Entrenchment

by SFaccountant

Chapters

Departure
Realpolitik
Realm of Nightmares
Diplomacy is Hard
Ill Tidings
Layovers are the Worst
Spy vs. Spy
Pieces on the Board
Kingmaker
Harbinger
Rip and Tear
The Patient Hunter
Silverfall
Deliverance
Apex
Retribution
Epilogue
War Footing
Springing the Trap

Departure

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 2

Departure

****

Ponyville - Sweet Apple Acres

"C'mon! Go fer it!" Applejack shouted, literally bouncing up and down on her hooves.

"On the left! The left! Hit it!" Braeburn threw his forelegs up, accidentally knocking his hat off onto the ground behind him.

"Go! Go!" a merchant corp guard thrust her fist into the air, grinning widely.

The hololith display on the Apples' back porch flickered briefly, displaying numerous ponies racing about in a chaotic flurry. A small sphere, helpfully marked out in bright red, bounced from one equine to another with such speed that it left crimson streaks across the green of the field beneath it.

The sphere was suddenly kicked up into the air, shooting up toward a pegasus that was flying near the goal net. The orb slammed into his chest and then bounced off into the net, sending the pegasus flailing through the air and the goalie pony stumbling uselessly in her attempt to block.

"GOOOOOOOAAAAAAAL!!!" screamed the humans and ponies surrounding the hololith. Bottles of synthehol clashed against each other as the spectators cheered and laughed.

"And Swift Striker takes the goal with her trademark 'Pinball Punch' The Canterlot Sunbeams race further ahead!" shouted the announcer from the hololith caster. A single earth pony mare broke from the ranks of the other players and started doing a victory dance on the field.

"Did y'all see that?!" laughed a mare as she stamped the ground. "That pegasus wasn't even on her team!"

"Crack shot, that one!"

"Wonder what she could do with a grenade! Ha!"

The Apple farmstead was unusually crowded, with nearly a hundred ponies and humans milling about or chatting within the great bunker complex. Many were clustered around the hololith player on makeshift seats of hay or wood, but others were gathered in smaller groups to chat, eat, play music, or dance to said music. There were even a few other hololith tables set up for games; or, as the Iron Warriors called them, "strategic combat simulations" that looked a lot like games to everyone else.

Most of Equinought Squadron was there as well, and generally taking the opportunity to relax outside of their power armor. Some of their friends were present as well, and Dest was dressed up in his apron and handing out baked goods as part of the catering team.

"I do not understand the strategy used in this game 'hoofball'," Dest confessed as he lowered a plate of apple tarts down to pony-head level. The equines descended on the platter ravenously, swarming around his legs and nabbing the treats like a flock of ducks.

"Well, shucks, it ain't that complicated," Braeburn insisted as he put his hat back on, "ya kick the ball into the other team's net."

"I understand the objective, but these players' tactics are curiously passive." A bottle of synthehol levitated through the air toward him. He took the bottle, pried off the cap with one of the horns on his shoulder pad, and then let the bottle float away again. "Why do the players not attack the opposition when they do not control the ball? If they caused sufficient damage, then the other team would be unable to protect their net."

"'Cuz this is hoofball, not hockey," Applejack drawled, "ya ain't supposed to hurt the other team."

"Curious. And you still find this... entertaining?" the driver mumbled.

"Sure. It's a lot of fun," Daniels said.

"I was talking to Vel," Dest replied.

Sunbeams have been having an awesome season, but my money's on the Germaney Thunders. Their lead bucker's special talent is never missing a foul shot! The daemon started rattling off sports statistics in Dest's head, and the Iron Warrior sighed before returning to work.

"Oh, I personally can't abide sports as entertainment. Never could. It just bores me to tears." Rarity paused to drain some amasec into her glass, and then floated the bottle a little higher. "Would you like some? It's quite tasty!"

Fluttershy shook her head quietly to refuse the offer. She was sitting next to the white unicorn and generally trying not to interact with anyone she didn't already know.

"Oh, but speaking of entertainment, I've seen some of the customers ordering up new vid-capture units! There are all sorts of studios aiming to broadcast new programs now that ponies are buying up holo-screens and vid-players."

"I think it would be nice to see a nature vid," Fluttershy said between sips of tea, "I really liked those playbacks in the restaurant yesterday. Maybe something from a forest?"

"I don't see why not. Mount the unit on an automaton and set it free into the wild," Rarity took another sip of her drink, and then quickly dropped the glass as she grew suddenly excited. "Oh! Or maybe you could go yourself! Our armor visors have vid-capture units, and you have a stealth field, too! You could make your own nature vid-journal!"

Fluttershy blinked. "Oh, uh... that does sound very nice, but... won't the Iron Warriors mind me spending so much time away from base? I mean, Applejack says it's a lot of trouble for her to get clearance whenever she wants to come back to the farm, and I don't want to cause trouble..." she trailed off weakly, shrinking back.

"Oh, you let me take care of that," Rarity scoffed, "it's foal's play to get a guard or two deployed when and where I want. On Mister Delgan's authority, of course."

She winked, and then tapped her glass against Fluttershy's.

"This is just amazing! I mean, I've seen a few of the humans with bionic limbs, and I heard they were giving them to ponies, too, but... well, just LOOK at this thing!"

Big Macintosh silently fought the urge to sigh as he stepped among the crowd with a basket of blue moon apples on his back. The humans that wanted a fruit would grab one from the basket without comment, and occasionally gave him a pat on the head. The other ponies, however, tended to be more impressed, and not by the genetically engineered produce he was carrying.

"No wonder they call you 'Ironside'! Hah... so, uh, can I touch your leg?"

"Nnope."

"Oh, okay! That's fine. I totally understand. Didn't mean to make things weird. Heh! They are REALLY cool, though."

He was glad that at least this mare wasn't a unicorn; they had a tendency to cast spells on his augments to see if they had any special effect on a bionic limb, or check if he'd notice. An angry grimace always put a stop to such experiments, but that usually just further developed his reputation as a brutal, die-hard badflank. Big Mac supposed he could have much worse problems than a reluctantly deserved reputation as a dangerous cyborg warrior, but he still didn't appreciate the attention.

"Big Mac! Hiiii!" a sing-song voice pre-empted the next question from the pony following him, and Big Macintosh winced. More unwanted attention.

A lime green unicorn mare with an ice cream cone for a cutie mark practically jumped in front of the other mare, grinning at Big Macintosh while she monopolized his field of vision.

"I'm so happy I could see you today! You've hardly been seen in town recently!" Sweetcream Scoops prattled on rapidly, seemingly oblivious to the disappointment of the mare behind her and the silent discomfort of the stallion in front of her. The former shrunk back and walked off, unable to get a word in edgewise.

Sweetcream paused in her torrent of small talk to smirk at the departing pony, and then fluttered her eyes at Big Macintosh. "I'm so sorry about that, Big Mac. It must be so tiresome to always have ponies pestering you about your bionic limbs. As if they're some kind of souvenir you 'picked up' on a battlefield."

"Eeyup," Mac said hesitantly. Then he shifted, tilting the basket on his back to be more accessible. "Apple?"

"Oh, I'd like an Apple, all right," Sweetcream grinned and leaned closer, coming nose-to-nose with the workpony.

Big Macintosh gulped.

"Okay, so Raptor unit 6 and Berserker unit the other one are firing on your pegasi," Tellis mumbled as he drew a line between the shooting units and the flock of armored ponies rendered in hololith below him. The images were scattered over a wide, rectangular field of illusory terrain, and there were randomizer cubes of various colors scattered across the surface.

The hololith's logic engine beeped at him. "Range insufficient."

Tellis beeped back as he spat a profanity, which was automatically censored by his vox filter.

"Those guys just have pistols. ALL your guys just have pistols," Rainbow Dash pointed out. She was sitting opposite the Chaos Lord, occasionally sipping from a mug of apple cider while Tellis took his turn. "You should really mix up your army list a little, dude. Your entire force is just guys with swords and pistols."

"Don't you get all smug with me! I have, like, a million times your combat experience!" the Chaos Lord growled.

"Sure you do. But you still take an army of ALL close-combat guys. They're not good against flyers."

"Everything in your army is a flyer!" Tellis complained. "And your OC is ridiculous. Alicorn super-psyker Princess of Destruction with daemon armor AND the Heart of Discord? Psh."

"Hey, my OC is awesome! Leave Starshatter alone!" Rainbow shouted angrily, aiming a hoof at the armored alicorn Princess hovering in the center of the board.

"Hee hee! Rainbow, that's a stallion's name!" Pinkie Pie popped up on one side of the table carrying a plate of apple tarts on her back. "Hey, guys! Take a break from being all meta and try these tarts! They're great!"

Rainbow eagerly did so, but Tellis shook his head.

"Eh, I can't really eat those," the Iron Warrior explained, "daemon armor, you know?"

"And it put you on a diet?" Pinkie gasped. "Tellis, your figure is perfect! You don't need to cut back!" She reached behind her and (somehow) took up a tart in her hoof.

"That... That's not-"

Pinkie jumped onto the table, opened up the vox grille of Tellis's helmet like the door of an oven, and then stuffed the tart into his mouth. Then she slammed the helmet grille closed and hopped down.

Tellis was stunned for several seconds. Then, slowly, he started to chew the tart.

"Say, why isn't Twilight here yet? She said she was going to be here!" Pinkie turned to Rainbow Dash.

Tellis swallowed his food, and then gripped the chin of his helmet with his hands. "... How?"

"Yeah, Twilight said there was some kind of announcement she had to make. She'll be here," Rainbow said.

"No, seriously, how did that just happen?" asked Tellis.

"Why isn't she here now? I know she left the fortress ahead of the rest of us!" Pinkie started scanning the crowd again, searching for a coat of purple among the crowd.

"My helmet has hinges on the mouthpiece? Where are they?"

Rainbow Dash shrugged her shoulders. "She and Gaela had a thing somewhere else today. 'Outreach', she called it. One of Twi's ideas on improving pony/human relations or whatever. She still has that announcement to do, though, so I'm sure she'll be back."

Tellis was now actively trying to pry the vox grille off of his helmet, grunting in frustration and mounting anger.

"Oh, well, as long as she isn't spending the whole party reading alone or something! Bye, Dashie!" Pinkie bounced away with the dessert platter still balanced on her back.

Rainbow turned back to Tellis. The Iron Warrior was now trying to pry his vox grille off with one of his lightning claws, and having absolutely no success. "Hey, dude, are you going to take your turn, or what?"

"SERIOUSLY HOW THE HELL DID SHE DO THAT THIS THING WON'T COME OFF GAAAAH!!"

****

Ponyville - Ponyville Elementary School

"The primary point of divergence between equine and sapien biology - at least as it concerns this world's unique strain of equinity - is in the development of manipulating digits: hands. While equines on this planet have developed intelligence and social organization that approaches humanity's in complexity, humans have evolved primarily as tool users. Our hands allow for far greater dexterity in handling useful objects, and our upright stature makes it much easier to use said objects while remaining mobile."

Gaela and Twilight stood in front of a large hololithic screen that had replaced the classroom's chalkboard in the school. The room they were lecturing was packed to bursting with a mix of the younger and older students that attended the elementary school as well as the few teachers, and it seemed perfectly split between ponies who were intrigued by the actual lecture and those who were too busy gawking at Gaela and Twilight's power armor to listen to what they were saying.

"Interestingly, several elements of Equestrian technology show signs of design preference for creatures with hands." Twilight took over the presentation as several objects appeared on the holo-board. "Bowling balls, door knobs, and cutlery are all objects rather infamous for their curious designs. Ponies have long suspected the holes in bowling balls, for example, were simply cut out of them to make them lighter."

"That's stupid," Gaela declared flatly, "they're for fingers." She clenched and unclenched the smaller of her bionic hands in demonstration, and a diagram of a human arm appeared on the holo-board.

"Right. Well, for some time, equinologists had assumed that such objects were simply designed by unicorns, who can move and manipulate any small object regardless of its shape and so neglected to fashion them conveniently for other ponies. However, the introduction of humans and their own technology raises the possibility that many pony-made objects are actually descended from human artifacts! It's entirely possible - especially given the age of humanity's star-faring civilization - that the current alliance between humans and ponies is NOT the first contact between our races!"

"And yet, in all the time you've been using our technology, surprisingly little of it has been properly modified to fit your physiology," Gaela added, "seriously, the very first building we ever built for you equines was designed with foot pedals to open doors rather than knobs. It's not a complicated mechanism. Are engineering cutie marks unusually rare?"

"That's very interesting, Miss Gaela!" Cheerilee interjected suddenly, stepping up to the front of the classroom to stand next to Twilight. "We all appreciate you taking time to come to our little school and teach the young ones about your species! Thank Miss Gaela for her time, everypony!"

"Thank you, Miss Gaela..." chorused the younger ponies with varying levels of volume and sincerity.

"It was either this or attend a Pinkie party," the Dark Techpriest grumbled before checking her chronometer, "are there any questions? I wish to delay my return to Sweet Apple Acres as long as possible."

Diamond Tiara, who was seated near the front, raised a foreleg.

Gaela's servo tool immediately focused a pointing laser on the filly, beaming a bright red dot onto her forehead. "Proceed."

"Do you think humans are smarter than ponies?" Diamond asked suspiciously.

"Yes," Gaela answered curtly, "any other questions?"

"Well, ACTUALLY, there's no definitive evidence that humans are more intelligent on average than ponies are," Twilight quickly interjected, "obviously their technology is far beyond ours, but they had the advantages of time, convenient physiology, and a hyper-industrialized society that prizes production and academic achievement at the expense of personal health and happiness. AND we have significantly better magic technology, which they consider an unpredictable and dangerous scientific field!"

The students stared blankly at her, looking completely lost.

"In other words, humans are smarter than ponies. But if you work hard enough and stop wasting your life having fun, then someday you could at least be as smart as Sparkle, possibly."

Twilight was very discouraged by the distinct lack of excitement or interest this generated from the younger equines.

"Blech! No thanks! I can do well enough without being a total egghead," Diamond Tiara scoffed.

"Your loss. Any other questions?"

Scootaloo raised a foreleg, and Gaela centered her pointing laser on her.

"What do you want?" she asked, sounding slightly more annoyed than usual.

"Why do some humans worship Chaos as an undivided force when that force includes Slaanesh, who sucks?"

This question got the orange filly a lot of bizarre and uncomfortable stares, but Gaela found it quite reasonable.

"Unfortunately, Chaos theology hasn't advanced to the point where we can excise Slaanesh's influence from the pantheon. In time, perhaps, after Chaos has conquered all mortal life and spread its blight across the stars, we can finally destroy the Prince of Excess and all its craven followers. For now, however, to cut that cancer from the ranks would weaken Chaos too much." She paused. "Besides, Slaanesh DID kill most of the Eldar race, so we can't claim it's COMPLETELY useless. Next question."

A slightly older filly raised her leg, and Gaela's laser marked her out. "Speak."

"Where do human foals come from?" she asked, blinking her eyes adorably.

Twilight and Cheerilee blanched, and the latter quickly moved to interrupt.

"Actually, it seems we're almost out of time, so-"

"Be silent," Gaela said, cutting Cheerilee off by slamming the jaws of her servo arm shut, "I am attempting to instruct your students."

"But, Gaela, I think-" Twilight began, only for her too to be dismissed sharply.

"Curiosity is a virtue, both to your ideology and mine. There is no reason to withhold such mundane data."

Gaela passed a hand over the holo-board, and an image of a human fetus in a large glass tube flickered into place.

"Humans reproduce using factories. When a human reaches a certain level of development - usually occurring after twelve to fourteen standard Terran years - then his or her reproductive organs are harvested and used to produce another generation of individuals. The flawed organisms of each generation are culled before reaching maturity, and those that survive their amniotic development become human younglings."

There were a great many ponies in the room that were stunned by the explanation, including Cheerilee. Twilight smiled nervously, uncertain as to whether that explanation was better or worse than the teacher expected.

Another filly spoke up. "My mommy said that pony foals are made when a mare and stallion have sex."

Cheerilee blanched again, while Twilight turned red. Several of the young ponies in the room giggled.

"That is true," Gaela admitted, "as you have not had access to reproduction manufactures, your kind has had little choice in methods of propagation, and as such you are all the products of such acts." Then her eye narrowed. "However, it is a primitive, repulsive, and unsanitary procedure, and you should all be ashamed of having such a disgusting origin."

Nearly every pony in the classroom wilted sadly, their ears drooping. "Awwwwwww..."

****

"Really, Gaela, why did you have to go there?" Twilight griped as they approached Sweet Apple Acres. "Some of them seemed really hurt!"

Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle were following along behind them, talking amongst themselves and occasionally glancing over to the cyborg.

"I did not suggest that any of them were to blame for having come from an inferior reproductive scheme," Gaela protested, "I do not stand in judgment of them, I merely recognize their inherent inferiority."

"No, that isn't..." Twilight groaned and dropped her head. "What do you have against love, anyway? Do you really object THAT much to the concept of two individuals having a deep affection for each other?"

The Dark Techpriest actually stopped to consider this.

"... Perhaps you're right. I may have devoted more energy to my objections than is strictly necessary," she admitted, much to Twilight's surprise, "I will endeavor to act with a proper degree of apathy in the future."

"It actually scares me that this qualifies as real progress in your social conduct," Twilight muttered.

"Hey, Miss Gaela!" chirped Apple Bloom suddenly. "We had an idea! Maybe ya'd be happier if ya got a special somehuman!"

"I'd be happier if you stopped talking."

"Well, that isn't happening," Scootaloo chuckled as she trotted up next to the Dark Techpriest, "so, what do human couples usually do together?"

"How would I know?" Gaela replied with increasing irritation.

"Maybe we could ask Daniels?" Apple Bloom suggested.

"Who?"

"Oh! Maybe Daniels would make a good special somehuman! He seems like fun!" Sweetie Belle giggled.

"I am ACTUALLY weighing the advantages and disadvantages in my head of killing the three of you right now."

Twilight almost gasped in relief once she spotted Crabapple waiting at the edge of the farm. "Look, girls! Crabapple's here! Go play with her, quick!"

The fillies suspected they were being driven away to spare Gaela's nerves, but nonetheless raced off to greet the Defiler standing sentinel in front of the farm.

"Thank you for getting rid of them," the cyborg said curtly.

"Thank you for not 'getting rid of them' yourself," Twilight replied.

It wasn't long before Applejack spotted Twilight and Gaela approaching, and the apple farmer pulled herself away from the cheering party-goers to greet them.

"Hey, y'all! Ya finally made it!" the orange mare galloped up to Twilight and then punched a hoof lightly against her chest plate. "Why're ya still in yer armor, Twi? C'mon, relax a little!"

"All right, all right!" Twilight chuckled and cast her dimensional wardrobe spell, banishing her power armor to its magical storage space. "There. Applejack, is that sports game almost over? I have an announcement to make to everyone."

Applejack raised her eyebrow. "Yeah, it just finished up. Ya want me to round up the others?"

"No, I'll be fine. Thank you."

Applejack nodded and then glanced up at Gaela. "Ah don't s'pose YOU wanna strip down and relax a little, do ya?"

"Negative," Gaela said, staring at something off to the side, "I will retain my usual armaments."

"Thought so. Well, Ah'll get ya some water, then, since that's all ya seem to drink."

Applejack started to turn around, but Gaela raised an arm to stop her. "That is not necessary. I will not be here long. Also, do you know why Lord Tellis is smashing his face into your residential complex over and over?"

"Gah! Come off, come off, COME OFF!" Tellis relentlessly hammered the chin of his vox grille into the ferrocrete wall, either ignorant or indifferent to the various ponies staring at him.

He stopped and started trying to pry off the face of his helmet. "I don't get it! She took this thing off in a second! She doesn't even have fingers! The HELL?"

After a few more seconds of scraping his fingers against his vox grille, the Chaos Raptor went back to slamming his face into the wall repeatedly. "Come OFF! I wanna eat cake, too!"

"... Not the slightest idea," Applejack admitted with a shrug.

"Just curious. You may go," Gaela said.

Twilight headed around the perimeter of the party, occasionally stopping briefly to wave at ponies who noticed her and shouted greetings. On one side of the gathering were several Chimera APCs parked side-by-side.

She hopped up and took to the air, landing on one of the vehicles and then facing the crowd. Her horn flashed, and the purple alicorn took a deep breath.

"IF I MAY HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE!" Twilight's voice boomed over the yard, and all conversation instantly stopped. Everyone turned to look at the Princess, and those inside the Apples' home started filing out to see what was happening. Tellis even stopped banging his head against the wall to listen.

"FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO MAY NOT KNOW, MY NAME IS TWILIGHT SPARKLE!" There was a great deal of chuckling from the ponies in attendance, none of whom could imagine not knowing who Twilight Sparkle was. Even the humans in attendance thought the idea was pretty unlikely.

"THERE HAVE BEEN MANY CELEBRATIONS SINCE THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SPACE HULK. TODAY'S PARTY, THOUGH, ISN'T JUST TO CELEBRATE OUR SURVIVAL, BUT OUR FUTURE TOGETHER! TO SEE HUMANS AND PONIES LIVING, WORKING, AND PLAYING TOGETHER AS FRIENDS IS AS MUCH A VICTORY AS ANY MAJOR BATTLE AGAINST THE ORKS! I'M SURE I DON'T NEED TO REMIND YOU THAT IT DIDN'T START OUT THIS WAY, AND THINGS COULD HAVE EASILY TURNED OUT VERY DIFFERENTLY!"

"Good thing we didn't bump off Shmithy!" Pinkie chirped from the watching crowd.

"YES, THANK YOU. LET'S NOT BRING THAT UP AGAIN. EVER." Twilight cleared her throat and continued. "TODAY WE REACH A NEW PHASE IN THE 38TH COMPANY'S OPERATIONS, AND THE FLEET IS EVEN NOW MAKING FINAL PREPARATION TO LEAVE! TO THE HUMANS, OF COURSE, THIS IS LARGELY BUSINESS AS USUAL! BUT TO PONYKIND, AND THE REST OF THIS WORLD, IT PRESENTS A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY!"

Rarity and Fluttershy shared an uncertain glance.

"I HAVE BEEN GIVEN A NEW MISSION BY PRINCESS CELESTIA, MY MENTOR AND SOVEREIGN OF EQUESTRIA! I AM TO TRAVEL WITH THE COMPANY FLEET TO THEIR ORIGIN POINT, IN THE EYE OF TERROR, AND OBSERVE CHAOS IN ITS HOME AND AT ITS HEART!"

A great many ponies in the crowd gasped.

"I WILL BE DEPARTING SOON, BUT BEFORE I DO, I WANT TO SAY: THANK YOU! YOU ALL MADE THIS POSSIBLE! NOT JUST BY FIGHTING THE TAU OR THE ORKS, BUT IN KEEPING YOUR MINDS AND HEARTS OPEN TO FRIENDSHIP! THIS IS ANOTHER STEP FORWARD FOR THE COMPANY AND FOR EQUESTRIA! THAT IS ALL!"

Twilight jumped down from the vehicle to the sound of heavy applause. Humans clapped and cheered, while ponies pounded the ground with their hooves. She offered an awkward smile to the crowd, and then saw Pinkie, Rarity, Fluttershy, and Applejack racing up to her from the side.

"Twi, what's goin' on? We're goin' to space now?" Applejack fretted, looking back and forth at her home and making a mental list of things she needed to get done right away.

"As... happy as I am to be further advancing human/pony relations, don't you think this is rather short notice?" Rarity asked anxiously.

"It was short notice, yes, but you don't need to worry," Twilight assured them, "this isn't a mission for Equinought Squadron. It's a mission for me. I'm going on my own."

The other mares were further shocked by the admission as Gaela approached the group.

"Not entirely alone," the Dark Techpriest corrected.

"Yes, of course," Twilight smiled, "I'll have you and most of the 38th Company there, and for them this is a routine matter."

"I... was actually referring to Spike, but yes, that's true as well," Gaela mumbled, "the gunship is already on its way for our ascent to the main fleet. We will be in Warp space before morning."

"So, what is the place you're going to, again?" Fluttershy asked nervously.

"Medrengard, the Iron Warriors' central bastion in the Eye of Terror," Gaela replied, causing the pegasus to flinch back.

"'Eye of Terror', huh? Ah'm guessin' they don't call it that to keep out the tourists," Applejack drawled.

"It's a region of real-space that overlaps with the Warp," Twilight explained, "and while it certainly has an ominous reputation, the Iron Warriors and their allies make the trip all the time. I'll be fine!"

Rarity shook her head. "I suppose I'm just surprised that Princess Celestia asked you to do this. I know she's come around somewhat in her attitude toward our human friends, but it wasn't very long ago that she didn't even want to TELL you about Chaos. This is quite a stark reversal."

"Well, I think it's super!" Pinkie said, bouncing in place. "It's like you're bringing the shiny-squishy happiness of friendship to the farthest reaches of the galaxy!"

Twilight laughed. "I don't know if I'll get the chance to spread much love and tolerance there. I think I'll settle for getting in and out okay."

"Which is by no means assured," Gaela said grimly, "but I will aid you to the best of my ability."

"Hey, girls! We have a gunship incoming!" came a shout from above.

Rainbow Dash swooped down over Twilight's head, grinning widely. "That's your ride, right? Looks like you're headed out!"

The alicorn blinked, somewhat surprised by Rainbow's reaction. "Oh, yes, I'm sure it is."

"Well, then I guess it's time to bring the awesomeness of ponykind into space!" the racer pointed a hoof to the sky as she hovered in place. "To bravely go where no pony has ever gone before! Except Princess Luna. But I don't think she counts. She didn't make it very far out there."

"Thanks, Dash. I'm sure I'll be back before you know it!" Twilight looked up as the sound of a gunship engine became more apparent. A Thunderhawk transport was speeding over the edge of the orchard, and seemed to be coming around for a landing.

Twilight turned back to her pony friends. "I really do wish I could have given you more notice, but I didn't have much time to get my affairs in order. The lecture I gave at Ponyville Elementary had been scheduled weeks ago, and I had to write some letters to my relatives, too."

"Ah hope those affairs includes yer last will and testament," Applejack said, "Ah don't wanna jinx nothin', but ya ain't exactly goin' on vacation."

"Actually, yes, but I'm trying to keep a positive outlook, here," the alicorn said, "there's also going to be a lot more time to study my notes and dataslates during void transit, since I won't have to run combat patrols. So, you know, there's a bright side."

The Thunderhawk swung around on its approach, kicking up waves of dust while it positioned itself for landing.

Twilight pursed her lips. "On that note, I'm hoping that the departure of much of the Company's forces will mean a drawing down of combat operations while I'm gone, but obviously Equinought Squadron may still have to fight without me."

Pinkie Pie immediately produced an officer's cap with a Chaos Star pinned on the front, and started fitting it on her head.

"While I'm gone, I'd like Rarity to hold operational command, in case that issue comes up."

Pinkie clicked her tongue and tossed the officer's cap away.

"Obviously, I'm the one heading into the relative unknown, here, but Equestria isn't completely safe these days either," Twilight continued, "be careful, girls."

The Thunderhawk gunship landed behind the line of Chimeras, and the ponies heard the familiar hiss and whir of the embarkation ramp opening up.

"Well, I should-" before Twilight could get any further in that sentence, Pinkie Pie dove in and tackled her into a hug.

"Goodbye, Twi-Twi! Bring us back something, okay?"

"Okay, okay! I'll see if the giant tear in reality fueled by nightmares has a gift shop," Twilight smirked as Pinkie released her, and Fluttershy came up next to give her another, much less aggressive hug.

"Please, be careful! If something happens here, I'll get Discord to tell you, okay?"

"I was, uh, really hoping that the vast distances involved in this trip would strand him here, away from me. But okay." Fluttershy withdrew, and Applejack pulled the alicorn into a hug that was just short of bone-crushing.

"Y'all take care of yerself. And you keep Solon outta trouble too, y'hear? Don't let him get in no duels."

"I'd really expect he could avoid almost dying on a routine trip back to the bulk of his own army, but I'll keep an eye on him." Rainbow Dash was next, and she landed next to Twilight before slinging an arm over the alicorn's withers.

"See ya, Twi. Good luck!"

Twilight glanced over her friends' heads. "I don't suppose Tellis is coming with the fleet, is he?"

"He considered it," Rainbow said, grinning, "for, like, three seconds!"

The blue pegasus laughed and jumped away, clearing the way for Rarity.

"Well, I wasn't expecting to say goodbye to a friend, today," the unicorn sighed, "do take care, Twilight."

"I will Rarity," Twilight said as she hugged the snow-colored mare.

"You realize that Lieutenant Dusk Blade is going to be crushed that he couldn't even see you off."

Twilight nodded. "If you see him, tell him I hate him."

Rarity stepped back, and then Pinkie trotted up to Gaela. "Well, so long Gaela! Gimme a hu-"

Gaela grabbed Pinkie's head with the claw of her gun-arm, and then she threw the pink mare away to the side.

"Let's depart," the Dark Techpriest said, walking toward the Thunderhawk.

Spike was waiting at the bottom of the ramp, and he gave a cursory nod toward Twilight and Gaela as they walked up into the waiting vehicle. Then he walked over to the mares waiting behind the gunship, focusing on one in particular.

"So, uh, Rarity," Spike began, fidgeting with his claws, "I know we don't really know how long this trip is going to take, and we're going to be really, REALLY far away, but Twi says there's a good chance that my fire teleport will still work even at intergalactic distances, right? So I was thinking that maybe we could send each other letters? They'd have to go through Celestia, obviously, but I just think-"

Gaela walked back down the ramp, picked up Spike by his tail, and then walked up the ramp again while carrying him.

"I'll write you!" the young dragon shouted as the embarkation ramp started to rise.

The other mares of Equinought Squadron backed up as the gunship took off again, shielding themselves from the dirt churning beneath the Thunderhawk's mighty engines. After rising above the treetops the transport took off, and its nose started to tilt ever further upward in order to set a course to leave the planet.

Within minutes, the gunship had ascended beyond the clouds and started its final exit from the atmosphere, aiming for the metal behemoths that awaited in the void beyond.

****

Harvest of Steel - Twilight's quarters

"Well, this is... cozy."

Twilight had found the trip from the planet pleasantly uneventful, which was never something that could be taken for granted with Chaos forces. Gaela had separated from her as soon as they'd disembarked within the flagship, stopping only long enough to give Twilight a room assignment.

Said room assignment was an eight by four foot space with a compartment built into the wall to hold her things. Two beds hung from the wall, one on top of the other.

"I call top bunk!" Spike said, dropping a suit case onto the floor.

"Spike, you can barely even get up there," Twilight pointed out as the young dragon started climbing up a vent built into the wall.

"Hey, isn't this ship supposed to be special, somehow?" Spike asked as he pulled himself up onto his mattress. "Like, besides being huge beyond all reason?"

"Yes, well, I don't have many specifics on that," Twilight admitted before she started unpacking the small suitcase at her hooves, "there are no actual blueprint diagrams or technical diagnostics for the Harvest of Steel in the general archives. Apparently Solon designed it himself - surprise, surprise - but I don't know much more than that."

She opened up the wall compartment, and then floated the dataslates from her luggage into the opening.

"Gaela said that the Harvest is alive," Spike said. He rolled onto his back and then poked at the wall next to him. "Feels like regular old space metal to me."

"Gaela also thinks that all mechanical devices have souls, so I'm not sure our definitions of 'alive' align perfectly." Twilight shut the storage compartment and then kicked the luggage container under the beds. "It's not like the ship literally has a mind of its own."

Spike stared up at ceiling, squinting into the dim lights of the lumen strips. "It DOES seem pretty normal in here. But still... aren't machines with minds of their own kind of common around the Iron Warriors?"

"Well... okay, yes. You may have a point there," Twilight admitted, "but still, I'm pretty sure this vessel is different. If it were truly a living thing, even with just a daemonic soul, then I would be able to communicate with it using magic. Here, watch."

Her horn began to glow, and Twilight cast the same spell she had used earlier to make her announcement at Sweet Apple Acres. It was a crude form of telepathy, straddling a middle path between the precise, directed whispers of Serith's mental invasions and the specifically non-telepathic magic that Luna used to project her voice at absurd volumes.

"HELLO, HARVEST? THIS IS TWILIGHT SPARKLE!" Spike winced at the volume of the shout and covered his ear fins. Even if she wasn't projecting her voice anywhere near the "glass shatter" spectrum as Luna sometimes did, Twilight was still yelling inside a small, enclosed room.

"CAN YOU HEAR ME? THIS COMMUNICATION IS AN EXPERIMENT TO DIVULGE THE POSSIBILITY OF TRUE SENTIENCE!"

Twilight's horn dimmed, and she and her assistant waited for any response.

When they didn't get one, the alicorn nodded.

"See? Whatever machine intelligence this ship possesses, it isn't... uh..." Twilight shuddered after she trailed off, feeling a strange, foreign sensation settle over her. A deep, gnawing hunger started coming from her belly, as if she hadn't eaten in days, and she swore she could hear a heavy, irregular heartbeat thumping all around her.

"T-Twi? Did you...?" Spike shivered and then coughed, suddenly finding it hard to breathe.

"This effect is... is temporary, I'm sure," Twilight squeaked as her stomach did little flips in her belly, "exposure to Chaos plays all sorts of tricks on the mind, and-"

A seam in the metal ceiling above spread open, revealing a gigantic, bloodshot eyeball staring down at them.

And there was much screaming.

****

Harvest of Steel - munitorium deck 16

+Ensure that all ordnance is secure as we proceed to the translation point. This area will remain on lockdown so long as we are on alert status tertius.+

Gaela walked among a small crowd of chittering, spider-like automata and a few lurching servitors while she inspected the deck, bringing up hololith screens with a wave of her hand and then matching them against the count composed by the serviles around her.

+Affirmative. Ordnance secure. Perimeter control active, engram designation 66-theta. Confirm status.+

A hololith flickered into place, and a harsh, electronic voice returned a blurt of Machine Code to her. +All systems operational. Trans-Warp anomaly detected.+

Gaela paused. The security systems were designed to detect concentrations of Warp energy and trans-Warp bleed, mainly in order to find and contain daemonic presences. But given that the Harvest hadn't yet entered Warp space, there was no particular reason for daemons to be stalking the decks.

Of course, the auger systems could also be detecting other kinds of Warp coalescence. Such as, say, psychic powers.

Gaela didn't get much further along that line of thought before Twilight flashed into being above her head and clamped onto her face.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!" Twilight screamed unhelpfully.

"... What was the reason that I don't wear my helmet all the time anymore?" Gaela mumbled into the alicorn's belly fur. "I really don't remember."

Twilight continued screaming for several more minutes straight, and Gaela waited patiently for her breath to slowly peter out until she was left gasping for air.

"I must confess, I'm surprised," Gaela said, "I didn't expect this reaction until AFTER we entered Warp space, at the earliest."

Twilight leaned back far enough that she could look the Dark Techpriest in the eyes/optics. "Gaela! The ship is alive!"

"I'm POSITIVE that I've told you this before. You shouldn't be this shocked," Gaela reasoned.

"No! I mean it's ALIVE! There are giant eyes appearing in the bulkheads! And it wants to eat me!" Twilight cried in terror.

"I don't believe we covered that part, but I still contend you shouldn't be so surprised," the cyborg muttered.

A second wailing scream came from behind her, and Gaela felt someone latch onto her robe.

"Gaela! Ship! Alive! Gonna eat me!"

"Hello, Spike," Gaela greeted as the young dragon panted for breath.

Gaela's blasé attitude helped Twilight calm down to the point of using intellectual reason again. "You don't understand! I felt the Harvest's mind! It LITERALLY wants to kill and devour me!" She shuddered. "Even now, I can still feel it! This isn't like the daemon engines!"

"True, it is not." Gaela's servo arm lurched forward and grabbed the alicorn Princess, pulling her loose. "The Harvest is far beyond the relatively simple mechanical horrors you've seen before. It literally feeds on souls and flesh to fuel its power core. Other daemon-machines may wish to kill out of hate and fury, but they do not feel true hunger or the satisfaction of consumption. The Harvest of Steel does."

"Yes! Exactly! And that is TERRIFYING!" Twilight explained, loudly. "What's to stop it from just opening up a giant mouth in the floor of my quarters and devouring me?"

"More than you'd think, and less than you'd hope," Gaela replied. "In any case, you needn't panic about becoming a particular target of the ship's predations. The Harvest wants to kill and eat everyone on board, with the exception of Warsmith Solon. Obviously this is detrimental to our operations, and its appetite is restrained."

Twilight was dropped onto the floor, and then she immediately yelped and jumped up before hovering in the air. "Restrained how?" the alicorn demanded.

"For one, we feed it other creatures," Gaela explained, "shipments of wounded Orks and the odd Kroot malcontent have been ferried here and sacrificed to the living core of the ship. There is no shortage of fuel at present, and as such it will not seek to sate itself with crew and passengers."

Twilight considered the claim. "Okay, I guess that's a..." she stopped speaking, and then dropped onto the floor again as her wings seized up. Her expression was one of horrified epiphany. "I... I was about to say that it's a relief."

"Is it not?" the cyborg asked.

"You're taking living, feeling creatures - not just animals, but sentient, relatively intelligent creatures! - and burning them to death in a horrible evil power generator!"

"'Burning to death' is a fairly inaccurate and euphemistic term for what actually happens to them in there," Gaela interjected, "it is not nearly so clean, and probably far more painful."

"When did I become okay with this? When did I get so jaded that the revelation of being in a monster ship that eats people doesn't bother me as long as there's a big enough supply of helpless prisoners to keep it from troubling me?!" Twilight's eyes were wide as she spoke, and she had a haunted look about her as she stared up at her cyborg friend.

+Omnissiah help us, we haven't even breached Warp space and she's already snapped,+ Gaela spat a burst of Binaric static before she replied a moment later in Gothic. "Given that you clearly ARE bothered by it, I'm not sure what the problem is."

"But I almost wasn't!" Twilight protested.

"Then you are still much too sensitive to the suffering of others. You may very well encounter greater atrocities on this voyage than simple mass sacrifice forced upon prisoners of war." Gaela started moving past Twilight to continue her survey. "I'm almost done here. Soon we will have everything prepared for Warp translation."

"Can we stay with you?" Spike whimpered.

"As long as you do not hinder my work."

"No, I mean, can we sleep in your room?" Spike trembled. "I don't want to go back to ours. There's an eyeball in the ceiling."

"It's probably gone by now," Gaela advised.

"It is of EXTREME concern to us that the space ship has large, functional organs appearing in the bulkheads at will," Twilight insisted.

"Please don't leave us," Spike begged.

A nearby vox caster suddenly crackled with static. "Shparkle, report in. I'm not detecting your shuit identifier node."

The Princess pony almost jumped at hearing Solon's voice, and then quickly worked the spell that banished and summoned her armor.

After several seconds, the segments of banded metal and heavy plating appeared in a series of purple flashes, and Twilight quickly activated the vox system in her gorget.

"Yes, Warsmith?"

"Ah, there you are. I wanted to invite you to the bridge ash we prepare for transhlation."

Twilight blinked in surprise. "Really? Do you need me for something?"

"No, nothing like that. But shince your shpeciesh shtill findsh void travel novel, and you in particular take interesht in great featsh of technology, I thought you might appreciate the opportunity."

"That sounds great, actually," Twilight replied, "and an excellent way to distract myself from dwelling on your horrible monster ship that feeds on souls and misery. I'll head straight there."

Twilight started trotting through the munitorium deck toward the hall. "By the way, how did you know I was here if you couldn't detect my suit signal? Did the ship see me and tell you? Or did you play that summons over the entire ship?"

"Neither. I jusht ashumed you would be with Dark Techpriesht Gaela. You and your shquad tend to clushter around her like she'sh your herd alpha." The vox line was cut.

Gaela sighed miserably, and Twilight stopped to offer the Dark Techpriest an apologetic smile. "Come on, Gaela! Think of it as a compliment!"

"It's hard to appreciate the virtues of 'friendship' with a dragon clinging to me like I'm his mother," the cyborg grumbled as she continued inspecting the hololith displays. "Go. I will see to the lizard."

"Thanks, Gaela! I'll be back soon!"

****

Harvest of Steel - bridge

"Oh, dear Celestia, WHY?"

Twilight trembled as she stepped into the bridge of Solon's flagship, her ears pinned and her head whipping back and forth.

She had held out hope that the ship's bridge would be more technological than daemonic or monstrous, reasoning that, as the nerve center of the entire vessel, its systems needed to be more predictable and mundane.

As it turned out, not so much.

Thick, pulsating cables and tubes covered the ceiling, occasionally dripping dark, viscous fluids onto the floor. Enormous eyes were a common feature: there were several poking out of the wall here and there, and there was an especially large, bloodshot one in the middle of the ceiling. Twilight couldn't help but think that, had she forced her way into this ship with the intention to destroy it, that particular organ would probably be a weak point.

The most harrowing aspect of the bridge, however, was undoubtedly the desiccated, mummy-like people in the walls, moaning and whispering to themselves and watching her with dark, empty eye sockets. Their writhing spoke of pain beyond her imagination, and their bodies betrayed how long they had suffered this extraordinary torment.

"Well? Are you coming, Princesh?"

Solon stood near the "front" of the bridge, in front of a high-fidelity projection of the void that represented the view from the bow section of the Harvest of Steel. The only other individuals in the cavernous room were a pair of Warpsmiths, neither of which gave the pony the slightest glance.

Twilight walked across the room hesitantly, keeping her eyes fixed on the floor. When she reached Solon, her gaze slowly crept up to look at the void ahead.

"... There's nothing there," Twilight mumbled, perplexed, "where's the Warp Storm? Did Serith calm it already?" The field of stars that stretched out before the flagship was unmarred by clouds of energy or violent electrical surges, which were both very common during her one previous trip to the Empyrean.

"Not quite, no. He'sh shtill working with the Nethalican," Solon assured her, "the Warp shtorm mainly exishtsh, ash you might expect, in the Warp. Shometimesh itsh effectsh bleed over into realshpace, but not alwaysh. The Nethalican ish a shurprishingly shubtle tool. Even when we take to the Warp, Sherith ishn't sho much calming the shtorm as shweeping ush along in itsh currentsh upon a shpecific path."

"Ah, I see," Twilight mumbled, staring out at the stars, "and is that... safe?"

"Meh."

One of the crew entombed in the wall suddenly shrieked, and Twilight jumped in fright. She landed back on the floor with a metallic crash of her greaves against the deck plating.

"The Empyrean! It's churning! Direction! The way forward! It's... It has appeared!" gasped out one of the shriveled crewmen.

"The Harvest sees the path! It wishes to swim the dark currents!" cried out another. The pitch of the desperate, straining cry suggested the second speaker was female. Twilight certainly couldn't tell by her appearance.

"Preparing Warp drive for activation," growled one of the Warpsmiths.

"Void shields falling. All main decks secure," said the other as he leaned over a console covered in glowing lights. His mechatendrils darted and slithered over the controls, and numerous glowing lumens shifted from red to green.

All the while, the bodies entombed in the walls groaned and writhed even more, to the point that they sounded like a choir. If the choir were performing while simultaneously being tortured.

"Open the path, but hold poshition," Solon commanded.

"Warp drives engaged. We have breach, Warsmith."

Watching the translation breach from the bridge of the Harvest was hardly the first time Twilight had looked into the face of the Warp. She had seen daemons claw their way from the heart of the Nethalican. She had plunged into the Immaterium in order to literally steal her friends' souls back from Chaos. And she had watched a Space Hulk come apart around her from the fury of a Warp storm.

Still, there was something especially fantastic about a Warp breach that was much easier to appreciate when she was viewing it safely from many kilometers away without an imminent threat to her life. The Empyrean was a terrible thing; a literal nightmare realm where the predominant form of "life" was hate and anger incarnate. Ponykind had only escaped its horrors so far by whatever miraculous feat of evolution had created their horns, which seemed to have developed explicitly to shield them from the dangers inherent in their own power.

As a vortex of rainbow-colored light opened up in the inky blackness of the void, Twilight felt her fear and disgust melt away. It was beautiful, soothing, and almost hypnotic.

"What the blazing Hell ish THAT?"

It was also wrong. Apparently.

Twilight looked up at the Iron Warriors in the bridge, wishing not for the first time that most Chaos Space Marines didn't have their helmets fused to their very faces. She could tell that they were all staring at the Warp breach, but couldn't read their expressions any further.

"So... is it NOT supposed to look like that?" Twilight asked. "Is it the rotation? The surrounding energy feedback? The size?"

"It'sh the bloody RAINBOW," Solon informed her as he brought up a communications hololith, "there ishn't shupposhed to be RAINBOWSH in the Warp."

"The Harvest speaks!" hissed one of the entombed crew.

"She is pleased by these so-called 'rainbows'. We feel the daemon's fury waning!" cried another. "That... That's kind of new..."

"God damn it," Solon cursed, connecting the shipboard vox system to the network planetside. "Sherith! Are you there?"

"Yes, Lord," came the smooth, serpentine sound of Serith's vox system, "how may I serve?"

"You may SHERVE by explaining why our path into Warp shpace looksh like THISH." He fed a pict-feed through the connection, displaying the view from the bridge in the Chaos temple planetside.

"Well, that... Huh..." Serith's voice hesitated. "I... can't. I actually can't explain that."

"Is it a Tzeentchian effect?" asked one of the Warpsmiths.

"It can't be. The color pattern is stable," murmured the other, "this section of the Warp appears to be... simply... wrapped in... rainbows." The Iron Warrior seemed to have some difficulty finishing that sentence without choking.

"It washn't like thish earlier!" Solon complained. "We entered the Warp shtorm to engage the Ork Shpace Hulk, and it wash ash ugly and nonshenshical ash ever!"

"Indeed, Warsmith," Serith confirmed over the vox, "but the tempo of the Warp around this planet has always been... strange."

"Well, FIX it!" Solon raised a fist to slam onto a length of railing, but then thought better of it and calmed down.

"Is this really a problem?" Twilight said suddenly, reminding the Iron Warriors that she was still there. "Is some pretty colors really going to impede our travel?"

"... I shupposhe not. Probably," Solon admitted, "although a shtorm like thish ish shure to attract the attention of every Navigator within ten parshecsh."

"Which isn't going to be many," pointed out a Warpsmith, "most of the fleets in this sector that would have a Navigator are Rogue Traders and lesser pirates. A warfleet wouldn't dare approach a Warp storm, no matter how... pretty."

"Warsmith? The fleet is ready for translation," grunted the other Chaos Marine.

"The Harvest is prepared," moaned one of the crew in the wall, "although she's fine just watching the breach like this, if you so wish. She, uh... She's actually feeling unusually mellow, right now."

"Sherith, shee if you can do shomething about thish before I return." Solon deactivated the connection with an annoyed grunt. "Let'sh get the hell out of here."

The vortex of swirling color loomed closer as the Harvest of Steel engaged its main drives, accelerating rapidly for its trip into the Immaterium. Ordinarily the process evoked the image of a great morsel being drawn into a gaping quivering maw, with tendrils of eldritch power reaching out to guide the ship into the furious ocean beyond the void. This Warp storm, on the other hand, showered glittering, prismatic sparkles over the surface of the enormous megafreighter as it dove into the breach. The other vessels hesitated in following, each one wondering what new oddity their army would endure next. Still, threats from Warp space tended toward the unsubtle, and no instrument could find anything particularly dangerous about the bizarre sight. The escorts relented and followed their flagship.

Soon the fleet was gone, and the breach closed. Only two vessels remained in orbit around Centaur III; one a cripple, the other a ghost ship.

The 38th Company was gone.

****

Sweet Apple Acres

Tellis stared silently at the data readouts on his visor. They were somewhat hard to read, because his left lens had cracked from his trying to pry his helmet apart, but the message was clear enough. He gazed up into the night sky, spotting a patch of darkness colored by a tiny splash of multicolored light.

"WOW. Really?" the Raptor asked. "She seriously went with them? Gods, what a tool."

A snicker came from behind him as Rainbow Dash landed on the wing of his flight pack. "Twi made it out, huh? I guess somebody owes me 300 bits!" She smirked at the Iron Warrior.

"Yeah, I guess I do," Tellis admitted. Then he crossed his arms over his chest. "Huh. You know? It suddenly occurs to me that I shouldn't be making bets with resources I don't have. Where am I going to get bits?"

"It's not that hard, dude. Heck, I'll even take your credits or thrones or whatever. They're easy enough to trade into bits," Rainbow offered.

"I don't have those either! How does one acquire money, anyway?" the Chaos Lord complained.

"Most of us get a job," Rainbow answered, "like fighting for the Company. You know, like what you've done for centuries? All the humans get paid for that."

"They do? Do you get paid?"

"Me? Well, no, but it's different. I'm saving Equestria! So it's more like a quest for me, even if the saving is mostly done with now."

"For me it's more of a hobby than a job, to be honest," Tellis said, "I only do it when I feel like it, rather than when my superiors want."

"Oh. Gotcha." Rainbow hopped off of the Iron Warrior and hovered in front of him. "Well, I'll give you some time to come up with the bits, but I'm not letting you off the hook!"

"Ugh. Fine."

On the other side of the farm, Applejack and Daniels were cleaning up after the celebration, scooping dropped items into a plastic sack. Braeburn followed behind them while balancing a few folding chairs on his back.

"Boy howdy, that was a good game!" the stallion said brightly. "Gotta hand it to ya, Cuz, you and Miss Pie sure put on the best shindigs!"

"Yeah, it went pretty well," Applejack mumbled. It was impossible to miss a note of concern in her voice.

"Jack? Ya all right?" Braeburn asked. "Ya seem a mite distracted."

"Just worried 'bout Twi, that's all," Applejack mumbled. She certainly seemed distracted, and every few minutes she would glance up at the stars above and frown.

"Ah don't see why. Y'all jump into fightin' them Orks every opportunity ya get. She's not headin' inta battle, she's droppin' off supplies," Braeburn reasoned, "Ah mean, it's like yer seasonal trips to deliver pies!"

"That trip is pretty dangerous," Applejack retorted.

"Oh. Well, then it's like yer trips to deliver pies if ya made the delivery in a giant armored boat with a small army behind ya," Braeburn amended with a chuckle, "mah point is, Ah think she's safer out there with them Iron boys and no Orks than we are down here."

Applejack made a frustrated noise and looked up at the stars again. Then she turned to Daniels. "Hey, what's this 'Eye of Terror' place like, anyhow? It really that bad?"

"Probably," Daniels murmured, picking up another apple core.

"Ya never been there?" Braeburn asked.

"No, I have. Once," the man mumbled. He was looking away as he spoke, trying to avoid eye contact with the equines. "I don't remember much of it."

"How's that?" Applejack asked. "Ya sleep through the entire trip?"

Daniels tossed the apple core into the garbage bag, his expression strangely perturbed. "No. I mean, I don't THINK I did." As the other ponies stared up at him, the mercenary sighed. "The whole thing seems like a nightmare, now. I mean, literally; it felt just like a bad dream, and all I can remember is a bunch of weird phantasms and fragmented images. Bloody claws and weird lights and whatnot." He shuddered. "After we had left the Eye, I woke up in the medicae chained to a table with a broken arm and a stab wound. Got off real lightly, apparently. The Biologis Techpriest said that some three percent of our humans died during that trip. Another five percent were injured so badly that... well, they died AFTER the trip, one way or another."

"Ten percent, huh?" Applejack mumbled uncomfortably.

"That's eight percent, Cuz."

"Quiet, Braeburn."

Daniels shook his head. "I'm pretty sure that Sparkle will be okay as long as she keeps her head down and does what the Dark Techpriest says. You ponies have always handled Chaos surprisingly well."

"Ah guess Ah'm more surprised at Princess Celestia than anypony else," Applejack admitted, "sendin' Twi out into the depths of space like that. Twi don't even work fer her no more, and she still ran off as soon as Spike coughed up her orders."

"I know, right? What a loser," Tellis grunted.

Everyone else stopped what they were doing and stared behind them. Tellis was leaning against the bunker complex, staring up at the sky and generally trying to look casual. His effort was entirely lost, although to be fair, it was extremely hard to look casual in daemonic power armor.

"Can Ah help you?" Applejack asked. "Usually yer the first one to jet on outta here when the party's over."

"Yeah, well... uh... look, Hat Pony..." The Chaos Lord stood up straight, looking around. "You run this agri-facility, right?"

"Mah name is Applejack. And yes, Ah do," the farmer replied suspiciously. "Why? Ya break somethin'?"

"No. I need a job," Tellis replied.

This earned him a few confused stares.

"Wait, Ah thought ya had a job. Don't ya kill Orks fer a livin'?" Braeburn asked.

"Yeah, but now I've got gambling debts. This is probably why the Imperium doesn't let Space Marines participate in civil society." Tellis pointed over to one of the apple trees by the side of the road. "Look, your thing is these trees, right? I can be an agri-worker! Just watch!"

Applejack frowned as the Chaos Lord walked up to the tree he had pointed out. It was one of the older trees that had so far survived the crashes on her property, although its harvest had been ruined and it currently bore no fruit.

"Ah'm not sure Ah can take on another worker, Tellis. Ah've still got a lot of mah relatives livin' here to pick up the slack, and ya ain't exactly experienced with this kinda thing."

"Pft, who needs experience? I have the fury of Khorne!" Tellis shouted as he reached the tree and laid a hand on it.

Braeburn quirked an eyebrow. "Fury of corn? Why's the corn so riled-"

"STOP THAT RIGHT NOW OR I WILL PUNT YOU." The stallion flinched away, and Tellis returned his attention to the bare tree. "This is no problem. I can harvest this apple tree way better than some puny horse."

"Uh huh. Yer gonna need to back them words up, cowboy," Applejack drawled, "but really, Ah don't know what yer gonna do with a tree that don't got no-"

"HYAH!!" Tellis shouted and swiped his claws through the trunk of the tree in front of him. The ponies gasped in surprise as the upper half of the tree started to topple over and scorched disks of wood tumbled onto the ground.

"Got it!" Tellis said cheerfully as he caught the trunk and held it firmly over his shoulder.

"WHAT IN TARNATION ARE YA DOIN' TO MAH TREES, YA IRON GALOOT?!" Applejack was red-faced with anger, and her tail twitched sharply as she instinctively tried to use her gravity lash. She didn't have her armor on, however, which was almost certainly a good thing.

Tellis looked back over his shoulder, clearly perplexed. "What? I'm harvesting your apple trees."

Applejack was rendered speechless by the combination of her rage and Tellis's stupidity, so it fell to Braeburn to make the obvious correction.

"We don't harvest the trees themselves, we harvest the fruits FROM the trees."

"Oh. Well... I can still get the fruits from the tree like this." He shifted the trunk in his arms, preparing to shake the entire thing like a massive club. He stopped when he glanced over at the branches, though. "Wait, this tree doesn't even have any fruit," Tellis pointed out, "what's up with that?"

"It ain't grown any yet!" Applejack snapped. "So much alien junk has been crashin' onto mah orchard that this year's harvest was ruined! Almost the only crops we got left are from the apple spines! And yer not helpin' bah comin' round and cuttin' up what's left!"

"Geez, okay, fine. Chill." Tellis snorted through his vox and then put the tree trunk back down, placing it upright onto the severed stump he had made.

He let go, and then watched as the top half of the apple tree teetered over and collapsed onto the ground.

"... Farming is WAY more complicated than I thought," the Chaos Lord remarked, "no wonder you joined us to go kill things in space, Hat Pony."

Tellis turned around, shrugging his huge, armored shoulders. "Well, whatever. I'm sure there's SOMETHING I can do around here for money."

"Ah'll give ya twenty bits to leave and never come back," Applejack said through clenched teeth.

"YES!"

****

Changeling hive - Queen's chamber

Queen Chrysalis smiled softly as she sat upon her throne, watching her children scurry across the floor of the grand hall. A dozen young changelings were clustered below her, all circling around a single unicorn mare. The pony was trapped in a translucent green pod, and suspended within a solution that maintained her life and kept her in a subdued, dream-like state.

The small, quadrupedal creatures scampered around the base of the pod, occasionally lifting their twisted, hole-ridden legs up and pawing at the outer skin of the prison. Warm, nourishing feelings of love and affection came from the trapped pony, like some sort of emotional space heater, and the changelings basked in the energy eagerly.

Chrysalis continued to watch the feeding quietly, positioned just close enough to absorb some small degree of the unicorn's waning love herself. It was a ritual she had observed thousands of times, and hardly needed to be present for personally, but the Queen of the Changelings very much enjoyed seeing it. Her young minions chittered in joy and grew stronger, while the pony within the pod was - literally - emotionally drained. She became colder, lonelier, and her memories of her family and lover began to fragment and become hazy. The mare would eventually be spent, and then thrown out into the wilderness where they could make their way back to pony civilization. Probably.

Chrysalis didn't really take much interest in depleted foodstuffs, so long as the ponies were brainwashed so that they couldn't figure out what had happened to them and find their way back to the hive. Even if some didn't actually make it back home, there was hardly any shortage of hapless equines that could be snatched away with minimal effort. This was an old game, but one that Chrysalis never tired of.

Which isn't to say that she didn't have newer, more challenging games to occupy her time nowadays.

"My Queen. The guardians have arrived," hissed a guard as he clambered into the chamber.

Chrysalis smiled even wider. "Enter!"

The guard quickly shifted to the side, moving away as several larger creatures entered behind him. A minotaur, a yak, a griffon, and a diamond dog, all of them female, walked into the throne room. Then, one by one, they knelt before the queen.

Chrysalis concentrated for a moment, and then the pod that was being used to feed her children floated up and into an adjoining room. The smaller changelings scrambled after it, chittering and whining the entire time.

"Welcome back, my children. You may dispense with your disguises," the Queen said happily. She then made eye contact with each of them, one by one.

"Mox." The diamond dog started to glow a bright green.

"Nox." The griffon's body twitched and quivered as her skin shifted from fur to chitin.

"Sox." The minotaur fell forward onto her arms and started to shrink.

"Rox." The yak seemed to collapse in on itself, the fur falling away and then vanishing into green flame.

Where before the assortment of furry creatures had knelt below the Queen, now four changelings stood at attention. They were obviously different from the ordinary drone workers and even the slightly larger changelings that functioned as soldiers. They had thicker carapace layers with stripes of green, and their horns and wings were much larger. Most obvious of all were their eyes, however; whereas most changelings had insect-like lenses of pale blue, these ones had complex green eyes like Queen Chrysalis herself that gleamed with malicious intelligence. Like all changelings, these ones had holes in their legs, wings, and manes, but the gaps were much reduced and less common across their bodies.

These were the guardians. The changeling elite. Creatures that Chrysalis had lovingly crafted from her brood to be stronger, smarter, and much deadlier than the average changeling.

"Report," Chrysalis commanded, crossing her forelegs, "how go your missions?"

The guardians shared an expressionless glance with each other, and then Mox stepped forward.

"The diamond dogs are a stupidly trusting lot. It didn't take much effort to get into a position where I could start leading them into the battlefield like lemmings. We have planned several sabotage missions against the humans robed in black." Then she scowled. "Their stupidity isn't exactly helpful in my missions, though. I have to lead the dolts by the paws to get anything done. I don't know if we're going to do any serious damage to the humans like this."

Nox stepped forward. "My infiltration has gone well, but I've had more trouble with getting soldiers to attack the humans when it's common knowledge that the kingdom hasn't declared war. The griffons aren't easily fooled, and I have to step lightly around their leaders." Nox frowned. "They, too, have proven largely helpless against the humans and their equine pets. Predators and warriors they fancy themselves, but I've seen how that measures up in the face of the humans' laser guns."

Sox shook her head. "The minotaurs are even harder to lead about by the snout. Without an organized military or strong government, I've been forced to simply build a reputation and try to convince my associates to join hunting squads." She scowled. "There are many tribal elders who speak out against me, claiming I'm trying to lead their people to ruin. Which, you know, is kind of true. Having to manage strategy and politics at the same time is exhausting."

Rox stood up straighter. "Rox in good place right now with yaks! Rox doing great! But yaks have problems carrying out ambushes and sabotage! Subtlety is not strong yak trait! Rox is working on it!"

The other changelings recoiled from their associate, and Queen Chrysalis frowned. "Rox, I said you may drop your disguise. That includes the voice."

"Rox having trouble breaking character! Yak accent kind of grow on Rox! Perhaps Rox acclimated too well to yak society?!"

"Oh, never mind," Chrysalis sighed, "in any case, it seems your missions are going well. Good. It is of extreme import that you maintain secrecy, however; we cannot let our dim-witted 'allies' know that we are pulling their strings or feeding their warriors into a meat grinder." She chuckled brightly at that particular bit of imagery. "Even if your mission results must suffer, you must ensure that you are not exposed, or that you kill any who discover your identity!"

Mox frowned. "Ah, Majesty? You said the mission is going well? Are you sure?"

"I think we've managed to kill a few humans in my ambush, but it was still pretty much a failure," Nox grumbled. "They killed a dragon. A dragon! Just shot it out of the sky. Embarrassing, really."

"Tut, tut, my children. You miss the point of all this." Chrysalis stood up and looked down on her guardians through a sheet of seaweed-green hair. "Although it would be nice if our cowardly puppets were capable of such feats, I never expected them to inflict any real harm as things stand now. If they kill a few humans or ponies, wonderful! If not, then they've at least served their purpose."

"And that purpose is...?" Sox prompted.

"To prod that big, metal hornet's nest that now occupies a point of central importance and power on our planet," Chrysalis answered, "I need to see how the humans react. How they think. How much pressure Equestria exerts on their alien 'friends' not to stamp out every species that dares raise a hoof against them."

"Ah, Rox sees!" shouted Rox. "But what if the aliens DO stamp out those kingdoms?! All Rox's stuff is still in Yakyakistan!"

Chrysalis winced at her yelling, and then replied. "This, too, serves our purposes. If the humans begin to attack the other nations, then those creatures can more easily be united against the space apes. And all the while we'll be waiting, and watching, looking for a chance to strike."

Her smile returned. "That day may come sooner than we'd hoped. I've learned much from our spies in Equestria, and it seems that the heart of this '38th Company' shall be absent for some time. Most of their mightiest warriors are gone, having sailed off into space to complete some asinine chore or another."

The guardians looked wary.

"With all respect, Highness, the cowardly rabble we've managed to lead so far won't be able to mount any kind of challenge against the human army, even if the apes are reduced in strength," muttered Mox bitterly.

"Even the smaller, weaker humans are skilled in the ways of war and armed much better than griffon warriors. And their fortress seems utterly impregnable," Nox claimed, "is it possible to overcome such a bulwark with an army of these useless pawns?"

"As we are now, no. It is not," Chrysalis admitted, "we need more soldiers. More information. More players on the board." She raised her voice. "Tox! Gox! Come out! Meet your sisters!"

"Really committed to this naming scheme, aren't you?" Mox mumbled as another pair of changeling guardians emerged from an adjacent chamber.

"As long as she doesn't name one of us 'Cox'," Sox retorted.

These two new guardians stood at attention facing the other four, silently sizing up their siblings. Physically the changelings didn't look very different from others of the same caste, but for creatures as complex as the guardians their personalities and magic specialties varied considerably. Each had studied the cultures and mannerisms of the species that they sought to mimic, and as a result their infiltrations were deeper and much more sophisticated than that of the common changeling. While most of the species copied the appearance of other races just to get close enough to drain some love or gather some general knowledge floating about the population, the guardians sought control and authority, and as such invited much more scrutiny.

"As you know, I created you each to help subjugate a population from within. Not too long ago I had intended to cripple these populations of ignorant and disparate feed animals while I seized control of Equestria. With control of the very sun, an endless supply of love to feed my changelings, and the closest nations infiltrated by my most capable agents, nothing could have stood in the way of our complete supremacy!"

There was a long, awkward pause as Chrysalis finished speaking.

"Things... didn't really work out that way," Chrysalis mumbled bitterly, "but now these aliens have arrived... the humans, Astartes, and the Orks... our world is changing, and the old balance of powers need not apply. Some see ruin and terror in the appearance of these creatures, but I see opportunity. However, we will need more information. More eyes, more ears, and more levers of power..."

She pointed a twisted hoof at Gox. "You, Gox, shall infiltrate the Orks. This should not be difficult, as they have quite a reputation for stupidity and inattention to detail. Still, you must be on your guard at all times; no matter how incompetent, the savages are still violent and extremely dangerous."

Gox bowed deeply. "As you say, your Majesty. The alien barbarians shall be yours to command."

"Also, be careful not to be so fully assimilated that you can't stop speaking as they do," Chrysalis added.

"Is that an indirect criticism of Rox's accent?!" Rox demanded.

"Speaking in the third person and yelling all the time is not an 'accent'!" Chrysalis snapped. "Now be silent, Rox!"

She turned toward Tox, who was awaiting her own orders. "Tox, I am giving you the most important and most challenging assignment." Her eyes glowed briefly, becoming pools of glimmering emerald light. "Your task is to infiltrate the 38th Company itself, and make your home in Ferrous Dominus."

Tox bowed deeply next to her sisters. "Indeed, my Queen."

"Be warned, however: We know little of the humans, but everything we've uncovered suggests your assignment will be very difficult. You cannot simply don the form of a random human and walk into their lands, as we may do with the other species. The other guardians have made their own identities, entering their victims' homes as unique individuals so as to create minimal suspicion. This is not an option for you. Every human on our world came from their ships in space, and they will expect to know you. They have incredible devices and strange magics. And the accursed ponies gather 'round them like loyal pets, and may warn them about us. You must study them, and then replace one of them. Only then will you have access to the fortress-factory, and then your true mission will begin."

Tox looked up at Chrysalis hesitantly. "If I cannot research the humans here, and cannot get into the fortress until I've studied and replaced one, how am I to do this, my Queen?"

"The ponies may be a nuisance, but they also provide a weakness." Chrysalis chuckled, drawing her long, pointed tongue across her teeth. "You will first go to Equestria, not Ferrous Dominus. Gather information from the equines, as much as you can, and then find a target to subdue. Learn from it, and then take its place. But remember that secrecy is paramount. If the humans learn of you, or worse, find that we are manipulating the weaker species into attacking them, all may be lost."

"It shall be as you say, my Queen," Tox said, lowering her head again, "did you have a particular target in mind?"

"Indeed I do, child." Chrysalis grinned. "Your target is the nexus of humanity's alliance with equine-kind. You go to Ponyville."

Author's Note

Most people seem to think hoofball would be a pony version of (American) football, but I don't see how they'd play that game without hands. (American) Soccer seems more likely.

Credit goes to Hey It's That (Dead) Pony for the idea of the Warp storm around Centaur III turning into a swirly rainbow acid trip.

Credit goes to EZTP for the new cover art.

Realpolitik

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 3

Realpolitik

****

Unknown tunnel network

1 week after Company fleet departure

"Oh, Goddess, what have we done?" mumbled a terrified diamond dog as she raced down a series of winding, glittering mining tunnels. Her pack sprinted along with her, running on all fours, with torches clenched in their teeth.

Explosions echoed through the halls behind them, and loose dirt rained down on their heads. One of the canines glanced back, and he felt a small surge of pride when he saw the path behind them collapse. The explosives had worked, and another Mechanicus mining rig was ruined.

"They're coming. They're coming. They're coming..." a small diamond dog chanted feverishly, almost biting through her torch in her fear.

"Calm down! We're almost home free!" barked another. "Mox said that she'd be waiting by the ruins! It's just a little further!"

A muffled grinding noise came from above, and more dirt started pouring down on the diamond dogs. This time it was obviously not from an explosion.

"They're here!"

"Shut up! Just keep running!"

The dogs reached a wide intersection lit by slow-burning torches, trying desperately to ignore the rumbling tremors and the sound of cracking rock.

"Okay," mumbled the pack leader as he skidded to a halt, "the North tunnel leads back to the village, but the West tunnel is where Mox-"

One of the diamond dogs yelped as a sudden shower of larger rocks almost buried her. A heavy, mechanical grinding noise came from the ceiling, and a moment later a large drill bit burst into the room from above amongst a cloud of rock dust.

"They're here! We're all gonna die!"

The canine saboteurs stood up on their hind legs as a clunking noise came from the digging machine, and many of them whimpered when a compartment on the side of the transport snapped open.

A single figure swung out of the compartment and landed in the path leading to the West tunnel. It was hard for the diamond dogs to tell what the figure was, exactly; it wore a tattered black shroud of rubber and the torch light was dim. Through the tears and folds of the cloak, however, the canines could see gleaming strips of metal and the glimmering green light of optics clusters set under a shadowy hood. The dogs' sense of smell, unhindered by the darkness, detected a pungent aura of machine oil and ozone clinging to what was presumably a cyborg hunter.

"Combat engrams engaged. Target unit identified. Analyzing viable engagement scenarios..."

From beneath the robes unfolded three gangly, multiple-jointed bionic arms, with two of them bearing crackling taser goads.

"There's only one of them!" barked the lead diamond dog, drawing a short sword from his belt and pointing at the Dark Techpriest. "Get him!"

"Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!" went the other dogs as they fled down the North tunnel. The remaining canine blinked in surprise, and then started backing away.

"You useless cowards! Boss Mox is going to-"

A mechatendril darted across the floor like a viper, stabbing a metal needle into the saboteur's ankle. The diamond dog stumbled and then the Dark Techpriest was upon him, pressing the taser goad to his chest. The weapon discharged, knocking him out instantly with a near-lethal blast of electricity.

"Target neutralized. Tracking..."

The Dark Techpriest stepped over the twitching canine, his optics peering into the gloom and rendering the backs of the fleeing enemies.

"Mapping engagement route... viable contact point identified. Dispatching support..."

****

"Did we lose him?"

"Yeah, I think so. Patches never stood a chance..."

"I meant the human! Of course Patches is gone! That idiot actually thought we were going to fight it!"

"Are you sure that was a human? I've seen a few, and I don't remember them having so many... metal bits."

"Who cares what it was, exactly? There are all sorts of freaks working for these humans. Robots, monsters... equines..."

One of the dogs gave a disgusted grunt as she slowed to a walk. The tunnel ahead led into an intersection, which then descended into a series of old, ancient mines. The tunnels were a dark, hopeless labyrinth for most creatures, with paths that went in circles or led to dangerous cave-ins. The diamond dogs, however, could find their way around by scent; the correct tunnels were traveled far more often, and as such the smell of their packs was much stronger.

A quick whiff of the air, and the diamond dogs had a direction. They took off at a swift jog with their ears perked to pick up any sounds of pursuit.

"... Hey, what's with all the torches?" asked one dog suddenly.

"What torches?" asked another.

"That's what I mean. Aren't there supposed to be some on the walls? Like, not too many, or it would make it obvious where the correct path is, but I don't see any at all! I'm pretty sure there were some when we set out!"

One of the diamond dogs held up his own torch and checked the wall. There was, in fact, an unlit torch mounted there, and judging by its scent it had been lit recently. Something had put it out.

"Okay, that doesn't bode well."

"Stop your whimpering and keep moving. We have to lose the freak in the robes before we get back to-"

"Shhhh! Quiet!"

All the canines fell silent and stopped dead in their tracks. Soon they could hear another voice coming from deeper down the tunnel.

"It just surprises me that this was all arranged on such short notice! She literally got the orders the night before she left! Otherwise I definitely would have known about it!"

"Okay, yeah. That is kind of odd, but still-"

"Not to mention where the orders came from! Princess Celestia? REALLY? Why is Miss 'Chaos is Icky and Evil and Gross' sending ponies to the Eye of Terror, anyway?"

"Well..."

"The Eye of Terror. EYE of TERROR. That's what they call it! I'll bet she took off thinking it was some sort of field trip! I'm seriously worried!"

"C'mon Lieutenant, focus on the mission..."

The diamond dogs were perplexed as they heard the voices talking deeper in the mines. The noise echoed through the caverns easily, giving ample warning that they were there.

"Put out the torches!" hissed one of the fleeing saboteurs. "We'll head back home by smell alone!"

The diamond dogs nervously ground their light sources into the dirt, and then started moving again at a more cautious pace.

"And what do I hear when I complain that I didn't get to say goodbye to the mare I love? 'Twilight just wanted to let you know she hates you.' What's with that?"

"Think it's kind of self-explanatory..."

"Man, I don't know. Maybe I should change tactics, here. You know, step it up a notch? She doesn't like who I am? Well, I can change!"

"Okay, really, could we just concen-"

"As soon as I get back home, I'm going to look into selling my slave. I won't actually do it until Sparkle comes back, but, y'know, I want to be sure I can ditch him fast."

"... Sell him? Not let him go?"

"Hey, change is hard. Besides, I'll need the money if I'm actually going to start dating... okay, hold on a sec. Found them."

A ghostly pulse of light came from down the tunnel, and the diamond dog in the lead yelped in pain. She collapsed a moment later, clutching her chest and the trio of needle-like crystals stuck in it.

"They can see us!"

"What? How!?"

"Run!"

Dusk Blade swooped across the front of the pack, cutting across one of the diamond dogs with his hoof blades and then striking another with a twirling kick. The heavy canine stumbled into one of the others, stopping the group briefly in its confused retreat.

"So here are the rats gnawing at our ankles," hissed the other Lunar Guard as she strafed the pack of dogs on the other side. Her echo cannon started to whine as the harmonic keys within powered up.

"Wait, this smell... ponies? But..." mumbled one of the diamond dogs as the pack clustered up and drew their own weapons.

"BATponies, mutt," Dusk growled, "you could never hide from us, even if you never made a sound... so, do you want to wake up in Happy Hills' bestiary cells or its medicae ward?"

"Kill the little shrimps!" barked a canine in the dark.

"I heard 'medicae ward'!" the mare chirped while aiming her weapon. "Here's your lullaby!"

An ear-splitting shriek came from the echo cannon, and Dusk gave the target area some extra clearance before the canines were bombarded by high-intensity sonic blasts. A few of the diamond dogs collapsed instantly, while most of them bolted away in pain and confusion.

One of them swung at Dusk, but he ducked the clumsy attack and then kicked out the dog's legs.

"You mutts think you can come into our tunnels and bury our machines?!" Dusk snapped before striking down another dog with a spin-kick. "Just wait! You'll be digging for us soon enough!"

Another canine swiped at him, but the attack was clumsy and hesitant. The diamond dogs were tracking his position in the dark through scent and hearing, neither of which were precise enough senses to guide a melee. The batponies, on the other hand, were in their element, and every taunting comment they made sketched the world around them via their echolocation. In an enclosed environment like the mines, they didn't even need to bother with their night vision optics.

"We'll destroy the human mines, and then we'll destroy you!" shouted another diamond dog charging at Dusk.

The Lunar Lieutenant was just a bit too slow in removing his hoofblades from the back of another enemy, and was tackled out of the air before he could dodge. Dusk hit the ground on his back, pinned by a large and powerful paw.

"Die already, you useless puppets!" snarled the dog before biting onto a leg. He nearly broke his teeth on the batpony's armor plating, but a pained screech from the stallion confirmed that it hurt at least as much for his opponent.

"Lieutenant! Don't worry, I've got you!" came a shout from above.

Dusk kicked at the dog on top of him, and then was slugged in the face by another paw. As dangerous as his situation was, though, what really set his heart pounding was when he heard the whining sound of the echo cannon building its charge.

"Gugh! Nacht, don't you DARE fire the echo gun at me! Oof!"

"Don't worry! This thing is super accurate, remember?" Nacht said as she lined up her weapon.

Unfortunately (or perhaps very fortunately), Nacht found herself hovering in the same place long enough for one of the angry diamond dogs to find her. He grabbed the batpony out of the air by the cannon barrel and then swung it around, flinging the mare away and into a wall.

"Kill 'em and let's get out of here!" barked the canine. He rushed at the wall after the mare, ready to pull the batpony limb from limb if necessary. "Ponies or human, you won't stop us!"

"Negative. Success probability of enemy retreat approaching zero," came a voice from the darkness.

Every diamond dog froze stiff, as if their blood had suddenly turned to ice. The gentle sound of measured footsteps against loose dirt came from the tunnel behind them, and a whiff of machine oil crossed the canines' noses.

Looking back into the gloom, a cluster of at least seven glittering green lights approached, step by step, without the slightest sign of urgency.

Dusk felt the shift in the combat immediately, mainly because his assailant had finally stopped trying to throttle him. He slammed a hoof against the diamond dog's knee, and then used a wing to push himself into a roll when the canine flinched back.

Dusk fired a burst from his splinter rifle as soon as he could get a clear shot, and the canine fell to the ground with a yelp while the rest of the pack broke and fled.

"Nacht! Echo cannon! Take them down!" Dusk shouted through the blood in his mouth.

"Y-Yeah! Got it!" She was still a bit dizzy from being thrown into a rock face, but Nacht swung her cannon around and took aim at the fleeing enemies.

"Negative. Hold fire," said the Dark Techpriest. He stopped in his approach, shifting his free hand around in his robes.

Both batponies dropped their guns from their firing positions. The Techpriest had taken up a long-barreled pistol in one hand, and he calmly raised it to firing level.

The barrel released a small burst of light as the weapon discharged with a muffled crack, like a tiny firework. A yelp of pain was heard from one of the diamond dogs ahead of them, but it didn't seem to slow them down. The cyborg lowered his arm.

Soon the canines were far beyond the range of both the batponies' echolocation and the Techpriest's optical sensors.

"So... uh... are we going to finish them off?" asked Nacht.

"Negative. Secure the prisoners for extraction," the Dark Techpriest ordered, "let the enemy retreat."

"Tracking device," Dusk whispered to the other pony. She nodded back. Then he look up at the robed cyborg. "Thanks for helping us out, there. Diamond dogs aren't exactly a warrior race, but they can be feisty when cornered like that."

"Your estimated chances of combat success against that many enemies was thirty-seven-point-eight-seven percent. These results are within simulation parameters."

"Er... thanks?" Nacht said in confusion. "Oh! You were watching over the combat recorder, right? How was my banter this time around?"

"Also within technically acceptable standards of mediocrity."

"YES!" the mare cheered. "I worked really hard on that!"

"Yes, you have," Dusk agreed, "to the point that I doubt you've had enough target practice to safely shoot a diamond dog off of me."

"Cease discussion. Remain silent and assist me with the prisoners," the Dark Techpriest commanded. Then he walked up to the unconscious diamond dogs.

"Uh..."

The cyborg halted and looked back over his shoulder. The batponies were fidgeting behind him, looking uncomfortable.

"So, you know about echolocation, right? We make noise and then figure out our surroundings by listening to how it bounces back to us," Nacht explained nervously.

"Yeah, so when we're talking all the time during our fights and missions, it's not just to act cool. That's pretty much how we see. And those dogs broke my optics goggles," Dusk mumbled, "telling us to be quiet is pretty much asking us to stumble around blind."

"... Very well. You may speak freely as you assist me," the Techpriest said as he pulled up a body.

"Cool! Thanks!" The batponies trotted up next to the robed cyborg and went about discarding any weapons or items they carried.

"So, Techpriest... did YOU know that Twilight Sparkle was leaving the planet?"

"OH, FOR MOON'S SAKE WILL YOU LET IT GO?! I WOULD RATHER WORK BLIND!"

****

Ferrous Dominus - sector 19

Train station

Hope stepped off the mag-lev train nervously, taking her first look around at the interior of a Chaos fortress. Other ponies and a few humans walked past her without pausing to take in the sights. Some were already wearing rebreather masks, while some paused outside to put them on. They moved on quickly, or else chatted with each other, all of them seeming oblivious to the heavy bolter turrets constantly sweeping their targeting arrays across the area.

Hope was not so jaded, and her ears flattened against her head as she stared up at the massive guns sliding back and forth. She could probably fit her entire leg down the barrel if she'd tried.

Her horn lit up, and a rebreather mask that she had been issued rose from her saddlebags and fit over her muzzle. She used her magic to secure the straps, and then hesitantly stepped in line to enter the fortress streets.

As she waited to be cleared by security, Hope looked back at the train she had come in on. The mag-lev train that connected Ferrous Dominus to Ponyville was an armored beast of a vehicle, boasting autocannon turrets and shielded cargo bays. Thankfully such defenses had proven unnecessary so far; Hope was frightened enough just being in a Chaos fortress without being attacked on the way in.

"Next!"

Hope was also thankful that they had a pony processing the new arrivals rather than a human or Iron Warrior. She shuddered as she approached the stallion, her approach being closely tracked by a pair of combat servitors.

"Name?" the armored pony asked.

"Hope."

The pony tapped away at a hololithic screen for a few seconds.

"And what is your business here, Miss Hope?"

"I am a diplomatic envoy from Canterlot. We sent word that I was coming to arrange a meeting with... uh, whoever is in charge right now."

The stallion looked up. She couldn't see his expression beneath his shaded visor and rebreather, but she got the sense he was surprised.

"Really? Huh. Hold on a minute..." he turned away, brought up another hololith screen with a wave of his hoof, and then started poking at it.

Hope stared at the floating, bright orange display board in fascination. She was quite intrigued by human technology, but - like many ponies - was rather squeamish about how much of it was designed and deployed in aid of murder. Her current experience, sadly, was doing little to dispel that. Turning away from the hololith gave her a nice close-up view of a battle servitor: an armored cyborg with a heavy tread chassis rather than legs, and each of its arms replaced by a pair of cannons. In the middle of a cage of wires and ballistics plating was the mutilated torso of a human, crammed into the mess of armor and cabling like an afterthought. It was pale, listless, and vigilant in a distinctly lifeless manner, with a blank-eyed stare fixed on the unicorn.

"Okay, I think we've got this sorted," the stallion guard said before he turned around. Then he frowned up at the battle servitor. "Hey, Teddy! Back up, would you? Give the poor mare some breathing room!"

Hope was mildly impressed when the servitor actually did as instructed. Its engine rumbled and spat out puffs of smoke, and the treads ground slowly backward to put an additional meter between the cyborg weapon and the shivering pony.

"And put the guns up! This one's clear!"

Again, the servitor followed the command immediately, shifting its weapons up toward the sky and away from Hope's face.

"Sorry about that, Miss. Just give me a moment to complete the auspex scan of the train, and then I can escort you to the command center." The guard pony tapped at the first hololith with his hoof, and numerous diagrams bloomed into view, one at a time, and then shrunk back to nothing before Hope could get a good look at them.

"All right, done! Let's go!" With another swipe of his hoof, the heavy crossbar fence that separated the train platform from the inner fortress slid shut behind Hope and locked into place.

"My name is Coal Dust, by the way! It's an honor to welcome you to Ferrous Dominus!" the stallion's cheerfulness came through in a distorted mumble, and seemed slightly incongruous with the remarkably depressing setting that Hope was being led through. Thick fences, razor wire, and ferrocrete barricades were everywhere, and the humans lounging around the area were all armed to the teeth.

As was her escort. Coal Dust wore the now-typical flak armor suit that protected his entire body save his head. His face was covered by a mask and a thick helmet with a Chaos Star mounted on the front. The flak plate was painted a dull red, and then scratched and dirtied from wear and local particulate filth. A lasrifle was attached to his ballistic harness on the right foreleg, and the left had a knife sheathed at the knee.

The setup didn't look unusual, as the Royal Guards in Canterlot wore the same basic wargear now. However, Canterlot's soldiers had begun the process of embellishing and caring for their equipment as proper icons of their station; the flak armor was painted elaborately, ribbons and medals had been added appropriately, and everything was cleaned regularly and well. There was also a lovely absence of Chaos Stars. Nopony had been so kind as to explain the rather chilling sensation that the symbols generated among unicorns when they looked at them. Hopefully it was because nopony could explain it. More likely, the answer was being withheld because it was ugly, terrifying, and unhelpful.

"Was that... thing back there really named 'Teddy'?" Hope suddenly asked.

Coal chuckled. "Kind of! The Company just numbers the servitors, or calls them the same name they had before they were mind-scrubbed and gutted. Some of us find that kind of depressing, though, so we give 'em new names! Teddy's my favorite!"

Hope's brow furrowed under her horn. "You said... 'mind-scrubbed'? What's that?"

"Pretty much what it sounds like. And I don't think I have to explain 'gutted' to you."

Hope gulped.

"Yeah, the humans don't take any back-talk from their slaves and prisoners. And the way things are going, we might be seeing a lot of new species up for conversion."

Hope halted in place, recoiling away from the soldier. "You mean they're doing this to ponies?!"

Coal stopped and glanced back at her. "Ponies? Nah. I think they were looking into that, but we're too small to fit with the heavier machines. Makes it kind of pointless. Also, they don't really have any pony slaves or prisoners to experiment on."

"Oh, thank Celestia," Hope gasped in relief.

"Actually, if anything, our fair Princess almost messed that up big time," Coal snorted, "but yeah. Mostly we're looking at diamond dogs right now."

Hope looked up at him in askance as she started following him again.

"I have to say, I'm REALLY glad that Equestria is getting involved diplomatically," Coal Dust said in a more serious tone, "I think the humans are awesome, personally, but they don't really have much of a head for... well... peace, I guess. The Tau are better about that, but screw those guys."

Hope nodded. "I heard that something besides the Orks attacked the 38th Company. Rumors are flying wildly about Canterlot right now, though, and the Company only shares information with the Equestrian government on a 'need-to-know' basis. And, well, there doesn't seem to be much information that it thinks we need to know. You say the perpetrators were diamond dogs?"

Coal glanced back again, giving the mare a sidelong look. "Yeah. Mostly."

"Mostly? There were other species involved in the attack?" Hope asked in concern.

"There's been a lot more than one attack," Coal Dust said grimly as he opened the front entrance of the command center and stepped aside for Hope, "most of them have been by diamond dogs. Some have been by griffons. We've had some minotaurs, and even a couple dragons."

Hope stopped dead in her tracks, staring at the stallion.

Coal raised a foreleg to shift his goggles up and lower his mask. For the first time, Hope saw the stallion's face. His worried eyes met hers, pleading with her.

"Listen, I've kind of got a... thing going with a bat pony. I'm a bit of a night owl. It's not important. But last night she told me that her squad had tracked some diamond dog saboteurs back to a little underground village in the tunnel network. From what I heard they're discussing whether to seize the village and move everyone in it to the slave camps or simply collapse the tunnels and crush it all at once."

Hope gawked at the other pony. He shook his head.

"Incidentally, my marefriend favors flattening the place. Bat ponies are kind of hardcore." Coal shook his head. "Anyway, I don't know what these guys are trying to accomplish by attacking our patrols and mining stations, but what they're doing is teaching the humans that everything non-equine needs to be shackled or shot. The camps are filling up fast, and the Company hasn't even launched an assault or invaded anyone yet."

Hope released a shuddering breath. "The situation is quite a bit worse than I feared, then."

"General Harlin and Princess Luna are waiting for you in briefing room secundus. Take the right hallway and it's the fourth room down. Good luck, Miss Hope," Coal Dust stood back and saluted, "we know we can count on Chaos if we need a massacre. I hope we can count on Equestria to prevent one."

Hope slipped her respirator mask off as she crept through the halls of the command center. Her pace was subdued, and she glanced back and forth nervously at the large Iron Skulls and Chaos Stars that served as the only decoration in the bare metal hallways. Humans in non-combat uniforms passed by her every once in a while, but they were surprisingly few. She hadn't seen a single Iron Warrior since she'd arrived either, although she had heard most of them were out in space at the moment.

She found the room she had been directed to, labeled with "II" above the door. Hope gulped and knocked against it with her hoof.

The door slid open.

"Enter!" barked a man's voice from within.

General Joseph Harlin sat at one side of a hololith table, his hands clasped together. He looked somewhat frustrated.

Luna sat on the opposite side, her head lying on the table and her eyes closed. She was sleeping, which may well have been related to Harlin's frustration.

"Introduce yourself," the General said sharply.

"M-My name is Hope. Hope Springs. I am the diplomatic envoy of Princess Celestia, here to represent Equestria."

Harlin pointed to a chair opposite his position. "Sit down."

Hope did so, steeling her nerve for the engagement ahead of her. She would never characterize herself as a brave pony, but in the context of formal negotiation she could at least distract herself from the fact that the General sent to talk to her appeared to be better armed than the pony soldier that had escorted her here; she couldn't really recognize a bolt pistol and differentiate it from a lasweapon, but chainswords were anything but subtle.

"My name is General Joseph Harlin, Commander of the 38th Company's mortal contingents," the man said before gesturing to the mare napping next to him, "I presume this one doesn't need an introduction?"

"Correct, General. I know who she is." Hope paused. "Uh... does Princess Luna need to be awake for this, or...?"

To her surprise, the man snorted and flicked Luna's horn. The Princess jerked upright and started stammering incoherently, suddenly awake but obviously dazed.

"Princess Luna. Your councilor has arrived," Harlin said, gesturing to Hope, "it's time to get this under way."

"A-Aye! Indeed. Quite," Luna mumbled, shaking herself from her sleep and yawning. "Well met."

"I am Hope Springs, Princess," the unicorn bowed her head, "it is my understanding that you've been encountering sudden aggression from our neighbors here on... er, Centaur III, as you refer to our world."

"Thou art correct," Luna said wearily, "the total number of incidents hath reached... ah..."

"As of yesterday, sixteen," General Harlin interjected as Luna hesitated, "every one of them carefully planned, cunningly executed, and utterly futile." He sneered. "Let me be blunt with you, Councilor: this is a military problem for which we have ample military solutions. For all their planning and courage, these upstarts have done no serious damage, and every fight has swiftly turned against them. But we will only suffer this foolishness for so long. By the time my masters return from the Warp, this situation will be rectified."

"I agree, General," Hope said grimly, "it is simply Equestria's intention that it be rectified without demolishing the surrounding kingdoms. We're not sure what's happening yet, and we must advise caution."

"Why?" Harlin demanded. "Do you think these creatures possess the power to challenge us?"

Hope actually laughed at that question. "No, General. No force of axe-wielding minotaurs or angry griffons is going to tear down these walls. That was true a few weeks ago, when the Company finished rebuilding from the war, and it's still true today, even with most of your strongest soldiers gone. That raises some important questions, and provides us with crucial advantages."

Harlin sat back in his chair, furrowing his brow. "Go on..."

Hope was cheering inwardly that she'd managed to calm the man's initial belligerence. She was sure she still had a long way to go before the option of artillery strikes and slave blocks was off the table, though.

"Well, first, is it true that these attacks all occurred around your patrol routes and facilities?" Hope asked.

Harlin swept a hand over his personal console rather than answering, bringing up a hololith. As he started entering data, a larger hololith flickered into place over the table. It was a map that placed Ferrous Dominus in the center and then displayed several of the surrounding areas. Small buildings and towers marked out the outposts belonging to the Iron Warriors, as well as the nearest Equestrian settlements.

"The locations of the attacks have all taken place within this area. They've all struck either patrol convoys or small, poorly-defended stations, usually with hit-and-run attacks. None of the strike forces we've deployed to attack Ork raiders have had any encounters."

"Our Lunar Guard hath also found several possible malcontents probing the fortress and surrounding lands in the dead of night," Luna added, "although these efforts art easily thwarted. None of the races that think to oppose us can match the thestrals' abilities in dead of night. If there were any such attacks planned, they hath faltered before being launched."

"This is all very strange," Hope mumbled as several red markers noted the location of the ambushes, "all of them have taken place far outside any other nation's recognized borders. Some of them have even occurred inside Equestria." Hope shook her head. "There's no way these are being conducted by the griffon and diamond dog militaries. They must be-"

"Yes, they are," Harlin interrupted.

Hope jerked her head up. "What?"

"Most of the griffons and dogs we've captured have confessed to being army regulars, acting under orders. Or the equivalent, for the minotaurs. They don't really have a formalized military. Not sure about the big lizards, as we haven't captured any."

The diplomat pony stared at him in shock. "But... But WHY? This makes no sense at all! You haven't even launched any invasions of foreign territory! Why would they be throwing soldiers at you like this?"

"Few of the non-equine races on our world art known for their calm temperament or sophisticated intellect," Luna pointed out wryly, "it may be that they see this conflict as inevitable, since the Company claims dominion over the entirety of the planet."

"But then, why no formal declaration of war?" Hope asked, scrunching up her muzzle.

"No what, now?" Harlin asked.

The unicorn glanced at him uncertainly. "You know... a statement of intent to challenge your army?"

The General looked over at Luna. "Oh. You do those?"

"Thou dost not?"

"It's pretty much implied. For us it's not challenging armies and condemning species to death that needs to be declared." The man shrugged.

The door to the briefing room opened, admitting another participant. Hope was busy scrutinizing the hololithic map, but General Harlin straightened up immediately when he saw who had entered.

"Warpsmith Kessler, welcome," the mercenary officer said quickly, bowing his head.

Hope turned her head around as she heard heavy footsteps enter the room, and then she nearly fell over off her seat.

The diplomat pony had seen Iron Warriors before, including Warsmith Solon and Serith. Still, she was far from used to them, especially in close quarters. The floor trembled with every step the engineer-warrior made, sending small, terrifying jolts up the legs of Hope's chair. Mechatendrils bearing drooling mouths, razor claws, and other dangerous implements snaked around the Iron Warrior, and a pair of steaming smokestacks were mounted on the back of his armor. The Chaos Space Marine was armed, of course, because apparently no one in this fortress could attend a simple committee meeting without a blade on hand. He even had a unique stench to him: a revolting mix of gun smoke and sulfur that made Hope seriously consider putting her rebreather back on.

The Iron Warrior took the side of the table opposite Luna, standing up with his power axe held at his side. He turned to look toward Hope, and the unicorn whimpered as she stared into the cluster of a half-dozen blood-red lights set into Kessler's helmet.

"Uh, h-hi. I'm-"

"I know who you are," the Warpsmith cut her off, which did nothing to shore up her nerves, "I've been listening to this meeting via vox-capture on the way here. Continue." Kessler's voice was curiously resonant, lacking the static feedback caused by most vox emitters. It really should have served to make him less intimidating, but Hope had to conclude that it did not.

"Councilor Hope?" Harlin asked after a long pause. "Was that all you had to say?"

She gulped and shook her head, but had difficulty finding her voice. "It's just... ah... w-we should seek an explanation from the sovereign territories before making assumptions, th-that's all." Hope found herself stumbling over her words and struggling to keep eye contact with Warpsmith Kessler as she pleaded her case.

"I do not see why," Kessler said calmly, "the natives have made themselves quite clear. They wish to remove us from this world, if not destroy us completely." Hope sputtered weakly for a moment before the Iron Warrior continued. "This is annoying, but also convenient. There was some question of how the 38th Company was going to lay physical claim to this world. Were we to seek alliances, as with your kind? Were we to burnish our image as heroes and saviors of the planet and demand compensation?"

"'Tis our preferred approach," Luna mumbled, looking sleepy again.

"Now there is no question. No need for hesitation or propaganda. They have harmed us in our own territory, testing our strength and patience. We will march into their homes and show them both measures laid bare. Each capital will be seized, one by one. Those creatures without a governing body shall have their settlements or nests razed until they submit." His mechatendrils hissed as he paused. "I will have many trophies and gifts to show Lord Sliver when he returns."

"Dost you mean Warsmith Solon?" Luna asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Meh."

General Harlin glanced over to Hope, who looked terrified. "What do you advise, Councilor?"

The diplomat levitated a handkerchief out of her saddlebag, wiping away the sweat that was beading across her brow. "Please, I b-beg you to reconsider! If th-they have truly decided to wage w-war on the Company, then, well, they're dead. That's a foregone conclusion. B-But I don't believe our neighbor kingdoms are r-really that stupid!"

"Their warriors clearly are," Harlin quipped.

"There has to be another dimension to this! Even if the griffon or diamond dog nations seriously thought they could win a war against the Company, they should have their hooves full with all the scattered Ork marauders! And none of them have made their intentions known to Equestria, either!"

"They may hath concluded that ponykind hath cast its lot in with Chaos," Luna mused, "and they art correct, at that."

"There are just too many assumptions in play, here!" By now desperation had focused Hope's mind and cured her stutter, and she started rooting around in her saddlebags with her magic. "Let Equestria consult the governments that have been accused of launching these assaults on your territory! We've scheduled a summit a week from now with representatives from this continent's tribes and kingdoms; I will present the evidence of their wrongdoing and demand an explanation!"

"And that will accomplish what, precisely?" Kessler asked curiously.

"It shalt establish a formal declaration of war, at least," Luna interjected, "We would prefer that their intentions art clear before We destroy them. We hath little to lose by a slight delay." She paused to yawn, curving around a wing to cover her mouth.

Hope really wished she could have gotten a stronger commitment to peace and de-escalation from the only pony in the 38th Company with any real clout. Princess Luna wasn't exactly known for her meekness or pacifism, but the Princess of the Night was still treating the conquest of nations as a chore rather than a major upheaval.

She laid out several sheets of parchment and started writing notes with her magic. "I realize, of course, that war is a natural state of affairs for you, Sir-"

"Lord," Kessler corrected calmly.

"L-Lord! Yes! Sorry!" She pounded a hoof against her chest. "But as your allies, Equestria must insist on doing its part for the Iron Warriors! Diplomatic relations are our specialty, and we have a strong rapport with many of our neighbors! Let us try to bring them into the fold without further bloodshed!" She pursed her lips, and then continued in a more subdued voice. "And, uh, please don't annihilate any villages without evacuating the civilians first. That's just uncalled for, really."

General Harlin didn't look convinced, but Luna raised up a wing.

"We concur with the Councilor. We possess the luxury of absolute military dominance, and thy armies hath suffered enough in the war against the Orks. Let us exhaust rudimentary diplomatic options before counter-attacking. We hast nothing to fear."

Hope contained a relieved sigh.

General Harlin shook his head. "I must recommend a more aggressive response. Even if the casualties have been light, the Dark Mechanicus has suffered repeated delays and inefficiencies due to these attacks and are demanding action, and I am accountable to them. Expanded and constant patrol and guard rotations put greater strain on our mercenary forces than a simple assault or bombardment would. We should attack."

The man and mares turned to look at Kessler.

The Warpsmith seemed to be staring at the hololith map, but it was impossible to guess what commanded the attention of the Iron Warrior as his optics flickered softly in the room's gloomy lighting. He could have been reading a visor display, running a program, or searching the noosphere with his neural uplink. They waited, and for forty seconds, the tension turned Hope's stomach into knots.

"Let us meet these other creatures outside the battlefield," Kessler finally said, glancing toward Harlin, "these diamond dogs, griffons, dragons... we know little of them. Exploring this world has yielded many surprises. We may yet find something of worth among the filth that snaps at our heels."

Harlin nodded, and the Warpsmith turned to look down at Hope. The unicorn's eyes were wide, and her ears were perked up for the first time since he had arrived.

"This... 'summit' may prove useful. And you say it is taking place soon?"

"In another week!" Hope almost shouted, still fairly shocked that things had gone her way.

"Excellent. Set its location on the hololith map. I will arrange a transport for us," Kessler said. With a wave of his hand, the hololith zoomed out to display more of the region.

Hope hesitated. "... When you say 'us', are you referring abstractly to our respective factions, as represented by me?"

"Negative. I will be accompanying you to this meeting," Kessler said softly as he poked at the hololith. New icons and pathways started opening up on the map, but Hope wasn't really paying attention to that anymore.

"B-But, uh, I r-really think that, er, I should-" the mare's sputtering was cut off by the Warpsmith.

"I shall allow you to ply your trade, Councilor, and I will not prevent Equestria from trying to bring the foe to heel without further expenditure of men and munitions. But I would have these insolent beasts see the enemy that they think to drive from this world as they bargain for their lives, and I would hear their excuses personally before deciding their fate."

"Shall I arrange a security detail, my Lord?" General Harlin asked.

"Negative. These creatures are expecting to parlay with an equine. I do not foresee any threats worth the attention of more than one Iron Warrior," Kessler explained.

"I don't s-suppose Princess Luna c-could come too?" Hope asked, almost whimpering.

The other participants looked over to the alicorn. She snored softly as she rested her head against the table.

"The Princess has been spending too many days awake, it would seem. It seems to be interfering with her usual rest cycle," Harlin mumbled, "best not to start piling on more daytime obligations. Besides, she strikes me as a lousy diplomat."

Hope might have pointed out that the Iron Warrior that had invited himself to the diplomatic conference had about as much diplomatic tact and experience as an inebriated Ork, while Luna, for all her flaws, was still a pony royal. But her diplomatic skills prevented her from doing so.

"It is decided, then," Kessler said, turning away from the table and walking back toward the door. "General, consult with the Dark Mechanicus and the Tau. I expect you to have assault plans ready if the negotiations fail."

"I suppose I should be glad that you said 'if'," Hope mumbled while massaging her temples with her hooves.

"I hold little hope for the future of these creatures," Kessler said, pausing before the exit, "but your kind has impressed me before. I will give you a chance to serve us."

Hope winced. "Th-Thank you, my Lord."

"You're welcome. I will send for you when preparations are complete." The Iron Warrior left the room.

"Well, I have a lot of work ahead of me," Harlin mumbled, "I suppose we can let those canine burrowers squirm for a few more days until we ruin them." He started walking to the exit himself. "Follow me. I'll see to your lodgings."

"Oh, okay." Hope dropped out of her chair, levitating her things behind her.

Then she glanced back at the table. "Uh... should we tell Princess Luna that the meeting is over?"

"Ssssnx," Luna snorted in her sleep, and then turned her head to rest on her other cheek. "No, Tia... my cake... give... give it back... ven... vengeance will... be mine..."

Harlin shrugged before walking out. "She seems fine to me."

"Ah. Okay."

****

Ponyville

The train whistled loudly before it started pulling away from the station, its wheels straining against the armored behemoth they carried. Heavy bolters rattled at the vibration and targeting lasers swept across buildings and ponies alike in a relentless hunt for targets. Seams of pulsing green came from the train engine, and white smoke leaked a perfectly unique odor into the air from the coolant vents. The vehicle was practically unrecognizable to anyone who had ridden it two months earlier, resembling a war machine more than a method of simple transit.

Many of the trains in Equestria had been upgraded with ballistic armor and autoturrets, and some even ran with guards on board. Ostensibly this was to protect the major routes of transit from Ork raiders, although many of the operators involved confessed that there were other dangerous, hostile creatures out in the Equestrian wilderness that could harass or even infiltrate their vehicles.

It was a point that Tox couldn't help but appreciate as she watched the weaponized transport leave, seeing as she qualified as such a creature herself.

"By the hive..." Tox whispered under her breath as she looked over her destination.

Ponyville was completely unlike any pony settlement she had seen or heard of. Rustic earth pony homes shared space with blocky towers of metal. Armored transports were parked here and there, and the roads had been paved to contend with the constant grind of massive tank treads. Large metal energy pylons bearing yellow and black caution stripes were located next to the larger buildings, humming and crackling loudly while power pulsed through thick braids of cabling. The train yard itself was now located next to a large construction yard, and Tox could see huge cranes with plasma welders and servo clamps rising and falling as they worked at some project she couldn't see.

It was quite obvious why Ponyville had been selected as a waypoint on her path to the Iron Warriors' fortress-factory. Evidence of humanity's influence was everywhere, freely mixed with the rural simplicity of traditional equine living. It was a stunning sight for a creature that had never so much as seen a functioning laser before, and Tox was glad that she wasn't the only one gaping and stumbling about upon exiting the train. It wouldn't do to look out of place, but luckily many disembarking ponies looked just as impressed as she did.

She was currently disguised as a yellow unicorn mare with a black mane and a lightning circle cutie mark. It was a partial copy of a pegasus selected at random at the beginning of her journey, with the fur and mane colors shifted and the cutie mark reversed. A lesser changeling might have assumed that taking the form of a random pony and then traveling several hundred miles to a different town would have been sufficient cover to avoid being caught as a shape-shifter. Tox's breed was more careful. Until their objective was in sight, caution was paramount.

She slowly walked out of the train station, taking in the smells of exhaust and coolant vapors. Rumor had it that Ferrous Dominus spewed so much poisonous gas into the air that it was dangerous to even walk its streets without breathing protection. Was such a fate in store for Ponyville, too? It seemed unlikely that the earth ponies, known for their connection to nature in general and horticulture in particular, would allow their village to be slowly consumed by the humans' machines. Was there any sort of equine resistance to this alien corruption?

As if on cue, a shout came from the side of the road.

"PROTECT OUR FORESTS! PROTECT OUR COUNTRY! JUST SAY NO TO CHAOS!"

Tox immediately veered toward the shouts, trying to suppress a smirk on her face. Her mission didn't include undermining human/pony relations, and in fact doing so would probably draw unnecessary attention her way. But that didn't mean that she wasn't interested in any possible discord between the allies that represented the greatest military threat to the changeling race.

In a grassy patch by the side of the road, four mares were slowly marching in a circle. One was shouting slogans through a bullhorn, while the others shouted words of agreement after her. They all had signs mounted on their backs bearing peace symbols and slogans like "make love, not lasers" and "daemons are illegal immigrants".

"END THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF OUR LANDS! END THE WAR! END THE HATE!"

"You tell 'em, sister!"

"Preach it!"

"DON'T POISON OUR AIR AND WATER! DON'T CORRUPT OUR FOALS WITH THE INSANITY OF THE DARK GODS!"

"Truth to power!"

"We will be heard!"

While most of the ponies either ignored the protesters or regarded them with rolling eyes and quirked eyebrows, Tox moved up to the edge of the tiny demonstration and sat down.

The mares seemed to immediately sense her curiosity. Lily whirled on Tox with a speed that genuinely impressed the magical infiltrator.

"You, there! Are you tired of having humans calling the shots?!" Lily demanded, standing nose-to-nose with the stranger.

"... Maybe?" Tox replied.

"Do you want to protect the Equestrian way of life?!" shouted Carrot Top.

"... Is the Equestrian way of life under threat?" Tox asked hesitantly.

"Do you want to keep diseased, wretched undead from clawing their way out of their very graves and devouring the living?!" Bonbon demanded with chilling seriousness.

"Yes," Tox said immediately, "that last one sounds like an inherently worthwhile cause."

"Then march with us, sister!" Rose declared, beckoning to Tox with a hoof. "We need all hooves on deck to show those humans we won't just turn over this planet to them!"

Tox looked at the outstretched hoof as if it carried a dead rodent. "I have additional questions, if you don't mind. I don't know much about the humans."

"Well, then you came to the right mares!" Carrot sniffed. "We'll tell you anything you want!"

Tox struggled to keep a grin off of her face. "I see that there's quite a lot of human technology around here. Are there a lot of humans living in Ponyville?"

"Not as many as it seems," Bonbon admitted, "the only humans that are permanent residents are the Sunsworn and a few of the priests at the Nethalican. You'll see quite a few mercenaries around here selling stuff and guarding the people selling stuff, but they don't live here."

That explanation contained a few words that Tox had never heard before. "Sunsworn?"

"Ugh, yeah," Carrot Top made a grunt of disgust and stuck out her tongue, "probably the best humans around, and that's not saying much. Bunch of fanatics that decided to abandon Chaos to worship Princess Celestia. They can be really annoying, but they're not that bad."

Tox found that interesting, and a little alarming. "There are humans that worship Celestia? Religiously? Why?"

"Apparently moving the sun is a big deal to them. I dunno," Rose shrugged.

"No, no, that's wrong, remember? She doesn't raise the sun, the planet circles the sun and she turns the planet."

"Says the humans! More propaganda, if you ask me!"

"I guess it could be, but, I mean, they have space ships. It seems like the kind of thing they'd know about."

Tox wished she could get away with taking notes on everything she was being told right now, but didn't want to seem quite THAT invested in this topic. "Okay, wait, what was that other thing? The Nethicon?"

"Nethalican. Yeah, I know it's a mouthful," Bonbon grumbled.

"You've never heard of it? It's super important!" Lily asked in surprise.

"Er... maybe in passing?" Tox wondered if she was in dangerous territory. She might have stumbled upon something that every Equestrian should know. "But what IS it, exactly?"

"That." Carrot pointed a hoof up toward the rooftops of their little village.

Looming above the lesser metal towers and the ordinary pony houses was a pyramid of dark metal surrounded by spike-tipped towers. It was an imposing structure, but from here it wasn't at all obvious what it was.

As Tox stared, a beam of light suddenly shot up into the sky from the Nethalican's peak, and she flinched back. "Wh-What was that?"

"It does that sometimes. Crazy black magic." Bonbon grumbled.

"The Nethalican is the Company's big evil Chaos temple. They LITERALLY constructed it right on top of most of the dead from the war against the Orks, using their tortured souls as energy."

"It's the thing that's causing the Warp storm, which we THINK is why unicorn magic has been a little wonky lately."

"Not only that! It puts out this weird, awful blight on the ground that's been worming into the Everfree forest! Zecora says that certain parts of the forest are suddenly falling dead for no apparent reason, and the animals are becoming more aggressive and destructive!"

"Plus I'm pretty sure that thing violates every zoning law ever."

Tox was quite intrigued. She'd definitely have to make time to visit the temple later. It seemed like the sort of place where one would meet humans on fairly neutral terms, too. "I see. So, aside from the Nethalican in particular, what kind of problems have the humans been causing?"

"Oh, don't get us STARTED!" Lily groused.

"That was the explicit intent of this encounter," Tox reminded her. The protesters all sat down around her, apparently settling in to their rant.

"Any way you tear it, Chaos is just awful. They worship evil gods and bring hateful monsters into the world on purpose! The eventual goal of Chaos is to conquer the entire galaxy and corrupt or destroy everything! They don't even make a secret about it!" Carrot Top fumed and beat a hoof into the ground. "I talk about it with Kairon all the time! He agrees with me!"

"And Kairon is...?" Tox prompted.

"He's an Iron Warrior locked in a metal coffin that someone dropped off in my front yard. He's kind of goofy, but nice enough."

"Ah. Right."

"They've started corrupting ponies, too!" Rose said with a shudder. "Three fillies around town who have been searching for their cutie marks for ages went to Ferrous Dominus and came back with Chaos Marks instead!"

Tox quirked an eyebrow. That was VERY interesting. "Oh? And what do they do?"

"They replace their special talents with infernal powers, and allow them to communicate with fell beings from beyond the veil."

Tox's other eyebrow arched upward. "Wow. Okay, yeah. That sounds pretty dangerous."

"Not to mention it makes the other children REALLY jealous. My little sister won't stop bugging me to take her to Ferrous Dominus, and she already HAS her cutie mark!" Rose griped.

Next was Lily's turn, and she leaned in until she was almost nose-to-nose with Tox. "Did you know that humans eat meat?!"

"They're carnivores? Interesting..." Tox mumbled.

"No, no, they're omnivores," Bonbon corrected, glaring at Lily, "they can eat plants and meat."

"But they still eat meat!" Lily shouted in Tox's face. "Do you know what that means?"

"...... It means that they have a greater number of possible food sources that provide a wider range of useful nutrients?" Tox guessed.

"It means they're going to eat us!" Lily shouted, planting her hooves on the sides of her head and shaking it back and forth.

"There's some contention on that particular 'problem', though," Bonbon grumbled, "by which I mean that it's not a problem at all. Nopony has ever heard of a human eating a pony."

"But they COULD!" Lily fretted. "What if we're delicious?! WE WOULD NEVER EVEN KNOW UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE."

"Moving on," Bonbon said, clearing her throat, "in addition to being generally awful, the humans also have the cult of Nurgle, dark god of disease and entropy. That's brought a lot of problems here to Equestria."

Tox was again very intrigued. As a guardian changeling, she was inured against disease, so it didn't really concern her. For most other creatures, however, illness was a severe and terrifying matter.

"And what has this cult been doing?" she asked.

"It brought the dead back to life!" Bonbon shuddered.

Tox again felt her expectations severely betrayed. "But... isn't that the OPPOSITE of how diseases work? Why would you even be mad about that?"

"Because I have been rooming with a ZOMBIE for over a month! I spend more on air fresheners and cleaning supplies than I do on food!" Bonbon wailed, slumping toward the ground. "I managed to tip off a few mercenary teams that there was a plague zombie living at my house, but every time they show up Lyra somehow manages to hide him and most of the evidence that he lives with us! Now the human soldiers just think I'm some kind of paranoid neat freak and won't listen to me anymore!" Bonbon sobbed into her hooves, and Lily and Rose pet her back sympathetically.

Tox took a moment to ingest the frankly overwhelming amount of information she'd gathered from the mares in front of her, and stared up at the dark temple that dominated the Ponyville skyline.

Assuming that what the mares were telling her were correct - and discounting the prospect of humans eating their pony allies - it was rather surprising to Tox that there was so little visible discontent among the ponies. Then again, she supposed that itself suggested that much of what the four pony protesters said should be taken with a grain of salt.

"Very interesting," she murmured after a long pause, "no wonder you want the humans off the planet."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, WHOA!" Carrot Top replied. Tox suddenly realized that all four mares were staring at her in shock, and she quickly checked that she hadn't accidentally let her disguise down somehow.

"Who said anything about wanting the humans off the planet?" Carrot asked. "Are you crazy? We'd DIE!"

"Look, no matter how much we might dislike Chaos coming into our villages and setting up polluting smokestacks and evil temples, the Orks are way worse. They want to kill all of us just for fun. And there's no way we can deal with the Orks without the humans and their technology and scary religion."

"Some three thousand of them died fighting for Ponyville! They're heroes!"

"We just don't want them mucking up our village after the battle is over."

Tox stared hard at the ponies. "So... you want the humans to fight for you against the Orks... and then leave?"

"Yes," Rose confirmed.

"But leave PONYVILLE. Not the world," Bonbon clarified, "I mean, seriously, who cares if they set up shop in the badlands and stink the place up with their smog? They're the badlands."

"Uh-huh." Tox glanced up at the ponies' signs. "And you apparently aren't against them fighting the Orks, so why are you agitating for peace?"

"Well, peace in this case can only be achieved when every Ork on the planet is dead," Rose reasoned, "so really, I suppose we're arguing for the 38th Company to just fight them harder until the entire species is wiped off the face of the planet."

Tox recoiled. "I... I have to go. It was... nice speaking to you mares, I guess."

"Wait!" Lily shouted, causing the infiltrator to flinch. "We never actually introduced ourselves! I'm Lily, and this is Rose, Bonbon, and Carrot Top." She nodded. "Whether or not you support our resistance to human dominion, we at least want to welcome you to Ponyville! What's your name?"

"My name?" Tox's eyes narrowed. "I'm Tox. Good day." She turned sharply and trotted off, heading for the Nethalican.

"... Tox? Like... toxin?" Lily looked over at the other mares. "Huh. Do you think her special talent is chemical engineering?"

"Oh, Celestia," Bonbon groaned, planting a hoof against her forehead, "sixty bits says she'll be a Nurgle cultist before the end of the week."

"You're on!" Rose said.

Tox furrowed her brow as she walked across town, taking in the sights of the rebuilt village. She made a beeline for the Nethalican, wanting to get a better look at what constituted a human's place of worship.

The structure loomed larger as she approached the side, studying the architecture. It bore the same hard-angled, over-armored look as the other examples of human structures in town, but the temple was obviously different. For one thing, spikes and chains adorned much of the surface, serving no obvious purpose except to make the building look ridiculously evil. For another thing, there were skulls. A LOT of skulls. Mostly human skulls, but there were also Ork skulls and a few from various species in the Everfree Forest.

"Huh. No pony skulls? Not even one?" Tox mumbled, looking over the edifice.

Closer...

Tox took a step forward, staring at the slanted, matte black temple wall. There was nothing unique and interesting about that particular spot at all, and yet her eyes were transfixed, and her attention mesmerized.

Yesssss...

Tox reached out with a hoof and placed it flat against the wall. Her eyes went wide and her every nerve tingled. For a moment she thought that perhaps the outer wall of the temple was literally electrified, but it didn't feel at all like that. Sensation poured into her as if she had been suddenly dropped into a river of pure, wild emotion. She had never felt anything like it. Her horn flickered, and her heart hammered in her chest. Her vision turned into wavy oscillations of light and color, and her mind was saturated with the screams of a thousand dying men.

It was that last particular sensation that finally led Tox to flinch away from the wall of the temple. She stumbled over her own hooves in her haste to back away, spilling onto the bare, cracked ground while her breath heaving. Laughter boomed in her head; a dirge of cruel, joyless mirth that faded away as she scrambled a few feet further from the grim pyramid.

"What in the pits was that?" Tox whispered to herself, quivering. She had lost herself for a moment, that much was certain. Normally she would be the sort to immediately freak out when hearing voices in her head, yet hearing the whispers from before had only enticed her closer. Was this human magic? Some sort of bizarre technology? Did the ponies go through the same thing?

After calming down somewhat, Tox realized something else amazing: she was full.

As in, her reservoir of energy from all the love she had absorbed had been filled to its very capacity. Except that she hadn't absorbed any love recently. The last morsel she'd had was a mare she had ambushed, drained, and brainwashed three days ago. But she felt like she had just broken into a honeymoon resort and drank it dry.

Tox stumbled to her feet. Her thoughts raced a mile a minute. Where had the energy come from? The temple? When had she absorbed it? When she had physically touched it? Why? She hadn't been feeding! And what exactly had she absorbed, anyway? It definitely wasn't love, yet she was more energized and powerful than she could ever remember being in her short life. She felt like she could take on Celestia herself and hurl her into her own sun. Like she could march right into Ferrous Dominus and enslave the entire population on her own. Like she could juggle the Elements of Harmony like bright pastel-colored plastic balls. Like she could take one of those Iron Warriors and tear him limb from-

"Hey, yellow nerd, you all right? You've been standing there and staring for like five minutes."

Tox broke out of her mental daze, and then whipped around toward the source of the voice.

Then she quickly revised her last thought. She did not, in fact, feel like she could take an Iron Warrior apart upon actually seeing one.

"H-Hi..." Tox squeaked as she craned her head up.

"Hey," Tellis mumbled, arms crossed over his chest. His claws were extended for absolutely no reason, and they made a resonant keening noise as he let his arms fall to his sides. "You okay?"

Tox was now using her newfound strength to keep herself from quaking in fright. The man before her was huge, entirely covered in metal, and possessed of an alarmingly obvious aura of destructive malice. As a changeling, Tox was quite sensitive to the emotions of others, and she could feel hate rolling off the man's armor alone with an intensity that froze her in her tracks. He was absolutely the most terrifying thing she had ever seen, and he had done absolutely nothing so far except ask if she was in good health.

Oh, right. He had asked her something. Best not to ignore him, lest she get her face impaled on his claws. That would be quite detrimental to her mission.

"Y-Y-Yes," Tox stuttered, "I'm f-fine."

"You sure? You look like you just tripped on a Bloodthirster's whip," Tellis pointed out.

Tox didn't know what that was, and didn't care. She nodded rapidly, hoping that the Astartes would decide to leave.

"Okay, cool." Tellis looked left and right, and then leaned forward slightly. Tox leaned backward about twice that distance, ensuring that there was a net increase in the distance between them. "Hey, do you have any money?"

If Tox were not both a member of an elite class of warrior-spies and currently at maximum power, she was positive she would have soiled herself.

"N-No!" She shook her head furiously and decided - yes, DECIDED - that it would perfectly suit her current cover identity to start crying and begging for her life. "I'm sorry! I don't have anything! Please don't kill me! PLEASE don't kill me!!" she sobbed.

Tellis stood back again. "Geez, fine. I was just asking. I'm not mugging you or anything. Relax."

That brought Tox up short, and she sniffled loudly before blinking up at the Chaos Lord. "You're... You're not?"

"Of course not. It's just that I'm trying to scrape together a few hundred bits, see? And when I ask ponies about how I can get money, sometimes they give me donations." He paused. "Then they usually run away crying. I don't really get it, but I can't complain if they pay me."

Tox gulped. "They probably thought you were mugging them. Like I did."

Tellis considered that for a few seconds. "... Aw, crap, I think you're right. That's not good. Rainbow's gonna chew me out for this if she finds out." He turned away from the unfamiliar unicorn and walked off, stewing over this new information and still fifty bits short of his bet obligation.

As the Iron Warrior left, Tox quickly checked to see if anyone else was in the vicinity. Then she stared at the Raptor's back, and her eyes flared a bright green.

Tox's magic gently filtered through the form of the Astartes, taking in the details of his armor and the flesh beneath it. His DNA, his enhanced and corrupted body, and the mechanisms built around it into a flying suit of metal; Tox took it all in, observing the Astartes in a way no other species could with the intention of making his form her own.

And then she got a splitting hornache, so she stopped.

"Guh! It... It's no good?" she mumbled, staggering away from the site of her encounter. "Blast!"

Changeling magic had limitations on what it could copy, to be sure. A changeling couldn't mimic something too far beyond or below its own mass, which was the main thing stopping Chrysalis from deploying an army of changelings "disguised" as dragons to smash anything in its way. Sophisticated magical abilities, such as the petrifying gaze of a cockatrice, were only possible to replicate for someone as powerful as Chrysalis herself.

This was a completely new complication, however. If Tox had to guess, it was the sheer complexity of the man's armor that was mainly hindering her. Her magic could copy clothing easily enough, but clearly the armor suit was far more bizarre and complicated. She couldn't even copy the Iron Warrior's body without it either, because it was bonded directly to his skin for some stupid reason.

Clicking her tongue irritably, Tox scurried off to find somewhere to stay. She had only just arrived, but she had much to dwell on.

Starting with why one of the mighty Chaos Space Marines would be wandering around a town asking for spare change. And how he might get it now that he wasn't just taking it from ponies at random.

****

Ponyville - Sugarcube Corner

Carrot Cake gently adjusted his bow tie in his bathroom mirror, smiling to himself. He was dressed in a leisure suit jacket with his hair slicked back, and his fur had a faint scent of aftershave. It was his finest evening attire, and surely would have given Rarity an aneurysm were she to see him in it.

"Cup Cake! Are you ready to go?" he called as he exited the restroom.

His wife stepped out of their bedroom to meet him. She was wearing a polka-dot blouse and a deep layer of makeup, and seeing the older mare next to her husband in such attire would have upgraded Rarity's hypothetical aneurysm to a stroke.

"Gr-r-r-r-r!" Carrot made a throaty growling noise and wiggled his eyebrows, and Cup Cake cuffed his shoulder coyly.

"Come on, dear. Dest should be waiting for us," Cup trotted happily down the stairs, and Carrot followed eagerly.

Their foals, Pumpkin Cake and Pound Cake, were sitting in their playpen together and smashing their rattles together, more or less as they'd left them. And waiting in the main dining room of the bakery...

Carrot Cake stopped short in confusion and no small amount of fear. While there was indeed an Iron Warrior waiting for them, bearing huge claws, spiked armor, and an aura of otherworldly malice, it was not the one they expected.

"L-Lord Tellis? What are you doing here?" Carrot asked cautiously, motioning for his wife to stay back.

The Chaos Lord was sitting in the middle of the dining room, using four chairs that he had pushed together to face each other and share his weight. Even then, the furniture made for ponies seemed to be straining.

"Hey. Going out, right?" Tellis asked, pointing at Carrot Cake.

"Y-Yes. We're going to have dinner and then go to that new holo-theatre in town," the baker explained. Then he cleared his throat. "So... again, why are you here?"

"Well, you'll need someone to watch over the spawn, right? I'm your guy!" Tellis jabbed a thumb into his chest plate, slightly disturbing the Ork skull hanging from around his neck.

Cup Cake cringed. "That won't be necessary, Mister Tellis. Dest should be coming by any moment."

"No, he won't," the Iron Warrior replied.

The ponies’ faces paled.

Tellis emitted a sound half-way between an annoyed grunt and a sigh. "No, I didn't kill him."

The Cakes gasped in relief.

"But I DID ask him how an Astartes is supposed to get a job around here, and then he told me that you had asked him to guard your younglings for a nominal fee because he had earned your trust and respect. That sounded hard, though, so I just ordered him to go away so I could do his job instead."

"The trust and respect part is pretty important, though," Cup Cake pointed out.

"RELAX," Tellis implored the ponies, "I'm his superior officer. That means I can do anything he can do, but better."

"I have absolutely no reason to believe that's true," Carrot said, "do you even know what foal-sitting IS?"

"Actually, yes! After a rather embarrassing incident at that farm outside of town, I took the time to ask what I'm specifically supposed to do to foal-sit. Good thing, too, because the name of this job is REALLY misleading." Tellis stood up and pointed to the playpen. "I just need to make sure the little guys aren't hurt while you're gone. I've been told that also keeping the house from being damaged while you're away is something of a secondary objective."

The Cakes shared an uneasy glance.

"My apologies, Mister Tellis, but I just don't feel comfortable with leaving you alone with my children," Cup Cake decided firmly, shaking her head.

"I'll go see if I can find Dest. We'll probably be too late for dinner, but we can still make the vid screening," Carrot started to walk around Tellis.

Then a great metal hand seized him by the back of his neck. Carrot yelped in fear, and then stared up into the Raptor's visor again.

Tellis leaned over the stallion, being careful to put as little pressure into his grip as possible. "Okay, listen: I've been trying to be a nice guy about this. But I seriously need that money. So we can do this the legit, friendship-is-blah-blah-blah way, or the space pirate way. Either you two pay me to watch your younglings for the evening, or I kill everyone here and rob the place."

Tellis brought up one fist, swiping his claws through the air. Their power field flickered, emitting a sharp hiss and a whiff of ozone as they passed near Carrot's snout. The Cakes stared for a moment, their expressions unchanged, silently rolling Tellis's ultimatum about in their heads.

"... That is a REALLY easy decision," the baker said, displaying the sort of eerie, fearless calm that came from someone who had stared death in the face and resigned themselves to their fate. "Honey, we're going."

"Okay. The diaper bag is under the register, Mister Tellis. Bed time is eight o'clock," Cup Cake explained with a small smile that didn't reach her eyes.

Tellis snorted. "You don't get to tell me when to go to bed. I'll stay up until nine if I want."

"What? No, I didn't-"

"Sugar muffin, don't argue with the crazy man," Carrot started leading his wife toward the front door, "come on, now. We're going to have a nice dinner and a movie, and everything is going to be JUST FINE."

Cup Cake spat out a dry, hollow laugh as she exited the bakery after her husband.

The door shut behind them, and then locked.

Pound Cake and Pumpkin Cake crawled to the edge of their playpen, staring up over the edge to look at the shiny stranger they had been left with. Tellis walked over and picked up Pumpkin, holding her in the palm of his gauntlet.

"Hmmm. What to do..." the Chaos Lord mumbled. "I have a lot of time to kill, and I have to limit my activities to things that probably won't destroy you or the bakery."

Pumpkin leaned over his fingers and stretched a curious hoof toward the curved talons underneath her. Tellis retracted them with a thought, and the baby unicorn made a disappointed noise as the blades vanished.

"Oh, so you like that dangerous stuff, eh? Okay! How about I convert you two to Chaos?" Tellis asked.

The foals stared up at him.

"You'll have to be Undivided though. I can't teach you the ways of the Blood God since one of you is a unicorn, and I'm pretty sure you have to have the same cult since you're twins," the Chaos Lord explained. "I don't really know much about Nurgle and Tzeentch either, except for the best ways to murder their followers. Are you two cool with that?"

"Uguh," said Pumpkin.

"Gahba," added Pound.

"Sounds like an evening! Lemme go get some candles."

****

Badlands

"Oi, youz liddel runtz! Hurree it up!" snarled a Big Mek as he trudged through a blast crater. All around him lay the twisted remains of Ork vehicles and soldiers spread far and wide among columns of smoke. The battle had gone very poorly for the Orks, obviously, but Mek Badcrank didn't care; the boyz had gone out with style, and there were spare weapons and scrap lying about everywhere for the taking. A mob of Gretchin followed behind him, picking up anything small enough for them to carry and hauling it back to a Trukk parked at the edge of the devastation.

"Wotta we got 'ere?" Badcrank mumbled as he stared at some smashed rocks. There were numerous scorched Ork bodies around the rocks, but what was most interesting about them was that the bits of armor plating that were scattered around weren't from Ork or human technology.

He picked up a shard off the ground and held it up in front of the glowing yellow lens of his bionik eye. It resembled a piece of ceramic.

"Grayskins," Badcrank mumbled before flicking the shard aside. There wasn't any other sign of the scrawny aliens remaining, of course; the Tau always recovered their dead and damaged wargear when they could. Still, it was good to know exactly what kind of squishy weakling was skulking around the place.

Atop the smoldering remains of a Deff Dread overlooking the battlefield, a pair of glimmering green spots watched the Big Mek work. Gox was disguised via magic so that her carapace matched the color and texture of the smoke from her perch, although a steady stream of curious green sparks mixed with the plumes above her.

The aliens didn't notice. Nor had they noticed at any point over the past ten hours as Gox had stalked them, studying the brutes.

"Whaddya fink yer doin', ya idjit!" the big, armored Ork shouted before he pounded a Grot into a bloody smear.

Gox flinched uncomfortably at witnessing the sudden outburst of violence. She certainly didn't feel anything for the simpering little green creatures that the larger Orks seemed to use as servants, nor was she so weak-willed as to feel squeamish at the sight of death. But the sight of such casual, lethal violence disturbed her, if only because she was going to have to eventually pass for one of the green barbarians. Life had value, even to a changeling, and ending a life was only done in service to a greater goal. The Orks seemed to adhere to a completely opposite philosophy: killing itself had value, and the life of any given creature had to be weighed against the passing amusement gained by smashing it. It was - appropriately enough - a very alien concept to her.

"Oi, ya fink dere's sumfink gud 'round 'ere dat ain't on fiyah?" came a squeaky voice from behind her.

Gox turned around carefully, her dark blue mane shifting in an out of focus among her chameleonic magic. Two Grots were crawling around the wrecked walker, plucking bits of shrapnel from the ground.

Gox's eyes gleamed as she stepped along the ruined hull of her perch, wraith-like. The wretched scavengers were utterly oblivious to her presence, consumed with their petty chore of collecting metal.

Her lips curled into a wicked smile, and Gox attacked.

Even once the magic spell manifested, it was utterly noiseless. The Grot didn't notice anything was wrong until his partner was swallowed in glowing, bright green energy, and even then his first thought was how pretty the shiny light was.

It wasn't until his partner's eyes rolled back and he collapsed that the other greenskin considered running.

"B-B-Bo-" the Grot started stuttering as he turned to flee, but his voice died when a dark, quadrupedal figure dropped down in his path.

"Shush now, little insect," Gox sang, her horn glowing and her wings quivering, "you're mine, now."

Her second spell activated, and the Grot's eyes turned glassy as his knees shook. His jaw went slack, and the plates of twisted metal he was carrying fell from his limp fingers.

Gox took another moment to look around and ensure there was nobody nearby to stumble upon her while she worked. The next phase was absolutely critical, and it would require her full concentration. She had to probe the mental defenses of her victim, and then defeat the alien's will entirely. Only then would the hapless wretch be completely under her control and divulge the secrets she required. It could take several minutes, and success was not at all guaranteed.

"Now, then," Gox hissed, "tell me who you are, worm." Her horn flared brighter.

"Wotavah ya say, New Boss," the Grot said in a slightly happy, vacant tone, "da naym's Rutwutta."

Gox couldn't help but stare down at the Grot incredulously. She felt absolutely no resistance from the creature at all. "Are you being serious right now? Is this some kind of clever trick to get my guard down?"

"Durrrr... mebbee? Don' reely noh wot's goin' on, t'be frank wit'cha." Rutwutta swayed back and forth slightly, giddy from the feeling of having his natural free will and fear instincts suppressed. For a creature born into a life of brutal slavery and never-ending terror, being completely dominated was ironically quite liberating.

Gox wasn't quite convinced. Perhaps the creature was simply playing along while still resisting, somehow. "Then your 'New Boss' commands you to cut yourself on the leg with a bit of metal." Even a completely dominated subject would try to avoid harming itself subconsciously. She could judge precisely how much effect her spell REALLY had.

Gox quickly came to wish she hadn't overestimated the Gretchin, or that at least she had given him more specific orders. The Grot not only took up a shard of shrapnel and cheerfully plunged it into his leg, but he did it twice. And then three times. And four times. In fact, he wasn't stopping at all.

Gox could only gape for the first few seconds, but she snapped out of her shock when she noticed his other hand was groping around for another piece of metal so that he could start stabbing himself with both hands. "Okay! That's enough! Stop!" she whisper-shouted.

"Okee-day," the Grot said, letting the shrapnel fall from his blood-slicked hands. Then he fell over, on account of one of his legs being shredded down to the bone. "Ow."

Gox cringed as the Grot bled out into a rapidly expanding puddle, and her head whipped back and forth in another search for anyone nearby. There was no one.

"Okay, well, this puts me ahead of schedule in some ways, and at a disadvantage in other ways," the guardian mumbled, "tell me about the Ork down there."

"Dat's Mek Badcrank. He's a Big Mek," the Grot said deliriously.

"And what is a 'Big Mek'?" Gox asked.

"Mek Badcrank iz."

This prompted the changeling to slap a hoof into her face.

"Ugh. But what does he DO? Is he an officer? A soldier? A laborer?"

Rutwutta blinked slowly, his eyelids closing and opening again one at a time. "Badcrank mayks fings."

"Makes things?" Gox leaned closer, scowling as she worked through the alien's bizarre pronunciation. "So he's a craftsman, then? Or a weapon smith?"

Rutwutta sniffed the air and grinned. "Da ayr smellz kinda funnee." His eyelids started to flutter closed.

Gox suppressed a groan as her victim died, thinking back to her reaction at seeing one of the scrawny aliens slaughtered earlier. Perhaps she had been too quick in judging the larger alien.

Gox was working out whether or not to wake the second Grot when she heard a scraping noise behind her. In an instant, she leapt back behind the pile of wreckage, her carapace shimmering to match the clouds of ash.

Before long, a creature crawled out of the smoke and craters. Gox had a perfect view of it, but had absolutely no idea what it was. It was vaguely reptilian and obviously bipedal, but it was crawling about on all fours.

Or, fives, rather. It had an extra arm, small and twisted, sticking out of its left side. It seemed obviously malformed, which matched the rest of the creature's body. Its skin was badly damaged, and there appeared to be deep patterns of scars cut into it. As the creature approached, Gox felt an uncomfortable tingle in her horn. The monster was clearly magical in nature, although of a sort that she had never seen before and could probably do without seeing ever again.

The scarred, mutated thing crawled over the bits of shrapnel, wheezing through the side of its drooling mouth. It walked straight up to the Gretchin and sniffed at the two bodies: first the dead Grot, then the sleeping one.

Then it snapped up the sleeping Grot in its teeth and claws, shredding it apart in a sudden fit of rage.

Gox flinched back, surprised and disgusted by the beast's ferocity. She slipped further into the smoke trailing from the wrecked walker.

The creature stopped eating and snapped its head directly toward her. Blood and bits of torn Grot-flesh dribbled down its neck, and its eyes seemed to cloud over.

Gox remained perfectly still and silent, and her eyes ceased glowing against the backdrop of smoke. Even her heartbeat slowed to a crawl to absolutely minimize noise and energy use. The beast couldn't possibly see her, and her scent was completely masked by the burning oil and wreckage. It didn't really have anything that were obviously ears, even if her breathing were loud enough to be picked up among the crackling flames. She was safe.

But then the monster snarled and leapt directly at her anyway, which was total tauros droppings.

"Aaah!" Gox leapt up over the mutant as it struck, her wings buzzing loudly and the smoke column breaking around her movements. The beast's attack missed, and it landed badly on the side of the wreckage before slipping off and falling back to the dirt.

Gox quickly landed, terrified that her scuffle would alert the Orks she had been observing. However scary and dangerous this beast was, the greenskins were a much more serious threat. She was also regretting the slowed heart rate thing, because now Gox was having trouble adjusting her heartbeat toward something that might save her life.

The monster stood up on its legs, hunched over and twitching, and then it screeched. The noise was stuttering and sounded extremely painful to make, and also killed any small hope Gox had that she hadn't made enough of a racket to attract the Orks.

"Blast it all! Perish, monster!" the changeling guardian snapped while her horn began to glow.

The creature staggered forward, and then twisted sharply to the side. A sickening crack came from what may have been its rib cage, and then a fleshy tendril burst out of a swollen tumor and shot toward her with impressive speed.

"YEEP!" Gox released her spell just before the tentacle could reach her, and a glimmering arc of green magic sliced through the new, blood-soaked appendage. It fell to the ground, and the strange beast flinched back and started to howl.

Gox shuddered at the sound, but forced her focus toward her surroundings. She could hear the rumble of a Trukk engine approaching and the shouting of Orks, so she might have as little as a few seconds to escape and hide. She turned to run.

Then she felt something wet and surprisingly strong wrap around her hind legs and bind them.

"Oof!" Gox stumbled, and then looked back at what had caught her.

Her expression turned horrified when she saw that the severed tentacle had apparently entangled her of its own accord, even as blood squirted from its stump.

"Oh, Hive Mother, no!" Gox gasped. "I've seen enough Neighponese comics to know where this is going!"

The mutant creature snarled and started advancing on her again, its claws twitching in anticipation.

The arrival of the Trukk changed the dynamic of the fight in a heartbeat.

The monster swung its head toward the Orks and roared, completely oblivious to the dozen machine guns pointed in its direction or too insane to care.

The Orks opened fire, pouring countless bullets out the side of the vehicle while it curved around the pile of wreckage. The monster was shredded apart in an instant by the fusillade, and a puff of rainbow-colored fire blasted from its mouth before it collapsed onto the ground.

"Wot? Dat it?" complained a Shoota Boy as the Trukk rattled to a halt. "All da noys fer dat liddel runt?"

"Naw, wayt. Dere's sumfin' dere," grumbled the unit Nob. Resting his shoota on his shoulder, the larger Ork hopped down onto the blood-stained ground.

He walked past the corpses of the Gretchin, and only paused a moment to observe the fallen Black Hound. The daemonic mutant was rapidly decomposing even as he watched, as if the physical universe was trying to rid itself of the abomination as quickly as possible. Soon it would be nothing but bones, and then even those would be dust before nightfall.

The Nob looked past the Black Hound toward what was presumably its victim. A single Ork Boy was lying on the ground, struggling with a tentacle wrapped around his legs.

Without a word, the Nob drew a combat knife and sliced the tentacle apart, freeing the smaller Ork. Then he grabbed the boy's arm and hauled him up to his feet.

"Oi, fanks," the unfamiliar Ork said gruffly, "dat fing wuz-"

Then the Nob punched him in the stomach.

Gox fought to hold her disguise in place as she doubled over around the Nob's fist, wondering what had given her away so fast. Was her accent off? Was there some codified response that she had been expected to give? Or were the Orks somehow gifted with natural senses that allowed them to immediately discern their own from any fakes?

"Dat'z wotcha git fer lettin' dat fing git da drop on youz," the Nob chuckled as Gox stumbled backward and wobbled. "Wot'z yer naym, Grot-lovah?"

Or perhaps they just punched each other all the time, whenever they had any kind of excuse. Could be that.

"I'm... er... da naym's Gox," Gox spat out between pained coughs, "you'z da boss?"

"Yeh. Me an da boyz jus' got a Mek ta fiks up da Trukk, so we'z heddin' ta wun of da biggah tribes up da hills. Ya wit' us?"

Gox nodded, steeling herself. This was the critical point of contact, where she needed to dispel any initial suspicions she generated as an outsider and establish a cover that wouldn't be questioned by the group leader. And even after succeeding in that most basic goal, what she said now could make or break her future with the group if she wasn't careful.

"Yeh, I'm witcha." Gox rolled her jaw into a scowl. "I wuz wit da uddah mob dat hit da arma-"

A green-knuckled backhand blew her back off of her feet, and Gox felt her disguise magic waver for a split second when she hit the ground.

"Shaddup and le's go," the Nob grunted, turning away just before Gox's skin flickered from green to black.

Gox's disguise recovered in an instant, and after a quick check to see if she had swallowed any teeth she was scrambling back to her feet. Her jaw was bleeding and her head was spinning, but her targets had practically rolled out a red carpet for her infiltration effort.

"Git in an' git a shoota," the Nob growled as he climbed back into the Trukk. Then he clocked the Trukk's driver in the side of the head. "Oi! Moov it!"

Gox scrambled to climb up the bed of the transport vehicle as it accelerated, and even once she was "safely" inside the bed she found herself bouncing and shaking violently from the harsh terrain and the laughable condition of the vehicle's shock absorbers.

Gox managed to stumble to the back of the Trukk - only getting kicked twice by other passengers busy looking for something to shoot - and reached a small barrel with a few loose guns rattling around.

"Izzis fing held togeddah wif gum r'wot?" Gox growled as she looked over the weapon. Mainly the complaint was a chance to practice her Ork, which she needed much sooner than originally anticipated, but it was a legitimate question. She barely understood the scientific principles behind firearms, but she was at least fairly certain the barrel of the gun was supposed to be straight.

"Lissen up, ya Grot-lovin' sops!" the Nob suddenly roared while the Trukk rocked violently back and forth. "We'ze gonna hed bakk to Boss Brakk's camp fer now! But if'n ya see da measly runts wot jumped da boyz, ya lite 'em up, yeah?"

Gox briefly considered asking the unit leader to clarify if the "measly runts" he referred to were the same ones who had evidently massacred an entire Ork raiding party. She held her tongue, however; she had the impression that intelligent questions like that were usually answered with a fist to the gut.

Then she got a fist to the gut anyway after the shaking Trukk caused her to bump another passenger.

As she leaned over the edge of the transport bed and gasped, Gox could only hope that they didn't run into any opposition on the way back to this camp. The infiltration of the Orks had proven to be abnormally easy, but she had a feeling there were going to be many other, more painful obstacles to completing her mission.

****

Ponyville - Sugarcube Corner

Carrot Cake nodded his head tepidly before taking up the key to the front door in his mouth.

"Well, everything's still standing. I don't see any fires..."

Cup Cake chewed her lip almost hard enough to draw blood as her husband unlocked the bakery. "It's just caring for a couple of foals. Everything will be fine. I'm sure he's not THAT stupid. Or incompetent. Or... insane and bloodthirsty and reckless and violent and-"

"Breathe, sugar muffin," Carrot reminded her before slipping the key back into his pocket. Then he pushed his way into his home and business.

The first thing that both baker ponies noticed was that it dark inside the bakery, as all the lights were out. The second thing they noticed was the sound of snoring cutting through the darkness.

Mentally bracing themselves for whatever horrors had befallen their children, they turned on the lights.

Tellis was sitting on the ground, against the bakery counter, sleeping.

"Snxkz! Wh-Wha? Who goes there?" the Iron Warrior jerked upright, almost falling over at being woken up.

The Cakes looked around the bakery, feeling reluctantly impressed. There were no blood splatters, dead bodies, or really any significant mess of any kind. Although the counter now had several new dings and scratches from Tellis's wings and there were numerous used candles set out on a few tables.

"Oh, it's you guys. Cool. Enjoy the movie?" Tellis mumbled. He rubbed at the visor of his helmet, which generated an awful scraping noise and probably didn't help him at all.

"It was okay. Not Quentin Palamino's best work, in my opinion," Carrot said awkwardly, "so... where are the foals?"

"Sleeping upstairs, in their crib," Tellis jabbed a thumb behind him toward the stairs, "alive and completely unharmed, just the way you like them."

The Cakes hurried upstairs while trying not to look like they were hurrying.

They were reasonably surprised, and VERY pleased, to turn on the lights to their room and see their foals curled up next to each other in their crib.

"Wow. I'm... I'm impressed," Carrot admitted after taking a moment to make sure both pony foals were breathing and not elaborate decoys.

"Told you. No big deal at all," Tellis scoffed.

"What did you do for most of the night?" Cup Cake asked, feeling somewhat dazed that everything had actually turned out okay.

"Mostly told 'em stories and stuff. Don't worry, I had the profanity filter on the entire time." Tellis nodded to himself in satisfaction. "Then they did some drawing and fell asleep."

"Oh, and here it is!" Cup Cake spotted a large sheet of paper covered with crayon scrawls. There were a great number of random arrows and curiously arcane-looking scribbles scattered over the page, along with what appeared to be a stick-figure drawing of a pony tearing apart some kind of two-headed eagle.

"Oh, my! We have a pair of little artists on our hooves!" Cup Cake giggled. She wasn't especially worried that the Star of Chaos was drawn in a big circle around the rest of the images. After all, the icon was all over the place nowadays. She was sure her children had just spotted it somewhere and copied it for their picture.

And she was sure that sense of creeping dread in her gut was simply a confused sort of relief that her children were still alive and well.

"Well, I have to admit, you did a much better job than we expected!" Carrot Cake said happily while leading Tellis down the stairs.

"Told ya," the Iron Warrior muttered, "so, where's the money? I have debts to pay, and for the first time in my life that phrase isn't a euphemism for revenge killing."

"Sure!" The baker stuck his head under the counter for a few seconds, and then emerged with a small bag of coins. "In fact, if you're interested in more foal-sitting work, I could let Berry Punch know that you're available! She has a hard time finding somepony to watch her filly on short notice, and isn't all that particular about who does the job."

"I already got some money from her," Tellis informed him while taking the bag, "so I'm not allowed near her house anymore. Or that corner of town."

Carrot arched an eyebrow.

"It was my first idea for making cash," the Iron Warrior explained, "taking money to stay away from certain areas. I actually had a lot of buyers, but before I even covered half my debt more than half of Ponyville was pretty much off-limits to me. I decided to stop before I got pushed out of town."

Carrot nodded slowly. "I can see why ponies would have a lot of interest in that, uh... investment."

"You're telling me! The Mayor was following me around for like an hour trying to pay me to leave forever." Tellis paused. "I feel like there's some kind of subtext to this that I'm missing, but I'm sleepy. Later."

The Iron Warrior turned away so suddenly that his flight pack nearly struck Carrot Cake, but the baker managed to duck in time before Tellis walked out of the building. He followed cautiously, and then closed and locked the door as soon as he heard the sound of rocket boosters screaming outside.

"Well... all things considered, that went WAY better than I had any right to expect," Carrot said happily as he turned back toward the stairs.

A spot of red fell from above, landing on the tip of his nose. Carrot Cake froze in place, and his heart rate surged to a dangerous pace.

His eyes slowly tracked upward. On the ceiling, smeared over the tiling in bright crimson, was the Mark of Khorne: a stylized "X" with a horizontal line through it and a comb-like block below it, such that it resembled a skull. Carrot Cake's pupils shrank to pinpricks.

Then, after a few seconds of breathless silence, he suddenly licked the tip of his nose.

"... Red gel frosting," the baker mumbled, "yeah. MUCH better than I had any right to expect."

He sighed and trotted upstairs to bed.

Author's Note

The original draft of this story had the scene with the protest ponies going on for much longer, to the point at which some of them suggested that the planet might seriously benefit from the genocide of other species besides just the Orks. You know, as long as the option is available. This put Tox in the awkward position of a changeling trying to convince a pony that genocide was wrong.
The scene was eventually axed because I remembered that some people get really worked up about the prospect of changeling extinction, for some reason.
I also guess it's probably a LITTLE extreme to start portraying the ponies as happily signing death warrants for entire species from the comfort of their still-somewhat-idyllic villages.
So here we are.

Realm of Nightmares

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 4

Realm of Nightmares

****

Harvest of Steel - Gaela's quarters

Twilight Sparkle's morning began, as it so often did nowadays, with a nice, long string of panicked screaming.

Her hooves flailed in the air, her wings beat at the floor, and her eyes darted wildly from side to side in terror. Spike jerked awake from the noise, his own eyes fluttering open. On the other side of the cell-like room, Gaela's biological eye slid open, and her augmetic began to reset from its sleeping cycle.

Soon Twilight's screaming stopped. She rolled over onto her side, whimpering softly.

"Good morning, Twi," Spike mumbled before he pushed himself to his feet.

A tired groan was his response.

"My next shift begins soon. Impeccable timing," Gaela noted. She shifted over to sit on her tiny bunk.

"Wonderful," Twilight replied bitterly. She rolled upright, and then looked up at Gaela through bloodshot eyes. "You never mentioned when we set out that living in a daemon ship was going to give me nightmares literally EVERY NIGHT."

"Would it have changed anything at all if I had?" Gaela stared at her augmetic arms one at a time, uploading visual diagnostic data.

"Well... no, I suppose not," the pony grunted, "still, it would have been nice."

"I've always had trouble with 'being nice'," Gaela admitted, "I'm going for a cleansing cycle. Do you wish to join me?"

"Not just yet, thanks."

As Gaela left the room, Spike also left his bed and started stretching. "So, what was it tonight?"

Twilight shuddered. "It started pretty innocently. I was just wandering around the ship, and Gaela was telling me about all the rooms and parts. The further along we went, however, the fewer people there were. Instead I'd see these big blood stains on the floor and walls, but Gaela would keep going like nothing was wrong."

"So far, so realistic," Spike mumbled.

"Then, all of a sudden, she stopped talking. I looked back at her, but she wasn't there. Nothing but a blood slick was left." Twilight cringed. "I started panicking. I called for help. I tried the vox. I ran from room to room, all the way up to the bridge. There was no one here. Gaela was gone. You were gone. Solon was gone. There was no one else. No one but those... those eyes. Those huge eyes in the ceiling. Staring at me. Watching me. Hungering for me. And... And then..."

Twilight was trembling by now, and Spike hesitantly stepped over and gently hugged her leg.

The Princess stopped shaking and then gave her assistant a grateful smile. "Thanks, Spike. I'm really glad I have you around."

"Happy to help," the young dragon said wryly.

"You have the nightmares too, right? Gaela said that practically everyone on this ship does during Warp travel."

"Actually, my dream was pretty good, this time!" Spike said, scratching his head. "I mean, it probably was going to be a nightmare like yours, but I think you woke me up before the scary part. Thanks!"

"Happy to help," Twilight grumbled.

Twilight went to begin her usual morning ritual, which in her case was a shower, a quick check that she didn't have any duties pending, and then a download of the day's reading material. The shower rooms were shared among their housing block, and Twilight passed by a few Dark Acolytes stripping down on her way to the stall.

+Disgusting creature. Why must we share living space with xeno psykers?+ griped one of the cyborgs in Binaric Cant.

+If you take issue with sharing sanitation facilities with an equine, you may issue a complaint with the Dark Magos,+ Gaela replied in turn, +I would not expect anything to come of it, however. Sparkle has better sanitation habits than you do, and your criticism is irrational.+

Twilight pushed into the shower stall next to Gaela, completely oblivious to the bursts of static that were discussing her. As far as the pony was concerned such things were just background noise at this point.

"I have to say, despite being in a completely sealed environment, it's very easy to get dirty around here," Twilight said as she adjusted the temperature controls below the shower head. A jet of water blasted out at her, and the alicorn ducked her head and moved further under the shower's flow.

"There's much detritus that is sealed in with us, obviously. Half the ship is devoted to storage and scrap piles," Gaela pointed out. She and Twilight couldn't see each other, as the shower stalls were separated by tall dividers, but the barrier did little to muffle their voices. "Also, you haven't been to the section of the Harvest devoted to Nurgle."

Twilight blinked. "Part of the ship is devoted to Nurgle? Devoted how?"

"Temples, reliquaries, alchemics, catacombs, and other sorts of structures generally not of priority when designing a void ship. All of it infectious and corrosive, such that it keeps threatening to spread to the rest of the vessel. Staving it off from the 'healthy' portions of the ship is an endless labor, like constantly cutting away at a growing cancer."

Twilight frowned. "That seems like an enormous liability on a vehicle as important as this one."

"It is. Most Iron Warriors do not traffic with daemons or join the cults of Chaos for precisely that reason. Powerful as they are, they introduce uncertainty into the rigorous formulae of war that lay at the core of Iron Warrior combat doctrine. Such power takes considerable will and leadership to manage successfully."

"I imagine that between Sliver and-" Twilight heard the door of the shower stall squeak open behind her, and she twisted her head around to see if Spike was joining her.

Long, razor-tipped talons like ivory darted into the steam, stabbing into her hips and then cutting across her cutie mark. Twilight screamed and stumbled, falling against the wall underneath the shower head.

A ghostly, bipedal shape stumbled into the stall, and Twilight's horn flashed. She wasn't precisely sure, in her panic, what spell she used, but after a ferocious thunderclap and a pulse of purple light, the stall door was blasted off its hinges and a mournful howl echoed in her ears.

Gaela calmly exited her own shower stall and then looked over into Twilight's. The pony was curled up in the corner of the metal box, wide-eyed and trembling, with her breath heaving desperately. A wash of blood leaked into the floor drain, leading up to four lacerations that cut across Twilight's right hip.

"G-G-Ga..." the alicorn's voice hitched as she tried to speak past her thundering heartbeat and the tears in her eyes.

Gaela turned away. Several other Dark Acolytes and Aspirants had emerged from their stalls at the disturbance and were staring at her.

"Sparkle has been attacked. Did anyone see the assailant before she dispatched it?"

"Affirmative," said an Acolyte near the entrance. His bionic arm was being held in an oil wash receptacle mounted on the wall, which suggested he been immobile during the attack and had a view of the entire sanitation room. "It was a daemon."

"A daemon?" Gaela mumbled.

Twilight stood up and exited the stall, although her legs were still quivering slightly. "It all h-happened so FAST! The d-door opened and then I saw these claws swiping for me!" The mare winced as she stretched her back leg. "Why was a daemon wandering around the shower area?"

"You are mistaken. It was not 'wandering'," the Acolyte corrected, "it entered the facility and then proceeded directly to your shower unit. It did not stop to survey the facility or show any interest in other life-forms."

"It was specifically trying to kill me?" Twilight asked, horrified.

"That is a plausible hypothesis," the Dark Acolyte replied. The green lumen over the oil station blinked on, and he pulled his arm from the wall cavity. Then he started getting dressed.

In fact, much to Twilight's alarm, all the people in the facility were going back to what they were doing, apparently having lost interest in her nearly being murdered. Even Gaela had turned away to put on the skin-tight bodysuit that she wore under her power armor.

"Wait, hold on! Why would a daemon be trying to kill me?!" Twilight demanded.

"It's just what they do," Gaela said while getting dressed, "trying to logically parse the motivations of Warp-beasts is usually futile."

"It's... what? No! This is the first time this has happened! No way is this just a random coincidence!" Twilight snapped. By now her earlier horror had entirely converted to anger and frustration. "Why are there even unbound daemons on the ship to begin with?! The Harvest of Steel is a sealed, environmentally pressurized vehicle with an extremely heavy security detail! There's no way a daemon can just appear out of nowhere and kill someone!"

"Yes it can," Gaela refuted.

Twilight gaped. "HOW?!"

Gaela frowned at the alicorn. "We can discuss this in detail later. I must proceed with my duties. You should have your wound treated. Report to the medicae facilities at once."

"And what if I'm ambushed by monsters between here and there?" Twilight demanded. "Apparently they can just pop into the ship whenever they want and nobody will even bother stopping them on their way to attack me!"

"I don't understand your frustration. You dispatched the daemon easily," Gaela pointed out, "I have complete confidence that you'll be able to contend with any further hostilities traveling from one facility to the next."

"I shouldn't have to contend with 'hostilities' on my own army's flagship!" Twilight complained, stamping her hoof on the floor.

"Considering that the flagship itself also wants to kill you, that seems like an unreasonable expectation on your part."

"RRRRRRGH!" the purple pony started growling incoherently, feeling dizzy from her mounting frustration (and possibly the blood loss).

"Unit Sparkle," interrupted a harsh voice from behind her, "refrain from causing any further disturbances in the sanitation facilities. Complete your cleansing cycle and evacuate the premises as ordered."

Twilight honestly considered telekinetically battering around the uncomfortably naked cyborg behind her. She relented, though. The Dark Mechanicus despised her enough as it was without her flinging them around for being uncooperative.

"Fine. Gaela, I'll see you later. When I do, I wish to discuss this incident." Twilight began trudging toward the door, glaring back at the Dark Acolyte that had ejected her.

"Affirmative, Sparkle."

****

The trip to the medicae ward was uncomfortable, to say the least.

Twilight had always been of the opinion that human structures were far too big, and that their ships in particular were oversized to the point of absolute lunacy. Nothing drove that point home quite so well as taking a painful, limping, half-hour walk while nervously expecting a twisted Warp monstrosity to attack out of nowhere.

The corridors were roomy, dimly-lit, and littered with large crates that provided suspicious shadowed areas and crevices where a bladed horror could potentially wait for prey. As if that wasn't nerve-wracking enough, the ship had its own collection of inexplicable noises that rolled through the dusty metal halls. When she'd first arrived she'd been fascinated by the reverberations of void travel caused by moving a space city at near-light speed through an alternate dimension of nightmare energy. Now all the strange clicks and deep groans only served to remind her that she was literally sitting in the belly of an enormous daemonic monster.

At least she wasn't alone. Bedraggled deck ratings were constantly moving cargo through the corridors, and she couldn't look down a hallway without seeing an Iron Warrior or a Dark Techpriest headed somewhere else.

So at the very least, if and when she had her throat torn out by daemonic stowaways, there would be witnesses to tell her friends and family what happened. Lovely.

"No. Stop that. Don't let this place get to you," Twilight chided herself, "you can handle this, Twilight. You knew that this wasn't a pleasure cruise when you got on board. Yes, there may be some loose daemons about. But that's in addition to all the restrained daemons you already know about. You just let your guard down, that's all."

Twilight reached the main entrance to this ship section's medicae ward, and she again stopped to check her surroundings. Once she was sure that there were no monsters waiting to leap at her from her from behind, Twilight's horn flashed and she teleported behind the door.

Twilight immediately leapt toward the wall, her horn blazing with power. Once she had an attack vector blocked, her eyes darted left and right to search for any incoming threats.

After a few seconds of careful inspection, she determined that the two Dark Techpriests staring at her mutely were not hostile. Overly judgmental, probably, but not hostile.

"Hi. I'm checking in for a laceration treatment," Twilight said coolly, lifting the wing that partially obscured her wound, "some disinfectant and nano-stitches should take care of it."

The Dark Techpriests exchanged a few bursts of Binaric Cant which Twilight was fairly sure did not express the overall seriousness and respect she and her injury deserved. One of the Techpriests walked out of the ward, while the other adjusted his various optical scopes to focus on the rather twitchy-looking pony.

"The wound appears to be non-debilitating. No treatment is necessary," the Dark Techpriest stated.

Twilight made an animal-like growl. "It 'appears' that way because I used magic to suppress the bleeding! Otherwise I'm sure I would have passed out on the way here!"

The Dark Techpriest considered this for a moment. "If that is the case, then further application of your witchcraft may substitute for ordinary treatment."

Twilight glared at the cloaked cyborg, and then took a deep breath. "Okay, let me put it this way; it will take you MAYBE five minutes to treat these cuts. It will take you much, much longer to convince me to give up and leave."

"Very well," the Dark Techpriest said, pointing to a steel slab on the side of the room, "lay on that table."

The alicorn trudged past the cyborg, grumbling under her breath about the absurdity of being ordered to the medicae by one Dark Techpriest only for another to try to brush her off. There was a metal table sitting under a servo-mounted surgical array on the side of the room, about three feet off the floor. Twilight jumped onto it with a quick flap of her wings, and then laid down. The Techpriest approached and leaned over her.

"Explain the nature of the incident."

"A daemon barged into my shower stall and slashed me with its claws," Twilight grumbled.

If she was hoping for some sort of surprise from the medicae worker, she was disappointed. "Physical description of the assailant?"

"I didn't get a good look due to the surprise and the steam, plus I blasted it to dust right after it attacked," Twilight admitted, "but it had very pale skin... or scales, maybe. It was bipedal. I think I saw some glowing yellow spots that might have been its eyes."

"Unhelpful. Certain categories of daemons are prone to causing specific complications to recovery. Did you experience any side-effects?"

"Pain, moderate bleeding, enhanced heart rate and elevated stress... nothing that really stands out as unexpected when being AMBUSHED IN THE SHOWER BY A WARP MONSTER."

Again, the Techpriest didn't seem interested in her experience beyond the job being asked of him. "Noted. Judging by your account and my observations, the daemon's appendages were not corrupted in any particular way. The damage should be entirely corporeal with an ordinary chance of infection. Hold still."

Twilight clenched her teeth as a needle pierced her hip, and she began feeling her leg go numb almost immediately. The Techpriest brought up his augmetic, which resembled a pair of knitting needles with a complex mechanized spool of thread attached. It sprayed a jet of disinfectant over the cuts, and then the cyborg started stitching them shut.

"... So, is being attacked by stray daemons actually common on the Harvest of Steel?" Twilight asked.

"Negative."

"So my situation IS abnormal. I thought so!" the alicorn grumbled.

"Attacks by daemons within the Harvest of Steel have an average incidental rate of one per ten thousand crew per standard solar month of Warp travel."

Twilight arched an eyebrow, and then her ears flipped down. "That... okay, I guess you wouldn't call that 'common', but still, that implies that it happens regularly. In fact... that suggests at least one attack most of the time the ship travels through the Warp."

"Affirmative. Operation complete." The Dark Techpriest stepped back from his work, and his patient turned her head around. The lacerations were now completely invisible beneath her fur; the only remaining traces of the attack was the terrifying memory of claws raking through her flesh and the lingering resentment that nobody else seemed to care.

"Thank you," Twilight sighed, "can I rest here a while? Until I get some feeling in my leg again?"

"So long as you cease attempts at petty conversation," the Dark Techpriest said with characteristic tact.

"Deal. Just, please, if a daemon marches into the medicae ward to kill me, please don't let it walk up and attack without at least saying something first."

"Should that scenario arise, I shall offer advance notice."

The cyborg walked away, leaving Twilight alone with her thoughts. The young Princess laid down on the surgical slab and closed her eyes, feeling somewhat drowsy from the earlier shot of sedative.

Not that she particularly wanted to take a nap, given the practical guarantee of terrible nightmares, but it beat taking another long, vulnerable walk through the halls while half-asleep and with reduced muscle control. Her mind churned with possibilities, considering the attack and the daemon's apparent purpose in targeting her. She considered the number of daemon attacks against ordinary Chaos forces that ostensibly occurred at random. She considered how Gaela had been concerned enough about her welfare to send her to have a minor wound treated, but not enough to offer her any sort of protection for the trip.

She considered how, if she was worried about being suddenly attacked, she should really have summoned her power armor.

"Aw, hay! I can't believe I forgot about my wargear! I got so used to walking around naked again that I forgot! Stupid!" she cursed.

"I concur," chimed in the Dark Techpriest from across the room.

"Hey, if you don't want a conversation, then don't reply to me when I'm talking!" Twilight snapped.

The Techpriest did not respond, which she took to mean that she had a point. Twilight laid her head back down and closed her eyes again.

A soft whirring noise came from above her.

One eye cracked open, and Twilight confirmed that the medicae worker was still on the other side of the room, working at a cogitator terminal.

The whirring continued, and then turned to a metallic squeak.

Twilight tilted her head just in time to see the servo-mounted surgical array plunge down toward her back.

The Dark Techpriest turned sharply as his recent patient screamed. The pony was flailing wildly, feathers flying, while the surgical tool arm mounted on the chirurgeon table seemed to be trying to eat into her wing. Motorized scalpels and fine-thread injector-drills tore through purple feathers, struggling to get to the muscle and bone underneath and bring it to ruin.

The alicorn's horn flared purple, and a beam of fiery magic lashed out and sliced the automated arm off at the elbow. Twilight jumped from the operating table to get clear of the homicidal machine, and then promptly stumbled and fell over due to her back leg still being numb.

"WHY IS EVERYTHING TRYING TO KILL ME?!" the pony wailed as she flapped her wings desperately, carrying her toward a more defensible corner. "This is the exact OPPOSITE of that machine's design purpose! That's not FAIR!"

The Techpriest calmly approached the table, analyzing the now-headless servo arm mechanism. It was thrashing left and right, and occasionally jerking straight toward Twilight as if was trying to carry the entire table along with it to pursue her. "A moment. I will attempt to calm the machine spirit."

"Yes! Fine! Then when it's calm, ask it what the hay its problem is!" Twilight barked.

The Dark Techpriest spoke several prayers in Binaric Cant, sputtering blasts of static at the twitching servo arm.

Then he turned toward Twilight. "I have diagnosed the problem. It would seem that the auto-chirurgeon is daemonically possessed."

The severed arm suddenly split apart and peeled back, the metal bending away while wires and cabling snaked out of the daemon's new 'mouth'. A high-pitched shriek came from the twisted machine, like a combination of an animal snarl and tearing metal.

"Daemonically possessed? Your SURGICAL tool is possessed by an evil Warp spirit?!" Twilight asked incredulously.

"Affirmative," the Techpriest confirmed. He watched silently for a few seconds as the possessed servo arm continued reaching directly toward Twilight, its wire-tendrils slowly stretching further and further. The Techpriest himself was much closer, yet the malicious machine was obviously ignoring him completely. "It also seems to show a strong preference toward equine victims. Fascinating."

"Oh, the hay with this!" Twilight growled, her horn glowing again.

This time her power armor appeared around her in a blaze of purple, with the helmet materializing a second later on her gorget. It flipped up over her head and then locked into place, sealing shut with a sharp hiss.

"Tactical engagement is unnecessary," the Dark Techpriest pointed out as the force harmonizer popped off of Twilight's back, "this daemonic-"

"YOUR WARRANTY IS UP, APPLIANCE MONSTER!! DIE!!" A wedge of crackling purple energy slashed down at the writhing servo arm, shredding its mounting and dropping the greater part of the machine onto the floor.

"I contend that this is uncalled for," insisted the Techpriest.

Twilight seemed to disagree. A purple glow surrounded the chirurgeon table, and then she pulled it up out of the floor with her levitation, tearing apart the bolts holding it in place.

The iron slab slammed down on top of the possessed servo arm, crushing it to shards of metal and plastic. That wasn't quite good enough for Twilight, and she smashed the possessed arm three more times with the table until she was convinced that the pieces of the servo arm were broken beyond any possibility of further attack.

"I needed that equipment," the Dark Techpriest informed her.

Twilight gave him an irritable look. "The table is fine. Just bolt it back in and it's still completely serviceable."

"I was referring to the servo surgical assistant," he retorted.

"What?! It was possessed!" the pony shouted.

"Such an unusual daemonic structure would have made an excellent experimental subject."

"It STABBED me!" Twilight protested. "It was trying to inject me with something, too! If I hadn't blocked it with my wing, who knows what would have happened?!"

"I do. Excessive dosage of those particular substances are easily survivable. The mechanism was a minimal threat, and dispatching it was unnecessary," the cyborg insisted in its droning monotone.

The alicorn's eye twitched. "Ah. So it doesn't matter if someone gets hurt if it's 'easily survivable'?"

The Techpriest's optics whirled in their sockets as the chirurgeon table floated up again and hovered over him.

"... I wish to qualify my previous asser-" the table crashed into him, knocking him back into a rack of metal cabinets. A painful fate, certainly, but easily survivable.

Twilight snorted angrily and let the table fall. Then she teleported out of the medicae ward entirely.

****

"All right, so now it's official: something strange is happening here."

Twilight Sparkle stalked through the halls of the Harvest of Steel, her force harmonizer still in blade mode and hovering over her head.

"One daemon attack, even if it specifically targeted me, may not mean anything. But two? Within the same HOUR?"

Her angry mumbling sputtered from her vox grille in uneven bursts while she passed by patrolling Chaos Marines and laboring deck slaves, all of whom were given pause by the fully armed equine stomping through the ship and muttering to herself.

"And that last attack was super-sneaky, too! Possessing the nearest sharp object that happened to be in the room the moment I closed my eyes? Something in this ship has it in for me!"

She stopped walking. "Wait. Maybe the SHIP has it in for me! Yeah! I know it already wants to kill me! What if it's sending smaller daemons to do the job because Solon won't feed me to the reactor core?!"

A pair of Scavurel warriors heading in the opposite direction from Twilight halted, shared a glance, and then quickly turned around and left back where they came.

The armored pony stared straight up at the ceiling, her optics visor pulsing a bright crimson. "I'm on to you, Harvest! You think you can pick me off because I'm not some kind of mutated super-soldier hardened by millennia of space-borne horrors and brutal warfare? Try me, you glorified flying bath tub!"

The Princess stood there in the hall, glaring hard at the ceiling. Everyone else near enough to hear her ranting stopped and stared, wondering what sort of spectacle would emerge from an alien pony psyker challenging the very void ship around them.

After nearly a minute, however, Twilight let her gaze drop again. "Suddenly it occurs to me that I really shouldn't try to antagonize the only thing standing between me and the river of death and horror carrying us through the galaxy. I mean, what am I going to do if it fights me, kill it? And if the Harvest of Steel really wants me dead, it probably has more severe options than what I've been through so far."

She turned her head back and forth, and the others in the hall quickly turned away from the searching glare of her visor.

"I need to talk to someone about this," the Princess decided, "where did Gaela go?"

Her visor brought up a floor plan and a route marker was set in front of her. Then Twilight jumped into the air and her flight pack engaged, sweeping her along the hall in a low hover.

The other crew members, including a nearby Iron Warrior, silently watched her fly off.

"Lass is completely barmy," mumbled a deck slave.

"Not used to Warp travel. It takes some getting used to," decided another.

The Iron Warrior turned to glower at them. "Be silent and keep to your labor, scum."

The slaves did as they were told, ducking their heads and grabbing hold of a large metal crate. They started hauling the container off down the hallway, hoping to get enough distance from the Marine to talk without any further reprimand.

Then the crate started shaking in their hands.

One man yelped and dropped his end, knocking the lid loose. The other slave retreated only after a blue, spider-like leg emerged from the breach and forced it open further.

The Iron Warrior had his boltgun up instantly, and he watched as a crab-like daemon - boasting scythe claws and a single compound eye set atop its body - hopped out of the crate and then scuttled down the hall. It completely ignored the helpless human slaves right next to it, racing across the floor in the same direction that Twilight had gone.

"I, uh, think this crate is mislabeled, Lord," one deck slave said timidly, looking at the words burned into the top of the container, "this is supposed to be plasteel sheets."

"... Huh. Curious," the Astartes mumbled to himself. Just before the daemon scuttled out of sight, he fired off a single shot that drilled right into the monster's back. It was nearly blasted in half by the bolt round, and an angry shriek echoed through the corridors before its remains disintegrated into smoke.

Then the Astartes turned away, opening up a vox channel in his helmet. "Warpsmith Pterax... I believe we have a problem..."

****

Harvest of Steel - materials recovery

"Hey, Gaela..."

"What is it, Spike?"

"You said that Twilight can't become a Dark Techpriest because she's a psyker, right?"

"That is not what I said. I said that the Dark Mechanicus would refuse to enlist her out of contempt and fear of her psionic abilities."

"That... really sounds like the same thing I said."

Gaela and Spike were in a massive scrapyard, standing before a veritable mountain range of metallic trash, twisted wreckage, and broken weapons. Slaves walked back and forth between the heaps and a line of huge machines built into the wall, tossing the scrap into the heavy recycling engines. The larger, more complex garbage was set upon by servitors and the odd Dark Acolyte, who cut apart the wreckage of battered tanks and shredded walkers and separated the useless materials for removal.

Spike worked around Gaela, taking a tiny plasma torch to the chunks of metal she cut from a line of ruined Ork Trukks.

"Anyway, fine. Twi can't be a cyborg. But-"

"Again, that is not what I concluded. Sparkle would not be denied augmetic components were she to suffer injury or demand bionic enhancement." Gaela stopped to think. "Or, rather, she would, but then the Iron Warriors would overrule the objections of the Dark Mechanicus. Or Warsmith Solon would just make them himself."

"ALL RIGHT. Not my point, Gaela," Spike grumbled. He tapped on the plasma torch and started burning through a flattened wheel. "I've been thinking about what you said a while back. About me making a decent Tech-Adept? Do you really think I could?"

Gaela stopped her own work and looked over to the dragon. "I did say that. Do you aspire to be Dark Mechanicus?"

"Well, not really, but-"

"Then it is futile," she interrupted. "The Cult Mechanicus isn't something you simply try out for, like a sports team, or even something you enlist in like a mere army. To be Mechanicus is something you devote your body and soul to, for the rest of your life, and perhaps for some time after your life ends. Were you to do so - and assuming that I could convince my superiors to allow me to teach a non-human - then I believe you might meet minimal expectations. That is what I meant when I said that." She turned back to the vehicle wreck she was working on. "While I find you useful enough for petty menial tasks, actually becoming more than that would require greater discipline and devotion to your work. And we're not going to accept anyone who still rolls his eyes every time we recite a prayer to the machine spirit."

Spike winced. "You noticed that?" He scratched the back of his head. "So what should I do, then? Mercenary? Adept? I'm not joining a Chaos cult, that's for sure! I've had enough of daemon contracts and mutations!"

Again, Gaela stopped her work to stare at the tiny dragon. "How old are you, again?"

A crackle and a pop came from the blast doors at the end of the room. A moment later, Twilight appeared in a purple flash and dropped down onto the metal flooring.

"Gaela! There you are!"

"Why, no, I never get tired of hearing equines run at me while shouting that. Why do you ask?" the Dark Techpriest replied dryly. "What is it, Sparkle? I'm working."

"I need to talk to you about these daemon attacks. It can't wait until you're finished with your shift," the Princess said grimly.

"Daemon attacks? What daemon attacks?" Spike asked, looking worried.

"Some Warpspawn assaulted Sparkle in the sanitation facilities," Gaela explained, "and, as I pointed out, it was obliterated for its foolishness. As far as I am aware the matter is resolved."

Twilight looked down at Spike, and then up at Gaela. "Wait, he's been with you since I left for the medicae ward and you didn't even tell him I'd almost been MURDERED?!"

"You were not 'almost murdered.' That daemon didn't even manage to inflict a debilitating wound despite the advantage of complete surprise. Don't be overdramatic."

Twilight growled. "How's this for 'overdramatic'? When I was resting in the medicae just now, a servo surgeon was possessed by a daemon and tried to kill me!"

"I presume you destroyed it with extreme ease and severe prejudice," Gaela replied.

"Not the point!" the pony shouted back.

"I get it. You probably don't want to be alone in the ship anymore, huh?" Spike asked.

"No, that's not... actually, yes, that's completely true and I'd really appreciate it if you could stay with me more often. But still not the point!" Twilight pointed a boot at Gaela. "Two daemon attacks on me within an hour! Not just from daemons who happened upon me, but who were attacking ME, specifically, while ignoring other vulnerable targets! How is this happening, Gaela?!"

The Dark Techpriest considered the question for a long moment. "Do you want the physical explanation first, or the behavioral?"

Presenting a simple choice of explanations in strictly technical terms seemed to immediately hit some sort of fuzzy, comfortable spot in the pony's brain, and Twilight suddenly felt more at ease. "Physical, please," she said before sitting down.

"Very well. As I'm sure you're aware, travel through the Warp is extremely dangerous. Not only does Warpspace generally lack the physical necessities for sustaining life, but the primary denizens of any reasonable intelligence and power are daemons, who are generally malevolent, irrational, and murderous."

"Of course. But it's the only way to cross intergalactic distances in any reasonable time frame, right?" Twilight asked.

"Technically, no. But it is the most feasible. However, ship armor cannot prevent infiltration by daemonic creatures in Warp space. We prevent daemonic corruption and infiltration of void ships during Warp transit with a machine called the Gellar field."

Twilight nodded slowly. "So, do you think there's something wrong with the Gellar field?"

"In a manner of speaking. The Harvest of Steel does not have one."

Twilight took a moment to remove her helmet just so that she could be sure Gaela was experiencing the full power of her "are you being serious right now" glare.

"Wait. The biggest, most important ship in your fleet doesn't have one of the most important machines for space travel?" Spike asked. "Why not?"

"It is unnecessary," Gaela insisted. "Within the Warp the Harvest of Steel is, for all intents and purposes, a daemon itself. Its hull can deflect the energies of the Warp as well as any mundane device. Better, in many ways." Then the Techpriest paused. "And worse in other ways."

"Elaborate, please," Twilight insisted.

"As it is essentially an enormous daemon, the Harvest's hull would be analogous to the skin of an ordinary living creature. A simple, effective barrier that keeps out the vast majority of daemons, which in this metaphorical comparison would be akin to harmful microbes. Unlike a Gellar field, it cannot suffer some sudden malfunction or fail all at once."

"But just like skin, sometimes the microbes get past it," Twilight concluded.

"It happens at times, yes," Gaela admitted, "which brings us to the behavior analysis. Even once a daemon penetrates the Harvest of Steel, it rarely attacks the crew. While not all daemons obey the masters of Chaos, the glyphs that represent the darker powers tend to inform all but the most mindless Warpspawn that they are in hostile territory and that the souls here are already claimed. Even the slaves are branded with the Star of Chaos." She pointed her axe at Twilight. "You are not. Even your armor is absent the Star."

"So the Chaos symbols typically ward away daemons, and I'm vulnerable because I don't have one?" the Princess reiterated. "Then shouldn't they be attacking Spike, too?"

"Psykers are ever a beacon for daemons, whether in the Warp or material universe. It is possible that daemons infiltrating the flagship sense you so easily that they ignore lesser, more vulnerable prey."

Twilight took a step forward. "It's 'possible' this is the reason? So we don't know?"

"I can only hypothesize based on the data you have provided. I can think of no other reason that daemon infiltrators would attack you with such determination."

Twilight sighed and sat down again. "Well, how do we get them to STOP?"

"We can modify your armor to bear the appropriate symbols," Gaela offered, "it would also help substantially if you were to convert fully to the cult of Chaos, swear yourself to the Dark Gods, and receive a mark upon your person."

Twilight recoiled. "Uh... well, a glyph stamped on my armor seems nice and superficial and... reversible."

"A pity. So long as you maintain your senseless façade of neutrality you will never reach your full potential." Gaela shrugged. "Nonetheless, it is your choice. I will see to it that-"

"Pardon, Techpriest," interrupted a voice from behind Gaela.

A pair of Dark Acolytes were approaching, their eyes and optics fixed on the Techpriest.

"What is it?" Gaela demanded, her frown slightly deeper than usual. It hadn't been long since she herself had been an Acolyte, but she still expected those of lesser rank to show proper deference and refrain from interrupting her.

"Overhearing your conversation with the insolent equine psyker, we have generated a hypothesis that we wish to submit for analysis," said one of the Acolytes.

Twilight scowled at him. "You KNOW my name! We're allies! Stop pretending I'm just some dumb animal you picked up on a random planet!"

The other Dark Acolyte continued, ignoring Twilight completely. "We believe that the incidents involved are not random daemonic infiltrations guided to the psyker by mere opportunity. We hypothesize that the daemonic incursions are the vanguard of a hidden yet sustained assault with the specific goal of killing the aberrant pony."

Twilight wasn't entirely sure what to say to that. On the one hoof, it was pretty much what she had suspected since the beginning. On the other hoof, only now that it was being taken seriously was she coming to realize just how terrifying a prospect this actually was. Daemons were bestial, generally unintelligent creatures, but they possessed a bizarre array of powers and qualities that made them unpredictable. The last two had managed to attack her when she was least expecting it, in places that she had considered safe. Was ANY place truly safe when daemons wanted you dead?

"What logical support or evidence do you have for this hypothesis?" Gaela demanded.

"Immediately after the animal's entry into the facility, an inactive Riot Drone inexplicably became functional without any prerequisite structural restoration," the first Acolyte explained, pointing to the side, "it immediately tried to aim its weapons in the witch horse's direction."

Everyone turned to look where he was pointing. A servitor stood nearby, holding one of the dish-shaped combat drones in its hydraulic arms. The drone was obviously struggling, trying to turn its broken pulse carbines toward Twilight while sparks blasted from its gear assembly.

"We have determined that the drone has been daemonically possessed. Upon hearing that this is the third such incident, it is my belief that these attacks do not represent an incidental convergence of statistically unlikely events, but a sustained, calculated effort to remove the xeno from this mortal coil."

Gaela continued staring at the Riot Drone for a little longer. "... I see. Destroy it."

A hiss came from the servitor's claws, and the squealing drone was crushed to shards. The servitor then carried the mangled mess over to the recycler engines.

"Why would daemons want to kill me PERSONALLY?" Twilight asked. "I'm not an enemy of Chaos! At least, not recently!"

"The will of the Dark Gods is often unfathomable to mere mortals," Gaela admitted, "perhaps we should seek a spiritual solution. There are preachers among the Chaos cultists."

One of the Dark Acolytes spoke up again. "I believe there is a more pressing matter at hand. Several previously inactive vehicles have began registering heat signatures. I believe their reactors are reactivating."

Gaela spun around, her optics whirling. Multiple wrecks were promptly outlined in bright red as her targeting systems picked out movement and thermal emissions.

"Wait, you mean even more daemons are coming?" Spike asked in alarm.

"Negative." Gaela's left arm split apart as it engaged its combat mode, exposing the magnetic coils within the cannon. "They are already here."

The first giant mechanized arm that broke free from the pile of rubbish and wrecked armor barely lasted a second before it was sliced apart by lasers. Hot, molten steel splashed from the arm as it collapsed, and a gout of purple-reddish flame sputtered from the severed limb.

The second and third machines to emerge from the scrap pile were shot apart in a similar fashion, stopped dead by pin-point accurate shots from the short line of Tech-clergy standing before the scrapyard. There were half a dozen Dark Acolytes and Techpriests in attendance, and as usual, all were well-armed and ready to take to battle without any particular concern for why they were suddenly fighting zombie robots in the heart of their own flagship. The servitors stopped working and trudged over to the firing line, while the slaves that had been assisting them quickly clustered in the corners of the room, as far from danger as possible.

"What is this?! This doesn't make any sense!" Twilight complained while she put her helmet back on. "How did this many daemons get into the ship?! This is a pretty clear indictment of this whole 'no Gellar field' idea!"

"Sparkle, save any corrective recommendations for after the combat has concluded," Gaela ordered. She fired a glittering white bolt over a defunct Killa Kan, striking another revived Riot Drone and blasting it apart. Then the Killa Kan itself started rumbling, and its main sensors began to flicker.

Twilight cycled her vox system to the ship-wide channel as soon as her visor turned on. "This is Twilight Sparkle! I'm in materials recovery center six in section 89-12! We are under attack! I repeat! We are under attack! Daemons have infiltrated the ship and are launching a concentrated assault on my location!"

She levitated the force harmonizer into its combat position, feeding a trickle of power to the weapon while awaiting a response.

"... Hello? Is anybody hearing this? You're not all ignoring me because I'm a pony, are you? We need help!"

The Killa Kan surged forward, ripping free of the pile of ruined armor and loose cabling that had buried it. Its buzz saw arm stuttered to a start, and bright red sparks blasted from a dozen malfunctioning systems.

"Geez, even the reality-warping monsters can't work Ork tech as well as Orks," Spike mumbled.

A brilliant purple beam screamed over his head, and the front of the Ork attack walker folded instantly before it was ripped in half. Spike yelped and jumped away, hiding behind Gaela's leg to avoid being between Twilight and any new targets.

"Why isn't anyone answering?!" Twilight shouted into her vox. "Is this some sort of Mechanicus-only local network?"

A horrendous screech suddenly came from her helmet vox, and the alicorn Princess felt her blood run cold. Every other member of the Dark Mechanicus likewise stumbled, clutching their heads and sputtering Binaric Cant.

"The vox... they've compromised the vox system!" Gaela shouted. Her tone of voice was finally approaching something like actual concern. She stood up straight again and fired her ion blaster, knocking down an automata that was trying to pull itself free from the garbage.

"They... WHAT? Is that even possible?" Twilight gasped while launching a volley of magic missiles.

"I would normally say no, but here we are," Gaela muttered bitterly. She chopped away a metal tendril of sizzling wires that was reaching for her leg. "Open the blast doors! There's no need to hold this facility against the daemons!"

"Not happening!" Spike shouted, pointing anxiously behind them. "Look!"

It became obvious with a glance that Gaela was not the first to have the idea of running away. The slaves were banging and screaming at the closed and locked blast doors, while a single Dark Acolyte worked at the door controls and spoke prayers of Binary to no obvious effect. A pair of servitors were trying to pry the door open with their hydraulic claws, but that too looked to be a doomed effort.

"Oh, Celestia, why?!" Twilight shouted, firing a beam across the surging mountain of scrap. "Why is this happening?! We've got an entire army of military wreckage trying to murder us and it's all my fault and I don't know WHY!" Her horn casing flashed, and a trio of lightning bolts punched into the junk pile. Robots and drones went berserk as the energy surge fried whatever electronics were sporadically reviving themselves, eventually falling back to a state of inert scrap waiting to be processed.

"Enemy units have limited combat function and compromised mobility," another Dark Techpriest reminded the others between shots of his arc pistol, "we possess complete tactical superiority."

As soon as the Techpriest finished speaking, part of the junk pile suddenly lifted upward. Scrap tumbled down the jagged hills, and the screech of metal scraping against metal briefly overcame the sound of energy weapons firing.

"Oh, NOW what?" Twilight demanded before shooting down another pair of damaged drones.

The Dark Mechanicus clergy began backing up from the scrapyard. "Scans indicate Warp coalescent event of magnitude four," bleated one of the cyborgs in black.

"Twi! What does that mean?" Spike asked.

"I don't know!"

"Gaela! What does that mean?" Spike asked.

"There's a big one coming," Gaela explained, "we may have just lost our 'tactical superiority'."

Another massive shift in the junk pile caused a hill of scrap armor to form, and something resembling a body began to break free.

At first Twilight thought that an Ork Battlewagon was somehow rising to the top of the scrap heap, and after a few seconds she confirmed that, in fact, an Ork Battlewagon was indeed somehow rising to the top of the scrap heap. Glittering red lights flickered behind the broken viewports, and the large steel lower jaw that decorated the front of the assault transport yawned open like a real mouth. Bits of metal churned all below it, some of it rolling down the hill of trash while other bits flew up and slapped onto the hull of the possessed vehicle like magnets. All around the larger mechanical, webs of cabling began whipping about and poking at other wreckage. These machines were pulled free of the scrap that bound them and animated more quickly, as if fed by the larger daemon.

"... Okay. That's a little concerning," Twilight admitted. Her force harmonizer started humming, and she carefully lined up a shot into the cab of the Ork vehicle.

"Wait! Twi! Watch out!" Spike shouted.

Twilight didn't know what it was that tackled her from behind, which she supposed was the point of Spike's warning. The harmonizer fired its charged beam as she hit the ground and lost control of it, slashing a thick ray of violet energy across the ceiling.

Twilight's armor shrieked as metal scraped against it, and she kicked frantically while trying to see what had grabbed her. One of her flailing swipes connected, pushing her attacker away, and Twilight finally managed to turn over and get a look.

It was a servitor. An ordinary, vice-handed, lumbering servitor. That seemed to be oozing blood from its mouth. That was kind of weird.

Even more bizarre was the way that it lurched forward and seized Twilight's leg with its claw while unusually loud Machine Code poured from its vocalizer.

"They... did they actually possess a servitor, too?" Twilight gasped.

Said servitor pulled Twilight closer and then hammered its free pincer into her helmet, suggesting that she was correct. Twilight's horn flashed, and purple flame washed over the cyber-slave, crisping its pale, weathered flesh.

This did not have the intended effect of actually stopping the possessed servitor, however. It swung Twilight around and slammed her into the metal flooring, jarring her within her armor even if it failed to break the plating.

The cyborg worker reached for her neck, the vise pistons hissing while the iron clamps of its arms yawned open.

"Get off her!" Spike yelled, leaping up onto the servitor's leg. He latched onto the rough thermal fiber clothing that the cyber-slaves wore for pants, and started tugging at a wire cluster on the servitor's arm to hold it back.

The possessed cyborg barely took three seconds to swat the baby dragon off of its leg, but three seconds was a long time to hope the armed psyker you were grabbing would stay stunned and helpless. After Spike bounced away, the servitor found itself staring at a damaged metal crate sailing toward it, propelled by a haze of purple light. The container struck the servitor square in the chest and knocked it back, although it retained its footing.

"By Celestia! Is there ANYTHING on this ship that can't be possessed by a daemon and used to kill me?!" Twilight griped. She shifted the focus of her telekinesis, and near-solid rings of purple magic snapped into place around the servitor's arms and legs, holding it fast.

The servitor struggled for a few seconds, but its augmented limbs weren't designed for high strength and it lacked any particular leverage. In response, the wires and cabling that coiled around its bionic parts each ripped free of one port, slithering away in a shower of sparks or blast of compressed air. Then they began to writhe and whip forward like tentacles, snaking forward to clear the gap between the servitor and the pony. The seams between metal and flesh split open, revealing a seething green energy that Twilight was fairly sure wasn't generated by either the augmetic or organic components. Spikes of bone and metal started poking out from the scorched epidermis of the cyber-slave, completing the impression that its form was shifting ever further toward the daemonic.

Twilight was not of a mind to leave her would-be assassin alone, however. As it squirmed and shifted, Twilight located her harmonizer and levitated it up off the floor. A wedge of crackling purple energy formed between the poles of the weapon, and then it arced over Twilight's head and plunged into the immobilized cyborg.

"First monsters, then machines, and now even the servitors!" Twilight shouted, ripping the sizzling blade through her attacker from shoulder to groin. "What's next?! You've got a long way to go before you can kill ME!"

A jaw-rattling crash answered her boast, and a flaming chunk of metal bounced off the floor just next to her.

Twilight whirled around, facing the main junk pile again.

"... Oh. Right. The big thing. I forgot about that."

The Battlewagon that had emerged from the surface of the scrap heap had risen even further above the enormous pile of wreckage by now, and couldn't really be considered a Battlewagon any longer. Enormous arms composed of twisted armor plates and loosely-bundled cables clawed at the garbage piles, drawing more metal onto the growing monstrosity and flinging wreckage at the surrounding warriors.

The tide of smaller possessed machines had not faltered either, and if anything seemed to be speeding up thanks to the greater daemon. Gaela was hacking away at dozens of small, lurching objects that appeared to be nothing more than clusters of random discarded armor and parts somehow stirred to mobility. The other Mechanicus clergy had broken into two groups, concentrating either on shooting down the smaller machines or helping break through the blast doors trapping them inside.

"Is the vox still being jammed?" Twilight asked before bringing up the force harmonizer again. "Can anyone hear me?"

She began charging her heavy beam weapon, and her vox system crackled in her ear.

"... Interloper... Thief..." the voice was scratchy, and surrounded by static feedback, but she could barely make out something hissing angrily at her. "Kill... the hope... you will... die..."

"Yeah, okay! You hate me and want me dead! I noticed!" Twilight snapped.

Her force harmonizer discharged, slamming into the face of the enormous daemon atop the scrap heap. Armor plating folded and a thick, glowing gouge was cut into the snarling maw of the mechanical monster, but as the beam faded Twilight was quite distressed to see that little real damage had been done.

Massive crane-like arms lifted around the mechanical horror, each one squeezing a claw full of refuse into a makeshift projectile. The arms lashed forward, flinging the balls of compressed wreckage at its equine target.

One trash ball missed entirely, smashing apart on the ground nearly a meter off-target and scattering shards of metal over the floor. The second was more accurate, but Twilight simply slowed the descent of the orb of junk with her levitation and then magically placed it to her side.

"Well, at least it can't dish it out as well as it can take it!" She fired her harmonizer again, ripping the beam across the face of the daemonic machine. Warpflame blasted from the impact and the cybernetic behemoth lurched back, yet as the last motes of violet energy faded away there was no damage beyond a burning scar across the monster's cab.

"Maybe if I hit the legs? It would stop it from getting loose from the junk heap, at least!" Twilight mused aloud, cycling the harmonizer for another shot.

"Twi! Forget that!" Spike's voice came from behind, and a tiny fist banged on her leg armor. "We're getting out of here! Let these things HAVE the trash pile!"

Twilight turned to look at the blast doors, and saw that a pair of Dark Techpriests were backing away from a ring of melta charges that had been placed against the front. Clearly they intended to simply blast a hole through the barrier and abandon the facility.

"All right! Great!" Twilight fired another harmonizer beam at the daemonic machine, shattering one of its arms that was wheeling back to hurl more junk at her. "Gaela! We're falling back! Let's go!"

+Wretched daemon! Weak, unworthy, mockeries of the holy machine!+ Gaela sputtered while ripping a damaged automata in two with her servo arms. Her left arm surged with power, and she unleashed a swirling lash of crackling ion radiation into a lumbering walker.

"Gaela! Come on! There's no point in fighting these things!" Twilight shouted.

The melta charges went off behind her, and she glanced back at the exit. Hot vapor poured from the breach, and the deck slaves started scrambling and pushing to get out before the doors had even cooled.

"We're clear! We can get-"

Then the screaming began.

Through the smoke came a claw like obsidian, reaching for the closest bodies pushing for the door. It scythed through the crowding slaves, swiping back and forth to ward the panicked laborers back.

"They're coming from the doors, too!" Spike shouted, running around Twilight's legs in panicked circles. "We're surrounded!"

Twilight gaped in horror as the crew trying to get out suddenly scattered. The new daemon, an ebony-skinned, giant humanoid with scythe-like arms, squeezed through the breach and onto the blood-soaked floor of the recycling facility, a needle-like tongue darting out from between its teeth. A servitor that had not been as quick to retreat as the sentient workers had its chest pierced by a talon, and a moment later the cyborg was sheared entirely in half.

"Get out of its way!" Twilight cried. "It's after me!"

The various humanoids were only too happy to open a path to the armored mare, and the daemon accelerated to a frantic sprint. Its arms flailed wildly as it ran, and a blade-tipped tail lashed behind it, scoring small, random cuts on the surrounding slaves and cultists.

Daemon and alicorn clashed in a burst of magical lightning and deadly Warpflame. Twilight teleported to avoid the initial charge, but was struck across the breast by the tail blade. The daemon seemed to shrug off the first magic blast, but the force harmonizer spun across its arm and severed it at the elbow.

Pony and monster staggered back, already gathering their power for the next exchange.

A ball of twisted scrap metal smashed into the floor between them, scoring both combatants with metal shards. Twilight forced herself not to flinch away from the shrapnel cutting across her visor, knowing that the Warp monster facing her would show no fear or pain.

Sure enough, the daemon leapt immediately. Its talons extended to punch straight through her helmet, and a howl that she felt more than she heard chilled her blood.

Twilight launched another spell, striking the daemon in mid-leap. Unlike the first enchantment, however, this magic wasn't intended to hurt the daemon directly. A powerful magnetic pulse surrounded the Warpspawn, and Twilight herself felt her body pulled forward within its shell of metal. As for the monster itself, it slammed straight down onto the metal flooring, its jump cut painfully short of its target. Every piece of shrapnel from the scrap projectile immediately jumped back toward the daemon, slicing and battering its false skin before clinging to it.

Another heap of wreckage launched toward Twilight, sailing in an arc through the cavernous facility. Twilight glanced up at the projectile, but did nothing as it approached, watching the scrap sphere veer off its course in due time and home in on her opponent instead. The heap of metal crushed the daemon utterly with its impact, smashing it across the floor in a streak of Warp flame and dust.

"All right, are we clear now?" Twilight demanded, glancing over to the large mechanical daemon atop the garbage heap. It kept growing ever larger, connecting to more wrecked vehicles and more lengths of cabling and metal for limbs. At the very least it didn't seem to improve its ranged attacks much, but if and when it managed to free itself from the scrap heap and move, she didn't think anything would be able to stop it.

Turning toward the exit revealed an even worse situation. Dark Techpriests and servitors battered back a constant stream of frenzied daemons that squirmed in through the room's exit breach. None were as large as the beast she had just dispatched, but there was no indication that the assault would stop. The daemons would keep coming, killing or possessing whatever was in their way... until SHE was dead.

"What do I do?" she hissed behind her visor. Red outlines flashed constantly. Warning runes glared at her. Targeting reticules spun. A cacophony of data spun around her head, tracking the violence in terrifying detail.

One of the red blips vanished.

An enraged roar came from the exit breach. A larger daemon trying to clamber into the room was instead being pulled back into the adjoined hallway. It screamed again, and then vanished into the hole.

Twilight's vox system came to life, this time of its own accord.

"Executive: All units, stand down."

Every member of the Mechanicus clergy jerked to attention and stopped, like puppets being tugged upright and held there. Weapons faltered immediately and the servitors that had been fighting froze stiff.

The various daemons seemed to sense the shift in hostilities immediately. Rather than cutting down the immobilized cyborgs, they whirled on their true prey. Some half-dozen blade-limbed Warpspawn and perhaps thirty more possessed machines of various mobility and potential threat began to clamber for the equine in the room, each one sputtering its own unique, horrifying battle scream.

Twilight gulped and jumped up into a hover, moving to dodge another ball of scrap being hurled from the junk heap. The monsters closed ranks, forming a semi-circle of twitching claws and squealing metal. The enormous mechanical snarled, sending more and more lumbering metal pawns stumbling from the trash pile. Spike - who didn't have the advantage of flight but did have the advantage of not being the target - kicked and shouted at Gaela's leg, trying to get the Dark Techpriest to move again.

Another burst of static came from the vox. This time, however, the irritating feedback seemed to linger, irritating Twilight's ears long after another order was issued through the network.

"Repeat executive: STAND. DOWN."

Twilight gaped in surprised as nearly every one of the possessed machines shuddered to stop. The enormous monster above the scrap heap roared, voicing its frustration with a voice like tearing metal. Even the daemons of pure Warp-borne faux flesh staggered and screeched, seeming confused and agitated by the command.

It didn't bother them nearly as much as the lasers, though.

Focused spans of crimson rays converged on the daemons one by one, scorching black tracks across immaterial flesh. Then the webs of lasers met at a single point and pulsed, coring each of the Warp-borne monstrosities. They fell screeching onto the floor, their bodies coming apart and gouts of green and pink fire vomiting from their wounds.

Twilight spotted the source of the attacks immediately, although it took some time to place the name. Thin, insectoid legs skittered over the blood-streaked metal flooring, carrying what almost resembled a nine-foot metal monolith cloaked in black rubber. Mechatendrils and laser emitters spun and lashed about in independent clusters, almost casually spreading patterns of utterly lethal red light upon any hostile within range. Atop the tower of humming metal and shadowy rubber was a cluster of dozens of glittering green orbs; a spider-like array of eyes sitting under the hood of the cloak that obscured the bulk of the cybernetic body.

"Dark Magos Kaelith!" Twilight shouted, tilting toward the ancient cyborg. "Did you fix the vox? We have to-"

A few optics lenses turned to focus on her, and then Twilight yelped as her suit systems suddenly went dead. She crashed onto the floor, rolling across the bits of metal detritus and scorch marks that used to be howling monsters.

The final true daemon leapt for the alicorn, only to be bisected by a streaming laser mid-jump. Its body disintegrated on contact with the armored, immobile pony, washing against her inert ceramite shell as if it were made of dust.

"Explanatory: Local interference is delaying operational timetables. Efficiency has fallen below average transit threshold."

Kaelith scuttled past Twilight as he complained, apparently ignoring the disabled pony. She could hardly believe her ears. Monsters roamed the ship, people were dying, and heaps of trash and defunct vehicles were being spontaneously animated to kill her, and his primary concern was a small drop in the tonnage of recycling output? Putting aside that he had deactivated her armor just to quiet her down! She resolved to ask Solon about re-working the armor killswitch authorization if she survived this.

If Twilight seemed annoyed by Kaelith's intervention, the daemon-machine atop the garbage pile was enraged. A sound like a buzz saw biting into a steel bar filled the room as it screeched, the jaws of its armored bumper yawning open toward the ceiling.

The possessed machines started twitching to life again, as if the sheer fury of the greater daemon were fighting against the commands of the Dark Magos.

Then Kaelith began to pray.

"Machine spirit, energizing force, eternal bond, heed the call of your Chosen." Kaelith curled up like the centipede he resembled, his melta torches clicking together under his cranial assembly like mandibles. "Let metal and flame be lashed forever to our will. The will of the Omnissiah. The will of Mechanicus. My will."

The Dark Acolytes and Dark Techpriests, Gaela included, suddenly moved as one, falling onto their knees (or adopting a similar positions for less traditional leg models). A cacophony of sequenced Binaric Cant sputtered from the dark clergy, layering their electronic verse after Kaelith's words in what was easily the most awful song that Twilight and Spike had ever heard. The screaming of the giant daemon robot was barely as bad, and at least it stopped quickly.

"Daemonic soul: wild, bestial, free... you pollute the cold dignity of the machine with your presence." The Binary chorus boomed behind the Magos, its static screeching rising and falling unevenly. "The place of the machine is to serve. To labor. To kill... at man's direction."

The possessed machines staggered forward, sparks showering the floor while their various limbs twisted and jerked against some unknown force.

"You are defective. You are unneeded. You are unproductive," Kaelith intoned, raising his head to look straight up. His torches and emitters spread out, as if he was gesturing grandly to some unknown spectator. "You are no more."

A wave of invisible energy blasted outward from the Dark Magos, generating a hum that barely tickled the flesh. As the pulse struck the daemonically possessed machines, however, the mechanical beasts howled and writhed, dropping to the floor. Snaking wires fell limp, lumens and sensors went dark, and hissing engines sputtered to a halt. Hunks of metal that seemed to be attached to each other with pure logic-defying Warp power collapsed into inert pieces. The mob of machines fell apart more quickly before Kaelith's prayer than any actual weapon could have managed, sweeping over the scrap pile and stilling the shattered walkers and automata clawing their way through the trash.

The tech-clergy stopped chanting in Binary, watching the proceedings silently. Even the slaves seemed to calm themselves and observe, fascinated.

Only the largest mechanical, the daemonic monster with the head of a Battlewagon, remained. It sat upon thick coils of wires and shifting pistons, glowering down upon the cyborgs below and the equine it had been sent to slay.

By now Twilight had magically put away her armor, having decided that being able to move and see was more important than having an extra barrier between her and the Warpspawn.

"Okay, so what's going on, now?" she asked irritably. "Why did you need to-"

"Executive," Kaelith interrupted, his distinctly electronic voice sounding harsher than usual. "Hold position and be silent."

The Dark Magos scuttled forward toward the scrap heap and the daemonic abomination sitting atop it. Twilight scowled, but didn't interrupt further. She could erect a barrier at will and the daemon seemed to be almost immobile. She didn't even know why the Magos was getting closer.

He did approach the garbage pile however, and the daemonic machine lurched forward. Scrap metal rolled down the sides of the heap, spilling across the floor under Kaelith's insect-like feet.

The Dark Magos stopped, peering up at the Warp-corrupted creature of wreckage through a dozen glittering green lights.

"Observatory: A flawed creation. Limited mobility, effective range, and overall combat viability. A daemonic will forced into broken vessels with no regard for schematic proficiency. Purpose without form. Repulsive."

The greater daemon either took offense at this analysis, or otherwise decided to remove the relatively tiny creature interfering in its task. The decorative jaw of the Battlewagon yawned open again, the metal pistons and misshapen gears around it squealing loudly. Within the gaping hull, several crackling energy nodes converged onto a single spot and then sparked to life.

Kaelith watched, silent and unmoving, as the daemon began building a coherent, contained plasma sphere within its "mouth". The sphere ballooned from the size of a marble to the size of a bowling ball, and the energizing nodes started to shake from the effort.

"Revision: It would seem there is some degree of sophistication in this unit's development cycle. Recommendation: There may be value in analysis post-mortem."

"Why are you just standing there?!" Twilight shouted. "That's obviously a projectile weapon! Run! Or kill it! Or... I don't know, pray? That worked pretty well before!"

Kaelith didn't acknowledge the pony, remaining still and staring up at the colossal machine. The plasma orb within the daemonic Battlewagon's maw swelled to nearly a meter in diameter, and then finally shot forward, directly into Kaelith's face.

Twilight wasn't entirely sure what happened after that. There was a pulsing, blinding flash at the moment of impact, but it was significantly dimmer and less noisy than the plasma cannon blasts that she'd seen before. There was also the fact that the Dark Tech-clergy were still standing attentively and silently while watching their leader face off against the possessed junk-daemon. Dark Techpriests were cold and dispassionate at the best of times, but Twilight felt that the mood here wasn't mere indifference.

Her eyes finished adjusting to the pulsing light (she really wished the ship's lumens had a setting higher than "unsettling gloom") and she stared at the sight of the Company's Dark Magos. A single small mechanical arm reached out above Kaelith, extending a trio of glowing finger-like nodes in front of the swirling ball of plasma. The destructive orb of boiling energy quivered in the air barely a foot above Kaelith, suspended in its magnetic bubble by some invisible force.

"Conclusive: The machine will serve, or it will be destroyed. Perish, daemon."

Another flash came from Kaelith's manipulator arm, and the plasma sphere suddenly rocketed back up toward the possessed machine. The "head" of the daemon lurched back as the orb exploded within it, coating its internals with lethal energy and burning a stream of vapor out the monster's back. Seams started to break apart and rivulets of metal slag drooled from the machine's body. The core of the daemonic device, more akin to daemonic heart than a functional reactor, sputtered to a halt, and the lights behind the windows of the Battlewagon began to dim.

Kaelith turned around, scuttling directly toward Twilight. He didn't even twist a single optic sensor around to watch while the corrupted wreck collapsed back into the scrap heap from whence it came.

"Observatory: This facility is secure. Interrogative: Why is unit Sparkle the target objective of a daemonic incursion?" buzzed the Dark Magos.

"That's what I want to know!" Twilight griped. "But why don't we start with questions that one of us might actually have an answer for? Why did you trigger my armor killswitch during a battle?! Another daemon could have appeared or possessed something near me!"

The rows of projectors along Kaelith's body quivered. "Counter-factual: I do not need to explain my tactical decisions to you, xeno filth. Executive: You will comply with my orders or be eliminated."

Twilight bristled, her wings spreading threateningly. "You didn't give any orders! You just glanced at me and powered me down for no reason and with no warning! That's dangerous, even if I wasn't already in a battlefield!"

"Counter-factual: Unit Sparkle survived my tactical execution without difficulty. Conclusive: You are wrong, and will cease your prattling. Interrogative: What is the current hypothesis in regarding the daemonic incursion?"

"Don't you 'conclusive' me! This is serious! I'm not under your command in the first place! I-" Twilight felt a metal hand rest on her back, and she barely stopped herself from lashing out with a terrified kick at whatever had unexpectedly touched her.

Gaela stood over Twilight, and she released a lengthy string of Binaric Cant. A few of Kaelith's optic sensors twitched over in her direction, and he returned the blast of static with his own.

Twilight sulked while the two Tech-clerics spoke in their own language, completely shutting her out of their conversation. She couldn't even use body language or facial expressions to follow the tone of the exchange, since metal shielding was very good at hiding both.

Another hand fell onto her leg, this one more familiar. Spike had emerged from wherever he had been hiding and was smiling at her nervously, trying to provide some comfort to the troubled mare. Twilight greatly appreciated the gesture.

It took a good four minutes of ear-grating static bursts before Magos Kaelith suddenly turned away, scuttling toward the blast doors. Said doors were slowly grinding open despite their earlier damage, and a contingent of black-robed Scavurel were holding position on the other side.

"We have concluded our discussion on your circumstances," Gaela informed Twilight. Her mask hissed sharply before breaking open and revealing the Techpriest's face. Her frown looked slightly more grim than usual. "Dark Magos Kaelith blames you for the interruptions and expenditures. He does not believe that you are unaware of how you have offended the Warpspawn, and is of the opinion that we should turn you over to the daemonic intruders."

Twilight's fur stood on end. "WHAT?! Is... Is that why he turned off my armor?" Then she paused. "But, wait, he also fought off the daemons. Why do that if he thinks I should be sacrificed to appease them?"

"Pride, mostly," Gaela said, gazing toward the scrap heaps. Unlike the lesser possessed machines, the larger one had not fallen apart completely upon its demise; it still resembled a head that funneled down into many smaller bodies of metal via thick bundles of cabling. "The Dark Magos cannot abide daemons operating freely within his facilities, as if they were peers to the Dark Techpriests given free rein through the ship. And machines that do not accept commands are always an offensive existence to the tech-clergy. Had he found the resistance here beyond his strength, he would have surrendered your life eagerly."

Twilight's expression managed to sour even further. Spike furrowed his brow. "Kinda complex, isn't he?"

"He maintains a distinctly human temperament, with all its idiosyncrasies and distortions. It is a flaw we all strive to overcome daily." Then Gaela's expression turned to a hateful sneer. "However, that is no excuse for putting his own will before that of the Iron Warriors. Warsmith Solon is your High Commander, not Magos Kaelith, and your life belongs to him."

Twilight winced. "Er... yeah. I guess it does. That's... just short of comforting, really."

Gaela quickly returned to an expression of excessively serious indifference. "In any case, he cannot reactivate your power armor while it is banished with your witchcraft, but he has authorized me to do so."

"Okay, so what happens now?" Spike asked. "We're sure these daemons forced their way in to try to kill Twilight, right? We can't just leave her alone! Who knows when they'll attack again?"

"You are mistaken," Gaela said bluntly, "the previous attack has not ended."

Both the pony and the dragon quickly whirled about, back-to-back, staring frantically about the recycling complex.

"Where? Where are they?! I can't see them! Oh, Celestia help us, are they invisible now?!" Spike wailed, his head whipping from side-to-side.

Twilight's horn flashed, and her inert power armor reappeared around her body. "Gaela! Turn it on! Hurry!"

The Dark Techpriest sighed. "The incursion in this particular room has been banished. There are no more enemies here." She took a moment to reset Twilight's armor settings anyway, and the powered shell started humming as its power cells reactivated.

"Then what did you mean the attack hasn't ended?" Spike asked nervously.

"You recall that when the exit was breached, it merely created another entry point for daemonic intruders?" She waited for the Equestrians to nod fearfully. "Daemons are appearing from all over the ship and attempting to converge on this location. Iron Warrior fire squads have been deployed to repel them, but that battle is still taking place."

"What the hay is going ON here?!" Twilight growled. "When did I make an enemy out of the Warp and everything in it?"

"That is an interesting question, but probably something to be researched later," Gaela mumbled, "for now we have contained the daemons' reinforcements. We will find their entry points and put an end to this."

Twilight's visor loaded a local-area map, and she winced. Numerous corridors were being guarded by Iron Warrior squads who were engaged in heavy firefights. The enemies were harder to track, apparently, appearing on the map outline and then flickering away, but the daemons at least seemed to match the Chaos Space Marines in numbers.

"Should I go help?" Twilight asked, levitating the force harmonizer above her head.

"Negative. Your movement may shift the enemy's tactical approach. The current situation is sustainable until our assault forces shut down the incursion," Gaela assured the pony, "for now, we have been asked to hold here. Once the threat has been contained, you are being moved to psionic isolation."

"Eugh..." Twilight grimaced and hung her head. "I just wish I knew why this was happening. I don't really like the idea of all these people getting hurt because of me."

"They are not getting hurt because of you," the Dark Techpriest said with an edge in her voice, "the daemons have forced their way onto the Company's ship. They are an enemy to all of us for this reason alone, and will be destroyed for their trespass. Their particular objective, while useful to know, is irrelevant."

"You might feel differently if they were after you," Twilight grumbled. Then she paused. "Well, okay, probably not. Still-"

"I must return to my previous work," Gaela interrupted. She leaned over to pick up a cluster of coiled wires. "The Dark Magos was already quite upset about lagging production schedules, and has adjusted our shifts to compensate for the personnel killed."

"Of course he has," Twilight growled. "Would you like some help? After all that it would be rather cathartic to shove the remains of my enemies into a furnace."

"By all means."

****

Harvest of Steel - sub-deck 33F

One by one they clawed their way into the stale, recycled air of the void ship. Claws, talons, and thick, powerful fingers emerged from crackling fissures, pulling horribly disfigured, bestial bodies from the bulkheads and onto the blood-spattered floors.

Each daemon paused to orient itself, taking in the strange sensations of the material universe that had intruded upon their endless ocean of psionic turmoil. They were simple-minded spawn, and barely more intelligent than mere beasts; none could fathom the complexity of their mission, or wonder at the orderly, seemingly inert interior of the massive daemon they had infiltrated. All they knew was their mission, and the psyker equine loomed large in their senses despite the many meters and barriers that stood between the hunters and their target.

There were only two other immediate curiosities that distracted them from launching the next wave in the continuing effort to slay the pony. One was the emaciated human man writhing on the floor, clutching his head in agony. He was quivering in the fetal position, in the center of a complex runic circle drawn from his own blood. He was also generating lashes of prismatic energy that passed over the blood runes and then arced up into the walls and floor, opening new rifts for new daemons. Although the daemons found this intriguing, and the man's fearful suffering tantalizing, they left him alone.

The second thing was the giant eye staring at them from the ceiling. None of them really knew what was up with that.

The pounding of metal on metal roused the daemons from their distraction, and each one oriented itself toward the distant alicorn whose soul they wished to claim. They set out down the hallway, snarling and ready to pounce. They sought no prey other than the purple one, but would not hesitate to destroy anything that thought to stand in their way.

Until that anything turned out to be a giant, heavily armored Chaos Lord with heavy bolters. Then they hesitated.

The heavy bolters opened fire with a roar, streaming explosive bolts into the hall. The closest daemons were blasted off their feet as the explosive rounds blew away portions of their bodies into puffs of Warpflame, and even those not hit directly were savaged by a whirlwind of deadly shrapnel. Many survived the first salvo, staggered and surprised but still mostly intact. Flesh began to knit back together and scorched dust rose from the floor to reform crippled limbs.

"Ah, I think I found the shource," Solon said to himself between bursts from his weapons. He continued striding forward, leveling brief, careful salvos at the Warpspawn crawling about the hall. A few of the daemons shrieked and charged, leaping up onto the Warsmith and scraping at his armor with their bare claws.

Solon scooped up one such creature with his primary servo claw, and crushed it to dust without ceremony. The other swiped at his face, and Solon caught the daemon's hand with his own before flinging it back to the floor. One of his legs rose out of sequence and crashed down onto the stunned Warp beast, banishing it back to the Immaterium outside the ship.

As Solon approached the daemons' origin point, however, they suddenly switched tactics. The remaining half-dozen clustered around the human on the floor, snarling and swiping the air like animals trying to ward off a larger predator.

Solon halted his approach while several meters away, and his heavy bolters fell silent. He couldn't destroy the remaining daemons without also cutting apart the human with the shrapnel, and he would really rather the human not die yet. He wondered if the daemons realized this, or if they were simply guarding a crucial objective the only way they knew how.

Well, it didn't really matter.

Solon leaned to the side and pressed a hand onto the wall. The metal under his gauntlet pulsed at his touch, a ripple spreading out through the bulkhead like the surface of a disturbed pond.

"Releashe codex three-shix-zero-zero-three, level gamma," Solon's optics glittered, and the eye still poking through the ceiling squinted.

Metal squealed and bent along the bulkheads, and then one plate seam ripped open. Torn metal formed rows of twisted teeth around a gullet of metal piping and ventilation ducts.

The daemons recoiled, alarmed at seeing a sudden act of aggression from the ship itself. The Harvest's thoughts, its anger, and its gnawing, constant hunger surrounded them as if it were soaking the very air itself.

"Go ahead, my dear," Solon said to the wall beside him, "feed. Leave the flesh-borne one though, would you?"

Iron chains shot out of the mouth in the bulkhead, smashing into the daemons and wrapping around them like a dozen prehensile tongues. The Warpspawn shrieked and struggled, tearing apart the chains as best they could, but there were too many, and those that were destroyed were quickly replaced by new lashes of iron. One by one they were dragged into the gaping tear in the wall. Sometimes they were yanked directly into the twisted mass of tubes that approximated a gullet. Others managed to grab hold of the teeth lining the breach, and got bitten in half as the mouth closed on top of them.

Solon approached the human on the ground, mostly ignoring the grisly spectacle. One daemon managed to tear apart the chain pulling its leg and made a run for the writhing mortal, but Solon reached down and grabbed the beast, throwing it back toward the snapping jaws.

"All right, you little pesht." Solon grabbed the man on the floor and pulled him up by his shoulder until he could look him in the eyes. "You have a lot of explaining to do."

The man was a psyker. One of the few human psykers in the 38th Company's fleet. A resource quite scarce to begin with, and not easy to replenish.

He lifted his neck, slowly, painfully, until he could meet Solon's optics with his bloodshot eyes. "L-Lord... Wa... War-"

"I washn't talking to you, Lucif Grannon," Solon interrupted, "I will need you to cling to life for a few more minutesh, but ashide from that your part in thish affair ish over. I need..." a chain snaked through the air toward the psyker's leg, and Solon quickly pulled him away. "Hey! No! Shtop that! I shaid the human ish off-limitsh!"

An echoing, persisting groan rolled through the halls, and a few more chains slithered up below the Warsmith.

"I don't care! You've had plenty!" Solon insisted. "Reshcind releashe codex! Eshtablish ward relay pattern alpha!"

An irritated shriek came from the bulkheads, and the chains were rapidly sucked back into the wall.

By the time Solon turned his attention back to the psyker, the man's countenance had changed entirely. He clutched the Iron Warrior's gauntlet, and hissed in a voice that wasn't his while he struggled. Most obviously, his eyes had turned solid black, and blood wept down his pale cheeks.

"Ah, here we go. I am Warshmith Sholon, mashter of thish ship. Who am I shpeaking with?" Solon asked.

"You need not know my name, Pawn of Nurg'leth!" The psyker Lucif was gone now, his spirit completely dominated by the daemon that had used him as an entrance. "Surrender the horned one! The Gods demand it!"

"Oh, sho NOW you shtart making demandsh, hm? After boarding my ship and running rampant through itsh hallsh for hoursh." He made a snorting noise through his vox grille. "I am dishinclined to asshisht you, daemon. If you had the power to overcome me, then you would be ushing it now. If you had any shway that I reshpected, you would not have begun your tashk in ambush. You are out of optionsh. You have losht."

A booming howl came from Lucif. His words emerged as two voices, discordant and angry, one of the echo of the other. "She has stolen what belongs to the Dark Gods! She has violated the sanctum of the Tormented Conclave, and-"

"Oh, sho you undershtand the mortal conceptsh of property and violation thereof? Good. Then lishten." He pulled the possessed man closer, until their faces were mere inches apart. "You have intruded upon MY ship, daemon shcum. You have attacked MY property. You've even killed the lasht of MY human pshykersh. And now you demand the mare? No. You will be punished for thish tresshpassh, not her."

"You will surrender the creature!" the daemon screeched. "The Dark Gods-"

"I follow ONE Dark God," Solon interrupted, "and Grandfather Nurgle doesh not need you to shpeak for him or sheek redressh from hish shervantsh. You have no leverage here, and with the death of my pshykersh, no power, either."

Lucif's body contorted painfully. Despite the daemon speaking through him, the man was in his death throes and fully aware of it. "I will not leave this ship without the horned one's soul."

"You will not leave thish ship," Solon agreed ominously. Then the Warsmith broke Lucif's neck.

"What an absholute washte," the Chaos Lord grumbled before dropping the dead psyker back onto the floor, "granted, pshykersh aren't ash rare to ush ash they ushed to be, but shtill."

A wasp the size of a bolt shell landed on his servo claw, its abdomen pulsing softly.

Solon silently looked up at the piping that ran over the ceiling, focusing on a vent near the wall. It was tiny, barely large enough for a rat to squeeze into.

Perfect.

****

???

Deep within the twisted and near-endless piping of the Harvest's ventilation ducts, a single body quivered softly. Anger and hate pulsed through it like blood, and was just as tangible.

Its form was small and trivial. Cabbage-like. A physical shell for its spirit simply because it needed one in this ridiculous halfway material existence inside a void ship inside the Warp. A single eye topped the Warpspawn, oscillating wildly and uselessly in its rage. Not that there was anything to see here, in the hollow veins of the Harvest of Steel.

The horned one - this Twilight of Sparkles, or whatever asinine gibbering the flesh-borne chose to call her - had escaped its sight. Its slaves had been successfully purged. Its gateways, the human psykers, had been found and executed. The ambush was a failure.

It wondered at the possibilities that it had squandered. A second daemon sent to slay the horned one while she was resting after she had been made aware of the threat. A great commitment of power to possessing the humans' destructive garbage. Could this failure have been salvaged? Was there some obvious error in its methods?

The daemon shook off the nagging thoughts as irrelevant. It didn't matter. The horned one, the pony, was still alive, and the mission still continued. It may have lost some of its initial assets, as well as some of the Iron Warriors' that it found useful, but it was not defeated. There were yet other tools to be expended.

"Bzzzzzzz..."

A curious noise came from one of the ducts above, and the daemon's eye shifted. There was no light in this alcove, but the Warpspawn's vision was unhindered. It watched as a large wasp emerged from one of the pipes, skittering about in the dark.

The daemon lashed out with its psychic power against the insect; an insulting use of its strength, frankly. Yet it felt the wasp resist for a moment before it was obliterated utterly, its body reduced to dust.

"Found you." The whisper seemed to float from all the interconnected vents at once, carried along the currents of air constantly pouring into the alcove.

Then, they came. Dark, skittering insects emerging from the ducts in their dozens, and then their hundreds, directed and united by some unseen will. The daemon resisted, lashing out with its Warp-fueled powers, but its abilities were ill-suited to such a fight, and the cramped quarters of its dwelling well suited to the insects. They descended on their target, cutting into the soft, weak flesh with razor-like jaws. Then, to its shock, they begin eating not just the daemon's physical form, but the spirit maintaining it, and the thoughts and will animating it.

In those moments, the daemon at last knew firsthand what it had so often perceived only in passing from hapless mortals: fear. It wasn't simply being ripped apart and returned to the Immaterium. Its essence was being carved apart and sealed away. Its memories were being absorbed into a greater consciousness, to be trapped there indefinitely.

The daemon made no sound as it was devoured. It had no mouth with which to scream. But for those few individuals that happened to be passing by ventilation ducts in this particular section of the ship during this particular time, they could have sworn they heard laughter coming from the walls.

Author's Note

Hey, we got a chapter of Ponies in Space! Yay!
... That was seriously bleak, though. I didn't realize until I started writing this that I left all the fun characters stranded a billion miles away from the most important characters.
... The most important characters other than Applejack, of course.
:ajsmug: <3

Illustration by EZTP.
Edit: Fixed the formatting. For some stupid reason, my phone browser shows JUST enough of the buttons on the edit taskbar to allow me to insert the picture, save, and publish, but cuts off the text positioning bar. Lame.

Diplomacy is Hard

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 5

Diplomacy is Hard

****

Unknown Ork Camp

Gox stumbled into her tent in an agonized daze, and collapsed almost instantly onto the bed of rags and leaves that apparently passed for a mattress in Ork "society". It was hard and dirty, and didn't help soften the impact with the ground at all. But it was damn near a luxury in an Ork war camp, apparently; most of the boyz slept out in the open, on the rocks.

Gox's body ached from head to toe. She was bruised and had a few small lacerations. Her head was throbbing with pain as well; partially from various impacts, and partially from having to listen to and replicate the Orks' atrocious speech patterns for hours at a time.

"Why does everything these barbarians do involve hitting each other?" Gox moaned, curling up on her bedding. A flash of green surrounded her, and the bruised and bleeding body of an Ork Shoota Boy was replaced by a bruised and bleeding changeling guardian.

She began to heal herself with her magic while she lay on her bed. While her mission was going poorly from a personal safety perspective, in light of her actual objectives it was going splendidly. She had infiltrated the Ork army and learned about what passed for civilization among the aliens. Nobody suspected anything; in Ork tribes, apparently, warriors came and went all the time, and no one bothered to keep track or verify their soldiers' identities. She could not only act freely, but any time she needed a new identity she need only find a secluded place to shift form.

What was more, the Orks' absurdly simple command hierarchy allowed authority to shift easily as soon as a bigger Ork showed up. The possibilities boggled the mind.

"If only their primary form of social interaction wasn't punching each other," Gox moaned.

The flap of her tent shifted, and the changeling's eyes darted to the entrance.

"Wot da..." a Gretchin froze after stepping into the tent, a purloined scrap of metal in his hands.

Gox huffed out of the side of her mouth, and her horn flashed.

The Grot's eyes dilated, and then his eyelids fell half-closed as the magical domination took effect.

"Come here, worm," Gox demanded.

The brainwashed slave stumbled over to the changeling, dropping the shiny metal shard near the front of the tent. Gox raised her head toward the scrawny alien and took a few sniffs.

Her expression soured deeply.

"Nothing. Just like all the others. Just like every wretched creature in this pathetic alien race!" she snarled. "Not a single shred of love in you! This is preposterous!" She kicked out at the Gretchin with a foreleg, knocking him over.

That was perhaps the most revolting thing about her target society, and was almost as agonizing as the constant physical abuse. None of the Orks experienced love. Their hearts were barren. They held no real affection for other creatures of any sort. The Gretchin were the worst, completely soaked in fear and spite, but even the higher-ranking warriors didn't have loved ones or family. Gox was starved. The only prospect of getting some nourishment until she was recalled to report to the hive was feeding off any prisoners the Orks took in their raiding activities.

Her eyes narrowed at the small greenskin. "That reminds me... Trogg attacked a pony settlement this morning, didn't he? He should've returned by now. Did he manage to take any hostages?"

"Yes'm!" the Grot nodded drunkenly. "I heah most o'da hosses tuk off 'fore da boyz got dere, but dere wuz a fyoo wut was fiddlin' wit sum gizmo an' got cawt!" The alien slave giggled.

"Ugh. I'll bet the savages plan on eating them, too," Gox moaned before she stood up, "if I hurry, I might get to have my fill before the thugs do."

A wave of green washed over her, transforming the equine-shaped, insectoid creature into a bipedal, muscle-bound Ork. The bruises were much reduced by now thanks to Gox's magical regeneration, but she didn't feel much better after just a few minute's rest.

While passing by the Grot, Gox placed a hand over the top of its head. Her eyes flashed green. "You saw nothing here but a sleeping Ork. Now leave."

The Grot stumbled the moment she let go, falling flat onto its face. It quickly picked itself up, suddenly free of the magic that had entranced it and suddenly nervous for reasons it couldn't quite articulate. Gulping, the alien slave crept backward out of the tent.

It didn't take Gox long to find the "victorious warriors" among the camp's dregs. Some were laughing and shooting their guns into the air for no reason, others were bartering away loot for guns to shoot into the air for no reason, and some were fighting over portions of loot so that they could start bartering for guns to shoot into the air for no reason. The take was actually quite lucrative, or at least it would have been considered so for any species other than Orks. There were bags of gems and bits, lots of fresh food, furniture, and various other trinkets that would have been immensely useful if the aliens had any intention of turning their squalid war camp into a home. Instead, however, most of the Orks' attention was centered around some kind of bulky metal machine with a dish on top, and three terrified earth ponies that were being kept behind a circular wire fence.

Gox narrowed her eyes as she lumbered up to the temporary prison. The Nob Trogg was arguing with a Mek, probably about the potential uses and value of the stack of metal he had dragged back from his raid. There were numerous other Orks giving the equines hungry looks, but their location and the pair of guards standing on either side of the cage made it clear that they belonged to the Boss. Around here, that Boss was Trogg.

"Oi! Wadda ya want? Dis 'ere loot iz da Boss's!" growled one of the Slugga Boyz on guard after Gox wandered too close to them.

"Yeah, I noh. Jus' lookin'. I ain't gonna tuch 'em," Gox assured the warriors. The ponies were a dark blue stallion, a yellow mare, and another mare who was cloud blue. The mares huddled next to the stallion, their eyes darting rapidly from one Ork to the next.

"Didn' git many of 'em, did ya?" Gox snorted. She made it up to the fence and peered down at the equines.

"Nah. Dere wuz onlee dese wunz left." One guard shrugged, unconcerned. "Wutevah."

The trapped stallion looked up at Gox fearfully, his ears pinned to the side of his head.

"'Ello, hossy," Gox said amiably, "you'ze ain't got long 'fore ya end up in da cookin' pot. Anee lass wordz?"

The ponies cringed and looked at each other. Then the stallion gathered his courage and glared up at the changeling spy.

"You'll get what's coming to you soon enough, greenskin. The cooking pot is going to look downright comfortable compared to where you're going."

Gox laughed, backing away from the pen. Inwardly, she was greatly relieved, and somewhat troubled. The blue stallion and yellow mare were lovers, drawing deeply upon their bond in this harrowing time to stay strong before their imminent demise. If she could have gotten the two alone she would have sucked that love away to nothing, but even being near them gave her some small and much-needed nourishment.

What troubled her, however, was another emotion that loomed large over their love and grappled with their fear: hope. The ponies actually seemed to think they might survive this. Perhaps they were just delusional optimists, but looking at the way they huddled and cowered in their prison suggested they knew precisely how serious their situation was.

Gox approached the raid's other main prize. Trogg's argument with the Mek had reached the point where he was slamming the Ork engineer into the mysterious machine repeatedly, and numerous other warriors were watching and pointing at the spectacle in raucous amusement.

She decided they were too busy to interrupt, and spotted a Grot quietly unscrewing a few bolts to steal at the bottom of the looted device.

"'Ey, you. Da runt. Whazzis fing heah?"

The Gretchin jumped, startled. Then it quickly cowered and started looking about nervously. "Uh, well, dunno. Badcrank sed it'z sum kinda cah-myoo-nicatah fingy."

"Communicator?" Gox asked. Her sudden concern was such that she completely forgot to properly butcher the word. "How'z dat?"

The Grot shrugged. Then he snatched up the bolt he had been tugging on and sprinted away.

"Yer gunna bild me a damm zappgun, or I'm gunna bild a new pointy stikk wit yer hed!" Trogg shouted suddenly, turning away from the Mek and evidently ending their argument.

Gox stared up at the bowl-shaped hunk of metal capping the tower. In her head, several recent observations clicked into place.

The ponies had been captured while working with some kind of machine during a raid of their village.

All the other ponies had apparently escaped. Only the three captured equines had stayed behind, apparently to work with the device.

Those same ponies seemed inexplicably confident that they would be rescued, and the raiders destroyed.

The machine, as it turned out, was a communication device. A human communication device, obviously.

"Oh dear," she mumbled, again forgetting to speak as if she had a severe head injury.

Gox rushed up to the Mek that was dragging himself up on the ground. "Oi, Badcrank, git up!" She grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet, surprising the alien engineer. "Ya noh how ta dryv da Trukks, rite?"

"'Cors I do," Badcrank grumbled, massaging his battered skull, "so?"

"Gud! Follah me!" Gox shouted, giving the Ork's arm a tug. Then she started jogging toward the back of the camp.

"Wot'z goin' on? Wheah ya goin'?" the Mek asked suspiciously even as he followed.

"Away from heah," was Gox's answer.

"Whyzzat?"

Machine gun fire started coming from the camp. Or rather, MORE machine gun fire started coming from the camp than usual. It wasn't very easy to tell, but there was a steady increase in volume that indicated that more and more Orks were shooting at an actual target.

Gox looked up just in time to see a dark, pony-sized shape darting overhead between the clouds. A single object dropped into the air before it banked over another white patch.

The changeling's eye twitched. Were she able to assume her true form, she could fly up there and easily put down an upstart pegasus. As an Ork warrior, however, all she could do is try to find a shoota with which to gun it down. And even that was an unlikely feat at best; she'd never managed to fire even a single full magazine without her shootas falling apart on her.

"Oi, 'old up. Wot'z 'at?" Badcrank stopped moving and pointed to the object that had fallen from the speedy flyer. It was a small metal sphere about the size of an orange, and it had been dropped in front of the Ork hut that served as the warband's armory. Suddenly it opened up, its metal shell splitting apart like the petals of a flower. A bright red light began to flash.

"Bet I cood mayk sumfin' nifty outta dat," Badcrank mumbled, stepping toward the object.

Gox's eyes widened. "No! Stay back! We're under attack!"

The Mek froze in surprise, glancing back at the disguised Ork.

Artillery fire crashed onto the hut a moment later, and the both of them were blown off their feet as the munitions detonated. Orks that had been racing to the armory for a weapon were flattened in an instant, and chunks of torn metal and shattered roof rained down on the surrounding camp.

Gox stumbled upright, her ears ringing and her vision blurry. She had no idea what had even happened, but she knew what was coming next. The 38th Company was here, and as such this settlement was a loss. She'd only heard of the power and brutality of human warfare from third-hoof accounts, but was in no hurry to see it confirmed for herself.

She stepped over to Badcrank and grabbed the Mek's arm, hauling him to his feet. "Le's go! We ain't got tym fer ya layin' abowt!"

The Mek gave her another odd look, his forehead creasing above his welding goggles. But when she began running again, the engineer followed.

Gunships were coming in now, the scream of their engines competing with the rattle of Ork guns.

"Get out of here! Hurry!"

Amongst the rush of Orks racing to battle in the opposite direction she was going, Gox caught sight of the pegasus from before. It had swooped down to the cage containing the pony prisoners, and was cutting an opening in the steel wire fence with some kind of leg-mounted chainsaw.

"Oi! Dem hosses iz gettin' away!" Gox shouted, pointing to the cage as she ran by.

Only one Ork aside from Badcrank seemed to hear her, and he quickly turned around with his axe raised in the air. He was about to shout a battle cry, too, but a burst of heavy bolter fire sawed across him from above, ripping the alien in half in an instant. A transport gunship then angled in for a landing over his corpse, ready to unload its soldiers.

The changeling clicked her tongue irritably while dodging through the Boyz going the other way. More artillery was crashing down over the camp, detonating buildings one after the other. Pegasi wearing dark red armor, oversized optics goggles, and various Chaos Stars made daredevil dives from a bank of low-lying clouds, dropping beacons or making weak, diversionary strafing runs around the gunships. The whole base had gone from victory celebration to killing ground in minutes.

Not that the Orks seemed to mind. In fact, it seemed like they were having a blast. Gox could hear Trogg bellowing a challenge above the hurricane of gunfire, laughing with glee even as his entire warband was surrounded and blasted apart.

Gox and Badcrank finally reached the vehicle lots. They were located a fair way away from the rest of the encampment, mostly because one Trukk had crashed and broken down there and all the others had then decided to park around it. Gox quickly surveyed the lots and found a Wartrakk that looked like it had all its pieces taped and glued together correctly.

"Dat wun! C'mon, ya Grot-lovah! Git us owtta heah!"

"Wayt, we'z taykin' off? We'z not heddin' bakk t'da fight?" The Mek jumped onto the seat. Then he started fiddling with the knobs under the handlebars.

Gox scowled. She wasn't exactly sure how to frame her retreat so that it made sense to the engineer. She didn't really understand the concept of Ork retreat in the first place; they loved to fight, and didn't fear death, but still ran away sometimes. How did that make sense? Her limited time amongst the aliens hadn't revealed the answer. Unfortunately, few Orks like to discuss psychology.

With no idea of what to say, living with Orks had at least taught her what to do. Gox reached into the cab and slugged Badcrank in the side of the head, knocking him onto his side.

"Stop yer yappin' an' git dis heep moovin'!" Gox snarled.

Badcrank growled back, but then immediately went back to starting the vehicle. Punches to the head were truly a language that every Ork understood.

The engine sputtered to life, and the tailpipe vomited a cloud of black smoke. Gox climbed up into the gunner's seat. The weapon itself was a double-barreled light cannon attached to a swiveling gunner's seat. Both barrels of the gun were clearly of different calibers and she didn't see anything resembling a targeting aid, but it was still easily the most mechanically sound firearm she'd seen so far in the Ork arsenal.

The vehicle started rumbling, and the engine coughed up another cloud of smoke. "Wheah we goin'?" demanded the Mek.

Gox was still working that question out when a string of explosions ripped through the vehicle lots. Parked bikes flew through the air on streams of fire and Trukks folded inward. Gox flinched away from the waves of fire and metal, but Badcrank immediately stood up to identify the threat.

"Oi! Dose're grayskin boyz!"

Gox winced. Indeed, there were a cluster of a half-dozen dark armored suits hovering at the edge off the lots. Missiles and plasma bolts streaked into a row of idle tanks, rapidly reducing the Orks' vehicle squadrons to ruin.

"Wot're ya waytin' fer? Git owtta heah!" Gox shouted to her driver. She didn't think it would take the mechanized soldiers long to notice the one Ork vehicle that actually had a crew operating it.

"Wot're YOO waytin' fer? Shoot da puny gits!" Badcrank shouted back. The Wartrakk launched itself forward, rumbling toward the closest thing to a road that led away from the camp.

Gox was rather nervous about actually fighting a battle against the Ork's enemies, but had to reason that she was probably pushing the socially acceptable limits of not being a psychotic idiot already. With a wordless growl, she swung the gun around toward the Crisis Suits.

The heavy recoil of the weapon nearly unseated her immediately, and Gox was quickly shaken past the point of properly aiming. Shells rolled up a heavy ammunition chain on either side of her, while hot metal casings bounced out of the cannon receivers and right onto Gox's head. After a mere three seconds of fire, a clunking noise came from the feed and the shooting stopped.

On the other side of the weapon, at least her burst fire had been aimed properly to start with. A stitch of heavy impacts crossed over the chest of a Crisis Suit, almost tearing through the frontal plating entirely. The battlesuit staggered, badly damaged but still functional.

The same couldn't be said of Gox's gun, which would only emit more clunking noises rather than bullets each time she pulled the trigger.

"Oi! Why'd ya stop shootin'?" her driver demanded.

"Da dakka jammed!" Gox growled, slamming a fist onto the controls. Why did the damn guns always fall apart on her? They never seemed to do that for the other Orks!

As the Wartrakk started picking up speed across the barren ground, one of the battlesuits took a moment to fire a spread of missiles after the escaping vehicle. Gox felt her heart seize up when she saw the spread of approaching warheads, and her eyes flashed a bright green.

A visible tunnel of swirling wind came from the disguised changeling, expanding to swallow up the incoming ordnance. The funnel proved barely strong enough to scatter the explosives and push them off-target, and Gox's teeth rattled in her head as they detonated beside and behind her vehicle.

As the flame receded, however, the Wartrakk kept moving. Soon they were outside of the battlesuit's range.

"That was too close," Gox said under her breath. The Wartrakk's rear bumper, scorched and loosened by the recent missile explosion, fell off into the dusty plains, punctuating her point.

"Wot da ZOG wuz dat?" demanded Badcrank.

Gox spun the turret weapon around to face forward, and was rather disturbed to see the Mek staring back over his shoulder. This was alarming mostly because it seemed he had seen her act of desperate magic, but also because he was supposed to be the one driving.

"Oi! Keep yer eyes on da rode, ya git!" Gox yelled.

Badcrank took a moment to adjust his bionik eye, refusing to turn forward. "Sumfin's not rite wit youz..."

Gox stared down the Mek for a few seconds, and then glanced up at the gun she was manning. "So, do ya noh wot'z rong wit da gun?"

"It'z jus' jammed up, z'all," Badcrank answered, "da dakka gitz stukk sumtymes. Nokk da feed looz. Dat shood do it."

"Oh! I sees," Gox said brightly, finding the shell lodged in the cannon receiver. She smashed a fist against it, and the munition settled into the weapon properly.

Then she angled the gun down at Badcrank.

One brief squeeze of the trigger blasted the Mek's upper torso off. Gox snapped the gun upward again immediately, careful to avoid shooting the vehicle itself.

"Wretched barbarians..." the changeling hissed, climbing across the hookup between the cab and the gun trailer. The vehicle was still rumbling along, grinding past rock outcroppings and dry shrubs. She was now far enough away from her previous home that she couldn't even hear the explosions anymore.

She grimaced as she shoved Badcrank's corpse out of the seat of the bike towing the vehicle, and then sat down in his place.

"Okay. That was close, but I learned a lot and didn't like any of those losers anyway. I just have to find a new Ork tribe, and this time-"

The handlebars suddenly came off in her hands.

"... What?" she mumbled, staring at the mess of bent pipes that was used to guide the Wartrakk.

A moment later a loud bang came from the engine. Several scorched bits of metal were flung out onto the ground, and the Wartrakk began to decelerate.

"What?"

A few more seconds after that, the vehicle came to a compete stop and wheezed smoke from its ruined engine.

Then the front tire popped off and rolled away.

"WHAT?!" Gox screamed to the sky, slamming a fist onto the control dashboard. "This thing was working fine a second ago! Why does everything just fall apart when I touch it?!"

A spring broke free within the dashboard a moment later and shot a button out into Gox's eye.

"AAAAAUGH!! What in the hive is going on here?!" she howled to the heavens, one meaty green hand pressed over her face.

No answer was forthcoming. The only sound other than her frustrated grumbling was the hissing from the badly overheated motor.

"... I have to go," Gox mumbled, slipping off of the vehicle, "I didn't exactly make a stealthy getaway, and I don't know how determined those Company soldiers are to hunt down survivors."

She started trudging away from the Wartrakk, already regretting her haste in leaving the camp. The terrain was largely desert, and neither food (especially changeling food) nor water were in evident supply.

"I suppose the only consolation in this whole affair is that I didn't get stuck with Tox's assignment," she muttered bitterly, "if I'm having trouble dealing with these idiots, I can only imagine the horrors she has to put up with trying to infiltrate the humans themselves..."

****

Ponyville

"Oh, Hive Mother bless me, this is THE BEST!"

Tox gasped, trembling, as she held her hoof against the outer wall of the Nethalican. Power surged through her. Voices whispered in the back of her mind. Visions of foreign places and creature flashed before her eyes. And all throughout the experience, the nourishing energy of the temple washed through her.

"Yes. Yes. Yessssssssss..." her tongue hung out of her jaw, and a few droplets of drool escaped onto the cracked dirt below her hooves. Just a touch against the wall of the building was enough to quench her appetite, but the sensation of absorbing the power slowly got more intense and enjoyable the longer she was in contact. "More. MORE!"

Across the street from the temple, Lyra and Bon Bon sighted the unicorn and stopped heading back home from the day's shopping.

"Geez, is she at it again?" Lyra asked. "Who is that pony, anyway?"

"That's Tox," Bon Bon informed her roommate, shifting the box that was secured on her back. "I met her when she first arrived in Ponyville a little while ago. Does she do this often?"

"Every day, as far as I can tell," Lyra snorted, stifling a giggle. "She just stands there touching the temple, and her eyes sort of glaze over and she mumbles a lot to herself. Weird, huh?"

Bon Bon frowned. "Don't you think that might be dangerous?"

"I don't see how. I tried touching it and nothing happened. I don't even know what she's doing."

"Lyra! Are you serious? What if it hurt you, or... or... I don't know, summoned a monster?"

"Get real, Beebee, it doesn't do that," Lyra scoffed. Then she paused. "Well, I mean, it DOES do that, actually, but not just by touching the building."

"How do you know?!"

"Because I touched it and that didn't happen."

"Lyra!"

"Oh, hey, here comes the priest."

The two mares fell silent as a man in a dark red robe walked around the corner of the structure. He was carrying something in his hand that trailed along behind him around to the front of the temple.

"Wait, what's that he's carrying?" Bon Bon asked in concern.

"Ssh! Hold on, check this out! This part is hilarious!" Lyra giggled.

"Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h YEAH. That's the stuff," Tox whispered. A delightful quiver ran up her body, generating sensations that she hadn't known she could experience before she'd arrived in Ponyville. "Just... Just five more minutes. Five more, and theWAAUGHRBLLGR!!"

Tox leapt away from the Nethalican after she was blasted by a jet of water, and then turned to glare at the one who had sprayed her.

"Get out of here, you little pest!" the temple acolyte snapped, holding up the garden hose he was carrying. "Either convert or bugger off! This is private property! No loitering!"

Tox growled incoherently and then pulled down one eyelid, blowing a raspberry at the man.

His response was to shoot another jet of water at her, but Tox cast a quick spell to speed herself up and raced off ahead of the spray.

"Ha ha ha! Oh, wow!" Lyra laughed and pointed a leg at the robed man. "That guy is a riot! He does the same thing to the tourists! Sometimes they try to get the skulls to take home as souvenirs."

"Yes, yes, very funny. Can we go home, now?" Bob Bon groused. "I don't like leaving you-know-what alone for this long."

Lyra frowned as she and her roommate started heading down the road again. "I don't know why you won't just call Jakey by his name. Or why you're still so bitter about me keeping him."

"He's an UNDEAD ABOMINATION, Lyra!"

"I even embalmed him, like you asked! He hardly ever gets little zombie bits on the floor anymore!"

"Ugh..."

Tox poked her head out from behind a corner, her eyes narrowing at the two mares. Seeing no one else in the vicinity, in particular no grumpy humans with garden hoses, she took a moment to magically dry herself off. The water soaking her coat was squeezed off onto the ground, leaving her fur unusually puffed out. Another shift in her disguise magic settled her hair, and she was ready to get back to work.

She probably didn't need to bother hiding in order to use some low-level magic to dry herself, but Tox had to be extra careful. Mostly because she kept getting caught siphoning the Nethalican's energy for her own consumption. That probably threw up a few warning flags. And because she couldn't seem to stop herself from doing that, she was REALLY hoping she could compensate by being extra cautious elsewhere.

Tox looked up and checked the remaining daylight. It would be evening soon.

Aside from rubbing herself against the nexus of evil on the edge of town, Tox had spent all her time in Ponyville delicately getting to know the humans and deciding which of them to subdue and replace. Many of the individuals she'd had to write off right away as potential targets. The Sunsworn weren't taken seriously among the 38th Company, and probably wouldn't even be allowed in Ferrous Dominus. The Merchant Corp guards were very rarely alone, and they would quickly be missed. The actual workers in that same group were even worse, as they possessed skill sets she'd probably be unable to master during the course of her infiltration. The mercenary soldiers were a better prospect, but they had very little autonomy; at any moment she could be gathered up and sent into a warzone! How was she supposed to work under those conditions?

So that left the Chaos cultists.

Not that she was trying to gain suspicion-free access to the Nethalican. Really.

They had power, they seemed mostly free to see to their own affairs day-to-day, and they were mysterious and strange enough that no one would question a bit of odd behavior from them. Perfect.

She even found that one of them, in particular, was generally avoided by his peers and the non-Chaos population of Ponyville. A loner who could often be found taking long walks to isolated places late at night. It was such a perfect scenario that she had been honestly suspicious at first, wondering if it was a trap. But a few nights of silent observation had revealed nothing amiss.

As Celestia brought the sun down below the horizon - or spun the planet further so that it looked like it did, or however that was supposed to work - she spotted her target. A repulsive man, even for a human Chaos Cultist, Leonard Kruss was tall and bloated, with a constant aura of stench around him and a small coterie of flies circling him in escort. Between the bandage wrappings, filth-spattered robes, and his respirator mask, much of his body was concealed entirely from view. Unfortunately, this didn't extend to the man's rotund, bloated belly, which stuck out over his belt. That rolling patch of exposed skin was like a canvas to display all the more visually disturbing diseases and infection, bearing thick, wet scars, lesions, and other symptoms that Tox couldn't even identify. Kruss's head was covered by a pair of persistently fogged goggles and a pointed hood, and his robe was a badly saturated green with some kind of symbol on the back. The Mark of Nurgle, apparently. Tox recalled hearing about that one on her first day in Ponyville.

The man strode away from the Nethalican, even further from the edge of town. Ponies that saw him quickly averted their eyes, which aided Tox enormously as she crept after him. She'd tracked the human zealot before, but today she would make her move and replace him.

Tox charged her horn with magic, and then shrouded herself in a strange fog, becoming little more than a colored blur as the last few slivers of daylight vanished behind the horizon.

With her goal set and her target oblivious, Tox followed Leonard Kruss into the Everfree Forest.

****

Everfree Forest - Gardenblight

"Grandfather, bless this place with your holy poisons. Let pestilent life grow warm and strong from your touch, that it may be gifted to our enemies. Through your love, our foes become our converts, and our flock swells further. Such is the way of the blessed cycle. Such is the way of Nurgle."

Kruss knelt by the edge of a bubbling marsh, his grimy hands clasped together as his raspy voice entreated and praised his god. This was his personal project, a gift of devotion that he had nurtured in the tangled nest of raw, magical wilderness that was the Everfree. This was Gardenblight.

To Tox, it just resembled a bunch of obviously diseased plants clustered together in a particularly unlucky patch of forest. The marsh was overrun with filth, insects buzzed about the place, and parasitic fungus decorated every tree. While generally disgusting, there wasn't anything particularly ominous about it.

Other than the creepy guy feverishly mumbling prayers to an evil god, that is.

The changeling watched silently from behind a sap-encrusted tree, working out an engagement plan. She could kill the man before taking his place, and was fully prepared to do so, but ideally she wanted him as a prisoner. As much as Tox had learned about humanity and the 38th Company, she didn't think she knew quite enough to stroll into their fortress just yet.

Inhaling deeply - and then wrinkling her nose at the stench - Tox stepped out onto the wilting grasses of Gardenblight.

"H-Hello?"

Kruss was quite surprised to have his prayers interrupted, but remained calm. He slowly stood and turned around to regard whoever had stumbled upon his ceremony.

A yellow unicorn timidly stepped toward him, her eyes darting back and forth. Obviously afraid, as many were of Nurgle's attention. Initially, at least.

"Hello, young pony. Are you lost?" Kruss asked. A long trail of flies started buzzing around him, creating a shadowy corkscrew around his head.

"No... I don't think so." Tox gulped. "There's someone looking for you, Sir. Will you follow me back to Ponyville?"

Silence. Kruss stared down through the fogged-over goggles, slowly tilting his head to the side.

"He said it was important," Tox said, averting her eyes, "one of the other Chaos priests, I think? I don't think he wanted to come here himself."

Kruss raised a hand and wiped the moisture from his goggles. Milky white eyes bugged out from behind the dirty shield.

"What are you?" Kruss whispered.

Tox swore her heart almost stopped. "What? What am I? What do I look like?" she asked, sounding highly offended.

"Deceiver. Deceiver. Deceiver." Kruss said the word over and over, as if marveling at it. One grimy hand reached into his robe and drew a long dagger. "They can smell it. You're different. You're... wrong. No love. No hope. No-"

"Okay, yeah, I get it." Tox's demeanor changed instantly, and her eyes narrowed. "You're pretty sharp for a crazy guy. I'm afraid I can't let you tell anyone about this, though."

Kruss stumbled forward, brandishing his weapon. "Deceiver. Deceiver. Decei-"

A magic blast knocked the man off his feet, and he fell into the mud. His dagger flew through the air and landed in the water, quickly sinking beneath the murky surface.

Tox's horn sparked green, and she smirked. "Where's your god NOW, little man?"

Kruss started climbing to his feet immediately. "Nurgle is all around us, deceiver. He will protect his children."

Tox's horn flashed again, and another bolt leapt from her horn and slammed in Kruss. This time, however, he braced himself against the blow he knew was coming. His sodden boots dug a furrow through the muck as his body lurched backward, but he remained upright.

"Well, Nurgle is taking his sweet old time, then," Tox mocked. Her horn flickered with power threateningly.

Then the changeling fired again, loosing another kinetic bolt against the Cultist.

This time, surprisingly, the corpulent man leapt to the side and evaded the sizzling bolt. Then he surged forward, reaching for Tox's horn.

The changeling was surprised, but made no move of her own to evade. It became obviously why when Kruss swiped his hand through her head; the mare's body dissolved instantly into mist, collapsing onto the fetid grounds.

Kruss stood upright immediately, swaying back and forth as the swarm of flies flew a new circuit around his ears. "Deceiver. Deciever. Dec-"

Another magic blast took him off his feet again, plowing him straight into the muck.

"Yes, fine, I'm a deceiver. We already covered that. You can stop chanting it," Tox said blandly while she lowered herself from an overhanging branch. Her insect-like wings had emerged, and they buzzed rapidly while she shifted into a hover.

Tox was somewhat worried when she saw Kruss push himself up again. "Listen, pawn: whatever delusions of power your god grants you, it will not be enough to defeat me," Tox hissed, "I tried to resolve this with a subtle touch, but you wanted to do this the hard way. Nonetheless, you cannot win. The longer you drag this out, the more painful it will be for you!"

Kruss chuckled deeply. "Painful? Nurgle's children don't know pain."

Tox clicked her tongue, and her horn started to build up a charge. "Then let me TEACH you, monkey!"

A crackling arc of energy like a green lightning bolt surged toward the Cultist, striking him in the chest.

"Pfeh," Kruss spat, walking forward and grabbing a low-hanging tree branch. He snapped the rotted limb away from the dying tree, and then started building up speed for a charge at the changeling.

Tox was honestly shocked. The man should have been on his knees from that spell, his every nerve alight with agony. He wasn't even slowed.

She hovered up sharply as the Cultist swung at her. "Okay, wait, so you mean you LITERALLY don't feel pain? That's actually kind of impressive."

"One of Nurgle's many gifts, wretch!" Kruss leapt into the air, swinging his makeshift club at the changeling.

Tox released a bolt of kinetic force directly into the rotted weapon, shattering it, and then followed up with another blast to the man's head. Kruss stumbled backward again into the mud.

This time, Tox followed up with a different spell. "You've proven to be a surprisingly challenging foe, monkey. Insofar as you've taken a lot of hits, at least." Creeping vines started reaching up through the mud and loam, wrapping around Kruss and pinning his arms and legs down. "But you never really stood a OW!"

Tox flinched back, feeling a sharp pain in her hip. Looking back, she saw a fairly large insect burrowing into the fur above her cutie mark, its abdomen quivering softly in the gloom.

A quick spark from her horn fried the parasite, popping its body instantly. As the bug's scorched and shattered carapace fell away, however, Tox felt new twinges of pain from her legs and on her back.

"Ow! Ow! What the hay?!" She began thrashing about wildly while more insects landed and sunk their jaws into her flesh.

"You come to Nurgle's doorstep with treachery in your heart..." Kruss ripped one arm free of the vines that bound him. "I am not the only sentinel within this garden. Your corpse will feed my precious flowers." A veritable carpet of buzzing insects rolled toward the changeling. Interspersed with hundreds of relatively harmless flies were large, hungry parasitic beetles with mandibles like razors. They dove through the swarm and clung to the fur of the infiltrator, and then sank their mouths into the warm, tender flesh beneath. Pain blossomed all over Tox's body, and some of the more dangerous parasites started burrowing into her hide.

Suffice to say, Tox was not happy about this.

A crackling noise came from the changeling's horn, and then she seemed to explode in a nova of bright green fire. The surrounding insects burned to cinders in an instant, and a roll of steam washed over Kruss from the vaporized surface moisture.

When the Cultist managed to wipe off his goggles again, the unicorn was gone. Instead was a larger quadruped, black in color, with a curiously hole-ridden carapace and a curtain of dark blue hair that made up her mane and tail.

"And now you've seen the truth," Tox said tightly, an arc of green lashing around her horn. It was curved and twisted, with a round notch cut into the front. "But you will never speak of it, human."

Kruss had mostly gotten free of the vines by then, but was in no position to dodge. A beam of green power struck him, tearing away his bonds and slamming him back into a tree. The beam stopped a moment later, and he slumped weakly into the muck once again.

Another of the parasitic creatures that infested the garden landed on Tox's back, having apparently survived the earlier magic purge. When it tried to bite into the changeling, however, its jaws scraped uselessly against a thickened carapace shell rather than warm flesh.

Tox zapped the irritating bug with a brief thought, and then calmly walked up to Kruss. "Under normal circumstances, you may have fended me off well enough to escape," she admitted, her eyes glowing. She reached the man and shifted a hoof under his chin, tilting his head upward. "But it's been kind of a crazy week, you know?" Her horn flashed with energy again.

Kruss was battered and bleeding by this point, and even if he couldn't feel the pain of his wounds he still felt his strength waning fast. His vision was hazy, and when he spoke he could barely manage a gasping mumble.

"What are you... here for? Why attack Gardenblight?"

Tox snorted, and then dropped the man's head back into the mud. "I'm here for you, dolt."

"What? What could you... want from me?"

Tox's horn surrounded her with a shimmering emerald aura. She reared up, and then her posture shifted along with her body structure.

When the magical light receded, Leonard Kruss was staring up into the lenses of a set of fogged goggles just like his own.

"... Everything," Tox said, grinning beneath the mask. Then she held up a hand that sparked with magic. "Rest now, little ape. We'll have much to talk about later."

Her hand flashed, and Kruss's world went dark.

****

Everfree Forest - "abandoned" lair

Tox trudged into her home base while dragging Kruss behind her, muttering incoherently the entire time. She was sore and out of breath, and she could tell that some of the parasites that apparently made their home on the Nurgle Cultist had made the jump over to his look-alike while he was being hauled through the forest. They weren't as large or painful as the bugs that had attacked her in the garden, but they were also much harder to get rid of. Stopping her trip to engulf her body in magic flame was not only time-consuming and exhausting, but also quite likely to draw attention if someone saw it. Or was within the same square kilometer. It just wasn't a good idea, was the point.

But now she had found the cavern she had set up in the Everfree Forest, and the next phase of her infiltration had finally come to an end. Giving a sharp tug to Kruss's leg, she practically threw the man into the cave. The magic wards she had set up around the entrance - a minor charm to instill a sense of creeping fear in wandering animals - briefly flared as the Cultist passed through them.

Tox sighed in relief and then pointed a palm at the long trail of disturbed dirt she'd left behind her. In a flash of green, the ground churned and then settled, instantly rubbing out the trail that she'd left while dragging Kruss through the woods.

The visible trail, that is.

"Ugh... I regret everything about this decision." The changeling guardian coughed and gagged on the stench that still hung in the air and likely created a strong - if not eminently repulsive - trail directly to her hideout. She knew no spells to manipulate odors, unfortunately. Her disguise included a respirator, but the simple visual copy her magic had created wasn't actually capable of filtering the air that she had to breathe. "'Take Mammal Anatomy rather than Olfactory Enchantment' they said. 'There's hardly any homework and you get to dissect pigs in class!' Wow, I sure am glad I know so much about lactation now that I'm in the field!" Tox growled and entered the cave, giving Kruss a solid kick in the side as she passed.

She quickly went to work enchanting a set of chains and manacles lying on the floor and then attached them to the rear wall of the cave. "I'd better be right about him being lonely and isolated, because if anyone suspects anything and investigates, this infiltration is over. The blasted garden shows clear signs of a battle, and I'm not going back there to tend to it if the stupid insects can somehow see through my disguise. And want to eat me."

She paused briefly in her work, narrowing her eyes behind the mask that mimicked the Cultist behind her. Kruss was able to figure out she was a spy almost instantly. She still wasn't completely sure how he had done that, only that the flies were apparently involved somehow. Wasn't it possible that other humans could figure her out if Kruss had? If she could instantly have her cover blown without any warning, her mission was nigh impossible. She needed more information.

Tox turned her head and glared down at Leonard Kruss. Then her eyes flashed, causing the lenses of her goggles to glow a bright green.

In an instant, Kruss's clothing was ripped off his body, and then hung in the air next to the now-naked man.

Tox immediately turned her head away, quivering in disgust and horror. "I did NOT need to see that..." Still shaking, she floated his robes closer so that she could observe them.

Aside from being filthy and obviously colonized by insects she couldn't identify, there were several objects within the robes that she figured she didn't want in arm's reach of her prisoner. There was a grenade, a small handheld device with a screen, several pamphlets, vials of awful-looking fluids, and a rusted amulet bearing the Mark of Nurgle. At least some of the items looked important enough that Tox debated pocketing them immediately. She decided against it, pushing the stripped clothes into a corner of the cavern.

Then she took a moment to pull down her goggles and breathe on them, fogging up the eye wear even more before she was willing to turn back to the nude Nurgle Cultist.

With a sharp gesture of her hands, the manacles Tox had enchanted snaked across the floor of the cave and snapped closed over his arms. Probably. She could really only see a shadowed outline of the man now. Those were probably his arms.

The chains dragged Kruss to the rear of the cave, and then shortened such that there was barely two feet of slack between the human and the metal pegs driven into the stone.

"All right, then. Time to chat."

****

Leonard Kruss awoke to the unfamiliar sensation of having water wash over him.

"Hnng? What?" He groaned and shifted to his side. "All right, I'm up. I'm up." He tried to wipe his face, but found his right arm restrained. For some reason his left arm wasn't, and he used it to rub his eyes.

Then a second bucket of water was dumped on him.

"I said I'm up!" Kruss shouted, lurching his head up.

Then he paused in shock. He was staring at himself. The memories of what he had been doing all came back to him at once.

And then he was splashed with more water.

"The first bucket was to wake you up," Tox insisted, "the rest are just because you really need a shower." She dropped the empty bucket, letting it bounce across the bare stone floor. "Welcome to your new home, ape. Make yourself comfortable. You won't be leaving."

Kruss took a long moment to observe his surroundings. There wasn't much to see. A single glowing crystal was set into the ceiling, providing some dim light to the interior. His clothes lay in a heap off to the side, well out of reach. On the other side, a steady drip of water came from a stalactite and created a small pool of water.

He looked up at the spy that had captured him. "Why did you chain up my right arm and right leg rather than two of the same limb? Or all of them, even?"

"Because you're ugly!" Tox snapped. Then she raised her hand toward the prisoner, and a soft, green light came from her palm. "From here on out, I'll be the one asking the questions. I have some homework to do before I replace you."

Kruss's head was encompassed in Tox's spell, and he immediately felt light-headed and dazed. He guessed this was some sort of witchcraft to aid in his interrogation.

"How did you detect me? Back at the garden you knew I was a spy instantly. The mare I was disguised as doesn't even exist, so it's not like I could have been doing something out of character. What did you do?"

Kruss didn't respond. He felt a prodding urge to do so, but it was strangely... subtle. Clearly this creature wasn't capable of reading his mind or simple domination, or at least didn't want to use those skills on him, for some reason.

"Who are you?" the Cultist asked. "What are you trying to accomplish?"

Tox sneered, although the expression was completely hidden by her mask. "I said I'm asking the questions here, monkey."

The power of the spell intensified. Some kind of strange, barely perceptible pressure started to build around Kruss's head, but he hardly felt compelled to cooperate. "What are you doing?"

The changeling paused, then let her arm drop. "Right. Immune to pain. Forgot." She frowned at the man. "That's going to complicate the torture."

"And how long do you think you have to break me?" Kruss asked. "How many days do you think I can go missing before my peers go looking for me?"

"I figure I have at least three days in which they're surprised at your absence but too relieved to care," Tox answered, crossing her arms over her chest, "followed by at least a week in which they're concerned, but don't want to actually put forth the effort to search for you."

Kruss frowned. "... Anyway, I won't fall to your sorcery, deceiver. You're wasting your time."

Tox glowered at her captive silently, mentally cursing her choice in targets. She certainly regretted not studying this "Cult of Nurgle" more extensively beforehand.

But that gave the changeling spy an idea.

"Speaking of wasting my time, I'm curious: what is this 'Nurgle' thing all about, anyway?" Tox planted her hands on the swollen hips of her false body. "Is this some kind of elaborate ruse so that you never have to bathe? I've seen my share of absurd cults, but worshiping disease seems somewhat beyond the pale."

"Nurgle is more than a God of disease. He is a creator. A protector. A father." Kruss gazed up at himself, and his wart-ridden face hardened. "Your sense of disgust, your revulsion of illness, your arbitrary sense of 'cleanliness'... it is a weakness. Nurgle frees us from those weaknesses, and places us in harmony with our surroundings. You have no need to cleanse yourself. You needn't fear the parasite."

"Oh, hive mother help me," Tox sighed, rubbing her head with a hand.

Even as she dismissed the man's words outwardly, however, she guided his thoughts with her magic, gently prodding him to continue.

"You doubt our power. Our creed. As do many others, out of fear. But Nurgle is the guardian of the cycle, the great progenitor, and all will succumb to him in time," Kruss continued.

"Yes, I do doubt your power," Tox drawled, "from here, you don't look all that powerful."

"You defeated me, yes. A single man, poorly armed and helpless before your witchcraft," Kruss chuckled, "but you would have forgone even that challenge if you had been able. Nurgle protects us from your lies, deceiver."

Tox tilted her head. "That seems like an... odd specialty for a plague god. Being able to sniff out intruders."

Kruss finally shifted his body around so that he was directly facing his host, sitting on his legs. "Nurgle is ever vigilant for the machinations of Tzeentch. Disguises and deception are favored tactics of the foe, and Nurgle's servants have learned to see past the lies that Tzeentch uses as his weapons."

If Tox's mouth was visible to her captive, Kruss would have seen that she was smirking. The Cultist's mouth was running freely, now, and secrets were already starting to spill out. "Tzeentch? So if Nurgle is the god of disease and filth, that makes Tzeentch, what, the god of soap and grooming?"

Kruss hesitated, surprised by the question. Tox waited patiently, but was inwardly worried that she had made a misstep. Why had he stopped talking?

"So, then... you're not of Tzeentch's ilk?" Kruss asked, sounding intrigued.

"I don't know anything about your ridiculous little cults. That's why we're having this conversation," Tox grumbled, "so, what is Tzeentch?"

The Cult Acolyte stared up at the copy of his own face. He had to admit, the visual likeness was perfect, as was his voice. But everything else about the man standing over him seemed... off, somehow. It was too shallow. This creature didn't talk like him, know his mannerisms, or understand his religion. No Tzeentchian infiltrator would be so clumsy and ignorant as this one had been.

Interesting.

"You wish to replace me?" he asked suddenly. "So that you may infiltrate the Nethalican and walk amongst my peers without their knowledge?"

"Yyyyes...?" Tox said hesitantly. "I'm pretty sure that much is obvious."

"Most of the others will be unable to see through your disguise," Kruss said bluntly, "there are no sentries which can detect deceit as I did in Nurgle's holy shrine."

Tox blinked repeatedly.

"However, there are individuals that can unmask you. There is little you can do but avoid them," the Cultist continued.

Tox's goggles glowed a brilliant green as she modified her spell, probing Kruss's mind. While her magic couldn't pull images from his consciousness, she should have been able to sense any falsehood from him. To her bafflement, she could feel none from the man. He seemed to be telling the truth.

"Uh... okay. Who should I look out for?" she asked cautiously.

"Discord, for one," Kruss grumbled.

Tox grimaced. "Ugh. Right. That's an easy one. Although I wasn't aware he hangs around your temple."

"He is an infrequent visitor. And logically, there's no reason to assume he could sense your true form. But logic does not apply to him." Kruss shook his head. "Next is Lord Serith, the Chaos Sorcerer. He is a powerful telepath, and will immediately detect your lies and panic if you speak to him."

Tox snorted. "I can protect my mind from some half-wit human wizard."

"Serith is not a human," Kruss warned further, "he is an Iron Warrior. Or at least, he was. I heard he's something else, now. But even if you can protect your mind from him, that itself will tell him that you are an impostor, as I could not."

Tox winced. "Ah. Okay. Good point."

"Serith appears at the temple regularly, but not often. He visits about once a week, and he should not be in for several days. Still, if you see an Iron Warrior with the trappings of a magic-user, you must avoid him." Kruss wet his dry, cracked lips. "Finally, there's Father Virgil."

"Okay. And what's his deal?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know? Does he have some kind of power that can detect me?"

"I don't know."

"Then why would you bring it up? Is he some kind of Sorcerer too?" Tox demanded.

Kruss glanced down at the floor uncertainly, and then back up at the changeling spy. "I do not believe he is a psyker. Father Virgil is a Chaos Priest."

"Like you?"

"No, not like me. Me and the others... we are mere preachers and students. We communicate with the Dark Gods but are not favored by them. Virgil is... different. He speaks to Chaos, and Chaos answers him." Kruss shook his head. "I do not know the limits of his knowledge or what powers he may possess. And Virgil will almost certainly be within the Nethalican. He is a strange fellow, and rarely intervenes in the affairs of others. He may do nothing about it even if he does detect you, in fact. But you should be on your guard for the dark-skinned man with the Iron Star on his head."

Tox stared down at the captive Cultist, her mind churning. He spoke the truth. She could tell that much. And yet, she couldn't account for why he had given her all this information. Her compulsion spell couldn't account for it. It was extremely suspicious.

"Why so cooperative?" Tox finally asked. "I have attacked you and aim to infiltrate your home. Why would you help me so readily?"

"Because you will fail," Kruss admitted.

The changeling snorted. "Don't underestimate me, human."

"You fight for a false hope. You resist out of ignorance," the Cultist explained.

"You know nothing about me!" Tox snapped.

"I know you seek to challenge the 38th Company," Kruss countered, "but Chaos will prevail. And perhaps you yourself will have an integral part to play."

"You're speaking nonsense. And none of this really explains why you're helping me," Tox growled.

"Chaos will prevail," the Nurglite said again, "I have faith."

Tox sneered and turned around, walking over to the pile of Kruss's clothes. She leaned over and picked up the amulet with the Mark of Nurgle.

"Faith. Sure. I can work with that. As long as you're willing to answer questions." She held the chain at arm's length, and then walked it over to the cave's water pool to wash it.

Kruss watched his simulacrum dip the tarnished chain into the water and start scrubbing it. "What are you doing?" he asked, perplexed.

"It's called 'washing'. It's a thing us civilized creatures who haven't sworn our lives to filth gods do." When Tox pulled the amulet up out of the water, much of the grime had come off, revealing the silvery metal below.

"Are you going to do that with all my clothes?" Kruss asked dubiously.

Tox snorted. "I don't need the rest of your clothes. As you can see, I've already mimicked your outfit. But this trinket here was more difficult to copy. Metals usually are. Easier to just take yours."

Kruss looked over the body that emulated his own. "It's not a very good reproduction. It looks the same, but I can't smell a thing."

The changeling rolled her eyes. "Yes, perhaps it's lacking in the STENCH department, but..."

Tox trailed off. Then she glanced over to the pile of filthy, infested, putrid robes laying in a heap off to the side. Then she looked down at her own clothing, which looked just as bad but was mercifully odor and parasite-free.

Just a few seconds ago, that had seemed like an advantage.

"Oh, buck me..."

****

Saddle Arabia

Royal Palace, main conference hall

"May I present to his royal majesty, Prince Su'tabel the Third, Lord Ambassador of Saddle Arabia! All rise!"

A pair of camels wearing turbans and carrying scimitars shouted the announcement to the hall as they stood on opposite sides of a gilded doorway. The doors opened, admitting a young stallion wearing a white robe and red headdress.

The Saddle Arabian Prince paused after entering, scanning the long table that occupied the hall. Seated on all sides were representatives from most of the major nations on the continent. The griffon and minotaur diplomats sat next to each other, sharing brief, intermittent conversations in whispers. The zebra and the yaks sat further down, flanking a smallish, nervous-looking diamond dog. On the other side of the meeting table, taking up that entire side of the room by himself, was the representative of the dragons; a rather small serpent by his race's standards, yet still barely small enough to fit into the room comfortably.

The collection of ambassadors was most conspicuous for what it was missing, however: there were no ponies present as of yet.

"Greetings, Prince Su'tabel," the minotaur said with a nod, "the envoy from Equestria has not arrived?"

"Ordinarily she would be here long before the actual meeting started, but as I understand it she's operating under highly unusual circumstances," Su'tabel took his seat at the head of the table. "Nonetheless, she sent word to assure us that she would be here to represent Equestria... and their new allies."

Dark murmuring came from around the table, and Su'tabel cleared his throat to re-gain the attention of the others. "Besides, I don't think we have any shortage of things to talk about in their absence."

"Alien invasion. I never thought I'd see the day," moaned the dragon, "between Discord escaping and the younger Princess trying to banish the sun way back when, we've had our fair share of trouble from Equestria." He shook his massive head, and the long, white whiskers trailing from his maw swung back and forth from the motion. "But now it seems as if they've actually sided with one of the crazy dictators they stirred up. How did things come to this?"

"Hearsay and rumors have their uses," interjected the zebra, "but let's allow time to hear their excuses."

"I'm less concerned with the humans than I am with the other races that were apparently involved in this 'Emerald Dawn War'," mumbled the griffon, clicking her talons together, "the humans may ultimately wish to control us. Yet they've seemed content to simply sit in the badlands and frolic with the ponies. They also have some kind of rational civilization, apparently, putting aside this talk of a 'Chaos Cult'. The Orks, however, are nothing but barbarians and raiders. And these... Tau, as I understand it, brought them here."

"The little blue aliens have much to answer for," agreed the minotaur, "yet now they're part of this 'Company'? How does that work? Surely there must be some way to hold them to account for their crimes."

"The Orks are a threat, yes, but a conventional one," a deer reared up and planted his hooves on the edge of the table as he spoke, glancing around at the other diplomats, "but Chaos is far more dangerous than it appears! Besides their obvious, raw military power, they possess a-"

"Wait, hold on," Su'tabel interrupted, "who are you?"

"I am Blackthorn, representing the deer of Thicket," the stag replied, "and I can tell you that my people's home has become-"

"Thicket? From that Everfree Forest place?" the dragon asked. "That's just one city, right? And isn't it in Equestrian territory?"

Blackthorn frowned. "I can assure you that we are an independent people with-"

"Get out," Su'tabel said firmly, turning and jabbing a foreleg toward the door.

Blackthorn's jaw went slack. "But... But you don't understand! The influence of Chaos is-"

"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to step out of the room," said one of the camel guards, stepping up behind the deer.

Blackthorn stammered for a moment, and then hung his head. Then he slid out of his seat and trudged toward the door. The diplomats said nothing as he left, some sparing the deer an annoyed sneer as he passed by.

The guard stopped at the doorway, waiting until Blackthorn was in the lobby outside the hall. "There's some free nuts and coffee available here. You can wait in the lobby for now if you want, but after the actual diplomats finish up you have to go or we're going to beat you and toss you out like the rest of the vagrants."

Blackthorn growled as the door slammed shut in his face. "Ugh... This is so unfair."

"Tell me about it," mumbled a buffalo around a mouthful of nuts.

****

Prince Su'tabel waited until the guard took up his position again. "Very good. Now, as you were saying?"

"The Orks want to destroy us. We have spoken to many pony veterans of the war. They have no interest in other beings as anything other than bloodsport and short-lived slave labor."

"But the humans, too, make extensive use of slave labor. They do not think much more of us than the Orks do, I'd wager."

"But they made peace with the Equestrians, didn't they? That has to be worth something."

"Yaks don't care if puny ponies friends with apes! Yaks not submit to crazy space people!"

A guard entered the room from a side entrance and whispered something to the Prince.

"Ah, it would seem the Equestrian envoy has arrived," Su'tabel announced. The guard continued whispering. "It seems they had some trouble landing their... flying machine? Well, whatever." He pressed his hooves together atop the table. "Friends, I don't think it needs to be said that this Company's claim to own our entire planet needs to be rebuffed. However, we must exercise caution. Equestria, at least, seems to be entirely under their thrall, and that's no minor feat. Above all else, we must keep from antagonizing the humans until we know more about them. I'm looking at you, Yakyakistan."

"You not boss of yaks! Yaks not be pushed around by puny horses!"

The minotaur envoy leaned over to the griffon. "Is that really the yak ambassador? He sounds and acts exactly like the rest of them."

"Are you kidding? He's Yakyakistan's finest diplomat," the griffon replied, "he's famous for not flipping out and starting a war whenever the catering doesn't meet his expectations."

The front entrance creaked open again, and another guard camel entered. Curiously, this one looked highly disturbed.

"Presenting the diplomatic representative of the nation of Equestria, Hope Springs!"

Prince Su'tabel stood up from his seat and opened his mouth to speak, but then the guard continued.

"As well as the acting Commander of the Centaur division of the Iron Warriors 38th Company, Warpsmith Kessler!"

Gasps came from all around the table as the two figures entered.

Hope meekly entered and turned to bow her head to the Prince, having performed this role before. Su'tabel didn't notice, as he was staring up at the armored giant that entered behind her, along with everyone else.

Kessler scanned the room slowly from behind the unicorn, his optics cluster pulsing and rotating slowly.

Su'tabel gulped and then stepped away from his chair, toward the new arrivals. "Ah, Mister Kessler, we-"

"Lord Kessler," the Iron Warrior corrected calmly, staring up at the dragon ambassador while he spoke.

The Prince cringed. "Apologies, Lord Kessler. I am Prince Su'tabel, representing the Saddle Arabian nation. You must forgive our surprise; we were not expecting a representative from the Company."

"Your surprise is... forgiven," Kessler said. Then he stepped forward, past the Prince, and sat down. In the Prince's chair.

The silence became ever more tense as Hope crept past her companion and took a nearby empty seat closest to her "escort." All of the other diplomats were seeing an Iron Warrior for the first time outside of newspaper clippings, and each one couldn't help but notice that Kessler was very well-armed. He carried a hefty axe in one hand that he held upright next to his seat, and his belt carried a plasma pistol and a small collection of grenades. Then there were the mechatendrils; snake-like metal tentacles capped with drills, welders, cutting blades, and in some cases drooling mouths with iron fangs. These bizarre appendages faced the surrounding creatures like serpents waiting to strike, occasionally releasing a high-pitched hiss and a puff of steam.

A camel hesitantly approached the Warpsmith, being careful to stay out of range of the mechatendrils. "My lord, diplomats are not allowed to carry weapons into the meeting. I can-"

"I am not a diplomat," Kessler interrupted, gesturing to Hope with his free hand, "Councilor Hope is representing the 38th Company as our official ambassador. I am merely here to supervise the proceedings and assist her as necessary."

"Uh..." the guard chewed his lip briefly, glancing over to Prince Su'tabel. The Prince nodded mutely as he took a new seat further down the table, next to the zebra diplomat. "I'm pretty sure your weapons still aren't allowed in here, Lord."

"You are mistaken," Kessler said curtly, leaning back in the chair he had confiscated. "Councilor, you may proceed."

Hope offered a wide, utterly empty smile for her fellow diplomats. "Well, then! We have a great deal to talk about, I imagine! Where should we begin?"

"First on the agenda is the 38th Company's rather presumptuous claim of sovereignty over the entirety of the planet," Su'tabel said, casting a nervous glance toward the warrior-engineer at the head of the table. "Is that acceptable, Lord?"

Kessler nodded. "Councilor Hope?"

"Right! Of course..." she gulped, and her horn lit up to levitate some papers out of her saddlebags. She flipped through them rapidly, and then magically held up a sketch drawing of an Ork warrior.

"Tell me, ambassadors, what do you know of the Orks?" Hope asked, turning the paper left and right to show the other envoys.

A clicking noise came from Kessler's helmet, and then a span of light came from one of his optical lenses. It rendered an image of several Ork units across the table in low-definition hololiths, ranging in size from the lowly Grot to a hulking Mega Dread.

"Oh. Okay. That's pretty handy," Hope mumbled, dropping her picture.

"The Orks are brutal warriors and raiders to the last, and their mobs have infested territory far and vast," noted the zebra diplomat. "But a misdirection this new subject would be. We were speaking of our planet's status as a 'colony'."

"It's hardly a misdirection. The 38th Company and Equestria are the only military forces on the planet with the necessary means and experience to keep the Orks on Centaur III subdued in the long-term," Hope continued.

"That is quite generous to Equestria's military," Kessler interjected. Hope pouted.

"What do you mean 'keep the Orks subdued'? The Orks are already defeated!" said the dragon.

"They lost the war, yes. And at fantastic cost to the Company's army, might I add," Hope said, "however, you perhaps don't appreciate the scale of the invasion force that the Company faced. Even in defeat, there were tens of thousands of Orks that survived the fighting. All of those fighters have splintered and spread, searching for new territory to hold so they could regroup and rearm. The Company has been running near-constant combat sorties just to eliminate the Orks that tried to dig in within Equestria's borders. Soon enough, we're going to have to spread our operations ever further, or the Orks will build up enough strength to threaten Ferrous Dominus, the heart of the 38th Company and the staging point for their only serious opposition." She paused for effect, her brow creasing under her horn. "For this reason, Equestria is proposing that all nations of Centaur III be unified into a federal protectorate! These nations will work together to protect everyone from the Orks, with the aim of eventually eliminating them as a threat permanently!"

There was much disgruntled mumbling and whispering after Hope finished speaking. None of the envoys looked particularly excited by the idea.

"Why, exactly, should we entrust the safety of our tribes to you?" the minotaur diplomat asked with a snort. "Our warriors are strong, and these aliens have already been crippled. We will endure without submitting ourselves to these humans!"

"A contest of endurance against the Orks is futile," Kessler replied. His voice was soft and chiding, as if he was lecturing a child. "You cannot 'outlast' the greenskins. They are peerless survivalists, they reproduce quickly and effortlessly, and they do not experience the despair and fatigue of constant warfare. They must be crushed, utterly and constantly. You are too weak to do this. All of you are."

The yak diplomat snorted angrily. "You not call yaks weak! Yakyakistan mighty nation! Yaks smash puny Orks!"

"You must understand that the Orks are relentless, powerful warriors!" Hope retorted, raising a hoof toward the yak. "Their technology is crude, but still effective beyond any non-magical equipment available to any of our people. The humans alone have demonstrated that they possess the weapons and tactics to hold strategic supremacy over them."

"A likely story from a conquering army that wants to bring the rest of the planet to heel," the dragon muttered, gesturing to the hololith, "but the dragons do not fear these little green men." Then his eyes narrowed at Kessler. "Nor do we fear you, Lord Warpsmith."

"Your suggestion is interesting, I will not lie," began the zebra with a raised brow, "but I am concerned for those nations who do not comply."

Kessler's hololith vanished as he glanced over at the zebra. "You are already part of the protectorate."

"I... but... what?" the zebra stumbled over her words, accidentally dropping out of her rhyming scheme.

"The equines have already submitted themselves in alliance," Kessler explained, "it is this other rabble that must be brought to heel."

"Uh, well, ACTUALLY-" Hope began, only to be cut off by an angry shout.

"'Rabble', are we?" growled the griffon diplomat. "So now we see your true objective! You don't seek 'allies' against the Orks, but simply dominance over the non-equines that will not serve you!"

"B-But Zebrica does not-" the zebra tried to interject, but was immediately shouted down by the yak envoy.

"Quiet, traitor! Zebra on human side! Yaks hate zebra now!"

"You cowards! How could you side with them so easily?" snapped the diamond dog.

The zebra groaned and slumped in her seat.

"So our choices are submit to the 38th Company or defend our territory from the Orks on our own, is it?" the minotaur snorted. "I think you might be disappointed in our decision, Councilor Hope. We would rather take our chances to fight off the savages than become slaves to some other aliens."

"Those are not the options you face, minotaur," Kessler said, leaning forward and resting his free hand on the table. "Councilor?"

Hope sighed, shaking her head. "While allowing sovereign territories to reject our alliance and inevitably perish under the Orks would be an... 'acceptable' compromise ordinarily... I'm afraid certain groups at this table have more to answer for." She narrowed her eyes as she looked over several particular ambassadors. "It has come to my attention that some of the sovereign territories represented here have been conducting military operations against Company assets on its own territory! Human soldiers have lost their lives in a number of clandestine and unprovoked attacks against their facilities and patrols!"

Gasps came from several of the diplomats.

"What? Which territories?" asked the diamond dog, scratching his head.

"Yours, for one," Hope said wryly. The canine's ears stood straight up, and his eyes widened. "As well as the griffon kingdom and the minotaur tribes." The respective ambassadors recoiled in turn, stuttering in shock. Hope looked up at the dragon in the room. "The dragons don't really have anything resembling a military or administrative government, but you should know that dragons have been involved in some attacks as well. Not in defense of their nests or in hunts for food, but rather in planned ambushes on military forces."

"Preposterous!" the dragon snapped.

"Lies! My people have instigated nothing!" the minotaur agreed.

"You accuse yaks of warmongering?! You slander good name of Yakyakistan?!" roared the yak.

That prompted a pause in the shouting.

"Uh... no. We haven't accused Yakyakistan of anything," Hope replied with an arched eyebrow.

"Yakyakistan not stand for this! Yaks not be ignored!" the hairy diplomat snorted angrily and started slamming his hooves onto the table.

"Are you actually TRYING to start a war, here?" Hope asked, furrowing her brow.

"By now yaks emotionally invested in violent outcome, yes," the diplomat admitted, speaking at a reasonable volume for the first time since he had arrived.

"We can accommodate that," Kessler said, pointing to the hairy bovine.

"What evidence is there of these attacks?" Prince Su'tabel demanded. "There have been no rumors, no mobilizations, no declarations of war! We have no reason to believe in these claims!"

The griffon and diamond dog diplomats flinched.

"There is considerable evidence," Hope said grimly, planting a hoof atop the papers she had brought.

Before she could offer up any of them, Kessler's optics flickered again. A new hololith started flashing images in sequence. Pict-captures of battles flashed before the stunned dignitaries. Pony miners and Techpriests fighting off diamond dog soldiers. Mercenaries shooting at griffons dive-bombing a convoy. A power-armored alicorn flying through the air as the dragon behind her was pounded with anti-air fire. A bleeding minotaur with a greatsword, lying on the ground among several human corpses.

Hope huffed and turned toward Kessler. "You know, I wouldn't have bothered spending the time to prepare all these materials if you'd told me that you had a mobile pict-imager."

"Ridiculous," the minotaur snorted. "We know nothing about your technology. How are we to trust that these images are real? Or that the incidents happened on your territory, and not that of the accused?"

"I think you'd know if Company troops were marching on your soil, Ambassador," Hope replied, "it didn't take Equestria long to figure it out. But if you're still not convinced, we have more."

Kessler's optics whirled, and the last picture was replaced by a hololith of a rather haggard diamond dog. There was a name and rank insignia underneath it, but there was hardly any time to read it before the image flickered and was replaced by a griffon. They kept changing, swapping out one prisoner for the next.

"The 38th Company has captured thirty-two diamond dogs, nineteen griffons, and two minotaurs. They have the bodies of several more. Psychic evaluation and interrogation has revealed them to be military regulars conducting covert sabotage missions. Missions that - THEY seem to think - were planned and ordered by their associated governments." Hope narrowed her eyes. "Would the representatives in question like to offer an explanation for this?"

It didn't escape anyone's notice that the griffon looked quite disturbed as she answered, and didn't immediately reject the claim as the minotaur had.

"The nation of Griffonstone denies any involvement in military hostilities against Equestria and the 38th Company," she said firmly. Then she hesitated. "However, we have suffered a string of... disappearances among our soldiers as of late. As far as we are aware, they were simply desertions, probably from troops afraid of having to fight the Orks."

"Well, you can clear them of any charge of cowardice, at least," Hope quipped, "no one afraid of fighting Orks would sign up for fighting Chaos Space Marines instead."

"Griffonstone does not condone these attacks upon your people!" the griffon continued, her head crest ruffling with frustration. "I can assure you that these individuals were acting on their own, not under orders from Griffonstone's military authority!"

"How convenient," Kessler mused, tapping his index finger against the table, "your people attack us, fail, and you have no knowledge or responsibility. I'm sure they would be quite surprised to hear it." His head turned slightly to regard the diamond dog. "And you, canine? What excuses do you offer for your insolence?"

"AHEM!" Hope cleared her throat loudly, glaring at Kessler.

The Warpsmith glanced over to her, and then nodded and leaned back again.

"Sorry about that," the unicorn mumbled, "now, would the representative of the diamond dog kingdom like to offer an explanation for the hostile activities we've presented?"

The diamond dog glanced back and forth nervously, wringing his hands. "Um, pretty much the same thing, really." He paused. "I mean, I MIGHT have heard about some rebellion forming against the aliens, but we certainly haven't helped them!"

"There are thirty-two guard dogs who would be very surprised to hear that," Hope said dryly.

"It wasn't us! I SWEAR it wasn't us!" the canine whimpered.

The dragon envoy blasted a cloud of smoke from his nostrils. "As you mentioned earlier, the dragon elders cannot account for the actions of our individual people. If some of them have taken up arms against you, then that is their business. But for the record, we condemn such pointless hostility."

"That's not good enough," Kessler said. An arc of crackling red energy ran over the blade of his power axe.

Hope sighed and steeled herself. "Even if other nations do not recognize the contributions of the 38th Company to global security, assaulting its people without so much as a declaration of war is intolerable!"

"But after war declared, is okay then?!" demanded the yak.

"Yes, fine. Then the humans can kill you and nopony cares. Whatever," Hope muttered. "For the REST of you, these attacks must be stopped immediately! Whether by rogue elements or official subterfuge, this cannot be allowed to go on any further! Equestria has fought hard for this chance to resolve this matter peacefully; were it up to the Company's commanders, they'd already have your cities under siege! A concerted, absolute commitment to stop these provocations is the only way to avoid open war!"

"And what if we are unable to stop these individuals?" the dragon asked, frowning deeply.

"Then we will do so," Kessler replied calmly, "we will march on your capitals, slaughter your insolent leaders, and lay waste-"

"AHEM!!" Hope said, glaring at the Warpsmith. She hadn't even actually cleared her throat this time, but just shouted the sound at him.

Kessler sighed and leaned back again. "Yes, fine. Go ahead."

"Thank you, Lord," Hope said through clenched teeth, "if the aggressor peoples are truly unable to control their own militaries, then the Company will do it for them."

"You speak of invasion!" the griffon hissed.

"And what are the Iron Warriors to do otherwise?" Hope challenged. "Stand idly by as your agents murder their people? Preposterous." She stood her front hooves on the table to give herself some extra height as she looked over the other diplomats. "You must stop these attacks at once. In the event of further hostilities, I'm afraid that Equestria will be unable to defend your independence, and your countries will be absorbed into the protectorate without the benefit of peaceful negotiation."

"There have been no Saddle Arabian warriors found attacking you, have there?" Prince Su'tabel asked anxiously.

"Negative, Prince Stable," Kessler replied.

The Prince frowned. "Uh, it's 'Su'tabel', Lord."

"That's what I said. Stable," the Warpsmith repeated.

"Oh, wow. I just got that," mumbled the diamond dog.

"We would have informed our equine allies of any such insurgents immediately, rather than using such a tiresome forum as this," Kessler continued.

"But... we're not your allies," the Saddle Arabian pointed out hesitantly.

"Yes you are."

"TRAITOR!!" boomed the yak envoy, causing the Prince to flinch back into his seat. The zebra ambassador leaned over and gave him a sympathetic pat on the back.

"I'm sure that, given time, we can come to an agreement on acceptable terms regarding your respective nations' membership within the protectorate," Hope announced. "For those of the aggressor territories, such a deal would no doubt involve the recovery of the captured soldiers. Unless, of course, you'd rather leave them to rot within the Happy Hills Unification Center."

The diamond dog and griffon shared a glance.

"Happy Hills? That doesn't sound so bad," the canine murmured.

"The name is misleading. I can assure you they're not very happy," Hope explained. "They are, however, being swiftly unified. Brutal forced labor has a way of bringing people together."

A camel guard whispered something in Prince Su'tabel's ear, and he looked suddenly relieved.

"Pardon me, ambassadors, but lunch is served," the desert equine said, standing up, "let us take a short break from shouting accusations at each other and eat."

There were some grumbles around the table as much of the previous tension evaporated. Hope turned toward Kessler. "I forgot to tell you that there would be a lunch break, Lord. I'm afraid we'll have to share my portion. Is vegetarian fare okay?"

"I brought my own meal," the Warpsmith assured her. He reached down and unclipped something that was attached to his greaves. Then he pulled up a tarnished canister of promethium.

"Isn't that the fuel for your vehicles and machines?" Hope asked while camels filed past her seat and started laying out dishes.

"It's fuel for a lot of things." One of Kessler's mechatendrils bit onto the capsule's spout and started draining it eagerly. The Warpsmith's smokestacks promptly began spewing streams of oily smog into the room, and a relaxed sigh came from his vox grille.

"Potatoes on the end, then onions, soup, and stuffed peppers," mumbled a guard to the Saddle Arabians filing out of the kitchen.

He briefly halted one that was carrying a plate of rubies. "Are those gems unpolished? The dragon ambassador has a heart condition!"

"Pear cut, unpolished, breaded with crushed limestone," the cook said with a snort, "made to order, my lord."

The camel nodded and waved him through. "And what is THIS?" he said, spotting another of the equines splitting off to the side. This one carried a large dinner plate on his back, and unlike the others it was covered.

The cook yelped in surprise, and the platter started to tilt over. He quickly stabilized it, sweating profusely and trembling.

The guard made note of this after he approached. "What's the matter? Which dish is this?"

"It's a... uh... a surprise! Yes, a very special surprise for the Equestrian envoy!"

The camel raised an eyebrow. The cook grinned, and his eyes briefly flashed green. "A very, VERY special surprise! Heh heh! Ha ha ha ha!"

"I suppose I SHOULD take a cursory glance at the dish ahead of time..." the camel murmured. "But I'd hate to ruin the surprise by raising the lid while she happened to be looking. And she probably is, because your generally inappropriate laughter is drawing a lot of attention."

"BWAH HA HA oh, sorry about that," the cook coughed lightly, "so, can I go deliver the package?"

"You mean the food," the camel said, stepping aside.

"Sure. That." The cook pushed forward, walking past the dragon and stopping behind Hope.

The unicorn watched skeptically as the dish was carefully shifted from the Saddle Arabian's back to the table, such that it sat between her and Kessler. "So, what is this about, then?"

"Just a little something to show our APPRECIATION for Equestria's role in protecting our fair planet," the cook hissed.

Hope started levitating the cover off, but then the cook quickly slammed it back down.

"No! Wait, not yet!" he said desperately. "It's a... uh... a dessert! So you can't open it yet! Until after I leave!"

"Who ordered that, anyway? It wasn't me," said Su'tabel, narrowing his eyes at the anxious cook.

"Ooh, look! A wishbone!" The diamond dog plucked an arch-shaped bone from his plate and reached over toward the griffon envoy. "Make a wish!"

Kessler tossed the empty promethium canister away over his shoulder, and then spared a glance at the covered dish between him and Hope. His optics automatically scanned the container, returning a chemical analysis.

"Why do you think it strange that I ingest promethium when you apparently consume trinitrotoluene?" he asked the unicorn.

"I consume what, now?" Hope asked.

The cook immediately bolted through the nearest window, breaking through the glass and plummeting out of sight.

The delegates and guards stared after him, stunned.

"I don't mean to delay our sup, but aren't we some seven stories up?"

"Ominous," mumbled the minotaur diplomat.

Kessler took a longer look at the covered dish. Then he suddenly jumped up out of his chair, grabbed Hope's seat, and hurled it away with her in it.

"GET DOWN!!" the Warpsmith ordered, grabbing onto the covered dish with the intention of hurling it out the window after the creature who had brought it.

It didn't even make it out of his hands before it exploded.

****

As far as Hope Springs was concerned, all of reality went completely screwy for a few minutes.

She couldn't hear anything but a furious ringing in her ears. Her vision spun and lurched to and fro. What little she could make out was fleeting, and everything seemed to be obscured by dust and running legs.

After a minute, the ringing gave way to muffled shouting, which became less muffled as she concentrated on them.

Once the unicorn was able to make sense of the world around her, she determined that she had been carried into a room adjoining the main hall. She was on the floor, surrounded by camel guards, and Prince Su'tabel was yelling orders at them.

Hope pushed herself upright, a sense of numbness filling her body as it finally faded from her mind.

"What... What happened?" she mumbled, eyes wide.

"Sabotage! That's what happened!" Su'tabel snarled, kicking a nearby column. "Some cowards have apparently decided that peace isn't in their best interests!"

The Saddle Arabian glared over his shoulder. Hope followed his gaze, and saw that the other delegates had been rounded up as well. They were all dusty, half of them looked terrified, and the dragon was curled up tightly in the corner while clutching his arm.

"You aren't seriously accusing one of us of this chicanery, are you?" sneered the minotaur. "Why don't you blame your pitiful security for waving through an assassin with a bomb?!"

"Well, it definitely wasn't me!" moaned the dragon, shivering. "I can't believe you treacherous mammals used me for cover!"

"Oh, what are you whining about? You're fireproof!" the griffon envoy growled.

"Fireproof! Not explosion-proof! Nothing is explosion-proof! That seriously hurt!"

"You no accuse yaks of sabotage! Yaks never use such sneaky-explodey tactics!"

"Nobody's accusing you or your people of anything, you jerk. The guilty party would have to know how to use bombs and lurk!"

"I have my guards locking down the palace grounds and sweeping the courtyard," Su'tabel snarled, "the coward won't get away with this..."

"What about Lord Kessler?" Hope asked softly.

All other conversation and complaining stopped.

"We... evacuated the room as quickly as possible," the Prince explained. "There's still a fire in there. I have more guards coming in to put it out."

Hope looked toward the doorway leading into the adjacent room. Cracks and fissures covered the wall to one side of the door. Smoke and dust were seeping in along the ground, and she could hear the sound of a roaring fire and crumbling masonry.

"Lord Kessler was at the center of the blast. He... did not leave the room with the rest of us."

Hope was still fairly numb, but she was barely able to feel the tear that crawled down her cheek.

"Wow," breathed the diamond dog ambassador, taking a thin, greasy object from his belt and holding it up. It was the greater half of a wishbone. "Be careful what you wish for, huh guys?"

The diamond dog chuckled.

Then a spear of melta gas vaporized him on the spot.

"WHAT THE FLYING FEATHER?!" the griffon screamed, leaping away from the ashen streak that now cut across the tiling.

"Lord Kessler!" Hope shouted.

The Warpsmith lurched out of the cloud of dust, smoke curling around his body and a loud hiss coming from a gasping mechatendril. His optics flickered and sparked, his movements were stiff and leaden, and his left arm was missing up to the elbow.

"You're alive!" the unicorn cheered, fresh tears rolling down her dirtied cheeks.

"Kill the alien," Kessler said coldly, pointing his power axe at the horrified griffon diplomat.

"... Yay?" Hope added uncertainly.

The ambassador for Griffonstone tried to take flight and make for a window, just as the saboteur had done. But there was too little room to maneuver and Kessler proved shockingly fast despite his size and injuries.

His axe bit into the side of the fleeing griffon, tearing through the hybrid creature in an instant.

The Warpsmith had turned on his heel and selected his next opponent before his last victim had hit the ground. The minotaur roared, clenching his hands into fists.

"MURDERER!! You kill innocent, unarmed diplomats! This is the 38th Company's commitment to peace?!"

"Yes, pretty much," Kessler answered calmly before decapitating the bull-creature. The minotaur managed to land a punch against the Iron Warrior's battered armor at the same time, but after shrugging off a bomb such a blow was meaningless.

"Lord Kessler! Please, stop!" Prince Su'tabel shouted, recoiling in horror.

"No. No more restraint," said the Warpsmith, "no more... peace. These creatures want war. So war it is."

The yak ambassador crashed into his side, actually managing to surprise the Chaos Marine. Kessler toppled over, his armored body slamming into the floor hard enough to crack the tiling.

"For Yakyakistan!" bellowed the envoy, rearing up.

One of Kessler's mechatendrils curled around and then blasted the bovine with a short blast of flame, interrupting his next charge. The yak lurched backward, screaming, as his hair caught alight. Kessler pushed himself back to his feet.

"Lord, please, reconsider! At least let me execute them FOR you! I feel like it's my obligation as a host!" Su'tabel begged, stepping in front of Hope to block her view of the violence.

"Keep your feeble guardians back, vassal," Kessler demanded before slicing into the burning yak. The power field crackled, and the scent of ozone mixed with the variety of other terrible smells currently circulating in the room.

The zebra was next, trembling on the ground below the mighty Chaos Space Marine.

"Please, I know I objected to your offer before! But now I believe in our alliance to my very core!"

"Whatever," Kessler said, stepping over the zebra. He had no idea why the striped pony thought he was going to harm her, frankly.

"Guards! Guards! Do something! Stop him!" screamed the dragon, backing away as far as possible from the rampaging Marine.

"Yeah, no. I don't want any of this," remarked a camel watching the massacre with wide eyes and quivering knees.

"Besides, you're like five times his size!" said another.

"I'm a lover, not a fighter!" the dragon moaned.

Kessler shot another melta blast from his mechatendrils while he advanced. The spear of super-heated gas burned through even the dragon's fire-resistant hide, punching a hole in the serpent's chest.

"I'm too young to die! I'm not even a thousand! AAAAAAAUGH!!"

Su'tabel turned his gaze away as the Warpsmith started hacking away at the ambassador, hugging Hope against his chest to protect her from the horrific sight. He was moderately surprised when she suddenly shoved him away and then jumped past him.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU PSYCHOTIC TIN MAN?!?!" the unicorn screeched.

Kessler barely turned away from his bloody work, his mechatendrils digging into the exposed internals of the dragon. "This is how an Iron Warrior negotiates," he said coldly. Hot blood pooled around his feet, mixing with that of the other non-equine delegates.

"No! No, it isn't! This isn't negotiation in any sense of the word! And I've SEEN how Iron Warriors negotiate! This is definitely not how!" Hope screamed.

"It does not matter." Kessler ripped the broken heart from the chest of the draconic ambassador, holding it up above his head while blood drooled down his remaining arm. "I am victorious. The diplomatic conference is won."

"No! It isn't! That's what I'm trying to TELL YOU!" The diplomat pony stamped her hoof on the floor in frustration. "You are NOT victorious! This is NOT a victory!"

Kessler paused, staring at her. Then he looked up at the bowling-ball-sized heart in his hand. "I don't understand. I have eliminated all opposition. Or do I have to kill the equine participants too?" the Prince and the zebra flinched.

"You can't kill anyone to win a conference! Avoiding violence is the entire POINT of this exercise! If you murder the other delegates, you lose by default!"

Kessler tossed away the dragon heart, and then pulled his power axe free of the dragon corpse's rib cage. "This makes no sense. I was attacked first, with the bomb. Is it not THEY who lost, then?"

"Not if you murder them immediately before we even determine responsibility! We don't know if any of them were involved in the attack!" Hope shouted in frustration. "Now we have nothing! Worse than nothing! The other kingdoms are sure to go to war, even if they never wanted to!"

Kessler mulled this over. "I see... then how does one win a diplomatic conference?"

"You don't really 'win' a negotiation," Su'tabel interjected, "you simply reach a compromise that gets you as much of what you want as possible."

"You can lose a conference, but you cannot win?" the Warpsmith asked, perplexed. "No wonder the Tau have an entire caste for this. Diplomacy is hard." Then he turned toward the door. "Let's be off, then. I need a new arm."

Hope groaned and trudged after him, stepping lightly to avoid the splashes of blood and chunks of gore littering the tiles.

"So, uh... about this 'protectorate' thing... did you want us to... do anything?" Prince Su'tabel asked nervously. The zebra mare was standing behind him, trembling.

"Oh, we'll work that out later. A little bit too much excitement right now, you know? Don't call us, we'll call you," Hope assured him.

Kessler opened the door to the next room. Then he stopped short.

"Hey! Hah... Sorry I'm late! Hah... Got here as fast as I could! Hah..." A tiny, airborne creature with gossamer butterfly wings and long, curled antennae hung in the air in front of the doorway, gasping for breath.

"There was a bad cross-wind. Hah... But I'm here now! I'm representing the breez-" One of Kessler's mechatendrils darted forward and snatched the newcomer up in its jaws. Two crunches later, it was gone, swallowed by the mechanical tentacle.

"Let's hurry," the Iron Warrior commanded, "I have a lot of invasion plans to go over since we're doing that, now."

"You're incorrigible," Hope grumbled, following him through the door.

Author's Note

To be fair, she would have ended up in the lobby with the deer and other bums, anyway.

Thanks to my bros in the Age of Iron group for helping me out with the canon MLP races. Even here, I'm sure I missed more than a few that could conceivably be numerous, intelligent, and organized enough to send a diplomatic delegation to protest about the annexation of the entire world, but I couldn't feasibly manage a genuine fantasy-animal-world UN and still keep it fun. I apologize if I left anyone's favorite critters out.

Ill Tidings

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 6

Ill Tidings

****

Ferrous Dominus - sector 22

Merchant Corp lounge

"Oh, Tigeraan! Please! You can't leave me! Not again!"

"I have no choice. You know this. Don't make this harder than it has to be, Angel Wing."

The lounge's holovid player hummed softly as it rendered the image of an unusually short Iron Warrior in embellished power armor standing at the edge of a balcony. Behind him, an orange pegasus mare stood against the balcony doorway, a silky gown draped over her withers.

The mare sniffled, rubbing a leg against her eye. "Time and time again, you leave for war! Slaughtering the innocent for the glory of Chaos! Time and time again I'm left here, alone! Gazing at the stars and pining for your touch! Oh, Tigeraan!"

The Chaos Marine hesitated, glancing over to the trembling pony. "Alone? What of your husband?"

"Speak not of that wretched creature!" Angel growled. "He won't come between us! Soon our marriage will be over!" she stepped up to the armored man and leaned against his leg.

Tigeraan shook his head. "Do not say that, Angel. He cares about you. He takes care of you in ways that I could not. Don't throw that away for your foolish lust."

"Foolish?!" Angel recoiled, scowling.

"Yes, foolish! I am an Iron Warrior! You, an equine duchess! It was never meant to be!" the Iron Warrior growled, striking a fist against the railing. "My vows are to Chaos. Yours are to your mate. We cannot continue this."

"My vows will soon be undone. My marriage is over," Angel said firmly.

"Don't leave your husband, Angel," Tigeraan insisted.

"He'll be the one leaving me," Angel Wing sighed, "for you see... I'm pregnant!"

Tigeraan flinched backward as a dramatic sting played.

"And YOU'RE the father!" the mare added, jabbing a hoof toward the Iron Warrior.

Rarity gasped, and she nearly dropped the glass magically floating next to her. Fluttershy recoiled in shock, her wings snapping open. Delgan rolled his eyes, picking up the remote control.

The title screen flickered in the holovid projection. "Next time, on All My Horses..." Delgan lowered the volume before the episode preview could begin.

"Absolutely ridiculous," the Trademaster snorted, "has the writer of this tripe ever MET an Iron Warrior?"

Rarity huffed and put down her glass. "Of course it's unusual. That's the whole POINT. It's forbidden love!"

"No, it isn't," Delgan retorted, pouring himself another glass of cider, "there is absolutely nothing keeping an Astartes from bedding an equine alien... aside from the fact that Astartes are entirely asexual. They have no capacity for romantic love. I don't think they even understand it."

The unicorn raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Does this knowledge come from... personal experience?"

"Don't start with that," Delgan warned her.

Rarity and Fluttershy were laying on a long couch on either side of the man, sipping cups of chilled cider while the trio watched soap operas. It had become something of a ritual for them, since Rarity felt she needed some "girl time" away from work and combat, and felt that Fluttershy needed some structure and regular relaxation to counter being around Tellis regularly. Delgan's presence wasn't strictly necessary, and when asked he insisted that he mostly participated out of curiosity. Rarity didn't believe him.

"It's just rubbish that they insisted on making the character an Iron Warrior rather than an ordinary human. Especially as they casted a human to play him anyhow! Nobody could seriously mistake that man for an Astartes just because they make him wear plate mail." the Trademaster said sourly. "This entire show is full of little annoying things like that. They made up absurd names for half the planets they mention in each episode, and made the character based on the Great and Powerful Trixie a GENERAL in charge of actual human soldiers! And the number of characters that contract amnesia is ludicrous! Nobody in that cast can turn over in bed without forgetting what planet they came from!" He crossed his arms over his chest. "If it weren't for Duke Eschil, I wouldn't even watch this program. He is a shining diamond in an otherwise banal and unremarkable lineup."

Fluttershy tilted her head to the side. "The devilish and cunning trade minister who drives his enemies to financial ruin and then forces them to work for him? Wasn't that character inspired by you?"

"My fondness for him is biased, yes. What of it?"

Rarity glanced back to the holovid display, and then tapped Delgan's leg. "Look, it's that new public service announcement you were in! Turn the volume back up!"

A young earth pony colt walked into his home and slipped off his saddlebags. He seemed preoccupied, staring at the floor and furrowing his brow.

"Hello, son! How was your day?" greeted a mare in the kitchen, turning away from the vegetables she was preparing for dinner.

The colt stopped, and then pursed his lips. "Mom? Can I ask you something?"

Looking concerned, the elder pony approached her child and sat down next to him. "Of course. What's wrong?"

"Well... I heard some of the other colts in school talking. About joining a... cult."

The mare recoiled slightly, her pupils shrinking. Then she relaxed and laid a single foreleg on the younger pony's withers. "I see. Son, I think it's time you and I had a talk... about Chaos."

An eight-pointed star flickered over the image, and then vanished from sight.

"Some of your schoolmates may already be experimenting with Chaos cults. They might even start pressuring you to join one. They might tell you about how cool Khorne is, about all the advantages of Tzeentch worship, or how Nurgle cultists aren't REALLY as horrible and disgusting as everypony says." The mare frowned and pulled her child closer. "You're going to have to make some difficult choices that will affect you for the rest of your life and afterlife. But no matter what happens, and no matter what your friends tell you, there's one thing you absolutely MUST remember."

The colt's ears perked up. "Yeah? What's that?"

"DO NOT WORSHIP SLAANESH," the elder pony said, her voice firm as stone.

The colt recoiled, surprised. "What? Why? What happens if I worship Slaanesh? Insanity? Psychotic breakdowns? Generally unfavorable mutations?"

"If you worship Slaanesh, heavily armed space men will break into our home and kill us all," the mare explained with cold, grim seriousness.

The young pony stared with wide eyes. "Oh. Uh... okay. I won't do that."

The ponies seemed to freeze in the display, and Delgan's image stepped into the picture in front of them, facing the viewers.

"It's never too early to start the conversation," he said, pointing to the viewer, "threaten YOUR children about the dangers of Slaanesh worship today."

The scene faded out, and then transitioned to a battery commercial.

Rarity clapped her hooves together in delight, grinning at Delgan. Fluttershy mimicked her more timidly. The Trademaster endured their attention with the look of a high school student being embarrassed by his mother in public.

"Ah, this is wonderful, isn't it?" Rarity asked. She rolled onto her side, sliding her head onto Delgan's lap. "No battles. No world-ending emergencies. At times like these, I could almost forget that I'm part of an army of space pirates."

Fluttershy nodded eagerly. "Yes, it's very nice. I wish it could be like this all the time."

"I admit I enjoy peacetime ventures more than I do piracy," Delgan said, rubbing Rarity's belly, "but it's always a temporary reprieve."

"Do you think it might not be, some day?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you think we might ever be rid of the Orks?" Rarity clarified. "That we might ever be free of war, at least on our own planet? That humans, ponies, and all the other races can live together, like we're doing now, in harmony and prosperity? It isn't such a terrible stretch, is it?"

While Delgan mulled that over, the doors to the lounge hissed and then slid open. Rainbow Dash poked her head in.

"Hey guys, just thought you should know: that peace conference thing was a bust. We're pretty much at war with the rest of the planet now."

Rarity pouted.

"What? What happened?" Fluttershy gasped.

"Kessler flipped out and killed everyone. Except for the ponies, zebras, and Saddle Arabians. I guess they're with us, now? I'm not really clear on how this alliance 'protectorate' thing is supposed to work." Rainbow frowned. "Actually, they seemed pretty confused about it, too."

"This is terrible! What's going to happen now?" Fluttershy asked, quivering.

"More war, more looting, more business," Delgan leaned forward and poured himself more cider. "Well, off you go, then."

"Me?" Fluttershy asked with a confused blink. "But I don't-"

"WHOOOOOOOOO!!" Tellis sprinted into the room, hooting obnoxiously and waving his arms in the air. Fluttershy instantly jumped off the couch and tried to bolt away to the window, but Tellis snatched her out of the air with ease and then held her up over his head.

"YEAH!! We 'bout to get our war ON!" the Iron Warrior cheered, oblivious to Fluttershy's panicked flapping and kicking. "C'mon, pegasi! We have to hurry before all the good murder is taken! We gonna sack us a village!"

"Doesn't Flutters need her armor?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"No time for that! Killing now!" Tellis ran back out the door, giggling and still clutching Fluttershy over his head. Rainbow Dash shrugged and followed after him.

Rarity watched them go, then looked up at Delgan. "Well, I suppose I should go get dressed. Will you be joining us?"

"No," the Trademaster said bluntly, leaning back again and directing his attention toward the holovid once more.

"Thank you for watching CBS, the Chaos Broadcasting System! Next up: Billy Bolt the Science Colt!"

An earth pony with glasses appeared in the display, trying desperately to handle a beaker with his hooves. After a few seconds he fumbled the glass container, and then leapt back as a flame shot up from the floor.

"Ugh. Fine. I'll go to war," Delgan grumbled, turning off the holovid player and standing up.

****

Ponyville - Sugarcube Corner

"Daniels! Daniels, over here!"

Daniels was just stepping into the bakery when he heard Applejack calling him.

Nearly everyone in the building was clustered around a vid player on the wall, watching it in concern. That included the Cakes, who watched from the counter, as well as several members of the Apple family and a few other townsponies. Daniels walked up behind Applejack, having an easy view of the screen over the ponies' heads.

"You're watching CNN, the Company News Network! We're coming to you live with a special report!" said a blond, ivory-colored pegasus mare on the screen. She was seated behind a large wooden desk in front of a giant studio holo-screen, which itself displayed the Legion symbol of the Iron Warriors. Next to the pony was a man wearing a suit and tie. Despite the professional outfit, he also had a dirty brown sack mask over his head, complete with an optical augmentation.

"So I guess we have a news network now," Daniels mumbled. Braeburn quickly turned and shushed him.

"Crisis has engulfed Centaur III! For this special report, I'm your host, Scoops, and this is my co-host-"

"WAR!!" the man suddenly shouted, slamming his hands onto the desk.

Scoops stared at the man next to her, confused. "But your employment application said it was 'Kilroy'. Or is 'War' more of a nickname?"

"No! War is the subject of the news I am breaking before our audience, like the spine of a feeble Imperial warrior!" Kilroy snarled, shaking a fist at the camera. "Tensions between the 38th Company and this planet's many weak and probably edible races boiled over yesterday, leading to the declaration of WAR!"

Scoops nodded. "A peace conference in Saddle Arabia was sabotaged by a mysterious assailant, who set off a bomb in the main hall during the proceedings."

"Six diplomats were killed," Kilroy added, "not by the bomb, though. Warpsmith Kessler, who was escorting the Equestrian ambassador to the event, was so enraged by the assault that he slew most of the other envoys in cold blood. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! All will now know and fear the might of Chaos! Your most helpless, unarmed diplomats are NOTHING before us!"

"We reached out to Warpsmith Kessler, temporary commander of the 38th Company's planetary forces," Scoops said, beckoning to her side, "he had this to say."

The screen transitioned to a vid of Kessler standing in front of a control station. He was tapping at hololiths and scrolling through veritable rivers of information even as he spoke.

"It is true. The feeble natives of this world think to defy us, and I shall..."

He trailed off as the sound of hooves came from behind him.

Hope Springs jumped up onto the control console in front of the Iron Warrior, trying to obscure the Chaos Space Marine as much as possible.

"No! Nuh-uh! You're not allowed to talk to the press!" Hope snapped, filling the vid screen with a hoof.

"What? We're not doing diplomacy things, it's fine," Kessler protested.

"Of course this is a diplomacy thing! Don't you know anything about public relations?! Go away! Shoo!" the unicorn swiped her hoof at the hulking warrior-engineer, and he reluctantly backed away from the console while grumbling in Binary.

Hope turned back to the screen, her face instantly shifting from irritated to detached and serene. "Sorry about that. What Lord Kessler meant to say is that the 38th Company regrets the outcome of the conference. However, the consistent acts of hostility and sabotage against Company assets must be answered for. So long as these aggressor nations refuse to reign in their hostile elements, the Iron Warriors have no choice but to take action!"

Kessler snorted and crossed his arms over his chest, turning away.

"The ineffectual and arrogant leaders of these territories will be deposed for the good of their own nations," Hope continued, "and their people will be inducted into the Equestrian protectorate, where they will be safe from the predations of the cruel and terrible aliens that infest our world!"

"Except us," Kessler interjected.

Hope turned her head to glare at him.

"... What?"

Daniels scratched the back of his head as the ponies in the room murmured amongst each other. "You know, it used to just be a joke that you pones were the ones bossing us around."

Applejack quirked an eyebrow. "Whaddya mean it 'used' to be? We ain't runnin' this show."

"Your coffee, Miss Apple," Dest rumbled, placing a mug down behind the orange mare.

"Thanks, sugarcube." Applejack flipped him a bit, which the Possessed Iron Warrior caught out of the air. "Do me a solid and get Danny here a cinnamon roll, wouldja?"

Dest bowed silently and plodded off. Daniels sighed and sat down.

"With news of the impending invasion spreading through the native territories like wildfire, kingdoms everywhere are scrambling to prepare," Scoops said grimly, "but will it be enough to offer them a chance at defending their sovereignty from the might of the Equestrian alliance?"

"NEVER!!" Kilroy snarled, slamming his fists onto the desk. "The weakling aliens of this misbegotten world shall fall before our indestructible armies! The corruption of Chaos shall spread across the globe! Anarchy! Destruction! Bloodshed!"

Then the human shifted back into his seat and gestured to the side. "Here to respond to the inevitable domination of the planet, we have a live interview with Blackthorn. He is representative of the feeble deer people of Thicket, one of the many victims awaiting eventual enslavement by the chosen of the Dark Gods."

Scoops arched an eyebrow as a holoscreen appeared off to the side next to her co-host. A stag appeared in the image, staring disdainfully at the man.

"Hello Blackthorn. How are you faring now, in your people's second-darkest hour?" Kilroy asked amiably.

Blackthorn snorted. "Second-darkest? Perhaps you refer to the Ork incursion which you SAY threatened the entire world, and which the 38th Company uses to justify its invasion!"

"Yes, that's the one," Kilroy replied. Scoops leaned over onto his arm and started whispering into his ear. "Hmm?"

"I fare plenty well, marauder! Thicket is well prepared to defy your cruel and terrible masters!" the stag raised a hoof toward the vid-capture unit. "Furthermore, I call on all decent and peace-loving creatures of the world to join me in REJECTING the forces of Chaos and their ridiculous creed of violence and domination! In particular, the ponies of Equestria should-"

"THIS JUST IN!!" Kilroy shouted, slamming his fists onto the table again. "Thicket is not a real nation, and nobody cares what you have to say!"

Blackthorn recoiled in surprised. "What? But, I-"

Kilroy suddenly brandished a laspistol, blasting the holoscreen projector and cutting off the signal.

"This live interview is now DEAD! Back to you, Scoops."

"Thank you, Kilroy." Scoops beamed at the vid-capture unit. "Despite strategic predictions tilting heavily in the Company's favor, the continual assaults on their assets by armed insurgents concerns tactical experts. They see these invasions as regrettable distractions from skirmishing with the Orks, and fear that without sufficient pressure, the greenskins may gather enough strength to launch an effective counter-attack. But only time will tell."

Scoops smiled and shifted away the stack of papers in front of her. "And now we go to Dark Acolyte Leverin, for sports!"

"They have the DarkMech do the sports newscast? Weird," Daniels remarked.

"Never mind that! Ya'll heard what the main story was about!" Applejack snapped. "We've got a real problem, here! War's a'comin'!"

"You do remember that you've been in as many sorties as I have since we made planetfall, right?"

"Still not the point!" Applejack groused. "Ah ain't gonna complain 'bout fightin' Orks or Tau, but this's different! These guys ain't tryin' ta destroy the world or bring in some other buncha critters to destroy the world for 'em! They're our neighbors!"

"Eeyup," Big Mac added helpfully.

"Well, that's the disadvantage of soldiering. You don't get to pick your battles," Daniels mused, "but hey, at least they did something to us, first. This space pirate gig usually isn't done in self-defense."

"We ain't had a war with the griffons in dang near a century," Braeburn sighed, pausing to take a sip of coffee, "hard to believe it could all fall apart so fast..." then he glanced at the holo-vid and instantly brightened. "Yee-haw! The Neigh Orleans Rainbow Riders are goin' to the championship! Ah just made fitty bits!"

There was much more hooting and cheering as the hooded figure in the holovid read off a list of match scores with a level of enthusiasm that most people reserved for eulogies. Dest approached Applejack and Daniels' table again.

"Whaddya think, Dest? How's this gonna go down?" Applejack asked.

The Iron Warrior placed a cinnamon roll in front of Daniels, then regarded Applejack with a long pause.

"If you're concerned for the fate of the enemy nations, then at least it is well that hostilities broke out while much of our forces are absent." Dest reasoned. "Our mightiest weapons are carried upon the Harvest of Steel, as well as our most ruthless soldiers. The enemy stands no chance against even our second and third-tier forces, but such... subtle military strength at least will not wipe their people out entirely. They will be subdued with some modicum of restraint."

Applejack grimaced. "Well, that's really the most Ah coulda hoped fer. Consarn it, Ah sure wish Twi were here. She'd know what t'do."

"True. I'm certain she would have her own plan to reconcile the concerns of the Iron Warriors with Equestria's desire for peaceful hegemony," Dest agreed, "and I would have enjoyed watching her hopes shattered upon the cruel realities of this conflict. A pity."

"Eeyup," Big Mac added, earning him a groan from his sister.

"At present, however, we have our own deployment orders coming in. Unless you have some futile scheme of your own, we should prepare to deploy." Dest's shoulder-mounted servo claws reached behind him and untied the strings of his apron with surprising dexterity and care. He placed the work apron on the table behind him, and then took up his boltgun.

"Yeah, Ah'd better go git mah armor on," Applejack agreed. Then she eyed Big Mac. "As fer you, seein' how this ain't no 'end o'the world' war, can ya stay home and work this time instead o' fightin'?"

"Eeyup."

"Good. Brae can really use the help. And Celestia knows Apple Bloom needs somepony with some sense around," Applejack said, reaching up and giving the stallion a pat on the head. "Now, don't ya worry 'bout me none. Ah'll be home lickety-split!"

The Apple siblings shared a hug, and then Applejack turned and shouted toward the back of the store.

"Hey, Pinkie! Move yer tail! We're goin'!"

"Okaaaaay!" A banging noise came from upstairs, and then Pinkie rolled down the steps as if she had tripped and fallen. On the last step she suddenly bounced upright, landing on her hooves.

"Goodbye again, Mister and Missus Cake! Want me to get you anything while I'm out pillaging?"

"Oh, no, that's okay. We don't really need anything," Cup Cake insisted.

"Although if you could loot something nice for the kids, we wouldn't say no," Carrot added.

"Okee-day!" Pinkie chirped, following the other soldiers out the door. "See you after we take over the world!"

****

Unknown sector

"All right! We're almost there!" Tellis crowed while he blasted through the sky. "I think the Dark Nerds said there was a trading settlement around that mountain! Let's go, let's go!"

Fluttershy mumbled something from within his arms, but with the combination of his high-speed flight and her weak voice, Tellis didn't notice.

"Hey, Tellis, I have to ask: why are you so gung-ho about this, anyway? This place is run by diamond dogs, right?" Rainbow Dash asked. The swift flyer was zooming along at a slightly higher altitude, sweeping the ground with her visor systems and searching for anything cool.

"What do you mean? I'm ALWAYS up for a good massacre!" the Raptor replied.

"Yeah, sure, but why are you so excited about THIS one? We've been fighting Orks constantly, so it's not like you don't get enough combat in!" She dropped in next to the Iron Warrior. "If you're hoping the diamond dogs are going to be fun to take on, I think you'll be disappointed. They're pretty lame."

Tellis spotted something and leaned backward, his flight pack spreading out to stabilize his flight.

"There we are. Good. Looks like we beat the rest of the army here," Tellis mumbled.

Rainbow Dash swung about and hovered in front of him. "And that matters because...?"

"We don't have to split the loot with them! All that sweet moolah is all ours!"

Rainbow Dash continued to stare. Fluttershy, who was still squeezed between the Raptor's vambrace and chest plate, looked up at him with a quirked eyebrow.

"And that matters... since when?"

Tellis sighed, deflating. "Okay, fine. Look... I have gambling debts. I need the money to pay them off."

"What are you talking about? You paid me the other day," Rainbow pointed out.

"Yeah. So I paid off my debt to YOU," Tellis explained, "and that was obviously the most important one. But now I have others. I'm three-thousand and fifty bits in the hole right now." He paused. "Wait, hold on."

Shifting Fluttershy under his other arm, he used his free hand to tap the side of his helmet. His visor scrolled through a list of broadcast channels, and then connected to the CNN signum feed.

"...... Shit! Three-thousand and one hundred! Damn you, Braeburn! And damn YOU, Sure Shot! Apparently your special talent is ACTUALLY giving the ball away when your team is only a goal behind!"

"Tellis... do you have a gambling problem?" Fluttershy asked hesitantly.

"Yes! Because apparently I suck at it!" he groused. "Now let's go earn me some dough! I have a poker tournament tonight."

Fluttershy squeaked in fright as Tellis began diving toward the ground, and she squeezed her eyes shut. The ground below was a sparse cluster of small wooden buildings, and Tellis aimed for one such structure on his descent.

"IRON WITHIN, BECOME THE IRON WITHOUT!! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!"

The armored berserker crashed feet-first through the roof, slamming into the ground hard enough to unsettle the building and cave in what was left of the ceiling.

The diamond dogs inhabiting the camp were already quite startled at having a missile fly screaming at them from above, and they promptly fled upon seeing the fiery object crash into a storage shed. Their caution was vindicated when Tellis burst from the wall a moment later. The rickety walls of the shack quivered for a moment, and then collapsed behind the armored marauder in a dusty heap.

"Attention, canine filth! I have come for your blood and booty! Preferably in that order!" Tellis roared. He held Fluttershy over his head as he shouted for some reason, as if he was brandishing her as a weapon. "The 38th Company lays claim to this village's riches, and Chaos will take your souls! Flee, hapless mortals, for your end is neigh! No, wait, it's nigh. Damn it, I'm so used to those stupid horse puns that I'm doing it myself, now."

"Um, Tellis?" Fluttershy asked.

"Yes? Make it quick dear, I'm in the middle of something," Tellis reminded the pegasus over his head.

"I think we found the treasure already," Fluttershy mumbled, staring down at the ground.

Tellis looked down himself. The dirt around his boots was littered with gleaming gemstones, with some of them crushed to shards under his armored feet. Behind him was a great mound of the jewels, likewise greatly disturbed by his entrance.

"Huh. I was kind of hoping to do the murder first and THEN the stealing. Oh well," the Chaos Lord mused.

Rainbow Dash swooped in next to him, carefully landing so as not to step on any valuables herself. "Okay, so did you bring a sack or anything? What do we do now?"

"I don't know. I'm new at this," Tellis admitted.

"You've been a space pirate for LITERALLY thousands of years!"

"Stealing stuff was never my department! I have people for that!"

"People that we left behind because you didn't want to share with them!"

"Rainbow Dash, please, your criticism isn't helping," Fluttershy gently chided the other mare, "also, please don't say anything that might upset Tellis while he's holding me like this. He could squish me like a tomato."

"True dat," Tellis admitted, making no move to release his timid teammate. "Okay, so here's the game plan. We need to steal a bag or crate or something to help us steal the other loot. Rainbow, you go do that. In the meantime, me and Shy will go kill some villagers. I'll start with the children."

"WHAT?!" Fluttershy yelped.

"Ha! Kidding! I'll save the kids for you, Fluts. You need the combat practice."

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes behind her helmet visor. "I have a better idea. You have actual hands, which is way better for handling stuff, so why don't YOU do the thieving, while me and Flutters terrorize the mutts?"

"Ugh. Now YOU'RE getting all tactical on me? Geez," Tellis groaned and finally lowered Fluttershy toward the ground. "Will you at least make Fluttershy brutalize some younglings?"

"I'll try. No promises," Rainbow Dash assured him.

"I'll take it." Tellis finally dropped the yellow pony, and then swiftly walked off in a random direction.

"You all right, Fluttershy? He's been holding onto you for a while," Rainbow remarked.

"Oh, no, I'm fine. I'm actually pretty used to it by now. And he almost never tries to juggle me anymore." Fluttershy smiled reassuringly, and Rainbow chuckled.

"All right, then. Let's get to conquering the town!" Rainbow adjusted her visor scope, zooming in on the main cluster of structures ahead. Her targeting auspex picked out the many diamond dogs sheltering next to windows and peeking out at the invaders from behind corners. None made any aggressive moves or seemed to be waiting in ambush, and she saw no indication of any weapons more advanced than a wooden cudgel.

"This'll be easy. We just have to find the mayor or whatever the dogs put in charge of their villages, and make him surrender. We probably won't even need to hurt anyone." Rainbow trotted down the main road, her armor servos humming with every step. Fluttershy followed behind her, creeping fearfully in the other pony's shadow.

"Do you really think we won't need to fight them?" the meek pegasus asked hopefully.

"Probably. I mean, what're they gonna do? Just look at me!" Rainbow Dash pounded a foreleg against her chest plate. Then she pointed a leg forward, toward a larger building that had a playground out front. "In the meantime, you check out that school. If you find any kids, take their lunch money."

Fluttershy gasped. "I couldn't! That's terrible!"

"Well, yeah. Barely," the armored pegasus reasoned, "look, you have to at least TRY to do something aggressive and pirate-like, or Tellis is never going to get off your case. Do you want to turn into some kind of blood-drinking lunatic?"

"No! Never!"

"Good, because we have plenty of those around. So go intimidate some pups for their pocket change. It's pretty much the weakest form of piracy there is," Rainbow Dash reasoned, "it'll also keep you away from any of the guards, since you don't have your armor on. Picking on little kids is pretty much all you're equipped for right now."

Fluttershy glanced over to the rickety school building nervously. "I suppose you're right, Rainbow..."

"Of course I am! Between us and Tellis, we'll have this place locked down in two shakes of a feather!" Rainbow gave her childhood friend a hearty pat on the back to encourage her. Fluttershy quickly jumped forward toward her objective, perhaps because "hearty pats" from ponies in power armor tended to bruise more than encourage.

Once Fluttershy was creeping toward the school building at a nice solid snail's pace, Rainbow Dash jumped into the air. She shifted her jets to a hover, and then started a low-speed sweep over the settlement.

There were a few diamond dogs hiding among the exterior of the shabby huts rather than inside, although they quickly moved to remedy that as soon as they spotted a gleaming suit of armor zooming overhead on a set of rocket boosters.

Rainbow Dash couldn't help but snort while she watched the town's dogs yelp in fright and bolt for their houses.

"Geez, is the whole war going to be like this? We send a couple ponies in and everyone shuts themselves in their homes and cowers? Why didn't they just surrender to us on the spot, then?"

She found a larger building that seemed like it was built to slightly more robust standards than the majority of the village, and was also clearly larger than a regular house needed to be. There was also a diamond dog with a helmet peeking out through the window.

"Really, the dogs should be GLAD I'm doing this! If the Orks showed up they'd all be dead! And if the Company armies showed up they'd be marching these losers right into the slave camps!"

She landed in front of the larger building, her flight pack steaming and her targeting auspex coming alive. "Knock knock, mutts!"

One shot from an impulse blaster caved in the door. Rainbow Dash stepped inside, counting the number of scan targets scrolling up her visor display. There were several more diamond dogs within, although they were covering behind furniture and walls while nervously clutching crude melee weapons. She couldn't really blame them.

"Yo! Who's in charge around here? I want to talk to them about a limited-time offer on complete military surrenders. Act now and I won't even take your sad little spears." The pegasus glanced left and right, searching for something that looked like the mayor's office in Ponyville. "C'mon guys, let's make this nice and painless. You give up, we swipe a few shiny things, and then you're with us. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? Hello?"

Rainbow entered another room, and she heard the sound of footsteps rushing off into an adjoining hall.

"You know that if you all run away, we get the town by default, right? I'm just gonna plant a flag in the middle of town and you'll have soldiers running... hm?"

She briefly scanned the table, and then noticed that a paper map was spread out with several pins marking certain points. She hopped up onto the surface for a better look.

Aside from the pins, there were other marks over the map. Markers, ink blots, and tiny flags created a confusing variety of labels across the parchment. Rainbow Dash couldn't make sense of them off-hoof, but noticed that the biggest "marker" of all was a dagger plunged into the center of the map, pinning it in place. The dagger was poised over a certain city that had only recently been added to most maps of the region, on account of it having been built mere months ago: Ferrous Dominus.

"What is all this? It looks like a war room," the pegasus mumbled. There were sheets of paper pinned to the wall, and notes laid about the table as well. She placed an armored hoof on one such sheet, and read off the contents.

"Thirty-one. Sixteen A. Three OP. Weap ship, four. Twenty, zero-three. What's 'weap ship'? Whatever... Twenty. Eight A. One OP. Exp ship, six. Twenty-one, zero-three..."

Rainbow trailed off, staring down at the note. There were many more lines of numbers below that one, and all of them led her to one inescapable conclusion.

"This... is WAY too complicated for diamond dogs to be working with," Rainbow said aloud. "What is all this stuff? Some kind of code?"

She was distantly aware of some shuffling noises coming from down the hall, but she had long since stopped caring about the canines skulking about.

"Okay, wait. This is supposed to be a trading village, right? Maybe it's like an inventory?" She tapped on the side of her helmet. "Hey, a little help, here?"

Small squares spontaneously appeared over several numbers in her visor, and the power armor's logic engine started analyzing them for context. Before long it began labeling the data.

"All right, so the last number is the date, these numbers are objects... what objects?" the pegasus mumbled. Another marker appeared on a different note that contained a different list. Rainbow Dash peered closer.

"More numbers?! This is ridiculous! Why couldn't they have a nice, simple memo lying around to explain things rather than their dumb math homework?" the armored pony griped.

Another marker flashed on her visor, outlining a sheet of paper pinned to the wall.

"Oh, hey. I wasn't even serious." Rainbow hopped off the table and trotted up to the note, reading it as soon as she got close enough. "Reminder: do not leave empty cartridges behind after practicing with laser weapons! And STOP 'testing' the human explosives! We can't afford to waste any more! This means YOU, Golma!"

Rainbow Dash blinked and furrowed her brow. "Wait... so... this place is-"

Then the numbers "3.2" started flashing on her visor, along with an arrow that pointed to her side.

"No! Quit it! Stop it with the numbers! I... wait, is that a cool factor?"

"NOW!! Get her!" shouting an unfamiliar and rather angry voice.

Rainbow Dash had been expecting resistance in the village. Mostly in the sense that she expected diamond dogs to pelt her with spears or crossbow bolts. If the village leaders had been investing a lot in security, then it was even plausible that she'd end up fighting guards with magic weapons or crude bombs that could pose a serious threat to her armor.

What she had absolutely not expected was to get flanked by someone with a boltgun.

Rainbow lurched to the side as mass-reactive rounds hammered her legs and wings, throwing up flashing red damage alerts. Then new alerts started coming from her OTHER side, and the crack of lasguns joined the ferocious roar of the bolter. Albeit at least the lasbolts didn't toss her around from the explosive impacts.

Rainbow was already in a panic, and a dozen questions shot through her mind as she stumbled around for some kind of cover or path of retreat. That panic reached a peak when a grenade bounced onto the floor under her nose.

"EXIT STAGE UP!!" the pegasus hit all of her impulse blasters at once, launching her straight into, and through, the ceiling. The poorly-constructed roofing proved little impediment to her ascent once her thrusters kicked in, and, most crucially, presented a less dangerous impact than a grenade explosion. After tearing through the clay tiling and bursting into the sky, Rainbow kept flying upward until she could hear the sound of her flight pack over her own heartbeat.

"Okay. Okay! I'm clear! Great." She finally leveled out her flight and started sorting through all the damage indicators on her visor. Meaning she discarded all of them with barely a glance. "So. What's going on here? We have diamond dogs, Company weapons, and apparently some kind of planning table. This... This must be some kind of secret military hideout!" She frowned. "But where did they get bolters and lasguns?"

Her musing was cut short by another visor alert. It clocked in at a 2.1, and was captioned with the label "neato".

Spinning about in the air, Rainbow Dash was treated to the sight of a pair of griffons rushing up toward her while bearing swords. It was pretty neat, to be honest.

"All right guys, look; I'll give you an 'A' for effort, but you should stick to jumping me when I'm on the ground, indoors, and surrounded." Her flight pack spread open, and the rumble of her impulse jets rose while she bracketed the lead flyer with her visor. "Last chance to give up! And I'd like to point out that I'm making this offer AFTER you already tried to kill me!"

The griffons slowed their ascent, scowling at her. "And serve as the humans' slaves and attack hounds, like you cowardly equines? Never! We'd rather die than submit to Chaos!"

Rainbow's eyes narrowed dangerously at the term "cowardly". "Well, glad we have that cleared up. I'ma smash your beaks in, now."

The griffons split up in the air, one ascending straight toward the armored pony while the other swooped in lower with the intent of coming in from another angle. It was a classic tactical maneuver for airborne melee fighters working in pairs and something that Rainbow Dash knew about from her days of studying Wonderbolt flight techniques. A pretty good move, if one wasn't an aerial ace encased in a shell of rocket-propelled ceramite shielding.

Rainbow blasted toward the first attacker, moving her trajectory as if she was going to barrel headfirst into him. Which wasn't a bad strategy itself, since she would obviously "win" that kind of collision, but she had something better planned. When it came to flying, at least, Rainbow Dash could think more than one step ahead.

The griffon started shifting his pose, ready to dodge out of the way as he adjusted his flight for her velocity. He spun and slashed at just the right moment, an impressive flap of one wing pushing him out of Rainbow's path. At the same time, Rainbow hit one impulse blaster, launching her to the side. Then another, swinging her ahead. An eye blink later, another one of her boots fired, throwing her backward straight toward her opponent. By the time the mare's boot impacted the griffon's side, he had barely completed his swing and was just starting to wonder how she had evaded.

As the first of the insurgents spun away with several ribs pulverized, Rainbow swung easily around to the second. This one was almost as shocked by Rainbow's agility as her actual target, and hesitated on her assault path.

"And YOU get ninja stars to the face!" Rainbow Dash declared, bracketing the remaining foe and firing a spray.

Unfortunately, the spray was less "concentrated rifle burst" and more "out-of-control water hose". Her shuriken catapult spasmed and flailed while firing dozens of ultra-sharp blades every which way, with absolutely no respect for where she had been aiming.

"Hey! Whoa! What the hay is this?! Why isn't it working?" Rainbow demanded. A diagram immediately flashed on her visor, displaying a wire-frame image of her shuriken catapult and helpfully informing her that a critical servo assembly had been damaged earlier. Not only was the machine's efforts ultimately futile, but it also obscured her vision at a moment when she was still facing an enemy in close quarters.

The griffon warrior slashed at Rainbow's belly, and the pegasus flinched at the shriek of tearing metal. Then her opponent grabbed onto her helmet, rearing the sword back for another strike.

Another burst from her impulse blasters broke the griffon's grip and sent Rainbow Dash hurtling away. She quickly hit her boosters and corkscrewed, trying to gain some time and distance to think.

"Okay, fine. So the gun is broken. I can do without it. These guys are a little better armed than I expected, but they're still no Orks!"

Another diagram flickered on the corner of her visor. Rainbow glanced at it briefly, and her eyes widened.

"Holy hay! How did that guy actually damage the plating?!" She growled and twisted around, spotting the griffon coming up on another attack curve. It seemed that even these guys' melee weapon technology had been upgraded. Where had they gotten all this gear?

She successfully dodged aside as the griffon sliced through the air where Rainbow's head had been. Her body twisted around sharply, and she hit her boosters again at precisely the worst time... for her opponent. A jet of flame scorched the griffon badly, and she squawked in pain and started flailing in the air.

Rainbow zipped around in a wide circle, aiming to knock her foe out of the sky and force her to land. Before she could, however, new readings on the "coolness sensor" started popping up, and spears of red light started darting up around her.

"Seriously! Why do these guys have our weapons? Tell me they don't have an autocannon or something too!" she griped, barrel rolling to throw off the firing line on the ground.

"Damn it, she's too fast! We can't hit her at this range!" complained a diamond dog, raising his lasrifle. Four other canines were spraying fans of lasers into the air uselessly, crouched behind a line of crates. None were marksmen under ideal circumstances, and trying to hit a supersonic target zig-zagging through the air some one hundred meters in the air was far from ideal.

"Just keep the tinhead away from Gella! We only need a few more minutes!" Another griffon was moving up to the barricade, carrying the warrior that Rainbow Dash had swatted out of the sky over his shoulder. "I'm heading into the tunnels! As soon as Gella gets back here, we're in full retreat! Move into the tunnels and collapse them!"

Another of the diamond dogs stopped shooting and turned toward the conscious griffon. "What about the cargo?"

"We're moving as much as we can, but we have to get out of here!" he snapped back. "Unless you think some laser gun is worth your lives, you..."

He trailed off when he heard the sound of another flight pack approaching from behind a nearby building. "Oh, Tartarus, not another one!"

Indeed there was 'another one', and a gleaming figure in silver and gold rocketed over the roof of the central trading house while trailing smoke and flame. One diamond dog spun around and raised his weapon, but didn't even get to fire a shot before the new combatant landed a short distance away. The impact threw the bipedal canines off their feet, as well as blasting a wave of dirt into the fighter's faces.

When the obscuring smoke and dust passed, the insurgent fighters found themselves staring up into the mask of a Chaos Raptor.

"Hey, any of you guys have a bag I can steal?" Tellis asked.

Nobody answered right away, or even dared to move. The diamond dog that had been about to shoot at him slowly got to his feet, slightly bewildered that the Iron Warrior wasn't attacking.

That dog snapped his lasgun up into firing position. Tellis swatted the gun aside with a backhand that sent the gun bouncing away across the ground before the canine had even realized what had happened.

"I guess a crate or barrel would also work," Tellis informed them. "Anyone? C'mon, it can't be THAT hard to find a stupid sack around here. What do YOU guys use for looting the weak and helpless?"

"There's... a crate over there..." the griffon said slowly, having some difficulty understanding the current situation. He pointed toward the large wooden cubes making up the barricades.

"Cool. Thanks." Tellis walked past the native warriors, not seeming to notice as they all bolted for the nearest buildings while whimpering in terror. He grabbed one such crate and lifted it, only to notice that it was already full.

"Oh, hey, are they already stuffed with treasure? Because that would make this even easier!" The Iron Warrior pried off the top and looked inside the container. "Damn. Just military equipment. I don't need this crap." He upended the crate, dumping about twenty helmets - with cuts at the top for equine ears - onto the ground.

Tellis was still determining whether he needed to keep a hand free to carry Fluttershy or if he could put her in one of the loot crates when something hit the ground behind him. He glanced back and saw a badly crippled female griffon curled up in the dirt, and a mono-molecular-edged short sword lying next to her.

He tilted his head up. "Hey, Dash. How's the conquest and subjugation going?"

"Lousy!" Rainbow Dash snapped before she swooped down into a hover. "Did you know these guys have Company weapons? I almost got torn in half by a boltgun earlier!"

"Nope, didn't notice," Tellis said while dumping fragmentation grenades out of a second crate and onto the ground.

"Well, they do! There's something fishy going on!" the pegasus said. "We have to take a few of these chumps back for interrogation."

"And how are we supposed to do that? I can't carry the loot and Flutters AND some dying enemies!" The Chaos Raptor held up the two empty crates. "Look, we have to make a decision here. Which is more important: my short-term financial stability, or whatever you were talking about that isn't that first thing?"

Rainbow clicked her tongue. "I'll bet if the others were here, they'd come up with some way to steal valuables AND figure this out. I feel like this could be important!"

"Speaking of others, where'd you drop off Shy? She didn't get captured or anything, did she?" Tellis started looking around the various crude shacks to spot the other pegasus.

"Nah, she's off shaking down some children." Rainbow smirked and tapped a boot against the Chaos Lord's shoulder pad. "It's not quite pillaging a town, but it's a start, right?"

"Only if she wins," Tellis pointed out. He was staring at something off to the side.

"Come on, Tell! Even Shy can handle a bunch of little puppies!" the mare snorted. Then she turned to look where Tellis was looking.

Fluttershy was bound and gagged, and being carried through town by a half-dozen excited young diamond dogs. The meek pony managed to spot her allies as she was being hauled through town, and she desperately wiggled her hooves and lashed around her tail to try to get their attention.

"... Okay, but technically this is still your fault for not letting her put her armor on, first," Rainbow muttered.

"True. She would have been able to hide from the helpless younglings then," Tellis admitted. "Can you go rescue her? I still have to go steal stuff."

"Yeah, okay, fine..."

****

Ponyville

Tox had gained a surprising amount of respect for the Cult of Nurgle during the course of her operation.

Not that she considered the tenets of the disease-based religion anything less than madness incarnate. Nor did she admire the filthy creature that she had come to replace in any way. She still loathed the idea of dealing with swarms of parasites, diseased growths, and assorted filth for its own sake.

Which was ultimately the point. This cult had come up with a remarkable defense against infiltration and subterfuge. Tox was positive that any lesser changeling would have abandoned their mission or completely blown their cover by now. She couldn't guarantee that SHE wouldn't still do that as she progressed further, and she was one of the changeling elite and had access to an apparently unlimited supply of magical power and nourishment. She couldn't possibly imagine any enemy standing against the Cult of Nurgle with anything less than overwhelming power and purely murderous intent. And who knows if even that would work?

Tox staggered through the streets of Ponyville like a cripple, completely miserable. The stench was nearly unbearable. Her tears had gathered in little pools in her goggles, and her body was nearly on fire underneath the vile robes of her victim. She had used every method - magic or mundane - that she could think of to remove the colonies of parasites within Kruss's clothes without damaging the garment itself. Evidently it had not been enough. Twinges of pain and a fiery itch crawled over her skin. She believed Kruss about the power of his god, Nurgle, simply because nothing short of divine intervention could make this tolerable when she knew damn well he had access to non-infested clothes and chose not to get any.

On the other hand, her efforts were working. Tox's vile stench had the denizens of Ponyville clearing a wide swath of ground in front of her, but otherwise paid little attention to her presence. Which was good, because she couldn't be sure if she was up to a conversation as Kruss just yet.

"All right. You can do this," Tox hissed under her breath, standing in front of the Nethalican, "I just need to get this fool's access card and inform the other priests that I'll be leaving for Ferrous Dominus. After I'm in the fortress, I can choose another human and replace him, perhaps. but first I need the access card."

Kruss had revealed that such identification was necessary to get into secure facilities, and that the entire city of Ferrous Dominus counted as such. The card was also keyed to a specific individual, and apparently included something called a "gene mapping test". He had been clear that he had no idea if shape-changing magic would be able to fool such a check, but at the very least he was sure she would have to enter the fortress under the guise of whoever's card she had.

It was all so strange... he had revealed everything she wanted to know, except why he was being so forthcoming. She had to assume there was something he wasn't telling her; some aspect of her mission or obstacle that had not occurred to her. But even then, she was going into this next phase of her mission much better prepared than she had hoped.

The front gates of the Chaos temple cracked open, and Tox shuffled uneasily. A man in black robes soon emerged, pausing in surprise when he spotted Tox.

"Brother Kruss, hello. You're late for evening services." His tone suggested he was quite ambivalent about missing the Nurgle Cultist. Good. The less questions and complaints, the better.

"I had some errands to run," Tox mumbled, shuffling past the other clergyman.

She paused in surprise and no small amount of awe as she stopped and beheld the interior of the Nethalican.

Black iron and carved ebony was the order of the day, composing by far the greater portion of the temple's interior. A wide stairway descended into the ground where a huge pit held the temple's pews for the worshipers. Walkways and bridges surrounded the pit, and other alcoves held small libraries, desks, and what appeared to be prison cells. High above the prayer pit was a massive chandelier in the shape of a Chaos Star (naturally) suspended by massive chains and covered in candles and skulls.

What dominated the temple, no doubt, was the Dark Portal. Tox had never known much about it, but had gathered that it was the "power source" of the building and probably also the reason that it apparently imparted a contact high to changelings. Behind the pulpit, supported by a dozen hefty chains, was what appeared to be a circular wall of fire within an iron ring. It was suspended off the ground and surrounded by glowing runes on both the floor, walls, and the chains themselves. It was beautiful in the way that only a magical abomination could be, and the changeling guardian felt a happy tingle roll through her body that actually let her forget about the repulsive insects burrowing into her skin.

"Uh... Brother Kruss? Is something the matter?"

Tox started, almost jumping in surprise. She had been standing in place gawking at the temple and soaking in the Nethalican's energies. Probably not a very human thing to do. "Yes, sorry. Lost my train of thought for a bit." She coughed to clear her throat. Then she coughed some more, as clearing her throat seemed to take a bit more effort than she had expected. The other priests seemed unbothered, luckily.

Once Tox had her breathing under control, she looked back and forth to try to reconcile the layout of the Nethalican with what Kruss had told her. She spotted the area which was supposed to hold his quarters, and that of the other Cultist personnel.

"I just have something to collect, and I'll be on my way," she assured the other Cultist, "I have business in Ferrous Dominus, so I'll be transferring there immediately."

The man quirked an eyebrow beneath his hood. "I see. Well, that's something of a shame. You were making some great progress here. These ponies seemed slightly vulnerable to Nurgle's attentions, and I know Apple Bloom was looking forward to seeing Gardenblight completed."

"That... uh, yes. Sure. Quite a pity," Tox mumbled, fighting the urge to clear her throat again. "Oh, one more thing: where is Father Virgil?"

"Right behind you," said an unfamiliar, monotone voice.

Tox yelped and jumped in surprise, and then immediately doubled over into a coughing fit again.

"Brother Leonard, are you okay? Nurgle's gifts seem to weigh heavily upon you today," remarked the Cultist. Virgil simply watched silently until Tox got her breathing under control and stood up straight again.

"Y-Yes! I'm fine! Just a... a new infection! It's great! Since I just LOVE being horribly, horribly sick!" Tox gasped out.

"Heh. Yeah, you sure do. Anyway, what did you want to see Father Virgil for?"

Tox finally turned to look at the Chaos Priest. He was tall and lithe, with dark skin and a pair of heavy shackles on his wrists that didn't seem to be attached to anything. Most obviously, there was a metal Chaos Star that appeared to be attached directly to the top of the priest's skull.

"I... just wanted to let you know that I would be leaving for Ferrous Dominus today." She quickly brushed past Virgil, hoping against hope that both the Chaos devotees would be too glad to be rid of her to examine her story or behavior any more closely.

"Hold," Virgil commanded, dashing that hope. Tox froze in place, already working out in her head which spells to use to disable these two.

"Brother Leonard Kruss," Virgil continued, "or whoever you are. We two must be leaving immediately. There's a daemonic infestation at the edge of town in need of exorcizing."

Tox flinched.

"We're exorcising a daemon?" asked the Cultist, looking surprised.

"No. There's an equine priest and pair of mages heading to the location to do that. We're heading out to watch and manage wagers on who dies." Virgil reached into his robe and pulled out a single heavy iron key. Then he tossed it to Tox, who snatched it out of the air on reflex. "You will be here on your own. Make sure that the incredibly powerful and important Dark Portal is not disrupted. And if you head out, lock up before you leave."

Virgil turned sharply and headed toward the door, leaving behind the bewildered infiltrator. The other Chaos clergyman followed, glancing back at Tox before heading out through the front gates.

"So... what did you mean when you referred to Brother Leonard as 'whoever you are'?"

Virgil shrugged, closing the gate behind him. "Probably nothing."

"Probably...?"

The gates to the temple creaked shut, leaving Tox alone with nothing but her thundering heartbeat and the parasites in her robes.

"Well... that was..." she trailed off, words failing her. Had Virgil just acknowledged she was a spy, and then ignored her?

She shook her head and rushed to the office Kruss had told her about. Then she headed to the desk in the back, isolated off in the corner. Nurgle's Mark was carved into the surface, and it was covered in musty scrolls and bottles full of dubious fluids.

Tox opened one drawer, and then immediately recoiled as tiny dark shapes started crawling out of it. "No, no, NO! Disgusting!" She almost loosed a firebolt into the drawer before remembering that there was probably something important inside.

"Hive Mother help me, why didn't I use a Khorne Cultist?" She moaned to herself, opening the drawer the rest of the way. "Got it!" She reached in, picked up a blank, silver card, and then shook it to rid it of the insects crawling on it as best she could. "Stupid, ridiculous, vile, HAKK!" Tox started coughing violently on the spot, merely adding another token discomfort to the current awful situation.

Once she got her breathing under control, Tox leaned against the wall and observed the security card. She couldn't see any identifying markings or features; if it weren't for her ability to sense dishonesty in her captive, he could have easily been lying to her.

She turned away and headed back toward the main antechamber. There may have been more useful objects in the desk, but she couldn't bring herself to dig around in the hideously infested furniture.

"I've informed them that I'm leaving, and I have everything I need," Tox mumbled, stepping out into the hall, "putting aside that one priest might know... something, I'm clear to access the fortress."

Then she paused, glancing back behind the temple pulpit. The Dark Portal sat there, humming and burning with untold power. Alone and unobserved.

Tox licked her lips.

"What would it be like... up close?" she wondered. There was no one to catch her this time. And even if there was, it didn't seem odd to her for a Chaos Cultist to be mesmerized by an arcane portal.

She quickly scurried up onto the altar, gazing hungrily at the flickering lights within the swirling disc. Tox already felt energy seeping into her. The power that she normally leeched from unwilling, unaware individuals clinging obliviously to their emotions poured freely like a river. It was like soaking in a pool of power and nourishment, and the feeling only grew stronger as she advanced. The itching of her skin, the weariness in her body, and a quite new and rather dubious pain in her chest all seemed to fade away in proximity to the creeping light.

What might it be like to touch the portal, she wondered. What new miracles would she witness? What power would be hers? Tox vaguely recalled being warned about the Nethalican. Something about disrupting it? Would touching it disrupt it?

Tox decided to find out.

Dipping her hand into the Nethalican produced a few alarming effects right away.

For starters, her hand became a hoof again. She wasn't sure how, or even precisely when, she changed back to her natural form. She was simply distantly aware that it had happened.

The reason that such an alarming and potentially dangerous thing was at the back of her mind was because her mind was filled with a lot of other things all of a sudden, and most of them were screaming at her. Otherworldly shrieking pierced her brain in ways that no ordinary sound could, carrying with it terrible secrets and images of fantastic ruin. Hatred, pain, love, and pleasure surrounded her and rocked her thoughts with phenomenal violence. Her world was a dizzying array of colors, feelings, and the furious roars of a thousand dead souls.

Tox couldn't exactly tell her own, discrete thoughts and emotions from the hundreds of other ones invading her brain while she was connected to the Dark Portal. But after the fact, she decided she definitely panicked at some point and fired a spell desperately into the Nethalican.

A pulse of force blasted out from the portal, wrenching Tox free of the magical rupture and flinging her across the altar. Her body slammed into the podium at the front, which she was quite unhappy to learn was ALSO made of reinforced metal.

"Augh! What... What's going on?!" she shouted desperately. Her senses were completely off-kilter, and the changeling flailed desperately on the ground as if in the throes of the most terrifying nightmare.

Eventually, the cacophony of insanity in her mind stilled to the point that she could differentiate the images in her thoughts from the ones provided by her eyes. Even then, voices in her head continued speaking and shouting, and she laid on the floor trembling, willing them to fall silent.

The Nethalican suddenly crackled, and the chains rattled. Tox snapped her head toward the Dark Portal, her eyes wide.

The portal's eye was shifting and spiraling in a wash of colors now, where before it had been a solid, furious red. She had no idea what that meant, exactly, but by now the changeling spy was quite sure that toying with the portal had been a terrible mistake.

Tox clambered off the floor. Or tried to, anyway. Her legs got tangled in the filthy robes she was wearing, and besides that her body felt weak.

Not weak as in malnourished, or under power. She had ample energy. Even more than she thought she was capable of containing, in fact. But some sort of other condition seemed to weigh upon her. Her lungs burned, and drool seemed to be seeping from her mouth in unusual quantities. Her muscles responded sluggishly and with constant twinges of pain.

At first she was tempted to blame the parasites, but they shouldn't have been able to affect her changeling physiology like this. If any of them even survived the Nethalican's mana pulse, that is. Most lesser changelings would have been scorched to a wispy husk after a shock like that.

"What is this?! What's happening to me?!" she screamed, her legs shaking.

"Welcome, insect!" bellowed a voice from within her head. It was but one of many, yet Tox immediately focused on it as being the clearest and most coherent of the insane chorus. "Before, you were lost. Alone. Apart. Now you are one of us. Part of our family. Come to us. Let us make you whole."

Tox scrambled away from the Nethalican, ignoring the voice. She threw off Kruss's diseased robes, not noticing as the access card - the entire point of her coming here - bounced out of an interior pocket and onto the floor. Only the amulet bearing the Mark of Nurgle remained among the trappings she had stolen from Leonard Kruss, and the metal pendant rattled around her neck while she scrambled, gasping, for the door.

She didn't change her form. She didn't cast any spells. She burst from the temple and took flight, soaring into the cool night sky, hacking and wheezing desperately. She barely had enough sense of mind to change her heading toward her "home base" where Kruss was imprisoned.

At no point did she notice that the Mark of Nurgle on Kruss's amulet was glowing a sickly, luminescent green the entire time.

****

Everfree Forest - "abandoned" lair

"Kruss! KRUSS!! Kru-HGK! Kack! Hakk!"

Tox staggered into the cave she had refashioned as a home base, pausing only long enough complete another coughing fit. They were getting worse: more painful, for one, and more common. Also, she'd started coughing up fluids that she didn't recognize. That probably wasn't good.

"KRUSS!!" she screamed, walking further into the cave.

"Why are you shouting like you're expecting me to come to you?" Kruss answered from deeper within the cave. "I'm chained to the wall, remember?"

"Shut up!" the changeling wheezed, finally rounding the bend that put her within line of sight of her captive.

"Hello, infiltrator. Did you recover the key card?" Kruss asked amiably.

"The... The key...?" Tox wondered at that for a few seconds, trying to grasp the memory of her main objective through the haze of pain and misery. Eventually she discarded it. "Forget the key card! What's happening to me?!" she snarled. Then she collapsed into another coughing fit.

"It looks like you've come down with something," Kruss deadpanned, "congratulations."

"Come down with... what? What are you going on about?" Tox stepped up to the Cultist, snarling angrily. "Something happened! It started after I put on your robes! My lungs started to hurt, and I feel cold, and I can't stop coughing!"

"Okay, so you're sick," Kruss shrugged.

"I'm what? Sick?! Like, with a disease?!" Tox looked absolutely stunned.

"... Yeah. Like, with a disease," Kruss replied, "you seriously didn't consider that until I pointed it out?"

"Impossible!" the changeling shouted. "I am a guardian changeling! One of the master breeds! Our kind do not suffer illness! I cannot get sick!"

"You're not the first one to think that," Kruss pointed out, "and Lord Nurgle takes it as something of a challenge."

Tox started to say something else, only to descend into another violent coughing fit. Leonard Kruss watched, his lips turning into a small smile.

"It is all right, guardian. Illness is a natural part of the great cycle. It is nothing to fear."

"Nothing to fear?! I'm dying!" Tox gasped. "How does one recover from being sick?!"

Kruss barely managed to keep from chortling in amusement. It was bad form, what with the infiltrator being so earnestly terrified. "Well, if you don't normally get sick, then your body probably lacks the mechanisms to recover on its own once you actually DO catch a disease. There are medicines, but you'd have to pose as me again... and even if you were up to that, a Nurgle Cultist buying medicine would raise some eyebrows."

Tox whimpered. "Then... Then this is it? I die here? Not to the human security or pony magic or that accursed priest who maybe COULD tell that I was a spy but refused to call me out on it for some reason, but because YOU choose not to wash your clothes?!"

"You don't HAVE to die, guardian. There is... another way." Kruss was grinning openly now. He had the creature right where he wanted her.

Or rather, where Nurgle wanted her.

"How? What can heal me?" Tox demanded. Her eyes flashed green, but the glow weakened almost immediately.

"You don't need healing. This is a BETTER way," Kruss whispered. "You can stay sick without feeling a thing. You can be put at peace with your disease. You can contract further illness, and only get stronger from them."

"H-How? What do I-" a wave of dizziness struck Tox, and she stumbled as the room seemed to spin around her.

"Join me, Tox. Become one of my many children!"

"The voice! What is... that VOICE?!" the changeling demanded.

"Join us, Tox. Become part of our family," Kruss said softly.

Tox couldn't remember telling Kruss her name. Had she done that? her memory was a little fuzzy right now.

"I... I have a family! The hive mother! My sisters! Our drones!" she protested, quivering.

"And yet, none of them are here for you," Kruss pointed out.

"We will protect you, child. Open yourself to me."

The voice was so cheerful and inviting. Almost... grandfatherly? Was that the word? Tox didn't know where it came from, but it sounded right.

"I can't! I can't join you!" the changeling wailed. She stumbled onto the ground, weeping openly and increasingly delirious. "I can't betray Mother Chrysalis! She is everything to me! I won't leave her! EVER!!"

The voice paused. Kruss hesitated with it.

Then Kruss cupped the side of Tox's muzzle with his free hand. Tox didn't remember getting within arm's reach, because that was just not a smart thing to do with a prisoner, but somehow the man's touch felt WONDERFUL to her. As if a brush of his fingers could make every ache, itch, and twitch of pain vanish in an instant.

"You needn't leave her," the Cultist assured her.

"I... don't?"

"She can join us, too," laughed the voice.

"She... can?"

"ALL your people can, Tox."

"They... can, can't they? We can all... be a family! We can all share this power!" Tox started panting, her breath becoming ever more heated and more drool spilling onto the rock below her.

"You need only open your heart to Nurgle, Tox."

"Spread my wonderful plagues, and my love shall swallow your hive and run rampant over this beautiful world! All creatures, big and small, living in harmony and united in my garden of pestilence!"

Tox could feel the voice now. Not just in her head, but digging through her entire body. It didn't feel as bad as she'd thought it would. It felt... rather nice, actually.

"Yes... thank you, Grandfather!" Tox gasped. Her eyes started to close. "Please... free me!"

"We will free ALL your people," Kruss assured her, stroking her head as she lost consciousness, "rest, now. There will be much to do tomorrow."

****

Ponyville - Nethalican

The following morning

"Father Virgil, what did you say to Brother Kruss before we left last evening?"

"I instructed him to lock up the temple before he left for the night."

"And what did he DO, Father?"

"He left the premises with the front gate wide open."

"That IDIOT!"

An assembly of Chaos clergy, ranging from Virgil to apprentice monks, all stared at the interior of the Chaos temple in exasperation and anger. Farm animals had gathered along the pews, braying and running around in circles insanely. In the hallway, a few ponies were sleeping among clusters of empty bottles, having apparently wandered in during a drunken stupor.

"The Apples aren't going to be happy about this," mumbled a monk.

"NOBODY is happy about this!"

"I don't know about that," another Cultist stepped out of the offices, "there's a pair of teenage ponies knobbing on Velmon's desk. They seem pretty happy."

"Damn it all!"

"Also, I think some Sunsworn got in here last night, too."

"Why? What makes you say that?"

"I don't know anyone else who would paint a mural of Princess Celestia's arse in the library."

"GAH!! Bastards! As if it doesn't look ENOUGH like a Slaaneshi whorehouse in here!" He gave one of the sleeping vagrants a solid kick in the side, and the pony woke up with a pained yelp. "This is a place of worship, damn it!"

"So is a Slaaneshi whorehouse, technically..."

"Shut your useless mouth and find a mop!"

"Hold on... is that Brother Leonard's robe?"

"So in addition to the temple being wrecked, the Nurgle Acolyte may be running around town in the nude. This has 'long day' written ALL over it."

The Cultists started cleaning up the place, dragging the livestock outside and gathering up the empty liquor bottles.

All the while, Virgil remained silent and stood in place, staring up at the Nethalican. The portal shook with unusual violence, and the angry red colors that normally pulsed within the containment iris were instead a shifting, vibrant cascade. Virgil also noticed that the Dark Portal was radiating a much higher level of psionic energy than normal. The dark clergy, long used to the insane whispers and occasional hallucinations, barely noticed any difference, but it was no coincidence that the nexus of corruption had attracted so many creatures too stupid or inebriated to know better.

"... This isn't good," the priest sighed. "The fleet..."

Author's Note

Oh, hey, a huge, unstable magic artifact! Let's poke at it! :D
Guess this pays out to all the readers who guessed Tox was going to end up in Nurgle's camp.

I've been binge-watching Futurama recently. Can you tell?!

Layovers are the Worst

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 7

Layovers are the Worst

****

Harvest of Steel – psionic isolation cell

A buzzing noise came from the vox caster on the wall, and Twilight looked up from her dataslate to see who was trying to meet with her.

“Hi, Spike! Come on in!” Twilight stepped over to the room’s console and pressed a few buttons with her hoof. One side of the circular cell rolled open, admitting the young dragon inside.

“Hey, Twi. How’re you holding up?” Spike entered the cell hesitantly.

“Oh, just fine! This place is great! A little lonely, but, you know, that’s why they call it an isolation cell! Ha ha!” She grinned somewhat anxiously. “What’ve you got for me today? Or tonight? Is it night time?”

Spike was carrying a dataslate and a bag with him, and he set the first item down before looking over the cell. The entire room was cylinder-shaped, and perhaps five meters in diameter. The interior was a pure enamel white, and that plus the bright lumens in the ceiling gave the cell a distinctly sanitized, surgical room look. Which wasn’t a bad thing on the face of it, but it clashed so completely with the gloomy industrial appearance of the rest of the ship that Spike honestly found the isolation cell creepier.

“There is no night time, remember? Space.” Spike looked over to a small pile of ration tins off to the side. “Have you been eating more than one ration a day? Didn’t you say that wasn’t a good idea?”

“Yes, I did! But don’t worry, I’ve been exercising! Sometimes I pace back and forth for hours! I won’t get fat!” Twilight insisted.

Spike winced. “That wasn’t really… uh… anyway! I got you a dataslate on spectral trans-Warp theory and its applications.” He pointed down at the dataslate on the floor. “Not the sort of information that just anyone can download! It was hard to convince the Techpriest to let me have it, and he definitely didn’t know I was going to give it to someone else. So keep this one hush-hush, all right?”

“Thank you, Spike!” Twilight gushed, grabbing her assistant into a hug.

“You’re welcome, Twi.” The young dragon patted her foreleg gently, and then waited for her to let go.

She didn’t.

“Uh… Twilight? You okay?” Spike asked nervously after a full minute passed.

The mare sniffled.

“Oh boy… what’s wrong? I thought you were doing fine in here!”

Twilight sniffled again. “I’m just… just a little lonely, you know? I miss you guys!” She clutched Spike even tighter, nuzzling against his head crest.

“It’s only been like three days!” Spike protested.

“The design of this room enhances the effects of physical isolation. It’s intensely psychological,” Twilight explained. While still hugging Spike desperately. “It’s a psyker thing. If they FEEL alone, then their powers act like they’re alone, and have difficulty perceiving others outside of the mundane senses. And being generally disconnected from the passage of time – in the form of night and day – inherently makes periods of depression seem longer and more pronounced!”

“So they don’t have any rooms that can protect you from daemons AND aren’t designed to make you miserable?”

“As a rule, Chaos only tends to want one of those things at a time.” Twilight started petting Spike gently along his back.

“Okay, well, can’t you talk to anyone? They didn’t take away your armor, did they? And that cogitator should have a vox connection.”

“Oh, yes, that’s true. I was talking to Gaela fairly often at the beginning. Too often, maybe. Because she started blocking my vox links.” Twilight paused, her ears flipping down. “And then I tried talking to Solon, and he did the same thing. And then Kaelith-“

“You tried to strike up a conversation with Kaelith?” Spike interrupted. “Aren’t you two still mad at each other over the daemon attacks?”

“I thought we could talk it out!” Twilight insisted. “Besides, I only tried him after selecting a few Dark Techpriests at random to try to chat with.” She cleared her throat. “Long story short, the entire Dark Mechanicus is ignoring me right now.”

“Twi, this isn’t really like you,” Spike squirmed slightly, but was unable to make any progress in getting free. “I would think you’d be pretty happy to be locked in a room with dozens of books. I mean, that was pretty much your entire school experience after sixth grade.”

“Not true!” Twilight said sharply. “I went to the senior prom, remember?”

“Because they held it in the LIBRARY,” Spike retorted, “I’m pretty sure you were there first and just refused to leave once they started setting up. But never mind that. Seriously, what’s the matter?”

Twilight pouted indignantly, but slowly released Spike from her grasp. “You’re right. I’m not just lonely. I’m scared. REALLY scared.” Spike watched the purple mare shiver, her wings shuffling uneasily on her back. “I didn’t take this trip thinking it would be easy, and everyone has been nothing but honest about the danger, but even THEY didn’t expect what happened last week.”

Twilight crouched on the floor, quivering, and Spike felt a wrenching sensation in his chest. He had always thought of Twilight Sparkle as one of the strongest, most courageous ponies he knew. And of the other ponies that earned that distinction, Twilight was one of the even rarer equines who could actually justify her courage. Seeing her now, curled up on the floor and shaking…

“Monsters were literally tearing themselves out of the bulkheads to kill me. ME, personally. The galaxy has a ACTUAL grudge against me, and… well… I guess I’m having some difficulty processing that.” Twilight’s voice wavered. “Is there any limit to that kind of power? Is this the work of some centralized intelligence? An organization? Are they going to chase me for the rest of my life? Is Equestria at risk? There are so many questions, and no answers!”

She felt Spike’s scales against her side again. This time her assistant was embracing her rather than vice versa, and his eyes silently asked her to continue.

“… I miss the girls. A lot. I really wish I had offered to let one or two of them come along. Isn’t that selfish? For all I know the daemons could want them dead too.”

“You don’t know that. It isn’t selfish,” Spike reassured her.

“Selfish or fair, it’s still futile. They’re not here. And the Iron Warriors…” she sighed. “I guess I shouldn’t complain. They’re working to protect me. But they’re really not a comforting bunch.”

“They have a lot of work to do on the ‘friendship’ thing, true. Gaela, too,” Spike mumbled.

“Again, not really fair. She has a job. And she refuses to be treated as a full-time foal-sitter, no matter how many ponies beg for her time and attention.” She paused. “Her exact words, actually.”

“I know. I read her noosphere notes too.”

“Maybe… in time this won’t seem like such a big deal,” Twilight reasoned, “when aliens first arrived, I thought serious warfare was horrifying. When I saw a pony kill another creature out of hatred, I felt like my world had unraveled a little bit. I thought at some point that swearing myself to fight for Solon was the most awful thing I’d ever have to do. And fighting Orks quickly went from terrifying maelstrom to a dangerous chore. Maybe this is just… the next step? Another hurdle to suffer through and overcome?”

“Another step on the path to what?” Spike asked.

Twilight decided very quickly that she didn’t want to think about that question. “Thank you for being here, Spike.”

“I can make time to be here more often, if you’d like,” the dragon offered, scratching lightly at Twilight’s withers. “I didn’t know you were so… so rattled.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Twilight whispered, smiling. “Just until we get out of Warp space. Which can’t happen too soon, as far as I’m concerned.”

The floor jolted, and Spike was flung backward into the wall. Twilight was already prone, so she merely flipped over onto her back with her eyes wide.

Bulkheads groaned and squealed all around her, and alarm klaxons began roaring in the halls outside.

Warning! Emergency Warp exit has been engaged! snarled a voice on the shipwide vox channel. All hands to battle stations!

The shaking intensified, and Twilight and Spike bounced around in a helpless panic for roughly twenty seconds.

Then the quaking started to weaken, and eventually it stopped. Spike and Twilight didn’t move, merely staring at each other bug-eyed.

Warp exit complete! All sections, damage report!

The vox caster cut out with a blast of static. The room was silent once again.

“…… I’m sorry,” Twilight whimpered, hanging her head.

“Not your fault!” Spike insisted, massaging his skull. “Not your fault at all! …… Right?”

They heard power armored boots stomping off outside the chamber. There had been a pair of Iron Warriors standing guard at the entrance as a further security measure against daemonic attack. Evidently they had both decided they had something better to do.

Twilight stared at the door for a few seconds, and then stood up fully. “Well, my fault or not, it looks like we’re in real space now. Which means I don’t have to be here anymore.”

Her horn flashed, and then her power armor appeared around her. “Let’s get out of here, Spike!” Her helmet winked into place next to her and she spent a moment to float it onto her head.

“You seem to be feeling a little better already,” he mumbled as he climbed up her side.

“Yes, actually. Dealing with a general catastrophe that only affects me incidentally is a relief.” The helmet seals engaged with a sharp hiss. “Apparently, this is what my comfort zone looks like now.”

The isolation cell slid open, and she trotted out into the hall. The entire interior of the ship was jumbled, with metal crates scattered across the flooring. A deck slave was being carried away down the hall by two other men, all of them looking somewhat battered. Still, the damage seemed to be of a strictly minor nature, at least in this section.

“Hear those alarms? That’s a tertius-level alert,” Twilight explained, “that means that we’re not under immediate threat of destruction. Whatever happened can’t be that bad.”

“Then why have an alarm for it?” Spike wondered aloud. “Also, where are we going? To find Gaela?”

“No, not this time. I don’t think Gaela is going to know much more about this than we do. It seemed to catch everybody by surprise.” Twilight frowned as she worked through her visor display. “Hold on, I’m uploading the local noosphere alerts.”

She galloped along through the halls in silence for several minutes after that. Iron Warriors ran past in the opposite direction, all of them with bolters at the ready. There was no indication they’d need them, but Spike supposed that with the sudden invasion in Warp space they weren’t taking any chances.

“Okay, apparently we had to exit because a Warp storm suddenly appeared on top of us,” Twilight said.

“A Warp storm? Like what was protecting Equestria from attacks?”

“Yes. You weren’t there for the battle against the Space Hulk, but I can assure you that those can tear apart even massive ships in short order.”

“Okay. So, where are we? Like, in the galaxy, I mean. Did we make it to the Face of Fear?”

“Eye of Terror, Spike.”

“Same difference.”

Twilight rolled her eyes and stopped at a transit hub. The stations acted as boarding platforms for a series of high-speed trains that brought crew swiftly between different portions of the ship, given that the ship itself was far too large to navigate quickly by foot. They also functioned as defensive hardpoints, because the Iron Warriors turned every location of importance into a defensive hardpoint.

“I’m pretty sure we’re not there yet. Or very close, either. According to the log, we’re in deep space. Nothing around for hundreds of thousands of kilometers in all directions.”

Twilight didn’t sound especially bothered by that, but Spike cringed. Being surrounded by vast, nearly unfathomable distances in all directions was not a comforting thought to him.

The transit car squealed into place in front of the access platform, and a number of lumens flashed danger warnings at the pair of Equestrians waiting to board.

As soon as the doors opened up a pair of Iron Warriors charged out of it, followed by two Dark Techpriests straining their augments in order to keep up. None paid the slightest attention to the alicorn or her passenger, which made Twilight glad she had thought not to stand directly in front of the exit.

She entered the train car and accessed the cogitator through her visor. “Section 2, please.”

“Acknowledged,” buzzed the robotic voice from above. The door swiftly shut before the entire car lurched into motion, accelerating far faster than was probably safe.

“Why do they have the weird robot voice do the unnecessary responses in the shuttle trains, the angry male voice do the automated messages explaining what’s going on, and happy-sounding girl voice for the deadly combat robots?” Spike asked. “Don’t you think those could be switched around a little?”

“It’s probably the result of a ruling class that sees psychology as a weakness to be overcome rather than a trait to be managed,” Twilight guessed. “But never mind that. I got another update. The fleet managed to exit safely, and there was very little structural damage to the vessels. Several crew injuries, but even there, nothing major, apparently. All the ships are ready to go.”

“That’s good!” Spike said brightly.

“Unfortunately, the local Warp space is still experiencing a dangerous storm. Until it stops or we travel far enough to get outside of its corresponding radius in the Empyrean, we can’t enter the Warp.”

“That’s bad,” Spike noted sadly.

“Correct. Without Warp travel, I’m pretty sure our ETA is longer than our natural lifetimes.”

Spike frowned. “But I’m a dragon, and you’re an alicorn Princess.”

“Oh, right! Good point. Our ETA would only be longer than YOUR natural lifetime.” She chuckled lightly as Spike boggled at the thought. “But even so, there’s no way it would take us that long to reach a point in space that wasn’t rife with Warp turbulence, so don’t worry.”

“I’m a little worried anyway!” Spike protested. “Even if we’re pretty sure we won’t DIE of old age during the trip, I didn’t leave Equestria thinking I’d be gone for years! Or is it decades? Centuries? ‘Shorter than a dragon’s lifetime’ doesn’t exactly narrow it down much!”

“Spike, just stay calm,” Twilight said firmly, “don’t forget that we’re not alone here. There are thousands of experienced crew members who all want to reach our destination as fast as physically possible. This can’t possibly be the first time they’ve had Warp travel difficulties; generally speaking, it really is one of their less reliable technologies.”

The young dragon huffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “And to think, earlier you were hugging me in terror, afraid that monsters might pour out of the walls…”

“Right? Putting aside that we’re stranded in empty void, seriously, I am SO glad to be out of the Warp!” Twilight smiled under her helmet as the rail shuttle started to slow down.

“Approaching section 2,” announced the cogitator vox caster. The shuttle finally came to a complete stop, and the door slid open.

Twilight stepped out quickly, barely managing to get out of the way before a team of Scavurel and another Dark Techpriest rushed into the car behind her.

Then she galloped further down the hall, eventually coming to yet another defensive fortification. This one was the heaviest yet, with numerous ceiling-mounted turrets and even a pair of bunkers boxing in a reinforced gate. A full dozen Chaos Space Marines stood at the ready before this entrance, and every one of them turned toward her with their bolters up.

“Hi! Is Warsmith Solon at the bridge yet?” Twilight asked, clearly unbothered by being a few finger twitches away from oblivion. Spike wasn’t quite so jaded and fidgeted nervously.

The unit Champion growled. “Negative. The Warsmith is still in his forge. Lord Sliver has the bridge.”

“Okay! Thanks!” Twilight chirped. Then she vanished in a flash of purple.

****

Harvest of Steel – bridge

“Minor hull breaches in section 4, deck 11 and section 8, deck 9 have been sealed.”

“Dark Techpriest Baan has confirmed that the ship drives are undamaged.”

“System checks complete. Reactor core system capacity stable… 65% and holding.”

“The Harvest screams! She is lost! Adrift! The Warp boils around her, and-“

“Be ssilent, sslave.”

All discussion and shouting halted at the command of the Iron Warrior standing in the middle of the bridge. Sliver sat the head of his great hammer on the floor, his hands resting on the hilt.

“Group the fleet. Defenssive formation. Thiss may be the work of raiderss,” Sliver hissed.

“A Warp storm, the work of raiders?” asked a Warpsmith, clearly skeptical.

Sliver turned to face him. “We are a fleet of raiderss who have ussed Warp sstormss to our advantage, are we not? I do not pressume that we are alone in thiss ability. There may be other posssibilitiess, but until we ssettle on a hypothessiss, I will not let my guard down.”

“Acknowledged, Lord. Vessels have been ordered into circlet formation.”

“Alter our heading,” Sliver added, “if we are sstumbling into an ambush, the foe may have predicted our route.”

“Acknowledged, Lord. Altering course.”

“And ssomeone get the Warssmith up here!” Sliver growled. “I need to sspeak to ssomeone who actually hass an inkling what iss happening!”

A fizzling noise came from next to him, and then Twilight Sparkle appeared in a flash of purple with Spike sitting on her back.

“Hi,” greeted the dragon, waving nervously.

Sliver honestly considered swatting the uninvited pony and her passenger away with his hammer like a croquet ball. In the end, however, his inherent practicality won out over his irritation. “Ssparkle, what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to be available in case I could help, Lord Sliver,” Twilight answered. It felt slightly awkward to her to be addressing the fleet’s Vice-Commander as the only available superior officer. It was a situation she usually strived to avoid. It also meant she couldn’t remove her helmet, lest she be overwhelmed by the Chaos Lord’s stench.

“Nobody requessted your pressence,” Sliver growled.

“Not yet, no. But as the only actual psyker remaining in the fleet, I thought it would be better if I didn’t wait to review the situation.”

“The witch has a point, Lord,” interjected one of the Warpsmiths, “if there is some sort of psychic trickery afoot, it will be helpful to have her close at hand.”

Twilight smiled under her helmet when Sliver grumbled something unintelligible in reply. It was always nice to be taken seriously by the troops, especially when certain leaders tried their absolute hardest to dismiss her.

Her smirk withered somewhat as the giant eyeball above the bridge shifted its gaze to stare straight at her. “Why do they even need that thing?” she mumbled.

Sliver stepped over to a large hololithic map displaying the Company fleet. “Very well, Ssparkle,” he spat, “you may sstart by explaining how a Warp sstorm appeared on top of uss without warning. The Nethalican’ss power wass intended to enssure clear and sspeedy travel all the way through the Ssegmentum Ssolar.”

Twilight winced. “Oh. Uh… I don’t know that, actually.”

Sliver took up his hammer and then pulled it back in preparation to swing at her.

“No! Wait! Hold on! I have theories!” Twilight yelped, flinching away. When the Chaos Lord hesitated, she continued. “Okay, so, one idea is that this is another effort by daemonic forces to get to me. They may have been hoping that we wouldn’t be able to exit the Warp storm in time and that we would all be destroyed, or perhaps that you would be willing to trade me for unobstructed passage through the Warp.”

“In resspect to the latter posssibility, they would be correct,” Sliver snarled, “sso you’d besst have another explanation, witch.”

“I do!” the alicorn yelped. “The other likely cause is a problem with the Nethalican itself! Since it’s clearly capable of generating Warp anomalies and affecting the Warp currents even at our current distance – and was in fact helping to move us at the time that the storm began – it’s possible that something happened to the Dark portal back in Equestria!”

Spike raised his hand. “I vote for theory number two.”

“You don’t VOTE on theories, Spike,” Twilight reminded him.

“The Harvest speaks!” shouted one of the crew members entombed in the walls. “She wishes to know if she can eat the purple thing now.”

“No, she can’t eat me!” Twilight shouted angrily.

“Obviously the Harvest wasn’t asking you, Lady Sparkle.”

“Why would it even ask?! There’s plenty of fuel, and we’re in the middle of a-“

Twilight was cut off when Sliver slammed his hammer into the floor, causing the entire room to shake slightly. She bounced off the floor and squeaked in surprise. The entombed crew flinched away, cowering in their terrifying alcoves.

“Ssilence,” Sliver commanded. Then he turned away, toward the pair of Warpsmiths on the bridge. “We will proceed under the asssumption that the Nethalican hass failed. It would not be the firsst time, after all.”

“How shall we contact them? Can the equine witch send astropathic messages?”

“Astro-what, now?” Twilight asked, answering the Marine’s question.

Sliver snorted in disgust. “Usselesss. We’ll have to enlisst a daemonic messsenger to contact the colony.”

“That could take weeks,” growled the Warpsmith, “if it works at all.”

“Actually,” Twilight interjected, “I may not be capable of astropathic messages – whatever those are, exactly – but I have a means of contacting Equestria. Er… maybe.”

All eyes – and hollow, withered eye sockets – were instantly on her.

“Explain,” Sliver commanded.

“Spike can send magic messages that go directly to Princess Celestia. The process is instantaneous… in theory.”

“In theory?”

“There’s nothing in the magical calculations or principles that suggest it would be affected by even astronomical distances…” Twilight hesitated before adding. “But I must point out that we’ve never really considered the possibility before now. We’ve never had to contend with distances that challenge even light-speed transmission. There may be some delay that we’ve never noticed, or a range limitation that was simply never relevant before when we only had to contend with the distances presented by a single planet’s surface. And, of course, as a magical effect, there’s a slight chance that it will be affected by the Warp storm itself.” She smiled somewhat nervously. “Still, there’s no harm in trying, right?”

“Damnable witchcraft,” Sliver snarled. “Do it. Pterax, contact the Cultisstss. We’ll disspatch a daemonic messsage as well.”

“Acknowledged, Lord Sliver,” replied one of the Warpsmiths.

Spike pulled a scroll from his belt holster with one hand and a pen with the other, preparing to write. “So, um… who’s dictating?” he asked, glancing between Twilight and Sliver.

“I should probably do it,” Twilight volunteered, “and, hey! At least we have plenty of time to wait for a response, or for the Warp storm to clear up on its own. Out of all the places in the galaxy where we could have randomly dropped into, it’s nice that we actually got a safe location. Right?”

“The Warp bleeds!” shouted one of the crew-mummies, gasping. Spike jumped in surprise, fumbling his pen on the floor.

“Lord Sliver, we’re reading new Warp exits in quadrant three!” announced Pterax, opening up new holoscreens.

Sliver turned to stare at the table showing the fleet disposition. “Our craft are all accounted for. Thesse contactss are not of our fleet.”

“Confirmed, Lord! We’re reading six Warp breaches! Eight! Eleven!”

Twilight stared wide-eyed as the Warpsmith continued shouting ever-greater numbers at them. On the hololithic table, new vessels started flickering into place behind the Company fleet. “Why can’t I keep my big mouth shut?” she murmured under her breath.

When Sliver spoke again, she was surprised to hear that his voice was solemn, rather than enraged or exasperated. “Inform all vessselss to hold fire and relay hailss to the flagship. Maintain formation, sstrategem Delta. Reactor levelss at minimum.” Then he turned away and placed a hand to the side of his helmet. “Warssmith Ssolon! We need you on the bridge, NOW!”

“All right, all right, I’m coming! Ish thish about the Warp shtorm? You know I can’t fix that, right?” grumbled Solon’s voice from the vox.

“No. It’ss worsse,” Sliver growled, “an Imperium battle group jusst dropped out of Warp sspace right on top of uss. About three timess our fleet sstrength, and already in optimal range. We could usse your guidance, Warssmith. Ssliver out.”

****

Imperial Cruiser Wrath of Promethius – bridge

“Would anybody like to tell me what the blazes just happened?!”

The bridge crew of the fleet flagship had descended into near-anarchy, with deck officers screaming at each other and aides dashing across the floor. Some people were being carried off the bridge unconscious, while new crew officers and soldiers rushed to get past them.

“I want damage and situational reports!” barked the Captain. “Raise the other ships! And someone escort the Head Navigator to the bridge immediately! I demand an explanation for this!”

“We have hull breaches on deck 23… deck 7… deck 10…”

“Repair crews dispatched, Lord Captain. Techpriest Herran has confirmed that the drive systems are intact and operational. The damage does not seem to be critical.”

“Thank the Emperor for small favors,” the Captain groused, falling back into his command throne, “still, to have a Warp storm suddenly bloom in front of us like that is nothing short of catastrophic. Why didn’t the Navigators see anything?”

“Captain Bennet!” shouted another officer. “There’s another fleet in attack range! They’re right on top of us!”

The Captain immediately jumped up again. “Xeno?”

“Negative, Lord Captain… it looks to be a freighter fleet. Definitely Imperial design. No active weapon signatures.”

Captain Bennet frowned, sitting back down. “Most likely caught in the same blasted storm we were. I want all weapons at the ready, but I need to take stock of our own fleet, quickly. We’ll deal with them later.”

“Captain, I’m receiving an update request from the Astartes strike cruisers,” said another officer with a hint of nervousness, “the Salamanders wish to speak with you.”

Bennet grimaced. “Of course… keep an eye on those freighters and continue compiling the damage reports. And someone get me an ETA on the Navigator! NOW!!”

****

Harvest of Steel – bridge

“Well, ishn’t thish a fine messh.” Solon’s fingers summoned and dismissed flickering screens of orange light in rapid sequence, bringing up data displays and making inputs faster than the others on the bridge could keep track of. His optics cluster pulsed and whirled, and occasionally a puff of dark smoke would shoot from his smoke stack, as if in agitation.

Other than the Warsmith, however, no one was taking any obvious action. The others waited calmly for his decision. Twilight wasn’t sure whether their patience was comforting or not; she was used to the Iron Warriors - particularly Sliver - reacting to every threat with varying levels of explosive violence and agitation.

“Well, I have shome good newsh. The Imperial fleet didn’t weather the Warp shtorm nearly ash well ash we did,” Solon announced. “They’re hurt, panicked, and clearly aren’t very worried about ush. They haven’t even attempted a hail yet.”

“That will not lasst,” Sliver grumbled.

“Clearly. Missh Shparkle, how ish that letter coming along?”

“All done!” Twilight announced, holding up a sheet of tan parchment with her levitation. She had elected to write it herself rather than dictating it to Spike, since she didn’t want to have to talk over the Chaos Lords’ deliberations. “Dear Princess Celes-“

“We don’t CARE what it ssayss! Ssend it, you idiot!” Sliver snapped.

Twilight shot a heated glare at the Vice-Commander, but wrapped up the scroll promptly. “Spike?”

Spike sucked in a breath, and then blasted the scroll with a jet of green flame. The Chaos Space Marines watched mutely, each one confirming with their visor that the sorcerous stationary had vanished on the particulate level.

“I can’t believe it’ss come to thiss,” Sliver groaned. “That the fleet’ss ssurvival may come down to the ssuccesss of your abssurd witchcraft.”

“Well, do we have any OTHER options?” Twilight huffed.

“Many, actually,” Solon confirmed, “but mosht of them are bad. We could attack, begin a full retreat, attempt a shtealthy withdrawal, attempt to allay any shushpicion that we are anything but a group of freightersh caught in the shame shtorm ash they were…”

“Yeah, uh, about that...” Spike began, wincing at the display on the naval hololith. “How long are they just going to sit there, anyway? Aren’t they going to figure out that we’re an enemy eventually?”

“Not from a dishtance,” Solon explained, “all the vesshelsh in the fleet posshessh shpoofing relaysh and encrypted identity codesh ripped from actual Imperial ship yardsh. And I take every opportunity to alter Imperial data nodesh with redundant and conflicting data to mashk the dishcrepenciesh our deceit generatesh.” He gestured to a vid-screen. “Even our hailsh are modified with imaging programsh to allow ush to shpeak to the enemy while projecting the appearance of shimple Imperial merchantsh.”

“So… they really can’t tell that we’re an enemy ship?” Twilight asked, surprised.

“No. Unlessh they board ush, of courshe,” Solon replied.

“As Imperial patrolss are wont to do,” Sliver added sourly, “we cannot posssibly deny them entry without revealing oursselvess as foess.”

“Can we win a void engagement if we have the first strike?” Warpsmith Pterax asked. “We, too, are at optimal combat range, and could quickly dispatch boarding parties.”

Sliver pointed to two particular vessels in the enemy fleet. “In the abssence of enemy Sspace Mariness, and with perfect luck, we would defeat thiss fleet. But the pressence of the Ssalamanderss tipss the balance fully in the favor of the enemy. We could conceivably win, but the only ssurvivor would be the Harvesst of Ssteel. Ssuch losssess are unacceptable.”

Spike suddenly started coughing, and Twilight literally jumped for joy when he spat out a scroll in a burst of green flame. “It worked! Yes! Everything is going to be just fine!”

“Shplendid!” Solon watched the pony lift and unroll the scroll with her magic while Sliver grumbled something to himself. “If the Nethalican hash been damaged, it may be a matter of national attention. What doesh your mentor shay?”

Twilight started reading the message aloud, her voice becoming weaker and more confused as she progressed.

“Dearest Twilight: I’m afraid I didn’t understand your last message at all. I can only imagine the fleet you speak of is the 38th Company space craft, but as I understand it those have already left the planet. As for the Chaos Temple in Ponyville, it is undisturbed as far as I am aware. There have been no attacks or incidents within the village recently. Please explain further. Sincerely, Princess Celestia.” Twilight tilted her head to one side.

“That wash lessh helpful than I would have liked,” Solon remarked.

“And yet sso perfectly conssisstent with her passt behavior,” Sliver mumbled.

“Hold on, we can clear this up!” Twilight said, nodding to Spike. “The important thing is that we have a method of instantaneous communication!”

The young dragon unfurled another sheet of parchment and readied his pen.

“Dear Princess: I know the fleet has left the planet. I went with them, just as you asked me to do. We need you to contact High Sorcerer Serith as quickly as possible and ask him to check the Nethalican. It is of critical importance that he confirm it’s working properly. Sincerely, Twilight.”

Sliver turned away. “I will began preparing for the inevitable boarding and dessperate void combat sscenarioss. I can ssee that thiss iss going nowhere fasst.” A soft green glow briefly reflected off of Sliver’s armor as Spike sent the next message.

“The Harvest still wants to eat the purple thing, when you’re done with her,” pointed out one of the crew entombed in the wall.

“Not now!” Solon snapped.

“Not EVER!” Twilight corrected.

“The Harvest ponders,” hissed another crew-mummy, “why do we never do what she wishes to do?”

“She really feels like she deserves to eat the horse,” clarified another.

“There is an entire armada of potential snacks floating right next to us, and you seriously want-“ Twilight’s rebuttal was cut off when Spike coughed and spat a scroll into the back of her helmet. “Ugh. Hold on…”

The armored alicorn quickly unfurled the new message and started reading. “Twilight, I never asked you to go with the Iron Warriors. Why would I do something like that? Does that mean you’re in space? Where… Where are…” Twilight’s voice broke, leaving the last few sentences unfinished. No one could see her expression under her helmet, but they got the distinct impression she was in the opening stages of a nervous breakdown.

“Aw, man! Seriously?!” Spike slapped a claw against his face. “I knew there was something weird about her sending the order through the regular mail!”

“No matter,” Solon said, “what about the portal? Ish she contacting Sherith?”

Twilight didn’t answer. She continued staring at the letter in stunned silence, with her breathing slowly getting heavier and heavier.

“Shparkle?” Solon asked again. “SHPARKLE!!”

She still didn’t seem to hear him. The room seemed to spin around Twilight, and her stomach felt like it was tying itself in knots. It reminded her of the time she and her friends had negotiated for the salvation of their planet before the Ork invasion, except that at least back then the situation had been perfectly clear and their impending doom had an obvious and direct cause. She couldn’t even start mentally organizing all the questions she had right now.

The Warsmith raised one leg and hammered it into the floor, causing Twilight to jump in surprise.

“LISHTEN to me, damn you!” the Chaos Lord shouted.

Twilight snapped her head up, terrified but suddenly focused.

“The Nethalican! What doesh she shay about the blashted Nethalican?!”

Twilight sucked in a deep breath, staving off her immediate panic attack. Immediate crises first, retrospective crises later.

“She s-says that she’s dispatching g-guards and messengers to try to t-tell Serith.” She swallowed. “But s-she wants to know what’s h-happening.”

“Fine. Explain it to her if you wish. Jusht ash long ash Sherith doesh hish job.” Solon waved a hand dismissively, returning to his data reports.

“Warsmith,” Pterax warned, “we have an incoming hail. It seems the loyalist dregs are at last in a state to pay attention to us.”

Solon started turning, but Sliver rounded on him first.

“Warssmith, what about the equine?” Sliver demanded. “Will your program obsscure her as well? We cannot be sseen holding audience with a xeno.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve already updated it to account for her and the young one,” Solon assured his second, “we’ll be fine. Thish ish the eashy part.” Then he turned to his Warpsmiths and nodded. “Let’sh begin. On-shcreen.”

****

Imperial Cruiser Wrath of Promethius – bridge

“Vid connection established, Lord Captain. Link confirmed, comms codes accepted,” mumbled a communications technician, “coming on-screen.”

The main communications monitor flickered, and a streaming vid quickly crystalized. An image of an elderly void ship Captain, with a thick beard and the Imperium’s Aquila stamped over his uniform’s chest, dominated the screen. Next to him was a portly merchant type, sporting a long and thin mustache.

“My name is Captain Bennet, Master of the Imperial flagship Wrath of Promethius. Identify yourselves, citizens!”

“I am Captain Geoff of the freighter flagship Ionish. Thish ish my aide, Theodore,” said the bearded man.

Bennet grimaced. Judging by the man’s voice, he was thoroughly intoxicated. While it was extremely bad form to speak with military captains under such conditions, he supposed it couldn’t be helped. The freighter had almost certainly been driven out of the Warp unexpectedly, as they had.

“Well met, Captain Geoff. As I’m sure you’re aware, a Warp storm has suddenly taken this region. We were forced out of the Immaterium on short order, as I imagine you were as well.”

“Indeed. Quite a bad shpot. I washn’t aware that Warp shtormsh happened like that.”

“Evidently, neither were our Navigators,” Bennet sniffed, “I would like a report from yours, to see if there’s any discrepancies or oddities we could investigate. I also insist that you submit your navigation records for review.”

“The Navigator ish going to be an isshue, I’m afraid,” Geoff said sourly, “oursh fell unconshcioush during the Warp exit, and shushtained non-fatal injuriesh. She’sh reshting in our medicae.”

One of the communications officers sniggered, mumbling under his breath. “Bloke is completely sloshed…”

Bennet, for his part, wasn’t so sure. His civilian counterpart seemed completely lucid, slurred speech aside.

“I can shumbit our navigation transhcript without issue, however. Jusht a moment.” Geoff leaned to the side, tapping against a holoscreen.

In that moment, however, Bennet started in surprise. When the freighter Captain stood straight again, obscuring the… creature behind him, Captain Bennet blinked repeatedly, wondering if he had been mistaken. A quick look at the other men around the bridge banished the thought, however. They all looked confused, clearly wondering the same thing.

“Uh… transmission complete, Captain,” muttered one bridge officer, shaking his head.

“Analyze the data, then send it to the Salamander strike cruisers,” Bennet demanded of his officer. Then he turned back to the screen. “We are working to understand and overcome this unexpected impediment, Captain Geoff. I’m sure I can count on your cooperation should we require your assistance, yes?”

“Affirmative, Captain! Anything to aid the heroesh of the Imperium!”

“Good. As of now, however, the important thing is fully assessing the damage caused to our fleet. On the advice of Salamanders Captain Orobes, we are conducting deck-by-deck sweeps to search for any unusual contamination from our brief exposure to the Warp storm. The Astartes have even mooted the possibility of daemonic infiltration.”

Geoff recoiled in horror and his aide shifted, clearly disturbed by the suggestion. The movement was smaller this time, but again, Bennet glimpsed something strange standing in the background behind the Captain.

“Theodore, shee to it that our armshmen do a complete check of the ship. Every shingle deck! Extend the order to the other shipsh ash well! Report any anomaliesh to Captain Bennet immediately!”

“Yess, Captain. Right away.” Theodore bowed and slipped away, moving out of frame.

“So, then, you won’t be needing security forces to check your vessels? The Salamanders have been volunteering their kill teams to perform sweeps. Certainly the Astartes would be well-suited to combating any potential infestations,” Bennet offered.

Geoff seemed to hesitate. “I’m shure the Ashtartesh have better thingsh to do than dig around a freighter during this tumultuoush incident. And… if I may shay sho, Captain, I feel it would be better for morale not to have the Emperor’sh Angelsh of Death rummaging through the decksh. At leasht, not until we’ve found a problem.”

“Very well, Captain. I expect a report once your sweep is completed, or when your head Navigator regains consciousness. Whichever comes first.”

“Of courshe, Captain Bennet. Good day.”

Geoff shifted to turn off the vid-link, but Bennet suddenly held up a hand.

“Hold on, please. I must ask, before you go…” he paused, wetting his lips. The bearded man on the screen tilted his head to the side. “… Why do you have a horse on your bridge?”

Geoff turned to look over his shoulder. Indeed, sitting on the floor next to a support pylon was a chestnut-colored horse with a white, diamond-shaped patch on its face. It looked just like any of the mounts used by the division of Rough Riders carried by the fleet, except that their animals obviously weren’t allowed in the nerve center of the flagship.

“Oh, her? I ride her. Obvioushly.”

Bennet blinked. “You… ride her. In your ship?”

The horse looked over toward the screen and whinnied softly.

“Yesh, in the ship. Look at thish thing; it’sh huge! Takesh hoursh to walk anywhere.” Geoff snorted. “Is that all, Captain Bennet?”

“Quite. Good day, Captain Geoff.”

****

Harvest of Steel – bridge

“Insholent worm,” Solon murmured after he confirmed that the transmission was terminated.

“The modified navigation recordss should prove perfectly uninteressting to the loyalisst dogss,” Sliver reminded the Warsmith. “However, we can only buy oursselvess sso much time. Eventually they’ll find ssome reasson to board uss.”

“How are we coming on the Nethalican?” Solon swiveled around to face the pony sitting behind him.

“Well, uh, the situation is unchanged,” Twilight confessed. Although she sounded slightly less distressed than before, there was definitely still an undercurrent of anxiety in her voice. “Princess Celestia sent ponies to find Serith and contact the Chaos temple, but it will be some time before they can report back. Hours, maybe.”

Spike started coughing, and then spat another scroll onto the floor before wheezing in exhaustion.

“Ish that the report?” Solon asked, his chassis rising slightly.

“I don’t think so.” The alicorn Princess unfolded the new message with her magic. “Right now we’re just discussing why and how I received orders from her to go on this trip when she didn’t send any such orders.”

“I don’t care about any of that,” Solon said with surprising firmness, causing Twilight to recoil a bit. “My entire fleet and army ish one minishcule error away from complete obliteration. YOU included. Sho shtop your ushelessh shimpering and focush on the tashk at hand, Shparkle!”

The mare backed up a step, feeling a quiver run down her spine. “Y-Yes, Warsmith,” she said, hanging her head.

“Good. Inform your mentor that I don’t want to shee any further communicationsh unlessh she hash shomething usheful to shay about the Dark Portal.”

“Yes, Warsmith,” Twilight said again, this time with more confidence, “I assure you, they’ll address this matter with all haste! Canterlot won’t let us down!”

****

Centaur III – Canterlot Castle

Royal Library

“Oh, there he is! Thank Celestia!”

A Royal Guard dashed around a bookcase and rushed toward a tall, armored figure standing in a corner and thumbing through a book.

“Lord Serith! Lord Serith, I have a-“

Serith didn’t turn to look at the pony, but instead raised one hand toward it, pointing his index finger.

The guard’s eyes fluttered closed mid-stride, and then he slumped to the ground in a heap, unconscious. A few seconds later, a rumbling snore came from the equine soldier.

Serith turned the page of his book.

****

Imperial Cruiser Wrath of Promethius – strategium

Captain Bennet sat at the head of a long table, drumming his fingers on the surface while holoscreens floated around him.

At the other end of the table sat a frail, wiry old woman. She wore gilded robes and had an intricate series of faded tattoos across her face. Most of those tattoos surrounded or pointed to her forehead, where the lids of her third eye were squeezed firmly shut against the harsh lumens of the room.

She was clearly exhausted, and her arm was wrapped in bandages from an earlier injury. A medicae technician stood behind her, waiting at attention.

The figure who dominated the room, however, was the giant who stood at the side of the table in green power armor edged with gold. A power maul hung at his side, along with a flamer decorated with ivory fangs. His helmet was off, revealing skin that was almost charcoal black and eyes that were a fierce crimson.

“So what you’re saying is that this storm is no accident,” Bennet growled, “our being stranded here is the result of some heretical design.”

The Head Navigator winced. “I am not saying that, Captain, although that is absolutely a possibility.” She wet her lips, casting a nervous glance at the Space Marine Captain. “But I absolutely believe this storm was created. Not of the ordinary turmoil of the Immaterium, but through the will of mortal minds.”

The Salamander narrowed his bright red eyes. First at the Navigator, then at the ship’s Captain. “Such witchcraft is far beyond the abilities of most psykers. There is only one force I’m aware of that can roil the Warp to this extent and with such hateful precision as to waylay a battle fleet: Chaos.”

“If this is a trap, however, whoever set it is certainly taking their time in springing it,” Bennet reminded the others, “we are stranded, damaged, and confused, yet find ourselves with ample time to collect our bearings and prepare.”

“What of the freighters?” asked the Space Marine. “They were already here once we translated back to real space. Are we sure they pose no threat?”

“We’ve already contacted them, Captain Orobes,” Bennet nodded reassuringly, “their navigation records and ID signatures check out, and we’ve had no reported problems from them so far. We’re watching them carefully, however.”

The Salamander Captain grunted slightly. “I don’t trust a band of merchants and businessmen to manage possible Warp corruption. If there is some greater plot at work, here, those ships are the most obvious stages for an attack. My brothers are almost finished sweeping our main combat vessels; I’ll send them to check the freighters next.”

“I see. I shall inform the Captain, then,” Bennet clasped his hands behind his back. “Ultimately, however, if this is an artificially created obstacle, I think it more likely that its creator intended mainly to keep us from our destination. Sub-sector Auris may not last long without our aid. So whatever we do in the meantime, ultimately it is CRITICAL that we are able to take to the Warp again.”

The Head Navigator hissed. “A dangerous thing, certainly, to ask in the heart of a Warp storm. Losing our fleet to the Empyrean will only aid whatever malign force willed the storm into being, Captains.”

“Agreed. Study this storm further. Find a weakness, or a cause. Anything. We must find a way to proceed.” Captain Bennet leaned forward, placing his hands on the table. “If that is all…”

“Actually, Captain,” the Navigator interrupted, “there is one other thing I wish to tell you. A… vision, perhaps, that appeared before me in the moments right before the storm manifested.”

“What was it?” Orobes asked, intently interested.

“For barely a second, I saw, in my Warp Sight… a face. Xeno in origin, clearly, but not any sort that I am familiar with. Dark exterior, perhaps chitin. But the face… it was elongated, with sharp, pronounced fangs and large, green eyes that seemed to burn with corrupt power.”

“Most likely the architect of our current predicament,” Orobes rumbled.

“Perhaps, Lord. Yet… the face was terrified. Lost. In that moment, pulsing through the Warp, I felt the creature’s fear and confusion. It did not feel like an expression of malice or intent.” She shook her head.

“It doesn’t matter what it felt. Do you have any idea where it is?” asked the Salamander.

“No, my lord. I’m afraid that my vision contained no such clues.”

“Then our plan of action remains the same,” Orobes growled, “continue the repairs, monitor the storm, search for any anomalies. The moment the Warp clears, we leave this empty void. By the Emperor’s will!”

“By the Emperor’s will,” the others intoned solemnly.

****

Harvest of Steel – bridge

“What the blazesh ish taking sho long?” Solon groused. He was still scanning and poking at hololiths and screens as before, but now seemed to be doing so with a tangible sense of irritation. “Perhapsh the Nethalican might not be fixed yet, but it shouldn’t take thish long to get a messhage to the Chaosh temple!”

Twilight fidgeted nervously. “Well, we have no idea how long it could really take them to contact Serith. I mean, when he doesn’t want to be found, you’re the only one who can find him!”

“Even sho, it shouldn’t take long to contact the Nethalican! The temple hash a shimple vox shyshtem!”

Twilight fidgeted some more. “Ah. Right. But… Canterlot doesn’t.”

“What?” Solon stopped working on the data screens. “Of courshe it doesh. Delgan hash shold vox shyshtemsh in Canterlot.”

“Right. Yes, he has. But not to Canterlot Castle or the royal family,” Twilight offered a high-pitched laugh. “Princess Celestia hasn’t had a vox system installed, and doesn’t really want one. She actually sent out a pegasus messenger.”

“She eshtablished a way to communicate with you inshtanteoushly acrossh millionsh of light yearsh, but she’ll wait hoursh to contact a village within vishual dishtance of her home? When better alternativesh are readily available?” Solon asked, bewildered.

“Ha! Yeah! Seems kind of silly when we put it in perspective like that, doesn’t it?” Twilight laughed some more, and then sighed weakly.

Sliver wordlessly walked up to Spike. The young dragon slapped a hand over his nose, but otherwise gave the Chaos Lord his full attention.

“Tell me, lizard: doess your witchfyre ssterilize the messagess that you ssend to your leader?”

Spike cringed. “It’s, uh, never really come up…”

“Let’ss find out,” Sliver growled.

“Shliver, no,” Solon warned, “remember, if we kill the white one, the planet shtopsh.”

“Couldn’t Princesss Luna manage both the ssolar and lunar cycless?” Sliver grumbled, turning away from Spike.

“Even if she could, I intend to take her with ush at shome point, you know. I don’t want her tethered the planet like that.” Solon shook his head. “Let’sh be patient. We have the Imperialsh fooled, and no reashon to turn thish into a battle.”

“Lord Warsmith, we have another message,” warned a Warpsmith. “One-way vox this time, prioritus secundus. Accessing.”

A blast of static came from the console, followed by the voice of the communications officer. “This is the Wrath of Promethius to the megafreighter Ionish… wait, Ionis? Did he slur that word, or… whatever.”

Spike immediately started snickering. Sliver glanced down at him again, and he stopped immediately and looked away.

“Under the authority granted to the Imperial Navy and the Emperor’s Angels of Death, the Adeptus Astartes, you are to submit your vessels for inspection. The Salamanders are currently aiding internal sweeps of the fleet’s combat vessels. Once they are complete, gunships will be deployed to your formation. You are ordered to lower your shields and any defensive measures you may possess and receive them at such time. Glory to the Emperor, forever our master and shepherd.” The message ended.

Solon sighed.

****

Centaur III – Ponyville

Outside the Chaos temple, just below the cloud level, a single gasping pegasus in combat armor swooped in for a landing.

While the route between Canterlot and Ponyville wasn’t THAT demanding, she had been ordered to make the journey at maximum speed. Combined with the surprisingly unruly weather lately, she’d had to fight quite a few air currents in order to make her current time. Which still wasn’t great, because Princess Celestia had been rather distraught and distracted when she’d given the messenger her mission.

“Geez, what’s the big deal that Sparkle left the planet? She’s coming back, right?” The pegasus slowed, beating her wings heavily and dropping onto the ground in front of the temple steps. “And really, even if she wasn’t, WHO CARES? Not like we need to rely on a half-dozen mares to protect the kingdom anymore. Hay, I’m more nervous that the Warsmith left the planet! Bet we wouldn’t be starting up wars with all our neighbors on his watch…”

She trotted up to the front gates, and then barely managed to dodge backwards before they swung open suddenly.

“Go on! Get! Get out of here!” A fairly large herd of sheep rushed out of the building, spilling onto the streets of Ponyville. Behind them was a Cultist with a barbed whip, and another with a crackling taser goad.

“Bloody animals! Get out!”

“I know I said we needed to grow our flock, but this is ridiculous! HAH!”

“I swear to ALL the Gods I will electrocute you, Garret.”

The messenger stepped out in front of the Cultists and raised a wing in greeting. “Hey, guys! Can I talk to you for a minute? Urgent message from the palace!”

She had the Cultists’ attention immediately. “What, Princess Celestia? What does she want?”

“Status report on the Nethalican, Sir! We have reason to believe it’s malfunctioning!”

The Cultists paused to look at each other.

“That does make some sense, actually.”

“I thought the color was a bit off this morning.”

One of them turned and called into the temple. “Father Virgil! We require your guidance!”

They waited silently until another man approached the gates. Virgil was carrying a young calf in his arms that had blood streaked across its face in a manner similar to war paint, but otherwise he seemed entirely bored to be here.

“What is the matter?” the Chaos Priest said, still holding the cow in his arms.

“Canterlot dispatched a messenger, it seems. They want to know if the Nethalican is on the fritz.”

Virgil looked down toward the pegasus. “The Dark Portal has indeed been affected. Possibly by a creature that may have infiltrated the temple disguised as a fellow monk. Maybe.”

The other clergy looked surprised and alarmed at this. “Wait, we’ve been sabotaged? There’s a spy?”

Virgil shrugged. “Meh… I wonder what prompted the palace to contact us, however.”

“Princess Celestia received a message from the 38th Company’s fleet in transit,” the pegasus explained. “I… don’t really get it myself, but I guess a Warp storm forced them into space, and then there’s this other fleet in space, and they’re not fighting, but maybe they could? Does that make sense?”

The humans stared at her.

“How is it that Princess Celestia is receiving messages from our fleet?” Virgil asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Oh, she can send magic messages to Twilight Sparkle. Who’s on the flagship. Apparently. That kind of came as a surprise to us.” She shook her head. “But that’s not important! We need to fix the Nethalican, pronto!”

“This is a problem,” Virgil mumbled. The calf in his arms mooed in a forlorn tone. “Only Lord Serith knows the mechanisms of the Dark Portal well enough to control the tides of the Warp. I do not know where the Sorcerer is.”

“Oh, we know where he is,” the pony said, “some guards outside the library were found in a near-catatonic state, so we’re pretty sure he’s inside, studying all the forbidden lore.”

“Then should you not have contacted him first? Or brought him with you?” asked one of the other Cultists.

“Well… yeah, actually. It is kind of weird I was sent ahead without him. I wonder if anything’s wrong…”

****

Canterlot Castle – Royal Library

“Hello!? Lord Serith? Fire Strike? Wind Whip? Anypony?” Flash Sentry stuck his head around a book case, nervously making his way through the massive library of the royal family.

“What happened to everypony? Am I seriously the first one to check on this place? Can’t be! We found those guards an hour ago!”

Grimacing, the stallion soldier sped up his search, whipping his head back and forth down each aisle.

A sound came from up ahead, and his ear twitched. It was a soft rumble, almost nasal. Like… a snore?

To his surprise, Flash Sentry found Serith at the source of the sound. To his dismay, he also found all the other guards that had been sent ahead of him.

The soldier stumbled to a halt, his eyes wide. There were equines bodies lying all over the aisle, and would have seemed like the sight of a horrific massacre if not for the snoring and distinct lack of blood.

Serith didn’t turn to look at the guard, but raised a single hand to point at him.

“Waitnopleasedon-“ Flash Sentry hit the ground like a sack of sand, immediately curling up and falling asleep.

****

Harvest of Steel – bridge

“We’ll have to concentrate fire on the Asstartess sstrike cruisserss firsst. We will have the firsst sstrike, but barely. The Imperialss have their guard up, and their confussion will not sstay their hand for long.” Sliver pointed to the two green void ships at each end of the enemy fleet. “The Ssalamanderss musst be removed quickly, sso they cannot counter our boarding partiess.”

He then started pointing to each cruiser in turn. “After the initial blow iss sstruck, we musst get as many Iron Warriorss as posssible onto the enemy shipss.”

Pterax grimaced as the hololith brought up the vessel’s combat data. “That’s going to be far from easy against that defensive web. The men disembarking from the Harvest’s tendrils will be fine, but we’ll suffer heavy losses amongst the boarding craft.”

“And yet, they’ll sstill be ssafer than had they remained on the shipss. Thiss will be a lossing battle, Warpssmith, but we need not go quietly.”

Solon grunted in aggravation. “No, no, no! Thish won’t do at all. We need to buy more time!”

“We could perhapss ssacrifice one vesssel by telling the Imperialss that it hass been corrupted,” Sliver mused, “sset up traps and dark iconss, and make them fight to ssecure the ship…” He looked up at the Warsmith. “Of coursse, if the ssituation on Centaur III iss not ressolved before they are done – or if the Nethalican iss not truly ressponssible – then the enemy will be more determined than ever to ssecure our craft, and we will be a ship down.”

“Tch!” Solon made a disapproving noise. “We need to generate a divershion, but on THEIR shipsh, not oursh!”

“And how are we to do that without revealing oursselvess as the ssource of the dissturbance?” Sliver asked, his voice somewhat incredulous. “They will be able to track the ssource of any teleportss, and their void shieldss are up, besidess.”

Solon lowered his head briefly. “Of courshe. Our teleportsh won’t work.” Then he turned his head around.

Twilight Sparkle felt her hackles rise as she stared into the Warsmith’s optical cluster. “Y-Yes?”

“You can teleport ash well, Princessh. And I doubt your shorcery shuffersh the limitationsh of the teleportarium,” Solon pointed out. Sliver and the Warpsmiths also turned to stare at the pony, and she winced badly under her helmet.

“Well, that’s, uhm, true. But it suffers from other, equally problematic limitations,” she said uneasily, “you see, my teleportation magic is very short-ranged, especially considering the distances involved in a naval engagement!”

She stepped up to the hololith table and reared, propping her forelegs against the table edge. “Normally I can’t even manage the distance between Canterlot and Ponyville. If I understand the scale correctly, the distance between us and the nearest enemy ship is, what, a hundred kilometers? Two hundred?” Her visor flashed a number in front of her. “Two hundred and eighty-two! The amount of magic energy it would take would be enormous, even before considering the margin of directional error!”

Sliver was already preparing a contemptuous retort, but Solon spoke first. “And what if we could get you closher? Up to the enemy’sh hull? Could you get inshide then, through the void shieldsh and armor?”

Twilight blinked. “Yes. I mean, I can’t think of any reason why not. How would you do that?”

“By catapulting you into hard void at extreme velocity,” Solon answered.

Sliver watched Twilight recoil. Then he looked up at Solon. “I like thiss plan. Let’ss do that.”

“Whoa, wait, you mean you’re going to send Twi into the enemy ship ALONE? You seriously think she can take on an entire crew by herself?” Spike asked.

“No, I do not. But she needn’t do shuch a thing. She need only get through the troubleshome barriersh that protect the foe’sh precioush shyshtemsh from my technologiesh.” Solon briefly turned his head away, speaking into his vox. “Magosh Kaelith! Meet me in shector shix, ballishticsh room D-twelve! Bring Malectush Beta! And the Geisht node!” He started heading toward the exit, walking past Twilight and Spike. “Come, Princessh Shparkle. It will be your effortsh that shave my army from deshtruction!”

Twilight gulped, but hung her head and followed the Warsmith out into the hall.

“The Harvest wishes blessings upon the purple creature, such that it may return safely!” called out one of the mummy-crewmen. “Because she wants to eat you when you get back.”

“Thanks. Almost,” Twilight grumbled bitterly on the way out.

****

Harvest of Steel – ballistics chamber D-12

“All right, please explain to me how this is supposed to work.” Twilight was standing on a raised metal platform while Solon loomed over her side and installed something in her armor. It was a small disk, barely larger than a tea saucer.

“Which part? The initial approach, or the shabotage?” Solon asked while he plucked various wires from an open plate on Twilight’s back.

“Let’s start with the approach, and continue all the way to the EXTRACTION, please.”

Kaelith was standing across the room at another table, working on something that Twilight couldn’t see. “Irrelevance. Analytical: Unit Twilight Sparkle’s estimated chance of survival is seven-point-three-nine percent.”

“Maybe I could IMPROVE those odds if I actually knew what I was getting into!” Twilight retorted.

“Negative,” was the cyborg’s reply, followed by a crackling noise that she had come to recognize as the Binaric equivalent of laughter.

“Ash far ash getting you to the enemy vesshel, we’re going to load you into a massh driver,” Solon explained while a mechatendril welded the disk into place. “You’re rather shmall, and we don’t actually intend for you to damage the enemy shipsh directly, sho we can fire you at very low power sho that the Imperialsh don’t detect anything. Once you reach the enemy void ship, teleport inshide. Preferably before you hit the void shield.”

“Okay. Got it. It sounds terrible so far, but I understand,” Twilight said. “Then what?”

“Explanatory: Then you use this.” Kaelith scuttled over and placed something next to the armored pony.

It looked like some kind of large chip, but Twilight didn’t get a good look before Solon reached over and yanked her head away to face him.

“Shtop! Don’t shcan it!” Solon warned. “Even tertiary data contact can be dangeroush!”

Twilight was understandably alarmed. “What is that thing?”

“Explanatory profile: Malectus Beta. An experimental, highly contagious daemonic viral engram using a physical data hive for transmission. Expansion: After activation, the virus corrupts a cogitator system and even the local noosphere nodes, driving the machine spirits to madness and nullifying manual overrides. Complete daemonic corruption follows. The damage is physical, severe, and irreversible.”

“The limitation of shuch a weapon being, of courshe, that we have to get it into the enemy shyshtemsh directly,” Solon added, “you’ll need to find an alpha-directive command conshole. There are a few throughout the ship; on the bridge, obvioushly, but alsho near the reactor core, Captain’sh quartersh, and enginarium. Infect one of thoshe consholesh, and the entire ship will go mad. That should convince the Shalamandersh that they have better thingsh to do than inshpect our cargo.”

“Okay. Got it. Find the important console, and plug in the virus chip.” She wet her lips anxiously. “On the topic of Salamanders, though… what am I supposed to do about all the people on the ship while I’m trying to sabotage it?”

“The module I’m inshtalling in your armor ish a bit of Tau handiwork. Their Lamman Shept hash shome clever ideash about hiding from Imperial augers.” Solon tapped the disc in the middle of the mare’s back. “I could build a better shyshtem given enough time, but thish will have to do. It will allow you to move undetected to the ship and within it. Moshtly.”

“Mostly?”

“Any jumpsh in your conventional energy output will reveal you to active shcannersh. Sho ushing your flight pack or force harmonizer are not recommended. And obvioushly, we will be out of contact entirely.” The Warsmith shrugged. “Alsho, I’ve updated your vishor to decrypt Imperial logic engine accessh nodesh. Try to shcan the command conshole before you infect it; it will rip shome data for our archivesh, and inshert new falshe data nodesh for me.”

“Sure. I’ll see if I can do that.” Twilight paused. “So, I believe that just leaves escape.”

Kaelith started making the static laughing noise again.

“Knock it off! I’m not going on any suicide missions!” the Princess snapped.

“That part ish up to you,” Solon confessed, “I recommend capturing a boarding craft, or ushing a shavior pod. We cannot make any movesh until the shtorm clearsh. You’re a clever girl, I’m shure you’ll think of shomething.”

Kaelith zapped the Malectus Beta wafer with a mechatendril, and it was suddenly wrapped in a muted yellow glow. “Directive: Place the wafer within the cogitator internals and strike it to shatter the containment barrier.” Kaelith stuck the wafer onto the underside of Twilight’s shoulder pad, where it clung to the armor with a firm magnetic grip.

“Strike it?” asked the pony. “Won’t that damage the wafer if I use too much force?”

“Conclusive: That is acceptable. The pain will only drive the infection further and faster.”

Twilight’s eyes widened. “It feels PAIN?!”

“We are ready to deploy. Massh driver turret twelve, charge accelerator coilsh to ten percent capacity.” Solon turned toward a bulkhead and pointed toward a maintenance access door. It unlocked with a hiss, and then opened into a relatively tiny airlock. “Check your void shealsh, Shparkle.”

“Okay, yeah. Sure.” Twilight quivered slightly as her armor systems flashed green. “Uhm, before I go, let’s check in with Spike and make sure Princess Cele-“

Solon grabbed Twilight by the head, ignoring the pony’s frightened yelp. “No time. Now get out there and break shomething!” Then he tossed her into the airlock.

Twilight managed to keep herself from smashing her face into the door. Which, in retrospect, may have broken her visor and gotten her out of this crazy mission.

Or they might have just demanded she go through with it with a broken visor. That seemed unfortunately plausible to her.

The door behind her sealed, and the door in front of her opened. The air was sucked out into the maintenance tunnel, and the armored pony entered the section of the turret assembly that was exposed to the chill of empty space.

“So this is what vacuum is like,” Twilight said to herself, her voice echoing in her ears. “I can even feel the lack of gravity plating. Fascinating. And generally disturbing.” Her every step adhered each boot to the tunnel floor with a magnetic seal, making the short journey seem tortuously long and clumsy.

And yet, it seemed all too short once she climbed up into the receiver of a mass driver. Magnetic rails circled the circumference of the turret barrel, and Twilight could see several gray blobs in the distance that she guessed were the Imperial ships.

“Okay, let’s stay positive. This is sure to be WAY less stressful than my first experience as a projectile! I mean, I can’t even imagine what would happen if Tellis was here!” Twilight shuddered.

Her vox system crackled to life. “Targeting now. We’re aiming you at the cruisher Heart of Vengeance. Shliver felt that the fleet’sh flagship would be too ambitioush. He wantsh you to have SHOME chance of shurvival.”

“What a guy,” Twilight deadpanned. The gun twitched to one side to aim. The shift was miniscule – almost undetectable – yet would make a substantial difference when stretched out over a matter of a hundred or so kilometers.

“So, is there some particular spot I should be standiAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!”

Twilight ripped forward through the driver barrel, her suit compensators barely able to block the worst of the G-forces. Her scream of panic soon trailed off to gasping, and finally mild panting. She hurtled through the void, spinning wildly end over end.

She wasn’t sure how long the trip lasted, but the proximity warning on her visor seemed to come shockingly quickly. Her horn flashed, and Twilight Sparkle was suddenly stopped dead in the void, wrapped in a purple sphere.

Before her was the Heart of Vengeance. An Imperium war cruiser.

The sight left her breathless at first, which she was fairly certain wasn’t just an after-effect of her hypersonic acceleration. She’d seen the ships of the 38th Company, which had been specifically engineered to be as unimpressive and harmless-looking as possible, and the void ships of the Tau, which were fairly sleek and relatively compact affairs. They were a world away from an Imperial cruiser.

Massive edifices were everywhere. Huge towers stretched upward while batteries of guns bristled from platforms the size of city blocks. Carvings and spikes were everywhere, giving the space craft a distinctly cathedral-esque feel. It wasn’t as big as the Harvest of Steel, and certainly lacked the subtle menace of secretly being a soul-chomping monster, but the Heart of Vengeance was perfectly monstrous in its own way; a behemoth of metal with sufficient power to strip entire continents – perhaps a whole planet! – of life.

“No vox. No support. No escape plan. Thousands of enemies to fight on their turf, behind their defenses. And every time I use my weapons, I risk bringing the entire crew on top of me.” Twilight explained her mission to the empty void while her visor worked out the nearest empty space within the ship she could reach. “Not even to save Equestria, this time! No, this mission is to save our fleet of pirate ships from being justifiably annihilated by the military of our victims! Ugh…”

The calculations flickered on her HUD. Twilight sucked in a breath. “Let’s go to work.”

Her horn flashed, and then Twilight Sparkle disappeared.

****

Heart of Vengeance – maintenance alcove T-61

Twilight reappeared in a small, cramped tunnel overrun with wires and surrounded by control panels. There was no one else around, and a small door on the end. There was also a skull with glowing red sensors in its sockets, which seemed a little unnecessary to her.

“Where do they GET all these skulls, anyway? Chaos uses them as trophies and decorations, and the Imperium uses them in their construction? Aren’t they trying to convey an image of nobility and righteousness?”

It was only after her questions echoed through the room did Twilight remember that she was no longer in empty void, and that it might be a good idea to keep her voice down. She switched off her helmet caster, so that at least it wouldn’t automatically project her voice for her.

“Okay, whatever. Stage one complete,” she whispered to herself, “as for the other stages, I think my diversion could use a little diversion of its own.”

Her visor searched the controls, labeling each item in turn. Eventually she found the manual overrides for the local fire suppression systems and switched all of them off with a single pulse of magic.

Twilight then stepped over to the doorway, staring at the bundles of cabling on the floor behind her. A small fireball shot from her horn, lighting the room ablaze in short order.

“That should give them some trouble.” She magically pushed the door access button, and it slid open in front of her.

… To reveal a deck rating on the other side.

“By the Emperor!” the man shouted, stumbling backward.

Twilight’s heart jumped into her throat, and her horn flashed again. A laser-like bolt of purple shot forward into the hapless crewman, burning a hole in his chest. He screamed in pain and fell onto his side, clutching his chest.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no…” Twilight snapped her head left and right, her pulse thundering in her ears. “What am I doing? Is he dead? I think he’s dead! I need to get out of here!”

An alarm started sounding, raising her immediate sense of panic another few steps closer to giving her a stroke.

“Warning!” sounded a feminine voice from a vox caster above. “Conflagration detected on deck 19, section lambda! Fire suppression systems off-line! Warning!”

Twilight felt slightly comforted that the alarm was in response to the problem she meant to cause rather than the one that had surprised her.

“All right, teleporting out to-“ she stepped across the hall, but then hesitated. “Wait! If they find this guy’s body, then they’ll know something killed him! He obviously didn’t die from the fire! I should-“

“What the blazes is that?!” shouted another crewman rounding the corner. He and a woman in red Mechanicus robes skidded to a halt, stunned at the sight of the equine-shaped power armor.

“NOOOO!!” Twilight screamed, loosing a fireball at the two newcomers. They were drawing laspistols when the spell hit, blasting them off their feet and immolating them entirely.

It didn’t kill them immediately, though, and Twilight cringed as the humans screamed and started flailing about while on fire.

“Sorry! Sorry! I mean, I can’t let you live, but I’m seriously very sorry!” A volley of magic missiles hammered the unprotected humans into the ground, breaking their burning bodies with ease. They crumpled to the floor, still burning.

“Okay! I can do this!” she said, unconsciously shouting again. “Just another firebolt for the-“

“Golden Throne, what is that?!” came a shout from behind.

Twilight screamed incoherently as she whirled around, launching the firebolt at the first body she saw. The deck gunner fell backward, fire blooming from a scorched hole in his chest, but another man from behind was drawing his own laspistol.

“Would you people just give me a minute to think?!” the alicorn shrieked.

Two lasblasts washed over her chest and shoulder pads to little effect, but she answered with a blade of magic that cut into the man’s shoulder and nearly ripped him in two. He fell to the ground, his death scream booming throughout the halls.

“Oh, forget it! I’m out of here!” Twilight snapped, facing the nearest bulkhead. She could already hear the sound of boots running through the halls, as well as the crackling noise of the power conduits cooking behind her.

Her visor calculated the distance to the next room and even detected that there was nobody inside to immediately notice her; a function she really should have remembered a minute ago. Her horn flashed, and once again, Twilight Sparkle slipped through the fabric of space and time.

****

Imperial Cruiser Wrath of Promethius – strategium

“Lord Captain! We have something!”

Captain Bennet looked up from his strategic holomaps. “Report.” Across the railing, Captain Orobes circled around to listen as well.

“A report just came in from the Heart of Vengeance! They’ve found evidence of an intrusion!”

Bennet frowned. “The Heart of Vengeance? They already declared that vessel cleared… what have they found?”

“Sabotage, Lord Captain! There was a fire set in the port section, near a defensive battery, and the fire suppression systems were disabled! A handful of crew were also found dead, some with their bodies scorched by flames and others with strange, unnatural wounds! They are fighting to get the flames under control and are searching for the intruder, but they currently have no further leads!”

“Daemons,” snarled Orobes. “No other beast could have appeared so swiftly from nowhere and so easily eluded the crew.”

“What shall we do, my lord?” asked Captain Bennet.

“Redouble the sweeps of our vessels! Complete searches! Open every crate and check every vent!” the Astartes ordered. “We have little else to do until the Warp storm clears, anyway.”

Bennet bowed. “Of course, my lord. I thank you for your counsel.”

Orobes favored the man with a nod before he started walking toward the exit. On the way, he tapped the vox bead on his head. “Purgatus Squad, Excelsior Squad, turn around and head to the Heart of Vengeance! We have an infestation to purge!”

“What of the freighter fleet, Captain?” crackled a voice in his ear.

“Forget them. The integrity of our fighting forces takes first priority! Board the cruiser, locate the saboteur, and CLEANSE it.”

“Yes, Brother-Captain. For the glory of the Imperium!”

****

Centaur III – Canterlot Royal Library

Serith flipped through the pages of the latest tome to catch his interest, his visor glittering in the dim candle light.

He reached the last page, stared up in contemplation, and then closed the book. Then he placed it back into the dusty slot where it had come from.

He walked down the aisle, unconsciously stepping around the comatose ponies in his path. The finger of his gauntlet ran over the spines of several new tomes as he walked, before suddenly stopping on one in particular.

“Lord Serith, what are you doing?” asked a voice to his side. “We require your assistance.”

Serith raised a hand toward the interruption, instantly seeking out the intruder’s mental presence. Once contacted, it was a simple matter to lull the weak mind to rest.

Except it wasn’t a simple matter, in this case. Serith’s power was rebuffed, his tendrils of psionic force washing against a barrier like water splashing at the face of a dam.

The Sorcerer made a disappointed noise. “What do you want, Priest?” Serith finally turned around to give the intruder his full attention.

“The Nethalican has been unsettled. I have been ordered to restore it with all haste,” Virgil explained.

“Unsettled?” Serith repeated sharply. “Such a thing is not easy to do. Yet you came to allow the single most important structure on this world to be damaged? Despite our unrivaled military strength, and your own considerable rapport with the Dark Gods?”

“Looks like it,” Virgil admitted blandly, “little help?”

A tortured sigh came from the Sorcerer. “Very well. I would hate for anything unfortunate to happen to our allies currently in transit.”

“Actually, I’ve received word that the fleet is-“

“Please, Priest. Do not mistake my dry humor for actual concern. You may spare me the details of Lord Sliver’s inevitable complaints of deadlines and quotas.” He walked past Virgil, still stepping over and around the scattered sleeping ponies.

“As you wish…” Virgil mumbled, bowing his head slightly and following Serith to the exit.

****

Heart of Vengeance – munitorium loading tunnels

“Okay, then. This is getting pretty serious.”

Twilight huddled on the floor next to a conveyance strip in the middle of a tunnel used for transporting ordnance to various weapons. Alarms roared in the hallways above and below her, and every minute or so she would hear the sound of boots running across the grates above her hiding spot.

“I killed humans. Several of them. Who were only trying to respond appropriately to defend themselves and their space ship. Which I’m still planning to sabotage. So, in all likelihood, that’s only the beginning of the casualties I’ll be inflicting.”

Twilight sucked in a deep breath, pressing her side against the wall. Her voice was cool and even, but she wasn’t fooling herself.

“Okay, no. Stop this, Twilight. This isn’t about right and wrong. This is about survival. Every one of these humans will kill you if they get the chance. And not just because you’re on their ship! But also because you’re allies with their mortal enemies! Their horrible, corrupt, brutal enemies that shot you at an enemy war ship to create a distraction.”

She banged her helmet against the wall. “I want to go home… why am I even out here? Celestia didn’t send that letter, and now the Nethalican is failing… what’s going on back in Equestria?”

No answer was forthcoming from the gloomy bulkheads, obviously, nor the otherwise extremely useful helmet cogitator. She continued staring into the empty gloom, unbroken save for the parallel strips of light bleeding through from the hall lumens above.

“… Okay, just two more minutes of feeling sorry for myself, then I really have to go,” the pony mumbled, “I have an incomprehensibly dangerous superweapon to… uh oh…”

The sound of footsteps came from above her again, but this time they bore a much heavier, metallic gait that she was quite familiar with.

“Space Marines!” she hissed under her breath, stepping back from the grate.

Her voice was extremely low, and further muted by her helmet. Twilight completely underestimated the amount of noise her own power-armored steps made, however.

The sound of armored footsteps stopped, and for a moment so did her heart.

“What was that?” rumbled a vox-altered voice. Not as harsh as those used by the Iron Warriors, she noted absently.

“An air vent?”

“No. It came from the ordnance loading tubes.”

Twilight started walking backward, trying desperately to move slowly enough that her metal boots wouldn’t make a sound against the metal flooring. It wasn’t easy. Her pulse was roaring in her ears again, which made it very hard to judge which noises would be audible to the super-soldiers right above her.

A clanging noise came from the grate above. Twilight kept backing away at a snail’s pace.

“I don’t see anything. Is there an access point?”

“Not here. The grate is too small for power armor. Hold position.”

Twilight glanced back at the tube behind her. She didn’t know if there was a larger entrance, as she had teleported through the bulkheads, but the tunnel itself was plenty large for an Astartes or two to move through. Still, if they had to leave to get in, then she was sure she could cover more ground in the opposite direction.

Twilight had just started working out which direction would be ideal for her escape when a loud hum filled the entire tunnel. The floor and walls started to glow.

“What?! Waugh!” Twilight was suddenly suspended in the air, her armor magnetically levitated above the tracked flooring. She floated and flailed about for a few seconds until she realized that she was making an entirely unnecessary amount of noise.

“There’s definitely something down there.”

“That didn’t sound like a daemon. Crew, perhaps?”

“Whoever is down there, if you are a servant of the Emperor, you shall be spared! Reveal yourself at once!”

Twilight Sparkle was not a servant of any Emperor, obviously, and had no illusions of potential mercy. Her flight pack spread open, and she flipped about to face away from the Salamanders. She launched herself forward through the air, rocketing through the tunnels.

“Okay, Solon said that they should be able to pick up my flight pack’s energy emissions.” She said to herself. “I’ll need to find a good point to stop where I can quickly teleport away and put some physical barriers between me and my last known location.”

Her visor displayed the local-area map, revealing the corridors above and below the tunnel and labeling them appropriately.

“Okay, I’m pretty sure the bridge and reactor are going to be extremely well-fortified and defended, since those would be the obvious places to sabotage a ship. I should go for the command console in the officers’ quarters. I think it should be…” she creased her brow as she noticed something odd in the map. It looked like a bulkhead wall was moving through the tunnel she was speeding through, but moving in the opposite direction.

She banished the map from her display, and then quickly determined the cause of the confusion: a giant cannon shell in a mag-harness, rocketing through the tunnel straight toward her.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAA-“ Twilight winked out of reality a split-second before impact, reappearing behind the munition. “-AAAAAAAAAAH!!”

The shell and the pony streaked off in opposite directions, collision avoided. Twilight sucked in a deep breath, and then scowled.

“So that’s what those Marines were doing! They were just going to run ordnance through the tunnels to squash anything hiding in it!” She shook her head. “Never mind. Have to focus. The crew quarters should be ahead and below. I just need to-“

Her visor flashed again, alerting the Princess to another incoming shell. “And, of course, they wouldn’t just let up after the first try. The hay with this.” As the new warhead became visible up ahead, Twilight marked out a location below for teleport. Then she vanished yet again in a flash of purple.

****

Twilight Sparkle re-appeared in a fairly small corridor that branched off ahead of her. A quick look around revealed no nearby crew and a sign over her head that labeled the section as the officer’s dormitorium.

“All right. Here I am. Almost done. Kind of. Excepting the whole ‘escape’ thing.” She whispered to herself, creeping forward. “They’ll have tracked me through the tunnel, so they know that I came this far and disappeared. While apparently running headlong into two ordnance loads. That’s okay. It’s better if they’re confused.”

She reached an intersection and peeked around the corner. Two human guards stood in front of a door, each carrying boarding shotguns. Twilight couldn’t get a good look at the door, but despite being one of a dozen such entrances it seemed to be the only one that warranted armed guards.

Twilight’s horn glowed, and an aura of purple energy engulfed the two men. They staggered drunkenly for a few seconds, and then slid onto the floor, unconscious.

“Perfect.” Twilight crept up to the door, noting the golden nameplate that said “Herate”. Her visor confirmed that was the name of the ship’s Captain.

She was about to teleport inside, but then hesitated and looked back up at the nameplate. It was shaped like a double-headed eagle, and composed of gilded durasteel. Not exceptionally ostentatious, but a step above the plain iron plates adorning the other doors.

Twilight turned her head back and forth, and then used her magic to tear the plate off the door.

“Well, I AM a space pirate now, technically,” she murmured, mag-locking the plate against the inside of her leg, “may as well nab a souvenir while I’m on mission.”

In a flicker of purple light, Twilight vanished from the hallway.

The inside of the Captain’s quarters were positively luxurious compared to the rest of the ship, to say nothing of the accommodations on the Harvest. Plush carpets, upholstered furniture, and actual finery dominated the interior. The entry room split off into three other rooms: the bedroom, the washroom, and a large office.

If Twilight had been of a mind to nab more “souvenirs”, there was quite a collection of interesting trinkets scattered around the place. But at this point she was entirely focused on the objective at hand, and how she might escape once it was complete.

She entered the office and zeroed in on the cogitator console built into the desk.

“Yes! This is it! I did it!” she squealed to herself, racing around the desk to the vid screen. Her visor locked on to the screen, and after a moment it started to flicker, activating its boot-up sequence.

“All right, so let’s think about this. This is an alpha-directive command console. It has at least partial access to all ship systems. I should be able to figure out where the savior pods are with this and which one will launch toward the Company fleet. If I can just get within a few kilometers – and outside the range of the smaller Imperial guns – then I can break out and just fly back to the ship.”

It was a simple plan. A little too simple for her tastes, actually. But then, she was fairly new to this. Not completely new, granted, but she wasn’t sure how many covert sabotage operations one had to complete before one got to be an “expert”.

The logic engine finished booting, and an access prompt appeared on the vid screen. A message read “Access level Alpha-Primarus. Gene-print identification required.”

The equine infiltrator ignored the gene-scanner next to the screen. “Crack it,” Twilight ordered her power armor, leaning her face toward the screen. At her command, numbers started streaming across her visor, and a progress bar on the vid screen appeared. One by one, hundreds of numbers were drawn from the digitized rivers of data, dropping into a flashing sequence that grew proportionately with the progress bar. Twilight couldn’t make any sense of the process, naturally, and definitely decided she’d have to thank Solon for his personal brilliance in developing her armor’s cogitator systems. She was absolutely sure she would have teleported into a wall or in the middle of a group of soldiers by now without it.

The progress bar filled up, and the vid-screen flickered.

“I’m in! Perfect! Now let’s do that scan, and-“

Her visor flashed “system scan complete” in front of her face.

“Efficient! REALLY have to thank Solon again for this thing. Almost makes it reasonable to be frequently sent on these ridiculous missions!” Twilight then focused on the vid-screen. “All right, I have a map of the whole ship now, so let’s check out the savior pods and plan a route off this thing! It looks like the hard part’s over! I’m almost home free!”

****

Heart of Vengeance – bridge

“Captain Herate, I’m getting some very unusual readings over the ship’s cogitator networks.” A Techpriest turned toward the ship’s head officer curiously, one optic fixed on her station’s console.

“What is it? Anything about that blasted intruder?” the Captain growled.

“Perhaps, Lord Captain. According to the networks, it is currently being accessed by your personal office logic engine. It is an authorized access.”

The Captain stared incredulously at the engineer-cultist. “You’re telling me that a daemon has accessed my command console?”

“That is an interesting hypothesis. There are no known records I am aware of in which daemonic entities have-“

“I DON’T CARE ABOUT ANY RECORDS OF WHAT DID OR DID NOT HAPPEN! I AM CONCERNED WITH WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW!!” bellowed the Naval officer. Then he whirled on the vox officer. “Tell every spare man with a gun to surround and move in on the crew quarters! Surround it on all halls and floors! Inform the Astartes too! FIND that miserable rodent, and KILL IT!!”

“Yes, Lord Captain! Right away!”

****

Heart of Vengeance – Captain’s quarters

“Okay, I think I can make this work. Lock down one of the pods with an access codex, and I can even prevent anyone else from using it before I arrive!”

Her visor danced with icons and shrinking and expanding circles, guiding her usage of the console just as much as the gentle pulses of telekinesis upon the screen. Honestly, this device seemed so convenient, Twilight seriously wondered if she should even risk using the daemon virus. She could probably fire a weapon from here, shut down a vital system, or transmit a message that indicated treasonous intent. Why risk releasing a literal monster when all she needed to do was cause enough of a ruckus to divert attention from the “harmless freighters” nearby? Maybe if she proved her technical competence and brought back Malectus Beta unused, it would even earn a pixel of respect from Kaelith.

The vid-screen flickered again, and a new message scrolled up. “Who are you, and how did you access this ship system? Are you a daemon? It is our working hypothesis, but I have come to believe it is incorrect.”

Twilight stared. The text box didn’t seem connected to any of the programs she was using. She was actually tempted to type out a response for a second, but quickly produced a long list of reasons that was a bad idea.

Then more text appeared. “I am only asking for posterity. Your infiltration will be studied in order to prevent similar incursions in the future. It would greatly aid this cause if you were captured in a conscious state to be interrogated and dissected, so I advise you submit immediately.”

Twilight quickly tried to bring up an auger scan of the deck she was on, but the program closed as soon as she opened it. To her increasing alarm, all of the ship system menus she was rooting through were closing.

“Someone must be using another one of the main consoles to shut me out! Can they do that?” The question seemed academic as the screen suddenly returned to the starting menu.

It seemed downright unimportant when she heard the sound of Space Marines running through the halls.

“PONYFEATHERS!” Twilight cursed, telekinetically hitting the button to the office door. The barrier slid shut just as she saw the door to the hallway slide open, revealing two giants in gleaming green armor.

“Okay, no more time to mess around!” Twilight squeaked, dropping to the floor and facing the main logic engine housing. “Time to do this the Chaos way!”

While her telekinesis engaged the door lock, her force harmonizer popped off her back and floated next to her head. Feeding a small sliver of energy into the weapon, she generated a relatively tiny energy blade and sliced off the front of the housing.

A beeping noise came from the door as the Salamanders tried to open it the easy way. Next came the hard way, Twilight was sure. That door wouldn’t stand up to a krak grenade.

The chip on the underside of her shoulder pad floated into the cogitator housing, and Twilight pulled back a leg. “I really hope Kaelith isn’t into practical jokes, because I need this to work!”

Her boot came down on the gleaming data wafer at the same time as the door exploded.

The two Salamanders stood on either side of the doorway, peering inside. One had flamer at the ready, the other a bolt pistol and chainsword. They couldn’t see anything initially, but their visors quickly picked up an energy signature behind the desk.

“The Captain’s office has been breached. Target confirmed. Engaging!”

The man with the flamer went first, his partner splitting off to the other side with the intent of attacking the intruder in a pincer.

Twilight didn’t bother to marvel at their speed or tactical nuance. She knew Space Marines well enough to know that she was at a severe disadvantage in such cramped quarters. She teleported away from the desk, into the next room. Her force harmonizer detached immediately, quickly shifting into a shield.

She had been hoping that the Astartes would be at least a little confused at her instantaneous retreat, but they rounded on her immediately.

“Witchcraft!”

“The enemy! It is…”

Luckily for Twilight, they DID seem slightly taken aback when they got their first real look at her. Which was good, as she was busy working out the best location for her next teleport and eventual escape.

“What in the Emperor’s name is THAT?”

“That’s no daemon...”

Their diversion was short-lived, and the weapons came up. Twilight Sparkle prepared her own retreat, deciding that any random corridor was likely safer than this place.

Then she heard a heartbeat. Not her own.

It thrummed heavily in her ear, like a drum being hammered right next to her. Her visor was briefly consumed with static, cutting off the calculations she was going to use for her teleportation spell. After a moment she realized that the sound had come from her vox system, and that the Salamanders must have experienced it too since they hadn’t tried to murder her with fire yet.

Her visor cleared, the static reduced to the edges of her vision. The Space Marines were staggering, clutching at their helmets to rip them off. Evidently their suit systems weren’t handling the anomaly as well as hers.

The heartbeat came again. Then the long, creaking groan of the ship’s superstructure shifting.

After another moment, Twilight realized that the alarms had stopped. They had been such a constant since she’d reached the ship that she’d eventually dismissed them as empty background noise. Now they were gone, and it definitely wasn’t because the problems she had caused had been resolved.

The clunk of two helmets landing on the floor reminded the equine that she was technically still in a battle. The two Salamanders glared angrily at the armored pony, their faces black as coal and their eyes pits of blazing crimson.

“What have you done, alien?!” demanded the Space Marine with the flamer.

“Diverted your attention from the true threat right under your noses,” Twilight answered with complete sincerity, “as well as a second, more immediate threat ALSO right under your noses.” She lowered her head. “I, uhm, realize that it’s a little late for this, but I really am sorry about all this. It’s nothing personal, you know? I’m just doing my job.”

The Salamanders were fairly surprised to hear the creature apologize, but it changed nothing regarding their mission. The ship once again groaned around them, and the thrumming heartbeat continued pulsing across the vox network.

“Do you surrender then, xeno?” demanded the soldier with the flamer. “There is no escape. All the surrounding decks are guarded. You will face the Emperor’s judgment.”

The pulse kept growing louder. Humming noises started rolling through the ship, and Twilight’s visor kept breaking into static and then rapidly clearing every few seconds. The static started collecting in small clusters, appearing close enough to form coherent shapes. Those shapes were letters, and they formed a rather unnerving, semi-coherent message to the pony.

DESTROY CONSUME KILL SUFFERING DEATH

“Look, guys, I’m getting out of here. I REALLY recommend you do the same.” Twilight’s horn flashed.

In the same instant, the Salamanders fired. Fire washed over Twilight’s shield and licked at her while a bolt round slammed into the barrier and shook the iron cross that powered it. The alicorn kept her concentration, however, and then winked away in a flash of purple.

****

When Twilight reappeared, her visor was again consumed by static such that she couldn’t see her immediate surroundings. She also still had that ominous heartbeat in her ears, but that didn’t obscure her hearing as much as the static obscured her sight.

So at least she had SOME warning before being pelted with lasgun fire.

“THERE IT IS!”

“The blazes is that thing? Is that power armor?”

“Doesn’t matter! Kill it!”

Twilight turned and ran, only to immediately run into a man’s leg and stumble.

“Oof! Sorry!” she kept going, shouting her apology even as she crushed the soldier’s shin under her hooves. Screams and angry shouting followed her down the hall, along with a prodigious amount of red laser beams.

Her visor finally cleared, helpfully revealing that there were armsmen ahead of her, too.

“Get out of the way!” Twilight screamed, activating her flight pack and harmonizer shield. She bowled into the men like a shining purple comet, shielding her face from the incoming fire and pushing further down the hall.

“Seriously, am I the only one who noticed that the ship is acting strange?! Which would make sense, actually, since I am the one who caused it and would be expecting a response, but-YEEP!” Twilight landed hard as a plasma blast slammed into her shield, causing it to flicker and almost overloading the barrier. She kicked away a man next to her, and then quickly spotted the plasma gunner sweeping around to get another shot.

Another short-range teleport took her right in front of the plasma gunner, and she reared up and slammed a hoof into the weapon receiver. The gun cracked in two, and the soldier bearing it flailed backward in shock.

“That thing is nearly as dangerous to you as to me! Don’t be reckless!” Twilight snapped before a shotgun blast pitched her head to the side. “Ow! Quit it!”

Her flight pack took her into the air again, and she rocketed down the halls toward a set of blast doors that sealed off that section of the ship from the rest.

Then her horn casing glowed, and the armored equine disappeared once more.

“Damnation! Daemonic sorcery!” spat a squad commander before he slammed a hand onto his helmet vox. “This is Sergeant Lonn! The target has escaped heading toward the bow on deck 30-C!”

The vox crackled with static for several seconds, along with a fairly disturbing thrumming noise, before he got a response.

“Confirmed, Sergeant. Have the blast doors been breached?”

“Negative! Bloody thing can teleport! Winks in and out as it damn well pleases!”

“That explains how it was able to navigate around the ship… Astartes are en route to assist.”

“It also… talks, Sir,” the soldier added, frowning, “it, uh… said something about the ship acting up? Is there… any truth to that?”

“We’re experiencing some system malfunctions, yes. But the Techpriests will-“

A feral, ear-piercing screech suddenly came from the vox, filling the corridors with terrifying noise. The floor trembled, and the entire superstructure groaned again.

The Sergeant ripped his headset off, nearly deafened. The others clutched their ears to try to block out some portion of the noise.

“Are we… are we moving? That felt like a combat maneuver just then.”

Then another familiar sound came from the surrounding bulkheads, echoing through the halls in rhythmic thuds. Weapons fire.

“We’re shooting? At who? There’s no one around except… oh no…”

“Emperor preserve us all…”

****

Imperial Cruiser Wrath of Promethius – bridge

“What the hell is going on here?!” Captain Bennet roared to his crew, staring at the tactical hololith below his command throne.

The bridge officers were working feverishly yet again, yelling to each other and racing from terminal to terminal to make sense of the situation.

“This is… no, but…”

“It’s confirmed! The Heart of Vengeance has opened fire!”

“On WHO?! Who do they think they’re shooting at?!” Bennet demanded.

“Everyone, Lord Captain! Each weapon seems to have simply fired at the closest available void ship!”

“She’s coming around, Lord! It looks like she’s lining up her lance batteries next!”

“All ships, prepare for evasive maneuvers!” The Captain shouted. “Someone open up a hailing frequency to the Heart of Vengeance!”

“Confirmed, Captain. There’s a lot of signal corruption, but we have a link.”

When the vid-screen opened up, it was immediately evident what the comms technician had been talking about. Static crackled around the edges of the image, and Bennet could barely make out human shapes racing across the bridge in an even greater panic than his own crew.

“Captain Herate! Explain yourself! What’s going on down there?!”

The response was badly muffled, breaking up frequently as to make most of the speech inaudible.

“… systems have…... corrosive… completely…… the Techpriests…”

“You must shut down your systems at once! I don’t know what’s happening down there, but you are targeting friendly vessels! If you do not get your vessel under control, we WILL be forced to open fire!”

A scream came from the vid-screen. Several of the human-looking shadows lurched back, flailing. It wasn’t at all clear what, if anything, was attacking them.

“… can’t stop…… dying, must……”

“The corruption is getting worse, Lord Captain. I’m seeing some elements of the signal attempting to creep into our own systems and infect them,” announced a Techpriest, “terminating signum.” The vid-screen went black.

“The Heart is firing lances! Direct hit against the Juraan Blade! It looks like they have a hull breach!” On the tactical display, one of the escort ships flashed red.

Captain Bennet slammed a fist onto the arm rest of his throne. “Alert all vessels. The Heart of Vengeance… is lost.” The bridge fell silent in an instant, all the crew stopping to hear the impending death sentence.

Bennet’s voice was tight and somber. “The Adon and Final Word are to make an attack run while we come about on the starboard flank. I want our own lance batteries charged and ready to fire as soon as the void shields are down. Alert all other vessels in the fleet. Kill that ship.”

Silence greeted his orders at first, but after a few seconds the crew went to work. One officer, however, took a deep breath and spoke up.

“Lord Captain… the Salamanders are still on the Heart of Vengeance attempting to neutralize the intruder. If we destroy the cruiser before they can extract…”

“I realize the enormity of the losses we face,” the Captain said bitterly, “but with the greatest respect to the Astartes, the deaths of several Space Marines cannot be seriously weighed against the loss of entire void ships and their crews. They will realize the threat soon enough, and hopefully find a way off the vessel in time. Tell the turret gunners they may fire at will.”

“Yes, Lord Captain.” The officer sounded positively defeated, which was an accurate reflection of the entire crew’s feelings. The Heart of Vengeance had indeed been defeated; and not in any contest of power or strategy, but by trickery and dark witchcraft.

“… Oh, hey. The Head Navigator sent a message,” mumbled another officer, “it looks like the Warp storm has cleared.”

“Then at least this vile diversion will be short-lived. Destroy that vessel, and then prepare for Warp transit.”

“Aye, Lord Captain.”

****

Centaur III – Nethalican

“There. I have found the distant disturbance and quelled it,” Serith grumbled, closing his spell book, “the way forward is clear again, and the currents are once again running to the fleet’s favor. They’ll be fine.”

Behind the Sorcerer, several of the Cultists shared dubious glances.

“Well, actually my lord-“ one began, only to be swiftly interrupted.

“Do not mistake my idle musings for an attempt at conversation, mortal.” Serith turned around, tilting his helmet down to stare at Virgil. “Will there be any further trifles you wish to test me with?”

Virgil leaned to the side to see past the psyker to the Dark Portal. It was once again a seething, angry red. He straightened.

“Not unless you wish to help investigate the cause of the disturbance.”

“Feh. No doubt one of the equines got curious as to how their magics might interact with the portal. It is no matter,” the Sorcerer dismissed the idea, walking past the clergy.

“Of course, Lord,” Virgil agreed, sounding completely unconvinced, “that must be it.”

Serith was already out the door by the time the priest finished speaking, and a moment later the front gate slammed shut.

****

Heart of Vengeance – deck 19-A

“Excuse me! Coming through!”

Twilight blasted over the head of a combat servitor before it had a chance to swing at her, and dove directly into the Techpriest standing behind the veritable barricade of cyborgs. She slammed her front boots right into his chest, knocking him onto his back and sending the Techpriest’s power axe spinning across the floor.

Twilight jumped away just as a servo arm snapped toward her neck, landing in a straight gallop down the corridor.

“I seriously think you all have bigger things to worry about right now! Why is everyone trying to kill me rather than evacuating?!”

As if to punctuate her point, the floor suddenly shook violently from a hefty impact nearby. This threw off the aim of a gun servitor enough to leave a shaky string of heavy bolter impacts on the bulkhead next to Twilight rather than on her armor. Quite fortunate, as her suit had already endured quite a bit of punishment already.

Twilight weathered the tremors well enough to make it to the next set of blast doors, and once again vanished in a flash of purple.

****

When she rematerialized, her visor was again briefly lost to static. It was extremely frustrating, but she dared not take her helmet off at this point. The ship was clearly deteriorating in its functions, and she didn’t know how long life support would last. That was on top of the tendency for Imperial soldiers to aim for her head, which was located at the height that human soldiers usually fired at when targeting enemy troops in a firefight.

She panted as her visor cleared, feeling the magical strain from her frequent teleports. She would have much preferred to make her escape using the ordnance transportation tunnels again, which would cut down on the number of teleports and enemy resistance, but judging by all the shaking those facilities were definitely being used.

“Okay… the route is… uh…” Twilight’s visor had cleared, but the flickering HUD didn’t give her a clear heading like it did before. This blast door was located at a four-way intersection, which left her with a decision to make.

“The savior pods are located on either side of the ship, and I was near the starboard edge, I think. So I should go…” she turned left.

Four Space Marines promptly rounded the corner of that corridor, charging directly for her. “FOR THE EMPEROR!!”

“Detour! Detour!” Twilight howled, leaping down another hall. The roar of bolters followed her, raining upon the bulkheads. “This is ridiculous! Are you all willing to die just to get me? Why?! Why does everything in space hate me so much?!”

She rounded another corner just ahead of the power-armored boots, and then raced into a room. She didn’t pause to take stock of what the room was, as she was in a hurry. Unfortunately, this led to her tripping over one of the bodies that was sprawled on the floor.

The Princess crashed gracelessly, slamming her armored face into the deck plating before bouncing onto her side. She started scrambling upright immediately, but this gave her a brief opportunity to see her surroundings.

The reason she tripped was because there were numerous bodies on the floor. The bodies of Techpriests and Enginseers, to be specific, as well as a few servitors. They all looked to be dead, which wouldn’t be THAT bizarre or interesting, but they also had coils of black wires running into their augmetics. The black wires all spread out from a single cogitator bank on the wall, and they pulsed like the veins of a living thing.

The ship lurched violently again, sending the pony rolling across the floor. Showers of sparks blasted from the cogitator banks, and something on the ceiling split open and started pouring a cloudy vapor into the room.

As soon as Twilight got upright again, that shroud parted around a mass of green armor.

Twilight leapt behind the cogitator bank as quickly as she could, but the Salamander had already opened fire. A bolter round struck her in the rear leg and knocked her over yet again; even though the armor protected her from direct damage, the sheer force of a boltgun shot was enough to throw her off her hooves.

Luckily, her pursuer followed that up with a grenade tossed after her. Twilight teleported the weapon back with barely a thought, scraping her way more deeply into cover.

As the explosive went off and the Space Marines started cursing, Twilight took stock of her options to continue retreating. Ideally options that didn’t rely on heavy magic use, since she was starting to exhaust her prodigious mana reserves.

Then she noticed a black wire slithering across the ground toward her.

“No! Stop that! I’m on your side, sort of!” She scorched the end of the wire with a tiny jolt of magic to drive it off.

It didn’t like that, apparently.

A furious howl boomed through the area, amplified by Twilight’s vox to the point that she nearly fell over again just from the volume.

The dead cyborgs on the floor jerked to life, their limbs quivering and twitching while they pushed themselves upright. Their optics flickered on, their weaponry hummed, and the various servo arms started snapping at the air wildly like enraged beasts.

“The Techpriests! They’re still alive?” asked a Salamander, recoiling.

“Negative! They’re corrupted!”

One of the figures in dark red stood up straight, a feral screech coming from his Binaric vocalizer. He leapt for the Space Marines, all the while still tethered to the ship by the black cabling.

“Cut them down! Purge them all!”

Twilight elected not to stay for the battle against the corrupted dead and the Astartes, leaping for the closest exit corridor and racing down it.

The ship continued to shake, and she idly noticed that its pulse was speeding up. She couldn’t be sure that the daemonic virus-controlled space craft followed the same rules as living creatures, but between that and the constant tremors she got the impression that the vessel was dying with tremendous violence.

Another set of blast doors came up ahead, and she again disappeared in a flash of purple light.

****

Twilight quickly brought her harmonizer shield around to protect her front as her visor exploded into static again.

“Come on… Come on…” she hissed.

The ship groaned and churned with echoing noise. The pounding of guns reverberated through the corridors, along with the sound of detonations and shrieks of the dying. Twilight was fairly certain that last subset of noises shouldn’t have been QUITE so audible to her, all things considered, but Chaos tended to emphasize such things.

Eventually her vision was mostly clear again, and she checked the new corridor.

“Yes! I’m here! Those are the savior pods up ahead!” She galloped forward, almost squealing with glee. She could even see that most of the pods were still present. If she escaped while the infected ship was still fighting, she could easily contact the Company fleet and get picked up without anyone noticing!

That was the plan, anyway. Although no part of that plan accounted for yet ANOTHER Space Marine stepping out of an adjoining corridor straight in her path.

“Are you serious?!” Twilight shouted, swinging her shield around to block an initial bolt pistol shot. “We’re right next to the savior pods! You can escape too! I’m not going to stop you! Don’t fight me here!”

This new Salamander was more extensively armored than the others, and carried a power maul along with a bolt pistol and a flamer. A scaly cloak hung from his shoulder pads, which was as good an indicator as any that the Astartes held rank.

“You will find no escape here, daemon!” Captain Orobes announced, charging across the deck.

“I’m not a daemon!” Twilight protested, her horn lighting up. “I don’t even like daemons! I work with daemons as an act of necessity, and nothing more!” She cast a spell to cover the deck floor between them with ice, and then spread her flight pack to fly over it to the pods.

The ice didn’t slow Orobes down. In fact, it did quite the opposite. He shifted his weight once his boots landed on the frozen surface, and slid across it straight toward his target. His maul smashed Twilight’s force harmonizer out of the way, and he slammed his other hand into the side of her helmet an instant later.

Twilight was sent sprawling across the deck, rolling haphazardly from the blow. She slid to a stop and started to stand, only for two bolt shells to strike her in separate legs. Again, the armor held but her legs didn’t, slipping under her and causing her to collapse onto her side.

Orobes bore down on his foe without mercy, the head of his power maul glowing bright blue as it streaked through the air. Twilight’s flight pack activated while she was still on the ground, blasting her forward in a clumsy and desperate dodge.

Orobes missed his swing, but wasn’t able to follow his opponent immediately. A tremendous jolt lifted the deck up underneath him, throwing the Space Marine to the ground as the bulkheads screeched around him. Panels collapsed and sputtered sparks onto the deck, and a howl of pain and fury reverberated through the vox.

Twilight’s barely-planned flight ended with her scraping up against a wall, and she collapsed back onto the floor while the corridor started coming apart. Her visor was a mess, with angry warnings, sensor intercepts, and a confusing jumble of scrapcode-inspired data all competing for her attention among the constant, flickering bursts of static. Her ears were ringing and her legs ached, and she wasn’t completely sure that her armor hadn’t been breached.

But she knew she still had a chance. She just needed to teleport into a savior pod.

“You die today, creature!” Orobes raged, surging to his feet and bolting forward. “The Emperor’s justice be upon you!”

Twilight’s horn casing began to glow again, its circuit-like seams blazing purple.

The ship quaked again, much more violently than before, rending the outer bulkheads. Twilight completely lost her concentration, was smashed in the side by a chunk of metal, and was thrown hard into the wall on the other side of the corridor. Her only consolation was that the same exact thing happened to the Salamander Captain, hurling him into a pile of supply crates that spilled small parts across the deck and partially buried him in metal boxes.

It took some time for Twilight to come to her senses. She wasn’t sure how much time; everything was a little hazy from the constant collisions and the extraordinary amount of stress she’d been under.

By the time she was able to remember that she was still in terrible danger and lucid enough to do something about it, she immediately noticed that there seemed to be some environmental differences. She felt weightless, a sure sign that the gravity plating had failed, and completely new and exciting warnings had taken a place of prominence on her HUD. She recognized them as indicators that the corridor had depressurized, and that she was now in a zero-oxygen environment. A brief search of her surroundings revealed why, and she felt her heart sink.

An enormous tear now ran through the outer bulkheads, revealing the empty void to her. Or, at least, it had been empty before the Heart of Vengeance had started leaking debris from its hull. Twisted wreckage and globs of cooling plasma surrounded the breach. And no doubt the savior pods Twilight was intending to commandeer made up a considerable portion of the ruins.

The pony’s mind stalled. Her thoughts became muddy. She tried to think, tried to come up with a new plan, tried even to panic blindly, but she simply felt numb. The Salamander was right: there was no escape. What was she supposed to do now?

In that sense, she was almost glad for a bolt shell pounding the side of her helmet. Twilight was thrown to the side again, but at least avoided another crash thanks to her weightlessness. She activated her flight pack and spun around to face her enemy.

Orobes was on his feet again, smoke floating from his bolt pistol. To Twilight’s surprise, a local-area vox signal connected to her helmet.

“You even have a functional vox system. Impressive. Whatever deranged fanatic forged your armor is quite skilled, creature. It is a shame his talents are wasted on heretical pursuits and feeble cowards like you.” The Salamander pointed his power maul at the pony. “Someday I hope that I may find and kill him, as well.”

Twilight felt her fur prickle along her back. “Don’t think you’re getting out of this alive, Space Marine. You had your chance. I’m the last thing you’ll EVER kill.” Her boots trembled, and then she was pulled down onto the floor, where they mag-locked to the ruined deck. “IF you manage to do that before the ship just explodes or crushes us.” Her eyes darted over to the force harmonizer, now floating in the air along with an assortment of other supplies. The metal cross hardly stood out from the rest of the detritus, and she could still move it without the aura of her magic giving it away.

“Whether by my hand or the mighty guns of our fleet, the righteous shall slay the unholy.” Orobes started walking toward her, his gait much slower now that he had to secure himself onto the floor. “The exact expression of the Emperor’s will matters little. His message remains the same: you are a disease upon the stars, and humanity shall cure you with fire and steel.”

Twilight clenched her teeth. “Just die, already.”

The force harmonizer’s blade flashed to life, darting for the Captain’s head. Orobes swung his maul upward, its power field crackling loudly, and blocked the attack. Then he knocked the blade away and sent the harmonizer spinning wildly, Twilight’s telekinesis proving too weak against an Astartes' brutes strength. His next move struck the cross directly, and Orobes smashed the force harmonizer like a baseball, sending it through the hull breach and into the empty void.

Twilight blinked in surprise, and by the time she was finished the Space Marine was striding toward her again. “All right, fine! Plan D it is!”

The ship trembled again, and deck panels began peeling from the sub-structure and floating around them. Neither combatant took particular notice, utterly focused on each other.

Twilight’s horn seethed with magic, flashing brightly. Her aura surrounded the Space Marine, trying to stop him directly, to change his body to some form more manageable and ideally inanimate. Her magic seeped into his flesh, but then that flesh REBELLED. She felt his will push back against her spell, and his matter simply refused her.

“Perish, monster.” The vox line was cut, and Orobes made his attack.

Twilight tried to dodge again, but that was a difficult prospect even before taking into account that she was magnetically locked to the floor. The power maul smashed into her chest, throwing her face-first into the bulkhead wall.

Her visor cracked from the impact, and several alerts flashed on her HUD briefly before they were scrambled into incoherence. She could probably guess what they were trying to warn her about, though; she could hear a noisy hiss, like a balloon being deflated. Her armor was depressurizing. That was on top of the painful throbbing in her head and legs, of course.

She ignored it. Additional peril was really quite redundant at this point.

Twilight pushed away from the wall and her flight pack sputtered to life. At the very least she had better zero-g mobility than the Space Marine, since he had no form of aerial movement.

Evidently Orobes realized this as well, and promptly corrected his oversight. A single bolt shot struck the mare’s wing, hitting the repulsor disk. It failed immediately, and Twilight yelped when she found herself spinning in the space above the deck.

She managed to stabilize herself by latching back onto the floor again, but that simply left her stuck in place once more as the Astartes charged. What could she do now? Her magic was practically exhausted. Her weapons were lost or expended. Her armor was shattered, and probably had less than a minute’s oxygen supplies. This was it. She was out of options. The Space Marine was right. There was no escape.

Her horn sparked again, desperately grasping for the last few motes of energy. A final fireball, a single magic missile. Anything to at least keep fighting to the end.

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut, and a flash of light bloomed between her and the Salamander. Orobes went for the kill, throwing his full weight behind an overhead swing of his power maul.

The power maul struck ceramite, sparking viciously as the crackling flanges dug into the outer armor layers of a shoulder pad. The results were patently underwhelming; the armor was not breached, and the flesh underneath obviously unharmed.

In fairness, Orobes had not struck the enemy he was expecting.

The hulking mass of terminator armor looked brittle and corroded, an illusion betrayed by the laughable dent made by the Captain’s power weapon. Black and yellow warning chevrons and tarnished gold decorated the armor, along with an ominous trio of circles upon its belt. A helmet bearing two drum gas filters and a single red optic lens turned to stare down at Orobes, regarding him in the manner a man might look upon a small, obnoxious dog.

Orobes didn’t move for a moment, stunned. Then he immediately pulled back for another attack.

Sliver’s hand moved like a striking viper, belying his size. He grabbed the haft of the maul, stopping it dead, and his other hand seized the Space Marine by the helmet.

Orobes brought up his bolt pistol and fired point-blank into the Chaos Lord, desperately unloading the magazine and trying to create a breach in the armor, or damage some important component. He did not do so before the weapon clicked empty.

Sliver, in turn, squeezed the Captain’s helmet. After a few seconds, the first layers of ceramite buckled under his fingers, and the left eye lens broke inward. Orobes beat furiously at the rusted giant with his pistol and tugged at his power weapon, but Sliver didn’t acknowledge the warrior’s efforts. After several seconds he ripped off the green helmet, shattering the pressure seals and spilling cracked bits of armor all around on a wave of released air.

The Chaos Lord held up the helmet briefly, staring at it. He did not look at the Salamander’s coal-black face, strained with fury and screaming noiselessly at him.

Then Sliver tossed the helmet away toward the breach in the ship, just as one would discard a piece of trash. He let go of the power maul and turned around.

Twilight Sparkle stared up at him, a web of cracks running through her eye lenses and much of her leg plating. Wires hung freely from a hole in her flight pack, and Sliver even thought he could see a tuft of purple feathers peeking out of the wing casing.

The Salamander’s power maul struck Sliver in the back, but he ignored it. He reached down for the pony, placing his hand over her helmet. Again and again the maul battered and sparked against his daemonic plate, but each blow was noticeably weaker than the last.

As Sliver’s armor began to glow, violent bursts of fire rolled through the corridor. Huge clouds of plasma and debris vomited out of the hull, and the bulkheads warped and fell apart even as the Nurglite and his “cargo” was consumed with light.

They vanished, and Orobes swiped his maul through empty void.

****

Harvest of Steel – teleportarium

Twilight gasped deeply as soon as she could, confirming that she was once again in a place with actual, breathable air. She collapsed almost instantly, and then started pawing at her helmet to take it off.

After a few seconds she managed to do so, and Twilight laid in the middle of the teleportarium array, panting. Then she looked up.

Sliver walked away from the array, stomping toward the corridor with a single hand on the side of his helmet.

“Ssparkle iss back. And sstill alive. Hurry, let’ss go before the loyalisst filth get their bearingss,” he growled bitterly. He actually sped up somewhat as he spoke, as if he had somewhere important to be during a routine Warp space translation. Or perhaps as if he was trying to get out of the room before Twilight recovered enough to ask questions.

The vox caster crackled, and then Solon’s voice poured from the walls. “Acknowledged. All vesshelsh, prepare for transhlation. Accelerate to entry shpeed on heading nine-shix-eight-two-nine.”

The ship trembled, although after the deck-quakes Twilight had lived through recently she barely noticed. Her eyes were focused on Sliver’s back, which finally disappeared from view once he entered the adjoining hall and the doors shut behind him.

“Good work, Princessh Shparkle,” came Solon’s voice again, only this time from Twilight's collar, “I think I jusht might owe you a gold bolt for thish one.”

The deck shook and lurched again, and once again the Harvest of Steel raced into the tides of the Immaterium.

Author's Note

You know, between this and Home, I seem to be seeing a pattern of me turning basically good, heroic characters into villains and making villains out to be heroes. Is there someone I should be seeing about this? Are there any pills I can take? I'm pretty sure this qualifies as a mental illness.

I included that picture of Sliver at the end there just because I had it; it was a test case. That's from EZTP, the same guy that did the cover art for this story, the chapter art for Visions. You may notice a slight stylistic difference.
He calls it "Blizzard art". I was so impressed that I changed the ending of this chapter just so I had an excuse to make Sliver look badass and include that image. I hope to buy much more of this in the future.

Spy vs. Spy

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 8

Spy vs. Spy

****

Centaur III – CNN broadcast studio

“Hello there, and Welcome to the eight o’clock news! I’m your host, Scoops, and this is my co-host and certified lovable roughneck, Kilroy!” Scoops waved to the camera.

Kilroy sat down next to the mare and adjusted his tie. “My certification required the slaughter of an entire village’s militia! The children of that hamlet still weep for the loss of their fathers!”

Scoops giggled, and then slapped a hoof down on a sheet of paper. “Tonight we have a very special report! We’ve received news about the 38th Company’s main fleet, which barely escaped total catastrophe in the depths of space!”

“After I finished savagely beating them, sources within Canterlot Castle revealed that Princess Celestia had been contacted by her former student, Princess Twilight Sparkle.” He pounded a fist into his open palm. “As many of our listeners are aware, Twilight Sparkle has joined our mighty fleet in its mission to supply the forces of Chaos with weapons and material to continue the Long War!”

Kilroy jumped up, throwing his fists into the air. “All glory to Chaos!! Death to the False Emperor!!”

“Right you are, Kilroy!” Scoops winked. “Unfortunately, that mission ran into a hitch when the Nethalican was damaged, causing a disastrous encounter with an Imperial war fleet!”

Kilroy sat down again. “We are not clear on all the details of the encounter, unfortunately, as the castle staff was rescued from my interview after a timely assault by the Royal Guard. However, we are certain that the conflict ended with a resounding victory for Chaos, and that the Imperial worms were left shattered in the wake of our glorious fleet!”

“Yes, it looks like once again, the forces of evil have triumphed! And, by extension, so has Equestria!” Then Scoops frowned. “However, authorities are still unclear on what happened to the Nethalican to prompt this unfortunate crisis! Journalists dispatched to question Serith, High Sorcerer and penultimate Nethalican expert, have so far failed to return. So we reached out to Chaos Priest Virgil, instead! He had this to say.”

A holo-screen appeared above the desk, obscuring the journalists with an image of Virgil standing in front of the gates of the Chaos temple.

“If anyone has information regarding the owner of the cow behind me, contact the Nethalican as soon as you are able,” Virgil said, gesturing to his side. The image panned over slightly to include a blood-streaked calf.

“At first we assumed it was one of the Apples’ animals, but the farm has confirmed it is not. It is best if the creature is claimed promptly. The Acolytes have proposed a cookout.”

The calf mooed, and then started grazing. Virgil bowed and then turned to enter the temple. The holo-screen winked away.

“Less informative than most of our sources, unfortunately,” Kilroy mumbled, drumming his fingers against the desk.

Scoops shook her head. “Right you are, Kilroy. Is this nefarious sabotage another part of the planetary insurgency rising up against the Company’s armies? Experts disagree.”

“Considering that the Nethalican mainly serves to protect the world from alien invasion, and that the main complaint of the weakling natives is OUR alien invasion, it seems an unlikely target, at best.” Kilroy snorted. “However, I expect no great feats of logic from the scum that think to take up arms against Chaos. Perhaps the wretches thought the Chaos temple was simply a vulnerable target, with no more thought as to their actions.”

“If so, then this is a case of unusually subtle resistance,” Scoops pointed out. “While most insurgent activities involve attacks on military personnel or extraction centers, this case appears to be a covert infiltration and sophisticated sabotage. Some suggest, however, that there’s no way the enemy could have predicted the consequences of attacking the Nethalican in this way; even our own Chaos forces were surprised.”

“It is true! The mechanics of the Dark Portal are curious, and such lore belongs exclusively to the Legion Sorcerers!” her Cultist co-host agreed. “Also, there was little evidence of military activity around Ponyville, nor any sightings of foreign creatures. Even greenskin activity and wandering monster sightings have dropped dramatically thanks to the militarization of Sweet Apple Acres!”

Then he pointed at the vid-capture unit. “Sweet Apple Acres is the supplier of blue moon apples, the delicious and healthy way to start your day! BUY THEM! NOW!!”

Scoops blinked in surprise, then glanced off-screen. “Kilroy, I don’t think the Apples are one of our sponsors.”

“That was not a paid endorsement. I just really like those apples,” the man insisted.

“Ah. Well. Moving right along, next we have our Battle Report segment!”

At the mare’s announcement, the words “THERE IS ONLY WAR” appeared on a holo-screen in front of them in large font before vanishing.

“At last! News of consequence!” roared Kilroy. He slammed his fists on the desk. “The offensive against the weakling non-equine races of this world has begun! The forces of Chaos march, and all will submit or be DESTROYED!”

Scoops nodded. “Company forces have already taken a few key Diamond Dog settlements, including Yorkieshire, Bonesville, and the ironically named village of Fortune.”

“Casualties, sadly, were very low, as was collateral damage. Very few screaming and helpless civilians were cut down in the crossfire or sacrificed to the Dark Gods. The rapid surrender of the inhabitants and lack of organized resistance is credited with the ease of victory,” Kilroy explained with a disappointed sigh.

“While evidence of organized resistance activities were found, very few active fighters were caught defending the captured villages. With the enemy continuing to elude the Company military juggernaut, strategists are concerned that the insurgency could distract vital time and resources from the greater struggle against the Orks.”

“But fear not, viewing audience! Chaos has heard your pleas for bloodshed and carnage!” Kilroy interjected. “Even now, our forces are moving in on the Griffon Kingdom, aiming to crush the feeble hybrids and gut their forces! In both the metaphorical and literal senses!”

“The Griffon Kingdom is unique among the insurgent races as having a well-organized and generally competent military as well as a highly centralized government. This gives the Company armies the advantage, as they have a highly visible seat of power to attack. But the griffons will be ready!” Scoops warned. “Will the forces of Chaos be able to overcome the capital of Griffonstone and defeat the mighty armies of Crown Prince Geoffrey?”

The two news anchors paused, staring hard at the vid-capture device. Then they started laughing.

****

Griffonstone – Guff Castle

“Atten-HUT! No sleeping on the job, soldiers!”

Two castle guards straightened up as a griffon Captain rounded the corner, shouting at them. The officer was huge, for a griffon, standing nearly a foot higher than the other warriors and wearing enchanted golden armor. Twin scimitars hung underneath his wings, which were themselves shielded by light metal plates.

The guards showed no particular interest in the officer, but their eyes almost bugged out as they saw another two soldiers and one other figure follow him down the hall. The individual they were escorting was a female equine of the bat pony species; they recognized the leathery, featherless wings right away, both of which were bound with leather straps to keep her from taking flight.

Judging by the way she was being escorted by two royal guards and a Wing Captain, anyone would have expected the pony to be a high-profile prisoner. Yet she was looking around the castle with a bored expression, like a teenager being forced to tour a museum.

“Is that… Is she Lunar Guard?” one of them mumbled as the mare walked by.

“Unclear,” admitted the Captain, “she’s here as a messenger for the apes, apparently.” He smirked. “Calls herself Empyra, Queen of Shadows. You have a proper rank to go along with that, fangs?”

Empyra regarded the Captain with an even, disinterested stare. “Empyra will do, Captain Gestalt. My exact position within the ranks of the 38th Company’s Equus division is… unclear. My enlistment was not voluntary.”

“Really, now? Aren’t they afraid you’ll defect?” asked one of the soldiers.

Empyra giggled, which sounded like several sharp squeaks just on the edge of a shrieking howl. “Defect? To you? I can’t think of a better way to once again experience the humiliation and distress of being beaten and captured by the Company than joining their next victims.”

The guards posted in the hallway glared at the mare’s backside as the escort moved on, heading deeper into the castle.

“You underestimate the griffon people, Empyra,” Gestalt said, opening a set of double doors into the next hall, “we are a proud warrior race, unlike the equines.”

“I do not underestimate your ignorance, Captain,” the mare countered, “you face a species you’ve never met, wielding weapons you don’t understand, supported by a power you can’t imagine. To the 38th, the entire military hierarchy of the Griffon Kingdom is but an irritating distraction from the task of annihilating the Orks.”

“And do you, as a pony, think that’s okay?” one of the other soldiers asked. “Do you want to see this world dominated by the space monkeys and covered in their city-factories?”

Empyra snorted. “I do not moan about what’s ‘okay’ or what should be. I see what is, and determine what I can do about it.”

The guard narrowed his eyes, but Gestalt arched an eyebrow. “Well, then, from where you’re standing, what do you think we can do about this?” he asked.

“From where I’m standing? You can make it easy on your people and give up,” Empyra said snidely, “or you can sacrifice your kingdom on the altar of your martial pride. You’ve already lost. Whether you drag your kingdom down with you is your choice.”

The Captain rolled his eyes. “Gloomy, aren’t you? It’s no wonder your kind was exiled for a thousand years. The other ponies probably would have probably given some kind of uplifting monologue about friendship and hope.”

“Maybe,” Empyra admitted. “Then again, the other ponies were killing aliens on behalf of the powers of Chaos long before I was forced to join them.”
.

They entered another hallway, and then headed toward a set of reinforced double doors with a pair of guards standing at attention. The guards looked surprised to see Empyra, and one quickly moved to stand in front of the doorway.

“Apologies, Captain Gestalt, but Prince Geoffrey is in a strategy meeting at the moment. He is not to be disturbed.” The soldier bowed his head to the larger griffon.

“A strategy meeting, at this time of night?” Empyra glanced above her, where the night sky was visible from a large gap in the stone wall. “He must be nervous.”

The griffons all paused to glare sharply at the mare. Then Gestalt turned back to the guards at the doorway.

“This visitor here may be of strategic importance. She’s here as a messenger from the 38th Company.” The guards at the doorway recoiled slightly, glancing uncertainly at each other. “I think it is important that the Prince at least be informed of her presence. We can wait here for him to finish the meeting if necessary.”

One of the guards nodded, and then opened the doorway to slip inside. As soon as the doors cracked open, those in the hallway could hear arguing from within the room.

“-the only way! They have weapons, experience, and the soldiers we need if we’re to have ANY chance!”

“Oh, don’t give us that. We have more than ten thousand wings available to deploy if necessary; far more than the monkeys. Having to deal with the diamond dogs will probably make our armies LESS effective.”

“Ten thousand wings means nothing if we don’t know how to defeat the enemy’s war machines! We’ve already lost some ground to the blasted Ork raiders, and the Company is the force that DEFEATED the Orks! Against far more than ten thousand of them, I might add!”

“Still, to deal with the rebels who got us into… hold on. Yes? What is it?”

“My liege, Captain Gestalt has arrived with a… messenger. A thestral mare, apparently with news from the Company.”

“The Company? As in the psychotic tin men from space, or the traitorous white witch who sits on her mountain watching our world be torn apart?”

“Uh… I… don’t know, Prince. I’m not really familiar with their hierarchy.”

“Bah! Fine! Send her in! I could use a good laugh!”

After a few seconds the soldier emerged and opened the doors completely, saluting to the Captain.

“You may enter!”

Gestalt nodded and gestured sharply to Empyra with his head. She walked forward into the throne room, still looking generally bored.

Once inside, the hall guards closed the door behind them, and Empyra got her first look at the throne of Griffonstone. Its current claimant, Prince Geoffrey, sat upon the dark wooden seat. He was a fairly young griffon, with snowy white feathering and a thin golden circlet upon his head. He was a far less impressive figure than the warriors who had guided Empyra through the castle, and she made sure her tired sneer expressed as much.

“Speak, wench!” There were a half-dozen older griffons in the room standing around a table in front of the throne, and one of them pointed to her. “State your name and your message!”

“I am Empyra, Queen of Shadows. I come before you today to present the terms of your surrender,” her eyes roamed the throne room while she spoke, and she still acted more like a bored tourist than someone acting in any sort of official or military capacity. “Let’s move this along quickly, please. I have much to do tonight.”

“We won’t waste much time on your proposal, I assure you,” Geoffrey sniffed. “Captain Gestalt, where did you find this thestral?”

“She landed right in front of the main gate and surrendered to the main guard contingent, my liege,” Gestalt explained, stepping forward. “She was searched extensively, and we only found this object.”

The Captain placed a small metal cylinder on the table. The others stared at it briefly, each of them utterly unable to so much as guess at its purpose.

“What is this?” demanded Geoffrey.

“One of the ape’s bizarre trinkets. I don’t know what it’s supposed to do, although they did assure me that it wouldn’t explode.” Empyra shrugged. “Can I get on with this, now?”

“You may,” allowed the Prince.

“Good. Tomorrow morning, the 38th Company will deploy a primary strike force directly to Griffonstone, with the aim of capturing the city and immediately neutralizing the griffon’s royal authority. The gunships are already fueled up and ready for the assault, and you possess no weapons capable of stopping them.”

Empyra paused dramatically, her lip curling up to reveal the curve of her fangs. “Your time upon the throne is at an end, Prince Geoffrey. However, if you surrender rather than forcing an assault, the Company is prepared to allow the following mercies.”

She cleared her throat. “First, the military and royal order shall be disbanded and moved into the general population, rather than being butchered or enslaved. Second, that population will likewise not be incarcerated, killed, or enslaved, with the exception of those who resist. Third, the entirety of the Griffon Kingdom shall henceforth be controlled and administered by the nation of Equestria.”

This last item surprised some of the nobles in the court.

“Equestria? Not the 38th Company?” asked one.

“The Company controls Equestria!” snapped another.

“Debatable,” Empyra interjected, “although undoubtedly as the first nation to submit to Chaos, Equestria enjoys a… curious level of autonomy. It was a matter of intense debate – and a direct request from Princess Luna – that Equestria take control of the day-to-day administration of your kingdom rather than the human soldiers. Us ponies familiar with Chaos consider this a considerable boon to your people, and for good reason.”

“A moot point, I assure you,” Prince Geoffrey growled, “as I will not be surrendering to that blasted solar tyrant OR her simian lackeys! Do you think I don’t see what’s going on here?!”

“Yes, but please, continue,” the mare replied with a smirk.

“Celestia, the immortal and all-powerful ruler of the very sun, sits on her throne high in Canterlot, preening and spewing asinine nonsense about ‘love and friendship’ while alien warriors swarm over the planet and tear the other nations apart! The humans bow and scrape at her feet, and die in droves to defend her kingdom, but that is not enough! No!” He jumped up from his throne, shaking a fist in the air. “Long has Equestria coveted the Griffon Kingdom! And now that she has an army of any real strength, she sends the apes to take the land that her weakling ponies could not capture themselves! And she even has the gall to declare that her kingdom will rule us after our subjugation as an act of ‘mercy!’ Ha! As if!”

Empyra cocked her head to the side. “Let’s say – for the sake of avoiding needless debate – that that’s true. So what? Do you think this brilliant deduction will make the lasers hurt less? The apes will absolutely annihilate any griffon that raises a claw against them. And I can’t guarantee that they’ll stop there. You choose between your pride and the lives of your subjects, Prince.”

“Territory can be recaptured. Citizens will obey whoever commands the soldiers in the streets.” The Prince leaned back in his throne with a deep frown. “The dignity and legitimacy of the royal order, however, is much more difficult to rebuild. I’m certain you already understand that, ‘Queen’.”

Then he waved at the Captain. “Gestalt, I’ve decided to show the Company’s envoy the same courtesy they’ve shown ours. Take her outside and execute her immediately.”

Captain Gestalt recoiled slightly, but then nodded. “If that is your will, my liege.”

Empyra kept staring up at Geoffrey with the same mildly disinterested expression. He leaned forward and scowled at her.

“Ordinarily I would let you suffer first, but you DID have the courtesy to warn us about the general timing of the Company’s attack. For that, I offer you a clean death, at least.” He swiped a talon toward the door. “Take her away!”

Gestalt sighed and pushed the doors to the throne room open. “Bring the mare. We’ll do this in the courtyard.”

The other guards took up position behind Empyra, who still looked perfectly calm while she followed the Captain out into the hall. “Not that it makes a difference, of course, but I feel like you misunderstand…”

Gestalt suddenly froze, his head snapping to the side and his nerves immediately on edge. The guards who were supposed to be standing sentinel at the throne room were gone. A splash of wet blood slashed over the stone floor and ran up the wall.

“On your guard!” Gestalt shouted. “We-“

He didn’t get any further before two dark shapes dropped from the ceiling from above his subordinates. Adamantium hoofblades scythed into their backs, punching through the iron armor with ease. Razor wingtips laced with enchanted toxins sliced across the solders’ necks an instant later, throwing fresh blood across the stonework floors.

Before the guards had even hit the ground, the thestrals had bounced off to take out their next target. Gestalt raised his wing shield just before one fired a burst from its splinter rifle, and the griffon warrior felt the crystals shatter upon the enchanted metal. He found little respite, however, as the second bat pony surged forward and slashed toward his throat.

Gestalt blocked, his enchanted gauntlet proving a fair match for the advanced metals of the blade. By the time he drew his own weapon the bat pony was already rising into the air, darting out of range now that the advantage of surprise was lost. Neither soldier attacked; Gestalt feared he would be instantly flanked by the other pony, while the thestral seemed to be waiting for something.

“… I said that the human gunships would be arriving tomorrow,” Empyra continued, lowering her head. The bat pony that wasn’t facing off with a soldier sliced open her wing bindings, and she immediately stretched the appendages to relieve the cramped muscles. “The Lunar Guard has been attacking since I arrived. You probably haven’t noticed.”

The same bat pony threw a shadowy cloak over her back, and she locked eyes with the trio of glittering green lights set in an obscuring metal visor. “Tell her the deal went as expected. We can proceed.” The soldier saluted, and then whispered something into her mask.

All of this happened in full view of the throne room. The nobles were completely stunned, staring slack-jawed at the sight of their dead guards and the ponies that had infiltrated their castle.

“T-Treachery!” howled the Prince. “You come here as a ‘messenger’ when your goal was assassination!”

Empyra turned her head back toward the throne room, her eyes narrowed. “Not true. I came as a messenger, and I have no intention of harming you. Not that I don’t want to, necessarily, but somepony else insisted upon the ‘honor’ of personally brutalizing a crown prince.”

The device on the table, largely forgotten by the griffons, started to hum. Then the middle of the disk opened up, revealing a ring of glowing blue light.

“Have fun, kitties.” Empyra’s wings stretched to grasp the edges of the doors, and then she slammed them shut behind her.

“And now… that just leaves you…” Empyra looked over to the griffon Captain, smirking.

The two Lunar Shades hovered close, waiting just out of his swords’ reach. They were the elite soldiers of the Lunar Guard, and each of them was completely covered in ballistics armor and blades, with an enchanted cloak that resembled an ink shroud over their backs. Both also possessed splinter rifles, which made Gestalt curious as to why they weren’t shooting at him.

“Your Company will not prevail, equine! The Griffon Kingdom will not fall so easily!” Gestalt growled.

“Sure. Whatever.” Empyra shrugged. “I must confess, I don’t care in the least. I act on behalf of my people, nothing more.” She tilted her head to the side. “Although I have to say, your angry resistance seems VERY familiar. I probably shouted something very much like it to the human wretch that wandered into the Bloodborne Caverns to ‘recruit’ my ponies to the Company’s ranks.” She chuckled. “Isn’t that funny? I wonder if we might be fitting you for carapace armor in a week or so.”

Gestalt suddenly broke and ran, his wings launching him down the hall as fast as possible.

One of the Shades promptly shifted her position in the air and lined up her splinter rifle.

“Don’t bother,” Empyra interrupted.

The soldier hesitated, and the shot was lost. Captain Gestalt rounded the corner and was instantly out of sight.

“He’s probably headed to trigger the alarm. The Tau Stealth Suits should be covering that. And frankly, even if he managed it, it wouldn’t make any difference.” She walked toward one of the windows, glancing back at the entrance to the throne room. “This place is already lost. Griffonstone is ours.”

****

“Wh-What is that thing? What is it doing?!” sputtered Prince Geoffrey, his claw pointing to the device on the table and quivering.

“She said it wasn’t a bomb, right? So it’s not going to explode, right?”

“As if we can take her word for it! The treacherous mare was fooling us all along!”

“Guards! Guards! Someone help us!”

One of the advisors up-ended the table, dropping the machine on the floor and providing a shield for him and his peers.

As they covered behind the wooden slab, a black mist emerged from the disk and started to expand rapidly, taking on the appearance of a pitch-black pool rising up from the floor. Spots of light glittered from within the void, giving the appearance of a patch of the night sky opening up in the middle of the throne room.

With that sort of backdrop, it wasn’t especially shocking to anyone when the darkness formed the shape of an alicorn in gold and ebony armor.

“BEHOLD, CHILDREN OF GRIFFONSTONE!! THE MASTERS OF THIS WORLD HATH COME TO CLAIM THY LAND AS THEIR DUE!! WHO SHALT STAND BEFORE US?!”

Prince Geoffrey shrunk back into his throne, his talons digging deep into the arm rests in terror. “No… it can’t be! It’s… It’s NIGHTMARE MOON!!”

The alicorn immediately recoiled, as if slapped. After a few seconds, her helmet peeled away from her muzzle in a wave of tiny metal chips, revealing her scowl to the griffons in the room.

“We art not Nightmare Moon! Thou shalt address us as Princess Luna!” the mare demanded hotly.

The Prince looked confused. “Wait, I thought you were called Nightmare Moon when you’re evil.”

“FIRSTLY, Nightmare Moon is an entirely different entity! We art not she! Secondly, We art not evil!”

“Debatable,” interjected an advisor sheltering behind a table.

“You launched a surprise attack and serve a bunch of lunatic slavers that worship ‘Dark Gods.’ Seems pretty evil to me,” mumbled another.

Luna’s eyes and horn flashed, and the griffon nobles watched their protective barrier of a table rip apart in two before being tossed to either side.

“Thou shalt have ample time to discuss our ethical shortcomings during thy interrogation and imprisonment.” Luna walked forward, an expression of hardened determination on her face while she gazed at the Prince on his throne. “Thy detainment shalt not be long, depending on how quickly thou submits.”

“NEVER!” Geoffrey sputtered.

“Then that shalt be when thou art released.” Luna’s Iron Gage rose from her shoulder pads, flipping over and closing into fists. “Make no mistake, Prince: thou art not escaping this encounter. Griffonstone is ours. However many more of thy warriors must die is all that is left to be determined.”

Prince Geoffrey stood up on his chair, and the feathers behind his head rose in agitation into a crest over his crown. “You will not get your way so easily, tyrant! I will not bow and scrape at your sister’s hooves, no matter what happens to me!”

“That is satisfactory. It is doubtful Sister will be making any visits to the mines,” Luna admitted. One of the black gauntlets opened and floated forward, moving over the heads of the advisors.

“Don’t just stand there!” shouted the Prince. “Stop her! General Grist! Attack!”

The gauntlet froze in place.

One of the other griffons – an elderly, grizzled sort with a thick scar over his neck and shoulder – looked up at the giant mechanical hand floating above him, and then back at Geoffrey.

“You’re not being serio-“ he didn’t get any further before the giant metal hand slapped him in the side, smashing him into the wall of the throne room. Luna heard some bones crack, but was confident the General would survive; all the griffons in this room would be valuable prisoners, and she adjusted her power accordingly.

“What are the rest of you waiting for?!” Geoffrey screeched, launching himself from his throne. “Kill her!”

The advisors made no such move to do so, and Luna’s head tilted to the side to track the retreating royal. He made a beeline for a back door, his talons clawing desperately for the handle.

A wave of glimmering red magic covered the exit, holding it shut. Geoffrey tugged at the handle, trying to budge the door, but made absolutely no progress before cold, metal fingers closed over his shoulder and dragged him away.

“Take thy seat, Prince,” Luna commanded, dropping the young royal in front of his throne, “we hast much to discuss…”

****

Griffonstone – city limits

Ten hours later

Captain Gestalt peeked around the corner of a stone building, his eyes narrowing.

Devilfish APCs were speeding overhead, zipping toward the castle to fill it further with troops. Human and pony soldiers stalked the streets in small squads, going from door to door and searching for weapons and sheltering enemy warriors.

He could see one such team just down the street. Three human mercenaries took the lead, one banging on doors while the others stayed back and covered him with their weapons. Behind them was a large cart towed by earth ponies, piled high with swords, daggers, crossbows, and the odd primitive firearm. A pegasus hovered over the cart, playing sentry to their confiscated armory.

“Do you think you can beat them?”

The Captain scowled and pulled back behind the wall. “I could. The pegasus is alert, but the earth ponies look like they’re fighting to stay awake. If I can get an angle…”

“Yeah, fine. Those six guys. MAYBE. But I wasn’t talking about just them.”

Gestalt seethed. “I KNOW, Nox! But… this is…”

A set of talons laid on his shoulder pauldron. He glanced back into the steely gaze of the griffon behind him.

“I know. You’re watching your home being ripped apart. It’s hard for all of us,” Nox said with a sad nod.

A shriek came from somewhere nearby. Gestalt flinched, and then he trembled when he heard the sound of lasgun fire follow the scream.

“The worst part is, this is only the beginning,” Nox said darkly. “With the capital taken, the rest of the land will submit quickly. The soldiers protecting other regions will be disarmed and disbanded. Or forced to labor as slaves. Or perhaps simply… killed.”

Gestalt’s feathers quivered angrily.

“But there is something we can do. We CAN resist,” Nox continued, her green eyes gleaming. “You cannot stop this. But you can absolutely make these alien wretches regret it. We can strike back. Not just the griffons, but EVERYONE who’s been threatened by these alien thugs.”

The Captain’s talons dragged down the surface of the wall they were sheltering behind, leaving thick tears in the stone.

“… What should I do, Nox?”

A ghost of a smirk tugged at Nox’s beak. “You’ve already managed to evacuate many of our soldiers from the castle, yes?”

“I… I told them we were regrouping for a counter-attack. But-“

“It doesn’t matter what you told them. You’re the highest-ranking griffon in our kingdom’s shattered military hierarchy,” Nox reassured him, “they will obey you, or turn themselves over to the apes to beg for mercy. There are no other options.”

The sound of something very large and heavy stomping down the road reached their ears. Gestalt turned to look, but Nox quickly pulled him back, making sure to maintain eye contact.

“Listen! Bring every warrior you can find to the base of Guff Spire by dusk. We will find them there, and take them someplace safe.” Nox’s eyes hardened. “From there, they will join with the rest of the warriors resisting the dominion of Chaos.”

Gestalt felt his blood boil at the thought of the insurgents. As violent vigilantes that fought outside of a state authority and killed others for their ideology, he was predisposed to loathe the insurgents. That was, of course, before taking into account their provoking this war and subsequent invasion.

But with enemy soldiers overrunning his home and murdering the people he had sworn to protect, that judgment inevitably faltered. “All right. Make sure they’re ready to receive my troops.”

The stomping came closer, and they were able to hear the noisy whir of a turret weapon servo shifting its gun back and forth. The griffons bolted from their hiding place, ducking into a low alley behind a retaining wall.

“This had better work,” Captain Gestalt hissed, “I want to see the Princess of the Night PAY for this, Nox. I’ll see her head on a platter even if the blasted moon plummets from the sky as a result.”

“Don’t be so quick to condemn the dark sister,” Nox warned, being careful not to smile, “she is as much a slave as any of the other equines. The ponies are not the enemy. CHAOS is the enemy.” Nox separated from the Captain, starting down a different path. “I’m sure she feels for what she’s done to your people, Captain.”

The green-eyed griffon saluted and then darted away, disappearing into the shadows.

****

Sweet Apple Acres

Big Macintosh clenched his teeth around the grip of his oil can, gently dripping machine lubricant into the crevices of his front left leg.

After a few seconds, he put the can aside and then lifted up the augmetic limb, testing its resistance. A warm whirring noise was the only result.

Nodding in satisfaction, the apple farmer headed toward the door to his bedroom, ready to start his day.

The door slid open. Princess Luna stood on the other side, grinning. Big Macintosh blinked in surprise.

“We conquered a kingdom last night!” the Princess gushed. She seemed to be breathing heavily, which made Big Mac wonder if she had sprinted here rather than just teleporting or taking a transport.

“Uhm-“ before the stallion could form a coherent word, Luna surged forward through the doorway and pulled him into a deep kiss. His eyes widened, and then he started staggering back when the Princess forced her way forward, pushing toward Mac’s bed.

The door slid closed behind her, and with a quick flash of magic, it locked shut.

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 24

Landing platforms

“All right ponies, we’re on clean-up duty today!”

Dozens of armed pegasi stood in a line side-by-side next to a gunship being loaded up with troops. Lightning Dust, wearing a small pair of chevrons marking her out as a squad Sergeant, marched in front of them while shouting through the vox amplifier in her mask.

“All pegasus squads are to head to the assigned waypoints for your team, and keep a keen eye for enemy resistance! We’ve had small pockets of griffon fighters trying to organize and ambush us since Griffonstone was taken, and it’s believed that they‘re using the adjacent villages as staging areas and riling up civilian resistance! You get into the sky and patrol your sectors, and if you see a griffon with so much as a wood knife, you take them down!”

Lightning Dust paused in her shouting briefly, staring at the last two ponies in the line. Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy were the only two who were power-armored, as well as the only ones who didn’t seemed to be paying strict attention to the briefing. Fluttershy had her head down as if trying to avoid attention, while Rainbow Dash seemed to be staring into space, suggesting that she was watching something on her helmet visor.

Lightning clicked her tongue and turned around to pace back toward the other end of the line. “Keep in mind that we ARE taking prisoners! You are encouraged to disable or corner targets and call in for retrieval, especially if the enemy is clearly civilian! This goes TRIPLE if you see anyone with Company tech out there! We’ve received word that some of the clowns ‘resisting’ Chaos rule have managed to dig up lasguns and grenades somewhere!”

“I found that intel!” Rainbow Dash shouted, raising a leg into the air.

“Yes, great.” Lightning Dust rolled her eyes. “However, you didn’t actually capture anyone who knew why or how they had them! The higher-ups want to know if they scavenged the gun or found someplace to buy them, or what! So this is a crucial secondary… hmm?”

A man approached Lightning Dust from the sector entrance, and then pointed to Rainbow Dash.

“Equinought Squadron! Come with me! Your deployment orders have been rescinded!”

Fluttershy perked up immediately at the news, but Rainbow Dash scowled. “What? Why?”

“Someone’s here to see you. Follow me, they’re waiting in the command center.” He turned and headed out again, not waiting for a response.

“Aw, c’mon, really? They’re the only power armor in our deployment!” Lightning Dust complained. “Can we at least keep Fluttershy? Dash is just going to goof off until there’s a firefight anyway, but we might need a medic!”

“Hey, shut up!” Rainbow Dash retorted. Then she shouted after the messenger. “Seriously though, who’s calling us up now, right when we’re making our push into the Griffon Kingdom? We have more important things to do!”

The man paused and looked back over his shoulder. “I can’t say you’re wrong. But most of you equines seem to think Princess Celestia is pretty damn important.”

Rainbow Dash flinched. Fluttershy gasped.

“The Princess is here?” the meeker pony asked.

“Waiting in the command center. Doesn’t matter to me a whit if you see her or not, frankly.” He shrugged and continued heading out.

“Well ain’t that a pile of rotten hay,” Lightning Dust grumbled. “I thought the whole point of joining the Company was so that we wouldn’t have to be lectured by Miss Love & Tolerate anymore.” She clicked her tongue and snapped a wing to the side. “Whatever! Equinought Squadron, you’re dismissed! Go see what the Princess wants!”

“Okay! I hope it’s nothing bad!” Fluttershy stepped out of the line and started galloping away, fretting audibly the entire way.

Rainbow Dash hung back for a few seconds, groaning to herself. Then she too broke ranks and rushed down the avenue.

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 17, command center

Auxiliary briefing room

When Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy entered the designated meeting room, they found pretty much just what they expected.

A dozen Royal Guards stood at attention around one end of a long, metal meeting table. All were armed with lasguns and combat knives, which made them far and away less dangerous than the mares in power armor on the other end of the table, but it was still nice to see the defenders of Equestria equipped with half-way decent wargear.

Behind the guards sat Princess Celestia, looking as bemused as ever. It was her first time in Ferrous Dominus, and it showed. Celestia’s eyes kept darting away, as if trying to catch sight of something off in her peripheral vision, and she kept fidgeting while occasionally moving to scratch her horn with her hoof. The ponies in the room had never seen the Princess so nervous, and they had witnessed her at some of her weakest and most humiliating moments.

At the other end of the table was Rarity, Applejack, and Pinkie Pie. The former two mares looked grim, while Pinkie was obliviously munching away at a bag of kettle corn like she was watching a movie.

“Ah, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash. Good. I am pleased you could make it,” Princess Celestia said, “I was informed that you two were being sent into battle, and wasn’t sure that I’d get to speak to all of you at once.” She grimaced. “I wished to summon you five to Canterlot, but all of my attempts to do so were refused by the individuals in charge right now, evidently. They insisted that if I was to speak to you, then I had to come here.”

“Was it necessary to come yourself, though? What’s the matter?” Fluttershy asked.

Rainbow Dash walked up behind her, sitting down quietly beside the other pegasus.

“I believe it was. This is not a matter I felt could be easily or safely dealt with through messengers.”

Rarity shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. Poor Twilight…”

Rainbow Dash flinched, generating a sharp whirring noise from her armor suit. “Wh-Why? What happened? Is she okay?”

“No, she is not,” Celestia said with a sad shake of her head, “for you see, she has gone with the 38th Company fleet to the Eye of Terror!”

There was a short pause, and Fluttershy cocked her head to the side.

“Uh… yes. We know. Didn’t you ask her to go with them, Princess?” Fluttershy asked.

“No, I did not,” Celestia replied.

Fluttershy’s jaw dropped open in shock. Rainbow Dash’s head slumped.

“All this time, we thought she was goin’ on some kinda space field trip, and it turns out it was a trick all along!” Applejack growled.

“As if that wasn’t bad enough, apparently she was almost killed!” Rarity added, levitating a napkin to delicately wipe her forehead. “Granted, that seems to have been unrelated to whatever sinister force forged the Princess’s letter in the first place. It’s just rather dangerous out there.”

Rainbow Dash clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut.

“This puts the apparent insurgency against the 38th Company in a new light,” Celestia said, her gaze hardening, “before, it was believable that the warriors banding together were simply trying to protect their land and people from Chaos dominion and choosing an unwisely aggressive strategy. I could even say that I personally sympathized with their efforts, although I could not condone their methods. Now, however, we see that there is another element to their plot. Their plans go much further and are more insidious than a mere band of resistance fighters trying to protect their land. In fact, it is my opinion that the only enemy of Equestria who could manage such subterfuge is…” she took a deep breath.

“Me,” Rainbow Dash interrupted miserably.

Celestia froze, her eyes going wide. The Royal Guards blinked in shock and confusion, and some of them hesitantly aimed their lasguns as if they were preparing to arrest the pegasus. Rarity, Applejack, and Fluttershy all snapped their heads around to stare at Rainbow incredulously. Pinkie Pie produced a soda and took a long slurp before scarfing down some more popcorn.

“I was… I was about to say ‘the changelings,’” Celestia confessed, stumbling over her words. “Wait, what? Rainbow Dash, YOU wrote that letter?”

“Yes,” Rainbow Dash mumbled, hanging her head. “Well, technically, Tellis wrote it. But it was my fault.”

“WHAT?!” shouted nearly every other pony in the room.

“I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, okay? The humans make the trip all the time! Hay, I didn’t even think she was really going to fall for it! I was just as surprised as Tellis that I won!”

“Won? Won what?” Applejack asked, narrowing her eyes. “Dash, just what did you do?”

Rainbow groaned again, but then continued with her explanation. “I was talking to Tellis one day about how Twilight actually wasn’t just a boring egghead and was actually kind of awesome, because of all the bad guys she beat. Then he wondered why she had to do it when Celestia and Luna were supposed to be so powerful. One thing led to another, and I eventually bet Tellis that Twilight would do anything if Princess Celestia sent her a letter asking her to.”

The other ponies stared, jaws agape.

“So, yeah. He wrote a letter with a ridiculous request, to see if she would do it,” Rainbow sighed, “in my defense, I made him re-do it after the first one asked her to exterminate the donkey race and the second one wanted her to light all of Ponyville on fire. By the time he got to ‘follow the Iron Warriors into space’, it really didn’t seem so bad.” Her ears twitched, and she stared at the floor again. “But apparently it still is, and I’m sorry.”

“Dash, you feather-brain…” Applejack sighed.

“Well, this was unexpected,” Rarity grumbled. “Among other things, I’m quite surprised that Tellis could reasonably reproduce Princess Celestia’s hornwriting.”

“He totally didn’t.” Rainbow Dash engaged her helmet, and the plates of metal shifted up and enclosed her head. “I just coached him on what the letter should say to sound kind of like the Princess. Even then, it was pretty awful. Here, I have a pict.”

The table had a hololith projector in the middle of it, and Rainbow quickly uploaded the file to the projection cogitator. The letter appeared and then expanded, zooming in so that the crude, inelegant font was easy to read.

Dear Princess DorkTwitlyt Spackle,

Twilite Sparkel,

Need your help with something. You know how the Iron Warriors are going to the Eye of Terror soon to drop off their stuff? Go with them and have some kind of awesome space adventure. For science or friendship or whatever.

This is not a trick.

Yours,

The White OneSun HorsePrincess Celery

Princess Celestial

“Twilight, you feather-brain,” Applejack sighed.

“Looks legit to me,” Pinkie remarked, idly licking sugar off the tip of her hoof, “I’d totally go on an awesome space adventure too if Princess Celestial asked me to.”

Princess Celestia slapped a hoof against her face, exasperated. “This is… most unseemly. And, unfortunately, it seems that little can be done at this point. The 38th Company is not about to turn their fleet around, or even a single vessel, just to return Twilight to her home planet.”

“Is it really that bad?” Rainbow asked anxiously, disengaging her helmet again. “I thought she’d be pretty safe with Gaela and most of the Iron Warriors around.”

“The presence of Chaos Space Marines rarely makes things more safe,” Celestia said wryly. “It is my understanding that the trip has been extremely turbulent for my former student.” She decided not to press the matter further when Rainbow Dash lowered her head sadly again. Clearly the speedster felt guilty enough.

“Princess…” Rarity said hesitantly. “You were saying something earlier about changelings? Did something come up?”

“Aside from the news that Twilight Sparkle was in space, no,” Celestia admitted, “I considered the possibilities, and I thought that only the changeling spies would be capable of that level of subterfuge. If they had nothing to do with the forged letter, then I have no reason to think they’re involved with the uprising at all.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why they’d want to bother humans. There’s not a lot of love around here,” Pinkie pointed out.

“It’s just that there is a mystery of sorts right now in regards to the insurgents,” Rarity pointed out. “Everyone knows that the insurgency sabotaged the peace conference to provoke the Company, and that it worked. However, no one was able to figure out HOW they managed such a thing. The saboteur was never caught, and the Saddle Arabians, to my knowledge, still have no idea how he managed to infiltrate or escape the palace.”

“While a changeling would have the capabilities necessary, obviously, there’s the matter of motive,” Celestia pointed out, “why set the Company against this world’s inhabitants? Why spread further war? And if the changelings wanted to set the Iron Warriors loose on a nation of their choice, why would they not choose Equestria itself? The changeling race holds no grudges against the diamond dogs or griffons, to the best of my knowledge.”

Applejack shrugged her shoulders, shifting the massive armored pads and rattling the attached chain. “Maybe they think the insurgents can win?”

One of the Royal Guards barked out a laugh. The unit Sergeant glared at him sharply, and he quickly cleared his throat and fell silent.

“While it seems unlikely from where we’re standing… if the native species of our world were united against Equestria and the Company, it would at least SEEM like they stood a chance so long as the bulk of the Iron Warriors are away,” Rarity pointed out.

“But to what end? The elimination of the humans? Why would Queen Chrysalis care about that?” Celestia asked with a frown.

“I’ve got it!” Pinkie Pie shouted, suddenly jumping up and planting her front hooves on the table. “If they upload the experimental love.exe app into the local servitor population, they’d have hundreds of perfectly docile love generators to feed their people for generations! It’s so obvious! They want to turn our cruel and hateful military superpower into a FARM! Those fiends!”

The other ponies stared at Pinkie for a moment, and then Applejack turned back to Celestia. “Anyhoo, as long as Twilight manages to tough it out and make it back, we’ll get through this. The Company’s already cleanin’ up the Griffon Kingdom, and Ah hear the minotaur tribes’re next. If there were any changelings involved, reckon they’ll learn to keep their heads down right quick.”

“I’d heard that Equestria will be administering the conquered territory after the initial invasions,” Rarity noted, raising an eyebrow at Celestia.

The White Princess sighed. “This is true. I’ve already prepared a regional governor for the Griffon Kingdom, and I’ll ready one for every other captured nation if I must.” She drew herself up. “I have failed, time and time again, to stop the bloodshed that now threatens to engulf our world. But I will do whatever I can to prevent further suffering. If the best I can do is to assign an overlord to the territories who is unlikely to massacre civilians for their passing amusement, then so be it. Ponies of character, patience, and humility will rule these conquered people and provide a steady hoof for the troops controlling the populace. In time, perhaps I can even replace the Company soldiers with my own.”

“That might be tough when we get to takin’ on the dragons,” Applejack pointed out.

Celestia grimaced. “We shall cross that bridge when we come to it. We will find a solution besides… besides genocide and slavery. We MUST.”

“Okay, wait, no. That won’t work,” Pinkie interjected, an expression of intense concentration on her face. “Using love.exe like that totally violates the license agreement. The changelings could get sued. Maybe they’re not involved after all.”

“I must go,” Princess Celestia said, finally standing up from the horribly uncomfortable metal chair she was seated in. “There’s much to be done yet, and the situation is… different from what I’d assumed.”

“Sorry…” Rainbow Dash mumbled again.

“I forgive you, but it is not me to whom you truly owe an apology, Rainbow Dash.” Celestia turned toward the door, and her escort immediately split into two groups, one opening the door and filing into the hall while the other stayed by her side. “If you send me a letter, then I shall send it to Spike to give it to Twilight.”

“Ugh. Yeah, I really should do that,” Rainbow Dash agreed. “Thank you, Princess.”

“You’re welcome, Rainbow Dash. Farewell, my little ponies, and please, stay safe.”

Rainbow Dash blew a lock of hair out of her face after Celestia and the guards left. “I was really hoping that wouldn’t come back to bite me in the tail until AFTER Twi returned.”

“So you didn’t even think you’d get away with it? Then why would you do such a thing?” Rarity demanded.

“I wasn’t thinking, okay?” Rainbow protested. “Besides, our day job now is literally to fly around and kill people while they spray us with machine guns! I really didn’t think Twi would be in any more danger out there than back here!”

Applejack was scrolling through a hololith screen over the table, checking the gunship deployments. “Well, Ah think we could still catch one of the transports headin’ to the Griffon Kingdom and help ‘em out. Y’know, if ya wanna blow off some steam by pillagin’ a village or two.”

“Nah. I should start on the letter right away, while I’m still feeling guilty,” Rainbow admitted.

“Ooh, are they deploying to New Gerall?” Rarity asked with an excited gasp after looking over the list of griffon settlements. “I’ve always wanted to visit Feather Falls! And I should really take the opportunity now, before it’s destroyed or drained for precious metals. Let’s go!”

Applejack turned away and stomped off, and Rarity eagerly trotted after her. Pinkie Pie bounced after them, grinning widely.

Fluttershy watched them leave, having absolutely no desire to head out on a mission herself. Then she turned to Rainbow Dash.

“Uhm, I suppose it’s too late now, but… nopony mentioned the insurgents having Company weapons to Princess Celestia.”

Rainbow looked over at the other pegasus with an eyebrow arched. “What would she do about? Or do you think that the changelings snuck in and stole our gear?”

Fluttershy frowned. “Well…”

“Doubt it. It takes more than looking like a human to get into the Ferry D armories. I mean, hay, they still give ME a hard time when I’m getting extra ammo, and there isn’t a single human or post-human in the world that doesn’t know and love Rainbow Dash!” She turned away from the table and trotted toward the exit. “Between the security badges and sensors everywhere, I’m pretty sure a changeling would get weeded out pretty quickly around here. And there’s no way they could make off with a bunch of guns.”

“Oh, well, yes… but…” Fluttershy’s already weak protests faltered as Rainbow Dash left the room.

She’d actually meant to point out that the only other sovereign power stockpiling laser weapons and other modern ordnance was Equestria. She’d been reminded of that when she saw the Royal Guard. And certainly Canterlot’s armories were less tightly guarded than the Company’s.

“No, I’m being silly,” Fluttershy mumbled to herself, “Equestria would notice if a lot of their wargear went missing.”

Feeling reassured, and very pleased that she had gotten an excuse to forgo deployment, Fluttershy trotted to the exit after Rainbow Dash.

****

Changeling hive – entry node

A lone Ork ducked under the jagged stalactites hanging from the mouth of the cave entrance, slipping into the darkened halls that led to the central hive of the changeling race.

The Ork had a few weapons tucked into a large backpack, but it brandished none of them while wandering the cave. It trudged through the darkness with an exhausted gait and the effortless familiarity of a creature perfectly at home in these tunnels. It only stopped when a trio of larg-ish changelings emerged from around a bend, carrying spears and lighting the surroundings with the glow of their horns.

“Intruder!” hissed the insect-like creatures, standing fast with their spears leveled at the greenskin.

The Ork paused in its approach, staring down at the soldiers. Then its eyes flashed green.

“It’s me,” Gox mumbled, “I have returned to report to the Queen.”

The changeling guards dropped their spears immediately, stepping out of the way for the guardian. Gox continued along her path, rubbing the side of her head.

“Hive sister,” one of the guards said before she could leave, “are you injured? Perhaps you should seek care before reporting to her majesty.”

Gox regarded the lesser changeling with a mildly annoyed frown. “I’ve been constantly injured since the beginning of my mission. Living amongst my targets is not for the faint of heart. Or soft of carapace, I suppose. I’ve gotten used to it.”

The changeling guards shared a concerned glance, uncertain how to respond to that. Compassion and empathy weren’t exactly strong traits in their species; if their hive-sister didn’t need help to complete her immediate task, their instinctual response was to stay out of her way. Gox continued on her way into the tunnels, leaving them behind.

The soldiers watched her go, and then started wandering back to their posts.

One, however, heard a scraping noise come from further down the entrance, and immediately froze to listen.

The scraping noises continued, and started coming closer. The soldier buzzed its wings, and the other guards quickly picked up the noise and returned to their formation.

Dimming their horns, they carefully crawled back down the jagged, rocky pathways, their spears held at the ready. Once they reached a cluster of stalagmites, the guards laid in wait behind it, preparing an ambush.

The scraping came closer, and the lead soldier saw light coming from up ahead, closer to the entrance. The light built brighter, shining around the corner ahead of the source. The guards raised their spears, ready to leap as soon as they confirmed that the intruder was not one of their own.

When they saw their target, however, they halted in confusion.

“Hmm? Is that…?”

****

Changeling hive – central cavern

“And THEN the blasted thing falls apart right under me! The steering wheel literally pops off in my hands!”

Chrysalis shifted uncomfortably as Gox gave her “report”, describing her experience of infiltrating the Orks in a series of angry rants. The changeling guardian had already reverted back to her true form, and paced back and forth across the hive chamber furiously.

“Do you know what the Ork initiation rituals are?” Chrysalis started opening her mouth to speak, but Gox cut her off. “Punching! Do you know what the Ork greeting rituals are? ALSO punching!” Chrysalis frowned. “Punching is, additionally, how these morons express displeasure! AND how they express joy! How the blazes does that even WORK?!”

“Gox, calm yourself,” Chrysalis commanded.

The guardian stopped pacing and then sat down, seething quietly.

“I realize that your assignment has been… difficult. And painful. But our understanding of these fiends is crucial if we are to manipulate them,” Chrysalis explained calmly.

“Oh, I understand them, all right,” Gox said, “Orks are motivated by violence. In case you hadn’t picked that up, yet. Everything they do revolves around warfare, and they think of murder as a team sport, rather than a crime or mechanism to accomplish some other aim.” She frowned, raising a twisted hoof to her chin. “They have a rather… abstract fear of death. It’s strange. They attach no sentiment or sacredness to life, hence why they see war as nothing more than a thrilling game. But they still possess a basic sense of self-preservation and fight-or-flight response.”

“Yet they still throw themselves into battle against the humans at every opportunity?” Chrysalis asked.

“As I said, it’s strange. They have little concept of long-term strategy or of conquest. If they did, then a great many of the other nations would probably be overrun by now.” Gox shook her head. “But Orks want a fight, and they’ve decided they get the best fights from the space apes. Even after fleeing numerous Company raids and losing every battle, the green thugs remain excited about the war and tell grand stories about Ferrous Dominus.” She cracked her neck to the side, wincing. “The stories are usually followed by enthusiastic punching.”

“Interesting… so even their losses do not frustrate them?” Chrysalis asked.

“In a way, perhaps. When their leaders fail to bring them victory, then they turn against them and replace them with new ones… assuming those leaders aren’t killed in the aforementioned lost battle. That happens a lot. But anyway, regardless of who takes over, the goal is the same even when the specific vision changes: fight, fight, fight.” Gox hung her head, sighing. “It’s quite tiresome, really.”

“So then, their leadership changes? Frequently?” Chrysalis grinned, her fangs shining under her lips.

“It does, my Queen,” Gox explained dutifully. “The largest and most powerful Ork is the leader of the warband. When the Ork meets a rival of similar size and might, they fight and the stronger alien thug slaughters the other. All that Ork’s former subordinates generally join the victor, and in this way a successful Warboss can build an army. Of course, this method causes constant turmoil and infighting as the green imbeciles constantly butcher each other for advantage and rank. With no goals other than violence and personal power, there’s no reason for them to unite against their actual enemy. Idiots.”

Chrysalis pondered this information silently, looking thoughtful. Then she tilted her head to the side. “I’m surprised they can maintain population with that sort of existence. They must be voracious breeders.”

“Orks don’t breed,” Gox said curtly. “They don’t even have genders. I tend to consider all Orks as male because of their body structure and temperament, but the term is basically meaningless to them.”

“Then where do new Orks come from?” Chrysalis asked, intrigued.

“No idea.”

“Hmm… I suppose that question would be somewhat strange for an adult Ork to ask…”

“It’s not that. I brainwash Gretchin and interrogate them all the time. But the Gretchin don’t KNOW. I’ve never risked doing the same to the Orks, but generally they’re even DUMBER than the Gretchin. The species is so mired in ignorance that they don’t even know where new Orks come from. They don’t even care.” Gox sighed, her ears dropping against the sides of her head.

Chrysalis smiled warmly. “My dear Gox, you’ve been through quite a trial. But you have done so well.”

The guardian looked up, a few traces of cautious hope on her face. “I have?”

“Oh, indeed. Out of all my beloved children, perhaps only Tox herself had a more difficult assignment. And yet you have prevailed.” Chrysalis stood up, and then beckoned to the guardian with a hoof. “Come here.”

Gox walked up to the changeling queen, and Chrysalis smiled and placed a leg over her withers. Then she hugged Gox, pressing the guardian softly against her chest.

The changeling infiltrator was almost brought to tears, and squeezed her eyes shut as her mother nuzzled her. Changelings could not absorb love from other changelings; their physiology shielded them from being psychically drained. Even so, however, she could feel the wellspring of pride and satisfaction within the changeling matriarch. She knew that she had satisfied her mother, and that even now her Queen was concocting another brilliant scheme to put her efforts and sacrifice to work.

“You need a bath,” Chrysalis whispered to Gox.

Gox sniffled miserably. “Orks don’t bathe. At ALL. They barely understand the concept.” Her voice hitched slightly, trying to restrain a sob.

“Oh, you poor dear,” Chrysalis cooed, “you’ve been through so much…” Her nose twitched. “Seriously though; we have baths, so you should go take one right away.”

Gox nodded as she was released from the hug. “Yes, my Queen. Honestly, it’s getting so bad even I can smell it again.” She sniffled, and then shuddered.

Then she hesitated, and sniffed the air again.

“Wait, that… That isn’t me!” she shouted, suddenly feeling slightly offended.

A scraping noise came from the entry tunnel behind them.

When Chrysalis and Gox whirled on the intruder, they were relieved to see it was simply a changeling guard.

They were fairly unnerved, however, to see it in a state of near-death. It staggered weakly through the hall, leaking a trail of ichor behind it. The ichor bled from a huge tumor around its rear left leg, which Chrysalis was fairly certain she hadn’t spotted the last time she’d inspected her guard detail.

“What?! What is this? What happened?” Chrysalis demanded, stepping down from her throne to approach the weakened soldier.

“Q-Queen…” the changeling hissed painfully. Its eyes, normally a gradient blue, were almost pure white. It tried to speak further, but immediately fell onto the ground and started coughing.

“What’s wrong? Answer me!” Chrysalis stopped approaching once the guard began spitting up a vile, green-tinted substance. Changelings didn’t vomit normally, mostly on account of having no proper digestive system. Love didn’t exactly require much in terms of organs to consume. The changeling Queen was more than hesitant to risk touching the fluid.

The guard moaned pitifully and slumped onto its side. It was either unconscious or so delirious that it could no longer respond to its mistress.

A pair of green lights shimmered in the darkness of the tunnels.

“SHOW YOURSELF, FOOL!!” Chrysalis’s horn flashed, and the small torches that provided light deep within the caverns suddenly grew considerably brighter all around them.

Gox got a look at what was in the tunnel and gasped. Chrysalis simply recoiled, stunned silent. Other changelings, attracted by the commotion and fearing that something could endanger their Queen, started scrambling out of the other passages attached to the throne chamber. Every one of them stumbled to a halt upon catching sight of the intruder.

Or, rather, intruders.

“Hello, my Queen,” Tox breathed. Her voice was raspy, and a thick mucus oozed from the side of her mouth as she spoke. “I’ve come to report back...”

The guardian was a horrifically twisted mess. Growths were scattered over her body, some of them visibly pulsing along with her heartbeat. The numerous holes and pits in her carapace dripped viscous fluids onto the floor. Her eyes, normally a brilliant green, were milky and unfocused. Her mane was a pale shred of the lustrous curtain it used to be.

As terrible as her appearance was, however, the changelings were even more alarmed to see the other individual behind her.

Leonard Kruss looked from one end of the throne chamber to the other, his breath rasping from within his respirator mask. He was clothed again, and bore no apparent weapons, but was also unrestrained.

“Tox…?” Chrysalis hesitated. Her initial instinct was to step forward, to reach out to her daughter, but the absolutely repellant smell and the presence of the human instantly put her on her guard. “What happened to you? What is this alien doing here?!”

“Oh, my Queen,” Tox lolled her head to one side, “I’m so glad I made it back. I have so much to share with you…”

“Tox! The human!” Chrysalis glared at the man, and her twisted, notched horn sparked with green magic. “What is it doing here?!”

“She insisted I come with her,” Kruss mumbled, staring down at the Changeling Queen through the foggy lenses of his mask.

“Yes. Yes!” Tox gasped as she nodded happily. “This is Leonard Kruss, Queen Chrysalis! He knows many, many things!”

“He KNOWS where the hive is!” Chrysalis hissed at the infected guardian. “And he clearly isn’t restrained, much less mind-controlled!” She took a step back. “Tox, what happened to you? Why are you… you…”

“Diseased?” Tox asked, smiling through rows of jagged teeth.

“Impossible! We can’t get sick!” Gox protested.

Tox laughed, her entire body shuddering from the motions. “Oh, but we can, my beloved sister. And it is WONDERFUL.”

Chrysalis turned her horn, still glowing with power, on Tox as her eyes narrowed. “As Gox suggested, I am unfamiliar with illness. But I’m given to understand that it is NOT ‘wonderful’.”

“But you don’t understand, my Queen!” Tox stepped forward. Chrysalis stepped back. “There is more to this infection than mere disease! I have found a new power!”

She took another step forward, but then Chrysalis’s horn sparked loudly.

“TOX. Stay back, child. You will stand where you are,” the Queen hissed through clenched teeth.

Tox did as she was asked, bowing her head. “Very well, my Queen. I do not wish to defy or harm you.”

“You can understand why I’m skeptical,” Chrysalis growled. “You come to the hive off of schedule, bring this human with you without restraining him, and… and…” The Queen gagged in disgust, her tongue hanging out. Then she pointed a hoof at the comatose changeling on the floor. “And THIS! What have you done to your brood-siblings?!”

“It is but the first step, my Queen! The introduction to Nurgle’s embrace!” Tox said eagerly. “It is unpleasant at first, of course, but once you speak to Grandfather-“

“What the blazing Tartarus are you going on about?” Chrysalis demanded. “Your grandfather?”

“Our Grandfather, my Queen!” Tox corrected reverently.

“I’m pretty sure we and Queen Chrysalis have different grandfathers,” Gox said. Then she cocked her head to the side. “Although… who IS our grandfather? Actually, who’s our father? Have we ever met him? Is he still around?”

“Long story. Not now,” Chrysalis snapped. “Tox, what were you saying?”

Tox shook her head, and then glanced back at Kruss. “Tell them, Preacher. Explain the glory of Nurgle to them.”

“Nurgle is the God of Plague and Cycles,” Kruss intoned, bowing his head, “one of the mighty deities of Chaos, he-“

“No, no! Don’t tell them that!” Tox interrupted. “Tell them he’s the God of Love! That’s the important part!”

“The God of WHAT?” Gox asked, recoiling.

Kruss groaned, hanging his head. “Tox, child, you can’t just open up with that part. You have to ease into it.”

“Why?”

“Because the most obvious aspect is disease! Nobody believes that Nurgle is the God of Love when they first see a Nurgle worshiper,” Kruss explained.

“You’re right, I don’t believe you,” Chrysalis interjected.

“See? And now you’ve totally ruined the mood.” Kruss crossed his arms over his chest. “YOU explain it, if you think you’re such an expert after barely a day of Nurgle worship.”

Tox rolled her eyes. “Ugh! Why did I even bring you along?”

“I don’t know, I wanted you to just let me go!”

“Well I couldn’t do THAT! You would have told the Company about us!”

“Which wouldn’t have mattered if you hadn’t-“

A green surge of lightning flashed past Tox’s muzzle, and then Kruss was blasted backward off his feet. He slammed into the wall of the throne chamber, and then collapsed onto his knees.

“Kruss!” Tox shouted in panic. Then she turned back to Chrysalis. “My Queen, please! Wait! This isn’t-“

“No,” Chrysalis silenced her agent in an instant. “I gave you the chance to explain yourself, Tox. And instead you offered me lunatic rants and the words of our enemy.” She pointed to the smoldering human on the floor. “How can I trust you, Tox? When you’ve allied yourself with these feeble apes and devolved into…” she made a face and gestured to the guardian. “THIS.”

Tox glanced left and right, her body swaying slightly from the movements. She was surrounded on all sides by changelings with spears and smaller blades. She had little to fear from her lesser brood-siblings, however; besides being much weaker than she, they were clearly hoping they didn’t have to approach.

“My Queen! The humans! They have a… a power!” Tox stumbled over her own words, wishing she had worked out a proper speech ahead of time. “It is difficult to explain, but it is FANTASTIC!”

“It doesn’t look so great from where we’re standing,” Gox noted, cringing.

“Nurgle comprises but a small fraction of the true power of Chaos! I’ve felt it!” Tox exclaimed, nodding her head. “The humans have built a structure in Ponyville. The… uh…”

“Nethalican,” Kruss mumbled from the ground.

“Yes! Thank you! Nethalican!” Tox nodded rapidly. “This structure is absolutely saturated with… well, not love, but some kind of fantastic, emotional energy! With just a touch against the outer wall, I could nourish myself! Unlimited power, all for the taking!”

Chrysalis raised her head uncertainly, and the glow from her horn dimmed. “Really? And the rampant and disfiguring disease?”

“Uh...” Tox hesitated, then aimed a hoof at Kruss. “His fault.”

“Oh, it is not,” Kruss spat as he tried to push himself to his feet. “You attacked me and put on my-“ Another flash of lightning slammed into him, throwing him back into the wall.

Tox winced. “My Queen? I… rather wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“And I wish you had not brought him here. So I consider this approach an acceptable compromise,” Chrysalis retorted. “Although, if the human wishes to join our cause, then he may kneel before me and swear his allegiance. That would also be acceptable.”

Kruss’s hand rose. “Not happening.”

Another lightning blast struck the fallen Cultist, and his body twitched on the ground among the curling wisps of smoke.

“Then this where we stand. Tox, you have failed me,” Chrysalis said sadly.

“B-But-“ the guardian began to interrupt, but a surge of magical energy wrapped around her muzzle and pressed it shut.

“You were to infiltrate the humans. Instead, you have let them expose and corrupt you.” The Changeling Queen drew a deep, calming breath. “You have brought the enemy – as well as some sort of horrific pestilence – into our hive. This is not merely a failure, but a betrayal.”

“NO!!” Tox snapped, surprising the other changelings. She took a step forward, teeth clenched, and Chrysalis took a wary step back. “I have betrayed NO ONE! I still serve the hive! Nurgle will make us strong! His power will sustain us!”

“What are you going on about, Tox?” Gox stepped up next to Chrysalis. “I think your brain has started rotting. We don’t want this Nurgle freak’s power if it means having to contract magic dysentery.”

“I do NOT have-“ Tox stopped mid-shout, frowning. “Wait. Maybe… uh…”

“Not actually a thing,” Kruss said, pushing himself up again.

“HOW ARE YOU NOT DEAD?” Chrysalis shrieked at the man.

Tox laughed. “Now you begin to see our strength! Nurgle protects us, frees us from the miseries of pain and the symptoms of contagion!”

The infected changeling lying on the ground started twitching. The growth on its leg began to swell, and the carapace cracked open.

“Do not fear, my Queen! My siblings! My family!” Tox reared up, her wings buzzing while she spread her front hooves. “Embrace Nurgle’s gifts! Accept his love into your heart! Take his strength, and no creature – not the humans, not the Orks, not the wretched ponies – will be able to stand before us!”

The lesser changelings recoiled in horror as their wounded sibling shrieked. The tumor on its leg finally split open at the top, and the wet, gleaming head of a large wasp ripped its way out. Its legs came next, pulling away and shredding the remains of its birthing pod. Before the hissing insect even finished pulling itself free, more wasps started wriggling out of the breach around it.

“What are those?! What are you doing, you maniac?!” Gox screeched, feeling her hackles rise.

“These are vessels of Nurgle’s power!” Tox proclaimed, laughing and gesturing to the emerging horrors. “Accept the gifts of the Plague God, my sisters! Do not fear!”

Her words did very little to stem the panic among her hive siblings, many of whom broke and ran from the central hive chamber. The first of the daemon wasps leapt into the air, its wings thrumming loudly while it compound eyes searched the chamber for new victims. Its abdomen pulsed, squirming with horrific venoms and parasitic larvae.

It died in an instant, swallowed in a haze of green fire.

Tox recoiled in surprise. “My Queen? But-“

“Be silent, traitor!” Chrysalis snapped. Her horn was awash with emerald power, and she promptly fired another blast at the downed changeling. It barely had time to gasp before its body disintegrated into ashes, along with the remaining wasps.

“I have heard enough. As I said earlier, you have failed me, and you have failed your hive,” the Changeling Queen glowered at Tox, who wilted under her gaze. “I will determine what to do with you in time, but for now… I think a quarantine is in order.”

“A what?” Tox took a step back. “What do you mean a-“

Another blast of green light poured from Chrysalis, and the infected guardian yelped as she was surrounded by intense magical power. After several seconds that power coalesced around her, generating a thick, green film that sealed over her carapace.

Within seconds the spell was complete, and Tox was sealed within a fluid-filled chrysalis. A patch of translucent film covered one section of the prison, allowing the prisoner’s terrified expression to be seen by the surrounding hive.

“Now, then.” Chrysalis turned toward Leonard Kruss, her eyes narrowing. “What to do with YOU?”

Kruss glanced at Chrysalis, then at Tox. The corrupted guardian was writhing angrily within the pod, struggling but apparently unable to get free.

Then he dropped to his knees and clasped his hands together.

“Ah, yes. This is a good start,” Chrysalis said, smirking. “Please, go ahead. Let me hear your futile begging.”

“Praise Lord Nurgle, God of cycles. Lord of pestilence. Guardian of the parasite. Patron of despair.”

This was, obviously, not the pleading Chrysalis expected, and her smirk faded. “Tch. Boring. Die, then.”

A thin beam lanced from her horn to Kruss’s chest, slicing straight through his body and cutting into the stone wall behind him.

“Hear my cries, Grandfather, and answer my pleas. In this hour of darkness, I call upon your warmth.”

Chrysalis blinked in surprise. The man had barely even flinched. His blood and a few less colorful fluids were splattered across the floor behind him, and still he pontificated in front of her.

“Blessed Lord Nurgle! Speed me to your embrace! And within my body, let your children flourish! Spread your gifts upon the unworthy! Let them feel the fevered bliss of your touch!”

Chrysalis fired another beam, this one much larger, and swept it down across Kruss’s chest. His flesh tore, spilling blood and bile across the rocky ground in front of him.

Kruss fell forward, slapping his palms against the ground. To the surprise of the watching changelings, the gore oozing beneath him started to run across the ground in a series of curved lines. It was clearly an unnatural effect, and Chrysalis herself felt a cold chill while she watched the blood race across the stone.

“Stop it!” the Changeling Queen growled. “Just die, already!”

“I give myself to you, Lord of Plagues! Make your-GUGH!” Kruss was struck with another blast of force, smashing him off his knees and slamming him into the wall again. Although technically no more painful than any of the other attacks, this time the Cultist heard his bones break and felt his breath evacuate his lungs.

“Changelings! Surround him! Kill the ape!” Chrysalis commanded. The drones and soldiers of the hive obeyed, darting toward the crippled human.

“Death is not the end,” Kruss gasped out. A spear punctured his side, and then another dug into his chest wound. “Death is… merely another beginning…”

More spears plunged into him. The changelings snarled and hissed, buzzing around his corrupted body as Kruss’s vision began to go dark.

“Chaos… ascendant…”

A flare of green fire shot into the Cultist, causing the changelings to flinch back. Kruss was engulfed in flame in an instant, and the changelings quickly abandoned their spears to the conflagration.

“Well. That was… unsettling,” Gox admitted with a shudder. “Those humans sure are creepy.”

“What is this?!” Chrysalis snarled, rearing up furiously.

Gox seemed surprised at first. “What is what? Isn’t he dead now?”

“The floor, Gox! Look!”

It took a few seconds for the guardian to understand what the Queen was talking about. In the brutal violence of the last few seconds, Gox hadn’t noticed the spread of Kruss’s fluids across the ground. Now that she did, she could see that they had spread and curved about to form a triangle of three circles.

“Okay. That… What is that, exactly?” Gox asked.

“It’s some kind of enchanted rune!” Chrysalis explained. “Stay away, my changelings! Who knows what vile power it may contain!”

“I’ll bet that human does. I mean, did,” Gox pointed out.

“Be silent, Gox! This is serious!” the Changeling Queen snarled. “With this so-called ‘Plague God,’ we can take no chance of infection. This chamber must be sterilized, such that-“

The green cocoon that imprisoned Tox quivered.

Chrysalis stopped speaking, staring at it. She could no longer see Tox through the translucent window of the pod. The fluid within had turned thick and murky.

The bloody rings on the floor pulsed with unnatural light.

The cocoon began to tremble and stretch.

“The pod! She’s breaking free!” Chrysalis shouted.

“What should we do, my Queen?” Gox asked.

Chrysalis didn’t answer right away, her mind racing.

A serrated, crab-like claw suddenly punched through the skin of the cocoon. Foul-smelling fluids poured out of the breach, and the nearest changelings scurried away in terror and disgust.

“No… No, no, NO!!” Chrysalis’s horn flashed bright green, drawing deep upon her magic power. “Tox, be still! I WILL destroy you if you disobey me!”

A snarling hiss came from the magical prison, and then a scythe-like leg ripped another hole in the pod.

“I think she’s pretty set on disobedience,” Gox mumbled weakly, creeping backward.

The confines of the pod were bulging now, swelling far past the point of a changeling guardian’s natural size. Chrysalis had no idea where all the additional mass was coming from; Tox had completely surpassed the limitations of a changeling’s morphing abilities.

“Gox!” The guardian stopped backing up and snapped her head toward Chrysalis. The Queen’s horn was glimmering brighter than ever, surrounded by crackling arcs of power. “It’s too late! Attack! Strike her down!”

The guardian only hesitated a moment, and then her horn blazed green alongside her queen. The two changelings fired together, releasing twin beams of emerald fury across the throne chamber. In truth, Gox’s own attack was so weak compared to Chrysalis that she needn’t have bothered, but she pushed her magic reserves to the limit to assist her hive mother anyway. The beams punctured the outer layer of the pod, burning into the grotesque, growing mass within. The cocoon quivered, and an enraged hiss briefly rose above the sound of magic power searing through raw biomatter.

Then, after a several tense seconds, the beams broke through. They burned through the back of the chrysalis and bored into the wall, spending the last of their power against the stone. The pod seemed to deflate slightly, and the noise from within petered out.

All was silent for a few tense seconds.

“Okay, wow,” Gox breathed, “I don’t regret ending up with the mission against the Orks anymore. Seriously, that was just-“

The pod suddenly burst apart, and a feral screech boomed through the hive chamber as Tox emerged from her prison. Or, at least, the creature that used to be Tox.

She was nearly unrecognizable now, a horrendous, tumor-ridden mass of flailing scythe limbs and cracked chitin. A series of thick, bulging tendrils wound upward into a long, twisted neck, and upon that grotesque appendage sat Tox’s head. Huge, deformed, and crackling with corrupt power, it was framed by a long curtain of filthy, seaweed-green hair that swung lazily with every movement.

“No, no, no, NO!” Gox recoiled, skittering backward until she bumped into the wall. “What the hay? What happened? I thought we got her!”

Changelings shrieked and chittered in fright, but Chrysalis fixed her eyes on her wayward daughter’s chest. “Do not falter, changelings! She is wounded! Attack!”

Indeed, the monstrosity had already been speared through the breast, courtesy of Gox and Chrysalis. A smoldering hole was burned through her torso, and her movements were staggered and difficult. The lesser changelings obeyed their hive mother, launching toward their corrupted sibling.

“Gox! Attack from afar! Do not let her touch you!” Chrysalis snarled. “Slay her! Bring her down and burn her remains to cinders!”

“Why do you do thiss, Mother?” moaned Tox, her jaws drooling bile with every word. “I wanted to make uss sstrong… make uss complete…”

Changelings rushed at her with spears and bare hooves, although the latter bunch seemed reluctant to touch their target. Tox endured the assault with lazy indifference, staggering forward through the thrashing black limbs and flimsy melee weapons.

One unfortunate hive soldier was speared in the back by a knife-edged leg stepping on him. Another few managed to tear open one of the throbbing growths on her side, only for a clutch of wasps to emerge from the broken shell. The insects dove at the changelings immediately, stinging and biting with suicidal fervor.

“Don’t you ssee the power that Grandfather givess me? Won’t you accept hiss love, Hive Mother?” Tox moaned.

“NO, Tox. I will not.” Chrysalis summoned her magic to her again, her horn glowing brighter. “You’ve rather ruined my appetite.”

Again, a sizzling beam of green magic blasted from the Changeling Queen’s head. This time, however, Tox brought her own horn to bear, and fired an identical beam right back. The magical streams plowed into each other, roaring to a standstill and tearing a deep crack in the chamber’s floor.

Gox immediately fired her own magic blast, striking Tox in the neck, but the attack fizzled while barely scorching the corrupted changeling’s chest.

“Gox! This is no time to hold back!” Chrysalis shouted. Beads of sweat dripped down her hair, and her body trembled from the power being channeled through her horn. “I know she is your hive sister, but she has turned from us! She is beyond saving!”

“That’s, uh, not really the problem,” Gox admitted in embarrassment. “You see, it’s pretty hard to find love around Orks, you know? So I’m kind of low on energy right now. Like, almost out. Completely. Sorry.”

The magical energy converging in the middle of the room suddenly exploded, tearing through the throne chamber in a wave of green force. Chrysalis was blown off her hooves and even Tox, despite her much greater mass, lurched backward while changelings were blasted off of her.

The respite did not last long, and Tox began lumbering forward immediately. “Sstop sstruggling, Hive Mother. Nurgle’ss domination iss inevitable. Your sstruggle only increassess your ssuffering, and that of my ssiblingss…”

“Back! BACK, you monster!” the Changeling Queen snarled, charging up her horn again. “You are not my daughter! You have stolen her from me, and brought our enemies to the hive! DIE!” Chrysalis fired a sphere of energy, launching it in an arc toward Tox’s head.

In response, Tox slammed her legs hard into the ground, and a green pulse of magical energy washed out from her body. The fireball in the air dissipated instantly, and every one of the lesser changelings still nearby fell to the ground in pain.

Chrysalis snarled incoherently, her hatred burning ever hotter as she watched her children writhe and scream. Vile fluids clung to their carapace, leaking greenish-tinted plumes of gas into the air. Every one of them had been infected, painfully and irreversibly, and their lives would be forfeit whether or not the changelings won.

Unfortunately, Chrysalis wasn’t generally empowered by hate and anger. As she charged up her horn yet again, she saw the writing on the wall: if she didn’t manage to land a decisive blow against Tox, the corrupted guardian would overwhelm her. With her out of the way, the changeling hive would be infested by parasites and disease. All her efforts would be for naught, and the mighty changeling race would perish or be reduced to monsters.

“You will not leave here alive, you vile traitor!” Chrysalis screamed.

She fired another magic beam, and Tox again met the attack with one of her own. The energy beams smashed together in the middle of the room, and the floor cracked and shifted further from the abuse.

“You cannot overcome me, Mother,” Tox assured her. “I am infinitely replenished by Nurgle’ss love. You exhaust yoursself with no ready ssupply of power. Give in. Let me SHARE thiss sstrength!”

The beams crackled against each other. Tox started walking forward, pushing ahead into the tide of magic.

“Gox! Do… Do something!” Chrysalis barked.

The guardian gulped. There were other defenses against intruders available to the changelings, but none of them seemed useful right now. Enormous stalactites hung in a ring around the throne chamber circumference, ready to drop and block a given entrance, but Tox was too far away and already in the chamber. There were also more changeling soldiers she could bring to help, but Gox couldn’t imagine that mere numbers could take Tox down.

“What should I do? I don’t have any ideas!” Gox yelped fearfully.

“You’ve spent all this time hiding amongst warriors, haven’t you?!” Chrysalis growled, reaching deep into her magic reserves. “The Orks fight these sorts of beasts! What do they do?!”

Gox jerked upright, suddenly inspired. She had completely forgotten that she’d entered the hive with a bag full of weapons.

Leaping to the side of the cavern, she located the discarded backpack and started rooting through it. The first weapons she discarded were the shoota (already jammed from the last time she tried to use it) and the choppa (easily the most worthless axe she had ever seen); neither would turn the tide against the corrupted changeling. Deeper in the pack was a stikkbomb, which was closer to the grade of ordnance she needed. Below that, however, was an even larger explosive. Flat and disc-shaped, with a large red button on the top and “BOOOOOOOOOM!!!” written in huge red font in a ring along the explosive’s outer edge.

Mines were uncommon weapons in Ork armories. Orks considered such passive weapons boring, and hated the idea of potentially causing explosions when they weren’t even there to see them. Their disdain wasn’t great enough to discard perfectly good ordnance, however, so when unused mines were looted from the enemy the Orks modified them and used them anyway. Usually their use involved making Gretchin run toward enemy vehicles and slam the mines directly onto the treads, button-first. It was a tactic Gox would have gladly utilized in her current situation, but luckily she had something even better.

As she was levitating the mine out of the bag at what she hoped was a safe distance, the magical deadlock in the middle of the chamber broke once more. Gox was nearly bowled over by the resulting energy wave, and Chrysalis wasn’t much better, stumbling back and tripping over her own throne.

Only Tox remained unbothered by the blast, and she lurched forward toward the Changeling Queen with an insane hunger in her bulging, bloodshot eyes. Oozing tendrils of cancerous flesh broke free from her chest carapace and curled ahead of her twisted body, reaching for the stunned monarch.

Then the sound of metal sliding across stone came from her side and underneath her. Tox glanced down, blinking at the strange metal plate that now sat underneath her body.

“I’m sorry, Sister!” Gox barked as her horn glowed. Tox prepared herself to deflect a projectile, but the projectile never came. Instead, an aura of green magic surrounded the mine’s detonator button, and it depressed with a distinct, ominous-sounding click.

Everyone froze.

Nothing happened.

The mine made several more clicking sounds as Gox pressed it over and over again, each time with the same distinct lack of result.

The guardian gulped. Her corrupted sibling raised a slime-soaked eyebrow.

“Heh, heh! Ork tech! Go figure!” Gox squeaked, grinning fearfully.

“Poor, helplesss ssisster,” Tox groaned. “Worry not. For under Grandfather’ss reign there will be no need for the complex treachery and ssubterfuge of the old wayss. Chaoss will rule thiss world, and the Orkss will die. Hah hah hah hah haaaaah!” Tox laughed, her voice bubbling through a lump of bile and mucus.

Then another magic beam slammed into her.

Tox snarled in frustration, staggering backward against the tide of force that burned into her chest. She felt no pain from the attack, yet that didn’t protect her body from slowly breaking apart under the assault. Carapace plates buckled and fell to the ground, and several of her new tentacles shriveled and burned down to their stumps.

Yet even as she was pushed back, she could see the strain coming from Chrysalis as she poured more and more energy into her spell. This would be the Queen’s last chance, and it would fail. After her magic was spent, Tox would walk up and seize her, and then this hive would belong to Nurgle.

“Okay, wait, let’s see if THIS works,” Gox mumbled, levitating the mine up into the magic beam.

Magical witchfire managed to succeed where Ork engineering had failed, and Tox was flung backward by a tremendous explosion. Chrysalis cut her spell short, gasping, and watched the hulking monster that used to be her daughter roll and skid across the floor before coming to rest before one of the chamber entrances. Tox's chest had been badly shredded from the explosion, and at least two of her legs were blown off and strewn about the room. Thick burns decorated her body and scorched insects and maggots fell from her wounds only to shrivel to ashes on the floor.

Still, though, Tox was not dead. She raised her head, glowering at her defiant family, and her horn sparked with power. “None can ressisst the cycle. None can deny their mortality. None can sstop the ssupremacy of the Chaoss Godss.”

“Then I suppose I’ll have to settle for killing you,” Chrysalis snapped, her horn pulsing again. “You have failed me, Tox. Now… sleep.”

Chrysalis fired a magic bolt. Tox fired a counter-shot, trying to intercept it, but her angle was off and she missed. This was because the attack was not aimed at her, but the ceiling above her, and the stalactites that had been placed as a defense. The green pulse smashed apart the weakened roots of the stone, instantly dropping the massive spikes of rock onto the corrupted changeling below.

Tox died not with a shriek or a shout, but something more like a resigned burble. Her body was completely ripped apart and crushed under the avalanche of stone, and the last twitches of life left her body as a pool of grayish ooze leaked from the pile of rock and chitin.

Chrysalis trudged forward, breathing hard from the exertion of her battle.

A nearby wheeze distracted her, and she saw one of the changeling soldiers lying on the ground at her side. It was curled up and quivering, and some manner of vile, horrific insect was gnawing at its neck. Growths had already started swelling beneath its outermost shell, no doubt full of more infectious horrors.

“Quiet, child. That’s enough. You did well, and now your service is complete,” Chrysalis whispered. Her horn glowed softly, and the soldier whimpered.

Then it burst into flame.

Chrysalis turned away from her burning warrior. There were many more, and she didn't have the strength left to destroy them all. “Guards! Get in here!”

A pair of changelings that had been lucky enough to avoid the encounter in the throne chamber peeked through the entrance hesitantly.

“Get the others. Find some torches and fuel and light this room aflame. The infected cannot be spared. Every trace of this debacle shall be burned clean!”

The changelings bowed and then bolted away to find the necessary supplies. Chrysalis sighed wearily, and then glanced over her shoulder.

“Gox?”

The guardian, who had been maintaining a respectful silence, suddenly perked up. “Yes, my Queen?”

“You were carrying that explosive with you the whole time?”

“Yes, my Queen. Why?”

“In that bag you brought with you?”

“Yes.”

“And all it takes to detonate it – in theory – is to press the large red button?”

“Yes.”

Queen Chrysalis frowned. “Weren’t you at all concerned that the button might be activated by accident just from being jostled around during your journey?”

Gox paused to consider the question. Then her eyes bugged out. “Oh, blast! I didn’t even consider that!” She slapped a hoof over her face. “Living with the greenskins has made me sloppy. I’m so used to being around high explosives and stupidly dangerous machines I don’t even think about it anymore!”

Chrysalis approached the exasperated guardian. “You’ve had a very difficult time, Gox. But you have remained loyal to me and our mission. Thank you.”

Chrysalis looped a leg over Gox’s withers, and pulled the infiltrator into a hug. Gox leaned into her mother eagerly, her wings buzzing in delight.

“I will not fail you, Queen! Tox was weak!”

Chrysalis shook her head. “No, my child. She wasn’t.” She released Gox from her embrace, frowning delicately. “The task I required of her was simply too much. Infiltrating the humans with changeling spies may be impossible to accomplish before the 38th Company finishes dominating the lesser species of this world. But we simply cannot defeat them head-on. We require a hoof in their corner, one way or another.”

Gox furrowed her brow. “Then… what are we to do? Send spies directly to Ferrous Dominus? Perhaps as refugees or immigrant citizens?”

“No. I cannot risk such a thin ruse. Not against such powerful foes.” Chrysalis turned and started walking out of the chamber while changelings carrying torches and barrels rushed by in the opposite direction. “If one of my finest agents was foiled in her effort, then I cannot rely on clumsy, desperate retaliation. I need a different approach.”

Then the Changeling Queen smiled. “Gox, I need you to stay here for a few days. Oversee the cleansing of the main chamber, and keep the hive locked down. I’m going on a trip to Canterlot. It’s time for Plan B.”

Gox blinked in surprise. “Canterlot? You’re going to try to turn Princess Celestia against the invaders?”

Chrysalis laughed. “Oh, my, no. What did I say about clumsy and desperate measures? Celestia and I have too much history together. And frankly, even if I could convince her, I’m not sure she would be very useful.” A long grin stretched across her face. “My tool of choice is nothing so obvious. I just need to go pick it up.”

Gox remained puzzled as the Changeling Queen chuckled to herself, heading to one of the exit tunnels. “Very well, my Queen. I obey.”

****

Canterlot Castle

Royal Statue Garden

“Halt! This area is closed!”

“Please stop where you are!”

Two pegasi stallions in molded flak armor and bearing lasguns swooped down on a small group of four ponies approaching the perimeter of the statue gardens. It was late at light, and from high above the pale glow of the magic streetlights didn’t allow them to get a good look at who was trying to enter the area.

Once the guards got low enough to get a good look, they stopped short in surprise and confusion. The ponies were all royal guards, and all of them unicorns. They seemed to be escorting a large wagon covered by a dark blanket. Also, despite having the appropriate armor on, none of them had rifles or ballistics harnesses.

One of the larger unicorns, a dark-furred mare, tilted her head up and regarded the pegasi with an arched brow. “Is there a problem, gentlecolts?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” one pegasi replied as he and his partner landed. “What’s going on here? The gardens are closed for the night.”

“Obviously,” the lead unicorn sniffed, “I’m just delivering a new exhibit. It’s rather short notice, but the artist demanded that her newest work get a guard escort since she thinks it’s so important.” She shrugged. “As long as we’re here, we may as well relieve you two, if you’d like. We’re scheduled to be here most of the rest of the night.”

“Really? Yeesh, we must be getting light on bat ponies. The Lunar Guard is supposed to be handling the night shifts, not us,” mumbled one of the guards, approaching the wagon. “So, what is this thing, exactly? I wasn’t aware there was a new exhibit coming in.”

“I’m not sure who the artist cleared it with. You know how those self-important ninnies are,” the unicorn replied bitterly. “I can take it back if you’d like, but it’s just going to waste everypony’s time.”

“Eh, I don’t think there’s any need for that. Just let me inspect the cargo…” the pegasus bit onto the edge of the obscuring blanket, and the two unicorns hauling the wagon unhooked themselves and stepped back.

The mare’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

The blanket was pulled off of the wagon, and both pegasi blinked in surprise. Sitting in the cargo bed was a big, bare granite block.

“…… Wait. THIS is supposed to be a new statue?” asked one guard incredulously. “It’s just a big cube!”

The mare’s expression shifted immediately to one of bored indifference when the pegasi turned to face her again. “Technically it’s not a cube, since the length is much greater than the other dimensions. It’s called a cuboid.”

“Okay, fine. It’s a cuboid. My point is, who the hay thinks they can pass this off as a finished statue?”

“That would be Ruby Radiant, who appears to be going through an avante-garde phase. This is apparently her attempt at modern art,” the unicorn sneered. “Frankly, I can’t see it taking up space for long. In fact, you shouldn’t be surprised if you never see it after tonight…”

“I hear that.” The pegasus guard shifted the blanket back over the block, and then backed away. “Whatever. They don’t pay us to play art critic. You sure you’ve got the next shift handled?”

“Absolutely. You two fly off and enjoy the rest of your night.”

“Sweet! Thanks, guys! Maybe we can still make that poker game!” One of the guards vaulted into the air, obviously excited to be relieved. The other one hesitated, staring at the unicorn mare.

“Uh, hey, I’m fine with getting a night off from guarding useless rocks, but shouldn’t you guys have lasguns?”

There was a brief flash of emotion that crossed the mare’s face, appearing and vanishing before the stallion guard could hope to identify it.

“… We didn’t want the harnesses to get in the way,” she replied calmly. “Besides, this is the middle of Canterlot. What are we going to find here that might require laser guns?”

“I understand, but we can’t take security so lightly anymore,” the stallion reasoned, wagging a hoof at her. “We’re at war, you know. The Royal Guard of Equestria has to be prepared to take on the enemy on the open road or the heart of our capital city!” He paused and glanced left, then right. Then he stepped closer to the unicorn mare. “Besides, we can never be completely sure where the enemy is, you know? We have to be ready for anything.”

The mare regarded him silently for several seconds. “… You make an excellent point,” she said finally.

The pegasus thought he detected a hint of sarcasm in her voice for some reason, but dismissed it and took to the air. “All right then, I’ll leave the rest to you! Make sure to stop by the armory later! Good night!”

After the pegasus flew out of earshot, two of the unicorns hooked themselves back up to the wagon. Another one turned to the taller mare.

“Should we stop by the armory and bring back a shipment of weapons too, my Queen?”

“I’m honestly tempted,” Chrysalis sniffed, “but no, we cannot afford the risk. Even the Royal Guard’s incompetence has its limits. I mean, probably.” She started heading forward again, constantly scanning her surroundings for any signs of eavesdroppers and patrols. “Besides, we’ve already stolen plenty of pony wargear for our little puppets. At this point I’m surprised there’s any left. Move!”

The infiltrators moved into the heart of the statue garden, glancing back and forth at the carvings of beasts and equines. Chrysalis took the lead, her senses keen for any sign of interference. Her assistants were less focused, and their gazes lingered on some of the surrounding statues as they pushed forward.

“Queen! Is that a Space Marine?” gasped one of the disguised changelings, stopping to point. “I’ve never seen one before!”

Chrysalis twisted her head around, and she stared briefly at the carving her servants had pointed out. It was ten feet tall from the bottom of its boots to the tip of its horns, and cut in admittedly fine detail. The Astartes warrior carried a boltgun in one hand, while the other was sheathed in an upturned power fist. In what was a very compelling touch, the artist had enchanted a stone in the palm to emit a small, constant red flame, so that it appeared the alien soldier was carrying the fire above his palm. The statue generated a potent sense of malice and intimidation, and the lesser changelings quivered under its stone gaze.

“To think that the insipid ponies are actually glorifying such creatures,” Chrysalis snorted and turned away. “But this place is not just a place to honor their allies. Celestia has also made it a prison for her foes.”

Her horn flashed, lighting the way ahead and illuminating their target at the edge of the yard. Chrysalis grinned maliciously.

Standing before them was the Tau High Commander, Shas’o Voidsong.

To be sure, the alien didn’t cut a very imposing figure. She was smaller than a human and lacked any sort of natural weapons or imposing stature. Even her pose looked pitiful; she was hunched over and seemed to be frozen in mid-shout. An utterly pathetic visage of a villain, particularly compared to the hulking Iron Warrior lying at the other end of the path.

But Chrysalis, of all people, could appreciate that appearances could be deceiving.

The changelings pulled away the wagon’s cover, exposing the bare block of stone. Chrysalis stared hard at the statue of the imprisoned alien, and her horn pulsed with an emerald shine.

The bare stone was surrounded by her magic, and then started breaking down. Sheets of rock splintered and slid away by the dozen, and large gouges were carved away. The large cracks and cuts soon gave way to smaller, more careful ones, digging small grooves and details into the shrinking mass.

After some ten minutes of magical carving, Chrysalis levitated a counterfeit Voidsong statue into place alongside the real one. The semblance was good, but not perfect. With the two side-by-side, it was easy to pick out small imperfections or awkward edges that didn’t properly mimic actual flesh turned to stone. Fast, covert, magical rock-carving had its limitations.

“Good enough so long as nobody knows what to look for,” Chrysalis mused while her changelings pushed the original over. The statue of Voidsong dropped into the wagon bed, its impact cushioned by the ground-up remains of the stone block.

The Queen of the Changelings lifted her duplicate statue onto the pedestal, and then carefully shifted it so that it was facing the same angle as the original had. With a satisfied nod, she turned away. Next she used her magic to shift the wagon’s contents, sinking the statue beneath the stone shards and rubble just in case it was inspected again on her way out of Canterlot. Like the statue, the ruse wouldn’t survive dedicated observation, but combined with some quick lies it would be plenty to get out of the city.

Once she had settled the blanket over the wagon’s contents, she began leading her servants out of the gardens.

“Security is so weak,” noted one of the other changelings, glancing around. “Two weakling ponies and nopony else? Do they not care that this is a great enemy?”

“Hence why most rulers don’t treat their prisons as tourist attractions.” Chrysalis chuckled lightly to herself. “But I can hardly blame Celestia for her laxity. The best kind of theft is stealing something no one else wants. After all, what POSSIBLE use could one have for the alien warlord that almost doomed our planet?”

Chrysalis grinned viciously, revealing a mouth full of curved, razor-edged teeth. “I can’t wait to find out…”

Author's Note

I know we're all very disappointed in Rainbow Dash, but let's be honest, here. She saved the donkey race and Ponyville from complete magical annihilation. Major props, Dash.

Pieces on the Board

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 9

Pieces on the Board

****

Changeling hive

Prison chamber

Voidsong gasped as shards of rock crumbled around her face, dropping to the floor into a rapidly growing mound of gravel.

For a brief moment the High Commander was caught in a terrifying stasis between flesh and stone, with her head and brain restored but those organs in her torso inert. A few seconds later the spell was broken, returning her vitals to their normal functions. She promptly collapsed onto the floor, desperately sucking in air amongst the bits of rubble.

“That… That was much less pleasant than last time,” Voidsong groaned, grasping her head.

“So sorry,” said an unfamiliar voice from behind her, “the alchemist that provided the potion didn’t offer a list of side effects. Very hard to rhyme. Zebras, am I right?”

Voidsong looked behind her to see an equine-shaped creature with a black carapace, long fangs, insect-like wings, and numerous holes in her body. She stared for several seconds, then looked around at her surroundings. She was in a small, dank cavern illuminated by a small yellow globe set in the wall. There was only one exit to the cave, and it lay directly behind the unfamiliar creature.

She turned back to said creature, looking supremely annoyed. “So, what now? What are you supposed to be? Are you some kind of twisted, broken descendant of the ponies, centuries after submitting to Chaos? I’m a little fuzzy on how much time has passed since I was petrified. Did my sentence actually expire, or what?”

The creature looked moderately surprised at the guess, but shook her head. “No. No, my name is Queen Chrysalis, and your sentence is far from served, Miss Voidsong.” Then she grinned. “I decided, however, that you have more to offer than passing amusement to ignorant foals and gawking tourists.”

“Yeah, great. What are you?” Voidsong demanded. “You resemble the horses, but…”

“I am a changeling. A mighty, proud species long shunned by the self-righteous creatures of Equestria and their neighbors.”

“Equestria…” Voidsong grimaced, turning over to sit down properly. “Does it still exist? Have the Orks demolished Centaur III yet? Last time I was restored, the white one told me that the Emerald Dawn Project had succeeded. The Iron Warriors were planning some ridiculous defense of the planet to try to stave off the Ork assault.”

“Ridiculous as it was, it was successful,” Chrysalis said somberly. Voidsong looked honestly stunned at the news. “Through a combination of black sorcery, the sacrifice of a few crucial magic artifacts, and sheer military might, the forces of Chaos have turned back the green tide. The Orks still infest this world in… unfortunate numbers, but they are scattered and consumed with infighting.”

Voidsong took several seconds to digest this information. Then she took another look at the cavern around her.

“What happened, exactly? And where am I?” the Tau Commander asked, standing up.

“Please, my dear, calm yourself. Have a seat and a drink,” Chrysalis chided with a wide smile full of curved, razor-edged teeth. A pair of changelings entered the cavern behind her, one of them levitating a stool and the other a flask of water.

Voidsong grimaced at the small, pony-like insects, and she backed away as the first one placed the stool. The other sat down nearby, holding the flask patiently with its magic. Chrysalis sat down herself, and then gestured to the stool with a hole-ridden hoof.

“We have a great deal to discuss, Miss Voidsong. Please, sit down and let’s talk…”

****

Things were bad.

“You cannot be serious.”

“Indeed I am, Miss Voidsong. Chaos is triumphant. The Iron Warriors are ascendant. And the Tau of your ‘Lamman Sept,’ abandoned by your military and left to die on this world…”

“Have become their conscripts?!”

Things were very, very bad.

Voidsong paced across the breadth of the cavern, her hand gripped tight around the flask.

It was only half-empty, and she had drunk from it sparingly. As far as she could tell it was nothing but distilled water, but she was wary of being drugged. She had no idea of why someone would break her free just to incapacitate her, but her experience on Centaur III had been bizarre enough that she wasn’t willing to trust her strange benefactors so easily.

“This is absurd… Fire Warriors, serving under Chaos? WILLINGLY?” the Shas’o seethed.

“Not just the Fire Warriors, as I understand it. Your other compatriots have joined as well.”

“The Kroot! The Vespid! The EARTH CASTE! By Tau’va, we have engineers willingly working for the enemy, dropping our technology right into their corrupt hands!” Voidsong flung the flask of water toward the wall, absolutely furious. The resin container bounced off the rock without much effect besides spilling its contents. “Cowards! What greater betrayal of the Greater Good could there be than selling our lives to CHAOS, of all things?!”

Chrysalis found the gesture hilarious, but hid her mirth. She had to stoke and guide Voidsong’s anger, not belittle it. “It is a sad state of affairs, indeed.” The Changeling Queen shook her head. “Your warriors, sworn to uphold your noble ideals, pressed into service as slaves to your enemy. It-“

“Don’t feed me your simpering platitudes, insect!” Voidsong snapped, whirling around.

Chrysalis recoiled, surprised.

“To the Tau people and our allies, the Greater Good is more than just a slogan or ideology!” the Shas’o growled, pointing at Chrysalis. “It is our guiding light, our promise of a better future! Our reason for fighting, for dying, in a galaxy filled from edge to edge with horror and destruction!” Her face twisted into a grimace. “But to you? To you it’s the excuse we used to sacrifice your entire world – changelings included, I’m sure – to a tide of billions of Orks. You do not understand the Greater Good, much less believe in it.”

Then the alien Commander crossed her arms over her chest. “Which brings us to the point you’ve so artfully danced around so far in this conversation: Why have you freed me? What do you WANT?”

Chrysalis didn’t respond right away, staring at Voidsong with an unreadable expression. Then she sighed.

“Is it really so hard to believe that I wished to help you out of the concern that you’ve been treated unfairly? Or at least the concern that Chaos is the greater threat?” Chrysalis asked, tilting her head to the side innocently.

“Yes, absolutely. I was the military commander directly responsible for almost dooming you all. Chaos is the military force responsible for and perhaps even dedicated to your world’s survival. Even if you’re right about Chaos – and you are – I’ll tell you the same thing I told the white Princess: you’re a fool to side against them.” Her eyes narrowed. “But even that simpering idiot horse wasn’t so stupid as to risk setting me free for long. What are you planning, Queen?”

Queen Chrysalis grinned widely, and her long, curved fangs glinted in the dim light. “Oh, Voidsong! You WOUND me!” she giggled. “Very well, let’s do away with false pretenses.”

The Changeling Queen stood up and leaned her head closer to the Tau. Voidsong was clearly uncomfortable with the invasion of her space, but refused to flinch away.

“My plan is to break the 38th Company,” Chrysalis said softly.

“Easier said than done. I would know,” Voidsong drawled.

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. And that’s why I need your help.” Chrysalis started circling the alien, softly whispering all the while. “The Company is weakened. It’s mightiest warriors are away. It is distracted fighting enemies that it hardly need bother subduing. And in the shadows, an ever-growing army of their victims awaits, seething, ready to lay down their lives to strike back.”

A nefarious chuckle came from the changeling. “But that will not be enough. Brute force cannot overcome the humans. Their weapons, their power, their mastery of war… it is too much. I need an edge. A new playing piece. A hoof inside their door.”

“The Tau,” Voidsong mumbled.

“Yessssss…” Chrysalis let the word ride her breath to the Commander’s ear. “The Tau. Not trusted by the enemy, perhaps, but not shunned. With no place to go, with no other master to turn to, little trouble is expected from the infamous grayskins. Even the ponies have been mollified, and have come to accept your presence. Hundreds of tools, just waiting to be used…”

“So you want me to turn them against the humans secretly. So that you can launch a surprise attack without having to fight head-on,” Voidsong mused.

She deliberated silently for a short while, turning away from the changeling.

“… I’m not opposed to this strategy, as it stands. I too want to see Chaos wiped out. But I have questions,” the Shas’o mumbled.

“I don’t expect you to take orders from me as a matter of course,” Chrysalis replied immediately. “After the humans are crushed, your people will be freed from their control and will be under no further obligation to serve me. You can go live on your own. Or, if it doesn’t especially please you to live on an Ork-infested world where most of the inhabitants loathe you, you can contact your people to pick you up. If that’s possible.”

Voidsong turned back around. “That’s nice to know, although I don’t really believe you. But that wasn’t my question. I was going to ask why you want to fight Chaos in the first place.”

Chrysalis blinked. “Isn’t it obvious? The humans are a serious threat! And these… ‘Dark Gods’ of theirs are clearly dangerous!”

“True. And yet, from what you’ve told me, none of that threat was directed at you. They saved your world from annihilation, and now you want them destroyed so badly that you’re willing to turn to me for help? That doesn’t make sense. What are you trying to accomplish, Chrysalis?”

The Changeling Queen chuckled darkly. “Oh, my… I can’t get anything past you, can I?”

“You’re inviting destruction on your people by opposing Chaos. You must know that. Why? Why fight them, rather than just… I don’t know, hiding out or something?”

Chrysalis suddenly looked grim, and her eyes narrowed. “Because I want their power.”

Voidsong took a step back. “What?”

“Their power. Their strength. Their knowledge. Their tools. Their weapons. Their devices. I want it. I want ALL of it. Everything the apes possess must become mine or be destroyed.” Chrysalis grit her teeth, glaring at the alien. “These warriors come from nowhere in their vast machines and build grand cities in a matter of days. They can strip the land of resources, reduce vast tracts of land to ruins, and sail between the very stars. They have tamed Equestria and leashed the mighty Princesses to their armies! These humans have power beyond my understanding, and I WANT it.” Her wings vibrated irritably. “At first I was content to learn about the apes, and entertained plots and schemes to infiltrate their ranks. I sought to control them from within. That strategy has failed.”

She leaned in closer, much to Voidsong’s discomfort. “Events are accelerating, and opportunities are few. If I do not act quickly, then this Chaos army will stamp out my many pawns among this world. As I lose control of the other species and the humans’ grip on this world grows tighter, my only choice will be to hide my people in the shadows, desperately isolated, and only one slip-up away from being exposed and annihilated… if not by the Company, then by their equine pets.” The thought brought an enraged sneer to her face, although she backed away from the Tau Commander. “That is why I seek to destroy the 38th Company, Voidsong. Left unopposed, they will surely crush the remaining resistance on this planet. But if I prevail, I just may find the power to do it myself. That is the gamble upon which I’ve staked my hive.”

Voidsong stared hard at the changeling. “… And what of the fleet? You seemed sure they would return. Even if we break their fortress and destroy their minions, do you think you can stand against the Iron Warriors?”

Chrysalis shook her head. “Of course not. I do not ‘stand against’ my enemies. I take my place behind them and stab them in the back. What will the warriors of Chaos find when they return to ‘their’ world? A deserted fortress, littered with traps? Hundreds of enemies, waiting in the shadows to lash out at them? A wasted crater where their city used to be, so barren of life that they simply elect to leave?” She snorted. “Perhaps, if my campaign ends well enough, I can even force my will upon Celestia or her sister, and use their command of the sun and moon to simply smash the ships apart in space or something. I don’t know just yet. But there will be ample time to plan for their return AFTER their base has been crushed and my people have picked through the ruins.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Queen,” Voidsong warned.

“I don’t know any other kind of game, Commander,” Chrysalis replied. “Now, you have a choice to make. Will you help me? Will you turn your people against their captors, and deliver this world from the grip of Chaos?”

“To return my people to the correct path and ruin the monsters that nearly destroyed the Tau Empire? Absolutely.” Voidsong nodded sharply, sitting down. “You get me to Black Point unnoticed by the humans and give me a way to contact you, and I’ll have the Tau ready to strike. We’ll tear the heart out of the Chaos fortress on your command, if you possess enough warriors to storm it.”

“Excellent,” Chrysalis hissed. Another changeling trotted up beside her. It had a small, rolled-up paper in its mouth. “This drone will assist you. Should you wish to contact me, it will facilitate communication, and serve you in any other way it is able.”

Voidsong frowned. “I don’t think I can march into my people’s main war camp with one of you by my side…”

The changeling levitated the paper out of its mouth, and then unrolled it. It was a pict-capture of a Fire Warrior, and it stared hard at the image while a shroud of crackling green surrounded its carapace.

Voidsong recoiled after the changeling’s body changed shape within the aura of emerald light. When it cleared, she was looking at a Fire Warrior identical to the soldier in the pict, with the exception that the changeling didn’t have a pulse rifle.

“… Psykers,” the Tau Commander grumbled uncomfortably. She had guessed as much when she’d seen an object levitating, but to see the full extent of their powers was disquieting. “This will do, then. Shall I leave immediately?”

“Soon enough,” Chrysalis said soothingly, wagging a hoof at her. “First, eat and drink, please. I have no idea what it’s like to be trapped in stone, but I imagine it must leave you rather hungry.”

Another changeling walked into the room, a plate on its back. It was piled with fruits and nuts, and the server gently levitated the meal to the floor at Voidsong’s feet.

“I have shared much with you, Commander, but now I have many questions of my own,” Chrysalis said. “Most of what I know of the humans, Orks, and others I’ve learned thanks to rumors traveling through various kingdoms into the ears of my spies.” She paused. “Well, that and CNN.”

“What’s CNN?” Voidsong asked while reaching for a piece of fruit.

The changeling disguised as a Fire Warrior jumped in immediately. “The Company News Network! The only modern news network for the discriminating viewer looking for an interstellar perspective! Or at all.” It giggled. “I like Kilroy.”

Voidsong and Chrysalis stared at the changeling.

“You’re going to have to talk a lot less, going forward,” the Tau Commander grunted before biting into her fruit. It was bitter and starchy, but she wasn’t one to complain about the quality of food. She addressed Chrysalis again. “What is it you want to know about the humans and Orks?”

“Their strengths. Weaknesses. How they think. Their hierarchy. Their technology. Everything,” Chrysalis grinned.

“Get me a better chair, then. There’s a lot to cover…”

****

Canterlot City

Rainbow Dash swooped down between the spires of Canterlot on her approach into Equestria’s capital, buzzing towers and blowing banners about with the jet wash from her flight pack.

She had her armor on, but had her helmet disengaged. She loved the feeling of having the wind in her face while still experiencing the raw, spine-tingling power of her armor’s flight pack. Rainbow could fly very fast and precisely without it, of course, but unlike most of the other mares of her combat group she very much enjoyed being attached to a hefty, personalized war machine.

The steering fins of her flight pack tilted downward, and she laughed in delight as her central thruster ignited. Rainbow Dash blasted upward into the sky on a trail of rainbow-colored exhaust, whooping loudly the whole time. Down below, she spied several ponies staring up at the sky and pointing. It was nice to know that even in a world of technological wonders and alien creatures, she was STILL the most awesome thing around.

On the topic of technology and aliens, a barn-sized transport aircraft was veering in for a landing on the air platform set up in the former royal gardens. Rainbow angled up over the vehicle, and then cut off her thrust before activating her impulse blasters. She jumped through the air and landed squarely on top of the transport with a heavy clang.

After a few seconds of being mag-locked to the hull, the vox system on her armor collar blinked on.

“Did we just hit a pegasus? And why does it have a vox system? Who is this?”

Rainbow Dash grinned and hammered the top of the aircraft with her boot. It did no actual damage to the vehicle, but did succeed in making a horrible racket.

“Yarrr, I be Rainbow Dash, the fastest pirate in the seven sectors! Gimme yer cargo or prepare t’be boarded, planet-lubbers!” Rainbow Dash shouted her threat into the vox receiver, recalling a few key lines from a Daring Do book that featured pirates.

“… You do know that none of us talk like that, right?”

She banged her hoof onto the roof of the hull again. “No more o’yer lip, matey! Surrender yer treasure, or it’s out the airlock ya go! Don’t be testin’ my-“

Rainbow quickly lost her nerve when a small defense turret popped up ahead of her.

“Okay, okay, never mind! It was just a joke!” Rainbow quickly jumped off the transport and reignited her flight pack. The aircraft moved on without her, with the turret exposed but unmoving. After a few seconds the lumen on her vox system winked off again.

“Yeesh. Nobody in this army has a sense of humor except Tellis,” Rainbow griped. Then she frowned at a small metal compartment that was mag-locked to her leg. “Although I guess his sense of humor is what got me into this mess in the first place.”

“Hey there, soldier! What’re you doing, harassing the traffic at this hour?”

A familiar voice came from above, and Rainbow twisted about. Her face instantly broke into a grin when she saw who was flying leisurely through the air above her.

“Spitfire!” Rainbow Dash twisted upward with a quick puff of her jets, and the Wonderbolts’ Captain actually flinched back out of fear of a mid-air collision. Skilled flyer or not, Spitfire never really trusted Rainbow’s control over the cluster of rockets bolted onto her back. “Hey, what’re you in town for? I don’t see any of the others!”

“Nah, it’s just me. Making a little supply run.” She tapped her chest. “Like the new suit? We’re upgrading!”

Rather than the normal blue and yellow jumpsuit that Rainbow Dash had spent the better part of her life fawning over, Spitfire was wearing molded segments of armor padding. The pads were attached to a suit that resembled the old jumpsuits in their color pattern, although they looked quite a bit heavier. It almost resembled carapace armor, and left only the mare’s head, wings, and tail exposed.

“The fancolts are gonna cry themselves to sleep when they see you’ve ditched the skintight look,” Rainbow giggled.

“Not an easy decision, mind you!” Spitfire said with mock seriousness. “But I’m pretty sure they’ll miss my flank less than I’d miss my organs. The ‘Bolts are seeing a lot of action nowadays, so we can’t take our survival for granted.”

“What’s the material? Flak plating?”

“Better. Tau poly-something-or-other. The grayskin armor. The cyborg goons have so much of that stuff now, they practically jump at the chance to make it into something useful.”

“Huh. Wish they’d start with the Chaos mercs! Those guys are always complaining about their armor quality!”

The pegasi lowered themselves down into the castle courtyard as they talked. Several ponies gawked at the sight of an armored Wonderbolt and Element of Harmony casually chatting on their way toward Canterlot Castle, but the pair paid them no attention.

“Yeah, we’re setting up a complete reconnaissance center now! Auger stations, vox node, data stacks, the works!” Spitfire grinned. “The biggest issue we’ve had is training pegasi to handle the sophisticated human tech! Between the hooves and the… rarity of academic cutie marks among pegasi,” she coughed lightly into a hoof, “it’s been tough to find capable staff. We might have to locate it someplace other than Cloudsdale in the end. Which would be a shame, you know, since it’s apparently invasion-proof.”

The Captain smirked at Rainbow. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into a Wonderbolts desk job, could I? You look like you handle the gear pretty well!”

Rainbow Dash laughed. “No way, filly! It’s the pirate’s life for me! I’m in this gig for life, not until I find a better offer!” Then she pounded a hoof against her chest plate. “Besides, I’m pretty sure they’d take my suit away if I tried to leave the Company. Can’t have that. Just LOOK at this thing.”

“Thought I’d ask,” Spitfire shrugged. Then she glanced away. “Anyway, if you’re heading into the castle, then I’ve gotta split. I’m just here to put in a request at the armory for more ordnance and weapons. We’re putting the Reserve to work full-time, nowadays, and we need the extra guns and ammo.”

“All right, Captain! Catch you later!” Rainbow trotted happily toward the castle gate.

Spitfire turned toward the Royal Guard barracks, striding past the soldiers heading to and from the training yards and mess hall. Despite what she’d said earlier regarding her armor suit, she still enjoyed plenty of appreciative looks from the army stallions she passed by.

Making her way behind the main barracks, a slightly smaller building sat under the guard of two hefty earth ponies. The Royal Guard’s armory used to be a forge and warehouse for the plate armor, swords, and spears that ponies had used to defend their lands for millennia. Almost overnight, however, it had been turned over entirely to warehouse space in order to hold crates of lasguns, grenades, and the weak but ubiquitous flak armor.

“Hey there, colts!” Spitfire shouted, stopping to salute the guards. “I’m here to get a shipment sent to Cloudsdale for the war effort! Could you get the armory master for me?”

One immediately turned to enter the armory, unlocking the door and slipping inside.

“Master Coals will be right here, Captain,” said the other guard, “I believe he’s taking inventory right now. There’s been a lot of turnover.”

“Oh? Have we been taking heavy losses?” Spitfire asked in concern.

“No, no. Nothing like that. Casualties are as low as ever! Duck and cover, and never let the greenskins get close!” He chuckled. “Anyway, we’ve always been better at running away than the humans. More legs, you know?”

“You realize that’s not exactly a good thing, right?” Spitfire drawled.

“It’s gotten us this far,” the guard shrugged. “Besides, you’ve seen those Iron Warrior people, right? HardCORE. I’m not standing between one of those guys and any freak who actually thinks they can beat one.”

“Such is the courage of our Princess’s noble guardians.” Spitfire rolled her eyes. “It’s quite surprising she’s survived this long.”

The door to the armory opened again, and an earth pony stallion stepped out.

“Ah, Captain Spitfire,” rumbled Forge Coals, “here for a wargear pickup?”

“Yeah. Got a pretty hefty order.” She dipped her head to a small pouch strapped to her leg, and dug through it with her nose. “I know it’s a little below my pay grade, but we need this stuff right away. I figured it would help avoid any complications with paperwork or whatnot if I did it in person.” She pulled out a small scrap of paper.

“Yes, I know. You don’t need to tell me again,” Forge Coals mumbled as he looked over the list hanging out of Spitfire’s mouth.

“Again?” the Captain mumbled, wondering when she’d done that before. She couldn’t recall using her personal authority and presence to request equipment, because equipment hadn’t been so important to the Wonderbolts until recently.

Forge ignored her while he studied the items. “You sure have been moving a lot of gear to Cloudsdale lately. At this rate we’ll have a larger air force than the griffons.”

One guard chuckled. “After the tail-whooping the Griffon Kingdom got the other day, I’m pretty sure we already do.”

“Whoa, hold on, back up. When did we start moving wargear to Cloudsdale?” Spitfire asked. “Do we already have some stuff up there I don’t know about?”

The three stallions looked at her with arched eyebrows.

“I doubt it, since you’re the one who authorized the shipments,” Forge Coals retorted.

“When did I do that?” Spitfire asked in alarm.

“You mean the last time? Just last week. Took like two hundred lasguns and a bunch of grenades.”

The list of wargear fell from Spitfire’s slack jaw, momentarily forgotten.

“Or did you mean the first time? That was almost a month ago,” volunteered a guard.

Spitfire recoiled, stumbling backward in shock.

“… Is there a problem, Captain?” Forge Coals asked.

The pegasus quickly collected her bearings, and then tightened her jaw. “Yes. Yes, there is. You see, today is the first day I’ve requested modern wargear for my unit. I haven’t been expanding the Wonderbolts or any other pony air force until very recently, and as far as I’m aware there have been no shipments of wargear to Cloudsdale.”

The guards stared at each other and shrugged in confusion. Forge’s face underwent a rapid and silent plethora of expressions, starting with irritation, then doubt, then concentration, then realization, then denial, then realization again, and finally settling on dawning horror.

“… Uh-oh.”

****

Canterlot Castle

Celestia’s study

“Thanks for doing this, Princess. I know I screwed up big this time.” Rainbow Dash said while opening the box attached to her armor.

Celestia sat across from the armored pegasus, a polite smile on her muzzle. “We all make mistakes, Rainbow Dash. To err is equine. It is how we take responsibility for our mistakes that is the true test of character.”

Rainbow Dash paused to mull that over, tilting her head to the side.

“… Although you shouldn’t take that as an invitation to replace good judgment with apologies,” Celestia quickly added, “you really shouldn’t be tricking ponies like that.”

Rainbow clicked her tongue. “Yeah, you’re right. Still, if it wasn’t for the trip being way more dangerous than we thought, I think it still would have been pretty funny.”

She slid the opened box over to Celestia, and the Princess of the Sun levitated two scrolls out of the box.

“Two? They both go to Twilight?” Celestia asked.

“Yup!” Rainbow nodded, and then Celestia’s magic aura began to build. “The second one is from Tellis, believe it or not.”

Celestia blinked. “Tellis?”

“Yeah. I told him what happened and that I was going to write an apology letter, and then he wanted to write one too. I’m kinda proud of him! He usually doesn’t apologize for anything!” She paused. “Except not murdering enough.” Celestia made a face, and the pegasus chuckled. “Long story.”

The scrolls vanished from sight, whisked away into channels of magic separate from the corporeal flow of time and space. Princess Celestia nodded in satisfaction.

“I am indeed surprised that Tellis wrote an apology letter. Perhaps we are having a better influence upon the forces of Chaos than I thought.” Then she tilted her head to the side. “I’m curious as to how an exemplar of the Blood God apologizes, though. What did it say?”

“I dunno. I didn’t read it,” Rainbow confessed. Celestia looked alarmed at this news, for some reason. “I wasn’t going to read his mail, Princess! That’s totally uncool!”

“Are you sure it was an apology, then?” Celestia asked anxiously.

Rainbow shrugged. “Well, why else would Tellis want to write Twilight?”

****

Harvest of Steel – Warp space

Isolation cell

“I can’t believe this!” Twilight growled, pounding a leg into the floor. “All of this was a prank! A PRANK! I’m sitting here in the middle of a nightmare galaxy manifest being hounded by space monsters because Rainbow Dash made a stupid bet! RRRRRRGH!!”

Spike watched Twilight freak out in her cell, stomping angrily around a letter laid out on the floor. Another letter was rolled up next to it, as of yet unopened.

“Geez, what is Dash’s problem? She couldn’t send us a message before we actually left the system that it was a lie? Did we have to really take off into space to convince her that we fell for it?” Spike griped, arms crossed over his chest.

“I’m not even mad at Rainbow Dash!” Twilight growled. “I’m mad at myself!” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “And Tellis. But mainly myself! In retrospect that letter was OBVIOUSLY a fake, and I didn’t even question it! Just because it had Princess Celestial’s name on the bottom!”

Spike blinked. “Wait, Princess who?”

“Exactly! He didn’t even spell her name right!” Twilight snapped.

Spike shook his head wearily, and then pointed to the other scroll. “So what’s the other letter say?”

Twilight impatiently pulled the other letter open, reading its contents with clenched teeth and simmering anger.

Her expression swiftly calmed as she read, shifting to one of grim determination. “It’s from Princess Celestia.”

Spike blinked. “Really?”

“Yes. It says that she wants me to…” she paused and looked around cautiously, and then stepped closer to Spike so that she could whisper. “She wants me to get rid of Lord Sliver.”

“REALLY,” Spike deadpanned.

“She says here that he’s a threat to the future of Equestria, and if he isn’t dealt with, it’s only a matter of time until he starts a pandemic or clogs up the royal toilet,” Twilight relayed with an expression of the utmost concern.

“Twi.”

“I can see her point, actually. Sliver has always been opposed to the Company’s alliance with ponykind. How long could it be before his distaste for ponies leads to one of us being killed? Or thousands of us being killed, for that matter? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care!”

“Twi!”

“He DID save my life when I attacked the Imperial cruiser, but he was also WAY too happy to send me off to do that to begin with. He knew I’d probably die. I’m pretty sure he would feed me to the ship if I didn’t keep proving myself so useful.” Twilight suddenly brightened. “Wait! The Harvest’s reactor! That’s how I can assassinate him! I’ll just-“

“TWILIGHT!!” Spike shouted, startling her.

“Shush! Not so loud!” the alicorn hissed, drawing closer to her assistant. “What is it?”

“Did ‘Celestia’ spell her name right this time?” Spike asked flatly.

Twilight looked back at the letter, her gaze fixing on the signature at the end. Then she crushed the parchment into a crumpled ball with her telekinesis.

“Son of a MULE!!”

****

Canterlot Castle

Celestia’s study

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Rainbow Dash scoffed.

“Well… all right,” Celestia said uneasily. “Did you have any news about the 38th Company’s war efforts? How fares the Griffon Kingdom?”

“The Griffon Kingdom is pretty much done for. After their Prince was locked up and Griffonstone was taken, most of the other cities didn’t even resist. There were even a few thanes or dukes or whatever declaring themselves independent and then declaring themselves un-independent by swearing allegiance to the Company so that we wouldn’t hurt them.”

“I see. And how is the new governor faring?” Celestia asked.

Rainbow shrugged. “Don’t really know. I don’t pay much attention to politics.”

“If you’re going to be liberating nations from their rulers, you may wish to start,” Celestia said wryly.

The door to the study creaked open, and the two mares turned to look as a stallion poked his head in the door.

“Mister Forge Coals? Is something the matter?” Celestia asked. She noticed that the burly smith looked somewhat nervous.

“The matter? No! No. Why would anything be the matter? Everything is fine!” Forge insisted, glancing left and right at the study interior. “So, just wondering. Totally random thought here. Do we have any, I dunno, changeling tests?”

“What do you mean? Do you suspect somepony of being a spy?” Celestia asked, arching an eyebrow.

“No, no, no… But, you know, MAYBE.”

“There is no simple magic spell for instantly detecting changeling magic, although certain spells may yield clues. They can also be revealed through suffering enough physical trauma, although I cannot condone that as a test for obvious reasons.” She stood up and approached the doorway. “The easiest way, of course, is to simply ask the suspect a question that few other ponies would know the answer to. Changelings are not sophisticated spies. For example: how many years have you served as the master of the armories, Forge Coals?”

“Twenty-two years,” he replied immediately. “Ah, okay! I get it!”

“Indeed. You are no changeling,” Celestia said with a wry smile.

Forge looked away, then glanced back toward the mares. “I don’t suppose either of you would know how long Spitfire has been Captain of the Wonderbolts, would you?”

“Six years.” Rainbow Dash replied just as fast as Forge had. “Uhm… why?”

“No reason! Just curious! EVERYTHING IS FINE GOODBYE.” The stallion ducked away and slammed the door behind him.

“That was weird,” Rainbow mumbled before turning back to Celestia. “You guys having problems with changelings? I remember you mentioned it the other day, when I came clean about the letter.”

“No, not at all. They’ve been very quiet, as far as I can tell.” Celestia tilted her head to the side. “Granted, it always seems that way before they reveal their plots, but I can’t imagine Chrysalis or her hive bothering Equestria now. The Royal Guard is stronger than ever, and our allies could probably demolish their home with ease. They cannot even make common cause with the other foes that rally against us, since the other creatures of our world fear and mistrust the changeling race. Any attack they made would be sure to fail, and invite a terrible reprisal.”

“Yeah! That’d be really stupid of them!” Rainbow laughed, pushing the door open. “See you later, Princess!”

****

Changeling hive

“Things are progressing adequately.”

Chrysalis strode through the halls of her hive tunnels, Gox at her side and a small cluster of changeling soldiers trailing behind her.

“Voidsong is already on her way to her army. All the pieces are falling into place. We have a fighting force, we have the information we need, and we’re preparing the dagger to plunge into the enemy’s heart.”

“Are you sure we can trust the grayskins, my Queen?” Gox chittered, her wings buzzing. “They thought they could sacrifice our planet to save their own people!”

Chrysalis chuckled warmly. “Oh, Gox… trust is for those who don’t have leverage. We don’t trust the Tau, and we don’t need to. To do what I say is in Voidsong’s best interest, and any attempt to betray me will lead her and whole swathes of her people to a bloody end.”

The Changeling Queen snorted. “If nothing else, let that be the lesson you learn from this, child: ideology, empathy, and trust are signs of weakness and vulnerabilities to exploit. They are obstacles on the path to power and control. Voidsong could very easily turn coat like the rest of her soldiers and submit to the humans, and she’d be better off for it, but she won’t. Her ideology doesn’t allow it, and she can’t condone the suffering of her people. She will fight humanity for what she believes in, even to her obvious detriment and ultimately to her death. The imbecile.”

“I see, my Queen…” Gox trailed off. “Then, are we ready to strike?”

“No. Not yet. While the subversion of the Lamman Sept creates a key advantage, I am concerned that it will not be enough.” She grimaced, staring up at the jagged, dripping ceiling of her hive tunnels. A thick, green film decorated patches of the tunnel, with young changelings quietly resting within the ooze.

“Even if we begin with the upper hand and severely wound the Company war machine, even wounded it will be a dangerous foe. I have gathered many puppets to my cause, and they have brought many equally gullible servants willing to die just to spite the space apes. But I have little use for martyrs. Even with guns and armor, diamond dogs and griffons cannot measure up to human warriors and their machines. Minotaur are strong, but few. And yaks are mostly just obnoxious. We need more power.”

“The dragons?” Gox asked.

“A difficult prospect,” Chrysalis admitted. “The dragons are a very… impolitic species. It did not greatly shock or infuriate them that their diplomat to meet the Iron Warriors was killed, and they are loth to commit their own lives toward a proper war effort. I cannot expect to rally the dragons in significant numbers.” Chrysalis tilted her head to the side so that Gox could see her grin. “But the humans have yet another enemy. One not only dim enough to be fooled into fighting for us, but dim enough to ENJOY it.”

“The Orks,” Gox breathed, “of course!” Then she hesitated. “Uh… how, exactly, do you aim to control them, my Queen?”

“While I would prefer to do so at leg’s length, they are too dangerous and volatile to wield with a light touch,” Chrysalis admitted. “We will need direct control. Luckily, you have found that the greenskins possess a uniquely… competitive chain of command.”

“Yes, well, it’s just that, if you wanted me to take charge, I don’t think I could manage that,” she said nervously. “I can only make myself as big as the Nobs, and, well, most of the Nobs would want to fight me if I was the same size, so-“

“Relax, Gox,” Chrysalis said soothingly, smiling at the guardian, “I will not throw you to those beasts alone.”

Gox sighed in relief. “Then what shall we do, my Queen?”

“We will address them together.” Chrysalis stepped out of the exit and onto a stone platform that overlooked the wilds surrounding her caverns. The wind caught her hair, whipping the long blue mane about her head. She grinned, showing the full length of her fangs. “I think it’s time the Orks met… Warboss Krystallis.”

“That name won’t work,” Gox said immediately.

Chrysalis felt her hair fall back into place as the drama of the moment was completely shattered. “What’s wrong with Krystallis? Do you think they might suspect something?”

“It’s not stupid enough. They won’t be able to pronounce it.” Gox sighed. “There could be massive confusion in the ranks from unit leaders trying to explain where an order came from, just because your name is too bizarre to them.”

“Oh. Good point.” Chrysalis frowned. “How about just Kryss?”

“That won’t be hard to pronounce, but it’s not an Ork name. We’ll lose a lot of time from Orks wondering what kind of a Warboss is named ‘Kryss.’ Most of the Warboss names reference violence, or popular parts of anatomy to destroy.”

Chrysalis scratched her head with a hoof. “Warboss Incinerator?”

“Dumber, my Queen. It must be dumber.”

“How about Warboss Firestorm? Magic Blaster? Magic Blaster sounds pretty stupid.”

Gox sighed. “I’m sure we’ll think of something on the way. Please, my Queen, follow me.”

****

Minotaur village Hornstead

Elder’s hut

It all began with the sound of a warhorn.

The horn was a warning of impending attack. For centuries, the minotaur villages had relied on such alarms to rally their fighters on short notice. In times of old it had been dragons harassing their towns. In time the dragons had become more civilized and less prone to warfare, and the biggest threat soon became wandering beasts such as chimeras and hydras. As of late, the threat had changed again, and Ork raiding parties and Gretchin scavengers were the most common cause for alarm.

None of those forces were moving on the village today. The inhabitants weren’t that fortunate.

“Matriarch!” A hulking minotaur warrior bearing a greataxe the size of a man pushed his way into the central building of the village. He towered eight feet tall, and patches of his body had plates of tarnished metal tied to them in a slipshod attempt to armor himself. Numerous round scars marked old bullet wounds on his chest and arm, an entirely novel form of injury that had been introduced to their world by alien invaders. Judging by a pair of bleached Ork skulls that hung from the warrior’s belt, said invaders hadn’t gotten away with it.

Another minotaur, this one old and female, sat in the middle of the hut, facing away from the entrance. Smoldering pots of incense sat around her, and she stared at a large circle of jade ornaments arranged on the floor in front of her.

The elderly minotaur tilted her head to the side as the heavy hoofsteps came closer.

“They’re here?”

“Yes, Matriarch. The apes come on their flying machines,” spat the warrior. “They were spotted crossing over the barrier forests that way. They’ll evade all our traps and ambushes and strike the settlement directly.”

“Mhm. Clever.” The Matriarch turned back to her stones. “You will fight them?”

“Of course, Matriarch.”

“You will lose.”

“There is no shame in fighting a losing battle, Matriarch. If the equines and their human puppets want this village, they will need to bury me and my bulls, first!”

“What of those who cannot fight?”

“They’re already being moved out of the village. When the enemy arrives, they will find no civilians to butcher, only hardened foes.” He paused, a moment of uncertainty flickering across his eyes. “Sox is leading the evacuation. She would not stay to fight.”

The other minotaur’s eyes narrowed. “That one… I warned the others to be wary of her. She is deceitful, her words dripping with pleasant lies and quiet malice.”

“You just don’t like her name,” the warrior scoffed.

“Well, what kind of a name is ‘Sox,’ anyway? You young ones have no respect for tradition! It’s no wonder the entire world is crumbling beneath our hooves! Let me tell you, back in my day-“

“Matriarch!” the other minotaur barked. “We don’t have time! Will you flee, or fight?”

The Matriarch snorted. “I have nowhere to run. I will not die on foreign soil. Go now. I must prepare.”

“Yes, Matriarch.” The warrior bowed, and then jogged out of the hut.

The elderly minotaur started rearranging the jade stones in front of her, sighing as she did so.

“So this is how the noble minotaur tribes meet their end. Swallowed by a storm of flame and iron. Consumed within the black tide of Chaos.”

She finished by pressing the center-most stone, and the incense burners suddenly flared in their intensity. A dark smoke leaked from the clay dishes, and sparks of eldritch energy flowed around the elder in an invisible current.

“Ah, well. May as well take some of them with us…”

****

Hornstead outskirts

“I’ve got twenty… thirty... more keep coming. Look like fighters.”

A unit of ten pegasi soared around the perimeter of the village, circling it like a flock of vultures. Their optics visors searched the ground, taking numerous picts and marking out movement.

“Windy, I’ve got a group moving out of the village opposite our approach vector.”

“Copy that. Get us an image but do not engage. We’re here for the town, not the townsfolk.”

“I’m seeing a combat formation at the front… defensive barriers… lots of axes. No sign of Company tech, though. If they had guns, they’d probably be shooting at us.”

“Well, sounds like they’re ready to welcome us! Don’t keep them waiting, boys!”

Gunships swooped down from above the clouds, leaving long contrails behind their wings. Five such vessels descended on the village, their on-board cogitators already assigning target priorities based on the scouts’ reconnaissance.

“Acknowledged, Windy. Beginning area pacification. Glory to the Iron Warriors and the forces of Chaos!”

The first transport to reach deployment level was a hauler for assault walkers. Large, claw-like legs hung from the two heavy Kaion automata held under the vehicle’s main body, and those legs shifted into a standing position while the transport slowed to a hover.

The two mag-winches holding the robots in place released, and they landed heavily in the dirt. Sensor lights flickered on, and their power relays hummed with energy.

“Unit 22B-106 online. Beginning area sweep,” announced the first automata before turning toward the village proper. Its voice was soft, feminine, and decidedly pleasant.

“Unit 24V-331 online,” added the other Kaion with an extremely un-machine-like giggle. “Targets detected. Beginning diplomatic outreach.”

Two missile pods snapped upward behind the main torso.

“Kidding!” laughed the automata. The missiles started blasting into the air, curving into tall arcs toward the village.

Behind the pair of assault robots, another walker was being lowered to the ground using the transport’s rear winch. This one was bigger than the automata, and boasted a distinctly humanoid body as opposed to the crab-like forms of the Mechanicus support robots.

It was also pink.

“Let’s PAR-TAY!” the Contemptor Dreadnought roared when it finally touched the ground. “I’m here to stomp minotaur and chew bubblegum! And I’m all out of gum!”

Pinkie Pie aimed her butcher cannon at the distant barricades, and a hefty clunking noise came from the ammo hoppers. Her visor marked out a series of targets in bright red boxes, most of them laying low under the barrage of missile fire.

There was a long pause.

“… Wait, hold on. I found more gum,” Pinkie announced, her walker standing still, “give me a minute.”

A light wheeze came from one of the Kaions, imitating a tired sigh. “Isn’t she supposed to be part of some other unit?”

“Try to ignore her, dear,” the other automata said gently while its lance weapon screamed. “With that coloration, I’m sure she’ll be the first one to absorb any incoming fire.”

“Hee hee hee!”

Behind the spearhead, more gunships lowered themselves to the ground to deliver their deadly cargo around the village. Mercenaries and Cultists rushed from the transports with dark prayers on their lips while unit commanders shouted orders. Next to the human gunships, Tau Devilfish APCs floated to a stop to set up a firing line on the settlement’s flank. Fire Warriors rushed behind toppled logs and carved boulders, while Pathfinders crept ahead to get a bead on their targets.

Between the two forces came the ponies. Unicorns and earth ponies charging across the ground, with a ring of pegasus scouts joining up overhead. Nestled between the Vicious firepower of the Tau Fire Warriors on one side, the hardened mercenaries of Chaos on the other, and the heavy armor at the front, the equines formed the center of the infantry push toward the minotaur village amongst a storm of burning lasers and crackling plasma.

“Take those barricades down! Pegasi, cover our approach! I don’t trust the grays’ fire discipline!” barked an earth pony stallion before his unit galloped forward.

The defensive walls had already been mostly smashed by the time the Kaion walkers reached them, shattered by missiles and pierced by energy lances. Nonetheless, the assault walkers slashed their claws through the walls of wood and stone, demolishing the barriers entirely.

The minotaur that weren’t already limping from the first line of defense or dead made a quick calculation at the sight of the hulking robots. Then they discarded said calculation and charged anyway.

“Perish, invaders!” roared a young bull, swinging a great maul over his head and leaping for the side of one of the robots.

He struck with precision, smashing the weapon against the base of its dark lance. The mounting was torn off from the strike, but the impact was just as notable for its effect on the maul. The weapon’s head dented inward, and the shaft splintered in the warrior’s hands.

“Oh, you are just ADORABLE!” gushed the Kaion, swiveling toward the minotaur defender.

Its combat claw plunged into the warrior, tearing open his chest before flinging him away. A brilliant arc of crimson slashed across the ground behind the body before it broke through the wall of a nearby hut.

“Enemy engaged!” chirped the other automata before it drove an arrow-shaped leg down into a wounded minotaur. “Don’t worry dears, I’ll be gentle!” It’s burst cannon fired a veritable stream of burning destruction across the path between huts, and minotaur warriors sprinted desperately to get behind the next row of defenses.

The Kaion walker passed by one dwelling, and a moment later it lurched back from a considerable amount of weight suddenly landing on its back.

“Vile machines! We’ll send you back to the garbage heap where you belong!” roared the minotaur warrior, rearing back a hand with a sparking battleaxe in it.

The Kaion made an entirely superfluous gasping sound as the weapon descended, striking the armor of the battle robot with a flash of blue light and a screech of tearing metal.

“Hey! Stop that! You’re playing too rough!” the Kaion complained, swinging back and forth to try to throw off her unwanted passenger. The axe struck its rear plating again, digging through the adamantium layers and carving a shallow swathe into the sensitive systems within. “A little help, anyone?”

“The minotaur tribes will never bow down to the corrupt aliens of-“ the bull’s monologue was cut short when a giant metal hand plucked him from the automata’s back.

“Gotcha covered, creepy robot lady!” Pinkie said. She smashed the minotaur warrior into the ground without ceremony, reducing him to a bloody mush.

“Oh, dear… that barbarian actually managed to break my armor,” the Kaion fretted. “This was NOT part of initial strategic projections!”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure this is magic.” Pinkie Pie’s Dreadnought reached down and pinched the haft of the battleaxe between two giant fingers. “This stuff is kind of all over the place. I don’t think our crazy space metals are magic-proof.”

“Well, that’s just not FAIR!” the robot huffed.

“… It… kind of IS, though…” Pinkie retorted hesitantly.

Gunships roared overhead in front of the infantry advance, sawing across the village with spreads of heavy bolters and slicing through buildings with lascannons. The mercenaries and ponies swarmed in behind them, lasguns spraying wild bursts across the shattered walls. Minotaur warriors emerged from the battered defenses and launched desperate charges at the invading soldiers, but each one was mercilessly brought down by fierce bursts of lasers before staggering into the dust. The bovine natives, with only simple weapons to defend themselves (magical or no), could not manage to reach their enemy, and with every minute their losses mounted at a terrifying pace.

Pinkie stomped through the front line of the assault, humming a tune that could scarcely be heard over the crack of lasguns and the defiant war cries of their targets. She didn’t bother firing her own weapons or charging into the minotaur lines; it didn’t seem remotely necessary to add the killing power of a Contemptor Dreadnought to what was already shaping up to be a complete massacre.

She scanned the surrounding buildings in thermal vision mode as she strolled through the village, eventually finding a minotaur warrior crouched within a hut and ready for ambush. She reached right into the wall, cracking through it like it wasn’t even there, and seized the warrior before it knew what was happening.

“Hey, quick question!” She held up the struggling minotaur – a female grasping a short spear – so that the warrior was at eye level with the oversized head of her Dreadnought. “Is there like a toy store or souvenir shop around here? I’m looking for something to take home for a couple of foals.”

“Die, invader!” the minotaur snarled, trying to pry her arm loose enough to use her weapon.

“That isn’t helpful,” Pinkie noted. “Do you guys even have shops and stuff? I seriously have no idea what kind of economy you guys work with. I mean, some of you travel across the continent giving self-esteem seminars, and others have this sort of ‘noble savage’ thing going on, which makes you, I guess-“

Her victim finally managed to get her weapon arm free, and she grunted angrily before driving the spear into the wrist of the Contemptor’s power fist. The spearhead flashed a brilliant blue, and a spark of cerulean energy lashed around the haft.

Pinkie paused to observe the weapon now firmly lodged in her Dreadnought’s wrist. It had punched right through the outermost armor layer, and dug deep into the servos that controlled the hand’s articulation. The minotaur warrior stared up at the Dreadnought’s head uncertainly, as if waiting for a reaction.

“Okay, you know that my hand isn’t actually in the power fist, right? For starters, I don’t even HAVE hands. They’re completely optional for piloting Dreadnoughts.”

The minotaur started swearing under her breath and took hold of her spear again, trying to pry it out of the Dreadnought’s wrist.

“Yeah, actually, I guess that isn’t totally obvious,” Pinkie allowed. Then she flung her close combat arm to the side, hurling the warrior into a barricade. “I’ll just keep the spear, then. Maybe I can trade it for an automata? I mean, Apple Bloom got one and she LOVES that thing.”

While Pinkie Pie observed the enchanted polearm, her vox system crackled to life.

“Pie, you have a forward position. Are you seeing anything unusual up there? The Kaions are reporting some strange readings.”

“Unusual? Well, I’m seeing some magic stuff. Does that count?” Pinkie turned around, searching the scattered defenses. Spears and the odd throwing axe battered against her torso plating uselessly, but for the most part the minotaur warriors were keeping low to avoid the constant fusillades of lasgun fire.

“It might be magic; we don’t know. That’s why it’s strange.”

“Are you sure the Kaions aren’t just messing with you? Those bots are WEIRD.”

“Oh, like you’re one to… wait. Okay, no, we’re definitely getting some kind of activity!”

A minotaur started hacking at the shin of Pinkie’s walker, and she took a moment to swat the warrior away before she replied. “Okay, where is it?”

A pulsing bolt of lightning surged into one of the larger buildings in the village, and a fierce crack of thunder rolled through the battlefield.

“Oh. Never mind, I think I see it now.” The lightning bolt wasn’t dissipating, as such things tended to do. A continual stream of power lashed through the suspiciously clear sky and into the central hut, and the walls of the structure started to tremble ominously.

“So… should I… like, shoot it or something? I’m really at a loss over here,” Pinkie admitted.

“All units, clear the area! Regroup at the village perimeter!” shouted the vox.

“Uh-oh...”

The central hut of Hornstead village suddenly exploded, and the surge of power from above finally waned.

Standing upon the ruins of the building was – as far as Pinkie could tell, anyway – a giant brass bull. It’s “skin” gleamed just like metal, as did the two enormous horns that jutted out of the sides of its head and curved forward. Each one was bigger than the arm of Pinkie’s Dreadnought, while the bull itself was only slightly smaller than an Ork Squiggoth. The minotaur warriors began cheering and bellowing enthusiastically, waving their axes in the air and clearing a path for this new monstrosity.

“WOW. Did NOT see this coming. Way to go, Pinkie Sense.” Pinkie’s Dreadnought started backing away. The bull was still some distance away, and it started hoofing at the ground as a blast of air came from its massive nostrils.

“Defensive perimeter, now! Gunships, initiate a strafing run immediately!” shouted the commander.

Pinkie continued backing up, eventually stepping into – and through – a home that was in her path. “Hey, now. Easy, now. Let’s not do anything rash…”

The brass bull launched forward, but not at Pinkie Pie. It sprinted past the shattered building and the Dreadnought stumbling through it, huffing angrily. Its hooves shook the ground as it ran, and a tide of minotaur defenders followed its wake toward the enemy assault line.

“Huh. That’s weird. I would have thought that it would charge right at me. I mean, pink is just a step away from red, right?”

“That’s just an common myth,” the vox replied, “bulls are actually colorblind.”

“Including magic avatar bulls from space?” Pinkie challenged.

“Well, obviously we-AAAAUGH!!” A crash came from deeper in the village, and the vox system returned a burst of static before it went silent.

“… I should probably go help out,” Pinkie mumbled. A clunking noise came from her butcher cannon, and the Dreadnought took off at a run.

“This was not covered in the mission briefingggggg!” howled a Kaion automata as it scuttled across the ground at full speed.

Full speed, as it happened, was not enough. The brass bull chased the assault robot and twisted its head right before impact. Its horn punched through the rear armor and impaled the entire machine, ripping out through the front in a shower of sparks and crushed components.

The Kaion made a vox-garbled groan, and its legs twitched before the active lumens dimmed for good. A howling red mist streamed from the breached shell, twisting upward into the sky.

Laser bolts and pulse fire battered at the giant bull with little ill effect. The energy bolts managed to leave small spots of intense heat upon the metallic “skin” of the monster, only to fade away in seconds. As for the bull itself, it pawed angrily at the ground with the Kaion still impaled on one horn.

A pair of gunships swooped in beside the brass bull, unleashing a salvo of lascannons into the creature’s body. The heavy lasers burned several deep pits into the brass skin before the aircraft turned and broke off for another pass. An underwhelming result, to be sure, but the first sign of permanent damage to the beast’s inexplicably tough armor.

The bull seemed annoyed at the assault, and it eyed the gunships for a moment before pulling its head to the side.

With a sharp twist of its neck, the wrecked automata was flung through the air and struck the lower-flying gunship in its tail. The vehicle swung wildly from the impact, trying to level out, but dipped just low enough to the ground for the bull to make its move. With a snort and a growl, the brass bull raced for the gunship, positioning its horns to spear through the cockpit.

A series of explosions stitched across the ground beneath its hooves while it charged, eventually catching up to the beast’s front legs. Shells the size of liquor bottles crashed into the enchanted brass skin, tearing through it with explosive force. Three such impacts hammered the bull before it stumbled, falling over to one side and spilling onto the ground with an earth-shaking crash.

“This is my first time bullfighting,” Pinkie said as the ammunition hoppers reloaded her butcher cannon, “am I doing it right?”

The brass bull surged upright, but almost stumbled again immediately. Its leg was damaged; the metal skin was shredded and released a bright white mist from the wound. The magical monstrosity was far from defeated, however.

The gunship swung up into the air, surging out of reach of the magic war beast. The bull immediately turned away, bolting down another path away from Pinkie Pie.

“Hey! C’mon! Now you’re ignoring me on purpose!” Pinkie complained, dashing after the bull. “Is it because I don’t have a cape? I figured that since that thing about bulls getting mad at the color red was wrong, the cape was probably made-up too! This is hard!”

The brass bull sprinted through the village, adjusting its gait as well as it could for its damaged leg. The bodies of fallen minotaur decorated the ground beneath it, and the shining metal hooves of the great beast managed to avoid every one as it charged.

There was a firing line of soldiers, humans and ponies, stretched between two buildings ahead of the bull. The line broke in an instant when it was clear the bull was charging for them; none of the soldiers possessed a weapon that could challenge such a monster. The bull, in turn, ignored the scattered infantry; the other minotaur warriors still chasing behind it would take on the troops now that they had abandoned their formation. The brass bull had a greater objective.

A dark lance screamed over the bull’s head before it turned around one of the larger buildings and picked up speed again. Its target scuttled away immediately, seeking protection from the enormous mass of metal racing toward it.

“Oh, blast! Those bovine wretches damaged my lance mounting earlier!” complained the remaining Kaion battle automata. With its lilting, feminine voice, it almost gave the impression it was pouting even as it fled from the fifty-ton magical avatar trying to tear it in two.

The brass bull turned to intercept, steam blasting from its nostrils with every impact of brass hooves on hard dirt. It plowed straight through the intervening buildings, shattering the huts as easily as paper, and lowered its horns to skewer the battle robot just as it had done to its partner.

“Gotcha!”

The magic bull’s head exploded to the side as a cannon burst pegged it in the jaw, throwing its horns out of alignment for impact. The bull struck the Kaion with its shoulder and knocked it out of the way, immediately prompting a string of high-pitched complaints from the daemonic war machine.

“Boom! Headshot!” Pinkie cheered, stomping up to the (other) metal monstrosity. “What now, brass cow?”

The bull turned its head back around. The side of its head was gouged out below its eye, or at least the gleaming metal surface where its eye should have been. More of the mysterious mist poured from the wound, and the magic beast paused even while the Kaion automata scuttled away.

It immediately turned away again, however, and jumped onto the battle robot. The Kaion screeched in anger, slashing at the bull’s face with its combat claws while the monster battered it with its hooves and horns.

“Stop ignoring me!” Pinkie shouted, running up to the brawl.

“Yes! Yes! Stop ignoring her!” agreed the Kaion automata.

The butcher cannon hammered the bull in the side, punching more holes into the magical monster’s gleaming hide. The bull managed to hook one horn under the Kaion walker and swung its head up, throwing the battle robot high into the air.

It seemed like the bull was going to gore the automata on its way down, but Pinkie reached it first. The pink Dreadnought barreled into the brass monster, knocking it to the side with an explosive punch. Her power fist boomed from the contact of its power field and the magical metal skin, and another hole was ripped open in the monster’s body.

“Oof!” the Kaion fell onto the ground without further interference, and bits of torn metal bounced away from its clumsy impact with the dirt. “You damned cow! That really hurt!”

A grunt came from Pinkie’s vox grille while she tried to hammer the bull over onto its side. “Why do you even feel pain?!”

“Because I was programmed by sadistic lunatics, obviously,” the robot pointed out while struggling to get upright again. “Why do you think I talk like this?”

The brass bull made an aggravated noise as it fought to keep its footing against Pinkie’s efforts. Then it sucked up a deep breath and tilted its head back toward the sky.

The sound of a war horn blasted from the monster’s mouth, rolling over the village and beyond. It sounded much like the horns that the minotaur used for their defenses, but with a strange reverberation to it.

It also set off Pinkie’s Pinkie Sense like CRAZY.

“Yipes!” She pushed away from the bull just before a huge bolt of lightning crashed down into it. Electricity lashed across the brass skin of the beast, and Pinkie’s sensors flickered just from her proximity to the electromagnetic pulse.

The bull jumped away, the ground shaking under its movements while it curved around. Ribbons of power snaked across its ruptured hide and curled around its horns, and its eyes flashed a furious white. It faced Pinkie at last, its head shaking from the energies surging through it, and its jaws yawned open.

“Oh, so NOW you’re focusing on me?!” Pinkie complained. The power build-up was giving her a rather severe full-power twitch, and her controls were still being sluggish. There’s no way she could dodge in time.

The combat claw of the Kaion automata slammed into the side of the bull’s head at the last minute, turning it away from the Dreadnought. A split second later, a huge, screaming beam of magical lightning blasted out of the creature’s mouth, tearing across the ground with a heat that rivaled the Company’s plasma guns. A trio of mercenaries that were being chased by a pair of snarling minotaur happened to be in the way of the misdirected beam, and both the men and their pursuers were scorched down to the bone in seconds, falling to the dirt into a pile of ash.

“Oh, hey! Nice save!” Pinkie said brightly as the Kaion struggled to hold the bull’s head away. “You’re pretty nice for a super-creepy, annoying killer daemon robot!” She paused, glancing over at the black trench burned into the dirt. “Well, nice to me, anyway. Too bad about those other guys.”

“BEDYNKJSHGFGLLZ!!” The Kaion’s systems were going haywire from its proximity to the electric discharge, but Pinkie had the definite sense that it was trying to express frustration.

“Oh, right. Got it.” Her butcher cannon thundered to life, sawing across the shoulder of the beast. Blasts of flame and shards of metal blew out of each impact, leaving a stretch of shredded holes in the brass hide.

The bull lurched backward, allowing the Kaion to stagger away as well. For a moment the three combatants paused, hesitating. The bull swung its head toward one walker and then the other. The Kaion twitched, sparks blasting out of its lance mount. Pinkie switched off the Pokémon battle music that had been playing in her cockpit since the bull appeared.

Then the gunships finally came back around for another pass.

Spears of crimson light blasted into the bull’s legs, cutting gaping holes in the enchanted metal. The enormous beast already seemed to be wavering in its aggression, and the attack caused it to stumble when the legs buckled.

This, in turn, gave the Kaion automata enough time to line up its severely damaged lance weapon. The dark lance screeched furiously, punching through one shoulder of the bull and tearing straight through it to emerge from the opposite side, over the rear leg. Plumes of black gas bloomed from the exit wound, and the lance weapon sputtered pitifully for a few seconds before blasting apart entirely.

The brass beast lurched forward, summoning enough strength to swing its head horns sharply into the offending robot. The Kaion was smashed off its legs, and it flipped over completely before it struck the ground again.

“Okay, hold on! I have an idea!” Pinkie shouted, running up to the metal monster.

The bull swung its head around to strike the Contemptor in the same fashion, but Pinkie’s power fist grabbed onto one of the massive horns. Already weakened from the damage to its body, the beast was stopped dead and found itself immobilized. It snorted angrily, blasting jets of the curious white mist from its nostrils.

Then the head of the Dreadnought popped up.

Pinkie pushed aside the enormous helmet that topped her Dreadnought, climbing out of the neck of the assault walker. “I hope this works. I only have one of these.” Her voice was somewhat muffled, as she was biting onto the handle grip of a melta bomb.

The bull blinked its glossy eyelids, understandably confused. It watched as the pink pony dashed across the arm of the Dreadnought and onto its horn. Those same gleaming brass orbs bulged when she dove into the hole in its shoulder and wriggled into its body.

“Hey, it’s kind of nice in here! I guess I was expecting a bunch of metal organs or something.”

The brass bull struggled, thrashing its head within the grip of the Contemptor. Eventually it manage to wrench its horn free of the immobile walker, stumbling as soon as it was loose.

“Okay, this looks important. It’s all glowy and stuff.”

The bull twisted its head around, now free to move but uncertain what to do about the pony clambering about in its belly.

“All right, so I really hope this hole I’m escaping through here is the exit wound from the lance and not… you know… a different hole. It’s hard to see in here.”

Pinkie’s head popped out above the brass bull’s thigh, and she quickly sighed in relief before squirming the rest of the way out. The metal beast rounded on her as soon as she touched the ground, scrambling to turn despite its bulk and injuries.

It didn’t quite make it.

Pinkie flinched away when a blinding flash came from the brass monster. A loud hiss filled the air, followed by an agonized moan that seemed to roll over the entire village.

When Pinkie Pie opened her eyes again, the bull was gone. Sitting in the blackened crater where it used to be was an elderly minotaur female. She looked shocked and confused, and lying around her hooves were several smoldering jade stones.

“Ooh, pretty!” Pinkie said, trotting up to the stones. “I’ll bet those would make a nice gift!”

The minotaur elder suddenly narrowed her eyes, and her hand shot to her belt. A long dagger with a wavy-edged blade slid out of its sheath. The matriarch snarled, her lips peeling back and a blast of steam puffing from her nose.

Then a huge metal claw caught her from behind, cutting into her side and holding her up.

“Dear, you really shouldn’t go scampering around without your armor.” The remaining Kaion fretted gently while the minotaur struggled. “It’s dangerous out here.”

The battle robot clenched its combat claw, digging the bladed fingers deep into its victim. Then it threw the elder to the ground and stamped a leg onto her.

Pinkie flinched away from the blood splatter, and then gagged as she saw the fan of crimson spread over the ground. “Awww! You got some on the pretty rocks! I have to carry things in my mouth, you know!” Pinkie stuck her tongue out in disgust.

“Speaking as a daemonic killing machine, there is something seriously wrong with you,” the Kaion declared. It promptly swiveled around and stumbled off, one of its legs dragging uselessly along the ground.

Pinkie Pie sighed and started pushing the jade stones across the ground with her hooves. As she did so, a blast of static came from the headless Contemptor Dreadnought nearby, heralding a vox message.

“All assault groups, prepare to make a final push for the village center. Fire Warriors, ensure that the flank is secured. I want any one of these beasts that tries to run cooked alive.”

A brief pause interrupted the message, followed by a loud whistling noise. Artillery shells crashed down on the wooden huts near the middle of the settlement, blasting them apart into showers of flaming wood. The gunships that had strafed the great brass bull swept into attack formation, sawing the ground apart around the impact craters.

“Advance into the village!” barked the commander through the vox. “Cut down the warriors and sweep the buildings! Secure prisoners for transport and form a perimeter! This settlement is ours, and the next hovel awaits!”

****

“I see the flag going up… Iron Skull emblem.”

Killer Instinct frowned, staring through the scope of a longlas rifle. He was crouched next to an outcropping on a hillside, with much of his bulk concealed behind a tree.

“Another one. Other end of the village. I see them marching the wounded toward the transports. The Company is victorious.”

There was a slight undercurrent of anger in the minotaur’s voice as he explained what he was seeing, but otherwise the bovine warrior maintained steely control. He shifted the rifle down slightly, scanning the village perimeter.

“They’re consolidating. It looks like they’re preparing to move on already. Little of the village is still intact.”

“Well, can you hit one of them from here?” snarled another voice.

Killer Instinct glanced behind him. Three more minotaur were waiting, crouched amongst the obscuring brush. Two were bull warriors, each of them wrapped in belts of ammunition. They carried heavy stubbers on their backs, as well as combat blades that were clearly designed for much smaller fighters.

“Don’t,” said the third minotaur. This one was female, wearing a suit of thick armor made from several pieces of flak armor sewn together into a larger, more complete piece. “Let them go.”

“Sox, you can’t be-“

The female silenced the dissident with a glare. “We cannot reveal ourselves. Move back with the others to the evacuation site. Then head into the tunnels I showed you. Go!”

The two warriors turned and raced off, snorting angrily. Sox watched them go, fighting hard to keep a twisted smirk from her face.

“The pegasi are taking to the air again. Scouting for ambushes and resistance,” grumbled Killer Instinct. He lowered the rifle, and his hand slipped to his waist. A battered power axe was attached to his belt by a leather strap, and his fingers brushed the activation stud for the weapon’s power field.

“Easy, Kee.” Sox placed a hand on the warrior’s shoulder. “Now isn’t the time to fight.”

“If not now, when?” the hulking bull asked, backing away from his vantage point. “If we cannot resist when they are sacking our home, then what is the point?”

“Vengeance,” Sox answered smoothly, pulling the other minotaur back. “We will take the fight to them, soon. Patience, Kee. The 38th Company will pay for this transgression in blood… Trust me.”

****

Black Point

Perimeter Watch Tower 3-9

*We have incoming. Devilfish group. Two units. Checking registration keys.*

A raised bunker sat at the edge of a ravine, tracking the approach of two Tau APCs. The bunker was camouflaged, painted a dull mix of grays and browns to mimic the blasted color of the surrounding badlands and protected by a web of energy fields designed to foil more sophisticated means of detection. All told it resembled a jagged boulder rather than an armed emplacement; a common feature of the Lamman Sept’s defensive line.

*Units identified. Diver Squadron, you’re two transports down. Casualty report.*

Within the bunker, a Fire Caste technician manned a communications alcove while a gunner kept his sights on the approaching vehicles.

*Negative. No casualties. Transports were re-directed to Ferrous Dominus.*

*Why? Wounded?*

*Negative. Prisoner transfer. ETA, four hours. Data transfer incoming.*

There was a pause as the comms link submitted a data packet. In seconds the bunker’s computers decrypted the information and compared them to local sensor scans.

*Confirmed, Diver Squadron. You are cleared for pad 16. Defensive matrix is standing down. Proceed.*

*Affirmative. See you in the mess, Watch.*

The link terminated, and an irritated grunt came from the technician manning the station.

*Disgusting. I can’t believe our units are being diverted to fill the Iron Warrior’s damned slave camps.*

The bunker’s gunner turned toward his partner. *You can’t?*

*You know what I mean,* grumbled the technician. *Not even an Ork warband, this time. Our resources are being diverted to suppress and enslave the local species!*

The gunner shrugged and turned back to his targeting screen. Then he frowned and peered at it more closely.

*Hold on, I think we have something. Targeting vector 9. Set. Enhance.* The gunner tapped the screen, and it swiftly zoomed in on the subject.

*What is it? Hostile? I’m not reading anything.* The technician started checking his sensors.

*I’ve only got two bodies. Must have slipped through the sensor net,* mumbled the gunner. His eyes narrowed. *Wait, those are our colors… I think we have a pair of Fire Warriors coming in on foot.*

*Are you sure? You remember what happened last week with the-*

*YES, I remember! I’m SORRY! Those Orks were damned sneaky, all right? None of us saw it coming! Let it go!*

He returned to his scope, grumbling under his breath.

*All right, I have a clear visual. First contact is a Fire Warrior, definitely.*

*Not an Ork in disguise? Definitely?*

*… First contact APPEARS to be a Fire Warrior. Second body isn’t wearing combat armor. Looks like a pilot suit? Hold on…*

Seconds passed in silence. The communications technician started drumming his fingers against the top of his station.

*Shas’la, contact Command,* the gunner suddenly ordered. His voice was tight, as if he was struggling to figure out what emotion to express. *We need these contacts picked up immediately and taken to base.*

*Why? What’s out there?*

*I think… I think that’s… Shas’o Voidsong.*

Author's Note

Sorry that I haven't been as active lately. USA's presidential campaign has me wasting excessive time on Twitter and various news articles.
Also, I changed the character tag from "changeling" to "Chrysalis" since she'll be taking on a more central role going forward.
Also, lookie! Bakki did another picture for me! It's for a different story but it's still great and I'm still happy and you should be too!
Also, mix-up did some great pictures of a prototype pony walker that I'll probably have to do an extra Codex for, but I guess it's not done so it isn't posted to his DevArt page yet but it's still pretty great!
Also, writing Pinkie Pie without a sane foil character is hard. Should have had another main character in that battle scene.
Also, I read on Wikipedia that yaks are actually unusually calm and non-violent animals that are very easy to domesticate. What the hell, Hasbro?!
Also finally, give your suggestions for Chrysalis's Warboss name below (yes Hey its that Pony, you totally called it)!

Kingmaker

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 10

Kingmaker

****

Centaur III – CNN broadcast studio

“Hello, dear viewers! You’re watching the Company News Network! I’m Scoops, your host, and this is my good friend and angry comic relief, Kilroy!”

“THE BLOOD OF A HUNDRED THOUSAND INNOCENTS SHALL CLEANSE THE RIGHTEOUS FOOLS FROM THIS WORLD!! CHAOS ASCENDANT!! MORE AT ELEVEN!!”

Scoops briefly straightened the papers on her desk, grinning toward the vid recorder. “Let’s get right to our Battle Report segment!”

Scoops beckoned to the title graphic, and it shifted to a regional map showing several Chaos Stars and mobilization arrows. “The last of the major minotaur settlements, Bovine Burroughs in the great Clove Canyon, was overrun yesterday! With nothing left of the minotaur tribes other than small, scattered villages and outposts, the 38th Company has officially declared the minotaur nation a vassal state of Equestria!”

Kilroy nodded. “Although the campaign could not account for a substantial number of minotaur citizens, many wounded and captured beast-men have been transferred to the labor camps. Productivity has jumped considerably, further feeding the purifying flames of war!”

“My stock portfolio doubled in value this morning!” Scoops said happily.

The pegasus mare raised a hoof into the air, and Kilroy slapped a hand against it.

“Along with the diamond dogs being – heh – hounded from their tunnels and losing settlements daily and the Griffon Kingdom shattered, the only two major racial powers still openly defying the 38th Company are the dragons and Yakyakistan,” Scoops continued. “Kilroy, what’s your take on the continuing resistance?”

“USELESS!!” the Cultist roared, slamming a fist on the desk.

Scoops hesitated. “Uh… can you give us a breakdown for the people at home?”

“Certainly, Scoops.” Kilroy laced his fingers together, adopting a more professional posture. “Of the two remaining military powers, neither present a credible threat to the forces of Chaos that lay claim to this helpless, pathetic world. The yaks are dim, incompetent, poorly-armed creatures. Their demise has been delayed only by the challenging geography of their homeland, located deep in the snow-capped mountain ranges. The dragons are powerful individually, but they are relatively few, and their people are not unified into an organized military force. Both factions present unique challenges to the mighty armies of Chaos, but their demise is inevitable. Soon the rivers of this land will run red with the blood of the righteous.”

The Cultist idly adjusted his tie while he continued speaking. “The only matter of mild concern is that Company forces have found little evidence of the insurgent warriors that provoked our wrath to begin with. Those fighters are more clever and seem to have acquired modern armaments somehow. Attempts to locate these munitions caches or discern any sort of centralized command structure have met with no success.”

“As we process the prisoners and interrogate the leaders of the rebel nations, it is our hope that additional intelligence will surface to aid our search. But for now, our armies focus on securing order in the new vassal states,” Scoops affirmed. “Equestrian governors have been dispatched to the conquered regions to oversee security and replace local leaders. Economic development and infrastructure are being prioritized to improve transport links and local control.”

“That concludes our Battle Report segment!” Kilroy shouted. “Pray to the Dark Gods that our foes soon falter before the coming slaughter! Lord Khorne, take these unworthy skulls and bless your wretched children with your power! HA HA HA HA HA HAAAA!!”

As Kilroy continued to laugh maniacally, Scoops smoothed her mane and waited for him to peter out. Once his cackling tapered off to unstable chuckling, she smiled at the vid recorder again.

“Speaking of conquered nations, the Griffon Kingdom is now officially under the control of Golden Rule, the new provincial governor!” Scoops beamed. “We’ve reached out to the governor for an exclusive interview, to get a better sense of what we can expect in the coming days of violent oppression!”

A smaller holo-screen flickered into being behind Scoops and Kilroy, and they turned slightly to face it. A unicorn mare in a velvet gown appeared on the screen. Her fur was bright orange, and her shining blonde mane flowed over one side of her neck all the way to her knees.

“Governor Rule! Greetings!” Kilroy shouted, pounding a fist against his chest. “It is an honor to meet the enforcer of the Lords of Chaos in our newly subjugated lands!”

Golden Rule chuckled, her voice like a glass bell. “Oh, dear. Please, just call me Goldie,” the mare said with a smile.

“I will not. I much prefer the name ‘Rule,’” Kilroy retorted. The Governor blinked in surprise, but he continued on before she could speak. “Please, enlighten our viewers as to the current state of the Griffon Kingdom under our mighty armies!”

“Oh, well… for starters, it’s no longer the Griffon Kingdom,” Golden Rule explained hesitantly. “Now that the EGA treaty has been signed by the Prince in return for his personal amnesty, these lands are now officially the Northern Territories of Equestria.”

“What is the EGA treaty, exactly?” Scoops asked.

“The Equestrian Global Alliance treaty has been drafted for all territories that are under Company occupation, in order to assist the transition to protectorate administration. The main articles-“

“ASININE!!” Kilroy suddenly shouted. Golden Rule recoiled in surprise. “You bore our audience with your talk of law and civil order! What of the resistance? What is being done to suppress the dissent of the unworthy fools that dare defy us?!”

Golden looked quite flustered by the demand, and she started stuttering. “W-Well, there have been many soldiers that were unaccounted for, according to Griffonstone’s military records, but-“

“Excellent! Then it is only a matter of time until the bloodshed begins once more!” Kilroy crowed. “Shall the unfaithful be slaughtered where they stand, or made to suffer the humiliating, slow death of forced labor for their new lords?”

Golden’s ears flipped down, and she nervously turned to look at Scoops. “Is he always like this?”

“Pretty much. He polls REALLY well with the kids.” Scoops giggled into a hoof, and then composed herself. “But do you have any news on the state of the rebellion, Goldie?”

“Only that it is not being based in the Northern Territories, I’m afraid,” Golden admitted. “Through security sweeps and reports by informants, we’ve learned that insurgents were recruiting and operating within griffon settlements. However, it seems that they disappeared quickly once the capital was taken.”

“Cowardice!” Kilroy snarled. “Why do they not stand and perish before the might of Chaos? The chosen of the Dark Gods demand that their souls be taken and consumed by our masters!”

“I… feel like you answered your own question,” Golden pointed out timidly. “In any case, the main focus of my administration is to update the Northern Territories with modern infrastructure to improve the lives of the citizens living under a brutal alien dictatorship.”

“Which you are willfully aiding, of course,” Scoops pointed out.

The governor looked annoyed, but nodded. “It’s true. But if these are the circumstances under which we are to survive, I will do my part to make these territories a fair and just place to live. In time, the division and resentment between our peoples will heal, and we will form a united front to the remaining enemies of Equestria.”

“United, under the glory of CHAOS!” Kilroy barked, leaning forward on one elbow. “The streets shall run red with the blood of the innocent, and the foul xenos will be buried beneath the tread of our glorious warriors!”

“Sure,” Golden sighed, “but for now I’m mostly concerned with establishing a functional vox-net and installing a modern power supply.”

“Your service is greatly appreciated, Governor Rule,” Kilroy said, his voice suddenly calm and collected. “Thank you, and good night.”

Before the unicorn could say anything herself, Kilroy drew his laspistol and fired it at the holo-screen. The projection broke into a series of flickering shards, which then swiftly disappeared.

Scoops stood up higher in her chair as the screen faded. “Next up: is Princess Celestia’s control of the planetary orbit a scheme to ensure her unchallenged reign over Centaur III? Watch our journalist panel take on the TOUGH questions!”

“You’re watching CNN!” Kilroy barked. “We report! Then we decide, also!”

****

Ork camp Killrokk

The call came in the middle of the night.

A massive explosion came from a fuel tank next to the Mekboy’z workshop. The detonation rolled through the camp, waking even the heaviest sleepers from their rest and sending them groping for their weapons.

Gretchin emerged from their pits and trash heaps and scattered in a panic. The smaller greenskins didn’t know what was happening, but fleeing at the sound of explosions was usually a smart first instinct. The Orks were subject to the exact opposite inclination, and they stepped out of their huts with weapons ready, prepared to defend their home or at least make someone pay for waking them up.

After a few minutes, it became obvious that whatever happened was not the result of a sustained enemy assault. There were no further explosions, no engine noises, and very little gunfire (a few Grots on guard duty had especially nervous trigger fingers, but that seemed to be all). Some suspected that the explosion was a singular act of sabotage, while others considered that the Mekboy in charge of the fuel had simply made a boneheaded error, as they were wont to do.

Either way, the greenskins eventually noticed something else odd: there was a tall plume of fire coming from a different fuel tank. It seemed to be on a slow burn, but still stretched up into the sky and illuminated the camp like a primitive beacon.

Which it was, apparently.

Gox stood beneath the ruptured tank, her arms crossed over her chest and a burning torch in her hand. She had taken the form of a Nob, and was wearing a collection of ramshackle body armor. Her off-hand carried a large choppa, which at this point was the only Ork weapon she trusted to work properly.

“Oi, whass all ‘is, den?” A small mob of boyz trudged up to the tank, looking around the area.

“Wot’z wit da ‘sploshuns?”

“We’z fightin’? I don’ see nuffin’.”

Gox snorted and cast a look up at the roaring pyre shooting from the tank. More Orks were arriving, and those already here were swiftly becoming restless.

“’Ey! Yoo bust da fyool drum? Wot’z goin’ on?” This latest question came from a Nob, who was approaching the gathering with several similarly-sized friends. “Hoo are ya, anyhow?”

Gox decided she had sufficient attention to proceed. “Greetin’s Orks o’ Killrokk! Da naym’z Gox!” She pounded her hand against her chest and glared out at the warriors surrounding her. “I’m heah ta intra-doos yer new Boss!”

The Orks surrounding Gox started mumbling amongst themselves. One of the Nobs punched a boy in the back of the head, and then jabbed a finger toward the camp while the smaller alien struggled to stand up.

“Go get da Boss. He’z gonna wanna see dis,” the hulking warrior growled.

Gox watched the smaller Ork stumble to his feet and run off. She made no move to stop him. So far this encounter was proceeding according to plan.

The Nobs started pushing their way through the mob toward Gox, and the changeling guardian gripped her choppa a little tighter. She didn’t expect to fight these brutes, but as an infiltrator being the center of attention for any reason made her anxious.

“Youz gotta lotta nurv messin’ wit da fyool,” growled one of the warriors. He lifted his machine gun and pulled back the slide, causing a loud shriek of metal scraping against misshapen metal. “Da boss ain’t gonna be happee, Grot-lovah.”

Gox sneered at the Nobs. “I don’ cayr wot yer sissee boss finks. Dere’s a new boss, now!” She raised her axe into the air. “Lookit all youz sorree gitz, sittin’ in da mud an’ waytin’ fer da humies to off ya! Wen wuz da las’ tym youz had a gud fight?”

There was some more murmuring amongst the mob. It wasn’t an especially deep or clever appeal, but Orks weren’t especially hard to persuade. The Nobs weren’t so easily convinced, though, and were anyway annoyed at having an Ork of the same size talk down to them.

“We fight plentee! Boss Razgatt duz gud!” snarled the Nob leader. He aimed his gun up into the air. “We’ze gotz lotsa lootin’, an’ dere’s a soopa-weppen, too!”

Gox snorted, lowering her choppa. “Pleez. Yer boyz look bored. Yer scrap heep’z tinee. Even yer Snots look haff-ded!”

The Nobs seemed to get angrier as Gox spoke, and the disguised changeling smirked.

“It’z tym yoo gitz got yer act togethah. Tym sumwun tawt ya how ta kill humies propa! Tym ya took da fight to da ‘ardest gitz on dis rokk!” Gox turned and held up her axe in the direction of Ferrous Dominus. “Dere’s a stahm brewin’, an’ soon da humies iz gonna pay. An’ da boss hoo’z gunna leed us to-“

The Nob in front of Gox suddenly exploded. Not metaphorically, due to anger, which she was expecting and generally prepared for, but literally. His torso burst open in a fiery, expanding ball and blasted the surrounding greenskins with flaming Nob bits. Gox was thrown backward from the detonation, slamming her back into one of the struts supporting the fuel tank. Most of the Nobs were knocked down as well, and the mob of lesser Orks erupted into a frenzy of cheering and laughing.

Despite her experience with the Orks so far, it still took Gox some time to come to her senses. She also had to fight down the terrified urge to revert forms and fly away. She had seen plenty of casual violence and graphic death since infiltrating the greenskins, but seeing one blow up mid-conversation was new. She rolled onto her back and then scrambled back to her feet.

When she got a good look at the Ork that was making its way through the crowd, she again had to resist the urge to run. The alien was enormous, nearly thrice the size of the Nobs, and wearing a heavy frame of ramshackle armor. One of the arms had numerous rokkits bolted onto it, while the other ended in a serrated power klaw.

“Hoo’z cawssin’ all da trubble?!” the Warboss snarled.

The smaller Orks parted before the giant, and Gox stumbled backward. The Ork Warboss sighted her quickly and lumbered forward, stepping over the remains of his Nob without so much as a downward glance.

“Hoo’re yoo?” the Warboss demanded. “Wot’s dis all abowt?”

Gox started backing away and stuttering, trying to think of an excuse to ward off the alien for a few more moments. “Th-This is, I mean, dis iz a chaynj-“

The Warboss lunged forward with his klaw, and Gox made a shrill shrieking noise that would probably never come from the throat of a real Ork.

Before the pincers touched her, however, a beam of green energy struck the klaw in the side, knocking it away. The Warboss staggered slightly, surprised, and Gox backed away into one of the support legs of the fuel tank.

A hush fell over the mobs as another Ork emerged from behind the structure. This one was large; almost as large as the Warboss. It had a long, blue topknot on its head and, in a curious reversal from most Orks, its canine teeth were much more pronounced than the tusks that extended from its lower jaw. It had a suit of plain, shabby armor, and a large, rusty choppa was held loosely in one hand.

It wasn’t immediately clear where the beam had come from, and the Warboss narrowed his eyes angrily at the newcomer. “Oi! Da naym’z Warboss Razgatt! Hoo do ya fink yoo ahr, ya Grot-“

“Shut it, nummskull,” the newcomer snapped, continuing its approach.

Gox stepped forward again, pausing to breathe a sigh of relief. “Dis heah iz yur new boss, gitz! From ‘ere on owt, dis tribe belongs ta Warboss Changeyface!”

Gasps rolled through the mob of Orks. Some of the greenskins started mumbling to each other, while many others began spreading out around their Warboss to get a better view for everyone. They had all seen this before, and they knew what was coming next.

“Warboss… Changeyface?” Razgatt mumbled, his lower jaw shifting from side to side.

Changeyface waited silently a few seconds, and then leaned over toward Gox and whispered, “Are you SURE that name will work?”

Gox nodded silently, gripping her weapon tightly.

“Feh! Nevah heard o’ya!” Razgatt barked eventually. Then he pounded his klaw against the chest plate of his armor. “An’ ‘round heah, I’M da Warboss! Youz work fer me, or youz bitz will feed da Grots!”

Chrysalis almost sighed in relief when it seemed that the Orks took no issue with her name, restraining herself only to keep up appearances. She still found it hard to believe that the aliens could be so stunningly dull and ignorant when they possessed a (mostly) working society and significant (if not shoddy) technology. This was a species that had mastered space travel?

Case in point, Razgatt was now aiming his rokkit-armed hand at her. “So, youz gonna joyn Warboss Razgatt?” He didn’t seem at all concerned that his opponent was standing right in front of an enormous fuel supply. Chrysalis was fairly new to the specifics of explosive energy supplies, but given the way the first tank had gone up, she imagined that detonating the other could kill every Ork in the crowd.

“Warboss Changeyface don’ tayk ordahs from nobodee!” Chrysalis snarled, stepping forward threateningly. “Youz work fer me now, or I’ll blast yer away!”

Razgatt laughed. This new Warboss was a hulking beast compared to his underlings, but laughable compared to an Ork of his experience. The feeble equipment, lack of war trophies, and half-hearted boasting all spoke of a clueless wannabe who didn’t know his place. Many uppity would-be bosses had rusted his armor with their blood, and this one would be no different.

“Youz got gutz, Changeyface,” Razgatt said with a laugh. “Mebbe I’ll mayk sumfin’ neet outta dem.”

Razgatt raised his arm, aiming the attached rokkit launcha at the upstart Warboss. The crude metal crosshair bolted onto his fist – barely any aid to the weapon at range, and certainly not at such close distance – settled over the enemy greenskin. A few red lights on the Ork’s shoulder started blinking, indicating that the warheads were armed.

Chrysalis tilted her head to the side, and then glanced over at Gox. Her servant cringed and started stepping away, confirming for the changeling queen that, yes, Razgatt was about to destroy all of them with his stupidity.

She looked back at the Warboss, and her eyes – colored a bright green rather than the angry red of most Orks – began to glow.

Razgatt released a belly laugh, and then released a volley of three rokkits. The warheads blasted off in random directions almost immediately, curling through the air, and the surrounding Orks whooped and cheered at the impending explosion.

Although the inaccuracy of rokkits was well understood and expected by the greenskins, many of them were quite surprised to see all three of them curve completely away from the tribe’s challenger and the fuel tank behind him, missing both of them by more than a full meter. The cheers trailed off in confusion as the rokkits kept turning, eventually arcing completely back around toward a stunned Warboss Razgatt.

The rokkits converged on his chest, and Chrysalis was knocked off of her feet by the force of the resulting explosion. She hit one of the supports of the fuel tank and grunted in pain, slipping onto her knees. She hadn’t been expecting the shock wave to be THAT bad, and she had always felt obnoxiously off-balance when imitating two-legged creatures.

When she stood up again, the smoke was just starting to clear around her hapless opponent. Razgatt lay on his back, groaning, with a blackened crater over his chest where his breast plate used to be. It was difficult to tell where metal ended and flesh began amongst the burnt mass. But it was clear that the mighty Warboss was not dead yet.

“Yoo… dumm… git…” Razgatt huffed painfully, his power klaw groping and snapping at his side in search of something to grab on to.

None of his subordinates stepped forward to help; they knew that a fight to determine leadership was a strictly one-on-one affair once their Warboss accepted. They were as likely to get smashed aside for their effort as thanked, anyway.

“So dis iz da kwal-uh-tee o’ Warboss youz gitz got owt heah?” Chrysalis sniffed and strolled up to her opponent, her hands tightening around her choppa’s shaft. “Wen I’m da boss, youz bot lovahs won’ git away wit bein’ so soft!”

“Grot lovahs, not bot,” Gox corrected from behind.

“Shut it, Gox!” Chrysalis snapped. Mimicking Ork speech patterns was exhausting, and she felt honestly ashamed every time someone used her Ork cover name. Luckily, snarling irritation at subordinates was also a very familiar trait to the greenskins. “Dis iz da way Warboss Changeyface deals wit’ low-lyff gitz!”

Chrysalis raised her choppa in both hands and then swung down into the Warboss’s head. A sharp crack came from the impact, followed by a spurt of fluids. The choppa wedged deep into the Ork’s skull, and she gave a few experimental tugs before letting go of the weapon.

“Now ya gitz see wot happenz ta yoosless softeez!” Chrysalis growled, turning to the mob around her. The changeling queen felt an uncommon nervousness when scanning the crowd of brawny aliens. She was taking Gox’s word that the horde of greenskins wasn’t going to descend on her after slaying their leader, and she doubted she’d be able to escape if things didn’t go as planned. “So, dis iz wot we’z gunna do now dat I’m in charj! We-“

“Oi! Razgatt ain’t ded yet!” shouted a Nob, pointing at his former master.

Chrysalis glanced down at the heap of metal and surly green flesh next to her and saw that the Warboss was indeed still twitching. She growled and kicked at the axe head, driving it slightly deeper into the alien’s thick skull.

“How ‘bowt now?” the Changeling Queen asked.

Gox leaned forward cautiously. “Don’ fink so, Boss.” When the larger infiltrator growled, Gox elaborated. “Da git haz a pritty tuff skull. I fink-“

Before the Guardian could utter another word, Chrysalis stepped back and her eyes flashed with power. Shrouds of green mist swirled in front of her, and then crackling bolts of emerald magic lashed out at the fallen Warboss. Razgatt spasmed weakly as the tendrils seared his flesh, and in seconds his body was covered in green fire, armor and all.

“Dere. Dat otta tayk cayr o’ him,” announced Chrysalis. She turned back to the crowd, judging their reaction. Most of the Orks looked surprised by her magic, but not particularly angry about it. Chrysalis could barely fathom such an absolute lack of loyalty from one’s subordinates, but it seemed that Gox had been correct.

“Now den, boyz,” she shouted, holding a fist up in the air, “you’z all gotz a-“

“Hold on, dere, Changeyface!”

Chrysalis groaned at the shout. A new Ork was pushing its way forward now, shuffling through the crowd with a copper staff.

The Changeling Queen almost recoiled when she got a good look at the greenskin interrupting her. A bent-backed, quivering alien wearing dirty brown robes, he looked much older than the other warriors and was smaller than the Nobs. What was most bizarre and repulsive, however, was that the top of this Ork’s skull had been removed, leaving his brains exposed to open air.

Gox spotted her Queen’s hesitation and quickly rushed up next to her. “That is an Ork magic user, Queen. The Weirdboy. A violent alien shaman,” she whispered.

Chrysalis didn’t know quite how to react as the Weirdboy shuffled over to her, glowering all the way. When the Ork psyker got to within arm’s reach, he stopped and stared at the newly victorious Warboss. Leaning on his staff, his brain matter churned visibly, and wisps of strange light seemed to shine within the Ork’s eyes.

Chrysalis bristled. She could feel the Ork’s psychic presence pushing against her. It was a crude and reckless probe – perfectly befitting a race that treated machine guns like party favors – but its effect was intense. Chrysalis felt her disguised flesh grow hot under the Weirdboy’s gaze, as if fighting the urge to revert back to form. She didn’t doubt that a drone would have broken down in an instant and revealed themselves under the mental assault.

“Dere’s sumfin’ not rite ‘bout youz,” the Weirdboy snarled, glancing down at the burning Warboss Razgatt. “Youz gotz a tuch o’ bad enerjee to ya! Ya don’ feel… Orky!”

That was easily the most ridiculous claim of suspicion Chrysalis had ever heard in her long and colored career of infiltration and subversion. And yet, grumbles started moving through the surrounding mob as the greenskin soldiers discussed the charge.

“I dunno, da Boss did looz…”

“Wut was all da green stuff?”

“Iz Changeyface a Weirdboy? He don’ look all brayny…”

“Wot’z it mattah?”

“He don’ look so tuff t’me. Mebbe he got luckee…”

Chrysalis took a step toward the Weirdboy. “Oi! You… grot-lovin’ weerdo!” she snapped, stumbling over her insults. “I’m in charj now! You betta bakk off, ‘fore ya joyn yer old boss in da dust!”

The Weirdboy seemed unimpressed. “I don’ see no blud in yer eye! Gork dosn’ fayvah Warboss Changeyface!” He turned around and pounded the butt of his staff onto the ground. “Lissen up, boyz!”

Chrysalis started sputtering furiously, trying to talk over the psyker without success.

“Warboss Razgatt wuz a rite ‘ard wun! Dis git beat ‘im wif sneeky trikks an’ stinkin’ magik!”

The Ork mob was getting riled up, now. Chrysalis could feel the mood of the crowd shift against her. This could be it; if she didn’t convince the aliens she was one of them, she and Gox would be torn apart in short order. She had to do something, and she had to do it NOW.

“Dis wun iz a bad omen! I can see it in da Great Green! I see-“

A green fist slammed into the side of the Weirdboy’s head, pitching the Ork to the ground. Chrysalis hesitated briefly after the shaman fell, wondering if the other greenskins would charge in to protect him.

They did not.

“Da noo boss seems a’right t’me.”

“Heh heh heh! Warboss Changeyface got ‘im gud!”

“WAAAGH!!”

Chrysalis was reasonably perplexed as the Orks started cheering her on, but didn’t stop to ponder it. She pulled the Weirdboy’s staff up from the ground and slammed it down over the shaman’s head.

The laughing and whooping got louder, so she did it again. The staff bent sharply from the impact this time, and Chrysalis winced as a small wash of blood splattered over her leg.

“An’ let DAT be a lessun to ya gitz!” Chrysalis spat, tossing away the copper staff. “Gox! Git ovah heah!”

The Orks in the crowd were all fired up now, chattering loudly, cheering, and otherwise acting very happy that a stranger had wandered into their home and murdered two of their peers for the purpose of being able to tell them what to do. It made absolutely no sense to Chrysalis. But it didn’t have to. She wasn’t here to seize a city or a kingdom. She was here to lead a thousand alien pawns into a war machine until their bodies choked it to a stop. For that purpose, at least, circumstances couldn’t be better.

“Now look heah, numm-skullz! No moh sittin’ abowt! We’z gotta big fight comin’!” Chrysalis shouted while Gox approached.

The mob was instantly inspired. Ork boyz whooped and cheered even louder, and several of them started firing their machine guns into the air. Some of the Nobs started screaming battle cries, as if they were ready to charge an enemy then and there.

“It’s a little scary how easy this is,” Chrysalis mumbled under her breath before placing a hand on Gox’s shoulder. “Dis heah is Gox! He’z my undah-boss! Youz gitz’re gonna do wut Gox sez lyk it wuz me sayin’ it! Dat cleer?!” she roared.

The lesser Orks kept cheering, but at this command some of the Nobs fixed Gox with suspicious looks. “I dunno, Boss. Dis git looks skwishy t’me.”

A howling bolt of green fire slammed into the dissenting Ork, and he was blasted off his feet and onto his back. The Nob screamed in pain and tried to pat out the magical flame, but the others merely pointed and laughed at the sight.

“Aneewun elz gotta probbem wif Gox?” Chrysalis asked, her lip curling up to show her fangs.

The Nobs shook their heads quickly. Some of them turned toward their immolated peer and started kicking him. At first Chrysalis thought they were trying to put out the fire, but their intent became obvious after the flames died out and the greenskins didn’t stop.

“Wut’re we gonna do, Boss Changeyface?” one of the unit leaders asked, his power klaw snapping open and closed. “Wayr’s da fight?”

“Da fight iz wiff da… uh…” Chrysalis hesitantly glanced over at Gox.

“Spikies,” the Guardian reminded her, fighting not to roll her eyes.

“Yeh! Da spikies! We’z gonna CRUSH ‘em, wonz ‘n fer all!” Chrysalis thrust a fist into the air. “I gotz a plan, see? We’z gonna tayk da sitty!”

The Orks seemed to like this idea a lot. Several started cheering, and a few began shouting ideas for the future assault; mostly involving wrecking the base or simply charging the wall, of course.

“Shut it, gitz! I ain’t dun yet!” Chrysalis snarled, swiping a hand through the air. She focused on the Nob that had approached her. “I gots to chek da lot o’ ya, an’ see wot ya gitz can do. Den we can git on wif it.”

“Gotcha, Boss Changeyface. Ovah heah.” The Nob turned away and started clearing a path through the mob.

Chrysalis growled slightly, and then waved Gox along before walking after the Ork. Gox followed cautiously, moving close enough that she could whisper into her Queen’s ear.

“The aliens are excited at the prospect of battle, my Queen, but their mood will spoil quickly if you do not lead them to war. Violence is to the Ork almost as love is to us,” she said quietly.

“I noticed,” Chrysalis hissed back. “You’ll need to keep these clods in line once I’m gone, Gox. I have to move quickly to guide your sisters in the assault. Along with my other assets.”

Gox nodded silently. She did not know the full extent of the plan, but the general idea was that all the rebel forces would attack Ferrous Dominus at once, before the Iron Warriors returned from their journey. Of course, the details of such an assault were paramount; if the changelings simply had their proxies rush the walls to scale or try to destroy them, then it wouldn’t matter how many fools there were in the charge or what grade of soldier manned the palisade. The rebels would be massacred.

One would think the Orks would be better prepared to overcome such an obstacle, as they had been warring with humanity for a long time and apparently did so on a more or less equal level. As Gox and Chrysalis followed the Nobs through the camp, however, they saw little that impressed them. Sure, there were piles of machine guns, hundreds of vicious green-skinned brutes, and several clanking war machines that could have ripped its way through a changeling hive with ease. But they all paled before even the vague stories of the Iron Warriors’ dark fortress.

As Chrysalis saw more and more of the camp, she became increasingly agitated. Mostly from having to keep up the damnable Ork accent and also from all the new Orks flowing in to get a look at the new Warboss and loudly calling out “Changeyface!” But no small part of her frustration came from the tour of the tribe she had just conquered. It was small, with merely several hundred Orks affiliated with it. Chrysalis knew that Warbosses typically went on a conquering spree of other Ork tribes in order to obtain more power, but she had neither the time nor the patience for such a campaign.

“Izzis reely all dere iz?” she asked in exasperation.

The Nobs leading the way halted, looking back at their new Warboss.

“If we’z gonna tayk da humie fort, we need bettah wepuns!” Chrysalis pointed out.

“Mo’ dakka,” Gox corrected.

The other Nobs nodded eagerly at Gox’s correction, to the chagrin of their new Warboss.

“Sorree, Boss. Da Meks been reel bizzy wit’ Razgatt’z fing. Dey ain’t been maykin’ da dakka, an’ lootin’z been bad.”

“But now dat you’z da Boss, we c’n get sum good fightin’ in, yeah? Mo’ fightin’, mo lootin’!”

Chrysalis didn’t like the sound of that. “Da Meks. Ya sed dey’s workin’ on sumfin?”

“Yeh. Razgatt’z fing. Da Big Bloo.”

Chrysalis turned to Gox for an explanation. Gox shrugged helplessly. Whatever this was, it was new to her.

“Wot’z da Big Bloo?” Chrysalis finally asked, glaring at the Nobs.

The aliens glanced at each other, and then wordlessly gestured for their new master to follow. Chrysalis did so, and they were diverted away from the Ork camp.

Outside the camp, Chrysalis and Gox saw some kind of enormous pit dug in the ground and surrounded by ramshackle cranes and rickety scaffolding. Several of the cranes were lowering huge guns and crates into the pit, while trains of Gretchin and Meks worked around the edge. It was a much bigger operation than anything they had seen in the camp proper, although it wasn’t at all obvious what they were working on.

“Whazzis, den?” Chrysalis demanded. She and Gox had spotted the pit on the way in, although they hadn’t observed it very closely. She wasn’t interested in the industrial processes of the Orks, especially when the results were so lackluster.

“Dis iz Big Bloo,” the lead Nob said, pointing toward the pit. He stopped well short of the edge himself.

Chrysalis hesitated, wondering if this was some kind of trap.

Then she heard a deep, rumbling growl.

Not from Gox, or the Nobs, or any of the aliens milling about the pit. The sound seemed to send a tremor through her bones and set her predator’s senses on edge. A few of the scaffolding rigs shook and groaned.

Chrysalis turned and walked toward the edge of the pit. Gox followed her, but the other Orks stayed behind.

The smooth, steep walls of the pit gave way to jagged rock deeper down. Huge chains ran across the pit’s sides, pegged to the walls with iron girders. The pit interior was swarming with Meks, Gretchin, and other Orks that had been pressed to assist, who labored over a hefty metal weapons platform. The platform’s deck space was stacked with tank turrets, machine guns, ammunition supplies, and armored huts. A truly enormous cannon, large enough for Chrysalis to stand up inside it (in her true form, at least) was mounted in the center of the deck and leaned forward at an angle. Crates of equipment, bullets, and armor plating were still being carried down, so it was clear the war machine wasn’t complete yet, either.

All of that was far more impressive than anything else Chrysalis and Gox had seen in the Ork camp until now. But the weapons platform was insignificant compared to what was holding it up. Chains wrapped tightly over blue, strangely translucent fur, pinning down enormous limbs and securing the armored deck. Greenskin corpses littered the ground around the restless giant, creating a veritable carpet of gore. Yet Chrysalis had to imagine that they represented but a fraction of the cost in lives it had taken to subdue the creature below her.

“Is… Is that...” Gox stumbled over the question and dropped her accent, unable to believe her eyes.

Chrysalis had the good sense to look around first to ensure there was nobody listening in before she replied. “Yes, it is. That is an ursa major.”

Another growl came from below. Steam blasted from the massive beast’s maw, and the chains that pinned the creature down rattled dangerously. Chrysalis and Gox felt the rumbling tremor down to their very bones, and every sense instantly came alive with a desperate, primal desire to flee. The ursa major dwarfed even the largest dragons, and no creature on Centaur III could consider the beasts either prey or peers. They were primordial creatures, ancient and rare, with bodies completely saturated with raw magic and given over to an insane level of growth. The star-studded bear was a monstrous, completely unstoppable behemoth, and every inhabitant of Centaur III knew as much.

Evidently, no one had told the Orks that. So they captured one and then strapped weapons to its back.

“Heh heh… he he he he he…” Chrysalis slapped a meaty green hand over her mouth to keep her chuckling down. “I believe I understand now why the ponies fear these aliens. What a wonderfully stupid race!” She tilted her head to the Hive Guardian, grinning. “It’s PERFECT.”

****

Crimson Crags (designated dragon nest Gamma-7)

“Yeeeee-HAH!!”

Rainbow Dash blasted through the air in a high arc, blasting her afterburners to their limit. Her mane whipped about in the air, free from the confines of her helmet, and the flames from her flight pack left a trail of inexplicable colors behind her.

She reached the apex of her ascent and cut the power, twisting into a dive toward a cloud bank. She hit the bank on her hooves and her suit hissed sharply, releasing pressurized gas in sequenced bursts around her legs. Rainbow herself didn’t even notice the suit’s function, galloping across the cloud surface to the edge. She leapt off the end of the cloud, letting the sensation of free-fall take her.

An angry roar came from below.

Rainbow Dash twisted in the air, and the impulse blasters in her boots fired. The pegasus shot to the side, clearing out of the way just before a pair of massive green jaws snapped shut behind her.

She hit her thrusters and twisted upright again, barely dodging out of the way of a large, leathery wing sweeping past her. A final dodge sent her curving sharply to the right before a long, scaly tail whipped by.

Rainbow released a self-indulgent chuckle as she swung upright again. Then her helmet slipped up out of her gorget to clamp shut over her head. The visor covered her eyes in a carmine tint and then lit up, the display coming alive with runes and targeting data.

One of the runes was activated with a blink of her eyes, opening up a vox channel. “Found us a live one! Big guy, too!”

“Confirmed. We’re in position, Dash. Lock the target and then choose an approach vector.”

Rainbow looked up at the mighty green dragon, and her visor drew numerous target reticules and data runes over the beast. She banished the mostly useless information, locking her shuriken catapult onto the dragon’s head.

“Hey, there!” she called, her voice booming from her vox grille. “I’m just stopping by to let you know that this place is Protectorate territory now! We just wanted to give everydragon notice before the tanks rolled in! If you still want to live here, all you have to do is register-”

Dash jolted to the side to avoid a smoldering fireball. It struck a rocky crag below her, exploding into clusters of flame and blasting stone shrapnel into the air.

“So, I’m guessing you’re not up for talking about your lease, then? We offer pretty good terms!” Rainbow taunted.

Puffs of smoke blasted from the dragon’s nostrils. “Flee this place, equine scum! Neither you nor the wretches from the stars are welcome in these lands! Flee, or I will burn you to cinders!”

Rainbow’s eyes narrowed behind her visor. “Yeah? You and what army?”

A screech came from below. Rainbow backed away through the air as two more dragons – one a rusty brown while another was bright red – flew upwards through the air to join the larger green one.

“Oh… okay, yeah, I might have a problem, here,” Rainbow admitted.

“Kill it!” snapped the green dragon. The trio of serpents launched forward, their wings churning against the wind.

Rainbow Dash cut her main engines, dropping suddenly beneath the red dragon before it could bite at her. Her boosters fired a few seconds later, and the pegasus pulled up into an arc behind the beasts.

“Hey, I’ve got a bunch of dragons on my tail now! You guys better be ready!” she shouted into the vox.

The three serpents curled about to follow Rainbow, their roars causing her visor screen to shudder. A few lines of Gothic crawled across her view screen in rapid succession.

“You’re choosing an alternate approach vector? We won’t be able to get a proper crossfire from that angle, you know.”

Rainbow swung tightly to the side, and a swirling fireball struck a cliff wall looming up next to her. “What does that even mean?! I’m bringing you the dumb lizards, you do the rest!”

“It means that we won’t be able to ground all the targets quickly. Can’t you bring them back around by the East valley?”

Another roar came from behind her, and Rainbow’s heart leapt into her throat when her visor flashed red warnings at her and her hind quarters started heating up. She banked hard, turning away from the stream of flames chasing behind her.

“No, I can’t just bring them around! I don’t have a lot of room for error, here!”

Dash shot upwards, then dove in behind several spines of rock to try to create a barrier between her and the dragons. The sound of rock being shattered behind her made it clear that her pursuers didn’t intend to give her that respite.

“Geez, would you guys relax a little?!” Rainbow complained as she soared ahead of the beasts. “I haven’t even shot any of you or anything! This is way too hostile!”

Her visor started beeping again, and Rainbow Dash looked over the warning runes in askance. These seemed to be warning about heat, which she reasonably assumed was because of all the fireballs exploding nearby as well as getting caught briefly in the fire breath earlier. She didn’t really understand what the problem was, though; her armor hadn’t been breached, so the damage was nothing, right?

She started understanding the issue a little better when her flight pack shut down.

“No no no no nononononono!!” Rainbow Dash plummeted to the ground, trailing wisps of smoke behind the tips of her impulse engines. Her altimeter screamed at her, but she banished the distraction with a thought. She didn’t exactly need her power armor to let her know she was in trouble right now.

Rainbow hit the ground on her hooves, and between the suit compensators and her own extensive experience with bad landings she managed to stay upright and keep running. Metal ground stone to dust as she galloped through the uneven crags, and she sputtered pony curses while the heat level indicators wobbled before her eyes.

The dragons seemed surprised at the sudden drop, and they spread out around the grounded pony to cut off any attempts to flee.

“Stupid suit! Hurry up and fix yourself!”

The visor alarm only seemed to get louder. The heat levels were slowly sinking, but the dragons were already covering each of her escape routes and swooping in for the kill.

One blasted a stream of fire at her, and Rainbow hit her impulse blasters. They vaulted the pegasus into the air, and she landed unsteadily on a higher crag.

The rock shook under her as the red dragon smashed his tail into the base, and Rainbow Dash quickly jumped away again. She hit her impulse blasters at the apex of her leap, launching her forward again in mid-air.

This barely kept her ahead of a pair of jaws snapping shut behind her. The green dragon soared past, flapping his heavy wings to slow himself. One of the wings came down on Rainbow’s back before she could get away, swatting the pegasus out of the air and sending her flailing back toward the ground.

Rainbow Dash yelped as her shoulder pad crashed into stone, and she started rolling over the uneven ground. Shards of rock jumped up in the air, and trails of sparks ran off of her wings and leg plating. She pushed herself up the moment she could get her footing, and her armor creaked from the strain.

Before she could take more than a step, a fireball struck one of the rock spires behind her. Flames washed over her flight pack and scorched her afterburners, and the mare clenched her teeth as her heat readout jumped again.

“Hey! Is anybody reading me? I need some help over here!” Rainbow Dash shouted while she sprinted underneath a stone outcropping.

The vox returned a blast of static before the current mission lead replied to her. “You need help? Well, that’s a new one. I thought you said you didn’t need an escort unit.”

“They grounded me! The stupid armor is too hot! They’re seriously going to kill me!”

The brown dragon landed roughly in front of Rainbow Dash, and she hit her blasters again to leap back out of range of a swiping claw.

“I need an artillery strike! Or an air strike! Give me an explosion or two, would you?!” Rainbow complained, kicking off from a rock facing. The dragon’s claws tore into the stone behind her, gouging deep holes in the surface but missing the pegasus entirely.

“Affirmative, Dash. Available assets are… uh oh.”

Rainbow Dash fought the urge to scream. “What?! What’s wrong now?!” she demanded while running under an arch. Another dragon flew over her, roaring angrily and positioning itself to intercept the armored mare.

“Arguably, nothing. In fact, you might like this. Looks like someone else was listening in on your call.”

“What?! Who?! What’s happening?!” Rainbow Dash screeched to a halt when the red dragon landed in front of her, cutting off her path again. The others were circling around, but keeping their distance; apparently they were intent on ending this chase for good rather than risking her slipping away again.

A locator rune flashed on Rainbow’s visor. The dragons hesitated, hearing the sound of a roaring rocket engine above them. Rainbow Dash’s panicked grimace shifted into a feral smirk.

“IRON WITHIN, BECOME THE IRON WITHOUT!! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!”

Tellis screamed down from the sky, trailing streams of fire behind him. The dragons looked up, alarmed, and the rust-colored one took to the air to intercept the Iron Warrior.

The Chaos Lord twisted about, arching up to meet the dragon at full speed. The serpent snarled, but its ascent showed hesitation. The incoming foe was approaching far too fast, to the point that it couldn’t really tell what it was facing.

By the time doubt turned to dread, it was too late.

Tellis struck the side of the dragon’s head, sending the beast twisting about in the air. His claws bit deep into the dragon’s hide and into the bone of its jaw, but the sheer force of the Iron Warrior’s fist propelled by the full power of his flight pack sent shock waves down the serpent’s spine. The dragon spun around in the air and then dropped onto the ground in a heap, not unconscious but thoroughly stunned. A heavy, serrated fang bounced across the ground at its feet, having been forcibly knocked free of its jaw.

Tellis landed behind the dragon, his boots carving furrows into the solid rock underneath. He slid to a complete stop, and then a chuckle came from his vox grille.

“Heh. I punched a dragon in the face.”

Then a giant green tail smashed into his back, sending the Chaos Lord tumbling away.

“Tellis! Are you okay?” shouted Rainbow Dash while she galloped across the crags.

“What? Oh, yeah. I’m good.” Tellis bounced to his feet and then vaulted into the air, his flight pack vomiting fire behind him. The green dragon pursued, sputtering flames from its jaws.

“Watch out for the fire breath! If it hits you, your jets overheat!” Rainbow Dash warned.

“They do? No they don’t,” Tellis shouted back.

“Seriously! I’m grounded right now because my flight pack got too hot!”

“Is that how it works? I don’t think that’s how it works.” Tellis jolted to the side, barely avoiding the dragon’s jaws as it tried to bite him.

“Well, just let it blast you! Then you’ll see!” Rainbow shouted.

Her vox crackled. “This is Command. I would have to recommend against that tactical decision.”

“You stay out of this!” Rainbow Dash barked.

A fireball exploded next to her, scorching the mare’s side before the red dragon charged after the pegasus. She hit her impulse blasters again, leaping away just ahead of the serpent’s sword-like teeth.

“Rainbow Dash, one of the Dark Techpriests is speculating about system damage with your flight pack,” said the vox. “Are your heat sinks out of order?”

“My what?” the pegasus asked, kicking off of a spike of rock to avoid the dragon’s claws. “Have you even seen power armor? There’s no room for a sink!”

“No room for-Oh, for Dark Gods’ sakes,” the man on the connection grumbled. “Your HEAT SINKS, Dash. They’re the system that keep your flight pack from overheating. Flush your heat sinks.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rainbow confessed while sprinting behind another outcropping. “How do I flush the-“

In that instant, several crystalline filament rods sprouted from the boosters of her flight pack, sliding from between the armor sheaths. They glowed a blazing pink from the absorbed heat and began a rapid cooling process that poured swirling clouds of hissing gases into the air above her. Rainbow stumbled to a halt, and her eyes widened when her system heat levels swiftly dropped into the safe range.

The red dragon advancing on her hesitated, and it too stumbled to a halt as its prey was swallowed by a scalding shroud of coolant vapor. While the serpent could hardly be harmed by hot steam, it didn’t know what else to expect from this equine. Every time it seemed they had her cornered she managed to slip away, and the beasts had no real idea what the pony’s strange armor was capable of.

“Rainbow…” The steam cloud rushed away, and the dragon felt largely vindicated in its restraint as it stared down at its prey. Rainbow Dash was now facing her opponent, crouched on the ground, and her impulse thrusters were trembling behind her with building energy. A low-pitched whine came from the central booster, and a crackling arc of prismatic energy danced across Rainbow’s helmet and chest plate.

“BUSTER!!”

The armored pony blasted toward the dragon like a cannon shot, and the kinetic refraction field sparked. The dragon screamed in pain while Rainbow Dash plowed into its chest, and was smashed aside in a blast of rainbow-colored light. The pegasus curved upward, rocketing into the air, while the dragon painfully rolled across the rocks below.

“Every time I think power armor can’t get any better, it does!” Rainbow laughed, curving and twisting through the air.

“Yes. Just imagine what your combat efficacy would be if you actually read your damn wargear primers,” grumbled Command.

“Just be ready for me, okay? I’ll be there in a sec with some target practice.” She switched over her vox and spun around in the air. “Hey, Tellis! I’m good to go now, buddy! Thanks!”

“You’re welc-OW!” Massive hooked claws cut down the Iron Warrior, scraping across the plating of his power armor and throwing him to the ground. The rust-colored dragon promptly pinned Tellis with its other claw, roaring victoriously.

“Uh… you need me to lend you a hoof, dude?” Rainbow asked, keeping her own visor locked on the two other dragons.

“Nah, I’m good!” Tellis reared back and arm, and then reached his fist between the dragon’s claws to stab it in the wrist. It flinched, but did not release him. Tellis stabbed it three more times in rapid succession before the beast could even move, and on his final attempt the sizzling powered claws punched into a nerve cluster.

The dragon shrieked and recoiled, leaping back. Tellis jumped upright immediately and then burst into the air. The wounded serpent glanced up at the Iron Warrior, then down to its bleeding wrist, hesitating.

“Okay, well, these two look like they want a piece of me, so I’ll catch you later!” Rainbow shouted through the vox while dodging a fireball. “If you need help, get to me later!”

“Cool! See ya, Rainbabe!”

The red and green dragons flew after Rainbow Dash, paying no obvious heed to the Chaos Lord that had enabled her escape. Which was poor tactics, as far as Tellis could tell. Combined, the three would have had a fair chance of catching and killing him, but apparently they were more interested in hunting down the small, weaker target that had annoyed them rather than a real threat.

Which he could totally sympathize with, actually, but still: not smart.

The remaining dragon eyed Tellis warily, deliberating on its course of action. It had already been injured twice by the alien marauder, and his armor had proven astoundingly resistant to dragon claws. It seemed objectively silly for a dragon to hesitate before a creature barely a tenth its size, but as it stared up at the Iron Warrior it felt its every instinct screaming to flee. There was a dark, primal energy that coursed through this warrior’s body; something similar to magic, but more… raw and brutal.

“What are you waiting for, lizard?” Tellis taunted, beckoning with a hand. “You taste too much iron already? This is your one and only chance to dine on Khornate flesh! Limited time offer!” He hammered a fist into his chest, laughing.

“You vile creatures will never take our lands!” the dragon snarled, a blast of fire puffing from its nostrils.

Tellis did not respond right away, staring down at the serpent while his flight pack burned at a steady hover.

“… Wait, you guys can talk?” he mumbled.

The dragon was clearly the more surprised of the two, and it scowled angrily. “Of course I can speak! Do you apes think dragons are mere animals?!”

“Uh… kind of? I mean, it’s hard to tell what counts as a dumb animal or not on this planet,” Tellis mumbled. “Wait, what about the rock alligators? Can THEY talk? I never asked!”

The dragon arched an eyebrow. “Such foolishness. You stand before Ignil, and this-“

“You even have names? This is wild,” the Chaos Lord interrupted.

“Of course we have names, fool!” Ignil snapped. “And we also have land! And property! And wealth! You dare to think us mere beasts?! These are our homes, our people’s sacred territories!” The dragon reared up, spreading its wings and baring its (remaining) teeth. “We will not bow to you vile cultists! We will not surrender our birthright! You will take this world over our cold, dead bodies!”

“I am DOWN with that,” Tellis assured him, raking his claws together. Tiny red arcs of power lashed between the adamantium blades, popping angrily at the contact.

“Feeble ape! You will BURN before the mighty serpent kings!” the dragon roared, leaping into the air and taking flight.

“Uh-huh. Sure. I’mma kill you and take your stuff now.” Tellis spread his wings and blasted forward, his flight pack screaming into the wind.

****

Rainbow Dash banked hard, dodging out of the way of a fire stream threatening to engulf her from behind. Her flight path brought her within inches of the jagged face of the cliff, and a tremor shook her wing from the an impulse jet scraping against passing bits of stone.

She turned her head slightly, and a series of reticule markers flickered into place. “Almost…”

Then the visor screen was swallowed in flame.

The fireball struck her from below, exploding against the plating under her belly and blasting her to the side. This in turn slammed her against the rock cliff, and the pegasus carved a short furrow into the stone before she bounced off and plummeted into a spin.

“Gah! No!” Rainbow tucked into a roll while her visor blasted alerts at her, turning her armor into a flaming buzzsaw that arced down through the air.

The drake that had ambushed her from below flew up to intercept its target, only to have the blazing wheel of metal strike it in the shoulder. Rainbow Dash bounced off the dragon, barely avoiding the flailing wings and whipping tail while it roared in pain and fury.

Rainbow pulled out of her somersault, landing roughly on a stone plateau and stumbling onto her side. She was up again and moving in an instant, her muscles burning from the abuse and adrenaline flood. Her heat sinks were already extended while she fled, generating a trail of steam for the great beasts pursuing her.

“There is no escape, equine!” roared the great green dragon. “Now you die for your arrogance!”

Rainbow’s vox crackled. “Target marked. Fire at will.”

The first shots hit the dragons’ ears like a thunderbolt, but they hit their bodies in the way only an armor-piercing hellbore shell could. Explosive blasts stitched a line across the green dragon’s chest and wing, blowing holes through the fire-tempered scales and swatting the great serpent from the sky.

The dragon roared in agonized fury as it fell, and Rainbow vaulted into the air again just ahead of its tumbling body. Her flight pack flickered and ignited, and she banked hard to evade the great red dragon just before it overtook its green sibling.

The crimson serpent started to turn, but it paused to look over the edge of the plateau. It was difficult not to, what with the thunder of guns and hail of bullets currently tearing its brethren to shreds. There was a small group of Company vehicles sitting in the middle of a large crater, along with a substantial crowd of soldiers. The units had fortified themselves behind duracrete barriers and fire rock crags, and the pair of armored vehicles boasted quad-barreled anti-air guns that spat a constant chain of fire into the green dragon. Between them was a platoon of mercenaries with rocket launchers, and within seconds a volley of flakk missiles streaked up into the air.

The red dragon twisted away, recognizing an ambush when it saw one. A line of quad fire followed it, but the serpent managed to evade while it sought to flee the scene. The heavy shells sliced through the air overhead, and a flakk missile curved through the air on an intercept course under the heavy gunfire.

The missile exploded under the dragon’s wing, and the serpent hissed in pain as hundreds of white-hot flechette fragments punched into its side and stung its wingflaps. Despite the pain and the echoing boom in its ears, the dragon powered ahead, desperate to get out of range.

When it heard the roar of more rockets approaching, it assumed more missiles were on the way. This was a reasonable guess, but it was wrong.

Rainbow Dash struck the serpent in the side of its head, grazing the creature’s jaw while her kinetic refraction field flashed. The dragon flinched in pain, but it wasn’t obviously injured by the surprise attack.

“Ponyfeathers! Missed!” Rainbow growled, spinning in the air to strafe the dragon. Her shuriken catapult spat a volley of monomolecular-edged razors into the great beast’s wings, slicing into its thinnest tissues and weakening it even more. “You can give up any time now, you know!”

“We will never surrender, equine! Never!” roared the dragon. “Die in flame along with your alien masters!”

Rainbow suddenly jolted upward through the air, avoiding a screaming fireball that had been aimed at her backside.

“Ah, ah, ah! Fool me once, shame on you!” Rainbow taunted, spinning around in the air. “Fool me twice… well... you didn’t fool me twice, so whatever. I’m gonna shoot your face full of ninja stars now.”

The other dragon was a much smaller creature than the others, colored a much darker shade of red and barely much larger than a Terminator. It still had wings and a projectile breath weapon, however, and its smaller size apparently let it sneak up on its targets instead.

Rainbow jolted forward, and the beast swooped in to meet her. The dragon turned its head aside from a flurry of shuriken, flinching at a critical point and wasting its attack. Rainbow kicked off the dragon’s head at high speed, flipping higher into the air while the dragon flailed.

“I’m telling you guys, you should just surrender now!” Rainbow Dash warned. “Greenie already bit off more cannon shells than he could chew!”

“Foolish equine! We know where your little ape friends are now!” The larger serpent landed on a crag, and then scraped a handful of flechette needles out of its hide. “We will purge the humans in due time. But they cannot reach us here, and-“

A thunderous crack pierced the air just milliseconds after a heavy rail pierced the red dragon’s back. The projectile punched through hardened scales like so much paper, slicing through bone, flesh, and internals before exiting out of the beast’s chest in a puff of hot blood. A shimmering line of blue light drew a line along the projectile’s path, the ionized air currents flaring briefly in Rainbow’s retinas.

The dragon stayed perfectly still for a moment, as if unable to comprehend what had just happened. Then its body slumped forward, collapsing onto the ground with its eyes still wide with shock.

The culprit buzzed low over the cliff that marked the edge of the plateau, its sleek armored body a patchwork of blue over a black undercoat. The Tau Hammerhead kept its railgun trained on the red dragon for several seconds, slowly circling the body. Only once its scans confirmed that the beast was losing body heat rapidly did it swing around for another target.

“Is there any reason you’re showing up now, rather than five minutes ago when I needed back-up?” Rainbow Dash yelled down at the hover tank. “I mean, you guys can pretty much fly, and apparently you were just waiting here along with the rest of the guns! What the hay, guys?”

The Hammerhead Gunship floated underneath her, its railgun barrel slowly tracking from one side to the other. Rainbow frowned, and then let her altitude drop until she landed on top of the turret housing.

“Hey! Are you listening?!” the armored mare demanded, kicking the turret. “Why didn’t you show up earlier?”

The gunship stopped, and after a few seconds her helmet vox received an incoming signum.

“Are you trying to yell at us through the hull? We can’t hear you without a comms connection.”

“Don’t get smart with me, jerk!” Rainbow Dash snapped.

“If we did, how would you know?”

Rainbow scowled and gave the turret mechanism another kick. “Whatever! Finish off the last one and let’s take this place!”

“What, the green one? It has been critically wounded already. Command is debating whether to bring it home or finish it off.”

“No, not the green one! I meant the little red-“ Rainbow Dash suddenly snapped her head up, and her targeting reticule bounced around the boundary of her visor display for a few seconds. It returned zero targets, and the pegasus groaned.

“Ah, ponyfeathers. He got away!” Rainbow griped. “I nearly got cooked alive corralling these guys! You couldn’t even bother to show up until now? You grays are useless!”

“I take it back. Go back to yelling at us through the hull,” the pilot retorted, cutting the vox connection.

****

The dragon Valk poked its head out of a hole in the cliff face, its bright orange eyes squinting against the light.

A pair of Tau Hammerheads slowly navigated the uneven crags below. Their turrets pivoted back and forth, covering any gap or outcropping large enough to hide a dragon waiting in ambush until they could complete an area scan and determine it was clear. There were many such places in these mountains, but other than Valk there were no dragons left to lay a trap.

The scream of an engine came from overhead, and a Hellblade Interceptor blasted through the sky. Valk gulped and slipped further into the cavern, his heart thundering in his chest. If the alien machines stalked the crags and the skies, there would be no escape until they left.

IF they left.

Valk crept through the uneven tunnels, turning and twisting around sharpened spikes of rock and pinching gaps. These passageways provided a veritable network of access tunnels to the nests of the larger dragons, yet were inconveniently too small for those same dragons to use. In the years past they had allowed Valk to sneak into their hoards and sneak a ruby or two, but now the tunnels presented a critical path of retreat from the army taking over their mountain lairs.

“It doesn’t even make sense,” the drake hissed to himself. “What do they need these lands for? They have their territory! What are they even here for?!”

Valk reached the end of the tunnel and pushed himself free, dropping down onto the floor. This cavern was much larger, and lit by a pair of bronze oil torches that burned with blue dragonflame. The torches stood on either side of a veritable mountain of gemstones, gold coins, silver bars, and the odd sword or elaborate helmet that looked exotic enough to sit amongst a dragon’s treasures.

The red serpent frowned at pile of valuables, which towered several meters above the floor and peaked about halfway to the cavern ceiling.

“Well, I suppose there might be SOMETHING around here worth taking,” Valk admitted, his eyes sparkling at the mound of treasure. While he’d certainly miss his broodmates, especially with hostile alien machines flying about his home, there were advantages to suddenly being the last dragon left in Crimson Crags.

A scraping noise came from the shadows, and Valk snapped upright, instantly on alert. He scrambled around the great pile of gemstones and riches, and soon spotted the source of the noise.

A single changeling stared up at the dragon, peering through large eyes of pale blue. It was a mere drone, and the creature buzzed its wings in irritation while it waited for the serpent to speak.

Valk grimaced. “Hello, insect. You were right. The killers from the void have come, and we were unable to stop them.” He sighed, and his tail knocked a sapphire from the vast mound behind him. “Grall and Kurn are gone. I’m pretty sure Ignil is as well, although I didn’t see what happened to him.” He picked up the sapphire and popped it into his mouth, crunching down on the gem.

The changeling grimaced, baring its short fangs to the serpent. “No good! Dragons fight the aliens with the changelings! Vzzzzzzzz!” The insect’s wings buzzed urgently at the end of its request. “Creatures of our world fight together or die alone! Vzzzzzzz!”

“Grall thought you were just trying to manipulate us. And you probably are,” Valk admitted, swallowing the sapphire, “but you’re not wrong.” He kissed his claws briefly, and then ran his tongue over his lips. “I’ll tell you what, insect: if you can help me get this treasure out of here and to a safe place, I’ll help you with getting more dragon allies.”

The drone tilted its head to the side, and then looked up at the veritable mountain of treasure. Then it looked back at the dragon, perplexed.

“Call your broodmates, or whatever you refer to the other disgusting bug spies as,” Valk instructed impatiently, “get more of them here to help me sneak this out and away from the humans. Then I’ll show you to more nests and speak to the others.”

The changeling continued to look perplexed, and Valk groaned. “If you insolent creatures merely show up and insist that we obey you or be killed by the apes from the stars, you will be turned away every time. If you’re lucky.” The dragon snorted, and puffs of flame came from his nostrils. “You insects are creatures of deception, not diplomacy and honor. We have no reason to believe you. Help me, and then-“

Valk’s ear fin twitched, and he stopped talking. There was a sound coming. Periodic and heavy. Like footsteps. Many footsteps.

The changeling perked up as well, and then started to panic. “Intruders! Vzzzzzz! We must flee!”

“No, wait,” Valk mumbled, glancing down at the equine-shaped insect. A smirk stretched across his face. “I have an idea.”

The footsteps got louder, echoing down the large stone hallway that led to the dragon nest. Some of them were particularly loud, and the sound of clanking metal and cracking rock boomed through the cavern long before the first glint of gunmetal was visible.

Once the metal was visible, one could see it was part of a four-legged suit of Terminator armor with a Stetson sitting on top.

“Mah stars, that’s a lotta shiny rocks!” Applejack said, a whistle coming from the steely slits of her vox grille. “Rares! Ya gotta see this!”

Three men in crimson carapace armor followed Applejack into the cavern, each of them carrying a pulse rifle; Fire Lancers. Behind them was Rarity and Delgan.

“Oh, MY!” Rarity gasped, her eyes lighting up. She currently had her helmet off, and a fourth soldier was carrying it behind her.

Delgan was equally pleased, although he didn’t show it as easily. “The dragons don’t make proper settlements, and they certainly put up more of a fuss than the others. The gains from conquest are more direct, though.” He snapped his fingers and glanced over to the guard with Rarity’s helmet. “Get a pair of transports here. Devilfish. It will be easier for the Tau to move this material than trying to get a Chimera up the cliffs.”

“Yes, Trademaster.”

The other soldiers started approaching the treasure mound, and Delgan snapped his fingers again. They stopped in an instant, looking back.

“Not so fast, gentlemen. This region isn’t conquered just yet. Miss Apple, are we quite certain that this prize no longer has an owner?”

The farmer grimaced behind her mask. She wasn’t completely comfortable yet with the reality that they were invading another creature’s home in order to kill them and seize their property. “Ah recall the boys saying they took down two big’uns that Dash baited. Tellis jumped another one, but Ah dunno how that ended.”

“We can guess how that ended,” Rarity quipped.

Applejack turned her head to look over the room, and her visor flickered with targeting indicators and sensor inputs. Small runes blinked into place in a rapid cascade, offering streams of data about material composition, structural integrity, and ambient heat.

One unusual heat signature seemed to appear in the wrong place, behind the treasure pile, and Applejack frowned. Before she could take a step toward it, however, her visor detected movement to the side.

“Whoa, there!” she shouted, spotting something moving at the edge of the hill of valuables. “Come out nice and slow, partner!”

The creature did so, stepping into view one trembling hoofstep at a time. To the intruders’ surprise, it was a mustard-colored pony, rather than a dragon. A unicorn stallion, specifically, with a scruffy black mane and a beetle for a cutie mark.

“Oh, my. Are you all right?” Rarity asked. She had her plasma gun floating next to her, and she quickly shifted the weapon to point up toward the ceiling. “You’re not with the Company, are you? Did these dragons capture you?”

The stallion gulped, nodding his head slightly. “I’ve been here a few weeks… they made me a slave,” he said, his voice scratchy and his eyes unfocused.

“Tch! Consarn lizards!” Applejack huffed, turning to glare at Delgan. “Not that we can say much on the topic of slavery…”

“Why are you looking at me? I don’t use slaves,” Delgan scoffed. “Their service is atrocious. I prefer the loyalty earned with a living a wage.” He leaned back slightly, placing his hand on the pommel of a power sword. “As for you, pony, where is your master? I’d prefer to confirm his death before absconding with his things, and you’re no different.”

Rarity huffed and rolled her eyes. Applejack shook her head, turning back toward the stallion.

Her visor beeped, sensing more movement at the edge of her line of sight.

The fireball came with too little warning, even with the alert offered by Applejack’s visor runes. The detonation struck her side, and a plume of flame swallowed her completely while blasting two of the Fire Lancers off their feet. The third human soldier wasn’t struck directly, and he quickly darted away from the explosion to seek cover.

Valk pounced like a tiger, bounding off the side of the treasure pile and landing on top of the mercenary with a bestial hiss. Long, hooked talons sliced through ballistic cloth between plasteel plates, and then dug into the vulnerable flesh underneath.

The Fire Lancer screamed, stabbing his rifle bayonet up into the dragon’s chest. The adamantium blade bit into the scales and split them, spilling hot blood onto the trapped man, but the attack did little beyond a flesh wound. Valk vomited fire onto the pinned mercenary, cooking him alive within his armor.

With a huff and a snort, Valk looked up from his first kill.

Were the dragon slightly slower, he might well have lost his head then and there. He recoiled suddenly, and a pair of crackling blades slashed across Valk’s neck, barely breaking through the scale layer.

Delgan only had time to click his tongue in annoyance before the dragon twisted about in the air, whipping his tail about at high speed. The Trademaster darted backward to evade, giving Valk enough clearance to flee.

The dragon took ample advantage of the opportunity, launching toward the pyre he had made with its first attack. A string of screaming plasma bolts followed after him as he bounced off a stalactite and then flapped his wings, adding critical height to a final leap toward his target: one of the scorched soldiers that had been knocked prone already.

To Valk’s surprise, however, he found himself with a face full of angry, armored pony instead.

“Consarn lizard!” Applejack snarled, ramming into the dragon while flames still clung to her armor. Valk recoiled, and then he slashed his claws against the mare’s helmet and stabbed his other talons into her side. Claws like diamond-edged blades shrieked against ceramite, striking with enough force to knock the pony back.

Applejack countered hard. Her boot hammered Valk in the stomach, and the dragon roared in pain. Or rather, he would have, but Applejack spun around and smashed her tail into the side of his head, stunning him.

Then she bucked the dragon in the chest, striking with the force of a thunder hammer. Valk went flying across the cavern, spinning in the air and slamming into a brazier before crashing into the treasure mound. Valk sputtered and coughed, wheezing hard while he scrambled to get to his feet.

Delgan pointed a blade toward the dragon. “Open fire. Aim for the wings; it will reduce beast’s mobility.”

The two Fire Lancers that had been knocked down by the first attack were still picking up their weapons. Rarity and the man carrying her helmet, however, had simply been waiting to get a clear line of attack while Applejack was fighting up close. A plasma bolt struck the dragon in the wing next to a trio of pulse bolts, searing the serpent’s heat-resistant scales and burning through to cut a molten hole through the flesh.

Valk made a quick calculation and scrambled for one of the tunnels, ducking behind the treasure hoard to evade incoming fire. He had killed a man and wounded a few more, but the blasted ponies were turning out to be even more dangerous than their sapien friends. He needed to retreat and lick his wounds before trying again.

The dragon heard the pounding of heavy boots galloping behind him, but paid the charging pony no heed. He glanced up at a hole in the rock, some two meters from the ground, and leapt into it. He was faster than the mare, and ponies were generally poor climbers anyhow. As soon as he was away from the guns, he would be safe.

“Oh, no ya don’t!” Applejack growled, her tail snapping forward.

Valk yelped when he felt something hold his tail in place. It was a strange sensation, as the appendage hadn’t been physically skewered or pinched, but the serpent tried to tug it forward with absolutely no result.

“Git back here!” Applejack pulled back, and the gravity lash yanked Valk out of his escape tunnel and sent him rolling across the ground. The dragon howled as the impact rattled his injured wing and ribs.

Applejack stomped up to the dragon. “Ya give up yet, varmint?!”

Valk’s response was a blast of dragonfire directly into the mare’s face, washing over her helmet and spilling around her gorget. Her armor temperature rose dangerously, and the bands of plating around her neck started to burn against her fur.

Applejack pushed forward through the flame, reared up, and decked the dragon in the jaw. Valk reeled backward, blood and embers sputtering from his mouth. He slashed across the pony’s faceplate, his claws shrieking angrily against the adamantium plating, and received another boot to his gut for his effort.

“Treacherous equines! You betray your own world for the alien scum!” Valk howled while he retreated. Steaming blood dripped from his jaws along with the odd bit of shattered teeth. “You will never succeed! This world will never be yours!”

His backpedaling stopped when a blade pierced him from behind. With a hiss and a series of electric pops, the tip of a power sword punched through Valk’s chest in a burst of blue sparks. Blood and smoke spurted from the wound in nearly equal measure, and the dragon froze in paralyzing agony.

“Darling, don’t be so melodramatic,” Rarity said with a sigh, standing behind the dragon. Her plasma gun floated up next to Valk’s head, a pulsing hum coming from its magnetic chamber. “We’re just doing our jobs.”

The plasma gun discharged, and Valk’s life was extinguished in a flash of green light.

Applejack huffed angrily through her vox grille, still feeling the intense heat within her helmet. “Consarn dragon jumped us outta nowhere! Never figgered them fer the sneaky type.”

“You get all kinds, darling,” Rarity admitted while she tenderly placed a boot against the dragon’s corpse. Her magic took hold of the handle of her power sword, and she slowly drew it from the beast’s hide.

One of the Fire Lancers – the only one who hadn’t been attacked in the skirmish – stepped up behind Applejack, holding his pulse rifle at the ready.

“Watson’s dead, obviously. Climes and Saggan got burned, but they’ll-“

“Darling,” Rarity interrupted, suddenly glaring at the man, “weren’t you carrying my helmet?”

“Huh? Yeah. So?”

“SO, I don’t see it with you. Where is it?” the unicorn pressed.

“I don’t know. I dropped it so I could-“

“You DROPPED IT?! On the GROUND?!” Rarity shrieked.

“Aw, hay. Here we go,” Applejack groaned. She turned around and started walking back around the treasure pile.

“What are you yelling at me for?”

“What am I-are you DAFT, sir? You dropped my helmet on the ground! The rocky, uneven ground covered in sharp edges! What if it gets damaged!”

“Are you serious? That thing is made to shrug off weapons fire!”

“I’ve taken my share of weapons fire you oaf, and I assure you the finish is far more sensitive than that! Do you think the Techpriests have nothing better to do than polish my armor over and over?! Use your head!”

Applejack grumbled under her breath while she trotted back to the two injured soldiers. One of them was still kneeling, but both had their carapace armor blackened and cracked from the dragonflame.

“All right fellers, we’re all clear now. You boys gonna be all right?”

“Affirmative, Jack. Sorry we weren’t much help back there,” grumbled one of the men.

“Naw, it ain’t nothin’. Critter took us all by surprise; I just happen to have thicker skin.” She chuckled and banged a hoof against her chest plate.

“Heh, yeah. Thanks, Jack,” mumbled the man still on the ground. He paused briefly, staring at the armored mare. “Wait, so… how is your hat okay?”

“Never mind her hat!” Rarity shouted, galloping out behind the farmer and looking typically indignant. “Somebody find MY hat! For all I know it’s lying in some horrid puddle of cave muck!” She looked over the cavern, pursing her lips. “Also, what happened to that stallion? The one who was being held here?”

“I think I saw him run off right after the dragon attacked,” volunteered one of the men. “He probably wouldn’t get far with the rough terrain and not being a flyer. Should we pursue?”

“No need. I got him,” came Delgan’s voice from the gloom.

It took everyone a moment to remember that Delgan had gone in with them, and yet had disappeared after getting in a quick attack on the dragon himself. The Trademaster emerged from the entrance tunnel, his swords sheathed. In one hand, he carried Rarity’s discarded helmet. The other he used to drag the mysterious unicorn behind him by the mane.

“Ow! Ow! Stop!” the unicorn complained while he was tugged along. “I thought you guys were nice to ponies! This isn’t very nice!”

Delgan shoved the stallion forward into the cavern, knocking him on his side. Then he pointed to the last guard standing. “Arrest him at once.”

Rarity blinked in surprise. “Arrest? For what? The poor dear was a captive! He must have been terrified!”

“Miss Rarity, I’ve run into my share of traps and nibbled my share of bait,” Delgan explained, staring coldly at the quivering unicorn stallion. “This equine absolutely knew that dragon was in here, and offered us no warning. He issued no surprise when we were being attacked. And once the lizard began to falter, he wasted no time in sneaking out, and not before.” Delgan drew a power sword with his free hand. “I know the difference between a captive and a collaborator, and this pony is the latter.”

“Even so, Mister Delgan...” Rarity huffed, preparing to lecture the merchant.

He spoke before she could continue. “Also, yes, your helmet did get some cave muck on it.”

“THE VERY WORST THING!!”

The sound of power armored boots came from the tunnel behind Delgan, and Applejack perked up.

“That from our transport?” the farmer asked, pleased that this mission was almost over.

“Negative. That’s Astartes power armor,” Delgan grumbled, lowering his sword. “And there’s only one Iron Warrior on assignment in this area...”

The humans and ponies groaned together, equally dreading what was coming. Only the captured unicorn seemed confused about what was happening.

As such, he was the only one surprised rather than exasperated when Tellis sprinted into the cavern.

“Yes! YES! That is what I’m talking about!” Tellis laughed, pointing at the treasure pile.

Rainbow Dash flew in behind him, sweeping around the Chaos Lord into a hover. “Nice! A real treasure stash! Now we’re getting our piracy on!”

Delgan took a deep, calming breath. “My Lord Tellis, we-“

“Dibs!” Tellis shouted.

Delgan stopped talking, frowning up at the Iron Warrior.

“I called dibs. That means I get it,” Tellis explained, jabbing a thumb into his chest plate.

“… Yes, Lord. I… suppose it does,” the Trademaster said through clenched teeth.

“WHOOOOO!! Las Pegasus, here we come!” Rainbow Dash cheered, spinning in the air while her impulse jets surged.

Applejack just shook her head. Rarity slumped onto the ground, groaning. The unidentified stallion looked over at them incredulously.

“THIS is one of the fabled Iron Warriors?” he asked.

“Yeah, he is. He’s a little more ‘fabled’ than the rest, in fact,” Applejack admitted. “Ah know he sounds like a goof, but if the vox logs’re right, that goof just took down one o’ the bigger dragons ‘round here.”

“So in a way, I suppose it makes sense that he claim the lion’s share of the treasure,” Rarity mumbled, shrugging.

“Yes! That. What she said.” Tellis walked over to the ponies, who all backed up warily. Then he pointed to Rarity. “By the way, you’re the fashion horse, right? You do clothes and stuff.”

“There is no POSSIBLE way this conversation is going to end well,” she replied, her ears flipping down.

“Don’t be lame, whitey. I just need to know how to skin a dragon for a cloak.”

“No! This is not happening! No, no, no!” Rarity shook her head wildly.

“I tried to do it on my own, but it didn’t come out right. Those suckers have a lot of meat on them, you know?”

Rainbow Dash floated up next to the Space Marine’s shoulder, chuckling through her vox grille. “Let’s just say Tellis is pretty lucky his armor drinks blood, because YUCK.”

“Stop it! I’m not listening! Somebody give me my blasted helmet!” Rarity cried, curling up on the ground and covering her head with her boots.

“And what’s this guy’s deal?” Tellis suddenly rounded on the only stallion present, and the mysterious pony yelped in surprise. “He doesn’t have armor or weapons or anything! Is he even with us?”

“No, Lord Tellis,” nodded one of the Fire Lancers, “he was captured by the dragons, apparently. We were-“

“By the dragons? So he’s part of the loot pile?” the Chaos Lord asked.

“Uh... I suppose that’s one way of-“

“MINE.” Before the unicorn stallion could stutter a reply, the armored giant grabbed him by the barrel and hurled him across the room, into the treasure mound. The pony yelped when he hit the small mountain of gems and valuables, and then started rolling down the side, out of control.

“You’re taking the pony?” Rainbow Dash asked, swinging around in front of Tellis. “Why would you want him?”

“Depends on what his special thingy is,” Tellis replied. “If it’s cool, I’ll keep him around for that. If it’s dumb, then I’ll probably just use him for shipping.”

The stallion tumbled down the face of the treasure pile to the ground, and ended up striking his head on the stone floor. He wailed in pain, and then his body was suddenly consumed by a flare of green light.

Applejack and Rarity gasped in shock. The Fire Lancers had their rifles up in an instant. Delgan clicked his tongue and brought up his sword. Rainbow Dash growled and landed, her shuriken catapult swiveling into position.

Tellis, who was facing away from the treasure pile, glanced from soldier to soldier in confusion. “What? What’re you all aiming at?” he mumbled, turning around.

On the ground lay a creature shaped like a pony, but bearing a black carapace rather than fur. Numerous gouges, notches, and holes riddled its legs, body, and the pair of gossamer wings on its back. The creature hissed in pain, clenching its teeth and revealing a pair of needle-like fangs beneath its lips.

“Huh… He turns into a bug. Bug horse. Okay, yeah. That’s a pretty good trick,” Tellis mumbled, crossing his arms over his chest. “I can work with this. Might ship him anyway, though.”

Applejack brought up her vox. “Command, can Ah get an ETA on that transport? We’ve got a critter here we’re gonna need to take back to Ferry D.”

“Affirmative, Applejack. The Devilfish you requested are two minutes out. Captured a dragon, did you?”

“Naw. Worse. Much worse,” Applejack groused. “We got changelings.”

Author's Note

Kudos to Hey its that Pony for his idea about how Chrysalis might conquer an Ork tribe.
Kudos to Heitomos for the idea of weaponized giant monster bears getting in on this warfare.
Kudos to me for twisting that last idea around and giving it to the Orks :pinkiecrazy:
And as always, double kudos to EZTP who does most of my art and is great and you should all shower him with views and comments and stuff.

As I do a lot nowadays, apologies for the length of time between chapters. I'm hoping to move it along a little faster next Chappie, because it's going to have a super cool TWILIGHT IN SPAAAACE part that I've been looking forward to, so we'll see.

Harbinger

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 11

Harbinger

****

Eye of Terror (exact location undetermined)

It was often said, by those who traveled there and yet maintained their sanity, that the Eye of Terror was more akin to a sea of nightmares than even the Warp itself.

The Warp was a place of raw psychic power. Sheer energy churning in an endless void. Swarms of daemons, pulsing currents of energy, and pooled reflections of mortal souls filled the ocean of madness. Violent, primordial, and possessed of a hateful, discordant intelligence all its own.

And yet, the Warp could be predictable in its own way. It tides were reliable enough for millions to ply its currents at any given moment. Its wrath was unfocused and immaterial enough to be held at bay with the humans’ science or the Orks’ belligerent will. There were entities within the Warp that controlled its power to a great degree, but that control was limited.

The Eye of Terror was another thing entirely.

A half-way collision point between the Warp and the material universe, it was a place in which reality itself constantly warred with the psychic horror of a catastrophe ten thousand years old. The birth of Slaanesh – the Eldar’s most dramatic and lethal mistake – was, in many ways, still in progress within that hateful realm. Within the Eye time passed unnaturally, in fits and starts, and often uncoupled itself from the consciousness of those within. Some regions of the Eye still re-lived the apocalyptic turmoil of its creation, over and over again, as the screams of a billion Eldar fell away to ashen silence. The tension between reality and the Empyrean eating away at it left the Eye in a state of constant struggle on the atomic level and beyond. Nowhere else in the galaxy, not even the infamous Maelstrom, could orchestrate such constant, comprehensive violence. The creatures of the Warp held more power here than during their incursions into the Materium, but even their control waxed and waned catastrophically while the material universe fought their essence from within.

The planets of the Eye of Terror were more stable, to a point. Each daemon world was a nexus of relative sanity where the laws of physics usually held sway and life was hostile rather than in a state of impossible, constant destruction. The flow of time was generally constant, matter reacted as expected, and there weren’t THAT many spontaneous incursions of bloodthirsty monsters. These worlds were possible to survive on and colonize, although they tended to be more horrific and lethal than the most savage death world.

It was into this shrieking tempest that the Harvest of Steel sailed with its fleet in its wake. The daemon ship was its own Navigator, sensing the tides of the Empyrean and riding out the turbulent currents. It needed no safe passage into the Eye itself, and could guide its fleet’s path through the outer reaches of the Eye without needing to challenge the fortifications of Cadia.

Indeed, the Eye of Terror was the Harvest’s natural territory, much more so than either the relatively peaceful, empty void of the Materium or the furious psychic sea of the Warp. It shared the Eye’s peculiar half-way nature between living daemonhood and inert metals. The skill and forbidden knowledge of the Iron Warriors’ Warpsmiths – not least Solon himself – turned that crude, primordial struggle between the Real and Warp-borne into a symbiotic reliance.

The daemonic constantly hunted the living in a hateful, angry stupor. The living fought back, pushed through fear to construct armor and weapons. The Chaos Space Marines saw this conflict, and like always, saw potential where others observed only ruin.

The 38th Company had returned.

Harvest of Steel – psionic isolation cell

A bell chime came from the wall, and Twilight Sparkle instantly perked up.

“Twilight Sparkle, we are approaching Medrengard’s orbital dockyards. You are now free to move about the ship.” Gaela’s voice came from the vox caster on the wall, and Twilight immediately jumped to her hooves.

“Gaela! Perfect! Wait for me! I’ll go with you!” the Princess shouted while her horn began to glow.

Spike was resting on the side of the chamber, and he groaned and started pushing himself up while Twilight’s armor materialized. “Are we there yet?”

“Yes! We’ve finally made it!” Twilight was visibly giddy as she levitated the main cell locking lever to the open position. “We’re going to see a whole new planet, Spike! We may be the first Equestrians to EVER set foot on an alien world!”

A clunk and a hiss came from the door, and then it slid open. Gaela waited calmly on the other side, axe in hand as usual.

Twilight quickly walked up next to the Techpriest, grinning. “Where are we going? What should we do? Can I go down to the planet’s surface? Are monsters going to try to kill me there? Because if not, I really want to go to the planet’s surface!”

Gaela waited for Spike to stumble over sleepily, and then she tapped the dragon on the head with a servo arm. “Wake up. Keep pace with us and stay close.” Then she turned around and started walking down the hall.

Spike quickly shook his head, and then dashed after Gaela. Twilight kept pace more easily with the Dark Techpriest and patiently awaited answers to her questions.

“You may have the opportunity to descend to the planet’s surface, although I would not recommend it,” Gaela finally replied. “The Harvest of Steel is safer.”

“How much safer? Because the Harvest really isn’t that safe,” Spike pointed out.

“Difficult to quantify as I am, as always, of a uniquely valuable human class. This exposes me to far less arbitrary violence than it would most other mortals,” Gaela responded. “Based on reports of casualties and estimates as to their various causes – and an expansion to estimate casualties gone unreported – I would estimate your chances of survival at eighty percent.”

Twilight and Spike blinked.

“Well, that’s a pretty high number!” Spike said cheerfully.

Twilight was less cheerful. “Uh… can you break that figure down a little bit? What if I keep to secure areas? Or only move with an escort?”

“The figure represents your aggregate chances of returning to the Harvest alive after being dispatched to the surface,” Gaela reiterated. “It does not suggest you will return uninjured.” She stopped talking, unwilling to clarify the number further.

Twilight quickly felt her initial excitement wane, and she lowered her head while she followed Gaela through the halls. Gaela glanced back at her.

“I see you have a new trophy,” the Dark Acolyte said suddenly.

Twilight perked her head up again. Attached to the chain that crossed her right-side shoulder pauldron were the heavy bolter shells that represented her mission successes. One was for her aid in capturing the Tau base. Another was for leading the destruction of a Gargant and another for the Ork Space Hulk. Whereas those bullets were all the color of mundane iron, however, a golden heavy bolter shell hung at the end.

“Warsmith Solon said I actually deserved a normal, legitimate reward for destroying an Imperial cruiser, but since he already started doing the heavy bolter on a chain thing with us ponies he just gave me a gold one instead.” Twilight flushed through her fur and grinned bashfully. “Well, that, and he promised to build me another Twiblade-“

“Force harmonizer,” Spike and Gaela corrected immediately, in perfect stereo.

“… Yes. Another one of those,” the purple pony grumbled. “I lost the first one while escaping from the ship.”

“A meager sacrifice for so great a kill, yet I mourn the loss of such an artifact,” Gaela said wistfully. “Regardless, you are to be commended, Sparkle. To have brought low an Imperial warship is a great boon to the forces of Chaos.”

“Heh heh! Thanks!” Twilight grinned and flushed darker. “I mean, obviously it’s terrible that all of those people died, though.”

“Hardly.”

“And I still feel that there must be some way to reconcile the hostility of this ‘Imperium’ aside from total war. These are humans, not Orks...”

“Naïve.”

“To even be in such a desperate situation where the only means of survival is the murder of tens of thousands of people reflects-“

“Sparkle, you had almost a week to wallow in your useless guilt. Don’t make me lock you back in the isolation center,” Gaela threatened blandly.

Twilight grimaced. “It’s not guilt, Gaela. Not really. I recognize there was probably nothing I could have done in that situation to save more lives than I did.” She took a deep breath. “But I don’t like fighting. I hate war. I have to believe there’s another way to deal with adversity besides destruction and hatred.”

“This is your first excursion beyond your planet’s orbit,” Gaela pointed out, “you will learn better soon enough.”

They entered an intersection, and Twilight was immediately struck by how busy the ship was. Iron Warriors ran through the corridors, dodging around slaves and servitors and the large crates they carried. Dark Techpriests scurried about with Scavurel in escort. For the first time since Twilight had boarded the Harvest of Steel, the vessel seemed busy and active.

A central pylon stood in the middle of the area, and Gaela’s optic augment flashed when she approached it. A holo-screen flickered over the surface, and she begin navigating the access runes.

“Behold, the fortress world of Medrengard.” The Dark Techpriest swiped a hand to the side.

An auspex view flashed onto the screen, and Twilight gasped at the sight of the planet they orbited. A huge, rocky orb without a spot of ocean or forest, the surface was a massive gray sphere covered in veins of yellow. Giant needle-like towers reached for the sky, and shrouds of eerie dark red clouds swirled over the atmosphere. It was a distinctly unpleasant-looking planet, all told, and far less impressive than Gaela’s picture of Starhaven that she had shown Twilight after they’d first met. But this was the first new planet she had actually traveled to and might yet set hooves upon.

Around Medrengard were great metal arches that made up the dockyards. With a gesture Gaela zoomed in on them, showing the vast structures in greater detail. Enormous skeletal husks sat within the docks, surrounded by giant servo arms, construction automata, and loose plates of metal waiting to be secured into place. Other bays contained damaged Chaos warships; vessels shaped like serrated spearheads of varying size covered in Chaos Stars, foreboding spikes, and sinister statues.

Twilight was entranced. She reared up and placed one boot upon the pylon to hold herself while she stared at the dockyards more closely. The smaller ships of the 38th Company fleet were moving in ahead of the Harvest, swooping into smaller docks for unloading. She could recognize them easily; the fleet’s vessels were of starkly different designs and lacked the open embellishments of Chaos that an Imperial vessel could immediately pick out as “heretical.”

Gaela swiped her hand again, and the image shifted to the side some more. “We’re lining up to the access terminal. All Mechanicus personnel will be called to the storage bays and forges to manage the-“

The holo-screen flickered suddenly, and then turned off.

Then all the lumens in the hall turned off.

Twilight felt a chill down her spine as everything went dark, and she instantly dropped down from the pylon. “Gaela, be careful! This could be another daemon attack!”

Her horn started to glow, and that glow intensified until it illuminated her surroundings. She turned her head to the side.

Gaela wasn’t there.

Twilight blinked. Spike wasn’t there either, despite him staying close to the Dark Techpriest. Nor were there any Iron Warriors, ratings, or anyone at all. Before this area was bustling with activity, and now she saw no one.

“G-Gaela? Spike? Wh… Where did you go?” she asked nervously, turning around in a full circle.

A clunking noise came from above, and Twilight’s heart jumped into her throat. The ceiling lumens began to hum, and then they slowly flickered back on.

Twilight turned around again, her eyes wide and her heart pounding. This entire section of the ship was deserted. There was nobody. No people, no mobile machines, nor remains of people or machines. Even the crates that were being moved had mysteriously vanished.

“Am… Am I dreaming? Maybe I’m dreaming.” Twilight whispered to herself. She felt like that possibility really should have calmed her down, but it didn’t.

Suddenly aware of an unusual chill, she levitated her helmet up over her head. The alicorn hesitated, her eyes darting back and forth, afraid for even a moment to have her vision obscured. Then she pulled her helmet down over her horn.

The visor blinked on immediately even while the in-built cogitator connected with her neural socket and the helmet seal. Soon data runes scrolled across her view screen.

“Come on, come on…” Twilight backed up down the hall while her systems loaded, waiting for access to her vox.

The view screen stuttered. Icons blurred, and then vanished. The words “NO DATA” flashed in the corner. Then it flashed in another corner. It flashed again, this time just slightly off-center.

Twilight restrained a scream as the warnings proliferated, and she started running down the hall toward the nearest set of blast doors. Her visor continued to bring up useless error messages even as she reached the control panel.

“Open. Open. OPEN!” she snapped, navigating the touch-controls with her telekinesis. Her signum identifier was registered, but for some reason the internal locks weren’t disengaging. Then the controls went dark, as if the power had been cut again.

The doors slid open.

“… Sparkle, is something the matter?” Gaela asked.

She was standing just behind the open blast doors, staring down at the purple pony. Spike was next to her, looking just as perplexed. Twilight had her legs spaced, her wings spread, and her horn glowing like she was expecting a fight.

Twilight stared up at Gaela. Her visor bracketed the Dark Techpriest normally, and all of the usual runes were back. There now seemed to be nothing wrong with her suit systems.

“Gaela? Is… Is that you?” Twilight asked weakly.

Gaela quirked her eyebrow. “Who else might I be?”

The data coming back from her visor feed was quite conclusive, so Twilight allowed herself to relax slightly. “Do you know what happened just now? How did you get in the next room?”

“We walked there,” Spike replied, scratching his head. “Then we realized you weren’t with us, so we turned around, and here you are.”

Twilight looked back into the room she had just left. It was still empty, but the pylon’s holo-screen was flickering sporadically now. She shuddered and stepped into the next ship section.

“It was… strange. The lights seemed to go out for a few seconds, and then everyone was gone,” the mare explained. “My visor and the other machines weren’t working.” She started walking down the hall, and the others followed.

“I don’t remember that,” Spike confessed. “Are you sure you’re okay, Twi? Do you… wanna wait in the isolation cell for now?”

Twilight bit her lip behind her helmet. She really, REALLY didn’t want to do that. “No. No, I’ll be fine. This is just a weird little hallucination, and-“

“Doubtful,” Gaela mumbled.

Twilight stumbled to a stop. “Doubtful? What do you doubt?”

“Doubtful it was a hallucination. Writing such things off as illusions can be fatal here,” Gaela continued, halting and turning toward the pony.

“I… I don’t understand. I CLEARLY had a completely different experience than you two just now. I must have blacked out, or-“

“Or you were subjected to a sudden Warp phenomena,” Gaela explained. “They can cause sudden shifts of a temporal, physical, kinetic, and psychological nature. And of course, we cannot necessarily rule out harmless hallucinations due to stress or psychocontamination either. Such phenomena are fairly common, and almost always dangerous.”

Twilight gulped. “So… SHOULD I return to the isolation chamber?”

“It would be safer, but less productive,” Gaela admitted, shrugging her heavy shoulders. Then she turned on her heel and continued down the halls.

Twilight followed quickly behind the Dark Acolyte and Spike rushed to keep up with them. “It’s not that I’m unwilling to face a little danger in order to see Medrengard! But, you know… I’d like more context on those exact dangers, if possible.”

“Very well. Time and causality may suddenly be suspended without warning or obvious remedy. When this occurs, do not panic. Your fear may attract nearby Warp entities,” Gaela said blandly. “There is decreased likelihood these creatures or phenomena possess an active, hostile agenda, as opposed to your experience in Warp space. The Eye of Terror is not the Warp, and is not the daemon’s natural home. Like creatures of material flesh, it struggles to survive here, although its struggles are very different.”

They reached another doorway just as it opened, and then quickly stepped aside for a squad of Iron Warriors marching the opposite way.

“Okay…” Twilight breathed, feeling slightly overwhelmed. “I can deal with this. I mean, magic is the essence of compromised physical law and diverted causality!” A joyless laugh came from the mare’s vox grille. “So… do you have any other advice?”

“Try to stay in groups,” Gaela replied. “Concentrated psychic energies tend to impress their expectations upon the surrounding space and render the environment more physically stable.”

Twilight grimaced. “There were a fair number of people in the other room when it went dark…”

“It may not be enough. It may happen that nothing you do is enough.”

The Iron Warriors passed, and Gaela walked through the blast doors. Twilight and Spike hesitated nervously, glancing back at the passage where they had come from. Then they followed her.

“… Just remember,” the Dark Techpriest suddenly continued. “If the harm is real, then the threat is real. If the threat is real… then it can be killed.”

Gaela, Twilight, and Spike proceeded down the corridor in silence after that. Vox traffic flitted across the noosphere, filling Gaela’s internal channels with noise. Twilight’s vox links were more selective – prioritizing combat alerts – so her visor was less cluttered, but she too was impressed by the level of activity present now that the flagship was making berth.

“The main efforts of the fleet will be divided into logistics, rearming, and leadership. Warsmith Solon will negotiate for new warriors and data in exchange for our resources, while Magos Kaelith contacts the Dark Mechanicus for technology exchanges.”

“What will we be doing?” Twilight asked.

“I’m sure the Iron Warriors would rather not show off a heavily-armed alien psyker in our central bastion,” Gaela explained. “You’ll be kept out of the way, working security with the unloading teams.”

A vox link connected to Twilight’s helmet. “Princesh Shparkle! Welcome to Medrengard! Home fortresh of the mighty Iron Warrior Legion! I trusht the trip wash shatishfactory?”

The alicorn halted and quickly linked Gaela’s vox connection before she replied. “The Warp certainly was… different when traveling inside a giant monster than it was with the Elements of Harmony. It actually had more daemons trying to kill me, though.”

“A common hazard of Chaosh. You get ushed to it,” Solon replied. “Anyway, you will be joining me when we deshend to the planet’sh shurface. Proceed to the marked embarkation airlock.”

A directional beacon appeared on Twilight’s visor, but she was initially too stunned to notice. “Wh-What? I’m… going with you?”

“Affirmative. You came all thish way, after all. And were almosht shlaughtered for your trouble! Did you think I’d make you wait in the ship?”

“Uh…” Twilight looked up at Gaela.

Gaela looked back down at Twilight for a few seconds. “I am as surprised as you are. This is a rare honor, Sparkle. And, if I might add, substantially reduces your chance of suffering fatal trauma during our visit.”

Twilight didn’t really feel much safer with Solon than Gaela, but conceded the point. She was getting a ride to the planet’s surface, and would get to see first-hoof what kind of activities occupied the Warsmith of the fleet when he made berth.

She took a deep breath. “Yes, Warsmith. I’ll be there soon.”

“Shplendid! I musht inshisht that the young dragon remain with the Dark Acolyte and aboard the Harvesht, however. Hish eshtimated value hash increashed shubshtantially shince he demonshtrated the ability to shend meshagesh inshtantaneoushly acrosh the galaxy.” The vox link cut out.

Twilight and Gaela both turned to stare down at Spike. Spike stared back into their visors blankly, having only heard their side of the conversation.

“What? What are you looking at me for?”

“… Nothing, Spike. Never mind.” Twilight tried to banish the many curious theories that came to mind when hearing that Spike had unique value for his magical teleportation breath. Not least the question of whether his being kept safe while she descended suggested he was more valuable than she was.

“Goodbye, you two. Stay safe!” Twilight turned and galloped away.

“I don’t see the purpose of such a command,” Gaela replied even as Twilight ran out of earshot. “Our safety is largely a function of random chance, not a matter-“

“Gaela. It’s just a thing ponies say when they leave, not a literal command,” Spike interrupted.

“Ah. One of those ‘social skills’ you refer to in interpersonal pleasantries?”

“Exactly! We’ll get you to understand basic conversation one of these days!” Spike said cheerfully, continuing down the hall.

He proceeded for several steps before he realized he didn’t hear the heavy tread of Gaela’s power armored boots following him. He turned to look, afraid that he had suddenly fallen into a Warp phenomenon like Twilight had.

No such thing had happened. Gaela was standing in place, staring down the hall in the direction Twilight had left.

“Gaela? Is something wrong?”

The Dark Techpriest hesitated, still transfixed. “I… I had a premonition just now. It was…” Her voice was a whisper, and lacking in its normal strength.

Then she turned around. “It is nothing. Let us go. There is much work to do.”

****

Relay shuttle – descent to Medrengard, bastion complex Heer-Ven

Twilight had imagined, perhaps foolishly, that fortresses didn’t come much bigger than Ferrous Dominus.

She considered it simply a matter of a limiting function. A defensive point was only worth as much as the most valuable thing there that someone would want to take or destroy. She only considered Ferrous Dominus to be a “properly” fortified bastion both because it was a highly productive manufacturing point and because the Iron Warriors’ enemies had proven that such overwhelming force was needed for its defenses. Twilight also knew that other complexes developed by humanity had been applied on a planetary scale, such as agriculture and industrial production, but she considered that reasonable. After all, such complexes actually produced something of value.

So the sight of a true “fortress world” was both awe-inspiring and jarring to her sensibilities.

Outside the window of the shuttle, countless black spires rose into the sky, connected by massive chains. The base of the spires were raised upon a seemingly endless grid of ferrocrete palisades, which merely formed the top of the larger castle. Cannons and gun batteries surrounded the fortification, and the land around the outer walls was covered with razor wire and open kill zones.

Beyond the no-man’s land around the fortress was… another fortress. On each side. Each fortress was surrounded by more fortresses, which were in turn surrounded by more fortresses. The structures weren’t identical; some were larger, others boasted more weaponry, and some were over-decorated with extensive caution chevrons, bones, or chains. But each one presented an impressive bulwark on its own, only to be surrounded by more bulwarks. Medrengard made Ferrous Dominus look almost quaint for possessing facilities aside from bunkers and barracks.

Twilight turned her head to try to see where they were headed. An enormous flat-topped pyramid stood in the distance, bristling with artillery cannons and towers that crackled with energy. As the shuttle sped toward it, Twilight could see that the Legion’s Iron Skull emblem was cut into the top. A marker on her visor painted the structure and attached a name: Heer-Ven. A simple, cryptic designation, barely more than a mere number. But for all the drama the facility lacked in title it made up for in size and power; a common theme for the Iron Warriors.

While she was taking in the sights, a red flash of light appeared at one end of the shuttle and then swept through its interior. Twilight’s visor raised an alert, and she glanced back at the other passengers on the shuttle.

“Thish ish Warshmith Sholon, confirming landing authority.” The Warsmith sat in the middle of the vessel, surrounded by hololiths as usual. Sliver stood in a corner, leaning on his hammer. Three Warpsmiths stood together, while Dark Magos Kaelith was curled up in the back, chittering to himself in Binaric Cant.

“Affirmative, the unregishtered bio-form hash been cleared,” Solon continued, speaking to a voice only he could hear. “Negative. That ish not the cashe. Becaushe I ordered it. Negative. It ish well within my command authority.”

Several of the other passengers turned to look at Twilight. All of them could guess which “bio-form” was causing a processing delay.

“Shubmitting override codesh now. Negative, my authority shupercedesh hish.” Solon swept one hololith away, and another one flickered into place. “Good. Don’t washte my time on thish again.” The shuttle trembled and turned, heading in toward its landing site.

“Warsmith, is everything okay?” Twilight asked, dropping down from the window.

“Yesh, yesh, it’sh fine,” the Chaos Lord insisted with a rumbling chuckle. “After we land, you and Shliver will accompany me and the Warpshmithsh. Magosh, you shee to negotiating for your own allotment.”

The Warpsmiths nodded. A crackling noise came from Kaelith. Sliver growled.

“Thiss doess not ssit well with me, Warssmith. We should not be here.”

Twilight tilted her head to the side. “We shouldn’t?”

“He meansh thish particular fortresh. It’sh unushual, that’sh all,” Solon said. “Normally I negotiate with Warshmith Lanz, the Mashter of the Keepsh. We were told to report here, inshtead.”

“I’m not familiar with the command hierarchy outside the fleet itself… do you actually report to anyone? Do you have a superior?” Twilight asked.

“There are a number of informal rulesh regarding my operationsh and activitiesh. Ash far ash having a direct shuperior… that’sh a more complicated queshtion.”

“The Primarch Perturabo obvioussly holdss ultimate authority over the Legion,” Sliver added, peering out the window, “but he isssuess few orderss. The daemon Primarch hass… other goalss that are not for uss to know. Asside from him, the Warssmithss lack rank with which to order each other. However, there are… caveatss.”

“I wouldn’t worry about the conduct of my peersh, though. They sheem largely content to ignore me sho long ash the iron continuesh to flow,” Solon chuckled.

“Which it hassn’t been, as we are behind sschedule and under quota,” Sliver hissed.

“Oh, come now Shliver. It’sh no big deal,” Solon scoffed.

The shuttle dipped suddenly, coming in for a landing.

“Observatory: It still perplexes why you decided to bring the xeno witch with us,” Kaelith blurted. Numerous glittering green lights swiveled in Twilight’s direction, peeking out from the cyborg’s hood.

“Why not? I thought she’d like it,” Solon said.

“I do!” Twilight interjected.

“And she certainly desherved shome kind of reward, ash she wash inshtrumental to shurviving the encounter with the Imperial fleet.”

“I agree!” Twilight piped up again.

“Executive: SILENCE, xeno.” Kaelith turned toward her, and a blast of static came from his vocalizer.

“Gah!” Twilight’s visor went dark, and her power armor systems immediately shut down. “Stop DOING that!”

“Dark Magosh, you have been in rather poor humor lately.” Solon pointed briefly at Twilight, instantly overriding Kaelith’s command signums. “Thish petulant bullying ish beneath you.” Twilight’s armor booted back up, and she glared at the cyborg through her visor.

Kaelith retorted with a series of bleeps followed by a low-pitched shriek, and then he turned away. The Warpsmiths glanced at each other in confusion, and Sliver chuckled quietly to himself.

Solon shook his head and stepped over to Twilight, looming over the armored alicorn. “I think it’sh shafe to shay thish ishn’t the purposhe I had intended when I inshtalled shafety killshwitchesh in your armor engramsh. Hold shtill.” He raised his left hand over her helmet, his metal fingertips holding just millimeters from contact.

Twilight froze as commanded, and her eyes went wide when streams of code started pouring across her visor. After a few seconds the stream slowed down, and then segments flashed and disappeared. He was re-writing her suit engrams.

“You’re getting rid of the killswitch?” Twilight asked somewhat breathlessly.

“Not quite. I’m jusht altering it. Only I will have the shignum key to activate it now.”

Kaelith twisted his head around, his entire body curving around like a snake. A metallic shriek came from the Dark Magos.

“If you abushe your toolsh, then I’m going to take them away!” Solon snapped back. “I have enough petty infighting among my circle ash it ish!” He pulled his hand away, and the code vanished.

“Thank Nurgle Telliss decided not to come,” Sliver mumbled.

The shuttle lurched to the side suddenly, and a trembling groan came from the bulkheads. The various post-humans barely budged, possessing preternatural reflexes and being long used to the tilt and shifts of aerial transports. Twilight yelped and started to tip over, barely remembering at the last moment to mag-lock her boots to the floor.

Another shudder went through the bulkheads, and then a series of heavy clanking noises. Then, silence.

“Princesh Shparkle,” Solon began, grabbing hold of the access latch. “Welcome… to Medrengard.” He pulled the lever, and with a hiss and a loud creak, the hatch opened.

Twilight gasped as the entry ramp yawned open, affording her first view from the ground of a true alien world.

“…………”

After a few seconds, she turned her head up and to the side toward Solon.

“So, normally, when you have a dramatic unveiling like this, it’s to show off something beautiful, or really awe-inspiring, or… well, new, at least,” Twilight explained while she stared into the hangar. “These are just a bunch of grimy metal corridors.”

“Yesh. That’sh Medrengard for you,” Solon agreed. His chassis lifted himself up higher, and the Warsmith walked over and past Twilight. “Metal wallsh beyond metal wallsh. An endlesh labyrinth of iron, fire, and mishery.” He headed down the ramp.

“Home,” Sliver said simply while he stepped past the armored pony.

Twilight shifted to the side to let the massive Iron Warrior pass. “I thought our planet was your home now.”

“Contra: Centaur III is an outpost with a unique defensive system. Any attachment not proportional to its strategic value is likely attributable to emotional error.” Kaelith scuttled by after Sliver, his numerous green optics shining down on the mare while he passed. “Addendum: Pain is corollary to sentiment. The Iron Warriors have cast aside such things. Conclusive: This is why they are superior as masters, and why both you and I serve.”

“It wasn’t a callous detachment to our home world and our people that stopped an Ork WAAAGH in its tracks!” Twilight snapped, speaking to the cyborg’s back.

Kaelith didn’t respond, turning away and heading down a different corridor than the Iron Warriors. Twilight fumed silently until she saw the Warpsmiths descend the ramp, and then rushed after Solon. She didn’t want to be left behind.

As she trotted through the bare steel halls, Twilight couldn’t get over a persisting sense of disappointment. The corridors were large enough for a Dreadnought and almost completely bare, with a slight sheen of moisture on the floor and a buildup of dark filth in the corners and seams between plates. Occasionally one bulkhead panel in a sequence of ten or so would have a relief of a Chaos Star or the Iron Skull, but even by Iron Warriors standards the terrain looked bare and purely functional from the inside. Almost suspiciously so, frankly. She was on a daemon world in the Eye of Terror. Just moving through this region had caused horrifying distortions of reality inside the Harvest. And when it came to hiding incredible power behind a formidable chunk of metal, nobody did it better than the Iron Warriors.

Then again, those surprises tended to be unpleasant in the extreme, and Gaela had been clear that visiting this place was potentially lethal. So maybe it was better this way?

“That’s Chaos for you,” the pony chuckled ruefully. “Unpredictable even in how terrible it is.”

“There are many vile wonderss on Medrengard,” Sliver said, having overhead her. “From the Ssteel Terrorss of Grallit to Continent Four’ss acid ssea. But we are not here as exploratorss or pilgrimss, xeno. There iss bussinesss to conduct.”

“Yes, of course,” Twilight mumbled in reply. “I’m glad I even got the chance to come along.”

“It would be a shame if you came all thish way by mishtake and then didn’t even shet hoof on the planet,” Solon added.

“Is there anything I should do to help?” Twilight asked the Warsmith.

“No, not at all. Thish ish quite a routine matter for ush. Jusht don’t wander off.” A chuckle came from his vox grille. “We may be in one of the nicer partsh of Medrengard, but it’sh shtill not quite shafe.”

“Nicer?” Twilight’s snout wrinkled.

“In a… behavioral ssensse,” Sliver mused aloud. “Thiss region iss well protected and accidentss uncommon. There are more impresssive landss, but they are… volatile.”

They reached a set of blast doors, and Solon passed his hand over a skull set in the wall nearby. The eye sockets filled with red light, and the blast doors started grinding open in that slow, noisy manner that such barriers tended to work.

Twilight wasn’t surprised at all to see there was an Iron Warrior waiting on the other side. This was, after all, an Iron Warrior fortress world. The Chaos Space Marine didn’t even seem all that unique compared to the two Space Marines that accompanied her. He wore standard pattern power armor, with the exception that his right arm and shoulder was bare. Rather than being of flesh or a clearly mechanical limb, the exposed arm seemed to be made of a silvery metal that looked and moved like skin and muscle. He wore no helmet, and had a large optical implant covering his left eye.

It was remarkable, then, the reaction he received from the Company’s leaders. Solon lurched backward, his legs screeching as they reversed locomotion and then braked. Sliver’s response was more subtle, and he recoiled slightly before moving quickly out of the new Iron Warrior’s way, assuming the other Marine was looking to pass. Twilight had never seen the Chaos Lord move to accommodate someone else, even Solon himself.

The Iron Warrior, for his part, did not approach or take any particular action at first, glancing at Solon, and then Sliver. His augmetic eye found its way to Twilight next, and here it lingered but a few seconds before he faced Solon again.

“Hello, Solon. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Warshmith Honshou? You are receiving me?” Solon asked. Between the natural distortion of his helmet vox and his slur it was difficult to determine his tone, but Twilight thought the Warsmith sounded nervous.

“I am. We have much to discuss.” The other Warsmith made a shooing motion with his metal hand. “Your aides may go. I’m sure they have much work to do, and you will not require their assistance.”

Sliver and the Warpsmiths shared a glance. After a few seconds, Sliver nodded. The Warpsmiths promptly turned on their heels and walked off, clearly eager to leave the confrontation.

“I will ssee to the trading of our main material sstoress,” Sliver said. “I take it thiss iss not what you have been called upon to disscusss. By your leave, Warssmith Honssou.” He followed the Warpsmiths, the heavy tread of his boots echoing along the corridor.

Twilight didn’t receive any kind of order, so she remained put. Solon’s legs shifted uncertainly, rising and then lowering back down without moving him anywhere.

Honsou started to turn around, but his augmetic eye again lingered on Twilight and he paused.

“What is that?” he rumbled, pointing at the alicorn.

“Thish ish Princesh Twilight Shparkle, my pet pshyker,” Solon said.

“Pet?” Twilight asked in alarm. “I’m not a-“

Solon interrupted her. “She’ll be shtaying with me sho long ash I’m planetshide. Ish that a problem, Warshmith?”

Honsou didn’t reply, walking up to Twilight and staring down at her. Twilight still wanted to protest being characterized as a “pet,” but decided that perhaps it was safest to remain quiet for now.

“An equine base psyker? And you even armored it.” Honsou leaned down, cupping Twilight’s helmeted chin within his silvery hand and tilting her head up. Twilight remained silent, hardly daring to breathe while she stared up into the Iron Warrior’s eye. As she waited for him to let go, her visor brought up a brief analysis of the arm holding her; a living metal construct, apparently. The same regenerating alloy Big Macintosh had been augmented with.

“… Fascinating.” Honsou finally let go of Twilight and turned around with a chuckle. “You always show up with the most interesting playthings, Solon.” He began walking down the hall again.

“I’ll take that ash a compliment,” Solon replied.

“Oh, it was intended as one,” Honsou agreed. “That is, in fact, what we’re here to discuss... more or less.” He reached a second set of blast doors and glanced at the control relay with his optical augmetic. It blinked green, and the doors started to open.

“We? You mean you and I?” Solon asked.

“No,” Honsou replied as the doors yawned open.

The room beyond was a small meeting hall lit by a panel of dim lumens on the walls. It bore considerably more furnishing than the parts of the fortress Twilight had seen thus far, in that it had a large table fashioned in the shape of a Chaos Star and several big chairs slotted in-between the arrow points.

Six Iron Warriors were already seated. They were all fairly distinct, with the heavy augmetics and more elaborate gear that marked them as being of high rank. Power weapons, mechatendrils, and macabre icons surrounded each of the Chaos Space Marines, and half of them wore Terminator armor.

“Is… there shome kind of problem?” Solon asked uncertainly. This was obvious moving further and further outside the scope of what he was expecting.

The Iron Warriors stared back at him wordlessly. Those without helmets revealed grim scowls while they sat and waited. Those with helmets, which ran a fascinating gamut of exotic and heavily modified armor styles, glowered from behind visors of a harsh, bloody red.

“A problem? Perhaps,” Honsou murmured while he walked around the table. “But I prefer to think of it as an opportunity.” He reached the only empty chair and sat down. “Come, Solon. There is much to discuss.” He pointed to the only empty section of the table, which incidentally lacked a chair. Its intended occupant, obviously, had no need to sit.

Solon slowly walked forward, but Twilight hung back for a moment to scan the Chaos Space Marines. As she pulled up their names she didn’t expect to see any she recognized, although she did tag an Astartes that went by the name of Warsmith Lanz. He was, evidently, the Marine Solon normally dealt with. Other than that, the names were unfamiliar. Warsmith Toramino. Warsmith Koros. Warsmith Zhorisch. Warsmith Kataris. Warsmith Ironclaw.

The most obvious common factor was their rank: Warsmith. Every Iron Warrior in this room could claim to be Solon’s equal, to one extent or another. Twilight felt a knot form in her stomach.

“What is that thing doing in here?” demanded one of the Chaos Marines, pointing a clawed finger at Twilight. “This is a war conference, not a bestiary!”

“Now, Brothers, let’s not quibble over such petty things,” Honsou said with a disingenuous chuckle. “Let Solon have his pet. For now. We have much more important matters to discuss.”

“Do we?” Solon asked after settling into his spot. It was a fairly awkward fit, given that his legs covered a much larger area than his peers, and two of his front legs rose up to brace against the table surface. “I musht confesh I’m not certain ash to the context of thish meeting. Did I mish a data package?” Twilight approached slowly from behind him, keeping the bulk of the Warsmith between her and the other Iron Warriors while keeping a good view of the table.

“No, Brother. You did not.” Honsou gestured across the table to the Iron Warrior that Twilight’s visor had marked as Warsmith Kataris. “I believe some introductions are in order. This is Warsmith Kataris.”

“Promoted from the ranksh of the 63rd Grand Battalion after shome three hundred shtandard sholar cyclesh of shervice, if my recordsh are accurate,” Solon said. “Very impreshive for one sho young.”

Kataris chuckled, but did not speak. Of all the Warsmiths present, he had the least elaborate wargear by far. A suit of slightly embellished power armor, a standard-issue power sword, and a bolt pistol made up his basic armament. A servo arm hung over his shoulder, bearing a drill on the end in-between a set of pincers.

“Warsmith Kataris has been very busy as of late,” Honsou continued. “His warband was largely untested and poorly armed when it ventured out of the Eye of Terror. But under his leadership it has accomplished great things.”

“Three worlds fell before my armies,” Kataris snarled, swiping his hand in front of him. A hololith set in the center of the table flickered to life, displaying a trio of planets. “All of them garrisoned. Each of them planetary hubs of great value to the pawns of the Imperium!”

Data started to appear over the planets, displaying combat flashpoints, fortifications, and cities. Arrows marking deployments and troop movements started criss-crossing the hololithic spheres, moving too fast for Twilight to keep track of. Chaos Stars bloomed over continents, and red X’s appeared over vast cities.

“One by one, the Imperium’s defenses fell. Each counter-attack broke uselessly against my defenses. Every bastion was cracked open like a mere egg. Dozens of Imperial ships raced to the rescue of their doomed world, only to be cut apart within my traps!” Kataris stood up from his seat and clenched one clawed hand into a fist. “Billions of Imperial citizens have been sacrificed by my order, their cities sacked and defenders slaughtered!”

At this, Twilight Sparkle gasped.

Kataris stopped speaking, apparently caught off-guard. A Chaos war council wasn’t usually given to reactions of shock or horror, and the alicorn mare suddenly found herself the subject of seven bemused stares.

“Oh, don’t mind her. She’sh new to mash genocide,” Solon assured them with a slight chuckle. “Pleashe, Warshmith Katarish, go on.”

“Let’s not,” growled Toramino. “I’ve heard enough of your boasts. We all know why we’re here. Let’s get on with it!”

“Ah, actually, I don’t know why I’m here,” Solon pointed out, pointing upward. “It sheemsh clear you were waiting for me. Ish there shomething that requiresh my attention?”

At this, several of the Warsmiths seemed to relax. Kataris sat back down, and a few of the others leaned back and laced the fingers of their gauntlets.

“Warsmith Kataris has indeed found great success,” Honsou continued, “but at a cost. His forces, though victorious, were depleted. His fleet escaped retribution, fleeing the sector before Imperial battlegroups arrived. But in crossing into the Eye of Terror, his Grand Battalion suffered grievously.”

Ironclaw chuckled. “The tide of the Eye turned against him. Despite his many pleas and bloody gifts to the Dark Gods, the Warp nearly tore his army asunder.” He turned his helmet toward Kataris. “How many ships did you lose to the void, Brother Kataris? How many dead, ingloriously, left drifting in the Empyrean to burn in the Seas of Chaos?”

Kataris clenched his fist again, glowering at the other Iron Warrior silently. Unlike Ironclaw, he wore no helmet, revealing a series of deep burn scars over the right side of his face. His right eye was a surprisingly subtle augmetic; a bionic eyeball, set in a largely unmodified socket, and glowing with a faint blue light from its iris.

Honsou grunted. “Warsmith Ironclaw, there is no need to taunt our brother. His victories are considerable, and his losses blameless. We look now to the future of the Long War, and how we may replicate this success.”

“Very difficult, so long as the Cadian Gate is so well-guarded,” complained Zhorisch. “With the only safe passage in and out of the Eye of Terror protected by the False God’s wretched bulwarks, we rely on the tender mercies of the Warp to see us in and out of the Eye when we wish to bypass Cadia. This risk is not always… tenable.”

“Indeed,” Honsou nodded, drumming the fingers of his living metal hand on the table surface. “And yet, I believe it is in the best interests of the Legion to support Warsmith Kataris in his efforts.” He swept his arm to the side, banishing the planetary hololiths and replacing it with a wide-view multi-sector map. “His aggression and dynamic strategy is… refreshing, I’ve found. I wish to endorse and support his efforts.”

“I shee,” Solon interjected. His optical augmetic turned in its socket with a soft whirr. “I believe I undershtand why you’ve called me here, Warshmithsh. You wish for me to shponshor Warshmith Katarish in hish war effortsh. I preshume that the bulk of my shuppliesh shall go to hish fleet?”

“No,” Honsou replied calmly, “we require a much greater contribution from you, Solon.”

“Then… you wish me to modify hish ship? Sho that he could shafely pierce the veil of the Eye of Terror, ash the Harvesht of Shteel doesh?” Solon guessed. “That could take a dozen sholar cyclesh!”

“Closer,” Honsou’s lips slowly crept into a smirk, “but again, no.”

“Wait, hold on,” Toramino interrupted, leaning forward. “Are you being serious? In but a dozen years, you could modify a ship to travel-“

“Warsmith Toramino,” Honsou said coldly, but firmly. “Now is not the time. Once our business is concluded, Solon will have ample opportunity to aid our war efforts.”

“What are you talking about?” said Warsmith demanded, his voice gaining just the slightest edge. “All I do ish aid your war effortsh! That ish the central remit of the 38th Company!”

Honsou and several other Warsmiths started chuckling.

“It has been decided that this aid is… inadequate,” Honsou said, still smirking.

“What are you going on about? How ish thish inadequate?!” Solon demanded angrily.

“Well, for starters, you have arrived late and under quota,” Honsou said with a hefty shrug. The smirk never left his face.

“’For shtartersh’ indeed! For the inconvenience of a shtandard month and a few megatonhs of shcrap, you wish to censhure me?”

“No, not at all,” Ironclaw rumbled. “We will not… censure you.”

“Let me get to the point, Solon,” Honsou said, his smirk finally disappearing into a grim frown. “We are hereby relegating the 38th Company to Warsmith Kataris, effective immediately.”

“YOU’RE DOING WHAT?!”

To the utter shock of the Iron Warriors, that shout had not come from Solon, but the armored pony standing beside him.

Zhorisch stood, looming high over the table in his gleaming Terminator armor. “Speak out of turn again, xeno beast, and I will be all too happy to end you where you stand.” His voice was like acid, and instantly poured cold water on Twilight’s sudden shock and anger.

Solon looked at Twilight, and then back to the Iron Warrior. “I don’t shee how that wash out of turn. It shounded like Warshmith Honshou wash finished shpeaking.”

The other Warsmiths slowly turned their glares from Twilight over to Solon, waiting silently.

“... Oh! Wait, never mind that! I meant, what do you mean you’re giving my army to Warshmith Katarish!”

“It’s Warsmith Kataris, tinker,” the younger Astartes snarled. “And I’m not much happier than you about this. The 38th is a band of imbeciles and weaklings. It was not my idea to fill my ranks with the Legion’s failures.”

“Then don’t!” Solon retorted. “Thish ish abshurd! How ish Katarish to manage the fleet’sh reshource operationsh?”

“Solon, we do not intend for this to be a punishment. We’re merely solving a problem,” Honsou insisted. “Warsmith Kataris suffers from a shortage of material and warriors. The 38th Company suffers from a shortage of… leadership.”

Solon’s chassis groaned as it lifted him higher, and the Iron Warrior loomed over the table to point at Honsou. “You take that back, you insholent worm,” he snarled. “I will not shtand here and lishten to you inshult my Company Commander! Shliver hash been a flawlesh Shecond, eashily the equal of any shtrategisht here!”

Again, the Warsmiths stared at him silently. Twilight reached up and tapped a boot against Solon’s leg.

“They were talking about you,” Twilight whispered.

Solon started in surprise, and then quickly dropped down again. “Ah. Yesh. I shee. That doesh make shenshe, actually. I shtill object, however.”

“Your fleet in its current capacity makes feeble use of its assets,” Honsou retorted, sweeping his hand over the hololith. The image changed to one of the Harvest of Steel. “The Harvest of Steel, a great daemon-ship of unparalleled capability able to pierce the borders of the Eye at will, is used for petty material raids and ambushes of civilian traffic. Your Company, boasting a wealth of armored support, endless munitions, and a full detachment of the Dark Mechanicus, flits from system to system raiding for industrial scrap and supplies. Commander Sliver – a superb Commander, as you say – languishes under your command, forced to spend his talents on mere piracy.” Honsou shook his head. “This is a waste. There is true war to be fought, worthy enemies to cut down, mighty fortresses to shatter! While the countless lapdogs of the False Emperor march into a thousand mass graves all across this wretched galaxy, why are the Sons of Perturabo content to brood behind bastion walls?”

“But I don’t brood behind bashtion wallsh! I sherve my Legion with shupply acquishition!” Solon complained.

“It has occurred to more than one Warsmith that your eternal chore would be better accomplished with a more aggressive strategic outlook,” Zhorisch snorted. “Put your weapons toward seizing worlds, Solon. As you strip each planet bare at your leisure, you’ll find the fruits of conquest at least equal to that of mere banditry.”

“Ash if I had never conshidered that?” Solon asked. “You are quite mishtaken, Warshmith. The reshourcesh required to sheize entire planetsh reliably exceed the immediate gain in pillage. Over a period of time, the worldsh can compenshate, but-“

“You leave that to me, Tinker,” Kataris interrupted, placing a hand against his breast plate. “From here on out, getting sufficient plunder shall be the duty of the 63rd Grand Battalion. I shall cut a bloody swathe through the Imperium, and take their weapons for my own!”

“You think othersh haven’t tried, pup?” Solon countered hotly.

“’Pup!’ Marvelous!” Honsou barked, his lips twisting into a cruel grin. “The ancient Techmarine lectures the conqueror on the ways of war!”

“Warshmith Honshou, thish ish abshurd,” Solon continued, his voice seeming more strained than usual. “I know the potential material gainsh from open war againsht vulnerable worldsh. I know what my fleet ish and ishn’t capable of. Thish shtrategy ishn’t a feashible replacement for my activitiesh. I’ve done the calculationsh.”

“I know, Solon,” Honsou said calmly.

Solon was surprised, and spent a moment stuttering. Kataris shot a glare at Honsou, and veins of light flared across his augmetic eye.

“It is time to move to the next phase of the Long War,” Honsou said solemnly, resting his cheek against his fist. “A new generation of Warsmiths, born and trained within the Eye of Terror, who have known nothing but constant strife and bloody suffering, is taking its place among the Legion.”

Warsmith Kataris nodded and scowled. “Unlike my honored elders,” he sneered, “I am unsatisfied endlessly fortifying castles on the edge of reality. Give me soldiers, weapons, and the daemon ship, and release me into Imperial space! Let loose the full fury of Chaos, rather than waiting like a patient lapdog for another of Abbaddon’s tiresome invasions!”

“Fine wordsh, but ushelesh,” Solon retorted. “My fleet hash a reshponshibility, Warshmith, and it ish one I take very sherioushly. My effortsh to leech materialsh from Imperial shupply linesh ish too important to be given over to your raw battle-lusht. I refushe to grant you command.”

Honsou seemed unperturbed. “Well, then we’re done asking politely.” He pointed to the hololith, and a string of numbers crossed its main beam. “Open vox-capture. This conclave will now proceed with my proposition. I, Warsmith Honsou, formally submit that the 38th Company is to be reassigned to the command of Warsmith Kataris and the 63rd Grand Battalion. Warsmith Solon shall be allowed a holding here on Medrengard in return.”

“A bastion in exchange for an entire raider fleet?! What kind of joke ish thish?” Solon griped. The powered claw that made up his right arm clenched tight, its pistons hissing under the pressure.

“Warsmith Solon, do not interrupt,” Honsou said coldly. It was the first time he had addressed Solon as “Warsmith,” Twilight noted. Perhaps because he was being recorded?

“Warsmith Solon shall maintain his rank and status as Warsmith, such as it is, but the Legion is no longer served adequately with his command,” Honsou finished. He turned his head toward the Iron Warrior to his left. “Warsmith Lanz?”

“I disagree,” Lanz growled. “I do not believe Warsmith Kataris can adequately fulfill the 38th Company’s imperatives. I do not believe the Legion is served by this change. Nay.”

Zhorisch was next. “Warsmith Kataris may yet surprise us. Aye.”

Then Koros. “It’s time the Harvest of Steel was put to better use than petty banditry. Aye.”

Toramino. “I am… skeptical of any proposition that strips an army from one Warsmith to award to another,” he grumbled. “But there is little question that the raiders of the 38th could benefit from a more capable master. Aye.”

“I agree with the previous assessment,” Kataris said with a dark smile. “Aye.”

Ironclaw chuckled softly, raising a single talon. “Aye.”

All eyes and visors shifted to Solon. His head twitched back and forth awkwardly for a few seconds, glaring from one Warsmith to the next.

Twilight tapped her boot against his leg again. “What are you waiting for? Vote nay!” she hissed.

“I’m going to loshe anyway, though,” he whispered back down to the pony. “I feel that-“

“It doesn’t matter!” Twilight snapped, causing the Iron Warrior to flinch back.

“Nay! I vote nay!” Solon said quickly. The other Warsmiths stared at him stonily, and Lanz slapped the palm of his gauntlet over his face.

“I think it hardly needs to be said, but I support my proposition,” Honsou said solemnly. “The ayes have it.”

“Wait, wait, wait! Doesn’t he get to defend himself?” Twilight suddenly shouted.

All eyes and visors snapped toward her, and she felt her heart rate surge. Sucking in a deep breath, she continued speaking. She had little idea what she was getting into at this point, but she couldn’t just stay silent.

“If planets and battles are currency in the Legion, then you should know he’s spent the last few months conquering my home world! He owns a resource base already!”

Zhorisch started to stand up, his hand seizing the grip of his plasma pistol in an indignant rage.

Honsou raised a hand toward him, and Zhorisch froze before he could finish drawing the pistol. “This creature intrigues me. You keep such fascinating pets, Warsmith Solon.”

Twilight flushed under her helmet, still annoyed by the designation. “I’m serious! Warsmith Solon fought off a Tau and Ork invasion in order to secure control of our world! That has to be worth something!”

“Xeno weaklings? Please!” Kataris barked. “I’d wager the Ork Warboss personally bested him! If the coward even dared to face the beast in a champion’s challenge!”

“I did, ash a matter of fact!” Solon snapped back. Then he paused. “Although the Warbosh did beat me.” Another pause. “Sho did the Tau Commander, too.”

Lanz groaned and raised a hand. “Is it too late to change my vote?”

“This is crazy! You can’t do this to him!” Twilight protested hotly.

“Of course we can,” Ironclaw laughed. “The good Warsmith may attempt to oppose us, of course, but resistance would end… poorly for him.” He waved a clawed gauntlet in Twilight’s general direction. “Warsmith Solon, your beast is becoming unruly. Why don’t you take it away, to your new domicile?”

“Not so fast.” Warsmith Kataris stepped around the table, approaching Solon and Twilight with his eyes fixed on the latter. “This creature is annoying, but perhaps it is useful. There must be some reason he leaves it free to bark at its betters.”

“Not necessarily,” Toramino sighed, “all of his subordinates and slaves act like that.”

“Hmph.” Kataris stopped just a few feet away from Twilight, and the alicorn mare backed up a step cautiously. “Regardless, since I’m taking the rest of his toys, I see no reason not to claim this thing, too.”

Twilight trembled, instinctively seeking out her force harmonizer with her levitation magic. Her threads of magic found nothing, of course, and the alicorn clenched her teeth. “I will NEVER serve you.”

Twilight’s horn was already flooding with power when she’d finished speaking, but it didn’t matter. Kataris moved faster than she could possibly react to.

The next thing she knew she was staring down the barrel of a bolt pistol and heard the sound of a single round firing. Severe pain exploded through her, and the world went dark.

“Fine,” said Warsmith Kataris with a shrug. “Have it your way.”

****

Centaur III

Ferrous Dominus, sector 4

Trial arena 6

“What… What IS this creature? I looks like an equine in its morphology, but…”

General Harlin stared at a bank of vid displays set into a wall over a cogitator bank. A single Dark Techpriest manned the cogitator in front of him, while Warpsmith Kessler stood behind him.

Pictured in the vid displays was a single changeling. The creature was slightly smaller than a pony, with a dark carapace riddled with notches and holes. It possessed a small, curved horn coming from its forehead, while a pair of ragged insect-like wings sprouted from its back.

The changeling was currently secured in a metal cage and surrounded by several ceiling-mounted gun turrets. Servo arms boasting drills, prods, and calipers hung over the enclosure like a subtle threat. The changeling himself cowered in his cage, quivering in fear. It already bore a few cracks in its carapace from being subdued, and seemed to be no threat even without the security measures that surrounded it. Nonetheless an Iron Warrior – one of the few left in Ferrous Dominus – stood at the front entrance to guard it. No chances were being taken.

“Analytic: Changeling. Native sentient fauna possessing characteristics of equine and arthropoda biology,” murmured the Techpriest, still staring at the screen. “The Equestrians have been most forthcoming about this new creature. They are an uncommon but infamous threat to the Equestrian territory.”

Kessler grunted, viewing the vid-screens with his arms crossed over his chest. His left arm, lost to a saboteur’s bomb, was now a thick, blocky augmetic that ended in a hydraulic pincer.

“And what kind of threat do these creatures pose to us, Carmed? Are they psykers as well?” the Warpsmith demanded.

“Affirmative, Lord Kessler. Expansion: The changeling race possesses a unique psionic ability attuned to their peculiar biologis. This ability allows the species to mimic the appearance of other creatures. Observe.”

Carmed’s mechadendrites slithered across the console controls, and a hololith projector in the changeling’s room flickered to life. The image of a mare appeared within it; a yellow earth pony with vines for a cutie mark. The changeling backed up cautiously, its pale blue eyes narrowing.

“Hello! I’m Ivy League! I’d like to submit for processing, please!” She smiled, throwing back her mane. “My special talent is garden plantscaping! You may not know what that is, since I don’t think there’s a single living plant within five miles of Ferrous Dominus, but I’m here to change that! Hee hee!”

The hololith froze. Then a vox caster boomed from above the cage.

“Commencing experimental cycle 37. Prisoner, take on the form of the hololith.”

One of the servo arms dropped down to the side of the cage, and an electric fork just small enough to fit through the bars sparked threateningly. The changeling whimpered, cowering, and then its horn started to glow.

That glow soon spread to its entire body, and a pulsing green wave consumed the changeling’s carapace. Yellow fur was left behind, and within seconds a copy of Ivy League was standing nervously in the cage.

“Hello! I’m Ivy League!” the changeling said, his voice perfectly matching that of the hololith recording. “I’d like to submit for processing, please!”

“They’re shape-shifters. By the Dark Gods, these creatures are natural spies,” Harlin murmured. He turned to Carmed. “How is it that the equines never told us about these creatures?”

“Explanatory: Interviews suggest no hesitation among equines to explain the nature of the changelings or desire to protect them. Put simply, we never asked.” Carmed shrugged. “Expansion: There seem to be numerous creatures on this planet possessing unique abilities and representing a substantial danger. We have not sought a full accounting of them all.”

“I’d think these changelings would warrant a mention as a unique security threat!” Harlin complained.

“Are they?” Kessler asked. “What other capabilities do these xenos possess? What do they want? Are they even dangerous?”

“Preliminary analysis shows few obvious defenses. The carapace is underdeveloped, offering only marginally more protection than skin. The changeling lacks any offensive bio-weapons or harmful psionic ability as far as we can detect. Excepting the potential of their shape-shifting and vocal mimickry, of course.” Carmed turned around. “However, the most fascinating aspect of the changeling biologis is their consumption requirements. It was revealed by our Equestrian allies that the changeling race feeds on love.”

Harlin arched an eyebrow. “… Love. Really.”

“Affirmative. They are psionic parasites,” Carmed clarified. “The precise mechanism for this energetic conversion has not been established – much less the precise psionic wavelength of the specified emotional feed – but deep scans have confirmed that the changeling’s physical digestive system is vestigial and barely functional. It is likely a remnant of an evolutionary ancestor, or perhaps a transitional juvenile form.”

“Can they mimic us?” Kessler asked.

“The transformational mechanism has shown imprecise but absolute limits. There is definitely a maximum capacity to replicate mass and materials of a given density or complexity.” Carmed turned back to the console. “Observe.”

The changeling cringed again when the hololith flickered. Now a human soldier stood in from of him. He was a tall man, wearing a drum filter rebreather, and he carried a laspistol in one hand while he saluted.

“Lieutenant Zayk reporting, Lord. The forward deployment zone has been secured. Zero enemy contacts. We await the Dark Mechanicus detachment.”

A blast of static came from the vox caster. “Commencing experimental cycle 38. Prisoner, take on the form of the hololith.”

The changeling took a deep breath, and then the green glow reappeared. The form of the pony vanished under the magic aura, which then started to contort into an upright stance. The process took slightly longer than transforming into a pony, but within seconds a copy of the mercenary stood within the cage.

“Lieutenant Zayk reporting, Lord,” he said, holding his arms stiffly at his side.

“Analytic: Although you successfully reproduced apparel appearing to be flak armor, you did not replicate the soldier’s equipment,” noted the vox caster. “Replicate the rest of the wargear.”

“Wh-What? You mean, the gun?” the changeling asked, staring up at the caster. “I can’t do that!”

“Replicate the rest of the wargear,” the vox caster commanded again. The electric prod on the servo arm crackled in warning.

The changeling stared at the hololith helplessly, and then a green light flashed from behind his goggles. The glow of magic reached his hand, swimming about in his palm and dancing across his fingers.

After several seconds, the glow receded, and nothing appeared in his hand.

“I can’t do it,” the changeling gasped. “I simply… the image, it… I-“

The servo arm lurched forward, stabbing through the bars of the cage.

“Well, that’s somewhat encouraging,” Harlin mumbled while the changeling’s screams floated through the room. “If they can’t mimic complex wargear, that creates less scope for fooling our security. And there’s no chance they could get away with copying an Astartes.”

“I still see no reason why these creatures would bother to do so,” Kessler grumbled. “Why and how would they oppose us? They cannot fight, and if they truly seek ‘love’ to feed on, surely the chosen of Chaos make poor livestock.”

“Clarification: It has not been determined that they do oppose us. This changeling was captured during a raid on a dragon nest. It has proven resistant to interrogation thus far, so we are unaware of its objective or circumstances.” Carmed hit a switch on the console, and the servo arm retracted. “Trademaster Delgan insists the changeling was working with the dragons at the time, but we are unable to discern the exact circumstances. The equines interviewed did not think it likely that the changeling hive is actively working against the 38th Company, but their strategic analysis is of limited capacity.” He turned toward Kessler, his optics gleaming under his black hood. “Lord Serith has already been notified and is on his way. This creature’s resistance will not stand. We will know its orders.”

“Good,” Kessler grumbled. “If these creatures do seek to defy us, I want them brought to heel immediately. Their abilities may be limited, but other enemies may seek to use them against us.”

Harlin crossed his arms over his chest. “My Lord… is not the opposite arrangement possible?”

“Explain,” growled the Warpsmith.

“Might it be that the changelings sought these creatures out and used them against us?” Harlin continued. “To this day the griffons, dogs, and minotaur deny arming or condoning any sort of insurgency against us. The spy that attacked your diplomatic conference has never been found. And now we find this… this thing among the dragons. Might they not be the source, rather than merely a tool?”

“I am not inclined to believe the coward xenos, even after they have submitted,” Kessler grumbled, turning to Carmed again. “Techpriest, how are these changelings organized? Do they have a civilization of their own? Or a leader?”

“Explanatory: The changelings possess a hive base social structure, dependent on the will of a single absolute ruler. The equines have identified the Queen of the changelings as that individual. Her name is Chrysalis.”

“So they have a Master. Good. That will make them easier to quell,” said the Warpsmith. “If these creatures think to oppose us, then they too shall be broken under the tread of the Iron Warriors.”

Carmed tilted his head as a different vid screen blinked. “We may find out soon enough,” the Dark Techpriest noted, “our interrogator has arrived.”

The changeling twitched in pain, lying on its side. It had reverted back to its true form, and smoke curled into the air around the pair of cracks where the taser fork had stabbed into the carapace.

A loud clunking noise came from the entrance, and the heavy mag-lock started to turn. The Iron Warrior standing guard took a few steps back, connecting his visor feed to the door cogitator.

“Lord Serith,” the Chaos Marine murmured as the door shifted open.

“Greetings, Brother.” Serith stepped past the other Astartes without giving him so much as a glance. “What chore do you have for me? Be quick about it.”

The Iron Warrior stepped back into place, nudging the chin of his helmet toward the cell. “Lord Tellis captured a shape-shifting beast yesterday while fighting the dragons. We need you to find out what it was doing there.”

“Oh? The Mad Angel took a prisoner?” Serith tilted his head to the side, staring into the cage. “I didn’t think he had the capacity to attack a creature without killing it.”

“… He actually described it as ‘claiming his loot.’ He was quite upset when the Dark Mechanicus wished to study it,” the guard murmured.

“Fascinating…” Serith leaned down, his visor glittering in the dim light. The changeling stared back, blinking its pale blue eyes through the lingering pain.

The vox caster came on. “Salutory: Greetings, Lord Serith. I am Dark Techpriest Carmed. I have overseen the analysis of this new capture, identified on this world as a ‘changeling’.”

“Quite a strange little beast,” Serith noted, standing up straight again. “A small mind drowning in fear. What do we desire from it?”

“We wish to know what it was doing in a dragon’s den, why it cooperated with the dragons against our units, and what plans, if any, it has regarding the 38th Company,” Carmed explained. “Any strategic or general behavioral analysis would be optimal.”

“As you wish,” Serith whispered, raising a hand.

The cage started to creak, and the changeling hopped upright. His head whipped back and forth uncertainly. After a few seconds, the main lock turned, and then the front of the cage opened up.

“Approach, insect,” Serith demanded.

The changeling flinched back, and he started looking all around the cage, searching for any possible exit point if he managed to get past the Chaos Sorcerer.

Serith waited for a few seconds, and then looked up toward the vox caster. “Techpriest, if you would?”

“Affirmative,” the vox caster replied. The servo arm with the taser fork dropped down and started angling to jab between the bars again.

The changeling yelped and bolted forward, its wings buzzing rapidly. He jumped out of the cage and tried to fly past Serith, but the Sorcerer was too close and too fast. Serith grabbed him by the leg, and then pulled him down.

“Now, then. Let’s see if there’s anything in that feeble mind besides terror…” His free hand seized the changeling by the forehead. The gauntlet pulsed, and a sickly green glow started to come from the contact.

The changeling, still squirming in Serith’s grip, gasped and screeched. Pain stabbed into its head like dozens of needles, and its wings vibrated in uneven bursts of movement.

“……… Hmmm. This will be difficult,” Serith mumbled.

“Requesting explanatory expansion,” Carmed said from the vox.

“This beast’s will is… incomplete. Its mind is weak as I first thought, but is controlled. This makes it resistant,” Serith explained.

“Interrogative: Will you be unable to complete the interrogation?”

“I can strip the thoughts from this alien, yes. But the insect will not survive.” A deep, echoing laugh came from the Sorcerer’s vox grille, and the changeling’s squirming increased considerably.

The Iron Warrior near the door stepped forward hesitantly. “But, Lord Tellis was-“

“It begins,” Serith hissed.

A blinding surge of light came from the psyker and his victim. The former laughed while psionic hoarfrost washed over his gauntlets. The latter shrieked as its agony intensified in ways far beyond mere pain.

“Yes… the dam is breaking…” Serith said, arcs of power lashing around him and his victim. “This creature did not end up in a dragon’s lair against its will. It sought out this place… sought out the dragons… as allies… to fight…” he paused for a short while, moments surging past him liked a datastream. Images flickering in his mind in the blink of an eye. Speech, disjointed and incomplete, boomed at him in one moment and whispered in the next.

“This creature sought to fight us. It approached the serpents to rally them as soldiers, and gave the serpents warning of our approach,” Serith continued. “That is its mission. To agitate resistance against the 38th Company.”

“Interrogative: What is the strategic necessity of this resistance?”

“Unclear. This drone is not given to explanations or strategy. It takes orders,” Serith admitted. “Let’s finish this.”

Another pulse of psionic energy came from the Sorcerer’s gauntlets, tearing the last few precious memories from the changeling’s fracturing thoughts. An audible crack came from the creature’s carapace, and its eyes started to pale.

In its final moments, the changeling was overcome with sudden determination. It could not resist the alien warrior, but as images were torn from its racing thoughts, it forced a few key mental pictures into the stream of consciousness being ripped from it. A deliberate addition of thoughts and emotional responses to complicate its unwilling admission. A last, desperate attempt to defend the changelings’ efforts, since it could not defend itself.

“I see…” Serith whispered. He let his arms drop. The dead changeling hung loosely within his grip, oozing green fluid from its mouth and a large breach in its skull.

Serith looked up toward the vox speaker. “These creatures are behind it. The insurgency. They approach the other races in disguise and convince them to provoke us. The diamond dogs, the griffons, those bull mutants, all of them. This one could not disguise itself as a dragon, and sought to convince them to obey instead. They may even be seeking to turn the equines against us. They have many spies amongst the Equestrians.”

A new voice erupted from the vox: General Harlin. “Then these creatures ARE manipulating the others! They’re trying to wipe us out using the native primitives!”

Serith chuckled darkly. “Oh, no, General. Not at all. There was a very interesting secret hidden within this slave’s mind. The changelings desire not for the natives to slaughter us, but for us to slaughter the natives.”

There was a pause. “… Really, my Lord? But you said-“

“Yes, this one was raising the dragons against us. But not because it expected the serpents to win. They know no number of mere beasts can overcome our fortress.” He held up the corpse, staring into its perfectly white eyes. “In its final moments the xeno spy revealed to me the aim of its infiltrations. Dead xenos torn apart before our guns. Slaves trudging into the mines of the Dark Mechanicus. The soldiers of Chaos marching through the streets of primitive cities. It revealed all of this with a most perverse sense of… satisfaction.”

“So then, these fools desire not our destruction, but those of their fellow xenos,” growled Kessler’s voice through the vox. “But why?”

“As I said before, I cannot say. This beast did not know.” Serith shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps it is some grudge between their nations that is beneath us, or some advantage in the natives’ downfall that is not obvious to us. If you brought me more of the insectoid wretches, I might be able to piece it together from the bits of their shattered minds.”

“I will see to it,” the Warpsmith rumbled. “If our strategies have been manipulated by this scum, then the creatures must pay for their hubris. Do you have a location of their central bastion?”

“I have an inkling, yes. I will join you momentarily.” Serith turned on his heel and walked back toward the exit. The guard unlocked the door and stepped back, staring at the Sorcerer.

“Are you… taking the changeling body with you?” he asked, perplexed.

“Yes. There is something I must do,” Serith replied cryptically as he entered the hall.

Back in the control room, Kessler summoned a regional map and started pointing out deployments.

“General, recall our forward reconnaissance teams and the interception deployments. The rest of the dragons and those imbecile yaks will live to see a few more solar cycles while we root out these pests.”

“Of course, Lord Kessler. May I presume we should have those teams redeployed once we locate the enemy base?” Harlin asked.

“Affirmative. Assault teams should begin a siege as soon as enemy presence is confirmed. As many of the beasts are to be captured as possible,” Kessler growled. “If the changelings think to use us as their pawns, then we shall extract the proper price from them.”

“Blood and souls, for the champions of Chaos!” Harlin bowed his head. “It will be done, Lord Kessler. The changelings will be yours.”

“Interrogative: Why is Lord Serith not proceeding to the briefing room?” Carmed asked suddenly.

Harlin and Kessler looked up from their planning, and then at the bank of vid-screens. They could see the Sorcerer moving across the hall in one corner, leaving the edge of the screen, and then moving across the breadth of another.

“Where is he going? Isn’t he going to brief us?” Harlin asked.

Carmed briefly checked the facility map. “It would appear he’s approaching the laboratorium lobby.”

“Why? Is he leaving?”

“I doubt he will be leaving. Lord Tellis is in that room.”

The three fell silent, fixing their attention on a screen on the bottom. The vid projection showed Tellis leaning against a wall, arms crossed over his chest and his boot tapping the floor impatiently.

Carmed raised the volume as the lobby door opened.

“Freakin’ finally! How long does it take to squeeze some info out of a damn bug?!” Tellis snarled, whirling toward the entrance.

“It takes longer if one makes sure to squeeze it ALL out,” Serith retorted, “but I’m done now. You can have this back.” He raised the changeling corpse into the air, and a few droplets of ooze dripped onto the floor.

Tellis froze. “Wha… Buggy? Is he…”

Serith threw the body into the Khornate’s face, and it hit Tellis with a wet smack. “Yes. He is. I killed him. He suffered substantially.”

“BASTARD!!” Tellis roared, hurling the body to the ground and advancing on the Sorcerer. “THEY PROMISED ME BUGGY WAS GOING TO LIVE!! WE WERE GOING TO HAVE COOL ADVENTURES AND… and play awesome pranks on the Royal Guard and… and…”

Tellis’s screaming gradually weakened to mumbling, and Serith chuckled.

“Your anguish DELIGHTS me.”

Serith didn’t even have time to flinch before four powered claws pierced through his helmet face and punched out of the back. Tellis swiped his arm to the side, throwing the sundered helmet across the room.

Serith’s armor remained standing, and then it raised an arm and gave the Chaos Lord a thumbs-up.

“Worth it,” said Serith’s discarded head.

“RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!”

Carmed shook his head while Tellis started ripping apart Serith’s armor on the vid-screen. “Observatory: This unnecessary violence will significantly delay strategic assessment.”

“Yes, it will,” Kessler agreed. Several seconds passed in which pieces of Serith’s armor were flung in different direction across the lobby. A shoulder pauldron struck the vid-recorder, briefly jarring the image and leaving a deep crack in the sensor. “This is fun, though. Make sure you’re recording it.”

A series of weak beeps came from the Dark Techpriest. “Yes, Lord Kessler…”

****

???

“Pain is corollary to sentiment. My, my, my… isn’t that the truth? Look at you now, my dear! Hah!”

Twilight squirmed uncomfortably. “Maybe it is, sometimes. But that doesn’t mean that the sentiment is wrong, necessarily. Undesirable outcomes are painful. That’s reasonable, not some dark truth that we need to hide from.”

“Perhaps it is. But are you really being sentimental about the right things? Certainly there should be more discretion in your attachments if you find yourself sad over the minions of Chaos!”

Twilight let out an exasperated huff. “As someone who made ‘friends’ with us after being a mortal enemy of all ponykind, you should know better than that. It’s not that simple, Discord.”

Discord nodded calmly to himself while scribbling on a clipboard. “Isn’t it, though? Your bond to Chaos is one of necessity, not friendship. You sold yourself to them and used them for your own ends, to save your own people. Aren’t you a little too attached, my dear?”

Twilight shifted again, finding it difficult to get comfortable. She was lying on her back on a long couch, while Discord sat nearby in a large wooden chair.

“I… I don’t know. What is ‘too attached?’ Why shouldn’t I try to make friends with my allies? Why should I accept that I shouldn’t help them beyond my own immediate self-interest?”

Discord hummed to himself briefly, tapping the pencil eraser against the single fang jutting down from under his lip. “Well, for starters, it leads you to do stupid things like talk back to Chaos Space Marines, which is why you’re dying right now.”

Twilight scrunched up her nose and looked around. The room she and Discord were in was small, with perfectly white, porcelain-like walls. It reminded her of the psionic isolation cell, except that her improvised bedroom on the Harvest of Steel had a cogitator on the wall.

And a door. This room had no doors. A rather important detail, probably.

“How…” Twilight paused to take a deep breath, barely daring to meet Discord’s eyes. “How bad is it?”

Discord kept staring at his clipboard but pulled out a hand mirror from nowhere, holding it up in front of his guest. Twilight recoiled, sucking in air through clenched teeth. A great mass of darkness clung to where her left eye used to be. It writhed and pulsed, like a living shadow leaking from her eye socket.

The mare turned away, curling up more tightly on the couch.

“… Do you regret it?” Discord asked, putting away the mirror.

Twilight’s tail pulled inward, tucking the fan of striped purple hair between her hind legs. “… I don’t know. I… I didn’t…”

“You owe your life to Warsmith Solon,” Discord continued. “You swore to serve him. There’s nothing wrong, on the face of it, with eating a bolt shell trying to defend him.” The draconequus chuckled and leaned his chair back. “Of course, I doubt anyone would have thought it would end in such a way. But that’s what happens when you listen to your heart and not your head!”

A long pause.

“Do you think I was wrong about them?” Twilight whispered.

Discord looked up from his clipboard, grinning. “Are YOU asking ME to judge your decisions, Princess?”

Twilight briefly looked up at him. “Well… there’s not a lot else to do right now, so yes.”

“Well, then! Let’s review!” Discord said brightly, hurling his clipboard to the side. “Over the course of the alien invasions of our lovely home world, you nearly doomed everything right off the bat with an ill-considered assassination attempt!”

He snapped his fingers. In an instant they were transported back to Ferrous Dominus, or at least a still image of it. Twilight looked around and immediately recognized the scene. They were in a transformer relay housing in the manufactorum, standing among the butchered remains of the Tau assault team. Another Twilight stared up defiantly at Warsmith Solon with Gaela paused in mid-recoil. Her friends, the other Elements of Harmony and Spike, stood behind her, ready to face down the metal goliath.

“Such an anti-climax!” Discord said, standing up and shaking his head. “After you came so far and fought through the Tau assault forces, to think the mighty Warsmith would just shrug it all off and de-escalate like that! Even you must have been a little disappointed!”

Twilight cringed. “Well… I wouldn’t say-“

“But what if he didn’t? What if you sparked some latent fury in this ancient warrior? What if he possessed the dignity to remove your opposition properly, rather than dismissing you like a brief irrelevance?” the draconequus continued. “Would you like to see what would have happened?”

“No,” Twilight said immediately, shaking her head.

“Oh.” Discord seemed disappointed. Then he shrugged. “Well, too bad. I have the alternate timeline all loaded up and everything.” He snapped his fingers.

“What tireshome alien thinksh to shtand againsht me now? Acolyte Galea, what ish thish?” Solon demanded.

Gaela seemed lost for words briefly. “… F-Forgive me, Warsmith! Allow me to deal with this treacherous filth!” she swung her axe to the side, and a crackling power field enveloped it.

“Gaela, you’d best stay out of this,” Twilight Sparkle warned. “I don’t want to hurt you. But this has to end. NOW.”

“The only thing that ish going to end ish your impertinence, xeno,” Solon slurred. “Acolyte, with me. Kill them all.”

Discord snapped his fingers again, and the vision froze.

“Please note what’s happening in the back here,” he said, pointing over to the side.

Twilight was almost afraid to look, but she slowly turned her head in the direction Discord was pointing. He was pointing at Spike. The young dragon was frozen in an expression of slowly dawning horror as he stared at the empty vessel that had held the Elements of Harmony.

“If you recall, at this point in time you were counting on the Elements to give you a critical edge over the invaders. You may not be aware, but Serith had already stolen them from you. This is what the humans sometimes refer to as a ‘FUBAR’ situation.” Discord snickered.

His laughter slowly trailed off into a wispy sigh. “I can’t actually show the next few scenes due to the story rating. It gets a little intense. So let’s skip ahead to the end of the battle!”

“No. No, please, I don’t-“

Twilight’s protests fell silent as Discord snapped his fingers again. Their surroundings blurred, and then snapped back into focus.

Twilight flinched, her remaining eye wincing. Even after she had become a soldier, fighting regularly in the bloody maelstrom of war, even knowing that this vision was a false hypothetical, the sight before her seized her heart in way she’d only experienced once before.

Her friends – the other Elements of Harmony, Spike, and even Trixie – lay before her in a series of bloody smears; small, paltry additions to the corpse pile that the Tau had made before them. Twilight looked away quickly, not wanting to discern how much of each pony remained or how much they may have suffered. In doing so, her eyes fell upon herself.

Twilight Sparkle sat on the floor, one wing fully removed and her flank peppered with metal shards. The alicorn Princess was frozen mid-wail, tears streaming down her face and mixing with the blood beneath her hooves.

Gaela lay in front of her. Broken. Great seams of molten metal and flesh cut through the cyborg, and her own power axe was embedded in her chest. For a brief, horrifying instant, a dozen fleeting tactical scenarios passed through Twilight’s mind as to how she may have accomplished that. It would have surely made her sick if her current body was at all close to substantial.

“I killed her,” Twilight whispered.

Discord snorted, trying to hold back laughter. “Mare, you killed more than that. Check THIS out!”

He reached over and gently turned the pony’s head.

Twilight’s remaining iris shrunk to a pinprick. Solon lay in the middle of the room in a column of smoldering flame. Numerous transformer towers were burnt out, their cabling extending toward the goliath Astartes and attached to various points on his armor. His body was burnt and fused together at the joints, locking him in a pose of perpetual agony, like a statue of a man being struck down.

“I… I killed… Solon?” she whispered, her voice reduced to a squeak.

“Well, of course you did. He lasted about two minutes. You’re SCARY when you’re mad,” Discord stepped in front of the alicorn, stooping over to look her in the eye. “Of course, he’s not really, completely, 100% no-take-backs dead. But he won’t survive the explosion once the little Tau pest underground successfully sabotages the fusion reactor. Nor will you, actually. A warlord and genius engineer thousands of years old, incinerated because he underestimated an adorable purple pony!”

Discord laughed. Twilight continued to stare miserably.

“Incidentally,” the draconequus said, suddenly turning serious again, “in this timeline the Emerald Dawn Project fails. Sliver is so enraged by the death of his master – by the Tau, or so he thinks – that he annihilates Black Point with a cunning and vicious counter-attack. The beacon being constructed is seized and the Company fleet departs, abandoning its helpless ships. The Tau fleet arrives to find its plan foiled. They never manage to lure the Ork fleet to Centaur III. The Tau Empire’s defensive fails, and enormous swathes of their empire are destroyed.” He turned his head, staring at some point far off in the distance. “But Equestria remains untouched. Sliver never considers attacking it. Celestia’s reign continues, uninterrupted by unsavory alliances or more interplanetary strife. As more and more death spreads through the surrounding galaxy, your home nation is safe and sound. What a happy ending!” Discord clasped his hands together and grinned.

Twilight stared at the floor.

“Oh, don’t be like that. I’m pretty sure they put up a new window in the throne room or something to remember you by,” Discord said, patting the mare on the head.

Twilight looked up. “You said this is a review of my decisions. So what’s your point here? This branch is from Solon’s decision, not mine.”

“My point?” Discord blinked, tilting his head to the side. “No point, really. I just like watching the timelines where you kill Solon.”

Twilight managed an impressively deadly glare for a pony with one eye.

“What? It’s hilarious! You’d be able to appreciate it more if you could have seen the fight itself. The part where you ram his face into a transformer and then overload it is THE BEST, I swear!”

“Bring me back,” Twilight commanded, her voice devoid of emotion.

Discord sighed and snapped his fingers. Instantly they were back in the sterile white room. There was no couch this time, which suited Twilight just as well. It hadn’t helped her comfort anyhow.

She looked up at Discord. “Can you see their future? Can you see what will happen to everyone?”

“No,” Discord answered curtly. “By which I mean yes, but not in a way that is either practical or useful.”

“That does seem to be a consistent theme with you,” the alicorn grumbled.

Silence.

“… I don’t regret it,” Twilight said after a moment, staring at the wall. “I mean, I regret SOME things, obviously. Mostly I regret only prepping that shield spell before I started talking to Warsmith Kataris rather than casting it outright. But I don’t regret allying with Chaos. I don’t regret trying to make friends with the Iron Warriors.”

A wan smile crossed her lips. “Gaela’s going to be disappointed when she learns I’m not coming back. Spike will be devastated. But I’m sure she’ll take care of him.”

“She’s part of a new army now, you know,” Discord warned. “And part of that army is still back home. The fleet will return to Equestria with some new, tiresome maniac at its head.”

“Yes. But things will be okay.” She chuckled humorlessly. “Maybe it’s just the prerogative of the dead to make unfounded assumptions like this, but I trust our friends in the 38th.”

“You shouldn’t,” Discord retorted blithely. “They don’t care about you. Our world is one of billions to them, distinguished only by an arbitrary designation and an estimate of how much raw material they can suck from its crust.”

“I know. But I believed in them anyway. And that much trust saved Equestria and got me to the other end of the galaxy.” She smiled more broadly. “For every time we’ve surprised them, they’ve surprised us back. We’re stronger together. Solon knows that.”

Discord leaned against the wall, his mismatched arms crossed over his chest. “Solon is no longer in charge. He’s so pathetic that a handful of other Chaos Lords decided amongst themselves that he didn’t deserve his army anymore, and he barely had the nerve to disagree. He’s so weak that YOU had to stand up for him, and then he stood by and watched as you were executed for the trouble. He’s a miserable failure, and he was still the BEST Iron Warrior that Equestria could have hoped to encounter.”

Twilight turned to look at him. She was still smiling, which sat rather uneasily with the dark hole that had been drilled into her left eye. “He’s my Warsmith and he’s my friend, and I wouldn’t have him any other way.”

“He got you killed!” Discord said incredulously.

“He saved all of ponykind, myself included. I got myself killed,” Twilight countered.

Her smile dropped, and she looked away again. “Speaking of death, am I going to be moving on soon? The afterlife isn’t just talking to you for eternity, is it? I’m pretty sure I haven’t done anything so heinous as to deserve that kind of fate.”

Discord shook his head. “Well, that’s-“

An explosive pulse suddenly came from Twilight’s body.

She wasn’t sure what kind of energy it was; she didn’t know what physical rules this space obeyed, and she didn’t exactly have time to observe much before she doubled over in pain and collapsed onto the floor. The mare screamed, only to be silenced as another pulse rippled through her body and dragged the air from her lungs.

Discord was buffeted, flinching back and squinting his eyes. When the second pulse hit, small cracks started to appear in the walls of the room. Beams of white light poured in through the cracks, shining with an intensity that was almost laser-like.

He looked completely stunned at first, but then turned his head up toward the ceiling. “Are you serious?! You’re really doing this?!”

“EEEEEAAAAAAAUGH!!” Twilight kicked and flapped wildly while she writhed on the floor, overtaken by inexplicable, invisible torment.

Another pulse blasted outward from her body. Discord leaned into this one, preventing himself from being knocked back, but even more of the walls were torn open by the blast. So much light was flooding the room now that it was becoming nearly impossible to see.

“Fine,” the draconequus shrugged. “Have it your way, rustbucket.”

Discord approached Twilight, pushing forward even as pulse after pulse came from the struggling pony. Soon the light became blinding, masking everything in hot white and making vision impossible. Discord stood over the struggling alicorn, and then he pinned the mare down with his taloned hand and brought his lips close to her ears.

“Time to wake up, Princess. Your master wants you back.”

****

Medrengard

Bastion Complex Kel-Teth

Twilight gasped in pain, her back arching reflexively.

She couldn’t do much more than that. Wherever she was, whatever was happening, she was firmly restrained. She was on her back, wings spread and pinned. Her legs were suspended firmly in the air above her with servo arms holding them in place. Her head was locked in a brace, kept aloft over whatever she was on.

Her eyes opened, and light bombarded her.

No… not her eyes. Her eye. As the light blurs slowly changed to shapes, and considering she couldn’t move at all to shift her field of vision, it became immediately clear that the left side of it was missing.

She had a vague idea why that was, but it was hard to think. Her head ached terribly, and a hundred other knife-points of pain covered various other parts of her body. They were mostly concentrated in her head, neck, and back.

The light above her finally moved into a sharp enough focus and the throbbing in her head settled down enough that Twilight could finally take in her surroundings. Above her was a mechanical wheel covered in servo arms attached to its circumference and hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling itself was a maze of piping and bundled cables, with a few gaps between the various tubes to expose lumens behind them.

There was surely more to this place, but Twilight still couldn’t move her head. That was troubling, but among her spiraling thoughts and the persistent shredding of her nerve endings, she didn’t know exactly how concerned she should be about that.

Then the left side of her vision blinked on, and Twilight’s state of confusion jumped to a whole new level.

System active. Boot sequence engaged. Optical engrams loading.

The words appeared in front of her, colored black on a plane of green. That plane now took up half her normal field of view, and was swiftly breaking apart into a grid that then expanded and distorted. Grid lines became discrete shapes, the shapes combined to form objects, and then the objects shaded and shifted to show spatial perspective. The green monochrome suddenly filled with pigment, and before Twilight understood what was happening her vision was restored in its totality.

Optical engrams online.

Cogitator systems online.

Neuromatrix hubs online.

Noosphere codex registering… Complete.

All systems functional.

Pain and panic swiftly faded from Twilight’s attention as she read the words that scrolled across her left “eye.” This sort of text interface was quite familiar to her, but she was used to seeing it blinking across the visor of a power armor helmet. She was sure she wasn’t wearing such a helmet now, barring the possibility that this was all some kooky hallucination brought on by the Warp or sudden head trauma.

“Good, good… Everything ish working perfectly. I’m shure you’re in a lot of pain right now, but it should fall within a tolerable shpectrum shoon enough.”

Twilight’s eye – the one that she could still feel and control as a proper organ, that is – widened at the voice.

“S… Solon?” she gasped, her voice still weak.

“Hello, Princesh. Welcome back.”

Author's Note

Uh-oh, it looks like Honsou is up to his old tricks again! :pinkiecrazy:
Man, I had like a whole thing planned where I was going to do different scenes of Company soldiers fighting the Elements of Harmony with the ponies being overwhelmed and all leading up to a big boss battle with Solon vs. Celestia...
And then I realized that I was writing fanfiction of my fanfiction and had to stop before the madness overtook me.
My apologies for the lack of intense, passionate longing between the Harvest of Steel for Twilight in this chapter, but there are other people/monsters that want her dead and it has to wait its turn. I'm just trying to be fair here.
In creating the council of Warsmiths I used mostly canon Iron Warriors but aside from Honsou I didn't really look up their details. If I got something wrong, please correct me.

Rip and Tear

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 12

Rip and Tear

****

Medrengard

Bastion Complex Kel-Teth

“Jusht a moment, Princesh. Let’sh get thoshe bondsh looshe.”

Twilight hissed when the servo arms holding her legs suddenly opened, finally feeling the sensation of full muscle control once again. It didn’t feel very good.

“How long… have I been out for?” Twilight mumbled. There was something tugging lightly at her skull, followed by a gentle clicking noise. The sensation passed, and then the brace clamps around her head snapped open.

“It’sh been shome fifty hoursh shince you were lasht conshioush,” Solon said. “I’m sure you’re hungry and thirshty, aren’t you?”

Twilight groaned in a generally affirmative-sounding way. The bands stretched across her barrel and waist opened up and slipped away. Finally, the clamps pinning down her wings opened and retreated, freeing the alicorn entirely from the array of restraining mechanisms.

She squirmed for a moment, and then rolled onto her belly. Or rather, she rolled off the edge of the surgical bed she was resting on to land painfully on the floor. Onto her belly.

“Careful,” Solon’s voice warned. “I jusht finished piecing your shkull back together. Give the bondsh time to harden before you shtart banging yourshelf about.”

Twilight craned her head up. Warsmith Solon stood just a meter away, looking exactly as she remembered him before she blacked out.

“Warsmith, you’re… you’re okay,” Twilight mumbled.

“I’m fine. You’re not.” Solon made a gesture with his hand, and a ceiling-mounted servo arm shifted toward Twilight. “Here. Eat.”

The servo arm was carrying a bucket. An honest-to-goodness plain steel bucket, just as one would find in Applejack’s barn. The bucket was full near to the brim with nutrient paste, neatly completing the imagery of being a livestock’s feed slop.

The Equestrian Princess spent a full second holding an expression of righteous indignation before she dropped her muzzle straight into the bucket. She slurped up the gruel with desperate speed, eating it so fast that she started choking several times. Each time she stopped to cough just long enough to clear her windpipe, and then dunked her face right back into the slime.

The servo arm moved away, and then returned a minute later with a second bucket full of water. It dropped it unceremoniously next to the first container, and Twilight immediately switched; she pulled her head from the ooze with a gasp, and then plunked her face directly into the precious liquid.

This went on for several minutes, and Solon waited wordlessly above the pony while she filled her belly and bladder. Eventually the feed bucket ran low enough that Twilight had to decide whether to lick the nutrient gruel from the bucket’s bottom, and she irritably kicked the container aside instead. Then she levitated the water bucket up and dumped it over her head. The bits of paste stuck to her fur – as well as a fair amount of dirt that had collected in her mane since she last washed – ran down her legs and onto the metal flooring at her hooves.

Twilight sighed deeply, letting the bucket fall onto the floor at her side. Then she looked back up at Solon.

“We have some things to talk about,” she said. Her tone was cool and emotionless.

“I’m sure we do. But firsht…” Solon gestured again with his hand, and more servo arms approached Twilight. “Hold shtill, Princesh.”

The alicorn did as she was told. A blunt-edged pincer claw grabbed her leg, holding her gently but firmly. A second arm levered into position above her shoulder, boasting a large syringe.

“Now that you have shome caloriesh in you, thish regenerator sholution should help you along. The damage hash been shevere, but thish should have you in top form quickly enough.”

The needle plunged into Twilight’s shoulder, but she barely noticed the puncture among all her other bodily aches. “So… what happened? I remember talking to… who was it… Kataris. Warsmith Kataris. And then… nothing, really.”

“He shot you,” Solon said simply. “In the face.”

Twilight’s ears pinned back, and she grimaced. “Ah. I was afraid of that. So then, that explains… this?” She tenderly raised a hoof and pressed it against her left cheek, sliding up across her fur until it touched metal.

Solon nodded. “Thankfully, you were wearing your helmet at the time.”

“It didn’t really seem to have helped,” the mare retorted bleakly.

“On the contrary; it shaved your life.” He held up a palm, and a hololith display of several visor-shaped cut-outs appeared along with a flurry of diagnostic text. “I conshtructed your helmet vishorsh with Eldar diodenyne jewelsh, reinforced by a layer of glashine for extra durability and impact diffusion. The bolt shell from Katarish would have penetrated anything lesh, and the bolt would had detonated in your shkull. That would have made your revival far more unlikely, obvioushly.”

Twilight squirmed at the mental image.

“Inshtead, the bolt detonated on impact, tearing the vishor lensh looshe and driving it into your eye. Shtill quite a shevere trauma, but entirely shurvivable!” He paused. “It alsho took out about two cubic centimetersh of brain, though. That complicated thingsh. I’m confident the neural core I inshtalled in the gap will compenshate adequately, but you may experience shome temporary mood shwingsh ash it’sh integrated into your prefrontal lobe.”

“Yes… like, for example, I’m feeling a lot of my confusion turning into anger right now,” Twilight growled.

“That’sh mosht likely jusht a normal shide effect of being shot in the face, honeshtly,” Solon shrugged. “I have inshtalled a comparable replacement for your losht eye, and inshtalled a few usheful engramsh in the nano-engine.”

Twilight’s horn flashed, and a silvery plane appeared in front of her to show her reflection. The augmetic eye was a green lens set in a thin metal plate that seemed to sit over her cheekbone and stretch back under her ear. The fur around the seam had apparently been shaved before her surgery, so she could clearly see that the metal strip tapered to a point and disappeared before it reached the back of her skull. There were a few small metal circles that she recognized as hidden input sockets for cabling, as well. As for the optical itself, it was a simple rectangle of emerald-colored glass smaller than her natural eye. It was compact and obviously unobtrusive; a far cry from the blocky, modular augmetics that the Iron Warriors or Mechanicus usually favored.

She dropped the reflector pane to check the eye’s fidelity, and was more than impressed. The difference between her organic and augmetic sight was negligible at a glance. Only once an object was suddenly bracketed and highlighted in a green outline – similar to the way her helmet visor tagged things – or when text started scrolling across it did the difference become obvious.

As she tested out her eye, however, she couldn’t help but notice that their surroundings were unfamiliar. She turned back toward Solon.

“Where are we, anyway?”

“We’re in my workshop,” Solon replied.

“Back on the Harvest of Steel?” Twilight sounded surprised.

Solon hesitated awkwardly. “Well… no. My NEW workshop. In my new bashtion, Kel-Teth.” He sighed, swiveling around on his chassis. “Apparently it belonged to shome Warpshmith that sherved Katarish who perished on one of hish shipsh. It’sh not perfect, and they haven’t shtarted moving my thingsh from the Harvesht, but I’ll make proper ushe of it.”

Twilight gaped up at the Iron Warrior. “… Wait, you actually did it?! You gave them your ship?! You gave them your army?!”

Her voice sounded accusatory, and Solon recoiled slightly. “It’sh lesh that I ‘gave’ them anything and more that I accepted the pittance they offered me.”

“Why?!” Twilight demanded, her eye narrowing at the Chaos Lord. “Why would you accept that?”

“What wash I to do? Fight them?”

“Yes! Or… Or escape, somehow! Rally the troops and shoot your way back to the ship! Or something!” The purple pony stamped her hoof on the floor, a tear welling up in her remaining eye. “Why would you let them do this to you?!”

“To defy the Conclave would mean to dishcard my title of Warshmith and any legitimacy in the eyesh of my Legion. I would become outcasht, and force my warriorsh to turn againsht their Legion brothersh for my benefit.” He shook his head. “I will not do that. Putting ashide that mosht of my army would probably defect and my ship ultimately be shiezed anyway.”

“I just don’t understand,” Twilight mumbled, sitting down and hanging her head. “These Warsmiths can just come together and seize someone else’s forces whenever they want?”

“In theory, yesh. It almosht never happensh, though. Thish wash a mashterful bit of political maneuvering by Warshmith Honshou, the bashtard.” Solon chuckled ruefully. “Warshmithsh do not eashily concede to shtripping each other of rank or ashetsh in Conclave. They recognize that it could jusht ash eashily be ushed againsht them. Thish wash very unushual. I can’t help but wonder what Honshou promished my peersh for their help.”

Twilight looked up at him. “So you DON’T think they did this because it’s best for the Legion?”

“Of courshe not. Honshou all but admitted ash much,” Solon snorted. “He’sh already revealed hish gambit to me: He intendsh to keep me here, working on hish key projectsh that the Mechanicush cannot complete for him. If I provide him hish devicesh – a labor that will take shome decadesh, I imagine – then he hash promished to change hish mind about how important the 38th Company’sh mission ish.”

“So… all of this was just a ruse to trap you here so you can build this jerk some new guns?!” Twilight asked incredulously.

“Shome gunsh, shome armorsh, a new pattern of Titan core, a few capacitorsh the shize of Land Raidersh, and a usheable interface for a Necron shuper-weapon. That one looksh like it’sh going to be an exceptional chore.” He grunted in annoyance. “Ashuming thish whelp Katarish doeshn’t get himshelf killed, I should have my ship back within a shtandard sholar century.”

Twilight’s ears perked up. “… If he isn’t killed? You mean if he dies, you get the Company back?”

“That’sh how theshe thingsh tend to work, yesh. In theory, Honshou could arrange to give my army to shomeone elshe, but he’d have to bribe the other Warshmithsh again and enshure shuch toolsh would not be ushed againsht him. That’sh not a shimple matter.”

“Then you’ll be back in charge within a month!” the alicorn said, finally cracking a smile. “When Luna finds out what happened, she’s going to rip Kataris in half!”

Solon again focused his gaze on Twilight. “I would think you, of all poniesh, would know better than to undereshtimate the power of an Iron Warrior.” This succeeded in removing the mare’s smirk, but he continued. “A revolt by the Equeshtriansh can only end with your people’sh extermination. Sho it was under my command, sho it will be under Katarish. Even if Shliver’sh men shtayed their handsh, thish pup hash hish own army that will not heshitate. You musht shtop the other poniesh from doing anything of the like.”

Twilight was again surprised. “Wh-What? Me? How am I supposed to warn them from here? Did you manage to recover Spike?”

“No. You will not be shtaying here, Princesh Shparkle.” Solon’s optics flickered, and a new hololith appeared in front of the confused pony.

The hololith expanded, turning into a three-dimension projection of numerous corridors, walls, and rooms. Twilight recognized it immediately as a facility map, similar to the ones in Ferrous Dominus.

“The Harvesht of Shteel ish shtill berthed. It will be for at leasht another shtandard week, shince the change in ownership hash dishrupted our normal activitiesh. You musht go back and shtow away on-board.”

Twilight gaped. “That… But…”

“Sho far, it sheemsh Katarish ish unintereshted in your home planet. He wash incenshed to learn that critical shuppliesh, pershonnel, and even a ship wash left behind in the Centaur shyshtem. It ish too far from the Eye of Terror for hish liking.” Solon snorted. “Shuch a feeble imagination, for one of the sho-called ‘new generation’ of Warshmithsh! A Dark Portal and thoushandsh of pshykersh lay at hish fingertipsh, but no, he deshiresh only our shtocksh of artillery and gunmen. Bah.”

Twilight again started stuttering, and Solon again interrupted her. “Katarish will bring the Harvesht to Centaur III and take every man and weapon he can find. He ish likely to leave without sho much ash shpeaking to Celeshtia or bothering any of the other equinesh. Hish ire lay with our old enemy the Imperium of Man, and xenosh are a tireshome dishtraction from thish.” The hololith shifted, stretching away from the surface level and up into orbit. “Get on board the Harvesht of Shteel, go home, and keep your people from interfering. The 38th Company will depart your world for good.”

Twilight took a step back. “… I don’t… I don’t understand. What about you? I’m not leaving you here!”

“I can’t even leave thish room without Honshou knowing about it,” Solon snorted. “There’sh no poshibility for me to eshcape. But I didn’t revive you to keep me company, Princesh.”

“Then why DID you revive me?” Twilight demanded, her voice rising to a growl. “You carried me to safety, rebuilt my brain, and gave me a new eye just to send me back to Equestria and never see me again?!”

Solon hesitated, looking away. A sigh came from his vox grille. “Conshider it a… gift, Princesh.”

“A gift?”

“Affirmative. Back in the Conclave chamber…” he trailed off, and his hand clenched into a fist. “… Honshou sheparated me from my advishorsh on purposhe. You shpoke for me in their shtead. But a xeno’sh wordsh carry no weight among Ashtartesh. You knew ash much, yet you shtill defied them. When faced with certain retaliation for your insholence, you defended me. And shuffered for it. All in vain.” He turned again toward the map. “Sho thish ish my lasht offering to you, Princesh. To correct my mishtake, and give you a final chance at shurvival. You sherve me no longer.”

Twilight’s ears drooped again, and she stared at the hololith.

“The way to the Harvesht will not be eashy,” Solon advised. “I have uploaded a number of usheful decryption codicesh to your new neural core, ash well ash updated IFF shignumsh that will not reveal your poshition to shimple vishor shcansh. You will be able to bypash the pashive and automated defenshesh that bar your path, but I cannot force the Iron Warriorsh or other sholdiersh that you may encounter here on Medrengard to let you go. Once you reach the Harvesht, it ish my hope that my former shubordinatesh chooshe to overlook your preshence. But I cannot even guarantee thish much.”

He gestured to the walls. “I have a few weaponsh here, courteshy of the previoush owner. A pitiful shtock, frankly; he musht have died with hish besht equipment. Take what you’d like. Unfortunately, I don’t have your armor; Katarish had hish men shieze it while I wash working on you, and he evidently gave it to Magosh Kaelith ash a gift. He sheemsh to be shoring up hish command in a hurry.”

Twilight looked over to the wall. Numerous boltguns, lasguns, and a few chainswords and chainaxes hung on bolts attached to a weapons rack. “… Kaelith wanted my armor? Why?”

“He collectsh shuch trinketsh. Alsho, I wouldn’t tell him how the shecondary shyshtemsh worked.” Solon chuckled. “You may have to shtop him from taking the armor shuitsh from your friendsh ash well. Or you can jusht give them to him. He’sh more reashonable than you think and you could probably make a usheful deal out of it.”

“You really want me to do this? Go back to Equestria and let Kataris get away?” Twilight asked.

“What I want you to do ish no longer your concern,” Solon retorted. “I’ve losht my right to claim you ash my shervant. What I am deshcribing to you now ish shimply the besht poshible courshe of action to protect your people. You alone among your kind have shown an enlightened pragmatishm in dealing with the forcesh of Chaosh and navigating our temperamentsh. The mosht recent incident notwithshtanding, that ish.”

Twilight walked up to the weapon rack. Two boltguns lifted off of their holding pegs. Next to the munitions table, a length of chain slithered from a crate into the air, flowing behind a pulsing orb of purple.

“Solon, may I ask a few questions before I depart?”

If the Chaos Lord was surprised or dismayed at being addressed without his title, he didn’t show it. “Of courshe. What do you wish to know?”

“Does Mark III pattern Astartes armor – I believe that’s the ‘Iron Armor’ model – have any particular weaknesses? Like, a serious flaw that necessitated another version and rendered it obsolete?” The chain wrapped over Twilight’s shoulder and then over her back, crossing its own length over her chest and between her wings. A flash of heat came from her horn, quickly fusing the chain’s ends together.

Solon puzzled over the question for a few seconds. “Ash a matter of fact, that power armor pattern wash built to enhance boarding actionsh, and hash additional plating on the frontal facingsh. In order to balance the production requirementsh, the armor in the back wash made much thinner. In particular the plating on the back of the legsh ish weak. Why do you ashk?”

Twilight levitated one of the bolters in front of her. Her augmetic highlighted it, confirming its combat readiness. Her magic carried a sickle magazine from the munitions table.

“If I recall correctly, that’s the base pattern of Kataris’s armor.” The magazine clicked into place, and then the slide pulled back on a streak of purple.

“Oh.” Solon’s chassis suddenly lurched higher. “Wait! Princesh, what are you planning to do?!”

“I’m going to find Warsmith Kataris. I’m going to isolate him. Then I’m going to kill him.” She loaded the other bolter.

“No. Shtop. You can’t do that,” Solon insisted.

“I think I can,” Twilight disagreed. “Let’s see who’s right.” Her horn crackled with energy, and then a purple light briefly engulfed the chain wrapped around her body. A moment later it magnetized, and the bolters attached to the chain.

“Okay, I think thish reaction might be due to the brain damage,” Solon mumbled. “Princesh, thish ish foolish. He’ll kill you if he sheesh you again.”

“He’ll try,” Twilight agreed. Multiple bolter clips flew through the air and attached to the chain, and the mare grunted at the weight. “Blast, these things are heavy… I’d cast a weight change spell, but that might hurt their penetrating power…”

“Shparkle, lishten to me,” Solon demanded, his voice shifting into the tone he used to lecture Serith or Tellis.

“You explicitly said that I don’t have to listen to you anymore,” Twilight reminded him. She disconnected a few of the clips and put them back, testing the drag on her body. “The boltguns’ weight is almost unbearable, but I’ll be levitating them most of the way…”

“You don’t have to obey me, but I want you to lishten!” Solon said firmly.

Twilight turned around, looking up at the ancient Chaos Lord attentively.

“There’sh no need for you to do thish. The rishk ish too great. If you attack Warshmith Katarish, there’sh no telling what he’ll do when he reachesh the Centaur shyshtem.”

“If I attack Warsmith Kataris, he isn’t going to make it that far,” Twilight assured him. A pair of krak grenades attached to the chain from a nearby crate of munitions.

“More than jusht your own life may shuffer for your arrogance,” Solon warned. “I do not know Katarish well, but we are a vengeful Legion by nature. Thish plan putsh your people at much greater rishk!”

The alicorn stopped to consider that. “… It almost sounds like you care what happens to us.”

“I DO care!” Solon snapped. “Maybe I shouldn’t, but I would much prefer you shimply leave thish place and presherve Centaur III. It ish not your place to intervene in the politicsh of Ashtartesh, Princesh.”

Twilight bobbed her head. “I understand. But I’m going to do it anyway.” She turned around and started trotting to the exit blast doors.

“Why?!” Solon demanded, stomping after the purple pony. “Why are you sho damned eager to return to shervitude? Why are you rishking sho much for shuch an ashinine purposhe?”

The blast doors started creaking open, and Twilight stopped for a moment to wait for them. While she stood she lifted her hoof and tapped it gently against the lens of her new augmetic.

“Because I want to, obviously. I don’t need another reason. I’m no one’s ‘pet’ anymore,” she replied with a wry chuckle. “I’ll see you again soon, Solon. Goodbye.”

Twilight raced out into the next room, and the doors promptly began sliding closed. Solon watched her go, searching for something to shout out to her. Some heartfelt appeal or thread of logic that would turn the mare away from her foolhardy mission. Nothing came to mind that he hadn’t already tried, and before long, the doors were shut again.

Solon turned away, his chassis squealing on its bearings.

“Tireshome creature… You poniesh are never going to leave me alone, are you?”

****

Bastion sub-complex

Twilight dropped down through the access hatch, stopping only briefly to search below her for hazards. A few quick flaps of her wings rendered her landing sufficiently gentle, and then she looked up at the hatch again. Her augmetic beamed a signal to the micro-cogitator, and the hatch slid shut and locked behind her.

Her rearguard secure, Twilight gazed into the tunnel beyond. It was a wide, dimly-lit hallway with the floors and walls built of plate metal. The ceiling, most notably, was raw burrowed stone. Numerous objects had been placed along the ceiling alongside the standard facility lumens. Twilight stared for a moment, and the objects were highlighted by her optic.

Demolition charges. K-CC199 standard pattern. Kartex base. Electronic fuse detected.

Twilight nodded grimly and trotted into the gloom. These tunnels were secondary passageways used to connect the Iron Warriors’ fortresses to one another and maintain resource pipelines. During ordinary operations, there was an abundance of shuttles and open ground between bastions for the movement of troops and equipment (although proper roads were notoriously rare). During a siege, the tunnels would be the only way to move supplies or troops. As this was as much a liability as an advantage, the tunnels were rigged to be destroyed at the owner’s convenience.

An unidentified, armed alien racing from one fortress to another could very well trigger such a reaction. She was probably safe from augers due to Solon’s enhancements, but if someone managed to spot her and spread an alarm, there was no telling how severe the security response would be. At the very least, they could swarm the fortress with angry Chaos soldiers, but a particularly impatient Warsmith might very well just collapse the tunnel on her.

Twilight Sparkle crossed through the hall, and through the set of blast doors that marked the exit. Then she moved through the next tunnel. And then the next. Dim hallways, grimy metal corridors, and thick shielded doors engraved with the Iron Skull drained much of the tension from what surely should have been a nerve-racking passage. Still, she kept her pace quiet and her senses on high alert, ready to fling herself into action as soon as she sighted anything that wouldn’t seek to judge her by the processors lodged in her brain.

It was in the fifth corridor that she finally saw the first signs of life.

The tunnel was slightly different from the others, in that it had more piping running through the ceiling and numerous other passageways branched off from it. Some of these tunnels didn’t seem to be planned by the builders; huge holes had been ripped through a few of the hefty metal plates shielding the walls. These holes descended into tunnels that were far beyond the reach of the weak ceiling lumens, as well as any obvious relevance. The results of an old war, perhaps? Or some sort of subterranean daemon monster?

She supposed she could have asked the man down at the other end of the hall what his opinion was, but that probably wouldn’t end well.

She spotted him before the doors even opened; her augmetic picked out a life sign in the distance and warned Twilight ahead of time. He was a man in a shoddy environmental suit, busy scraping rust off some machine lodged in the wall. He didn’t notice the door opening down at the other end of the corridor, and he didn’t look up while Twilight crept into the room and hid behind a stack of bulkhead plates.

“Okay. Options. I can wait until he leaves. I can make a noise in one of the tunnels to distract him. I can try to teleport past. I can try to knock him out…” Twilight mumbled quietly to herself.

The man stopped scraping the device, and then started flipping switches on the front. He checked something on top, and then grabbed onto an attached lever.

“It looks like he’s almost done,” she whispered, leaning her head out further.

A clunking noise came from above, and Twilight ducked back immediately. In that instant, every lumen in the hall suddenly went out, plunging the tunnel into absolute darkness.

Twilight didn’t light her horn, as she would have given herself away immediately. The man at the end of the passage grunted and started fumbling with his helmet to activate the head lamp.

“HYURK! Hhgk…”

The sudden shout provoked Twilight into peeking out again. Her right eye was useless in the dark, but her augmetic instantly switched to an alternative detection mode. A swift, inhuman shape presented in bright white and purple blobs darted through the gloom, disappearing into an intersecting corridor.

Movement detected. Warp psyogen traces at 19.3 meters.

“Daemons,” Twilight said under her breath.

A second later, another clunk came from the ceiling, and the lights flickered back on.

The man who had been working at the other end of the corridor lay in two pieces, his body neatly sliced apart just above the waist. His blood was splashed across her path now, and his murderer was nowhere in sight.

“Did… Did that daemon just HELP me?” she wondered, grimacing. It certainly seemed convenient that the most obvious obstacle would suddenly be removed through no action of her own.

Additional Warp convergence points detected. Daemonic presence confirmed. Enemy contact imminent.

“Oh. Okay, yeah, it actually makes more sense this way,” Twilight deadpanned while a counter in her augmetic blinked into view. Four. “You didn’t kill him to keep him from calling an alarm on me, you did it to prevent an alarm on you.”

The sound of talons scraping across stone and metal came from the intersecting tunnels, and Twilight levitated her boltguns free of the chain around her chest.

Contact read her optical, outlining a loping, wolf-like body through the wall ahead of her

“Contact!” Twilight shouted as she fired her first rounds.

The bolters bucked fiercely from the shot, lurching back through the air on trails of glittering purple light. As soon as the daemonic beast appeared, twin bolts drilled into the side of its head, blasting its exposed, horned skull apart. The headless body promptly stumbled and collapsed in the middle of the hall, and the counter switched to three.

She jumped forward, wings flapping, and another daemon appeared behind her. This one was bipedal, with long, thin limbs that ended in vicious sickles. It stared at its airborne prey for a moment, and then started accelerating into a run.

Twilight hit the floor in a gallop, the boltguns floating in fixed positions above her. When another monster leapt at her from a shadowed tunnel, she was already shifting her weapons into position.

A single shot from both weapons annihilated much of the daemon’s chest cavity and eliminated its forward momentum, causing it to fall just short of its prey. The daemon fell into a puddle of its own blasted flesh and entrails, and then raised its head just in time to get a rear hoof to the face.

Twilight lined up a shot on the sickle daemon even while the ambusher went flipping away. It was picking up speed now, dragging the tips of its arm-blades over the floor and leaving long gouges in the plating. She fired, and the creature suddenly skipped to the side in a dodge. She fired the other bolter and it hopped the other way, neatly avoiding the next shot while closing critical distance. In that split second, while both guns were reeling from their recoil, the daemon bunched up its legs to pounce.

Twilight’s horn flashed before it could, and a lash of purple lightning arced into her opponent. The daemon shrieked and quivered, standing more or less in place just long enough for Twilight to take its head off with a bolter round.

“Okay, what’s next?” the mare breathed while the booming report of her weapon echoed in her ears. The counter on her augmetic blinked from two to one.

Then, after a second of silence, it became two again.

“Wait… did one of them recover? I mean, I guess they’re not truly dead, since they’re daemons. But how does that…” Twilight started to turn, her optic only barely catching a glimpse of highlighted energy bleed below her.

She shrieked and reared when a small drainage vent burst open below, not even a meter away. Something leapt out of it in a blur, clawing clumsily for her wings and latching onto her chain. Feathers and blood flew through the air while she tried to shake off the snarling creature, and then she felt fangs puncturing her shoulder.

“GET! OFF!!” One of the boltguns swung toward her like a bludgeon, smashing into her side and stunning the goblin-like daemon clinging to her. She knocked the creature down with her wing, and then started trampling it underhoof.

“I already lost one major organ on this trip! I do NOT want to drag myself back to Solon to be fitted for an augmetic leg!” Hooves hammered the diminutive monster, shattering its thin, twisted limbs and splitting its fanged, eyeless skull.

A guttural laugh filled the hall, and the purple pony jumped back from her latest target. She almost stumbled due to the pain in her leg, but she kept her focus locked on the sound.

From one of the broken lengths of wall plating it emerged, slow and lumbering, with no apparent fear of the alicorn it hunted. It was a large, fat, pot-bellied monster, with a ruddy red hide, a set of curved horns atop its skull, and a single huge eye.

Twilight levitated her boltguns into position and the daemon stopped. Its mouth – a giant, toothy pit oozing with drool – stretched into a grin. Then it spoke.

The sound that came from the daemon’s mouth couldn’t be perceived as words, from Twilight’s perspective. It sounded like a cacophony of tortured, broken instruments and growls, so discordant and senseless that she couldn’t have discerned any kind of sensible pattern that would even lead her to consider it might be a language.

Luckily, her augmetics knew better.

The Lost Marauder walks the halls of flame and iron. Like a lamb to the slaughter.

More guttural noises came from the monster, and her optical flickered with static snow for a moment before more words appeared.

Do you fear death, Spirit Thief? Now that you walk the hallowed halls of the Slaves of Chaos? You will die here, and your wretched light will die with you.

Twilight blinked as the last of the words passed. The daemon still wasn’t approaching her, and the contact counter was fixed at one.

“Okay… so… since we can communicate and you’re not really getting in my way, do you mind if I ask some questions? You know, in regard to this multi-dimensional grudge you guys have against me? Because I really feel that you-“

The lumens went out again.

With an undignified yelp, Twilight fired the boltguns on full burst, emptying the remaining clips into the shadows. The guns went wild from the recoil, kicking upward and shaking violently until they unloaded their last few bolts into the ceiling above. Luckily this section of the tunnels wasn’t rigged to explode – at least, not in such an obvious way – and one lumen box detonated after a bolt round punched through its casing, showering Twilight with glass.

The lumens came back on.

Twilight blinked in shock. The big demon was gone. The counter in the corner of her optical was at zero, and after a second it vanished.

The confused but relieved mare was about to turn around and go on her way, but then she realized something else was missing: the small daemon that she had stamped to death was gone as well. There was no sign of the blood smear she had made of its body. Nor any sign of the other two corpses.

She was about to write it off as a case of some sort of hyper-enhanced decay or dimensional reset, but more details started jumping out at her. The vent where the little one had jumped out at her was back in place. The long cuts that the sickle daemon had scraped into the floor were gone. The passageway that the big daemon had emerged from was now just a plain bulkhead.

Whirling around, Twilight saw that the body of the human was gone. There was no corpse. No blood. No sign that his life had been restored like the condition of the décor. The only remnant of the panicked battle she’d just had were the spent bolt casings lying in the hall and a single shattered lumen over her head.

Twilight idly contemplated the possibility that she was going insane while she shook her wings to clear out the bits of glass. In doing so, she felt new surges of pain run up her spine, and the Princess clenched her teeth.

“… Not a hallucination,” she hissed to herself as she shook the glass off her. She turned to look at the wing that the goblin-beast had attacked, confirming an unpleasant permanence among the temporal chaos. Long tears ran through her wings, and blood stuck to some of the feathers. Her shoulder was also bleeding, although that didn’t seem to be as bad; probably the lingering effects of Solon’s regenerator serum.

“It seems Gaela was wrong about me being beyond the reach of daemons here. I hope she was also overselling the benefit of traveling in groups, because that isn’t happening.”

Her horn flashed, and she set a spell on her wing and shoulder to stop the bleeding and prevent infection. Then the alicorn turned toward the exit and remotely unlocked the blast doors.

The empty magazines fell from her boltguns, and she levitated two new ones into place, setting them with a click. “One thing I’m pretty sure she was right about, though…”

Warp anomaly detected. Daemonic presence confirmed.

“If the harm is real, then the threat is real.”

The blast doors started to crack open, and a rumbling growl came from the next corridor.

“If the threat is real…”

Enemy contact imminent.

“Then it can be killed.”

A charcoal-black claw reached through the gap between blast doors, and a furious roar boomed through the tunnels under Medrengard.

****

Harvest of Steel – Bridge

“Is this vessel more daemon than machine? Was there no way to control it with conventional crew?”

Sliver turned from a diagnostic panel to face his new Warsmith. Kataris was in the center of the bridge, staring up at the eye in the middle of the ceiling. He carried a dataslate in one hand, while his other hand rested on his sword hilt. A pair of Terminators stood behind him as his bodyguards, each of them taking in the sight of the Harvest’s bridge.

“Yess. And then, no,” Sliver replied simply.

Warsmith Kataris lowered his gaze to regard the Nurglite. “I suppose I should have expected as much. Still, as a flagship I would have much preferred a true battleship. This vessel is badly undergunned, for a warship.”

“The Harvesst iss not a warship,” Sliver retorted.

“ALL vessels in service to Chaos are warships, Commander,” Kataris countered, “and I expect them to function as such. Some may perform specific roles aside from combat, but they are all pieces of the sword aimed at the Imperium’s throat.”

Sliver didn’t respond, staring at the Warsmith. Then he turned back to the console. “The Harvesst cannot be refit, Warssmith. If it iss to lead your fleet, then it will do sso as it iss now.”

Kataris stepped down from the command platform. “You sound irritable, Commander. Is there something the matter?”

“I am sstill ssurprissed that my Warssmith and misssion changed over the coursse of a ssingle cycle, yess,” the Chaos Lord growled. “I am mosst disspleassed to have my army’ss fate ssorted out by the Conclave behind my back.”

“I realize that these circumstances are… unexpected, Commander,” Kataris began.

“Unexpected to uss, indeed. There wass no ssurprisse among thosse of you arrayed againsst Ssolon.” Sliver turned back around, green fumes puffing from his mask filter. “I know treachery when I ssee it, Warssmith. Do not think me a fool like the man you’re replacing.”

The Terminators serving as Kataris’s guards stepped in front of the Warsmith menacingly, prepared to savage the Chaos Lord at their master’s command. Kataris merely tilted his head to the side.

“… I see. Your reputation is well-deserved, commander. You are too good for this fleet.” His pale lips pressed into a slight smirk. “Perhaps too good for this Legion.”

A grunt came from the Nurglite, followed by another puff of fumes.

Kataris let his smirk fade. “Whatever concerns you have over this change of leadership will soon be forgotten in the churn of battle, Commander Sliver. I intend to return you and your men to WAR. At last, you will match wits and arms against true warriors and earn glory rather than salvage!”

“The prosspect… doess not disspleasse me,” Sliver grumbled. “But thiss fleet will not be sso eassy to command as you ssupposse.”

Kataris glanced back up at the giant eye set in the ceiling. It squinted back at him, its pupil shrinking and its iris glowing red. “You refer to the ship?”

“The Harvesst can be guided. It will misss itss masster, but I know how to usse thiss ship.” Sliver walked past the Warsmith, his heavy greaves nearly shaking the deck. “It iss the resst of our force that will be a true tesst of leadership, Warssmith.”

“Ah, you mean the dregs left back on this worthless planet you found?”

Sliver stopped walking.

Kataris chuckled and held up the dataslate in front of him. “I’ve read a little bit about it, and with every word I grow more perplexed. Situated on the edge of Tau space, infested with Orks, and colonized by feeble equine mutants. THIS is the world that Solon – supposedly a Warsmith of GREAT intellect – chose to make his home bastion?”

Sliver hesitated, his feelings torn. “… The location… becomess irrelevant sso long as the Dark Portal-“

“Ah, yes. The Dark Portal. Consider me unimpressed with your Head Sorcerer’s workmanship,” Kataris sneered. “I see here more than one note complaining of the unreliability of sorcery in maintaining our security… a few of them are yours, I believe.”

Kataris snorted and dropped the dataslate on a console. “I’ve heard more than enough about this tiresome hovel. My blade seeks the blood of MEN, not weakling aliens! When my forces have reorganized, we will go to this world, take whatever weapons and armsmen we left there, and return to Imperial space with all haste!” He walked toward the bridge entrance, passing by the other Chaos Lord. “If Solon hadn’t abandoned a ship, I wouldn’t even bother. No Iron Warrior worthy of the title would be left to guard a hold full of mortals and useless horses.”

Sliver watched the Warsmith leave the bridge, followed by the Terminator bodyguards. He turned to glance at the dataslate Kataris had left, and then, submitting to an impulse of curiosity, swiped a grimy finger across the surface. The next data package on the slate was the battle report regarding the Imperial cruiser Heart of Vengeance.

“… Not quite as usselesss as they sseem,” Sliver mumbled, turning to follow Kataris.

****

Medrengard

Tunnel network – exact location unknown

(Recommended listening)

“I do NOT need this right now! Get out of my way!”

The thunder of boltguns and the flash of muzzle flare filled the darkened tunnels while Twilight fought through the daemons in her path. Twisted nightmares covered in spikes, claws, hooks and vile tendrils crawled from tunnels and vents to challenge her. Most were hurled back to oblivion with the bark of a bolter, while others were simply left behind as their target galloped onward to the next set of doors.

“SCREEEEEEEEEE!!” A bird-like monster hurled itself toward the alicorn, swooping past the thundering bolters. Its jaws yawned open as it dove for the pony’s back, only for a purple hoof to slam into it.

One of the boltguns tilted to the side after the monster hit the ground, and then it fired a single shot. Twilight took off into a gallop immediately, not waiting to confirm her kill.

“Why are there so many of you?! This is ostensibly an Iron Warriors facility, and-“

A drain on the floor opened up, and a multi-limbed horror stuck its head out. It started to emit an enraged scream, but promptly found a boltgun jammed into its mouth. The weapon fired, and the daemon’s head fell apart in a puff of gore and smoke.

“-And this daemonic presence is DEFINITELY sufficient to warrant an aggravated security response!” Twilight continued, her breath heaving.

She galloped around the headless body on the floor, only for a larger humanoid daemon with skeletal features to emerge from another intersecting tunnel. The mare hit the ground and rolled, slipping between the monster’s nearly fleshless legs. Her boltguns followed an arc over the daemon, and one flipped over in mid-flight to blast it in the back of its skull.

A wolf-like daemon leapt, and Twilight barely summoned a magical kinetic burst in time to knock it off-course. Once she had her footing again she leapt into the air, and a flap of her wings saved her from being tackled from behind.

The first bolter clicked empty when she pulled the trigger, but the second pulverized the monster’s back, staggering the beast. Twilight dropped onto the wounded daemon, stamped its head into the floor, and then bounded away.

“Just a little… further…” the alicorn gasped while rushing for the blast doors. Her augmetic locked onto the cogitator and started submitting its access signum.

Then a massive, bone-like blade ripped through the wall.

Twilight yelped and skidded to a stop. The claw was huge; bigger than she was, and curved like a raptor’s talon. It wasn’t so big that it covered the entire width of the tunnel, but the way it kept thrashing and stabbing made it too dangerous to approach.

She glanced behind her. A small army of groaning and snarling daemons were following in her wake, like a tide of claws, spikes, and twisted flesh. Some were lumbering giants, slow and ponderous in their gait, while others were lithe, agile killers that had the misfortune to get stuck behind first sort. There was no possibility of fighting off so many daemons at once, and more seemed to be joining the crowd constantly.

Twilight glanced to the side, which led into the complete darkness of an earthen tunnel.

She looked up, spotting an air vent that had not yet spat out a Warp-spawned horror.

Then her horn flashed, and she just teleported past the giant claw.

“All right, you animals,” Twilight growled while she activated the doors. “You want me?” Her empty boltgun swapped its magazine in a blur of purple light. “COME GET ME!”

She spun around.

The tunnel was empty.

Twilight blinked in shock, thinking at first she had gotten her teleport coordinates wrong. There were no daemon bodies, no displaced vent covers, and the hole in the wall where the giant claw had emerged was gone as if it had never happened. Only her strained muscles and the bolt casings littering the floor – some of them still smoking – gave any indication that the combat had actually happened.

Despite having experienced this exact phenomenon already, Twilight still found it extremely jarring when things suddenly stopped obeying the rules of object permanence, like reverse peek-a-boo. She couldn’t help but wonder if there was a specific name for this sort of thing; she resolved to look it up after Kataris was dead and Solon was back in charge of the fleet.

“If there’s no name for it, I think I’ll call it a ‘Pie Shift,’” she mumbled to herself. “Or ‘Pink Shift’ maybe? The first one sounds like it has to do with math, so that might be better.”

The mag-lock disengaged, and the blast doors opened.

Twilight’s vision was immediately flooded with red light. Her optical adjusted first, revealing a glowing runic circle on the floor in front of her. A circle composed of blood, judging by the human corpses lying against the wall, and a very active one, judging by the large crimson daemon emerging from the center.

“Ohhh, no! Not happening!” the mare snarled, her horn pulsing with magic. The ritual circle stuttered to a stop, and purple energy started feeding into the bright red glow.

The daemon, which had barely emerged up to its shoulders, suddenly flinched and dropped back down several inches. It started clawing at the ground around its emergence point, scraping claws like scythe blades against the flooring.

“NO! NO! GO AWAY!” The bolters swung up into firing position and unloaded into the daemon’s face, exploding against the armored shell around its skull.

The monster roared, thrashing back and forth under the barrage, and eventually its grip failed. The claws slipped free of the flooring, and the monster was sucked back into its own summoning gateway.

Twilight’s breath heaved while the blast doors closed shut behind her. This room was large and circular, with several different heavy machines built into the walls for controlling resource and power flow. There didn’t seem to be any access points aside from the doors behind her and the doors opposite that point, which would lead into the next fortress.

“WAS THAT IT?!” Twilight screamed up into the ceiling. “THAT’S ALL YOU HAVE?! I WAS ALONE, UNARMORED, AND LOW ON AMMUNITION, AND YOU BARELY SCRATCHED ME!! YOU FILLED THE TUNNELS WITH MONSTERS AND PLAYED A FEW OBNOXIOUS TRICKS WITH MY PERCEPTION, AND NOW YOU’RE GIVING UP?! THAT’S YOUR BEST?! THE ORKS PUT UP MORE OF A FIGHT THAN YOU!!”

Her horn pulsed, and the rune circle was suddenly cut through with runs of purple flame. She crossed the threshold of the ritual area, her head craned up toward the ceiling.

“THE NEXT TIME YOU WORTHLESS MONSTERS CHASE ME FROM ONE END OF THE GALAXY TO ANOTHER, YOU’D BETTER BRING YOUR ‘A’ GAME, YOU HEAR ME?! BECAUSE NEXT TIME, I’M GOING TO HAVE AN ARMY WITH ME!!”

She paused to take a few gulps of air and then spread her wings, rearing up in the middle of the circle.

“I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU QUASI-SUBSTANTIAL, SEMI-SENTIENT PSIONIC DETRITUS WANT ME DEAD SO BADLY, BUT YOU FAILED!! YOU WON’T KEEP ME FROM KATARIS!! NO ONE WILL KEEP ME FROM KATARIS!!”

Her optical beeped, and two bright green outlines appeared in the distance.

Iron Warrior IFF signums confirmed. 20 meters and closing.

“Meep.” Twilight’s ears flipped down, and the boltguns broke out of her levitation spell and dropped onto the floor.

She started looking for a hiding place immediately, and her heart rate surged when the mag-locks of the bastion access doors started to disengage.

“What is this? A daemonic circle?”

The Iron Warriors stepped into the room the moment the blast doors cleared, immediately spotting the tattered circle of blood on the floor. The second thing they noticed was the boltguns lying on top of it, and the third was the corpses heaped against the walls.

“Blasted Cultists,” snarled one of the Marines, marching up to the ritual icon. “It looks like they summoned something.”

“But what was that shouting? I see no one here,” mumbled the other. “And where is the daemon?”

“Perhaps it vanished already. Or it may have been wounded and fled. They put up a fight, apparently.” The Iron Warrior mag-locked his own weapon to his hip, and then leaned down to take the boltguns lying on the floor. “Idiots.”

Then he proceeded to the tunnel blast doors and disengaged the lock. “Let’s search the corridors. One of the slaves was doing a maintenance check. I don’t see an environmental suit amongst the bodies.”

“It’s strange…” mumbled the other Marine. “This doesn’t look like any summoning accident I’ve seen.” His gaze shifted over to the piled corpses. “It looks like these fools were butchered to create the ritual circle, not killed in combat by the summon. And they… hmm?”

He paused mid-sentence, his gaze fixing on a spot of color lying under a bloodied body’s hand. It appeared to be a feather. A purple feather.

The blast doors opened. “Cover me,” barked the first Astartes.

“… Yes, Brother.” The second Iron Warrior turned away, and then followed his partner into the gloom.

Twilight didn’t dare move until she clearly heard the sound of the mag-locks re-engaging. The pile of dead bodies shifted, and then the mare burst free of the corpses.

“Ugh… that… was terrible.” she landed unsteadily on her hooves, her head spinning and her stomach turning. Her fur and feathers were covered with splotches of partially dried gore, and the stench of death had invaded her nostrils in a way that would persist long after she had left this room.

Squeezing her eyes shut, a wave of purple magic swept over her body; starting at the tip of her horn and moving all the way to the end of her tail. The rancid fluids and flaking blood peeled away from her, but Twilight still felt like she’d need a dozen long showers before she’d feel remotely clean again.

Kicking out each leg briefly, the Equestrian Princess shook herself. The chains around her body rattled, reminding her that she was still carrying several pounds worth of ammunition and had no guns to fire them with.

“Well, so far so good… kind of,” she mumbled, detaching the magazines and dropping them onto the floor. “This is the next bastion. There should be a shuttle here that I can use to get to the Harvest of Steel… but I’m sure it also has a garrison. Still, it seems like the daemons aren’t working with the Iron Warriors, so at least I won’t have to deal with Warp ambushes.”

The blast doors opened into an impressively fortified wider hall that led deeper into the complex. Twilight immediately recognized many of the innovations of the Iron Warriors, including hidden kill slits in the bulkheads, an extra set of blast shields tucked into the ceiling, and an inactive mine field. No soldiers manned the defenses, although she took some extra time scanning with her optical to make sure.

Behind the assorted barriers and hazards was an alcove with a logic engine, and Twilight’s ears immediately perked up. Pausing to check again for anyone in earshot, she then rushed up to the console.

“Okay, let’s see this decryption key in action,” she mumbled, tapping the screen with her hoof. The input screen blinked on, and then raised a prompt for an access code.

Security bypass engaged… Primus Admin access node decrypted. Processing…

The access code filled with indecipherable runes, and then vanished. New screens appeared. Twilight cackled with malicious glee.

“Hmm… it looks like this facility’s owners aren’t here right now. Maybe even dead, like the adjacent bastion. That explains the light security. So much to do!” she cooed, looking over the wealth of facility functions available to her. “First… let’s seal the tunnel blast doors and disengage the manual override.”

With a sweep of her hoof, it was done. The window vanished, and the cogitator next to the heavy blast doors turned off.

“Next… I think the local noosphere and vox-net might be a problem, so let’s shut down the local data-streams and alarms.” A few more taps and swipes of her hoof, and several windows opened and closed. “That probably won’t go unnoticed for long, though. What else do we have… Ah! Facility map!”

A wire-frame hololith appeared over the console. Twilight was slightly disappointed she couldn’t simply download the data into her optical (or, at least, that she didn’t know how to do so) like she could with her helmet visor, but reasoned that she wouldn’t be spending much time here anyway.

“… Okay, I think the sub-level below this one would be the safest route. It stretches to the other end of the fortress and to the launch pads.” She looked back at a heavy gate that led to an entry ramp. “There we are.” Slapping a hoof onto the console, the gate started to creak open.

Twilight deactivated the cogitator and trotted over to the ramp, peering down into the dim lights. The entrance was unusually large, with an especially high ceiling and a path wide enough for two Rhinos to fit side by side. She descended slowly, her optical scanning constantly for any “friendly” signums.

As she reached the bottom of the ramp, she picked one up. A targeting reticule appeared off to the side, and a large outline highlighted a huge, bipedal body with ridges sticking up out of its back. Twilight recognized the shape even before the augmetic spelled it out for her.

Target identified: Maulerfiend.

Designation: Seth’rehl.

Status: Not deployed. Unit under restraint.

“Ah. So. I’m in the Daemon Engine pits… Good to know,” she mumbled under her breath. “Probably should have checked that when I was looking at the map.” The Pits weren’t the safest place in an Iron Warriors fortress, but that was a fraught comparison under the circumstances. The important things, as always, was that there didn’t seem to be any Iron Warriors or mortal humans around.

There were many different facilities making up the Daemon Engine Pits, resulting in huge corridors and heavy tracks attached to the ceiling for transportation of materials. There were also numerous dents, divots, and burn scars on the walls and floors, suggesting that the war machines kept here occasionally got rowdy.

Twilight Sparkle walked through the central hub, which offered a straight path over a raised causeway to the other end of the facility. Adjacent to the causeway were the Engine pens.

Maulerfiends lay curled within cells reinforced with thick metal walls covered over in runic circles. Huge shackles bound the machine-beasts by their arms and legs, and small puffs of smoke leaked from their exhaust pipes in time with a quasi-mechanical heartbeat. Further down the path laid the Forgefiends, standing at attention with their massive rotary cannons held firmly by augmetic clamps. The daemonic machines turned their heads at the gentle tapping of hooves and rattle of chain links, staring at the purple equine intruder through lenses of bloody red. Snarls and electric growls came from the Daemon Engines, but they made no move to free themselves or test their restraints.

Twilight continued onward down the causeway, trying not to stare at the metal behemoths that surrounded her. Her focus was on the consoles, nooks, and small platforms that would hold the slaves, servitors, and Techpriests that tended to the Engine Pits. It was they who could recognize her as an intruder and inform the rest of the fortress. Luckily, there seemed to be no one. Even a skeleton crew to watch over the walkers seemed to be absent.

It was getting a little suspicious.

Thanks to her intense vigilance, Twilight managed to spot something out of place on the path ahead. Behind a large stack of metal crates was the end of a segmented metal tube with a trio of claws at the tip; a common mechatendril. She paused, looking over the area with her augmetic, and frowned when it detected nothing. No signum, no life signs, and no heat signature of any note.

The alicorn crept forward, her movements more akin to a panther than a pony. The Forgefiends watched her pass from their nearby prisons, snorting blasts of hot sparks at the sight. Eventually she reached the crates and peered closely at the mechatendril, as if it were a snake and she was attempting to test its life signs. Her telekinesis gave it a brief tug, which did nothing; apparently it was attached to something of considerable weight.

She stepped around the stack of crates. She wasn’t at all surprised to see a Dark Techpriest lying against the crates. She was slightly surprised that he had a hole punched in his sternum and was sitting in a pool of fresh blood, but frankly it was the only explanation for his being invisible to her sensors.

“That’s a daemon’s wound. Even here… did the daemons manage to take the bastion?” She shook her head. “No, of course not. They’re here for me. Fighting off the Iron Warriors, even a leftover garrison, just to get to me is-“ A sudden shriek came from behind her, sounding like tearing metal. The purple mare jumped in surprise, yelping.

Warp anomaly detected. Daemonic presence confirmed.

Twilight whirled around, her horn already crackling with power. On the causeway behind her, barely ten meters away, was the cyclops daemon from before. The nearby Maulerfiends were in a frenzy at the monster’s presence, snarling and yanking at their bindings. Quite a different reaction than she had prompted.

The cyclops started speaking its nonsense horror-language again, and her augmetic dutifully translated.

You run. You fight. You kill. But you do not die. Where is your fear, Marauder? Why does your soul not sing to me?

“My fear?” Twilight barked a short laugh, her horn sparking again. “I’m on my way to kill someone much, much scarier than you, monster. You’ll have to do better than sudden teleports or playing with the lights.”

A rumbling noise that might have been a laugh came from the daemon.

You hope the Men of Iron will save you.

“The Men of Iron already saved me. Now it’s my turn to save them.”

A sizzling bolt of purple blasted from Twilight’s horn, striking the daemon in its pot belly. It groaned, lurching backward, and a few droplets of green slime leaked from its mouth onto the floor. The droplets sizzled loudly and bubbled on contact, warning Twilight of their corrosive nature.

“Acid spit, huh? Okay, why not?”

The daemon grunted and closed its mouth. Its throat started to bulge, and its loose, hanging jowls inflated like balloons. Twilight summoned a bubble shield, silently regretting that she had lost her boltguns.

She was fully expecting the creature to vomit a jet of acid at her, but instead it turned its head and let loose into the nearest Engine pit. The Maulerfiend locked down in the pit turned its head away, roaring furiously as droplets of searing venom splattered across its head and neck. The surface armor layers started bubbling and leaking smoke into the air, but the siege walker itself wasn’t the true target of the attack.

Twilight dropped her shield and recoiled, her eyes bulging. The daemon had sprayed the massive chains shackling the Maulerfiend to the walls. The bindings had been swallowed in a cloud of noxious gases, and the sound of the metal dissolving reached a fiery pitch.

“What are you doing?! You can’t let the Daemon Engines free! They’ll destroy you, too!” the pony shouted. The Maulerfiend pulled its arm away from the wall, and the chain strained to resist even as the links thinned.

The daemon spun to face her again, its jowls flapping loosely and acidic drool dribbling down its chest. It’s face stretched into a grin, and it burbled more of its nonsense language.

Now. Now you know fear. Your heart sings terror. Good. Now you will die.

“WHAT is your problem?! Why are you doing this?!” the mare shrieked.

The cyclopean daemon leaned forward, leering at her. It opened its mouth wide, and the first few horrible noises of its nonsense language emerged.

Then the Maulerfiend seized it by the head.

Twilight jumped back again as the daemon was yanked into the Engine pit, carried along by huge adamantium claws. The Maulerfiend snarled at its catch briefly, and then it smashed the Warpspawn against the wall, smearing it across its prison while its power fist thrummed with energy.

All the while, two words floated across the mare’s optical, translated from the daemon’s abortive reply.

Hope will

The Maulerfiend growled and reached its free hand down toward its belly, where its magma cutters were locked together. It seized the durasteel bands and its fingers sparked, shredding the restraint in an instant.

Twilight turned and bolted down the causeway. “Okay, time to exit! Please don’t follow me, I’m on your side, technically!”

With an ear-rending howl, the Maulerfiend broke free of the last of its restraints, slicing through the remaining shackles rapidly with its magma cutters. The siege walker clambered out of the pit and into the causeway, free at last.

“It probably won’t even chase me,” Twilight gasped while galloping for the blast doors. “I mean, I have an IFF signum, and-“

A roar boomed through the facility, followed by the sound of enormous metal feet pounding the causeway. Twilight yelped in fright, and her horn started to glow.

“Must get out, must get out, MUST GET OUT.” She squeezed her eye shut, and a moment later the mare vanished in a flash of purple.

Twilight reappeared in the next corridor. Her optical went fuzzy with snow for a moment, and then swiftly recalibrated and reset. Her heartbeat took a moment later to start up again once she confirmed there was nobody in the immediate area.

“Okay. That went… pretty well, actually,” she mumbled to herself nervously. She began walking forward slowly. “I think I regret disabling the alarms now. If the Iron Warriors knew that a Maulerfiend was loose without its deployment rites, they wouldn’t have any time to bother with me.” The purple Princess chuckled nervously to herself.

Then a sizzling noise came from the blast doors.

Twilight froze when she heard the sound, and then slowly turned her head around. Sure enough, there was a thin spike of melta gas burning through the barrier near both edges, slowly moving up from the ground in a wide arc.

“… Oh. Right. You’re kind of made to get past these obstacles, aren’t you?” she squeaked. Then she turned around and bolted.

Twilight galloped through the hall, searching desperately for a hiding spot or an air vent large enough to accommodate a pony. Unfortunately, the vents were much too small, and the only object around large enough to hide her was a crate of battle cannon shells. The hall stretched on ahead and then turned sharply, but the distance was too great and her pursuer was too fast; she’d never be able to outrun a Maulerfiend. The ceiling was too low for her to fly out of reach. Teleporting would move her along the path faster, but it would exhaust her magic quickly and soon leave her trying to outrun the walker anyway.

“Ponyfeathers! Isn’t there another connecting tunnel? Somewhere I can lose it?” She wasn’t sure if Maulerfiends had any capacity to track prey beyond sight and signum augers, but she was fast running out of options.

A loud crack boomed through the hall, followed by the sound of an enormous chunk of metal hitting the floor. After that came the sound of metal limbs racing through the corridor, announcing that it was time for her decision.

“Okay, then. I guess I’m fighting a Maulerfiend,” the alicorn sighed miserably. Her horn lit up, and a stream of purple energy reached for the crate of cannon shells. She lifted one out of its pocket and turned it on its side, pointing it toward the Daemon Engine barreling down the corridor.

“Here! Catch!” the mare taunted, hurling the shell with a strong pulse of telekinetic force.

The Maulerfiend screeched to a halt, twisting its head slightly as the projectile arced toward it.

Then it reached its hand up and snatched the shell out of the air.

Twilight blinked, and then started backing away. “I, uh… I didn’t mean it literally.” Her horn started glowing again, preparing a barrier spell.

It was very much needed when the Maulerfiend hurled the battle cannon shell not at Twilight, but at the munitions crate. A string of rapid detonations ripped through the hall, and a crushing wave of pressure slammed into Twilight’s shield. It collapsed almost instantly, and the alicorn screamed as she was bowled over and hurled across the hall.

Twilight spent a few seconds on the ground, lying on her side. Her ears pinned to her head, still ringing from the detonation, and her eye was squeezed shut against the pain. Her augmetic didn’t have an eyelid, though, so it continued transmitting while the Maulerfiend walked up to her through the smoky haze left by the explosion.

“I’m usually better at this, I swear,” Twilight mumbled up at the siege walker. “It’s just, usually you guys are on my side, and it’s hard to put my heart into this.”

The Maulerfiend lifted a hand, clenched it into a fist, and swung it down onto the purple pony.

Twilight appeared behind the Daemon Engine in a burst of purple, still lying on her side against the floor.

The Maulerfiend lifted its fist out of the dent it had made in the ground. There was nothing there, and the siege walker started whipping its head around in confusion.

Twilight watched the war machine silently, scanning it with her optical. She had two krak grenades still attached to her chain, but the munitions had limited damage potential against such a large target. Only a detonation at a weak point had any hope of stopping the siege walker. Numerous joints, bearings, gaps, and exposed cable bundles were highlighted as viable targets, but none of them seemed remotely easy to get to. Teleporting the grenades would be difficult too, since the Maulerfiend kept moving around.

Said walker suddenly turned around, its thick tail of bundled wires and cables whipping over Twilight’s prone body. The Maulerfiend spotted the pony on the floor, and puffs of angry black smoke blasted from its smoke stacks while it snarled.

“Idea!” Twilight suddenly chirped, her horn flashing again. She vanished in another flash of purple just before the Daemon Engine swiped at her, its fingers tearing molten gouges in the floor.

She re-appeared behind the walker and jumped to her hooves. Then she had to jump again, and a little more desperately, as the daemonic machine tried to swat her with its tail. She took to the air, dodging desperately out of the way when the walker turned and swung its giant fist at her again.

“Would you back off for a minute? I’m trying to do a thing!” the mare demanded, firing a magic blast with her horn.

The magic bolt struck the Maulerfiend in the face. It didn’t detonate explosively or release an energy pulse, but rather released a burst of a black ink-like substance over its eyes and snout. The walker shook its head and screeched, its voice like a buzzsaw scraping steel.

Twilight swooped forward over her opponent and landed on its back, between the rows of smoke stacks. She stumbled almost immediately, as the Maulerfiend was still moving and the footing on its back was poor. Fighting to stay steady, her telekinesis removed the pair of krak grenades from her munitions chain and levitated them toward the smoke stacks.

“Here goes everything!” The krak grenades were stripped of their arming pins, and then she sunk them into an exhaust pipe on each side.

The Maulerfiend growled, and then sharply leaned to the side. Twilight was thrown off her hooves and slammed against the row of smoke stacks, stunning her. Then she tumbled painfully down the armored ridges of the siege walker’s back. She barely avoided slicing herself open on the blades sticking out of the armor, but as soon as she rolled onto the base of the tail it whipped it to the side, swinging her into the wall.

Twilight squeaked painfully and collapsed onto the floor, blood dribbling from beneath her mane.

The Maulerfiend whirled about to finally finish off its prey.

The two krak grenades detonated with laughably understated popping noises, such that Twilight couldn’t even hear them over the loud ringing in her skull. The effect on the Maulerfiend, however, was appropriately devastating. The red seams over its chest plating swiftly went dark, its legs quivered, and jets of fire rather than exhaust blasted from its smoke stacks.

The Maulerfiend quailed pitifully, its voice emerging as a near-whine, and the lights in its eyes flickered. A moment later its legs failed, and the war machine collapsed on its side.

Twilight looked over at the Daemon Engine, feeling some of her dizziness clear. A single giant hand reached over to her, claws like massive swords. The arm quaked from the effort, sparks blasting from the power cabling in the bicep.

Twilight scooted away. The Maulerfiend’s hand fell short, slamming onto the floor with a grim finality. Its eyes went completely dark, and the last plumes of smoke drained from its exhaust pipes.

Twilight laid where she was for several minutes, panting heavily.

“What the blazes is going on down here? Did one of the Engines really get loose?”

Twilight’s ears perked up. That voice didn’t come from behind a vox grille. The sound of footsteps were coming from behind the Maulerfiend’s body, further down the hall.

“I don’t hear anything anymore… Khorne’s teeth, a Maulerfiend broke free?! I think it’s dead!”

Twilight slowly pushed herself up off the ground. She gently removed the chain from around her body and placed it on the floor; with no more munitions to carry, all it did was weigh her down and make noise.

“…Yup. It’s dead. How’d it even get free? You think it’s responsible for the vox-net going down?”

“Doubt it. Let’s find Techpriest Goran. He can get it up and running again.”

Twilight checked the position of the approaching Chaos armsmen with her optical, marking both of them. Then she sucked in a breath, and her horn filled with magic.

The two men cautiously approaching the slain Maulerfiend suddenly heard a gentle pop behind them, and they went stiff. A second later their hands darted for their laspistols, only to grasp empty air.

The rogues made eye contact, their chests tightening. They turned around.

“Hi. I realize that this is extremely unconventional, even for individuals that make their living on an evil monster planet, but I need to get to one of the ships in orbit. I’d really appreciate it if you could help me.”

The laspistols that previously rested in the men’s holsters floated in the air, surrounded by a shimmering purple glow and aimed squarely at their heads. Twilight sat behind and below the levitating weapons, her horn aglow and a weak, long-suffering smile on her face.

“So, do either of you know how to operate a transport shuttle? I PROMISE I won’t kill you, regardless of how you answer.”

The two men glanced at each other, then back at Twilight. One slowly raised his hand.

“I know how to fly the shuttle. But-“

Before he could finish the sentence, the other soldier’s head was suddenly wrapped in a magical glow. He shouted in surprise, and then found himself shoved forcefully toward the wall. His forehead slammed against the metal bulkhead, and he collapsed in a heap.

“You treacherous xeno,” the other soldier growled, his eyes fixed on his floating gun.

“Not treachery! I said I wouldn’t kill him, and I didn’t! Really, you guys treat concussions like skinned knees anyway; he’ll be fine.” Twilight paused to clear her throat. “Now, please lead me to the shuttle and fly me to the Harvest of Steel. I promise that after you do, I will not kill you OR slam you into something to knock you out for my convenience!”

The man blinked, frowning. “… Been a long time since anyone asked me to do something with a ‘please.’”

“Politeness is important,” the mare said with a gracious nod. “I mean, I’m asking you to do me a favor under threat of severe bodily harm. It’s the least I could do.”

“Look. I don’t really care what happens to you or the ship, but if I take you anywhere, I’m as good as dead. Better to take a lasbolt here and now; at least it’ll be a clean death.” The soldier clenched his jaw and crossed his arms over his chest, fully expecting the pistol to fire.

Twilight shook her head. “No, not at all! In fact, if you help me, I can guarantee you’re not punished! You’ll get a better posting!” She paused. “Assuming I survive, that is. So it’s maybe… let’s give it a sixty percent chance.”

“Even if you’re telling the truth, it’s not a good idea to tie my fate to a xeno I found skulking around the bastion,” the soldier replied.

“You live on a Daemon World in the Eye of Terror,” Twilight deadpanned, “I don’t think you get to lecture anyone about poor decisions.”

The man dropped his head, grimacing. “Well… uh…”

“Also, there’s no reason I have to give you a so-called ‘clean’ death if you refuse. Just saying.” The two laspistols tilted down to aim at the man’s knees.

“All right, all right! Have it your way, you bloody animal!” the soldier snarled, moving down the hall. “Good chance we’ll just get vaporized by a defense turret anyway; that’s about as quick a demise as you can get.”

Twilight followed after him, still levitating the laspistols. “Don’t worry; I have the access codex to let us dock. We won’t die. Not in that particular way, at least.”

“Why are you even doing this? To get off Medrengard?”

“No. Well, I mean, YES, but that’s just a happy side-effect. I’m actually boarding the ship to assassinate someone.” The mare’s voice lightened considerably as she followed her hostage through the halls.

The man twisted his head around to regard Twilight with an arched eyebrow.

“It’s for friendship, though,” she assured him.

He turned his head back around and sighed.

****

Harvest of Steel

Embarkation deck CT-9

The trip to the Harvest of Steel was completed, as Twilight had hoped, without incident. Her access codex had been accepted and auspex scans had triggered no alerts. The shuttle hadn’t even been hailed on its way from the planet up into the orbital rings.

After bidding her unwilling pilot goodbye and making sure he understood that triggering an alarm would dramatically decrease her – and by extension, his – chances of survival, she left the shuttle and crept onto the daemon ship once more.

The embarkation deck was empty, save for several servitors moving equipment and cargo. Most likely because the ship was docked; almost everyone boarding or leaving the Harvest would go by way of the orbital rings. Still, Twilight felt a chill down her back.

Just a few days ago, this had been her ship. She had made it a second home, despite all the problems and miseries that had entailed. Now it was someone else’s fief, and she didn’t know if she’d be greeted with indifference or gunfire.

Twilight crept into the next corridor, waiting for something, anything, to register on her optical. And then the next corridor as well. And the intersection hall beyond that.

In each area, spots of color indicating automated turrets blinked at her from the ceilings. Servitors occasionally walked by, taking no notice of the equine skulking the decks. But no sentient creature crossed her path; not a human, post-human, or other sort unique to Chaos vessels.

It put her even more on edge. Planetside, such an absence of troops had been a prelude to vicious daemon attacks. Was that more or less likely within the Harvest of Steel?

“Where IS everyone?” the alicorn hissed, leaning her head around a corner bulkhead.

Her optical beeped, and Twilight was half relieved, half exasperated to see an Iron Warrior’s signum appear in the next hall. Followed by several others. There appeared to be eight of them; far more than she had any hope of getting past.

She quietly stepped up to the bulkhead door to consider her options. A large Chaos Star done in gold was emblazoned on the barrier, and she stared at the emblem even while her attention was on the bodies behind it.

“Let’s see… can my augmetic tell the difference between 38th Company and 63rd Grand Battalion?” she asked under her breath. “If not, the ship cogitators should be able-“

One of the signals on her optical winked out, and she gasped mid-sentence. Then another, and then another. There were no sounds on the other side of the bulkhead door that suggested sounds of combat.

The view from her optical augment suddenly exploded into static, and Twilight recoiled. The lumens above and around her went out, plunging the corridor into darkness. The Chaos Star in front of her inexplicably remained visible; everything else fell away to complete black. A sensation like a claw made of ice touching her spine crawled down her back.

“You cannot hide from us.”

The voice was a hissing, malicious whisper coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Twilight quickly cast a light spell, but to her shock the bright glow only illuminated the Chaos Star better. The rest of her surroundings were still completely black; an empty, inexplicable void.

“You cannot stop us.”

Twilight’s horn started to itch and heat up while her eyes were fixed on the Chaos symbol. She had gotten fairly used to the sensation before, but now it returned with new intensity.

“We will hunt the light within the darkness from now unto eternity, and we will extinguish your hope.”

The Chaos Star started to glow. The golden light built brighter and brighter, and the feeling in Twilight’s horn grew painful. The mare turned her head away, squeezing her eye shut.

When Twilight blinked her eye open again, she was looking at a bulkhead wall. Her optical flickered on a moment later, its function restored. She quickly turned back toward the doorway.

… And found herself staring at the greaves of an Iron Warrior.

“Gah!” Twilight lurched back, and in an instant the Chaos Space Marine had his bolter up and aimed at her face. Deciding that she’d had enough bullets to the head lately, the alicorn froze in place and nervously awaited the soldier’s judgment.

“... You actually made it,” the Iron Warrior grumbled. He reached down and seized Twilight by the back of her neck, hauling her up to carry her.

The rough handling was somewhat painful, obviously, but Twilight didn’t struggle or say anything. She was carried into the next corridor, past several other Iron Warriors. All of them stopped whatever they were doing to turn and stare at the pony being hauled through their midst. Her optical, apparently functioning on her earlier request, tagged the Astartes as belonging to the 38th Company and listed their names. That was good, then. Or at least, not nearly as bad as it could be.

The Chaos Marine holding her opened a door on the side of the corridor and tossed the mare inside. He closed the door behind her, and then turned away and left.

Twilight was quite gratified to see that the room she had been flung into was not a cell. She wasn’t precisely sure what it was for, and didn’t get much time to look it over. The only other occupant was another Iron Warrior, and he held her full attention immediately.

This Iron Warrior, as it happened, was familiar to her. The plasma gun and power maul attached to his hips was a fairly unique selection of wargear, along with the warrior’s distinctive bionic arm.

“Armsmaster Tolken?” Twilight asked, finally breaking her nervous silence.

Tolken approached the mare wordlessly, and then leaned down onto a knee to look her in the eyes. His bionic hand took a relatively gentle hold of her chin and tilted her head to the side, giving the Chaos Space Marine a better look at her new augmetic eye.

“Warsmith Solon’s work, no doubt,” Tolken mumbled. “I can only imagine what that device is truly capable of.” He chuckled. “That ancient fool.”

“… Armsmaster?” Twilight asked cautiously.

Tolken let go of her and stood back up. “We received word that we may be receiving ‘very friendly cargo’ and were asked to ensure it remained safe during transit. I don’t know what transpired on Medrengard, but since I find myself serving a new Chaos Lord and you find yourself missing an organ, I expect the events were quite turbulent.”

Twilight bristled, and her wings quivered in anger. “… Yes. Yes, you could say that.” She shook her head. “Warsmith Honsou arranged all of this to trap Solon here. The entire fleet is just a bargaining chip for his power play.”

“Ugh. Politics,” Tolken grumbled, turning away. “It is no matter. I’ve arranged for a room in the underdecks for you until we return to Centaur. I will attempt to secure your dragon slave, but there are those who have taken an interest in his unique abilities. He may end up serving the Legion without you.”

“Spike is NOT-“ Twilight bit her tongue to stop herself, and then took a deep breath. “Okay. Three things, if I may, Lord Armsmaster?”

The Armsmaster glanced back at her. “What?”

“One: There’s a man waiting in a shuttle on the embarkation deck who needs a new posting. I would really appreciate it if he could come with us. Two: If you know where my power armor is, I really need it back. Three: Just asking, no real reason, but is Kataris on the Harvest right now?”

Tolken turned completely around, staring at the alicorn.

“I’m just wondering… because… it would be SUPER AWKWARD to run into him right now. The last time we met I kind of snapped at him and he shot me, and I feel like there could be some bad vibes.” She smiled widely, completely failing to make a remotely sincere expression.

“You’re going to assassinate Warsmith Kataris?” Tolken asked.

“What? Me? I never said that!” Twilight started to flop-sweat on the spot.

Tolken ignored her denial. “Don’t be ridiculous. You escaped Medrengard with your life. Many greater warriors have been less fortunate. Don’t think to turn against us, xeno.”

Twilight grimaced, realizing that her protests were useless. “I wouldn’t really consider that turning against the Iron Warriors as opposed to restoring the 38th Company to its rightful leadership…”

“You would be wrong,” Tolken said firmly. “You are reputedly quite intelligent. Do the smart thing and leave us when the time is right.”

Twilight Sparkle lowered her gaze to the floor and wet her lips. “If I… If I leave this room, on my own, and don’t head to my underdeck room, will you stop me?”

“Sparkle, don’t be an idiot,” Tolken growled. “Warsmith Kataris is a Chaos Lord. He will gut you alive, power armor or no. No wargear made by Solon or any other can make one of you feeble equines the equal of an Astartes.”

Twilight looked up him, her eyebrow arched. “So your concern isn’t that I’m betraying anybody, it’s that I’ll probably fail?”

“MY CONCERN is that the next time I come back to this Warp-blasted rock, I’ll be returning that augmetic to its maker as the only scrap of your body that yet remains!” Tolken snapped. “I could hardly care less about you worthless horses, but after being stripped of his army and made to be Honsou’s slave smith, Warsmith Solon does not need to learn that even this small, meaningless effort was in vain!”

Twilight backed up a few steps, surprised by the heat of the reply. “So… you’re not okay with this arrangement, then?”

The Armsmaster hesitated. “… What I like is irrelevant. I have my orders. I serve my Warsmith.”

“But surely you must have an opinion of the difference between two Warsmiths…” the pony mused aloud.

A snarl came from Tolken. “Warsmith Kataris looks upon the Company with contempt, like all the others. He has refused to integrate us fully into the 63rd Grand Battalion, so we will remain a lowly sub-division of his attendant fleet. Meanwhile, his army is to be rearmed with our weapons and wargear.” His voice was low and hot, like boiling magma threatening to erupt. “Our Warpsmiths, who should be replenishing our ranks, have instead been tasked with stripping our Company of its heavy equipment and artifacts for use by Kataris’s other soldiers. Like the Harvest of Steel, the rest of Warsmith Solon’s creations are being lavished upon a whelp who has earned NONE of them!”

Tolken suddenly snapped up his plasma gun, drawing the weapon so quickly that Twilight reflexively jumped in terror. If the Iron Warrior noticed, he didn’t show it, but instead continued his furious rant.

“This plasma weapon, forged for me over 200 standard solar cycles ago, is a relic created as thanks for saving Warsmith Solon from an Eldar witch! It has been fired thousands of times, and never once overheated!”

Twilight looked like she was about to speak, but he pre-empted her. “Yes, he lost a duel and I intervened before the xeno could land a killing blow. Not the point. Now Warsmith Kataris has demanded my wargear be pooled with other relics in his personal inventory, to be handed out to his favored troops. He treats the most prized possessions of our cursed Company as loot earned from a glorious conquest!”

Tolken seethed, his grip tightening around the gun in his hands. “… But it is not my place to dictate how the Legion should allocate its ‘resources,’” he spat. “With time, perhaps I can convince my new Warsmith that I am worthy of MY weapon.”

Twilight stepped up to the Iron Warrior. “You don’t deserve this, Tolken. Solon doesn’t deserve it. Let me fix it!”

Tolken started laughing. Twilight blinked in shock and stepped away again, surprised by the sudden change in mood.

“I’m suddenly struck by the complete absurdity of this meeting,” the Armsmaster said between chuckles. “The noble and righteous Princess of Harmony, attempting to sway an Iron Warrior to mutiny!”

Twilight just looked confused. “I’m not sure I understand…”

“You wouldn’t. You creatures are far too earnest. Even your betrayals reek of hope and innocence,” Tolken said, his voice returning to its normal almost-but-not-quite-angry tone. “It takes great courage to stand against an Astartes, Sparkle. It takes great foolishness to stand against a Lord of Chaos.”

“I think I’ve proven I have plenty of both,” the mare retorted. “All you have to do is not stop me, Armsmaster.”

“I will not,” Tolken snorted. “Your power armor is in Magos Kaelith’s private quarters, among his personal collection. Warsmith Kataris is on board the Harvest of Steel, touring its facilities. Go. My men will hinder you no longer. Throw your life away as you wish.”

Twilight Sparkle bowed her head. “Thank you, Armsmaster Tolken. I’ll be leaving now.” She started to turn around.

“Wait,” Tolken said, stopping her.

The Iron Warrior suddenly tossed his plasma gun at Twilight. Her eye widened, and she quickly stopped it mid-air with her levitation magic to keep it from striking her nose.

“Wh-What are you-“

“Since you’re set on meeting our new Warsmith again, you may as well deliver my plasma gun to him personally,” Tolken growled.

Twilight spent several seconds gaping, and then tilted the gun onto its side. It was longer than the other plasma guns she had seen, with several small cylinders jutting out from under the flex-sheathing. The casing was chased in gold, with the Iron Skull stamped on the fusion micro-reactor shell. A switch near the back flipped, and the energy cell popped out of the injection crucible with a hiss. Twilight pushed it back down, and it clicked shut before emitting a pleasant hum and a rush of heated air.

“… I’ll make sure he gets it, Armsmaster,” Twilight said, trying hard not to smile.

****

Harvest of Steel

Dark Mechanicus penitent cell block

+Pain is corollary to sentiment.+

Kaelith’s various welders and cutters clicked together like an insect’s chittering mandibles.

+Expansion: When the goals of the Dark Mechanicus and a Techpriest’s private attachments conflict, prioritization is necessary. Conclusive: In accordance with these parameters, you have failed.+

Standing in front of him was Dark Techpriest Gaela. She was nude, having been stripped of her servo harness, her armor, her robes, and even the skin-tight bodysuit that normally protected her under that. Metal plates, sockets, and loose tubing decorated her naked body, along with a ridged arc of silver metal protruding from her back along her spine. Her bionic arms had been removed from their sockets, and chains had been bolted into the augmetic ports in her shoulders and stretched to the walls of the cell. Her legs, waist, and neck were shackled as well, attached to thick, dark chains that were anchored to several motorized reels.

Despite her situation, Gaela stared into the green optics cluster of her superior with disinterest. “I see no error in my calculations, Magos. My loyalty to Warsmith Solon serves a higher purpose than my own preservation. This usurpation of his army is an affront to our long contract with the Iron Warriors, and we will suffer for having him stuck in Honsou’s workshops.”

+Contra: Your analysis suffers from limited vision. Many opportunities are open to us now with a superior leader. Addendum: Former Warsmith Solon’s efforts will better serve his Legion and the Dark Mechanicus in his new capacity,+ argued the Magos. Despite Gaela’s irritating insistence on using Gothic, Kaelith spoke entirely in Binaric Cant.

“Absolute slag,” Gaela retorted calmly. “In addition, you may wish to restrain your vocalizer, Dark Magos. Warsmith Solon is still, in fact, a Warsmith.”

+Contra: The title of Warsmith is meaningless to one without an army. Hypothetical: It would be highly beneficial if Warsmith Honsou were to strip him of rank to better dominate his production.+

“I’m beginning to think your disdain for Warsmith Solon has some origin other than his bearing and leadership,” Gaela drawled. “Won’t you miss it, Magos? The wonders that he rolls out of his forge on the merest whim?”

+Negative,+ Kaelith replied in a burst of static. +Explanatory: Warsmith Kataris has promised us much, Dark Techpriest. He sees the Dark Mechanicus – correctly – as a greater asset than the Iron Warriors within the 38th Company. Our division is to be given a greater share of his spoils in return for combat and logistics assistance, and he has promised to conquer forge worlds in search of artifacts.+ The welders and cutters clicked together in sequence, rolling down Kaelith’s elongated belly like a wave. +Conclusive: These conditions are superior to our previous configuration, in which we were assigned to looting battlefield scrap and had to beg Solon for any technology of worth.+

“I really had no idea how much it grated on you,” Gaela sighed. “It’s eaten away at your cores, hasn’t it? Having to serve a superior technologist? Having so many secrets hidden away so close, and yet-“

With a silent signal, the chain securing Gaela’s collar shackle suddenly reeled in. She immediately choked and lurched backward, her neck stretching back painfully and her breathing cut off. Her neck would have broken if not for the tritanium reinforcement of her spinal column.

“Hey! What’s going on over there?! Gaela? Gaela, are you all right?” Spike’s voice came from the adjacent cell, but Kaelith ignored him.

+Executive: Do not accuse me of irrational bias, Techpriest. Our new Warsmith would not miss you were you to expire.+ He sent another signal, and the chain let out some slack. +Ultimatum: You will be restrained until you come to properly rationalize our reorganization. If this process exceeds two megacycles in duration, you will be declared unrecoverable and be liquidated.+

Gaela gasped and coughed for a few seconds, trying to ease the pain in her throat. Then she looked up at Kaelith again. “I serve Warsmith Solon,” she said simply.

+Cautionary: Those whose loyalty proves inflexible will find themselves without a role under Warsmith Kataris.+

Kaelith’s robes rustled as his mechatendrils shifted something around that was hidden under the cloak of black rubber. After a few seconds, the object was pulled out of its hiding place and then dropped on the floor at Gaela’s feet.

Gaela’s jaw tightened, and her organic eye twitched. Laying in front of her was Twilight Sparkle’s power armor helmet. The left visor lens was missing, and the slot it had been set into was cratered in a manner consistent with a mass-reactive bolt impact.

+Reiteration: Two megacycles, Dark Techpriest Gaela.+

Kaelith scuttled out the cell entrance. Once he was out, the cell door slammed shut, and the thick adamantium bars electrified.

“What did you do? Is Gaela okay?” Spike’s voice came from the next cell over, and Kaelith regarded him with a few peripheral optics.

The young dragon was in a cell like Gaela’s, albeit his shackles were far smaller and simply chained to a metal stake welded into the middle of his prison. Unlike Gaela, he hadn’t been imprisoned for defiance.

“Explanatory: Her fate is none of your concern,” buzzed Kaelith, finally speaking in Gothic. “Cautionary: Your own immediate future is far less certain than hers. Your survival depends on the transfiguration of your trans-Warp communication ability. Conclusive: Your worth to your new masters is in great doubt regardless of your allegiance, xeno.”

Spike glared up at him angrily. “Forget it! Even if could, I wouldn’t! Where’s Twilight? What did you do with her?!”

Kaelith didn’t answer, turning away. Bickering with a Dark Techpriest was enough of a hassle, but arguing with some xeno child was entirely beneath him.

“You know you’re not going to get away with this! Even if Solon isn’t charge anymore, Twilight will come back! She’ll teach you a lesson!”

Kaelith scuttled toward the exit, not giving the dragon another glance. As he left, a strange, repetitive buzzing came from the Dark Magos. It sounded almost like laughter.

Kaelith ascended the hallowed halls of the Mechanicus decks, scuttling past huddled groups of black-clad Techpriests and darkened laboratoriums. In truth, Gaela was far from the only Techpriest unhappy at the sudden change in leadership; there was more than one tech-cultist who would have gladly opted to join Solon’s new, empty workshop rather than serve under their new master. Kaelith had assured his division quite clearly that this was not an option. The Dark Mechanicus had made its deal with the 38th Company, and that Company now served Kataris.

The other Dark Techpriests weren’t motivated by personal loyalty, though, which was why Gaela’s only co-prisoner was Spike. The others would complain, but they would also rationalize and obey. Loyalty was a more stubborn, illogical trait, and Kaelith wasn’t very good at navigating his subordinate’s ridiculous emotional conundrums. He had shown off the pony’s helmet to display the price of defiance, and even left it with her so that Gaela had a prop with which to better visualize her fate. If fear would not sway her, then better she just be disposed of.

Eventually Kaelith reached his personal quarters and entered. His home on the Harvest of Steel was largely stereotypical of a Dark Magos: small, personal forging facilities, data stacks, and an experimental reactor replaced amenities such as a bed, washroom, and kitchen. A raised platform was set in another room, surrounded by logic engines set in towers that thrummed with energy even while not in use. Another room was set aside with a stasis barrier, locking a mysterious, twisted, spherical thing in an eternal temporal prison.

Beyond these rooms dedicated to research and production, however, was another hall with a less conventional purpose. Dark Magos Kaelith naturally considered his trophy hall to be an extension of his research collection; within were numerous pedestals and armorglass cases that contained suits of armor and weapons from a variety of foes of Chaos. And to be sure, all had been studied extensively and some had even been partially cannibalized for components.

The aesthetic nature of the hall was undeniable to any observer, though. Suits of Astartes power armor and tactical dreadnought armor had been cleaned and detailed before being set in poses of un-Space Marine-like submission. Eldar armor, always a prime example of form over function, were displayed with elaborate battle damage, often next to an example of the munition or weapon that struck down the bearer. Tau battlesuits of various patterns had been carefully restored to their original state, and then posed and even partially powered so that their optics were active; it was not difficult at all to imagine the suits suddenly gaining independent mobility and breaking free of their prison. In fact, their weapons had been replaced by useless model replicas for exactly that reason, as such a bizarre incident would not be out of place in the Warp.

The Dark Magos continued down the hall toward his newest prize. A type of armor that was patently absurd in its design and ultimate purpose: to augment the abilities of creatures that clearly had no place on a battlefield. The Centaur pattern armor was an absolute affront to the artificer’s craft. To create wargear on par with that of the Space Marines for tepid, weakling xenos was a heresy even most Dark Techpriests couldn’t stomach. On top of the sheer wrongness of it, the design itself was nearly impossible to replicate. The Centaur armor somehow compressed all the necessary components into the armor shell without need of a full-sized power pack AND still maintained armor integrity equal to a suit five times as large. It was in equal measure a treasure chest of knowledge and a detestable abuse of resources. Chaos in a nutshell, really.

It was also missing. That wasn’t right.

Kaelith froze in place, his optics locked on the empty platform to his side. A blast of steam came from his cranial assembly.

The armor had been left in a headless heap, as he intended to dissect the artifact entirely once the fleet departed Medrengard. Still, even if it hadn’t been posed, the suit had been secured behind an armorglass casing locked with an encryption cipher that would have alerted him – and numerous automated turrets – if it had been broken into. That the case was open suggested that someone had unlocked the case without access to his decryption codex, which bordered on the impossible.

The Dark Magos snapped out of his stupor, practically vaulting toward the logic engine that controlled the security locks. He submitted his signum identifier with a glance, and the primary vid-screen flickered on.

Kaelith was fairly shocked to find his view of the screen obstructed by a note stuck to the screen. He paused, absorbing the note’s contents in an instant.

Dark Magos Kaelith,

By the time you read this I expect you’ll have noticed that I took my power armor back. I realize that this turn of events may seem unfair to you. After all, you didn’t steal the suit from me, and as I understand it it’s a legitimate practice for leaders to give gifts to their commanders.

Still, I needed my wargear back, and since I was neither dead nor under Kataris’s command when it was taken from me, I feel my claim is stronger. I’ll be happy to discuss the matter with you at a later time if necessary so we can come to a proper agreement. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

Twilight Sparkle

Kaelith kept staring at the note, puzzling over its contents. None of this made sense. Not only was Twilight Sparkle supposed to be dead, but she was stuck on Medrengard. Even if she had survived, how had she gotten onto the Harvest and into his quarters? She had psychic abilities, obviously, but using such powers to enter and recover her power armor would have triggered the security alerts. The thief had unlocked his systems directly. It simply wasn’t possible that the pony had done this.

Unless she had help.

+Solon…+ Kaelith buzzed, another steam burst shooting from under his cowl. +You meddling, insipid wretch…+

****

Harvest of Steel

Reactor core

“It iss a marvelouss thing, iss it not? The Warp calefactor iss another of Warssmith Ssolon’ss mosst treassured creationss. The beating heart of the Harvesst of Ssteel, and the ssource of itss power.”

Sliver stood within the reactor room of the ship, standing ahead of Kataris and his bodyguards. In front of him was the Warp calefactor that served as the main power source for the Harvest.

The calefactor wasn’t much to look at, really. It was a large pit at one end of the reactor room that glowed faintly and had several extended arrow-shaped metal segments shielding its contents from view. No doubt it was somewhat more impressive in an open state, but as it stood now it could have been mistaken for a garbage chute with strange lighting.

The reactor room itself was another story. Ordinarily such rooms were titanic, and overrun with pipes, Techpriests, and servitors tending to the primary power source. In comparison, this room was bafflingly small. A giant eye in the ceiling immediately reminded one of the bridge, as did the only engineer present.

Rather than a small army of crew to handle this reactor, the Harvest had one minder watching over its daemonic heart. A Techpriest was wired into the ceiling above the calefactor, held upside-down in a prison of extensive piping that seemed to have replaced his lower body and wormed directly into his abdomen. Like the other “crew,” the Techpriests seemed ancient, broken, and withered. His augmetic components were weathered, burnt, and rusty, mirroring the degraded state of his desiccated flesh.

“The construction here is more… subtle than I had anticipated,” Kataris mumbled. His Terminator bodyguards were at his sides, their weapons aimed up at the entombed Techpriest. “And you fuel this ship with souls?”

“That iss… practically correct,” Sliver replied. “The reactor iss remarkably efficient; a ssingle, ordinary human can fuel the entire ship’ss normal non-combat operationss for almosst a full sstandard cycle. An Ork lasstss longer, perhaps one and a half cycless. Tau are nearly usselesss, providing barely an hour of energy. Eldar are her favorite.”

“How long would an Astartes last?” Kataris asked.

Sliver hesitated. The Techpriest twisted his head to one side, and then the other. Then he spoke.

“The Harvest of Steel has never tasted an Astartes spirit,” the Techpriest informed the Warsmith.

“Really?” Kataris turned toward Sliver, a slight smirk on his face. “You’ve truly had no occasion on which to sacrifice a Space Marine?”

Sliver sighed. “Warssmith Ssolon forbade the ssacrifice of Sspace Mariness. He felt that ssuch a fate wass unacceptable, even for thosse whosse crimess warranted death.”

“Such a weak man. It’s no wonder his men disrespect him,” Kataris chuckled. “But what about other Astartes? Our enemies? Surely you’ve fed the odd loyalist or Emperor’s Child into the forge?”

“We have not,” Sliver admitted. “Warssmith Ssolon… thought it besst that the Harvesst not acquire a tasste for our ssoulss.”

“A weakling AND a coward,” Kataris snorted. “Living in fear of his own tools.”

The Warsmith craned his neck up, looking into the eyeball set in the ceiling. It shifted to look back at him, its iris dilating and the veins around it pulsing.

“What do you think?” he asked, smiling. “Do you want your first taste of Astartes?”

“Warssmith?” Sliver asked, suddenly taking a step away from the calefactor.

The eye squinted, and the Techpriest shuddered.

“The Harvest… is uncertain. She has never devoured one such as yourself. It is forbidden!” the minder howled.

“I am your new master, and from this point on, it is not,” Kataris said, pointing to the eye. “I prefer my dogs with some bite to them. And I intend to fuel many excursions with the lives of the False Emperor’s slaves.”

Then he tilted his head to the side. “Commander Sliver.”

“… Yess, Warssmith?”

“Find me an Iron Warrior that will not be missed and bring him here. Tell him nothing except that I demanded an audience. I wish to see this vessel feed,” Kataris commanded.

“An Iron Warrior? Why?!” Sliver shouted, suddenly incensed. “We have hundredss of Orkss, humanss, and-“

“Commander Sliver, I gave you an order,” Kataris said blithely. “If you wish me to explain it, very well: your Company has a reputation for incompetence and unruly foolishness. I intend to correct this, and that starts by making an example.”

“An example of what?! You’re not handing down a ssentence, you’re jusst demanding a body to ssacrifice!” Sliver protested.

Kataris turned fully toward the Nurglite, his features drawing into a scowl. “Surely you can find me a suitable sacrifice, Commander. If you can’t think of think of a soldier that committed a sufficient error, then I suppose I could settle for an increasingly insubordinate officer…”

Sliver’s shoulders quivered, and his grip on his hammer tightened. The Terminators next to Kataris shifted their stances, and their power fists started charging up.

“I… will ssee what I can do,” Sliver said, his voice emotionless. He turned on his heel and stomped toward the exit.

“Don’t take too long,” Kataris commanded. “This… thing on the ceiling does not look to be enjoyable company.”

“… Were you referring to me, or the Harvest’s eye?” asked the withered Techpriest.

“Take your best guess,” the Warsmith snarled.

Sliver said nothing as he left the reactor core. The warded blast shielding locked shut behind him with grim finality. He paused briefly after that, thinking over his orders.

There were, in fact, Iron Warriors that he could recommend for a sudden death sentence. And Sliver wasn’t strictly against killing insubordinate Space Marines in the first place; he had done so himself in the past. Why, if anything, his wrath had been unduly restrained up until now. He’d have disposed of Serith and Tellis already if such matters had been entirely up to him.

But like this… everything about it set the Chaos Lord ill at ease. This wasn’t to be a punishment for a specific infraction, but a gesture to display the casual cruelty of their new Warsmith. Kataris had made it perfectly clear that he didn’t care who the victim was, or what he had supposedly done. He could bring the Warsmith a skilled and perfectly obedient Iron Warrior and he’d be just as doomed. The thought made Sliver’s blood boil.

Sliver raised a hand to the side of his helmet, preparing to open a vox link to one of his quartermasters. To his surprise, the link failed to connect.

He tried searching for a different vox signum, only to find none open at all. He had been cut off from the vox-net, and, if his visor indicators were correct, his local noosphere datalink was off-line as well.

Sliver grunted and marched down the reactor hall, keeping his hammer at the ready. He was neither especially surprised or bothered by the sudden paralysis of his helmet systems. They were in the Eye of Terror, and such phenomena were common and relatively harmless.

Assuming that an outage was the extent of the effects, of course.

Sliver turned the corner, heading into the next hall. He saw what was waiting for him, and he stopped.

“… I wass under the impresssion that you had not ssurvived your vissit to the Conclave, Princesss.” Sliver’s voice was glib and conversational, and he rested the head of his hammer on the floor. “For all Warssmith Katariss talkss of sstrength, it would sseem he iss lax in hiss killing.”

Twilight Sparkle sat in the corridor. She was wearing her power armor, sans helmet, and a strangely familiar plasma gun was carried on her back between the wings of her flight pack. Her exposed expression was uncertain; whether she had been expecting this encounter or not, she wasn’t at all sure where she and Sliver stood right now.

“I ssee you’ve been repaired, as well. Iss the current sstate of the vox-net your doing?”

Twilight wet her lips anxiously. “It is, Lord Sliver. I need to speak to Warsmith Kataris. Alone.”

“Ah. And I asssume you want me to move along and pretend I don’t know what you’re intending to do with that plassma weapon?”

Twilight’s expression soured. “I would… appreciate that, yes.”

“No. Turn back, xeno,” Sliver said, waving a hand in a shooing gesture.

“Lord Sliver, I don’t believe that the current leadership is-“

“Sspare me your naïve, usselesss ssquawking, Ssparkle,” Sliver interrupted. He started lumbering forward as he spoke. “I know why you’re here. It’ss not going to happen. Warssmith Katariss controlss thiss army now.”

Twilight frowned. “Because Honsou decided it was in the ‘best interest of the Legion?’”

“Commanderss command. Ssoldierss obey. It iss not for you or I to determine leadership bassed on our own whimss and impulssess. Go, Ssparkle. Return to your quarterss. That iss an order.”

Twilight started to take a deep breath, and then almost choked. Sliver had nearly crossed the distance between them, and the stench was getting stronger. She wished she had been able to find her helmet, even if it did have a hole in it.

“I don’t take orders from the Company officers anymore,” the alicorn announced. “I refused to serve Kataris. The bolt shell he put into my eye suggests he accepts my resignation.”

Sliver finally stepped within a meter of the pony and stopped, staring down at her through the single blood-red lens of his helmet.

“Of coursse. You sstill sserve Warssmith Ssolon. That’ss why you’re here, after all,” he mused.

“Incorrect,” Twilight replied. “Solon released me from his service too. He told me to make my way to the Harvest, hide away, and escape back to Equestria when we reached the Centaur system again.”

Sliver hesitated, surprised. That DID actually seem more characteristic of his previous Warsmith than the idea of him sending a magic alien assassin to remove his rival. Treachery was not Solon’s strong suit. It was one of the traits Sliver actually admired about the man.

“Then what are you doing here, like thiss?” the Iron Warrior demanded. “To survive an encounter with a Chaoss Lord with nothing losst but an eye iss too rare a mercy, Ssparkle. You have taken on ridiculouss misssionss in the passt on our orderss, but thiss...”

Twilight shook her head. “I can’t leave him here, Sliver. I won’t.”

“You’ll die,” Sliver scoffed.

“That’s a risk I’ve faced down before. I’m doing it on my own this time, but I have a plan. Kind of. I WILL beat Kataris.”

Sliver leaned forward slightly, his massive, armored bulk towering over the purple pony. “And what do you intend to do if I sstop you?”

Twilight gulped. She leaned to the side, looking past the Chaos Lord, and then back up at him. “Well, I guess I’d try to teleport past you… uh… and maybe the door seals would hold against you for… what, thirty seconds? Forty? It would make this a LOT more complicated, for sure.”

A disgusting snort came from the Iron Warrior. “Ssuch hopelesss conviction. You’re not as clever as you pretend, Princesss.”

He stepped forward, and Twilight clambered to the side nervously to get out of his way. Sliver walked past her, heading further down the corridor. He made no move to attack or restrain the equine.

“Warssmith Katariss hass demanded the ssacrifice of an Iron Warrior to the ship’ss core,” Sliver said while he walked away. “Sspecifically, ssomeone who would ‘not be misssed.’ Perhapss you can think of ssuch a Sspace Marine.”

He didn’t turn around again, stomping off down the corridor and then turning at the intersection. Twilight watched him go pensively, and then sucked in a deep breath once he had passed and the pervasive aura of filth had gone with him. Then she turned her gaze toward the reactor core.

Iron Warrior signums detected. Designation: 63rd Grand Battalion.

Identifier codices received.

Terminator Gulren.

Terminator Khar’hrel.

Warsmith Kataris.

Target locked. Enemy contact imminent.

****

Harvest of Steel

Reactor Core

“To have a void ship that hungers and has a will of its own, like a living beast… it seems there could be many disadvantages to such a creation,” Kataris mused.

“The daemon ships are most often the products of the more fanatical Legions,” remarked a bodyguard. “If that is the price to navigate the Eye of Terror at will, perhaps it is worth it.”

“The Harvest speaks,” hissed the Techpriest above. “She does not like how you speak of her as if she isn’t here.”

“Be silent, wretch,” Kataris sighed, turning his head up toward the mummified engineer. “I also find these bizarre conduits distasteful. I prefer a conventional crew.”

The Techpriest suddenly snapped its head to the side, and its mechatendrils twitched. “How strange. She is here? But why?”

Kataris frowned. “I told you to be sil-“

The slight popping noise behind him caused Kataris to pause, and a feeling of dread that had served him reliably for over a century alerted him to the threat. He whirled behind the bodyguard to his left, putting the Terminator's armor-clad hulk between him and the door.

The scream of a plasma gun’s discharge vindicated his decision, and a burst of howling energy bolts splashed over Terminator Gulren. A agonized howl came from the Iron Warrior as the plasma ate through his plate and burned through his body, cooking him within his armor.

Kataris and his remaining guard descended on the perpetrator with their full fury. Neither gave any immediate thought to the horned equine in power armor, and they unloaded their guns – a bolt pistol and combi-bolter respectively – into the assassin. The shots splashed over a purple energy barrier rather than removing the pony’s head, and at this the Chaos Space Marines paused to regard their foe.

“… You? I thought I dealt with you already,” Kataris snarled, his eyes narrowing.

The Terminator tilted his head to the side, being much more shocked than his Warsmith to see a purple horse-xeno brandishing a floating plasma gun. He glanced over to Kataris, and then trained his gun back on the equine.

Twilight kept her eyes fixed on Kataris through the shimmering haze of her magic shield. “I’m here to renegotiate the terms of my release from the 38th Company.” Her optical locked onto a pedestal console next to the wall, and the Techpriest flinched.

“You. What are you doing?” the entombed Techpriest demanded.

Kataris dared not look away from the alicorn. “Shut up, wretch.” He pushed aside the smoldering corpse of his bodyguard, stepping further from his surviving soldier. “You took me by surprise, little one. You cost me a good soldier.”

“If it’s any consolation, I’d really rather let them live, but you dodged the shot,” Twilight explained. “I mean, I don’t know them; they could be nice guys.”

The other bodyguard apparently aimed to prove her wrong, and his combi-bolter opened fire again. A punishing double salvo of mass-reactive shells spilled over Twilight’s barrier, and a painful throbbing like dozens of tiny hammer-blows assaulted her skull.

Command sequence confirmed. Calefactor iris shielding disengaged.

“This is in violation of safety protocols!” warned the entombed Techpriest, trying to lift his voice of the thunder of boltguns. “Both the opening of the shielding AND the use of firearms in the reactor area!”

This finally got Kataris’s attention, and he spared a glance at the reactor’s minder. “What shielding?”

A deep, pulsing crimson light appeared from below, illuminating the desiccated cyborg. Kataris turned his gaze down, and saw that the arrow-shaped plates of warded metal were retracting, revealing a pit of seething red. This was strange, but not entirely out of line with what the Warsmith expected, or particularly threatening. It didn’t become obvious what the immediate danger was until a hook connected to an ebony chain snaked out of the calefactor and shot toward him.

Kataris drew his sword in an instant, slashing it at the incoming threat in a sweep of crackling lightning. The chain was severed under the hook, and the remaining length suddenly jerked back, like a wounded serpent.

The other Iron Warrior had his back to the calefactor, and didn’t realize anything was wrong until a chain hooked onto the cowl of his armor and pulled. Taken off-balance for a split-second, the Chaos Terminator pushed forward to steady himself, only to find a second chain wrapping around his leg.

“Damnation!” Kataris jumped away from the pit, firing his bolt pistol at Twilight to keep the mare’s defenses up. “Techpriest! Close the shielding at once!” The chains that previously sought to latch onto the Warsmith veered away once he was out of reach, darting toward his bodyguard instead.

“I cannot. Unit Twilight Sparkle possesses superior access codices. Override is impossible.”

The Terminator grunted, struggling to move forward while more chains wrapped around his arm and legs. “Foul vessel! Release me! I am your master, daemon!” His power fist crackled with energy, and he ripped off a chain binding his leg. Two more attached to his shoulder pads in the meantime.

The entombed Techpriest shuddered. “The Harvest has been permitted to consume Astartes souls. The Harvest can taste your will. It is… satisfying.”

With a screech of metal sliding against metal, the Chaos Terminator was ripped backwards off his feet, the chains finally breaking his mag-locked greaves from the deck. The bulk of the Iron Warrior was pulled into the calefactor, his dying scream echoing in the minds of those present.

Both Twilight and Kataris staggered from the tortuous Warp echo, and the former dropped her shield and her plasma gun as her organic vision exploded into stars and her optical began stuttering. Kataris weathered the backlash better, having suffered such things frequently, and he swiftly started firing again while his vision was still hazy.

The bolt shells crashed against Twilight’s shoulder armor and then her hip, and a shard of shrapnel sliced through her ear. This helped to bring her immediate survival into greater focus, and the mare bounded away from another bolt that crashed into the deck, using her flight pack to assist the jump.

Kataris heard his pistol click empty, and moved to reload. “USELESS! The damned ship, the damned crew, this entire Company!” He leaned out of the way of a howling plasma bolt, and then fired again at his equine foe’s head.

The bolt shells hit Twilight’s barrier again, and the mare permitted a smirk to cross her muzzle. “Now it’s just you and me, Kataris… And the giant, hungry, monster ship mouth, I guess.”

A gurgling shriek came from the Calefactor, causing both combatants to wince. The eye in the ceiling snapped back and forth between the combatants, and several chains hovered over the mouth of the calefactor like waiting serpents.

“The Harvest has a name, and she does not appreciate being addressed in this manner,” pointed out the Techpriest. “Also, while the Astartes was quite filling, the Harvest of Steel greatly desires to eat the purple thing. That would make her very happy.”

Kataris pointed his blade at Twilight. “No. This xeno pest has slighted me, and it will die by my hand. The damnable vessel will have to be sated by its cries of agony.” He sneered. “That’s what you want, isn’t it, creature? You wish a personal conclusion to our grudge?”

Twilight blinked. “Grudge? Over what? My eye? Solon made me a better one. I don’t even miss it.” She shrugged. “I guess I do resent you taking me out of action for a few days and making me sneak back onto the ship from Medrengard, but that’s hardly worth anything like this.”

Kataris retracted his blade, turning to a combat stance. “Then why are you here, scum? Surely you don’t think you can kill me now, after squandering your surprise attack.”

“I do. And I will,” Twilight said, her horn glowing brighter. “As for why… you probably wouldn’t understand. It’s a friendship thing.”

Twilight disappeared in a flash of purple light. Kataris vaulted to the side, twisting on one leg to face behind him. Twilight was already there, the light from her teleport still receding, and her magic choice quickly switched from offense to defense before her opponent took aim.

“You cower behind your feeble sorcery!” Kataris snarled while his bolt shells slammed against the quivering purple barrier. “How long do you think it will save you from my steel?”

“Just long enough!” the mare growled.

Twilight knew she was at a disadvantage, despite her magic. She couldn’t fire the plasma gun while her shield was up, and very few of her spells would work on the Chaos Lord directly. If Kataris managed to catch her with one good shot or strike without her barrier, then she would die. She couldn’t count on the Space Marine falling as easily.

But she did have one other edge, as long as she could keep finding uses for it.

Reactor coolant system diagnostic engaged. Emergency coolant venting active.

Twilight’s augmetic blinked, and several nozzles lining the walls appeared in bright green.

Initiating emergency coolant flush.

Kataris lunged, letting his spent pistol clip fall to the floor while his power sword stabbed for Twilight’s barrier. Crimson lightning coursed across the blade edge, whipping at the purple shell of magic and increasing its energy feedback exponentially. Twilight screamed through clenched teeth, all her focus and power devoted to holding the Iron Warrior at bay for a few more precious seconds.

Loud hissing noises came from above, and the coolant valves in the reactor walls released. Jets of snowy white gas blasted onto the floor, and then rolled up into the pair of warriors. The gas parted around and over Twilight’s barrier and then swirled around Kataris, blasting up into the Chaos Lord’s face and wrapping around his armor like a cloak of mist.

Kataris went on the defensive instinctively, lurching backward and trying to clear away the coolant dust blinding him. His augmetic eye reset to track thermal bloom, wary of his opponent’s plasma weapon more than any potential sorcery.

“More tricks and diversions! Cowardly alien!” Kataris snarled, briefly detecting an energy flare in front of him. He swept to the side in a dodge before slashing his sword down, ripping a swathe through the blinding mist and cutting a molten streak into the floor.

The entombed servitor shook his head. “Warsmith Kataris, please refrain from using or discharging weapons in a reckless and indiscriminate manner. The damage-“

“SILENCE, FOOL!” Kataris roared, whirling around. “Clear this room at once, or you will die before the xeno worm!”

A brief hum came from the corner, and a flash of thermal bloom appeared. Kataris leapt to the floor into a rolling dodge, clearing the pair of screaming plasma bolts that cut through the obscuring coolant mist.

“Acknowledged. Active ventilation purge engaged,” the Techpriest blurted while the plasma shots splashed into the wall and started cutting into the bulkheads. “Unit Sparkle, please refrain from-“

“I said SILENCE!” Kataris roared, hopping back to his feet and side-stepping another plasma bolt. The Chaos Lord was shockingly nimble for a warrior in full armor, even taking into account Astartes reflexes and power armor functionality.

A rumble came from overhead, and the overhead atmospheric engines came to life. The coolant mist started to swirl into small, upside-down funnels that seeped into the ceiling.

Kataris sprinted through the reactor room while it cleared, darting past another missed plasma shot. His path briefly took him too close to the calefactor, and a chain darted out to meet him. He severed it with an almost contemptuous flick of his power sword, and then dropped into a crouch to avoid the raking plasma fire.

The plasma gun hovered above the remaining dust, wrapped in a highly visible shroud of purple light while it sought its target. Rather than waiting for the weapon’s user to be revealed, Kataris took aim at the gun itself, snapping off a shot with his bolt pistol.

The first bolt hit the gun squarely on the nose, tearing open the magnetic stabilizer and knocking the weapon to the side. A second and third shot blasted apart the heat sinks arranged under the gun’s flex sheathe. An inky blue mist seeped from the shredded metal and plasteel, and intense white light came from the exposed reaction chamber.

“I have you now, ‘unit Sparkle,’” Kataris sneered, vaulting forward once he could make out a dark shape past the diminishing mist.

Twilight gaped up at the shredded plasma gun, and then her eye darted toward the Iron Warrior dashing across the room. She had barely two seconds to escape with a teleport or put up a barrier to try to extend the battle a little longer.

She vouched for option 3.

Twilight’s plasma gun swung forward through the air toward Kataris during his charge, like a floating club, while still leaking coolant, plasma, and steam. Kataris swatted it out of the way with his pistol hand. Twilight telekinetically pulled the trigger.

The plasma gun wasn’t even aimed at the Iron Warrior at that precise moment, but Twilight’s gamble didn’t need it to be. As soon as the trigger depressed the plasma gun accelerated the fusion reaction in its core, and then immediately destabilized. The weapon exploded, briefly emitting a flash of light and heat with the intensity of a star. Twilight turned her head away from the glare, and that simple reflex probably spared her face another remodeling as droplets of raw plasma splashed over her. Her power armor’s ceramite shielding absorbed the worst of the heat, although several drops burned through the thinner armoring of her flight pack and seared her wings.

The effect on Kataris was far more dramatic. His pistol hand was gone; the weapon and extremity had vanished into a vaporous cloud. His left forearm now ended in a molten stump, and the rest of his armor was badly scarred by the superheated shrapnel. The golden Chaos Star beaten onto his breast plate glowed defiantly against the heat of the plasma, briefly enveloping the Iron Warrior in a halo of howling green power. Kataris had stumbled and fallen to one knee, but the Astartes was not beaten.

The light receded, and the hiss of plasma faded. The last of the coolant dust was sucked up into the ventilation engines. A deep, mournful wail came from the mouth of the calefactor, followed by the rattle of chains.

Kataris and Twilight stood several meters apart from each other. The former’s breath was heavy, but even, and his expression was intensely focused and calm for someone who had just had his hand burned off. Twilight’s breathing was more ragged, and her organic eye darted from side to side, trying to find another object to use to her advantage.

“I must inform you that the Harvest of Steel is greatly perturbed,” the Techpriest said, breaking the tension again. “The bulkheads seethe with pain. The calefactor tastes hatred in the air. This is sub-optimal, and she wishes you to cease this senseless violence.”

Kataris creased his brow, and his remaining hand seized his combat knife by his belt. Twilight’s horn flickered, and she crouched her front legs.

“If you do not wish to stop fighting, the vessel is willing to devour you bo-“

The combat knife sliced through the air, and then punched into the reactor engineer’s neck. The entombed crewman screeched, his vocalizer wailing even while his throat was shredded. His ancient, disused mechatendrils quivered and thrashed like wounded snakes, but within moments they fell limp along with the cyborg’s body.

“… Why? Why would you do that?” Twilight whispered, the glow of her horn fading. She had been certain that the knife had been meant for her.

“I warned him. He disobeyed. He’s dead now,” Kataris said. “This is what it means to command. This is why your erstwhile master failed.”

Twilight narrowed her remaining eye. Her optical was starting to bring up strange warnings, flashing text at her in cryptic and rapid patterns that flickered and vanished in moments.

“You’re not nearly smart enough to lead this army. For everyone’s sake, you have to die here.”

“Again, you think to cast judgment on me,” Kataris growled. “And again, you will fall, wretch.”

Kataris bolted forward, keeping his injured arm tucked close while his blade lanced ahead. Twilight’s horn pulsed with magic, firing a wave of kinetic power in a swirling violet ray at the Iron Warrior.

The spell could have ripped open a brick wall with its sheer force, but against the Chaos Lord it only served to slow his approach. His pulsing aura quivered around his power armor, and the Chaos Star against his chest shined bright in angry sympathy.

“How long do you think you can evade my wrath, alien?!” Kataris shouted against the waves of force. He took a step forward against the tide of magic, sparks screeching from his greaves the moment they touched the floor. “Your sorcery, your tricks, your diversions, they all merely delay the inevitable! My sword will taste your heart, and no technology of Solon’s will restore you again!”

“Just… a little… bit longer…” Twilight grunted, squeezing her eye shut. She was drawing out her spell as long as she could, but the Iron Warrior refused to break stride.

Kataris took another step, and then another, each footstep being accompanied by a jet of sparks. Violet lightning lashed about the Chaos Lord, washing against his own aura generated by the Chaos Star and his own sheer will. He raised his power sword, and the weapon howled against the stream of force like an enraged daemon.

Exactly like an enraged daemon, in fact.

After a tendril of searing pain spiked into the combatants’ brains, like a red-hot mechadendrite worming into their ears, Kataris and Twilight began to think it wasn’t his sword.

Twilight’s spell broke as the pain rapidly jumped past her point of tolerance, shattering her concentration and sending her stumbling onto her side. Kataris swung his blade down, but it was more an effort of gravity than his arm. The power sword struck Twilight’s shoulder pad and carved a glowing tear down through it, slicing across the mare’s flank before stabbing awkwardly into the deck surface. The Iron Warrior struggled to stay upright, teetering precariously against his own momentum and the paralyzing noise.

Again, Kataris recovered before Twilight, his senses rapidly returning to normalcy. His grip was still on his power sword, but when he saw the cringing alicorn before him he didn’t waste time pulling it from the deck. Kataris raised a foot to stomp on the mare’s head and dash her skull upon the deck.

Instead, he almost lost his balance again when something tugged backward on his shoulder.

“What? The chains! Damnation!” Kataris roared.

One of the chains from the Warp calefactor had hooked onto his backpack, pulling the Iron Warrior back. Ever since the mysterious tendrils had appeared, he had given the mouth of the daemonic reactor a wide berth, assuming that they had a limited reach. Up until this point, it had seemed he was correct. Had something changed?

His eye darted toward the Techpriest’s corpse dangling over the calefactor. Blood oozed down the cultist's flickering opticals, dribbling steadily into the hazy furnace below. Overhead the Harvest’s eye quivered, its veins bulging and its iris a bloody red.

“Well, then.”

His power sword wrenched free of the deck plating in a streak of carmine, and then sliced behind him in a crackling arc as he turned. The chain was severed, the shorn links tumbling to the floor and the beheaded length flinching back. A gasping bellow issued from the mouth of the calefactor; a strange, confused moan that seemed to press against Kataris with angry confusion.

And yet, behind the wounded appendage, more chains slithered across the deck like ebony vipers or floated through the air like swimming eels. Four, five, six reached for the Chaos Lord, with more metal hooks and claws peeking out of the blistering soul furnace.

Kataris faced the encroaching chains with a sense of annoyed contempt. His power sword flashed in short, precise strikes, severing each chain from the hook at its head and sending its length reeling back into the pit from whence it came. His wounded arm remained clutched tight to his side, out of the way, and no apparent hindrance to the warrior. For every chain he severed, more emerged from the infernal light of the calefactor, but it seemed they could not touch him.

Kataris jumped forward and stabbed his power sword down, tearing through yet another chain and briefly sheathing his weapon in the floor again. With all the nearby tendrils incapacitated, the Iron Warrior reached for his belt and withdrew a fragmentation grenade.

“Despite my initial interest, you’ve proven yourself a tiresome and unworthy opponent, xeno witch,” he said conversationally, flicking the pin away with a finger. “Die on the ground like the useless dog you are. I must discipline my property.” He tossed the grenade behind him and then wrenched his sword from the floor, not once looking over his shoulder at his equine enemy.

Twilight blinked almost sleepily as the grenade bounced across the floor toward her. Her horn began to glow, and a spell configuration that had recently become reflex to her coalesced in her mind. Her magic took hold of the bouncing explosive, and it vanished with a gentle pop mere inches from her nose.

The grenade reappeared in a puff of purple right behind Kataris and dropped toward the floor. The Chaos Lord began to move, hearing the strange sound of the magical effect, but it was too late. It exploded before it even landed, sending dozens of hot razor shards into the Iron Warrior’s back. The shrapnel punched through the thinner plating in his armor’s rear, sinking into his legs and knee tendons. Blood spilled to the deck, and Kataris shuddered and dropped to his knee, snarling an ancient Olympian oath through clenched teeth.

A slinking chain from the Warp calefactor suddenly darted ahead of the others, shooting forward in the brief moment the Warsmith was distracted by his wounds. It latched onto his shoulder pad and then wound around his sword arm, severely restricting the limb while the other ebony tendrils doubled the pace of their approach.

Kataris remained calm, wrenching his blade to the side to get the necessary angle to cut away at his bonds. Then he heard the sound of iron-clad hooves racing across the deck.

“This is for Solon and Equestria, you conceited, puerile thug!” Twilight screamed, whipping around in mid charge and bunching up her back legs.

She bucked him directly in his hind plating, launching the Iron Warrior forward with a tremendous crash of metal. Kataris landed awkwardly on the deck, unable to roll or control his fall properly with his legs still full of sharpened metal and his free hand missing. He did manage to hold on to his power sword, though, which seemed ever more important as several new chains latched onto his prone body.

“You will NEVER rule this army, Kataris!” Twilight taunted, panting from her mounting exhaustion. “If you want to contribute to the war effort, do it as fuel!”

Kataris stabbed his power sword into the floor again, wrapping his wounded arm around it as an anchor. Then he used his free hand to snatch one of the hooks that was reaching for his gorget.

With phenomenal effort against the tendrils trying to immobilize him, Kataris twisted around and flung the chain straight toward Twilight. She reared in surprise, but nonetheless the chain bounced around her legs and then snapped up around her wing casing, entangling her.

“Hey! What are you doing?!” the mare demanded. Twilight tried to use her telekinesis to unwrap the chains, but was surprised and dismayed to find even her simplest magic slipping off the ebony metal without any effect.

“If I go down, I’m taking you with me!” Kataris growled, struggling against his own bonds.

“Oh, the hay you are,” Twilight grumbled. Her horn started to glow again, and she calculated a teleport to take her out of the reactor room. She had intended to stay and make sure Kataris was dragged into the core, but there were other ways to confirm his fate.

Then the chains against her shifted of their own volition, and the hook at the head of the tendril latched onto her horn. Twilight felt the magic instantly drain from her, and her spell collapsed.

“Wh-What?” the mare mumbled, a creeping sense of dread wrapping around her heart while the chain wrapped tighter around her legs.

Her optical flickered.

At last… You’re mine.

The chain pulled hard against the pony, and Twilight screamed as she was wrenched off her hooves. She stumbled across the deck, sparks flying from the scrape of metal against metal. She got as close to the calefactor as Kataris – although well out of arms’ reach of the Astartes, luckily – before she managed to stabilize her tumble with her flight pack and mag-lock her boots to the deck.

Your flesh, your power, your spirit, your mind, your… terror…

“No! Wait! Let me go! Stop this, please!” Twilight shouted, trying to fling away the hook around her horn. Another chain slithered past Kataris and latched onto her leg, and her boots started squealing against the deck as she was dragged further toward the core.

“I see fear seizes your heart at last, xeno filth,” Kataris snarled. He himself was clutching his power sword desperately against a dozen chains trying to drag him back. “Your trickery spared you from my blade again and again, but this is the price you pay for your hubris. Rather than a clean death at the hand of a warrior, you will suffer the ignominious torment of being a daemon’s fodder.”

Twilight tried to back up and kick at the chains, but it merely unbalanced her. She almost fell flat on her face when the tendrils tugged sharply, drawing her closer to the hissing mouth of the calefactor than Kataris was.

Struggle. Fear. Cry. Hate. Let me hear the song of your doom as I feast.

Aside from the words blinking across it, Twilight’s optical had completely turned to snow by now, eliminating any chance of accessing the core systems. And even if she could, what could she do that would free her and not Kataris? Even with one hand, wounded legs, and a new wariness of using grenades, the Iron Warrior was still easily as great a threat as the Harvest of Steel.

If magic was useless, force was insufficient, and technology was inoperable, what was left?

“Harvest! Harvest of Steel! You have to let me go!” Twilight shouted, staring up at the eyeball that peered down from the ceiling. The chains pulled, and her greaves squealed across the floor. “I’m your ally! I want to help you!”

Her optical displayed more text among the crackling static.

Meaningless. Come to me, fleshborne. Let me feed.

“My name is Twilight Sparkle! Not ‘fleshborne’ or ‘purple thing!’ I am not fodder or raw meat for your reactor! You have to stop!”

Another pair of chains wrapped around Twilight’s wings, and Kataris laughed.

“Begging a daemon for mercy… You’re not as clever as you first seemed, xeno.” The chains drew tight around his wounded arm and reeled back, and the Iron Warrior grunted as it was slowly pried off of his power sword. “Surely you didn’t expect to leave this encounter alive, whether or not you were successful.”

Another chain slithered around Twilight’s neck, and she knew that she only had seconds left before she wouldn’t even be able to speak.

“Harvest! This is for Solon! You have to stop! For Solon!”

For the first time, the chains stilled. Twilight tried tugging herself back to absolutely no success, but she was no longer being pulled. The tendril that had been reaching around her throat had gone slack. The ever-roaming eye in the ceiling focused on Twilight, and its pupil shrank.

Solon. Smith. Creator. Master.

Where… Where is the master?

“I can bring him back to you! I’m here to save him! Let me go!” the alicorn pleaded.

Kataris sensed an immediate change in the vessel’s mood. Twilight’s boots had stopped shrieking from being pulled across the deck, and even his own bindings ceased pulling as hard.

“You wretched fools,” the Iron Warrior snarled. “I am your master now! You would stand against me and tear apart this army for that addle-minded coward?!”

The eye in the ceiling shifted, its gaze snapping to Kataris. A rumbling growl came from the calefactor, and the flooring trembled.

“For my friend? Yes.” Twilight took a few steps back, and this time her chains didn’t resist, slackening enough to allow her to move.

“Friend? You’re nothing but his pet psyker! A glorified attack dog dressed up like a prized beast!” the Warsmith snapped. “A dog with more loyalty than sense, to bring low the mighty so that the weak can rule over you!”

The floor trembled again. The chains around Twilight started to slide away, while the chains around Kataris wrenched tighter than ever.

“Mighty? YOU?” the mare sneered. “You didn’t even last a day doing Solon’s job.” The hook around her horn came loose, and the chain slid away from her. “Really, it’s better you just die here and now, before you meet Tellis. Trust me.”

“RAAAAAAUGH!!”

With an enraged roar, Kataris pulled himself upright against the force of the chains around him. Hooks snapped free of his armor, and the other metal tendrils strained against his surging strength as he ripped his power sword from the floor. Blood gushed from his wounded legs, drooling into a puddle on the floor, but his injury didn’t stop him. The Chaos Lord lunged across the room, stabbing his blade at his tormentor.

Twilight Sparkle vanished with a flash of purple light. The power sword struck the deck at a poor angle, bouncing off, and then tumbled from Kataris’s grip when a chain around his elbow pulled back. The Chaos Lord fell to the floor, and his armor squealed against the metal surface while he was dragged toward his doom. He made no protests and spoke no oaths, simply staring up at the Harvest’s quivering eye with an expression of angry contempt.

Seconds later, all that remained of the mighty Warsmith was a blood slick that stretched across the reactor room, past the corpse of a fallen Terminator. Jets of crimson fire puffed from the Warp calefactor, cremating the dead Techpriest hanging above it and delivering his ashes into the heart of his charge.

The Harvest of Steel howled, begging its master to return.

Author's Note

So, for those of you who may have been wondering, no, there will be no Visions of Darkness chapter for Warsmith Kataris.
I'd also like to apologize to anyone who was put off by the brazen spaceship-on-pony lewdness in this chapter. I'm usually better about my content, but please understand, I'm only human.

We're back to good ol' Planet Pone next chapter. I'm sure things are going just fine back there!

The Patient Hunter

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron Story

Chapter 13

The Patient Hunter

****

Centaur III

Black Point – main security checkpoint

“What is the blasted hold-up? We’ve been waiting for nearly an hour! We didn’t bring anything with us, so what are they checking?”

“Darling, please, relax. We’re not in a hurry, and it’s not like the Company takes its security less seriously. You’ve been so restless ever since leaving the fortress!”

“You’re both right. It’s very unusual for checks to take this long. But so what? I think you’re just feeling anxious because you’re cut off from noosphere access for the first time in months.”

Rarity sat near the rear of the Devilfish transport space, her front legs primly crossed while she magically tended to her mane. She was wearing her power armor, complete with plasma gun and power sword attached to her flanks. Her helmet lay on the bench in front of her, its gleaming surface acting as a makeshift mirror while she primped.

Behind her, keeping a healthy distance from the armored equine, was a group of several Tau and a single other pony. Most of the Tau were lower-ranked Earth Caste members, although Fennin stood ahead of the group. The Fio’el was tapping away on an engineering tablet as usual, his grim features bathed in a soft blue glow from the screen. He didn’t look up at the equines as he spoke, and seemed the only one unconcerned with standing within leg’s reach of the ponies.

At the rear of the Devilfish was Shas’el Wraithstar. His arms were crossed over his chest, and an expression of cool irritation was stretched over his face.

“I don’t like it. We’re not being searched more extensively, we’re being delayed,” Wraithstar grumbled.

“Delayed? Why would your people delay us? We’re just picking up our own battlesuits! Do these clods think I don’t have better things to be doing?”

The second pony in the transport bay was an unfamiliar one to most of the Tau. A stallion, as far as any of them could tell, the equine was heavily augmented and decked in the black robe of the Company’s Dark Mechanicus contingent. Numerous glowing optics peeked out from the shadows of his hood, and his nose and jaw had been completely replaced by a respirator mask. Atop the stallion’s back was a servo arm, which was clamped tight onto a hook hanging from the ceiling of the passenger bay. The cyborg pony’s tail had been replaced by a long mechatendril as well, and was capped with a dataspike at the end. A servo skull hovered above and behind him, waiting faithfully for any orders from its master.

“Gear Works, darling, pipe down. You’re much too irritable. This is a happy occasion,” Rarity chided the cyborg. “Mister Delgan is very excited about seeing the first production models of the Strider battlesuit. He already has buyers lined up. And next week he wants to hold a demonstration rally!”

“I wish we could bring the armoring bays to Ferrous Dominus,” the Dark Acolyte responded. “Having to move the new walkers between bases is troublesome enough even without these meaningless delays.”

“There was some kind of disturbance the last time I contacted the Fio’o,” Fennin mumbled. He was still tapping and swiping at his tablet as he spoke, speaking without looking at the equines. “He wouldn’t tell me what it was about, but he seemed exhausted and hedgy. I think there was an accident while we were gone.”

Wraithstar’s lips pressed into a thin line. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Shas’vre Kohall seemed quite anxious when he requested I report back. If they’ve been hiding something from me, then that’s it for Black Point.”

“What do you mean by that?” Rarity asked, arching an eyebrow.

“I mean that this division between the Tau and other Company soldiers is reaching an intolerable point. I’ve been trying to establish a colony for non-combatants, but aside from them, there’s no reason for Xenis detachments to operate out of Black Point rather than Ferrous Dominus. Every combat or engineering group I have is fighting to get assigned to reserve duty to stay here and stay away from the humans and equines, and the Iron Warriors don’t care for it.”

The Earth Caste Tau shifted uncomfortably. Wraithstar’s observation was a simple, undisputable fact, but it still aggravated some of his subordinates that the Shas’el sympathized more with the concerns of the Iron Warriors than those of his own species.

“If something important happened and they used the fragmented command structure to hide it from me, then that’s all the excuse I need. There’s plenty of room in the fortress for all these facilities.”

“Yes! Yes, exactly!” Gears said.

The rear access ramp hissed and creaked open, silencing all conversation in the transport bay. The passengers turned to see a small force of Fire Warriors carrying pulse carbines waiting outside, one of whom bore the markings of a Fireblade detachment leader.

“Shas’vre,” Wraithstar nodded to the Fireblade.

The Fireblade wasn’t paying attention; his eyes immediately fixed on the ponies waiting near the ramp.

“Ugh, FINALLY. Can we go now?” Gear Works asked. His servo arm released its grip from the ceiling hook, and his servo skull beeped while bobbing to and fro.

The Tau didn’t respond immediately, staring at the bizarre equine through his mask. “… Why are you here?”

If Gear Works still had a jaw, it would have fallen open in surprise. Before he could start berating the alien, however, Rarity stood up and stepped in front of him.

“Good day, Shas’vre. My name is Rarity, personal assistant to Trademaster Delgan. My associate and I have been dispatched by the Merchant Corp to bring back some equipment that was being finished here. I believe you have a dozen Strider battlesuits waiting for us?”

“They sent equines to come get their wargear?” the Fireblade asked. “ARMED equines?”

“I tried to schedule a drop myself, but was told it was impossible within any reasonable time frame, and nobody could explain why.” Fennin walked past the ponies and down the ramp, glaring at the guards. “So we came to get them ourselves. We told you all of this when we arrived. Move aside.”

The Fire Warriors did not move aside. The Fireblade raised a hand to halt the Engineer. “That’s what you’re all here for?”

“No, Shas’vre.” Wraithstar moved past the Earth Caste workers, his eyes narrowed. “I am here to receive a report as to why there’s been so much disruption here the last few days. Again, we told you all of this when we first checked in. What is the meaning of this?”

The Fireblade hesitated for a moment, and then waved Wraithstar forward. “Shas’el, Fio’el, please follow me. The rest of you may stay here.”

“What? No! I’m not staying here! I have work to do!” Gear Works snapped.

“This is for your own safety,” the guard explained. “We will-“

“Shas’vre, if you can explain, here and now, why these equines can’t retrieve their property, then do so. Otherwise, move aside. That is an order.” Wraithstar’s voice was like ice, and the guards of lower rank rushed to get out of the way.

The Fireblade hesitated again. “… Very well, Shas’el. But I still require you and Fio’el Fennin to come with me.”

“Why do I have to go?” Fennin demanded.

“All ranking officers must be screened. I cannot say more here. Please, we have to hurry.”

Rarity descended the entry ramp with her head held high, looking for all the world like a royal sentinel in her gleaming armor. She was followed by the shrouded cyborg, who glared at the Tau warriors suspiciously through the numerous optics set under his hood. His servo skull floated after him, shining its bright red optics lights over the attendant guards before sputtering bursts of static and swooping away.

The Fire Warriors watched the ponies go, and then the Fireblade nudged his head after them. The guards nodded silently, and then marched after the equines. The other Earth Caste members followed, leaving Fennin behind.

*I hope you have a very good explanation waiting for me wherever we’re going,* Wraithstar warned while descending the ramp himself. He switched to his native tongue now that the ponies were out of earshot.

*I think so, yes,* the Fireblade confirmed. *Follow me, Shas’el, Fio’el.*

They did so, and the three aliens split away from the path the ponies took. Most of the buildings in Black Point were short, wide domes, with their foundations build into the ground and their roofs painted to match the wasteland surface. From orbit, a ship’s augurs were completely unable to discern the base’s structures from the terrain and pick out its power sources. Its design philosophy was opposite that of Ferrous Dominus, which was such an obvious and visible settlement that news of its founding had spread all over the world in a few weeks.

At this point, however, there was little to hide from. The base’s stealth features helped obscure it from Ork attention, but being well-hidden was less useful than being nigh-impervious to assault, as Ferrous Dominus was. The food supplies were running low, and unlike the fortress-factory, Black Point didn’t produce anything of its own while housing much of the Tau element of the 38th Company. And yet it remained; an ugly reminder of the cruel alien plot that had brought so much war to this world.

*There aren’t many soldiers out here,* Wraithstar said suddenly. *Are they occupied at the moment, or are they out on mission?*

*They… They are occupied,* the Fireblade mumbled. *All will become clear very soon, Shas’el.*

*I hope clearing this up – whatever ‘this’ is – doesn’t take too long,* Fennin grumbled. *My schedule isn’t quite as tight as the Dark Acolyte’s, but I have a lot of other work to do.*

*I think you’ll find your schedule wide open after this, Fio’el.*

The Fireblade led them to one of the larger buildings, and then pressed his hand to the door scanner. The door beeped, and then it unlocked and slid open.

The interior was crowded. As Fennin and Wraithstar entered, they recognized several of the officers bunched up and facing away from them, toward the center of the room. Fennin only knew the highest-ranking individuals, but Wraithstar was far more familiar with his subordinates. Everyone stationed in Black Point who held any substantial rank was here.

But why?

“What is this? A meeting?” Wraithstar said, raising his voice.

Immediately, numerous other Tau turned to face him. They had been mumbling amongst themselves when he entered, but now they all fell silent.

*I recognize that voice… Shas’el Wraithstar. You’re finally here.*

Wraithstar barely twitched at the voice, but Fennin jumped in shock. The wall of officers standing in front of them parted.

*Shas’o Voidsong,* Wraithstar said coolly. *Welcome to Black Point.*

The Commander of the Lamman Sept’s armies sat in the middle of the room, legs crossed and fingers steepled together. A single Fire Warrior in full armor stood behind her with a pulse rifle at the ready. Another high-ranking Tau, this one of the Earth Caste, stood on the other side of her, looking haggard as he tapped away at his engineering tablet.

*I’m glad to see you weren’t lost fighting the Orks, Shas’el. I suppose the corrupted Imperials take better care of their slaves than I expected.*

Wraithstar tilted his head slightly to one side. *I’m glad to see you were freed from imprisonment, Shas’o. Truly, the Equestrians are more merciful and benevolent than even their reputation would suggest. I would have expected them to inform me of your release, however.*

*I was not freed of imprisonment. Not by the Equestrians, at any rate.* Voidsong smirked slightly. *But I’m sure you knew that.*

Fennin started backing away. *Well this is great and I’m very happy to have the integrity of our Fire Caste restored but I’m not sure what this has to do with me and I have a lot of work to do so I-*

The doors behind him slammed shut. The Fireblade that had guided them here gently but firmly took Fennin by the shoulder.

*There is much work to do here as well, Fio’el. This will require your help.*

Wraithstar cast a glance back, then focused on Voidsong again. *Shas’o, have you been briefed on the events that have taken place on this world since your imprisonment?*

*I have.*

*Then you are aware of our current alliance with the 38th Company. Was it they who secured your release?*

At this question, Voidsong’s cold expression shifted into an angry scowl. *No. No, it was not. The filthy monsters had nothing to do with it. And for that I’m glad. I’ve been freed without their knowledge and without falling under their control. That makes the next steps easier.*

*And what “next steps” would those be?* Wraithstar started pushing his way forward through the other officers. They quickly cleared out of his way, and soon the Shas’el stood in front of his Commander.

Voidsong schooled her features. *The steps to remove this strike force from under the control of Chaos forces, obviously. That we have warriors of Tau’va aiding and contributing to the war machine of corrupted humans is beyond intolerable. It will be corrected.*

Wraithstar paused to look around the room. Fennin was massaging his forehead in exasperation, but other than him, none of the others showed any kind of surprise at hearing this. Clearly they had all heard this before.

*I’m glad that you returned, Shas’el,* Voidsong continued. *You’re the highest-ranking officer of my caste still alive on this world, and our timetable is accelerating quickly.*

*We’ve been trying to keep as many of our people here as possible while we plan the operation,* continued the Fio’o, *but it’s been difficult with the irregular service rotations. We’ve tried to come up with a way to get the word out to Ferrous Dominus, but it’s just too risky. Gue’la security is tight, our people are often closely supervised, and we can’t know for sure how many of the psykers can potentially read our thoughts.*

*It’s almost certain that when we make our move, a substantial portion of the Lamman Sept will not be aware of what’s happening or why. They will almost certainly be called upon to fight against us. Some of them, confused and under orders, may do so. This is unfortunate, and likely unavoidable,* sighed Voidsong.

*And what is “our move” exactly, Shas’o? Did you come up with some way to escape the planet?* Wraithstar asked.

*No.* Voidsong clasped her fingers together over her lap. *This operation is to see to the complete destruction of Ferrous Dominus, and the crippling of the 38th Company’s power base on this world. Operation Silverfall will remove the roots of Chaos from this planet.*

****

Black Point

Battlesuit garage

“And here we are! Finally!” Gear Works extended his servo arm to a console, and smaller metal tabs unfolded from a claw and started tapping against the surface.

The doors to the attached structure rumbled open, revealing several Tau battlesuits. Broadsides, Crisis Suits, and a few of the Lamman Sept’s unique Heavy Stealth Suits were all lined up within the various alcoves and platforms. In the middle of the room was the twelve Strider suits, all of them glistening with fresh coats of gunmetal paint over their ablative armor panels. Various heavy energy weapons hung under the sensor heads, their power cables winding down and routing through the torso cockpits. Curved smokestacks sprouted from the back of the walkers, each one still gleaming.

Rarity walked in front of the equine-shaped battlesuits and inspected their exteriors. “Oh, dear. They’re not quite as… aesthetically pleasing as I remember from your presentation.” She tried to contain a displeased expression, but her snout scrunched up at the sight of the war machines.

“Those materials were only concept designs. The real thing turned out bulkier than expected, and these models aren’t painted or detailed. But we breezed through the prototyping and testing phases much faster than anticipated. Fennin was very impressed!”

Behind the equines followed the Tau; first four Fire Warriors, then several Earth Caste workers that had accompanied Fennin. The workers started to rush forward to help with the Striders, but stopped when one of the guards raised a hand.

*Stay back, Fio’la. It is not safe.*

The workers hesitated uncertainly, missing their only chance to raise an alarm. The Fire Warriors crouched behind the ponies and aimed their pulse carbines.

“As long as we’re sure they work then that’s good enough for our customers, surely.” Rarity sighed. “Perhaps something can be done to the next batch? Really, it’s as if someone conspired to fuse all of the ugliest aspects of human technology with all the-“

The subtle pop of compressed air being released came from behind, and Rarity’s ear twitched. Before she could think much more of it, a blazing photon grenade landed in front of her and Gear Works, exploding in a strobing flash.

Rarity whinnied in surprise, stumbling backward. Gears winced as all of his optics sensors overloaded and reset, leaving him momentarily blinded as well. The servo skull made a high-pitched squealing noise, sputtering static. A volley of pulse fire came immediately after the grenade, before the equines could fathom what was happening.

Much to Rarity’s dismay, the weapons were trained exclusively on her, as she was both armed and armored. Crackling energy bolts slammed into her rear, back, and flank, and the ablative ceramite layers rapidly burned away beneath the barrage. Several slivers of energy managed to partially burn through the inner frame of her power armor, and the unicorn shrieked as hot spikes of power stabbed into her body.

Gear Works’ optics turned back on just in time to see Rarity collapse onto the ground with a gasp and a whimper, her armor smoldering. The cyborg stallion recoiled in shock, snapping his head around toward the Fire Warriors.

“You treacherous slime! What are you doing?!”

Gear Works promptly found himself the target of several pulse carbines.

“Quiet, horse. Down!” snapped one guard in hesitant Gothic.

“What is this? Are you trying to preserve the battlesuits?” Gear Works slowly lowered himself onto the ground as commanded.

“Quiet. Speak more, I shoot.”

One Fire Warrior kept his carbine trained on the Dark Acolyte while the others carefully approached the downed unicorn. The servo skull started beeping loudly, swinging back and forth through the air.

“Ssh! Striker! Be quiet!” Gear Works hissed.

The Fire Warriors grabbed Rarity’s armor by the collar and pulled her up. A groan issued from the unconscious mare. One of the guards nodded.

*This one is still alive. Passed out from the shock. Might need some patching up, but she won’t give us any more trouble.* He ripped the plasma gun and then the power sword off of her back. *I’ve seen these equine psykers levitate and use weapons from several meters away. We’re going to have to lock these up.*

*We should also get her out of that power armor. If there’s extensive tissue damage, it could hemorrhage without treatment.*

The servo skull started buzzing around Rarity, still beeping and nearly running into the Tau.

*How do we get her out of the armor? It doesn’t look like there are any obvious latches.*

*Make the other pony do it. He looks like one of those-* The Fire Warrior suddenly jerked away as Gear’s servo skull almost swung into him. He stumbled onto his rear, but the hovering drone paid him no mind as it continued its frantic circuits. *Would somebody get rid of that blasted drone?*

“Striker, stop!” Gear Works shouted.

One of the Fire Warriors swung his carbine like a club, smacking the cybernetic helper out of the air. Striker tumbled onto the ground, its manipulators and cables flailing behind it. It started re-initializing its anti-gravity engine immediately, but the Fire Warrior that had hit it was already aiming his weapon.

“No! Please don’t-“

A single shot screamed from the barrel, punching through the servo skull and blasting it apart. Smoking bits of bone and metal scattered across the ground, and a whip of blue power slashed a burn scar across the dirt.

“Striker, NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!” Gear Works screamed, rearing up and howling his despair to the sky.

The Fire Warrior behind him was alarmed at the sudden movement, and he quickly slammed the butt of his carbine into the Acolyte’s head. Gear Works fell back into the dirt, his vocalizer stuttering.

“Quiet. Remove armor. Move, pony,” commanded the guard, pointing at Rarity.

“You fools… You arrogant, wretched, alien scum,” Gears sobbed as he pushed himself upright again, and the Tau swore they could see rivulets of oil dribbling down the sides of the pony’s respirator mask. “What have you done… we trusted you, you sadistic mules…”

Gear Works staggered over to Rarity, hanging his head. Then his servo arm swung down, jabbing a electric probe into the recesses of Rarity’s power armor. The Fire Warriors watched him from outside of his servo arm’s potential range, although the stallion hadn’t displayed any aggression or capacity for defensive violence thus far. After a few seconds the outer seals of the power armor split open, and several burnt pieces of plating shook off and fell to the ground.

*That weirdo is more upset that we shot the bone thing than he was that we shot the unicorn,* one Fire Warrior observed as Gear Works began stripping the mare of her armor.

*Tech-cultist freaks,* spat another.

*Shas’ui, what is happening? Why have we attacked these ponies?*

Two of the Fire Warriors turned to address the Earth Caste Tau behind them. The workers were obviously shocked at the sudden outbreak of violence, and some of them were glancing back at their transport as if weighing their chances of escape.

*These ponies happened to be in the way, that’s all. We can’t have them running around Black Point, and we certainly can’t have them shipping more weapons to Ferrous Dominus.*

*I don’t… I don’t understand…*

*You do not need to understand our actions, Fio’la. But you must understand that this is for the Greater Good.*

Several of the Earth Caste stepped away, as if physically repelled by the phrase.

*But… Shas’ui… the Greater Good-*

The Fire Warrior cut him off. *Tau’va is our guiding light. Our oath. Our past, our present, and our future. It shapes our lives, and as such it will shape our deaths.* He pointed his weapon in the direction of the ponies. *These creatures and their masters, the Iron Warriors, think to take this from us. To strip us of our purpose and make us tools to serve their twisted deities. They have failed.*

*This is insane,* snapped a different worker, *the Iron Warriors are our allies! We made a treaty with them and they upheld their part of the bargain! This is a betrayal!*

*The only betrayal was spending Tau lives to protect those of gue’la cultists,* the guard replied defiantly.

*Shas’el Wraithstar will not stand for this,* warned another worker. *He has worked too hard and sacrificed too much to let you launch this doomed mutiny.*

*This is no mutiny,* a different Fire Warrior retorted. *At least, not unless the Shas’el defies his orders.*

This gave the Earth Caste pause. *But Shas’el Wraithstar is the highest ranking warrior on this world…*

*Luckily, Fio’la, that is no longer the case…*

“There. It’s done.” Gear Works sniffled pitifully as he stepped away from Rarity. The mare lay on the ground, naked and surrounded by the scattered pieces of her power armor. Her hind legs and one flank were peppered with small but severe burns, marring her otherwise pure white coat with ugly streaks of black.

*Good. Shas’la, take the unicorn to the med bay. Once it’s treated, have it restrained and relocated to the holding cells.* Then he gestured to the workers. *All of you, come with me.* Then he kicked Gear Works in the side. “You follow, pony.”

The Dark Acolyte barely stumbled from the impact, but he silently turned in the direction the guard indicated, still hanging his head. The Earth Caste were more hesitant, but nonetheless started following when a Fire Warrior slipped in behind them.

*Where are we going, Shas’ui?*

*To the holding cells, Fio’la.*

*Why? What have we done wrong?*

*You’ve been… less enthusiastic than hoped for at the prospect of serving the guiding light of the Tau’va. There is a chance, however remote, that you would inform the cultist madmen of our actions,* said the unit leader with a grim snort. *But your confinement will be only temporary. Soon there will be no 38th Company left for you to betray us to…*

****

Black Point

Command Center

*This is ridiculous. Utterly, entirely, unacceptably ridiculous.*

Wraithstar stared down Voidsong with a scowl of contempt. *What you propose is not only infeasible but a gross and total betrayal of the pact currently keeping our people alive on this world.*

*Ah, yes. Your “pact.” Let’s talk about that,* Voidsong said with a sneer. *Surrendering the weapons of the Tau Empire and the services of the castes to the insane humans of Chaos is an error that might shame our Sept until the end of days, Shas’el. I believe it was you who arranged this fate?*

*I did,* Wraithstar said fearlessly. *My actions, however, do not reflect upon any Sept of the Tau Empire. We have been abandoned by our Sept, discharged in our duty to Tau’va, left to end our own lives as we see fit. As we’ve been disowned by our empire, how do our actions reflect upon it?*

*Don’t you play games with me, Wraithstar,* Voidsong hissed. *Tau are creatures of the Greater Good. We serve it always, even when it does not serve us.*

*No. Not this time, Shas’o,* Wraithstar replied coldly.

Many of the other officers were fidgeting uncomfortably now, unnerved by the unfolding confrontation. This was not how the reunion between the High Commander and sub-commander was supposed to go. Although every one of the Tau at Black Point were happy to have Voidsong freed and returned to them, many also respected the efforts Wraithstar had made in her absence. Negotiating the treaty that had kept the Tau safe from Chaos retaliation and given them a chance against the Orks was no minor feat.

*We completed our mission. We were explicitly disbanded from our service. In this wretched wilderness, surrounded by enemies, despised by the local populace, and facing certain annihilation, we were left to meet our fate however we saw fit. So yes, I made a pact with Chaos. I decided that a life serving the 38th Company is better than no life at all.*

*You were wrong,* Voidsong said blandly. *But more importantly, your outlook that there exists no outcomes aside from extermination or submission is simple defeatism. If we have no acceptable options, then we must make them.*

Wraithstar twitched every so slightly. *... On the topic of better outcomes, I also decided that if there was a chance to save this world in the bargain after we put it in danger, then we would take it. After we wrote off billions of creatures as “necessary sacrifices,” the Iron Warriors found a way to divert the horde. It is not just our people that this alliance has saved, Shas’o. And the forces of Chaos, however insane or corrupt, have kept their end of our bargain. We cannot turn against them.*

*Pathetic.* Voidsong’s rebuke felt like a blow to the gut, and Wraithstar twitched again. *I severely misjudged your character and qualifications if you’re subject to such crude and selfish whims, Shas’el.*

*Selfish?! You think I’m being selfish?!* Wraithstar bristled, clenching his teeth. *I’ve been fighting constantly since you got yourself locked in stone! Hundreds of kills, dozens of camps wiped out, and THREE Warbosses assassinated, all in-between trying to accommodate our forces among a populace that would happily see us lined up and executed! I deemed that the lives of hundreds of Tau and Kroot were worth more than a hollow, useless sacrifice, and for that I’m “selfish!?”*

Voidsong’s grip on the armrest of her seat tightened, and a vein pulsed on her head. *Yes, of course you’re selfish! Aiding Chaos does not advance Tau’va. The Greater Good suffers when these “Dark Gods” or whatever they are achieve their goals. To give aid to these monsters simply to preserve your life – or that of your subordinates, even – is the utmost cowardice and a gross betrayal.*

Wraithstar narrowed his eyes. *So, then: Had you been commanding Black Point’s garrison after the completion of Emerald Dawn rather than serving as a latrine for birds, what would you have done? As the Orks marched through Equestria and the 38th Company prepared a defensive engagement to rip out the warband’s heart, where would you sink the Lamman Sept’s dagger?*

Voidsong rolled her eyes, leaning back in her chair. *Obviously, I would have attacked the defensive fortifications. Timed correctly, they’d collapse instantly before the Ork offensive.*

Wraithstar was stunned. Several other officers winced. The Fio’o, already quite frightened by the arguing among the Fire Caste, tugged nervously on the collar of his jumpsuit.

*You’d doom us all? Knowingly? Human, Tau, pony, and every other sentient on this world? You’d see every one of us slaughtered by the Orks?* Wraithstar mumbled.

*Perhaps. Perhaps not. But that would hardly be the worst possible outcome. Sometimes when you sink the dagger, the dagger breaks,* Voidsong snapped. *Beyond the Emerald Dawn project, our main priority is that Chaos dies. From what I’ve seen, they’re a greater danger than the Orks, and we caught them at a moment of unique vulnerability. Your actions in my absence can be forgiven, Shas’el. You did the best you could with the information you had. And your actions have given us an advantageous position: access to the Chaos base. But now that I’m back this game is over. Soon we will launch a new attack on the Company, while the bulk of their strength is away, and we will wipe out this infestation.*

*You’re insane!* Wraithstar growled, taking a step forward.

The Fire Warrior sprung into action, leaning forward and raising his pulse rifle. Wraithstar stopped and stared in confusion. Most of the others in the room looked equally perplexed. Not so much because the guard reacted, which wasn’t surprising, but because he was holding the rifle wrong. Both of his hands were wrapped awkwardly around the stock, and the weapon barrel wobbled comically while he tried to aim it.

Voidsong glanced up, and then she growled a curse before snatching the rifle away. *Ahem! Thank you, Shas’la, for handing me my weapon,* she said unconvincingly. The Fire Warrior stumbled, his shock being evident despite the helmet concealing his features.

*… Who is that?* Wraithstar murmured, peering over the Fire Warrior’s uniform. *I see no squad designators. Shas’la, what is your-*

The Commander was cut off when Voidsong stood up and took aim at him. Unlike the guard, she pointed the rifle the correct way. *This has gone on long enough, Shas’el. You have your orders. We are attacking the 38th Company. You cannot stop us; you can only help our counter-attack succeed. Decide now where your loyalties lie.*

Wraithstar didn’t respond right away. He looked around once again at the officers in the command center. Most of them only met his eyes for a moment before diverting their gaze or nodding hesitantly. Turning completely around, he saw Fennin was still standing near the back. As soon as they made eye contact the engineer shook his head.

*… Very well, Shas’o Voidsong.* Wraithstar once again faced the High Commander, paying no apparent attention to the pulse rifle aimed at his chest. *My loyalties lay with my soldiers and allies here in the Centaur system. As such, I refuse your orders.*

Voidsong’s gaze hardened.

*Your plan will likely fail and see us all butchered. More to the point, it will see us all butchered even if it succeeds. The 38th Company is the only force on this world that can quell the local Orks. You’re handing every Tau, Kroot, and native a death sentence just so you can play the martyr, and I will not support it.* He spread his arms to his sides. *If you’re going to kill me, Voidsong, dispense with these games and do it here and now. No tiresome rhetoric; no veil of nobility. Pull the trigger and let our subordinates see your intentions stripped bare.*

The pulse rifle trembled slightly. Voidsong struggled to contain herself as her finger curled around the trigger. A chuckle came from the “Fire Warrior” at her side, and her stomach lurched in an unfamiliar manner.

Voidsong lowered the weapon. *Shas’el Wraithstar. You have defied direct orders and disgraced your Sept with your weakness and ineptitude. By the power vested in me by the Tau Empire and Tau’va, and in the name of the Ethereals, I hereby void your ranking among the Fire Caste and declare you outcast. The Greater Good shall endure without you.*

*I think I liked this speech better the first time I heard it, as our fleet was retreating from orbit,* Wraithstar mumbled, lowering his arms. *They at least acknowledged that they knew they were wrong.*

*Shas’vre!* Voidsong shouted, gesturing to several other officers. *Take him to the containment block!*

Several ranking members of the Fire Caste moved to comply. One did not, instead turning toward the High Commander.

*Shas’o, please, this is too much. I realize what we’ve done here without the Sept leadership, but the Shas’el has-*

Voidsong cut him off with a gesture. *All that stuff I said earlier goes for you too.*

She snapped her fingers, and the dissident was suddenly bludgeoned in the back with a pulse carbine. He tumbled onto the floor with a shout, and was soon hauled away toward the door while Wraithstar was being shackled.

*What about you, Fio’el?* Voidsong rested her rifle against her shoulder while glaring at Fennin. *Do you have any objections?*

*No. I’m okay with it. I was pretty sick of the horses anyhow. You may proceed,* Fennin said with a shrug. Wraithstar gave the engineer an incredulous look as he was dragged away.

*Good. Anyone else who objects to my orders may feel free to accompany Wraithstar to his cell. Operation Silverfall will proceed as we have planned,* Voidsong growled while the new prisoners were being led away.

The Fire Warrior behind her slowly reached over for his pulse rifle. Voidsong slapped his hand before he could touch it, and the guard flinched back.

“Don’t YOU have something to be doing, too?” she hissed.

Her voice was very low, and almost everyone else couldn’t make anything out since she suddenly switched languages.

But the Fio’o – much closer and fully fluent in Gothic – couldn’t help but wonder what the High Commander meant.

****

Black Point

Holding cells

*Now this one might be a problem…*

Several Fire Warriors stood in a circle within the prison structure, their carbines held at the ready. In the middle of the group was Gear Works, the equine Dark Acolyte that had been caught earlier. The stallion snapped his head from side to side fearfully, unable to understand the aliens’ conversation and afraid to so much as twitch his servo arm.

*Between the claw and the tail, it looks too dangerous to simply toss in the cell.*

*Why? The bars are electrified. What’s he going to do?*

*I was at Ferrous Dominus briefly, Shas’la. I’ve seen what those wretched cultists can do. This one may be trembling like a leaf now, but it’s dangerous.*

*I don’t understand. Does it have a laser emitter or a cutting torch or something?*

*If it’s a problem, why don’t we just cut the metal parts off?*

*Are you being serious? What if he needs those?*

*Personally, I don’t see why we don’t just execute them now. Are we planning on even letting them out eventually?*

The main entrance hissed open, briefly diverting the attention of the guards away from the shivering pony. The Fire Warriors were reasonably surprised to see Wraithstar being shoved into the room, his wrists bound behind his back. A few other Tau of the Fire Caste trudged into the facility behind him, also bearing shackles. Behind these soldiers came a pair of Fireblades and a certain engineer.

*Shas’el Wraithstar? What is this?* asked one of the guards in shock.

*Voidsong has decided to veto my agreement keeping us all alive,* Wraithstar said dryly.

*Fire Warriors do not value their lives over the Greater Good, Wraithstar!* snarled one of the soldiers behind him.

*You’re not a Fire Warrior,* Wraithstar replied with a snort. *You’re a refugee with a gun. Voidsong may insist on ignoring the difference, but I won’t protect you from the truth.* He turned his head to glare over his shoulder. “You’re all dead men, now. Whether by the human’s hands, or the Orks, or maybe even the ponies, you will not survive this. I won’t be able to save you.”

The guards didn’t speak much Gothic and were caught off-guard by suddenly change in language. The Fireblades understood him perfectly, and one of them trembled angrily before shoving him forward.

*Shut up and get in the cell, traitor!*

One of the containment complex guard raised a hand. *What about the others?*

*Chaos sympathizers,* snarled the Fireblade in return. The other prisoners winced and trudged forward.

*And Fio’el Fennin? He’s not restrained.*

The Fireblades seemed surprised, and they turned around. Fennin was standing in the doorway, his eyes glued to the tablet in his hands.

*I’m here to do a security modification for the Cultist,* Fennin explained, pointing to Gear Works. The stallion recoiled, his optic lights winking off and on in sequence.

*So it CAN get out of the cell with its augmentations?*

“The dataspike and integrated mechadendrites are useless against our containment systems. I just have to block a few tertiary access paths into the local network sphere; he’s worked with them before and can cause trouble remotely, otherwise. We wouldn’t want to allow him access to the auto-turret system, now would we?” Fennin swiped a finger across the face of his device. “There! He won’t be getting out of his cell now!”

Gear’s ears twitched, although the Dark Acolyte remained silent. He also stopped shaking in fear.

The guards, for their part, seemed confused. *Fio’el, why did you switch to Gothic just-*

*Force of habit. And what is all this?*

Fennin followed Wraithstar and his jailers down the hall, shaking his head sadly. Most of the cells were already occupied. Kroot made up a substantial number of the prisoners, although there were plenty of low-ranking Tau lounging on the tiny beds or reading behind a set of crackling bars. A handful of humans were held near the end of the hall, some bearing the tattoos of hardened Chaos fighters and others the broken frame of exhausted slaves.

*This place was nearly empty when I left it! Shas’o Voidsong has a bigger prisoner base than some of the smaller labor camps I’ve seen!* Fennin remarked.

One of the Fireblades entered a code into a cell’s access console. *The trauma of abandonment has been… hard on some. They have forgotten our obligation to Tau’va.* The bars to the cell opened, and Wraithstar and the other dissidents were pushed inside. *They refused to fight Chaos. They may come around if Silverfall is successful, but until then it’s too dangerous for them to be free.*

The other Fireblade opened up a cell opposite Wraithstar’s. *Bring that metal horse over here! And then go get the white one from the med-bay and get her into a cell as soon as possible! Along with one of those psi-inhibitor collars!*

Gear Works was marched down the hall toward his prison. The stallion kept his head low, but one of his peripheral optics peeked from the cowl of his robe at Fennin.

The engineer didn’t appear to notice. He frowned down at his tablet, as if there was some inscrutable puzzle on the screen. *If Silverfall is successful…* He looked up. *Do you expect it to be?*

The Fireblade closed Gear’s cell. *We have the element of surprise, Fio’el. The Lamman Sept has ever made excellent use of it.*

*The element of surprise has achieved precisely one mission objective against the 38th Company so far,* Wraithstar interjected. *Out of all the Tau on Centaur III, maybe a sixth are stationed here in Black Point as reserves. If you can’t even rely on all of them, what chance do you have, even with the Iron Warriors gone?*

*Shas’o Voidsong assures us that we are not alone.* Casting a final glare at Wraithstar, the guards escorted Fennin back to the entrance. *We have allies.*

*Allies? What? Who are they?* Fennin asked incredulously. *Everyone on this planet hates us. Except maybe the Orks, who also want us dead, but not out of hatred. Where did the Shas’o find allies?*

The soldiers bristled visibly, but they resisted lashing out at the engineer.

*… Does it matter? We’re not getting off this planet alive.* The Fireblade gripped his pulse carbine tightly, his finger grazing the trigger. *At least we get our choice of who to take with us, this way.*

Back in his cell, Wraithstar shook his head in disgust.

****

Badlands Camp

(Precise location unknown)

In the distance, the setting sun illuminated a dark cloud of ash and poison.

Even when consumed in something as simple as a sunset, a splash of bright color over the horizon, Ferrous Dominus was a hideous blight. At the present distance the massive fortress itself was invisible; even the spires of Nightwatch and the anti-orbital batteries were imperceptible. But the poison of the aliens’ presence extended much further than their walls. A gray blotch sat in the middle of an otherwise unbroken stripe of brilliant orange, an unsubtle reminder of the very real and physical corruption carried by the invaders alongside the metaphysical and moral kinds.

Mox sat on the edge of a deep incline, her eyes fixed on the gray spot. She was disguised as a diamond dog, as usual; she hadn’t had the privilege of reverting to her true body for over a month now. A bandoleer was strapped over one shoulder and connected to a munitions belt, both of them laden with lasgun power cells and grenades.

“It’s almost time. We’ll be rid of them, soon.”

A deep, gruff voice came from below, and Mox snapped her head around. A hulking female minotaur wearing scavenged Ork body armor was trudging up the incline. A belt of heavy bolter ammunition was slung over her shoulder, rattling with every movement.

After ensuring no one else was in earshot, Mox spoke. “So much planning and work and brutality… yet it still feels like we’re careening recklessly into the jaws of a chimera, Sox. Can these creatures truly be defeated?”

Sox reached the edge of the pit and brought a set of monoculars to her eyes. Even with the telescopic enhancement, Ferrous Dominus was barely a gray smudge on the horizon. It was an extreme distance from which to prepare an assault, but it was as close as the insurgents dared gather to the fortress-factory while exposed to mundane sight.

“Anything can be defeated, Mox. Even the mighty Sun Princess fell when challenged with the Queen’s cunning! The humans will be no different.”

Mox pursed her lips, looking away. “I… think you and I may have drawn different lessons from that incident…”

“Take it from me, Mox: those creatures that pride themselves on raw strength crumble the quickest once their strength fails them.” Sox lowered the monoculars and crossed her arms over her chest. “The minotaur and griffons faltered instantly once they got a taste of the sheer force arrayed against them. Your diamond dogs, on the other hoof, evaded the aliens for months. The stealthy dagger will defeat the spiked flail every time.”

“Speaking of ‘stealthy daggers...’” Mox mumbled, looking over into the pit below. “Are those blue-gray aliens gonna show up? The jerks that brought the Orks here?”

Below the edge of the incline was a huge quarry pit. The walls of the pit had been carved down into pathways and platforms that led to a tunnel network in the surrounding area, while the ground in the middle was dotted with cook fires. The “soldiers” of the insurgency – griffons, diamond dogs, minotaur, and yaks – milled about or carried things across the makeshift base. Of the native species that opposed the 38th Company, only the dragons had not gathered here, seeing as the monstrous serpents would substantially increase their chances of being spotted.

Sox shook her head. “I don’t think so. I do not know what the Queen has planned, but bringing the grays here would be foolish, don’t you think? All these fools hate them as much as the humans. Maybe more.” She smirked. “The Queen will handle our allies. We must be ready for our part.”

“The tunnels are almost ready,” Mox assured her sister, “but what are we going to do when we reach the fortress? You don’t seriously think we can dig right up into their backyard, do you?”

“No. I’m sure we’ll encounter some sort of barrier that would be impenetrable to canine claws or even our captured weapons.” Sox pointed down into the pit. “We will overcome.”

Mox peered down again and soon spotted the object Sox was pointing at. Among the metal crates of supplies was a large, drum-shaped object nearly three meters long. She couldn’t determine what it was at a glance, but she noticed that all the workers and soldiers were giving it a wide berth.

“Is that-“

“A bomb, yes. Specifically, a ‘shaped melta-base excavation charge.’ It will carve a hole through any material, guaranteed.” Sox looked extremely proud of this, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Where did you steal something like that from? Why would the Equestrians even keep such a weapon?”

“They didn’t,” Sox admitted. “Or rather, they didn’t keep them as weapons. Nor did I steal it. That was acquired through more… conventional means.”

****

Coltson

“The Shiny Stuff” mining supply store

Three days earlier

“-four pick axes, one ‘rock grinder’ powered maul, a dozen lumen helmets, and one ‘Big Boom’ shaped excavation charge!”

An earth pony happily jabbed his hooves at a cash register, adding up the prices of the various items piled on the counter in front of him. At one end was the enormous barrel-shaped bomb.

“Now then, do you folks have a ‘Motivated Miner’ membership card?”

Standing in front of the counter were half a dozen minotaur and griffons, all of them scowling impatiently and many bearing ammo belts and holstered guns.

“No, we don’t.” Sox was at the front, carrying a sack full of bits. “How much is it?”

“Would you like to sign up for a membership? All we need is your address and vox ID and you get-“

“NO, thank you, I’d like to just check out,” Sox said through clenched teeth. “Why do these places always do this…”

“All righty then, Miss.” The cashier pony hesitated, glancing over to the melta charge. Numerous warning stickers were plastered over it, and suddenly the pony’s expression turned solemn.

“Now then, before I finish ringing you up, I’m going to have to ask you what exactly you’re planning to do with this here bomb.”

The scarred and battle-hardened customers flinched, and some of them started growling to each other.

Sox quickly took the offensive, leaning over the relatively tiny equine and snarling down at him. “What business is it of yours? Since when is it common practice in Equestria to interrogate everyday, innocent miners about their business, which is definitely mining and nothing else?”

“Now, now, don’t get all riled,” the stallion retorted calmly. “I don’t mean to impugn your motivations, Miss, but these are troubled times. There’s been talk of discontent and violent revolution and such. Such a dangerous item as this could do some real damage if it was sold to insurgents or other ne’er-do-wells.”

“I can assure you, shopkeep, that we are nothing but honest, hardworking miners. We need this bomb to… get through…” Sox chewed her lip briefly. “Well, not a giant metal wall, exactly, but something of very similar dimensions and resilience. In our mining work.”

“So, like, a diamond wall, maybe?” the stallion asked.

“Yeah, sure. That.” Sox cleared her throat briefly. “The point is, we are most definitely NOT insurgents who hate humans and want them all dead. In fact, I’d say we’re mostly – but not suspiciously! – pro-human in our general sentiment.”

“That griffon there is wearing a ‘Kill all humans’ T-shirt,” the cashier pointed out, gesturing to one of the hybrids near the back.

The others turned to stare, noting that the largest griffon did indeed have a shirt on with that message. Below the slogan was a picture of several human skulls in a burning pile, surrounded by a shattered Chaos Star.

“Oh… uh… right. The shirt.” The griffon cringed and tugged on the collar. “I wear it… IRONICALLY. Yes.”

“Huh... You kids today and your ‘edgy’ apparel.” The stallion rolled his eyes and slapped a hoof down on the cash register, completing the sale.

****

“The important thing is that the charge will get us through the wall when we get to it. Have your diamond dogs reached a barrier yet?”

Mox shook her head. “The teams are digging as fast as they dare. The blasted canines were terrified when they started reaching tainted soil, and some of them started getting violently ill just from handling the dirt before we handed out protective gear.”

“Pollution?”

“That’s what I thought at first too, and… I don’t know. It could be, but I touched some of it myself and it felt… different. Wrong. Wrong in a way that dirt shouldn’t be able to feel wrong.” She made a gagging expression. “We’ll have the tunnel done, though. Our tunnels will get you to the fortress if your bomb can break through the wall.”

“And right into the teeth of a thousand human warriors…” Sox mumbled.

“More than a thousand. Plus ponies and whatever monsters these Chaos freaks bring along with them.” Mox shuddered. “We’re putting in an awful lot of work just to get to the most dangerous place in the world, Sox. This is it. We either butcher them all or get wiped out entirely.”

The larger Hive Guardian chuckled. “Are you saying you doubt our queen, Mox?”

“No. My queen and my sisters are the ONLY things I trust.” She scowled and pointed down into the pit. “It’s all THOSE scum that I don’t believe in.”

“You needn’t worry so much, Mox,” Sox assured her. “Pawns exist to be sacrificed for the cause. They’ll do their part…”

The two Guardians fell silent as a griffon flew up toward them. Nox was wearing stitched-together flak armor with a modified helmet mask, and a plasma gun was strapped and holstered to her flank. The weapon was a very rare find among the insurgents, and the other Hive Guardians suspected that she had stolen it from a more successful scavenger.

“Sisters, she’s arriving.” Nox hovered in front of the other spies, pointing a talon at the other side of the quarry.

Sox brought up her monoculars, and then she frowned. “There’s some kind of… smog cloud? Wait… the Queen is in a vehicle? Did she take one from the humans?”

“Not from the humans, no.” Nox’s beak twisted awkwardly into a grimace. “We’re going to want to be on the ground to prevent panic.”

“Orks. Right,” Sox hissed. “The Tau are despised too much to work openly with us, but we’re supposed to ally with Orks. I suppose we should have expected this…”

“Oh, no…” Mox sighed, slapping a paw over her face.

Screaming started coming from the insurgents as soon as the first Ork Trukk came close enough to be heard in the pit. Considering the quality of Ork engineering and how they considered noise exciting rather than annoying, the rebels got plenty of notice.

“Firing lines! Get into firing lines!”

“Everyone without a weapon, into the tunnels!”

“THIS PLAN NOT INCLUDE ORK ATTACK! PLAN FAIL NOW! YAKS HATE WHEN PLAN NOT PERFECT!”

“Stop screaming and take cover, you useless ball of hair!”

Nox sailed over the heads of the insurgents, grimacing as the rebels formed a firing line. This part of the plan wasn’t going to be easy to sell, but Chrysalis was counting on them.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” the changeling screeched, dropping down in front of the foremost rebels. “Nobody fires a shot until I say so!”

“Are we retreating?” sniffed a huge minotaur carrying a twin power axes. “I would rather stand and fight. These aliens will be decent practice before the next batch.”

“No, we’re not retreating! Killer Instinct, back off!” Sox slid down the side of the pit incline, her hooves cutting furrows through the hard-packed dirt.

“Wait, we’re not running and we’re not fighting, either?” asked an armored griffon incredulously. “What are we going to do, then? Just stand here and hope they miss us?”

“YOU STAY CALM AND NOT SHOOT!” boomed Rox while she scurried through the ranks of soldiers. “EVERYTHING FINE! YOU TRUST ROX! EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL!”

A canine yelp came from above, and all eyes snapped up to a diamond dog who was peeking over the edge of the quarry pit.

“There’s more than one! Dozens of trucks! There must be hundreds of them!” the diamond dog howled, dropping down and quivering in fear.

“All of you, just CALM DOWN!” Mox snapped. “Keep your weapons ready, but your fingers OFF the trigger! Got that?! No one fires unless I give the signal!” She stalked among the squads of uneasy insurgents, a low growl rumbling in her throat.

“Wait, are you being serious? What is this?” The old griffon captain Gestalt bristled, his feathered crest rising on his head. “Are we surrendering to the Orks, Nox? Answer me!”

“We’re not surrendering. Be quiet and let me handle this.” Nox unslung her plasma gun and landed, craning her head up toward the edge of the pit.

The sound of engines got much louder, and then started to thin out as the Trukks idled near the quarry. The sound of guttural shouting, laughing, and the occasional burst of gunfire into the air came from above the terrified rebels.

The first Nobs reached the pit, stopping at the edge and glaring down at the creatures meeting them. Huge, muscled warriors with heavy guns, massive bladed weapons, and angry red eyes leered at the insurgents below. They didn’t open fire, however, which the rebels found absolutely perplexing.

“Nox! What’s going on here? What is this?” Gestalt demanded while more and more greenskins gathered around the quarry.

“Come now, Captain. You didn’t seriously think we were going to try and break into that fortress and clear it out with just this rabble, did you?” the changeling replied, her eyes glittering slightly.

“Orks? You made a deal for us to fight… alongside ORKS?” The minotaur Killer Instinct blasted a jet of steam from his nostrils.

“How… How did you even DO this? Orks kill everything that crosses them! What is this madness?” Gestalt asked.

“Who cares? Just keep your finger off the trigger and we’ll have a wall of green bodies between us and the human weapons,” Sox growled.

“Are you insane?” the minotaur warrior asked. His voice was calm, but there was an undercurrent of building anger that immediately put Sox on edge. “The Orks are WORSE than the humans. I will not count any of these aliens as my allies. You may as well have made a pact with the Tau.”

Mox and Sox shared a synchronized wince.

“So you’d rather fight the Orks and then the humans than get the Orks to fight the humans? Because that’s literally the choice we’re faced with right now,” Mox hissed.

Killer Instinct considered the question for a moment. “Yes.”

“And that’s why you’re not in charge,” Sox snarled, “now shut up before you get us all killed!”

By now the Orks had formed a partial ring of bodies around the quarry, and the greenskins grumbled amongst themselves or pointed and laughed at the cowering natives below. They still weren’t attacking, however, or making any obvious moves to descend, which was the only thing keeping the rebels’ guns quiet.

“Oi! Moov it, you gitz!” barked a voice from behind the mob. “Da Boss iz comin’ troo!”

The Orks near the center quickly parted, clearing a path through the mob. Sure enough, a huge Ork started pushing his way to the front, followed by a snarling Nob and a pair of Gretchin.

Queen Chrysalis, still in the guise of “Warboss Changeyface,” reached the edge of the pit and looked over the troops staring up at her fearfully. Her big choppa sat on one shoulder, and she ground her jaw from side to side.

“OI!” Chrysalis bellowed. “Hoo’z in charj roun’ heah?!”

Nox leapt into the sky, flying up so that she was hovering just a meter below and away from her disguised master.

“We have no single leader, but I will speak for the warriors of the allied uprising,” the faux-griffon said with a small bow of her head. “We have prepared a means into the fortress, Warboss. The tunnel network is almost complete. Tomorrow, we will breach the wall, and the humans will be swept from the streets of their noxious city!”

Chrysalis snorted. Then she leapt off the edge of the pit.

Many of the insurgents standing behind barricades and crates recoiled as the massive green form landed. Chrysalis herself only stumbled slightly before standing up, briefly regretting both her current two-legged form and her lack of wings. How it came to be that all the most successful, advanced species in the galaxy all had such unwieldy anatomy was a persisting mystery to her.

“Dis iz da rebel mob? Feh! No wundah youz gitz ain’t been able ta beat da spikies!” Chrysalis growled, shaking her head.

“That’s rich, coming from an Ork,” Killer Instinct sneered. “The only reason anyone tolerates the humans is because they keep beating YOU.”

Several of the Nobs started sliding down the sides of the pit to join their leader, and a few more armed rebels emerged from the tunnels to join the ranks facing the Orks. The disguised Guardians started sweating anxiously; they could feel the fear, anger, and tension building to a breaking point, and it was nearly suffocating to their empathic senses. This was a powder keg waiting for a spark.

“Hah hah hah hah!” Chrysalis laughed, clutching her belly and grinning at the impudent minotaur. “So’z sum of ya gotz gutz! But dis heah fort iz MY pryzz, ya heer? My boyz an’ I will do da ‘ard fightin’. All youz squishies gotta do iz get us in!”

Murmurs and muttering passed through the ranks of the rebels, and some of the tension drained away. While none of the native inhabitants expected or approved of an alliance with the Orks, they DID like the idea of the greenskins taking the brunt of the punishment while fighting a skilled and well-equipped army.

Most of them did, at least.

“WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!” boomed a yak, stamping its hooves angrily and jumping out ahead of the pack. “THIS OUR ATTACK! YOU NOT SHOW UP AND TAKE CHARGE!”

Rox quickly moved to counter the agitated soldier. “Wait! We hear out Orks first! Ork participation rather integral to strategic assumptions!”

Killer Instinct crossed his arms over his chest. “Maybe so, but I’d still like to hear an answer. Who are you, Ork? Your kind DO have names, yes?”

A blast of hot steam came from Chrysalis’s nostrils. “Yeh, we does. Da Boss o’dis heah tribe iz… WARBOSS CHANGEYFACE!!”

Chrysalis bellowed the embarrassing moniker into the air, and the Orks around and above her started whooping and cheering while waving their choppas about. The fanfare was quite loud and distracting, but it wasn’t quite enough to disguise a wave of chortling rolling through the insurgents.

“Warboss… Changey Face?” Gestalt asked, his beak twisting into a grin. “Really? Oh my feathers, that’s even worse than the pony names!”

“Ugh. Aliens,” grumbled Killer Instinct.

Chrysalis was none too happy about being mocked, but at least the soldiers giggling at her seemed less likely to panic and open fire. If that was the greatest humiliation she would have to endure for this mission, then she would be quite lucky.

“Now den, my boyz iz jus’ gonna get sett-“

Chrysalis was suddenly cut off by the same yak that had pushed to the front before. “YOU NOT THE BOSS OF YAKS, WARBOSS CHANGEYFACE! YAKS NOT AGREE TO FIGHT WITH ORKS! YOU LEAVE NOW!”

Unlike the griffons, diamond dogs, and even the minotaur, the yaks had not burst into giggling fits when Chrysalis had named her cover form. Instead the burly bovines were pushing to the front, ahead of the other rebels, and looked as upset as ever. Unlike the other rebel species the yaks obviously couldn’t hold guns; instead they had been decked out in layers of flak and metal armor over their backs and sides, and many had covered their horns in metal plating, spikes, or razor wire. Any one of the beasts looked like they could knock over a Nob with ease, but they were still grievously outnumbered and outgunned by the green horde.

Chrysalis growled in the back of her throat, and then cast a glance at Rox. The changeling Guardian jumped into action, racing in front of the soldiers she had recruited.

“Wait! Consider benefit to yak from Ork ally!” Rox shouted, dashing in front of the hairy brutes. “If Ork fight and yak win, then-“

A huge boot suddenly struck Rox in the side, and the spy was lifted up off the ground and sent flailing into the air. She released a wailing moo as she flipped end over end, and then crashed painfully onto a pile of firewood.

The Orks immediately started laughing, while the rebels snapped their weapons up again. The Nob that had kicked the infiltrator guffawed the loudest, pointing and laughing at his victim.

“OI!” Chrysalis snarled. “Stop smashin da softies, ya-“

“OI!!” boomed the nearest yak, shouting over Chrysalis entirely. “YOU KICK ROX!! HOW DARE YOU HURT YAK LEADER?!”

That yak stepped toward the offending Nob, and then immediately caught a boot in the face himself. The bovine was knocked onto his side, blood oozing from his nose.

“Stop dat, ya Grot-lovah!” Chrysalis shouted, waving her choppa.

“Hah hah hah! Dese gitz iz s’pposed ta help us git da humies?” the Nob laughed, clutching his stomach. “Boss, we don’ need-“

In the next moment something hit the Ork like a wrecking ball, shattering his leg and sending him into the air. The Nob barely had time to blink dimly before he smashed into a rock face, causing an agonized wince to roll through the dumbfounded spectators. He slid down the bare stone, leaving a thick streak of blood behind.

“YOU. NOT. STEP. ON. YAKS.” The yak that had been kicked – that is, the REAL yak that had been kicked – stood before the Nobs with his head held high even while fresh blood dribbled from his nose. “YOU WANT TO BEAT HUMANS?! THEN YOU FIRST BEAT YAKS!!”

“Okay, dat’z enuff!” barked Chrysalis. “You’z-“

Before she could even get to the second sentence, another Nob jumped forward and swung his choppa down. The rusted axe broke through the layers of flak armor and sunk into the yak’s shoulder.

“Wait! Hold on! No, you idiots!” Mox shouted.

Another yak slammed into the Nob attacker, spearing his abdomen on a horn and then flinging him away.

“Hey! Stop it!” Nox screeched.

Another Ork tackled the first yak, slamming it onto the ground. The greenskin had barely hit the dirt before two more yaks rammed him and trampled him into the dirt.

“What in Tartarus is wrong with you?!” Sox bellowed.

Several more Nobs rushed toward the yaks, and some of the Orks above the pit started firing their shootas into the air and cheering on their tribesmen.

“I SAID KWIT IT, YA NUMM-SKULLZ!!” Chrysalis roared.

Her voice was immediately drowned out by a pair of even louder battle cries, blending together into a perfect storm of frenzied bloodlust.

“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!”

Chrysalis slapped her hand over her face as the yaks and Orks crashed into a swirling melee, kicking up a vast cloud of dust around them. The sound of bellows, pained shouts, bone-crunching impacts, and point-blank gunshots poured from the scuffle, along with the occasional greenskin body sent flying from being rammed.

The other rebels, however, simply watched the skirmish nervously. None of them seemed to want to escalate the fighting, and many of them seemed honestly embarrassed by the conduct of their peers. By the same token, while the other Orks Chrysalis had brought with her were cheering on the Nobs from the edge of the pit, they at least refrained from jumping in themselves.

“Well, den… doez anywun ELSE haff a probbem wit do Orks leadin’ da charj?!” she snarled.

“No! No, we’re fine. Thank you,” Nox said quickly. “Nobody else has a problem with the Orks spearheading the attack, right?”

Killer Instinct raised a hand. Sox immediately slapped it down. They glared at each other.

Gestalt clashed his wing shields together, and then the former Captain nodded at the griffon troops behind him. “I don’t like the idea of siding with the Orks. But if these aliens want to charge in first and take the brunt of the defensive fire… well, the only other option seems to be fighting them.” He pointed at the Warboss. “You keep your troops under control, and we won’t shoot you in the back. Yet.”

“Then it’s settled!” Nox said, casting an icy glance at the griffon warrior. “All we have to do is finish the tunnel and blast open the wall!”

“That’s hardly ‘all’ we have to do,” sniffed Killer Instinct. Then he pointed toward Chrysalis. “Tell me… Changeyface... you’ve fought wars against the humans before, have you not? I am led to believe that you ‘Warbosses’ are the oldest and most experienced of your kind.”

“Yeh, wut uv it?” Chrysalis growled. “I killed lotsa humies! I eefen killed me fill o’ spiky boyz!” She slammed the head of her great choppa on the ground for emphasis.

“I’m sure you have. So do you really think this force is enough to take on the Chaos army? With thousands of troops and a fortress to break open, can your Orks turn the tide of battle in our favor?”

Chrysalis released a deep, guttural laugh, and her lips stretched into a grin. “I gotz a trikk r’two ta help wif dat. Don’ worree horny boy, we’z got enuff bakk-up ta tayk da fort!”

The minotaur’s eyebrow twitched while Sox fought the urge to laugh. “Please do not address or refer to me as ‘horny boy.’”

“Shur, shur,” Chrysalis waved off the warrior, and then glanced toward the battle going on behind her. “Oi! You gitz dun yet?!”

Remarkably, almost as soon as she turned around, a yak burst from the chaos and thundered across the quarry floor. Sitting on the beast’s back and holding on by one horn was a Nob. Both creatures were battered and bleeding, but the latter whooped wildly and fired his slugga into the air. The other rebels scattered, and eventually the yak screeched to a halt in the middle of the pit.

“Now dat’z sum good fightin’!” the Nob laughed between heaves of breath. Then he paused, rolled his tongue around his mouth for a moment, and then spat out a tooth.

“YAKS DONE! READY TO SMASH PUNY HUMANS NOW!” the yak acting as a mount shouted. He pawed at the ground beneath him, and his rider bellowed a war cry.

Chrysalis stared at the Nob and yak, dumbfounded. Then she felt Gox tapping her on the shoulder. She twisted her head toward the Ork-disguised Guardian, who then pointed back toward the site of the skirmish.

The fight had ended entirely. Several Yaks and Orks lay on the ground dead or severely injured, and great splashes of blood criss-crossed the breadth of the combat zone. The surviving Orks, evidently, had all managed to climb onto the surviving yaks, who were all lining up into ranks or stumbling away for treatment of their wounds (and those of their riders).

“… Wut jus’ happened?” Chrysalis mumbled.

Gox leaned in to whisper to the disguised Queen. “It seems we have a cavalry corps now, Warboss.”

“But… dey were… I meen, wen did dey… how did… WUT?”

“Best not to over-think this. They certainly don’t.” Gox walked past Chrysalis and then snarled at Nox. “Oi! We’z gotta tokk ta yer leederz! Fer stratejizin’!”

The disguised Guardian grinned, pounding her fist into her palm. “Dere’z a lotta killin’ t’do, ladz! Le’s git to it!”

****

Chrysalis watched the ramshackle wooden door close behind her, her green eyes narrowed dangerously. The door was locked, and then a crossbar was put over it.

She turned toward the other occupants of the small, dug-out strategy room: Gox, Nox, Rox, Mox, and Sox all waited patiently, along with a pair of Gretchin.

“Dis room sekyur?” she rumbled.

Mox shook her head.

Chrysalis grabbed a table covered in maps and then threw it toward the door. The table slammed into the barrier, falling on its side and blocking the entrance. Then the changeling Queen’s eyes flashed, casting a barrier over the door to block sound.

“That will have to be secure enough,” Chrysalis said, her voice returning to normal. An emerald aura surrounded the massive Ork body, and it rapidly deflated back to her true form. “FINALLY I can drop this absurd disguise. Warboss ‘Changeyface.’ Feh.” Even with her spell in place she kept her voice down as a precaution.

The two Grots vanished in flashes of green magic, and were replaced by ordinary changelings wearing small saddlebags. The Guardians kept their disguises on; they were deep in infiltrated territory after all, and keeping cover was a deeply ingrained habit.

“All the pieces are finally in place. All the traps set, all the players in their corners. Tonight’s moon marks the final day of human dominance on my planet,” Chrysalis hissed. “The final push was convincing these fools to tolerate fighting alongside Orks. At this late stage, they have little choice. If these idiots can last one night without killing each other then the assault can proceed.”

“You did something with the Tau as well, didn’t you?” Mox asked.

“Yes. But that alliance is more… low-key. It needn’t be revealed to our other pawns.” Chrysalis chuckled, and then gestured to a lesser changeling. “It’s also proven quite productive. Voidsong’s slaves have access to the fortress and she has provided a list of targets. Critical information for a band of savages who can hardly tell one towering lump of metal from another.”

Her horn glowed, seizing a sheet of paper that a changeling was removing from its pack. The paper had a list of facilities and a bird’s-eye sketch of Ferrous Dominus showing where the targets were.

“The city is huge, fortified, and deadly. Your soldiers won’t get anywhere just trying to tear it down block by block. This will tell you where to attack.”

“Excellent, my Queen,” Nox hissed, her beak curving into a grin. “I’ll have this copied and distributed amongst the rabble.”

“The grays also have something else planned,” Chrysalis continued. “I’m not certain what, exactly. Their strategy involves their machines, somehow. Voidsong said that she would be able to cripple the fortress defenses, and would strike at the heart of the wretched apes.”

Sox furrowed her brow. “What does that mean? What’s the ‘heart’ of the human army?”

“I don’t know, and my messenger didn’t bother to ask,” Chrysalis sniffed, briefly casting a glare at one of the changelings behind her. “But I doubt it’s the same heart I have in mind. Voidsong isn’t nearly as smart as she thinks she is. Still, I’m confident she will do her part and then die a useful, glorious death as she desires for all her people trapped on our world.”

The Queen chuckled darkly and then levitated a regional map that had fallen onto the floor when she’d tossed aside the table. A dagger floated up next to it, cutting paths through the paper around the Chaos city.

“The Tau will infiltrate and strike at the city from within. You will breach the city from below. The hoofful of dragons I have managed to persuade or bribe shall attack later, from above. And finally, Big Bloo shall perform a conventional ground assault from the East.”

Most of the Guardians looked confused.

“Big Bloo? What’s that?”

“It’s the Orks’ prize achievement on this world; the most powerful weapon my lackluster ‘tribe’ could muster. You’ll know it when you see it. And you’ll want to stay out of its way when you do; the aliens manning the beast didn’t seem terribly interested when Gox was explaining that there would be non-green allies on the ground.”

Mox gulped. Sox rubbed at her chin, nodding slowly.

“With the assistance of the aliens and a coordinated assault, we just may be able to overcome the human defenders,” Sox mumbled. “Or at least weaken them to the point that later infiltration and subversion is easy.”

Gox nodded her head. “You may need extra protection though, my Queen. The Orks will expect you to lead them to the thickest fighting. It will be dangerous, even for one of your power.”

“No it won’t,” Chrysalis said simply. “You will be in charge of the Orks during the assault, Gox. You should probably tell the alien freaks that I’m simply leading a different mob attacking a different point, but I won’t be joining the assault in the tunnels.”

“Oh.” Gox blinked, then quirked an eyebrow. “So, where will you be?”

“Ponyville.”

The Guardians spent several seconds staring at the map of Ferrous Dominus, and then at Chrysalis.

“Ummm…” Mox raised her paw, but Chrysalis cut her off with a chuckle.

“As you said Gox, it will be far too dangerous to join the assault. What’s more, I have decided to seize a different power while the apes lose their grip on this planet.” Chrysalis magically rolled up the map and let it fall at her hooves. “Tox failed in her mission, but she brought back critical information. Although the humans are best known for their guns and space knights, their greatest achievement and asset is the strange building in Ponyville: the Nethalican.”

The changeling Queen grinned, baring the full length of her fangs. “If Tox was telling the truth, then that building is an infinite source of power. Power that can sustain us directly, without the need for love! Just think, my children; finally the changeling race will be unshackled from the weakling races we rely upon for food! Without the constant toll of feeding weighing upon my kingdom, we may divert all our energies toward subverting our enemies and finally seize our proper place as rulers of the cattle around us!”

The Guardians glanced at each other wide-eyed. The idea of the major battle occurring without their Queen at their side made them uneasy, but when Chrysalis laid out her plan for their future they couldn’t help but be entranced. Only Gox cringed at the monologue, scratching the back of her neck and coughing lightly.

“Ah… you do remember what happened to Tox… right?”

Chrysalis nodded. “I do. She was corrupted by the humans’ power. She allowed the priest to turn her against me. To convince her that some banal God was a greater authority than I, and that she knew what was best for the hive.” The Queen shook her head. “I will not falter so easily before these wretched powers. While the humans are crushed before the combined fury of their enemies, I will scout the temple and capture it if possible. If I manage to seize it quietly, I can probably even set up a hive in the heart of Ponyville. With a limitless supply of power, the changelings will slowly and inexorably replace the citizens, and we will spread across the kingdom! I can spawn a new generation of Guardians, and all of Equestria would fall at my leisure!”

“And when the space monkeys return?!” Rox shouted.

“They’ll see little to vent their rage on but their old alien foes and their little ‘Protectorate’ allies,” Chrysalis laughed. “The Orks will almost certainly kill the rebels after Ferrous Dominus has fallen. Gox may even order it herself, if circumstances allow it. The rest of you should be prepared to find a convenient hiding spot where you can slip into something greener.”

“It’s perfect, my Queen,” Sox and the other Guardians bowed, and Chrysalis cackled.

“Of course. The hour of our triumph fast approaches,” Chrysalis cooed, her magic washing over and returning her appearance to that of a Warboss. “All we need to do is push our hapless pawns into the Chaos war machine and wait to pick up the pieces!”

She turned around and stomped toward the door, flinging the barricade away and dispelling the noise barrier. “Le’s go, boyz! Nuthin’s gonna stop us now! WAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!”

****

Primary Changeling Hive – following day

“All units, take up defensive formation! Idle engines and establish a perimeter!”

General Harlin’s voice thundered across the vox system, and dozens of growling vehicles rumbled to a halt before the mountain crags of the changeling hive. Chimera transports, Leman Russ battle tanks, and several Sentinel scout walkers all took up position along a firing line. The APCs began disgorging troops, releasing hundreds of soldiers into the line.

Most the of the soldiers were human, but not all. There were a few units of earth ponies armed with drills and carapace armor to act as sappers. A squadron of Devilfish APCs followed up the rear of the column, and a lone Rhino rumbled along on the periphery alongside a bright pink Contemptor pattern Dreadnought. Above the column, a pair of armored figures - one pony and one Astartes - flew in wild, dizzying arcs while shouting and laughing at each other.

At the front of the formation, General Harlin emerged from his command APC. The man grimaced at the sight of the hive. A collection of rocky crags and caverns that fed deep underground, there would be ample opportunity for the enemy to lay traps and ambushes. He would have preferred hammering the mountain with siege guns to collapse the tunnels and bury it. Digging insects out of a dirt mound was hardly the sort of combat his men were suited for, and the creatures being capable shape-shifters could complicate things further. But Warpsmith Kessler had demanded captures, and what the Iron Warriors wanted, the Iron Warriors got.

He pressed a finger to the vox bead in his ear. “All reserve forces, defend this perimeter. Scouts, begin surface scans. Vanguard teams, combat teams, prep for assault! Prisoner transports are standing by for enemy captured and wounded, as well as any useful bio-samples you can secure. The primary objective is to find, neutralize, and capture Queen Chrysalis! We will then place the demolition charges within the heart of the nest and collapse the entire tunnel network! Today the Dark Gods visit their wrath upon these vile insects, and show the folly of defying the Lords of Chaos!”

“Roger that, Command. Main assault forces are ready for some pest control!”

“We are prepared, gue’la. Let’s get on with it.”

“Cleansing squad is ready for assault. Iron within! Iron without!”

“Um, m-medicae assistance is ready to help. If you need some, that is.”

“Yay! We’re gonna stompy-stomp some meanie-bugs! Whoo!”

“I’m ready to run down any changelings that make a buzz for it! I’ll have them out of the sky in ten seconds flat!”

“Let’s go let’s go LET’S GO! BLOOD! FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!”

Author's Note

I recall there be a reader who came up with the concept of Orks and yaks getting into a huge melee and then emerging as mount and rider. I don't remember who it was, (it was probably ayh, who often writes entire mini-fanfics in the comments), but thanks, and let me know so I can give you credit. The next chapter is going to have Orks riding yaks while firing dual machine guns, and you deserve credit for that!
I'm pretty sure the assault on Ferry D is going to be a three-chapter extravaganza, because that's how these things seem to pan out. I know you guys hate those, but here we are :fluttershbad:

Silverfall

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron Story

Chapter 15

Silverfall

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 20

Nightwatch – Luna’s bed chambers

“Princess? Princess Luna! Come on, wake up!”

An incoherent mumble answered the call. Under the covers of her bed, Princess Luna’s ear twitched, and her wings shifted.

“Princess? Princess! Okay, look, if you don’t wake up I’m going to have to start shaking you. I know this sort of thing is against protocol, but this is kind of an emergency! Please don’t blast me or anything, okay?”

Luna groaned and slowly kicked out a back leg. Then she sighed into her pillow.

A pair of greaves cautiously crept over the edge of the bed and pushed up against the sleeping alicorn along her back. Gently at first, as if the contact might be dangerous, the hooves started shaking her.

“Princess! Wake up! Seriously!”

Princess Luna squirmed, and her leg kicked out much more quickly this time. The hooves flinched away, and then suddenly shoved forward hard.

“Guh! Whuh?” Luna’s eyes fluttered open, her wings suddenly spread and her horn sparking with power. The pony next to her yelped and stumbled backward, shielding his face with his front legs.

Luna jumped up to stand on her mattress, dizzily glancing left and right. Spotting the pony next to her bed, she quickly whirled around.

“Lieutenant Dusk Blade! Wherefore hast thou disturbed our slumber?” Luna demanded sourly. “’Tis not yet time for our awakening, lest the device should hath sounded!” One wing beckoned to the cogitator console in the wall.

Dusk Blade, who was clad in full armor and had his mask down, quickly fell into a bowing pose. “Forgive me, Princess, but this is an emergency! We need you in the field immediately!”

“The field?” Luna frowned, her mind sluggishly working through its sleep-deprived haze to figure out what he was talking about. “Ah, of course. The siege of the changeling hive was to occur today, was it not?”

She yawned, lifting a wing to her mouth. “We hast thought the assault force wouldst be sufficient to crush the insects. Didst General Harlin fall into some trap?”

“Ah… no. Well, maybe? In a strategic sense?” Dusk mumbled. “See, the thing is, the field isn’t out near the hive, it’s here.”

“Here? In the badlands?” Luna asked.

“No, ‘here’ as in ‘right outside.’” Dusk Blade pointed a hoof anxiously toward the balcony door.

Luna looked over toward the balcony, and then back toward Dusk Blade. Her expression was halfway between uncomprehending and incredulous.

“What dost thou imply? The enemy charges the walls? By what means? They wouldst surely be repelled with ease!”

Dusk growled incoherently, his patience rapidly wearing thin. He dashed over to the black shutters over the balcony, and then hit the button near the base of the door. A whirring noise came from the shutters, and then the darkened plate metal started sliding down into the floor.

Luna blinked. “… We do not understand. What is the meaning of this?”

Dusk, for his part, seemed to be confused as well. “Wait, what happened to all the alarms? Isn’t this shielding soundproofed?”

He stepped forward onto the balcony, the air around him shimmering slightly as he breached an invisible magic perimeter. He recoiled, his ears standing straight up. Suddenly he could hear everything happening in the city below: the siege klaxons, the crack of lasguns, and distant booming noises. He took a step back, and suddenly he couldn’t hear a thing.

“Wait, is your room MAGICALLY soundproofed?! Why?” Dusk asked, turning back to the Princess of the Night. “No wonder you can’t hear any of the klaxons! You probably even have your console muted to regular base announcements during the day, don’t you?”

“That… is a… matter of personal preference. Nothing more,” Luna said evasively. “And what of it? Thou hast not explained the current emergency that apparently requires our intervention.”

“The city is under attack, Princess!” Dusk Blade said through clenched teeth. “The enemy is here! In the streets below us! Diamond dogs! Yaks! Griffons! Minotaur! Even Orks! They’re all here and we’re getting our flanks kicked! We need your help!”

“How did this happen?” Luna asked, her jaw agape. “When we took to bed there was not a hint of the foe! And now they hath pierced the outer bastions?”

A massive, scaly green body suddenly flew in front of the tower balcony. The shutters that still protected Luna’s bedchambers from the light of day rattled from the powerful wind, and a long, whip-like tail struck the railing at the edge of the platform, tearing part of it free and sending it plummeting to the streets below. Luna and Dusk watched with wide eyes, the entire event occurring in complete silence while they remained within the boundary of the magic noise-canceling barrier.

“…… Okay, then. Also dragons. We have dragons supporting the attack.” Dusk Blade sucked in a breath through his teeth. “That’s not good.”

“What is this?!” Luna bellowed, racing out onto the balcony.

The Princess stumbled once she passed the edge of the noise barrier, suddenly surrounded by blaring alarms amidst the distant sounds of combat. Recovering quickly, she searched the sky for the dragon, and found it gliding over the streets in an adjacent sector and searching for targets. It seemed to be studying one of the larger refineries, trying to determine if it were a suitable target and how it might be destroyed.

“Wherefore does the foe attack unmolested?! What of the defenses?! What of our armies?!” Luna complained.

As if in response to her comment, the thunder of a single quad gun came from the edge of the lots, slicing into the serpent’s side. The dragon roared and whirled about in the air, zeroing in on the weapon in an instant.

The gun emplacement was swiftly engulfed in an enormous fireball. Its operator was incinerated before he could attempt any kind of escape, and a moment later the entire weapon detonated along with its ammunition stores. The dragon built altitude, laughing as a plume of smoke billowed up beneath it.

Luna stared, and then her lip slowly curled into a snarl. An arc of blue lightning ran up the length of her horn, and her eyes started shining with power.

“What revolting ARROGANCE,” the alicorn growled, feeling a deep, almost painful burning in her chest. “To think, after We took to battle so many times and endured so much to defeat the Orks, these... insolent FOOLS would side with the greenskins!” A furious storm of dark, shadowy energy started to swirl around her, flushed with crimson sparks. “Wouldst that We could leave these wretches to the mercy of the Orks if they so fear the dominion of Chaos!”

An explosion of power came from the Princess, and Dusk was almost bowled over by a pressure wave that left his fur standing on end. He steadied himself and pushed down his goggles over his eyes to protect them.

When he looked up again, Luna was wearing her daemon armor. The Iron Gage floated by her shoulders, fingers curled and twitching, as if they were clutching at something only the dark Princess could see. Her helmet was retracted, revealing a furious scowl to the world as well as the magic aura around her horn. The magic kept flickering and changing colors, turning to bloody crimson to dark blue and back again.

“… But We cannot,” Luna hissed. The Iron Gage swung around, and one gauntlet curled into a fist and slammed into the palm of the other. “So be it. We shalt see these traitors ground into the dust from whence they rose! How fares the Lunar Guard, Lieutenant?!”

“Not great,” Dusk Blade sighed. “We’ve been clustering around Nightwatch so far and spread a few teams down into the adjacent structures in sector 20. A couple of griffons showed up and we shot them down, but other than that we’re not crazy about moving out. It’s the middle of the day, most of us have only had a few hours’ sleep, and nopony wants to lead a counter-attack when the humans are still on the back hoof. Er… foot.”

Luna’s helmet engaged, and a swarm of tiny black plates of metal clambered up her neck and locked into place all around her head. Her optics flickered on, and the seams of circuitry wrapped around her horn started to glow hot.

“We shalt lead the counter-attack, Lieutenant,” Luna said solemnly. “We shalt descend upon the foe postehaste and smite their mightiest warriors directly! Assemble thy soldiers, and bolster our WHAT THE HAY EVEN IS THIS.”

Behind the visor of her helmet, Luna clenched her teeth in frustration. According to her visor, there wasn’t a single enemy contact in the streets below Nightwatch. Friendly signum intercepts were spread all throughout the distance, and their identifier tags flickered and shifted sporadically across her view screen. She zoomed her view further, and her field of vision narrowed on a mob of green-skinned soldiers covering behind a burning lifter.

A vertical line swept over her visor, from left to right, and every one of the Orks was surrounded by a blue outline to indicate allied status. Individual Ork soldiers were picked out one by one, and her system starting matching the identifier signums to names. Verrex. Kash’mull. Yerrel. Wyatt Daniels. Targus. Starling Snows. Princess Luna.

The Princess of the Night felt a vein on her head pulse upon reading that last icon. Her wargear was malfunctioning? Such a thing seemed unlikely for a device of the Warsmith, especially as it hadn’t suffered any damage recently. But she was hardly proficient with technology, and the evidence was clear as a moonlit Canterlot sky.

“Bah! The enemy masks their tresspass from our machines, do they? So be it!”

Luna’s helmet came apart again, crumbling into metal chips and crawling down her neck in a perfect reversal of its deployment. The crimson shroud around Luna’s horn became less pronounced, and her magical aura flickered between daemonic red and its natural blue again.

“We shalt track the foe with our own eyes before We smite them! These wretches shalt see the true face of their demise in their final moments!”

“Sounds good, Princess. I’ll get a few squads together for support.” Dusk pushed his mask into place and then dove over the edge of the balcony.

Luna’s eyes narrowed at the distant blooms of explosions and columns of rising smoke. Her horn’s power built, and her mane billowed out behind her in a dramatic, star-spangled pool.

“THOSE WHO MARCH UPON THIS FORTRESS, KNOW THAT THY LIVES ART FORFEIT!! THE TRAITOR, THE ALIEN, AND ANY CHANGELING WRETCH AMONG THEM SHALT FEEL THE FULL, UNBRIDLED FURY OF THE NIGHT UNLEASHED!!”

After that primal, magic-enhanced scream, Luna leapt over the balcony’s edge. Her magic swallowed her in a bubble of darkness, and Princess Luna vanished in mid-air.

Luna’s magic took her next to the band of Orks she had spotted before. The mob had been suppressing a few human soldiers shooting from a building while a pair of Meks tore apart the cargo lifter nearby. The shadows of the greenskins seemed to spring to life and congeal on the ground briefly, before rapidly bubbling up into the vengeful form of an alicorn armored in daemonic plate. The aliens weren’t especially frightened by the display of witchcraft, and the nearest ones turned their shootas on her immediately.

Luna didn’t waste any time either. The Iron Gage swung into the nearest boy, punching him with enough force to flatten his rib cage. The other gauntlet rose above the mob, its fingers sparking with eldritch power.

Lightning coursed from the Iron Gage, whipping across the enemies. Several Orks fell where they stood, stunned if not dead, while others howled in pain and turned their attention away from the soldiers they had been shooting at. The unit Nob roared in challenge, firing his big shoota into the air.

“We’ve little time for thee, knave!” Luna barked, a single finger of the Gage pointing toward the larger Ork.

A beam of searing red light jumped from the gauntlet and struck the Nob, and then the other Gage floated up overhead. It made a fist and then hammered downward, trailing a glowing arc of glittering crimson behind it before driving into the Ork’s skull with pulverizing force.

Bullets whipped around Luna, many plinking uselessly off her armor. The laser fire from the adjacent building started to become more accurate and discriminating with their target distracted, and more and more Orks were cut down.

A burst of lasers suddenly rained down on the Princess from above. Most of them sparked off her wing plating, but one struck her face, slashing down over her cheek. A blue flash came from the contact as her magic aura – passively protecting her otherwise vulnerable head – deflected it, leaving nothing but a hot stinging sensation. The Princess grimaced, and then glared up at the sky.

“Equestrian dogs! We’ll never submit to you or your alien masters!” snarled a griffon before aiming his lasgun down at the Princess again.

Luna spread her wings, and the crystal shards embedded in her flight pack emitted a resonant hum. The alicorn vaulted up into the air, leaping ahead of the next laser burst before swinging around. The Iron Gage punched forward like a haymaker, trailing crackling whips of blue lightning behind it.

The griffon dodged, veering out of the way in a burst of feathers. He turned around entirely and dove away in a panic, barely avoiding a magic beam that scorched his tail.

The flailing rebel swooped around the corner of a building to put some cover between him and the Princess, and he nearly collided with another griffon that had been sheltering in the alley.

“Move! We gotta fly! They’ve got a Princess over here, and she is MAD!”

“A Princess? Which one?”

“The SCARY one! Let the Orks handle her! We can run down-“

Barely a whisper came from above before a fully armored batpony landed on the griffon’s back and a pair of adamantium talons punched into the back of his neck. The insurgent gasped in pain, and an aggravated snort came from behind the thestral’s rebreather mask.

The other griffon recoiled and snapped up his lasgun, only for several quiet cracking noises to come from above. Crystal needles punctured his back and wings, and nerve-shredding agony burned across his body. The griffon wheezed – lacking the energy to scream – and then dropped to the ground in a quivering heap.

Dusk Blade kicked off of the insurgent he had landed on, sending the corpse down to join its partner. Two more Lunar Guards hovered a few floors above, silently awaiting orders amongst bedlam going on outside the alleyway.

“All right ponies, let’s stay sharp and stay quiet. I know this isn’t ideal for anypony, but we have a job to do.” He pointed a hoof toward the streets. “Stay elevated, stay covered, and take the easy kills. Try to trail the Princess, too; she draws lots of attention and that causes plenty of openings.”

A loud shrieking noise from a vehicle sliding across rough ferrocrete came from the streets. The batponies winced at the noise, their sensitive ears catching the agonizing screech much better than was strictly necessary.

“Loathsome wastrels! Have at thee!”

Dusk pressed a hoof against his helmet, turning up its noise dampeners just before the sound of thunder rolled down the alley. Dusk merely flinched at the booming reverberations, while his subordinates were nearly swatted out of the sky from the sound.

“Also, I know we don’t usually bother with this feature, but turn the sonics down! You don’t need echolocation in the middle of the day! Now get flapping and cut some throats! MOVE!”

Large black fingers closed around a drum of metal, each digit buzzing with an aura of destructive power. Alloys instantly softened under their grip, and then the great floating gauntlet squeezed. The plating buckled like clay, and the muscle and bone below hardly offered more resistance.

“AGH! Ya daggum hoss! Dat wuz me ahm!” the Big Mek snarled after his bicep was crushed to a pulp. He tried to swing his power klaw at the alicorn floating over him, but the other gauntlet slammed into it directly. The power fields exploded against each other, blasting both weapons away.

Luna’s Iron Gage bounced up into the air and then plummeted down again. Its knuckles hammered the Mek’s armor flat, crushing the Ork and cratering the street below him.

“WAAAAAAAGH!!”

The ever-familiar battle cry of the Orks roared from behind her, and the Princess spun around just in time to catch a hail of bullets against her chest. Her armor shuddered around her, and one stray bullet was barely deflected from her head before the stream of gunfire passed to saw across the ground.

Two Ork Nobs barreled down the street on armored yaks, charging straight for the Princess of the Night. They carried shootas in both hands and gleefully sprayed bullets in the Princess’s direction while they closed the distance.

“FOOLS! BACK TO THE VOID WITH THEE!!” Luna roared, her Iron Gage swinging to the fore. The fists opened toward the nearest Ork, and wisps of shadowy power collected into their palms.

Twin beams of force washed over the mounted warrior, utterly obliterating Ork and yak in a screaming blue flash. The beams tore into the streets behind the target as well, shredding the ferrocrete surface and leaving behind smoky wisps of darkness.

The other Nob didn’t spare a glance for his partner, seeing only an opening for his own attack. The yak poured on a burst of speed and rammed into Luna’s shoulder, throwing the mare upward with a toss of his thick, spike-covered horns. The Ork swung his shootas into the air, firing an enthusiastic spray of bullets after the stunned alicorn.

Luna recovered near the apex of her flight, and her flight pack pulsed before it stabilized her in the air. A string of gunfire cut across her chest plate and one wing, but the dark Princess pushed it aside as little more than a distraction. She focused her power in her horn, and then her eyes flashed and became windows of pure shining light.

Luna’s body briefly dematerialized, and a bolt of lightning crashed down into the Ork cavalry below. Ork and yak recoiled in pain while the whips of blue power seared them, only to stumble when their target reappeared to their rear.

Luna bucked the Nob off his seat, sending the burly alien flying. The yak rounded on her, but her Iron Gage smashed into the beast’s side before it could attack again. The yak was tossed across the street, and the other gauntlet began to charge with magical power.

The Nob rider was just pushing himself up before he was annihilated by a beam of shadow blasting him in the back. His yak mount stirred, wounded but not yet broken, and started climbing to his feet.

Then the Iron Gage seized the hairy bovine by the horn, pulling its head up and twisting it to the side to face an infuriated alicorn.

“So now the prideful yaks, who scoffed at the entreaties of the Chaos Lords, instead submit thyselves to the Orks as beasts of burden? It is to laugh.” Despite her words, Luna did not seem in any way amused. “Explain thyself, wretch! How hast thou pierced the outer bastions?! Wherefore art our guns silent as thou roams our city at will?!”

The yak snorted angrily, and his struggles increased. He began pawing at the ground and twisting his head, trying to get free from the grip of the dark metal fist.

“Did our last blow deafen thee, beast? SPEAK!” Luna growled. “Our patience runs short!”

A roar came from above, and Luna snapped her head up. A huge red dragon was soaring overhead, flames leaking from its maw. A Valkyrie Gunship was flying just ahead of the serpent, its engines burning with magical crimson fire. The dragon raised its altitude and speed, pushing itself above the damaged aircraft, and then smacked it out of the sky with a claw. The Valkyrie entered an uncontrolled spin into a building, and the reptilian predator bellowed with laughter.

Luna’s eyes narrowed, and she flung the yak into a wall. “Soldiers! Advance and clear the avenue of the foe! Drive them from this sector! We shalt deal with the serpent!”

Several Ork boys had been left behind in Luna’s wake; some continued shooting at defenders in the windows, some sat in cover waiting for her to go away, and still others fired after the Princess (to minimal effect). At Luna’s order, dark clothed, bat-winged equines burst out of alleys and windows, descending on the scattered infantry with terrifying speed. Talon-shaped blades sunk into necks and crystal spikes rained from above. One by one the Ork warriors were rapidly cut down by the fleeting shadows, silencing the survivors’ guns in short order.

The counter-attack had begun.

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 14

“With me, Councilor Hope. Stay low, but do not lag behind.”

“Yes, Lord Kessler. I’ll keep up!”

The streets of Ferrous Dominus had descended into pandemonium. Mobs of Orks swarmed around any vehicle they could find while firing wildly at the surrounding buildings. Griffons flew over and between the structures, pouring lasfire onto any defenders from above before zipping away from any retaliation. Humans soldiers and diamond dogs fired from the windows, frequently engaging each other in building-to-building firefights with laser volleys flashing back and forth over the streets. Minotaur followed behind the Ork raiders, carrying heavy weapons or sacks of explosives. Whenever the greenskins stopped to shoot at something or dismantle a vehicle, the horned hybrid beasts would seek out the most important-looking piece of equipment in the area and destroy it.

Ahead of the invaders rushed a panicked swarm of humans and ponies trying to flee to safety. Every time the Ork spearhead would get bogged down in fighting the Ferrous Dominus residents would scatter, trying to seek shelter in buildings or break off onto a street where they hopefully wouldn’t be pursued. None had any particular destination or plan in mind; they could only hope to find shelter while the invader’s numbers slowly withered from attrition.

It was against this stampede that Kessler marched, his optics fixed on the Ork vanguard. Humans and ponies parted away from his path, sometimes ramming into other refugees in order to keep their distance. Hope followed in his footsteps, her ears pinned down against the constant rattle of machine guns and cracks of lasweapons.

A fan of lasbolts cut across the crowds, and a man and a pony stumbled onto the ground with blackened holes in their backs. Kessler’s head snapped up and to the side, locking on to a griffon insurgent just as she spotted him.

“Whoa, is that-“ the griffon didn’t manage to utter another word before she was swallowed by a plasma bolt. It incinerated most of her body in an instant, and the surrounding non-combatants scattered away from the shot.

“You there! Stop!” Hope shouted while jumping out from behind the Warpsmith. Most of the fleeing individuals ignored her, but a few ponies stumbled to a halt long enough for her to give further orders.

“Over here! Take the wounded and head to the train station! We’ll have treatment facilities established there! Go! Go!”

Her horn flashed, and the gasping, las-burnt bodies on the ground slowly lifted into the air. The ponies scrambled underneath them, taking the wounded onto their backs, and then quickly raced off to re-join the panicked stampede.

Kessler started building speed, charging toward a dozen Orks who were hacking apart a battle servitor. The servitor, naturally, offered negligible resistance; its wetware detected only friendlies around it. By the time the choppas started ripping it apart and its engagement protocols allowed it to retaliate, its primary and secondary weapons had already been torn off.

Kessler pinpointed the servitor on his approach, uplinking his mind to its power regulators. In an eye blink, all of its safeties were disengaged and the drum-shaped reactor on the servitor’s chassis started to overcharge.

Kessler fired his plasma pistol the moment he was in range, taking down one of the Orks furthest from the pile-on. The mob reacted almost immediately, and the aliens jumped off of the wrecked cyber-slave to meet the Warpsmith’s assault.

A sharp whistle came from the servitor’s smokestacks.

The cyborg detonated, blasting apart the center of the mob and throwing heavy shrapnel and fans of plasma over the rest. Orks went flailing over the ground or were torn down where they stood by the explosion, and those furthest away from the servitor stumbled.

This was all the opening that Kessler needed. His power axe met the closest Ork at the shoulder, slicing deep into the alien warrior’s torso. The Chaos Marine kicked him away to tear his weapon free, while at the same time a mechatendril drilled into an Ork reaching for his back.

A sharp turn on one foot, and the wounded greenskin was beheaded. Kessler shot down another, and then leapt forward to stomp on an Ork trying to stand up.

“I will never be able to fathom the joy some of my peers experience in slaying the greenskin hordes,” grumbled the Warpsmith. One of his mechatendrils spat a jet of fire over the struggling aliens in front of him, lighting them ablaze. “They’re such tiresome opponents.” He flipped his power axe upside-down and planted the spike atop the head into an Ork’s back.

Bullets suddenly sawed across the street, and several hammered against Kessler’s breastplate. He’d identified the weapon as a heavy stubber by the impacts and discharge noise even before he spotted the two minotaur shooting at him.

Kessler wrenched his axe free and walked into the spray of burst fire, holding his vambrace in front of his visor. His armor shook and shuddered from the constant impacts, and hot sparks rained down his legs along with dozens of flattened lead slugs.

“Lord Kessler!” Hope shouted in a panic, galloping toward the Iron Warrior.

“Hold position, Councilor,” Kessler commanded. “I have not yet secured the combat zone.”

One of the heavy stubbers shuddered to a halt when the last of its bullets slid into the feed. The minotaur bearing the weapon had additional ammunition hanging over his chest in belts, but tossed the gun aside rather than reloading it. He reached behind him to unstrap a chainaxe, and his hooves pawed at the ground in preparation to charge.

Kessler shot the other minotaur with his plasma pistol, sending the beast to the ground clutching its chest. Then he bolted forward, meeting the minotaur’s charge head-on.

The blades crashed into each other, and ferrocrete cracked underfoot from the collision of the two warriors. The teeth of the chainaxe screamed while they scraped across the haft of the power axe, and Kessler leaned hard against his opponent. His mechatendrils struck like the serpents they resembled, slicing and biting at the minotaur, but the minotaur didn’t flinch.

The beast threw his head forward, slamming a horn into Kessler’s helmet and tearing through the optics cluster. It didn’t penetrate far enough to dig into the eye socket itself, but the Warpsmith was staggered long enough for his opponent to press the advantage.

The deadlock broke, and the minotaur swung his axe again, striking Kessler’s shoulder. Sparks blasted furiously from the impact, and the teeth of the chainaxe screeched against the hardened shell of fleshmetal.

Kessler detected his plasma pistol had cooled sufficiently, and he fired a blast directly into the minotaur’s chest. The beast howled as a molten hole burned into his ribs, and one of his hands slipped from the axe grip. Kessler kicked forward, knocking his opponent onto the ground and onto his back.

“Lord Kessler! Behind you! The other one is up again!”

Hope’s voice alerted the Warpsmith in time, and he spun on one heel while a mechatendril blasted a gout of flame into the air. The minotaur, bearing a huge sword and with a blackened crater in his abdomen, flinched back from the wall of fire before he could land a blow, and shifted his weapon to parry.

Kessler dashed through the billowing flames, and his power axe whistled sharply as it cut through the air. Through metal, then flesh, then bone; the energized edge sliced through all three with equal ease while blood boiled away on its disruption field. The minotaur fell with a groan, and Kessler wrenched the axe free of its corpse.

A final shot from his plasma pistol finished off the other invader, who had been struggling to get up again. The scorched bovine mass collapsed onto the ground, and a plume of dusty ashes curled around it.

“Feeble animals.” The Iron Warrior grumbled, walking past the dead insurgents.

There were more fighters above, as a group of diamond dogs in the adjacent building were locked in a firefight with some ponies in the structure across the street. The Warpsmith paid them no mind, though; his objective was the vox spire behind the minotaur.

The construct had been damaged by an explosive halfway up the main shaft, almost splitting off the tip entirely and causing the spire to tilt over and lean against a wall. An Ork Mek was already digging around in the wreckage as well, tearing out hoses and internals. Several Gretchin worked around him, prying open the spire’s casing and throwing bits and pieces into a sack.

Kessler wished he could have simply flamed the lot of them, but he didn’t dare risk more damage to the spire. Brushing some ruined glassine away from his damaged optical, he prepared to charge.

The greenskins heard him coming, and several of the Grots shrieked and scattered. The Mek turned in surprise, and then threw himself behind the spire just in time to avoid a plasma bolt.

“Oi, it’z wunna dem spikies! Stop runnin’ and stab da git!” the Ork engineer snarled, peeking out at the Iron Warrior.

The Gretchin stalled in their panicked retreat just long enough for Kessler to reach them. The first was crushed under an adamantine boot, and another died by a sweep of his axe. Mechatendrils snarled and lashed out, biting and drilling into the puny alien slaves. In short order half a dozen of the Grots were dead, and the remainder were fleeing again.

The Mek burst from his hiding spot, his power klaw sparking dangerously and swinging for the Warpsmith. Kessler turned away from the attack and swung his axe at the same time. The power field cracked against the Mek’s shoulder pauldron, and the blade hewed the Ork’s arm from his shoulder.

“Wretched vermin,” Kessler said, his voice emerging almost as a sigh. His mechatendrils stabbed and snapped at the wounded Ork in rapid sequence, staggering the alien, until a second axe swing ripped through the alien’s chest. Blood sprayed across Kessler’s armor in a crimson fan, and then he wrenched his axe free of the body.

“Councilor Hope, warn me of any approaching threats.” Kessler kicked the Mek’s corpse away, and then approached the vox spire. “Here. Use this if the little ones try to sneak back here.”

The Warpsmith tossed his plasma pistol behind him. Hope yelped and recoiled, barely catching the weapon with her telekinesis before it hit the ground.

“But Lord Kessler, is your eye okay?” the mare asked anxiously.

“No. The damage is limited, but it will be a considerable hindrance,” the Warpsmith replied before leaning up against the spire and peering inside the breach in the structure. His mechatendrils seemed to start working on their own, sweeping over the damaged pylon, pulling loose pieces of shrapnel, drilling through damaged plating, and digging into frayed wires. “But I will endure. Keep your watch, Councilor.” One tendril stretched across the ground to bite onto the Mek’s bag of looted parts, and then dragged the sack closer.

Hope scanned the area nervously, levitating Kessler’s plasma pistol just inches from her nose. She could still hear the crack of lasguns above, firing in rapid volleys from one building to another. Thankfully, none of the windows faced the spire alcove, but it was far too close for her to be comfortable with. And that was aside from all the other, slightly more distant sounds of warfare. Booming explosions rolled through the streets, the rattle of machine guns regularly mingled with lasblasts, and more than one enthusiastic Orkish battle cry echoed across Ferrous Dominus while Kessler worked.

“Do you… Do you think these insurgents can win, Lord Kessler?” Hope asked after several minutes of silence.

Kessler pulled a cable free of the rupture, and then touched it to another loose cable clasped by a mechatendril. “They can. Briefly. Our current strength is too scattered, and the enemy’s assaults too precise.” He touched a finger to the point where the cables met, and a hot spark flashed at the contact. “The Orks, in particular, will take a grievous toll now that they have surpassed our defenses. They excel at this manner of assault; close, chaotic, and with a wealth of wargear and machinery to scavenge.”

He shoved his power axe into the breach, and then started levering it against the surrounding plating. The power field sparked and hissed, and within seconds the edge had sliced through the width of the spire tower. The upper length, leaning against the adjacent building, came loose and fell onto the ground with a metallic crash.

“However… we will not yield for long. This assault is not enough to sweep our defenders before we will have a chance to regroup. Our army has already been recalled to our defense. And while our active defenses have been foiled, our enemies cannot turn them against us. They will NOT keep Ferrous Dominus. The only matter is how much damage they are allowed to cause before they are purged.” He held up an antennae and started twisting something into the bottom.

“So much death and terror… and for what, then?” Hope asked sadly, staring at the plasma pistol floating in front of her. “Why do all this if their efforts are so obviously futile?”

“The Orks, obviously, need no impetus to war with us,” Kessler mused while he connected more parts to the antennae. “For them the assault is its own reward. For the others…”

He placed the antennae on the edge of the severed spire casing, and then started welding it into place. “Perhaps they are so eager for revenge that they wish to harm us no matter the cost to themselves. Or, more likely, they do not know the hopelessness of their objective. Many such warriors are but pawns being positioned to be sacrificed to some greater advantage, all without their knowledge. Pushed into one kill zone after another, waiting on a call to retreat or a reinforcement drop that will never come. We’ve done the same on numerous occasions.”

“For a greater advantage?”

“Affirmative. Such as when the grayskins used our liberation of your capital city as a diversion to deliver the final components of their Warp beacon.” Kessler pushed the spike atop his axe into a slot near the base of the spire, and then turned. A heavy clunking noise issued from within. “I have little idea what greater objective these creatures would seek, however. Particularly if the changelings have been guiding this scum for their own ends.” He retracted his axe, and a torch on his arm started welding another piece in place.

“The changelings…” Hope mumbled. “They seek dominion, mostly. But mainly for a food source. They wanted to defeat Equestria for our love, since that’s what they eat. What could they want to defeat the Iron Warriors for? Your weapons?”

“They seem to have acquired those without great difficulty,” Kessler grumbled while installing a wire.

“Your other technology, then? But I hardly think a changeling could understand human devices sufficiently to use most of them, never mind maintain or copy them.” Hope scratched at her head, frowning.

“It would be a curious objective, although still worthwhile,” Kessler noted mildly. One mechatendril slithered down to the spire base and bit onto an exposed length of cabling. “I cannot guess as to their true goal. But we possess other treasures besides those of steel and fire.”

An electric jolt rushed through the tendril, and dozens of lumens lit up over the spire’s base. A subtle hum came from the antenna, and several meters on the damaged cogitator console jumped after the instruments started drawing new energy. The main vox spire – still laying next to the adjacent building – hummed with current, and a whip of energy lashed from the shattered tip and cracked against the wall.

“THIS IS LORD KESSLER, ACTING COMMANDER OF THE 38TH COMPANY. THIS VOX TRANSMISSION IS BEING BROADCAST ON ALL AVAILABLE FREQUENCIES.”

The Warpsmith’s voice boomed across the city, pouring from every vox caster at once. Much of the gunfire stopped, with both the defenders and many attackers curious about the interruption.

“IN CASE IT IS NOT ALREADY CLEAR, FERROUS DOMINUS IS UNDER ATTACK. OUR DEFENSE WEB AND INITIAL CONTAINMENT PROTOCOLS HAVE FAILED. AS ACTING COMMANDER, I AM ISSUING AN ORDER FOR THE EVACUATION OF ALL CIVILIAN PERSONNEL. ALL SUCH INDIVIDUALS SHOULD RETREAT TO THE TRAIN STATION IN SECTOR 19 BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. THEY WILL BE RELEASED TO THE FORTRESS EXTERIOR. THE ENEMY IS NOT EXPECTED TO PURSUE.”

Hope nodded encouragingly, and then paused when a shadow fell over her. It passed after a moment, and then she looked up.

“ALL DARK MECHANICUS PERSONNEL ARE SUBJECT TO TACTICAE DOCTRINAE OMEGA. REINFORCE YOUR CURRENT POSITION OR REACH A RENDEZVOUS NEXUS TO REGROUP. ANY UNITS THAT CAN REACH THE MANUFACTORUM AND SUBMIT AN AUTHORIZATION CODEX FOR ENTRY SHOULD DO SO. STRATEGEM PRIORITUS 7-7-2 IS IN EFFECT.”

Hope started backing away while staring upward. “Was that…? No. It couldn’t be.”

“COMBAT PERSONNEL ARE TO FALL BACK AND REGROUP AT LOCAL SECTOR HARDPOINTS. IF THE POSITION CANNOT BE HELD AGAINST THE ENEMY, RETREAT TO SECTORS 4, 16, 20-“

“L-Lord Kessler!” Hope squeaked. “Dragon! There’s a dragon!”

Kessler glanced upward at the warning, but could do little else before a quivering orb of crimson landed atop the broken vox spire. The Warpsmith was engulfed in flame, and the vox transmission screeched with feedback before cutting out entirely.

****

Sector 12

Manufactorum munitions block

Voidsong stared up at the vox caster, the light of her optics glittering in the dim light.

*So this is working, then? Fascinating… I can hardly believe that the insects actually pulled it off.*

She stood in the midst of her small army, which was holding position in an empty lot. Behind them was the manufactorum. In front of them were the empty streets. There was no fighting going on this section of the fortress; the subterranean levels below were part of the manufactorum and effectively cut off from the attackers. All the workers, fighters, and other assorted personnel had already fled the area either to get to a fortified location or aid a location under attack.

The Fio’o was typing furiously at a cogitator console, occasionally releasing a frustrated grunt. A set of massive, reinforced double-doors lay beyond, and within the massive labyrinth of iron was their objective: the fusion reactor core. The beating, molten heart of the city.

The target was obvious enough, among all the lesser devices and facilities throughout the fortress. It was by far the most valuable machine in Ferrous Dominus, and destroying it would leave the fortress crippled long after this assault was over. With the fortress gutted and without power, it would probably fall prey to a determined Ork offensive within a week.

No doubt with that in mind, the manufactorum was subject to a whole second layer of defenses. Dark Techpriests had taken direct control of many defensive guns, manually targeting enemy units that stubbornly registered to augurs and autosenses as friendlies. The doors had all been locked down, requiring personalized Mechanicus access codices in order to unlock them. Their code bypass protocols had also been tightened, much to the Head Engineer’s frustration.

*BLAST! Another lockout!* the Fio’o snarled, looking like he was about to punch the screen. *This is complete gibberish! How do these lunatics work with this garbage system code?!*

*You’re the one that spent a month working under them. You tell me,* grumbled a Fireblade. *Look, if we can’t bust through the system, let’s just bust through the doors!*

*Yes, fine. You do that. Good luck explaining your incursion to the Scavurel and Dark Mechanicus fire teams that will meet you on the other side,* the Fio’o sneered. *They’re already on high alert and no longer trusting IFF signums. They’ll be able to detect and identify our class of weapons and figure out what’s happening within minutes. You can be sure they won’t hesitate to slay their “allies” to protect their precious core.* He paused, looking over to Voidsong. *Of course, if you feel that our forces here are adequate for such an assault, that may be the most feasible plan. Shas’o? What are your orders?*

Voidsong was still staring up at the vox caster. *He said they were evacuating. They’re actually moving non-combatants away from the fighting.*

*… So? Is that… unusual?* one of the other battlesuits asked.

*Yes. I believe it is.* Voidsong turned her battlesuit around, gazing at the Fio’o. *Suddenly my thoughts turn to escape. Perhaps there is another way after all.*

*Shas’o?*

*Our battlecruiser. The Rep’talal. During our fleet’s assault on this world, it was invaded by monsters and abandoned in orbit. The automated navigation systems pulled it into a stable orbit to minimize power drain. Is it still there?*

*Correct. The Iron Warriors haven’t touched it. They’ve ignored all our questions and requests about the vessel.*

*Then that will be our escape ship,* Voidsong said, bringing up a sector map. *Sector 19 holds the station, and is also where they park their landing vessels. There is one such ship currently on the ground. We will take it, pick up our remaining brothers at Black Point, and then quit this planet entirely.*

The other Fire Warriors and battlesuits seemed jarred by the sudden change in priorities.

*Shas’o, are… are you sure? To leave the base intact…*

*Oh, I would love nothing more than to gut this wretched scrap heap once and for all and watch it be swallowed under a tide of Ork filth,* Voidsong admitted with a sigh. *I would gladly be willing to give my life for that eventuality. But there are greater concerns in play than my life.*

She turned to regard her soldiers. *Which would better serve the Greater Good? To ensure the death of the remaining vermin here and deny them a foothold on this world, or seize our ship back and return to our Sept? So many battles rage all around the Empire, and millions of lives hang in the balance; why should we die here, on this discarded backwater, to spite some miserable rogues? Let the insect queen do what she will with this place. And if she should fail, let the Orks pick apart what’s left. We have better things to do than struggle and die for the hollow satisfaction of finishing these wretches ourselves.*

With a gesture, the Fire Warriors started moving to get into formation. The Earth Caste bunched up behind Voidsong, and soon the detachment was marching down the avenue.

*Shas’o Voidsong, shall I transmit a message to our brothers here in the fortress?* the Fio’o asked. *No doubt that even now they’re being forced to fight the attackers, or locked down in the manufactorum. And we’ll need all the help we can get to fight those… things in the Rep’talal and crew it once it’s clear!*

Voidsong’s battlesuit turned its head to side far enough that he could see the crimson gleam of its optics. *And how long would it take for the gue’la to pick up and translate your message, Fio’o? What countermeasures could they deploy if they wish to stop us? How hard would it be to shoot us down?*

*… I, uh… I didn’t-*

*I feel for my Caste-brothers and sisters that will be forced to die in service to this vermin,* Voidsong declared while she kept plodding forward, *but we cannot be so clumsy. We will get but one strike, if we are lucky; it must be swift, and it must be SILENT.* She turned her head forward again. *For the Greater Good.*

*… Y-Yes, Shas’o. For… for the Greater Good.*

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 14

Vox spire 339-C

“Lord Kessler! Lord Kessler!”

Hope coughed and turned her face away from the smoke billowing around her, wishing she had remembered to secure a respirator before she had left the dormitory structure. She had been just out of the blast radius of the dragon’s fireball, but still close enough that she had been knocked off her hooves by the explosion. She couldn’t see much behind the plume of smoke; something in the spire was releasing an impressive amount of it while it burned.

A deep, rumbling chuckle eventually turned her head upward. A yellow-scaled dragon stooped over the edge of the adjacent structure, grinning down at the mare. It wasn’t the largest dragon she had ever seen – about the size of a daemon engine – but it hardly mattered. Hope glanced over at the plasma pistol that had fallen to the ground behind her, and then up at the serpent.

The dragon vaulted off of the roof, spreading its great wings to hover. “Hello, little equine! Did you think you would escape this place? That you could get away from us?” He chuckled some more. “The ponies will burn for siding with the human scum. For betraying our world to this filth.”

Hope stared up at the dragon. He found her expression perplexing; it seemed to sit somewhere between incredulity and sorrow. While he imagined she must have been very sad at having her space ape buddy incinerated and being mere moments from annihilation herself, the situation still felt… off.

“So why are YOU here? What lies did the changelings offer the dragons to get their help? Or did they buy your assistance? For treasure? Land? What?” Hope asked miserably. “You’re going to die here. You’re all going to die. I can’t save you. Chrysalis can’t save you.”

“What are you blubbering about?” the great serpent asked, tilting its head to the side. “I need no bribe or contract to cleanse the humans from our lands. The changelings simply said that they could stop the humans’ weapons. And so they have! Without them in my way, I am unstoppable!”

He laughed, gesturing to a nearby pylon. A twin-linked heavy bolter sat atop the short iron tower, active and alert, but completely oblivious to the massive beast behind it. The turret slowly swiveled back and forth, its targeting lumens blinking.

“Ha ha ha hwa?”

The dragon’s laughter cut off when he spied… something darting over the ground toward the tower. It appeared to be a ray of shimmering light, like a gossamer thread, zipping across the scorched ferrocrete. The light crossed the floor of the alcove, reached the tower, and then faded away.

The turret stopped swiveling. Its lumens turned red. Its ammo hoppers wound up with a hefty clunk. The guns, and three other nearby turrets, all swung about on their servos to aim directly at the dragon.

“Wh… What?” he managed to mumble before the guns opened fire.

Hope Springs flinched away from the thundering heavy bolters, and her ears pinned to her head as the dragon let out an enraged roar. Bolt shells hammered the thick, steely scales, while the bursts stitching over his wings punched a jagged line of bloody holes in the thinner flesh.

Then the serpent moved, leaping within swiping range of the nearest turret and smashing it with a claw. The gun came apart with the blow, and bits of shattered metal and fans of sparks spilled onto the ground below. The other heavy bolters swiveled after their target, tearing a line of explosive shells over the wall and ground.

Hope turned away from the dragon, and looked toward the flames around the vox spire. There was still a great deal of smoke coming from the device, but as the fire waned it seemed as if much of the smoke was coming from something else within the firestorm.

“Kessler! Lord Kessler!” Hope gasped, spotting the glimmer of golden trim that capped the Warpsmith’s integrated smoke stacks.

A gust of air – perhaps coming from a flailing dragon wing while the beast destroyed the guns – blew away the curtain of smoke in front of the Space Marine. He was kneeling on the ground, one hand spread against the ferrocrete, while a prayer of low-pitched Binary clicking came from his vox. The mechatendrils were all bent to the ground as well, as if the serpentine tentacles were respectfully bowing their heads. His armor was scorched from the flame, and one bionic arm was smoldering badly, but the Iron Warrior was obviously alive.

A second heavy bolter turret was smashed, and then the third one was swallowed in a jet of flame. Rays of light flashed over the ground again, shooting back to the Warpsmith and then zig-zagging around him on the ground. It was hard for Hope to track the light amongst the smoke and debris, but she was guessing the pattern was an eight-spoked wheel.

“If this is the best you worms have to face me with, then you never stood a chance!” raged the dragon as he descended on the final gun.

The heavy bolters hammered the beast’s scaled chest, sputtering fire and metal until a claw dropped on it. The servo mounting came apart under the blow, and the dragon swatted the final turret aside. The moment the last weapon failed, Kessler stopped his chanting and rose to his feet.

“That is not, in fact, the best we have to offer,” the Warpsmith quipped, hefting his axe and raising his vox amplifier. “Come to me, lizard. Let me show you.”

The dragon wasted no more breath arguing, and instead put it all into a jet of fire. The flames washed over Kessler even while he ran toward the serpent, and several mechatendrils shriveled away and crumbled from the heat.

Kessler kept moving. He hoisted his power axe in a two-handed grip and swung into the dragon’s chest as soon as he was within reach. The power field popped and sparked chaotically while the axe blade ripped through the thick, heat-resistance scales. Much of the wiring and external components of the power weapon had been damaged or melted clean off due to the dragonflame, and cutting through the beast’s natural armor taxed the weapon to its limit.

The serpent screeched and lurched backward, crawling away from the Iron Warrior while swiping clumsily with a claw. Kessler met the attack with his own, slicing into his foe’s massive hand and hewing two fingers off. He flinched and the Warpsmith pressed his advantage, driving forward relentlessly with brutal swings of his axe.

The dragon shielded his face and started to flap his wings rapidly, aiming to fly out of reach. Kessler vaulted forward, jumping past his foe’s head and slicing through the left wing at the shoulder joint. It flopped onto the ground amidst a wild spray of blood, followed a moment later by its wounded owner.

Both combatants turned, and Kessler plunged his weapon forward again, driving it toward the breach he had cut into the dragon’s chest scales. The great serpent attacked at the same time, swatting the Warpsmith aside with his non-wounded claw. The Iron Warrior was sent flying, bouncing painfully across the ferrocrete ground.

The dragon grunted, tenderly taking hold of the axe lodged in his chest and pulling it free. Once it was loose he closed his fist around it, shattering the haft.

“Useless,” he snarled, tossing the twisted bits of metal aside. Then he rushed after his opponent, hot blood still drooling from his wounds.

The Warpsmith was starting to stand up when a giant scaled hand – missing two fingers – slammed onto his back, pinning him against the ground.

“I have you now, you insolent little-OW!”

The dragon flinched again when a screaming bolt of green stabbed into his shoulder. The projectile was extremely hot, to the point that it completely burned through his lava-proof scales and scorched the more sensitive flesh beneath. He turned to see what had shot him, and a puff of fire blasted from his nose when he saw the little unicorn mare leveling a plasma pistol at him.

“Get off! Get off of him!” Hope shouted, tears streaming down her face and spoiling her view. Luckily, her target was very big and at the moment effectively immobile. Another two bolts bored into the dragon’s side, and steam started rising around the pistol’s flex sheathing.

The dragon snarled, and then sucked in a breath. Hope yelped and bolted away, sprinting as fast as she could before the serpent vomited another fireball. The crimson orb exploded behind her, missing the diplomat but still blasting her off her hooves. Hope crashed against the ground painfully, feeling an intense wave of heat singe her fur. The plasma pistol, left behind in the blast zone, released a shrill whistle before it overheated catastrophically, causing a second, smaller explosion after the first.

The dragon was readying a second projectile when he heard a slight ringing noise from metal bouncing against the ferrocrete below him.

Kessler’s krak grenade exploded next to his leg, and the great serpent staggered to the side as yet another extremity was injured. With his breath already caught in his throat, the dragon released a pitiful wail on a jet of dragonflame, sweeping the ground before him with fire entirely by accident.

Kessler was caught in the conflagration, but after enduring two such assaults, he didn’t waver before another. The Warpsmith leapt to his feet and then dove through the flames for the dragon, slugging the beast in the jaw with his augmetic arm.

The dragon reeled, but then swiped at the Warpsmith with his good claw. The mighty talons ripped into Kessler’s shoulder with a ferocious shriek and splash of sparks. Kessler, already aflame and half-blind, fell to his knees before his left arm was severed entirely. Blood and oil spurted from the wound briefly before internal pressure regulators cut off the flow. A thick blast of oily smoke puffed from the smokestacks on his back.

The serpent was already rearing his claw back to attack again, but the Warpsmith moved faster. Leaping forward, past the raking talons, Kessler plunged his remaining arm into the chest wound he had already carved into the dragon’s torso. His augmetic fingers seized bone and sinews and he held fast, pinning himself against the beast’s breast as the dragon recoiled.

“WHY?! WHY WON’T YOU JUST DIE?!” the dragon roared painfully, grabbing the Iron Warrior with his good claw.

He tried to pull Kessler away, but the pain in his chest was too intense and the Warpsmith’s grip was too strong. The serpent gasped weakly, and then started squeezing the Astartes instead. Metal screeched and seals started to crack from the desperate pressure, and the puffs of smoke from Kessler’s smokestacks became jets of black mixed with crimson embers.

STILL the Iron Warrior did not buckle. Between his own wounds and the Warpsmith’s unnaturally strong armor, crushing him seemed as painful to the dragon as his victim.

“You will not stop us, tin man,” the serpent snarled. “Your city will burn and you… you will… what… what are you doing?”

His concern was due to the intense heat coming from the armor shell he was slowly crushing between his fingers. His scales were, of course, all but heat-proof, which made the slight twinges of pain all the more worrisome. He released his grip to get a better look at the Iron Warrior.

“K-Kessler? Lord Kessler!” Hope shrieked, surging upright when she got a good look at him.

Kessler’s torso was glowing a bright red. Weaker alloys and non-metallic components melted and sloughed off of the Warpsmith’s fleshmetal plating, while his smokestacks started blasting flame rather than mere exhaust. The source of the heat was obviously internal, and it was clearly more intense than anything the dragon had managed to spit out. Even with all his remarkable technology and arcane power, she couldn’t see any way that the Warpsmith could generate that level of energy and survive.

Which suggested very strongly that he did not intend to.

“By the will of the Warsmith do I fulfill my final duty this day,” the Iron Warrior intoned. His voice was choked and hard to hear over the roar of his smokestacks. “Ferrous Dominus will not fall to you, xeno filth.”

“Kessler! Kessler, please, stop!” Hope begged.

“L-Listen to the pony! Stop it! Wh-Whatever you’re doing, cut it out!” the dragon agreed nervously. His remaining wing, utterly useless on its own, started to flap out of sheer panic.

Kessler’s vision had already blacked out entirely, and his thoughts were hazy. His internal reactor had nearly overloaded, and his remaining biological parts were being cooked alive. In the final seconds before detonation he intended to murmur the Iron Warrior’s ancient catchphrase, but something else bubbled up through the Warpsmith’s rapidly melting vox grille instead.

“Forgive me, Councilor Hope. You were right.”

The reactor went critical, and the Astartes and dragon both were consumed by the unbound wrath of a miniature star.

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 24

“Begone, serpent! Return to thy lair, or thy carcass shalt decorate our tower!”

“Puny little horse… you won’t escape from us. Your masters’ fate is sealed, and yours with it.”

A screaming beam of crimson pulsed from the Iron Gage, slashing over the streets of Ferrous Dominus and crashing against scales hardened by ancient magic and hundreds of years. A fireball sailed in the other direction, exploding against the ground and splashing eldritch flame against plates of gleaming ebony.

The dragon definitely came out the worse for the exchange, staggering and clutching the burning wound in his side. But the creature was enormous, as large as a small building, and his scales offered surprising resistance to the psychic weapon. Luna’s armor held against the dragonfire, but the heat scorched her exposed face and the Princess leapt into the air to escape the blaze.

Around the serpent and the pony was the full and uncompromised pandemonium of war. Men took cover wherever they could with no effective orders and no thought to unit cohesion. Orks scrambled over the battlefield, laughing and bellowing amidst the storms of gunfire. Lasblasts and bullets flashed across the street in wild, scattered bursts. A Leman Russ tank, badly damaged but still operable, trudged down the street with guns blazing and several greenskins clinging to the back. Along the margins of the combat stalked dark shapes in the alleys and piping that wound through the city between the buildings, preying on any invaders that strayed into shadowed spaces for cover.

The battle tank had the misfortune of coming too close to the duel in the middle of the avenue. The dragon’s tail smashed into it entirely by accident, throwing the tank onto its side. Several Orks were squashed or flung away, and the damaged engine sputtered weakly before finally giving out entirely.

Luna dove toward her opponent, and the fists of the Iron Gage followed close to her wings on trails of crimson magic. The dragon moved to bite at her, and she altered direction at the last moment. Teeth like greatswords, each one longer and thicker than her leg, snapped closed next to her. Spittle flecked against her armor, only to instantly combust against the furious aura of her magic.

The Iron Gage fell upon the serpent, slamming into his neck with explosive force; one in the side, and one in the throat. A fiery gasp escaped the dragon’s lips, and then he swung at the Princess with his claws. The talons swept through a wisp of liquid darkness, slicing through it without meeting resistance or causing injury. Luna materialized behind him a second later, and her horn blazed red with magic.

Sparks burst into the air above her, and then started moving in sharp, geometric patterns through air. Lines of glowing crimson were drawn in the air behind them: first, a series of circles, layered within and above one another. Then stars. Then a series of runes.

The dragon twisted its head back and forth, and then heard a keening noise rapidly building behind him. The beast whirled about, its tail accidentally smashing aside a bloody melee occurring a little too close. The magical pattern finished drawing itself in the air, and then the layered circles started turning.

“TO THE VOID WITH THEE!!” Luna screamed, her voice drowning out the sound of gunfire. The magic circle pulsed.

The dragon lurched into motion, accelerating to a sprint as fast as he could. His strides crushed men and Orks alike in its haste, and a half-wrecked macrocrane was knocked over after he shouldered it aside.

The magic circle started releasing large crimson projectiles that rained down on the avenue below. One by one the missiles burst from the swirling portal and curved down into the city below, screaming like angry daemons and exploding like battle cannon shells. Several Ork mobs were flattened all at once under the rain of devastation, while the magical bombardment shifted away from the human and pony positions in sudden, inexplicable arcs or vanished in mid-air.

Many of the crimson bolts chased after the dragon, spiraling through the air and cutting into the serpent’s back and wings. He snarled in pain, but kept up his manic sprint before leaping into the air and taking flight. Great splashes of steaming blood rained on the streets below from the beast’s wounds, scalding a few soldiers who were fortunate enough to escape being trampled. The missiles trailing behind the serpent slammed uselessly into the streets or veered away, dissipating into the air.

“Your power is considerable, little equine,” the dragon snarled as he turned in the air. “To think, a creature like you – Mistress of the moon itself! – should become a mere attack hound for the human scum!”

Luna closed the crimson gateway and swung about to face her opponent. “Dost thou imagine thyself to be our better, serpent king? Thou fights in league with the Orks, monsters that seek to slay and destroy for mere sport. Should they stand unopposed, all life on this world shalt become fodder for the greenskins!”

“The Orks are a mere tool. What other vermin are so happy to die in their hundreds in the streets below? Once the apes and the little gray ones are crushed, the green filth will be cleansed from this world as well.” The dragon laughed, a puff of flame spurting from his jaws. “Just think, Princess! Our world can belong to us again! Free from the torment and corruption of this alien scum!”

“Such grand foresight,” Luna sniffed. “And to think, there are those who ponder why the dragons do not rule Equestria.” The fists of the Iron Gage slammed together in a crash of glowing red sparks. “This is thy final warning, lizard. Retreat or perish.”

The thundering staccato of a quad gun came from below, and heavy tracer rounds slashed through the air between the two combatants.

“There will be no retreat, equine,” the dragon snarled. “It seems we’ll have to do without the moon for a time…”

An autocannon round whipped past Luna’s ear, close enough for her to feel the heat of its passage. She recoiled, floating backward, only for two more to slice through the air in front of her.

She was just starting to consider that maybe the turret gunner wasn’t just a poor shot when the first shot found its mark. Shells the size of a man’s fist hammered her from below, cracking against the daemon plate. The rounds weren’t especially good at piercing armor plating, but the sheer force of the explosive impacts sent the alicorn flailing through the air in a panic.

Luna banked sharply, picking up speed to try and escape the sudden barrage. She heard the dragon pursue behind her, but dismissed the beast for now. She was slightly more worried about the weapons of the 38th Company being turned on her than the eldritch flame of the dragons.

Down below, on the edge of a refinery complex, was the gun. A quad-barreled autocannon platform with an armor shield protecting the gunner platform and twin ammunition feeds drawing from the building interior. Luna couldn’t see the gunner from her angle, but it was obviously being crewed by one of the insurgents. Putting aside that she seemed to be the main target, the turret kept jerking unsteadily to try to track her, as if the shooter was just learning how to use the controls.

A furious roar came from behind the Princess, and she flinched from the sheer volume. A stream of fire shot under her a second later, brushing her greaves.

Luna fixed her gaze on the roof of the nearby building, and her eyes gleamed. Darkness spilled from her horn like a pen suddenly overrunning with ink. The tendrils of black swirled over her armor, surrounding it entirely in a blanket of pitch, and then the entire mass began to shrink and deform. The quad gun’s fire found the dark alicorn, cutting across the darkness with a stitch of explosive shells, but the projectiles found no flesh or armor to sink into, tearing the amorphous shadow apart without effect.

Another pool of darkness appeared on the rooftop next to the turret, expanding from a dark spot into a puddle. Luna emerged from the shadows, her starlit mane whipping up above her and the Iron Gage twitching in the air. Her eyes found the quad gun and narrowed; as expected, there was a rebel fighter there. A griffon, as it happened. She was swiveling the gun turret back and forth, clearly confused as to where her target went.

“Tiresome pest,” Luna sniffed, one gauntlet bolting forward toward the griffon. “Such mundane weapons are useless against-“

The soldier whipped around, and Luna’s taunt died on her lips when she saw a plasma gun in the griffon’s hands. Instantly the Iron Gage stopped, and then spread its fingers.

The griffon fired, and a force screen flickered into place in front of the Iron Gage. Luna winced as a burst of screaming, white-hot bolts crashed against the field, quickly overwhelming the barrier from the tremendous energy output. The other gauntlet swung in from the side, but the insurgent leapt up into the air ahead of it, leaving the black fist to smash into the turret.

“A plasma weapon?! Where didst thou acquire such a thing?!” Luna demanded.

The griffon didn’t answer, taking off into the air while snapping another shot at Luna. The Princess leapt, and her flight pack carried her well over the shot and sent her soaring after her prey.

“Art thou listening to us?” Luna barked. The Iron Gage hummed, and spheres of crimson power swelled between their fingers while they zoomed along next to the alicorn. “Don’t presume to test us, scoundrel! Thou hast absconded with a superior weapon, but We assure thee, thou shalt not triumph here!”

The griffon swung around in the air, firing another burst. At the speed the two combatants were moving, and with her target similarly airborne, the shots went wide, and Luna barely budged her approach as the screaming blasts of plasma sailed past her.

One of her gauntlets flung its sphere like a baseball, sending it spinning through the air on a curving course toward the griffon. She banked sharply through the air, only for the crimson projectile to curve its trajectory and follow.

“Tch! Oh, no you don’t!” The insurgent whirled to face the oncoming sphere, and her eyes flashed a bright green.

A lash of magical lightning erupted from her talons, striking the orb. Both magic projectiles burst into flashes of colored sparks, and then dissipated in the air.

Luna almost stopped mid-flight from her surprise. The other gauntlet hovered unsteadily, still holding its own charge, but she didn’t release it. The pony’s eyes narrowed angrily.

“CHANGELING,” Luna spat.

“Well, well… It looks like my cover’s blown. Pity,” mumbled Nox. Her claw pulled back a switch on her plasma gun, and a puff of steam blasted from the coolant vent. “Then again, if I bury you here, I suppose none of the rubes need to know about it.”

“So it is true! The changeling spies command these foolish rebels! Thou hast led them all to their deaths!” Luna snarled. “For what purpose?! Speak, insect!”

“I think I’ll let this do the talking.” Nox aimed the plasma gun. She squeezed one eye shut, leaning her head to the side and staring down the sight. A high-pitched whine began to come from the weapon, and the flex-coiling glowed a bright green.

Luna was unimpressed. “Surely thou dost not think We can be defeated with yon trinket?” The Iron Gage holding a power sphere tapped the magic orb with its index finger, and then twisted about to point it at the hive guardian. “We bear the greatest artifacts the Warsmith could devise. Even the plasma weaponry of the Dark Techpriests art but foal’s toys in comparison. Surrender to us or to oblivion, changeling. ‘Tis thy only choice; thou canst defeat us.”

An earth-shaking roar came from above.

“… Oh. Right,” Luna mumbled.

Nox smirked.

The dragon descended on the two combatants, his wings sliding back and his neck arching into a dive.

Luna tried to evade to the side, but a burst of plasma bolts caused her flight path to cut back the other way, losing precious speed. Her horn flashed to attempt a teleport, but she had already lost precious seconds. Enormous claws seized the alicorn, and her armor plates groaned under the sudden pressure.

The dragon broke his dive, beating his tremendous wings rapidly while clutching his prey tighter. Pressure seals popped and plating screeched from digging into the other armor layers. His maw opened, and dozens of teeth like steel swords descended on the mare.

The Iron Gage fired, expending its stored magic charge and cutting across the dragon’s wing. He flinched, briefly sparing Luna from his jaws, and his flight became unsteady.

Luna craned her head up toward the snarling serpent, and then fired a blast of magic from her horn, striking the dragon directly in the eye. He reeled from the pain, only for another hand of the Iron Gage to circle around and smash into his jaw.

He recoiled, roaring, and then flung Luna away toward a rooftop. Her flight pack pulsed, trying to stabilize her flight, but it was a useless effort. She slammed onto the top of processing plant, her armor shrieking against the surface of the roof while she tumbled painfully to a stop.

Blood dribbled down the side of Luna’s head, and scraps of ebony plating lay scattered around her. Her eyes were unfocused and her vision spinning. She felt like vomiting, and dozens of needle-points of pain came from her legs and wings.

The moment her vertigo passed, the dark Princess was on her hooves again. Her breath came in angry, snarling huffs, and she could feel a burning sensation against her chest that she had never experienced before. Her thoughts were scattered, but her body seemed to move on its own, guided by nothing more than inchoate rage. Brilliant arcs of red power crawled up the length of her horn, burning with such intensity that they scorched the fur near the base.

Wretched lizards. Pitiful Orks. Mewling humans. Cowardly equines. So many vermin snapping at your heels. So many souls begging for final release…

Luna wasn’t completely sure whether the thoughts bubbling to the surface were her own or not. All the anger flooded her limbs with strength and fed ever more power to her horn, but it left her a little hazy. Certainly some parts of that tirade seemed wrong, but it hardly seemed important at the moment.

The dragon spent several precious seconds massaging the point where he had been struck by the Iron Gage. The great fists hit with the power of cannons, but the ancient serpent’s bones were as hard as any alloy. With a snort and a shake of his head, the dragon descended once again. He sucked in his breath, and then blasted a veritable beam of dragonflame down on his equine foe.

With a booming shout, Luna fired her own magic beam skyward. The swirling crimson lance met the jet of flame head-on and ripped through it, dispersing the fire in a useless spiral while pushing up toward Luna’s target. It slashed across the serpent’s cheek, and the dragon winced as another dozen scales were ripped off.

This beast is nothing. An overgrown snake that thinks itself a god. Rip its heart out and it dies, like any other mortal. You know what to do, don’t you?

The dragon descended, reaching back a claw. It looked like he was aiming to smash Luna flat against the rooftop.

Crimson magic washed around the mare like a shroud of red ink seeping from her horn. Pain surged up her legs from more punctures; claws of metal and pointed wires poking hesitantly into her legs, chest, and flanks. The mysterious voice seethed, goading her onward and whispering promises of bloody victory into her ear. Luna’s racing thoughts reached a fever pitch, drawing upon the hundreds of spell patterns locked within her memories. Works of fantastic destruction were drawn, unraveled, altered, re-drawn, combined, pruned, washed away, and drawn again. In those few, crucial seconds the world around her was stripped away; there was only her, her enemy, and the power thrumming around her head.

The dragon reached the alicorn, and he thrust his claw onto the shimmering pony.

Luna’s aura exploded, and a black spike surrounded by a blood-red coil thrust upward into the serpent’s palm. Enchanted scales like adamantium resisted for a moment, and then buckled. The ebony lance tore through flesh, muscle, and bone like so much paper, and then twisted and splintered. The dragon’s entire forearm turned into a cloud of shredded gore, and the beast crashed onto the roof in agonizing pain.

Wings flailed and tail thrashed, hammering duralloy and tearing off the various smaller structures and peripherals on the roof. The dragon roared again, but the bellow that had sent tremors through the city’s structures minutes ago was weaker now. Exhausted. Pained.

Afraid.

Luna watched the serpent stumble, her vision encompassed by a red haze and a cruel, terrible laughter in her ears. The Iron Gage floated down to her, and crackling arcs of crimson lashed from her horn between the two mighty gauntlets.

The dragon turned his head, gasping, and stared past the stump of his arm at the Princess of the Night. The mare was shrouded in a blood-colored fog, with only the tips of her flight pack and the pale white glow of her eyes visible from within the storm. Malevolence rolled off of her in waves, and droplets of spilled blood seemed to be peeling off the ground and darting toward her, only to vanish amongst the crimson mist. A daemon in all but name.

He swiped at his enemy with his tail, and Luna blurred into motion. The enormous whip of flesh and scales was taller at mid-length than she was, but she leapt over it and landed right next to the dragon’s belly. Her greaves crashed loudly against the durasteel roof cladding, and the Iron Gage swung in behind her, ready to assist.

The serpent moved to snap at her, but crimson lightning flashed from one gauntlet and pounded against his face, stunning him. The other Gage grabbed onto the dragon’s chest, and its power fields crackled as the fingers dug into the outer scales.

“Thou hast lost,” Luna said simply while her enemy gasped for breath. Her voice had a curious quality to it, as if another voice were repeating her words in an angry hiss, but the dragon could hardly be bothered to care at this point.

“Equestria lost long ago, as soon as it submitted itself to these monsters,” he growled back. “At least I lost fighting for my own cause, rather than as some alien’s pet! You are a traitor and a coward, equine!”

“Thou knows nothing of what We hath endured. Of the unstoppable brutality from beyond the void that still hungers to engulf us all,” Luna snarled back. A surge of energy pulsed from the Iron Gage over her foe’s heart, and the dragon quivered in pain. “Thou preening reptiles couldst not be bothered to take to battle until thy precious treasure hoards were threatened directly. And even then, this is all the force thou hast mustered to face us? Marching astride the Orks themselves, the very monsters that wouldst see us all killed and enslaved! ‘Tis not OUR people that art cowards, wastrel.”

The dragon inhaled deeply, intending to make another attempt to blast the mare with fire. Luna’s horn pulsed, and the gauntlet over his chest pulsed in sympathy, flaring a brilliant crimson. The dragon gasped, and his lungs emptied.

“Perish, fool. Trouble this world no longer.”

The Iron Gage suddenly pulled away from the dragon’s chest. A crimson haze still surrounded it, like ethereal smoke surrounding a central point of light carried in the palm of the gauntlet. The dragon convulsed, its tail whipping back and ripping through a power substation.

The Iron Gage floated back to Luna, the glittering light still clinging to its palm. Luna kept staring at her opponent, watching as his eyes clouded over.

“Even if you… defeat us…” the dragon gasped, his vision dimming fast, “… you have still… failed.”

Luna clenched her teeth, and the Iron Gage slammed flat over her chest plate. Seams of brilliant red ran over the daemon armor, and she felt a quiver run through the plating’s frame. Breaks in the plating sealed themselves, spines lengthened and sharpened, and the entire suit seemed to sit even lighter over the alicorn’s body. The light was sucked into the face of the golden helm on her chest, and the red mist seemed to seep into the joints of the armor.

The dragon slumped onto the roof, dead.

****

Beads of cold sweat crawled down Nox’s neck while she stared down the iron sights of her plasma gun. The weapon whined gently in her ear, its charge capacitors at full and its vents overloading. At the other end, some thirty feet away from the edge of the roof, stood Princess Luna, facing away from her.

A corona of shining red light surrounded the pony, and a shadow seemed to be cast in such a way that it stood in the colored light rather than being cast from it; or so it seemed. It was hard to tell from Nox’s angle, there was an almost palpable fog of magic on the roof, and the changeling’s thoughts were racing. The shot was perfect. The target was distracted. One super-charged plasma bolt to the back of her head would remove it, and half the Equestrian diarchy, from the changelings’ path to supremacy. She would never get a better chance than this.

Nox’s claw tightened around the trigger. Her eyes strayed to the massive corpse laying next to her target. A dragon. A giant, warrior dragon, at that; no mere wyrm or hundred-year drake that had been coaxed out of its nest with a promise of easy prey. How confident had he been when he saw Luna? Had he imagined that he’d find himself outmatched? Had he sensed the otherworldly hatred and ancient power entombed within her armor plating? Or had he thought that the Princess might fall easily and crumble before a single, opportune strike?

Just like Nox was counting on now.

A whistling noise started coming from the auxiliary coolant valve.

Luna’s ear twitched, and she twisted her head around.

There was nothing there. The sounds of gunfire still raged from the surrounding streets, albeit nothing directly adjacent this building. She took a deep breath, and then winced at the smell of blood mixed with sulfur that greeted her senses.

“We mayhaps were somewhat carried away,” she mumbled, kicking out one leg. She could feel several sharp points on the inside of the armor that weren’t there before, almost as if the frame was trying to burrow into her skin. Which it may well have been, for all she knew; Solon had admitted that daemon armor gradually attempted to fuse with its bearer.

The Iron Gage smashed their knuckles together, and another pulsing wave of crimson swirled around her horn. “Onward, to the next invader!”

As Luna flew off, Nox clung to a shuttered window just below the roof’s edge. Her plasma gun was quietly dissipating its charge, and her heartbeat thundered in her ears. The weapon’s grip felt very hot to the touch, but she clutched it like a lifeline.

How close had she just come to being vaporized in a pulse of magic? Surely closer than she had been to killing the Princess of the Night. Just staring at the mare’s backside had generated premonitions of doom unlike anything she had experienced before. A fear so paralyzing she had to wonder if it wasn’t a defense mechanism in and of itself.

“Forget the Princess,” Nox whispered to herself, staring at the shutters. “This is still proceeding according to plan. The dragons, the griffons, the greenskins; they’re all just here to die. It may as well be the moon horse that gets them. But I have to be more careful…”

With a self-satisfied nod, Nox jumped back from the wall and spread her wings.

A pair of razor-edged talons punched into the Guardian’s back, and Nox gasped in pain. Then something struck her hard, pushing her off of the blades and slamming her against the shuttered window. She bounced off the durasteel slats and plummeted into the alley below, stunned.

Nox seemed to burst into green flames in midair, and before she’d even reached the bottom floor her form had reverted entirely to her changeling body. She snapped one wing out and flipped herself right before impact, landing painfully, but safely, on her hooves. A flash of green from her twisted horn caught her plasma gun before it struck the ground, and the Guardian snapped her head upward to search the sky.

She saw nothing. The two looming walls of the adjacent buildings stretched upward, and the crack of gunfire came from the street at the end of the alley. Lumens built high on the structure flickered unsteadily due to the power disruption. The light was dim, but hardly low enough to hide an assailant.

The wound was anything but imaginary, obviously. Ichor dripped from the deep puncture in Nox’s carapace, collecting in a small pool at her hooves. Adrenaline and a minor combat enchantment kept the worst of the pain at bay, but if she didn’t address it soon it would become debilitating.

The sound of moving air from behind her was all the warning she got. The Guardian whipped around to face the noise, and swung the plasma gun around along with her. Adamantium blades sunk into the flex-sheathing, piercing the outer coils and nearly ripping the weapon in half. Nox telekinetically pulled the trigger, and a shrill whine came from the ignition chamber.

The claws embedded in the gun swung upward, tossing it into the air. Nox jumped back, her horn already pulsing with magic. The dark shape that had assaulted her did the same, its attention mostly on the crackling plasma gun.

Said plasma gun exploded in the air a second later, vanishing within a screeching fireball.

“… A bat pony,” Nox said after a moment of tense silence.

“A changeling,” Dusk Blade said, flicking one foreleg to the side. Tiny glowing droplets of plasma spattered over the ground, burning against the ferrocrete ground where they landed. “What a surprise. I don’t suppose you want to give up, do you? Our resident Sorcerer would enjoy carving up your mind…” His voice had a hollow, echoing effect from within the respirator mask, and his eyes were hidden behind a half-dozen green optics lenses set in his visor.

Nox’s horn glowed brighter, and her eyes shifted to become windows of pure white light. “That’s enough, slave. Lay down.”

The enchantment hit Dusk like a physical blow; he staggered to the side, and his vision started to blur badly. His thoughts started to jumble as well. Images, memories, and observations spun into a kaleidoscope of incoherence that made it impossible to concentrate.

He did not lay down, however.

Dusk stumbled forward, and Nox yelped and started backing up. Her wound was distracting and weakening her, and in the end she hadn’t managed to get any real grip on the thestral’s mind. The infiltrator turned and ran, galloping toward the streets at full speed.

“You’re not going…” Dusk bolted after his prey, leapt up onto one wall, and then kicked off toward the Guardian. “ANYWHERE!”

The kick landed on Nox’s hip, knocking the changeling out of her sprint. She whipped her head around as she stumbled, and crackling orb of green launched from her horn and curved into Dusk’s head.

He shrieked loudly when the magic bolt struck him, tearing open the side of his helmet. The helmet and his optics goggles fell off with a shake of his head, and a bit of blood spattered across the ground next to them.

Nox winced at Dusk’s scream, feeling a sudden wave of vertigo. She stood back up in a hurry, but Dusk was after her just as quickly. Hoofblades slashed across her leg, and then a kick slammed her into the wall again.

“W-Wait!” Nox gasped, her eyes practically spinning in her head. “I surrender! I’ve had enough!”

“Sorry, you already selected the ‘no surrender’ option!” Dusk chirped. “Now go to sleep. Forever.”

He whipped around, lashing out with a back leg and the adamantium claw mounted behind it. The blade sliced into the changeling at the neck, slashing a long streak of bright turquoise fluid across the wall behind her.

Dusk Blade turned his head to watch his prey topple to the ground. Then he took a deep breath and tapped the vox bead just below his ear. “Lieutenant Blade, here. Changeling down. I repeat, we have a changeling infiltrator down in sector… uh… like, 22, I guess? 18? Kinda lost track stalking the Orks.”

He took his hoof off the bead. Only static answered him.

“Command? Hello? Is anybody still around? What’s going on? I’m requesting mission objectives!”

Static and silence.

****

Sector 19 – train station

Rendezvous point

“Fill those cars! First come, first serve! As tight as you can pack them! Come ON, people, we could have rebels or Orks or whatever on top of us any minute!”

Breezy Blight hovered above a veritable river of ponies and humans, her vox grille turned up to maximum volume. Below her, at the gates of the train station, a plethora of turrets and heavy combat servitors sat in a row in front of the gates of the station or mounted on fence pylons. Heavy bolters, autocannons, plasma culverins, and assault cannons twitched back and forth before the flood of refugees, boasting enough firepower to wipe out a platoon of soldiers in an eye blink.

All those weapons were useless. Attached to automated wetware programs hard-coded to ignore certain signals under all circumstances. The unthinking, unfeeling machines, for all their advantages in the traumatic, chaotic fury of total war, would obliviously watch a thousand friendly targets die if engagement conflicted with their wartime protocols. Fierce debate raged elsewhere as to the potential gains and risks of immediately replacing those protocols with something more haphazard and reactionary, but for now the phalanx of heavy guns remained thankfully silent.

In front of the station, behind platforms and barricades, were the remaining mercenaries that had so far decided to extract themselves from their sectors and had survived the journey. Barely more than two hundred men, and less than half as many armed ponies. Three Leman Russ tanks and a pair of Sentinels at least provided some heavy firepower that wasn’t crippled by the mysterious electronic warfare, but there would probably be little more, if any, armored support coming. The attackers were relatively ill-equipped to fight off the Company’s vehicles, and as such the tanks were critical in containing the assault and protect the most important sectors.

“Hey! If you have wings, use them!” Breezy shouted, causing a pair of pegasi to flinch. “Go on, get out of here! The defense perimeter is down anyway!”

The winged equines jumped into the air, building up altitude. Then they soared over the palisade wall and out into the wasteland beyond the gates.

“Breezy!” Poison Kiss called from below. “The train is packed! We’re moving her out!”

The armored pegasus looked back over the line of refugees. “There’s still a lot of people left! Can we cram some ponies into the cargo train or something?”

“Rubbish that! We’re just going to open the gate and let them out into the wastes!” Kiss pointed a hoof off to the side. “There’s also-“

The sudden booming of battle cannons and heavy bolters came from the defensive line, and both ponies winced.

“Contact! Contact! We have greenskins on the eastern approach!”

“Watch that cannon fire! There’s a lot of people in those buildings!”

“Keep those heavy bolters on them! Squad, clean them out while they’re suppressed!”

Poison Kiss levitated her bolter free of her armor. “Go! Get that train moving! Everyone who doesn’t have a gun, get into the security gate proper! Leg it!”

The crush of non-combatants became a stampede, with the ponies flooding around and under the humans to get behind the turret pylons. The servitors swiveled to track the various civilians, their guns warm and their optical trackers processing hundreds of images per second. Their heightened alert status didn’t help them process the flood of false data fed to them, however, or make them any less oblivious to the enemies close by.

Kiss’s vox system suddenly linked up to Rot Blossom.

“Kiss! We found some crew who know how to fly the cargo lander! We still don’t have a Dark Techpriest, but they say they can get it into orbit without a problem!”

“Bully!” Poison Kiss galloped past a battle tank, and then fired a burst of bolt shells down the street. “Start moving the other survivors onto the lander, then! Prioritize the humans; if this fracas gets much worse, they’ve got nowhere to go but back to their ship!”

“Wait, some of us are evacuating to space?” asked a stallion behind her. “I want to evacuate to space! Where’s the space line?”

A spray of gunfire sawed across the ground, cutting across Kiss’s chest. Sparks and bullets bounced across the ground in front of her hooves, and her visor briefly turned to static before resetting.

“Bloody greenskins,” the unicorn snarled, swinging up her bolter and firing back. There was a great deal of smoke, however, and her targeting system was still effectively useless. “Bloody signal. Bloody yaks, bloody diamond dogs, bloody griffons, and BLOODY thrice-cursed dragons!”

The battle tanks fired again, rocking backward under the force of their battle cannons. Detonations rolled across the street in a flaming volley, pulverizing the mob trying to advance into the sector.

One Ork stumbled out of the dust, and a half dozen lasbolts promptly cut him down. A second one emerged, and Kiss put a single bolt round into his chest, knocking him over with a crater in his sternum. A third one bolted into view, and then keeled over forward when a pulse round struck him in the back.

Kiss blinked in surprise. The impact flash of pulse weaponry was very distinctive, and that Ork had looked like he was fleeing, not charging. She had almost forgotten about the Tau forces stationed in the fortress.

“Hold fire! Hold fire!” barked one man next to the battle tanks. Their lower-caliber guns cut off immediately, smoke seeping from the barrels.

The haze started to clear enough that the defenders could make out shapes marching toward the station. The Fire Warriors had a thankfully distinctive profile; smaller than Orks, with their oddly-shaped helmets and unusually long rifles. Behind the ranks of the light infantry came battlesuits: Crisis and Broadside teams stomped along the avenue, obliviously squashing Ork corpses to paste under their tread.

The small army looked largely untouched, with very few signs of damage and injury among the aliens. Poison Kiss briefly wondered where they had been such that they had apparently avoided most of the fighting, but she supposed that didn’t matter now.

“Oi! Grays! Get behind a barricade and take up formation!” she shouted, beckoning to the advancing ranks of blue and black. “Suits can go near the tanks! We need a bigger firing line until the civvies can book it!”

One of the battlesuits barked something to the other troops in their own language. The Tau ignored the pony’s instructions, marching past the defensive barricades and the train station.

“Hey! Don’t any of you louts understand Gothic?!” Poison Kiss growled.

Most of the Tau soldiers kept moving, ignoring her, but one of the suits suddenly hit its jet boosters and leapt over its allies. It flew over to Kiss and landed in front of her, causing the mare to recoil a few steps.

The battlesuit looked like one of the Lamman Sept’s XV28 Heavy Stealth Suits. Big and boxy like the XV8, but with veins of silvery circuitry running over the ablative armor layers and several round emitter lenses mounted over the body, the battlesuit towered over ponies even more than the Chaos Space Marines in their power armor. This particular suit, though, seemed slightly… different, somehow. Kiss couldn’t immediately identify why.

“Are you in charge here?” the battlesuit rumbled.

“No, all the Commanders and Sergeants are back there!” Kiss swung her boltgun around to point to a small crowd beyond the gates. They were huddled around a platform near the end of the tracks, next to several servitors and a stack of dataslates. “They’re planning a counter-attack while we manage the evacuation!”

The battlesuit looked up. “And those are all the city’s surviving leadership?”

“Not quite, no,” Kiss said again. “There’s quite a few that were out on mission, and Warpsmith Kessler hasn’t checked in yet.” She smiled behind her helmet. “I have to admit, I’m right tickled you lot showed up! With this many guns it should be easy to push out the baddies!”

Then she glanced behind her. The Tau were still marching past the defensive lines, past even the evacuees moving out of the city. Some of the other soldiers were yelling at them, but the aliens paid them as much attention as they had paid the Plague Witch.

“Say, where are your lads going? We need the firepower here!” Kiss complained.

“We’re moving our Earth Caste personnel into the lander for safety,” the battlesuit replied. “Then we’ll survey the area for the best defensive positions.”

Kiss nodded. “That’s fine, then. We just got a pilot in there and we’re starting to load her up with other civvies. They’ll make for orbit if things get dicey.”

The battlesuit stood up straight, and its box-shaped sensor head turned toward the ship.

*Fio’o, it seems fortune favors us. The lander is crewed and will be able to depart. Get on board. We’ll be making quite a mess before we join you,* Voidsong ordered into her comms.

*Acknowledged, Shas’o. However… it seems they’re loading humans and equines onto the vessel already. We may-*

*That’s our ship now, Fio’o, and we do not give sanctuary to the servants of Chaos. Once you reach it, have a Fireblade tell the evacuees as much and then shoot a man. They’ll get the message; they’re pirates, after all.*

*Ah… y-yes, Shas’o Voidsong. As you say.*

*Once you’re inside, switch the frequency of the local disruptor drones to block vox signals from this area. I’ll be along to help you with the crew.* Voidsong switched her comms to connect to the other squad leaders. *All Broadside groups and Crisis groups, take aim. Railguns in the tanks, missile pods in the commanders. Fire Warrior teams, you have the soldiers. Sink the dagger on my mark, then break for the ship.*

“Say, are you going to speak to the leadership?” Poison Kiss asked the battlesuit towering over her. “They’ve been in right tizzy since the command tower was overrun. You should let them know you’re ready to deploy!”

Several of the other battlesuits stopped and swiveled on the spot, bracing their weapons in preparation to fire.

“It’ll really help morale, if nothing else!” Kiss continued. “Some of us were starting to think we wouldn’t make it out of this!”

“And so you won’t.” Voidsong’s voice came strong and clear from her suit’s external speaker, completely free of the feedback and distortion from before. “For the Greater Good.”

Poison Kiss didn’t feel pain, but she certainly felt plenty of other sensations when two plasma bolts cut through her flank armor and bored into her torso. Her stomach lurched, her legs failed, and the world suddenly seemed to spin around her. Her visor exploded into warning icons and emergency runes, and then quickly blurred into a fuzzy kaleidoscope of bright colors.

She tried to move, but promptly stumbled and fell onto her side. Noise erupted all around her, but then started to fade just as rapidly. The spinning lights from her visor display began to dim, and shadows stretched across her vision.

Then the three-toed foot of a Tau battlesuit struck her helmet, sending the mare’s armored body spinning away.

Voidsong looked up as the Broadsides discharged their weapons, stabbing deep into the side of a Leman Russ battle tank. The hypersonic rails pierced the vehicle entirely, punching small, clean holes in one side before blasting out the opposite armor facing in huge, messy explosions of superheated metal. The tank was perforated before its crew had even known it was being fired upon; a perfect kill for a Lamman warrior.

The Commanders, Lieutenants, and other men of any rank enjoyed slightly more time to panic before the missile bomblets hit them. The entire group was swallowed by explosions and utterly pulverized, firmly decapitating the defenders.

The Fire Warriors opened fire as well, and the entire area erupted into pandemonium. Ponies and menials bolted away in a panic, soldiers hit the ground or started shouting, and the engines of the tanks sputtered to life in order to turn around.

Voidsong watched the rapid descent into chaos with a small smile. In all her years in command, in all her ambushes and combat operations, she had never executed a strike quite as satisfying as this one. It was a petty revenge, and honestly quite beneath her. But this vengeance, at least, would serve Tau’va.

A nearby Sentinel walker rounded about, its lascannon whining while it built up power. Voidsong almost casually lifted her fusion blaster and shot it in the head section, vaporizing its cockpit and pilot in a single blast. The legs, still in the midst of turning, wobbled comically before tripping and collapsing onto the ground.

She gunned her jet pack, and her battlesuit skimmed over the ground. Several civilians sprinted or dove out of her way, and she ignored them entirely. Swiveling her head, her targeters zeroed in on the engine block of a Leman Russ, and her fusion blaster began its recharging cycle.

One of the heavy bolter sponsons snapped toward her, but the Shas’o veered out of its firing arc with effortless grace. The treads squeaked and churned to swing the tank around, but soon the battlesuit was behind it.

Voidsong reached optimal range and fired her fusion blaster. A menial running by at the wrong time had his entire upper torso burned away to nothing, and the bolt kept going to bore into the battle tank’s engine. It liquefied much of the internal systems, and then instantly cooked the fuel supply, which went on to detonate the munitions. In a chain of three rapid explosions, the tank was ripped in two, hurling bits of hot armor plating into those nearby.

*One more,* Voidsong mumbled. Her armor shimmered, and then disappeared from view.

*Go! Go! To the ship! That’s enough!*

Fire Warriors and battlesuits sprinted across the landing lot toward the mass lander. Lasfire raked at them from behind, but the shots were scattered and half-hearted. Most of the mercenaries and guards were trying to reach new cover or had joined the civilians in fleeing the area. The servitors and automated guns watched over the firefight with heightened interest, detecting the exchange of gunfire but being unable to process a response. Very few circumstances would allow them to fire upon a friendly Space Marine, and the 38th Company’s mightiest defenders appeared frequently among the false signals blanketing the base.

The Fio’o and his Fire Warrior team disappeared up the embarkation ramp. Seconds later, shouting came from within the vessel, followed by the flash of pulse fire. People and ponies started fleeing the vessel’s hold immediately, sprinting into the lots and then scattering away from the incoming soldiers.

*Battlesuits, secure the ramp! Fire teams, get up into the bridge, before they try to lock it down! Move! Move! Mo-*

The report of a battle cannon drowned out the Fireblade’s shout, and a detonation came from the middle of the Broadside battlesuits. One of the suits took the shell directly, its arms blown off and the pilot compartment knocked onto the ground in a useless, immobile heap. The others stumbled, and then continued their rapid march to the landing ship while swiveling to face the vehicles attacking them.

Heavy bolter fire sputtered from the remaining Leman Russ, cutting into the fleeing Tau with stopping power and vicious decisiveness the lasfire lacked. Polyceramic body armor was pulped by the shells and shrapnel scythed into the soldiers’ legs. A Sentinel scout walker accompanied the battle tank, firing its multilaser into the troops scattered by the larger vehicle to pick off the wounded.

The Broadsides fired back, sending screaming volleys of hyper-accelerated rails back at the tank. Most missed their mark entirely, their aim troubled by the lumbering, desperate gait of the heavy battlesuits. Those rails that did hit strained against the Russ’s heaviest armor, and the projectiles were found wanting. One shot came at the Sentinel, striking its leg at the knee. The walker was instantly dismembered, and crashed onto its face in an immobile heap.

The Leman Russ rumbled forward toward the retreat, every gun blazing into the Tau. A swarm of missiles came back into it, pounding the front plating some more, but the vehicle pushed through the explosions and smoke in a single-minded fury. Its battle cannon fired again, briefly causing the entire vehicle to lurch backward. A Broadside battlesuit vanished under the impact, torn open and pulverized.

Then the air behind the tank shimmered.

*That’s enough of that,* Voidsong grumbled before she fired her fusion blaster again.

The Leman Russ detonated, ripping itself in half under the force of its own ordnance exploding. Voidsong’s battlesuit turned away, raising an arm to shield her from the chunks of smoldering armor peppering her suit.

*You’re clear of the heavy weapons. All units, gather any wounded and board the landing vessel at once. Full speed; don’t worry about return fire.* Lasbolts and the odd heavy stubber slug started striking the back of Voidsong’s suit, and she activated her cloaking field once more. *I’ll do a final sweep for any problem targets, and… hm?*

Her primary optics were suddenly covered by a dark shape landing on top of it. She had no idea what to make of it at first. A long, thin thing surrounded by several thinner lengths splayed out around the lens. It twitched and then turned, and Voidsong finally realized what she was staring at: the underbelly of a flying insect.

With a grunt, she raised a hand and flicked the insect away with a blocky metal finger. With her vision cleared, she could see that there were several such bugs circling her now. Wasps and flies buzzed around her sensor head and crawled over her armor. They seemed to have come from nowhere, but Voidsong had seen something similar before.

*Cultists,* she hissed, whirling around.

“YOU TREACHEROUS GRAY FREAK!!” a swarm of bugs, clustered together closely enough to form an obscuring smokescreen, raced toward Voidsong while a voice from within screamed at her. “I’M GOING TO INFEST EVERY ONE OF YOU RUBBERY MULES!!”

Voidsong cursed to herself and quickly re-routed power away from her cloaking field. She swiveled about to shoot into the oncoming whatever-it-was, only for another large wasp to land on her sensors and obscure her view.

She fired anyway, and a burst of plasma bolts sprayed across the oncoming swarm. Dozens of insects vanished in puffs of hot vapor, and the swarm broke apart in an angry frenzy just before an armored form galloped out of it.

“DIE, SCUM!!” Rot Blossom snarled, leaping up at the battlesuit before it could move to evade. Small triangular blades popped out of her greaves, and she slammed them into the suit’s torso.

Voidsong rocked back under the attack, spitting curses in her native language. The power transmission and agility of the XV28 was far inferior to that of her customized battlesuit, but that armor had been ripped apart by pony psykers. She very much didn’t want to consign this battlesuit to the same fate.

A kick from the armored pony struck her leg and staggered her, but Voidsong didn’t break her concentration. Putting the full output of her suit reactor to the jet pack, the Shas’o leapt into the air and out of reach of the mare thrashing at her. A quick spin and a venting of her heat sinks scattered the insects crawling all over her armor as well, clearing the pests from her battlesuit.

“GET BACK HERE!!” Blossom roared, snapping up her bolter leg to fire. Flying insects whipped around her like a whirlwind, chittering and buzzing while a stitch of mass-reactive shells crossed the sky toward the Tau Commander.

Voidsong darted to the side, neatly evading the first burst and aiming her plasma rifle. Before she could fire, however, a plume of thick green fog washed over her from above, obscuring her vision again.

“Oh, what NOW?” the Shas’o snarled, switching her vision modes to thermal while also activating a sensor ping. She picked up her attacker almost immediately – a suit of powered armor hovering several meters behind her – but before she could act on it alerts started flashing in front of her.

She switched gears again, spinning in the air to dodge away from another boltgun burst. The alerts started multiplying, however, and a quick diagnostic revealed minor damage in several joints and power transmission systems.

*Corrosive gas. Of course,* Voidsong sighed, feeding more power to her jetpack. A pair of bolt shells and a lasblast hit her arm, and the Shas’o grit her teeth. If any of those weapons managed to breach her pilot compartment, she could only imagine what the toxins or insects would do to her with direct exposure.

It would be a tremendous and humiliating irony if, after being freed from her stone prison and initiating this attack upon her enemies, she fell in combat to a pair of deluded equine cultists after ushering her people to safety. It was an utterly absurd prospect. Her pride rebelled against the very prospect, detesting such defeatism and spurring her to counter-attack.

And yet…

*This is Shas’o Voidsong,* she grumbled into her comms system. *Get ready to seal the ship and lift off. I’m coming in.*

Breezy Blight could barely see her targeting reticules through the haze of sheer anger over her vision. It may not have mattered if she could; after all, the treacherous battlesuit still registered on her visor as a friendly like everything else. Her armor shuddered from the constant bolter salvos, and her flight pack strained to keep up with the shockingly agile battlesuit ahead of her.

“Stop MOVING you grayskin worm!” she snarled, rising up above the battlesuit to get another angle. Her wrist bolter rattled again, firing another spread of mass-reactive shells after the traitor.

The suit shimmered, and then its cloaking field activated again. The effect didn’t hide it very well; the damage the suit had sustained meant that some armor facings were still exposed, or kept flickering into translucency. It did make it harder to shoot at, though, which made Breezy even angrier.

“You’re not getting away!” the pegasus roared, her voice amplified by her vox into a dreadful shriek. The wings of her flight pack tilted forward, and miniature boosters hidden in the top paneling fired. The armored pony burst forward with the extra push, closing rapidly to a range at which she could use her breath weapon. Her helmet’s jaws opened, revealing sharpened teeth and a pestilent green fog seeping from her muzzle. The transport ship loomed ahead of her, its cargo ramp yawning open.

She sucked in a breath, and Breezy’s chest tingled. Secondary organs teeming with parasites and acidic spores flooded her lungs, rapidly mixing it all into a poisonous stew. A pulse blast sliced through the air under her, but she ignored it, concentrating on the battlesuit.

Another pulse shot slammed into her chest, and warning runes flashed over her visor between brief floods of crackling static. This made it slightly harder to ignore. Her flight path stumbled slightly, but she remained on course. Then another warning flashed.

A markerlight had painted her, sending data pulses flooding through her systems. And those of the Tau targeting networks, presumably. She briefly glanced down at the soldiers who were firing at her from the ship’s loading ramp.

Breezy spotted the hulking armor frame of a Broadside battlesuit too late. Its railguns fired into the air, whipping past Breezy’s prey at hypersonic speed. One of the shots missed by sheer dumb luck.

One of them didn’t.

Breezy’s wing was sheared clean off, armor casing and all. To the Nurgle cultist it felt like nothing more than a sharp tug at the limb, but the bright red indicators and the lurching sensation in her stomach suggested far more serious damage. She also started spinning through the air out of control, totally losing sight of her target and winding badly off-course.

The pegasus smashed into the top deck of the lander, her plating scraping across the outer shielding that protected the vessel’s bridge. Breezy hit a random protrusion and yelped, and then bounced away into the lot.

She didn’t feel so much as a pinprick of pain crashing onto the ferrocrete, but the shock of the impact still stunned her. Her visor cracked, and the increasingly dire damage display was engulfed by static briefly before blacking out entirely.

Voidsong barely registered the mare’s fate. She landed onto the entry ramp and sprinted into the vessel’s cavernous cargo bay.

*Close the ramp. Seal and guard all entrances to the vessel!* she hissed, stomping past the threshold.

A Fire Warrior rushed to comply, pulling a heavy lever on a manual control panel. Jets of pressurized gas blasted from huge hydraulics, and the ramp lurched upward.

*Broadsides, keep watch and prepare to fend off any incursion. We’ll be in the air as soon as possible, but someone out there might be able to dig up a plasma cutter on short notice,* Voidsong commanded, pointing toward the heavier battlesuits. The warriors nodded back to her, and then the Shas’o started heading toward the deck access. *We’re almost done. Almost free of these maniacs…*

The ramp finally closed, and a wave of palpable relief rolled through the Tau soldiers in the cargo bay. Many slumped against walls and crates or rapidly stripped off their helmets. The rest kept their guns at the ready, facing the ramp in grim silence.

One Fire Warrior with his helmet off suddenly yelped in pain, and then smacked a hand against his neck.

*What’s the matter? Did some shrapnel hit you back there?*

*No… It’s nothing. Just some kind of insect.* He wiped his glove off on a crate in disgust.

*Did it sting you?* Another soldier walked up and checked the back of his neck. *Ah, it did. It’s already swelling. See if you can find a medkit in the upper decks.*

*Does it look bad?* asked the victim.

*A little. It got you three time, it seems.*

*Three times? Really?*

*Yes. There are three welts, in a triangle. They look a bit discolored, too. See to that medkit, Shas’la.*

Author's Note

Lotta action in this one. Apologies for keeping most of the main characters on the sidelines, but as usual I can't do a major battle in one chapter and needed to establish the setting properly before they could be rescued by (checks notes) Princess Celestia and... uh... Wraithstar? Really? Huh.
RIP Nox, RIP Kessler, and also RIP the two dragons that were pretty important to the chapter's plot but whom I didn't want to give names to because they weren't going to make it out of the city alive.

Deliverance

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron Story

Chapter 16

Deliverance

****

Ponyville – Nethalican

“Death… is to be feared.”

“This is a simple truth, ancient and self-evident. Self-preservation is the oldest, most primitive impulse. The foundation of survival. We need no faith, no science, no abstract philosophy to turn our eyes from the abyss and flee to sanctuary. The terror of death reaches every species. Even the brutal Ork, infamous for its reckless love of violence and disdain for injury, will flee the field in the face of certain destruction. Its calculation of The End differs from our own, but not its answer. It must live. Death must be avoided.”

Virgil strode between the pews of the Chaos Temple, his hands clasped behind his back. Clergymen scratched notes on lecterns. Men cowered on the benches, hugging weapons or books or iron Chaos amulets. An armored body knelt at the altar below the quivering Warp portal, speaking in incoherent whispers to entities unknown.

Near the back of the temple was Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo, their eyes fixed on the preacher. They were easily the most cheerful worshipers present, standing up in their pews with their front hooves up against the row in front of them.

“That brings us, of course, to Chaos,” Virgil said. “Our faith is rife with death. Our creed spreads terror and devastation across the stars. Ruin, pillage, genocide… We are harbingers of death, and it is not only enemies and unbelievers that are dragged into the Warp by the bloody claws of Chaos.”

Virgil reached the end of the pews and turned around sharply, the chains from his manacles rattling around him. Then he started walking back the other way.

“To know Chaos is to fear death, yet understand it. It is to know violence and terror in the most intimate way. To surround yourself with carnage and destruction. To make death an ally.”

“Blessed by Khorne are we, may his foes drown in an ocean of blood and their skulls be heaped before his feet,” intoned several other cultists.

“Woooo! Blood for the Blood God, yeah!” followed Scootaloo, speaking a little more enthusiastically than was strictly necessary.

“The daemon slaughters mortals with unrestrained glee, yet it is also the mortals’ key to immortality. To know Chaos is to seek what one fears. To accept what repulses. To learn that which defies reason.” Virgil reached the other end of the pews and turned around again.

“This is the primordial truth, our grand bargain with the Gods that thirst for our demise,” Virgil continued. “Let terror into your hearts, my brothers. Not as your master. But as your ally. Death comes. Take its hand.”

The creak of iron hinges came from the entrance, interrupting the sermon. Virgil stopped pacing. Several cultists and priests looked up to see who had entered.

A tall woman slipped into the temple interior, clothed in a black hooded robe. Her hair was a dark bluish-green, and her skin had a slightly gray hue to it. Two more people followed her inside. They were shorter, and their hoods hid their features more completely.

Virgil watched in silence while the newcomers looked around at the temple. Then he unclasped his hands and spoke to the worshipers.

“It seems my service will be ending early. Circumstances have accelerated. Please proceed to the exit, my brothers.”

The men looked confused, but did not disobey. They stood up, bowed to the Chaos Priest, and then scurried away to the door as if they had been waiting for the chance to leave.

“What’s the matter, Father Virgil? Why we gotta leave?” Three particular cultists in the pews seemed reluctant to depart. Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle looked crushed that the sermon had ended early, while Scootaloo was angrily sizing up the woman who had just entered.

“You may stay, if you want,” Virgil said with a disaffected shrug. “Perhaps you may learn something…”

“Wait, but didn’t you say you were ending the service?” Sweetie asked, confused.

“Indeed I did. But Chaos teaches us in many ways, little one,” the priest replied cryptically.

Chrysalis stepped aside to let the cultists leave, eying the Chaos Priest suspiciously. Her two guards held the door open for them. Two more changelings outside watched them leave while standing in front of the Nethalican’s entrance.

Although she suspected the priest of some sort of trickery, she couldn’t focus on him for long; the interior of the Chaos temple was just so… distracting. The skulls. The statues and reliefs. The absolutely repugnant incense. The hideous, quasi-industrial architecture. Everything within this hallowed space seemed designed to offend her senses.

And then, of course, there was the Dark Portal.

She had sensed it the moment she laid hands on the temple doors, but compared to seeing it that sensation was akin to tasting the condensed moisture clinging to the outside of a glass of fine elixir. Like an eye of flame captured within a ring of metal, it thrummed with a level of power Chrysalis had quite literally never imagined. Energy spilled into the room freely; it wasn’t love, but it was… close. Close enough that she was passively absorbing it without needing to actively feed. She had absorbed more power just walking into the room than she had gained draining the love of entire villages in the past.

“Tox was right,” she whispered under her breath.

“Is there something I can help you with, Miss?”

Chrysalis snapped out of her dazed state when Virgil spoke to her. The Chaos Priest and several other clergy were staring at her, having interrupted their previous activities.

“Yes… Yes, I believe you can,” she stepped forward, looking over the dark-skinned man. His expression was… odd. Unassuming and attentive. Uninterested, but not quite bored. She couldn’t get a read on his emotions with her more exotic senses, either, which she found slightly alarming. Was he some sort of machine created to look like a human? Bizarre. “My name is Chryss. I wish to learn about… this. The Nethalican.” She gestured to the Dark Portal.

“What, you weren’t briefed?” asked a scribe. “Who are you, anyway? What division are you with?”

Chrysalis was going to concoct a cover story on the spot, but to her surprise Virgil answered her question before she could address the scribe’s.

“The Nethalican is an unholy icon of the Dark Gods’ power burned into the fabric of space and time,” the priest explained. “It is the core of our power on this world. A sliver of Chaos itself, buried into this hallowed ground, forced open, and directed to serve us.”

Chrysalis smiled, intrigued. “Go on…”

“The Dark Portal serves as a conduit to the Warp. It floods this place with the stuff of Chaos, and allows us to hear the voices of the Gods more clearly. In turn, our prayers are channeled more easily to the lords of the Empyrean.” Virgil clasped his hands together and bowed his head. “Such a conduit also possesses certain… utilitarian uses. But that is not my concern.”

Chrysalis put a finger to her chin, staring at the roiling gateway thoughtfully. Her first instinct was to scoff and dismiss the muttering about Gods – internally, at least – but her encounter with Tox was still fresh in her mind. Whether the malign will of some ancient being or simply magic run amok, there was great danger in this place.

A low chuckle came from the temple’s altar.

“What a curious turn of events. Is this the culmination of some fell trap set by the Dark Gods? Or merely arrogance from a hapless beast who knows no better?”

The armored body kneeling before the altar stood up.

“Either way, I welcome you to our temple, insect queen. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Serith.”

Serith turned around, his force glaive in hand. Chrysalis recoiled, her face twisting into an angry sneer.

“Insect Queen?! What is that supposed to mean?” Chrysalis demanded hotly. Her eyes glittered with green light, and her magic reached out invisibly to the Iron Warrior.

Her spell broke apart against his body as if it were a dirt clod hurled against his chest plate. She wasn’t even sure the man noticed. The priests started shuffling away, toward the walls of the temple, while the three fillies looked back and forth between the woman and the Astartes.

“You know precisely what it means,” Serith said, raising a single hand. “Come now, shed your ridiculous facade. You barely fooled the children.” He raised his free hand in front of him. “There will be no lies within these sacred halls, my Queen. Only truth… no matter how unbecoming.”

Chrysalis tensed, and Serith snapped his fingers. The sound was shrill and sharp, no doubt due to the adamantine gauntlet, and she felt an invisible surge of magic much like her own.

It hadn’t been directed at her, though. The drone on her left began trembling, and then screamed and grasped the sides of his head. Chrysalis recoiled, nearly knocking over her other bodyguard.

“NO!! NO, PLEASE!!” the drone shrieked, his eyes bulging and his body quivering. “What are you?! Why are there… s-so many voices?!”

A flash of green energy burst around the drone, as if the human form was simply a bubble to be popped. The changeling collapsed into a heap immediately afterward, its real body exposed, twitching and shrieking all the while.

The fillies gasped in shock.

“Changelin’! Those’re changelin’s!” Apple Bloom yelped.

“Spies! Get ‘em!” Scootaloo snarled, leaping up onto the back rest of the pews.

“I, uh, I knew that. Yup. I knew all along they were changelings,” Sweetie Belle said unconvincingly.

Despite the exposure of her guard, Chrysalis noted that nobody but the three young ponies seemed upset. The Chaos Sorcerer lowered his hand, clearly waiting for her to respond. Most of the Chaos clergy simply glared at her silently, while Virgil seemed completely unmoved. The head priest calmly walked over to the CMC and picked up each of the fillies in his arms, and then carried them over to the rest of the spectators.

“… Well, then. It seems the subtle approach has failed.” Chrysalis was surrounded by emerald-colored flame, and in an instant her robe and body burned away. The twisted, hole-ridden, quadrupedal form of the Changeling Queen stood in its place, staring at Serith through blazing green eyes narrowed into slits. The remaining bodyguard hesitated only a moment before it too returned to its true body. “You wish to resolve this the hard way?”

“My current Legion masters ALWAYS choose the hard way,” Serith chuckled. “Now, let us pray to the Gods of Chaos!”

“I didn’t come here to PRAY, fool,” Chrysalis snarled. Her horn pulsed, and several chains, pews, and braziers near her started trembling in the wake of her aura. Blazing green power crawled up and down her horn, and the other changeling guard yelped and shrunk back. “If I need to destroy you all to seize this place, then I’ll destroy you all. The Dark Portal will be mine.”

Serith laughed. “My Dear Queen, you misunderstand. To the Dark Gods, battle is as pure a ceremony as any trite ritual or devout plea!”

He lifted his free hand again, and then clenched it into a fist. The changeling on the ground shrieked again, and then started thrashing about as if it were being choked.

“Our attacks are our prayers. Our pain is our offering. Our hatred is our deliverance.”

He suddenly twisted his arm in the air. A cracking noise came from the struggling changeling guard, and it twitched one last time before slumping lifelessly onto the floor.

“… And death is our reward,” the Sorcerer finished, taking up his glaive in both hands. “But whose death shall it be? The Lords of the Empyrean have not yet spoken these secrets to me.”

“You won’t live long enough to hear any more of their gibbering,” Chrysalis snarled. She turned slightly to address her other guard. “Lock and barricade the door. I’ll take care of this scum.”

Chrysalis was half-expecting the Chaos priests to charge her or draw weapons, but instead the dark clergy knelt along the wall. They clasped their hands together and bowed their heads, and then whispered chants filled the temple. Only Virgil kept watching the imminent conflict, his expression as bland and unassuming as when she first came through the door. He was also still carrying the fillies, in the crook of one arm, and the young ponies flailed and cheered while in his grip.

“Get ‘em, Serith!”

“You’re in for it now, buggy!”

“I don’t like either of you, so I’m rooting for injuries!”

A pulsing blue light surrounded Serith’s body, and psychic hoarfrost flashed around his vambrace. “Come, my Queen. I will inscribe the glory of Chaos into your very soul.” He swept his glaive to the side, and a quivering sphere of energy collected over his palm.

“I’ve seen the ‘glory of Chaos,’ Serith. I’ve scraped it off the walls of my hive and tossed it into the deep pits with the other trash.” Chrysalis grinned, fully exposing her fangs to her opponent. A writhing arc of bright green energy crawled up her horn.

Virgil looked back and forth between Serith and Chrysalis, and then raised his free arm.

“Round one. Fight.” His arm fell.

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 19

Lander lots

serra-class cargo transport T-338, bridge

*Fio’o, I hope you have an explanation for why we’re still on the ground.*

The Head Engineer winced at the sound of heavy footsteps approaching from behind. In front of him, a pair of humans glared defiantly at the half-dozen Fire Warriors aiming at them. Several Tau of the Earth Caste sat at the controls, looking appropriately nervous.

Most of those controls, incidentally, were inactive. Many of the screens were in stand-by mode. There was nothing to suggest the crew was even preparing to lift off.

*The crew saw what happened outside, Shas’o Voidsong. They are… reluctant.*

Before she could respond, one of the lower-ranked Earth Caste gasped in surprise.

*Shas’o Voidsong? You’re free? You did this?* He stood up from his seat uncertainly. *When… How…*

*We are too pressed for time, Fio’la,* she said imperiously, waving a hand to dismiss him. Then she stepped closer to the humans and switched languages. “Now, then… What’s the problem, pilot?”

One of the humans, a short woman covered in a web of crude arrow tattoos, craned her head up to look Voidsong in her sensors. Then she sucked in a breath and spit directly into it, splattering mucus over the primary optic.

“That’s as good a summary of the problem as any, Shas’o,” the Head Engineer sighed.

Voidsong paused for a few seconds, then turned to address him. “Fio’o, do we require both these humans to lift off?”

“Uh… No, but-“

He was interrupted by the howl of plasma fire. The woman’s corpse hit the floor in a smoldering heap, smoke pouring from the black lump that used to be her torso.

“You’re our pilot now,” Voidsong said, pointing to the man standing next to her. “Hurry up and get this lander in the air.”

In retrospect, it really shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when a second wad of mucus splashed against her sensor head.

“You want void passage, grayskin? Get out and fly there yourself,” the pilot said with a grin.

“… I am perplexed,” Voidsong admitted after a moment. She lifted a blocky finger to her battlesuit’s head and swiped away the spit. “You’re a pirate. I’ve taken this ship. You work for me now, or you die. Am I missing something? Is my Gothic incorrect?”

“I refuse,” snarled the remaining human. “I serve – in order – Trademaster Delgan, Warsmith Solon, and the Dark Gods. Treacherous xenos can get out and push if they want this heap off the ground.”

“Why do you care?” Voidsong demanded, her voice starting to get heated. “You serve an army that attaches no value to your life. You have no noble aims to aspire to. Your martyrdom is meaningless. Why would you die to oppose us?”

“I’d rather die right away and spite you than work for you and die when we get to orbit.”

“Work for me and you needn’t die at all. Not today, or in the foreseeable future,” Voidsong offered.

“I don’t believe you. I might have a minute ago, but…” he tapped a boot against the dead body next to him.

Voidsong’s head again swiveled toward the Fio’o. *This is a waste of time. Is it possible for you to lift us off? Are the controls that complicated?*

The Head Engineer recoiled. *Me? I… I don’t know. I suppose I could figure it out, but we’re going to be navigating through a war zone! And then initiating a manual docking sequence in orbit!*

*Can you and your men do it, Fio’o?* Voidsong pressed. *I can give you the time you need, but we must begin immediately.*

He fumbled around with his engineering tablet for several seconds. *I think… Yes. These are the control schemata. It will take some time to decrypt the access codex, I think, but we can manage this.*

*Good.* Her plasma gun released a shrill whine while it started charging, and the remaining human clenched his teeth in anger.

*No! Shas’o, stop!* One of the lesser Earth Caste jumped up from his seat, rushing between the plasma weapon and the pilot. *Please! This is barbaric! You can’t do this!*

The weapon did not discharge. It didn’t move its aim away, either. Voidsong’s battlesuit stared down at the panicked worker in silence.

*I don’t know why you betrayed the gue’la. I don’t know why we’re abandoning them in their hour of need. Since we reached this world, everything has gone wrong and even Tau’va has failed us!* He took a deep breath. *But I can’t let you do this! What you’re doing now isn’t warfare! It’s murder!*

*Your objection is noted, Fio’la,* Voidsong replied blandly. *Now sit down and be quiet.*

*Why?!* the worker demanded, his legs quivering. *Why must we do this?! Why have you returned to us just to-*

The plasma rifle fired twice, boring a hole first through the worker and then the pilot. The bodies slumped onto the floor atop the other scorched corpse, and an exasperated sigh came from the battlesuit’s speaker.

*Defiance once is failure. Defiance twice, treason.* Her sensor head swiveled to the side. *Get to work, Fio’o. If we wait too long, whoever wins the useless tug of war over this pit of smog and metal isn’t going to wait long before dismantling this vessel.*

The Head Engineer’s face was ashen. His eyes darted between the corpse of his subordinate and Voidsong. *Shas’o, that… he… he didn’t know. I didn’t have time to tell him our plan! He was among the evacuees when we-*

*GET. TO. WORK,* Voidsong repeated. The lower-ranked workers flinched and shrunk back. The Fio’o swallowed nervously and nodded.

*Good. Shas’ui, I’m going to do a deck sweep. Find someplace to stash these bodies.*

Voidsong turned and stomped out the bridge entrance. The Fire Warriors shared a glance, and then took hold of the corpses and started dragging them behind her.

The Earth Caste watched them leave nervously, and then returned to work. Most started activating dataslates, while the Head Engineer linked his tablet to the primary control station.

Voidsong moved much faster than the Fire Warriors, and soon she had rounded a corner and walked out of earshot.

*That was… temperamental of the Shas’o,* grumbled one of the soldiers, once he was reasonably sure she wouldn’t overhear. *The Fio’la could have been subdued easily. There aren’t enough of us to summarily execute crew without good reason.*

*Perhaps. Sympathizing with the gue’la is a decent enough reason, I think,* grunted the other. *It’s about time these monsters got what was coming to them…*

They reached a supply room, and one of them slapped a hand on the access pane. The door slid open with a hiss.

*We can put them in here until-what in the black moon happened here?!*

The soldiers stopped dead in their tracks. There was already a body in this room. A Fire Warrior, by the looks of things, splayed out over a bench next to an open medikit that had its contents spilled on the floor.

The corpse was hideously bloated, its body stretching the undersuit and armor carapace to its limits. Rancid fluid was pooling underneath it, and its head was an almost unrecognizable, swollen mass.

*Did they kill someone and stash the body here? Do we have an infiltrator?*

*If… If we do… what could even do something like this?*

*Ugh… drop the bodies and seal this room. Hopefully we won’t need anything from it before we abandon this vessel.*

He dragged the two human corpses inside and shoved them against the wall. His companion hesitated, but eventually pulled in the body of the Earth Caste worker and leaned him up against a bench.

*Can’t wait to be rid of this wretched planet. I hope I never find myself in a gue’la ship ever again.*

The Fire Warriors exited the supply room, and one stopped to close the door. He slid a finger across the access panel, locking the room behind him. Without another glance, they turned around and left.

****

???

“I miss them already. I feel so lost. So pathetic. So… weak. I let my guard down for a moment, put aside my anger, and then take two plasma slugs for it. Miserable.”

Poison Kiss stared up into the darkness as she complained at length, her vision fixed on some random patch of the drab, swirling colors above her. She didn’t know where she was. Her recollection was hazy in general, aside from the last few minutes of her life.

“UNGRATEFUL WRETCHES. YOU DIDN’T DESERVE SUCH A CRUEL BETRAYAL, CHILD. I’M SORRY.”

Kiss twisted her body – or whatever it was she had right now, exactly – around to face the voice. She was laying in a veritable carpet of filth; a sticky patchwork of vile fluids and rotting flesh stretched out in all directions. Directly behind her was… well, basically a mound of the same filth. As if some quantity of the muck was just pushed together into a big pile and then had some rotted teeth and cataract-ridden eyes jammed into the top.

“Why did the Tau do it? They saved them! They could have turned them away! Could have wiped them out! Instead the mules were given a fighting chance, and what did they do with it?!” Kiss complained.

The pile of muck tilted slightly to one side. It’s mouth was arced into a sorrowful frown. “TERRIBLE. THEY DIDN’T NEED TO HARM YOU.”

“This isn’t about me!” Kiss yelled in anguish. She moved, leaping into the body of the monstrosity. She sank slightly into the slimy, bubbling flesh before curling up on top of it. “I may have let my guard down, but I never trusted them! The humans DID! How many Chaos soldiers have died because of the Tau?! And they opened their fortress to the bloody aliens! Took them in! Gave them homes and jobs! Treated them like friends! Even us ponies weren’t so forgiving!”

The daemon laughed ruefully. “THE FATE OF THE HUMAN IS TO DIE, MY CHILD. LONELY, FORGOTTEN, AND CONSUMED BY THEIR OWN PETTY ARROGANCE. IT DOESN’T MATTER.”

“It matters to me!” Kiss wailed, her vision blurring. She buried her face in the tumor-ridden folds of flesh and started to cry in earnest. She wasn’t sure how long she sobbed into the cancerous body; the rush of emotions felt much more intense and pure than usual. As if her previous form had been holding her back and keeping her from experiencing true sorrow.

The daemon waited for some time, and then reached over with a lumpy, misshapen arm. Jagged claws infested with parasites gently stroked the unicorn, eventually calming her.

“YOU CARE ABOUT THE MORTALS A GREAT DEAL, DON’T YOU?”

Kiss looked up at the mound of filth. “I do. They were… my allies. My friends. They accepted what I am even while other ponies came to fear us. They helped and protected me and my sisters in the cult. Fought alongside us in defense of our planet and our home. I… I loved them.”

Images became a blur in front of her. Names and faces. Tattoos and weapons. Unique augmetics and insane personality quirks. “How many of them are gone now? Dead for having dared to trust the Tau?”

The daemon shifted forward, looming over the pony. “A GREAT MANY OF THEM, NO DOUBT. DOZENS. HUNDREDS, BEFORE THE DAY IS DONE. PLUCKED FROM THE GALAXY AND HURLED SCREAMING INTO THE WARP TO FEED MY COUNTLESS CHILDREN.” His face seemed to turn in the middle of his head so that its facial features were almost laying on their side. “HOW DOES THIS MAKE YOU FEEL, MY CHILD?”

A pulse of magic came from the unicorn, briefly banishing the local gloom. A hot, destructive shock wave rolled through the floor, breaking apart pools of encrusted effluent and burning away swathes of vile toxins.

“I hate the Tau,” Kiss seethed. Her eyes, such as they were, were pools of glowing green. “I hate them! I’ll kill them! ALL OF THEM!!”

Her magic started burning the mountain of filth she was resting against, and she began beating her hooves into the scorched flesh in a mindless rage. “Wretched, insolent, alien whelps! I’ll tear them apart! I’ll rend their minds, dismember their bodies, and turn their remains into festering rot piles! RAAAAAAAAAUGH!!!”

Poison Kiss released a wordless scream into the air, and another shock wave of magic rolled over her surroundings. The daemon was scorched further, but if he felt anything he didn’t seem to mind, at least.

“YESSSS… HATRED IS THE ROTTEN FRUIT OF LOVE. LET YOUR AFFECTIONS TURN TO PAIN, AND THEN UNLEASH THAT PAIN UPON YOUR ENEMIES.”

“Let me go back,” Kiss snarled, her head practically swimming in magical power. “Let me go back and destroy them! I’ll wipe them all out!”

The daemon laughed while his grimy hand continued to stroke the mare. “VERY WELL, MY CHILD. BUT FOR NOW… SLEEP.”

The glow around Poison Kiss began to dim. It wasn’t a conscious effect; she wasn’t letting up with her magic at all. But her senses – already feeling strange since she awoke in this place – began to go numb. Darkness slowly overtook the pony, stealing away the last sense of spatial awareness.

Through it all, the guttural chuckling of the daemon reached her ears unimpeded.

“MAKE THEM SUFFER, MY DEAR KISS. LET THEM FEEL THE LINGERING AGONY OF MY GIFTS, AND EXPERIENCE THE GOSPEL OF ENTROPY IN THEIR VERY SOULS. MORE LIVES FOR NURGLE…”

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 19

Train station

“Kiss! Kiss, no… Please! Please wake up!”

When consciousness returned to Poison Kiss, it came like a hammer blow to the gut.

She gasped, sucking in air desperately, only to feel her internals quivering in response. An unpleasant sensation, not quite pain but distinctly unpleasant and jarring. And that was aside from the disturbing realization that she probably had a hole in her lungs.

“She’s moving! She’s alive! Oh, thank Nurgle!”

“Can we get a medicae or something over here?!”

“What do you think a medicae is going to do? Half her organs are scorched lumps of carbon.”

“So what?! You guys replace organs and limbs all the time!”

“Not in the field, we don’t. We can’t really get to… uh… what’s going on, there?”

Poison Kiss’s horn started to glow. She couldn’t see properly. Her visor was dark and her vision somewhat blurry. Her armor was inactive, restricting the normal ease of movement it provided her limbs. Nonetheless, she started to writhe and kick her legs, twisting on the ground in a series of awkward spasms.

Her body flooded with magic, and she didn’t exactly know why. She wasn’t casting a spell. As the energy rapidly engulfed her, she felt her internals shift and swell.

“Kiss? Kiss, what’s happening?!”

Breezy Blight and Rot Blossom slowly backed away, watching their squad leader in confusion. The unicorn flailed and squirmed, and the blackened hole in her armor started shaking and bubbling like a stew brought to boil. Charred flesh broke away, and new organs – already swollen with tumors and infections – inflated to fill the space like hideous, multicolored balloons. Small, bony protrusions poked out of the scorched edges of the hole in her power armor, resembling pointed teeth. Then the hole started to flex closed, concealing the wound under a horrific, grimy, grinning mouth.

An electric arc whipped around Kiss’s horn, and the armor’s power supply kicked in a second later. The visor flickered on, and Kiss suddenly felt her breath coming much more easily.

“Kiss? Kiss, are you… okay?” Blossom asked, rushing up to her friend.

Poison Kiss growled, her voice erupting from her vox grille in a burst of static. She lurched upright, her head swinging slightly and her horn still sparking.

“Where is my boltgun?” the unicorn hissed.

“What? Kiss, we-“

“Boltgun!” Kiss snapped, whirling around on her squad mates. “I’m going to track down that grayskin duff and empty every last magazine into them! We’ll fill the halls of the Temple of Nurgle with their blooming corpses!” She slammed a boot onto the ground, and another mana pulse crackled around her helmet.

Her vision was still slightly hazy, so she didn’t get a good look at her surroundings until a few seconds later. She was in the main yard of the train station, right next to the tracks. She was sure she’d been carried here, as the main defensive position had been outside the yard before.

The crowd of civilians was gone, presumably having fled out the gate into the badlands. The remaining mercenaries, which barely numbered in the dozens, were set up behind new barricades next to the tracks. The ring of useless servitors and turrets was in worse shape than she remembered, with several of the tread-mounted cyborgs shredded by bullets and a few of the defense pylons ablaze.

“Where are they? Did they flee the city? WHERE is my bloody bolter?!” Kiss fumed.

“Kiss, please! Calm down!” Breezy shouted.

Poison Kiss finally noticed that Breezy Blight had her helmet off. That wouldn’t have been exceptional on its own, but her power armor in general was battered and scraped. Even more dire was the mare’s left wing, which was missing entirely; streaks of dried, filth-encrusted blood ran down one side of her armor.

The wound was bad enough to deflate Kiss slightly, and she took a deep, calming breath. “All right. Okay. I’m level. What’s the scheme?”

“The Tau locked themselves in the cargo lander back there. It hasn’t taken off though, and we don’t know why. But honestly, that’s like the third most important issue right now,” Breezy said. “Most of the civilians already left. Some are locked down in the buildings nearby and are trying to wait this out.”

“Yeah? Okay, so what’re we doing?” Kiss demanded.

“Well, uh, we don’t really know,” Blossom admitted weakly, glancing behind her. “Everyone in charge is dead, and our vox is down. Some of the mercenaries ran off already, but we still have a few dozen guys who think reinforcements might be coming. We fell back behind the defense perimeter and fought off a few small attacks mostly from the Orks. The greenskins keep shooting at the turrets and servitors even when they won’t shoot back, so it slows down their advance.”

Kiss looked over at the gate, staring at a Kataphron battle servitor. It hung limply over its armored chassis, blood pooling with oil underneath its treads. Its plasma culverin, a massive cannon studded with heat sinks and wrapped in thick flex coiling, sparked and shuddered while hot gases seeped from the weapon’s casing.

“A few other ponies are with us too, but they’re trying to get the mercs to flee the base for a frontier town,” Blossom continued.

“What? Where?!” Kiss shouted, whirling around again.

Blossom recoiled, unnerved by how angry the unicorn was. “I think… they mentioned Fort Hoof? It’s a long walk, but they-“

“Rubbish! We’re not going to leg it! Not against this scum!” Kiss growled, approaching Rot Blossom. “We’re not abandoning Ferrous Dominus! We’re not letting these sodding mules seize the manufactorum while we tuck tail and run just because some birds and woolies found lasguns!”

Blossom stumbled backward onto her rear, and Kiss came close enough that their helmet grilles almost touched. “I didn’t drag myself back from the brink of death just to give up, and neither will any of you! You’ll PROTECT this place, or you’ll meet Grandfather before Luna’s moon rises! IS THAT CLEAR, BLOSSOM?”

The earth pony nodded her head fearfully. Poison Kiss whirled around, and then spoke loudly enough to be heard by the men crouched behind a defense barricade. “Listen up, lads! It wasn’t that long ago that we stood in the path of some tens of thousands of Orks to protect one lousy pony village! And we gave that horde such a belting that they haven’t been back since!”

Her visor flashed, glowing brightly, and her horn pulsed with magical power. “We killed so many of those sorry sods we ripped a hole in reality over their graves! We’re NOT surrendering OUR FORT, OUR CITY, OUR HOME, to a handful of brassed off vagrants! I’m not stepping one hoof beyond that palisade until every Ork, yak, diamond dog, griffon, minotaur, and whatever other vermin are dead or in chains!! Are you with me, brothers and sisters?! Shall we honor the Dark Gods with our courage, and see off these dregs with the strength of our friendship?!”

“INCOMING!!”

The sound of a battle cannon firing wasn’t quite the encore to her passionate speech Kiss had hoped for. The shell landed off-course, impacting between two combat servitors and blasting a crater into the ferrocrete. The oblivious cyborgs were blown onto their sides from the shock wave, and they began pushing themselves upright with the sort of unhurried calm that could only come from being completely blind to obvious danger.

“The hay was that?! Why is a tank firing on us?!”

“Look out! Greenskins! Coming from sector 20!”

“Did they loot a Russ? Already?! Damned xenos!”

The armored vehicle lumbering down the street on creaky, damaged treads had obviously been worked over by Ork Meks, albeit in a hurry. The engine popped and sputtered, spitting bursts of flame from the exhaust pipes. One heavy bolter sponson had been torn off its servo mounting, while the other spewed fire at nearby windows seemingly at random. A half-dozen Orks were riding on the tank, firing their weapons wildly and hooting. Completing the tank’s rapid conversion, a Chaos Star that had formerly decorated the main frontal plate had been painted over with an Ork glyph.

“Anti-armor fire! We need a heavy weapon!” shouted a mercenary, firing his lasgun uselessly down the street.

“We don’t have one! Not an infantry-portable unit!” shouted back another.

“Khorne’s teeth, we’re surrounded by autocannons and plasma culverins and completely helpless!”

The battle cannon fired again, and one of the servitors came apart in a burst of fire and gore. The other cyborgs swiftly turned to stare at the tank, confirmed its friendly status, and then went back to ordinary combat readiness.

“This is ridiculous! We can’t hold here!”

“We have cavalry charging on the left flank! Take them down!”

Poison Kiss turned to face the direction of the new assault, zooming her visor scope. Yaks with Ork riders were barreling down the avenue, spearheading a charge by more Orks on foot. Other, less enthusiastic species followed behind the mob; griffons kept watch from above, diamond dogs skulked about the fringes, and minotaur brought up the rear while hefting heavy bolters and chainblades.

“Here! Your boltgun!” someone shouted behind her.

Kiss turned her head, and she saw her gun skidding across the ferrocrete. It stopped in place with a burst of magic, and then floated up next to her.

“All right, girls. Status report?” she demanded, sliding a magazine from the magnetic strip under her stomach plating.

“Well, uh… not great,” Breezy Blight admitted. “I have ammo, but I’m a little light-headed. Also, I’m not flying anywhere, obviously.”

“I’m okay, but I’m running low on bugs,” Rot Blossom explained. “I was going to infest a few corpses, but kind of got caught up trying to revive you.”

“WAAAAAAAGH!!” The classic war cry of the Orks mixed with the sound of pounding hooves, and lasers started flashing by the cultist ponies.

Kiss slid her boltgun magazine into place and pulled back the slide. “All right, here’s the skinny! We need to close on that tank!”

“The tank? But our bolters-“

“Keep your fire on soft targets, but we need to get closer! That hull is covered in structural breaches! Breezy, you have to get close enough to blow some poison into the crew compartment, savvy?”

A battle cannon shell struck a fence pylon, demolishing it and sending shards of ferrocrete and duralloy rebar raining down on the defending troops. Breezy Blight flinched away, and then steeled herself.

“All right, Kiss. You clear the way, and I’ll choke those monsters,” the pegasus said, her voice shaking only slightly.

“Nurgle watch over us!” Kiss shouted, whirling around toward the tank. “Take her down, girls!”

By the time the mares began galloping toward the gate, the firefight had heated up substantially. The lasfire was mostly aimed at the foot soldiers and cavalry racing toward the defender’s flanks. The return fire, in turn, battered the remaining turrets and stubbornly unresponsive servitors. The captured Russ lumbered forward obliviously, and the Orks riding on top hooted and fired their guns into the air.

A string of bullets sawed across the ground in front of Kiss, and she glanced over to her side. A pair of Nobs riding yaks were charging past the gate and positioning to plow right into Phage Squadron. Perhaps they reasoned that the ponies must be a threat to the tank they were charging, but more likely the yak – primarily in charge of navigation – homed in on them as the closest moving target.

“Waah ha ha!” The Ork rider laughed while he sprayed automatic fire over the mares, his arms quaking from the recoil. The Ork behind him fired with only slightly more discretion, slapping the rear of his mount with his axe.

Breezy and Blossom’s boltguns were mounted on their greaves, so they couldn’t return fire while running. Poison Kiss could, but the unicorn was hardly a marksman even when she wasn’t sprinting across a battlefield. Her bolter fired at the rapidly approaching Ork, shaking wildly in the air. The burst mostly went wide, with only one shot cracking uselessly against the shabby plate armor on the yak’s side.

“Haw haw! Lookit ‘em run! C’mere, hossy!” the Ork laughed, spurring the yak forward with a kick. “Git da little fuzz-“

Lasers and autogun fire suddenly raked the Nob, originating from the barricade. He roared in anger while a half-dozen lasblasts punched into his chest, and then gurgled pitifully when a solid slug round smacked into his head, knocking him off his mount. The yak started to turn with the shift in weight, confused, and then staggered when a burst of lasers stabbed into its side. The second rider charged ahead, his slugga bucking wildly in his hand.

“Keep going!” Rot Blossom shouted, turning to head off the approaching yak. “I’ve got this!”

Blossom crossed in front of the charging bovine and then stopped suddenly, kicking backward. A power-armored buck crashed into the yak’s head, and the beast immediately tripped while its vision exploded into stars. It fell onto its side and skidded across the ground, while the Nob on top spilled off and rolled.

Blossom spun and fired a burst into the struggling Ork, and the alien’s left arm was torn apart by mass-reactive shells. The Nob flinched, and then responded with an angry lunge with his choppa.

The battered axe nearly took Blossom’s head off, striking the plating against her cheek with sufficient force to knock her off her hooves. She hit the ground on her side, scraping the ferrocrete below.

She scrambled upright as soon as she got her footing again, and the jaw segment of her helmet snapped open. A centipede emerged from her mouth, dripping with mucus and wiggling venomous fangs. As the Ork bellowed and charged, the centipede snaked forward, stretching for the alien’s throat.

Blossom didn’t notice the yak turning on her until it was too late; she hadn’t expected the beast to recover at all, in fact. But yak skulls were impressively thick, and she experienced that density directly when it rammed into her and threw her into the air.

The Nurgle mare yelped and flailed her legs helplessly, her vision spinning along with her body. Then she slammed into a refueling tower, striking the outer casing hard enough to crack her visor. She tumbled down, slamming into several protrusions and tangling her leg in some hosing before striking the ground in a stunned heaped.

The giant centipede fell on top of her a moment later, similarly disoriented. Then it scuttled down and crawled back into the pony’s slack-jawed mouth.

“Take the other side! I’ll try to divert the weapons!” screamed Poison Kiss while she and Breezy Blight pounded across the ferrocrete.

Bullets whipped by and sawed across the ground around them, occasionally cracking against their ceramite shells. The looted battle tank churned forward obliviously, its turret rocking back to fire its main gun at the inert defenses. The Orks atop the vehicle laughed and fired at the ponies, delighting in having small, fast targets to attack.

Kiss slowed enough to aim her boltgun, and then fired a spread into the cluster of greenskins clinging to the hull. One fell off from a wound on his leg, slamming into the tread and then bouncing off onto the ground in front of it. The looted Leman Russ rolled over him without hesitation seconds later.

The Russ’s lascannon fired, and Kiss’s heart jumped into her throat after a spear of blazing red light pulsed between her and Breezy. The laser uselessly struck the side of building the in the rail yard, but Breezy, with her helmet off, felt a warm tingle over her face from the heated air.

“Rot and die, greenskin scum!” Poison Kiss snarled, running around the side of the tank. Her bolter shook and her helmet opened, spitting a stitch of bolter shells and infected spines across the top of the tank. Three more Orks fell from their perch atop the battle tank, either clutching brackish needles or bloody bolt wounds. Only one greenskin remained, hanging onto the rear of the turret.

Breezy bolted past Kiss, and then that remaining Ork jumped into action, leaping off to intercept the mare. He landed directly in her path and started firing his slugga, missing by several feet while he charged.

Regardless of his accuracy, Breezy stumbled to a halt, hesitating at a crucial moment; normally she would simply fly over an obstacle in her path, but with one wing missing she wasn’t able to avoid the alien. He reared back his choppa, and she blasted her well-prepared jet of toxic fog into his face.

The Ork staggered mid-swing, and his blade mercifully passed just centimeters from Breezy’s nose. He started coughing and pushing forward anyway, and the pegasus found herself without any way to evade.

An iron-shod boot slammed into her leg, knocking her onto her side. Her head struck the ground, and for a few seconds everything went hazy. The Ork, still coughing badly, pinned Breezy down with one boot before the pony could stand up.

A searing lance of red light flashed by him, followed by the hiss of rapidly dissolving metal. Kiss, who was just turning her aim onto the greenskin, decided to duck and cover instead.

The Leman Russ exploded, and the Slugga Boy was thrown off of Breezy Blight when several chunks of armor sliced into his back. She flinched away from the detonation, and then craned her head while the noise still echoed in her ears.

“What was that? Did the boys find a lascannon?” the pegasus mumbled.

“I think… no! Look!” Kiss jumped up, slinging her boltgun onto her back. “Sentinels! Coming from across the lots! And Chimeras! Blow me down, we have reinforcements!”

From behind the lander – still grounded, curiously enough – they came. A half-dozen Sentinel walkers strode at the front, picking their targets with the careful discretion and timing of a warrior who had achieved a perfect flanking position. Lascannons and autocannons bracketed the Nob cavalry, knocking the riders off their yak mounts or carving ashen tunnels through both in an instant.

Behind the walkers rolled troop transports. Gleaming Chimera APCs stormed across the lot in front of the lander, racing toward the barricades. Laser fire sprayed from the turrets, spreading wide fans of crimson bolts across the marching infantry. The advance immediately slowed while the less warlike races sought cover, and even the Orks became less enthusiastic about their chances with the arrival of armored resistance.

“Who the blazes is that? Did a quadrant’s defense forces regroup?”

“Those aren’t from the assault force! Those Chimeras look forge-fresh!”

The first of the transports shuddered to a stop in front of the barricades, and immediately the Sentinels moved to a defensive position around the vehicle. It wheeled around immediately, swinging its rear ramp toward the weary defenders. The mag-locks snapped up, and the ramp creaked open.

“Good day, gentlemen,” greeted Norris Delgan, walking down the ramp with his arms clasped behind his back. “I heard there was an evacuation and regrouping in this sector. Evidently, so did the enemy.”

Six more APCs rolled into place next to the command vehicle, slowing to a stop and turning to face oncoming fire.

“Trademaster? Then… these are Merchant Corp vehicles?” asked one of the mercenaries, nearly slack-jawed. “Even the Sentinels?”

“As of today, yes. They are. The Mechanicus would have just let them sit in the manufactorum for want of ‘authorized pilots,’ but promises and investments have a way of circumventing such tiresome rules.” Men wearing blue and black combat armor and holding pulse rifles started rushing past Delgan, taking position around the Chimera.

Then the man frowned, his mustache dipping disapprovingly. “Where are your commanders? I see no rank tags higher than Sergeant.”

“Dead, Trademaster,” replied one such Sergeant.

“Ugh. Embarrassing.” He snapped his fingers in the air while the other transports opened. “Men, it seems the scenario is even more dire than I had anticipated! I will determine a plan of action posthaste, but for now I require my assets defended!”

Delgan drew one sword, pointing it in the direction of the approaching mobs of Orks and rebels. “There lay the enemy. Slaughter them all.”

More soldiers started spilling out of the transports. All of them carried visibly superior wargear to the weary soldiers already defending the sector; sophisticated optics visors, full-body combat armor, fully-equipped grenade belts, and Tau pulse weaponry made each of them thrice the combat threat compared to the mercenaries boasting old autoguns and lasrifles. They crouched beside the APCs and began to return fire, adding lethally accurate pulse volleys to the wide spread of the Chimeras’ multilasers.

Behind them came Fire Warriors.

The mercenaries flinched back at the sight of the aliens rushing to back up Delgan’s human soldiers, taking up points on the firing line along with the others. Some promptly aimed their weapons at the Tau’s backs, but they hesitated to fire. The Fire Warriors didn’t notice, concentrating entirely on the enemy at range.

Norris Delgan did.

“What are you doing? I intended to give you lot a break,” the Trademaster sneered, looking down on one of the soldiers disapprovingly. “If you’re that eager for targets, step up and kill some greenskins.”

The men quickly put up their weapons. None said a word, having no idea in the first place why the other Tau had attacked. As long as these ones stood between them and enemy bullets, the mercenaries were willing to bide their time until they weren’t actively under assault before bringing up the topic.

Not everyone was so patient, however.

“What are the blooming Tau doing here?! Bucking traitors!!”

Delgan swiftly turned to the side, toward the ravaged gate that led into the station. An armored unicorn was standing between the defense pylons in shock, a boltgun hovering over head. A pegasus – tragically missing a wing, it seemed – stood behind her. The lack of a helmet on the second mare revealed an expression of shock and quickly rising anger.

Delgan wasn’t completely surprised when the levitating boltgun lowered itself into a firing angle, presumably aimed at the backs of the Fire Warriors. He still didn’t know exactly why, however, and this had the scent of a tragic misunderstanding.

Delgan’s body moved in a blur, crossing the meters between him and the ponies so quickly that they flinched back in surprise. That brief moment of hesitation may have saved lives, and Delgan smacked the flat of his power sword against the barrel of the boltgun to tilt it upward.

“Would you like to explain why you’re about to summarily execute those soldiers, Miss…”

“Kiss! My name is Kiss!” Poison Kiss snapped, pulling her boltgun away from the man’s sword. “And those Tau are traitors!”

Delgan raised an eyebrow. Breezy Blight hurried to explain.

“A grayskin combat group marched in earlier! They turned on us in an instant; took us completely by surprise! Wiped out our command, our armored support, and then captured the lander over there!” She pointed to the massive transport vessel still parked in the vast ferrocrete lots.

“Hmm. Curious,” Delgan mumbled, drawing a finger over the metal implant along his jaw. “It seems our little vassals are making a break for it. I wouldn’t have thought they’d have the gall.”

“Well, they did, and thanks to them this has all gone pear-shaped. We need to get rid of those other sods, before they turn on us too!” Kiss growled, trying to aim her bolter again.

Again, Delgan calmly pushed the weapon away with his sword. “Let’s not. These Tau have had their communication systems replaced with our vox networks so they can’t speak to each other without us hearing. They were also vital to helping put down several of those canines who were trying to break into a weapons cache, and right now they’re standing between my last escape route and an Ork horde. I think questioning their loyalties can wait.”

A third pony staggered up to the Trademaster, walking with a slight limp. It wasn’t obvious, at a glance, whether her gait was due to armor damage or an injury that her power armor couldn’t correct for.

“What about the grayskins in the lander?! If you have something that can cut open the landing bay, we can stop them!” Blossom pleaded.

Delgan frowned. “… You said it was a combat group? Not just a single squad?”

“No. Dozens of Fire Warriors, along with heavy battlesuit support!” Breezy explained. “If you have some detcharges, we can probably take them by surprise!”

“Pass,” Delgan said blithely. “It’s not my lander. They can have it.”

“Trademaster!” Kiss scolded.

“I have limited resources, no current orders, and civilian personnel following the armor for evacuation,” Delgan sniffed. “I will not overextend myself so easily.”

An explosion came from the battle line, and Delgan whirled around. One of the Chimeras had been torn open, and a large puff of dark smoke was rising into the dirty gray clouds above. Across the lots, where the enemy was taking cover, Delgan spotted a minotaur puzzling over how to reload a missile launcher.

“Someone put down those heavy weapons!” the Trademaster barked. “We don’t have the armor to spare right now! It’s a damned long walk to the nearest village!”

He snorted, then eyed the mares next to him. “Miss Kiss, I encourage you to keep careful watch on our auxiliaries for any signs of treachery. But for now, we have other aliens that require your ordnance. Pick a hostile target and open fire at once.”

Poison Kiss hissed through clenched teeth, but after a few seconds she swiveled toward the Orks and floated her boltgun into place. “After this is over, I expect to get this Tau business sorted, Trademaster.”

“I will see to it, Miss Kiss,” Delgan assured her, drawing his other power sword. “For now, let’s excise this filth from our city.”

****

Primary changeling hive cluster

Assault line Delta

“Unbelievable! Are the Techpriests from the main cluster still not back?! Our home fortress is under attack and they’re still meandering around the frakking caves! Get your men BACK here, or I’ll leave them in the dust! It took long enough to extract the Astartes from the lower caverns when they wanted to complete the demolition of the hive!”

General Harlin seethed loudly while he paced back and forth in front of his command vehicle. Several armed men and Dark Techpriests watched him pace, their moods ranging from bemused to exasperated.

“General Harlin, all strategis estimates suggest that further delays will generate negligible difference in tactical outcome,” one cloaked figure droned. “The Techpriests will need to be inspected and cleared to check for infiltrators, and we-“

“Damn your estimates and delays!” Harlin snarled. “No ‘strategis estimates’ accounted for a native insurgency penetrating our fortress defenses and shutting down our autoturret manifold! Every second you waste means lives and material lost! Check their internal IFF signums when they get back, and then prepare for immediate departure! Conduct further security checks later!”

Behind the General, a pink Dreadnought was leaning on a Rhino and tapping a giant metal finger against the top impatiently.

“So… should the rest of us just go on ahead? Dash and Tellis already left!” Pinkie noted.

“No. Nobody else is going ahead,” Harlin said decisively. “I have practically no intel on what’s happening or how. This could be an elaborate feint, or the insurgents may have already been disposed of. I’ll not have units ranging ahead to stumble into danger, or units lagging behind to be ambushed the moment my attention is elsewhere.”

“It’s a long trip back to Ferrous Dominus,” growled Dest, who stood next the APC Pinkie was leaning on. “Much longer if we must be on guard for ambushes. If the enemy really has taken the command center already, we can expect the battle to be over by the time we get back, and hostiles manning our defenses.”

“We have sufficient forces to penetrate the front gates and launch an assault if Ferrous Dominus is no longer ours,” Harlin said grimly. “The xenos will be unable to turn our autoturrets and other active defenses against us.”

“So you hope,” Dest rumbled, “if the enemy somehow disabled them, it is hardly impossible.”

“General! General Harlin!” shouted an APC gunner. “Skyborne contacts at five o’clock!”

Harlin whirled around, searching the air while he fumbled for his monocular. Two Hydra anti-air tanks swiveled their turrets around, bracketing the approach of several dark specks in the distance.

“Permission to open fire?” barked a voice from the vox.

Harlin pressed his monocular over his eyes, and then swiftly zoomed in on the approaching bodies.

“… Negative. Hold fire. It’s just some pegasi.” He paused. “And… Princess Celestia. Approaching on an intercept course.”

The General frowned, and then turned to look at Dest. The driver nodded and pulled his boltgun from his hip.

“All units, prepare for immediate assault,” Dest growled into his vox. “We may be seeing our ambush already.”

“Wait, what? What are we doing?” Pinkie’s Dreadnought straightened in alarm. All around her, soldiers were taking cover or forming up firing lines with their weapons at the ready. “What was that about an ambush? Why would Princess Celestia ambush us?”

“We’re assaulting a nest of shapeshifters, have just received unlikely news that happens to demand we depart immediately with all haste, and are preparing to receive an unexpected visit by an unlikely ally who possesses no validated ident-codes at this critical time,” Harlin pointed out, letting his hand rest on the grip of his bolt pistol. “These circumstances are… inauspicious. I dislike being tugged this way and that at the whim of cowardly xenos.”

“Tacticae analysis: Targets are in small arms range, General. Most are armed with standard-pattern lasguns and approaching at combat speed,” noted a Dark Techpriest.

“If you see so much as a single lasblast from that squadron, tear them from the skies,” Harlin sniffed. “But until then… be ready.” Then he turned toward the pink Contemptor. “That goes for you, too, Equinought.”

“Right! Yes!” Pinkie Pie quickly swiveled around and brought her butcher cannon to bear. “Ready to blast them to itty-bitty pieces, General! But hoping not to! Because I’m pretty sure those are our friends and loved ones!”

“YOUR friends and loved ones. Just have your weapons primed and aimed.” Harlin grumbled.

Then he suddenly kicked a foot to the side, banging it against an invisible shell of metal. Fluttershy yelped in fear as her cloaking field collapsed, briefly rendering her visible to everyone else in the convoy.

“That goes for you too, medicae. A stun grenade in the middle of the formation may be critical to averting a first strike.” He tilted his head thoughtfully. “In fact, I may have you do that regardless. It’s not as if your weapons are lethal.”

“Oh, uhm, I uh, I don’t feel totally comfortable with, er, shooting grenades at Princess Celestia at all,” Fluttershy stuttered.

“Hush,” Harlin replied. “They’re here.”

Princess Celestia flapped her wings steadily while her altitude dropped, slowing the spearhead for a landing.

Two dozen pegasi flew with her, all of them wearing flak armor, ballistic harnesses, and attached lasguns. The wargear had been modified significantly since it had first been issued, however; the flak plating was painted over in golden yellow, and bright crimson crests had been attached to helmets. Some of the ponies had gone further, decorating the drab, industrial equipment with rank markings and painting on their cutie marks, while others carried more elaborate blades than the simple adamantium-core combat knives that had been issued to the Equestrians months ago.

Celestia herself wore a golden peytral with a set of banded golden greaves. A silken shroud wafted around her body, seeming to refract the light and generate strange splashes of color over its surface. The barding was less extensive and effective than the suit she had worn during the battle at Ponyville, but that armor hadn’t survived the event so she’d had to settle for something more formal and ornamental. Its magical protection was minor; it wouldn’t protect her from anything stronger than a lasblast at best. She felt it displayed an image of graceful royal dignity, however.

So it was all the more galling that when she landed in front of the assault convoy, Princess Celestia found herself staring at dozens of weapons pointed at her.

“What is the meaning of this?!” Celestia asked, her eyes widening. The lasguns were bad enough, but she could see that the tanks and heavy weapons troops were also swiveling their guns to bear on her. “I am Princess Celestia! Please, stand down! I’m your ally!”

“That remains to be seen,” Harlin said sharply.

Celestia blinked. “You’re not sure if I’m your ally?” As much as she’d protested against the idea in the past, it was unusual to hear the sentiment from a human.

“I’m not sure you’re Princess Celestia,” the General clarified. “I expect some sort of verification, Princess. Then we can discuss what you’re doing here. And make it quick, please; I’m very short on time.”

Celestia gaped for a few seconds, and then deflated with a sigh. “You think we’re changelings? Of course not!”

“This is an insult!” barked a pegasus Sergeant, bristling. “Princess Celestia led us here to save you!”

General Harlin quirked an eyebrow. “Really. To save us.”

“That is, incidentally, what one would expect a changeling minion to say,” Dest noted. He calmly brought his boltgun into firing position.

Near the back of the gun line, Daniels watched the confrontation silently, keeping his weapon up and aimed at Celestia.

Then he suddenly dropped his aim, secured his rail rifle, and started walking toward the nearest Dark Techpriest.

“Okay, wait! I’ve got it!” Pinkie Pie chimed in, suddenly taking a heavy step forward. “Princess! Tell us something only Princess Celestia would know!”

Celestia recoiled slightly, but then pursed her lips. While she was upset at this reception, she could hardly blame the General for his caution; really, she was quietly impressed he had predicted such an underhanded strategy when it hadn’t even occurred to her.

“Very well. This is embarrassing, but lives hang in the balance,” Celestia admitted.

“Primarily yours,” Dest pointed out.

“Quite. So.” The white alicorn cleared her throat. “I don’t like to admit this, but… I have quite an obsession with cake.”

Silence met her admission, and several of the pony soldiers gave the Princess incredulous looks.

“Really, it’s like an addiction!” Celestia said, her cheeks flushing. “I have to give my assistants special authority to override my orders to the kitchen to keep me from eating too much! Thrice a week is all I’m allowed!”

“Can you come up with something a little more secret than that?” Pinkie Pie asked. “I mean, I guess the humans didn’t know, but…”

“I knew that, actually,” Dest interjected again. “The Cakes are terrible gossips.”

Daniels leaned over toward the Dark Techpriest and whispered something. The cyborg listened quietly, and then nodded. A mechatendril reached down and wriggled through his robes for a moment, and then pulled out a taser goad.

Daniels took the goad, and then started walking over to the Royal Guard.

“Why exactly are you even here?” General Harlin interrupted, drumming his fingers against his sword hilt. “You think to save us? How? A handful of equines are hardly a substantial addition to my forces, and it’s not the enemy’s military strength that’s the problem.”

“Yes, I know!” Celestia agreed, eagerly seizing on the new topic. “I got news of the attack on Ferrous Dominus in Canterlot and knew that most of your power was diverted elsewhere! I can help you return to your city immediately!”

This got the humans’ attention, and several of them lowered their weapons.

“Oh? All of us? Including our armored support? How?” demanded the General.

“I can link a magic gateway to my sister! Luna is still in your fortress, correct? All you need to do is step into the portal and you will emerge in Ferrous Dominus!” Celestia explained, her horn flickering.

Several guns promptly went up again, and the alicorn’s muzzle scrunched up. She killed her magic output immediately, and her horn stopped glowing.

“… So your plan is to create a… psychic gateway, so you say… and my force is to walk into it?” Harlin asked, his brow furrowing.

Celestia suppressed a groan. “General, please, I realize you have good reason to be cautious, but so much is at stake!”

“I really feel like we could go back to my idea,” Pinkie Pie volunteered, raising the arm of her Dreadnought into the air. “Remember that? The ‘thing that only Celestia would know’ plan? We can try again!”

“How would that help? I can’t verify any such information!” Harlin pointed out.

“But I can! Probably!”

“You’re hardly an objective source. Why should I believe that you know more about the Princess than a skilled infiltrator would?”

“Silly! I’m an Element of Harmony!”

“… And that means… what?”

Daniels walked past the General while he argued, holding up the fork-tipped taser goad and twisting a dial on the handle.

The Royal Guard seemed to dismiss him while he approached, more concerned, understandably, with the various cannons and rifles aimed at them. Still, the mercenary got a few odd glances when he stopped next to the nearest guard, which turned to alarmed gasps when he touched the goad’s fork against a pony’s wing.

“GYAAA-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH!!” screamed the guard, flailing violently from the electric discharge. Loose feathers and smoke that smelled like cooking meat curled into the air as he staggered, and then the stallion collapsed into a twitching heap.

“… Nope. Not a changeling,” Daniels announced, tapping the goad against the ground. “Sorry about that mate. Had to make sure.” The guard groaned.

Celestia stared hard at General Harlin, who pursed his lips.

“That proves THAT guard was not a changeling. It hardly seems beyond their abilities to trick a contingent of equine soldiers to defend them by imitating their sovereign,” Harlin pointed out.

“General, please!” Celestia shouted in exasperation.

“I suppose I could try zapping the Princess, but if I hurt her that might prevent her from doing the gateway thing, for all I know,” Daniels pointed out.

A Royal Guard jumped up immediately, hovering in front of the mercenary and drawing his sword from its sheathe. “You dare to threaten Princess Celestia, scoundrel?! She raced here to help you ungrateful apes, and you jus-“

The other ponies flinched away and pinned their ears down as Daniels tapped the taser goad against the guard’s leg. Several seconds and much screaming later, a second pegasus fell to the ground in a quivering heap.

“So neither of these are changelings, then. I think this squad is legit at least, General,” Daniels said, turning around and heading back to the Dark Techpriest.

General Harlin’s expression betrayed nothing while he stared at Celestia. The white Princess stared back, her gaze firm but silently pleading.

“Make a decision, General,” Dest growled, flexing the claws of his gauntlet. “The last of the Techpriests are being cleared now. We depart on foot, or we step through the portal.”

“… Very well. We will accept your assistance, Princess,” Harlin said finally. “Establish the gateway.”

“Good. And YOU’RE WELCOME,” Celestia said irritably before her horn began to glow.

“You’ll have my thanks when and if something good comes of this,” Harlin said curtly, turning toward his command vehicle. “I must relay new orders to the convoy. It seems we’ll be fighting a defensive today.”

“Hooray, kind of!” Pinkie cheered.

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 15

Armor lots

“THOU! SHALT! FALTER! BEFORE! US! ALIEN!”

Luna’s voice boomed across the sector while the Iron Gage hammered a heavily armored Mek into the ground, punctuating every word with an earthshaking punch. Bullets whipped by her in every direction, occasionally bouncing off her plating in small bursts of sparks. Ork corpses littered the ground in various states of immolation and dismemberment. Several vehicles burned or lay in pieces, having been blasted apart or in the process of being looted by the greenskins.

Luna slapped the flatted Mek away, and then flinched away from a spray of lasblasts across her side. A squad of griffons were hovering overhead, bombarding her from what they hoped was outside the range of retaliation.

Luna craned her head up toward the fliers, and an arc of bright blue power lashed across her horn.

The griffons scattered immediately in terror. The Orks, however, saw the brief pause in the big, armored horse smashing them, and decided this must have meant they had the upper hand.

“WAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!” Slugga Boys flooded around and over the various parked vehicles, making a mad sprint toward Luna’s back while their airborne allies darted to safety.

The Princess of the Night turned to face them, and black lightning flashed between her horn and the Iron Gage. Then it crashed into the oncoming horde in a chain of rapid bolts, slaying the front line in a matter of seconds.

“Although We admire the Orks’ tenacity to some grudging extent, thy kind’s haste to leap to thy doom hath grown tiresome,” Luna mused aloud.

One gauntlet rocketed forward, punching into the unit’s Nob and crushing him against the side of a Hellhound flame tank.

“To think that even now, thy ilk wouldst-“

“LUNA! Luna, are you there?!”

Luna recoiled in surprise, whinnying slightly.

“Who speaks?! Reveal yourself!” Luna shouted. Her Iron Gage kept pounding at the Orks, smashing boyz apart with long swings and pulverizing impacts.

“Luna, it’s Celestia! Thank goodness this spell worked! It’s been ages since I’d attempted this connection.”

“Sister? ‘Tis truly thee? Salutations!” Luna shouted. Then she fired a lance of darkness forward, skewering another pair of greenskins. “We art quite occupied at this juncture, however. Might thee call us back at a more convenient time?”

“I can only imagine, Luna. But this can’t wait. I know that Ferrous Dominus is being invaded. I can help!”

“Thou… can?” Luna mumbled, hesitating.

Then a heavy bolter round slammed into her flank, almost knocking her over.

“Yes! Listen, do you remember that spell we used during the Equineox? To surprise that Duke by bringing his family home some… oh, what was it… 1300 years ago? Does that sound right?”

Luna summoned a barrier briefly, and then checked for the gunner. A minotaur with a heavy bolter was standing on top of a parked Leman Russ for a better firing angle.

“Anyway! I’ve found my way to the assault convoy that the Company sent to attack the changeling hive! If we open a linked gateway, then we can send the convoy back to the city immediately, and they can help you fight!”

“Splendid idea!” Luna shouted, watching the minotaur. “We shalt extricate ourselves from battle in but a moment!” Another Slugga Boy charging at her was seized by the Iron Gage, and the gauntlet lifted the alien into the air before slamming it back down against the ferrocrete.

A few seconds later the heavy bolter fell quiet, having sucked up the last of the munitions from its ammo belt. The minotaur squeezed the trigger handle a few more times, snorting irritably at the futile clicking coming from his weapon.

Before he could start reloading, Luna’s horn flashed, swapping her barrier for a different enchantment. A spiral of magic runes appeared in front of the tank, etched into the ferrocrete surface in gloomy blue flame and swelling to form some indecipherable pattern. The bovine warrior hesitated for barely a second when he spotted the magical light, and then turned to jump away.

Tendrils of black shot from the ground and lashed around the minotaur, seizing his legs and holding tight. The massive biped grunted and dropped the heavy bolter, and then he gripped the Russ’s turret to try to pull himself free by force.

Before he could, two thestrals burst out from under the tank, taking to the air and then diving at the minotaur. Blades punched into his back and legs, and the warrior’s howls of rage were soon drowned out by the amplified screeching of his assailants.

“We believe We hast dispatched the last of the foes in the vicinity,” Luna announced while the Iron Gage electrocuted another Ork. “Be warned! The greenskins art everywhere, and aided by numerous warriors hailing from our treacherous neighbors! We must take to battle at once when reinforcements arrive!”

“Of course. I’m already beginning the spell on my end. Seek out my magic thread and begin opening a gateway.”

Luna took a deep breath, and the Iron Gage slowly lowered itself onto the ground, lying flat while she closed her eyes. Her horn pulsed. Glowing motes of light gathered around her armor. The eyes of the Iron Skull over her breast dimmed. Her own eyes flashed with eldritch light. The Chimera behind her exploded.

That last part wasn’t part of the casting, and Luna was bowled over painfully when a chunk of burning armor plate slammed into her rear. A fireball bloomed over the devastated vehicle, and the guttural laughter of happy Orks came from behind the smoke.

“… Luna? Hello? Did you just scream? What’s wrong?”

“Rrrrrrgh!” Luna lurched upright and sent a burst of fireballs arcing through the column of smoke, exploding out of sight. A rokkit flew back toward her, spiraling wildly and zooming over her head.

“The field hast not yet been cleared!” Luna growled. “Hold whilst We dispatch these new foes!”

“Can you flee to a safer place? This spell isn’t easy, and it will be much easier to fight the enemies later with all the troops we have waiting here.”

“… Nay.” The relief of the Iron Skull on her chest glowed, and Luna’s eyes narrowed. “We hast identified another means. We will be but a moment, Sister.”

“Okay, but please, be careful! Do hurry, though. General Harlin is quite impatient and most of the tanks are still aiming at me.”

Luna leapt high into the air, spreading her armored wings and the glimmering crystals floating at their edges. The Iron Gage orbited around her, thrumming with magic. She flew into the smoke, and then emerged beyond it. A half-dozen Tankbustas were scattered about a line of battle tanks, clambering over them and scavenging ordnance. A pair of Meks worked on one such tank, cutting the entry hatch open with a torch so that they could abscond with the vehicle.

“We request several volunteers to perish in a most unpleasant manner!” Luna shouted, glaring down at the aliens below. “Whom shalt serve to fuel our fell magicks?”

It wasn’t clear whether the Orks understood her, but it didn’t really matter. Most of the Tankbustas looked up and took aim with their rokkit launchas, sending a volley of heavy explosives up at the armored pony.

“Thy cooperation ‘tis most appreciated!” Luna snarled, her eyes flashing and her horn pulsing.

An aura of dark magic exploded around her, spreading quickly over the twisting rokkits. Every projectile froze in the air, its engine sputtering out instantly and impossibly. The magic pulse passed, and the warheads promptly fell, dropping to the ground.

Naturally, every rokkit exploded on contact with the ferrocrete, and a rolling chain of explosions ripped through the lot in front of the Tankbustas. Half the boyz perished, pulverized by their own munitions, and even the survivors were knocked off their feet from the force.

Luna landed heavily, and her gaze turned toward the Meks. The Iron Gage floated after her, and one gauntlet formed a fist and slammed into the palm of the other.

Both Meks drew their sluggas and started shooting, but their efforts were useless. A shadowy lance of energy sliced off the pistol arm of one Ork, while the Iron Gage snatched up the other and threw him onto the ground at Luna’s hooves.

“Thy kind once fueled the salvation of this world with thy wretched souls,” Luna spat. Her horn’s magic flickered, it’s color shifting from blue to bright crimson. “Mayhaps again, thy death can be of use to us.” The eyes of the Iron Skull on her chest glimmered.

The Iron Gage poked a single finger into the Ork’s chest, and a flash of red lit the tip of the digit. The Ork snarled as seams of crimson started spreading over his skin from the contact, branching out like the roots of a tree. He started beating at the gauntlet with his wrench and slugga, trying to knock the Gage away.

“Oi! Git da hoss!” growled the other Mek, leaping at Luna and swinging his wrench with his remaining arm.

Luna bucked at him, and the massive wrench met adamantium horseshoes with a noisy crash. The Ork recoiled, managing to keep his grip, but he was still off-balance when the free hand of the Iron Gage seized his shoulder and flung him on top of the other Ork.

A Tankbusta rushed at her, only to get blasted by a ray of crimson magic. He collapsed onto the ground in a twitching heap, his rokkit launcha tumbling from his fingers. A moment later he was seized by the Iron Gage, and then dragged on top of the two other Orks.

The black gauntlets sought out the remaining survivors, tossing them onto the pile of injured greenskins. Below the struggling aliens, seams of crimson light had spread from the first Ork into the ground, slowly spreading outward over the ferrocrete. The magic seemed to send the aliens into a senseless stupor, and they thrashed blindly within the ritual circle without making any actual effort to stand up and flee.

The Iron Gage backhanded a Tankbusta into the side of an APC, and then dragged him toward the pile. Luna’s levitation reached out to a different greenskin, tilting his rokkit launcha up into the air just before he fired. The rokkit blasted upward, darting into the soot clouds above with no ill effect. Luna’s magic wrenched the launcha from the Ork’s hands, and then clubbed him with his own weapon. The warrior, already badly injured, still took three blows to the head before he staggered, and then the Iron Gage plucked him from the ground.

“Sister! We shalt open the gateway posthaste!” Luna announced. She could already hear more Orks nearby, running alongside the rows of armored vehicles and hooting in-between bursts of gunfire. “Beware of thy footing! The portal grounds may be somewhat cluttered.”

“I’m ready, Luna. Open it quickly, and we’ll be able to help!”

An Ork had his arm crushed by the Iron Gage, and another was blasted by a tendril of darkness that wrapped around his face and legs and immobilized him. The gauntlets pulled both warriors off their feet and threw them into the pile behind Luna. She paused to stare at the collection of writhing aliens, and then nodded sharply. Bullets still whipped by her head and plinked off of her armor, but Luna shut her mind to the combatants that were outside of her immediate reach. Her horn began to glow again, and the seams of red beneath the Orks flashed brightly.

“We realize that such sentiment ‘tis worthless to thy kind,” Luna quipped while one gauntlet floated over the pile, “but in this manner thy deaths may aid a useful cause rather than some forlorn hope of conquest. We thank thee for thy assistance, unwilling as it is. Now… let thy torments rend space and time, and speed our allies to our side!”

The ground cracked sharply under the Orks, and the slowly expanding runes doubled in size in an instant. Intertwining loops and strangely geometric spirals overlapped each other, and the outermost threads of seething red stuck out from the center in eight directions. The Orks continued to writhe, but now their bodies started to wither and deflate, and a pale, luminescent mist poured from their mouths and eyes.

Luna could swear she heard laughter somewhere in the background while she turned away from the ritual. She didn’t bother to think on it; there were more Orks strafing her and a pair of Stormboyz descending with sluggas bucking wildly in their hands. In the short time her attention had been diverted, many more enemies had arrived.

The Iron Gage caught one Stormboy with a haymaker, slamming its knuckles into the greenskin with explosive force. The other gauntlet stopped a second jump trooper from carving into Luna’s face as he landed, blocking the attack with a noisy crash of metal. Luna reared up and blasted the Stormboy with a magic beam, but by the time the alien’s corpse hit the ground there were more Stormboyz landing around her.

“Begone, knaves!” Luna howled. Legs bucked and metal clashed against metal. Magic thrummed all around the alicorn, piercing and burning her enemies with brief pulses of thought. One after another the Orks were pulverized, littering the ground around her hooves with their bloodied remains.

Soon only the Nob remained, and that Ork was seized around the neck and shoulder by a gauntlet before being slammed against the side of an APC.

“Where art they leaders, mongrel? Which Warboss is responsible for this travesty?!” Luna loomed over the warrior menacingly, and the Iron Gage squeezed. The metal collar of the Nob’s shabby armor crumpled and bones started to crack, but the Ork merely snarled and clawed at the fingers around him.

Luna, already quite tired and irritated, resisted the urge to simply squash the alien. Her eyes flashed, and mana danced around her horn. “Speak! Thou hast failed, and thy doom is nigh! Who is thy master?!”

A muted booming noise came from behind her. The sound was loud and close enough to discern clearly from all the other noise in the immediate area, but not so much that Luna let it distract her from her interrogation.

At least, not until a battle cannon shell landed on the Nob she was restraining.

The explosion obliterated the Ork in an instant and sent the Iron Gage skidding across the lot. Luna was bowled over by the shock wave, and her armor shrieked against the ground while she scraped to a stop on her side. Even after stopping she remained still for several seconds, completely stunned; the flash, noise, and explosive pressure had knocked her senseless. While her magic shielding had protected her head from being physically crushed, it did little against the sensory overload.

When the Princess did collect her senses and stand up, she saw a Leman Russ battle tank rumbling toward her some twenty meters away. At first she was confused, wondering if the tank had simply fired on the Ork without realizing that she had been interrogating it or that she had been in the blast zone. Only when an Ork popped his head out of the (conspicuously absent) top hatch did she realize that the shot had been a near-miss, not an imprudent attack of opportunity.

“By the stars! We take our eyes off thee for but a moment and thou art already absconding with our armored cohorts!” Luna complained. She had done her best to contain the Ork threat in the lots, but there was simply so much space and so many reserve vehicles that the Meks had apparently managed to hijack one right under her nose.

One of the heavy bolter sponsons came alive, spraying an arc of fire across Luna’s legs. The explosive bolts crashed against her plating in bursts of fiery scarlet, leaving small dents behind but failing to breach the outer plating. The Iron Gage swung in front of Luna, shielding her head from the barrage while she waited for the battle cannon to fire again.

A few seconds later it did, and the turret rocked back behind a puff of flame. The shell sailed high, arcing to fly well over Luna’s head, but she had no intention of letting the ordnance land without intervention anyway. Her horn flashed, and the battle cannon shell froze in the air, suspended in an aura of glittering blue just above her horn.

The Iron Gage leapt up next to the munition and flicked the edge, spinning it around to point at the looted tank. Then it swung behind the shell, rearing back as if it were preparing to punch it. Which it did, slamming its obsidian knuckles into the projectile and sending it sailing back on a stream of crackling azure power.

The shell hammered the tank’s front plating hard, but before Luna could assess the damage or attack again she heard another Orkish battle cry from behind. A loud hiss followed the angry howl, which seemed strange until the dark alicorn was engulfed in the flames of an inferno cannon.

The Princess yelped and bolted away, feeling the fire sear her cheeks and neck past the protections of her magic. Bullets of a wide mix of calibers careened around her while she flailed, occasionally bouncing off her ebony plating with a metallic crack. The Leman Russ, having shaken off her attack, lurched forward toward the alicorn, aiming to crush her beneath its treads.

“Halt, villain!” barked Luna, summoning the Iron Gage back to her. One gauntlet was still lying too far away for her to pick up easily, but the other launched forward through the air and slammed into the tank’s left track like a crimson rocket. The outer shielding buckled, and the vehicle ground to a halt as metal crumpled and tore from the treads.

With the vehicle slowed, Luna spared a glance behind her. A Hellhound flame tank was creeping from a row of similar vehicles, its top hatch conspicuously missing. The Hellhound’s inferno cannon was still rebuilding pressure after its last shot, but the tank hull-mounted heavy bolter roared to life as soon as the alicorn was within its arc of fire.

A wild spray sawed across the ground at her hooves, and Luna lost her balance briefly when one shell cracked against her knee and nearly sent her tumbling. The Hellhound shuddered to a stop while she regained her footing, and its main weapon swiveled about and took aim again.

“TIME TO GET THIS PARTY STARTED!! WOOOOO!!”

The odd battle cry was accompanied by a stitch of cannon shots that tore into the Hellhound’s side. Armor plating folded and collapsed under the brutal impacts, and one shell punched into the tank’s fuel reserves, ripping it free of the chassis and sending it flying. The fuel tanks detonated before they hit the ground, splattering the Hellhound with spinning hoops of liquid fire. Some of the blazing fluid spilled inside the shattered entry hatch, and the vehicle suddenly made a sharp, wild turn as angry Orkish bellows came from inside.

“ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?!?!” Pinkie Pie’s Contemptor Dreadnought sprinted across the lots, its butcher cannon roaring and crazed laughter booming from its vox.

The Hellhound didn’t manage to get its bearing before the assault walker reached it, and Pinkie swung her power fist directly into the cockpit. The hull armor and superstructure crumpled immediately under the force of the impact, rendering the Ork hijackers indistinguishable from the mess of shredded hull and components around them.

“Got one!” Pinkie chirped, wrenching her Dreadnought’s arm free before kicking the ruined Hellhound away.

“Miss Pie! Thou hast returned!” Luna shouted while the Iron Gage ripped a heavy bolter sponson off the side of the looted Leman Russ. “The gateway hath opened!”

“Yupperooni!” Pinkie twisted toward the looted battle tank and loosed another salvo with her butcher cannon. Shells larger than a man’s fist pounded the front of the tank, further chewing apart the heavy front armor. “The others were arguing over who should go first, so I ran in! The portal works!”

The looted Russ fired its battle cannon again, causing Luna to flinch away from the noise. Pinkie jumped to the side just in time, shaking the ground with her landing as the shell sailed past.

“WOOO! Close one!” the mare laughed while the shell detonated behind her.

“WAAAAAAAAAGH!!” The roar of an Ork charge came from the far end of the lot, and Pinkie’s helmet visor picked up dozens of new greenskins sprinting between the parked vehicles. Incidentally, they all registered as friendly units to her visor too, but like most of the Equinoughts she mostly ignored the data readouts from her reticule.

“Miss Pie! Art thine allies coming?” The Iron Gage fired a screaming beam of power into the enemy Russ at near point-blank range, finally breaking through the last of the armor layers and pulverizing the crew. “Though surely we possess strength enough to turn back this tide, further aid would be most appreciated!”

“Yeah! Probably! I mean… They were actually talking about how whoever goes first should step back through to let them know that the gateway worked, so… maybe?” Her butcher cannon shuddered while it cut a line of devastation across the enemy ranks, littering the ground with heavy casings. “Should I go back? I can go back.”

“Nay! Hold thy ground!” Luna bellowed, flattening a Slugga Boy with the Iron Gage. The other gauntlet swiped in an arc in front of her, swatting away another pair of warriors. “We shalt smite the alien and deny them the Company’s armaments! We cannot falter!”

Two Orks riding yaks bolted around a line of APCs, bellowing their war cries while loosing their shootas into Pinkie’s side. Bullets scraped and hammered the plating over her Dreadnought’s arm, and then they split apart before racing around her.

She swiped at the Nob in front of her, the massive fingers of her power fist coming close enough to singe the alien’s back. The yak swerved away, though, keeping its rider from the walker’s clutches. The Ork swiveled around in his seat, laughing while he sprayed shoota fire across her front plating.

The Nob diverting behind her went largely unnoticed, at least until he launched himself off of his mount and landed on the Contemptor’s back. Pressure sensors alerted the cockpit to a rogue presence, but Pinkie didn’t take notice until she heard a shoota fire into the engine block. The sound of dozens of ricochets rang through the cockpit, and several icons flashed on her output display.

“Hey! C’mon, I just got here! You can’t wreck me already!” A rokkit spiraled overhead and crashed into the ground, and she swiftly turned toward a Tankbusta who had broken cover. A single shot from her butcher cannon tore the Ork in half, and his smoldering rokkit launcha bounced across the bloodstained ground.

Another burst of gunfire to her rear, and an icon started flashing red. “Uh oh. That looks important.” She squinted at the damage rune while her cannon continued to carve through the enemy mobs. “I can’t believe this thing didn’t come with an instruction manual! There’s so many doohickeys and not even any buttons or anything!”

She swung her Dreadnought around, swinging again for the yak-mounted Nob making another pass. This time she connected, and the rider was flattened into a sizzling paste before being flung away across the lot. Another volley from her gun cut into a slugga mob, obliterating two warriors before the rest scattered back into cover. Luna had been surrounded further down, but the alicorn was a veritable whirlwind of ebony metal and crimson flashes, picking apart the aliens as fast as they approached.

The pressure sensors again alerted Pinkie Pie to the Nob moving on top of her. She swung the torso sharply to the right, trying to loosen the Ork, but soon she heard the sound of something hammering at her walker’s helmet.

“Aw, fudgemuffins,” Pinkie groaned, hearing the helmet seals start to crack under the strain of the Ork’s blows. Seconds later a knife stabbed through the seam into the cockpit, and she flinched away and squeaked as the jagged blade levered the helmet off.

The Nob yanked his stabby choppa out of the breach, and then pried the helmet off. “I gotcha now, ya squishy-“

A banana cream pie flew out of the cockpit, slapping into his face. Then Pinkie pulled the helmet closed again.

The Nob hesitated a moment in bewilderment, then wiped his face off with an arm. “Wot da zog is… wuz dat a hoss?” he could have sworn he saw something bright pink before his vision had been obscured by whipped cream.

While it didn’t seem like such a stretch that the spikies were making horse dreads given that they already had horses in power armor, it was still a bit galling and slightly worrisome. The Orks hadn’t had the best of luck fighting horses on this planet, particularly that big black one with the floaty star hair currently tearing apart the supporting mobs. It was starting to make some of the more superstitious greenskins nervous. And now the equines were piloting the enemy’s biggest, stompiest battle walkers?

The Nob was still contemplating the pony-manned Dreadnought and what to do about it when a rail rifle blasted through the back of his head.

“Void’s breath, it’s a mess over here,” Daniels grumbled, staring down at the pile of gore under his boots. Electric arcs sizzled across the accelerator tines of his rail rifle, fairly worn after seeing so much use in a day.

“Daniels! You made it!” Pinkie Pie cheered, her voice booming from the Contemptor’s amplified vox grille. “Then they didn’t decide that I had been disintegrated or dropped into some trap and kill Princess Celestia in revenge! Yay!”

“What?!” Luna jerked her head around in alarm. “Wherefore doth thee-OW!” She flinched back from a slugga shot that was barely deflected from her eye, and then shook her head. The Iron Gage descended on the Ork responsible, crushing him between their palms.

“Yeah, no one really expected you to check back. There was quite a fuss about the next person to go through, though. Not everyone is as expendable as you, I guess.” Daniels turned back toward the shimmering crimson gateway and stuck his head inside. “Hey, it works! Just watch your step, because there’s an awful lot of WHOA!”

Daniels lurched backward from the portal, scrambling to get out of the way before a power-armored body sprinted out of the red-tinted gloom.

Dest didn’t pause noticeably after emerging into Ferrous Dominus, charging straight ahead toward the battle while his fingers stretched into claws. “Yet again we must purge the greenskin filth from the streets!” The pilot shouted, his voice booming from a vox grille bracketed by iron fangs.

“I know, right? I feel like we JUST did this!” Pinkie voiced her agreement as the Iron Warrior bounded past her toward the Ork battle lines.

“Advance! Break the enemy formation! Shatter their leaders, then slay the survivors!” Dest snarled while he ran.

“Wheeeeeeeee!” Pinkie shouted, her Contemptor bounding after the possessed Astartes.

Dest reached the Orks first, diving deep into a mob while his limbs scythed all around him. Three greenskins fell in the first instant, and the unit Nob turned just in time to have his power klaw scissored off by crab-like blades. Dest’s boot found his stomach, and the larger greenskin was propelled back into the mob while blood sprayed across his subordinates.

Pinkie’s Dreadnought crashed into them moments later, flailing inelegantly and scattering the warriors with the sheer size of her walker. Two boyz were crushed underfoot, while a third was backhanded into the side of a tank, striking the side armor hard enough to be reduced to a red and green smear. After that the mare happily stomped and swung through the mob, largely impervious to the desperate choppa blows all around her.

Luna electrocuted an Ork that was trying to hack at her leg, and was pleasantly surprised to see a bolt shell strike the next enemy in line before she could get to it. The alien’s shoulder exploded after the mass-reactive round drilled into it, knocking him over while his arm rolled away across a slick of blood.

“Hark! Further reinforcements approach!” the Princess of the Night cheered. A pair of Iron Warriors were advancing from the gateway, their boltguns thundering while alien entrails were crushed under their greaves. “The hour of our retribution is at hoof! Let none of the foe escape!” A gauntlet slapped another warrior onto the ground, and the other formed a fist and hammered down onto the greenskin.

A detonation suddenly swallowed the APC behind Luna, and the blast wave and scattered shrapnel knocked her off her hooves again. She skidded across the ferrocrete, slamming into a wounded Ork boy and tripping him over on top of her.

A kick and a flash of azure magic sent the Ork flying across the lot, and Luna stood up with an angry snarl. A Vindicator siege tank was rumbling toward her with smoke still wafting from its demolisher cannon. The top of the tank bore the telltale signs of forced entry, and a pair of squealing Gretchin were riding on top while whooping obnoxiously.

Luna barely had time to identify the threat before a lascannon speared into the side of the Vindicator. Armor warped and sloughed off the impact point, and the tank shuddered to a halt.

The Princess turned her attention to her portal, and was quite pleased to see a formation of three Leman Russ tanks rolling out of the gateway in a line. What Ork remains that hadn’t already been crushed under the boots of power armored warriors were ground to a wet slurry under the tanks’ heavy treads, almost completely obscuring the Chaos runes that had been scorched into the ground.

The lead tank already had the looted Vindicator in its sights, and it spent but a moment before its main turret fired, putting a battle cannon shell into the same armor plate it had targeted with its laser. The siege tank rocked back, battered but not broken. Two more cannon shots from the other Leman Russes finished the job, blowing out half the vehicle and annihilating the Mek that had commandeered it. Once they had confirmed the kill, the tanks split into a spearhead formation and their sponson guns started tearing at the Ork infantry.

More and more troops marched through the gateway. Iron Warriors and mercenaries. Dark Techpriests and their Scavurel attendants. Ponies and Fire Warriors. Scores of transports emerged from the portal and then turned, clearing space for the next group before turning loose their soldiers.

The sudden flow of reinforcements swiftly broke the Ork mobs trying to seize the armor lots, frustrated as they were already trying and failing to overwhelm a single, well-armed alicorn. The greenskins raced for the streets, the Meks abandoned their efforts to pry open tank hatches, and the few allied griffons that had been aiding the Ork advance scattered into the air.

Before long, all the vehicles and soldiers from the assault team had emerged in Ferrous Dominus, including those that held captives and samples. Those particular transports wheeled around to move out of the way and out of potential combat zones. Only then, after every other Company asset was through the gateway, did General Harlin emerge into Ferrous Dominus.

“…… It seems my suspicions were misplaced,” the General said calmly while he secured his respirator mask. “This witchcraft has indeed delivered us into the heart of the fortress, and not a moment too soon.”

Ponies of the Equestrian Royal Guard started racing through after him, forming a defensive circle. Finally Princess Celestia emerged from the swirling pool of magic, her horn awash in a golden glow. Only when her hooves had firmly settled upon the sticky, bloodstained ground did she let her magic fade, and the gateway rapidly shrunk to a pinpoint before vanishing entirely.

“By the sun and stars,” one Guard said, coughing into his hoof, “what have the insurgents done to this place?! The sky is nearly black with smoke and you can barely breathe! How did they cause this much damage so quickly?”

“They didn’t. It’s always like this,” replied Jerriha, who was standing nearby with a squad of Fire Warriors. “There are a few more smoke columns than usual, but the city is mostly unharmed as far as I can tell.”

“It probably would have been best had you left your retinue behind, honestly,” Harlin said to Celestia. “But no matter. We must make contact with the-.”

“SISTER!!” The magic-enhanced bellow nearly knocked the General over, and he stumbled aside just before Luna dropped from the sky in front of her sibling. “Thou hast rescued our allies from whence they tarry! Well done!”

Celestia, for her part, was staring at the ground beneath her hooves and raising them one by one. “Luna, what is this? Why were you not here holding the gateway open?”

“There were complications. It doth not bear recall,” Luna said dismissively. “Quickly! We must pursue the foe and dispatch them, lest they find less capable prey!”

“This almost looks like a sacrificial circle! These are Chaos sigils, Luna!” Celestia narrowed her eyes.

“’Tis hardly unusual to find Chaos sigils in a Chaos bastion, Sister,” Luna scoffed.

“They’re YOUR Chaos sigils, Luna!” Celestia said more firmly.

A crackling power sword suddenly stabbed into the space between the two alicorns, and they recoiled in surprise. General Harlin held the blade in place, his brow furrowed in irritation and his other hand resting on his bolt pistol’s holster.

“Princesses, while I appreciate your contributions to our bastion’s defense, I must request you put aside this meaningless banter until a less sensitive time. We now have the weaponry and manpower to decisively turn back this invasion, but there is much yet to do.” The mares pinned their ears back, looking embarrassed. “Now, then. Techpriest!”

One of the cyborg cultists stepped forward from a cluster of his peers. “General Harlin, please proceed with your query.”

“What is the current status of the local vox-net? I have been unable to contact any commanders.”

“Vox-net capability has been compromised. The deliberate targeting of communications infrastructure combined with interference from local signum bafflers has rendered all but short-range vox unreliable.” The Dark Techpriest’s optics flickered while long stretches of code passed before his eyes.

“Bafflers? What’s that about?” Daniels interjected. “Obviously if the attackers were smart enough to hit the relays that would hurt our comms, but how did Orks and a bunch of angry natives get vox-scramblers? I thought only the Tau had that tech.”

“This hypothesis remains likely. The interference we are experiencing is consistent with such units commonly deployed by the Lamman Sept,” the Techpriest droned. Several soldiers and ponies looked over at Jerriha. She shrugged at them, apparently having nothing useful to add.

“General,” the Dark Techpriest continued, “communications on the noosphere network have been expanded to take advantage of additional manifold processing assets. You may relay prioritus beta communications through my colleagues as necessary.”

“Excellent. Contact command immediately for a status update. We need to find the bastion’s initial breach and the other sectors most in need of reinforcement,” Harlin said, sheathing his power sword again.

The Dark Techpriest blurted an unpleasant-sounding noise. “Priority order nullified. Command assets have been terminated.”

“Makes sense. If somebody was feeding them important targets, the command center would be the most valuable objective after the fusion reactor,” Jerriha grumbled.

“The emphasis on degrading our infrastructure and command hierarchy rather than hunting our infantry or simply killing every human the insurgents see smacks of Tau tactics,” Harlin noted, casting a suspicious glare at the Fireblade. “But no matter. Dark Techpriest, contact Warpsmith Kessler. He should have direct access to your noosphere.”

The Dark Techpriest blurted an unpleasant-sounding noise again. “Priority order nullified. Warpsmith Kessler has been terminated.”

This news had a visible effect on the troops. Luna gasped in shock, and several soldiers spat curses. Celestia shook her head sadly.

“Damnable xenos… Get me a strategis sitrep, Techpriest. I don’t care who it’s from,” Harlin demanded.

“Lieutenant Jannis… status: deceased. Captain Gorvid… status: deceased. Captain Whit… status: deceased. Commander Reval… status: deceased. Captain Juul… status: deceased.”

The Techpriest continued listing names, each one followed by a brief confirmation that the officer in question had died. Luna’s expression, already mournful, quickly descended into shock, and after the twentieth name had been declared dead an arc of red lightning flashed around her horn.

“By the light of the moon, how is this possible?!” the mare demanded angrily. “The traitors and greenskins struck a blow whilst we were unprepared, but this sort of damage is beyond them!”

The Dark Techpriest hesitated. “All fighting units of rank Sergeant and above are augmented with subdermal bio-chip implants for ease of diagnosing combat injury and casualty tracking. Several perished during the assault on the command center, as fits strategis projections.” He paused again. “I am unable to determine the tactical conditions under which it occurred, but most of the other such officers were terminated simultaneously at a later point in time.”

“I’m so sorry,” Celestia said sadly, shaking her head. Fluttershy flickered into the visible spectrum next to her, looking up at the Princess of the Sun. “Had I moved sooner, perhaps more could have been saved.”

“So we’re flying blind, then. It doesn’t matter,” Harlin growled. “I WILL purge this filth from our streets and return control of Ferrous Dominus to the 38th Company Iron Warriors.” He glared down at Celestia. “Your world may have proven slightly more difficult to tame than we thought, but this failure will be corrected.”

He turned sharply on his heel. “Soldiers! Our point of entry into the fortress is fortuitous; any soldier or Tech-adept who can pilot a vehicle is to choose one immediately! The enemy is lacking in armored support, including the greenskins; it’s no wonder they were making a push to loot ours so quickly. You’ll form up into hunter-killer squadrons immediately and be assigned sector sweeps! After-“

“General Harlin. Forgive the interruption. We have a prioritus alpha communication.” The Dark Techpriest from before loomed over the man’s shoulder, his servo arm clanking shut.

The General frowned, but most of his men were already moving to obey his orders. “Yes? Is it from the other Dark Techpriests? You said it was alpha? It would either be from them or an Iron Warrior. Perhaps Lord Serith?”

“Negative. The data-packet is from Fio’el Fennin, a xeno engineer.”

“Fennin?!” Jerriha exclaimed. “What does he know about all this? Shouldn’t he be stuck in the manufactorum during a lockdown?”

“I am uncertain as to how this code burst entered the noosphere data-logs, but it is tagged as a strategis priority. Fennin has ascertained that Xenis detachment assets are responsible for the failure of the defensive matrix. Datafile sub-tag: Commander Voidsong.”

Celestia gasped. Luna whinnied angrily. Jerriha clutched her pulse carbine angrily. Daniels whistled.

“How? How is any of this possible?” Harlin demanded. “More importantly, how do we fix the defense systems?”

“Error. File corruption detected. Transmission burst was interrupted by tertiary access codex.” The Dark Techpriest stepped in front of Harlin, and then turned around. “Additional data capture… inload complete. Xeno life-form approaching perimeter palisade. Initiating scan… error. File match not found. Augur match inconclusive. Error. Error.”

“What are you on about? What’s the matter now?” Harlin demanded impatiently. “We have enough problems with enemies inside the walls, and there’s something coming from the outside as well?”

“Affirmative. Organism class theta… error. Estimated mass displacement… error… error… logis processing unable to comply… error.”

While General Harlin tried to make sense of the Techpriest’s sputtering, Luna jumped into the air. The crystal spines of her flight pack glowed, vaulting her straight up into the soot-stained skies over Ferrous Dominus.

As she flew, Luna’s helmet re-engaged, crawling up her neck in a creeping swarm of black plates. Soon her head was again enclosed in the pressurized seal of her armor, and her vision was masked by data-feeds and targeting matrices.

As before, those systems were baffled by the false IFF signums that had blanketed the fortress. Numerous friendly signums were marked, sometimes assigned to distant combatants within the dirty gloom of the city’s streets, and sometimes marking out random objects that clearly weren’t even individuals. But it didn’t matter; that wasn’t the particular function she needed her visor for.

Once she was at sufficient altitude, Luna could see over the intervening buildings to the palisade. The thick, spiked, turret-laden edifice that had failed so completely to stop this invasion still stood as tall and proudly as ever. Having found her point of reference, she started to turn in the air, scanning the palisade for anything out of the ordinary.

After a few seconds, she found it. A strange, discolored dark splotch that was barely visible in the distance. With a blink, her visor zeroed in on the patch of darkness, scrubbing the image capture of particulate interference and magnifying it.

It also happened to tag the incoming mass as Applejack, but that meaningless inaccuracy was discarded as Luna’s eyes bulged.

“By the stars… an ursa major?”

****

Ferrous Dominus – exterior

“Oh, blast. Is that fool really doing this?”

Crouched uncomfortably on the back of a Strider battlesuit, Fennin tapped irritably on his engineering tablet. Several lines of transmission had been disconnected, and a pair of circular graphics that represented node access points flashed red. He touched the node, and a window expanded to explain in painful detail how he had been ejected from the manifold connection he had been using to pass data packets into the noosphere.

“Well? Did it work?”

Fennin glanced over to Wraithstar. The Shas’el was sitting on another Strider, his legs hanging off the side.

“No. The Fio’o is monitoring the network traffic, apparently, and he found my rogue signal very quickly.” Fennin grimaced and tapped his tablet.

The Strider under Wraithstar turned its blocky head to shine its main sensors on Fennin. “What does that mean, precisely? Surely you don’t mean to say that you can’t do anything about the sabotage!” said Rarity’s voice from its comms speaker.

“It doesn’t mean that at all,” Fennin assured her. “But I can’t do it from here. I need direct, manual access to the base’s drone controller. Get me there, and I’ll have every drone in Ferrous Dominus shut down no matter what the Fio’o does.”

“That’s on this side of the city, luckily. And if the manufactorum is on lockdown, I can get you inside,” said the Strider Fennin was perched on.

“So… that just leaves the little issue of getting inside the fortress itself,” Wraithstar mused aloud.

“Yes, well… I don’t think that wall is going to be much of an obstacle to entry much longer, darling,” Rarity’s Strider said with a sigh, shifting its gaze back to the fortress-factory.

The Striders and their passengers were standing atop a small hill, less than a kilometer away from the palisade. Even closer than that to the fortress perimeter, and closing at a rather sanguine pace, was Big Bloo.

The Tau didn’t know what to make of the thing, except that it was a new brand of Ork monstrosity that they had never seen before and hoped they’d never see again. Bigger than even the most massive Squiggoths, the titanic star-spangled bear dwarfed any land-based war machine either of the aliens had seen or even heard of. Fennin wasn’t even sure that the Imperium’s infamous Titans would compare.

The ponies, for their part, knew of the famed ursa major, but were fairly stunned to see one captured and weaponized by the Orks. Huge chains secured ragged plates of metal to the flanks and legs of the beast. Atop its back was enough guns to arm an entire fleet of Battlewagons, including a central cannon that looked at if it had been scavenged from a defeated Gargant. The ursa’s head had been encased in a massive, horned helm that was chained to a pair of steering gears over the shoulders, and had a cluster of oversized skorchas hammered into place on the sides of its jaws. Because why not.

The Striders’ scouting auguries allowed them to easily pick out the numerous Orks manning the bear’s battlements and weapons. The combat platform was a veritable fortress, and looked to be packed to bursting with infantry. Trailing behind the enormous bear were more transports and a few Guntrukks, but they seemed like an almost embarrassing escort to such a monster.

“We need to get inside and get the guns working again. After that, the Company can surely bring down that… thing,” Wraithstar declared, hoping his voice sounded stronger to the ponies than it sounded to himself.

“Are you sure? The ursa will be inside the fortress by then, you know,” Rarity pointed out.

Even as they discussed the matter, a few scattered bursts of gunfire erupted from the palisade. Half a dozen lascannons and autocannons lashed out desperately at Big Bloo, surely manned by a handful of soldiers who had noticed the beast’s approach amongst the bedlam of the invasion. Even then, however, the city’s macrocannon turrets remained silent while the ursa strode forward.

One massive paw rose, and then talons longer than battle tanks carved through the bulkhead. Cannons on either flank erupted, hammering layered plating apart. Lesser weapons covered the palisade battlements with burst fire, driving away what few defenders there were or tearing them apart.

Again and again the ursa major clawed at the wall, tearing long, deep gouges into the reinforcement layers. Then one of the chains linked to its helmet tugged at it, followed by the other chain. The bear paused, and then backed up several massive steps.

The soopagun on its back fired, shaking the rest of the battle platform with its recoil. The explosion was immense, briefly blinding the Strider’s augurs and even making Bloo herself flinch away from the shock wave.

When the smoke cleared, a large hole had been blasted into the tear that the ursa had carved open. Not quite big enough for the bear itself, but it would only take a little more clawing to get the extra clearance needed.

“This isn’t going well,” Gear Works mumbled from within the Strider.

Fennin swiped his hand across his screen, shutting it down. “It looks like reinforcements are arriving, at least. That should keep the total damage down.”

“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”

Everyone flinched as an exuberant scream came from above, followed by the roar of engines. Glancing up, they could see two figures in power armor blasting across the sky, trailing fire in the direction of Ferrous Dominus.

“Or maybe it will just make things worse,” Fennin grumbled, “you know, whatever.”

“The Orks are piling in through the hole in the palisade. We should go,” Rarity said with a sigh.

The Tau shifted his posture to something more appropriate for riding, and the Striders soon took off at a light run toward the wall.

“I hope that Shas’o Voidsong isn’t still in the city when we attempt to restore the defensive matrix!” Fennin yelled to his companions. “Things would get ugly, quick!”

“I very much hope she is!” Wraithstar shouted back. “If we or any other Tau are to survive the repercussions of her betrayal, it will take more than the testimonials of a few ponies that we sought to oppose Voidsong! We’re going to need a trophy! You should consider locating the Shas’o a secondary objective only to knocking out the drone network!” His eyes narrowed. “Voidsong WILL face the consequences of what she’s done. And if I have it my way, they’ll come from the barrel of a pulse rifle, not a boltgun…”

Author's Note

Ha! Who could have predicted that I'd save the Nurgle ponies with Chaos shenanigans?!
What? Everyone? Oh. Okay, fine.
I was actually halfway into writing the "Celestia arrives and saves the assault force" part before I realized how easily it could have been a changeling plot. Heck, if I'd thought of it before now, I might have made that Chrysalis's plan rather than taking the Nethalican, only to have it fall apart when the real Celestia arrives to actually help.
But a magic showdown against Serith is good too.
The next chapter SHOULD be the last. But it'll be a doozy. Lots of people and non-people still need to die. Then epilogue and then, as before, everyone is safe basically forever.

Apex

Entrenchment
An Age of Iron Story

Chapter 17
Apex

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 6

“Okay, this… This is getting bad. Really bad.”
A squad of griffons were resting on a roof, taking a pause from the battle still raging in the streets below.
A battle, it seemed, that was escalating catastrophically for both sides. One griffon lay prone near the edge of the roof, watching the streets below. Company tanks rolled down the avenue, spitting destruction into a retreating horde of Orks. Soldiers marched alongside the tanks in a supporting formation, pausing after each cannon shot. Those aliens merely wounded or knocked down by the blast wave were cut apart by laser fire with disciplined precision while the armored units rumbled on, preventing the mob from regrouping. The fleeing Orks were the survivors of several mobs and hundreds of warriors. There was no reason to think any of them would get out of Ferrous Dominus alive.
Another griffon stared toward the opposite end of the roof, his raptor’s eyes doing much to pierce the polluted gloom of the city. A massive, dark body wreathed in smoke, decked in metal, and covered in stars crossed through a breach in the palisade. Gunfire bloomed all around the ursa major, drowning out the laughter and war cries of the aliens cheering from its ramparts.
Between the two seemingly unstoppable forces sheltered the griffons. Formerly a unit of ten warriors, the insurgent squad had been cut down to four, and one of them lay on a blanket in the middle of the roof nursing a lasburn through his wing. Their armor was battered, their lasguns nearly out of power, and their other munitions spent. They were also exhausted from choking on smog; the griffons fought at the highest altitude possible to minimize counter-fire, which placed them in the worst of the particulate filth that covered the city’s skies. None of the hybrid avians had thought to bring respirators, and they were in no position to scavenge some anymore.
“What are we still doing here? Do we have a plan? What are our targets?” asked one warrior, checking the charge status on her las-packs.
“We only had two objectives: take down the pylons in this sector, and support the Orks causing havoc in the streets. We already took down the pylons…”
“Well, shouldn’t we be helping the Orks, then?” demanded another.
The other griffons shook their head firmly.
“Oh, come on! They have a giant… bear? That’s a bear, right? They could still win this!”
“Do you seriously think you can get in las range of that monster without eating a dozen bullets? They’re shooting at everything that moves!” snarled the injured griffon. “For that matter, if the Orks DO win, what do you think will happen to us afterward? We should have never allied with them! Curse Nox for agreeing to this!”
“Without the Orks we never would have survived this far or caused this much damage!” the other rebel protested, pausing briefly to cough. “The Company would have organized a counter-attack long ago if it weren’t for the greenskins! There’s no way we’d make it out alive!”
“You featherbrain,” the wounded soldier spat. “You still think we’re making it out of this alive?”
“B-But… But we-“
“We took them by complete surprise. Cracked their wall. Smashed their vox machines. Killed their leaders. Slaughtered their civilians. We did everything we were asked. And now look at us.”
An explosion came from the building across the street, and fire blasted from one of the windows. At street level below, a pair of ragged-looking diamond dogs were marched out the main entrance behind a pair of Cultists bearing autoguns. Just minutes ago the structure had been filled with the crack of small arms and the explosions of grenades, but now it was almost silent.
“We gave it everything we had. It didn’t work. We still can’t break them. All we can do is clear the way for those wretched greenskins, so that they can kill everything in sight. Even then, the imbeciles will probably fail, and we’ll be right back where we started,” the injured griffon growled. “And to think, we never even laid eyes on an Iron Warrior…”
A distant roaring sound came from overhead.
“… Does… Does anyone else hear that?” asked one of the soldiers, his talons tightening around his gun.
The sound had been barely audible at first, due to the firefight in the streets below, but it was quickly getting louder. The griffons looked up toward where it was coming from, but could see little beyond the greasy brown clouds.
Then Tellis the Mad Angel dropped out of the sky.

The impact of artificer greaves against the roof nearly knocked the griffons over, and they stumbled back with a fearful squawk. One soldier drew a sword and two others raised their lasguns, but the act was perfunctory. Every one of them was completely stunned to see the gleaming giant land right in front of them, and their hearts seized in their chests.
Tellis stood up straight, the wings of his flight pack stretching outward briefly before folding against his back. Electric arcs coursed down the length of his lightning claws, dancing in-between the blades. His helmet slowly tilted forward, and eventually the sword-bearing griffon was staring straight into the bloody red glare of its lenses.
“Yo, Kessler! I need you to fix my helmet. It’s not picking up any targets.” Tellis reached up and knocked his knuckles against his own helmet. “I’m getting a ton of friendly marks, but nothing red. That can’t be right.”
The griffon in question blinked. Twice. “I… I, uh…”
“Also, you’re in charge now, right? Gimme a priority target and I’ll stab it first,” the Raptor demanded.
The griffons gaped in confusion, slowly turning to stare at each other. One of them lowered his rifle and raised a talon, like a student in class wanting to be called on.
“So… if we… tell you what to kill… you’ll go kill it?”
Tellis snorted. “Ha! No! I was just messing with you. I’mma go cut up the very first greenskin I see. But I really do need my visor fixed so it can detect greenskins like before.” He banged on his helmet again. “Chop chop! Get to work, Nerd Marine!”
The griffons continued staring, perplexed beyond words.
“…… Hey, wait a minute. You’re awfully short and feathery for a Warpsmith,” Tellis pointed out.
“M-My name is G-Garry,” the insurgent in question stuttered.
“No, your name is Kessler,” Tellis retorted, pointing down at the terrified soldier. “Just because you’re small and fluffy now doesn’t mean you get to change your name on us.”
“Maybe it’s, uh, better if you went by Kessler from now on?” ventured one of the other griffons, slowly creeping around the side.
“See? Scootaloo agrees with me!” Tellis said, briefly checking the other soldier’s ident-codex. “… Hold on… Something ain’t right here.”
Rainbow Dash rocketed overhead, dipping down below the smog clouds and then whirling about in the air.
“Hey, what’s going on?! All these enemies are marked as our guys!” she complained while her flight pack slowed into a hover. “When did we pick up griffon soldiers?! There’s no way this is right!” Rainbow Dash grimaced, and then noticed something near the edge of the roof, behind Tellis.
“Okay, okay. I have an idea,” Tellis declared. Then he pointed at the griffon with the sword. “Griffon Kessler, I don’t know if you were turned into a xeno through wacky magic shenanigans or if you’re just tagged wrong due to the very problem I’m asking you to fix, but here’s the plan: either you repair my helmet or I’ll kill you. I’ll probably kill all your buddies too. I mean, if they can’t fix my helmet eith-“
“TELLIS, BEHIND YOU!!”

The Chaos Lord whirled around with impossible speed, lashing out his lightning claws before Rainbow had completed the second word of her warning. Talons wrapped in destructive energy fields scraped across enchanted metal, and a sharp crack issued from the contact. The initial attack was deflected, and Tellis homed in on the source with his other claw; his Chaos-fueled blood lust detected a heartbeat and pinpointed it before anything else registered through his autosenses.
Yet again, lightning claws crashed into a blade fortified by magic power, and again the two weapons burst apart in an ear-piercing shriek. The source of the attack was thrown backward, squawking in alarm, while Tellis paused.
His attacker was another griffon. Unlike the others, this one didn’t bear stolen Company wargear. Dark ebony plate armor covered the warrior’s torso, and he had two metal sheathes on the upper edges of each wing. The griffon carried a pair of scimitars as weapons, and they were clearly enchanted; the metal had a slight blue glow to its polish, and there was no other explanation for having parried power blades with little more damage than a scorch mark.
The newcomer flew back out of immediate lunging range, and then crossed his swords in front of him. “So there IS one of you Astartes monsters left here… good.” His beak twisted into a sneer. “No matter how this assault eventually ends, I’m glad I’ll be able to send one of you to the ground!”
Tellis laughed. “Ha! You were really looking to fight an Iron Warrior? YOU?! You’ve got guts, Tolken!”
The griffon blinked. “Tolken? My name is Gestalt, former Captain of the Royal Army of Griffonstone!”
“No, the helmet says Tolken, so you’re Tolken now,” Tellis said.
“I… What?”

A lasburst came from behind, splashing over the Raptor’s back. The griffon firing into Tellis instantly got an adamantium hoof planted in her own back as Rainbow Dash crashed into her, and she screeched in pain as she bounced across the roof.
Rainbow Dash tilted hard, and she skimmed away just before another insurgent lunged for her with his sword. Her impulse jets fired, jumping her up into the air above a spread of lasblasts. “Tellis, these guys are the invaders! We’ve gotta stop ‘em!”
Tellis looked over, watching Rainbow Dash zip around the building while a griffon wildly sprayed lasers into the air. Then he turned back to Gestalt. “Okay, I’m kind of getting the sense you guys aren’t going to fix my helmet.”
Gestalt rose upward with a few rapid flaps of his wings, and then dove. His scimitars flashed a bright white, and he slashed both weapons in a long overhead swing.
Tellis moved, spinning on one foot to avoids the blow and stabbing his claws into Gestalt’s side. The claws struck his wing sheathe, shrieking and flashing while eldritch disruptor fields battled against magic-infused metals. Gestalt was thrown through the air from the impact, and the Captain hit the ground rolling before a wing flap brought him upright.
Tellis was already on top of him, his flight pack puffing smoke and his lightning claws whistling against the air. The Iron Warrior stabbed down, and his claws crashed against the flat of a scimitar. Gestalt stumbled back, overwhelmed by the force despite having blocked the attack entirely.
The point was driven home when Tellis smashed a boot into the griffon’s chest, blowing through Gestalt’s guard. The Captain was sent flying off the edge of the building, and both his scimitars clattered to the roof. The Captain stabilized himself in the air quickly, coughing from the pain in his chest but thankfully still mobile.
“Heh! You’re pretty fast!” Tellis chuckled, his flight pack spreading. “A few broken bones should fix that.”
“FOR GRIFFONSTONE!! FOR THE LOST PRINCE!!” bellowed another of the griffons behind him, dashing across the ground with his sword aimed at Tellis’s back.
The Chaos Lord barely moved, tilting his shoulders slightly to one side. One of the talon-like engines of his flight pack stretched up, and then slammed down onto the insurgent mid-charge. The griffon gasped in pain and fell forward, landing in front of Tellis’s greaves while his sword bounced along the roof uselessly.
“Hey, Tolken! What’s your favorite organ?” Tellis reached down and picked up the griffon below him, hauling him up by his neck.
“My name… is Gestalt!” Gestalt seethed. One hand slipped down to a pouch near his hip, withdrawing a trio of vials. “And your days of butchering griffons are over, tyrant! Even if only yours, Astartes blood WILL paint the streets of your wretched city!”
“Okay, yeah, sure. Organ? Any preferences at all?” He held up the struggling insurgent. “C’mon, man! Nobody ever wants to play this game! Be cool!”

Rainbow Dash zipped through the air, her boosters sweeping sharply from side to side. She cut a dizzying series of spins and banking turns over the roof, neatly avoiding the converging laser fire from the other griffons.
She moved near kicking range of one, but then hit her impulse blasters rather than ramming into him hooves-first. She jolted upward at an angle, launching into a back flip. The insurgent was blasted back across the roof, screaming in shock. His lasgun tumbled in a different direction.
“Wretched ponies…” The wounded griffon who had already been laying down when Tellis arrived slowly pushed himself upright, one hand clutching a laspistol and the other holding his stomach. “After all they’ve done, you little pests are still allies to these monsters?”
“After all they’ve done, you guys aren’t?” Dash countered, boosting up higher in the air. “This is your last chance to give up, bird brain! Tellis won’t…“
Rainbow’s head twitched to the side, spotting Tellis holding up one griffon while Gestalt hovered in the air just off the roof. The Captain, holding three glass vials containing bright red, blue, and silver fluids, tilted his head back and poured the vials’ contents into his beak. Rainbow’s eyes widened behind her visor, and her body swiveled about in the air.
“Tellis! Stop him! Those are magic potions!” the pegasus shouted. A lasblast cracked against her side, and Rainbow Dash reflexively boosted upward again to evade. “Take him out now! Quick!”

Tellis immediately hurled the griffon in his hand at the griffon in the air. Gestalt caught his ally with his free hand, his wings flapping harder to compensate for the added weight. Almost simultaneously, Tellis launched himself forward, his flight pack blasting flame across the roof.
The disruption field from his power claws whistled against the air as they cut a neon red arc toward the insurgents. Claws met flesh, sinking into one side and punching out the other. The sheer force behind the blow nearly tore the griffon in two, even putting aside the blades, and when Tellis swung about to stabilize himself he had one very dead griffon stuck on his fist.
It was not Captain Gestalt, however.
“His swords! He’s going for his swords!” Rainbow Dash bolted forward, chasing the silvery streak descending from the air over Tellis’s head. Gestalt hit the roof in a roll, snatching up one scimitar in his right hand.
He raised one wing, and a burst of shuriken shrieked against the enchanted shield attached to it. Some of the ultra-thin blades stuck into the armor, while most bounced off with a small jet of sparks. Stray projectiles sliced off bits of feathers and grazed fur, slicing through anything that wasn’t armored with disturbing ease.
Tellis threw the corpse on his claw, flinging it at Gestalt yet again as a projectile. The Captain jumped, flipping over his fallen subordinate, only to see Tellis rocketing up after him to seize advantage of the diversion.
Lightning claws met scimitar, and a thundering crack issued from the duel of energies. Tellis swung his other arm, but the griffon had already bounced higher into the air and the Iron Warrior blasted underneath him.
Tellis hit the roof with one foot and spun to face his opponent again. Gestalt had reached his other sword, and was calmly taking up a dueling stance.
“Watch it, Tellis! You have no idea what those magic potions can do!” Rainbow Dash warned. She descended on one of her own targets, slamming her boot into the center of its lasgun and knocking the insurgent over in addition to breaking the weapon in half.
“Why? What can they do?” the Raptor asked curiously.
“I don’t know either! But nobody drinks those things in the middle of a fight because they’re thirsty!” the griffon below her stood up, and she was forced to evade a surprisingly deft attack from a combat knife.
Gestalt’s eyes narrowed, and he lifted off into a hover. “Tellis, is it? I’ve heard of you. The Mad Angel of the Iron Warriors. The most fanatical, insane murderer in an entire army of fanatical, insane murderers.”
“And I’ve heard of you, Armsmaster Tolken,” Tellis replied solemnly. “You’ve lost a lot of weight, though.”
“MY NAME IS GESTALT, YOU-“ the griffon Captain cut himself off with an angry squawk. “Enough of this! I’ll shut you up for good!”

Gestalt darted to the side, flying in a wide circle around Tellis with his swords held loose in his claws. He was flying faster than before he had imbibed the potions, certainly, but Tellis was far from impressed. That kind of speed might have been crucial to an aerial retreat, but on the attack it would barely make a difference against the Adeptus Astartes.
“Okay, let’s make this quick. I wanna have a go at that giant bear thing before someone comes up with a clever, desperate plan to put it down.” Tellis spread his flight pack and reared one arm back. “Iron within, become the iron without! BLOOD FOR TH-“
Gestalt briefly touched his foot on the roof, and his speed trebled in an eye blink. He blasted toward Tellis like a bolt of lightning, trailing a wash of white sparks and releasing a predatory screech. Griffon met Iron Warrior with a tremendous crash, and Tellis was pushed back a few feet from the impact with his catch phrase still dying on his lips. A horrendous squeal came from his lightning claws as they struggled to hold back the sword wedged between the talons, but Tellis had only one arm ready to guard.
The other scimitar plunged into his breastplate, piercing the ancient metal with a white-hot flash and a jaw-rattling thunderclap.
Then it exited out the other side amidst a jet of blood, tearing through the Chaos Lord up to its hilt.

****

Ponyville – Nethalican

“I suppose you thought this would be easy, didn’t you? This far from our seat of power and hidden amongst our little equine pets, a being such as yourself could have gotten quite far. Most unfortunate for you.”
Oscillating orbs of power circled Serith’s halberd, leaking sparks of glimmering light in a mesmerizing spiral. Chrysalis stood at the other end of the temple, her horn aglow and an unhurried expression of contempt on her features. The priests and acolytes of the temple watched and whispered and prayed.
Their voices created a constant stream of mixed, incoherent gibberish that Chrysalis quickly pushed out of her mind. There were many distractions that kept tugging at the threads of her consciousness; the physical, the magical, and a few odd sensations that seemed to be bizarre echoes of her personal mental connection to her brood. The changeling that had died had not done so peacefully, and its final moments seemed to flicker before her eyes as if demanding prominence even while she was threatened with a similar fate.
“I was unlucky to find you here, Serith, but it is an easily corrected problem,” Chrysalis mused, “I won’t take up much more of your time.”

Chrysalis swung her head forward, and a swirling beam of green energy blasted across the temple.
Serith raised his left hand, and his vambrace split open. The beam swerved in mid-air and seeped into the palm of the psykant occulus, and dispersal rods stuck out of the gauntlet’s wrists to hum vigorously against the eldritch power.
“Adorable,” Serith remarked. Then he swung his halberd lazily in the Changeling Queen’s direction. The hovering spheres rocketed toward her, screaming through the air like men in their death throes.
A bare flicker of magic sent a pew jumping in the path of the orbs, and they detonated against the temple’s seating. The pew was reduced to splinters, burning under a shadowy flame that seemed to drink in light rather than generate it.
Chrysalis hardly spent a moment observing the curious blaze before she attacked again. A green pulse of magic leapt from her horn into the ground, zipping toward Serith through the flooring. Furniture rattled with its passing, but the Sorcerer seemed unworried.
Serith slammed his hand onto the floor, meeting the projectile directly. Green light pulsed in a halo around him, and the dispersal rods in the psykant occulus crackled and released jets of ionized gases.
“If you haven’t picked up on this yet, your arcana will not work on me,” Serith mused, summoning more power to him. Psychic hoarfrost swirled around his force halberd, coalescing over his gauntlet.
Chrysalis smiled. “My, you humans do have some impressive toys, don’t you?”
“I am very, VERY far from human, insect queen,” Serith chuckled.
He thrust his halberd toward Chrysalis, and her horn flashed to launch another beam straight into it. The two projectiles met above the pews, blasting against each other ferociously. The massive iron chandelier rattled above, and several pews were blown away from the impact.
Chrysalis froze one of the long seats in mid-air, and with a thought she flung it straight at her opponent. Serith didn’t seem to be expecting such an attack, and he clumsily tried to dodge to the side. The pew struck his shoulder and bounced off, almost knocking the Space Marine over.
He steadied himself quickly, laughing. “Surely you don’t think you’re going to bludgeon me into submission with stray furniture,” he chuckled. “More effective than your witchfire, perhaps, but only barely.”
“If that is what it takes to end you, then I will,” the Changeling Queen retorted. “But surely there are faster ways.”
Serith lashed out again with a whip of lightning, and Chrysalis met the psychic assault with her own. Black lightning crashed against green, and the Iron Warrior’s bolt was swiftly overwhelmed.
“You may be able to spot a changeling, but your power is disappointing for one of the vaunted Astartes,” Chrysalis sneered while her magic attack dissipated. A moment later her eyes flashed, and one of the acolytes praying nearby shuddered. “Let’s make this more interesting, shall we?”
With another pulse of magic, the cultist was yanked off his feet and thrown into the middle of the temple, landing right in front of Chrysalis.
“Now, then…” Chrysalis smiled, and lashes of neon green power snaked from her horn around the hapless man’s wrists. “Let’s see if-“
A lance of black lightning blasted the acolyte, and Chrysalis jumped back in surprise. The cultists screamed, and his body writhed in agony for several seconds before he collapsed onto the floor.
“… I feel like that was a bit hasty,” Chrysalis remarked, frowning at the column of smoke rolling off of the scorched corpse.
“Feel free to try again,” Serith said cheerfully, pointing his halberd at the dead body. “There are plenty more souls where he came from.”
A disquieted murmur rose among the remaining clergy. Virgil sighed. “This is why no one likes you, Lord.”
“Go tend to your pawns, Priest,” Serith snapped, a bit of heat entering his voice. “Your droning pleas to the Gods are not needed at present.”

As Virgil turned away – still holding three young fillies in his arms – energy thrummed through Serith into the force halberd. The dead body started to rise, and a pale, mist-like energy started seeping from its smoldering skin. That energy twisted together into tendrils, snaking over the floor toward the Iron Warrior’s weapon.
Chrysalis watched silently, her horn flickering absently. She found the armored alien’s magic irresistibly fascinating despite the current combat and obvious danger to her life. Here she was, awash with mana, so full of power that it was hard to even concentrate, and yet the Sorcerer… wasn’t. She could feel the interaction of energies between his gauntlets, his weapon, and the magic around them, and how different and inefficient it was compared to her own. The process of drawing the soul from a dead man, which would be a terrifying and pointless chore for her or just about any unicorn, seemed to empower the Sorcerer somehow in a way that she couldn’t fathom.
Serith lifted his force halberd, and the mist-like power seeped into a crackling orb floating bare millimeters from the weapon’s tip. “A soul for a soul. Let death’s echoes carry you to oblivion, Insect Queen.”
The sphere quivered and distended, and then reshaped itself into a skull. Serith swung his halberd down, and the skull released a soul-chilling scream before rocketing forward.
A beam of green magic lashed out, striking the skull. It was instantly obliterated, and its scream briefly intensified, echoing around the temple interior before fading away with an embarrassing hiss.
“I do hope this is all part of some clever ploy to lower my guard or convince me to spare you out of pity, because otherwise this is starting to look sad,” Chrysalis remarked. She grinned, and her wings buzzed. “You can’t use it, can you?”
Serith hesitated, rather annoyed that his skull-projectile had been so easily nullified after he had invested a dramatic monologue into it. “Can’t use… what, precisely?”
“The portal. This power. The veritable OCEAN of energy we’re swimming in,” Chrysalis replied, her eyes flashing green. “I’m up to my wingtips in magic, lapping it up as quickly as I can expend it, and yet I can see you straining with every cantrip. Quite ironic, as it’s your temple…” Her lips curled back, revealing long fangs that glinted in the light.
“Fascinating. I was truly unaware that this was such a boon for you,” Serith raised the occulus to the chin of his helmet, scratching at it with a metal digit. “However, I’m afraid I’m not the one at a disadvantage here.” He strode forward at a leisurely pace, his force halberd resting against one shoulder. “Your psychic skills are powerful indeed, but still useless against my wargear. If I must cut you open like a common trooper, it is no great chore.”
“You think so?” Chrysalis asked, tilting her head to the side. Her blue-green mane swung around her neck. “You’ve miscalculated, tin man. Badly.”
“Be silent, insect,” Serith replied, holding up his free hand into a fist. The dispersal rods around the psykant occulus whirred and clicked, ready to absorb whatever deadly energy was flung its way. Once the Sorcerer was only a few meters away, his stance shifted slightly to a proper combat pose. “Your lies cannot sway me. Your magic cannot touch me. And your fangs cannot pierce me.”
“Mmm, true. I’ll need some bigger fangs,” Chrysalis said, still smiling. Serith stopped short, moving to a defensive pose.
A corona of green magic burst around her, and emerald flame swirled around her horn. “I wouldn’t try something like this as a mere battle tactic under normal conditions… but with this much raw power at my beck and call, certain magic limitations are less… onerous.” The streams of magic fire swarmed over her carapace, expanding rapidly and hardening into sharp, angular crags. Her neck swelled and her muzzle expanded, and needle-sharp fangs became thick, knife-like shards of razor crystal. Wings vanished, legs bulged, and what used to be a fringe of sea-green hair became a thick stone tendril.
“A… crocodile. Made out of... rocks,” Serith said. He tried to sound flippant and dismissive, but Chrysalis had gone from less than half his size to maybe three times larger. He’d been told that the changelings were sharply restricted in the sorts of things they could mimic; that was probably the “limitations” she spoke of.
Chrysalis opened her jaws, like a jagged stone crevice cracking open during an earthquake. Then she lunged.

****

Nethalican – Virgil’s chambers

“This could take some time, and is likely to be extremely hazardous. Especially if the changelings are victorious. Because then they’ll probably kill the rest of us.”
Virgil pushed his way through the door into his personal quarters, still holding Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo behind his arm. His voice was as bland and disinterested as ever, but the fillies couldn’t help but notice the Priest’s curiously pro-active retreat from the main temple.
“Whaddya mean if the changelin’s are victorious? Ya don’t think Chrysalis can win, do ya?” Apple Bloom asked.
Virgil shrugged, still moving across the room. It was small and spartan, containing little more than a bed and a rack full of scrolls. On one wall, mounted above his bed, there was an air vent.
“You should leave. Your deaths will not serve the Gods. Not yet,” Virgil explained. He reached down behind his bed with his free hand.
“Wait, we’re leaving? Why? How?” Scootaloo asked.
“This vent serves as an emergency escape tunnel when necessary. You can use it to leave the temple. There are more of the creatures guarding the entrance, but they cannot attack you openly outside this place.”
Virgil’s hand found a button behind his bed, and he pushed it. The vent over the duct slid upward on a magnetic track, leaving an opening that was barely wide enough for a man to crawl through.
“I don’t get it. Why are we leaving? Do you really think Chrysalis can stand up to Serith?” Sweetie asked.
A loud crashing noise came from the temple, along with a ferocious roar.
“… It is possible,” Virgil said. “Now go. The sermon is over.” He raised his arms, and the young ponies clambered into the crawlspace one by one.
“Okay, hold on a minute,” Scootaloo said once she was in the duct, “you have a plan for this, right? You acted like you weren’t surprised at all, and you told Chrysalis everything she wanted to know, and even sent out all those people before when-“
While Scootaloo was speaking, Virgil reached down and pushed the button again. The vent suddenly slid shut, and Scootaloo stopped speaking with a gasp.
“Hey! Whoa! Aren’t you coming with us?” she exclaimed.
“No.” Virgil turned away and headed back to the door.
“Wait! Wasn’t this tunnel for you, too? Chrysalis will kill you!” Sweetie shouted.
“Likely.” Virgil reached the door and opened it.
“But-! You-! We-!” Before Apple Bloom could complete a sentence, Virgil stepped out and the door closed behind him.

“Ah… Ah don’t get it. What’ll we do now?” Apple Bloom asked.
“I think you’re making a big deal out of nothing. Serith’s got this,” Scootaloo scoffed.
Sweetie Belle frowned. Then a voice in her head snickered.
The Sorcerer is weak. He underestimates the Queen. He will fail. As usual.
“I don’t think we can count on Serith, girls,” Sweetie mumbled while she started walking down the duct.
“Then what do we do?” Scootaloo asked, sounding annoyed. “We have to tell some soldiers somehow! We can’t just go home!”
Apple Bloom frowned, and then brightened. “Yeah, we can! And we WILL!”
“Erm… what?”

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 6

“Tellis? TELLIS!!”
A gasping wheeze came from the Chaos Raptor, and his flight pack shuddered and blasted puffs of discolored gas behind him.
“A quick death is far more than you deserve,” Gestalt snarled, his eyes glaring into the blood-red visor above him. “You’re welcome.”
Tellis still had a claw free, and he punched it toward the griffon. Gestalt caught the awkward swipe on his wing sheathe, quickly turning the blow away.
Then he jumped up and kicked off of the Chaos Lord, tearing both his swords free and back-flipping out of reach. Hot blood gushed from the breach in the daemon armor, and Tellis wobbled unsteadily.
“AAAAAAAAAAAARGH right in the ticker,” the Iron Warrior groaned, slapping a gauntlet over the wound. His blood started clotting almost instantly, staining the gunmetal plating a brilliant red.
“Tellis! Tellis, stay with me, man!” Rainbow Dash swooped past the Iron Warrior to hover between him and Gestalt.
“You’re next, pegasus,” Gestalt clashed his wing sheathes together above his head, and then shifted his stance again.

Rainbow, as expected, started with a burst from her shuriken cannon. Gestalt darted forward, twisting his body to swat away the projectiles with his armored wing and lead into a swing. The movements were a blur, leaving silvery streams of light behind while the blade sang against the air.
Still, Rainbow Dash was faster, and fully prepared for the griffon’s stunning agility. She rocketed to the side, evading the swing before her boots touched against the roof. Her impulse blasters launched her skyward again, leaping over a sword thrust aimed straight at her forehead.
Gestalt spread his wings, intending to give chase, but caught movement out of the corner of his eye. In a flash the griffon turned, sweeping both blades around and barely knocking away the lightning claws that had been stabbing for his flank.
He twisted around to dodge another slash from the glowing claws, and then leapt backwards and took to the air. “You’re still moving? How?! I got you! Straight through the heart!” he growled, pointing a scimitar toward Tellis.
Tellis straightened. Blood was still trickling from the thick breach in his chest plate, and the Iron Warrior’s movements were clearly more sluggish and hesitant than before, but he wasn’t obviously close to death.
“It’s cool. I have two,” Tellis said with a chuckle. He gasped slightly at the end, and then drew his claws close together. “We’re not really made to run on just one heart though, so it’d be super helpful if you came closer and didn’t make me chase you around a lot.”
Gestalt’s eyes narrowed, and he crossed his swords in front of his beak. “One down, one to go, then. I WILL see you die today, alien.”
“Blood for the Blood God, Tolken,” Tellis retorted, parting his claws and blasting forward.

The Iron Warrior, despite his injury, wasn’t much slowed in his flight, and he now had a better idea of what the Griffon Captain was capable of. Tellis stabbed straight for his feathered foe, and caught a scimitar lancing for his chest again when Gestalt deflected and countered.
“My NAME is GESTALT!!” Gestalt shouted before he kicked at Tellis’s vambrace, wrenching his blade free. The scent of ozone mixed with the more common smell of smoldering metals, and a blinding flash briefly obscured the combatants.
Rainbow Dash swooped around behind, trying to find an angle to fire a burst of shuriken into Gestalt’s back. The griffon swung this way and that, curving and swinging around Tellis in the air while his swords scraped armor in great silver arcs or crashed against lightning claws in sizzling electric bursts. Her targeting reticule bounced across the length of her visor, constantly beeping warnings that she was targeting a friendly unit.
Rainbow growled in frustration and switched off her external vox. “Tellis! Break for a sec! if I can get one good shot at his wings, he’ll be grounded!”
A burst of static filled her ears before Tellis replied. “Not really in a position where I can break off whenever I want! This guy is fast! How long do those potions even OW! BLEEP! My arm! BLEEPing magic bullBLEEP weapons!”
Rainbow Dash couldn’t help but spend a moment wondering why he was still auto-censoring his vox, but quickly disregarded it. “Okay, fine, on the count of three, I’ll charge his back with a Rainbow Buster!”
“Okay, no way you’re going to hit just him with that if you hit him at all. I’m like five times his size. Rainbabe, just leave this to me, all right? Go finish off the other bird thi-OW! BLEEP! BLEEP-BLEEP-BLEEEEEP!!”

Rainbow growled, listening to the crackle of feedback within her helmet. Looking over the roof, she could see the other surviving griffons fleeing the scene, carrying their wounded comrade. They were flying slowly; it would be foal’s play to intercept them and cut them down mid-flight. They weren’t a threat any longer. In fact, the way they were visibly hacking up smoke, they might very well drop dead if they flew any higher into the smog layer…
Rainbow Dash tilted her head up, staring up at the clouds of ash and soot above. Tiny informational windows popped up, sensing her focus and providing information such as chemical content, temperatures, and particulate grain size. She ignored all of it, and her eyes slowly grew wider.
“Tellis!” she barked into her vox. “I’ve got a new plan! Keep him busy for a little bit! When I’m ready, drop down onto the roof!”
“What? Why? What’re you doing?”
“It’ll be awesome!” Rainbow assured him. Her flight pack opened wider, and she blasted straight up into the air. “Trust me!”

Tellis stabbed again and again in rapid sequence, building his momentum to push Gestalt on the defensive. His arms became a series of rapid, neon-red blurs, clashing explosively against the magic alloys of Gestalt’s blades or missing entirely when the griffon bobbed away. Small fans and wild curls of blood splashed against the roof, draining from the cuts in his armor.
Gestalt dodged away from one jab and then dove under another, flying a tight curve around the Iron Warrior. The wings of Tellis’s flight pack twisted and roared, and a great ceramite boot smashed into Gestalt’s side before even his magic-enhanced reflexes could react. The griffon Captain was hurtled toward the roof with a dent in his torso plate.
The second Gestalt touched down he jumped away, moving just millimeters ahead of the humming blades sweeping for his wing. A wild sword swing clipped the side of his foe’s abdomen, tearing a gash through a power cable and earning him another splash of blood.
“Gah! Quit it you BLEEPing BLEEP!!”
And then Gestalt was on the defensive again, his entire focus and straining muscles dedicated to keeping the lightning claws at bay. His scimitar crashed against one stabbing blow, and he leapt above another. A thrust toward the Iron Warrior’s head ended with his blade again lodged between the disruptor fields of adamantium talons, crackling ferociously.
Had Gestalt been any less focused on the battle, he would have been terrified at how fast and deadly Tellis remained after having lost a major organ. Despite the distracted grunting and obnoxious censoring noises from his helmet, the Raptor’s spatial awareness and control was nearly perfect and his attacks were only slightly weaker than before. Gestalt had faced many skilled aerial combatants over his career, but absolutely nothing he had faced before combined such speed and power with such casual skill. The Astartes truly were ultimate weapons.
Gestalt kicked off of Tellis once more, twisting about with his swords cutting blindly around him. The shriek of metal met his ears, and one of Tellis’s thrusters hit the roof in a puddle of flame.
The loss of a piece of his flight pack actually stunned the Iron Warrior briefly, and a cascade of alerts flashed across his visor. It took merely a second for Tellis to regain his balance in the air and re-route the flight pack’s pitch control, but by that time Gestalt was already speeding toward him. Both scimitars crashed into his lightning claws, barely being pushed out of their original trajectory straight toward the Marine’s helmet. The claws on the left gauntlet shattered, falling away to the roof in twisted pieces while their disruption field burst into a spray of prismatic sparks.
Tellis whirled around, but with his flight pack damaged Gestalt was faster. The griffon lowered his aim beneath the great burning wings of the daemon armor and attacked, plunging a scimitar into the back of the Iron Warrior’s thigh. Daemon-forged metals shrieked and parted before the blazing white edge, and the sword point punched through armor and flesh before lodging itself in iron-hard bones.
In an instant Tellis retaliated, throwing his other foot back while Gestalt was briefly immobile. The griffon blocked with his free sword, sparing his beak from the ceramite greaves. His scimitar was wrenched free from his grip, however, and was sent spinning away to the roof below.
“Tellis!” Rainbow Dash’s voice burst into the Chaos Lord’s helmet as pain surged up his leg. “Separate! Now! Get lower than him! I don’t know if you can survive this if it hits you too!”
Tellis obeyed without question or hesitation. His flight pack suddenly went dead, and gravity quickly claimed the armored giant. He plummeted downward, and Gestalt, still gripping the blade stuck in his thigh, was carried down with him.
Gestalt was most alarmed at his opponent suddenly becoming dead weight in the air, and had only a split second to consider his options. He released his sword grip and kicked off his enemy’s back, clearing as much distance between him and the Iron Warrior as he could. He assumed this was some sort of ploy, which meant the hybrid warrior was quite puzzled when Tellis crashed gracelessly onto the roof.
“RAINBOW BLASTER!!” boomed a voice from above.

A condensed pollution cloud boiled with energy high above the building, positively writhing with glowing red veins within the grimy dust.
Then, in an instant, it popped like a balloon, and a molten orange bolt of energy lanced downward. It made a hollow, roaring noise against the air, like a blooming inferno, rather than the more traditional thunderclap. But even if Gestalt had been able to properly identify what was coming, it was doubtful he could have done anything to evade it.
The bolt struck his wingtip, right on the guard of his right wing sheathe. The flash of light was blinding, and the wing underneath the enchanted metal was instantly burned away to a few smoking cinders of bone. Gestalt barely understood what was happening before he began plummeting. His right side was unresponsive, and most of the afflicted nerves had been scorched down to the roots. He slammed hard into the roof, trailing acrid smoke through the air behind him.

Rainbow slowly descended to the battlefield below, cringing at the wild splashes of blood across the metal roofing. One such puddle lay under Tellis, and was slowly growing wider as he wrenched a scimitar out of his leg. “Tellis! You all right? Did he get any organs you don’t have spares for?”
“Nah. But GEEZ that last one stings! All the way to the marrow!” Tellis hissed before tossing the sword away. “This is why Khorne hates magic! It SUCKS!” He pushed himself upright, and then stretched his flight pack out behind him. “What even was that?”
“Eh, just a lightning bolt.”
“A lightning bolt?”
“Yeah. Kinda. I mean, I used the smog cloud the same way I’d use a thundercloud. The result was… different. There’s a lotta weird energy in those things I’m not used to. Worked, though!”
Tellis spared a glance over to the corpse of the griffon he had crushed earlier, and then back to the crippled Captain. Gestalt was slowly moving away, pushing himself across the roof despite the molten cavity where his right shoulder used to be.
“Hmmm…”

Gestalt knew the battle was over even before he heard the heavy footsteps of power-armored greaves approaching behind him. He was crawling toward one of his swords, but even if he reached it he hardly had an idea of how it would help. He was defeated, and almost certainly mortally wounded. The pegasus could have ended him with a single burst from her shuriken weapon. When the footsteps stopped right behind him and he heard the sound of powered armor shifting into a kneel, Gestalt dearly wished she would hurry up and do so.
He was expecting talons to pierce his back. Or a crushing stomp to break his spine. Or any number of smaller torments while he was wounded and helpless. Instead, a metal gauntlet carefully – almost tenderly – took him around the head, fingers loosely parted around his beak.
“Last words. You earned ‘em,” Tellis said. His voice was cool and almost subdued. It was such a departure from his lunatic screeching or stupid jokes that Gestalt wasn’t sure it came from him at first.
Regardless, after a few seconds, Gestalt inhaled deeply and steeled himself. “My last words are for the pegasus, not you.”
Tellis shifted his body out of the way and tilted the griffon’s head to face up toward Rainbow Dash. The armored mare was hovering overhead, staring down at the defeated Captain in morbid puzzlement.
“You think you saved us. You think you spared this world from annihilation. You probably even think we should be grateful, and submit ourselves peacefully to the horror that’s swallowing our planet.” He coughed several times, and when his throat was clear again he continued. “You’ve merely doomed us to a slower, crueler death than the Orks offered us. Chaos will consume this world down to its heart and soul.” He took a weak, shuddering breath. “I won’t live to see it… but you will. And I pity you for that.”
“Eh. 6/10. Needed more friendship,” Tellis replied, pre-empting anything Rainbow Dash had to say in response. “Goodbye, Tolken.”
“MY NAME IS GES-“
The sound of bones cracking briefly filled the air.

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 19

“Heavy weapons, at last! Get them to the back! Behind the front firing lines! If any of you can unlock that sentry’s tower, then do it! We could use some more autocannon fire if they show up with another armored vehicle!”
Norris Delgan shouted to be heard among the constant whistle of multilasers and the understated whine of pulse rifles. The defensive at the lander lots had been a resounding success so far, and his soldiers had raised emergency barricades to create entrenched gun lines between the Chimeras. Heaps of dead Orks lay on the avenues approaching the sector, along with the odd scorched yak and minotaur.
Despite the mounting losses, the greenskins had not yet broken. They had assembled their own ramshackle barricades from loose scrap, salvaged metal, and occasionally their own dead. Several of the aliens had also forced their way into the buildings adjacent to the lander lots, turning the fortified structures against their owners. Bursts of hopelessly inaccurate gunfire spat from various windows, only to fall silent once a spray of lasers and pulse bolts answered them. Behind the improvised bulwarks Orks scraped up whatever weapons and ammunition they could find, desperate to keep the pressure up in the face of steadfast resistance.
“I generally don’t expect a great deal from Orkish leadership, but even by their sorry standards this is miserable,” Delgan mused, peeking out from behind an APC. “They’re not retreating or regrouping. I can’t see them mustering for another assault. They’re just… fighting until they die.”
“Well, that is the default Ork tactic!” a mercenary shouted while he reloaded his pulse rifle. “And their entire life philosophy, come to think of it!”
“More or less. And yet it’s so far beneath the strategic prowess it must have taken to get here. Has their Warboss already been slain?”
Several mercenaries turned to each other and shrugged. “Ork plans aside, what are our own? We can probably hold this area, but pushing out is going to be risky, Lord!”
A flash of light appeared in the distance, obscured partially by the smog blanketing the city. A vast, shaking roar like a peal of thunder rolled through the streets, and many of the soldiers stopped firing and shifted uncomfortably.
Delgan frowned. “That’s the third discharge of that magnitude we’ve heard so far. What IS that? It can’t be one of ours.”
“I’ve heard a macrocannon blast before, but this was something else. Gotta be Orkish; they like their weapons loud.”
“I don’t get it; how did the Orks sneak a heavy cannon in here?” Breezy Blight asked sourly. “They dug in from underground, right?”
“That’s the most likely explanation, yes. Although the battle has been going on long enough that we can’t discount other avenues of attack. With our defenses down and command crippled, it would be easy to breach the palisade,” Delgan mused. “Regardless, I have no intention of launching an assault. Be ready to withdraw on my order and make for the nearest village!”
“Withdraw?! Seriously?!” Poison Kiss complained. “You have plenty of guns! We shouldn’t give up the ghost yet!”
“YOU may do as you like, Miss Kiss. I will not die on these ramparts in some misbegotten gesture of fealty to the Iron Warriors.” Delgan turned on his heel. “I’m only holding for now because I’ve little reason to believe the route outside the fortress is safer. And to provide a haven to other evacuees, of course.”
“Speaking of evacuees!” A pegasus in combat armor pointed a hoof to the massive lander sitting behind the defensive line. “Are we really not going to do anything about all the Tau locked up in your space ship?”
Delgan cast a cool glance up at the pony. Then he tapped a power sword against the ground. “First, get down from there before you get yourself killed. You’re making a target of yourself.”
The pony quickly complied, dropping down at a controlled pace before landing at Delgan’s feet.
“Second, no, we’re not. I have neither the manpower nor the inclination to fight two bands of treacherous aliens at once. If the Tau flee, it is not my responsibility to stop them.”
“What IS your responsibility?” Rot Blossom asked.
“To secure as many assets as possible and protect them from the enemy,” Delgan replied curtly.
Kiss scowled. “Really? The Iron Warriors are away, we have rebels popping out of the woodwork, a bleeding Ork horde is swarming through the streets, and the grayskin tossers murdered most of our leadership before locking themselves in the only boat off this planet! All that and you’re telling me your job is to grab your dosh and book it?”
“My ‘dosh?’ Hardly.” Delgan didn’t turn to face the infected mares, instead gazing across the lots at something out of their line of sight. “There are many assets of value within the fleet, Miss Kiss. Raw metal is difficult to move but also difficult to destroy beyond recovery, and weapons can always be recovered later. Some assets, however… are more fragile.”
Kiss perked up suddenly when she saw the glint of metal coming from between two rows of buildings, which quickly turned into a silvery blur. “The train! The mag-lev is here!”
“Of course. It’s the most obvious transport to the evacuation zone, so long as the enemy doesn’t destroy the track,” Delgan said. He raised a hand and snapped his fingers. “I need a full squad to see to the unloading of the civilians. Take them around the far side of the lander, along the palisade. Any who wish to depart the fortress immediately may do so, although I can’t personally recommend it. Then hold position and guard the extraction zone.”
“Yes, Trademaster!” one heavily armored man jumped to his feet, and then he started slapping other soldiers on the shoulder to join him.
“Phage Squadron, accompany them,” Delgan commanded. “You’ve sustained considerable injury, and you’re not terribly useful so long as we keep the Orks at this range. Go.”

Kiss grimaced, but nodded her assent. The other power armored mares pulled away from their spots on the barricades and trotted over to join the collection of mercenaries and Fire Warriors jogging away toward the train station.
“All right, listen up! As this is the entry station, the train is locked down for security sweeps and augur scans before the doors open! Patem, you’ve run security detail, yeah? Get inside the control kiosk and open ‘em up.”
“And the rest of us?” asked Breezy Blight.
“Take up some cover just in case, and enjoy not getting shot at for a few minutes. Who knows if it’ll last,” the man grunted before speeding into a run.
The train was a dozen cars long, and seemed to have endured at least some small-arms fire on its journey through the city. Lasburns and dents decorated the exterior, but like most objects in the city the passenger rail was constructed with enough armor to be used as a battle platform; not a single breach was evident among the cars.
“Our exit clear?”
“So long as that lander doesn’t start spitting out Fire Warriors,” Breezy growled, turning to glare at a Tau soldier that had tagged along.
That same soldier evidently spoke excellent Gothic, and he recoiled in surprise. “Fire Warriors? Why would it be a problem if we had more Fire Warriors?”
“Are you asking that seriously?” Blossom demanded, her voice a near-growl.
“Oi! Girls! Pack it in!” Kiss snapped. “Like the Trademaster said, there’ll be plenty of time to drub the grays when we don’t have a thousand greenies breathing down our throats!”
The other mares reluctantly peeled off, walking off to join their squad leader in a sulk. The other soldiers remained confused, but were more focused on their objective.
“All these windows have their emergency shutters down. I can’t make anything out. Is there even anything in there?” one mercenary demanded.
“Aye,” Kiss replied, her visor switched to thermal imaging. “Packed in right snug, too.” The passengers from each train appeared as a massed bunch of yellow-orange blobs within the shell of duralloy and armaplas, shifting only slightly while they waited to be let out.
Except for the last car, for some reason. “Hmm? What’s that?” the unicorn mumbled and started backing away from the train to get a better look.
“Patem! You got those doors up yet?”
“Gimme a click! I never worked these controls before, and there’s blood all over the fragging cogitator!”
The other soldiers dutifully took up defensive positions, relaxed but still alert. One of the men stepped up onto the rail platform and banged his knuckles on one of the shuttered windows.
“Hey! You all still alive in there?!” he shouted.
There was an immediate barrage of noise from within the car, causing him to recoil. There was banging on the window, hammering on the door, and a great deal of yelling muffled by the train’s impressive exterior shielding.
“Okay! Still alive! Great! We’ll have you out in a moment, but you’re safe for now!” he patted the window, slightly unnerved by the rising intensity of the noise.
Poison Kiss walked up to the last car, peering uncertainly through her visor. The last car wasn’t empty, as it first seemed, it just wasn’t packed end-to-end like the others. There were bodies inside, but they seemed… different. It was rather hard to tell one cluster of orangish blobs from another, though, and she wasn’t used to using the alternative vision modes of her visor.
Suddenly, one of the external vox casters on the train crackled to life.
“-can’t even hear us! Does this work? Hello? Is this thing on?!” A feminine voice came from the caster, booming across the train station and causing the soldiers to wince.
The man that had been knocking on the train before did so again, but more sharply.
“I’ll take that as a yes! Listen, we have to get out of here! They’re on the train! We think they forced their way on three stops ago but they only board-“
The electric system suddenly went haywire, and hot sparks blasted from the vox caster. The men were instantly at attention, scanning the area for any sign of intruders.
“… They’re on the train? Who’s on the train? Orks?” the mercenary mumbled, searching for any obvious signs of forced entry. “They’re being awfully quiet, then. Can we run an auspex scan on these cars first?”
“Auspex? I don’t know how to work that thing!”
“Then go back to the Trademaster and find someone who does! We’re not in any hurry so long as those doors are secure!”
Poison Kiss recoiled a few steps as the heat blobs she was observing started moving more quickly. One of them stood up straight, facing her, and a gasp escaped her lips as the orange silhouette formed a shape she could finally recognize.
“MINOTAUR!! ON THE LAST TRAIN, THERE’S MINO-“
The security door was smashed out of its frame by a ferocious kick, and Kiss yelped as the twisted hunk of metal – all but invisible in her current view mode – slammed into her and threw her over the edge of the platform.

“Contact! Contact! On the right!”
A mangled Dark Acolyte was hurled from the last train car, her servo arms ripped from their sockets and her optics shattered. A moment later a massive, muscled beast leapt from the car and landed on her, crushing the cultist’s skull under armored hooves the size of anvils.
“At last. Warriors,” Killer Instinct grunted, brandishing a pair of axes. One was a cog-toothed power axe stripped from a dead Techpriest, while the other seemed to be a more conventional power weapon taken from an armory stash. Both were chipped and scorched from heavy use and minimal care from a wielder who didn’t particularly appreciate the technical nuances of disruptor power fields.
A pair of huge, thick gauntlets covered the minotaur’s hands and forearms with thickened plating to act as shields. Even a Space Marine would have struggled to wear such a thing without power armor, but Killer Instinct carried them like mittens. A much less obtrusive breast and abdominal plate protected the insurgent’s body, thick enough to absorb a lasbolt but little else. Iron-shod hooves and knees completed the outfit, wrapping the horned warrior in enough metal to immobilize a lesser minotaur from its weight.
And he was not alone.
Two more minotaur charged out behind Killer Instinct, each one carrying a heavy bolter and laden with ammo belts. The first lasbolts and pulse shots streaked by them while they turned, but the train station’s defenders were already shrinking back behind cover by the time the first salvo was unleashed. Heavy bolters tore across the train station, hammering barricade walls and sawing across the ground. Hot shrapnel exploded across the ferrocrete, clouding the air and cutting into a few soldiers at more vulnerable angles. More minotaur leapt out behind the others, each one boasting a heavy weapon; most with heavy stubbers and Astartes chain weapons, and a few others carrying missile launchers and multimeltas clearly stolen more recently.
Killer Instinct raised an arm to block an incoming pulse blast, and the bright blue flare sizzled to nothing against the thick metal shield of his gauntlet. “Spread out and tear through their defenses! These are merely an escort. There are more foes beyond this voidcraft.”
He beckoned to the massive lander, and a blast of steam puffed from his nostrils. Then he stopped suddenly, and his eye fixed on the damaged door panel he had kicked out.
The door suddenly blasted toward him, propelled by a burst of powerful magic. He jolted forward rather than back, slamming a fist into the metal debris and flinging it to the side.
“Rot and die, you horned sods!” Poison Kiss snarled. Her horn pulsed with a sickly yellow glow, and her much-abused boltgun swiveled about in the air. Killer Instinct paused, sensing a sickening darkness welling up within the enraged mare.
Arrows of venom blasted from the armored unicorn, shooting out of her horn in several random directions before curving sharply to hunt for targets. Her boltgun thundered to life a second later, as soon as Kiss could spare the concentration to keep the weapon aimed properly on burst fire. Spears of vile toxins punched into muscled flesh and burned through plates of scrap metal. The boltgun’s shots mostly went wide, but one lucky round drilled into a minotaur’s knee, blasting apart his leg and dropping him in an instant.
Kiss quickly darted away after the attack, wary of several heavy stubbers being turned on her while minotaur roared in anger and clutched at rotted patches of flesh. The noise of heavy weapons doubled in volume behind her, and a jet of hot melta gas ripped a trench into the ferrocrete just off to her left.
“Easy! Easy! I don’t think Grandfather is going to give me another mulligan today!” Kiss gasped, retreating behind a building.
Killer Instinct narrowed his eyes, and then spared a glance at the firefight going on behind him. The armored mare hadn’t done severe damage to the others, and most of the soldiers were still staying low behind cover. The sheer volume of fire the minotaur were capable of laying down kept the defenders firmly pinned, although he knew that wouldn’t last.
As if to illustrate the point, a pulse shot struck one of the beasts in the arm, throwing off his aim and very nearly turning his entire bicep into a charred husk. A pair of lasblasts quickly filled the gap in the suppressive fire, and the minotaur slumped to the ground in a smoldering heap.
“Sox! Get out here and help put these apes down! I have other prey!” Killer Instinct bellowed. He stomped after Poison Kiss, dismissing the rumble of gunfire behind him.
Sox poked her head out of the train car, grimacing. She wasn’t especially happy to be so close to heavy combat (even if her side had the bigger guns), but there was hardly anywhere else to go from here. It had been hard enough to keep Killer Instinct from leading them into a suicidal charge THIS long.
“Keep them down!” she shouted, lifting her own heavy bolter and adding a wild spray to the thunderous barrage. “Use the melty guns! Hit the barricades directly! It will go right through it!”
Two more minotaur marched up, hoisting the double-barreled multimeltas over their shoulders. They paused briefly to aim the unwieldy weapons, and then fired.
Two men vanished into a flash of light and smoke, along with their barricades. A plume of glowing ash swung up into the air over the molten remains of their cover, and for a moment the suppressive fire slackened.
The instant it did, one of the mercenaries rose and fired a shot with his pulse rifle, tagging one of the melta gunners in the abdomen.
“Hey! Alert the Trademaster! We need another squad to flank!” He ducked back down before a heavy bolter sawed across his position again, hammering a line of smoking dents in the barricade he was hiding behind.
“How?! All the vox networks are down!” complained the soldier in the station control center.
“Well do SOMETHING! We’re pinned down!” A jet of melta gas blasted across the ground, scorching the end of the barricade and barely missing the soldier.
“Do something? Like what? There are no active defenses and they already have plenty of cover,” Patem griped, staring down at the switchboard.
A spray of bullets hammered the armorglass windows, and they shook furiously from the impact. The mercenary flinched, but the panes held; only a stitch of small, circular craters marked the stubber burst.
“Well… how about this, then?” He reached down to a covered dial and then flipped the cover up. It was labeled “Emergency Override.” He didn’t know what it would override, but since this seemed like an emergency he grabbed the dial and turned it anyway.

The hiss of compressed gas and the clanking of unlocking gears were easily drowned out by the roar of heavy bolters and stubbers. When every door on the train suddenly snapped open at once, however, the combatants were startled enough that the gunfire actually slackened for a few seconds.
“What the blazes was that? Why did you open the bloody train doors?!”
“I… I dunno! You told me to!”
“That was BEFORE the minotaur showed, you Warp addled son of a-“
That soldier vanished in a flash of hot smoke when another multimelta fired, this time finding its mark perfectly. The man was incinerated before he even knew what was happening, and the soldier next to him fell over from the wave of dusty heat.
“Forget this! We can’t hold here! Fall back!”
“You’re kidding! Against these savages?!”
“Against these savages and their heavy fragging bolters! Come on!”
Sox laughed, lowering her weapon so that she could get a better look at the enemy. They crawled for safety beneath a constant hail of explosions, dragging along the wounded or making short rolls from barricade to barricade. It was a pathetic sight, and she briefly considered ordering the minotaur to charge. Surely the enemy would get away otherwise, but she ultimately decided against it. It would be too easy to overextend her little army or make a misstep and get them all killed.
“Chase them away and then reload, quickly!” the changeling spy barked.
“Sox, the trains have opened. The passengers are exposed as well,” grunted a minotaur behind her.
“… Yes. So?” Sox turned toward him. “Did you want to stomp on more hapless workers? I don’t mind, but we have better things to do.”
“Not that,” snarled the horned beast, pulling back the slide on his heavy bolter. “I ask because the evacuees could be hiding tools or weapons among themselves.”
“Hiding weapons? Like what?” Sox scoffed. “We just fought off a squad of actual warriors; what sorts of things do you think a bunch of worker rabble will have to fight with?”
“Magical floating boltguns,” the minotaur replied, his eyes widening.
Sox barked a laugh. “Hah! That’s ridicu-“
“No, there’s magical floating boltguns behind you!” he grabbed Sox by the shoulder and then threw both of them behind a metal wall. “LOOK OUT!”

One by one, bolters floated out of a train car on beds of sparkling pink. They hovered in a parallel line at first, muzzle to stock, forming a chain of guns that stretched across the platform. One boltgun was struck by a heavy bolt round and was blasted from the line, spinning across the ground. Another was removed by a multimelta blast, reduced to a molten slurry in mid-air and splashed across the ground.
But there were still a good eighteen boltguns in the air once they turned toward the minotaur and opened fire.
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha haa!” A feminine laugh, amplified and distorted by a vox grille, boomed over the roar of the bolters. “You goons think you can march into Trixie’s city and start tearing up the place?! Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?!”
The minotaur scrambled for cover, leaping behind barricades or dropping flat onto the ground. The boltguns were firing completely blind, with only the general direction of the minotaur to guide them, but without a real target to fire back on the insurgents could do little but seek protection from the storm. A few of the bolts even hit out of sheer chance – minotaur were fairly large targets – blasting craters in muscled flesh or cracking apart shabby armor plates.
“What are you doing, you cowards?!” Sox shouted. “It’s obviously a unicorn doing that! Stand up and go get her!”
“But… with that much incoming fire, we-“
The soldier next to her was cut off when Sox grabbed his horn and twisted his head to look her straight in the eyes.
“Stand up and kill the pony,” Sox said firmly, her eyes flashing green.
She released the minotaur, and he immediately pushed himself upright, heedless of the wild spray of bolt shots zipping around him. Turning the flat side of his heavy bolter to face in front of him, he held the gun up like a shield and jumped over the barricade.
“Follow me! Into the train car!” he roared, his eyes gleaming with residual magic. “Kill everything you see! Ape, pony, Iron Warr-“
A pair of pulse blasts cracked against his leg, cooking the flesh down to the bone. He stumbled immediately, falling onto his side while his heavy bolter slipped from his twitching fingers. The fog around his mind cleared in an instant, purged by agonizing pain.
“Regroup! We have supporting fire! Settle in and take them down!” shouted a mercenary crouching next to the command room. The other soldiers were already taking up their briefly abandoned positions, adding volleys of aimed pulse fire to the blind spray from the boltguns.
“Hit the melta gunners! Quick, before those bolters run dry!”
Alas, almost as he said the words the hovering boltguns shuddered to a stop. Their hammers clicked ominously in staggered sequence, and then the glow around them vanished. The battle rifles fell to the ground, leaving the minotaur and Company soldiers facing each other directly once more.
Until a power armored pony leapt out of the train car and landed on the passenger platform.
“Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho!” Trixie laughed and popped off her helmet, ensuring that the musclebound insurgents could see the smirk stretched across her muzzle. “Is this really the kind of enemy that managed to outwit the mighty Iron Warriors? Trixie is honestly embarrassed for them!” She laughed, throwing back her head while both sides’ warriors stared dumbly.
Sox furrowed her brow while she peeked out at the unicorn. Something about the pony felt wrong to her senses, and that was before she considered that Trixie was standing in front of a squad of heavily armed minotaur.
One such minotaur hoisted a rocket launcher and fired. Trixie vanished under a plume of flame, smoke, and hot shrapnel as the frag warhead exploded, and several of the empty bolters were flung away across the platform. A pair of pulse blasts found the shooter in retaliation, staggering him, and then a hot-shot lasgun beam struck him in the forehead and sent the horned beast to the ground.
Sox peeked out from behind her barricade, and her teeth clenched angrily. “… Nothing. It’s an illusion, you fools! Stop wasting time and attack! Killer Instinct, where did you run off to?”

“Yeesh, really? A missile? Overkill much?” Trixie grimaced at the plume of dust rising from where her hololith used to be.
She took a step back into the train car, pushing into the crowd of civilians still packed tightly into the interior. Her hat floated above her, held upside down while magic spiraled around her helmet’s horn casing.
“All right, everyone step on up! Take a weapon and get out there while we still have the advantage!” Boltguns started popping up out of the hat, dropping to the floor at Trixie’s hooves.
“What? Why? They’ll cut us apart!” complained a menial.
“Not if you shoot them first!” Trixie chirped, levitating the weapon up into the man’s hands. “Now go out there, snap off a burst, and then flee for safety!”
“Not the worst plan, I guess, but can’t you just float the guns out there and fire them like before?” asked a woman nervously picking a bolt pistol off the floor.
“Trixie has a hard enough time firing twenty bolters even when Trixie can see what she’s shooting at! And you heard them order an attack! We have to get out of here!” the magician protested.
“We won’t give up the city without a fight!” barked a unicorn stallion, levitating a bolter into the air next to his head. “Let’s lock and load!”
Trixie’s horn pulsed, and a burst of force knocked the weapon out of the air and sent it into the arms of a surprised menial behind the unicorn.
“Leave the fighting to the humans before you get yourself killed,” the armored mare drawled. “Everybody who isn’t armed, break for the station buildings as soon as you clear the crossfire!”
Trixie’s horn casing pulsed again, the geometric threading practically steaming from the amount of energy surging through it. A trio of humans flickered into view next to the train exit, and then they bolted out into the firefight. It only took a few seconds exposed before the suppressive fire started training on them, drawing the heavy weapons fire away from the train.
“Go! Go! Go!”

“Oh, NOW what?” Sox growled when she saw armed humans fleeing the train. Heavy bolter shells quickly centered on the escapees and cut across their path, but with no discernible effect. “It’s an illusion! Like I said before! Stop shooting at decoys and get to the train car!”
A burst of bolter fire scattered into the minotaur, and one of them staggered to his knees. Pulse salvos quickly sought him out, and he keeled over with an agonized groan.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Sox grumbled under her breath. More people were flooding from the train car now; those with guns fired desperately at the insurgents before diving behind barricades, while those without simply sprinted away from the crossfire or started crawling under the train for cover.
Another minotaur slumped to the ground next to Sox with smoke pouring from his chest. This battle was turning against her, and the changeling knew she didn’t have much scope for survival if she had to face the humans without a gang of hulking warrior-beasts in tow. If only Killer Instinct hadn’t gone chasing after that damn pony!
Of course, those weren’t the only tools she had at her disposal. Probably the best ones, strictly speaking, but she was quick running out of options.
“Time to stop fighting like a minotaur and start fighting like a changeling,” she mumbled. Then, louder, she shouted “ROX!! YOU’RE UP!!”

“And here’s a gun for you, and a flamer for you, and a grenade belt for you, and a gun for you…”
Trixie’s hat shook up and down in the air, spilling a steady stream of weapons onto the floor. Men and women picked them up reluctantly before running out into the fray, creating a steady stream of armed humans into the battle zone. Soon the train car was almost empty, with the only remaining civilians being Trixie, her assistant Suuna, and a handful of ponies who decided it would be safer to cower in the train than run for cover.
“Should I get people from the next car, Miss Trixie?” Suuna asked anxiously. “There may be many more who can still fight.”
“Yes! Good idea!” Trixie chirped, shaking her hat again. “Just give me a minute to summon more weapons!”
The muzzle of a plasma gun slipped out of the hat. Curiously, the rest of the gun didn’t fall out, but instead remained stuck halfway and wiggled back and forth.
“Hmm? C’mon, c’mon,” the performer grumbled, shaking the hat up and down again. “Trixie doesn’t have time for this! Is something wrong with the portal?”
She levitated her hat higher and then brought it down, slamming the gun directly onto the floor. Then the hat jumped up again, spilling the plasma gun onto the ground along with a very surprised Grot.
“Oh, are you serious? We have greenskins in the armory?!” Trixie groaned.
The Grot tried to stand up and hoist the gun, but Trixie turned away and slammed a single armored hoof into him. The diminutive alien was flung across the train car with a pained yelp, landing flat on his face.
Then Trixie flipped the plasma gun up into the air with a pulse of magic and fired a single shot, vaporizing the Grot in an instant.
“Welp, that does it for Trixie’s hat trick,” she sighed, letting said hat drop back onto her helmet. “Here Suuna, you take this.”
Suuna, who had remained admirably stoic during the appearance and casual annihilation of the greenskin, squeaked in surprise when the plasma gun flew toward her on a trail of glittering pink. She grabbed it awkwardly out of the air, and then immediately held it out at arm’s length.
“Me? But, uhm… aren’t these plasma guns supposed to be dangerous?” she asked, tenderly handling the weapon as if it might explode at any moment.
“Plasma guns are USUALLY far more deadly to the target than to the shooter,” Trixie assured her, “and definitely less determined to kill you than an angry rebel minotaur. So on balance Trixie thinks you’re safer with that gun than without it.”
The unicorn turned around to face the exit. “Trixie’s going to create another hololith to give the clods more targets, and then Trixie will make a break for it. You cover Trixie from the exit, and when Trixie reaches the security kiosk then Trixie will do the same for you. Understand?”
“Okay, Miss Trixie. I’m ready,” Suuna agreed, not feeling ready at all.
“Good!” Trixie concentrated, and a hololith of Twilight Sparkle in her power armor appeared next to the entrance. “I’ll bet THIS will attract some crossfire! Now-“

With a ferocious snarl, a minotaur jumped in front of the exit wielding a roaring chainsword. Trixie screeched and jumped back, which accidentally caused the hololith to recoil as well. The minotaur’s weapon came down on the illusory pony, and the teeth of the blade hammered against the metal flooring with an angry squeal and a wave of sparks.
The insurgent was surprised for a moment, but quickly got his bearings when a pair of plasma shots hit the wall of the car next to him. With an enraged snort, he jumped up into the train.
“Suuna, how could you miss at this range?!” Trixie complained. Her fireburst launcher engaged, and the barrel pushed aside the cape that covered Trixie’s back. “Here’s your encore, ha-“
The minotaur advanced quite a bit faster than Trixie had hoped, and she was cut off by a savage chainsaw slash. The teeth of the blade hardly got a chance to dig into her armor, as the sheer force of the blow knocked the unicorn off her hooves and threw her into the far wall of the train. With a pained squeak, she bounced onto the floor and collapsed into a heap of metal and shredded fabric.
Suuna recoiled, the plasma gun shuddering in her hand. Her back hit the wall of the train, and the minotaur’s gaze turned to her. The plasma gun began to whine and its flex sheathing glowed white, as Suuna had accidentally clutched it over the cycler charging key. The ionizing chamber began quivering, and a thin puffs of coolant spat from the barrel.
The minotaur moved, sweeping forward in a stab. The chainsword growled, it teeth turning into a silvery blur while they reached for the young woman. Suuna squeezed the trigger without uttering so much as a gasp.
The plasma gun practically vomited energy, blasting into the insurgent’s shoulder with a flare of light that briefly blinded its wielder. The chainsword, with hairy forearm still attached to the grip, dropped next to Suuna’s feet. Its teeth briefly scratched at the flooring before the disembodied hand fell away, and then the engine sputtered into silence. The minotaur himself wobbled to a halt, the shock of having a good portion of his body atomized understandably leaving him somewhat stunned.
“Ah! Hot!” Suuna tossed the plasma gun away as it sizzled against her skin, and she clutched her burnt hand against her chest. Even so, she kicked away the minotaur’s dismembered arm and took up his chainsword in her good hand.
The weapon was too large and heavy for someone of her frame, but years of forced labor lent her the desperate strength she needed. She thrust the chainsword into the insurgent’s stomach and pulled the handle. The engine roared to life, and the quaking of the chainsword as it tore through flesh and viscera almost ripped it free from her grip. She refused to let go, and her teeth rattled in her skull until the horned beast finally keeled over into a puddle of his own blood.

“G-Good job, S-Suuna,” Trixie said uneasily as she walked back to her assistant. “He got in a lucky hit! Trixie would have handled him!”
“Are you all right, Miss Trixie?” Suuna dropped the chainsword onto the floor with a sigh. It was painted over with blood now, and more than a few splashes had reached her. She still clutched her burnt hand to her chest, although her face betrayed little more than a slight grimace.
“Yes! Trixie is well. Mostly. A little rattled, actually. Obviously this armor saved Trixie from the worst of it, but it could really use a little more padding in the helmet.” She shook her head. “Enough of that, though! Let’s stick with the plan and get out of here, and then we can get that hand looked at! Ready… GO!!”

****

Poison Kiss’s pulse roared in her ears while she galloped under the cargo lander, her greaves scraping the ferrocrete beneath her.
The pounding of much heavier hooves followed close behind her. Killer Instinct had a much longer stride, but Kiss had a four-legged gait and armor that assisted her movement rather than hindering it. Even so the beast seemed to be slowly gaining, and she couldn’t slow down enough to even snap off a quick bolter shot or distracting spell at her pursuer.
“Just… a little… further…” she hissed to herself. Micro-sensors detecting her body stress sent extra surges of energy to the joint motors in the legs and raised the oxygen content of the air pumped into her helmet. Many of the normal functions of her visor were effectively useless due to interference, but the visual zoom and navpoint tag kept her focused on her destination. The only safe place nearby was the defensive strongpoint held by Delgan and his cronies; with advance warning, they could sweep the train station with ease.
Without warning, they would probably be taken by surprise just as she had been.
Kiss turned around a refueling tower that jutted up from a metal well in the ground and connected to a vast wing above her. Ahead were the massive landing skis of the lander. A series of huge metal slats, supported by webs of reinforced supports and heavy hydraulics that allowed the lander to make planetfall on surfaces less forgiving than the broad landing lots of the Ferrous Dominus. In the current ideal conditions, only a few of the supports needed to be deployed to hold up the vessel’s tonnage and allow for maintenance, one of which was dead ahead. The spaces between the criss-crossing bars that made up the vessel’s legs looked appealingly hard to squeeze through for anything bigger than she was, and the unicorn made a desperate leap as soon as she was close enough.
Ceramite scraped loudly against durasteel edging, but she managed to get her head and front legs out the other end before she screeched to a stop. Kiss squirmed her way out, noting that the heavy hoofsteps behind her had stopped. Once she was free she dropped down onto the edge of the landing ski, finally getting enough space to think.
She promptly heard the minotaur move again, but more quickly, and in a different direction.
“Barricade’s that way… but the horned wanker’s going to be in my path. Maybe if I can reach the other landing leg, I-“
Several bright red lumens winked on across the underbelly of the lander, and the clanking and grinding of various gears and mechanisms filled the air. Kiss froze nervously, and then looked up at the voidship looming over her.
The vessel had numerous thrusters on its underside to account for a variety of different conditions during landing and liftoff. High gravity, excessive load, and unusual atmosphere could increase the amount of energy necessary to achieve basic lift by a factor of hundreds as compared to ideal Terran-standard scenarios. Poison Kiss didn’t understand any of the particular engineering nuances of flight, of course, but she did notice that many of the thrusters above her seemed to be warming up.
“No, no, no! Not now, you gray pillocks!” she shouted, whirling about in a panic. “Aren’t there any safety sensors on this thing?! Manual shutoff?! COME ON!”
Her visor responded by shuffling through various relevant but ultimately unhelpful points of interest on the cargo lander. In the meantime, the thrusters in front and behind her began a slow burn, swallowing the mare in blasts of hot air.
The jets weren’t hot enough to melt her armor, though, and soon they shut off. Several other thrusters activated elsewhere on higher power, searing the ground with jets of bright blue. The vessel creaked and groaned overhead, but the thrust wasn’t anything close enough for lift-off.
“The blazes are you twits doing up there?!” she screamed up at the bulkhead. “Is this a test firing? Are you seriously trying to learn to fly that thing NOW?!”
Honestly it made sense. The lander was the only way to get a small army off-planet, and the pilots might be unwilling to cooperate. Under those circumstances, what option did they have but try to figure out how to fly it on the spot?
They really could have started BEFORE she ran under the ship for shelter, though.

The thrusters powered down, letting the blasts of white-hot plasma recede upward into the thruster nozzles. As the jet in front of her fizzled, it revealed a certain armored minotaur patiently waiting on the other side, axes held loosely at his sides.
“NURGLE TAKE YOU!” the unicorn screamed. In a flash of magic her boltgun jumped off of her back and into the air.
It didn’t get to fire a single shot before Killer Instinct hurled a power axe through the air. The blade cleaved through the gun in a flash of sparks, slicing it in two before the axe embedded itself in the ferrocrete behind Kiss.
Poison Kiss was understandably upset about the loss of her weapon, but didn’t have time to shout further complaints. Killer Instinct charged, and she shifted spells on the fly. The minotaur warrior was surrounded by an aura of green gloom, and he stumbled noticeably before reaching melee range. Cramps, nausea, and inexplicable pain flared across Killer Instinct’s body, as if a dozen minor diseases had taken root at once. His vision blurred with tears, and an irritated snort spat phlegm across his chest.
Even so, when Killer Instinct made his swing, Kiss only barely evaded. The axe’s edge grazed her flank, biting through the ceramite with a hot screech but failed to reach the armor’s frame. Kiss landed her jump and her helmet’s jaw snapped open as she whirled on the minotaur.
A trio of diseased bone darts shot from her snarling maw, but her opponent was already recovering his senses. He snapped one of his gauntlets up, letting the spines bounce off uselessly. Then he kicked out at the mare, taking her by surprise and slamming an armored hoof into her helmet.
Poison Kiss was flung across the ground, her world spinning and her right visor lens shattered. She was so overwhelmed that she didn’t notice that several thrusters overhead were powering up again.

Killer Instinct backed away as one such thruster ignited just ahead of him, cutting off a direct route to finish off the unicorn. The thrusters weren’t burning as hot as before, but more of them were igniting, heating up the entire landing pad at once.
“… This is a less than ideal arena,” the warrior grumbled, wiping his nose against his arm. The feeling of illness was starting to subside already as his body fought against the corruption, but it would probably be several minutes until he finally shook off her spell.
Ducking low under the roar of the thrusters and weaving around the plasma flares, Killer Instinct jogged toward his second axe and snatched it from the ground. Glancing over at the unicorn, he saw her pushing herself up, helmet broken, but without obvious injury. Even considering the mare’s armor, he was slightly impressed.
Her horn flashed, and a large knife slotted into her leg armor was drawn by a pulse of magic. It was rusty and pitted, and its blade was wet and filthy in such a way that suggested its condition was a consequence of its care rather than a lack thereof.
“Good. Die with your blade bared, equine,” Killer Instinct said as he approached.
“Die with your guts rotting from the inside out, you horned muppet!” Kiss snarled in reply. Her plague knife hovered near her helmet, ready to launch forward with a thought.
Killer Instinct stopped, and his large ears twitched. With the sound of the lift thrusters all around him and his focus on the unicorn, it was hard to hear other nearby noises. But armored hooves galloping over ferrocrete had a very loud and distinctive ring to them.
He whirled, bringing up one of his massive gauntlets to shield his face. Just in time, apparently, as a string of mass-reactive rounds pounded against them.
“Suck boltgun and die, maggot fodder!”
“Kiss! Are you okay? We had to go around the station to follow you!”
Breezy Blight and Rot Blossom stood at the edge of the cargo lander’s wing, outside of the ring of thrusters threatening to cook the combatants underneath. The former was firing her wrist bolter with abandon, hoping a shot would land on a vulnerable point.
Within a few seconds, however, the weapon clicked empty, and a puff of gunsmoke leaked from the twin barrels.
“Ponyfeathers! I’m dry! Blossom, shoot him!” the pegasus snarled.
“We’ve been fighting for hours without resupply. I ran out a while ago,” Blossom retorted, shaking her head. A pair of bloated flies crawled from the crevices of her armor and jumped into the air, buzzing straight for the minotaur.
The insects surely should have been beneath his notice, but Killer Instinct’s senses were on a razor’s edge. He flicked an axe at one, popping it instantly against the crackling power field. The other axe he tossed into the air before lashing out with the free hand like a snake. He squashed the fly within his fist, and then reached up to grab his other weapon on the way down.
“Gotcha!” Kiss snatched up the axe with her levitation magic, and then sent it spinning toward the minotaur at a different angle. Killer Instinct dodged awkwardly to avoid taking the edge in his face, and ended up losing part of his horn instead. The power field snapped ferociously as it ripped through the thick, iron-plated bone, and then the power axe flew over his shoulder to bounce across the ground.
Kiss expected an enraged howl or other reaction to the loss of a horn, but the minotaur warrior was surrounded and not so easily diverted. When Breezy Blight hopped close enough to use her breath weapon Killer Instinct whirled and charged, rushing directly into the stream of foul gas.
He emerged with eyes tearing and lungs rasping, and Breezy dodged away with a surprised cry and a forlorn wish that she still had both her wings. The humming power axe missed, slashing down, but a mostly blind backhand found its target. With a seismic clang of metal against metal, Breezy was sent spinning across the lots.
Killer Instinct moved to follow, but then his right ear twitched. He whirled again, lashing out with his free hand and grabbing the neck of the giant centipede that had been snaking toward his back. He tugged on it, ripping it out of Rot Blossom’s throat, and then threw it on the ground. A quick stomp of his armored hooves turned the venomous creature into a yellow stain on the ground, and the minotaur started advancing on Blossom.
“Your vile blessings are useless before a real warrior.” His voice was hoarse and cracked, and blood leaked from his nostrils from inhaling Breezy’s toxins. If any serious disease had taken hold in the minotaur’s body, though, it wasn’t working nearly fast enough. “Face me with steel and die properly, scum.”
Blossom wordlessly tapped her front hoof on the ground twice, and then a blade like a raptor’s talon flipped out of her boot. Kiss slowly advanced from the other side, her plague knife levitating near her head. Breezy Blight was still gathering her senses from the last impact, but she rushed to get upright and only stumbled a little while flanking from another angle.
“You want more of Nurgle’s love, ya horned nancy? I’ll give it to you,” Poison Kiss snarled. “For Nurgle! For Chaos! FOR THE IRON-“
“What the blazes are you fools doing?!”

All four combatants were reasonably surprised to be chastised from a third party, and the shout broke the violent tension between pony and minotaur. Trademaster Delgan was standing near a refueling pylon, his arms crossed over his chest.
“… Uh… is something wrong, Trademaster?” Breezy asked.
“Aside from the hostiles behind our defensive perimeter,” Kiss added hastily. “We’re working on that, my Lord.”
“I can see that, Miss Kiss. I was referring to your proximity to the lander.” He pointed up at the void ship, its thrusters still sputtering to life in seemingly random patterns. “I left the defensive line when I saw that they were test-firing the takeoff thrusters. Why are you lot fighting under there? If they try to take off you’ll all be incinerated. What would your combat be in aid of, then?”
The mares hesitated, and then stared up at the minotaur standing between them.
“So… how… how do we do this?” Blossom asked nervously. “Like, do we mark a point and then start fighting again when we reach it, or-“
Killer Instinct suddenly sprinted forward, eliciting a yelp of surprise from the earth pony. She tried to leap out of the way, but only barely managed to keep her head out of the path of the descending axe blade. The power weapon chopped into her back, sinking through plates of ceramite and adamantium to slice into the flesh and bone below. He didn’t stop running even as his axe got stuck, kicking away both the pony and his remaining weapon.
“AAAAAAAaaaawww right in the spinal cord,” Blossom moaned as she limply bounced and scraped across the ground.
“HEY!! Get back here!” Breezy barked. She ran after the insurgent immediately, puffs of dark gas blasting from her nostrils.
Kiss looked like she was ready to follow, but hesitated and glanced over at Rot Blossom. With a pained grimace, she rushed to help her fallen teammate while the thrusters behind and around her begin another test cycle.

Killer Instinct sprinted toward the axe that Kiss had discarded, snatching it off the ground while he ran away from the lander. Breezy galloped after him, mumbling angry curses under her breath while she summoned up another toxic cloud within her lungs.
The minotaur suddenly slammed a hoof against the ground, braking hard against the ferrocrete. He reared the axe back and then hurled it like a tomahawk, sending it straight at his pony pursuer. Breezy barely had time to realize the danger, much less dodge; the power axe sunk into her shoulder plate, biting through the armor with a scorching hiss. She stumbled immediately, spitting out a cloud of vile gas before falling onto her side and scraping to a stop.
“OOF. Okay, yeah, that hit bone,” she said while she twitched on the ground. “They can fix that, right? Or do they have to take the whole leg off now? I hope not. I already lost a wing today!”
Killer Instinct stomped up to the pegasus, and then slammed a plated hoof onto her flank. The armor creaked, the frame straining against the sheer weight being pressed against it. The minotaur grabbed his axe and wrenched it free, grimacing at the spray of sparks and the smear of brackish blood left behind.
“Excuse me! You there!” Delgan spoke again, and Killer Instinct glanced over to him. The Trademaster was walking closer, his stride calm and unhurried. “Two things: One, you’re still a few meters closer than advisable to a cargo lander readying for takeoff. Two…” He laid a hand on the hilt of his power sword. “… I would recommend you leave the mares be. They are injured and exhausted from a day of fighting, and you’ve bested them. Take your victory and go.”
Killer Instinct narrowed his eyes. The human looked weak; fit, perhaps, and obviously armed, but it was hard to gauge any possible threat level. He also couldn’t imagine why the alien was making a plea for his withdrawal under the circumstances. There were soldiers at either end of the lots, and this Trademaster person was going to stand here and make requests?
The minotaur reached down, grabbing Breezy by the rear leg. “Such vile, cursed creatures your band employs. What were they like before, I wonder,” he growled, hauling the mare up into the air upside-down. She began thrashing her legs and remaining wing about, trying to kick herself free, but the horned warrior simply held her at arm’s length. “You aliens brought this blight here. Wars and magic and cults from bloodstained stars, slowly devouring our planet and people. Infesting them. Turning them into… this.” Killer Instinct tightened his grip on Breezy’s leg, and the ceramite creaked under the pressure.
Delgan stopped walking and stood up straight, crossing his arms over his chest. “And you think you can stop us?”
“I do.” The minotaur glowered, and a series of snaps came from the armor’s frame. A pressure seal popped, and a plume of toxic gases blasted out of the cracks. Breezy Blight winced; not all of the cracking noises had come from the armor frame.
He held the pegasus up higher, and then reared back his axe, aiming to decapitate the mare before he turned his full attention to the human interloper.
For a split second, all became a blur. Killer Instinct leapt back out of sheer, inexplicable reflex. Breezy went flailing away, landing with a dull clang and an exhausted grunt. Delgan’s power sword hissed, its particle disruptor fields eating through metal and a few precious millimeters of flesh before blade and meat parted.

Killer Instinct slid backwards, leaning forward in a combat stance with his axe at the ready. He was visibly shaken, his pose extremely defensive and his eyes darting between the cut on his abdomen and back to the Trademaster. Delgan had crossed the distance between them in an eye blink, and drawn his blade just as fast. If Killer Instinct hadn’t moved, he’d probably be trying to tuck his intestines back in his stomach.
“… Tch. I missed,” Delgan grumbled, slowly pulling back his arm. He calmly drew his second power sword with an expression more suitable to a deckhand preparing his mop for work. “You’re faster than you look, beast. But then, I’m sure the feeling is mutual.”
“Trademaster! Keep him busy a tick, yeah?” Poison kiss had Rot Blossom draped over her withers – still with a Techpriest’s power axe lodged in her back – and was running away from the cargo lander. “I’ll be right back!”
Killer Instinct shook off his surprise, and then shifted his stance to something more aggressive, but still unusually guarded. “Humans may occasionally impress. But your kind bleed like anything else. My name is Killer Instinct, human. What is yours?”
“You may refer to me simply as ‘Trademaster,’ although when begging for one’s life it’s customary to use the more polite term ‘Lord,’” Delgan explained. He ran one sword blade over the other, and a arc of coruscating energy crackled around the contact. “Let’s begin.”

****

Train station

“On the left! The left! He’s going for the multimelta!”
“I got ‘im! You handle the damned stubbers!”
“Oi! Stay out of the crossfire, you daft horses! We’re going to be scraping up your remains with a spade!”

The battle against the minotaur had leveled out considerably once a few of the insurgents had been dispatched. There were only four of the horned goliaths left in fighting shape of the original assault team of twenty. Flames and spent casings littered the barricades between dead bodies, and those warriors that remained had to keep scouring their fallen for ammunition belts in order to reload. The Company garrison fared better thanks to the sudden intervention of a certain unicorn, but only barely; only six human soldiers were left trying to hold back the minotaur. All others were dead, badly wounded, or had fled the scene with the many civilians from the train.
“Hey, Miss Great and Powerful! Help us out a little, would you?!” screamed one man as stubber rounds shook his barricade.
Trixie, who was ducking behind a cargo crane next to Suuna, poked her head out. “Trixie already did that! You got this far with Trixie’s help, stop whining and put your back into it!”
A heavy bolter round slammed into the side of the crane, and she recoiled as shrapnel screeched against her helmet. “Look, Trixie can’t summon a bunch of guns anymore, okay? And it’s not like Trixie’s weapon is any better than yours!”
“If you could use the bloody fireballs to drive them out of cover, then we could cut them down easily!”
“No way! They’re already mad about the illusions! Trixie is a civilian! You deal with it!”
“A civilian?! You have frakking power armor!”
“A Great and Powerful civilian, but still a civilian!”

While pony and mercenary bickered over their combat strategy, Suuna waited patiently with her hands clamped over her ears, tracking possible avenues of escape. Most of the civilians had already escaped the crossfire one way or another; Trixie was only waiting for the firefight to break because her armor and earlier fighting – despite her protests of her status – made her an obvious target. If the trajectory of the battle continued along its current course, it wouldn’t be much longer until the minotaur were wiped out. They had spoiled their initiative too easily, and Delgan’s guards were quite tenacious in addition to being exceptionally well-armed.
“Hmm? Who’s that?” Suuna mumbled to herself, spotting a woman in flak armor and a red coat creep around the back of the train. Women were fairly uncommon among the mercenaries, and she was sure she hadn’t spotted any soldiers board the train in uniform. Had this one gotten on before she had, in a different car? Maybe she had fled here from a different sector?
Either way, it seemed strange that a mercenary who had abandoned her post was heading for a battle zone rather than away from one. Not that such a thing mattered to Suuna. They needed all the help they could get.

The woman ducked low and rushed toward the tail end of the formation, sliding into place next to a man reloading his pulse rifle. She flinched and huddled lower behind the barricade wall when a heavy bolter round thumped against it; evidently one of the gunners had picked out her brightly-colored uniform as a target.
“What’s this, then? Reinforcements?” asked the soldier next to her. “You part of a squad, lass?”
“NO SIR! ROX ALONE NOW, SIR!” the woman bellowed.
He didn’t find it that odd that she was shouting, necessarily. The din of the firefight was considerable, and it was easy to be rendered near-deaf on the battlefield. It was more strange that she was speaking in the third person, but things were still hectic enough that he didn’t give it a second thought.
“If you need a gun you can take Saliff’s! He’s the blood smear behind the barricade ahead of us, and I’m pretty sure he’s done with it!” He took a few shots over the top of the metal shielding, and was rewarded with a minotaur’s bellow. “Got ‘im! Only a few left!”
The woman tapped him on the shoulder. He glanced over, peering into the respirator mask and green-tinted goggles that covered her face. The lenses of said goggles flashed, and an inexplicable mental fog consumed the mercenary’s attentions. His vision spun and his body felt numb, and all of his muscles seemed to relax at once.
Then the woman drew his laspistol and shot him in the head.

“Behind you! There’s one behind you!” Suuna shouted, suddenly pointing to the rear of the formation. Trixie jumped in surprise, and several men glanced over in confusion.
Rox cursed under her breath and hit the ground, concealing herself entirely behind the barricade. A green flash washed over her, and the Guardian’s dirty red coat was replaced by what appeared to be clean, angled armaplas. Having taken on the image of the soldier, she quickly grabbed his pulse rifle and prepared her voice to mimic his.
“WAIT! DON’T SHOOT!” Rox shouted, poking her head up while waving one arm in the air. “IT ME!”
Trixie blinked repeatedly, and then tilted her head to look at Suuna. Her assistant was stunned, her eyes wide and her shock evident even through her rebreather. Most of the soldiers quickly went back to the combat still in progress, but one of them kept looking between Suuna and Rox.
“But, I… I saw… there was this woman in red… I saw her shoot him!” Suuna insisted.
“SHE… SHE TRIED TO KILL RO-erm, ME! I WON, THOUGH. EVERYTHING FINE NOW!”
Suuna seemed to shrink back uncertainly. That wasn’t what she remembered seeing, but the man behind the barricade obviously wasn’t dead, and the current circumstances were generally stressful and confusing enough that she began to doubt herself.
Trixie frowned behind her helmet. “Hey, you!” she called out to the noisy soldier. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“NAME… THAT… NAME IS… UM…” Rox stumbled over the question for a few seconds, and then started fumbling around underneath her. “MOMENT, PLEASE… NAME IS…” She pulled up an iron Chaos Star amulet, and then flipped it over to read the inscription on the back.
Then a fireball struck the barricade, forcing her to recoil from the scorching flames.
“That’s a changeling!” Trixie shouted. Her horn flashed, and the fireburst launcher clicked upward to a higher firing angle. “Take it down!”

Sox slapped a hand over her face, teeth clenched and curses threatening to emerge.
“Rox, you moron,” she seethed under her breath. Now that her fellow Guardian had been exposed, their last hidden advantage had been played. She couldn’t even help with her magic, as her minotaur squad mates would surely balk if she revealed her true identity. Minotaur held changelings in the greatest contempt, and knowing that a spy had led them into this conflict would turn the entire team against her.
As another minotaur slumped to the ground on top of his weapon, she wondered how much longer that would be a problem.

Rox hissed as pulse fire battered her cover, striking the reinforced plating with a low sizzle. The human squad’s attention was now split between the remaining minotaur and her position, but both sides were a rapidly diminishing threat. Unlike the other changelings, she had been disguised as a yak and thus hadn’t gotten any practice with firearms, either. She estimated her chances in a gunfight only slightly better than changing forms again and trying to talk her way out of this.
She shoved the barrel of the pulse rifle up over the barricade and pulled the trigger, releasing a spray of pulse shots in a blind fan. She held the trigger down until a bizarre, low-pitched whine came from the weapon and it stopped firing. Then she tossed it aside with a growl.
“ROX TIRED OF THIS! TIME FOR ROX TO SHOW YOU HOW CHANGELINGS FIGHT!” she shouted. The goggles of her mask pulsed bright green, and emerald flame swallowed her yet again.

Trixie largely ignored the creature’s bellowing, and a pair of fireballs spat from her cannon and arced up into the air.
Before the projectiles landed, however, Rox dashed from behind the barricade. Twisted, hole-ridden hooves raced over the ferrocrete and thin, gossamer wings buzzed frantically to speed her along. The Guardian emerged in a green blur, darting across the open and behind an armored mantle with such speed that it startled the soldiers trying to gun her down and spoiled any potential shots. Swirling bolts of emerald light curved away from the changeling while she ran, rocketing toward one such man and smashing into him.
The mercenary screamed and fell amidst a wash of magical, glittering flame. His allies scattered, and one of them reached for his grenade belt.
“Frag out!” he shouted, flinging the explosive to land behind his target’s cover.
“No, wait! Don’t use those!” Trixie protested.
Sure enough, the grenade was halted in mid-air by a green aura, and started moving back in the opposite direction. Before it could get very far, though, Trixie’s horn flashed and tugged it the other way. Green and pink light swirled together around the cylinder, struggling against each other in a duel of arcane will.
Then the grenade exploded, ending the contest.

Rox clicked her tongue and made another jump, using her wings to flit from behind the armor mantle to the security station. It was a large enough building for her to easily hide behind it and possibly – or rather, hopefully – come up with another angle of approach.
She heard the sound of armored greaves banging against the ground, and her lip curled up above her fangs. It seemed one of her targets didn’t want to wait.
“You’re not going anyWHOA!” Trixie turned the corner only to find herself subjected to a beam of green force that cut across her legs. Her armor cracked and her footing failed, and the showpony spilled forward to land face-first on the pavement.
“STUPID CREATURES. THE HUMANS GIVE YOU SOME FANCY TOYS AND YOU THINK YOURSELVES WARRIORS!” Rox barked. Magic pulsed and swirled around her horn, and her wings buzzed threateningly. “PERISH!”
A pulsating globe of magic launched toward Trixie, crackling with raw power. The unicorn barely had enough time to stand up again before lashing out with her own magic, jabbing a small spike of force into the projectile. It would have barely broken skin against most creatures, but it was enough to at least detonate the opposing spell early.
The magic bomb exploded, blasting the ground underneath and lashing out at random with bright green whips of destruction. The pressure wave slammed into Trixie, knocking her over again, and her visor display briefly turned to static when one of the energy bolts struck her shoulder pauldron. Immediately she begin scrambling to stand, but a blanket of green magic suddenly fell on top of her, pushing her down onto the ferrocrete.
Rox’s jagged horn pulsed with ever-greater intensity, pinning her equine foe firmly to the ground. “YOU CANNOT ESCAPE ROX! YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE FATE THE CHANGELINGS HAVE CHOSEN FOR YOU! WE RULE THIS WORLD NOW! PONY, HUMAN, ORK! ALL WILL SERVE THE CHANGELINGS OR DIE!!”
“Why are you yelling? Trixie is right in front of you,” Trixie complained, wincing. “You do know you’re still in a battlefield, right?”
Rox bristled. “YOU NOT MAKE FUN OF ROX’S ACCENT!!”
“Shouting all the time is not an ‘accent!’” Trixie protested. “What, were you infiltrating the yaks or something?”
Rox’s cheeks puffed up indignantly, and she flushed.
“… Wait, Trixie was right? Seriously? Ha! That’s hilarious!” She broke into giggles despite still being pinned against the ground. “You idiots really planted a spy with the yaks?! Why? We were pretty much guaranteed to have to fight them anyway!”
Rox clenched her jaw, her lips curling up over her curved, razor-edged teeth.
Then Trixie stopped laughing. “What? Suuna! No! Don’t come any closer!” she shouted.
Rox snorted. “ROX KNOW YOUR STUPID PLOY, PONY! YOU USE ILLUSION AND MISDIRECTION! ROX NOT FALLING FOR-“
Then a piece of duralloy rebar slammed into her side, tearing off a wing and throwing her across the ground.

Trixie started scrambling to her feet before Rox even landed from the blow, desperate to get some mobility back. She had rather severely underestimated the Guardian just because said changeling hadn’t been willing to face down more than one Company soldier at a time, but it seemed like she would have to end this struggle quickly or draw it out long enough for the mercenaries to help.
Trixie began powering up her fireburst launcher again. Rox was staggering upright at the moment and entirely vulnerable, but the unicorn wasn’t a very good shot. There was a reason she preferred summoning dozens of weapons and blindly emptying them in the general direction of the enemy, and it wasn’t just because she had a flair for the dramatic.
Trixie fired her main weapon, and then growled in frustration when the sizzling projectiles went wide, exploding behind the changeling and barely singing her in the process. Rox came to her senses from the near-miss, whirling on her opponents with her horn aglow again.
Suuna, apparently taking Trixie’s lead, held her improvised weapon like a javelin while she backed away from the wounded changeling. Trixie noticed her posture and gasped in surprise.
“Wait! No! Don’t throw-“
The rebar pole flew through the air like a spear, and to Suuna’s credit it flew on target, too. Surely it would have skewered Rox if the changeling wasn’t paying attention. But with a flash of her horn the rebar pole shuddered to a stop, and with a slight grunt of effort it started speeding back where it came from.
“Suuna, NO!” Trixie activated her own telekinesis, and a swath of pink slowed the rebar’s path back toward its source. “How does everyone not get this yet? Do NOT throw things at magic users!”
Trixie’s efforts bought Suuna enough time to dodge out of the way, and the rebar pole hit the ground harmlessly, bouncing away after the levitation magic broke. Rox panted, tired and injured, but quickly fed more power into her horn. Trixie turned to face her again, pausing only slightly when her visor display flickered.
The magician blinked. All the annoying, redundant, and misleading information had been cleared from her display. Rox was outlined in bright, angry red, and a targeting reticule fed Trixie the exact firing angle necessary for her main weapon.
“WRETCHED PONY! USELESS HUMAN! ROX FINISH YOU!” Howling needlessly, Rox unleashed a bolt of green straight toward Trixie.
Trixie fired back at the same time, her fireburst launcher sending a screaming fireball sailing low over the ground.
Rox’s projectile hit, slamming into Trixie’s helmet on the left cheek. A hairline crack split up and down the impact, sundering the ceramite and nearly shattering the visor lens, and Trixie was again thrown to the ground from the force of the blast.
Trixie’s projectile also hit, and Rox shrieked as flames bloomed all around her. The changeling Guardian was completely consumed within the inferno, her death cry booming and then rapidly withering to a pitiful squawk. The fires rose for several seconds, and then turned a bright, eldritch green color.
And then the fire receded, guttering to a few embers sitting atop a heap of ash.

“Miss Trixie! Are you all right?” Suuna rushed over to the fallen unicorn and then grabbed on to her shoulder pad, trying to help hoist her upright.
Trixie released an exhausted grunt and stood up. “Figures that as soon as the stupid visor starts working right the bug goes and breaks it. Ugh.” She grimaced at the web of cracks and wild static that made up her left eye lens. With a thought she shut it down, leaving a badly distorted and cracked plate of bare, translucent crimson.
“You said your visor is working again? So that strange glitch where it misidentified people is gone?”
“Yes, meaning the targeting system is working again. Trixie is quite embarrassed that she missed so many easy shots; more practice with the launcher may be in order.” She snapped her head toward Suuna. “Tell no one.”
Suuna drew a finger across her lips with a solemn expression, and then they both walked around the security station back toward the train.
It didn’t escape their notice that the sound of gunfire had stopped entirely. When they peeked out at the platform, they saw four soldiers still standing among the various dead bodies. One was treating a wound on his leg. Another was gathering Chaos amulets from the dead men. The other two were on guard, watching for any further signs of resistance, and one of them immediately sighted Trixie and pointed to her.
“Oi! There she is! Did you get the bug?”
Trixie and Suuna emerged from behind cover, and the former nodded.
“Of course Trixie did! You don’t seriously think a mere changeling could challenge the Great and Powerful Trixie, do you?” the mare said, laughing. A shard of her visor lens popped loose and dropped to the ground at her hooves.
“Well, Sergeant Barrun’s dead. What do we do now? Should we head back to the defensive line or-“
Trixie suddenly cleared her throat loudly, interrupting him. Once she had everyone’s attention, she pointed a metal-clad hoof at the nearest soldier. “Names!”
“What?”
“Tell Trixie your names!” the unicorn insisted.
“Ryain Holdt.”
“Trav Geer.”
“Patem Vellin.”
“I’m Sox.”
Everyone slowly turned to face the last soldier. The soldier stared back silently, expression hidden behind an iron mask with a Chaos Star etched onto the face. Pulse rifles were readied.
“… It’s more of a nickname, though,” Sox said casually. “My real name is Donal Ryza.” Trixie relaxed immediately.
The mercenaries didn’t.
“You got that name off of his amulet, I take it,” said another soldier, pointing a pulse pistol at Sox’s chest, “since I watched Don get wiped by a multimelta.” He reached forward and snatched away the scorched Chaos Star hanging around Sox’s neck. “Thanks for finding it, xeno.”
The other soldiers wordlessly aimed their weapons. Sox groped for something clever or disarming to say, but found herself at a loss for ideas.
“So, uh… you guys… take prisoners, ri-“
The pulse weapons fired.

****

Lander lots

Power fields buzzed and crackled, singing their understated song of molecular annihilation against the air.
Sword blades whipped and jabbed, each movement accompanied by a suddenly rising hum and shuddering hiss. The axe blade, like its wielder, was more deliberate and prudent, cracking gently in anticipation of grasping its prey.
Delgan walked calmly around Killer Instinct, their eyes locked, and only deigned to move faster when the minotaur attacked. The larger biped lurched forward with a chop, and the Trademaster hopped back out of reach. Killer Instinct reached after the man with his free hand, and Delgan spun on one heel, his power sword flashing like a bolt of lightning. The blade nicked Instinct’s arm, but the horned warrior didn’t pull back.
Another axe swing chopped at chest level, and with sufficient force to hew the Trademaster in half. Delgan back flipped, touching one hand on the ground before bouncing to his feet with some extra space between him and his target.
“Is this how humans fight? Are you the best that you apes have to offer?” Killer Instinct growled, sternly marching forward.
“Oh, no. Not at all. For starters, most humans would have just shot you,” Delgan explained. He stabbed one sword into the ground, and then shook off his jacket. “As for being the best we have to offer, you HAVE caught us at an awkward time. We would have countless soldiers of more fearsome countenance to face you if you withdrew for now and returned… say, perhaps two weeks from now?” He tossed his jacket to the side where it caught on an augur antennae and hung there.
“You’re not funny,” Killer Instinct snarled.
Delgan actually recoiled slightly, looking somewhat offended. “Come on then, cow. See if you find my blades any sharper than my wit.”

Killer Instinct charged, his massive, armored hooves almost shaking the ground at a sprint. Delgan sidestepped, moving in short, brief hops to get to his opponent’s flank.
When the minotaur slowed to turn, Delgan jumped in to skewer him, one sword darting in like a striking viper.
Blade met flesh with a hiss and a crack, but to Delgan’s surprise, the flesh didn’t yield. Killer Instinct had grabbed his sword by the blade, and his giant, callused hands sizzled and bled against the sword’s edge and the molecular burn of the disruption field.
He pulled on the blade, and Delgan let go immediately, not willing to be dragged closer to the horned rebel. Killer Instinct snorted, and then flung the power sword away. The weapon flew an impressive distance, landing underneath the hijacked lander in the adjacent lot. It bounced several times after that, scraping across the ferrocrete ground and through a few of the thrusters that were actively test-firing.
“That… That weapon was a gift from the Warsmith, you horned oaf!” Delgan snapped. His expression was mostly hidden behind his respirator plate, and still seemed too mild for a life-or-death combat, but the man was obviously very upset.
“It should have been granted to a more deserving swordsman,” Killer Instinct grunted. “You’re no warrior. Such weapons are wasted on you.”
“Your kind constructs huts of mud and wood as mine cleanses the stars of alien life,” Delgan sniffed. “Your entire world is an idyllic pond in a galaxy soaked in blood. You wouldn’t have even gotten this far without the Orks on your side. What know you of war?”
Killer Instinct swiped at him again, and Delgan smoothly slid out of the way, nicking the minotaur across his chest armor with his remaining sword. Despite his failure to land a blow, the horned beast was grinning.
“Pitiful. You dance away like a coward, unwilling to commit to a blow. You’ve had a dozen chances to finish me. Were you a real warrior, this fight would be over by now,” chuckled the minotaur.
“Were I a ‘real warrior’ I would have no doubt been smeared across a patch of rocks on some misbegotten planet ages ago,” Delgan quipped. He hopped backward to evade another axe swing, and then darted to the side when his foe threw a punch to follow it. “I’d be one of however many millions of lost souls who are expended and forgotten with every sunrise across the galaxy, sent to their doom at the bidding of their betters. Just as you will be, once the sun falls.” He ducked under another swing, slicing a shallow gash across the minotaur’s leg before shifting out of range. “I’d rather be one of the betters.”
“You’ve no one to hide behind now, Trademaster. It’s too late for that.” A puff of steam blasted from Killer Instinct’s nose.
“I beg to differ,” the Trademaster retorted, right before an unearthly howl filled the air.

Arrow-shaped bolts of foul magic screamed toward Killer Instinct’s back, and the minotaur turned sharply to catch the projectiles against his gauntlet. The arrows hissed and bubbled against the heavy iron shields attached to his wrist armor, corroding them and seeping through the cracks to eat at the flesh below.
Delgan was inside his guard in an instant, and his blade plunged into the minotaur’s weapon arm, punching through muscle and bone to completely pierce the forearm. Killer Instinct snarled, throwing his arm to the side with the power sword still stuck in the vambrace. Delgan ducked away yet again, losing his last sword but avoiding a blow that could have ripped his head off.
“You ready for round two, you hairy git?!” Poison Kiss screamed, galloping across the ground. Her plague knife hovered beside her head, and her helmet opened around the jaw. “Die! Die and rot!”
Darts of sharp, infected bone shot out of her mouth, peppering the insurgent’s backside. Most of the spines bounced off of thick armor plating or the warrior’s obnoxiously thick hide, but a few found purchase and broke skin. Muscles spasmed painfully and blisters started to swell in seconds.
Still, the infections weren’t QUITE fast enough to cripple Killer Instinct entirely before Kiss reached him.
A quick backhand swatted the plague knife out of the air mid-stab, and Kiss barely avoided a metal-clad hoof almost as large as she was from stomping on her. Her horn blasted the minotaur in the chest, but he barely flinched. Another swipe struck Kiss in the shoulder, and she was sent flailing across the ground after a metallic crash.
Snarling, Killer Instinct rounded on Delgan, who was trying to work out a good angle of approach to take his sword back. With his weapon arm barely able to keep clutching his remaining axe, he leapt forward and punched with his free hand, trying to cave the Trademaster’s head in.
Delgan dodged backward, but Killer Instinct raced after him and finally caught the merchant off-balance. The minotaur’s shoulder crashed into Delgan and sent him sprawling onto the ground.
Blood oozed from a dozen wounds. Sores and infections burned away at his legs. His weapon arm was in agony, almost useless for anything aside from keeping Delgan’s weapon out of his reach. And still the minotaur charged forward, each injury only stoking his fury.
Delgan rolled away, gasping painfully, just before a huge hoof smashed onto the ground where his head had been. He flipped back to his feet in an instant, but his chest burned from what he was sure were some fractured ribs and his opponent was already reaching for him again.
“Hey!” Kiss shouted, sounding somewhat dizzy. “I think that weird interference is gone! My visor is working right again!”
Delgan ducked again, scrambling to stay out of reach of the massive beast. “Does that mean you can stop this creature?!” He started sprinting away, but Killer Instinct sped after him, unrelenting.
“Uh… well, no. If I had a gun…” Kiss mumbled in embarrassment.
The shriek of a heavy laser weapon came from behind her, and Kiss almost jumped as bright red spears of light flashed over her head. One, two, and three such bolts struck Killer Instinct in the side, drilling through armor and boiling flesh underneath. The minotaur stumbled, one leg simply unresponsive, and with a drawn-out growl the warrior crashed onto the ground.

Delgan nearly collapsed with relief at seeing his pursuer dispatched. He stopped to lean on a fueling pylon, panting, and fished around in his pocket for a hydrator tablet. At the same time, he searched out the source of the laser attack and was surprised to see a tall, four-legged machine trotting through the gloom.
“Is that a… a Strider? Thank the Dark Gods, it seems someone in the Mechanicus decided to manufacture them after all!” the Trademaster proclaimed.
“Not quite, darling,” the stilt-legged battlesuit replied, shocking the man further. The radio-like voice quality of the suit caster rendered the voice almost indistinguishable, but there was only one pony who referred to Norris Delgan as “darling.”
“Miss Rarity! So good of you to join us, then! And you brought some more of my hardware as well!” Delgan laughed while Poison Kiss marveled at the approaching machine.
“Oh, yes! It was quite an adventure, too! But that’s for another time. It seems our little Fio’el friend made it to the drone controller.”
“The drone controller? Fio’el?”
“Oh, that reminds me! If you see a bunch of Tau skulking about without obvious orders, they’re probably traitors.”
“Smidge late for that warning, Miss…”

Breezy Blight and Rot Blossom watched the exchange in miserable silence, lacking the current motor function to even walk over and join the others. Blossom was paralyzed from her barrel down, courtesy of the cog-toothed power axe STILL lodged in her spine. Breezy was even worse off, with a severed wing, wrecked helmet, and two broken legs. The pair of them had been dragged next to a pylon that Kiss had deemed probably safe, and then dropped off next to each other like a set of cargo cells.
“I hope they don’t forget about us,” Blossom moaned.
“I hope they can find my lost wing,” Breezy muttered in reply. “I’m sure a Dark Techpriest could make a replacement, but I really liked that wing. Do you think they can re-attach it if they do? It’s not like we have to worry about infections…”
“I think they-“ Blossom suddenly stopped, her eyes locked onto the smoldering minotaur body behind Delgan. “Hold on… Is that thing still ALIVE? I’m getting a heartbeat!”
“Er… can’t back you up on that, Blossom. My helmet’s gone. And even yours took a beating today, so…”
“He’s moving! HEY!” Rot Blossom screamed, banging her front hooves on the ferrocrete. “WATCH OUT! He’s not dead yet!”

Delgan moved like a cat, bouncing away from the minotaur in an instant. Poison Kiss was more sluggish, stumbling around with her horn flickering into action.
“Oh, bother,” Rarity sighed, warming up her Strider’s multilaser. “Just get clear and I’ll-“
A power axe whipped through the air in a blazing crimson circle, striking the battlesuit’s head right in the center and ripping straight through it. The power axe fell to the ground, followed by a good chunk of the sensor head and its attached weapon. A blast of garbled static came from the battlesuit, and it wobbled slightly out of sheer surprise.
“Miss Rarity, NO!” Poison Kiss shouted.
“No kill, no respite.” Killer Instinct was on his knees, panting, and struggling to push himself up. Injuries covered every part of his body, and much of what hadn’t been ravaged by blade or laser was suffering virulent infection. He was also out of weapons, aside from the power sword that was still stuck in his right arm.
Delgan darted in again, grabbing onto his weapon and kicking against the minotaur’s shoulder to dislodge it. The power sword ripped free of Killer instinct with a spray of blood and a fierce series of pops from its disruption field. The warrior beast grunted slightly from the gaping wound in his arm, his breath uneven and strained.
“Here you are, then.” Delgan circled around behind Killer Instinct, taking his remaining sword in both hands. “It’s been a pleasure to be of service.”
The power sword swung hard for the minotaur’s neck, its blue disruption field sparking brilliantly as it burned through muscle, flesh, and bone. It didn’t quite make a decapitating strike, due to the sheer amount of muscle mass it was attempting to cut through, but this time when Killer Instinct collapsed with a power sword lodged in him it was clear he wouldn’t be rising again.

“Miss Rarity! Are you okay? Do you need help?” Kiss asked, pawing frantically at the legs of the Strider battlesuit. “I’ve never seen one of these thing before! Was that her head in there?”
With a hefty clunk of machinery, a hatch on the Strider’s back popped open. Rarity popped her head out, grimacing at the damage to the sensor head.
“Oh, dear. And with none of my Techpriest friends around to fix it!” She clicked her tongue. “While I can appreciate the Tau design philosophy that my head doesn’t belong in the suit’s most vulnerable point, I don’t think I’ll be replacing my power armor with a scout walker. These machines are absolutely beastly.”
Delgan wrenched his power sword free once again and began to clean the blade. “Are there more coming? Did you arrive as part of a combat force?”
“I did not. I arrived as part of a desperate ploy to foil Shas’o Voidsong’s gambit for revenge. Gears’ little Tau friend knew how to reverse the signal baffling that plagued the fortress. It appears we were too late, though,” Rarity sighed.
“Not quite! With signum integrity restored, all of our autoweapons are working again! The servitors and defense turrets can help us push back the remaining infiltrators!” Poison Kiss exclaimed. “Then we can concentrate on cracking that lander!”

As if on cue, the thrusters from the nearby cargo lander suddenly trebled in output. A low roar filled the air just ahead of a wave of hot air, and the transport ship finally lifted up off the ground. It hovered in place for a few seconds, as if uncertain what its next move should be. Then the landing skis quickly flipped up and the vessel started to turn.
“Well, bugger me,” Poison Kiss grumbled.
The lander shuddered into motion, and slowly blasted off into the soot-stained skies.

Author's Note

OKAY THERE I LET TRIXIE KILL SOMEONE LEAVE ME ALONE

*Ahem* Also, I failed to finish this entire thing in this chapter, obviously. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of Where The Hell Are All the Main Characters Anyway and see Serith get Rekt by bugs! :raritystarry:

Update: Somehow I messed up the paragraph spacing. Should be better now.

Retribution

Entrenchment
An Age of Iron Story

Chapter 18
Retribution

****

Airspace above Ferrous Dominus
serra-class cargo transport T-338, bridge

It was mere seconds after they had taken to the air that the crew heard a battlesuit sprinting through the halls. The door slid open, and once again the Earth Caste survivors watched Voidsong’s heavy stealth suit stomp into the bridge.

*FINALLY. What took so long? The battle down there is turning completely on its head,* Voidsong complained. *The Orks dug up something big, apparently. The sooner we’re rid of this place, the better.*

*Agreed, Shas’o. I apologize for the delay,* replied the Fio’o at the helm. *Obviously, it was necessary to ensure that all systems were optimal and properly responsive in accordance with the instructional materials. We’re not going to get another chance at this.*

*Yes, yes, fine,* Voidsong said impatiently. She approached a screen and then placed a large metal palm on it, activating it. Then she poked clumsily at various input selections so that she could see outside the vessel. *Bring us to Black Point first. We’ll snatch up the remainder of our forces before entering orbit.*

*Wait, we have to fly over a war zone and land this thing too? I thought the operations were take-off and zero-g manual docking!* interjected another worker.

Voidsong’s sensor head swiveled to face the complaining engineer. He felt a cold chill down his back, but the High Commander said nothing.

*It’s… It’s just that these vessels are primarily designed to ascend and descend atmosphere, connecting vessels in orbit with fixed contact points below,* he explained nervously. *Our lateral flight speed is pitiful relative to, say, combat transports. It will add half a day to our projected flight time.*

*An acceptable cost to recover some twenty good soldiers,* Voidsong said simply. *The field has changed swiftly since initiating the operation, but I’m satisfied with these results. The greatest challenge lies-*

A red lumen on the main command console started beeping and flashing red. The Fio’o blinked, and then stared at the console through narrowed eyes.

*That’s a prioritus vox communication…*

*I was under the impression that their vox network was crippled,* Voidsong said darkly.

*It should be! And what’s left is being shut down by our disruptor drones! But… ugh…* he started tapping at his console.

*Rejecting transmission… what? No, wait! Something is overriding-*

The screen went black. The bridge’s primary vox caster spat static. Then a voice entered the bridge.

“Attention vessel T-388. You are currently in violation of siege protocol directives V-91, 121, 83, 86…”

The voice, obviously some Techpriest’s droning vocalizer, continued to rattle off numbers in no obvious order. Voidsong raised her plasma gun at the console.

*Shut it off or I’ll do it for you,* she commanded.

*No! No, we need that console! You can’t shoot the console!*

The voice halted, apparently overhearing the argument. “Xeno linguistics confirmed. Additional protocol violations logged. Attention, xeno units: your presence on T-388 is unauthorized. Immediately descend for processing or vessel T-388 shall be designated an enemy unit and be targeted appropriately.”

*They can’t do that with the signum bafflers up,* Voidsong reminded her crew. *Maintain course!*

“Tau signum baffling has been resolved. All functional auto-targeting layers are optimal,” the Techpriest warned them.

The Tau were only slightly surprised that the cyborg-cultist had mastered their language; Tau wasn’t especially difficult for humans, and Techpriests were tireless students. They were quite shocked, however, to learn that their key strategic advantage had been taken out of play. The Fio’o snatched up his engineering tablet and his fingers began to dance over the screen.

“You would fire upon your own vessel?” Voidsong asked, stepping closer to the vox receiver.

“Affirmative,” replied the Techpriest.

“We have civilians on board trying to escape the invasion. You’d kill hundreds of humans and equines,” Voidsong lied.

“Irrelevant,” replied the Techpriest.

Voidsong glanced down at the Fio’o again. He was swiping at a particular section of the screen repeatedly, but several red icons kept blooming in response. He was also becoming increasingly frustrated.

She rounded on another group of Earth Caste. *Terminate the transmission. I don’t care if you have to rip the console apart. Disconnect that vox link.*

“As you wish,” the Techpriest’s voice responded. “You have been designated as a hostile unit, prioritus 7. Targeting configurations under way. Goodbye, xeno.”

The lumen winked out, and Voidsong whirled on the Fio’o again. *What is going on down there?!*

*I don’t know!* he replied, similarly distressed. *The drones themselves haven’t been destroyed! Something happened to the controller! I’ve been locked out, and…*

He stopped suddenly, staring hard at a particular line on his screen. *Wait… Earlier, before we took off, there was a message that was trying to piggyback on our control network to feed messages to isolated vox links.* His hands started tapping rapidly on the screen again. *I assumed that it was just a Dark Techpriest getting too clever and trying to use our systems after theirs had failed. I shut it right down. But now that I think about it…*

A muted thump came from the hull, followed by a groan that seemed to echo through the substructure. Another member of the improvised bridge crew grimaced, looking at his console.

*We have missile hits on the bottom-left… er, keel? Port keel? Is that how…? Whatever, they’re shooting at us. Autocannons too.*

*Get our void shields up! What’s the damage?*

*Not much. Those are small weapons compared to this voidship, and for a lander this vessel has impressive armor. But we have no way to retaliate or evade. No matter what our exit vector is, we’re going to have to soak up all the incoming fire until we’re out of range.*

*Would elevating help? We could enter the upper atmosphere to get out of range of the point-defense network and then travel to Black Point at high altitude.*

*That would work, Shas’o, although it would add several more hours to our flight path.* The engineer hesitated. *Also, it would bring us within the firing angle of the heavy anti-orbital batteries. But they wouldn’t shoot those at us while we’re over the city… Right?*

A growl rose from Voidsong’s suit, only for her to be interrupted by an enraged scream from the head engineer.

*Fennin, you traitorous scum!* he roared, gripping his engineering tablet at both ends like he was trying to snap it in half. *He did this! He shut down the drone bafflers! He’s locked me out of the controller network! He’s helping the Company finish us off!*

While he sputtered indignantly, Voidsong walked up behind the Fio’o. *Are you communicating with him now?*

*Yes! He-*

*Can you open a voice link?* Voidsong said, cutting him off.

Still fuming, the Fio’o tapped a few icons on the engineering tablet. Within seconds, a new icon blinked onto the screen.

*Fio’el, are you reading me? This is Shas’o Voidsong. Respond at once.*

“Why hello, Shas’o!” Fennin’s voice replied in cheery Gothic. “It’s nice to be able to speak to you again, given that it will probably be the last time. Good work seizing the lander! I didn’t expect that angle at all! Here I’d nearly sent Gears to shut down the fusion reactor under the assumption you were arming it to blow! Ha!”

*Fio’el, what do you think you’re doing?* Voidsong demanded. *Surrender the authorization key to the drone controller at once.*

“That would run contrary to my orders from Wraithstar, Shas’o. So sorry.”

*Wraithstar? He’s giving people orders from within the brig?*

“Sure. Something like that.”

*I OUTRANK the former Shas’el,* Voidsong growled.

“Maybe if you escape the city to secure our lost battleship, you can find some survivor inside who cares.”

The weapons on Voidsong’s battlesuit started humming and warming up from her sheer agitation, and the Earth Caste Tau flinched away. *Submit your codes, traitor! And quit speaking Gothic like a tame gue’la servant!*

“No, aaaaaand… no. I need the practice. At the rate you’re getting us killed, there won’t be anyone else left speaking Tau in Ferrous Dominus soon.”

The bridge shook and groaned again. One of the bridge crew looked over to his console and hissed through his teeth.

*We’ve lost an elevator thruster! There are plenty more, but… well, we still have a long way to go. If we lose too many of them we won’t be able to escape the atmosphere! And that’s assuming we maintain hull integrity. Our void shields just aren’t strong enough to repel this sustained attack.*

*We can affect repairs at Black Point if necessary. Stay on course, Fio’la!* Voidsong barked.

“Oh, that is just ADORABLE. You really think you’re getting out of here alive,” mused Fennin. “You’ve made quite a mess, Shas’o, and the humans don’t yet understand all you’ve done. When they do, there is no force in all of Tau’va that will stop them from tearing you from the sky.”

Voidsong stared back at the tablet for several seconds. *… And you will help them. Why?* she demanded. *I am not accustomed to asking things like this, but why would you do such a thing? Betray Tau’va, betray the Tau Empire, betray your Sept and your brothers and sisters? What do you get out of it? What do you want, Fio’el?*

“Why? You’re asking me why? Are you serious? Are you really this deluded, Shas’o? Or just stupid?!” Real anger finally touched the voice of the engineer. “After our empire and Sept left us here to die, after Wraithstar crafted an alliance with our enemy while you were locked in stone, after we – NOT you – fought and bled to preserve this world against impossible odds, after you allied with ORKS of all things to unseat the Iron Warriors, after betraying Wraithstar’s bargain and abandoning our remaining soldiers in the pirates’ grip, doomed to face whatever retribution the humans desire after you slip through their fingers?! After all that, Shas’o, you have the GALL to call ME traitor?!”

*I have-*

Fennin cut her off immediately. “You have tried your hardest to doom all of us, leading the Lamman Sept into one slaughter after another! And just when a handful of us finally escaped your insanity – after completing one of your missions, no less – you swiftly return and demand we die obediently to ensure that Chaos not benefit from our survival! Do you really wonder WHY we do not obey, you arrogant fanatic?!”

*Fanatic? I am a fanatic for abiding to Tau’va? I am a fanatic for aiding the creation of a brighter, better future rather than submitting to the whims of monsters, madmen, and pirates?* Voidsong asked, sounding weary.

“Ah, yes. The Greater Good. The Greater Good that decided the bright future for me and every other resident of this planet was as brief entertainment for a billion Orks,” Fennin spat. “What am I to think, Shas’o, when the whims of madmen make so much more sense?”

*Pitiful. You have been fully corrupted, then. For a Fio’el of the Lamm-*

“I am no longer a ‘Fio’el!’” Fennin shouted. “I’m no longer merely a caste title to be used and discarded by you imbeciles! My name is Fennin! Fennin! Xenis Engineer Superior Fennin of the 38th Company! For the first time in my blighted existence, I choose my fate!” Several deep, heaving breaths were audible over the link. “And now… I’ve also chosen yours. Good luck, Shas’o. I’ll see you in hell.”

****

Ferrous Dominus sector
Mechanicus Temple Tertius-6

Fennin practically punched the face of his engineering tablet to sever the audio link. Then he shoved the device across the table, sending it sliding off the end and onto the floor.

The engineer was shaking, sweat rolling down his head. He’d never spoken like that even to one of his subordinates, never mind someone who ostensibly outranked him… and commanded a small army. Authority was everything in the Tau Empire. The explosion of resentment he had been endured for decades was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.

Gear Works was standing behind Fennin, glancing back and forth between the engineer and the tablet.

“… Do you need a hug?” the cyborg pony asked after an awkward stretch of silence.

“NO,” Fennin said immediately.

A few more seconds passed.

“… Maybe,” Fennin mumbled.

Gears leaned forward and gently wrapped his forelegs around the alien’s waist.

Several more second passed.

“If you get debriefed on what happened here, make sure to leave this part out,” Fennin grumbled.

“I know.” Gears’ servo arm levered up and then tapped Fennin’s shoulder several times in an awkward, stilted imitation of a back-pat.

Eventually Fennin coughed and leaned away from the stallion. “Anyway. I have to go over the access logs to detail precisely what those idiots did and how we can prevent it from ever happening again. You should go help the security sweeps. There’s going to be a lot of damage to patch up, and we still have that… that…”

“Ursa Major.”

“Yes. Go on. I’ll take care of things here.”

Gear Works backed away, and then his servo arm swung flat over his brow in imitation of a salute. Then the equine cyborg turned and galloped out the door.

Fennin eventually pushed himself up from his seat once the sound of metal clattering against metal faded into the background. He walked over to his discarded engineering tablet, and stooped over to pick it up.

The air shimmered in front of him, revealing the hidden contours of a cloaking field.

Fennin screamed, stumbling backward onto his rear and fumbling for the pulse pistol holstered on his belt.

“Relax, Fennin. It’s me.” Wraithstar’s battlesuit walked past him, becoming a ghostly distortion of bent light. “Sorry about startling you. The cloak becomes a force of habit at times.”

“How did you sneak in here?!” Fennin demanded as he snatched his tablet from the floor. The battlesuit’s steps were heavy against the metal flooring and its movements made other noise besides; it seemed impossible that the suit could have entered without making considerable noise.

A chuckle came from the suit’s speaker. “Trade secret.”

“Wait, how long were you watching? Did you see… uh…”

“Voidsong is going to escape at this rate,” Wraithstar said grimly, strategically changing the subject. “Given its trajectory, I do not believe the base’s basic anti-air defenses will knock out the cargo lander before it escapes their effective range. Likewise the escape of Shas’o Voidsong is hardly a priority for the humans now, as they struggle to recover their city. But it must be done. She must be stopped.”

“How? All our combat interceptors are grounded or were loaded back onto the fleet carrier when the rest of the ships left,” Fennin admitted.

“We do have transport gunships. I only need one. Plus a pilot. Can you acquire these?”

“… I can beg the Dark Mechanicus. I imagine they’ll be interested in revenge, but I can’t promise they’ll trust us to carry it out.”

“I don’t need promises, Fennin. I need action. Can you do it?”

“I’ll find some way to ship you off to your doom,” the engineer sighed. “I’m fairly certain everyone on the lander would perish trying to re-capture the Rep’talal anyway, but I suppose it would be tragic if she died before we got a chance to kill her first.”

“Voidsong is too dangerous. I will not leave her fate to chance,” Wraithstar said coldly.

“It may sound odd after my earlier spiel – if you were around to hear it after all – but this really is a revolting eventuality. Fire grunts or no, Shas’o Voidsong was your teacher. I can’t understand what happened to her…”

Wraithstar’s battlesuit turned its sensor head, and a few gleaming red lights stared at Fennin through an indistinct cloud of awkwardly refracted light.

“You think something happened to her? You think Voidsong lost her mind?” He chuckled. “No, Fennin. She hasn’t changed. She’s as much a vicious servant of her creed as always. We’ve changed, though. Whether by isolation or simple adaptation, Tau’va has loosened its grip on our spirits.”

“Maybe we have been corrupted, then,” Fennin grumbled.

“Maybe the corruption is right. Get me that gunship, Fennin.”

****

Ponyville
Nethalican temple

Virgil rejoined his fellow priests as a loud crash echoed through the temple interior. Pews snapped in two, brass candlesticks were flung aside, and iron chains rattled obnoxiously overhead. Guttural laughter and hisses of defiance created a frantic backdrop to the comical excuse of a battle, with a power-armored Sorcerer sprinting in a circle away from the massive, snapping jaws of a stone-scaled lizard.

“Father Virgil,” bowed one of the acolytes, “the Gods no longer speak to me. The voices since this… creature arrived have been silent.”

Virgil nodded, watching the bedlam with a flat, inscrutable gaze. “They reach out to her. They whisper. But she does not answer. She drinks of the Dark Gods’ power without tithe in blood or devotion. She hungers… but she thinks herself the master. She will not obey.”

“Can she not be taken, Father? Or at least stopped?” asked another cultist, scratching his chin. “Is this changeling beyond the reach of Chaos?”

“Nothing is beyond the reach of Chaos,” Virgil confided. “But… at times the Dark Gods require their servants to act in their stead.”

Another loud crash came from the inner sanctum, followed by the screech of a psychic enchantment running its course to no real effect.

“… Does that mean we should help, Father Virgil?” asked another acolyte.

“Nah.”

Chrysalis lunged across the altar, her enormous crag-toothed maw snapping at Serith’s armored heels. Serith snapped an arm toward her as he ran, and a broken pew jumped from the floor and into her mouth, wedging her jaws open.

Chrysalis stopped for barely a second, crushing the wooden bench to splinters within her mouth. After spitting out the remains she advanced again, marching implacably across the temple.

“Such courage from the mighty Iron Warriors! The feared invincible soldiers from the stars! Ha ha ha!” Her voice was a rumbling snarl, barely intelligible from the cragodile’s throat.

Serith reached a safe-ish distance and swiped one hand toward his foe, palm out. Black lightning flashed across the temple, howling in a disturbing, soulful manner quite unlike its natural counterpart. Dark ribbons of power met the stony carapace of Chrysalis’s chosen form, dancing across them and digging shallow, glowing wounds into the scales.

Chrysalis hissed, but didn’t stop. Her eyes flashed bright green, and then beams of hot, screaming power blasted toward Serith in return.

The Sorcerer absorbed the beam into his hand, activating the psykant occulus as expected. The changeling’s attack did no damage, but it did give her a few precious seconds to dash into biting range again.

Serith fell over as the enormous stone jaws slammed shut on one leg, sweeping him from the ground. Diamond-hard teeth punched through the outer layers of ceramite, and the larger adamantium frame slowly crumpled under the sheer pressure. Interior reinforcements snapped into place and held firm, keeping the entire greave from being crushed, and in response Chrysalis started tugging at the limb to rip it off.

Serith couldn’t feel a thing, of course. He twisted until he could get a good angle of attack, and then stabbed his force glaive into his foe’s neck. The disruption field hissed and popped, slicing easily through the rocky scales, and was followed by an unearthly shriek. A psionic pulse surged into the wound, and Chrysalis recoiled in pain.

“Ah, so you DO know how to fight!” Chrysalis shrank, her excess mass and rock-like hide burning away in a wave of bright green. Then she was in her natural form again, staring down at the Iron Warrior with a haughty smirk. A small cut was visible on her neck, but the wound was visibly shrinking even as she spoke. “Good! Good! Chances are I’ll need to battle another one of you metal goons eventually, so I need to get in some practice now. I might not always be able to face your kind in front of a wellspring of unlimited power.”

With a wordless cry, Serith jumped up and swung his force glaive at the changeling Queen. It slammed into an arc of shining green energy, bouncing off with a sharp crack.

“Don’t you have anything else to show me? No further tricks, clever machines, or mighty war engines?” Numerous swords shimmered into place around Chrysalis, summoned by the energy pulsing around her horn. “I was told you were the mightiest creations of humanity, clad in their finest armors and given their most powerful weapons. Is this really the best you can do?”

Serith thrust a hand forward, and a lightning bolt lanced through several of the floating blades, whipping from one emerald sword to the next. They popped like balloons, vanishing into nothing, and Serith leapt into the gap in her defenses.

He was too slow, however, and as he swung his glaive toward Chrysalis the rest of her summoned blades swooped in to parry.

“Ah-ah-ah… Not good enough,” Chrysalis laughed.

The blades swung outward all at once, nearly wrenching the force glaive out of Serith’s hand and pushing him back. Then they started darting in, slashing and stabbing at the Sorcerer in rapid sequence. The shriek and squeal of ceramite being carved open, little by little, clashed with Chrysalis’s laughter within the great hall of the Nethalican, rising high above the murmurs and prayers of the watching clergy.

“Useless,” Serith hissed. He lashed out with the psykant occulus, spreading the palm of his hand while the dispersal rods fanned out and started to buzz.

With a flash of light, the many blades nicking away at his armor vanished into motes of green light. Then they were sucked into the palm of his gauntlet, seeping into the gem set in the center.

“You toy with the likes of Chaos Space Marines at your own peril, insect scum,” Serith growled. He started advancing again, his grip firmly upon his force glaive.

Chrysalis pouted. “Insect scum? How hurtful. You don’t like insects?”

Serith lashed out with a palm, hurling a lash of dark lightning yet again. The psychic attack struck Chrysalis in the chest, and then immediately broke apart into useless, twinkling green sparks. Thin, singed ridges had been burned into her carapace, but the damage was trifling.

“Hmm…” Chrysalis raised a twisted hoof to her chin, as if pondering. “I don’t know too much about you metal monsters, but you favor the fleshy, tentacled sort of creature, don’t you?” She grinned, and her eyes flashed. “I can work with that!”
Serith charged, sprinting across the length of the temple. He raised his glaive in both hands, swinging the blade in a wide arc to decapitate the Changeling Queen.

Before he reached melee range, a fleshy tentacle with one side covered in suckers shot forward out of an emerald miasma. The impact did no damage, but was enough to stop Serith’s charge and surprise him long enough for another tendril to sweep in from the side and wrap around his leg.

He stabbed his glaive down into the tentacle, slicing into it, and then cut the entire tendril off in a spray of blood and green sparks. He kicked the rubbery limb away, but found seven more such tentacles hovering in front of him.

Chrysalis chuckled, her voice a raw, wet gurgle. Her body had transformed into an enormous squid, boasting several tentacles, a large, hooked beak, and a torpedo-shaped head with a crest of blue-green spines bisecting it. The one severed tentacle thrashed about while oozing blood, but promptly started to seal up into a stump and regenerate.

“Is this more to your liking, Serith?”

A tentacle jabbed at the Sorcerer, and he lashed out with his glaive to slice it open along its length. In the same moment another tendril swung in from the side, slapping into him with wet, meaty impact. Serith staggered but swung back with the force glaive, only to have another tentacle sweep in and trip him.

“Ha ha ha haa! This is so much FUN! I never get to use my morphing magic as a combat spell! I wonder how big I can get? Chimera? Dragon? Ursa minor, maybe?” Another tentacle slapped Serith on the back while he was trying to rise, knocking him flat again. “You have no idea the kind of things I can do with this much energy! I could spawn a million changelings! I could build a dozen hives and shield them from any retaliation! Why, with time and some research, I could wrench control of the very sun from Celestia herself!” Chrysalis cackled. “And what were you bumbling thugs using it for? To scare away other alien ships or something? Bah!”

Serith rolled over, sweeping his arm through the air, and an arc of blazing crimson sliced through the three tentacles jabbing and swatting at him. Thick, squirming lumps of flesh thumped to the floor in pools of blood and brine, and Serith stood up defiantly.

“You gorge yourself on the strength of Chaos, and yet you know nothing of it,” the Iron Warrior snarled. “You will learn to fear-“

A jet of ink splashed over his helmet, cutting him off mid-sentence.

“Oops. Sorry about that,” Chrysalis giggled.

Then another tentacle smashed into the Sorcerer, throwing him into the wall of the temple.

Serith bounced off of a daemonic statue and collapsed onto the floor with a metallic rattle. Although he felt no pain from the impacts, each blow threatened to shake his armor apart and still required a moment for him to strengthen the telekinetic bonds that allowed him to move. Then the Sorcerer rose to his feet, lifted from the floor with effortless grace.

Or rather, he would have, but a tentacle pulled the daemon statue out of the wall and dropped it on top of him.

The Queen’s guttural laughter filled the temple as Serith hit the floor again, pinned under several hundred pounds of finely-carved stone. Black ink still dribbled down his gorget, so he had to rely on thermal imaging to see that the remaining tentacles were hovering over him while the others rapidly grew back.

“Oh, my poor, poor Serith. Such a valiant attempt, and such a complete, humiliating failure!” Chrysalis slowly lurched across the temple floor, her tentacles rolling under her to move the slimy mass of her body.

Serith dropped his force glaive – useless with his current lack of leverage and range – and his hand spat another bolt of black lightning. Chrysalis’s eyes flashed, and the psychic attack fizzled to glittering sparks in an instant. Then she continued speaking as if nothing had happened.

“I think I’m done with you, now. But I might grant you a final favor before I dispose of you… Tell me, Serith: do you have any loved ones?”

The statue shook and started to rise off of the Sorcerer’s back, carried on a wave of pure will. A tentacle slapped it back down, followed by the creak of straining metal.

“Although this Chaos energy is nice and filling, it lacks… flavor. I find myself craving some good, old-fashioned love!” A slurping, pointed tongue flicked out of her beak. “Is there someone you love, Serith? I’ll take their form, and let that be the last thing you see! Very merciful, if I do say so myself! Just think of the creature and let me into your mind! Come on, now!”

Serith grunted, and his hand reached for the force glaive he had discarded earlier. A tentacle beat him to it, picking up the polearm, flipping it blade-down, and then stabbing it into the floor well out of his reach.

“Is there anyone? Anyone at all?” Chrysalis asked, her voice almost giddy. “No? Really? Are you truly so pitiful, so repulsive, so utterly useless that you don’t have a single true friend or lover with the entire galaxy open to you?!” The Changeling Queen laughed some more, and another tentacle slapped down on top of the statue pinning Serith down.

Then Virgil interrupted. “As it so happens, the entire galaxy is not available to him,” he said, innocently correcting the taunt. “There are many systems in which his presence would be opposed with prejudice.”

Chrysalis swiveled her massive, rubbery body around to give the priest a half-lidded stare. Then she spat a glob of ink at him, covering his face.

“Anyway…” she turned back to the struggling Chaos Space Marine. “I think I feel something… Do you have a friend after all? I can’t see it clearly. I am a patient changeling, Serith, but I DO have other things to do today.”

“Spare me your mind games, insect,” Serith snarled. He felt her presence probing his consciousness, and he expelled it with his own psychic will. “If you think to destroy me, then do so. I will not sully my final moments.”

“Pity. Then you’ll die as you lived. Angry, alone, and an embarrassing failure.” Chrysalis’s tentacles had mostly grown back by now, and they crept toward the Sorcerer.

“Putting aside how he lived,” Virgil interrupted, wiping his face with a cloth, “the Gods seem fit to spare him his ultimate fate this day.”

One massive green eye rolled to the side to stare at Virgil. It squinted. “If your Gods think to stop me, pest, they’re sure taking their time. What do you think they’re going to do? Smite me? Drive me mad? Steal back their power? Send some kind of monster after me?”

“That last one, probably,” Virgil replied. “For a given definition of ‘monster,’ I suppose.”

A scream suddenly came from the doors. Chrysalis recognized it immediately; it was the shriek of a wounded changeling, and it was coming from outside.

Another changeling guard was holding position on the inside of the heavy double doors, standing in front of a barricade it had assembled of furniture and a pair of corpses. That changeling whirled to face the entrance, frightened and confused.

“What, did you manage to warn somepony?” Chrysalis hissed.

“Maybe,” Virgil answered.

“I asked you a question, worm!”

“I provided a response, Queen Chrysalis.”

With a frustrated growl, Chrysalis shifted several tentacles toward the priest while making sure the other ones kept Serith pinned. He made no move to defend himself and evade, but before they reached him, something slammed against the temple doors.

Chrysalis froze. The changeling guard yelped. Another heavy impact struck the door, shaking it and rattling the objects being used as a barricade. The changeling, in its desperation, jumped onto the barricade to add its meager weight to the various objects blocking entry.

“Here comes a new challenger,” Virgil said blithely.

Then the doors exploded open. The furniture was either smashed to pieces or thrown clear, and the changeling met a swift, untimely end when the door swung into it and crushed it against the wall.

“Well, well, well… Ain’t this a fine how-do-ya-do.”

Heavy, armored hoofsteps clapped against the flooring, crushing bits of furniture flat. Chrysalis narrowed her eyes.

“Now, this here temple ain’t beachfront accessible. So Ah’m guessin’ this here sea critter must be her Royal Highness, the queen of them shady bugs.”

“Eeyup.”

A clunk came from a heavy bolter entering active fire mode. The pilot light on a heavy flamer flickered on. Tactical codices came online, painting the giant squid in red and mapping out vulnerable points.

Applejack and Bic Macintosh stood in the entrance, gleaming in their respective armor suits.

“Welcome to Ponyville, Chrysalis.” Applejack’s armored tail curved over her head to briefly tip her Stetson. “Stay awhile.”

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 10

“Khorne’s teeth, what in the Warp IS that thing?!”

“Damned Orks found a monster! It’s bigger than any Squiggoth I’ve ever seen!”

“Autocannon turrets are back online, but I don’t see them making a dent!”

“Armored support! We need armored support, now! That… alien… bear THING is heading for the manufactorum!”

An ear-piercing boom filled the air, and the soopagun on Big Bloo’s back spat an enormous shell into a building. A thundering explosion absolutely gutted the structure, stripping away the outer armor and then caving in the interior reinforcement.

Armed men and ponies sprinted down the street and ducked into alleyways, chased by bursts of hopelessly inaccurate machine gun fire. The few Company vehicles that were on the same avenue as the Ursa Major spun around and accelerated to full throttle to get away.

Trukks and Wartrakks rolled alongside and under the enormous blue beast, but they were hardly worth the defender’s attention compared to the monster they were supporting. The vehicles, including a handful of heavy transports, raced about in tight circuits, tailing Big Bloo or diverting themselves by gunning down some random fleeing target. The Ork formation, such as it was, mostly held together over its plodding advance, weathering a constant beat of fire from the newly active gun turrets.

Their warpath was meandering and uncertain, as the Ursa stopped frequently to sniff the air or scratch at a shell impact on its belly. The Orks didn’t have any clear objective besides marching through Ferrous Dominus and leaving a trail of blazing destruction behind them.

To the greenskins, of course, such carnage was its own reward. But there were more than just Orks crowded on Big Bloo’s battle platform.

“I SED: lemme haff da behr, ya gitz! Iz my turn!” Gox shouted furiously at the Nobs in the driving throne.

Big Bloo was driven (such as it was) from a small armored hut that sat between two enormous motorized wheels. The wheels held the chains that “steered” the Ursa Major by dragging its helmet to one side or the other, while a number of prodding blades above the beast’s neck controlled its speed. In theory.

The Nobs piloting Big Bloo didn’t seem to give too much thought to how much control they had over their mount, whooping and cheering with every swipe of claws or blast of the cannon. They were also having too much fun to let Gox onto the piloting seat, much to her chagrin.

“Ahm in charjj o’ dis fight, an’ ya dumm gitz bettah lissen! Ya wanna ansah to Warboss Changeyface?” the guardian snarled.

A fist-sized piece of rubbish smacked into her face. One of the Nobs managing a chain wheel pointed and laughed.

Seething, Gox approached the gantry that led up to the driving throne. One Nob stood in her way, laughing and firing his shoota at random windows as they passed. She grabbed onto the Nob’s shoulder, and yanked him around to face her.

“Now lissen heah,” she began, leaning in close. Her eyes flashed from red to green, piercing the fog of the Ork’s mind. “Yooz gonna wokk up dere an’ tell da boyz-“

A meaty fist collided with her face, and Gox stumbled away. Her hypnosis broke instantly, and she had to concentrate hard to avoid reverting to her true form.

“Buzz off,” the Nob snorted. He slapped a new clip into his shoota and turned away.

Gox pushed herself upright, absolutely livid, but didn’t know what to do about it. A true Ork would have jumped at the Nob and beaten the defiant thug into the ground, obviously. But Gox was far from a true Ork. What use was subterfuge and deceit when your targets were too dumb and violent to respond properly?

It was maddening. She was SUPPOSED to be driving Big Bloo on a high-speed rampage to the front gates to rip them open, destroying everything in their path and disabling the gate’s defensive cannons. Her sisters were to meet her there, along with a considerable number of insurgents, and from that point the Guardians would sneak away and let the carnage conclude at a safe distance.

Instead, the bear was plodding along to the middle of the city, sniffing at things, blowing open random buildings, and generally wasting time. It made no sense. What did the Orks think they were accomplishing? The humans had plenty of time to escape, regroup, and encircle the insurgents, and she could spot several vehicles rolling by on the intersecting streets. It was only a matter of time until the 38th Company tightened the noose.

But of course, that probably sounded like a good time to the idiot aliens.

“IRON WITHIN, BECOME THE IRON WITHOUT!!” screeched a voice from above. Gox groaned and dove for cover.

“BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!”

Tellis barreled onto the combat platform like a gleaming comet, smashing several Orks to paste and then immediately setting upon the startled crew.

“Hi how ya doin’ don’t mind me just need some blood to patch up an organ some dude knifed earlier DIE XENOS DIE!”

Lightning claws scissored across the decks, slicing through choppas and limbs alike. Tellis kicked out the legs from one boy and grabbed his leg in mid-air, using the greenskin as a flail. His other hand punched his claws into a gunner and then ripped them upwards, slicing apart the warrior’s entire upper torso in a wash of red.

“WOOOOOO!! Killing is the BEST!!”

At the other end of the platform, a silvery rocket-propelled body trailing rainbow-colored exhaust arced down into the tightly-packed crew. Rainbow Dash broke through the railing on one side and blasted all the way to the other, plowing over a dozen greenskins in her path. Once she broke through to the other side she hit her impulse blasters, jumping back up into the air while also launching a Mekboy off the edge of the platform and down into the streets.

Tellis blasted off a moment later, and they rocketed up into the air while explosions of flakk and streams of bullets chased after them.

“HELL yeah! This is what I’m talking about!” the Raptor whooped, spinning in the air. Red streaks trailed behind him, mixing with the flame and smoke from his flight pack. “This is just the finisher I need after that sweet duel earlier!”

Rainbow Dash budged her flight path to bring her closer to the Iron Warrior. “How’s your heart doing?!”

“Not great!” Tellis replied. He cut most of the power to his pack, and his ascent slowed rapidly. “It takes a LOT of blood to regrow the major organs!” He banged on his chest plate.

The daemon armor was gleaming silver now, but hadn’t completely regenerated from its earlier damage. Bizarrely, the part of the plating that had been pierced was even slightly discolored, like scar tissue. On top of that, Tellis was still missing one set of lightning claws.

“Should we pick off some of the transports? I’ll bet I can hit the engine block with my suicide dive!” Rainbow volunteered. “Then you can drop into the back!”

“Naw! It’s time for a REAL sacrifice to Khorne!” Tellis laughed, pointing down at Big Bloo again. “That thing should have enough blood for me!”

Rainbow looked down at the Ursa Major, watching as the entire creature was wrapped in a glowing red outline. Apparently the problem with their visors’ targeting had been solved somehow, but that didn’t matter much when the target was the size of a building.

“So… how do we do this? Take down the drivers? Blow the ammo supply? Try to cripple its legs?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“HIT IT IN THE FACE!!” Tellis announced before tilting into an attack dive.

With a feral shriek, the Chaos Lord blasted down toward the head of the massive war beast. Gunfire whipped around him while the Ork crew fired at the loudest and brightest immediate target, and bullets cracked against his plating in bursts of sparks. None landed a good hit, much less one that could divert the Raptor from his target. Tellis adjusted his dive, curving away from the ground and toward the Ursa’s eye.

“KHORNE SAYS HI!!” Tellis landed directly beneath the monster’s eye, hammering his boot over the cheekbones. His lightning claws went into the eye itself, punching through the thin membrane and piercing into the sensitive nerves.

Big Bloo flinched, blinking in pain. Then it raised a paw and scraped its claws over its cheek. Tellis was brushed off and flung onto the ground, slamming into the ferrocrete road and bouncing across the surface for several meters until he scraped to a stop.

“Owwww…” the Chaos Lord moaned, laying face-down in the street. A few seconds later a Trukk raced over him, its passengers whooping enthusiastically while the vehicle bounced off the prone Space Marine.

Big Bloo glanced down in annoyance, looking for the tiny flying pest that had poked it in the eye. Then another shout came from above.

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall! RAINBOW BUSTER!!”

Rainbow Dash blasted downward through the pollution layers, streaming rainbow-colored light behind her against a plume of flame and exhaust. After tilting into her approach vector she activated her booster and the kinetic refraction field, striking Big Bloo precisely in the forehead like a missile. The monster’s helmet gave way, and a blinding flash of prismatic light emanated from the impact point, followed near-instantly by the deafening crash of a sonic boom.

When Rainbow Dash’s helmet finished suppressing the excessive light and noise, however, she found herself sitting in a big metal crater staring at the unbroken fur – or whatever it was Ursas had – of Big Bloo’s forehead. It didn’t even look bruised, although that was possibly because the Ursa Major’s hide was a dark purple to begin with.

Big Bloo grimaced and flung its head to the side, hurtling Rainbow Dash into an adjacent building. She smashed into the damaged metal wall, and then bounced off to fall down to the street with her flight pack sputtering.

****

“Well, the flying idiots are down. That may have slowed down the beast a minute,” General Harlin mused.

He was reviewing the vid-capture footage from the back of his command Chimera, several blocks away from the new Ork spearhead. Leman Russ tanks rumbled nearby, forming a perimeter, and Dark Techpriests waited in a line behind the man.

“If we can’t lure the beast back outside the fortress we’re going to have a hard battle on our hands to stop it. That… thing is just too big and well-equipped, and the Ork escorts aren’t straying far enough from it to pick them off separately.” Harlin groaned. “What a time for the Iron Warriors to be off-world. Give me a few dozen Astartes and I’d put down that monster where it stands.”

“Explanatory: multiple vid-captures have demonstrated the effect of lascannon impacts during the creature’s assault,” a Techpriest interjected. “Analysis of these images suggest that the creature’s epidermal structure has unusual properties that mitigate tissue damage from amplified light weapons. Conclusive: visible damage from las discharge has been registered at just thirty percent of estimations.”

Harlin turned and stared hard at the Techpriest. “… Are you telling me that in addition to being enormous and covered in Orks and guns, that thing is resistant to las?”

“Affirmative. Addendum: kinetic and explosive weapons inflict damage within expected parameters. Recommend additional autoweapons feature in prime deterrence strategems.”

As the General shook his head, Princess Celestia and Luna swooped down over the ring of tanks. The latter quickly took the lead, rushing up to Harlin with the Iron Gage still slick with Ork blood.

“We hast routed the greenskins who dared assault the eastern manufactorum halls! The foe is crushed!” One hand of the Iron Gage gripped into a fist and then pumped up and down in the air.

“It looks like the insurgents are abandoning their attack across the city,” Celestia continued. “I saw several diamond dogs and griffons fleeing into the underground tunnels. We did our best to seal those entrances behind them, but Ferrous Dominus is vast. There are countless spaces to hide, and no simple way to root them out.”

“That’s good enough,” General Harlin said curtly, his attention still fixed on his monitor. “We’ll eventually form teams to sweep the sub-structures and patrol them. I’ll take a rout for now. Then we just have the Orks, and more specifically this ‘Ursa Major’ to deal with.” He frowned, eventually glancing at the alicorns. “I’ve just been informed it’s resistant to las weaponry. Have you any idea why?”

Celestia set her jaw into a somber frown. “The Ursas are an ancient race, and their bodies are rich in magic. Equestrian scholars have discovered that an Ursa’s hide actually drinks in the sunlight, energizing the Ursa and storing the energy as the stars you can see in its coat.”

“It… photosynthesizes?” Harlin asked, perplexed.

“Aye. As such, the Ursa’s appetite ‘tis greatly diminished for a beast of its girth,” Luna muttered. “And a fortunate thing, that. Surely a predator of such size wouldst devour entire forests and villages to sate its hunger otherwise.”

“Fascinating. And unfortunate, as that makes it resistant to our most common and effective anti-armor weapon,” Harlin grunted. “But hopefully that won’t be an issue.”

“Pardon? Why would it not be?” Celestia asked.

“I have another plan. Something Miss Pie suggested, actually,” Harlin grumbled, turning some dials on his vox unit. “It sounded ridiculous, but as we’re being besieged by talking animals and enormous, weaponized bear xenos, perhaps a ridiculous solution is most appropriate.” He picked up the vox receiver and pressed the switch on the side. “Miss Fluttershy, the Ursa is approaching your position. All units have fallen back from the engagement zone. You are cleared to engage.”

Luna and Celestia stared at the General as he put down the receiver and turned around.

“… Fluttershy?” Celestia asked incredulously.

“As I said, it wasn’t my idea,” Harlin mumbled, “but we’ve seen more absurd feats from you horses than what she’s been tasked with.”

“And… what, pray thee, hast she been tasked with?” Luna asked uncertainly.

“Talking it out,” General Harlin said, shrugging helplessly.

****

Big Bloo grunted, blinking its eyes as an auto-turret stitched fire across its cheek. The massive bear halted, watching impatiently while tracer fire sprayed across the building at random and failing to touch the thundering autocannons mounted atop it.

Snarling, Bloo wheeled to the side, and then reared up to reach the top of the building. The obnoxious cheering and whooping from the Orks on its back increased tenfold, even while some of the aliens failed to grab onto something in time and spilled off the edge of the battle platform. Then Big Bloo raised a massive paw and slashed its claws across the building top. The turret was instantly sheared from its mounting, and huge furrows were carved into the dirty metal wall.

One of the steering chains tugged at Big Bloo’s head, and the titanic beast dropped back to the streets below. Almost immediately the soopagun on its back fired, stunning the Ursa with the fantastic noise of its discharge and subsequent detonation. Another building had its upper floors annihilated, swallowing much of the structure in flame and smoke.

A blade jabbed into the back of Big Bloo’s neck, eliciting a growl from the beast. Then it strode forward, resigned to its slow march to the sprawling manufactorum ahead.

Then, inexplicably, something below caught the Ursa Major’s eye. A flicker of light, bending and snapping into place before being replaced by a tiny, shiny… thing. Big Bloo paused briefly at the curiosity, but another jab to its neck diverted it. Its eyes lifted up and it strode forward.

Until the weird shiny thing spoke.

“Uhm, hi! Excuse me, Mister Ursa!” chirped a vox-amplified voice from below.

Despite its ears still ringing from the soopagun, Big Bloo picked up the voice and glanced down again. Its next step hesitated.

“I’m very sorry to ask this of you. I know it must be very unpleasant having all those Orks on top of you, goading you like this.” Fluttershy flinched slightly as a burst of gunfire sawed across the ground next to her, ripping a line of holes down the street. “I really think it would help if you turned around and left the fortress, though.”

Another blade pricked Big Bloo in the back of the neck. Rather than moving forward, however, the Ursa Major leaned down and lowered its head to get a better look at the shiny pony.

“… Oh, for hive’s sake, what NOW?” Gox growled once she realized that Big Bloo had stopped.

Most of the Orks were unfazed, shooting at terribly offensive windows or throwing things at the transports rumbling along below, but the Nobs seemed agitated. Angry shouting was coming from the command throne, and Orks were rushing to the great wheels that were chained to Bloo’s head.

The changeling frowned at the bedlam, and then leaned over the side of the platform railing to try to see what had caught Bloo’s attention.

It was hard to see past the Ursa’s enormous head, and impossible to hear past the Orkish shouting, but she got a glimpse of something sitting in the middle of the road when Bloo tilted its head briefly.

“Is that… a pony?” Gox was confused at first. Then her waxy green face paled.

A resonant growl came from Big Bloo, and the Ursa Major pawed at the air with one arm.

“Oh, dear. That’s just terrible,” Fluttershy agreed. “And what happened after that?”

A Warbuggy raced out from under the massive beast, twin big shootas blazing. Bullets pattered across the ground, and a few of them cracked against Fluttershy’s armor, knocking the pegasus over with a terrified squeak.

With a snarl, Big Bloo slammed a paw down onto the vehicle, flattening it instantly and smearing the pair of Ork drivers across the street. The number of blades and prods jabbing into its neck increased, but the Ursa just grunted and licked the pad of its paw. Fluttershy quickly pushed herself back up off the ground.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” Fluttershy said, her voice a low whimper amplified by her helmet. “What the Orks have done to you… They don’t care about pain. They don’t understand loss. This is all just a game to them.”

A Battlewagon rumbled forward from under Big Blue, its deff rolla grinding against the ferrocrete and aimed to crush the armored pony flat. Big Bloo simply pushed the vehicle with a paw, throwing it onto its side and spilling a dozen passengers onto the ground.

“You don’t need to do this. We can help you!”

Big Bloo made a deep, mournful groan. Then one of the skorchas mounted on its helmet suddenly activated, blasting a wave of fire into the air over the pegasus. Fluttershy flinched, while Big Bloo seemed to be even more agitated.

“Idiots. Idiots. Idiots. IDIOTS.”

Gox seethed to herself while she ran across the battle deck, so incensed that she didn’t bother to use her hard-learned Orkish accent. The greenskins were shouting suggestions at the command throne, trying to get Big Bloo moving again, but none of the imbeciles knew what the problem was. Gox hardly knew anything about the mechanics of controlling an enormous alien monster, but she guessed the Orks’ hold on it was far weaker than they imagined.

Spotting an Ork hefting a rokkit launcha, Gox grabbed the end of the weapon and tried to yank it away. “Oi, gimme dat! It’z a ‘merjencee!”

“Git yer own!” the foot soldier grunted, tugging his weapon back and throwing a fist into the changeling’s gut.

Gox doubled over from the hit, concentrating on keeping her form stable over the pain. Then she slapped a hand over the resisting Ork’s face, and her eyes flashed a bright green. The Ork shuddered, and then his grip on the launcha went slack.

Gox seized the weapon, and then clubbed her victim over the head with it, knocking him over. Such a careless use of magic could have easily exposed her, and it went against all her training and experience to take such a risk. But right now she was the only green-skinned soldier who understood what was happening.

Carrying the rokkit launcha under one arm, Gox leaped off of the edge of the combat platform. She landed on a huge chain that wrapped around Big Bloo’s shoulder, forming an uneven walkway toward the front of the massive Ursa. She dashed along the chain as best she could, almost tripping on more than one occasion.

Then, suddenly, she could see it: the dull metal and beaten gold of Iron Warrior power armor in the diminutive form of a pony. The pegasus was completely focused on Big Bloo, nodding her head and mumbling niceties in response to the Ursa Major’s groaning. It was a perfect shot, and probably the only one Gox was going to get.

She lifted the rokkit launcha and fired. Immediately the rokkit veered off to one side, spinning wildly due to its poor fuel packing and badly bent tailfins. Gox didn’t have time to curse, and brought the full strength of her telekinesis to bear on the projectile. Her eyes flashed, and a shimmering emerald aura surrounded her. With sheer force of will, the rokkit curved back, screaming toward the road.

Fluttershy was largely ignoring the gunfire from the various Orks; Big Bloo’s head blocked the vast majority of firing angles, and what’s left was the usual inaccurate, smooth-bore gunfire that her armor deflected with ease. When a green light glinted in the corner of her eye and a red warning icon flashed on her visor, however, the pegasus was quickly shocked out of her complacency.

She jumped into the air, instantly shifting her flight pack to maximum acceleration, but her armor wasn’t made for speedy take-offs like Rainbow Dash’s suit. The rokkit slammed into the ferrocrete under her, failing to hit directly but blasting the pegasus with a wave of fire and shrapnel.

Fluttershy shrieked as she was tossed upward and spun, and then fell after she failed to stabilize her flight. She crashed onto her side and bounced, skidding across the avenue and past Big Bloo’s paw.

The Ursa Major blinked, and then growled and turned its head to look for the source of the explosion.

A quivering Grot pressed flat as possible to the misshapen armor plating of Big Bloo’s shoulder pad, trying to stay out of sight of the hairy behemoth. A rokkit launcha fell to the ground below, forgotten. A heavy snort blasted a wave of steam over the shoulder pad, instantly soaking the lone greenskin.

After a few seconds, however, Big Bloo lost interest and gave in to the constant jabbing pains in the back of its neck. The Ursa Major began walking forward once again, stepping over the smoking pony-shaped armor by the side of the road.

****

“Blast. BLAST! Dark Gods help us that thing is still on approach!” General Harlin slammed a fist onto his command console in frustration.

“Oh no! Fluttershy! Is Fluttershy okay?!” Princess Celestia gasped.

“Oh, how should I know?” the officer snapped. “I’ve got what amounts to a Bio-Titan bearing down on the city’s most important asset, and you-“

A thunderous explosion interrupted him, courtesy of Big Bloo’s soopagun. A fireball surrounded by showers of hot metal bloomed over the manufactorum. Secondary detonations rolled over the surface, and a nearby smokestack toppled over.

Harlin set his jaw. “It’s firing on the manufactorum. If it breaks through the superstructure and hits a munitions or chem-vat cell, the entire facility could be rendered inoperable.”

“How many volleys wouldst that take? The manufactorum doth not seem crippled by the enemy attack so far.” Luna asked grimly.

“Impossible to say. Ork super-heavy weapons are powerful, but unreliable as anything else they construct. The manufactorum is heavily armored from above, but the walls are more vulnerable. I don’t even know for sure if the Orks are driving toward the main facility as an objective, or because it’s the largest building that just happens to be in their way.” General Harlin swiped across his command screen and picked up his vox receiver again. “All armored squadrons, proceed to your engagement zone. Tacticae pattern Zeta-9, center entry zone avenue 66-E! Prepare ranked formation and await orders to fire on my mark!”

“We art attacking, then?” Luna asked, slamming the fists of the Iron Gage together.

“We have little choice. Unless your Majesty would care to scour the beast from above with the fury of the sun, as you did to the enemy Squiggoth?” Harlin asked.

“I could try, but…” Celestia stared up at the sky and sighed. “The pollution cover will make such a spell much weaker.”

“We have little to lose. Use whatever means you have at your disposal to shut down that primary cannon.” Harlin snapped his fingers and pointed down the avenue. “Take up position and await my signal.”

“Aye, Lord General!”

“Of course, Sir.”

****

“Here be the ambush point. Whence the beast crosses this threshold, we shalt crush it with fire and steel!”

Luna and Celestia perched atop an iron tower on the corner of an intersection, inspecting the deployment below. Rows of tanks were lined up at an angle, cannons bared and engines idling. Soldiers were holding positions behind barricades, boasting numerous autocannons and missile launchers. Pinkie Pie’s Contemptor Dreadnought stood at the flank of one row of tanks, its vox casters booming industrial techno music.

It was a fearsome show of force, but an Ursa Major was still an Ursa Major.

“Will it be enough, Luna?” Celestia asked breathlessly. A few guards flew next to the Princess of the Sun, huddled within a magical air bubble.

Luna had re-deployed her helmet, pleased to see that the device was working properly once more. “If We hast one boast We might make of Chaos without reservation, ‘tis the potency of their weapons. With our aid, the Ursa shalt fall.”

“How tragic. Such an ancient, majestic creature, turned into a crude war beast,” Celestia sighed. Her horn started flashing brighter, pulsing with ever-greater power. “Curse the Orks.”

****

Gox had just finished climbing back onto the platform when she sensed it.

Magic power, flooding through the ether with such potency that it almost blacked out her meta-senses. The sheer amount was dizzying, rushing up from the ground and up to a raised pinnacle like a waterfall running in reverse. Enough power to move an entire world, it seemed, or stop it short in an instant.

Gox suspected that such a quantity of magic was being gathered for some less dramatic purpose, but it was extremely troubling to feel it now, when she was clinging onto the side of a titanic war monster during a high-stakes assault.

She made a tortured groan, eliciting annoyed glances from nearby Orkish crew. The real Orks didn’t know what she was making discontented noise about, considering that they were rampaging through a massive fortress with impunity. The idiot aliens were oblivious to every possible threat, even after they’d been dive-bombed by a pair of armored foes and temporarily immobilized by an even weaker one. They had encountered some vehicles and troops, but not nearly as many as expected. Where were the armies of Chaos so feared by their enemies and lauded by the Equestrian weaklings? Where was the Princess of the Night, given over to the aliens’ warlord and fully weaponized to act as their attack dog?

Closer than Big Bloo’s drivers thought, Gox suspected.

The Guardian leapt back down into the avenue, her form dropping well out of sight of Bloo’s battle palanquin before she was consumed by green magic. Moments later she zipped back up, her wings buzzing furiously to build altitude.

Immediately the random gunfire from Big Bloo doubled and became much less random. Bullets whipped past the changeling and plinked against the building adjacent, tearing long, crooked lines of dents into the metal layering.

The pace was maddening, but after a few seconds Gox reached the top of the building and flung herself flat onto the roof, her breath heaving and her pulse roaring in her ears. After a brief break to catch her breath, she pushed herself upright again.

“These greenskin clods must be rubbing off on me. Such bold tactics aren’t my style,” Gox grumbled. With a thought, her body changed to that of a nondescript white pegasus bearing the humans’ flak armor.

With her position mostly safe Gox dashed toward a higher structure, leaping up and building altitude toward the roof. She didn’t even have to land before she spied the gleaming beacon of power standing atop a taller building across the street.

“Oh. Oh, no… No, no, no, no…” Gox felt her fur pale when she spotted the two bodies standing atop the structure, well out of the line of fire of Big Bloo. One shining like a lighthouse, standing within a column of brilliant power. One standing at attention within a shell of ebony, waiting for her turn to strike.

“BOTH Princesses. We have the daggum sisters right on top of us!” Gox hissed as she landed, spitting an Ork curse. “If they engage Big Bloo…”

Gox paused. She wasn’t sure exactly how that would turn out, actually. The power of Celestia and Luna was a very different power from that of a weaponized thousand-ton monster covered in Orks and cannons. But suffice to say, such a match was far more even than she was comfortable with.

She started to turn, considering her options, when she happened to spy something else in the streets below. “Wait a minute…”

Gox flew up to get a better look, coughing briefly from entering a particularly thick pollution layer.

“… Okay, no. This isn’t happening,” she groused to herself.

Dozens of tanks were lined up at an angle on both sides of an intersection, ready to decapitate Big Bloo as soon as the Ursa was exposed. Gox had only a vague idea of how much damage the human tanks could cause, but there were just too many of them. Combined with the Princesses, this spelled the end of the Orks’ superweapon.

She could warn them about the trap they were strolling into, of course. But Orks being Orks, they’d probably just run into it faster. They thought themselves invincible upon Big Bloo’s back.

Gox’s eyes narrowed, and a plan started forming in her mind. There were a series of relatively short buildings off to the right side of the avenue, before the intersection. The low height relative to the adjacent structures formed a little alleyway through the block, and looked just large enough to accommodate the Ursa Major’s titanic girth.

Of course, deciding on an alternate route was the easy part.

Gox transformed again, turning into a Nob once more. This time, however, she kept her insectoid changeling wings, and formed the appearance of a Stormboy’s jump rokkit between them. Inert, of course; her magic wasn’t nearly strong enough to create a working chemical fuel out of pure will. The wings stuck out of her shoulder blades at a rather awkward angle, and she wasn’t entirely sure they would be able to carry her weight in this state.

“Welp. ‘ere goez nuffin’.”

****

“WAAAAAAAAGH!!”

The classic greenskin battle cry boomed from above, and several Orks cheered and fired their guns into the air while responding in kind. Others looked up to see who was goading them on, and they were surprised and somewhat confused to see a Nob plummeting toward the battle platform on a trail of green flame.

Granted, they were all big fans of green, but rokkit burn was usually more in the red-yellow spectrum. Also there was a strange blur just behind the Nob. Also none of them remembered there being a Stormboy contingent fighting with them.

Gox hit the rusted metal deck, and her wings vanished in a flash of green. Her legs quivered in agony – her descent had been much quicker than she would have liked – but she forced herself to stand immediately so she could start bellowing orders.

“OI!! Wut’re yoo gitz doin’?! All da fightin’ is ovah dat way!” the Guardian shouted, pointing to the right side of the road.

“Erm… wut wuz dat glowy-“ one Ork started mumbling a question, but Gox simply shoved him aside and marched toward the command throne.

“OI!! Yoo gitz lissenin’?” Gox barked. “Youz goin’ da wrong way!!”

Her belligerence was rewarded when two Nobs in the shack that made up the “cockpit” stepped out and sized her up.

“Eh? Oo’re yoo?” glowered one of the larger Orks. The smaller crew formed a circle around the disguised changeling, staring at her with varying degrees of suspicion and anticipation.

“Don’ mattah!” Gox barked. “Dere’s nuffin’ ovah dere!”

Before she had tried to leverage her abstract authority to get the alien clods to do what she said. It had failed disastrously. But now she was done with subtlety. If she was going to manipulate the Orks, she had to make her lies big, flashy, and aggressive.

Gox pointed off to the side. “Dere’s a buncha humies and spikies runnin’ dat way! I saw ‘em jus’ now! Lotsa big dakka! We’z gotta cach ‘em! Now!”

“But I wanna nokk down da big bildin’!” complained one of the Nobs to the other. “Dere muss be lotsa gud loot in dere!”

“Dere ain’t nuffin in dat bilding!” Gox shouted, pointing ever more firmly toward the gap in the structures. “Da… Da humies took all da loot! Dey’z getting’ away! We gotta cach ‘em! WAAAAAAAAAAGH!!”

The changeling threw her fists into the air while she shouted, and numerous other Orks copied her, bellowing at the top of their lungs. The Nobs didn’t quite look convinced, but they weren’t brushing her off, either, which was a substantial improvement over last time.

“’Ey, wut mob’re yoo wiff?” grunted one of the larger greenskins, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Da mob of SHUT IT AN’ GET TA FIGHTIN’!!” Gox screamed, shoving her way past the Nobs. She approached the giant chain spool mounted on Big Bloo’s right shoulder. “Le’s get dis WAAAAAGH on! Hahd ta starbear’d!”

The Gretchin manning the chain spool hopped to work, grabbing a heavy lever at the base of the machine and pulling it down. The engine next to it sputtered into action, and the giant wheel started to turn. Chain links bigger than the Orks themselves were rolled up onto the spool, tugging the Ursa Major’s head to the right.

The monstrous bear grunted as its head was pulled to the side to face the uneven wall of industrial buildings. The spool engine stopped, and Big Bloo sniffed at the shorter adjacent structures in puzzlement. It reached up and clawed at one, eliciting an ear-rending shriek from its enormous talons scraping through the metal plating.

A sharp prodding to its neck spurred it forward. Big Bloo took a cautious step up, placing one paw on the roof of the building and pressing some weight down. When the roof failed to fold in, Big Bloo reared up and started climbing onto it.

The battle platform tilted backward, and the various crew quickly reached for something to hold on to. The Nobs driving Big Bloo latched on to handles bolted onto the cockpit, while Gox herself latched onto the chain spool. Those greenskins that didn’t find a way to brace themselves tumbled down the inclined deck, eventually slamming against the rear railing before plummeting to the streets below.

The Ork vehicles below screech to a halt, confused about the sudden detour and unsure how they were to follow. Some hit their accelerators and sped forward into the intersection ahead. Some parked where they were, either to argue with each other about where to go or point and laugh at the light rain of their fellow Orks slamming into the street around them.

Those in the former group were instantly demolished, gutted by a crossfire of lascannons, missiles, and anti-tank guns. Two Warbuggies were reduced to smoldering black spots on the ferrocrete in an instant, while the Battlewagon racing behind them had its chassis gutted by lasers before a demolisher shell flattened its passenger cab. The hefty vehicle skidded forward on shredded tires for a few more meters, its hull belching smoke and flame, and then a burst from a butcher cannon stabbed into the driver’s cab. The vehicle fell apart on the spot, spilling scorched metal and pulverized greenskins onto the ground around it.

Pinkie Pie zoomed in on the wreck, her visor picking out particular pieces of interest and estimating the number of kills. She zoomed out again, and then scanned the kill zone for further targets. There were none.

The head of her Dreadnought popped up, and the pink pony looked down to the Iron Warrior next to her. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a really big thingamagobbin coming? Was that it? Are we done?”

Dest touched the ear of his helmet. “Negative. Primary target seems to be… stalling? What is it doing?”

He cycled his vox to connect to Luna’s. “Princess, you have a higher vantage point. Where is the target? Why have the escorts left?”

****

“It seems our prey hath… taken an alternate path. Vexing.”

Luna peered over the edge of the tower at the Ursa Major below, watching it climb over the low buildings. The immense weight of the creature had folded in the top floors, collapsing them inward. The Dark Mechanicus reinforced the buildings well, however, and they were constructed to resist bombardment from above. As the roofs collapsed secondary struts fell into place to help support the load-bearing beams against the crushing force, creating solid footholds for the Ursa. Big Bloo seemed uncertain about its path, pausing every time a floor buckled and a paw sunk closer to the ground, but it slowly pushed forward.

“Drat. The beast hath detected our trap. It flees northward!” Luna proclaimed.

A flakk shell slammed into the tower just below the roof, and the Princess recoiled as shards of red-hot flechette slashed across her helmet and chest. Grimacing, she turned to Celestia.

“Sister, art thou going to smite the creature? It is nearly immobile at present.”

“I can’t possibly hit it now, Luna! The beam is hard to aim and the Ursa is right below us!”

“Shouldst we take to a different perch, then? What distance is ideal?”

“I really don’t think I’m going to do any damage at all with this smog cover! And it’s already evening! The sun is already at the horizon!”

“Then call it back. Really, Sister, thou acts like our star doth not cross the sky at thy whim.”

“I can’t just delay nighttime whenever it’s convenient, Luna! You remember the 20-year drought!”

“We consider the present circumstances slightly more dire than thy cake being delivered with excessive-“

A thunderous series of booming noises interrupted them, and the roof started quivering under their hooves. The Princesses froze anxiously, wings spread in case they needed to retreat, but after a few seconds the structure was still again.

Then General Harlin’s vox boom in Luna’s ear. “I’ve dispatched two squadrons to clean up the Ork escorts and secure the breach in the palisade. The rest of my units are moving to flank the ursine, but we won’t be able to form another trap like that unless the blasted creature stops. Are you two going to do anything about it?”

Luna frowned. “We hast little chance of halting the Ursa Major outright, but mayhaps We might foil its primary weapon. Sister! General! We shalt engage the foe!”

“Luna, wait! It’s too dangerous!” Celestia protested.

General Harlin was more understanding. “Great. I’m sure they have a Mek or two on-board to repair any such damage, so try to kill it while you’re down there, too.”

“Aye, General!” Luna’s flight pack spread, and the crystals at the edges of her wing case glowed. “Sister, assist my descent!”

Celestia groaned, but did as requested. Her horn lit up while Luna galloped to the edge of the roof, and a bubble of golden light appeared around the Princess of the Night before she leapt off the edge.

“BY THE MOON ABOVE, THOU SHALT BE DELIVERED TO THE VOID BY THE BRINGER OF NIGHT!!”

Flakk bursts and sprays of gunfire pelted the barrier around Luna, sizzling and sparking in flashes of gold. Her drop toward the battle platform was loud, certainly, but not especially quick. She maintained a controlled drop while her visor scanned and picked apart the components of the central soopagun.

The ammo supply, it seemed, was internal; somewhere in the veritable mountain of metal was its shell storage, but it wasn’t easily accessible to enemies wishing to blow it up. An unfortunate feature of this weapon’s design, Luna thought. Most Ork constructions were more accommodating.

“NO MATTER!!” she roared, continuing her silent stream of thought less silently. “FEEL THE POWER OF THE NIGHT, GREENSKIN SCUM!!”

The Iron Gage detached and fired twin beams of shadow down into the combat platform. They punched into the heavy armor of the gun and then exploded, blasting blackened pits into the metal and flattening the Gretchin clinging to the outside of the weapon.

Flakk guns continued to pound away at the alicorn descending toward Big Bloo, but the puffs of shrapnel seemed useless against the golden bubble of light that surrounded her. Luna landed on the soopagun’s mounting, and then smashed a glowing fist into a nearby secondary turret, caving in the frame. The other gauntlet shot over to an anti-air gun on the other side, grabbing onto the barrels of the thundering flakk cannons and squeezing them shut.

“Now, then…” The Iron Gage returned, black fingers wiggling as she looked over the main cannon to decide where to start.

“… We’z SO boned.”

Gox’s comment was completely drowned out by the scattered gunfire while dozens of crew all around her fired shootas, sluggas, and whatever other weapons they could turn in on the platform, at the armored alicorn. A few particularly bright sparks even fired rokkits, inevitably missing the pony-sized target and slamming armor-piercing explosives into the enormous cannon receiver she was standing on.

Big, black gauntlets crackling with destructive power slammed into breaches that were patched over with scraps of junk metal or pulled apart banks of wiring and dense cables. The gunfire around Luna intensified into a steady beat against her shield, but Celestia’s magic seemed indestructible to the Orkish small arms. Crimson energy surged around the black spike jutting from Luna’s helmet, and lashes of power whipped about and struck random greenskin crew while the Princess worked on the greater task of sabotage.

“I’z gettin’ reel tihad o’ savin’ deez gitz,” Gox growled, gripping the railing next to her.

The Iron Gage swooped downward, punching into one of the bracing struts that kept the receiver secure against the platform. It grabbed onto the strut, power field crackling, and then broke it in two before snapping forward and grabbing on to the next one.

“Hmmmm…” Gox’s eyes narrowed.

“Oi, wot’z dat hoss doin’ up dere! Shoot it!” a Nob bellowed, stepping out of the command hut.

“We IZ shootin’ it!” barked an Ork boy in response. “It ain’t helpin’! We needz mo’ dakka!”

A pair of Meks emerged from the command hut bearing kustom blastas, and Gox suppressed a groan.

“Ferget dat! Lissen up!” the Guardian shouted suddenly. “Wen I say ‘now,’ fiyah da soopagun!”

The Meks looked at her strangely, peering through their oil-stained goggles and flickering optiks screens.

“Fiyah at wot?” one Mek asked.

“Don’ even mattah!” Gox replied.

The Meks apparently found this plan agreeable, as they cackled and turned back toward the hut. Gox peered back at Luna, who was still ripping apart the main gun with impunity.

Bolts were melted in their sockets and pneumatic pumps flattened into scrap. Granted, Ork weapons were assembled from trashed machinery to begin with, and the sheer size of the weapon was clearly giving the mare some trouble, but it was definitely steaming a lot more than usual.

What Gox was watching for, though, was the support struts. Luna’s Iron Gage ripped through another pair, and the entire cannon started to shake from its ever-looser connection to its platform mounting.

“NOW!!” Gox bellowed.

The soopagun fired, and the massive cannon instantly tore itself apart. Jets of fire blasted from numerous breaches in the casing, tracking the shell’s journey through the gun barrel. Pieces of machinery were ripped apart or simply burst into flames from proximity.

The barrel itself flew backward from the explosive recoil, breaking free of the receiver and sailing clear of the platform itself. Luna was flung away through the air with it, cleared the partially collapsed structures behind Big Bloo, and then hit the street on the other side gracelessly. The golden bubble around her popped, and the Princess of the Night bounced and rolled until she scraped to a stop in the middle of the avenue.

“LUNA!!” Celestia shouted from above. “LUNA, ARE YOU OKAY?!”

Luna’s vision blurred as she struggled to stand, her legs having become a tangled mess during her ejection from the Ursa Major. Her visor flickered and blinked with rapidly flowing warning text, doing the Princess no favors. Impact analysis, relocation data, velocity tracking, and kinetic stress mapping all flashed uselessly before her eyes while she was still trying to work out what, exactly, had hit her.

She raised her head to find her sister’s voice. “We-“

A massive shell casing, similar in size to a light combat vehicle and still smoldering from the heat of its munition discharge, landed on top of her. The casing bounced off and rolled down the avenue, now sporting an alicorn-shaped dent on one side of its brass surface.

Luna did not attempt to finish her sentence, choosing instead to lie down where she was for a little while.

“Luna! Luna! Oh no, did she pass out?!”

Princess Celestia swooped down onto the street in a panic, landing next to the armored figure embedded in the street. “Luna! Speak to me! Please, tell me you’re okay!”

Heavy footsteps came from behind her, but in her panic Celestia didn’t realize anyone had approached until a vox-distorted growl interjected.

“Her life signs are stable. She is alive,” Dest concluded after linking his visor to that of the mare’s. “More importantly, she has successfully disabled the warbeast’s primary weapon.”

“That’s not the most important thing to me,” Celestia huffed at the Possessed Marine. “Your people can finish the Ursa now, right?”

“… Eventually,” Dest murmured.

Explosions came from several blocks away, followed by an enraged roar.

“The warbeast is still a considerable threat. The main gun will be unable to wipe out our armored support, but they will still struggle to stop such a creature. Especially considering its… light resistance.” Dest admitted. “However, we have cut off further Ork reinforcements. This battle is almost over.”

A squeal came from below, and Luna’s legs started to move.

“Wait! Luna, no! Stay still, please! You could hurt yourself inside that thing!” Celestia begged. Then she turned her head away. “Techpriest! Is there a Techpriest nearby?!”

Dest grunted. “I will find one. Remain here.” He turned and bolted away, moving with such sudden speed that Celestia recoiled slightly in surprise.

“Urgh…” Luna struggled to place her hooves such that she could stand up, the folds of her plating fighting her every move.

“Luna! Please, stop! Help is coming!”

“We require no assistance…” Luna hissed through clenched teeth. “This is… but a minor… setback.”

“Yes, fine, I understand,” Celestia assured her. “Now lie down and let the hateful cyborgs do their jobs, please!”

“Our fury sustains our armor!” Luna retorted, starting to push herself up.

“Luna, would you stop being so stubborn?” Celestia growled, seriously considering using her magic to push down the other Princess. “You’ve done enough already! Calm down!”

The rapid thump of ceramite greaves against the ground announced Dest’s return.

“I have acquired a Dark Acolyte,” the Iron Warrior announced, holding up the cultist in question. “Apparently some of them are ponies now.”

“Uhm, h-hello.” Gear Works greeted the Princesses hesitantly, quite uncomfortable being held within the heavy, curved talons of the Possessed Marine. “Can I help you?”

“Aye! Thou may indeed!” Luna barked, standing up on her own. Sparks blasted from her armor joints and dented plating shrieked from the movement, but the daemonic plate was slowly shaping itself back into a fully functional state. “Hath not the city’s defenses recovered from the earlier affliction? Wherefore doth the Ursa Major march unmolested?!”

The numerous optics lights under Gear’s hood winked off and on in sequence. “But it doesn’t really… the interior turrets-“

“We speak not of those trifling heavy bolter emplacements,” Luna interrupted. “The cannon, stallion! Wherefore doth the perimeter cannons not fire upon the beast?”

“You mean those big guns on the wall?” Celestia asked, puzzled. “Wouldn’t they cause damage to the city if they fired into the streets?”

“Surely less damage than the Ursa shalt inflict if not promptly dispatched! They art the only weapons large enough to quickly fell this creature!” Luna countered. “Techpriest, give the order!”

“Impossible,” Gear Works scoffed.

“Why?” Celestia asked. “Do we need General Harlin’s permission?”

“No. It’s physically impossible,” Gears replied. “The turret foundations are built to deny them firing solutions into the city, or even at each other. They don’t rotate that far in their mountings.”

Dest grunted in agreement. “I remember that engineering doctrinae. In a successful siege, the outer wall is often the first part of the fortress seized. It’s crucial the foe isn’t able to turn its weapons onto the rest of the fortress.”

“Then what of the daemon engines? Canst we not deploy thy abominations, as thou didst against the Ork Gargants?” Luna demanded.

“Most of the daemon engines went with the fleet,” Dest grunted. “And the ones we have left don’t bear any weapons that can easily cripple that warbeast.”

“By the moon and stars, what absurdity is this?!” Luna shouted, slamming her Iron Gage into the street. “We stand athwart a city of arms and machines of destruction, and yet there art no weapons to slay this beast?!”

“The Pride of Olympia could have made a decent opponent for that thing, but not much of her survived the Battle of Ponyville,” Dest admitted. “I see no other options besides degrading its defenses with conventional anti-armor weaponry. Even the Baneblade or macro-turrets would take several hits to fell something that size, and we have nothing larger.”

“Nothing larger that can be effectively used on a ground target, that is,” Gears corrected.

Luna’s head swiveled toward the Dark Acolyte. “Explain,” she commanded.

“Err… I was referring to the ground batteries. The anti-ship guns,” Gear Works said hesitantly. “Obviously, those would kill the Ursa Major instantly. But there’s no possible way to use them against a ground target.”

Luna swiveled her head around again, zooming in on the distant towers of sector 1. Massive steel obelisks surrounded by webs of cabling and enormous hydraulic pistons stretched into the sky, silent and helpless against the assault. Weapons of a scale so absurd they were useless against even something as large as an Ursa.

Supposedly.

“… Sister, gather thy pegasi. Lord Dest, find Pinkie Pie and take her and the Acolyte to the battery grounds. We hast an idea…”

****

Ponyville
Nethalican Temple

“Take ‘er her down, Mac.”

With that simple command, the heavy bolter roared to life.

Chrysalis summoned a protective barrier immediately, her eyes flashing a brilliant green. Small explosions bloomed across the shield, sending ripples of emerald light spreading across the air with every impact. Despite this, many shards of hot shrapnel carved into the tentacles below unimpeded, shredding the slimy, glistening flesh. The Changeling Queen was simply too big for her to protect all of her bulk with the barrier.

“Shucks, y’all were really makin’ a play fer our spooky evil invasion repellant?” Applejack asked, galloping forward. “Sorry Queenie, this thang’s a little too important to lose to you!”

Tentacles slithered across the floor toward Applejack, and Big Mac shifted his aim. The heavy bolter sawed across the floor in front of the barrier, tearing into the fleshy tendrils and blowing them apart mid-length. Blood, ink, and green flame spewed from the shredded, rubbery stumps, and several of the lengths sliding toward Applejack went slack.

One of them crept up from around the other side and struck, slapping the armored mare on the back. Applejack brushed off the impact without a misstep and kept rushing forward. The tendril then slithered around her barrel, wrapping around under her belly and sticking to the plating with its suckers.

Her gravity plating turned on, and her weight increased fivefold in an instant. The tentacle tugged and writhed uselessly, trying to lift or at least knock over the mare without appreciable effect.

Applejack turned her flamer on the length of tendril in front of her, blasting fire over it in a tight, controlled stream. The tendril shriveled and burned rapidly, and once it weakened Applejack shook it off.

“Feh. This body is no fun anymore,” Chrysalis groused, vanishing behind a curtain of green magic. “Time for a new one…”

“Now! Strike at her now!” Serith shouted, still pinned to the floor. “While her focus is diverted away from a barrier!”

The green aura vanished, revealing Chrysalis in her true form. The changeling Queen gazed upon the ponies with contempt, her horn and eyes flickering with power.

Big Macintosh locked his targeting reticule onto her, and the micro-servos of his suit whirred and clicked as they shifted the heavy bolter into position. Applejack started stomping forward again, small tongues of fire sputtering from her heavy flamer.

“FALL, equines,” Chrysalis commanded, her eyes pulsing brightly.

In an instant, Big Mac’s vision went fuzzy and started spinning. A pain in his head came from nowhere, like someone had beaten in his skull with an iron rod. The stallion stumbled to the side drunkenly, his firing solution lost amidst the confusion.

Applejack suffered the same effects, but she recognized it immediately. She’d suffered these symptoms before several times thanks to the very Iron Warrior lying on the floor on the other end of the temple.

“Blasted mind games!” Applejack spat, slowing down her charge. Her vision spun and blurred, turning colored notifications into streaks of neon across her perception. Her skull pounded like her brain was trying to escape, and hot needles seemed to plunge into her back. “Git outta mah head, ya changelin’ pest!” She concentrated on putting one hoof in front of the other, moving forward on momentum and simple muscle memory.

Chrysalis frowned at seeing such resistance, but quickly moved her attention toward a new shapeshift. The giant squid had been fun, but it seemed a more conventional “combat form” would be necessary.

Applejack’s vision started to come back into focus, and she triggered her flamer as soon as she saw the dark splotch surrounded by green center in her vision. “BURN, varmint!”

Yellow flame poured from the nozzle and mixed with green, and the changeling Queen screamed. An unearthly howl of pain sent another pulse of psionic agony through the Apple siblings. Big Mac nearly fell over, still dazzled by the previous magical assault. Applejack didn’t flinch, her anger laser-focused on the target in front of her.

That target was growing. Growing a lot, and quickly.

Chrysalis grew taller, her equine neck stretching high up and becoming more serpentine. Her legs spread, growing fingers and claws. Her tail thickened, changing from a loose collection of hair to a single, scale-covered length that tapered to a point. Her wings stretched and deformed even while they burned, becoming bony, bat-like protrusions.

Applejack continued spraying fire at Chrysalis, but as the changeling swelled to her full size and the green flame abated, the form of a smallish red dragon unfolded before the armored mare. The heavy flamer’s discharge had done some damage to Chrysalis, evident now in patches of missing scales, but now the flames washed over her without effect. She was about the size of a Maulerfiend, which certainly put the changeling Queen in the lower range of dragons size-wise, but still a great deal larger than anything the Apples were hoping to face, and the replication of fireproof scales was more than a little inconvenient.

“Mmm… toasty,” snarled the red serpent.

Chrysalis swatted Applejack away with a claw, her talons slamming into the heavy armor with an ear-rending shriek. Applejack was knocked onto her side and skidded across the floor, but wasn’t flung very far. Even against a dragon’s talons, her armor seemed almost impenetrable.

Chrysalis slammed her claw down onto the mare, pinning her in place. “Well-protected, aren’t you? Just like a fresh egg.” Flames puffed from between her teeth. “Yummy.”

She blew a stream of fire down onto her hand atop the struggling pony. Applejack’s thermal regulators blinked on in an instant, and warning runes started flashing in various corners of her visor. After a few seconds the heat started working its way through her frame insulation, and she could feel the metal bands of her suit interior warming up.

A heavy bolter burst slammed into Chrysalis, tearing into her side and stitching a line of explosions up to her neck. The changeling Queen cut off her breath weapon, coughing, and tried to shield her body with her wing.

Her dragon scales did a remarkable job of protecting Chrysalis from severe damage, but the sheer output of fire from a heavy bolter was punishing. The hefty shells battered the shape-shifter with explosions, and one bolt whipped by her eye closely enough that she couldn’t afford to ignore the shooter any longer.

“You're annoying! Die, fool!” Chrysalis whipped her head toward Big Macintosh, and her eyes pulsed with magical light. The stallion was too far away for her breath weapon, so instead two piercing beams of green blasted into him. One beam cut across the side of Mac’s armor without lasting effect, scorching a black line over his flank. The other punched directly through the chest plate, breaking into the collection of augmetics that made up most of Mac’s life support. The stallion recoiled, staggering, and a pained whinny came from his vox grille.

“MAC!!” Applejack screamed. She redoubled her efforts in standing up, and her greaves and leggings creaked against the weight of the dragon on top of her.

Chrysalis promptly slapped another claw down over the first, nearly doubling the force pinning her down. It was a ridiculous sight, a dragon putting its entire weigh to try to hold down a creature a fraction of its size, but the Queen looked rapturous rather than worried.

“Yes. YES. This is what I wanted!” Her tongue swiped from one edge of her jaw to the other, wetting her lips. “The quickening heartbeat! The surging strength! The intoxicating brew of fear and anger, anchored to another! Love! Sweet, succulent, delectable LOVE!” She inhaled deeply, taking in a scent that no one else, not even the other psyker in the room, could detect. “Familial love, a rather lighter bouquet, but so PURE!”

Then she lowered her head and opened her jaws just over Applejack’s head. “GIVE IT TO ME…”

Mist-like energy started seeping from the pony-shaped terminator armor and into the changeling’s oversized maw. Chrysalis shuddered in ecstasy, her tongue making lapping motions at the nearly invisible sustenance.

“Fascinating. So this is how you feed,” Serith mumbled.

Chrysalis snapped her head up, her eyes narrowing. Serith was standing again, and the statue that had pinned him down was now floating in the air next to him.

With a thrust of his hand, the badly abused artwork flew through the air at the shape-shifter. Chrysalis snorted in contempt, and her eyes pulsed again. The telekinetic hold on the statue broke, and it dropped uselessly to the floor halfway to its target.

“Do you MIND? I’m trying to eat!” Chrysalis complained.

“I do mind, actually.” Serith walked up to his force halberd and yanked it from the ground.

“Are you really going to go through this again? The only reason you lasted longer than these pests was because that machine on your hand absorbs my magic!” Chrysalis said, spreading her wings. “But fine. Come at me, wretch. I’ll turn you to scrap and cinders.”

“Not so long as you can’t move your claws, you won’t,” Serith mused. “Are you afraid of these creatures, Queen? Do they threaten you? More than I?”

“Well... yes, actually. More than you. That’s not saying a lot, though.”

While the Sorcerer and shape-shifter bantered, Applejack switched her vox system to internal mode and linked to Big Mac’s suit.

“Mac! Mac, are ya still kickin’? Please…”

A gasping noise came through the vox. “… Eeyup.”

“Oh, thank Celestia,” Applejack sighed. “Listen, Ah got an idea. But we need to break Chryss outta this dragon body, meanin’ we need to hurt her, bad. Can ya still stand up and shoot?”

A grunt came from the vox. “Eeyup.”

“Good. Here’s whatcha need to do…”

“What tiresome creatures you Iron Warriors are. If you didn’t create such interesting things, then you’d be completely useless,” Chrysalis taunted. Then she leaned back and spread her wings, as if gesturing to the temple interior. “But I am VERY fond of your constructions. Such grand tools and fascinating arcana! Perhaps I’ll keep that polearm of yours as a personal weapon. Or a trophy, to remind me of the blackened soul that bravely perished to delay my victory for half an hour.” She chuckled darkly, and flames started to build within her jaws.

“If yer looking fer high-tech trophies, ya can’t do better’n these armor suits,” Applejack said suddenly.

Chrysalis looked down hesitantly, somewhat confused that the mare was volunteering that information. “I think I’d have trouble fitting into those. And it will be so much work to clean your ashen remains out of it!”

“But lookit all the neat stuff these things can do! Show her, Mac!”

Chrysalis snapped her head up and summoned a barrier, protecting her face from the expected sneak attack.

Big Mac, moving once again despite the considerable hole in his chest plate, galloped forward with his heavy bolter on full burst. Rather than the changeling Queen, however, he was aiming up at the massive spike-covered chandelier that dominated the upper level of the temple.

Iron screeched and folded around the heavy bolter impacts, and the entire disk shuddered as three of the chains holding it to the ceiling snapped apart and went slack. A resonant groan came from it, and Chrysalis glance up in understanding.

“Cute. But no.”

Flares of green light burst from her eyes, and the heavy bolter on Big Mac’s side was sliced clean off its mounting with another beam of emerald magic. He staggered to a stop, and then watched helplessly as his main weapon was flung back toward the entrance with a pulse of telekinesis. Then an emerald-colored blade formed above the stallion’s head.

“My fault for not finishing you last time,” Chrysalis hissed. “Let’s see the humans rebuild THIS.”

The blade plunged downward, straight toward Mac’s forehead. But a silver gauntlet reached forward and grazed the edge of the magical weapon on its way down, before it could touch the armored equine. The blade collapsed around its fingers, breaking apart into twinkling green light.

Serith stood over Big Macintosh, wiggling the fingers of the psykant occulus as if teasing his opponent. “I’m sorry, my Queen, but we find these beasts too useful to simply stand idly by for their slaughter.” He glanced over at the priests. “Well, SOME of us, anyway.”

“Die! Just, die! Why won’t any of you DIE?!” Chrysalis snarled furiously. “Fine! You wish to defeat me? Come here and try it!” She spat a brief stream of fire across the room in front of her, although neither the stallion nor the Astartes was within range. “Strike me down, if you dare! I’m tired of toying with you and your ridiculous-huh?”

Applejack had finally managed to wriggle her tail loose from under the changeling’s claws, and her gravity lash shot up and struck the damaged edge of the chandelier.

With a powerful tug, several more supports on that side ripped loose, and the spike-covered wheel swung down over the pews and slammed into Chrysalis’s head. The many metal spikes among the candles mostly bludgeoned themselves against the dragon scales, but a few managed to puncture the thick, armored hide. Chrysalis shrieked in agony, and most of the clergy watching the battle fell to the floor with their hands pressed over their ears.

Applejack finally shouldered aside the dragon’s claw, and then she promptly whipped around to line up her rear legs with the changeling Queen. “Consarn it, drop the scaly face already!”

She bucked Chrysalis in the stomach, her greaves striking the shape-shifter like a cannon shot. Chrysalis lurched back, stunned and bleeding, and the familiar green fire of her magic aura started to spill from her wounds and spread over her.

“There we go! Keep the pressure on!” Applejack barked, using her gravity lash to grab the edge of the chandelier again. Another tug slammed it into the false dragon’s wing, staggering Chrysalis yet again.

Big Macintosh galloped across the temple, plowing aside the battered pews in a thundering charge. Sorcerous lightning flashed over his head from behind, striking the great shape-shifter in a rapid volley. The stallion struck Chrysalis in the leg with a tremendous crack of bone and spray of blood, and her body lurched backward before it finally began to shrink.

Chrysalis howled again in pain and fury, and her eyes became mirrors of pure energy. A pulse of force blasted out from her shriveling form, throwing Big Mac away through the air. Applejack activated her gravity plating in time, her greaves shrieking while they were slowly pushed across the floor anyway. Her armor shook all around her and her visor flickered with error screeds under the weight of the psionic assault, but Applejack kept her eyes focused on the changeling Queen. Chrysalis was stumbling backward, trying to keep her distance while her body re-formed.

Then, once the emerald flames had abated and Chrysalis had returned to her true visage, the farmer snapped the gravity lash at Serith.

“What? What are you-“ the Sorcerer mumbled a confused protest when the crackling beam struck his right hand, securing the energy string to the gauntlet.

“GOTCHA!” Applejack pulled Serith’s entire forearm clean off, flinging it across the temple and back at Chrysalis. The changeling Queen was still regenerating her newest injuries when the disembodied gauntlet latched onto her horn.

Chrysalis blinked up at the metal hand grasping her horn, uncomprehending. Applejack started charging again, her greaves thundering against the floor.

“Try yer fancy magic tricks NOW ya sneaky, no-good, love-munchin’-“

A volley of green magic promptly hammered the mare. Rays of force slammed into her visor, chest, and legs, denting the outer ceramite layers and putting a solid crack in Applejack’s visor. She staggered in shock, staring at the flickering, distorted icons and runes flashing in front of her eyes.

“Good try,” Chrysalis said. Her horn flashed even brighter than before, the magical energy flooding around the gauntlet still attached to her horn.

Applejack started to feel pressure building in her head, as if something in her skull was trying to push its way out. “Augh! How? Why didn’t that work?!”

“It was a clever tactic,” Serith admitted, holding up the empty sleeve of his right arm plating. “But you took the wrong hand.”

“Ha ha ha ha! You fool!” Chrysalis laughed, increasing the flow of magic power into the mare. “You had the perfect chance to stop me, and you… Wait, hold on. What is this?”

Chrysalis stopped trying to crush Applejack’s head and pointed a twisted hoof at Serith. “Where is your arm?! She pulled your arm apart! But there’s no blood!”

Serith didn’t answer, wiggling his right-hand bicep sleeve in the air.

Chrysalis removed the gauntlet from around her horn with her magic, and then flipped it around to look into the glove. “Empty! There’s nothing inside! No flesh, no blood, no machines, no nothing!” She flipped the gauntlet back around, peering closely at the palm. “THIS is how I’ve been biting you and cutting you and crushing you and flinging you around like a doll and you keep getting back up! You’re not a Space Marine! What are you?!”

“Something more. And something less. An immortal, implacable nightmare; a pale shadow of a soul, clinging to this world through the feeble artifice of fools and madmen,” Serith intoned darkly. “… But that’s not important. Don’t blink.”

The fingers of his disembodied gauntlet suddenly stabbed forward, poking Chrysalis in the eyes. The changeling Queen yelped in pain, reeling back and dropping the empty hunk of armor onto the floor.

“Now! Crush the insect!” Serith commanded. His right arm flew back to him through the air, slamming into place on his elbow sleeve in a burst of sparks.

Chrysalis snarled angrily, eyes still squeezed shut. “That is IT!! I’ve had it up to HERE with you worthless pests!”

The Apple siblings, each battered but still breathing, once again charged across the temple with the intent of flattening Chrysalis up close. This time she took to the air, floating up out of reach just before Big Mac could hit her. Applejack followed, spraying a stream of fire up at the changeling, but Chrysalis buzzed away ahead of the flames and zipped up to the altar.

“You scum have NO IDEA what you’ve done!” Chrysalis landed in front of the Warp portal, blinking her eyes painfully. “Your love, your souls, your homes, your families! Everything will be dust! No survivors! I’ll construct my new hive on the ashes of this town!”

Long, flickering whips of ethereal energy came from the blazing red gateway, curving like eels swimming through open sea. They curled around Chrysalis and collided in front of her chest, rapidly forming a sphere of energy.

The ponies had little sense for magic, but they felt the power of this spell like a vibration in their bones. Serith’s vision started to blur as the ambient psionic energy started to overwhelm his senses. Several of the priests fell to their knees, screaming and clutching their heads (Virgil wasn’t one of them, of course).

“Stop her!” Once again Applejack and Big Mac charged, racing across the floor of the Nethalican in thundering gallop.

Chrysalis narrowed her eyes, and the changeling Queen allowed some small quantity of power to leak from the sphere.

A tremendous pulse of force blasted out from the altar, smashing aside splintered furniture until slamming into the iron walls of the temple. The Apple siblings lurched back from their charge as if they had hit a wall, and Serith stumbled and fell to one knee. Most of the priests were flung backward, slamming hard into the nearby wall and slumping to the floor. Virgil leaned into the wall of force and somehow seemed to weather it easily, merely sliding backward across the ground.

Another pulse followed the first, and then a third, and then a fourth. These waves were less intense, but the constant drumbeat of force radiated through the temple and pushed constantly against the two armored ponies closest to the altar.

“Ah… Ah can’t… MOVE!” Applejack growled. Her armor shuddered all around her, creaking and squealing against the power trying to hurl her back. Big Mac wasn’t doing any better, and sparks sputtered from the gearwork of his augmetic legs.

“You have failed. Now BEGONE,” Chrysalis hissed.

A beam blasted forward from the energy sphere in a tremendous howl, aimed at nothing in particular. It sawed a line across the ground, ripping a trench through the flooring between the Apples, before racing toward the exit in what would had doubtless been a titanic explosion.

Instead, however, it met the outstretched hand of a Space Marine.

The beam hit the psykant occulus with a sound like a thunderclap, and several of the dispersal rods blew apart on the spot. The entire gauntlet assembly quivered, and that vibration rolled up Serith’s arm, rattling the armor plating. The beam didn’t disperse, however, and instead flooded into the Sorcerer’s palm, streaming from its source to the gauntlet in a screaming river of power.

“I cannot hold this much power for long!!” Serith growled. “Slay her! Now!”

Applejack whipped her gravity lash toward the changeling. The tractor beam fizzled in an instant, undone by the sheer force surging around the target.

“The Star of Chaos shall be your salvation!” Virgil shouted, raising his voice for the first time Serith could ever recall. “Deliver her to those beyond the veil!”

“The dark gods have not seen fit to interfere yet,” Serith spat. “This moment calls for more than mere faith!” His vision was flickering now, his senses being totally overwhelmed by the psychic currents.

“I was speaking literally!” Virgil shouted back.

Applejack puzzled over that for a moment. There were Chaos Stars all over the temple, but the two largest ones were the massive chandelier (now ripped free of its moorings and smashed against the wall), and the portal ring itself. With the instruction to “deliver her,” that meant…

Applejack’s gravity lash fired again, zipping past the river of psychic power and attaching to one side of the spiked metal ring holding the portal. “Mac! Let’s do this!”

The other farmpony understood in an instant. His magnetic harpoon fired across the temple, striking one of the spiked arrows on his side of the portal circumference.

“PULL!” Applejack commanded.

“Useless vermin!” Chrysalis howled. “STILL you resist? You waste so much effort fighting the inevitable, and yet you-eh?”

The floating ring did not move easily. The chains attaching the portal ring to the walls hung loose and looked to be generally ornamental; the force that held the ring and the energies within was invisible and, it turned out, quite formidable. Against the grinding force of both Apple siblings, the swirling eye of the Dark Portal leaned forward just enough to touch the tips of the changeling Queen’s wings.

Chrysalis gasped, her every nerve suddenly ablaze. Her eyes went wide, and the stream of magical destruction fizzled to a few scattered, buzzing arcs of energy crackling along the beam’s path. Serith promptly fell over, collapsing into a pile of disparate pieces of armor on the floor. The floating sphere of power remained, wobbling unsteadily and flashing an array of inexplicable colors.

“No… No no no no NONONONONONO” Chrysalis began chanting frantically, her eyes wild and unfocused. Her body twitched and spasmed, and the orb of power started frothing wildly in the air, like boiling water.

“I WILL NOT!! NOT TO YOU!!” Chrysalis howled, her eyes suddenly blazing green. “GET AWAY FROM ME, MONSTER!!” She began to move forward, slowly and haltingly, as if merely flexing her legs and neck were feats of tremendous will. “I WILL NOT FALL! I WILL NOT SUBMIT! I WILL NOT DIE! I WILL NOT LOSE! NOT TO YOU!!”

With an enraged snarl, her horn lit up and pulsed even faster than before. Green whips lashed out and pushed against the portal ring, tearing away Big Mac’s harpoon. The portal bobbed back up, slipping away from the changeling’s wings.

In an instant, ordinary sensation returned to Chrysalis. Her limbs moved freely, the pain surging up her spine washed away, and her eyes once again witnessed the gloomy interior of the Chaos Temple and all of her enemies standing within it.

The first of those enemies whom Chrysalis saw was Applejack, just as the farmer slammed a boot into the hovering magic sphere and shoved it into her chest.

“Hrkklg!” Chrysalis tried to cry out, but her lungs burned away in an instant. Along with a few other important organs. The sheer magical power still dissipating from the orb ate away at Applejack’s hoof plating and Chrysalis’s torso with equal intensity, but the latter proved far less resilient. The sphere quickly destabilized and fizzled to nothing, leaving a much larger hole in the changeling’s body than the various notches and grooves cut into her legs.

Applejack’s helmet hissed and split apart, the plates and visor opening up to reveal the farmer’s stern glare. Chrysalis could only stare at her, gaping, while her body weakened and her vision dimmed.

“Don’t you EVER hurt mah family, ya slimy, lyin’, hole-ridden freak.” Chrysalis wobbled and slumped to the floor, and Applejack kept her icy gaze locked with hers the entire way down. “Ah reckon ya learned that lesson a mite late, though.”

Chrysalis twitched, and the twisted horn on her head flickered slightly, like a lumen trying to squeeze a few more seconds of lighting out of a dead battery. Then it dimmed, and the Queen’s eyes clouded over.

Applejack snorted and turned around, hopping down from the altar. Her gait was slightly uneven, and one of her greaves scraped loudly against the floor with every step due to the uneven disintegration of its sole. She passed by the priests without comment, trotting directly for Big Macintosh.

“Mac, you okay? She got ya right in the chest back there. Nothin’ important broken?”

The stallion spent a moment to bring up his internal diagnostic. A long series of incomprehensible data screeds poured across his visor, along with small diagrams that he didn’t understand but were mostly colored red.

“Eee… maybe?”

“Well, that ain’t good enough. Let’s head into Canterlot and see one of them Techpriests. Ah know the Warsmith makes a good ticker, but Ah don’t trust that ‘livin’ metal’ stuff to keep yer organs workin’.”

Applejack tossed her head toward the exit and started to lead the way, only to find Virgil standing in their path.

“Apple siblings, this humble servant of the Dark Gods thanks you.” Virgil’s voice was as deadpan as ever, and he made an obscure gesture with one hand, like he was writing in the air. “In our hour of need, Chaos has-“

“Look, don’t take this the wrong way, Father, but Ah’m leavin’.” Applejack plodded right past the preacher, followed hesitantly by Big Macintosh. “Ah’m bruised, burnt, Ah have a headache from whatever Queenie tried to do to mah brain back there, and my big bro could have a heart-motor attack at any moment.” Her muzzle scrunched up. “Also, this place still gives me the heebie-jeebies. If ya wanna thank somepony, thank Apple Bloom! She told us what all was happenin’! Bye!”

The armored ponies rushed out the front door, not slowing down for any response.

Virgil watched them go, and then crossed his arms. His brow creased deeply in contemplation. He tilted his head up, staring at the free-hanging, broken chains that once suspended the great chandelier lying in a heap on one side of the temple. He squinted his eyes, as if looking for something in the dusty air that only he could perceive.

Finally, he uncrossed his arms and looked over at Serith. “How was her hat undamaged?”

“I can think of few mysteries less worthy of my attention,” the Sorcerer admitted.

Serith hadn’t cast a single glance at the ponies since Chrysalis had fallen, even after he had finished reassembling himself with his mind. Even now he stood over the Queen’s corpse, quietly scanning every inch of the changeling’s devastated body. Smoke poured from the dark, jagged pit in her chest, but no blood or ichor. The stifled horror and disbelief of her last moments – a brief glance of pure, incomprehensible Chaos, followed by the disastrous return to the waking world – hung in the air above her like a foul smell.

The Sorcerer kneeled down next to Chrysalis, slowly reaching out toward the twisted, notched horn on her head.

A spark of green crackled around it, jumping across the gaps and notches and finally leaping up to his gauntlet.

“Hmmmm…”

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 1
Ground batteries

“… No. No way. Nuh-uh. Negative. Nope!”

“Priest, do try to keep thy mind open. These art desperate times, and call for extreme methods.”

“It’s impossible. Completely impossible! You can’t angle the weapon to fire at something in the city! The batteries are just too big!”

“We hast sufficient force. We can move the weapon. We need only the will.”

“I don’t have it! I don’t have NEARLY enough will!”

“Do as We instruct, Priest. Our salvation is at hoof!”

While Luna argued with Gear Works, Celestia, Pinkie Pie, and Dest were looking over the massive cannons that made up the ground batteries. Towering guns built into huge scaffolds, each one was much thinner than most buildings, but they stretched hundreds of feet into the air. Nets of cabling followed the weapons over the length of their barrels, along with the necessary oversized hydraulic pistons needed to move such a cannon from side to side to aim.

Obviously, none of the enormous guns could move far enough to be fired into the streets of the city.

“What do you think we’re doing here?” Dest asked, brushing his clawed hand across the well-oiled metal of the scaffolding supports. “These are useless against our target, are they not?”

“Maybe… Princess Luna wants to shoot into the air, so that it comes back down on the Ursa Major?” Pinkie guessed, tracing an imaginary arc with the finger of her power fist.

“These are Tau rail and ion cannons. Their projectiles do not function like that,” Dest explained.

Ooh! I know! She wants to tear the supports out and aim it down the street, so you can fire the entire thing at the big bear when it walks past!

Dest restrained a frustrated sigh. “Even more unlikely,” the possessed warrior said, heedless that he was openly answering the voice in his head. “That would require dismembering the weapon barrel.”

“Aye! We shalt begin at once!” Luna jumped forward, her Iron Gage pointing at the base of the nearest rail cannon. “We shalt remove these components! Once the weapon begins to fall, it will take all our combined might to shift it into place!”

Dest stared. Vel laughed.

Oh, dude, I wasn’t even serious! This mare rocks!

“Absolutely not!” Gear Works shouted, running up between the armored Princess and the anti-orbit cannon. “You can’t possibly disassemble, aim, and fire this gun like that!”

A great black gauntlet gently picked the cyborg pony up by his servo arm and carried him out of the way. “Thy objection is noted, Priest. Now please instruct Sister as to which connectors are strictly required to discharge the weapon. All others shalt be given over to the pegasi as support rigging.”

“You’re insane!” Gears protested.

“Our corrupt pirate allies art laid low by a tremendous ursine armed and ridden by deadly, inept warmongers from beyond the stars! What use is sanity in such dire times?!” Luna proclaimed, pointing her gauntlet at a rivet over a foot in circumference.

A beam of bright orange zapped the rivet head, and it swiftly melted down and drained down the side of the cannon.

“You- I- It- That-“ Gears sputtered uselessly, his mask spitting static. Then he whirled on Pinkie Pie and Dest. “Why aren’t you stopping her?! She needs to be stopped!”

Pinkie Pie’s Dreadnought made a humming noise while the mare inside watched Luna melt down another rivet. “I dunno… I kinda like this plan! Besides, if we don’t do this then they’re gonna make me fight the Ursa, and there’s no WAY this walker is surviving that. I don’t have any more replacements, you know!”

Dest crossed his arms over his chest. “As unlikely as this endeavor is, I have no better plans. If it works, it will deal a deathblow to the beast and save us countless lives and heavy units.”

“But it WON’T work!” Gears retorted, banging an augmetic leg on the ground.

“Is it truly impossible?” Princess Celestia asked, looming over the Dark Acolyte with a concerned frown. “I believe that between me and Luna, we can lower the weapon down to the street safely.”

“Yes, it’s impossible! A quarter of the cannon is underground! Along with the receiver and the ammunition hoppers! It would be like breaking off the barrel of a rifle and trying to fire it without the rest of the mechanism! The machine spirits do NOT approve!” Gears explained hotly.

“That is true, but the barrel of a rail weapon accelerates the projectile on its own,” Dest mused. “We would have to deliver the munition directly to the removed component, but it could yet achieve kill velocity. Possibly.”

A creaking noise came from the rail cannon, and Luna suddenly shouted to the others. “Lord Dest! Miss Pie! Begin tearing down the scaffolding at once! Sister, hold the tower in place with thy magic! Priest, cease thy prattling and ensure the device shalt function once repositioned!”

“How?! How am I supposed to make it work after you’ve torn it in half?! Stop this at once!” Gears protested.

Dest and Pinkie Pie approached the gun and started grabbing at the support scaffolding and cutting away bundles of wires. Gear Works shrieked, his voice like a circular saw cutting into steel gauge, but they seemed unbothered by the reaction. Pinkie’s power fist ripped away the duralloy bars like cobwebs, while Dest worked on cutting the links at their connection to the gun itself.

Celestia winced at the noise, and then beckoned the Dark Acolyte with a wing. “My little pony, please, calm yourself. Trust in Luna.”

“Trust?! Trust that nocturnal lunatic tearing apart a priceless weapon so she can fire it into the city streets?!” Gears raged, jumping up and down in place while puffs of steam blasted from beneath his hood.

Celestia frowned. “I cannot pretend to understand the value of these machines, but for now many lives are at stake. Machines can be rebuilt. The dead cannot be restored.”

“Yes we can,” Dest interjected.

“I mean besides that one time,” Celestia huffed.

A loud groan came from the rail cannon, and the towering barrel started to visibly tilt to one side.

“Royal Guard! Get into position! Hold the weapon upright!” Celestia ordered, her horn flashing with power.

Golden light flooded over the rail cannon, and dozens of pegasi swooped by and snatched up the loose cables to help.

Luna continued dissolving rivets, and the rail cannon’s superstructure started to shift out of alignment with the rest of the weapon underground.

She took a moment to search her vox channels, and then linked to a particularly busy one. “General! How fares thee?!”

“What? Princess, where are you?! You disabled the main gun but chasing this damnable bear through the streets is impossible!” cursed Harlin through the vox.

“Fear not, General! We hast a plan!” Luna announced proudly, zapping another rivet and watching it melt down. “We need but a few more moments. Then thou must shepherd the Ursa into position!”

“A plan? What are you doing?”

“’Tis nary time to explain further! We require the enemy step foot on avenue 9 once we hath prepared thusly! That is all!”

She turned off the vox, and then charged up two more beams within the Iron Gage. “Prepare thyselves! We canst let the weapon fall without our guidance!”

Dest reached down for another bundle of cables, only to hesitate when Gear Works started shouting.

“Wait! No! That’s a primary power supply! If you damage that cabling the magnetic accelerators won’t work!” the Dark Acolyte protested. “Each magnetic assembly has an individual power coupling and capacitor array! Destroy them and this entire weapon becomes an inert metal tube!”

“I see.” Dest dropped the cables, and then pointed to another bundle attached to a different point.. “And what of these?”

“Those power the dampening array! They’re necessary for diffusing the structural stress of firing each shot! Without them, the cannon would be useless after a few discharges,” Gears explained impatiently.

“Then they are unnecessary,” Dest declared, slicing through the bundle with a claw. “We will only be able to attempt this once, I’m sure.”

Luna unleashed the charged rays into another pair of rivet heads. Within seconds, the groaning creak of metal shifting against metal rose rapidly in pitch as ever more of the gun’s weight threatened to topple over. Finally a series of sharp snaps came from the cannon superstructure as the remaining rivets broke one by one.

Luna’s horn casing flashed, and her magic shifted from blue to a deadly crimson as it wrapped around the tower threatening to topple over. Both alicorns grunted, straining their telekinesis magic to its limits, and the pegasi trying to help flapped ever-more-desperately to keep the cannon from falling.

Dest and Pinkie backed away, staring up at the quivering rail cannon finally unmoored from its mounting.

“Where are you going to place it now?” Dest asked. “Flat against the road will not work. Bracing it atop a building may position it too high to aim correctly.”

“Follow our lead!” Luna declared. The Iron Gage flew up into the air, and then started swinging to one side in tandem, like an air traffic director. The cannon barrel started to move through the air, trembling under the forces keeping it aloft. Wires hung loose and bits of small debris fell off as it moved, bouncing along under its shadow.

Luna’s vox crackled in her ear. “Princess Luna, we’re directing the enemy per your instructions. However, we have very limited control over the beast’s speed. It seems to be avoiding our armored formations – an unusual response from Orks, but one I’m thankful for – and we’re chasing it to the requested intersection.”

“How long do we have?” Luna asked grimly.

“One hundred and fifty seconds is my best guess, Princess. I suppose we could try to turn the monster around again, but it would be near impossible without cornering it.”

“Try to slow thy pursuit if thou can,” Luna requested. “This process is quite-“

“BLAST! No! All units, cease pursuit at once! The damned monster is dropping explosive charges into the streets behind it! It has some kind of mine dispenser, too?!” Harlin shouted, causing Luna to wince. “How many tons of ordnance did they manage to fit onto that thing?! Redirect formation seven and have four move down sector 9! Don’t let it turn!”

Another blast of static ended the transmission, although Luna had to imagine the General was still howling orders into his command console. The Princess of the Night looked up at the dismantled anti-ship cannon floating overhead and set her jaw.

“Faster, compatriots! Our time grows short!” Luna bellowed. The glowing red eyes set into her chest plate glowed brighter, and the cannon’s movement accelerated.

“Luna! Careful!” Celestia yelped, her horn pulsing as she tried to keep up.

“We wouldst surely prefer to conduct this plot with caution and diligence, but circumstances hath conspired against us!” Luna said. “Quickly, now! Move the weapon into position!”

Princess Celestia looked over the area, frowning. “Where is the position? Where were you planning on putting it?”

Currently the cannon was floating parallel to the street, hovering dozens of feet above a macrocrane. The boxy construction vehicle was the size of a superheavy tank, boasting thick, wide treads and an array of extending construction rigs. The vehicle wasn’t made for combat, but like most heavy construction units, boasted thick armor and a reinforced chassis anyway.

None of which helped much when the barrel of a titanic rail cannon dropped onto it.

“Oh! Look at that! That’s just great!” Gear Works shouted angrily. “Now you’ve destroyed TWO valuable machines for the sake of this ridiculous plan! Splendid!” His servo arm lashed about wildly, and Celestia sighed.

Luna seemed undaunted, and she flew up onto the cannon. The partially flattened macrocrane stood roughly halfway down the barrel length, acting as a fulcrum that left the mouth of the gun tilted up into the air while the other end rested on the ferrocrete. Luna trotted up its length toward the high end and started barking more orders.

“The beast is nearly in position! Priest, ready the device for firing! Sister! Attendant pegasi! We shalt lift the end of the cannon to aim it!”

“Oh, yes. Fine. Will do, Princess!” Gears sneered. “As long as you’re destroying important things for stupid reasons, do you want to test-fire the cannon first? Maybe you could use the city’s fusion reactor as target practice!”

“’Tis little time for thy admonitions, Priest! See to the weapon!” Luna retorted. “Ammunition!”

“Present!” Pinkie Pie and Dest marched from a surface lift, carrying an enormous rail cartridge between them. The projectile was a tremendous metal spike with two thick rings of some non-metallic material wrapped around it near each end, making the munition dumbbell-shaped. It was very nearly too large for Dest to keep his end up off the ground, and the driver’s armor squealed as its enhanced servo-motors fought to move against the formidable mass.

The Iron Gage swooped down and clamped onto the middle of the ordnance, helping to carry it along. Pinkie’s Dreadnought fed one end of the munition into the end of the cannon barrel, and then helped Dest push it into place.

Luna’s visor entered telescopic mode, peering down the street and filtering out the particulate interference. Immediately she could see the looming shape of Big Bloo striding toward the intersection far ahead.

“The target approacheth! Priest, prepare the weapon to fire!” Luna barked.

Another jet of steam shot from beneath Gear’s hood, but the Dark Acolyte stomped over to the cannon barrel. “Fine! But don’t you dare miss! If you destroy a heavy rail cannon and a macrocrane just to put a hole in one of our buildings don’t expect me to take any more of your early morning calls to clean up your-“

The Iron Gage suddenly banged its knuckles on the cyborg pony’s head, and Gear Works yelped and staggered.

“Priest, prepare the weapon to fire!” Luna repeated, glaring down at him through the blood-red lens of her helmet.

Gears glared back through the shining green optic clusters within his hood, but he said nothing. His servo arm reached up and opened a panel next to the main power cables, revealing an assortment of buttons, switches, and sockets. His tail swiveled around and reared back, scorpion-like, and then plunged into one of the sockets.

“… All right, I can power the magnets in sequence from here,” Gears grumbled. “You may not want to be standing on the cannon when it fires, though. Without the regulator fields the barrel won’t survive a discharge.”

Celestia frowned, staring at the massive weapon thoughtfully. “Now that I think about it… could we have just placed a linked portal at the top of the gun and then opened another one facing down the street? That would have been much easier.”

The sound of metal smashing into metal came from Gears, followed by an outpour of angry-sounding static.

“’Tis no time! Aim the cannon!” Luna bellowed.

The alicorns once again took hold of the broken rail cannon, but this time their magic concentrated on one end of it. That end lifted up, swiftly bringing the entire weapon more or less parallel to the street. Gear Works, who was attached to the side of the gun, yelped and quickly mag-locked his hooves onto the outer plating below his access panel before he was carried up into the air above the ground. Luna spread her legs and braced herself, pointing her horn forward.

“Shell of rage and iron, We beseech thee! Guide our hoof so that this lance of devastation should find the foe! Reveal to us the way forward!” the Princess of the Night bellowed.

“Are… Are you talking to your armor suit?” Celestia asked hesitantly.

A large, glowing track appeared within Luna’s visor, sweeping down the street and tilting slightly to the left. The outline of Big Bloo stepped into the intersection dead ahead, just out of line with the shot.

Luna’s horn pulsed brighter, and the metal under her hooves creaked in protest from the tremendous force need to shift its aim. Big Bloo walked into the middle of the street, and a targeting reticule flashed over it.

“LOOSE THE CANNON!!” Luna roared, stamping a hoof.

“Omnissiah forgive us,” Gears whimpered.

Sparks blasted from around the Dark Acolyte’s dataspike, and a gentle electric hum quickly rose to an ear-splitting shriek. A brilliant beam flashed across the city; a rolling trail of flame where the hypersonic projectile’s passing ignited the air.

The cannon barrel split on one side, the outer case tearing from the oscillating magnetic fields deforming the superstructure. The power sockets exploded one by one, gradually crawling over the length of the cannon barrel in a steady march of crackling detonations. Whips of partially-melted cables flopped weakly on the ground like wounded tentacles, still buzzing with raw energy. The dismembered weapon shook, grinding away at the macrocrane beneath it and caving in the top of the structure a few more feet. A wave of silvery particles blew up into the air from the breach, like a dusty cough, as superheated metals were released to the air and rapidly cooled back to a solid state.

The barrel, suspended in the air via magic on one end, unceremoniously crashed back down. Gear Works was wrenched free of his perch and slammed into the street on his back, and Pinkie Pie was nearly bowled over from the massive pieces of broken plating that flew off the cannon like shrapnel. The entire gun collapsed from the impact, its various segments snapping apart one by one and dropping as massive, inert, partially shredded rings.

Only the section Luna was standing on remained unsettled, as it sat more-or-less stable on top of the macrocrane. The mare herself paid no heed to the destruction unleashed all around her; the quaking of the cannon barrel, the rending of its structure, and not even the various discharges of gas and debris seemed to disturb her.

The Princess of the Night listened, entranced, to the echoing death cry of an Ursa Major, and the last gasp of the assault on Ferrous Dominus.

****

Serra-class cargo transport T-338, bridge

*By Tau’va... it’s… it’s dead. I don’t know what happened, but…*

Several screens on the bridge of the lander showed still-frame picts of Ferrous Dominus. A fiery streak cut across the city’s street grid, striking Big Bloo in the side. The light and particulate interference made the images grainy, and the angle obscured wherever the discharge had come from, but there was no disguising the sheer scale of the weapon. Jets of flame scorched nearby buildings around its passing, and the impact with its massive target had blown out all the armorglass and shuttered windows within a block of its impact.

The enormous bear itself was frozen in mid-roar, its head flung up to the sky while its body lurched sharply to the side. A creature equal in size and might to an Imperial Titan, felled by a weapon of somehow ever greater scale.

Voidsong studied the picts silently while the crew murmured in speculation and awe. That the Chaos pirates had killed the Ork-dominated warbeast hardly impressed her. However, there were strategic implications that could not be denied. The Company was wounded, but not broken, and had cleared the last of the primary threats endangering their home.

She was out of time.

*Prepare for immediate ascent. Keep our trajectory outside of their anti-ship batteries, but we need altitude, NOW,* Voidsong said suddenly.

The Earth Caste crew looked shocked. *But… Black Point is-*

*Too far away,* Voidsong snapped, her voice cold as ever. *I regret leaving loyal Fire Warriors behind, as always, but the base represents too great a risk now. Change our heading.*

The crew moved to comply, staggered as they were by this newest setback. The Fio’o peered more closely at the pict-capture on the main screen, squinting at the impact point.

*This… This is… a starship-class rail cannon?* He breathed the words, as if he dared not contemplate such a thing. *How did the Gue’la construct such a thing? How did they fire an ANTI-SHIP weapon at a ground target?!*

*They are resourceful, desperate, and insane. Such a combination has led to countless mythical feats of destruction,* Voidsong said acidly. *I intend to leave their sphere of influence before such a thing is used on us.*

The bridge crew went to work, and the lander creaked ominously while its angle of movement shifted considerably.

Then, a muffled explosion came from outside the hull, near the bottom, and one of the fio’la hissed.

*Blast! We lost another vertical thruster! Our speed has been nearly cut in half compared to when we lifted off!*

Voidsong frowned. *We left the firing range of the fortress’s point defense weapons long ago.*

*Yes, Shas’o. It must have been residual damage catching up with us when we ignited the vertical lift. They can’t-*

Another explosion came from below, and several crew glanced at each other nervously.

Then one of them slammed a fist onto his console and cursed. *Gunship! We have an interceptor right under us! It’s opened fire!*

*How did we not notice until now?* Voidsong barked.

*I’ve never controlled an augur station before, Shas’o! I’m still managing this device according to the instruction slate!*

*How do we lose it? Aren’t there any weapons on this boat at all?*

*Is there only one? Why did they not send a full squadron?* Voidsong asked.

*I don’t know, Shas’o. It seems to be one of the patterns used primarily to transport assault teams rather than a pursuit fighter.*

*Get those void shields back up! Re-route power from the damaged engines!*

While the bridge crew barked orders and worried over their pursuer, Voidsong considered other possibilities.

It didn’t make much sense that they had dispatched only one gunship to chase after the escaping lander. Combat resources were currently stretched thin and endangered, but surely they warranted a wing of fighters if they warranted any response at all. Unless, of course, they were very confident a single gunship would be enough…

*Get me an augur scan of the hull,* Voidsong commanded.

*Yes, Shas’o. The gunship is-*

*No, not the gunship. OUR hull. Scan for anything attached to it.*

*Ah… Okay…* The Fio’la worker shifted his eyes anxiously between the battlesuit and his station instruments. *Hmm. These reading are odd. There’s… something on the hull, all right. It’s moving. I’ll attempt to ascertain-*

*Don’t bother,* Voidsong said sharply. Her battlesuit turned on its heel, heading to the door. *It’s a strike force. Probably Mechanicus. They’re sabotaging the lander.*

She reached the door and halted, turning its sensor head toward the crew. *Maintain our ascent according to my orders. We’re still vulnerable. I’ll resolve the threat.*

Without waiting for a response, the battlesuit stepped out into the hallway.

Outside of the bridge, several Fire Warriors stood guard in the hall. They turned sharply as Voidsong emerged, clutching their pulse carbines to their chests.

*We have boarders on the hull exterior. They’ll be trying to access maintenance hatches and sabotage power relays and fuel cells,* Voidsong barked while she stomped between the soldiers. *We also have a gunship cutting apart our engines. I’ll see what I can do about that, but I need the rest of the battlesuits ready to deploy on the hull exterior as soon as they can. Get down to the cargo bays and assist them! Now!*

*Yes, Shas’o! Ah…* One Fire Warrior hesitated when Voidsong turned a corner and disappeared down the hall. *Shas’o! The airlocks are on the level below us! There’s no access to the exterior that way!*

*Yes there is,* Voidsong retorted. She continued down the hall, and her heavy footsteps soon fell out of earshot.

*What is she up to? There’s nothing over there, is there?* asked one soldier.

*No idea. I didn’t have time to study the maps.* The other soldiers jogged past, heading toward the stairwell. *Let’s get the others ready to deploy! We’ll need to WHOA!*

The Fire Warriors stumbled to a halt when an insect squeezed through the vent near the top of the hallway. It was large for a bug; almost the size of a rat with a green coloration and yellow mottling on its wing case.

Its internals were mostly black, as the Tau learned when one of them smashed it against the wall with his pulse carbine.

*These Chaos gue’la are disgusting,* the soldier hissed, wiping off the side of his weapon. *Feeble minds, slaves to superstition, and they can’t even keep vermin off their starships. Do you think there’s a nest on board?*

*Shas’vre, we don’t have time to sanitize the vessel! Get to the hangar and… and, uh…*

The other soldier trailed off as another bug crawled out of the vent. Along with another. And another. A vent on the opposite wall started rattling, and a pair of insectoid antenna poked out from the metal slits.

*What is this?! Shoot them!*

*Shoot the bugs? Really?*

*Shoot them or run, Shas’la! There are too many!*

*Tau’va, where did they all come from?!*

*OW! Get it off! Get it off me!*

*Eeyaaah! Gyaaah! AAAAAAAAAAH!!*

****

Ferrous Dominus sector 9

Gox gasped and started coughing violently. Her body shuddered, and pain surged through every joint. Everything hurt. Except the parts of her body she couldn’t feel anymore. Those were fine. Or they had been torn off entirely, which was very not-fine. One of those.

A bloody haze clouded her thoughts. She was pretty sure she had been leading Big Bloo on a winding course through the city, trying to find her way to a good exit point. Now she was… elsewhere. On the ground. Was it the ground? There was this dark, oily substance everywhere. It smelled elemental, somehow. Like fresh rain and dark soil and crackling fire all at once.

Time passed, and more senses and thoughts slowly came into focus. Gox was still in Ferrous Dominus. The ground was covered in some inexplicable fluid, but it was also littered with Ork corpses. Big Bloo was…

She twisted her neck around, painful as that simple motion was. A terrified quiver ran through the Guardian’s body. Big Bloo was dead. Very, very dead. She had no idea what had happened, but after identifying the enormous corpse behind her, Gox came to the belated conclusion that she was lying in a giant puddle of the thing’s blood, or whatever bizarre concoction made up its internal fluids.

That realization, in turn, spurred several subsequent concerns. Gox had shifted back to her real form. She was still in enemy territory. The death of Big Bloo marked the removal of the final threat to the humans’ armies. The invasion had failed.

“Regrettable. Now, to get out of here…” Gox slowly pushed herself up, feeling her legs wobble under her. She had been injured, perhaps seriously, but she had no time to take stock of her injuries. For now it was enough that she could feel all of her legs. All she had to do was reach an obscured position where she could track her surroundings and then shapeshift when appropriate. In the bedlam following the assault, it would be trivial to escape the city.

Gox had barely taken a single step when a thick, meaty hand grabbed onto her hind leg.

“Wuzzis fing?” A Nob was kneeling on the ground behind the changeling, one hand clamped tightly around her hind leg and the other groping blindly on the ground for a weapon. Blood dribbled freely down the side of the Ork’s head, and he was swaying unsteadily from side to side, but the warrior was obviously lucid enough to restrain an enemy, at least.

“Leggo, ya git!” Gox barked, automatically defaulting to Orkish slang.

Her horn flickered, but a sudden surge of pain broke the changeling’s concentration. Her vision spun, and Gox nearly collapsed on the spot from her vertigo.

More Orks started standing up. Although much of the crew had been wiped out along with their combat beast, several had survived being flung into the streets below. Gox only realized belatedly that this made her the only non-Ork in the immediate vicinity.

The Nob stood up, hauling Gox’s leg with him. She yelped and tugged, trying to break free. The Nob yanked her back and slammed his fist into her side, knocking the wind out of her.

“W-Wait! No!” Gox started coughing painfully. “Da humies-I mean, the humans are coming! Don’t you want to fight them? Because they sure want to fight you!”

“Dere’s sumfin funny ‘bout dis hoss,” the Nob noted, ignoring her pleas. “Iz got holes innit. But we aint’ shot it up, yet!”

“We’z gonna add s’more?” asked another alien, eagerly loading his slugga.

Gox’s struggling became ever-more frantic. She could see large, metal shapes advancing down the street through the pollution haze. Tanks. And every Ork was surrounding her, completely oblivious to the threat.

She tried to change shape. Even an Ork would be unlikely to be fooled by an Ork that had been a changeling Guardian just seconds ago, but perhaps the shock and confusion would give her an opportunity to escape.

The moment her horn lit up a metal-shod boot slammed into her stomach. Gox collapsed onto her side, gasping desperately. Her horn sputtered, and then went dark.

“Feh. Dis wun ain’t nuffin’ speshul. Kill it and le’s go,” the Nob sneered.

“Please, stop this! They’re coming! They’re going to kill all of us!” Gox begged.

She received another kick for her trouble. A slugga went off, and new surges of pain flooded her body as the gun’s report rang in her ears. Changeling blood mixed with the strange fluids below, forming new, colorful, and terribly morbid patterns over the street.

“You… You’re all-“ A choppa wedged into her back, and Gox interrupted herself with a pained gasp.

Past the ring of alien brutes, the tanks of the 38th Company ground to a halt. Cannons slowly positioned themselves to take aim, and heavy bolter sponsons swiveled into place in preparation for a lethal, concentrated volley.

“… You’re all loveless, vile, smelly idiots, and I hated being one of you, and now we’re all going to die,” Gox snapped even as her body started to go numb. “Tartarus take you all, alien scum.” She closed her eyes and relaxed, feeling oddly satisfied at the admission.

The tanks fired.

****

Serra-class cargo transport T-338, exterior

+Warning: Vessel acceleration vector has altered. Tactical outlook modified. Processing…+

A Scavurel soldier looked up, and an altimeter blinked over his visor, flashing a series of increasing numbers. The clouds above started approaching as the massive metal floor underfoot roared up into the sky.

Five of the cyborgs held a perimeter on the lander’s hull, their augmetic feet mag-locked to the bulkheads. Behind them was a large pit several meters across that had been carved into the superstructure. The sounds of las-welders and melta cutters crackled from the pit as the other Scavurel and the Dark Techpriest they were escorting rapidly dug a hole through the bulkheads to the critical systems. Plating had to be breached carefully, and the Mechanicus saboteurs had to avoid those structural blocks that would open up into the ship interior.

While the pirates would normally seek entry into the vessel itself to cripple its systems, they were quite aware of the heavy complement of troops that the Tau were escaping with. Instead, it was decided that the vessel would merely be crippled so that it might be forced to land. At that point, it could be surrounded and its occupants hunted down at the Company’s leisure once its military assets were less occupied. The lander could be recovered and repaired, and the alien traitors shown an appropriately horrific fate.

+Warning: Grid surge detected. Savior pod system engaged.+

The Core, the unit leader, immediately snapped his head toward the source of the disruption. His taser goad crackled, energy dancing along its tines at the soldier’s agitation. Warning runes and data-screed flashed across his visor in a jumble of information.

Some twenty meters away, a piece of armor plating was blown off of the hull by carefully placed microcharges. A cylinder-shaped vessel arose from the cell underneath it, sliding up slowly like a rising piston. Then it blasted off, rocketing up into the air with the single-use heavy thruster attached on its bottom.

The Scavurel were on their guard, weapons ready, but none did anything but observe as the savior pod launched. Several seconds later, the pod suddenly flashed as an energy discharge tore it apart.

+Anomaly. No external discharge detected. Emission originating within savior pod. Causation: pod failure/occupant malfunction/ordnance detonation?+ muttered the unit Core.

+Only one pod launched. Either this was some sort of attempt to launch an improvised missile, or some coward is fleeing while escape is still likely,+ a Dreg grumbled in rougher, informal Binary.

+Error detected: No causation of explosive reaction in latter hypothesis.+

The Scavurel soldier turned away, the edges of his cloak whipping in the wind. +The Machine Spirits rejected the xeno fool. The Dark Gods have many ways of taking vengeance upon their enemies.+

The Core glanced upward again, unsatisfied. The remains of the savior pod flew back, falling away from the lander’s ascent path. A stray splash of sparks erupted from nowhere, leaving a strange shimmer in the air.

He shifted his vision mode just in time to identify the foot of a battlesuit descending toward his head.

Voidsong landed with a sickening crunch as bone and metal shattered under the weight of her armor. A last-second burst of her jet pack minimized the jolt to her system, and she had her weapons aimed the moment she touched down. One shot from her fusion blaster at point-blank range vaporized a cyborg from the waist up, leaving his legs standing comically on their own, feet fixed to the hull. Her plasma gun took down the next-nearest soldier, burning through flesh and metal with equal ease and rendering the Dreg into a smoldering heap.

The remaining two Scavurel were moving in an eye blink, instantly reverting strategic control from the Core to the Dark Techpriest. One hit the deck in a roll, his servo arm latching on to the edge of a discarded armor plate in passing. When he pushed himself upright again the plate came with him, propping upright to form a barricade. The other Scavurel leapt at just the right time to land in a crouch behind the plate, ducking her head out of the line of fire.

+Proximity warning! Battlesuit detected; heavy stealth sub-pattern. Anti-armor weaponry confirmed. Chances of combat success 8.291% and falling.+ The two soldiers shifted to the ends of the barricade, gripping their lasguns tightly. +Engaging.+

As one, they leaned out with their weapons ready to rake the Tau defender. They saw only the ruined bodies of their companions.

+Enhancing aural sensitivity. Check air-flow vectors for mass displacement. Do not-+

He was interrupted by the sound of a battlesuit landing from a high jump behind him, its feet scraping across the hull and its jetpack firing a sudden, intense burst of thrust. The Scavurel again dove away, which managed to save one of them from the flanking plasma fire. The other hit the ground with smoking holes in her body and a burst of static erupting from her vocalizer.

The other Scavurel jumped to his feet and loosed a burst of lasblasts at Voidsong, who was in no position to evade. He dashed behind a spire, barely ducking out of sight ahead of a screaming bolt of plasma.

Voidsong spat a curse, glancing at her diagnostic display. The lasbolts did minimal damage, but every crack in her armor made her cloaking field less effective. A single visible fluctuation could mean the difference between life and death in a close-quarters fight such as this one.

She shimmered into invisibility again, and then connected her comms to her men inside the lander.

*Shas’ui, I need that support! Where are-*

A hideous scream filled her ears, almost causing her battlesuit to recoil.

*GO! GO! GET OUT OF GYAAAEEH!!* The shrill whine of energy weapons followed the cry of agony. Shifting machinery, small detonations, and some kind of persistent buzzing noise turned the feed into a useless, horrible cacophony.

Voidsong quickly switched her connection while she hovered away from her previous position with her jetpack. The noise was mostly obscured by the rushing wind and the roar of the lander’s engines, but it still meant she’d be much easier to detect when she faced enemies again.

*Fio’o! What’s happening down there?! The boarding team is in a panic!* Voidsong demanded.

*It’s an infestation, Shas’o! We don’t know where they came from! Some kind of insects are pouring into the main halls, and-*

Banging noises interrupted the transmission. There was more shouting, indecipherable to Voidsong, but no blood-curdling screams, at least. Then more banging noises, but this time from outside her suit, coming from the open wound in the lander’s hull.

Scavurel soldiers leapt from the pit, landing on the edge of the opening and instantly dropping into crouching combat positions. Three of them wielded lasguns, while the others boasted phosphor pistols and flickering energy shields projected over a metal span bolted onto their forearms. The shields created a protective screen for the others, who searched the area to try and spot their assailant.

Then came the Dark Techpriest. Steel appendages akin to a scuttling insect clambered over the edge of the hull breach, carrying with them a hunched body wrapped in a black shroud. A servo arm that resembled a fanged maw hung over its head, along with an array of less imposing technical mechatendrils. A sizzling energy cannon hung from one arm, while a thick, bulky augmetic arm on the other side carried the priest’s power axe.

The sound from Voidsong’s comms stabilized. *We managed to block the vents and seal off the room before they got in here, but we’re trying to figure out how to vent sections of the ship while we’re still in an atmosphere!*

*I’m not getting my support, am I?* Voidsong sighed.

A moving screen of fragmented light swept across the deck, originating from the Dark Techpriest. Voidsong shifted away to try to get behind a raised bulkhead, but the edge of the screen tagged her arm before she moved out of sight.

In an instant, a furious barrage of lasblasts scoured the air behind her. They first bisected at a single point in the air, and then the shots started spreading away from each other in burst fire to generate a growing web of burning light. A fascinating firing pattern for dealing with hidden enemies, if not useless against one crouched behind cover as she was.

A high-pitched whine filled the air, and Voidsong felt a cold chill run down her spine. She rushed further behind the bulkhead, putting more space between her battlesuit and the raking lasfire.

A shriek cut through the air before a section of the bulkhead behind her vanished in a burst of hot, flickering particles. The blue-white beam of the eradication ray punched through the metal and lashed out into the sky, burning away atmosphere with a sickening hiss before dissipating into clouds of light. Voidsong winced and tried to re-balance her stealth field to compensate for her armor damage. She’d never encountered that particular weapon before.

*Fio’o, can you deploy savior pods remotely? I need you to launch one for me.*

*Uh… yes, actually. Why, though?*

*Prepare to launch unit… 23-C. On my mark. The timing will be close, so pay attention!*

+Target not found. Area scan complete. Determining assault vectors. Threat must be eliminated before mission completion.+ The Dark Techpriests buzzed noisily while he removed a canister from his eradication ray and replaced it with a new one. With a twist the new munitions cell snapped into place, and then sunk into the particle accelerator with a hiss of air.

The Scavurel broke into two groups of three soldiers, including the one survivor of Voidsong’s assault. The raised section of the hull she was hiding behind was roughly twenty feet across, and the two groups each approached one end with a shield Dreg in the lead.

+Aural intercept detected. Active jetpack, thruster class F-19 H-2. Low-energy mode. Pinpointing target location…+

The Scavurel stopped at either end of the bulkhead, waiting for a data resolution before committing to the assault.

Suddenly, several micro-charges detonated under the feet of one of the groups, blasting aside restraining clamps and staggering the cyborgs. Before they realized what was happening a savior pod underneath them catapulted into the sky. One of the Scavurel was flipped over and landed painfully on his (largely organic) shoulder. The two others were not so lucky, and were launched upward with the pod to an altitude that guaranteed their descent would be fatal.

Another cyborg met his fate when the discharge of a fusion blaster tore through the bulkhead and into his chest. The others scattered, trying to get clear, but Voidsong was on top of them already. A pair of plasma bolts cut into the back of one, and then she darted toward the final target.

The Scavurel reversed course almost instantly, swiveling about with stunning speed to meet the battlesuit. The bayonet attached to his rifle plunged into the side of Voidsong’s torso component, ripping a wide tear into the much-abused armor layer. He ducked a swinging fist as the battlesuit tried to club him, and a spike-tipped mechatendril whipped around to stab into the suit’s sensor head, like a scorpion’s stinger.

Voidsong’s second swipe at the Dreg worked, smashing him off his feet and onto the ship’s hull. She lunged forward immediately, stomping the cyborg’s body underfoot to ensure he wouldn’t be re-joining the fight.

She turned on her heel and snapped off a plasma bolt. It struck the last Scavurel in the chest while he was struggling to stand up from where he had been flung by the savior pod launch. He collapsed with a weak burst of static, smoke puffing from the blackened hole in his torso.

Voidsong quickly re-cloaked, and then did a count of her enemies. The Dark Techpriest. Where did it…?

A high-pitched whine came from behind her, right next to the raised section of the hull she had emerged from.

Voidsong cursed as she dodged, screaming a litany of angry slurs in her native tongue while the eradication ray howled into the air. Her damage displays flashed around her arm – the one that held her fusion blaster – and then the suit component diagram for that part went hollow. It was gone.

She hit the ground and rolled, displaying uncanny agility for a battlesuit. Mid-roll her jet pack activated, carrying her off the top of the ship’s hull.

When she turned around, however, the Techpriest was already on top of her, his many legs scuttling across the bulkheads. A power axe scythed toward the suit’s head, slicing through part of it in a shallow gash. Steely tendrils snaked and stabbed from the hooded figure, lashing wildly and trying to entangle her. Voidsong swung back at the cyborg, but he leaned backward and avoided the attack with ease, his body curving like a snake.

These Techpriests fought using pre-programmed, ever-evolving combat protocols that determined the predicted combat response and controlled their reflexes ahead of time. If Voidsong tried to pull away to clear room for her plasma gun – the most obvious tactical option – her opponent would almost certainly prevail. Her cloaking field was useless at this point, and her skill wasn’t sufficient to overcome the Techpriest’s combat programming on its own.

The Dark Techpriest swung again, his power axe singing over the hollow roar of the lander’s engines.

Voidsong grabbed his axe around the haft, seizing it mid-swing and stopping it dead.

The Techpriest paused, and though his face was a cluster of green lights set in the darkness of his hood, the Shas’o imagined there was real shock behind the façade of metal and glass.

She slammed a brutal kick into the cyborg’s body, and the limb holding the power axe actually ripped out of its shoulder socket rather than relinquish its grip. The Techpriest lurched away, fluids gushing briefly from its shoulder.

A box on Voidsong’s shoulder opened, and a cluster of micro-explosives shot out at her foe like a shotgun blast. A defense field flashed in front of the Techpriest briefly, catching the worst of the discharges, but shrapnel and flame punched through to the armored body nursing its new wound. The engineer-cultist fell, slamming sidelong onto the hull of the lander while its legs and mechatendrils tried to restore balance.

Voidsong flipped the axe around in the grip of her battlesuit’s hand, and then plunged the spike atop the weapon directly into the cyborg’s hood. She didn’t know how to activate the axe’s power field and she didn’t try; metal shrieked and tore and less ductile materials shattered before the raw force behind the strike. The Dark Techpriest keeled over, a Binaric howl erupting from his vox.

“And so it ends,” Voidsong hissed in Gothic, leaning further into the blow. “Your final effort, wasted. Just another pile of bodies in my wake.”

The Techpriest was fading fast, but not yet dead. His tendrils whipped and thrashed, and the lights of his optics flickered even as fluids oozed into the gorget of his personal armor. Voidsong watched him die, both as a matter of prudence and some lingering fascination with the cyborgs.

She remembered the last time she had engaged one of the monstrous cultists of the Dark Mechanicus in battle: in Canterlot, while facing Warsmith Solon himself. Then, as now, she had been ascendant, having outwitted her enemies against dubious odds. This time, however, the ending would be different. She would take back her ship, rejoin her Sept, and return to this wretched planet with a force capable of annihilating the fortress from orbit.

A proximity warning flickered in the corner of her eye.

With a sizzling crack, a single powered blade plunged into the back of Voidsong’s battlesuit.

It didn’t even occur to Voidsong to dodge until she felt the hot razor pierce her physical, living back. She gasped, and her battlesuit shuddered in sympathy. The crippled suit started to turn its head, but a hand reached up and seized it, holding it still.

*… It’s over, Shas’o. You lose.*

Voidsong felt like laughing when she heard the quiet, steely voice behind her. *Wraithstar. You’re here. Unbelievable. The one dagger that I couldn’t see coming. How long have you been watching and waiting for the perfect strike?*

*I’ve been trying to get inside the lander airlocks. It took some time to get back here once I realized you were on top of the vessel. I didn’t hide in the shadows and watch you kill these men while waiting for an opportunity. I’m not like you,* Wraithstar hissed, shoving the other battlesuit down to the bulkheads.

Voidsong’s suit thumped against the hull, its one remaining arm bouncing limply. *No… you’re not like me,* she mumbled. *You’re broken. Look at you. Even escape is too much for you now. So desperate are you to please your vile ‘masters.’ Sickening.*

A whirring noise came from the decks around them, and several large vents opened up on the top of the cargo lander. The sound of rushing wind doubled, and insects started pouring out of the vents. Hundreds of them were blown into the sky, streaming up over the sides of the lander and spreading into the air.

Wraithstar watched the purge of the lander’s ventilation system silently, barely glancing away from his target. *It seems escape is too much for you, too. Did you know you were leading our survivors to their doom? Do you care?*

Voidsong didn’t answer. Within her battlesuit, her comms system received a link from the lander’s bridge again.

*Shas’o, we managed to purge the ventilation shafts and the infested rooms, but… the men in those rooms… I don’t think they’ll survive. That’s over half our warriors. We’re having difficulty working out the distribution system for the remaining atmosphere – we don’t want to risk sucking up any of the creatures we just ejected or exposing our crew to any surviving insects in the vented rooms – but we should have enough air to-*

Voidsong cut the link. Her senses were starting to fade, and she didn’t want to spend her final moments listening to a bleak status report.

*What do you think you’ve accomplished here, Wraithstar? You’ve abandoned Tau’va to fight for corrupt monsters,* Voidsong said wearily.

*The Greater Good asked me to fight and die in order to doom a world. Chaos asked me to fight and survive in order to save it,* he replied evenly.

*You haven’t saved anything,* Voidsong snapped. *You’ve simply sentenced it, and us, to a different kind of doom.*

She convulsed painfully, and then spat a glob of pale blue blood onto her suit display. Her breathing was more ragged now, and she couldn’t feel much of her lower body.

*… But I suppose it doesn’t matter now. The project was completed. The Empire is saved. Our lives are nothing in comparison. Our fate is nothing but a footnote in the history of the Lamman Sept’s wars,* Voidsong sighed.

*My life no longer belongs to the Sept,* Wraithstar retorted. Then he pushed the other battlesuit so that in lay on its side. *Now eject, Shas’o. If I can return your body mostly undamaged, perhaps I can get it turned to stone again and returned to the ponies’ garden.*

*A hero’s burial for the planet’s greatest villain,* Voidsong whispered, a rueful chuckle escaping her lips. *It doesn’t sound all that bad…*

Wraithstar waited several seconds, and then a sharp crack came from Voidsong’s battlesuit. The emergency ejection system within her cockpit broke open the front armoring and inner frame structure, and it spat Voidsong out onto the hull of the lander. Her body rolled limply across the bulkheads, leaving a grisly cyan streak over the dirty metal. She came to a stop next to the corpse of the Dark Techpriest, who still had his own power axe stuck in his face.

Wraithstar kicked aside the empty battlesuit, and then glanced up. The air was getting very thin, now. The lander would soon break atmosphere. The gunship had already pulled off its pursuit after the assault team had died. The remaining Chaos void ship was performing a system patrol and wouldn’t return in time to intercept. This transport would reach its destination and dock with the Rep’talal.

And after that? What would these desperate survivors find when they reached the tomb that Chaos had made out of a fully crewed Tau battleship?

As he lifted Voidsong’s body up and held her under one arm, he connected his comms system to the bridge below him.

*Goodbye and good luck.*

*Wh-What?* stuttered a voice in return. *Who is-*

Wraithstar didn’t bother to listen to a response. He cut the channel immediately and took to the skies, Voidsong clutched tight in the crook of his battlesuit’s arm.

Author's Note

Finally. This was a beast of a chapter, but I couldn't find any good way to break it up. So instead it's just huge. Oh well.
Time for the epilogue...

Epilogue

Light flooded into the void through a jagged crack in reality, spilling a wash of color into space. Rays of light colored like rainbows sliced through the darkness, erupting from the breach in a series of dazzling pulses. The opening widened, and a dark shape loomed from within and slowly pushed itself through the pool of impossible light.

The Harvest of Steel roared to life as soon as it was clear of the breach, its engines burning hot and its augur arrays sweeping the sector for threats and data.

Behind the megafreighter came more ships. Smaller freighters translated into the system one by one, leaping from the breach while great arcs of prismatic energy lashed from their spires. First came the vessels that had left with the fleet mere months ago, and then came more. A pair of light cruisers, featuring the dagger-shaped helms that characterized Imperium vessels and the swollen underbellies that marked them as converted cargo carriers, brought up the rear of the fleet formation.

After that came a different kind of ship. Larger and awkwardly shaped as compared to most of the fleet, it featured a bulbous head surrounded by boxy protrusions on all sides. Its hull was covered with scaffolding and exposed sockets, giving a strong impression that its exterior wasn’t finished. It was the last of the vessels, and the wound in the Materium slowly knit closed behind it.

This ship joined the others in the Harvest’s wake, settling into an approach vector toward the system’s third planet. As the other ships turned into high-orbital positions, however, it moved into a much lower and more stable orbital ring.

Once it was in position, the vessel’s hull started to shift: the boxy protrusions extended outward and spires started rising in key points. Servo constructors unfolded from the scaffolding, and crews in void suits emerged from airlocks to crawl out over the hull.

By the time the rest of the fleet started dispatching transports to the world below, the constructor craft had fully unfolded, and was well on its way to completing Centaur III’s first orbital void docks.

The 38th Company had returned.

****

Ferrous Dominus - sector 19
Lander lots

“Get out of the way! Move to the second block! Yes, all of you! Lightning Dust, get your team down here and keep them grounded! The air currents could become dangerous!”

Humans, equines, and cyborgs all moved to line up at the edge of the lander lots, standing in ranks and eagerly awaiting the descent of the cargo transports. The Dark Mechanicus took formation swiftly and gracelessly, standing still and offering nothing but a few short bursts of static in what passed for idle conversation among the cyborgs. The mercenaries and other human personnel who were attending - much-depleted and fairly battered though they were - milled about and muttered amongst each other. The ponies, as ever, were the most excitable, chatting and restless.

At the front of the equine formation stood Princess Luna, standing tall in her gleaming ebony armor. Behind her loomed Pinkie’s Dreadnought, and behind the assault walker waited Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Fluttershy. The mares of Equinought Squadron were unarmored aside from Pinkie, and wore respirator masks over their muzzles (Rarity, naturally, had a heavy cloak and goggles on as well).

“There it is! Look!” Pinkie shouted, jumping up and crashing back down with such force that the ponies behind her bounced slightly.

The outline of landing transports was barely visible through the smog layer, descending rapidly toward the vast open lots that stretched through sector 19 of the fortress. Pinkie waved her Dreadnought’s power fist wildly while they approached, as if expecting the vessels to signal back somehow.

“Quiet down! Stay in formation!” Harlin barked just before the thruster noise drowned him out entirely.

The first transport lander was the largest, and this vessel slowly settled into the lot immediately in front of the assembled soldiers and personnel. There was a long pause once it touched down, and then a tense silence as an embarkation ramp opened up and lowered itself to the ground.

“Would anyone care to explain why there’sh a giant bear carcassh outshide the fortressh perimeter?” Solon asked, emerging from the lander and slowly lurching down the ramp. “Alsho, am I missing an anti-ship cannon? I thought there were shix of them when I left.”

A wild, raucous cheer rose from the gathered crowd, startling the Warsmith. Ponies started jumping up and down, and humans pumped their fists and weapons into the air. The Dark Mechanicus contingent were more subdued, although most of that group shifted to kneel before the Warsmith.

Solon, for his part, was fairly stunned. “... Huh. Not ushed to thish kind of reception.” Still puzzled, he sped up and clambered more quickly down to the ground.

Behind Solon came the other high officers of the fleet. Sliver stomped down the ramp, perplexed as anyone else that the mortals below were cheering their arrival rather than watching in silent dread. Kaelith followed, scuttling silently to the lots and then quickly slithering away through the ranks of his cyborg underlings. Tolken and a clutch of other Iron Warriors marched down next, lined up by rank, with their gait strong and tall. If they found the reception awkward or surprising, it wasn’t obvious.

Behind a line of Warpsmiths came the smallest of the figures emerging from the lander. Twilight Sparkle’s armor had been repaired and polished to a sheen, and a brand new force harmonizer - shaped like a golden Chaos star - was mag-locked to one leg. Spike waddled along behind her, carrying a bundle in his arms wrapped in a burlap cloth. Gaela followed behind Spike, pausing only briefly to give a tired sigh at Pinkie's Dreadnought waving at them.

The cheering instantly doubled from the equine section, and Twilight flushed within her helmet. As far as she knew, the ponies were just happy to see her again; none of them had any inkling of what she had accomplished on her long, treacherous journey with the Iron Warriors.

“Twilight! Twilight, over here!” Pinkie Pie waved the arm of her Dreadnoughts wildly, as if their friend and leader might miss the enormous pink walker.

“Hi, girls! It’s great to be back!” Twilight said once she was in earshot. She turned to join her squadron with Spike in tow, while Gaela silently broke off to follow Solon.

“Salutations, Sparkle!” Luna shouted in the not-quite magical noise spectrum. “We art most pleased to see thou hast returned unscathed!”

“Yeah! Heh… uh… sorry again about helping Tellis trick you into a deadly voyage into the Eye of Terror,” Rainbow Dash volunteered. “No hard feelings?”

“Not at all! It was actually very interesting,” Twilight said with a dismissive wave of her armor-plated wing. “A little deadly, with the odd attacks from daemons and frequent suspensions of the laws of space and time, but still less stressful than fighting Ork Dreds, so…”

Rarity suddenly noticed something was off, and her lips tugged ever-so-delicately into a frown. “Twilight, darling, did… something happen to your helmet? It looks different than I remember.”

Twilight laughed. The helmet to her power armor suit had been adjusted so that the left side of her visor would interface directly with her augmetic eye rather than simply generating a screen for it to look at. From the outside the change had been very minor, replacing a regular lens with a block-shaped sensor, but it obviously broke the symmetry of the design. Leave it to Rarity to notice.

Her helmet cracked open and lifted off, and the other mares gasped and recoiled. Even Luna clearly flinched when she saw the optical augmetic. Twilight smiled.

“T-T-Twilight, your eye!” Fluttershy stuttered, lifting her hooves to her chin in horror.

“Oh, this thing?” Twilight swung her head sharply to the side, moving her bangs out of the way of the optics band. “Do you like it? Solon made it for me!”

“Uh… what happened to yer old eyeball?” Applejack asked bluntly.

“A bolt pistol.”

“Someone shot you? In the HEAD?!” Rainbow Dash asked, gaping.

“Yeah. Don’t worry, though; I got him.” With a wink of her remaining eye, Twilight walked past the stunned mares. “I have to drop off some souvenirs to my room, but after that we can catch up! Unless we have any assigned duties, of course! There’s a lot to do now that we’re back!”

“There is? How’s that?” Applejack asked, furrowing her brow.

“Wait, what was that about souvenirs?” Rarity asked.

Twilight walked on without answering, but as Spike followed her he flipped a corner of the cloth he was using to carry the objects in his arms. After a moment he pulled the cloth back, smirking, and rushed after the purple Princess.

“... We art at a loss,” Luna confessed, tilting her head to one side. “Did she not travel to the Eye of Terror? The dread world of Medrengard? A place of nightmares and fell magic? Surely Princess Sparkle encountered greater artifacts than… that.”

“Yeah, I don’t get it. What were those things, anyway? It looked like junk,” Rainbow muttered.

“I think there was some kind of metal plate? Like a nameplate, I guess?” Pinkie said. Her power fist reached up and scraped a finger against her Dreadnought’s helmet. “And I’m pretty sure the other thing was a… broken sword?”

“General Harlin. I have reviewed the cashualty logsh on the nooshphere.” Solon stomped up to the mercenary officer standing at attention in front of the other mercenaries. “They’re high. Alarmingly high.”

“Yes, Warsmith,” Harlin agreed. “We have a full report available, but suffice to say the general absence of the Iron Warriors was sorely felt. Morale is fine after pushing out the last assault, but our attrition is becoming a hindrance to launching operations.”

“We have accounted for thiss already,” Sliver grunted, walking around Solon’s chassis. “Although I’m quite interessted in the ssiege that ssealed Kesssler’ss fate, you will have your troopss, General.”

Sliver gestured vaguely to the air, where another pair of landers were slowly descending into open spaces behind the first transport.

“We have reinforcements?” Harlin asked eagerly.

“Yesh. And more,” Solon said happily. “We acquired new voidshipsh to replace our losshesh, and a new conshtructor vesshel to build a shervice and defenshe orbital! We’ll be able to off-load material in orbit and conduct expedited repairsh!”

"Efficiency gains of having a stable orbital dock for rapid cargo transfer and repairs should exceed 47.31 percent. It will also allow us to put our abandoned ship back into service by the time we deploy for raiding duty again," Gaela interjected.

Harlin looked surprised. “An orbital? That seems like an unusually rich boon for a standard shipment, is it not? Are the Warsmiths supporting our operations more directly?”

“In a manner of sspeaking,” Sliver drawled, walking past the others.

Solon chuckled. “Ash it sho happensh, the other Warshmithsh were quite generoush to me. It sheemsh that with the shudden and tragic dishintegration of the 63rd Grand Battalion, my peersh shuddenly had an abundance of new combat asshetsh thirshty for shuppliesh and raw materialsh. They alsho wanted to enshure there wash no… hard feelingsh about earlier dishagreementsh.”

Harlin nodded slowly. He understood that the disbanding of a Grand Battalion would leave numerous men and weapons open to being requisitioned up by other Warsmiths, but couldn’t make anything else of the explanation. In particular, such circumstances certainly didn’t seem “tragic,” and Solon’s tone made it clear he was very happy about it.

“Well, this is a most fortuitous turn. Despite our losses, we should be able to return to full productivity, and stave off any further assaults.”

“Indeed,” Solon agreed. “And I look forward to returning to our raiding operationsh ash shoon ash our new forcesh are eshtablished.”

“Pardon, Lord Warsmith.” Serith’s voice seemed to come from nowhere and Harlin jumped in surprise, his hand twitching toward his sword.

The Sorcerer made a shallow bow as he approached, using his force halberd as a walking stick. “I apologize for demanding your attention so soon after you’ve arrived, but there are certain outstanding tasks for which only you are suitable.”

Solon swiveled around to glance at the pink Dreadnought and the largely naked mares standing around its legs. Then he swiveled back toward Serith. “Would theshe tashksh happen to be armor repairsh?”

“Many are, and sadly they are not limited to your equine servants.” Serith raised an arm and activated the psykant occulus. Only two of the dispersal rods slid out of their casings, with the entire gauntlet shaking and sputtering like an engine struggling to start. One of the rods trying and failing to deploy fell out of its slot entirely, tumbling to the ground and shattering into glassy flakes.

“By the Eye, you lot did have have quite a shcuffle while we were gone,” Solon muttered.

“Oh yes, Warsmith. However, our victory in your absence may have borne… unexpected fruits.” Serith turned on his heel, beckoning to the larger Space Marine. “Let your servants see to the new recruits. We’ve already moved the materials I spoke of to your forge. I think you’ll be VERY interested in what we have acquired.”

Across the lots, several light transports slowly touched down, locking heavy landing skis with the loading clamps that lined the sector. Embarkation ramps creaked open, releasing a wash of pressurized air and cold mist.

“Brother and sisters of Chaos! Our long wait is over!”

Cultists marched down into the lots, laughing and chanting prayers to the Dark Gods. At the front was a large, pale man with a Chaos icon attached to his back like a battle flag. He was shirtless, and his upper torso was covered in tattoos and ritual scars, several of which matched the star suspended over his head.

“A fresh world, ripe for despoiling! So many souls who must know the eight truths!” The head cultist threw his arms up in the air, and the others following him raised their voices in an incoherent chant. “Let Chaos consume this feeble planet! May darkness creep into every corner and hatred seed its very core! More blood! More pain! More DEATH!”

“Hello everyone! Welcome to Ferrous Dominus! It’s so nice to meet all of you!”

The march of the new soldiers stopped, and the head Cultist stumbled to a halt. A pegasus trotted up to the ramp wearing a respirator and a pair of saddlebags, with a Chaos Star amulet hanging loosely from her neck. She walked right up to the first man, and then her wing slipped into one of the bags.

“What manner of pathetic xeno is this?!” the Cultist growled, drawing a long, jagged knife from his belt.

“I’m Wind Chime! I’m a pegasus pony! Here, this is for you!”

While the man held out his blade, Wind Chime held out a glossy pamphlet with her wing.

“This gives a brief rundown of some of the services, activities, and stores we offer here in Ferrous Dominus, and where you can learn more!” the mare chirped, not obviously distressed by the weapon in her face. “You might be particularly interested in our apparel shops, since you seem to be lacking a shirt! You humans do love your clothes!”

The lead Cultist, fairly baffled, hesitantly took the pamphlet from the mare. “I don’t… um, but the…”

“If you guys hurry with your base registration, and aren’t detained for psychic scouring, you can still make today’s spin class! And please, make sure you use the trash receptacles placed at most grid intersections and don’t litter! Helping keep our death fortress clean is everyone’s responsibility!”

Wind Chime hopped forward and hugged the lead Cultist on the leg. Then she jumped away and took to the air, flying off toward the next lander.

The shirtless man watched her go, and then looked behind him at the other warriors, still holding a blade in one hand and a pamphlet in the other with little idea what to do with either of them.

“...... The hell just happened?”

****

Canterlot - statue garden

Wraithstar stood at the edge of a circle of stone tiles, waiting silently with his hands clasped behind his back. In front of him stood a great open-topped sarcophagus made of pearly marble. The sides were elaborately carved with strange, elegant runic patterns; not any language that a speaker of Imperial or Tau languages would understand, but some sort of script from the Equestrian magi. It went well enough with the statue holding a silent vigil over the tomb: a non-descript pony warrior in archaic equine half-plate, holding a spear - somehow - in the crook of its front knee.

In front of the Tau officer marched a procession of real Equestrian guards. Modern ones, of course, bearing the armor and weapons of their unlikely allies from the stars. Carried on a set of wooden planks was another statue, or so it seemed. A near-perfect likeness of Shas’o Voidsong’s body, laid flat with her hands resting on her belly, done in fine granite. Or whatever rock that petrifying spell purported to transmute into.

The absurdity that the corpse of Voidsong should be returned to the Equestrians, the ones responsible for losing her petrified body the last time, didn’t escape him. Between the Iron Warriors and Lamman’s own Fire Warriors the ponies could certainly take the least credit for her defeat. But Wraithstar didn’t care, and the 38th had no interest in Voidsong beyond confirming her fate once and for all. Even ritual corpse desecration was a meaningless chore upon a species with such weak souls, apparently.

“Would you like to say a few words? Is there some funeral rite we can help you with?”

Wraithstar glanced behind him. Princess Celestia stood close by, her expression somber.

Then he turned back around. “No. No ceremony is needed. This will be enough. More than enough.”

The ponies reached the sarcophagus, and several of them pushed Voidsong’s body into the shallow stone box. She fell in with a dull thud.

“Obviously I have no reason to honor her. To Equestria she was a merciless villain who condemned us all to extermination without a second thought,” Celestia replied. “To the Iron Warriors, she was a canny foe, but eventually one more victim among thousands. But to you…”

Celestia left the proposition hanging, and Wraithstar sighed.

“To me she was a leader, a teacher, and a hero. Her efforts may have saved the Tau Empire. I can’t claim that doesn’t matter to me, no matter what happens after this point.” He unclasped his hands and then crossed them over his chest while the soldiers marched off. “But I have no rites to offer her. I don’t know any. We rarely hold funerals for our dead. The only one I’ve ever seen was for the Lamman Sept’s last Ethereal, and I’ve seen so much death since then that the memory is a cold blur.”

“I’m surprised,” admitted Celestia. “Your people seem rather egalitarian and empathetic… incidental genocide notwithstanding.”

He shook his head. “Funerals are generally considered testaments to ego. Individuals are celebrated for their achievements in life, not the loss felt by their deaths. And few on this world are very thankful for what Voidsong accomplished.”

He walked up to the stone coffin, running a gloved hand over the edge of the opening. “Her interment here is more a warning than an act of ceremony.” Wraithstar turned his head toward the white Princess. “The survivors of Lamman will forget her soon enough. The soldiers of the 38th Company only ever saw her as another target to be dispatched and logged in their archives. But you, Princess… there’s a lesson here for you and your people.”

Celestia’s brow furrowed. “There are many lessons the Lamman Sept taught us, although we’ll be hard-pressed to forget about the capricious wars of the alien while Chaos hunts Orks through the hinterlands.”

Wraithstar smirked, his lip curling humorlessly. “If nothing else, then, don’t let your people forget that it could have been worse. Have them remember that their struggles are the price of power; the cost demanded for any race that would dare stand firm in the face of this galaxy’s numberless cruelties. And, of course, remember that at least one alien empire besides your so-called allies claims this system and every living thing in it as rightfully theirs.”

Celestia listened intently, staring at the sarcophagus amongst the garden’s immaculate hedges. “... I think we’ll need a bigger plaque,” she said eventually, walking closer. “That aside, would you like me to commission something of you to stand next to the stallion? Or some other, anonymous Fire Warrior? It was mostly your efforts that defeated her, and given that Voidsong has tried to doom us all TWICE now and the natural increase in suspicions this causes, I think it would be wise to have a… Excuse me, are you listening?”

Wraithstar wasn’t listening, in fact. He was staring up at the sky, facing away from Voidsong, with his hand shading his face against the sun.

“It’s still there, even now,” he said, his voice dry and grim. “They failed. I knew they would.”

Princess Celestia squinted up at the sky in the direction he was facing. There weren’t any clouds, but she couldn’t tell what Wraithstar was looking at. The tips of Canterlot’s towers? The pegasi soaring through the air? The Arvus Lighter transport swooping into the city?

“What are you talking about? Who failed?” the mare asked.

“Nobody you need to worry about any longer,” he sighed, dipping his body into a bow. “Thank you for granting me this boon, Princess. As little grace and forgiveness as Equestria has shown us, we have done little to earn it. Farewell.”

****

Ferrous Dominus - Solon’s forge

“Nurgle’sh beard, what did thoshe girlsh get up to while I wash gone?” Solon asked, looking down into a metal cart.

Inside the cart were armor pieces. Pony armor pieces. The loose collection of helmets, boots, and plating were in various states of disrepair, but each had clearly suffered calamitously in protecting its user. Rarity’s finely polished armor had been riddled with holes and some of the frame was burnt away from sustained pulse fire. Applejack’s heavy armor had been cracked at the helmet, partially melted, and one of the boots had suffered a disintegration event over the sole.

“Godsh alive, how did Rainbow Dash shurvive thish kind of impact without breaking her neck?” the Warsmith asked, plucking a particular helmet from the cart. It was partly flattened on the face, and one of the visor lenses was missing.

“Bad luck, I suppose,” Serith said.

“Bad luck that she shurvived?” Solon asked.

“For the rest of us, yes.” The Sorcerer made a waving gesture with his hand, and the helmet floated out of Solon’s grip and dropped back into the pile. “Unfortunately, those armors have suffered damage to systems that only you can repair, Lord. But you may attend to that at any time; what I wished to show you is more… delicate.”

“You shaid you fought shome short of mashter pshyker in the Nethalican?” Solon asked, scuttling around the pile of armor.

“Indeed. She claimed to be the master of the changelings that attacked us,” Serith explained. “I’m still uncertain as to her aims, but this ‘Queen Chrysalis’ leeched power from the Dark Portal at will, and sought to use that energy for some greater end. Then the farmer shoved a power sphere into her torso and annihilated much of her chest cavity.”

“Ha! Applejack never dishappointsh! I’ll have to give her another heavy bolt on her trophy chain for that kill.”

Serith made a dismissive sound. “Her performance was passable. But she did not kill the Queen.”

That gave Solon pause. “Queen Chryshalish shurvived the annihilation of her chest cavity?”

“She did. As she lay there, on the temple dais, I saw her soul cling to this world, sustaining her body’s cells through a combination of the Nethalican’s power and sheer will. She could not move, or even maintain basic consciousness amid her desperate final bid for her life, but she did remain stable long enough for… well, this.”

Serith reached a console and tapped a button at the edge. In a corner of the forge, a large metal cylinder stirred, lifting its duralloy cover to reveal an armorglass tube within. Monitors flickered to life all around it, flooding the local noosphere with bio-data and measurements. Some of them started running vid-capture from Serith’s helmet, showing off frankly bizarre scenes of a giant squid and cragodile fighting within a Chaos temple.

A light went on behind the tube.

“I present to you Queen Chrysalis, Warsmith,” Serith said, bowing and gesturing toward the tank. “Her fate, and that of her misbegotten hive, is now in YOUR hands.”

Solon stomped up to the containment vessel, peering at the body within. It was a shattered, twisted mess, covered in holes and disfigurements, most of which seemed to be unrelated to the obvious battle damage. An expression of unblinking horror stared out through the oxygenated stasis gel, frozen in the moment of its defeat. Withered, broken, and helpless, and yet not quite dead.

The ancient Warsmith reached up to the glass, slowly sweeping a grimy metal hand over its surface to clear some of the frost. He leaned close, and his optical cluster rotated its active lens with a soft whir.

“Magnificent…”

Entrenchment End

Author's Note

And here it is. Done in time for Christmas.
There'll be more chapters, because hey, why stop here? Might as well ride this train until I run out of ideas completely.

Happy holidays to all you bronies and heretics!

War Footing

Centaur III - Bloodborne Caverns

Wyatt Daniels was quickly learning to appreciate that not all of Equestria was covered over in bright, sunny fields, pleasant villages, and cheerful talking animals.

"Hello? Anybody here? Or... 'anypony' is the word you lot use, right? Hello?"

Granted, that was in no small part due to the 38th Company erecting outposts, extractors, and temples here and there, and generally turning many pristine and idyllic landscapes into military and industrial centers. So the Iron Warriors and Dark Mechanicus bore a lot of the blame for that.

"Ugh... nothing but bats. Bats, bats, bats..."

But there were many places that remained untouched by the technology of the 41st millennium. Dangerous places where the wild magic of this world showed a darker side. The Everfree Forest was one such place, infested with many beasts of legend that incidentally shared their names with many of the vehicles of Imperial Armored Companies.

"Is that a centipede? Bloody hell, that thing's almost as thick as my leg."

There were others, too. Oily seas that hid sleeping monsters. Bubbling swamps that seemed to consciously suck trespassers into the muck. And huge, labyrinthine caverns that...

Well... that hosted lots of of bats. Daniels supposed that it was kind of creepy if compared directly to the villages and cities of Equestria, and he was definitely getting a subtle vibe of hostility from the place. But even so, it hardly impressed the mildly hardened soldiers of the 38th Company.

The ceiling of the cave was absolutely crowded with small, dark, furry bodies, and a constant undercurrent of squeaking rolled through the dark passages. Hundreds of tiny, glittering eyes stared down at the soldier as he tromped through the dark.

Daniels stepped up onto one of the larger guano-encrusted boulders, and he put his hand to his tri-optics visor. The passage ahead was sketched out for him in waves of neon green, and a rangefinder cursor sat in the middle of his field of view.

"Wait a minute..." he mumbled to himself as he caught sight of some movement on the ground. Something dashed out from behind a distant stalagmite, quickly breaking for a bend in the cavern where Daniels couldn't see.

Although the mercenary hadn't gotten a good look at the creature, he knew what it was. The sound of galloping hooves had become quite familiar to him as of late.

"All right, I know you're in here!" Daniels shouted as he hopped down and headed into the next tunnel. "You may as well come out and chat! I'm not here to hurt you!"

Despite his words, Daniels gripped his rail rifle tightly against his chest as he advanced. He didn't expect anything very dangerous to be here, but danger didn't always come when you expected it. He hadn't survived this long as a mercenary by blundering obliviously through his missions.

"C'mon, now! Let's love and tolerate a little! Eh? Eh?"

Daniels stopped at the end of the tunnel, placing his hand to his helmet again as he stared out into the gloom. It was quiet, unlike the cavern behind him, and he was pretty sure it wasn't because it was empty. He took another step forward, exiting the tunnel.

This area of ground was curiously smooth, clean, and level with a few large stone pillars here and there that rose about halfway to the ceiling. The walls were high, but not precariously so, and they too stopped and formed flat platforms well before they reached the ceiling.

Daniels got a sinking feeling in his gut as he stepped out into the open space, glancing back and forth and searching for movement. This space looked suspiciously like an arena.

A crash came from behind, and Daniels leapt behind one of the stone columns, slapping his back flat against it.

Creeping quickly around the obstruction, he raised his rifle and sighted the entrance to this new space. Or, rather, the spot where the entrance used to be. There was now a large boulder in his way, completely covering the tunnel entrance. Still no sign of anything in the cavern besides himself.

He had a krak grenade, so he could destroy the obstacle if he needed to, but Daniels turned back to the arena and crept across to the wall instead. He wasn't quite convinced that he was in over his head, yet.

The walls were mostly sheer rock, and had the same sort of clean, angled quality that indicated they were created through planning and labor rather than the whimsy of nature. There were also stone spikes that stuck out from them, spaced unevenly across the circular enclosure. Daniels spotted a group of them that could act as adequate hand and foot holds for something his size, and he slipped his rifle onto his back into its sling.

The climb up the wall wasn't especially trying, and it only rose some twenty feet before ending in a cliff that looked suspiciously like a viewing balcony. Daniels was confident that he could handle the landing if he fell from the top.

Which was good, because the moment his hand grabbed onto the top edge of the cliff, a hoof slammed down on top of it.

"Well, well, well. Looks like our new pet is trying to escape its cage." Daniels found himself staring up into a batpony mare's smirking muzzle, framed by a bowl cut mane and bearing a smile that emphasized her fangs. "You sure are good at climbing, aren't you? Just like an ape." Her voice was a soft, low-pitched caress against his ears, gentle but full of subtle malevolence.

Two other batpony mares crept up to the cliff on either side, their giggling voices bouncing around the cavern.

"So this is a human, huh? Smaller than I thought."

"Is that a set of goggles on its face? Lame!"

The one holding his hand down leaned down closer. "It's the first time we've seen one of you glorified monkeys, so you'll have to forgive our... curiosity." A light hum came from her throat, painting a sonic picture of the intruder for her ears at least as detailed as the images provided from Daniels' visor. "... I wonder how your blood tastes..."

Daniels silently looked over the three batponies for a few seconds, still hanging off the edge of the cliff.

"Okay, look, girls: I know you're trying your best," he assured the bat-winged equines, "but it isn't working. You're just too cute to be scary."

The mares all scrunched up their noses, which Daniels guessed was supposed to pass for grimacing angrily.

"We'll see how scary I look when I'm digging through your entrails, monkey!" snapped the batpony on top of him. Her voice had become shrill and high-pitched now, and the sound sent a needle of pain through Daniels' head.

"Look, I just want to talk. I'm not here to conquer and subjugate your little cave tribe or whatever. We have other people for that. Whaddya say we settle down and have a pint, yeah?"

Daniels was told quite frequently that he was among the most genuinely amiable and diplomatic souls in the 38th Company, but he didn't especially feel like it as the mares hissed down at him.

"We don't take solicitors," snarled one of them, "especially not ones peddling ruin, cultist."

"I'd tell you to take your weapons and blast off to the vastness of space where you came from, but that actually isn't an option for you, anymore," taunted another.

The one still standing on him spoke again, her voice returning to its earlier, deceptively friendly pitch. "Now, what to do with you? Gut you alive? Drain your blood? Or make you our pet, along with the other vermin that scurry around the caves?" She smiled down at Daniels. "What do you think, ape?"

"I think there are some important things you need to know about humans," he replied.

The mare leaned over further, arching an eyebrow. "Oh? Like what?"

"Well, for one thing, we ARE really good climbers. I can hold on to this ledge with one hand, in fact. Watch."

The mare didn't understand the relevance of this until Daniels' free hand shot up and seized her mane, yanking her off of the edge of the cliff.

The batpony shrieked and flapped her wings furiously as she was held in the air, trying to escape the man's grip. Then Daniels slammed the pony face-first into the wall, briefly stopping her flailing about.

He flung the mare onto the ground below before jumping down after her, landing in a crouch. Daniels could hear the other batponies screeching and shouting angrily behind him as he stood back up, but he focused on the equine struggling to stand in front of him. "You might want to be a little nicer to visitors, lass. That's why your brightly colored cousins outside do so well, you know."

He kicked the struggling mare in the side, striking the muscle used for wing control. She screamed in pain as she was flung into a stone column, and then fell into a heap at its base.

A sudden impact against his back and the sound of metal scraping against his armor alerted Daniels that the other two mares had joined the fight. He threw himself onto the ground and rolled away before jumping up into a sprint.

"Another thing you need to learn about humans!" he barked as he pulled out his rifle again. "Our wargear is better than yours!" He switched on the rail rifle, and a gentle hum rose from the device as the magnetic drivers energized.

He caught a blur of movement on his left, and threw his elbow up just in time to catch a charging batpony in the muzzle. She flinched backward, screeching, and Daniels swiped at her with his rifle's bayonet, cutting across a wing.

Another batpony hit him in the back, clinging to his shoulders as a blade scraped against his helmet. Another tried to take him by the shoulder, but he managed to slug it away as the screeching all around him intensified.

There were more than three batponies attacking by now, although he could hardly get an accurate count while surrounded by green blurs and shrieking. His carapace armor offered excellent protection from the small, crude iron weapons of the tribal ponies, but if they managed to completely surround him then they would have ample opportunity to find a weak spot.

Daniels threw himself backward against one of the stone columns, and he heard an agonized yelp come from behind him as the mare on top of him was slammed between him and the rock. He swiped and clubbed at the attackers in front of him with his rifle as best he could, but he could barely even tell if he was hitting anything. His vision through his optics was a chaotic flurry of bright green, and his helmet sonic dampers were working as hard as they could to keep the ear-splitting cacophony from deafening him outright.

"ENOUGH!"

The shrieks stopped with a bewildering suddenness, replaced by the much softer sound of beating wings as the batponies scattered. Dozens of them flew back up onto the cliff that surrounded the arena pit, landing on the edge and then turning around to glare down at the human that had intruded upon their territory.

Daniels remained where he was, breathing heavily. He was somewhat proud to see that four batpony mares were limping away from him on their hooves, apparently too injured to fly. They staggered around the stone columns, trying to escape the sight of the human in the center of the arena.

"Well fought, ape. But then, that's hardly surprising. Your kind is known for little else."

The voice was haughty and regal, and it boomed around the cavern such that Daniels hadn't the slightest idea where to look. One of the lenses to his tri-optics had been broken in the earlier skirmish, and he twisted that lens off as he replied.

"Really? That's it? Not for our spacefaring technology, impeccable style, or sense of humor? The Iron Warriors are really selling us short!"

"Hmph! Well then, ape: you wanted to talk, didn't you? Face me!"

"Just a second, just a second..." Daniels finished switching off the defective lens input, and then searched for the origin of the voice.

A tall batpony mare stood atop the arena's central pillar, staring down at him like all the rest of the batponies. She had a thick mane tied into two long braids that hung next to each shoulder, and a wild, unbound tail that hung below the edge of her platform. Her wings were big compared to the others - much bigger than their difference in basic body size would demand - and had a trio of long talons at the peak of each wing. A shadowy cloak hung off of her body, flowing in a breeze that Daniels was quite sure didn't exist. It reminded him immediately of Celestia and Luna's manes. He couldn't make out a color through his optics, since everything appeared in shades of green, but he presumed that she was a combination of dark, cool colors like every other thestral he had ever met.

"I am Empyra, Queen of Shadows! Mistress of the Bloodborne! Speak, intruder, and let us know whose corpse will soon feed the stone-crawlers!"

"Name's Wyatt Daniels. Call me Daniels," he started scanning the crowd watching from atop the wall as he answered, "I'm attached to the 38th Company Iron Warriors. Pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"I disagree," Empyra spat, "there is nothing pleasant about having to dispose of you monkey ver-"

"Question!" Daniels interrupted.

"What?" Empyra growled.

"I'm just taking a look around at your citizens here," Daniels mumbled, placing a hand against his helmet to adjust his optics, "and I'm pretty sure every single one of them is female. There's gotta be, what, sixty, seventy of them in here? Not a stallion to be seen. What's up with that?"

The batpony queen furrowed her brow. "Our breeding studs are secured elsewhere. Why would we bring them here, where they may be in danger?"

Daniels laughed. "Oh, wow! The cultural survey for this one is going to be FUN!"

"Silence, fool! You shall now receive the judgment of the Bloodborne!" Empyra flung her head to the side, and her cloak curled about to sweep over her chest and more fully wreath her body in darkness. "You have trespassed upon our tribal homeland, ape! As Queen and prime adjudicator of my ponies, I hereby sentence you... TO DEATH!"

Her voice boomed across the cavern, and the batponies watching ducked their heads and hissed quietly, ritually submitting to their queen's judgment.

Daniels snickered.

"What?!" Empyra demanded, her eyes narrowing. "What amuses you, simian?!"

"I'm sorry, it's just... I really want to just pinch your cheeks and give you a big hug right now," Daniels said, leaning against the column, "you are ADORABLE."

"SILENCE, ape!" Empyra screeched, her wings spreading to her sides as she bared her fangs. "I am VERY SCARY!" Her face flushed in embarrassment as she made this declaration, and her shroud quickly swirled over her muzzle to hide it.

"Okay, okay, sorry about that. Anyway," Daniels coughed, "putting aside the death sentence, I'd like to talk to you about becoming a protectorate territory of the 38th Company Iron Warriors."

"Protectorate territory?" Empyra snorted, her blush receding. "You mean a vassal state! I know well of your ways, ape! You do not come to 'protect us'! You have come to demand tithes and conscripts for your army of madmares and slavers!"

"Oh, good! You know how this works already!" Daniels said brightly. "That's a relief. I'm not very good at the pitch. I usually say something like 'nice town you've got here. Be a shame if something BAD happened to it.' it's just embarrassing for everyone."

Empyra sneered. "I'm sure. Anyway, the answer is 'no'. I will not submit to your army, and your corpse shall be nailed up in the caverns as fair warning to the rest of you glorified monkeys!"

"I don't suppose it would make a difference if I said that Luna, Princess of the Night, was on my side, would it?" Daniels asked, grimacing.

"Oh, why didn't you say so?" Empyra said, her expression brightening instantly. "Let's get you out of that awful death arena and then you can join me for mid-evening tea upstairs!"

Daniels blinked under his optics. "Really?"

"No." Empyra's expression did another flip back to an aggrieved sneer. "Why should we bend knee to the Princess of the Night? That madmare who went insane one thousand years ago and was utterly defeated, leaving us thestrals to flee and hide as outcasts from ponykind?" Her wings shuddered in irritation. "The ponies that bask in Celestia's light may have forgotten that desperate age and forgiven her, but we have not! We shall not return to being vassals of the dark Princess! Not now, not ever!"

"Oh-kay... looks like I kind of touched a nerve, there," Daniels mumbled, "would it help if I said we saved the world? Like, you've heard of the Orks, right? They would have been all over this place if it weren't for us."

"Meh." The equine queen shrugged, and then pointed a wing talon down at the human. "Kill him."

Daniels was expecting the batponies to rush back into the arena and swarm him, but instead he heard the sound of larger, heavier wings against the air.

Turning his head around, he saw an enormous shape glide down from the shadows and then land, hunched over, on one of the columns. It was about the size of a scout Sentinel, with teeth like knives and bladed talons on the peaks of its wings.

"Giant bat," Daniels said as he looked up into the beast's maw, "of course you have giant bats. Don't even know what I was expecting."

Two more of the monstrous flying mammals landed on pillars behind him, forming a rough triangle around the mercenary. Whispers and chuckles came from the crowd of equines watching the spectacle.

Well, not "watching" so much as "listening". There still wasn't a spot of light in the arena according to his optics readings, so he presumed that they were all keeping track of his execution via echolocation.

"Well, then," Daniels mumbled as he reached for his belt, "let's give 'em a show."

The giant bats dropped off of their respective columns, swooping into glides that were alarmingly silent for something their size.

Daniels tucked his rifle under his arm briefly as he twisted the head off of the emergency flare.

"Here's some better light for the audience!"

The flare lit up, suddenly filling the darkened arena with bright light. The three giant bats screeched in shock, pulling out of their dives and flapping desperately to turn away.

One burst from Daniels' rail rifle cut into the giant bat immediately ahead of him, shearing off one entire leg and puncturing its chest and splattering the ground with fans of blood. The winged monster sputtered angrily as its flapping grew more desperate and erratic, and then it collapsed into a shrieking, bloody heap.

"Next!" Daniels whirled about to find another target, only to see large shadows darting between the outermost columns and generally staying out of sight. He slowly stepped out into the open, ignoring the confusing cacophony of screeching that came from the spectating crowd and - probably - his immediate enemies. It was impossible for him to make any sense of the noise in the arena this point, so he ignored it.

A shroud of dark smoke appeared behind him, and Empyra's form appeared before scooping up the flare in a shroud of shadows.

"Hey!" Daniels shouted, turning around just as the batpony queen vanished again into the darkness. "No fair! It's supposed to be me against the monsters!"

He whirled around again just in time to see one of the bats careening toward him, and fired a panicked burst from his rifle. One projectile ripped through the creature's wing membrane, but it left a fairly small, clean hole and didn't stop the beast's charge. Daniels was pushed to the ground as large, clawed feet wrapped around his waist and shoulders, and his rail rifle bounced away out of reach.

Daniels grunted from the impact with the floor, and his free arm went for his pulse pistol. The giant bat opened its toothy maw to feast, only to have an energy bolt slash through the side of its face. It flinched and jumped back off of its prey, screeching and trying to shield its head.

Daniels jumped up, firing his pistol with one hand while grasping for his sword with the other. Two more pulse shots bored into the bat monster, and it staggered back along the ground while shielding itself with its wings.

"Dark Gods, be my strength!" Daniels shouted as he vaulted toward the wounded bat. He plunged the blade through its wings and into the stiff, muscled flesh underneath, piercing the creature's chest before another pulse shot burned off more of its wing. The bat shrieked and leapt away, throwing itself into a full retreat.

"One more, then!" Daniels whirled around, but caught sight of a trail of inky darkness on the edge of his optics view.

Something cut into his pistol arm, punching through the armor on his sleeve. He hissed and swung in that direction, but his sword sliced only air before the pulse pistol was tugged out of his hand.

"Let's see how well you fare when we take your space weapons out of the equation!" snarled an angry, feminine voice.

Daniels rushed after the pulse pistol, not especially wanting to fight the last monster in such "fair" circumstances. He spotted it lying at the base of one of the stone pillars, and promptly made a break for it.

He didn't even catch sight of the final giant bat before it snatched him up by the shoulder, and the mercenary was picked up clean off his feet. Daniels made a rather awkward over-the-shoulder stab with his sword, striking barely hard enough to break flesh. Still, it was enough to loosen the bat's grip, and the mercenary tumbled to the ground from a tolerable height.

"What's the matter, ape? No more nasty toys for us?" Empyra snarled. She was riding on the back of the third giant bat, leaving trails of darkness in her wake that obscured even the night vision display. The beast alighted upon a stone column, glaring down at Daniels as a high-pitched squeal cut through the noise of the arena.

"Oh, I might have a few left," Daniels grunted, rolling over so that he sat upright. His hand fumbled at his belt for his remaining tools, and he discreetly unclipped his only krak grenade.

"Enough of this!" Empyra cried. The giant bat hopped off of the column and landed on the ground just a few meters from Daniels with its jaws snapping hungrily. "Kill him! Leave nothing but bones!"

The giant bat lunged.

Daniels tossed his krak grenade at it.

The giant bat adjusted its course instantly, twisting to snap up the explosive in its jaws.

The arena immediately went silent as all cheering and conversation in the "stands" ground to a halt.

"Oh. Wasn't expecting that," Daniels admitted, "guess that's how you feed 'em, huh? Conditioned response."

Empyra blinked, likewise surprised. "I... wait, what? What was that?"

The krak grenade detonated, instantly collapsing the bat's abdomen in the implosive blast. The bat jolted back sharply, throwing Empyra off its back and slamming her into a stone column.

The monster quivered, wheezing, and then started vomiting onto the ground; Daniels couldn't identify exactly what was pooling onto the stone floor, given the poor resolution from his optics, and he was all the more thankful for his ignorance.

The monstrous bat keeled over moments later, its organs too ruined to even release a death scream.

****

"The target's name is Empyra. She claims title as the 'Queen of Shadows', and claims these cavernous networks as her tribal homeland."

Princess Luna stood before a hololithic projector, glaring down at a display of hundreds of interwoven threads of light that represented the deep scan of the caverns. Opposite the armored alicorn were Applejack and Rainbow Dash, also in full battle gear. Several Lunar Guard thestrals stood in a line next to them, all of them bearing rank markings in addition to their own wargear. Behind the meeting around the hololith, dozens of squads of Lunar Guard soldiers milled about or conversed in hushed tones near the mouth of the cave. A few squads of Chaos mercenaries and a small group of Dark Mechanicus worked behind the ponies, unloading supplies and taking care of those pre-mission tasks that generally required hands.

Rainbow Dash snickered softly. "Queen of Shadows, huh? Real edgy."

"Aye, she shows much talent for showmareship and spectacle," Luna agreed, her eyes tracing the many paths represented by the hololith, "and as suggested by the title of 'Queen', she hath defied all attempts to bring her tribe into the Equestrian nation." Luna looked up at the other ponies. "The Equestrian nation, consequently, made no great effort to reclaim the batpony tribes that resisted assimilation and wished to remain independent. Such is why her so-called 'Bloodborne' hath been left alone thus far." Her eyes narrowed. "The 38th Company feels the time for their unification is nigh, and hath ordered this warlord subdued. The thestral tribes shalt march under the banner of Equestria, or that of Chaos! No other!"

"Understood, my Princess," breathed one of the batpony Lieutenants, her voice a metallic shriek as it emerged from the layers of augmetic constructs that had replaced her natural muzzle, "the tribes WILL serve... either in the Guard, or in the mines. The choice is theirs..."

Dusk Blade spoke up next. "Are we going in hot, or should we be... diplomatic about this?"

Luna pursed her lips. "We wish for the mission to be completed with minimal casualties. These ponies art our cousins, not fell beasts or cruel aliens. We do not wish a single equine to die by our hoof." Luna paused. "However, their resistance shalt no longer be tolerated. They WILL be returned to our service. If it should come to battle, then we hast permission to do what we must."

She frowned as she returned her attention to the hololith. "Such resistance is likely to be more evasive than violent, however. We outclass the tribal ponies in every military respect. Finding them will be the challenge."

"Yer tellin' me," Applejack grunted, staring at the tunnel network, "it's like a termite nest in here!"

"Aye, and the thestrals are well-suited to strategies of ambush and setting traps." Luna paused while the batponies nodded in agreement. "We shalt need to locate and corner Empyra herself. All else hinges upon her capture."

"Easier said than done, I presume?" hissed another Lunar Lieutenant.

"Aye. She is not one to stand fast against a foe of equal measure, much less one of much greater strength." Luna set her jaw. "She is cunning, treacherous, and possesses intimate knowledge of the caverns. It could take days of patrols and scouting before we uncover the barest hint of her location, and even then, it shalt likely be a ruse. It will require all of thy skills, my mightiest magic, and the humans' technology working in perfect concert. But eventually, with perseverance and wit, we shalt track down the Queen of Shadows, and we SHALT-"

"Found her," Daniels said before he dropped Empyra next to the Moon Princess.

Luna stood shock-still for a few seconds, and then twisted her head around to look next to her.

Empyra winced as she met the gaze of the dark alicorn, and then whimpered pitifully. Her phantom cloak was nowhere to be found, having been stripped off and discarded during her capture.

"So, I'm, uh, here to offer my tribe's formal surrender to the 38th Company. Apparently," Empyra mumbled, averting her eyes from the Princess.

"Wut." Luna replied.

Daniels, for his part, kept on walking past the meeting, stepping around the clusters of armed and armored thestrals standing around the cave and staring at him. "Hey, AJ! You got any blue moons left? I'm pretty hungry right now!" he called out, looking over the transports parked outside the cave entrance.

"They're in the Scav Crawler!" Applejack shouted over to him. Then, after a brief pause, "Hey, Wy?"

"What?"

"Ah thought ya just left to take a leak!"

"Got lost. Like a bloody labyrinth down there. Never would have found my way back without her help." He turned and grinned, waving back to the group surrounding the hololith. "Thanks, Empy!"

"Hate you so much," the thestral queen grumbled.

****

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron story

Chapter 1

War Footing

****

+Analysis indicates ultra-dense composite silicates and carbons. Approximate portion of local soil is twelve-point-two-six-four percent.+

A trio of Dark Acolytes were surveying a large field of dark soil among the lowland hills. Gemstones of various colors stuck out of the ground at their feet, and a mechatendril snaked down from one of the cloaked figures to snatch up a ruby.

+Such an... unlikely mineral lode,+ one of the Dark Techpriests buzzed hesitantly as he brought up the jewel he had picked up. It was nearly the size of a grenade, and already seemed to be cut and polished. It looked as if a jeweler had simply passed by and stuck his wares into the ground, but judging by basic scans there were even more deposits underground. +This planet is bizarre.+

+At least it's bizarre in a way that is convenient to us, in this case,+ chittered a third Techpriest as its optics glimmered.

A massive mining rig on treads slowly crawled over the hills, followed by a train of supply vehicles. Servitors and Scavurel were being loosed on the fields by the dozen, and menials started unloading materials from hitched wagons.

More unusually, a Chimera transport was unloading several ponies into the area. Most were earth ponies laden with digging gear - both of the Equestrian sort and that made by the Dark Mechanicus - but a few pegasi and unicorns also trotted out into the fields of gems, ready to work.

"Work groups 3, 6, 7, 10, and 12 will begin on the barracks area! Groups 1, 2, and 4 shall begin laying down infrastructure cabling for the foundation!"

A Dark Acolyte foreman barked orders to the workers lined up before him even as servitors began work according to pre-programmed labor inputs.

"Once the ferrocrete foundation is set, we will begin establishing substructure footprints. Labor camp 09 will be secure as of 1600 hours, local chrono. It is estimated to be fully operational as of 2000 hours. Rest periods and ration supplies have been allotted appropriately. Are there any queries before construction shall proceed?"

One of the earth pony mares raised a foreleg while leaning on a shovel for extra height.

"Speak," snapped the Acolyte.

"Why do we call it a 'labor' camp rather than a 'mining' camp? It kind of gives the impression that the facility isn't so much here to supply mineral resources as it is a place to park unneeded bodies where they can still do something productive for us."

"That is precisely why," the Dark Acolyte confirmed.

"Well, sure, but we don't have to be so blatant and cynical about it," the mare protested.

"We know that you guys really like to own the whole 'tyrannical army' thing. Trust me, we get it," interjected a stallion from a different group, "but you could use SOME window dressing. There's a middle ground here, I'm sure."

"Like the name," a pegasus said, jumping up and hovering over a group of human laborers, "the camps should have real names rather than just numbers. At least that way they'd sound like places where people might live, rather than places where they're just stored, you know?"

"Hey, that sounds like a pretty good idea," agreed one of the humans.

"Yeah, and can we get a name that isn't 'Iron Something-or-other'? Seriously, the metal theme is so overplayed by now," complained another man.

The Dark Acolyte considered the statements, and then turned toward a Techpriest waiting behind him.

+Are we seriously putting up with this? Requesting permission to have the petitioners beaten for insolence, Techpriest.+

The Dark Techpriest considered the request briefly before it replied. +Negative. Implementation of suggested changes constitutes negligible expenditure of resources. Seek recommendations for facility designation.+

The Dark Acolyte groaned under his respirator mask as he turned back to the crowds of workers. "Do we have any... suggestions, then?"

"Camp Rocky!"

"Gemstone Strip!"

"Crystal Fields!"

"Happy Hills Unification Complex!"

"Ha! Irony. I like that one."

+Dark Gods give me strength...+ blurted the Acolyte.

+Cease your dramatization and...+

A sudden tremor cut off the exchange of static-laced bursts of code, and the Dark Mechanicus clergy fell silent as they immersed themselves in torrents of incoming data. The workers milled about uncomfortably as the ground shook, silently searching for any potential safe spots in case of serious danger.

The quake wasn't so strong as to knock anyone over, so there wasn't much in the way of panic when the shaking finally receded after a few minutes.

"Seismic event registered at magnitude three-point-three-seven. Damage prospects negligible," the Dark Acolyte declared.

"That event was curiously localized," interjected a Techpriest, "and the timing is auspicious. It is likely that the seismic event was artificially generated."

A loud creaking noise came from the mining rig, and the tech-clergy whirled around.

A moment later the ground under the rig collapsed, and the machine started sinking into the ground. Huge clouds of dirt were flung up into the air, and everyone could hear the groan of straining metal.

Eventually the shaking stopped, and when the dust cleared, the rig had sunk some five meters below the surface.

"Sabotage," said the Dark Techpriest in an angry buzz. Although partially burying the equipment was a decidedly low-key sort of attack, digging out the heavy rig would require yet another rig to be moved in, and that could set back production schedules by a day or more.

"The diamond dogs did this," growled another voice. Prince Blueblood stepped up next to the Acolyte, sneering. He was wearing an officer's jacket and had a bolt pistol strapped to his hip, while a peaked cap sporting a Chaos Star sat just behind his horn.

"And what is a 'diamond dog'?" demanded the Acolyte.

"Are they like those alligators made of rocks?" asked a menial, gripping a spade nervously.

"No, nothing like that. The diamond dogs are a race of idiot canines that populate this region. They mostly occupy vast tunnel networks underground where they constantly mine and hoard gems," Blueblood explained, glaring at the mining rig, "they're dull-witted, but excellent diggers."

"If they are dull-witted, then how did they come to disable the most crucial machine in our convoy without even exposing themselves?" the Dark Techpriest pondered.

Blueblood hesitated. "That's... a good question, actually. They normally prefer much less subtle methods of confrontation. Odd."

"This is their territory? It was not claimed according to your political maps."

"That's ambiguous. They have little legitimate political structure of note, and tend to consider any land they wander onto 'theirs'." The Prince snorted.

"That much we have in common, then," hissed the Techpriest, "the difference is that WE possess the strength to hold our title." He lifted his power axe and thrust it toward a larger vehicle in the back. "Deploy the automata. And get me seismic sensors established. I won't have any more of our machines lost to mere sinkholes." He turned his head back toward the workers, the emerald light of his optics glowering from beneath his coal-black hood. "All laborers are to proceed with construction as scheduled. Happy Hills WILL be operational on time."

"Oh, God damn it..." the Dark Acolyte slapped a gauntlet against his face and groaned.

****

"Well, that went better than expected," mumbled a diamond dog as he watched the distant convoy through a telescope.

There were three of the large canines crouched atop a hill, all of them wearing dirt-colored cloaks to disguise themselves from a distance.

"So then the big machine sunk, right? What are they doing now?" demanded the dog in the back. This one was a female, thick-muscled and squat, with short, sharp ears and a reddish-brown coat.

"I think... yeah, they're going to work anyway." The dog with the telescope grunted as he continued spying on the distant workers. "Wait, they're unloading something from one of the trucks." He twisted the telescope to magnify the distant vehicle. "... Wow. That is a BIG robot."

"Hmph," the female dog scratched at her chin, "so they're going to shrug that off? Fine. That was just a warning. They ignore it at their own peril." She started chuckling.

The other two diamond dogs shared an uneasy glance. "Uh... so what do we do now, Boss Mox?"

"Keep watching the humans. They may have all those shiny guns, but that doesn't do them any good on the surface. And if they think they can come down into our tunnels to get us..." she chuckled darkly, and the idle diamond dog chuckled along with her. When she stopped, so did he.

"... So what if they think they can come down into our tunnels?"

"Then we'll trap and ambush them! QUEEN ALIVE, do I really have to spell out every little step of this thing?" growled Mox. The male diamond dog flinched back, wincing.

"Hey, Boss Mox, you said to watch the humans, right? What about the ponies?" asked the dog with the telescope.

Mox snorted. "Forget about them. Or do you think the ponies are going to be the ones to shoot you with laser guns?"

"We just might, furball!"

The three canines jumped into the air at the voice, and the one holding the telescope fumbled it onto the ground.

Mox whirled around first, having easily the best reflexes of the three, and she growled as she spotted the newcomer.

"This is Lightning Dust! I have three enemy contacts on the southern hill!" the pegasus shouted into her headset. In her optics view, she tagged each of the diamond dogs with an eye blink each, feeding their location to the Dark Techpriests and the automata.

"Drat! We've been seen!" Mox snarled.

"Roger that, Dust. Reinforcements incoming," Lightning's vox headset crackled, "can you engage the targets?"

The pegasus grinned as she levered up her foreleg, setting the lasgun into firing position. "Thought you'd never ask!"

"Run! Move it!" Mox shouted, sprinting down the hill.

The other two broke into a run after her, dropping on all fours to make a mad dash for safety. "But Boss, I thought-"

"Stop thinking! You're not good at it!" Mox snapped as she spied their exit point. A small mound of dirt was clustered around a large hole in the ground, just like a huge anthill entrance.

A spear of hot red light shot past her ear, and Mox felt her heart leap into her throat. From what she'd heard, the lasguns were among the very weakest weapons in the humans' arsenal, but the way they turned patches of the ground into smoldering black spots boded ill should any of the projectiles reach her flesh.

"YEEP!" a pained yelp came from behind as one of the diamond dogs behind her took a lasbolt to the back. The canine collapsed onto the ground and curled up into a ball, whimpering.

"Snowball! No!" screamed the other dog, slowing down his flight.

"Forget about him, you idiot! Follow me!" Mox dove into the hole in the ground, squeezing through the sandy entrance and disappearing into the tunnels below. The remaining diamond dog hesitated for a moment, but then relented and leapt after her.

"Feh. Only got one of them," Lightning Dust complained as she slowed to a hover. The injured canine was immediately below her, and she landed right next to his head.

"Nn-nn-nnh..." the diamond dog whined pitifully as Lightning prodded it with her lasgun.

"Good, you're still alive. That means you can still answer questions." She shifted her optics visor up onto her forehead. "Believe me, the Dark Techpriests are going to have LOTS of questions for you."

The dog suddenly lashed out with his paw, aiming to swat the pegasus aside. Lightning Dust leapt smoothly over the desperate swipe, and then slammed a hoof into the canine saboteur on her landing.

"YIPE!" the diamond dog spasmed in pain, and then curled up again.

"Yeah, go ahead and try it, mutt," Lightning Dust spat before tapping her headset again.

"Yo, I've got a live one, here. Injured, but nothing fatal."

A chuckle came from the vox. "Then it looks like we have our first resident of Happy Hills! Why, they're practically beating the door down, and we haven't even installed it yet!"

"Cool. Thing is, there were two more mutts, but they escaped down into the tunnels," Lightning explained.

"Not a problem. We're deploying a tactical solution."

Lightning Dust spotted two more pegasi flying her way in a careful formation. The reason for their precision was that they were wearing a special two-pony harness that carried a fairly large metal sphere between them.

"Ha! Oh, man! Can we get a pict-feed on that thing?" Lightning Dust laughed.

"Affirmative, Dust. Should be quite a show..."

****

"S-Snowball! The-hic!-They got Snowball! Bwaa-hah-aaaugh!"

Mox massaged her temples as the diamond dog behind her bawled openly, rubbing his giant paws against his cheeks.

"Oh, will you STOP? He's dead already!" Mox snapped. "Whining about it isn't going to bring him back!"

The male canine whimpered and flinched back.

"It doesn't matter, anyway! We accomplished what we needed to, now we need to get out of here!"

Mox glanced about at the branching tunnels, working out the mental map in her head of the vast subterranean labyrinth.

"Boss, I don't like this!" the other diamond dog whined, "that wasn't a human or an otto-mata or anything like that! If just the Company ponies are that dangerous, then how're we going to fight these 'Iron Warrior' guys?"

Mox clenched her teeth. "Well, we're going to start by NOT CRYING over every one of you lunkheads that gets himself shot! Seriously, you didn't think any of us might die resisting Chaos?"

"But... But, Boss!"

"Shut it!" Mox growled, whirling around and glaring at the trembling canine. "If you're so scared of the big, bad humans and their little pony friends, you can crawl right back out there and give yourself up! Does that sound like a good idea? Do want to scout out their work camp from the OTHER side of the fence?!"

The other diamond dog trembled and wrung his paws as Mox dressed him down, and then he shook his head.

"Good! Then stop your sniveling and-"

A heavy, repeating clunking noise came from further on down the tunnel, as if a metal object were hitting several stones in a row.

"Well, it seems like they're not looking for surrender anyway," Mox mumbled as a metal sphere dropped down into the main passage.

A whir-click noise came from the iron shell studded with spikes and blades, and then the sphere quivered. The spikes and blades extended away from the armored body, revealing long, powerful metal tendrils that pushed the orb-shaped body of the Butcher-pattern automata up into the air.

"It's... It's some kind of death robot!" shrieked the male dog, his tail flipping down between his legs. "Boss Mox! What do we-"

When he turned his head back toward his superior, the diamond dog found himself staring at an empty tunnel.

"B-Boss? Where..."

****

Mox paused briefly as screams started echoing through the tunnel, and the barest hint of a smile crossed her lips.

"I was getting sick of that one, anyway. No guts. Other than the gunk spilling around the tunnel, I guess," she chuckled as she passed into a larger open area.

This room acted as a link for several interconnecting tunnels. Its width made the ceiling less stable, and as such there were several wooden supports holding up the cracked ceiling. The diamond dogs' aptitude for digging, however, did not extend to the structures they used to aid their operations; the supports were thin and barely held together with rope and rusted nails.

Perfect for her purposes.

Tapping each of the supports at their weakest point, Mox smiled and walked across the room, stopping just before the entrance to another tunnel that she had selected as her primary escape route.

Before long, she heard it: the whirring noise of shifting mechanical tendrils and the muted bleeping from the automata bearing them.

"Hello, little tin soldier," Mox whispered as the Butcher automata clambered into view. Wet globs of fresh blood were splashed over its body casing, and the whipping motions of its tendrils threw bits of viscera every which way, leaving a trail through the tunnels behind it.

"Goodbye, little tin soldier." The diamond dog said before her eyes flashed a brilliant green.

At once the various supports holding up the ceiling buckled, dropping to the ground in pieces just as the hunter-killer robot lunged into the room. A shower of dirt and pebbles instantly dropped down, and the automata stumbled as a rock almost as big as its body slammed on top of it.

The initial drop was only the beginning of a complete collapse. Before the automata could regain its bearings, an even greater downpour of dirt and small rocks fell down on top of it, trapping its appendages and obscuring its sensors.

The last thing its vid-feed captured was the grinning face of the diamond dog as she watched the ceiling fall, her eyes gleaming like emeralds in the darkness.

****

Canterlot City

Princess Celestia looked out over the vast crowd of ponies and humans standing below her balcony as trumpets blared all around her, announcing her arrival to the spectators. Her expression was calm and serene, and for once that expression didn't falter when she looked upon the many Chaos Stars scattered throughout her audience.

Twilight Sparkle stood behind the white Princess, almost giddy with anticipation. She was wearing a silvery dress rather than her power armor, although she still had a vox headset on that fed into one ear.

After a few more seconds of trumpet music, Princess Celestia raised her head and spoke to her city.

"My little ponies. Thank you for coming here today to hear this royal address in person," Celestia said, her soft voice booming across the plaza with a sudden spark of magic, "and to the humans here, thank you for taking the time out of your plundering and murder long enough to take an interest in Equestrian affairs."

"You're welcome!" shouted a mercenary from below.

Celestia cleared her throat lightly before continuing. "We have overcome a great trial in this kingdom, and survived the onslaught of two alien powers. The Ork threat has passed, and soon the Warp storm will cease. Canterlot has been restored, and once again stands as a beacon of light and hope to all of Equestria and the rest of the world."

She took a deep breath. "But this beacon now sits under a shadow. The forces of Chaos claim this planet as their own, and all nations within it are mere protectorates; territories to be stripped of resources to feed their war machine. As we look to the future of our kingdom, it is a future that includes not just humanity, but a particular strain of humanity that is vile, violent, and corrupt."

She paused, and her eyes met one of the humans staring up from below.

"... No offense."

"None taken!" he shouted back.

"As we take to the future with the black banner of Chaos flying overhead, it is more important than ever to keep love in our hearts," Celestia's voice rose higher as she reached the crux of her speech, "harmony cannot prevail through dominion; the Iron Warriors are our rulers now. But as we are carried into a future of warfare and strife, a future where aliens wage constant battles of genocidal scale and evil gods demand tithe in souls and blood, I ask that you not lose hope! Keep harmony within you, wherever you go, and whatever horrors you may face, and never allow hatred to take hold of you! Draw your strength from each other, the bonds that tie our destiny together, and look upon our enemies with mercy and compassion! Friendship will be our way forward as we ascend to the stars!"

Celestia raised a wing to the side, and great crimson banners were unfurled from towering flagpoles. They sported the image of the Iron Warriors' Legion emblem with the royal sisters circling it, in imitation of Equestria's national flag.

"The Age of Harmony has come to an end, my little ponies!" Celestia declared as dropships rose from behind the castle, speeding off toward the fleet locked in orbit. "We stand now on the brink of a new era! One of exploration, industry, and strife! The Age of Iron has begun!"

The crowd exploded into cheers. Humans lifted their rifles toward the sky and fired into the air. Ponies pounded the ground in applause with such force that the ground trembled.

Twilight Sparkle almost shed a tear as her heart swelled with pride. Although the words came from Princess Celestia, Twilight knew that this was her achievement. Her tireless efforts to manage relations between the militaristic Company and her peaceful home nation had finally come to this, an alliance that had stayed the hand of the Iron Warriors and twice saved the planet from annihilation already.

She could honestly only think of one way this day could get any better.

"Also, this is somewhat off-topic," Princess Celestia continued, silencing the crowd, "but the Chaos Lord Tellis, the Mad Angel, has been declared outcast from the 38th Company. Even now he is being hunted down by the Company's warrior elite, and will be put to death in short order!"

The crowd's reaction made the earlier applause seem tepid. Wild cheers boomed through the city, pegasi started doing crazy, excited loops in the air, and a flurry of fireworks whistled into the sky and exploded.

This time, Twilight couldn't hold herself back. Tears of pure joy dribbled down her cheeks, and her lip quivered as she stared up at her mentor.

"This is the happiest day of my life!" Twilight sobbed.

"Really, Twilight?" came a voice from behind her.

Glancing back, Twilight saw Spike standing nearby. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he sounded really annoyed, for some reason.

Twilight thought about her declaration as she wiped off her cheeks with her hoof. "Well, okay, I suppose the day I hatched you and became Princess Celestia's student would be the happiest, technically. But today definitely ranks-"

A burst of static in her ear interrupted her.

"We have a bead on Lord Tellis! He's pinned down by gunships just outside of Black Point!" snarled a vox-distorted voice.

"This is Shas'vre Jerriha. We have Broadsides deployed and the target is in sight. We've got him, Command."

Twilight sniffled as a fresh wave of emotion overwhelmed her. "No, I take it back. This is DEFINITELY the happiest day of my life!"

"Too bad. Wake up," grunted Spike.

The purple pony blinked. "What?"

"Wake up, Twilight!" Spike shouted more forcefully.

"I don't..." Twilight stumbled backward as the world started to turn fuzzy all around her. "Spike, what are you-"

"WAKE UP, ALREADY!!"

****

Ferrous Dominus - sector 22 guard barracks

Twilight Sparkle's quarters

Twilight yelped and rolled out of her bed, falling onto the floor and landing painfully on her wing.

She righted herself quickly while blinking away the sleep from her eyes, and then she took in her surroundings.

There wasn't much to take in. Long, bare metal walls loomed around her, and thin lumen strips set into the ceiling cast pallid light across the room. A single shelf laid against the wall, filled from edge to edge with dataslates. Next to it was Spike's bed, conspicuously empty. A table stood near the door, holding an assortment of papers, inks, and other conventional writing supplies. The room's cogitator console stood next to the table, providing a curious contrast to the primitive writing tools adjacent to them.

"TWILIGHT!!" shouted Spike, causing Twilight to swing around in alarm. "WAKE UP!! SERIOUSLY!!" The shout came from the adjoined restroom.

Twilight quickly rushed for the door, groaning. She already had a good idea what was wrong.

When she opened it, she was treated to the sight of Spike floating in mid-air, right in the middle of the bathroom. A spherical cage of luminescent purple encircled him, and a magic circle on the floor flickered unsteadily. The young dragon looked every bit as irritated as he had in her dream, although at least here he had an obvious reason.

"Finally!" Spike groused. "A little help?"

Twilight grimaced as she dispelled the magic construct that was keeping Spike levitated. Her horn was swallowed in a quivering purple aura, and Spike was slowly lowered to the floor before the magic faded entirely.

"Spike, why do you keep stumbling into these?" Twilight asked. "You KNOW about the traps and their locations."

"Well, excuse me if I'm not thinking clearly the minute I get up! The toilet has a way of taking top priority first thing in the morning!" Spike snapped. "I don't even know why you bother with the traps! It's not like Dusk Blade ever trips them! And why does one need to be in the bathroom, anyway?"

Twilight's cheeks flushed. "It's just, well, there are... certain things in here that an... uh... impure mind like his might want. Maybe."

"Come on, Twi. The guy may be an evil slave-owning assassin, but that doesn't mean he's some kind of pervert, too," Spike noted, "also - and I don't mean to keep harping on this point - the traps don't seem to WORK on him, so he can still do whatever he wants and get away with it."

"Just do your business, Spike," Twilight grumbled before she stepped out and closed the door.

Twilight walked to the end of the room and then slapped a hoof against a button on the wall.

A set of blast shutters creaked open, giving her a peek outside. Not that there was much to see. Normally her window afforded her an unimpressive view of a munitions loading bay, but today even that much was obscured by sheets of rain.

"Acid rain. Great," she sighed and closed the shutters. The materials used to build Ferrous Dominus were generally able to withstand the corrosive storms caused by its pollution, but the rain was highly toxic nonetheless.

The Princess turned toward her room cogitator and activated it with her horn, brushing against the control pad with her telekinesis.

"Let's see... day's schedule: Combat patrol, standby for strike force, study period, combat patrol, dinner with Rarity, study period." Twilight frowned and checked for any messages sent to her console. "Report on Tau battle strategy. Later. Invitation from Rarity to try out the new spa. Later. Ah! A reply to my request for a diplomatic assignment!"

She opened the message. "... Rejected so that I can be on standby for the strike force," Twilight said bitterly.

She supposed she should take pride in the fact that the Iron Warriors took her seriously enough as a fighter to request her support directly. Rainbow Dash and Applejack certainly did. But there were other duties that she would have much rather preferred.

"Every day it's just 'kill Orks', 'kill more Orks', and then 'burn the area where you killed all those Orks'," she complained, "it's like the war never actually ended."

Which it hadn't, really. Twilight had read up on the Orks thoroughly enough to know how difficult it was to exterminate the green-skinned aliens through attrition. She also knew that there was no other way to prevent them from becoming a serious threat over time that didn't also involve effectively destroying the planet.

"Hm? Wait, is this a message from Tellis?"

"A message from who?" Spike asked as he exited the bathroom.

"It's from Tellis. He's never messaged me before," Twilight explained, sounding curious.

Spike's eyes bugged out. "Twi! No! Don't open the-"

The console screen blew up before he could finish the sentence, throwing Twilight back and blasting her with bits of debris. A thick arc of electricity leapt from the ruined machine onto her, eliciting a loud yelp from the prone pony.

Spike winced as he stared at the sparking remains of the console. "Yeah, so... Tellis does this thing where his armor tries to upload a dangerous virus code into every logic engine he connects to. Gaela isn't actually sure he even does it on purpose anymore; she thinks it was a one-time prank that infected his suit system that he doesn't know how to stop."

Twilight sniffled. "It was such a BEAUTIFUL dream..."

****

Ferrous Dominus - sector 1 main gates

"Sparkle. Check in."

"Equinought Squadron, unit code 33915. Ready for active deployment."

Twilight stood at attention in her power armor, watching the rain run down her visor. An Iron Warrior stood in front of her, completing the personnel check.

Next to her stood ten mercenaries, all of them wearing thick overcoats or ponchos to ward off the poisonous downpour. There were a dozen armed ponies next to them, also in ponchos, and one unicorn was projecting a thin barrier overhead to act as a magical umbrella for the equines.

The pegasi looked particularly miserable in this weather, being unable to even stretch their wings under the ponchos, much less fly. None of them were willing to test out just how poisonous the acid rain was, however.

The Iron Warrior finished registering the mission group, and then he glanced at a black-robed figure approaching the transports. "Dark Techpriest Gaela," he rumbled, "we are prepared to deploy."

Gaela turned her head toward the assembled troops. Twilight had one foreleg raised and was waving enthusiastically at her, as if she might have missed the only power-armored equine in the combat group.

"We are ready, Lord," Gaela said, inclining her head toward the Astartes.

"Then get in and let's go!"

****

Patrol route 33 tertius, 6 kilometers outside of Saddlebrook

"I'm just worried about the expansion plans, that's all. I really wish the Company would let Equestria take a greater role in the colonization phase!"

Twilight almost had to shout to be heard over the rumble of the Rhino's engine combined with the rain pounding against the hull outside. Gaela stood over her, one hand gripping a ceiling hook to keep steady.

"The Company leadership is consumed with preparations to complete the latest supply run. You know that," Gaela said, "their priorities lie elsewhere, and anyway none of them take your sovereign seriously."

Twilight fumed. "Well, they should! Princess Celestia has been running our nation and dealing with Equestria's neighbors for over a thousand years! If the Company wants to annex our planet's governments to form a united protectorate, it doesn't make any sense to cut her out of the diplomatic process!"

Gaela paused in her response. "... 'United protectorate'? That's the line we're using now?"

"It was Trademaster Delgan's idea," Twilight mumbled, looking away, "I wish Solon would at least put HIM in charge of contacting and dealing with other nations, if he's not going to let us ponies do it. Instead he just lets the Dark Mechanicus go where they want and take what they want!"

Gaela tilted her head to the side. "I don't see a problem with that."

"I think all the griffons, dragons, buffalo, and various other non-ponies do," Twilight countered.

"I don't see a problem with that, either."

"Sparkle, do you really think any of them will go for that, anyway?" asked another of the ponies in the transport. "You have to admit, it's a pretty hard sell. 'Oh, hey, you see these big armored guys with guns? They saved the world so they own it now.'"

Twilight glanced at the earth pony stallion, gleaning his name from the encoded identifier chip in the Chaos Star amulet that hung around his neck.

"Stone Grinder, the Orks have been spreading CONSTANTLY since we destroyed the Space Hulk and stopped the Waaagh. They threaten much more than Equestria, and the Company is still the only force that can feasibly eliminate them. I think there's room for an approach more sophisticated than sending in armed cyborgs to carve up the ground wherever they find enough metal ore."

"Well, I don't think-"

The Rhino suddenly tilted forward, and Twilight instinctively mag-locked to the floor of the passenger bay. The other ponies, who had neither magnetic greaves or hands with which to hold on to a secure point, stumbled as the transport lurched upward again and leveled out.

"What was that?" Gaela demanded, linking with the transport pilot. "My lord, what happened?"

"A pit was hidden along the patrol route," growled the Rhino's interior vox, "prepare to disembark! We may have an ambush coming!"

"A pit trap? Ambush?" asked a shaken pegasus mare. "Since when do the Orks fight like this?"

"They don't," Gaela confirmed as the rear ramp of the vehicle started to open, "we may not be fighting Orks."

The Rhino had been sunk into a muddy pit almost half of its total height, and the ramp was only able to open partially in order to let its passengers out. The ponies left first, being small and limber enough to easily get free. Gaela took more time to escape the confines of the passenger bay, quietly mumbling curses in Binary as she climbed the ramp's incline.

"So, this is non-acid rain, right?" asked Stone Grinder as he dropped down into the muddy ground. "No face-melting chemicals?"

"We're far enough away from Ferrous Dominus that the air pollution shouldn't be affecting the local precipitation!" Twilight confirmed as she searched their surroundings.

"Of course - urg! - given your planet's tendency toward Warp-based phenomena - oof! - I wouldn't be entirely surprised if you had some sort of ridiculous 'magic rain' just to make our work more difficult."

Gaela finally pulled herself free from the Rhino access ramp, dropping down behind the equines. Two other Rhinos and a Predator attack tank made up the patrol convoy, and the other soldiers had already disembarked from their transports to investigate the hold-up.

"Well, if this is an ambush, they're sure taking their time in springing it," mumbled one of the ponies.

"No, they have," disagreed the Iron Warrior manning the Rhino's combi-bolter, "we are under attack."

This got the Chaos Marine a few stares.

"... Are you sure? I don't see any-"

A dull ricochet came from the side of the vehicle, and Twilight whirled around to see the damage. This was difficult, because there wasn't any.

"Muzzle flash detected from the tree line. About eighty meters," the gunner declared. He didn't seem particularly worried about it.

Twilight searched the ground next to the Rhino, and she figured out why: there was a small, marble-sized piece of metal in the mud that was flattened on one side.

"A lead ball bullet? Are they attacking us with MUSKETS?" Twilight asked incredulously. Another impact struck the side of the vehicle.

"And why are they attacking the Rhinos?" asked another pony. "We're all just standing here waiting for them."

"At this range, and with the rainfall obscuring us, a primitive firearm would have abysmal accuracy. Our assailants are probably aiming for our infantry and simply missing," Gaela explained blandly. A bullet streaked into the mud at her feet, splattering her robe with muck.

"Mercenaries!" The Iron Warrior Champion in charge of the patrol gestured to the forest next to the road. "Find whatever is shooting at us and kill it. Techpriest, get the transport moving again!"

The humans saluted and hoisted their rifles. The ponies were more hesitant, looking at Twilight in askance.

"Lord San'toh!" Twilight said, rushing up to the Astartes. "My lord, is it necessary to kill the attackers on sight? We have almost no information about them and appear to outclass them technologically to an absurd degree. There may be other, less... wasteful options!"

Twilight forced herself not to fidget as the Iron Warrior glared down at her through his blood-red visor.

"Other options. Like what?" growled the Chaos Marine.

"If I may, Lord," Gaela interjected, "we do have new prison camps available and under capacity, and the Dark Mechanicus is in need of additional bodies. The additional labor would be far more useful."

Twilight blanched. "Well, that's true, but that isn't what I-"

"Soldiers!" San'toh snapped, cutting Twilight off. The humans all stopped instantly. "Belay that last order! You are to equip non-lethal equipment and capture the attackers!"

Twilight repressed a groan as the mercenaries started pulling large, club-like weapons from the transports. They resembled swords, but had a blunt edge and they ended in a pair of prongs rather than a point. One of the soldiers pulled such a weapon from Twilight's Rhino, and then pushed a switch near his thumb. Thick arcs of electricity ran up the length of the device, and then lashed between the prongs at the end for a few seconds.

"Set the taser goads to level 2 or 3 to effect non-lethal submission discharges," Gaela instructed.

The pony recruits were fitting shaped metal shells over their hooves, one for each of them. One pegasus slapped the hoof against the Rhino's side, eliciting a burst of electricity and an obnoxiously loud thunderclap.

"Shock gauntlets are harder to control in terms of discharge strength, but you should do fine as long as you stop attacking once they stop moving."

"Good call, Princess Sparkle," Stone Grinder said as he slipped his optics visor down, "this way we don't have to kill anyone!"

"Y-Yeah," Twilight mumbled as the ponies galloped away toward the trees, "that's... better." A musket ball smacked into the side of her helmet, uselessly. She didn't even flinch.

"Sparkle, go check the road ahead for any more pit traps," San'toh commanded, "keep an open vox so you can warn us of any further... 'ambushes'. I will have the Iron Warriors in reserve."

"Yes, Lord," Twilight said as her flight pack gently lifted her into the air, "right away."

****

"Are they IGNORING us?" squawked a griffon angrily as she peered through the scope of her long musket. "They are! Those big, silver space monkeys are just standing out in the open while we shoot at them!"

A male griffon standing next to her was growling as he reloaded his rifle, trying to keep his gunpowder supply dry under his cloak.

"And why shouldn't they? I can't shoot straight in this storm! I don't even know if I've hit one of them yet, much less hurt one!"

The female bristled before she fired her weapon again. A sharp crack came from her musket, followed by a puff of white smoke that was quickly swallowed by the rain.

She took a moment to wipe off her scope and check her view of the convoy. The Iron Warriors still weren't advancing toward, covering from, or even acknowledging the assault.

She whirled around to glare at a pair of figures behind her. One was a hulking minotaur wrapped in tribal fetishes and carrying twin battleaxes. The other was another female griffon. She was tall and lean, with a patchwork leather vest and dark feathers all around her head and neck that eventually formed an upward-tilting crest at the top of her head.

"Why did we have to run the attack today, with this weather?! You know we can knock out those clouds, right?"

"Or we could have at least brought some of those alien weapons you said you scavenged! I may as well be flinging spitballs at these guys!"

The griffon in the back waited patiently as the others complained, her tail swinging slowly and steadily in the downpour.

"Nox, are you even listening?" barked the other female, gripping her gun tightly.

"I am," the dark-feathered griffon replied, "the weather conditions and your weapons are sufficient for the job. You don't need to shoot down any of the Iron Warriors. That's not the point of this."

"Maybe not, but getting the shiny freaks' attention IS the point of this, and these pop guns aren't doing it." The male griffon lifted his weapon again and stared through the scope. "At least the little ones took the bait. They'll be on top of us in a second. We have ponies and humans charging through the forest."

"All together, like a big, happy family," the other gunner chuckled, running her tongue over her beak, "how cute."

"The pegasi, too?" asked the minotaur suddenly.

The griffon gunners hesitated. One raised his musket again to check.

"Uh... shoot, it's really hard to tell. None of them are flying, but with the armor on, they-"

"Got 'em!" shouted a voice from above.

"Well, that answers that!" screeched Nox. The four creatures scattered as a sizzling flare tumbled down through the branches above, marking their location.

"Let's go! Fall back!" shouted the male griffon, leaping into the air and flapping his wings.

"No! Don't! Stay down!"

Before the airborne gunner could respond, a pegasus dove down into him, slamming her shock gauntlet into his side. Any shriek of pain or surprise was utterly eclipsed by the ear-splitting crack of the gauntlet discharge, and a moment later the griffon was careening back toward the ground.

"Blast! Pony traitors!" snarled the other gunner, snapping up her musket. The pegasus didn't answer her insult, simply building altitude again over the treetops. She followed the equine with her scope, but then found her weapon pushed aside.

"Forget it! We have to run!" Nox barked. "The pegasi are just here to keep us grounded! Let's move!"

The minotaur was already sprinting, and the two conscious griffons took off after him with nary a glance back at their fallen comrade. It was merely seconds later that an earth pony broke though the brush and almost tripped over the stunned guerrilla fighter.

"Found a capture!" Stone Grinder shouted as several other soldiers followed him into the clearing around the flare. "Griffon, looks like!"

"Kellin, you take the beaked sod back to the convoy. The rest of you, spread out and pursue. Pegasi, keep a bead on them!"

"Roger that, Sarge!"

Stone Grinder nodded and hopped forward through the brush, his hooves pounding against the ground and his optics showing three heat signatures far ahead.

Then he slipped on something, and scrambled to keep his balance. He managed to stay standing, and glanced down at the forest floor under his hooves to see what had tripped him up.

"... An oil slick?"

****

Nox kept her eyes and thoughts focused ahead as she rushed through the forest, keeping pace with the minotaur in front of the retreat.

"Nox, can we call in the freaking lizard, already? Those monkeys are right behind us!" demanded the other griffon.

Nox snapped up a small pistol from under her wing, and briefly checked the payload. It was an enchanted bullet, with tiny runes etched into the ball surface, and the powder was still dry.

"Kee, stop them here," Nox ordered as he raised the pistol.

The minotaur ground to a halt, and steam puffed from his nostrils as he turned on the spot. The two griffons gave him plenty of room, rushing past and leaping over a thick stripe of oil laid across their path.

Nox raised her pistol to the air and fired.

****

Twilight snapped her head around as her visor sensors picked something out in the distance. A bright yellow spot of light was shooting straight up through the treetops.

"A signal flare? Do our soldiers need help?" Twilight asked as she started turning around.

"Negative, Sparkle," crackled her vox, "that wasn't one of our flares. Proceed with your mission objectives."

She hesitated. "Wait, so that was from our attackers? They could be signaling for help! Our soldiers might be walking into a trap!"

"Given the destructive power of enemy ambushes thus far, I'm not especially concerned," rumbled the Space Marine, "what threat, exactly, do you suppose these primitives could bring to bear on us?"

"They could have a dragon waiting nearby to swoop in and kill them all," Twilight pointed out, "and by 'could have', I mean 'do have', because I'm looking at it."

Giant wings lifted an enormous serpentine body from the thickets of trees, tearing away the branches that had obscured its bulk. The rainfall worked to obscure and muffle the beast's flight, which naturally headed straight for the airborne flare.

Twilight's visor bracketed the departing dragon as her flight pack boosted her higher into the air.

"I'm moving to engage! Gaela, could you get some drop rigs deployed near the convoy?"

"I don't see why not. Do you have a plan?" the Techpriest asked.

"No, but the attackers do," Twilight replied as she zoomed after the massive serpent, "let's see what I can do about that."

****

The first three soldiers to catch up to the fleeing attackers were all ponies. Being small, four-legged, and not possessing the years of deadly combat experience that taught the humans to advance more cautiously under cover, the equines had a much easier time breaking through the forest terrain at high speed.

That said, they weren't all that proud of their agility once they found themselves staring at a massive, axe-wielding minotaur standing in their path. Their human allies were probably still a minute or two behind.

"A minotaur? What're you doing here?" Stone Grinder stumbled to a halt at the sight of the huge biped, snapping his lasgun up into a chambered position.

"Doesn't matter! Take him down!" shouted a unicorn mare as her horn sparked.

Both stallions with her looked more hesitant. Most minotaurs were as big as Astartes, with a muscle mass that was easily on par with the Space Marines. This one was even bigger than most, with a size rivaling the larger varieties of Ork. Its fur was ash white, and its massive horns boasted spiked metal bands.

Unlike an Ork, the minotaur seemed to be in no rush to fight. He simply stared silently at the equines with his arms held loosely at his sides, and his gaze dared them to advance on him.

"Okay, so, uh... s-surrender, minotaur! We have orders to take you alive!" Stone Grinder said, his voice cracking slightly.

The bovine warrior narrowed his eyes. "So the enemy wishes to divine our purpose here?" His voice was a deep rumble that cut through the rain with ease. The ponies started backing away.

"Well, not really. I mean, your purpose here isn't all that mysterious," the unicorn admitted, "and it's not like we don't understand WHY you might fight the Iron Warriors, either. But still, we're on their side. So you should really give up before we have to hurt you!"

The enormous warrior looked more bored than threatened as the unicorn levitated her shock gauntlet into the air. Her horn pulsed, and then the stun weapon shot forward toward the minotaur.

He smashed the gauntlet aside with one axe, knocking it away with a flash of light and clap of thunder.

This was followed by ANOTHER flash of light and clap of thunder when the shock gauntlet slammed into another pony. He shrieked in pain as he was flung to the side and out of the fight.

"Dang it, you're supposed to wear the gauntlet, not throw it!" Stone Grinder shouted to the mare.

"What are you, crazy? I'm not getting near this guy!" she snapped back.

The minotaur slammed an iron-shod hoof down, and the ponies flinched as a rock was ground to powder underneath him. "You two. Fight, or flee."

"Orrrr... we could sit here and discuss the matter until our friends get here to surround you," Stone Grinder suggested, making no move to approach, "say, I didn't catch your name! We're going to need that for registering you with the work camps."

"My name..." the minotaur's eyes narrowed to slits of cobalt blue. "My name is Killer Instinct, equine."

"Ooh, nice! I'm Stone Grinder, and this is Bright Bubble. The pony over there on the ground is Black Hammer."

"H-Hello..." mumbled the disabled stallion weakly before he coughed.

"You wear the garb and sundries of soldiers, but you lack a warrior's will," Killer Instinct said with a snort, "come, pony! Face your foe with courage and honor!"

The bushes around them rustled as more Company soldiers reached the standoff. Their taser goads crackled and sparked loudly in the rain as the humans silently approached, their weapons extended carefully.

"... Call me a coward, but I think I'd rather face my foe with laser guns and a ten-to-one advantage," Stone said, pawing the ground with a hoof.

The minotaur grinned. "Coward."

The human soldiers closed in as a team, surrounding the target's front and each aiming a goad at a different height. Killer Instinct bounded to the side with surprising agility, his battleaxes arcing down at the same time toward one of his opponents.

A loud spark gave way to a scream of pain as both the mercenary's goad and his arm were cleaved apart. The man stumbled to his knees, and was silenced a moment later with a short chop that removed his head.

Killer had to immediately parry another stab from a taser goad, and whips of hot electricity lashed from the contact before he knocked the weapon away. He twisted away from another jab, and then leapt backward, evading the goads that were reaching for him through the rain.

"Got him!" Stone Grinder shouted as he leapt at the minotaur's side, lunging for a knee with the shock gauntlet.

Killer Instinct lifted one leg to avoid the swipe, then stomped it down on top of the pony, crushing the stallion against the ground.

"Pathetic," the bovine warrior grunted before kicking the pony forward.

Stone Grinder landed in a groaning heap as the other soldiers advanced on the minotaur, although some of the mercenaries were securing their taser goads and taking up rifles.

The fight was brought to a standstill, however, when a terrible roar cut through the storm above.

"The hell is that?" mumbled a trooper as he peered up into the rain. His vox headset crackled in his ear a moment later.

"You guys! Dragon! You've got a freaking dragon over you! Get back to the convoy, before-"

Another roar cut off the transmission, and this time a flash of light lit up the darkened forest. A thick stream of fire poured down into the forest some distance away, and gave the soldiers their first glimpse of the monstrosity swooping in toward them. It was about the size and shape of a Maulerfiend, with thick, dark red scales and huge wings. It was also attacking an area where there were no soldiers, much to the confusion of the mercenaries.

Killer Instinct smirked as the rain dribbled down the braided locks of his hair. "Awareness of the battlefield is the difference between life and death," he jumped backward, leaping past a thick stripe of thick, black oil that laid across the ground, "a lesson learned too late, I fear."

Fire rushed across the oil stripe, jumping up to nearly five feet high as the falling rain created a shroud of steam rising over it.

"It's magic oil!" yelped a unicorn. "Don't let the fire touch you, or you'll never be able to put it out!"

"Damn, the flames are behind us, too! We're surrounded!"

"A gesture to your leaders," growled the minotaur's voice from behind the wall of flames, "they think to take this world? To be the masters of-OW!" Killer staggered back as a lasbolt pierced through the barrier of fire and burned into his chest.

"Shoot the son of a bitch!" shouted a mercenary as more lasers started stabbing through the fire and steam.

"I'm pretty sure he's the son of a cow!"

"No arguing! Just kill him!"

Killer scrambled away from the bursts of lasers, and another beam managed to cut into his leg before he stumbled behind a tree.

"And as the trap is sprung, the hunter's decoy is withdrawn," the minotaur hissed as he flexed his leg. He grit his teeth against the pain that resulted; intense, but not debilitating.

"'Flashlights' they call them. Hmph..."

Within the ring of fire and steam, the soldiers of the 38th Company fired blindly after the minotaur as a mood of rising panic took hold.

"Did we get him?"

"How would I know?!"

"Well, can we stop shooting, then? I'd like to think about how we might not get cooked alive, here!"

A human mercenary who was checking on Stone Grinder's injuries stood up and ran a hand through his hair anxiously. "Okay. Okay, I have an idea. We need a Rhino over here. It'll park on the flame wall, and we can walk over the transport out of the trap!"

"Got it!" snapped another mercenary before tapping his vox headset. "My lord! We request immediate evacuation! We're trapped behind..."

The man stopped speaking when the dragon that had ignited the fire ring swooped down on the unit, landing heavily on one section of the blazing wall. Neither the flames nor the abundant steam seemed to bother the creature as it stared down at the stunned mammals, and small puffs of white smoke blasted from its nostrils as it chuckled.

"... Trapped behind what?" growled the vox. "What's wrong?"

"H-Help..." the mercenary replied weakly.

"And here Nox claimed you apes were clever." The dragon's voice was a deep, resonant rumble, and his conversational tone didn't change even when lasers started spraying across his chest. "I hope you pests taste better than you fight."

The dragon opened his maw, and a quivering red flame flickered over its tongue. The mercenaries backed away, almost tripping over each other to escape the coming flames.

A screeching whine came from above, and the dragon hesitated at a critical moment.

"HUARGH!!" The monster was blasted in the side by a thick purple beam, and it collapsed onto the ground with a furious howl. The plating under the attack buckled in moments, cracking open and drooling hot blood onto the ground.

Twilight Sparkle settled into a hover overhead as the dragon stumbled to its feet. The water rolled over the repulsor engines of her flight pack unevenly, spraying droplets about in thick fans, while her force harmonizer blazed purple and psionic hoarfrost shimmered about it.

"You're hungry, are you? Chew on this!" Twilight shouted. The force harmonizer flashed again, and a shrieking purple ray slashed across the dragon's wing.

The beast roared again, and the trapped soldiers leapt away as he jumped into the air and beat his wings against the stormy sky.

Twilight had a moment to spare while the dragon got airborne, and her horn casing glowed while she pinpointed a part of the flame wall. The ground underneath the burning layer of oil rose up and peeled away in opposite directions, rolling into the surrounding flames and leaving a muddy trench through the fire.

Content that the soldiers would take the chance to exit, Twilight concentrated fully on the dragon.

"Ambushing a squad of under-armed humans and pony soldiers after you have them trapped in place. Aren't you brave?" Twilight said with a scowl.

The dragon reached even height with the alicorn and stopped in a hover, flames leaking from its maw. "Not as brave as you, certainly. That's probably while I'll fly away ALIVE!"

Twilight summoned a sphere barrier just before a jet of fire speared through the rain at her. The blast left a thick cloud of steam behind it that washed around her after the fire was gone, and her visor switched to thermal mode in an eye blink.

Tracking the dragon's approach, Twilight teleported away seconds before he reached her, snapping his jaws shut on a cloud of empty vapor.

"See this? This is why I don't let Spike hang around with other dragons. You're a bad influence." Twilight's horn flashed, firing a spread of magic blasts at her opponent.

The magic missiles struck the dragon's scales harmlessly, failing to so much as scratch its natural armor.

"Cheeky little equine! Do you think that little piece of tin the humans gave you will keep you safe from me?"

The dragon swept close to Twilight, and she had to teleport behind it again to avoid the beast's claws.

"No, it probably wouldn't!" she shouted as the dragon turned around. "But it has other advantages! If you want to get out of this alive, then this is your last chance! Either surrender or flee!"

The dragon hovered for a moment, sneering through the rain at the purple Princess. "The human filth and all of their corrupt allies will burn, equine. If the Iron Warriors and Equestria would fight together, then you will die together. This world will NOT submit."

"Don't we get ANY credit for saving the planet and everything on it?" Twilight griped. "I didn't see YOU fighting any Orks!"

The dragon's response was a fireball, which Twilight turned away with the shield barrier of her harmonizer. "Right. Silly me. Of course we have to do this the hard way." Twilight cut her flight pack, and then cast a spell to soften her landing as she plummeted back into the forest.

****

"Geez, that lizard is making a racket. Wasn't he supposed to toast the soldiers and leave?"

Nox remained silent as the other griffon complained, listening to the dragon's shouting through the storm.

"Can't believe we lost Ferrel, though. Poor guy." The gunner looked down at her musket, her forehead feathers ruffling. "I can't imagine what it's like to actually be captured by those freaks."

"In a few hours you WILL!" growled a voice from above.

The griffon gunner hit the ground in a roll as a pegasus swooped down through the branches, evading a swing from the pony's shock gauntlet. She snapped her musket up and fired at the pony's back, striking its wing.

"Quick! Finish it off!" the gunner yelled as the pegasus crashed into the ground. She quickly turned her attention upward, spying the other pegasi approaching overhead.

Nox glanced down at the wounded pony, and then up at the three other pegasi who were circling around and looking for good paths through the branches.

Without a word, she turned and ran.

"Nox? Hey! Where are you-" the other griffon yelped as she leapt over another attacking pony, and her wings pushed her higher as she instinctively sought greater altitude.

That instinct proved her undoing, as it brought her directly in the path of yet another equine soldier. A shock gauntlet struck her with a thunderous crash, and the griffon girl screamed before she was thrown back into the mud.

She writhed on the ground for several seconds, her muscles going numb and spots dancing over her eyes. Though her vision wasn't so bad that she couldn't see the pegasus she had shot earlier stepping within leg's reach.

"This is Sky Sweeper," the mare spoke into her vox as she raised her shock gauntlet, "target secured."

"This is White Wing. Confirmed Sweeps, hold position. I'm tracking the final target," replied another pegasus as a shock impact boomed through the storm.

"Well, the final target aside from the dragon and minotaur," mumbled the wingmare flying behind him.

"Hey, if you want a piece of that, you go ahead. I'll be going after the guys that are only TWICE my size, thanks." White Wing tapped a hoof against his headset, and his optics mode switched to thermal vision. "Okay, I've got something! Zephyr, circle around and get ready to follow-up when you see an opening! Let's go!"

Centering his view on the upright blob of bright orange below, White Wing switched vision modes again and swooped down onto the figure.

"Whoa!" the figure shouted, holding up an arm to shield himself.

White barely managed to veer away at the last second to avoid hitting his target, and stumbled into the mud instead. The creature he had been lining up to hit was a human man, wearing their typical outfit of a red overcoat over a flak vest. He was leaning against a tree and held an arm against his side, suggesting that he was wounded.

"A friendly? How did you get here?" White Wing asked, lifting up his optics.

The mercenary shook his head. "I circled around hoping to cut off the snipers. And I did. For all the good it did me," he spat, "one of those bird-cat things cut me and ran. She made damn good time, too." He pointed off to the side, into the thickets.

The pegasus clicked his tongue as his wingmare moved into a hover directly above him. "Aw, haystacks. We might've let her get too much of a lead on us."

He spread his wings again, but then hesitated and glanced at the human soldier. "Hey, do you need help? We can stay if you need us..."

"I'll be fine," the man grunted, "get that damn bird! Uh... cat. Thing."

"On it!" The stallion jumped into the air and flew up above the trees again, followed by his partner.

The two pegasi soared deeper into the storm, switching vision modes frequently and winding their paths to cover a greater area. Minutes stretched by with no sign of their quarry.

"Shoot. I think we really lost her," grumbled White Wing.

"... I wonder what happened to all his wargear," Zephyr said, turning her head back where they had flown from.

"What?"

"That guy had no weapons. No rifle, no goad, no sidearm... There wasn't anything on his belt, either. Did the griffon manage to strip all his gear during a hit-and-run attack?"

"...... Huh. Weird."

****

"The 38th Company is a perfectly valid government entity with a..." Twilight galloped to the side as a fireball exploded against the tree next to her, peppering her armor with mud and bits of wood. "... A serious claim to this planet!" She continued racing forward, and then teleported across a clearing such that she was facing her pursuer.

"I don't CARE," growled the dragon as he pushed through the trees and rain, "stop talking and FIGHT ME."

"That sort of attitude is only going exacerbate-"

She teleported again to avoid a stream of flame, re-materializing behind the massive beast.

"-the problems that drive you to resist Company dominion in the first place!"

Twilight jumped into a hover as the dragon's tail swept about to try to swat her away. "Besides, you can't seriously think you can defeat the Iron Warriors militarily!"

The dragon hissed as he turned around. "I have to admit, I'm more of a 'short-term' thinker. I cannot fathom how such a war would end. But this BATTLE, at least, can only end with your death!"

Another tongue of flame blasted out toward the armored pony, and she was briefly swallowed by flame and steam.

Twilight emerged a moment later, however, blasting higher into the air against the constant downpour. "Unlikely! I've already analyzed and figured out your ambush plan!"

"Congratulations," the dragon snorted as he launched himself up to follow her, "it really wasn't that complex."

"No, but it did have certain important subtleties to it!" Twilight countered as she continued to blast higher up over the treetops. "Specifically, you were obviously going to great lengths to avoid the actual patrol convoy and its armor escort!"

This gave the dragon pause. "... Wait, why does that-"

The sound of anti-air fire cut off the beast's question, and a furious roar emerged from his throat after he found himself being hammered by powerful armor-piercing shells. Chunks of scaled plating were blasted away, and his flapping became more desperate as his wings were shredded apart.

"BRIMSTONE!! A thousand curses upon you, pony!" he snarled, glancing at the patrol convoy out of the corner of his eye. Evidently he'd been led much closer to the road while he'd been chasing the armored equine through the forest, and now the humans' heavier guns had a bead on him. They had even called in some extra ones, it seemed, since a pair of drop-deployed quad-cannon turrets were thundering against his hide.

The patrol's Predator tank fired its twin-linked lascannon into his torso, searing through his body at a temperature that made a mockery of his draconic, fire-resistant hide. His wings faltered and the dragon fell.

Twilight heaved a vox-scrambled sigh once the dragon hit the ground, generating a hefty wave of mud. Then she angled around for a descent.

Twilight's helmet scanned over the fallen dragon while she landed, marking out the numerous bleeding wounds and analyzing them to determine cause and severity.

"So, now that you've felt a small sample of the Company's weapons, are you ready to surrender?" the force harmonizer flashed as it engaged its blade mode, and the arrow-shaped wedge of magic power crackled against the falling rain.

The dragon shifted weakly to twist its head around and look at the pony that had outmaneuvered him. "I will NOT submit, equine," he choked out, "you and your Princess may bend knee to the iron tyrants, but you will come to regret your cowardice."

"Not nearly as much as we would have regretted the 'courage' of letting them leave, but apparently you don't care about that," Twilight grumbled, "look, it's not that I can't sympathize with your resistance. I do. But you should be helping us build a new world that we can all tolerate, not dragging us all into a war that you can't possibly win!"

"Build a new world? Ha!" The dragon coughed painfully after the attempt at laughing, and his vision started spinning as ever more hot, steaming blood oozed into the muck below. "A world where Chaos rules the planet and you ponies wait on them like loyal hounds? You can have it!" He coughed again. "But you'll have to fight for it first, Princess."

"... So be it," Twilight said sadly as the force harmonizer floated forward, "show me your neck, dragon. The Twiblade with finish-"

"That's a stupid name for a weapon," the dragon interrupted.

"Oh, just shut up!" the alicorn shouted as she scrunched up her muzzle. The humming purple blade darted forward.

****

Ferrous Dominus - sector 25

Chez le Saddle

Twilight walked into the restaurant uncertainly, her armored gait feeling more and more out of place with every step.

She had never been in this place before, as it was a fairly new establishment. Unlike the other eateries in the fortress that she'd seen, this one conspicuously avoided sharing the same aesthetic as the rest of the fortress at large. The flooring was layered with a plush ivory carpet, the chairs were all delicate wooden constructs (in different sizes and shapes for different species), and the walls and ceiling were covered over in textured wallpaper that hid the armor, pipes, and riveting that usually "decorated" the building interiors.

The most impressive - and obvious - attempt to escape the general atmosphere of the base, however, were the windows. Rather than actually letting customers see out into the dreary cocktail of smog and rain that Twilight had just walked through, each window was covered over with a vid-screen. These screens displayed high-fidelity images of far nicer places, giving the restaurant a bizarre but effective sense of displacement from the fortress-factory. On one side of the restaurant one could see endless stretches of ocean occasionally broken by a breaching whale or sea serpent. The other walls boasted other peaceful environments, from jungle canopies to grassy savannas.

"Welcome to Chez le Saddle, Princess Sparkle," said a greeter at the front. Twilight quickly turned her head around, suddenly quite aware that she had been standing in front of the entrance and gawking at the decor.

Sitting behind a small podium was a unicorn mare possessing the same vaguely disinterested semi-sneer that seemed a permanent fixture on the wait staff at these sorts of places. "It is an honor for Chez le Saddle to serve you tonight, your Highness," the greeter said, somehow managing to perfectly combine her haughty expression and tone with her fawning words, "will you be claiming one of our VIP rooms this evening?"

"I'm actually meeting with Rarity. Is she already here?" Twilight asked, looking over the dining floor. The restaurant was half full, with the vast majority of the customers being ponies. There were a few humans here and there, however, and one table where a pegasus was evidently having a very intense conversation with a pair of Kroot.

"Let's see... ah, yes. Under Delgan, party of four. Very good." The mare gestured to the side with her hoof. "Our dress code, unfortunately, does not allow for powered armor at the table. If you would like, we can have your suit disassembled and stored until your departure."

Twilight looked where the greeter was pointing, and she was rather impressed to see a tile-floor alcove off to the side with servo arms hanging from the ceilings and walls.

"No, thank you, I can take care of it," Twilight said as she turned back around. With a flash of purple light, her armor seemed to disintegrate around her, and soon the alicorn was naked.

"Ah, very good," the greeter unicorn walked toward a stairwell, seeming utterly unfazed by the feat of magic, "this way, your Highness."

The unicorn led Twilight Sparkle up the stairs and then into a new hallway with soundproofed doors leading to a series of private dining rooms. She knocked on one of them, and then waited for the indicator lumen to turn green.

"There you are, Princess Sparkle," the greeter said as she stepped aside, "if you need anything, please notify your waitress via the vox link at your table." With a brief nod, she started heading back down the stairs.

"Thank you," Twilight managed before the other mare walked out of earshot. With a momentary glance at the green lumen, Twilight pushed the door open.

"Twilight, darling! I'm so glad you could make it!" Rarity said brightly.

"Greetings, Princess Sparkle," said Delgan before sipping a glass of amasec.

Fluttershy mumbled something unintelligible in greeting, and then went back to lapping at her tea.

Twilight sat down next to Fluttershy while twisting her head around to stare at the walls. Rather than the windows being covered with vid-screens, they covered three of the walls entirely. The image they played was of an underwater vid-capture, making it seem like the dining room was surrounded by schools of fish, sharks, and the odd kraken.

"Wow. This is really nice," the alicorn mumbled, quite surprised and impressed.

"Isn't it just a world apart from the filth and blight outside?" Rarity asked with a grin. "This room uses some of the lowest technology available to the fleet, and look at how much they've done with it!" She sighed. "I'll have to ask Solon if he can install a similar system in my room."

Twilight winced. "Rarity, if the technology isn't that sophisticated, couldn't any Acolyte install the system? Why would you have to bother the Warsmith?"

"So that it responds to my magic, of course!" Rarity tapped a button on the table, and a hololithic panel appeared in front of her. "These hololith menus are neat, of course, but hard to use with hooves. Everything is built with fingers in mind. And you know how the tech-clergy get when asked to accommodate psykers. Solon should be able to come up with something more convenient for me."

"At this point I'm quite certain he's only refrained from killing you as a favor to me, Miss Rarity," Delgan drawled.

The white unicorn scoffed. "Oh, please! Solon complains, but the man is an absolute dear beneath all his grumbling! I'm sure he doesn't really mind!"

Twilight and Fluttershy chuckled nervously as Rarity gingerly tapped a spot on the hololith. "Go ahead and order, girls. Tonight's feast is on the Merchant Corps."

"As free with my money as always," Delgan said as he rolled his liquor glass about in his hand, "on the subject of the Warsmith, though, I don't think he'll have time to build anything for anyone. The fleet is finishing final preparations to depart."

Twilight blinked. "So soon? I thought there was going to be another week's delay, at most."

"Lord Sliver decided to abandon the Triumph of Baal to this system for now. The materials it holds are being shifted to other vessels as much as possible, but the priority, evidently, is to get our supplies to the Legion armies immediately."

"How long until they depart?" Rarity asked thoughtfully.

"They're aiming for tomorrow."

Fluttershy tapped her order into the floating hololith. "So does that mean you're all leaving until you can drop off your supplies?"

"Not all of us, no," the Trademaster said, "almost all of the Iron Warriors will go, and a fair majority of the Dark Mechanicus. The humans that aren't strictly necessary to the drop off - including myself - will be left behind to protect the manufactorum and keep up production while the fleet is gone. A good deal for everyone; the Eye of Terror can be rather... hard on us mortals, and the Iron Warriors dislike having to deal with the additional disruption among the human troops when we're not even needed for combat duty." He paused to sip his drink. "The Nethalican is to silence the storm tonight."

"Well, that's a relief. Kind of," Rarity put her own order into the hololith screen, "I'll be glad that those 'mana surges' will finally stop, but it's somewhat nerve-racking that our planet could be subjected to a new alien invasion at any time, and without having the Astartes on hand to help fight."

"How many Iron Warriors will be left here?" Twilight asked as she too ordered her dinner.

"From what I heard, merely a dozen. That includes Lord Serith, Lord Dest, and Warpsmith Kessler, who will be in command of the skeleton crew." Delgan finished his drink and put down the empty glass. "It does NOT include Lord Tellis, although he's liable to end up staying here anyway. We imagine that he'll show up the day after the fleet departed and start asking around about where everyone is. So, you know, we can look forward to that."

Twilight pursed her lips as she thought that over. "That means the fortress will be vulnerable..."

"Vulnerable? To what? The Orks?" Rarity asked.

"I wouldn't worry about them too much; even if they could muster the numbers necessary to be a threat to Ferrous Dominus, it's doubtful they could lay a successful siege. And they probably won't even try, since they're busy running rampant over the countryside."

"Also, we'll still have the Tau," Fluttershy pointed out.

Rarity and Twilight gave her an exasperated look.

"Wh-What?" the pegasus shrunk back, afraid that she had said something wrong.

"Nothing. I'm just not sure whether the Tau are an asset to our defenses, or a threat," Twilight mumbled.

"Oh, come now. Love and tolerate a little," Delgan said before the entry buzzer rang.

"Appetizers are here!" Rarity said gleefully as she cleared the waiters for entry. "You're going to LOVE the salads, Norris! This chef is quite famous for them!"

"No doubt. Although I'd really hoped human and equine integration had reached such levels that I could get a steak. You're going to turn me vegetarian at this rate."

Twilight tuned out the small talk as the group's salads were distributed, thinking on the fleet's impending departure.

She supposed that she shouldn't be seriously concerned. Ferrous Dominus was easily the most heavily militarized location in the world, and the soldiers that were to act as its garrison were still perfectly capable. The Tau hadn't shown much capacity for rebellion so far, and still possessed no obvious route off-planet. Luna and Equinought Squadron would be ready to defend the base. And - just maybe - a general lack of Iron Warriors might allow Equestria to take a leading role in dealing with matters of expansion and integration.

Nothing to worry about at all...

"Twilight, how did your patrol go today?" Rarity asked, snapping the Princess out of her thoughts.

"Oh, not too bad. I killed a dragon," Twilight levitated her fork up to her plate.

Delgan quirked an eyebrow. "Did you, now? I'll bet that skull would make quite a trophy. Would you be willing to sell it?"

"The unit champion took it. I think he's going to mount it onto the Predator." Twilight shrugged. "Which is fine by me. It DID score the first mortal wound."

"I miss our old conversations, about flowers and friendship," Fluttershy murmured before the group fell silent to eat.

****

Ferrous Dominus - sector 22 guard barracks

Twilight sighed happily to herself as she walked back to her room, feeling quite contented after a fine meal and relaxing atmosphere.

"Subsisting on nutrient gruel most days really makes you appreciate good food like that," she said to no one as she reached the door to her quarters.

The ID scanner read her armor identifier, and the door thumped loudly before it slid open.

"Spike? Did someone fix my cogitator console yet?"

The young dragon was sitting next to his bed, tapping at a dataslate. "Does it look fixed?" he asked without turning his head around.

Twilight had to admit that it did not. The screen was just a hole in the wall that had been covered over with strips of thick tape, and the controls were a mess of twisted metal.

"I called in the DarkMechs, but they said they were busy getting everything prepared to go with the fleet and didn't have time for it today," Spike explained.

Twilight groaned. "Drat. I thought you had some special pull with them?"

"That's probably what it looks like to you since they don't literally throw me out of the temples, but no, not really," he finally turned his head to look up at the Princess, "do you want me to ask one of those Earth Caste guys? They've had more free time lately."

"No, never mind. I'll just use my helmet unit until a Techpriest can come around," Twilight sighed as she cast the spell to banish her power armor again.

"Your call. Also, you got mail." Spike pointed toward her desk.

Twilight saw a rolled-up scroll waiting for her, tied closed with string, and her eyebrow rose. "A letter? From who?"

"Don't know. It came by regular mail, apparently. Servitor dropped it off this afternoon."

Twilight picked up the scroll with her levitation magic and untied the string. Then she unfurled the parchment and looked at the signature at the bottom.

"It's from Princess Celestia!" Twilight gasped.

Spike jerked his head up. "What? Really?" That seemed very odd to him. Why would Celestia send Twilight a message by ordinary mail rather than his fire teleport? "Does she not trust me now because of those messages that Serith intercepted? He doesn't do that anymore!"

"The Princess can't know that for certain," Twilight pointed out as she read the letter, "and come to think of it, we can't either, really."

Spike groaned and folded his arms over his chest. "Oh, fine. So what's SO IMPORTANT that the Princess had to send it by Pony Post, but not so important that she couldn't just get anypony with a vox system to tell you?"

Twilight didn't respond for several seconds. Then she didn't respond for several more seconds.

The silence continued, and Spike started to get worried. "Twi? Is... everything okay?"

"...... Interesting," Twilight finally mumbled, "this changes everything."

"Wh-What? What do you mean?" Spike asked nervously.

"Start packing our things, Spike. We're going on a trip."

Author's Note

And the saga continues. I decided to go with "Entrenchment" after all.
I'll be writing up a more general (and constantly expanding) character roster soon rather than doing the usual thing where I post everything at the beginning. I'll also be posting most of my notes and story discussion topics in the Age of Iron group rather than in my profile blog, so if that doesn't convince you to join the group, then I'm completely out of ideas!

Springing the Trap

Entrenchment

An Age of Iron Story

Chapter 14

Springing the trap

****

Ferrous Dominus

Sector 1 – Security Checkpoint

“Auspex scans complete. Let’s see… drones, personnel, battlesuits, weapons…”

The guard at the gate sounded bored as he checked off the contents of the Tau transports waiting for entry. Several Devilfish APCs and cargo haulers hovered in a line outside the main gate, and a Fireblade stood before the mighty guns of the palisade with his pulse carbine by his side.

“Is there a reason for all this stuff?” asked a voice off to the side.

The Fireblade turned his head. A unicorn in a flak helmet and rebreather was walking along the length of his transport while an auspex scanner hovered over him and picked out the contents.

“This is a military base. These are military supplies,” the alien grunted, his hand resting on the stock of his carbine.

“We were only expecting a transfer of a bunch of experimental walkers,” the pony retorted, slipping his goggles up to glare at the Fireblade. “Instead you bring all this? I don’t even see the walkers!”

“Shas’el Wraithstar has demanded that additional forces and equipment be transferred to Black Point to aid our combat readiness. Is that a problem?” the alien snapped.

“When you do it without telling anypony, yeah, it is!” the equine snapped back.

“Give it a rest, would you Cutlass?” the human guard grunted. He held up a dataslate. “Fireblade, I’ve cleared all your equipment and re-activated your security passes, but some of your crew haven’t been here before. Take those without security cards to be registered before proceeding to the Xenis barracks.”

The gates yawned open, and the convoy started moving into the fortress proper. Most of the Devilfish APCs followed the cargo haulers down the main avenue, while several peeled off toward the structure used to register newcomers that didn’t arrive by train.

One Devilfish coasted off to the side, and then its entry hatch swung open. A pair of hovering drones, each one equipped with a small array of welders and transmitter uplinks, slipped out and then zipped away. The hatch closed and the APC accelerated away.

“What are they doing now?” the pony groused from the guard kiosk. “What are those drones for?”

“I think they’re the Earth Caste units. They use them for maintenance and stuff. Relax, Cutlass.” The mercenary tossed aside his dataslate and leaned back in his seat. “Seriously, you’re too jumpy around the grays. What do you think they’re going to do?”

“I don’t trust them,” the stallion huffed. “They’re twisted, back-stabbing, evil aliens!”

“So am I, but you and I get along.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s because you give me ear scratches.”

“Hah! C’mere, you!”

As the mercenary rubbed the pony’s head, the engineering drone floated higher and higher, rising next to the massive macro-cannon towers on top of the gate. It stopped at a seemingly arbitrary point, and several antennae unfolded from its shielding. Then it flipped 90 degrees, attached to the side of the tower, and then fixed itself in place.

The drone’s optics dimmed, and it went into stand-by mode.

****

Ponyville

Train station

Applejack and Big Mac trotted down the road, their heavy greaves leaving deep indents in the dirt. Behind each of the two siblings was a huge metal cart full of bright blue apples. Four more farmers, including Braeburn, were hitched to a third cart behind the power-armored Apples and following along, but the others struggled to keep pace with the sheer mass of their cargo.

“Awright, our first big order!” Applejack laughed while pulling up next to the station. “The blue moons’re sellin’ like cider!”

The tail of her armor was clamped onto the cart hitch, and it snapped off as soon as the hauler came to a complete stop. Applejack turned around while Big Mac pulled up next to her.

“Braeburn, ya got everythin’ ya need?”

“Sure do, Cuz!” Braeburn hopped free of his harness and then started digging under his vest with his nose. A moment later he raised his head again with several train tickets held tight in his teeth.

“Manehattan, here we come! When Ah bring these trailers back, they’ll be haulin’ bits!”

“Ya’ll sure ya don’t need servitors or Big Mac’s help to deal with the load?” Applejack asked.

“Naw! They’ve got them fancy cranes and trucks t’do haulin’ now!” Braeburn winked. “Ah gotcha covered, Cuz! Ya leave the sale t’me an’ take care o’ them apple spires while Ah’m gone!”

The frontier pony leaned his head to the side, spotting a fast-approaching gray blur. “There she is! Right on schedule!”

“Well, o’course it is. If them Chaos boys were late somebody’d probably die fer it,” Applejack giggled, trailing off with a snort.

She spotted a servitor staggering across the passenger platform – wearing a train engineer’s hat, bizarrely enough – and Applejack stamped her hoof. “Hey there! We got cargo!”

The cyborg shuddered to a halt, and then twisted its head toward the farmers. “Designate destination.”

“Manehattan Bastion Primus. The big station.”

“All cargo cars are reserved on designated vehicle.”

“Yeah, Ah know. I reserved ‘em! Braeburn, give ‘im the ticket!”

The train started to slow it approach into the station, and a loud hum came from the single rail it was hovering over. Lashes of power snapped and flashed from the rail to the repulsor anchors, and the vehicle shuddered while its speed fell dramatically.

The servitor’s optics pulsed over the ticket pinched in its claw. “Registration confirmed. Cargo verified. Beginning loading sequence in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…”

The train slid to a complete stop, and a series of hissing noises erupted from the vehicle before it was secured to the station dock. Doors opened, access bridges extended, cranes started shifting, and a gruff, angry voice started yelling from the vox caster for the passengers to disembark.

“Awright, looks like ya got this well in hoof,” Applejack said. Cargo cranes swiveled over the carts and lowered, clamping onto the heavy steel boxes. “Me an’ Mac are gonna head back, now. Bloom should be back from Temple soon.”

“G’bye, Cuz!”

Applejack and Big Mac began trotting away. The former glanced over to the station platform. Then she lightly banged her boot against Big Mac’s bionic leg.

“Hey, Mac. Get a load ‘o the new visitors!” she chuckled. “Ah guess they ain’t never seen a pony in these digs before.”

Big Mac stopped and turned his head around. Five figures had stepped off the train platform and were staring at the Apple siblings in bewilderment. They were obviously human, and were dressed in long black robes and hoods. One of them was a slightly taller woman, with locks of bluish-green hair poking out from her cowl.

Applejack called out to them. “Hey there! Y’all new to Ponyville ain’tcha?”

The hooded figures jolted in surprise, and most of them turned toward the tall one. She glanced at the others, and then nodded to Applejack.

“Well, Ah’m guessin’ ya ain’t Sunsworn, so the Chaos Temple’s thataway!” Her tail swiveled up over her head and pointed off to distant pyramid. “Big black thingamajigger on the far side ‘o town. Skulls hangin’ off it, shoots evil into the sky, can’t miss it.”

The stranger hesitated, then nodded again. “Thank you, pony,” she rasped.

“Think nothin’ of it! And if y’all get hungry, consider stoppin’ by Sweet Apple Acres fer some fresh blue moon apples!”

The farmer grinned and started trotting away again. Big Macintosh tilted his head to the side, staring for a few seconds, and then eventually turned away to follow her.

“… Ignorant hicks. I can’t believe humans actually give these useless animals their weapons.” Chrysalis hissed to herself while watching the farmers leave.

She pulled her gaze away from the heavily armored equines. The Nethalican was as easy to spot as Applejack suggested; a big, black structure, totally out of place, that loomed over the rest of the village. Chrysalis wasn’t sure what she meant by the “shoot evil into the sky” part, but it didn’t matter.

Now that she had gotten this far, the changeling Queen felt an uncomfortable sense of foreboding. This all seemed too easy. The disparity of military power on display in the badlands versus that of Ponyville seemed too vast for them to be concealing such an important font of power. And on top of her purely strategic concerns, there was… something else. A hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Without question, she had set out for this temple with far less intelligence than she usually insisted upon. All she knew about the Nethalican was that it was a source of some sort of planetary defense, Tox had claimed it was a source of infinite power, and Tox had returned to her a diseased, mutated traitor. Was she putting too much faith in this lead? Could it be a misunderstanding? A diversion? Or even a trap?

The distant temple pulsed. A bright, white aura swam around it, and then condensed into whips of lightning arcs that crawled up toward the peak. The energy vanished, and then a moment later a beam of sheer power screamed into the sky.

“… I must have it,” Chrysalis hissed, pushing away her doubts. “I WILL have it.”

She gestured sharply to her entourage, and her servants rushed ahead toward the distant temple. Chrysalis followed them, her eyes glittering from underneath the shadow of her hood.

****

Black Point

Containment center

“EEEEEYAAAAA!!”

Wraithstar winced as a feminine shriek of pain came from the cell next to him, and the ex-Commander clenched his hands tight. He banged a fist on the wall between cells, and a growl rose in his throat.

“Would you STOP that? How many times do you need to test the blasted restraint collar? YES, it works! Quit it!”

In the cell in question, Rarity lay in a twitching heap on the ground. Smoke curled around her badly frayed mane, and thick bandages covered her hind legs.

“Th-That wasn’t a test!” the unicorn groaned while she pushed herself up. “It was an accident! I’m used to levitating things! How am I supposed to eat without manipulating the spoon? I don’t have hands, or even wings! It’s impossible!”

Gear Works tilted his head to the side. “Us earth ponies manage well enough.”

Rarity’s eyes narrowed at the only other equine in the containment block. “Yes, of course. You manage so well that you went and got an extra limb installed in your back first chance you got.”

“Ah. Touché,” Gears mumbled, straightening again.

Rarity gingerly tapped a hoof against the collar around her neck. It was a thick ceramic ring with coils of metal threads twisted around it, and a hefty box attached to the circumference that held both the power supply and the sensors that detected any nearby psionic activity. The collar emitted an intensely painful shock every time she tried to use even the tiniest bit of magic, which she hated almost as much as how ugly it looked.

“Why do your people even have things like this?” she asked weakly. “I thought you didn’t even know anything about ponies when you came here!”

“We have those collars for general hostile containment. The psionic-detection settings are fairly unique, but only because the Lamman Sept spends a lot of time capturing and studying psykers.” Wraithstar turned his head as a gun drone hovered past outside his cell, doing an automated patrol circuit. “You should be thankful. If we didn’t have them, our only choice would have been execution.”

“I am LESS than thankful,” Rarity hissed. “This is a complete disaster! We have hundreds of your people crawling around Ferrous Dominus and no one the wiser! What’s going on, Wraithstar?! What is Voidsong plotting?!”

“Shas’o Voidsong is plotting a heroic last stand among a pile of human corpses. Beyond that I don’t know.” He sighed. “I do know that she isn’t going to sell her life cheap. Her current forces are trifling in terms of total combat power, but she’s in an ideal position. She will sink the dagger deep, and the Company will not see it coming.”

Gear Works turned his head as another drone passed through the hall, following its movement.

“Do you think, Shas’el…” one of the other Tau prisoners started to speak, but then trailed off nervously.

“I am Shas’el no longer,” Wraithstar said. “Speak your mind. What punishment do you have to fear at this point?”

“Do you think the Shas’o could be right, Wraithstar?” the other alien laced his fingers together, his expression grim. “Are we the ones who disgraced Tau’va? Are we the traitors?”

The cell block was silent for several seconds. Rarity mumbled to herself about needing a mirror, while Gear Works watched another drone pass by his cell.

“… There is no good answer to that question. For our entire lives, we are taught the ways of Tau’va. To subordinate all other loyalties to The Greater Good. That our lives are meaningless in comparison to the destiny of our empire.” Wraithstar sighed. “I’m not sure when I started to doubt that creed. It was long before I’d reached this world and had to choose between survival and empty martyrdom. Years of war – of seeing zealots die painfully and uselessly – may have disillusioned me. I’ve been fighting for over a decade, always in the most dangerous, brutal conditions. I haven’t even seen an Ethereal since before I ascended to the rank of Shas’el. So maybe I am wrong. Maybe war has simply exhausted my trust in our leaders.”

He chewed on his lip for a few seconds. “But it’s possible… possible that I learned the truth, instead. A truth that most other sentients seem to acknowledge from birth that needs to be washed out by propaganda, lies, or psychic enslavement in order to make them into ‘proper soldiers.’ That we’re not just mere components in a great war machine. That we’re more than currency to be expended for the sake of some abstract triumphalism and deluded dream of empire. That our individual survival matters. That our lives are important.”

He shifted in his cell, peering through the bars at the worker who had asked the question. “The humans working for Chaos sell their lives for glory, wealth, and power. What do we sell ours for? An illusion. A dream that we are told, flatly, we will never see realized in our lifetimes, but which is more important than we are. And for this dream, this goal that is still hundreds or perhaps thousands of years in the making and will inflict trillions of deaths more, we are told to lay down and perish. Lest our survival inconvenience the Empire.”

He shook his head, chuckling wearily. “No. I do not think us wrong, or selfish, or evil to object. But then again, I’m the one who’s lost our traditional purpose and guidance; Voidsong has not. And – not to put too fine a point on it – I’m also the one locked up for insubordination and treason.”

“Not for long,” Gear Works said. “The drones have stopped.”

Everyone in the cell block was startled by the announcement, and they scrambled to look. The gun drones that patrolled the facility in lieu of living guards had frozen in place, hovering silently with their optics lights blinking.

“What? How? Why?” Wraithstar stammered in surprise.

“Gears, you bionic devil! You disabled the drones?” Rarity asked, grinning.

“No, of course not. I can’t do that.” Gear Works turned around in his cell, and his spike-tipped tail slithered out from beneath his robe.

Wraithstar still seemed confused. “But… Fio’el Fennin mentioned you could access the control nexus and-“

“Yes, he did. He was lying. I cannot access the Tau’s encrypted networks without a manual uplink,” Gear Works admitted. “And while he was lying about that, he set up an unusually long update cycle for the gun drones that would be guarding us. They’ll be out of action for several minutes, at least.” The Dark Acolyte’s tail slipped between the electrified bars of his cage, managing to clear the sparking conduits with mere millimeters on each side.

“Several minutes? Can we escape in several minutes?” Rarity asked, looking back and forth anxiously.

“Since all the live guards left with the assault force, yes!” Gears chirped. “Or rather, I can escape, at least.” His tail started twisting around, aiming the dataspike tip at the control console. “Fennin’s most crucial deception was telling the guards that my augments wouldn’t work on their systems. They do. And he knew that.”

The metal tendril suddenly snapped toward the console, piercing the case and stabbing into the internals. Sparks blasted from the contact, and the lights under the Acolyte’s hood dimmed and brightened seemingly at random.

“Data feed accessed… register access protocols disabled… locating primary control node… confirmed.”

A loud click came from his cell, and the bars suddenly sunk into the floor.

“Splendid!” Rarity cheered, shifting into a sitting position and clapping her front hooves together. “Now we have to get to-HEY! Where are you going?!”

Gear Works flinched. He had turned toward the exit, and started creeping in the opposite direction of Rarity’s cell. She had noticed.

“I have to get out of here! The update cycle will only disable the drone combat tracking subroutines for 80 seconds longer, maximum! If I’m not gone by then, they’ll re-activate and vaporize me!”

“Then what are you going to do?! You’re not going to leave me here, are you?!” Rarity demanded.

“Uh… well… I mean, ideally-“

“GET BACK HERE AND OPEN MY CAGE, YOU CYBERNETIC GHOUL!!”

Wraithstar sighed and slammed a fist onto the wall to get the equine’s attention. “Dark Acolyte, does your interface system work on all our systems? Would it work on the drones themselves?”

The cyborg pony hesitated, glancing over at the nearest automated gun platform. “I… think? But I can’t possibly reconfigure its friend-or-foe identification subroutines in time for-“

“Seize direct control of a drone and shoot the others,” Wraithstar ordered. “Hurry!”

Gears flinched again, and then turned his optics toward the nearby combat drone. His tail extended again, the dataspike freezing in place briefly while the tendril mounting it coiled like a waiting viper.

The spike punched through the drone undercarriage, and it wobbled unsteadily in the air. Gear’s optics dimmed, and then started blinking on and off again in sequence.

“Okay, let’s see here… this network is a little more complex than the last one…” The drone quivered, and ribbons of electricity danced over the top of its armor dome. “Ugh, so much layered code! I always told Fennin that branched code pathing is much better for access routing!”

“What? No, that’s a terrible idea,” interjected one of the Earth Caste prisoners.

“So you say from behind the bars of a cage while I’m trying to re-order a horizontally stratified codex schema as quickly as possible so I don’t die,” Gear Works retorted. “As somepony who has great need for cracking your control algorithms at the moment, I assure you, they’re terrible.”

The worker was unconvinced. “In ANY other situation aside from needing you to manually interface with the primary core drivers, the codex scheme would be much-“

“STOP ARGUING AND SECURE THE BLASTED WEAPON!” Wraithstar shouted.

The drone connected to Gear Works shook in place, and then its optics blinked on fully.

“I’m in! Targeting systems linked! I’m opening fire!” the stallion shouted.

The drone swiveled, aiming its twin pulse carbines at its nearest twin. The weapons screamed and released a stream of crackling blue particles, every one of which missed the top of the target by several inches and splashed against a wall.

“… Okay, wait, I think the linking algorithm was off,” the Dark Acolyte mumbled.

“GEARS!” Rarity screamed, pointing a hoof through the bars of her cage. “The lights on the drones are blinking! Hurry!”

The drone attached to Gear Works fired another volley, and this time the burst struck true. The automated guard was ripped apart, and the pieces of polyceramic armor fell to the floor in smoldering chunks.

“Four more! Next target, right flank!” Wraithstar barked.

Gear Works turned his head, his optics glittering in the shadows of his cloak. The next drone was blasted apart by shrieking bolts of power, and the Kroot in the nearby cell flinched away in annoyance.

“Next target, ten o’clock!”

Another drone burst apart under the fusillade, and an electronic cackle came from Gear’s vocalizer.

“Gears! They’re moving!” Rarity warned.

One drone quickly pivoted in place, wobbling slightly while it lined up its carbines toward the escapee. It was a split-second too late, and a trio of shimmering blue energy pulses ripped it apart in the air before it could fire.

There was, however, one more drone in the area, and Rarity gasped when it turned its guns on the Dark Acolyte. Gritting her teeth and squinting her eyes, Rarity directly all her focus to a single telekinetic push, as strong as she could.

The very moment her horn lit up, a nerve-shredding electric surge stabbed into her. Rarity screamed, but through the pain she managed to at least set off the machine’s aim. The drone tilted sharply, and its fire screamed over Gear Work’s head.

The cyborg stallion yelped, and he immediately flattened onto the ground while shifting the gun drone over his face to protect it. The remaining guard drone steadied itself, and then a burst of pulse shots crashed into the makeshift shield.

“Acolyte! Fire back!” Wraithstar ordered.

“But I-it can’t with the-MEEP!” Gear Works stuttered helplessly while his drone was ripped apart under the barrage. Eventually the fire became so intense that the hijacked drone burst around Gear’s tail, coming apart in a puff of smoke and raining smoldering bits and pieces onto the pony’s robe.

The active drone paused briefly while its sensors adjusted to the smoke, angling a new firing arc down on the prostrate stallion.

Then a pulse bolt struck it square in its sensor array. The drone rocked back through the air, sputtering sparks and blasts of smoke. Then its anti-grav booster died, and the machine fell onto the floor with an anticlimactic thud.

“… Is it over? Did we lose?” Rarity moaned. She was lying on the floor in a fetal position, still feeling the lingering agony of her restraint collar.

“Acolyte! Behind you!” Wraithstar barked. Unlike the unicorn, he’d been watching the entire confrontation. He couldn’t see behind Gears due to the angle of his cell opening, but that pulse shot definitely hadn’t come from the pony.

Gear Works jerked his head up, surprised and amazed at still being alive. Then he stumbled around to looked behind him. “Fennin! Fennin, you’re here!”

The engineer was panting, and his hands quivered as they held a pulse pistol in a double-handed grip. “Yes, well… I would have been here a little earlier, actually, but I heard the pulse fire and assumed everything had gone completely wrong. Rather than just mostly wrong.” He glanced at his wrist, which held a small datascreen. “I managed to re-route some sub-routines so that the main drone dispatcher core won’t be able to process the losses and deploy a hunter-killer team immediately. But we don’t have long.”

Gear Works ran over to the nearest cell and stabbed his tail into the control console. “Fennin, you free the others on that side. I’ll take this one!”

“They don’t actually give me the brig override codes, so I’ll need to access the root file,” the engineer mumbled once he reached his own console. “Just bear with me for a few seconds…”

“Couldn’t you have just deactivated the drones entirely and spared us all this horrid drama?” Rarity huffed.

“Oh, what a fantastic idea! I can tell you’re one of the smart ponies, since you present mind-numbingly simple solutions to people whose job it is to know better!” Fennin replied acidly. “I can’t just ‘turn off’ the drones! There are numerous failsafes and alerts that prevent network-wide failures or interference, many of which need Shas’o verification codes to modify! If I were any LESS brilliant than I am I wouldn’t even be able to disable them for a few minutes at a time!”

The first two cells opened, freeing Wraithstar and a clutch of Earth Caste Tau. Wraithstar clapped Fennin on the shoulder as he stepped out of his prison.

“You did well, Fio’el. I’m not completely sure why you took this risk, however. You never seemed that fond of the humans, nor did I imagine that my earlier lecture to Voidsong moved you.”

“It’s a friendship thing,” Fennin said dismissively. “Anyway, should we free the Kroot? If they’re on our side, great, but if not...”

One of the Carnivores snarled a response, and the other Kroot replied in a cacophony of enraged growls.

“Yes, Fio’el. You may free them. I think they’ll be cooperative. More so than the unicorn, at least.”

“I heard that!” Rarity snapped. “Don’t you even THINK of leaving me here! After what I’ve been through, I’m not going to sit here waiting for everyone else to finish off that treacherous harpy!”

Fennin replied to her while he unlocked the Kroot cell. “I already checked on your armor and weapons. The former is damaged beyond immediate use, and the latter is locked up in the armory. Which is, incidentally, the one place still guarded by the handful of Fire Warriors still on base. I’m not sure how you’ll be of more use outside of your cell.”

Despite Fennin’s explanation, Gear Works trotted up to Rarity’s cell and stabbed his tail into the console.

“Gears, darling, how long would repairing my armor take?” Rarity asked.

“With access to every tool I could want and a quiet place to work where all the inhabitants aren’t all trying to kill me, it would take about a day,” the Dark Acolyte confessed.

“Which is to say, it’s not happening,” Rarity grumbled.

“Not in enough time to make any kind of difference, no.” The console sparked, and the bars retracted. “Although, speaking frankly, I’m not at all sure what we’re supposed to do from here. I didn’t really have a plan aside from getting out of my cell if and when Fennin managed to stall the guard drones.”

“Do we even know what Voidsong is attempting? Is it just a surprise attack?”

“It is not just a surprise attack,” Fennin replied. “Using stolen data from the Company noosphere, the Fio’o managed to modify our communication disruption drones to broadcast oscillating IFF signums ripped from the Company datastacks that artificially converge on sensor pings. The plan is to spread them throughout Ferrous Dominus in preparation of the main assault.”

“Uh… and that would do… what, exactly?” Rarity asked, glancing toward Gear Works.

“It would disguise every single sensory intercept as a friendly,” Gears explained while he observed the collar around Rarity’s neck. “Every automated defense system and the majority of cybernetic combatants would be unable to detect hostiles. Brilliant, if somewhat unnecessary.”

“Unnecessary?”

“Voidsong and her team are all Tau. Tau are already permitted in Ferrous Dominus. The tactical benefit of being continually flagged as friendly after bypassing the most impressive defenses is somewhat marginal.”

Wraithstar grimaced. “I don’t quite understand, but I believe there’s more to it than that. In any case, we should send a dispatch to Ferrous Dominus immediately.”

“Not happening,” Fennin said curtly. “All communications are locked down, and I’d need the Fio’o to unlock them. That’s in addition to a vox-dampening field to foil any unauthorized devices anywhere near Black Point. Voidsong made sure no one staying behind and out of her reach would be able to warn the Company.”

“Devilfish? Or any other vehicles?”

“Already taken or also locked down. We could probably unlock those eventually, but not before the drones figured out what was happening and sent that hunter-killer team.”

Wraithstar groaned and clutched at his forehead. “Useless. This was all useless, then. All we can do is hide from the drone patrols and hope everything works out without us!”

“Almost… got it… THERE!”

Rarity gasped as the collar around her neck suddenly popped open on a seam and then tumbled to the floor. Her horn flashed with magic immediately; not because she had any particular need for it, but just to enjoy the sensation without it being accompanied by a severe electric shock. Gear Works withdrew his dataspike from the unicorn’s throat, and a sigh came from his respirator mask.

“Thank you, darling! It feels so good to be a free pony again!” Rarity gushed, running a hoof tenderly across her throat. “I dearly wish we had time for me to correct the absolute MESS these traitors must have made of my coat, but we have a job to do!”

“In all seriousness, the base’s showers are a pretty decent hiding spot if we just want to wait this out. You could clean yourself up there, too,” Fennin replied.

“But we’re not going to wait this out,” Rarity sniffed. “Tell me, Mister Fennin: how well guarded is the battlesuit garage?”

“It’s not guarded at all,” Fennin admitted. “But given that Voidsong took every battlesuit in Black Point, I don’t know how that helps.”

“I highly doubt she took EVERY battlesuit,” Rarity tittered. “A Tau can’t pilot a Strider, darling.”

Wraithstar and Fennin seemed startled at the revelation. Gear Works perked up instantly.

“Of course! Voidsong probably doesn’t even know the Striders exist!” Gears said. Then he paused. “Although that only explains how you and I are going to leave, Miss Rarity. The Striders can maintain long-distance sprints, but we have no other vehicles.”

“Correct. If anyone wants to come with us, they’ll just have to ride on top.”

Fennin immediately raised his hand. “I volunteer to not do that.”

Wraithstar slapped his hand down. “Denied. You and I will go with the ponies. I need you to disable the disruption drones while I get my battlesuit.” He turned toward the few Fire Warriors and the Kroot that had been imprisoned with him. *You will secure the base. Take out the guards around the armory, then arm yourselves. If the drones start getting aggressive, start culling them.*

*Yes, Shas’el!* barked the Fireblade prisoner.

*Not Shas’el, no. That title was stripped from me. I am no longer an agent of Tau’va.* He smirked, and then continued in Gothic. “Now I am only Wraithstar, outcast and survivor of the Emerald Dawn. Commander of the 38th Company Xenis contingent and – so some would claim – servant to Chaos.”

“It’s lovely to have you, dear,” Rarity said with a smile. “Now let’s get going, shall we? It’s a long gallop back to civilization, and we’re running a bit behind!”

****

Changeling hive

“Contacts sighted. Three. No, four. Threat level minimal. Incoming.”

“Confirmed. More captures?”

“Negative. We’ve taken enough of these xenos wretches. Eliminate resistance.”

The changelings skittered across the ground in long leaps. Their wings buzzed loudly with every jump to keep them aloft, and spears and short swords were clenched tight in their jaws or carried along in a cloud of bright green magic. The defenders of the changeling hive zeroed in on the intruders, and then charged with an angry screech that echoed through the caverns.

And then, in the blink of an eye, they perished.

The bark of bolt pistols quickly drowned out the battle cry of the shape-shifting insects. Three of them were ripped apart by mass-reactive rounds in short order. The fourth staggered to the side, its flank torn open by shrapnel. Before it could make much sense of what happened or formulate a response, it found itself staring up at a giant in gleaming silver and gold armor.

“These are the hive defenders? This is what passes as a warrior among this species?” Dest clutched a bolter in his claws, but didn’t aim down at the creature.

The changeling snarled and stabbed its spear toward his abdomen. Dest slapped the weapon away with one hand, tearing it from the changeling’s grasp and throwing it across the tunnel. Then he reached down and seized the guard changeling by its neck.

Another Iron Warrior bearing a flamer walked past the Rhino driver. “These creatures are shape-shifters, no? Clearly their only skill lies in deceit. Falsehoods and trickery will not save them now.”

The changeling in Dest’s grip struggled and thrashed, beating against his vambrace with its twisted, malformed hooves. His grip tightened, and the carapace cracked. The changeling’s struggles ceased, and a faint green glow seemed to seep from the body into Dest’s gauntlet.

Oh man, these little guys are delicious! For real, gut as many as you can because we’re talking SERIOUS soul power, bro! Vel said cheerfully.

“These creatures are psykers and infiltrators… why do they charge at us with sticks and knives?” Dest wondered. “This is too easy.”

Don’t harsh my buzz, roomie. Ork souls are great, but getting them takes so much WORK! These little bug things are tasty, filling, and easy to kill! Don’t sweat it!

“Please stop talking,” Dest begged under his breath.

A Dark Techpriest followed behind the Chaos Space Marines, his mechatendrils hovering near the walls of the cave. Dark green eggs the size of a man’s fist were stuck to the rocks in a thick, wax-like substance, and the tendrils plucked the largest ones from their resting place. Several white changeling grubs were crawling about the ground as well, apparently oblivious to the fighting and the death of their protectors. The Techpriest leaned down, and then picked one up in his augmetic hand.

“The larval changelings show minimal sensory awareness. Unusual for a species of psionic sensitivity. Perhaps psykant traits emerge during the gestation period.”

The Techpriest held the grub closer. It twisted its head and blinked its pale blue eyes, fixated on the cyborg’s green optical lights.

An Acolyte held a glass tube behind the Techpriest. The Techpriest turned and dropped the larvae inside the tube, and then placed a lid on top. The lid sealed with a click and a hiss, and then numerous diagnostic lights and indicators on the top facing came on.

“That is the last sample canister,” the Acolyte said, turning to a servitor who was storing the numerous tubes and a case of eggs. “We may hold specimens and request more from the requisitioner temple, or improvise containment cells from spare materials.”

“Negative. We possess sufficient bio-samples,” the Techpriest advised. His mechatendrils placed the changeling eggs in the large metal case attached to the servitor’s back, and then sealed and locked it. “My lord, we have completed our work. This nest may be cleansed.”

The Iron Warriors took up their flamers on either side of the Tech-cultists, facing the clusters of eggs and obliviously squirming larvae. Dest mag-locked his bolter to his leg, and puffs of Warpflame started leaking from his palms.

“Purge the alien,” growled the driver.

****

The caverns echoed with the screams of pulse discharges and the crack of lasbolts. Followed by the crack of splitting carapace and the screams of dying changelings.

The insect-like quadrupeds scattered, stumbling away from their dying siblings in a confused haze. Another pulse shot ripped through one, searing away its wings and toppling it on its side. Another charged recklessly toward the line of humans, only for a rail rifle shot to strike it in the chest, nearly splitting it in half. The changeling shuddered, and then collapsed into a pile of ichor.

Daniels saw another pair limping away behind a stalagmite formation, and he snatched a fragmentation grenade from his belt. “Watch the right side!”

He flung the explosive against the wall, and it bounced off and landed behind the rocks. A moment later it detonated, and a fan of green slime splashed across the ground.

“… That the last of them?” Daniels asked.

Jerriha tapped the side of her helmet, and then snapped her pulse rifle up into firing position. “Negative. Got two more hiding around the bend.” She raised her pulse carbine, switching on the photon grenade launcher.

With a gentle pop, the stun grenade sailed toward the wall, and then bounced off and landed out of sight. Most of the mercenaries looked away anyhow before a fantastic flash and panicked screeching came from the next tunnel.

“Move!” the Fireblade barked, sprinting to the end of the passage.

She turned the corner and spotted two changelings with helmets stumbling about and screeching. She took aim with her carbine.

In a single burst, both insectoid shape-changers collapsed onto the ground in smoking heaps.

“Huh. Sure aren’t putting up much of a fight, are they?” Daniels mumbled. Despite Jerriha’s order, he showed no particular hurry in joining her. “At least the pones had the good sense to surrender when they were being invaded and had no chance of victory. Why do the bugs keep coming at us like this?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling. This is going too well,” grumbled another man. “Feels like a trap.”

“That’s what I thought at first, too. I believe I was mistaken,” Jerriha said. “This is no trap. This is no defense. This is a nest of animals taken completely by surprise and fighting out of its element.”

“Completely by surprise? How? We practically parked our tanks on their front door!”

“And yet nothing like a barricade or a concentrated counter-charge has materialized.” Jerriha glanced toward Daniels, the optic lens of her helmet gleaming in the dim light. “Tell me, Daniels: Have you ever fought Tyranids?”

“Unfortunately.”

“If your officers at the time were anywhere close to competent and well-informed, they’d know to target the psychic organisms first. They direct and bolster the swarms that give Tyranid armies such relentless staying power.”

She leaned down and nudged a changeling body with her carbine. It twitched.

“Without their leaders, Tyranids become weak. Directionless. Easily startled and incapable of coordinated offense. Some will attack, some will flee, and none of the units will act in concert or with useful timing. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”

She slammed a boot into the changeling’s neck, cracking it and putting the creature out of its misery.

“So, wait, you’re saying these things are controlled like Tyranids?” Daniels asked.

“I don’t know. Swarm dynamics are common evolutionary social structures, and don’t require actual hive minds or psychic networks. But these creatures are used to being guided, and their individual behavior is useless in fending off a concerted attack.” Jerriha turned to face Daniels. “Most importantly, this means their leaders aren’t present. This Queen we’re supposed to capture is not here. This defense is a panicked sham.”

“Sounds like good news to me,” a mercenary mumbled. “I mean, too bad we might miss a mission objective, but it’s rare that a battle turns out EASIER than expected!”

“Maybe…” Jerriha grumbled. “But if the Queen isn’t here, defending her hive in its hour of need… where is she?”

“Excuse me? Hello there!”

Several guns went up as a man wearing the usual long red coat of the Company mercenaries stumbled out of an adjacent tunnel.

“Greetings, fellow space primates! And also this other creature that is not a primate, as I understand, but is also from space!” He waved awkwardly at the soldiers, none of whom stopped aiming at him. “I’m glad I found you! I got lost in these tunnels and I barely managed to avoid the changelings! What a relief!”

Jerriha looked over at Daniels. Daniels pulled up his optics visor and stepped up to the newcomer.

“You seem to have lost your wargear, friend. No rifle, no sidearm… You should be more careful!”

“… Uh, yes! Yes, I should. Sorry about that. I should probably go get a weapon right now, in fact! Where are they?” the man asked, looking unreasonably pleased.

Daniels smashed the butt of his rail rifle into the stranger’s face. The man cried out in pain and stumbled onto his rear, and then his entire body seemed to burn up with green fire. A moment later, a changeling lay on the ground, twitching and bleeding slightly from his head.

“Somebody drag this bug back to the supply line,” Daniels said, stepping over the writhing shape-shifter. “If this is really the best defense they have to offer, then I say we take our time and do a thorough search. Maybe this Queen isn’t here. Or maybe we caught her asleep or something.”

“Sure, whatever. Nothing better to do, anyway,” Jerriha grumbled as she followed.

She paused only briefly, glancing down at the cringing changeling. It seemed so perfectly helpless; a small, weak creature with no weapons which was too stupid to competently use its most impressive natural ability. Yet its leader thought to attack the Iron Warriors? It thought it could overcome Chaos? The thought was hilarious.

But somehow Jerriha didn’t feel much like laughing.

****

Ferrous Dominus – palisade perimeter

20 meters below the surface

Four minotaur trudged through the tunnel, carrying the excavation charge between them. Their steps were stiff and overly deliberate, and their pacing could be generously described as “cautious.” Between the hulking bovines the bomb wasn’t very heavy at all; any one of them could have dragged it through the tunnel. But they were more than a little nervous about hauling a massive explosive charge.

The environment didn’t make them feel any safer. Small, magical glow crystals were stuck into the ceiling of the tunnel, casting a dim but workable light over the interior. The soil around them looked obviously strange; the dirt was black and wet in some places, while seams of some kind of red silt cut through it in a pattern that looked suspiciously like veins. The moist spots tended to ooze slime onto the ground that stuck to everyone’s feet or hooves and smelled terrible. The diamond dogs hadn’t handled digging through such strange soil very well, so the dimensions of the tunnel varied at random and the scaffolding placed through it got visibly shoddier and more haphazard as one advanced toward the fortress.

But what the minotaur found most uncomfortable – even more so that towing a giant bomb – was undoubtedly the Orks.

Green-skinned warriors sat in the siege tunnels approaching Ferrous Dominus or leaned against the walls, glowering at any non-Ork that passed by. Some of them caressed their choppas or licked their lips, always with their eyes locked on those that they considered their inferiors.

In truth the Orks had been surprisingly compliant so far, what with the promise of violence so close. The plan for getting into the fortress was just simple enough for even the famously dim aliens to understand and appreciate, and having the “squishy races” take care of the annoying non-fighty work suited their tastes just fine. There was also the surprising rapport they had found with the yaks, some of which were still acting as mounts for several Nobs… but nobody really wanted to delve too deeply into that subject.

Finally, the minotaur reached the end of the tunnel.

This area had been dug out more widely to act as a staging area, and most of the largest Orks – and their yak mounts, if they had one – were waiting impatiently to deploy. Very few of the other insurgents were waiting along with them. Mostly because of all the greenskins that were to make up the first wave, but also because they knew what the next phase of the invasion was. A huge stretch of flat, solid metal blocked off one side of the cavern, and the demolition of such an obstacle would be dangerous, at best.

The leaders of the insurgency waited near the wall. Mox, Nox, Sox, and Rox all brightened at the arrival of the bomb. The Orks also stirred, several of them coming to the conclusion that the time for action was nigh. When they started hooting and cheering, however, one Nob shouted them down.

“Kwyet, ya gitz! Ya wanna scroo dis up ‘fore we even in da front door?” Gox growled. Several Orks growled back, irritated at having to be lectured by someone of similar size. None of them objected, however.

“Here! Place the charge here!”

Nox pointed to several metal crates that had been set up in a row next to the metal wall. The minotaur moved the explosive into place, and then slowly set it down.

“We ready now?!” Rox shouted unnecessarily. “We clear out, make big boom, then start war?!”

“Uh… might this thing collapse the tunnel?” Nox asked nervously.

“The explosive is a shaped charge,” Sox explained, slapping a large arrow embossed on one end. “When it explodes, almost all the destructive force will go this way, burning through the wall. It shouldn’t reach the ceiling or kill anyone nearby.”

“’Shouldn’t,’ huh?” mumbled a minotaur.

“Yes, well… we’d best still give it some space. But whatever else you can say about the humans, their machines usually work as advertised.” Sox pressed several buttons on a small activation panel.

“This is it, then.” Mox nodded sharply to Nox. “Let’s get the others. It’s time.”

“We’z gotta fight, boyz! WAAAAAAAAAAGH!!” In blatant defiance of her earlier caution, Gox led the battle cry of the Orks, and the greenskins started thumping their melee weapons against the ground.

“T-minus fifteen minutes,” Sox grinned, and then turned the arming switch.

The bomb beeped, and the numbers to the right of the decimal place rapidly went from 99 to 0. The number on the left switched to 14, and the process began again in an eye blink.

“I mean… seconds? Fifteen… no, wait, twelve? Oh dear.” Sox started backing away.

“You damn fool! Run!”

The changelings and the minotaur haulers scrambled away, barely keeping themselves from screaming in terror. Gox likewise broke for the tunnels, shoving her way through the greenskins to get to a safe distance.

The Orks she shoved aside growled at her in irritation, but she didn’t hold their attention for long. The greenskins did not flee. They caressed their blades and hoisted their guns, all the more pleased that they should not have to wait a full fifteen minutes more before the slaughter could begin. Those that could see the timer rapidly counting down from their angle stomped their feet with each second, laughing.

The timer reached zero.

Those Orks closest to the bomb were knocked off their feet by a pressure wave. The massive shell flashed brightly, and a jet of superheated gas speared through the wall and then spread outward in a series of controlled blast rings. Bare bulkhead armor several inches thick gave way to layered ferrocrete, and that too crumbled under the atomizing heat. Clouds of metal vapor burst from the hole, washed against the ceiling, and then rapidly cooled into shards of crystalline debris.

The initial, understated hiss of the detonation built higher and higher with the rapid bursts, eventually culminating in a fantastic roar that washed over the aliens behind a rush of oven-hot air. The Orks looked away briefly, shielding their eyes. The yaks that served some Nobs as mounts shook and growled, their thick nostrils filling with tangy chemical fumes.

And then it was over. The bomb was a scorched husk, with one end of the device completely gone. In front of the excavation charge was a big, almost perfectly round hole put through nearly four feet of durasteel and concrete, and spilling out into an unlit bombardment shelter.

“Sumwun tell da squishy gitz!” barked a Nob near the front. “We’ze in! Get in dere! KILL ‘EM ALL! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!”

****

Ferrous Dominus

Sector 21

*Detecting an energy surge… Hmm. Surprisingly small. Was that a detonation? An underground breach? Interesting choice.*

The Tau Fio’o looked up from his engineering tablet, glancing at the pair of drones hovering just inches away from him. Behind him, dozens of Fire Warriors checked their weapons while pilots started up their battlesuits.

One Heavy Stealth Suit peered over his shoulder, briefly reflecting a crimson light over the screen. *Then it’s begun. Are the drones ready?*

*They are, but, Shas’o…* He hesitated. *The energy surge seems small enough that it may be missed or dismissed by the gue’la entirely. They will not fail to notice our drones once active. Are we sure that this… other assault force succeeded in creating a path?*

*No. We’re not sure,* Voidsong admitted. *I don’t trust our “allies” at all, much less trust in their ability to launch a successful attack on a target like this. But this is the plan. It either comes together or falls apart now. Activate the drones.*

The head engineer took a deep breath, then tapped his tablet twice. After a swipe of his finger, it was done.

*The drones are active, Shas’o. Network augurs are already picking up a dramatic increase in friendly signums just from the terrain interference alone… The entire fortress is blind now. Anything without an organic brain and the sense to use it won’t be able to tell friend from foe.*

*Excellent. How long will it last?* Voidsong demanded.

*The signum emitters are easy to identify once one has all the transmissions sorted out and analyzed. That will take time. I’m not sure how much time, but more in the scope of hours rather than minutes. Assuming the Techpriests aren’t distracted from being invaded and killed, of course.*

A Broadside battlesuit stepped up behind Voidsong. *Do we have our targets yet? When do we deploy?*

*Patience, soldier.* Voidsong’s battlesuit twisted its head around to stare up the black spire of Nightwatch. *Let’s see how the foe turns before we decide where to plunge the blade.*

*Noosphere traffic has jumped considerably… I can’t interpret their chatter. They keep using obscure forms of that absurd code language and would never let me observe the encryption algorithms,* the Fio’o complained.

*We can make a guess. Let their engineer-cultists panic. We’ll know soon enough if our allies came through for us.*

Voidsong turned toward her army. Or rather, the glorified platoon that served as her army. Less than seventy Tau were gathered to act as her strike force, a laughable number even compared to the 38th Company’s Astartes component. Luckily, a considerable fraction of the force was composed of battlesuits, and much of the light infantry were the most experienced and trusted warriors of Wraithstar’s detachment. Even so, she had no doubt they’d be hopelessly outnumbered if her team had to fight the garrison on their own, and it was only through sheer luck that the bulk of the fortress’s troops seemed to be away on an engagement at the moment.

But such a situation suited her just fine. The point of covert operations, of prioritizing deception over strength, was to do more with less. To circumvent unfavorable odds and impossible battles. If Chrysalis managed to assemble an actual assault force, then Voidsong would play her game, moving while the enemy was occupied and striking when their backs were turned. If the insect’s plan fizzled, as she expected…

Well, a heroic end gutting the city’s fusion core would be a fitting final contribution to the Greater Good. Much better than decorating an alien city as a showpiece, at any rate.

“Geez, what’s with all the grays? Is there a deployment today?”

“Shouldn’t they be helping the humans break up that changeling nest? Ugh, they’re so useless!”

“The Iron Warriors should keep those big suits locked up. I don’t trust these guys with that kind of ordnance.”

Voidsong looked up. A trio of pegasus ponies hovered overhead. She could only imagine the equines were sneering from behind the respirator masks and goggles while they openly talked down to them. Such an attitude wasn’t exactly unfounded, of course; she imagined that the horse Princesses would come to dearly regret not having her executed after today.

Several Fire Warriors looked over to her, tilting their rifles ever-so-slightly at the equines. A silent, subtle way of asking for permission to fire. They could always ask in their own language, and the ponies would almost certainly be oblivious to a calm discussion of their murder. But discretion was the watchword for now.

In respect to that discretion, Voidsong’s battlesuit shook its head. The equines were unarmed and clueless. There would be no benefit to slaying them other than venting their righteous indignation.

“Hey! Who’s in charge here? Is this some kind of military drill?” barked one of the ponies. “… Hello? Do any of you guys even speak Equestrian?”

“It’s called Gothic, Circuit.”

“I’m pretty sure everyone in those battlesuits are supposed to speak it. Remember that time Warsmith Solon killed one for lying about it?”

“Ha! Good times.”

Voidsong started to reconsider the value of venting her righteous indignation.

Then the explosions started.

****

+Re:signum transmission malfunction. All receptors have been diagnosed. Zero system errors have been detected.+

+Noosphere contamination and atmospheric disruption have been similarly ruled out.+

+Run alternate diagnostic pathing 293-71196. Verify data is consistent with archive still 772.+

+Maintenance call for sub-sector 7-2. Unusual energy emissions detected. Require observation team.+

+Augur station Lambda reporting additional contacts. Friendly.+

+Redundancy. EVERY augur station is reporting additional friendly contacts. Identification impossible.+

+The data is flawed. However, the timing of the intercepts does not correspond with the initial disruption.+

+Cache 1.83 to 6.89 cleared. Diagnostics have returned minimal signs of corruption. Initializing memory dump…+

+WARNING: Uncontrolled detonations detected in sector 16.+

+Re-route all sector defense teams to checkpoint 46-112. Activate all automated sentries and place emplacement network on high alert.+

+Error. No enemy contacts registered. Multiple sector breaches detected. Containment failure imminent. Alert status elevated to beta-primus.+

+Dispatch a warning to command. Ferrous Dominus is under attack.+

****

Canterlot Castle

Sitting room

“I’m telling you, Tigeraan isn’t going back to her. Not after last week. He’s been burned too many times.”

“How many times have you said that, your Highness? He always finds some excuse. Or rather, the writers do.”

“This would just be too much, though. After Fillydelphia, it’s over. They should just retire Angel Wings from the show entirely, to be honest. I think she’s had enough amnesia-inducing knocks to the head to be interred in a psychiatric ward by now.”

Princess Celestia lounged among a pile of silken cushions while the ending credits for All My Horses scrolled down the holovid screen. Raven sat behind her, a notebook floating in the air next to her head.

“I admit they could stir it up a bit. There are rumors that they’re planning to add a changeling character next season,” Raven mumbled.

Celestia sipped from a hovering tea cup, and then levitated a slice of chocolate cake from a dish by her hooves. “A changeling, hmm? That would be interesting. I wonder how hard it would be to mimic their shapeshifting with special effects.” She took a bite out of the cake.

“Oh, they’re not talking special effects. Apparently they were thinking of using an actual captured changeling for the role.”

Celestia stopped chewing, favoring Raven with an incredulous look.

“That fell through when the Iron Warriors killed it, though. But I guess they think they might get a new one soon?”

Celestia swallowed her cake and then washed it down with a mouthful of tea. Once she had delicately wiped her lips, she turned back to her assistant.

“Where do they think they can find changelings to keep as… slave-actors? Is that even a thing? Can you enslave that profession?” the white Princess asked.

“Leave it to the Company to try,” Raven sniffed. “As for where… well, turn on CNN.”

Within a swirl of golden light, the vid selector floated above the cake, swiveled toward the holovid projector, and then clicked. The screen flickered, and then an image of a black-robed cyborg appeared.

“-but even with home sector advantage, the simulated probability of the Buzzers emerging victorious in the semi-finals remains an abysmal 18.6137 percent.”

Next to him, a hoofball was balanced on the tip of an upraised mechatendril, kept just barely in frame. The Dark Techpriest reached a finger over and calmly spun it while he talked.

“The injury of Bouncer will continue to severely limit team performance. Far inferior secondary goalies reduce defensive efficiency by an average of 13.917 percent. This tactical obstacle has correspondingly raised recruitment concerns, as the franchise is extremely reliant on its elite players to the detriment of the field unit as a whole.”

The Techpriest bowed his head, and the mechatendril suddenly vaulted the hoofball away. “This has been Dark Techpriest Leverin, with your sports coverage. Glory to the Dark Gods. Omnissiah bless our viewers and grant victory to our sponsors.”

“Why do they have those half-metal priests as their specialist correspondents?” Raven sighed while the CNN logo – with the “C” superimposed over a Chaos Star – flashed across the screen. “You could get identical performance from a servitor, and at least they wouldn’t have to pay it.”

“I don’t mind the Dark Techpriests so much,” Celestia replied. “I can’t stand that Kilroy person, though.”

“Kilroy? What? Everypony loves Kilroy!”

“Raven, the man is a psychotic maniac.”

“I know, your Highness, but he’s so funny! Remember that Blackthorne interview? Hah!”

The screen finally changed to the main CNN news desk. Scoops and Kilroy sat in their usual places; the former with a bright smile, and the latter with his expression hidden by the dirty sack he used as a face mask.

“Greetings, weak and feeble viewers! We have updates from the inexorable march of the Dark Gods’ chosen!” Kilroy snarled.

Raven snickered. Celestia frowned at her.

“As we reported earlier, the bulk of the Company garrison is currently engaging the changelings!” Scoops said while the words “Changeling Menace!” appeared over her head. “Thanks to the 38th Company’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, our army has located the central hive of Queen Chrysalis and even now lay siege to the xeno nest! The assault is in the earliest stages, but initial reports sound promising!”

“Indeed Scoops!” Kilroy barked. “Before the might of Chaos, the outermost defenses crumbled in moments! Our warriors stalk the caverns of the treacherous xenos, slaughtering them without mercy!”

“Not QUITE without mercy, Kilroy!” Scoops chirped, winking at the vid recorder. “The assault teams have orders to take prisoners and bio-samples from the target, as Dark xeno-biologis Techpriests have shown considerable interest in the shape-shifters!”

“Bah! It is true. Our engineering cultists are fascinated by these cowardly beasts! They demand prisoners, scrapings, and other detritus of the battlefield for their tiresome curiosities.” Kilroy admitted. “But the military objective remains paramount! This ‘Queen Chrysalis’ sought to turn the extremely punchable races of your wretched world against Chaos through guile and deceit, so that we might slay them for her convenience! But we have uncovered her manipulations, and now she shall pay the ULTIMATE price for her hubris! Ha ha ha! HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!!”

Celestia blinked repeatedly, surprised. “Chrysalis… was trying to get the Company to kill all the griffons, diamond dogs, and others? How odd.”

“Who knows what goes through that twisted witch’s mind?” Raven sniffed.

“Queen Chrysalis is twisted, certainly, but her motivations aren’t usually cryptic.” Princess Celestia shook her head. “She attacked Equestria to get our love. What does she have to gain from genocide?”

“Revenge, perhaps? Changelings are terribly unpopular across many different species. I would be surprised if she didn’t have some scores to settle we weren’t aware of.”

“Maybe. But then it’s strange that the one score we ARE aware of is the one she’s left untouched. Have the changelings made no attempt to drive a wedge between Equestria and the Iron Warriors? I’ve seen or heard nothing of the sort.”

Raven tilted her head to the side. “I can’t think of anything… Our relations have been better than ever, what with most of the actual Chaos Space Marines gone. Why, Hope Springs very nearly has Warpsmith Kessler wrapped around her hoof!” She smirked. “Do you think an attempt to start a conflict between us would even work?”

“Yes. I think about the prospect frequently,” Celestia grumbled before turning back to the screen. “Sometimes I have nightmares about it…”

“With the source of the native insurgency firmly in the crosshairs of our noble warriors, some have asked whether the elimination of the changelings might end our military conflicts with Yakyakistan and the dragon territories, which are still subject to ongoing combat operations,” Scoops said.

“Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaa!!” replied Kilroy.

Scoops slapped a hoof onto the desk. “Despite my co-anchor’s amusement at the prospect, knowing as we do now that the insurgency was a changeling plot against the insurgent races generates new possibilities for peace! Surely it is not in the Company’s best interest to serve as a murder squad for upstart Queens!”

“Why not? Is that not our relationship to your insolent Sun Goddess?” Kilroy asked with a snort.

“No it isn’t!” Scoops retorted. “It’s different in Princess Celestia’s case!”

“How?”

“For starters, she isn’t-“

A klaxon blared in the background, startling the two news anchors out of their argument.

“That’s… what? What is that?” Scoops mumbled.

“The siege alarm? Impossible,” Kilroy scoffed, looking off to the side.

A muffled boom came from the background, barely loud enough to be heard between the rapid rise and fall of the alarm’s noise. Scoops looked in the same direction Kilroy was facing, and she squinted her eyes.

“Is… Is that…”

A louder boom and a flash came from the holovid player, and the feed turned to static.

Celestia and Raven’s eyes were wide as they stared at the holovid screen. The static churn continued for a few more seconds before suddenly switching to a still image of the Legion’s Iron Skull emblem. Celestia’s tea pot hovered in the air, tilted sharply to one side and leaking into her cup. After a few seconds the tea cup overflowed, and the Princess yelped as the scalding liquid spilled on her leg. Both cup and pot dropped onto the floor, bouncing across the plush carpet and spilling their contents everywhere.

Raven eventually turned to her Princess. “Is this some kind of publicity stunt? Can Ferrous Dominus really be under attack? Who would even do that?”

“There are many who would try. I can’t think of any who would manage enough success to warrant more than a brief mention after the fact in the CNN newsroom,” Celestia mused while wiping off her leg with a cloth. “Perhaps they’re actually in the field? Might this be happening somewhere near the Company’s attack on the changelings? It’s hardly beyond their ability to build a mobile broadcasting center.”

“It seems quite off-brand for them, if you ask me,” Raven mumbled doubtfully. “And Kilroy clearly said it was a siege alarm. A field base wouldn’t have something like that, would it?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. But the newscast being interrupted is unusual, right?”

“I’ve never seen that before. But then, CNN has only been around for-“

The screen crackled again, and then the feed resumed.

Scoops stared nervously into the vid-recorder, her hair askew and several loose feathers scattered over the desk in front of her. The rattle of automatic fire was coming from just off-screen, and a constant stream of bullet casings kept flying into the frame before dropping down below the desk.

“He-Hello! Loyal viewers! Um! So, we have some, uh, breaking news right now…”

“Alien scum!” Snarled Kilroy’s voice. The frame suddenly tilted its angle, revealing the newscaster firing a heavy stubber out the window. “You dare encroach upon corrupted ground?! Your souls will feed our gods, and your agony shall birth a hundred snarling daemons!”

Scoops chuckled humorlessly, and a few droplets of sweat crawled down her brow. “In t-tonight’s special report, blood spills in the streets of Ferrous Dominus! An unlikely alliance of insurgent soldiers and-“

The sound of a nearby detonation came from the background, and Scoops flinched. Her ears pinned to her head, and she ducked lower in her seat and waited for the booming to subside.

“… and… and Orks… have descended on Ferrous Dominus.” She gulped, and stared hard into the vid-recorder. “That’s right, loyal viewers! The treacherous rebel defectors from the Protectorate have BETRAYED our world, siding with the monstrous Orks against the 38th Company! Is there any limit to their craven-“

Again she was interrupted, this time by a bullet ricochet off the wall. Scoops instantly ducked under the desk and out of sight.

“Meep! It, uh, it seems there are currently some problems with our active defenses! B-but details are hard to establish at the moment!” she shouted from beneath the desk. “W-We will try to keep you, our loyal viewers, advised of the situation as it develops! I’m sure that soon enough our noble warriors will push the aggressors back to… uh… wherever they came from! Wait, how DID they get past the walls?”

Kilroy’s stubber clicked empty, and he roared wordlessly before tossing aside the weapon. “Scum! I will tear you all apart!” He drew a laspistol and started firing it out the window. “I shall recount your final moments in a special report of RUIN!”

“We can at least confirm that the invaders have breached sector 22, home of the CNN headquarters!” Scoops continued. “It seems that whatever has disabled our active defenses is also making it difficult to tell where the enemy is! At the moment we’re compiling reports of enemy activity in sectors 18 through 26, but so far we haven’t found-“

Another explosion boomed nearby, and an armorglass window in the back, behind the news desk, was blown inward. A plume of fire washed into the room, and the image started flickering.

“YEEP!! Kilroy, stop shooting at them! They’re shooting back at the studio!” Scoops shouted.

“NEVER!!” the co-host roared, swapping out the battery for his laspistol.

Scoops poked her head out to berate her co-worker, but then spotted some movement by the window.

“GRIFFON!!” she screamed, right before a burst of lasers cut off the feed again.

Celestia stared at the holovid slack-jawed while the image switched back to the Iron Skull.

“… Well, that settles that,” Raven mumbled. “Rebels and Orks, huh? Didn’t see that coming.”

Princess Celestia jumped up, her eyes still fixed on the holovid. “This is an emergency! The base has been breached! There are hostile soldiers in the streets!”

“Yes. That’s a shame.”

Raven levitated some tea to her lips and then took a long sip. She smacked her lips, and then noticed Celestia was staring at her.

“What? Was there something else?”

“Yes! We need to do something!” Celestia growled.

“Like what?” her assistant asked.

“We can send aid! We have reserves!” the white Princess suggested. “With our new weapons and armor-“

“We’ll still arrive several hours after the battle is over, probably,” Raven interrupted. “Our new equipment doesn’t include transports. Rather long march to Ferrous Dominus.” She shrugged. “Of course, the pegasi could get there much faster, but on their own…”

Celestia clenched her teeth and sat back on her haunches. “No… there must be a way…”

“Well your Highness, I’m not sure what your limits are with your teleport spell, but I doubt you can take an entire army with you that far.”

Celestia rubbed the underside of her chin with a hoof.

Then the holovid player flickered.

“-the feed working yet? Hello? Is anypony there?!”

Scoops leaned over the news desk in a panic, waving her hoof at the recorder. A frenzy of screeching and shouting came from behind her, and one of the windows was blocked with flaming debris.

“If anybody can hear this: pony, human, daemon or whatever, send help! We need to get out of here!”

Kilroy growled a curse while he grappled with an enraged griffon warrior, trying to throttle the winged beast amidst a cloud of feathers. The griffon clawed ferociously at the furious cultists, but was unable to cause more than flesh wounds as it weakened.

“Orks and yaks are in the streets, diamond dogs keep popping up in the buildings from the siege tunnels, and griffons are covering them from the air!” Scoops cried, pounding a hoof onto the desk. “The guns and augurs aren’t working right! Nothing is working! We have a total containment failure in the entire North quadrant! Our troops are reliant on visual contact and have no fire support!”

The griffon shrieked, and then managed to plunge a knife into Kilroy’s arm. The cultist screamed in fury, and then slammed his forehead into the invader’s face.

“Additional contacts are approaching the fortress, but initial reports could not determine whether they were friendly! Defensive forces are grouping for a push into the compromised sectors, but many of our active fighters are at the changeling hive! Our strategic correspondent is occupied right now, but my assessment of the situation is that it’s-“

“USELESS!!” Kilroy lifted the griffon high over his head, and then swung the invader down into the desk, right next to Scoops. The griffon’s back hit the edge of the surface with a sickening crunch, and it released a feeble squawk and a spasm before it went limp.

The feed went to static again, but this time the disruption only lasted several seconds. Soon it was restored, and Celestia and Raven were treated to the sight of Kilroy laying across the news desk while Scoops pressed a bloody rag against his knife wound.

“Kilroy! Hang in there! You’re going to make it!” the mare sniffled.

“These wounds… are nothing…” Kilroy grumbled, shifting slightly on the desk. “Khorne has not… summoned me to his side… just yet!”

“Medicae! Is there a medicae officer anywhere?” Scoops shouted into the recorder. “Please send help!”

“No! If you are hearing us, warriors of Chaos, see to the destruction of the enemy!” Kilroy demanded between weakening coughs. “If the foe… breaches the heart… of the manufactorum, then all… the Warsmith’s machinations shall be… for naught.”

“Kilroy! Kilroy, I can’t stop the bleeding!” Scoops sobbed.

“I will… return! After a word… from our… sponsors…”

He coughed again, and a dark stain spread through the dirty rag he used as a face mask.

“KILROY!! NOOOOO-“

The holovid clicked off.

Raven seemed startled from the screen going dark, and she quickly rubbed away a tear that was crawling down her cheek. Princess Celestia was levitating the remote controller with her magic, and the white alicorn gave an irritated grunt before dropping the device.

“I don’t think we’ll get any more useful information from that broadcast,” Celestia said sharply. “Besides, we must act quickly.”

“Right! Yes.” Raven paused. “… Act to do what, exactly? Are we going to go with the ‘sending pegasi to their doom’ plan?”

“No. I may have a better one. Do we know exactly where the Company’s assault force is?”

Raven blinked. “Uh… well, I can get that information. Dark Techpriest Carmed is still available at Canterlot General Hospital. He should have the exact coordinates.”

“Good. Get their location immediately and bring it back to me. I need to write a letter to Cloudsdale,” Celestia said firmly, turning to head to her study.

“ACTUALLY…”

Celestia paused, and then glanced back at her younger assistant.

“Techpriest Carmed also has a vox feed that can contact Cloudsdale directly. So, you know, that could save an hour or two if time is of the essence. Which I’m guessing it is?” Raven ventured. “Oh! Also, he’s part of the biologis temple, so if we need medicae assistance…”

“… Maybe you should simply bring Techpriest Carmed here,” Celestia said. “I must consult with the mages. Hurry, Raven!”

“Yes, your Highness! Right away!”

****

Changeling Hive

Siege operations perimeter

“There’s two more from squad Delta. Squad Lambda reports a capture, but it’s injured. Omega Squad has another one, and they’re falling back. Not due to enemy fire; traps. Some of the deeper tunnels have defenses.”

General Harlin nodded absently, tapping at a dataslate. “That makes forty-six prisoners so far. Quite a take on the first push.”

“All squads are reporting the same thing, Lord General: enemy attacks are infrequent and uncoordinated. We’ve had no casualties thus far. Delta ran into some heavy resistance in a particular chamber and fell back from the sheer numbers, but even they got away with all their men. These defenses are a joke. The ponies could do better.”

“Good. This is a nice break from scouting Ork encampments and having mobs popping up on our flank,” Harlin grumbled. “Has there been any problems with their shape-shifting abilities?”

“No, Lord General. Not yet, anyway. I’ve heard some units have run into disguised changelings, but none of them have put up a convincing ruse so far. Mostly they take up the disguise after running away, hoping we’ll mistake them for one of ours. It hasn’t worked.”

“Excellent. Of course, we can’t let our guard down,” Harlin said with a nod. “Every soldier that emerges from that mound needs to be checked with a gene-key. And they can expect a brief psychic check once we return to base. I’ll not allow any spies into Ferrous Dominus.”

“Yes, Lord General.” The Lieutenant replied. “And the Astartes?”

“The Iron Warriors are exempt, of course,” Harlin said quickly. “All our data suggests the changelings cannot mimic them, and their power armor has unique bio-markers.”

“Right. Of course.” The lower officer paused. “But I meant to ask what we’re going to do about ‘that’ Astartes, Lord General.”

Harlin quirked an eyebrow. “What are you talking abo-“

Shouts of surprise and terror suddenly erupted from the front line.

Men dove to the side and covered their heads as a trail of flame streaked over them. Nobody bothered firing back, simply hugging the ground in fear while a whooping cheer came from above. The men recognized the lunatic laughter coming from the air overhead immediately, and soon General Harlin did, too.

“Oh. Right. HIM,” the General sighed. “What does he want now?”

The Lieutenant gulped when he saw two gleaming suits of armor arc up through the sky and then start descending as if to land nearby. “I think he wishes to tell you in person, Lord General…”

Tellis tilted backwards as he approached the ground, spreading the jets of his flight pack more evenly to slow his descent. It was an unusual maneuver for him, but he had reason not to crash onto the ground as he usually did. Two reasons, actually.

A changeling was tucked under each of the Chaos Lord’s arms, held tightly against the torso of his armor. The creatures were obviously terrified, but apparently unharmed. After a relatively soft landing, one of them started struggling and screeching, while the other made some insectoid approximation of a whimper. Up above, Rainbow Dash zoomed up behind the Chaos Lord with another prisoner hugged tight against her chest with her power-armored forelegs.

“Hey, General! I have some prisoners! Go find a place to put them!” Tellis shouted. A slight flexing of his arm caused the noisier changeling to yelp in pain and fall silent. “This one on the left is Bugsy. The one on the right is Krom! The one Dash’s got is named Spines!”

“Those… Those aren’t our-“ another slight flex silenced the changeling that had started to speak.

General Harlin nodded hesitantly. “Of course, my Lord. I’ll have the prisoners restrained and secured for transport.”

“Good! Also, make sure they’re kept separate from the other prisoners. These ones are mine!” Tellis dumped the changelings in a heap in front of him, and Rainbow dropped her own captive next to them.

“… They’re… yours, Lord? As in, you’re taking them as slaves?” Harlin asked.

“No, no. Not slaves. Pets,” Tellis clarified, waving a hand. “Anyway, make sure there’s room, because I’m gonna go get more. We need like thirty or forty of these guys. Oh! And make sure you don’t detonate the nest until I’m done!”

“Seriously?” Rainbow asked. “Why so many?”

“I want to build a giant changeling farm out of two huge panels of armorglass and some sand and then put them inside,” Tellis explained, spreading his arms and gesturing to the dimensions of such a structure. “I’ll take the Queen too, if I can get to her before the Tech-nerds do. I want a full colony.”

”Hah! That’s awesome!” Rainbow Dash laughed. “Let’s do it!”

One of the changelings started whimpering again.

General Harlin restrained a sigh. “My Lord, have you considered-“

“The answer to these questions is usually ‘no,’” Tellis interrupted.

“… It’s just that the Queen was specifically requested as a prisoner by Lord Kessler and Serith,” Harlin pointed out gingerly. “Her capture could be vital to ending the remaining conflict on Centaur III.”

“Yeah, but screw that. If they get her first, they’ll probably kill her, and there goes my colony.” He turned to the side, pointing down at the changelings. “Now you bugs be good and do what the weakling humans says! If I find out you’ve been bad, then off go the legs!”

He paused, and then looked over to Rainbow Dash. “These guys regenerate legs, right?”

“Pretty sure you made that up just now, actually,” the pegasus replied.

“Well, I guess we’ll find out.”

The whimpering graduated to terrified quaking.

“My Lord, the operational objective is-“

Suddenly the Iron Warrior was looming over him, and Harlin’s breath caught in his throat.

“Look here, ‘General:’ we’d all prefer I was busy killing things right now, but this assault is pathetic! I can’t fight these things! Just look at them! Quivering weaklings, every one!” He poked the General in the chest with a single armor-encased finger, almost knocking him over. “Either you do your job and find me something fun to murder, or you start finding room for my new pets.”

General Harlin surely would have started running the logistics of transporting a swarm of changelings, but a burst of static interrupted the exchange. His command post included a vox pylon and a bank of communications equipment, and several instruments jumped to life as a feed linked to his command signum.

“General Harlin! General Harlin, come in! We need immediate assistance! All units need to withdraw from the assault area and return to base! Ferrous Dominus is under attack! I repeat, Ferrous Dominus is under attack!”

Harlin glanced over to the vox unit, and then up at Tellis. Tellis and Rainbow Dash looked at each other, and then the Chaos Lord marched up to the device and spoke into the receiver.

“The fortress is being attacked? Like, for real?”

“Yes! We have hostiles in the streets and the subterranean facilities! All defensive systems have failed! More contacts are on the way, but we can’t even tell friend from foe without visual contact! We need reinforcements!”

“Hostiles? What kind of hostiles?” Rainbow asked suspiciously, swooping in closer to the vox system. “Like, are we talking Orks?”

“ALL KINDS of hostiles! Orks! Dogs! Griffons! Beastmen! Even the bloody yaks are down here! They have our weapons and they’ve broken into the munitions stores under the Fortress! They’re tearing the entire city apart!”

“AWESOME!!” Tellis bellowed, clapping his gauntlets together with eardrum-rattling clash. His flight pack spread its jets, and a rising whine came from the central engines. “C’mon, Rainbabe! We out!”

“Right behind you, Tellis!” Rainbow Dash shouted. A short burst of her impulse blasters vaulted her into the air, and her own engines started building power.

General Harlin turned his face away as Tellis rocketed into the air, whooping loudly. A wave of intense heat washed over the General and everything else nearby, and one of the changelings nearby actually caught fire on its wings from sitting too close. The insectoid creature started screeching and jumping around, its wings buzzing desperately to escape the flames.

Harlin grunted in annoyance and drew his laspistol, blasting the howling shape-shifter through the head. It collapsed into a burning heap, and the other changelings quickly reconsidered trying to escape in the confusion.

“Someone get these filthy insects stowed with the other ones!” the General shouted. Then he approached the vox station and picked up the receiver.

“Command, I didn’t realize we were transmitting, but I appreciate the diversion. Just make sure you have a good excuse ready for Lord Tellis once he gets there.”

“…… What? Diversion? Excuse? General?”

“When Lord Tellis gets there, he’ll be expecting a fight,” Harlin said. “Did you already have something in mind? It would be best if you actually did have a few scraps of alien to entertain him.”

“Does this mean you’re not coming? Lord General, we need more than just Lord Tellis! We’re looking at a complete containment failure!”

General Harlin frowned, his eyes darting to the comms instruments. “Wait… you were being serious? There’s really an enemy assault occurring?”

“Yes!”

“Consisting of a combined force of… Centaur natives and Orks? Armed with our wargear?”

“YES!”

“And this assault force has somehow disabled our defense network, breached the wall, and is undetectable to our augurs?”

“It would be more accurate to say that our augurs are experiencing some strategic sabotage which has rendered the defense network useless, but essentially YES!”

General Harlin clenched his teeth, turning to look at the changeling hive. “It will take some time to clear out. We have not placed charges yet, but our vanguard-“

A booming noise came from the vox caster, and Harlin flinched away when the voice on the other end screamed. The feed turned to static, and then several meters on the vox pylon sunk to zero.

“… By the Dark Gods… He was wrong. Lord Serith was deceived. We all were,” he growled, the vox receiver shaking in his hand. “The shape-shifters aren’t using us to wipe out some petty resistance. The bastard xenos actually managed to raise an army against us. They got into the damned city the moment our backs were turned!”

He switched the frequency to the local spectrum channel. “This is General Harlin to all units! All units, fall back immediately to the siege lines and submit to gene-key verification! We are abandoning mission! I repeat: consider all mission objectives null and retreat immediately! Ferrous Dominus is under attack!”

****

Ferrous Dominus – sector 18

Psyker dorms – Hope Spring’s quarters

“Oh, this just HAD to happen when I was almost on leave, didn’t it? Ridiculous!”

Hope Springs muttered irritably to herself while she levitated a steady stream of objects into her suitcase. Her ears were pinned to the side of her head, but that hardly did much to block out the screech of the siege klaxons.

“Warning! Containment failure level alpha detected! Siege lockdown engaged! All units, report to battle stations!”

Hope glared at the vox caster attached to her room cogitator. She felt like shouting a tirade of profanity at it, but her diplomatic inclinations kept her in check. Even though the electric growl was almost certainly a one-way communication, venting her frustrations wouldn’t do anything to help right now and could still land her in trouble.

“It’s going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine.” Hope floated a pair of dataslates into the case, and then closed it. A few pulses of magic secured the latches. “The Company can handle this. They’re MADE to handle this.”

She heard a booming noise through the walls, and an object on her desk rattled slightly from the vibration. Her eyes darted toward it, and her breath caught in her throat.

The tremor lasted only a moment, but her eyes remained locked on the object. A laspistol sat atop the only desk in her room. It was a simple, ugly, gray device; standard issue, built from recycled scrap, with no spare ammunition. It was a small and weak enough weapon that the Iron Warriors would hand one to any visitor that wanted one. Hope HADN’T wanted one at all, but Warpsmith Kessler had demanded that she take it after they had been attacked at the diplomatic conference.

The unicorn took a deep breath and touched her magical aura to it. Slowly, inch by inch, her magic spread over it, as if too much pressure would cause it to go off or explode. She knew better, of course; she had lifted the laspistol before, even if she had never fired it. But somehow the gun seemed… heavier and more sensitive now.

The crack of lasguns firing came from the hall. Hope felt her heart leap into her throat.

“Okay… Everything’s going to be okay.” The mare whispered to herself again while she levitated the laspistol in front of her. “We’re on lockdown. Nothing can get in or out.”

Another explosion. She could hear shrapnel screeching against the metal corridor walls.

The vox caster near the ceiling briefly cut off the siege alarm for an announcement. “Warning: Hostile presence confirmed. Security breach in sector 16, sector 18, sector 19, sector 21, sector-pfffshgt!”

Another explosion, and another vibration trembled through the building. The vox caster was just transmitting static now.

Hope slowly backed away from the door to her room, and then sat down behind the bed. Just in case.

The door opened.

Hope was frightened enough when the sound of lasfire started washing into the room unencumbered by the walls. She almost wet herself on the spot when two diamond dogs ducked into the room.

“Gugh! Human vermin!” shouted one of the canines, staggering inside and collapsing onto the floor. He had a deep lasburn on his arm, and was clutching his bicep in pain.

The other diamond dog was unharmed, and he whirled about and fired his lasgun back into the hall, using the doorway as cover. Neither of them had noticed the quivering unicorn behind the bed. Spears of crimson light zipped down the hall, ensuring Hope that at the very least she wasn’t the only resistance faced by the insurgents. It was a small comfort.

“Do you have any grenades left?!”

“Just one!”

“Well, use it!”

The wounded canine unhooked the fragmentation charge from his munitions belt and held it up. Taking several deep, haggard breaths, he gripped the handle and pulled the pin. Then he caught a spot of color out of the corner of his eyes.

The diamond dog whipped his head around, and his blood ran cold. A pink pony was peeking over the top of the bed, her horn alight with white magic. That magic was currently levitating a laspistol up above her head, aiming unsteadily at the injured rebel.

“UNICORN! LOOK OUT!”

Hope Springs had been working out whether or not to fire, and that shout pretty much sealed the deal. Her magic curled around the trigger, and the first lasbolt stabbed through the air over the diamond dog’s shoulder.

His partner whirled around with his lasgun, and Hope squeaked in fright. She ducked her head completely beneath the bed below a burst of suppressive fire, hearing the lasers sizzle as they bored into the wall behind her. She fired the laspistol again and again in return, sending a hopelessly inaccurate spread of laser blasts across the room.

The wounded diamond dog hit the floor on the opposite side of the bed from the pony diplomat, and an enraged growl escaped his throat.

“Hey, pony! CATCH!” barked the insurgent, hurling his grenade over the bed.

The grenade sailed across the middle of the room in a graceful arc. Then it was swallowed by a glowing white aura. It promptly reversed course, arcing back toward the two canines.

“I said catch! You didn’t catch! You were supposed-“

The diamond dog’s terrified blubbering was cut off by an explosion that had Hope’s ears ringing painfully. Bits of sheeting and mattress filler jumped into the air and rained down across the room, and Hope also felt the magical grip of her laspistol shake loose as the weapon was knocked away.

After a few seconds, however, the ringing subsided. The first thing she heard was the door closing, as the cogitator no longer detected any living bodies near the door.

“That… went okay,” the diplomat squeaked. Her voice was very high-pitched, and she felt her legs quivering under her.

Hope Springs wasn’t new to the sights of war. The bodies of the diamond dogs, shredded by shrapnel and oozing blood into an ever-expanding puddle, were hardly any more grisly than the many pictures she’d seen of horrible battlefields. Never mind the diplomatic conference she had attended with Warpsmith Kessler that ended with most of the other diplomats murdered in front of her.

The knowledge that she had done this, though, shook her to her core. She had taken a life. She didn’t feel that her actions had been unjustified in the slightest, but the enormity of wiping out two living, sentient creatures with a brief act of will left her nauseous.

“… I… I have to get out of here,” Hope whispered to herself. “I don’t know how those guys got in, but it’s not safe.”

She levitated her suitcase onto her back, settling the weight as well as she could. She fixed her laspistol – battered, but still functional – to a metal strap on her leg. Then she approached the door to her room and slapped a hoof against the access button. Her understanding of the security measures in place was that the siege alarm locked all fortress doors for non-combatants such as herself, while allowing friendly soldiers access as normal. That understanding was challenged, obviously, by the diamond dogs that had raced into her room without a problem.

Sure enough, after pushing the button, the door console sputtered for a second before the doors slid open. Was lockdown not in place? Hope couldn’t imagine why. The alarm had triggered, and there were obviously enemy soldiers in the base. She couldn’t imagine a situation where such a safety precaution would be more appropriate.

“H-Hello?” she yelled into the hall, not daring to poke her head out just yet. “I’m friendly! Please don’t kill me!”

The laser blasts had stopped soon after the diamond dogs had perished, so she had assumed that Company soldiers still held the hallway. At one end of the building, at least. After a few seconds, a voice shouted back to her.

“Come on over, then! We have a barricade set up!”

Taking a deep breath, Hope burst into a gallop, curving into the hall and sprinting toward the sound of the voice. Her horn glowed as she ran, holding her suitcase on her back.

Ahead of her were two mercenaries aiming lasguns down the hall, crouched beneath a retractable shutter barricade. The metal shields were common installations in Ferrous Dominus, located in most areas that didn’t have regular standing defenses. They were cheap, simple plates of metal that could be pulled up from the flooring and locked into place, and were installed in many strategic locations such as this hallway intersection.

Hope leapt the barricade, landing unsteadily past the two crouched soldiers. There was another soldier covering another passage, and yet another on the ground with a blanket covering him. The man was clearly alive, but the placement suggested he was wounded. A lasburn, judging by the lack of blood.

“Does anyone here know what’s going on? How did enemy soldiers get in the base, and why aren’t we on lockdown?” the unicorn asked.

“No, nobody here has a bloody clue what’s happening,” spat the soldier in front of her. “All I know is that we ARE on lockdown. For some reason the doors are opening for everyone anyway. Including the damned enemy!”

“We’re trying to gather enough men to head on outside, but these damned dogs keep popping up from the lower levels!” growled another man.

“What? They dug their way under Ferrous Dominus?” Hope asked.

“Impossible. Where did they enter from? There are no siege lines and they have no digging machines!” sneered a mercenary. “And you can’t just dig into the fortress! Even the blasted sub-decks are armored like ship bulkheads!”

“How they got here is really besides the point by now, don’t you think? They’re obviously in the sub-decks! If we can’t lock them out, they can get into almost every facility from there!”

Hope furrowed her brow. “Almost? Which buildings aren’t-“

A laser blast zipped overhead and seared a nearby wall, and Hope yelped and ducked.

“Contact! I see one!” Two of the soldiers moved to the correct barricade and started firing back. The third active warrior hugged the corner next to them, giving him a good view of the other halls.

“You’d best stick with us, lass! As far as I know the only safe place in Ferrous Dominus right now is probably the manufactorum or Nightwatch!” the man shouted over the crack of laser bursts.

“The manufactorum? That doesn’t extend underground?”

“It does! But the Techpriests have a hundred ways to secure their facility in a lockdown! You’ve gotta figure one of them works against whatever this scum did to disable our guns and augurs!”

“Frag out!” yelled one of the other soldiers, arming a grenade and hurling it down the hall.

“And Nightwatch doesn’t have a sub-level that's built into the siege tunnels! Not rightly sure why; I think they're keeping something dangerous down there! Both of those should be safe against the dogs, at least!”

The grenade explosion marked the end of the firefight, and Hope risked a glance over the contested barricade once the mercenaries stopped shooting. A dark shape was lying in the hall, next to a lasgun sitting within a slowly spreading pool of blood.

“… The problem is, there’s more than just dogs about. Griffons and Orks are running rampant through the streets.”

“Some of the Orks are even riding yaks. However THAT works…”

“It’s like a small army bubbled up underneath us. So I want a few more guns behind me before I make a run for it.”

Hope pursed her lips and glanced down at the laspistol strapped to her leg. “Well… I do have a gun. I’m not any good with it, but if you could use a panicked spray of laser blasts, I can provide.”

“Actually, yeah, a few more stray lasbolts would help plenty. Settle down here for now, lass.”

“Oi! Hold your fire! I’m on your side!” shouted a new voice from down the hall.

A mercenary wearing a full optics mask jogged down the hall toward the barricade. The soldiers holding the hall shifted their aim to cover him, while the third man stood up to greet the newcomer.

“And that makes five. Not a bad start. I figure if we can get eight guns together we can make a decent run of the streets. We’ll need to get Marthas settled in a room first and hope the beasties don’t find him, though.”

The wounded man on the floor groaned.

The new soldier stepped over the barricade and stopped in the middle of the intersection space, looking back and forth.

“This all you got?” he asked, his voice muffled considerably by his rebreather mask. He hefted his lasgun, searching the surrounding corridors for any signs of movement.

“For now, yeah. A lot of other guys rushed outside once the siege alarm broke. I was about to follow them when a few of the damned dogs popped up in the building.” The mercenary wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Where were you holed up? Do you know where the Cabal went?”

The new soldier ignored his questions. “So nobody else is coming here, as far as you know?”

“Nah. Vox is an absolute mess right now, but right now we’re trying to either barricade critical areas and regroup to push the scum off the streets. Nobody’s going to be coming up here for a while.”

The new soldier nodded. Then he shot the other man in the face.

Hope screamed as the soldier’s corpse slumped onto the floor, scrambling backward in terror. The other soldiers turned at the sound of the discharge, but the traitor was one step ahead of them. A spray of lasers sliced into the men, cutting across their chests and easily burning through their flimsy body armor. The rogue paused after they collapsed, switched the lasgun back to single-shot mode, and then fired another shot into each body for good measure.

Hope’s rear bumped into the blast shield behind her, and her horn flickered as she tried to draw her laspistol from its sheathe. “Ch-Ch-Changeling! You’re a changeling spy!”

“And you’re a dead mare,” Mox said simply, swinging her aim over to the unicorn.

Hope instantly switched her levitation focus. Her laspistol tumbled away onto the floor, while her suitcase suddenly jumped up and intercepted the first lasbolt that had been directed at her head. She squeezed her eyes shut as another shot burned through the casing, and then another. Her luggage wasn’t bulky metal or made of anything similarly durable, but it at least contained enough personal possessions to act as a shield. What she would do once the suitcase fell apart or when the infiltrator got tired of trying to shoot through her luggage was a quandary that escaped her under the steady beat of laser fire.

“Stop! Please! Why are you doing this?! What do you hope to accomplish here?!”

“Ha! Are you for real?” Mox laughed, firing the rifle with one arm while leaning back against the wall. “I’m not telling you anything, equine. You made yourself the humans’ pet, now die with them like a good slave!”

She stopped shooting and took a step forward before kicking the suitcase out of the air. The fabric casing, already full of scorched holes from lasbolts, came apart from the blow. Assorted books, papers, dataslates, and a few formal outfits tumbled onto the floor in a scattered heap, leaving their owner exposed. Hope stared up at the Guardian, her eyes wide and her muscles frozen out of sheer terror. Mox chuckled and aimed her lasgun at the pony’s forehead.

The next discharge came before she pulled the trigger. A spear of red light stabbed into Mox’s shoulder from the ground, and the changeling reeled back and howled. Her own weapon tumbled from her quivering fingers, bouncing onto the metal flooring.

In the corner of the barricade space, The wounded mercenary clutched his stomach while trying to line up another shot with Hope’s pistol. Sweat dripped down his forehead and his hand shook, pain wracking every twitch of his muscle.

“RRRRRAAUGH!!” Mox lurched forward, and the green lights of her optics mask flashed brightly as she snapped her head toward the man. The laspistol was torn from his hand and hurled down the corridor, smashing against the wall along the way with enough force to dent its barrel.

“Human SCUM,” Mox hissed while her body started to deform. A shroud of green flame washed over her, leaving the changeling’s true form exposed. One leg was raised gingerly to avoid putting pressure on her wounded shoulder, but despite her injury she had clearly endured the lasburn better than any of the humans had suffered theirs.

Her weapons, freed of her formerly bipedal anatomy, lay on the floor around her twisted, hole-ridden hooves. A combat knife was suddenly encompassed by emerald-colored power, and it pulled free of its sheathe.

“Dark Gods curse you, you filthy insect,” gasped the soldier on the floor. “You’ve led all your little friends into a killing field… You’ll never escape Chaos!”

“Useless. Stop sniveling and die,” Mox sneered. Her knife arced down through the air and into the man’s throat.

This grisly sight seemed to snap Hope Springs out of her fearful paralysis. Screaming, she turned and leapt over the ballistic shield, racing down the hallway toward the elevator doors.

Mox didn’t bother to pull her knife from the soldier’s neck, turning her angry gaze onto the fleeing mare. She briefly considered taking up one of the dropped lasguns, but she hadn’t practiced firing the weapons with telekinesis. She had more precise methods available.

Her notched and jagged horn flickered, and a lash of green lightning blasted across the hall. Hope shrieked in pain, and her legs seemed to turn to rubber underneath her. The unicorn collapsed onto her side, sliding to a stop barely more than a meter in front of the rumbling elevator.

“You… You don’t know what you’re doing!” Hope gasped. Her legs felt like jelly, and her vision was slightly hazy now. “There could have been an accord! We could have had peace!”

“Peace? You idiot equines want PEACE?” Mox growled. Her telekinesis swept up one of the lasguns on the floor, holding it up in the air. “Look around you, fool! The humans, the Orks, even the Tau! All these aliens are only good for killing! All these monsters know is war! So just as you corral the freaks and use them as your weapons, we’ve done the same! The only difference between you and I is that I admit it!”

“What about all the others?” Hope asked. Her paralysis was slowly fading, and sweat crawled down her face while she tried to push herself upright. “The diamond dogs? The griffons? The minotaur? You’ve doomed all your allies, and for what? WHAT do you think you’ll accomplish here?”

“I’ve had enough of your blubbering,” Mox sneered, slowly lining up the lasgun in front of her so that she could use the iron sights. “If you have questions, then you can die curious.”

The elevator beeped. A console lumen changed from red to green. The door in front of Hope opened.

Suddenly the diplomat found herself staring at the greaves of an Iron Warrior Warpsmith.

Mox felt her heart stop and her muscles freeze. Her levitation magic flickered, and the lasgun wobbled in the air unsteadily.

Warpsmith Kessler showed no such hesitation. He surged forward, and in two strides he was between Hope and the quivering lasgun. The weapon fired, and a laser splashed across Kessler’s greaves harmlessly.

Mox dropped the levitation and whipped around, stumbling slightly when she accidentally put pressure on her injured leg. Her wings buzzed desperately, slowly lifting her off the ground and relieving her injured leg.

She didn’t get very far before a mechatendril bit into a rear leg and yanked her back. The length of the tendril slithered around her leg once it got some slack, swinging the Guardian about in the air. Mox’s world spun for a few terrifying seconds, and once it stabilized, she found herself hanging upside-down and staring into the optics cluster of Kessler’s helmet.

“Hello, insect,” the Iron Warrior said, his greeting emerging in a perfectly calm, static-laced voice. “I am displeased to find you here.”

“L-Lord Kessler!” Hope shouted. She pushed herself upright, her breath heaving. “Wait! Don’t kill her! She may have valuable information about what’s happening!”

Kessler’s helmet tilted slightly to the side. “Councilor Hope makes a logical point. Even after you attempted to slay her, she vouches for your survival. What say you, insect?” Several other mechatendrils surrounded the changeling, hissing like enraged snakes or breathing puffs of fire.

Mox was hyperventilating. She had heard plenty about the Iron Warriors, of course, but for her first actual encounter with one to occur under such extremely unfortunate conditions – injured, exposed, and alone – brought her over the edge of panic. She screeched as loudly as possible, and her horn lit up like a magical torch.

Kessler grabbed the Guardian’s horn with his free hand, and with a brief twist he snapped it off. Mox recoiled, shrieking even louder, and a shock wave of green-tinged magic burst from her severed horn and rolled down the hallway. Hope flinched when it rolled over her, feeling a distant echo of pain in her own horn. It was nearly debilitating, despite it no doubt amounting to a fraction of what Mox was suffering.

And suffering she was. The changeling howled and thrashed, kicking and biting at the mechatendrils around her. Kessler waited silently for several seconds, and then he tossed the broken horn onto the floor.

“I have the distinct impression you’re not going to cooperate,” he murmured. “So be it.”

Kessler shifted his tendrils, lifting Mox higher in the air. Then he hurled the Guardian onto the floor in front of him, slamming her into the metal surface. He raised a foot and stomped on the shape-shifter, reducing Mox to a dark green smear across the flooring.

“It seems we have infiltrators among all of our other enemies,” Kessler mumbled, turning away from the mess of changeling bits. He approached Hope Springs, his every step leaving gooey footprints behind him. “The situation is approaching a critical point.”

Hope stared forlornly at the corpses in the hallway, and then meekly looked up at the Warpsmith. “Did you… come to get me, Lord Kessler?”

“I did,” he replied simply. “Follow.” His optics blinked, and the elevator opened.

Hope didn’t know what to say at first as she walked into the lift next to the Chaos Marine. The last few minutes had been so bloody, so terrifying, and so thoroughly exhausting that it had already blended together into a miserable blur in her mind. She didn’t realize she was crying until her vision became too blurry for her to see.

“Th-Thank you,” she stuttered, wiping at her face with her forelegs. “I’m… I’m sorry, I… I just… thank you so much! I don’t know wh-what’s happening or why you c-came to save me, but… b-but…”

Kessler turned to look down at the mare as her stuttering descended into sobs. “I came for you because I wanted to. I need no other reason.” He looked up again, returning his attention to the thousands of data nodes sending tactical information across the noosphere. There were many large holes in the datastreams already, and more kept appearing as the enemy damaged transmitter nodes and power relays. “You may weep until we reach the building exit, Councilor. Then I require your full attention.”

Hope Springs didn’t ask for his permission, but she took enthusiastic advantage. Her restrained sobs became hysterical bawling, and she curled up on the floor of the lift while it descended.

“She… She was… She was going to kill me!” Hope gasped through the sobs. “Why?! Why did this have to happen?! I tried to stop this! If… Maybe if I… If I had just…”

“You were given the task of procuring peace from those who desired war,” Kessler interrupted. “A nigh impossible task, and yet our enemies feared your success so much that they sought to intervene. You claimed that the assaults by the insurgents were a clever, deceptive ploy rather than forthright resistance. You were correct, yet I dismissed you. This failure is not yours.”

The mare sniffled, rubbed at her nose, and then looked up at the Iron Warrior. “I actually think the bomb didn’t doom the diplomatic effort so much as you killing most of the diplomats.”

A booming noise came from outside, and Hope felt a slight tremor in the elevator. The lumens flickered, and Kessler’s mechatendrils snapped and snarled in irritation. The elevator shuddered to a stop, and then started descending again at a much slower rate than before.

“… I have come to regret that particular decision,” Kessler grumbled, fingers tightening around his axe. “I was given command of the Warsmith’s army in his stead, and entrusted with the safety of his city. I fear that I have failed him.”

Hope sniffled again. “How… How bad is it? I heard that there were enemies in the streets, but...”

“The enemy emerges from below us at will. They are unskilled, but decently equipped. And while our own defenses have been somehow sabotaged, they know their targets well. Too well. Many vox spires and noosphere hubs have been destroyed, and we have barely begun to counter-attack. The command complex is under attack and there have been attempts to breach the manufactorum. They have begun a direct assault on the armories in order to capture additional weapons to use against us. All while the vast bulk of our fighting strength is away.”

“It’s that bad?” Hope whispered.

“It’s worse,” Kessler said. “Before they were shut down by the Dark Techpriests for analysis, the augurs detected several large aircraft inbound, and one ground-based unit of Titan-class mass displacement. Due to the sabotage we were unable to identify them, but it is… unlikely they are friendly units.”

“The dragons,” Hope whispered.

“Highly probable,” the Warpsmith agreed.

“What is our plan in case we need to evacuate? Where do we go? I didn’t see it when I reviewed the security stratagems.”

“You didn’t see it because there is no such plan. There will be no evacuation. There is nowhere to escape to that is more secure than Ferrous Dominus. If our enemies can strike us here, no bulwark or security measure can stop them. We face our enemies and triumph, or we perish.”

Hope sprang to her hooves. “That was certainly our operating assumption, but we were not prepared for this! There must be another way! We will find another way! You have the equipment and the operational capacity! So many lives are at stake.”

“Every life in this fortress is inconsequential compared to the manufactorum,” Kessler said blandly.

Hope pursed her lips. “… You don’t believe that.”

Kessler’s fingers twitched around his axe. He turned his head to stare down at the mare. His optics cluster pulsed, briefly splashing a pall of red light over Hope’s light pink fur.

“… If you did, you wouldn’t have come for me. You didn’t know the changeling was here before you arrived, and I’m of limited help to you in the middle of an assault,” she continued. “I know you value your pride, Lord Warpsmith, but don’t lose sight of everything else. Too many people and ponies are counting on you.”

The elevator emitted a screeching noise as it approached the bottom levels, scraping its outer walls against the walls of the shaft that had been deformed from explosives. The doors rattled, and the lumens flickered again.

“… I do not know what to do,” Kessler finally admitted. “Even if I were to hold the fortress against this invasion, there are a great many non-combatants, and the damnable sabotage has foiled our lockdown procedures. How would we initiate an evacuation under these conditions?”

“The train!” Hope said. “We can use the train to move civilians to the gate station. Open the rail gate, and they can escape right out onto the main road. Those that can’t fit in the trains can go by hoof; as long as they can escape the perimeter, they should be okay. It’s safe outside the walls, right?”

“… We had never conceived of a scenario where the fortress exterior would be safe but our facilities were not. It is a crude plan, but it may spare us unnecessary losses,” Kessler said grimly. “As I said previously, many vox spires have been damaged or destroyed. I will need to get to one of them to relay orders across the city. You may wish to flee for the gates when we leave this structure.”

“I’d rather stay with you, if that’s all right,” Hope replied.

The elevator ground to a halt. The doors sparked and shuddered, but did not open. Several warnings popped up on the elevator control console, and Kessler glanced at it briefly. The warnings immediately subsided and the lock disengaged, as if the machine had been frightened into compliance with the Warpsmith’s gaze.

“Very well. Stay close, Councilor. We march into the teeth of the enemy.” The door finally opened. “Iron within. Iron without.”

Author's Note

Well, I don't know if this lived up to what everyone was expecting, in particular those that confessed zero interest in this arc climax, but I hope I managed to insert SOME drama into the siege >_>