Banks of the Chicacolt River
Dusk

“Hit the deck!” I heard one of the rangers yell, right as he dove behind a collapsed bus stop.

BANG!

The impact from a small shell in the street kicked up chunks of old asphalt and showered our small group with the bits of centuries-old grey material. About half a mile away in the middle of the river was the old raider-infested cruiser, now moored off the beach that we were at the head of.

“Damn it, those autocannons are getting really annoying!” Sunny shouted as more shells cratered the street.

All while the shells were landing around us in the rubble, I could see some movement below us on the beach. As the last volley landed, three more Rangers hopped up onto the street and joined up behind the broken concrete that littered our part of the street.

“Glad you decided to join us Sandy.” Sunny muttered. “You still have the parcel?”

The masked stallion patted the pack on his back. “Still dry too. Now did you figure out a backup plan yet?”

“We haven’t gotten that far yet.” I spat, flinching as a shell took a chunk out of the top of my cover. “So please, feel free to offer some suggestions.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I could sense the poor Ranger’s growing headache. “Let’s see… We got two of the barges dropping guys on the beach, that ship has us zeroed and we’re hiding out in the shadows of some buildings that I’d question the integrity of. Maybe I’m being cynical, but I don’t think we have much to use.”

I sat there as more shells slammed into the ground and mulled over Sandstorm’s rather bleak assessment of our situation. That’s when I looked up at an apartment building whose shadow we were in. Ten floors to the skinny-looking building. But as my gaze turned to the ground near it’s base I saw far more of it’s foundation exposed than would be reasonable. Barely visible was an old iron pipe, likely a water main, that had long since gone dry. “Do we have any plastic explosives?”

Steeljack and Dart both started fishing what they had of the white explosive out of their pockets, all while I made my way over to the damaged building. Further examination of the trench proved what I had seen from a distance; a long-broken water main had undercut the corner of the foundation facing the beach. The concrete was hanging over the washout, a large steel beam making up the corner of the foundation. “You have a plan?” Steeljack asked as he walked up, handing me a small bag full of C4.

“You heard Sandstorm.” I said with a smirk. “We’ve got a building of dubious integrity, and a growing crowd of unfriendly raiders down on the beach.”

Slowly a reflection of my grin grew across Steeljack’s face. “You crazy bastard…”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Sandstorm asked, having finally joined myself and Steeljack at the top of the washout.

“Oh, nothing.” I said with a grin, swinging the bag of explosive ever so slightly. “Just our backup plan.”

Sandstorm looked at the bag, the foundation, back at the bag and finally the beach. “Son of a bitch… Supressing fire!” The newly-invigorated stallion yelled.

While we had been on the receiving end of shells behind the rubble, I was relatively protected in the washout. Sure there were some pebbles that trickled down the sides and bounced off my shoulder pads, but that was nothing. I quickly set into a pattern; grab a charge out of the bag, stick it to the beam, add a detonator and repeat. I got five of the two-pound blocks on the beam in a relatively clustered spot before I realized that I had emptied the bag. So I flipped the switches that were on the sides of the detonators to arm them and checked the detonator signal on my pipbuck. I hit the connect button, and the orange light on the top right side of the screen flashed orange three times, turned solid green, then shut off. A message appeared on the screen that confirmed all five detonators had been linked.

I clambered out of the water-cut trench and nearly ran right into Steeljack. “You good?” He asked.

“Good?” I asked, sounding as sarcastic as possible. “What’s good about live explosives?”

Steeljack rolled his eyes. “We’re set!” He yelled, breaking into a jog that I was easily able to keep up with. We soon made it into the burnt-out husk of a bakery across the street.

Right behind us came Dart, the Rangers right on her heel. “You think this is going to work?”

I shrugged and pulled up the detonator prompt on my pipbuck. “We’re about to find out…”

Click

“Huh?”

BANG!

To say that the delay between hitting the detonator and the explosives actually doing their thing was shocking was a bit of… Well, let’s say that the weak of heart would’ve dropped dead right where they stood.

“Did it work?” Dart whispered over the sounds of gunfire outside.

Grrr….

“I’d say so.” I said, watching as the apartment building across the street slowly began to tilt towards the beach. But after a minute of the building shifting, it stopped moving and shed a few loose panes of glass from the upper levels to the ground below. “But I am allowed to be wrong.”

“So now our backup plan has failed spectacularly. Thanks Dusk!” Sandstorm yelled.

“Hey, don’t take it all out on me, that building was falling!” I insisted.

“And from up here it looks like it needs a little nudge.” Came a voice of reason over my radio., one that held years of experience and could deal with- “Fire in the hole!”

From our position in the bakery I saw two rockets stream down the street and slam into the far side of the building. Their explosion was muffled from our position, but soon the apartment building began to shudder and shift once more. Cracks began to spread along the side of the building that we could see. The seconds ticked by and they grew wider, breaking apart wiring and pipes that had hid within its walls for centuries. And as those very bonds broke, the building began to topple over faster, and faster, heading for it’s ineveitable-

CRASH!!!

The dust cloud that the building kicked up obscured our view of what little part of the beach that wasn’t covered in the rubble from the monument to our desperate plan.

“That’ll do it.” Said Sunny as she walked out into the street.

The rest of us filed suit, joining her in the dust-filled air outside our meager shelter. As an armed Vertibuck made a pass over our group, my radio chimed in once more. “Anyone still alive down there?”

“We’re here General.” Dart replied, using her own to respond. “Any chance you can give us a ride home?”

The radio remained silent as the echos of propellers bounced off the buildings that were still standing, and the same Vertibuck that ensured our plan’s success touched down with the doors wide open. I was the first one to clamber in and grab a seat, hitting it with enough force to shake the Vertibuck slightly to the side. “Long day champ?” Gramps asked from the pilot’s seat behind me…

Wait, since when can he fly a Vertibuck?

“You’re trying to figure out where I got the pilot’s license, aren’t you?” Gramps asked over the din made by a series of boots landing on metal deckplate.

“What was your first clue?” I retorted.

“You didn’t open your mouth and start throwing half-hearted insults around.” The old stallion replied as the craft began to shudder and lift from the cracked earth.

Well he’s right, but I still don’t see where the old coot learned to fly a highly advanced and complicated piece of military equipment… I opted to push those thoughts out of my mind as the beach became visible in the Vertibuck’s window. If I didn’t know that the hellraisers were running around on that beach, I might feel bad for them. The sight of the shrinking specs that were the individual hellraisers moving around the beach below were the only real clue to the lives that were on the beach.

Damn… If only everything was that simple.

***

Neighfair, Twenty Minutes Later

I’d be lying if I said I knew why Gramps flew us around Chicacolt. Maybe he wanted to give the raiders a chance to forget about the flying target, maybe he wanted to do some sightseeing. But as Neighfair came into view and I saw the plume of smoke pouring out of the storage hangar my heart sank. “What happened down there?”

Gramps didn’t say anything. Maybe he didn’t hear my question… Or maybe he did and was deciding to keep his mouth shut. The Vertibuck shuddered when it hit the ground followed by the decreased whining of the engines as they spun down to a stop. Only when the engines went quiet did the doors slide open and allow the faint smell of burning metal to drift into the cabin.

The ground made a bit of a squelching noise as my boots hit the ground. I looked down and realized I had landed in a puddle of fresh mud, courtesy of the water running out of the hangar door. “What the hell happened?” I heard Dart wonder aloud once she hit the ground.

Like Gramps, I kept my mouth shut and made my way into the hangar. The burning smell that permeated the air was stronger inside the hangar, but not by much. By the door was nearly a dozen unicorn Division members. They all looked like they had been through the meat grinder, faces plastered with soot and grime that was carried by the smoke. As I looked around I saw the cause of all the trouble; the ammunition storage for the field guns, or what was left of it, was nothing but a charred hole in the wall.

“In case you’re wondering, there was a live bomb in there.” Kovac said as he took a place next to me. “The two EOD techs that were in there taking an inventory got out alright, and our lovely volunteers kept the fire contained to that section of the hangar-”

“But now we’ve got nothing to throw at the cruiser.” I interjected.

“That’s the long and short of it.”

So now we’ve got a bunch of useless howitzers and a cruiser that can just blast away at the walls of the base… “Kovac, do we have access to the Chicacolt’s blueprints?”

The older stallion mulled it over for a moment before nodding. “We should, might have to do a bit of digging to find them though.”

“Just get your people on it.”

BFFT!!

The sound of the first shell landing outside the walls was the start to the ticking clock that is now hanging over all our heads. “And Kovac? I need those plans now.”

One Hour Later

“So… Do you have any ideas?” Strike asked once more. His incessant questioning over the last few minutes had only served to give me a minor headache, although it had no clear signs of abating.

“Not yet.” I muttered. About five minutes ago one of Kovac’s engineers brought me a copy of the Chicacolt’s blueprints. The mare said something about the shelling causing trouble, but I didn’t pay much attention to her or the annoying knat that had followed her to my hiding spot.

Instead I unfurled the old canvas paper and zeroed in in the heart of the cruiser. What needs to be noted about a cruiser as old as the Chicacolt is its method of propulsion; instead of electric drive systems powered by some fusion reactor, it used a far older method; steam driven turbines. Three turbines were for the propulsion system, set up at different gearing ratios for different performance. Only two moved the ship forward, the other turbine was geared so the ship could reverse. But those turbines are just the ships legs… Sure, breaking those made the ship immovable, but it still would be an intact floating gun battery. To kill the Chicacolt you’d need to cut out it’s heart.

Or in our case, cause a catastrophic failure in the ship’s boiler. Should be easy enough considering it’s age at this point, and the likely deterioration in the materials that it’s made of after almost three centuries… But that’s beyond the point. The problem remains simple; how to get to the engine room on the Chicacolt without dying. And then you still need to get out of the ship before the boiler blows and takes out who knows what… It’s a steam system under pressure, so there’s no telling how it’ll die when injured.

“Hello, I’m talking to you!” Strike droned.

Maybe another set of eyes could help… “Alright Strike, riddle me this. How do we get into the Chicacolt’s engine room? We need to fight through the crew on that ship, so by the time we get there it would just be easier to take out who’s left and use the ship for ourselves.”

“But we’ve got no use for it.” He pointed out.

“Exactly! So how do we get into the engine room?”

Strike started staring at the engineering section of the plans before he tapped a small section of the paper. “This maintenance hatch.”

“Maintenance hatch?” I looked at the spot on the paper that Strike was pointing at, and sure enough there was a watertight hatch on the outside of the hull near the engine room.

“If we can get someone under the ship and open the hatch, that same someone could go in, mess with the boiler and get out.” He said. “The hatch leads into a parts room. Why guard a parts room in the heart of the ship when you own the joint? Better yet, do you think they’d expect someone to use an old trap door under their feet to get into their house?”

Alright, it’s clear to me that Strike is far more observant than I give him credit. “So if you got all that by looking at that one little spot on these plans… Where do we plant a bomb that’ll cause a catastrophic failure in that boiler?”

Strike snorted in amusement. “Dusk, that thing is a bomb.” He replied. “All you need to do is drain the water from the boiler. Once the crownsheet is exposed it’ll become the fuse, and adding water to it will cause the boiler to blow apart. Obviously you adding water is a bit problematic…”

“If it’s a steam boiler wouldn’t there be some gauge somewhere to tell how much water is actually in the thing?”

“Yes, there is…” Strike mumbled. “I got it! There’s usually a valve on the bottom of the gauge glass. Close that valve and the water that’s in there will stay put. Just unbolt the handle and put it on backwards once it’s closed and it’ll look like the valve is still open. If the engineer thinks the boiler just needs to have water added, he’ll do it and BOOM! You got your explosion.”

“Should I be concerned that you thought of this plan seemingly off the bat?” I asked.

Strike shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s up to you. But you still need to breathe while you go for that hatch, and I can’t solve that problem”

I nodded and mulled over my options before I decided on the answer I was searching for. “You won’t need to.”

Author's Note

And there's our third chapter in the first arc. Not only has Dusk shown he's still able to think on his feet, but he knows enough to ask someone when he's stumped. And who'd think that Strike could concoct a scheme so quickly? Up until now he was just muscle. And yes, we'll delve more into his excellent analytical abilities during his character arc. In the mean time, I'll keep cranking away on Chapter Four; Heart of Fire

In the mean time, does anyone have questions? Like what you're seeing so far? Hell, maybe have some gripes? There's a comment section and the Mirrorverse Codex. Read and comment away, because I want to hear from you fellow denizens of this corner of the internet. Until next time gang!
-Striker