Pre-launch is always terrifying.
You’re stuck in a tiny titanium-crystal bubble little bigger than a sofa, attached to a tiny synthetic star, a pair of SparkleDrive thrusters, and a battery of magecannons. One failed plasma manifold, one careless technician, one miscast charm, and you and a thousand other souls will be get an early ticket to the afterlife. All you can do is grit your teeth, pray, and try to ignore the jumpy, queasy feeling in your stomach. Some ponies learn to deal with it.
I am not one of those ponies. As I lead my squadron through our third system check of the day my Bubblefighter pumps a steady stream of anti-anxiety medications to keep from from breaking down into a blubbering mess of jelly. Despite this, as we check off every system, sub-system, and sub-sub-system, my voice is cool and crisp; more like a pony taking roll call rather than a pilot about to be hurled into a meat grinder.
Green lights pop up all over the net. We are good to go. “Prepare for insertion,” I bark over the BattleNet.
My squadron replies with “Aye, commander Steelwing.” Through my link, I can feel the confidence in their voice. I’m like a talisman to them; a good luck charm. If they stick around me, there’s no way they can fail.
It’s a relief that they can’t see my true thoughts. If you peeled back this handsome, chiseled face, this salt-and pepper mane, that confident voice, you wouldn’t find Steelwing. You’d find a coward wearing his face.
-
Lieutenant-Commander Steelwing, Fifth Squadron. That’s what they call me. Sixty combat missions, over six hundred confirmed kills, and every medal the brass could think of, plus a few they invented just for me. The press calls me “Equus’s champion”, the “Last Hope of Sapientkind”. Rookies look up to me. Mares and stallions fawn over me like lovestruck school fillies.
They’re worshipping a lie. The real Steelwing is a cloud of vapor some twenty lightyears away. Me? I’m just an understudy cooked up by the United Equestria Defense Force brass. My rugged face, my golden mane and solid, piercing eyes? All grown in a tank and sewn over my real ones. My memories, my quirks, my mannerisms? You can thank hypnotic suggestion and subconscious implantation for that.
There’s so much Steelwing in me that I’m not sure where my body ends and where his begins.
-
Something twists inside my gut, like some giant were using my innards as a stress ball. My Bubblefighter’s auto-injectors pump me full of anti-nausea medication as our ship, the United Equestria Defense Force Seaddle, finally drops us back into sweet, sweet, normal space.
“Prepare for launch,” I bark over the net in a dead stallion’s voice, resisting the urge to curl up into a ball. Over the net, i see little flares of acknowledgement from my squadron. A red dot appears in the center of my field of vision, and the airlock in front of me opens like an oversized camera shutter. My stomach starts practicing for a career in acrobatics, doing somersaults, flip flops, to an enraptured audience. Before I can prepare myself, the tube’s launch rails grab my fighter and hurl it down the shaft like a ball from a cannon, crushing me into my seat before the anti-inertia charms kick in.
As my squadron and I rocket out of the Seaddle, my heart starts hammering against my rib cage. A second dose of anti-anxiety meds is pumped into my body, dulling some of the fear. While they could give me Steelwing’s face and voice, they couldn’t give me his courage. You can't grow that in a tank.
They didn’t choose me because I was a good pilot or incredibly brave. They chose me because of convenience: the only member of Steelwing’s squadron to survive the disastrous Battle of the Horsehead Nebula. A battle I survived by running away.
Once they fished my cowering, radiation-burned body out of my Bubblefighter’s cockpit, it was off to United Equus Defense Force HQ for a full makeover. My real name, my real face were placed on the casualty list while the press got a story about Commander Steelwing’s “miraculous recovery.” I became a ball of lies, glued together by science.
As the rest of my squadron is spat from the Seaddle like seeds from a seed pod, I wonder if this is some kind of penance for my cowardice; the Goddess’ way of punishing me for my cowardice. If so, it’s a fitting punishment.
-
There’s a click as my connection to the Bubblefighter kicks in. I melt into my craft: my skin becomes titanium alloy, charmed to resist the effects of inertia, while my hind legs turn to Sparkle Drive pods. My forelegs turn to twin high-power magecannons, humming with magical energies, while my heart becomes a synthetic star straining against its containment bubble like a caged manticore.
I quickly push aside the feeling. The rest of the squadron has a bit more difficulty; I have to take direct control of several crafts to keep them from flying off by themselves and going on a one-pony rampage. Once upon a time, back when we still had volunteers, they would have been given additional training to counteract the rush- "plugmania" they call it. Now, there are no volunteers, just clones fished out of the gestation tanks and flushed through a simulator, supplemented by changeling nymphs barely past their first molt.
You’d be surprised how flexible morals can be.
Once everyone manages to shake off the euphoria of full connection, I swivel my thruster pods around, giving a few test bursts to make sure they’re working properly, then jet over to our assigned position with my squadron dutifully following behind. Through the Battlenet, they feel like beads of light strung together by gossamer threads.
All around us are ships, looking for all the world like a volley of kilometer-long arrowheads. At the rear are the dreadnoughts Celestia, Luna, and Twilight, each carrying enough firepower to crack a small moon in half. Screening them are the fleet carriers, who are in turn surrounded by a screen of frigates and destroyers, little more than bullet catchers for the big guns. And then there’s us; tiny crystal-steel bubbles set in metal frames.
Up ahead, I can see our target, less than a light-minute away and closing. The Glutton.
Bile rises in my throat before the anti-nausea meds can push it back down. Out of all the threats the UEDF has faced since its founding, the Glutton is the ugliest by far: a mass of mottled, flabby meat the color of rotting flesh, covered with whip-like tentacles. Like a tumor the size of a small moon, it clings to the former colony world of Harmony with tendrils the size of continents, ripping apart matter at the atomic level and consuming the resulting particle soup.
Even here, hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, I can see how messy of an eater it is. Massive hypercanes scour Harmony’s surface as its blanket of air is sucked up.Tendrils dig into the crust and dig out out massive trenches and ravines, magma welling up from the wounds like blood. On the portions of the planet that are already engulfed, I can make out the outline of the its smallest continent, slowly being slurped up into the Glutton.
If we don’t stop it, this world will wind up like the other five we’ve lost since this war started: stripped down to a ball of molten iron surrounded by a mantle of Glutton. Once it’s finished, the abomination will do what it always does: rip off a huge chunk of itself, hurl it at the nearest suitable world, and the whole process will start over again.
It’s our job to ruin its dinner plans.
Orders flash over the Battlenet, bypassing my senses and injecting straight into my brain. I swivel my engine pods and maneuver into our standard starburst formation: three up top, three down below. The larger ships slowly jockey into position with the strange elegance that comes with zero gravity until they form a crude globe around the dreadnaughts.
Another order flashes over the Battlenet, and my pilots ignite their shield generators. Deep within my Bubblefighter, some esoteric gadget does unnatural things to both magic and spacetime. There’s a strange, electrified ice feeling, and a bubble of solidified magical energy wraps around me like a blanket.
So far, as we move our pieces into position, the Glutton ignores us. Thanks to the bafflers installed on our thrusters, we’re not hot enough to attract its attention yet, so it’s happy to chow down on Harmony, blissfully unaware of the heavily armed battlefleet looming over it.
Magical energy builds up in the dreadnaughts main batteries as Plasma is skimmed off their synth-stars, converted into magical energy, and stored in massive capacitor crystals like tension in a bowstring. My sensor readings spike, and fat purple comets spit from the cannon ports, nearly too fast for the eye to see. Enough energy to turn a mountain range to gravel streaks through space, sparkling tails trailing behind them as they shrink to pinpricks against the Glutton’s surface before disappearing entirely. I curse the speed of light for being so slow.
Contact. Flesh explodes, sending geysers of pulverized Glutton erupting into the atmosphere like parasols, slowly spreading across the planet. When it clears, two very large craters can be seen in the flabby surface. Quickly, the dreadnaughts charge up for another shot. There’s no subtlety of any kind. No fancy maneuvers or feints.
Our main strategy this entire war has boiled down to “shoot it until it dies, then shoot it again just to be safe.”
Like most creatures, the Glutton doesn’t take kindly to being shot. Tentacles the size of mountains sprout from the doughy flesh, each gouging out a chunk of Glutton, then cracking like whips, slinging globs of flabby meat the size of an office building tumbling towards the fleet in an act that is part self-defense, part self-mutilation.
Our escorts prepare a counterpoint to the Glutton’s argument. Salvos of blinding magic punch into the nearest chunk, boiling and blasting away chunks of flesh until they excavate a shimmering red core at its center. The lead ship fires a single slug from its spinal railcannon, punching through the orb like a slingshot pellet through a Hearthswarming tree ornament. The glob spasms, then goes completely limp, flaking away into a cloud of dust.
There’s a warning over the battlenet. One of the large globs is breaking up. Like rotting clay in a potters hooves, it starts by pinching itself in two, then those halves pinch themselves into quarters, then eighths, and sixteenths. Soon, what used to be a solid mass is now a swarm of hundreds of smaller globs.
That’s our cue. My sensors lock on to the closest one. From here, the horrible little thing resembles a lumpy, flabby starfish propelled by a force scientists are still trying to puzzle out.
Quickly, I flash an order and my squadron breaks up into two-stallion pairs, one covering the other. There’s a weird electric tingle inside my skull, and the implants inside my head unspoken words are whispered into my ear, telling me exactly what to do. They cross reference a list of every possible maneuver, every jink, dodge, roll, and loop you can think of, run it through some convoluted algorithm, and spit out the result.
Once, I asked the brass why we haven’t made these implants standard issue. They gave me some spiel about cost and the logistics of supplying every single pilot with custom implants and whatever. Apparently, a few hundred thousand or so newbits is worth more than a pilot’s life.
Typical.
I heed the implant advice and maneuver my crosshairs over the target. Once they turn green, I fire a burst from my mage cannons while my wingmate fires a slug from his railcannon, shattering the core to shards. As glassy shards ping off my shield, He calls out another target over the battlenet; Globs five o clock low. I copy. The implants speak once again and I roll to face the attackers, letting inertia take over for a second. A few bursts from my cannons burns off their hides, while a few well-placed slugs shatter their cores to pieces.
There’s a frantic scream over the Battlenet and one of my Squadron’s bubblefighters streaks by, shields down and jinking madly. Globs wrap around its hull, digging into the metal like a starfish into a clam. Loops of hot starflesh sprout from the hull as the glob digs into his containment sphere.
Frantically, his wingmate tries to shoot the thing off with his cannons, but with the pilot’s frantic jinking and weaving it’s impossible for him to get a target lock. I open a channel to the pilot, trying to calm him down. No use.
There’s a flash of light, blinding my sensors for a few moments as the Bubblefighter’s synth-star consumes itself in a blaze of suicidal glory. When the afterglow fades, all that’s left of the craft, the pilot, and his wingmate is a cloud of semi-molten metal and ionized gas, with a gleaming red core in its center.
Without hesitation, I put a slug into the naked core and move on. The score: two valuable fighters and pilots for one easily replaceable glob, and the battle is barely five minutes old.
Usually it’s a lot worse than that.
Salvo after salvo slams into the Glutton, each strike blasting megatons of flabby meat into orbit. Globs hurl themselves against our shields, bashing themselves to pieces in an attempt to crack them open. Again and again fighters are cut down Globs by the scores, littering the Battlespace with glittering clouds of shattered cores, while the escort ships bombard the swarms with megaspell rockets.
Our wall of steel and firepower holds firm. Soon, all that are left of the first swarm are a few scorched stragglers, easily mopped up by my squadron. The rookies start celebrating, bragging about how many Globs they killed or how many brushes with death they survived.
“Cut the chatter.” I bark over the Net. That was only the first wave. The Glutton still has plenty of meat to sling at us. Already, the Fleet’s sensors have picked up a second wave of incoming Globs.
As we wait for the surging tide of flesh, I can’t help but wonder: if we win this war, what’ll happen next? When all the ticker tape is swept up, the cloning facilities are shut down and the squadrons demobilized, what then? What will they do with me? Send me home to a dead stallion’s wife and a dead stallion’s colt ? Hang out with friends I never had, work at a job i never had, reminisce about old times I never experienced? How long will I have to convince everypony that Steelwing is still alive?
Sometimes I seriously consider blowing the lid off this whole scam. A few words to the right ponies and this whole charade will be over. Then I ask “what good will it do?” Right now, even a fake hero can make the difference between survival and extinction. So, I play along. Sign autographs, pose for pictures, and play the part of a hero. All so Sapientkind can live to see tomorrow.
-
I don’t have long to reminisce. Soon, the leading edge Globs of the second wave come into range. I lock on to the closest one, fire, and fire my thrusters, my wingman trailing close behind. Like a puppet, I dance to the beat of my implants, dodging, weaving, and shooting when told to, like a student looking at a cheat sheet.
My wingmate flashes a panicked cry. I turn to see a fat glob digging through his shields, bashing itself against the magical barrier. Following my implant’s advice, I fire a half-second burst from my magecannons and slice the flabby mass free like a scalpel cutting out a tumor
A cry for help flashes over the Battlenet. I turn to see the destroyer Neighpon, shields stripped and mobbed by Globs. The hateful little things swarm over the her like flies on a corpse, rooting themselves into the hull. There’s a scream over the com channels as the crew is irradiated and devoured at the same time, followed by a silent explosion as her synth-stars blow.
There’s a solid thump against my hull, followed up by a feeling like shattering glass as my shields disintegrate. A quivering glob of Glutton latches onto my hull and starts digging in. Matter screams as the Glob rips it apart on the atomic level. I can feel radiation shooting through my meat-self with a prickling, metallic sensation. Pure fear lances through my body.
My implants quickly crank out a solution. I pivot my thruster pods in opposite directions and pull a full burn. The universe blurs into a chaotic tunnel around me. My hull creaks and groans as centrifugal force starts bleeding through the charms.
The Glob begins to stretch like pulled, flabby taffy. The tentacles anchoring it to my hull stretch, becoming skinnier and skinnier until they finally snap, flinging the horrible thing into space like mud from a spinning wagon wheel. I kill my spin, roll to face the tumbling terror,, and give the little glob a tall glass of magecannon fire, followed by a cannon slug chaser before returning to the fray.
Time passes. My hull is scored by globs that can’t keep their tentacles to themselves. My overtaxed magecannons glow red-hot. My meat-self is covered in sympathetic welts, burns, and blisters.
By now, the Fleet isn’t a collection of ships and ponies anymore, but a titan made of magic, titanium, and plasma, slugging it out with the Glutton like two boxers in a ring. On one of its forelegs are the dreadnaughts, pummeling the Glutton relentlessly. On the the other are the fighters and escorts, blocking incoming blows as best it can.
Our titan is becoming chipped around the edges. At least half of our Bubblefighter squadrons are out of action, some permanently. The surviving escorts are almost as hurt as we are, with shields like cracked glass globes. Even the dreadnoughts are feeling the pain, scored and chewed by Globs that managed to smash through their shields.
Our hard work finally pays off, though. One final salvo hits home, flesh explodes into vapor. When the debris clears, we can see a sleek, red mass embedded in the meat, like a giant sign shouting “Hey, shoot me here!”
That’s our cue. The dreadnaughts divert power to their spinal magcannons, charge for a bit. Once they reach full charge. Three ferrous iron slugs, each the size of hovercarriages hurtle towards the exposed core like relativistic cannon balls.
Here’s a quick question: what happens when you accelerate a half-ton chunk of iron to five percent of lightspeed?
The answer is one Tartarus of a light show.
The slugs slam into the core with the force of a falling meteorite. There’s a blinding white light, followed by a massive plume of flesh. Like a snake without its head, every Glob in the Battlespace twitches, spasms and dies, flaking into powder.
The Battlenet goes ballistic. All over the fleet, pilots whoop, neigh, and buzz, reveling in the almost sexual craze that comes with total victory. Comms tries to keep the chatter under control, but it's like trying to stop an avalanche with a bucket. Even I manage to crack a smile as I set a return course to the Seaddle.
The debris clears. The plumes of Glutton material settle...then slowly begin to reform. The Battlenet goes deathly quiet, as if somepony had just flipped a switch. It shouldn’t be doing that. Right now, the entire flabby mass should be turning to powder.
Optical sensors zoom in on the exposed Core. It’s perfectly intact.
My meat-self’s jaw drops. How? How is this possible? Ice water flows through my veins; has it done it? Has the Glutton found a way to adapt?
A report flashes over the Battlenet. Mage sensors pick up the traces of a high-power shield spell, more than enough to stop the slugs in their tracks.
That’s...not supposed to happen. Since when can the Glutton use magic?
New orders flash over the Battlenet. There’s no sign of building magical energy within the Glutton. Seems the shield was only good for a single use. One more volley should kill it.
Our relief is interrupted by a strange, itchy feeling flowing throughout my meat-self. Space ripples and wobbles, and an entire swarm of Globs just appears out of nowhere, hidden by a cloaking spell of unprecedented power.
My meat-self’s blood freezes in its veins. It’s doing more than using magic.
It’s setting a trap.
At once, the Fleet snaps out of its stupor and scrambles to fight off the surprise attack. Ragged Bubblefighter formations, some reduced to a few damaged craft, hurl themselves at the Globs. Damaged shield emitters spark and crackle as technicians struggle to get them back online, while exhausted crews reload magazines and recharge capacitors.
The swarm grows in my hud: shapeless, wriggling flab, hungering for fresh matter. The fighters on the edge of our perimeter fall like parasprites, swatted aside with tentacles, crushed, and engulfed. I hear the screams of pilots as they’re broken down into their component elements or irradiated to death. My wingmate take a tendril straight to his synth-star, vaporizing him in a cloud of star-hot vapor. At this rate, the swarm will break through in minutes.
It’s the battle of the Horsehead Nebula all over again.
I target the nearest Glob and trigger a burst...only for pain to bloom in my chest. A tiny animated schematic of my bubblefighter pops into view, it's containment sphere flashing red. The implants whisper new instructions into my mind: reduce thrust, return to the Seaddle. Run away. Just like I did at the Horsehead Nebula.
My meat-self takes a deep breath and I open the magnetic nozzles all the way, launching myself straight through the swarm. Pain, searing, unimaginable pain. It rages through me, turning thought to ash. With a thought, I override my safeties and pump a near-lethal amounts of painkillers into my bloodstream, then shut off my craft’s bafflers. If the Glutton has eyes, I’ve just lit myself up like a spotlight in a dark room.
That’s it, follow me. I mutter, ignoring the screaming of my implants. Like moths to a candle, every Glob in the swarm breaks off their attack and start homing in on me, changing direction far more quickly than any Bubblefighter.
“That’s it,” I coo to the swarm. “Come to me”. That’s right, come on, little Globs. Come on over. Look at me. Look at how hot I am, how delicious my hull is.
With a thought, I turn end over end then cut my engines, letting inertia take over as I spray the swarm with bolts and slugs alike. Core after core. Glob after glob, they shatter.
Maybe it’s the near-lethal levels of drugs flowing through my meat-self’s veins, but as I hurl myself into the fray, I feel something that I haven’t felt in, well, ever: peace. All of my cowardice, all of my doubts, all of my fear, my self-loathing melt away like ice in a Sparkledrive exhaust.
I squeeze off another burst, only for both of my magecannons to explode, showering me with blobs of molten metal. Even with the painkillers flooding my bloodstream, I can barely hold on to consciousness. So much for my guns.
Time to improvise. I kill some of my forward thrust, allowing a few of the globs to catch up.
Closer... closer... now!
White-hot starflesh explodes from my thrusters, instantly stripping the globs down to their cores. A few cannon slugs shatter them to pieces before my synth-star starts to scream. Warning pains erupt all over my hull. Sweltering heat builds up inside me.
Automatically, my neural plugs disconnect and I become a small, fragile chunk of meat, nestled in a metal cocoon. There’s a gentle thump as explosive bolts fire. My cockpit flies off into space. As I tumble, I catch glimpses of Globs swarming my dying craft, jackals closing in for the kill.
Loops of plasma erupt from the dying shell. The hull grows red hot. Then white hot.
In the distance, I can see the Fleet regrouping. Can see the Dreadnaughts charging up for another shot. I smile. That should buy the Fleet enough time to get off a second shot.
There’s a flash of light from my dying fighter. In the last few milliseconds before I’m evaporated, I lean back, stretch out my forelegs, and close my eyes as if to embrace the miniature supernova.
In the last few milliseconds of my life before I’m atomized, I’m not just playing Steelwing.
I am Steelwing.
