PonyTech: Ashes of Harmony

by CopperTop

Rating: mature
Tags: Profanity, Adventure, Violence, Crossover, Death, Twilight Sparkle, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, BattleTech, Changelings, Science Fiction
Length: 600195

The Celestia League has fractured. Successor States fight an endless war for resources and domination. At the forefront of this war are the intrepid pilots of massive war-machines known as: BattleSteeds.

A Dark Age has befallen ponykind. Where once reigned the united Celestia League, five Successor States now battle for control of the settled region of the galaxy known as: The Harmony Sphere. Wars' destruction ravaged the once-flourishing worlds and left them in ruins. The advancement of magic and technology has not only ceased, but the spells and equipment of the past cannot be produced by present-day worlds. Now, the Succession Wars are fought over resources, ancient magitek, and spare-parts factories, for control of these elements will lead to the final victory and domination of all the known worlds.

By the 16th century After Celestia, war has raged in the Successor States for over 500 years.  The battlefields of the Succession Wars are dominated by the most awesome war-machines in equine history: BattleSteeds.  These huge, pony-shaped vehicles are faster, tougher, and wield more destructive potential than a legion of 1st century Crystal Knights.  From the twenty-ton Breezy, to the hundred-ton Big Mac, BattleSteeds are the preeminent warfighting machines of the galaxy.

In this ongoing conflict, the mercenary soldier has ample opportunity to seek their fortune under the banner of one of the Great Houses.  It is a career fraught with danger, but rich in potential rewards.  Slipshod is one such mercenary.  A BattleSteed pilot in the employ of a small freelance outfit, The Steel Coursers, he hasn’t expected much more from his life than to do a job, get paid, and likely someday die on the field of battle and be quickly forgotten by time.

That is, until The Steel Coursers happen upon the wreckage of an ancient Celestia League era DropShip.  What they find inside could change the fates of all who dwell within the Harmony Sphere forever…

Cover and TRO art provided by the talented Mix-Up. Be sure to show him some love!

Published 2020-05-14 15:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2022-04-22 23:17:33 UTC

Chapter 2: Lost Destiny

“Jump Complete,” a mare announced over the ship’s communication’s system, “all craft are cleared for undock and system travel. Enjoy your stay on Canis.”

“About damn time,” Squelch muttered under her breath as she leaned forward in her piloting couch and began to flip a series of switches that would detach the Galloway from its mooring on the JumpShip. Slipshod’s ears perked at the telltale metallic clunks reverberating through the ship as the docking clamps released, followed shortly thereafter by the deck suddenly lurching forward as the main engines ignited. The mare at the helm laid her hooves on the control yokes and deftly maneuvered them away from their ride, guiding them onto a course deeper into the system.

Val similarly straightened up at her own station as she began to look over the readouts from their sensors. “Traffic is pretty heavy at the moment,” she noted. Slipshod looked over and could clearly see that her displays were dotted with a healthy number of signatures.

“House Glimmer is making a push into Kirin territory now that their attention is on Canopy,” Squelch said as an afterthought, not taking her eyes off of her own screens as she steered their ship to avoid colliding with any of the other ships detaching from the jump tender that they’d rode in on, “Canis is a perfect staging system for their vanguard operations.”

“Looks like we won’t have to go far to pick up our next job,” the stallion mused.

The commander frowned, “we’re not exactly specked for frontline combat, Slip.”

“Any advance force needs scouts,” he pointed out, then nodded in Valkyrie’s direction, “and you’d have to look far and wide to find anypony who can pick out signatures like our little wundermare here.”

Squelch gave a noncommittal grunt as she resumed focusing on piloting. She wasn’t wrong though: their little operation was not suited for the kind of heavy-hitting action that would be featured in a genuine conquest campaign like the one Blueblood was embarking on. Mercenary companies that were equipped for such operations would doubtless have their own recon elements anyway. At best, they could hope to snag a contract later on if any of those merc companies found themselves needing to subcontract for lighter units if they lost too many of their own.

Although, if some of those outfits had need of an experienced pilot, Slipshod couldn’t say that he wouldn’t be tempted. He liked the Galloway and its crew, to be sure, but it wasn’t like he was married to the ship. Anymore…

“Uh oh…”

All eyes went to the pegasus mare at the sensors. Squelch narrowed her eyes. “What ‘uh oh’?”

“TimberWolf’s Dragoons,” she said, looking over at the others with a worried expression.

Slipshod felt his gut tense up as well. “What are the chances that Dominus Blueblood’s rescinded that ‘shoot on sight’ order he issued to them?”

The mare piloting the ship rubbed her brow as though she felt a headache coming on. “You slept...with his wife…”

“I thought it was his daughter!”

“Wouldn’t have made it better.” Fair point. Squelch let out an exasperated sigh and looked over at their sensor operator. “How bad is it?”

“Just one ship,” that was good, “but it’s heading this way,” that was bad.

“They’d have to be blind not to see us on our way in,” Squelch sighed as she began tapping at her controls, “so it looks like we’re going to be taking the scenic route.” She rubbed her chin as she studied her screens for a few seconds. Then she took hold of her control yokes once more and Slipshod felt the ship lurch as their course shifted suddenly. “I’m going to head for the gas giant. Plenty of moons there to hide behind until the JumpShip has left the system.”

“Sounds good to me,” the stallion said, “I wasn’t in a hurry to get paid anyway.” He stood up from his seat and trotted for the door leading from the bridge. “I’ll be in my bunk if anypony needs me.”

That was actually something of a white lie. It was the first Monday of the month, which meant that―

“Howdy, stranger,” a mare cooed at him as he rounded the last turn on his way to the DropShip’s portside crew quarters. The thestral with jade eyes and a dusk-purple mane tied back in a long braid was waiting for him, propped up against the open doorway leading into her shared quarters. “You’re late,” the tone was accusatory, but her expression was not.

Slipshod merely grinned, “sorry, Rigs. Past caught up with me on the bridge. Squelch’ll be breaking the bad news about our delay in making orbit in the next hour or two, I bet. Silver lining: looks like I’ll be free next week after all!”

The mare’s eyes narrowed at him. The singular talon on the joint of her leathery wing reached out and caught the earth pony roughly by the collar of his jumpsuit, dragging his head closer to hers. “We’re going to be stuck on this ship for an extra week, and it’s your fault?” this time there was a―slight―genuine edge in her tone.

The golden stallion forced the best apologetic smile that he could, “...I’ll make it up to you?”

“You’d better. Now get in here and get out of those clothes,” she tugged him none-to-gently through the hatch and followed him inside.

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Coffee?”

Squelch stifled a yawn as she glanced back in the direction of the bridge door that had just opened. “You’re timing’s impeccable,” she murmured with a wry smile as she saw Slipshod stepping in with a tray and a couple of steaming mugs of coffee balanced on his back. She reached out with her magic, wrapping her telekinesis around one of the cups to bring it to her lips, giving it a small test sip before taking a more generous gulp of the bitter fluid. It was no surprise that he’d made it to her exacting specifications.

The stallion shuffled the tray off onto a nearby console that wasn’t being used for anything and took up his own mug in his hooves. “Hour fourteen is usually when you need a pick-me-up,” he remarked simply before taking a sip of his own drink. “Truffle rolls are in the warmer if you ever decide to make it down to the galley.”

“Thanks.” Squelch swallowed another generous mouthful of her coffee and set the mug down on the armrest of her piloting couch, letting her gaze drift over to Slipshod as he made himself comfortable at the sensor station and looked over the readouts. He wasn’t anywhere near the wizard that Valkyrie was, but he could tell if there was something dangerous nearby easily enough.

With her fatigued state, it took hardly any time at all before little fragments of nostalgia began to tug at her. She quickly turned away and focused her attention ahead of her out of the main viewport before the stallion noticed. The last thing she wanted to do was give him any indication that she was interested in anything. Not again.

It wasn’t that he was a bad pony. On the contrary, he’d been the consummate coltfriend, and a model husband: attentive, thoughtful, considerate; he was everything that a mare could want from a stallion. That hadn’t been the problem. She’d even been able to tolerate his impulsive flirting. He was a rake. It was just the kind of pony that Slipshod was. For months, it hadn’t ever gone beyond flirting either. Then she’d come back to their quarters to find him in their bed with another mare.

He’d been apologetic. He’d placed the blame squarely on his own shoulders, citing his personal weakness. He’d even been the one to offer to give her a divorce. She’d actually balked at first, ready―Celestia knows why―to give him a second chance if he promised never to let it happen again. However, much to her surprise, he’d admitted that wasn’t a promise he could guarantee that he’d be able to keep.

So...they’d parted matrimonial ways, while still remaining coworkers. It wasn’t something that she’d have thought that they’d be able to make work, long term, and she’d been ready to see him jump ship and take on a contract with another outfit in short order. He hadn’t though. He’d stayed onboard. It was anypony’s guess why. Any other stallion would surely have bolted the moment they could. Though, Squelch had long known that Slipshod wasn’t like ‘other stallions’.

He had this...uncanny ability to get along with ponies. To a degree that should have been impossible. Ponies that, the unicorn had to admit with some chagrin, included herself, despite everything.

She’d hated him for his betrayal, but that was as far as her animosity went. He’d remained kind to her, and bore her well-deserved scorn without complaint or retaliation. Eventually, most of her ire abated and they were able to get back to being ‘just shipmates’, but the unicorn would be lying if she said that she still didn’t see the same qualities in the stallion that had attracted her to him in the first place. They’d relapsed a time or two since then, waking up together after an evening of too much ‘celebrating’ at the end of a lucrative contract.

Then she’d find him walking out of another pony’s quarters the next evening and any thoughts of ‘trying again’ would wither and die on the vine.

Again, she wanted to hate him for that, but she just couldn’t seem to bring herself to. While Slipshod certainly didn’t try and hide his promiscuity, he didn’t go out of his way to rub it in her face either. Spending an evening in the cabin of one of the Galloway’s crew was just...how he spent his evenings.

Honestly, the part that baffled her the most was that those other members of the crew seemed to be perfectly fine with the arrangement too! Squelch had even seen the stallion and his most recent nighttime companion coming out of their quarters and strike up a conversation with a pony that the unicorn knew he’d been with just the previous night, all three of them chatting amicably as though there was nothing the least bit awkward about it.

Had Slipshod been a unicorn, Squelch would have sworn that there was magic in play. The idea certainly made her feel better about how little she despised him despite his adultery―

“If you’re out of Autumn Twilight, Val has some, just so you know,” the stallion said, not looking up from his console.

Squelch jerked in her seat, her head whipping in the stallion’s direction. “What?”

“You haven’t used any in a week. Figured you were out. Val has a bottle, and I’m sure she’d lend you some. Heck, I bet she’d just give it to you. She’s a Rainbow Falls No. 9 kind of mare anyway.”

The helmsmare looked over at the stallion with a critical expression. “You do realize it’s none of your business what perfume I wear or when I decide to wear it, right?” she said in a dour tone, all the while trying hard not to let her surprise show at how he’d accurately deduced one of her own private qualms about their delay in making Canis orbit. She hadn’t said a word to a soul on the ship about it, so how he could possibly have known...

“Never said it was my business,” he replied without a shift in his detached tone, nor meeting her gaze, “but you always put a dab under your chin every couple of days, and you haven’t for a while. You love that scent because it was your grandmother’s, so I know you didn’t stop wearing it because you changed your tastes. Ergo: you’re out.

“You’re also not the kind of pony to bring it up, so there’s no reason why you’d have asked Valkyrie about it, and―like I said―she happens to have some she’ll probably just give to you because she doesn’t wear it at all.” He finally looked towards her, and she could clearly see the sincerity in his expression. “I mean, it’ll be another three days before the Jump Ship leaves with that Dragoon courier, so we won’t be going shopping any time soon.”

Squelch relaxed slightly, “...Thanks.” She looked forward once more. “Yeah, I’m out.” She was quiet for nearly a minute before her curiosity got the better of her. “How did you know? I use, like, literally a drop, and the two of us spend approximately no time together off the bridge.”

“True,” the stallion nodded with a small smile, “but that’s because you spend approximately no time off the bridge at all.” He wasn’t wrong. On more than one occasion, Squelch had considered setting up a cot off to the corner and just abandoning the pretense that she required private quarters at all. “Which is how I knew. This whole place usually has a hint of Autumn Twilight to it. Now it doesn’t.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a moment before another thought struck her. “And how exactly do you know that Val has a bottle if she doesn’t wear it?”

“Because I bought it for her.” He looked over and saw Squelch’s surprised expression, giving her a little shrug. “What can I say? The scent grew on me. I figured if things ever went anywhere with her, I wouldn’t mind sleeping in another bed that smelled like it.” He saw the mare’s eyes narrow critically and waved a dismissive hoof at her. “Relax, she shot me down. And has done so repeatedly,” he chuckled, “you trained her well. She should still have the bottle though. I can’t imagine she’d just throw it away.”

“...I’ll keep that in mind,” the unicorn mare finally said, letting herself relax a little, grateful to have the reminder of why ending their romantic relationship had been a good idea. She took another sip of her coffee, then a shrill beep from Slipshod’s station caught her ear. The stallion seemed to have been just as surprised by the sound as she was. “What’s going on?”

“Power reading,” the earth pony said in stark surprise as he began to tap at the console.

“Approaching ship?” Squelch mentally frowned at the worried note in her voice. It was unlikely that the Dragoon courier vessel had spotted them before they’d reached the moons of the gas giant, but it wasn’t impossible. Still, a ship like that wasn’t exactly capable of doing anything to the Galloway even if they found them, were they? How heavily did the Dragoons arm their couriers?

“It’s not coming from a ship,” Slipshod announced, “at least, not one in space...it’s coming from the surface.”

The green unicorn mare’s frown deepened into a sneer. “Pirates.” Just their luck to slip into orbit around a moon that was hiding some sort of raider stronghold. It’d have to be something along those lines, as a legitimate operation would have been squawking all sorts of transponders and beacons and the like in order to help transport ships find their way to landing pads. Only an organization that didn’t want to be found would be running as quietly as possible, and those organizations tended to be up to little that was legal.

“I don’t think that’s it either. The reading’s really small. I don’t think it would have been detectable by most ships in an orbit like ours, except that Val’s done quite a bit of tinkering with our sensor systems. This power signature is, like, EVA suit small.”

If the stallion sounded impressed that such a tiny source of energy had been picked up by the Galloway’s sensor suite, he was right to be. A transport like theirs had no business detecting something so small from hundreds of kilometers away. “Is it pulsing a rescue beacon? We should have picked it up on comms long before the suit’s power core pinged our sensors.” And that should have been true no matter how much Valkyrie modified their systems.

“No beacon,” Slipshod said with a shake of his head, “and I’m not convinced that it really is a suit. It’s just about the size of one.” He squinted down at the screen for a few seconds before straightening back up in surprise. “We should get Val up here to double-check, but I think there’s a crashed ship down there.”

“So, a crashed ship, something that might be an EVA suit, and no beacon?” Squelch quirked a brow at the stallion, who could only shrug helplessly. She sighed and rubbed her hoof against her temple. The simple solution here was to either completely ignore it or just find another moon to orbit in case anypony came looking for whoever was down there.

Admittedly, that thought didn’t sit well with Squelch. She’d known ponies who were in situations like that. Not all of them survived. Sometimes they didn’t survive because a passing ship had the attitude of: ‘not my problem’ and just flew on by. The Galloway wasn’t going to be one of those ships. Not while she helmed it.

“Val, to the bridge; we found something,” the unicorn said, punching up the ship’s internal comm. “Mig, Tig, prep the Bronco and an APC. We’re going to investigate a ship crash. ETA: thirty minutes.” She glanced back at the stallion and jabbed a hoof towards the door. “Go get suited up.”

Slipshod’s lips spread in a smile and he nodded before trotting off the bridge.

“Gallop One to Ops: cresting the final rise now. Two thousand meters out from the Nav Point. Should have eyes on the crash site in the next few seconds,” Slipshod announced over his headset. He glanced at a few of his displays, making sure that he wasn’t getting too far ahead of the APC trailing him. His towering BattleSteed let him effortlessly trot up the side of the mountain, while the wheeled vehicle behind him was forced to take a significantly more circumspect path along more even terrain.

“Roger that, Gallop One. Keep us advised of what you find,” Squelch’s voice came back over the comm. The stallion nodded wordlessly and directed his gaze back out the armored glass panes of his cockpit. His hind hooves eased back on the steering pedals, slowing his ‘Steed down so that he came to a stop just short of the rise, allowing him to peek over the crest without exposing any more of his ‘Steed than was absolutely necessary. Not that he was expecting any sort of trouble, but he still wanted to get an idea of what he was getting himself into with this wreck.

The mountain ridge dropped away beneath him and Slipshod finally found himself peering down into the valley below, and the gnarled husk of a large transport ship. Right away the stallion could tell that it was far larger than the Galloway. Maybe not Friendship-class DropShip big, but still a pretty hardy size. “Woah.”

“What do you see, Gallop One?”

“I see the ship,” Slipshod replied, “it’s not going to be getting off the ground ever again.” That much was fairly obvious even to somepony not mechanically inclined like himself, not with damage like that. Not all of it looked like it was due exclusively to a crash, either. “They were shot down,” he frowned, “I’m having trouble pinning down the class. It’s nothing I recognize. Patching in a feed for you. See if you have any ideas.” He reached over and manipulated some controls to begin streaming a video feed to the Galloway’s bridge.

“Receiving…” There was silence for several long seconds, then, “...I think...I think that’s a Strongheart!”

“The fuck’s a ‘strongheart’?”

“A Celestia League Era DropShip,” Squelch replied, still sounding in awe, “five hundred years ago they were the mainstay of transport ships. Today they basically only exist in scrapyards.”

“So this is an old wreck then?”

“Probably a very old one,” she agreed. “It’s been centuries since these things were flying around.”

“No chance of survivors then,” Slipshod reasoned. “Still, it might be worth seeing if there’s anything salvageable. If it’s a DropShip, might mean there're some ‘Steed parts. Centuries old or not, Mig and Tig will be able to make something of them.”

“Sounds good,” the unicorn mare replied, “head on inside.”

“Roger.” Slipshod put his hooves back onto the control yokes and throttled forward once again. As he got closer though, something about the wreck stood out to him. “Ops, you seeing this? That’s some pretty serious scoring on the hull there. Way bigger than a PPC or larger laser array could cause.”

“I see it...yeah, that’s pretty big alright...it looks like it runs all the way across the width of the ship...” There were several seconds of silence. “I think that was all caused by just one shot.”

“That can’t be right,” the stallion said with a deep frown as he surveyed the extent of the damage. It was like some great talon had torn a ragged gash through the top of the ship, opening it up like a tin can. He saw little evidence of the sort of scoring that would have indicated a laser or particle weapon had done the deed. It wouldn’t have been the result of a missile either. It had to have been a kinetic impact of some sort, but no autocannon shell he knew of was that big. “It must have been hit by a meteor or something,” he insisted. No ship had weapons big enough to have sliced so cleanly through a DropShip like this. They just didn’t exist.

“If we’re talking about a centuries-old crash, then it’s not impossible that this ship was shot down by a WarShip,” Squelch insisted. “They fired rounds about the size of a medium ‘Steed, give or take.”

Slipshod looked at the size of the tear. “Yeah...that looks about right,” he admitted, then suppressed a shudder at the thought of having something the size of his own Wild Bronco hurtling towards him at supersonic speeds.

He deftly maneuvered his ‘Steed closer to the rupture and peered through the opening, using his floodlights to illuminate the interior. “Mostly clear inside,” he announced, frowning a little. “Don’t think they were hauling all that much when they went down―hold on.”

“What? What do you see?”

“This was a Disciple ship,” Slipshod announced grimly.

“Disciple? Are you sure?”

“Oh yeah,” the stallion said, his eyes focused on the painted symbol on the far wall of the ship’s interior. A crossed deer antler and goat horn, the easily recognized symbol of the Disciples of Discord, a notorious terrorist organization reviled throughout the Harmony Sphere. They were honestly rarely seen these days in civilized space. Occasionally they’d pop up for a bit of mischief on some backwater world close to the Periphery, but they never stuck around long. They were more of a nuisance than a legitimate threat these days, though ComSpark had a standing bounty posted that paid out for any confirmed kills on Disciple units. It was pretty easy money if you could find them, because they never had much hardware that posed a risk to a BattleSteed. The hardest part was finding them, honestly. They struck suddenly, out of nowhere, and were gone within the week. There was rarely enough time for an out-of-system force to respond to the attack before they vanished.

He’d certainly never heard of them having anything like this though! A full sized DropShip capable of hauling, what? A full company of ‘Steeds? That took resources that the Disciples just didn’t have. At least, not anymore. If this ship really was as old as Squelch suggested, then maybe things had been different for the Disciples a few centuries ago.

Slipshod looked around the opening and frowned again. He could have muscled his way through with his ‘Steed pretty easily. A centuries old ship husk wouldn’t do much to impede a Wild Bronco. However, there was no telling how much of the ship might collapse in on itself if he did. This was still primarily a salvage operation, so leaving as much of it intact for Mig and Tig to haul away was the priority. If he was going to do any further investigating, it wasn’t going to be in his ‘Steed.

“I’m heading in on hoof.”

“Understood. Stay safe.”

“I always do,” he said before he cut the channel and sealed his suit. This moon hadn’t seen any terraforming. Outside was little more than a frozen vacuum. His suit’s systems would keep him warm and alive for a few hours, long enough to poke around for a bit to get a lay of things while the APC caught up. The stallion glanced briefly at the displayed map and noted that the rest of the team would be there in a little under fifteen minutes. The twins would appreciate knowing what they were getting into; or if there was even anything worthwhile inside.

Slipshod checked his suit’s seals a second time before finally cycling out the cockpit’s atmosphere and popping the hatch. He grabbed his rifle on his way out, just in case. The moon’s gravity was about a third standard, and put a bit of a spring in his step. The stallion performed a few experimental hops on the head of his ‘Steed in order to get a grasp for how gingerly he’d have to step. Then, with a final look through the opening in the side of the ship, he leaped down from the top of his metal behemoth.

A few judicious firings of his suit’s thrusters ensured that the ‘Steed pilot saw a safe landing within the ship’s interior. He clicked on his helmet’s exterior lights and looked around. As he’d suspected, the DropShip’s hold was depressingly bare. Though it was not completely empty, he was delighted to find. There was a single ‘Steed in one of the bays. It was hard to get a clear look at what model it was, as it had been shaken loose from it’s carriage in the crash and was currently laying in a heap on its side. Still, a ‘Steed was a ‘Steed. Broken or not, as long as most of its pieces were present, the Galloway’s twin mechanics would be able to get it in working order again.

“Mig, Tig, there’s a ‘Steed in here for you two to play with,” he announced over his suit’s personal comm unit. “Looks to be at least a heavy, too.”

“Awesome! We’ll call up a salvage rig from the Galloway so we can haul it back.”

Slipshod nodded and closed the channel again, resuming his sweep of the interior. The ship’s bow was a lost cause, that much was obvious. The area around the crash site made it clear that its command crew had fought valiantly to save as much of it in the crash as possible, but in the end they’d smashed right into the side of a mountain, crumpling the forward decks. The mid section had been opened up like a ration tin by whatever stupendously powerful weapon had shot them out of the sky. The rear sections, however, actually looked fairly decent. With luck, they’d manage to recover some usable parts for the Galloway itself, which he was sure Squelch would appreciate.

He began making his way in that direction, as it also happened to be where that power reading that brought this place to their attention was coming from. He was very curious to learn what sort of power system could endure for several centuries like that. The stallion pranced across the bay’s low-gravity interior to the far side, slipping through an open hatch into the crew area beyond.

That was where he found the bodies.

The discovery honestly didn’t shock him all that much. If anything, he was surprised that he hadn’t seen any thus far. Though, if this ship really had been shot up while still in space, it was likely that any personnel who might have been in the main bay area had been blown out into space then and there. The bodies here were suited up just like he was. A few had cracked visors or torn suits, probably from the crash. As he passed a few crew cabins, he noticed suggestions that some of the ponies had met more...desperate ends. Suited ponies slumped over tables or cots with partially destroyed helmets on their heads and guns near their hooves. Frozen blood splattered against a wall.

Faced with the prospect of dying by suffocation...Slipshod wasn’t so certain that he’d have made a different choice himself. By all accounts, it was not a quick or pleasant death.

Ten minutes later, the stallion finally located the source of the power signature: the infirmary. Unlike most of the other rooms, this one’s door was closed. It was even locked, curiously enough. A pair of shots from Slipshod’s rifle proved sufficient to open it. There were bodies in here too. Unsuited ones. Several were laying on beds. Others were on the floor.

They were deep enough in the ship’s interior that Slipshod suspected this area could have retained an atmosphere. At least, prior to the crash itself. He could see some tears in a few of the bulkheads that were clearly the result of the craft’s hard landing. That had probably killed everypony in here who hadn’t been wearing a suit. Like the wounded.

The stallion could almost imagine what it had been like. Getting shot up in space. Losing a lot of the crew to the blow-out in the hangar. Anypony who had survived had been brought here to be treated. Taken out of their suits. The crash event might have been hours later. Maybe days, depending on where in the system the fight itself had actually happened. Obviously not everypony died when they hit the moon, but these poor sorry sods sure had. Would have been a hard day for whatever ship’s physician had been onboard, to lose all of their patients like that after working so hard to try and save them.

Terrorists or not, that was a shitty way to go.

Then Slipshod’s eyes finally landed on the source of the energy reading, and they instantly widened.

Perhaps he had spoken too soon. Slowly, he reached up and keyed in his suit’s comm device. “Ops...Tell Dee...we have a survivor.”

“Gallop One, say again,” came Squelch’s consternated response, “did you say: survivor?!”

“Yup,” was all the stunned reply that the stallion could give. He didn’t begrudge his boss her skepticism. He wouldn’t have believed it either. Not if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. But he was seeing it: a single bed nestled within a glowing energy field that was occupied, not with a vacuum-desiccated husk of a corpse, but a vibrantly-colored―living―purple mare. A purple mare with wings...and a horn. “And it’s an alicorn.”

“So how is she, Doc?” Squelch asked as the bone-white unicorn physician stepped into the conference room that was rarely utilized. Today though, it was being used by the crew’s command staff to bring everypony up to speed on what had decidedly become a much more interesting salvage operation than any of them could have ever predicted. For a number of reasons. Firstly though, was the topic of their inexplicable survivor.

“It’s a miracle that she’s alive at all.”

“That bad, eh?” The unicorn said with a frown. She’d hoped that they’d be able to get some answers from the mare about what had happened to the ship, and how exactly it was that an alicorn had come to be on it.

“Hmm, what? Oh! Oh, no, nothing like that,” the ship’s doctor assured them. “I mean, yes, her injuries were life-threatening, but it’s nothing that can’t be easily rectified with a few hours of surgery. She’ll be back up and on her hooves in a few weeks, don’t worry about that. No, I was referring to the fact that she’s actually endured so long in stasis.

“Anypony else would have died centuries ago.”

Squelch scratched her chin with her hoof. “Yeah, I’ve been wanting to ask about that.” She glanced over at the twin kirin mares who were also sitting in on the meeting. “What the fuck was powering that thing that managed to keep the lights on for...how long?” Now she glanced at Valkyrie, who’d been charged with combing the computers that could be salvaged to recover what records were still intact.

“Five hundred and forty-ish years,” the pegasus supplied.

The green unicorn looked back at the mechanics. “Alright, so what kind of battery lasts over five hundred years on a charge?”

The pair of cyan and rose scaled equines exchanged glances and then shrugged in unison. “You got us, boss,” the blue Tig admitted.

The rosey Mig nodded her head. “We put that battery through every test we know.”

“It’s just a standard arcane power cell.”

“This ship uses hundreds just like it.”

“The design hasn’t even changed much.”

“We could plug that one into this ship no problem.”

“Especially since the one Slip recovered even still has a full charge!”

Everypony exchanged glances before looking back at the twins. “So it has been running for over five centuries and wasn’t even drained a little? How?” The pair of kirin could only shrug helplessly, looking almost mortified that they couldn’t provide an explanation for the seemingly impossible violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

The doctor cleared his throat. “Actually, I might have an answer to that.” The gathered ponies all looked to the physician, Mig and Tig with rapt attention, curious to learn how the ship’s chief medical pony had the answer to a technical anomaly that had completely stumped the pair of them. “Arcane cells use a form of energy that is almost identical to unicorn magic. Hypothetically, enough unicorns could recharge a cell all on their own.”

“Hypothetically, yeah,” Mig agreed somewhat reluctantly.

“But it’s highly impractical,” her sister added.

“Even a powerful unicorn would only be able to charge a cell a quarter of the way.”

“Before they suffered burnout and were useless for the rest of the week.”

“That’s why they’re charged using mana crystals.”

The doctor nodded in agreement. “Indeed. However, my point was that arcane cells and unicorn magic are essentially interchangeable...to include alicorn magic.”

Another round of dubious looks for the gathered ponies. “Look, I know that alicorns are supposed to be powerful,” Squelch said, “but there’s no way they’re ‘five hundred years of charging a battery’ powerful. Especially not when they’re unconscious!”

“Under normal circumstances, you’d be correct,” Doctor Dee conceded, “however, there was nothing normal about these circumstances.” Again the physician found himself the focus of the crew’s full attention. He cleared his throat. “Yes, the patient was unconscious; and yes, she was in stasis. However, I’m fairly certain that was what allowed this feat to be pulled off in the first place.

“You see, contrary to common belief: stasis fields don’t really ‘stop time’. That’s actually impossible. Time cannot be ‘stopped’. However, it can be looped back around on itself in a stable manner. That is what a stasis spell does: it loops the patient through time. The loop is a very small one―a fraction of a second―but it is a loop nonetheless.

“What it looks like happened was that the patient was placed into stasis to keep her from succumbing to her injuries, and then somepony else used their magic to connect the patient’s innate arcane leylines into the stasis spell’s power source.”

“For five hundred years?” Squelch asked dubiously.

“Not from the patient’s point of view,” the doctor pointed out. “Remember: time loop. For her, only a small burst of power was taken, and then she was flung through time. Her magic never drained, because she never sustained the spell for more than a second.”

Slipshod’s brow furrowed and he raised a cautious hoof. “Wait...I don’t think that makes any sense. If she’s constantly getting sent back in time...then shouldn’t that mean that she’d keep getting older? Because time is still passing for her as she goes back through every loop?” his head started to hurt.

“Stasis fields don’t loop a patient back in time,” the doctor corrected, “they send the patient forward in time to a point that simply hasn’t been determined yet. It’s a loop that starts at the future’s end.”

“Oh...wait, no, hold on,” the stallion began to rub his temples, “that...how does that even―? I mean, when―wait…” If there was any comfort to be had, it was that Slipshod wasn’t the only pony apparently having trouble trying to wrap their head around what was happening.

The doctor sighed and rubbed his chin. “It’s easiest to just think of the stasis field as a time portal. What we are seeing through it is the patient as they were when they were put inside. When we turn it off, they arrive in the present from the past, and were never really ‘in’ the stasis field for any of the time in between.

“That kind of answer on a test on stasis spells would get you kicked out of medical school for how abysmally reductive it is, but it’s as much as any of you need to understand about them.

“From the patient’s perspective, she has been in there only a moment, and so her magic has been powering it for only a moment. For us, it’s been five hundred and forty years, and so her magic has been powering the field for five hundred and forty years.” He grinned. “And thus concludes today’s lesson on subjective time!”

“My head hurts,” Squelch whined, then noticed a rattling sound near her head. She looked up to see Slipshod holding out a bottle of aspirin to her, already appearing to be chewing on a few tablets himself. She took the bottle and tapped out a couple of tablets for herself. The bottle then got passed on the Valkyrie.

All the while, Doctor Dee frowned at them. “If you really want to fry your brains, ask me to explain how that kind of time manipulation is affected by ships traveling at near-luminal velocities. Special relativity is the real kicker.”

“But she will live though?” Squelch asked pointedly, making it clear that she had no interest in sidetracking this meeting with a physcis lecture.

“Yes, she’ll be fine,” the white unicorn nodded, “I can’t guess when she’ll regain consciousness, but physically she is already on the mend. Fortunately it turns out that alicorns aren’t so different from us mortal ponies in that way.”

“So she is an alicorn? It wasn’t just some mare who got a bunch of cosmetic alterations?”

“I honestly can’t be certain either way at the moment,” the physician shrugged, “I’ve never encountered an alicorn before. No doctor that I know ever has. Except for the Court Physician on Equus, of course,” he added matter-of-factly.

“It has to be cosmetics though, right?” Valkyrie asked. “I mean, there’s only the one alicorn: Queen Twilight Sparkle. There aren’t any others. We’d have heard about them if there were others, right?”

“I assume,” Slipshod said, frowning. He’d had some time to study their new patient while he’d waited in the infirmary for the APC to arrive and cart her back to the Galloway. The notion of cosmetic alterations had crossed his mind more than once then too. However, he hadn’t been able to identify which addition must have been the fake: the horn or the wings. He’d seen prosthetics before―even really good ones―and nothing on that mare looked fake. Still, the fact remained that the whole galaxy knew that there was only the one alicorn, and she was a good couple hundred lightyears away in the capital on Equus.

Exactly where she’d always been.

“All I can say for certain about our guest,” Doctor Dee said, “is that she is a mare...who has wings and a horn. They’re both natural. I could find no signs of surgical scarring or magical transmutation that suggests this was done unnaturally. At least, not through any means that I’ve ever encountered before.”

“Maybe she's just a genetic freak?” Valkyrie offered. “Some pegasus and unicorn genes fought for dominance and it ended in a tie?”

“It’d be the first case I ever heard about,” the doctor said, sounding mostly unconvinced, “but it’s a big galaxy, so maybe this could be one of those one in a billion things that is technically possible, but is so unlikely that nopony ever really thinks about it. Like a JumpShip landing inside a rogue planet.”

Their commander grunted, but she too seemed unconvinced. “Fine. Until we find some way to figure it out for sure, she’s not actually an alicorn. She’s going to live, so we’ll see what she says when she wakes up.” Squelch now directed her attention towards the kirin mechanics. “Now, onto the ‘Steed we pulled from the wreckage: what have we got?”

The cyan and rose equines exchanged giddy grins with one another before looking back at the pegasus mare. “It’s a Rainbow Dash!” They both excitedly announced in unison.

This produced raised eyebrows from Squelch, Slipshod, and Valkyrie, and a confused frown from Doctor Dee, who posed, “A what?”

“You’re sure?” Slipshod asked of the pair, who both nodded vigorously, still grinning like foals who’d gotten exactly what they’d asked for for Hearth’s Warming. The stallion looked over at the chief medical pony and answered his question. “A Rainbow Dash is an old Celestia League heavy BattleSteed. It’s honestly pretty awesome. Basically the Crystal Heart of ‘Steed design: tough as horseshoes, fast enough to keep up with some light ‘Steeds, and packs enough firepower to go hoof-to-hoof with a Big Mac and make a good show of itself, despite being out-massed by about thirty tons. As you can imagine, engineering like that was difficult to mass produce, so only a few were ever built, and I don’t know of a single outfit that actually operates with one. You’ll find pieces of them on the market from time to time, but never enough to actually put one back together again,” he looked at the twin mechanics, “this one’s in one piece?”

“It’s shot to shit,” Mig said with a grimace.

“It was fighting something pretty nasty,” Tig agreed.

“Probably a lot of somethings, honestly.”

“A lot of firing angles, yeah. They were surrounded.”

“But the internals are intact.”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly.”

“So you can fix it?” Slipshod asked.

The faces of both kirin lit up. “We get to fix it?!” both exclaimed in excitement.

The stallion looked over at Squelch. The unicorn mare was looking pensive at the prospect. Getting the parts and materials to fix up a heavy ‘Steed, especially one that was as rare as a Rainbow Dash, would carve pretty deep into their cash reserves. Fiscally, it really made more sense for them to just sell it off for the payday. A novelty like that would net them enough C-bits to buy a few medium ‘Steeds if they wanted. A rare ‘Steed like this would be quite a feather in their manes, yeah, but they really weren’t a ‘heavy ‘Steed’ sort of outfit. Not yet, anyway. Maybe someday. Though, who was to say that that ‘someday’ couldn’t start with this ‘Steed ‘today’?

“Get me a list of parts,” Squelch finally said with a reluctant sigh, “I’ll have them picked up when we finally touch down on Canis.”

“Yay!” both kirin cheered as they leaped at each other and embraced one another in a fierce, excited, hug. They eventually parted and Mig dug out a stack of papers from a pouch on her tool harness and held it out to Squelch with her magic. “Here’s the list! We put it together already.”

Tig held out another―smaller―stack of papers. “And here’s the list of the usual stuff we need to keep the other two ‘Steeds running.”

“Great,” the pegasus mare took both stacks in her magic and folded them into the other papers on her clipboard, “so that just leaves the ship.” She glanced at Valkyrie, “do we know how The Disciples of Discord got their hooves on a Strongheart transport five hundred years ago?”

“The ship’s logs were lost in the crash,” the pegasus said, “that kind of stuff would have been with the bridge computers, and those hit that mountain pretty hard. All I had to look through were a bunch of personal records, which were exposed to vacuum on that dusty moon for half a millennia,” she continued by way of caveat to explain her lack of detailed information, “and not much of that survived.

“What I have found is really...confusing.”

“In what way?” the pegasus pilot pressed.

“They mentioned stuff like family back on Equus, some big fight that was happening against ‘The Enemy’, and how things weren’t going so well,” Val frowned as she relayed the information, reading from some notes that she’d taken from her record perusing.

“Could we be seeing the remnants of the first Disciples?” Slipshod offered, “maybe they started out on Equus and were forced to flee towards the outer rim worlds. ‘The Enemy’ could be the Celestia League, and, yeah, that fight didn’t go well for them.”

“Maybe,” Val conceded somewhat reluctantly, “though I saw the kind of equipment they had...that didn’t look like the kind of stuff that a bunch of terrorists should be able to get their hooves on.” She jabbed a hoof at the kirin mechanics, “heck, what about that ‘Steed? If a Rainbow Dash was so awesome and rare, how’d the Celestia League let one slip through their hooves?”

That was actually a pretty good question, Slipshod was forced to concede. The fact that the DropShip had actually been branded with their emblem suggested that this wasn’t just a transport that they managed to hijack at a port. This had been their ship for a long time. A ship designed to transport and refit ‘Steeds; a piece of equipment that Disciples didn’t have at their disposal that he’d ever heard. At least, that was how the Disciples were today.

“Do we have any idea where they were trying to get to?”

“Clan territory, it sounded like,” the unicorn informed them, earning another round of surprised looks.

“I’ve never heard of the Disciples having Clan connections,” Squelch mused, “but that would explain why we never seem to find many of their bases, but they keep popping up every once in a while. Maybe they’re staged deep in Dragon Clan territory.”

“That’d be pretty surprising,” Slipshod said, “considering that the Dragons basically don’t interact with the Harmony Sphere at all. I know they don’t have any love for ponies, but they’ve never gone out of their way to antagonize us.

“You’d think that they’d be concerned that harboring terrorists might provoke us into performing a serious invasion.”

“Maybe that’s why the Disciples never really seem to hit anything particularly big?” Squelch offered, “they do just enough to be annoying, but never anything worth organizing a force to hunt them down over. They get to ‘stick it to the mare’ while not wearing out their welcome with the dragons.”

Slipshod grunted. It was possible, but he wasn’t sure that that kind of passive-aggressive stance really fit with the mentality needed to sustain a terrorist cult for half a millennium.

“So does that cover it? Pilot, ‘Steed, and ship; anypony have anything else we need to go over?”

“The JumpShip leaves with the Dragoon courier tomorrow. We can break orbit and head for Canis whenever you want; it’s too late for them to do anything about us without missing their ride,” Valkyrie said before casting a glance at the stallion sitting next to her, “and I doubt you pissed them off badly enough for that.”

“If you ask me, he’s overreacting as is,” Slipshod mumbled, crossing his hooves stubbornly over his chest.

“Alright,” their employer said, standing up from the table, “in that case, everypony get back to work. I’ll go and plot us a course for Canis and get us there as soon as possible. We could all use some shore time.” She picked up her recently thickened clipboard with her magic, “and we appear to have quite a bit of shopping to do.”

“We get to fix a Rainbow Dash! We get to fix a Rainbow Dash!” The pair of mechanic twins sing-songed as they pranced out the door towards the ‘Steed Bay.

“You two owe me big for this!” Squelch snapped at them as they left. “My quarters; tonight!” The door sealed automatically behind them and the mare grunted as she lifted the clipboard and flipped through the sheaves of paper on it, browsing the list of needed parts, performing a cursory mental tally. “Hope nopony wanted to get paid this month,” she groused.

She cast an accusing glare in Slipshod’s direction. “This whole thing was supposed to gain us C-bits, you know?”

The stallion threw up his hooves in surrender. “Hey, nopony said you had to agree to fix it. You could have sold it for enough to buy a new DropShip.”

“Yeah, but then I know all I’d have heard from you for the next three months was,” the mare dropped her register into what the stallion assumed was meant to intentionally sound like an exaggerated parody of himself, “‘you know? It would have been nice to pilot that Rainbow Dash just once; just to see what it felt like’, and I am not in the mood to listen to you whine about ‘Steeds.”

“You mean like how we shared a JumpShip with that Manticore DropShip that one time and you spent the next week complaining that it would take us four years at our current profit margins to be able to afford one and would it kill me to try for a few extra bounties on our contracts?” The stallion admonished in a playful tone, smiling at the mare. “For the record: it very nearly did.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” The mare sighed, shaking her head. “Fine, whatever,” then she jabbed her hoof at the stallion, “but when she wakes up, you get to explain to our guest that we’re keeping her ‘Steed.”

“You think it was hers?”

“Those ponies did everything in their power to make sure she survived. She either owned the ‘Steed, or the ship, or maybe was even one of their leaders. Either way, I bet she’ll have a lot to say about what happens to it.”

“Speaking of,” the stallion said thoughtfully, “what’s going to happen to her when she wakes up?”

“She’s a Disciple,” the unicorn replied simply, “the laws are pretty clear about what we’re supposed to do with Disciples.”

“Right.” The requirements put out by ComSpark were crystal clear on the matter of what was supposed to be done with Disciple captives: they were interrogated and executed at the earliest opportunity. It was a standing order from the Queen herself. “And how does Dee feel about having all his hard work being undone the moment we land?”

Squelch was silent for a brief moment. “She’s only his patient until she leaves the med bay. After that…” she shrugged, “it’s not like you and Val don’t make every effort to undo all his hard work every time he’s done patching you two up,” she reminded the stallion with a wry smirk. It melted away rather quickly though. “Dee knows the score. If she’s going to be tortured to death, at least he can help her to be in as little pain as possible going into it.”

“Yeah. I guess there’s that, at least,” the golden earth pony nodded. He sighed. “A real shame that. Never got to meet an alicorn before.”

He headed for the door and left.

“Most of my patients would be lucky to have family members that are half as attentive as you’ve been,” the white unicorn physician noted as he strode into the main ward of the infirmary from his connected office. It wasn’t particularly large, since they didn’t have a large crew of personnel, and it mostly only saw a few patients a day with minor illnesses. At the moment, it held only the one patient. Doctor Dee stepped up to the side of the bed opposite the pensive Slipshod and began to chart the readings on the various displays. “I haven’t seen you by a bed for this long since Squelch’s appendix burst.”

“Yeah, well, you know me: can’t stay away from a pretty mare,” the stallion said, flashing the physician a broad smile. He was only half-joking though. The truth was that the slumbering mare was genuinely quite attractive. He’d already thought of quite a few lines to feed her when she finally woke up, and may or may not have fantasized about a few fun things he could think of to try out in bed with a mare who had both wings and magic.

That sort of thing was for later though. Right now he had other thoughts on his mind. “Her injuries; what were they?”

Dee glanced down at the other stallion briefly before flipping back through his notes. “Contusions on the shoulders and hips, fractured skull, broken ribs, a broken femur, and burns to the face and back. All of which have been addressed, as you can see,” and Slipshod could. The mare was covered almost entirely in dressings and rigid casts.

“That bruising was consistent with a ‘Steed’s piloting harness, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” the medical pony acknowledged, “and all of her other injuries are also quite typical for somepony who’s BattleSteed was put through the ringer in a fight.”

The earth pony was nodding. “Mig found burned purple feathers in the cockpit. She was the pilot,” he gestured to the unconscious mare. “A damn good one too.” The kirin twins didn’t yet have the parts that they needed to fix the Rainbow Dash, but that hadn’t stopped them from getting it strung up in the stall so that they could start removing the damaged components that would need to be replaced. They and their team were crawling over it like a swarm of excited locusts at this very moment.

Slipshod had been present when they finally got the ‘Steed standing and had done his own appraisal. He agreed fully with Mig and Tig’s assessment that the Rainbow Dash had been in a fight with multiple opponents. Shots had struck it from both low and high angles, and the weapon types were far too varied for all the damage to have been done by just one ‘Steed. Yet, all the same, the damage had been spread out. Very spread out. It was almost like either the enemy had gone out of their way to shoot every single square inch of the ‘Steed’s armor, or...the pilot had worked tirelessly to make sure that a numerically superior enemy couldn’t focus their fire on any one specific area and cripple her.

That was hard, especially if a pilot was surrounded by smaller and more maneuverable enemies. Indeed, it was a preferred tactic of a lance fighting a single mech to circle the target and hold their fire until presented with a particular vulnerable location―usually the left or right barrel of a ‘Steed’s torso. It was nearly impossible for a single opponent to keep a given facing out of the line of fire like that. That this mare had managed it spoke volumes about her skill.

More than that, she’d clearly managed to get away from that fight as well. Either by defeating all of them or escaping to her DropShip. Slipshod wasn’t sure which was the more impressive feat, honestly.

His eyes wandered over her wings and horn. “Any luck on figuring out her alicorn-ness?”

Dee finished updating his notes and floated the chart back over to his office. “Nothing more than I said before: no signs that any of this was done surgically, and I don’t see any of the usual signs of magical transmutation. She’s either the genuine article or the unlikely natural combination of pegasus and unicorn genetics. Though, given the kind of magical resilience that she’d have needed for somepony to link her leylines to the stasis spell…” The doctor shook his head. “Something like that would have pretty much caused my horn to explode on the spot. So she’s obviously a very powerful magic-caster.”

“Do you have any theories?” Slipshod asked. “We’d have heard about another alicorn, right? That kind of thing should have been broadcasted all over the Harmony Sphere. Everypony in the galaxy would have known that there were two alicorns.”

“I’d have thought so,” the physician shrugged, then thought for a moment. “I wasn’t as attentive in my history classes as I could have been―honestly, who pays attention in their elective courses anyway? But I could swear that I remember one of my professors mentioning that pre-Sphere Equestria was ruled by two alicorns? Something about a war between them and one of them being cast out too.

“Maybe that’s how the Disciples started,” the doctor offered. “The two of them fought, one founded the Disciples, and was defeated and banished,” he scratched at his brow, frowning, “I think that’s how it went anyway.”

Slipshod looked at the ivory unicorn. “So, does that make her ‘Discord’ then?”

“Makes sense. Discord was the name of a villain that got banished by the ruler of Equestria. I remember that much pretty clearly. ‘Discord’ being banished and the alicorn sisters fighting was covered in the same lesson on ancient Equestria, so I think they’re the same event.”

“Should we be concerned then that we’re transporting an ancient enemy of Equestria and Queen Twilight?”

The doctor paused for a moment, considering. “I doubt that this could be the real Discord,” he finally stated with a measure of certainty. “All of that was supposed to predate the Celestia League. This mare is probably a look-alike or something. She’s way too young to have been around in the days before the Harmony Sphere.”

“Unless she really is an alicorn,” Slipshod pointed out, causing Dee to look pensive for another moment before continuing. “But, like you said: the other alicorn was cast out. She wouldn’t have been on some transport in a backwater system like Canis was five hundred years ago. I don’t even think this was a settled system back then.”

The ‘Steed pilot regarded the unconscious mare for a few more seconds and then glanced back at the doctor, who looked like he was still trying―unsuccessfully―to remember his history electives from over a decade ago. “What does Queen Twilight Sparkle look like?”

“Hmm? Oh, um...I think she’s blue...maybe? Green? I honestly don’t know,” the unicorn said with a dismissive shrug. “I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen a picture of her. Not much really comes out of Equus that’s worth paying attention to these days. Every news outlet tends to focus on the infighting between the various Houses and coalitions,” the doctor looked at the unconscious mare for a few moments. “Maybe pink? My mind wants to think that ‘pink’ was in there somewhere for some reason…

“You attended Sandhoof Royal Military Academy, didn’t you? Back on Equus? Didn’t you get to see the Queen while you were there?”

Slipshod balked for a brief moment before managing to recompose himself. “Yeah, that’s right. No, I, uh, didn’t see the Queen while I was there.”

“Really? I thought she attended all of the graduations there...”

The golden stallion winced, having managed to forget that little fact. “She does,” he confirmed, “and I’m sure that she was at mine too. I just don’t remember seeing her though. I had...other things on my mind that day. I’d gotten a message from an old friend that my family had been executed the night before the graduation ceremony.”

“Oh! I’m...sorry to hear that. I didn’t realize,” the doctor said, looking a little abashed, “I mean, I knew your family had been killed, I just didn’t know you’d heard about it right before you were supposed to head back home.

“That had to have been rough for you.”

The earth pony’s lips were set in a grim line. “It wasn’t how I’d envisioned leaving Equus, no.” Silence rang through the clinic for several long seconds. Then the ‘Steed pilot finally turned towards the door and started heading out. “Pink sounds right though.” He paused in the doorway. “Call if she wakes up, alright?”

“Of course. I’ll let everypony know the moment she so much as twitches.”

“Right. Thanks.” And, with that, the earth pony stallion left the room. He had some groundwork to lay.

Author's Note

TECHNICAL READOUT

WB0-3L

The Wild Bronco is a medium-tonnage BattleSteed designed and developed originally in 1027 AC (After Celestia) by Heel Caulk Construction, which used their largest model of industrial WorkSteeds as the frame for the WB0-1A. Initially fitted with a pair of autocannon type-fives in each shoulder, the Wild Bronco has seen a variety of loadouts emerge since then, thanks in large part to the modular design philosophy of the WorkSteed that served as the genesis for the series. The 3L variant saw a complete departure from ballistic weaponry in order to provide battlefield endurance for long campaigns where resupply could not be guaranteed; trading out the autocannons for magical energy weapons and a chest-mounted missile rack. While debatably underpowered compared to other BattleSteeds of its weight, the Wild Bronco boasts superior armor and maneuverability compared to its peers.

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

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Chapter 3: Assumption of Risk

“Torque wrench set to ninety Clover-meters.”

The golden stallion withdrew the prescribed tool from the box, twisting the bar a few times until the dial was lined up with the proper setting, before holding it out in the direction of the rose-tuffed tail attached to a brown-scaled posterior. He only wished that his heart was truly in admiring the finely-toned flank being dangled before him. Unfortunately, his mind was elsewhere.

“So how do you and your sister manage to do it?” He asked as the kirin mare’s magic gripped the torque wrench and drew it up inside the chest wall of the Rainbow Dash that she was currently working on. They’d be landing on Canis in less than twelve hours. It’d take a day or two for the parts that they needed to get the Rainbow Dash functional to arrive after that, but that didn’t mean that the pair of mechanics and their teams couldn’t get a head start by first stripping off everything that would need to be replaced and fixing what they could in order to expedite future installations. As a result, the two had spent nearly every minute since getting the go-ahead from Squelch buried in the internals of the ancient BattleSteed.

If there was one dark cloud hanging over their heads, it was that the budget didn’t quite allow for the kind of weapons systems that a ‘Steed like this truly deserved. They would have to make do, in the interim, with spares that they’d had in storage for his and Valkyrie’s ‘Steeds.

Until they came up with the finances for some heavier firepower, this ‘Steed’s bark was going to be a lot worse than its bite.

“Do what?” Came the mechanic’s muffled response.

“Unless you were just blowing smoke that night, the two of you are, like, the heiresses to House Kiso or something aren’t you? They’re supposed to be pretty big players in the Kirin Confederation, last I checked. You can’t tell me that your family is okay with you guys tagging along as wrench wenches in a small-time merc outfit.”

“Oh, Mom’s in an absolute snit about it,” Tig called out from where she and another tech were currently tearing out what was left of a particle projectile cannon from the mount in the ‘Steed’s oversized right canard. The gauss rifle in it’s left canard was theoretically repairable, but it would still need to be removed and effectively rebuilt from the ground up over the next few weeks. Not that the kirin didn’t absolutely relish the opportunity to do so.

“She’d have Squelch hunted to the end of the Sphere if she knew what company we were with,” Mig agreed.

“And she’d have you drawn and quartered for ‘tarnishing her precious flowers’,” the cyan kirin mare said with an annoyed expression as she made what was obviously a crude imitation of their mother’s voice.

The stallion perked up in surprise. “Wait, what.”

“Which is why we don’t tell her anything beyond that we’re both still alive...and especially that we’re happy,” Mig carried on, seeming to ignore Slipshod’s comment.

“The former to reassure her, and the latter to piss her off,” Tig added with a snigger before returning her full attention to her work.

“Incidentally, the latter is also why we let you take us to bed that one time, and why we made sure to send Mom the vid of it,” the rosie kirin floated the torque wrench back out and passed it to the earth pony. “Eight gauge blade connectors and crimpers.”

Slipshod passed the electrical tools to the mare’s waiting telekinetic field as he processed what she’d just told him. “Wait, you only slept with me to piss off your mother?” The stallion wasn’t sure how he felt about that revelation. It felt so...tawdry...somehow. Also, “...can I get a copy of that vid?”

“Oh?” Tig peaked back from over the canard, “and what will you give us?”

The stallion frowned, and waved his hoof at the ‘Steed, “I literally found this for you. You’re telling me that wasn’t worth anything?”

“He’s got us there,” Mig’s muffled voice called out from inside the torso. Followed shortly by an electrical crackle and a sharp, “ow!” A moment later, “I’m okay!” Slipshod reached out and delicately smoothed out the now frizzy tuft at the end of her tail, “...thank you, Slip.”

“Fine, we’ll send you a copy,” the cyan mare sighed, going back to work for only a second before she peeked back down at him. “Why are you suddenly so interested in our pedigree anyway?”

“It’s not that, so much,” the stallion said, “I was just curious how a pair of ponies that were sort of ‘famous’, in a way, managed to get about without being noticed by somepony that would be interested in finding you. I mean, I’m sure your mother has ponies―or kirin, rather―on retainer with orders to report back to her the moment they spot you somewhere, right?”

“Oh, without a doubt,” Mig agreed.

“Why do you think we never leave the ‘Steed Bay?”

“I assumed it was because you really liked working on ‘Steeds,” Slipshod offered sheepishly.

“While true,” Tig admitted from her perch, “it also means that nopony sees us who we don’t want to.”

“We aren’t exactly ‘night on the town’ mares anyway,” Mig reminded him. “Give us a ‘Steed that needs a little TLC and we’re happy as a New Nipone harpy with its talons full of fugu!”

The stallion quirked a brow and glanced up at the cyan sister. She nodded her head. “They are quite happy.”

“Right. So, the takeaway here is that: if you don’t want to be found, then just keep yourself out of sight.” He sighed. “Not quite the revelation I was hoping for, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Mig pulled herself out from the Rainbow Dash’s torso, floating the crimpers back to Slipshod before reaching up and smoothing out her still-frazzled mane. The rosie kirin glanced at the earth pony with a quizzical expression. “What’s going on? Did you just remember that you overstayed your welcome on Canis and have enemies looking out for you there too?”

“Cuckolds, more likely,” Tig snorted. “Whose relative did you bork this time that you shouldn’t have? The planetary governor?”

“It’s occurred to you that you could just...not bring home a mare every night, right?”

“This isn’t about me,” the stallion snapped a little more irritably than he’d meant to, earning a pair of sniggers from the kirin, “and who I ‘bork’ is none of your business.” He paused, thinking for a brief moment. “Unless you feel like making a sequel vid to antagonize your mother. I picked up a book on Ambrosia that has all sorts of ideas for things that’ll send her into outright apoplexy!” The scaled sisters exchanged glances and rolled their eyes. “But anyway,” he hurried on, “this is about...somepony else.”

“The alicorn?” both asked in unison.

He frowned. Perhaps he’d been a little too optimistic about his ability to obfuscate on a ship this small. If not himself, who else on board might not want to be recognized, after all?

“Look, it’s hardly going to matter any time soon. She won’t be awake for weeks yet. I’m just..trying to think ahead here.”

“She’s a Disciple, isn’t she?” Mig asked. Slipshod nodded. “So then what’s the point? I thought Squelch was going to hoof her over to the authorities the moment we landed?”

“Hard to go under the radar when you’re downrange of a firing squad,” Tig chimed in.

“Yeah...I’m going to talk with Squelch about that.”

The pair of kirin exchanged shocked expressions. When they looked back at Slipshod, Mig gawked. “You’re going to try to talk Squelch out of turning over a Disciple?”

“Screw the sex tape, I want to see a vid of that!” Tig said.

“It’ll never happen,” Mig agreed matter-of-factly.

“Because Squelch isn’t stupid enough to cross ComSpark.”

“Granted, I’d’ve assumed that you weren’t that stupid either,” Mig frowned at the stallion, joined by her twin. “So maybe we’re wrong and both of you are certifiable.”

The earth pony rubbed at the back of his head. He knew full well that this was just a preamble to the conversation that he’d be having with the emerald unicorn later. Her reaction wasn’t likely to be much different. It wasn’t like what they were saying weren’t legitimate concerns. ComSpark had very clear directives on the books about what anypony, anywhere, was supposed to do with captured Disciples of Discord. The last thing that any merc outfit wanted was to be branded as Disciple sympathizers by the Mercenary Review Board. None of them would ever work in the Harmony Sphere ever again, either as mercenaries or anything else for that matter.

Regardless, “that mare hasn’t been an active Disciple for over five hundred years,” he pointed out. “That’s got to put her outside the statute of limitations or something.”

The pair of mechanics exchanged glances, still very obviously unconvinced.

“Look, I’m just saying that she might not even have done anything wrong, okay? Can either of you tell me exactly what year that whole ‘kill all Disciples’ order was put out by Queen Twilight?” Both mares frowned again, but then reluctantly shook their heads. “So, for all we know, she went into stasis before anything she did was technically illegal!”

“Slip, we’re not the one you need to sell this to,” Mig pointed out.

“Which is lucky for you, because I don’t think I’d be buying,” Tig added.

“I know, I know,” the earth pony sighed heavily. It was going to be an uphill fight getting Squelch to see things his way, he knew that much.

“Just please tell us that you’re not trying to keep her alive just so you can bork her,” Mig glared at him.

“That’s not it at all,” he scowled.

“Uh huh.”

Slipshod took a deep breath and shook his head. He could hardly fault the pair for adhering to the reputation that he’d spent so long building for himself. “Look, she’s...she’s a good ‘Steed pilot, right?” He gestured to the mostly dismantled Rainbow Dash. “You’ve seen what this thing’s been through, but it’s somehow still salvageble. Even I couldn’t have pulled off something like that.

“Probably,” he added as an afterthought in an attempt to not downplay his own abilities so harshly.

“A good pilot with experience fighting in a heavy ‘Steed,” he amended, “that could be worth a lot to this outfit.”

“...As long as nopony finds out she’s a Disciple,” Mig finished for him, much to the stallion’s chagrin.

“As long as nopony finds out about that, yeah,” he frowned again.

“I’m sorry, Slip, but there’s no big secret to laying low,” Tig offered with a little shrug, “just think of whatever you would do when landing on a new world―”

“―and have her do the opposite,” Mig finished with a grin.

“Right. Thanks for your help,” he turned away from the pair and their team. “Have fun with your new toy.”

“And good luck trying to talk Squelch into holding on to that Disciple mare,” Mig called after him as he headed for the ‘Steed Bay’s exit.

“Seriously though: vid it for us!” Tig added.

Slipshod must have stood outside Squelch’s room for a good two minutes, rehearsing his pitch. The twins hadn’t been wrong: it was going to be a tough sell, and that was still putting it really mildly somehow. This would actually be the second time he psyched himself up for this. The first time had been at the entrance to the bridge, only for him to learn from a rather amused-looking Valkyrie, that the unicorn had retired to her quarters early for the evening.

At least he’d had extra time to practice what he was going to say. Not that it had done all that much to calm his nerves. Somepony’s life was riding on his ability to persuade a mare to do what he wanted. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal. He did that sort of thing all the time.

However, this time, the mare in question knew all of his tricks, and was completely inoculated against his bullshit. So, that didn’t help matters much.

The earth pony took a final, deep, preparatory breath, and touched the button to ring the door chime. The pause that followed felt like it drug on for the better part of an eternity. Then a mare’s voice finally responded through the speaker above the chime, “yes?”

“It’s me. Can we talk?”

Another neverending silence, eventually answered by the door sliding into the wall.

Slipshod’s eyes, out of habit, immediately locked onto the bed. That was where Squelch had usually been whenever he came back to their quarters during their time as a married couple. She very much enjoyed laying there, reading a book before finally going to sleep. The mattress was empty this time though. In fact, it didn’t even look like it had seen much use at all in some time.

The desk on the other hoof…

Squelch looked like she was surrounded by a tiny fortress built out of disposable paper coffee cups which the emerald unicorn seemed unwilling to dispose of for some reason. It might have been related to the fact that the waste bin beside the desk was already overflowing with the same cups. The stallion frowned. He’d lived with the mare for nearly a year. She wasn’t usually the messy type. That had always been his vice.

“Is everything alright?” In the back of his mind, he was slightly irritated that his whole train of thought had managed to be immediately derailed. He’d come down here to talk to Squelch about the unconscious mare in their clinic, but now that was the furthest thing from his mind. Three seconds in their old quarters, and he was already falling back into ‘married Slipshod’ mode. The stallion frowned internally at the realization. He was supposed to be better at that than this.

The unicorn mare sighed and waved vaguely around her cluttered desk. “Just my insomnia catching up with me again. I should be fine in a couple weeks.”

“You never had trouble sleeping whe―” the stallion slammed his mouth shut immediately as he realized what he was about to say. He was normally very good about not bringing up their past. It was something of an unspoken rule that the two of them tried very hard to enforce. “Er...I guess I forgot about your insomnia,” his eyes lingered on the legion of coffee cups, “...do you take anything for it?”

Squelch frowned at the earth pony for several long seconds, presumably deciding whether or not she was going to overlook his near-faux pas. Ultimately, she seemed to let it slide. This time, “sleep aides make me hazy. It only happens when I’m stressed anyway. Like I said, it’ll pass in a week.

“What do you want, Slip?”

He wanted to find out what was making her so stressed out these days, truth be told; but he had a fairly good idea how that conversation would all play out. Not that the conversation he’d come here to have with her was likely to ameliorate things either. As though he hadn’t been nervous enough already.

“I…” He took a deep breath to brace himself, “...want you to not turn over the Disciple mare,” he cringed slightly in anticipation of her predicted response.

The green unicorn stared at him with a flat, unblinking gaze for several long seconds, not saying a word. Her horn began to glow. One of the drawers on her desk took on a matching aura and slid open. A brown bottle floated out. The cap slowly unscrewed itself and the bottle was tipped into the paper cup closest to the mare. From the sound the liquid made, it hadn’t been entirely empty. The bottle was then set down on the desk, it’s opening left uncapped, as Squelch shifted her telekinesis to the cup instead.

All of this was done without saying a word, or shifting her gaze away from the stallion. Which did quite a bit to heighten his unease, if he was being honest.

Squelch spun her chair around so that she was facing the earth pony ‘Steed pilot and reclined back, folding her hind legs over each other as she made herself comfortable. She took a long sip of her coffee―which was honestly now mostly bourbon, Slipshod guessed. “Well, go on. Get to the punchline…”

The golden pony winced, “look, I kn―”

“Because I assume there’s a punchline coming,” the mare interrupted in an icy tone that was matched by her cold eyes. “There had better be one coming, because I know this is a joke.

“For your sake, there’d better be one tartarus of a twist in it too, because it’s not sounding particularly funny right now.”

Slipshod swallowed. “I know th―”

“No,” she cut him off again with her curt denial, “no, I don’t think you do ‘know’. Which is weird, because you used to help me run this operation. What, did you leave your sense running down the inside of some mare’s thigh along with your jizz? Did you fuck your own brains out?” She let out a derisive scoff, taking another sip of her bourbon-coffee. “Wouldn’t surprise me, honestly.”

The stallion closed his eyes, deflating visibly beneath Squelch’s cutting remarks. “This has nothing to do with us. It’s―”

“Oh, it has everything to do with ‘us’!” The unicorn snapped abruptly. Up to this point, her tone could have been generously described as: ‘cutting’. Now she sounded properly outraged. “As in: the kind of future that awaits ‘us’ if ComSpark ever finds out that we gave aid and comfort to a Disciple!”

“We’ve already treated her injuries,” Slipshod pointed out, trying to take back control of the conversation, but his employer wasn’t having it.

“What happens in that clinic is Doc Dee’s business. I have an actual contract to that effect, in fact. Legally, I can’t actually stop him from tending to anypony that makes it through those doors. Not without paying some hefty fines. I’m insulated on that front. Dee’s the one who’ll have to answer to ComSpark for that on his own.

“Though he can just say that he wanted to make sure she survived long enough to be interrogated and they’ll probably pay him a fucking bonus for it,” she added with a wan smirk that lasted for only a second before melting away the instant she shifted her attention back to the stallion.

“What I can’t explain is why I failed to inform the local system government about having a Disciple in my custody. Part of the agreement between myself and ComSpark is that all Disciple activity is reported to the nearest local authority as soon as possible.” She paused for a moment as she took a third sip. When she was done, the bottle floated back over and refilled the cup. “Actually, the letter of the agreement is: ‘as soon as practical’.

“Pretty sure that’s some sort of legalese to keep assholes from skirting the letter of the law in order to look the other way on Disciple activities. After all, it’s ‘possible’ to report terrorist activity by making a radio transmission right then and there at the point of contact. But, depending on which system you’re in, it could take decades to actually reach anypony who’s responsible for doing anything with the information,” she shrugged, “regardless: I am bound by honor and the law to let the authorities on Canis know we found a Disciple at the earliest ‘practical’ opportunity.”

Her cold eyes locked on Slipshod once more. “If I don’t,” she said through gritted teeth, “then the Steel Coursers get blacklisted by the MRB and ComSpark puts out a bounty on us.”

The stallion felt himself deflate. “So you’ve already commed about her?”

The unicorn was silent for several seconds, her magic swirling her cup, “...I have not.” Slipshod raised a surprised brow. “The techs have the comm array down for maintenance. I want to be sure that it’s in perfect working order when we need to speak with the Canis Landing Authority. Getting stuck in orbit because of a bad comm system wouldn’t help anypony.

“In fact, it would even delay our ability to turn over our prisoner.”

Slipshod narrowed his gaze at the mare, not entirely convinced by her explanation. “Are you...having second thoughts? About turning her in?”

“No,” came her easy reply, “I fully intend to turn the mare over to ComSpark. However,” she added with a deep inhalation, “I first want some idea of how exactly she fits into their organization―or, rather, how she used to fit into their organization.

“Whether she’s a real alicorn or not, she was important to them,” Squelch pointed out, “and being important to the Disciples means that she could be valuable to ComSpark. Valuable enough that she might be worth more than the standing bounty being offered.”

The earth pony’s eyes were wide now. “You’re planning on negotiating a higher bounty from ComSpark?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” the mare sneered, “there’s no ‘negotiating’ with ComSpark. However,” she then amended, “there is such a thing as taking what could be a one-time bounty and turning it into a many-times bounty.” She saw the stallion’s confused expression and allowed herself the first expression approaching a smile that she’d worn since he stepped into her room. “If she really was some sort of big-shot with the Disciples way back when, there’s a chance that she knows things: cache locations, bases they might still be using today, the exit coordinates for whatever JumpShips that the Disciples must be using in order to conduct their raids.

“All of the information that ComSpark will want to wring out of her, I’m hoping that we can get her to give up, and then sell that to ComSpark piecemeal, finding ways to explain away how we got so ‘lucky’ as to learn about it.

“She tells us about a cache, I find us a contract on that world to do some random job, and then we just happen to stumble across the Disciple cache and turn it into ComSpark for the bounty,” her smile broadened slightly into a predatory smirk. “That mare could become our Golden Cockatrice.”

Comprehension spread across the earth pony’s face now, though there was one possible hangup that he saw. “And you think she’s just going to give up that kind of intel because we ask her to?”

“If she doesn’t, oh well,” the unicorn shrugged, “we’ll just turn her in like we were supposed to. That’s her decision to make.

“She can tell us voluntarily, or she can tell the ComSpark interrogators while they’re teasing her intestines out through her belly button an inch at a time. It’s no fur off my fetlocks.”

Slipshod shuddered briefly at the image that was conjured in his mind. It honestly probably wasn’t all that far off from what the Queen’s Royal Inquisitors would do with the mare they had in Dee’s clinic. One way or another, the Queen’s captives told her exactly what she wanted to know. That much he knew for a fact, at least.

“So,” Squelch began again, finally setting down her cup of bourbon, “as for your ‘request’ that I not turn our mystery mare over to the Canis authorities...it’s not necessary.” Her tone had softened somewhat from what it had been earlier, but her demeanor remained considerably on the ‘cool’ side. “Lucky for her, our financial situation is such that I am encouraged to seek...creative C-bit-earning opportunities,” she waved a hoof at her desk, and the pile of pads which all displayed various accounting spreadsheets. The stallion couldn’t make out any specificas, but he did note the abundance of red numbers they contained.

“I didn’t realize that things were that bad,” he admitted.

The unicorn sighed, her posture deflating more noticeably. “It’s not ‘bad’ so much as...tenuous,” she corrected. “We’re not spec’d to maintain a heavy ‘Steed. Not on short notice like this. Repairs, weapons, servicing...that Rainbow Dash is going to need a lot of expensive care and parts compared to your’s and Val’s ‘Steeds. Most commander’s in my position would have just sold it.

“However, I take a longer view of things, and I’m wagering that ‘Steed will be able to recoup its costs, and then some, given enough time,” she paused for another moment, considering, “and assuming that we find a pilot for it.”

Slipshod hesitated a moment, then ventured, “aside from the one in the Med Bay?” Squelch didn’t respond immediately, which was honestly a pretty good sign, all things considered. It wasn’t an outright denial, at least. She was frowning though. “Nopony in the galaxy knows that she’s a Disciple, aside from us.” Still no response. “She’s a damn good pilot, Squelch. For her ‘Steed to take the kind of hits it did, and still make it out of the fight in one piece?

“You’re not going to find a pilot like that who’s willing to work for whatever you could afford to pay them.”

The mare’s frown deepened briefly into an outright scowl that made the earth pony wince, but it faded quickly as she was forced to acknowledge the accuracy of his statement. Though she certainly didn’t do so out loud. “...If ComSpark ever found out…”

“Who’d tell ‘em? She’s certainly not likely to go around advertising it!”

Squelch began to shake her head slowly. “If one of the crew―”

“The crew that you hired, and that you pay?” He emphasized. “These ponies respect you a lot more than they respect ComSpark. I promise you that.” He smiled at the mare. “Nopony knows the mares and stallions on this ship better than I do, and I know that not a one of them would go against you.”

There was the briefest of glares at his mention of knowing the mares, but it waned quickly in the face of her appreciation of the compliment. Another small smile tugged at the emerald unicorn’s lips. “Thanks for that. I’ll...think about it.”

Slipshod smiled. “Thanks a lo―”

“Ah ah ah!” She waggled a hoof at him. “That wasn’t one of my old ‘I’ll think about it’ yeses,” she insisted with a hard look at the stallion. “That was a real ‘I’ll think about it’! I might still say ‘no’. I mean it!”

The earth pony quashed his smile and made himself look properly cowed, though it certainly took quite a bit of effort to do so. She could obfuscate all she wanted, but he knew that she’d already decided to go along with his suggestion. He still played along though. “I understand. Whatever you choose to do though, I know it’ll be the right decision.”

Knowing that his work was done here, the stallion turned to leave, but paused as he caught sight of the unused bed. He looked back at the unicorn mare. “I’ve got some chamomile tea in my quarters. The real stuff. I can have Cookie bring you a cup?”

Squelch started to shake her head, but paused as she regarded the earth pony. With a resigned sigh, she silently nodded her head in the affirmative. Slipshod left without a word, saving his smile for when he was out of sight.

After dropping off a couple bags of tea at the galley with instructions for them to be steeped for two minutes and served with a slice of lemon on the side―Squelch didn’t actually add the lemon to the drink, she preferred to suck on it after finishing the cup―Slipshod returned to his quarters. The next thing he did was review his rota to figure out who he was supposed to meet that evening and send them a message on the ship’s internal system that he was going to have to cancel. He cited a meeting with Squelch―which was technically true―and promised to make it up to them next time.

The truth was though that his mind was simply too occupied with the mare that they’d found for him to be properly relaxed with anypony right now. He’d arguably crossed one of the bigger hurdles in his path―keeping her out of ComSpark’s reach for the time being―but that was hardly the end of his troubles.

After all, getting Squelch to keep the alicorn aboard only served to beg the question: now what? He was making this all up as he went, and improvising wasn’t his strong suit. That was a revelation that would probably have shocked most who knew him to their core. After all, he was Slipshod; the stallion with the magic tongue who somehow seemed to know exactly what to say in order to make any stranger he’d just met into that evening’s adoring lover.

However, that was essentially the limitation of his ability: he was able to almost immediately work out how to succeed with strangers. What he was about to walk into now was a very unfamiliar realm. Honestly, what was brewing in him now wasn’t something that he’d have thought he was even capable of: revenge.

Perhaps that notion wouldn’t have surprised too many ponies, honestly; that he was interested in righting a personal injustice. That was a thing that most ponies would do, after all. His past even made for the picture perfect motivation for such a thing: his immediate family had been killed while he’d been away at the ‘Steed academy on Equus. Murdered on the orders of Archon Dominus Blueblood of the Pony Commonwealth. He was sure that the expected cliche would have been for him to go out, rally together a band of similarly antagonized allies that would relish the chance to have a hoof in putting a gun to Dominus’ temple, and overthrow the Archon.

However, the reality was that Slipshod could actually care less about his former family members. It had been their own faults that they’d been arrested and executed. What exactly did they expect was going to happen when they were caught conspiring with Dominus' neice, Victoria, in an effort to install her as the Commonwealth's new Archon? Death was the usual outcome when a pony was caught committing treason. As far as the earth pony was concerned, those family members of his were justly punished for breaking the law. He didn’t hold a grudge against Dominus in the slightest.

Besides, if he could have gotten his hooves on the money, soldiers, and BattleSteeds that it would take to unseat the Archon, he’d be better off just setting himself up as the ruler of his own little star cluster out on the Periphery and not have to worry about all of the Harmony Sphere’s petty politics.

So, no, it wasn’t Blueblood he wanted to antagonize.

Though, some grudges did need to be kept up for appearance’s sake. Hence his little trist with Regina Blueblood, who he’d known full well was the Archon’s wife, despite his claims otherwise. An absolute ghoul of a mare, if he was being honest. Part of him actually pitied Dominus for marrying that viper. No wonder they didn’t have any foals. Whatever political advantages that union had earned the Archon, Slipshod sure hoped they’d been worth it. That was about as far as he was going to take things where ‘revenge’ went in that regard though.

He’d long since written off being able to do anything that would stick in the craw of the true target of his animosity. He’d considered that possibility right out from day one. There were few creatures in the Harmony Sphere’s political landscape that could be described as being genuinely ‘untouchable’, but she was certainly one of them. So it was that the golden earth pony had resigned himself to always possessing a particular itch that would remain forever unscratched.

And yet...here was a chance to actually do something about that irritation! He wasn’t sure exactly what that something was, but that mare in the clinic had to be useful somehow!

Until he managed to figure that out though, he had to do what he could to keep her safe, as well as a secret from the rest of the galaxy. If he could do that long enough, and manage to come up with a plan…

A smile began to worm its way across his lips as he lay back in his bed.

Never in his wildest dreams would he have thought that he, of all the creatures in the galaxy, would be fortunate to stumble across Princess Twilight Sparkle! It was nothing short of a gift, honestly; beautifully wrapped and topped with a glistening bow.

Slipshod flashed a vicious grin into the darkness of his quarters.

And he knew just who to give it to...

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 4: Decision at Lupine Pass

Slipshod stepped back into his quarters, dabbing at the last bits of dampness in his dark brown mane with the towel. He stepped lightly across the private quarters that were one of the many perks of being a ‘Steed pilot on the Galloway, and made his way to the locker on the far side. A freshly laundered uniform was waiting for him, deposited there by a member of the crew yesterday afternoon.

This wasn’t a jumpsuit that was intended to be worn while fighting in a ‘Steed. Those offered a lot more protection and didn’t have so many shiny buttons and colorful patches. No, this was not a garment designed for utility, but rather to make a statement. Well-to-do clients appreciated seeing their contractors looking as professional as they made themselves out to be on paper. That meant showing up as these sorts of meet-and-greets all dolled up.

Not that the stallion had anything against dressing up. He rather enjoyed the attention it got him.

“Hmm,” somepony groaned appreciatively from the direction of his bed, “why weren’t you wearing that last night?” The owner of the tenor voice lifted themselves out of bed and stepped around behind him, running a burgundy wing down the taught wool of the gray jacket.

Slipshod cracked a smile as he fished out the tie that went with the ensemble and turned around to face his most recent bedmate. “As I recall, you were having enough trouble as it was with just my vest,” he chided lightly, looping the tie around his neck and lifting his chin, inviting the other stallion to finish affixing the accessory.

The pegasus snorted as he brought his pinions around to begin manipulating the length of fabric. “It’s hardly my fault you got me so drunk last night that I forgot how buttons work.”

“I told you to say ‘when’, but the ‘when’ never came,” Slipshod grinned.

“It was hard to get a word in edgewise with your tongue down my throat for just about every second of the evening,” the pegasus finished up the last loop and straightened the knot snugly against the collar of the earth pony's shirt.

“Well, somepony had their wings wrapped around me so tight I didn’t have much choice in the matter, now did I?” The golden stallion turned and briefly inspected himself in the mirror, noting the rather sharp job that the other stallion had done on his tie. He turned back around and gave them a quick peck on the lips. “Thanks for the tie,” then a second, longer, kiss, “and for last night.”

The pegasus sighed and tilted his head slightly, smirking at the ‘Steed pilot. “I’m never going to see you again, am I?”

“I told you that much over dinner,” Slipshod pointed out with an apologetic smile of his own.

“Yeah, I know. I guess I’m just a romantic at heart,” he shrugged. “Though, if you ever find yourself back on Canis…”

“You’re sweet,” Slipshod said with another brief peck. “I’ll think about it.”

“Dang. That’s a 'never-gonna-happen' think about it, isn’t it?” the stallion’s expression suggested that he was neither hurt nor particularly surprised by the anticipated revelation.

“And smart too!” the earth pony sniggered. “Do you want me to get a ride for you?”

“Nah, I’ll call my chauffeur,” he sighed, reaching for his comm on the nightstand. “The last thing I need is for my wife to see me pulling up in a strange car. Bonnet is a discrete mare. She doesn’t say anything about where she picks me up from. Celestia knows she’s dragged me out of a few gutters...”

“Alright then,” Slipshod closed up the locker and headed for the corridor. “It was a pleasure meeting you, and good luck with your shareholder meeting next week.”

“And good luck with your next job,” the pegasus called back. “Stay safe out there!”

The door closed behind him as Slipshod stepped out of his quarters and he turned towards the garage. Valkyrie was waiting for him at the top of the stairs leading to the DropShip’s lower level, dressed in a uniform identical to his own. She frowned at the stallion briefly, giving him a pair of rather overt sniffs. “Hmm. Good on you for remembering to shower before our client meeting so that you’re not reeking of sweat, shame, and another pony’s cologne.”

“Good morning to you too, Val.”

“That makes. What? Six ponies in five days?”

“Seven,” the stallion corrected as the pair of them descended towards the garage. “I spent yesterday afternoon with a mare at her place before going out and meeting Sebastian.”

“Unbelievable. Where do you find the energy?”

“I’d offer to show you, but you keep refusing,” he quipped with a little smile at the pegasus. He paused for a moment, then, “are you...jealous?”

“No. I’m tired. My quarters are right next to yours and the bulkheads aren’t nearly as thick as you seem to think they are,” she groused.

“Oh, wow!” Slipshod very nearly choked in surprise, his eyes wide as he reflexively glanced over his shoulder in the direction of his cabin. “I am genuinely sorry about that. Admittedly, in the moment, I’m not thinking about stuff like that. I’ll try and keep a lid on it in the future,” he offered a sheepish shrug.

“Oh, it’s rarely you that’s the problem,” Valkyrie deadpanned.

“Ah. Right. I’ll, uh, come up with something for that.”

“Thank you.”

The pair emerged from the stairwell to find a slightly irritated Squelch waiting for them by the car, impatiently tapping her forehoof. Unlike himself and his feathered comrade, the unicorn mare wasn’t wearing a military-style uniform, but rather a formal business suit, as she herself was not any sort of ‘Steed pilot. However, the steel gray color and the rigid cut of her suit complimented the attire of her pilots quite well, leaving little doubt that the three of them were part of the same outfit.

“About time,” she remarked sternly, locking her gaze on Slipshod. “How about a little less cuddling on mornings when you have actual work to do?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the earth pony said under his breath, offering Squelch no retaliatory quip the way that he had for Valkyrie’s comment earlier. He simply nodded and stepped into the door of the waiting limo that was going to be taking them to their client’s office.

The two mares filed in after him, after which the door closed and the jet black luxury vehicle drove out of the Galloway’s garage and towards the city which surrounded the spaceport.

“A little background on our client,” their employer began, pulling out a thin binder and opening it up to the relevant pages. “Ferrous Holdings Incorporated owns several raw metal extraction and refining facilities across the Sirius Cluster. One of their competitors, Argent Extractions Limited, has been contracting out to freelance operations in the cluster to strike Ferrous facilities in a bid to hurt their profit margins and thus reduce their share price in preparation for a hostile takeover.”

“Argent’s hiring mercs to hurt their competition, so now we’re being hired on to fight the mercs,” Slipshod concluded.

“Pretty much,” Squelch nodded, “it’s likely to be as straightforward as it sounds: we’ll be sent to one of the sites they think is likely to be hit and it’ll be our job to repel the attack. I don’t know yet how many outfits Ferrous is approaching, or how long this contract’s likely to be good for. Could be a one-and-done, but I’m feeling like they’ll want us to guard multiple sites throughout the cluster while they upgrade their static defenses.

“Assuming you two don’t completely fuck up the first round, of course.”

The pilots exchanged eye rolls. They actually failed surprisingly few contracts, given how few resources they had between them with only their two relatively lighter ‘Steeds. “Do you know what kind of stuff we’re likely to be going up against?” Valkyrie asked.

“The client hasn’t said, officially,” the unicorn informed them as she flipped to another page of her dossier, “but I pulled a few recent news reports on the raids and it looks like Argent hasn’t been springing for ‘Steed-equipped companies yet. Honestly, I get the impression that this represents an escalation on Ferrous’ part.”

“They want to see how committed Argent is,” the earth pony nodded his agreement, earning a mildly baffled look from his feathered compatriot at his apparent insight. “Argent’s shelling out a relative pittance for merc units that probably don’t field anything heavier than a Hydra Heavy Tank, if that. More than enough to overwhelm a mining camp’s static defenses, sure, but not much of a threat against even your Parasprite, unless they happen to get in a lucky hit.

“Argent would need to keep as much cash on hoof as possible if they want to buy out a majority stake of Ferrous’ outstanding shares. If Ferrous puts a couple of ‘Steeds in the field, then Argent’ll have to shell out the big C-bits for ‘Steed companies too, if they want to actually keep hurting Ferrous’ bottom line.

“But if they do that, they risk using up all the petty cash they’ve been saving for the buyout. Which means that all they did was spend a lot of money to get them nothing. Money that, at the end of the day, would have been a lot better spent developing their own extraction and production infrastructure in the hopes of beating Ferrous the old fashioned way: by offering a better product at a cheaper price. If this all falls apart for them, whatever exec hatched this mercenary plan of theirs is going to be out on their flank in a bad way.

“Which’ll likely cause a lot of internal instability in Argent’s upper echelons, making their own investors really nervous, and tanking their own stock prices. It’s hard to say what’ll upset their shareholders more: being left in the dark about a management shake-up, or being outright told that Argent did the next best thing to lighting millions of C-bits on fire. Either way, their stock price isn’t going to have good things happen to it in the near future.” Slipshod snorted, “if this goes bad for them hard enough, Ferrous could ultimately be the one buying out Argent when the dust settles.”

It was at about this time that the earth pony noticed that both mares were looking at him with slightly agape jaws. He glanced between the pair nervously, “...What?”

Squelch narrowed her gaze at her lead pilot. “How’d you know all that? I mean, you’re exactly right," she flicked her hoof down at the dossier she was still holding, "but how’d you know it? I've spent most of the week digging through every public record and corporate document I could find, and all you've been doing is plowing the natives!”

“Sebastian's the Chief of Operations at Argent Extractions. This whole ‘hit Ferrous facilities with mercs’ thing was his idea.

“We discussed it at length last night over dinner.”

“Who the fuck is Sebast―” Valkyrie started to ask before she stopped suddenly and her eyes went wide. “Wait, do you mean: ‘fly me, daddy!’?! He’s the stallion you brought home last night?!”

“Hold on,” Squelch was using both hooves to massage her temples, “let me get this straight―” She balked for just a moment, her lips silently mouthing ‘fly me daddy?’ before she shook herself and refocused. “You not only slept with, but talked with, our client’s competitor about the job last night? How could you be that stupid?” She said the last through gritted teeth.

“First of all,” Slipshod defended, noting how bemused he felt that Squelch seemed the least concerned with the fact that he spent the night in bed with their client’s adversary, “he talked. A lot. About a lot of things. I didn’t say shit about who we were working for.

“And it wasn’t ‘stupid’. It’s called reconnaissance.” He glared at the mares. “I will have you know that I am more than just a pretty face with a perfectly sculpted flank that just won’t quit.” Both mares glared and Slipshod made a mental note that his usual deflective brand of humor was not being well received at the moment. He’d save it for later. The stallion cleared his throat. “So, yeah, when you mentioned who we’d be meeting with today, I went ahead and looked them up to see what kind of jobs we were likely to get.

“That’s when I saw the news reports you just showed us,” he gestured at Squelch’s dossier. “I didn’t know immediately that it was Argent who was behind them, but I figured it had to be one of their big competitors, of which there are only two in the Sirius Cluster. So I tracked down a couple of execs in town that were as high up as I could find and tried to learn what I could from them.

“First I met up with Stannum Resource Consortium’s Regional VP of Finance, but she didn’t know anything about any contracts with merc outfits; and besides, they’re actually thinking about selling off their Sirius holdings to focus on their Sagittarius operations. So it probably wasn’t them.

“Then I met Sebastian, and he was more than happy to talk with somepony about how nervous this whole thing was making him. It’s a huge risk that Argent’s board is taking on his say-so, and he is absolutely terrified that Ferrous might do exactly what it is they’re about to do: hire ‘Steed companies to protect their facilities. Argent doesn’t have the money to hire their own ‘Steed mercs―because of the reasons I mentioned before―and so the plan’ll pretty much be shot to shit the moment we show up. Throwing good C-bits after bad would just sink the whole company.

“Somepony’ll need to answer for all the money they’ve spent so far on ultimately useless merc raids though, so he’s pretty much guaranteed to be fired when this blows up in their faces. At which point he has no doubt that his wife’ll file for a divorce and take the kids, leaving him alone and penniless. He hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep all month worrying about this.” He thought for a moment. “Until last night anyway.” Judging by Valkyrie’s narrowed eyes, that last addition hadn’t been wholly appreciated either.

“And he has no idea that we were hired by Ferrous? You’re sure?” Squelch demanded.

“Positive. I told him we were being brought on by TimberWolf’s Dragoons for their skirmishes with the Gray Lines Legion along the Our Worlds League border.”

The unicorn mare breathed a deep sigh of relief and leaned back into her seat. “Well...I guess now we at least know that this isn’t likely to be a protracted contract. If Argent really is ready to fold the first time we show up.” She thought for a moment. “Though, I can’t see how Ferrous would know that...” She glared at Slipshod. “You don’t breathe a word of any of what you learned last night in that meeting, got it? If Argent actually folds like a wet blanket after the first fight and calls the whole thing off, then we can probably get away with a couple months of sitting on our flanks watching sunsets and still getting paid before Ferrous figures it out too. It’ll be the easiest money we’ve ever made.

“Money that’ll let us arm that Rainbow Dash properly,” the green mare rubbed her chin, “I bet I can get another massage from the twins when I drop thirty tons of guns on the threshold of the ‘Steed Bay…”

It was then that Slipshod noticed that Valkyrie was staring at him, as though she were studying some sort of university textbook. “What?”

“Reconnaissance. That was pretty smart, what you did. It never occurred to me that you went out last night to do actual work. I apologize.”

“Eh, don’t feel too bad,” the stallion shrugged, “I mean, I learned about everything related to the mission way before I slept with either of them. So it was more of a...working...leisure...combination thing.”

Valkyrie was glaring at him again now.

“I’m just saying,” Val’s voice crackled over his headset, “it wouldn’t kill Cookie to mix things up every now and then. Not every Tuesday has to be tacos for lunch.”

“You don’t honestly expect him to serve tacos on Wednesdays, do you?!” Slipshod remarked, pumping all of the dramatic mock-incredulity he could into his tone. “If he does that, then when exactly is he supposed to serve his Lunch-time Waffle Wednesday Breakfast Stacks? Fridays?! That’s for his Friday Frijoles Night Lunch Special!” The stallion thought for a moment. “Though, dropping that would certainly make Saturday’s a lot more tolerable on the ship…” he acknowledged with a grin.

“That jack is a master in the kitchen, but damn does he suck at naming things…”

“No argument here,” the earth pony pilot chuckled, “but let’s face it, you’re not going to get him to change his menu line-up. I think it would actually kill him. That donkey’s stubborn as a mul―erm…”

“I’mma tell him you said that. I’ve even got the radio logs recording. I can play the tape for him. Over and over again.”

Slipshod’s eyes widened in equal parts feigned and genuine horror. “Please don’t.” There were certain realities about living on the Galloway that ponies learned to abide by quickly if they wanted their lives to remain tolerable: you never borrowed one of Mig’s tools, or she’d literally light you on fire―Tig was compassionate enough to put you out...after a minute or two. Using Squelch’s blue coffee pot to brew decaf was a capital offense. Jokes about Doc Dee and ‘white doctors’ coats’ earned you a complimentary colonoscopy. And referring to Cookie Dough as a ‘mule’ got you put on the ‘special menu’ for a month. Which consisted of actual gruel… Exclusively. Served cold.

Even asking for anything else earned you an additional month on his ‘special menu’.

“I will literally do anything you ask if you delete those three seconds of the log!”

“Ooh...this rush of power and control,” the mare cooed, “this must be what having a dick feels like...I’m kinda liking it!” The self-satisfaction in Valkyrie’s voice was palpable, even over the headset. She was very much obviously enjoying this. Enough so that even Slipshod couldn’t help but crack a little smirk himself, despite his very real dread at Cookie getting wind of his unintended verbal faux pas.

He was fairly confident that he and the azure Parasprite pilot could come to an arrangement though. “I’ll polish your hooves for a month,” he offered.

“Ha! What makes you think I’d let you anywhere near my hooves? I’m the one suffering with that deal. No way.”

“Okay,” he thought for a moment. It had been worth a shot. “I’ll get Emery to polish your hooves for a month.”

“...How?”

Slipshod was grinning again upon hearing the piqued interest in his partner’s voice. Emery File was an aspiring hooficurist onboard the ship who was well known among the crew for the outstanding work she could do with a pony’s hooves. She had full-time duties to attend to, like most everypony else, of course, so her availability for those services was quite limited. There was actually something of a wait-list among the crew.

However, the stallion had a ‘fast pass’ of sorts where that particular mare was concerned. “Easy, you can have my slot. I have appointments on alternating Tuesdays and Fridays,” his smile broadened even further, “sometimes those appointments even involve doing my hooves.”

There was a burst of static that sounded a lot like a disgusted snort. “Un-fucking-believable. I swear that Squelch and I are the only ponies you’re not banging on that damn ship.”

“Emery and I do not ‘bang’,” the earth pony didn’t even need to affect an indignant tone at the unappreciated implication.

“‘Passionately embrace’ then. Or ‘vigorously cuddle’. However you choose to describe it, I honestly don’t want to hear it.”

Slipshod rolled his eyes. “Look, do you want the hooficures or not?”

“...Yes.”

“And the audio log?”

There was a pause. “Deleted.”

“Thank you.” The stallion let out a relieved sigh and visibly relaxed on his piloting couch. “I’ll talk with Emery once we’re back on the ship.” He thought for a moment. “And if you could be so kind as to not imply that the two of us are ‘vigorously cuddling’, I’d very much appreciate it.”

“Like I said: I don’t want to hear about it anyway,” the mare was silent for a few seconds, then, “why do you even care? It’s not exactly a secret that you’re sleeping with half the crew.”

“Wait, wha―?”

Unfortunately for Slipshod, getting clarification on her comment was going to have to wait, as Valkyrie’s voice burst back over the comm channel that the two of them were using with what the stallion referred to as her ‘on-the-clock’ tone. As far as she was concerned, the time for casual conversation was over and all of her focus was now directed at her ‘Steed’s telemetry readouts. “Contact” she snapped, “multiple contacts! Five kay meters. Bearing two-eight-seven. Unknown IFF.”

It looked like their bantering was done for the moment. The earth pony keyed in the frequency that connected the pair of them to their patron company’s communications net. “Ferrous Control, Gallop One.”

“Gallop One, this is Ferrous Control. Go ahead,” came a young stallion’s response.

“Ferrous Control, we have contacts at your…” Slipshod glanced down at his nav map and recalculated the direction of the contacts relative to the refinery, “...two-seven-two, five kilometers out. Expecting any deliveries today?”

“Umm...wait one, Gallop. Let me check,” and the channel went silent. The earth pony frowned, silently berating the Ferrous Control operator in his head. The Steel Coursers were here specifically because Ferrous installations were getting hit by raiders. You’d think that whoever was in charge of the response on their client’s side of things would have already put out that facility operators should know exactly when expected deliveries were going to arrive, so that literally anything else could be properly categorized as a ‘possible raider’.

Not that every unscheduled contact was a raider, mind you. Two days ago it had turned out to be a lost planetary militia patrol. Boy did they ever get a fright when his Wild Bronco popped out from behind a mountain and blocked their path! According to Valkyrie, militia transponders in the region didn’t seem to be getting turned off even while they were parked back at their base.

Once bitten; twice shy, and all that.

However, these signals were very clearly not militia. Valkyrie’s Parasprite was already on the move, he saw, maneuvering around the edge of what a vehicle’s sensor range should be, and using the terrain to mask the profile of her ‘Steed. From the signal profiles that she was building, Slipshod was just about positive that, whoever they were, they weren’t here to restock the kitchens either. The pegasus had already pegged one of the contacts as having a high probability of being a Bulldog Medium Tank.

That wasn’t an escort vehicle that Ferrous used. Nor the planetary militia, for that matter.

Finally, a rather nervous-sounding stallion came back over the comm channel. “Gallop One, that is not one of ours! Say again: Not a friendly contact!”

“Understood, Ferrous Control,” Slipshod was already in motion, throttling his Wild Bronco to a trot as he turned onto an intercept vector. Valkyrie had been kind enough to lay down some nav points that would let him approach without getting spotted too early. “Spool up your turrets in case one gets by us.” He cut the frequency and swapped back to their own private channel. “Open season, Val. What’ve we got?”

“I’ve got high confidence on...two Bulldogs and four Harassers. There’s...something hanging back that I can’t get a profile on. Could be a C&C vehicle. Maybe a lookout watching their rear. Hard to say. It’s just on the other side of the saddle. I’ll be spotted if I get much closer.”

There was a questioning element to the pegasus mare’s last statement. She was letting him know that the option still existed for her to get a definitive profile on the last contact if the two of them were willing to reveal to the enemy that BattleSteeds were present at the mining facility. “Negative. Those Harassers are fast enough to catch you, and that’s a lot of SRMs for a Parasprite to handle on its own. Hang back, keep an eye on it, but let’s stay in cover until they reach…” the earth pony reviewed his tactical map, “...Point Echo. We’ll catch the Bulldogs in a crossfire. The Harassers might bug out when they see their heavy units buy it.”

“Understood. Laying low.”

“I’m almost at Delta now. Comm the Galloway and let Squelch know we’re engaging.” There wasn’t much that the unicorn was going to be able to do from orbit at the moment, but she could still put the DropShip on an alert status in case things went unexpectedly south and he and Val needed an extraction. He was fairly confident that these seven contacts represented the entirety of the raiding force, but it was better to be safe than dead.

The stallion took a deep breath, reviewing the tactical situation in his head. The Bulldogs were concerning, as they basically brought the same firepower to the fight that his Wild Bronco did. They were considerably less well-protected though. His ‘Steed could stand up to a few hits from their large magical energy weapons, and his ablative armor would shrug off the first few SRM volleys. The same could not be said for any of the vehicles that he and Val were facing.

Especially the Harassers. Those flimsy hovercraft would get torn in half by Valkyrie’s medium energy cannons. As long as she managed to land a hit, anyway. This region was fairly arboreal, so they wouldn’t have the open space that would let them get up to their one hundred and sixty kilometer an hour top speed, but they would still be quite agile nonetheless.

As he’d suggested: the ideal outcome was that this fight ended after just one volley. This raiding force was spec'd specifically to devastate a minimally defended mining complex. The Bulldogs’ heavy energy weapons would have had no issue at all outranging Ferrous’ static defenses and melting them down into slag. After that, the hovercraft would zip in, ravage the facility with a hailstorm of almost continuous SRM fire, and then bug out once the place had been reduced to rubble. The whole thing would have been over in less than five minutes.

With the Bulldogs out of commission though, their operation would almost certainly be a wash. The Harassers would have to close inside the camp’s defensive fire range in order to engage, and four of the admittedly swift-moving combat vehicles wouldn’t be enough to overwhelm even the token turrets that were present. Without any way to reasonably destroy the mining camp, the surviving raiders basically had no reason not to sound the retreat about three seconds after Slipshod and Valkyrie slagged the tanks.

That was the plan, anyway.

Of course, if there was one thing that every ‘Steed academy in the Sphere taught their aspiring pilots, it was that the first casualty in any confrontation with the enemy was: the plan.

Today would not be the exception that proves the rule.

Slipshod slowed to a stop almost right on top of the nav point that Valkyrie had plotted for him. He was located just on the other side of a rise that blocked his ‘Steed from view of any vehicles that would be traveling down the service road leading to the Ferrous facility. So far, the red blips on his tactical overlay that Val’s Parasprite was feeding him looked like they were taking advantage of the road’s existence in order to expedite their arrival. There was hardly any reason for them not to use it, after all.

At the moment, the tanks were at the rear of the formation. They’d eventually be stopping and taking up positions that would let them neutralize the camp’s defenses while the hovercraft continued further ahead, until they were just at the edge of the effective firing range of those turrets. That would allow them minimal time to get into the camp once the turrets were dealt with and do as much damage as they could as quickly as they could.

The earth pony pilot studied the map of the surrounding area. Unlike their clients on Canopy, Ferrous possessed exceptionally detailed and up-to-date topographical maps of the local terrain. Being a mining company, they had been quite motivated to survey as much of the surrounding area as they could in order to capitalize on the richest and most easily accessible metal deposits. Such detailed maps were not only invaluable to material extraction corporations, but to tactically-minded BattleSteed pilots as well.

Given that these raiders were ostensibly being employed by a competing mining company, Argent Extractions, it was possible that they possessed similarly detailed maps as well. Keeping that in mind, Slipshod eyed a few locations that would allow for direct-fire weapons, like a Bulldog’s heavy energy cannon, for example, to capitalize on their long range without much obstruction.

He marked the positions on his map and shared their locations with his partner. “The Bulldogs will be heading to one of these locations,” he informed her, “we’ll wait for them to get in place. Their attention will be on the camp, and they won’t have their Harasser escorts. We roll in from behind, take them out, and then herd the hovercraft into range of the camp’s turrets. Got it?”

“Copy. Moving into position.”

Slipshod’s gaze was locked onto his tactical display as he watched the half-dozen crimson dots slowly meander along the road. He flicked to the seventh, detached, blip a time or two, just to ensure that it was remaining where it had stopped earlier. Valkyrie was probably right: it was acting like a rear guard of sorts. He admitted that he was a little nervous not knowing what it was for sure, but it was a long way off. Too far to engage either him or Val any time soon, even if it turned out to be a fifth speedy hovercraft. Not that an additional Harasser would turn the tide in this fight once those tanks were gone.

The earth pony smiled as he watched the two rear blips in the column divert off of the road and begin to move towards one of the locations that he’d just marked. The other four did indeed continue along the road towards the mining camp.

“And this, gentlecolts, is why you bring pickets,” the stallion murmured around a grin as he throttled up with his rear hooves. The Wild Bronco lurched and began ascending to the top of the mound. Once he crested its peak, he’d be a scant five hundred meters from his target, well within the effective range for his heavy laser. Over the comm, he said, “move in. I’ve got left, you take right.”

“Copy,” the blue marker of Valkyrie’s recon ‘Steed started to move now as well.

In just a few seconds, Slipshod’s Bronco reached the top of his cover, and he was now looking down over the pair of medium tracked vehicles. His forehooves teased the angle of the heavy magical energy weapon in his ‘Steed’s right shoulder mount. A quick tap of a button on the control yoke brought up a video feed on the inside of his helmet’s visor, allowing him a magnified view of his target as well as a reticle for the weapon he had selected.

The crews of the Bulldogs had yet to react to his and Valkyrie’s presence. Even their limited sensor suites should have allowed them to see the towering ‘Steeds at their rear by now. However, their attention was laser-focused on the mining facility. The ponies who were presumably the two tank commanders were actually even turned-out at the moment. One of them was looking down at the Ferrous complex through a rangefinder while the other was saying something to him. Both were smiling broadly.

Somepony in the tank must have been looking at their sensor displays though. One of the ponies poking out of the tank’s turret hatch suddenly jerked and looked down inside. A second later he shot straight up again, his head whipping around in Slipshod’s direction.

He was lost in a stream of blue destructive magic, along with the rest of the tank’s turret. The second Bulldog commander had just enough time to duck back down inside and close the hatch behind him as the bipedal Parasprite Light BattleSteed burst through the treeline less than fifty yards to their rear. Twin lances of jade fire crossed the distance in an instant and burned their way into the thinner armor of the tank’s engine housing. The fuel that was also contained there detonated in spectacular fashion.

In less than three seconds, both of the biggest threats on the field were wiped away. All that was left to be dealt with now were the quartet of hovercraft. They were another three hundred meters further out, beyond the range of every weapon that he and Valkyrie had except for his larger laser, which needed a little bit more time to charge before it was ready to fire again.

Slipshod keyed in his mic once again. “Alright, let’s run down the rest of ‘em. Try not to get too far ahead of me. We’ll stay close to cover each other and―”

The stallion’s train of thought was cut off as a klaxon began blaring in concert with a flashing scarlet warning message being branded across his heads-up-display: MISSILE LOCK!

Just as his brain began to process the implications of the alert, but before he had time to fully recover from the shock of seeing such an unexpected warning, Val’s voice began screaming across his helmet’s headset, “LRMs! LRM Carrier at our six! Two thousand meters!”

The seventh signal. It had not been a command vehicle or a rear guard. Not as such. It hadn’t hung back because it wasn’t going to be participating in the raid. It had done so because it was an artillery vehicle that would be bombarding the Ferrous mining camp from beyond the horizon. It didn’t need to be anywhere near the facility to do its work. Not so long as there was an ally nearby feeding it firing control telemetry on the target so that its missiles could acquire and maintain their lock.

And the raiders had four such forward fire directors, in the form of the Harasser hovercrafts that were already scattering. As long as any one of them kept his and Val’s ‘Steeds on their scopes, the LRM Carrier could rain destruction down on them with impunity.

They’d fucked up.

They needed a new plan; and picking the wrong one would get them killed. Of course, so would hesitating while they determined which of their available options was the best one.

There are two kinds of ‘Steed pilots: the quick and the dead. Right or wrong, make a decision and see it through. It’s the only shot any pilot has at survival.

“Get on my six! We’re making a run for the carrier!” Slipshod wrenched at the control yokes and manipulated the throttle pedals of his Wild Bronco as he heaved the fitty-ton behemoth around and vaulted for the distant missile platform.

There were two ways they had of getting out of harm’s way: removing the source of the missiles, or removing the means by which the platform was acquiring its target lock. Only Valkyrie’s Parasprite was swift enough to keep up with the Harassers, and her ‘Steed lacked both the armor and the firepower to go hoof-to-hoof with four of them at once while also dodging missiles. If one of the Harassers managed to maneuver behind her and land a solid hit with all twelve of its SRMs, they’d crack her reactor for sure.

His Bronco could take some hits at least, but he’d be hard-pressed to take any of them out if they remained content to dance at the edge of the effective range of his heavy laser while the carrier’s LRMs tore him apart bit by bit.

No, they couldn’t hope to destroy all four of the hovercraft in time. Nor would they be able to outrun the much faster craft if the two of them tried to retreat.

That meant charging the carrier itself. Two thousand meters would take his ‘Steed almost a full two minutes to cross. The carrier could reload its launchers every ten seconds, give or take. Which meant that there was more than enough time for that platform to launch all four hundred and eighty of its missiles at the two of them. If even half of those found their mark…

Even sending Val’s much speedier Parasprite on ahead wouldn’t help, as there was still more than enough time for nearly half a dozen volleys of sixty missiles apiece to cut her down before she reached the target.

They had to stick together, and they had to keep moving.

A little bit of praying probably wouldn’t hurt either, in all honesty…

Slipshod’s gut tied itself in a knot as he saw the veritable wall of white missile exhaust rising over the horizon. Though they weren’t visible yet, he knew that the nearly solid column of smoke was being trailed by three score of missiles that were heading right for them. “Incoming!”

Not that he thought the warning was truly necessary. Valkyrie was hardly blind. He just needed to yell something to help him cope with the stress.

The earth pony heaved his galloping ‘Steed hard to the left at the last moment. Metal screamed as myomer muscles threatened to snap the alloyed ‘bones’ of his Wild Bronco in half. A wall of warheads fell down around him like a sledgehammer pounding at a tac, saturating the immediate area. The ‘Steed shuddered as armor plates were shattered by over a dozen separate detonations. Previously green armor integrity indicators along his ‘Steed’s right shoulder, barrel, and flank went amber.

He grit his teeth and snarled at the distant dip between the westward mountains where the LRM Carrier was hiding. Still another eighteen hundred meters away.

His ‘Steed lurched again, unexpectedly. An alert flashed on the integrity indicator of his barrel’s left side. One of the Harassers had moved in close to harry the stalled medium BattleSteed. If its crew thought that was something that they were going to get to do uncontested, then they had another think coming.

Slipshod threw his Wild Bronco into reverse, pushing down hard on the left throttle pedal. The result was a near-perfect leftward pivot of the ‘Steed as he brought the center of his chest in line with the fleeing hovercraft. The golden stallion snap-fired the six-pack SRM nestled there. Earth erupted and trees shattered into splinters. Somewhere in the sudden chaos, one of the missiles struck the vehicle’s skirt. It dipped low on the affected side, caught the ground while going the better part of eighty kilometer an hour, and was promptly sent cartwheeling into a massive old growth oak, which didn’t seem at all impressed with the flimsy construction of the hovercraft that shattered itself upon its trunk.

One down, at least. Though it was likely that the remaining three would learn from the folly of their over-eager compatriot and keep their distance from now on.

His eyes were drawn back to the “MISSILE LOCK!” still blazed across his HUD. Another volley of missiles would be heading his way any second. He needed to get moving again.

The Wild Bronco’s direction of travel was shifted back to “forward” and Slipshod was soon back at a full run. Val’s lighter bipedal ‘Steed was keeping pace with ease. Briefly, the stallion once again weighed the merits of sending her on ahead of him. Again, he dismissed them. They needed to stick together as long as they could.

A second plume rose up from the horizon. A second time missile hammered him. A second time his cockpit became illuminated by warning lights and caution indicators. One of his light lasers was inoperable. His right flank’s armor was already in the red.

They pressed on.

“LRMs,” the stallion grumbled as he weathered the third salvo with his ‘Steed’s left side this time. “If we survive this, I’m having the twins install LRMs on this thing…” If he’d had even a five-pack of LRMs of his own, he could have been returning fire by now, using Valkyrie’s more robust sensor suite to acquire a firing solution for him.

As it was…

His ‘Steed trembled beneath the fifth barrage as it collided with the left side of his barrel. Then, suddenly, his piloting couch dropped out from under him. The earth pony clutched desperately at his controls for stability as he felt himself thrown against his restraints. His ‘Steed was tilted precariously to the left. A flashing light alerted him to the fact that his ‘Steed’s left foreleg was inoperable. One of the missile impacts had managed to sever the power couplings to the myomer musculature.

Slipshod sputtered a slew of curses as he fought to get the Bronco back on its hooves. He was able to bring the left hind leg forward and move the right foreleg to a more centered location, giving the ‘Steed enough support to stand erect at least. However, he wasn’t going to be running any further.

So much for his latest plan.

His lips pulled back in a grim line as he eyed their tactical situation. The Harassers were circling them, like wolves around a wounded elk and her calf. They didn’t even have to move in to deal the killing blow themselves. The distant LRM Carrier would do that with another few barrages. First they’d put him down from range, and then they’d move in close tear Valkyrie apart.

And, with one lucky missile hit, a course of action that would have meant Val’s death now became their only hope for salvation. “Val, take out those LRMs. I’ve got the Harassers.” He could barely move fast enough to track the speedy targets, and there was no way that, even at her ‘Steed’s unfettered top speed, the pegasus was going to be able to cross the remaining distance in time to save him.

However, by the time they’d finished with him, his partner would be too far away for them to catch in time. This way, at least she’d have a chance.

The Harassers could choose to abandon his crippled ‘Steed in favor of the more lightly armored target, yes, but Valkyrie’s Parasprite could move faster through the forests and up the mountains than they could. It’d take all three of them to try to keep her signature on their sensor net. Which would mean leaving him free to continue making his way towards the missile platform. It might take him a while to get there, but Val’s ‘Steed should be able to skirmish with them long enough.

Either way, the LRM Carrier would go down. These mercs just had to decide which ‘Steed kill would be a better feather in their cap. Slipshod knew which way he’d lean in their situation.

“...Copy.” There was clear reluctance in the mare’s voice. Thankfully, Valkyrie was too much of a professional to sit around and argue with the commander in the field. She didn’t have to like―or even agree with―his orders; the pegasus just had to follow them.

Slipshod watched the blue dot of his comrade begin to move westward, away from him. He allowed a brief smirk to touch his lips before focusing his full attention on the trio of crimson dots that were lazily circling him. He highlighted one of them and looked out through his cockpit window. His HUD layered a red rectangle over the hovercraft's position, though the vehicle itself was blocked from view by several hundred meters of forest. Still, no reason that he couldn’t keep them honest.

The earth pony fired his charged heavy energy cannon. The sapphire column of destructive light sliced through the trees like they were little more than blades of grass. Limbs and trunks smoldered and fell to the ground, creating a cone-shaped clearing in the old growth forest. For a fraction of a second, the golden stallion caught sight of the Harasser’s rear end as it managed to dance just ahead of the beam. Then, just as suddenly, it was swallowed up by the terrain and returned to being little more than his sensor’s vague guess as to its location through the trees.

He noted that the selected blip had increased its range from him slightly.

The alert blared again.

It was getting difficult to show the LRMs a facing that still had most of its armor plating. There was no part of his ‘Steed that was undamaged. If he survived this, the twins were going to rake him over the coals for the state of his Wild Bronco.

Slipshod threw a foreleg between his helmet and the paneling to his right as the console sputtered and sparked. His HUD delivered some rather grim news on the state of his heavy laser: it was no longer operational. One of the weapon’s capacitors being ruptured by a missile strike would certainly have explained the surge in power that had to be the cause of the panel in his cockpit shorting out.

Well, that certainly wasn’t good. Now he was down to just his SRMs and a single light laser. A fact that even the reather meager sensor suites of the circling Harassers were bound to pick up on soon.

The stallion eyed his tactical display grimly. His ‘Steed wasn’t long for this world no matter what he did now. The least he could do was buy Valkyrie as much time as possible. Slipshod threw his ‘Steed into reverse and began to open up the distance between him and the LRM Carrier. The hovercraft could either stick with him, pulling them further away from the Parasprite heading for their vulnerable missile launcher, or let him get to the relative safety of the mining camp’s defense envelope.

The raiders would have to choose quickly though. Even at a limp, the earth pony was only a minute or so from the mining facility.

The Harassers decided to take a third option, it seemed, much to Slipshod’s annoyance. The blips darted inwards towards him. Apparently they had decided that, if they finished him off quickly enough, they’d have sufficient time to catch up with Valkyrie and take her down too. The stallion doubted that very much, but his opinions weren’t something that the crews of those hovercraft were keen to take into consideration at the moment.

He was thrown against the straps of his piloting couch as a dozen short-ranged, but hard-hitting, rockets slammed into his ‘Steed’s left flank. Readouts in his cockpit dutifully reported that the last of his ablative armor in that region had been obliterated. Nothing had ceased to function in that limb―yet―but another solid strike was likely to shear it off completely. The stallion strained as he tried to turn his limping Wild Bronco, firing off the light laser. It was more of a display of indignation than anything. They were far outside even the ineffective range of the weapon. He might as well have been tagging them with a laser pointer for all the good it did.

Another sextet of SRMs belched from his ‘Steed’s chest, carving a divot into the highway and diverting one of the hovercraft, but little else that would save him. His harness kept him rooted at his controls as his barrel’s right side was raked now. He’d only started to turn that direction when he caught a flicker of movement through the viewport of his cockpit. His eyes widened in recognition even as his hooves pulled hard on the control yokes.

Something gave way this time. Slipshod was thrown from his seat, his helmet indenting a panel on the left side of his cockpit as the straps meant to keep him secured lost an anchor point or two. He was weightless for half a second, and then the floor jumped up and smacked him in the chin. He could taste blood in his mouth―likely related to the sharp pain in his tongue―and the acrid smell filling his nostrils told him something was burning. The latter was all the more concerning since his helmet was supposed to be sealed.

His eyes opened finally, though they teared almost instantly from the blue-hued smoke that was whisping up from several dark consoles. That certainly wasn’t ideal. Nor was the fact that all he could see through the cockpit’s viewport was dirt and debris. His ‘Steed was down. Even if he could get it to stand back up, he’d only be on his hooves for another second before a few dozen missiles breached his reactor and leveled a square kilometer of forest.

The fight was over. For him at least. Hopefully Valkyrie could still give a good accounting of herself.

Slipshod crawled back to his piloting couch and flipped up one of the panels nearby, revealing a yellow and red hashed lever. He hooked his fetlock around it and gave the lever a firm yank.

“EJECTION SYSTEM FAILURE.”

...That wasn’t good. The stallion reset the lever and pulled it again.

“EJECTION SYSTEM FAILURE.”

He pulled it a third time, his anxiety rising, “EJECTION SYSTEM―EJECTION SYS―EJECT―EJECT―EJECT―EJECTION SYSTEM FAILURE.”

Slipshod hadn’t really expected rapidly pulling on the lever to magically change anything. It had helped to alleviate a little of his frustration though. He toggled his comm. “Val? I’m down. Ejection system’s a no-go. What’s your situation?”

Static.

He looked at the display on his suit’s left sleeve and growled. It seemed that more than the seal on his helmet had broken when he’d been thrown. He was trapped and without a way to get word out. Not an ideal situation for a ‘Steed pilot that was still surrounded by the enemy.

Speaking of which...the stallion spied a hovercraft drifting around through the corner of his cockpit as it took its time to line up a shot that would finish him off. The earth pony glanced at the nearby hatch, briefly considering using that to make an escape. He’d never get it open and clear in time though.

His eyes then darted to one of the few working displays. Much to his surprise, the readouts insisted that his remaining small magical energy cannon was charged and operational. It wasn’t going to be enough to pierce even the thin armor of a Harasser, but it would make him feel better about dying, knowing that he’d at least scratched their paint before he went.

The stallion climbed back onto the couch and gripped the yoke. He was forced to eyeball the shot this time. His hoof curled around the trigger and fired the weapon. A ruby beam struck the Harasser, leaving a deep blackened groove just to the side of the craft’s crew cabin. Slipshod grinned in satisfaction despite himself. “Ha! I hope you have to spend a whole week buffing that out, you fuckers!”

The hovercraft vanished behind a pillar of blue light. Then it exploded.

“Umm…” The earth pony gaped at the location where his would-be killer had just been a moment ago, and which was now a smoldering wreck in the middle of a glassed circle. What was perhaps more surprising than the appearance of the heavy energy strike―which was still pretty damn surprising!―was the fact that it had seemed to come from directly above.

High-pitched whines of several additional blasts of energy weapons being fired could be heard through the cracked cockpit viewport, but these were out of Slipshod’s line of sight. A crescendoing roar of a DropShip’s massive thrusters drew the earth pony’s attention skyward, and to the source of the mysterious beams of destructive energy. He felt himself relax as he caught sight of the Galloway’s familiar blue and silver livery. Her dorsal energy turrets panned from side to side as they searched for any additional threats.

A rope dropped down in front of his cockpit, and quickly began to wriggle and flutter until a unicorn mare wearing combat barding and holding an assault rifle in her telekinesis descended into view. Once at the bottom, she dashed outward and took up a defensive position. More ponies followed down after her, all similarly armed. He heard suited hooves clomping on top of his cockpit. A few seconds later, the seal of the hatch above him popped as the egress port was manually ratcheted open by the Steel Coursers' Recovery Team. A stallion popped his head in and looked hastily around before his helmeted gaze locked onto Slipshod.

The new arrival put a hoof to the side of his head. “Target's alive and located. Alert medical. We’re on our way back up.” He extended the hoof towards Slipshod. “Sir, can you walk?”

The golden earth pony grinned up at the crimson pegasus stallion. “I can; but I have always wondered what it’d be like to be carried off by a strapping young stallion…” He folded his fetlocks under his chin and fluttered his eyes at the other pony. “Will you please be my hero?”

The other pony rolled his eyes with an annoyed snort and turned his head back over his shoulder to address the others with him. “He’s fine.” He then withdrew from the hatch entirely. “Let’s just work on getting the hoists hooked up for Mig…”

Slipshod frowned and blew a raspberry. “You know, Blood Chit,” he called out loudly as he rose back onto his hooves and headed for the now open hatch, “you’re somehow a lot more fun when we’re playing euchre. Which is a sentence that I don’t think anypony has ever said in the history of the Harmony Sphere!” He emerged to find that upwards of a dozen ponies were busily attaching thick cabling to a dozen different load-bearing points on the top of the ‘Steed.

Another dozen ponies surrounded the slumped over Wild Bronco, keeping a vigilant watch for any uninvited guests. He noted that there was a second column of smoke rising up from somewhere in the forest, but he saw no sign of what might have become of the third remaining Harasser. For that matter…

He looked westward, but he couldn’t get a clear view over the trees of what might have become of Val or the LRM Carrier. His assumption was that it had been dealt with, as it would have been far too dangerous to bring the Galloway here with a vehicle like that still lingering around. Sixty LRMs would have done more to the DropShip than scratch the paint.

“Thanks for the rescue, by the way,” Slipshod said to the crimson pegasus stallion who was overseeing the recovery effort.

“Thank Valkyrie,” the armored pony responded, “she put in the call that you’d gone down, and plotted an approach to put us right on top of you.” He paused as a thought seemed to occur to him. “She also had a message for you,” the pegasus raised a curious brow, “something about: ‘it’s two months now’. Whatever that means?”

Slipshod blanked for a few seconds. Then burst out laughing.

Author's Note

TECHNICAL READOUT

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 5: Twilight Rising

“―and then when we factor in the cost of replacing the large laser array...oh, look! We’ve crossed the half million C-bit mark, and we haven’t even touched the bill for ten tons of ablative plating…”

A resigned Slipshod merely lay on the clinic’s patient bed like a deflated equine-shaped balloon. Squelch’s persistent brow-beating notwithstanding, the earth pony ‘Steed pilot was receiving a very poignant education on the pathology of ‘whiplash’. He was forced to admit that he’d never before suffered from the condition, and had only really seen it portrayed on entertainment dramas.

Those portrayals had led him to the―apparently erroneous―conclusion that the condition was a largely fictional one that was concocted by ambulance-chasing lawyers for the purposes of obtaining more House-Bits during a lawsuit. After all, the characters who were claiming to be suffering from the condition would always appear to be perfectly fine and mobile in the scenes immediately following the purported catastrophic accident, only to show up in court in a wheelchair and moaning like the living dead.

Now he realized that the portrayal had been surprisingly accurate. Slipshod had had little issue climbing out of his crippled and fallen ‘Steed not six hours ago. He’d not hesitated at being winched up the belay lines lowered from the hovering DropShip and had merrilly trotted to his quarters for a change into a fresh uniform while the ship’s crew worked to salvage the Wild Bronco.

The pain hadn’t kicked in until about four hours later, when the earth pony discovered that so much as twitching a hoof elicited a groan and a desire to not move that part of his body ever again. He’d very carefully―and very slowly―limped to the Med Bay and informed Doc Dee of his impending death. However, in lieu of last rites, the ivory unicorn had instead administered some pain killers and an order for two weeks of bed rest.

Slipshod had hardly been devastated by the physician’s order. Not that he did a whole lot on the ship when he wasn’t at the controls of his ‘Steed―which was going to be out for at least a month anyway―but now he could claim that it was “doctor’s orders” and not just his general reluctance to exert himself beyond the bounds of his employment contract. He was paid to pilot ‘Steeds, and little else. If anypony on the ship expected him to perform other duties, then they first needed to approach Squelch so that she could renegotiate his contract...and his pay.

However, it seemed that his “bed rest” order didn’t stop his boss from descending upon him to give him a verbal lashing thorough enough that it left his pride hurting as much as the rest of his body. “Mig’s going to be rewiring consoles for the next two days, and has informed me that we are now officially out of myomer sinew. Restocking that adds in another two hundred thou…” The unicorn glared down at her bedridden pilot, “I don’t suppose you want to take a guess at what our profit off this contract is going to be...before I factor in all those fun little ‘luxuries’ like, oh, I don’t know, everypony’s pay!”

The emerald mare took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nostrils, “I swear the only favor you did me was not dying...so that I don’t have to pay out your death benefits to your next of kin.” A thought struck the mare and she glared briefly at the stallion before tabbing over to another screen on her tablet, “...which, I just remembered, had better not still be m―” She jerked, scowling at the screen. With a growl, she slammed the pad down on the mattress beside Slipshod and stormed for the door.

“Update that! I don’t care who you put down, but it’d better be changed before I come back for it!”

The earth pony winced as the Med Bay door slid shut. He let out a defeated sigh and reached out for the tablet. Displayed upon it was his company personnel file, which contained all sorts of fun little tidbits of information like his employment history, job performance reports―which he made a note to review while he had the opportunity―and...his beneficiary information.

For which Squelch was still listed as the primary recipient of all his assets in the event that he was killed in action.

In the stallion’s defense, this form was usually updated only once a year, and it hadn’t―quite―been a full year since the two of them divorced. Not that there was exactly a long list of other ponies that he could think of to put in her place. The rest of his family members were already dead. As far as he was concerned, there really wasn’t anypony else in the Sphere he could replace Squelch with, despite their...problematic past together.

Still, he knew that she had been serious about wanting it changed. No reason to antagonize her any further than the damage he’d allowed to happen to his ‘Steed already had.

He knew that she was being a little overdramatic on that front. Yes, the repair bill for the materials was going to be pretty high, but he’d been there for the contract negotiation. He knew what they were being paid for this job. They certainly weren’t going to be seeing quite as much of a windfall as they would have if his Bronco hadn’t been thrashed like it was, but they were going to fly away from this system with more money in their account than what they’d arrived with, and that was better than a lot of merc companies could say, even three years into their operations.

At worst, properly arming the Rainbow Dash was going to need to wait another contract or two.

Slipshod finished altering the information on his record and pushed the pad aside. He’d look over Squelch’s official opinions of his performance as a pilot later.

“Hmm,” a stallion said from beside him, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” the new arrival remarked. The earth pony glanced up to see Doc Dee looking down at the pad. “I don’t think I’d trust a wingpony to cover my flank if they knew there was a payday waiting for them if I bought it out there.” The unicorn physician floated out a bottle of pills towards him. “But, it’s your flank on the line, so…” He shrugged. “Take two of these three times a day, with meals. Come back here and see me if the pain gets worse.”

Slipshod took the bottle and looked over the contents. “Thanks, Doc.” He then looked back at the pad, which now listed Valkyrie as his beneficiary. “I could put your name down if you want. Or will that be too tempting the next time I get wheeled in here?”

“Heh,” the unicorn chuckled, tapping his chin with his pen, “I have been wanting to purchase a second boat…”

The earth pony stallion smirked, then his eyes drifted to the only other pony in the room besides the pair of them. “So how’s our marathon napper doing these days?”

“Still hasn’t so much as twitched,” the unicorn responded, his tone shifting from amusement to something more professional and concerned as he stepped closer to his other patient. “Her injuries are all treated, save for what appears to be a lingering case of mana burn.”

“‘Appears’?”

“It’s not true mana burn,” the medical pony replied simply, “but it is quite similar in its presentation. I suspect that it’s a result of another unicorn looping her ley lines into the stasis chamber’s spell matrix. Whoever did it did a good job, obviously―she survived―but ‘good’ doesn’t mean ‘perfect’. My guess is that it’s left her in something of a comatose state.”

“How much longer before she wakes up?”

The pony shrugged. “Anywhere between the next five minutes or the next fifty years.” Doc Dee thought for a moment. “Or maybe the next five hundred years in her case,” he amended, “if she really is an alicorn.”

The earth pony’s ears perked. “You think she might be a real alicorn?”

“I have performed every test and scan that I can,” the unicorn said, “and I have discovered no signs that those wings of hers were grafted on. And I specify the wings because I ran a sequence on her DNA, and it came back ‘unicorn’. Very pure unicorn, too. Her parents, grandparents, and most of her great grandparents were all unicorns, it looks like.” Doc Dee flashed a wry smirk in the prone pilot’s direction. “If that kind of insular heritage doesn’t scream ‘nobility’, I don’t know what does…”

“Would an alicorn have unicorn DNA?” The earth pony asked.

The white stallion shrugged. “No idea. But, like I said, the wings aren’t fake, as far as any test I know about can tell.”

“...So who do you think she is?”

Before the physician could render his answer, the door to the Med Bay slid open, and a pale yellow earth pony mare with pink eyes and a cyan mane came trotting in, a look of concern on her face. “Hey, Slip, sorry I wasn’t by sooner. I just got off my shift.” Her eyes scanned over the stallion laying on the examination bed before her head turned to the ship’s doctor. “Is he going to be okay?”

Slipshod spoke up before the medical pony could. “Hey, High Gain. I’m fine,” he assured her, grinning up at the mare and folding his legs in front of him. He did his best to suppress the wince of pain the movement caused him. “Just a little whiplash.”

“Ooh...sorry to hear that,” the mare cringed sympathetically, “my mother had that after her car accident. She could barely put her saddlebags on for a week!” She flashed the stallion a wan smile. “So...I take it that tonight’s not happening then?”

The earth pony shook his head, smiling, “‘fraid not. Even without the whiplash, I bit my tongue pretty good.” He opened his mouth and stuck out the indicated muscle, giving her a clear view of the glistening red marks that his teeth had made when he’d been thrown from his harness in the battle. “Hee?” He withdrew his tongue and offered the sunflower mare an apologetic shrug. “I wouldn’t be much use. Sorry, but it looks like you’ll be a solo act tonight.” He thought for a moment and grinned. “Unless you can convince Channel Lock to join in!”

“Pfft,” High Gain waved her hoof, dismissively, “only when she’s drunk; and you’re the only pony on this ship that can mix a Salty Diamond Dog that she’ll actually drink! She won’t touch the ones Cookie makes and she curls her nose up completely at anything else! Seriously,” she mumbled under her breath, “what kind of pony only drinks gin?!”

Slipshod laughed, “that’s because Cookie refuses to deviate from the published recipe he has, and I add a ‘special ingredient’ to my grapefruit mix!” He winked at the other earth pony.

“Please tell me what it is so I can make them for her,” she pleaded.

“And render myself obsolete?!” The stallion protested in mock indignation. “Why would you ever need me to come by again if I gave you the secret to putting Channel Lock ‘in the mood’ whenever you wanted?”

The yellow mare smirked at the prone stallion and poked him playfully in the nose. “I’d never do that to you, silly! You know that sometimes I need a stallion, and you’re the only one I know on this ship that fits the bill,” she chided him, grinning broadly at the pony. “You’re the only one who really puts in the effort!” She beamed.

The ‘Steed pilot laughed again. “Ha! How can I not, the way you hit those high notes!” But he continued to shake his head. “But my answer on the secret ingredient is still a hard ‘no’, High-Gee.” The mare outwardly pouted, but there was still a playful glint in her eyes, and he knew that she wasn’t genuinely disappointed in his response. Well...maybe just a little, below the surface. “Honestly, I’m just terrified of giving you that kind of power over your bunkmate. The things you’d have her doing with you…” He made an effort to shake his head in a somber fashion, but a smirk snuck through his feigned seriousness.

“Eh, you’re probably right,” the mare acknowledged with a shrug, “but you can’t blame a mare for trying.” She glanced over at the physician, who had been very pointedly reviewing some patient files in a part of the Med Bay that didn’t give him a vantage point from which he could overhear their conversation. No, not at all. Not that either had been speaking in a particularly discreet tone anyway. “How long’s he going to be out for, Doc?”

The medical stallion opened his mouth to speak, hesitated, looked over at Slipshod, as though waiting for something, and then turned back to the mare to answer her question. “He―”

“I’ll be by next week,” the earth pony pilot answered her, “I might still be a little achy, but my tongue should be perfectly fine by then. I won’t be busting out the moves like I usually do,” he warned her, smirking wryly, “but I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

“Oh, gag me!”

Both earth ponies turned their heads towards the open Med Bay door to see an azure pegasus fluttering in. Doc Dee frowned, looking around his clinic which was the most crowded that it’d been in months. “If I’d known that I was hosting an ‘open house’ today, I’d have laid out cheese and crackers…”

“Don’t mind me, Doc,” Valkyrie waved her hoof at the white unicorn as she touched down beside the other mare, “I won’t be long. I just heard that Slip was here and wanted to see if I should call dibs on any of his things.” She eyed the prone stallion briefly, frowning. “He doesn’t look like he’s dying.

“Damn. Guess I won’t be piloting the Bronco on our next op after all, huh?”

“Thank you for your concern, Val,” Slipshod replied with a sardonic smile. His hooves very slowly and subtly reached out and darkened the screen on the pad displaying his updated beneficiary information. “It means a lot to me. Really.” He looked back at High Gain, who was frowning slightly in the direction of the other ‘Steed pilot. “I’ll be by next week. Promise.”

The yellow earth pony tech sighed and wrapped her hooves around him in a brief hug. He tensed up immediately, but only the tiniest whimper escaped his lips, which High Gain seemed to take no note of. “Feel better soon,” she gave him an extra squeeze before letting him go that had the stallion wondering if he’d actually managed to make her angry in some way and she’d been out to punish him. Though, knowing the earth pony tech like he did, she probably needed the hug more than she believed he did. So be it.

Slipshod waved after the departing mare before returning his attention to the scowling pegasus. Now he frowned too. “What?”

The mare shook her head. “Nothing,” she sighed. The pegasus ‘Steed pilot took a deep breath and looked over at the doctor. “He’s good, right?”

Doc Dee cast his gaze to the prone earth pony, not saying a word. Slipshod met his stare stoically. The two held their locked gaze in silence. The golden earth pony began to shift uncomfortably, his eyes wandering away beneath the withering glare of the physician. Finally, after what felt like nearly a minute, prompting Valkyrie to glance in confusion between the pair of stallions, the unicorn pursed his lips.

“I’m good―”

“Luna’s black ass!”

Both ‘Steed pilots whipped their heads around to stare after the DropShip’s doctor, who was storming away from them towards his office. Somehow, despite the fact that the door was attached to servos which were most assuredly moving at the exact same speed as they did for every single automated door on the ship, this time it felt like the door closed ‘harder’ behind him.

“―Just some...whiplash…” He looked back at Valkyrie. “What was that about?”

“Beats me, but I bet it was your fault,” the blue flier remarked. She rolled her eyes and looked back at her companion pilot. Her expression was―a little―softer than it had been a moment ago. “You’re really fine though, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good, Val. Just got bounced around the cockpit a little. How about you?”

The mare snorted, shaking her head. “Unbelievable.” The stallion quirked his brow in confusion at the mare's hostile-sounding tone. “You almost die, I don’t get a scratch because you took the beating for me, and you ask how I’m doing? You’re an ass.”

“I...apologise?” The stallion said, not even trying to hide how thoroughly perplexed he'd become by the mare's atitude. Was she genuinely angry at him because she didn’t get hurt? “Next time you can get shot to shit...in your paper-mache ‘Steed…

“What exactly am I supposed to say here? What did I do wrong? Live?”

“Well, for starters,” the mare sneered, “you’re not supposed to ask how I’m doing, when you’re the one laid up in Med Bay!”

“I’m not ‘laid up’,” he protested, “I’m just here for some pain pills for my whiplash.” He held up the bottle and read over the label. “I don’t even think these things are the good stuff...yeah, they’re just straight Ibuprofen.” He frowned. “Wait, really? Not even codeine?” He looked back towards the doctor’s office. “That’s harsh, Doc!

“I mean, a Vicodin or two wouldn’t go amiss here―”

Valkyrie slammed her hoof down on the deck plating, startling the earth pony stallion. “Could you be serious for once in your fucking life!” She had his rapt, wide eyed, attention now. The mare jabbed a wingtip in his face, glaring at him. “You do not get to play ‘hero’ and get yourself killed for me; do you understand?! That noble, ‘crystal knight’ bullshit? That doesn’t happen between you and me.

“I am not your fucking damsel to rescue, you shit-stain!”

She was mad. Honestly, it didn’t take some sort of expert in psychology or anything to see that. Everything from the ire in her tone, to the piercing fire in her eyes, to her puffed out plumage broadcast ‘pissed off pegasus mare’ to anypony who would have seen this scene playing out. There was more to it though. There usually was, in Slipshod’s experience. Most ponies were a lot more complicated than they wanted to let on.

Yes, Valkyrie was mad. That much was true. However, he could sense that she was masking the reason for that rage...and its target. She wasn’t angry at him.

She hated herself.

The mare hated herself for following his orders, and leaving him to die. It didn’t matter that it was the right call. It didn’t matter that it had all worked out. For over a minute down on that planet, from the moment she’d throttled her Parasprite away from him and towards the LRM Carrier, she’d been convinced that she’d just left her lance-mate to die, and that she’d never see him again.

Valkyrie was a mercenary. She was supposed to care about the pursuit of the C-bit above all else. Leaving a comrade to die shouldn’t have bothered her. But it did.

And she hated herself for that. It was like a sign that she was failing at becoming the kind of pony that she was supposed to be. Veteran mercs didn’t bond with the other pilots in their outfits. That sort of thing led to stupid, selfless sacrifices. That was a desirable quality in a ‘Steed pilot employed by genuine militaries, sure. 'Star nation before self' and all that. Giving your life for House and ‘The Cause’, whatever it happened to be.

But they weren’t real soldiers. They were mercenaries―soldiers of fortune. They risked their lives for C-bits and glory, not each other. They certainly didn’t throw their lives away in selfless acts of heroism.

Valkyrie knew this. He knew this. Then she’d seen their situation, heard his orders, and now...she was feeling remorseful about actually following them. Because what she saw as him making a selfless sacrifice was making her feel like a piece of shit, since she wasn’t sure that she’d ever have given the same order in his situation.

He couldn’t have her thinking that way. He couldn’t have her feeling that way.

“What are you, an idiot?”

The mare balked, her eyes widening in surprise now as the earth pony pilot on the bed frowned at her, issuing the pegasus a disappointed expression. “You think that’s what I was trying to do? Is your head so far up your own flank that you think I’d die for you?” The stallion let out a cackling laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re a fine slice of flank I would love to slam up against the headboard for five minutes.” He let his gaze wander along her spine. The other pilot immediately folded her wings to her sides again, obscuring most of her figure as she cast him a wary look.

“But let’s be real here: no flank is worth dying for,” Slipshod pointedly informed her. “Least of all yours.” Valkyrie seemed oddly offended by that notion, funnily enough, but the stallion pressed on. “No; I gave that order because that’s what would save the contract,” he stressed.

“A lesson about merc work they only teach you at the good schools: Mission first.

“Hey, I get it,” he acknowledged, “you can’t spend C-bits you don’t live long enough to collect. But there’s a limit to even that. You let enough contracts go tits-up; suddenly you don’t have any contracts at all. No contracts means no C-bits to spend, alive or dead.

“If a mission can’t be salvaged, then you bug out, sure,” Slipshod conceded with a shrug, “but if there’s a chance…” He jabbed a hoof at the mare. “...Then you take it!” His lips broke out in a hungry grin. “You take it, and the C-bits that come with it.” He spread his hooves wide. “And the booze, mares, and good times, that come with the C-bits.

“That’s why I gave you the order to press on,” his serious expression was back again as he regarded the pegasus mare, “because that was the only way to salvage the mission and get paid. If you moved your flank fast enough, there was even a good chance I’d survive to collect too!” His grin returned once more. “And I was right. Good on you for that hustle. I really appreciate it.

“But, if you need a little 'noble fantasy' in your life,” he folded his hooves under his chin and flashed a broad smile at the mare, “then I think, that in this case...you’d be the ‘crystal knight’, and I’m the ‘damsel’ that got rescued. So how about you come a little closer and let me give my big, strong, hero a kiss...” He puckered up his lips expectantly.

The mare balked again, then her face broke out in a wry smirk. “Ha! Kiss this!” She smacked her flank with one of her wings.

“Oh my, don’t mind if I do!” The stallion perked up, leaning a little further forward. “But you’ll have to back it up here for me first. My preemptive apologies if this doesn’t feel as good as it could’ve. Like I was telling High Gain: my tongue’s a little on the fritz.” He opened his mouth and waggled the injured muscle.

Valkyrie’s mouth worked in silent consternation for several seconds before she slammed it closed and took a deep breath, nodding her head in acknowledgement. “Okay...that one was my fault.

“Whatever. I’m out. Drop dead for all I care,” the winged pilot said as she turned around and headed for the door. “Save your tongue fuckings for High Gain or whoever.” One of her wings flipped up, all but one of her pinions curled inward.

“We don’t―” The door closed shut. The stallion sighed, finishing lamely, “―do that stuff…”

Ah well, at least he’d brought the ‘Steed pilot back around out her self-loathing despair. One less dark cloud that he was going to have to deal with on the ship. Squelch’s still existed though, and would continue to.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that he could do on that front. Not yet.

Slipshod’s eyes shot open.

At first, it was difficult for him to pinpoint exactly why this would have been the case. He was usually a pretty sound sleeper. Had he heard something? His ear swiveled slowly, but he wasn’t able to hear anything more than the normal humming operations of the ship as it cruised leisurely in its orbit above the planet that Ferrous had sent them to guard. It wasn’t a sound that had woken him.

It was...something else.

Odd, as usually that didn’t wake him up either...

The earth pony crept slowly out of his bed, mindful of the aches in his back that the painkillers Doc Dee had prescribed only did a minimal amount to ease. Mostly they just took off the worst of the pain’s edges. Honestly, it was no great comfort. Fortunately, he also had the physician’s bed rest order to help keep him comfortable.

Valkyrie wasn’t super appreciative, he imagined. His being confined to the ship meant that she was saddled with the sole burden of continuing their protection contract. The bright side there was that Mig and Tig had managed to get the Rainbow Dash operational enough to move around on its own, and outfitted it with a few spare weapons from their reserve. The large laser, two medium lasers, and six-pack SRM launcher meant that the heavy ‘Steed was more powerfully armed than either of the other two could be. Though it was still woefully lacking in the bite it would have, once a proper weapons compliment was purchased.

It did mean that his Wild Bronco was going to be unable to be rearmed until they made port on a more developed world than this backwater mining colony.

Still, even the sight of a heavy ‘Steed should give any mercenary outfit that was only fielding vehicles pause and make them reconsider a raid. With luck, all that Valkyrie would have to do all day was sit there, look intimidating, and twiddle her pinions!

The stallion moved stiffly down the corridor of the quiet DropShip. Technically, the ship never really ‘slept’. There was a shift on duty and awake at any given time. However, the reality was that the third shift was much more lightly staffed than either of the others, simply because the Steel Coursers didn’t have the ‘Steed pilots to run twenty-four hours ops. With just him and Val, the most they’d ever pull is a twelve or maybe a sixteen hour day. Though the latter was really pushing things.

Tired pilots often became dead pilots when the shit started to fly.

So most of the Galloway’s crew was scheduled for duty when the ‘Steeds would need work, since that was the primary purpose of the DropShip: maintaining the ‘Steeds. It was currently night time where Valkyrie was planet-side, so she was sleeping in the quarters that Ferrous had set aside for her. Which meant that the support crews on Galloway were asleep too.

The only ponies awake were the skeleton crew that kept an eye on the DropShip’s systems and the comm pony keeping their ear to the radio in case somepony called. Other than that...the ship was dead.

Except...something.

Slipshod kept up his stilted walk down the spine of the ship, letting his senses draw him to wherever the...sensation was.

He came to a stop outside Med Bay.

Cautiously, the earth pony reached up and depressed the panel that would open the door. Like most of the rest of the ship, the medical ward was dark, save for a few dim lights that were always on, illuminating key controls, like the light switches. Slipshod reached out for one such switch nearest the door.

The lights slowly brightened until the room was awash in a soft white glow. The stallion’s eyes went instinctively to the bed that had been consistently inhabited by the mare that they’d rescued from the derelict in the Canis system...only to find it empty!

He didn’t have to go far to find its former occupant though. A crashing sound from off to his right drew the ‘Steed pilot’s attention instantly. In the back of his mind, Slipshod knew that he shouldn’t have been entirely surprised by what he saw, but it was still a rather...unique sight.

A purple alicorn, with a long deep blue mane streaked with violet and magenta, was currently standing amongst a tray of fallen medical implements. Her amethyst eyes, a near perfect match for her coat, constricted into near pinpricks as her head snapped to look over at him. Her stance widened and her horn began to glow with purple light.

“Woah woah! Friend! I’m a friend!” The stallion sputtered hastily. He wasn’t sure what spell the alicorn was about to blast him with, but he was confident that he wouldn’t have enjoyed the results regardless. “You’re okay; you’re safe! Nopony here’s going to hurt you! Just put down the...spell…?” The earth pony finished lamely, not quite knowing how to properly phrase the request that he was making.

“Who are you?” The mare demanded in a voice that sounded equal parts angry and tired. Honestly, to Slipshod it looked like she barely had the energy to stand up straight. He wondered how potent any spell she might cast could actually be. Not that he was all that keen to find out, mind you. “Where am I? What is this place?”

“My name’s Slipshod,” the stallion replied as calmly as he could, remaining in the doorway so as not to make the newly conscious mare any more anxious by being approached by a strange earth pony. “You’re aboard the DropShip Galloway; and this is...the Med Bay...of the DropShip Galloway.” The stallion frowned. “I’m sorry, you’re last two questions were really similar…

“You should probably really not be out of bed,” he went on, clearing his throat and gesturing towards the patient bed that she’d vacated. “I don’t think the doc wants you up and about quite yet. You were in a bad way when we found you―”

“What unit are you with?” The purple alicorn demanded in her wavering, yet firm tone.

“Um...the Steel Coursers,” Slipshod said.

The mare furrowed her brow, shaking her head. “I don’t recognize that unit. What regiment? Who’s your commander?”

“We don’t...have a regiment?” At least, he was pretty sure they didn’t. “And Squelch is our commander.”

“‘Squelch’?” She replied skeptically. “What rank is he? Under whose command? What General?”

“Uhh...her ‘rank’ is ‘commander’, I guess? I mean, she’s more of an administrator really,” Slipshod shrugged, wishing he’d had a little more time to prepare for this encounter. Truth be told, he wasn’t as awake for this as he probably should be. He really wished that Squelch or the doctor were here right now, but he was reluctant to start crowding this mare with more ponies until she was a little calmer. “And we don’t have...a general. We’re sort of...freelance?”

“Freelance?” The notion seemed to confuse the mare.

“Listen,” the earth pony began, deciding that he needed to take charge of the conversation and direct things. Hopefully he’d even manage to answer some of her questions along the way. Celestia knew he wasn’t doing so great at it now. “We found your DropShip in the Canis system. It was in a bad way, and so were you.” He slowly gestured at the Med Bay. “We brought you on board and patched you up.”

The mare looked down at herself, seeming to take note for the first time of her condition. “...Right. We were attacked…” She closed her eyes, her hoof massaging her temple as she winced in pain. “We were...going to a meeting…

“Canis?” Her questioning gaze returned to the stallion.

Right. Five hundred years. That system might not even have had the same name back then. “Um, in the Sirius Cluster?”

He saw recognition wash over the mare’s face. “Yes! The Sirius Cluster,” she nodded, seeming very grateful to finally have a firm answer to a question that satisfied her, “we were on our way to meet with the Lunar Empire…”

It was Slipshod’s turn to look confused. “The who?”

However, it seemed that she wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. “...I was going to tell them about Cozy Glow...Get them to come back to The League…” Her expression was drawn in grim lines as she murmured her recounting of events as best she could remember them. Her eyes closed, her head shaking in slow, sad, movements. “Tirek destroyed so much...they were afraid. It wasn’t their fault…”

Her eyes snapped open and she locked her gaze on Slipshod. “We were attacked!”

“Yeah, we kind of figured that much,” he offered, “your ship crash-landed on a moon back in Canis. It’s a miracle you survived, honestly.”

The alicorn frowned once more. “Ship? I made it back to the ship?” She looked away, her eyes moving as she scoured her own memory. “...I don’t recall. I remember...going to the meeting. No…” She cocked her head. “...That’s not right. I was going to the meeting...but we never made it. We were ambushed…” Her eyes slowly grew wide. Haunted. It was an expression that Slipshod recognized. He’d seen many a veteran in the bars he went to while planetside with those eyes.

She whipped her head back towards the earth pony. “Did anypony else make it?” She didn’t wait for his response as she quickly peered around the otherwise empty medical ward in an attempt to find any trace of her companions.

The stallion swallowed, not relishing being the one to supply the response that she was dreading...yet that she fully expected. “No. Everypony else on the ship was dead.

“I’m sorry.”

Her eyes closed and she bowed her down. There was a brief shudder from a contained sob. Then, shortly after, a sharp inhalation of breath and her head raised back up. Her expression was set in stoic lines, but the stallion knew that they were merely a mask she was wearing for the moment. “I understand,” she replied in a husky tone, “I need to speak with your...commander. Immediately.

“I need to get back to Canterlot. Cozy Glow can wait. Chrysalis is making her play.”

Slipshod stood still in the doorway. “Um...I don’t think―”

The purple mare’s expression hardened even further as she cast a baleful glare the stallion’s way. “We don’t have time for you to think! If we don’t rally every regiment of the Royal Guard now, everything could be lost!” And with that, the alicorn made an attempt to storm past him, out of the Med Bay.

Her ‘attempt’ was rather paltry. She stumbled and collapsed after only two steps.

“Shit,” the earth pony sighed before slapping at a nearby control panel. “Dee? Your patient’s awake, and she’s determined to hurt herself all over again. You better get down here ASAP.” He released the comm button and hurried over to support the struggling purple mare.

“Listen, you’ve still got a lot of recovering to do before you’re ‘rallying’ anypony, alright?” The stallion cautioned as he made an effort to get her back onto her hooves. Her legs were barely willing to support her weight, it seemed.

The mare at least allowed herself to be aided back to the bed, albeit with some reluctance. “We have to get back to Canterlot as quickly as possible,” she insisted even as she meekly climbed back onto the bed and all but collapsed upon the mattress, clearly exhausted. “There’s no telling what kind of damage Chrysalis has already managed to do. The whole Celestia League could be at risk!”

“I’m...fairly sure it isn’t,” Slipshod offered meekly. This pony was the better part of five centuries out of date on the stellar-political starscape. He was pretty sure that it was going to be impossible to not shock her with at least one or two of the inevitable revelations that she was going to be encountering soon, but the earth pony was hoping that the shock could at least be minimized in some way by breaking the news to her in the right way, in the correct order.

He just had little idea of what it was that she’d need to hear first in order to lay the foundation for future revelations.

The purple alicorn was shaking her head. “You don’t know how dangerous she is,” she insisted breathlessly, “she’s come so close to victory so many times...if we let our guard down for even a moment―”

The door slid open, and a disheveled white unicorn stallion came galloping inside. His horn burst to life, floating several diagnostic implements to him from various cupboards around the clinic. “What happened?” He demanded in a tone that wasn’t―quite―bordering on accusing Slipshod of being responsible for this somehow.

“I...was on my way to the galley for a snack,” the stallion stammered, “I heard a crashing sound and found her over there,” he gestured to where the mare had spilled the tray earlier. “I called you and got her back into the bed.

“I guess patients have always been difficult to deal with,” the physician grumbled as he began evaluating his now conscious patient. Slipshod, for his part, took the opportunity to back away and give the medical pony the room that he needed to do his work.

The listless mare continued to insist that they needed to get to Canterlot on Equus as quickly as possible. Doc Dee was responding with a slew of noncommittal statements as he continued to make certain that his patient had not managed to undo any of his previous treatments somehow. A few minutes later, he was confident that her condition wasn’t likely to worsen any time soon and so took the time to more directly address the mare’s concerns.

“Miss, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to ask you some questions,” the medical pony began, “it’ll help me build a medical history for you, and perhaps speed your full recovery. Will that be alright?”

The alicorn initially looked like she was going to refuse his request, but she hesitated and then sighed. “I...suppose that’s reasonable,” she relented. Her lips cracked a small smile. “my Court Physician is the same way. If you’re anything like her, you’re likely as not to sedate me unless I acquiesce, aren’t you? Very well, Doctor, ask you questions.”

Dee exchanged a brief look with Slipshod at the mention of a 'Court Physician' but then shrugged and returned his attention to the prone mare and retrieved a tablet to take notes on. “Okay. First: your name, miss?”

The mare chuckled. “Really? Very well. My name is Twilight Sparkle.” She rolled her eyes. “I suppose that next you’ll want to know my profession?”

Again, the stallions exchange a brief look. The white unicorn affixed a professionally detached expression to his face and proceeded to begin entering the responses that he was being given. “I see. Um...sure. Your profession would be appreciated.”

“Princess,” the mare supplied patiently.

“Of course. Age?”

“One Thousand and twenty-nine.”

Somehow, the doctor managed to maintain a completely straight face as he dutifully made the notation. “Many patients have a habit of lowballing me when I ask them that.” He peered down at the alicorn. “Shall I assume that’s not the case this time?”

The mare shifted uncomfortably for a moment before muttering under her breath. “...One thousand and forty-seven.”

“There we go. I weighed you while you were unconscious, so we don’t have to go through that fact-finding expedition,” he murmured, earning an affronted frown from the mare before continuing, “any family medical history that I should be aware of?”

“My mother died of pancreatic cancer,” she replied. “My father technically died of heart failure, but at ninety-eight years old, I’m not sure that’s really a sign of any sort of ‘underlying medical condition’.”

“Fair enough,” the doctor nodded in agreement, “are you taking any medications or have any allergies?”

“No, and no.”

Doc Dee made the last little notations and lowered the pad. “Well, that’s enough for me to at least finally get you in the system as something other than ‘Unknown Mare’,” he smiled down at the purple alicorn. “Now, how are you feeling? Any pain? Discomfort? Nausea? Headache? Anything?”

“A slight headache,” the mare admitted, nodding her head. “It’s hard to walk, and I do feel pretty tired.”

The unicorn stallion nodded. “The headache is likely still the residual mana burn. The last two are classic post-stasis side-effects and usually abate a few hours after waking. I’ll have the galley send up a fruit bowl. Simple sugars and water will help get your metabolism back into gear. Honestly, it’ll do your body a world of good to get nutrients through some means other than IV tubing.” He stepped away and headed for his office to place the meal request with the ship’s kitchen.

“Mana burn? Stasis?”

With the doctor otherwise occupied, Slipshod decided to answer her questions. “You were in stasis when we found you on your ship. You were in a bad way. The doc says they used your own magic to keep the stasis spell running somehow.” He’d have offered more details, but the stallion was still a little hazy on the specifics of how it had all worked too.

She seemed to understand what must have happened though, as her eyes widened with comprehension. “Oh! That was rather creative,” she said, nodding. Then her expression fell as she must have remembered that those same ‘creative’ ponies had all died. She sighed and looked back at the earth pony. “Please. We need to get to Equus as soon as possible―”

“On the contrary,” another mare announced. Slipshod and the prone alicorn both looked towards the Med Bay door to see a green unicorn stepping through. It seemed that Squelch had received notification that their guest was awake now as well. “This ship ‘needs’ to stay in orbit until we’ve fulfilled the terms of our security contract,” she countered. “Unless you’re carrying enough C-bits in that mane of yours to cover the penalty for defaulting…?”

Twilight frowned at the newcomer, casting her an incredulous glare. “I beg your pardon? Who do you think you are―?”

“I ‘think’ I’m the mare who owns this outfit and this ship,” Squelch shot back with an equally imperious stare at the purple alicorn. “Thus, I think that I have unilateral control over where it goes and when.

“Who do you think you are?” The viridian unicorn countered.

The other mare’s wings arched in clear annoyance. “How dare you! I am your Princess and I will not be subjected to that kind of tone from you or any other pony, young lady! Now, as your Princess, I order you to take me to Equus immediately!”

“Princess, huh?” The outfit’s commander didn’t appear to be the least bit impressed by their patient’s claims, and with good reason. “Look, I bet that carries a lot of weight in the Federated Moons, but you’re way outside their borders right now, ‘Your Highness’.” The unicorn executed a mocking bow that was not well received by the alicorn. “But I’ll be sure to have House Belle contacted as soon as I can.” She looked to Slipshod and shrugged. “Maybe there’s a reward for long long ancestors?”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” the purple mare sputtered indignantly, “or what the ‘Federated Moons’ are. How can you not recognize me?! I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle of the Celestia League!”

The silence in the Med Bay was deafening. It also lasted long enough that the purple alicorn’s initially imperious expression started to wilt ever so slightly. Likely because Squelch continued to look just as unimpressed as she had a minute ago, and because Slipshod was idly rubbing the back of his neck while wearing an uneasy expression.

Squelch smirked. “That’s quite the demotion you’ve given yourself there, Queen Twilight,” the unicorn chided.

“Queen? I’ve never called myself a―” Twilight’s expression contorted with confusion. Then Slipshod watched it quickly morph into a look of abject terror. She all but lunged off the exam bed. The earth pony stallion managed to catch her before she fell again, but only barely. “It’s her! It’s Chrysalis! She’s not the real me!” The mare was screaming at the top of her lungs in a panicked fervor. It was all that Slipshod could do to hold the alicorn back, and his efforts were certainly not doing his already aching body any favors.

“We have to go there and stop her now, before she can do any dama―uhhh~!”

The purple alicorn went limp and collapsed in the stallion’s hooves. Slipshod experienced a brief moment of panic himself, afraid that she’d somehow died, until he spied the floating syringe slowly withdrawing from her neck. It drifted away from the mare, and back towards Doc Dee, who was wearing a very concerned expression of his own. “Get her back onto the bed, please,” the physician instructed, using his magic to assist the earth pony in getting the larger equine back upon the cushioned sleeping surface.

“Well...that got exciting,” Squelch remarked as she lent some of her own magic to the task as well. “Aren’t the crazy ones always fun?”

“Hmm,” the white unicorn stallion grunted as he proceeded to evaluate his patient for any indications that she’d managed to harm herself in her fervor. “I’ll likely need to keep her sedated for a while.” He looked back towards the outfit’s commander. “If she is delusional, then ultimately caring for her is beyond my scope. We’re going to need to get her to a more suitable treatment facility.”

The emerald mare frowned. “Lupine might have a hospital or two worth a damn,” she noted, gesturing broadly at the planet below the vessel, “but the nearest decent facilities are almost certainly back in Canis. Can you look after her here for a month until we finish out the contract?”

The physician was clearly not happy about the prospect, but said, “as long as she doesn’t get too combative. I’d like to suggest posting a guard in here from now on, if only to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”

Squelch nodded. “Noted. I’ll let Flechette know to have somepony in Med Bay until further notice. Anything else?”

Slipshod ventured, “...so, neither of you think she’s actually Twilight Sparkle?” He winced upon seeing the pair of dubious frowns being shot his way.

“You mean the Twilight Sparkle that’s never left Equus...ever?” His boss remarked wryly. “Do I think she’s that Twilight Sparkle? No. Doc?” She looked over at the other unicorn.

The physician opened his mouth to make a reply, but the earth pony cut him off. “Nah, you’re right. It’s stupid,” both he and Squelch paused to look in the direction of the ivory stallion as he stalked towards his office in a huff, each wearing matching confused expression. “...I’m just tired is all.” He flexed his aching shoulder. “And sore from wrestling a crazy mare. I’m going back to bed.

“Good night, Squelch,” he said as he walked stiffly past the green unicorn and left the clinic. The mare grunted in reply, but remained behind for a while longer.

Well...she was awake. So, Slipshod supposed that accounted for ‘phase one’ of his plan going according to...plan. He really was tired. However, the issue before him now was how to proceed on to ‘phase two’? He wasn’t entirely sure what that phase was yet, exactly; but he was positive that it wasn’t ‘take a JumpShip all the way to Equus’. That was, like, phase seventeen. At the earliest!

Phase two might have to become convincing Twilight that laying low and keeping as far away from Canterlot as possible was the right thing to do. For now. Obviously, there would come a time when her identity would need to be revealed to somepony, but that was going to be a ways off. Perhaps even a long ways off.

It wasn’t enough to just have Twilight Sparkle. They need resources, material, BattleSteeds...and Slipshod had exactly zero idea of where he was supposed to get any of that, in quantities that would matter. Yet. With a little time, he should be able to come up with something.

The more immediate concern: how did he convince Squelch to let the ‘obviously crazy mare’ stay on the ship indefinitely?

He’d sleep on it and come up with something by morning.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 6: Truth and Shadows

Slipshod shambled out of his quarters sometime around mid-afternoon the next day. In his defense, he wasn’t usually the sort of stallion who did things like that; but his middle-of-the-night escapades, combined with being woken up frequently by his whiplash, had made sleep...illusive, for the most part. He made a note to ask Doc Dee about getting something a little more potent to help him with that. However, in the interim, he needed coffee! All of it, if the galley was as lightly packed as it should be this time of day.

There were a few ponies present, chatting and snacking on their shift breaks, but the dining area was otherwise rather empty. The earth pony stallion staggered over to the percolators and retrieved one of the full pots that was simmering there. The act earned him a curiously raised eyebrow from a couple ponies who noticed the act, but was otherwise unremarked upon. He shuffled to the nearest table and slowly eased himself onto the bench, gingerly sipping from the carafe he’d taken.

The liquid felt almost immediately revitalizing, and Slipshod sighed contentedly.

A briskly moving form entering the galley like a mare on a mission caught the earth pony’s attention. He glanced up, noticing that she was heading in his direction at a rather fair clip. Slipshod smiled. “Hey, Emery! What’s going on? How was your session with Va―”

The unicorn mare’s magic wrenched the coffee pot from the earth pony’s hooves. Before he could process what was going on, she returned it to him. However, it was returned with much greater fervor and gusto than it had been taken with. Which was saying something, honestly, as she’d been none-too-kind about acquiring it in the first place.

The tempered glass shattered as it slammed across the side of his head. The blow was fierce enough to send the stallion toppling off the bench and to the floor. If there was a bright side, it was that the throbbing of his head and stinging of his flesh where it had been splashed with hot coffee supplanted the general aches of the rest of his body. Not that any of that was much of a bright side from the stallion’s point of view.

He blinked up in shocked double-vision surprise as the furious mare glared down at him. “How dare you, you degenerate fuck!”

“Bluh~?”

“Where the fuck do you get off telling other ponies that you and I are sleeping together?!” She screamed in his face, her own expression seeming to be torn between tears and rage. She was upset. Very upset. At him...for some reason? What’d he do?! He hadn’t seen her all week!

“Mwehh~” there seemed to be a disconnect between his brain and his mouth. Likely a result of having a coffee pot shattered across his temple. It was making it quite difficult for him to articulate his innocence. To say nothing of finding out what she was talking about. Who on the ship had he told that he and Emery File were sleeping together? Why would he have told anypony that?

A hoof connected with his gut, forcing the wind from the stallion’s lungs and causing him to reflexively curl up protectively in a ball. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about! Valkyrie told me that you’re always bragging to her about sleeping with half the ponies on this ship!”

Okay, things were starting to make sense now. Not that the stallion was having any luck in explaining himself, as all he could do now was gape like a fish out of water as his diaphragm refused to let him get a full breath of air. All that he managed to do was shake his head furiously as he fought desperately to get out a coherent word. However, between an oncoming concussion, his kick-induced coughing, and the tirade of a scorned mare, that wasn’t going to be happening any time soon.

“I can’t believe you’d do that to me,” she was screaming, “I thought we were friends! You complete piece of shit!”

She reared up to kick him again. Fortunately, it seemed that enough time had managed to pass for the onlookers in the galley to get over their initial shock and come to his rescue. Two ponies got hold of Emery and pulled her away from him while a third pony bent down to make sure that he was alright. Typically, Slipshod was the kind of pony to wave away such assistance, but right now he was honestly quite thankful for it. Between his general aches from his recently acquired whiplash, his throbbing head, and his inability to breathe normally, the earth pony was barely able to do anything more than groan at the moment.

Emery File wouldn’t have actually killed him―he didn't think―or even likely done truly serious long-term damage, but she’d certainly done a number on him already. Probably delayed his recovery by another week, honestly.

The other ponies in the dining area were doing their level best to calm the distraught unicorn mare down. He heard the sound of armored hooves clomping into the room as well. The security ponies were probably just as shocked by what was going on as everypony else in the room had been. Fights like this―if his being sent to the floor after a single hit could be generously called a ‘fight’―just didn’t happen on the Galloway. They mostly just kept the DropShip secure while they were in port, more than anything.

Slipshod fought for words now as a pair of uniformed ponies closed in around Emery File, ready to take her into custody. At best, she’d be in the ship’s brig for a few days, at worst Squelch would outright terminate the mare’s employment contract right here and now and drop her off on Lupine to make her own way to wherever she wanted to go. The earth pony wasn’t keen to let either of those things happen over something that―he strongly suspected―was Valkyrie’s fault. “No~!” He gasped, shaking his head vigorously. “Let her go. Let her go!”

Everypony in the room paused, their attention falling to the injured earth pony. Even Emery looked confused. One of the security mares cast a dubious look at the stallion. “Sir?”

“Misunderstanding,” he managed to get out, feeling his breathing finally getting easier, though he was still coughing a good bit. His head was still throbbing, but progress was progress. “Just a misunderstanding. We’re good.” The armored ponies exchanged hesitant looks, but they knew that there really wasn’t much more that they could do if the ‘victim’ of the nominal assault was telling them that nothing untoward had taken place.

Slipshod fixed his gaze on Emery now. “Val misheard me,” he insisted in a firm tone, “that’s all. I swear.” He gestured around at the gathered ponies, looking to them. “Has anypony here ever heard me talking about Emery like that? Or any other member of the Galloway crew?” He paused for a moment, then hastily added, “Except for the twins last year?”

Everypony shook their heads. The golden stallion looked back at the unicorn mare. “See? I’m not telling anypony anything like that. Not even Val. She just…” he sighed, “she has an active imagination is all. I promise I’ll talk to her.”

Emery File’s expression slowly shifted away from one of vitriolic anger to confusion as she glanced around at the other ponies for confirmation. Each insisted that they’d never heard any rumors about Slipshod doing anything intimate with her, or any other ponies on the ship. Now the mare was looking almost panicked, and more than a little ashamed. “Oh shit. Oh shit! Slip, I―”

The earth pony was shaking his head, despite the discomfort that it caused. “S’alright. Not your fault,” he smiled up at the mare, “you would have had every right to clock me like that if I actually was telling ponies those things. I hope that these ponies would’ve joined in if that was the case!” He chuckled, nodding to the other galley patrons before his expression softened again. “Let’s just...forget this ever happened, okay? No hard feelings. Promise.” The stallion crossed his hoof over his chest and touched it to his brow, beaming warmly at the mare.

Shakily, the unicorn nodded, trying to manage her own smile, though it was clear that she was having some difficulty. Her embarrassment at having apparently overreacted to what turned out to be misinformation was palpable. It was clearly going to take more than a few words to put her completely at ease any time soon. That wasn’t ideal, but Slipshod would have time to sooth those frayed nerves in the coming weeks. As long as the worst of it was past, that was fine in the interim.

Perhaps an act of contrition would help things along. “Maybe get me a fresh coffee―and buy Cookie a new pot―and we’ll call it square?” he offered.

The unicorn mare nodded. “Eheh...yeah.” She swallowed. She seemed a bit more at ease now, having been given a means by which to tangibly make recompense.

“Good,” the stallion groaned as he finally peeled himself off the floor with the help of the pony who’d come to check on him. Slipshod winced and touched his hoof to the side of his head. Pulling it away revealed that he was bleeding. Not particularly badly, but a few stitches probably wouldn’t go amiss. “In the meantime, I’m going to wash up so I don’t smell like dark roast, and then I’m going to see Doc Dee.

“Thank you, everypony, for your help. You should probably go back to...doing whatever it is you all do on this ship,” he flashed all of the ponies a brief grin and waived away the offered assistance before stiffly trudging towards the exit. His expression soured the instant he caught sight of a wide-eyed blue pegasus mare standing at the edge of the room.

“Val,” he said sternly as he walked by, “a word, please?”

The feathered ‘Steed pilot cast one final look around the room at all of the other ponies who were now regarding her with expressions that bordered on accusatory. After all, it had been her rumor-mongering that had prompted the incident. She flushed and hurried after the golden stallion.

“Wow,” she said, attempting to affect a light chuckle, “I didn’t know that mare had it in her to deck a pony like th―”

“Val,” the mare closed her mouth with an audible ‘click’ and went silent, “why did you tell Emery File that I was telling other ponies we were sleeping together? You know she’s married, right? And that she met her husband through Axle Rod, the motor sergeant? Axel and her husband comm all the time. They’re frat buddies that go way back.

“What would have happened to Emery’s marriage if Axel had passed on that rumor of yours to her husband?”

“Leave it to you to sleep with married mares―”

Slipshod wheeled around and glared at the pegasus. “I am not sleeping with married mares!” He screamed at the mare at a volume that very well might have been audible on every level of the ship. In a much lower―though no less intense―tone, he continued. “Not that it is any of your business, but there are exactly three ponies that I have ever been with intimately on this ship.

“One is Squelch―obviously―and then there’re the twins―who came on to me the week they came onboard and haven’t so much as lifted their tails in my direction since. Though, even that―while being the next best thing to ‘public knowledge’―is, and I cannot emphasize this enough: none of your Celestia-banished business!” He at least had the marginal satisfaction of seeing the pegasus wince away. “And I don’t constantly roam around the ship talking about it because I’m not a colossal ass!”

“Hey―!” a gruff masculine voice could be heard coming from the kitchen.

“Shut up, Cookie!” Slipshod snapped, not looking away from Valkyrie. “I’m in the middle of something here!”

The earth pony opened his mouth to continue, but hesitated, his gaze darting briefly to the galley and the ponies who were most assuredly not paying any mind to the screaming stallion just down the corridor. He grunted and turned around. “My quarters; now.” At least there’d be a modicum of privacy there for them to finish this ‘conversation’. Valkyrie trudged tensely behind him in silence, appearing to find the ship’s deck immensely fascinating.

When they’d finally arrived at his cabin, the stallion had had some time to calm his own ire. There was no sense in leaping any further down the other ‘Steed pilot’s throat than he already had. At least, not before finding out why she said those things to Emery File in the first place. It wasn’t like the pegasus mare to stir up drama this way. She’d certainly never done it in the past. He’d appreciate knowing why she was doing so now.

Slipshod motioned the mare inside and closed the door. He took the bed to soothe his now much aggravated aches, and gestured for the pegasus to take the chair at the little desk he had. The earth pony took a deep breath and regarded the other pilot for several seconds before starting. “So let’s hear it: why did you tell Emery that I was telling ponies we were sleeping together?”

Valkyrie shifted uncomfortably beneath his hard stare. “...Because I thought you were?”

His eyes narrowed. “Why would you think that?”

“You’re always going to her quarters...” she began lamely, now only seeming to realize how flimsy the foundation for her suspicions were.

“...Because I have an appointment to get hooficures,” Slipshod reminded her bluntly. He held up one of his hooves, showing her the well-filed and polished surface that was the product of frequent treatments from the unicorn mare who’d recently assaulted him in the galley. “Like I told you. Specifically.”

“You said you only got hooficures 'sometimes'!” Val protested.

“...And the other times we’re talking about her sister and nephew.”

The azure mare balked. “...What?”

Slipshod rolled his eyes. “Her sister gave birth to a colt about three months ago. She’s been gushing about being an aunt ever since, showing off pictures to anypony who’ll stop and talk to her for five seconds,” he explained, “she thinks her nephew is the cutest thing ever―which, he is pretty adorable, actually” he admitted as an aside, “and she can’t wait for her contract to be up so that she can go back home and start a family of her own.

“She’s been bouncing baby names off me for a month so she can get a shortlist together to send her husband.”

“...You talk about baby names?” The mare said skeptically.

“At length,” Slipshod responded with a deadpan stare off into the distance, borne of many hours spent reading over flowing lists of names from every corner of the galaxy. That they’d managed to narrow it down to two dozen―twelve colt and twelve filly names―was nothing short of a genuine miracle, in his opinion. “Though none of my suggestions made the list,” he added with a slightly bitter note.

The feathered mare was taken aback, apparently mystified by the concept entirely. “But what about all of the other ponies on this ship that you’re always with?”

“What about them?”

“Why do you spend so much time in their quarters? Don’t try and tell me you’re talking about baby names with all of them!” She demanded. “And you’re always kissing that one unicorn tech!”

“You mean Channel Lock?” The mare nodded, a smug expression on her face as she sensed catching him in a lie. “She’s from Mareseilles. Little pecks on the cheek are how close friends greet each other there,” he said dryly, “you can ask anypony else on the ship.” Valkyrie was looking less sure of herself now.

“And of course I’m not talking about baby names with all of them. Don’t be absurd,” Slipshod frowned. “It depends on the pony. For example: Channel Lock likes to have somepony to ‘riff’ on bad movies with. She and her brother used to do it all the time when she was back home. She gets kind of homesick out here, so I come by every couple of weeks with some drinks and snacks and we put on a cheesy movie and make jokes about it.

“It really does make those films much more fun to watch,” he chuckled, “I highly recommend it.

“High Gain is a fan of karaoke,” the stallion continued, “but―unsurprisingly―not many other ponies on the ship are willing to do it with her. She’s fine just singing to herself most times, but she doesn’t like to do duets alone, and those songs are some of her favorites. So I drop by to sing with her.” He shrugged. “She says I have a great singing voice, but I’m not convinced. When her bunkmate gets a few drinks in her, she’ll join in too on backup vocals.

“Soft Prose likes somepony to read over her short stories before she submits them for various anthology publications,” Slipshod said, now summarizing more succinctly as he began ticking off others, “Axel Rod needs a spotter for his workouts. Faraday says I’m the best armature masseuse on the ship. Rigger wants a model for her drawing…” He listed off the various ways that he went about spending time with the ponies on board the Galloway, and had been for a long while. With each revelation, Valkyrie’s surprise only seemed to grow. Eventually the stallion trailed off and regarded her warily. “Why is any of this so surprising to you? What did you think I was doing with them?”

The pegasus shifted uncomfortably for several seconds before responding. “Well...when we’re planetside you’re always bringing ponies back here,” she looked candidly at the stallion, “and it’s sure not ‘karaoke’ I’m hearing through the wall every night!”

Slipshod rolled his eyes. “Well, yeah, I’m obviously screwing those ponies.”

The other ‘Steed pilot jerked with an incredulous wave of her hooves. “Well how am I supposed to know who you are and aren’t fucking?!”

“Frankly, you’re not," he deadpanned, "because―and let’s go ahead and go over this again: it’s none of your―”

“―none of my business. Right,” the mare sighed, rubbing the bridge of her muzzle with her hoof. “My point is that it’s not exactly my fault if I assume you’re doing with crewmembers what you’re doing with random barflies, now is it?”

The earth pony stallion blinked at her, dumbfounded. “...It’s absolutely you’re fault, yes. That’s how ‘fault’ works. You could have, you know, talked with anypony on this ship about what we do when I come by. You know that, right?”

Valkyrie frowned and looked away, pouting. After a few seconds she glared at the stallion once more. “You flirt with me all the time,” she charged.

“Because you like it.”

The pinions of the mare’s wings prickled. “I do not―!” She sputtered in vehement protest.

However, Slipshod was not the least bit swayed by her purported incredulity, leveling an impassive expression at the mare. “You like everything about it,” he countered. “You like that a stallion you think is good looking,” the mare bristled and opened her mouth to refute his assumption but he held up a hoof to silence her and pressed on, “finds you physically desirable. You especially like knowing that you have the power to rebuke the advances of good looking stallions and they can’t do anything about it but continue to pine after you like you’re some sort of noble heiress. It gives you a feeling of control and boosts your confidence.”

The mare’s mouth opened and closed several times without uttering a word as she sought out a point which she could rebuff, but eventually gave up and folded her hooves across her chest indignantly. “Even if that were true―which it isn’t,” she insisted coolly, “it doesn’t explain why you don’t treat me like the other ponies on this ship and just spend time with me like you do with Channel Lock and Emery File and all of them.”

It was Slipshod’s turn to look incredulous this time. “What are you talking about? We hang out and just talk all the time!” he protested, throwing his hooves in the air in exasperation, despite the pain such sharp movements caused him. “For literally hours at a time while we’re on a mission. We talk about anything and everything! I talk to you more than anypony else on this damn ship!”

Valkyrie was looking abashed again, biting her lower lip as she realized that the two of them did spend a vast quantity of their days chatting merrily away while in their ‘Steeds. Most of their jobs were about one percent action and ninety-nine percent idling in their cockpits. Nearly all of that idling was spent gabbing about just about any topic that took their fancy. Some days she even marveled at how waywardly their conversations seemed to meander. They’d start out talking about the local topography and end up musing about the color preferences of Federated Moons nobles, only to finish up pondering the question of which was invented first: shampoo or coat wash? And what was the difference anyway?

Slipshod massaged his temples with his hooves. “What more is it that you want from me, Val? We talk about whatever it is that you want. We joke with each other constantly. We give each other advice. We share meals. So just tell me: what part are you unsatisfied with?” He asked in a defeated tone. “Because I’m at a loss here.

“Something nudged you to stir the pot on this ship,” he continued with a frown, indicating the open wound on the side of his head which was scabbing over nicely. Doc Dee would probably berate him for waiting so long to come by the Med Bay, but this situation with his partner was something that he felt needed to be resolved sooner rather than later. “And whatever it is, I want us to fix it before it gets out of hoof.” He thought for a brief moment before adding as an aside, “Well any more out of hoof.”

“I guess…” she squirmed uncomfortably, “I just want to understand.” She was kneading her hooves now. “I mean...there’s no way that the corny lines you feed me are enough to get ponies to actually follow you back to this ship?” Slipshod nodded in acknowledgement. While he had no doubt that he could find ponies who only needed a stiff drink and a compliment to lift their tails, those were never truly satisfying partners. “You absolutely could rut any pony on this ship you wanted,” she grudgingly admitted, adding with a note of defiance, “except me, obviously.” The stallion nodded again, a small smirk sneaking onto his lips.

“...So why don’t you?” The pegasus finally asked. “Why aren’t you mounting the ponies on the Galloway left and right like you do in port?”

“Because that’s not how you build long-lasting relationships with a lot of ponies at once,” the stallion replied simply, shrugging his shoulders. At the mare’s quizzical brow-quirk, he sighed and elaborated. “There is no such thing as ‘no-strings-attached sex’. At least, not if you want there to be more than just the sex. Adding sex to a relationship adds a level of intimacy that is just...not something that you can have with dozens of ponies. At least not with ponies who aren’t also okay with that sort of thing.

“Yeah, I could probably take things up a notch with one of the ponies I hang out with regularly―other than you, of course,” he added with a smirk, earning a frown from the feathered mare, “but doing that at this point would mean having to scale back on the time I spend with the others.

“It’s natural to get...possessive of the ponies we care about. Any pony on this crew I might get with would inevitably wonder if they were really the only pony that I was with like that. Some of what I do with these ponies―Faraday’s massages, Rigger's model drawing―they’re pretty...intimate activities already.

“Would you be okay with your coltfriend dropping by a mare’s quarters every week to give her a rub-down?” He asked pointedly. Valkyrie shrunk down and shook her head slowly. “You’d want him to stop, right? Even if you never actually told him to stop, you’d prefer that he did, right?” A small nod. “And until he did, there’d be this little cloud of animosity between you and that other mare, as you would always wonder―in the back of your mind―was it really just massaging that was going on?” Another reluctant nod.

“Now picture that, but going on between dozens of ponies on this crew. It’d be like walking on eggshells―for everypony. I don’t want that happening on the Galloway,” Slipshod insisted. “I want everypony to be friendly and happy. There’s not a lot of space onboard, and ships can become a powder keg of drama very easily; making life very uncomfortable very quickly.

“So I’m doing everything I can to keep that from happening. Which includes abstaining from taking any of these relationships I’ve cultivated with the crew to the ‘next level’,” he offered a wry smile, “if I need that particular ‘itch’ scratched...well, that’s why I bring my, uh, ‘guests’ onboard while we’re at a port. That’s just two ponies looking for a good time, not a long time, and both of us know it.” He winked at the mare.

Valkyrie was rubbing her foreleg now, feeling like a filly who’d just been given a dressing down by her father. She swallowed, “...So you’re really not sleeping around with anypony on the ship? Every time you’re going to somepony’s quarters...it’s just to...hang out?”

“Pretty much,” he said with a shrug.

Silence reigned in the small cabin for several seconds. “I owe Emery an apology, don’t I?”

“I’m sure she would appreciate it,” Slipshod said.

Valkyrie’s eyes darted briefly to the open wound on the stallion’s head. “And you too. Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I can forgive you for not knowing,” he said with a nod, “but, for not even asking first? We’ve spent over six months gabbing, and you never thought to ask about what I’m doing every evening?”

The pegasus gave a helpless shrug. “I thought I knew,” she protested meekly. “I mean, you cheated on Squelch with another mare...I just sort of figured you were a…” Valkyrie let the sentence trail off as she seemed to try to come up with a polite way to phrase things before finally giving up, “...y’know?”

“Letch? Horndog? Slut?” He offered helpfully, wearing a wry smile. The mare nodded. Slipshod maintained his wry smile for several more seconds, nodding his head as well. “I can see that. I mean, looking objectively at it, I must seem like an absolute sex-fiend...to have not thought that I’d be caught cheating...by my wife...in the quarters that we shared...knowing full well that said wife was on the ship at the time.

“It could be argued, in fact, that a pony like me was just begging to be caught in the act.” He looked now at the pegasus, sharing a knowing look with her. “Yup. A real strong argument to be made there.”

Valkyrie cocked her head to the side in confusion. “Are you saying―?”

“I’m saying that anypony who did what I did deserved to be caught,” he interrupted, shrugging off her question, “there was no way that I was going to get away with it. That’s all that I’m saying, and all that I ever will say on the matter. Now,” the stallion stood up abruptly―perhaps a little too abruptly, given how much his head started to spin. Just perfect, he inwardly groused. He walked away from having his ‘Steed thoroughly shredded with hardly a scratch on him, but got a concussion eating breakfast. “I think that covers everything, and I need to get to medical.” he reached out a retrieved a towel and a bag of shower sundries. “After I wash the coffee out of my mane.

“If you still have any burning questions, I ask that you save them for later. Perhaps as a topic for discussion during our next mission together?” He turned and left the room, heading for the showers.

“She got you pretty good,” Doc Dee mused as his magic maneuvered the curved suturing needle deftly around the forceps gripping the tail of the thread. He was currently finishing up the last of the four stitches that Slipshod’s injury had required. There had been the obligatory ridicule about waiting over an hour to finally report for treatment, but the earth pony had anticipated as much and brushed it off.

“I’ve never been more glad that Cookie doesn’t have metal carafes,” Slipshod said with a sardonic smile.

“Hmm,” the physician responded. A pair of scissors floated over and snipped away the excess. The white unicorn leaned in and gave the site of the injury a final inspection before nodding in satisfaction and pulling away. “I’m still going to be keeping you here overnight for observation,” he said, “I’d rather have you vomiting here than in your quarters if a concussion does set in.”

“You and me both.” Slipshod eased himself back onto the patient bed and made himself more comfortable. His eyes darted briefly to the third pony in the room. Well, third and fourth, counting the security mare that had been assigned to watch over their guest. “So what’s the plan for her? You’re not just going to keep her drugged forever, are you?”

Doc Dee glanced over his shoulder at the purple alicorn as he began to put away his tools. “I honestly don’t know,” he admitted, “she was quite delusional and agitated when she woke up the last time. Physical trauma I can treat, but I’m not very familiar with mental trauma. She’ll need a specialist. I’m concerned that anything I might try would only make her delusions worse.”

The earth pony was quiet for a moment, then, “So you think she’s crazy?”

“You don’t?” The doctor flashed the other stallion a skeptical look. “Calling herself 'Twilight Sparkle' and screaming about a chrysalis? She had a pretty convincing ‘crazy rant’ going, in my professional opinion,” he snorted.

“She woke up five centruies out of time,” the earth pony pointed out, “with a case of severe mana burn, and after being put through the wringer in some pretty gnarly ‘Steed combat―for what was probably for her―just yesterday.

“You heard her: she could barely remember what she was doing before being put in stasis. Something like that? Even I’d need more than two minutes to sort out what was what.” He shrugged. “For all we know, she was just having a really bad nightmare and was too disoriented to know what was real and what wasn’t yet. Maybe she thought she was still dreaming!

“We should give her some time to process what happened to her,” Slipshod suggested to the ship’s doctor. “Maybe she’ll make a little more sense when she’s not freaking out after waking up in a strange room surrounded by strange ponies.”

“Hmm,” the unicorn rubbed his chin, “I’ll...talk it over with the commander.”

“Talk what over with me?” Both stallions turned to face the doorway as Squelch walked in. Her eyes darted briefly towards the sedated alicorn and her guard, but quickly found their focus on Slipshod. “Should I assume it has something to do with whatever went on in the galley?”

“That’s all been dealt with,” the golden earth pony assured her quickly.

“I’ll be the judge of that, thank you,” the emerald mare shot back tersely, narrowing her gaze at the ‘Steed pilot. “Now what happened?”

“Just a misunderstanding,” Slipshod insisted. “Val and Emery thought I said some things. I didn’t say the things. Other ponies verified I didn’t say the things. Everypony’s apologized and we’re all moving on with our lives.”

The company’s owner held her critical gaze on the stallion for several long seconds, and he was worried that she would press him for more details. She was well within her right to, of course; and he’d give them to her if she insisted. However, he didn’t need anypony else making a bigger deal about this than already had been. Emery didn’t deserve to be punished for an honest mistake.

Finally the unicorn made a noise that suggested she wasn’t entirely satisfied by his response but was willing to let the matter drop―for now―and instead turned her attention to the doctor. “So then what is it that needs to be discussed with me?”

“Her,” Doc Dee indicated the purple mare on the nearby bed, “and seeing if we can get something more coherent if we ease her into adjusting to the situation. Admittedly, yesterday wasn’t what I would have called ‘ideal’ as far as introductions were concerned.”

Squelch raised an eyebrow. “Are we thinking the mare claiming to be the Queen―who’s still on Equus last I checked, by the way―isn’t actually crazy?”

“Her delusions might simply be temporary,” the physician pointed out, glancing briefly at the nearby earth pony. “Slipshod pointed out that we don’t know what long-term stasis exposure might do to a pony. If we give her a chance, she might level out.”

The mare frowned skeptically. “And the fact that she’s clearly altered herself to look like an alicorn doesn’t suggest that she was delusionally before going into stasis?”

“Maybe she’s not the Queen, but still an alicorn,” Slipshod interjected calmly, earning looks from both unicorns. “You said it yourself, Doc: you learned in history about how there used to be two alicorns and one got banished.” The earth pony waved a hoof at the purple mare. “What if we found that one? What if this is Discord?”

“Wouldn’t that be all the more reason not to wake them up?” Squelch pointed out. “The greatest threat that the Harmony Sphere’s ever known?”

“Not too much of a threat that the Doc couldn’t dart her from behind,” Slipshod pointed out, smirking at the physician, who merely rolled his eyes. He looked back at the green mare. “Besides, doesn’t this make your plan ever more workable? Who better to tell you about Disciple caches than the pony that founded them!

“But she can’t tell you about any of it if you never let her wake up.”

The mare still seemed unconvinced. “Their leader seems like the last pony who’d help us dismantle what’s left of them.”

“Maybe,” he conceded with a shrug, “but we don’t lose anything by trying, do we? Worst case scenario: we knock her out again and drop her off on Canis when we get back and collect the standard bounty.”

This time their commander remained silent for a long while as she stared pensively at the alicorn mare, weighing the merits of Slipshod’s suggestion. Finally, she said, “Alright.” She looked to the physician. “Get her lucid, get her up to speed on what happened to her, and get her ready to answer some questions in the morning.” Slipshod opened his mouth to suggest more time be given to the effort, but Squelch cut him off. “I just got commed from the surface an hour ago. Argent put out a press release to their shareholders announcing that they’ll be undergoing some ‘executive restructuring’ over the next month or so. Ferrous is confident that means they’ve caved and won’t be sending any more raiders to attack their sites. They’re terminating our protection contract.

“A JumpShip leaves the system in twelve hours, and we’re going to be on it,” she continued. “Tomorrow morning we’ll be heading for Canis orbit to collect the rest of our agreed upon fee and buy what we need to fix up the Wild Bronco.” She briefly glared at Slipshod, who cringed away slightly. “She has until we enter orbit to convince me not to give her over to the authorities there.

“So either get her talking sense, or get her packaged for a transfer.”

Doc Dee shrugged and sighed. “I’ll work out a plan. I can probably bring her around while keeping her calm.”

“Fine by me,” Squelch said. She hesitated, glancing back at Slipshod, her eyes darting to the recently sutured cut on his head as her expression softened for a brief moment. “You’re positive this won’t be an issue in the future?”

The earth pony gave her a wan smile and nodded. “It’s been resolved. Promise.”

A beat, then, “Alright. Call me when she’s ready to talk, Doc.” And with that, the unicorn mare turned and left the clinic.

“If you’ll excuse me,” the ship’s doctor said, turning from Slipshod towards the clinic’s exit as well, “I’ll need to collect some notes from my quarters if I’m going to do this right.” He was frowning. “I’m a little rusty on my pharmacology where anti-anxiety meds are concerned. I haven’t had to deal with psych patients since my Fellowship…” The unicorn grumbled as he left the room.

Slipshod cracked a wry smile and chuckled. As a general rule, the kinds of ponies who pursued the life of a mercenary were rather mentally resilient. He glanced over at the other bed for a moment. Then he looked to the guardsmare standing watch. “Hey, Puttee?” The mare glanced over at him. The stallion grinned at her, and pointed at his head. “I, uh, didn’t really get to have much of a breakfast this morning before I got brained.

“Could you run down real quick and pick me up a to-go plate, please?”

The mare frowned at him, glancing between the earth pony and the slumbering alicorn. “I’m not supposed to leave the prisoner unattended―”

“She won’t be ‘unattended’,” Slipshod interjected with a dismissive wave of his hoof, maintaining his smile at the mare, “I’ll be here! Come on,” he pleaded, affecting a properly pitiful, if blatantly exaggerated, expression, “I’m starving, and it could be hours before Doc orders up anything from the galley.” The mare looked furtively, biting her lip as she looked between the stallion and her charge. But he sensed her hesitation. “When’s the last time I ever asked you to do anything for me?”

They both knew the answer. He almost never made requests of the security mare. Conversely, it went without saying between them that he’d done a great deal for her over the last several months. After another few seconds of agonizing over the dilemma, the mare finally let out a defeated sigh and looked over at the stallion. “What do you want?”

“Just some oatmeal and orange juice would be perfect.” The earth pony was beaming again. “Thanks, babe!” The security pony turned to leave, but Slipshod stopped her just as the door opened. “Oh―!” He hesitated, made a big show of thinking over what he had intended to say, and then shook his head and waved her off. “No; nevermind. Oatmeal and juice is fine, I guess.”

“What? What is it?” the mare asked.

Again, Slipshod visibly hesitated for a short bit, then, “I just remembered that Cookie makes omelettes to order today. But that’d take a while. I don’t want you out there any longer than you have to be. So forget about it. Oatmeal and juice,” he reaffirmed with a definitive nod of his head.

The security mare sighed and turned around. “...What do you take on your omelette?”

“You’re sure? It’ll probably be like a ten minute wait or something…”

“Just tell me what you want, Slip,” she said with a―not quite―exasperated sigh, paired with a lopsided smile.

“Three cheese with tomato and peppers?” The earth pony stallion said with a grin. The mare turned around and headed out. “But still with the orange juice!” She waved an acknowledging hoof as the door closed behind her.

The stallion’s grin fell away instantly. He didn’t have long.

Slipshod slipped off the exam bed, wincing slightly at his protesting body and swimming head. Not exactly the most ideal of circumstances, but there was no helping that. Ferrous’ early termination of their contract and the subsequent premature return to Canis had greatly accelerated the timetable he thought he’d have to work with. He needed to get this mare on the right page, and fast. Otherwise, he’d lose his chance.

And she’d lose her life.

He stepped into the doctor’s office and sat down at the terminal there. He’d learned the physician’s passcode a long time ago, back when he and Squelch were married. The systems on this ship had been set up by her, and she’d had a way to override everypony’s otherwise ‘secured’ systems. She never used it, of course, but it was sometimes necessary to have a backdoor into the personal files of the crew. Such as when one of them died and the files needed to be passed on to their next of kin along with the rest of their personal effects.

Since he’d been her right-hoof-pony, Slipshod had had the access as well. Squelch had changed the access codes that would allow him to use that backdoor since―probably the night she’d found him in their bed with that other mare―but Doc Dee had not changed his. Why should he, when he didn’t know that somepony had had a way to just look it up?

The earth pony logged on to the system and accessed the medical records for the alicorn. Specifically he looked over her medications. He noted the last time the sedatives had been administered and at what time. The earth pony then logged back out and walked―stiffly―to the medical cabinet. He drew out a dose of the counter-agent, along with a smaller dosage of the indicated sedative. He now had everything he needed.

Slipshod approached the slumbering alicorn and inserted the counter-agent into the IV line feeding into her foreleg. “Rise and shine, Princess,” he murmured, “we need to have a chat.”

It only took seconds for the drug to take effect and clear out the effects of the sedative. The purple alicorn began to stir on the bed, her eyes fluttering open. “Huh?” She was still obviously groggy, and would continue to be. Slipshod had made sure not to give her enough counter-agent to eliminate all of the sedative in her system, but she should at least be able to be cogent with her thoughts. “Where…?”

“We don’t have a lot of time,” the earth pony informed her candidly, “so I’m going to need you to do a lot of listening and zero talking, understand?” Even if she didn’t, neither of them had the luxury of making her. “You have been in stasis for five hundred years. Everypony in the Harmony Sphere ‘knows’ that Queen Twilight Sparkle is―and has always been―on Equus.”

The alicorn stirred at this, blinking her blurry eyes and looking over at the stallion, shaking her head as fervently as her lethargic body would allow. “She’s not…”

“So you say,” Slipshod interrupted, an ear swiveling towards the door to listen for approaching hooves, “but you’re not going to convince anypony on this ship about that any time soon. They think you’re a Disciple, and they’re ready to give you over to the Canis authorities―to Queen Twilight―unless you can give them a reason not to.”

The mare’s tired face scrunched up in confusion as her wayward eyes looked both at―and past―the earth pony stallion’s face. “Wassa D’scible?”

“The crest on the ship you were in,” he hastily explained, “the crossed horn and antler? Whatever that meant five hundred years ago, it’s the mark or a terrorist cult today. You were on that ship, ergo you’re part of that cult.”

“S’notta cult…” she insisted weakly.

“Maybe not when you went into stasis,” Slipshod conceded, “but it’s been five hundred years, Princess,” he reminded her, “a lot has changed. Today, the Queen...considers them terrorists,” he stressed, staring hard at the alicorn, “...understand?”

The pair held each others’ gaze for several long seconds. Then the purple mare finally nodded, slowly; saying nothing.

“Good. When Squelch talks to you tomorrow, you’re going to want to give her something that shows you’re worth keeping around. Losmagitek, old ‘Steed barn locations, Disciple caches, something.

“Or the Queen gets you.”

She was still for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “...Why are you helping me?”

“Because I need you to help me,” he replied simply.

“Help you what?”

The earth pony stallion jerked up and looked towards the door. Hoofsteps were approaching. He drew out the syringe with the dose of sedative. “We’ll discuss that later.” He depressed the plunger into the IV administration line. The mare looked like she was about to protest, but whatever she was going to say came out as little more than a distressed moan. A few seconds later, she was unconscious again.

The clinic’s door opened to admit the security mare bearing a tray containing a freshly made omelet and a large glass of orange liquid. Slipshod rolled over on his bed where he’d been laying and grinned at the returning mare. “You’re too good to me, Puttee; thanks a lot!” He sat up as she deposited the tray on the nearby table, flashing the stallion her own wry smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes as she trotted back over to the alicorn’s side and resumed her post. “Did she give you any trouble?”

“I think we hit things off, actually,” he said, grinning broadly, “she’s an amazing listener!” He began to eat his―very―late breakfast.

Author's Note

TECHNICAL READOUT

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 7: I Am Twilight Sparkle

It was unusually tense in the DropShip’s small briefing room. Honestly, it didn’t typically see a whole lot of traditional use. The Galloway had four ‘Steed stalls and a forward hangar with two berths for aerofighters. A full-scale op, with all concerned pilots and their support staff, would have required the sizable conference room in order to get everypony on the same page before launching an operation. As it was, with just Valkyrie and Slipshod to brief―the two ponies who, more often than not, attended the initial briefing from the client with Squelch in the first place―their immediate employer rarely had a need to do much more than talk over a few additional points with the two of them either in her cabin or in the ‘Steed Bay just before they launched.

It was pretty well packed now though! Squelch, both ‘Steed pilots, Doc Dee, Mig and Tig, and two security ponies to watch over the purple alicorn that had been woken up a few hours ago, all filled out the chairs gathered around the holoprojection table. Its surface was dark at the moment. As were the plethora of screens surrounding the room. There was no mission briefing today.

This was an interrogation.

At least, that’s what it must have felt like for the alicorn, who had the full attention of every other pony in the room. As well as a couple of rifles that were being carried in very conspicuous fashion by the armored ponies at her flanks. Slipshod noted that they were at least not crass enough to actively be pointing those weapons at the mare. Though that could be changed in a heartbeat if their prisoner/guest did anything that seemed out of place.

Nopony said anything for what felt like a rather long time, though it was probably only a few seconds after everypony was seated. Squelch began the proceedings. Only fitting, Slipshod supposed. This was her ship after all, and it was the meeting that she’d requested.

“Let’s start, with your name,” the sage unicorn mare said in an even tone, her hooves arched together, obscuring her muzzle, as she contemplated the purple alicorn sitting across from her at the far end of the table.

“Princess Twilight Sparkle,” the other mare responded in a surprisingly imperious tone, given her situation. She certainly had all of the affectations that somepony would expect of a royal, Slipshod noted. Though it was pretty clear that the outfit’s commander didn’t particularly care for that answer.

Squelch sneered at the alicorn, “this again,” she lowered her hooves in disgust. She glared at the ship’s physician, “if she’s still delusional, then this is all a waste of time―” she started to stand up from the table.

“I am Twilight Sparkle,” the violet mare repeated, flashing her own piercing gaze at the unicorn. She fluttered a wing in Doc Dee’s direction, “he’s had to have confirmed for you that I’m an alicorn at least, correct?”

The doctor looked over at his employer and gave her a slight nod, “I’ve run every test I could come up with,” he assured her, “every piece of equipment on this ship confirms that she is an alicorn,” the purple pony allowed herself a satisfied smirk, which soured slightly as he continued, “as for whether or not she’s the Queen―”

“That is Chrysalis!” she snapped, her features creasing in dark lines. Slipshod couldn’t remember the last time that he’d ever heard a pony utter a name with such visceral hatred. No, that was a lie. Dominus Blueblood had sounded much like that when he’d been roaring for his guards after discovering the golden earth pony in bed with his wife.

The emerald unicorn arched an eyebrow, but slowly slid back into her chair, folding her hooves in front of her, “and ‘Crystal’ is…?”

“Chrysalis,” the alicorn stressed, “is a changeling―the Queen of the changelings, to be precise. She’s an ancient enemy of Equestria. One that I had thought vanquished forever,” she added bitterly. She closed her eyes and shook her head in despair, “that...was my failing. I’d forgotten that Harmony’s magic doesn’t work like that. It didn’t do so for Nightmare Moon, nor Discord.

“I should have been paying more attention, but…” a sardonic smile creased the corner of her lips as she looked back up, “time has a way of...getting away from you after the first few hundred years. When faced with the more immediate concerns of your subjects on a day-to-day basis, it becomes very easy to put off making preparations for an event a thousand years in the future until ‘tomorrow’. It also didn’t help that my day planner only allowed for scheduling events so far in the future…”

The other ponies all exchanged looks. Some confused, other’s skeptical. However, it was still only Squelch that was addressing the alicorn mare, “Discord? As in, the Disciples of Discord, correct? Is he your leader or something?”

Again the purple pony’s face contorted in annoyance, “I don’t know who or what these ‘Disciples of Discord’ are, or why you keep bringing them up,” she insisted.

“You were found in one of their old DropShips,” the company commander shot back accusingly, “it had their emblem all over it.”

Still the mare looked confused. Slipshod raised his hoof and tentatively offered some elaboration, with a permissive look in his employer’s direction, “the crossed horn and antler,” he explained to the alicorn.

Realization dawned over Twilight’s face, “ah. You mean the emblem of the Ninth Force Recon? Discord’s Rangers?”

It was Squelch’s turn to frown now, “what’s a ‘ranger’?”

The alicorn shrugged, “I have no idea,” she admitted, “when I asked him about it, he told me to ask Spike. Spike said it was an ‘Ogres and Oubliettes thing’. What Discord chose to call them was none of my concern anyway,” she said, shifting the subject slightly, “the Ninth Recon were many things, but they were never a cult, or a terrorist organization,” she insisted vehemently.

“Well they are now,” the unicorn mare quipped, earning a dour look from the alicorn, which she ignored, “and since you were on their ship, you were either one of their prisoners, or one of their members. Nopony goes through what they did to save a prisoner though,” she leveled a knowing look at the alicorn, “which suggests to me…”

Twilight sighed, rubbing her temple, “the Ninth Recon was tasked with keeping watch during my meeting with Princess Selena of the Lunar Empire,” she explained, “we weren’t expecting any treachery, but...better safe than sorry, and all that. Tirek had been dealt with, but Cozy Glow and Chrysalis were still unaccounted for.”

The gathered ponies exchanged looks with each other, clearly at a loss to place some of those names. Tirek’s was known, of course. His appearance in 998 AC, and the subsequent destruction that he’d wrought across the Harmony Sphere had been the impetus for the development of BattleSteeds, as well as the first target for their deployment. The other two, Slipshod could tell, were names that meant nothing to anypony other than Twilight.

“I know I never made it to the meeting,” the alicorn continued, “so if I was on one of their DropShips, that means that things went very badly indeed and they must have pulled me out,” the alicorn frowned, “I honestly don’t recall making it to their ship…”

“You were in a pretty bad way,” Doc Dee spoke up, looking between the alicorn and Squelch, “it’s fairly common for victims of serious trauma, like the kind you sustained, to have little memory of the events that led to their injuries. I’d honestly be shocked if you did remember everything that happened.”

“I know we were ambushed,” the purple mare insisted, her tone once more brimming with ire, “and I know it was Chrysalis. She couldn’t resist taunting me,” her amethyst eyes unfocused for a moment, “we were suddenly surrounded. BattleSteeds powered up all around us, as if on cue. They’d known exactly where we would be dropped off, and the route we would be taking.

“She must have had one of her changelings in our communications loop already. It’s the only explanation.

“It was a trap.”

“So what is a ‘changeling’, exactly?” Squelch asked.

The alicorn looked taken aback, “what do you mean? Surely you’ve heard of changelings! They were one of Equestria’s greatest enemies!”

“Well, ‘Equestria’ hasn’t existed for a very long time,” the unicorn mare pointed out, “and studying ancient history isn’t high on a lot of ponies’ lists these days.”

“But there should still be reformed changelings now,” Twilight protested. She appeared to notice the mirrored looks of confusion among the other in the room, as Slipshod saw her look from one face to the next in search of comprehension. When she didn’t find it, her features began to falter, “...aren’t there?”

“And a ‘reformed changeling’ is…?” Doc Dee prompted.

“A changeling that’s bought into the Our Worlds League’s weird Cutieless Cult?” Tig offered in an audible aside to her twin, who wasn’t able to restrain herself from sniggering. A stern look from their employer silenced the pair.

“A changeling that’s decided to share love, rather than devour it,” the alicorn explained patiently, though was clearly a little distressed at having to elaborate at all, “you’ve never met one? How is that possible?”

Nocreature had an answer to that, Slipshod noticed. Not surprising. He suppressed a deep sigh when he noticed that Squelch was looking less and less convinced of the alicorn’s sanity. Not good for his plans. The stallion had to find some way to salvage this before the unicorn just ended the meeting and had Twilight locked back up in the brig to await entering Canis orbit.

“So,” the earth pony interjected, trying his best to redirect the flow of the conversation back to topics that didn’t make the purple mare seem quite as insane. It took a lot of effort on Slipshod’s part to remain as composed as he was. He’d specifically asked Twilight to be more cooperative so the Squelch would be more easily convinced she was safe to keep around. Blathering about ‘changelings’ wasn’t accomplishing that, “you said that you were ambushed on your way to a meeting of some sort?”

Twilight started for a moment, surprised by the topic shift, as she stared at the golden pony. The pair held each others’ gazes for a long moment, then she took a deep breath and regarded the green unicorn mare, “you said I was the only survivor?”

Squelch nodded, adding, “and your Rainbow Dash was the only ‘Steed on the ship.”

The alicorn paled visibly now, looking down at the table, “...a Strongheart carries twelve ‘Steeds.” she whispered.

Slipshod recognized the implication. If the unit that the DropShip had been a part of was tasked with guarding the delegation's flank, then in the event of an ambush, it would have flown in and deployed its forces to cover the fleeing Princess and her escorts. Twelve ‘Steed pilots had disembarked from the ship as a screening force to hold back the attackers long enough for Twilight to get onboard.

Then, either because they’d already been destroyed by that time, or because the DropShip was taking too much fire to safely remain in the hot zone any longer...it had flown off without the forces it had arrived with. All twelve ‘Steed pilots had been sacrificed to save her life. Later, the ship’s entire crew had died saving her as well. To say nothing of however many of her escorts had been slain in the initial ambush, or however many other Ninth Force Recon Strongheart-class DropShips might have arrived to deploy their own forces in her defense.

Potentially hundreds of ponies had lost their lives to save hers―if not thousands.

That the weight of their sacrifice was shaking her like this spoke volumes about the mare’s character, in Slipshod’s opinion.

Squelch’s too, it seemed, as the earth pony noted the slightest softening of the stoic expression that she’d been wearing rather consistently during the whole exchange up until this point, “and your claim is that this ‘Chrysalis’ and her ‘changelings’ took your place?”

The haunted look in the alicorn’s eyes was replaced by fire once again at the mention of the name. A focus for her grief, and her vengeance, “if the ‘alicorn’ reigning from Equus is indeed styling herself a ‘Queen’, then it has to be her,” her brow furrowed now as she looked around the room, seeming to find something very amiss all of a sudden, “...but so then how are you all still here? How has she not consumed everycreature after five centuries?”

The other ponies in the room all exchanged looks. Slipshod could tell that most of them still didn’t believe a word that the alicorn was saying―about the changelings, at least. That her ‘Steed had been ambushed and beaten to Tartarus and back had been fairly evident from the physical damage. There was also the fact that Doc Dee had verified that this mare was as real an alicorn as he could determine too.

So not everything she was saying was a lie, at the very least.

Right now they were trying to decide exactly which parts they were willing to believe on just her word.

“If Chrysalis has been maintaining everything the way it was all this time,” the purple mare continued to muse aloud, starting to pace across the front of the briefing room, “then she must have something else planned...but what could possibly require centuries to put in place when she already has everypony fooled?

“She’s not doing this by half-measures either, if she’s managed to somehow purge the knowledge of the existence of changelings from the public record...” she paused for a moment and looked at Squelch, “I want access to a record of the Celestia League’s history,” she said, “I need to know what lies she’s been spreading.”

The unicorn frowned, and for a moment Slipshod thought she was going to refuse the request―though the tone involved had certainly suggested that it’d been a demand, the stallion felt. Apparently, Squelch ultimately felt that there was no harm in agreeing, “that can be arranged,” she nodded.

“Good,” again the earth pony suppressed a sigh. A ‘thank you’ wouldn’t have gone amiss, he thought. Twilight was really going to have to get used to not being the top rung of the hierarchy ladder around here. Pissing off Squelch wasn’t going to do the alicorn any favors, “I don’t suppose I could also get census records for the last five centuries so I can find out what happened to the reformed changelings?” the unicorn’s expression was much more incredulous now, but before she could issue her flat denial, the alicorn seemed to rethink the idea on her own, “nevermind. If Chrysalis has been fudging the history books, then she has to have been fudging the records too, or somepony would have noticed by now.

“So she’s ruling from Equus, but she’s still letting everycreature go about with their lives…” the alicorn rubbed at her chin, “why? What does that get her?”

Then a thought seemed to occur to her and she looked over at Slipshod, “the first time we met, you said that you were all ‘independent’. What did you mean by that?”

“We’re mercenaries,” Squelch answered for him, taking back control of the conversation from the alicorn’s ramblings, “freelance. We take contracts with just about anycreature. The kirin, hippogriffs, ponies, whoever. C-bits are C-bits.”

The princess’ brow furrowed, “mercenaries fighting...who?”

“Whoever,” the emerald mare shrugged, “right now the kirin and the hippogriffs are going at it pretty good. The Federated Moons and the Pony Commonwealth are at each others’ throats. The Our Worlds League gets on everycreature’s nerves, it seems like. So, yeah, plenty of work to go around for ponies like us,” she paused for a moment, then hastily added, “and kirin,” the twins nodded in unison.

“Who are all of these―what about the Celestia League?” the purple mare asked.

“They dissolved a long time ago,” Squelch explained, “as I remember it from history, Queen Twilight basically told every system that they could do whatever they wanted, and so they did. By that time, half the systems in the old League had left anyway, so it was kind of a foregone conclusion no matter what she said.

“Whole galaxy kind of went to shit for a while there though. A lot of very brutal wars. Lot of creatures died. Lot of records, technology, and infrastructure was lost and had to be rebuilt.

“So, a little over three hundred years ago, the Queen stepped in and set up ComSpark to try and ‘civilize’ the wars a little, along with the Mercenary Review Board to regulate groups like ours. It’s actually been going pretty smoothly since then.”

“Smoothly?” the purple alicorn remarked, sounding mildly taken aback. Squelch nodded, “but creatures have been fighting almost constantly ever since?”

The unicorn nodded, “it’s a big galaxy,” she said, “some planet somewhere is getting annexed on any given day. But most of the destruction is kept to a minimum...ish.”

“That’s not ‘smooth’, that’s horrible!” the alicorn protested indignantly, “why doesn’t everycreature just stop fighting?!”

“Because food doesn’t grow on―” the unicorn caught herself and rolled her eyes and let out a defeated sigh, “okay, so maybe food does grow on trees,” she allowed, ignoring a pair of snickers from the kirin mechanics, “but there are only so many trees in the galaxy, and a lot of creatures! Same goes for mana crystals and clean water. In order for somecreature to have any, other creatures have to go without.

“Curiously enough, a lot of creatures are willing to fight hoof and claw to not be part of the latter group,” she smirked at the alicorn.

“That’s ridiculous!” Twilight spat, “just terraform more planets to grow more food! Build more Dulmen Spheres around stars to harness the power needed to charge depleted mana crystals! There’s plenty of resources in the galaxy for everycreature!”

“That would be nice,” Squelch conceded, “except that terraforming is losmagitek that nopony’s been able to reproduce for centuries. Same goes for the ability to build Dulmen Spheres; and the ones that used to exist got destroyed in the wars before the Aris Conventions set guidelines to preserve civil infrastructure.

“So, yeah. What there is, is what there is; and there just isn’t enough for everycreature. It is what it is, and we just have to make the best of it.”

The alicorn was stunned to silence as she digested the news. It had to have been quite the sock, Slipshod reasoned to himself. She’d once known a galaxy of plentitude where all the beings on all the worlds lived in nominal peace with one-another. Now she had awoken to discover that that serene society was no more, and in its place was a galaxy at war with itself. Anypony could be forgiven for being overwhelmed by such a revelation and falling into despair―

“I’m going to fix it,” Twilight stated, her features set in determined lines, “all of it. I need you to take me to Equus,” she insisted, “help me defeat Chrysalis and take back the throne and I can―” Slipshod put his head in his hooves.

Squelch burst out laughing. There was nothing mirthful about the sound though. It was an incredulous, scathing, cackle that served as an indictment on the absurdity of the alicorn’s request, and promptly brought the violet mare to silence once more, “listen, ‘princess’,” she snorted, “I don’t ‘need’ to take you anywhere. Least of all Equus!” the alicorn opened her mouth to object, but the green unicorn held up a hoof to forestall her, “first and foremost: no creature goes to Equus without the expressed permission of the Queen Herself!

“There is exactly one JumpShip that has the jump point coordinates for the Faust System, and they don’t let just anypony dock up with them and hitch a ride,” Squelch explained. Then she leaned forward on the table, glaring at the alicorn, “but even if I could get authorization, I still wouldn’t take you. I mean, unless you have about five million C-bits tucked up your flank to pay us,” she smirked.

Twilight Sparkle scowled at the other mare, “if money is all you’re concerned with, the Royal Treasury has more than enough to cover whatever price you could care to name.”

“Not good enough,” the unicorn insisted, “we need payment up front.”

“I do not appreciate having my integrity questioned like this,” the alicorn growled, her ears folding back on her head in obvious anger, “if I tell you that you will be compensated for your aid, then you will be! I can meet any price that will satisfy your banal greed―”

“It’s not about greed,” Squelch shot back, her eyes flaring with barely contained rage, “it’s about transit fees! We’re currently the better part of three hundred lightyears from Equus. A ‘best time’ route would mean effectively renting out an entire JumpShip for the whole trip to do the minimum ten jumps required to get to Equus from our current position. They’d absolutely charge us for the cost of the potential business they’d lose catering to our intended destination, which would mean paying to cover all the available docking ports. Easily the better part of two hundred thousand C-bits, per jump, for a minimum of ten jumps. Realistically, it’d be closer to fifteen, but let’s be optimists for a moment.

“That’s over two million C-bits in just the jump fees alone. I also have a crew that needs to be fed and paid for the three months it’ll take us to get there,” Squelch pointed out, “Cookie’s good in the galley, but even he can’t whip up a hardy meal using only promises of future payment. I doubt the families of my crew can pay their rents using IOUs with your signature either.

“I didn’t spit out the number ‘five million’ because I’m a greedy bitch. That’s the number I gave because it’s just about the break even amount to get your flank to Equus and then get us back to where we are now so that we can get back to going about our lives,” the emerald mare held the gaze of the alicorn with her cool eyes, “I’m not even turning a profit on it. That’s the closest you’ll get to charity out here, princess.

“But if it’s not fucking good enough for you, then your only cheaper option is to march your happy flank out the airlock and hitchhike.”

Much to Slipshod’s surprise, his employer’s little tirade actually seemed to cow the alicorn somewhat. The feathers on her wings lost their puffed appearance and her expression waivered, shifting from ire to uncertainty and embarrassment.

Squelch hadn’t been exaggerating either. Co-opting a whole JumpShip for the journey was certainly the quickest option, at just under three months for the trip, ideally. It might even be the cheapest route too, seeing as how catching passage on whatever JumpShip just happened to be going in the vague direction of Equus could possibly end up meaning dozens of additional jumps and many more months of travel.

Normally, such transit costs were covered by a client when the Galloway set out for a job in another system, hardly making them much of an issue. This time though, traveling would be the job; and the coffers of the Steel Coursers was nowhere near deep enough to bankroll it upfront. Especially with such an uncertain payday. It wasn’t as though Chrysalis was just going to roll over and give up the throne to Twilight the moment the purple alicorn arrived in the system.

The alicorn’s ‘plan’ was barely worthy of the word.

“...I apologize,” the alicorn said, much to the surprise of the golden earth pony; and much to the satisfaction of Squelch, “I had failed to consider the logistics involved,” a wan smirk touched her lips, “I always had generals for that sort of thing.”

“What did you hope to accomplish when you got there anyway?” Slipshod asked of the purple mare, “if you think Equus is a changeling stronghold of some sort, then Chrysalis isn’t just going to let you walk up to the front door unopposed. You don’t honestly think one mare can stop the whole hive, do you?”

The alicorn looked at the stallion for a few seconds, seeming to study him before saying, “that’s all it took one time,” with a cryptic smile on her face, her eyes clouding for a brief moment before she sighed and shook her head, “but...you’re right. Having allies would be the smarter course of action. Not that I know where to find many of those now.”

Twilight’s expression fell into a deep frown. Then she abruptly sat up, her eyes wide as she looked back at Squelch, “these Disciples of Discord,” she began, “you said that they’re still around?”

The green unicorn shrugged, “they pop up from time to time on some world or other near the Periphery. They show up, cause a little mayhem, and then vanish again. Nopony knows where they’re operating from. ComSpark offers bounties on any kills on them, as well as for information on their whereabouts.

“So, if you happen to know where any of their old hideouts were a few centuries ago, we might be able to cash in on it and help you pay for this trip to Equus of yours…?”

Twilight gave the mare a flat look, “in my day, the Ninth Force Recon was based out of the Loki System. Even back then it was well developed and very populated. They never had any permanent installations anywhere else.

“However, if they truly are still active, and they do use their old regimental crest…?” she looked between Squelch and Slipshod. Both ponies nodded, “then it’s possible that they recognize that the Twilight on Equus right now isn’t the real me,” she said hopefully, “maybe that’s why they’ve been raiding: they’re resisting her rule, even after all this time!”

The other ponies at the table all exchanged unconvinced expressions, but the alicorn seemed undeterred, “I need to find them. To speak to their leadership. They might be able to help me!”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Squelch rolled her eyes, “violent fanatic cultists are frequently known for philanthropy…” the mare said in a sarcastically drole tone that was quite evidently unappreciated by the purple alicorn.

“If they’re opposing Chrysalis, then it only makes sense to seek them out,” Twilight countered.

“Unless they’re not opposing her, but instead are after you,” the unicorn pointed out, “and by ‘you’, I mean Queen Twilight Sparkle, the alicorn who’s been ruling the Harmony Sphere for thousands of years.”

“I haven’t been―I mean, she hasn’t been ruling for―oh, never mind!” she let out an exasperated sigh, “I won’t be able to prove anything to you about that until I know how she’s changed the historical record anyway...

“But those have to be remnants of Discord’s Rangers,” the purple mare insisted, “they’re still using their old crest. The Ninth Recon knew I was ambushed and never made it to the meeting with the Empire. They have to know that the Twilight on Equus is an imposter!

“You’re right,” she continued, glancing at Slipshod, “I can’t do this on my own. I need allies. The descendants of the ponies who rescued me might be the closest thing that I have to friends left in this galaxy,” now she looked back to Squelch, “if you can’t get me to Equus, then can you at least help me make contact with these ‘Disciples’? I’m sure they’ll have the finances to cover whatever transit fees are involved,” she added with a wry smirk.

“Can I help you link up with avowed enemies of the Harmony Sphere?” the emerald unicorn mare propped her head up with a hoof, gazing levely at the alicorn, “violating somewhere around a dozen galactic laws and getting me and my whole crew blacklisted by both ComSpark and the MRB?

“Sure. For fifty million C-bits. To cover the cost of all the money we’ll never make again because we’ll have to flee to the Periphery and live out the rest of our days in hiding.

“I’m sure the mare that couldn’t manage five million can come up with ten times that amount without any issue whatsoever.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes at the unicorn, “you know, sarcasm is a sign of a weak mind.”

“Well, right now this ‘weak mind’ controls a ship, a crew, and whether or not you’ll spend the rest of your life―which, as I understand it, for alicorns is quite a long time―in a dungeon in the Queen’s palace on Equus,” there was no amusement whatsoever in the smile she was directing at the alicorn, “so what’s that say about the weakness of your mind, exactly?”

“Nopony knows how to contact the Disciples,” Slipshod interjected, drawing Twilight away from the deathly cold glare she was shooting his employer. Nothing productive was going to come from the pair of mares trading barbs with each other, “they show up without warning, raid some garrisons, and then withdraw back out of the Harmony Sphere. There’s no way for anypony to just ‘take you to meet them’.”

The violet mare seemed to deflate a little, “I see.”

“Well, this has been a profoundly ‘enlightening’ conversation; but I think that I’ve heard all that I need to,” Squelch said, standing up from her seat, “you can’t help us, and you can’t afford to hire us to help you. You’ll be secured in the brig until we reach Canis. Then you’ll be given over to the local ComSpark rep and you can be their problem,” and with that, the emerald unicorn strode from the room, Valkyrie, Doc Dee and the kirin twins following closely behind her.

Slipshod watched them all leave, looking furtively between the door and the alicorn. The ‘interrogation’ hadn’t gone quite as well as it could have, honestly. He hadn’t counted on Twilight being so inflexible. Squelch was a good mare when it came down to it. She did right by her crew at the end of the day. The alicorn had, at multiple points, insulted her integrity and suggested endangering the wellbeing of everypony onboard. Neither of those were ways to get the unicorn on your side.

The stallion had to wonder how well those ancient negotiations that Twilight had been prevented from attending would have gone with an attitude like that...

“The others seemed quite surprised by all my talk of changelings,” the alicorn said in a low, even, tone from where she was standing in the front of the room. The pair of guardsmares at her flanks were still standing rigidly at attention.

Slipshod didn’t immediately reply, taken aback by the unexpected comment. He was also a little curious why her escorts hadn’t ushered their charge to the brig yet, like Squelch had ordered them to. He gave an uneasy laugh, “I mean, you did just tell us that a bunch of shape-shifting monsters have been controlling the galaxy for the last five hundred years and nopony knows about it. That’s a bit hard to swallow.”

“You misunderstand me,” Twilight corrected him, regarding the stallion with a cool gaze, “I said: ‘the others’ seemed surprised. You...on the other hoof…”

The stallion went perfectly still. A cold knot formed in the pit of his stomach. He fought through the crawling sense of dread that her fixed gaze evoked within him and forced out a laugh that sounded a lot more nervous than he might have preferred. Why weren’t her guards saying or doing anything? “Heh...trust me, I’m just as surprised as everypony else! I’m just really cool under pressure, you know? Comes with being an experienced ‘Steed pilot. You know how it is, right?”

The purple alicorn maintained her stare, her gaze seeming to burrow right through the stallion. He felt himself swallow nervously even as he tried to maintain his uneasy smile, “...you called them a ‘hive’. If you’ve never heard of changelings before, how did you know they were a ‘hive’?”

“Umm…” before the stallion could muster a reply, her horn, which Slipshod only just now noticed had been glowing with a faint aura already, flashed and filled the room with purple light. Slipshod winced, briefly blinded by the brilliant pulse of magic, but the light quickly faded away, seeming to leave the room exactly as it had been.

Well...perhaps not exactly as it had been. The stallion didn’t know what it was at first, but something felt...off. He couldn’t put his hoof on it, but he suddenly felt...exposed. The alicorn’s expression remained as hard and impassive as it had been, but there was now an additional element of animosity in her amethyst eyes. The armored mares behind her continued to remain apparently oblivious to everything that was happening, not reacting in the slightest. The earth pony suspected that the veneer of magic surrounding them had something to do with it. Some sort of paralysis spell, perhaps?

Slipshod couldn’t stop himself from looking away beneath her glare. That was when he saw it. He caught sight of a powered down display mounted on the wall beside him. Without being lit up, the jet screen functioned almost exactly like a mirror. In it, he could see his reflection.

Only, it was not a golden earth pony stallion that was looking back at him. It was a glistening black equine form. It had a pair of wide, solid pale blue eyes, framed by a jagged maw and a curved horn emerging from its forehead. Delicate gossamer wings peaked out from behind its shoulders.

It was a changeling.

“Oh...fuck!”

Slipshod panicked and bolted for the door. He wasn’t sure why. Being seen like this by the rest of the ship was hardly going to do him any favors. Where did he think that he was even going to go? They were in space! There was nowhere for him to run. Not that he was doing a lot of it at the moment, the stallion realized. His legs were moving, but no progress was being made, on account of his hovering a foot over the deck plating. The alicorn had him enveloped in a telekinetic field and was already pulling him back towards her.

Soon the unfortunate changeling found himself turned to face the stern gaze of his captor. Her expression was cool and detached. It was the face of a pony who was weighing what to do with a piece of trash that they had just picked up off the deck...and that tossing it in the incinerator wasn’t necessarily off the table.

Slipshod’s mouth was moving for a good three seconds before he was actually able to coax any words out of it, “I-I-I can explain! Don’t kill me!”

Twilight’s lip curled back into a sneer as she glared down at the carapassed equine, “by all means: explain to me what you’re doing here. Explain Chrysalis’ plan. Explain how to defeat her. And after you have explained everything to my satisfaction, I might―might―not kill you.”

“I’m hiding!”

“I can see that much,” the mare growled, “I want to know why?! What good does infiltrating this ship do for Chrysalis? She’s cunning, yes, but there’s no way that she could have known that this ship would stumble across me. Unless she has a spy on every ship in the Harmony Sphere?”

“No! I mean, I-I-I don’t think she does,” the stallion stammered. He could feel the magic field that was holding him slowly constricting all over his whole body, crushing him. It wasn’t painful, just uncomfortable; but there was no doubt in his mind that she could change that on a whim if she found his answers to be unsatisfactory, “I honestly don’t know! I’m not a part of the hive anymore!”

“You don’t honestly expect me to believe that?” the alicorn scoffed derisively, “your whole species is based on lies and deception.”

“It’s true! I swear―!” Slipshod winced as he felt the field constrict suddenly, squeezing the breath from his lungs. She was going to pop him like a balloon!

“Lies! Do you expect me to believe that the first drone I come across just conveniently happens to be a deserter? Do you take me for a fool?!”

“I’m not a deserter!” the stallion gasped desperately, fighting for every breath in his bid to explain himself as quickly as possible before the angry alicorn finally crushed him to death, “I just...completed my mission already! The Queen has no more use for me, so I’m left to my own devices; with no way to contact the hive―!”

Another sharp squeeze. He was pretty sure he felt something crack that time, “what mission did she give you? Why not give you another assignment if your previous one was completed?”

“My mission was to leave Equus,” the changeling managed to get out in a pained breath, “changelings are only ever given one mission their entire life! Most take a lifetime to complete...I was just...unlucky,” he gasped, looking desperately at the alicorn for mercy, “please...I mean no harm…”

The mare snorted derisively, “what sort of mission is that for one of Chrysalis’ agents?”

The magical hold relaxed slightly. Slipshod gasped loudly as he managed to take in the desperately needed breath, which flowed almost immediately into a hacking fit as his lungs continued to burn from their mistreatment, “the only assignment that mattered any longer for me,” he spat out contemptuously. His disdain wasn’t directed at the alicorn though.

“Explain yourself. Now.”

The changeling swallowed and nodded. He was dead if she didn’t like his answer, and she was most certainly not going to appreciate a lie. Slipshod wasn’t convinced that she was going to accept the truth, but it was his best shot of surviving the next five minutes, “the academies on Equus,” he began, “that’s how Chrysalis gets her agents in place.

“Everypony who’s anypony ‘knows’ that the best universities and ‘Steed academies in the Sphere are on Equus. Every family with the connections, money, or means to do so, sends at least one of their foals there. Like Squelch said: access to the Faust System is tightly controlled. Only one JumpShip has the jump coordinates. When the new academy attendees arrive...they’re cocooned, replaced, and drained immediately.

“From day one, the pony studying under their identity is a changeling assigned to take their place. We go through all the classes, do all the course work, write home to our―their―families. All of it. We become them from that moment on. When we graduate, we’re sent to our new families. Those families that had the wealth and political power to procure a slot in one of those premiere schools.

“We live out our lives in those families, funneling back information to the Queen, and taking orders from her. She has her hooves in every planetary government and the leadership of every major mercenary unit in the Harmony Sphere. Nothing in the galaxy happens without her knowledge, or say-so.

“You asked why she hasn’t wiped out everypony over the last five hundred years? It’s because she doesn’t have to. She controls everything already, and the whole galaxy sends her a steady supply of creatures to feed the hive back on Equus. She has no reason to do anything more than she already has. Whether anypony knows it or not: they’re just as much one of her puppets as any drone.

“That’s why nocreature knows about changelings too, by the way: she’s had centuries of agents in place rewriting the history books. She has agents in most levels of every planetary government, so she gets to control the school curriculums. Creatures know what Chrysalis wants them to know. Why would anycreature think it had to be different?”

“...and Thorax and the reformed changelings?”

Slipshod swallowed, knowing that the alicorn wasn’t going to like the answer, “the Queen deals with traitors only one way,” he said softly.

“All of them?” the alicorn asked breathlessly.

He nodded slowly, “it took a while,” he admitted, “but nothing’s easier for a love-starved changeling agent to sense out than a love-emitting reformed changeling. However, they couldn’t tell the difference until it was too late.

“In all the fighting going on back then, nopony really noticed the genocide until after it had happened. A couple generations later, and they were just anecdotes. A few generations after that...well...creatures have had other things to focus on besides some obscure, extinct, race of bugs.”

The best word that the stallion could come up with to describe Twilight’s expression right now was: haunted. Nopony else might know, but Slipshod was aware of the connection that the alicorn had had with the reformed changelings and their leader. Chrysalis didn’t feel a need to keep the extermination of her enemies a secret from her drones. It was actually meant to be a source of pride for them, really. Though it had taken a thousand years, she had rebuilt her hive, and exterminated every last descendent of the drones that had abandoned her.

All without the average Harmony Sphere denizen noticing either, as it had all taken place behind the scenes. The discrete nature of the extermination of the reformed changelings had been essential, actually. Stoking explicit hatred and animosity and creating anti-reformed changeling propaganda that would have been required to fuel an overt campaign of genocied would have created a long-lasting cultural memory among the galaxy’s inhabitants.

By letting it all take place in the background, while everypony was too busy worrying about the wars and destruction that they brought, it meant that creatures had just sort of...woken up one day and realized that they hadn’t seen a reformed changeling in a few weeks. Then a few months. Then years, and decades, and...now nopony thought about them at all.

It was like they’d never existed at all; and all with honestly very little massaging of the history books.

This alicorn, however, didn’t need a book to know about them. She’d been present for their emergence as a species, and had spent a millennium interacting with and guiding them. Now they were all gone. Wiped out to a bug by his own race.

That was it. Twilight was either going to kill him now, or...well, honestly Slipshod didn’t see much of an ‘or’ at the moment. Knowing the truth didn’t make him any less of a changeling. He was still the same reviled creature that this alicorn despised; and thereby complicit in the atrocities committed against her by his race through association. He could beg for her mercy, but he didn’t have anything to actually use as a bargaining chip in exchange for his life.

The purple mare regarded him for a long while in silence, studying him intently. Searching for signs of deception. Finally, she said, “and what about you? Do you mean to tell me that this mercenary outfit was significant enough to warrant Chrysalis’ attention?”

“I doubt it,” the stallions snorted, “I’m here for me, not the Queen. Like I said: I completed my assignment. We only get the one.”

“What was your mission?”

“To leave Equus,” the magical field restraining him began to constrict once more. The stallion cringed, “I swear that was it! That was all I was directed to do!”

The telekinetic field did not ease as the alicorn growled at him, “what manner of ‘mission’ is that?”

“The only one left to me after my host’s family got themselves executed for treason!” he cried out desperately.

Twilight’s magic eased―slightly, “explain.”

Slipshod coughed once more, though it was still hard to draw a full breath, “while I was attending the academy, my host’s family became involved in a plot to depose the Archon of the Pony Commonwealth. They were caught, and the Archon had them executed. When that happened, there was no longer a House for me to infiltrate and report back on or influence.

“All that was left for me to do...was leave...and never go back,” he spat out, bitterly.

“Why not simply have you assume a different identity?” Twilight asked skeptically, “if there was no longer a family to infiltrate, Chrysalis could have―”

“Because ‘Slipshod’ existed,” the changeling responded with a defeated sigh.

“Pardon?”

“Slipshod existed. So he had to keep existing. If he just...vanished...it would leave a hole in the records.”

“What would that matter?” the alicorn asked with a derisive snort, “you don’t mean to say that Chrysalis cares that much about the identity of one pony that no longer had any use to her. Why keep a useless agent in the field like that?”

The stallion looked up at the princess, “hundreds of thousands of students are enrolled in the academies on Equus from around the Harmony Sphere every year,” he explained, “maybe even millions. The average course of study is five years. That’s a lot of time for the political landscape to change somewhere in the galaxy. It’s not uncommon for a family to fall out of favor, suffer an accident, or get wiped out down to the last pony because they got involved in a coup,” he said with a sardonic smile.

“You’re right, if one or two ponies vanished without a trace, it would hardly really matter. Ponies go missing all the time in the galaxy. But we’re not talking about one or two; and we’re not talking about your common plebian creature either. We’re talking about potentially hundreds of members of the highest echelons of the galaxy’s societal elite every year. Ponies with connections to massive interstellar corporations, planetary governments―ponies with high profiles. For centuries. Over time, that adds up to hundreds of thousands of creatures directly tied to galactic leadership that would be unaccounted for.

“Eventually, that would get noticed.

“Look at my case: my family plotted to snatch the throne of the Archon right out from under him! He killed my host’s father, mother, and eight siblings in retaliation. The only reason that he spared Slipshod was because it was conclusively proven that the plot didn’t start until after he’d left for Equus, and they could find no evidence that any mention of the plot had been made to me―er, him. Which is true; I didn’t know a damn thing about it until the news of their execution broke.

“The Archon publicly absolved Slipshod of any wrongdoing and granted him a full pardon. He did that to send a message to any other potential plotters: ‘turn in the members of your family that are traitors, and I won’t punish you too’.

“But what if the Archon hadn’t been feeling so ‘magnanimus’? What if he wanted to avoid a potential situation where I went on a crusade for vengeance against him?” the changeling shrugged his shoulders, “I mean, that’s not exactly a super unlikely scenario, is it?” honestly, from what the stallion knew of his host, it was very likely something that the real Slipshod would have gone through with, “sending out some assassins to tie up a loose end like Slipshod was arguably the more pragmatic thing for the Archon to do in that situation.

“So let’s say he does that. Let’s say a bunch of highly skilled and motivated assassins go out to track down and kill Slipshod. How do they find him?” he asked rhetorically, “they follow his trail obviously. A trail that leads them to Equus. With no record of Slipshod ever making port at any other system in the Harmony Sphere after leaving Equus.

“There are records of him arriving on Equus. Transcripts of the classes he took. A record of the dorm he stayed in. A record of him graduating as a top tier―” the alicorn arched a brow, “...mid tier,” the changeling grunted, “BattleSteed pilot. Maybe even a record that he left.

“But no record that he actually arrived on any other world. Their trail would end on Equus. So where are they going to go to start looking for him?

“The last thing that Chrysalis wants are teams of assassins finding a way to sneak into the Faust System, crawling through Canterlot looking for loose ends to tie up, and risk having them stumble over…something else.

“So, yeah...there had to be a record that ‘Slipshod’ left Equus and―more importantly―arrived...somewhere. It didn’t matter where I made port, or even where I went from there, as long as it wasn’t back to Equus,” the changeling growled, “the moment I got stamped in at the gate on Simeron, I’d ‘completed’ my assignment as far as the Queen was concerned. What I did after that...didn’t matter. I was no longer part of a noble House in the Commonwealth government that I could influence and control. I was useless to her.”

“What exactly did she expect you to do once making port?” the alicorn asked.

He shrugged, “die, probably,” at the mare’s skeptical expression, he elaborated, “we’re supposed to be returning to the robust social support network of our host’s family and friends. Which means we don’t have to go looking for love to feed on. We can just take whatever we need from the ponies in our host’s social circle. We’re not taught how to scavenge for ourselves, because we don’t need to. So, most changelings that don’t have that support structure...they just...wither away after a few weeks.”

“So how did you avoid dying then?” there was an edge to the alicorn’s voice that suggested she expected to not like the answer she was going to receive, and that she would be responding appropriately.

“I got lucky,” he informed her, swallowing nervously, “I walked into a merc Hiring Hall, figuring ‘battlefield comradery’ might be able to sustain me, you know? Squelch showed up the next day, saw I was willing to work for barely anything despite being highly―er...decently skilled, and brought me aboard the Galloway.

“Now I have a whole ship full of ponies that I―erk!”

“How many?” the mare demanded in a deathly growl, her magical hold tightening around the changeling’s throat, “how many have you killed on this ship?”

“Nrrk―” the changeling couldn’t breathe at all beneath the crushing weight of the alicorn’s telekinetic grasp on him. Every last mote of air had been wrung out on him. Even his heart was hard-pressed to get in a full beat beneath the intense pressure surrounding it. All that he could do was thrash his head desperately from side to side in the negative.

By some miracle, the field loosened and he found breath once more, “none!” he assured her, desperately, “I’ve never killed anypony,” hastily, he amended, “on the ship anyway. I mean, I’ve killed a lot of ponies in my ‘Steed―agh!” another tight squeeze, “that’s literally my job!” he wailed. Twilight let out an annoyed grunt but relaxed her magic nonetheless.

“I’ve never husked anypony, I swear!” he specified as quickly and sincerely as he could, “I’ve never had to! There’re dozens of ponies on this ship that care about me; I don’t have to drain anypony. I can just...sort of ‘graze’ whenever I want. I even make sure I’m not taking too much from any one pony. I have a rota!” he furiously tapped at the terminal on his suit’s fetlock. This earned him a withering look from the alicorn.

“Bodies leave questions and increase stress,” he said hurriedly, “stressed ponies don’t radiate a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings, you know? I go to a lot of trouble to keep the ponies on this ship happy. Karaoke, poetry readings, riffing, spotting, art modeling―I do whatever ponies want to make them feel happier about being a hundred lightyears from home!

“I don’t husk them,” the changeling repeated emphatically, adding, “I never would.”

“Fine. I believe you,” the stallion let out a long sigh of relief. It, however, proved to be short-lived as a fresh constriction of her magic quickly reminded the shape-shifter that his fate yet remained precarious, “but I still think it’s too dangerous to let a changeling stay on this ship. The risk that you’ll report my presence to Chrysalis is too great.”

Slipshod’s blood grew cold. His mind worked frantically to think of some way to stay the princess’ hoof and remain alive. Unfortunately, his panic made it hard to think straight. He blurted out, “but they’ll want to know why you just killed me for no reason!”

The alicorn frowned, “...other than you clearly being a changeling? The exact creature I just finished warning them about? You’re the proof that I need to convince them to aid me in defeating Chrysalis and save the galaxy.”

Fuck!

The changeling gasped as the magic surrounding him suddenly began to press down around him on all sides with rapidly increasing force. He’d be crushed to death in seconds. Desperately he yelled out, “they’ll turn on each other! You’ll panic the ship!”

Mercifully, the pressure abated once more...barely. At the very least, the stallion was able to regain enough breath to plead his case for life, “Slipshod has―I’ve―been with these ponies for years! They never suspected a thing. If you kill me and reveal that their loyal comrade, pilot, friend, and former lover, was a ‘monster’ living among them this whole time,” the changeling panted, “exactly how long do you think it’ll be before they start wondering who else isn’t who they say they are?”

Twilight snorted, “you’re the only changeling on this ship. All I have to do is tell them that.”

“They’ve known me for years,” Slipshod reiterated, “you’ve been conscious for less than a day! You really think that you can kill their best pilot and they’ll go along with it? That you just happened to find the exact kind of ‘mythical monster’ you just told them about ten minutes ago?

“That’s damned convenient, don’t you think? About as convenient as this ship stumbling across the ‘real’ Twilight Sparkle who is ranting about the one who’s been ruling from Equus for a thousand years being a fake…

“Damned convenient, isn’t it?” the changeling glared at the alicorn, who he was gratified to see wasn’t looking quite so sure of her plans anymore. Though the audible gritting of her teeth suggested that she still hadn’t discounted killing him quite yet. At the very least though, she was back to merely considering killing him, and not actually actively doing it.

Slipshod felt that was a marked improvement on his situation, and so he risked pressing his luck just a little further, “mercenaries are a suspicious, pragmatic, bunch. It’s how we survive. You’d be asking them to accept a lot of things really quickly if you hoof them over a dead changeling immediately after telling them we exist. Doc’s given me a hundred physicals, patched me up a dozen times. He never found anything to cause him to suspect I wasn’t exactly what I looked like,” the stallion pointed out, “...which will make everypony start to wonder if it’s not actually you who managed to fool Doc.

“Finding the actual Chrysalis locked away on a cultist transport after being defeated by the real Queen Twilight who is very much still ruling from her throne on Equus is at least as believable as the story you’re feeding them, isn’t it?”

Doubt. The changeling could see it clear on the alicorn’s face. Just enough of it for the princess to stay her magic for the moment and consider alternate resolutions. She resented him. Slipshod didn’t need to be empathic to know that. Her eyes very clearly revealed exactly how much she wanted to transform him into the first of many corpses that she was ready to make of Chrysalis’ drones on her crusade to reclaim her throne and truly free ponykind, “...what do you want?”

“You’re not going to believe me,” he told her, a wry smile crossing his fanged muzzle.

“That’s a given,” the alicorn sneered.

“Fair. Fine: I want Chrysalis to go down.”

The mare’s eyes widened in stark surprise for a second, before the purple mare schooled her features and narrowed her gaze at the changeling, “why would a drone turn on its Queen?”

“She’s no Queen to me,” Slipshod sneered back at the alicorn, “I told you she cast me out to die, didn’t I? I devoted myself to my Queen―mind, body, and soul―and her last order to me was to leave and never return. My fate was to die alone and forgotten within a week. If Squelch hadn’t hired me...I probably would have.

“Fuck ‘er. This crew has done more for me than the hive ever has. Seeing it burned to the ground around her? Oh, I’d die one happy bug to see that,” the changeling’s grin was predatory.

“Assuming that I believe anything that you’ve told me,” Twilight said, still a note of doubt in her tone, “your commander still intends to give me over to Chrysalis. Neither of us get our revenge if that happens.”

“You let me handle that,” Slipshod insisted, “I know Squelch. I can get her to change her mind about you. She’ll keep you onboard. However,” he stressed pointedly, “you have to promise to play nice too,” the alicorn didn’t seem to like him taking that tone with her, but the changeling wasn’t going to be cowed this time. Twilight had been determined to undermine his efforts to defend her to his boss up to this point, and it was going to finally stop.

There was hardly any point in him sticking his neck out for the alicorn any further if she was going to save Squelch the trouble and just cut it off again, “hey, you already tried throwing your high-and-mighty weight around and that didn’t work out now, did it?” her glare intensified, “this is Squelch’s ship. Her crew. She calls the shots. She’s the ‘princess’ around here, got it?

“If you want her to help you, you’ve got to prove you’re willing to help her. That’s going to mean piloting that ‘Steed of yours and earning some C-bits. Maybe you don’t know any Disciple hideouts; fine. But you were the fucking Princess of the Celestia League! You have to know where some sort of ‘top secret’ R&D lab or something was. A military base that the galaxy’s forgotten about. Something that we can raid or salvage for a quick C-bit.

“You give her that, she’ll warm up to you, and then we’ll see about finding a way to contact the Disciples and see if they really are what you think they are. Alright?”

The alicorn stared at him, considering. Slipshod waited, tensely, for her response. He was asking a lot of the mare, he knew that. He was one of her avowed enemies. A―former―servant to the creature that slaughtered her protectors and usurped her throne. Chrysalis may not have wiped out the whole galaxy, but that fact was largely immaterial when compared to the billions who’d died over the centuries because of her. Potentially hundreds of millions husked on Equus alone, in that time.

Now Twilight was supposed to trust him to keep her safe. Trust that she’d encountered a changeling drone that was ready to turn on his hive. All because he’d been given a bum assignment. Drones like him were expected to lay down their lives for the hive and be grateful for the privilege if doing so, right?

Once upon a time, that would probably have been the case, Slipshod admitted to himself.

Then he’d actually been faced with the prospect of death. A day after stepping off the transport onto Simeron, the stark reality of his situation had finally hit Slipshod. For the first time in his life, love would not be delivered to him. He was feeling hunger. Weakness. Loneliness.

Terror.

His devotion to Chrysalis began to waver in the face of those feelings. In the face of a slow, painful, death through starvation. Since then, that wavering had evolved into despisal. How dare his Queen cast her loyal servant into the cold like that! He’d done nothing to deserve such a fate. He’d served her―loyally―all his life. He’d pledged himself to her cause!

She’d sentenced him to die in return.

Fuck her.

He’d stewed on those feelings of betrayal for two years. Frustrated all the more by the knowledge that he’d never be able to do anything that could harm Chrysalis.

Until now.

Here was his chance to not just hurt his former queen, but to utterly destroy all that she had been building for half a millenia! The ultimate revenge. Casting her into the cold. Alone. Unsupported. With no course of action left available to her...but to die.

Slipshod would have his revenge. And so he would save Twilight from her fate as well. He needed her. All he needed to do was to convince Squelch that the purple alicorn was more valuable alive and onboard the Galloway than in the clutches of ComSpark.

All the princess had to do...was put her trust in him right now.

“...Very well,” she finally said. Her magic finally released the changeling completely.

Slipshod didn’t even try to hide his immense relief, letting out a long sigh and slumping against the wall. He briefly closed his eyes and the room glowed with a flash of green firelight. When it faded, the ebony changeling was gone, and in its place was a golden earth pony once more. He smiled up at the alicorn, “thank you,” his eyes darted briefly to the two security mares, who were still standing stoically by the door, “I’ll go talk with Squelch. She’ll probably be by in an hour or so to talk with you.

“Agree to whatever deal she offers you, okay? Please? I promise it’ll be the best you’re going to get,” he could see the reservation on the mare’s face, but there was little help for it, “we’ll get you to Equus. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how―yet,” he insisted, “but we will bring down Chrysalis.”

Twilight regarded him for a long moment, “...I once knew a drone who turned on Chrysalis,” she said, “a long time ago. He went on to do great things.

“I don’t get the impression that you’re anything like him,” the stallion wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel about that assessment. It hadn’t sounded like a compliment though, “I guess we’ll just have to see if that makes a difference.”

The purple mare turned away from him and walked back over to her escorts. As she neared, both security ponies began to move again, appearing to be completely oblivious to anything that had transpired during the last ten minutes. Both mares dutifully ushered their charge out the door to take her to the brig as they’d been ordered.

Slipshod took a few minutes to compose himself before leaving the briefing room as well. Step two of his plan was almost complete: keeping Twilight alive and on the DropShip. He just needed to convince his ex-wife that the alicorn could be an asset to them. Just because he wasn’t one hundred percent clear on how he was going to do that was only a minor issue. He’d figure out something.

After that...well, things somehow got a little more complicated…

“I should have Dee give you another lookover. Apparently Emery File hit you over the head harder than he thought,” the emerald unicorn said flatly to the stallion standing near the door of her quarters, “because you’ve clearly lost your damn mind!”

This was going well. He could tell, “we have a Rainbow Dash, but we don’t have a pilot for it,” the earth pony began again, being sure to keep careful control of his tone and expression. He was trotting on thin ice as it was, and he was only going to get the one shot at this. If he pushed Squelch too hard on this and she shut him down, there was little chance that she’d be willing to revisit the topic of what to do with their alicorn captive prior to reaching Canis orbit.

“There are plenty of pilots looking for work on Canis,” she pointed out.

“Okay, yes, but,” he conceded, “how many of them will be willing to work for just room and board? Twilight won’t care about C-bits. Three hots and a cot is all it’d take with her.”

Squelch arched a brow, “‘Twilight’? You’re not trying to say you believe that crazy mare―”

“I don’t care what she calls herself,” he insisted, “Twilight, Discord, she could claim that she’s the First Archon of the Pony Commonwealth for all I care! For all you care, too. Be honest,” he sighed, “since when have you given a damn about anypony’s past on this ship? I know a dozen ponies on the crew who are a fugitive wanted on some planet or other.

“Shit, the Archon has a modest price on my head!”

“But none of them―or you―are wanted by ComSpark,” the unicorn shot back, flashing the stallion a knowing look, “there’s a huge difference there. The Steel Coursers won’t be blackballed by the MRB because of Axel Rod’s unpaid back taxes on Serval. But if ComSpark finds out we’re harboring a Disciple―a mare who could turn out to be a Disciple leader―”

“Exactly!” The mare balked at his outburst, her eyes widening in surprise. The stallion smiled and continued, “don’t you get it? That pony very well could be a Disciple leader; and she’s determined to make contact with them and get them to take her back to their base!”

“Which is exactly the problem,” Squelch informed him flatly.

“Is it?”

“...Yes?”

Slipshod grinned, “I think it’s an opportunity,” he stressed. He was unsurprised that the green mare still appeared unconvinced, “if we hoof her over to ComSpark right now, we’ll collect a pittance of a bounty. You know that. The price offered for Disciples is a flat rate; they don’t care about rank when paying out. They’ll interrogate her, but because she’s obviously a crazy fanatic, you and I both know she’ll never talk. Not to ComSpark.

“But to us…? She just might. She wants us to take her to meet the Disciples so that they can take her back to their base. They just might take the rest of us along too,” he pointed out, “at which point we’ll have the coordinates for a Disciple base to turn over to ComSpark for a real payday!

“All we have to do in the meantime is entertain this mare’s delusions.”

It was obvious that Squelch wasn’t completely sold on the whole idea yet, but Slipshod didn’t hear her shooting him down outright, so that was a hopeful sign, “we don’t even know how to make contact with the Disciples. Nopony does―not even her apparently!”

“That’s the easy part,” he assured her, “we just have to wait until we encounter some of their units in the field. We’ve fought them before. Someday we’re bound to run into them again,” he said with a shrug, “Twilight’ll accept that reality. Which means she won’t complain about how long it’s taking or anything like that. She’ll keep helping us―keep fighting for us for free―for months, if not years. It’s not like any of us will have any control over where and when the Disciples’ll pop up, right?

“But, someday they will, and we can have her comm them and see if she can convince them of who she is, or who they think she is, or however that works.”

“You realize that your plan relies on her having told us the truth about Queen Twilight being an imposter, right?”

Slipshod was quiet for a moment, considering the company’s commander, “...and what if she is?” he asked carefully. The unicorn’s frown deepened and she was about to chastise him again, but the stallion interrupted her rebuttal, “what would that change? Honestly? How would whoever’s actually in charge on Equus affect anything that you and I do out here in the Sphere?”

Squelch stared at the golden earth pony, “Sweet Celestia, you do believe her, don’t you?” the mare let out a dry laugh, shaking her head, “a mare bats her eyes at you and you start falling all over yourself to get under her tail. I don’t know why I’m surprised―”

“It’s not like that,” the stallion said coolly, gaining the unicorn’s attention once more, “you know it isn’t. Don’t make this about me, or ‘us’. This is about the company and what’s best for the crew. That’s it.”

“Harboring a fugitive is ‘what’s best for the crew’?”

“No, but giving them a chance at a big score is. The kind of score that we’ll get for telling ComSpark about a Disciple base. That’ll be a lot more than a bounty on a Disciple member.”

Squelch started shaking her head, “the risk involved is―”

“―is minimal,” Slipshod interrupted her, earning a skeptical frown from the unicorn, “it is! What risk is there, really? ComSpark blacklisting us? Only if they find out that Twilight was found on a Disciple wreck. How many ponies on this ship are making regular reports to ComSpark about our personnel? You’re certainly not. ComSpark doesn’t care about the hiring practices of every little merc outfit in the Sphere.

“The MRB’s going to want a Merc ID number,” Slipshod allowed, “but it takes all of five minutes for prospective pilots to register,” the stallion gestured at the terminal on Squelch’s desk, “you can even do it for her right now!”

“And how are we supposed to explain her being an alicorn?” Squelch asked sardonically.

“How do you explain it?” he shot back. To which the mare didn’t have an answer at the ready, “only a few ponies know about the results of Doc Dee’s exams. He’s got that whole ‘patient confidentiality’ thing going on, so he’s not going around telling the crew she’s the real deal. We can tell ponies whatever we want to. She’s a pegasus with delusions of grandeur. A unicorn with a feather fetish. A genetic freak. Whatever.

“The point is that ComSpark has no way of knowing who we have on board without us explicitly telling them about it.”

“Alright,” the unicorn conceded reluctantly, though it was clear that she still wasn’t entirely convinced of the efficacy of his plan, and voiced another of her concerns, “but how exactly do you expect to convince her to let us turn in her Disciple ‘allies’?”

“We don’t tell her we will,” Slipshod replied simply, “you have a unique opportunity to double-dip here. Triple dip, even! We get the help of an experienced and competent ‘Steed pilot essentially for free for an indeterminate length of time. We get to collect a reward from the Disciples for returning their ‘princess’. And we can collect a bounty from ComSpark for telling them where the Disciples are hiding,” he smiled at the mare.

It stung a little to play her like this, the earth pony thought to himself. That was the trade-off for knowing her as well as he did: he knew how to get her to do what he wanted by appealing to her motivations. Made all the more uncomfortable by the fact that he had no intention of allowing her to capitalize on that last part. In order for he and Twilight to get their revenge on Chrysalis, they very much needed for the Disciples to remain unmolested by ComSpark.

Hopefully, by the time the issue came up again, he’d have been able to convince Squelch that Twilight was the real deal, and that she’d been telling the truth about what had happened five hundred years ago. Her and the rest of the company. Most of them were genuinely decent ponies―he knew that much after years spent with some of them―and so would probably be all for helping to dislodge the changelings once and for all. Those that weren’t quite so altruistically-minded...well, they’d go along with it anyway as long as their paychecks continued to clear.

That was what happened when you didn’t concern yourself with fostering a sense of loyalty and devotion among your ‘subjects’, Chrysalis was about to learn: it didn’t take much more than enough zeros at the end of a payout for creatures to turn on you.

Squelch hadn’t been lying earlier when she’d offered to get Twilight to Equus for a few million C-bits. Had the purple alicorn had the cash on her right then and there, the Galloway would be docked at a JumpShip right now making the trip―assuming that Twilight knew the coordinates for an arrival jump into the Faust System. Queen Twilight was little more than a concept for most ponies. She was the ruler of Equus and the controlling interest behind ComSpark. But that was it. Nopony swore any sort of fealty to her, not even the leaders of the major star nations. Who ruled in Canterlot didn’t matter to anypony, not really. So why not lead a revolt to dethrone her if the money was good enough to balance out the risk involved?

The only thing that kept that from happening at any given moment was the fact that no group existed that would bankroll such an operation. ComSpark certainly wasn’t going to foot that bill. Neither were any of the other major powers in the Harmony Sphere, by virtue of the fact that they were being either passively or actively influenced by Chrysalis’ agents. Which was probably why Chrysalis felt so secure, despite no creature in the galaxy being her "loyal subject"―or even knowing she existed: there was no power in the galaxy that could rival her without her either knowing about it, or already actively controlling it to some extent through her network of changeling agents embedded directly into their hierarchy.

At least, not yet...

Squelch was massaging her chin with her hoof as she pondered the proposal, looking for the downside that would sour the whole deal. While even Slipshod would acknowledge it was hardly the greatest C-bit-earning opportunity for their outfit, it also wasn’t a bad one. ‘Steed pilots―especially the good ones―weren’t cheap. Getting potentially months, if not years, of work out of the alicorn for next to nothing was quite the fiscal incentive. And if she really did turn out to be the real deal, and the Disciples were grateful enough to pay out a reward for her return, all the better. Especially considering that making contact with the Disciples would only entail doing what they would have done anyway: taking on contracts to intercept their raiding parties.

Minimal risk. Reduced costs. High potential payout. The holy trinity of the ‘perfect’ mercenary contract.

It looked like the company’s owner came to the same conclusion in the end, “alright. We’ll try it your way,” the unicorn finally added, “get her to give up a cache, and I’ll keep her onboard as a pilot. We’re not going to go Disciple-hunting right this minute,” she added sternly, “but that kind of work is inevitable, and I’ll keep an ear out for potential incursions.

“If she plays nice, we’ll see about letting her try to make contact with them,” it was pretty clear that Squelch was dubious that any such effort would prove fruitful, but it ultimately didn’t cost them anything to let Twilight make radio contact with a Disciple raiding party if they encountered one in the future. If it didn’t work, oh well. That was the alicorn’s problem more than it was theirs.

“Thanks,” Slipshod said with a smile, “I’ll give her the good news.”

“While you’re there, get her measurements too,” the stallion blinked in surprise. His boss glared at him briefly and added, “for her uniform, you letch. I’ll have some barding picked up for her on Canis.”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 8: Highlander Gambit

Slipshod nodded towards the armored pegasus stallion standing beside the door in the corridor, “hey, Flechette.”

“Sir,” came the curt reply. The prim and professional tone prompted an amused smirk from the golden earth pony. The feathered stallion was very ‘by the book’ while on duty, but that was in stark contrast to the sort of pony he was while out at the bar when they were planetside. Where he’d learned so many drinking games, Slipshod doubted he’d ever know.

He pressed the chime next to the door. A moment later, he heard a mare answer, “enter,” and so he did.

The purple alicorn was sitting at the room’s small desk―which was so minimal that it was honestly hardly worthy of the term―staring at the screen of the terminal mounted on it. She briefly glanced away to see who it was that had come to call on her. Slipshod didn’t miss the hardened glare that she briefly flashed at him before she looked away to resume her reading.

When the door closed behind him, she started speaking, “Chrysalis has been rather thorough,” the alicorn noted, gesturing a wingtip at the screen, “it’s rather surprising, honestly. I remember her being a lot more impulsive and short-sighted.”

Cautiously, the stallion looked to make sure that the door was really closed before responding, “yeah, well, you gave her a thousand years to come up with her plan. That’s a lot of time to consider every contingency.”

Twilight balked and turned once more to look at him, her eyes narrowed, “you know she was imprisoned?” he nodded. The mare jabbed a hoof at the screen, “this says it was only Tirek who was turned to stone.”

Again the earth pony―who only the two of them knew wasn’t really an earth pony―nodded in the affirmative, “we’re given the real history on Equus, along with the one that everycreature else is taught. Who else is the Queen supposed to boast to about ‘how she finally defeated every alicorn, once and for all!’?” his tone suggested that he was repeating an often-heard line of dialogue from his past―which he was.

Twilight snorted, “more cautious, but still as big a blowhard, I see.”

“That part’s probably only gotten worse since you last knew her,” Slipshod allowed, smiling thinly.

“...What happened to the other alicorns?” the purple mare asked cautiously, obviously dreading the possible answers that she could receive, “this says that Celestia and Luna died before I ascended. And that Cadence and Flurry Heart were killed by Tirek. I know that’s a lie, but...are they actually…?” her voice caught, unable to complete the question.

Slipshod spared her from having to, “dead?” he saw the fear in those amethyst eyes which had held little else but fire and fury nearly every other time she’d looked at him. It somehow made him feel more uncomfortable, “no,” he finally answered, watching Twilight let out a relieved breath, “they’re alive, but I don’t think that’s much consolation to any of them.

“Chrysalis delights in tormenting them. Daily. She reports the number of creatures who have died in the fighting in the Harmony Sphere to them every morning. She shows them vids of the battles. Especially any that involve a lot of collateral damage and civilian casualties.

“She won’t kill the three of them,” he assured her, “not anytime soon. The way Chrysalis sees it: she owes them at least another five hundred years of suffering, just to make things even between them.”

“Three?” Twilight latched onto the number, “who isn’t―”

“Flurry Heart,” Slipshod answered before her question finished. His mouth spread in a wry smile, “even the Queen doesn’t know what happened to her. The ‘real’ record shows that she did die,” the alicorn’s breath caught in her throat, “...but a body was never found.

“The Queen suspects that report was faked, but she never found any evidence one way or the other,” he shrugged.

“Could she be with the Disciples?” the princess asked hopefully.

Another shrug, “possible,” he admitted, “but even we don’t know that much for sure.”

She latched onto his wording, “but you do know something about the Disciples,” she prompted. The stallion nodded, “are they really the Ninth Force Recon?”

“That much I don’t know for sure,” he admitted to the mare, “I do know that some Celestia League Defense Force units went ‘missing’ shortly after the Queen replaced you. Around the same time that she started making waves with the rest of the League worlds that were petitioning for new leadership. There’s evidence that some units defected to the governments of those worlds.

“A few turned pirate, or just deserted altogether.

“The Disciples though,” he went on, “the Queen actually has a cocoon set aside, specially, for whoever’s leading them. They’ve been a particularly annoying thorn in her side.”

“How so?” Twilight asked, curious, “from everything I’ve read, they’re just raiding backwater planets. They hardly even seem to destroy much important infrastructure...”

That was true; on paper they actually appeared to look like something of a joke. The sort of group that any fresh merc pilot could cut their teeth on without being in much actual danger once they got used to the handling of their ‘Steed. That was the official impression cultivated by the media with the help of ComSpark. Of course, he knew better than most ponies how unreliable the ‘official’ anything could be in the Sphere...

“Registered infrastructure,” he corrected pointedly, smiling at the alicorn, “what the news doesn’t report is that the Disciples are hitting ComSpark comm arrays.”

“I’d think that the galaxy would notice a disruption in ComSpark’s ability to get message traffic across the Sphere,” Twilight pointed out.

“Oh, they’re not hitting the comm arrays that everypony knows about,” he corrected, “they’re hitting ComSpark’s other array network. The one that the Queen’s agents in the field use to coordinate their activities. We’re having to rebuild them constantly.”

“...I see,” the alicorn massaged her chin idly, considering the new information, “which suggests that even Chrysalis doesn’t quite have total control over all the information flowing around the Harmony Sphere. Somecreature has an intel network of their own; and they know the truth.

“Why don’t they come forward with what they know though…?” she mused aloud, looking over at the stallion to see if he could supply an answer, “they could reveal her agents, expose the changeling threat―”

“The galaxy considers them crazy terrorists,” Slipshod pointed out, “a fanatic cult that can’t be reasoned with. No respectable creature in the Sphere would listen to a thing they had to say, and reaching out just exposes their operatives to capture and interrogation by ComSpark.

“Any information they do manage to get out into an open network gets scrubbed by the Queen’s agents within minutes. Or, worse, repackaged as viral marketing for a new vid or even a game,” he snorted, sitting back on his haunches and waving his hooves in the air, “shape-shifting monsters have taken over the government...now it’s one mare’s job to uncover their plot and save the Federated Moons!” he parodied, as though performing a voice over for an advertisement, “‘Body Snatchers from Beyond the Periphery’! Coming to a vid screen near you, this fall!

“All star cast. Big budget,” the stallion continued, adopting his normal voice once again, “mixed reviews. Lackluster reception. Two sequels that the studio was contractually obligated to make―and it showed. Channel Lock and I did a marathon riff of the trilogy a few months back―Celestia was that third one horrendous! ‘Body Snatchers from Beyond the Beyond’? I mean, Really? Genuinely surprised they didn’t just purge the files once they were done filming and spare the galaxy from that travesty.

“Almost too bad to make fun of, believe it not.

“Poor Seabasket Weaver,” he shook his head, frowning in sympathy, “I hope she fired whatever agent roped her into that role. Nearly ruined her career,” he brightened up again, “thankfully she landed the lead in ‘A Song of Wendigos and Dragons’. Sent her right back to the top.

“Nice mare―great stamina,” Slipshod went on, ignoring the alicorn’s baffled raised eyebrows, “laughs off the Body Snatchers Trilogy at cons any time some troll tries to bring it up. I have a couple souvenirs from the con I attended earlier this year back in my quarters,” the stallion paused for a brief moment before adding, “well, technically she signed a photo and left…something else,” he cleared his throat and continued on, “my point is―”

“Oh, so there is one?”

The stallion rolled his eyes, but otherwise ignored the alicorn, “my point is,” he pressed on, “that between the dozens of movies like those, plus the shows, and novels, and whatever, any time a Disciple does manage to sneak a report of ‘changelings’ into a network on some planet and somecreature sees it before it gets scrubbed, anycreature who actually sees that report just assumes it’s another promotional piece for a reboot, or a teaser article, or a satire entertainment piece.

“Nopony actually takes it seriously,” the stallion shrugged, “then it’s gone five minutes later, and a million other articles about anything else going on in the Sphere take its place, and it’s forgotten in an hour.”

“So if there are movies about changelings, why didn’t anypony in the briefing recognize it when I used that word?” Twilight asked, mildly annoyed.

“We’re called: ‘Dopples’ in most mainstream media,” Slipshod said, “just adds another layer of obfuscation,” he added at the mare’s questioning look, “reports of ‘changelings’ end up sounding like off-brand ‘dopples’; which everypony already knows are ‘made up’, so it’s easier to think that ‘changelings’ are made up too, and just somecreature trying to capitalize on an existing franchise for a quick c-bit.

“Anyway, yeah; the Disciples know something’s up with the ‘Twilight’ on Equus. They are likely to be the closest things to allies that we’re going to find. It’s way too risky to approach any of the star nations or larger mercenary outfits for help. They’re saturated with changelings.”

“Perfect,” the princess said with a despondent sigh, suggesting that she did not, in fact, think it was ‘perfect’. Slipshod agreed, “and our chances of running into the Disciples are…?”

“I mean, the chances of coming across a Disciple raid eventually are pretty solid. ComSpark’s ‘unofficial’ network arrays are everywhere, pretty much. Hidden behind the name of some shell company or whatever. It’s just a matter of being in the right system at the right time.”

The alicorn let out a slow breath, slowly nodding her head, “...very well,” she looked back up at the stallion, “I assume that you’ve come here for a specific reason?”

“We’re dropping in thirty―” the stallion glanced at the chronometer on his fetlock’s computer, “―now twenty minutes,” Slipshod informed her, “we need to get down to the ‘Steed Bay for our pre-deployment checks.”

Twilight sighed and nodded, reaching over and turning off the terminal’s display. She rose up out of her seat, taking Slipshod by surprise a little as he was still trying to get used to how much taller the alicorn was than just about any other pony he’d even met. Hippogriffs were about her height, but he was rarely in their company either.

When the alicorn turned, her eyes caught a glimpse of the narrow window slit showing a view of the planet below. As part of the provisional deal that had been struck between her and Squelch, Twilight had been added to the company’s official roster as a ‘Steed pilot―though under a pseudonym, for obvious reasons. In exchange, ‘Purple Rose’ had provided the Steel Coursers with the coordinates of one of the Celestia League’s forward operating bases in the region. A little browsing of the records on Canis had confirmed that nothing was listed as being at those coordinates on any official records, so it was likely that the facility had been forgotten about over the centuries, and might still have a few goodies stored within.

That was going to be for Tig and her salvage team to discover though. The rest of the Galloway would be otherwise occupied doing the job that they were officially here to accomplish: Demolishing a firebase that was being set up by elements of the Aris Highlanders Mercenary Company. Prior to this mission, assaulting a purpose-built military installation of any sort, even something as lightly defended as a firebase, wouldn’t have been Squelch’s first choice of mission. A light and medium ‘Steed duo wasn’t exactly the ideal force for such an operation, after all.

However, it was the only job that was available in this system, and now the company had a heavier ‘Steed with a little more firepower. The Rainbow Dash still wasn’t as heavily loaded as it could have been, given the plenitude and size of the chassis’ available hardpoints. Unfortunately, the weapons that the Rainbow Dash was designed to wield weren’t cheap. It was at least respectably well armed for its tonnage at the moment, though, and by far the heaviest-hitting BattleSteed of the three that they had.

If the salvage operation went well―and assuming they kept the repair bill conservative―then they should come away from this mission with the finances necessary to complete the Rainbow Dash’s rearmament, and maybe even be able to spring for a few upgrades for Slipshod and Vals’ own ‘Steeds.

This wasn’t a fact that had gone unremarked upon by anypony on the crew, unfortunately. After all, Slipshod was known to be liked by everypony; so then why was the new mare giving him the stink-eye? For the moment, it was just a fascinating little kernel of speculation for the members of the Galloway’s crew who cared about such things. As long as it didn’t venture beyond that it shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Ultimately though, Slipshod didn’t need Twilight to like him―though that would have been preferable, yes―he just needed her to not kill him. That was a low enough bar that it shouldn’t present much of an issue.

He hoped.

“I’ve been to Kenway once before,” Twilight announced, “on the anniversary of the founding of its first settlement. I made a point of doing that: visiting every new world that creatures settled. I wanted to let them know that, even though they were lightyears away from Equus, that they were still important to me. That they were still friends.

“I arrived wearing my regalia that first time.”

She looked down at the armored barding that she was wearing now. It had been something of a chore to locate a set in her size, and even then significant tailoring had been required after the fact, “now I return dressed for battle,” her words dripped with bitterness and revulsion. Another glare was cast in Slipshod’s direction, as though he alone was to blame for these circumstances.

The earth pony winced reflexively. For a brief moment, he even did feel like he bore at least some of the responsibility. After all, it was the changeling queen―his nominal master―who had been keeping the embers of war stoked these last few centuries, “‘battle’ is hopefully a strong word for what’ll happen down there. If thing’s go well, the fight should be over in about fifteen minutes. The Aris Highlander forces shouldn’t have had time to dig in and…” Slipshod’s words choked off beneath the alicorn’s withering stare. He swallowed and nodded silently.

“If your Commander Squelch thinks that I will kill hippogriffs, then I hope that she is prepared to be sorely disappointed.”

Slipshod frowned, “well, they’re going to be trying to kill you, princess.”

“They can try,” was her dismissive reply. Whether it was borne out of faith in her abilities, or the quality of her ‘Steed, the stallion didn’t know, “their choices will not affect my own.”

“Most ‘Steed pilots eject before their core breaches,” he pointed out helpfully, “as long as you don’t crack their cockpit, I doubt you’d actually kill anycreature out there by downing their ‘Steed.”

“It is ridiculous that there should even be the risk of doing so!” Twilight snapped, “why does your commander even care that the hippogriffs have set up a military outpost on this world? What is accomplished by dismantling it?”

“Honestly? Squelch doesn’t care. Nopony on this ship does,” he said with a shrug, noting the alicorn’s incredulous sneer and finding himself wincing again beneath it. Maybe it was an inherent alicorn ‘thing’ to make other ponies feel like misbehaving foals, “we were hired to do a job. It’s nothing personal.

“The Combine wants a base on this planet, and the Commonwealth prefers they don’t have one. The latter offered C-bits to fight the former. We need C-bits, so we’re going to do it,” he shrugged, “no malice. No personal investment. Just...business.”

“And that makes it better?”

“It makes it...what it is,” the earth pony sighed anemically, “that’s just how the galaxy works now, Princess. Everycreature just sort of lives in it.

“If you want to hate somecreature, then you know who’s ultimately to blame for this: Chrysalis. Her agents keep the factions fighting.”

“I still don’t quite understand why that is the case,” the alicorn murmured, looking back to the window once more, “how does the constant conflict benefit her?”

“If everycreature’s fighting, then they’re not cooperating,” Slipshod pointed out, flinching internally at how obvious it sounded, and so amended it with, “which means that Chrysalis doesn’t have to worry about any sort of coordinated effort that might contest anything she does. The perpetual need for competent BattleSteed pilots also means that there’s a constant supply of creatures delivering themselves to the hive on Equus to be...um…” he petered off, stumbling for how to phrase it such that Twilight didn’t feel compelled to question her decision to spare his life in the face of what he was.

“...How likely is it that the ‘Steed pilots we’ll be facing are also changelings?”

“I mean, obviously not every ‘Steed pilot’s a changeling,” Slipshod said, grateful for even the slight shift in topic, “but the academies on Equus are genuinely some of the best in the galaxy, overall. Whoever’s in charge down there probably went to a good academy, so they might be one…” he shrugged, genuinely sorry that he couldn’t be more definitive, “every drone’s not exactly given a comprehensive list of who is and isn’t one of the Queen’s operatives.” That’d be quite a long list anyway.

“A vast operation like that would require a substantial communication’s network,” the purple mare remarked, casting an askance view at the earth pony, “which is why ComSpark is running that secondary secret array you mentioned earlier?”

“Pretty much,” he confirmed.

The alicorn merely grunted and said nothing more on the subject. She continued to stare out the small window. Slipshod idly wondered if the mare was going to refuse to leave her quarters. He wasn’t precisely sure what the response to doing that would be. Probably, Squelch would just have him take the Rainbow Dash instead and hope that two ‘Steeds would be able to do the job.

Fortunately, it didn’t look like they’d have to seriously consider any contingencies. This time, anyway. Twilight spent a few more seconds looking down at the world, wearing an expression that spoke to her distress at the current state of the galaxy and its denizens. Then she turned away and headed for the door, her magic collecting her helmet on her way out. Slipshod fell into step behind her.

Flechette trailed them all the way to the ‘Steed Bay.

Valkyrie was already climbing into her Parasprite when the trio arrived. Slipshod broke off down the gangway leading to his Wild Bronco, though he did take a moment to admire the work that Mig and Tig had done on Twilight’s heavy ‘Steed before descending through the hatch. The pair of kirin had relished the opportunity to restore such a rare BattleSteed, and their doting showed itself readily. They’d polished and painted every piece of ablative armor until it shown like new, even going so far as to give the heavy ‘Steed it’s iconic cerulean coloriation and chromatic highlights.

If Slipshod hadn’t known any better, he’d have sworn it rolled right off the assembly line that day.

He idly wondered what he’d have to do to get the twins to give his ‘Steed that kind of attention…

Indeed, the only detractors from its appearance was the fact that its armament was lacking. Where there should have been a pair of Prismatic Projector Cannons hanging from pylons beneath each of the canards, were mere heavy energy beams. Similarly, only five-pack long range missile pods lay tucked behind its shoulders, where mountings capable of fitting much larger twenty-counts were present. Though the greatest disservice was perhaps the machinegun barrel poking mekely out of the center of the ‘Steed’s chest, where it was obvious a much larger weapon was intended to be accommodated. An autocannon type-ten, the stallion believed.

Still, it was a weapons compliment that far exceeded his own. His and Val’s combined, honestly. That―hypothetically―counted for a lot. Assuming that the princess could bring herself to actually pull the trigger at any point during the fight…

He paused, noting that Twilight herself had come to a stop at the entrance to the gangway leading to her ‘Steed. She was admiring the mechanical equine―no...that wasn’t quite it, the stallion realized. It wasn’t admiration on her face, it was...regret.

“Once upon a time, these were the only ‘Steeds designed for war,” the alicorn said, ostensibly to Slipshod since he was the only pony close enough to her to have been heard over the din of the ‘Steed bay, “all the others were conversions of industrial models.

“When Tirek was defeated, I had all the other surviving Rainbow Dashes decommissioned,” she continued soberly, “in the hopes that it would help the galaxy to heal―to go back to how it had been...but it didn’t.

“...these were never intended to be turned against my subjects. My friends.”

There was a resignation in her voice, a despairing tone which suggested that the reality of the state of the galaxy was finally setting in for her. Twilight had only known a united Harmony Sphere under the Celestia League, where every citizen cooperated and got along. Now the galaxy was at war with itself, and she was about to experience it first hoof.

He sincerely hoped that her stated reluctance to kill didn’t become an issue. Well...at least an issue for him. The stallion very much doubted that Twilight was going to let Valkyrie die to satisfy her conscience. She certainly wasn’t likely to do much that would directly save his life, of that he was confident.

For a not so brief moment, the stallion debated calling up Squelch and voicing his concern. He was prepared to face being called out for his hypocrisy―after all, he’d been the one who’d pushed for Twilight’s inclusion in the operation. But he was dubious about how likely they could accomplish the mission with just the Rainbow Dash and the Parasprite. Even if Twilight wasn’t keen on shooting at their enemy, there was no doubt that the Aris Highlander mercenaries down there would recognize the heavy ‘Steed as the more pressing threat and focus the majority of their attention on it.

If all that Twilight managed to accomplish was to draw enemy fire for a time, then that might actually be all that was needed, and definitely made success far more likely than him being both the primary target of the enemy’s fire, as well as the majority of his side’s own offensive capability.

For better or worse, they were probably better off with Twilight in the Rainbow Dash, even if she never fired a shot. Whatever questions that Val and Squelch had for the alicorn about her performance upon their return...well, he’d worry about defusing that situation when it came up. First, he had to focus on living through the afternoon.

“Before there were ‘Steeds, there were spears,” Slipshod finally said in response to the princess’ words, drawing the attention of the alicorn, “do you ever wonder if the creature that first invented those did so for the purpose of waging wars, or do you think that they were created to protect others from dangerous monsters; and that later the invention was co-opted for killing other beings?” the purple mare lowered her gaze in thought for a moment.

“You don’t get to control how creatures use the tools you give them, Princess” the earth pony shrugged before trotting to the cockpit of his ‘Steed and climbing up the side, “doing that would be called: ‘tyranny’.”

The earth pony stallion finally slipped into his ‘Steed and started going through the pre-deployment checklist. He took a moment to marvel at the quality job that the twins had done at repairing the damage that had been inflicted during his last outing. Though the pristine nature of the new paneling made it easy to spot what had been replaced. Hopefully there would be no need for the kirin mechanics to swap out the remainder of the control surfaces after this mission.

Through the window of his cockpit he saw the alicorn princess finally closing the hatch of her own ‘Steed as well. She didn’t like fighting. He understood that. However, he hoped that she understood that a lot of fighting was going to be required in the future if she really wanted to undo the damage that Chrysalis had inflicted upon the galaxy.

Things were going to get a lot worse before they could start to get any better.

He had just finished checking the last of the Wild Bronco’s systems when his headset crackled with static and Squelch’s voice made an announcement, “all pilots: atmo in five minutes. ETA to drop site: nine minutes, thirty seconds.”

The earth pony felt himself tense up reflexively at the news. His earlier concerns about the quality of Twilight’s participation in the mission weren’t helping matters any. The opposition that they were going to be facing wouldn’t be all that much, relatively speaking: a few static defenses, screening vehicles, maybe some missile carriers―for which Slipshod was grateful to now have an LRM of his own to counter with. Their primary concern would be the ‘Steeds present at the firebase. Which the intel they had purported to be two light and two medium tonnage ‘Steeds. They were technically outnumbered in this fight, ‘Steed-wise, but their fielded tonnage with the Rainbow Dash should put them within ten tons at the most.

Not that going into a ‘fair fight’ was an ideal situation as far as most mercenaries were concerned―or most military-minded individuals in general. Why give the enemy a fighting chance, when you could overwhelm them instead?

Unfortunately, this was the mission that was available to them, so this was the battle that they were going to have to fight.

Slipshod’s piloting couch began to vibrate as the Galloway made contact with the planet’s atmosphere. He took a deep breath to soothe his nerves. He just had to trust that Twilight would be willing to make good use of her ‘Steed. For her’s and Val’s sake, if not his own. After all, she couldn’t save the galaxy from Chrysalis if she was dead, right?

“I have eyes on the objective,” Valkyrie’s voice crackled over the comm.

The DropShip had seen fit to deposit the trio far outside of whatever radar array the firebase was likely to field, leaving the ‘Steed pilots with a lengthy jog to their destination. The blue pegasus’ light recon ‘Steed had assumed a distant point position, taking advantage of her sensor suite and low visual profile to avoid contact with any early warning systems and even found a few holes in the Highlanders’ own sensor net. Fortunately for them, the newness of the firebase meant that they were still in the midst of building up those early-warning stations, and so they didn’t yet have complete coverage.

Valkyrie had managed to guide them to within a few kilometers of the base’s perimeter, and was now perched just on the other side of a rocky mountaintop that permitted her a clear look at their target, “pretty typical layout,” she relayed to the pair of waiting pilots, “four medium magical energy turrets. Six Scorpion Tanks. Two Strikers. Four ‘Steed Stalls.

“I only have IDs on three of the ‘Steeds though. Fourth Stall’s closed up. But what I do have eyes on is a Breezy, a Pipsqueak, and a Blackjenny.”

“Two lights and a medium,” Slipshod noted rhetorically. Valkyrie well knew the tonnages of those ‘Steeds. Twilight might not though. The stallion wasn’t positive on the dates that all of those designs had been fielded, and which ones might have been developed after she’d gone into stasis, “everything’s matching up with the intel brief so far. The closed Stall is likely a medium that’s being worked on. Which means that they might even be down a ‘Steed, depending on how far they’ve disassembled it.”

He paused now, considering the rest of the forces present. The turrets didn’t bother him too much. Most of their weapons vastly outranged the static emplacements and thus they could be taken out without any difficulty at any time during the fight. The tanks concerned him a little more. Those autocannon type-fives fired out further than their own heavy energy weapons, and could fire more frequently. The only real downside was the fact that it was a projectile weapon, and would need to lead its targets in order to score hits. All three of them were capable of moving pretty quickly, so as long as they kept moving, they shouldn’t be knocked around too badly before being able to deal with the tracked vehicles.

The Strikers were honestly the bigger threat with their LRMs. They’d need to go first. Once those missile platforms were gone, then the three of them would be able to move around the battlefield with relative impunity, Slipshod and Twilight raining missiles down onto everything until the Highlanders managed to get their pilots into their mechs.

Even then, he wasn’t worried much about the Breezy, with it’s quartet of machine guns, or even the Pipsqueak, despite its twin six-pack SRMs. It was the Blackjenny that had him concerned. If it was armed the way that they typically were, that forty-five ton ‘Steed arguably packed more firepower than his Bronco and Twilight’s Rainbow Dash combined, at the moment. It’s armor was significantly lighter than even his own ‘Steeds’, so it wouldn’t be able to take a serious pounding; but it would be able to do a lot of damage for as long as it was up.

Slipshod really hoped that that second medium ‘Steed wasn’t functional.

“We’ll start hitting them from here,” the golden earth pony began, laying out their plan of attack now that they knew precisely what they were up against, “we have LRMs, and Val’s sensors’ll let us get locks from defilade,” no sense in exposing themselves to enemy fire when they didn’t have to. It might even take the base’s defenders a volley or two to figure out where exactly they were being attacked from, “Twilight, you prioritize the turrets,” the alicorn shouldn’t have any qualms about destroying the unmared automated defenses, “I’ll focus on the Strikers.

“It’ll take a few minutes for their pilots to even get to their ‘Steeds, so once the turrets are down, Twilight, I want you to start hitting those,” can’t kill ‘Steed pilots if there’re no pilots in the ‘Steeds, “I’ll work on the Scorpions.

“Val, you stay down until they come out to engage us. Once we’ve got whatever’s left of their defenders occupied, move in and wreck the firebase and get out, got it?

“Remember, that’s the objective: the firebase,” he stressed to the mares, “no support facilities for their ‘Steeds means no useful ‘Steeds at all. They’ll be forced to pull back off-planet until a new one can be set up, and that’s all our employer wants. Once the firebase is leveled, we can withdraw and call Squelch in for an extraction. Understood?”

“Roger,” Valkyrie replied. If she was unhappy about being kept from direct engagement with the enemy, the stallion couldn’t hear it in her voice.

“The plan is...agreeable,” came the alicorn’s more reluctant response.

If she didn’t want to kill creatures, that was fine. As long as she helped, that was all that Slipshod really cared about.

“Alright then,” the earth pony moved his hooves around his control yokes as he selected the Wild Bronco’s new LRM launcher, “select you targets and fire at will.”

“You know,” the lilac hippogriff hen sighed as she held up a piece of what the cafeteria’s server had insisted was ‘cod’, but appeared to have the consistency of undercooked calamari, “one of the benefits of planetside duties is supposed to be that we eat better than we did on the DropShip,” she let the piece of flesh flop unceremoniously back onto her tray.

The cinnamon tiercel sitting across from her smiled around a mouthful of his own burger, “I told you to avoid the fish,” he chided playfully despite his full mouth. His lack of manners earned him a glare from his comrade, so he made a point to swallow what he had before continuing, “it’s exactly like what’s on the DropShip because it is what was on the DropShip,” he pointed out, “they just finished up the landing pad a week ago. The first ship carrying our foodstuffs won’t be in for another three days.”

The hen let out a defeated sigh and pushed her tray away, slumping morosely onto the table, “I should have brought my fishing gear,” she whined, “the perimeter crews said there was a river just five minutes' flight from here. I could have had all the fresh fish I wanted. Instead of...that,” she pointed an accruing talon at the contents of her tray.

Her partner chuckled and proceeded to take another bite of his burger. Beef seemed to hold up better to long-term storage aboard ships, so an experienced ‘Steed pilot like himself knew what to get when making his way down the chow line.

Just as he was about to clamp down on his meal, the building rumbled. It was only a slight tremor, doing little more than rattling the silverware on the table. However, it was enough of a shake to instantly silence every bit of idle conversation that had been going on in the dining area. Every head, beaked and muzzled, was perked up, everycreature looking around as though one of them had the answer to the question on all of their minds.

A question that the hen voiced, “what was that? Earthquake?”

The red-hued hippogriff dropped his burger and stood up, shaking his head, “too short to have been a quake, and I’m pretty sure I heard―” his words were cut off as a second tremor pulsed through the cafeteria, this one more significant than the first, and accompanied by a thunderous chorus of explosions. He was about to yell out when a much larger explosion followed a second later, on the hooves of the first. This blast was big enough to shatter the dining area’s windows, pelting those seated near the walls with shards of glass.

The pair of hippogriffs instinctively ducked, despite being far enough towards the room’s interior to be relatively safe from the debris. He finally found time to get out his warning, “we’re under attack!” he informed her. As though it had been waiting for his own assessment, the base’s sirens finally began to sound the alarm, their long, drawn out, howl cutting through the renewed―and much more energetic―verbal din of the now former diners. Creatures were darting for the exits in droves as they sought to get to their posts to repel the surprise attack.

“I thought we had an early-warning system!” the pink-hued hen protested as she hastily buttoned up her armor and grabbed for her helmet. Her companion was doing the same, the pair zipping for the exit that was nearest to the ‘Steed stalls, “we should have known somecreature was coming an hour ago!”

“They’re still setting it up,” the tiercel replied grimly, silently echoing her sentiment in his head, “apparently there’re a few holes,” his words dripped with contempt for the nameless individuals whose job it was to ensure such flaws weren’t present. Not that it was necessarily anycreature’s fault, he was forced to concede. The sensor net wasn’t done being built. Such things took time, and not enough had passed. If whoever these attackers were had waited another few days, it would have been a different story.

As it was…

“Just get to your ‘Steed!” he yelled back at her over his shoulder as the pair burst outside. A third explosion caught their attention and they whipped their heads to the right just in time to watch the small ploom of smoke rising up from where a defensive turret had once stood. The red tiercel whirled around to look in the direction of the motorpool and grimaced. One of the Strikers was already a flaming wreck―likely the blast that had shattered the windows of the cafeteria―which meant that they’d lost half of their ability to respond in kind to what had to be a missile barrage. Not that the other Striker was going to be doing them a lot of good without something out there to give them a target lock on whatever was bombarding them.

The missile carrier’s crew was at least currently clambering to get inside and power the vehicle up so that it could respond when the time came―

He saw the salvo arcing through the air. Five trails of gray smoke tracing their way through the air, diving in towards the firebase in a tight formation. The moment he spotted them, he knew what their target would be. And it didn’t matter. He didn’t have time to call out a warning. He was too far away to have been heard over the din of the klaxons. None of those in danger would have been able to react in time anyway.

All that he could do was look on, his face etched with grim lines, as those five missiles landed directly on top of the stationary remaining Striker. They were well armored enough to be able to take a hit or two, depending on where that hit came from, but they weren’t a ‘line unit’. They were artillery. Designed to hit from afar, and avoid direct engagement. They didn’t have a lot of armor.

Their crews had even less. Especially when they were still standing outside of the armored cab, exposed.

When the smoke cleared, the Striker was still standing, but none of the creatures who’d been galloping towards it were. Tendrils of smoke were wafting up from the vehicle. Somecreature must have seen something he couldn’t from where he was, because a couple of ponies and a hippogriff were grabbing up fire extinguishers and running towards the Striker. It carried quite a bit in the way of munitions onboard. If they blew…

That wasn’t his problem. Containing those fires wasn’t his job.

Getting to his ‘Steed and stopping whoever it was out there from killing any more of his comrades, that was.

The tiercel pulled on his helmet, angled himself towards the Stall where his ‘Steed was berthed, and winged his way there as quickly as he could. The ground crews flying and galloping around could have been mistaken for panicking to the untrained eye, but the hippogriff knew that every one of those movements had a purpose. These creatures had drilled more than once on exactly how to get a ‘Steed from inert to combat-ready in mere minutes.

In this specific case, those crews had a little bit more working against them than just a lack of adequate warning. The last components for his new ‘Steed had only arrived two days ago. In fact, he was informed that it had only just been completed last night. Today was supposed to have been dedicated to diagnostics and testing to make certain that everything was working as advertised. He hadn’t even been able to start it up yet!

Taking it into battle after powering up a ‘Steed for its first time was not what any pilot would consider an ‘ideal’ shakedown run; but it was what he was left with. Idly, the tiercel wondered if dismantling the Flash Sentry had been a good idea after all.

Not there was any helping it now.

He flew into the closed off ‘Steed Stall and arced towards the cockpit. Technicians were hastily disconnecting computer terminals and diagnostic equipment. The pilot received a talons-up from the chief mechanic, signalling that she―at least―was confident that everything was ready to be powered up and taken into battle. That was good enough for him.

He darted into the cockpit. Slapping the controls that would lower and seal the hatch on his way by. Clawtips danced over controls, powering up the ‘Steed’s various systems even as he set himself down in the piloting couch. All around him, lights blinked to life, and the cockpit’s interior began to hum with the sounds of activity from deep within his ‘Steed. Within seconds, the monotone voice of the computer systems announced that his brand new Queen Novo, and all of its very lethal heavy magical energy beams and prismatic projector cannons, were ready to go into battle.

The corners of the tiercel’s beak spread into a murderous grin, “come and get some, you fuckers!”

“The light ‘Steeds are coming your way,” came Valkyrie’s warning over the radio.

Slipshod’s eyes darted to his map display as he confirmed the pair of red blips leaving the firebase at a speed far greater than any of the remaining tanks could have managed. According to the pegasus, he’d dissabled the Strikers and two of the Scorpions, and Twilight had made short work of the turrets and even landed a few hits on the Blackjenny before it had powered up and started moving. She’d ceased firing on it the moment that it had powered up, much to the stallion’s chagrin, but at least she’d hurt it. That should reduce the work he needed to do somewhat.

Briefly, the earth pony debating between advancing and remaining where he was. He had time enough yet to rain a couple more volleys on the approaching ‘Steeds before they found him. Ultimately though, he was better served being mobile and up to speed by the time those lighter units engaged. Speed was their primary asset, and it was in his best interest to not be stationary when they first made contact with him. It was going to be rough enough being outnumbered.

“Moving in,” he announced, his hind hooves pushing down hard on the throttle pedals, “once that Blackjenny’s clear of the firebase, move in and start wrecking shop. Start with the Stalls and command center.”

“Understood,” the mare replied.

Slipshod glanced over his shoulder at the display screen linked to the external camera showing his right flank and the stationary Rainbow Dash that was there, “and feel free to join in whenever you want, Princess,” he offered in a sardonic tone, not actually believing that the alicorn would, “you came all this way; no reason I should have all the fun,” and with that parting quip, the stallion focused his sight ahead once more, locking his targeting computer onto the Pipsqueak and its twin SRMs.

In no time at all, his Wild Bronco was up to a gallop as he and the pair of light ‘Steeds engaged in a faux joust. He idly lobbed a volley of missiles at the fast-moving target, not really seeing a reason not to at least attempt to land a hit with his missiles. Though the probability of it happening was rather low, given the size and speed of his target.

His heavy energy beam was another matter though. The sapphire lance of light bridged the distance between them in an instant and carved deep into the left shoulder of the oncoming ‘Steed. The missile launcher sequestered there evaporated beneath the onslaught of potent energy and detonated, staggering the slightly-built equine frame. It kept on coming though, soon getting back up to its full speed.

Slipshod barely registered that the Breezy was breaking off to his left. He’d known before throttling up that it would be impossible to keep both light ‘Steeds in front of him, so he wasn’t going to try. His goal right now was to focus on one, down it as quickly as possible, and then deal with the other. Hopefully he could take them both out of the fight before the Blackjenny arrived. Two opponents were bad enough. Three would be the next best thing to impossible for him to deal with in the Bronco.

A quartet of muzzle-flashes flickered off to the side of his cockpit’s window as the Breezy’s pilot opened fire with its machineguns. What sounded almost like the muffled pattering of a tropical storm filled his cockpit as the streams of rounds impacted his ‘Steeds armor. They weren’t much of a concern right now, and both he and the Breezy’s pilot knew that. However, given enough time, they could eventually become a concern. Slipshod just had to make sure that he didn’t allow that much time to lapse.

Of greater immediate concern were the trails of missile exhaust that he saw streaking towards him. Slipshod tensed up, bracing as the sextet of ordnance detonated along his torso and forelegs. His eyes darted briefly to his integrity displays, which assured him that the hits had been spread out and only inflicted superficial damage. They also informed him that the Breezy’s hits were speckling his Bronco’s left flank now.

The earth pony selected the medium energy cannon which had been swapped in to replace the pair of small lasers that he’d lost in his last fight back on Lupin, and teased the reticle onto the Pipsqueak’s left shoulder once more. The emerald beam drifted slightly to the right, and missed digging deeper into the light ‘Steeds internals. However, it did manage to clip the limb’s joint enough to stagger the smaller mechanical equine once more. Slipshod seized upon the opening and kicked back with his hind legs on the throttle pedals even as his forehooves thrust forward on the control yokes.

The Wild Bronco leaped forward into the air, arcing up and forwards, as though aided by jump jets. However, this was no flight-assist. This was merely the feature which earned the ‘Steed its name. Long ago, in an age before combat was undertaken by pilots encased in steel quadrupeds, ‘Steeds had been designed, built, and operated by mining and construction outfits. To that end, they had needed to be able to navigate terrain which had previously not been developed. Terrain which included steep hills, mountains, and even small cliffs and fissures. The Wild Bronco traced its lineage to just such construction vehicles. In the interests of streamlining the shift from WorkSteeds to BattleSteeds, the designers had changed as little as they could about the Wild Bronco’s utilitarian design so that costs could be kept low and downtime to a minimum during the retooling of the factories.

As such, the ‘Steed’s ability to leap up small cliffs or across narrow ravines had been retained, though the need for the additional myomer musculature to pull off these feats had meant a reduced capacity to support weaponry.

Slipshod idly wondered if the Pipsqueak’s pilot had known about that feature of the medium ‘Steed, as the Bronco began to arc back downward. Doubtful, otherwise they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to get this close.

Fifty tons of leaping metal equine came down upon the smoldering joint on the Pipsqueak’s left side. The frame of the lighter ‘Steed had never been intended to support anywhere near that kind of weight, and sheared off nearly instantly. Had that been the end of it, the lighter machine might still yet have survived the encounter. However, while the Wild Bronco might now be back on the ground, its forward motion hadn’t abated in the slightest.

Raw physics worked against the Pipsqueak now, as fifty tons of Wild Bronco met thirty tons of crippled light ‘Steed. It was a foregone conclusion that the former would lose out in the altercation. Slipshod lurched forward on his couch, the restraints biting into the shoulder pads of his armor, as his ‘Steed was suddenly slowed by the collision. However, he was certainly not stopped by it. Through the window of his cockpit, the earth pony saw the frail little ‘Steed he’d just bowled over tumble across the ground in front of him, wiping out several hoofball fields worth of vegetation as it went. Another limb came off in the fracas, twisting out of its socket and sailing heedlessly into the air.

It was decidedly out of the fight now―

Something more serious must have come apart deep with the bowels of the Pipsqueak, Slipshod supposed, as the light ‘Steed’s midsection began to crackle with purple light before it had even come to a complete stop. The earth pony’s eyes locked onto the cockpit, his lips pulled into a tight line as he recognized that―assuming the pilot was even still conscious after a fall like that―there was little chance that the ejection system would even function if it was pointed in any direction but ‘up’. He idly hoped that the pilot was unaware of what was happening as the ‘Steed vanished within the violently crackling magical fire of a reactor breach.

One down, he supposed.

The stallion tightened his grip around the control yokes and heaved his Wild Bronco around to confront the Breezy.

“Novo! Queen Novo!” Valkyrie’s voice crackled suddenly, and loudly, across the stallion’s headset, “the forth ‘Steed is a Queen Novo!”

Slipshod jerked up in his couch and looked towards the firebase, “What―”

“―in the―?!”

The sound of the hippogriff hen’s voice cut off suddenly. The cinnamon tiercel’s gut tied itself into a knot as he mentally lambasted the Stall’s doors for their lethargic pace. It was taking them longer to open than it had for his ‘Steed to start up, for egg’s sake!

Though the opening was wide enough for him to catch sight of the violet fireball that blossomed into existence a kilometer away. His eyes darted up to the readout which displayed his lancemates and their respective conditions. One of the names was blacked out, indicating a loss of contact with that ‘Steed’s transponder.

He reached out and selected that specific channel, “Flight Three, what’s your condition?” he paused, his chest growing tighter with every fraction of a second that went by without a response, “Flight Three―Gulfsteam―respond!”

Silence.

The tiercel snarled and switched back over to the lance-wide channel, “does anycreature have eyes on Flight Three? Did she eject?!”

“Negative,” came a mare’s grim response a second later, “repeat: negative on ejection for Flight Three.”

The roar that escaped the hippogriff was primal.

The first victims of his fury were the Stall’s doors, who paid the ultimate price for their lack of haste as his heavy ‘Steed launched through them, ripping the multi-ton portal coverings from their mounts and sending them crashing to the ground below. Creatures screamed and scattered as they sought to escape from the tumbling wreckage left in the heavy ‘Steed’s wake.

The tiercel intended to reduce the ‘Steed of whomever had slain his lancemate to a similar state.

The most forward of the two visible enemy targets, as well as the one nearest the last known location of Gulfstream’s ‘Steed, was the Wild Bronco. He targeted the ‘Steed. His talons flicked through the firing controls on his yokes, pelting a steady stream of alternating indigo and chromatic light at the medium-tonnage mechanical equine. Even the Queen Novo’s plentitude of heatsinks wouldn’t allow him to maintain such a continuous barrage of destructive fire for long before the safeties triggered a shutdown of the reactor to keep it from going critical.

But it would be long enough to melt down the pilot who’d just killed his wife.

Slipshod had just enough time to process Valkyrie’s warning by the time the first column of coherent blue light struck the side of his ‘Steed. The cockpit lurched and the armor integrity indicator flashed. His mind raced with a series of images from his last confrontation. The earth pony didn’t want a repeat of that. Even if he survived the battle, he very much doubted that he’d live through whatever Squelch might do to him if he trashed his ‘Steed for a second time in a month.

He throttled up to the ‘Steed’s maximum speed. He didn’t have a destination in mind yet. He just knew that he needed to be moving as much as possible in order to make himself a more difficult target for whoever was shooting at him.

He suspected that it was the Queen Novo which the pegasus had just informed him about. This complicated matters. Significantly.

With the Pipsqueak out of the fight, ton-for-ton, their forces were on approximately even footing. At least on paper. Unfortunately for him, their heavy ‘Steed wasn’t likely to contribute as much to the engagement as the enemy’s was. Which was going to leave him and Valkyrie to fight all three of the remaining ‘Steeds and whatever Scorpions were still operational. The Breezy would be easy enough to deal with, provided he was willing to get battered around by the Queen Novo for a minute or two while he focused on the lighter menace. The Blackjenny was another matter―

Speaking of which, where was that Blackjenny?

Slipshod had only just glanced down at the map display on his console when he received his answer over the radio, “shit, they found me!” Valkyrie announced, “evading!”

The stallion grimaced. She was right to pull back. She was outmassed, outranged, and outgunned by the medium ‘Steed, and he was in no position to support her at the moment.

Of course, now their whole plan was effectively shot to shit. Neither he, nor Val, were going to be able to get to the firebase and wreck enough of the infrastructure to render it useless. The mission was a wash. Honestly, the smart thing for them to do now was withdraw and call for an extraction. Squelch was going to bite his head off over the penalty their employer would levy against the company for failing to fulfill the contract, but there was still a chance that whatever Tig salvaged from the Celestia League base would keep them in the black for this trip.

Right now, the best thing he could do was to limit the repair bill for their ‘Steeds.

“Gallop One to Gallop Lance: pull back. I say again: Pull. Back. Make for Nav Omega at best speed,” he swapped over to the comm channel for the DropShip, “Galloway, Gallop One. Set condition: Black.”

A second later he received a response from the orbiting DropShip’s on-duty communications tech, “Galloway copies Condition Black. ETA for pickup: five minutes.” the mic for the operator cut out, but not before the earth pony was able to catch the sound of a mare cursing in the background.

Well, that part was done. Now all he had to do was live long enough to reach the rendezvous. Which would be immeasurably easier without that Breezy eroding his armor while it circled him. The Wild Bronco faltered slightly for a brief moment. Slipshod learned the likely reason for the stuttered movement a second later as a sapphire beam flashed past his cockpit window from behind. The sensors nestled in his ‘Steed’s right hind leg informed him that the armor there had been significantly damaged by the hit.

He yanked on the control yokes and heaved the Wild Bronco hard to the left. A second later, a helix of rainbow light punched through the air where his ‘Steed had just been and impacted on the ground a few hundred meters away. An expanding field of shimmering multicolored light enveloped the area, its edges just barely touching his flank. Even that slight brush with the crackling energy field caused the readouts on his cockpit’s heads-up-display to waiver for a second. A direct hit from one of those Prismatic Projector Cannons was certainly something to avoid, Slipshod concluded.

The stallion snapped off a shot with his medium energy cannon at the Breezy, but knew even as he did so that it would only be a glancing hit. The reminder that his Wild Bronco had bigger guns than the lighter ‘Steed, and that the gangly mechanical equine carried less ablative plating than was present in one of his legs at least convinced the Breezy’s pilot to break off its attack for a moment while it repositioned itself out of Slipshod’s line of fire. It would only be a brief respite, but he’d take any amount of time that he could get.

Distant bars of emerald light and muzzle flashes drew the earth pony’s eyes to where Valkyrie was currently attempting to outrun the Blackjenny. He briefly spied the bulbous bipedal ‘Steed as it bobbed through the trees. One of her radar dishes was missing, a few tendrils of smoke trailing from the Parasprite’s backside where a hit from the medium ‘Steed had blasted it off. Valkyrie was much quicker and more agile than the pilot chasing her, and was already outside of the effective range at which medium energy weapons could do meaningful damage. If she could survive long enough to get out of the much longer range of the Blackjenny’s autocannon type-twos, she’d be just fine.

Slipshod was going to have a much tougher go of things. The Queen Novo’s weapons complement were all weapons which possessed significant effective ranges. The PPCs especially so; and his speed advantage was marginal, at best. He certainly wasn’t going to be able to outrun the Breezy. However, hopefully that annoying gnat of a ‘Steed would break off once it realized it was too far away from its cohorts to be properly supported by them.

The Wild Bronco lurched again. His left side flashed red, an audible alert warning him that little remained of the ablative armor there to ward off future direct hits from heavier weapons. Unfortunately, all of the Novo’s weapons fell into that category. Two or three more strikes on that side from it’s heavy energy weapons, or those PPCs, and his reactor would be cracked for sure. Not that any of his remaining lightly damaged facings would last much longer than that.

He pushed his ‘Steed to its maximum speed, drawing the steering yokes to and fro in order to take the Wild Bronco into a slalom. Running in a straight line with his much thinner rear-facing armor exposed to the Queen Novo was the surest way to be brought low by a single alpha strike from the heavy ‘Steed. Of course, as the pilot of the Queen Novo didn’t have to engage in such maneuvers in order to track him with their weapons, it meant that Slipshods ability to grow the distance between them was severely restricted. The earth pony would be dodging enemy fire the whole way to the DropShip.

Assuming that he lived that long.

Another lurch. Another alert from the Wild Bronco’s armor integrity sensors.

The Breezy zipped by in front of him, all four of its barrels blazing away with reckless abandon. Close enough to the stallion that he could see the tips of the machineguns glowing white hot from the sustained fire through the ricochettes that bounced off his cockpit window, leaving behind a web of thin cracks in their wake. That pilot was certainly going to be getting an earful from whatever tech had to do the overhaul later. Slipshod panned and fired his heavy beam weapon, raking indigo energy across the harassing ‘Steed’s tordo. One of the machinegun barrels melted away, its ammunition feed mechanism detonating. The small explosion staggered the ‘Steed, but it managed to scamper out of his firing arc without much issue.

Any satisfaction that the earth pony felt at having cowed the lighter ‘Steed was almost instantly quashed by the convulsion of his cockpit, and the momentary blackening of just about every display screen around him. When the computer rebooted a few seconds later, he noted that his right flank was indicating that it was now devoid of any ablative protection. Another solid hit like that could cut the myomer musculature and cripple him.

He’d be as good as dead at that point.

Another lance of blue light sailed past him and incinerated a grove of trees in his path. It was a strike that, had it been just a few meters to the left, would have crippled his ‘Steed.

Slipshod grit his teeth and let out a frustrated snarl. The DropShip was just a couple minutes out. All he had to do was live long enough for it to arrive. Which meant he needed to make sure that the enemy’s hits were landing in places where he had plenty of protection. Like most ‘Steeds, his Wild Bronco carried its thickest protection on its forward facing areas; because that was―theoretically―the part of a ‘Steed that would most often be exposed to incoming enemy fire in a fight.

If he wanted to take hits, he’d have to be facing the Queen Novo.

The stallion jerked hard to the left and locked his ‘Steed’s rear legs. The back end of the Wild Bronco slid around over the ground, the angular momentum pitching the earth pony hard against his harness. When the move was completed, his hind hooves throttled the behemoth into full reverse. His speed would be half of what it was; but he’d hopefully live at least twice as long now that the enemy had largely unmolested ablative plating to deal with.

His hooves toggled the firing controls for both energy weapons as Slipshod found himself also now in the enviable position of being able to shoot at a properly surprised Breezy pilot. Just about every scrap of plating along the light ‘Steed’s left side dissolved beneath the potent attack. The equine machine stumbled, shuddered, but didn’t fall. It did, however, turn and bolt back in the direction of the firebase. The stallion launched a volley of missiles after the fleeing ‘Steed for good measure, though he doubted that they’d do much additional damage.

At least now he only had the Queen Novo to deal with.

Muzzle flashes in the distance ahead of him caught the earth pony off guard. He spared a second to check on the position of the Blackjenny, but it was still harrying Valkyrie several hundred meters away. The stallion would realize a second after that that the signs of fire that he was seeing were too spread out and too low to the ground to be coming from a singular BattleSteed anyway.

Oh, right. The Scorpion tanks.

The Wild Bronco shuddered and shook as explosive shells shattered the steel and ceramic plating coating it; punctuated by a beam of sapphire heat and coils of prismatic light. Those rainbow columns that didn’t hit his ‘Steed directly invariably landed close enough to interfere with the electronics that Slipshod effectively lost his HUD in its entirety. He was essentially firing blind. Fortunately―for rather broad definitions of ‘fortunate’―the Queen Novo proved a massive enough target that it wasn’t very difficult to hit while firing from the flank like he was.

Of course, there was a pretty evident disparity between the volume―and quality―of firing being exchanged between the two ‘Steeds. Slipshod tried his best to focus his shots on a singular point, with the hope of being able to burrow into the heavy ‘Steed and hit something vital enough to take it out of the fight―even just temporarily―but that was proving to be nearly impossible, given the pummeling his ‘Steed was taking from the Scorpions.

However long he’d thought that his forward-facing plating was going to last, he’d obviously grossly miscalculated. Slipshod prepared to turn his Wild Bronco back around and resume making a run for it and hope that no hits were scored on anything vital. Then, just before he manipulated the control yokes, a vast wall of cerulean slipped in front of him, obscuring his entire field of view. The stallion blinked in shock as he watched what turned out to be a ‘Steed perform what looked like an impossible sequence of maneuvers. It would only be later that he realized what was actually going on.

When most pilots engaged the jump jets of an equipped ‘Steed, it was in an effort to clear a significant obstacle, or even so that they could bypass or flank an opponent. Usually, this involved the ‘Steed in question vaulting dozens of meters into the air and then landing again some distance away in a generally straight line.

That wasn’t what Twilight’s Rainbow Dash was doing.

The alicorn pilot was feathering her heavy ‘Steed’s jump jets so that they just barely lifted the massive equine machine off the ground by less than a meter, so that she could use the maneuvering jets to strafe and yaw. That was how she was able to seemingly glide across the ground in the massive ‘Steed, taking several hits on her as-of-yet-unblemished plating. Nozzles pivoted and flared with plumes of magical violet fire from the Rainbow Dash’s fetlocks as they spun the ‘Steed in a wide arc. As it turned, twin pairs of sapphire and emerald light lanced out and converged on the Queen Novo’s left shoulder.

Assailed by a quartet of searing beams, the joint gave way, staggering the heavy ‘Steed. It was far from being completely out of action, but it did halt the onslaught of fire long enough for Slipshod’s displays to finally stop flickering. He wasted no time in lining up a shot on the same joint and adding to the damage. The limb fell away, leaving behind a smoking nub, collapsing the Novo.

Twilight did not seem to be done with her run though. Her ‘Steed’s jump jets cut out, dropping the Rainbow Dash to the ground once more, skidding through the dirt as it bled off the last of its momentum, coming to rest with one of its hind legs just about touching the front of one of the Scorpion tanks. This proved to have been completely by design, as that metal hoof gave a deft backward flick that lifted the front of the tracked vehicle up off the ground, where it proceeded to balance precariously for a second, before finally toppling over onto its turret and wobbling like a discarded foal’s toy.

The three remaining tanks took clear note of the new arrival, and appeared to all agree that the larger ‘Steed standing in their midst was a far greater threat to them than the battered hulk of Slipshod’s Wild Bronco. However, their turrets were unable to pan around fast enough to accurately track the rainbow-accented ‘Steed that was prancing around them, casually tipping them over one by one until all four of the tanks were left helplessly upended, yet all completely intact. Slipshod suspected that the crews were all relatively unharmed as well―save for a few assorted bruises―though they most assuredly had to be feeling quite put out by the whole ordeal.

Slipshod’s attention was drawn away from what was being done to the tanks as he saw that the Queen Novo was slowly starting to rise back up on it’s three remaining legs. The stallion grunted and took hold of his ‘Steed’s controls, trotting it out of the immediate line of fire as quickly as he could. His Wild Bronco was battered, yes, but still whole, and quite mobile. He had the advantage now, and was prepared to circle and harry the larger ‘Steed in much the same way that the Breezy had been whittling away at him.

Before he could fire though, the earth pony found his field of view once again obscured by a cerulean wall of metal and chromatic highlights. Beams of blue and green light leapt from the Rainbow Dash as it once more skated across the ground, riding upon plumes of purple fire. The readout of the Queen Novo’s condition on Slipshod’s displays showed that the enemy ‘Steed was losing functionality in several of its weapons. Both PPCs had been lost with its leg, but now it was also down two of its three heavy magical energy beams.

The Rainbow Dash slowed and set down standing directly in front of the crippled Queen Novo.

Slipshod heard the alicorn mare’s voice crackle over his headset as she broadcast on a wide-band frequency so that all nearby receivers could hear her, “forces of the Aris Highlanders: stand down! You have only two barely operational BattleSteeds,” the stallion balked and quickly scanned the map display. He saw the marker for the Blackjenny...but noticed that it was no longer actually moving. The blip which served to represent the Breezy was though, but the blue marker that must have been Valkyrie’s Parasprite was just about on top of it. Given the state that Slipshod had left the enemy light ‘Steed in, the pegasus mare’s recon frame would have little issue finishing it off if it gave her cause.

The same went for the Queen Novo, in fact. It still had an operational beam weapon, but the pilot would only get the one shot with it before Twilight responded and likely detonated his reactor core with a concentrated shot. Not that the earth pony suspected that she would. However, the enemy pilot didn’t know that.

“Enough creatures have died today,” the alicorn continued, “there’s nothing to gain by throwing away more lives. Power down your ‘Steeds. Evacuate the firebase.

“We’re here for the infrastructure, not your hides.”

“―not your hides.”

The cinnamon tiercel scowled through the cracked viewport of his cockpit at the enemy ‘Steed. They managed to sucker him into their ambush perfectly. He’d been too blinded by his rage to realize that there had to be more out here than just the single medium ‘Steed and the recon chassis. A Wild Bronco couldn’t have accounted for the volume of missile fire that had been raining down on the base at the onset of the engagement.

He’d just assumed that any attacking forces would have shown themselves the moment his Queen Novo arrived on the scene. After all, if they’d had anything more capable of repelling a heavier ‘Steed like his own, then they’d surely have sent it out earlier and not let him come so close to destroying the Bronco, right? Keeping a heavy ‘Steed back in reserve for so long was not a move that he could have predicted.

To say nothing about anticipating a Rainbow Dash, of all things, to be said heavy ‘Steed!

Where this outfit had managed to dig one up...he couldn’t imagine the money and resources required for such a feat. Whoever these mercenaries were, they were well-equipped and well-financed. Staffed with expert pilots too. He’d only seen jump jet control like that a couple times before in his career. It wasn’t easy to pull off.

The hippogriff’s eyes scanned over the map display as he took a few seconds to assess their situation, and their possible options. Flight Two was down, and Flight Four nearly out of ammunition and badly damaged. Even if that Parasprite stood perfectly still, the Breezy didn’t have the resources to destroy them without at least a resupply.

Meanwhile he was down to a single heavy beam, and both of the ‘Steed’s facing off against him looked to have their full weapons compliments. Resisting was only going to get him killed.

His eyes darted to the smoldering wreckage that had once been Gulfstream’s Pipsqueak. They began to burn with grief. He’d urged her to swap to a heavier chassis. She’d declined, citing her appreciation for the faster and more agile ‘Steed. How now he so desperately wished that he’d pushed harder for her to at least start piloting a medium tonnage ‘Steed. If only he’d…

The tiercel’s foreclaw tightened around the trigger.

It wouldn’t accomplish anything. Not really. Still, that impulse to get any amount of vengeance welled up within him. A last shot, in her name, before he was sent to join his beloved…

Only…

His talons relaxed.

...Only she wouldn’t have wanted that. He knew that much, at least. His death accomplished nothing. It might even get more of his comrades killed back at the base. Gulfstream would never forgive him for that.

The mare was right in that regard: there’d been enough death today. He toggled his radio, “...acknowledged. All Highlander forces, this is Flight Lead: stand down,” he reached up and started powering down his weapons systems.

The future was an uncertain thing. Perhaps, if the universe felt like being kind, he’d happen across these ‘Steed pilots again in the fullness of time, under more favorable circumstances. Then he’d be able to properly avenge his wife’s death.

That thought gave him at least a modicum of comfort.

Author's Note

TECHNICAL READOUT

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

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Chapter 9: TimberWolves on the Border

“If I’d known you’d find a way to capture a Queen Novo intact, I’d have negotiated better salvage rights,” Squelch muttered as she looked over the after-action reports that he and Valkyrie had just turned in. Per company policy, Twilight was supposed to have done one as well, but the green unicorn agreed to give her a pass on the grounds that she wasn’t a traditional ‘employee’, as such. Also, the less of a paper trail there was regarding the alicorn, the better things would be for everypony concerned, honestly.

“If we’d known that there was going to be a Queen Novo, I’d hope that you’d have been able to negotiate for better pay,” Slipshod smirked at the mare.

She sighed and shrugged, putting the reports away to be read over more carefully later, “established Aris Highlander doctrine is that new firebases are initially garrisoned by a lance of light and medium ‘Steeds with vehicle support,” she offered lamely, “nopony had any reason to think they’d moved in a heavy that fast. I’m sorry.

“A Condition Black was the right call, by the way,” the unicorn added soberly.

That was gratifying to hear, honestly. Slipshod knew that nopony who operated a mercenary outfit liked to abandon a mission. Aside from the obvious financial impact of not only losing out on the pay for completing the contract, and also perhaps even paying a penalty for reneging, many organizations didn’t want to risk acquiring the stigma that their outfit couldn’t ‘get things done’.

While it was true that any mercenary company which continually failed to produce results was destined to go out of business, it was rarely the case that a single botched mission spelled out irredeemable doom for an outfit. While a prospective employer was certainly more likely to offer better work at higher pay rates to companies with excellent records, they hardly expected anypony to have a perfect one. That sort of thing basically didn’t exist. No matter how well-equipped or prestigious the organization.

The fact was, that for somepony to win a fight, somepony else had to lose that fight. If any organization had ever existed that never lost a battle, then they’d have conquered the entirety of known space centuries ago. Even the big players like the Shadowbolts, the Nirik Light Pony, and the Gray Lines Legion had all lost fights with somecreature at some point along the way.

Today it was the Aris Highlanders―or at least one of their subcontractors―who’d lost a fight to the Steel Coursers. Slipshod was pretty sure that the Highlanders would still receive contracts in the future. The same would have been true for the Coursers if they’d pulled out. Their employer wouldn’t be happy, of course, and it was possible that they, specifically, wouldn’t have been eager to give Squelch’s company any more work in the near future―or at least not good paying work―but they’d have found another job somewhere in time.

Squelch understood all of that. So she wouldn’t have held anypony personally responsible for the failure of the mission.

Fortunately, it looked like she wasn’t going to have to after all, “and I guess taking the alicorn on as a pilot was the right call too, apparently,” the green mare added, her lips curling into a wry smirk at the golden earth pony, “Mig says the Rainbow Dash hardly has a scratch on it and it’ll be fixed up in a day. Val’s Parasprite’s a little more roughed up, but it’ll be good to go by the time we’re ready to jump out of the system,” now the unicorn’s eyes narrowed at him, “the Bronco, however…” her horn began to glow, as her magic retrieved another datapad.

The stallion let out an aggrieved sigh, “oh, for Celestia’s sake―”

“Eight tons of ablative plating, half a ton of myomer, two joint replacements―” she began reading.

“Am I suddenly the only pony who remembers the Queen Novo?” Slipshod asked sarcastically.

The unicorn didn’t react to his comment as she continued to list off the damaged components logged by the kirin mechanics, “―three heat sinks, the LRM needs to be rebuilt, thirty-four relays were burned out by all those PPC blasts―”

“It was a Queen. Novo!” he repeated in exasperation.

“―and you were a colossal moron to send a Wild Bronco up against it unsupported!” Squelch snapped at the stallion, her eyes flaring with anger. The earth pony recoiled as the pad was suddenly hurtling his way, deflected at the last moment by his quickly upraised hoof. His employer was out of her seat now, marching up on him, her features contorted by a sneer. Slipshod instinctively backed away from the irate mare until he felt his hind end meet the wall of her quarters, “that is twice―in a month!―that you’ve nearly gotten yourself killed down there! What the fuck is wrong with you?! You’re better than that! You’re smarter than that!” she seethed at the pilot.

“This is a dangerous job, Squelch, you know that―”

“Well it didn’t used to be this dangerous!” she snapped back, cutting him off. The unicorn paused, took a breath, and then finished with a resigned sigh, “or, ast the very least, you used to be better at avoiding it before,” again, she shot him another brief glare, “so whatever you’re doing different: stop it!

“If you get yourself killed out there I’ll―” Squelch sputtered and huffed for a second as she seemed to come up with some sort of punishment that she could possibly inflict on the stallion that would act as deterrent, “I’ll...I don’t know what,” she finished off lamely. Then the mare jabbed him sharply in the chest with her hoof, “but you won’t like it!”

If he smiled, it would be significantly unappreciated; so Slipshod expended a colossal amount of effort to ensure that his expression remained properly cowed, “I understand,” the mare huffed and turned away, collecting her discarded datapad and returning it to her desk, “and I’ll try to take better care of the Bronco―and myself―in the future.”

“Don’t bother,” she sighed, prompting a raised eyebrow from the stallion, “about the Bronco, I mean. We’re stripping it for parts and selling whatever’s left.”

Slipshod blinked in shock, “...what?”

“It’s just not cost effective anymore,” Squelch explained, “it’s never had great firepower, but that hasn’t mattered as much up to this point because we’ve just been clearing out rag-tag raiders and insurrectionists who couldn’t afford a ‘Steed of their own. Now that we have the Rainbow Dash, those sorts of contracts just don’t pay enough to maintain it. We need to take contracts that involve fighting other ‘Steeds.

“Which means we need you piloting something that can hold its own in a real fight.”

The stallion frowned. He’d been piloting that same Wild Bronco for nearly two years. He’d grown pretty attached to it, and all of its little quirks. His employer was right though: it wasn’t the most combat effective design that had ever been produced. It wasn’t a dedicated military chassis after all. It was easy to repair, cheap to maintain, but it also packed the firepower of a true combat ‘Steed half its weight. If they were going to be involved in more fights like the one they’d just been in, he would need a better BattleSteed.

“So what’d you have in mind?”

A pad was floated over for him to look at. Slipshod took it in the crook of his fetlock and reviewed the information contained on it. His eyes widened at what he saw. When he looked back at Squelch, she was grinning now, all traces of her earlier ire vanished from sight, “guess what was in that old Celestia League outpost?”

“Running away from home was the best thing that we ever did,” the rosey pink kirin mare sighed as she stood looking up at the large BattleSteed strung up in the last remaining unoccupied stall of the Galloway, “first we got to restore a Rainbow Dash, and now we’re working on an OG Crystal Cavalier,” Mig grinned with excitement.

“Better than ‘OG’!” her twin called down from where she and a pair of technicians were pulling out one of the weapon mounts so that it could be rebuilt. While the ‘Steed had been intact and undamaged where the salvage teams had found it, it had also been without any sort of maintenance for the better part of five centuries. It would need a decent amount of care before it was usable again. Even more so than the Rainbow Dash, as that had at least had the benefit of being in a vacuum, which mostly preserved it.

The Cavalier, on the other hoof, had been exposed to the slowly corrosive effects of oxygen and humidity for all that time. Still, if there were any mechanics in the galaxy that could effectively erase any evidence of the passage of so much time, it was the two kirin.

“This is a 6b!” Tig was dancing on the tips of her cloven hooves, “double heatsinks! Pulse beams! Endo crystal chassis! Eeee!” the powder blue scaled equine veritably leaped down through the opening that had been created by the removal of the mount and vanished completely into the ‘Steed’s interior. Her voice echoed out from within, “it’s so shiny!”

Mig chuckled, casting an aside glance at the earth pony standing next to her, “you keep bringing us choice ‘Steeds like this to work on and you might just get a chance to make that ‘sequel video’,” the kirin purred.

Slipshod was actually pretty sure that she wasn’t joking. Though, even if she wasn’t, that wasn’t where his mind was at―not right now anyway. Truth be told, he was just as enamored with the new find as the twins were. If for slightly different reasons. For the mechanics, it represented a chance to indulge themselves in a rare opportunity related to a job that they’d loved doing enough to flee a life of near-infinite luxury in order to experience it.

For him, it was a little different. He didn’t regard the Crystal Cavalier as an expression of art and design like the two mares did. Instead, he saw the heavy BattleSteed and the raw combat power that it represented as a large step forward in his personal quest to see the aspirations of his former queen reduced to dust. He wouldn’t deny that, overall, he still didn’t have anywhere even close to the quantity of resources he’d need to destroy Chrysalis. Nopony knew better than he did what was waiting in the Faust system for anycreature foolish enough to think that they could wrest the seat of power from ‘Queen Twilight Sparkle’.

Hundreds of BattleShips. Thousands of assault-class BattleSteeds, all equipped with the advanced technology of the Celestia League which had largely been lost to the rest of the galaxy’s major powers over the centuries of fighting and destruction.

Anything less than a genuine army wouldn’t last past the first few hours after jumping into the system. Slipshod knew that.

However, he also knew that any army had to begin somewhere, and a Rainbow Dash and a Crystal Cavalier were a decent start. Twilight knew the locations of dozens of other ancient Celestia League strongholds, each of which might contain even more potent treasures than they’d found here. The recorded data at these sites also contained information regarding the location of many other sites which the alicorn didn’t know about, as well. Given enough time, they wouldn’t just be able to bring an army to the Faust system, but one that was built upon the very same advanced losmagitek weapons and systems that Chrysalis’ forces wielded.

Maybe it would take many more years―perhaps decades―to get to that point, but he was finally confident that they could get to that point!

“I’ll keep that in mind,” the earth pony replied, his eyes still surveying the salvage team’s latest find, “did your sister bring back any other neat toys?”

“Weapons, ammunition, myomer, plating,” the pink kirin replied nonchalantly, “that sort of thing. There were ‘Steed parts, but nothing that was worth the space they’d take up to bother bringing them back,” she gestured behind them at the Rainbow Dash, “though we do finally have what we need to get the RD properly loaded out,” she smiled, “between that and the Cavalier, you guys should be pretty unstoppable―as long you don’t go tangling with a lance of Big Macs at least.

“We also recovered a lot of stuff that’s mostly useless to us right now, but it can be sold for a good price. So Squelch is pretty happy about that.”

“She could have fooled me,” the stallion murmured under his breath, recalling how his earlier debriefing had gone.

“Bah,” the kirin waved a dismissive hoof, “that’s just because you abused our Whittle Bee,” the mare’s expression became briefly accusatory now too, “again. What’d it ever do to you, anyway?”

The earth pony massaged the bridge of his nose, “Queen. Novo,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

Mig snorted derisively, but her face quickly broke out in a smile again as she returned her gaze to their new acquisition, “well, one of those shouldn’t rough you up too badly anymore,” she announced, “it’ll take us a few weeks to get it all sorted out,” the mare continued, shifting the topic of conversation slightly, “but everything should be good to go by the time we’re looking for our next contract. Has Squelch suggested when that’s going to be, by any chance?”

She had actually, “we’re heading for New Aris, as it turns out,” Slipshod informed the kirin, “it’s the largest market in the cluster, so we’ll get the best price for all that surplus gear clogging up our cargo hold. Should be plenty of jobs posted on the board there too.

“Hopefully one of them’ll take us to the same planet as another of those League bases Twilight told us about.”

“Ah, sailing right into the heart of Combine-controlled space immediately after dismantling a Highlander firebase,” the mechanic said with a smirk, rolling her eyes as she did so, “won’t we be popular?”

“We’ve taken about as many contracts for the Combine as we have against them,” he reminded her, shrugging, “there shouldn’t be any hard feelings,” he thought for a moment, “as long as we don’t run into anycreature who knows a pilot whose death we were directly responsible for…”

“Knowing your luck?” she chided him.

“It’s a big galaxy. The chances of that happening are―”

“―much higher than I anticipated...” the golden earth pony muttered under his breath as he, Valkyrie, and Squelch strode into the briefing room where they would be meeting their employer and receiving their intel dump for the upcoming operation.

The two week trip to New Aris had been largely uneventful, with the majority of the time taken up by his familiarizing himself with the Crystal Cavalier, as well as he and Val working to integrate Twilight into their previously established tactics and doctrine. That had been quite the experience, and not for the reasons that Slipshod had initially assumed. Given the rather abrasive way that the purple alicorn had conducted herself thus far during their―few―social interactions, the stallion had fully expected for the mare to immediately dismiss everything that they said and insist on implementing her own tactics from that point forward.

However, that had not been the case. Oh, the alicorn had certainly had a few...what could be loosely considered ‘critiques’ about the way the Steel Coursers went about doing things; but she had found the pair’s actual tactics to be quite commendable, given their available equipment and numbers. It was something of a novel concept for her, actually. As the nominal developer of many of the technologies behind the first generation of WorkSteeds, and the driving force behind their subsequent militarization, Twilight had been working with them for longer than anycreature who’d ever lived. She’d also never had to go into battle with any fewer BattleSteeds than she’d desired, since she was the one who’d chosen where and when most fights happened, and her personal forces had constituted the next best thing to all the BattleSteeds in existence most of the time.

Being the pony who also―quite literally―wrote the book on ‘Steed tactics, she was able to make several suggestions on how to adapt and refine the duo’s doctrines in order to best accommodate a third pilot. Slipshod didn’t miss the fact that every one of those new engagement profiles also prioritized disabling the target ‘Steed or vehicle, and largely avoided doing anything that might kill the pilot or crew, respectively. Valkyrie didn’t take much exception to this, as her Parasprite didn’t see much direct combat in most cases anyway―provided everything went according to plan.

For Slipshod...it honestly didn’t matter to him either way. His priority had always been completion of the contract. Leaving a body count didn’t earn him any additional bits, not really. Kill bounties on certain contracts were tied to the ‘kill’ of the ‘Steeds or vehicle encountered, not the creatures controlling them. To his knowledge, no employer usually offered C-bit incentives for wiping out infantry companies on the battlefield. It was just hardware that everycreature cared about.

So, if the only way that Twilight was going to reliably help them out was if he made a concerted effort to stop a ‘Steed while putting its pilot in minimal jeopardy, then so be it.

On the other hoof, if one of his shots meant to slag a weapon mounted in an enemy ‘Steed’s shoulder happened to drift a little to one side and snipe the cockpit...the battlefield was a chaotic place with a lot of things in motion. Not every shot could be perfect. The princess would just have to live with that reality.

The point was that the alicorn seemed to at least tolerate his existence now; which was a marked improvement when compared to her initial efforts to crumple him up like a used tissue. She wasn’t a particularly warm or inviting conversationalist―with him―by any stretch, but Slipshod would have gladly endured several long months of the alicorn’s detached aloofness to what he was likely to experience over the next couple hours in this room.

The burnt orange hippogriff hen sitting across the table from them at the far end of the room was staring daggers into the earth pony stallion from the moment he walked in. He noticed that the talons of one of her hands were digging into the surface of the table, etching noticeable groves into the laminated surface. Slipshod idly wondered if it would make things better or worse if he said anything. Best not to risk it, he ultimately decided. He and Val were here mostly as ‘window dressing’ anyway; Squelch was the one that was here to do the talking.

“Jilted lover?” he heard the azure pegasus mare standing beside him whisper. Obviously Valkyrie had taken notice of the special attention that he was being given by the hen.

“I wish,” the stallion replied just as quietly. He meant that, too. Creatures he ran into later after an ‘evening encounter’ who might be a little put out at being a mere tryst―though a rare occurrence―were easy enough to deal with; and more often than not ended up back in his quarters. Being a creature that could read the emotional state of another like the menu at a café had certain advantages when it came to manipulating behavior.

However, that was―unfortunately―not the case this time, “remember that op on Atlantea eight months ago? The one where we were ‘disrupting’ an arms deal between the Aris Highlanders and that Our Worlds League company?” he inclined his head slightly in the hen’s direction, “her brother was the Highlanders’ rep for that meeting.”

The pegasus’ eyes narrowed slightly in thought, “...didn’t we blow up the―oh,” the mare’s eyes widened now in realization.

“Yeah,” Slipshod confirmed, nodding his head slightly, “a week later I received a message from his sister which was...creative about how I’d be punished for that.”

“Oh...well, this should be fun!”

Squelch cleared her throat in a noisy enough fashion that Slipshod felt Doc Dee would have been motivated to prescribe her his most potent decongestant. The two ponies took her meaning and ceased their hushed exchange. Val took up an appropriately prim and proper stance behind her employer, looking every bit the professional ‘Steed pilot that she was. Slipshod felt that he would have been able to look similarly impressive, if not for the fact that he felt compelled to look in any direction but forward, where the orange hippogriff hen was still drilling into him with her intense gaze.

Two other creatures were in the room as well, and both seemed to be largely oblivious to the animosity; or were at least too professional to acknowledge it. Likely the latter, the stallion suspected. Sometimes mercenary companies had histories with one another. That was the nature of the business. Most didn’t take it personally―grudges didn’t typically pay maintenance costs. Sometimes though, that was harder to do. Especially where family was involved.

“That should be everycreature,” a violet tiercel began solemnly, tapping at a few keys on the console built into the table. The room’s lights dimmed and a holographic display materialized in the center of the room, “so let us begin:

“This is System PEA-02-UX. If that doesn’t sound like the name of a typical inhabited system, that’s because it isn’t. Records suggest that it was slated for terraforming and colonization prior to the dissolution of the Celestia League, but efforts were halted when Crown funding dried up. However, we now believe that the terraforming progressed far enough for the system’s second planet to become at least marginally habitable.

“We believe this, because the Combine has received intelligence suggesting that Commonwealth forces are setting up a forward supply base,” the hippogriff paused, favoring all of the other creatures in the room with a pointed look, “allow me to emphasize what I just said in case there was any misunderstanding: Commonwealth forces are setting up a forward supply base. Specifically, elements of the 5th and 12th Dongola.”

Slipshod’s eyes widened slightly as he took in the meaning of what had just been said. It was certainly something that had needed clarification, as the political nuances of Sphere politics usually meant that star nations and their nominal pocket mercenary outfits could be used interchangeably. When the Gray Lines Legion, for example, launched an attack on a Federated Moons planet, it was implicitly understood that they were acting on behalf of the Our Worlds League. Officially there was a distinction, so such an attack wasn’t an actual ‘act of war’; even if everycreature ‘knew’ who was behind it.

In such cases, the appropriate response was for the Shadowbolts to attack something of the Our Worlds League. Not at the behest of the Federated Moons, of course. Just...as a matter of their own, independent, business.

That was how the ongoing cold war of the Harmony Sphere perpetuated. ‘Hot’ wars meant massive mobilizations, huge expenses, colossal body counts, and a lot of wrecked infrastructure that nocreature wanted to have to spend the C-bits to rebuild. It was cheaper to just fling mercenaries at each other like foals having a snowball fight...but with BattleSteeds.

That’s how Chrysalis preferred things anyway.

An open war―a real war―meant that it was possible that one side or the other might actually win. Then, suddenly, the five major powers would become four, with one of those powers now controlling twice the resources of any of the other three. At that point, the three smaller powers would be forced to band together to oppose the new, much larger, nation. To do otherwise would risk a second nation being invaded and annexed. At which point, there would be nothing the remaining two powers could do against the third, overwhelmingly powerful, adversary which now controlled a majority of the galaxy’s resources. When those dominos started to fall, it was inevitable that the worlds of the Harmony Sphere would eventually come under the control of a single star nation again.

Chrysalis didn’t want a single, unified, star nation that controlled the resources of the former Celestia League surrounding her. With no opponents to fight any longer, creatures would stop sending applicants to the Academies on Equus; which meant no food for the hive and, worse, no means by which to replace those in power with her operatives. She’d lose control of the Harmony Sphere, and there’d be nothing that she could do about it.

No, the changeling queen didn’t want open warfare. There was no ‘good’ outcome for her that was better than the existing status quo.

If the Pony Commonwealth was indeed making preparations to launch a genuine invasion of the Hippogriff Combine, then she’d want them stopped at all costs. She wouldn’t be able to do it through ComSpark though. That was established as being an apolitical entity, with no official interest in Sphere goings-on, and thus no stake in how much territory or power any of the five major star nations possessed. So she’d need to act through her operatives in the Combine.

Which explained how the hippogriff leadership had come to learn about this otherwise secret build up of Commonwealth forces on an uninhabited world beyond the Sphere.

What it didn’t explain was why the Steel Coursers had been brought in on this operation―

“Normally,” the tiercel continued after having made his point clear, “the Combine would look to the Highlanders exclusively to clear out such a threat. However, many of their companies in the region are dealing with a TimberWolf incursion,” the violet hippogriff cast a side glance at Squelch and her mercenaries, “which has become significantly more difficult to ward off since the recent destruction of a firebase that was meant to support those efforts.”

Squelch made no comment on the matter. Business was business, after all.

“Things being what they are, however,” the tiercel continued, “House Novo has authorized the funding to hire additional independent contractors for this operation. That is where the Steel Coursers come in.”

“Forgive me, Baron Mar,” Squelch began, “it’s not that we don’t appreciate the work; but I am curious why an operation like this one is going to be so small. If there really are two regiments down there―”

“Elements of two regiments,” the tiercel corrected gently, holding up a talon, “at this moment, we suspect that there are only fifty or so ‘Steeds in total, with support vehicles.”

It was all that Slipshod could do not to snort derisively. ‘Only’ fifty ‘Steeds! With support vehicles! The expression on his unicorn employer’s face suggested that she was experiencing similar thoughts, but their benefactor spoke up before Squelch could voice aloud what would have been improper for him to.

“However, the part that you’ll be playing should mean that you’ll avoid any entanglements with the main body of the Commonwealth forces on the planet. Specifically,” the holographic display shifted to show a map of what the earth pony presumed was the operational area of the mission they were being briefed on. Several locations lit up along the perimeter, “we would like the Steel Coursers and Captain Peregrine’s lance” he gestured towards the burnt orange hen who had remained silent throughout the briefing thus far, “to strike at their observation and communications posts. By hitting their outlying positions from opposite sides simultaneously, it should hamper the ability of the Commonwealth’s reactionary forces on the planet to respond in force to any one attack.

“To be clear: your priorities will be the designated infrastructure. How many of their forces you tangle with is your business; as long as the priority targets get taken out. You are merely the prelude to a larger offensive that is being mounted in a neighboring system as we speak. Once their sensor and comm nets are down, The Highlanders can land their assault divisions and remove the base and its garrison before it gets any bigger.”

The earth pony was chewing his lip thoughtfully as he regarded the projected map. Even if they were supposed to just hit minimally defended perimeter bases, he didn’t like the idea of several dozen ‘Steeds being only an hour away at most. If they got hung up at one of their objectives, they could end up in big trouble. Honestly, he wasn’t entirely convinced that this contract was worthwhile, and wouldn’t have been surprised if Squelch refused to be a part of it―

“Sounds good. We’re in,” the pegasus said succinctly.

Then again, what did he know?

“Excellent. Then let us all get comfortable and begin going over the details for the operation, shall we?”

Two hours later, the trio of ponies were in the limousine on their way back to the Galloway. The briefing hadn’t been anything special, and nothing about their mission seemed out of the ordinary. Though Slipshod did have to marvel at the quantity of information that the Combine appeared to have on the supposedly ‘secret’ Commonwealth base that had been set up on an entirely unsettled world. It only served to reinforce his theory that Chrysalis’ agents had been involved in ensuring that the Combine was in a position to put an end to the Commonwealth’s planned invasion as quickly as possible.

Doubtlessly, Archon Dominus Blueblood would be quite put out at the rather egregious hole which apparently existed in the Commonwealth’s information security where secret military operations were concerned. An investigation would be conducted, those changelings present in his intelligence services would fabricate evidence implicating a suitable scapegoat, said scapegoat would be summarily tortured and executed, and everypony would move on with their lives, satisfied that no such issue would threaten future operations.

The status quo of the Sphere would be maintained and no creature would be any the wiser as to the hows and whys. Just as had always been the case for the better part of half a millennium.

In fact, the only real mystery to any of this would be: “why did you accept this mission?”

Squelch regarded him with a slight frown. A not unusual reaction to having her leadership implicitly questioned by one of her employees. It was the sort of question that she wouldn’t have tolerated at all from just about any of her other employees in the company. However, Slipshod’s position as a ‘Steed pilot―who would be directly subjected to all the associated hazards of the operation she’d ‘volunteered’ him for―afforded him a little more leeway where such things were concerned.

“Because accepting and executing contracts is how mercenary companies like ours make money,” the green unicorn mare replied tersely. From beside her, Valkyrie chortled as she failed to completely suppress her mirth at the response.

Slipshod was less amused, “you know what I mean. Going up against two ‘Steed regiments? With just ours and Peri’s lances? No offense, but you’re not usually this ambitious with our contracts.”

“True,” the unicorn mare conceded with a nod, “and, honestly, this mission is a bit outside my own comfort zone too,” this prompted a raised brow from Val as well as the earth pony stallion, “but it’s our best shot at getting to another Celestia League outpost in the area.

“We’ll be getting routed to PEA-02-UX through the system where the Highlanders are staging their invasion forces. That system is the Dovetail System, which was once home to a League R&D facility, according to our guest. While we’re there, we’ll drop off a team to survey and salvage the site. Hopefully, they’ll pick up a few losmagitech toys without anycreature being the wiser as to what we’re up to.”

“The Highlanders aren’t going to wonder what we were doing on the planet?” Valkyrie inquired.

“We’ve got an untested Crystal Cavalier that’s just been refurbished,” Squelch pointed out with a shrug, “it would be reckless to not put it through a shakedown run.”

She had a point, Slipshod conceded. They’d want to spend a day or two making sure that Mig and Tig got it working right. Or at least find anything that they missed. Still, “a raid like this is still pretty risky,” he pointed out.

“Not if you do it right,” his employer countered, “everything suggests that we’ll get the drop on the Commonwealth forces, which means that you should be able to get in, hit your targets, and get out before their forces can mobilize a proper response. At worst, you’ll run into some of their lighter picket lances.

“If things do go bad,” she amended, “then call a Condition Black and the Galloway will pull you out.

“But, if it’s all that same, I’d rather you avoid doing that unless absolutely necessary. After Kenway, we’re not the Combine’s favorite mercenaries right now. Botching this operation on the fetlocks of raiding one of their firebases might get us on their ‘naughty list’ for a while, and we’re in the heart of Combine territory. I really don’t want to have to pay the transit fees to get us all the way to Federated Moons controlled space without any work along the way.

“We’re not that far in the black.”

“Noted,” Slipshod smirked. He took a deep breath and nodded, “alright. We’ll do our best. As long as the Cavalier works as advertised, we shouldn’t have any issues.”

They certainly knew how to build ‘Steeds back in the day, the stallion decided. The smile spread across his lips grew even broader as he depressed the rear pedals even further, his eyes flicking to the readout displaying his current speed. Twenty-five tons heavier, and yet the Crystal Cavalier was easily able to match the speed of his Wild Bronco. Half again more armor and double the firepower cemented his newfound love for the heavy ‘Steed.

His gaze flickered ahead to where his HUD was advising him of a hostile-marked contact. Several actually. Unconcerned, his forehooves nudged the control yokes they were wrapped around, teasing the crosshairs onto the targets. A helix of rainbow-patterned light bolted from the tip of the lance mounted on the ‘Steed’s right side. A second later and a thousand meters ahead of him, the canvas silhouette of the Demolisher Heavy Tank vanished in an expanding sphere of chromatic electricity.

Two subsequent pulls of the trigger reduced two other mock ‘threats’ to ash as pulses of sapphire energy lashed out and struck them down. He leaned his ‘Steed to the left, guiding it in a wide arc towards the next set of targets. Nearly a dozen transponders lit up in front of him, denoting vehicles of various types and sizes. Slipshod eased back on the throttle and cycled through his weapons as quickly as they would recharge, keeping an eye to the steadily climbing temperature of his reactor.

Even though the Crystal Cavalier had been designed from the ground up as an exclusively energy weapon based platform, and the 6b variant used―now―hard to come by double heat sinks, Slipshod was finding it difficult to maintain a steady volume of fire even while keeping the temperatures dangerously near the shutdown threshold. He suspected that only two or three alpha strikes would be enough to trigger an outright shutdown of the reactor in order to avert a meltdown.

Even so, he was able to make steady progress through the second throng of targets in what he felt was a respectable amount of time. When the last target was incinerated, he flicked open his comm and proudly announced, “that’s the last of ‘em! Perfect accuracy too,” he couldn’t help but grin at the accomplishment, feeling rather satisfied with himself.

“Three hours of work undone in ninety seconds,” came Mig’s sardonic reply through the radio, “how’s the ‘Steed doing?”

“No issues that I could find,” the earth pony stallion informed the kirin mechanic, “acceleration was good, handling was smooth, and targeting was right on the money.”

“Noted. I’ll have the crew do a quick tear-down and inspection all the same once you get back.”

“Mind if I stay out here a little longer?” he asked, “I want to try and get a better feel for the balance at different speeds. See how well it bucks and pivots too.”

“Knock yourself out,” Mig said, “be as rough as you want. It’ll give us a better idea of how it stands up to real wear and tear. So go nuts.”

“Don’t mind if I do!” Slipshod kicked back hard on the throttles and grinned as he felt the ‘Steed suddenly lurch on ahead as it propelled itself back up to a full run.

A second mare’s voice chimed in over the communications channel, “if I might make a suggestion?” the stallion recognized Twilight through the radio’s mild distortion.

“What’s that, Rosie?”

There was a short pause and Slipshod felt himself cringe empathetically with the inhalation that he knew the alicorn was taking as she withheld her annoyance at the use of the pet name that the kirin twins had adopted for her since it had been decided that her name for the purposes of employment with the Steel Coursers would be: Purple Rose. She’s been annoyed enough at the use of a pseudonym as it was, but had at least agreed with the reasoning for its use. Nicknames, she had not agreed to, “...perhaps a mock battle is in order? That would be the best way to simulate realistic wear―minus the battle damage, of course.”

“That sounds like a wonderful idea,” a third mare joined in. Slipshod frowned, wondering why so many other ponies were suddenly so interested in contributing to this conversation. He also couldn’t help but feel a little wary at the note of amusement in Squelch’s voice, “sending out the commands to your ‘Steeds now…” the displays in the stallion’s cockpit flickered briefly before settling down again, but with a yellow hue to them, “...and that should do it. When the two of you are ready?”

“I am prepared,” Twilight confirmed.

“Perfect. Match start!”

“Hey now, wait a min―!” Slipshod began to protest, but stopped abruptly as a column of rainbow light streaked by just ahead of his cockpit, missing him by less than a meter and inducing several rapid blinks as his eyes protested the sudden assault by so many bright colors at once. He jerked his control yokes and heaved the Cavalier hard to the right, away from the source of the incoming fire.

His ‘Steed stumbled, throwing him into his harness, and an indicator flashed on his rear ablative plating to denote where he’d been struck. Twilight had missed him on purpose with the first shot, he instantly realized. She’d forgone the strike against his ‘Steed’s modestly armored barrel in order to scare him into exposing his less protected rear. The stallion grit his teeth and silently cursed how easily he’d been manipulated. Now not only had the alicorn drawn ‘first blood’, but she was also in a position to keep shooting at him while he couldn’t retaliate at all!

An advantage which the purple mare was apparently willing to take full advantage of as more sections of his plating flashed warnings, and his cockpit continued to buck and lurch. He was honestly getting more than a little annoyed at his ‘Steed right now.

After all, Twilight’s weapons were not actually doing anything to his ‘Steed at the moment. As a result of the commands that Squelch had transmitted to their computers, both his and the alicorn’s weapons were shooting little more than brightly colored lights at one another. The energy output wasn’t even high enough to scratch the paint. What was happening was that Twilight’s ‘Steed was transmitting its targeting computer data to his own ‘Steed’s computers so that his Cavalier knew where it had been ‘hit’, and it could register the damage and react to the blows accordingly.

Every jolt that he was feeling right now was actually his ‘Steed’s own myomer muscles throwing him around in order for him to receive the same tactile sensation that he would in an actual fight. The idea was for trainee pilots to be able to get used to the sensation during mock battles so that they didn’t become disoriented by the phenomenon in their first actual fight.

Right now though, Slipshod was just finding it really annoying!

“Alright, princess,” he grunted under his breath as he focused and took hold of the controls, “let’s see how you handle this!” He heaved the control yokes and worked the throttle pedals, throwing his ‘Steed’s hind end around in a skid that allowed him to perform a pivot, bringing his weapons to bear on the princess. He fired, sending out dual streams of pulsed blue energy―

―into nothing.

“Wait, wha…?” the stallion blinked in surprise. His eyes then immediately darted to his navigation map and the blip that insisted his adversary was still directly in front of him.

A flash of prismatic light from above caught his attention. Slipshod’s screens blurred and briefly cut out appropriately in response to the PPC’s distorting effects, much to the stallion’s frustration. He glared at the airborne Rainbow Dash. A tug on the controls slammed his own ‘Steed’s hind end to the ground and allowed him the elevation he needed to track his target. A rainbow helix of his own leapt skyward from his lance…

...only to have the other ‘Steed dart effortlessly to the left with a burst from its jump jets before finally falling back towards the ground.

His screen suddenly flashed with crimson warning messages alerting him to a missile lock. Slipshod’s eyes went wide. He pushed ahead on his control yokes and pedals both, but he already knew it was a futile effort. It would take his ‘Steed a couple of seconds to stand back up and get underway to a respectable speed. Those ‘missiles’ were already in the air, of course. Slipshod closed his eyes in silent resignation as the cockpit shuddered to simulate the peppering of those forty missiles as they hammered home onto their largely stationary target.

Just as Twilight had intended them to.

Every move she had made so far had been carefully calculated to elicit a specific response from him that she could then take advantage of. Had he been watching her do this to anypony else, he’d have found it to be a decidedly fascinating fight. However, as it was his flank that was being soundly bucked up one side and down the other…

The Cavalier was finally back on its hooves, and once again Slipshod was throttling it up to a full run. He fired alternating blasts of pulsed sapphire energy towards the princess’s ‘Steed, noting that his shots appeared to be pulling to the left. Apparently his computer had determined that the damage that he’d sustained in the fight thus far had affected his targeting systems. Not that having a perfectly aligned system was likely to have helped him anyway. Twilight’s Rainbow Dash was doing remarkably well at living up to its name and making a trivial effort of using bursts of its jump jets to dash from side to side and avoid his shots altogether.

Slipshod’s teeth grit in further frustration at having all of his efforts thus far thwarted. He continued to charge headlong towards her, his weapons chain-firing in an attempt to saturate the area and score a hit through sheer volume, if nothing else. It didn’t even occur to him that she wasn’t returning fire until after the fact. Presumably this was done in an effort to draw him further in by not giving him any incentive to veer off.

The stallion’s tunnel vision meant that he was taken completely by surprise when the Rainbow Dash’s jump jets flared one final time, arcing its hind end around into a powerful hook kick which caught Slipshod’s Crystal Cavalier square in the side of its head. His ‘Steed had no need to ‘simulate’ the hit this time as the force of the blow from his opponent’s ‘Steed was more than enough to send his own off balance and careening into the ground. His harness kept him from getting seriously injured, but the wrenching force of the impact still disoriented him nonetheless.

The earth pony allowed himself to hang limply in his sideways piloting couch for several long seconds as he awaited the inevitable announcement of the results of the match through his comm system. Princess Twilight Sparkle had not merely won the fight, she’d given him an indisputable thrashing; and all without sustaining a single hit on her own ‘Steed. She’d enjoyed it too. He could actually taste her satisfaction from here. It’d be deliciously refreshing if he weren’t so distracted by his own eviscerated self-esteem.

“...now that was just sad,” Squelch lamented over the radio, “I almost feel bad about taking High Gain’s C-bits,” a brief pause, then, “Purple Rose, get him on his hooves and teach him how to pilot a damn ‘Steed, will you?”

“I’ll see what can be done,” was the alicorn’s terse reply.

Slipshod’s eyes briefly darted to the ‘Steed’s scuttling command switches. Dying in a reactor meltdown would at least mean he didn’t have to endure whatever awaited him back on the Galloway…

There was a burst of muffled static before he heard the princess’ voice again, “that was simultaneously cathartic and depressing,” Twilight chided him, “I thought you were trained at the ‘best ‘Steed academies in the galaxy’? Isn’t that why the pony whose identity you stole after murdering him went to Equus in the first place? To become an ace BattleSteed pilot?”

Slipshod’s eyes widened in a moment of terror until he saw that the two of them were conversing over a privately encrypted frequency, at which point he allowed himself to relax. A little, “first off: I haven’t ‘murdered’ anypony,” he corrected the mare, insistently, “and second...you’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have,” he winced at how petulant the excuse ended up sounding out loud.

“My excess of experience does not excuse your multitude of mistakes,” Twilight said before starting to list them off. Slipshod wisely chose not to inform her of how much she was reminding him of his old instructors at the academy right now...or how much what she was saying now directly echoed their criticisms of his performance then, “you turned your flank on an actively engaging enemy. You came to complete stops multiple times. You closed to melee range with a more agile foe. And, most egregious of all: you fought in close quarters against a ‘Steed whose capabilities you did not fully understand.”

The earth pony stallion cringed and hung his head. Yep, that sounded all too familiar alright. What made it worse was that he’d routinely exploited exactly those sorts of flaws in his opponents. He used terrain masking and sensor net holes to start engagements from his enemy’s flanks. In their last battle on Kenway, he’d managed to use an enemy pilot’s ignorance of his Wild Bronco’s ability to leap great distances to lethal effect. What was perhaps even worse, was that he knew Twilight was capable of using the Rainbow Dash’s overpowered jump jets to devastating effect! He’d seen her do it!

“I find myself honestly wondering how you’ve managed to survive as long as you have,” she said in a dismissive tone.

“By being a medium-sized fish in the tiniest ponds I could find,” he retorted. It wasn’t like he wasn’t aware of his lackluster skills as a pilot. Fortunately, a high degree of skill hadn’t been required to successfully put his Wild Bronco up against Scorpion Tanks and Savana Masters.

“Was maintaining only a moderately passable competence at ‘Steed piloting part of your grand plan to defeat Chrysalis?” Twilight sneered through the radio.

Slipshod rolled his eyes, “like I ever really believed I’d have a chance of doing something like that,” he snapped back at the alicorn, “I knew it was a pipe dream; but what could I do about it? Even if I’d become the best pilot in the Sphere, I still wouldn’t have had a chance,” he pointed out, “there isn’t enough skill in the galaxy to overcome the numbers she has.”

“When we finally locate the remnants of the Ninth Force Recon, the odds will no longer be stacked quite so steeply against our success,” the earth pony stallion envied the mare’s optimism. He was pretty sure that they’d need more than a small ragtag cult operating out of the Periphery to stand much of a chance against the Queen’s guards, “which means that, if you actually want to survive long enough to see Chrysalis defeated, we’re going to need to work rather hard to lift up your level of skill.

“It would be a shame if you got cored in the opening engagement,” Slipshod perked up in his piloting couch, not able to help but feel a little surprised at the notion that Twilight might actually care about his well being, despite her publicly displayed attitude towards him on the DropShip, “that Crystal Cavalier is a very valuable ‘Steed, after all.”

Oh. Right.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 10: Double-Blind

“‘Marginally habitable’,” Slipshod snorted derisively, “there’s nothing ‘marginal’ about this place. It’s a damn tartarus-scape,” the earth pony stallion noted as their trio of ‘Steeds strode across the basalt flats between a pair of volcanoes that looked a little too active for his liking.

The operation, thus far, had gone off without a hitch. All indications were that their insertion into the system via a ‘pirate jump point’ had gone largely unnoticed by the Commonwealth listening posts. That probably wouldn’t have been the case in a truly developed system, where the coverage would have been considerably more extensive, but PEA-02-UX was a recently established forward support base, and thus had little in the way of orbital surveillance. What there was would have been focused on the zenith and nadir of the system’s primary star, which were the two typical points of entry for a jump ship.

The two small DropShips―both that of the Steel Coursers, and Captain Peregrine’s―had managed to evade the plotted planetary surveillance network as well, utilizing the exceptionally well-mapped satellite constellation around the planet.

Slipshod found himself idly wondering if anypony on either ship found it the least bit bizarre that the Pony Commonwealth seemed to have such a massive security leak that all of this information had paltry little trouble finding its way into the talons of their employer. The earth pony felt like he’d have certainly been questioning the plausibility of having gotten such extensive information on a military target like this.

Then again, he supposed that these sorts of intelligence windfalls were hardly rare. Any time Chrysalis’ agents uncovered this exact kind of operation―which wasn’t difficult, as those same agents were typically in positions where it was part of their job to plan these operations―exactly these sorts of treasure troves of information were passed along to the relevant party so that they could put a stop to it. A suitable ‘security leak’ was then fabricated out of a convenient patsy, said patsy was ‘dealt with’ by the outraged leadership, and everypony moved on to plotting their next move; inexplicably hoping that it would all go according to plan ‘next time’.

Rinse; repeat.

So, the earth pony supposed, when it was actually fairly typical to receive this kind of detailed information about planned clandestine military incursions, then it made a certain amount of sense that nopony questioned how so much intelligence had been allowed to leak to the enemy. Apparently without the perpetrator of the operation even being aware that so much of what they were doing had leaked!

Every satellite was exactly where it was supposed to be. Nothing had been moved to compensate for the calculated holes which had been plotted by Combine Intelligence―Slipshod idly wondered if the ponies who’d set up the net for the Combine hadn’t specifically created those holes to be used for this very purpose…

The more he thought about it, the more the earth pony came to conclude that the reason that all of this seemed to frustrate him so much was because he knew that it was all a farce. The fighting, the scheming, the plotting, all of it. He knew that it was all fabricated behind the scenes by Chrysalis and her operatives. To everypony else though, it appeared to be wholly organic. Politicians and military leaders were just going about their day making the decisions that they thought would best advantage their star nations. That was what it looked like to the common creature.

None suspected for a moment that many of those politicians and military leaders in opposing factions were actively working together to orchestrate these sorts of confrontations. No creature thought that, because no creature could possibly conceive of a reason why that would be the case. What good could such a thing possibly accomplish for anypony? It certainly wasn’t benefiting any specific group. Prominent Houses rose and fell on a nearly monthly basis somewhere in the galaxy, so it wasn’t like there was a cabal of the ‘ruling class’ working behind the scenes to retain power.

At least, not that anycreature could see. After all, Queen Twilight Sparkle didn’t have any ‘power’. She certainly never took any public stances on the fighting or voiced any support for a specific faction. So if any were so conspiracy-minded as to want to look for malicious interests influencing galactic politics, they certainly weren’t inclined to consider such things from her perspective.

So, here he was, galloping across a planet on his way to begin the first phase of an operation that would stop the Pony Commonwealth from launching a surprise invasion of the Hippogriff Combine and risk altering the precarious balance of power that Chrysalis was intent on preserving in order to keep the nations of the Harmony Sphere fighting amongst themselves. An operation that had been specifically engineered to succeed through the combined efforts of a carefully mismanaged setup by the Commonwealth units on this planet, and the well-informed forces that were about to assault them.

It was like playing a game of chess against yourself.

All that Slipshod had to do was find a way to specifically not fuck this all up and snatch defeat from the jaws of all-but-assured-victory.

Though, admittedly, the stallion was finding it a little hard to take this mission seriously, knowing that it was supposed to be effectively impossible for them to lose this fight. After all, if the Aris Highlander forces lost, then the Commonwealth would be able to launch their attack on the Combine and start a genuine war.

Chrysalis wasn’t going to allow that to happen. She couldn’t afford to.

That meant that no chances had been taken with this operation, and far more forces than were necessary had been committed to ensure its success.

Which honestly said some things about the quality of the Commonwealth’s leadership that weren’t actually Chrysalis’ drone operatives that they’d seen nothing wrong with setting up a forward staging area which could be crippled by two lances of ‘Steeds without much issue.

“In fairness,” Valkyrie’s voice replied over the radio, “the whole planet isn’t like this. The Commonwealth specifically chose to set up their base here so that the ash clouds would conceal their facilities from passive orbital scans.”

The earth pony rolled his eyes, finding himself having to keep from audibly expressing his exasperation at the idea that so much effort had been gone through to keep information a secret that was just going to be fed to the enemy anyway. He wondered if there was a drone somewhere in the Commonwealth who was having trouble keeping a straight face as they meticulously went through planning all the ways to keep an operation like this a secret, while simultaneously sending a detailed list of everything they were doing to their counterpart in the Combine.

For his part, the stallion thought back to their planning meeting about this operation, and the layout that they’d seen of the base’s facilities, “fat lot of good it did them,” he murmured off-mic before keying his comm, “isn’t the rest of the planet an ice ball or something?”

“I mean...yeah,” the pegasus mare conceded.

“The atmosphere is too thin to retain sufficient heat,” another mare’s voice chimed in. It was Twilight, “that’s usually the last step in the terraforming process once all the toxic gasses are removed and sufficient oxygen is added to be able to breath.

“With enough additional thickening agents like nitrogen and argon, this world would warm up and become perfectly suitable for colonization. Another planet that could be cultivated for food production,” there was a resigned note in her voice as the alicorn managed to remind herself of one of the ostensible justifications for the ongoing fighting in the galaxy: food and resources.

That was the rhetoric fed to the public, of course. It was a better motivator for long-term hostility than simple ideological differences. Ideologies could shift and morph over time. Hunger was eternal.

Not that resource scarcity wasn’t a genuine issue, of course. It was. However, Slipshod knew that a lot of that would be mitigated if the wide-scale destruction caused by all the fighting stopped for a decade or so and the land and agricultural infrastructure was allowed to recover. Of course, creatures were hungry now, so few were willing to entertain long-term solutions when short-term ones could garner sufficient public support. Plus, there were plenty of ‘experts’ in Chrysalis’ pocket who weren’t shy about crafting reports and studies that decried the theory that the devastation of perpetual fighting contributed significantly to existing scarcity issues.

Officially, it was all just an inevitable numbers game. Too many creatures existed to be supported by available production. For some to have, then some would have to do without. That was just how the math worked. No malice. No malevolence. Just...survival.

Anycreature was hard-pressed to come up with better excuse for fighting than that.

“First target’s five klicks out,” Val informed them.

Slipshod turned his thoughts back to the task at hoof. Served up to them on a silver platter or not, this mission would still carry risk, because the Commonwealth forces on this planet certainly hadn’t been told that they were supposed to lose.

“Acknowledged,” the stallion replied over the radio, “Val, you and I will screen any forces present at the site. Twilight, focus on taking out the transmission towers and the sensor array,” those two structures wouldn’t be occupied, so there was minimal risk that she’d kill anypony.

“Understood,” the alicorn responded evenly.

Valkyrie’s Parasprite picked up speed and began to pull away from their formation, getting out further in front of them. Her ‘Steed’s sensors would allow for Twilight’s missiles to lock onto and take out their objectives from as far out as possible. Which would minimize the chances that any distress calls would get out before they lost the capability to make any.

Slipshod’s HUD illuminated with a crimson blip, “perimeter defense turret,” he snapped in warning, “they know we’re coming,” he teased his ‘Steed around, bringing his prismatic projection cannon to bear and fired off a shot. The helix of destructive chromatic light effectively vaporized the automated weapons platform.

“I have sensor contacts at the outpost,” their point mare announced, “isolating the primary targets...annnnnd...marked!”

The stallion’s display lit up with additional markers as Valkyrie shared her targeting data with her comrades. Two seconds after they appeared, a storm of missiles arced overhead. A second identical stream of exhaust trails followed close behind those as Twilight fired off a barrage from her second launcher. In the distance, missiles poured down upon the base’s transmitter tower, crumpling the steel truss almost instantly. The sensor array went down in a slightly more spectacular fashion as the alicorn’s LRMs shredded the dish with a succession of impacts until the whole construction inevitably collapsed into a heap of scrap.

Slipshod keyed in his radio, using the frequency that allowed them to contact their nominal partners for this operation, “Gallop One to Raptor Lead; Target Apple is down.”

“Understood, Gallop,” came Captain Peregrine’s gruff reply, “Target Bronco is down too. We’re already moving onto Canter. You take Diamond Dog.”

“Wilco,” the earth pony swapped back over to the lance channel, “set heading for Nav Delta―” the words were no sooner out of his mouth than he noticed that his map was populating with a host of scarlet contacts, “shit! Multiple contacts in the outpost. Break and engage!”

Fortunately, nothing immediately registered as a ‘Steed at the moment. It looked like it was just the base’s organic vehicle garrison, along with a half dozen or so turrets. The latter wouldn’t prove much of any issue as long as they kept far enough away, and they no longer had any reason to close with the outpost now that the installations which they were concerned with were gone; but they’d want to eliminate those combat vehicles.

Slipshod selected his ‘Steeds dual heavy pulse weapons and dropped the targeting reticle over the nearest vehicle―a Pegasus Hover Tank―which had raced out ahead of its cohorts. Presumably in an effort to strike a quick blow with its SRMs and scoot on by and out of range again before any of us could respond. Unfortunately for the crew of that vehicle, the earth pony was far too accurate, and the weapons on his ‘Steed far outranged theirs.

Pulses of brilliant indigo light hammered the speedy hovercraft. Centimeters of armor plating evaporated with each successive blast of energy until the weapons inevitably punched through to the vehicle’s interior. The crew was vaporized by a single pulse. The one after that effortlessly sliced through the paneling leading to the engine compartment. Subsequent pulses sailed through the expanding cloud of debris that the hover tank had become until the firing sequence was finally completed.

A cerulean and yellow streak with rainbow highlights lurched ahead of him, charging at the distant vehicles. Slipshod blinked in surprise before growling in annoyance at the alicorn. He empathized with her desire to minimize casualties, but he still found those efforts frustrating when it meant that she was obscuring his own shots. He watched the barrel of the autocannon mounted in her chest belch out a shell, striking the ground just below another hover tank with a precision that the earth pony might have considered reckless. Even the slightest misstep given the speeds and distances involved had as much chance of demolishing the vehicle as accomplishing her goal: which appeared to be to use the detonation to send the hovercraft vaulting tail over nose into the air and crashing to the ground on its side.

The craft was certainly out of action now, though Slipshod was dubious as to how intact the crew was after something like that. Hopefully none of the occupants had seen fit to leave their harnesses unfastened in their haste to respond to the Steel Coursers’ assault on their base.

A muzzle flash in the distance announced the presence of a scorpion tank. The resounding ‘ping!’ the earth pony heard through his cockpit, accompanied by the indicator flash on his console, informed him of their target. Twilight was free to take all the risks that she wanted in her effort to spare the lives of the crews trying to actively kill them.

Slipshod wasn’t inclined to be quite that merciful. He hopped his ‘Steed to the side to clear the alicorn’s Rainbow Dash from his line of fire and sent a blast from his recharged PPC at the offending tank. It promptly detonated. Twilight snapped something at him over the radio, but he wasn’t paying attention to her protests as he sought out the next threat. The ponies in those vehicles had understood the risks of facing down ‘Steeds when they’d left their base’s perimeter. They’d chosen this fool’s errand. Saving them from their own stupidity wasn’t his job.

Defending himself and his lancemates, and completing their employer’s mission was.

He selected the next target.

“Target is moving on to their next objective,” the mare’s gravelly voice announced through the headset.

The only source of light in the dim cockpit was the navigation map and the trio of slowly moving crimson blips upon it. Everything else was powered down so as to ensure that the Sombra assault-class BattleSteed didn’t show up on their target’s sensor systems until it was too late. The three Pharynx heavy ‘Steeds at his flank were in a similar low-power state. All four were being fed information on their quarry by the Swift Wind parked at the edge of the caldera.

A smile tugged at the equine’s chitinous lips as his eyes tracked the movement of the three crimson blips. They were following the path traced out for them―provided ever so graciously by their Combine employers―almost perfectly. To deviate from it was to risk setting off the sensor net that they had been told existed in the area after all.

While that network of detection towers did exist, it was entirely unpowered at the moment. “For maintenance”, was the official reason given. Their targets didn’t know that, of course. That detail had been omitted from the intelligence packet delivered to the Combine.

Another bit of information that had been left out of the briefing was that the radio tower at the 5th Donogal’s firebase in the area would also be offline today―for a routine firmware update. Even if the Highlanders’ raid on these outposts went awry, there wouldn’t have been any Commonwealth forces that would hear the distress calls. At least, none that could respond in time to do anything about the attacks. Though, the tower being inoperative had not been for the benefit of the Steel Coursers. Not entirely.

In reality, it’s suppression had been so that his lance could move in and level the firebase without word getting out. Their mission was of far too critical importance to risk having it be spoiled by the intrusion of Commonwealth ‘Steeds.

The pilot of the assault ‘Steed reached out and toggled their radio, “all units: power up on my mark. Focus fire on Bogeys Two and Three. Aim for the cockpits. Target limbs on Bogey Prime only,” he stressed.

“Her Majesty wants that one alive…”

“You didn’t have to kill them.”

Slipshod let out a frustrated sigh. He’d desperately hoped that this was going to be a conversation that could have waited until they were back on the DropShip, where he’d have had the option of locking himself in his room and turning up some music to drown the alicorn out. Apparently Twilight had considered that course of action, and so was choosing to berate him now so that he couldn’t ignore her.

Clever mare.

Though that didn’t mean that he was going to be any more amenable to this conversation, “they didn’t have to fight us,” he quipped, “if somepony attacks me, I’m going to defend myself, Princess. That’s just how it’s going to be, and I’m not going to apologize for that.”

“They didn’t stand a chance―” she protested.

“All the more reason they should have stayed at the base!” Slipshod snapped at the mare. He refused to be made to feel guilty for killing ponies who made the conscious decision to fire on him. It was enough, as far as he was concerned, that he didn’t take the initiative to cause any more property damage than the contract called for. While the mission objectives specified the destruction of the communication and detection capability of their assigned targets, there would certainly have been no issue raised if the Steel Coursers stomped every single structure flat before leaving.

Besides, the ultimate fate of every Commonwealth pony on this planet was to be either killed or captured by the Highlander invasion that was due to jump into the system in just a few hours. How many were among the latter group would depend entirely on how much brig space existed on the DropShips. Which Slipshod was honestly willing to bet amounted to: ‘not a lot’.

He idly debated whether it was worth letting the princess in on the fact that every pony she was ‘sparing’ right now was more than likely going to die during the imminent invasion anyway. Arguably, it would be more merciful to kill them quickly now, rather than risk their deaths being through hypoxia and asphyxiation when their barracks’ were cracked open by Highlander weapons. That sort of death was slow, agonizing, and terrifying. Being vaporized by pulse lasers was at least mercifully instantaneous.

Really, when he took the time to think about it, he was the ‘kind’ one here. Twilight was the monster for choosing to subject the Commonwealth ponies to that kind of fate.

The stallion suspected that such a revelation wouldn’t exactly go over well if he pointed it out to her.

“Gallop One, I’ve got...something...” Valkyrie interrupted.

Slipshod spared a moment to silently thank the pegasus for the conversational diversion before allowing himself to feel mildly annoyed for a different reason, “that’s what I like most about you, Val: your exemplary field reporting…”

“It’s hard to identify!” the mare retorted acidly, “I almost didn’t pick it up at all. I think I’m just catching refractions. There’s a lot of crap in the atmosphere bouncing signals around. I’m trying to narrow down a source.”

The stallion narrowed his gaze and scrutinized his map display, “I’m not seeing anything on sensors, and we’re too far away from the next objective to be picking them up,” not that their next target should be having much call to be sending out transmission in the first place, “you sure it’s not our own stuff coming back at us?”

“It’s a completely different frequency,” the mare said, sounding mildly distracted by her own efforts to ferret out an explanation, “and I think it’s encrypted too. It’s hopping around a lot.”

Now he was concerned. Encrypted radio chatter from an unknown source? If that wasn’t a ‘red flag’, the earth pony didn’t know what was. He chewed his lip idly in thought, very briefly mulling over instructing their lance to divert their course. Had he not known what he did about Chrysalis’ desire for this base to ultimately be destroyed, he probably would have. However, knowing that pieces were being deliberately maneuvered to guarantee the success of this operation made him hesitant.

For all he knew, this chatter was from operatives on the ground actively working to sabotage the Commonwealth forces, and the best thing for the three of them to do was stick to the plan as it had been given to them. Otherwise they risked actually fucking things up.

“Keep an eye on it,” Slipshod finally said, “but continue with the plan.”

“Lieutenant Valkyrie,” the stallion wondered if the mare’s official rank sounded as odd to her as it did to him as the alicorn intruded back into the conversation, “would you mind sharing those readings with me?”

“Sure; here’s what I’ve got,” a pause, “also, ‘Val’’s fine, by the way.”

Apparently it did. Wait; why didn’t Twilight ever call him ‘captain’?

His musings were abruptly cut off by the alicorn’s next transmission. It was odd hearing the usually reserved mare sound panicked from inside her ‘Steed, “these transmissions are using CLDF encryption protocols!” she blurted out, not bothering to hide her astonishment.

“CLDF?” Valkyrie said in mild disbelief, “who even has those codes anymore?”

“Perhaps they’re elements of the Ninth Force Recon?” theorized a hopeful Twilight, “could they have agents nearby?”

Slipshod wasn’t paying much attention to the pair at the moment. He knew perfectly well what group would be using that defunct encryption standard, and it wasn’t the Disciples of Discord. His unease rose slightly, but he still refrained from commenting on it. He’d already mused that those errant transmissions had been chatter between changeling operatives on the planet working to actively help with the Highlander raid. Knowing that the signals were using the security protocols that Chrysalis had co-opted from the Celestia League centuries ago only further confirmed it.

Though, he didn’t need the princess insisting that they deviate from the mission to check to see if the source was her potential saviors. They needed to stick to the plan, which meant that he needed Valkyrie to confirm the origin of those signals were parts of their target. How exactly he was going to explain Commonwealth military units using CLDF encryption algorithms, he didn’t know yet, “Val, could you track an origin if Twilight gives you the protocols?”

“Sure thing. Princess?”

“Transmitting...there you go.”

“Awesome,” the pegasus said, “now we just use a little grade school trig to triangulate the orig―wait; what?”

Slipshod frowned, “is something wrong?”

“Maybe?” the mare sounded unsure, which made the earth pony nervous, “the transmissions are coming from the caldera to our right.”

“You’re sure?” the stallion studied his map. No Commonwealth installations were noted to be near there. A firebase which housed a lance of ‘Steeds was on the other side, but the volcano obscured any radar that their base might have, and no transmissions had reached them. The Commonwealth forces there wouldn’t have been using CLDF encryption anyway. It had to be changelings, but what reason could they possibly have for being in the crater?

“Oh shit,” the mare piped up, “I’m also getting active radar emissions from that direction! Somepony’s tracking us!”

Now he was concerned, “you’re sure they’re tracking us?”

“It’s low-power, narrow-band, and uni-directional,” the mare informed him tersely, “which makes it nearly impossible to detect unless you look for it―which I just did―and only useful for keeping an eye on a small area. Basically only used by scouts to track specific targets at long range. There’s either a recon ‘Steed or a Swift Wind near that crater.”

Somepony was tracking them? Or rather, Chrysalis’ agents were tracking them, he corrected? Why? While he knew that it was important to the Queen that this base be destroyed, he very much doubted that an observation team would have been dispatched here specifically to foalsit the Highlander ‘Steeds on the ground the whole time. Even if the operation was only marginally successful, Slipshod was confident that Chrysalis’ Commonwealth agents could persuade the Archon to rethink the plan and pull his forces back. This level of hoof-holding was simply uncalled for.

They weren’t here to help with the operation. They couldn’t be.

But...they couldn’t be here to keep an eye on them...could they? What exactly made the Steel Coursers so important that Queen Chrys―

“Oh...fuck!” Slipshod wasn’t positive if that part had been transmitted over the radio, but he made certain that the second part was, “Abort! Val, Twi: turn back, now!” he was already heaving his galloping ‘Steed hard to the left even as he issued the order. He’d have to come up with some sort of excuse later for why he was scrubbing a mission that was ostensibly going perfectly fine, anomalous radio chatter aside. Squelch wasn’t going to like it, and he had no idea how he was going to excuse it to her, but he knew that the three of them needed to be anywhere else.

Now.

“Abort?! What are you talking about, ‘abort’?” the pegasus mare demanded indignantly, “why―? Power ups! Multiple reactor power-ups!” Valkyrie’s tone rapidly became almost as panicked as the stallion’s had been. He saw the quartet of crimson blips flashing on his navigational map, “four contacts,” she continued, giving her report almost by instinct as her experience took over and spurred her into action, “three heavies and an assault by reactor output. Computer doesn't recognize the profiles.”

Well, that was concerning, the stallion grimaced. Their internal databases contained profiles for just about every ‘Steed ever manufactured and fielded in the last five hundred years. Even extinct designs like Twilight’s Rainbow Dash were stored; in case such obscure designs suddenly ceased to be extinct. That way, the targeting systems could provide reliable information about what a pilot was shooting at.

Slipshod did know, however, that there was a small list of ‘Steed designs which were not stored on any computer in the Sphere: those which had been independently designed and built by Queen Chrysalis’ changelings on Equus. Those ‘Steeds very rarely left the Faust System, in order to keep the existence of such designs a secret. They were only ever deployed on very special missions.

The stallion suspected that ‘capture the real Princess Twilight Sparkle’ was exactly the sort of mission that such a lance of ‘Steeds would be sent out on.

These ‘Steeds wouldn’t be push-overs either, he knew. Unlike the rest of the galaxy, the Faust System’s manufacturing and technology base was pristine. What was considered ‘losmagitech’ to the rest of the Harmony Sphere was just ‘tech’ for the changelings. Which meant that all four of those ‘Steeds were going to be at least as capable as his and Twilight’s; and that Val’s Parasprite might as well not even be a factor in this fight.

Two-to-one tonnage and number disadvantage. Not a fight that Slipshod relished. The stallion had to fight hard against calling in a Condition Black to the Galloway. Valkyrie’s computers might not be providing her with a profile ID, but he could tell what they were going up against. That Sombra assault ‘Steed had a pair of gauss cannons, and each of the heavy-weight Pharynxes had a PPC. Those weapons would shred a Mustang-class DropShip in just a couple of volleys. Squelch and the rest of the crew wouldn’t live long enough to come to a hover, let alone actually retrieve them.

No reason everypony had to die…

Could he surrender, maybe? If he turned over Twilight and revealed to them that he was a changeling, there was a chance that they’d let him live. Not a big one, sure; but a chance.

They wouldn’t let Valkyrie live though. Not their ‘Steeds either. The sensor data they’d collected couldn’t be allowed off this planet. Slipshod could plausibly explain Twilight and Val’s deaths, as well as the loss of all three ‘Steeds to Squelch.

That would be the end of the Steel Coursers though. The company didn’t have the finances to buy even a single ‘Steed, let alone replace three. The unicorn mare would cut her losses, fold the company, take a job with another outfit in their accounting department or something. He’d...be left on his own again.

Back right where he’d been two years ago. Would he get lucky a second time and just fall into a good outfit?

He certainly wasn’t ever going to come across a second long-lost alicorn princess that gave him at least a tenuous shot at getting revenge on Chrysalis for all that she’d done to him. Which meant he’d be back to impotent pipe dreams again.

Was he ready to be set back like that? After managing to actually get a chance at revenge? Was he really going to give that all up?

Slipshod’s hooves tightened their grip around his control yokes as he glared at the quartet of blips. She’d already stolen everything from him once. He wasn’t going to let Chrysalis do it again.

The stallion closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then heaved the Crystal Cavalier around in a tight skid. His hoof tapped furiously at the console before transmitting to the other two ‘Steeds in his lance, “focus fire on the assault’s left barrel!” he barked over his mic, “one meter down and two meters back from the shoulder joint!

“Twilight, get airborne and hit the heavies on their backs! Just to the right of the spine, midway down!”

“What?” Valkyrie blurted in shocked consternation, “first you’re screaming for us to abort and now you’re telling us to fight?! Will you make up your damn mind!”

“Shut up and move your flank, Val!” Slipshod shouted as he drove hard at the Sombra, “stay away from the Pharynxes and hit the Sombra exactly where I told you to. Your medium cannons aren’t going to do any damage worth a damn anywhere else!”

“That’s another thing: how do you know what these things are or where to hit them?”

“I’ll tell you later,” the stallion said grimly, not particularly looking forward to doing so. Though, it was entirely possible that he wouldn’t have to make good on that promise.

Knowing the weak points of these particular designs hardly guaranteed them victory. These were very formidable designs, and were equipped with technology that eclipsed most of what was available to the common inhabitant of the Harmony Sphere. Their pilots wouldn’t be slouches either.

There was every possibility that they’d lose this fight. These changelings wouldn’t have launched this attack if they’d thought there was anything remotely like an even chance that they could lose, after all. This was an ambush, designed to capture Twilight. It had been planned around the operation that the Steel Coursers were a part of. Very likely, their deaths would be blamed on a Commonwealth Quick Reaction Force response being more timely than anticipated. Captain Peregrine's lance would finish off the targets the Coursers didn’t make it to, and the operation would continue as normal.

Nopony would be the wiser, and Squelch would have to accept that her mercenary company was effectively wiped out under perfectly acceptable and not-at-all-unusual circumstances.

Assuming that there wasn’t also some sort of ‘accident’ awaiting the Galloway before they made port in another system. Leaving nopony alive that could report on the existence of another alicorn.

Chrysalis would keep her secrets, and capture the ruler she’d replaced so long ago. Without the galaxy knowling that anything out of the ordinary had transpired.

That was what would happen if they lost this fight. That was what these changelings intended to have happen. It was part of their plan.

However, what wasn’t a detail that they could have factored in, was that one of the ‘Steeds they were currently ambushing knew just as much about the design and production of their ‘Steeds as they did. To include certain vulnerabilities and shortcomings that were unavoidable in any design.

Like the fact that the Sombra’s dual gauss cannons required an oversized capacitor in order to sustain a charge. The placement of which had shifted the reactor’s position to the left of the ‘Steed’s center. The engineers had done all they could to ensure as much reinforcement as possible was in place to protect the vital component, but other physical realities had meant that certain limitations existed: such as the need to place the anchor points for the myomer muscles of the joints in very specific locations to ensure the limbs moved properly. These anchor points could not be reinforced with additional protection below the ablative plating without hampering range of motion. So, if a shot got through the Sombra’s―admittedly quite thick―armor at the location Slipshod had indicated, it would meet effectively no resistance before it cracked the reactor’s casing and triggered a nearly instant detonation.

All that they had to do was not get killed before managing to do that…

Pulses of emerald light battered Slipshod’s ‘Steed as he charged the onyx mechanical equine. He responded in kind, jabbing at the much heavier assault-class ‘Steed with a barrage of cycling streams from his quartet of medium energy weapons. The damage that those weapons were doing to his target was minimal, but it was keeping the other pilot’s attention focused at least. Slipshod’s Crystal Cavalier would be able to stand up to much more of a pounding than Val’s Parasprite. A single strike from those gauss cannons on just about any part of her light bipedal ‘Steed would spell the end of her tenure as a mercenary pilot.

Not that even his heavy ‘Steed would be able to take many hits either, he soon discovered as twin nickel-iron slugs struck him in the chest, missing his ‘Steed’s head by less than a meter. Alarms sounded and warnings flashed, informing him that the armor plating there had been completely compromised. Another head-on hit would crack his reactor, no question.

The earth pony grimaced as he veered to the right. He teased the control yoke and snapped off a shot with the prismatic projector cannon in the ‘Steed’s side-mounted lance. Not wanting to risk lingering too long near the larger opponent, he turned wider and took an opportune shot with his heavy pulse weapons at one of the Pharynxes which were trying their level-best to swarm Twilight’s Rainbow Dash.

However, the alicorn was doing a fine job of demonstrating what age and experience could make up for where numbers were concerned as she danced her ‘Steed around them.

Maxillae’s eyes widened slightly as his ‘Steed shuddered from the PPC hit. Not because of the damage that it had caused, as that had been mitigated significantly by the thick armor plating. It would take several more shots like that to penetrate it.

However, what was interesting to the changeling stallion was that the pilot of the Crystal Cavalier had chosen there, of all places, to land their blow with their heavier weapon. The other shots hadn’t done much more than blacken his plating. Using the PPC in conjunction with the medium energy weapons would have been much more effective, and an expected tactic from most opponents.

That he’d waited was curious.

That he’d placed the hit on the Sombra’s left side behind the shoulder was concerning.

…

It had to have been a coincidence. No other explanation existed. Still, he’d have to make an effort to be more vigilant about which side he had exposed to the enemy.

He turned to keep his focus on the heavier ‘Steed. What he saw made Maxillae frown. Three-on-one odds should have meant that his lancemates would make short work of the princess’ ‘Steed. It should have. However, the reality appeared to greatly differ, as he watched the cerulean ‘Steed effortlessly slip and slide around the darker foes surrounding it. The few shots that managed to hit the alicorn’s ‘Steed looked to be only glancing blows as well.

With a snarl, he toggled his radio, “what are you fools doing? How hard is it to cripple one ‘Steed?!”

“A lot harder when the only parts of it you authorized us to target have fucking rocket engines attached to them!” came a snapped response from a mare, “meanwhile, she’s hitting us wherever she damn well pleases―” the transmission cut out briefly. The cause was readily apparent as the Rainbow Dash suddenly shot upward, arcing over one of the Pharynxes in a forward flip of all things, pumping successive shots from it’s PPCs into the other ‘Steed’s spine, “fucking bitch!” the mare snarled, “hold still you fucking―!”

The transmission cut off again, but not for any overt reason that Maxillae could see. It was likely nothing more than the pilot realizing that she still had a hot mic, but no longer had anything relevant to say to her lance commander. The stallion watched as the offended ‘Steed wheeled around and fired off a barrage of shots at the fast-moving blue equine.

Those shots were very clearly not being aimed anywhere near the Rainbow Dash’s limbs, and he was about to chastise the other mare for her disobedience to the Queen’s orders when the Pharynx suddenly stopped firing altogether. In fact, it stopped doing...everything. A quick glance at the status read-outs for his lance confirmed that the mare’s ‘Steed had powered down.

He frowned. Overheating a ‘Steed to the point of an emergency shut-down was such a novice mistake that he was loath to believe a member of his team would have made it. The stallion made ready to reprimand the pilot the moment her ‘Steed started back up.

Which, honestly, it should have already started to do by now…

“Swarm Two, get me a status on Swarm Three,” Maxillae instructed, “why isn’t her ‘Steed starting back up?”

“Unknown,” came the response, followed soon by, “I can see her through the cockpit. She’s alive. Cursing up a storm too, by the look of things. Going to try patching her helmet’s transmitter into my comm network. Wait one, Lead...there we go―”

“―iece of fucking shit! Start up, you scrap heap!”

Well, she was clearly unhurt. Thank Her Majesty for small favors, “report, Swarm Three,” he cut in through her tirade, not having the time to waste waiting for her to finish berating her inoperable ‘Steed. In the meanwhile, he resumed firing on the far-less-maneuverable Crystal Cavalier. The pilot of which was making a valiant effort not to let him get off another hit on their chest with his Sombra’s gauss cannons. A pity.

The mare broke off her cursing. Mostly, “my worthless cheapest-fucking-bidder reactor won’t cool! The temp’s still at ten-thou and won’t come back down again,” she groused, “I don’t get it; cooling system’s running, but nothing’s happening!”

Maxillae cursed under his own breath now―off mic. They didn’t have time to troubleshoot this kind of issue during a fight. Down a ‘Steed already and they hadn’t managed to accomplish any part of their objective in this fight. No help for it at the moment though, “understood. Report any change in your situation. Two? Get back after the princess.”

“Understood, Lead.”

In the meantime, he would best serve his lance by eliminating the other two targets so that he could help capture the alicorn. The stallion lined up his targeting reticle on the Cavalier and fired.

Slipshod reeled as his ‘Steed was rocked by the hit. More alarms sounded. More notifications that a facing had lost all effective armor protection. So much for his Cavalier’s left barrel. At least Twilight had managed to take one of the Pharynxes out of the fight. Hopefully she’d even be able to appreciate that he’d given her a way to do it without killing the pilot.

The earth pony idly wondered if, when the report of this confrontation finally reached Canterlot, the Queen would call in a second team of engineers and task them with revising the design―after letting them witness the execution of the first team she called in for not having already addressed a known exploitable flaw in the heavy ‘Steeds. Not that there was much that could be done about it anyway. It wasn’t like engineers liked designing in vulnerabilities. Whenever such things existed, it was because there was simply no choice.

In the case of the Pharynx, it was a matter of mitigating a potentially catastrophic design flaw by replacing it with a―theoretically―less severe one. BattleSteed coolant reservoirs were subjected to extreme pressures. It was necessary so that the fluid could perfuse throughout the entire radiator system of such massive machines. A direct hit from weapons fire on such a reservoir produced an explosion not so very unlike a magazine detonation. As such, they tended to be sequestered as deep inside a ‘Steed as possible, not unlike volatile ammunition and the reactor itself.

Space considerations of the heavy ‘Steed had meant that the designers couldn’t quite fit the reservoir and the coolant pumping system right next to each other and still keep them properly protected. So, the options left to the designers had been to either leave the reservoir exposed to enemy fire―and the risk of an internal detonation as the result of a lucky hit from the enemy―or to separate the two components and connect them through additional pressurized lines.

They’d chosen the latter option, and run those lines along what should have been the least vulnerable part of any BattleSteed: the spine. Attacks from above happened, yes, but not even experienced pilots or ‘Steed engineers considered them “common”. The dorsal facings of ‘Steeds were the first places that any mechanic went to when looking for places to strip armor to free up tonnage for the installation of additional weapons, ammunition, or other systems, simply because it was extremely rare for an enemy to score hits there.

Strictly speaking, the actual damage that Twilight had done to the ‘Steed was minimal. It would take a reasonably competent repair team less than six hours to replace the severed pressure lines and refill the reservoir. Slap on new plating, and the Pharynx would be as good as new. They wouldn’t even need to send a recovery team to fetch it, as the reactor would manage to self-radiate enough excess heat to start up again in about an hour. It would behoove the pilot to keep the ‘Steed’s speed down to a gentle trot until the damage was repaired―firing any energy-based weapons was right out―but it would certainly be able to return to whatever DropShip was waiting to retrieve these pilots under its own power―

The head of the heavy BattleSteed exploded.

―or not…

A moment later, Slipshod saw the Rainbow Dash sprinting past the recently decapitated Pharynx that was already collapsing to the ground. Wisps of smoke whipped from the barrel protruding from the cerulean chest. The golden stallion was taken aback for a second by the sight, and suffered for the distraction as his cockpit shook with another hit. He quickly took hold of the controls and resumed his evasive movements.

His jaw set in a firm line. Of course, he thought, Twilight wouldn’t have any compunctions about killing changelings the way she did about any other creature…

He snapped off a twin burst of indigo pulses at the Sombra, shearing off several plates of ablative armor from its right flank. The pilot of the assault ‘Steed had obviously caught on to what he was trying to do and was now being quite coy about showing Slipshod his left side. That wasn’t good. The stallion wasn’t sure that his Crystal Cavalier would last long enough to take down the much heavier opponent the conventional way.

Viridian flashes caught his eye from the far side of the Sombra. The gray ‘Steed seemed to flinch, and then Slipshod saw Valkyrie’s bipedal Parasprite sprint on by, slipping in and out of the Sombra’s field of fire before the enemy pilot appeared to even be aware of what had just struck it.

His eyes snapped up to the cockpit display that provided a readout on his target’s disposition. The armor just behind the Sombra’s left shoulder was at critical levels. A few more good hits should be able to punch through it. With the two of them working together, the assault ‘Steed’s pilot shouldn’t be able to keep from being outflanked.

He slammed his hooves down on the throttle pedals and spurred his ‘Steed forward. Slipshod braced himself for the impact as the gauss slug caught him in the flank. It didn’t completely strip away all of the armor plating from the Cavalier’s hindquarter, which was a welcome sight. The damage that Val’s light ‘Steed would have suffered had he not interposed himself between the Sombra and her Parasprite would have been significantly greater.

“I could swear that we’ve already talked about you playing ‘hero’ where I’m concerned,” the pegasus mare quipped over the comm.

The stallion smirked, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My hoof slipped,” he fired off a round of his own medium magical energy cannons at the assault ‘Steed, raking it’s chest but doing little else besides scouring the metal.

“Uh huh. I guess I should tell Tig you’re getting her new favorite toy beaten up because you’re clumsy?”

“I’d prefer you didn’t,” he replied, though he did cringe slightly as he imagined what the teal kirin’s reaction would likely be when she saw how roughed up the Crystal Cavalier had gotten on its first outing during what was supposed to have been a relatively low-risk outing, “you know, Rigger Brush used to work as a manedresser at her aunt’s salon. I could arrange for her to set aside an hour or two next week for you―”

“Did you just imply that my mane needs work?”

Slipshod blanched, “uh…” there was a right answer here, he was pretty sure of that. He just didn’t quite know what it was.

The Parasprite sprinted past him, slipping around a pair of pulsing emerald blasts from the Sombra that tried to tag her. The recon chassis’ bulbous head pivoted on its squat torso as Valkyrie once more managed to maneuver her much more agile ‘Steed back into a position where she could get a shot on the vulnerable portion that Slipshod had identified. Her own twin beams of destructive energy flashed out, boring into the ablative armor as they depleted their capacitors. Once they were exhausted, the ‘Steed’s head locked forward once more and Valkyrie throttled up to its maximum speed as she made her exit from the engagement zone.

Slipshod ensured that the Sombra’s pilot didn’t get too focused on the smaller target by firing off his prismatic projector cannon. A rainbow helix sprung out of the heavy ‘Steed’s side-mounted lance and stuck the Sombra in the shoulder with enough force to briefly stagger the assault-class mechanical equine. But it was at least enough to send the shot that was fired off at the retreated Parasprite going wide to the left. He followed up the shot with an additional onslaught of his four medium energy weapons, one after the other, in a nearly continuous stream.

The shots were debatably ‘wasted’ on the Sombra’s chest and shoulders, well away from the vulnerability on its barrel, but Slipshod was much more concerned with keeping the assault ‘Steed’s attention focused on his Crystal Cavalier, rather than Val’s recon chassis. His heavy ‘Steed was designed for front line combat, and he had enough plating remaining to take a few more decent hits―theoretically.

The changeling pilot swore as he watched a second Pharynx shut down. The pilot had only just managed to get out a report that his heat management systems appeared to be non-functional after receiving a hit to his ‘Steed’s spine. Maxillae immediately realized what must have happened. He was familiar with the schematics of that design, and knew about the work-arounds that had been done regarding the cooling systems.

However, there was no conceivable way that Princess Twilight could have known about it. The Pharynx was a heavy BattleSteed which had been designed centuries after His Queen had usurped the alicorn’s throne. Twilight had never seen a Pharynx before today.

It was possible that she had simply gotten lucky. Any passable ‘Steed pilot knew that the dorsal plating of a ‘Steed was usually the thinnest, so it wasn’t completely unexpected that she’d take advantage of her Rainbow Dash’s jump capabilities to try and score hits along the spine in a effort to get through to internal systems more quickly. Seeing how well it had appeared to work the first time would understandably have compelled the alicorn to try it again.

On its own, it could have just been a coincidence.

However, the flashing crimson indicator on his left barrel made him reluctant to write it off as one.

Again, most ‘Steed pilots―even the less skilled―knew that ‘best practice’ during a fight was to pick a facing and lean into it when possible. The faster one got to the internals of an opponent, the faster the fight could be ended. In that respect, it only made sense that one of his Sombra’s facings should be receiving the brunt of the enemy’s fire.

But the fact that it had been that facing, gave him pause.

Identifying both vulnerabilities on ‘Steed designs which none of the pilots here should have seen before was not something that he was willing to chalk up to a ‘coincidence’. Somehow, these ponies knew where to hit their ‘Steeds to make them hurt. His lance was down to half strength, and so far they had only managed to seriously damage one of the targets, and the Rainbow Dash was not even close to being crippled.

He tuned his radio, “Swarm Lead to Overlord: Request for emergency extraction,” the words tasted like bile in his mouth. In the back of his mind, he was already dreading the report that he would be forced to file explaining this fiasco. Unfortunately, there was no help for it. They’d been outmaneuvered somehow.

The only rational explanation was that there was a changeling within the Steel Coursers. One that had supplied them with information about the capabilities and weaknesses of Her Majesty’s BattleSteed designs. He’d have to ensure that a search of the agent records was conducted to see what operatives might have been embedded with the Coursers, and what information could have been extracted from them.

An intelligence leak like this was a serious matter―

“Mission status?” came the terse reply from the ship in orbit. The changeling on the other end of the line sounded bored more than anything else. Maxillae grimaced. Hardly an appropriate tone to take when one received a request for an ‘emergency’ extraction. That sort of thing tended to suggest a sense of urgency, he’d have thought.

“Mission failure,” he replied bitterly, “Swarm Three and Four are down. I’ve received significant damage. We are outnumbered, and it is no longer possible to secure the target. We need immediate extraction!”

“Negative, Swarm Lead,” the changeling ‘Steed pilot blanched in shock at the response he received, “recovery is not authorized for this mission without completion of stated objectives.”

Maxillae’s lips set in a grim line. So that was how it was, “Understood. Swarm Lead, out.”

He supposed that, in hindsight, he shouldn’t have been too surprised by the revelation. This was an operation to recover an alicorn, after all. Obviously, getting hold of Twilight Sparkle was a high priority, and of paramount importance to Her Majesty. Maxillae had hoped, however, that the operation taking place on a world outside of the Harmony Sphere meant that some of the usual clandestine provisions surrounding a high-priority operation would be waived.

It seemed that he was mistaken.

There was only one way off this planet for him: with a crippled Rainbow Dash ready to be recovered by the waiting DropShip. Otherwise, all that the vessel in orbit was prepared to do was to recover the remains of their ruined ‘Steeds in order to mitigate the evidence that these designs existed.

He’d certainly have preferred for the DropShip to fly in, use its own substantial weaponry to pound the targets, and then recover whatever was left of the princess. However, that would be noticed by both the Commonwealth and Combine forces in the system. Not nearly enough of the ground radar was incapacitated to hide that sort of activity. To say nothing of the satellite network.

Her Majesty wanted the alicorn princess; but she wasn’t willing to expose ComSpark’s true capabilities to get her. Yet.

What was left of his lance certainly wasn’t going to be able to accomplish the job. That was an unfortunate reality, no matter how he looked at it. He was not going to be able to disable the Rainbow Dash with the resources he had left.

However, that didn’t mean that there weren’t resources elsewhere that couldn’t be brought to bear. He swapped to another frequency, “sound the alarm,” he instructed the crew of the Swift Wind, “let the Commonwealth ponies know what’s happening; and where.”

“Understood.”

The changeling pilot returned his full attention to the fighting now, glaring at the cerulean ‘Steed darting around the field, “let’s see how well you fare against a company or two of the Archon’s finest…”

Slipshod’s cockpit shuddered again. His ‘Steed’s left foreleg wasn’t looking so good. It had lost effectively all of its ablative plating, and the endo-crystalline structure wasn't nearly as up to the task of resisting incoming damage as the armor plating had been. He was also down a pulse laser. Hopefully it just needed a rebuild; because he was not looking forward to listening to Squelch rant about how difficult―and costly―finding a replacement would be.

At least this fight was going pretty good for the three of them overall. Twilight was making good use of her Rainbow Dash’s jump capabilities, and Valkyrie was keeping her little Parasprite mostly out of the more dangerous firing arcs. His was the only ‘Steed that had taken a serious pounding. It was worth noting that the goal of the enemy lance would have been to take Twilight alive, and had prioritized trying to destroy his ‘Steed from the outset over Val’s. Taking that into consideration, Slipshod felt that he was actually doing remarkably well, despite the damage he’d sustained.

After all, he was still alive...

Another rumble as a hit was scored on his ‘Steed.

...so far.

The earth pony banked his Cavalier hard to the left, covering his more heavily damaged limb with his right flank. He and Valkyrie were doing a commendable job of tagging in and out with each other as they slowly chewed away at the Sombra, but the truth was that the ninety-ton assault ‘Steed was very heavily armored and could take a harder pounding than the two of them put together. Twilight was tangling with the final Pharynx, whose pilot seemed to have finally learned what the alicorn had managed to do to its two compatriots, and was doing a frustratingly good job of avoiding becoming her third such victim. Twilight was finding herself having to fight her remaining opponent the old fashioned way: with brute force.

The Rainbow Dash had an intimidating arsenal of weapons for a ‘Steed of its size, this was true, but so did a Pharynx. Few other heavy ‘Steeds of a similar tonnage would have been able to make that same sort of claim, but both designs were designed and built around a technology base that no longer existed for much of the Harmony Sphere. Twilight maintained an advantage in maneuverability, thanks to her ‘Steed’s jump jets, and that would no doubt mean that she’d inevitably come out as the victor; but it was still going to take her time.

She wasn’t going to be able to help them with the Sombra. He and Val would have to take it down themselves.

Slipshod tensed as he saw the assault ‘Steed shift right just as Val’s Parasprite was zipping in to make another pass, “Val, break off!”

Whether a result of his warning, or because the pegasus had seen the same motion that he had, the Parasprite’s course shifted at the last minute, but it wasn’t quite enough to completely avoid the hit. A nickel-iron pellet struck the lighter ‘Steed on the left side of its bulbous torso, shearing away nearly all of the plating. Sparks and smoke billowed from the wound as vital systems gave way beneath the devastating blow.

The ‘Steed staggered, stumbled, but it didn’t fall. Slipshod watched with bated breath as it sprinted back out of the engagement area, “I’m alright! Left cannon’s gone, but everything else looks good,” she insisted.

That had been too close. A meter to the right, and that gauss round would have blown through her cockpit, “go help Twilight; I’ve got this guy,” it was perhaps a bit of a bold claim, he supposed, but he knew that there was no way that he’d be able to convince the mare to stay out of combat for the rest of the fight, despite the hit that she’d just taken. The least that he could do was steer her towards the ‘Steed that wouldn’t be able to take her out with a single hit.

“...roger,” the Parasprite arced towards the Rainbow Dash.

Slipshod breathed a small sigh of relief, though it was overshadowed by the realization that, while Val was no longer fighting the Sombra, he still was. He was also now the only concern that the Sombra’s pilot had. Wonderful.

Not unexpectedly, the larger gray ‘Steed began to turn to confront the earth pony. Slipshod throttled up and got himself moving as fast as he could in an effort to make himself a much harder target. The Sombra’s armor was in much better shape than his overall. The only section that had sustained serious damage was the plating on its left barrel where he and Valkyrie had been focussing their attention. Meanwhile, he had quite a few facings that wouldn’t hold up to another good hit.

With nothing left to divert the other pilot’s attention, Slipshod kewn that he was going to have a difficult time getting another clear shot. In fact, it would probably be impossible. He toyed with the idea of just playing grab-flank with the assault ‘Steed until Twilight and Valkyrie finished off the last Pharynx and could come over and help him. It was certainly an option.

“Gallop One, I don’t know what’s going on down there, but we’re seeing multiple launches from the spaceport,” the Galloway’s comm officer, High Gain, informed him, “the signatures are heading your way. They read as Friendship-class DropShips, One. Three of them.

“The commander wants you out of there now. We’re making our approach. ETA: five minutes.”

The stallion’s gut tied itself into a knot. A Friendship-class Dropship carried a company-sized ‘Steed element. With three of them en route, that meant that up to thirty-six Commonwealth ‘Steeds were on their way to join this fight. He wasn’t sure what the pilots of those ‘Steeds would make of the unknown Pharynx and Sombra designs, but they’d know that those units weren’t Commonwealth BattleSteeds. The orders would likely be to shoot first, and sort through the salvage later.

He momentarily considered what had tipped those forces off to their presence, but he quickly concluded that it had to have been the changelings. It was a move that he’d honestly not thought they’d go with. The Commonwealth pilots didn’t know that the Rainbow Dash was piloted by the real Twilight Sparkle. They wouldn’t be trying to preserve her life, and could very easily end up killing her in the fight. Everything about this operation up to this point had suggested that Chrysalis wanted the alicorn alive.

Then again, Twilight had been assumed to have been dead for a few centuries now. Perhaps the queen was perfectly fine with returning to that notion if this cursory attempt at capturing her failed.

In any case, this new information certainly shortened their timetable considerably.

“Understood, Galloway. We’ll be ready for you,” he reached to cut his comms completely, but then hesitated. He had a unique opportunity, he realized, that he probably wasn’t going to get again any time soon. He punched in a new frequency. One which he’d used only once before, two years ago, “how’d you find out?”

Slipshod fired off another volley of emerald beams, entertaining a brief moment of mirth in the back of his head at the juxtaposition of shooting at the very creature he was attempting to open up a dialogue with. In fairness, he had serious doubts that he’d actually get an answer. He just figured that there was nothing to lose by trying.

Which was why the earth pony was genuinely surprised when he received a response over that very same frequency from an amused-sounding changeling drone, “well, I assume that it wasn’t from you. Fascinating. Though that would explain a few things. It also raises some additional questions.”

Viridian pulses smacked the Crystal Cavalier on it’s right flank. Slipshod responded with significantly heavier sapphire pulses of his own across the Sombra’s right shoulder. Both exchanges did little real damage to their opponent’s ‘Steeds. Fencers tapping their swords together to remind them that a fight was still nominally going on.

“I’ll answer yours if you answer mine,” Slipshod offered, matter-of-factly.

“Nothing in the Sphere happens without Her Majesty knowing about it,” the Sombra’s pilot reminded him haughtily, “ComSpark’s reach is infinite.”

“And yet,” the earth pony stallion said as he loped just out of the path of a gauss round, circling in a wide arc as he jockeyed to get at the assault ‘Steed’s left side again, “you obviously missed a detail this time, didn’t you?”

“Which I will definitely notate in my after-action report,” the other pilot quipped, “this oversight is going to devastate someling’s next performance review…

“Now, I do believe it’s my turn to have a question answered, correct?” the Sombra was trying to turn with Slipshod’s Cavalier, but the much heavier ‘Steed was very slowly losing ground. It would only be a matter of seconds before the earth pony was presented with another opportunity to strike at its left side. Which was good, because they only had minutes before either the Galloway or the Commonwealth arrived.

“Shoot,” the stallion grimaced as the Sombra did just that the moment he uttered the word, “funny.”

“I thought so,” the changeling chuckled, “but I digress. What I’d like to know is what would possess one of us to threaten the great thing we have going for us. What were you offered?”

“I’ll tell you what I wasn’t offered,” Slipshod growled, “a seat at the table. Your ‘great thing’ didn’t get to be my ‘great thing’. So what does it matter to me if it all goes up in smoke?”

There was a pause, then, “ah, I see. Note added to the report: Keep. Better. Tabs. On. Capstone. Drones.”

The golden earth pony’s lip curled back in a sneer. “Capstone Drones”. Drones whose job it was to close out an identity, and nothing else. Drones like he was; given the mission to leave Equus and make port on another world...and then die soon after so that there was a complete paper trail, complete with a corpse.

His eyes flickered to his weapons status indicator.

“You’ll have to forgive us; your types usually die off within the week. Seems a shame,” the other changeling added, sounding genuinely sympathetic, “you’re obviously quite resourceful. You’d have made for an excellent agent,” a pause, “perhaps you still can.”

Slipshod’s ear flicked at that. He shifted his gaze from his weapons to the terrain in front of him, doing a little rough geometry in his head. He was only going to get one shot at this. If he failed, even if he lived, there wasn’t going to be time to try again before the Commonwealth arrived and surrounded them. It was certainly too risky to board the Galloway with the Sombra still active.

But he’d be lying if he said that he wasn’t at least a little curious about what the changeling commander had to say next.

“A lot of creatures are going to be listed among the dead when this operation wraps up,” the Sombra pilot continued, “your identity could be added to the list easily enough. We can take you back to Equus. Place you on a new assignment. Something worthy of your obvious adaptability.”

The earth pony briefly stalled to avoid another gauss pellet, then continued on, visually plotting out his route, “noling gets a second assignment. You know that.”

“I’m sure Her Majesty will make an exception for the drone that brings her Princess Twilight Sparkle. I’m offering you a ‘seat at the table’. But it’s an offer with a short suspense time. Specifically until those DropShips arrive.”

He did hesitate. He wasn’t ashamed to admit that. An offer to be set up with a new identity and a new life? One with an organic social support network that would keep him pleasantly topped off on love with a minimum of effort on his part? It was exactly what he’d been promised the first time, before having it denied at the last minute.

It tempted him. It definitely did. All he’d have to do was swing to the left instead of the right. Twilight’s Rainbow Dash had its flanks to him. He’d be able to leg her before she knew what was happening. It’d only be a matter of time after that.

All he had to do was...swing left.

Slipshod throttled forward.

The burst of speed sent him almost completely around the Sombra’s heavily damaged left side, going far too quickly to have a hope of making a turn that allowed him to fire his weapons at the assault ‘Steed. Even if he’d tried to kick out into a skid with his back end, he’d have ended up spinning too far around by the time his Cavalier came to a stop. There’d have been a moment during such a maneuver where his weapons would traverse across the Sombra, yes, but it would have been folly to try to make that kind of shot with any sort of precision.

They were out of time to fight this out any longer. The Commonwealth DropShips were only a couple minutes out, as was the Galloway. They needed this to end now, which meant he could afford to try for a difficult shot that had such a high chance of missing. He needed a solid hit on that weak point. A guaranteed hit.

Which was why he didn’t skid. He jumped. His galloping Cavalier leaped into the air, landing up the wreckage of the seventy-five ton Pharynx laying in a heap in front of him, and bounding off at a near-right angle. The force of the rebound sent the massive gray meta carcass skidding a hundred or so meters across the volcanic wasteland, but it served its purpose perfectly by negating his forward momentum, and diverting his direction of travel directly at the ninety-five ton Sombra assault BattleSteed.

Slipshod hooves kept themselves depressed on the pedals, driving the ‘Steed hard at his target. The other pilot didn’t have time to process the sudden change in direction and react to it before the earth pony collided with him. Metal screamed and plating shattered as two ‘Steeds with a combined weight the better part of two hundred tons made a valiant attempt to become a single entity. The earth pony’s harness strained to keep him restrained as his speed dropped down to zero in less than a second.

He shook his head, pretty sure that Doc Dee was going to diagnose him with another concussion―he idly wondered how many of those he could get in a year before it caused actual brain damage. Then the stallion’s eyes looked out the right side of his cockpit. A satisfied smile pursed his lips as he beheld the lance’s tip embedded in the Sombra’s barrel, a meter below, and two meters behind, the Sombra’s left shoulder.

“I’m not much for ‘sloppy seconds’,” he muttered, not even sure if he was still transmitting, or if the other pilot was even listening anymore. He depressed the trigger on his prismatic projector cannon, which was mounted within the lance. A rainbow corona of light bled out of the hole in the assault ‘Steed’s armor where it had been pierced, and out the other side.

A second later, the Sombra began to crackle and glow with violet lightning. The reactor was going critical. Slipshod slammed his hind hooves on the pedals, reversing his ‘Steed as fast as it would go. He didn’t know exactly how much time he had to clear the blast area before the core blew; but he was fairly sure it was just the unfortunate side of ‘not quite enough’.

Slipshod decided that he wouldn’t mind being wrong a little more often just about the time the blast wave hit, bringing along with it a wall of debris that stripped away the rest of what little armor had managed to stubbornly cling to his ‘Steed throughout the fight. He set about silencing a slew of alarms and skimming the litany of reports that the computer fed him, paying more attention to what wasn’t being mentioned. Specifically the systems related to the Crystal Cavalier’s mobility. He wasn’t particularly concerned with weapons anymore. They weren’t going to be of any further help anyway.

“The last target is down,” Twilight reported.

The stallion spared a second to see that the third Pharynx had indeed been neutralized. With extreme prejudice as well, he noted with a frown. The alicorn was indeed rather selective when it came to her ‘no killing’ policy, “perfect. Let’s move to the extraction point. The Galloway’ll be here in two minutes,” his radar, though much patchier as a result of the damage he’d sustained, seemed to indicate that the Commonwealth DropShips had landed spread out over the area, the closest one about five kilometers away from their position. Either the Donagle units didn’t know exactly where they he and the others were, and were trying to cover a wide area, or they were trying to box the Coursers in.

Either way, they should just have enough time to board their own DropShip before more than a few light picket ‘Steeds stumbled across them. If any of the Commonwealth’s heavier BattleSteeds showed up…

He was in no shape to do anything, and he doubted that Twilight was that good.

“What about the last objective?” Valkyrie asked.

“It’s three klicks out,” Slipshod didn’t even try to hide how dismissive of the notion he felt. The pegasus had better sensors than he did. She knew perfectly well they’d never make it in range of the sensor and comm arrays in time, to say nothing of getting to their pickup, “and in the opposite direction.”

“I can get us a shot from here!” she insisted, “If I go low power and uni-directional with my targeting radar, I can get a lock on the primaries. Purple Rose can use my tracking data to lob some Hail Celestias with her LRMs. They’d be ballistic on their way down, sure, but radar dishes aren’t known for their maneuverability―”

Slipshod had started shaking his head before Val was done talking, “it’s too risky. The Commonwealth’ll be on us in―Val!” the Parasprite was already running for the slope of the nearby volcano so that she could get the elevation she needed to acquire her line-of-sight lock on the outpost.

“Mission first, remember?” the mare chided him, “I just need a minute!”

The earth pony’s eyes went to his radar display. Crimson contact blips were popping in and out on the screen as his ‘Steed’s sensors made intermittent contact with the output from their reactors through the rough terrain. He wasn’t entirely positive that they had a minute.

Not that there was anything that he could do about it now.

His eyes bounced between his sensors and the Parasprite as it nimbly climbed its way to the lip of the caldera. His map suddenly lit up with over two dozen signatures as Valkyrie’s more potent detection suite found all of the incoming units closing in on them from its new vantage point. Then they began to slowly wink out as the pegasus mare tweaked her systems for focused distance, rather than broad area coverage.

Five agonizing seconds later, he saw two contacts illuminate in the distance. The comm tower and the radar array at their target, over four kilometers away.

“I have tone. I have lock,” Twilight announced, “Firing first salvo...firing second,” Slipshod watched as a nearly endless stream of forty missiles streamed skyward from the Rainbow Dash’s backside,“Missiles away.”

“Great, now get down from there!” Slipshod snapped over his mic.

“Can’t yet; I have to guide them in until they’re ballistic! Five more seconds…”

The earth pony felt his teeth grinding, nearly cracking a tooth when a new voice came over his helmet’s headset, “Galloway inbound,” High Gain announced, the stress of the moment clear in the unicorn mare’s voice. These sorts of hot-zone recoveries were understandably dangerous for all involved, and done relatively rarely if it could be helped, “pick up in thirty seconds!”

“Val, get down here now!” Slipshod yelled into his mic. A new marker appeared on his HUD, supplied by their DropShip to let the three of them know exactly where they needed to have their ‘Steeds for retrieval. The Galloway wouldn’t be landing like it usually did, but instead coming to a hover so that it could start ascending as rapidly as possible the moment the ‘Steeds were secured.

“Annnnd...Bingo! Splash two! Targets down; mission complete,” the pegasus announced excitedly, “see? Nothing to worry ab―”

The comm abruptly went dead.

Slipshod whipped his head around to look through the cockpit window. He was just in time to see Valkyrie’s bulbous little Parasprite topple over and begin tumbling limply down the steep slope of the volcano. Its roll permitted him periodic glimpses of the cockpit. Or, rather, the blackened divot where a cockpit had once been.

Multicolored helixes of light crisscrossed beneath the clouds as other Commonwealth pilots missed out on being the one to score the killing blow on the exposed little ‘Steed. Somepony would likely be bragging tonight about how’d they been the quickest on the trigger today, and maybe even score a free drink or two off their comrades for the feat. Valkyrie’s death would be reduced to a drinking contest by ponies who’d never even known her.

“Val!” Twilight called out, “Galloway, Lieutenant Valkyrie’s ‘Steed is down; requesting S&R immediately―”

“Belay that,” Slipshod cut the alicorn off, “no ejection; no beacon,” he informed the DropShip crew tersely, “proceed with extraction. Get to the pickup site, Gallop Three,” he was already spurring his Cavalier to the designated coordinates.

“But…” a heavy pause, “...understood,” the Rainbow Dash fell into step beside him.

Jade and sapphire beams of light danced around the pair of ‘Steeds, a few inevitably finding their marks by virtue of saturating the area. The range was still very extreme though, so even those hits did little more than burn away paint. A few seconds later, those shots received answering volleys from the Mustang-class DroShip that burst out of the overcast cloud layer. Heavy magical energy blasts, prismatic projection cannons, and missile volleys rained down from the sky, joined soon by emerald columns of light as the boxy vessel rapidly decelerated to an altitude of just fifteen meters above the ground. A scant few meters above the pair of heavy ‘Steeds that it was here to collect.

Blood Chit’s recovery team must have been jumping out of the ventral doors before the Galloway had even come to a complete stop, because it wasn’t even a second later that Slipshod heard armored hooves clattering over the exterior of his Cavalier. An identical team of six ponies had landed on Twilight’s Rainbow Dash, dragging down with them lines of steel rope that were swiftly and smoothly affixed to hoist points spaced strategically along the topside of the ‘Steed.

A third team seemed to have not gotten the message about Valkyrie, as a half dozen ponies started clambering back up their lines; having rather abruptly discovered that the ‘Steed they were supposed to be recovering wasn’t there to be recovered.

The ponies who ended up having actual work to do seemed completely oblivious to the lethal light show going on around them, which was now being joined by tracer fire as well. They had a job to do, and the sooner they did it, the sooner everypony would be out of danger. It wasn’t as though they’d have a hope of moving faster than a beam of light, or a supersonic kinetic round. They wouldn't even see it coming. So there was hardly a point in trying.

Even as that thought crossed Slipshod’s mind, he saw a unicorn with a line gripped in her telekinetic grasp vanish in a cloud of fleshy confetti. She’d been standing where an autocannon stream had apparently called ‘dibs’, and paid for it with her life. A pegasus who’d just finished securing his assigned line a couple meters away didn’t even flinch. He simply hopped over, grabbed the flailing bloody line with a wing, and completed her work.

The signal was given, and Slipshod felt his ‘Steed lurch upward. It was anypony’s guess whether it was because the winches were drawing them in, or because the Galloway was rocketing upwards away from the kill zone that the Commonwealth had been creating around them. Both seemed to have happened simultaneously, as far as he could tell. The recovery team was clinging to their lines like their lives depended on it.

Probably because they did.

Both ‘Steeds were fully winched inside and the ventral bay doors sealed shut before the Galloway hit the troposphere, but it was a near thing, judging by the fact that the techs were all wearing vac-suits. They’d obviously been prepared in the event that the DropShip’s hull was breached.

Slipshod numbly waited for the Bay team to lower his Cavalier back down to the floor of the ship before beginning the power down sequence. A rapping of a suited hoof on the outside of his cockpit drew the stallion’s attention. The earth pony saw a pressure-suited Tig shaking her head and motioning for him to lay back down before jabbing her hoof behind her. The earth pony craned his neck and saw that the Galloway had, in fact, not emerged from the battle completely unscathed. Repair teams were already working to seal the breach, but it would be some time before the ‘Steed Bay was repressurized.

Hopefully, it would be time enough for him to figure out how he was going to explain to Squelch exactly how things had managed to go so wrong on a mission that was supposed to be a cake walk...

Author's Note

TECHNICAL READOUT

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 11: Shadows of War

It was quiet in the conference room. Oppressively quiet. Yet, despite the echoing void of sound that was the rarely used chamber, that wasn’t the worst part for Slipshod. He could tolerate quiet. Truth be told, there were plenty of times that he yearned for a little silence every now and then. No, it wasn’t the muted aural atmosphere that was putting the earth pony off at the moment. It was the emotional atmosphere; and not just of this particular room. The whole ship...stank.

In two years, he’d never known the Galloway to taste this bitter.

Now, of course not every pony on the ship was in a good mood all the time every single day. Sometimes ponies had bad days. That was life. But those little motes of vinegar were easily lost in the mix of the otherwise prevailing upbeat mood that the majority of the crew experienced on any given day. Making for a generally pleasant dining experience for a changeling feeding off of the emotions of others.

But right now…

It was like everything in his fridge had suddenly moved past its expiration date. For the first time in two years, Slipshod was putting up every mental barrier that he could in an effort to stave off having to experience everypony’s grief and bitterness.

Not all of it was over Valkyrie, of course. Her’s hadn’t been the only life lost during those last fateful minutes of the operation. In addition to her and the member of Blood Chit’s retrieval team who’d been splattered by an autocannon burst, three other ponies had been killed as well. One of the ‘Steed Bay techs had been sliced neatly in half by debris created by the missile that had ripped into the service bay; and a pair of gunners operating one of the DropShip’s heavy energy batteries had been killed when their turret was struck by a Commonwealth PPC.

Five members of the Galloway’s crew had died in the span of a minute.

And Squelch was determined to find out exactly why.

Which was the reason that she, Slipshod, and Twilight Sparkle, were now seated in the briefing room, watching the recorded video feeds that Mig had extracted from their ‘Steeds’ gun cams. Squelch had ordered the feeds pulled as soon as the ‘Steeds were hooked up to their diagnostic umbilicals so that she could review them. Half an hour later, she called her two remaining pilots into the conference room. Twilight’s usual escort had been instructed to remain outside in the corridor, which piqued even Slipshod’s curiosity. Whatever Squelch had wanted to talk with them about, she didn’t want anypony else getting wind of it before she’d decided that they should.

Which made the earth pony a little nervous. There wasn’t a pony on the DropShip who could have not known that the operation had ended ‘poorly’. So whatever Squelch wanted to keep under wraps, it had to be something that wasn’t immediately obvious to the rest of the crew. The stallion, of course, knew a great many things that were best kept secret from other ponies on the ship. To the best he knew, his employer did not.

...Did she?

The sage green unicorn now watched the two videos simultaneously with the pilots whose ‘Steeds had recorded them as they played side by side on the room’s main screen, her chin resting delicately uptop her lightly touching hooves, as if in careful contemplation of what she was looking at. Her eyes barely even blinked as she reviewed the initial appearance of the four unidentified ‘Steeds.

Calmly, she reached out with her magic and paused the playback. Her eyes didn’t leave the screen. If anything, they got more intent as the feeds tracked back a few seconds, and then resumed again. She then paused them in the same place as before.

“Four-point-two-three-seven seconds,” the company’s owner stated coolly, having done the math based off of the feeds’ timestamps. She finally broke off the staring contest that she was somehow winning against the inanimate display screen, and turned those piercing blue eyes on Slipshod, “that’s how much time elapsed between your order to abort the mission, and the reactor power-ups of the unidentified ‘Steeds.”

The stallion winced, unable to bring himself to meet the gaze of his employer. He’d spent two hours sealed in his cockpit waiting for the ‘Steed Bay to be repressurized, preparing himself to face exactly these kinds of questions.

Oddly enough, he was responding exactly how he was afraid he would: with unforgivable silence.

“I’ll grant you,” Squelch pressed on, as though she’d anticipated exactly this sort of reaction from the earth pony, “that CLDF communications protocols are hardly a common thing to encounter...anywhere,” she nodded sagely, “a certain amount of trepidation is warranted under the circumstances. But...then we have this part:...”

The playback resumed. Slipshod closed his eyes, wincing slightly as he heard himself say, “focus fire on the assault’s left barrel! One meter down and two meters back from the shoulder joint! Twilight, get airborne and hit the heavies on their backs! Just to the right of the spine, midway down!”

Again, the playback froze. The stallion shut his eyes and shrunk further back into the chair, as though he might somehow be able to violate every known law of quantum mechanics and phase his atoms through the seat, the floor, the room, the two decks below it, the DropShip’s inner and outer hull, and finally float out into the sweet embrace of death awaiting him in the vacuum of space beyond.

Unfortunately, his sins were far too great for the universe to grant him such a mercy as that, and so he was forced to bear the weight of Squelch’s questions, “...and I find myself asking: ‘how is it, that Slipshod recognized ‘Steed profiles from a kilometer away, before the ‘Steeds in question ever actually came into visual range?’”

He winced again, and reluctantly cracked open an eye as the unicorn demonstrated the voracity of her observation by resuming the playback, which indeed revealed that Slipshod had issued his commands to the others before the newly powered-up ‘Steeds had crested the lip of the caldera and began their descent toward the trio of Steel Coursers.

“‘Steed profiles,” the mare continued, her eyes boring into the earth pony, “which don’t even seem to exist,” this statement was punctuated by the unicorn’s telekinesis sending a display pad skidding across the table to come to rest in front of him, showing the sensor readings of the Sombra and Pharynx beneath large block lettering stating: ‘NO MATCH FOUND’.

Slipshod didn’t respond. He had no answer for her. Or, at least, he didn’t have an answer that he was prepared to give her. For reasons that the golden stallion didn’t comprehend, Twilight Sparkle was remaining mum on the issue as well. He idly suspected that it might be some sort of ancient pony evolutionary defence mechanism from a distant bygone era: when confronted by a dangerous threat that hasn’t noticed you yet; don’t do anything that might cause it to notice you.

Silence echoed through the briefing room again. He didn’t know exactly how long for, but it was both an uncomfortably long, and a painfully short time before Squelch addressed him again.

“I am in the process of writing five letters to inform next of kin of the deaths of their loved ones,” the unicorn said very carefully, “and I would like to be able to tell them more than the typical vapid platitudes of how they ‘died bravely’ and were ‘well respected by the crew’,” she seethed at the earth pony, “I want to at least be able to tell them who the fuck they died fighting against,” she jabbed a hoof at the display, “because that sure as shit wasn’t the 5th Dongola!

“Who were they, Slip?!” the unicorn roared, shooting out of her chair and slamming a hoof down on the table hard enough to crack the screen of the holographic projector, “who shot up my ship and killed my crew?! I want a fucking name out of you, or I swear to Celestia I will drag you down to the airlock and space your sorry flank right fucking now!”

She meant it too. Even through his barriers, Slipshod could feel the raw, visceral, hatred that roiled within Squelch. She’d had ponies die on her watch. That was all part and parcel of a mercenary commander’s lot in life. War wasn’t a game; sometimes ponies died. So losing members of her crew wasn’t specifically what was aggravating the unicorn so much. It was that, in every prior instance, she’d known who was responsible. Mercenary outfits and star nation regulars wore their colors proudly and brazenly. It was how you gained reputation and notoriety: by having creatures know that it was you who’d participated in a specific operation.

So Squelch had always had a name and an emblem to go with the outfit that was responsible for killing one of her employees. It made it...easier. Because you could go out and trace back exactly why that fight had happened, and understand the reason that creatures had died that day. Even if it was ultimately a pointless reason, it still offered some semblance closure. For both her, and the next of kin.

In this instance though, she had none of that. No IFFs. No known paint schemes. No identifying emblem. Not even a hard reading on the tonnage of the mechs in question other than the class category typically associated with the recorded reactor outputs.

Those five crewmares might as well have been killed by ghosts for all the information she had.

Whereas Slipshod appeared to have a much better idea of what they’d been facing. More than that, he’d even inadvertently done something that an extremely select few experienced creatures could have pulled off: he’d identified ‘Steeds based off of reactor outputs alone.

He might as well have identified a pony based on the smell of their fart―which was technically possible.

For a changeling, anyway.

The alicorn seemed to have picked up on Squelch’s lack of exaggeration as well, and made the bold―if foolish―attempt to intervene on the stallion’s behalf, “perhaps if we adjourned for a few minutes to calm ourselves―”

Big mistake, the earth pony thought to himself as the jade green mare whirled on the princess with an audible snarl that made even Twilight recoil with a momentary look of fear in her eyes, “oh, I am calm compared to how I’m about to act with you!” she snapped, glaring daggers into the larger mare, “I may not be a ‘Steed pilot, but I’ve watched enough of these playbacks to know when pilots are pulling punches,” as she spoke, her horn glowed and began to manipulate the controls of the display, queuing up Twilight’s battle with the trio of Pharynxes, “so you better have a damn good reason yourself for why those three ‘Steeds are holding back!

“In the span of four minutes, I counted―counted―no fewer than forty seven moments when those ‘Steeds had a bead on your Rainbow Dash’s barrel and held. Their. Fire. Opting instead to try and leg your ‘Steed,” she growled, leaning upward in order to maintain her glare with the withdrawing alicorn, “and I cannot wait to hear your theory about why’d they do that.

“At the expense of their own lives, no less,” Squelch finished, coolly, as she finally backed off of the purple mare and returned to the seat she’d been occupying previously. Her eyes darted briefly to the crack she’d made in the table, prompting an annoyed sneer which may have actually been directed at herself for losing control and breaking part of her ship.

Slipshod suspected that the cost of the repairs was still going to be docked from his pay though.

The unicorn sat down, straightened out her suit jacket, and cleared her throat, before once more leveling her earlier deceptively serene look at the stallion, “now...let’s hear it: who were they?”

Not answering was not an option. Slipshod knew that. Of course, giving her the unbridled truth was just as equally out of the question. Squelch wasn’t ready for it. She still hadn’t accepted that Twilight was a real alicorn. If he tossed out a story that sounded like the plot to ‘Pony Snatchers from Beyond the Periphery!’ she was going to have him out the airlock before he’d finished the synopsis of the first act!

That meant finding a middle ground that was both factually correct...and not quite entirely accurate.

This was going to be one of the finer lines that he’d ever had to walk, but he certainly had some spectacular motivation to get it right on the first run through, “they were with ComSpark,” he replied simply. The less he said or embellished, the easier this would be.

It was a good thing that he was an empath, because Squelch’s poker face in this moment was impeccable. While her expression didn’t so much as twitch a muscle, the stallion could feel the incredulity beginning to build up within her. He could understand why that was too. After all: ComSpark? ComSpark was fielding an army of secret ‘Steed designs that the galaxy had never seen before? Everypony ‘knew’ that ComSpark was little more than a collection of glorified mail delivery ponies.

The idea that mail ponies were fielding lances of secret never-before-seen ‘Steed designs ambushing mercenary companies on backwater worlds during covert forward supply base strikes was so fantastically incredible that only the most gullible of morons would have believed it.

Which...was kind of the point, “a subsidiary of ComSpark, anyway,” the stallion elaborated, “one that carries out special missions in the Harmony Sphere for Queen Twilight Sparkle,” he ignored the alicorn’s own annoyed sneer at the use of the usurped name and pressed on, “missions that she doesn’t want the other powers to know about.

“There’s no data on those ‘Steeds because ComSpark has classified them. And it’s pretty easy to control what information gets spread around the galaxy when you’re literally the only means of spreading information around the galaxy,” the earth pony shrugged, unable to keep himself from spreading his lips in the tiniest of sardonic smiles.

Squalch’s indignation had withdrawn somewhat as she continued to regard the pilot. It had by no means vanished entirely of course, “...and you knew about these ‘secret ‘Steeds’...how?”

“I saw them while I was on Equus, attending the Sandhoof Royal Military Academy,” another factual truth. He’d done more than ‘see’ them, of course. He’d been fully checked out on those chassis, as well as every other ‘Steed that the changelings fielded. He knew everything there was to know about them. Just about every changeling did who were trained as ‘Steed pilots.

“You saw them well enough to know them by their reactor signatures from a kilometer away?” While her tone remained deadpan, the unicorn’s internal indignation was mounting again.

A skilled sensor tech with suitably sensitive equipment could get a reliable enough reading on a reactor that it could be compared to known ‘Steed reactor models on file. This wasn’t quite the same thing as being able to identify a specific BattleSteed, as different designs sometimes used the same make and model of reactor. Similarly, it was not entirely uncommon for outfits to swap out the factory standard reactor of a given ‘Steed. Either stepping it up in order to either give it more speed or rolling back to a smaller model in order to free up tonnage for additional weapons and armor plating.

Broadly speaking, you could always be sure of the tonnage class based on a reactor’s outputs. There wasn’t a lot of crossover between categories like that. A reactor designed for a light BattleSteed would barely be able to move a medium ‘Steed faster than a pony could trot, and putting a heavy ‘Steed’s reactor into a medium chassis would pretty much preclude it being able to carry any weapons at all. So crossovers like that pretty much never happened.

However, this wasn’t what Slipshod had claimed that he’d been able to do. He hadn’t merely identified tonnage ranges for the new contacts. His orders about where to focus their attacks had suggested that he’d instantly known the specific ‘Steed models that they were confronting.

Now, again, this was something that was technically possible; but was also very impractical for most sensor techs.

The fact was that the same make and model of reactor behaved differently based upon the ‘Steed that it was installed in. Each BattleSteed design had unique drive and weapons systems that put slightly different strains on their reactors, even for ‘Steeds of the same tonnage. Meaning that there would be a―very―slight variance in how the reactor’s output registered on a ‘Steed’s sensor suite.

To be able to pick something like that out, a tech would need to be able to consult a comparative database of ‘Steeds of every design using every make and model of reactor that could be physically installed on it. No such database existed―that Slipshod knew about, at any rate―as there wasn’t much benefit in a group expending the time, money, and resources to create such a database; as that would require going through and outfitting every ‘Steed design with all compatible reactors on the market in order to power them up, get a clear recording of the profile that was generated, and then log that profile.

Any conceivable benefit wasn’t worth it, as all it would really do was let a pilot know what ‘Steed they were going to be fighting once an opponent’s reactor showed up on sensors. Which was typically only a few seconds before visual contact was made, and thus the complete identity profile obtained at that point anyway. So, having such knowledge wasn’t really a huge practical benefit going into a battle.

Like Squelch had pointed out for their own fight: Six seconds was all the time that had elapsed between reactor detection and visual contact. Had those ComSpark designs been part of the galactic database, like any other ‘Steed would have been, his being able to ID their reactor signatures would have been of no real benefit.

It wasn’t like he’d made a concerted effort to memorize those sorts of readings though. He’d merely just happened to see them before while back on Equus two years ago and remembered them. In fact, he remembered every signature that he’d seen before.

That was part and parcel of being a changeling, after all: remembering every minute, fine, detail of what you saw, even if for only a few seconds. How else were you supposed to be able to mimic another creature’s identity?

“Yes,” Squelch’s incredulity was back as Slipshod sighed and closed his eyes, “I know every ‘Steed’s reactor signature.”

“Bullshit,” the unicorn blurted, glaring at him, “nopony knows that.”

“I do,” Slipshod stated coolly, doing his level best to keep a smile off his face now, lest she think that he really was putting her on, “eidetic memory,” he tapped his head.

Anger flared in the mare, “now I know you’re lying to me, because you’re shit with your memory! You forgot our anniversaries; every one of them: first meeting, first kiss, first ‘I love you’, the wedding―”

“August seventh, August twenty-third, November ninth, December twelfth,” the stallion rattled off, still ensuring that he didn’t smile upon seeing the green mare’s shocked expression, “at ten thirty-four, nineteen-twelve, oh-five oh-one, and thirteen-ten, respectively.”

Twilight was just as surprised as Squelch was. The purple alicorn blinked several times, then a thought occurred to her as she looked back and forth between the other two ponies, “wait, you two were married?” another thought, “you got married after knowing each other for just four months?”

The death-glare from the unicorn silenced the princess once again before Squelch resumed sneering at Slipshod, “don’t remind me.

“Of course it turns out you were lying to me the whole time we were together,” she scoffed, “why the sudden bout of honesty now?” Slipshod didn’t trust himself with answering that, “so how many ponies were there besides me? How many times did you cheat?”

The earth pony didn’t flinch, “just the once.”

The mare threw up her hooves, “fuck’s sake; I don’t even know who you are anymore, Slip!”

Squelch’s poker face was superb, but Twilight was best kept away from any and all card games whatsoever, the earth pony decided, “ha!” The alicorn snapped her mouth closed as both ponies shot her a look. The unicorn’s annoyed; and Slipshod’s anxious, “...sorry.”

The viridian mare took a deep breath and looked back to the earth pony, “so, assuming for a second that those were actually ComSpark pilots down there: why?” the mare massaged her temple, “fuck; how?! They were lying in ambush! They were waiting for us―for you!” Slipshod wasn’t certain if Squelch was referring to their lance, or Twilight Sparkle specifically. Chances were that the unicorn hadn’t quite made that connection yet.

“They’d have had to have gotten here before we did in order to do that,” the mare continued, thinking through the situation, “but this op was a secret and even we only found out about it with barely enough time to get here when we did!” She was glaring at Slipshod now, “I don’t suppose you can explain that?”

Of course, Slipshod was fully aware of how Chrysalis’ agents had gotten their hooves on the operational plans for this assault. More than one of those same agents had likely had a hoof in crafting them, after all. It was honestly a toss-up as to whether that lance of ‘Steeds on the planet had been positioned to intercept the Steel Coursers, or if the Steel Coursers had been given a route that would take them straight into the waiting hooves of the ComSpark forces. Perhaps a combination of the two.

He couldn’t tell Squelch that though. She wasn’t quite at the ‘the galaxy is controlled by shapeshifting bug-ponies’ stage of enlightenment yet.

That was likely going to be coming sooner rather than later though. In the meantime, the situation called for more not-quite-the-entire-truthing:

“All interstellar traffic goes through ComSpark,” the stallion reminded her, “they could have gotten the operation plans that way.”

“ComSpark doesn’t read the messages they send,” Squelch retorted dismissively, “that’s part of their neutrality charter. They just send the messages; no matter who from or who to.”

“Just like they also don’t field secret BattleSteed designs?” The stallion asked in a tone of feigned innocence. The quip earned him a pointed glare from his employer. Fair.

The unicorn closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her muzzle, “alright, I’ll grant you that there’s nothing that would physically stop them from reading any and all message traffic that they’re sending. As horrifying as those implications are―” this time Twilight managed to restrict herself to a half-suppressed chortle, “―but that still doesn’t explain why they were there!

“Captain Peregrin’s team wasn’t ambushed, so ComSpark doesn’t seem to have a problem with the op; they went after us, specifically. What did we ever do to―” Squelch broke off suddenly, her shocked gaze diverting immediately to the purple alicorn, “...you. They were after you!”

Twilight nodded, “almost certainly.”

The unicorn mare’s expression became haunted as she slumped back in her seat, “fuck...they know. They know we’re harboring a Disciple! We’re fucked!” Slipshod could sense the panic rising within her as her mind reeled with the revelation, “We’ll be blacklisted for sure! They’ll put a bounty―” she jerked up in her chair, confusion clear on her face.

“...they should have put a bounty on us,” she stated, perplexed, “the Highlanders should be arresting us right now―should have arrested us a while ago. If ComSpark knew about you enough in advance to have forces stationed here, then we should have been blacklisted before the Highlanders even approached us with this contract. They’ve had every opportunity to apprehend us over the last two weeks!”

“That would mean a lot of other creatures seeing Twilight,” Slipshod pointed out, “you know, the purple alicorn that’s not supposed to exist because there’s just the one? On Equus?”

“...they wanted to take her without anypony knowing,” Squelch said with shocked realization. Then the confusion was back, “but why? If she’s just some freak-of-nature Disciple,” the alicorn frowned at that remark, “what does it matter if others know who she is or what she looks like?

“What does ComSpark gain by keeping her a secret?”

Slipshod paused for a moment before venturing his response. The unicorn mare had just had a few of her foundations rattled in the last few minutes. She might be a little more amenable now, “...a lot; if what she told us before was actually the truth,” he said, nodding towards the alicorn. Twilight nodded somberly.

Squelch blinked at the pair for several long seconds before once more slumping, defeated, into her seat. She ran a hoof through her mane, shaking her head, “...I should have turned you over to the Canis authorities,” she said under her breath.

Twilight jerked in surprise, “but then Chrysalis would have me and there might not be any way to ever stop her!”

“Yeah...and?” the green mare asked derisively. The alicorn looked completely taken aback by the notion that a pony would knowingly aid the queen of the changelings, “I’ve lived my entire life―apparently―in a galaxy ‘ruled’ by this Chis...all...whoever―”

“Chrysalis,” Twilight supplied.

“I really don’t fucking care,” Squelch snapped, “and that’s kind of the point I’m making here: I. Don’t. Care.

“All I wanted from life was to make a stupendously large sum of money running a mercenary outfit so that I could retire in comfort with plenty of years left in my life to enjoy myself. A mansion, expensive jewelry, spending all day watching a legion of toned, oiled up, cabana colts cleaning massive swimming pools I never actually use; you know: the good life! And I was well on my way to having all that! Then...this happened!” the unicorn mare waved her hooves broadly about the room, “and now that dream is fucked.

“If it’s really ComSpark that’s gunning for us, then we are all fucked. You. Me. Every other pony on the crew of the ship who has no idea―or probably even cares―about what’s going on with you and this dopple queen―”

“Changeling,” this time it was Slipshod who supplied the correction. He then promptly ducked out of the way of the datapad that was flying towards his head.

“I don’t care!” Squelch raged, seething in the direction of the pair, “do neither of you get it? We’re screwed! If ComSpark is really the one gunning for us, there is nowhere in the Harmony Sphere that we can go to get away from them. The moment we jump into any system, they’ll know where we are and they’ll be able to coordinate with whoever they want to get at us!

“And meanwhile, we’ll get exactly no contracts. That means no money. No money for food, fuel, ammunition, nothing. We’ll be dead in the water inside a month.”

Squelch wasn’t entirely wrong in that, Slipshod had to admit. He had to wonder if the failure by her personal forces here today meant that Queen Chrysalis would be willing to move more openly against them. He was somewhat doubtful on that front. ComSpark had a DropShip and/or a Jump Ship somewhere in the system at this moment, and therefore agents who knew that their abduction lance had failed to get the job done and that Twilight had made it off the planet. They could just as easily transmit a message to the Highlanders offering a bounty for the Galloway and its crew if they wanted.

If they hadn’t done that by now, that might suggest that the plan was still to keep Twilight’s existence as low key as possible. For now, at any rate. That was bound to change eventually, once the Queen became frustrated enough. They’d need to capitalize on her hesitation while they could.

Though that would be very difficult to do. ComSpark was indeed uniquely situated to essentially monetarily strangle their outfit to death. After all, ComSpark also controlled the Mercenary Review Board, which was responsible for listing all respectable licensed mercenary companies in the galaxy. The Steel Coursers would doubtless be shadow-banned from the MRB listings. Nothing overtly marking them as pirates or raiders, as that would paint a target on their heads and risk Twilight being outright killed before the Queen could get her. But, if the MRB simply...omitted the Steel Coursers as an organization available for hire, that would mean that they wouldn’t see any further contracts or job offers.

Even previous clients who had worked with them wouldn’t touch them for future business. Payments for mercenary services had to go through the MRB, otherwise the employer could get in trouble too and potentially lose access to respectable mercenary units. No creature in the galaxy liked Squelch enough to risk that.

The Steel Coursers were over with. Squelch might be able to officially dissolve the company and set up a fresh charter under a new name; but even then it would only be a matter of time before the Queen’s agents caught on and were once more on their trail.

Even ditching the alicorn wasn’t likely an option anymore. Not really. The Queen would want to make sure that there were no loose ends.

Slipshod idly wondered if her agents would go so far as to arrange for any Jump Ship they were riding with to suffer a ‘missjump’…

The terminal near Squelch chirped, alerting the unicorn to an incoming message. The jade mare glared down at the offending console and jabbed it with her hoof, “whatever it is, it’s going to have to wait,” she tersely informed the pony on the other end of the line. Clearly, she wasn’t quite finished berating the two of them, Slipshod realized with a grimace.

“Um, Ma’am,” a very brave High Gain ventured, despite having just received orders to the contrary, “we’re receiving a tight-beam from the outer system,” there was a long pause as the mare considered how to phrase the next part, “it has a Disciple ident code.”

Slipshod and the alicorn exchanged equally surprised looks. Their employer merely closed her eyes and pressed a hoof to her temple, “because why shouldn’t it get any worse,” she grumbled under her breath, “fuck it, ComSpark already has us by the teets; why not consort with terrorists?”

She depressed the transmit button, “forward it to the conference room,” she said with a resigned sigh.

“Yes, Ma’am. It’s text only.”

All three ponies shifted their gaze to the main display as the pair of video feeds was replaced by a surprisingly short blurb of text. The trio exchanged equally perplexed expressions at the message’s contents.

>> WHO WAS YOUR FIRST FRIEND?

“...the fuck?” Squelch finally broke the silence, looking over at Twilight as though the alicorn should have the answer, “what is that, some kind of Disciple code phrase?”

“It’s not any official coded message that I recognize,” Twilight assured the unicorn as she continued to stare at the screen, “I think...it’s literally just a simple question.”

“They actually want to know who my first foalhood friend was?” the sage mare asked sardonically, “what’s next? The street I grew up on and the make and model of my first ground cart?

“Phishing somehow seems beneath even a terrorist cult…”

“Not your first friend,” Slipshod said before casting his gaze to the alicorn, “I think it’s not just ComSpark who knows you’re on this ship.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Squelch growled, “I don’t even know who you are! How does everypony else in the galaxy seem to?!” Then the unicorn blanched for a second and quickly became even more incredulous, “and how did the Disciples know we were going to be in this system?!

“Highlander opsec is a shitshow!”

This time it was Slipshod who snorted. If only the mare knew, he thought before once more focusing his attention on the alicorn, who was regarding the message now with genuine consideration, “they want to make sure I’m really me,” she observed, “by asking me something only the real Twilight would be able to get right.”

“Probably,” the earth pony conceded, “I’m sure that the Queen has tried to get her agents into the Disciples for centuries. Learning the real Twilight Sparkle is alive and about again sounds too good to be true, I bet.”

The purple mare brought her hoof up to her chin, gently stroking it, as she contemplated the screen and its ostensibly simple question, “Pinkie Pie was the first of my friends that I met in Ponyville…” she mused pensively, “but I wouldn’t say that made us ‘friends’ in that moment, seeing as how all she did was gasp and bolt off. Applejack treated me like part of her family right off the bat…Rainbow wanted to hang out again after only just meeting me...

“This is hard,” Twilight admitted, biting her lip as she receded deep into thought, “we sort of became friends all at once that night; I can’t really say which of them was first…” a thought occurred to the mare, “wait...Ponyville wasn’t where I made my first friend, not really. Back in Celestia’s school there was Moondancer! I didn’t think of her that way back then, but eventually I realized that that’s how she thought of me. It turned out that I was really important to her. So I guess she was my first fr―”

The mare broke off, staring blankly at the screen. Then the faintest smile tugged at the corner of her mouth and she let out an amused snort, “...I’m an idiot. I am literally the dumbest princess,” Twilight sighed. She was shaking her head as she rose out of her seat and stepped around the table to peer down at Squelch’s terminal. Her horn glowed with faint, purple, light as she tapped out a short, five-letter, response on the terminal, “send that reply.”

The unicorn glanced at the terminal, quirking a confused brow at the alicorn, “that’s all?” the purple princess nodded. Squelch shrugged in exasperation, “fuck it,” she reached down and activated the comm, “High Gain, I’m sending you message to respond with.”

“...respond, Ma’am? To the Disciples?”

Slipshop could understand the other mare’s surprise. After all, she hadn’t been privy to the revelation that ComSpark was already after them, and engaging in dialogue like this with the cultists was the sort of offense that could prompt ComSpark to blacklist an organization if they ever found out. In their specific situation, of course, it was doubtful that there was anything the ponies on this ship could do that would get them in more trouble with Chrysalis.

In for a C-bit, and all that.

“Tight-beam, of course,” Squelch responded, as though that should put the mare at the comm station more at ease, “unless that’s something you’re not capable of doing? Should I come up there and do it myself?”

“No, Ma’am; that won’t be necessary. Transmitting reply via tight-beam.”

Squelch closed the intra-ship channel, looking back at the alicorn, “I don’t suppose anypony wants to explain to me why we’re playing twenty-questions with the Disciples?”

“You wanted a way out of the system that ComSpark couldn’t track,” Slipshod pointed out, “something tells me that however the Disciples got here, it wasn’t with their blessing.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting that we sign on with those wackjobs?” the unicorn sputtered incredulously, “have you lost what’s left of your barely existent mind?!”

The stallion frowned, “I’m sorry, weren’t you just the one angsting about what ComSpark was going to do to us a minute ago? Unless you want to set down a homestead here, you’re going to have to make a choice, Squelch: ComSpark or the Disciples of Discord.”

“I’m not convinced that I wouldn’t live longer down on that tartarus-scape…” the green mare grumbled.

“The Disciples aren’t crazy terrorist cultists,” Twilight insisted, “If they really are the descendants of Discord’s Rangers, then they’re our best hope of defeating Chrysalis. They’re our friends, and they will help us and keep us safe. I promise.”

“‘Safe’,” the unicorn scoffed, glaring up at the alicorn, “because of you, five good ponies died today,” she reminded the larger purple mare coldly, “because I stuck my neck out for you.

“Nowhere you go is going to be safe,” she turned away and put her head in her hooves, “I should have turned you in…damn me for listening to the two of you,” she seethed.

“If you’d done that, there’d be nothing left to stop Chrysalis.”

“So?” the jade unicorn asked, glaring up at the alicorn, “you act like that’s a bad thing,” Slipshod wasn’t sure that he had the words in his vocabulary to describe the look of utter shock on Twilight’s face upon hearing Squelch’s statement, “if everything you’ve said in true, that we’ve all been living in this galaxy ruled by dopples―”

“Changelings,” the stallion corrected more quietly this time.

“Still don’t care,” his unicorn employer said dismissively, not breaking eye contact with the princess, “we’ve been living like this for...what? Five hundred years? Give or take?” she didn’t wait for a reply from the alicorn, “and everypony hasn’t been hunted to extinction or whatever. We’re still going about, living our lives. From where I’m sitting? Things aren’t actually so bad,” she shrugged, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs over her chest, looking up expectantly at the other mare, “so explain to me why I should actually care who’s sitting on that throne on Equus?”

Twilight’s jaw moved wordlessly for several seconds as she seemed to try and process what she’d just heard. Obviously the idea that somepony wasn’t innately horrified by the state of galactic affairs hadn’t quite occurred to her, Slipshod suspected, “b-because it’s horrible right now!” she exclaimed, as though shocked that she even had to point out that fact, “creatures are fighting and dying all over the place! It’s terrible!”

“That’s life!” Squelch shot back, “sometimes it sucks for some creatures. That’s how it is! What, you think it’s supposed to be all sunshine and rainbows all the time?”

Twilight blinked several times before vehemently asserting, “yes! It was! Well, I mean, okay, it wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Obviously every planet has a night cycle, and crops needed rain, and some stars emit different spectrums of light that didn’t create what we think of as classic ‘rainbows’ when they’re refracted by―”

Squelch had ceased to actively pay attention by that point, “oh, I call bullshit! There’s no way every creature was happy and getting along all the time!” she shot back accusingly at the alicorn.

“Of course we all got along,” Twilight defended, “we were friends―all of us! We helped each other, and supported one another. We cared about each other, because we knew that we all came from the same place and had the same needs and desires as every other creature. Things like family, and friends, and love, and―”

“Oh, gag me with a rancid used dildo!” Slipshod scowled reflexively in disgust at the mental image that statement conjured, “you sound like a Cutie Cultist, except somehow worse! Spare me your ‘utopian dreams’ drivel―”

“It’s true!” the alicorn snapped at the other mare, “there was peace for almost a thousand years! It didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t easy, but eventually all of the creatures of Equus were brought together in harmony, as friends. And we brought that harmony with us when we spread throughout the galaxy. It was...amazing,” Twilight’s lip curled in a nostalgic smile as her eyes glazed over at the memories of a bygone era. A better era.

Then her expression fell, “...until I screwed everything up. I got so wound up in my accomplishments―so convinced that I could do no wrong―that I forgot that not quite everycreature had accepted the magic of friendship…

“Then came the day that Tirek, Cozy Glow, and Chrysalis escaped. My three greatest failures. Individuals that I gave up on redeeming. This―all of this―is my fault, and it’s my responsibility to fix it.

“You can leave me with the Disciples and do whatever you want after that,” Twilight continued, looking at Squelch, “I can’t ask you to come with me and fight. That’s a decision you have to make for yourself.

“You’re right: you’ve all built lives for yourselves in this galaxy, despite Chrysalis’ control―maybe even because of it,” she amended, noting her surroundings, “it was wrong for me to judge you because you never got the chance to experience anything better. That wasn’t your fault.”

Slipshod doubted that the unicorn mare had expected an apology during any part of that. A suspicion that was made apparent by the surprised look on the green mare’s face, “uh...right. Look, we don’t even know where the Disciples are in this system―”

The terminal chirped again, “Ma’am? Another message via tight-beam from the Disciples. It’s a set of coordinates...”

“Oh course it is,” the jade unicorn deadpanned off-mic.

“...It looks like it’s the super jovian’s L2.”

Aagin, off-mic, “pirate jump point. That explains it,” the mare rubbed her head and sighed. She was silent for several long seconds as she weighed their options which, in fairness, weren’t exactly ideal either way. Squelch looked back at Slipshod, “those were really ComSpark forces?”

The golden earth pony couldn’t keep the wan smile from his lips at the desperate note in his employer’s voice. She wanted him to have been wrong―needed him to have been wrong. She wanted to hear that there was still a chance at being able to go on with the life that she had built for herself. That everything she knew wasn’t over and done with and that she’d have to leave it behind.

He’d fed her a lot of lies over the years that they’d know each other. This was the first time he felt bad about telling her the truth, “they were.”

“Fuck,” she toggled the internal comm, “plot a best time course. Then break orbit,” the unicorn said with audible resignation.

“Ma’am?”

“Do it,” the bite in her tone was only half-hearted this time. Squelch completely understood the other mare’s qualms. It looked like she was still entertaining a few of them herself. It actually bothered Slipshod a little to see his employer looking this despondent.

Squelch cut the line and then tapped out a series of commands on her terminal. A brief alert flashed across the screen indicating that a lockdown had been placed on all outgoing communications until further notice. Everypony on the ship would see the message the next time they accessed their terminal in their quarters, letting them know that any personal messages that they sent out would be retained on the ship. Not that any traffic was going to be leaving the system until the Highlander Jump Ship left in a week.

This was so that nopony on the Galloway could respond to the inevitable requests from the Aris Highlanders about where they were heading off to, when they were supposed to be either waiting patiently in orbit of the planet for the assault to finish, or heading back to the Highlander Jump Ship that would be ferrying them back to the Harmony Sphere.

Slipshod felt the deck plating lurch gently beneath his hooves as the DropShip accelerated out of orbit. Squelch stood up and headed for the door, “well, I have about six-ish hours to figure out how I’m going to explain to the crew that their lives are effectively over. Until then...Slip, go secure...the princess, I guess, in her quarters. Then don’t let me see you again until I’m sober, as I’d be just as likely as not to space you,” the earth pony’s brows raised in concern.

The jade mare keyed in her personal comm, “Cookie? I need you to pull out a bottle of the rankiest, swilliest, paint-peelingist, shit you’ve got. Fuck me up, mule daddy―” the door closed behind her.

The two remaining ponies stared at the door in silence, Twilight silently mouthing the last two audible words in contemplation. Finally, she ventured cautiously, “she’s...adopted?”

“Nope.”

“Ah.”

Another long period of silence passed between the pair. Broken once more by the princess, “you realize what ComSpark knowing about my presence on this vessel implies, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” a lump formed in the stallion’s throat. He’d realized the implication since seeing those ‘Steeds on the planet. He simply wasn’t quite sure what to do with the information quite yet.

“There’s a second changeling onboard,” Twilight said nonetheless.

“...yeah.”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 12: Service for the Dead

The pair remained appropriately quiet and subdued as they allowed the security mare to escort Twilight back to her quarters. Not that this required much in the way of feigning on either of their parts, given the uneasy nature of the conclusion that they’d reached just minutes ago. Slipshod went inside with the alicorn ‘to help her write her first after action report’. Once the door was closed and they could be assured of having privacy from prying ears, it was time for them to resume the conversation that had begun in the conference room regarding the recent revelation that they’d made.

“I thought you said that Chrysalis didn’t have agents on every ship?” Twilight hissed, scowling at the stallion.

“I said I didn’t think she did,” Slipshod corrected pointedly, his own mind racing with the implications, “the Steel Coursers aren’t a high profile outfit. I figured there’s no way the Queen would waste an agent on them. There are a lot of changeling agents out there, but not nearly enough to genuinely bug every ship―er, infiltrate,” he mentally cringed at the unintended―yet not entirely inapt―pun.

“So you don’t know who the other changeling is?” the alicorn’s tone wasn’t―quite―accusatory. She wasn’t using her magic to compress him into a singularity again in an effort to figuratively―and literally―squeeze the information out of him; so it was doubtful that she actually suspected him of trying to hide this fact from her. After all, she knew that he wanted Chrysalis removed from power about as much as she did―if for entirely unrelated reasons.

“I have no clue,” the stallion insisted, “it could be anypony,” he thought for a moment and then hastily amended, “okay, well not quite ‘anypony’. There’re a couple dozen ponies I know for sure it couldn’t be.”

“How?”

Slipshod tapped his personal terminal on his uniform sleeve, “the ponies on my rota. The ones I draw from. Another changeling wouldn’t let me draw from them, so none of the ponies I frequent could be the Queen’s agent,” he frowned, “though that still leaves a lot of suspects.

“And honestly...there’s at least a possibility that there actually isn’t another changeling on the ship,” the earth pony ventured, “you may not have left the ship since you woke up, but other members of the crew sure have. They weren’t supposed to say anything about you, but it’s not like everypony stayed completely sober the whole time they were in port. Somepony may have just blabbed about the ‘weird purple pony’ that was added to the crew in earshot of the wrong creature.”

“Can we really afford to take the risk of making that assumption?” the princess asked him pointedly.

“No. No we can’t,” Slipshod admitted bitterly, “we need to check. I’m just not sure how to go about it,” he looked to the alicorn, “unless you’ve managed to pick out any other ponies who didn’t react ‘appropriately surprised’ to you, like I did?” Twilight shook her head, “what about that spell that nixed my disguise? You could just go around blasting the crew with it…”

“I suspect that your ex-wife wouldn’t appreciate me using my magic on her crew without us first explaining why I’m doing it,” she said, casting an aside glance at the stallion, “besides, unless we were lucky enough to find the spy in the first few attempts, they’d doubtless get wind of our search. I shudder to think of what one of Chrysalis’ agents might do in an act of desperation if they thought discovery was close at hoof.

“Such actions would also necessitate revealing to the crew of the ship why we were doing it, and what we were looking for,” she reminded him, “do you no longer think informing them would ‘panic the ship’, as you put it?”

Slipshod opened his mouth, but said nothing before closing it again. He considered the idea carefully. Squelch had only recently grudgingly accepted that Queen Chrysalis and changelings might be a real phenomenon. The earth pony wasn’t quite so certain that she’d be receptive to the notion that a member of her crew was currently one of those very changelings.

Well, actually, that wasn’t quite true, now was it, the stallion snorted bitterly. Squelch would probably jump at an explanation for how ComSpark was tracking the Galloway’s location so easily. An embedded spy was the perfect scapegoat for her frustrations. That wasn’t the problem though. The problem was that the jade mare was already suspicious of how he seemed to know so much about what was going on.

She’d wonder if he was a changeling too.

If Squelch ordered Twilight to ‘test’ him, would the alicorn refuse? Would she fudge the results of the spell somehow? Or would she decide that exposing him was a way to further cement her concerns about the insidiousness of changelings and the danger that they presented? Assuming that Squelch didn’t outright kill him for being a ‘monster’, the fact was that having his true nature revealed to the crew would eventually lead to his death anyway.

There was no way that any of the ponies on his rota would let a shapeshifting monster anywhere near them. Especially when they found out the reason he wanted to be was so that he could feed off of their raw emotional essence. It would only be a matter of time before he starved to death.

“We need to keep this between us,” the stallion finally concluded unhappily. Twilight also was right, of course: the spy might do something drastic if they thought the crew was onto them. To say nothing of what the crew would do to each other in the meantime as they became increasingly more paranoid about who was and wasn’t a ‘real’ pony. In the aftermath, once the genuine agent was dealt with, there would almost certainly be dozens of torn and tattered relationships as a result of the inevitable accusations. Slipshod did not envy having to repair those rifts between members of the crew just so that he could get a decent meal again.

He was going to have a time of it as it was, in the wake of the recent tragedy. He couldn’t afford any significant backsliding right now.

“If we spook the agent, they might do something that gets a lot of ponies hurt, or killed,” he agreed, “right now, they have no reason to think we know that there’s a changeling onboard―another changeling anyway,” he amended with a roll of his eyes.

“I’ll find out who it is,” he insisted, “I’ll start with the more outgoing members of the crew that aren’t on my rota. Another changeling would need a wide social network in order to stay well fed, just like I do. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out who’s been frequenting a lot of the other crew’s quarters.

“In fact, it should be pretty easy to find out who it is right now.”

The alicorn raised a curious brow, “how so?”

“They need the crew to be as generally happy as I do,” Slipshod pointed out, “and right now there’s a dark cloud over just about everypony’s head. Neither they, nor I, will be able to feed until that’s mostly dealt with. Most ponies are going to be moping and stewing over the recent losses, but us changelings will be the ones actively going out and trying to get everypony’s spirits back up so that we can feed again.

“I’ll start asking around tonight,” he informed the alicorn, “I’ve got a lot of ponies to visit too,” he sighed, not looking forward to the workload that he had before him, “I can try and find out who else is going around trying to cheer ponies up.”

The princess seemed surprised by the notion, “that...is curious,” she said, prompting a look from the stallion, “in my time, reformed changelings very frequently pursued careers as counselors and therapists, due to their empathic nature, and desire for those around them to be in ‘high spirits’.

“It’s fascinating to see that this desire for happiness among the general population is inherent to even unreformed changelings. I had not anticipated such compassion from Chrysalis’ drones.”

“I don’t know if I’d call what I’m feeling ‘compassion’,” the earth pony frowned at the purple alicorn, “it’s not that I really care whether the ponies on this ship are happy or not, on a personal level. I may act ‘friendly’, but I’m not their friend. Changelings don’t have ‘friends’, we have ‘food’,” he told her flatley, “and right now everypony’s either nervous or in mourning. Neither of which are particularly ideal emotions to feed off of. The sooner I get some ponies cheered up and thinking positively again, the sooner I get to eat.

“This is about personal pragmatism, not altruism. If fear and loathing nourished us as much as love did...well, let’s just say that there’d be a very different dynamic between me and the ponies on this ship.”

That revelation certainly seemed to sour the alicorn’s opinion of him, the stallion observed. That was hardly his fault though. She was the one who was supposed to be familiar with changelings and how they operated. Nothing he had said should have surprised her.

“Look, I’ll work on vetting the crew, you just work on what you’re going to say to the Disciples to convince them that there aren’t any of Chrysalis’ spies on this ship,” he instructed the purple mare, who regarded him sardonically.

“But there could be a changeling spy onboard.”

“I know,” the stallion sighed in annoyance, “but what happens when they go looking for a spy and then find me?” he pointed out; then assumed a mocking, sarcastic, tone, “oh, no, Mister Disciple; I promise you I’m not the bad changeling! I super-duper swear it!”

Slipshod’s expression fell into a flat look at the princess once more, “unless you know how you’re going to frame it so that I don’t end up lynched? Or worse,” the mare frowned, but didn’t seem to have an answer ready for him. The earth pony sighed, “just...please don’t get me killed, alright? I recognize that the Disciples are the best chance either of us is ever going to have at beating Chrysalis...but my life is going to be hanging by a thread just being around them, more than it ever has.

“If Chrysalis has an agent on the ship, I’ll find them; and I’ll deal with them. I promise.”

Twilight regarded him for several long seconds before finally nodding, “I believe you. Very well; I’ll help you keep your secret.

“Go, see to the crew,” she said, waving him towards the door, “friends or no, it’s good that it matters to you how they feel.”

Slipshod frowned but left without another word. With a parting pleasantry to the security mare posted at the princess’ door, the stallion continued down the corridor, glancing at his fetlock-mounted personal pad and the rota that it contained. According to his normal schedule, this was supposed to be his and Channel Lock’s regular riff night. She’d have been on station in the ‘Steed Bay during that hasty retrieval just a few hours ago, so it was anypony’s guess as to whether she was still there or back in her quarters again.

It was a place to start though. If she was still on duty, he’d just move on to somepony else.

The golden earth pony was surprised to find that the door to the cabin that Channel Lock shared with High Gain was actually still open. He quietly crept up to its edge and peered inside. A concerned frown creased his lips at what he saw: the strawberry red unicorn mare was sitting on her bed, using her telekinesis to scrub furiously at the back of a vac-suit helmet with a rag that he didn’t suspect had been quite so crimson before she’d started. He didn’t need to be an empath to see that she was in distress, though it did allow him to understand that her features actually concealed just how distressed she really was.

His changeling senses also allowed him to pick up on the more subtle undertones of her emotional state: tinges of shame and guilt. Something terrible had happened, and she felt partially―if not completely―responsible for it. She was so distracted by these feelings that Slipshod somehow doubted that she was aware that she was continuing to wipe at an already clean patch of the helmet clutched in her hooves, while plenty of blood yet remained on other parts. Her eyes were clouded over, as though she wasn’t even actually seeing what she was doing anyway.

The unicorn mechanic also didn’t seem to be the least bit concerned with the splotches of blood dotted across the back of the rest of the vac-suit that she was still wearing. Or that she’d stained the sheets of her bed when she’d sat down on it.

“Chans?” he offered gently from the open doorway, softly rapping his hoof on the frame more out of propriety’s sake than anything else.

The mare jerked, letting out an audible yelp. The helmet went clattering across the room, coming to rest by Slipshod’s feet. The rag she’d managed to catch in her hooves as her magic failed her in her moment of surprise. Channel Lock instantly began to knead the stained swath of cloth against her chest as her wide eyes locked themselves onto the floor in front of her.

“S-s-sorry, Slip,” she said almost too quietly for the stallion to hear, “I...I know that we usually riff on Thursdays...but I think I want to pass this time. I’m...not really feeling into it right now…”

The earth pony reached down and picked up the helmet, briefly examining the blood stains. It was only the back of the helmet that looked to have been affected. Nothing that she’d have noticed until she removed it, he suspected, “is it Thursday?” he asked absently, even going so far as to glance at his fetlock, as though only now taking note of the date, “I’d honestly forgot,” he looked back to the mare, “no, I’m actually here to make sure you’re okay,” that much wasn’t a lie, at least.

“I saw that the Bay got hit. Wanted to check on you,” he made a show of looking between the blood-stained helmet in his hoof and the mare, “are you hurt? Should I get Doc Dee?” he knew that she wasn’t actually injured, but the perceived empathy was what was important for her right now.

Channel Lock shook her head, “I’m fine. Doc’s got his hooves full right now anyway.

“Other ponies...weren’t so lucky,” the last came out in an almost haunted tone.

Slipshod slowly stepped through the opened door, closing it behind them to give the two of them some privacy, and sat down on the bed next to the mare. He set the helmet on the floor, away from the unicorn, “tell me what happened, Chans.”

The mare closed her eyes tight, clutching the rag to her chest as she started to rock slowly back and forth, “I got somepony killed,” she said in a ragged breath, before sniffing loudly.

That sense of guilt flared white hot within the mare, nearly making the stallion visibly wince in response to its intensity. He reached out with a hoof and brought the mare in close to him. He’d have to quelch that first if he wanted to make any progress here, “if there’s anypony on this ship that’s responsible for what happened, it’s me; for calling the Galloway into the middle of that killzone. The Commies shot us up. You didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You don’t understand,” she insisted, shaking her head even as the mare seemed to reflexively curl up against him, welcoming the embrace, “Spanner wouldn’t have been standing where he was if I hadn’t fucked up!”

She sniffed again, “the call went out: Hot Retrieval. Everypony in the ‘Steed Bay ran to the locker rooms to get their vac-suits. I couldn’t get mine on right. One of the zippers got stuck. Spanner stayed behind to help me. We finally got my suit on and ran out to Val’s stall.

“The way it was was that first on the scene gets the hoist controls. Second to get there watches the wire guides,” she sniffled again, “because Spanner helped me, he got there second. So he was watching the guides when…”

Her words cut off as a shudder coursed through her body at exactly the same moment that Slipshod was assaulted by a wave of cold fear coming off the mare, “it happened so fast,” she whispered, “all I remember is is it felt like somepony had jerked the catwalk from under me. I stumbled a bit. I go back up. I saw the hole in the door. It hadn’t been there a second ago. That was for the damage control teams to worry about though. My job was to hoist up Val’s Parasprite. Of course she―” Channel Lock broke off for a moment, looking briefly up at the stallion before continuing, “...there was nothing to hoist, so I turned around to go help one of the other teams…

“...that’s when I saw―” she clamped her lips shut as her body convulsed. Nausea. Revulsion. Then the guilt again.

“Spanner should have been the first out,” the mare said when she could talk again. Bitterness was overshadowing the guilt now. Self-loathing, “I was the fuck up. I should have been out last. Then I’d have been standing where I could see the wire guides.

“I’d have been the one that died,” anger now, “should have been the one that died.”

Slipshod sighed and closed his eyes, sorting through the tangled mess of emotions swirling within the unicorn mare. He traced each and every strand back to its source until he managed to find those that wouldn’t merely lead to further self-depreciation when pulled upon. If he could unravel the right ones, he’d be able to set her straight without too much trouble. It was just a matter of hitting the right notes in the right order.

“You said that you didn’t have time to react,” the earth pony began. The mare nodded, “if you had, would you have pushed him out of the way? Even if you knew you’d die doing it?”

“Of course,” Channel Lock replied firmly, without any hint of hesitation. She meant it too. He could feel it.

“Do you think that he’d have done the same for you?” the earth pony asked next, “you said he stayed behind to help you. Sounds to me like he cared about the ponies he worked with. Just like you. So if you’d been watching the wire guides, and he saw that you were about to be killed by debris, do you think he’d have tried to save you even if he knew he’d die trying?”

“He…” the mare squirmed uncomfortably at his side, “...he might have.”

“I think he would have,” Slipshod assured her, “you guys―all the ‘Steed Bay techs―you’re a team. More than that,” he amended with a dry chuckle, “you’re practically family, the way I see you guys acting in the Bay.

“You look out for each other. You help each other. When one of you’s in trouble, another steps up to lend a hoof,” he felt her guilt thinning as he spoke, “you didn’t get anypony killed, or ‘let’ anypony die. Spanner stepped up to help a member of his team in trouble. Just like you would have if it’d’ve been him struggling. Right?”

The mare nodded. Slipshod could feel her guilt ebbing, and pressed on, “it happened fast, like you said. That’s not your fault. Nopony’s faster than an autocannon round or a missile,” the stallion’s mind flashed with an image of the recovery team mare being splattered while securing Twilight’s ‘Steed, but quickly suppressed the image. It wasn’t about him right now.

“The point is that: if you could have saved him, you would have. Everypony knows that. Spanner knew that too. Nopony holds it against you that you were slower than an explosion. And, like you said: if everypony had seen it coming, Spanner would have taken that hit for you anyway.

He gave her a squeeze and reassuringly rubbed his hoof over her shoulder, “you didn’t get anypony killed, Chans. The Commies did this. Nopony else. You see that, right?”

Channel Lock sighed and nodded once more. With the guilt all but evaporated, her self-loathing burned brightest now. Her frustration with herself for not being able to perform like she was expected to, “which zipper were you struggling with?”

The red unicorn blinked through a brief moment of confusion before rubbing her hoof along the front of her suit, and the zipper that ran up her chest. Slipshod stepped around and knelt down, looking closely at the seam of her vac-suit. After only a few seconds, the earth pony’s lips canted in a wan smile and he pointed a hoof at a part of it, “about right there’s where it got hung up?”

She looked at where his hoof was indicating, and nodded her head, her eyes wide with mild surprise, “that’s exactly the place it got stuck! How’d you…?”

“If you look real close, you can see the stitching’s a little uneven,” he informed her, “it’s never perfect. Most uniforms with zippers have a spot somewhere that the zipper fights them a bit. If you’re not ready for it and pull too hard in the wrong direction, you can even jump the teeth and get everything all bound up.

“It’s a manufacturing defect,” he assured the mare, holding her gaze pointedly, “it’s nothing that you did. The stitching was just a little off. A pocket on my piloting barding’s left foreleg never quite closes all the way for the exact same reason,” he said, flashing her a wry smile.

The mare stared down at her chest, running a hoof along the seam, “...I should have inspected this better,” she insisted, though the earth pony could already feel that she wasn’t being quite as hard on herself as she’d been a minute ago now that she realized her wardrobe issues earlier hadn’t been caused exclusively by her own incompetence.

Slipshod shook his head, “issues like this aren’t always obvious,” he said, “here, take it off,” the unicorn mare seemed unconvinced, but complied. Her horn began to glow as she took hold of the zipper with her magic and drew it down as far as it would go. The stallion held up his hoof, “stop!” the mare did so, mildly surprised, “now back up. Slow,” the mare frowned, but complied. The zipper began to slowly ascend back up towards her suit’s collar.

It caught halfway up, dragging on the fabric of the garment and refusing to go any further. Slipshod looked more closely, “back down...stop...up again, but bent it to the left a little,” the mare quirked an eyebrow, but did as the stallion had instructed. This time the zipper didn’t catch at all and rode smoothly all the way up to her neck. The mare’s eyes widened in surprise.

“See?” he said, standing up once more and returning to the bed beside her, “you could have put this suit on a dozen times, and never known that the zipper would only give you problems if you held it a certain way. That’s not something that anypony can reasonably be expected to know about a vac-suit that they wear...how often? Seriously, outside of drills, when’s the last time you had to get this thing on in a rush?”

“...Never,” the mare admitted, more of her self-loathing melting away as she was forced to confront the evidence that she was not wholly incompetent at manipulating a zipper.

“You didn’t fuck up, Chans,” Slipshod reassured her, putting his hoof around her shoulder and bringing the mare in close once again, getting a read on her emotions. She was almost there, but not quite. All she needed was some outside assurances. He could easily provide the unicorn with that much, “you had a bad zipper that was hiding how screwed up it was. Your teammate helped you out, just like you’d have helped him. Nopony could have known where or how the ship would get hit. It didn’t matter where anypony was standing. Heck, if the helmsmare had picked a retrieval site a few meters in any direction Spanner would have been fine.

“Do you think it was the pilot’s fault for parking the ship where they did?” Channel Lock shook her head, “was it Mig’s fault for pairing you and Spanner on the same stall?” another shake, “was it Squelch’s fault for taking the job?”

“No,” the mare finally answered aloud, the faintest hint of a smile tugging at her lip as she was forced to accept the absurdity of her own thought process, “okay, you’ve made your point. It’s not my fault Spanner’s dead. But…” her features fell once more, “I just…” she let out a defeated sigh, “a good pony’s still dead. He shouldn’t have died like that. And it just seems wrong that nopony can be blamed for it! You know?

“If a pony dying like that isn’t anypony’s ‘fault’, that means it can happen again. At any time,” she withdrew on the bed, wrapping her forelegs around herself comfortingly, “and it shouldn’t be like that,” she frowned.

Slipshod gave the mare a brief, reassuring, squeeze and shrugged, “that’s...life. It’s not fair. There’s no way to make it fair. We just have to accept that,” he leaned down and gave the unicorn a peck on her forehead, “I think that’s what’s called ‘living’; you know?”

Channel Lock to a deep breath and let it out as a heavy sigh, “yeah...still sucks though.”

“Tell you what,” the stallion began, adjusting himself on her bed, “I suggest reaching out to some of Spanner’s other friends on the ship. Get together, swap stories, share a few drinks, toast the good stallion that he was. Like some sort of memorial or something.”

He felt the mare perk up at the idea, “you know, that’s a really good idea actually!”

Slipshod flashed the mare a wry smirk, “I do have those from time to time…”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” the unicorn mechanic apologized, extending her neck to briefly nuzzle the earth pony on the nose, “but you’re right: the whole ‘Steed Bay should get together and do something for Spanner,” she thought for a brief moment before adding, “I mean, obviously anypony would be invited. He had friends in other departments,” another thought soon seemed to occur to the unicorn, “maybe this could even be more than about just Spanner!

“Can you talk to Squelch about hosting a shipwide memorial for all the ponies who died?” she asked the stallion, regarding him expectantly.

The earth pony winced and rubbed the back of his head, “ehhh...I would, but I’m not really Squelch’s favorite pony at the moment,” at the mare’s confused expression, Slipshod raced to come up with a plausible explanation as to why that would be. Channel Lock knew nothing about ComSpark’s involvement in the ambush, or even the fact that this ship was currently enroute to meet with the Disciples of Discord. Now was hardly an ideal moment to break that news to the tech either.

Not that Slipshod could think of when a particularly good time for such a thing was going to be coming up any time soon…

“I got the Crystal Cavalier beaten up pretty good,” he quickly explained, “and she thinks I fucked up by leading everypony into that ambush.”

Channel Lock’s face scrunched up in an almost incredulous scowl, “that’s hardly fair,” she protested, “you stuck to the plan the Highlanders laid out, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Slipshod nodded, careful to hide his own dour amusement at his knowledge that it had been ‘adhering to the plan’ which had allowed them to be ambushed in the first place, “and I didn’t say that Squelch was being rational about it,” he pointed out, “she’s just...stressed,” understatement of the decade, “she lost five of her crew, including a ‘Steed pilot, and we couldn’t even salvage Val’s Parasprite. The mission didn’t pay nearly enough to cover all of that.

“Her business took a really serious financial hit today,” he pointed out.

The unicorn continued to scowl, “she’s not honestly thinking about money at a time like this? Ponies are dead!”

The stallion waved his hoof at the mare’s ire, shaking his head, “trust me, she cares about those ponies. She’s writing letters to their families right now,” or soon would be once she was sober again, he didn’t add out loud. The tech calmed down somewhat at that information, “but she also has to take a longer view for all of the ponies that are still alive,” he continued, “which includes things like balancing the company’s budget. Being down a ‘Steed means we have to take smaller, lower paying jobs; which means taking more of those jobs to keep up overall income.

“Squelch doesn’t get the luxury of wallowing. Because I bet you still need to be paid by the end of the month, right?”

The unicorn tech looked away and awkwardly kneaded her hooves, “I mean...yeah. I guess I get it. I suppose I can talk to Mig, Tig, and Cookie about arranging something,” the mare decided, perking up a little more as the plan formed in her head, “food, drinks―ooh! I know! Eulogies, or whatever!” she looked back at Slipshod excitedly, “we’ll find ponies close to the ones we lost to say a few words about them!”

Slipshod nodded, smiling, “that sounds like a great idea,” he said, patting the mare on her head, “a great way for everypony to come together and find a little solace,” and perhaps an expedient method of dispersing that gray cloud that was hanging over everypony’s emotions too, the stallion thought to himself, “if there’s anything I can do to help…?” he offered rhetorically. He didn’t actually expect that there was anything further that the unicorn was going to need from him. She sounded like she’d have the matter well in hoof. So he started getting off the bed to take his leave.

“Um...actually,” the stallion stopped, looking at the unicorn with a confused expression, “if you could speak for Valkyrie, I think that’d be great,” Channel Lock said, sounding hopeful.

The earth pony blinked in stunned silence. She wanted him to speak for the pegasus pilot? Why? “Wouldn’t it be better to get one of her close friends to do it?” he asked, trying not to sound as sarcastic as he ended up being. He winced inwardly.

“Oh. I’m sorry, I thought…” the mare seemed uncertain, biting her lip, “I mean, you two were always hanging out together. I just assumed that you were close.

“I didn’t really hang out with her much,” she admitted, “so if you know a pony who’d be a better choice, by all means, ask them to do it. You’d know who’d do a better job, I guess. Sorry if I misread things,” she added.

“No no, it’s alright,” the earth pony waved off the apology, smiling at the mare, “I’ll get somepony to talk about Val, don’t worry. You just work things out with Cookie and the twins,” the tech nodded eagerly.

Sensing that his mission had been accomplished here, Slipshod took his leave. Once in the corridor, he hesitated. Had Channel Lock been serious about suggesting that he be the one to speak on behalf of Valkyrie? The idea seemed patently absurd to the earth pony. Obviously it should fall to one of her friends, like…

Slipshod was drawing a blank on candidates at the moment, but he did have a lot on his mind, so it made sense that he was having trouble focussing on something as trivial as that. Only, the stallion supposed that who Valkyrie spent most of her time with wasn’t quite so trivial a matter anymore. Not if he was supposed to find somepony to toast her at Channel Lock’s impromptu memorial service.

He’d seen her and Axel Rod in the gym at the same time on occasion. That seemed like a reasonable place to start his search, so he headed to the DropShip’s garage.

The head of the motor pool was currently buried up to his cannons in the engine housing of a cargo truck, performing a regular overhaul of the vehicle. At Slipshod’s prompting, the oil-stained stallion slid out from beneath the truck and retrieved a rag to wipe away the more egregious grease smears from his face, “you want me to what?”

“Channel Lock’s putting together a memorial for the ponies that died pulling me and Purple Rose off the planet,” the ‘Steed pilot reiterated, “I was hoping you could give Val’s eulogy. Since you knew her pretty well and all.”

The mechanic regarded the other earth pony with flat confusion, “...I didn’t even know she was dead,” he looked away for a brief moment, frowning, “damn. That sucks,” he turned back to the golden stallion, “how are you holding up?”

Now it was Slipshod’s turn to be confused as his lips curled into a frown of his own, “I’m fine. Why?”

“I mean, you just lost your friend,” Axel Rod replied, sounding a little bewildered at the question, “you two were practically joined at the hip!”

The pilot was about to rebuke the obviously erroneous observation, but no words ended up actually coming out of his mouth in refutation. He was forced to grudgingly admit that the pair of them had spent a lot of time together, even outside of missions, but that was merely a consequence of them holding the same position on the ship. They were the company’s only ‘Steed pilots. As a result, they were required to train and go on missions together. It had only made sense to share a lot of their meals too, so that they could discuss how their last mission had gone, or refresh each other on what was supposed to happen on their next outing.

That didn’t make them friends.

Friends...shared interests. Presumably outside of piloting BattleSteeds. Friends also frequently socialized. Again, presumably outside of the scores of hours that the two of them had spent conversing over the radio while on assignment. ‘Socializing’ only counted if the ponies in question were physically present in the same room.

...Right?

Slipshod shook his head vigorously and looked back down at Axel Rod, “you don’t happen to know who else she spent a lot of time with, do you?”

“Besides you?” the oily stallion smirked at the ‘Steed pilot, who scowled in return, prompting a chuckle, “I mean, I guess she was on the bridge a lot. Maybe check with the bridge crews?”

That was right, Valkyrie had made several modifications to the Galloway’s sensor systems. She’d have had to spend a lot of time with the ship’s electronics techs, “Doppler!” the stallion blurted as he turned and quickly trotted out of the garage, leaving behind a bewildered looking Axel Rod.

“...good talk?”

Slipshod climbed up the four decks necessary to get from the garage at the bottom of the Mustang-class DropShip to its bridge in short order. He found the control center in a fairly subdued state, and didn’t quite appreciate the tense atmosphere he was getting from the three ponies currently occupying the room. They were cruising through space, well away from any possible threats. There shouldn’t be any reason for these ponies to be so nerv―

Oh, right. These were likely the only other ponies on the ship that knew Squelch had ordered them to meet with the Disciples of Discord, designated terrorists and avowed enemies of ‘Queen Twilight Sparkle’. They probably thought that their employer had lost her Celestia-given mind. Honestly, it was a testament to all of the good will that Squelch had earned with the ponies in her employ over the years that they’d even gone along with her orders thus far!

The stallion should probably soothe a few frayed nerves while he was here too, if he was ever going to get a decent meal today…

But how exactly was he supposed to sell these ponies―or anypony, really―on the idea of committing one of the few galactically recognized crimes that still actually existed in the Harmony Sphere? How was he going to make any of what was going on make any kind of sense without also hitting all of these ponies with some of the hardest to swallow truths that any of them would probably ever encounter in their lives: that the Disciples were the ‘good guys’, ComSpark was actually evil, Queen Twilight was a shapeshifting bug horse, and that ‘Purple Rose’ was the real Twilight Sparkle, lost in suspended animation these last five centuries?

Even after being confronted with what Slipshod considered an overwhelming quantity of hard evidence, Squelch was still only mostly on board with some of those realities. And he’d been chiseling away at her convictions for months!

What was he supposed to do that would calm these ponies in six hours?

Well...there was always his tried a true method of handling situations: lie and manipulate like his life depended on it.

The golden earth pony manifested a broad smirk and leisurely propped himself up against the frame of the open doorway leading onto the bridge, “don’t you all just look like a sorry bunch. What? Did Cookie put you guys on his ‘gruel only’ diet?”

The ash gray pegasus stallion sitting at the Galloway’s helm station turned his head to look over his shoulder at the new arrival, frowning, “the Captain ordered us to―”

“Aileron!” High Gain hissed at the other pony from her seat by the communications console, glancing fervently between the two stallions.

The ship’s backup pilot scowled at the electronics technician, “oh like she’s not going to tell him eventually anyway!” he retorted, nodding at Slipshod. The earth pony mare rolled her eyes but offered no additional objection to Aileron sharing what they had all apparently decided was ‘sensitive information’ not meant for general dissemination among the ship’s crew. The stallion at the helm looked back at the golden earth pony, “the Captain’s having us ride out to meet up with a Disciple ship that commed us out of the blue,” his tone suggested that Slipshod should find the offered information to be profoundly shocking.

He made sure that his expression remained completely unphased by the news, “oh? Do tell,” the earth pony trotted over to High Gain’s station, peering over her shoulder at the display, “what’d they say?”

The earth pony mare frowned slightly, “well, I mean, they didn’t technically say anything. It was a text message. I didn’t actually read it. It was addressed to the commander. By name,” it was clear from the mare’s own tone that she was quite uncomfortable with the implications of that last fact.

“And now,” the comm tech continued, “the Highlanders are blowing up the comm lines, wanting to know where we think we’re going, but our transmitters are locked out,” she brought up the applicable notification so as to demonstrate this fact to the ‘Steed pilot. Sure enough, the console stated in no uncertain terms that nopony was permitted to transmit any outgoing traffic without Squelch’s explicit permission to do so, “so I’m pretty much just sitting here, logging all of the abuse they’re sending at us,” the mare reached out and tapped a button on her terminal, wincing in anticipation.

“―OU GET YOUR SORRY FLANKS BACK IN ORBIT THIS MINUTE!” even Slipshod recoiled slightly in genuine shock at the pure vitriolic hatred spewed out through those words. He couldn’t ‘sense’ the emotion behind them, but he could feel it, “IF I DON’T GET A REPLY IN THE NEXT THIRTY SECONDS, YOU’RE BLACKLISTED! YOU HEAR ME?! YOU’LL NEVER WORK IN THE COMBINE AGAI―”

High Gain tapped the mute button once more, sparing those present from being assailed by any more of the roaring tirade. Slipshod continued to look down at the terminal with an appreciative look on his face as he considered what he’d just heard, “they sound a little put out,” his sarcasm earned him a flat look from the earth pony comm tech.

“‘They’,” a periwinkle unicorn mare sitting over by the sensor station chimed in, “happen to be Baron Mar, the Aris Highlander leading this little operation,” the earth pony stallion recalled encountering the tiercel for their briefing on the operation, “he’s a heavy hitter in both the Highlanders, and also a part of the Combine’s government. So blacklisting the Coursers is a threat that he can definitely make good on.”

Slipshod smiled broadly, “he could,” the stallion agreed, though he certainly didn’t sound as though he was particularly concerned about that point, “siding with the Disciples is a pretty big deal after all.

“It’s a good thing we’re not doing that then, isn’t it?”

All three of the ponies on the bridge exchanged confused looks before looking back at the ‘Steed pilot. It was High Gain who spoke up, “excuse me? But we’re―”

“I know what it looks like we’re doing,” he acknowledged, nodding sagely, “but just ask yourself one thing: is Squelch an idiot?”

“I assume that’s a rhetorical question?” the unicorn sensor tech asked in response, propping her head up on her hoof, “or is our response going to come up on our next performance reviews?”

“That’s what I like about you, Doppler: you’re very career oriented. It puts a level head on your shoulders,” Slipshod grinned at the blue mare before clearing his throat and once more addressing the room at large, “seriously, though, we’re not throwing in with the Disciples. At least, not really,” the others flashed him a collection of confused and skeptical looks, “we’re plants,” he informed them pointedly, pumping every ounce of confidence that he could into his demeanor.

“Obviously, none of you heard this from me,” he went on, giving each of the bridge crew a knowing look until he got a nod from them, “but isn’t it a bit...odd, that there’s a Disciple ship parked in a system with a secret Pony Commonwealth base in it? A ship that has clearly been here since before we arrived?”

The three bridge ponies once more looked at one another, seeming to confirm between themselves that they each did now wonder about that coincidence. Slipshod seized upon their fledgling doubts in order to implant the new narrative that he was crafting for their consumption, “ComSpark has suspected for a while now that the Archon has been getting support from the Disciples, but there’s never been anything that they could prove. Even this is technically ‘circumstantial evidence’,” he gestured at a display with a map of the system on it, and the signal that they were enroute to, “if they want to pin anything on Dominus, then ComSpark needs hard evidence. Irrefutable proof that the Archon’s in bed with terrorists.

“How better to get that than to go right for the source?”

“This is part of an op?” Aileron quirked an eyebrow at the other stallion.

Slipshod tapped his hoof on the side of his nose and winked at the stallion, “I didn’t say that, of course. Right?” the pegasus offered a hesitant nod, “and, obviously, none of you should either. Because you didn’t hear that.”

High Gain frowned, looking back at her own console, “but that still doesn’t explain why the Disciples reached out to us first―”

“That was our doing on the planet,” the ‘Steed pilot quickly cut in so as to head off the technician’s well-founded doubts, “if you go over the logs, you’ll see that there was some coded chatter from my ‘Steed during that last little scuffle,” the earth pony mare frowned at him, but did turn back to her screen and skim back over the communication logs from the fight. Within a few seconds, her eyes widened in surprise, “see? Right after picking up those same kinds of coded chatter from the other ‘Steeds?” another nod of agreement.

“That was Val’s doing,” a tiny part of Slipshod’s meager conscience wondered at using the dead pegasus like this. Though, her absence made for a perfect opportunity to attribute to her whatever he wished to. It wasn’t like she was going to be able to refute any of it, “she intercepted and broke down their codes, and then I used them to convince the Disciples that we were their Commonwealth contacts! So now the Disciple ship is reaching out to us, thinking we’re the ponies they had on the inside.

“Baron Mar has to play all this up,” he went on, waving a hoof at High Gain’s station, “so that nopony gets wise to us. It can’t look like we’re getting away too easy, or that it went unnoticed.”

“...Oh fuck,” Doppler said breahtlessly, falling back in her seat as she digested everything that the golden stallion had just related to them, “this is...big time stuff though…like way above a small outfit like the Steel Coursers,” she added, sounding concerned.

“Which is why nopony would suspect us,” Slipshod pointed out, “we’re the perfect double-agents.”

“So the commander’s not actually throwing in with the Disciples?” Aileron asked pointedly in an effort to soothe his concerns.

“Squelch would be offended if she heard you ask that,” Slipshod frowned at the helmspony, “you know her better than that. All three of you do,” he amended, looking at the other two in turn, and seeing them shy away at his gaze. He could feel their shame at having doubted a mare that they’d all come to respect and trust so much.

“She knows what she’s doing,” he reiterated, “and she’s not going to do wrong by us, okay?” the other three nodded.

Slipshod spent a few seconds confirming that the majority of the apprehension that they three bridge ponies had been cultivating prior to his arrival had indeed been dissipated before nodding and making his way over to Doppler at her sensor station, “Doppler, hey, I was wondering if I could ask you to do something for me? Well,” the earth pony quickly corrected a second later, “more of a favor for Val, really.”

The periwinkle pegasus regarded him expectantly, “um, sure, I guess. What’s up?”

“Channel Lock’s going to be working with Cookie to organize a memorial service. Nothing big. Just drinks in the mess, I bet. She’s looking for volunteers to say a few words for the ponies we lost today. I was hoping that you’d be up for speaking about Valkyrie?”

The mare cocked her head to the side in clear confusion, “me? I mean...I guess I could, but…” she frowned, rubbing the back of her head, “I’d kind of feel real weird about it,” she admitted, “we barely said two words to each other since I came on board.”

Now it was Slipshod’s turn to look a little abashed, “oh, really? I’m sorry. I assumed that since you both worked this station that you’d...hung out I guess.”

“Not really,” she said, shaking her head, “she gave me an orientation on the tweaks she’d made to the ship’s sensors and then we only ever saw each other for the thirty seconds or so we tagged out shifts on the bridge,” the unicorn looked up at the ‘Steed pilot, “is there a reason you can’t go to the service? I’m sure Squelch’d let you get out of whatever she has you doing if you asked her.

“I think it’d be good for you to go,” she went on, reaching out with a hoof and placing it on his shoulder, “we all know how close you and Val were,” she flashed the stallion a wan smile, “if anypony on this ship is qualified to speak for her, it’s you.”

Slipshod wasn’t sure what surprised him more: the very genuine empathy wafting over to him from the unicorn, or the fact that he could feel how strongly the other two ponies on the bridge agreed with her. He was the best qualified to speak for Val? That couldn’t be right.

“Yeah...I’ll, uh...ask Squelch about it,” he managed to get out as the swirling mass of confusing emotions began to form a little tempest within him. How was it possible that he’d become the closest thing that that poor pegasus had to a genuine friend on this ship? There was no way that could be the case.

He turned to take his leave from the bridge, pausing at the door, “just, uh, remember: not a word to anypony about us being ComSpark spies infiltrating the Disciples,” he said absently before leaving. They assured him that they’d keep the secret.

Once more back out in the Galloway’s corridors, the stallion paused for a moment as he actually processed what he’d just said.

They’d really bought that story? It wasn’t even his best work…

It was barely even passable work, in his personal opinion.

He shook his head and resumed trotting away from the bridge, “and Twilight wonders how Chrysalis had it so easy convincing ponies that changelings aren’t a thing…” he muttered under his breath.

Four ponies down, another several dozen to go, Slipshod thought dourly. He’d known this was going to be a long and drawn out endeavor from the get-go, but that still didn’t make him appreciate the scale of it any less. That brief surge of compassion from Doppler had served as a refreshing little snack at least. Not that he was quite in danger of starving to death any time soon. He was certainly well on track to have a suitable little clique of ponies cheered up and content by tomorrow. So that was one less concern.

The bigger one was by far the still as-yet-unknown identity of the changeling agent on the ship. He’d floated the idea that Chrysalis had learned of Twilight’s presence through other means, but he knew that was likely not the case. His conversation with the ComSpark ‘Steed pilot on the planet had confirmed that there was genuinely an informant on the Galloway.

He was also convinced that they’d be doing exactly what he was: visiting crewmembers and raising their spirits. So, if he came across any ponies who looked like they’d already been cheered up, he might be able to get a lead on who’d come to them, and build his list of suspects.

They might even make an appearance at the memorial service. It was a prime opportunity to help a large segment of the crew work through their grief. The agent would either be working the crowd, or perhaps even be one of the ponies giving a speech. He’d have to keep an eye out.

Which would be a lot easier for him to do if he wasn’t also one of the eulogizers.

He needed to find a pony to speak for Valkyrie, but he was fast running out of possible candidates. Didn’t that damn pegasus hang out with anypony on this ship?! It sure wasn’t helping that every time he came up with a candidate, they went ahead and pointed their hooves right back at him! Now he was fast running out of leads, and could think of even fewer avenues of tracking down additional ones.

Specifically: asking Squelch to look at Val’s personnel file.

The company’s owner had made it pointedly clear that he wasn’t her favorite pony on this ship, and that encountering each other today would prove very dangerous to his health. However, he wasn’t seeing a lot of other options. Besides, she’d just been being hyperbolic about spacing him.

...Probably.

The earth pony stallion smelled Squelch before he saw her. Or, at least, he smelled what he hoped to Celestia the green unicorn wasn’t honestly drinking. Much to Slipshod’s horror when he stepped into the galley, he saw his employer slumped over a table, her hoof wrapped around a half empty bottle of...something. More than a little alarmed, he ran up to the mare and placed his hoof gently over her neck. She had a pulse, and was breathing; so it hadn’t killed her. Quite.

He picked up the bottle and examined the sickly yellow contents, making the fatefully unwise decision to sniff at the opening. He gagged instantly and extended the offending container as far from him as his leg would allow as he dry heaved, “sweet merciful Celestia!” he gasped, “what is this stuff? Cookie, what the fuck?!

“You actually drink this shit?” he asked the donkey chef in disbelief.

The jack was leaning lazily over the counter by the kitchen, watching the stallion’s display with his typically detached expression. He slowly shook his head, “tartarus no,” he motioned behind him with a hoof, “I use it to degrease the stove. Best shit for it. Look at that sucker: you can see yourself in it!”

Much to Slipshod’s chagrin, the donkey was not exaggerating: the stove looked absolutely pristine, despite its age and frequent use, “then why’d you let her drink it?”

Cookie shrugged, “she asked.”

“She asked you to let her drink oven cleaner?!”

“Cleaner? Boy, that there’s Jetsam’s Malroot. Minotaur booze,” the ship’s cook informed him, “I just use it as cleaner.”

Slipshod wasn’t sure if that was actually a meaningful distinction, but decided that getting into an argument over semantics wasn’t something that he wanted to do right now. Instead, he simply placed the container of―alleged―alcohol as far away from him and Squelch as he could get it, and looked to tending the unicorn mare. The rest of the crew certainly didn’t need to see their boss in this kind of state, “I’m going to get her back to her room,” he informed the donkey.

The sage unicorn stirred at his touch as he sought to scoop her up onto his back, opening one of her bleary, bloodshot, blue eyes. She groaned, closing it again, “...said’I’d kill’u…” she slurred. Maybe it was the booze, but she didn’t sound like her heart was really in the threat. She wasn’t putting out any particularly hostile feelings either. Granted it was hard to really pin down any of what she was feeling through her drunken stupor. In any case, she was hardly in a condition to make good on any threats that she might make.

“How about we get you to bed first?” he suggested. The unicorn offered an unintelligible grunt in response.

“You coming back for Channel Lock’s little service?” the chef asked before Slipshod was quite out the door.

He hesitated midstep, looking back over at the jack, briefly confused as to how Cookie had known. Then he realized that Channel Lock would of course have reached out to coordinate her impromptu service with the galley’s overseer as soon as possible, “yeah,” he responded, “I’ll be there.”

“Good,” he nodded, “I’ve got a bottle of Apploosa Estate set aside for you to use to toast Valkyrie after you’ve said your piece on her. Picked it up fresh for her on New Aris. She’s the only pony on the ship that drinks that brand,” the mule frowned as he corrected himself, “she was anyway. Not sure what I’ll do with the rest of it.”

“I’ll take it,” the words were out of the earth pony’s mouth before he’d quite been conscious of uttering them. He wasn’t quite sure what had possessed him to make the offer. He recalled the pegasus mare’s penchant for toasting successful missions using the niche rum, and knew that it was nowhere near the heavy favorite among the crew the way that spirits like Wild Pegasus, Prince Morgan, and Bonnie Trotter were. Without Valkyrie around, that bottle would likely go unused until some new addition to the crew came along someday who shared the pilot’s tastes.

Yet...that thought rubbed the stallion the wrong way for some reason. The bottle in question had been bought explicitly for Val. Nopony else should be allowed to drink it if they hadn’t even known the mare.

“After the memorial,” Slipshod said, “I’ll take it.”

“I’ll have it ready for you,” Cookie assured him.

The golden ‘Steed pilot shifted his burden to make sure the unicorn didn’t manage to slip off his back in her limp state, and left the galley. It wasn’t until he’d made it several steps down the corridor that he’d realized he hadn’t refuted the jack’s assumption that he’d be eulogizing Valkyrie at the group service. He let out a resigned sigh and shook his head. He probably did need to give up on what was clearly turning out to be a futile effort and submit to the collective will of the ship’s crew.

If everypony thought that he was the best choice, then who was he to argue?

Not that it made things much better. All it did was replace one problem with another. He no longer needed to trouble himself with tracking down a pony that had known Valkyrie well, sure; but now he was confronted with the prospect of having to draft a fitting speech in...five hours? Maybe a little less―

His personal pad beeped at him, the tone announcing that he’d just received a message. The stallion lifted his leg to peer at the screen. It was a calendar update. One that had been pushed out to the entire crew, inviting any who were interested to attend the memorial service that Channel Lock was organizing. It was scheduled for three hours from now.

Perfect.

Three hours to put together a speech that made it sound like he’d know his fellow ‘Steed pilot inside and out. Obviously, it wasn’t as though it had to be anything exemplary. None of the other ponies who were going to be offering any words for the other crew members who died had been given more time to fashion their speeches than he was. He’d likely just have to fill a minute or two. The length of the speech wasn’t the issue though.

It was the substance. Especially after finding out that everypony on the Galloway had thought of him and Valkyrie as close friends, he’d clearly be expected to offer at least something that made it sound like that had been the case. Just a few vague platitudes that could have made it sound like he was talking about anypony weren’t going to suffice. He’d be expected to talk about her like she’d been special to him.

Slipshod grimaced. It’d been a while since he’d had to put on an act like that. Even his planetside daliences hadn’t needed him to come off as genuinely emotionally invested in their interactions. Just like him, they’d been interested in finding somepony to share a good time with, not a long time.

In fact, the last time he’d had to put on that kind of an act with anypony had been…

The stallion turned his head to regard the listless unicorn on his back. Squelch could testify to his abilities to affect a facade of emotional attachment and investment better than just about anypony else who knew him. He’d had her convinced in short order that he genuinely loved her. Enough so that she had agreed to marry him in less than four months, as Twilight had noted.

A trivial task, really, when one considered that he could read in real time how the unicorn had been feeling about everything that he said and did. As a result, he’d always managed to say exactly the ‘right’ thing to her. His every action towards her struck the proper cord, making the mare believe that the two of them shared a deep connection that signaled something special. The sex had been amazing too, as it had felt―to her―as though the two of them responded instantly to one another’s desires.

And every moment of it had been a ploy.

Admittedly, an ultimately ill-thought out one. That had been his mistake though. One that he’d corrected as quickly as he could, once he’d realized that he’d made it.

Though, despite his changeling senses making him particularly adept at manipulating his way into a creature’s good graces by playing off of their emotions, that would still leave one middling little snarl when it came to delivering his speech: Valkyrie wouldn't be there for him to play off of. He couldn’t sense the emotions of a dead pony. Especially one whose corpse was still on a frozen wasteland of a plant tens of millions of kilometers away and getting more distant by the second.

Playing off the audience would be risky. Too many different ponies with differing expectations. He’d end up being all over the place if he tried to appeal to the crowd’s communal senses. Especially when it seemed like so few of them had known Valkyrie on any sort of meaningful level beyond: Parasprite pilot. He’d somehow need to come up with genuine feelings to draw on.

Which was profoundly difficult for a changeling to do.

His ear flicked behind him as he heard somepony talking softly, “...show me d’way t’go home,” Squelch was chanting in a somewhat sing-songy voice. Her right forehoof was waggling lightly in time with the―groosly off―beat of her words. Mostly, “‘m tired’n’I wanna go t’bed. Had m’self a’drin’ bout’n’hour ago, an’it wen’ staigh’ t’my head!”

Slipshod turned his head away from the mare, wafting away at the air in front of him as his features creased with disgust, “went straight to your breath too, sheesh! And it was a lot less than an hour ago,” he pointed out to the inebriated mare, whose response was to mekely swat at his head with a hoof that seemed quite unwilling to comply completely with its owner’s instructions.

She stubbornly continued on with her singing, though she did raise the volume a bit, “where’e’er I m’roam, in space’n’sea’n’foam, y’can always hear me, sin’in’ my song: show me th’way t’my home!”

“By your command, Commander,” the earth pony chuckled as he brought them to the door leading into her quarters, “and here we are!”

He shimmied up to the keypad nearby so that Squelch could submit her personal code to get in. The sage unicorn turned her head and squinted at the panel in irritation. Likely because it was making less sense to her now than it typically did, and she was of a mind to ascribe malicious agency to the door on that count. After limply fat-hoofing a few buttons, she let out an annoyed grunt and turned away from the uncooperative keypad.

“Y’do it.”

“I don’t know your code, Squelch,” he reminded her gently, unable to keep himself from smirking a little.

“S’day you cheated,” she mumbled. Adding a half-hearted, “y’bastard,” a breath later.

The earth pony frowned at the revelation but diligently typed in the date without remark.

The door obediently slipped open with a welcoming chime and the stallion stepped inside. He gingerly sidled up next to her bed and carefully eased the quasi-fluidic unicorn onto the mattress. It was frankly always fascinating to him how amorphous ponies became when they were drunk enough. It was like the alcohol content of their blood had a direct correlation with the rigidity of their bones.

He tugged at the sheets, draping them over the prostrate mare, who shifted and snuggled with a contented sigh as she was deftly tucked in. Then the earth pony dragged over the waste bin and placed it near the head of her bed ‘just in case’. He stepped into her cabin’s attached latrine―which was notably bigger than the one that he had in his quarters―and retrieved a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin, placing them on the nightstand nearby.

“There you go,” Slipshod announced, looking around her cabin to see what additional precautions he should consider taking where her impending hangover was concerned. He glanced up and then reached over to dim the lights to a level that was unlikely to split her head open from the inside when they came on again later, “all ready to wake up regretting the day you learned alcohol existed!”

Squelch groaned in response and rolled in her bed to face away from him, pulling the covers tightly around her. She mumbled something that he could quite make out, and honestly doubted would have made much sense if he’d been able to hear it anyway, “I’ll take that as a ‘thank you’,” he said, heading for the door, “get some rest. I’ll handle things until you’re feeling better―”

The stallion stopped short at the door, as something had his tail rather firmly rooted in place. He looked back over his shoulder to see tendrils of cyan magic gripping him from behind, “...stay.”

Slipshod sighed, a wry smile winding its way across his lips as he nodded and turned around. Her magic faded away and the stallion daintily crawled up into the bed next to her, doing his best not to disturb the drunken unicorn. Her body squirmed and shifted until her back was pressed up firmly against him. The earth pony crossed his hooves, and craned his neck, laying his head down over the unicorn’s shoulder, looking down at her face.

Drunk though she may be, he features right now looked anything but relaxed or carefree. He reached out with his empathic senses and very quickly found the worry bubbling up within her, fighting its way to clarity through the alcohol, “m’scared.”

He frowned, feeling sympathetic for the mare. She was casting aside the life she knew―her entire world-view, in fact―on the say-so of a mare that she’d known for only a couple of months. It wasn’t even just her own future that was at stake either. She was risking her entire crew, nearly all of whom didn’t know anything about what was happening. Sometimes, operational security meant that she couldn’t tell everypony everything that was happening. That was the nature of the beast. But there was keeping a few mission details a secret, and then there was...whatever this was. The two honestly couldn’t be reasonably compared.

The reality of the Steel Coursers’ situation would come out eventually. Then what? What would the crew do? How would they react? What vengeance would they exact on Squelch for leading them down this path and putting all of their collective futures on the line like this? She could try to put the blame of him or Twilight, sure; but ultimately she’d been the one to make the decisions. She was the commander and owner of the company. The C-bit stopped with her.

She was right to be worried.

“I know,” he said softly.

It wasn’t much, he knew. Honestly, he didn’t have all that much else to offer. His ambitions lay far outside the considerations of a single ship’s worth of ponies. A battle to topple Chrysalis would certainly result in thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even tens of millions of deaths. Perhaps several billion or more, in the fullness of time.

What did one DropShip with a crew of less than a hundred matter when numbers like that were involved? What became of these ponies after he and Twilight were delivered into the hooves of the Disciples of Discord honestly didn’t matter. Not in the long run. Besides, everypony on this ship was a mercenary, why should they care who and why and where they were fighting for? The Hippogriff Combine, the Pony Commonwealth, the Federated Moons, the Our Worlds League, the Kirin Confederation, ComSpark, the Disciples―they all wanted to fight somecresture, and they all payed those who fought in one manner or another.

These ponies took on contracts from nearly any organization against any other. So it wasn’t as though they had any particularly strong allegiances towards any group in the Harmony Sphere. Would there really be that strong of an outcry about throwing in with the Disciples, as long as they were extended the promise of continued pay? Granted, the Disciples presumably didn’t pay in C-bits―for obvious reasons―but money was money, no matter the denomination it came in.

Besides, Slipshod was confident that he could come up with a plausible enough lie that would satisfy the crew, if it really came to it. The bridge crew had seemed eager enough to believe that this was all part of some elaborate ComSpark plot to infiltrate the Disciples. Once Squelch sobered up, he should be able to get her to pass that off as the ‘official’ purpose behind them doing all of this.

It certainly would explain why she’d been so mum about the details until they’d docked with whatever Disciple ship was out here: the crew had to be kept in the dark to avoid possible leaks to the Commonwealth until they were out of the Harmony Sphere.

The best part was: it was the sort of story that would hold up over the long term too. It could legitimately take years to get whatever information they decided they needed to get for ComSpark. So, reasonably, most of the crew shouldn’t get too suspicious if it was a while before they made their way back to the Sphere. There might be some grumbling about exceeding their previously agreed upon contracts, but Squelch could just extend them, citing ComSpark as the reason for the extenuating circumstances. Even those grumblings shouldn’t be anything a little bump in pay, or maybe some bonuses to make up for the inconvenience, couldn’t solve.

“It’ll work out,” he assured the unicorn, “you’ll see.”

The mare didn’t respond. She just closed her eyes. Slipshod remained in the bed with her for another ten minutes, until he was certain that she was genuinely asleep. Once her breathing had settled into the familiar soft snores that he remembered from their nights together, he carefully extracted himself from her bed and slipped out of the room; making sure to set up a ‘Do Not Disturb’ warning on the doorside panel.

Well, that was one minor crisis dealt with, he supposed. All that was left was to come up with what he was going to say in remembrance of Valkyrie…

Channel Lock did good work, Slipshod concluded, as he stepped into the ship’s galley three hours later. Something of an altar of sorts had been assembled on one side of the mess, hosting five holo-busts of the crewmares who’d died that day. A few already had little collections of offerings and tokens gathered around them, presumably left by ponies who’d known them. Slipshod inwardly cringed as he realized that he hadn’t brought anything specifically to leave as a tribute. As Valkyrie’s foremost ‘friend’ among the crew, he was probably expected to have done something like that.

Thinking quickly, the earth pony stepped up to the table with the holo-busts and very somberly removed a pin of a stylized robotic pony head and crossed lances from his duty uniform and placed it by Valkyrie’s image. He’d be able to get another of the company’s BattleSteed Pilot designators easily enough later. It wasn’t like anypony was going to jump him for being ‘out of uniform’ anyway.

He noted a couple of nearby ponies regarding his actions with approval. His respects properly paid, the stallion began making his way around the room, taking stock of who was in attendance and what they were doing. This was one of the most likely locations that he was going to find the other changeling, after all. Somepony here was going to be far more actively pepping the others up, he just had to figure out who―

“You made it!” a strawberry unicorn mare’s face popped up into his field of view, a glass of white wine floating in her magic. She pressed the fermented beverage to the earth pony’s chest, smiling at him, “I was honestly getting a little worried,” she admitted, biting her lip nervously for a moment before her expression brightened again, “but now we have everypony who was going to speak.

“There’s not any real order that I had planned, but I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind going first?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” that was probably for the best, Slipshod decided. He’d be able to focus on the crowd without having to worry about when his turn was coming up. He took the offered drink in the crook of his hoof and redirected himself back towards the memorial altar. As though the ponies in the galley somehow were able to recognize the difference between a pony going up to offer a token, and one preparing to give a speech, Slipshod felt a hush slowly descend over the room.

He turned around to find that every other face in the room was looking in his direction, expectantly. All idle chatter had ceased, as they waited for the impromptu ceremony to get underway. The earth pony stallion suppressed a grimace, as he realized that while going first offered him an opportunity to conduct his audit of the attendees unmolested, it also meant that he’d be setting the standard for what was expected of the eulogizers. He hoped that what he’d managed to come up with passed muster.

It wasn’t as though he’d done a lot of these in the two years since leaving Equus.

Slipshod cleared his throat, glancing briefly at the monochrome image of a smirking pegasus mare with a short-cropped mane. He took a preparatory breath and looked back at the crowd, “us ‘Steed pilots, we go into this job with it always in the back of our minds that every mission could be our last. This job has risks. We know that, and we accept it,” a few ponies were sagely nodding their heads in agreement. He seemed to be on the right track, at least, “and for mercs, the job’s not about ‘duty’, or ‘honor’, or some noble higher calling,” he favored the crowd with a wry smirk, “it starts out being about the almighty C-bit.

“We live hard, on the chance that we’ll be able to retire young. Looking for the next big payday, and hoping that we don’t meet that HE shell with our name on it before we find it,” a few scattered chuckles, though there was certainly a bittersweet tinge to the mirth, “that’s how it starts anyway. You focus on yourself, think about your own bank balance, and get along with your life one day at a time.

“Then, one day you sign up with a crew that motivates you to fight for more than your own bottom line. You start going that extra kilometer. You put in that extra effort, because the ponies around you matter to you. Maybe even more than C-bits,” Slipshod grinned, “maybe,” some audible laughter this time. He was sensing a general upward trend in the atmosphere though. It was going well.

“That was Val,” Slipshod went on, “this ship mattered to her―this crew mattered. She put in that extra effort, tweaking the Galloway’s sensors until they were so finely tuned that they could detect a pony farting in their vac-suit on the other side of the solar system,” another chorus of gentle chuckles, along with a nod of agreement from a periwinkle pegasus mare who’d managed to steal herself away to the memorial despite still technically being on shift on the bridge.

“She was my eyes and ears on the ground, keeping my dumb, blind, flank out of trouble on every op. I can’t count how many times I’d have been killed if it wasn’t for her,” marginally true, if a little embellished, “this op was no different. She spotted that ambush before they could spring their trap,” that much was certainly true, “she’s why Purple Rose and I made it out, and she’s the reason that we completed the op,” he allowed his tone to become more somber now, as he headed into the bitter ending of his speech.

“She exposed herself to enemy fire in order to get a target lock that would have been impossible for any other pilot. Because completing the op was how this crew’d get paid. And this crew mattered to her. Mattered more than C-bits. Mattered more than her own safety.”

Correctly sensing that he was coming to a close, Cookie stepped out from the galley’s kitchen, balancing a tray on his back containing a bottle of Apploosa Estates and two full shot glasses. He slipped them onto the altar, where Slipshod put down his wine, picked up one of the shots, and faced Valkyrie’s image.

“Well, you mattered to us too, Val,” he stiffly touched his shot to the one by the pegasus mare’s image and then tossed it back. He suppressed a sour expression at the bitter brew. He could see why nopony else on the ship seemed to care for it. He honestly wasn’t a fan either. He placed the now empty glass back on the table, “and you’ll be missed.”

Slipshod picked up his wine glass and turned back to the crowd once more, who were now mutedly stomping their hooves in a reserved applause, most just finishing mirroring their own toasts to the dead ‘Steed pilot. It looked―and also felt―like the rest of the crew approved of the speech and the perceived sentiment behind it. Mission accomplished, it seemed.

Channel Lock stepped up to the stallion and embraced him in a tight hug, “that was lovely, Slip; thank you,” she pulled back a little, looking up at him, “are you okay?”

“I’ll manage,” the earth pony assured her with a somber smile. He leaned in and gave the Maresaille native a polite peck on each cheek before parting company with her to take up an unobtrusive spot near the back of the room where he could get a view of everypony else in the room. A few other ponies extended their own condolences and words of appreciation for his speech along the way, to which Slipshod respectfully responded to each in kind, a smile plastered on his muzzle.

“Blood Chit? If you’ll do the honors?” the unicorn technician hosting the event beckoned.

The stallion in charge of the Steel Coursers’ recovery teams stepped up to the front of the room, taking up a position next to the image of the unicorn mare who’d been killed on Twilight’s ‘Steed. He took a deep breath, “Lifeline was a good mare…”

The earth pony quickly tuned out the rest of the speeches. They weren’t why he was here anyway. His attention went exclusively to the crowd, and the ponies within it. The other changeling had to be here, just like he was, and for the same reasons. They’d be working the crowd, soothing emotions and raising spirits. More so than other ponies. They’d be moving from clique to clique, not limiting themselves to what would otherwise be considered their ‘circle of friends’.

That tended to be unusual in an organization like this. ‘Steed mechanics hung out with ‘Steed mechanics. Engineers hung out with engineers. Electronics techs hung out with electronics techs. It wasn’t a ‘rule’, per se. It was just how things tended to work out: ponies formed bonds with those they spent a lot of time with, and they spent most of their time with other ponies on their shifts. There were social butterflies on every ship, of course, and those were the ponies he needed to find and vet, because it was one of those ponies who was Chrysalis’ agent.

So he watched, and he waited. He made careful observations about which ponies were mingling with which groups, and whether or not they were migrating towards ponies from divisions of the ship that they’d have little expectation to encounter during their normal duties. Having once had a direct hoof in helping Squelch manage the outfit, Slipshod had a general idea of who worked where for the most part. He didn’t know everypony on the ship in serious detail, as there was always some turnover every few months, but he could look up records later using his old access codes if he really needed to.

Over the course of the rest of the service, he managed to compile a list of a few suspects that bore serious investigation. Three ponies in total:

A unicorn stallion who worked down in engineering, Arc Light, who was being a little more chummy with Rigger Brush and her team than he had any professional right to be. He’d been brought onboard six months ago, and Slipshod hadn’t had much cause to interact with him on a regular basis. He resolved to make an effort now though.

Then there was Dustoff, a pegasus mare assigned to Blood Chit’s team, who hadn’t spent hardly any time at all with those that had come to mourn Lifeline before meandering over to Channel Lock’s group of ‘Steed Bay mechanics, and then on to the ponies from the gunnery crews. That was an unusually wide social net to have cast, to be sure. It was definitely worth finding out what connections could possibly exist there.

Lastly, there was Wing Nut. Who...honestly was standing out by virtue of not standing out. They were one of the two vehicle mechanics who worked with Axel Rod in the Galloway’s garage. Slipshod was having a difficult time trying to place why the earth pony mare was even up here in the first place. They weren’t mingling with any of the other groups, and hadn’t seemed particularly invested in any specific eulogy. They were just kind of...there.

Not so very unlike what he was doing right now, honestly.

Slipshot narrowed his gaze at the mechanic, wondering if he might have actually managed to track down the most likely candidate to be a changeling spy. Not that there was any great hurry to nail down who it was just yet. He still had some time before action needed to be taken. The Disciple signal that they were heading to was almost certainly a Jump Ship. Why else be located at a Lagrange point? There was also no way that this system was only a single jump out from whatever planet they had their base on. Which meant that there’d be weeks of transit time ahead of them.

Plenty of time to thoroughly investigate all three of his suspects and present his conclusion to Twilight.

At which point they could then decide on how they wanted to handle things. Whether that meant disposing of said changeling quietly, or setting things up for the Disciples to find them out and try to capture the agent for interrogation. Slipshod knew for a fact that would be a useless endeavor, but there was no reason he could think that the Disciples would be aware of it.

The earth pony glanced at the time on his personal pad. It was nearing the time for their rendezvous with the Disciples. He slipped out of the galley and headed for the bridge. Squelch having drunk herself into unconsciousness was perhaps for the best. It meant that Slipshod could take charge of the situation and ensure that things went in the direction that he needed them to. Though he did need one other pony present with him.

“Flechette?” he spoke into his transmitter after keying in the desired recipient, “have Purple Rose brought to the bridge please.”

“Yes, sir.”

Slipshod closed the channel.

Time to join ‘The Resistance’, he thought with a smirk.

Author's Note

TECHNICAL READOUT

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 13: Malicious Intent

“Clearing the super jovian now,” Aileron announced for the benefit of the ponies on the bridge, most of whom were peering out the forward-facing viewport at the massive beige-hued gas giant that seemed to take up a full half of the visible area around the ship. Slipshod surmised that, had the planet been just a bit bigger, it might very well have collapsed into a second star and rendered this into a binary system. As it was, the gaseous world merely presented itself as an ideal spot to hide a ship from view from the inner system.

To say nothing of providing for some very generous-sized gravitationally null locations that a Jump Ship could use without the need to loiter for all to see at a system’s typically utilized distant zenith and nadir points of entry, which allowed for substantial margins of error, and were much easier to plot. ‘Pirate’ jump points, like the one that was likely used by the Disciple ship, were quite dangerous. Not only were they much smaller, and thus much harder to ‘hit’, they were also much more mobile, making them exceedingly difficult to plot.

This was especially true for systems like PEA-02-UX, which saw effectively zero regular traffic, and thus no routinely updated stellar navigation data was available for an astrogator to use to plot the jump. Granted, even in those systems which saw a lot of thru traffic, these sorts of inner system jump points were almost never used. The risk simply wasn’t worth the measly few days that one saved in sunlight transit time.

Honestly, the only time using risky points of entry and exit like this made any sense was for cases exactly like this one: where a Jump Ship being operated by an outlaw outfit wanted to get in and out without reputable forces knowing anything about it.

Not that it made it any less risky. These Disciples were either needlessly reckless, exceptionally skilled, or very desperate.

Slipshod suspected that it was the latter.

“Getting a contact on sensors,” Doppler said, leaning over her station’s displays as she endeavored to make a determination of what she was seeing, “it’s big,” there had been little doubt that it would be, “getting lidar returns on a cross-section...computer’s made an ID. It’s a―” the mare broke off unexpectedly, looking back at the other ponies on the bridge, her jaw agape, “...it’s coming back as a WarShip! Manticore-class!”

More than a few sets of eyes went towards the viewport, despite the millions kilometers still between them and the Disciple craft meaning that physically seeing the WarShip wasn’t actually possible. Slipshod quickly crossed the bridge to join Doppler at her station and look at the display screen himself. It wasn’t that he actually doubted the mare’s ability to relay the ship’s determination accurately, it was simply that he hadn’t quite been prepared to learn what had been waiting for them here.

He’d assumed it would simply be a Jump Ship. Never would he have believed that the Disciples would tip their hand quite this early on.

“What the fuck are the Disciples doing with a WarShip?!” Aileron sputtered in disbelief. His consternation was hardly a unique reaction. Even the guardsmare assigned to escort Twilight was gaping out the window in response. Slipshod could understand why it was a sentiment mirrored by the other ponies on the bridge. Save for Twilight, of course.

The Disciples of Discord were a galactic ‘joke’, after all. A ragtag band of crazy fanatical cultists who appeared seemingly at random to terrorize underdeveloped systems and wreak a little havoc. It usually didn’t take a lot to drive them off, as they never appeared with so much as a Breezy in attendance. Just some lighter combat vehicles. The perfectly rational conclusion to draw was that the group had very limited funding, and paltry few sources from which to draw their equipment. Which made sense, seeing as how nopony of any repute in the Harmony Sphere would knowingly deal with them to sell ‘Steeds or heavier vehicles to them.

That was the ‘official’ rationale, of course.

The reality was that the Disciples never bothered to bring any of their substantial firepower with them. After all, if they appeared to be a genuine threat, then Chrysalis would pay them actual attention and dedicate the resources necessary to finding their bases and rooting them out. The Disciples were doubtlessly better equiped than anypony could conceive of, but Slipshod doubted that they were genuinely capable of staving off the dedicated might of Chrysalis’ Equus-based forces if she was inclined to bring them to bear.

However, so long as they continued to operate like they were little pissant raiders, she’d keep those forces at home, where they could keep her safe. Any given planet’s local militia or―at most―a light mercenary lance were usually more than enough to drive the Disciples out of wherever they popped up.

It wasn’t like it took a lot of firepower to blow up lightly defended secret hyperpulse generators anyway. Why bring a lance of Big Macs, when a half dozen harriers could do the job?

They had Big Macs though―or at least ‘Steeds just as powerful. Slipshod had always suspected as much, given the nature of their origin as refugees from the defunct Celestia League. Twilight’s revelation that the Disciples’ emblem was that of an old Celestia League military regiment cemented those suspicions. Even on Equus, the records were spotty as to how much equipment had been smuggled out of the system by the defecting CLDF commanders. Likely by design, the earth pony assumed. They’d certainly taken plenty of jump-capable ships. Of that much there’d been no doubt. It only made sense that those Jump Ships would have been loaded down with all the ‘Steeds they could get their hooves on.

It seemed that they’d made off with quite a few WarShips too.

“Well, we were sent to find proof that they were getting Commonwealth support,” Slipshod offered in response, turning his head to smirk at the pilot. He ignored the confused look on Twilight’s face. He’d not yet had a chance to fill her in on the cover story that he’d come up with for the bridge crew. Hopefully she was perceptive enough to play along.

“‘Support’?! A Manticore-class WarShip isn’t ‘support’!” the other stallion retorted, gesturing wildly at the viewport with his wing in exasperation, “where did the Disciples even get one?!”

That was a fair question, Slipshod supposed, as even the major powers in the Harmony Sphere didn’t possess such vessels. At least, not anymore. Those which weren’t currently being hoarded in the Faust System, or hadn’t fled with the defectors, had been whittled away during the centuries of fighting that followed the League’s dissolution. Losses had tended to go unreplaced, not that the initially catastrophic levels of infrastructure destruction commonly seen prior to the adoptions of the Aris Conventions had left many intact shipyards capable of building such ships. By the end of the first decade of fighting, it was functionally impossible to build anything much bigger than a Princess-class DropShip.

Not that the extinction of WarShips was something which the major governments of the galaxy lamented. Not really. WarShips were expensive to build and, frankly, not cost effective for perpetuating the ongoing ‘proxy wars’ between the major powers and their in-house mercenary companies that were the current norm where modern conflict was concerned.

WarShips were designed to wreak vast devastation upon an enemy force, and that was no longer the goal of most battles these days. The Harmony Sphere was plagued by scarcities of every kind, to include the very warfighting materials and weapons needed to continue waging their ongoing conflicts. Thus, the goal of most fights was to defeat an enemy while placing the victor in a position to recover as much salvageable material as possible, so that it could be refurbished and pressed back into service against the enemy from which it had been plundered. The devastating weapons of a craft like a Manticore-class battleship were ill-suited for such operations; and so, there had been little purpose behind maintaining them any longer.

There might be some smaller non-DropShip capital vessels among the navies of the Great Houses or their vassals―the odd frigate or destroyer-sized ship mostly. Craft which were treated more like well-armed pleasure yachts than true combat vessels. They honestly rarely left the capital system of their owners, lest they be destroyed in a fight and the prestige associated with possessing one lost forever. In any case, no creature―save for Queen Chrysalis herself―laid claim to any vessel nearly as large as the two million ton bona fide ship-of-war that was pinging their scopes at this very moment.

At least, no creature in the Sphere.

“Our mission is to find out,” the earth pony reminded the ship’s pilot pointedly, sounding as though he wasn’t nearly as phased as the other ponies on the bridge. Again, aside from the alicorn. Which only served to reinforce the notion that the two of them were ‘in’ on more details of the alleged ComSpark plan than the rest of the crew. In that regard, it was perhaps doubly best that Squelch wasn’t present for this. She could remain cool under pressure most times, but if their last meeting was any indication, the mare did seem to have her limits; and these last few months had pushed hers right up to the breaking point.

There might even be some minor cracking, if he was being honest.

Slipshod looked back at High Gain, “have we received any additional signals from the Disciple vessel?”

The earth pony mare hesitated for a second or two, clearly still trying to process the enormity of the revelation that the presence of a WarShip precipitated. However, in short order she was looking back at her own console, “um, no, nothing from them ye―” her terminal beeped, “oh. Message coming in. Text only again,” she said, looking up at Slipshod with a bemused expression, “...addressed to ‘Princess Twilight Sparkle’.”

Aileron scowled, “‘Princess’? Is that supposed to be some weird sort of slight? Why even bother with a royal title at all?” then the stallion’s expression contorted even further as he processed the rest of what the mare had said, “why would they even be asking for the Queen anyway? They don’t honestly think she’s on the ship, do they―?”

Slipshod cut off the pilot, looking pointedly at the comms tech, “pass it through to Purple Rose,” he instructed, and then motioned for Twilight to seat herself at a nearby auxiliary bridge terminal. The alicorn nodded and made herself as comfortable at the station as her size would allow. The designers of the DropShip had obviously not taken alicorns into consideration when deciding on the ergonomics of the bridge’s various stations.

High Gain blinked in surprise, looking between him and the purple mare before merely shrugging and complying with the instructions that she had been given, “...transferring to Aux One.”

The earth pony stallion left the sensor station to make his way over to where Twilight had seated herself, peering around her to get a look at the message:

>> WHAT DOES IT SAY?

Slipshod frowned at the screen. His frown deepened when he noticed that Twilight seemed to be just as confused by the message as he was, “what does what say?” he decided to prompt anyway.

The alicorn merely shrugged, “I have absolutely no idea,” she admitted, “‘it’ could refer to so many things, that it’s impossible to know what ‘it’ they’re talking about. The Journal of the Two Sisters, The Elements of Harmony, The Tree of Harmony; I don’t have any context for this question,” the mare sounded clearly frustrated by the presentation of what seemed to be an unfairly vague riddle.

“Well, you may want to figure out some context,” Doppler called out nervously, her eyes glued to her display, “because I’m picking up some movement on that WarShip’s weapons mounts! I think they’re targeting us―” the bridge’s speaker system issues out a loud, and rather shrill, warning trill, indicating that the ship’s systems had registered a radar suite singling them out, “yep! They’re targeting us!”

Aileron bolted upright in his piloting couch like he’s just been struck by lightning. His hooves and wings instantly reached for the controls at his station, “starting evasive maneuvers!”

“Belay that!” Slipshod ordered, earning stunned expression from every other member of the bridge crew, “hold steady! They didn’t call us out here just to kill us,” maybe. He hoped, “they’re vetting us,” he nodded his head towards the alicorn currently pondering the nebulous question that they’d been sent by the Disciples.

“And we’re not going to pass,” the pegasus stallion pointed out, clearly more than a little on edge. Understandable, as they’re just been targeted by weapons that were capable of launching projectiles approximately the size of a ‘Steed at them. Even a glancing blow from one of those would effectively destroy the Galloway. The earth pony recalled the extent of the damage he’d seen while investigating the wreckage of the Strongheart-class DropShip that they’d found Twilight in. That hadn’t even been a ‘direct hit’ either, “we need to get out of here while we still can!”

“We’re not escaping a WarShip,” Slipshod stated bluntly. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t feeling more than a little anxious himself, but the cold fact of the matter was that they were at the mercy of the Disciples. He’d assumed that they’d been given these coordinates because Twilight managed to pass their initial test. But, if that had been the case, then why ask another question now?

Then something occurred to the stallion. He looked over at High Gain, “you said this message was addressed to Twilight, right?” the mare nodded, “the one from before though, that one was addressed to Squelch?” another nod.

Slipshod massaged his chin in thought. They’d known that the Galloway was going to be here, and wanted to get its captain’s attention. So they’d addressed their first message to the unicorn owner. It had still been a question meant for Twilight though. Presumably, the alicorn had given them the correct answer to their question. Otherwise, why even send the coordinates to rendezvous with the WarShip?

So they now knew that Twilight was onboard. Which was why this message had been addressed to her specifically. That still didn’t explain why they were asking a question that she clearly didn’t know how to answer. Honestly, it puzzled the stallion as to why they were still sending messages in text form. Why not use audio, or even visual comms if they wanted to make sure she was really here? They had line-of-sight. Establishing a secure tight-beam video exchange that couldn’t be intercepted or overheard by the Highlanders would be foal’s play.

The answer came to him almost as soon as he’d finished forming the question: changelings.

The Disciples knew about changelings. Using sound or images risked passing on voices or likenesses that Chrysalis’ agents could then mimic, if they ever got hold of them. Text was just text. As long as they vetted the creature on the other end with targeted questions, they didn’t have to worry as much about being compromised by changeling spies.

Of course, that only worked as long as the recipient of the question understood the questions meant to vet them!

A flash of green light out of the corner of his eye drew Slipshod’s attention. For a brief moment, he felt himself panic, as the hue had been a nearly dead ringer for a changeling’s transformation. His brain whirled for a fraction of a second as he battled with the possibility that Twilight had been the changeling spy all along and that this had all been some sort of elaborate setup.

Fortunately, though the realization came too late to spare his now tachycardic heart, the light had not been produced by Twilight revealing her ‘true form’, but had instead been generated by a quaint―and very anachronistic―looking roll of parchment. It was even enclosed by an embossed red wax seal.

“Huh,” he said, blinking at the sight, and willing his pulse to slow so that it was no longer throbbing in his ears.

The alicorn’s horn glowed as she lifted the scroll off of the console in front of her and very deftly popped the wax seal. The ancient-looking vellum noisily unfurled. Upon it was written four words: Welcome back, Your Majesty.

Twilight glanced briefly over her shoulder at Slipshod, who was still utterly baffled at where the scroll had come from and how it was supposed to have gotten there in the first place. It had obviously been through magical means, yes, but the color and method were confounding him. It had been green fire. He’d seen it. But that was changeling magic...wasn’t it? The purple mare didn’t seem to be at all put off by that fact, however; and she should have been just as aware as he was...right?

...Was this all some weirdly convoluted plot to entrap him? Did that make any sort of rational sense?

Was there an irrational angle that he was discounting?

Heedless of the earth pony’s own internal turmoil, Twilight typed the words from the scroll into her terminal and glanced over at High Gain, “would you please relay this message?”

The comm tech bit her lip, looking apologetic, “um...I can’t,” she admitted, gesturing at her terminal, “I’m still locked out of the transmit functions. Per Squelch’s command override,” she swallowed now, recognizing the danger that they were in. The WarShip was awaiting their response to the question they’d posed―which they’d apparently sent to Twilight magically―and deadly consequences would befall the Galloway should they give the wrong response. Or likely no response as well. At least, after whatever the Disciple commander over on that ship decided was a suitable amount of time to wait for one.

Unfortunately for the Steel Coursers, they didn’t have much in the way of an articulable quantity of minutes that would constitute a ‘timely manner’. Which meant that they could have anywhere from ten seconds to an hour to transmit the answer to the question they’d been asked before they were blown out of space. However much time it turned out that they had to give their response, Slipshod surmised that it was best described as: ‘the rest of their lives’.

The earth pony looked back to the alicorn, “can you send it back the same way they sent it to you?”

Twilight frowned, “I could if I knew who I was supposed to be sending it to. This isn’t Spike’s clawwriting, so I don’t think teleporting the scroll to him will let the response get to that ship out there any time soon,” she admitted.

“Oh, we’re fucked,” Aileron snarled, once more reaching for the controls so that he could try and get them away from there.

However long they had to respond, Slipshod was quite confident that making any alterations to their course would constitute the ‘wrong’ answer, and only serve to get them all killed, “belay that!” he yelled, charging across the bridge and outright tackling the pegasus out of his seat before he could touch the controls. The pair tousled briefly before the earth pony jumped back up off of a shocked Aileron.

“Are you crazy?! We can’t respond; we’re locked out!” the feathered stallion was yelling at him in consternation.

Slipshod ignored the ship’s pilot and instead rushed over to High Gain’s terminal. He firmly―though not quite violently―bumped the startled mare out of the way, prompting a surprised yelp as she stumbled to the deck, “―the fuck!”

The golden earth pony paid her just as little mind as he quickly brought up the terminal’s override commands. He deftly tapped away at the console for several seconds, all the while aware of the stern glares that he was getting from the other members of the crew. However, he didn’t address any of them immediately. He had to save their lives first.

The comm station let out a pleasant little chime as it acknowledged the passcode that he’d entered, having received it from a drunken Squelch just a few hours ago. He then proceeded to forward Twilight’s message to the Disciple WarShip. The stallion earnestly looked over at a stunned Doppler, who was paying far more attention to the goings-on happening in the back of the bridge than she was her own station, “status of the Disciple ship?” he demanded sternly.

The blue unicorn blinked in surprise before spinning back around and looking at the reading on her computer, “...they’re lifting their lock,” she announced, deflating in her seat as the tension of imminent death left her body. Slipshod experienced a similar feeling of relief wash over him, helped greatly by everypony else’s agitation levels ratcheting back down.

High Gain was looking up at him with a confounded expression, “...you know Squelch’s codes?”

“She gave them to me so that we could respond,” he lied. Then he looked over to Aileron, who was still glaring at the earth pony even as he got back onto his own hooves, “sorry about that. We just have to play this cool, alright?” he looked around at the rest of the bridge crew, “look, I get that none of you exactly trained for this kind of mission, and so you’re all a little...twitchy. But you can’t just jump to conclusions and react, alright? Just stay calm, and wait for my orders, got it?

“I’ll get you guys through this.”

“You mean Squelch’s orders, right?”

High Gain’s question drew the earth pony’s attention, and he blinked at her a couple of times before recovering from the unexpected prompt. Slipshod briefly considered his options, but then decided that it was worth taking a risk, “no. I mean my orders,” he then went on to clarify when he saw the rebellious looks in the eyes of the comm tech. Understandable. She’d signed a contract to serve on Squelch’s ship, not his. She was also a new hire since he and Squelch had separated, and wasn’t aware of a time that they’d run the company jointly.

“Squelch owns and runs the outfit,” he explained, “but I’m the one with the experience needed to run this op. Like you just saw: sometimes the situation can evolve quickly, and we’re not going to have time to wait for Squelch to evaluate and vet every call I make on this thing,” he waved a hoof in the vague direction of the distant WarShip, “you just watched me handle making contact with the Disciples.

“I’ve got this; alright?”

The earth pony stallion looked around the bridge, holding the gaze of each of the other ponies present until he saw them nod in acknowledgement. He’d worry about selling Squelch on the mission hierarchy that he’d just imposed later, after she’d sobered up. Slipshod also noted that the glare Twilight was giving him suggested that he’d need to have a private conversation with her as well.

The comm console beeped, drawing his attention to it. He saw that the terminal was alerting him to an incoming series of text instructions from the WarShip. He stepped away from the station and offered a helping hoof to High Gain, “the Disciples are contacting us again. It looks like docking instructions,” he gestured towards a still fuming pegasus, “coordinate with Aileron and dock the ship. Follow any instructions you receive to the letter.

“We’re almost done with the hard part,” he assured them, flashing each a confident smirk, “let’s not go and get ourselves killed by doing something stupid.”

“You mean other than trying to bluff our way into the Disciples?” the comms tech countered. She jabbed a hoof at the purple alicorn as she continued to glare at Slipshod, “what exactly do you think they’re going to do to us when they find out she isn’t the real Queen?”

“Yeah,” Aileron piped up, “and why are they calling her a ‘princess’ anyway? What the fuck’s going on?”

Their questions were understandable and perhaps even warranted under the circumstances, but they were also damned inconvenient. Slipshod had been essentially pulling cover stories out of his flank all day, and was on the brink of backing himself into a corner. Assuming that he hadn’t already. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to concoct this elaborate of a cover story.

Though, in fairness, he’d never tried to obfuscate a defection either.

In some respects, it would simplify things greatly if the crew were brought in on the scheme. However, he’d be doing so in the face of a lifetime spent ‘knowing’ that the Disciples of Discord were crazy equicidal terrorists. Undoing all of that conditioned learning would have taken a lot longer than the few hours of intrasystem travel that they’d just undertaken. It could very well take more than the few weeks of jump travel that lay ahead of them as the WarShip ferried them to...wherever it was they were headed to next.

The stallion inwardly grimaced at the realization that it would even be hard for him to rally the crew using Twilight as a figurehead. Squelch’s reaction to the purple mare’s true identity would more than likely be shared by the average pony on the ship: so what? In her assumed identity as ‘Queen Twilight’, Chrysalis had counter-intuitively receded from the image of the alicorn ‘ruler’ being a pseudo-deity. Her involvement in galactic affairs was negligible. To the point where most denizens of the harmony Sphere regarded her as a name, and little more.

Queen Twilight owned ComSpark and...that was essentially it. At least, as far as most were concerned. She certainly wasn’t the focus of abject devotion by the public.

Which meant that there was little reason that most of the ponies on the ship should care that Purple Rose was the real Twilight Sparkle. Certainly they wouldn’t care enough to effectively abandon the lives they’d once known.

And if she and Slipshod were to reveal the true nature of ‘Queen Twilight’, and the existence of a vast network of shapeshifting changelings that were controlling the Harmony Sphere…

Beyond the initial panic that would doubtlessly run through the ship, the stallion worried that even then there would be a lingering sense of apathy. After all, the galaxy had existed in this state for the better part of half a millenia, and everypony on the ship was living a decent life.

So where was the motivation to overturn the status quo?

Unlike Twilight, they knew nothing of the golden age of the Celestia League. They didn’t know a galaxy of creatures united in genuine peace and harmony was even remotely possible. How would a pony who’d known only an endless state of scarcity and conflict even be able to comprehend such a thing intellectually? Even Slipshod, who, while knowing that an era of peace had existed, found it extremely difficult to actually imagine what it would have been like to live in it. Squelch’s skepticism was hardly going to be a unique reaction as a result.

So how exactly was Slipshod supposed to inspire the crew of the ship to follow along with his plan using the truth? He couldn’t. Nothing about the reality of the situation would ensure the continued cooperation of the ponies onboard. They cared about their jobs, their livelihoods, and their families back home. Those were the pressure points that he had to use for as long as he could.

If his deception unraveled before he and Twilight were safely in the heart of Disciple territory, then he’d likely be in a lot of trouble. However, if he could just keep stringing everypony along until then...it’d be okay. Whatever the crew found out, and whatever they did after he and Twilight were with the Disciples didn’t really matter. They’d have outlived their usefulness by that point anyway. One more DropShip was hardly going to matter much during the eventual invasion of Equus.

The crew could do whatever they wanted at that point, as far as the earth pony was concerned. However, until then...

“Just dock the Galloway,” he repeated, throwing some authority behind his tone, much like his instructors had back at the academy, “Squelch and I will tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it. Don’t worry: everything’s well in hoof, alright? I’m going to get you all through this.

“I promise.”

The three ponies on the bridge crew exchanged skeptical looks, but eventually offered up reluctant nods. At the end of the day, they were paid to do a job; and that job was to follow Squelch’s orders. Even those being ostensibly relayed by her ‘designated representative’. Fortunately, the earth pony stallion’s well-understood personal and professional relationship with the sage unicorn mare saw him filling that role with relative consistency. It was genuinely believable that Squelch had placed him in operational control of this mission.

After all, he routinely held operational control during their mercenary contracts planetside.

He looked to Twilight’s escort, “take Purple Rose back to her quarters. I’m going to update the commander,” and get her lucid again, he didn’t add out loud. The security mare nodded and stepped up beside the purple alicorn, silently prompting her charge to leave the bridge.

Twilight regarded the earth pony with a dour expression, but remained thankfully silent as she allowed herself to be led to her quarters. Slipshod decided that he likely wasn’t going to enjoy their next conversation.

Par for the course, he thought to himself. After all, he wasn’t going to enjoy his upcoming conversation with Squelch either. As he stepped off the command deck as well, he idly regarded his rota, hoping that whoever it was that he was supposed to meet with this evening would be in a better mood than either of those mares were going to be.

Much to the stallion’s surprise, he found that Squelch was already out of bed, and combatting her hangover by doing what she did best: paperwork. The sage unicorn mare was sat at her desk, pad and terminal in hoof, her horn aglow as it floated a carafe of coffee to her lips. A tray that had likely been delivered by Cookie was nearby, and contained a mug that the company’s owner had apparently opted to bypass in the interests of efficiency.

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye as the door to her cabin slid open. The earth pony cringed slightly as he realized that he hadn’t used the chime to request permission to enter her locked quarters, and had instead used her personal code again. In his defense, he’d been operating under the assumption that the unicorn was still asleep, and hadn’t wanted to wake her with something as abrasive as the door’s call function. The mare seemed to rethink commenting on his lack of manners, and instead returned her full focus back to her work.

“You’re up,” he said before once more cringing at his statement of the obvious. He was only slightly more annoyed by his own nervousness. Slipshod was well aware that Squelch was more than a little irked by the events of today. And while she was very much inclined to place the manticore’s share of the blame on his shoulders, he figured that he was, at worst, only tangentially responsible for their current predicament.

He’d convinced her to keep Twilight onboard, yes; but that had only manifested itself as a problem once Chrysalis became aware of it. That information getting back to the Queen was not something that he’d wanted at all, and both he and Squelch had done just about everything that they reasonably could to keep Twilight’s existence a secret. However the changelings had learned about Twilight, that wasn’t his fault.

It also wasn’t his fault that they’d been ambushed on the planet. Even if he had known that Twilight’s existence had been discovered, the speed with which Chrysalis’ agents had been able to move in response was phenomenal. He’d only done some of the rudimentary math in his head, given the distances involved but, basically, this all had to have been set in motion within just a week or two of the Galloway coming across that crashed DropShip in Canis.

Even then, that team that had ambushed them would have had to have been enroute to the planet long before the Steel Coursers had ever been made aware of the mission. Honestly, given the extent of the construction that had happened at that Commonwealth base...Slipshod was half convinced that even it had been part of the plan to capture the princess. After all, what better place to allow the ComSpark retrieval team to get on and off planet undetected than on a planet which lacked the typical orbital infrastructure of even the most sparsely populated worlds?

Not that Slipshod thought for a moment it would help his situation in any way to point out to his employer that the mission that she’d accepted had been an elaborate trap in and of itself.

The stallion idly wondered what Chrysalis would have done if Squelch had turned down the operation? Had other missions been set up in the region that were also traps? Possible. In fact, quite probable; and it would have hardly taken any effort at all to do, given that a significant proportion of every operation that happened anywhere in the galaxy was initiated on one side or the other by Chrysalis’ agents.

That too was probably not information that Squelch would find reassuring.

“So what are you doing?” Slipshod asked, stepping a little closer so that he could see the screen of her workstation. He tried to make the question sound as innocuous as possible, but the totality of the existing circumstances likely ensured that whatever question he could have asked would have sounded like the not-so-subtle probe that it was.

Fortunately―or perhaps not so fortunately―Squelch seemed of a mind to allow him the facade. Partially, “finalizing the op’s after action reports,” she replied tersely. Then adding, “after this, I’m going to process the authorization for the release of the death benefits to the next of kin for the five members of my crew that died today.”

That last sentence possessed an edge to it that Squelch had very plainly made no effort to hide. Slipshod didn’t have to spend long reasoning why: that release would require transmission to the Mercenary Review Board, so that the funds could be dispersed from the company’s escrow account. Of course, there were no ComSpark relays in this system that could be used to transmit that information. Those communication packets would have to be carried by the Aris Highlander-owned Jump Ship.

The Jump Ship controlled by the same Highlanders who’d likely by now disavowed the Steel Coursers, and were certainly not about to deliver any of their mail.

Squelch’s message wasn’t going to be acknowledged. The company’s accounts weren’t going to be debted. Those families weren’t going to see a deci-C-bill of the compensation promised in the crew’s contracts. More than that, they were unlikely to even receive news that their loved-one had died. It wasn’t uncommon for letters to take months to reach destinations when the nature of a pony’s work entailed them traveling from one side of the Sphere to the other. It could likely be quite a long while before those families even began to get worried.

Well, perhaps not that long. That worry could very well kick in quite early, even for the families of the members of the crew who were still alive.

The Highlanders would be back in civilized space in another couple of weeks, after they were done mopping up the Commonwealth base. Once back, they’d report that the Steel Coursers had gone off the reservation to the MRB. At which point, all the assets of the Steel Coursers would be frozen. To include the salaries of the crew. Most of which were funneled back to their families on whatever worlds the crew called ‘home’. Next month’s deposits would be a no-show, and those families would almost certainly wonder ‘why?’.

A lot of families were going to be in a bad way in a few weeks.

None of that was directly his fault, of course. Squelch likely didn’t see it like that though. Not that he fancied arguing the particulars on that point. Instead, he took the coward’s way out and bypassed the remark entirely, “we’ve made contact with the Disciples,” he informed the unicorn, “they’re going to allow us to dock,” he paused for a moment, briefly weighing the benefits of elaborating on any of the details, then, “it’s a WarShip. Manticore-class.”

The mare stopped typing. She turned her head to look at the earth pony. As impassive as she’d been trying to be, even that information was impossible not to react to with the appropriate amount of shock that it deserved, “what.”

He nodded, “yup. They brought a battleship to meet us. Whether that was because they figured only one of the biggest WarShips ever built was the only vessel suitable to ferry the princess, or because they wanted to be ready for anything ComSpark might have tried to pull, I can’t say.

“Word’s going to get around about that, and soon,” Slipshod pointed out, “even if the bridge crew doesn’t say anything―and I told them not to―this ship has windows. As soon as we’re within visual range, somepony’s going to look outside and see a damned WarShip.”

Squelch turned back to her desk and put her head in her hooves, “fuck me,” she groaned, “a fucking WarShip…”

“For now I’m trying to play it off as us being part of a deep cover mission directed by ComSpark,” the earth pony explained, “the bridge crew is mostly buying it for now. The best part is that we don’t need to be able to explain how or why the Disciples have WarShips, because that’s the whole point of the alleged ‘mission’: to find out.

“They are starting to ask questions about ‘Purple Rose’ though,” he added with a frown, “the Disciples continually referring to her as ‘Princess Twilight’ isn’t going unnoticed. I’m not sure how to play that off yet, so if you have some ideas―”

The unicorn sat back up and flashed a sharp look at the stallion, “deep cover? ‘Play it off’? You mean you haven’t told the crew yet?”

“Tell them what? That ComSpark is controlled by changelings and that they’ve infiltrated the highest levels of Sphere government? Tell them Purple Rose is the real alicorn princess and that the Disciples are the true defenders of galactic harmony or whatever?

“Exactly how much of that do you believe? Even now?”

The mare frowned but didn’t say anything in response. Not to say that she was completely accepting of his actions, “...I’ve never lied to this crew before. I don’t want to start now. Especially not when this isn’t just going to affect them,” her gaze darted briefly back to her terminal and the work that she’d been doing when Slipshod came in, “their families―”

“Are going to be screwed no matter what,” the earth pony finished, “if you tell them the truth, there’s going to be a mutiny.”

“It’s not a ‘mutiny’ if the captain’s leading it,” Squelch quipped through gritted teeth as she glared at the stallion.

Yup, she thought of this as being―at least partially―his fault. Unfortunately for her ire, there existed a few uncomfortable realities, “even if you turned this ship around and threw yourself at the mercy of ComSpark and the Highlanders, you’re not nearly naïve enough to believe that anypony on this ship will live to make it back to civilized space.

“Shit, Chrysalis might even arrange for all of the Highlanders to die too, just to make sure that there’s nopony in the galaxy alive who’s actually seen Twilight,” Squelch looked away now, her expression suggesting that she did, in fact, recognize the existence of that probability. He could empathize though, with how little that knowledge did to ease her frustrations. She felt like she was being herded into an uncomfortable situation―which she was―and she was not a mare who liked being puppeted. After all, she was supposed to be the master of manipulating data to put herself in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to benefit her.

Now she was the one being moved about like a game piece at somepony else’s whim, and she didn’t care for the sensation at all.

“We can’t just keep lying to them,” she insisted, though she did not opt to voice a counterproposal either, Slipshod noticed. She wanted an alternative, she just couldn’t think of one yet.

Or at least, she couldn’t think of one that wasn’t as bad or worse than the earth pony’s current plan. He just needed to make certain that she understood that, “telling them the truth doesn’t help anypony,” he countered, “and it could end up hurting us.

“Aileron’s nerves are on a knife’s edge up there,” he gestured in the direction of the bridge, “he’s ready to bolt. The problem with that,” among other things, he thought sardonically to himself, “is the Disciples know that we have Twilight now. They’re not going to let us go anywhere, and the only pony on this ship they give a damn about is the alicorn.

“If this DropShip so much as twitches the wrong way, they will run us down, they will board us, and more members of this crew will die as the Disciples use any and all force they believe they need to to ‘rescue’ their princess.”

Slipshod truthfully had no way of knowing how ruthless any boarding party sent by the Disciples would actually be. They knew about changelings, and would almost certainly be operating under the assumption that any and every pony they met―to include Twilight Sparkle―was a changeling agent in disguise until they could find a way to prove otherwise. That was likely the bulk of the reason why they were still refraining from making audio or visual communications.

So it was certainly possible that they’d be less than accommodating towards any perceived resistance by the crew. A crew who would also be operating under the assumption that the invaders were crazed mass-murdering terrorists. To say that the situation would be ‘tense’ was undoubtedly an understatement. One wrong word, one wrong twitch, and it could all erupt in violence.

However, none of that happened as long as the Galloway’s crew believed that it was their job to ‘play nice’ with the Disciples in the first place. Everypony would be on their best behavior, on both sides. Nopony would get twitchy. Nopony would start shooting. Everypony―including him―would live to see tomorrow.

Which meant that Slipshod could spend the rest of this trip dedicating his time to contemplating much more important matters: such as finding the probable changeling agent on board, and figuring out what methods the Disciples would use to screen the crew for changelings, and how to avoid getting caught in them. He hoped that Twilight could provide some insight into that.

He briefly considered doing nothing about the agent and leaving them to be caught by the Disciples, but then thought better of it. If they found one changeling agent, that was far more likely to make them look extra closely at the rest of the crew, as they’d have their suspicions confirmed that changelings had been implanted even on a ship this insignificant. The longer their screening process went on without giving them any positive results, the more complacent they would hopefully get, as they started to view the vetting process as more of a procedural activity than a critical one.

That might have been wishful thinking on Slipshod’s part, given that the Disciples had to be more aware of the stakes than anypony else in the galaxy, but the stallion had enough stressors at the moment without thinking about worst-case scenarios. He needed to believe that he’d be able to fool them. Otherwise, what point was there in any of this?

The sage unicorn was still defiant, though he could sense that her resolve was wavering slightly in the face of his arguments, “and what about their families? They deserve to know that their families aren’t going to be receiving their deposits any longer―”

The stallion waived away the mare’s concern, “we just brought the Disciples their long-lost princess. Do you really think we won’t be able to negotiate some sort of reward for that? They have a WarShip. I think they can find a few million C-bits for the crew. They clearly have ears in the Sphere too, if they knew we were going to be in this system,” he pointed out, prompting an annoyed look from the mare as she was reminded of how poorly kept this ‘secret mission’ had apparently been.

“I bet they can get some money into the accounts of the crew’s families.”

Squelch was silent for several long seconds as she considered what the ‘Steed pilot had said. She wasn’t happy. Not that many ponies were at the moment. For the umpteenth time that day, Slipshod found that his empathic senses were completely redundant in the face of plainly obvious expressions. Finally the mare sighed and gave a slight nod of her head, “...fine.

“Write up a mission profile. If we’re going to pretend this is an op, then we should treat it like one. Send me an outline, I’ll proof it, and then we’ll at least be able to keep our stories straight,” she then threw a hard gaze at the earth pony, “and tell ‘her highness’ to meet me in the conference room in an hour.

“I want assurances from her about compensation for the crew. As well as a promise that nopony on this ship will be harmed.”

“I’m sure she’ll agree to that,” Slipshod said, nodding his understanding, finally allowing himself to breathe just a small internal sigh of relief that the cover story he’d so hastily crafted on the bridge was going to receive corroboration from the ship’s captain. Between the two of them, they should be able to plug any of the holes that he’d missed too. He hoped. Ponies were gullible, but they weren’t morons. If any blatant cracks in the story were left unpatched for too long, they’d start to pick at them.

Such as finding a way to explain how their ‘fake’ Twilight was apparently able to pass all of the Disciple’s tests, and why the Disciples seemed to be so welcoming of their ‘avowed enemy’ in the first place.

That was going to be a really tough sell…

Slipshod took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it. That was a problem for Future Slipshod. Present Slipshod needed to go and have a talk with the princess, “I’ll see you in an hour,” he assured his employer, “and I’ll have a draft for the mission profile by then too,” the stallion promised. He then left Squelch’s quarters and made his way to Twilight’s.

He found the purple alicorn lounging on her bed, holding the vellum scroll in her magic. She only seemed to be half-regarding it though. Her expression was glassy, as though her focus was a thousand lightyears away. The earth pony felt a miasma of melancholy permeating the room, emanating from the princess. Even though she’d verbally acknowledged his use of the chime for her quarters, Twilight didn’t seem to quite register that anypony else was in her quarters until the door slid shut behind him.

Then her gaze broke off from the parchment floating before her, and found its way to her newly arrived guest. Instantly, her mood soured, evoking a mental wince from the stallion. He was getting a little irritated at everypony disliking him today. Especially when he’d worked so hard, for so long, to be a pony that just about every other member of this crew looked forward to seeing.

“Good work up there,” Slipshod said, nodding his head towards the door. It certainly hadn’t felt like Twilight was going to initiate anything approaching a civilized conversation, given the feelings of animosity he was picking up from her, and the earth pony very much did not want this encounter to devolve into any sort of screaming match. She didn’t like him because he was a changeling, her mortal foe. He could accept that.

He was also the only ally she truly had on this ship at the moment.

She had to accept that.

Of course, once she was delivered into Disciple custody, that dynamic would change. He’d cease to be of immediate value to her as a sole ally. Which meant that it was also in his own best interests to both keep from antagonizing her unnecessarily, and to demonstrate that he’d still have value to her after they docked with the WarShip. Slipshod wasn’t entirely positive how he’d do that yet, but he was working on some possible angles to play.

“All I did was answer a question,” Twilight replied tersely. Her telekinesis carefully furled the scroll back up and gently set it down upon her desk. The purple mare then cast a withering look at the earth pony as she added, “...honestly.”

“Oh, for Celestia’s sake…” Slipshod said under his breath, prompting an intrigued eyebrow raise from the alicorn, “I just got done having this talk with Squelch,” he informed her flatly, “so can we just skip to the part where you acknowledge that it’s what’s best for everypony for the moment? The truth can come later. Right now our primary concern is getting you to your subjects or whatever.”

“The ends justify the means; is that it?” she posed cautiously.

“Yeah, they do,” was Slipshod’s unabashed retort, “especially when the ‘means’ are a few harmless―and temporary―lies, and the ‘ends’ are keeping you away from Chrysalis,” the earth pony sneered at the mare, “unless you want to be captured? Because there’s not a pony on this ship that would have taken you to the Disciples―in direct violation of ComSpark directives―if they’d known that’s what we were doing.

“Without me and what I said on that bridge, you’d be cocooned and on your way to Equus right now,” he informed the princess bluntly, “so you’re fucking welcome.”

Twilight paused for a moment and then nodded her head, “I acknowledge that what you have done has ultimately helped me―and will help the whole of the Harmony Sphere in the future. But it’s a fallacy to presume that it was the only way you could have helped.

“You don’t know for a fact that these ponies wouldn’t have responded to the truth,” she tried to point out.

“Don’t I?” the stallion snorted, “I’ve known these ponies for years. I’ve worked with them. Gotten to know them. I can literally feel what they think,” he tapped the side of his head smugly, “I like to think that gives me just a little bit of insight into how they’d handle the truth about you and ComSpark.

“As opposed to how you think they’d react, having known them for all of...what? A month? Two? And we’d kind of be stretching the definition of ‘knowing’, seeing as how you haven’t even had a real conversation with anypony outside of me, Squelch, and Val,” Slipshod was mildly gratified to get the satisfaction of seeing the alicorn frown in acknowledgement of the truth of what he’d just said.

Suddenly she didn’t seem to be a big fan of ‘honesty’, the stallion thought with a smirk.

“These aren’t you subjects, ‘your highness’,” the earth pony continued on, “they didn’t swear fealty to you. They don’t know you. They have no reason to trust you or anything you say.

“You heard Squelch,” he reminded her, “I’ll tell you right now that her opinion isn’t an anomaly. The average pony probably genuinely doesn’t care that Chrysalis is just posing as you. Oh, sure, they certainly might get a bit pissy if they learned what really happened to the academy applicants who went to Equus,” he nodded his head in agreement, “but, then again, look at the number of creatures that changelings are devouring directly when compared to the number of casualties on any given day throughout the Sphere; what we’re doing barely registers as a statistically significant ‘cause of death’,” he scoffed.

“More ponies die in this galaxy every year from bona fide DropShip accidents than from husking.”

That earned a baleful stare. Twilight wasn’t happy to hear that, and it was clear that it did little to shift her opinion on the matter either, “I think it’s perfectly fair to count the constant war and bloodshed going on in the Harmony Sphere as being ‘caused’ by Chrysalis and her changelings,” she countered primly, “seeing as how you informed me that the machinations of her agents are what perpetuate it.”

Slipshod shrugged, unabashed, “eh. Even if you convinced the crew that changelings existed, asking them to believe that we’re all part of an intergalactic cabal of shapeshifters who’ve infiltrated every planetary government in order to carry out a centuries-long conspiracy would be a tad more difficult.

“And then, you’d still have to get them to care.” he added, “and even Squelch very much doesn’t. Not really,” the stallion snorted, “most creatures already possess a resigned acceptance of the idea that political institutions are controlled by an entrenched ruling class that’s indifferent to the plight of the ‘common creature’. All you’d be doing is replacing ‘the bourgeois’ with ‘changelings’. Nothing of their worldview would really change.

“All Squelch wants is a cushy retirement. Most of the ponies on the ship want that, and could care less who they’re paying taxes to at the end of the day.”

“I don’t believe that,” Twilight insisted, shaking her head, “when they find out that they could have a better life―a life free of constant wars and hate and violence―they’ll help me stop Chrysalis.”

Slipshod audibly laughed at the notion. It was hard not to, “if you find a pony that believes that kind of existence is actually possible, please send them my way. I’ve got some beachfront property on that ice ball of a planet we were just on that I’d like to sell them,” he flashed a smug smile at the alicorn.

“Face it, princess, that’s an uphill battle.”

“Maybe so,” she conceded with a somber nod, “but it’s a battle that needs to be fought, for the good of everypony.”

“I think you’ll find that those high-minded ideals died with the Celestia League...” the earth pony scoffed.

“Maybe not,” it was Twilight who was smirking now, “these ‘Disciples of Discord’ may still hold true to those values as well,” again her gaze narrowed at the stallion, “...values which include honesty.”

“Fuck me,” he groaned, “will you let that drop already? I did what I had to do.”

“Lies like that are going to get you into trouble eventually,” the sanctimonious tone of the alicorn’s voice was particularly grating on the earth pony.

“‘Lies like that’ are what have kept me alive these last two years!” Slipshod snapped at the mare, causing her to recoil slightly at the sudden forcefulness of his demeanor, “and don’t you talk down to me, you hypocritical bitch!”

So much for not getting into an antagonistic screaming match.

Twilight narrowed her gaze at the earth pony, “how dare―”

“Oh, I’ll fucking ‘dare’!” he snarled, cutting her off. He adopted a mocking tone, glaring at the alicorn, reveling inwardly at the satisfaction he felt at her loathing as his voice perfectly matched hers, “‘your whole species is based on lies and deception’,” his lips curled back into a sneer, as he then dropped the unflattering affectation of the mare’s voice, “remember that? Well guess what? You weren’t wrong.

“My whole existence is founded on lies,” he conceded, not sounding the least bit ashamed of the admission, “my name, my appearance, my history, my family, everything; it’s all lies. I have nothing of my own!” He leered at the alicorn, noting that she looked less self-assured now, having had her own words thrown back in her face―in her own voice no less, “except for my vengeance. That’s mine.

“The truth is a death sentence for me,” he said coolly, “so of course I’m going to lie. I spent eight months lying to my wife; you think I’m going to hesitate for a moment about lying to anypony else on this ship if that’s what it takes to keep me alive, and get me what I need?

“And don’t pretend for a moment that my lying isn’t about to get you everything you want too,” he pointed out, “I didn’t see you chomping at the bit to correct anything I said on that bridge. You could have turned me over to Squelch and told her what I really am from day one.

“But you didn’t,” the earth pony reminded the alicorn, a wicked smile crossing his lips, “you kept my secret. Lied by omission to everycreature on this ship. Are you about to sit there and try and argue that it’s not the same? That lying by keeping your mouth shut when you know the truth is really so much better than lying outright?

“It served you then, so you let it happen. It’s going to serve you now,” he stressed, holding the alicorn’s gaze, “...so you’re going to let it happen. It’ll serve you in the future...so I suggest you let it happen when it does.”

Slipshod held the purple mare’s gaze for several long seconds, daring her to argue with any of the statements that he’d just made. She declined, so he nodded and recomposed himself before he spoke again, “Squelch wants to talk with you in the conference room in forty-five minutes. She wants your word that her crew will be treated well, and that their families will be financially taken care of. I told her that wouldn’t be a problem.”

He smirked at the alicorn, “...you’re not going to make a liar out of me, are you?”

For a brief moment, Twilight’s amethyst eyes glared at the earth pony, but her ire subsided quickly and she sighed, nodding her head, “that...is the least I can do for the ponies on this ship. I will talk with whoever is currently in control of the Disciples and see to it that arrangements are made to properly compensate them. You may assure your commander of that.”

The earth pony nodded, “good. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my nature is compelling me to go and organize some lies,” he said, not hiding the note of contempt that colored his words as he turned to leave.

“...I’m sorry.”

The stallion stopped just before reaching the door, his ear cocking in Twilight’s direction.

“About what I said to you that day. It was unkind,” the purple mare admitted soberly, “I was...upset. I lashed out. I shouldn’t have, and I was wrong to do so. You have helped me, and placed yourself at great risk doing so.

“Thank you.”

Slipshod closed his eyes and took a deep breath, “I’m not doing this for you, princess.”

“I know; but you are doing it nonetheless. For now, that’s enough.”

“The ends justify the means, is that it?” he wasn’t able to resist throwing the comment back in the alicorn’s face. To her credit, her expression seemed to acknowledge the hypocrisy.

The stallion moved for the door, but was once more given to pause as the alicorn asked a rather unexpected question, “what’s your name? Your real one.”

He turned his whole head to regard the mare this time, studying her. She was more subdued now than she had been earlier, and he did get a sense of genuine shame seeping off of her. Some of what he’d said had apparently bitten a little deeper than he’d expected. She genuinely did want to know his name.

Unfortunately for her, the earth pony wasn’t in the mood for olive branches at the moment, “it doesn’t matter. I’m no more that ‘ling than I am Slipshod,” and with that, he left.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 15: Daughter of the Dragon

The intercom buzzed, drawing the attention of both passengers in the rear of the limousine whose sides were emblazoned with the silver pony head silhouette that was the emblem of the Steel Coursers, “five minutes out, ma’am,” Axel Rod said from the driver’s seat, “BattleSteeds visible on the horizon.”

Squelch craned her head around to try and get a look forward. Sure enough, she was able to easily spot the hulking mass of a Big Mac looming in the distance, parked in front of the spheroid Friendship-class Disciple DropShip. It looked powered down at the moment. That fact didn’t make it look any less threatening though. The same went for all of the other massive heavy and assault tonnage BattleSteeds arrayed around the ship, like hulking steel sentinels.

The sage green unicorn took in a deep, reassuring breath, and did her best to relax herself. To help distract from her nervousness, she once again looked over her suit, smoothing out wrinkles that really weren’t all that visible, just so that she’d have something to do. Celestia knew that she wasn’t going to be contributing much to whatever ‘discussions’ Purple Ro―Twilight Sparkle, she corrected ruefully―intended to have with the Disciples.

That was still a hard pill to swallow, the unicorn thought to herself wryly. The alicorn sitting on the throne on Equus had been an imposter for centuries, and the Disciples of Discord were the good guys, fighting to free the galaxy from her clutches. So much as things like ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ mattered these days. Squelch was still nowhere near convinced of the purple mare’s assertions that life could be anything other than strife. Fighting and killing were just too...commonplace.

Besides, something about the whole situation was still bothering the mare.

If Twilight’s accounts were to be believed, she’d presided over a galaxy that had already been united. Some cracks had started to form in the wake of Tirek’s return―spurred on by a mare named ‘Cozy Glow’, whoever that was―and Twilight was in the process of mending those budding fractures in the Celestia League when she was ambushed and replaced by Chrysalis.

Which meant that Chrysalis had also effectively already gained control of a single, peaceful, monolithic, galactic star nation. According to every book and vid plot that the unicorn had ever read or seen, that was traditionally the aspiration of would-be despots: having complete, undisputed, control over everything. This changeling queen had had that gifted to her from the outset!

So why go through the trouble of breaking the League up and plunging the galaxy into turmoil? Had she just turned out to be nowhere near the diplomat that the genuine article had been? Perhaps, but...she controlled ComSpark, and through it the Mercenary Review Board. She was actively profiting off the fighting; while simultaneously creating the primary currency―the C-bit―used to wage it. And Squelch could think of nothing that ComSpark had ever said or done that could have been perceived as an attempt to curb the bloodshed. The Aris Conventions, the most that had ever been done to address the rampant destruction of civil infrastructure caused by the fighting, had predated ComSpark. So it was unlikely Chrysalis had had a hoof in them. Directly at least.

If anything, ComSpark and the MRB were perpetuating the conflicts raging across the Harmony Sphere.

What kind of aspiring ‘supreme ruler’ encouraged instability? And why?

Maybe she could get some answers from the Disciples.

Though, even there, she was finding herself with a lot of questions.

They were supposed to be ‘small time’ terrorists with little to no resources. So how had they gotten their hooves on a WarShip?! More than that: if they had WarShips, why hadn’t they already moved in and toppled Chrysalis and restored the Celestia League, or whatever it was they were hoping to accomplish? Even just on its own, the Rockhoof would be able to devastate most of the Harmony Sphere! They could just fly around wrecking shit. They could jump to the Faust System, aim one of their oversized naval autocannons at Canterlot Castle, and end the problem once and for all.

Boom; done. Hold for applause.

But they hadn’t done that. Instead, they’d played grab-flank with the Harmony Sphere for the better part of five centuries, all the while hiding their real capabilities and assets. Only even risking their revelation to ComSpark in order to rescue one mare. True, she was an alicorn, but so what? What was she supposed to be able to do to help that a WarShip couldn’t?

Yeah, the sage mare was bubbling with questions, but she wasn’t sure if she’d be given the opportunity to ask any of them. After all, this was a meeting between the Disciples and Twilight. She was just there to…

...why was she there? Probably because she was the one who owned the limo.

The unicorn smirked to herself, looking out the window. Then she frowned, her eyes narrowing. They were much closer to the DropShip now, and she could see that not only did the Disciples have BattleSteeds outside their ship, they had ground vehicles staged as well. APCs specifically. A lot of them.

They were currently in the process of being readied to go...somewhere. Large armored equines―as well as creatures who were not equines, she noted―were rallying in preparation to board the transports. As were a much smaller group of non-armored zebras dressed in what Squelch had to assume was ‘odd attire’ by the standards of just about anypony these days. It certainly didn’t look anything like what the Disciples around them were wearing!

Then Squelch’s gaze was drawn to what had to have been a rather hastily set up ‘royal reception’, given that the unicorn mare was well aware of exactly how much time had passed between the acceptance of Twilight’s request―though Squelch was of the impression that it had ultimately been more of a ‘demand’―for a meeting, and their arrival here now. The Disciples had had less than thirty minutes to get these preparations in order, but she had to admit that they’d done very well for themselves given that sort of timetable.

Banners bearing the six-pointed star of the Celestia League had been hung, framing one of the DropShip’s massive ‘Steed Bay entry ramps. A deep purple carpet ran down the length of the ramp, extending all of the way out to a congregation of uniformed equines who were standing in formation, clearly waiting to receive their regal guest. It all looked very professional and well coordinated.

Again, not what Squelch had come to expect from a group which held the reputation of being ‘crazed terrorist cultists’.

Axel Rod pulled the limousine up to the waiting formation and expertly parked it so that the rear door of the luxury car was perfectly framed by the waiting retinue of Disciples. On instinct, Squelch moved to exit the vehicle, but the gentle pressure of a purple wing kept her in her seat.

“Protocol is for the Princess to exit first, and then her staff,” Twilight murmured softly. The sage green mare bristled briefly, fighting back a harsh retort. Then she reminded herself that, despite the employer-employee relationship that they’d broadly been observing over the past few months, that wasn't actually the dynamic anymore. Squelch wasn’t about to bend her knee to the alicorn anytime soon, but there was no denying that Twilight was still much higher on the social pecking order than she was. Especially here, surrounded by their present company.

She’d do well not to offend the sensibilities of the ponies with Big Macs parked in their front yard.

“By all means...Your Majesty,” the mare said, gesturing for the alicorn to precede her out of the vehicle.

Twilight hesitated for a brief moment, having noted that the use of the title hadn’t actually sounded very deferential at all, but she ultimately chose not to remark on it. Her attention was better spent focusing on other, more important, matters: such as the Disciples. She stepped out of the vehicle, mentally smirking at how ‘underdressed’ she was for this sort of reception. She’d left her royal regalia aboard her personal transport...five hundred years in the past. Not even Celestia knew where it was now.

Not that anypony here was likely to, in any way, make a note of her ‘lackluster’ appearance. Though, the alicorn supposed that there was at least something that she could do to help her ‘look the part’ of a princess. She closed her eyes for a brief moment and focused her magic. A second later, she heard a muted gasp from behind. Twilight ever so slightly tilted her head to catch sight of Squelch, and her dinner plate sized eyes, as the smaller green unicorn watched the alicorn’s magenta-streaked mane grow from its close-cropped ‘Steed pilot trim out to a body-length mane which looked as though it were billowing in an ethereal wind which no other pony could feel.

The uniformed guards to either side snapped to attention. Twilight regarded them, noting their neat appearance, and meticulously polished barding. Professionals through and through, who would not have been the least bit out of place among her own bygone Royal Guard. If these Disciples weren't the descendents of her stalwart supporters, they certainly played the part well.

She paused for a brief moment, glancing subtly between the Disciple guards and the pair of mercenary ponies. The Disciple ponies certainly looked a fair bit...broader. Taller too, by a significant margin. It was like she was looking at a lineup of Big Macs and Rockhoofs. The alicorn pushed the curious thought aside with a mental shrug. It made sense that an honor guard would consist of the most impressive specimens from among their forces, she decided.

The alicorn looked towards the ramp, noting a trio of figures standing at its base, awaiting her with rapt attention. Two of them were ponies, a pegasus and an earth pony. The other figure, standing in the center, was bipedal. With scaled wings.

“Is that...a dragon?”

Twilight almost missed Squelch’s whispered statement. The cobalt blue dragoness standing at the head of the waiting delegation was attired in what was quite obviously military liverly far more resplendent than anything that the others were wearing; leaving no doubt as to who was in charge. She too looked every inch the consummate professional, her scaled features looking impassively forward.

“It is,” the purple alicorn noted with mild approval, “and an admiral too,” she added as she started walking forward.

“The fuck is a dragon doing with the Disciples?” was Squelch’s incredulous demand under her breath. Then she noticed the other armored figures near the APCs that were almost certainly also dragons, “multiple dragons!”

“By the time of Tirek’s defeat, the Celestia League Defense Force was comprised of a significant percentage of dragons,” Twilight answered simply, a wry smile creasing her face, “even after a millennia of exposure to the Magic of Friendship, their race was possessed of a temperament that made them...shall we say: ‘ideally suited’ for the role?”

It took hardly any time at all for the pair to cross the short distance to the base of the DropShip’s ramp. Once there, the dragoness finally moved, falling reverently to her knee and bowing her head. The uniformed ponies to either side of her likewise knelt in supplication to their long lost princess.

“Your Majesty,” the dragoness said, “we are honored to be the first to welcome you back from your absence.”

“Arise, admiral,” the purple mare instructed, smiling warmly at the group, “and thank you for all that you’ve done. May I know your names?”

All three members of the Disciple delegation rose to the feet once more, the cobalt dragon nodding, “Star Admiral Cinder, Your Majesty. This is the captain of the Rockhoof, Star Commodore Mizzen, and this is the commander of the Fourth Special Recon Binary, Star Captain Honeycrisp,” there were nods from the almond brown pegasus stallion and cherry red earth pony mare respectively.

Twilight looked to the ‘Steed commander and cokced her head slightly, “am I to understand then that it’s you I have to thank for that timely intervention yesterday?”

The earth pony beamed brightly, her freckled cheeks dimpling with her wide grin, “shucks, Yer Majesty; weren’t nothin’. ‘S’far as I’m concerned, it was y’all that did the heavy liftin’! All my pilots an’ I did was bat a lil’ cleanup.”

“Nevertheless, you have my thanks,” the alicorn then paused, considering the mare a moment longer, before her own smile broadened slightly, “and I can think of nopony I’d rather have looking out for me than an Apple,” her amethyst eyes darted briefly to the nearby BattleSteed, “and I know the real Big Macintosh would be very proud of how his...however-many-times-great granddaughter is doing.”

The mare managed to blush through her already thoroughly red coat as her hoof scuffed at the ground, “...thanks, Yer Majesty. That means a lot.”

The alicorn then looked to the pegasus, “and thank you too, commodore―sorry, star commodore,” she corrected herself, cracking a slight smile at the unusual rank, “for all that your ship and crew risked coming to retrieve me from the Harmony Sphere. I am exceedingly grateful.”

“Service above self, Your Majesty,” the stallion responded with a bow of his head.

“And, star admiral,” Twilight Sparkle continued, turning back to the dragoness once more, “I thank you for your willingness to see me. I understand that you have security protocols in place, and nopony knows better than I why they are so important,” she acknowledged, which did a little to soothe the ranking officer, who was clearly still not entirely thrilled about this meeting, “however, I have never been one for impersonal exchanges. There are important matters that the two of us need to discuss.”

“Several, in fact, Your Majesty,” Cinder agreed with a curt nod, “one of which was very nearly undone by the Reiver raid yesterday.”

The alicorn quirk a curious brow, “explain, star admiral.”

“Capinses was a planned layover location for a very specific reason, princess,” she explained, “it is the traditional home for a collective of zebra alchemists. A number of them were supposed to shuttle over to the Rockhoof while we were recharging the jump drive in order to help screen the crew of the Galloway for changelings.

“The raid threatened that, and so we had to intervene to ensure that no harm came to the alchemist enclave here. It was a grievous violation of procedure, but we were left with few alternatives,” the dragoness frowned, “it’s possible that irreversible damage has already been done.”

“What damage?” Twilight asked, a little taken aback.

“We have reason to believe that there is―or at least was―a changeling infiltrator aboard the Galloway. We’d intended to keep the crew isolated on board so that we could keep the spy from escaping. But now…” she shrugged helplessly, “they could have easily fled and hidden themselves among the populace of this planet, and we don’t have the resources to screen a few million zebras. Not in the timetable we’re working with, anyway.

“We’ll still check out everypony currently aboard the Galloway, but I’m not confident about finding the spy,” the admiral shook her head in resignation, “losing an intel source like that is a shame. But, like I said, our hand was forced as a result of the attack.”

The dragoness then fidgeted ever so slightly, her mouth quirking, “...to that end, Your Majesty, if you will forgive any perceived insult: I would very much like to, erm…” her gaze shifted uneasily, “that is to say, while I would never presume to order Your Majesty to submit to, uh―and I assure you that it isn’t that I don’t trust Your Majesty―”

Twilight chuckled warmly, “I understand completely, Star Admiral Cinder,” she assured the cobalt dragon, “and I will graciously submit to whatever test is required to prove my lack of ‘changelingness’,” she nodded her head in Squelch and Axle Rod’s direction, “all of us will.”

Cinder’s posture relaxed considerably and she issued a slight bow of her head, “thank you, princess,” she then cast her gaze to her right and nodded her head. At her signal, an elderly zebra mare wearing brass circlets on her neck and cannons approached, a small clay jar balanced neatly on her back, “may I present: Madame Zora, High Matriarch of The Conclave.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Madame Zora,” Twilight said warmly, nodding down at the mare. The wrinkled zebra nodded in turn, but said nothing. The alicorn raised a brow, glancing at the star admiral.

The dragoness cleared her throat, “the members of the Conclave have taken a vow of silence, until such time as the changeling threat is resolved.”

“I see,” the purple princess said, looking back to the striped mare, “in that case, I hope to have a conversation with you soon,” she flashed a broad smile at the zebra, “now, what does this ‘screening process’ entail exact―” the alicorn went abruptly silent as a swath of thick green slurry was smeared across her eyes by the zebra. The princess blinked in silence for several seconds before nodding, a wry smirk touching her lips, “...right, I remember now,” she glanced down at her hooves and then her wings, “and not even glowing this time.”

The zebra mare had already moved on to the unicorn behind the princess, who instinctively recoiled away from the outstretched hoof covered in green slime, “woah; hold on! Careful, this jacket is―” the older striped mare was surprisingly quick for her advanced age, managing to smear the poultice across the unicorn’s eyes despite her recoiling, “...mohair,” Squelch finished flatly, watching with resignation as a few idle droplets dripped from her cheeks onto the lapel of her suit jacket.

Squelch glared first at the zebra, who didn’t give any outward appearance that she’d noticed the look, and then the dragoness, “you couldn’t have let me at least take it off first?” the mare sniffed, then quickly scrunched up her muzzle and stuck out her tongue, “ugh! This stuff smells like compost!” She wiped at her face and proceeded to fling as much of the substance away as she could, “you guys ever hear of blood tests?!”

“Changeling magic is difficult to disperse,” Star Admiral Cinder responded simply, offering a mild shrug, “and their disguises hold up perfectly under nearly all mundane medical procedures. Otherwise they’d be undone by a simple x-ray,” the dragoness looked back at the alicorn and bowed her head, “I thank you for your cooperation, Your Majesty. Allow me to show you to a washroom so that you may clean up―”

“I’ll survive,” Twilight assured the scally officer, “instead, I would like to speak with you about these Reivers, and what can be done about them.”

The admiral hesitated, briefly exchanging glances with the other two ponies with her, before nodded, “as you wish, princess. If you would accompany us to the officer’s mess? That should be a suitable setting for our conversation.”

“Well I’d like a shower,” Squelch muttered bitterly, still shaking green slime from her hoof.

“Ah’ll show ya to one,” Star Captain Honeycrisp grinned motioning for the unicorn to follow her.

“Once you’ve done so, star captain,” the dragoness said, “take the convoy out to the Galloway and screen its crew. It might already be too late, but we still need to be sure anyway.”

“Righty-oh, ma’am!”

Whether because the personnel situation became desperate enough, or Doc Dee had determined that the educational barrier to entry was no longer warranted anymore for most of the patients, Slipshod eventually found himself inducted into the growing ranks of the ship’s newly-minted ‘medical corps’. This cadre of ponies essentially consisted of every member of the crew that wasn’t either tending to the three damaged BattleSteeds, or otherwise performing a duty vital to the DropShip’s operation.

This still left a pretty abysmal ratio of attendees to patients though, in Slipshod’s opinion. Not that he knew much about how a hospital functioned or what the staff ratio was in one of them. On the ship it was just Doc Dee. He didn’t even have any sort of assistant. He also rarely had to deal with more than a couple patients at a time.

The unicorn physician was certainly justifying his pay today though. Slipshod barely saw the fluttering white lab coat for more than a second or two at a time as the doctor darted from one ward to another doing his rounds. In theory, there were supposed to be more genuine medical personnel on their way here from the city to help out, but Celestia knew when they were actually going to show up. The golden earth pony was sure that the local population’s medics were already plenty swamped as it was. Likewise, the medical personnel from the Disciples had been dispatched to the city and its surrounding suburbs as well.

No, there wouldn’t be any help coming for quite some time.

Which was why Slipshod was currently carefully making his way across the packed floor of the garage, balancing a half dozen trays of food on his head and back. The vehicle bay was just one of the many areas of the ship that had been cleared out in order to create a patient ward. The ground carts that would normally have been parked in it were currently scattered outside. Well, most of them anyway.

A couple were missing at the moment. The limousine and one armed truck to escort it.

Squelch, Twilight Sparkle, Axel Rod, and a number of Flechette’s security team, were currently elsewhere, meeting face-to-face with the Disciples.

At first, the request had been flatly refused. In fact, it had been repeatedly refused a half dozen times. The Disciples were adamant that they would not physically meet, and that all discussion was to continue to take place through text message exchanges.

Then Twilight Sparkle had taken the first scroll which she’d received from them, written something upon it, and used her magic to teleport it away. Ten minutes later, Squelch had received very specific instructions on where and when she could send a delegation to meet with the Disciples.

Slipshod had not been invited. Strictly speaking, nopony other than Twilight and Squelch had been named in the instructions that had been given. However, the sage green unicorn was not about to go riding off into the middle of nowhere on some backwater Periphery planet without at least a token protection detail. The earth pony wasn’t sure how the Disciples were going to react to having their terms spurned like that, but he did wish that he could have been there to see it.

Ah well, he’d just have to settle for hearing about it when they got back. In the meantime, he―apparently―had duties to perform. He glanced down at his datapad for several seconds and then cast his gaze around the garage. Credit where it was due: Doc Dee was a phenomenal organizer. In spite of the initial chaos―or perhaps even in anticipation of it―he’d been absolutely draconian in his enforcement of documentation procedures. Every zebra that had been brought to the ship had been issued a patient identification number before any form of treatment was performed.

That patient was then triaged, treated, and sequestered somewhere in the ship where they could be checked upon periodically so their condition could be monitored. Throughout that whole process, there was a member of the crew standing by the doors leading to and from these new ‘wards’ that logged the patient’s identification number in the ship’s system.

The result was that the Galloway’s logs contained a continually updated roster of what patient was in what part of the ship, along with what was wrong with them and what had been done for them. Lucky for Doc Dee, while most of the crew didn’t know all that much about medicine, they were all long-time veterans of corporate accountability practices! If there was one thing that every department on the Galloway participated in doing, it was tracking inventory and personnel.

For all intents and purposes, the patients had become cargo, and were tracked as such.

This made it exceptionally easy for Slipshod to find the patients he was here to deliver meals to.

If there was one equine on this ship that was more overworked than Doc Dee, it was probably Cookie. The crotchety donkey had very suddenly found himself going from feeding less than a hundred ponies to putting together meals for the better part of five hundred. As if to complicate matters even further, the ship’s physician had even placed very specific parameters on those additional meals, tailoring them to the requirements of the patients based on their condition and disposition. This meant that the donkey couldn’t just throw together a massive cauldron of soup and call it “good”. He’d had to actually prepare specific meals for hundreds of new mouths.

Slipshod suspected that a raise was going to be asked for when his contract came up for renewal…

Just as the earth pony was delivering the last of the trays he’d been carrying to a very thankful zebra mare, his comlink chirped, alerting him to an incoming message. He frowned and tapped the acceptance key, “what is it?”

“Sir,” Flechette’s voice was tense, “I believe we may have a problem.”

The stallion sighed and rubbed the bridge of his muzzle with his hoof, “oh, you are going to need to be a lot more specific. The ship’s crammed with wounded zebras, Cookie’s liable to quit if somepony so much as asks him for a little extra salt on something, Mig and Tig are using the next best thing to hooftools on spark reactors just outside the ship…

“But go on, what’s your ‘problem’?”

Honestly, that little tirade probably hadn’t been warranted. He was just stressed. A consequence of being an empath surrounded by hundreds of anxious minds. It would have been unusual for him to not suffer more than a little ‘bleedthrough’ under the circumstances.

“There’s a convoy of APCs approaching,” the ship’s head of security informed him, thankfully choosing not to remark on the ‘Steed pilot’s outburst. Bless his professionalism, “I think they’re Disciple.”

Slipshod frowned in thought, “that might be the medical support they promised,” he pointed out, “or they’re coming to transport some of the wounded to the city.”

“I feel like we’d have been notified about that by the commander,” he pointed out.

Now the earth pony was concerned. The guard pony had a good point, “has High Gain heard from Squelch?”

“I commed her before reaching out to you. Nothing’s come through her station. As the ranking officer on site, I figured I’d come to you for guidance.”

The earth pony snorted. ‘Guidance’? Their ship was grounded, their BattleSteeds were in pieces, and their security detail consisted of fewer than twenty ponies. A full quarter of which were already out with Squelch and Twilight. Exactly what ‘guidance’ was Slipshod supposed to give in this situation? The Steel Coursers weren’t even remotely in a position to rebuke the approaching Disciple convoy. Whatever those ponies wanted to do, they were going to do it.

“If they’re gracious enough to stop and tell you what’s going on, comm me,” the golden stallion responded, not bothering to hide his resignation on the matter, “otherwise, try not to get yourself run over when they blow past you.”

“Understood, sir. Out,” at least the chief of security sounded like he hadn’t anticipated that there was much else that they could have done.

Still, the news did raise some questions that the ‘Steed pilot would have preferred to have answers to, “High Gain? Can you raise the commander?” he called up to the bridge as he left the garage and headed deeper into the ship.

“I just tried,” the communications tech admitted, sounding a little anxious, “no response. A message did just come through for Doc Dee though,” she informed him, “it was a request from the Disciples for a complete personnel roster, to include a count of all the wounded on site.”

Slipshod’s brows furrowed, “they wanted a list of all the wounded and the ship’s crew?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t they already have a roster? I thought we’d been sending them PERSTATS every day?”

“Those were just raw numbers,” the mare explained, “they’re asking for complete files now. Names, descriptions, departments, everything.”

Slipshod’s blood froze in his veins. He could think of only a few reasons why the Disciples would want something like that. Combining those possible reasons with the news that a convoy of who knew how many Disciple troops were on the way here suggested really only the one possibility: they were about to screen the crew for changelings.

“Fuck!”

“Sir?”

The stallion blanched as he realized his mic had still been hot. He quickly attempted to cover his flub, “sorry, nearly tripped over a patient. They’re fine. Uh, you said that Doc received the request for the records? Do you know where he’s at right now?” if he had any hope of finding a way out of this, it was through the physician and the records he was about to submit. Maybe he could find a way to scrub himself from them and then...figure out something from there?

“I’d assume he has to be in his office getting the records togeth―oop! Yeah, I just got the packet to forward to the Disciples. If you hurry, you can probably catch him before he leaves.”

“Awesome, thanks!” Slipshod cut the comm line and picked up the pace as he tried to reach medical. Doc Dee might have already sent the records, but maybe he could get into the physician’s system using the access codes that he still remembered and alter them anyway. Then he’d forward the alterations to the Disciples as a ‘corrected record’ or something.

It was a longshot, sure; but it could also be his only shot!

Twilight sat across the table from Star Admiral Cinder and Star Commodore Mizzen in the small dining area which was reserved for the DropShip’s officer complement. The Galloway had no such exclusive eating area, as its crew complement wasn’t large enough to justify it. A Friendship-class DropShip, on the other hoof, was considerably larger, with an appropriately proportioned crew complement. As such, the design did include a separate, more intimate, dining area reserved for the ship’s senior officers.

It was well after breakfast, but not quite close enough to midday to justify lunch. However, the admiral had obviously felt that not offering their recently returned monarch something in the way of refreshment would have reflected poorly on her and her crew. A carafe of tea and a platter of pastries had been waiting for them when the trio walked into the room. Twilight had politely accepted a cup of the hot beverage and a scone, though she doubted that she’d actually touch the latter.

Despite her insistence that no washing was necessary, a pony entered not long afterwards carrying a small wash basin and a collection of warm, damp, cloths. The purple alicorn took them and dabbed at her face, clearing away nearly all of the substance which had been smeared there by the old zebra mare.

“How may we be of service to Your Majesty?” Cinder inquired as her pegasus subordinate poured out servings of tea for all three of them, “you mentioned the Red Reivers?”

“I did,” Twilight acknowledged, her tone growing terse at the memories of the death and destruction that had been wrought on Capinses by the raiders yesterday. Thousands―tens of thousands―of lives had been lost in the attack. Much more infrastructure had been destroyed, rendering many of the survivors homeless, or without access to food, water, and medical attention. The alicorn fully expected the death toll in connection with the attack to rise as a result of those secondary effects.

“I had a lengthy discussion last night with a survivor of the attack,” the purple princess explained, “a ‘Steed pilot. He indicated that the Red Reivers have been operating in this region of space for a long while―decades, in fact,” she leveled her gaze at the dragon, “what I would like to know is: why nothing has been done about them?”

The pair of Disciple officers exchanged a brief glance before the dragoness cleared her throat, “I can understand why Your Majesty is upset by the state of the Periphery,” she acknowledged in a diplomatic tone. The alicorn was already frowning, having heard such tones often enough during her millenia holding Court to know that a foundation was being laid for a response that all of them knew she wasn’t going to like, “but you must understand, princess, that we have been otherwise occupied dealing with the changeling threat in the Harmony Sphere.

“And while I truly empathize with the plight of the zebras on Capinses, as well as the rest of the Farsian Empire, my duty is to return with Your Majesty to Somni Patrium as quickly as possible.”

Twilight’s frown deepened, nearly to a full on scowl, “I will admit that my access to intelligence reports has not been what it used to be; however, I was under the impression that only limited operations are being conducted against the changelings in the Sphere. No WarShips, no BattleSteeds, not even particularly heavy ground combat vehicles.”

She gestured above her with her hoof, “may I ask what the Rockhoof is up to when not ferrying long-lost princesses?”

Star Admiral Cinder sighed, apparently already resigning herself to what she recognized was not going to be a well-received answer, “...moored at New Cloudsdale Orbital Station, Your Majesty,” then, as if sensing the probable follow-up question, she added, “along with an additional battleship, four heavy cruisers, seven light cruisers, and fifteen destroyers.”

“A healthy little fleet,” the alicorn noted, “more than enough to deal with some nuisance raiders, I should think.”

“With due respect, princess, the Red Reivers are a significant power in the region.”

“Significant enough to fend off the Rockhoof?” Twilight countered. The dragoness’ mouth opened briefly, and then closed as she silently conceded the point, “very well. Then we shall deal with these Reivers before moving any deeper into the Periphery.”

“Your Majesty, my orders―”

“Are rescinded, star admiral,” came the purple mare’s terse rebuttal, as she leveled a cool stare at both officers, “and I am issuing you new ones. We will travel to where the Red Reivers have their strongholds, raze them to the ground, and rid this sector of their threat once and for all.”

The almond pegasus stallion leaned towards his superior and quietly asked, “can...can she do that?”

Star Admiral Cinder squirmed uneasily in her own seat, “technically,” the cobalt dragoness admitted, though she didn’t sound all too happy about it, “...Your Majesty, if I may...counsel your decision?” the alicorn’s lips curled in a dubious frown, but she nodded nonetheless, “while it is true that no star nation, even in the Periphery, can repel the Rockhoof―or any WarShip, honestly―space superiority alone does not make a victory. Ultimately, putting hooves on the ground will be required.

“While I and the Star Commodore both have the utmost faith and confidence in the abilities of Star Captain Honeycrisp and her company, to put them up against the full might of the Red Reivers―alone―is not...an ideal disposition of forces.”

Twilight wanted to argue the point. She’d seen the BattleSteeds that the Fourth Special Recon fielded. The better part of a thousand tons of war machine was carried by this DropShip. They could tear through any raider company with impunity, surely. However, the alicron had to admit that she didn’t know how significant the forces were that the Red Reivers had at their disposal. They’d deployed a dozen ‘Steeds to this world just for the purpose of sending a message, after all. There could be whole divisions on whatever worlds those raiders made their dens in.

Sometimes quantity possessed a quality all its own, she knew. As skilled as she and her own personal guards had been, the sheer number of changeling ‘Steeds which had ambushed her five hundred years ago had simply been too much to fight off.

She wouldn’t put others in that position.

Twilight let out a resigned sigh of her own, “I take your meaning, star admiral. You are right. A single BattleSteed company cannot subdue an entire world,” she was still frowning though, “but I would assume that the Disciples have more than the star captain’s single company at their disposal. Why have the Reivers not already been dealt with?”

“It is our policy to not get involved with the politics of other star nations,” Cinder replied, “lest we draw attention to our true strength, and the existence of the Clans. Our best advantage against Queen Chrysalis is her overconfidence, borne of the ignorance of the actual threat we pose to her control.”

“The ‘Clans’?” Twilight posed, rolling the unfamiliar designation over in her mouth.

“The Dragon Clans, Your Majesty,” there was a rueful glint in the dragoness’ eye, “while dragons may have made up a ‘significant’ portion of the CLDF military five hundred years ago, they constitute the bulk of our forces today. By contrast, the units that the Sphere knows as the ‘Disciples of Discord’ are something of an exception, fielding almost exclusively pony forces during their operations.

“Presently, the changelings believe the dragons to have no interest in the Harmony Sphere. We are endeavoring to keep them believing so.”

“Honestly,” Mizzen said, sporting a wry frown of his own, “I could do with some of the Clans being a little less ‘interested’ in the Harmony Sphere.”

“Beg pardon?” Twilight said, looking between the two officers.

Cinder glared briefly at the stallion before turning back to the alicorn, “the political situation back home is...tense, Your Majesty. Rest assured, Dragon Lord Ember has matters well in claw.”

The purple mare held the dragoness’ gaze for several long seconds, evaluating how much faith she wanted to put in that statement, especially given how the pegasus had made it sound. Still, she knew Ember well―or at least, she had known the Dragon Lord―so she was inclined to accept the star admiral’s assurances. If nothing else, it was something of a relief to know that at least a few things hadn’t changed in the last few hundred years.

“Ember is still the Dragon Lord? Good. Good,” Twilight nodded, “I assume that I’ll be meeting with her soon after my arrival on―what did you say the planet was called?―Somni Patrium?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Cinder assured the princess, “that is where she and her consort hold court.”

“Her consort?” the alicorn’s lips turned up in an amused smile, “you mean Spike?” the star admiral nodded, “took them long enough to make it ‘official’,” the mare snorted, “figures. I wait a thousand years to officiate their wedding, and they somehow manage to get it done while I’m indisposed,” she narrowed her eyes playfully at the dragoness admiral and jabbed a pinion at her, “you dragons live too long. It gives you a warped sense of time. Who let’s an engagement last for eight hundred years?!

“Didn’t your kind ever hear of ‘eloping’?”

The senior officer squirmed uncomfortably again, though this time seemingly from embarrassment, “I’m...led to believe it’s evolutionary,” she muttered, “dragons are long-lived and tough to kill. If we reproduced as frequently as ponies, we’d have very quickly overwhelmed our homeworld, and exhausted our food supply.

“Thus, upon reaching adulthood, we don’t have much of a sense of...urgency, when it comes to...procreation.”

Twilight raised a brow, “you know, I don’t know that I’ve met a dragon who was this reserved when discussing their culture. In fact, dragons tended to be second only to yaks when it came to bragging about it.”

Again the dragoness seemed uncomfortable, “it’s different when the discussion is so...personal, Your Majesty,” Cinder admitted, “I don’t particularly enjoy discussing my parents’ relationship history.”

Twilight’s eyes grew wide, and her jaw fell slack as she gawped at the cobalt dragon. Then, in an act that was profoundly unfitting a pony of her majestic station and fell far outside the bounds of what anypony would consider proper decorum―even in non-royal settings―she snatched the dragoness out of her seat with her magic and threw her hooves around the decidedly shocked reptile, embracing the flustered star admiral in a spine-crunching embrace.

“Ohmygosh! I have a new niece!” the princess of the Celestia League squeed in a very foal-like manner.

That his mind was so focused on avoiding detection helped to explain why Slipshod didn’t notice the rose red unicorn mare making her way through a corridor intersection at the same moment that he tried to. The pair of ponies fell to the floor in a tangle of limbs, “ow!” “Celestia, fuck!”

The earth pony clambered stiffly back onto his hooves, looking down at the mare he’d unwittingly accosted, “Channel Lock! Are you okay?” He reached out to help her up.

“Yeah,” she winced as she allowed the stallion to ease her up onto her hooves, “sorry about that. I was a little distracted,” she admitted, “have been for a while, honestly,” the mare bit her lip pensively, “the memorial service helped, but I’m still...bothered, I guess?

“I mean, I could swear that I just saw Spanner right down the hall―”

Slipshod wasn’t even paying attention to what the technician was saying, honestly. He had far too much else on his mind at the moment, “yeah, no, that’s great,” he muttered, dusting himself off and reorienting himself in the corridor, “listen, can we talk later? I need to get to medical right now.”

“Oh...um, sure, I guess―”

He was already out of earshot of the unicorn, trotting through the winding passages of the DropShip on his way to the clinic. Though he was being far more mindful of other ponies as he went this time. He couldn’t afford too many more delays like that.

“Hey, Slip! C’mere a minute!”

Oh, sweet, merciful Celestia; what now?! The beleaguered earth pony turned to see Blood Chit waving him over, “can it wait? I’m busy with something,” he tried his best not to snap at the recovery team leader, he really did. Yet the other stallion still recoiled slightly, looking hurt.

“Uh...yeah. I was just going to ask if―”

His comlink beeped. Because of course it was going to. Slipshod wasn’t able to contain the exasperated growl that escaped his lips as he slammed his hoof on the key to accept the call, “what?!”

Flechette’s professionalism was uncanny, as the stallion didn’t sound the least bit fazed by the outburst, “update on the Disciples, sir: they’ve formed a perimeter around the ship. They’re asking for you.”

So that was what heart palpitations felt like, the earth pony thought to himself as his mind processed the security pony’s words, “...they asked for me...specifically?” he hoped that he hadn’t sounded as nervous as he felt. His throat had gone surprisingly dry though.

“They asked who was in charge here with the commander away. I informed them it was you, sir. They want you to meet them out here.”

Celestia bless his little heart. Flechette was just. So. Helpful.

Slipshod had to force his teeth to stop grinding, “thank you. I’ll be right there.”

He felt numb. His mind raced, desperately seeking out alternatives. He could try to make a run for it. Not that he’d get very far. It wasn’t like the Disciples would be able to miss him once he tried to cross their perimeter. He couldn’t even try to pass himself off as one of them, because he had no clue what their uniform even looked like! Damn them and their precautions…

Could he send somepony else out to meet them? Flechette had told them he was the pony in charge, sure, but that could also be his ‘out’. There were hundreds of injured zebras lying everywhere, after all. He was far too busy coordinating their treatment to spare even a moment for a ‘chat’ with the Disciples. That was plausible, right?

But who exactly was he supposed to send in his place? Doc Dee? That pony genuinely was too busy treating patients to spare time for a meeting. Mig or Tig? He’d have to go outside to get to their makeshift ‘BattleSteed Bay’. He’d almost certainly be spotted on his way there anyway; and if he had time to go and talk about BattleSteed maintenance at a time like this, then he obviously had plenty of time to talk to the Disciples about matters that they doubtlessly considered of far more importance than ‘Steed statuses. Flechette was already out there…

Fuck.

He enabled his comlink again, “High Gain, I need you to get me through to the commander or Twi―er, Purple Rose,” he was honestly having trouble remembering who knew that mare by what name these days, “just keep trying,” he ordered, “patch them through to me the moment you establish contact. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t like how helpless she’d sounded in that moment. The communications technician didn’t believe that she was going to be able to establish a successful connection to their employer any time soon. Honestly? Neither did he. Reaching them truly was looking like his only hope though. Twilight knew what he was. She’d be able to intercede. Wasn’t she their ruler or something? She could exempt him from whatever test they were going to administer.

If they asked why he was being exempted...well, wasn’t that the point of being a despot? You didn’t need to explain yourself to your underlings? You just sort of told them what to do and they did it, no questions asked? That was how the Queen did things. Twilight was a princess, so there shouldn’t be all that different of a dynamic.

...Unless she had already told them what he was.

Would she have? She’d told him that she didn’t like lying to ponies, but she’d also kept his secret thus far. Granted, the Disciples enjoyed a very different relationship to the alicorn than the Steel Coursers did. They knew who she really was. Twilight might be more inclined to be upfront with them than Squelch, who she clearly experienced some friction with.

It didn’t matter. Whether they knew now or not, they’d be subjecting him to whatever ‘screening process’ they had; a process which had certainly proven adept at detecting changelings thus far, he knew. Chrysalis had tried numerous times over the centuries to get an agent into the ranks of the Disciples. Many agents had gone in...none had ever sent back any information, and all were presumed dead.

How was he supposed to succeed where countless others had failed? Especially when he had no idea what they had failed at? That spell of Twilight’s had certainly had little issue dispelling his disguise in the conference room. However, he was given to understand that changeling magic was supposed to have been resistant to simple unicorn ‘dispelling’ cantrips. Enchantments of all types were routinely dispelled for various reasons as just a normal part of any given day. Agents would be getting unmasked every time they attended a sporting event if that was all it took!

So either it had been an effect specific to that particular spell, or the increased potency as a result of it being cast by an alicorn; or a combination of the two. The Disciples could have access to a changeling unmasking spell specifically, but surely that kind of magic in their possession would have made them far more adept at not just rooting out infiltrators in their own ranks, but at systematically revealing agents in the Harmony Sphere.

They certainly didn’t have broad access to alicorns!

It was unlikely to be a spell then. But what else could it be? Changeling disguises were complete enough to fool any known medical screening, so that couldn’t be it either…

These musings were doing nothing to reduce his stress level, Slipshod noted as he trod out of the ship. He also noted that he felt remarkably like a pony walking towards his own execution. What was he supposed to do?!

He easily spotted what must have been the principle Disciple delegation speaking with Flechette and another of the Galloway’s security team. Where the armored barding of the Steel Coursers security ponies was steel gray with maroon highlights, the Disciples of Discord were wearing suits which were primarily cerulean in color, with deep purple accents. A six-pointed purple star was emblazoned upon their chests. The ancient symbol of the defunct Celestia League, though the color was slightly different from what he recalled in the history texts. Even the real ones.

Odd. He had expected to see the crossed horn and antlers, but that symbol was nowhere to be seen...

He noted too that there were more than the large armored figures filing out of the APCs. Over a dozen zebras were with the Disciples, though certainly not dressed anything like them. The earth pony was hard pressed to identify their affiliation, because he wasn’t quite convinced that these particular zebras were affiliated with the local government either. He’d met Xanadu, and seen hundreds of examples of the local populace laid up in the Galloway. Other than being zebras, they honestly hadn’t seemed all that different from any other Harmony Sphere denizen, dressing with an eye towards contemporary fashion trends and sensibilities.

These zebras, on the other hoof, looked positively anachronistic! Hoof-fashioned brass bands were looped around their legs and necks. Beaded leather straps criss-crossed their barrels and chests. Their rustic saddlebags also had curious little clay pots topped with wax stoppers strapped to them with...was that twine? Even for a backwater Periphery world, that was a bit much…

The line of dozen or so oddly-dressed zebras was soon joined by twice as many Disciple troopers as the whole congregation marched towards the Galloway. As much as Slipshod wanted to see what it was they thought they were going to get up to on the DropShip, the earth pony knew that his business was elsewhere.

He approached the group, noting that there was one Disciple which all of the others seemed to be acting in clear deference to. A bright red earth pony mare with a sunflower mane and freckles on her cheek. Sturdily built, but certainly quite attractive nonetheless. Slipshod idly wondered if he’d be able to get out of this by reading and manipulating her...

Slipshod cleared his throat and nodded his head, “I’m Slipshod. Lead BattleSteed pilot for the Steel Coursers and current ranking pony onsite. I was informed that you wanted to speak with me?”

The earth pony looked him up and down, appraising him. He could sense their suspicion and distrust. Though whether that was just how Disciples felt about non-Disciples, or because they were on the hunt for changelings, Slipshod wasn’t able to tell for sure. He had a sinking feeling that it was the latter though…

The mare regarded him for several long moments before letting out a grunt, “Star Captain Honeycrisp o’ the Fourth Special Recon,” was her terse introduction, “tell yer fellas t’not give those zebras any hassle. Let’em do what they gotta do,” it was phrased as an order, and her tone left no doubt that there was no negotiating this point.

“Right,” the earth pony reached down and contacted High Gain once again, “High Gain, put out a shipwide alert; highest priority: if a Disciple asks anypony to do something; do it. Got that?”

“...Yes, sir,” it was somewhat reassuring to hear that the mare on the other end of the line wasn’t any more happy about it than he was. Though he suspected their mutual unease sprouted from vastly different sources. For High Gain―and likely most of the rest of the crew, Slipshod suspected―this would represent something of a sacrilege. The Galloway was the refuge of the Steel Coursers. Their home away from home. A place where they alone were presumed to hold sway, and all others that came aboard were merely guests passing through. The idea that outsiders could just board the ship and impose their authority felt...anathema. Even to him.

Of course, for the earth pony, it was more than just an invasion of privacy: it was a hunt. For him specifically.

Would they find the other changeling too, he wondered? How could they not? Slipshod had at least had the benefit of forewarning, and he hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Whatever agent was onboard right this moment about to be surprised by the sudden arrival of Disciple troopers surely stood no chance at all. After all, Slipshod was certainly fucked…

“Is there anything else you need?” the golden stallion inquired, doing his level best to sound cordial in spite of the circumstances.

The mare took out a datapad similar to the ones that were used throughout the Harmony Sphere, “Ah’d like to verify some numbers with you real quick,” she began, “how many patients did you pick up?”

The question surprised Slipshod initially, but he soon recovered and brought up his own fetlock-mounted computer, “give me a sec, I don’t know the patient count off the top of my head,” which was true, as he hadn’t seen a need to bother himself with what was quite clearly Doc Dee’s business, “it looks like...three hundred and seventy-two?”

The Disciple nodded in agreement, “and eighty-five members are assigned to your company, correct?”

Slipshod was about to disagree, but then quickly ran through the count in his head, murmuring out loud, “there’re usually eighty-nine, but we gained―” he broke off for just a moment, briefly unsure of how he was supposed to refer to the alicorn. Though, given who he was speaking to he saw little need to obfuscate, “―Twilight,” the crimson earth pony snorted at his use of her shortened name and omission of any titles. The stallion winced, “which put us to ninety. We lost five in the ambush, so...yeah. Eighty-five sounds right.”

He’d passed on the request to Squelch regarding Xanadu wanting to sign on with the company, but that had only been last night. It was pretty unlikely that he’d been formerly added to the crew roster already. Doc Dee would have had the additional personnel file if that had been the case―if not the time to do a proper onboarding physical. So that would have brought the count to eight-six.

The earth pony frowned now, wondering how the former ‘private security contractor’ would be counted for the purposes of the Disciples’ investigation, given that he wasn’t a ‘patient’, and apparently hadn’t been added to the crew roster yet. Unless...was he being counted as a patient? He’d certainly been treated after the fight…

Whatever; Doc Dee knew what he was about.

Though, now that he thought about it, Slipshod supposed that he should start acting like he didn’t know what any of this was about. After all, as a simple Harmony Sphere mercenary, he wasn’t supposed to know anything about the Disciples or changelings, “why the sudden interest in our personnel?” he asked, trying to sound properly annoyed at the idea of having his company’s files being audited by ‘outsiders’ who clearly had no connection to the Mercenary Review Board.

“We’re searching fer changelin’s,” Star Captain Honeycrisp stated bluntly.

It honestly caught Slipshod a little off his guard. He hadn’t quite expected for her to just come right out and say it. He opened up his mouth to inquire further, still intent on playing the role of the ignorant merc, but then paused.

Squelch and Twilight had gone to speak with the Disciples. The Disciples knew Twilight was their true and rightful princess. So, surely they’d have met her arrival with their highest ranking officers. This mare was a ‘star captain’―whatever that was―and with her accent, there was no doubt in his mind that she was also the mare in charge of the Disciple BattleSteed company that had intervened at the last moment against the raiders yesterday. Slipshod may not be an expert on Disciple rank structures, but he had to think that the senior ‘Steed pilot was pretty high up there, even for the Disciples.

How many star captains could they have on a single ‘Steed company?

This mare had very likely already met with Twilight; or at the very least been present when she’d arrived at their own DropShip for her meeting. Twilight certainly knew about the changeling invasion of the Harmony Sphere. She’d been there for it! The two of them had spoken about it on multiple occasions. Twilight knew; and the Disciples knew.

The question was: had Twilight informed the Disciples that he knew about the changelings too?

If he acted like he didn’t know, and Twilight had told her that he did, that would appear suspicious. If he acted like he did know, and Twilight hadn’t mentioned anything about him also knowing, then that would appear suspicious. The stallion’s head began to hurt at the mere prospect of trying to resolve a ‘do they know that I know they know’ scenario to anything approaching a positive outcome for himself.

Saying just about anything risked him sounding suspicious. Would saying nothing also make the mare wonder if he was out of place?

The golden stallion felt as though he was usually so much better at getting a read on any given situation. But he was just so damn nervous right now. The worst part was that those feelings weren’t even all his own! He was experiencing the emotional feedback of the hundreds of nearby creatures who were also currently riding various states of alarm for one reason or the other. There was little chance that he could block it all out and manage to focus, not that that would help resolve his dilemma of finding out how much about what the Disciples were doing he was supposed to already ‘know’ about.

Did Squelch know that he knew about changelings beyond what Twilight had explicitly told them? He was having trouble remembering through all of the psychic turbulence in the air. Would she have corroborated that he knew? Would she even have been included in any conversation between the ranking Disciples and the princess?

He didn’t know.

He didn’t know anything about how he was supposed to behave right now. Flechette was clearly baffled at what was going on, but he was understandably ignorant because he’d been kept in the dark at Slipshod’s own request to Squelch. He’d told the truth to some, lied to most, and now one from each camp had engaged in a discussion with the Disciples and the golden stallion had no clue what version of himself he was supposed to put on display for the star captain.

And making the wrong choice could get him killed.

What was he supposed to do?! What was he supposed to say?! Would saying nothing or anything be worse?

He didn’t know!

“Hmmmm.”

It was the most strained-sounding non-word that the stallion could ever remember uttering in his entire life. He hadn’t even been aware of consciously making it. It had just sort of...come out. At least it was broadly noncommittal, he felt.

He needed out of this conversation somehow. Now. He needed to come up with some plausible reason to excuse himself and then find some way to escape, or hide, or―

His comlink buzzed. Oh, thank Celestia it buzzed! What better excuse to say nothing more in a conversation than an incoming call? “If you’ll pardon me, star captain; I have to take this,” he gestured at his flashing datapad. For her part, the Disciple officer merely nodded and turned to talk to a zebra who was approaching their group, “this is Slipshod...”

Squelch stepped out of the shower with a resigned sigh. She’d scrubbed her face so hard that she’d genuinely feared she’d be scouring the fur from her muzzle, and she still felt greasy. The sage green unicorn had finally conceded that it must have been all in her head, despite the fact that her nose still crinkled at the faintest hint of the reek of the substance. She wondered if the zebras would be willing to give her a list of ingredients so that she could check to see if she might be allergic to something in it.

In any case, she’d used enough of the DropShip’s hot water, and the remaining half of a bottle of shampoo which she had been loaned. She made a note to have a replacement bottle shipped over from the Galloway’s stores as an apology. Her telekinesis enveloped a nearby towel and began to furiously rub it over her body as she walked back towards her discarded clothing.

The sight of the flashing datapad made the mare cringe. She’d been away from the ship for an hour, and somepony already needed her for something. The faint crease of her lips quickly morphed into an outright scowl when she noted that it was not merely one or two contact attempts which she had missed, but seventeen. All of them from Slipshod.

Squelch absolutely dreaded learning what news the stallion had that could have been urgent to warrant that level of harassment. The unicorn wrapped her mane up in the towel, and floated over a second for her tail as she took a seat on a nearby bench and mentally braced herself for whatever catastrophe presumably awaited her when she returned this call. She commed the stallion, who picked up almost immediately.

“This is Slipshod.”

“Fucking tartarus, Slip,” Squelch snapped at him bitterly, wiping away at a tendril of wet hairs that had inexplicably managed to slip from beneath the towel, “can’t a mare take a shower anymore without coming back to a hundred missed calls?! If the Galloway’s not on fucking fire, I’m going to have your flank in a sling!”

There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. Hopefully, the unicorn thought, it was because the earth pony was contemplating whether whatever bullshit he was calling about would be worth the aggravation she’d be calling him if she deemed it to be trivial, “shower? I thought you were in a meeting with the Disciples?”

“Twilight is in a meeting,” the unicorn corrected him tersely, “I had to go wash up after this zebra gave me a mud mask. Twenty minutes and half a bottle of shampoo later, and I still smell like a damn compost heap. Fair warning for you guys, by the way,” maybe it would be best if she and Twilight spent the night on the Disciple DropShip, she thought to herself. Even though she had her own washroom, there was bound to be absolutely no hot water available in the morning with over eighty ponies furiously scrubbing away like she had been.

Then the unicorn had an additionally unpleasant thought as she considered whether the Disciples were going to be mud masking the zebra patients too.

“Mud mask?” the earth pony blurted, sounding utterly baffled by what she was saying, “what kind of meeting did you go to?”

“Fuck if I know; now what do you want?”

“The Disciples are here and they asked for personnel files for the whole crew,” Squelch frowned at the information, but didn’t remark on it. She still detested that they weren’t in a position to assert any sort of sovereignty, but the fact was that they were pseudo-captives of the Disciples. She’d seen the resources that they had at their disposal. Any refusal on her part to comply would only be notional, since there would be nothing that the Steel Coursers could actually do to stop them.

Better to simply cooperate. It was the least painful option. She could lodge a formal complaint with Twilight or whoever later, if she really felt like making a stink about it, “I assume you gave them over?”

“Doc forwarded them, yeah,” Slipshod confirmed.

“Perfect. He has the latest ‘unofficial’ version anyway. Once he’s done with Xanadu’s physical―assuming he can ever find the time―he said he’d post it to the ship’s network.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line long enough that Squelch actually felt compelled to check to ensure that she was still connected to the stallion’s comlink. Then she finally heard him say, “...Xanadu was added to the roster?”

“Should have been,” the sage mare said simply, “I got a read receipt from Dee, so he definitely saw the new file. I know he’s been pretty swamped, but it literally just takes seconds to add it to his database,” the unicorn floated over a third towel and began rubbing it over her damp fur to try and speed along the drying process, “but, like I said: it’s just in the file he has for right now. The ship’s network wouldn’t show it yet.”

“So, wait...then shouldn’t it have been eighty-si―huh?” Squelch frowned and was about to ask what the stallion had been about to say, but she it sounded now like he was speaking with somepony else, “Oh, hello there. Sorry, I’m kind of in the middle of a call...what do you mean she doesn’t speak? Vow of silence? What is that stuff? Woah, hey, watch the eyes―!”

The mare rolled her eyes, turning her attention to drying herself as she waited for the stallion to get back to the call with her. She felt herself smirk slightly at the thought of the golden earth pony now having to deal with the same stink that she had.

What she hadn’t been anticipating was the scream.

“AHG! Fuck; it burns! What the―agh!”

Squelch shot up to her hooves, towels slipping from her magic and tail, “Slip? Slip, what’s going on? Are you alright?” she didn’t hear the stallion, but his mic was picking up a great deal of additional yelling. Most of it was impossible to make out. A lot of ponies were very clearly upset about something though, “Slipshod!”

“Back away; all y’all!” that was not Slipshod, but a mare’s voice that she only faintly recognized.

“What’re you doing to him?!” that was Flechette, the mare knew. Had they done something to Slipshod?

“Don't move!” that stallion’s voice she didn’t recognize; nor the multitude of other ponies barking jumbled orders that were in its vein, “Halt!” “Drop your weapon!” “Freeze!” “Stay back!” all being screamed at the top of their lungs it sounded like, but too far from the mic to be clearly distinguished. Squelch wasn’t even certain that she’d have been able to comprehend all of the overlapping commands had she been there in the flesh.

The gunfire though...that she heard clearly.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 16: Lethal Heritage

Slipshod stared at his hooves. It was safer than looking anywhere else. The broiling hatred oozing off of the Disciples surrounding him suggested that they were all willing to act upon any excuse that they could get their hooves on to justify causing him a great deal of pain. Not that the stallion thought that any of their superiors would put much effort into checking into whatever explanation any of these soldiers gave as to why they’d beat their changeling captive to within an inch of his life on the ride back from the Galloway. They’d only get in any real trouble if they managed to outright kill him. Even then, the only trouble they’d be in was for killing him before they could torture him to death.

So he continued to look at his hooves. Or, rather, more specifically, the blood on them.

Flechette’s blood.

Nopony would be getting in trouble for that either, he reasoned. Squelch would obviously be livid that her head of security had been gunned down by Disciple soldiers, but their justification would be difficult to dispute, even for the sage green unicorn. He’d attacked them, after all. Well, more accurately, he’d been trying to defend Slipshod. Or, at least, the creature that he’d always thought was Slipshod.

From the security pony’s perspective, things must have been so confusing. He’d known nothing of ‘changelings’, or the secret war being waged by the Disciples against Chrysalis and her agents saturated throughout the Harmony Sphere. He was just a security contractor, hired by Squelch to keep order on the Galloway. A job that that was foalishly easy to do, since the most he ever had to deal with was the occasional employee who’d drunk too much and gotten a bit too rowdy as a result. These past few months ‘guarding the prisoner’ had been the most ‘real’ work that Flechette had had to do since being hired.

Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t take his job seriously; he did. The safety and the security of the ponies on the ship mattered to him. He cared about his fellow Coursers.

So, when he’d seen Slipshod, a Steel Courser whose safety and wellbeing was his primary concern, in obvious distress, seemingly as a result of something that a zebra working with the Disciples, a cult of fanatic terrorists, had done to him, he’d acted. It really hadn’t been anything too threatening, in the grand scheme of things. He’d charged ahead to interpose himself between the Disciples and his comrade, his pinions going for his sidearm as a precautionary measure. Slipshod wasn’t sure that the pegasus had even drawn it from its holster.

The Disciples had seen things from a slightly different perspective though. They’d been focused on one of the monsters that they’d been fighting for centuries―perhaps the single greatest threat that ponykind had ever known. Then, suddenly, an armed pony that they didn’t know―and hadn’t yet screened with their weird green paste―had sought to keep them from their quarry. They’d yelled their commands, but Flechette would have been a poor excuse for a security pony if he simply stepped aside for anypony who screamed at him while he was near the Galloway, the place where―to his best understanding―he held jurisdiction, and the Disciples did not.

Flechette was dead before Slipshod was even aware that the pegasus stallion had been trying to protect him. The forced transformation had been far more shocking this time than when Twilight had dispelled his disguise. Likely a consequence of alchemy being used rather than true magic. The other Steel Courser security pony that had been with Flechette had probably survived by virtue of having poorer reflexes than his superior. He’d at least had the sensibility to not reach for his weapon when a half dozen armed and armored Disciple soldiers put him under their guns.

Nopony was that fast of a draw.

These were all events that Slipshod pieced together after the fact though. In the moment, he’d been too disoriented to understand what was happening. From his perspective, there’d been a stripped hoof covered in green oatmeal reaching for his face, a sensation of burning pain, Squelch yelling in his ear, a lot more yelling from ponies around him that weren’t Squelch, some gunfire, and then he’d been tackled to the ground by no fewer than three ponies wearing very heavy barding.

Now he was sitting shackled in the back of a Disciple APC being driven back to their DropShip with a dozen armed ponies surrounding him, each one seeming eager for any excuse to cause him a great deal of pain. Barring some sort of miracle, or an uncharacteristic display of ineptitude from the Disciples, he was a dead pony―well, changeling now, he supposed.

Obviously, they didn’t intend to just outright shoot him when they got back to their ship. They’d have just put a bullet in his head back at the Galloway if that were the case. Likely he’d be tortured for information first. Slipshod weighed his options in that regard. Strictly speaking, he doubted that there’d be any way to make that process more tolerable. Even if he was completely forthcoming and upfront with every one of his responses to their questions, they wouldn’t believe him. Not just because of how unsatisfying his answers would likely be to them, but because what changeling agent worth their slime just gave in to their interrogators? Clearly he was lying to them!

He could be a spiteful little asshole and either remain silent or feed them a bunch of obvious lies until they finally just washed their hooves of the whole thing and euthanized him. If he was going to die anyway, he would have liked to have at least performed one last act of spite against Chrysalis by spilling everything he knew to her greatest enemies. It would have given him at least some measure of satisfaction. But, if they weren’t actually going to believe him and make use of that information, then he’d have to derive his satisfaction from pissing them off.

Maybe if he feigned resisting their interrogations at first? Acted the part of the tight-lipped agent until he was finally ‘broken’ by their torture and spilled the beans? They might believe the intelligence he gave them then. It meant enduring a lot of agony, but, let’s be honest: he was going to be enduring just as much of it no matter what he did. Whether he was upfront and honest, spitefully silent, or anything in between, they were going to torture him to death ‘just to be sure’. He wasn’t going to be spared any measure of pain or suffering no matter what.

In the end, all that really mattered was: what did he want to do?

The changeling hid a smirk. Well, obviously he wanted to live, but that was off the table. Next best thing then: he wanted to fuck over Chrysalis. The best way to do that would be to give the Disciples the information that they needed in order to have the best advantage possible in their continued operations against her. Whether they chose to believe him or not, they’d still have the information. Maybe, someday, after they could independently verify some of what he’d said, they’d begin to trust the rest of it too.

He might not be around to see the fruits of his labors first-hoof, but he could at least die with the comforting thought that―someday―Chrysalis would fall. That was a better death than he could have hoped for a year ago. Which was something.

Slipshod hadn’t quite been able to avert the snort of amusement at the thought of so dismal a ‘silver lining’, and quickly set about masking it with a cough as several pairs of eyes glared in his direction. He was careful to still keep his gaze focused on his hooves. The changeling frowned now, idly rubbing at the drying blood. Not that he was able to do much more than smear it around a little.

He mentally sighed. Squelch was probably going to blame Flechette’s death on him, adding it to Val’s and the others from the ambush. That was her prerogative, and likely not an unfair characterization. The unicorn was going to be in a state, he imagined. Part of him was kind of disappointed that he wasn’t going to be present when she finally received the news about what he was. It was probably for the best. The Disciples might actually offer him a cleaner death than what would happen to him if Squelch got her hooves on him after that…

Another snort had to be turned into a cough.

Squelch indeed was in what would be termed in polite society as: ‘a state’. Most anypony else would have described her as ‘freaking out’ though.

Slipshod’s comlink had gone dead seconds after the gunshots had been fired, and nopony else she could raise on the Galloway seemed to have any more idea about what was going on than she did. High Gain was on the bridge, and hadn’t been told anything yet. Though a few dozen ponies had certainly reported hearing the gunfire as well. Her Chief of Security wasn’t answering his comm for some reason, and the unicorn figured that if anypony might know who was shooting and why, it would have been him.

Her messages to the doctor were going right to his voicemail, but she wasn’t quite as surprised about that. He was already being stretched well beyond the limits of anypony’s expectations for him as a result of the influx of hundreds of zebras for him to treat. Mig had only been able to tell her that the kirin thought the shots had come from the direction of where the Disciples had parked their APCs when they’d arrived at the Galloway, but she’d been using a grinder at the time, so she couldn’t be sure. The chief mechanic had reported seeing what looked like a lot of activity, but again that was hard to judge, since dozens of ponies had been milling about the armored vehicles since they’d arrived.

All that the sage mare had been able to confirm was that Slipshod had indeed gone out to meet with the Disciples, and that there had been gunfire in the area. Nopony knew if anypony had been hurt, and the Disciples had issued a lockdown order for the area. Beyond that, there wasn’t any additional information available. Neither from from her own ponies, nor from the Disciples here. Star Admiral Cinder’s aide had curtly informed Squelch that, as she was not a member of their crew herself, the unicorn mare was not authorized to know what may, or may not, be going on with their personnel.

When the mercenary company owner had pointed out that this incident had apparently also included Steel Courser personnel, she had been told that she should then seek out details from the Steel Coursers. The unicorn had ground her teeth so hard she made a note to consult a dentist to check for chipped molars the next chance she got.

Now she was on her way towards Axel Rod and her waiting company limousine. Her suit jacket was slung over her back, and her shirt was on but hanging open, as her concentration was simply too frazzled for her to properly work the buttons with her telekinesis. If she couldn’t get any details over comms, then she’d go to the scene and find out what was going on firsthoof.

She emerged from the Dropship to find her earth pony driver still idly mopping at his face with a rag. Unlike her, Axel Rod had not been given the benefit of a shower. He noticed her approach and quickly tucked away the cloth, walking over to open the door for her.

Suddenly, an armored form stepped in front of the unicorn, drawing her up short. She briefly gaped at the Disciple soldier before narrowing her eyes at him, her lips pulling back in a sneer, “out of my way,” she practically snarled at the other pony, “I need to get back to my ship.”

“Ma’am,” the Disciple pegasus stallion said in a stern tone, “until I have been given clearance by my superiors that you are permitted the leave, I cannot―”

“Fuck your ‘clearance’, fuck your superiors, and fuck you if you think you can stop me!” Squelch screamed at the now quite taken-aback pegasus, “one of my ponies might be hurt. I’m going to my ship,” she growled at the Disciple, “and if you don’t step aside now, I’ll drag your princess out here by her damn tail and make her order you to let me leave!

“I saved her fucking life, in case you haven’t heard,” she railed on, jabbing the stallion in his armored chest with her hoof, “she owes me for the next thousand years, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not afraid to start calling in that marker right here and now to get your flank banished to fucking tartarus; so move!”

Admittedly, Squelch wasn’t certain if she actually had that kind of pull with Twilight. The alicorn seemed like a soft-hearted enough sort that she had to feel something was owed to Squelch and her mercenary company. At the very least the purple mare would give Squelch permission to return to her own damn ship. If this trooper wanted to make a big enough deal of all of this though, she might find herself detained in the brig or something until Twilight could be reached to clear things up. Celestia knew how long that could be. Minutes, hours, the rest of the day. Far longer than the unicorn wanted to be delayed, regardless.

The Disciple pegasus finally overcame his moment of shock and bristled at the sage green mare’s demands, glaring down at her, “Ma’am, I am ordering you to get back inside the DropShip until such time as I have been informed that you can leave the area,” his right wing lifted slightly, revealing a sidearm strapped to his withers.

Squelch didn’t miss the implication. She was also well aware that she had no recourse either. Neither she nor Axel Rod had any weapons. Not that drawing them if they’d had would have helped matters. The mare had no choice but to comply with the guard’s demands, not that that knowledge did anything to soothe her ire.

...No. No, she wasn’t just going to roll over and do what these ponies wanted. She might not be able to actually fight them, but that didn’t mean that she had to just submit either. If this stallion wanted to make a big deal about this, then she was going to let him, “fuck you,” she said to the armored soldier, and had the pleasure of seeing him look surprised once more. Clearly he was not used to not getting his way.

“Ma’am, if you don’t return to the DropShip, I will be forced to take you into custody,” he warned, “I don’t think you really want to go to the brig over this―”

“I want to go back to my ship and check on my ponies,” Squelch cut him off, “so you can either move, or take me to your brig. Your choice.”

The pegasus frowned and let out a resigned grunt, “fine,” he brought up his fetlock and spoke into it, “Main Entrance to Ops, I need a detention team here. Green unicorn mare refusing to comply with orders,” he eyed her carefully, “appears unarmed. Belligerent, but not combative. Over.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen ‘belligerent’ yet, trust me,” Squelch sneered at the guard, “allow me to tell you exactly what I think of you Disciples. First of all―”

The arrival of a pair of APCs distracted the mare from her intended tirade. The Disciple soldier as well seemed to forget that the two of them were involved in a heated exchange as he put a hoof to his ear and listened intently to whatever was being said over his comlink. A few seconds later, he seemed to forget about her entirely as he looked to the armored vehicles, his stance becoming much more rigid.

The unicorn mare glanced between the pegasus and the newly arrived APCs, “what? What’s going on?”

“Ma’am, go inside!” he barked over his shoulder. The stallion’s eyes darted briefly behind her before he looked back towards the wheeled troop transports once again.

Squelch nearly jumped in surprise when a hoof took her by the shoulder and attempted to draw her backwards. She wheeled around to find a pair of Disciple soldiers looking at her sternly. One of them held a pair of hobblers in her telekinesis, the other was floating a dampening ring, “you’re advised not to resist, ma’am.”

She very nearly jerked away, if only on instinct, but managed to retain enough dignity at least to remain still. She’d quite literally asked for this, after all. Her gaze darted to a quite obviously concerned Axel Rod, who looked like he was wondering if he was expected to intervene in some way to help his employer. The sage unicorn turned her head towards him and shook her head as her forehooves were fitted with the hobblers. There was no reason that the mechanic needed to suffer for her stubbornness.

Then she looked towards the APCs, and the Disciple soldiers that were filing out of the back of them. Specifically, her eyes locked onto the figure that was quite clearly not a Disciple. Nor a pony, she realized with stunned surprise. She didn’t know what it was; she’d never seen a creature quite like it before. Its shape was vaguely equine, yes, but the beast looked like something that would only come to creation if a mare fucked a cockroach.

Shiny black carapace, gossamer wings, bulbous blue eyes devoid of iris or pupil, and limbs that appeared to be perforated. The only word she could think of to describe it was: a monster, “what is that thing?” she couldn’t refrain from uttering the breathless question.

“A changeling,” the unicorn mare arresting her stated simply.

“That’s a changeling?” then the horrific realization crossed her mind, “that thing was on my ship?” Twilight really had been telling the truth about everything, the mare realized, a cold lump forming in her gut. She’d never suspected for a moment that any of the ponies on her crew weren’t, well...ponies. How long had that...thing been hiding out on the Galloway? Months? Years?

Her captors didn’t have any answers for her, only pulling her back to the edge of the boarding ramp as the column of Disciple soldiers escorted the bug pony thing into the DropShip. For a moment, she thought it looked at her. It was difficult to tell with eyes like that though.

One of the new arrivals from the APCs, a pegasus mare glanced at the trio, raising an eyebrow as she glanced between the Disciple soldiers arresting her, “what’s going on here?”

“This mare refused to remain confined to the ship, Point Commander. We’re escorting her to the brig.”

The pegasus nodded her understanding before looking back at Squelch, “you’re from that other DropShip, right? One of the mercenaries?”

“I’m Squelch, owner and Commander of the Steel Coursers Mercenary Company, and registered Captain of the DropShip Galloway,” she was pleased to note that she’d managed a properly imperious tone as she rattled off her titles. Not that the ponies around her sounded all that impressed. That was usually the case with ‘bona fide military’ types, honestly. The unicorn didn’t quite understand why soldiers who were part of ‘proper armies’ felt themselves superior to soldiers of fortune like herself. As thought fighting and killing for a House and an emblem was so much more noble than fighting for C-bits and fame.

“The commander, huh?” the officer mare frowned and then looked at the other Disciples arresting her, “let her go. Something tells me that the star captain’s going to want to talk with her.”

Without protest, the pair of armored ponies removed Squelch’s hobblers and the ring on her horn meant to mute her magic, though the sage mare barely noticed, as she was more intently focused on what the pegasus had said, “why? What happened on my ship? I heard gunshots.”

The point commander frowned, “there was an incident while we were capturing the changeling,” she admitted, waving a wing in the direction of the procession that was vanishing into the bowels of the Disciple DropShip, “Star Captain Honeycrisp will be able to give you the details on what happened. The rest of your crew’s been screened. You’re free to go.”

Squelch scowled at the feathered mare, frustrated that she’d finally encountered somepony who knew what was going on and still wasn’t being given any details. Didn’t she have the right to know what was going on with her own damn crew?! With a disdainful huff, the mare gathered her fallen suit jacket and stormed off towards Axel Rod and the waiting limo, “get me back to the Galloway. Now.”

“Right away, boss,” the earth pony nodded, closing her door before trotting over to the driver’s seat. Much to his credit, it did sound like he was pushing the engine’s revolutions into a range that wasn’t recommended by most mechanics.

“Well, that certainly explains how you got me those scrolls,” the purple alicorn said as she floated over another scone, having rediscovered her appetite amidst connecting with newfound family. Though there were certainly plenty of arguments that could be made one way or the other as to whether the princess and the star admiral were actually ‘aunt’ and ‘niece’, respectively. To that end, Star Admiral Cinder felt that she’d have met with significant resistance if she’d ever tried to make a familial bid for Twilight’s throne.

Not that she’d considered such a thing for even a moment. She was in the process of being groomed to eventually succeed her mother for the position of Dragon Lord, and rule over the associated Dragon Clans. While the laws of their race precluded a successor from actually being ‘appointed’, per se, there was broadly little doubt that she’d be the victor in whatever trial her mother established in order to evaluate and choose her replacement. Not because any of the various Khans of the Clans thought that Dragon Lord Ember would manipulate the test to favor her daughter, but rather because they knew that Star Admiral Cinder was genuinely that capable.

It wasn’t like Admiralties were given out to just anycreature, after all, especially in the Clans.

“My father figured that it might come in handy someday, Your Majesty,” the cobalt-blue dragoness nodded, “though, I will admit,” she added with some trepidation, “I had begun to wonder if I would ever have need of it.”

“Please, you can call me Auntie Twilight,” the mare insisted, grinning broadly, “or just Twilight. Or Auntie!”

Cinder cleared her throat, “as you command...Auntie.”

Now Twilight frowned, “that’s not a ‘command’,” she insisted, “it’s just...you’re Spike and Ember’s daughter! That makes us family. You’re not this formal with your mother, are you?”

“Certainly in public settings, I am,” the star admiral said, “and our private interactions are much rarer of late. My assignments keep me from home much of the time.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

Cinder merely shrugged, “the price of doing one’s duty, Your―” the dragoness cocked a wry smile after catching herself, “Auntie.”

“Still, I couldn’t imagine being away from my friends or family for so long,” then a sad thought occurred to the alicorn, “...though, I guess from their point of view, I was. That’s probably going to be the weirdest part of all of this: seeing everycreature I ever knew having changed so much in what―from my perspective―has only been a few months.

“I know a little about what happened to some of my friends,” she continued, somberly, “I know Celestia, Luna, and Cadence were captured by Chrysalis,” she looked furtively at Cinder, “but I heard that Flurry Heart might be...dead?” she desperately hoped that wasn’t the case, and Slipshod had certainly suggested that it might not be.

Much to the alicorn’s immense relief, the dragoness smiled and shook her head, “Princess-Regent Flurry Heart is indeed alive and quite well...Auntie. She serves as the head of the aptly-titled Celestia League-in-Exile, of which the Dragon Clans are a part.”

“Thank Celestia for small favors,” Twilight said with a sigh of relief, with only a minor flash of bitterness upon recalling where Celestia currently was, “and where’s Discord? I assume that he’s at least somewhat involved with his unit’s namesake still.”

“Actually...no,” Cinder admitted, “Discord has been absent for a long while,” the alicorn’s eyes widened in stark surprise, prompting the dragoness to further clarify, “for all that he’s the ‘Lord of Chaos’, I think that the fighting was too much ‘chaos’ for him to stand.”

“That’s pretty hard to believe,” Twilight muttered with a frown, “he thrives on chaos.”

“He needs it to survive,” the admiral acknowledged, “that much is true; but I guess even he’s subject to the adage ‘too much of a good thing’. Everycreature needs water, but everycreature can also drown. I feel that’s what happened to him: he was ‘drowning’ in the chaos of a galaxy-wide war.

“He retreated to his realm not long after the fighting reached a fevered-pitch; and nocreature has heard from him since.”

“I see…”

Twilight frowned. That was unfortunate, and not just because her friend was suffering. Discord was an absurdly powerful being. She and the effort to restore the Celestia League would have benefited greatly from his help. Though, maybe it was for the best that he wasn’t involved. He derived his power from chaos. With the turmoil of thousands of worlds embroiled in a war spanning the whole of settled space…

...well, Twilight still recalled vividly how much trouble she’d had trying to contain and control the power of three additional alicorns. She didn’t want to consider what might have happened to her―and especially those around her―if a few hundred more alicorns worth of power had been stuffed inside of her. Would that much chaos energy overwhelm his reformed nature? She’d seen what his magic could do to others, even those who were pure of heart.

“Still, it’ll be nice to see Flurry Heart again,” the purple mare said, attempting to steer the conversation back onto more pleasant topics again, “maybe together we can start making a real push to defeat Chrysalis!”

“That has long been the hope, Auntie,” the dragoness nodded, offering her own smile in return, “we’re certainly glad to have you back sooner rather than later.”

“I’m glad to be back, but I’m sure that Flurry Heart has been doing a wonderful job in the meantime,” she paused and thought for a moment, “or at least as good a job as could be expected under the circumstances.”

“I apologize, that wasn’t what I meant to imply,” Cinder corrected carefully, “Princess-Regent Flurry Heart has performed commendably, yes,” she agreed, “what I said was in reference to the Dragon Clans,” her tone became significantly more somber now, and twilight couldn’t help but straighten up in seat as she took note of that, “they’ve become...uppity, of late.”

“Uppity?”

“After a fashion,” Cinder nodded, “our inherent nature as dragons can predispose us to avaricious ambitions. The Magic of Friendship and Dragon Lord Ember’s guidance has helped to curb the bulk of those desires over the last millenia or so, but…” she frowned now, shifting uncomfortably in her chair, “...well, it was much easier to do that when we still had other creatures to look to as aspirational examples.

“Now the creatures we once looked to for guidance on how to be friendly towards one another have apparently discarded those very ideals,” she shared a pointed look with the alicorn, “some time ago, a few of the Dragon Clans began to wonder aloud why we were still trying to cling to those ideals when even the bulk of ponykind had abandoned them.

“There is growing concern that they might invade the Harmony Sphere,” it was clear from Cinder’s tone, that the thought disturbed her, “and that they wouldn’t do so with the intent of helping the creatures within it.”

Twilight’s face blanched, “but Ember wouldn’t allow them to do that, right? She’s the Dragon Lord. The other dragons have to do what she says, don’t they?” the idea of a dragon invasion being launched upon the already violence-embroiled inhabitants of the Sphere was clearly quite upsetting for her to think about, and with good reason. The last thing that the galaxy needed was to be destabilized even further by a hostile dragon invasion!

The admiral proceeded to squirm uncomfortably in her seat now, “the other dragons ‘have to’ do what she says, only insofar as they believe that she could forcibly compel them to do her bidding by using the Staff of the Dragon Lord if they refused,” she clarified, “to be compelled in such a way is incredibly demeaning for a dragon―especially one who holds a position of authority, like a Khan―so dragons tend to follow whatever commands she gives without the need to be compelled. It allows them to retain their dignity and the respect of those they rule directly. However…” the admiral trailed off, furtively biting her lower lip.

“What?”

Cinder hesitated for several moments before finally quirking her mouth and rolling her eyes, “shells, it’s not like the princess doesn’t have a high enough clearance or a ‘need to know’ for something like this,” she muttered aloud, though she did still cast a glance around the otherwise empty room, as though to confirm that no other creature had wandered in during the course of their chatting. Star Commodore had left to attend to his duties a good while ago, leaving the pair quite alone.

She leaned over the table, her gaze intent on the alicorn, the implied seriousness of the matter even prompting Twilight to inch her head in closer as well, “some time ago, Dragon Lord Ember confided in me that the Staff hasn’t functioned in nearly a thousand years.”

“What?” Twilight’s startle exclamation left no doubt to her own surprise on the matter, “a thous―? She never mentioned that to me!”

“Likely out of embarrassment,” the cobalt dragoness acknowledged, “for obvious reasons, she has kept the matter extremely quiet. Confined to her immediate family, I believe. And Princess Flurry Heart, of course. If the Khans of the Dragon Clans were ever to learn that she could no longer wield the staff’s power…” Cinder shuddered, “it would be pandemonium.”

“What’s wrong with it? Is it broken?”

The dragoness shook her head, “Princess Flurry Heart doesn’t believe so, but she acknowledges that she isn’t familiar with dragon magic. For obvious reasons, the Dragon Lord is reluctant to broach the subject of the Staff with other dragons. Those who are wise and old enough to know what might be wrong with it are also the same dragons most likely to revolt when they learn they are no longer tethered by it as they once were.”

“That’s...not great,” a grandiose understatement if ever there was one, the alicorn knew, “I’m not very familiar with dragon magic either,” she admitted, flashing a sardonic smirk at the admiral, “as you can imagine, dragons aren’t too keen to share where they get their power from.”

Cinder nodded in understanding, “indeed,” then her expression became more concerned again, “but this has led to something of a downward spiral: Dragon Lord Ember knows she cannot compel any of the Clans to obey her, so she shies away from issuing any order that they might balk at, and is giving the Khans much more leeway where their conduct is concerned so as to avoid being placed into a situation where she is compelled to forcibly reprimand them and reveal the Staff’s impotency. Similarly, many Khans have begun getting more brazen with their actions and rhetoric. For which the Dragon Lord has only reprimanded them for verbally. She threatens them with use of the Staff if they should go too far, and that has been enough of a deterrent for the moment, but…”

“It’s only a matter of time before one of them calls her bluff,” Twilight finished in a resigned tone. Cinder nodded.

That was...hardly ideal, the alicorn thought to herself. A number of theories as to what might have gone awry with the Staff of the Dragon Lord bloomed and withered in her mind as she considered―and quickly dismissed―various possible causes. Most intriguing though was the timetable that had been outlined: the better part of a thousand years since it last worked? That meant that whatever was wrong couldn’t be connected to anything that had transpired since Chrysalis’ return.

Twilight wasn’t certain if that made things better or worse. Certainly it made things a little more personally concerning, as there was the possibility that it might be connected to something that she’d done.

The purple mare took a deep breath and extended her hoof from her chest out to the side, feeling herself begin to recede back from the manic state that she’d been working herself into fretting over the Staff. Certainly there was no use putting too much thought to the matter when she hadn’t even seen it yet. Finding the problem, and formulating a solution, would have to wait for that much at the very least.

On that note: “how long will the trip take to reach...Somni Patrium?”

“Not long,” Cinder assured the princess, “a jump chain is in place beyond the Periphery, waiting to ferry this DropShip back to Clan space. A couple weeks, at the outside.”

“And what of the Steel Coursers?” Twilight asked.

The dragoness hesitated for several moments, “they will be coming with us,” she stated simply.

The purple mare frowned. She had not completely approved of the tone with which Cinder had said that, “what is to become of them?”

“Nothing,” the star admiral replied, still sounding a little confused, “I mean, we certainly aren’t going to harm them, or anything like that,” she assured the alicorn adamantly, sounding a little offended at even the notion that that might have been the assumption, “however, as they have all seen the Rockhoof, they cannot be allowed to return to the Harmony Sphere.”

“So...what? They’ll be imprisoned back on Somni Patrium until Chrysalis is defeated?”

The star admiral was squirming uncomfortably beneath her monarch’s gaze once again, knowing that the answer that she was about to give wasn’t going to be as well-received as she might have hoped, “essentially? Though, I assure you that they won’t be confined to anything even remotely like a prison cell. They certainly won’t be treated like criminals. They will be set up with proper homes and a modest living stipend to support themselves. They’ll even be free to pursue vocations if they wish―and still receive the stipend.

“They simply will not be permitted to leave Clan space until we have managed to finally defeat Chrysalis,” she finished, looking expectantly at the princess and hoping that her response had been found to be satisfactory.

“Knowing full well that it could take years―even decades―to complete such an invasion,” the dragoness was forced to acknowledge the possibility beneath the alicorn’s cool gaze, “perhaps the rest of their natural lives.”

“Word of our true capabilities cannot be allowed to reach the changelings, Your Majesty,” the star admiral insisted in a deferential tone, falling back into the formal relationship of a military leader and her monarch, “Chrysalis’ mistaken belief in her own superiority is our greatest asset at the moment. With the level of control she exercises over the Harmony Sphere, she has access to the raw materials and industrial capacity to outproduce the Celestia League-in-Exile. If she thought―if she even suspected―that anycreature else in the galaxy possessed a genuine navy, or an entire corps of BattleSteeds not under her influence, she’d begin a massive production effort to give her an indisputable advantage over it.

“If that happens…” the star admiral shook her head in resignation, “we’ll never be able to retake the Harmony Sphere. Chrysalis will have well and truly won, Your Majesty.

“The crew of the Galloway simply cannot be allowed to return to their homes. I’m sorry.”

“What of their families?”

The admiral balked again, “I...um,” she clearly had no response to that point.

Maybe she couldn’t do anything about the Red Reivers―not right this moment, anyway―Twilight admitted, but this much at least, she could do to help, “may I assume that the Clans operate a spy network within the Harmony Sphere?” the dragoness nodded. Twilight had figured that had to have been the case; and that it was a rather talented one. After all, they had known who she was with, and where to find her, almost as quickly as the changelings had, “then I shall have a list of the families of the Galloway’s crewmembers sent to you, and you will forward it, along with whatever proof of my authority is required, to the appropriate field agents, with instructions that they are to move those families into whatever protective custody is necessary to ensure they are safe from Chrysalis.

“Bring them all the way back to the Dragon Clans if that’s what it takes, and they are willing to come. Whatever must be done, they will be protected from Chrysalis. Am I clear on that point, star admiral?” the alicorn’s tone left little doubt as to the finality of this command, and so the dragoness nodded.

“Yes, Your Majesty. The arrangements will be made as quickly as possible.”

Twilight sighed now, resentful that a meeting that had taken such a warm and inviting turn should end on so formal a note. The pitfalls of leadership, the alicorn supposed. Still, with the next month to spend together, the two of them might still manage to form close bonds of genuine friendship, “thank you, Cinder,” she said, mustering a wan smile. Then she stretched her wings and touched the now thoroughly dried paste that was still spread across her face, her lips crinkling in a tiny smile as she recalled a future-that-never-was.

“And now, perhaps, I should follow Squelch’s example and seek out a shower.”

“A suite has been prepared and is waiting for you...Auntie,” Cinder said, standing up from the table and gesturing towards the door, “I’ll show you the way myself.”

“Thank you, Cinder. That’s very kind of you.”

Squelch stood in the infirmary of the Galloway, staring at the body of her chief of security as it lay beneath the sheet on the retractable locker slab. Her expression was cold and impassive, betraying nothing of the maelstrom of emotions that raged beneath it. The cherry red earth pony Disciple officer in charge of the screening operation here had been sympathetic, and acknowledged that the outcome had not been ‘ideal’, but had stood by the actions of her soldiers and their decision to open fire.

The Steel Coursers’ commander didn’t agree with the justifications as they had been presented to her, but she wasn’t a ‘fighting pony’ at heart. She freely acknowledged that she lacked the training, experience, and expertise, to evaluate when lethal force was acceptable. Squelch had traditionally relied upon the conclusions of those around her who did know better. In this case, she would have deferred to Flechette’s guidance.

But she couldn’t of course. Not this time.

He was dead. Killed in the confusion that arose from the exposure of a monster hiding in the midst of her crew. A monster that the Disciples now had in their custody.

As a result, it wasn’t the other soldiers that Squelch held responsible for this. It was that creature. It was their fault. That alone would have been enough to fill Squelch with a desire to see it punished. However, an additional reason to despise it was also present, “...you’re sure it was him?”

The only other living pony in the clinic at the moment, the other security pony who’d been present when Flechette had been killed, nodded, “yes, ma’am. It was Captain Slipshod. When the zebra put that stuff on his face he―it―changed into that thing…” the guard trailed off, clearly still trying to process what they’d witnessed.

Squelch could empathize. She was having trouble coming to terms with it as well. Slipshod? The stallion that they’d all known and trusted for years? An imposter? A monster? It was difficult to believe. Yet, the evidence was indisputable. Some of it was lying cold and dead right in front of her.

“That you, corporal,” the mare said in a cool tone, “you may return to your duties. See if you can track down the doctor. Tell him, when he gets some time, that I’d like to review Slipsh―that thing’s―medical records,” if changelings were going to be a part of her reality, she wanted to know as much about them as possible, in order to avoid something like this happening in the future.

“I...yes, ma’am,” the security pony said before withdrawing from the infirmary.

Squelch stood in silence, staring at the slain pegasus stallion for another minute or so. Finally, she reached out with her telekinesis and depressed the controls that would retract the slab into the locker, where the body would be preserved until they could return it to his next of kin. Whenever it was that they finally made it back to the Harmony Sphere, that was.

She began to seethe now, her lip curling in a hateful sneer. Nopony on the Galloway was talking about it yet―at least not where she could hear it―because they all had much more pressing matters occupying their thoughts. But once the current crises were dealt with, these events would finally start to gain traction. About how a creature who could look like any of them had been hiding out on the ship, undetected. They’d start to ask what it was, and where it had come from.

‘Infiltrating the Disciples’, the green mare snorted at the thought. That cover story was going to unravel any day now. Ponies would start to demand the truth―and they’d damn well be entitled to it too. What would happen then? Clearly there’d be no going home for any of them, not if this was a war that had been going on in secret for so long. So what would happen to them?

Damn that creature, and damn her for giving in and letting it spin that bullshit story to feed to the crew. She should have come clean to them from the onset. Now she was going to be left to clean up its mess. That much was partly her own fault, she knew, and she was prepared to face the repercussions for that.

Which wasn’t to say that the unicorn wasn’t also interested in obtaining the justice that was due her.

Squelch walked to the clinic’s storage cabinets and tapped in her personal code, overriding the lock. The door obediently opened. She looked over the shelves, scouring them for what she was seeking. While she might not have been a medically trained pony, she wasn’t completely ignorant of all things pharmacological either. Running a mercenary outfit was a very stressful job. She’d had more than a few restless periods in her life, and had needed some help getting the sleep that she knew she needed.

The mare soon found what she was after and filled a syringe with the contents of the vial. If Doc Dee complained about her ‘stealing his medications’, she’d just point out who had bought them for him in the first place. She capped the hypodermic and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket. The unicorn then left the clinic.

Just one more quick stop to make before finding Axel Rod so that he could take her back to the Disciple DropShip.

Slipshod craned his head up, looking first to his left, and then his right hoof, noting the shackles that were suspending him from the ceiling of the surprisingly well lit room. Somehow he’d formed this mental image of being dragged to a place that was damp, and dingy, and dimly lit. However, he’d been surprised to discover that the cell he was being kept in was actually quite well illuminated. It was also quite clean and the humidity was on par with any other part of the DropShip. Likely just a consequence of being a contained environment. Dampness and the potential mold that such a condition could produce probably didn’t work out well for a spacefaring vessel and its life support systems.

The restraints and the tray with the assortment of concerning-looking implements, those were matching with his expectations pretty well though. His imagination was already starting to run a little wild with how a few of them might be creatively used. While there wasn’t anything quite as intimidating as a spark-battery with leads hooked up to it, the changeling was feeling a little put off by the quantity of tools that had blades of some sort attached to them.

...and was that a...small circular saw?

Okay, that had him feeling a little uneasy about how these sessions might go down.

The door opened, drawing the changeling’s attention to the new arrival to his cell. He was a little surprised to see that it was a griffon who had come to see him, though they were clearly still a Disciple, by the uniform that they wore. The pink-hued hen adjusted her wire-frame glasses as she reviewed some papers on a clipboard that she was holding in one of her clawed hands. Her tail flipped out and smacked the door controls, closing it behind her, as she walked calmly up beside the restrained changeling.

She didn’t say anything at first, and Slipshod was unsure if he’d be punished in some way for speaking out of turn. He couldn’t sense anything overtly hostile or malicious coming from the griffon, so he didn’t think she was the type to be gratuitously cruel. On the other hoof, the sheer indifference she was exuding was also a little concerning in its own right. He might as well be a decorative wall piece to her, for all the acknowledgement that she was giving him. In fact, a piece of art might have actually evoked stronger emotional reactions than what he felt from her. He suppressed a grimace at his lack of insight into the new arrival and decided that it was best to just ere on the side of caution for now and remain silent until directly addressed.

The griffon seemed to be less interested in him than his restraints, inspecting all four of the shackles and chains attached to his limbs. She appraised their tightness on his joints, and then how securely their other ends were mounted into the walls of his cell. She made a note on her clipboard and then stepped over to the table full of implements. These she tallied and counted, making additional marks on her paperwork. All the while operating in complete silence.

It was honestly getting a little unnerving how little attention that the griffon was paying to what Slipshod would have expected to be the most interesting thing in the room: the changeling prisoner.

“Age?”

Slipshod blinked. The question had come so suddenly and stoically that, at first, the changeling hadn’t even realized that it was a question, let alone one being addressed to him, “huh? Oh, um, twenty-five Standard Equus Years?” he hadn’t meant to sound unsure, but he was still a little taken aback that that had been the first thing that any of the Disciples had wanted to know about him.

Not: “what’s your mission?” or “how long have you been on the Galloway” or “what does Chrysalis know?” Instead, they wanted to know his age? Why? What use could that be to them?

The griffon hen nodded, made a notation on her clipboard, then set it down on the tray and picked up the small circular saw. She depressed the button on it, prompting the blade to spin up to full speed with a high-pitched whine that chilled the changeling’s blood. A second later, having confirmed that the battery possessed a full charge, the feathered Disciple walked over to Slipshod.

“Woah, hey!” he instinctively tried to recoil away from her, but that was nearly impossible for him to do to any meaningful extent, suspended as he was, “what gives? What are you going to do with thaAAARG!”

It was up for debate what echoed more loudly in the small cell: his scream, or the sound of his carapace being carved away by the spinning blade of the small circular saw.

Three times it bit into him, and each of those times it was like a fire had been lit inside of him. Each time, a scream tore from his lungs as if in an effort to somehow expel the pain from his body upon his breath. Those efforts were to no avail, of course. The pain remained, only growing in intensity with each successive slice into his carapace. Only after the third cut did the griffon stop, floating away with a few deft flaps of her rosy pink wings. The saw clutched in one hand, and a small triangular piece of his excised exoskeleton pinched between the talons of her other.

Much to his relief, the griffon set down the saw and turned her focus to the sample of shell that she’d taken from him. This she scrutinized with the aid of a loupe for several long seconds. She then discarded it into a nearby bin and turned back to her paperwork, making a note and murmuring under her breath, “age confirmed...at...twenty-five...SEYs...”

Slipshod hung, panting as the pain continued to wrack his body from where the griffon had just―literally―carved out a piece of him, “what the fuck...” he gasped, “why…?”

“Role?” There wasn’t the slightest hint from the griffon that she’d heard his question. Beyond that, the changeling noticed with some confusion, he still wasn’t getting an emotional reading on the hen. She hadn’t enjoyed doing that to him, nor did she seem to regret it either. She’d just...done it. Like she was slicing a brown patch from a banana.

“...Infiltrator,” the changeling said, swallowing back his mounting dread. His mind raced with thoughts about how the griffon might seek to independently verify his response, and how painful any of those methods might be.

The hen nodded, made her note, looked at the array of implements at her disposal. She retrieved an oral retractor and a scalpel. The griffon then turned back towards the strung up changeling, who had just felt his mouth go dry with dread, “what are you going to do with―awk!”

Slipshod’s question was cut off as the griffon reached up and fearlessly grabbed onto his jaw with her talons, yanking down on his chin and slipping the retractors in with a practiced deftness that surprised him. A few quick twists and the changeling found that his mouth had been spread open to a painfully wide degree. He was pretty sure that the hinges of his mandible were being pried out of their sockets, in fact.

Then the scalpel went to work. The screaming soon followed.

He tried to pull his head away, but his captor retained an impressively firm hold of his jaw with her other hand, clamping her talons onto the metal device which was keeping his mouth open. Pain and fire burned along his pallet as she did...something with the razor-sharp surgical implement. He began to choke after a few seconds of cutting as ichor dribbled down the back of his throat. Still, through all of his convulsions, he couldn’t pull away. Panic welled up within the changeling as the sensation of fluid pouring freely down his throat convinced his body that he was in the midsts of drowning. Some of the ichor was certainly going into his lungs, but he genuinely doubted it would be enough to kill him.

No that that knowledge was enough to overcome the instinctive terror coursing through him.

“One...aaannnnd...two sedative sacs,” the griffon mumbled to herself before receding from the changeling. She flipped the release on the oral retractors and tore them from Slipshod’s mouth. The changeling immediately began to hack and cough as he sought to expel the fluids that had taken up residence in his lungs. Droplets of green ichor splattered onto the floor below him. The griffon returned the implements to her tray and made another note on her paperwork, “confirmed...infiltrator...type...drone.”

When the worst of his upheavals finally subsided, the changeling hung his head forward, his jaw slack, as rivlets of green fluid continued to dribble onto the floor from the open cuts on the roof of his mouth. His eyes were wide from the shock of what had just happened to him, as well as the continued lack of emotional sensation he was getting from the griffon.

She wasn’t feeling anything from this.

What was any of this supposed to accomplish? Were they performing some grotesque sort of ‘assessment’ of his reliability by asking him questions that they could objectively confirm? While he could see some merit in doing something like that, it ultimately didn’t make sense. He’d have had to have been an idiot to lie about things that were so easy to prove were lies. And it wasn’t like they could objectively prove the answers to some of the more pertinent questions they were eventually going to ask him. What ‘medical evaluation’ could they do on him to confirm the number of WarShips that Chrysalis had in Equus orbit, or the reserve fleet staged a few lightyears out in a nearby otherwise-uninhabited system?

At this point, his situation felt less like an ‘interrogation’, and more like a ‘cataloguing’, if anything.

“Sex?”

Slipshod’s head shot up, his eyes growing wide as he saw the hen turning to face him, an oscillating saw clutched in her hand. She gave the trigger of the cutting tool a quick test pull. The whir its motor made alone was enough to make the changeling start screaming again.

Princess Twilight Sparkle stepped out of shower and into the adjoining full-body dryer that was attached to the washroom of what the ship’s directory identified as “The Royal Chambers”. The purple alicorn had to admit that the designers had certainly not overlooked any amenity when it had come to crafting the suite. She knew that these sorts of quarters were nowhere near standard fair for a DropShip of this class. Clearly this vessel had been tasked specifically for her retrieval from the Harmony Sphere, and outfitted accordingly.

The closet―which alone was larger than her quarters aboard the Galloway had been―had been stocked with dozens of elaborate garments all sized for her specifically. None of them were articles that she’d worn prior to her entering stasis, as five centuries was far longer than any fabric had a right to last and still be serviceable, but the styles were perfectly on par with what she had worn during most of her rule over the Celestia League. She’d chosen a soft yellow gown and laid it out on the absurdly large bed to put on once she was done with her shower.

Blasts of first cool, and then progressively much warmer air assaulted the alicorn from all sides as the dryer sought to wick away most of the water dripping from her body. Her horn began to glow as Twilight used her magic to levitate and spread out her mane and tail in order to expedite their drying process. She looked down, admiring her coat which now seemed to positively glisten in the aftermath of the conditioners that had been made available for her use.

After several minutes spent lingering in the invigorating heat of the dryer long after she was properly dry, the alicorn returned to the sleeping quarters part of her suite and began donning her dress. She had noted as well that a set of regalia had also been provided. The genuine article too, she noted after a brief period of inspection. Obviously smuggled out of the Sphere, likely by Spike himself. She’d have to remember to add that to the list of things to thank the dragon for.

As she regarded herself in the full-length mirror next to her vanity, the mare’s smile faltered at the thought. From her perspective, she’d been gone only a hoofful of months. Barely anytime at all when compared to the average time it took to travel across the galaxy using Jump Ships. She’d certainly been away from Spike and the rest of her Court at Canterlot for longer periods of time in the past. Yet, from the purple dragon’s perspective...it had been far longer.

Five hundred years.

How much would he have changed in that time? She wanted to think that he hadn’t. How silly a thought that must have been, that her nearest and dearest companion might be different from how she remembered him, after having known him for a millennium. He hadn’t changed hardly at all in that time, after all, right?

That was how it felt, anyway. Twilight knew that the reality would be different. Ponies―and other creatures―changed over time. Molded by their experiences. She wouldn’t have noticed over the centuries as she changed with him, increment by increment. It would have been difficult―if not impossible―for her to tell. But now she would be skipping over five centuries of Spike’s personal development. She’d meet him, expecting the dragon to be exactly how she’d left him, and that wasn’t the individual that she was going to meet.

This Spike will have been changed by centuries of strife, and fighting, and loss. Twilight had only experienced it for a few months and could feel the effect it was having on her, emotionally. How jaded might she become after a year? A decade?

Would she even still recognize her oldest and dearest friend?

That thought chilled the alicorn. She didn’t want the galaxy to be such a vastly different place. She needed something to be unchanged, so that she could try and anchor herself. Her emotions were already so frayed from the past few weeks, and the suffering that she’d borne witness to. A nice brunch with her new niece had been a pleasantly refreshing diversion, at least. The shower and being surrounded by all the trappings of her royal position had briefly taken her back to a better time, before the Celestia League had begun to fracture.

Perhaps that really wasn’t for the best―to escape to delusions of normalcy in a galaxy that clearly didn’t fit her personal definition of what ‘normal’ was anymore. But she liked it nonetheless, and she wanted more of it. As long as she didn’t fully retreat into those delusions it would be fine, she suspected. Just those occasional indulgences, in order to help her ease into acclimating to the ‘new normal’.

A temporary ‘normal’, the alicorn thought to herself with finality.

She’d get the galaxy back to the way it was―the way it was supposed to be―soon enough. Too many lives were counting on her for her to fail them.

A terminal beeped at her, flashing an alert for an incoming message. The purple mare reached out with her magic and accepted the summons, “yes?”

“Pardon the interruption, Your Majesty,” a mare’s voice said over the speaker, “there’s a Miss Squelch at the entrance stating that she has an appointment to see you?”

Twilight frowned. She didn’t recall the two of them arranging a specific time to speak. Regardless, she supposed that the least that she could do was speak with the mare. It would give her a chance to confirm with the mercenary commander that measures would be taken to protect the families of her crew. She did also need to obtain a list of those family members anyway. A meeting was probably a good idea, “yes, please send her up.”

“Understood, Your Majesty. I’ll call for security detail to escort her immediately―”

“That’s hardly necessary, I think,” Twilight sighed, “Commander Squelch is perfectly capable of making her way to my quarters. Just direct her where to go,” forgoing all of this excessive security for a moment was going to be another of the alicorn’s little indulgences. She understood the justification for them, but honestly they just made her feel uncomfortable. Harmony was never going to flourish if they remained so suspicious of one another all the time.

“...as you command, Your Majesty,” the purple mare grimaced at the response that sounded as though the guard pony was far from thrilled at the order. Twilight really did have a long way to go when it came to reeducating ponies about friendship, didn’t she?

She should have a talk with Cinder about that. There would be months to go before they arrived in Dragon Clan space. Perhaps the star admiral could be persuaded to allow Twilight to host some classes on the Magic of Friendship? Well, strictly speaking, the alicorn knew that she could just order the dragoness to have her crew attend those classes, but that was hardly an ideal way to set the tone for those lessons, wasn’t it? She would ask, and make it known that attendance was encouraged, but absolutely not compulsory.

One DropShip crew might not be much when compared to a whole galaxy containing trillions of beings, but the alicorn knew that she had to start somewhere!

She used her magic to open up a new channel, “Cinder? Might we talk for a moment in my quarters when you have some time?”

Squelch strode purposefully down the corridors of the Friendship-class DropShip. She was familiar with their layout, having been on several during the course of her life. She’d actually worked on one in her youth as a personnel officer before deciding to strike out on her own. Which was how she was able to navigate herself, not to the overflow cargo bay that had been converted into an oversized executive suite, but instead to where the brig was located.

Nopony who even spared the time to notice her gave the unicorn a second glance. After all, if she had made it past the front door onto the ship, then clearly she had been cleared to board. Similarly, if she was without an escort, then she also clearly did not require one. That marked her as somepony of importance, and none of the lowly techs going about their day were interested in antagonizing somepony who might be important enough to get them in trouble with their supervisors.

In that way, military structure was a lot like corporate structure: you didn’t stray outside of your prescribed lane. It just got you into trouble more often than not.

It didn’t take her long to get to the brig. As she arrived, she saw a uniformed Disciple soldier speaking with a pink-feathered griffon hen. The griffon was just finishing up wiping her talons off on a rag that bore a number of odd green stains. The unicorn stayed back, watching the exchange from just around the corner. She couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, but it didn’t last for very long. Less than a minute after Squelch had arrived, the griffon nodded to the Disciple pony and stuffed the rag into their pocket before walking away.

Once the griffon was gone, and only the single guard remained, the sage mare took a deep breath and made her presence known, “good afternoon,” she greeted pleasantly as she approached the guard.

The Disciple jerked a little, clearly not having expected anypony else to show up quite so soon, and certainly not anypony who wasn’t dressed in a Disciple uniform of some sort, “can I...help you?” the stallion asked, looking Squelch over suspiciously, “are you lost?”

“I hope not,” she cocked a wry smile, “I was looking for the ship’s brig. Is this it?”

“Yeah, but―”

“Good,” the unicorn mare smiled. Before the Disciple could react, the syringe in her pocket darted out, the cap flicking off as it plunged itself into the stallion’s neck. The guard tensed, reached for his sidearm with his own magic, but the telekinetic field almost immediately faltered and fizzled. He fumbled for his comm to no avail, made an anemic attempt to yell out, and then collapsed to the floor. Squelch placed a hoof to the side of his neck, noted the presence of a pulse, nodded to herself, and stepped past the body.

She looked down the hall and the rows of opposing doors that each led to holding cells. There weren’t a lot of them, only six. Even on a ship this size, they didn’t anticipate a great deal of trouble, or need to incarcerate a lot of ponies. In fact, Squelch strongly suspected that only one of them was occupied at the moment.

After all, only one of the doors appeared to be locked.

The mare’s horn glowed as she rifled through the pockets of the slumbering stallion’s uniform before finding an identification card. She stepped up in front of the locked door, and held the badge in front of the keypad next to it. A second later there was a pleasant-sounding beep and a flash of green light. The door slid open.

What the unicorn saw in the cell made her take a step back in shock.

She’d seen the changeling as it was being led into the DropShip less than an hour ago. She’d been ready to confront that alien black creature again. What she saw now though...wasn’t that. At least, it wasn’t only that. The insect-like equine form was suspended in the air by shackles affixed to the corners of the cell. Below it was a pool of green fluid, some of which was still continuing to leak out of several portions of its shell that looked like they’d been cut away.

Her gaze darted briefly to the table nearby that was laden with various tools and cutting implements, most of which were still stained green. The mare’s instinctive reaction was horror. The idea of torture held no appeal for the unicorn. In her mind, it didn’t gain anypony anything worthwhile. It was just a way for the torturer to gratify some dark desire within themselves. It repulsed her.

Then she remembered that the thing hanging in front of her wasn’t a being worthy of her pity. It was a changeling. And whatever Princess Twilight might claim that they had done to ponykind in the past, Squelch knew that this particular monster had done something unforgivable vile to her.

So, in this case, she wasn’t sorry that it had suffered. If anything, she regretted that it hadn’t suffered more.

The door closed behind her.

Squelch didn’t say anything at first, instead listening to the ragged, pained, panting of the changeling. Green fluid, that she took to be the creature’s blood, flowed steadily from its jaw, expanding the pool that was congealing on the floor. Slowly and jerkily, it raised its head and looked at her. It was difficult to tell, but she thought that she saw its eyes widen in surprise at her presence. It tried to say something, but almost immediately choked and began to cough, expelling more ichor.

The mare sneered at the sight, briefly rethinking her plan. Maybe it was better that she left it like this. Allowed its suffering to be prolonged at the hooves of the Disciples.

...No. She deserved satisfaction for the wrongs committed against her.

Squelch’s horn glowed, and a pistol floated out from within her jacket. The unicorn glared up at the monster hanging before her, as the barrel of the weapon positioned itself beneath the changeling’s chin and pressed up against its flesh there, forcing the creature’s head upwards so that it was looking at her. She narrowed her blue eyes at the monster, growling up at him, “when did you do it? When did you kill Slipshod?”

The changeling’s mouth moved for several seconds as it swallowed back the blood filling its mouth, “...didn’t,” it rasped.

“Liar!” she snarled, drilling the pistol deeper into the creature’s jaw, “I know you’re lying; because I know he changed! You’re not the stallion I married, so I know you replaced him. When did you do it? How long ago?!”

“...s’always me,” the bug pony choked out, stubbornly.

“Liar!” the unicorn mare screamed again, her eyes burning with tears that threatened to break free down her cheeks, “the Slipshod I married wouldn’t have cheated on me! He was good, and kind, and he loved me! You’re not that pony!

“So when did you kill him?! Tell me!”

The changeling closed his eyes, swallowed, and then began to mutter something that was hard to make out at some parts, “you didn’t want to be like your mother.”

Squelch blinked in surprise, the gun lowering slightly in her shock, “...what?”

“The week before the wedding,” the changeling said huskily, coughing out some blood, “we were talking about foals. You said you didn’t want any. You were terrified that you’d turn out like your mother; putting work before family. You didn’t want a foal to grow up in a home like yours. Foals deserved love, you said, but you knew that the Coursers would always come first in your life,” he looked down at her, a little smile tugging at what was left of his chitinous lips, “you even had yourself fixed, just in case; years before we met.

“You cried because you thought I’d want foals and call off the wedding when you told me the truth.”

“You...you couldn’t know that unless…” the mare swallowed, staring at the creature in disbelief. The changeling nodded slowly. It wasn’t mocking her though, or trying to taunt her. If anything, it seemed resigned, “...what was I to you? Did you actually love me?”

For a moment, it looked like the creature was about to smile and nod, then it caught itself. It’s big blue eyes stared down at the unicorn for several long moments. Then a wan smile spread across its mouth and it began to slowly shake its head, “...I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

She almost believed him. Regarding the apology anyway. She completely accepted the truth of the first part, “then why...all of it? The lies, the marriage? Why?”

“Food,” the changeling said, offering a weak, sardonic, smile, “changelings survive off of feelings of love. I figured if I got somepony to fall in love with me, it’d be a life-long mealticket,” it’s expression fell, “I’m sorry.”

Again, the unicorn almost thought the creature was sincerely apologizing. It sounded genuine enough, but whatever this thing was couldn’t actually feel empathy, not if it had been willing to do something like that, “you were using me...for food?” she couldn’t have hidden her revulsion if she’d wanted to, it was so overpowering. It nodded, “you really are a monster,” she once more sneered at the changeling, the muzzle of her gun jamming itself back up beneath his chin, “you deserve so much worse than a clean death.”

A siren began to wail, sounding an alarm that echoed throughout the ship. The thud of booted hooves in the corridor. She’d been discovered. There was no more time to waste, “but it’ll have to do.”

The door opened.

“Nooo!” a mare yelled.

Squelch pulled the trigger.

Author's Note

TECHNICAL READOUT

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 17: Assumption of Risk

“I apologize, Princess, but a meeting will have to wait,” Cinder replied over the comm, “I’m expecting a preliminary report on the captured changeling from my Chief Information Specialist.”

Twilight sat up straighter in her seat, “you captured a changeling?” The alicorn cringed, as she realized that she had managed to completely forget about the convoy of Disciple soldiers and zebras that she’d seen organizing outside the DropShip when she and Squelch had arrived that morning. She’d been so intent on discussing the matter of the Red Reivers and the threat that they posed to the region. Then she’d gotten caught up in the revelation that Cinder was Spike and Ember’s daughter, “why wasn’t I informed about this?”

She’d asked the question on impulse, and almost immediately winced as she realized the reasoning at about the same time that the dragoness provided the answer, “forgive me, Your Majesty, but I had intended to make my report to you only once I felt confident I had enough information to make the announcement worthy of your time.”

Cinder was in command of this expedition. As such, she was expected to be able to run things without having to keep Twilight informed about every little thing. Finding a changeling agent was hardly a ‘minor detail’, of course, but if the dragoness had called up to say that they’d captured one the moment it had happened, it could be reasonably assumed that the purple alicorn would want to know details like who it had been, what they were after, and a whole host of other things. It would have been quite frustrating if all that Cinder could answer with was: “I don’t know, I haven’t found out yet.”

The cobalt dragoness would have been a piss poor senior officer if she went to Twilight over every little thing.

Of course, in this specific case, the alicorn had a fairly good idea of who the changeling in question was, and was keenly interested in making certain that they were alright, “where are they now?”

“Don’t worry, Your Majesty, I assure you that they are confined securely to the ship’s brig. We have become quite adept at restraining them over the years,” Cinder replied, having understandably misinterpreted the reason for Twilight’s interest in the matter, “I will be sure to include you in all correspondence regarding updates on the interrogation process.”

“What kind of ‘process’ are we talking about here, exactly, star admiral?” Twilight asked with some trepidation.

Now the dragoness commander paused briefly, as she considered how best to phrase things when conversing with a member of royalty, as to respect their sensibilities, “a...thorough one, Your Majesty. By their nature, changelings can be quite difficult to extract useful information from using traditional methods. However, our interrogation specialists have put together a regimen that has proven quite adept at obtaining useful intelligence from captured operatives.

“As I have said: I will be more than happy to provide you with a complete briefing on all that we learn after the interrogation is complete.”

“And what will become of the changeling then?”

“The remains will be preserved for further study by our research staff on Somni Patrium.”

“The ‘remains’?! You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Twilight blurted in surprise.

Another pause from Cinder, “...the interrogation process is...very thorough, Your Majesty.”

Twilight was already out of her seat, yelling loud enough to be heard by the terminal even as she headed for her suite’s exit, “that is unacceptable, star admiral! You will meet me at the ship’s brig, now!”

“Your Majesty, I must insis―” the rest of the dragoness’ protest was cut short by the closing of the door behind the alicorn as she galloped down the hall.

Squelch was not the only pony who was familiar with the layout of a Friendship-class DropShip. Twilight had been given tours of nearly every significant craft put into service by the Celestia League Defense Force. After all, as the Princess, she had final say on what vessels would be utilized in the Celestia League’s conflict against Tirek. She knew where the brig was located.

A very flustered looking Cinder caught up with her just as she reached the lower level of the DropShip. A pair of security ponies were close on the dragoness’ heels, “Your Majesty, I understand why you might feel uncomfortable with―”

“The CLDF does not murder its prisoners, star admiral!” Twilight snapped, charging ahead of the cobalt commander. Cinder sputtered out a few more attempts at arguing the point, but soon settled for adopting a resigned expression and following in her monarch’s wake with the rest of the hastily assembled security detail.

When the quartet rounded the corner, they found the body of the guard who had been tasked with watching over the brig. The star admiral’s eyes immediately went wide as she assumed the worst. She slapped her wrist-mounted datalink, “shipwide alert! Security breach! Code: Masquerade. Lock down everything!” within seconds, strobing red lights and blaring klaxons filled the DropShip. Behind them was the sound of metal doors slamming shut as the DropShip was partitioned off.

The dragoness looked back at one of the security ponies with her and jabbed a claw at the prone figure, “check him! Princess, stay ba―” however, by the time she looked back towards her monarch, the alicorn had already whipped around the corner, “or for―!” she and the other soldier sprinted after their wayward princess.

Twilight quickly identified the door that must have held the captive. It was still closed, and the panel indicated that it was locked as well. She did not know the code, or possess credentials that would have granted her access. She did, however, have powerful magicks at her disposal, and a potent burst from her horn indeed proved to be all that she needed to convince the door to slide open. Whether the mechanisms that were meant to facilitate that opening during normal operations would work again without being rebuilt by a maintenance team remained to be seen.

The first thing that the alicorn noticed was the sage green unicorn mare, Squelch. The owner and commander of the Steel Coursers had her back to the door, facing inward towards the center of the holding cell. The second thing that caught Twilight’s attention was the changeling strung up by chains anchored to the sides of the room. Or, rather, what was surely a changeling beneath all of that blood.

Then she saw the gun, clutched in an aura of cyan telekinesis, positioned directly below the changeling’s jaw.

Twilight lashed out with her own magic, screaming in horror at what she was beholding, “nooo!”

It had been many centuries since a unicorn had been born whose magic could rival that of an alicorn. Squelch was far from that powerful. The pistol was rested from her grasp with little difficulty, but Twilight had not been fast enough to prevent the trigger from being pulled. The shot that rang out in the small metal room set everypony’s ears to ringing. One of the bloody tools on the nearby table jumped into the air and fell to the floor, presumably having caught the recochetting round.

“Gun!” the soldier accompanying them yelled, managing to squeeze past the purple princess. He dropped to his haunches in a smooth motion, sitting on one cocked hind leg as his forehooves went for the weapon slung at his side. The carbine was out and leveled at Squelch, a hoof laying on the trigger mechanism and ready to fire.

Mental images of the unicorn mare being gunned down swirled through Twilight’s mind. She couldn’t let the mercenary commander die like that. She reacted, lashing out with her magic at the guard and smacking his weapon away before he could fire. She turned to reprimand the soldier, only then to see that Cinder too had a pistol out and aimed past her princess into the cell’s interior. The dragoness’ eyes were just widening as she saw what Twilight had done, and was about to blurt out a confused question when her own sidearm was suddenly and forcefully ripped from her grasp by Twilight’s magic.

“STAND DOWN!” the alicorn roared, the booming Royal Canterlot Voice cowing both ponies and dragoness alike. Or perhaps it was Twilight’s fiery glare and bared teeth.

What was wrong with these creatures?! Had they all gone completely and utterly mad? Everycreature seemed so intent on shooting everycreature else with hardly even the slightest hesitation. Certainly nocreature wanted to spare even a moment to talk and understand what was happening! Had five hundred years allowed them all to fall so far?

It was honestly infuriating. All three of the firearms held fast in the alicorn’s magic field bore the brunt of Twilight’s frustrations at the situation, as her magic compressed and folded the weapons like tissue paper. Their mangled remains were cast to the ground as the alicorn continued to glare at the others. None seemed willing to meet the gaze of the enraged princess. They certainly didn’t speak to voice an objection to anything that she was doing.

Nor did Twilight quite trust herself in that moment to speak. Her emotions were running high, and she knew it. Even her old foalsitter’s usual calming tactic felt like it would be of little use under these circumstances. In the moment, at least. Perhaps later.

In the meantime, the purple alicorn instead turned her focus to the changeling. What was left of him. The sight of what had been done to him turned her stomach. She’d killed changelings, she’d very likely be forced to kill many more, but this…

...this, she would not abide. Not while she still yet ruled.

Words―many words―would need to be had with her nieces―Flurry Heart and Cinder both―about this. Later. For now…

Magic leapt from Twilight’s horn, deftly vaporizing the manacles restraining the changeling captive, the limp body held aloft now by her telekinesis, as gently as she could manage. Blood still flowed from uncountable wounds, dripping persistently to the floor. A thousand years to study magic, and she’d truly never felt compelled to learn anything pertaining to the medical arts? Twilight cursed her past self ruefully for her dismissiveness on the matter.

“Fetch a doctor,” the alicorn croaked as she brought the changeling in close. He yet breathed, at least. It was a shallow thing though. Several seconds passed, and she didn’t hear her order being carried out. Her head whipped around towards the soldiers behind her, “now, star admiral!”

The cobalt dragoness jerked in surprise, apparently still massaging her wrist after it had been twisted at an odd angle when her pistol had been stolen from her. She quickly recovered and brought her datalink to her mouth, “medics to the brig,” she ordered. Then, after another moment added, “cancel lockdown; standdown Masquerade. Authorization: Cider-One-Nimbus-Donkey-Three-Rutabaga.”

Soon after, the alert siren went silent, and the red lights ceased to strobe. The sudden lack of such loud sounds made the quieter ones much more pronounced. Such as the rasping, gurgled, breaths of the changeling Twilight was holding. The alicorn swallowed as she looked at him. Her inattention had allowed this to happen. She should have cautioned the star admiral and the rest of her crew about his existence. Perhaps even asked that he come with her to their DropShip so that she could present his case and cushion the blow of the revelation regarding his true nature.

She should have, but she didn’t. She’d failed him, and he’d nearly died for it, “Slipshod, forgive me,” she didn’t deserve it though, Twilight knew.

“...you knew?”

It had not been either of the uniformed soldiers, but rather Squelch who had spoken, looking over at the alicorn with an incredulous expression, “you knew that Slipshod w―that that thing had taken his place? And you never told me?!”

“He asked me to keep his secret,” the mare replied numbly, recognizing how hollow any excuse would sound in this moment, “he thought the truth would incite panic among the Galloway’s crew.”

“Panic among the―” the sage green mare scoffed, holding her head in her hoof, cackling in a mirthless laugh, “oh, and finding out like this was just so much better~” the unicorn’s sarcastic tone caused the alicorn to wince, “Flechette is dead, by the way,” there was no false mirth or thinly veiled sarcasm now. Squelch’s tone was rife with righteous fury, “those fucks shot him!” her hoof lashed out in the direction of the dragoness and her pony escort, “while trying to capture that thing.

“But I’m glad you didn’t panic the crew,” the mare continued on in her less-than-subtle mocking tone, “they’re so much calmer now that somepony’s dead and their friend’s a monster.”

Twilight’s blood ran cold as she gaped at the unicorn. The head of the Steel Coursers’ security detail had been slain? By Cinder’s soldiers? She turned back to the dragoness, intent on demanding an explanation from the star admiral, but her words died a quiet death in her throat, unasked. On what grounds was she supposed to hold the senior officer responsible for any of this?

The Clanners had no way of knowing that Slipshod’s intentions were benign. Twilight hadn’t told them. All that they’d known was that they’d found a changeling hiding out among the crew of the mercenary DropShip. Which, to be fair, was exactly what they had been expecting to find. However, they had been operating under the belief that whatever operative existed among the crew was an active agent working for Chrysalis, and had had a hoof in arranging the trap on PEA-02-UX. They’d been anticipating a hostile changeling, as was their experience. So they had reacted accordingly, doing everything that they thought they had to in order to secure the captive before they could escape. Potentially even finding a way back to the Harmony Sphere to tell Chrysalis about how powerful and well-equipped the so-called ‘Disciples’ truly were.

Stopping the spread of such information was part of their job, and they’d not been given a single reason to believe that the situation could lead to anything other than that.

Which was Twilight’s fault, not theirs, and not Cinder’s.

“I’m...sorry.”

The words tasted like ash in her mouth. Not because the alicorn didn’t feel genuine regret for the events that she’d allowed to transpire―absolutely she did. No, it was the realization that those mere words fell so far short of even beginning to make up for how tremendously grievous of an error she’d made.

She was ‘sorry’ that her oversight had led to an innocent stallion dying? ‘Sorry’ that the secret which she had elected to keep had proven to be a deadly one? What a ridiculous notion. And yet...what more could she do, other than to sincerely apologize, and make an effort to ensure that nothing like it ever happened again?

Squelch sneered at the alicorn for several long moments. Then she snorted and shook her head, “you know what? Fuck you. Fuck you, and fuck me for helping you. I’m going back to the Galloway,” she pushed past the alicorn, which probably hadn’t been entirely necessary, but Twilight certainly didn’t remark upon it.

Cinder did, however, “hold on,” the dragoness said sternly, “you’re not going anywhere. You assaulted one of my ponies,” she pointed down the corridor, in the direction of the unconscious brig guard.

“And you killed one of mine!” Squelch snapped at the larger dragoness.

“Let her go, star admiral,” Twilight ordered stiffly, not turning around.

The dragoness opened her mouth to rebut, but snapped it closed almost immediately, rethinking her impulse to question her sovereign. Instead she offered a reluctant, “yes, Your Majesty,” and stepped aside, permitting the green unicorn mare to leave unimpeded. Cinder even managed to retain her composure when the Steel Courser ‘accidentally’ bumped into her too on her way past.

Twilight looked down at her new gown, idly noting that it had become quite thoroughly stained with changeling blood. Not that that fact truly bothered her in the moment. It did ratchet up her anxiety regarding Slipshod’s deteriorating condition though, “do your medics always take so long to respond to a call?” she asked of the star admiral.

The dragoness glanced to her side briefly and cringed. She hesitated for a brief moment before grunting and calling out, “I need one of you down here as well!”

Moments later a mare in a clan uniform, but with a Jennyva Cross emblazoned on her sleeve, came trotting up, “yes, ma’am? Where’s the pati―” the mare cut her question off abruptly once she caught sight of the interior of the cell, “Your Majesty, are you alright? Where are you injured?” the beige unicorn wasted no time and quickly began to unpack her medic bag and examine the purple alicorn, somehow appearing completely oblivious to the bleeding changeling hovering nearby.

“Wha―? Him!” Twilight blurted incredulously, thrusting Slipshod’s limp form very nearly into the medic’s chest, “treat him!”

The beige mare balked. She quickly gaped between the alicorn and the dragoness, as though seeking to confirm that she had indeed heard the command correctly. Cinder managed a nod. Still looking more than a little uncertain, the unicorn medic finally looked at the changeling and enveloped him in her own magic, “...of course, Your Majesty,” she appeared to fumbled for a few more moments with her equipment, as though contemplating exactly how to go about her task. Twilight, for the life of her, couldn’t comprehend why. Surely stopping green blood from leaking out of a body couldn’t be so drastically different a concept from stopping red blood!

She didn’t remark upon it though. Mostly to avoid distracting the medic. Slipshod was receiving at least some form of treatment. That was enough. For now.

After some time, both Slipshod and the guard that Squelch had incapacitated were evacuated to the ship’s infirmary. Twilight’s first instinct was to follow them, concerned that the resident medical staff would elect to neglect his care if given the opportunity.

Cinder either anticipated her princess’ apprehension, or at least didn’t want her clinic’s staff to be subjected to the presence of the thoroughly irate alicorn. As the beige medic loaded her changeling patient onto a litter and sought to leave, the admiral briefly stopped her, “corpsmare? It―” the dragoness cleared her throat with a brief glance in Twilight’s direction, “he will be treated. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the medic nodded. The clawed hand was removed from her shoulder and she, as well as the other responding medical personnel and their two patients, receded from the brig corridor.

Soon, all that remained were the princess, the admiral, and two very uncomfortable looking Disciple soldiers. Twilight glanced between the troopers briefly before saying, “you two are dismissed. Star admiral?”

“Yes, Your Majesty?” Cinder said with a slight bow of her head.

“Convene your senior staff in the conference room. We need to have a long, long, overdue talk.”

Approximately an hour later, Twilight walked into the conference room. She wore her regalia, but not a gown this time. Her expression was muted. Somber. Spending the better part of half an hour washing Slipshod’s blood from her coat had given the alicorn a great deal of motivation to reflect on a lot of things. Among them the state of not just the Harmony Sphere, it seemed, but the remnants of even the Celestia League that she thought she knew.

Celestia’s sake...torture? Had that even been ‘torture’? The state that Slipshod had been in, and the implication from Cinder that he was not intended to survive the ‘interrogation process’ no matter what...the matter-of-factly tone suggesting that this was simply a part of how they typically operated...

How many changelings had the Clans and the Celestia League-in-Exile...butchered like that?

Changelings were their enemy, yes, and Twilight would not shy from fighting―or even killing―them. But...that? Surely the creatures descended from the League that she’d once known―that she’d built―hadn’t fallen so far. And, yet…

...The evidence suggested that they had. Somehow, even without Chrysalis’ machinations and manipulation, what was left of the League had managed to warp, if not outright cast off, the core values that Twilight had worked so hard to instill in the hearts of every creature.

Had it taken the full five hundred years for things to get this bad, she wondered? Or had the fall happened long ago?

She would find out. The Princess of Friendship Returned would have her answers. Then she would begin to set things right.

The conference room was a little more crowded than it had been the last time she’d been in it. Aside from the the senior officers that she’d been formerly introduced to before―Star Admiral Cinder, Star Commodore Mizzen, and Star Captain Honeycrisp―there were two other new faces as well: a pink feathered griffon hen and a thestral stallion with a white-streaked cyan mane and slitted orange eyes.

The white coat and embroidered cross suggested that the thestral was the ship’s chief medical officer. However, Twilight was not immediately able to pin down the griffon’s role based on her appearance.

All five creatures in the room immediately shot up to their respective feet or hooves upon the alicorn princess’ entrance. A seat had been left open at the head of the large well-polished table. Twilight serenely walked over and took her seat. She cast her gaze over the others, taking stock of their demeanor and expressions. The star admiral certainly looked like she was anticipating a less-than-pleasant experience. As were the star commodore and the star captain. Likely the two of them had received a summary of the events leading up to the reason for Twilight calling this meeting.

The griffon looked...completely nonplussed. Either Cinder had not had the same conversation with them that she’d clearly had with the other officers, or the hen was much better at keeping her features schooled. The thestral looked more curious than anything.

“You may be seated,” said Twilight.

The Rockhoof’s captain and the commander of the BattleSteed company did so, but the other three remained standing. Cinder cleared her throat and gestured at the other two, “Your Majesty, permit me to introduce Doctor Nightingale,” the thestral stallion nodded, “he’s actually the Rockhoof’s doctor, but I had him shuttled down to better coordinate with the planet-side medical staff after the attack yesterday.

“And this is Gesche, my Chief Information Specialist.”

“Head torturer, you mean,” Twilight was unable to restrain herself from muttering as she turned a cutting gaze towards the griffon. The other officers in the room cringed and exchanged uncomfortable glances with one another. The pink-feathered hen, on the other hoof, cracked a small smile and simply nodded her acceptance of the title. The alicorn scowled, “you and I have much to discuss,” the princess vowed before turning towards the thestral.

“But, first: how is Slipshod doing? The changeling. Will he live?”

Oddly enough, this was the point where the griffon seemed to take some measure of offense, offering a slight frown. She remained silent though, permitting the doctor to respond unimpeded to the question that he’d been asked. The stallion nodded, “its injuries looked far more serious than they were,” he insisted, “some moderate blood loss―which we’re treating with colloids. It’s in a lot of pain more than anything,” he said with a dismissive shrug.

“For which you are giving him,” she stressed the pronoun pointedly, “pain medication, of course?”

At that the physician opened his mouth and faltered, “uhhh…” he cleared his throat and awkwardly gestured at a nearby com terminal, “...if Her Majesty will permit me to make a quick call down to the infirmary?”

Twilight scowled balefully at the stallion, but flicked her wing out towards the com panel. The doctor nodded and scurried over to relay her instructions to his staff. Now the alicorn turned to the griffon, who still didn’t look the least bit intimidated by the alicorn’s hostile temperament. If anything, that just made Twilight all the more annoyed, “I take it that you supervise the creatures that did this to him?”

The griffon smiled pleasantly. Or, rather, the curve of their lips beyond their beak was meant to affect a ‘pleasant’ smile. However, something about the whole expression was...off. She shook her head, “not exactly, Your Majesty. I have no staff to supervise. All interrogations are solely my responsibility.”

“So you did that to him?” the purple mare’s lips pulled back in a sneer. Yet, it faltered somewhat as she continued to glare at the hen. She just looked so...unrepentant. Every other being in this room appeared to at least acknowledge that―whether they felt they’d acted inappropriately―their princess was not at all pleased with their actions. This griffon...didn’t.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Why?”

“A thorough examination of the subject’s physiology, demographics, and tolerances, needed to be compiled so that an effective interrogation regimen could be designed which was appropriate to the individual,” the pink hen explained, sounding far too detached from the topic for Twilight’s liking, “contrary to what many believe, changelings, on an individual level, are as diverse as any other species. As a result, different changelings respond to different stimuli. Before any productive questioning could begin, I needed to learn as much as I could about the subject’s demeanor, as well as their physical limits.

“I have a preliminary psychological profile ready for your review, as well as a suggested provisional torture schedule, if you would like to see them?”

“Absolutely not!” Twilight gasped, now fully taken aback by the griffon’s response.

“Of course, Your Majesty. I apologize for offering you anything less than my best work. I will have the final report completed by the end of the day and sent along.”

“Wh―? No!” the alicorn sputtered, aghast at the thought of reading a detailed account of what had been inflicted upon Slipshod. She was insulted that the implication had even been made that she’d want to, “in fact, destroy it,” Twilight instructed. That at least seemed to catch the griffon of guard.

Gesche blinked, hesitantly looking between the princess and the physician, “destroy the...changeling, Your Majesty?”

“The report!” How did that response make the griffon look even more confused?!

Twilight massaged her forehead with her hooves, grumbling, before raising her head back up and looking at all of the creatures gathered around the table, “I can’t even pretend to know how practices like that became acceptable,” she stated sternly, “and, frankly, I’m not sure that I want to know.

“But they stop. Here and now. The Celestia League does not torture. We do not abuse our prisoners. We adhere to the core principles of Friendship and Harmony, even where our enemies are concerned,” even as she said those words, Twilight suppressed a bitter grimace as she recalled her own previous excessiveness. She’d killed the changeling pilots in their disabled ‘Steeds, after they had ceased to be an immediate threat to her or anypony else. The alicorn might have liked to claim being caught up in the heat of battle, but that was still not a real excuse.

She wasn’t perfect, of course. She knew that. She had, did, and would continue, to make mistakes. As long as she endeavored to learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes in the future, that was what really mattered. Twilight would try her best to live up to the ideals that she had championed for so long, and she would push the remnants of the League to do so as well.

“Your Majesty,” Cinder began to protest, “Chrysalis and her changelings have done much worse to―”

“Are you really about to suggest that I need to behave more like Chrysalis?” Twilight cut in pointedly, which had the intended effect of drawing the dragoness up short, looking appropriately cowed by the insinuation.

“...no, of course not, princess.”

“Good. Which brings me to my next point: I find myself very concerned with the mentality I’ve witnessed, both here in this room, and from other members of the crew. You claim to be a part of the ‘Celestia League-in-Exile’, and yet...I don’t see how that could be the case,” she said with a frown, “maybe it’s the constant fighting, maybe something more. I don’t know.

“To help me find out, I am going to do something that I haven’t done in a very long time: I’m going to host Friendship classes,” her smile was bittersweet. While it should have been pleasantly nostalgic to be undertaking one of her first serious initiatives again, the circumstances which had motivated her to do so were certainly far more dire than the original ones, “these classes will not be compulsory, but I would like the crew to be made aware that I highly encourage attendance.

“It will take us some time to reach League-in-Exile space, I assume?” she saw Cinder’s nod of agreement, “so I intend to make the best use of it by evaluating, for myself, where we are at now as a society.”

The dragoness admiral nodded, “very well, Your Majesty,” she gestured to the feathered stallion nearby, “the star commodore and I will make arrangements to notify the crew, find an appropriate venue, and reorganize duty rosters to ensure as many creatures as possible may attend.”

“Good. In the meantime: I want periodic updates on the conditions of the local zebras currently being treated by the Steel Coursers―as well as the latest timetable for their transfer to planetary care facilities and a list of recommendations on what can be done to expedite said transfer. I want to see a detailed plan of action regarding the transport and and quartering of the Steel Coursers―they will be made aware of my Friendship lectures as well, if you please,” Twilight turned to Doctor Nightingale, who was only now returning to his earlier seat after having relayed the new medical orders to the infirmary, “you will send me daily progress notes on Slipshod’s condition,” she looked back to Cinder, “Slipshod will also be given access to a personal comm device which he can use to contact me directly,” the alicorn paused long enough to received acknowledgement of her directives from both individuals.

“Lastly,” the purple princess said with a tired sounding sigh, “I will need access to...well, everything. Histories, activity reports, action reviews―I have five hundred years of catching up to do, and not nearly enough time to get caught up.”

“Of course, Your Majesty,” the dragoness said, “your credentials should be fully added to our network within the hour.”

“Thank you, star admiral. Now, it sounds like all of us have a lot to do. So let’s get to it. Dismissed,” then a thought occurred to the alicorn, “oh, star admiral?” the dragoness and every other creature in the room paused mid-rise, looking expectantly between the two, “I assume no other changelings were found while screening the Steel Coursers?”

“No, Your Majesty. Just the one.”

“And did you manage to screen everypony?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. All eighty-five members of the Steel Coursers were subjected to the screening. We accounted for all of the names on the ship’s manifest we received.”

“...Understood,” the alicorn frowned slightly as she waved for the assembled creatures to resume their departures. She and Slipshod had been fairly confident that another member of the crew had also been a changeling, but it appeared that they must have been mistaken. Perhaps news of her revival and location aboard the Galloway truly had been leaked through some less malicious fashion.

At least that was one less concern to be worried about...

Mimesis watched the last of the Disciple’s accursed zebra alchemists file back into the APC. A hoofful of their soldiers were being left behind to ‘supervise’ things, and to aid the local government with reintegration of the civilians still in the care of the pony mercenaries. However, those few remaining Disciple troops were keeping a respectful distance from the Galloway and its crew. Likely due in great part to the recently developed hostilities between the two groups.

Killing somepony did have the tendency to produce a lot of animosity among the friends of the deceased, he had noticed. In an effort to reduce the likelihood of another confrontation, the officer in charge of the local Disciple forces had ordered the soldiers to form a loose perimeter around the Galloway, but to also keep their distance from the mercenaries themselves unless absolutely necessary.

Which meant that while there were still technically Disciples in the area, none of them were close enough to notice that there was, in fact, one additional Steel Courser walking around than there should have been, according to the list of personnel that had been forwarded to them anyway.

It had been something of a lucky break for him that the zebra BattleSteed pilot, Xanadu, had asked to enlist with the company. Otherwise, he might have actually run into some issues during the screening of the crew. As it was, the extra pilot had allowed for the personnel files to identify the same number of on-site mercenaries as had been being continuously reported to the Disciple WarShip since their departure from the Harmony Sphere.

That wasn’t to say that staying out of their grasp had been a simple matter. Far from it, in fact. Mimesis was completely exhausted. He doubted that any changeling who ever lived in the last few hundred years had ever found themselves having to shift their form as many times as he had had to during the last hour. If he’d even bothered to try and tally the number of transformations that he’d been forced to make, he was certain that he’d have lost count. There’d definitely been more than a hundred.

Remaining a single pony in one place for too long had simply been too much of a risk. The chances that he’d have been truly noticed and recognized would have grown with every second, and not just with the Steel Coursers either. Disciple soldiers had been everywhere during the screening, trying their best to keep track of every mercenary and civilian as they were going about their duties. Too many of the zebras were in critical condition, and simply could not be left alone for the entirety of the time it would have taken to segregate and isolate every creature for a proper screening.

A lot of zebras would have died if they’d done that. Whoever was in charge apparently didn’t want to have to explain to the planetary government why so many of their citizens had been sacrificed like that, and so had opted for a more haphazard and less orderly solution. Much to Mimesis’ gratitude.

Which wasn’t to say that the Disciples had been sloppy, of course. They’d meticulously tracked who needed to be screened, where they were, and where they went afterwards. There wasn’t a pony on their list who didn’t have at least one set of eyes on them at all times.

However, Mimesis―or rather, the multitude of ponies that he’d become during that time―hadn’t been on their list. Which meant that the Disciples hadn’t noticed that he’d been ‘missing’. Nopony had. Not really. Oh, a lot of the Galloway’s crew had certainly been looking for him―or, rather, the pony that they thought he was―but with the general chaos caused by the hundreds of injured zebras lying around, nopony was really all that surprised that they couldn’t find him.

After all, he was a very busy pony right now...

The changeling smiled as a wave of transformative magic washed over him, and he finally reverted to the form that he’d been wearing for a great many years. He rounded the next corner, emerging back into a crowd of ponies and patients. Almost immediately, a half dozen Steel Coursers looked in his direction and started waving him over for assistance and advice on the patients that they’d been charged to monitor.

“Doc! There you are; do you have a minute?”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 18: Exodus Road

Slipshod idly wondered who was more surprised by the turnout for the princess’ first ‘class’ on Friendship. Certainly there had to be more than a few department heads who were feeling just a little put out by what must have represented a significant depletion in their staffing. Of course, promises had been made that anypony who’d asked to attend would be allowed to do so―within reason, one assumed. Though, given the shoulder-to-shoulder packing of what should have been a suitably spacious aerospace hangar for the whole crew of the DropShip―as well as ponies from the Rockhoof and the Galloway―perhaps that was an erroneous assumption on his part.

The stallion wondered who the poor unlucky sod was that must have been running the bridge for the WarShip all by themselves, given the attendance that he was seeing. Seriously, this was less of a ‘classroom’, and more of a ‘lecture hall’. Even then, none of his lectures at the academy had been this massive.

On the other hoof, none of his lectures had been proctored by Chrysalis herself.

These ponies―and a great many other creatures as well, he noticed―were being given the opportunity to hear right from the mouth of their long lost and now returned princess. How could any of them not want to be in attendance? Heck, they were being given the chance not just to listen to their princess, but to actually have some of her wisdom imparted to them!

So, yeah, the hangar was packed alright. Despite everything that had been done to make as much room as possible. Of course, the fighters could only be moved around so much. This hadn’t stopped a significant number of creatures, especially those who could fly, from perching on top of them. Even the catwalks above them were packed. Probably in excess of the recommended weight limit, Slipshod suspected.

For the first time in almost a week, Slipshod found himself feeling grateful that he was a changeling and, oddly enough, that everypony else knew about it. He’d managed to successfully argue that he be allowed to walk around in his earth pony form, as that tended to not provoke the very visceral reactions that the crew experienced upon merely seeing a changeling. However, this agreement had been reached with the understanding that Slipshod was not to use any other form besides his natural or earth pony ones. Doing so for even a split second would see him thrown in the brig for the remainder of their trip to Clan space.

His image had also been shared among every creature on board all three vessels, to alert them to what he really was. This seemed to undermine a lot of what Slipshod had hoped to accomplish, if he was being honest. The suspicious and hostile feelings being directed at him every time he passed a creature in the corridor were hardly what he’d call ‘ideal’, but in this moment they seemed to be a minor blessing as the ponies near him were more than willing to compact themselves even more uncomfortably in an effort to be as far from him as physically possible. This left the stallion with a ‘buffer zone’ of sorts even in the otherwise crowded hangar.

This was presumably also appreciated by his ‘chaperone’, a green-eyed thestral mare who refused to give him her name. Or the time of day. Or even a slightly annoyed grunt. Slipshod would have sworn that she was just straight up mute, except that she was perfectly willing to talk with any other member of the crew that approached her.

His musings were interrupted by the sudden hush that fell over the crowd, every head suddenly facing in a singular direction. Slipshod was in the far corner of the hangar, about as distant from where the princess’ dais had been set up as one could be―the changeling was hardly about to be given preferred seating, after all―so he had trouble catching more than a brief glimpse of her flowing mane. His brow raised slightly. He could have sworn that it had been much shorter the last time he’d seen her. Huh.

While he might not have been able to see her very well, the sound system which had been set up at least meant that none of the attendees had any trouble hearing the alicorn as she began her presentation, “my little ponies, and every other creature who has stood with us, I can’t begin to express how thrilled I am to see so many of you interested in learning about Friendship! I know that together, we will be able to drive out Chrysalis and restore the Celestia League!”

This announcement was met with raucous cheering from everycreature in the hangar. Hooves stomped and clawed hands of all types clapped. A chant soon materialized, gaining volume and vigor until it was finally being echoed by all: “death to Chrysalis! Death to changelings! Death to ComSpark!”

Slipshod wondered if his coming here might have been a mistake…

Though it wasn’t much consolation at the time, it didn’t look like this had been quite the reaction that Twilight had been going for. It took her some time, but eventually the purple alicorn was able to quiet down the chanting and make herself heard over the crowd again, “while I certainly appreciate the, um...enthusiasm, I also need you all to understand that our focus shouldn’t be on ‘death’ to...anything, really. It’s not about destruction, it’s about restoration―rebuilding what was lost. About helping the creatures suffering under Chrysalis’ machinations.

“That is a goal that will not be accomplished solely through violence. We need to instead rely on the Elements of Harmony, and hold ourselves to their ideals. Everypony knows what those are, of course? May I see a show of hooves and hands of who can list the elements?” a sea of limbs shot up into the air, “fantastic! You there; can you tell us one?”

“Devotion to your Clan!” a young dragon announced loudly. A chorus of other creatures echoed their assent.

Twilight seemed to sound a little less sure, however, “um...well, I suppose that is a kind of loyalty, yes. Er, can somecreature tell me another? You?”

“Sacrifice for The Cause!” a mare shouted, receiving another smattering of agreeable outbursts.

“Generosity...right…” a pause from the princess, almost as though she was afraid to receive the next response, “anycreature else?”

“Respect for fellow Trueborns!” this seemed to be met with the loudest cheers.

“What-borns? Was...was that meant to be ‘kindness’?” the alicorn faltered now. Clearly this was not going quite the way that she had anticipated, “I’m almost afraid to ask what ‘laughter’ is―”

“Find joy in domination!”

“Of course,” Twilight sighed, “well, it looks like today is going to be an...enlightening day for us all. Perhaps I started going about this the wrong way,” she admitted, “who wants to hear a story?” as expected, there was a great deal of cheering from the crowd, “great! Our story begins many centuries ago, long before there was a Celestia League. In fact, there wasn’t even a unified Equus yet!

“Long ago, in the magical land of Equestria…”

As the last of the Clanners finished filing out of the hangar, Slipshod looked in the direction of the purple princess. She was speaking with the cobalt dragoness and a few other high-ranking officers, and looking quite satisfied with herself. The changeling frowned. It was obvious that she’d felt her first ‘Friendship Seminar’, or whatever, had gone swimmingly.

However, she wasn’t an empath.

The general mood had certainly begun positively enough. The Clanners were overjoyed at the prospect of hearing from their princess, and had been eager to hang on her every word. They’d been proud to demonstrate their understanding of the ‘true principles of the League’ to her and bask in the praise that would surely follow for holding fast to those ideals which the Harmony Sphere had obviously forgotten about.

Of course, that praise hadn’t been as forthcoming as they’d been expecting. Likewise, the story of how Princess Twilight had come to meet her friends and their missions to spread the Magic of Friendship to the far corners of Equestria, and then the rest of Equus, had also not seemed to be what they were hoping for. Insofar as the alicorn seemed to be a lot less...aggressive than was the general mindset of the crowd.

Slipshod got the impression that these creatures had been anticipating a Princess Twilight who would be much more forceful in her advocacy.

Twilight wasn’t the only one who’d been pursuing records over the last week since leaving Capinses. She’d given him access to some of the archives as well. The reading had proved a welcome distraction from...well, everything. He certainly hadn’t had much else to do in the quarters that he’d been assigned, and while he was technically permitted to roam about the DropShip―an order from Twilight that he was fairly certain had not been entirely well-received―the changeling wasn’t about to do so. He could sense the revulsion of the crew every time one of them walked past the door to his cabin. He had no desire to experience any more of that first-hoof than was necessary, thank-you-very-much.

So he had read.

Twilight had been doing research as well, he had come to understand. However, five centuries was a lot to catch up on, and decisions had to be made on where to start. Presumably, in anticipation of resuming her role as the leader of the Celestia League-in-Exile, the alicorn had focused her attention on the political climate and historical events. Topics that would help establish a foundation for whatever briefings she anticipated having with Princess-Regent Flurry Heart prior to the official transfer of power back into the hooves of the purple alicorn.

Slipshod, meanwhile, had sought out other topics. Perhaps this was more of his changeling nature guiding his thought process, but he’d looked into sociological information. He wanted to know how the Clans thought, and how they functioned. Because it was immediately clear to him that it was nothing like the Great Houses of the Harmony Sphere.

His findings had been...enlightening, as well. Slipshod actually found himself wondering if Twilight had read any of the same topics that he had. Probably not. She was far too calm for that to be the case, given what he knew of her. The alicorn had certainly not remarked on the odd appearance of the crew.

Again, maybe it was a ‘changeling thing’ too that he’d noticed it.

They were too similar. Bone structures, fur follicle spacings, limb and body ratios. While subtle enough features to most, he supposed, his natural eye for such things noted that there wasn’t nearly the variation that there should have been. Two many ponies had the same cheekbones. Too many griffons had the same clawspan. Too many dragons had the same nape ridge pattern. It was uncanny―unnatural.

A few hours of reading had proved him to be correct on the matter. These Clan creatures had a phenomenal eugenics program in place. A significant portion of their population―and nearly all those who served in the military―were artificially produced. It appeared that, early on in their strategic thinking, the exiles had concluded that they’d never be able to ‘outgrow’ the Harmony Sphere. In terms of population, they’d always come up short, meaning that they’d always be fighting a numerically superior enemy force when they finally took the fight to the Sphere.

Thus, it had been decided that, if they couldn’t have quantity on their side, they’d need to make sure they fielded a superior quality of soldier instead. So the exiles had been screened, and the best genetic profiles from among them selected to be further tweaked and modified in order to create ‘ideal specimens’.

That was just the physiological side of things. The sociological side was debatably more eerie. Certainly from a pony perspective, Slipshod assumed. To him, it wasn’t quite so foreign a concept.

The Clans appeared to have a ‘caste system’. One that wasn’t entirely unlike what existed in changeling society. From birth, creatures were assigned to various societal functions. Some were raised to be soldiers, some engineers, scientists, laborers, farmers, etc. Clan citizens didn’t get to freely choose careers the way that Sphere citizens did. They did the jobs that were chosen for them. That they had been effectively born to do based on their genetic profiles.

Not unlike himself. Slipshod had been born an infiltrator. He’d known that his purpose would be to assume an identity and further the queen’s agenda in the Harmony Sphere since he was a larva. So he could see the merits of such a caste system. He doubted very much that Twilight would though. Caste systems seemed like something that would irritate her more delicate sensibilities.

In any case, the changeling found himself doubting very much that the alicorn would be as optimistic about ‘restoring the Celestia League’ as she currently was once she discovered that those ancient League ideals regarding Harmony and self-fulfillment didn’t even seem to exist in the League-in-Exile anymore either.

Slipshod’s thoughts were interrupted by a spike in irritation coming from behind him. The golden earth pony glanced briefly over his shoulder at his thestral escort, noting her blatantly annoyed expression. The path out of the hangar was now completely clear of traffic, and she felt that it was long past time for him to make his exit as well so that he could be taken back to his quarters. He sighed and trudged out into the corridor beyond.

The stallion started to turn left, which would take him to his quarters, but then hesitated for a moment. This earned him a second psychic assault from his chaperone. Still, the changeling cleared his throat and looked to the thestral, “can we...swing by the Galloway? Please?”

The gray mare scowled, but a moment later jerked her head to the right, in the direction of the airlock leading to the Rockhoof’s docking collar. Likely she suspected that, if she refused his request that he’d just ‘whine’ to Twilight about it and cause trouble for her and her superiors. He wouldn’t have, if for no other reason than because he had absolutely no inclination to antagonize these Clanners than was absolutely unavoidable. The crew might be under orders not to harm him, but ships in space were simply dangerously places as a general rule. Accidents happened.

Sometimes changelings took wrong turns and went tumbling out of unsecured airlocks. Who could really explain how those sorts of things happened?

Honestly, what if his death wasn’t played off as an accident? What exactly was Twilight going to do to the culprit? Summarily execute them? Hardly. She’d pout, and yell, and angst...and then try and teach them ‘Friendship’. Meanwhile he’d still be dead.

Twilight’s grace wasn’t keeping Slipshod alive, not really. It was the fact that he was less of a pain to deal with alive than getting chewed out for killing him would be worth. It was in his best interests to keep it that way too. So he did his best not to ruffle any manes he didn’t have to.

He just...he hadn’t heard from a single member of the Steel Coursers since being dragged away. It was...weird.

Slipshod kept suitably quiet and demure during the entirety of their trek out of the Clan DropShip, through the docking collar of the WarShip, and up to the airlock leading to the Galloway. It was currently closed. The stallion reached out to a panel near the airlock and depressed the chime there.

“Galloway bridge; this is High Gain. How can I help you?” the earth pony mare greeted in a very professional tone.

Slipshod couldn’t help but smile upon hearing a familiar voice again, “hey, High Gain! It’s Slipshod!” Silence greeted him. The stallion’s smile faltered as the seconds without a response went on. The frequency was still open, he noted, the comms tech simply wasn’t saying anything to him.

He let out a disappointed sigh. He supposed that shouldn’t have surprised him really. He’d just...sort of hoped, was all, “I...just wanted to check in with you guys. See how you were doing,” still no response came, but he pressed on anyway, “I also wanted to say that I’m sorry. About what happened to Flechette. He was a good pony. He didn’t deserve that,” a wan smirk curled the corner of his mouth, “I’m sorry about other things too.

“Not that I expect to be forgiven. I’m not here for that. I just…” the stallion stared at the panel as he fumbled for the right words, and finally just abandoned trying to come up with them. He wasn’t even sure what he’d expected to get from this anymore. He wasn’t a part of the Coursers anymore. The stallion was fairly positive that, from their perspective, they’d just as soon as forget that he ever had been.

And he couldn’t fault them for that. He’d used them. Lied to them. He wasn’t their friend. He shouldn’t expect to be treated like one.

“Nevermind.”

He started to turn away, but caught himself once more and looked back to the comm panel, “hey, in my quarters―assuming everything wasn’t just set on fire already,” he tried to add a bit of levity to the aside that―might―have been an exaggeration, “there’s a bottle of Appaloosa Estates? That, uh...that was meant for Valkyrie. Cookie gave it to me. So, maybe make sure it gets put with her personal effects in storage or something? Just, you know, don’t destroy it―if you haven’t already―it’s not mine. Not really.

“So...yeah. Sorry. Bye.”

Very aware of the fact that the exchange represented a patently pathetic excuse for a ‘conversation’, Slipshod closed off the channel and turned away from the door, heading back for the Clan DropShip and his quarters. Just as he turned back into the docking collar, he managed to miss a step and stumble, catching himself on the frame of the airlock before falling all the way to the ground. The thestral had made no effort to help him, “I’m fine,” he assured her anyway as he straightened back up, massaging the fatigue from his eyes.

He needed a nap.

Squelch was massaging her temple, trying in vain to will away the headache that was coming on. It was her own fault though. The pain was the result of combining against-medical-advice quantities of caffeine and an attempt at understanding advanced medical and physiological concepts far outside of her grasp. She wasn’t a doctor, and if there was anything that the last few days had taught her, it was that never could have been one either.

“One more time,” she insisted, wincing as the ache that seemed to be coming from her protesting brain itself suddenly spiked in intensity, seemingly at the mere thought of having to make another attempt at comprehending the subject of her investigation. She popped a pair of pain-relief pills―ignoring the unhappy expression on the face of the other unicorn in the room as she did so―and washed them down with a generous gulp of coffee. The frown increased slightly in intensity.

“You realize that too much caffeine can cause headaches, right?” the ivory-coated ship’s physician admonished his employer.

“Which is why I’m taking the pills,” the sage green mare grumbled back, “now explain it to me one more time: why didn’t you notice Slipshod was one of those...things?”

Doc Dee sighed and shrugged, gesturing at the contents of the former Courser ‘Steed pilot’s medical file which were splayed across the briefing room’s table, “because there was never anything to notice,” he insisted, “his vitals were always within normal range for an earth pony his age, every x-ray showed every bone exactly where it was supposed to be, every blood test―of his very red blood―showed perfectly normal results,” another anemic shrug, “nothing to suggest that he was ever anything other than a perfectly average earth pony stallion.”

Squelch’s forehoof tapped the table in agitation as she scowled at the repeated answer from the medical pony, “there had to be something that wasn’t right,” she insisted, “because that creature I saw didn’t look a damn thing like a pony at all!”

“Ma’am, frankly we don’t know a thing about changelings, or how their ability to mimic other creatures works. I’m led to understand that it is, at its heart, a magically-based transformation, correct?” the mare nodded, “which means that there’s the chance that it could be a genuinely complete transformation. No different than if I were to take your datalink and transform it into...say, a teacup.

“It would cease to be a pad made up of silicates and circuits and polymers, and instead truly become an object of ceramic and floral designs. Changeling’s may possess an innate ability to do something very similar to themselves.”

“There’s got to be something that can be detectable though,” Squelch said, still sounding annoyed. She rifled through the sheets until she found the one she was looking for and held it up, “what about this?” she jabbed a hoof at a row of numbers, “a little over a year ago you found unusual...what’d you call them? Nero-something?”

“Neurotransmitters,” the stallion corrected. He floated over the indicated test results to look at them more closely. After several seconds looking over the results he sighed at the other unicorn, “this does show an unusual dip in many neurotransmitters during an exam. However, if I am remembering this date right, I did a similar examination of you that day too, and found lower than normal levels.”

“And those levels suggest…?” she prompted.

“Levels this low? The onset of clinical depression, quite frankly,” he smirked at her, “which would have been an unusual thing to see so suddenly in a mare or stallion your age, with no prior history,” the stallion continued, “so I ordered a second round of tests to be conducted a week later just to verify everything before I started prescribing antidepressants.

“However, that was around the time that you and Captain Slipshod...erm,” the physician cleared his throat as he sought out a polite way to phrase things, “encountered marital difficulties―”

“You mean I caught him fucking that New Neighpon whore,” Squelch growled.

“Quite,” Doc Dee cleared his throat, “anyway, you pushed back the followup tests until you two had worked things out―”

“Until the divorced was finalized.”

“―and by the time I did the test again, everything was fine,” the white unicorn stallion reached out with his own telekinetic field and retrieved another sheet of paper, holding it up to the one that Squelch had selected, showing them both to her as he pointed out the relevant lines, “him too. See?”

“So what did it all mean? Why were the levels so low in the first place?”

“Honestly? Given that neither of you had a history of mental issues―” he ignored a derisive comment from his employer as she made an unkind appraisal of Slipshod’s own faculties, “―and nothing has been out of place ever since, I’m left to conclude that these low readings were my fault. Something clearly went wrong with the test. Perhaps a contaminant or an improper calibration.”

Squelch didn’t look very satisfied with that answer, but there was nothing that Doc Dee could do about that and so he simply shrugged, “sometimes tests are wrong,” he informed her apologetically, “that’s why doctors do follow-ups on things like this before we go pumping your body full of possibly dangerous drugs,” the stallion flashed her a broad smile.

“I’m afraid this doesn’t mean anything,” he concluded, gesturing to the test results.

“Fine,” the mare groused, setting aside the papers, “then what can you tell me about that paste the zebras were using?”

“Now that was a lot more interesting,” the physician admitted, “I did some careful analysis of the substance―there was certainly more than enough of it smeared all over my patients,” he added as an annoyed aside, “and tried to break it down into its basic components.

“Ultimately, it amounted to something not entirely unlike ‘bug repellent’,” he said, smirking slightly, “obviously, there was a lot more to it than that, but many of the chemicals present in the paste are also what one would find in pesticides on a farm. However, the paste does lack the potency to actually kill anything much larger than a cockroach.

“It’s worth noting that most common pesticides target the nervous system of insects. My working theory is that the goal of the zebra paste isn’t to actually kill a changeling, but instead disrupt their nervous system enough to disrupt whatever magic conceals them.

“That being said,” the doctor went on, “I don’t think this means that misting ponies with bug repellent is enough to reveal changelings. There were a lot of other substances present as well, most of which I couldn’t identify their purpose,” upon seeing the frown from his employer, Doc Dee held up his hooves in a gesture of helplessness, “I’m not an alchemist,” he said with an apologetic note, “and none of the other ingredients had medical applications, so I’m not familiar with them or what purpose they serve.

“Poisons, I know; because part of my job is treating for exposure to them,” the stallion said but then shook his head, “but if it’s not a toxin or a medication, then I suggest you ask a botanist for their opinion.”

Squelch sighed, “alright, Doc, I get it. Thank you,” they weren’t answers that she necessarily wanted to hear, but that certainly wasn’t the physician’s fault, “I guess I’m just...well, honestly, I’m pissed off. Mostly at myself for getting taken in by that thing,” the last word came out in a growl.

The ivory unicorn stallion nodded sympathetically, “I understand. Slipshod’s nature came as a shock. To all of us,” he assured her, “you weren’t the only one he fooled.”

“But I was the only one he married,” the sage mare sneered, “you know what that bastard told me? He said he did it to feed off me! Can you believe that? He used me as a literal ‘meal ticket’?! I almost shot the fucker. Would have if Twilight hadn’t stopped me,” she grunted in disappointment.

“That is pretty sickening,” the doctor agreed.

Squelch nodded, accepting the physician’s sympathies. Then her eyes wandered back over to the neurotransmitter tests, lingering on the papers, her expression growing more contemplative. She reached out with her magic again, floating up the page containing the lowered levels and looking at the results again.

The doctor raised a curious brow, “what is it?”

“...Twilight says that changeling’s feed on emotions. Would that show up on a test as reduced neurotransmitter levels?”

“Without knowing the precise mechanism that they use to actually ‘feed’ with, I couldn’t be positive, but I suppose that’s possible,” he nodded, “why?”

The mercenary company owner didn’t respond at first, still staring at the test results. If Slipshod was feeding off of her emotions―her cultivated love for him―then it made sense that she’d show signs of an altered mental state. She did remember feeling ‘out of sorts’ last year. She’d assumed that it was just built up stress from running the company. Now she knew that there were more nefarious external factors involved.

That explained her low levels. What she was looking at right now weren’t the results of a test performed on her though. These were Slipshod’s results. His low levels.

If there was a connection between hormone levels and changeling emotion feeding, then it stood to reason that his own levels would be representative of how ‘full’ he was. Did this test suggest that, at the time, he was ‘malnourished’? Was that why he’d cheated on her: because he was starving?

The unicorn shook the train of thought from her head.

Why was she even considering the motivations behind his actions? He was a monster. The actions of monsters, by their nature, couldn’t be ‘justified’. Slipshod wasn’t deserving of her pity, or her sympathy. All that he was entitled to was her disdain.

“It’s nothing,” she finally said in response to Doc Dee’s question, “thank you for your time. I’ll let you get back to your duties,” she stood up and left the room without another word.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” the cobalt dragoness said as she took the offered cup of tea. She did so a little stiffly, despite herself. She wasn’t entirely comfortable at the thought of being the one getting served by the princess instead of the other way around. On the other hand, she would have been horrendously out of line to rebuke the alicorn and insist that she couldn’t serve tea if she wanted. She was the rightful ruler of the Celestia League. If Princess Twilight Sparkle wanted to serve tea to one of her officers, then that was her right.

The purple mare smiled warmly as she floated the kettle back to its place on the little hotplate that had been brought up from the galley along with the rest of the tea set, “relax, Cinder. I’m not mad at you,” her features wanned a little at the memory of the events on Capinses, “you were doing what you thought was right for the League. Your heart was in the right place.

“You were just...not taught the right actions,” now the alicorn’s expression cooled even more, “and I’m going to be having a long talk with your parents about why that was. Both of them know better; Spike especially.”

The star admiral was squirming a little more uncomfortably in her seat now. Centuries old, a high-ranking officer in the navy, and yet being faced with the disappointed look of the alicorn left Cinder feeling like a whelp in the midst of being scolded by her mother, “I’m sure that they had good reasons, Your Majesty,” she said weakly, feeling obligated to speak in defense of her parents, “the conflict has forced us to make very difficult choices in order to survive.”

“I understand. I’ve seen what creatures can be reduced to when faced with a terrifying enemy,” Twilight said, nodding her head somberly as she thought back over the many encounters that she’d had during her life with creatures who were dealing with strife in a multitude of ways. The various hypothetical futures that she’d witnessed while chasing Starlight through time, the self-imposed seclusion of the hippogryphs, her own despondency when it looked as though Triek, Cozy Glow, and Chrysalis had managed to conquer Equestria…

If she’d not had her friends by her side, what might she have been reduced to at that moment? What extremes might she have gone to? In her fight with Tirek, she’d unleashed powers that devastated the land and reshaped the world. Something that the ‘old’ Twilight wouldn’t have ever considered doing, but that a furious alicorn brimming with an abundance of magical energy thought was the only chance she had of winning.

She’d forsaken everything that she’d believe in―everything that she’d been taught―and turned to violence in order to oppose a threat. Had their battle happened in a crowded city like Manehattan or Fillydelphia instead of the wilderness…

However, she’d had her friends to bring her to heel back then. In the wake of Chrysalis’ infiltration of the Celestia League, who had Spike and Flurry Heart been left to turn to for support and stability?

It didn’t absolve them of what the League-in-Exile had become, Twilight knew; but it gave her hope that the damage could be undone, given enough time. The League could be reforged―would be reforged.

“I just…” Twilight’s words caught, as she fumbled for how best to express her disappointment. Finally, the alicorn just sighed and shook her head, “what hurts the most is that it didn’t take changeling infiltrators to do this to us. The League did it to itself.

“And now I’m left wondering, if I’d been around―if Chrysalis hadn’t replaced me, but instead led an open opposition―would I have let the Celestia League fall just as far in order to defeat her? Would I have become twisted into something malevolent, like Luna did? A Nightmare Dusk, or Duskbreaker, or Midnight Sparkle?” the idea sent a shiver through the violet mare as she contemplated the dark prospect. Her greatest role models had hardly been infallible; it would be the height of hubris for her to think that she’d have been immune.

“Maybe, in that regard, it’s for the best that I’ve been away,” Twilight supposed aloud, “it means that a memory of those untainted Elements was able to survive,” it was a hopeful notion at least.

The door chime attracted the attention of the pair, “enter!” Twilight called out. The door to her suite opened a second later, exposing a golden earth pony stallion and his armed escort. The alicorn found her expression soured once more. Not because of Slipshod specifically, but rather the reminders of her failures that his presence reinforced.

“Slipshod, thank you for coming. Please, come in,” she gestured with her wing at one of the open seats at the table. The changeling nodded and stepped through the door. His escort was about to do the same when Twilight spoke up again, her attention firmly on the security pony, “thank you, corporal. I appreciate you bringing my guest here safely. I will call for you when our meeting is done with.

“Until then, feel free to relax as you see fit. It should be a few hours until you are needed here again.”

The pegasus guard hesitated, looking more than a little unsure of himself. It was clear that he was less than thrilled at the prospect of leaving the princess and the star admiral in the company of ‘the enemy’ unattended. Yet, at the same time, there was no denying that he’d effectively been told―albeit in a very diplomatic fashion―to ‘get lost’. Staying put would be tantamount to insubordination at the very least, and outright treason if the matter of his disobedience of the princess herself was pushed to its ultimate conclusion.

So, as uneasy as he might have felt at the prospect, the pegasus stallion resolved merely to salute his superiors and withdraw from the doorway. However, the parting baleful glare he flashed at the changeling suggested that, when he returned, if it even looked to him like a single hair on the princess’ head was out of place, Slipshod might get ‘accidented’ to death on the way back to his quarters.

Twilight noted that it wasn’t just the pegasus who’d been tense at the notion of the changeling being unguarded. Cinder’s claws had started to unconsciously gouge themselves into the sides of her teacup, leaving grooves in the enamel. The dragoness only seemed to notice this when the alicorn politely cleared her throat and offered the changeling a cup as well. The star admiral placed her now empty cup back on its saucer, the scratches turned from view of the others. Though her piercing gaze didn’t stray from their newly arrived guest for a great while.

The alicorn found herself idly wondering exactly how long dragons could go without blinking.

In the interest of easing tension, and sparing Cinder’s eyes from undue dryness, the purple princess elected to get down to the purpose of this little meeting, “now, I know that to say things got off on the wrong hoof between us would be the understatement of the century,” Twilight began, noting the earth pony idly rubbing at his limbs, and the multitude of scars that lay beneath his disguise. He’d assured her many times that he ‘felt fine’, but Twilight doubted very much that any creature could truly be ‘fine’ so soon after suffering from as much pain as he’d obviously been subjected to.

“However, I also know that it will be of vital importance that the three of us find a way to work together,” she turned to regard the dragoness, “Slipshod represents something extremely important, that hasn’t been seen in a very long time: an unreformed changeling who is opposed to Chrysalis,” the star admiral was unable to suppress her dubious scowl. Obviously, she didn’t believe the claim, but was mindful enough of decorum not to outright contradict the princess to her face, “it’s true,” she insisted, gesturing now to the earth pony, “and I ask that you hear him out as to why. Slipshod?”

The stallion cringed beneath the weight of the dragoness’ animosity. It was palpable. She hated him. Reviled him. He was the embodiment of the antithesis to everything she held dear. She had already resolved to dismiss anything and everything he had to say in her presence, and was only listening now because she felt that she’d been ordered to by her monarch.

Still, this was something that was important to accomplishing what both he and Twilight wanted, if for very different reasons, so he could at least say his piece and let the dragoness draw her own conclusions about his trustworthiness, “I no longer serve the queen,” he began, noting the dismissive snort from the star admiral but moving past it, “not because I’ve ceased to believe in her vision, or because I sympathise with the plight of all the creatures who are suffering in the Sphere.

“I just want her to suffer. The same way that she made me suffer when I was left to die out in the cold, all because my intended assignment got itself removed,” a coolness of its own seeped into his voice as he recalled those first sobering days on Simeron, when the full weight of how desperate his situation was had finally become clear to him. The hunger, the desperation, the fear.

The seething rage at a lifetime of service and devotion being scorned without hesitation.

“To be clear: I couldn’t give a fuck about your League-in-Exile,” Slipshod stated bluntly, drawing a scowl from the dragoness, and a disappointed frown from the alicorn. It seemed that Twilight wasn’t quite the fan of ‘honesty’ that she’d claimed to be, the changeling noted with a mental smirk, “I don’t care if it burns to the ground after Chrysalis is defeated. Just as long as you bring her down first.

“That’s why I’m willing to help you: you’re the only creatures who have a chance of destroying her. And I’m willing to tell you whatever you want to know to help you do that.”

Finally the star admiral spoke, sneering at the earth pony, “you really expect me to believe that you’d turn your back on your queen, just like that?”

“She turned her back on me first,” he quipped in return, unfazed by her skepticism. It was nothing less than he’d expected, after all. Only a fool would have taken a traitor at their word from the outset. Even Twilight had all but strangled the truth out of him initially.

At this, the dragoness started to regard him more thoughtfully. To say that she was convinced of his sincerity would have been substantially overstating things, but she was certainly looking a lot more receptive to the idea that a creature in his position would be willing to work against his former queen. However, “you can’t be the only changeling who’s ever been in that position. Why haven’t we encountered dissenters like you before?”

“At exactly what point during the vivisection process you subjected them to were they supposed to tell you that part?” Slipshod shot back. He even managed to receive the satisfaction of seeing the dagoness looking at least mildly cowed by the snarky rebuke. The small personal victory achieved, the changeling leaned back in his seat and gave a more complete answer to the star admiral’s question.

“What exactly were any changelings like me who managed to survive longer than a month supposed to do anyway?” he asked, bitterly, “if we tried to get the word out about what was ‘really’ happening with ComSpark, we’d be quietly snuffed out and our ravings easily dismissed as crazed delusions in the face of overwhelming counter-evidence provided by every mainstream media network in the Sphere―all of which are effectively under the complete control of loyal Chrysalis agents.

“If I hadn’t run across Twilight, I’d have kept leading my quiet, simple, little mercenary life with the Coursers. I’d have either died in battle or retired in comfort somewhere, never breathing a word about ‘the truth’ to anycreature.

“I doubt any other capstone changeling ever did anything different either,” he said, shrugging, “but Twilight presented me with a unique opportunity that no other changeling like me has ever had: a real chance at getting back at Chrysalis. Maybe the only chance.”

“He’s certainly no Thorax,” Twilight said with a despondent sigh, “but he’s better than nothing,” she looked to the star admiral, “all I’m asking is for you to hear him out.”

The cobalt dragoness grumbled, looking between the alicorn and the changeling as she weighed her concerns. Finally, she let out a resigned sigh, “fine. Let’s hear what you know.”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 19: Way of the Clans

Twilight stared out the window at the planet hanging in space before her. Somni Patrium. The refuge of the Celestia League-in-Exile. She was informed that it also served as the nominal capital world for Clan Timberwolf, which was the first of the Dragon Clans to be formed, and the clan to which Star Admiral Cinder was a member of, which Dragon Lord Ember ruled directly. The alicorn had been informed that the name had been chosen in the hope of providing a source of inspiration for the members of both the Clan, and the League-in-Exile as a whole.

“Knock a timberwolf down, and they’ll put themselves back together,” the sapphire dragoness had said, “knock the Celestia League down, and we’ll do the same.”

Their trip to the world had accelerated greatly the moment they left the Periphery. As it turned out, the Clans had what amounted to a ‘chain’ of Jump Ships holding station in star systems extending far out into otherwise ‘unmapped’ space. These Jump Ships allowed for the rapid transport of both personnel and information between the Harmony Sphere and the distant worlds held by the Dragon Clans. By moving from one Jump Ship to another in succession, both DropShips had been able to make the thousand-plus lightyear journey in just a matter of days. The Rockhoof itself would be taking the ‘long way’ by making their own week-apart jumps back.

In all, a little more than a month had passed since leaving the Harmony Sphere.

Twilight liked to think that she’d made the most of that time. She’d hosted more Friendship seminars, though she noted that the size of the crowds at the others had been significantly smaller than the first one. The demeanor had been different as well. The alicorn got the impression that they were just there to ‘bask in her presence’, and weren’t really invested in the substance of her lectures. It was disheartening, but she wasn’t inclined to give up on the effort. As long as creatures attended, she would try and convince them of the merits of Friendship, and the values of the real Elements of Harmony.

How the Clans had come by those warped notions, Twilight wasn’t sure. She anticipated finding answers though, and soon. Princess-Regent Flurry Heart and Dragon Lord Ember―along with her consort―were awaiting her down on the planet. Twilight was led to understand that a grand reception had been organized to welcome her back. A ceremony as well would be hosted in the near future to officially end Flurry Heart’s regency and crown Twilight as the Princess of the Celestia League-in-Exile.

A lot of pomp, a lot of circumstance, and a lot of pageantry awaited the purple alicorn down there. But, once all of the political I’s had been dotted and the T’s crossed, they’d be able to get down to the real business of creating a plan to defeat Chrysalis.

That was just the short-term though. Twilight didn’t have the luxury of allowing her thoughts on the future to end there though. She had to take a longer view of things. Unfortunately, that was where her optimism began to sour. Beating Chrysalis was just the first step on a much longer journey of rebuilding the Celestia League. A colossal task under any circumstances, to be sure, but one that the alicorn feared had been made all the more difficult by these warped ‘Elements’ that she’d encountered.

Devotion to your Clan.

Sacrifice for the Cause.

Respect for fellow Trueborns.

Joy in domination.

True fealty to your Khan.

Power over your foes.

Twisted, malignant, interpretations of the Elements that she and her friends had known in their youth. Twilight shuddered to think of what could have happened to bring them about. Perhaps the same factors which had brought about the other changes that had been brought to her attention by Slipshod. The eugenics and breeding programs. The social stratification. The rampant militaristic attitudes of the citizenry.

This society seemed to be the ‘Celestia League’ in name only. It certainly didn’t share any of her old realm’s values or ideals. If she didn’t know any better, Twilight might have thought that Flurry Heart had been replaced by a changeling too.

The door behind her opened, drawing the alicorn’s attention. Star Admiral Cinder stepped inside, snapping to attention and issuing a sharp bow of her head, “Your Majesty, we will be landing in fifteen minutes.”

“Thank you, star admiral,” the purple mare said, her lips stretching into a sad smile. She and her niece hadn’t formed nearly the bond that she’d hoped they’d have by now. The dragoness was very rigid in her demeanor and beliefs, which Twilight supposed was to be expected considering the upbringing and education she’d apparently had. While Cinder respected Twilight as her rightful sovereign, and thus would never consider disobeying her commands, that wasn’t the same thing as agreeing with them.

Slipshod was the biggest source of contention between them by far, but he was far from the only thing that was keeping them at emotional odds with each other. Twilight’s opinion on a lot of the tactics being used by the Clans were not well-received. On the other hoof, Cinder was also too ‘proper’ to actually engage the princess in any actual debate on the matter; instead simply acknowledging the criticisms and adopting any requested changes as best she could.

If Twilight was being honest, she’d have appreciated at least a little push-back from the star admiral. The alicorn fully acknowledged that she’d been ‘out of the loop’ for quite a few centuries. The dragoness had a much firmer grasp of the current realities of the galaxy at large. Twilight wanted to be able to rely on Cinder’s experience and critiques of the alicorn’s orders so that she could tell if she might be changing too much too soon. While the way that the Clans and the Celestia League-in-Exile did things did need to be changed in her opinion, Twilight was well aware that such radical changes needed to be eased into over time.

Bringing Friendship and Harmony to the creatures of Equus―even other ponies―wasn’t exactly something that had happened overnight the first time around, after all.

However, the purple princess didn’t receive any overt pushback. Instead, Cinder merely gave an acknowledgement and then began to execute her commands. The dragoness was, perhaps, too respectful of the chain of command, in Twilight’s opinion.

At least she wouldn’t have to worry about that sort of blanket obedience from Flurry Heart and Ember. In fact, Twilight was a little nervous that she would receive the opposite. They were the ones who had been leading the resistance against Chrysalis since Twilight’s disappearance. What if they felt like they were the best qualified to continue leading it, and relegated her to a figurehead position? Would she really be in a position to insist that they were wrong?

Would she end up inadvertently fracturing the League-in-Exile if she contradicted Flurry Heart? The crew of the Rockhoof, and Cinder in particular, had certainly accepted Twilight as their reigning princess quickly enough, but was the crew of the single WarShip really a viable sample size when trying to judge the response of a whole multi-system star nation? It wasn’t like she had personally interviewed every member of the crew on the DropShip either. For all she knew, the common enlisted creatures would rather have Flurry Heart leading them than this new alicorn who was obviously less than a fan of the values that they’d grown up with.

If ‘growing up’ was even a good term for what most of these creatures went through. While she was relieved to learn that not every creature was a genetically modified and vat-grown super-soldier, the fact remained that a lot of them were. Especially those in positions of power and authority. If Twilight had thought it was a fluke of familial genetics that Star Captain Honeycrisp looked so much like her many-times-great grandsire, she’d have been wrong. Lingering remnants of Big Mac’s genetic material had been specifically selected for when the mare had been―for lack of a more apt term―produced.

Cinder was completely ‘natural’ though. Dragons didn’t seem to reproduce often enough to justify a lot of manipulation. Likely the implication that any dragon suitably tough enough to attain a position of leadership in a Clan wasn’t also capable of producing equally powerful offspring without technological help was also a factor as well. Their egos simply wouldn’t allow for the perceived insult.

Intellectually, Twilight understood the argument for pursuing artificially engineering soldiers and ‘Steed pilots. It didn’t take a mathematical genius to be able to compare the difference in numbers between the Clans and the Harmony Sphere. The Clans needed objectively tougher fighters than anything the mercenaries and professional armies of the Sphere had. On something approaching a four or five-to-one ratio. She understood that.

Which wasn’t the same thing as liking it.

However, more frustrating than the need for eugenics was the emergence of the social stigmas that surrounded it. Twilight considered those far more of an issue in the long term. It was easy enough to simply decide not to vat-grow any more super-soldiers once the war was over and the Celestia League was restored. What would not be as simple a thing to ‘turn off’ would be the cultural perception among the existing engineered population that they were objectively superior to natural ‘freeborn’ citizens; as well as the idolization of Trueborn creatures by said ‘freeborns’. It would be like dealing with the aristocracy all over again, only worse.

Twilight let out a sigh as that thought reminded her that, in addition to the eugenic aspect, she would also have a much more ingrained caste-based stratification to deal with. Again, while the alicorn did acknowledge that fighting creatures were of more significance to their efforts with a war on the horizon, the notion that the ‘warrior caste’ was deserving of subservience from the other castes would have no place in society once the fighting was over. She was hesitant to think of how all of the soldiers and BattleSteed pilots were going to react when peace was restored and the focus started to shift away from them to the ‘less prestigious’ technician and laborer castes that would become far more essential to the rebuilding of the Harmony Sphere.

It was exactly the sort of social upheaval that historically led to civil wars.

The last thing that Twilight wanted in the galaxy was to defeat Chrysalis, only to plunge the Harmony Sphere into even more fighting as a result of trying to revert Clan society to what the League had been like five hundred years ago.

If that happened...would she even be able to bring herself to fight in such a conflict? Would she even have a choice?

...problems for Future Twilight, the alicorn reluctantly decided. Present Twilight had plenty of things to deal with today, rather than worrying about what would happen in the aftermath of a war that they hadn’t even started fighting for real yet.

“Star admiral?”

“Yes, Your Majesty?”

“I assume that quarters have been arranged for me in the capital?” the dragoness nodded, “see to it that Slipshod is taken there once we’ve landed. After the reception, I would like Ember, Spike and Flurry Heart to meet him, and hear what he has to say about Chrysalis and her forces.”

Cinder pursed her lips, hesitating for a moment, “you would like the leadership of the League-in-Exile, to all be present―alone―with a changeling, Your Majesty?”

A sad smile tugged at the alicorn’s lips, “I want them to hear what we’ll all be up against from an intelligence source, star admiral.”

The dragoness didn’t look to be all that convinced. However, she was also not the sort to disobey a command from the pony she regarded as her rightful princess, “I will pass on your message, Your Majesty.”

Her arrival was something of a blur. With weeks to prepare for her arrival instead of less than an hour, a ‘proper’ reception and ceremony was able to be arranged to greet Twilight as she stepped off of the DropShip. Flowing violet banners, cheering crowds, confetti, blaring trumpets, the whole nine yards of royal receptions unlike any that she’d seen...well, ever. Even her coronation hadn’t been so extravagant.

There was a bit more of a military component to it than she might have liked. Rows of guards adorned in ceremonial armor were to be expected, of course, and had long been a traditional element of such processions. Those weren’t what prompted a mental grimace from the purple alicorn. No, what made her uncomfortable were the rows of assault-weight BattleSteeds arranged beyond those ceremonial guards, and the formations of aerofighters that zipped across the sky overhead.

These creatures had been preparing their whole lives―preparing for generations―for an inevitable war. Now their rightful princess was returned, and Twilight sensed that the crowd was of a mind that the war they’d been so eagerly awaiting could finally begin in earnest. She felt like some sort of harbinger, more than a princess.

Those feelings, unfortunately, served to make what should have been a profoundly joyous reunion with her friends and family much more bittersweet than she’d have liked.

The walk wasn’t that long. The Royal Palace had a dedicated landing pad. Less than a hundred yards separated the DropShip’s ramp from the castle entrance, and the trio of figures waiting for her there. Twilight’s eyes instantly misted up as she beheld her friends. Flurry Heart and Ember stood steadfast, side by side, centered in the doorway. Spike’s purple form was slightly offset as he stood next to his wife.

His smile was the most genuine, the purple alicorn noticed, faltering slightly as she continued to approach the trio. They’d known each other for nearly their entire lives. He was her oldest and dearest friend―a sibling even, as far as she was concerned―and had stood by her side through even her most trying times. The Celestia League was, honestly, as much his creation as it was hers, seeing as he’d served as her principal ambassador in her Royal Court and helped to maintain the close relations between Equus and the rest of its member worlds.

Ember’s expression was ‘appropriately’ pleasant for the occasion. However, it was clear that the Dragon Lord was carrying quite a lot of stress on her shoulders. Understandable if what Cinder had explained about the staff and the resistance to her authority by the other clans was even half accurate. The cyan dragoness was likely dealing with a great many issues involving her kind as she tried to hold them together. Twilight just hoped that there was any way that she could help.

Flurry Heart...hers was a ‘smile’ in name only. Even from as far away as she was, Twilight could see that it was nothing more than a facade that the pink alicorn knew she was ‘expected’ to wear for the reception. It would peel off like a mask the first moment she got. Unlike Ember, Twilight had no idea why Flurry Heart would be anything but relieved and overjoyed to find that her aunt was safe and sound. The younger alicorn was certainly likely to be under a great deal of stress too, of course, the purple mare knew, but there was a...hostility hovering just behind her baby blue eyes that tied Twilight’s stomach in a knot just looking at her.

As Twilight climbed the small staircase leading to the dais where the three other stood, Flurry Heart announced to the gathered cheering crowds in a booming Royal Canterlot Voice, “PRESENTING HER ROYAL HIGHNESS, PRINCESS TWILIGHT SPARKLE!”

Somehow the roar of the crowds managed to ratchet up an octave. All three creatures proceeded to bow to Twilight―though Flurry Hearts was noticeably stiffer from the purple mare’s close vantage point. The purple alicorn turned and waved to the throngs of creatures on the landing pad. She wasn’t expected to do much more at this precise moment, she knew. A proper ceremony for the official transfer of authority from Princess-Regent Flurry Heart to herself was scheduled to take place a few days from now. Until then she wasn’t technically ‘in charge’ and these were not her subjects.

Honestly, she was perfectly fine with that. She intended to make full use of these next few days to get herself caught up on the state of the League-in-Exile and review what preparations had been made for the push to defeat Chrysalis.

Perhaps she could also learn what was bothering her niece.

In short order, all three of the bowing creatures straightened up, and the newly formed quartet of rulers entered the palace proper. Only once they were out of sight of the crowd did Twilight allow herself to finally relax her composure and promptly throw her hooves around Spike in a constrictive embrace, “I’m so glad you’re okay!” she didn’t care that her cheeks had become damp from the happy tears that she was shedding. Her oldest and dearest friend was safe.

The purple dragon was caught off guard for only a brief moment by the hug, but quickly returned it with equal vigor, “welcome back, Twilight,” he said with a hardy chuckle, “I’m fine. It wasn’t the first time I’ve had to tangle with a villain,” the purple dragon added with a wry smirk, “and Chrysalis does a terrible impression of you.”

Twilight relaxed her hold on the dragon, pulling back a bit so that she could look him in the eye, her expression creased with concern, “how did nopony notice I wasn’t, well, me long enough for Chrysalis to get away with it?”

Spike sighed, shaking his head with a rueful expression, “you―she―didn’t return to Equus immediately after the meeting with Selena,” he informed her, “said she had a lot to take care of. Which, to be fair, she―you―did,” he rolled his eyes, “Cozy Glow was working overtime and little rebellions were popping up all over the place. It was completely believable that you needed to stay out there and meet with them―I was doing the same thing!

“The whole of the Ministry of Friendship was working overtime trying to keep systems from jumping ship. It was years before ‘you’ came back to Canterlot. By then, Chrysalis had replaced most of the senior staff and her advisors with changelings.

“I knew ‘something’ was off right away, but it didn’t click for me that you’d been replaced by Chrysalis until it was basically too late to stop her,” he flashed her an apologetic look, implying that he saw some part of their inability to stop the changeling queen as being his fault, “it was all I could do to smuggle out as many of our forces as I did. Not nearly as many as I’d have liked,” he added ruefully, “but I didn’t want to risk taking anypony with us that Chrysalis might have already replaced.”

The dragon paused, glancing briefly at Flurry Heart―who was pretending that their conversation wasn’t even happening, “the other princesses agreed to stay behind and keep Chrysalis distracted while I took Flurry Heart and nearly half the fleet on a ‘Friendship Tour’ of the galaxy.

“I can only imagine how pissed off Chrysalis was when she learned that we’d left the Harmony Sphere entirely.”

“Oh, Spike…” Twilight caught the dragon up in another tight hug, “I’m so sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault Twilight,” he assured her, patting her back with a clawed hand. Both looked over upon hearing a rather impolite sound that had been poorly contained by the pink alicorn standing nearby, who still wasn’t looking in their direction.

Twilight opened her mouth to say something to her, but then closed it, eyeing the palace guards standing unobtrusively in the corners of the room. She got the feeling that, whatever conversation the two of them would eventually have, would be best reserved for a more private setting. The Royal Guard were certainly properly discrete, but Flurry Heart was entitled to the courtesy of not having anypony overhear what she apparently had to say about Twilight.

Instead, the purple alicorn turned her attention to the Dragon Lord, “and it’s good to see you too, Ember,” no hugs were exchanged between them, but that wasn’t due to any lack of fondness that the pair of rulers shared for each other. Ember simply wasn’t the ‘hugging’ type. Twilight smirked and eyed the pair of dragons, “though I am a little upset that I missed out on the wedding…”

The Dragon Lord and her consort exchanged mildly embarrassed looks before the cyan dragoness cleared her throat and responded, “yeah, well, if we’d known that you were going to be replaced by a bug monster, I suppose we could have bumped the date up a bit.”

“And exactly how long after the ceremony did Cinder come along?” Twilight eyed the pair mischievously.

Spike cleared his throat this time as Ember blushed, “there...might have been some overlap.”

“Scandalous! I love it!” Twilight grinned, relishing the moment of frivolity with her friends for all that she could. In the back of her mind she knew that this event would soon be overshadowed by the realities of the serious threat they faced for the fate of the Harmony Sphere. But, right now, in this moment, she got to share just the tiniest iota of joy with her closest friends.

She needed that.

“Well, I just want you to know that I think the two of you made pretty good parents,” the purple alicorn informed them, “Cinder―excuse me―Star Admiral Cinder, seems like a skilled leader and I look forward to working with her more in the future.”

“We’re certainly proud of her,” Spike nodded, grinning at his mate, who merely rolled her eyes and smirked. Her consort chuckled.

Now Twilight was forced to look in the direction of the other alicorn, and she felt her mirth begin to dwindle. She’d wanted their reunion to be just as joyous as hers and Spike’s had been. Twilight liked to think that she and her niece had had a very close relationship growing up. They’d been more like siblings in their later centuries. After all, when you lived for thousands of years, a difference in age of a couple decades hardly even registered.

For the briefest of moments, the purple alicorn’s analytical mind pondered whether her time spent in suspended animation ‘counted’, and if that meant that Flurry Heart was, in fact, now her elder by the better part of five centuries?

Of course, this was not the proper time for philosophical musings. Now was the time for consolation for a mare whose mother was the captive of one of the greatest threats that ponykind had ever know, “Flurry Heart,” Twilight began hesitantly, not certain yet how the pink alicorn was going to react given her abrasive demeanor thus far, “I am so sorry about what happened to Cadence. We’ll get her back, safe and sound, I promise.”

The other alicorn finally looked in Twilight’s direction, whipping her head towards the purple mare. The hard expression and icy glare actually caused Twilight to take a half step back from the princess-regent. That look hurt the purple alicorn more than she felt any possible collection of words could have. It was just so completely full of loathing and hostility. Twilight wasn’t confident that, even knowing everything that Chrysalis had been responsible for these last five hundred years, that she could have mustered up such intense feelings of negativity towards the changeling queen if they ever came face-to-face.

“Flur―I…” the purple alicorn stuttered briefly before finally opting for silence. The pair of dragons exchanged grimaces behind her.

Yes, it seemed that the two of them did indeed need to have a long―private―conversation. Twilight suspected that there were going to be more than a few unkind words said.

Twilight stepped back from the other alicorn and cleared her throat, casting the three of them a more general look, “I don’t know how much you’ve been told yet, but there was a changeling on the mercenary DropShip that found me,” judging from the lack of utter surprise on all of their faces, it was clear that this wasn’t news to them, “his name is Slipshod, and he wants to help us take down Chrysalis,” there were skeptical looks exchanged between Ember and Flurry Heart. However, Spike looked a bit more receptive to the concept, and Twilight focused her gaze on him, “I wouldn’t exactly say he’s anything like Thorax, but I do believe him.

“I’d like you to hear what he has to say about Chrysalis, as well as any suggestions that he might have about the invasion plans you have.”

Flurry Heart finally spoke up, “you want to give a changeling access to our invasion plans?” she scoffed, “your brain must still be in suspended animation if you think for a moment that I’m letting that happen. That changeling isn’t going anywhere but straight to an interrogation cell.”

“No,” Twilight snapped almost on reflex, drawing surprised looks from all three of the others, “you’re not torturing him,” she continued on in a very carefully controlled tone, mindful of the guards standing at the periphery of the room, “if you want to learn what he knows, you’re going to have to talk with him. Properly.”

She flashed a disappointed look in Spike’s direction as she continued to address all three of them, “this torturing business? It stops. Now. That’s not what the Celestia League was about―it’s not what we’re about,” she stressed, “at least, I didn’t think so.”

Spike at least had the decency to look ashamed. The Dragon Lord as well seemed to be a little uncomfortable regarding the subject, though she did still defend the position, “we’ve had to compromise on a few things over the years to have a chance at winning this thing, Twilight,” she told the purple alicorn, “we’re not proud of what we’ve had to do, but we believe that it’s more important that we defeat Chrysalis.

“We can get things back to the way they ‘should’ be once she’s out of the picture,” Ember assured the purple mare.

“It’s not like it’s something we started doing overnight, Twilight,” Spike chimed in, looking uneasily at the alicorn. He clearly regretted a great many of the decisions that he’d made over the centuries; but the jury was still out with Twilight whether that forgave anything outright, “in the beginning, we were doing things the ‘League Way’. No torture. No...disposals,” he winced as he groped for the way that he’d wanted to phrase what Twilight still could only think of as outright murder. The purple dragon did sound like he recognized the lack of any practical distinction though.

Again, the alicorn wasn’t positive that really mattered.

“The thing was,” Spike went on, “that it was kind of a futile effort with changeling prisoners. Reformed or unreformed, changelings need love to survive. Love for changelings was in pretty short supply after we left the Harmony Sphere and saw what they were doing to the creatures still in it. I don’t think a single captive ever made it to a year in custody before they just...starved to death.

“It also meant that merely questioning them wasn’t any good. There wasn’t really anything that we could offer them in exchange for cooperating. They knew they were dying, and they knew that we couldn’t let them go back to the Sphere. So they just sort of...starved to death in silence.”

Spike closed his eyes, as though reliving the memories of watching countless changeling prisoners whither and waste away until finally succumbing to death, knowing that there was nothing that he could do to help them that wouldn’t endanger the last remaining fragment of hope left to defeat Chrysalis. Twilight tried to imagine such a thing herself, and very quickly realized that she wouldn’t have been able to endure it. She knew that she’d have caved in with their first prisoner, releasing them rather than sentencing them to die of starvation.

At least, the Twilight from five hundred years ago would have done that. The Twilight forged by watching Equus fall. The Twilight who’d been forced to flee the Sphere with a smattering of forces in the fleeting hope of being able to return one day and save everycreature. The Twilight who’d been through everything that Spike had…

...The alicorn suspected that fire-forged Twilight might have made...other choices.

She didn’t like that thought.

“The vast majority never even made it back here,” the dragon continued soberly, “it takes months to get personnel to and from most of the deeper parts of the Harmony Sphere. Only a few changelings ever made it back here alive. Barely. They never lasted long.

“Catching them alive, just to have them slowly die in custody, was hardly productive,” he let out a disdainful snort, “it was debatably ‘kinder’ to put out orders for changelings to be executed instead of captured,” he said ruefully, shooting a look at the properly shocked alicorn. Twilight wanted to admonish the notion, but a deep, dark, part of her recognized the logic in such a decision. Forcing a changeling to endure starvation was hardly a very noble thing to do, wasn’t it?

“It didn’t start out as torture,” Spike continued, “just...inconveniences. Leaving the lights on or playing loud flugelhorn music constantly. Making their cells colder. Things to irritate them, that we’d stop if they cooperated.

“But that didn’t work very well, really. It was pretty obvious that all we were doing was offering to let them die in agony slightly more comfortably. Our interrogators didn’t make a lot of headway like that. Actually, we started running into some other problems.”

“What kind of ‘problems’?” Twilight asked.

It was Ember who answered, “the prisoners began earning the trust of their jailors,” she said bitterly, noting the shocked look on the purple mare’s face and nodding, “changelings are empaths. They started reading the emotional states of the creatures interrogating them and gaining their sympathy.

“There was a breakout. A changeling nearly got a message back to Chrysalis.”

“It was just too close,” Spike said, shaking his head, “we couldn’t risk something like that happening again. From that day on, interrogations were carried out exclusively by...well, psychopaths,” the dragon flashed Twilight a wan smile.

“Excuse me, did you say psychopaths are in charge of questioning our prisoners?! Creatures genuinely incapable of compassion? You’re not treating them, you’re employing them?”

The revelation was truly shocking to the alicorn princess, for several reasons. First and foremost was the idea that creatures who were physically incapable of experiencing and nurturing meaningful friendships weren’t receiving the treatment for their condition that was readily available, and had been for millenia. It used to be that a simple zap with a Reform Spell was all that was needed to ensure that any citizen could be a friendly and productive member of society.

Yet, to find out too that such creatures were having their conditions exploited like this…

Twilight instantly understood why the decision had been made. A psychopath couldn’t be emotionally manipulated. More than that, they’d have been the next best thing to impossible to read for a changeling. They also wouldn’t be able to be fed off of. They represented both the best, and the worst type of creature to use to interrogate a changeling. Impervious to their manipulations, while also a metaphorical ‘empty bowl’ that a changeling would probably not even be able to forcefully draw emotions out of for sustenance.

“They were immune to the changelings,” Spike said, both echoing and confirming Twilight’s internal musings. Though he became even more uncomfortable as he added, “...and they didn’t hesitate to...erm, ‘go the distance’ during interrogations.”

The purple alicorn’s expression instantly hardened once more, recalling the state that she’d found Slipshod in. She wasn’t about to let Spike get away with being evasive about it this time though, “vivisect the prisoners, you mean,” she corrected him, coolly. The dragon winced, looking away in shame.

“How could you? How could any of you?” Twilight’s amethyst eyes darted away from Spike, landing briefly on both Ember and Flurry Heart.

It was the younger alicorn who didn’t appear to be cowed though, meeting her aunt’s eyes with her own defiant glare, “trust me, it got a lot easier at around the time Chrysalis burned down the tenth world with a fabricated war. Or was it the hundredth world?

“I don’t really remember anymore. You sort of just...stop counting them once the bodies pile up past a certain point,” she scoffed with what was most likely not feigned indifference, “I lost all sympathy for changelings after the first trillion or so deaths they caused.

“It didn’t take them as long as you might think to reach that number either.”

Twilight found it difficult to put into words what she was feeling for her niece right now. She was disappointed, to be sure, that a mare who had once been so full of love and compassion―a near perfect reflection of her mother―become twisted into the spiteful alicorn standing here today, lacking even a glimmer of mercy. She’d known many creatures who forsook their nobler natures during times of strife. Intellectually, Twilight knew it could happen. Yet, to see it in the eyes of one that she’d known when they were a true innocent―a foal―it caused her physical pain.

And the purple mare despaired at the thought that she might have turned out this way had she been forced to take the ‘long way around’ to get to this point in time, like all the others had. Incremental sacrifices, year by year, decade by decade, until the sheer gravity of the change couldn’t even be recognized for what it was anymore.

Applejack’s convoluted chore list, but with a body count attached to it.

Twilight shook her head sadly, “we can’t lose sight of who and what we stand for,” she insisted, “if we just compromise our ideals whenever it suits us, then they’re not really ‘ideals’, are they? It’s easy to stand for something when times are good. What truly matters, and what makes a principle a ‘principle’, is when you hold fast to it even when things aren’t going so good.”

The purple alicorn sighed, “the torture has to stop,” she said again, leaving little doubt of her unwavering position on the matter, “prisoners will be treated with dignity.

“And these warped ‘Elements’,” she continued, “the ‘devotion’, ‘sacrifice’, and ‘power’ stuff? That has to end too. That’s not Harmony. It’s not Friendship,” Twilight glanced between the three of them, her expression almost pleading as she sought understanding, “I don’t understand how the three of you let things get this way, but you have to see how wrong it is, don’t you?”

Again, the dragons shared an uncomfortable look, Ember speaking for them, “the Dragon Clans needed a more ‘palatable’ version of the Elements,” she explained, frowning. Obviously, she didn’t seem to be any more pleased with the change than Twilight was, “I tried to keep them as close to the originals as I could, but…” she shook her head, “it hasn’t been easy,” another uncomfortable look, “there have been...issues.”

“Cinder mentioned that your staff has been acting―?” Twilight prompted.

Ember coughed very loudly now, completely drowning out what the purple alicorn was saying, “―fine. It’s been acting perfectly fine,” she stated firmly, casting a hard gaze at the purple mare for several seconds before her eyes darted briefly to the nearby guards. Clearly, the Dragon Lord didn’t trust them to be nearly as circumspect as Twilight did.

“You know what?” Spike piped up now, “I’m hungry. Anypony else hungry? Yeah, you’re all hungry, I bet. And tired,” he hurriedly went on, “long trip. Hungry and tired. All of us. Let’s get you to your room, Twilight. Right this way,” he said, waving a clawed hand towards one of the corridors, his teeth showing through a forced grin.

Only when the door closed on Twilight’s luxurious quarters did Spike seem to finally relax. Ember too looked a little more relieved to be out of earshot of other creatures. Flurry Heart, however, didn’t become any less tense. The pink alicorn simply took herself to the far side of the parlor room that they were in and made herself comfortable on a divan, acting completely uninterested in anything that the other three were talking about. This was likely a topic that she was well-versed in anyway.

Twilight, however, was quite curious to hear what was going on with Ember’s staff, “it’s not ‘fine’, is it?” she prompted.

“No,” the Dragon Lord conceded gruffly, “it’s not. It hasn’t been for a while now.”

“How long?”

Ember fidgeted uncomfortably for several seconds, exchangeling a glance with Spike, who nodded and encouraged her to share. The cyan dragoness finally sighed and slumped down into a well-padded chair of her own, “I started noticing that it was losing a bit of its ‘oomph!’ a few decades after becoming the Dragon Lord.”

Twilight’s jaw dropped open in stark surprise, “that long ago?! And you never said anything?”

The dragoness’ cheeks burned with embarrassment, “of course I didn’t!” she snapped, “do you know how long I’d have been in charge after admitting that the Staff of the Dragon Lord―an artifact that has existed for almost as long as dragon society itself―started losing its powers almost the moment I got it? The other dragons would have revolted! They’d have said it was a sign that I wasn’t supposed to be the Dragon Lord at all, and,” she stressed, casting a pointed look in Twilight’s direction, “that friendship with ponies was a mistake.

“The fledgling alliance between our races would have died in its egg,” she concluded bitterly.

Twilight let out a deep sigh as she digested the new information. It seemed that Ember and Spike hadn’t been completely straightforward with their own daughter about the seriousness of the problem either, “almost immediately…” she repeated, rubbing the back of her head. Ember merely nodded her confirmation.

“I talked to Starlight about it,” the Dragon Lord continued, “her theory was that the magic in the staff and the Magic of Friendship were incompatible.”

Twilight frowned now, “wait, you talked to Starlight about it, but you didn’t mention it to me?”

Ember cleared her throat and mumbled something under her breath that the purple alicorn hadn’t quite been able to hear, “what?” Again the cyan dragoness made a series of noises. Spike chortled, but quickly covered his reaction with a more neutral expression upon receiving a glare from his mate, “I still couldn’t quite hear you?” Twilight prompted again.

“I said: I thought she was you!” the Dragon Lord snapped irritably, this time more than loud enough to be easily heard by the alicorn. Spike was laughing a lot louder too. He received a smack on his head with the staff for his trouble, but the reprimand only encouraged him to half-heartedly suppress his mirth, and not stop it altogether.

“Seriously?” Twilight’s tone was incredulous.

“Hey! I’ve got pony-face-blindness,” the dragoness insisted. The volume of Spike’s laughter increased slightly.

The purple alicorn’s features scrunched up in confusion, “...but I have wings,” she pointed out, extending one to serve as an example, “and at the time, I’d have been about three times her size…” she added, gesturing with a hoof at her stature, which was much larger than that of a typical pony, “...and sitting on the throne in Canterlot!”

“But you had similar faces...and you were both ponies,” Ember insisted defiantly, “hence: ‘pony face blindness’!” Twilight wasn’t certain that that first part was entirely accurate, but neither did she feel that she was going to make much more headway on this specific topic, so she let the matter slide.

The Dragon Lord’s consort finally managed to sober himself up enough to talk, though his eyes were still dancing with barely contained amusement, “the way Starlight explained it, since the staff’s magic was tuned to dragons, and our inner magic is based on domination, and power, and control, and stuff like that―you know: dragony things―then when Ember started relying on Friendship magic, the staff wasn’t getting passively recharged the way it used to.

“Eventually, it ran out of juice and the only way to get it powered up again would have been if Ember started behaving and ruling more like her father had. Not that Torch was a bad Dragon Lord,” he hastily amended, looking briefly to Ember, who offered up another shrug and an eye roll, not seeming to feel disparaged by Spike’s comments on her father. Then the purple dragon looked back in Twilight’s direction, “but it’s safe to say he wasn’t very ‘friendship-oriented’.

“The result, though, is that the staff can’t control other dragons anymore. So, if the other Clans decide they want to, say…” Spike started to fidget again, looking a little more nervously at the purple alicorn, mumbling the next portion in a bit of a rush that Twilight almost had too much trouble understanding, “plundertheHarmonySphereandtakeeverythingforthemselves,” he coughed, “well, there’s nothing that Ember could do to actually stop them from doing just that,” he finished with a helpless shrug.

Twilight blinked as she parsed out the rushed portion of what the dragon had just said, “they want to what?” she glanced between both dragons for confirmation that she’d heard him right.

Ember nodding her head reluctantly, grimacing, “the Khans are getting restless,” she informed Twilight, “they’re seeing all of the fighting and destruction going on in the Harmony Sphere and are basically of the opinion that, if the other creatures are just going to break all of their own stuff anyway, then us dragons might as well take it for ourselves. Add it to our hoards. Grow ourselves big and powerful again like it was back when my father was in charge.”

“It was a real uphill battle early on convincing dragons to not focus on hoarding,” Spike added, “the feelings of power―and the actual power―that come with Greed-Induced Bigness are very enticing to us dragons. It’s like the best ‘high’ a dragon could possibly experience.

“Of all the Elements, generosity was the hardest to get dragons to adopt. But we did,” he grinned now, sharing a proud look with Ember, “in the end, we got dragons to share and spread out their hoards. Keeping all of us about the same size.

“But now…” he cringed and shook his head, “well, it’s getting a lot harder to keep the other dragons convinced that we shouldn’t just straight up pillage the Sphere. It’s pretty hard for a dragon to just sit back and watch all those valuables get destroyed over and over again when we ‘know’ they’d be ‘safer’ with us.”

“I’ve basically been keeping them from jumping the gun by promising them some pretty generous rewards once we defeat Chrysalis,” Ember said in an unhappy tone, seeming to recognize that it was hardly an ideal compromise.

“What kind of ‘rewards’?” Twilight found herself experiencing more than a little trepidation as she asked the question.

“I hope you don’t mind passing out a few dozen regional governorships once the dust settles.”

The alicorn grimaced. It wasn’t that she had anything against dragons, of course. Broadly speaking, they were quite tough and resourceful. Both qualities that leaders benefited from. However, they did tend to lack empathy, which was another very useful trait to have in such a position of authority. The thought of having to deal with the sorts of fallout one could expect from ornery dragons ruling over collections of systems for however hundreds of years they ended up wanting to retain those positions didn’t exactly fill Twilight with a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings.

Still, “well, it’s not like they won’t have earned them,” she acknowledged with a wan smirk. She had little doubt that the Dragon Clans would be doing the bulk of the fighting in their war against Chrysalis. Giving the Dragons custody of the systems that they liberated from the changelings was hardly an unfair compensation. As long as they respected the laws and the decrees coming out of Equus, she supposed that she could live with it.

“Glad to hear it,” the Dragon Lord nodded, “I’ll keep doing what I can to keep the other Clans in line but…” she grunted in frustration, “let’s just say that the sooner we kick this thing off, the more likely they’ll be to stay ‘on task’, alright?”

“I understand. Thank you―both of you―for everything you’ve done,” Twilight said, smiling broadly at the pair of dragons, “it means a lot to me. I know that it couldn’t have been easy, and I can’t even imagine the challenges you’ve had to face holding everycreature together like you have―all of you,” she amended, casting an eye in Flurry Heart’s direction as well, “and while there may have been some missteps along the way, I―”

That seemed to be all the criticism that the princess-regent was willing to tolerate for the day. Twilight and the pair of dragons found their attention diverted towards the divan where Flurry Heart had been lounging as a teacup that she’d been drinking from was hurled to the ground, shattering to pieces.

The soft pink alicorn was standing erect now, her baby blue eyes narrowed fiercely at Twilight. The corner of her lip curling up in a derisive sneer, “oh, do you have a problem with how I’ve been trying to clean up the mess you left me?” the purple mare winced, but wasn’t given an opportunity to respond yet, “am I not handling things the way you would have?

“I know!” the princess-regent’s face brightened with a feigned revelation. Both dragons exchanged stunned expressions, but wisely chose not to intervene, “how about I sit on my flank for a thousand years, ignoring the problem completely, and then drop off the face of the fucking galaxy and let somepony else figure out how to deal with it!

“That’s how you’d have done it, right?” the faux smile from earlier was gone now, replaced completely by a very genuine expression of utter contempt that almost caused Twilight physical pain to see directed at her by her niece.

“One. Thousand. Years,” Flurry Heart growled through tightly gritted teeth as she marched closer to the purple alicorn, “that’s how long you had to deal with them. A whole millenia to figure out what to do with Chrysalis, Cozy Glow, and Tirek. But did you? No. Of course not.

“You were too busy building your precious little love letter to Celestia~” she sing-songed in a mockingly sweet tone, “a thousand years old, and still pining for that hag’s approval,” the younger alicorn sneered at her aunt, “I can’t believe how many trillions of creatures had to suffer because of your misplaced mommy-issues.”

“Flurry, I―” Twilight tried to finally get a word in edgewise, but the princess-regent wasn’t having it yet, it seemed.

“Princess-Regent Flurry Heart to you!” she snapped sharply, glaring at the purple mare, “you can’t even conceive of everything I’ve had to do to keep the resistance alive; but let me assure you that I earned my title.

“Not that you left me any choice in the matter,” the pink mare continued, her words softening into a much more somber tone, “you threw me right into the deep end, leaving me to sink―and take everypony else in the galaxy with me―or swim, and managed to somehow save us all.

She snorted, “and now, just as we’re poised to start making a push into the Sphere, here you appear. Ready to take all the credit and resume your position as though you didn’t miss a beat,” her eyes narrowed at that purple alicorn, “and how much of this little ‘dark chapter’ are you going to let stay in the history books, hm? In a thousand years, what are you going to let the creatures of the League remember about what I did to keep the light of hope alive?”

Twilight jerked in stark surprise, “Flurry, I would never hide the truth―”

“Princess-Regent,” she snarled again, cutting off the elder mare, “and don’t you fucking start with that bullshit. How many books do you think I found talking about those three and how to defeat them, hmm?

“Cozy Glow was a fucking footnote in the history texts that I could find, and she was arguably the worst of them all!”

This revelation stunned Twilight. Seeing her obvious surprise prompted yet another mirthless laugh from the pink alicorn, “oh, yes indeed. You’d think that it would be the twenty-meter tall centaur leveling whole planets, or the queen of a hoard of shape-shifting psychovores that were the biggest threats, but no. No, the pony who did the most damage to the League was that pink midget of a pegasus.

“For decades after Tirek was defeated, she was traipsing around the galaxy putting bugs in the ear of every regional governor that would give her the time of day. The New Lunar Empire seceding? That was all her doing. As was the formation of every major government that exists in the Sphere today. The Periphery and its multitude of nations was her doing too. Even without Chrysalis slipping her agents in everywhere, the League would have fractured.

“The only silver lining was that the little turd was mortal,” the alicorn spat, “but she’d done her damage.

“All the while, ‘you’―meaning Chrysalis―just had to sit back and let it all happen. Though, I’d certainly argue that the real you was just as responsible as she was.”

Flurry Heart’s cold gaze was riveted to the purple alicorn now, “why didn’t you break that damn statue the minute it was made?”

Twilight didn’t answer immediately, not entirely sure if she was actually being given an opportunity to answer this time. However, the princess-regent did indeed seem willing to let the other alicorn get a word in this time, so she swallowed and tried her best to keep her voice steady. That tirade had shaken her a lot more than she would have thought, “killing them would have been wrong,” she insisted mekely.

“Better to let them return and be responsible for the deaths of countless trillions! How noble of you...” Flurry Heart concluded mockingly.

Twilight shook her head, “no, that wasn’t it at all. They deserved a chance to redeem themselves. Like Discord. Like Starlight. Like―”

“And when exactly was it that you were going to get around to ‘redeeming’ them, hmm?” the punk mare cut in with a snarl, “because you missed your chance with two of them. Tirek and Cozy are dead. Not a single good deed between them.

“And if you think―for even a second―that Chrysalis is getting anything other than a bullet in her head for everything’s she’s done to the creatures of this galaxy, you’re fucking delusional,” she spat, glaring daggers at the purple mare.

Twilight’s mouth moved wordlessly for several seconds. Eventually, all she managed to get out was a rather anemic, “I’m sorry.”

Flurry Heart snorted, “of course you are,” she said contemptuously, “you want to prove it? Abdicate.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” the pink alicorn said with a sneer, “tomorrow morning. Make an announcement that you thought it over, looked at everything that I’ve accomplished since you went missing, and decided that you wouldn’t be able to do a better job, so you’re officially stepping down and designating me as your successor to the throne.”

“Flurry Heart, maybe we should take a moment and all just―” Spike ventured, but the pink mare was obviously having none of it.

She dismissed his words with a flick of her wing, leering back at him, “princess. Regent,” she growled at the purple dragon, who went immediately silent, “and if I want the opinion of a consort, I’d get one of my own,” she then snapped her eyes to Ember to see if the Dragon Lord had any desire to object to how the alicorn was speaking to her mate. The dragoness simply stared back levely, but said nothing. Flurry Heart turned back to the purple mare again.

“If you’re really sorry, you’ll step down and let me finish what you left me to start,” she repeated coldly, “you’ll do what’s right for my subjects,” Twilight winced at that line, but offered no rebuke of the assertion, “I’ll leave you to think it over. I expect you to make the right decision.

“I’ll even do you the courtesy of not having to publicly admit that everything that went wrong is entirely your fault,” Flurry Heart added, finally turning and heading for the exit, presumably to attend to her other duties for the day. She did have a princedom to rule, after all, “consider that my ‘farewell’ gift to you.”

She paused at the door and looked back over her shoulder, a sneer marring her lips, “oh, and before I forget: I’ll let you have your little pet changeling in here for whatever it is you want to do with it,” her wing waved around Twilight’s suite, “but if you bring it anywhere near me, I’ll kill it myself.”

Flurry Heart finally left, slamming the door behind her.

Twilight’s hind end slumped to the floor, the purple mare’s ashen face staring at the closed door that Flurry Heart had left through. That reunion hadn’t gone at all like she’d thought it would―like she’d hoped it would. She was simply stunned at the way the pink alicorn had reacted. The contempt, the visceral hatred...it wasn’t anything like the Flurry Heart that she’d known just a year ago, from her perspective.

“What happened to her?” she asked in a trembling voice that betrayed exactly how close she was to tears.

“She lost her mother, her empire, and her subjects, all in a single day,” Spike answered soberly, “and she’s been watching it all burn ever since.”

Unlike Flurry Heart, there was no audible malice in the purple dragon’s words, but they still struck Twilight like a buck to the gut. She’d lost those things as well, she realized, but it had been different. For Twilight, she’d effectively just ‘woken up’ one day to find they’d been taken. And they’d been lost largely due to her own past failings.

Flurry Heart had watched it happen in real time. She’d suffered through those events as they unfolded.

Worse, perhaps, was that she knew that all that suffering hadn’t been because of any mistakes that she’d made herself, but had been the result of another’s fuck ups. Flurry Heart had a target for her ire.

Twilight found herself hard pressed to fault her.

“I can try and talk to her if you’d like?” Ember offered, “I’ve learned how to deal with her over the years,” the Dragon Lord grimaced, “I mean, I haven’t seen her quite like this before, but I can probably―”

“No,” Twilight said softly, shaking her head, “I appreciate the offer but, no,” she affirmed. The purple mare took a deep, ragged, breath and let it out slowly, “she...may be right,” the admission was like a dagger twisting in her gut, “my assuming the throne would be a dramatic change in leadership on the eve of a major military campaign. Morale would suffer. Five hundred years of habits can’t be shaken off quickly.

“It’s best if Flurry Heart retains the throne,” Spike quirked a brow at Twilight’s assertion, her tone suggesting that she was trying to convince herself of the statement as much as the pair of dragons, “she’s held things together for this long. She can manage,” the purple alicorn was nodding her head a little too quickly as she took in another steadying breath.

“Give her all the support she needs,” Twilight continued, looking to the others, “both of you. I’ll...try and find another way to be useful,” she didn’t know what way that was yet, but she’d find something.

“Swank,” Slipshod remarked upon finally being shown into the quarters he’d been informed he would be staying in while at the Palace. He’d honestly feared the worst when nearly half a day passed between the time that the DropShip had landed and the time when he’d finally been ushered off of it. He’d been wondering if they hadn’t been physically digging a new pit beneath the dungeon to throw him into.

He certainly wouldn’t have dared to expect this level of opulence. If the gold-trimmed vaulted ceilings and polish marble floors, and gargantuan tapestries, that comprised these chambers were where they were stashing their changeling ‘prisoner’, then Slipshod could only imagine where Twilight had ended up―

“Ah, you’re finally here.”

The changeling jerked with a start at the unexpected sound of the purple alicorn’s voice coming from a nearby doorway. He wheeled around and gawked at Twilight, “what are you doing here?”

“...it’s my room,” the princess stated flatly, quirking an eyebrow. Upon seeing the confusing coloring the stallion’s face, she explained further, “you’re going to be staying here because―as much as it pains me to admit it―I’m not completely convinced that you won’t wind up dead if you stayed anywhere else,” the resignation in the alicorn’s voice was impossible to miss, “there are a half dozen guest rooms; so just pick one,” she turned around and slipped back through the doorway, “then join me and Cinder in the library.”

The changeling blinked in mild shock, “...this suite has its own library?” then another thought occurred to him, “wait; Cinder?”

Seeing as how he had no personal effects to unpack, Slipshod felt that picking out a room to designate for his exclusive use was a bit excessive. He might as well sleep on one of the dozen or so couches in this place for all it mattered. Strictly speaking, the stallion was reasonably certain that the lumpiest divan in this suite would be exponentially more comfortable than his bunk on the Galloway. Even the marble floors of this place were feeling pretty inviting, come to think of it…

The changeling hurriedly trotted after the alicorn, not convinced that he’d have been able to locate the library without getting lost once or twice during the attempt. Just as Twilight had indicated, the cobalt-blue dragoness was already there, leaning over a large wooden table, a glass of amber liquid held in one clawed hand. Slipshod suspected that the star admiral was likely off-duty, and not just because of the liquor. Her uniform had been ditched for a pink satin robe. Strangely, the earth pony found himself feeling a little uncomfortable, a sensation which only increased in intensity when he finally noticed that Twilight was ‘dressed down’ in a shimmering white cotton robe of her own.

“I feel very overdressed,” the stallion murmured, clearing his throat.

The purple alicorn seemed to miss a lot of the substance of what he’d said and simply flicked out a dismissive wing as she approached the same table that the dragoness was hunched over, “then feel free to strip down. Heck, revert your form for all I care,” her horn started glowing and a glass of red wine floated from across the room to her lips, where she took a generous sip before letting the remainder continue to hover nearby at the ready. A quick glance at the origin of the glass by the stallion, and the presence of the very nearly empty pair of wine bottles, suggested that this was far from the alicorn’s first sip of the evening.

Slipshod mulled over the purple princess’ offer for a few seconds, but ultimately shook his head, “I...shouldn’t,” then he cleared his throat and shook his head briefly to refocus his thoughts, “so what are you two finding so interesting here...oh,” the stallion didn’t even try to hide his surprise at what was on the table: a pile of maps and operations outlines.

These were the plans for the Clans’ invasion of the Harmony Sphere.

“Cinder’s helping to walk me through the planned operation to stop Chrysalis,” Twilight inclined her head briefly in the direction of the star admiral.

The dragoness shrugged and waved her claws at the table’s contents, “not that there’s anything super complicated about it,” she admitted, “our available numbers limit our options somewhat.

“We can’t conduct anything approaching a total invasion of the Harmony Sphere,” the star admiral explained, “we’ll never have the numbers for that; so an ‘invade and annex’ strategy is right out. We have to drive hard, right to the heart of the Sphere: Equus,” Cinder thrust her empty hand forward in a sharp stabbing motion, “it’ll be a slog, to be sure,” she acknowledged, “and securing only a narrow corridor for our advance means that our supply lines will be extremely vulnerable,” it was clear from her tone that she wasn’t a huge fan of that idea either, “but we can’t afford to divide our forces if we want to make sure we have the firepower necessary to overwhelm whatever Chrysalis has waiting for us in the Faust System...”

The dragoness let the last sentence hang in the air casting her gaze in the changeling’s direction, inviting him to contribute to the conversation. Slipshod’s lips cocked a wry smirk. “She’s got a massive WarShip fleet. The better part of a dozen battleships and a suitable complement of smaller hulls. They're anchored in orbit of the moon. Any run at Equus itself will take you right into them.”

Cinder grimaced and took a deep swallow of her scotch, “yeah...figured as much,” the ice in her glass clinked lightly as she started to swirl the contents, deep in thought. Finally she sighed, “we can probably do it. Assuming we don’t lose much on the way in,” a deeper frown now as her eyes scanned the maps and did a quick tally of the systems between Faust and the edge of the Sphere from where the Clans would make their start, “it’s going to tie up enough forces just keeping our supply lines open,” she sneered.

Slipshod looked at the maps now as well, and could clearly see what was gnawing at the dragoness. The Harmony Sphere was a vast realm, containing thousands of systems. Even a best time approach from the edge to Faust at its center would take scores of jumps. They couldn’t simply rush their goal, of course. An invasion of Equus would take thousands of DropShips and millions of soldiers. Those ships and creatures would need fuel and food respectively. Far more than a fleet could carry on its own.

They’d need to have supplies shipped in from the Clan systems on a near-constant rotation. Those convoys of food, fuel, and munitions, would be vital to the invasion. Losing even one group of cargo ships could doom the whole thing if it came at the wrong time. So each system they took would need to be fortified and defended. That would deplete their reserves of soldiers and ships. Not to mention taking precious time to accomplish. Time that Chrysalis would use to have ComSpark and the Mercenary Review Board bring in Sphere forces from anywhere they could get them.

The Clan’s invasion would turn into a slog, and could even end up getting bogged down completely. If that happened...well, then they’d effectively ‘lose’ the war. No matter how dramatically casualty counts might favor the invaders, there’d be no way that the Celestia League-in-Exile could ultimately take Equus and defeat Chrysalis.

Slipshod knew that they didn’t have the luxury of many options, but their ‘best’ hope was hardly what he’d have considered a ‘good’ one. Or even a likely one. Unfortunately, there was simply no way for the Clans to overcome their most crippling disadvantage: numbers. Technology, they had. Skills and training, they had. But numbers...never.

Nowhere near enough to defeat the Sphere outright if even a small fraction of worlds resisted them. Perhaps even not quite enough to hold even that singular narrow corridor. It simply depended on how obstinate the locals intended to be.

The changeling snorted with amusement. On the other hoof, if the populace welcomed the Clans, then they could sail right on through without much issue at all; almost right up to the doors of the Faust System itself. Not that he could think of a reason why any of the current leaders of the Harmony Sphere would ever welcome an outside force like the Clans. Even putting aside whatever hold Chrysalis and her agents had in their governments, there was simply no motivation for the heads of any of the Great Houses to want to allow a superior military force through their territory. They’d never trust it.

In order for a large force like theirs to be granted safe passage, they’d have to be effectively ‘bonded’ to them under contract―even if not one officially sanctioned by the MRB. However, every House’s leader already had a big-time bonded company in their pocket; and outfits that big didn’t particularly like to share. So, unless they found some ‘sixth Great House’ to latch onto they were―

The changeling stallion blinked as a wayward though blazed through his mind. It was a patently silly notion, he knew. Hardly a chance at all that it could work. But…

Slipshod thought on the notion for a few moments longer before his head started to nod along almost of its own accord. It was possible that they’d need to risk very little in the attempt and, if they came out on top, they’d have exactly what they needed: “an ally.”

He hadn’t been quite aware that he’d said the last two words aloud, but Cinder’s eyes wandered in the changeling’s direction, “pardon?”

The golden pony hesitated for a minute, reluctant to present a possibility that was quite likely to be discarded out of hoof just because of how slim of a chance it had of actually working, “if we had a Great House as our ally,” he said, “we wouldn’t have to fight our way through to Equus. And our supply lines would be pretty well protected.”

“Well, obviously,” the dragoness said in a droll tone, rolling her eyes at the idea, “but there’s not a chance in Luna’s stary galaxy that any of the Great Houses would ally with us.”

“They would if their leader owed us,” Slipshod pointed out.

“Probably,” the star admiral conceded, frowning in mild annoyance as she narrowed her gaze at the changeling, “but none of them do. Nor can I think of anything that could happen to make them ‘owe us’ anything.”

“What if we installed a new leader in one of the Houses?”

The dragoness’ eyes widened slightly as she considered the idea, though her expression soured not long after again, “that would certainly be a good reason for them to give us their support, but I can’t see any of the Successor States rallying around some obvious puppet that we planted on the throne. If whoever it is doesn’t have a solid claim to rule, then the alliance with our forces would be lucky to last out the year before they were overthrown in a revolt. Which wouldn’t be nearly enough time to take Equus.”

“And if I told you that I know somepony who did have a strong claim to a throne? Somepony who would absolutely love to accept help from pretty much anycreature in the galaxy in order to get it too?”

He seemed to have Twilight’s attention now too, “who?”

“Victoria Blueblood.”

Cinder let out a derisive chortle, “it’s a sad state of affairs when I know more about Sphere politics than a changeling operative,” she said in a mirthful tone, taking another sip of her scotch before candidly informing the pair, “she died over two years ago. Killed while organizing a coup against her dear uncle Dominus.”

“She wasn’t killed,” Slipshod stated flatly, fixing his gaze on the dragoness, “she escaped. Her death was a ruse.”

The sapphire star admiral was clearly more than just a little skeptical of the changeling’s claims, “and what makes you say that? How could you possibly know what ‘really’ happened to Victoria Blueblood?”

“Because my family―or rather, the real Slipshod’s family―were the principal backers of that coup attempt,” he informed the dragoness. The changeling had her attention now, “after Chrysalis’ agents sold them out to Dominus, they used the time they had left to get her to safety.

“And I know where she’s been hiding.”

“How?!” Cinder gawped incredulously.

“Because Slipshod’s father told me,” the changeling grinned at the stunned dragoness for a brief moment before letting the facade fracture somewhat as he was forced to acknowledge some of the facts that he was gleaning over, “well, okay, I didn’t find out until over a year after I left Equus that he had,” he admitted, “and I never suspected that Victoria was alive either, in all honesty. I bought the official story just like everypony else.

“And then I slept with Dominus’ wife.”

Twilight spit up her wine, “y―what!?” she cringed, looking defeatedly down at her―now quite thoroughly stained―robes, “...poop.”

“Dominus likes two things,” Slipshod explained, fetching the purple alicorn a napkin. The princess took the small square of cloth in her telekinesis, glanced down at the mess that she had made of herself and the floor, stared blankly at the extent of the catastrophe, and found herself at a loss for where to even begin to address the mess, “books, and trophies.

“He especially likes books that he keeps as trophies. While I was mounting his misses, I noticed that he had a copy of Sun Kazoo’s Art of War on his desk―which isn’t any great surprise, honestly,” he acknowledged. One could find the definitive text on warfare and tactics on the shelf in most senior officers’ studies, “except...this one had a embossing of House Lackadaisy on its spine―which was Slipshod’s House.

“That book came from Slipshod’s father’s personal study,” he continued, “Slipshod himself had brought one exactly like it with him to Sandhoof Academy. Because of course he did, he was there to study BattleSteed combat tactics.

“But it was in that moment that I thought about all of the letters that I received from my―from Slipshod’s” he corrected hastily, “father. I used to think that old stallion was half-senile, honestly. He’d bring up Sun Kazoo at the weirdest times in those letters. At the time, I thought he was just some obsessed old codger and ignored it.

“But, in that moment, seeing that book...I found myself wondering,” he chuckled, “honestly, I started pushing rope there for a good while I was so distracted,” the purple alicorn’s face contorted in mild confusion as she mouthed the words. Cinder hid her muzzle behind an overlong sip of scotch, “anyway, when I got back to the Galloway, I acted on the hunch, cracked open my copy of The Art of War, and started rereading my old mail.

“Turned out it was code,” he shrugged, “never knew it at the time. I guess nopony else did either, because Dominus pardoned me for my father’s―” he sighed in frustration but quickly ceased to find fighting the slips worthwhile any longer. They knew what he meant by no, surely, “my father’s coup attempt.

“But...yeah. I know what the plan was in the event that they were discovered,” he finally concluded, “they were going to smuggle Victoria out of the Commonwealth to one of the Periphery nations.”

“I don’t suppose you know which one?” Cinder asked, frowning slightly. After all, there were the better part of a dozen middling lesser factions on this side of the Sphere alone. They couldn’t be expected to search them all for the hiding Blueblood family member.

“Assuming she hasn’t moved on of her own accord, she should still be somewhere in the Minotaurian Concordat.”

The star admiral mulled over the information as she reached out and sought to bring up maps and other available information for the indicated area. A largely unhappy grunt escaped her throat as she took in what she’d found, “something tells me that they wouldn’t be very happy to see a Clan task force show up on their doorsteps. The Farisians like us well enough, but we haven’t made a lot of inroads with the minotaurs.”

“Why not?” Twilight asked curiously, having apparently mostly given up on trying to salvage the damage done to her robe.

“The only creatures more prideful than minotaurs are dragons,” Cinder cast a sardonic smile at the alicorn, then thought for a brief moment and added, “and maybe the yaks. Honestly a toss-up there. My point is: they soundly rejected our requests to let any of our agents pass through their territory.

“They’re not going to let us in to look for Victoria, if she’s even still there,” the dragoness paused, then cast a knowing look towards the purple alicorn, “not voluntarily anyway.”

It would have been patently visible to anycreature how little Twilight liked the implication of the sapphire officer’s words, “you’re not seriously recommending that the Clans invade the minotaurs, are you?”

“I’m letting you know that we have that option,” Cinder elaborated patiently, clearly very aware of just how unpalatable the mare was going to find the suggestion, “and I will point out as a matter of record, that however many lives might be lost during a military raid into the Concordat, that number would be only a fraction of the casualties that will be incurred by whichever of the Harmony Sphere powers are chosen for us to move through on our way to Equus.

“Objectively, the Concordat might be the better option,” the star admiral concluded. At least she had the courtesy to sound like she understood why Twilight wouldn’t be thrilled with that information. Unlike pirate bands or violent Red Reiver raiders, the citizens and military forces of the Minotaurian Concordat would have done absolutely nothing to deserve the destruction coming their way. Even if it would represent a quantitatively lower loss of life than the equally undeserving inhabitants of the Harmony Sphere.

Was Twilight really supposed to feel better about slightly fewer innocent creatures dying in order for the Clans to defeat Chrysalis?

“Perhaps I can offer an alternative?” Slipshod said, wedging his way into their conversation. Both of the much taller creatures looked in his direction expectantly, “send the Steel Coursers,” the pair exchanged looks with one another, not appearing to be wholly convinced, “a mercenary outfit freelancing in the Periphery would hardly be out of place,” he pointed out, “and Squelch is pretty resourceful. I can give her what I know about Victoria Blueblood, along with whatever intel dossiers you guys ever made on her,” he gestured at Cinder, “I’m sure she’ll be able to find a lead or two within a month of getting there.”

Twilight spent a few moments mulling over the proposal, and seemed to find it quite amenable. The star admiral, however, looked less than enthusiastic about the idea, prompting a query from Twilight, “why not? We can make contact with Victoria and, at the same time, not have to worry about stepping on any cloven hooves doing it.”

“Those mercenaries know far too much about what we’re doing out here,” Cinder said unhappily, “if they returned to the Sphere and reported everything to ComSpark―”

“They’d be signing their own death warrants anyway, and Squelch knows it,” Slipshod cut in, “Chrysalis isn’t going to ‘pardon’ any member of that crew exactly because they know too much about what’s going on. They know stuff that you guys don’t want Chrysalis knowing and they know stuff about Chrysalis that she doesn’t want the rest of the Sphere knowing.

“The Coursers are mercenaries through-and-through,” the golden stallion continued, “if you guarantee them pay, and carry through on your promise to get their families out of harm’s way, they’ll fight for you.”

Admittedly, Slipshod wasn’t one hundred percent positive that each and every member currently serving as part of the crew on the Galloway was exactly willing to fight on behalf of the ‘Disciples’, no matter how many zeros were inscribed on the check. There was a lot of propaganda to work through on that end of things, after all. However, Squelch was certainly smart enough to have seen everything for what it really was by now. Many other members of the crew had to be questioning things now too, given the indisputability of where they were, what they’d seen over the last month, and who they were surrounded by.

There were bound to be a die-hard hold out or two―there always were in any group―but the changeling had faith enough in his comrades―former comrades, he mentally amended with a wince―that most of them would follow Squelch’s lead. If not for the ‘good of the galaxy’ or any other particularly noble ideal, then at least for the promise of earning significant personal fortunes.

Twilight looked back at the dragoness, “what would it take to make that happen?” the alicorn sounded almost eager about the idea now.

“A small miracle,” was Cinder’s sarcastic reply. At Twilight’s frown, she elaborated, “ultimately, Princess-Regent Flurry Heart has the final say in an operation like this one. I can meet with the rest of the advisory cabinet―ask Dragon Lord Ember to give the mission her blessing―and get them to endorse it.”

A thought occurred to the star admiral as she scratched the back of her neck, hesitant to make the recommendation, “you could make it a condition of your abdication,” she said. Twilight grimaced, but at least didn’t discount the notion out of hoof, “tell the princess-regent that she can have the throne as long as she lets you try and secure the League-in-Exile an ally in the Sphere to pass our forces through.

“She’ll probably go for it,” Cinder continued, “after all, it would cut down significantly on the time it would take our forces to reach Equus once the invasion’s launched.”

“Abdication?” Slipshod glanced with surprise between the pair, “you’re abdicating? I thought the whole point was that they couldn’t―or at least didn’t want to―launch this invasion without you leading it?”

The purple alicorn grimaced, refilling her wine glass with the last dregs of the second bottle, “it has been indicated to me that my leadership qualities might be found...lacking,” she took a long drink from her glass. She then sighed, looking despondently down into her remaining wine as she gently sloshed the contents around with her magic, “I have...made mistakes. I acknowledge that. As you yourself have pointed out,” she looked back at the changeling, “this galaxy is very different from the one I remember.

“It plays by different rules. Ones that I don’t yet understand, or even agree with,” she added with a rueful smile, “even if the leaders of the other Dragon Clans would accept me and follow me―and I’m not convinced that they would,” Cinder’s expression suggested that she was forced to unhappily agree with the notion, clearly disheartened that her fellow dragons would fail to fall easily in line behind the ‘rightful’ princess of the League, “I know I’m not the kind of leader that they’d respect.

“Chrysalis is powerful,” the alicorn continued, “taking her down will not be easy. My ascension and my temperament could rock the very pillars upon which the society of both the Clans and the League-in-Exile are built. Our chances of victory are too tenuous to risk lowering them any further with internal friction.

“Maybe someday, when the galaxy is a calmer place, there will be room for the kind of Harmony I used to know. In fact, I know that day will come,” she affirmed, sounding determined and self-assured once more, if only for a fleeting moment, “and I will commit to working towards it once we’ve removed Chrysalis.

“But, for now, I’ll be taking a ‘back seat’. Helping wherever I can, of course; but just not as a princess of the realm,” Twilight paused, an amused little snort escaping her nostrils, “...just like old times.”

She tossed back the remainder of her glass before casting a glance in the direction of the two now completely empty bottles. For a brief moment, she considered teleporting in a third, but eventually decided against it. She still had to be somewhat useful tonight.

Slipshod nodded, acknowledging a few good points that the purple alicorn had made regarding her mindset and temperament. In his estimation, Twilight wasn’t necessarily ‘incompetent’ as a leader, per se; she was just outside of her element. Given enough time to properly adapt―along with an actual willingness to do so―she could easily become the sort of inspiring leader that a movement to defeat Chrysalis would benefit from having. She didn’t necessarily have to prove herself to be a tactical genius―that’s what senior military commanders like Cinder were for―so long as she was charismatic enough to inspire devotion among those following her.

Twilight certainly seemed to have it from the star admiral. Though that had likely been helped along by her own parents’ faith in their old friend’s abilities.

Perhaps this mission to secure Victoria as an ally could serve as a validation of Twilight’s capability in that regard. If the purple princess was indeed able to convince the Blueblood pretender to allow the Clans access to her realm so that they could invade Equus, that would have to give her quite a lot of political clout among the exiles.

“So,” Twilight began, finally setting the glass down and turning to regard the earth pony, “which of us gets to convince Squelch to sign on to this plan?”

“Thank you for meeting with me,” Twilight said as Princess-soon-to-no-longer-be-Regent Flurry Heart finally entered the throne room. The elder purple alicorn was choosing to believe that there had been genuinely important affairs of state which had kept Flurry Heart busy for the last three hours since Twilight had been allowed into the room. The annoyed expression on Spike’s face as he and Ember followed the younger mare in suggested that belief might have been misplaced.

The leader of the League-in-Exile remained silent as she crossed all of the way to the throne sitting upon the raised dais and took her seat. Only then did she see fit to respond, leveling her cool gaze at the purple mare, “I have been informed,” her eyes darted briefly to the Dragon Lord, “that you have seen fit to unilaterally revise our entire invasion strategy,” the princess’ teeth were grinding by the end.

Twilight took a moment to ensure that she was properly composed. Flurry Heart was upset―angry even. Justified or not, she was directing all of her ire at Twilight, and that meant that the alicorn was facing a significant handicap when it came to trying to convince the pink mare to see things her way. The usual inherent reluctance to accept another’s ideas over their own would be many times more pronounced in Flurry Heart, and even the slightest hint of aggression on Twilight’s part wouldn’t do anything but prompt Flurry Heart to dig in her hocks even further on the issue.

She had to be diplomatic about this―submissive even. Whatever sense of pride she had needed to be temporarily suspended if she wanted to be able to successfully plead her case. If she failed, and the plan as it stood was allowed to go ahead, billions could die. Worse, the invasion might even fail in the face of all of those deaths, with no hope of a second attempt in the future.

The plan that she, Star Admiral Cinder, and Slipshod, had worked out last night had its risks, certainly; but Twilight also firmly believed that it offered a much better chance of defeating Chrysalis. Even if they failed to install Victoria into power, there was a negligible chance that the changelings would find out about the Clans anyway, and so it would still be possible for the original invasion plan to be used anyway.

There was effectively nothing to lose by trying out the new approach, and perhaps everything to gain, and uncountable lives to be saved.

She had to make Flurry Heart see that.

A good start was to make sure that she made absolutely no mention of Slipshod’s involvement, “if that was the message you received, then I’m sorry that there was a mistake,” Twilight began, bowing her head slightly in the seated alicorn’s direction, “I would never go behind your back and change any of the plans you’d authorized,” Flurry Heart grunted, but didn’t outright contradict the purple mare’s statement, which she took as a good sign.

“Last night I asked Star Admiral Cinder to review the invasion plan with me. While I won’t be leading it, I do want to help in some way, and so I thought it best to understand it,” which was entirely true, Twilight noted to herself, “however, during the briefing, an observation was made that the existing plan would have a much higher chance of success if we didn’t have to fight our way through the Harmony Sphere.”

“Obviously,” Flurry Heart snorted dismissively, “a foal could have told you that. However, there’s not a chance in Harmony that any of the existing Successor States would ever let our fleets pass unmolested through their space.”

“None of the current leaders, no,” Twilight agreed, “however, there is credible intelligence that suggested Victoria Blueblood, niece to Dominus Blueblood, escaped the Commonwealth and may still be alive and operating in the Periphery. If she could be found, and successfully installed as the Archon of the Pony Commonwealth, there is every possibility that she would grant our forces passage. The Commonwealth’s borders extend practically right to Equus’ doorstep.”

Spike’s and Ember’s eyes widened and the pair of dragons exchanged intrigued looks. They clearly recognized the benefit to the invasion that such passage represented. Flurry Heart was no fool either, but she was a lot more skeptical, “how reliable is this ‘intelligence’?”

“It’s over two years out of date,” Twilight admitted, “and we know only the approximate region where she was going to,” keeping details of the plan or its detractions to herself was hardly going to help her case if Flurry Heart ever learned the truth, so there was no advantage to doing so. The purple alicorn resolved to be as upfront as she could reasonably get away with without completely poisoning Flurry Heart’s opinion of the proposed plan, “but a search for her can be done reasonably quickly. If she’s alive, then we can use her. If she’s dead, then there’s no reason to alter the invasion plans as they stand.”

“Finding her is hardly any guarantee that she can be successfully installed as the new Archon,” Flurry Heart pointed out, sounding properly skeptical, as opposed to unreasonably dismissive. She was making a very valid point, and one that was arguably the single-greatest obstacle to the revised plan. Her first attempt at a coup had failed, after all. What assurances could be made that a second would be more successful?

Twilight didn’t have an answer to that, unfortunately. If they did manage to find Victoria alive, then any pitch she made for the leadership of the Commonwealth would require the backing of a large military force. They couldn’t import one from the League-in-Exile. Her showing up out of nowhere with a massive military force with no easily explained origin would risk tipping their hand to the changelings and undermine everything that they were trying to accomplish anyway.

The Coursers were a group of just three BattleSteeds at the moment. Hardly an overwhelming military force. They were barely a recon detachment. It was at least within the realm of possibility that something of a ‘bloodless’ coup could be launched, bypassing most of the need to fight. Among the standing armies at least. Dominus’ House Guard would be another matter. As would any mercenaries he hired to fight against Victoria. Most worrisome among those would, of course, be the―

“Timberwolf’s Dragoons.”

All eyes went to Spike now, as he was the one who’d seemed to bring up the renowned mercenary company unprompted. Flurry Heart frowned at the dragon initially, but then began to mull over the name with apparent appreciation. This only served to make Twilight’s already confounded expression twist up in even further confusion.

Fortunately, her former Number One Assistant came to her rescue, explaining, “Timberjack, the leader of the Dragoons, is one of ours,” he informed the purple alicorn, “most of the company’s leadership are Clanners, actually. We let a few of Chrysalis’ agents into non-essential positions within the company to keep her at ease, but it’s firmly under Timberjack’s control.”

He looked over at Flurry Heart now, “we can send him orders to have the Dragoons back Victoria. With any luck, it’ll just take a few skirmishes in the capital to oust Dominus.”

“You’re controlling one of the mercenary groups in the Harmony Sphere?” Twilight asked, almost incredulous. If the League-in-Exile was capable of operating in territories ostensibly controlled by Chrysalis like that, then why did they even need to draw up the sorts of invasion plans that Cinder had shown her last night?

“‘Controlling’ isn’t quite the word that I’d use,” Spike cautioned, “the Dragoons are given a lot of latitude so that they’re free to adapt to the situation in the Sphere and keep above suspicion. They operate no differently than any other mercenary group, except for the fact that they provide intel and financing to the Disciple cells so they can conduct their own disruption raids.”

The purple alicorn frowned, “they’re financing the Disciples? How? Wouldn’t that get noticed by the Mercenary Review Board that ComSpark set up? I was under the impression that it oversees a lot of the financial records for the mercenary companies operating in the Sphere.”

“There’s a lot of leeway with the MRB when it comes to things like ‘combat losses’,” the purple dragon assured her with a grin, “even if you’re just padding out the repair bills by a few percent, it adds up when you’re an organization the size of the Dragoons. And even if the irregularities do get noticed, it would just be chalked up to the typical graft and corruption that exists in nearly every Sphere corporate structure.

“A hundred thousand C-bits here, an extra Harasser reported destroyed there; suddenly a terrorist cell is being supported by one of the most highly regarded private mercenary groups in the galaxy,” he flashed Twilight a triumphant smile, “ComSpark doesn’t look too deep as long as Timberjack’s mercenaries fight the battles in the way they want them to, and the Commonwealth sure isn’t about to question what their primary striking force is doing with the money they’re earning by keeping the other House’s pet mercs at bay.

“That being said, it wouldn’t take a lot of work to arrange things so that the Dragoons declare themselves for Victoria when she makes her move for the Archonship,” Spike turned his attention towards Flurry Heart now, “it’s entirely possible that we could get Dominus replaced within the year if it goes well.”

The pink alicorn mulled over the proposal, then looked in Ember’s direction, “can you keep Clan Smoke Jabberwock in line for that long?”

The turquoise dragoness’ lips curled in a frown at the mere mention of the name, snorting in disdain, “I can try,” she admitted ruefully, “Khan Smolder’s been getting very vocal though. I don’t particularly like how much Garble and his band seem to be echoing her sentiments either.”

“Wait, you can’t be saying that Smolder is one of the dragons that wants to loot the Harmony Sphere,” Twilight said, aghast at the notion that one of her prized students from the inaugural class of the first Friendship Academy built on Equus was one of the Clan leaders calling for a hostile invasion which would target the denizens of the Sphere itself, instead of focusing exclusively on Chrysalis.

Both dragons looked like they were at least as disappointed by the notion as the purple alicorn was, but it was Spike who offered an explanation, “she...didn’t start out that way,” he told her, sounding almost despondent as he reflected on one of his oldest dragon friends, “she was just as determined as Ember and I were to take on Chrysalis―and only Chrysalis―when we finally returned to the Sphere. I even pushed for her to form a Clan of her own to help train the fighters I knew we’d need.

“At first, everything was going great; she’s a natural leader. But then…”

He broke off, unable to continue as the pain of those memories started to overwhelm him. The Dragon Lord picked up the story where he’d left off, “it’s no secret that it’s not only the changelings that are contributing to the Sphere’s instability. Plenty of opportunistic creatures are capitalizing on the chaos and destruction of their own accord, unprompted by Chrysalis’ agents.”

Squelch was immediately brought to Twilight’s mind as she listened to the turquoise dragoness. While the alicorn would never have thought of the sage mare as being a specifically malevolent individual, there was no denying her blatant apathy with regards to Chrysalis and her changelings, even when confronted with dire warnings of their sinister plans for the other creatures of the galaxy. The unicorn had said herself that she didn’t particularly care if Chrysalis was controlling everything, so long as she got to pursue the prospect of a retirement in luxury.

Twilight had no doubt that there were probably a great many creatures who felt the exact same way. As distressing as the notion was, the alicorn found herself wondering how much of the galaxy would rise up in opposition to Chrysalis if the changeling queen were to actually come right out and reveal her true self. It terrified her to think about how low of a percentage of the population that might turn out to be.

“Smolder found it harder and harder not to consider creatures like them to be complicit in Chrysalis’ schemes,” Ember went on, soberly, “she feels that the Clans aren’t doing enough to prepare, and that it’s not going to be enough to take down just Chrysalis if we’re going to restore Harmony. That, if we want to win, then dragons need to make themselves as big, and as powerful, as possible so that we can subjugate the whole Sphere, not just Equus.

“She’s preaching capitalizing on our GIB to the fullest. That means the need for massive hoards of wealth and material; and there’s only one way to get that,” the Dragon Lord shared a knowing look with Twilight.

“She has to know that’s not the way to go about restoring Harmony,” Twilight all but pleaded, still finding herself at odds with believing what she’d just heard about the burnt orange dragoness that’d she once helped to mentor, “the creatures of the Sphere are just...lost! They’re not evil, they just need to be shown the way again, that’s all!”

Flurry Heart spoke up this time, “it can be hard to make the distinction between apathy and malice when that ‘apathy’ leads to so much death and destruction,” the pink princess said coolly, glaring down at Twilight, “there’s no denying that a lot of creatures like the way that things are now. They’ve benefited greatly from the system that Chrysalis has put in place.

“Convincing them that a radical shift in the societal paradigm would benefit them even more might prove to be a tall order to some.”

Twilight gawked at her niece, “you’re not seriously advocating for what those dragons have planned, are you?”

The younger alicorn sneered at her aunt, not particularly liking the insinuation. The purple alicorn winced, now regretting even making it. She should have had more faith in the pink mare, “I’m just pointing out that it will be hard to convince everycreature in the Sphere to stand aside and let us help them. A lot of them won’t see it as ‘help’. They’ll regard us as a threat, no matter how much we assure them that we’re just interested in stopping the changelings. Because―to them―stopping Chrysalis does threaten them, and their preferred way of life.

“As much as we might like to think otherwise, there will be creatures who will voluntarily oppose our invasion, even if we confront them with irrefutable proof that the Twilight Sparkle they know is a shapeshifting monster bent on controlling them like livestock for her personal consumption.”

A wicked little snarl curled the pink alicorn’s lips, “especially if they’re convinced it’s somepony else who’ll end up getting husked by a changeling, and not them.”

The purple mare frowned, but said nothing. Flurry Heart wasn’t wrong. She knew ponies who thought like that. Squelch hadn’t found the concept of changelings or their infiltrations to be repugnant until it turned out that one of her pilots was a changeling, and that he’d used her as a source of sustenance. If the unicorn mercenary commander was a typical example of a modern Harmony Sphere resident―and Twilight had no reason to think she was anything but―then it was likely that the League-in-Exile would find few sympathetic allies when they invaded.

Even this revised plan that she, Cinder, and Slipshod had come up with wasn’t predicated at all on Victoria Blueblood’s possible desire to help the League-in-Exile’s invasion solely to free the Sphere from the clutches of the changelings. They were actually even resolved to keep most of that information to themselves just in case it poisoned Victoria against them.

After all, once they overthrew Chrysalis and set Flurry Heart up on the throne in Canterlot as the ruler of a newly restored Celestia League, the plan was to eventually dismantle the other existing star nations. There would be regional governors throughout the Harmony Sphere for logistic and managerial purposes, of course. No one pony could ever hope to directly govern the lives of trillions of beings, after all, not even immortal alicorn princesses. However, those governors would wield nowhere near the power, and enjoy only a fraction of the autonomy that the Archon of the Pony Commonwealth currently did.

There was no telling if Victoria would be willing to help them if she knew that it also meant someday ceeding her own throne and swearing fealty to Flurry Heart. While such things would never be outright demanded of either Victoria or the other current heads of state, there was no telling how they would perceive even the implication that it was eventually expected that they’d join the restored League voluntarily. They could very well assume that the eventual intent was to forcibly compel allegiance to the Celestia League.

After five centuries of living in such a bleak and cutthroat galaxy, Twilight wasn’t even sure that she’d be able to blame anycreature for assuming that the League-in-Exile’s plan after taking Equus was to move on to forcibly conquering the rest of the Sphere. Especially if one or more of the Dragon Clans launched their own much less discriminatory invasions. If Smolder really did take the forces that she controlled, and those of some of the other Clans, and started to conquer and plunder Sphere worlds...the damage to the image of even the most benign of the Clans intent on actually helping to free the Sphere from the changelings would be catastrophic.

Flurry Heart turned her attention back to Dragon Lord Ember now, “keep me apprised of Kahn Smolder and the others. If we can’t ultimately stop them from going through with their plan, then at the very least we should be ready to capitalize on the opportunity,” she must have noticed Twilight’s shocked expression, because the pink alicorn next turned a nonplussed smile on the purple mare, “if the other Clans are going to invade anyway, then we should be ready to make our move at the same time to take full advantage of the confusion.

“If enough of the Sphere’s forces are distracted dealing with the renegade Clans, we might be able to slip the forces still loyal to us all the way through to Equus. Not an ideal scenario,” Flurry Heart conceded with an anemic shrug, “but it’ll be all we have at that point.”

“Maybe I should talk to her,” Twilight said, turning towards Ember and her consort, “she knows me. I might be able to convince her to come onboard with the new plan,” she paused, looking back in the pink mare’s direction, “assuming you’re going to approve it?” she couldn’t hide the hopeful uptick at the end of the question.

Flurry Heart sighed and eventually nodded, though she did seem a little reluctant to agree that her aunt had come to her with a palatable proposal, “Spike’s right,” she acknowledged, “it doesn’t risk us much, and has the potential to make getting to Chrysalis a lot easier. What resources would you need?”

Now Twilight hesitated. This would be the hardest sell, honestly, “I would like to use the Steel Coursers―the Harmony Sphere mercenaries who rescued me,” already the League-in-Exile’s princess was narrowing her eyes in displeasure, but Twilight continued to argue her case, “they’re a small group who won’t draw attention while operating in the Periphery,” she pointed out, “with a fresh paint job on the Galloway, and a registry under a different company name, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be tied to anything that happened in the Sphere either.

“No flags should get raised if word of anything they do manages to make its way to ComSpark somehow,” she added, “and they’re actually dyed-in-the-C-bit mercenaries, so they won’t stand out while looking around for Victoria. Plus…” the purple alicorn hesitated again, biting her lip. Flurry Heart definitely wasn’t going to like this next part either, “...Slipshod―the changeling―will need to come with us. He knows how to contact Victoria.”

Flurry Heart glowered down at her aunt, “...the changeling is your ‘intel source’?” Twilight winced, but nodded. The pink princess snorted in abject disgust, “unbelievable. I didn’t think even you’d be that gullible. It’s frankly embarrassing.”

“He’s not lying about this; Victoria Blueblood’s alive―”

“I assume you’re basing that conclusion on the inherent trustworthiness of changelings?” Flurry Heart sneered.

“Not all changelings are bad!” Twilight shot back, waving her wing in Spike’s direction, “Thorax risked everything to help us, multiple times! Slipshod wants to help us.”

“Why?” the younger alicorn demanded flatly, “what could it possibly stand to gain from turning on Chrysalis? What advantage does it get from helping us?”

Twilight opened her mouth to respond, but paused. She had been about to insist that Slipshod was doing this because it was the ‘right thing’ to do, but that would have been a lie, and she knew it. Flurry Heart would have known it too. That was the reason that Twilight would have liked Slipshod to have for helping them. But it wasn’t. He didn’t care about the greater good of the galaxy any more than Squelch did. For the changeling, it was a purely personal matter.

Though, at least maybe in that regard, it was one that Flurry Heart could appreciate, “because Chrysalis wronged him,” Twilight finally said, deflating slightly at the less-than-philanthropic motivation. Though she noticed that it did at least evoke a spark of interest in the other alicorn, “by the time he was put into the field, his cover identity had become useless to Chrysalis. He was pushed aside and left for dead. He feels cheated by the other changelings.

“He wants to see Chrysalis suffer. To lose everything, the same way that he did. That’s why he’s helping us,” it galled Twilight that one of her staunchest supporters and advocates since waking up in the present had such vapid and shallow motivations. Slipshod wasn’t a Thorax by any stretch of the imagination.

But he was all she had.

The League-in-Exile’s princess massaged her chin as she mulled over the purple alicorn’s words. Twilight took it as a good sign that they even seemed to be getting genuine consideration at all, and hadn’t been dismissed out of hoof. Maybe it was for the best that Slipshod’s motives were so banal and relatable after all. A revenge-minded changeling seemed to be more palatable than an altruistic one. Though Twilight found herself feeling more than a little despondent at the thought of even her closest remaining friends and family not being willing to believe in the inherent good in others.

How long would it take to get the galaxy right again?

...Could it really even be done a second time, even with an eternity to work with?

The possibility of a negative response to that musing was an incredibly unsettling thought.

“You want me to allow Sphere mercenaries, along with a known changeling spy, back within HyperSpark range of the Harmony Sphere’s interstellar comm network?” Flurry Heart asked in a tone that was unsettling in its calmness. Almost to the point where it sounded like she was taking some measure of pleasure in posing the question to Twilight, “creatures who know more than enough about the Clans to do irreparable harm to our plans, and possibly forever seal the fate of every creature in the galaxy, cementing changeling control over all creatures for all eternity?

“Knowing full well that, if you slip up, and if we’re undone, that there is no second attempt. You will have given Chrysalis the ultimate victory that she has been craving. No act of contrition from you at that point could possibly hope to make amends for that level of catastrophe.

“Debatably, you would be the greatest villain that the galaxy has, or ever will know,” Flurry Heart held her aunt’s gaze for several long, pointed, seconds, “are you willing to commit to that?”

To say that Twilight had complete faith in her choice would have been a lie. The full weight of the consequences if she was wrong about Slipshod, or the members of the Steel Coursers, were not lost on her. That being said, while the penalties for failure were horrific in the extreme, the advantages offered couldn’t be overlooked. A direct, uncontested path right to Chrysalis. They could end the bulk of the changeling threat in a single battle once Victoria was made Archon without having to involve hardly any of the rest of the Sphere. Billions of lives could be saved.

Yet, if she was wrong, trillions would suffer.

Flurry Heart was right: there would be no way for Twilight to make up for that failure if things went wrong. There was every possibility that the sheer weight of that level of suffering would crush her very soul into dust―and even then she would be getting off lightly.

But if they pulled it off…

“I am,” the purple alicorn finally said, “and I am making it the condition of my abdication,” she added, noting that the sadistic mirth dancing behind Flurry Heart’s eyes as she’d been laying out the full breadth of her aunt’s gamble evaporated almost instantly, “I get the Steel Coursers, Slipshod, and Cinder, to help me look for Victoria Blueblood,” she glanced over at Spike, “as well as the full support of Timberwolf’s Dragoons to help install her as Archon once we locate her,” Twilight focused once more on Flurry Heart, her face set in firm lines as she made her demands, “give me that, and I’ll grant you the throne; with the understanding that my plan has your full endorsement for as long as it proves viable.”

The pink alicorn’s face was marred by a sneer as she glared hard at Twilight’s determined expression, “or, what? You’ll insist on ascending? You know as well as I do that the Dragon Clans won’t accept you for long, especially if you start preaching the real Elements at them. They’ve already embraced the revised versions that those two massaged for them,” she waved in wing at the Dragon Lord and her consort, who both shared an unhappy look. Spike flashed an apologetic glance in Twilight’s direction.

While she’d been disheartened to learn that the Elements of Harmony as she’d known them no longer existed, she did understand that altering their message had been done in an attempt to keep the League-in-Exile from fracturing completely. Without the revised Elements, who was to say what the dragons would be up to now, left to their own devices and driven only by their ancient thirst for power and personal glory.

Teaching a ‘variation’ of the Elements of Harmony to the current generation would certainly have to be easier than working from scratch all over again. Maybe in a generation or two Twilight would be able to undo the damage that had been caused to the Clans.

However, Flurry Heart was right that trying to change too much too fast might end up fracturing everything. Assuming the throne and insisting on restoring the old values of Friendship and Harmony would certainly mean postponing the invasion for decades, at the least. More likely another century. In that time, a lot of creatures would suffer though. But…

“If that’s the only way that I’ll get a shot at doing this with as little bloodshed as possible, then I’ll risk it,” Twilight insisted, “I would rather you help me though. Please. Work with me, Flurry Heart. Help me save your mother and the others.

“Help me save everycreature.”

For a moment, Twilight was afraid that she’d pushed too hard. At the mention of Cadance, the pink mare’s features darkened, her eyes going cold. Flurry Heart still blamed her aunt for what had happened on Equus. However, it seemed that her sense of reason eventually prevailed, because the younger alicorn’s demeanor softened and she finally nodded, “very well. Give me the throne, and you’ll have your chance to try this new plan of yours.

“I’ll give you what time I can, but it’s ultimately up to Smolder and her allies if things kick off prematurely,” she warned, sharing a knowing look with the purple mare.

“I understand. Thank you. We can perform the coronation whenever you’re ready,” she looked over at Ember, “and I’d appreciate it if you could arrange for a meeting between myself and the Dragon Clans that are causing you the most trouble.”

“I shouldn’t have any trouble getting them to do that much, at least,” the turquoise dragoness said in a rueful tone, “I sure doubt you could make the situation much worse!”

Twilight winced. If there was one thing that she was learning about how the galaxy tended to operate these days, it was that it was always a bad idea to tempt fate...

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 20: Patriots and Tyrants

“―I’m not sure what you expect me to do about it,” the sage green unicorn mare grumbled into the comm as she leaned on the railing of her apartment balcony overlooking the lake, “I’m not their boss anymore,” Squelch didn’t make even the slightest effort to conceal the irritation that she felt towards that new aspect of her life. While the scenic view from the new accommodations which had been provided for her were just that―breathtakingly scenic―a gilded cage was still a cage.

The last week spent in this place had done nothing to dull the sensation of being a prisoner.

Her ship, her crew, her company, had all been effectively stripped away from her upon her arrival on the homeworld of the so-called “Celestia League-in-Exile”, or “Dragon Clans”, or whatever it is they were calling themselves. It honestly seemed to be dependent on who she was speaking to. The only thing that she had been made clear on so far was that they weren’t the “Disciples of Discord”. Apparently that was the label reserved explicitly for the units they had operating in the Harmony Sphere.

All that she had left now was an―admittedly―nice apartment with a view of the lake and a living stipend that was designed to keep her at least moderately comfortable. Not the worst retirement that she could have found herself with, especially if the Steel Coursers had ended up going bankrupt at some point. But it was also a far cry from the plan of amassing a few billion C-bits and settling down with a mansion somewhere by her forties.

Honestly, the most frustrating part was that she didn’t have nearly as much to complain about as she could have. The apartment was nice―even luxurious by the standards of some larger cities in the Sphere. The compound that the Galloway’s crew had been confined to possessed all sorts of recreational facilities and quality-of-life accommodations that were usually only found at high-quality vacation resorts. A good number of her former crew actually seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Most of those who weren’t happy were primarily concerned with their family back home, but they’d been assured that measures were being taken to safeguard them, and had even taken up their hosts on the offer to have said families smuggled here as well. In a few months, Squelch was convinced that most of her former crew would be perfectly content to live out the rest of their lives in this little community which had been furnished for them.

At least a few weren’t likely to settle in any time soon though. Case in point, “look,” she said into the mic, “I don’t know how they got ahold of the tools either; but let me ask you one question: does it run more efficiently?” there was a reluctant response in the affirmative, “so then what’s the problem?

“You have two options here: either do a better job of locking up your shit, or―and this is my recommendation―just let them tinker with whatever they want. Because, trust me, you do not want those two to get bored. When they get bored, they get ‘creative’.

“I promise you they will strip this compound for parts and use those parts to build a fully functional BattleSteed, just to see if they could―and I know they can―and then you’ll have that to deal with,” Squelch made sure that her tone sounded deadly serious, because she absolutely was, “so my advice is to tell your maintenance techs to just stay out their way and let them tinker with whatever they want. It’ll be better for all of us that way, okay?”

She disconnected the link and tossed it away. If the pony charged with supervising this little reservation of Sphere ‘refugees’ wanted to complain more about what Mig and Tig were getting up to in their spare time―which now consisted of literally every waking hour―then she could do it to somepony else. As Squelch had pointed out: the unicorn was no longer their employer, and thus had no real authority to leverage over the kirin twins. She was powerless to do anything, and so she wasn’t even going to try.

Besides, she was too busy battling her own boredom, quite frankly.

Her career-driven lifestyle up to this point hadn’t left her with a lot of time to develop any real hobbies, and she had yet to come up with any appealing candidates yet. She looked out over the lake, her mind briefly toying with the notion of taking up fishing. Slipshod had claimed to find the activity relaxing―

Squelch winced and shook her head fiercely, cursing aloud as she sought to remove even the thought of that monster from her mind. Mercifully, a further distraction presented itself in the form of her apartment’s door chime ringing.

“Come in,” she called out as she turned around, curious as to who it was that had come by to pay her a visit. The smile on her face vanished in an instant when she caught sight of the large purple alicorn stepping inside. Just beyond the open doorway, Squelch caught sight of a pair of armored guardsponies who had taken up position in the hallway for security purposes, “what do you want?”

Twilight Sparkle at least had the decency to acknowledge that she was unlikely to be the unicorn’s favorite guest, wincing slightly at the biting note in Squelch’s tone, “I came by to make sure that you and the other Coursers are being well taken care of.”

“Does it usually take you a week to get around to checking on your prisoners?”

A cringe this time, “you’re not prisoners,” she insisted.

“So we can leave then?” this question was met with silence and a brief period of open-mouthed hesitation, before the alicorn finally shook her head, “I thought so,” Squelch was smiling now, a cruel curve of her lips as she took satisfaction in confronting the princess with those realities that she seemed to find so uncomfortable, “so what can this prisoner do for her jailor?”

Resigned to the terms that Squelch was insistent upon using, the purple mare instead pushed through and moved on to the business that had brought her here, though she was certainly far less convinced of how this conversation would go, “I’d like to ask you for a favor.”

Squelch blinked at the other mare for several moments, in stunned silence. Then she snorted. Then she began to outright laugh at the alicorn. A cackling, indignant sort of laugh that was anything but mirthful, “a favor? Are you pulling my fucking tail? I hide you from ComSpark, help smuggle you to the backend of the galaxy, give up my livelihood and the livelihoods of my crew, and you have the gall to ask me for a favor?!

“Get out of my sight,” she wasn’t laughing anymore, turning away from the princess.

Unsurprisingly, she didn’t hear the alicorn leave. It wasn’t like there was anything that she could do to force her to. This wasn’t really ‘her’ apartment, Squelch knew. It was just a really fancy jail cell in a prison that Twilight owned.

“You’re right,” the larger mare acknowledged, “it was wrong of me to ask for more of you, especially when I haven’t exactly done a lot to repay you for what you and your crew have already done,” hearing the admission, and how genuine it sounded, didn’t do nearly as much to assuage Squelch’s bitterness as the unicorn thought that it would have. Maybe because it was little more than a pyrrhic victory in the end. She was still trapped on this world after all.

“I’d like to hire the Steel Coursers for a job.”

That got Squelch’s attention. The sage green mare slowly turned around, not entirely certain that she’d heard the princess correctly. She narrowed her eyes at the other mare, “excuse me?”

“I am in need of mercenaries for a mission,” Twilight went on, “and I would like to offer the opportunity to you first.”

“And why exactly would I help you?”

“Because you’ll be well paid,” the alicorn began, “because it will get you off this world. Because doing this job may be the key to defeating Chrysalis and finally putting an end to the fighting―meaning that there won’t be any reason to...retain you any longer, and you’ll be free to go as and where you please again.

“And, maybe, because it’ll save a lot of lives,” she said with a hopeful little smile, “any one or a combination of those reasons would be perfectly fine.”

Squelch held the purple mare’s gaze, regarding her. Appraising her. Twilight was hardly the type to be trying out some sort of cruel, elaborate, prank in an effort to try and play with the unicorn’s emotions. She knew that much. This wasn’t some sort of con. She was being serious. If anything, that only made Squelch more curious. As well as more suspicious.

It meant that there was an angle that she wasn’t seeing, and she didn’t like that, “what’s the catch?”

The alicorn sat back on her haunches and began to furtively tap her hooves together, “there’s not a ‘catch’ so much as there are certain requirements for this job that I think you won’t appreciate much,” the unicorn was already frowning, but she did appreciate that the princess was willing to be up front with her about it. She might be able to work with Twilight if she was going to be the type of client who was candid about a contract. In fact, she tended to prefer clients like that.

A pity they tended to be so rare.

“First, Star Admiral Cinder and I will be coming with you.”

“You? Don’t you have an empire to run or something? Wasn’t that the whole point of coming out here in the first place?”

Twilight averted her gaze briefly, clearing her throat, “I have...abdicated my position,” she admitted in a faintly bitter tone, “It has been...suggested to me that I acknowledge that I lack many of the qualities that would be required to lead a war of the type that is to come. There is already an existing leadership in place. Disrupting it on the eve of a large-scale military campaign would do more harm than any possible good I might hope to bring.

“So...I have stepped away from my place as Princess, and will instead seek to help defeat Chrysalis through other means.”

“Means such as hiring my company?” the alicorn nodded, “and the star admiral?”

“She will be coming along as a tactical advisor,” Twilight said, “the contract I’m offering you will be rather long-term, and if the initial phase proves successful, then the latter ones will involve much larger-scale operations than I suspect you are used to.”

“How large scale?”

“Including, but not limited to, overthrowing the existing leadership of the Pony Commonwealth.”

“Oh, is that all?” Squelch chortled, sounding just a tad incredulous; understandably, “I think I could probably clear an afternoon for that…”

“That would just be Phase Two, actually,” the purple mare blew right past the unicorn’s sarcasm without missing a beat, “your participation in Phase Three would be optional, but appreciated.”

“And Phase Three would be…?”

“Invading Equus.”

“Of course it is,” the unicorn began massaging the bridge of her nose, “what the heck is even supposed to be Phase One of this crusade of yours?”

“Tracking down Victoria Blueblood in the Minotaurian Concordat.”

“Finding a dead mare in cow country. Of course that’s how this insane plan of yours starts,” Squelch was finding herself having doubts about how confident she’d been that Twilight wasn’t the type to come down here to make jokes. Not that any of this was sounding the least bit funny to her, “you said that the ‘first’ thing that I wasn’t going to like about this contract was that you and the lizard would be coming with us. Assuming that the objectives of the contract itself aren’t the second thing, dare I ask what would be?”

Twilight hesitated this time, taking what sounded a lot like a deep preparatory breath. Whatever she was about to say, the alicorn was certain that Squelch was going to find it particularly objectionable.

“I want Slipshod to come with us as well.”

She was right: the unicorn mare didn’t appreciate that caveat at all.

Her features hardened into grim lines in an instant, “fuck off,” she turned around once more, looking determinedly towards the lake, and away from the alicorn.

“The real Slipshod’s family were the ones who helped Victoria escape to the Concordat,” Twilight explained, apparently deciding that it was still worth the effort to try and convince the unicorn to help her. As far as Squelch was concerned, it was a wholly wasted effort, “he’s probably the only pony she’d be willing to listen to, and we need her help if we want the invasion to succeed.”

“I believe that I’ve already explained to you how little I care about whether your invasion succeeds or not,” Squelch retorted in a curt tone.

There was silence from the alicorn for a bit, then, “so then what do you want? You’re a business pony―a mercenary. You’ll do just about anything for the right price, correct? So then what’s the price for Slipshod’s inclusion? Ten million? A hundred million? A billion? You’ll have it.”

The desperation was almost palpable. Twilight really wanted the changeling included in this mission. It was enough to prompt Squelch to look back towards the purple mare. Though she was sure that her expression was hardly encouraging. She wasn’t the least bit amused, after all.

It wasn’t that she minded the insinuation that she was some sort of ‘C-bit whore’ who’d agree to anything as long as there was a big enough number attached to the offer. That was honestly a largely accurate appraisal of her character when everything was said and done. True, there were a few lines that she wouldn’t cross―massacring civilians and such―but otherwise she could be quite accommodating to what prospective clients wanted from her and her company. Money went a long way with her. It bought her skills and abilities, her client’s privileged confidence, even her unwavering loyalty for the length of the contract.

However, there were a few things that couldn’t be bought from her with money. Not for any price. One of those things was her trust.

Slipshod was a changeling. A monster. He’d played on her emotions and violated her in ways that it was difficult for her to even speak about, for purposes that made her skin crawl just thinking about it. He’d lied to her. He’d used her. There weren’t enough zeros that could ever be added to a number written down on a check that would let her overlook those violations.

“What would be your price?” she asked, cooly, “what would it take for you to let a creature back into your life who’d manipulated you? Who’d used his ability to read your emotional state so that he knew exactly what to say and how to say it so that you’d convince yourself you were in love with him? Who’d gone through all of that just so that he could devour your very essence, like you were his personal buffet?

“What’s the going rate on that in the Sphere these days?” Twilight didn’t have an immediate answer for that, “he’s a monster.”

“He’s not a monster,” the alicorn countered softly, “he’s a changeling,” the unicorn rolled her eyes and looked away once more, but Twilight merely persisted, talking more loudly now, “he can’t help what he needs to survive. No more than you can help eating hay or oats. He’s a psychovore. He needs emotions to sustain him, or he dies.

“He was wrong to manipulate you like that,” the purple mare conceded, “he shouldn’t have tricked you into feeling a certain way about him. He should have genuinely reached out to you as a friend. Earned your feelings like any other friend would have.

“He made a mistake.

“But he didn’t do it maliciously,” Twilight insisted, “he didn’t do it to be cruel, or to hurt you. He did it to keep from dying. And I know that he feels badly about it.”

Squelch scoffed, “I can’t believe you’d actually trust a word that thing says.”

“I’m not basing this on anything Slipshod’s said to me,” the alicorn said, “I’m basing it on the fact that you two are divorced.”

The unicorn glared over her shoulder at the other mare, “mares who catch their stallions sleeping around on them tend to do that,” she growled.

“And why exactly would he have cheated on you?” Twilight asked, apparently unconcerned with the dour look from Squelch, “if all he was after was a meal, and he had you wrapped around his pastern,” the unicorn’s gaze narrowed further at that remark, but she said nothing, “then why step out? What did he have to gain?”

Squelch didn’t respond. She didn’t have an answer at hoof. Not anymore. At the time, she’d figured that the reason had been a rather simple and cliché one: Slipshod was a letch. That was hardly a rare cause for divorces―one pony sleeping around on the other. There hadn’t needed to be a deeper reason than that.

Admittedly, that had been the obvious excuse for it all back when she’d believed he was just a regular old earth pony. Now she knew that wasn’t the case. He wasn’t an earth pony. For all she knew, he didn’t even feel sexual gratification the same way that other species did. They were psychovores; they might not get a lot of gratification from physical stimuli at all compared to ponies. Which meant that the usual and obvious explanations for what had prompted him to stray probably didn’t apply to Slipshod.

So why would he have done it then? If it wasn’t to get his dick wet, then why bring that other mare back to their quarters that night? Specifically their quarters, too. That was the part that had always bothered her the most about it, in a lot of ways. At the time, she’d waffled between believing that Slipshod had either been too preoccupied thinking with the wrong head to realize Squelch would be back on the ship that night, and thinking that he’d done it deliberately in order to be extra cruel to her.

However, the latter had never proven to be justified by anything that the stallion had ever said or done since that night. He’d never insulted her directly, and she’d never caught him disparaging her to the rest of the crew. He’d never been antagonistic, and he’d never left. The stallion had stayed, as though he found nothing objectionable about anything that Squelch had said or done to him in retribution since that night. She’d not shied from giving him abuse either, and he’d taken it all in stride.

Which really only left the first possibility as the most likely reason for getting caught. But even that didn’t quite sit right with her. Slipshod was neither careless nor stupid. Not even when he was drunk. If anything, he was one of the most methodical and organized ponies she’d ever met! There was no way that he’d have forgotten where she was going to be that night or when. It would have been too easy for him to have his little dalliance somewhere else and leave her none the wiser.

So why let himself get caught? He knew her well enough to know that she’d divorce him in an instant for an indiscrecion like that…

The unicorn blinked. He did know her well enough to realize that. Had he...counted on it? Had he been playing her even then?!

Somehow the thought that the stallion had manipulated her into getting a divorce made her angrier than the thought of him manipulating her in marrying him in the first place, “that son of a mule! Does he just get off on playing mind games with me?!” she snarled. She glared at the alicorn, “I don’t know what he had to gain,” she admitted, “and I don’t know why he’d trick me into divorcing him. I was so out of it at the time that I’d probably have just agreed if he’d ask―”

The unicorn’s words cut off abruptly as she recalled a conversion that she’d had a little over a month ago. She had been feeling off around the time she’d caught him cheating. Doc Dee had even run some tests, and made some findings. She hadn’t thought that they were related at the time, but now…

“Serotonin,” she blurted out, stunned. Twilight raised an inquiring brow, but remained silent, regarding the green mare expectantly, “Doc Dee said he’d found I’d had some low neurotransmitter levels around that time. In Slipshod too,” she added after a second’s thought, “...if having your emotions fed off of had a physiological symptom, that’s what it would be, isn’t it?” the alicorn nodded, “low levels in me would make sense, because I’m the one being drained,” then Squelch’s brows furrowed, “but why would he have had low levels too?"

The mare went on to work out the answer to her own question, “if low levels in their prey represent getting fed upon, then low levels in changelings could mean not feeding enough,” she surmised, “...Slipshod was hungry,” she blinked, looking to the other mare for assurance that she was on the right track.

“Because of how vital emotions are to a changeling’s physical wellbeing, their ‘optimal’ neurotransmitter levels are actually at a slightly higher level than the average pony at any given time,” Twilight informed the unicorn, “if Slipshod’s levels were ‘low’ by pony standards, then it’s actually more likely that he was suffering from outright starvation.”

“...I wasn’t enough,” Squelch concluded, receiving another nod from Twilight, “then why marry me in the first place if one pony can’t sustain a changeling on their own?”

“He likely didn’t realize it,” she offered.

“So then why not ask for the divorce himself?” she frowned, “he obviously realized what was going wrong long before I did. Why trick me into doing it?”

“You could always ask him,” the alicorn suggested with a shrug.

Squelch grimaced, “and you expect me to believe that I’d get the truth from him? He’s done nothing but use me since the moment we met.”

“I’m just saying that if you want an answer to your question, he’s the only one you can get it from,” Twilight pointed out, “whether you believe it or not is up to you. But it couldn’t hurt to ask. Maybe you’ll even be surprised by what he has to say.”

“Doubtful,” the unicorn snorted, “but alright. Have him call me and I’ll ask him. But,” she quickly amended, “I don’t promise to believe him.”

Twilight smiled, “that’s fair. Trust is a lot harder to mend than it is to break. But it can be mended, given enough time,” she said with a firm nod, “as long as everypony is sincere.”

The purple mare then looked over her shoulder, “well, you heard the mare: she’s willing to at least listen.”

Squelch’s eyes went wide with stunned surprise as a golden earth pony stallion hesitantly stepped into view through the still-open apartment door. He was clearly more than a little nervous, and it probably wasn’t all due to the heavily armed ponies glaring daggers at him on his way past. She whipped her head back to Twilight, glaring accusingly at the alicorn, “what’s going on? You knew I’d agree to hear him out?”

The purple mare smiled, “I hedged my bet,” she said, “I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out how to mend the rifts between ponies. It used to be my whole...‘thing’ for a while.”

She stepped aside, using her wing to usher the stallion further into the room and closer to the unicorn so that they could have a more involved conversation, “now, I believe that you had a question for Slipshod? I know he has quite a lot of things he’d like to tell you.”

Twilight turned to Slipshod now, “I’ve done all I can: she’s willing to listen. Getting her to believe it is entirely on you though.

“Don’t fuck it up,” both ponies turned their stunned expressions towards the princess, who merely shrugged, “what? I’m trying to adapt.

“I’ll wait outside,” and with that, the alicorn turned and left the apartment. The door closed behind her, leaving the pair of ponies with some modicum of privacy.

What passed next were several long seconds of uncomfortable silence as the pair of ponies separately sorted through their feelings regarding the upcoming conversation. Especially Squelch, who was pointedly aware that she had received far less warning about the possibility of this meeting than the stallion had. Which meant that she found herself with quite a lot of emotions that she wanted to process before they had the conversation that Twilight had ostensibly brought him here to have with her.

“I hate you,” she stated bluntly, earning herself a shocked look from the earth pony, “I hate everything that you being in my life has done to me. The sham marriage, the heartbreaking divorce, the secrets and lies, getting me involved in all this bullshit,” she gestured broadly to their surroundings, “I wish I’d never met you. I genuinely believe my life would have been infinitely better if I hadn’t.”

Slipshod swallowed, but then cleared his throat and started nodding, “that’s fair. Harsh, but fair. For what’s it’s worth; I’m so―”

The unicorn cut him off with a sharp look, “I’m not ready for an apology from you,” the stallion’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click, “not until I believe you’re capable of meaning it,” he remained silent, but did offer her a meek nod in understanding.

Squelch took a deep breath, steadying herself, “okay. So, you already told me that you married me so that you could...feed,” just the thought of it made the mare shudder. Slipshod at least had the decency to look ashamed of himself, “and I’m guessing that what Doc Dee found out in those tests meant that you weren’t getting enough...whatever from me. Right?” the earth pony nodded, still refraining from speaking, “okay. The cheating. You said that it only happened the one time?” another nod, “but it wasn’t for food, was it?” Slipshod shook his head.

“...Was it to hurt me?”

He hesitated, closed his eyes, and nodded.

“Why?”

“Because you needed to be the one who ended things, if you were going to get better,” Slipshod finally said aloud, “if I’d broken things off, you’d have thought it was your fault; blamed yourself and not me. You’d have still cared for me. Felt positive emotions towards me.

“You’d have continued feeding me, at the expense of yourself. You wouldn’t have gotten better.”

Squelch frowned, “why did it matter to you if I got better or not?”

“Because you mattered,” Slipshod responded, the words catching the sage mare off guard. He offered a small smile and shook his head, “not like that,” he said, “you were a brilliant administrator and the owner of the company. You mattered to the ship, you mattered to the crew, and you mattered to me insofar as you gave me a job and a home.

“If you’d died, I’d have lost all of that. I’d have lost everything that I had left in the galaxy. And I didn’t want that.”

Squelch frowned at the stallion, “that has got to be the most unromantic phrasing of the most romantic sentiment I’ve ever heard,” she said flatly.

The ‘Steed pilot chuckled, “I may never have loved you, but I have absolutely always respected you, Squelch. Obviously not enough to ever tell you the whole truth about me,” he acknowledged, offering a helpless shrug of his shoulders, “but in my defense, honesty isn’t generally a good policy for a changeling.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind. So you went out of your way to hurt me so that I’d be the one to cut ties,” Slipshod nodded his confirmation, “and from there you…?”

“Swore off long-term romantic entanglements and focused on trying to entice as many positive reactions from as much of the crew as possible,” the earth pony replied easily, “give myself a wider array of ‘menu options’, so to speak.”

“That’s still really fucking creepy,” the mare said with a shiver.

“I know,” Slipshod replied with a warm smile. Then the stallion’s expression seemed to falter somewhat for a brief moment. He shook his head and rubbed at his eyes.

Squelch regarded him, “you okay?”

“Just tired,” he assured her confidently, “had a lot of late night planning sessions with Twilight and Cinder this week.”

“Yeah, she mentioned something about a job tracking down a mare who’s been dead for over two years? Victoria Blueblood? What’s that about?”

“Remember how I told you my family died plotting a coup?”

“Yeah? Why―oh,” the mare blinked in mild surprise, “really? So she’s still alive?”

“She was two years ago,” Slipshod shrugged, “part of that job Twilight offered you is tracking her down.”

“And you need to come along to make the pitch, because it was your―or, rather, the real Slipshod’s family that supported her. Which means she’ll be more willing to believe that we’re out there to give her a second shot at her uncle’s throne if she hears it coming from you.”

“Pretty much.”

Squelch sat back on her haunches, rubbing her chin thoughtfully with a hoof as she weighed the offered contract. She believed Twilight when the alicorn said that this would be the quickest way to end the fight against Chrysalis. Which meant that it was indeed the swiftest route to her life returning to some semblance of normalcy. Heck, this operation would be ‘normalcy’. A paying gig, a chance to get back out to the Sphere…

There wasn’t really a downside. In fact, the only one that there had been was working with Slipshod again. Which...if the stallion was being sincere―and Celestia help her, Squelch believed he was―she might be able to tolerate him again. Whether the others on the crew would though...that was another matter.

“How exactly am I supposed to sell this to the crew?” she asked the earth pony, “it shocked a lot of ponies when the truth came out. They might not want you along.”

Slipshod nodded somberly, “I know. I used them like I used you. I don’t expect any of them to forgive me―I don’t expect you to forgive me; and I’m not asking any of you to. Keep me locked up somewhere out of sight. I don’t care.

“I just need to talk to Victoria and get her onboard with Twilight’s plan. After that…” the stallion closed his eyes and rubbed the side of his head, clearly quite fatigued, “...well, I suspect a lot of problems will be solving themselves at that point,” he flashed the unicorn a wan smile.

Squelch frowned, not quite understanding the implications of the earth pony’s last statement, but chose not to push him on the topic, “I’ll call a meeting,” she informed him, “see where everypony stands. I’ll let Twilight know what we decide.”

Twilight idly wondered if she was ever going to get used to her temporal displacement. Despite being confronted at seemingly every turn with evidence that just about everything―and especially everycreature―had changed, the purple alicorn still found that her first impulse upon meeting one of her ‘old friends’ was to treat them like they’d just seen each other, and that they hadn’t just lived through half a millenia of bitter strife.

Smolder had always presented herself as was expected of a young dragon: strong, willful, and independent. Even after she’d embraced the core ideals of Friendship at Twilight’s academy, the burnt orange dragoness had never let those outward affectations slip. She might be more open to sharing her innermost thoughts and feelings with those closest to her, but she was still a dragon. Which wasn’t to say that it wasn’t apparent to some that Smolder had been possessed of some hidden depths.

Every Grand Galloping Gala that Smolder had attended, she’d worn a decidedly resplendent gown. If pressed on the matter, the young dragoness responded with a mutter about ‘reluctantly observing the dress code’, and that seemed to satisfy most. Of course, Twilight knew that there wasn’t any such ‘dress code’. Not officially, at any rate. It was custom to dress nicely for the event, but hardly required.

It was certainly not anything that had ever been explicitly brought up in the invitations that Twilight had sent out.

That repressed fascination with delicate jewelry and extravagant dresses, along with her managing to find all manner of justifications for why she ‘had’ to wear them had been one of the qualities that the―now former―Princess of Equestria had found to be quite endearing about the dragoness. It had reminded her of Rainbow Dashes ‘secret’ love of reading.

There was no sign of that Smolder in the icy blue eyes that stared at the violet mare from across the table now though. Hundreds of years spent watching the Harmony Sphere rend itself into pieces, and then proceed to blow those pieces to flaming bits in perpetuity had apparently burned out that little light within her. She’d lost her faith in the inherent goodness of creatures. For that, Twilight was disappointed. Of course, it wasn’t like Smolder was the only creature to have undergone such a change, was she? In fact, such changes had been so common that Twilight found herself wondering if she herself might not have felt that way if she'd been forced to sit by and watch everything that she’d built become undone, helpless to do anything to stop it.

Was the only difference between herself and Flurry Heart nothing but the accumulation of time?

It was a harrowing thought, to say the least.

Smolder was not the only dragon in attendance for this meeting either. Three others were present, and Twilight couldn’t say that she was surprised by who they were: Garble, Clump, and Caldera. The first of whom, Twilight was the most familiar. She’d met him early on in her own life, and gotten to know the crimson dragon as a bully and a blowhard. He’d made efforts to smooth his rougher edges over the years, but always harbored various resentments. He’d not been a fan of Dragon Lord Ember’s rule from the outset, and had mostly complied out of a sense of peer pressure. It was not considered seemly, even within dragon culture, to be the sole dissenting voice against the Dragon Lord.

The other two she had met in passing over the centuries at various functions, bother formal and otherwise. Like Garble, their level of courtesy at those functions had been quite superficial. They were behaving as their Dragon Lord was expecting them to, and little else. They’d exploited the ideals of Friendship more than they embraced them, capitalizing on the networking advantages it provided in order to bolster their own personal and political power as much as they could get away with.

Twilight had always known that it would be the hardest to convince the older generations of dragons to adopt the philosophies of ponies. Centuries of tradition were almost impossible to change, and she understood that. It was enough for her that they had at least adopted the facsimile of Friendship, for the benefit of the generations that came after them.

Now, the alicorn found herself wondering if maybe she shouldn’t have tried harder to impart Harmony and Friendship onto them. There were limits to what could be done, obviously. Forced Harmony was not Harmony at all. A creature had to be open to embracing those ideals. Yet, it seemed that even then the good embracing them did could be undone with enough time and cynicism.

Smolder was proof enough of that.

“I’d like to start things off by telling you all how grateful I am that you’ve agreed to meet with me,” Twilight began, bowing her head politely in Smolder’s direction. She did her best to keep a warm smile on her face, but she was forced to acknowledge how difficult it was to see such coldness in the eyes of one she’d known to be a lot warmer the last time they’d met.

There was no reciprocating nod from any of the four dragons, and Smolder’s expression reflected annoyance more than anything else, “when the Dragon Lord says ‘jump’, the Clans jump,” she grumbled, “now what do you want?”

The alicorn suppressed a grimace. She was relatively certain that Ember wouldn’t have framed this meeting as any sort of actual ‘command’ that these Khans were obligated to obey. Then again, oftentimes it was not about how the request was phrased, and more about who was giving it. Twilight knew that, when she had been the ruler of Equestria, even her most mundane requests had been treated tantamount to royal decrees, no matter how apparently optional she’d made them. Nopony wanted to disappoint the princess.

Presumably, no dragon wanted to disappoint the Dragon Lord either.

“I have been made aware that some of the Clans have grown…” Twilight spent a moment groping around for the right word to use. She didn’t want this to devolve into an argument of any sort, or give the impression that she was trying to give them commands. Especially since Twilight knew that she no longer had the authority to do so, “...disappointed,” she finally settled on, “with how the inhabitants of the Harmony Sphere have been behaving.

“Which I understand completely,” she added, nodding her head sagely. Twilight vividly recalled how much of what she’d personally experienced upset her, “and I can empathize with wanting to do anything to make it stop. To try and restore even some measure of peace to the Sphere again.

“And I think that Princess Flurry Heart, Dragon Lord Ember, and I have managed to come up with a plan that will allow us to remove Chrysalis and restore Harmony to the Sphere with a minimal loss of life and in the most expedient way possible,” Twilight did her best now to sound as enthusiastic about the plan as she could, which proved to not be quite as easy as she might have hoped. While she did believe what she was saying was true, and that their new plan would mean fewer casualties, that wasn’t the same thing as saying few casualties overall.

Millions could still end up dying in the fighting. Blood that would lay the foundation for the new era of peace, as Slipshod had warned her. It was difficult not to feel at least some measure of bitterness at that thought, “I’m here to ask that you give the plan your full support, as well as the time needed to execute the plan, before you all decide to, er...take matters into your own claws. Please.”

Smolder was silent for several tense moments, exchanging glances with the three other dragons with her before looking back in Twilight’s direction, “you want us to abandon our invasion plans in order to support your invasion plans,” Twilight visibly winced at the not wholly inaccurate phrasing, but didn’t object, “and our incentive to do that would be…?”

The alicorn blanched for a second, stunned at the question, before managing to get out a response, “to keep down the number of casualties,” she said, “we’re trying to limit the destruction as much as possible so that just Chrysalis’ forces are affected.”

Smolder flashed a contemptuous sneer, “you’re talking like it’s only the changelings that are behind the fighting and the destruction in the Sphere. Except that nocreature in the Sphere knows that any of what’s going on is part of some nefarious plot! They’re all perfectly willing to go along with it just ‘knowing’ that ‘that’s how the galaxy works now’,” the burnt orange dragoness snorted, “so if the creatures of the Sphere are willing to do all of this when they don’t know there are changelings at all; what makes you think they’ll stop once Chrysalis and the changelings are gone?”

The purple mare was forced to admit that she mentally stumbled for a brief moment. It was very easy to lay all of the galaxy’s woes as Chrysalis’ hooves; but Smolder had a point: none of the Sphere denizens knew they were playing right into the changeling queen’s clutches. They thought that they were just going about their normal lives, which included all of the national and regional leaders who were perpetuating the violence and destruction and death. They were like Squelch, believing that this was how things had to be. They’d be doing it whether the changelings were there or not at this point.

“You’re right, it’s not enough to defeat Chrysalis,” Twilight admitted soberly, “that’s just the first step on a long road to recovery. The galaxy will need to be taught Friendship and Harmony again. It’ll be harder than before, I know that,” she met Smolder’s gaze now, her expression more determined, “but I also know that it can be done.”

“And so do we,” the dragoness said, gesturing at the other dragon Khans with her, all of whom were now sporting hungry grins that made Twilight more than a little nervous. The hunger behind those eyes was anything but reassuring, “we can stop the violence and restore peace. And we can keep that peace enforced,” Smolder asserted, clenching an upraised fist in emphasis, “long enough for that peace to become the new ‘cultural norm’, just like the fighting did.

“They’ll resist us; at first,” she acknowledged with a dismissive shrug, “everycreature resists change. It’s only natural. But, in time, they’ll adapt and they’ll embrace Harmony once more.”

“What you’re describing doesn’t sound like ‘Harmony’,” Twilight cautioned, unable to hide now how disappointed she was in one of her former students, “that’s...tyranny.”

Smolder glared at the alicorn now, “...it wasn’t ‘tyranny’ when it was ponies going around telling every other creature how to live their lives.”

“What?! We never ‘told’ anycreature how to―!”

“Didn’t you?” the dragoness snapped, silencing the former princess, “your kind indoctrinated a whole generation of creatures at that school, and then every generation after it at the hundreds that followed in its wake,” she sneered at the alicorn, “we were children, being explicitly told how we were expected to live our lives according to pony philosophies. Only to find out, centuries later, that even ponies don’t believe any of that ‘Friendship’ crap!

“Do you know what that tree of yours did to me and my friends at that school of yours?” Smolder seethed, jabbing her claw accusingly at the purple mare, “it played on our fears to get us to bend to its whims! It made Gallus and Silverstream think they were in mortal peril until they agreed to do what it said!

“And you don’t think that counts as ‘forcing’?”

“What? No, that...that can’t be true,” Twilight protested, shaking her head in defiance, unwilling to believe such outrageous allegations, “the Tree of Harmony would never do something like that! It existed to help the creatures of the world―”

“It existed to control them,” the dragoness shot back, the other three dragons around her nodded their assent, “obedience was rewarded, and deviation was punished. I didn’t see that clearly when I was just a whelp, it took me centuries to understand what was happening, took me seeing what even ponies become when that threat of retribution for being anything other than ‘harmonious’ did to the society that you molded.

“Stop constantly reminding ponies how ‘important’ Harmony and Friendship is, and suddenly they’re at each other’s throats!” Smolder scoffed, “which just proves it’s nothing but a load of crap to begin with.”

“No, that’s not true,” Twilight insisted, though, even to her own ears, she didn’t sound nearly as certain about that anymore. There was no denying the state of the galaxy, after all. Friendship and Harmony were foreign concepts to modern societies. Maybe she could lay the blame for that at the hooves of Chrysalis and Cozy Glow where the Harmony Sphere was concerned…

...But how did she rationalize the state of the Clans and the League-in-Exile? Torture, butchering of its captives, the Disciples certainly didn’t sound like a ‘stabilizing force’ in the Sphere as far residents like Squelch had been concerned. Those warped values that seemed to glorify violence and subjugation...that hadn’t been the changelings’ doing.

The League had done it to themselves.

Excuses could be made regarding a need to abandon the ways of real Harmony for the sake of defeating a greater evil; but an excuse was not the same thing as a justification. Were the changes to the principles of the League-in-Exile and the Clans justified? They’d been excused, yes, but that didn’t mean it had been right.

The purple alicorn shook her head, distraught t not just how this conversation was going, but at the general state of the galaxy, and how far things had fallen, “I believe in the Magic of Friendship,” she insisted, though her voice still wavered much to her own chagrin, “I know that the Elements of Harmony are the path to a happy and just society. I believe that with all my being.

“No creature is perfect,” she said, finding the determination within herself to meet the dragoness’ eyes once more, “certainly not ponies. Falling short of ideals doesn’t mean they’re not worthwhile! It doesn’t mean they’re not worth pursuing, even in the face of adversity.

“The galaxy existed at peace for a thousand years! When Chrysalis and her influence are gone, someday we can have that peace again.”

“For how long?” Smolder quipped, dismissively, taking the alicorn aback once more, “another thousand years? Then we have another few centuries of war to deal with? Is this going to be the new cycle?”

“No, of course not; this time it will last!”

“You can’t possibly make that promise,” she snapped, rebuking the mare, “not even an immortal alicorn can see the future,” she snorted, “otherwise you’d have seen this whole Chrysalis thing coming…” she waggled a patronizing claw at Twilight, “you just lied to me there, princess,” the dragoness’ smile was anything but warm. It was a cruel, mocking thing, “you threw your own vaunted Elements right out the window just there to try and get your way.

“How are you going to get a whole galaxy of creatures to abide by them for the rest of time when you couldn’t adhere to them for ten minutes?”

The feigned smile was gone now, replaced with a contemptuous glare once more, “we already tried building your perfect little utopia once. It failed. So now we’re going to try things our way,” she jabbed a claw at the center of her chest, receiving cheers of ready agreement from the other dragon Khans, “we’re going to bring this galaxy to heel and finally give it peace.

“Any creature that resists us obviously doesn’t want peace or an end to the violence,” her tone had acquired an icy chill that sent a shiver down the alicorn’s spine. It was a soft, but firm tone that promised to not be exaggerating in the slightest, “creatures like that don’t have a place in a genuinely peaceful galaxy, and so they’ll be culled.

“They will be Sacrificed for the Cause. For the good of all.”

“Please,” the alicorn pleaded, sounding almost petulant in her apparent helplessness to sway these dragons, “Smolder, don’t do this...give me a chance―give our plan a chance!

“Please?”

The burnt orange dragoness hesitated, and for just a fraction of a second, her eyes seemed to soften. Twilight felt hope swell within her heart, sure that she’d gotten through to one of her first pupils. Then Garble spoke up.

“Why choose?” the gruff crimson-scaled Khan asked of the pair, earning confused looks from both, “who says that only one option can be done at a time?” his beedy yellow eyes seemed to delight at Twilight’s discomfort, “I say we try both,” he looked at Smolder, “we put out the word among the Clans that they can either help try and put the galaxy back together ‘the pony way’, or they can join us on our crusade to forge an even better society!”

He leered at the alicorn, grinning sadistically at her, “after a thousand years, we’ll see whose half of the galaxy is better, and who was right.”

Twilight was shaking her head, ready to counter the red dragon and once more appeal to Smolder, but even as she looked back at the orange dragoness, and the delight in her cyan eyes, the mare knew that she’d lost this battle. The prospect of a competition to demonstrate superiority pushed exactly the right buttons where a dragon’s inherent nature was concerned. Smolder wouldn’t even entertain the notion of backing down, not in front of the other Khans, where she might be seen as ‘weak’ to refuse such a challenge.

The other two Khans were similarly already muttering among themselves how much more quickly they’d be able to ‘pacify’ planets that the ‘pink pony princess’ could ever hope to. The bottom fell out of Twilight’s stomach. Had...had she just somehow made things worse by inadvertently giving the Dragon Clans an incentive to boycott the League-in-Exile’s invasion strategy in favor of their own distinct invasion plan?

A soft, “don’t...please…” was all that Twilight was able to manage, even as she saw the hopelessness of her cause reflected in Smolder’s hungry baby blue eyes.

Her lips pulled back in a vicious grin, “tell the Dragon Lord that she’ll have to command us―all of us―to hold off. Otherwise, the Clans are going to war without her…”

The icy blue griffon hen sat hunched over the desk, tapping idly at the keys as they navigated their way through the various file directories. The building was otherwise rather quiet, save for the click-clacking of talons on keys. This late at night, most of the command staff was home asleep. The only creatures to be found on the premises were the custodial staff, the night watch, and a few others looking to get less behind on their administrative paperwork.

The griffon lieutenant classified themselves among the latter.

Her official duties were actually rather limited, but her clearance level allowed for her to accomplish far more if she wished to. An enterprising officer displaying initiative in an effort to gain recognition wasn’t something that was wholly unique, and so none of the other officers had paid her much mind when she came in long after her duty hours had technically ended and sat herself down at her desk and began working.

An hour later, she finished compiling the summary of the forces fielded by the Clans and had the information transferred to her personal datalink. The griffon then went ahead and cleared out the system’s log entries for that evening and shut down the computer. She bid the cleaning crew and good evening on her way out of the building and took to the sky.

Ten minutes later, she landed at the front gate of the compound housing the Harmony Sphere mercenaries. While she could have flown over the wall quite easily, protocol was that every creature had to check in with the security detail before entry.

A burly gray earth pony stallion stepped out of the guard shack, snapping off a quick but sharp salute upon catching sight of who the arrival was, “good evening, lieutenant,” he greeted the hen, “I thought you got off duty a few hours ago?”

“I did. Realized I’d forgotten something in my locker that I needed. I’ll just be a few minutes and then I’m heading back home again.”

“Ah, no worries. I forget things all the time. Good night, LT.”

He waved the griffon through and she nodded and took to the air once more, heading in the direction of the small duty-barracks. Once she was out of sight of the guard post, she instantly diverted towards the apartment complex housing the mercenaries. Specifically the third story balcony on the west face. The blue feathered feline alit briefly on the railing before hopping through the door on silent, stealthy hind paws.

If anycreature had been positioned so as to be able to look into the apartment from the air, they might have seen the briefest flicker of emerald green light. It lasted for only a fraction of a second, so even any who might have seen it would have thought nothing of it.

The white unicorn stallion walked quietly to his desk and slipped his datalink into one of the drawers. He then turned his attention towards his bedroom, and the sound of the soft, chittering purs, that were wafting out of it. The more potent effects of the sedative would have already worn off by now, meaning that his guest would be poised to wake up if desturbed. Which was good, because she had expressed an earlier desire not to spend the whole night in his bed, insisting that she had a trio of hatchlings and a husband who would wonder what she’d gotten up to if she was out the whole night.

Her story for her family was going to be that she’d spent some extra hours at the office catching up on writing overdue reports.

Doc Dee had seen little issue in taking the initiative to give that alibi some witnesses who’d corroborate things if they should be asked later.

The stallion crept into the bedroom and eased himself into the tousled bed sheets. The icy blue hen stirred, murmuring something that hadn’t been quite intelligible. The physician smiled, leaning over and beginning to nibble on the plumage along her neck. The griffon let out a pleasurable pur, stretching out languidly. Her eyes began to flutter open lazily, a pleased smile spreading over her lips to either side of her beak.

Then, with a sudden start, she sat bolt upright, “shells! I didn’t mean to fall asleep; what time is it?!”

“Half past one,” Dee informed her, affecting a satisfied groan and an accompanying grin, “you’re quite welcome, by the way.”

The griffon grunted in a huff, though her cheeks did blush beneath her feathers, “yeah, yeah; you’re a real stud, stud,” her tone suggested that she was being patronizing, but the amorous feelings that simmered beneath the surface attested to the reason why she had been making frequent layovers in the unicorn’s apartment for the past week. She hopped out of bed and glanced between the exit and the bathroom before giving the underside of her wing a test-sniff.

“Yeah, I definitely need a shower,” she grumbled, “shards know Gunther hasn’t gotten me this hot and bothered in a long time…”

“Want some help?” the stallion flashed a playful grin in the hen’s direction.

“No,” she said emphatically, though there was the slightest hint of longing just beneath the word, “I’m late enough as it is, and ‘showers’ with you take an hour,” she dipped into the washroom and closed the door behind her. A second later, he heard the water start running.

The smile fell instantly from his face as he let the facade drop. The sooner the griffon was gone, the sooner he could get some sleep of his own. He rolled over in the bed, and his nostrils instantly flared as he recoiled from the residual stench of their ‘love-making’. The moment she was out of the apartment, he’d change the sheets.

Though, if a little sex and a brief experience with an irritating odor on his sheets was the price that he had to pay for the opportunity to collect information on the dispensation of the opposition’s forces, then it was most assuredly a price worth paying. Mimesis wasn’t entirely certain what his reward would be when he finally found a way to get the information to his queen, but the changeling didn’t have to fake the smile that was spreading across his face as he contemplated the possibilities…

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 21: Fortress of Lies

The door chime woke him up.

Slipshod groaned as he struggled to lift himself out of the bed. One of his forelimbs started shaking under the strain of propping the rest of his body up. He clamped down on it soundly with the other hoof and took a deep, fortifying, breath as he swung himself off the mattress and onto the floor. The next few seconds were spent waiting for the dizziness to pass, and the blackness to retreat from the corners of his eyes. Once he had his wits about him, he retrieved the glass of water from the table beside his cot and used it to wash back a pair of capsules that the ship’s doctor had been kind enough to provide for him.

The official reason that the ‘Steed pilot had given to Doc Dee for why he’d needed the stimulants was because of all of the late night planning conferences that he’d been having with Twilight and Squelch. Unofficially, however, the real reason was much different. However, there was little reason to bother revealing it to anypony else on the ship.

It’s not like telling anypony would help things.

Everypony on the Galloway hated the ‘monster’ that was onboard. No secret was made about that. Slipshod was along for the ride because he was essential to the mission. At least, the first part of it. Once he’d succeeded at making contact with Victoria Blueblood, he’d have outlived the bulk of his usefulness to the campaign to invade the Harmony Sphere.

Which was quite fortuitous, if he was being honest.

The chime buzzed a second time.

“Come in,” he called out hoarsely, immediately clearing his throat and taking another long gulp of water. The door opened, revealing a tall purple figure standing in the doorway, “G’morning, princess. What can I do for you?”

“It’s evening, actually,” the alicorn corrected. Slipshod glanced over at the clock on his desk and noted that the hour was, in fact, quite late. He frowned, not particularly caring for how frequently he was losing track of time. He was spending more hours asleep than he was awake these days. There was no helping that though, “I came by to let you know that we’ve arrived in Minos. We’ve started pulling records from the system network. We could use your help figuring out where to start looking for Victoria.”

Slipshod nodded, “yeah. Got it. I’ll be right up,” he took a deep breath and massaged the bridge of his nose, willing the stimulants to kick in faster, “conference room, right?”

“Yes,” the purple mare hesitated, regarding the earth pony, “are you feeling okay?”

“Just some jump lag,” he lied, relieved to know that it still came easy to him, even in his weakened state, “we just finished averaging a jump an hour for the last day and a half, for the second time in a month,” he flashed the mare a tired smile, “that’s got to be some kind of record. I’ll be fine in a few minutes,” he assured her, hoping that he was being just a little bit more truthful this time. The pills usually did the trick of getting him up and looking peppy for a few hours before the effects wore off and he found himself struggling to even stand up straight again.

“...Alright. See you in a few minutes,” Twilight said. She turned, leaving the room and allowing the door to close behind her.

The moment he was alone again, Slipshod let the facade drop away, panting harshly as he finally allowed himself to relax. He wiped away at his mouth, where rivlets of drool had been threatening to seep out and dribble down his chin. Concern. Compassion. A desire to help him. The princess’ delicate emotions had been hammering at his skull, just begging to be gorged upon.

The temptation to pounce on the mare and drain her of every last shred of her being had been quite powerful. Stronger than during any of her previous visits. Likely those compulsions to forcefully feed from her―or any of the others―was only going to get stronger with time. The more ravenously hungry he got, the more tempted he’d be to discard any of the remaining shreds of his inhibitions. For now, he could fight back those primal urges. He could focus on the mission, and the good of the crew.

For now.

That wouldn’t be the case for much longer though. A few more weeks. A month at the outside. After that...he doubted that there was any possibility that he’d be able to retain enough self-control to overcome that visceral desire to keep from starving to death. He wouldn’t be able to help himself, and he certainly wouldn’t be able to control himself. Whoever he cornered while he was in that state...they wouldn’t survive.

He wouldn’t let that happen though. Once they’d made contact with Victoria, he’d find a way to...solve the issue. Permanently.

Everything would be up to the others anyway, whether he was still around or not; so it shouldn’t affect the mission all that much.

Once the golden earth pony recomposed himself, he stepped up to the door and pushed a button on the interior comm panel, “I’m ready to come out, Sabot.”

A second later, the door to his quarters opened. A silver unicorn mare dressed in her duty barding, and with a loaded carbine floating near her chest, stepped back from the open portal, just out of hypothetical lunge range if her charge tried anything, and gestured for him to precede her down the corridor. The stallion wore a sad smile as he noted the way that the security pony was looking at him―to say nothing of the feelings that she was directing at him. Flechette had never looked at Twilight like that when he’d been escorting her.

Then again, Twilight hadn’t been responsible for getting their last boss killed. So, perhaps that wasn’t a fair comparison.

He turned and wordlessly started walking down the narrow corridor, heading for the DropShip’s conference room. He kept his head down, and his gaze focused on the floor. Both to avoid accidentally doing anything that Sabot might find suspicious and cause her to lash out at him, and also because he still didn’t quite trust his sense of balance. The last thing that he wanted to do was trip or collapse and draw all sorts of attention to himself.

A small gasp from his right drew the stallion’s gaze. He couldn’t stop himself from looking, if only briefly. That short second was all he needed though. The strawberry unicorn mare and her terrified expression instantly burned itself into his brain. That look of abject fear in her eyes would likely haunt him for the rest of the day. The look of a pony who’d just seen a monster and was afraid for her very life.

Slipshod focused his gaze ahead of him and didn’t miss a step as he kept walking. If nothing else, the encounter was a firm reminder of why it was a good idea for him not to leave his quarters more than was absolutely necessary.

Squelch and Twilight were waiting for him in the conference room. The largest of the wall-mounted displays was scrolling through what looked to be passenger manifests. As he got closer, he noted that the date placed those rosters at a little over two years of age. Approximately the time that Victoria would have been smuggled into the system.

The sage green unicorn looked up at his entrance, “good; you’re here. We just finished downloading the passenger records for the time period we think would have been covered; but if you have any hard names and dates that would be a lot of help.”

“Dates, no,” he admitted as he climbed into one of the seats, relishing being off his hooves even after that short walk. It probably wasn’t a good sign that even a brief jaunt from one side of the ship to the other was wearing him out, “but I do know the name she was given: Corsair. Vought Corsair.”

“Alright, well that shouldn’t be too hard to find,” the unicorn mumbled as she began to work at her console, “just do a quick search and―oh, shit…” the mare looked up from her own display with a surprised expression and a moment later transferred her findings to the main monitor, “Victoria’s been very busy, it seems.”

Both Twilight and Slipshod looked at the display, and the earth pony felt his jaw go slack. Squelch had indeed been successful in finding the date of Victoria Blueblood’s arrival into Concordat territory, but a search under her alias had also revealed quite a bit more about what the mare had been getting herself up to these last two years. Her new persona was listed as being the current commander of a band of mercenaries going by the moniker: Crimson Corsairs.

Well, ‘mercenary’ might be putting too nice a polish on things. A lot of the article’s referred to the group as a straight up pirate band. Though, Slipshod did suppose that one side’s ‘mercenary’ was another side’s ‘raider’, and it did seem like it was mostly news outlets from Harmony Sphere sources which were giving the group the latter label. None of the Periphery powers seemed to take too much issue with anything Victoria and her group were doing.

“Well, at least tracking her down won’t be hard,” the earth pony noted with some mirth, “we can literally just reach out and request a meeting to discuss a ‘job’.”

“That does seem to be the easiest route to take,” Twilight agreed, “and it looks like she’s already got quite a few resources at her disposal. Not saying we could take the Commonwealth without the Dragoons,” she qualified hastily, “but she won’t be showing up in the Sphere completely unsupported either.”

“Which is good,” Squelch noted, “Showing up with a solid core of her own forces at her back will only help to legitimize her. If all she had going for her were mercenaries and no regulars, it would look like she was effectively ‘buying’ the throne. Which is a perfectly valid strategy, of course,” the mare added after a moment’s thought, “but it could hurt her politically in the long term.”

“Not to mention that it might raise a flag or two with Chrysalis if the Dragoons just suddenly threw themselves behind Victoria if she showed up with nothing of her own,” Slipshod pointed out.

Another thought seemed to occur to the mare, “speaking of,” she looked in Slipshod’s direction, “ComSpark was pretty keen on keeping Victoria from becoming archon before. What if they try and stop a second coup?”

That was a concern that the earth pony had also been privately nursing. However, the more he thought about it, the less he believed that Chrysalis would do anything to actively oppose the change in leadership this time. Mostly because she wouldn’t really have the same options available to her this time, “when it was just a plot being talked about in back rooms, it was easy for her agents to leak the intel to Dominus’ counter-intelligence staff and let him handle it more or less on his own,” he pointed out, “ComSpark didn’t do anything directly. They’re officially strictly neutral in political matters, remember?”

“This time, it won’t matter if anything gets ‘leaked’ to Dominus, because it’s basically just going to be an open revolt anyway. ComSpark’s hooves will be more-or-less tied. They can’t condemn a merc company for taking a valid contract without raising some high-profile eyebrows. There might be a changeling-backed assassination attempt or something along the way,” he acknowledged with a shrug, “but that’s always the quickest way to stop an usurping attempt, and is something that Dominus would try even without Chrysalis’ help.

“The point is: Chrysalis won’t be able to openly move against anything we do in the Commonwealth,” Slipshod concluded with certainty, “what she will be doing though is making sure she has agents in place ready to infiltrate the new administration if Victoria does end up becoming the next archon,” he looked over at Twilight, “that’s honestly our biggest concern: keeping the Clans off Chrysalis’ radar before we’ve set Victoria on the throne. Give her as little warning to work with as possible.

“Keeping Chrysalis in the dark until our forces are just outside the Faust System is unrealistic,” the earth pony said, shaking his head, “No matter how hard we try, changelings are going to make their way into Victoria’s new administration. There aren’t nearly enough of those zebras and that salve to screen the billions of citizens of the Commonwealth. The moment we start coordinating anything about the invasion through Commonwealth territory, we need to assume that Chrysalis know’s we’re coming.”

The two mares exchanged uncomfortable expressions, but both knew that Slipshod was making a valid point. Keeping an invasion force the size needed to take Equus a secret would be impossible once they were firmly in the Harmony Sphere again, and trying to vet every creature involved in the Commonwealth’s command and logistics networks for changeling agents would be effectively impractical besides. No matter what they did, Chrysalis would know that they were coming. Honestly, that hadn’t been the biggest issue with the invasion anyway. The original plan calling for a forceful push through a narrow corridor wouldn’t exactly have gone unnoticed from the outset either.

What they stood to gain going this route was an unimpeded line of advance which would allow them to reach Equus in a matter of months, instead of years, without taking any losses or worrying about shedding forces to safeguard their supply lines.

That being said, there was no telling how long the coup itself could take. That might end up taking several years on its own. If Chrysalis learned about the Clans and what they were planning before Victoria was made Archon, then that could end up spelling disaster for them. It would give the changelings time enough to begin putting in place preparation for a Sphere-wide mobilization against the Clans. Which would arguably be worse for them than an outright invasion would have been.

If this was going to go smoothly, ComSpark needed to remain ignorant of the real backers of the coup until Victoria was crowned, at the least. Which broached the question:

“Do we tell Victoria about who we’re really working for?” Slipshod asked. He found it telling that Twilight wasn’t immediately discounting the idea of keeping the Clans a secret from her out of hoof. She actually seemed to be genuinely weighing the pros and cons of that approach.

However, ultimately, the purple mare shook her head, “we can’t keep this from her,” she insisted, “otherwise we risk her denying us passage anyway when she does eventually find out,” that was a good point, the earth pony acknowledged, “however,” the alicorn went on, shifting a little more uneasily now, drawing a raised brow front he stallion, “I do think that we should keep that knowledge to just her. For the time being.

“The more creatures who know, the more potential sources that can end up leaking it to Chrysalis. Victoria has a right to know what she’d getting into with us, and what it is we’ll be asking from her in the future, but it is still important to try and keep as much about the Clans as we can a secret from the rest of the Sphere until we’re ready to make our move on Chrysalis.”

That seemed like a fair compromise, Slipshod decided. Twilight was right that Victoria would prove to be a better ally in the long-term if they were upfront with her and what it was that the Clans hoped to receive in exchange for their support of her ascension.

“Agreed,” Squelch announced, “I’ll start putting together a message for transmit,” she looked in Slipshod’s direction, “I need you to send me some code word or phrase I can use so that she’ll know that you’re involved. That might bump us up on her list of priorities when it comes to giving us a response,” the stallion nodded, he’d spent a fair portion of the last few weeks in transit rereading the letters that he’d received from the real Slipshod’s father so that he had a better understanding of how the codes were supposed to work. Hopefully Victoria still remembered them too.

“Good. In the meantime, I’m going to take the opportunity to register our new mercenary company,” the sage green unicorn said with a hint of bitterness. While little about their outfit had really changed beyond the name and the color palette, it still felt like something of a loss to her. The Steel Coursers had been her creation―her intended legacy. But now they were gone, and it felt like she was establishing something lesser in their place.

This despite the fact that, other than the name, hardly anything about their company had changed. Only a hoofful of the crew had elected to remain behind in Clan territory, finding the accommodations not all that bad. Wing Nut had told Squelch that it felt like something of an early retirement for her. One that was better than she’d believed she could achieve in the Sphere.

That had certainly been the minority opinion though. The bulk of the crew had jumped at the chance to get back into space, especially when it was made clear that they’d be going back to doing merc work again. The sort of creature that became a mercenary in the first place tended to be the sort that craved adventure and thrills. There were plenty of much safer and more boring ways to make a lot of C-bits, after all.

Squelch really just wished that she’d been the one to come up with the name, and not the Clan’s intel spooks who’d forged their new identities. Spies just didn’t seem to have an appreciation for the artform that was naming a merc outfit.

‘Rayleigh’s Irregulars’ sounded less like a dignified mercenary outfit, and more like the name of a particularly insubordinate militia detachment. Their ship’s new name, Zathura was less objectionable, at least. Though its new black and red paint job left a lot to be desired. To say nothing of the uniforms. Those looked a lot less professional in Squelch’s estimation.

Or, rather―the mare thought with a bitter scowl―’Rayleigh’s’ estimation.

Not every member of the crew had been forced to adopt aliases. In fact, it had really only been herself. She was the registered owner of the ship and the company, and so her name would be showing up on a lot of documentation. Documentation that would inevitably find its way to ComSpark and the MRB. Squelch was known to them to be helping Twilight Sparkle―whose new pseudonym was: Dusk Shine―and so having her name show up as the leader of another mercenary company, even one with a different name, risked setting off too many alarm bells with the enemy.

Not that she was going to insist that any of the crew call her by her new identity. As far as the unicorn was concerned, that name was strictly used for tax purposes. On this ship, she was still going to use Squelch.

“Is it too late to do anything about the uniforms?” the earth pony asked, “the red’s not nearly as slimming.”

“Yes,” Squelch said with a smirk, wondering a little at how the stallion had apparently been thinking similar thoughts to her own, “but it’s not going to matter, because nopony’s going to be seeing much of you from inside your ‘Steed anyway.”

Slipshod blinked in shock, “...you’re going to actually let me fight?”

The mare didn’t look up from where she’d turned to study her console, “I’m not about to send just Twilight and Xanadu out on ops alone and keep a perfectly fine BattleSteed―and marginally competent pilot,” she cast the stallion an aside glance which contained just the faintest hint of amusement, “on the sidelines. Not if we end up getting into any serious fights.

“If there’s no other questions,” the unicorn said, suddenly changing the topic of conversation as she shut down her console and turned for the door, suggesting that she wasn’t particularly interested in fielding any actual questions at the moment anyway, “I have a company to register and some work contracts to review.

“Rayleigh’s Irregulars should have some work under their belts before they go reaching out to other established outfits. Especially if we want Victoria’s―sorry, Corsair’s―pilots to take us seriously.”

The pair sat in silence for several seconds after Squelch left. The revelation that he’d be permitted to go on missions had certainly come as quite the surprise to the stallion. He’d fully expected to spend the entirety of his voyage confined to his quarters. That Squelch trusted him enough to let him near a ‘Steed again was...welsome. Perhaps ultimately unnecessary, the stallion thought wanly to himself, but still a pleasant thought.

Slipshod took the better part of a minute sitting in his seat gathering his strength to stand and begin the short―but extremely arduous―walk back to his quarters so that he could go back to sleep. If a walk down the hall winded him, there was no reasonable way that he was going to be able to take a ‘Steed into battle.

He didn’t know why the alicorn was staying. Surely Twilight had some business to attend to that would take her out of the room so that the stallion could stagger in private.

“...how are you holding up?” the purple mare asked.

Slipshod cringed inwardly. This was not a conversation that he wanted to have. With Twilight or anypony else, “fine,” was his terse reply, “just a little tired. Like I said: jump lag. It’ll pass.”

“Uh huh. When’s the last time you ate?”

“Cookie sent up pancakes this morning,” the stallion said, casually avoiding what he knew the actual meaning to be, “I slept through lunch though. I understand that dinner’s minestrone.”

“You know what I meant.”

“I do.”

“And…?”

Slipshod took a deep breath and let it out slowly, working to keep both his thoughts focused, and his emotions in check. The alicorn was treading on potentially deadly ground at the moment, with the state that he was in, “you are the pony who hates me the least on this ship,” he articulated in a very carefully controlled tone, “and you still do not possess fond feelings for me.

“For me to eat in this environment, would require a forceful feeding,” he turned his head, leveling a cold stare at the purple mare, “...and nopony wants that.”

“They don’t hate you,” Twilight insisted quietly, “they’re just...afraid of you is all.”

“And ponies hate what they fear,” Slipshod quipped, turning back around and closing his eyes. Just looking at the princess was starting to trigger some very predatory urges deep within him with the state that he was in.

“Then let them get to know you―the real you! They’ll stop being afraid, they’ll stop hating you―they might even start to like you again!”

The stallion couldn’t restrain the derisive cackle that escaped his lips at the mere thought of such a thing happening. Besides, “they’d have to be willing to stick around me long enough to have a conversation for there to be a chance of that,” he pointed out, “and none of them would, if given a choice.

“What do you plan to do? Tie them up and force them to spend the day with me?”

“I…” the mare began, her words drifting into silence as she was unable to come up with a response, “I don’t know,” she finally admitted.

“Well, neither do I,” finally, Slipshod decided that if Twilight wasn’t going to leave him in peace, then he’d have to be the one to do it. The stallion got out of the chair in what could perhaps best be described as a manner approximating a ‘well-controlled fall’, and proceeded to lean against it for several seconds while he caught his breath. Those stimulant capsules were either losing their potency, or he was getting fatigued a lot more quickly these days. Almost certainly the latter. He’d have to start increasing the dose beyond what the ship’s physician had recommended.

What harm would there be in that anyway? It’s not like dying of an overdose was a significant difference from what would ultimately be killing him in a few weeks anyway.

Finally confident that he had his legs firmly under him, he stepped past the alicorn and headed for the exit. He paused at the door, “just...don’t let this be for nothing, okay? Stop Chrysalis,” he tapped the control panel and opened the door. The security mare was waiting for him on the other side, and promptly gave him room enough to pass so that he wouldn’t be within hooves-reach of her carbine, “Hey, Sabot.”

The unicorn mare said nothing in response, merely glaring daggers at him. The golden stallion looked over his shoulder at the princess and shared a knowing glance with her, indicating the guardspony. Twilight bowed her head in resignation. Slipshod started trudging back to his quarters at gunpoint.

The door chime woke him up.

Slipshod groaned, sputtering, “I sent the code phrase already,” and then rolled over. He was too weak and tired to be bothered to get up for anything that he wasn’t positive was important. He knew that not nearly enough time had passed for them to be meeting with Victoria/Corsair. Squelch might have found some work for them, he supposed, but if that was the case then he was going to need to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that he simply wasn’t physically capable of helping them with a mission. No matter how much he might have been touched by her offer to let him participate.

The door chime repeated.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake what?!”

“You have a visitor.”

It wasn’t a mare’s voice that replied over the intercom. This caused a brief moment of confusion in the stallion. He looked towards the room’s clock and sighed. More than twelve hours had passed since his meeting in the conference room. Sabot wasn’t on shift anymore. This would be Breech Block. As for who the visitor was, he couldn’t even guess. Nopony should be needing him for anything for at least the next few days.

The earth pony let out another, more annoyed, groan. He was in no condition to deal with anypony. He could barely sit up on his own without pharmaceutical help. Whoever this was, and whatever they wanted, he hoped they made it quick, “fine, let ‘em in,” he relented.

The door opened, and the earth pony was forced to squint as the brighter lights of the corridor flooded into his dark quarters. When his eyes finally adjusted, his head cocked to the side in confusion, “...Xanadu? The fuck do you want?”

The zebra ‘Steed pilot who represented the second-newest addition to the crew of the Galloway―er, Zathura―after Cinder, flashed the bedridden stallion a wry smile, “you’re even more of a charmer than I’ve heard,” he reached out and turned on the room’s lights, extracting a second, more annoyed wince from the earth pony.

“If you’re here to ask for permission to use the Cavalier, then it’s yours. Take it,” Slipshod groaned, rolling over in his bed so that he was facing the wall.

“That’s very generous of you,” the zebra said in a rather amused tone, “but it’s not why I’m here.”

The golden stallion frowned and looked back over his shoulder, narrowing his gaze at the striped equine, “...then why are you here?”

“Dusk Shine said you could use someone to talk to,” Xanadu replied simply, walking over and straddling the chair at the desk, somehow managing to seat himself in it in a reverse fashion, leading over the seat’s back. He was obviously rather limber, “or are we still calling her Purple Rose?

“Actually,” the zebra hastily corrected himself, flashing the earth pony a bemused look, “is everypony on the ship really still supposed to pretend that she’s not the real Queen Twilight Sparkle? Because some of the ponies on this ship when I first arrived were doing a really good job of playing dumb…”

Slipshod snorted and rolled back over towards the wall, “I call her Twilight. I think she prefers that name.

“And I’m fine.”

“That’s not what Twilight said,” the zebra said, not sounding the least bit phased, “she says you’re dying.”

“She’s being dramatic,” the golden earth pony lied easily. Dancing around the truth was in his very nature, “I’m just tired is all.”

“Damn, you’re really good at that!” Xanadu proclaimed, sounding genuinely impressed. The other stallion looked back over his shoulder again, flashing his striped guest a confused look, “at lying, I mean. I don’t think I could sound that convincing even if I was telling the truth.

“Not that I’m trying to be insulting or anything,” he quickly assured the earth pony, again sounding quite sincere. Indeed, Slipshod didn’t detect even a sliver of animosity behind the zebra’s inviting expression. If anything, that only served to confound him even more, “some creatures are just really good at feigning feelings and emotions, and I’ve always found that to be a fascinating skill.

“Any time I’m watching a vid and the actors in it are looking genuinely angry, or sad, or happy, or whatever; I can’t help but remind myself that those creatures aren’t really any of those things in that moment. They’re just pretending to feel that way. Probably not for the first time either, depending on how many takes they had to do to get everything in the scene right.

“It’s got to be super hard to convince creatures that you feel a certain way, while actually not feeling anything at all like it. I mean, I know I couldn’t. I’m a terrible liar. Terrible poker player too,” he added with an amused snort, “took losing a few thousand C-bits in my life to finally accept that.

“But you…” Xanadu flashed a grin at the earth pony, “Oh, I bet you’d clean up at a poker table,” he propped his chin up on his hooves, his eyes dancing in the reclining stallion’s direction, “I’d love to watch you work sometime.”

The zerba wasn’t far off the mark, actually. Though the jury was out on how much of Slipshod’s gambling success was due to his ability to skim the emotional state of his opponents―and thus their respective elation or disgust at their cards―or to keeping his own outward facing features in check, “...thanks?”

He honestly wasn’t sure how he was supposed to be reacting here. Which was a first for him. He was generally pretty good at reading social cues and tailoring his responses to them appropriately in order to serve the setting and get what he needed out of the encounter. But, this time...there wasn’t anything to really ‘read’. Xanadu was doing the emotional equivalent of screaming from the rooftops at the moment.

Most creatures, no matter how pleasant and open they appeared to be, were always holding something back. Not necessarily anything nefarious. Just a little polite reservation in order to keep from committing any social faux pas and risking alienating their peers. Nearly every creature, in some way, ‘projected’ a version of themselves to the public that wasn’t completely a reflection of their true selves.

Squelch, for example, carried herself as a no-nonsense business-minded mare with her eyes on the next fat contract. She wasn’t particularly cutthroat, but she was definitely a shrewd negotiator, and she took her business seriously. That was how the clients saw her. It was how the crew saw her.

But that wasn’t everything. Beneath that calm and calculating exterior was a mare genuinely valued intimate personal relationships. It was a part of her that she didn’t broadcast to the world, because she didn’t think prospective employers would take her nearly as seriously if she let them see her fawning over a stallion that she cared about. In another life, she could have been a homemaker instead of a mercenary contractor.

However, that wasn’t the case with Xanadu. The zebra wasn’t holding anything back. He was being open, upfront, and genuine with his feelings.

It was an extremely dangerous prospect given his current company.

Slipshod turned away a third time, surreptitiously using the bedsheet to wipe away the drool that was starting to seep between his lips. The striped stallion needed to leave while Slipshod could still control himself, “I’m really tired. You should go,” he swallowed, “please.”

“Ooh,” Xanadu shook his head now, frowning a little, “see, now that time you didn’t do so good. At least with the first part. The second part was you being honest, but that first bit...we both know you’re not actually tired.

“You just want me to go because you’re afraid you’ll drain all my emotions and kill me.”

Slipshod went rigid with shock, his eyes wide. There was an instinctive moment of panic that coursed through his body at the prospect that his nature as a changeling had been discovered. That feeling passed quickly though as his brain receded from instinct and processed things far more logically. Of course the zebra knew. Everypony on the ship knew. Xanadu might have been the newest addition to the crew, but that didn’t mean that nopony would have talked to him by now about the single-most shocking revelation that had come to light in the history of the company.

Though, that did then beg the question: “if you know what could happen, then why are you here?”

“Because I also know that you’ll die if you don’t siphon something from somecreature soon,” Xanadu said, sounding completely nonplussed at the notion.

“So...what? Are you saying you’re room service or something?”

He’d meant it as a joke, going so far as to audibly laugh at the notion. After all, the very idea that a creature would knowing stroll into the den of a hungry changeling for the specific purpose of letting it feed off of them was a completely laughable prospect. The zebra certainly didn’t strike Slipshod as being suicidal.

“That might be the most macabre way I can think of to phrase that, but pretty much, yeah.”

Slipshod wasn’t laughing anymore. The stallion not only turned around to face the zebra, but actually sat up on the bed, staring at the striped stallion in utter bafflement, “...you’re not serious? You...want me to feed off of you?”

“I want you to not die,” Xanadu corrected simply, sounding much more serious than he had since entering Slipshod’s cabin. His expression too was much more somber, yet there was no diminishment of emotional convictions. He was still being forthright and honest with the earth pony, “I don’t want anycreature to die if I can do something about it. Especially if all that I have to do to save them is sit and have a friendly chat,” the zebra was beaming again.

Before he knew what he was doing, the golden stallion was reaching out, both with his physical, as well as psychic, ‘fangs’ that would allow him to latch onto the zebra and start to extract every last iota of feeling from the striped being. Xanadu was sitting there, just so...open. So obvious with his emotions. He was a prime cut of steak tossed in front of a ravenous manticore. By the time Slipshod was done with him, there might very well be just as little left of him as there would be in the case of the manticore.

It was only by some great miracle that the changeling managed to stop himself. For that’s what he was now. His earth pony facade had burned itself away in his hunger, leaving behind the black chitinous monster that he truly was. He fell to the floor, quivering, heaving, saliva rolling out of his mouth in veritable streams. He started shaking his head vehemently, “if I start draining you...I can’t promise I’ll stop,” he insisted ruefully, “you’ll die. Or Breech Block will rush in here and put me down.”

Unbelievably, Xanadu barely seemed to react at all to the transformation. If anything, he only became even more intrigued, “wow...so that’s what a changeling looks like. Neat!

“Somehow I always thought you guys would look more like giant mosquitoes. You know, because of the whole ‘sucking out a creature’s essence’ thing. But the fangs are way cooler than whatever that straw thing mosquitoes have is called. So this looks way better.”

“Weren’t you listening?!” Slipshod snarled, glaring up at the zebra whose mere presence was still taunting his growling stomach, “if I start draining, I won’t stop! I’ll kill you!”

“Then don’t drain,” the zebra said nonchalantly, shrugging, “Twilight said changelings don’t have to take what they need by force. She said you can just accept positive emotions that are offered to you freely. That if you had a friend, you’d be alright.”

Xanadu slipped off of the desk chair and stepped around to lay down beside the trembling changeling. It was almost physically painful to be so near to so much obvious emotion and not feed on it, but Slipshod did everything he could to maintain his composure. The zebra clearly didn’t know what he was getting into. The changeling shook his head vehemently, “leeching off one creature like that won’t be enough for long,” he insisted, “tried it before. I’d need at least a dozen ‘friends’ to be sure I’m not hurting any of them.

“You can’t help me. You can’t save me. At best you’d extend my life a month or so before you started to be severely affected too.”

“Really? A whole month; wow!” the zebra stallion sounded preposterously excited about that for some reason. Slipshod would have been tempted to believe that Xanadu was being facetious, except that there was no hint of any such mocking feelings coming from him. He was still his blatant, forthright self, “that’s more than enough time to help save you.”

“Weren’t you listening?!” Slipshod said through gritted teeth as he continued to struggle to keep his primal urges to feed under control, “I said you can’t help me!”

“No, you said that you need a dozen or so friends,” Xanadu corrected brightly, “and a month is more than enough time to accomplish that!”

“How? Everycreature on the ship’s afraid of me…”

“And creatures are afraid of things that they don’t understand,” the zebra quipped, smiling, “they just don’t understand the ‘new’ you yet. We just need to start introducing them to the real you. Show them that you’re still the same Slipshod they know and care about. Just...not quite as fuzzy anymore.”

“I’m a monster―”

“You’re a changeling,” Xanadu corrected gently, “that’s not the same thing. So you look different. So what? I look different and the crew likes me well enough,” his expression became bemused as he glanced towards the door, “those two kirin mares even asked me back to their cabin so they could ‘count my stripes’. I’m, uh...not sure if they actually meant that how I think they did…but it sure seemed like it?” he looked back at Slipshod, as though seeking confirmation.

The changeling actually managed a snort, “oh, that’s how they meant it alright,” he confirmed, smirking despite himself at the incredulity of the shift in subject. If Xanadu was trying to distract him from his pain by throwing out unexpected topics of conversation...it was working. Somehow, “probably want to film it to send back to their mother,” it seemed that the striped stallion could be shocked. Who knew?

“That came out kinkier than I intended,” Slipshod acknowledged, rolling his eyes, “they’re Confederation nobility and had a, uh…‘falling out’ with their mother before they left. Sending her vids of themselves fooling around with trashy stallions is their way of pissing her off.”

“They think I’m ‘trashy’?” Xanadu actually sounded genuinely hurt by the notion, pouting.

“They don’t,” Slipshod assured the zebra, “but their mother would. Unless you’re hiding a royal pedigree and/or a billion-plus C-bit trust fund?” the striped stallion shook his head, laughing at the absurdity of the notion, “then you’re ‘trash’. Or, at least, too close to ‘trash’ for her daughters to be consorting with.

“It’s a good time though,” the changeling opined, reminiscing on his own prior trist with the twins, “I’d give it some thought.”

“Does their offer come with any sort of suspense date, or―?” the zebra stallion cleared his throat and shook his head, seeming to recognize that they’d drifted off topic, “nevermind. My point was: there are clearly friendly creatures on this ship. Creatures that, from what I understand, liked you well enough before.

“I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t like you again.”

“I lied to them,” the changeling pointed out, feeling his mood sour once more as they returned to their previously, more dour, topic of conversation, “I hid what I was from them. They’re right to be afraid of changelings. Of what we’ve been doing to this galaxy for centuries.”

“It’s never ‘right’ to blame one creature for the actions of others,” Xanadu said with finality, glaring now at Slipshod, “I’ve asked around. No creature on this crew can think of a single thing that ‘earth pony Slipshod’ ever did that was anything other than friendly. They liked you. A lot.”

“That’s because I tricked them into being my friends,” he spat, ruefully, “I read their emotions and did what I knew would make them like me better so I could feed off of them. I used them.”

“...and?”

The changeling blinked, rightfully stunned by the zebra’s question, “what do you mean: ‘and’? I exploited them. What more is there?”

The zebra started the laugh again, drawing an annoyed look from the changeling. This only seemed to make the zebra laugh even harder. Eventually, when Xanadu finally get himself under control, he wiped a tear from his eye with his hoof and grinned at Slipshod, “I’m sorry, I just think that it’s hilarious that a creature who understands others well enough to ‘trick’ them into becoming friends doesn’t understand how friendships actually work,” when he saw that the changeling continued to favor him with a blank stare, he chortled again and proceeded to explain.

“Friendship’s aren’t one-way streets,” the zebra began, “nocreature with any sense stays in that kind of genuinely parasitic relationship. If the members of this crew continued to welcome you into their company for years, then it was because they were getting something out of it too. Something that they needed. Emotional support, validation, comfort, laughs―something that made spending time with you worthwhile to them.

“No amount of ‘trickery’ is going to get a creature to stay genuinely emotionally invested in another for a prolonged period of time. If they feel like they’re not getting anything out of hanging out with you...then they’ll stop hanging out with you. It’s as simple as that.

“The fact that they didn’t stop during all that time―the fact that so many of the creatures on this crew are genuinely hurt―means that you weren’t ‘using’ any of them. Not in the way that you’re meaning.

“Sure, you slurped some emotional juices, or essence―or however that works with your kind―but they were getting something that they needed out of the arrangement in return. That’s how friendships work. Creature’s are friends because all of the involved parties get their needs satisfied; even if that need is different from creature to creature.

“You’re still you. You’re still perfectly capable of interacting with the members of this crew exactly how you always were,” Xanadu continued on, patting the changeling on the head in a manner that Slipshod would have assumed was patronizing, if he wasn’t feeling the genuine affection that was positively flowing out of the zebra...by choice. It was just...there. For the taking, “we just need to get the others to see that too.”

Slipshod blinked.

Something was different. Missing. It was several long seconds before the changeling recognized that it had been his hunger which was gone. Well, perhaps ‘gone’ was the wrong word. Sated was more apt; for the time being, at least. It would have been a gross exaggeration to say that he was no longer suffering from the effects of starvation. However, it was indeed safe to say that, for the moment, he’d been satisfied enough such that he doubted he’d pose much of a danger to another member of the crew. For a couple days at any rate.

It would take quite a few more ‘full bellies’ before the physiological effects of his starvation were fully abated, but this certainly felt like a promising first step towards recovery. Not that Xanadu would be able to accomplish it on his own. Slipshod could already see that the zebra stallion’s features were looking significantly more drawn than he had been when he’d first arrived. Like the striped stallion had been awake for days. It’d be risky to take this much from him again.

What was more, the zebra actually seemed to be fully aware of what had happened. He stifled a yawn and stretched out his joints, “so how was that; feeling better? Woof! Feel like I ran a marathon…” he rubbed at his eyes then feigned checking over his limbs for signs of injury, “not husked though,” he remarked with a wink at the changeling.

“You...you tricked me,” Slipshod wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be offended or impressed that he’d somehow been manipulated by the zebra.

“Nonsense,” Xanadu said with a dismissive wave of his hoof, “I befriended you. You got something out of this that you needed, and so did I,” the zebra moved to stand up, but managed to sway enough that had to reach for the bed to steady himself. Slipshod was on his own hooves quickly, reaching out a chitinous hoof to help the zebra. Xanadu graciously accepted the aid, smiling tiredly at the changeling, “thanks. Make that two marathons; wow,” he shook himself forcefully in an effort to wake himself up, his smile never wavering.

“What could you possibly have gotten from this except halfway to comatose?” Slipshod scoffed.

Xanadu beamed at the changeling, “the satisfaction of helping a creature in trouble.”

He meant it too; that was the most absurd part. It left Slipshod speechless, actually. The zebra took a deep breath, tested his balance, and seemed to find it satisfactory. He took a step towards the door, “I think my work here is done for now.

“Oh, before I forget,” Xanadu said, pausing at the door for a moment, “a mare invited me to her place―strawberry coat, unicorn, I think her name was a tool of some sort? Don’t remember―she said she’s watching an old ‘Kaufmane Movie’: Sgt Kabukimare New Yak P.D.? She told me I could bring a friend―”

Slipshod was already sensing where the conversation was heading and started shaking his head, “she didn’t mean me,” he assured the zebra.

“I’m pretty sure she did,” the striped stallion said, his grin never wavering, “seeing as how I dropped your name and she didn’t say ‘no’,” Slipshod was stunned into silence, gaping at the zebra, “what she did say, was that you’d be the best pony on the ship to teach me the ‘fine art of riffing’. It turns out I have no idea what that means. My initial assumption was, uh...shall we say: ‘off the mark’,” he admitted, clearing his throat as he blushed in mild embarrassment, “but what she told me it really is sounds fun too!

“So what do you say? Thursday night? I think I can clear getting out of your quarters with Squelch.”

“I…” Slipshod found himself struggling to come up with the right answer for some reason. He was still so taken aback that Channel Lock wasn’t opposed to seeing him again. She’d looked so terrified of him when he’d passed her in the corridor earlier.

What had changed since then?

“Well, that’s not a ‘no’, so I’ll tell her we’ll be there. Pick you up at eight!” the zebra opened the door and left without another word, leaving the stunned changeling behind to process what had just happened.

The next morning saw something very unexpected happen: Slipshod’s lockdown was lifted.

“Why?” the changeling asked, unable to hide how bewildered he’d been by the announcement from his former employer. Squelch had dropped by to deliver the news to him directly, which, truth be told, actually made Slipshod a little uncomfortable. He wasn’t quite sure where the two of them stood anymore.

Their relationship had been something of a quagmire ever since the divorce, this was true, but even then there’d still been the professional respect that they’d had for each other as ‘Steed pilot and Commander. Yet, that relationship no longer existed now either. The sage green unicorn mare retained her position as the owner of the mercenary company―if under a different name now―but Slipshod was no longer one of her hired pilots. He was just her means to establishing a relationship with Victoria Blueblood.

He wasn’t sure what that made them to one another anymore. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to him that it might help to lower her suspicion of him.

“Because my stereotypical obligatory condemnations as your ex aside, I don’t actually want you to die; in a fire or otherwise,” Squelch quipped at the confounded earth pony, “Twilight explained how isolating a changeling like this is basically no different than starving them to death.

“Obviously, I can’t make the other creatures on this ship interact with you―that’s going to be on you to mend those fences―but I can give you the chance to repair the damage.

“I’ve spent the last month reviewing every memory I have of you and your time with the Coursers,” the mare went on, smiling ruefully at the other pony, “mostly to try and find something that I could use to justify despising you for hiding what you were. And while there’s a lot that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive you for personally, that’s between you and me to work out.

“I don’t have the right to dictate your interactions with the rest of the crew. How they feel about you is their business, and it’s for you to work out with them whether there’s forgiveness warranted there. Keeping you isolated like this denies you that opportunity, which isn’t right.”

“Aren’t you worried that I’ll betray our plan?” He was a changeling. A threat. An agent of the very forces that were causing every other race in the galaxy so much suffering. It didn’t make any sense for Squelch to risk so much on his behalf like this.

“You helped us escape from one changeling trap already,” the unicorn pointed out, “and while I’m sure there are ponies out there who would try to argue it was all part of some masterstroke four-dimensional chess double-blind play or whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes in clear doubt of the reality of such a sequence of events, “I don’t have the patience to engage in that level of paranoia.

“You saved our lives. In my book, that earns even no-good-cheating-bastards a little bit of leeway,” she flashed a wry smirk at the stallion.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some research to get back to,” Squelch turned to leave.

“Squelch?” Slipshod ventured, causing the sage mare to pause in the doorway and look back at him over her shoulder expectantly. The golden earth pony chewed his lip as he sought out the words that he wanted to say. A lot of things popped into his head as far as what the ‘right’ things would have been for a situation like this. The sorts of apologies that would play on her feelings and their history together in order to manipulate her opinion of him. The sorts of assurances that would help to further alleviate any lingering concerns that she might have.

Reading her emotional state, it was clear to him that, despite her statements to the contrary, she was still holding on to some reservations where he was concerned. Likely, she was feeling pressured by Twilight to do this, and might have chosen differently if it had been entirely her own decision. The changeling wondered what Cinder’s opinion was on his release from confinement, if she’d even been consulted at all on the matter.

There were quite a few things that he could have said in order to improve his position by exploiting his abilities.

But Slipshod ultimately refrained from doing so, despite his initial instincts which had been honed over the years of training and survival. His circumstances had changed. He’d been outed as a changeling. Any lie he was caught in would be compounded by the suspicion that every other creature on the ship would already be viewing him with. It’d undermine his efforts to try and rebuild his relationships with the crew, and thus his survival. In a stark reversal to how he’d been having to live his life as ‘Slipshod the earth pony’, ‘Slipshod the changeling’ would be best served by the truth.

So he didn’t deliver any of the multitude of lines to Squelch that he might have a year ago. Instead, he was honest with her, “if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t have manipulated you into marrying me. I didn't understand how dangerous it would be for you. I’m sorry about that.”

His former employer remained in the open doorway for several long moments, staring at him as she digested his words. Then, “I notice that’s not quite the same thing as saying: ‘I’m sorry I used you’,” the mare pointed out, earning a wry smirk from the changeling.

“No, it’s not,” he acknowledged, “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” the stallion clarified, “but I definitely did mean to ‘use’ you.”

The narrowed eyes of the sage unicorn were accompanied by a slight spike in animosity, which was to be expected. However, Slipshod was also able to feel the grudging respect that the mare felt for his blunt honesty. Finally, she issued a rueful snort and shook her head, “typical. While you’re being so candid, there is one thing I do want to know though,” Slipshod raised a brow, inviting her to ask her question, “why me? If you’re really so good at reading ponies, you could have wormed your way into anypony’s life. Why mine?”

That was a fair question, the changeling supposed. It deserved a fair answer too, “two reasons: first, you were in charge. Obviously, being married to the boss comes with a lot of perks. I did go from being your newest pilot to being your lead pilot in no time at all,” he pointed out. This response earned him another pointed glare from the unicorn, who obviously did not appreciate having been so brazenly exploited like she’d apparently been. However, his followup disarmed some of her ire, and left her feeling a lot more conflicted than he suspected she’d anticipated being about the whole thing.

“...and, well, you ‘tasted’ the best,” Slipshod said, shrugging his shoulders as he sought to elaborate, “your passion for the Coursers and the challenge of managing them was...intoxicating. Changelings don’t need the feelings of love we feed on to be directed explicitly at us. Blood Chit’s love for his coltfriend back home, Channel Lock’s love for her brother, Rigger Brush’s love for her art...it’s the intensity and the purity of the feeling that matters, not specifically what or who it’s directed at.

“It doesn’t take an empath to see how important the Steel Coursers are to you, or how much effort you put into managing them. This company is...your ‘baby’, in a very real way. And, you ‘loved’ it as much as any mother would love her foal. I wanted to be around that as much as possible.”

By the time he was done explaining, Squelch was gaping at him in shock. She quickly realized that she’d let her self-control fall by the wayside during the very candid explanation, and closed her mouth with an audible ‘click’, clearing her throat as she sought to hide her blushing cheeks, “you didn’t need to make that sound quite so weird,” she insisted, trying her best to sound annoyed through her embarrassment. It wasn’t working very well, and the changeling couldn’t help but grin as he sensed how flattered she was feeling.

Slipshod noted that he’d been hard-pressed to get this sort of reaction from the unicorn when he’d first started flirting with her after being hired into the company. Maybe there was something to this whole ‘honesty’ thing after all…

“Just try and stay out of trouble, alright?” Squelch said, finally managing to recompose herself fully before heading out into the corridor.

Slipshod endeavoured to do his best to do just that by not pressing his luck too much initially. There was still an uneasy miasma of emotion hanging around the DropShip, especially whenever he walked by. It would have been the height of hubris to think that he was the sole cause of the unease though. There was plenty else going on that had the crew on edge. Such as learning the true nature of ComSpark, and that they were part of a mission that would lay the foundation for undoing all the harm that had been inflicted upon the galaxy.

That was a much taller order than the company’s typical ‘smaller view’ of things. Galactic politics and massive threats weren’t what any of the crew had signed up for, after all. They’d joined up to earn a living undertaking low-level mercenary contracts. Helping to liberate the Harmony Sphere from the changelings was a bit over their heads.

For most, they seemed to be coping by putting all of that ‘big picture’ stuff aside and determining to focus squarely on their usual duty tasks. This was easier for some than most, of course. Like Cookie. His primary job was to prepare meals for the crew. This was the case whether they were doing little mercenary contracts, or acting as the expeditionary force for the League-in-Exile. The border politics didn’t matter to him one bit, just as long as Squelch parked the ship at a dock often enough for him to restock the pantry.

Then you had ponies like High Gain, who had a front-row seat to the broader goings-on for their new mission. Part of her job, as the outfit’s chief communications technician, was to specifically scrub through traffic and transmission logs to look for clues about the whereabouts of Victoria’s alias, as well as any hints that their newly-minted mercenary company had been found out by changeling agents, despite the near impossibility. She’d effectively been shoe-horned into a counterintelligence role that the glorified receptionist had neither signed up for, nor had she ever been formally trained on how to do it.

Cinder was helping her to sift through what were and were not pertinent findings, but it was still a job that she wasn’t experienced with, and one for which the consequences for failure were admittedly quite dire. If she screwed up bad enough, a lot of creatures that she cared about to end up very badly hurt. Or worse.

To say that she was feeling overwhelmed was an understatement.

Slipshod honestly debated whether or not he should stop by the galley when he saw her sitting there on his way by, puzzling over a datapad. On the one hoof, he could feel how stressed out the earth pony mare already was, and didn’t want to add to it by confronting her with the ship’s resident ‘monster’. Yet, at the same time, he didn’t particularly enjoy seeing anypony in that state. A very cynical part of his brain pondered whether his desire to ease the discomfort of other creatures was actually a sign of any sort of altruistic empathy on his part.

After all, strong emotions tended to affect the overall ‘flavor’ of the ship. Particularly unpleasant emotions, such as fear and worry, soured what could otherwise be pleasant meals. A better dining experience for the changeling required that as much of the crew as possible be in good spirits. Helping out High Gain was really just helping himself. Hardly a sign that he felt any sort of compassion for the creatures on the ship. He was just ‘weeding the garden’, so to speak.

Yet, at the same time…

“Hey.”

Slipshod metally facehoofed. A changeling. An empath. A master manipulator who could shape the flow of another’s mental state with the right inflection on the right words. But the best he had managed was the same awkward ‘hey’ that a colt might have come up with the first time he worked up the courage to speak to a filly he fancied.

Obviously he was a lot more stressed out than he’d realized.

As painfully lackluster a prompt as the single word might have been from an objective standpoint, there was no denying that it had served it’s ostensive purpose of attracting the mare’s attention. She looked up from whatever she’d been reading and peered over her shoulder. Slipshod winced slightly at the sudden surge of apprehension―and even a mote of fear―from the comm tech, but noted that High Gain quickly set about stamping those feelings out on her own accord.

Soon, she was merely feeling ‘conflicted’, as far as the stallion could tell. The familiar sensations of the warm fondness that he was used to getting from High Gain were there―deep below the surface―but they were overshadowed by confusion. Like she wasn’t sure how she was ‘obligated’ to feel about her long-time comrade who’d turned out to be nothing at all like she and every other member of the crew had always assumed.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all, “...I can go away if you’d like?” the changeling offered. He wasn’t going to be able to smooth out her frayed nerves if his mere presence was just putting her more on edge.

Unexpectedly, the offer to remove himself from her presence actually provoked another brief surge in negativity. Though, this time it was directed inwardly, “...they said you can sense how other ponies feel,” she said hesitantly, as though worried that she was going to provoke the monster standing behind her. More anguish and resentment, but again not appearing to be focused on him, “I’m sorry I’m nervous. I’m just…”

She struggled to find the words she wanted to use to express her emotional state, which to Slipshod felt like it was shifting unpredictably between variations of fear, shame, and loss. Considering it was starting to give him a headache, the changeling could only imagine what it was doing to the owner of those thoughts, “―it’s just that you’re not sure where we stand anymore,” he finished for her, sparing the mare from trying to seek out the properly delicate way to phrase how she was feeling.

High Gain smiled sadly at the golden earth pony, “pretty much, yeah. And then there’s our new mission,” she said, visibly deflating, her eyes darting back to the datapad that she’d been reviewing, “there’s just so much information to look over…” she shook her head, resigned.

“It’s not just you though, is it? Squelch had to have given you some help…”

The mare nodded, though she didn’t look to be any less overwhelmed, “that dragoness, Pur―uh, Twilight, Doppler, and a couple others,” she reached over and picked up the pad, waving it in the stallion’s direction, “this is just my share. Minos Air Traffic comm logs carrying MRB coding.

“We know that the Crimson Corsairs operate in the area, but we don’t know where they have their base at. Predictably, a pretender to the archonship in hiding doesn’t make that information very public,” she frowned at the pad, as though it was responsible for withholding the information from her.

“In fairness, most outfits that size try not to advertise the location of their headquarters, regardless of their political status,” Slipshod pointed out. Which was true. There was something of a ‘sweet spot’ with mercenary outfits when it came to how public they were about their activities. Mercenary units were competing companies, just like any of the corporations that they frequently hired themselves out to. One tried and true method of securing more work―and thus more profits―was to reduce local competition.

It wasn’t too unusual for one mercenary company to attack another, even without an explicit contract in place. If you couldn’t protect yourself from another group of mercenaries, then it was taken as a sign that you were too weak to have likely lasted much longer in the industry anyway.

Small companies like the Steel Coursers―or, Rayleigh’s Irregulars, he reminded himself―that could contain all of their resources on a single ship were hard targets, since they could pack up and move at the drop of a hat. They also were rarely serious competition for the juicier contracts anyway, and so were typically not worth the trouble of wiping out.

On the other side of the spectrum were mercenary outfits on the scale of the Grey Lines Legion or the Nirik Light Pony. Those weren’t ‘companies’, they were bona fide armies in their own right, with enough firepower to rival the standing militaries of the Great Houses. You didn’t mess with them unless you were also on their level.

Then you had the groups that fell in between―like the Crimson Corsairs. Outfits that fielded perhaps a couple dozen BattleSteeds of various sizes, allowing them to undertake a wide variety of mission profiles, but also requiring them to maintain a physical base on a planet somewhere. These were often kept hidden or out of the way as much as possible in order to safeguard their assets while the bulk of their forces were away on a contract.

While Squelch could hypothetically reach out to Victoria through official Mercenary Review Board and ComSpark channels, that would leave a record. Obviously, there was a lot that they intended to discuss that they didn’t want Chrysalis getting wind of, and that meant that any HyperSpark transmissions of any kind were completely off the table. They needed to speak directly with one another, and that meant either running into the Corsairs while they were out and about on a job―and most ponies weren’t very chatty while they were on the clock―or learning where Victoria’s outfit roosted.

Neither was likely to be particularly easy to do, given the constraints that they were operating under for the sake of secrecy.

“Yeah, I know. Still frustrating,” she grunted, tossing the datapad back onto the table.

“Have you looked at average mission response times?” He asked. High Gain looked at him in confusion, so he elaborated, “they probably only have the one base,” Slipshod began, “so they’ll always deploy from one location. Compare contract acceptance dates with logged arrival times in the designated systems, and you should be able to get any idea of how many jumps they needed to make to get there.

“With enough of those kinds of examples, you should be able to narrow the possible candidates to just a few systems. Maybe not as good as giving Squelch an exact latitude and longitude on a specific planet,” he acknowledged with a wry smirk, “but it’s a lot better than what we’re working from now. And peeking into three or four systems won’t take a massive amount of time if that’s all you can whittle it down to.”

High Gain blinked, perking up in her seat. Slipshod felt the first stirrings of excitement from inside the mare, “...yeah. Yeah! That...that just might work! Thanks, Slip!”

Before either of them knew it, the mare had jumped out of her seat and was giving him a tight hug. Then the mare realized what she was doing and quickly recioled, as if she’d been burned. High Gain looked at her hooves, examining them intently; though, for what, Slipshod couldn’t quite guess. At least, not at first. Then he sighed and smiled wanly at the other earth pony, “relax, I didn’t suck out your soul, or whatever,” he assured her, trying his best not to sound as bitter as the implication made him feel.

To the mare’s credit, she started projecting an appropriately ashamed reaction to the changeling’s words, “I’m sorry,” she blurted, “it’s just...you’re a...you know.”

“I know,” he sighed, “but that’s not how it works,” he said, delighted that he hadn’t sounded the least bit scolding. It wasn’t High Gain’s fault that she didn’t understand what changelings were or how they functioned, “I’m just like I’ve always been, and you’ve never hurt yourself touching me before, right?”

“Right…” she admitted, obviously quite embarrassed now. The comm tech fidgeted for a few more seconds, biting her lip, before hesitantly asking, “so...how does it work?”

Slipshod rubbed his chin, coming up with what felt like an appropriate comparison that she’d be able to easily understand, “it’s like being a plant,” he explained, earning a skeptical look from the mare, which prompted him to chuckle, “no, really. Changelings take in emotions like trees take in sunlight. If it’s around us, being actively projected, we can just absorb it as we need it.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” High Gain noted, frowning now, “so then why are they so scary, to the point that the Disciples or whoever were willing to kill Flechette to capture you?”

Slipshod sighed, wincing slightly at the memory of the pegasus being gunned down right in front of him, trying to mistakenly protect a monster from its ancient victims, “...when there’s not enough love and positively just being projected about to sustain us, we can...take it. By force,” now the mare was looking appropriately horrified. That was how she should be reacting to his kind, and to him, “the results are...bad.”

“Oh,” High Gain receded even further away from him now, eyeing the stallion cautiously, “...have you ever…?”

He’d met the real Slipshod. Long ago. Just the one time.

‘Husking’ another creature was...disconcerting, even for him. The fear in the victim was so strong at first, as they predictably reacted the way that prey does when confronted with a predator. Then, gradually, that guttural response to having their very life threatened begins to wane as their passion is sucked out of them. Their passion for everything. Their dreams, their aspirations, their love for their friends and family. The simple little pleasures that they get from mundane trivialities in life, like the way a sky might take on an odd coloring when the weather is just right. Even their very passion for their next breath.

It all goes away.

Until all that’s left is...nothing. Yet, they’re not quite a corpse yet. Their heart beats, their lungs take in air. The autonomic functions of their bodies enduring at the behest of their brainstem, uninterested in what’s become of their conscious selves. Clinically, they are ‘alive’, as might be measured by any medical device or physician. Any mundane creature might not really notice anything odd about them at all, save that the victim looks a little lethargic.

But for an empath, it’s deeply eerie. To changelings, the husked creature was simultaneously alive and dead. A form of ‘zombification’, in a way.

A changeling senses the creatures around them as much by their emotions as they do by sight, scent, and sound. A completely husked creature doesn’t register with their sixth sense though. As far as a changeling can ‘feel’, there’s nothing there. Yet they can see a ‘thing’ that is obviously supposed to be a creature. It messes with a changeling a little bit, actually, playing havoc with their minds as they try to reconcile receiving ‘contradictory’ information about the world around them.

It would be like a pony who was hallucinating. Seeing an apparition that couldn’t be heard, or smelled, or touched, and yet was also fully visible.

Husked creatures never died of natural causes. They were killed. Quickly. Reflexively. As the changeling’s mind demanded that the world be made ‘right’ and that all of the ‘ling’s senses achieve consensus on the perceived creatures ‘state’ of life. Since the changeling wasn’t about to return the emotions that they’d just stolen away, that left only the one possible ‘reconciliation’.

“Not since leaving Equus,” was all that Slipshod could bring himself to say.

There was a momentary dread that flashed through High Gain...only for it to pass. The stallion very nearly visibly balked. Had the comms tech just...overlooked the fact that he’d admitted to effectively killing creatures by draining them of their emotional essence? Was she out of her mind?!

As though hearing his thoughts―or more likely because she’d seen his face and simply inferred his thought process, the mare offered up a sad smile, “I guess it’s stupid to hold killing another creature against you. You’re a ‘Steed pilot. You’ve killed lots of creatures since signing on with the Coursers.”

Slipshod was already shaking his head, “that’s not the same,” he protested, “in combat―”

High Gain was frowning now, “that doesn’t magically justify it, Slip,” she said sternly, “you don’t get to claim: ‘I was just defending myself’ on the jobs we take, as though you never wanted to be put in that kind of position.

“Nopony on this ship is that naive. It’s not like Squelch only volunteers us to defend orphanages and hospitals,” she pointed out, “we’re the aggressors as often as we’re not. It’s not ‘self-defense’ when you specifically seek out the fight!

“But I’m not going to call what we do ‘murder’ either,” she conceded, “it’s...just how things are out here,” the mare shrugged, sounding a little resigned and offering up a sardonic smile, “it’s the life we have. And I bet when you drained whoever it was that you did―however many of them you did―that was ‘just how things were’ too. Doesn’t make it right; doesn’t make it wrong.

“It just...makes it what it is.”

Slipshod imagined that Twilight would have had quite a bit to say in opposition to High Gain’s claims if the alicorn had been present, “you can’t possibly think what I do in the Coursers and what I did on Equus are in any way comparable?”

“We’re mercenaries, Slip,” High Gain reiterated sardonically, “not every creature we kill out here is some ruthless pirate. Most of them are creatures just like us, with friends and family who love and care about them, who are just trying to do a job to put C-bits on the table and make their way in the world.

“In order for me to think of what we do as anything close to ‘righteous’, I’d also have to think of myself as somepony who deserves to die for what she’s been a part of. Obviously, I don’t think that about myself―or any of my friends on this ship. So I can’t think of the creatures you’re out there fighting as being like that either.

“And I don’t think of you like that.”

Slipshod remained silent as he processed what the comms technician had said. He wasn’t sure exactly how much stock he was supposed to put in it, honestly. It felt...too easy, in a way. That he should be given a ‘pass’ for everything that he’d done as a changeling.

Yet, at the same time, it was hard to discount her words out of hoof. She had a point after all: he’d killed far more creatures as a BattleSteed pilot than he’d ever husked as a changeling. Hundreds―maybe even thousands―of creatures had lost their lives to his guns in the last couple of years. The earth pony did some hasty tallying, estimating crew compliments of three to as many as six for each combat vehicle, and he’d certainly blown up hundreds of those during even his brief career.

Valkyrie had killed her share too, he knew.

He didn’t consider his former lancemate to have been any sort of reprehensible monster.

Maybe High Gain had a point after all. Although, “but you’re still afraid of me,” Slipshod pointed out.

The mare winced, kneading her hooves as she acknowledged the observation, “I mean...you’re basically like a dopple from those old vids, right? Can’t blame a mare for being a little on edge around one of them.

“I guess it’s just that, every time I look at you, I keep picturing you looking like the creatures from the movies,” she thought for a moment, “are they what you look like for real?”

Slipshod thought back over the series of movies that the mare was referencing, and found himself rolling his eyes. While ‘dopples’ had been used as a means of obfuscating the existence of changelings on the rare occasion that somecreature tried to get word out about them, quite a few ‘liberties’ had been taken regarding their appearance and abilities when compared to real changelings. After all, the more fantastical and otherworldly that dopples felt like, the less likely it was that any rational being would believe that anything like them could actually exist.

“No,” he assured her, “I only have two eyes. There’s no slightly smaller mouth inside of my actual mouth, and we don’t lay our eggs inside other ponies.”

“Oh. Well...that’s good,” High Gain let out a chuckle that sounded a lot more embarrassed than it did nervous. At the same time, Slipshod could feel that the mare was genuinely a lot less wary about his proximity. The changeling wondered just how much of the crew’s apprehension had to do with the artistic licensing of a many decades old movie series…

“Anyway, thanks again for your help,” the comms tech said, reaching over to scoop up her datapad, “I’ll go back into the system’s records and see what I can piece together using the data. Hopefully I can narrow it down to just a couple systems, but we’ll have to see.

“You’re coming by our quarters tonight, right? Channel Lock mentioned that you and the new pilot were going to be watching a movie,” Slipshod nodded, “cool. I’ll, uh...I’ll try to drop by too. See you tonight, Slip,” the mare smiled, before slipping out of the galley.

The changeling stared after her, still mulling over what she’d said to him regarding how ‘monsterous’ he actually was from her point of view. He couldn’t necessarily deny any of the points that she’d made. But...was he really ready to accept that he wasn’t nearly as different from the rest of the crew as he’d always thought of himself as being?

Certainly, it was worth giving further thought to later.

“Come in!”

The door opened a second later, exposing the interior of the slightly more cramped quarters that were reserved for the regular members of the Galloway-turned-Zathura’s crew. Slipshod once more immediately appreciated the advantages that came with being a ‘Steed pilot on Squelch’s payroll. The quarters were made slightly more cramped by the fact that two other equines would be squeezing themselves into it, in addition to the pair of mares who normally inhabited the space.

The lower bunk was going to be quite ‘cozy’, that was for sure.

Xanadu was already present, and had apparently stopped by the galley on his way here and picked up a collection of snacks and drinks. Slipshod wasn’t sure if the striped stallion simply didn’t know how ‘movie nights’ worked, or if zebras had different customs when it came to such things, because there wasn’t any sign of popcorn whatsoever. There was an expansive vegetable platter though that looked like it was half aubergines.

The nascent pilot flashed a grin at the changeling, “hey, you made it! We were just about to start the movie,” he sidled over on the lower bunk, making as much space as possible between him and Channel Lock for Slipshod to fit into. The strawberry maintenance tech was mustering up her own smile and endeavoring to make it as inviting as possible. In her defense, she wasn’t putting off nearly the intensity of nervousness as she had the other day. The reassuring hoof pat that the unicorn mare was receiving from her bunkmate suggested that High Gain had already had a talk with her about Slipshod’s nature and her own views on the matter.

“Sorry I got held up,” the golden earth pony apologized, reaching around and flipping open the flap of the satchel he had slung over his withers, “had to get some ingredients for refreshments. Anypony up for a Salty Diamond Dog?”

“Ooh; me!” High Gain’s hoof instantly shot up.

The door to the cabin closed and Slipshod set about unpacking the collection of bottles that he’d procured from Cookie. He had enough liquor and other additives to make a far selection of drinks actually. Channel Lock requested a Brown Derpy, and Xanadu took a Palomino. Slipshod settled for using the bottle of Appaloosa Estates that had mercifully not been tossed out the airlock in the aftermath of his outing to make himself a Highball.

Refreshments in hooves, and snacks close by, it was time to start the evening’s entertainment. As Channel Lock did the honors by starting the vid, their zebra companion posed a question, “what exactly is a ‘kabukimare’, anyway?”

“Absolutely nothing like what you’re going to see in this movie, trust me,” Slipshod informed him with a grin.

The unicorn tech next to him nodded in agreement, snorting in amusement, “we should have invited the twins. I’m curious to see if they’d have been more amused or offended by what we’re about to see.”

“Oh, definitely amused,” the changeling assured her, grinning, “they hate classical kirin theater.”

“Should we be hushing down now?” Xanadu asked, gesturing to the screen where the movie seemed to have progressed almost immediately into a scene that was establishing the plot.

“On the contrary,” Slipshod smiled at the other stallion, “part of the fun is going to be talking over what’s happening on the screen.”

“That stallion’s hoof is on fire,” the other ‘Steed pilot deadpanned, pointing at the display, his eyes wide in shock, “why is that stallion’s hoof on fire?”

“So that we know that all of the cliche stuff about prophecy and doom the mare is talking about is important,” Channel Lock responded in an almost disinterested tone.

“Oh. Wait...now we’re in a city? Are those two stallions doing glitterdust off the back of that wagon? I thought that stuff was illegal in most of the Sphere?”

“It is,” High Gain assured him.

“...but they’re just doing it in public. And nopony else seems to care,” there was a brief pause, “and I don’t think they’re even actually doing it right.”

“That’s because those actors aren’t getting paid enough to snort enriched flour,” Slipshod said, grinning, “ironically, I bet they actually would have snorted real glitterdust.”

“Okay...wait, what do those foals have to do with the last scene? What is even happening in this movie,” Xanadu frowned, glancing over at the other three, “this makes sense to you?”

“Are you kidding?” Channel Lock snorted, “part of the fun is that it doesn’t make sense,” she looked over at the zebra, “and it’s only going to get more nonsensical from here on out,” she gestured at the screen, where a stallion and mare were now visible rutting on a bed in detail graphic enough to arguably classify this vid into a completely different genre.

“Oh!” the striped stallion’s eyes widened in mild surprise, before narrowing at the screen, “are they in that position explicitly so that her teets are flashing that camera―who’s that and why does he have a bloody sword?!”

“Coitus interruptus,” Slipshod murmured, prompting him and the pair of mares to all take a sip from their respective drinks. A moment later the mare on screen screamed as her lover was impaled through the gut in a jarringly awkward transition sequence. The earth pony looked over and smiled at Xanadu, “ready to see a truly ‘break-out’ performance?”

The zebra looked back at the display just in time to see another jarring rapid-fire sequence of scene transitions that ended with the mare being hurled naked out of the window of a highrise, “what in the―?!”

“I gave up being a waitress for thisssss!” Slipshod intoned, affecting as though he were making the exclamation while falling from a great height.

A second later, High Gain chimed in just as the actress ‘fell’ upon one of the drug-using stallions from earlier―apparently from the side despite supposedly being thrown from above, “it’s raining mares~! Hallelujah, it’s raining mares~!”

Channel Lock, however, was looking squarely at Slipshod, her eyes wide. It was enough to distract the changeling from the next joke that he’d been about to make, as he found himself wondering if he’d perhaps said something wrong, “what?”

“How did you do that?”

“Do...what?”

The unicorn mare reached over and paused the movie, which drew the attention of the other two to their exchange, “you sounded exactly like a mare just now!”

Slipshod blinked, “did I? Huh. I guess I did,” he typically didn’t truly lend himself to doing perfect impersonations when riffing on these films, but it wasn’t like he was feeling a lot of pressure to hide his changeling nature anymore.

“You can do that?!”

“I’m a changeling,” the stallion pointed out, “I can look or sound like anycreature I’ve seen and heard. That’s kind of our thing. I’ll stop.”

“Stop? Are you kidding?” the unicorn sputtered, “do you have any idea what we’ve been missing out on because you’ve been keeping this to yourself?!

“Screw riffing!” the technician exclaimed as she reset the movie, only this time she muted the volume as well, “you’re going to redub this thing for us!”

Slipshod’s first instinct was to protest. However, upon getting a whiff of the excitement wafting off of both mares, the changeling was inclined to accommodate Channel Lock’s request. He did his best to ignore Xanadu’s smug expression as the stallion refocused his attention on the now silent movie and began to imitate the voices of the characters on screen, but using his own original dialogue that made light of the events happening around them.

Maybe it was the chance to ‘stretch’ his changeling abilities in a way that he never got the chance to before. Maybe it was the mixture of mirth and excitement that the other three were all feeling every time he made a new joke at the movie’s expense in an exaggerated voice he manufactured for the character on the screen he was dubbing for. Maybe it was the opportunity to forget every otherwise stressful facet of his life.
Whatever the reason; that movie night was the best, and the most filling, that Slipshod could ever remember having.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 22: Initiation to War

The Zathura was an unexpected hive of activity the next morning, much to everypony’s surprise, Slipshod was sure. He certainly couldn’t have predicted the call to his quarters from Squelch, telling him to be in the briefing room in thirty minutes...dressed in his piloting barding.

He knew that the sage green unicorn had been looking for work for them to do, in order to pad out the resume of Rayleigh’s Irregulars, as well as searching for leads on the Crimson Corsairs. However, he had not expected their employer to not only track down a job so quickly, but to also have found one in the Minos System itself. He’d have thought that there were more than enough local groups willing to take up contracts that pickings would be slim in the Concordat's capital system.

Apparently he’d have been wrong.

“You’re late,” Squelch admonished him in an exasperated tone that touched more than one nostalgic nerve in the changeling as he strode into the briefing room, “take your seat and let’s get this briefing started. Our drop window’s pretty tight and there won’t be a lot of time for questions. So pay attention and let’s only do this once,” the unicorn mare jabbed a hoof in the direction of the chair that Slipshod usually sat in while receiving their mission briefings.

It was all a little surreal, honestly. If he hadn’t known any better, Slipshod might have thought that the last three months hadn’t even happened. Nothing seemed like it had changed. Mig and Tig giggled as they shared some little joke between themselves. Doc Dee was present, leaning back in his chair as he waited patiently to deliver his own rote reminders of the various health hazards that would be present for the operation. Twilight was doing her best to hide a satisfied smile as she cast a sideways glance at a unquestionably health-looking, and far less lethargic, changeling.

Slipshod allowed himself a visible eye roll as he mentally acknowledged the alicorn’s correctness in her decision to send Xanadu to his quarters the other night. Presumably it had been the two of them working in concert that had been responsible for laying the groundwork among the crew to facilitate his reintegration.

One notable difference between today and their previous briefings was the zebra stallion sitting where Valkyrie would have been. It didn’t bother the changeling as much anymore though. Slipshod wasn’t sure if that was because he’d had more time to process her absence, or because Xanadu didn’t feel like as much of an interloper anymore. It would have been a bit much to say that the zebra felt like a genuine part of the crew to him at the moment, but he was certainly far from an unwelcome presence. After this mission, depending on how it went, it was possible that the earth pony might even be willing to fully recognize their new recruit as a bona fide Courser.

Er...well, an Irregular, rather, he supposed.

There was, however, one other creature in the room that set this briefing apart from others in the past: Cinder. Slipshod didn’t know what role she’d be playing during the meeting, if any. The chances were actually pretty high that her only purpose here was simply to be present, so as to be kept in the loop regarding their activities. His understanding was that the star admiral had come along in order to act as a liaison for the Clans when they managed to work out a deal with Victoria Blueblood, and to offer her expertise when they set about drawing up the plans for both the coup to unseat Dominus, as well as the invasion through Commonwealth space.

The dragoness’ being here likely mostly just helped to save Squelch time by not needing to explain what was going on to Cinder later.

He assumed his regular seat. From across the table, Slipshod noticed that the kirin sisters actually did their best to smile warmly at him. There were still hints of unease, and he could feel their inner trepidation, but it wasn’t anything particularly abrasive. It was just...there. Perhaps best likened to him having been diagnosed with a grave illness, and the others not yet knowing how they were supposed to react to the news when broaching the subject with him in conversation.

That probably wasn’t even an unfair comparison, the changeling thought to himself. The crew had learned a fact about him that potentially shifted the very paradigm of their relationship with one another. What was the first thing that they said to each other supposed to be? Were they supposed to come right out and ask about it like, “so, you’re actually a parasitic bug monster; what was it like growing up?”

Last night with Channel Lock and High Gain had gone smoothly enough of course. It turned out that his changeling nature was something that the pair of mares found quite a lot of entertainment value in. There was no reason to assume that would be the norm, Slipshod cautioned himself, but it had certainly proven to be an optimistic start to things. With them too, it had just been about getting past the initial awkwardness and finding the right way to ask him about what he was, and how that might change the way they interacted with him. After that though, it had been smooth sailing.

Not that Squelch seemed inclined to give any such conversation topics a chance to come up during this meeting, as she activated the room’s main display and launched into her briefing, “I’m going to start off by saying that this isn’t ‘technically’ a job. Our goal is simply to be in the right place at the right time.”

The screen shifted to display a collection of maps and intelligence data related to an industrial complex of some sort, “this is the regional manufacturing hub for Delerex Composites Consortium, located on one of the moons of the system’s outermost gas giant. DCC is a relative newcomer to the Concordat, having established this branch only a decade ago.

“Much to the chagrin of their native-born chief competitor: MinoTech Smithing, who has lost nearly thirty percent of its market share in less than a decade since DCC moved in. We’re talking billions of bulls―the local currency, not the citizens―in lost revenue. Now, the Concordat is pretty hooves-off when it comes to the private sector,” the sage green unicorn mare continued, “so there’s not much that MinoTech can do through the courts or litigation to try and curtail DCC’s intrusion into their traditional markets.

“But, they can certainly do other things,” the mare flashed a vicious smirk at the gathered mercenaries.

The screen changed again, showing what looked to be a collection of news articles which all contained headlines outlining a similar theme: the destruction of Delerex Composites Consortium facilities and materials. Pictures accompanied many of the articles. Most were expected images documenting the aftermath of the destruction of the factories, though a fair few looked as though they’d managed to be captured during the raids themselves.

Slipshod couldn’t help but note that the BattleSteeds featured in each of the images all bore similar scarlet markings.

Squelch apparently caught on to his observation, offering him a nod and cocked smile, “that’s right,” she said, “just about every one of those raids was conducted by the same mercenary group. No points for guessing who it was either: the Crimson Corsairs.

“It seems that they made some pretty significant inroads with MinoTech as a preferred contractor. Needless to say, DCC doesn’t like them much.”

“So, what? You found out that the Corsairs are on their way to hit the DCC facility here, and we’re going to go and meet them?” Xanadu asked.

“You’re half right,” Squelch informed the zebra, “the Corsair’s are on their way, and they’ll be landing within the hour. However, we’re not going there to ‘meet’ them.

“We’re going to create an opening for them.”

The screen shifted to display an aggregate list of ship itineraries, “these are the shipping logs for the DCC hub. As is typical for a facility engaged in large-scale manufacturing, they need a lot of consistent deliveries of materials in order to keep up with production quotas,” several rows were highlighted, “one of those consistent deliveries is nitric acid, which they use to produce nylon in order to powder coat some of the alloys they make onsite.

“To save a little on costs, they have the nitric acid shipped in from one of their own chemical plants a couple jumps out. It’s cheaper to pay the jump fees than the mark-up if they bought local―especially since many local suppliers have close ties to MinoTech already, or are outright subsidiaries.

“These deliveries are―and have to be―precisely scheduled. Delays by even a few days can cost DCC millions in lost production time,” one line in particular got highlighted in red, “which is why it really stood out to me when their latest shipment arrived in-system a whole day late.

“Now, in and of itself, this isn’t a huge deal,” the unicorn admitted, “however…” the screen shifted to show more detailed information about the deliveries being made to the manufacturing hub, “I did note that the freighter coming in with the delayed nitric acid shipment is moving a lot faster than it should be. Like, a lot faster. I asked Tig if it was possible that the captain was red-lining the engines to make up for the delay, but…” she nodded towards the cyan kirin, who was already shaking her head.

“Hypothetically, red-lining their engines like that is something a ship’s captain could do, but that’s listed as a Danais-class cargo ship, which uses a Bilkmore C200 drive. They trade off thermo-regulation for reliability. They’ll burn for just about forever with just a yearly overhaul, but if you take them above spec for more than an hour, you’re basically asking for the coils to melt themselves into slag. Going above two gees for even five minutes mandates a complete engine rebuild. Whatever money they’d save making up for the lost day wouldn’t balance out the millions that a rebuild would cost.

“However,” the kirin mechanic grinned and nodded towards Squelch, who had already moved on to the next slide in anticipation of what Tig was about to say, “a Friendship-class DropShip has the exact same dimensions as a Danais. And they can red-line their engines for prolonged periods without any serious problems. That would explain the acceleration we’re seeing on the ship currently headed for the moon.”

“This is a feint. That’s not the ship that DCC’s waiting on,” Squelch informed them, “that’s a Corsair DropShip running a stolen IFF beacon.”

The stallion studied the displayed information, privately praising the merits of a plan based on assuming what amounted to a ‘disguise’ of sorts to reach a target undetected. It held a certain appeal to a changeling. What he didn’t quite understand though was, “how exactly does this involve us? It sounds like they have everything under control,” he pointed out.

“Because it’s a trap,” the sage mare said succinctly, drawing widened eyes from just about everycreature assembled in the room.

“What do you mean, ‘it’s a trap’?” Cinder asked, curious as she narrowed her eyes at the mercenary commander.

“MinoTech didn't actually put out the contract,” Squelch said, “it’s too bold,” the display screen shifted back to show the prior news articles, “these previous hits were at distribution centers and satellite facilities. Annoyances that caused DCC some hurt, sure; but nothing truly provocative. The corporate equivalent to trading insults across the table.

“DCC has been responding in kind with contracts of their own,” she showed off another collage of news headlines that indicated MinoTech-owned properties had been subjected to raids by mercenaries, “but they’ve also avoided hitting anything significant. Neither side wants to escalate this to anything that’ll cost them billions in damages. Nocreature ‘wins’ a fight like that.

“As cheap as hiring mercenaries are compared the value of a manufacturing complex, whichever company ‘loses’ by having their headquarters destroyed is just going to pay out the relative pittance to have the ‘winner’ lose their headquarters too; and then nocreature will ‘win’.

“Mutually assured destruction isn’t profitable,” Squelch concluded, “not at this point. Besides, about twelve hours before the ‘freighter’ arrived in Minos, two other DropShips landed at the DCC complex, registered to a local planetary militia.”

“They beefed up their security,” Cinder said, nodding as she idly rubbed a claw across her chin, “almost like they were expecting something…” then the dragoness frowned, “I thought you said that the Concordat wouldn’t get involved? Why are militia units helping defend the DCC complex?”

“Because, technically, militia units are privately owned by the citizens comprising them,” the unicorn informed her, “and while they are officially ‘discouraged’ from taking ‘mercenary’ contracts, there’s nothing that specifically forbids it. Not on the Concordat's side of things, anyway. The MRB certainly doesn’t like non-affiliated groups taking contracts, but they don’t have the same monopoly on mercenary work in the Periphery that they do in the Sphere.”

Much to Chrysalis’ chagrin, Slipshod was sure, “So the DCC reached out to local militia groups for security to keep that information off the MRB job boards,” this observation earned a nod from Squelch, “and you think the DCC is also behind the contract that the Corsairs took to hit their factory in the system?” another nod.

“The Corsairs represent a genuine threat to their operations. Taking them off the board hurts MinoTech by removing their most effective weapon in this corporate ‘spat’ they have going on.

“It is my strong belief that DCC posed as MinoTech for the purposes of a contract that they knew the Corsairs would take, in an effort to ambush them and cripple their ability to undertake future operations.”

Cinder was scratching her chin with a pensive claw as she took in the presentation, “I can’t help but notice that there’s a lot of speculation at play here,” the dragoness pointed out, “you could be way off the mark.”

Squelch merely chuckled. As though having anticipated the star admiral’s critique, she reached out with her magic and tapped out a series of commands on the conference table’s interface. The display screens surrounding the room all lit up, each one detailing various articles or government agency reports, “it’s not like any of this is classified information,” the unicorn said, gesturing at all of the documentation on display for everycreature in attendance to see, “DropShip and Jump Ship arrivals and departures have to be specifically cleared through Minos System Traffic Control, and are posted at every major spaceport and orbital station.

“Contracts for mercenary companies are curated and posted through the Mercenary Review Board, even out here in the Periphery. While those aren’t necessarily available to the ‘public’, any accredited merc company―like Rayleigh’s Irregulars, for example―is granted full and unabridged access to an organization’s complete posting history. This is so that a company can evaluate who they’re working for, and judge how reliable a client is,” she pointed at one screen in particular, “MinoTech has taken out fifteen industrial sabotage contracts on its competitors in the last six months. Thirteen were taken up by the Crimson Corsairs.

“The only reason that they didn’t take the other two was because the Corsairs were already booked in other systems at the time. It is also worth noting that those two raids were successfully repelled by onsite DCC security forces. The Corsairs are the only mercs who’ve managed to actually hurt DCC, and they’ve hurt them a lot.

“At the moment, the Corsairs have no other active contracts on file, but are also listed as ‘unavailable for contracting’. So, either they’re working under the table―which is a big ‘no-no’ with the MRB―or they’re working an exclusive contract somewhere. An exclusive contract won’t show up with the MRB until it’s completed and payment is being processed.”

“But what makes you think that this is some sort of ‘fake contract’? Shouldn’t that be impossible to do?” Cinder countered, still sounding unconvinced about the conclusions reached by the unicorn.

“Not with exclusive contracts,” Squelch informed the star admiral, “they still get processed through the MRB, but they’re kept nominally ‘anonymous’. Ironically, this is intended to keep mercenary companies safe from ambushes, so that their targets don’t know that a contract has been taken and accepted against them. But, it also makes it harder to vet the contractor.

“Usually, some sort of code is used for verification,” the unicorn explained, “but any code can be broken with enough time and effort,” this much, it seemed, the dragoness had to concede, nodding ruefully.

“Next time I have an opening on my staff for an intel analyst, I’ll have to keep you in mind,” the star admiral mused, smiling now as she took in the information displayed around her.

“I’ve seen what those jobs pay. I’ll pass,” was Squelch’s dismissive response. Cinder looked even more amused, rather than disappointed, Slipshod noted.

Now the main screen swapped over the show an orbital layout of the manufacturing hub, several points of interest were already labeled, “now for the mission specifics: the main landing pads are here,” Squelch indicated a trio of large circular structures to the north of the facility, “we can’t know which one specifically the Corsair dropship will be cleared to land at, but they’re not too far from one another to matter much.

“Victoria’s plan was to land like nothing’s out of the ordinary, and then have BattleSteeds spill out of the bay doors instead of cargo. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an utterly devastating attack,” she pointed out, earning nods of agreement from all the experienced combat veterans in the room, “as it puts them well inside the defensive perimeter.

“However, with DCC militia units ready and waiting for them, it’ll end up becoming a turkey shoot.”

Slipshod suppressed an internal shudder at the thought of having to face such a thing. Most of the ‘Steed pilots on that DropShip would be hard-pressed to even make it out of the bay doors before being struck down. If one or two of those ‘Steeds went critical…

He idly tallied up in his head the typical crew compliment for a Friendship-class DropShip and wondered how many of the support-side crew would even realize that they’d fallen into a trap before they died in the resulting cascading reactor detonations.

“I assume there’s a good reason why we’re not simply contacting Victoria to warn her about the trap?” Twilight asked, not appearing to be all too happy that Squelch seemed intent on bypassing that option.

Slipshod only now realized that that would have been the most desirable option. It would ingratiate them into the Corsair’s good graces, while avoiding the need to engage in any combat. However, that couldn’t have been the choice that Squelch had made. Otherwise, there’d have been no reason for the three pilots to get suited up as though they were about to go into combat.

It would have been a relatively simple affair for Squelch to have had High Gain call up the ‘freighter’ and relayed to them all the information that she’d collected here. No ambush, no fight.

So why weren’t they doing just that?

“Actually, two hours ago, I did,” the unicorn mare replied, simply.

The response to that revelation was stunned silence. Slipshod’s brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of where this meeting was going. If Squelch had correctly deduced that the contract for the Corsairs was a trap, and reached out to the Corsairs about said trap, then why were he and the other pilots suited up to deploy on a mission? Surely the Corsair DropShip was intent on aborting the landing...wasn’t it?

“What is about to follow is the revised attack plan that Vought and I worked out immediately prior to this meeting,” their employer said as the image of the DCC facility was updated to denote approach vectors and targets, “the Zathura will approach the moon from the far side, so as to avoid radar contact, and make a low-altitude approach across the surface.

“You three,” she indicated the trio of suited ‘Steed pilots, “will be hot-dropped on the southern side of the facility, just inside the defense perimeter. All that should be there are the turrets. DCC has redeployed most of their onsite forces to the landing pads to support the militia ‘Steeds.

“Secure your drop zone, and then take out the facility’s comm relays and main power generators,” two structures were highlighted, only a few hundred meters from the indicated landing site, “this’ll disrupt the base’s communications and coordination capabilities.

“You’re then going to start trashing their primary manufacturing sites here,” another structure was highlighted, “they’ll be forced to redeploy the forces set for their ambush to stop you, and clear the landing pad for Vought’s insertion, because if they don’t, then in just a few short minutes, the Corsairs won’t even need to bother landing anyway, because the facility will be rendered useless,” the unicorn’s lips spread in a predatory grin.

“If they redeploy, feel free to start pulling back to lure them further out of position,” Squelch continued, “try to avoid an all-out retreat if possible though, otherwise they might be able to double-back to the landing pads before Victoria can get her forces off the DropShip. She has assured me that, once her lances are deployed, the Corsairs can handle themselves, so you don’t have to participate beyond that point if you don’t want to.”

Another hungry smile graced the sage green unicorn’s lips, “but she is offering to pay us kill bounties on any militia ‘Steeds that you bring down. So...just keep that in mind.”

The comm panel on the conference table chimed. Squelch reached out with her magic and acknowledged the call, “go ahead.”

“Beginning our approach to the moon now, ma’am,” High Gain’s voice announced over the room’s speakers, “Aileron’s starting his surface approach. ETA to drop site: fifteen minutes.”

“Excellent,” Squelch looked up from the conference table towards the kirin twins, “go ahead and make sure the hot-drop is ready to go. I know we don’t do a lot of those, so double check the preparations and confirm everypony knows their jobs, okay?” Mig and Tig both nodded their heads vigorously before hopping up from their seats and trotting out of the conference room in the direction of the ‘Steed bay.

However, Slipshod was still a little confused about the nature of the operation, and raised a hesitant hoof, “wait, if Victoria know’s it’s a trap, and that the job’s not real; then why is she still going through with the attack?”

“Because it turns out she’s furious that DCC would try to trick her like this. She’s taking it pretty personal, and wants to make it clear to any other organization in the Concordat that this is not something that the Corsairs will tolerate. At all,” Squelch then shrugged and added, “and we’re going to help her because she’s paying us and it gets us an ‘in’ with her to talk about launching a coup to get her the archonship.

“Now go do your system checks,” she waved her hoof at the same door that the kirin had left through, “dismissed.”

Doc Dee cleared his throat from where he’d been sitting at the table, patiently waiting to be able to make his own contribution to the meeting, “so we’re skipping health advisories now?”

Squelch rolled her eyes and waved a hoof in the direction of the seated pilots, “sorry, Doc; advise away.”

The ivory unicorn stallion looked over at them, “double check you suit seals. This moon has no atmosphere, and I don’t want to have to treat anypony for vacuum exposure if you have to eject,” there was a pause as the pilots waited expectantly for more, but it seemed there wasn’t any more, “that’s all. Go.”

Slipshod frowned, but just shook his head and headed out of the room, Twilight and Xanadu following in his wake. They made their way to the ‘Steed Bay, which they found to be quite the hive of activity as techs scrambled over the three BattleSteeds, getting them ready for the hot-drop. They were all wearing vac-suits of their own as they worked, in anticipation of the Bay being opened to vacuum for deployment.

The ‘Steeds were oriented in a ‘forward’ facing direction, matching the DropShip’s own direction of flight. This was in contrast to their usual outward facings, as the ship would not be coming to a complete hover when they deployed. The Zathura would be releasing it’s payload while moving along at the better part of sixty kilometer per hour, meaning that his Crystal Cavalier was going to have to hit the ground as a full gallop or he’d end up face-planting right off the bat. Twilight was likely going to have an easier time of things, thanks to her jump jets.

Mig met them at the entrance to the gantries, motioning for them to pause for a moment. She had already donned a vac-suit of her own, save for the helmet, which was currently balanced on her flank, “just wanted to let you guys know that we’ve made some modifications to your ‘Steeds,” she advised, “nothing major for the most part. The Disciples―or whoever,” she amended with an ambivalent shrug, “provided us with some choice gear,” the kirin was all grins now, teeth showing from ear to ear, “better than Celestia League stuff!

“Twilight,” she began, looking towards the purple alicorn, “nothing much has really ‘changed’ for your Rainbow Dash. You pretty much have all the same weapons you did before, they just shoot further and hit harder. The same goes for you too, Xanadu,” she added with a brief nod in the direction of the zebra. Then she focused her attention on Slipshod.

“Your Cavalier has the most significant changes, but they’re still not revolutionary: basically we swapped out the pulse lasers for large lasers. However, the ones that Cinder’s techs provided to us hit way further out than any Sphere variant you’ve ever seen, and it hits harder than your pulse lasers did. Same with the PPC. Saved us a lot in terms of tonnage too, which was good because those things throw out heat like a damn nova! Let us nearly double the heatsinks you had though, so you actually run cooler than you did before.

“We have some new reactors too which are lighter and more powerful than what’s currently in all your ‘Steeds,” the rosie kirin was now back to addressing the group as a whole, “but we didn’t have time to swap those out. We’ll start that after this mission. With even more tonnage saved there, Tig and I are thinking of slapping on some additional plating, since there’s honestly nowhere else we can mount additional weapons on your ‘Steeds without outright redesigning them, and we’re not feeling quite that ambitious. Yet,” she winked at the trio, wearing a broad smile.

“That’s all I’ve got,” she slipped her helmet off her flank as she stepped out of the way of the ‘Steed pilots, “give ‘em Tartarus!” the mechanic trotted off to oversee the deployment.

Slipshod and the others departed for their respective ‘Steeds along the Bay’s catwalk. The changeling slipped inside his Cavalier, tapping the controls that would close the hatch behind him. He paused long enough to review the display’s assessment on the quality of the seal that had been made, confirming that it was indeed good, and would have no issue holding up to a vacuum. He then took Doc Dee’s advice and gave the various connections of his suit’s components firm tugs to confirm that they were all securely being held in place. Last to go on was his helmet, which he also gave an extra little tug even after hearing the ‘click’ of the locking ring.

“Comm check,” he said into the helmet’s mic, “Gallop One to Gallop Lance, report in.”

The changeling began starting up his ‘Steed as he waited for the other two pilots to respond to his radio check. Twilight was the first to acknowledge, “Gallop Two, receiving loud and clear. How copy?”

“Good, Gallop Two,” Slipshod replied simply, before moving on to Xanadu, “Gallop Three, report in.”

There was a brief pause, and then, “Th...those aren’t actually our call-signs, are they?”

He frowned, “what do you mean?”

“I mean, those aren’t call-signs,” the zebra’s voice was a veritable whine, “ those are designations, at best! A call-sign has character and heart! It’s personal. For example: I’ve always gone by, Xanax.”

“Xanax?” Slipshod repeated, sounding a little bemused as he lowered himself into his ‘Steed’s piloting couch and began to absently tap out the sequence that would power it up.

“Yeah! Way better than ‘Gallop Three’,” the zebra insisted, “Haven’t you ever used real call-signs before?”

“I used to go by, Princess One,” Twilight offered helpfully, though it seemed that Xanadu didn’t find this to be a particularly ‘inspired’ moniker either, if the audible sigh coming over Slipshod’s headset was any indication.

“Yeah, uh, that’s not much better; no offense, Your Highness,” the changeling wasn’t sure if the title had been in mocking or not. Likely not, given what he knew of the newer pilot. Though he had sounded less than impressed by the alicorn’s contribution to the conversation, “but, no, we’re not doing the whole one-two-three thing. We’re going to use real call-signs, okay?

“Like I said, I’m Xanax. Twilight, you’re Twiggie, and Slipshod’s Bug.”

“Those are a bit on the nose, aren’t they?” the changeling remarked, frowning into his mic as he turned his head in the direction of the striped pilot’s Philomena, despite not actually being able to see it from where he was, as the medium tonnage ‘Steed was stowed directly behind his own Cavalier.

“I have an objection to my new call sign,” Twilight said.

However, it seemed that no objections were going to be entertained anytime soon, as Squelch’s own voice cut into their conversation, “stow it, Twiggie. Bug, we’re two minutes from the LZ. Give me a go/no-go for hot-drop.”

Slipshod couldn’t help but smirk now as he shook his head, eyeing the console in front of him and confirming that everything was registering as operating within spec. He lingered for an extra second on the display denoting the status of his weapons, verifying that the newly installed weapons were reading as fully functional, “Bug is ‘go’,” he replied.

A second later, an audibly disgruntled alicorn reluctantly replied, “...Twiggie is ‘go’.”

Slipshod looked forward to being present for the next opportunity that she and Xanadu had to speak to one another. The zebra, who sounded as cheerful as ever enthusiastically responded with, “Xanax is ‘go’! And wow, I bet this thing’ll punch like a Shining Armor with these new guns!”

“Just don’t think you can take a beating like one,” Slipshod cautioned their newest pilot, reminding him that while the firepower of each of their BattleSteeds had indisputably seen a marked increased, their heightened lethality had not been matched with additional protection quite yet, “stay sharp, and focus on the targets as I call them out.”

“Don’t worry about me, boss! I’ll follow your lead.”

“Copy ‘go’s,” their unicorn employer acknowledged, ignoring the rest of their banter, “sixty seconds to drop,” what followed next was not addressed the the ‘Steed pilots exclusively, but was broadcast for the benefit of the entire ship’s crew, “all hooves: combat status. If you’re not suited up, secure yourself in quarters. Gunnery crews look sharp.

“Opening ‘Steed Bay doors. Standby for drop!”

A klaxxon began to ring out in the bay, accompanied by strobing red lights. Technicians and mechanics, all suited up against the vacuum of space, cleared the way for the ‘Steeds to be deployed. Slipshod’s Cavalier gave a slight lurch as it was winched off the ventral door hatch just enough to allow it to open. Off to his left side, Twilight’s gold and cerulean Rainbow Dash was similarly lifted into the air. Seconds later, the doors beneath her cracked open.

Slipshod’s BattleSteed trembled, swaying on the cables attached to it, as air rushed past him on its way out. Depressurizing the Bay ‘properly’, using the ship’s atmospheric pumps, would have taken nearly an hour. They lost all of the atmosphere in the Bay using this method, but it was certainly far more expedient. They’d be able to replenish whatever air had been lost the next time they made landfall on a planet with a breathable atmosphere anyway, and it wasn’t like the DropShip didn’t have plenty of oxygen stored in reserve tanks in order to recover in the event of an unplanned breach anyway.

He just hoped none of the tech’s had left out any loose tools, because those were probably long gone now.

In a matter of seconds, the sound of the blaring siren died down to nothing, as the air that had been carrying the sound was blown out into space. Then the doors resumed opening until there was enough room for the ‘Steeds to drop through. The changeling’s eyes widened slightly as he managed to glimpse the terrain racing beneath them through the open hatch beneath the Rainbow Dash. With no atmospheric considerations, the Zathura didn’t have to fight against any air resistance, and wasn’t limited to just a thousand kilometers an hour or so. Aileron was free to fly the ship at the same speeds that he would have through open space. Perhaps as fast as a few hundred kilometers per second.

Given that, as Squelch had made mention, they had approached the moon on the far side from the factory, that probably gave them a significant distance to cover to reach their target. Slipshod had no idea how big the moon in question was. Some of those in the orbit of a jovian planet were easily as large as inhabited solid inner worlds, meaning that they could have needed to traverse twenty-thousand kilometers to reach the DCC factory. Maybe even more.

“Fifteen seconds,” the sage green unicorn’s voice warned them.

At almost the same moment, Slipshod felt himself being eased forward on his ‘Steed’s piloting couch. His Cavalier―as well as Twilight’s Rainbow Dash―were swaying towards the boward end of the ‘Steed Bay as the DropShip’s inertial dampers failed to counter all of the deceleration being applied to the ship as it was slowed for the imminent drop. They would need something far slower than the barely subluminal speeds that Aileron had been skimming the moon’s surface at if their ‘Steeds were going to survive making landfall, after all.

“Five seconds…” just beneath them through the ventral hatch, Slipshod spied brief flashes of emerald and sapphire light as energy weapons fire was exchange between the ship and the ground defense stations that they were approaching. The Zathura shuddered. Different lights began to flash in the ‘Steed Bay, warning the crew of potential hull breeches, “Drop!”

Slipshod through his throttle full forward at the same instant that the cables released. He imagined that it must have looked like quite the spectacle to see the Cavalier’s legs flailing wildly in the air as he fell to the ground. It was certainly an odd sensation to be in freefall like he was, as it made it difficult to tell if his ‘Steed was falling ‘down’ through the DropShip’s ventral bay doors, or if the ship was lifting ‘up’ away from him.

Given that the Zathura’s engines flared brightly at nearly the same moment he was clear of the Bay and hurled the ship out of sight into the blackness of space in a matter of seconds, the changeling suspected that it may actually have been a little of both.

He didn’t have much more time that the passing second to appreciate the swift departure of their DropShip as the ground rushed up to meet him. His Cavalier’s actuators squealed and protested as they sought to cushion the impact, even as they continued to flail in their running motion. The gyro was pushed to its limit as if fought to keep the massive BattleSteed upright. There wasn’t much that Slipshod could do to help those systems though, and so he left them to triumph and set his ‘Steed right, or fail and plunge him headfirst into the ground.

Instead, he focused on what he could control: calling out their most imminent threats.

While the facilities mobile defenders and their militia BattleSteed reinforcements might be on the far side of the complex, kilometers away, waiting to catch Victoria and her mercenaries coming out of her DropShip, that still left the static defenses for Rayleigh’s Irregulars to deal with. His sensors detected several nearby, which had only moments ago been engaged with their DropShip. However, the Zathura was now far outside their range, and so the automated turrets were realigning themselves with the unidentified BattleSteeds that had effectively ‘materialized’ inside the defensive perimeter.

“Xanax, left side; I’ll take right,” the changeling lance commander snapped, already heaving his charging ‘Steed to the right as he spoke, “Twiggie, hit the comm tower with your missiles!”

“We’re going to talk about that call-sign,” the alicorn threatened, even as her Rainbow Dash’s jump jets ignited, lifting the heavy ‘Steed high above the nearby structures so as to give her a clear line of sight on the factory’s communication’s hub.

“I look forward to it,” Slipshod lied as he lined his targeting reticle up with the closest turret and opened fire with a quick succession of striked from the four medium-range energy weapons mounted in the Cavalier’s chest. They sliced neatly into the turret, detonating it soundlessly and scattering the debris into the powdery surface. He then flicked over to the newly-installed heavy energy weapons in the shoulders and snapped off a shot at a much more distant turret.

He winced away from the unexpected brightness of the beams. He’d expected them to be the same sharp indigo color as a typical Harmony Sphere weapon on that type. However, these twin lines of light were very nearly violet, and at least twice as bright as was typical. They were also quite obviously far more powerful, passing clear through the distant turret and carving furrows into the ground beyond.

Unsurprisingly, that turret exploded as well.

The map display in front of him showed that Xanadu had dealt with the pair of turrets near him just as efficiently. His ‘Steed’s sensors were showing that other perimeter defenses existed as well, but they were much too far away to pose any kind of threat to them. Perhaps later they could be dealt with, but there were targets of a much higher priority that required their attention at the moment.

“Comm tower is down,” Twilight informed him as her ‘Steed touched down, it’s jump jets feathering it in for a gentle landing.

“Good. Next target’s the generators,” Slipshod consulted the map and compared it to the layout from their earlier briefing. He tapped in a few commands and sent out an update to the others, “should be at Nav Bronco. Form up on me and let’s head there. Stay alert for those militia ‘Steeds. We have no idea what sizes we’re facing, or when they’ll show up.

“In the meantime, feel free to blow up anything that looks valuable or important along the way,” he added, “let’s put as much pressure on those ‘Steeds to chase us out as we can.”

The other two pilots acknowledged his orders and quickly fell into formation in the wake of his Cavalier as he guided through the facility. They moved quickly, knowing that it was already quite likely that word of their arrival had reached the facility’s defenders before their comm array was reduced to slag. Blazing columns of light lept out from the three ‘Steeds as they trotted along, carving into various structures and machinery. Each blast easily amounted to hundreds of thousands―if not millions―of c-bits worth of damage for Delerex, Slipshod knew.

Somewhere, the changeling suspected that there was a site director who was losing his absolute shit over what was happening right now; all the while mourning the loss of whatever ‘performance bonus’ they might have otherwise stood to receive at the end of the year.

“Generator in sight,” Slipshod announced as he rounded a warehouse that Xanadu was trashing with machine gun fire, “let’s see what one of these does to it,” he murmured as the newly installed Clan Prismatic Projector Canon was charged up. He fired.

The results were...fascinating.

A Harmony Sphere PPC’s blast resembled a helical coil of rainbow-patterned light, twirling its way to its target. That was not the case with this new weapon, it seemed. There was not the single helix, but a pair of them, each winding in an opposite direction and criss-crossing over one another. The colors too were significantly different, looking much darker and sharper than normal. Slipshod soon realized that this was because the new weapon was not expelling a prism of separated light, but rather what looked like a spectrum of paint pigments, on the order of cyans, magentas, and yellows, and their corresponding complementary colors.

The double-helix drilled into the side of the massive fusion reactor which served as the primary source of power for the large manufacturing facility, melting effortless through the thick reinforced concrete walls and piercing into the generator within.

A moment later, the structure was blasted outward in all directions as the reactor detonated. The small sun inside that had been powering the factory effectively went ‘nova’, vaporizing anything nearby in a flash of light. Whatever material existed outside this immediately lethal area was thrown outward with enough force to create a shockwave that was visible even in a vacuum.

Explosions were far more dangerous, and had a much longer reach, outside of an atmosphere. There was no air here to act as a buffer, or impeded the debris being hurled outward. Shrapnel didn’t lose velocity, or bleed off as much of its heat. The moon’s gravity would drag it down eventually, but not quickly enough to spare the closest structures.

Buildings were ravaged by chunks of steel and concrete the size of houses, hitting with the full force of the explosion which had shattered the generator initially. Predictably, those buildings lost nearly all their integrity in short order, and started collapsing of their own accord, unaided by Slipshod or his companions.

The ‘Steed pilot turned his Cavalier in order to shield his cockpit as some of the debris from the exploded reactor reached them. They struck his ‘Steed with the force of autocannon rounds, but the ablative plating was designed to absorb and mitigate such damage, so he wasn’t overly concerned.

“Something tells me they’re not going to have much trouble finding us,” Xanadu remarked sardonically.

“Good. That’s kind of the point,” Slipshod pointed out. He scanned the sensor readout once more, looking for any signs that the militia ‘Steeds or the facility’s organic defenders were making their approach yet. The zebra was correct that there should be little doubt as to where he and his lancemates were, and should thus be quite easy to find. Hopefully they’d also caused enough of a ruckus to draw off a significant number from the landing pads.

“Let’s start withdrawing all the same,” the changeling said as a followup, “slow and steady. Keep up the infrastructure destruction though.”

He pulled his Cavalier back into a slow reversal, using his newly acquired heavy energy beams to cut through nearby buildings and demolish expensive-looking equipment. Beside him, Xanadu’s Philomena was spraying thirty-caliber rounds into some holding tanks, spilling their liquid contents out onto the ground. Twilight’s Rainbow Dash belched out another stream of missiles, lobbing them skyward so as to bombard numerous structures in the distance. Those smoke trails should help to guide the defenders right to their location, Slipshod noted with an appreciative nod.

An audible alert drew his attention to his sensor display at the same moment that his alicorn lancemate announced, “Contact! Derpy, bearing one-oh-eight!”

Slipshod’s eyes snapped back to his cockpit’s viewport as he guided his Cavalier around to face in the indicated direction. He immediately spotted the rotund little BattleSteed ambling towards them. He locked onto the newly arrived target and glimpsed the more detailed readout that his targeting computer was giving him regarding the enemy’s loadout. He felt his lips pull into a tight grimace. While the broadly discounted ‘Steeds tended to be overlooked as ‘serious’ threats by civilians who didn’t know any better, experienced pilots recognized that, while Derpies might not have a lot of weapons mounts, the one that they tended to have was worth being wary of.

Many were the novice ‘Steed pilots who found themselves wondering where they’d gone wrong as they punched out of their dying BattleSteed after having been dealt a devastating blow by a Derpy’s oversized type-twenty autocannon. They also tended to have enough plating to endure in a brawl even against a heavier opponent.

Though, even then, that was usually only when they faced off against one heavier opponent. Opponents that weren’t outfitted with more advanced weaponry either.

Slipshod was pleased to see that he and his lancemates were all equally well-informed about the threat posed by the light-tonnage ‘Steed as his twin beams of cyan light were joined by a third from Xanadu, and Twilight’s Clan-series PPCs, all converging on the Derpy’s right shoulder, and the large-bore cannon mounted there.

It was highly likely that the militia pilot had not anticipated anything remotely approaching that level of firepower waiting for them, or they certainly wouldn’t have made first contact alone. Though, in fairness, a Derpy could usually survive an alpha strike or two against typical opponents.

However, it seemed that no Harmony Sphere BattleSteed had been designed with Clan technology in mind. Slipshod was keenly aware, more than perhaps anypony other than Twilight, the quality of firepower that Chrysalis and her changeling forces would have at their disposal, having retained the more sophisticated technology of the Celestia League which had been lost to the rest of the Sphere. Which meant that the changeling was quite cognizant that nothing in Chrysalis’ arsenal would be able to match what Flurry heart and the Dragon Clans would be bringing with them during their invasion.

As Cinder had pointed out, the biggest hurdle that the Clans would face would simply be the far superior numbers that the Sphere could bring against them. Even the most powerful weapons in the galaxy could only fight so many targets at once. If the forces of the Harmony Sphere were willing, they’d be perfectly capable of saturating the battlefields with enough vehicles and BattleSteeds so as to overwhelm the Clanners. The losses would be staggering, true; but Slipshod doubted that his former queen would shed so much as a tear over the cost in lives to keep her domain secure.

The Derpy reeled and staggered as it was pounded mercilessly by the devastating fire from so many powerful weapons all at once. It hadn’t even been able to get the interlopers in range of its heavy gun before the weapon had been melted into useless slag. Realizing their grave mistake, the militia pilot quickly started reversing out of the engagement area. However, Slipshod was not feeling inclined to allow the pilot to return and inform their compatriots of the disposition of his own lance. He flicked over to his ‘Steed’s PPC and lined up the weapon with the Derpy’s cockpit.

The squat little BattleSteed fell over soundlessly, it’s head a smoking ruin.

“Movement left!” Xanadu warned, “negative sensor contact, but I see movement on the west ridgeline!”

“Acknowledged. Twiggie, get some elevation and see if you can get a missile lock,” the changeling said, resuming his own ‘Steed’s slow backwards withdrawal towards the perimeter, “Xanax, get on our right flank,” except for the one heavy energy weapon, the zebra’s Philomena didn’t have a lot of range to work with where his weaponry was concerned. He was much more effective at close-in fighting. While Slipshod’s Crystal Cavalier could engage at range, he needed line-on-sight with his energy weapons. Twilight’s missiles wouldn’t necessarily be immediately thwarted if those targets tried to duck behind the ridgeline.

“Moving and engaging,” the purple alicorn confirmed, her ‘Steed’s jump jets firing off and carrying the Rainbow Dash away, “identifying one full lance: pair of Riflemares and a pair Breezies. Locking onto a Riflemare...tone...missiles away!”

A torrent of forty missiles streaked from the Rainbow Dash’s launchers, leaving Slipshod’s sight in short order. Their destination was far outside his own line of sight, so he didn’t concern himself much with where they were headed. Instead, he focused on what that lance of ‘Steeds was likely doing so far out on their flank like that. At the extreme distance that they were at, even the Riflemares couldn’t hope to engage, and it didn’t look like they were going to try and get in closer any time soon. More than likely, they were trying to circle around and cut the Irregulars off from a possible withdrawal.

Only the Breezes were actually fast enough to get out in front of any of their group’s ‘Steeds, of course; but there was no way that the militia pilots could have known that before getting any detailed readings on the composition of the force assaulting the DCC facility. Even now they were probably too far out to get a hard lock on Twilight, and it was even money on how many of them would be able to recognize an ancient design like a Rainbow Dash on sight. Unless they happened to be BattleSteed enthusiasts like Mig and Tig were.

If the Irregular lance wanted to withdraw, they could. It was highly doubtful that those two Breezes had any intention of getting inside the energy weapon range of him and Twilight without the support of heavier ‘Steeds close at hoof. That being said, if they retreated too soon, then those militia forces could go right back to the landing pad and reset their trap. Their job was to keep the enemy occupied and out of position for as long as possible. So he wasn’t going to give them the order to withdraw, not yet.

But he was still going to do his best to keep them from getting encircled, and he knew that the militia lance along the ridge would not be the only group trying to get past them. He eyed the terrain on his map, looking for another likely avenue that he’d have taken a lance down if he was the one trying to get behind a more powerful adversary. He identified a likely route and then plotted a new nav point, sharing it with Xanadu, “Xanax, follow me to Nav Haybale. I think we’re going to find more ‘friends’ that way.

“Twiggie, keep that other group from feeling too ignored, will you?”

“Every time you call me that is one more hour I’m going to spend with you two strapped to chairs, reciting the poetry Fluttershy composed while dressed as a goth when she was running Rarity’s Manehattan boutique,” the alicorn promised him in an eerily flat tone.

“I don’t know what any of what you just said means,” the changeling told her, not feeling particularly concerned about the purported ‘threat’ in any meaningful way, “but I’m going to take it as a ‘aye aye, captain’. So you have fun and comm us if things get too lively.

“Xanax, on my six.”

“Movin’, boss!” the chipper zebra acknowledged, “and don’t worry about Twiggie; the name’ll grow on her.”

“That’s four,” the alicorn said, ominously.

Slipshod snorted and threw his ‘Steed into a canter, winding his way through both intact and mangled structures. He didn’t add to the carnage any further though, as he was hoping that they’d be able to surprise any group trying to flank them on the eastern end of the complex, and so didn’t want to provide any unnecessary indications of his location.

That plan seemed to have been one that was shared by the militia pilots, and both turned out to have been equally effective. The changeling found himself missing Valkyrie’s sensor and forward observation capabilities a great deal at this particular moment. Had the pegasus mare been here, he had no doubt that his current predicament could have been avoided entirely.

As it was, Slipshod was grateful that he did not appear to be the only one who was surprised upon rounding the corner. He did make a mental note to remark upon the Cavalier’s excellent deceleration capabilities as he had managed to bring his heavy ‘Steed to a rather abrupt stop and avoid actually ramming into the Royal Guard which he now found himself confronted with.

The militia pilot at the helm of the medium ‘Steed had likewise been able to arrest his ‘Steed’s movement moments before a collision. Both BattleSteeds seemed to be entranced with each other, likely as a result of mirrored shock being experienced by both pilots. It probably didn’t actually last for much more than a second or two, though it had certainly felt like quite the long while in the moment.

“Hey, what gives―?” Xanadu’s consternation-filled remark crackled across his helmet’s headset as the striped stallion demanded an explanation as to why Slipshod had come to such a sudden unanticipated halt. His targeting computer must have updated with the information being fed to it by the changeling’s Cavalier in that same moment, because his tone abruptly shifted to a lightly shocked, “―oh.”

This seemed to be enough to spur Slipshod back into action at least. Not that there was a lot that could really be done from a tactical standpoint that could be interpreted as particularly ‘clever’ in such a situation. The stallion reached out with his hoof and slapped at a macro that just about every BattleSteed had, but which he hardly ever found reason to use.

Now seemed like a good time though.

The Crystal Cavalier instantly unleashed all of its weapons simultaneously upon the smaller ‘Steed in front of it. No longer set to chained fire, four beams of iridescent viridian light cross from the chest of the heavier metal behemoth and drilled into the neck of the Royal Guard. Mounted just above them, the pair of recently swapped in Clan-developed heavy energy beams had little trouble melting away several tons of armor plating from along the militia ‘Steed’s back and withers, slicing neatly through the thinner dorsal armor and into the internal components beneath.

The PPC, however, which was mounted into the tip of the lance mounted on the Cavalier’s right side wasn’t quite able to gimbal inward enough to score a hit at such close range. The helical projection of destructive energy sailed harmlessly past the Royal Guard...but managed to strike the Derpy that had been following behind it. The dumpy little ‘Steed was rocked by the blow, and even Slipshod’s own interface experienced some residual effects as a result of the far too close impact, but it survived without too much issue.

The same could not be said for the Royal Guard.

One of the heavy energy beams must have found one of the ‘Steeds ammunition magazines. Whether it had been the one for the autocannon rounds or the LRMs, Slipshod couldn’t be sure. Perhaps both had been breached. It hardly mattered. Both contained very volatile munitions, and both were usually nestled relatively close to the reactor in a ‘Steed like this. Fusion reactors and detonating explosives didn’t mix very well.

The right side of the Royal Guard blew outward along its barrel in a torrent of orange flame a half second before a purple pulse of energy ripped up through its back. The pilot tried to inject, Slipshod saw, but something went wrong. One of his medium energy weapons which had hit the Guard’s neck must have crippled some part of the ejection system, and only half of the thrusters meant to carry the cockpit and the pilot to safety fired. The result was an ejection which didn’t send the pilot skyward, but instead flipped them hard over to the side and sent them slamming into the ground with an impact that had enough force behind it to completely shatter the little pod.

At least it had been a quick death. Quick enough that it was even possible the pilot hadn’t had enough time to realize that something had gone horribly wrong before they were merged with the regolith.

While the Royal Guard’s pilot may not have been able to get off a shot of their own before ejecting from their dying ‘Steed, their death did not go entirely unavenged. Slipshod was reversing as quickly as he could, but again the lack of an atmosphere demonstrated how accommodating it could be to powerful explosions and greatly increased the ‘danger zone’ of a ‘Steed experiencing a reactor breach. A siren warned the changeling of dangerously high heat levels that his systems were experiencing, and just about every forward-facing piece of plating was registering as being in the yellow, at best.

“Enemy lance!” Slipshod was yelling into his mic as he tried to reverse out of the confrontation, “one down, two up; Derpy and a―” he quickly tabbed through the target to get a glimpse of the silhouette return, “―SneakyShy!”

Two lighter-tonnage BattleSteeds, to be sure, and even together they wouldn’t necessarily have been a huge threat to his Cavalier in a typical engagement, but he had several factors working against him at the moment. Both were in close enough to use their weapons effectively―to include especially the Derpy’s oversized autocannon, while his own ‘Steed was dangerously overheated, and using even one of his medium energy weapons risked putting him over the edge and triggering a reactor shutdown. As a result, he was effectively defenseless against them for the next hoofful of seconds, and was showing them a facing of his ‘Steed that had seriously damaged plating already.

At the very least, he needed to give the two militia BattleSteeds undamaged armor to shoot at.

“Moving to flank!” Xanadu announced, taking the initiative. Slipshod spared only a moment to admit to himself that that was a sound course of action. There was an even chance that the enemy pilots didn’t even know that the Philomena was there, as they couldn’t possibly have seen the smaller ‘Steed past his own Crystal Cavalier from where they’d been positioned, and the Royal Guard’s pilot certainly hadn’t been granted the opportunity to relay its existence if they’d been aware of it.

An emerald beam cut through the vacuum just in front of Slipshod’s cockpit before swinging wildly around as the SneakyShy’s pilot recovered from the shock of seeing their companion struck down in front of them and made an effort to exact revenge. The line of destructive energy scored only a glancing hit that lasted for a fraction of a second before the charge was depleted. The damage inflicted was negligible. Their follow-up with a six-pack of SRMs was slightly more so.

Slipshod’s cockpit was rocked as five of the six rockets managed to connect with his ‘Steed’s ablative plating. It sent a few facings into the red, but it didn’t appear that anything had managed to penetrate. He still wasn’t in a position to respond though, and he could see the Derpy was moving in order to line up a shot on him as well.

The changeling pilot grimaced, noting that he was wedged rather neatly between two large buildings, which was greatly limiting his maneuverability. He was effectively limited to just going forward and reverse, and he’d instinctively chosen the option that had seemed like it would get him to safety the fastest. In hindsight, this might have been a mistake, as it had also been the slowest of the two options, and actually prevented him from presenting the undamaged facings of his BattleSteed for far longer than might have been the case if he’d opted to push through.

He was committed now though. If he tried to change tacks and accelerate forward, he’d just end up bringing the Cavalier to another stop before it could get back up to speed in the other direction, making him more of a target, while still keeping his most vulnerable armor sections directed towards the enemy.

Jump jets would have been really nice to have right about now…

Four more hard-hitting explosive rockets lept from the SneakyShy and raked themselves over his ‘Steed’s chest. An alert flashed, noting that the last few segments of plating had been blown off of the left side of the Cavalier’s chest, leaving the much less robust internal components exposed. One of the medium energy cannons was also no longer responding to firing controls. Mig and Tig were likely going to have words for him about that.

Slipshod’s gaze shot to the readout of his reactor’s current temperature. It was still dangerously in the red, his ‘Steed’s heatsinks having difficulty radiating the heat out into his airless surroundings without gases to convect it away. Radiating was a much slower process. However, if he didn’t defend himself in some way, heat retention was going to be the least of his troubles after a couple more SRM volleys. Or if that Derpy lined up a shot on him with that AC-twenty…

The changeling snapped off a shot with one of his heavy energy cannons. The cyan beam scoured the SneakShy, melting away plating and burning out a limb almost completely. The light BattleSteed staggered and quickly veered away, obviously not too keen on sustaining another hit like that one.

For Slipshod’s part, he watched as the internal temperature of his reactor spiked into the critical range. A synthetic voice wanted him that his ‘Steed was about to shut down entirely. That would be significantly less than ideal with one enemy unit still facing off with him. With a frustrated snarl, the stallion reached out and tapped in a hasty override code, listening with bittersweet relief as the computer responded to his command by keeping all of the systems online.

Had his suit not been sealed against vacuum, he was positive that his nostrils would be getting irritated by an acrid burning smell of overheated polymers and semiconductors. He certainly didn’t want to risk the consequences of firing off another shot like that until he was at least back down into the orange-hued ‘caution’ heat index readings. The Derpy’s cannon only might kill him. A reactor melt down would absolutely do so.

His eyes locked out of his cockpit in the direction of the barrel-chested light ‘Steed that still posed an immediate threat to him, trying to gage how much longer it would be until it fired. Slipshod frowned, however, as his view was filled with orange dots of light flashing through the vacuum around the militia BattleSteed. He traced those flashes of light back to their source, and his brows rose in mild surprise as he spotted Xanadu’s ‘Steed trotting into sight behind the enemy and opening fire.

“Peekaboo, motherbuckers!”

Even with the more powerful Clan weaponry, his Philomena lacked the punching power to down a Derpy in short order, even from behind; but his assault from the militia pilot’s undefended flank looked to very nearly panic the individual. For several seconds, it looked like they didn’t know if they were supposed to press forward, or turn around to confront the new threat. Their indecision gave Slipshod all the time that he needed to recede to the leeward side of some nearby structures as he waited for his temperature to drop back down to much safer levels.

Not that it seemed that he was going to get a whole lot of respite, as Twilight snapped out a warning over the radio, “I’ve got incoming,” the purple alicorn sounded outwardly calm perhaps, but Slipshod was far better at picking up on the more subtle timbres of a pony’s voice, and he picked up on the much more serious concern that she was feeling, “a lot of missiles are headed my way. Hundreds,” she cautioned, “breaking off my attack and taking evasive action.”

The changeling looked northward and, sure enough, he was able to pick up the vapor trails of the LRM volleys that were arcing from the direction of the landing pads, and where nearly all of the DCC facility’s defenders had been gathered. To include any LRM carriers that might have been among the garrisoned combat vehicles, he realized. The stallion cursed under his breath. Those were going to make things considerably more difficult, even as they withdrew. As long as at least one of the militia BattleSteeds could maintain sensor contact with them, those carriers would be able to rain down indirect missile fire.

Slipshod briefly considered what few options they had. Retreating was certainly one, but it would be quite risky under the current circumstances. Those LRMs had a long reach, and would be able to harry them for kilometers as they withdrew. A lot of damage, some of it even potentially crippling―especially for Xanadu’s much less protected Philomena―would be coming their way, unopposed. Going on fighting as they were certainly wasn’t a more appealing option though. With artillery support well within range, those militia ‘Steeds didn’t have to brawl with their lance. They could hang back, their quicker and more maneuverable light ‘Steeds keeping out of weapons range while still directing LRM fire. There was no doubt that the Irregular lance would ultimately lose such a fight.

Those carriers had to go, it was as simple as that.

“Xanax, I assume you can handle these two on your own?” he asked over his mic.

“As long as this Derpy doesn’t butt-check me I should be fine, boss,” the zebra assured him, “what’ve you got in mind?”

“I’m going LRM hunting. Twiggie, keep that other lance interested.”

“Five,” was her only reply. Slipshod rolled his eyes and then briefly consulted his map to plot a route for the landing pads. It would only take him about a minute to get there. The changeling’s mind flashed with memories of an earlier mission which had consisted of a similar attempt by him. He hoped that things went much more favorably this time.

After all, those militia elements had most certainly deployed more than just the two lances to defend the facility. If he ran into a couple of them, there could be problems. On the bright side, the trip across the operational area would give his Cavalier all of the time it needed to cool back down to optimal levels. So, he would at least have the ability to defend himself if he did encounter any trouble.

The Crystal Cavalier galloped between warehouses and factories, ignoring the various blips that popped up on his sensors, warning him about the occasional automated turret which was tracking him as he passed through their field of fire. Most consisted of lighter weaponry, and didn’t pose too much of a threat as he was only within their firing range long enough for them to take a single shot, which missed more often than not as his ‘Steed slalomed lightly around the buildings. If a turret happened to be directly in his path, he’d blow it away with a pair of viridian shots from his medium energy cannons, but he otherwise conserved his heat for what he was expecting to be a rather intense fight once he got to the landing pads.

There was no way that the militia had deployed all of their forces to handle the unexpected assault. They’d have recognized it as a feint if they had any amount of real battlefield experience. Obviously, they couldn’t afford to ignore it completely, not after the catastrophic damage that he and his lancemates had inflicted only a minute after landing, but three ‘Steeds didn’t require a couple companies to contain.

At least, that had to have been what the local commander of these militia units must have assumed. Not that it would have been an unfair assumption, of course. Slipshod certainly would have considered two lances to be more than sufficient firepower to deal with a single, ‘understrength’, lance of attackers. He would, like the militia commander, have also been operating under the assumption that the enemy was using equipment and BattleSteeds approximately comparable to his own. The idea of facing a pair of rare, heavy-tonnage, Celestia League era, ‘Steeds that represented the pinnacle of martial engineering at the time, outfitted with weapons that were more advanced than anything that anycreature in either the Harmony Sphere or the Periphery had ever conceived of, simply wouldn’t have crossed his mind.

In that same vein, Slipshod would also have not considered doing what he was planning had those not been the specific circumstances. It would have been ‘reckless’, to say the least…

Had the changeling been sitting in the cockpit with any of the militia pilots, he suspected that he would have sensed both their surprise, as well as their incredulity, as the four lances of assembled BattleSteeds and the nearly division-sized element of combat vehicles, witnessed the single Crystal Cavalier emerge from the cramped quarters of the factory complex into the much more open and exposed spaceport. That shock bought him a few seconds of peace, and Slipshod intended to take full advantage of it.

He largely ignored the militia BattleSteeds―though he did still note that half of them were large enough to meet or exceed the weight of his Cavalier―his first concern was the row of LRM carriers which were lined up in an open field approximately five hundred meters off to his left. The changeling grit his teeth and used the steering pedals to tease his ‘Steed in their direction, still keeping himself at a full gallop.

The surprise wore off as he was toggling the lance-mounted Prismatic Projector Cannon. Beams of light, explosive shells, vapor trails, and even tracers, saturated the space between him and his intended targets. He suspected that a similar view would have existed behind him. His piloting couch trembled as more than a few of the torrent of shots managed to find their mark despite his expedient movement. There was no help for it though.

He targeted the furthest missile platform and fired. Before the double-helix of destruction had crossed the entirety of the distance to its target, Slipshod was already swapping to his shoulder-mounted energy cannons. The PPC struck home and easily detonated the LRM carrier that it had been fired at. The explosion framed his next target almost perfectly as twin columns of cyan light bored their way through it. Chain fired medium energy cannons lanced outwards, one after another, as the third missile launcher entered their much greater effective range. It didn’t detonate in the same spectacular fashion, but its launchers were left obviously non-functional.

None of his weapons had time to recharge in order to be used against the fourth and final LRM carrier, but a charging BattleSteed hardly needed to shoot most combat vehicles in order to destroy them. The massive missile platforms might have weighed as much as lower-end heavy classed BattleSteeds, they possessed effectively no armor. They were really little more than bulk cargo transport that had been packed with as many missile launchers as could reasonably be mounted to them. A shoulder-fired SRM placed in the right location would have been enough to cripple one of them.

The hoof from a seventy-five ton Crystal Cavalier was more than capable of crushing the entire front end, and the crew there that controlled it.

Slipshod, wisely, chose not to linger and admire the aftermath of the carnage that he’d just wrought. The militia ‘Steed pilots had taken full notice of the Cavalier wreaking havoc in their midsts, and were all now very intent of getting rid of it. A couple dozen tanks of various shapes and sizes were joining in effort as well. His ‘Steed’s right-side plating, which had been mostly unscathed prior to engaging with the LRMs, was now reading as being in the red in far more locations than it was not. He maintained his run, but heaved hard to the left. While this meant that his rear-facing armor was now taking hits, it was still mostly unmarred.

That did not remain the case for long.

The stallion wasn’t about to turn and engage with the forces here, and nor was he convinced that he’d survive a withdrawal back to the relative safety of the factory complex. Instead, he sought out the meager shelter offered by the spaceport’s traffic control tower, wagering that DCC would frown very heavily on the wanton destruction of their property and the killing of their employees by the very same militia forces that they hired to protect those things.

His theory proved to be correct, as the incoming fire abated almost immediately. However, Slipshod was fully aware that this was not a condition that would endure forever. It would be an incredibly trivial task for the enemy to flank around both sides of the tower and surround him. He likely had less than a minute before exactly that happened, at which point he would be, in a word: fucked.

“I don’t suppose I can get a little help over here?” he asked over their lance’s comm frequency. He tried to keep as much apprehension as he could out of his voice, but his success on that front was markedly limited.

“Sorry, Bug,” Xanadu replied, “still tangling with the duo over here. The SneakShy’s being frustratingly wiley!”

Twilight’s own negative response followed immediately afterward, “I can send missiles your way if you get a lock for me, but I’ve only had time to down one of the Riflemares. The missile fire only just stopped. Thanks for that, by the way.”

“What are friends for?” the changeling deadpanned sarcastically, “no, but seriously, I’m in pretty deep, so if either of you could get here and dig me out―”

A new female voice that Slipshod didn’t recognize interrupted him, “shovels incoming!”

The confusion lasted just up until his sensor display, which had up until this moment effectively been a swath of red as the enemy surrounded him, lit up with a dozen new contacts. All of which were a calming, friendly, blue.

Vought Corsair had arrived.

He wasn’t sure at first how and where the mercenaries had come from, as the display made it look like they’d simply materialized out of thin air. Of course, BattleSteed sensor displays were designed for combat that was taking place on a nominally two-dimensional battlefield, and didn’t necessarily interpret altitude very effectively. It wasn’t until beams of sapphire, emerald, and chromatic light, began to rain down from above―and thankfully onto the enemy―that Slipshod looked upwards.

A dozen BattleSteeds emblazoned with scarlet paint, most with outsized retro-rockets bolted to their sides, glided down on plumes of smoke, raining fire from above onto the unsuspecting militia lances and defending combat vehicles.

Front and center of the airborne assault was a SaddleMaster. Heavily modified compared to the variants that were typically seen operating in the Sphere, Slipshod was immediately able to tell. The typical loadout for such assault ‘Steeds only allowed for a single PPC. This one had two, bolted to either side of the BattleSteed’s barrel on gimbals that allowed them to pivot with quite a bit of flexibility. Right now, those gimbals were angling the massive projection cannons downward, a torrent of coiled rainbow light beating on hapless militia and DCC units.

Slipshod would have loved to be privy to the enemy’s communications network traffic as the surprised garrison tried to reconcile what was happening and figure out where the assault was coming from. It was quite obvious from the fact that just about every one of their forces were out of position, that the units waiting to ambush the Crimson Corsairs had at least expected the DropShip to land first before unloading its complement of ‘Steeds. In fairness, airdrops like this were not super common. If a location was too well-defended or too inaccessible to land a DropShip at for a typical ‘Steed deployment, then most commanders regarded the operation as something as a ‘suicide mission’, as there would be little to no hope of an exptraction if things went sideways.

In this current example, had Vought Corsair dropped her forces onto the factory complex like this, with the local security and reinforcing militia elements ready and waiting to receive her, the changeling doubted that half of her mercenaries would have made it to the ground intact. However, right now those same forces were distracted and out of position. There were also considerably fewer of them present than had been fifteen minutes ago. An insertion like the one she was performing now would have a significantly better chance of succeeding.

Red blips vanished from his sensor display in concert with the dozens of nearly simultaneous fireballs illuminating the moonscape. Combat vehicles, whose armor was already considerably lacking compared to that of a BattleSteed’s, was even less effective at protecting them from topside threats. Single strikes from even medium energy cannons were enough to dispatch most of them. The militia ‘Steeds weren’t fairing much better. Their ablative plating was thinnest on top, and most of them also had quite a bit of difficulty achieving the kind of elevation that they needed to respond with their own weapons.

Slipshod estimated that half of the forces on the ground had been either destroyed, or effectively taken out of the fight, by the time the Crimson Corsairs finally landed. The outpouring of weapons fire didn’t abate in the slightest now that the scarlet-tinted mercenaries were on the ground either. Meanwhile, there were considerably fewer defending units who could effectively respond.

Those that were left had also seemed to forget entirely about the Cavalier that they’d had pinned behind the traffic control tower.

“Thanks for the assist, Vought,” the stallion grinned as he throttled back up and whipped out from behind his cover, lining up his weapons on the backside of a JagerMare. The heavy ‘Steed possessed a lot of firepower, to be sure, but had achieved so by sacrificing a significant amount of protection. Especially in the rear. Twin beams of cyan light from his new overpowered Clan cannons right up its tailhole cracked the reactor casing almost immediately, “whatever you’re drinking, I’m buying!”

“Eh, it was no big deal,” the mare’s voice assured him, “we were just in the neighborhood. Thought we’d drop in and have some fun. Though―and for no particular reason I’m offering this information―I’m partial to Bloody Mares. Two olives. Lemon wedge. Rutabaga in place of the celery stalk.

“Hardly even know why I mention it.”

“I’m never going to stop being disturbed by how easily you ponies can banter like this in the middle of a battle,” Twilight cut in. A moment later, her Rainbow Dash also made an appearance in the landing pad melee. Her BattleSteed’s paint was scoured and scuffed in a few places, but the ‘Steed looked otherwise to be no worse for wear. The alicorn quickly set about targeting limbs and weapons, obviously still looking to avoid causing outright death to the militia pilots. Slipshod felt his lips instinctively pull taught into a frown, but figured he could forgive the―former―princess her eccentricity. It wasn’t like there was a convoy full of innocent lives on the line this time.

“It’s a classic deflection technique used by pilots to reduce stress,” Xanadu chimed in. Slipshod caught sight of his much more battered looking Philomena plodding out of the factory complex, though he still continued to add what friepower he had to the fight all the same, “I can’t remember if deflection through humor was a B.B.B.F.F Spinner thing or something Cart Tongue wrote about. It was one of those old-timey brain-ponies though.”

“Actually, I think it was Frond. Spinner’s work focused mostly on behaviorism and operant conditioning―what the fuck am I doing?!” the purple mare blurted, “why am I debating psychological theorists in the middle of battle?!”

“Cognitive deflection during a stressful situation,” Vought Corsair quipped, Slipshod noting the tinge of amusement in the mercenary commander’s voice through the radio static.

“Very funny,” Twilight shot back. There was a brief burst of static as the alicorn swapped over to a broad-band broadcast so that every receiving unit in the area could hear what she said next, “all DCC and Concordat Militia units: you are instructed to power down your vehicles and ‘Steeds at once and surrender! Comply, and your lives will be spared.”

“Spoilsport,” Corsair muttered, though the changeling didn’t get the impression that the mare would violate the terms of the surrender if the defenders offered it. She was a mercenary after all, and would likely exercise her right to claim the spoils of the fight. Which meant that the more BattleSteeds that she could take intact, the better the price she could negotiate for them when she sold them right back to the planetary militias on the local market. Whatever satisfaction that she might have gotten from killing the same adversaries that sought to entrap her was be greatly outweighed by her chance to wallow in the indignity of those same opponents being forced to effectively beg her for the chance to buy their former ‘Steeds off of her for whatever overinflated prices she deigned fit to charge them.

Though, that was all contingent on those pilots actually opting to surrender in the first place. Slipshod watched his sensors expectantly. For several long seconds, nothing much on it changed, save for the loss of signal contact that came with the destruction of yet another combat vehicle. It seemed though that, eventually, sanity won out. A few, then a few more, and then suddenly every remaining active sensor contact vanished from the board as the combatants accepted the terms of the offered surrender and powered down.

With an almost surreal suddenness, the fight was over.

“This is Major Pain,” a gruff male voice came of the same open frequency that Twilight had used. The changeling idly wondered if that first part was a rank or part of their name, “we surrender,” the resignation was palpable.

“That is very much appreciated, major,” Twilight said, managing to sound perfectly polite and cordial, despite the otherwise tense circumstances that they’d all recently found themselves in, “please remain where you are as arrangements are made to transport you and your personnel to the factory’s habitation modules,” the mare swapped back over to their internal frequency, “Call up the Zathura and let Squelch know that she can land. Miss Corsair, feel free to do the same with your vessel. We’ll work out who gets what spoils then. Does that work for you?”

“It’s ‘commander’, not ‘miss’,” the other mare responded tersely, then, “and, yeah; that’ll be fine. I’m also led to believe that you guys have some other matters that you wanted to discuss with me?”

“That’s correct, commander,” Twilight acknowledged, “matters that we believe will be of a particular interest to yourself.”

“Color me intrigued. I can’t wait to hear all about it,” there was a brief pause, “Crystal Skull Vodka for my Bloody Mare, by the way. If you have it. Grey Cockarice is fine though if you don’t.”

Anypony who’d actually met Victoria Blueblood would have been forgiven for not recognizing her in the visage of the scarlet pegasus mare who was currently sat, comfortably reclined, in the conference room of the Zathura. In her youth, the Commonwealth heir had looked just as pristinely white as her uncle, and her expression very nearly mirrored Dominus’ in its seriousness. A meticulously trimmed and coiffed citrine mane, hooves polished to a mirror shine, and an ivory coat brushed until it glistened. She’d been almost a work of art in her appearance.

A far cry from the mercenary commander currently leaning back in her seat with her hind hooves kicked up on the table and a tall glass of a blood-red cocktail held in her pinions. Her now golden hued mane was shaved down on one side and swept over the other, exposing an elaborate tattoo etched below her left ear. Piercings covered her ears and her brow, ranging from simple gold studs to silver bars. The mare looked more like a pirate than a respectable mercenary, if Slipshod was being honest.

Of course, it was just a look, the changeling realized. An exceptionally well-crafted one, to be sure, but a facade nonetheless. Her baby blue eyes might have danced with feigned frivolity, but beneath them was a coolness of collected thought that betrayed a mind that some might have erroneously called: ‘manipulative’. Slipshod regarded it as ‘adaptive’.

Vought Corsair recognized that to be Victoria Blueblood was dangerous. Deadly, perhaps. So she could not be that mare. Her life depended on adopting an identity that could never, and would never, be conflated with her old life. A lifetime of being taught how to be diplomatic in a Court setting, putting on affectations for the benefit of those from whom you wanted to extract as much as possible while giving up as little as necessary, had translated quite well into adopting the art of deception. Vought Corsair was a projection of who Victoria knew that she had to be―of who the creatures around her expected her to be―in order to make her way in the Periphery.

It was an almost―almost―changeling-worthy transformation. Certainly as far as any non-changeling would be concerned.

Deep down though, she was still that same well-schooled and collected mare who had spent her youth learning politics and art. Perhaps she’d been tempered by the last two years spent fighting, yes; but that hadn’t changed who she was at her core. If anything, it had only galvanized it.

The crimson pegasus caught the stallion’s stare. Internally, Slipshod sensed her brief flickers of unease and worry. She seemed to recognize that he was doing more than merely ‘looking’ at her, but she couldn’t possibly know exactly how deeply into her psyche he could delve. All the same, she recognized a need to distract him, or at least let him know that she recognized his attention. She flashed him a wry smirk that had none of the mirth behind it that she was projecting, “you’re a better barpony than you are a ‘Steed pilot,” she quipped, swishing her drink around in its glass as she took another appreciative sip, “you should consider a career change.”

The barb was meant to put him off. It might have even worked on a stallion who couldn’t sense how on edge she was. The changeling’s lips spread in an effortless smile. Unlike the pegasus, he no longer felt a need to hide who he was after all. That change in his lifestyle had turned out to have a profoundly freeing effect on him stress-wise. Meanwhile, Corsair was still very much worried that she’d lose control of her carefully crafted facade at any moment and give away everything about who she was. That constant distraction held her back, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

It seemed to irk the mare somewhat that he hadn’t been at all put off by her attempt to jab at his ego, but once again her expression didn’t slip. By all appearances, she took the comment in stride and turned her attention instead to the sage green unicorn seated across from her, “Squelch, right? You, on the other hoof, have a lot of talent. Great job spotting that trap,” this time her feelings matched her words, the mare’s praise genuine. The relief she was feeling was kept in check though. Likely just a negotiation tactic more than anything else. It was never smart in a negotiation to let the other party know that you felt you owed them anything, after all, “my organization could always use a brain like that.

“We offer competitive rates…” Corsair let the offer hang in the air, flashing the unicorn an inviting smile.

“I’m sure you do,” Squelch nodded, “but I’m afraid that I’m already under contract at the moment,” the disappointment on the scarlet mare’s face was genuine, but there was also a curiousness bubbling beneath it. She was surely wondering why, if Squelch was currently working for a client, that she’d take on the risk of helping out another mercenary outfit. She certainly couldn’t fathom a reason why she herself might have been a part of any existing contract. Not one that involved helping her anyway.

“A shame,” Corsair said, shrugging as she took another sip of her cocktail, “I assume then that you’d like a bigger share of the salvage? I could argue that, without my intervention, your forces would have been wiped out, and so it’s really you who owe me, but I’m not that crass. I’ll up the divide to a fifty-fifty split.”

Squelch didn’t react to the offer. Instead, she and Slipshod shared a brief look. The changeling felt his employer’s barely contained excitement at what she anticipated her next words were going to do in terms of disrupting the other mercenary commander’s demeanor. Truth be told, Slipshod was also looking forward to seeing what it did to the mare’s otherwise well-schooled features.

“Actually, I do have a counter-offer in mind,” the unicorn began. Vought Corsair’s expression registered little more than polite interest, mentally preparing herself to negotiate a new compromise; out of propriety if nothing else. Nopony simply accepted terms that were dictated to them when there was no leverage being applied, after all. She didn’t particularly care about the salvage, as this contract had been about optics rather than monetary gain. Her ‘true’ compensation had come in the form of financially ruining the company which had conspired to entrap her, and demoralizing the militia units that had enlisted to help do so. Money was just icing on her schadenfreude cake.

“Oh?”

“You keep everything,” Squelch began. Internally, Slipshod felt the brief―almost reactionary―sense of grief in the business-minded mare as she effectively ‘gave away’ one of the biggest windfalls of her mercenary career. It easily amounted to tens of millions of c-bits worth of material and would have effectively more than doubled the value of her whole company.

However, that feeling passed as she reassured herself that this act of charity was in the furtherance of a goal that would see her receiving a phenomenally bigger payout from the League-in-Exile once they’d been restored to power. As Slipshod understood it, Twilight had basically written Squelch a ‘blank check’ in exchange for her services, allowing the unicorn to ask for just about anything she wanted as compensation when Chrysalis was defeated and all of this was over with. In that way, she could look at giving Victoria the BattleSteeds as more of an ‘investment’ than a ‘loss’, “and in exchange we’ll supply you with about a hundred tons of the most advanced weaponry that the galaxy has ever seen.”

Slipshod felt the cognitive equivalent of a drive chain slipping off the gears in Victoria’s brain. For just the briefest of moments, the crimson pegasus was absolutely positive that she’d misheard the other mercenary owner. Then, when she replayed what had been said in her head, and realized that she hadn’t, her brain scrambled to try and find out if perhaps she’d overlooked something incredibly important about the encounter that she’d somehow managed to miss than would make any of what had just been said make sense.

When she couldn’t manage to do that, the scarlet feathered flier carefully placed her drink on the conference table and slowly withdrew her hooves from its surface, assuming a far more dignified posture as some of her old self bled through the facade that she projected, “I beg your pardon? You...what?”

Slipshod chortled. Even some of the Commonwealth heir’s refined accent from her previous life had bled through in her shock. Squelch too seemed to be enjoying rattling the other mare with such an unexpected turn in the conversation, “you’re going to need it more than we will,” the green mare said matter-of-factly, “it still won’t quite be enough to defeat Dominus’ Royal Guard outright,” she acknowledged, “but it will be with the backing of the Timberwolves.”

That shock mixed with fear now, the changeling felt, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her old accent was gone, replaced once more by the one that she affected as part of her cover identity. She was quite a bit more wary now too, “I don’t have any business with Dominus, the Commonwealth, or the Dragoons. Let’s just call it a sixty-forty split and part ways―”

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized,” Slipshod informed the pegasus coolly, “and you would be a fool to let this one pass you by.”

Suspicious blue eyes narrowed at the golden-furred stallion now as the pegasus regarded him for several long, silent, seconds. Then, finally, “they who wish to fight, must first weigh the cost; and anypony knows that the cost of fighting the Commonwealth would be very high,” she said, her expression the most serious that it had been since she’d walked in, “even if I added in all the ‘Steeds that we salvaged from today to my forces, the prospect of taking on my―” the pegasus abruptly caught herself and cleared her throat, “taking on Dominus Blueblood’s forces would be tantamount to suicide.”

“Only if you were forced to conduct a true invasion,” the changeling countered, “but that would hardly be necessary. If you strike the palace complex outright, bypassing everything else, you could enact a fait accompli. Dominus would be deposed, and his heir,” Slipshod flashed a knowing look at the mare, feeling her barely concealed surprise, “would be primed to assume the archonship with only having to win a single battle.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” the changeling offered a tiny shrug as he added an addendum to the quotation, “or, at least as little fighting as necessary.”

“...who are you? How could you possibly know what you know?”

“Slipshod Lackadaisy,” the stallion replied simply, watching realization dawn across the pegasus mare’s face, “I believe you knew my father?”

Grief now, an outpouring of it like the changeling hadn’t expected. The mare genuinely regretted what had happened to the family of his cover identity. She was a good pony then. There was no faking what she was feeling right now. The guilt, the anguish. The memory of an entire family line that had very nearly been wiped out for the simple crime of trying to help her to do right by her nation’s citizens. A sympathy for the pain of loss which she assumed that Slipshod must have been feeling as well for the loss of his ‘family’.

In that moment, all pretenses vanished. The entire reason for the persona that she was affecting had evaporated. What was left was a mare whose composure and elegant demeanor clashed garishly with her otherwise rambunctious appearance, “my sincerest condolences for your loss,” she said, sounding subdued. She could barely even bring himself to look at the stallion right now, “your father was a good stallion. The best, even. I never…” the mare swallowed and let out a deep sigh, “he deserved better.

“I am sorry.”

“He knew what he was getting into,” the stallion said, likely a lot more easily than the real Slipshod would have been able to in the same situation. The ponies who’d been executed hadn’t been members of his family, of course. He’d never actually even met them. He certainly wasn’t keen in wallowing in melancholy over their deaths with this mare; not while they had far more pressing matters to discuss.

“What’s important,” he went on, determined to steer the conversation back on track, “is that you understand that we’re here to give you a second―much better―shot at the archonship, with a lot more resources backing you up.”

“I assume that you’re referring to the Dragoons?” the pegasus asked skeptically, receiving a nod from both Slipshod and his unicorn employer. Victoria shook her head, ruefully, “there’s nothing that I could possibly offer Timberjack that would compel him to forsake his contract with my uncle in order to help me,” she added firmly.

“There’s nothing that you could offer them, that’s true,” Slipshod conceded, earning himself a scowl from the pegasus, “but we have it on good authority that the Timberwolves answer to a ‘higher power’ than their contract with Dominus,” he glanced over and shared a look with Squelch, who in turn depressed a button on the conference table’s console.

“Star admiral? If you would care to join us?”

Slipshod idly wondered if he was deriving too much pleasure from the abject shock of other ponies. In any case, it was patently evident that, whoever Victoria might have anticipated seeing walk through the door, a dragon had not been it. Let alone one dressed in the officer attire that bore an exceptionally strong resemblance to the uniforms of the Celestia League. It was enough of a surprise to cause the pegasus to briefly lose her sense of composure, her jaw hanging agape as she stared at the cobalt blue dragoness.

“Admiral Cinder,” Squelch said by way of introductions, “I present to you the Pretender to the archonship of the Pony Commonwealth, Victoria Blueblood. Commander Blueblood, this is Star Admiral Cinder of the Celestia League-in-Exile. She has a proposition that I think you would very much be interested in hearing.”

Two hours―and an abbreviated history lesson―later, cocktails had been replaced with coffee as a crimson pegasus wrestled with the fundamental restructuring of everything in her life that she had previously taken as the gospel truth. To her credit, she was taking things remarkably well, given the circumstances. That appraisal wasn’t just in regards to her outward composure either. Slipshod noted that, emotionally, she was very diligently processing and evaluating everything that she’d been told and was doing a remarkably commendable job on integrating it.

If anything, some of the revelations that she had just been subjected to had even had the effect of relieving several of her previously deep-seated internalized shortcomings. She’d spent the better part of two years second-guessing herself, mentally chastising herself for whatever it was that she believed she’d overlooked or done wrong that had gotten her original plot discovered and her co-conspirators executed. Learning that she’d been outed by a cabal of changeling spies that neither she nor even her uncle had even known existed, and thus could not have had a hope to plan against, helped to alleviate that burden from her conscience. At least now she knew that it hadn’t been a failing of hers.

The changelings were to blame for that tragedy.

Slipshod was of mixed feelings about how strongly they wanted to stoke that particular fire. Especially before it had been revealed that he was one of those same changelings. Not one which had been directly involved in the sabotaging of her coup, but one who had incidentally put the metaphorical final nail in the coffin of the Lackadaisy family dynasty through the real Slipshod’s death. Albeit, many years before she’d brought the rest of the lesser noble family into her plot.

One galaxy-shattering revelation at a time, he and the rest of those in the inner circle of decision-makers had decided. First they’d get Victoria acclimated to the idea that changelings were a thing. Then they reveal that she would actively be working with one. Hopefully that would be a pill which would become significantly easier to swallow once they’d helped her secure her throne.

“So, to summarize,” the crimson pegasus began, speaking quite steadily despite how surreal an experience this all had to be for her, “the Timberwolf’s Dragoons―who are actually an advance reconnaissance force for the League-in-Exile―will help me secure the archonship for myself...in exchange for my letting a massive invasion force pass through Commonwealth space uncontested, in order to launch an assault on Queen Twilight―I’m sorry, Queen Chrysalis―on Equus?”

“That’s the gist of it, yes,” the star admiral said with a shallow nod, “with Timberjack’s help, we can smuggle your forces right to the capital without Dominus being the wiser. A brief scuffle with the palace garrison and the throne’ll be yours for the taking.”

The pegasus snorted, smirking at the dragoness, “you make it sound almost too easy.”

“If you were anypony else, it wouldn’t be,” Slipshod pointed out, “Dominus has no children. You were the heir apparent before your purported ‘death’. The population of the Commonwealth would be welcome to your return,” the changeling flashed his own rueful smile now, “I can imagine that the bulk of its government administrators would breathe a sigh of relief too, given that the succession of the archonship is kind of up in the air right now.

“Bureaucrats hate uncertainty like that. The last thing any of them will want is some sort of civil war as the more ambitious of them vie for control after Dominus’ death.”

To this, Victoria added her agreement. However, there was still one point that she was wary of, “and what about Chrysalis? She stopped me before. Why wouldn’t she again?”

“I don’t think that Chrysalis really ‘objected’ to you assuming the archonship ever,” the stallion explained, though admittedly he was operating under quite a lot of his own speculation and conjecture in this regard. Still, he did know some things in regards to how his former queen tended to operate her shadow empire, “it was more that your timing was inconvenient. You were the heir apparent. Someday you were going to take the throne. Chrysalis doesn’t want instability in the Commonwealth. If it collapses, it throws the Harmony Sphere’s balance off, and she doesn’t want that. She needs all five of the major powers intact.

“If you seize the throne before she can do anything about it, Chrysalis won’t remove you. At least not until her agents have had time to mold a new heir that can be sold to the public,” he noted the sour look that the pegasus adopted at his mention of that possible outcome, but he wasn’t about to insult her intelligence by trying to insist that nothing like that could happen. Besides, “and we’re not going to give her time to do that,” the stallion pointed out.

“Her agents will have to support your ascension. Undermining it would weaken the Commonwealth and embolden its enemies to attack it,” Cinder pointed out, “as long as you don’t do anything that Chrysalis perceives as an imminent threat to her plans, she won’t move against you.”

Slipshod blinked in mild surprise as he sensed a newly formed ball of worry from within the pegasus. Not the same general concern in regards to their talk up to this point, but something much more specific. He narrowed his gaze at Victoria, cocking his head, “...you think that you do threaten her plans somehow? But we just told you that―”

“You said she wants to maintain the balance,” the pegasus corrected gently, though she was a little put off by how perceptive the stallion had been of her mental state, “that she wants all five of the major powers at each other’s throats all the time, but without one achieving any real advantage over the others,” both the dragoness and the earth pony nodded, “...then I assume that she will take exception to whom I have taken as my consort.”

The other three creatures in the room all exchanged confused looks. It was Slipshod who finally posed the question though, “and that would be…?”

“Nacht Belle.”

Both ponies gawked at the pegasus, while Cinder only looked mildly confused. It was Squelch who spoke up this time, “Natch Belle...as in the younger brother of Menulis Belle, First Prince of the Federated Moons. That Natch Belle?”

“What’s he even doing out here in the Periphery?!” Slipshod sputtered.

“He isn’t,” Victoria corrected, “we met before my self-imposed exile. On the field of battle, actually,” this raised a few intrigued eyebrows, which prompted a wry smirk from herself, “knowing how to pilot a BattleSteed is practically a requisite for a prospective ruler, don’t you know? I spent a stint with a subsidiary of the Dragoons for a year. Long enough to ‘get my hooves wet’ at any rate.

“During that time, we attacked a Federated Moons forward supply base, which was being guarded by the Third Belle Guard...commanded by Nacht Belle. We surrounded them and forced a surrender,” a melancholy smile spread across her lips as she relived the memory, “he was in our custody for nearly three months while a ransom was negotiated. We were all civilized ponies, so he wasn’t confined to a cell for that time. He was the heir to one of the Great Houses, and so I gave him a comfortable cabin on the ship. I stopped by quite frequently, playing the ever-so-gracious host.

“He was quite pleasant to talk to, actually. We found that the two of us shared a great many views in regards to the state of galactic affairs, and the seemingly endless fighting that had been raging across it. The two of us developed a healthy respect for one another.

“Then...eventually...we developed something...more,” Slipshod felt an inrush of quite a few very powerful emotions from the pegasus. Suffice it to say, the changeling found himself feeling quite sated for the day where his need for love was concerned. Victoria cleared her throat and wiped the blush from her face as she resumed speaking, “we hatched something of a plan to unite our Houses and form a new alliance between the Commonwealth and the Federation.

“It’s what led me to plotting the coup to overthrow my uncle. I knew he would never condone it. And I certainly didn’t want to have to wait until after his death to pursue it. That could have taken decades, with millions more dying in the skirmishes between our nations,” she lamented.

The mare looked back to the earth pony, “I approached your father about my plan to depose my uncle and marry Natch, in the hopes of forging a sustained alliance between the Commonwealth and the Federation. He supported the idea. I wouldn’t have gone to him if I thought it would end the way that it did. I’m sorry.”

Again the stallion felt nothing of the sorrow that he suspected the real Slipshod would have at this moment. Which was perhaps for the better under the circumstances. A more personally invested pony might have sabotaged what they were trying to accomplish here, “you wanted peace between your Houses,” he countered, giving the mare a warm smile to reassure her that he harbored no ill feelings for her; because he didn’t, “so did he. I know he wouldn’t have regretted dying for a cause like that.”

Which, given what he knew of the real Slipshod’s father was likely a true enough statement. He had been an idealist. Strictly speaking, had no coup been plotted by Victoria, there was every likelihood that one of Slipshod’s first missions on behalf of his former queen would have been to arrange for an ‘accident’ for his father in order to speed his own ascension to the head of the family and nip those sorts of ‘unsavory’―for Chrysalis, anyway―ambitions in the bud.

This revelation did answer some questions though, the changeling thought to himself, “you’re right though,” he acknowledged towards the pegasus, “Chrysalis wouldn’t want that alliance to happen. The last thing she wants would be genuine, long lasting, peace between two or more of the Great Houses. You marrying Nacht would upset the dynamic she’s established.”

“So she would oppose me if I assumed the throne,” Victoria concluded unhappily.

“If we gave her enough time to, she would find somepony to usurp it from you, yes,” he admitted, “but that’s not going to happen anyway, because in less than a year after you take over, the League-in-Exile is going to take Equus,” Slipshod pointed out, “that’s nowhere near enough time for her to establish a clear heir apparent, even behind the scenes. Not one with enough political support to be uncontested anyway.”

This seemed to relax the crimson-hued mare significantly. However, it seemed that the star admiral was keen to move on from more personal matters to more immediate concerns, clearing her throat, “now that we’ve cleared that up, perhaps then we could get an answer to our proposal?”

“The answer as to whether or not I’ll let you help me claim rule over the Pony Commonwealth from my detestable uncle in exchange for allowing you to free the Harmony Sphere from the tyranny of a hidden cabal of manipulative shape-shifters?” the mare asked, with just a touch of mirthful incredulity.

Well, when she phrased it like that…

“Yes,” she relented in giving the dragoness a definitive answer, though she was still smirking quite broadly, “I accept your offer.”

“I think it’s utterly adorable!”

Slipshod was torn between the mirrored desires to both roll his eyes in annoyance at the alicorn’s gushing and join in on the ‘mare-talk’ as he basked in the joy that was radiating outward from the purple mare as she revelled in the recounting of the success of the earlier negotiations. Though, there was nothing that ultimately precluded the changeling from doing both, so he opted to do both, snuggling up against the zebra’s warm side as he did so. He’d ceased paying much attention to the vid that was playing for the three of them a while ago. Not that the film wasn’t of particular interest to him, it was a passable experience with a decently acted cast of characters, but it was hard for him to focus on it with so much positive emotion flowing around him.

Who could possibly focus on a movie while being served such choice cuisine?

Much like his own changeling nature, the existence of Twilight as the returned and true ruler of the defunct Celestia League was being kept from Victoria until she’d had time to process the first few profound revelations that she’d been presented with. Strictly speaking, the less that the pegasus mare knew, the safer the invasion of Equus would be. They wouldn’t be able to keep changeling agents away from her once she was installed as archon, and so they had to assume that anything that she was told had a chance to be passed on to Chrysalis once her uncle was deposed.

Fortunately, they’d be able to let Victoria do most of the heavy lifting without taking too much direct action themselves. The Irregulars’ part in the immediate plans now consisted of little more than getting Victoria and Cinder to a meeting with Timberjack so that the commander of the Dragoons could receive his new marching orders and escort Victoria to the Pony Commonwealth's capital. At that point, it would be best for all if neither the Dragoons, nor even the Irregulars, help with her assault on the palace complex. The more that she could do on her own in that regard, the more legitimate her claim would be in the eyes of the public.

As it was, the young mare would enjoy every conceivable advantage. The BattleSteeds that had been surrendered largely intact after the fight at the Delerex Composites facility let Victoria bring her fieldable strength up to nearly a full regiment, which put her on numerically equal footing with the units that would be guarding the palace propper. However, thanks to the resources of the League-in-Exile Cinder was offering, Victoria’s forces would be fielding superior weaponry compared to what the Archon’s guards had at their disposal.

The fighting would be intense, but with more powerful weapons and the element of surprise on her side, Victoria should be able to achieve a decisive victory.

“You don’t think ‘love on the battlefield’ is a little overdone?” Xanadu asked absently, rubbing at his chin as he pondered his own question. “Never mind the slightly questionable morality of developing feelings for your prisoner. That’s a very unbalanced power-dynamic. You could argue that she took advantage of him. If they actually ‘did’ anything during those few months, it’d be legally classified as ‘rape’ in a lot of Periphery star nations,” the striped stallion pointed out.

Twilight’s mood soured almost immediately at that thought, which evoked a grimace in the changeling a second later as his ‘meal’ abruptly ‘spoiled’ in an instant. Slipshod flashed his pillow a sharp glare, accentuating it with a sharp snort.

“Sorry,” their newest ‘Steed pilot apologized, offering a conciliatory smile, “just sayin’...”

“Well I choose to think that those two had a much healthier―and more power-balanced―relationship than that,” Twilight insisted hautilly, “and not just because of the political implications that it has. I mean, those are very significant, yes, but I don’t want to cheapen what those two might have for each other by pointing out how beneficial to us it might be.”

“If Chrysalis caught a whiff of their conversations, it’s definitely why she stopped Victoria’s coup,” the changeling said, still a little disappointed that his pleasant repast had been cut short, “the last thing she’d want is an alliance between any of the Great Houses.”

“But it’s such a promising start to a new Celestia League,” the alicorn emphasized, “a demonstration that centuries of animosity can be put aside in an effort to build bigger and better alliances. If those two could come together, why not the other three too?”

Slipshod found himself feeling slightly more content now as the purple mare’s hope for the future replaced her earlier feelings regarding the morally-ambiguous origins of Victoria’s love-life. The changeling did issue the zebra a look that defied him to sour Twilight's newfound positive outlook. Xanadu, wisely, kept his mouth shut and his attention on the vid screen.

“What do you think they’ll call the unified star nation once they make it official?” Twilight mused, “I mean, I guess the easiest thing to change the name to might be...the Federated Commonwealth?”

It was Slipshod’s turn to frown and flash a dubious look at the alicorn, “those are both just words for kinds of groups,” the changeling pointed out, “wouldn’t that basically be like calling it: the Organized Organization?”

“Well it’s certainly better than calling it the Pony Moons,” Twilight countered, “tell me, with a straight face, that the first thing you don’t think of when you hear that is flanks,” the stallion acknowledged that, of the two presented options, the former was certainly the more aurally pleasing, in spite of its redundant nature.

The door chime interrupted their semantic discussions on hypothetical future star nation names. Twilight responded with a polite, “come in.”

All three were rather surprised when the door opened to reveal a thestral mare standing in the corridor. More so when they noted that her expression looked to be particularly cross. Slipshod specifically was trebly shocked when he sensed that the bat-winged mare was directing her hostility towards him. He’d barely even spoken to Rigger Brush since they’d returned from Clan space. What could he have possibly done that had upset her?

“You,” the thestral seethed, jabbing a leathery wing in the changeling’s direction and fixing him with a look of such intense disgust that the stallion very nearly lost his disguise in his shock. Rigger stormed into the purple alicorn’s quarters, seemingly oblivious to anypony else in the room, her gaze fixed on the stallion.

Twilight might not have been an empath, but she could certainly recognize an angry mare when she saw one. Xanadu, similarly, had somehow managed to cease being Slipshod’s pillow in an effort to be somewhere in the small room that wasn’t in the thestral’s path, “excuse me, but if there’s a problem, I’m sure that we can discuss it like civilize―”

The batpony shifted her glare to the alicorn now, which had the rather astonishing effect of silencing her mid-sentence, “this. Doesn’t. Concern. You,” Rigger growled slowly at the purple mare. Slipshod sensed that he’d just lost the protection of the royal mare, which didn’t bode all that well for him, he felt. The stallion swallowed back his fear and made an attempt to stammer out something―anything―that might stem the ire the mare was feeling towards him.

He just didn’t know what he’d done wrong! Which made it distinctly difficult to apologize for it was…

“You,” Rigger Brush reiterated, leaning down as she refocused her golden eyes on the changeling, her lips pulling back to reveal rows of an uncomfortably large number of pointy teeth. There was no way that thestrals were true herbivores, like their other equine cousins, Slipshod decided. Which begged the question as to what the bulk of the diet of ancient batponies had consisted of?

The knowledge that the various species of actual bats which didn’t subsist off of fruit dined almost exclusively on insects was not sitting very well with the arguably ‘bug-adjacent’ changeling right now.

“...Y-yes?” Slipshod managed to get out in his best effort to try and defuse the situation. Objectively, not a good effort; but the best that he apparently could manage at the moment as he frantically processed her outpouring of emotions to try and latch on to what specifically was upsetting her and find a way to address it.

“Channel Lock told me you can change your voice to sound like whoever you want,” the thestral said, still holding the changeling with a piercing look. Slipshod blinked, uncertain how to respond, as she seemed to be quite angry about something connected to that topic, but he eventually nodded, “and she said that you told her you can change your whole body too?” Another hesitant nod, “to things other than ponies?” A third, no less confused, nod.

“You mean to tell me,” the thestral seethed, “that all this time, you’ve had me sketching a mere pony, when I could have been drawing anything in the galaxy?!”

Wait; what?

Her wing shot out, snagging the stallion by the collar of his uniform as she proceeded to turn around and march staunchly for the door, dragging the profoundly stunned earth pony behind her, “you’re coming to my room right now! I’ve been wondering how I was going to get a minotaur to model for me since we got here!”

As he was pulled out into the corridor, Slipshod noted that his ‘friends’ were far too busy laughing to help him.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 23: By Blood Betrayed

“C-bit for your thoughts?”

Slipshod glanced over his shoulder from where he’d been perched atop his Crystal Cavalier, staring out at the planet below that was visible through the window set into the bay door. He’d been there for about the last hour or so, ever since he and the other pilots had been placed on an alert status following Victoria’s departure for the palace complex on the Commonwealth's capital world of Hackamore. They hadn’t gone down with the rest of the Crimson Corsairs, as it was deemed that showing up with mercenary forces―while not something that would have been seen as uncommon―had the potential to undermine the validity of her claim.

Victoria Blueblood was here to obtain the archonship using her own cunning and martial might, and didn’t want to look like she had ‘bought’ the title with soldiers of fortune. So, neither the Timberwolves, nor Rayleigh’s Irregulars were going to be part of the assault itself. However, they would still be available in the event that the situation went sour and it started to look like Victoria might actually lose the fight. If that happened, then every mercenary in orbit would be dispatched to the fight in order to ensure that the side the League-in-Exile ‘needed’ to win, did so.

Even if the optics of such a dubious ‘victory’ might not have been optimal, Twilight’s plan for the invasion of Equus couldn’t be allowed to take a backseat to Victoria’s pride. Ultimately, they didn’t require her hold of the throne to be absolute or unquestioned. As long as she retained control long enough to guarantee the safe passage of the invasion force through Commonwealth space, that was what truly mattered.

And so, Slipshod and the others found themselves waiting for a call that each of them kind of hoped wouldn’t come. Long-term, it was better if Victoria won this fight on her own.

The changeling smiled at his employer, noting that the unicorn mare was also wearing most of a pressure suit, save for the helmet, which was probably back on the bridge. If they were called in, it would only be because the enemy was present in near-overwhelming force, after all. That meant that the Zathura would undoubtedly take some hits while going in for a deployment, and there was every likelihood that the DropShip wouldn’t be spaceworthy by the time it was leaving the drop zone.

“Just feeling a little anxious, I guess,” the stallion admitted, turning away from the viewport and arranging himself a little more comfortably on the top of his ‘Steed as he spoke with the unicorn, “feels weird to know that there’s a really important battle going on and not be a part of it.”

Squelch smiled and shrugged, “that’s the mercenary's lot,” she said matter-of-factly, “we fight the battles that our clients tell us to. Personally, I’m not too bothered by it. I get paid whether we fight or not, so I’d just as soon not.

“I figured that the three of you would feel the same way,” she eyed the earth pony curiously.

“Hey, don’t get me wrong; I’m just as happy to not be getting shot up as the next pony,” he assured the sage mare with a grin, “I’m just saying that it feels a little weird is all. We came all this way, and there’s a really big battle going on, and for once I’m not in the middle of it.

“That’s not usually how things work.”

“Well, I encourage you to enjoy this little ‘vacation’ while it lasts, because something tells me that they’re going to need all hooves on deck for the fight in Faust,” her tone was considerably more sober now, and Slipshod could understand why. He may not have known exact numbers regarding the capital system’s defenses, but the estimates that he could reliably give still left a lot to be desired. If anything, he’d done his best to exaggerate those numbers so that they could be overprepared.

At least, he hoped that he’d managed to exaggerate them. Slipshod knew that there was a second fleet of WarShips on standby near the Faust System, but that was it. He’d never been in a position to see the rundown of its composition, and was just sort of assuming that it approximately matched the size of the fleet orbiting Equus.

“Yeah,” he agreed, his own features turning a little more grim as he considered the prospect of dropping into Canterlot and facing down its defensive batteries. The quality of the technology that Chrysalis had managed to cling to while the rest of the Harmony Sphere lost access to it didn’t quite match up to what the Clans had developed perhaps, but it would still be formidable. The changeling queen had spent centuries fortifying her new throne, driven by the paranoia of losing it to outside forces as she had so many times before. This time, she was resolved to hold onto her kingdom.

Digging her out would be...a challenge, to say the least.

“I have to admit,” the stallion said, now eyeing the unicorn with his own inquisitive expression, “I’m a little surprised that you’re willing to go along with all of this,” the mare frowned, raising a confused brow in his direction, so the earth pony added a clarification, “the invasion of Equus, I mean. I know you’re being offered a lot of money and all, but this is going to be the highest-risk job we’ve ever taken. There’s a very real chance we’ll all be killed―and I don’t just mean us ‘Steed pilots. There’re WarShips there that make even the Rockhoof look like a system patrol craft.

“You saw the wreck of that Strongheart we found Twilight in. That was just a glancing blow from a naval gun. If something like that hits the Zathura, vac-suits aren’t going to help anypony,” he pointed out, “is the money really worth it?”

“That money’s all I have to look forward to,” Squelch said, her tone sounding just a little despondent, and her emotions souring, “when this is over, and if Twilight wins and kicks out Chrysalis...all of this,” she waved a hoof at their surroundings, “it all goes away.

“The galaxy she wants to build won’t have a place for mercenaries in it. Eventually,” she acknowledged with a wry smirk, “even she’s not naive enough to think that things’ll change overnight. But I need to keep my sights set on the big picture. Work’s going to dry up as more systems fall in line and flock to the new League that’s going to pop up.

“That means making sure that I―and the rest of the crew―have our retirements secured before that happens. Sure, some of us will always have work, no matter the political climate. Like High Gain and the twins. Technical professions don’t go away just because the fighting stops.

“But mercenaries? We don’t have a future in that world.”

“Me, maybe,” Slipshod acknowledged, “but you’ve got a broad enough skill set that you wouldn’t have to worry much. Company’s a company,” the stallion assured her, “whether it’s hauling BattleSteeds or consumer goods, you could easily make your way in Twilight’s new galaxy.”

Squelch waved away the notion with a snort, “it’s not just about balancing books and finding the right tax loopholes,” she insisted, “I’d never be satisfied with running some mundane company that moves boxes around from planet to planet to try to eek out a margine big enough to survive on. I could have been doing that now, you know?

“This job’s...exciting,” the unicorn said, reaching out and rubbing her hoof over the chassis of the Crystal Cavalier, “I may not have ever learned how to pilot one of these things, but I’ve always appreciated them. Their power, their grace. Nothing beats the sight of these things dropping onto the battlefield and marching on their objective.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to glorify the death and destruction that’s involved,” the mare insisted with a pointed look in the stallion’s direction, “but there’s no denying that the ‘spectacle’ is awesome in its own right. These things change the fates of whole sectors. Being a pony that controls where they go and how they’re used―even if it is just a few of them―that’s...it’s power.”

Slipshod regarded the sage green unicorn as he took in both her words and her radiating emotions. It amused the stallion that he sensed a slight state of arousal coming from the mare as she spoke, “I never thought of you as the ‘power hungry’ sort. I feel like I’m seeing a new side of you.”

His employer looked up at him, her lips still curled in a hungry smile, “if you are, then it’s your own fault for not paying attention,” she chided the changeling.

“I’m just saying that I never thought of you as the type that wanted to exert any sort of broader influence or control over things,” the earth pony said, “you always seemed to be thinking more inwardly―about the company and such.”

Her smile broadened, “I guess being able to read emotions doesn’t mean that you notice everything about a pony,” the mare teased him, her tongue poking out slightly at the stallion, who balked in mild confusion, “what do you think I was doing every time I picked us out a contract? I was shaping a galaxy. Or, at least, one little piece of it,” she amended with a roll of her eyes.

“Every engagement has two sides, and you can bet that each of them was offering a job just about every time. I picked out the side that I wanted to win based on what I thought they’d be able to do for the region.

“Remember the Ferrous Holding’s job?” Slipshod nodded, his expression pulled back in a grimace as he recalled how thoroughly trashed his Wild Bronco had gotten as a result of that fight. It was the last time he’d piloted it, in fact. He wondered if Squelch had ever managed to get around to selling it before they’d been carted off to Clan space, but he didn’t get the chance to ask, “but I bet you don’t remember the parts I didn’t bother to bring up during the mission briefing.

“Like the part where Ferrous was a primary materials contractor for several civilian construction companies in the region, working with local governments to build hospitals, schools, and waste treatment facilities? While Argent was a subsidiary of a defense contractor?

“If Ferrous had lost that mine, it would have spelled the beginning of the end for their company, and Argent would have bought up all of their holdings, funneling the materials away from civil development into making more weapons.

“Suddenly a half dozen worlds have fewer hospitals to treat the injured, and more Scorpion Tanks creating the injured. Except...we changed that. We kept the potential for future escalated violence at bay, and contributed to the welfare of an entire sector. All by picking out a contract,” once more the mare was looking back at the BattleSteed, idly rubbing it with her hoof, “these things changed the fates for billions of beings with one ‘small’ fight.

“Tell me that’s not ‘power’.”

Slipshod’s lips were pursed as he considered what Squelch had just said. He felt suddenly very shallow. Most of his thoughts while ‘on the clock’ very rarely extended much beyond the bounds of winning the next fight, with very little care given to the ‘bigger picture’ or the sorts of ripple effects that the engagement could have on the galaxy at large. To him, they were just the next operation in the furtherance of keeping the company operating in the black and ensuring that everypony’s paychecks cleared at the end of the month. He never really considered the further reaching repercussions of the outcomes of the battles he won.

Apparently Squelch had. She didn’t just use her deductive talents to place her pilots in systems where there was good work to be had, but where that work might also have the potential to benefit others.

Now, perhaps, Slipshod understood a little more of what the mare had been talking about earlier. Maybe, as the director of a massive corporation directing entire fleets of massive freighters, she could still affect lives on a planetary or regional scale by funneling resources where they were needed most, but that would take a lot more logistical power than a single Mustang-class DropShip was capable of. Meanwhile, a single lance of ‘Steeds in the right place, at the right time, could indeed shift entire socio-economic paradigms.

He needed only to look at how their little group had contributed on Capensis to see proof of that.

“That’s why you need the money,” the stallion realized, “startup capital.”

Squelch nodded, “when BattleSteeds do become obsolete, and brute force isn’t how problems get solved anymore, I’m going to need to substitute martial leverage with capital leverage. The trouble is that it’s a lot harder to change the galaxy with money when none of it can be used to apply force,” she flashed a sardonic smile at the ‘Steed pilot, “kind of counter-intuitive sounding, maybe, but that’s the way of things.”

“Couldn’t you just ask Twilight or Flurry Heart for whatever resources you’d need?”

The unicorn let out a derisive little laugh, “what makes you think either of them knows what’s best for the creatures in this galaxy anymore? They’re both five hundred years out of touch, just in their own ways. I can’t be bound to their ideas of what they think is ‘best’.”

“That’s a little big-headed of you to think that you would though, isn’t it?”

“I’m not saying that I’m infallible,” the mare conceded with a shake of her head, “but I like to think that I have a better grasp of where help is needed―and, more importantly, how it’s needed―than ponies who haven’t had to really experience what life is like in the Harmony Sphere these days. I’ve kept my hoof to the pulse of galactic politics for my whole life. I know where the hotspots are, and how to cool them while ruffling as few hackles, feathers, or manes, as possible.

“I can help ponies. And I will,” Squelch stated emphatically, turning a hard gaze on the earth pony, “but, in order to do that without BattleSteeds, I’ll need a lot of resources. Which means that I need to see this fight through to its end and earn that payday,” the mare hesitated for a brief moment before continuing in a slightly more subdued tone, “and I’ll need you there to help me. Obviously, showing up with just the Zathura, and no ‘Steed pilots to drop on the field, wouldn’t count for a lot.

“Feel free to try and renegotiate your contract, now that I’ve laid out just how extensively you have me over a barrel,” she flashed a wry smirk at the stallion.

Slipshod raised up a hoof and started to massage his chin speculatively, “well, there was this moon that I’ve been wanting to buy,” he mused, not even bothering to hide the teasing note in his voice. Though it was difficult to maintain the mock-seriousness expression while Squelch was laughing, “the brochure assures me it’s populated exclusively with single young ponies in my area all tacked-up and looking to meet me…at only a billion C-bits, it sounds like a steal!”

“Just a billion? Wow, that is a bargain!”

The pair shared in the moment of mirth before the changeling issued a more genuine response, “I’m not doing this for money, you know that. My motivations are―apparently―a lot less noble than yours.

“I just want Chrysalis to suffer,” he said with a shrug, finding it a little irritating that he wasn’t feeling quite the same level of glee that he used to when imagining his moment of triumph over his former queen. Maybe that was because, back when it was a mere fantasy, he felt free to revel in how he thought he should feel upon achieving his imagined victory. But, now when that same moment was so tantalizingly close to becoming a reality…

Be careful what one wished for, he supposed. It could never live up to your internalized hype. Mostly because―

“...and after that?”

There it was. That was what had always been missing from his fantasies: the ‘and after that…’ part.

There’d simply been no point in putting any thought into considering what would come next, since it had all been an ‘impossible’ future in the first place. It was the same reason that erotic vids never continued the narative the morning after the main event. What followed wasn’t the point, it had all been about the climax. It had been the same with him. The galaxy could have all burned to ash the second after his victory, for all the stallion cared. He’d have achieved his goal, and so nothing else in the dream mattered.

But it was looking like it wouldn’t be a dream for much longer.

So what did come after? Where did he go? What did he do? Did it even matter to him?

“...I don’t know,” the changeling admitted with a tired sigh, “I didn’t think I’d even get this far.

“I don’t know that it matters either,” he added, shrugging, “unlike you, I don’t have a wide variety of skills that translate well outside of ‘Steed combat,” he smiled mirthlessly at the unicorn, “I’m just a one-trick changeling, I guess. Maybe the Gymkhana Games on Celestis VII will still be a thing when this is all over? I could try my hoof at being a gladiator.”

“You really just want to spend the rest of your life fighting?”

Slipshod paused, regarding the mare more carefully. She’d felt...disappointed? Had that been the wrong answer somehow? The stallion hadn’t really thought that there could be a ‘wrong’ answer when it came to choosing a next stage in life. Well, presumably as long as that ‘next stage’ wasn’t outright piracy or something like that. Competing in the Games was hardly something that was frowned upon by most of the galaxy though. Quite the contrary, being a champion gladiator was considered quite the accomplishment for a ‘Steed pilot. It was admittedly something that likely lay far outside of his reach with his current level of skill, but that just meant that it was something that he could work towards. A way to ‘better’ himself, after a fashion.

How could Squelch not like that answer?

“It’s what I know how to do,” the stallion defended, still feeling out the unicorn to see if he could pin down the source of her disappointment. He didn’t like her feeling that way about him, and not just because of how bitter-tasting it made their surroundings, “I figure I can make a living at it. I mean, I know I’m not hot shit or anything,” he admitted―grudgingly, “I don’t expect to perform like Mire Billetstar right out the gate…”

“No, no...I get it,” the unicorn said, clearing her throat and suddenly finding the Crystal Cavalier a lot more interesting again as she idly ran her hoof along the plating. There was a pause, then, “...you could always learn to do something else,” she pointed out, sounding as though it were almost an off-hoofed thought. She didn’t sound nearly as hopeful as she was feeling deep down though, “go anywhere. Do anything.

“Work with...anypony.”

Ah, there it was. Slipshod was finally able to trace the target for her feelings...right back to himself. It was a pleasant thought, perhaps, but ultimately, “...it won’t ever be like it was, Squelch. It can’t. It’s not safe for you.”

“I’m not asking to be the only pony in your life,” the green unicorn huffed, glaring at the stallion now, “I just…” she paused as she sought how she wanted to phrase her thoughts, all the while suppressing a stubborn blush, “I’d miss you if you weren’t around, is all.”

Slipshod cracked a more heartfelt smile now, “you’d manage,” he assured her, “and I’m just not sure I’d ever be able to offer you any useful skills where you’re going. You can’t just keep me on payroll because you like me,” he laughed at the absurdity of the notion, that would simply be pretty ridiculous from a thrifty business-pony’s perspect, like Squelch’s.

“Who says?” the unicorn snorted, “with the kind of ‘fuck you’ money I’d have, I can keep anypony I want I payroll, for any reason I want.”

“Is that really what you want; a trophy stallion? A pony who just hangs around doing nothing?”

“Of course not,” she said, offended at the notion. Another pause. A tinge of sorrow welling within her, “but I wouldn’t mind having an old friend around. Even if they’re not an employee.”

Hope. Faint, but there. Reluctant. Afraid of being snuffed out by the wrong response. It was some of the most vulnerable that Squelch had ever made herself around him since their divorce. Honestly, Slipshod wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond. His instinct was to cut the cord entirely by taking advantage of the opportunity she was giving him. He could wound her deeply with the right words. Slam the door on the notion of the two of them sharing an emotional connection of any sort ever again, and ensure that the two of them parted ways for good the moment the invasion of Equus was over with.

She’d hate him; but she’d also finally be free of the threat that he represented to her.

“Whatever gave you the impression we were friends?”

“We both know there’re only two kinds of ponies in your life: employees and clients. You don’t do ‘friends’.”

So many ways to hurt that mare.

It was the best thing for her, really. Yet, at the same time...it was proving exceedingly difficult to bring himself to actually say them out loud. The truth was, that he didn’t want to hurt her. She’d taken him in, served as his life preserver―even if she hadn’t known it at the time. In return, he’d caused her a great deal of pain. He’d very nearly husked her, in fact. She knew what he was, and understood the full breadth of what he’d done to her. It had made her rightfully furious with him.

Murderously so, in fact. Or, very nearly, at least…

Yet, here she was. Extending more than just an olive branch. This was a true second chance. An opportunity to wipe the slate clean and see what could be built in place of the tattered shamble that had once been there. It was the same thing that most of the rest of the crew had offered him as well: another chance at being friends.

From Squelch, though, it was far more significant. He’d wounded her far more deeply than any other creature on the ship. Physically, emotionally, mentally...if anycreature in the galaxy was justified in despising him forever, it was undoubtedly Squelch.

And here she was all the same.

“I―”

Both ponies found their attention abruptly drawn to the other side of the ‘Steed Bay, and the echoing sound of something apparently falling as loudly as was physically possible, and bouncing around an absurd number of times. The pair found Xanadu trying his level best―and failing in spectacular fashion―to regain control of his helmet, which he’d apparently dropped when he’d nearly slipped off the top of his Philomena after leaning too far over the edge of it. Slipshod and his employer watched in stunned silence as the striped stallion awkwardly struggled to regain control of the rebellious headgear.

After what was objectively far too much time spent trying to go about so in what looked like a vain attempt to do it in a ‘dignified’ fashion, the zebra appeared to acknowledge that he’d been bested by the helmet and fell upon it with his whole body in an effort to finally get it under control and silenced. He then flashed the others an apologetic smile as he stood back up and spiked the helmet into the open hatch of his cockpit, denying it any future opportunities to embarrass him.

“Sorry! I, uh, slipped. You two can go back to what you were talking about―” Xanadu blanched and quickly backtracked, “if the two of you were even talking, that is! I wouldn’t know, because I wasn’t eavesdropping―” he facehoofed and forced an even wider, more ‘innocent’ looking grin, “have I told you two about how some zebras have weird ways of talking? Well, we do. So don’t read into anything I’m saying right now.

“You two just go back to making up―or whatever you two were doing. I obviously wouldn’t know, because I wasn’t listening. I’m just going to...inspect...something...” the striped pilot’s grin stretched uncomfortably wide as he looked around, found nothing nearby available to focus on except for the same open cockpit hatch next to him, “...inside my cockpit. Where I can’t hear you…” the last was muttered with an air of disappointment as he reluctantly trudged over and slipped inside.

Slipshod and Squelch continued to stare at the open hatch for several more seconds. Long enough, at least, to catch a glimpse of Xanadu’s vertically-styled mane cautiously popping back out. However, the moment the other pilot was out far enough to see that he was still being watched, he immediately withdrew back inside, muttering something that didn’t sound ponish, but was almost certainly an epithet.

“I...should probably be somewhere else too,” Squelch finally broke the silence hanging around them, turning away from the Cavalier and its pilot.

“Squelch,” this was an opportunity, Slipshod realized. He shouldn’t let it slip away like this. It was a chance to make amends―to really mend things between them again. Maybe they couldn’t have a real ‘future’ together in any meaningful sense, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t at least part amicably. So, he was grateful that the unicorn actually stopped and looked back at him. He did balk slightly as he once more felt that swelling of hope from within the mare. It was a short-lived feeling, as she seemed to be trying to tamp it down of her own accord.

It was good that she was tempering her expectations. The earth pony swallowed and tried to begin giving his response once more, “look, I―”

Her datalink beeped at her, cutting off the stallion. She shot it an accusatory glare, but her expression melted away into resignation when she glimpsed the source of the interruption. The mare cast Slipshod a brief, apologetic look before acknowledging the call that she was receiving, “I’m here, High Gain; what’s up?”

“Signal going out from the palace, ma’am. Wide band, general transmission. I think we’re about to find out who won.”

The changeling and unicorn exchanged looks. Squelch was feeling furtive and, for a brief moment, so had Slipshod. However, he was confident that, had things started looking bleak for Victoria, they’d have been informed of her need for help long before defeat had become certain. There was a far greater chance that this was the new archon of the Pony Commonwealth announcing her ascension over her uncle. He nodded to the mare, encouraging her to listen in to the transmission.

“Put it through the ship PA, please,” she instructed the comms tech.

“Yes, ma’am.”

There was a blare of a sharp tone that echoed through the speaker system of the Zathura, immediately drawing all eyes in the direction of the nearest source of the sound. A moment later, a familiar mare’s voice could be heard throughout the DropShip, “―y name is Victoria Blueblood. While many believed me to be dead, I can assure you that is a falsehood. It was, however, necessary to avoid further assassination attempts perpetrated by my uncle.

“For too long, Dominus has abused his position as archon of the Commonwealth. He’s sought only to personal profit, and neglected the citizens he was charged with caring for. I refused to sit idly by and let it happen for a moment longer.

“Ten minutes ago, my forces and I breached the palace and secured the surrender of most of the House Guard. My uncle is in custody, and has acknowledged my victory. A more formal transfer of power will be arranged in the coming days, but I wanted the ponies of the Commonwealth to know that their salvation is close at hoof. Things will be changing, for the better. I promise you, that I won’t fail, and I won’t falter.

“Archon Victoria Blueblood, out.”

The wash of relief that flooded the ship would have been palpable to even non-changelings, Slipshod thought to himself as he felt the tension around him unwinding. Even Squelch was breathing a sigh of relief. Not that the stallion wasn’t also glad to hear that he and his lance wouldn’t need to drop down into a fight. He was. Of course, knowing that the battle to install Victoria as archon was effectively over as far as they were concerned simply meant that now they had to worry about how the invasion of Equus was going to be handled. Arguably a much more stress-inducing contemplation.

“Well, looks like you got all dressed up for nothing,” the sage green unicorn quipped, flashing the earth pony a much easier smile, now that just a bit of the emotional burden taxing her had been lifted away by the news.

“Looks like,” Slipshod agreed, “how about I change into something more comfortable and swing by your quarters later? We can talk a bit more about―”

Squelch’s datalink chirped at her again. This time though, the mare’s expression suggested that she’d anticipated the interruption. Without even looking at it, she accepted the new incoming communication, “Squelch here. I assume Timberjack and Victoria want to talk with Twilight and I?”

“Uh…” High Gain had obviously already had her introduction prepared to deliver, and now was trying to figure out what to say now that most of the reason for her call had already been correctly anticipated, “yes, ma’am. Do you want it forwarded to your link, or―”

“Put it through to my private terminal in my quarters,” the mare informed her comm tech, “let them know I’ll be with them shortly.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Squelch closed the channel and turned a wan smile back towards the ‘Steed pilot, “talking’s going to have to wait until later,” she informed him reluctantly, “some of us are actually going to have to work today, turns out,” the mare said, teasing. She even managed to work up a slightly more mirthful upturn in her lips near the end. Of course, deep down, Slipshod could sense that little mote of dread that was starting to form. The upcoming campaign would be dangerous. They all very well could die.

Slipshod did his best to help by giving her a broad grin in return, “hey, I am all for chatting up a hot BattleSteed pilot...and maybe Victoria too,” the stallion phrased the latter as though it were an afterthought, earning a surprised look from the unicorn, “have you seen Timberjack? I bet that dude can buck like a Big Mac! Imagine what he can thrust like,” he winked at the mare and issued a quick double-click with his tongue.

Despite herself, Squelch chortled into her hoof, “letch,” she chided, jokingly.

“I’m just a stallion with needs like any other,” he defended, feigning a prim indignation at her comment, though he still allowed his face to break out into a broad smile a moment later.

“I often wonder about that,” Squelch said, narrowing her eyes at the earth pony. He raised a confused eyebrow and she added, “about the ‘stallion’ part. You knew a lot about...certain things,” she said, clearing her throat, “are you...a stallion? Like, really?”

For a moment, Slipshod contemplated giving the unicorn a definitive answer to her question. But then he thought that it would be significantly more entertaining to not do that. Instead, he shook his head and informed her, “now, now…” the changeling kept his expression perfectly schooled, leaning in closer to the mare as he affected a very sultry soprano that arguably sounded more feminin than Squelch’s own normal speaking voice, “...a pony’s got to have their secrets…”

The mare’s eyes widened in a brief moment of shock, her cheeks flushing visibly even through the light coat of fur covering them. The changeling could sense the brief flares of uncertainty deep within her as she mentally debated whether he was serious, and how she retroactively felt about their relationship―and her own personal preferences―if he was, “I...should get to that meeting,” she managed to get out brusquely, before turning away and trotting towards the exit of the ‘Steed Bay. She paused at the end of the catwalk, briefly glancing back at Slipshod. He merely grinned and waved his hoof at her.

She smiled, and then left his sight.

For his own part, the earth pony dropped down inside his Cavalier’s cockpit and began to cycle everything down to a completely powered-off state, as it looked like there wasn’t going to be a need for the lance to go out after all. By the time he was done with that last little bit of housekeeping before he could officially sign off for the day, he emerged to find that Xanadu was waiting for him at the end of the gantry, an expectant look on his face.

The golden stallion paused, regarding the striped pilot for several silent seconds before finally asking, “...yes?”

Xanadu let out an exasperated sound, “well?! What’d you say? What’d she say?”

“...about?”

Slipshod, of course, knew perfectly well what the zebra was asking about. However, as he was getting quite a lot of amusement out of the frustration wafting from the other pilot, he was willing to continue to ‘play dumb’ for a bit longer. It might also help to prove a point regarding the concept of ‘private conversations’.

“About the two of you! Are you getting back together? Did she forgive you? Is there going to be a ‘happily ever after’ for the two of you?”

“Wow, you really have no personal boundaries, do you?”

Xanadu frowned, “I’m not allowed to ask how my friend’s are doing?”

Slipshod rolled his eyes and walked past the zebra, making his own way out of the ‘Steed Bay as he headed for his quarters to get changed into something more comfortable. He had another session booked with Rigger Brush later. She wanted to draw an Abyssinian this time, “we’re fine,” he informed the other stallion.

“I heard the two of you used to be better than ‘fine’,” he replied, falling into step beside the earth pony, “you guys were a ‘power couple’ according to every member of the crew I’ve talked to who was on the ship during that time.”

A frown creased the changeling’s lips as he thought back on those bittersweet days. He’d felt content, and positively vibrant, feeding off of Squelch’s incredible passion and dedication for her work. The cost, however, had turned out to be quite high, as it had very nearly ‘crippled’ the mare; and risked ruining the Coursers as a result, “we’re not good for each other as a couple,” he replied evenly. Then he thought back on what he’d said, sighed, and rephrased, “I’m not good for her.”

“Oh,” the zebra said, his features falling slightly as he caught the implication. Though it apparently hadn’t dismayed his efforts entirely, “but you don’t have to take love from her, right? You said as long as you have enough creatures in your life who care about you, it won’t hurt any of them. Most of the crew seems to have adapted,” he pointed out, “you and Squelch could―”

“Squelch doesn’t need me in her life,” Slipshod snapped, casting a glare over his shoulder at the other pilot.

Xanadu recoiled slightly, hurt by the rebuke, but still persisting, “but she obviously still wants you in it.”

“Well maybe I don’t want to be in hers!” the earth pony snarled back. It wasn’t only the zebra who was surprised by that reaction either. Slipshod hadn’t even really been thinking when he’d said it. It had just sort of...come out. Yet, at the same time, he didn’t feel like there’d been any deep ‘truth’ to that sentiment. Rather, it was more likely one of his old instincts rising momentarily to the surface:

Lying to protect himself.

Apparently, one didn’t completely change everything about themselves, even the bad habits, quite so quickly. Not even a changeling; the quintessential ‘experts’ at changing.

“You don’t mean that,” Xanadu charged. Slipshod wondered for a moment if changelings really had a monopoly on sensing the feelings of others.

Taking a moment to recompose himself, the stallion opted not to deny the obvious, “no...no, I don’t. But,” he stressed, jabbing a hoof pointedly at the other equine, “that doesn’t mean that I should be. The truth is...I don’t know,” he sighed, shaking his head, “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go or be when this is all over.

“I never thought that far ahead.”

“So then why not be with her?”

“And do what? Just...exist around her?” the earth pony snorted, “that’s not living; that’s being furniture! What am I supposed to do? How do I contribute?”

“Well, how would you like to contribute?”

The question sounded so simple, and was so easy to ask. Answering it though, for Slipshod, was effectively impossible, because, “I. Don’t. Know!” he all but screamed through clenched teeth in exasperation, “I’ve never had to think about ‘after’ being a mercenary,” Slipshod detested that how he sounded right now could very well be arguably described as ‘whining’, but he was simply too frustrated about his lack of ability to answer such a simple question that he couldn’t quite control his tone effectively, “I never thought I’d live long enough for it to matter!”

Xanadu looked empathetically at the changeling, “aww, that’s so sad…”

His sincerity was somehow more aggravating, “thank you,” was Slipshod’s flat response. He turned around to resume heading for his quarters, “look can we talk about this later?” Or never. Preferably never, the stallion thought privately, “I’m meeting up with Rigger tonight and need to study some reference material for our session.”

“Yeah. Sure. No problem,” the changeling could feel that there was still something of a problem, but was grateful that the zebra wasn’t pressing the issue any further for the moment, or following him any further, “we’ll talk later. When you want to.”

Which wasn’t to say that it meant Slipshod was freed from having his thoughts plagued by those questions any further. If anything, the silence only allowed them to echo around more loudly in his head. Nor did their persistence prove at all helpful in coming up with answers to them. He was a ‘Steed pilot. It was what he’d been trained to do in the Sphere. His other skills related to surviving as a changeling among non-changelings while remaining hidden. Not exactly a marketable skill set once the galaxy knew changelings were a thing.

He’d offer to work for the new League government as a spy, but something told him that such things weren’t really going to be a pursuit of the kind of ‘open’ and ‘benevolent’ government that Twilight would want to build. Nor did he believe that Flurry Heart would want to work with changelings.

Slipshod wasn’t even all that certain that changelings, as a species, would have a place in the Harmony Sphere of the future. Twilight wasn’t the princess anymore. Flurry Heart would be the one making the calls; and she despised his kind. Solving the ‘changeling problem’ with genocide didn’t strike him as something that was completely outside the realm of possibility.

That would solve his dilemma, the changeling acknowledged sardonically.

But, assuming for a moment, that there wasn’t a mass-cleansing of his kind from the galaxy, that didn’t mean that Slipshod had a firm grasp on what he would even want to do with his life, if given a choice. He’d only ever just wanted to survive. That had been enough. Had been. It wouldn’t always be though, he knew. Not anymore. He knew he needed purpose. He just...didn’t know what that would be.

Learning tumbling might be a good start.

That was the thought that went through the earth pony’s head as he managed to lose his footing while descending a flight of stairs. Obviously he’d been a little too distracted by his wool-gathering to even manage properly placing one hoof in front of the other. That sure boded well for his hypothetical ability to learn to do something productive with his life. He was perhaps lucky to even still have a ‘rest of his life’ after a fall like that, the stallion reasoned once he’d come to a stop at the bottom and recognized that he was, in fact, not―quite―dead.

An exaggeration, to be sure. He wasn’t mangled or crippled, or anything like that. That much was immediately obvious to him. Though he did feel a good deal of pain in his right foreleg―the one which had betrayed him on the fateful step. He didn’t think it was broken, but it certainly hurt bad enough that he had to wonder if it might be.

“You ponies do realize that I don’t mind having an empty clinic, right?” a stallion’s voice that was equal parts resigned and patronizing said, sounding as though it were very nearly right on top of him. Slipshod looked up to see that Doc Dee was, indeed, standing only a foot away, looking down at the prostrate ‘Steed pilot, “I promise you that I’m not bored.”

“S’up, Doc?” Slipshod groaned.

“Oh, good; you managed not to kill yourself,” the ivory unicorn’s features softened slightly as his eyes surveyed the other stallion, “did you bruise anything other than your pride?”

“Might’ve broke my leg,” the earth pony seethed, cradling the affected limb with his other hoof.

“Ah! I see you’ve become a medical professional since we last spoke. I’ll leave you to it then! Obviously you don’t need my help,” the physician smirked down at the grimacing pilot, “why do you all keep insisting on diagnosing yourselves? Do I plan BattleSteed missions?”

Slipshod glared at the other stallion, “Doc…”

The unicorn rolled his eyes and motioned for the fallen changeling to present the injured limb, “let me see it,” Slipshod very carefully ceased coveting the leg, which was quickly―though very gently―taken up in the ship’s doctor’s telekinesis. Magic very gingerly poked, prodded, and manipulated the lumb and joints. As careful as the handling was, Slipshod did still wince a few times with pain as the injury was aggravated. Finally, Doc Dee released the limb back into the pilot’s care and made his diagnosis, “well, it’s not broken,” he proclaimed, much to Slipshod’s relief, “but it’s sprained pretty badly.

“We’ll get you to your room―since it’s closer than Medical―and I’ll set you up with a brace and some painkillers. You’ll be fine in a week. Sound good?”

“You’re the expert, Doc.”

“I certainly am. Need any help standing up?” The changeling nodded, and the doctor lent his magic to helping him back onto his three uninjured hooves. From there, the pair limped slowly back to his cabin and helped him into his bed, “you should be good to go from here,” the unicorn said. Then, after a moment’s thought, he fished a small bottle out of his lab coat pocket and passed it to the ‘Steed pilot, “I take these for my arthritis, but they should take the edge off for you too until I can get you a bottle of your own. It’s just Ibuprofen. One tablet, three times a day.”

Slipshod wasted no time in cracking open the bottle and popping one of the oversized pills and swallowing it down. He frowned at the bitter taste of the tablet, and the doctor floated him over a bottle of water from nearby, “thanks, Doc.”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Dee assured the earth pony as he headed for the door, “try not to cripple yourself any further in the meantime, okay?”

“No promises, Doc!” Slipshod flashed the white unicorn a mischievous grin, already sensing the edge being taken off of the pain in his leg. He eyed the bottle with mild intrigue, not recalling the last time he’d felt mere Ibuprofen working quite that fast, or that well, “does this have codeine in it?” the unicorn winked at him from the doorway and then disappeared, “you’re a good pony, Doc; I don’t care what Squelch says about you!”

The door closed without further comment from the physician. Slipshod signed and leaned back on his cot, feeling quite warm and fuzzy inside. Figures that the doctor would keep the best medications for himself, the changeling thought to himself with a small chuckle. He hadn’t even gotten anything this good after getting roughed up on the Ferrous mission. He wondered what had made the unicorn...feel so generous...this time...around…

…

His door didn’t chime this time.

At least, if it did chime, Slipshod hadn’t heard it. He honestly couldn’t recall hearing much of anything prior to being awoken by a forceful telekinetic throw from his bed up against the far wall of his cabin. He’d barely had time to register that he was no longer in his cot before his body was heaved upwards by that same, powerful, magical field, sending him slamming into the ceiling. The light fixture he collided with cracked and dimmed, darkening the room slightly.

The levitation field finally released him at this point, leaving the stunned changeling to fall to the floor. He’d barely come to a stop before two ponies piled on top of him, pining his limbs together as hobblers were snapped to his fetlocks. Slipshod’s eyes finally managed to focus long enough in the now much more dimly lit cabin to identify Sabot and Breech Block as the two ponies who were restraining him.

“Woah! What the fuck, guys?! What’s going―”

Sabot delivered a sharp cross against the changeling’s jaw, sending his head bouncing soundly off the floor of his cabin and silencing him, “shut up, traitor!” the unicorn mare screamed. Apparently not entirely satisfied with striking him only the one time, her hoof cuffed him again, making his ears ring, “get this piece of shit up, Breech,” she instructed her partner as she finally climbed off of the ‘Steed pilot, “I’d toss you out the airlock for what you did; but I know Squelch’ll want to gut you herself,” the security mare, apparently unable to resist getting in another hit, belted the earth pony a third time, this time in the gut, “...if she ever wakes up.”

That caught Slipshod’s attention. He fought through the pain and the fog that was still clouding his mind―most of it from the beating that he’d just taken, but there were still some lingering effects from the medication he’d taken as well, he sensed, “what do you mean? What happened to Squelch?” She was hurt? By who? There was even the possibility that she was hurt bad enough that she might not regain consciousness? What had happened? How long had he been asleep?

The answer he received was another kick. This one from Breech Block, “don’t play dumb, you fuck,” he seethed, his roiling rage an equal match for Sabot’s, “Timberjack and Victoria both saw what you did while they were on comms with Squelch! You were caught red-hoofed!”

The security stallion looked over at his partner, “let’s just eject this filth. What if he breaks out while we’re waiting for Squelch to wake up?”

“I didn’t do anything to her!” Slipshod protested, “I’ve been here since we stood down from alert status an hour ago!”

“You lying bastard!” Sabot snapped, “you. Were. Seen! Victoria commed the bridge and told High Gain that you’d just assaulted Squelch!” She then looked at the other stallion, “fuck it. We’re spacing him. I don’t care if we get yelled at or whatever. I don’t want this thing on the ship anymore.”

Slipshod’s initial confusion over hearing the outright impossible notion that he’d been ‘seen’ hurting his ex-wife was quickly overridden by visceral fear as he sensed the iron-clad dedication within both security ponies to make good on his execution, “no, wait! I didn―”

Breech Block turned and bucked him upside the head. That was his last clear memory before feeling himself being dragged along the deck towards the airlock. Panic began to set in again. He fought to keep it in check. Yelling out or struggling too much might get him bucked unconscious again. If that happened, the next time he came to could very well be while suffocating to death in the vacuum of space.

This was crazy. It made no sense! How could he possibly have been ‘seen’ by Timberjack and Victoria doing something that he knew he couldn’t have done! He’d passed out in his quarters! The first thought that crossed his mind was that he was being set up by the new archon of the Commonwealth and the commander of Timberwolf’s Dragoons. Of course, that still required somepony on the inside conspiring with them to hurt Squelch, and he couldn’t think of any member of the crew who’d do that. Let alone why those two would want him out of the way.

There was simply no obvious motivation that he could see! They couldn’t be lying. Not knowingly at any rate.

Had they been mistaken then? Had they seen another pony that they only thought was him? The changeling quickly ran through a mental list of every other pony on the ship and what they looked like. There were ponies with his coloration, but none of them were earth pony stallions. It was pretty unlikely. Besides, he was doubtful that Sabot and Breech Block would be doing all of this on just anypony’s say-so. They’d have reviewed the call footage and judged for themselves who had attacked Squelch.

They either believed it was him too, based on the recording; or they were both part of some weird conspiracy. The former was the ‘simpler’ explanation, but the latter was the only one that it could have been, given that Slipshod knew he hadn’t done it!

Nopony on the ship looked enough like him to be mistaken for the ‘Steed pilot. So, unless there was a second changeling onboard―

The stallion blanched.

There were eighty-six members of the crew.

He’d had a great deal of other concerns that had come to occupy his attention in the aftermath of the fight to protect the zebra city on Capensis. He certainly hadn’t been given much of an opportunity to dwell on the implications while being delicately carved up by that psychopathic griffin on the Clan DropShi. After that, it had just felt like so much more was going on. He’d pushed that brief moment of confusion during his call with Squelch prior to Flechette’s death to the back of his mind. It had felt unimportant with everything else going on. A negligible miscount on a new draft of a recently updated roster. Hardly a particularly surprising thing to have happen. Especially in the midst of turning the DropShip into a makeshift field hospital. He’d been perfectly willing to ascribe the slip-up to nothing more than a miscount conducted by an overworked and exhausted ship’s doctor.

But now, he wasn’t so sure.

He and Twilight had been so certain that another changeling must have been onboard the Galloway/Zathura. It was the simplest and most obvious answer as to how the lance of changeling BattleSteeds had been able to ambush them on what should have otherwise been a secret mission. He’d conducted his own low-profile search and turned up no sign; but he’d have been the first to acknowledge that his efforts had been anything but genuinely thorough. He’d checked for ‘the obvious suspects’ as best as he knew how without tipping off any potential changeling spies. Which wasn’t the same thing as saying that he was positive that no other member of the crew was a shapeshift like himself.

Then along had come Cinder’s teams, doing a much more overt and thorough screening of the crew. If there was a second changeling on the DropShip, her search would certainly have succeeded where his had come up short. But, in the end, he’d been the only shape-shifter that they’d turned up.

However, they hadn’t actually screened every member of the crew. Not really.

Cinder’s teams had checked off eighty-five members from the Galloway’s roster. But there should have been eighty-six on it as of that afternoon. At least, according to his conversation with Squelch, that was the number on the roster that she’d given to Doc Dee to pass on to the screening teams. That hadn’t been the number that Slipshod had seen written on it though. It had been changed. And there was only one individual who would―or even could―have done that.

The other changeling on the ship.

And he had a pretty clear idea of who it was now.

As though summoned by his thoughts, Slipshod caught a glimpse of a familiar unicorn stallion in a lab coat standing in one of the connecting corridors. His expression―smug self-satisfaction―was all the confirmation that the ‘Steed pilot needed. Doc Dee was the other changeling on the ship. It made a certain amount of sense, now that he thought about it. After all, who wasn’t happy to have their doctor take care of them? The gratitude of the crew would have been more than sufficient to sustain the physician. Nor would he have been forced to go out and actively cultivate relationships the way that Slipshod did. All of Dee’s meals were all too happy to deliver themselves right to his office.

Now Dee was here, watching the results of his latest machinations, as Slipshod was hauled off to be executed. The earth pony seethed, his blood boiling at the thought that the real traitor in their midsts was going to get away with having sold them out to Chrysalis. Get away with framing him for a crime he hadn’t committed.

Get away with hurting Squelch.

Not that he thought for a moment the two security ponies who were about to vent him into space were going to believe him if he were to call out and identify the doctor that everypony else on the ship respected so much as being the actual assailant. His plees would fall on deaf ears. More likely they’d fall on more bucks to his head as well. So he didn’t bother saying anything. Besides, Slipshod wasn’t feeling like talking right now anyway.

This was a time for action.

Both of his would-be executioners yelled out in surprise as their prisoner suddenly disappeared in a wave of roiling emerald fire, leaving behind a pair of empty hoof-cuffs that clattered to the deck plating. A moment later, they realized that the changeling hadn’t actually vanished. He’d simply shrunk. They gawked in shock at the diminutive little breezy fluttering between them, apparently having failed to grasp up to that point that changelings could, well...change. Even if they had been keeping that fact at the forefront of their thoughts, it was possible that they hadn’t quite realized how varied the shapes were that he could assume.

After all, only Rigger had ever seen him in a form that wasn’t even vaguely equine in shape or size.

He didn’t remain a breezy for long though, having needed to become one simply to escape his bonds. No he was free, and of a single-minded purpose: expose and punish the true traitor who’d hurt Squelch.

Another flash of green fire illuminated the hallway. Both of the security ponies recovered from their surprise now, and began chasing after the golden earth pony who was running full tilt at the physician. Dee looked momentarily shocked as the pony that he’d come to watch die slipped his bonds, but he recovered quickly. It wasn’t like he didn’t know exactly how versatile changeling transformations could be.

They were still keen to play their role though, and so the physician adopted a shocked and terrified expression, turning to run away from his assailant. A mad dash through the corridors ensued, as all four ponies sprinted down the ship’s restrictive causeways, narrowly avoiding collisions with a few unsuspecting members of the crew as they went. Other members of the mercenary outfit’s security team made appearances too, likely summoned by Sabot and Breech Block to help apprehend their errant prisoner.

Those that Slipshod couldn’t easily dodge around as a full-grown earth pony, he slipped past while in the form of a ferret or sparrow, much to their shock and consternation. Eventually, the ‘Steed pilot was able to catch up to Dee and tackle the ivory unicorn to the ground, pinning him.

“Help!” the terrified doctor yelled out, cowering beneath the earth pony and throwing his hooves protectively over his face, “he’s trying to kill me!”

The words sounded exactly right for a stallion trying to express exactly how utterly afraid they were. Yet, Slipshod couldn’t sense a single more of fear from the stallion that he’d accosted. Terror should have been radiating off of the physician like heat through an open oven. The fact that it wasn’t was all the confirmation that he needed.

It wouldn’t be enough for the squad of security ponies who were only seconds away from rescuing their ‘comrade’ though. Slipshod was going to need to show them something that would be perceivable by non-empaths. He needed to show them what Dee really was.

The earth pony stallion’s lips curled back in a snarl as he stamped a hoof squarely in the middle of the doctor’s chest, “not yet, I’m not. Game’s over, ‘doctor’.”

A massive green fireball of changeling magic engulfed the corridor. When it dissipated a second later, all that could be heard was the sound of a couple dozen galloping hooves all skittering to a stop. A half dozen security ponies all looked on in confusion as they saw the earth pony that they’d been chasing after now in his changeling form...standing over a second changeling.

Twilight wasn’t the only pony who knew how to unravel changeling disguises. Frankly, it was a rather simple matter for a changeling to do so to others of their kind. A ‘hard reset’ of sorts could be employed to dispense with a compromised disguise. It was a very standard changeling spell. With some effort, its effects could be applied to anything that the changeling was touching, in much the same way that a changeling could include any clothing or barding that they were wearing into a transformation.

It would, of course, be a simple matter for Doc Dee―or whatever their real name was―to change back into his disguise. Which Slipshod would then just undo again. The two of them could play at that game for hours. But there would be little point. The revelation had been made. Nothing that Dee could say or do would be enough to save him from further scrutiny by the rest of the crew; or by Twilight, who would easily know Dee for who and what he truly was.

The charade was over with. The smart move was to surrender. Slipshod would―and had―done just that when he’d been found out. Now it was Dee’s turn. He’d be imprisoned, questioned, and held indefinitely. Not the worst fate. A better one than he deserved, as for as Slipshod was concerned.

All he had to do was stand down.

“...traitor,” the newly exposed changeling whispered to Slipshod, sneering with his chitinous madable, “you betrayed our queen!”

“She was no queen to me,” Slipshod shot back, “she left me to die.”

“It is our duty to serve her! Even if death is the service,” Dee insisted defiantly. Then the other changeling did something that surprised Slipshod: he smiled, “allow me to demonstrate…”

A green flash, and then a pair of massive canine paws latched onto Slisphod’s shoulders. A second later, the ‘Steed pilot found himself sailing down the corridor in the direction of the stunned security team, bowling a few of them over when he collided. By the time he was back on his hooves, he was only able to catch sight of a diamond dog’s tail vanishing around a turn down the corridor in the direction of the DropShip’s ‘Steed Bay.

Why the exposed spy was going in the direction, Slipshod didn’t know. It wasn’t like it mattered where on the ship Dee went. Ponies knew he was a changeling. The Zathura would be locked down, and Twilight would use her magic to screen the crew and reveal him in whatever disguise he chose to assume. He was trapped, with no means of escaping. Running was pointless.

That ‘service in death’ bit had him feeling a little concerned though. Perhaps Dee intended to take his own life in order to deprive them of a possible intelligence source? If so, Twilight and Cinder would likely appreciate the physician not being given the opportunity to do so.

Slipshod shifted into a griffon and flew after them.

The arms room wasn’t along the path that the doctor was taking, so he wasn’t going to shoot himself. The airlock was in the opposite direction. For a moment, Slipshod thought that Dee might be heading for his clinic and the stockpile of drugs that could doubtlessly be used in lethal fashion by a pony with his knowledge; but then the diamond dog darted down a hall that took him towards the rear of the ship past the ‘Steed Bay. This puzzled Slipshod, as there wasn’t really much down that way other than their BattleSteeds and the ship’s―

“The reactor!” he gasped in horrified realization, “he’s going to blow the reactor!”

Dee wasn’t out to kill himself in service to Chrysalis; he was going to remove one of her biggest threats: Twilight Sparkle.

Slipshod slapped his talons across his left wrist, intending to put out a shipwide alert. However, much to his frustration, he found that he was no longer wearing his datalink. He couldn’t remember taking it off before passing out in his cabin, so it must have been stripped from him by Sabot and Breech Block after they’d knocked him out.

He couldn’t contact the engineering teams to warn them to seal off the reactor compartment. The rest of the ship’s security teams had doubtlessly been alerted to the presence of a second changeling by now, but without knowing exactly where he was headed to, they’d be attempting to perform a general search and lockdown. Dee wouldn’t have any trouble taking out one or two guards. Especially if those guards had to spend those first couple seconds of the encounter trying to understand where a diamond dog―or whatever form Dee chose to adopt for the encounter―was coming at them.

He could even choose to look like another security pony and slip by them entirely uncontested. The Zathura didn’t have a Masquerade Protocol the way that Cinder’s DropShip did, in order to specifically deal with the possibility of a rogue changeling roaming around. The crew had been trained on how to deal with or respond to something like this. They were all but helpless against a determined changeling.

Which meant that fell on him to stop Dee from killing them all.

The narrow twists and turns of the compact Mustang-class DropShip’s corridors impeded Slipshod’s ability to take full advantage of his ability to fly, but he still managed to gain some ground on the feeling physician. Fortunately, the design of the ship meant that the only way to reach the ship’s reactor was by going through its wide open ‘Steed Bay. This was where Slipshod was able to make the best use of his griffon form, pumping his wings and bridging the gap between himself and diamond dog in just a few seconds.

“Gotcha―woah, shit!”

He only just managed to avoid being swatted aside by the massive, clawed, swipe of a maulwurf as he averted his charge and backflipped out of the way. As he came out of the tumble, he transformed, emerging out the other side of the gout of magical fire as a rocky-hided cragadile. The catwalk spanning the ‘Steed Bay loudly protested his landings, as the massive weight of his form combined with that of Dee’s own atop the walkway that was designed to facilitate the travel of much smaller―and much lighter―ponies. It still held though. For the moment.

The maulwurf swiped again, its meter-long claws racking the backside of the stone-skinned reptile. Slipshod roared, more in anger than in pain, and lunged for the other beast, snapping at it with his jaws. He managed to grab a chunk of the creature’s thick hide, but he wasn’t quite able to pierce it. A pair of meaty arms wrapped around Slipshod’s barrel and tried to lift him off the catwalk in an effort to throw him away. Instead, the cragadile rolled sharply to the side.

The suddenness of the maneuver was enough to tip the other other changeling off balance and send them listing precariously over the railing. It seemed that the catwalk wasn’t going to wait around to see if the pair of massive creatures battling upon it would be able to recover or not, however. With a screeching cry of rending metal, bolts and welds gave way, sending the two writhing monsters, and most of the ‘Steed Bay’s suspended walkways, falling to the floor.

Both changelings released one another as they enveloped themselves in emerald flames. The newly apparated bugbear and manticore flew around one another. Scorpion tail clashed with barbed stinger, bear hands grappling with lion paws. Roars echoed throughout the cavernous repair bay. Beneath the flying melee, technicians who had previously been merely enthralled by the fighting above them now dashed for cover to escape both the falling debris, and thrashing beasts.

The bugbear cried out in pain as their opponent’s stinger managed to get in a slash across the flying ursine’s gut. A flash of fire later, a furious roc was lashing out with its talons, grasping hold of the offending barbed tail and ripping it messily away from the manticore’s body. The leonid unleashed and blood-curdling scream before transforming into a hydra. A sextet of very toothy heads snapped at the large avian.

The otherwise rather spacious DropShip ‘Steed bay was feeling quite a bit more cramped as two monsters every meter as tall as the mechanical equines continued their brawl. Metal was mangled, and machinery crushed as multi-ton beasts stomped and collided with their surroundings. Alarms were sounding now. Specifically those which would alert the crew in the Bay to an imminent depressurization. Slipshod was fairly confident that the hull hadn’t been punctured―yet―by the fighting, but it was certainly a prudent precaution, given the nature of the battle taking place in a part of the ship where the hull was essentially meant to come apart in very specific places. One good throw against the door had the potential to cause a breach.

In an effort to avoid the snapping heads, the roc vanished and was replaced by a much more agile phoenix, which sought to use its smaller size to nimbly avoid the slower and clunkier hydra heads. All the while, blasts of fire from the fiery bird’s beak seared portions of its flesh. Frustrated with its lack of success, the six-headed behemoth chose to shrink itself down as well, into a fireproof dragon. The pair chased each other around, trading flames with one another.

The dragon was eventually forced to back off slightly as its target transformed into a stone-skinned gargoyle. The pair grappled and tousled in the air, before flying got too cumbersome for either, and they both came crashing to the bay floor. An enraged centaur emerged from the fray, bucking wildly as it sent a stunned minotaur sailing into the foreleg of the nearby inert Crystal Cavalier.

The bovine clambered clumsily back up onto its hooves, just in time to catch the headlong charge from the centaur. Both horns and heads locked as the two collided. For several seconds, it looked like the pair were on even footing, neither giving ground. However, the minotaur eventually began to lose traction―and ground―as their mere pair of cloven hooves found themselves unable to gain enough traction on the deck plating to counter the power behind the half-horse’s own quartet. He was soon pinned back up against the heavy BattleSteed, unable to overpower the centaur.

Then, in a flash of flame, the minotaur was gone. With a shocked yell, the centaur lurched forward and bounced their head off the armored limb of the Cavalier with a resounding CLANG! They stumbled, momentarily disoriented, but recovered quickly and snarled, looking around for their opponent. Suddenly, they cried out in intense pain, rearing back, their arms clutching at their chest and belly. Blood flowed from the dozens of quills that had impaled themselves into the centaur’s flesh. A pukwudgie scampered out of the way in order to avoid being trampled by the other’s hooves.

As the chaotic battle raged, the technicians fleeing the ‘Steed Bay were replaced by member’s the of the ship’s security and recovery teams. The better part of forty armed and armored ponies took up firing positions to either side of the melee, rifles gripped by hooves or floating nearby in telekinetic fields.

One unicorn mare glanced hesitantly between the brawling gargoyle and nirik and the blood-red pegasus stallion standing beside her, “do...we open fire?”

Blood Chit’s jaw was set in a grim line as he watched the spectacle unfolding in front of him, and shook his head, “one of those is Slipshod,” he reminded her.

“Didn’t he attack Squelch?”

The leader of the company’s recovery teams, and the current acting chief of the vessel’s security detachment, looked at the unicorn, “if that’s really true; then who’s the other changeling?” the mare didn’t have an answer, “I’m not so sure it was really Slipshod that assaulted her.”

“How are we supposed to tell who’s who?”

To that, Blood Chit didn’t have an answer. Even if the changelings reverted to whatever their pony forms were at some point, how could they trust that the Slipshod they would be looking at was the ‘original’ Slipshod? The pegasus felt the next best thing to useless right now. How were they supposed to stop a fight when, at any moment, the combatants could transform into something almost as massive as a BattleSteed? Even now, he was watching an ursa wrestle with a sphynx. He was doubtful that their auto-rifles would be able to do much to monsters the size of light BattleSteeds.

He looked over to tell the rest of the security ponies nearby to simply hold their fire until they could figure out a method of differentiating the changelings from one another. Just as he looked away from the fight, the deck beneath his hooves trembled. A moment later, a cry went out, “look out!”

The crimson pegasus turned in time to see an ammo jack flying through the air towards their position. Designed to be able to lift several tonnes of explosive shells or missiles into the internal magazines of BattleSteeds, the utility vehicle-sized piece of industrial equipment would easily crush any pony that it hit, and it was currently hurtling towards several of them.

Blood Chit wasted no time. He bucked the unicorn mare next to him in the ribs, kicking her aside. Then he bolted forward and used his forehooves to shoving another stunned stallion out of harm’s way. He spun, locking his focus onto a third member of his team. A mighty clap of his wings sent a targeted burst of wind slamming into the other pegasus mare, blowing her into a tumbling sprawl to the edge of the bay, and relative safety.

A shadow fell over the crimson stallion as the ‘Steed Bay’s lights were blotted out by the lift falling towards him. Blood Chit had time enough only to recognize that he’d used up his chance to save himself while ensuring that everypony else was safe. He hadn’t even had to think about it, really. After all, as a part of a ‘Steed pilot recovery team, getting ponies out of harm’s way was kind of his ‘thing’. And he was very good at what he did.

It did surprise him that the thunderous sound of crumpling machinery that he heard a heartbeat later had not, in fact, been the result of the ammo jack crushing him to death. Though the lifting equipment had been involved. The pegasus stallion looked up with wide, shocked, eyes at the massive slingtail standing over him, panting. The large tri-horned creature looked from where the jack lay in a crumpled heap, deflected in the nick of time by a swing from its meaty tail, and locked its eyes on Blood Chit. It smirked at the stallion.

The recovery team leader let out a short bark of relieved laughter, feeling the tension leaving his shoulders as he realized his life had been saved; and recognizing who must have saved it, “much appreciated, Slip.”

The slingtail’s lips pulled up further into a broad smile. Then, suddenly, it gasped. It’s eyes widened in shock. Blood Chit’s own face scrunched in confusion as he followed the slingtail’s gaze towards its belly. It was there that he noticed the strange boney barb that was protruding from the softer flesh of its stomach, blood dripping to the deck. Just as suddenly as it had appeared, the bard retracted, causing the large gray beast to jerk and wince.

Upon its back, a large wyvern waving a tail tipped by a blood-soaked stinger behind it, issued a victorious roar. Fury and indignation overrode Blood Chit’s shock. The pegasus took to the air and unslung his rifle in one smooth motion. His hind legs coiled forward and the butt of the weapon tucked snug into his shoulder. Achieving a stabilized aerial firing position, the stallion depressed the trigger. A torrent of hypersonic slugs sprayed against the wyvern’s thick hide. The creature snarled, more in annoyance than pain, as the anti-personnel caliber rounds didn’t seem to be up to the task of piercing the hide of a creature that was close kin to a dragon.

The wyvern leaped from the back of the slumped over slingtail and flung itself at the pegasus. Blood Chit balked, but continued to fire as his wings flapped desperately to pull him back from the monster’s assault. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to evade it though. A few other ponies were finally adding their own shots to his, but their rounds were just as ineffective. None had thought to break out the heavier ordinance for what had gone out as a shipwide alert to apprehend a fugitive ‘pony’. Perhaps a few were heading to the arms rooms to withdraw an SRM launcher or two, now that they understood just how unrestrained a changeling’s ability to transform truly was. However, that help would come too late to save him.

The pegasus mentally cringed at the thought that Slipshod had likely just gotten himself killed saving his life, just for him to end up throwing it away less than a minute later in an act of―ultimately futile―revenge. Hardly a thoughtful way to return the favor; but there was no help for it now. He was committed.

A thunderous cacophony of sound buffeted the stallion’s ears, sending them ringing into a state of temporary deafness. In that same moment, the wyvern was ripped from the air by a stream of brilliant orange tracer fire. At first, Blood Chit assumed that some enterprising security pony had arrived with a machinegun from the arms room, but then he realized that the slugs were a good deal larger and louder than anything they had that was intended to be wielded by ponies in the field.

He traced the path of the gunfire back to its source, and that was when he was surprised to find that somepony had been a lot more enterprising than he would have ever thought. Or, rather, somezebra had been. While his auto-rifle wasn’t powerful enough to pierce wyvern hide―and, in fact, he had his doubts about the ability of their light machine guns to do so either―the twenty-millimeter diameter slugs employed by the Phelomina’s shoulder-mounted ballistic weapons could. Designed to be capable of drilling their way through the armor of lighter combat vehicles, and shred the internal systems of BattleSteeds, the automatic weapons had little trouble with an organic target.

The wyvern screamed and wailed over the din of the gunfire, but only briefly. Its body was pummeled limply to the deck by the tracers, which continued to brutalize the corpse for several seconds after it had ceased to move. Either for prudence sake, or out of a sense of anger and vengeance, Blood Chit wasn’t prepared to say of the striped ‘Steed pilot. Either way, the pegasus approved.

“Medic!” he screamed once the Philomena had ceased firing, though he could barely hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears. He hoped that everypony else wasn’t nearly as deafened as he had been, “get a medic here! Somepony call Doc Dee!”

He dove for the slingtail’s prone figure, his eyes glued to the wounds on its back and belly. Each was about the length of his own leg. He was at a loss for how he was even supposed to staunch the bleeding from injuries that large, on a creature that was a dozen times his size! They certainly weren’t getting anything that big into the infirmary…

“Hold on, Slip; we’ll figure something out,” he assured the changeling, his mind still grappling with where he was even supposed to begin…

The slingtail groaned, coughed, and then grunted. Its body erupted into green flames, startling the feathered stallion. A second later, he was looking down at the―much more manageable-sized―body of a changeling laying in a pool of red blood that was slowing mixing with green ichor. Blood Chit alit on the deck beside his friend, but again found himself at a loss as his efforts to control the bleeding saw his hooves sliding almost uselessly over the changeling’s blood-slicked carapice. How was he supposed to apply pressure to a wound on a semi-rigid shell?!

“Medic!” he screamed again, much more urgently this time. He had a basic knowledge of first aid procedures, but those had been focused more towards treating ponies and the other common races inhabiting the Harmony Sphere. Did changelings even have arteries that he could apply pressure to to stem the flow of blood? If so, he certainly had no concept of where they were located.

He wasn’t even sure that either of the ship’s duty medics would realistically be able to do any more than he was now. It wasn’t like they had an intimate knowledge of changeling physiology. For that matter, Blood Chit had to wonder how much help the ship’s doctor was going to end up being. Would Dee really know how to put a changeling back together who was hurt this badly?

He tried not to think about that too much. The pegasus didn’t want to believe that nothing could be done to help the ‘Steed pilot.

“No pressure, buddy,” the pegasus stallion said, still fumbling over the openings in the changeling’s shell as he tried to keep as much of the green liquid from getting out as he could, “but it’d really help me out if you made yourself into a pony again. I have no clue what I’m doing here!” he tried pressing his wings up against the wounds as well to see if that would help. It was honestly hard to tell if it did anything more than just get his feathers soaked with ichor.

The changeling didn’t respond. Not so much as a grunt.

“Slip?” Blood Chit spared a glance at the changeling’s head, but found it laying limply in the pool of blood that was getting progressively greener by the second, “Slipshod; stay with me!” the stallion tried to check for a pulse with one of his pinions, but couldn’t feel anything. He convinced himself that didn’t mean anything. After all, he was trying to search for an artery he wasn’t even sure existed, beneath a hide that was far more rigid than pony flesh and likely wouldn’t allow for a palpable carotid pulse to be felt even if there was an artery there.

He hoped that was the case.

“MEDIC!”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 24: Dragon Rising

Booted hoofsteps echoed off the vaulted marble ceiling of the palace hall. Occasionally marred by the more subtle crunch of debris still leftover from the brief―but intense―firefights that had sprung up as Victoria Blueblood’s force’s clashed with her uncle’s loyalist guards upon breaching the palace compound’s defenses. It would likely take weeks for masons to properly patch up the bulletholes. Once Victoria actually got around to even worrying about such trifling matters like how spotless the walls of the palace halls looked.

Such things were hardly at the top of her list of priorities at the moment.

She’d only just received word that the compound had been fully secured, and the last of Dominus’ forces captured. It remained yet to be seen how much longer it would take for the same to be said for the rest of the city. To say nothing of the planet and the rest of the Pony Commonwealth. Victoria, for the moment, held only the manifested symbol of power for the star nation. Which was not the same thing as holding actual power.

If the local system governments refused to acknowledge her claim, then securing the archonship over the Commonwealth got a lot harder. After all, spending the last few years ‘dead’ was likely to cause more than a few of those local governments to understandably doubt that the pegasus mare was, in fact, who she claimed to be. She―or, more specifically, the League-in-Exile―didn’t have time to spend months or years trying to convince every regional duke and planetary governor of her identity.

They needed to fastrack this process.

Victoria and her armed escorts finally arrived at the door that led to the most straightforward and expedient means of doing just that: her uncle’s personal quarters. The pair of guardsponies outside of it snapped to rigid attention and saluted the ivory pegasus.

“Please inform my uncle that I request an audience with him, at his earliest convenience,” the young mare asked. The aristocratic accent from her youth still felt weird on her tongue after so long without use. It almost felt like this was the false image that she was projecting, and that ‘Vought Corsair’ was who she’d always been. Victoria wondered how long that feeling would endure.

One of the guards nodded his head, “yes, Archon,” and dutifully vanished through the door. He returned seconds later, bowing once more, “Archon, your uncle has granted you an audience.”

Victoria suppressed a wry smirk. It would have been unseemly for her to do so. It wasn’t as though nopony knew that Dominus was effectively her prisoner and her ‘request for an audience’ couldn’t have actually been denied. She was his jailer. He entertained her visits at her leisure, not the other way around.

However, there were certain ‘niceties’ that were expected to be observed where prisoners of noble blood were concerned. Such had been the case as well when Natch Belle had been her prisoner all those years ago. It was important that the perception of choice and autonomy be maintained so as not to erode the dignity of the captive noble. It was simply how things were done.

Notionally, her uncle still had full run of the palace and its grounds, but he was ‘choosing’ not to leave his quarters simply because he had no desire to. Were he crass enough to actually try and step hoof outside his personal suite and exercise that notion, a notably awkward situation would be created for all concerned. A lot of dignities―and a specific royal’s equinage―would be bruised.

Fortunately for everypony concerned, Dominus seemed to be mostly content to ‘go with the flow’ for the time being.

When Victoria entered the suite and closed the door behind her, she found her uncle lying comfortably on a devon, a book wrapped in his telekinesis floating in front of him. The older unicorn stallion feigned not realizing that somepony else had entered his presence for several pointed seconds before marking his place and setting the book aside. The pegasus merely maintained her composure and chose to ignore the slight. Whatever ‘power’ her uncle might choose to try and flex in this setting, both of them knew who was truly in control at the end of the day.

That was all that really mattered. Not this pageantry.

“Is there something that I can help you with, Victoria?”

The younger mare had to suppress a snort at how dissonant the elder stallion’s tone sounded, given the realities of their situations. To an outside observer, it wouldn’t have occurred to them that he was her prisoner, or even that she’d just recently deposed him as the archon of the Pony Commonwealth. In fact, it didn’t even sound like he was surprised to find that his niece was even alive after his attempt to assassinate her several years ago! The sheer audacity of his nonplussed greeting grated at the pegasus, but still she kept a firm grip on her composure.

Instead, she chose to meet him with an equally unperturbed tone, “my aides are drafting a concession speech for you to deliver this afternoon,” she informed him casually, “a copy of it will be delivered for you to look over in an hour or so.

“Nothing overly objectionable or incriminating,” she assured him, “just a succinct abdication and appointment announcement.

“I just wanted to check your availability for delivering it.”

Dominus, in a testament to his poise as the―former―archon of the Commonwealth, didn’t react with the least bit of anger or even bitterness. In fact, for all the affectation he gave to his voice and expression, she might as well have informed him about a new policy announcement that he was giving, “I will need to consult my schedule for the day, but I’m confident that I can make some time to attend to your request.

“Is there anything else that you’d like to ask of me, my dear?”

That last part evoked a visible twitch from the mare. She almost snapped at him, in fact. She could entertain the obfuscations of the power dynamic at play in this moment. That was all part of The Game that nobles ‘played’ at. She understood it. However, she was finding it significantly harder to pretend that they didn’t share the history together that they did. The history where she tried to depose him in a political coup, and he executed her conspirators and tried to have her killed for it.

Acting like none of that had happened was a bit too much to ask of her, especially after she’d received the final tally of the casualty reports for both sides. Thousands had died today. The majority of them were on her uncle’s side, but that didn’t make them any less citizens of the Pony Commonwealth. Ponies whose only ‘crime’ had been to adhere to the oaths that they’d sworn to defend the throne, no matter who sat upon it. Had her coup from years prior been successful, those same ponies would be defending her now. In time, she was certain that nearly all of the surviving palace guards would be right back to holding their old posts.

Yet, because of some shape-shifter on Equus, and her aversion to real peace in the Harmony Sphere, so many now lay dead. Lives lost which could have been averted, were it not for outside machinations.

If those machinations truly were from ‘outside’.

Victoria had to wonder now, “...did you know, Uncle?”

The elder unicorn furrowed his brow, frowning at the young mare, “know what?”

“Did you know about ‘them’―about Chrysalis and the changelings? Did you know, when you sent your assassins after me?”

That was the moment when the pegasus saw her uncle drop the facade and fall out of the ‘role’ that he’d been playing in their little talk. The hurt and pain―real pain―etched into his face, was clear to see. Dominus was not a Bridleway veteran. He could play the role of the ‘indifferent noble’ well enough, but that was part of the job of being archon, and not the result of any real acting talent on his part.

“...I didn’t know you were on that ship,” the unicorn finally said, his voice quivering slightly, “I swear to you, Victoria; I didn’t.”

Damn her if she didn’t believe him too.

“They weren’t even ‘my’ assassins,” the stallion continued, “Duke Bittercreek informed me that he’d uncovered a plot by House Lackadaisy to usurp the archonship, and had taken care of it,” he paused for several long seconds, “your name wasn’t even mentioned,” he insisted, “I...found out on the news, like everypony else.”

There was a hardness to his tone now as he glared off into the distance, reliving a memory that only he could see, “Duke Bittercreek insisted that you ‘weren’t supposed to be there’,” he said in a low growl, “but I found it difficult to believe that his spies were good enough to ferret out a coup plot, but couldn’t read a passenger manifest.

“The rose garden blossomed particularly beautifully that year.”

Victoria barely paid attention to the pyrrhic satisfaction in her uncle’s voice as she found herself pondering how likely the―former―Duke’s insistence of his ignorance was to be true. He wouldn’t have known about the destruction of her ship, as that had been a ruse set up by her own loyalists. She might have felt some measure of guilt in regards to his being executed for an offence he’s had no hoof in, had it not been for one other detail.

While Duke Bittercreek might not have been involved in the bombing used to cover her flight from the Harmony Sphere, what he would have known about, was the explosion that happened a week prior. While it was anypony’s guess whether the Duke’s spies were working for―or, at the very least, provided information by―Chrysalis’ changeling agents in the Commonwealth; what was not in doubt was that they were behind the bombing which had truly nearly claimed her life. It had shocked her to think that Dominus would have permitted such a thing. After all, even Victoria had imagined that the most serious punishment that she’d have faced if her uncle had uncovered the plot would have been to be imprisoned in her quarters much like her uncle was now.

Nobles―especially heir-apparents―were not executed haphazardly, after all.

That’s what she had thought, at least. Then she’d nearly been killed in a bombing.

“Are you saying you knew nothing about the attempt?”

The unicorn sighed, “I knew about it, yes; but I thought that it was only Ramshackle Lackadaisy and a few of his cohorts who were the targets. I had no way of knowing that you would be there too. I would never have cleared the operation had that been the case; I swear.”

Victoria grimaced, “it wouldn’t surprise me if that was why you weren’t told,” she murmured, “and you really have no knowledge about Chrysalis or changelings?”

The stallion frowned, looking as though he might be a little concerned for his niece’s mental health, “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Who is ‘Chrysalis’?”

“A subject of conversation for another time,” she assured him, breathing her own sigh of relief. It was a massive weight off her shoulders to know that her uncle wasn’t out to kill her, and had merely been a pawn being moved around the board as part of somepony else’s machinations. With luck, that would make the transition of power less contentious, “once things are settled, we’ll discuss it.

“Are you comfortable, Uncle?”

The older unicorn smirked, “as can be expected, under the circumstances,” he chuckled, “this was certainly a far more abrupt retirement than I had expected.

“In a way...I’m proud of you, Victoria,” the pegasus balked, which prompted a more robust laugh from the unicorn, “I mean it! You aspired to be more than you were, and seized upon the opportunity to make those ambitions into a reality!

“It was very Blueblood of you.”

Victoria wasn’t certain that she felt truly flattered by that ‘praise’. Still, if it meant that she wasn’t going to have to worry about Dominus contesting her authority too much in the near future, she supposed that she could live with it, “thank you...I think. I’ll have that speech to you as soon as I can.

“In the meantime, I need to check back in with our forces in orbit. There was a ‘situation’ developing a little while ago. I need to find out what the resolution was,” at worst, Victoria would be dealing with a new representative for the Rayleigh’s Irregulars.

Or whatever their name was changed to in the event that Squelch had ultimately been killed by her assailant.

“One thing you’ll find about being the archon,” Dominus said mirthlessly, even as he grinned at the pegasus, “is that there is always a ‘situation’ developing somewhere. Good luck, Victoria; you’ll certainly need it.”

With that, the stallion retrieved his book, and the mare took her leave.

Once outside, the pegasus turned and headed for her―formerly her uncle’s―office. She’d be able to get back in touch with the Dragoons and the Irregulars from there with some measure of privacy. After learning the details about how the situation aboard the Zathura had been resolved, she could arrange for HyperSpark messages to be sent out across the Sphere announcing the change in Commonwealth leadership to the rest of the galaxy. She was well aware now of Chrysalis’ ability to read such communications, but the new archon also recognized that she was still supposed to be acting as though she didn’t know that changelings existed.

That meant going about doing things as she always had, or would be expected to; and that meant continuing to use the HSG network to send expected messages between systems.

Well, most messages at any rate. There was one pony that Victoria wished to contact that she suspected it was best to keep the changelings in the dark about. She keyed up her datalink and spoke into it, “prepare a courier ship. I have a letter that I need to send…”

The better part of a thousand lightyears away, another royal was dealing with a ‘developing situation’ of her own.

Flurry Heart sat in front of her vanity, staring blankly into its mirror as a gilded brush made its way gently through her mane for the hundredth time. Likely it had been far more than times that. She was hardly in the business of counting brush strokes. It wasn’t even about getting the tangles out of her mane―she had spells for that!―it was about distracting herself with a repetitive task when her life’s usual stressors started mounting and weighing on her mind.

She’d been doing a lot of brushing since Twilight’s reappearance.

The pink alicorn wanted to curse that mare to oblivion and back again. Wanted to lay the blame at her hooves for the myriad crises that were springing up throughout the League-in-Exile like mushrooms after a heavy rain. Wanted so badly to have a scapegoat; or, at the very least, a way to foist all of these issues onto somepony else.

However, that wasn’t an option. Not really. As loath as Flurry Heart was to admit it―and she was uncertain if she would do so in public―she was the Princess. In true, official, fashion since Twilight’s abdication. Which meant that, now, the bit stopped with her.

She had to field the issues and devise solutions, even when she had no concept of how to do so. There simply was no precedent for the problems that she was facing right now. Worse, perhaps, she expected those problems to be getting significantly worse in the near future.

No, that wasn’t quite right. They were already ‘worse’; she just hadn’t yet received the reports that would outline the full breadth of their direness. That was what she was waiting for at this moment: the other horseshoe to drop.

Flurry Heart tensed up suddenly as a pair of legs draped themselves around her shoulders. A second later, a delicate muzzle began to brush over the nape of her neck, gently nibbling at the base of her mane and slowly wandering along her wither. In the mirror, the princess could see the saffron unicorn behind her. She let out a sigh, which she tried her best to keep from sounding too annoyed. It was hardly the other mare’s fault that she’d chosen to be affectionate at a bad time. Not that Flurry Heart felt like she ever experienced many ‘good’ times these days.

“I hope Her Majesty found last night as pleasurable as I did…” the unicorn murmured as she began to move her muzzle back up towards her monarch’s ears.

The alicorn closed her eyes and pointedly moved her head to the side, away from the other mare’s attentions, as a clear indication of her lack of interest. The unicorn immediately ceased in her nibbling, looking in surprise at the pink mare, “not now, Myrtle.

“In fact, it’s best that you leave,” Flurry Heart said after a moment’s thought, “for now,” she amended. The saffron unicorn’s expression looked hurt, but she nodded nonetheless and stepped away from her liege.

“Of course, Your Majesty; as you wish,” the mare backed towards the royal suite’s door, bowing low, “I will await your summons,” and with that, she withdrew, closing the door quietly behind her.

“You do that,” the alicorn said in a flat tone. Inwardly, she made a note to reassign the unicorn elsewhere in the palace. Somewhere where Flurry Heart was unlikely to encounter her. Perhaps to the guest wing, as a maid.

It wasn’t that the mare-in-waiting had transgressed or done anything wrong―and the regular rotation of palace staff was nothing out of the ordinary, so this reassignment wouldn’t necessarily be viewed as ‘punishment’ for anything either. Quite the contrary, in fract, Myrtle had proven to be quite an enjoyable distraction...for a time. The novelty had worn thin of late though. As a result, their charms had waned, and Flurry Heart found that the unicorn held little interest for her any longer.

That new sous chef that had recently started working in her personal kitchen was rather cute though. She might serve as an adequate distraction for a few months…

As the alicorn entertained the thought, the terminal near her vanity chimed, announcing an incoming communique. Flurry Heart sighed, briefly debating whether or not she truly wished to be confronted with one of those things from which she found herself requiring distracting. It was a fleeting thought, of course. She’d specifically asked for this notification, after all. It wouldn’t do to turn it away now.

She resumed brushing her mane while reaching out with her magic to accept the call, “yes?”

“Your Highness,” the stern vassage of one of her star admirals, a steel gray pegasus stallion, appeared on the screen, “I have the rosters, as you requested,” she could already tell from his tone that he was not looking forward to delivering his findings.

Which was fitting, since the pink alicorn was not anticipating looking forward to receiving those findings. Yet, she needed the confirmation all the same, “and…?”

A palpable pause as the officer mentally prepared himself to deliver what could very well end up being the final report of his career, if his princess was displeased enough by it. Flurry Heart liked to think that she wasn’t quite so capricious towards her officers when they were simply doing their jobs, and the troubles that they reported to her were no fault of their own. Such as was about to be the case now, she knew, “and...nearly the entireties of the fleets and listed clusters of clans Smoke Jabberwock, Ghost Ursa, Jade Roc...and Timberwolf, are unaccounted for.”

Flurry Heart’s lip curled in a slight sneer at the star admiral’s choice of phrasing. Being ‘unaccounted for’ made it sound as though nopony knew where those forces had scurried off to. Of course, the reality was that everypony knew perfectly well where they’d gone. It was the worst kept secret that the Clans had ever tried to obfuscate―if they had even tried to do so. They certainly hadn’t tried to keep their activities veiled from the other Clans.

While it would have been an outright lie to claim that the departure of those forces was at all surprising, the alicorn could forgive the star admiral for not expecting Clan Timberwolf to be a participant in the impromptu ‘crusade’ into the Harmony Sphere. After all, Spike was ostensibly one of the most outspoken critics of it!

However, there was something to be said for the adage: ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’, and that was more or less why Timberwolf was going along. As well as in order to maintain their de facto status as the preeminent Clan in the League-in-Exile. Sitting out such an important endeavour entirely risked costing Spike what little regard he had left among the Khans of the other Dragon Clans, and undermining his―admittedly tenuous―hold on them.

By joining in with the others, the purple dragon could both save face and do his best to mitigate the destruction that would undoubtedly befall the Harmony Sphere at the claws of his brethren. At least, that was how he and Ember had floated the notion to her when they brought Flurry Heart the news of the summit which all of the Clans had held recently.

One which the Princess had found herself specifically not informed about. Apparently, it had been ‘dragon business’, and not an official League-in-Exile matter.

Curious then, that it should involve the redeployment of so many soldiers and ships which were―theoretically―pledged to the League’s―and thus her―service. Very ‘curious’ indeed...

Not that the foreknowledge of this mass departure of war materials made the official news of it any less palatable. She’d hoped that the invasion would have been put off for much longer―was supposed to have been put off, in fact. The timetables which Spike and Dragon Lord Ember had been relaying to her had anticipated a departure date that was the better part of six months in the future. Long enough for Twilight to make a respectable attempt with her own plan to oust Chrysalis. Perhaps time enough even for her to succeed in freeing the Harmony Sphere of the changeling queen’s control, and thus rob the Clans of their facile casus belli to launch this ‘crusade’ of theirs in the first place.

It seemed though that the dragons were not nearly as patient as their long lives should have predisposed them to be. One would think that, for a creature which could endure for millenia, another few months wouldn’t have been a huge bother for them. Apparently, Flurry Heart had misjudged their thirst for power.

“Thank you, star admiral,” the pink mare said, reaching out with her magic once more, “dismissed,” she terminated the transmission before the pegasus stallion could say another word. There was nothing more that she needed to hear from him, and the alicorn certainly didn’t have any worthwhile instructions for how he and the rest of her military were to proceed. Yet.

Flurry Heart was trapped now, between a rock and a hard place. Conflicted about who she was supposed to root for. If Twilight Sparkle succeeded in opening up an avenue for the swift conquest of Equus, there was every possibility that the League-in-Exile no longer had the forces that would be required to take the system anyway. If she committed what the League had left, and they lost...the Clans invading now certainly wouldn’t have the strength needed to complete their conquest of the Harmony Sphere.

By the time they’d captured a few dozen systems, their forces would be spread too thin in order to simply hold what they’d already taken to advance any further. They would need time to fortify and garrison their holdings before they could launch another round on conquests. Time that Chrysalis would spend consolidating her forces and rallying the Successor States under her influence to repel their dragon invaders. Even if Smolder’s belief that any one of her BattleSteed pilots was worth a hundred of their Sphere counterparts, her lances would be facing thousands.

Their WarShip fleet would prove decisive, yes, but even they had their limitations. The Clans had been able to build and staff only so many of the vessels. All of the intelligence reports that Flurry Heart had seen suggested that their present fleets outmatched what Chrysalis was fielding...at present. However, if ComSpark were to release ‘recently unearthed’ schematics to the other star nations that would allow them to build their own, it wouldn’t take long at all for Smolder’s invaders to encounter battles in orbit that they couldn’t hope to win.

Their first round of invasions would no doubt be beyond decisive. Flurry Heart shuddered at the thought of being one of those planetary garrison commanders who would be unfortunate enough to find themselves leading the initial defensive actions against the Clan invaders. A pre-League Crystal Empire knight would stand a better chance of defeating a SneakyShy in open combat than a Harmony Sphere ‘Steed regiment had of beating a mere star of Clan-built BattleSteeds.

But...then the advance would inevitably stall as the Clan battle lines grew thinner. They’d pause their conquest, consolidate, reorganize...and then they’d run into a genuinely reinforced and prepared enemy for the first time. All of the fresh, unbloodied, Sphere pilots would be dead, leaving only the battle-hardened mercenaries who had far more real combat experience than any Clan pilot did. It would be superior technology up against superior ability.

Those battles would not be quite so decisive, whatever the hubris of dragons might lead them to believe otherwise. They would falter. They might even fall…

Four Clans. Nearly a quarter of the military might of the League-in-Exile hung in the balance with this invasion. If they were soundly defeated...it would be the end of their hopes to free the Sphere from Chrysalis and the changelings. Forever.

Did she then throw in her full support for the crusading Clans then? She could rally the rest of the League-in-Exile, and launched a full invasion now. They might have a chance if they all moved in and rushed as much territory as possible in the initial advance. If they took enough systems, then it was possible that they could rob Chrysalis of the resources she needed to build up a counter force, while gaining more for themselves to expand their own warfighting capability. It would be a long and bloody fight, but one where their technological superiority might prove to be all the edge that they needed to ultimately win. If they could take a quarter, or even a third of the Sphere before a proper response to their invasion could be organized, it might be enough to stifle the ability of the rest of the galaxy to properly oppose them.

Twilight would not approve of the death toll that would be involved, but making such weighty decisions were not a concern for the purple alicorn any longer, so it hardly mattered what her opinion on the matter was. This was about defeating Chrysalis and freeing the creatures of the Sphere. Surely it was better than some of them be sacrificed for the cause of eventual freedom than to doom them all to eternal servitude?

The denizens of the Sphere might resent the Clans at first―and would certainly resist them as invaders. However, in the fullness of time, the alicorn wanted to believe that her actions would be vindicated. Once the League was reestablished...

Not that Flurry Heart actually believed that the Dragon Clans genuinely had any intention of helping her to restore the League. Not any longer. They knew that Ember couldn’t compel them with the staff. That this invasion was happening―against the expressed wishes of the reigning princess―was proof of that. This had been Smolder’s final little test of her working theory that the Dragon Lord no longer possessed the control over them that she once did. Which meant that the dragons were now free to do as they wished.

Spike would undoubtedly try to mitigate the damage as best he could, but his claws would mostly be tied. He could only dictate how Clan Timberwolf would conduct itself during the invasion. Warriors from the other clans wouldn’t respect his authority. They would only listen to their own commanders and Khans, and Flurry Heart knew the kinds of dragons that Smolder had taken with her.

The pink alicorn let out a resigned sigh.

She had tried to do her best. She really had. Keeping the exiles together had been of paramount importance if they ever wanted to have a chance of defeating Chrysalis. So she’d compromised, in the interests of maintaining that unity at all costs. With Spike and Ember’s help, she’d adapted the Elements of Harmony to be more palatable to dragons, rather than risk them breaking away. She’d nurtured their more ‘brutish’ natures in order to cultivate more aggressive soldiers for the inevitable counter-attack that they would lead against the changelings who’d evicted them.

It had been necessary.

Taking back the Harmony Sphere was the only thing that mattered. Whatever changes needed to be made, whatever sacrifice was required to accomplish that goal, was worth it. Twilight could be as horrified as she wanted to be at how different the League-in-Exile today was from the Celestia League that she had once ruled. The fact remained that it had to be different. They wouldn’t have a chance of defeating Chrysalis otherwise.

...was what Flurry Heart had been telling herself for five centuries.

But, now…?

She was losing control. The ‘League-in-Exile’ barely existed as a functioning government in most regards that mattered. It had become too decentralized. The Khans wielded most of the power―especially marital power―and they weren’t loyal to the Crown. The emphasis on Clan loyalty and personal power the modified Elements encouraged had helped to undermine that.

Culminating in the brash and haphazard ‘crusade’ being launched right now. Smolder herself might believe that she could rebuild a newer and better League, but other Khans like Garble? They just wanted to accumulate wealth and power in order to trigger the same Greed-Induced-Bigness that their ancient ancestors had enjoyed before ponies had brought them Friendship.

They didn’t want Harmony.

Which meant that, despite her best efforts, she had failed. Utterly. The League-in-Exile had died some time ago, in any respect that truly mattered. The Clans were fractured, and some had broken off to invade. She could try and salvage as much as she could of her princedom and join their invasion. Or, she could stick to Twilight’s plan, hold what forces remained loyal to her in reserve, and hope that they’d be enough to take Equus.

Both were hardly ‘ideal’ options, but they were the only choices that she could see.

The brush continued to stroke though the alicorn’s mane as she considered which option she would take...

Twilight idly wondered in the back of mind if she was beginning to develop empathic abilities. Because she could clearly sense the despondent feelings of every other creature around her. Though, now that she thought about it, that sense probably had more to do with the somber expressions being plainly worn on every face. Hers was likely no different. A bit more haunted than some, perhaps. Save for Xanadu’s.

After all, unlike the others sitting at their table in the galley, the two of them had actually seen the aftermath of the fight in the ‘Steed Bay.

“It’s my fault.”

The alicorn could have sworn that she’d been the one speaking. It came as quite a surprise when she saw the cobalt dragoness next to her glancing in the zebra’s direction, “I threw the numbers off when I joined up,” the striped stallion continued, his head bowed, “the confusion...it let that other changeling slip through the screening on Capensis.

“This is all my fault.”

The star admiral sitting across from him glowered at Xanadu, “that’s bullshit. I’m the one who ordered the modified screening,” she countered, “if we’d done a proper segregated search, it wouldn’t have mattered what the roster said. We’d have found the bastard.

“I should have done a proper search,” she insisted, bitterly, “even if a few of the civilian’s died, those lives weren’t worth the risks in the grand scheme of things. As the senior officer, it was my call and my fault,” Cinder looked over at the alicorn, like a filly resigned to be scolded, “Your Majesty, I accept full responsibility for this failure. If you desire my commission, I shall forfeit it immediately.”

The purple mare was already shaking her head, “I had the chance to search the ship months ago when I first found out Slipshod was a changeling. I let him talk me out of it, but I should have known better. We’d have found the other changeling long before reaching Capensis if I’d listened to my gut and insisted on revealing the existence of any changelings and vetting the crew right then and there.

“Whatever panic revealing that information might have caused couldn’t have been worse than what’s happening right now,” she added ruefully.

“What about me?” the fourth and final member of their group, Squelch, said. She glanced around at the three of them, wearing a sardonic smile, “I get to take some blame too. I hired Dee, after all. He gave me his resume and everything.”

The mare’s gaze now turned to her coffee, which she had been nursing without much enthusiasm since having it delivered by Cookie. It was pretty tepid right now, and not worth drinking. The mug did give her hooves something to do though while her mind was occupied with the plethora of ‘what ifs’ whirling through it, “it was a few years ago, but I swear I remembered seeing it mention his attending Hayyard University. As in the one on Equus.

“When you told me it was all changelings there,” the unicorn nodded towards the alicorn, “I double-checked the ship’s records,” she frowned now, “it still said Hayyard, but it specified that it had been their New Aboddon campus in the Federated Moons,” the mare shrugged, “so I didn’t think anything of it.”

There were several seconds of silence as the unicorn’s eyes seemed to burn into her lukewarm drink, “...when I heard what happened, I looked at my personal files, where I still kept a copy of the resume Dee submitted when he applied for the position,” her lips curled back in a slight sneer, “he was on Equus, at the Camelbridge campus. He’d altered the ship’s records,” a glance in the alicorn’s direction, “the day we brought you aboard.”

Squelch took a deep breath and leaned away from her drink, “So, now that we’ve established that there were a lot of failures along the way, maybe we can talk about how we’ll be moving forward from here?”

Twilight looked over at the sage green unicorn mare and pursed her lips, about to say something...but wasn’t quite able to find the words. Of the four of them, Squelch somehow seemed the most calm. Or, at least, a lot calmer than the alicorn would have expected her to be under the circumstances.

The mercenary commander had been attacked by a pony who’d looked like a close comrade, only to find out later that it had actually been a different close comrade, who ultimately turned out to be a traitor. Now she was down a ship’s doctor and a ‘Steed pilot on the eve of an invasion that would be punching deep into the heart of the Harmony Sphere. Strictly speaking, Twilight wasn’t certain that the unicorn should even be out of the infirmary right this moment. Doc Dee hadn’t been very gentle with her during his attack. Nor were there any indications that he’d made much of an effort to actually treat her injuries in the aftermath.

Her flesh was visibly discolored through her coat around her eyes and right cheek. One of the ship’s medics suspected that she’d suffered a mild orbital fracture, and had suggested that the unicorn rest up for a few days. However, Squelch had insisted that she only needed one good eye to run her company, and would proceed with her regular duties. She had, however, been dosing herself with copious quantities of painkillers in the meantime. Her injuries were distracting, Twilight had to admit, and it pained the alicorn to see the other mare walking around the ship with a pronounced limp, but she wasn’t exactly in a position to order the unicorn to take it easy.

In fairness to Squelch, it had seemed to put a lot of the crew at ease to see their commander out and about, even in her injured state. In their minds, Twilight supposed, if their employer could go about her duties while hurt as badly as she was, then they certainly had no excuse to do anything but their own best despite the circumstances.

That didn’t mean that Twilight wasn’t at least a little concerned for the mare though. Once she’d informed Squelch of what had actually happened in the wake of her attack, the sage unicorn had almost immediately excused herself from the infirmary and picked up right where she’d left off, calling back Timberjack and Victoria as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Watching all three of them very pointedly not remark on her battered appearance had been...fascinating, to say the least.

It was a common enough coping mechanism, the alicorn supposed. Perhaps not the healthiest means of dealing with trauma and loss, but an excusable one. The galaxy didn’t come to a halt and allow a pony to work through their personal problems at their own pace. It marched on.

As must they.

Squelch did have a point though: time was not on their side, and so it wouldn’t do for them to waste too much more of it throwing around blame for something that none of them could change. The alicorn took a deep breath and nodded, “Victoria’s courier ship left the planet an hour ago. It’ll take a couple months for them to reach the Federated Moons and make contact with Natch Belle.”

“Timberjack’s courier will take a little longer than that to get back through the Periphery and reach the start of our Jump Ship bridge,” Cinder added, “call it another month to get the Clans organized and formed up, and another three months to get to Commonwealth space. We can be at Equus in nine-ish months? Assuming nothing goes wrong.”

Xanadu cast the dragoness a baleful glare, “do you really think that Chrysalis is just going to hang around for nine months sitting on her bug-butt doing nothing? She knows we’re coming. She’ll be ready for us.”

Everycreature at the table tensed up at the reminder from the zebra. Squelch wore a disgusted expression on her face. They all might have found ways to ascribe blame to themselves over the collective failure to find out Doc Dee was a changeling, but it was the green unicorn who was seeking to monopolize responsibility for Chrysalis catching wind of their plans.

The ship’s physician hadn’t assaulted her simply to frame Slipshod. Presumably, that had just been something of a ‘bonus’. His true purpose in her quarters had been in order to circumvent the lockdown that she had placed on comm traffic off the ship. The HyperSpark Generators located on nearly every inhabited planet across settled space―both within and outside of the Harmony Sphere―were the only means of faster-than-light information transmission in the galaxy.

The ones in the Sphere were also under the unilateral control of ComSpark, and thus Chrysalis’ changelings. Any transmissions sent through them was assumed to be information that was also passed on to her agents. Despite the ‘official’ CompSpark narrative assuring users that their data was kept confidential and remained unmolested by HSG operators.

Consequently, both Squelch and Timberjack had all instituted blackouts on transmissions off their ships in order to keep any information from being sent through the HSGs of the systems that they were traveling through. Even something as innocuous and innocent as a letter home could―when combined with other tidbits of idle traffic from similar personal messages―could serve to alert the changelings to the upcoming Clan invasion of Equus. It was safest to just place a lockdown on all communications and remove the risk until Chrysalis was defeated.

In the case of the Zathura, Squelch had restricted access to the ship’s outbound comm network using her personal codes. Nopony else could get a message out, not even from the bridge, for any reason. This had caused some mild irritation with High Gain and the other techs when they were trying to deal with system traffic control and other mundane operations which they now needed their employer to handle for them, but it was better to be inconvenienced than have the whole invasion compromised.

However, by accessing her terminal while she’d been logged into it, Dee had been able to bypass that lock and send out a transmission to the planetary HyperSpark Generator. While Victoria might have been able to place a similar camms blackout over the palace and her own forces until they got things there under control, the planetary HSG itself wasn’t controlled by the Pony Commonwealth government. All Sphere generators were operated by ComSpark personnel, who didn’t answer to local authorities. Victoria making any attempt to curtail their usual operations would have raised too many questions, and suspicions.

Dee’s transmission had since been relayed out of the system. Nopony doubted what its final destination would be.

What was perhaps worse than the fact that a warning of any sort had gotten out at all, was what they later learned the message had specifically contained once they reviewed the transmission logs. Cinder had been near apoplexy when she’d seen that it had listed the entirety of the League-in-Exile’s active fleets and ground forces. Vows had been made regarding numerous bodies being summarily relieved of their ‘incomptetent heads’ upon her return to Clan space. Twilight wasn’t convinced that the dragoness was being hyperbolic either.

Now, not only did Chrysalis know that they were launching an invasion of Equus, she knew exactly what forces would be used to do it. Which meant that the changeling queen was in a perfect position to start gathering together the forces that she’d need to repel the imminent invasion of her seat of power.

Cinder’s teeth were audibly grinding as she glared at the zebra pilot “of course she’s not just going to sit around and wait,” she growled, “but what am I supposed to do about it? I can’t just fart out another fifty clusters of Assault ‘Steeds and an armada of Dreadnoughts!

“Why don’t you bend over and I’ll check to see what I can pull out of your ass?!” the star admiral flashed a clawed hand―one talon in particular―at the striped stallion, “what we’ve got is what we’ve got, and we’ll just have to go in with it, even if Chrysalis will be waiting to meet us head on.

“Clanners don’t go down easy,” the cobalt dragoness insisted, puffing her chest out and painting her words with a measure of pride, “we’ve been preparing for this fight for generations. Most of our soldiers were specifically designed for it,” she reminded him. She looked to Twilight now, “we’ll take that system, Your Majesty. Even if I have to dismantle their ships personally with my bare claws!”

Twilight didn’t doubt the star admiral’s conviction for a moment. However, “I doubt that will be necessary, Cinder; but I appreciate the offer,” she flashed the dragoness and reassuring smile before looking at the zebra.

Xanadu was a far sight from his usual chipper self, but she recognized that he was still dealing with the events from earlier, and their aftermath. Even somecreature as typically happy-go-lucky as him had to have a breaking point, and he’d apparently reached his, “nocreature is expecting Chrysalis to just sit idly by,” she assured him, “but there’s nothing we can do about her right this moment.

“Even if we took the Timberwolf’s Dragoons and made a best-time run for Faust, we’d arrive months after they’d been warned,” she pointed out, “and since Timberjack doesn’t have a single WarShip, we’d all be slaughtered before we even reached the planet,” Xanadu grunted and sat back in his seat, grudgingly acknowledging their present collective impotence.

“But we’re not going to sit here doing nothing either,” the purple alicorn informed the group, “Victoria’s with us, and she might even be able to get the Federated Moons on our side as well,” she looked to Cinder, flashing the dragoness a wry smirk, “they may not be Clanners, and I don’t know if they’ll have a full fifty clusters worth of BattleSteeds between them, but it’ll be more firepower than we’d have without them,” the star admiral politely acknowledged that the additional forces for the invasion would be welcome.

“I’m sensing a ‘goodwill tour’ in our future,” Squelch muttered, frowning at the alicorn.

“If we could get even just one of the other Successor States to join in, it’ll help shift the odds further in our favor,” Twilight pointed out.

“Easier said than done,” the sage unicorn countered, “we had an ‘in’ with Victoria that we don’t with any of the other Houses, and we lucked out that she has a hook in House Belle. Getting one of the other three Houses isn’t going to be anywhere near as easy as this was.”

The purple alicorn frowned slightly. While she recognized that the connection that Slipshod’s host family had had with Victoria was likely to be a unique advantage when it came to aligning one of the major Harmony Sphere powers to their cause, she was less willing to think of the new archon’s relationship to the younger brother of the Federated Moon’s First Princess as a ‘hook’. Twilight wasn’t quite that jaded. However, now was not the time to debate the sincerity of noble relationships which were indisputably politically advantageous.

Xanadu piped up again, now sounding slightly more optimistic, “aren’t Mig and Tig kirin nobility? Maybe they can line up a conversation with whoever’s in charge…”

Squelch’s frown deepened, and the mare was already starting to shake her head, “their mother is the noble, and the three of them aren’t on what I would call ‘good terms’, at the moment. She’s not going to do them any favors any time soon.”

“It doesn’t hurt to have them ask anyway,” Twilight said, “it’s a better chance than we’d have if we just called up the Chancellor out of the blue,” that much Squelch had to admit was true, and agreed to float the idea by the twins when she next saw them, “which just leaves the Hippogriff Combine and the Our Worlds League. I don’t suppose there are any ideas in regards to them?”

“Between the two, the League would be the easiest to approach,” Squelch said, “they’re the easiest to sway, since we’d just have to convince Captain-General Moonlight Radiance to join the cause. While there’s ostensibly a parliament that would have to sign off on big matters―like invading Equus, for example―the reality is that the League isn’t nearly as egalitarian as they like to make themselves sound.

“Their whole ‘everypony is equal’ shtick gets tossed right out the airlock the moment it conflicts with whatever the head of House Glimmer wants to do,” the unicorn flashed a wry smirk.

“The Combine, meanwhile, couldn’t give two shits about what happens to the other races in the Sphere. They only even employ non-hippogriff mercs when they need fodder more than fighters. Getting them to help...” Squelch paused, making a show of trying to come up with an option, “I just don’t see you―or any of us―being able to do it.

“Not with Trade Winds being off his rocker the way he is,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “the sooner he kicks that bucket and Thera inherits the position, the better off the whole galaxy’ll be…”

Twilight thought back on the intelligence reports that she’d looked over while in Clan space, and how they had compared with what was otherwise ‘common knowledge’ and could be accessed through local system networks. While the two didn’t always line up perfectly with one another, as they were filtered through very different lenses, they did happen to concur on that point: the current head of House Novo, Trade Winds, was half mad. Or, at the very least, so paranoid as to make negotiating with him the next best thing to impossible.

His daughter, on the other hoof…

“Cinder,” Twilight spoke up, and the dragoness stiffened in her seat upon being addressed by the alicorn. While perhaps no longer the ‘princess’ of the League, the star admiral still held a clear reverence for any command that the purple mare gave her, treating it no different than she would any ‘genuine’ royal decree, “I want you to meet with Thera and reveal the truth to her regarding the changelings. If she’s as prudent as everyone says she is, we might be able to get the help we need from her.”

The star admiral squirmed uncomfortably in her seat for a moment, “...is that wise, Your Majesty?”

The former princess shrugged helplessly, giving the dragoness a wan smile, “all our cards have already been tipped to the enemy. We can’t afford to be circumspect anymore,” she pointed out, “we need allies, and we also need them to know what’s at stake. My understanding is that Thera, while not technically ‘in charge’, does have a lot of latitude with regards to the Combine’s military,” Twilight glanced to Squelch for confirmation on her assessment, and received a nod from the other mare, “and, for the moment, that’s what we need most.

“We can work on political unity later,” Twilight pointed out, “after we’ve dealt with Chrysalis.”

“Understood, Your Majesty,” the dragoness bowed her head, “I’ll assemble a team and depart for Combine space as soon as practical.”

“Good. Take Timberjack with you―not the whole company,” she hastily amended when the dragoness shot her a raised eyebrow, “but Timberjack himself has built up a decent reputation in the Sphere as an honorable pony. Having him to back you up might keep them from being too skeptical about the whole changeling matter.”

Cinder nodded in agreement. The alicorn took another deep breath, letting at out slowly and managing a―mostly―contented smile, “it sounds like we at least have a plan of action now: Cinder and Timberjack will talk to the hippogriffs, Mig and Tig will test the waters back home, and the rest of us,” she motioned between herself and Squelch, “will pay the Our Worlds League a little visit.”

She was about to wrap up the meeting when she noticed that Xanadu seemed a little uncomfortable about something, “what’s wrong?”

The zebra cleared his throat, and seemed to have some difficulty making eye contact with the others, “nothing! Just...really glad that the blackout on HyperSpark communications has meant that the twins couldn’t send their mother their latest...um, ‘video message’,” he offered up a sheepish smile and a short cackle of forced laughter. The other three continued to stare at the stallion with varying degrees of confusion etched on their faces, “it, uh...probably wouldn’t have helped things if she’d seen it.

“So, you know...we lucked out there! Hehe…heh…” the zebra pointedly picked up his drink and began to take a long, unproductive, sip from it; still having difficulty making eye contact with any of the others at the table.

The awkward silence at the table lasted for several seconds before it was finally broken by Cinder, “they made a video with you too?”

Twilight found herself wearing Xanadu’s drink a moment later, and never received a satisfactory explanation as to why.

“Outbound Whinney-One-Zero-Seven, you are clear for throttle-up on nav corridor two-four.”

“Roger, Botany Tower. We copy throttle up on two-four.”

Briar leaned leisurely back in his chair, kicking his cloven hooves up onto the control station so that he could more easily relax. Something that he’d have gotten reprimanded for by his supervisor, were his supervisor in the control room and not already back in her quarters after signing out of her shift early. Not that there was anycervid who would blame her. One-Zero-Seven was the only craft that had been docked at the orbital platform, and there wasn’t any other traffic in the system that fell into their jurisdiction. The Botany Bay system was hardly what one would call a ‘hive of activity’, even by most Periphery standards.

Having three craft in planetary orbit was an ‘all hooves on deck’ madhouse, as far as their usual level of activity was concerned. That buffalo-crewed light freighter could pretty much have flown anywhere that it wanted to without having to worry about running afoul of any other traffic. However, the fact that they effectively had free reign of the system’s space was no reason to completely ignore established interstellar flight control operations.

Or so Briar was consistently told. He wasn’t exactly one to complain though. After all, it meant that he had guaranteed employment where he was required to perform less than an hour of anything even remotely approaching ‘work’ during a typical duty shift. If the Botany Bay government wanted to pay him to watch vids for seven hours a day, he wasn’t going to argue with them!

Speaking of, “Safe travels!” the young deer cut the comm and pulled his datapad back out, cueing the show that he’d been watching back to where he’d left off and resumed the playback. A new season was slated to be released in a couple of weeks, and he wanted to refresh his memory of the characters and events involved.

He wasn’t certain how long the light identifying an incoming communications request had been flashing by the time he looked up from his vid and finally noticed it. He couldn’t think of a reason why it would have been flashing at all, honestly. He put aside his datapad and skimmed the details regarding the message’s origin, initially suspecting that the freighter he’d recently cleared had run into some sort of issue and needed to return. However, that turned out not to be the care.

Far more interestingly: it was from the Jump Ship at the system’s nadir.

Why were they contacting him? Briar couldn’t think of anything vocation-related that the Jump Ship’s crew could possibly have to talk about, and he certainly wasn’t personally close to any members of its crew.

Briar reached out and opened the channel, “this is Botany Bay System Traffic Control; Tech Officer Briar Patch speaking. How can I help you?”

The cervine buck waited patiently for several long seconds, but received no reply to his acknowledgement. He frowned and did a quick check of his console to confirm that everything was functioning properly and ensure that he hadn’t accidentally muted or deafened anything. He couldn’t locate any problems on his end that would explain the silence, so he tried again, “this is System Traffic Control acknowledging your comm request. Please respond.”

Silence.

“Did somecreature flank-dial, or what?” the buck muttered under his breath as he set about doing a more thorough investigation of the anomalous signal. First was a quick diagnostic of his own panel to check that it was functioning properly and hadn’t thrown out any false alerts. When that came back clear, Briar checked the station’s comm array to make certain that it was capable of sending and receiving traffic. His surface-bound counterparts on the planet below confirmed that they could understand his transmissions, so there didn’t seem to be anything wrong on his end of things.

The problem had to be with the Jump Ship then.

The cervine turned his attention now to the platform’s long-range sensors, which he rarely had any cause to regard given the lack of activity in the system. The console saw such infrequent use that he discovered that it wasn’t actually even on at the moment. Somecervid had probably shut it down for it’s weekly maintenance and then forgotten to turn it back on again. Wouldn’t have been the first time. After all, he’d clearly forgotten to make sure it was on for his shift…

When the console completed its boot-up checks and finally began relaying sensor information, Briar was positive that it was either broken, or hadn’t been calibrated correctly. It should have been showing him two contacts: the buffalo freighter and the Jump Ship.

He was looking at dozens. Half of them were registering as being larger than the Jump Ship itself! That obviously wasn’t possible.

Briar initiated a reset and a diagnostic of the system, which consumed another fifteen minutes of time. When the display came back up, it was showing nearly double the number of contacts that it had previously!

“What in the…?” the buck rubbed the back of his head idly with his hoof, trying to make sense of things.

The chances of this being a malfunction of some sort were looking less and less likely. If it really had been a defect in the system or the equipment, then Briar reasoned that he should be getting back a lot of ‘garbage’ readings on the alleged contacts. While he would go so far as to say that a lot of what he was seeing was plausible, he wasn’t finding a lot that was outright impossible. Technically. The mass readings, vectors, velocities; they all made rational sense, to a degree. Everything pointed to these being genuine contacts in the system. The computer was even generating some profiles for them based on the sensor reflections.

Not that those preliminary identifications were doing a lot to convince the traffic control tech that what he was seeing was really happening. The dozens of DropShips that were being detected all matched up with readings he’d seen before―though never quite so many of them at once. However, he was more than a little skeptical about the supposed ‘WarShips’ that the computer was identifying.

After all, those just...weren’t a thing. Not in real life anyway. Vids set in historical periods showed them, sure―and rumor was that some of the Great Houses back in the Sphere had one or two smaller ones stashed away to show off for big events―but an actual fleet like he was seeing now simply wasn’t a thing that existed!

Speaking of ‘existing’, it was only now that Briar Patch realized that, aside from the dozens of new signals that he hadn’t expected to see on the sensor plot, there was also one signal that was conspicuously absent from it: the Jump Ship. It was gone.

Curious about―and somewhat dreading―the reason for this, Briar tapped out the set of commands necessary to review sensor logs. He punched in the timecode for the moment that his console noted initially receiving the communications request from the Jump Ship. It was there on the plotter now, the buck noted, along with a trio of other signals that were each at least as large as a Jump Ship in their own right. He sped through the recording, noting that several more large unidentified signals emerged.

Then the Jump Ship vanished. However, what Briar did not see noted on the sensor logs was the telltale energy spike of a jump translation. The ship hadn’t left.

It had been destroyed.

The question now was: by who?

There were a few proximal regional powers in this part of the Periphery that Briar could think of who might be invasion-minded. Not that Botany Bay had a lot to offer in the way of wealth, weapons, or resources, that would make an invasion worthwhile. Nor did they possess the sorts of defenses that would have justified committing the forces that he was seeing displayed here. A single Friendship-Class DropShip with a half-load of BattleSteeds would realistically be all than anycreature needed to take his backwater home of a planet.

What he was seeing here was the sort of force he’d have expected to be employed against a robustly garrisoned Sphere world!

Briar moved back over to his console and brought up one of the platform’s optical arrays. These saw even more infrequent use, as there was usually very little of interest to look at in the system. However, he wanted to verify what the computer was telling him about their visitors before he started waking important cervines up. Though, if what he found turned out to match the computer’s deductions, Briar suspected that he was going to get yelled at anyway for waiting so long to call anycervid.

Not that there was anything that could realistically be done, given the numbers involved. He could count the number of BattleSteeds on the planet with one hoof. In fact, an amputee could display an accurate count.

When the scopes came online, and Briar directed them towards the system nadir, the buck felt his blood go cold in his veins. In one of his vids, the sight would have filled the traffic control tech with a sense of awe. During one of the more pivotal climax scenes, he might have even been cheering.

He wasn’t cheering now though.

He was frantically calling up his supervisor in her quarters, “Fern! I need you in the tower; we’ve got an emergency!”

After repeating the call for the third time, the buck finally received a response from an audibly irate doe, “what, in the fuck, do you want, Briar? If the station isn’t deorbiting, I swear I will―”

“We’re being invaded!” the buck blurted.

There was a long, pregnant, pause from the other end of the line, followed by a, “...what?”

Briar ignored the clear note of doubt in the doe’s voice. After all, he’d just spent the better part of half an hour in denial himself. However, now that he’d finally come to terms with what was happening, it was his duty to make sure that word got out to the proper creatures who would know better than he did what needed to be done. Never mind that even a lowly tech like himself was acutely aware that there wasn’t anything that realistically could be done to stop whoever was coming.

Perhaps he would be commended if he just got back on the comm now and started trying to preemptively offer these newcomers the unconditional surrender of the system? It might minimize the death toll somewhat…

“Dozens of new contacts have jumped into the system over the last hour,” the buck began explaining to his supervisor, “they blew up the Sojourn! Now they’re heading towards the planet. There’s something like twenty DropShips, maybe more. Friendship-Class or larger.”

His superior sounded much more awake now. In the background, he could hear muted sounds of somecervid getting dressed, “who are they?”

“No idea,” the buck admitted, “I don’t recognize the transponder coding. Maybe it’s scrambled, or really out of date―or our systems are really out of date,” he added under his breath as an aside, “I got scopes on them, so I know they’re there. I don’t recognize the markings though,” he reached over and tapped out some additional commands, sending a still image to the doe’s terminal, “anyone you recognize? Merc unit or maybe a new pirate faction?”

Fern spent several seconds scrutinizing the dark silhouette painted on the bows of several of the WarShips. A winged creature with a large, gaping, toothy mouth; posed as thought leaping at the viewer. She finally gave her frustrated response, “never seen it before.

“Keep tabs on them. I’ll call up the governor’s palace.”

“Will do, boss,” Briar said before closing down the channel. He looked back at the system plotter and swallowed back a lump of dread that had been building in his throat. The audible resignation in the doe’s voice in that last part―while not unexpected―had served to confirm the buck’s own weighty fears: there wasn’t anything that could be done to stop the threat headed their way. She was going to call the palace as a matter of protocol, not because she believed that it would do any good.

The buck reached out to his console and placed another call. There was no response this time, but that didn’t surprise him much, considering what the local time at the destination was. He contented himself with leaving a message, “hey, Mom; it’s Briar. Haven’t told you that I loved you in a while. Just...wanted to say it again in case...well, while I had the chance…”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 25: Forever Faithful

Blood Chit didn’t approve of the guard. At least, not at first.

He learned later though that he’d actually misinterpreted the reason for the armed Timberwolf’s Dragoons security pony standing outside the door to the medical ward aboard the Princess-Class DropShip, Wyrm, which served as the command ship for the mercenary company while they were away from their main base of operations on Magnus Station. He’d erroneously believed that their principle duty was to keep the recovering Slipshod in. However, he came to learn much later that the guard had actually been there to keep all but a select few out.

At least, until such time as Twilight Sparkle could do a magical sweep of the Dragoon forces and ferret out any changelings among them.

A grand total of six had been found. However, only five had been apprehended. The last had apparently succeeded where Doc Dee had been stymied by Slipshod, managing to overload and detonate the reactor of the DropShip that they were aboard, taking all hooves with them. A full company of BattleSteeds and their support units had been lost. The better part of two hundred lives in all.

Timberjack hadn’t taken the loss very well. Though, not quite for the reason that Blood Chit would have assumed. While the earth pony leading the mercenary unit was indeed upset at the loss of life, the true source of his frustrations was that he and his command staff had only been able to identify four of those changelings prior to Twilight’s screening.

Though the organization was effectively a ‘false flag’ group sent to the Harmony Sphere by the League-in-Exile to covertly support the Disciples of Discord and funnel intelligence on Chrysalis back to Clan space, not every mercenary serving in the Dragoon was a Clanner. The initial group had been, of course, but those leading the expedition had long understood that, if they were going to play the part of mercenaries, that meant that they were going to have to occasionally hire on new pilots as they took inevitable losses or sought to grow their company. That meant that they would risk hiring changelings.

This, too, was seen as inevitable, and actually a necessary step in maintaining their cover story. After all, everypony in the Harmony Sphere ‘knew’ that the best BattleSteed academies were on Equus―and there was some genuine merit to this too―and it would be rather odd for a premier mercenary company to inexplicably never hire otherwise very desirable pilots who had been trained at some of the best schools in the galaxy, always passing them over for objectively ‘inferior’ pilots that had received training at lesser academies. This would place them under scrutiny from the changelings, who would wonder why the Dragoons were the only large mercenary group in the Sphere who never hired pilots trained on Equus...and why they might have cause not to do so.

So, the Dragoons had elected to perform a few ‘token hires’ of pilots that were known to be changelings.

This was seen as a necessary―but largely very minor―security risk, as none of the other rank-and-file ‘Steed pilots that were taken on while the Dragoons were in the Sphere were going to be let in on the ‘big secret’ about the origin of the unit and their true mission anyway. It hardly took any ‘extra’ work to not tell the changelings anything they wouldn’t be telling the other native-born ponies anyway.

Besides, in theory, it was very simple to identify changelings if one knew what to look for, since the most obvious identifier was actually something that was not only public knowledge, but was actively bragged about by the changeling infiltrators in question: attendance of a school on Equus. For it was only the Clans who knew that the world which was the ancient origin of the races of the Harmony Sphere was now effectively a giant changeling hive.

No smelly zebra goop or alicorn magic needed! If a prospective member of the company listed Equus anywhere in their resume: changeling.

Interestingly, Twilight’s magical vetting had inadvertently identified three other pilots who had apparently lied about where they’d received their training, as they had turned out to be genuine ponies, despite insisting during their hiring interviews that they’d been to Equus academies. As far as Blood Chit had heard, there was still some ongoing debate among the lance commanders about how those pilots should be disciplined; if at all.

The news of the existence of changelings had created a rather noticeable divide among the members of the Dragoons though. The original Clan-born crew complement was completely unsurprised, as they’d been well aware of the ‘traitors’ hiding in their midsts. Meanwhile, the Harmony Sphere natives were understandably anxious, and even a little paranoid in spite of Twilight’s insistence that there could be no other changelings in their ranks. After all, those same Sphere-borns were also having to reconcile the obvious impossibility that an alicorn who could only be ‘Queen Twilight Sparkle’ was walking among them and rooting out fantastical bug-monsters that could look like anything.

Blood Chit wasn’t sure whether the Dragoons currently traveled with any therapists on their ships, but he suspected that the inclusion of such specialists would be raised as a topic for discussion during the next command staff meeting.

The crimson pegasus knew that he was still coming to terms with some things as a result of the unexpected information dump. And he’d found out weeks ago!

Which wasn’t to say that he’d really dealt with the news in all that time. Truth be told, he’d actually been avoiding Slipshod since they’d left Clan space. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t because he was afraid of the ‘Steed pilot for being a changeling, or because he ‘hated’ them for lying about what they were. Slipshod would hardly have been the only pony he’d ever met who’d lied about their past, after all. The recovery team leader had more than a few ex-coltfriends who’d done plenty of lying to him, in fact! Hiding who you were was nothing special, or specific to changelings.

...Which might have been what hurt the most, if he was being honest. Slipshod had turned out to be just another lying stallion. Maybe not one that he’d been involved with romantically, this time; but certainly one which the pegasus had been emotionally invested in. That realization had triggered some very familiar feelings in the recovery pony, and led to some subsequent familiar reactions: pushing them away, and keeping himself distant. Protecting himself from further pain.

Then, over time, as he’d started to process and work through what he felt―like had always happened after a break-up―Blood Chit had started to recognize that there was one significant difference between Slipshod’s lying and that of his exes: where past coltfriends had lied in order to take advantage of him, Slipshod had been lying to protect himself. There’d been no malicious intent behind it.

While that epiphany might have assuaged Blood Chit’s anger towards the earth pony, it also served to inspire new feelings of guilt within him for not recognizing the distinction earlier. He now realized that he’d pushed a pony away when they’d been at their most vulnerable, and most in need of the support of the ponies that were important to them.

He’d abandoned a ‘Steed pilot who was in trouble.

Some ‘recovery pony’ he was, the pegasus thought to himself bitterly. Failing at both his job, and as a friend.

It wasn’t like Slipshod had ever been anything but kind and supportive since they’d met. So few ponies on the ship seemed to know how to connect with the pegasus on such a personal level. If Slipshod and Squelch hadn’t already been married when he’d come aboard―and if he wasn’t already very happily attached as well, he reminded himself―Blood Chit didn’t doubt that he’d have been spending a lot of nights bunking in the ‘Steed pilot’s cabin…

Which was why the crimson stallion was currently perched outside the Wyrm’s medical bay: he was determined to be the supportive friend that always should have been.

If he even ever got that chance…

The door to the DropShip’s infirmary opened. Blood Chit sat up rigid on his haunches, his neck straining as he sought futilely to catch any sight of his friend. However, the layout of the clinic precluded the pegasus from seeing anything but the waiting room. A Princess-class DropShip was a far sight larger than a dinky little Mustang like the Zathura, with an operating crew north of five hundred needed to properly support the full battalion of BattleSteeds and support fighters that it carried. Which meant that their treatment facilities were also quite a bit more robust than the pair of beds and cozy doctor’s office that his own ship possessed. The Wyrm had what amounted to a genuine urgent care facility with a couple dozen beds and an actual staff of medical ponies.

One of those staff, and the earth pony that they were speaking with, were blocking most of the pegasus’ view at the moment―the majority of the blocking being perpetrated by the very large earth pony. The guard beside the door straightened up slightly at the emergence of the pair, though it didn’t look like either were intent on paying them any attention. Even Blood Chit went largely unnoticed as they finished up whatever conversation they were having.

The pegasus only caught the tail end of it, “―maybe weeks, I honestly don’t know,” the khaki unicorn mare wearing a white physician’s coat was saying, shaking her head, “I just... I don’t have experience with changelings, TJ; you know that. He’s alive, and his vitals are stable, that’s all I can say for certain. Whether his vitals are good, I genuinely have no idea. For all I know, they’re unsustainable and he’s compensating; which means that, at any moment, he could crash and die on us,” the medical pony shrugged helplessly, apparently just as unsatisfied with her answer as the pony he was talking to was.

“I understand, Vie,” Timberjack responded, sighing heavily, “and I know you’re trying your best. I’m doing what I can to get you our files on changeling physiology from back home,” he was frowning now, apparently knowing that the doctor wasn’t going to appreciate what he had to say next, “but...it’ll take some time. A couple months, at least.”

The medical mare looked disgusted by the news, “I can’t keep him alive that long without knowing what I’m doing!” she protested, “he was mostly dead when that alicorn teleported him into my med bay; and his vitals haven’t changed all that much since then!

“TJ, he’s lost a lot of blood, and I don’t have a lot of this,” the unicorn’s magic wagged a vial of green ooze in front of the earth pony, “in the blood bank!”

“Then take some from the prisoners we rounded up the other day,” the earth pony responded, as though the solution were so obvious that he was annoyed that he even had to make the suggestion to the mare.

The doctor looked utterly offended by the implication, “even putting aside all of the moral objections to harvesting prisoners for medical treatment, I don’t even know if changelings have their own version of blood types and RH factors,” she protested, “a transfusion from the wrong changeling could kill him faster than no transfusion at all!”

Timberjack massaged his brow, clearly trying not to let his frustration get the best of him and say something that would upset the mare, “then don’t give him any blood,” he responded through gritted teeth, “I don’t know what you’re expecting from me, Vie,” he said, sounding exasperated, “I told you: I’m doing what I can to help you, but there’s only so much I can do. What more do you want from me?”

“I just want you to let the princess know that when that changeling dies, it wasn’t because I didn’t do my best,” the tan-coated unicorn said.

“Nopony thinks you’re half-flanking this,” the earth pony stallion assured her, “we all know you’re doing your best under difficult circumstances―”

“When he dies?” Blood Chit reflexively bit his lip when he realized that he’d just spoken his concern aloud. He hadn’t meant to interrupt their conversation, but the word choice that the ship’s physician had used had been very difficult to ignore.

Not that it wasn’t something he hadn’t expected to hear, the pegasus mentally acknowledged. Frankly speaking, he had been surprised that Slipshod had held on as long as he had, given the state he was in after the fight in the Zathura’s ‘Steed Bay. Both he and the medic who’d eventually shown up had done what they could to bind the changeling’s wounds, but it hadn’t been easy. Try as they might, they hadn’t been able to identify any major arteries to pinch off to stem the flow of the green blood. It had just seemed to come from everywhere. They’d settled for sealing the openings in the carapass as best they could, but it had felt like a futile effort.

Twilight had appeared shortly after, alerted to the fight by one of the ship’s security ponies. Apparently, she’d only been informed of what had happened to Squelch when Victoria asked to be patched through to her quarters. The alicorn hadn’t said a word to either him or the medic. She and Slipshod had simply vanished in a flash of violet light, leaving behind only the pool of mixed red and green blood.

He’d since then only heard that the ‘Steed pilot was being treated aboard the Dragoon command ship. Nothing specific on Slipshod’s condition. Nor had it been easy to get any additional information over the next couple of days. The whole of the Dragoon fleet had been placed under a communication’s blackout while Twilight went from ship to ship, sweeping them for changelings. The blackout had been designed to ensure that any changelings aboard a ship that she was checking couldn’t warn their comrades on other ships and motivate them to do something rash.

Like blowing the reactor core.

Obviously, that precaution had only met with limited success.

Now that every ship had been screened, and every changeling agent apprehended, both comms traffic and personnel traffic could resume. Within their little fleet, at least. This did mean, at least, that Blood Chit had received permission to travel to the Wyrm. Officially, he was there to act as a liaison between the Timberwolf’s Dragoons and the Rayleigh’s Irregulars, allowing for the smaller mercenary unit to receive independent updates on their pilot’s condition. Unofficially, he wanted to be with his friend; and to have the chance to apologize for letting him down.

...While he still had the chance.

Both of the Dragoons turned to look at the crimson pegasus in the corridor, only now seeming to realize that there had been anypony else of note around to overhear their conversation. The sandy physician looked slightly abashed about having let details regarding a patient’s condition slip amidst prying ears. Timberjack, on the other hoof, didn’t appear to appreciate being interrupted by a mere visitor on his ship. Especially one who was likely only here because Twilight had twisted his hoof into allowing for an ‘interloper’ to loiter outside his med bay.

The pair exchanged looks, and then Timberjack said, “just do what you can,” he instructed her, “let me worry about the fallout,” and with only a brief acknowledging glance in Blood Chit’s direction, the gruff earth pony left down the hall, turning out of sight.

Silence hung outside the medical ward now. Even the guard shifted uncomfortably after a few seconds. Finally, the doctor sighed and waved at the pegasus, “come inside,” Blood Chit followed solemnly behind the medical mare. Once inside the clinic, his eyes immediately started scanning around for any sign of Slipshod, but it was quickly apparent that this was all a simple reception area, with no treatment beds at all. He spotted some empty beds through a nearby open door though.

His view was abruptly blocked by a stern-faced doctor. The pegasus backpedaled a couple steps and swallowed. The mare stared him down for another few seconds before seeming to satisfy herself that Blood Chit was paying attention to what she had to say. She then nodded in the direction of a chair that was sat across from a desk with a placard on it that read: “Dr. Vie Scope, MD”

“Sit. We’ll talk about your friend.”

The stallion sat down stiffly, not particularly finding the resigned tone that she’d used all that reassuring. The medical mare also took up her own seat behind the desk. She then levitated over a data tablet and started scrolling through information. Blood Chit waited patiently for her to begin. Fortunately for his nerves, he didn’t have to wait long.

“The short answer to your question is that he’s not getting better,” the unicorn began, speaking candidly. She turned the pad around so that the pegasus could see the information, which consisted of a lot of line graphs that didn’t really mean all that much to him. The lines were all fairly straight, which seemed like it was a good thing; but they were also very low to the bottom of the horizontal axis, which probably wasn’t a good thing. He knew from his own charts which Doc Dee had shown him, that doctors liked seeing lines in the middle on most things.

“And,” she continued, retracting the tablet, “if patients aren’t getting better, that’s usually an indicator that it’s only a matter of time before they get worse,” the expression she wore now was appropriately sympathetic, as she was well aware that she was delivering bad news.

“I’m a doctor, not an entomologist,” she said with an anemic shrug, “and the fact is that your friend has more in common with a cockroach than a pony. I can provide his body with nutrients...and that’s about it,” her hoof twirled dismissively as a mirthless smile creased her lips, “until I can get my hooves on a copy of Bay’s Anatomy for Bug Ponies, I’m at a loss as to what to do.

“I’m terrified to try anything more than giving him saline, because I don’t know what will kill him and what won’t.”

“I thought that High Gain sent over all of Slip’s medical fills from the Zathura?” Blood Chit asked, “wouldn’t all of his allergies or whatever be in there?”

The mare nodded her head, but her demeanor was still that of one resigned to impotency, “and those medical files were exactly what I would expect to see for a typical earth pony ‘Steed pilot. I’ve got a dozen files that are dead ringers for his in my own records,” her hoof tapped the tablet again, “which is the problem, because none of that data lines up with what I’m seeing now.”

She spun it around again and started scrolling through profiles of other ponies too fast for Blood Chit to see much more than their faces, “and it’s the same story for all the other changelings we have in custody. Even though I knew, from day one, that most of them weren’t real ponies, I’ll be damned if I could find any sign that they weren’t! But now that they’re all bugged-out, their vitals don’t match up with ponies at all.

“Which leads me to believe that, however their transformation is done, it’s not just cosmetic. They really do become whatever they turn into.

“That other changeling that was killed on your ship? The one that died as a wyvern?” the doctor brought up another file and pushed the pad towards Blood Chit. Again, the pegasus was at a loss to interpret most of the data, but it seemed that the mare was willing to explain the revelation to him anyway, “is a wyvern! Anatomy, blood chemistry, DNA―one hundred percent wyvern.

“Now, I can’t treat a wyvern,” she continued, “nor, can I treat a changeling. I just know how to treat ponies,” after a brief pause, she belatedly added, “and hippogriffs, griffons, and a few other races―but definitely not changelings.”

Realization began to dawn on the pegasus stallion, “...so, if Slip turned back into an earth pony―”

“I’d have him up and out of here in a week,” the unicorn finished with a dismissive flip of her hoof, “resection his bowels, grow him a new liver, top him off with some O-neg blood, and buck him out the door. His injuries would barely be worth my time. I’d probably even pass him off on that lazy PA of mine...”

“So how do we turn him into an earth pony again?” Blood Chit tried not to sound as hopeful as he was feeling, he really did; but he failed miserably. Hearing that his friend’s salvation was so easily attainable―

“No idea!” the mare threw up her hooves in abject surrender. To her credit, she didn’t take even the slightest bit of delight in seeing the stallions restricken face, “easiest way would obviously be to get him to do it himself,” she pointed out, “but seeing as how he’s got three hooves in the grave as it is, and I’m afraid to breathe on him too hard in case that gets the fourth hoof to join them…” another helpless shrug, “waking him up so he can try to shift isn’t an option I’m willing to take.

“Even if I do manage to wake him up without killing him, I genuinely don’t think he’d have the energy to transform anyway. Most unicorns wouldn’t even be able to levitate in his condition, let alone perform more complex magicks.”

“Then what about Twilight?” the stallion suggested, “if she can undo their transformations, then maybe she can redo them? Have you―”

Vie was already shaking her head, “asked and answered,” she informed the pegasus, “and before you ask ‘why’ she can’t, I’ll spare you the dissertation on unicorn magic and leave it at: while dispelling enchantments isn’t necessarily easier than casting them in the first place, it can be a fundamentally different process. Being able to do the latter doesn’t mean you can do the former.”

Upon seeing that Blood Chit was obviously dubious regarding her claims, the unicorn rolled her eyes and sighed, scratching her chin as she scrounge up an explanation that the pegasus would accept, “...it’s like demolishing a building,” she finally began, earning a bemused look from the stallion, “no, really, hear me out: there’s a lot of ways you can take a building down. You could do it piece-by-piece, right? Almost like reversing the order you built it in? That would be how a pony who knows how the original enchantment was done in the first place would do things: unravel the spell all neat and orderly-like.

“Or, if you can’t be bothered to learn every facet of how to deconstruct a building with all the trimmings, and you just need it gone now; you can implode it with properly placed explosive charges. Doing that gets that building down in no time flat. But that doesn’t mean the demo team is going to know the first thing about how to use those explosives to build something, does it?”

Blood Chit deflated, “so Twilight only knows how to undo changeling magic, not copy it?”

Vie nodded, “she said she put transmutation magic on the backburner after a friend of hers caught her turning apples in oranges and made her promise to stop. No idea what any of that meant,” the physician threw up her hooves in a helpless gesture upon fielding the stallion’s confused frown. Then the mare frowned, “then she asked to borrow my copy of Hinney’s Principles of Arcane Medicine and left. I mean, it’s only going to tell her how to treat ponies and donkeys, so I don’t know how much help it’s going to be...”

“What about the other changelings?”

Vie drew up short over her musings regarding the leant out medical text and looked over at the pegasus, “what about them? Look, I already told TJ: I’m not going to experiment on sentient creatures, even if they are chang―”

“No, not that! It’s just, they obviously know how changelings...change,” Blood Chit pushed past the brief falter as he recognized his lackluster word choice, “maybe they can teach you or Twilight or some other unicorn how to do it?”

“Ha!” the stallion didn’t appreciate how derisive the laugh from the khaki unicorn sounded, “if you can get one of them to actually help us, I’ll eat my stethoscope!

“Buddy, half of them tried to blow up the DropShips they were on―one even succeeded!” she spat out bitterly. Loath to abuse the prisoners the mare might be, but that obvious didn’t mean that she thought at all fondly of them, Blood Chit recognized, “whatever you’d need to promise them for their help―if they’re even willing to give it!―TJ won’t agree to it. I guarantee it.”

“Maybe they’ll be willing to help one of their own kind?” he offered, hopefully.

“Isn’t your pilot supposed to be some sort of traitor or something?”

“They might not know that! I can tell them that one of their other operatives in the Dragoons was hurt when we caught him, and we need them to change him into a pony so we can treat him,” the suggestion didn’t sound all that implausible to the stallion’s own ears, at least, despite how unconvinced the doctor still looked, “worst case scenario, they say ‘no’ and we’re still no worse off than we are right now,” he pointed out.

That much the unicorn conceded, “alright,” she relented, “I’ll call TJ. Get you a meeting. I still think you’re wasting your time; but it’s your time to waste, so…”

Within the hour, the crimson pegasus stallion was being escorted down to the DropShip’s brig. It wasn’t a very large section of the ship, which he supposed made some sense. Mercenary DropShips weren’t typically enlisted to conduct prisoner transports. At most, they were used to keep particularly unruly members of the crew segregated, or for transport of high-profile targets that might have been captured during a mission. If more accommodations were necessary for the transport of a large number of captives, then a dedicated prison transport could be acquired for the purpose.

The Wyrm had exactly six small cells. Five of which were occupied, as Timberjack had decided that he preferred all of their changeling captives to be kept in a singular area for better accountability. Two uniformed ponies stood guard over the detention area at all times. The third security pony who had led Blood Chit down here remained as well, with instructions to make sure that the Irregulars member made it back without managing to get himself swapped with one of the changelings somehow.

What surprised the stallion a bit was the fact that all five of the captives appeared to be lounging in their changeling forms. None of them seemed interested in retaining their old identities. This was the second time that Blood Chit had ever seen changelings before. The first had been a few days ago, when Slipshod had reverted from being a slingtail. These specific individuals looked understandably far more healthy and intact though.

One of them perked up at the sound of his approach, glancing out of the door with their solid amethyst eyes from where they were lounging on the cot in their cell. An amused little smirk manifested across its mouth as it announced to its comrades, “heads up; we got another looky-loo!” chittering sounds started coming from the other cells, like a collection of agitated hornets were gathering, “let me guess: you’re ‘nice cop’?”

Then, without warning, and before Blood Chit could even react, the changeling flung itself at him! For a brief moment, the pegasus entirely forgot about the locked door and the steel bars that caged the changeling and recoiled back. His hooves tipped over themselves in his panicked efforts to get away and he ended up falling to the deck against one of the other cells. A loud ‘hiss’ from right beside his ears hat the stallion scrambling a second time. The commotion drew the attention of the nearby guards, but when all that they saw was their mercenary visitor falling over themselves without being in any obvious danger, they started to snicker amongst themselves, prompting Blood Chit’s cheeks to flush.

The changeling who’d spoken licked at the air with a tongue that looked entirely too long for the pegasus stallion’s liking, their eyes half-lidded in a clear indication of pleasure as they chittered contentedly. Slowly, they withdrew from the bars and returned to reclining on their bunk, “hmm...it’s been a while since I got to taste real fear up close like that…” they purred.

The crimson stallion cleared his throat and smoothed out his plumage, still mentally fuming from how easily he’d been spooked by the caged changelings, “I thought you guys were supposed to go after love,” he muttered.

“We survive on love,” the changeling corrected pointedly, “but that doesn’t mean that we don’t appreciate other emotions as well. Personally, I find terror to be particularly delectable.

“I know an earth pony mare who eats peppers hot enough to power a BattleSteed,” they added, “it’s kind of like that.”

“So you’re saying that you’re going to take a really uncomfortable shit later today?” Blood Chit shot back.

“That actually wasn’t a half bad comeback, Vespa,” another changeling chuckled from their cell, “this one could be some fun after all.”

The amethyst-eyed changeling nodded their head from one side to the other, as though considering the remark, “maybe,” they conceded, “let’s see...” their eyes now focused squarely on the pegasus as they massaged their chin with one of their pockmarked legs.

“...well, he’s definitely not a Clanner,” they remarked matter-of-factly, “not arrogant enough,” Blood Chit wasn’t certain if that was a compliment or not, “not a Dragoon either,” the changeling continued, “not enough self-confidence, “ okay, that one felt like an insult.

“Not cocky enough to be a ‘Steed pilot. He doesn’t stand like he owns the Sphere,” that observation actually provoked Blood Chit to straighten up a little, now that he was aware that his haunches had been slouching a little. This reaction evoked a fanged grin from the changeling and a scowl from the pegasus as he realized how easily he was being manipulated by their comments. Besides, it wasn’t like ‘Steed pilots were all that bad―

“But he likes ‘Steed pilots,” the changeling noted, almost like they were reacting to his thoughts, taking the stallion aback, “so he either doesn’t work with them at all, or works with them really closely,” the changeling was rubbing their hooves together, licking their lips as they started to really get into the little game that they were playing with the pegasus.

“Can’t be a merc and not be around pilots, so close it is,” they reasoned, “which means technician―nope…” Blood Chit felt a chill in his gut as he continued to watch the changeling dissect his thoughts in real time. He was finding the experience quite unsettling. The changeling smacked their lips and flashed another toothy smile his way, “Delicious…”

“Recovery team,” a different changeling deduced from down the corridor, “salvage tech would smell greasier.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” the violet-eyed changeling concluded with a soft clap of their hooves, “nail on the head there, Apis. We have ourselves a member of a recovery team. Probably from the pissant little merc outfit that brought that Commonwealth pretender back home.

“Now what brings a sweet little pony like yourself down here to see our lowly selves?” they asked in a sardonically sweet tone. After several moments of silence during which Blood Chit didn’t offer an answer, the changeling added, “no, really; I’m asking. We’re empaths, not mind-readers. Why are you here?”

Blood Chit grimaced, trying not to let how annoyed he was at how easily they’d inferred so much about him show on his face. He'd ‘known’ that changelings could feed off of emotion, and that this predictably meant that they could also sense emotions as well. However, he’d apparently not really been able to properly prepare himself for what that truly meant insofar as not being able to keep how he was feeling a secret from them. ‘Tough buck’ acts clearly weren’t going to work on changelings, so there was no point in trying to pretend like he had any more pull than he really did.

That didn’t mean that obfuscation was completely off the table though, he reasoned. Like the changeling had said: they weren’t mind readers. As long as he wasn’t trying to mask his feelings, they shouldn’t be able to figure out that he was keeping anything from them. He should still be able to accomplish what he’d come down here to do, “a friend of yours is dying in the ship’s med bay,” the pegasus began, “the doctor doesn’t know how to treat him. Not while he’s a changeling. If one of you can help turn him into a pony, we can save his life.”

The changeling with the violet eyes maintained their amused smirk, though their gaze did narrow noticeably, “nope, I was wrong: you’re obviously the dumb cop,” this prompted a few snickers from the other cells. Now they directed a bored expression right back at Blood Chit, “only an idiot lies to a changeling.”

“I’m not lying,” the stallion insisted, “there is a changeling in the med bay dying! You can help save him―”

“The lie was that he’s not ‘our’ friend,” the changeling interrupted, now sounding a little annoyed at having to make the correction, “he’s yours. Which makes you double-dumb for still feeling attached even when you know what he is,” now their smile was predatory, “no wonder you ponies are so easy to manipulate. Even when confronted with an obvious enemy, you’ll delude yourself into believing that they still care about you because of the ‘special bond’ that the two of you share that’s totally different from the exact same fake ‘bond’ that changelings share with every other creature in the Sphere.”

As they continued to speak, their sneer had grown more and more contemptuous, their eyes burrowing harder into the pegasus, “it’d be hilarious, if it wasn’t just so pathetically sad,” they spat.

Blood Chit hated that the comments that the other changeling was making had prompted him to again question whether Slipshod actually did care about him or any other members of the Zathura’s crew. Sure, on the surface, it could be argued that he’d only stopped the other changeling in order to keep himself from being killed in the sabotage attempt. However, that didn’t explain why Slipshod had taken his attention off the fight long enough to save Blood Chit’s own life from the falling ammo jack. It had nearly gotten the ‘Steed pilot killed.

Somepony who was just ‘pretending’ to care about others didn’t risk getting themselves killed to protect them. This changeling either didn’t know what they were talking about, or was just trying to fuck with him some more. The stallion staunchly pushed their comments from his thoughts as a result, “they’re still a changeling,” he pointed out, “are you going to help one of your own kind, or not?”

“Why should we care?” another of the captive changelings piped up from further down the corridor, “do you honestly expect any of us to think we’re going to get out of this alive? Let him die. Spare him the tedium of sitting in a cell waiting to be tortured to death or getting popped out an airlock after they get what they want from us.”

“That’s not what’s going to happen to you,” the stallion insisted, and then immediately winced as he recognized his own inward uncertainty. He wanted to believe those weren’t the fates that awaited the captive changelings. However, he’d heard the rumors about what had been done to Slipshod while in the custody of the Clanners on the zebra planet. The pegasus honestly had no idea what Timberjack’s plans for these changelings were. Did the mercenary leader intend to keep them locked down here for the months―maybe even years―that it took to oust the changelings from Equus?

Assuming that they succeeded, what did that mean for the other changelings in the galaxy anyway? A species that specifically preyed on other creatures to a potentially lethal degree? Would changelings even be allowed to exist in the galaxy after it was freed?

...Would they be hunted to extinction for the good of the rest of the galaxy?

Blood Chit didn’t honestly know, and that realization didn’t sit very comfortably with him.

“...Exactly,” the violet-eyed changeling―Vespa―said in a grim tone, “even you know it will. So, aagin: what’s in it for us to help you? What’s in it for them to be helped? If you really think of them as a ‘friend’, be merciful and go slit his throat yourself.”

The mere thought of doing something like that to Slipshod horrid the pegasus. Which seemed to prompt both another amused chuckle, as well as a salivating lick of the lips, from Vespa. Blood Chit glared at the changeling, “if you believe that, then why haven’t you offed yourself yet?” he challenged.

“Because I want to live long enough to watch you morons jump into the Faust System,” they responded, completely nonplussed as they idly polished their hoof against their chest. They began laughing now, “I bet you think the WarShips are the biggest threat you have to contend with there. Ha!

“They won’t need to fire a shot,” Vespa sneered at him, “our queen has grown so powerful with all of the love she’s absorbed over the years, she’ll be able to vaporize your whole invasion force with a single spell!”

“Vespa!” another changeling hissed from their cell across the hall, “shut up, you idiot!”

The changeling clamped their mouth closed, their violet eyes widened in surprise as they too seemed to realize that they’d gotten carried away and said more than they’d intended to. Blood Chit suspected that they indeed had given away more information than they might have liked, since he found himself contemplating the wording that they’d used.

“Love makes changelings stronger?” he asked aloud, regarding the now very much abashed and cowed changeling, “it’s not just food for you?” Vespa pointedly said nothing, opting instead to simply glare at the pegasus in silence. Now it was Blood Chit’s turn to smile. He might not be able to sense emotions like a changeling, but he could tell when somepony was angry; and anything that pissed off these changelings was good news in his book, “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.

“Thank you; you’ve been a great help!” the crimson stallion grinned at the changelings, turned, and trotted towards the waiting guardponies, “can one of you take me to the bridge? I’ve got to make a call to my ship.”

As he left the brig, he heard one of the other changelings―he thought it was the one that had been identified as ‘Apis’―comment, “you better hope they toss you out an airlock, you moron. Because the queen will literally eat you alive if she finds out what you just did…”

When the call came across the terminal in her quarters, Twilight Sparkle was laying back on her bunk staring intently at the spell matrix diagrams in the text that she had borrowed from the Dragoon physician. She honestly didn’t hear the chime the first few times. When the alert finally managed to pierce through the alicorn’s intent concentration, she lowered the tome and glanced over at the terminal screen, her face creased in mild annoyance at the interruption.

It was an expression that vanished immediately when she noted the profile of an open-mouthed timberwolf’s head emblazoned across the screen, denoting who the call was coming in from. The alicorn promptly vaulted out of her bed, the medical text completely forgotten as she accepted the call with feelings of mixed anxiety and trepidation. There were only a hoofful of reasons that she’d be getting a comm from anypony in the Dragoons, and few of those reasons were likely to be in order to pass on good news.

The fact that it was the face of the leaders of the Rayleigh’s Irregular’s Recovery Team―and acting head of the company’s entire security division―that appeared did little to assuage the tension. Blood Chit would only be calling her to pass on news of Slipshod’s condition.

Last the alicorn knew, the prognosis had been trending in one specific direction…

“Yes, Blood Chit?” Twilight said, swallowing against the sudden dryness in her throat.

The haggard looking pegasus barely even let the mare get out her greeting before he blurted out, “Love!”

The purple mare blinked in mild surprise as her brain fought for context, “what?”

“I talked with the changeling prisoners on the ship,” the crimson stallion explained, “they mentioned that their queen would be really powerful because of all the love she’d been gathering,” Twilight winced as she realized that this was one detail which she had been loath to consider during all of their planning conferences thus far. Mostly because there was little that could be done to counter it if it were the case. She’d seen alicorns defeated by a love-powered Chrysalis in the past; and that had just been when she’d been the recipient of the love of a single stallion.

She shuddered to consider the possibility of facing off against a changeling queen who had been stockpiling the love of billions over the centuries…

However, that didn’t mean that they still didn’t have to try.

This bitter reminder of how steep of an uphill battle the invasion would ultimately be mercifully did not seem to have been the point of the stallion’s call to her, “is it the same with regular changelings? Does love give them more power, or strength, or whatever?”

Twilight’s mind flashed with another memory from a bygone era. “Yes,” she answered easily, the barest hint of a smile tugging at her lip as she was reminded of a much happier time in her life, “any changeling drone with enough love can accomplish simply amazing things. Why do you...ask…”

Of course, the purple mare almost immediately recognized exactly why Blood Chit was asking her about the validity of that little fact about changelings, “if we can get Slipshod enough love, we can save him,” she concluded without prompting from the pegasus, who was looking through the screen at her with a hopeful expression of his own.

“I’ll go to his side right now! I’ll let you know when he improves―” the stallion blurted, obviously quite satisfied with the news that he’d just received.

However, here Twilight was going to have to put a slight damper on things, “Blood Chit,” the alicorn cautioned the pegasus, drawing him up short, “we’re talking about real love. Beyond platonic. Even more than just romantic love. To supercharge a changeling requires genuine, unadulterated, true love.

“You have a coltfriend, yes?” the stallion nodded hesitantly, “can you honestly say that you love Slipshod more than your coltfriend?”

“Well, I mean, of course I don’t, but…” the pegasus faltered, looking plaintively at the screen, “fuck, I’m not even sure I feel that strongly about my coltfriend!”

“I’m not saying that the love you feel for your friend won’t help,” Twilight conceded to the distraught stallion, “but it won’t be enough to save him,” she shared a look with the pegasus, “there may be only one pony on this ship who can,” both ponies wore grim expression now. Each was aware that the pony in question had what could be charitably described as a ‘rocky’ history with the changeling.

However, Squelch was his only hope of salvation, “go to him,” Twilight said with a sigh as she contemplated the conversation that she was about to have with the unicorn, “I’ll go talk with her.”

“Okay,” the alicorn hated herself for eroding the recovery pony’s prior enthusiasm like that, but she wouldn’t have felt right sending him Slipshod filled with false hope that might ultimately not pan out, “I’ll see you in a bit,” the screen went dark before Twilight could caution the pegasus on feeling even that optimistic.

“I sure hope so,” the purple mare sighed.

Five minutes and a quick call up to the bridge to confirm Squelch’s whereabouts later, Twilight Sparkle was standing outside of the sage green unicorn’s quarters. She depressed the call button and waited patiently to be acknowledged, “yes?”

“It’s Twilight. Can we talk? It’s important.”

A moment later, the door slid open to admit the alicorn. She stepped inside and gave the cabin a cursory scan. The interior certain gave the appearance of a pony who had been kept rather busy the past few days. The desk was cluttered, the trash can was overflowing, and the bed looked untouched. At some point in the recent past, one of the galley’s coffee machines had been migrated into Squelch’s cabin. Likely because it was less hassle than bringing the unicorn a fresh mug every hour of the day.

The sage unicorn barely even looked up from her terminal long enough to acknowledge her guest, offering little more than a grunt as she continued to furious tap away at her console, “what do you need?”

“It’s about Slipshod.”

There was the briefest of pauses, but the mare continued to work, not looking away from the display, “is he dead?” the words were uttered so flatly, that it was hard to determine how she might have processed the news if Twilight had come here to tell the mare that he had died.

“Do you still love him?”

Squelch stopped working. She cast a cold look in the alicorn’s direction, “what?”

“Do you still love Slipshod? It’s important,” Twilight insisted.

“Not to you it’s not,” the unicorn turned away once more and resumed tapping at her console, “it’s that’s all you wanted to talk about, get the fuck out of here.”

“You’re right: it’s not important to me,” Twilight conceded, not moving from where she stood, “but it’s a matter of life and death for Slipshod.

“Do. You. Love. Him?”

Squelch suddenly slammed her hooves on her desk and reeled on the alicorn, glaring balefully, “what does it matter how I feel about him?!”

The purple alicorn remained stoic in the face of the obvious irate mare, “because if you do, you could save his life.

“If you don’t, he’ll almost certainly die.”

The unicorn recoiled, looking almost disgusted with the other mare. “What kind of fucking mind game are you trying to play at?”

“No games,” Twilight said, shaking her head, “just facts. Love can do more than keep a changeling alive. True love can make them genuinely powerful. With enough of it, Slipshod could even become powerful enough to mop the deck with me with one hoof tied behind his back,” she admitted, allowing a mirthless little smile to peak through her otherwise serious demeanor.

“Exposure to real love right now could help Slipshod recover,” the alicorn continued, “but it has to be real love. What Xanadu feels for him, or Channel Lock, Blood Chit, Rigger Brush―any of the others who just think of him as a ‘good friend’? That won’t do it.

“You once loved him enough to marry him,” she reminded the unicorn, prompting a bitter grimace and an averted gaze from the sage mare―which wasn’t exactly a reassuring sign, Twilight thought, “do you still love him now? Did you really ever?”

Wordlessly, the unicorn turned away. Her horn started glowing, a matching aura manifesting on a locker door near her bunk. It opened and a bottle of Wild Pegasus floated out. It was uncapped by the time it reached Squelch’s lips, and she was taking in several long gulps as she made her way to a far corner of her cabin. While spacious by the standards of a typical spacecraft where space was at a premium, this didn’t equate to all that much of a great distance between the two mares. Once as far away from the alicorn as she could get, the ship’s captain and owner slumped down against the bulkhead and let the―now noticeably emptier―bottle come away. She let out a haggard grunt as the liquor burned its way down her throat.

“What does ‘love’ even mean?” she growled bitterly, her eyes remaining locked on the bottle floating in front of her.

“I barely believed in the idea when I first met him. My parents…” the unicorn’s expression soured even further, “well, I’m pretty sure there was no ‘love’ there,” she quipped and took another―though much more abbreviated―sip of whiskey.

“Then into my life comes this cocky, arrogant, Celestia’s gift to ponykind, alicorn-among-ponies, stallion―you know, your average ‘Steed pilot,” she chortled, the barest hint of a smile fighting valiantly to make itself visible and very nearly succeeding, “and for the first time in my life, I felt like somepony really understood me! He knew what to say, when to say it, he even knew when not to say anything at all and just listen!

“I’d never felt so comfortable―so connected―with another pony before, in my life!” the unicorn lamented, “and the sex...oh, Celestia, the sex!” At this point, Twilight started to feel a little discomfort with the conversation. Mostly at having her mentor’s name being associated with carnal pleasure, “it was like he was inside my head, knowing exactly what to do…”

“Because he was,” the sudden tone shift in the mare as she switched from wistfully nostalgic to bitterly accusatory was jarring for the alicorn, “that son-of-a-mule was reading my emotions in order to use me! Not even as a meal ticket―fuck, I could have been content with a stallion who just wanted me for my money, as long as the sex was that good!―but, no; he used me as a literal meal!

“Do you have any idea how much that whole thing fucked me up?!” the unicorn seethed, “happily-married me coming back to our cabin to find him buried balls deep in another mare? Spending a year hating him for being a lecherous bastard. Deriding him like some bitter witch of an ex every time I saw an opening to level an insult. Believing that the only reason he even continued to hang around―parading every dockside whore in the galaxy past my cabin on his way to fuck them stupid―was just so he could go on rubbing it in my face how ‘I wasn’t good enough’ to keep him faithful!

“Only to find out―after a year of teaching myself to hate him―that the whole reason he cheated, was to save my life!” the nearly-empty bottle of whiskey went flying across the cabin, and would have shattered against the wall next to Twilight, had the alicorn not been quick with her own telekinesis and saved the liquor from its untimely fate. This move earned the alicorn a brief glare from the green mare on the floor, but Twilight had been soaked by enough drinks from other ponies for the week, and was determined to remain dry for this encounter. So she merely resealed the bottle and floated it to Squelch’s desk as the unicorn resumed her tirade.

“Even more fucked up: was that that had to be the most ludicrous excuse for cheating on your spouse that has ever been concocted by a pony caught in the act, in the history of ponykind...and I bought it! I believed that bastard! Worse? He was one hundred percent right! I saw the medical reports―I even had both Victoria’s and Timberjack’s own doctors confirm the results for the tests Dee did.

“Their diagnosis? I was well on my way to suffering permanent, serious, neurological damage. As in: rest of my life in a vegetative state, damage! Another two or three months―at the most―with my rate of decline...”

Squelch was holding her head in her hooves now, “the love of my life broke my heart...in order to save me.

“Do I love him?” the unicorn raised her head again, her expression almost manic in appearance, “lady, right now I’m torn between wanting to give that stallion the rut of his life, and strangling him to death with my bare hooves―all in the same instant!” Twilight was significantly put off by the fact that the other mare took to pantomiming the latter act, and grateful that she hadn’t done so for the former.

“Is that love? You tell me! Because I sure as shit don’t know how I feel about that fuck anymore after the rollercoaster of emotions he’s had me on since the day we met,” she finally concluded with an exasperated wave of her hooves and a near-helpless look at the alicorn.

“Well...you certainly feel a lot of something very strongly,” Twilight remarked with a sardonic smile of her own, prompting another chortle from the unicorn, “so, if you can promise not to strangle him―or rut him,” Twilight cleared her throat immediately following the addendum, “it might be worth making a trip to the Wyrm.”

Squelch leaned her head back against the wall, taking a deep breath as she sought to calm herself back down from the state that she’d ended up working herself into. After a long moment, she tapped out a short sequence on her datalink, “High Gain?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I’m leaving the ship for a bit. Hold my calls.”

“Leaving, ma’am?” the mare on the bridge asked, sounding a little confused, “but we’re not docked with any―”

“I’m teleporting over to the Wyrm with Twilight,” Squelch explained, “not sure when I’ll be back. Might only be fifteen minutes,” she said, looking over at the alicorn and saying away from the commlink, “if this doesn’t work, there’s no point in hanging around, right?”

“...Understood, ma’am.”

The unicorn cut the connection and stood up. She turned and headed for her cabin’s small washroom, “give me some time to freshen up,” she said, her magic already working to discard her current garments, “I’ll be out in a bit.”

The first thing that Squelch noticed aboard the Dragoon DropShip were the stunned expressions of the clinic staff. One of whom lost her telekinetic grip up a tray of equipment that he was carrying as he instinctively recoiled away from the brilliant purple flash and the pair of ponies who had manifested inside the medical ward. Fortunately for the contents of the tray, Twilight was just as quick with her magic here as she had been in Squelch’s quarters and caught everything before it could reach the floor. She carefully floated the supplies over to a nearby table.

“What in the―oh; it’s you,” a rather irate khaki unicorn mare began, bursting into the ward from the front reception area. She sighed and glared at the alicorn, taking note of the two others that Twilight had brought with her, “I thought I was clear about visitors? He’s in critical condition and I don’t want my staff having to work around lookie-loos!”

Squelch was barely paying attention to what the Dragoon doctor was saying, or how the alicorn that had brought her here was responding. Her attention was fixed on the nearby hospital bed, and the black form laying upon it.

She’d seen critically injured creatures before. A pony couldn’t spend most of their adult life working around BattleSteed pilots and not have seen such things. Missiles, terraspark-range magical energy beams, and high-explosive ballistic munitions, were all exceedingly capable of making a mess of the flesh and blood pilots of the ‘Steeds they struck if too much of the ablative plating designed to protective had already been blasted away. Even Slipshod had been laid up a time or two during his career.

She’d never seen him this bad before though.

Machines whose functions that she only broadly understood were clustered around the bed, most of them either beeping or humming in some fashion as they worked to stave off death. A respirator tube had been shoved down his throat. Another, smaller, hose had been fed in through the changeling’s nose. Squelch knew that one was there to keep a steady supply of nutrients and fluids going to the patient’s stomach.

Other connections had been made to the changeling’s limbs as well, these significantly more atypical when compared to what she’d seen in medical wards before. It was clear that there’d been some difficulty in establishing intravenous access in a creature that had a semi-rigid shell instead of more pliable flesh. Nonetheless, nearly a half dozen clear plastic lines had been attached at various points along his limbs that were filled with thick green fluid being cycled through at least one other machine.

Squelch’s eyes darted to one of the more prominent displays near the bed, which was currently displaying the patient’s vital signs. The unicorn might not know exactly what ‘good’ or ‘bad’ readings looked like when compared to a medical professional, but she certainly didn’t like the look of the ‘0’ next to the detected heart rate.

“Is he alive?”

Her question drew the alicorn and the Dragoon doctor out of their discussion regarding whether Squelch counted as a ‘visitor’ or a ‘treatment’, and what the proper steps of approval would have been even if she could be classified under the latter. The tan unicorn stifled and grunt with a glance at the alicorn which suggested they would be having a much lengthier discussion about this subject at a later date, and turned her attention to Squelch, apparently resigning herself to the fact that the owner of the Irregulars was here now, and would not be leaving easily.

“As best as I can tell,” Doctor Vie Scope said with a note of exasperation, though the sage unicorn didn’t get the impression it was her and Twilight that the other mare was exasperated about―in this regard, at least, “he has a heartbeat. His lungs are exchanging oxygen. There’s even the occasional bit of neurological activity,” she gestured at a small display containing―mostly―straight lines that quivered every once in a while.

Then the doctor noted the screen that Squelch was fixed on and waved away the concern, “don’t mind that asistole, it’s a problem on our end, not his. He has a heartbeat but no pulse,” she explained. Then the doctor used her magic to shift the contents of the screen, showing a pulsing line, “his EKG shows activity. Nothing like a pony heart,” she amended, “but it’s a repeating rhythm, so it’s probably okay,” the last was said with a sour note which matched up well with the doctor’s frustrated expression.

“He hasn’t improved in the last couple of days though,” Vie went on, “and, frankly, as long as he looks like this,” she waved a hoof at the changeling on the bed, “there’s not much I can do to fix him. He’s got a hole through him big enough to stick my hoof through, and it’s made a mess of all kinds of organs that I’ve never even seen before―let alone know how to put back together.”

Squelch was nodding numbly as she processed the physician’s diagnosis, her eyes never leaving the changeling. The last time that she’d seen him like this, he’d been suspended in a cell aboard Cinder’s ship, and hadn’t looked to be in much better shape either, if she was being honest.

She didn’t like it.

Not his strange appearance so much―though that was still pretty jarring. No, what she disliked the most was that he simply looked so lifeless. The Slipshod that she had in her head―whether he looked like an earth pony or not―was always self-assured and cocky. He thought that he was funnier than he really was, and wasn’t shy about making himself the center of attention. He was vibrant.

The thing lying in this bed...wasn’t.

“So,” the doctor continued, “if I could get you two to leave my clinic please and―”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Squelch stated flatly, still not taking her eyes off of Slipshod.

The kahi unicorn frowned and was about to issue a retort when Twilight stepped in between them, her gaze focused on the physician, “as I was trying to explain before: changelings are psychovores. You know this already. However, what you probably don’t know is that strong emotions don’t just sustain changelings, they can empower them.

“It is my belief that, with an infusion of enough strong, positive, emotions, Slipshod can regain enough strength to affect a shift back into his pony form. Which will allow you to properly treat him.”

The physician didn’t seem to be entirely convinced of the alicorn’s claims, but her response wasn't overtly dismissive, “look, any doctor will tell you that there’s a tangible benefit to the ‘power of positive thinking’ when it comes to treatment...but asking me to believe that ‘thinking happy thoughts’ will actually help my patient in and of itself―”

“I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes, on multiple occasions,” Twilight assured the doctor, “I promise you, this can work. Even if it doesn’t, there’s no additional risk to Slipshod.”

Doctor Vie Scope’s lips worked fitfully for several seconds as she mulled over the proposition. Finally, she let out a resigned sigh and nodded. “Fine; whatever.”

Twilight smiled, having achieved success in the next phase of her plan. She then looked between Squelch and the medical staff in the room, “perhaps some privacy as well? This is something of a personal matter.”

The tan mare was scowling again, “you want me to leave my near-death patient unsupervised while he’s subjected to a radical, untested, treatment?”

“I understand your frustration―” the alicorn began, but it was clear that the physician had her limit.

“No, I don’t think you do, or you wouldn’t be trying to kick me out of my own clinic so you can mess around with my patient! You understand that, right? How that is my patient?” she said, jabbing her hoof at Slipshod, “you’re the one who foisted him on me in the first place, remember? You don’t get to give me a patient and then start interfering with how I treat them. That’s not how this works!”

Twilight wasn’t looking any too thrilled by this point either, her lips drawing themselves into a thin line, “I assure you that I appreciate everything you’ve done, Doctor Scope; truly. I don’t doubt your commitment to your profession, or your patients. However, this is one matter where, the simple fact is, your professional training is lacking―through no fault of your own.

“I am asking you to be gracious and acknowledge my recommendation for a course of treatment―as I imagine you would when reviewing a prognosis from a specialist during a referral,” now her features shifted to become a little more mischievous, “and if I was trying to ‘kick you out’, I wouldn’t be politely asking you to leave.

“I’d just do this.”

Squelch and Twilight were suddenly alone in the clinical ward with Slipshod. Every other member of the staff had vanished in a flash of violet light. The sage unicorn’s mouth turned up in a wry smile, “oh, she’s not going to be happy about that.”

Twilight looked to the door, and zapped it with a burst of magic from her horn, forming a solid barrier across the portal, “eh, fuck her,” satisfied with her efforts to secure the room, and their privacy, she turned back to the unicorn and nodded, “I’ll, uh, leave you to do...whatever.”

Squelch looked a little apprehensive now, fidgeting on her hooves, “what do I do? Like, kiss him or something?”

Twilight let out a soft chuckle, “I mean, if you think that’ll be the surest way of expressing how much you love him, I guess you could try that? But…” she examined the network of tubing snaking from the unconscious changeling, “that’s probably easier said than done.

“Just be here for him,” the alicorn suggested, “that’s all that matters.”

“Is it weird that I kind of hope that this doesn’t work?” the unicorn glanced over at Twilight, “I mean, if it does, then that means I’m hopelessly in love with him, right? As in: feelings that will never go away no matter what happens between us? That’s what ‘true’ love is supposed to mean, isn’t it?”

The purple mare offered a wan smile to the unicorn, “I honestly couldn’t tell you,” she admitted, “I never found love―well, never looked for it really. A crush here and there,” she offered with a wry smirk, “but nothing super serious.

“I knew a lot of creatures who found love like that though,” the alicorn continued, her features clouding slightly now, “Cady and Shiny. She never remarried after my brother passed. Discord did after Fluttershy, but I know he still keeps pictures of her―and all his partners―around his home.

“Would that really be so bad though?” Twilight asked of the sage mare, “never losing that feeling?”

The unicorn took a deep breath and nodded along in understanding, though she wasn’t sure if she genuinely agreed with the sentiment. She turned to thank the purple mare, but Twilight was gone before she could say anything. Where to, Squelch wasn’t sure. Now it was just herself, Slipshod, and a symphony of beeping, whirring, machinery. The mare sighed and shook her head.

“My life used to be simple before I met you, you know that?” she muttered to the changeling as she stepped around and sat down next to the bed.

“No grand conspiracies, no changeling cabals, no massive army of dragons poised to invade the Sphere…” the paused and thought for a moment, frowning, “well, I guess those things all still existed,” the admitted, before shooting Slipshod an accusatory glare, “but I didn’t used to know about them!

“I mean, I wouldn’t’ve gone out and founded a merc outfit if I didn’t want at least some excitement in my life, but this has all been a bit much. I wasn’t prepared for it, and I don’t like that,” she groussed, “I hate getting involved in situations I don’t understand, because then how am I supposed to know what the consequences are? What contingencies to make?

“It’s...frustrating. You’re frustrating,” she added, shooting another glare at the changeling, “because it turns out I didn’t understand you either.

“I thought I’d had you all figured out too: disgraced noble turned freelance pilot. So cliche, I didn’t think twice about it. Didn’t think twice about you. You were just another ‘Steed jockey on my payroll...until you weren’t. You flirted with just about everypony when you came onboard. I figured it was who you were. A lot of nobles are rakes anyway.

“So, when you flirted with me, I brushed it off,” Squelch went on. Her features had softened by now, her eyes lingering on the changeling’s inert face. It was silly of her to think that she could see any of the familiar features there from his earth pony identity, but the unicorn still felt like she could. Inexplicably, it did look like Slipshod...somehow, “...at first.

“Then you did more than flirt. You talked with me, and not just about yourself, or the usual chit-chatty stuff. We talked about the future of the Coursers. We talked about what we wanted from life. I eventually stopped thinking of you as an ‘employee’ and started to think about you as a partner.”

The mare snorted now, shaking her head, “I was about to give you a stake in the company and officially make you a partner, in fact. I’d even drawn up a first draft of a contract to that effect...and then you proposed.”

Squelch paused for a moment, swallowing hard against a lump in her throat. She blinked a few times, ruefully determined to banish the stinging sensation she felt mounting just beneath her eyelids. That sort of thing was beneath her.

She took another deep breath before pressing on, “no fancy dinners. No mood lighting. No big gestures,” she cracked a smile, “you produced a comprehensive accounting report showing how much money on fuel I’d save if the two of us moved in together and cut off the power to your cabin,” the unicorn rolled her eyes, “how could I do anything but say: ‘yes’...

“What followed was probably the best year of my life,” she continued in a wistful tone, “emotionally, financially...everything was perfect.

“I wanted it to last forever like that…”

Squelch was forced to pause again. With a frustrated growl, she wiped at her eyes, mentally deriding them for having the gaul to produce tears. She sniffed to clear her nose and took another deep breath, determined to ignore the burning that persisted just above her cheeks, “when I came back to...that, in our bed…” she needed to take another slow breath, reminding herself that now was not the time to physically lash out at the stallion.

“That wasn’t the first time in my life I’d been betrayed by somepony I trusted,” she said through a firmly set jaw, “that dubious ‘honor’ goes to my mother, who asked to borrow five Blue-Bills from me as a filly...and never paid it back because: ‘I didn’t have the debt in writing’,” she sneered at the bitter memory.

“...but it was the betrayal that hurt me the most,” a mirthless chuckle managed to escape her lips, “I think I’d have been less angry if you’d actually embezzled from me or something. Because I could have understood stealing money from me. Ponies want as much money as they can get. I could have rationalized it.

“But cheating on me…” she sighed, “I didn’t understand that.

“We never argued. We never fought. You were always happy. I was always happy. I didn’t understand it, and you never tried to explain it.

“In hindsight, I think you knew that, if you’d given me any kind of excuse at all, I’d have bought it and tried to work things out between us,” the unicorn acknowledged ruefully. A little part of her was rather scathing for acknowledging that she might have been that...was ‘naive’ the word? Or was ‘desperate’ more fitting? Either way, she didn’t like the implication of what taking Slipshod back in exchange for whatever flimsy excuse the stallion had mustered would have been in regards to her character.

“You just told me that was the kind of stallion you were, and I either had to accept that or end things. So of course I ended things. I rationalized keeping you on payroll―Celestia knows why…” Squelch trailed off now. She closed her eyes and sighed, “no. I know why.

“I didn’t want you gone,” she reluctantly admitted.

“I hated you for what you did, but I still wanted you around; because I’d never been able to work so well with somepony before, the way that I could work with you. ‘Talking shop’ still seemed to be something that the two of us could do with some civility...so I took what I could get. I’d lost a husband, but I could still keep a good employee―a business partner.

“I could live with that. I did live with that.”

She glared over at the unconscious changeling, “and before you think I’m about to get overly sentimental on you; I can live without you too!

“...I just wouldn’t want to. If I can help it,” she amended more soberly.

“And now, Twilight’s telling me that I can ‘help it’; I just have to ‘love you enough’, or something else just as inane-sounding!” she threw her hooves up in the air, letting out a frustrated groan, “what? It’s not enough that I kept you around after you broke my heart? Not enough that I listened to you over my own better judgement and kept Twilight around―which is why I’m now flank deep in all this shit, by the way!

“It’s not enough that I want the two of us to always be carrying on together after all of this craziness is finally behind us?” her questions now sounded meke and wistful to her own ears. She was looking helplessly at the unconscious figure laying in the bed. Nothing about his condition or situation had seemed to change throughout the whole interaction. Which only frustrated the mare even further, prompting her to glare accusingly at the monitoring equipment, as though it was at fault for her lack of progress.

“What do you want from me?!” Squelch wasn’t sure if she was yelling at Slipshod of the equipment now, “do I need to actually say it? Is that how this works? Fine! I love you, you fuck!” she screamed at the changeling.

“I want you in my life forever! Happy now?!” she glared once more at the monitors, but she couldn’t spot any change in their readings.

“Bullshit!” she spat, going so far as to lash out and punch the display. The screen cracked and went dark. She wheeled on the changeling now, but fortunately managed to restrain herself from punching him for his lack of cooperation too, “that’s bullshit, and you know it!

“You’re a fucking changeling; you know exactly how I feel about you! You’ve always known, and that’s why you keep pushing me away; to ‘protect me’, or some shit. Well fuck you and your ‘protection’! I’m not some defenseless filly; I can protect myself just fine,” she screamed at the changeling, seething, “I run a fucking mercenary company, for Celestia’s sake. I like a little danger in my life!”

She wasn’t sitting anymore. The sage green unicorn mare was now up and leaning on the bed, staring directly down at the unconscious stallion’s face as she raged at him. His continued failure to respond to her screaming only further fueled her mounting frustration.

“For fuck’s sake, we could all die the moment we jump into Faust; so I don’t really care if loving you puts my life at risk,” she insisted, “I’d rather have just the one more year of life with you in it, than a hundred more without you…”

The admission, and the personal acknowledgement that came along with it, seemed to drain the mare of her anger. She deflated, resigned to her obvious failure, bowing her head over the changeling. Her brow brushed up against him. He felt so different now, compared with how she remembered it feeling when they’d cuddled up with each other in their past. Yet...it still felt like him somehow.

“...don’t make me do this without you.”

The machines around them hummed and beeped.

Then something hard brushed up against her hoof. Squelch jerked with a start and looked over. One of Slipshod’s pocked hooves was arched over her left fetlock. The mare gasped and pulled her head back, looking to the changeling’s face. One eye was half-lidded. Though there was no visible pupil within the amber orb, she knew immediately that the changeling was looking at her.

The tsunami of emotions was incredibly difficult for Squelch to process as she realized that he’d regained consciousness. She’d be a fool to think that the changeling was anywhere close to being meaningfully ‘better’, but it was certainly a marked improvement on his condition!

The unicorn very quickly fought to clamp down on the whirlwind of thoughts rushing through her head. She grudgingly admitted to herself that it was rather pointless to try and hide how she was feeling from a changeling, but the mare still felt inclined to at least pretend that she could retain some measure of dignity in her otherwise emotionally vulnerable state. So she took a moment to school her features and compose herself, doing her best to level a neutral expression at the bedridden stallion, “good; you’re not dead. I don’t need to post a wanted ad after all.

“Now turn yourself back into a pony so the doctors here can operate and save your life,” she instructed him, “because if you die and I do have to take out an ad? The cost’s coming out of your death benefits.”

It was a faint thing, but the corners of the changeling’s chitinous mouth pulled back in a rather pathetic approximation of a smile. But it was likely the best that the stallion was actually able to manage in his condition, and around the ventilator that was currently jammed down his throat, along with the paralytics that would have been injected into his neck to keep any residual gag reflexes in check. He lifted his head slightly, his eyes taking in his current situation, and the myriad of tubes coming out of his body.

Satisfied that he’d seen enough, Slipshod lay his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes. For a moment, Squelch was concerned that he’d fallen unconscious again. However, those worries were soon set aside when a green magical flame erupted at the crown of his head and spread down along his body. It krept slowly along his figure, morphing his figure as it went, molding it in such a way as to accommodate the medical equipment intruding on his body.

Nor did the transformation seem to limit itself to just his body either. As the mare watched, flickers of flame wormed their way through the various lengths of tubing, turning the green ichor into normal-looking red blood. Soon, a familiar-looking golden earth pony stallion lay where a changeling had been only moments ago. When it was over, a brown eye peered up at the unicorn. A half-lidded, visibly exhausted, eye. Another attempt at a smile was made.

Squelch wasn’t even aware that she’d been holding her breath when she let out the long, relieved, sigh. She maintained her impassive expression, but there was no doubt in her mind that Slipshod was able to clearly sense the immeasurable relief that she was feeling within, “good.

“By the way,” she added, her gaze became more stern as she looked at the stallion, “I’ve looked over your file,” she lied, “and I’ve calculated that, by the time you’re discharged from here, you’ll have used up all of your contracted sick days.

“If you take any more this year, I’ll be forced to count it as unpaid leave, and deduct it from your salary,” she took a breath and swallowed in an effort to keep herself looking properly reproachful at the prospect of an employee who was mismanaging their paid leave days. It mostly worked, “so...no more getting yourself almost killed. Got it?”

Slipshod simply looked at her, and gave the barest hint of a nod.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 26: Close Quarters

“If I didn’t know any better―and I honestly don’t,” the light gray earth pony stallion muttered as he finished up his morning check of his patient, “I’d say you were improving remarkably fast,” he stepped away from the bed and fumbled briefly as he tried to remember what cabinet the exam equipment he’d been using ha come from. He paused for a moment and glanced over his shoulder at the ‘Steed pilot, “...you guys can’t, like, fake vitals, right?”

Slipshod’s face scrunched up slightly in an uneasy expression, “technically, we could...but that’s not super easy to do without also suffering from the actual effects of those vitals,” he explained, “I could ‘fake’ a fever...but only by actually giving myself a fever, so…”

The medic frowned and finished putting away the equipment, “worst. Superpower. Ever.

“In that case, I guess you’re doing okay. Though, I still don’t really know how well you’re supposed to be doing two weeks after a surgery like the one you had,” he shrugged, “that Dragoon doctor said to give you a month though. So, I guess I’m still going to insist you stay here?”

The changeling chuckled, “you’re the doc, Doc.”

The other stallion grimaced at Slipshod’s use of the title. Understandable. Until two weeks ago, young Cravat had been a mere medic serving with Blood Chit’s recovery team. His principal duties had consisted of performing first aid and stabilizing patients long enough to reach Doc Dee for more definitive care. His knowledge and training regarding diagnosing and treating patients on a more long-term basis was limited, to say the least.

However, he was currently the most knowledgeable medical pony on the Zathura―beating out Caduce, the medic attached to the ship’s security detail, by a whole four months―which meant that he was first in line to be ‘promoted’ to ship’s doctor. Until such a time as Squelch could secure a replacement, at least.

As Slipshod understood it, offers had been made from both the Timberwolf’s Dragoons, as well as Victoria Blueblood, to loan the Irregulars a real physician in the interim. However, the unicorn mare running the company did not particularly like the idea of any more ponies on her ship that answered to outside authorities before they answered to her. It was her ship and mercenary company, after all. She tolerated Twilight and Cinder well enough, but that was because they were nominally her clients. She was less thrilled at the prospect of having a member of the ship’s operating crew who wasn’t technically on her payroll.

A posting for the position had been issued―targeted towards residents of the Our Worlds League, since that was where they were headed―and Squelch anticipated being able to conduct interviews in a month or so. In the meantime though, that meant that a ‘lowly medic’ constituted the highest medical authority on the ship. For better or worse.

Not that it made much of a difference to the changeling. It turned out that Doctor Vie Scope was quite the skilled surgeon. True to her alleged boasting, she’d had Slipshod stitched back together and on the mend within hours of his reverting back to an earth pony. He’d been transferred back to the Zathura the following morning too. Though, Slipshod suspected that the reason for that had been so that the Timberwolf physician could rid her DropShip of the last lingering excuse that Twilight might use to try and return to the vessel after being summarily ‘banished’ from it by Doc Scope.

The doctor had not taken very kindly to being teleported out of her own medical ward by the alicorn so that she could experiment with ‘homeopathic medicine’. Strictly speaking, Timberjack hadn’t appreciated the reported events either, as Slipshod understood things. While Timberwolf’s Dragoons were nominally under the direction of the League-in-Exile, Slipshod got the impression that, after many decades of operating largely unsupported in the Sphere, the mercenary outfit wasn’t feeling quite as beholden to the Clans as some of their leadership might have liked.

Slipshod wasn’t sure if Timberjack and the other Dragoons were quite at the point of outright bucking any of Twilight’s or Cinder’s orders―after all, they wanted Chrysalis gone as much as anycreature―but it also wouldn’t be accurate to say that they were prostrating themselves before the Princess-Returned. They certainly didn’t hold anywhere near the same reverence for Twilight that Cinder did. Though, it had been Slipshod’s observation that few creatures, even out among the Clans, had.

Falling off the face of the galaxy for a few centuries seemed to have eroded her relevance among even her ‘supporters’.

He knew that a discussion had been held regarding continuing to keep Twilight’s existence a secret any longer. Especially now that word of the existence of the Clans had reached Chrysalis. The thought had been that, if they came forward with news of the ‘real’ Twilight Sparkle’s existence, they might be able to better entice some of the major powers to support the Clans in the invasion of Equus.

Ultimately, this had been decided against. While Chrysalis might know about the Clans, and their planned invasion, the existence of changelings was still not common knowledge among the inhabitants of the Sphere. They were in a much better position now to spread that knowledge, perhaps, but that didn’t necessarily make it the best course of action. Changeling agents operated within the highest echelons of the Successor States governing bodies. Putting the word out brazenly might motivate those high-placed agents to do something drastic.

Like whatever the equivalent of detonating a ship’s reactors was in political or economic terms.

Trying to mobilize a military after its entire logistical network had been sabotaged by changeling operatives looking to cripple it was hardly an ideal situation.

It was still in the best interests of their plan to keep matters quiet as much as they could. Approach only who they needed to, when they needed to, and vet key players when necessary. Chrysalis might know that the Clans were coming, but even Twilight didn’t know when the invasion would begin in earnest. Which meant that they still possessed at least a marginal element of surprise, and it was still in their best interests to stay off ComSpark’s radar by making a spectacle of themselves or their efforts to galvanize the Sphere against her.

Besides, there was only so much that Chrysalis could openly do as well. ComSpark wasn’t a governing body, and exercised effectively zero executive or martial control over any nation. They had military forces of their own, obviously, but their strength on paper was very different from their actual numbers. If too many ComSpark forces started to pop up or move around the galaxy at once, that might prompt the larger star nations to ask some very dangerous―for Chrysalis―questions. This meant that the changeling queen’s deployments would have to be done a little bit at a time.

At least, right up until the first Clan forces appeared in the Sphere. Once the invasion kicked off in earnest, all bets were off.

Even then, ‘Twilight Sparkle’ did not―officially―have the authority to order any military force to take any action. At most, she could, through ComSpark and the Mercenary Review Board, hire the major mercenary companies to combat the Clans when they appeared. Now, that wasn’t to say that her agents in the Successor State governments couldn’t employ their political capital in order to pressure the leadership into doing what Chrysalis said. However, bureaucracies, by their nature, moved at glacial speeds. If the changeling queen wanted fast results, going the MRB route was her best option.

Meanwhile, their best option actually did lie in approaching the political leaders of the major powers. They didn’t have the ability to compete with the monetary incentives that Chrysalis could offer―especially since ComSpark could legitimately create all the money it needed to incentivise the mercenary companies. It was their proprietary currency, after all. Which meant that they had to appeal to the sensibilities of the government officials.

That wasn’t to say that any of their efforts were certain to meet with success. Strictly speaking, Slipshod had his doubts regarding how many of the various leaders were likely to be persuaded to join together into any sort of cohesive coalition against ‘ComSpark’. Especially given how long those same star nations had been fighting each other. He wasn’t even convinced that Victoria Blueblood and Natch Belle getting married would legitimately create any sort of alliance between the Pony Commonwealth and the Federated Moons. After all, unlike Victoria, Natch wasn’t actually the one in charge in the Federation. That distinction fell to his older brother, Menulis.

So unless Menulis was willing to put aside centuries of animosity for the sake of his younger brother, or unless he met an untimely end before producing an heir, there wasn’t any genuinely concrete alliance that would come about from their marriage.

At least, as far as Slipshod knew. Not that he was always right about such things…

The changeling’s musings were interrupted by an intrusion into the Zathura’s small clinic by three more ponies, “good morning, Doc,” a beaming crimson pegasus stallion greeted, seeming to delight in the slight wince from the ship’s acting physician as he used the traditional honorific for the position, “how’s the patient?”

“He’s fine, as far as I can tell, sergeant,” Cravat answered.

“Well enough for guests?” the ship’s recently promoted head of security nodded in the direction of the two other ponies with him. Slipshod felt himself reflexively tense at the sight of the pair of security ponies: a silver pegasus mare and a blue earth pony stallion. Each of whom were members of the company’s security detachment. He’d known them for the better part of two years, since signing on with Squelch’s ship, and had fostered a cordial relationship with both ponies.

However, the last couple of months had been...rocky. Especially the last encounter he’d had with them.

The changeling was able to calm himself soon after that initial reaction to the sight of the security ponies though. Mostly as a result of picking up on their own emotional states: guilt, remorse, embarrassment, and disgust. That last feeling being directed inward, rather than towards any other individuals in the room. Confirming the ‘Steed pilot’s burgeoning theories regarding the purpose of this visit, Blood Chit introduced the pair, “Slip, these two have something they want to say to you.”

There was a biting edge in the crimson stallion’s tone that made the other two wince upon hearing it. Slipshod got the impression that there had been at least one conversation between the three―perhaps even including Squelch―that he’d not been aware of. However, he found no evidence that this visit was truly being compelled, or lacked sincerity. They felt bad for what they’d done…

...though not for why they had done it. That was a worthwhile nuance to their state that wasn’t lost on the changeling, and one that he tacitly approved of. They’d genuinely believed that he’d assaulted their employer, and had been incensed by the thought that anypony would do such a thing. To them, it had been like a personal affront. Like a member of their own family had been harmed by a traitor in their midst. The pair simply could not let such a trespass go unpunished.

Slipshod could appreciate their passion...if not their diligence in making absolutely sure that the pony in custody had been the actual perpetrator of the crime. The changeling suspected that specific oversight had already been covered at length during whatever debriefings the security ponies had been a part of in the last couple of weeks.

Sabot took a deep breath, and somehow even managed to work up the courage to look the golden earth pony in the eye as she spoke, much to her credit, “we’re sorry. When we were told that Victoria and Timberjack had seen you attack the commander…” she started faltering now, but Breech Block was able to pick up where she’d trailed off.

“We jumped to conclusions,” he admitted, wearing an expression reminiscent of having to swallow particularly bitter medicine, “we didn’t even wait for confirmation or anything. We shouldn’t have treated you like we did.”

“Even if it had really been you,” Sabot finally managed to continue again, “and you had done what we were told you did; it doesn’t excuse what we...what we almost did to you,” the mare wasn’t able to meet his gaze any longer. The remorse within the mare very nearly doubled in intensity as she recalled how they’d very nearly carried out their threat to eject him into space.

Slipshod couldn’t exactly say that he felt very comfortable recalling those events either. Granted, he’d found himself faced with the prospect of imminent death on more than a few occasions in his life―though with far more frequency of late for his liking. Still, there was something especially harrowing about being forcibly dragged towards an impromptu execution when compared to facing a barrage of missiles, or some other such typical battlefield hazzard.

He needed to look no further than the tightness he’d felt in his chest the moment he’d seen these two step into the clinic just now to see the evidence of that. For a brief fraction of a second, his brain had inconceivably lept to the conclusion that the pair of security ponies were here to ‘finish the job’ and kill him right here and now. Logically, he knew that couldn’t possibly have been the case, but that had been his initial, irrational, thought.

The stallion idly wondered for how much longer that would be his first thought whenever he passed either security pony in the corridor. Frankly, he had enough stressors in his life without suffering minor heart palpitations whenever making eye contact with certain members of the crew.

“Suffice it to say that more than a few policies were violated,” Blood Chit chimed in, narrowing his gaze at the pair, “and arrangements are being made to drop these two off at the next appropriate port, as per the termination terms of their contracts. However, I thought it would be a good idea to give them the opportunity to apologize before departing.”

Slipshod’s eyes widened in mild surprise as he glanced between the three of them, “they’re being fired?”

The crimson pegasus favored his friend with a mildly amused look, “they nearly tossed a suspect out the airlock,” he reminded the earth pony before glaring back towards the―apparently former―security ponies, “which is not how things are done on this ship, is it?”

Soft acknowledgements were muttered by the shamefaced pair.

“Look, I can understand why they reacted the way that they did―” the changeling began. However, Blood Chit interrupted him.

“Really? Because I can’t,” he quipped, “and neither can Squelch. Or the rest of the security team.

“This ship has policies and rules, not much different from any ‘real’ policing force,” the pegasus stallion went on soberly, “and they’re in place for a reason. We can’t let ourselves overreact and jump to conclusions, or make hasty decisions. Especially when the possibility of dealing with changelings is involved,” he emphasized, looking pointedly at Slipshod.

“‘Trust, but verify’ needs to be our mantra going forward on just about everything,” Blood Chit continued, “six changelings were found on the Dragoon dropships alone. Who knows how many were present in the capital palace complex? For all we knew, it could have been changelings calling High Gain to tell her something had been done to Squelch.”

He waved a wing at the pair, “these two never actually even saw her! They heard from somepony else that Squelch had been attacked, and that somepony had ‘heard’ it had been you! I never even knew you’d been taken into custody, and I’m supposed to be the pony who orders that sort of thing,” the stallion briefly sneered at the pair during the thinly veiled reminder of one of their apparent myriad transgressions. The unicorn and earth pony both winced again.

“However you may feel, Slip―and whether their ‘hearts were in the right place’ or whatever―is immaterial. The bottom line is that I don’t need ponies like that on my security detail, and Squelch doesn’t want ponies like that on her payroll,” the winged stallion concluded, “so, when the Zathura docks at Concordia Station this evening, they’re getting off.”

“Oh…” the changeling was genuinely stunned. Mostly because he was finding it difficult to grasp the idea that ponies were being disciplined by other ponies for the ‘crime’ of almost killing a changeling. His kind were the enemy. Ponies were supposed to be regarding him with animosity and only barely restrained hatred. That was the healthy attitude to have. Honestly, he was wondering if maybe their personal feelings towards him were prompting Squelch and Blood Chit to overreact to what Sabot and breech Block had nearly done.

“Well, I do accept the apology anyway,” he insisted, looking towards the former security ponies and trying to muster up some facsimile of a smile to reassure them, “if that means anything?” the stallion shrugged anemically.

Both ponies could only nod silently, and were then dismissed by their supervisor to return to their quarters in order to perform one final check to ensure that they’d not overlooked any of their personal effects while packing. Blood Chit remained behind, stepping closer to the changeling’s bed and sitting down beside him, “you’re too nice,” he remarked, smiling towards the ‘Steed pilot, “a lot nicer than me at any rate. You could feel deck plates rattling when I found out what they’d tried to do to you…”

“Yeah, well, when your personal comfort is directly tied to the happiness of the others in the room with you, you tend to try to soothe as many sensibilities as possible,” Slipshod pointed out, “think of it like setting an ‘emotional thermostat’. Why would anypony keep the room they’re in feeling uncomfortably cold or hot when all they have to do is tweak the nob a bit in their favor?”

“I guess I can see that,” the pegasus conceded, though he still sounded a little reluctant, “but, at the same time, they did try to murder you,” he pointed out.

“They tried to kill a monster that they thought hurt Squelch,” Slipshod corrected, smirking at the ship’s chief of security, “I’d have given them a medal!” the earth pony let out a brief bark of laughter. Even to his ears, it sounded a little strained, and it ended rather quickly when he caught sight at the complete lack of amusement on Blood Chit’s face. The ‘Steed pilot swallowed, “what?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Call yourself a monster.”

Slipshod sighed and shook his head at his friend’s obvious denial, “I’m a changeling. Of course that makes me a mon―”

“Oh fucking stop it!” Blood Chit snapped, scowling balefully at the golden earth pony. The changeling gaped in shock at the other stallion, too surprised to do anything but comply. The clearly discernible hints of genuine anger that were somehow mixed in with the more familiar sensations of compassion wafting off the pegasus perplexed him even more.

“You haven’t done one ‘monstrous’ thing since coming aboard this ship!” the crimson stallion said, still glaring, “you’re friendly and kind to every member of the crew, you put your life on the line every time you go out in that BattleSteed, you even turned your back on your entire race in order to help free ponykind from changeling control!

“What part of any of that makes you a ‘monster’, again?”

Well, when he phrased it like that…

Still, Slipshod couldn’t help but feel like the pegasus was leaving out some pretty important details, “I’m only friendly because I need positive emotions to survive,” the changeling countered, “I pilot BattleSteeds because that’s damn near my only marketable skill, and I’m only working against Chrysalis to get personal revenge. I don’t actually care if all the other creatures in the galaxy benefit,” he insisted.

“Oh, so your motives aren’t completely altruistic; I guess you’re right and you are a complete and total villain!” Blood Chit’s overly dramatic sarcasm was B-movie quality. Slipshod was actually half-tempted to invite the stallion to the next movie night with Channel Lock.

“Slip, nopony cares how selfish or noble your motives are. I mean, do you think I’d be here if the pay wasn’t so good? I can help ponies anywhere! I could be part of a disaster relief team on pretty much any planet in the Sphere, but I’m not,” he pointed out, “I’m here, making nearly double the going rate for my skill set, dragging your flank out of half-junked ‘Steeds, so that my hopefully soon-to-be-fiance and I can move out of our current near-slum apartment and into a decent upper-class condo.

“Does that make me a ‘bad pony’, for helping out with all of this because I want a nicer place to live?”

“No, of course not, but―” Slipshod began.

“So then why are you a monster?”

The changeling didn’t know what frustrated him more: the insistence on asking him that question again, or the fact that he couldn’t come up with what the pegasus would consider to be a compelling response in that moment. However, just because he couldn’t come up with an answer on the spot didn’t mean that there wasn’t one. It just meant that he was still in the middle of recovering from a traumatic injury and could hardly be expected to win any heady philosophical arguments right now. If anything, Blood Chit was taking advantage of his condition to try and manipulate him. Not that Slipshod actually thought the pegasus was that malicious of a pony.

He was sure that his friend meant well. That didn’t mean that he was right though. He just didn’t understand.

Still, Slipshod acknowledged that he would have to admit defeat in this particular conversation, due to his less-than-optimal condition, “it’s not quite the same thing. It’s complicated,” was all the answer that he could come up with.

“Uh huh,” was Blood Chit’s dubious reply, “well, feel free to ‘uncomplicate’ it whenever you’re up for it,” his wing reached up and briefly ruffled the earth pony’s mane.

“Is the patient up for taking on any more visitors?”

Both stallions turned their heads in the direction of the clinic’s door, where they found Twilight and Squelch having just arrived. Blood Chit was grinning and making room to accommodate the mares as they approached the bed. Slipshod’s own expression was welcoming as well. However, internally, he was feeling far more reticent. Especially as he noticed that particularly intense emotions were radiating outward from the sage unicorn.

He hadn’t been entirely cognisant a couple weeks ago during her visit aboard the Wyrm. He’d been short a pint or two of ichor at the time. However, since then he’d had time to review events and examine what had happened―as well as their implications―with a more rational frame of mind.

In the moment, he’d just been so incredibly grateful to receive her outpouring of emotion, and the strength that it had given him. The reaction had been almost entirely instinctual. He’d been a changeling near death. It was only natural that he’d want to ingest as much love as possible from whatever source was available. As far as Slipshod was concerned, Squelch was lucky that he’d been as weak as he was. A stronger changeling that desperate for love would have drained her.

Whether the unicorn understood it or not, what she’d done had the potential to be lethal for her. It had been reckless of her, no matter the reasons. She was the pony in charge of this company, and the one with the analytical mind that had the potential to help with the planning of the invasion of Equus. Meanwhile, Slipshod was just a C-bit a dozen ‘Steed pilot. He could be replaced at any spaceport with a five minute visit to a MRB hiring hall.

Bottom line: his life wasn’t worth hers; and she had no business risking it for his sake.

While not nearly as imminently dangerous to the mare’s health, Squelch’s current feelings for him would eventually prove detrimental. It had happened before. In a matter of months, she’d start losing her mental faculties. Start making mistakes. This would begin at around the same time they hoped to begin the invasion of the Sphere; right when they’d need the unicorn to be at the top of her game.

The fate of the whole galaxy―Chrysalis’ defeat―could very well rest on Squelch making the right calls at the right time.

If she still loved him by then…

No. Too much was riding on this. He couldn’t let that happen―wouldn’t let that happen.

Slipshod spared a moment for a silent apology directed towards the sage mare before propping himself up in the bed and craning his head, attempting to peer around behind the pair, “that depends: are two of those visitors going to be the twins? I know for a fact that they own some, uh...not quite ‘practical’ nurse uniforms,” the stallion paused for a moment, “well, not practical for nursing anyway,” he winked at the nearby crimson pegasus even as he suppressed a wince as he felt Squech’s own mood sharply sour.

Though Slipshod noted that the unicorn’s reaction was frustratingly transitory. Within moments, her ire seemed to pass, and was replaced with...acceptance somehow. That was...troubling. Then again, she was well aware that Mig and Tig hadn’t actually done anything with him since their first dalliance. So he shouldn’t be surprised that she didn’t regard what he’d said as anything more than a joke. Maybe a different target would yield the results he wanted. But who?

It’s not like he had a lot of options on the ship. He’d specifically made it a point to not sleep around with the crew if he could help it. Alluding to any of them would either also be brushed aside, or risk getting back to the named crewmember and cause a whole host of problems for them.

The stallion eyed the alicorn. Twilight wasn’t a member of the crew. Maybe…

It was worth a shot.

Slipshod rolled onto his side, barely managing to hide a wince of intense pain behind a flirtatious grin as he eyed the taller purple mare, “say, princess: a little birdie told me you borrowed a book on healing spells. Why don’t you break it out and the two of us can play ‘doctor’ together?” the earth pony then proceeded to waggle his eyebrows and click his tongue at the mare.

“Make another pass like that, and I will turn you into a ficus,” was Twilight’s flat reply. Then she tapped her chin as she pondered out loud, “I wonder if your changeling transformation ability can override alicorn-level transmutations?” she now looked back towards the stallion, her expression now one of great interest that was setting off alarm bells in Slipshod’s head, “why don’t we find out? Worse case scenario: I’ll have a new plant to decorate my quarters with!”

He genuinely had no idea whether or not his innate ability to assume any form he wanted could be constrained by alicorn magic. The level of genuine annoyance from the mare was all that motivation that he needed not to call her bluff too, “on second thought, Cravat’s been just great,” Slipshod assured the mare, returning to his earlier prone position, “you hear that, Cravat? You do good work; keep it up!”

“Flattery’s still not going to get you a sponge bath,” the medic announced from Dee’s―now Cravat’s, Slipshod supposed―office.

The changeling cleared his throat and smiled sheepishly at his three guests, “well, above average work, anyway…”

The earth pony was more than a little concerned that Squelch actually seemed to have found something about the last few moments endearing. How was he making this worse? With an exasperated inward sigh, Slipshod decided that it was best to give up his efforts for the moment. Obviously there had been some rather poignant―and very inconvenient―epiphanies reached while he’d been unconscious. He’d need some time to delve into their nature if he wanted to successfully undermine those renewed feelings and dispel them.

It wasn’t like this was a problem that needed to be solved now anyway. He had a few months before noticeable changes started to appear. He’d be able to figure out something by then.

“Anyway,” Squelch began, smirking at the changeling, “we figured that, since you’re on the mend, you might as well be brought up to date on the latest revisions to the plan.”

“To start off: some bad news,” Twilight interjected, “Dee managed to get a message off to ComSpark. That was why he attacked Squelch. To get access to her terminal and bypass the comm lockout,” Slipshod had already guessed as much. Dee wouldn’t have risked blowing his cover for something as trivial as finally punishing him, “it gets worse,” the alicorn continued, prompting a deeper frown from the changeling as he tried to imagine what was worse than Chrysalis knowing the Clans existed, “somehow, Dee also got his hooves on intel about the Clans. Specifically, their force rosters.

“Chrysalis now knows exactly what she’s up against, and can plan accordingly.”

Yup, that was certainly ‘worse’, Slipshod agreed. He sighed and massaged both sides of his temple with his hooves, “well that’s...unfortunate.”

“Very,” the purple pony agreed.

“We’re expanding our recruitment efforts,” Squelch announced, “the twins are reaching out to the Confederation―which we don’t expect to do any good,” she hastily interjected when she caught the changeling’s dubious glance, “but we don’t lose anything by trying.

“Cinder and Timberjack are going to talk with the hippogriffs. We’re going to let Victoria work her end of things with the Federated Moons. Meanwhile, we’re,” the unicorn waved her hoof leisurely around, “going to approach the League,” she paused for a moment, “Our League. As in the Our Worlds League. Not the Clan league.”

Slipshod frowned, “aren’t we going to run into some issues now that Chrysalis knows the Irregulars are working with the Clans? Did you already re-register us as a new company again?”

“That’s actually some of the good news,” the unicorn replied, “we’ve seen no sign that ComSpark’s blacklisting us. We think this is because they don’t know Dee’s dead, and want to let him keep operating as an active agent.”

“Still, they have to know that we’re working with the Clans,” the changeling pointed out, “it’s too risky to keep our identities.”

“Not necessarily,” Twilight piped up, earning a dubious glance from Slipshod, “don’t get me wrong, it’ll be tricky, but we think we can make this work to our advantage.”

“Chrysalis is going to be tracking us. No two ways about it. However, we can make that work for us,” Squelch explained, “we intend to misdirect ComSpark. We’re going to make it look like we’re approaching the larger mercenary companies to try and recruit them.

“What we’ll actually be doing is convincing the Successor States themselves to help us,” the sage mare paused for a moment, “well, I’ll be convincing them at any rate. The rest of you will be working with the Grey Lines Legion on a little operation that they’ve got in the works. The relevant details are already in your inbox,” she said to Slipshod.

The changeling blinked in stunned shock, “...my inbox?”

“Well, I can’t be expected to run things all the way from Aether,” Squelch pointed out, smiling broadly at the earth pony stallion, “so that means you’ll be commanding the Irregulars on your own until I get back.”

“Are you sure the crew will be fine with a changeling running things?” Slipshod squirmed uncomfortably at the thought of the likely reactions from the rest of the creatures on the ship, “especially after what just happened?”

“You mean the part where you stopped a saboteur from blowing up the ship?” Blood Chit said, smirking at the other stallion, “or the part where you nearly got yourself killed saving my life?”

“Given the number of ponies who’ve promised to buy you drinks the moment you’re out of here, I’m genuinely concerned you’ll be sent right back with severe alcohol poisoning,” Squelch remarked, only half joking.

“Please don’t!” came the muffled plea from Cravat in his new office, “still just a medic!”

“You’re a good pilot,” the pegasus stallion by his bed assured him, “the crew knows and trusts you. You did use to help run things before, you know? It’ll be fine.”

Personally, Slipshod still fostered some doubts about that. He just...couldn’t conceive of how that could be possible. He was a changeling. The crew knew that he was a changeling. A race of monsters that survived on deceit and lies. They were the antithesis of trust. The fact was that the creatures on the Zathura didn’t know him. They might listen to him―even obey the orders he gave during Squelch’s absence―but that would only be because their real commander had told them to listen to him until she got back.

But...if this was what had to happen in order to bring them one step closer to defeating Chrysalis, then he’d go through with it, “if you say so,” Slipshod finally replied. He looked at the unicorn, “when do you leave?”

“I’m getting off at Concordia Station when we dock and catching a shuttle from there,” the mare informed him, still smirking, “I’ll still be in the system for a few days before we jump out, so you can contact me any time before that happens. But I highly doubt anything’ll go wrong between now and then.”

The earth pony stallion nodded. Squelch would be off the ship. Good. That would keep her away from him and out of danger. He’d also have plenty of time to come up with a plan of action upon her return to push her away from him and douse those rekindled feelings. Apparently he’d need to do something more drastic than sleeping with somepony in her quarters too, if her reaction to his innuendos earlier was any indication. Finding something that was repulsive enough to quash those feelings, but not quite so heinous as to get him booted off the ship was going to be a fascinating line to toe…

But, for her, he’d do his best.

“That stallion really doesn’t make it easy,” Squelch quipped sardonically as she strode into her quarters.

The purple alicorn in her wake entered behind her, accepting a glass of brandy that the sage green unicorn floated over to her. Twilight hadn’t traditionally been much of a fan of alcohol in her youth―after all, alcohol clouded the mind―but she’d developed an appreciation for its stress-relieving qualities in her later years as princess. The purple mare sipped at the glass as she watched the mercenary commander shed her duty uniform and tossle her mane with her magic in an effort to get it to hang more loosely over her withers.

Squelch studied her new disheveled look briefly in the mirror of her small vanity by her locker and sighed, “I don’t know if it makes it ‘better’ or ‘worse’ that I now know he’s a changeling and needs to feel ‘loved’―or whatever―by as many ponies as possible,” she said, frowning. The unicorn glanced back over her shoulder, “how do you build a long-term relationship on something like that? I mean, something that’s more than just friends or coworkers?

“I know some ponies can do the whole ‘open relationship’ thing...but that always just sounded to me like couples tolerating each others’ affairs…”

Twilight snorted, “if you’re trying to ask me for relationship advice, you’re coming to the wrong alicorn,” Twilight’s smile was a lot more wan than she’d have preferred as she thought about her sister-in-law and former foal-sitter. Cadence was alive on Equus, but had been held captive for centuries. What that must have been like for her…

The purple alicorn shuddered at the thought and took another―slightly larger―sip of brandy.

“Fine, then what about changeling advice?” Squelch asked with a hint of exasperation, “do relationships between them and ponies even work?”

“For the most part,” Twilight nodded, “changelings got along with just about every race on Equus. Their empathic natures make them extremely sympathetic to just about every way of thinking, and they can appreciate a wide range of emotions.”

“And that wasn’t dangerous for any of their partners?” the green mare asked dubiously, recalling her own near-manic state of mind during the latter phase of her marriage to Slipshod, “it wasn’t even a year before I started to suffer problems,” she pointed out.

Now Twilight was frowning as well, “admittedly, I’m referring to relationships between other creatures and reformed changelings; which isn’t quite the same thing. They were basically different species, honestly.”

Squelch poured herself a glass of spirits and stepped across the modest living space to her desk, taking a seat. She gestured towards the bed, offering it to the purple mare, “so there are two kinds of changeling?”

“Sort of?” Twilight winced as she made herself comfortable on the bed. It was obvious that the other mare was not appreciative of the vagueness of that answer, and so the alicorn sought to elaborate, “reformed changelings are what changelings like Slipshod are capable of becoming,” she explained, “and what I believe all changelings used to be a long time ago.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A changeling like Slipshod takes in emotion almost exclusively,” Twilight explained, “they absorb it, horde it, and feed off of it. The results―as you’ve experienced―can be very debilitating for their victims.

“A reformed changeling still needs positive emotions to survive, but they’re also capable of sharing those feelings with others. They can sustain others more or less symbiotically. Non-changeling creatures they’re with for long periods of time don’t feel any ill-effects.”

Squelch frowned, “well, that sounds objectively better,” she pointed out, “why even bother with the ‘only hoarding’ way of life?”

Twilight smiled sympathetically, noting that the mare made a very good observation, “because of this risk involved,” she said, “both kinds of changelings still need love in order to live. By also sharing the love that they have with others, reformed changelings are leaving themselves very vulnerable. Because it means if they stop being loved for any significant period of time…” she allowed the implication to hang in the air between them.

The unicorn mare nodded her understanding, rubbing her chin, “they’re betting their lives on how others feel about them.”

“For the most part,” Twilight nodded, “it’s not a big deal for reformed changelings who stay with the hive. They’re actively passing love around the community all the time. Even little changeling cliques in foreign communities aren’t in much danger. Changelings who are on their own are at the greatest risk.”

Squelch leaned back in her chair, the glass in held in her telekinesis swirling lazily in front of her as she pondered the implications of their conversation, “Slipshod’s surrounded by a crew of creatures that care about him,” she pointed out, “could he become one of these ‘reformed’ changelings? If he did, then we wouldn’t have to worry about my being drained, right?”

“The only thing that keeps a changeling from being reformed is themselves,” Twilight stated soberly, “they merely need to make the conscious choice to share their love with others.”

“Well, shit; that’s an easy fix,” the sage mare snorted.

“Is it?” the purple alicorn asked pointedly. Squelch no longer looked as sure of her position as she had a moment ago, “think for a moment about what would be asked of him:

“For you, you’re risking heartbreak. If things go south, you’ll grouse, drink, whine, complain to your friends, maybe even cry a little,” Twilight ignored the scowl from the unicorn, continuing, “but for Slipshod...he could die. He would be placing his life in the hooves of others in a way that is extremely hard to do.”

“He’s a ‘Steed pilot. He risks his life every time he climbs into the cockpit,” Squelch pointed out.

“He does,” the purple mare acknowledged, “but he’s not giving up control over those risks. He relies on his skill, his abilities, to see him through danger. If he gives all of his love to you―or anypony else for that matter―he’s giving you exclusive control over whether he lives or dies.

“Could you do that?” Twilight now asked of the other mare, “could you put your life in somepony else’s hooves like that so completely? Is there anypony in your life that you’ve ever trusted that much?”

Squelch was silent. She wanted to be able to insist that she could have done just that, but she knew that would have been a lie. The unicorn couldn’t even say that she’d trusted her parents enough to do something like that, and those should have been the easiest examples for a pony to give of such a thing.

This information also painted things in a slightly different perspective for her, and how she viewed what she and Slipshod might be able to have together. The unicorn had to admit that she was a little uncomfortable at the thought of the power imbalance that would exist between them if the changeling somehow managed to ‘reform’ himself. If genuinely loving her meant that he became physiologically dependent on her reciprocating those feelings...that suddenly placed a lot of pressure on her shoulders, and made her question exactly how deep for him her feelings ran.

Obviously, she loved the stallion enough that it could provide him with at least some strength when he was gravely injured. But did that necessarily mean that she loved him enough to keep him alive? Were her feelings for him genuinely that deep? She thought of the changeling as a close confidant, a reliable business partner, a brave fighter―once, even a passionate lover. She loved him.

But did she love him?

The fact that she was even having to ask herself that kind of question somehow felt like an answer, the mare thought to herself bitterly.

Twilight was nodding, having seemed to mostly interpret the unicorn’s silence correctly, “not quite an ‘easy’ fix,” the alicorn noted with some sympathy. She finished off her brandy and stood up from the bed, “but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t holding out hope,” she set the empty glass on Squelch’s desk and headed for the door, “and not just for the sake of your relationship.”

The purple mare paused in the doorway, a frowned crossing her lips now, “I was recently reminded that Chrysalis has been hoarding love for centuries. I can’t even imagine how powerful she’s managed to become in that time,” she swallowed, trying to quell the nervousness building within her, “we could bring every ship and ‘Steed to Equus, and still...it might not be enough to defeat her.”

Squelch was staring at the alicorn now in stark surprise, “seriously? You’re just bringing this up now?!”

“There’s nothing that we can do about it, no matter what. Chrysalis won’t be getting any weaker as time goes on,” Twilight pointed out, tamping down on her own anxiety over the matter.

“But if we can’t win anyway―” the unicorn began to sputter in protest, however the other mare cut her off.

“I didn’t say we couldn’t win,” Twilight clarified, “just that ships and weapons wasn’t how we’d be able to do it.”

“So how, exactly, are we going to do it?”

The purple princess turned and flashed a broad smile at the mare, “why, with the most powerful magic that the galaxy has ever known, of course!”

Without another word, the alicorn left. Squelch scowled at the door for a long, silent, moment. Then poured herself another drink.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 27: Warrior - En Garde

The apartment might have been significantly smaller than the quarters that she’d been assigned while on the Clan homeworld, but Squelch found them considerably more pleasant to inhabit without the spectre of indefinite imprisonment hovering over her head. It was certainly much more spacious than her quarters on the Zathura. With far more amenities as well, like a jacuzzi tub.

The unicorn mare let out a long, deep, sigh of contentment as she reclined in the warm water, letting it seep into her coat as it never could during one of the water-conserving showers on board the DropShip. For a pony who spent the majority of their lives in space, something like this tended to be the height of luxury. There was a miniscule amount of anxiety nestled in the back of her mind as she considered whether this indulgence had truly been the best first action to take upon arriving on Aether, but the jets of water gently massaging her backside helped to shoo the feeling away.

Theirs was a campaign that would last for many months, if not years. Taking an hour to soak in a bath was hardly going to be what undid it all.

Besides, it wasn’t like she couldn’t get some of her work out of the way while also lounging in the tub. The mare’s horn began to glow as she used her telekinesis to manipulate the nearby controls of the room’s comm panel. The unicorn then waited patiently until a voice responded through the speaker.

“Office of the Captain-General, how may I direct your call?” a stallion’s voice answered.

“Yes, my name is Skywave, Chief Operations Officer with Palomino Dynamics, and I would like to arrange a meeting with Captain-General Moonlight Radiance at her earliest convenience to discuss next year’s contract bids,” the unicorn replied.

“I see; give me a moment please to check the general’s schedule.”

“Take your time,” Squelch assured the reception pony. She hardly expected to be able to get in to see one of the most important ponies in the League in the next day or so; even with using the cover identity that had been created for her. There were sure to be understandable demands on the captain-general’s time. However, Squelch doubted that she’d need to wait more than a few weeks, maybe a month at the outside―

“I can work in a couple of hours for a meeting in August. Will that work for you, ma’am?”

“Yes, that shou―” Squelch shot up in the tub in stark surprise, sending a substantial amount of water splashing onto the floor of the bathroom, “I’m sorry, did you say August? As in nine months from now, August?!” she sputtered.

“Yes ma’am,” the stallion on the other end of the line did a phenomenal job of sounding completely nonplussed by Squelch’s indignant outburst.

“There’s got to be something sooner,” the sage mare liked to believe that hadn’t come out sounding completely like a whine, “I just need an hour or two. It’s important!” even as she spoke, the unicorn felt herself wincing as she considered that it was highly unlikely that anypony asking for a meeting with the nominal leader of one of the massive star nations in the Sphere would stipulate that the meeting was for trivial reasons.

“I understand ma’am, but the captain-general will not be available to take meetings until she returns to Aether in July,” the reception pony explained, “August is the earliest that can be done, I’m afraid.”

Squelch cocked her head, “‘returns to Aether’? As in: she’s not on the planet at the moment?”

“Correct, ma’am.”

The mare sighed and leaned back in the tub again, “well, fuck, I might as well fly out and meet her wherever she is then,” she grumbled, then spoke up more loudly so that the stallion on the call could hear her, “were is she?”

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to disclose that information, ma’am,” he insisted, “now would you like to schedule the appointment or not?”

Squelch pondered the question for several seconds but finally gave a reluctant answer in the negative and ended the call. Somehow the novelty of the jacuzzi bath had lost some of its charm in the preceding two minutes. She’s flown all the way out to the heart of the Our Worlds League, only to learn that the whole point of the trip wasn’t even here!

Though, it was curious to the unicorn that the location of the captain-general was being kept something of a secret. A head of state generally didn’t do much traveling that was ‘off the books’, so to speak. Most times they left the planet, it was to attend to affairs of state, and those sorts of things were typically quite noteworthy affairs that were widely reported on.

That suggested that, wherever Moonlight Radiance had gone off to, it wasn’t to participate in some sort of diplomatic function. A personal holiday was possible. Yet, if that had been the case, then the reception pony would have likely said as much. Vacations were also not exactly ‘state secrets’, even if the pony in question might want the exact location kept confidential so that they could better enjoy their leisure time without being hassled.

So, they weren’t out doing bureaucratic business, or taking some personal leave―certainly not nine months worth.

That left...military-related actions. Something like a review of the League’s forces would explain the long timetable, but not the secrecy. Reviews were pseudo-public affairs that involved spectacle and parades and such. That implied the reason for the trip was something more sensitive, like a genuine military action. However, Squelch was unaware of any significant actions that the Our Worlds League was involved in directly that would be worthy of the personal oversight of the captain-general.

The unicorn mare floated over her datapad and began to do a little research, on both the League, and its head of state. She’d reviewed her dossier and public file during the long trip to Aether, and recalled a few points that stood out. The current captain-general was a relative newcomer to the role, having ascended only last year with the death of their aunt during a bombing.

Squelch rolled her eyes at the apparent ‘endemic’ of uncle/aunt-nephew/neice related inheritance issues that seemed to plague the leadership of the Sphere. Almost exclusively involving explosives too, for some reason. Didn’t anypony hasten the deaths of their titled family members with poison or bullets anymore? Why bombs specifically? Somepony should really look into that…

Despite her short reign thus far, it was clear that the new captain-general was ambitious. They’d embarked on more than a few internal campaigns within the League in order to consolidate power. Flexing their own personal military experience gained from many years spent serving―and eventually leading―significant portions of the Leagues militia forces.

A very military-minded captain-general was away at an undisclosed location...while the League’s pet mercenary force was engaged in a planetary invasion along the Kirin Confederation border…

Squelch leaned her head back and grimaced, “ah, fuck me!”

She was in exactly the wrong place. Meanwhile…

Victoria Blueblood’s coupe had made the prospect of invasion look positively trivial, Slipshod noted as he looked out over the world of Colton; ‘formerly’ of the Kirin Confederation. In the pegasus mare’s case, the matter of control over the world―and the broader Pony Commonwealth―had been quite easily resolved by a single speech from her uncle and a treaty signing. After all, the matter in that case was largely one of familial inheritance. Most of the mechanisms for Victoria to succeed her uncle had already been nominally in place. She’d just sort of sped up the process.

That wasn’t the case here. Colton was the site of a genuine planetary conquest. Which meant that things were a lot messier where ‘control’ was concerned.

By this point in the fight, most of the heavy-lifting had already been taken care of. Orbital infrastructure―whatever hadn’t been destroyed or damaged beyond recovery during the first hours of the assault, at least―was firmly under the control of Gray Lines Legion forces. Most major planetary garrisons had been subdued, and the capital and governor’s palace had been seized. For all intents and purposes, the ‘invasion’ was over, from a strategic standpoint anyway.

But that didn’t mean that all of the fighting was done.

There was something of a ‘resistance’ and a ‘government in exile’ on the planet now that was still engaged with Legion forces. The fighting was sporadic, and not nearly on the scale of the sorts of battles that had taken place during the initial couple of months. However, only a fool of a general would assume that the conquest was completed while any sort of even loosely organized opposition remained. Which wasn’t necessarily any easy task. The planetary forces were no longer operating in large, concentrated, forces; but rather more dispersed cells.

Combating them meant that a lot of forces were needed for the occupation, and in order to quickly respond to any hotspots of activity. That was why the Legion had seen fit to offer a lot of additional subcontracts to other mercenary outfits, like Rayleigh’s Irregulars, at this point. Their duties would more than likely consist of escorting supply convoys as Colton’s defenses were rebuilt, reacting to ambushes by loyalist forces, perhaps even the odd search and destroy operation if one of their cells was located.

Potentially months of work lay ahead of them.

The deck lurched beneath his hooves, jostling the golden earth pony briefly. A moment later, a mare’s voice crackled over the speaker, “docking complete…” a chorus of muffled metallic thunks could be heard faintly through the nearby airlock, “...hard lock achieved,” High Gain informed the pair of stallions waiting by the airlock.

Slipshod glanced over at Xanadu and nodded. The zebra reached out and depressed the controls to open the thick metal door, granting them access to the large orbital platform that the Zathura had just docked with. The acting commander of Rayleigh’s Irregulars fitfully straightened his uniform, still not particularly fond of the red-on-black color scheme of their company. It somehow looked less garish on the zebra that was here to act as his second-in-command. Officially, that was still Twilight, but the changeling wasn’t about to drag the purple alicorn through a space station full of creatures that didn’t need to know what was really going on with the galaxy.

Not that he believed for a moment that they and their ship weren’t being closely watched by changeling spies at any given moment. Spies that could very easily become assassins if they were given the order.

That was still the part of this whole operation that bothered him the most: keeping their identities in the wake of Doc Dee’s message. Squelch was insistent that it broadly helped their cause to be so visible, because it would keep Chrysalis’ attention on the ship, and perhaps not on the other members of their inner circle who were working to gather support.

Timberjack and Cinder were using Dragoon owned and operated Jump Ships to make their way to the hippogriffs, which meant that they’d be able to take routes that would keep them from being easily tracked by the changelings. They’d be able to accomplish their mission and be on their way back to the Commonwealth before Chrysalis even knew what they were up to. Similarly, it was easy enough for Squelch to travel commercially under a pseudonym without drawing any attention. Though that was made a lot easier if the changelings had little reason to bother looking for her, because they all ‘knew’ that she and her company were somewhere else.

Like participating in a high-profile invasion of a planet with the Gray Lines Legion.

Just because a plan made sense didn’t mean that Slipshod had to like it though.

A young green earth pony mare was waiting on the other side of the airlock, dressed in a crisply pressed mauve uniform with gray accents. A pair of parallel stacked dashes were emblazoned on the uniform’s shoulders. Notably, the mare’s cutie mark was obscured by a decal that bore the same reddish-clouded equal sign. She issued the pair of stallion’s a stiff salute, bringing her hoof rigidly up to the tip of the barret on her head, “Commander Slipshod? Lieutenant Scutch. I’ve been assigned to escort you to your briefing. If you two will please follow me?”

The changeling regarded the mare for a brief moment, probing curiously at her emotions. While he’d worked with branches of the Legion before, he’d never gotten the chance to be in close proximity with one of their officers before like this. She seemed to have impeccable control over her emotions for somepony her age. He wondered if that was something that she’d cultivated herself, or if it was indicative of a standard that Legion officers were expected to uphold?

“Lead the way, lieutenant,” he nodded as both he and Xanadu fell into step behind the veridian earth pony.

The station was quite the hive of activity. Which was hardly surprising, as it had been co-opted by Legion leadership as their orbital base of operations to coordinate the final stages of Colton’s conquest and eventual ‘voluntary transfer’ to League control. As a gesture of thanks for the many long years of fruitful contracts, naturally. A planet-sized gift basket that wasn’t an uncommon gesture from a business to a valued client.

It certainly wasn’t because the Legion was being ordered to annex the planet for the Our Worlds League. That would have been something that could be interpreted as an overt act of war! Which was why it most certainly wasn’t anything like that. This was merely an independent mercenary company looking to plunder a little extra loot and salvage from a non-client world, and then decide that they couldn’t be bothered governing said planet and choosing to pass it on to another party who might be interested in expanding their holdings.

Completely innocent and above-board.

...Which was probably why Slipshod nearly tripped over his own hooves when they finally reached the conference room that had been set aside for the briefing, and he stepped through the door to find Captain-General Moonlight Radiance herself leaning over an operational map. He became quickly aware that he was outright gaping at the sight of the high-profile mare and set about schooling his features appropriately.

Which didn’t at all do anything to quash the stark surprise he felt at seeing Moonlight Radiance here, of all places. Both because of the fact that her presence had the potential to shatter the―admittedly―thin veneer of distinction between the ‘independent’ actions of one of the larger mercenary companies and the Great Houses they almost exclusively contracted to. Something that could very genuinely lead to an outright war between the League and the Confederation.

Between this and the imminent Clan invasion, Chrysalis had to be near apoplexy, the changeling thought to himself.

But―and perhaps more importantly from his perspective―there was also the fact that the captain-general was supposed to be on Aether, meeting with Squelch! This had the potential to undermine so many of their plans in so many ways, the changeling thought bitterly to himself. Squelch wasn’t going to be able to negotiate with them and there was now the potential that the League and the Confederation could end up going to war! They wouldn’t get help from either faction against ComSpark if both were fighting each other.

This was bad.

The rosy unicorn mare dressed in the formal regalia of her position glanced up from the operations map to note the new arrivals, “you’re one of our new mercenary groups contracted to help with the cleanup, yes?”

Slipshod stood at attention, but refrained from saluting. The captain-general was his client, not his commanding officer, after all, “yes, ma’am. Rayleigh’s Irregulars are at your service. Where would you like us?” he’d find time to ponder the implications about the mare’s presence on this platform and her involvement in the invasion later. Right now, he still had a job to do.

“You’re timing’s impeccable,” the unicorn commander said, “one of our combat engineering battalions apparently ran into some trouble while surveying a sight for a new dam,” she gestured to the location on the map, and Slipshod stepped over so that he could get a better look at the area. The first thing he noticed was that it was located quite a significant distance from any major settlements. It wasn’t particularly close to any minor ones either, as far as he could tell.

“Why build a dam way out there?” he asked, arching a brow at the captain-general, “there’s nothing to power.”

“Not yet,” she nodded, “but I intend to construct a munitions depot there to help support future operations against the Confederation. The sooner the area is surveyed, the sooner construction can begin. Besides, the area is―well, it was supposed to be―well away from enemy positions. So it should have been perfectly safe,” she flashed an exasperated look around the table at the other members of her cadre present, who all looked as unhappy as she was in regards to the news.

The changeling’s eyes went wide as he once more very nearly gaped at the unicorn. She was planning to conduct future attacks on the Kirin? In fact, she’d very noticeably left out the usual obfuscations. Perhaps as a mistake? The stallion cleared his throat and attempted to find out, “...you mean future independent actions by the Gray Lines Legion, of course.”

The mare snorted, “those were my aunt’s games,” she said, contemptuously, “not mine,” she now turned her determined gaze towards Slipshod, “once I have Colton established as a proper forward supply base, I can finally turn the full might of our military on the Confederation. The Legion can occupy the Nirik Light Pony mercenaries while my forces take decisive actions to secure territory.”

“But that’ll start a war,” Slipshod pointed out dumbly, inwardly wincing. This was just so...not how things were done! How had this pony even managed to get their plan this far along without Chrysalis’ agents stepping in to stop it? This was exactly the sort of thing that the changeling queen’s operative curtailed in the interests of maintaining the Sphere’s general homeostasis.

“So I’ve heard,” Moonlight deadpanned. The unicorn then turned back to the map and redirected the conversation back towards the matter at hoof, “your mission is twofold: protect my engineers, and find out who is behind the attacks.

“Every source I have on the planet suggests that it can’t be Colton Defense Forces, and we haven’t caught sight of any mercenary DropShips touching down in the area that aren’t ours,” she frowned at the map, clearly frustrated by the lack of information, “it’s probably pirates or smugglers, but there’s something off about their tactics. They’re being far too aggressive.”

“Projected enemy strength?” Slipshod forced his own mind back into ‘mercenary mode’. There’d be time to ponder the broader political ramifications of the captain-general going ‘off script’ later. He was here to do a job, first and foremost. Though it was not lost on the changeling that convincing Moonlight Radiance to help them against Chrysalis might actually fall on his shoulders now, instead of Squelch’s.

Great.

“Nothing too serious, or there wouldn’t be an engineering battalion left to save by now,” she smirked, “combat vehicles mostly. Spotty reports of light ‘Steed activity.”

“‘Spotty’?”

“They swear they’ve seen what have to be BattleSteeds, but haven’t been able to pin down chassis for us yet,” the unicorn explained, clearly a little frustrated with the lack of complete intel, “but whatever they are, they can’t be anything too heavy, or our forces would already have been wiped out,” she noted.

“Understood,” Slipshod said evenly, though his own mind was already swirling with very unpleasant possibilities. This whole mission was likely to get a lot worse before it got any better, “in that case, we’ll drop as soon as I get back to my ship. Though I would appreciate a copy of whatever intel you have.”

The unicorn nodded, “I’ll have the data transmitted to your ship,” she assured him, nodding towards one of her aides as she did so. The pegasus mare that she’d motioned to was already tapping out commands on a datpad.

“Thank you. We’ll be sure to let you know what we find out,” the changeling assured her before turning and leaving the briefing, his striped companion close on his heels. The lieutenant who’d escorted them from the airlock was once more leading the way.

Xanadu leaned in and, in a hushed tone so as not to be overheard said, “you know who the attackers are, don’t you?”

Slipshod began to wonder if zebras were empaths as well as he issued a curt nod, “pretty sure, yeah.”

“And I thought the big players in the Sphere didn’t openly attack each other?”

“They’re not supposed to,” the earth pony confirmed, his expression grim, “this is bad.”

In a lot of ways, that last bit had the potential to be a significant understatement. There was little doubt in his mind that the moment the House Vernal heard that the captain-general herself was directing the invasion of a world controlled by the Kirin Confederation, there would be an official declaration of war. It would be next to impossible for any changeling operative involved in the Confederation’s own government to forestall it. No doubt those agents were already hard at work attempting to coordinate with their counterparts in the League in order to orchestrate a hasty resolution to the conflict. Arranging for some sort of disastrous military action that would force one side or the other to sue for at least a cease fire that could lead to an armistice.

More likely than not, the side that would need to suffer the disaster was the Our Worlds League. As the aggressor, a major military setback that stalled their momentum and derailed their plans for future invasions would put them on their back hoof. The Confederation could press the advantage, retake Colton, and then the changeling bureaucrats on both sides could make their respective cases for an cessation of hostilities, citing that the status quo had been maintained and obviously nothing else could be gained from such costly fighting.

Slipshod now just needed to make sure that the Irregulars weren’t one of the inevitable victims of the ‘military blunder’ that was no doubt in the works even as they spoke. It would also probably help if he could find some way to make sure that Moonlight survived it too, which was going to be much easier said than done. She was exactly the kind of pony that Chrysalis didn’t want in any sort of position of power: ambitious, headstrong, and unwilling to play by the rules of the game that the changeling queen had set in place.

Yet, at the same time, that could make the captain-general an ideal ally for Twilight’s purposes. If the invasion ended up sabotaged, and all of her work undone, there was a good chance that she’d be willing to throw in with the alicorn when it was revealed that the deck had ultimately been stacked against her by ComSpark. A mare like that wouldn’t take kindly to that news at all.

Of course, how easy it would be to keep her alive was entirely dependent on what means of assassination the local changelings opted to go with. If it turned out to be something like, say, blowing up the entirety of the space station that she was on, there wasn’t going to be much that anypony could do about that. If it was something more conventional, like in combat, then maybe there was hope. Only time would tell.

However, at the moment, they had other concerns. Such as dealing with what Slipshod was fairly certain was a changeling force that the engineering company had run into while snooping around out in the middle of nowhere.

“There are two HyperSpark Relay Networks,” the changeling pilot explained to the seated ponies in the briefing room. Cravat was still settling into his role as the ship’s ‘chief medical officer’, and didn’t look to be entirely comfortable sitting in on his first briefing as a member of the company’s command staff. While most of what Slipshod was going to reveal here today would constitute news to just about everypony else, the gray-coated earth pony didn’t have the benefit of having been privy to many of the other world-changing tidbits of news that Slipshod and Twilight had been providing the others over the past few months. Still, he seemed to be taking it well enough in stride. The changeling was only picking up mild levels of anxiety from the medical pony.

“There’s the Primary Circuit, which everypony knows about and is used to transmit about ninety-nine percent of the galaxy’s interstellar message traffic,” Slipshod continued, “However, there is a secondary network of HyperSpark Generators that is used exclusively to relay orders from Chrysalis to changeling agents in the field. These sites tend to be sequestered in out of the way locations that don’t see any traffic. Arctic regions, distant archipelagos, high mountains, that sort of thing.”

“And you think that the Legion engineers ran into one of these secondary arrays?” Twilight prompted.

“I do,” Slipshod nodded, “Moonlight Radiance is confident it can’t be a local defense force, it’s out of the way, and while the forces on the ground can’t get a positive ID on the ‘Steeds they’ve spotted,” he reached out and brought up a blurry image that was purported the best intelligence that the teams on the ground had been able to get of the alleged BattleSteed, “they have a lot of features in common with a Twittermite,” a second image appeared on the display next to the photograph. This one was a hastily compiled computer model of the aforementioned ComSpark light ‘Steed that Slipshod had created from memory after he’d gotten a look at the image.

“It’s a light ‘Steed. But packs a lot of punch for its weight, thanks to ComSpark using quite a few ‘lost’ technologies like endo-chrystal skeletons and extra-light reactors. It means that they can mount three pulsed medium energy cannons, in addition to a five-pack LRM,” he glanced at the other two pilots at the table, “not too big of a threat for Twilight and me, but you’ll want to mind your tail, Xanadu. If it outflanks your Philomena, it can do you some serious hurt,” the zebra nodded soberly, well aware that his was the most vulnerable ‘Steed of the three of them.

“It’ll also be equipped with an ECM, so be ready for it to ‘pop out of nowhere’ if our sight lines aren’t good.”

“How many are we likely to be facing?” Twilight inquired.

“Shouldn’t be more than a pair,” Slipshod replied, “these facilities don’t have the same kind of serious garrisons that Primary Circuit relays do, in order to help keep their imprint smaller and less noticeable. However, there’s likely to be a significant combat vehicle element as well and with this terrain,” the changeling brought up a satellite image of the boreal forested region that they’d be dropping into, “sight lines are going to suck. There’s every chance that they’ll have something lying in wait, engine off, so that our sensors won’t see it until we’re almost right on top of them.”

Both Twilight and Xanadu were wearing mirrored frowns at the news, each being fully aware of how undesirable the terrain was for ‘Steed combat against an enemy that was likely to try to capitalize on guerilla tactics.

“On the other hoof, this also represents a golden opportunity to get our hooves on some serious intel,” Slipshod said, turning his attention now to Blood Chit, who was now also the head of the company’s security element as well as its recovery team, “if we can find that relay, and take it intact, it could be a huge boon to our invasion efforts. Records of ComSpark force movements, covert operations, maybe even the identities of some of their operatives in the region.”

“They’re not going to let it fall into our hooves easily,” Twilight noted, and Slipshod nodded in agreement.

“We won’t have the personnel to garrison it on our own,” he acknowledged, “but if we save enough of the engineering battalion, then maybe. In any case,” the stallion turned once more to address the crimson pegasus, “I want your ponies suited up and ready to drop the moment we clear the area. Your mission will be to take the main reactor as quickly as possible.

“Before they have a chance to scuttle the whole complex.”

At this point, an uncomfortable silence had descended over the occupants of the conference room, which was only broken by Blood Chit, “do you honestly think just two dozen ponies can shoot their way to a HSG reactor before they can overload it?” then he added, as though the idea only just then occurred to him, “and exactly who’s going to secure the reactor itself? None of us are engineering techs who’d know what we’re doing with one,” he pointed out.

Slipshod’s gaze shifted to the kirin twins. Each of whom was suddenly looking a little bit paler. When neither of them spoke up unprompted, the golden earth pony reminded them, “we’re probably not going to get another chance to get our hooves on this kind of intel. Thanks to Dee, Chrysalis knows just about everything there is to know about us and the Clans. Now we can balance the scales.”

The pair of kirin looked at each other for a brief moment, then Mig spoke up, “earth, unicorn, pegasus?” she asked. Her sister nodded, her expression just as reticent. Both mares squared up as they turned to face one another and took preparatory breaths, “and...one, two three!” Mig counted off, each number being accompanied by a clap of their hooves, which then moved to a slap on their knees, and finally meeting each other's hooves between them. On the last count, their horns ignited and a pair of apparitions manifested in the air between them. A horseshoe in front of Mig, and a wing in front of Tig.

The latter kirin cursed under her breath and turned back to the table in disgust, looking in Blood Chit’s direction, “...I’ll deal with the reactor,” she said in a tone that was devoid of any enthusiasm at the prospect. Then she glanced towards Slipshod, “I don’t suppose the same model is used for these secret HyperSpark Generators that is used for the public ones?”

“They’re identical in every way,” the changeling assured the ‘Steed tech. That news seemed to relieve the kirin. A little. She obviously still wasn’t thrilled at the notion of following an armed security team into a fortified position. Neither was Blood Chit.

“That still doesn’t answer my question about whether or not my team can actually even get her that far,” the crimson pegasus pointed out, “we’re not shock troops, Slip. We’re just not equipped for a genuine bunker breech like this.”

“I know,” Slipshod assured the recovery team leader, “and I’m not asking for you all to make some sort of suicide run in order to get this intel. I’m hoping,” he stressed, “that the appearance of three BattleSteeds in the area snooping around will draw out nearly all of their own security forces, and you’ll all meet minimal resistance.

“But as the pony leading the op, I’ll leave whether or not to go through with things up to you once you see what you’re up against. If you don’t think you can’t do it, then withdraw.

“Just know that what we could learn from that facility could change the course of the invasion; and maybe determine whether or not casualties are in the millions...or the billions.”

Blood Chit snorted, shaking his head at the changeling even as a wry smirk appeared on his lips, “you’re making it really hard for me to say ‘no’,” he narrowed his eyes in feigned suspicion, “are you playing off my emotions?”

Slipshod beamed unabashedly at the other stallion, “it’s a commander’s job to motivate his ponies to do what needs to be done to accomplish the mission,” he pointed out, “and I know you well enough to know what motivates you.”

“Fair enough,” the pegasus conceded.

“Well what’s my motivation to go through with this?” Tig piped up plaintively.

He waved at the other two ‘Steed pilots, “we do our best to make sure you get a slightly-used, no longer quite mint condition, Twittermite to play around with,” he grinned at the kirin mechanic, “you’ve never gotten to see an extralight reactor before, have you? You’re in for a treat,” he winked at her, noting that the cyan mare’s demeanor had already brightened significantly at the mention of new tech to play around with.

“...it’s a start,” she said, doing her best to―poorly―hide her excitement.

“I thought it might be,” Slipshod allowed himself and the others one more moment of pleasant reverie before he was forced to direct the room back to the serious matter at hoof, “Doppler will be scanning the area from orbit to try and find the HSG. Val’s modifications give our sensors a lot more sensitivity and precision than just about any other DropShip in the Sphere. They may be nearly invisible to the casual observer, but we’ll be looking for them,” he looked back towards Blood Chit again, “to include checking the area for hostile signals. If the HSG’s still crawling with vehicles even after the ruckus us ‘Steed pilots are making, Aileron’s not gonna try an insertion.

“Like I said: the intel would be nice, but we’re not going to throw away lives if we’re not confident it can be done successfully,” the pegasus gave an acknowledging nod, and Tig looked a little more relieved.

“Everypony clear on what we’re going to try and do here?” the changeling scanned the room, and was pleased to be greeted by a see on nodding heads, “good. Blood Chit, get your ponies suited up. Twiggie, Xanax? We’re dropping ASAP, so let’s get to our ‘Steeds,” he was already heading for the door by the time the purple alicorn could cast her glare at him. He was able to feel her ire though. Something that she could hopefully productively channel in the enemy’s direction.

Slipshod was more focused on keying his comlink into the bridge of the Zathura, “Aileron? We’re heading for the ‘Steed Bay. Begin making our approach. Has High Gain managed to reach the engineering battalion to get the latest on their situation?”

“Yes, sir,” the ship’s pegasus pilot replied, “they’re currently engaged with the enemy, trying to conduct an orderly withdrawal from the area, but it sounds like they’re getting pounded pretty bad. Could turn into a rout at any moment.”

“Understood. Put us down where we can cover their escape,” the earth pony’s pace picked up to a trot. He heard the hoofsteps of the other two pilots picking up in tempo as well as they overheard the conversation that he was having.

“You got it, commander!”

Slipshod felt the deck beneath him dip almost imperceptibly as the ship’s inertial dampeners fought to mitigate the DropShip’s sudden―and rapid―descent towards the planetary surface. It didn’t impede the progress of the three of them making it to the cockpits of their respective ‘Steeds though. They were being rotated from their inward facing stowed orientations to their outward deployment orientations even before the hatches were closed and sealed. Slipshod’s hooves flew over the control interface, starting up his Cavalier. His helmet went on as the familiar synthesized voice of his BattleSteed’s computer sounded out the activation of the critical systems so that he could conduct a hasty radio check.

“Gallop Leader to Gallop Lance, report in.”

“Xanax reads you Llama-Cider, Bug!”

There was a long pause before the purple alicorn’s resigned response finally sounded out over his helmet’s integrated headset, “...Twiggie reports all systems go...Bug.”

The changeling’s lips split into a smile, “Understood. Stable? Gallop Lance ready to deploy.”

“Copy you, Gallop Lance,” answered High Gain, who would be acting as more than a mere liaison between the Zathura and the ‘Steed pilots on the ground now that Squelch was elsewhere. She would be their direct orbital coordinator and source of intelligence on the area of operation. Slipshod would still retain unilateral operational control, and would be her authority as well, but it still behooved him to heed any recommendations that she might make, as she’d be the one with access to a lot of information that he simply wouldn’t have while they were on the ground, “tangos will be to DropsShip’s three o’clock upon landing. Mostly armor and long range support units. Scorpions and Strikers from what I can see.”

“Any sign of those ‘Steeds?”

“Negative. Nothing that immediately shows up on the ship’s sensors,” the earth pony admitted, sounding a little apprehensive at her lack of information, even though all knew it wasn’t a failing on her part. Not only were the light ‘Steeds in question fitted with hardware that aided in masking their signatures from anything beyond direct line-of-sight, the fact that they were designs that didn’t officially ‘exist’ meant that the ship’s sensor suite would be unlikely to classify any emissions that it did pick up from them as ‘Steeds in the first place.

Chances were actually pretty high that one or more of those ‘combat vehicles’ could very well be a Twittermite that had been misclassified by the computer, “Understood,” he assured the mare before directing his comments back towards his lance, “remember: those Twittermites have ECM. Don’t rely on you HUD; keep your eyes peeled for signs of movement in the trees. They might be able to hide from sensors, but they are still ten meter tall robots.”

“Will do, Bug!” the zebra pilot assured him.

“Twiggie, I want you to hang back and use Xanax to target their own long range support units. I’ll move in close and take out the armor pursuing the friendlies,” Slipshod said, laying out the plan of attack, “Xanax, watch your back. Don’t get drawn in too deep spotting for her. If there are a pair of Twittermites out there, they’ll be able to overwhelm you before we can reach you if you’re too far away, and it’ll be almost impossible for you to get a lock that Twiggie can use to help you, understand?”

“Okay, Dad!” the striped stallion replied in a faux exasperated tone, “this isn’t my first skirmish, you know?”

“But it is your first time going up against ‘Steeds of this design,” Slipshod countered sternly. He knew that the zebra was skilled. Being able to hold off those Gildas as long as he had back on Capensis had made that fact evident, but sometimes even skill could be soundly outweighed by technological superiority, especially when the pilot in question didn’t completely understand the nature and extent of that superiority. ComSpark’s technological edge was almost on par with that of the Clans, from what the changeling had seen. Both having managed to make what amounted only to incremental improvements on what had been in existence during the height of the Celestia League.

Even with three centuries to work with, this wasn’t entirely unsurprising, Slipshod supposed. Advancement was spurred onward most aggressively by necessity. Where weaponry was concerned, that meant that more efficient and potent weapons were typically developed to overcome―or at least achieve―an advantage over what the other side held. Presuming a firm research and development infrastructure existed, and wasn’t being routinely ‘interrupted’ by a malevolent changeling cabal intent on retaining their own technological superiority.

In any case, without any true adversaries to fight and evaluate the capabilities of their war materials, neither the Clans, nor ComSpark, had seen much opportunity to make leaps or bounds in warfighting capabilities over what had existed when the real Twilight had reigned. Thanks to the equipment that had been provided to the Irregulars by their Clan benefactors, that meant that they’d been able to refit Xanadu’s Philomena to make it more formidable than just about any other variant in the Harmony Sphere, but there was a difference between refitting a ‘Steed with advanced equipment, and a ‘Steed that had been designed, from the ground up, specifically to use the most advanced equipment in the galaxy.

He had pulsed energy weapons now, yes, but not the reduced-weight drive reactor that would allow them to fit the additional heat sinks to allow him to make the best use of them. In fact, in order to keep from sacrificing any armor plating to fit the heavier weapons, Mig and Tig had actually been forced to remove heat management systems. The result was a ‘Steed that could hit much harder over a shorter amount of time than the original loadout, but he’d struggle in a prolonged fight without support.

Xanadu had been briefed on the new advantages―as well as the shortcomings that went along with them―by the twin kirin mechanics, and he was a seasoned enough pilot to understand what those changes meant and take them to heart. So it wasn’t that Slipshod was ‘worried’, per se...well, not entirely. He was worried. The changeling would acknowledge that much―privately, at least. This was their first engagement where they would be going in anticipating meeting ComSpark resistance.

And, besides, the last time they’d fought ComSpark...well, they’d returned a pilot light.

That thought weighed heavily on Slipshod’s mind. He recognized that this was a battle, and that sometimes creatures died in battles. That was the way of things. He could live with that much. What was harder to push aside was the apprehension that he felt knowing that there would be aspects of this fight that he’d essentially pushed for, beyond what was absolutely necessary. If something went awry on that end of things...well, it would be a lot harder to convince himself that he hadn’t had a hoof in their deaths.

Like he had with Valkyrie, and his ill-conceived ‘advice’ to the pegasus mare on how ‘real’ mercenaries did things on a mission. He’d been trying to cover up for his own misplaced ‘weakness’ when he’d put himself in harm’s way to protect her during a mission gone awry. Only to have that advice come back to bite him in the flank, and get her killed needlessly.

There was a small part of him that was scared that this too was ‘needless’. That worried the intelligence that they stood to gain wasn’t worth the lives of the creatures that would be put in danger to get at it. If they died trying…

Worse, if they died and failed…

“Touchdown in ten seconds!” Aileron’s voice announced across the comm frequency, interrupting Slipshod’s thoughts and bringing his focus abruptly back to the present. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves, made one final assessment of his BattleSteed’s systems, and looped his fetlocks around the control yokes in front of him. An amber light began flashing in the ‘Steed Bay. A second later, the lateral doors of the DropShip began to rise up, opening up the changeling’s view of the imminent battlefield.

He could already spot the myriad vapor trails of missiles crisscrossing the sky between the retreating engineering battalion and their ComSpark pursuers. Tracer fire from small-arms could also be seen where the rounds occasionally broached the treeline of a hilltop or mountainside. The sensor overlay of his HUD illuminated with blue icons, denoting the location of friendly contacts. More sparsely placed crimson symbols directed him towards the confirmed positions of enemy vehicles. There were sure to be far more out there than the half dozen or so that were detectable at the moment.

It was just a matter of finding them.

Slipshod’s hind hooves flexed and depressed the accelerator pedals of his Chrystal Cavalier, moving it out of the DropShip, “Bug clear,” he announced. The other two pilots announced their own departures as well.

“Zathura returning to orbit,” Aileron announced. Behind him, through the thick viewport of his cockpit, the changeling could hear the roar of the DropShip’s engines as it shot away from the engagement area at several times the speed of sound.

“Alright, Gallop Lance, let’s get to work,” Slipshod glimpsed down briefly to the map displayed on his console and started setting markers, “Twiggie, move to Nav Apple. That should let you lay down fire support to help cover the withdrawal,” he peered out over the engagement area, eyeing the sources of missile fire from the enemy before marking another pair of points on the tactical overlay, “Xanax, sweep from Bronco to Cider. Mark targets for Twiggie and take out anything that gets too close to you.

“I’ll create a phase line along the ridgeline at Donkey and hold them back. Anypony spots a Twittermite, call it out immediately. Understood?”

“You got it, Bug!” the zebra announced just as his Philomena cantered past him and plunged into the woodline.

“Moving,” Twilight acknowledged as well, the blip identifying her Rainbow Dash heading for the position that Slipshod had marked for her.

The changeling nodded to himself and accelerated his own ‘Steed ahead at a full run. Trunks shattered into splinters, barely proving to be more than a minor inconvenience to his Cavalier, as he hammered his way through to boreal forest in pursuit of the advancing ComSpark armor. The HUD overlaid onto the visor of his helmet marked targets that he couldn’t hope to see with his naked eye through the coniferous trees. Trusting in the accuracy of his cockpit computer, the changeling lined up his side-mounted prismatic projector cannon and depressed the trigger.

The chromatic projectile punched through trunks and sheared away branches in its path, seeming to not even acknowledge their existence at all. A second later the scarlet bracket that identified the position of the Scorpion Tank winked out.

“TARGET DESTROYED!” the computer announced. A moment after that, a column of smoke became visible as it peeked out above the treetops and continued to rise further into the air. Slipshod moved onto the next target in range, toggling over to the pair of large pulsed energy cannons in the shoulders of his ‘Steed while the PPC began its recharge cycle.

It would be fascinating to see how many vehicles would be destroyed before the commander of the armor element recognized that new threats had entered the engagement zone and started issuing orders to have their―remaining―forces respond.

There were―TARGET DESTROYED!―two fewer already…

“Jump complete, commander,” the kirin mare announced from her position at the astrogation station on the DropShip’s bridge.

The scale-backed stallion reclining in the command couch of the Friendship-class DropShipd’s bridge stared hard at the tactical projection on the holographic table in front of him, taking in the disposition of forces in the system. Brumal Storm, commander of the 3rth Striker Battalion, of the 21st Striker Regiment, of the Nirik Light Pony Mercenary Company, was no stranger to difficult fights. As the designation of his command implied, his were among the forces routinely used as the ‘tip of the spear’, so to speak, when their company was called upon to assault a fortified objective. It seemed that this, however, was to be one of their more difficult landings.

The planet’s orbitals were already firmly in the grasp of the enemy, and the number of vessels in orbit suggested that a considerable quantity of forces were either already on the surface, or could be deployed within rather short notice. He idly rubbed at his chin with his cloven hoof, mentally weighing the substantial disparity in the balance of forces between his fours DropShips and the Legion’s dozens.

He had the fighter support necessary to make it to the surface and deploy his ‘Steeds, sure; but to what end? They wouldn’t be able to hold out indefinitely against the Legion like this, and resupply wasn’t something that could be guaranteed until the orbiting ships were pushed back. He didn’t have the fighters to accomplish that. Not yet. He had assurances that more DropShips and fighters were coming as soon as other elements of the Nirik Light Pony could be mobilized and routed, but that would take another few weeks. At the earliest.

Yet, his marching orders were to get his forces to the surface as soon as possible.

Curiously, it had also been made abundantly clear to him that ‘possible’ did not mean ‘practical’, in this specific instance. He wasn’t authorized to wait for reinforcements in order to make any sort of counter-attack ‘stick. He was to fight his way through the blockade and get his battalion―along with their company of recently attached freelance mercenaries―to the surface of the planet immediately.

He wasn’t very happy about that, but those were his orders…

“Order the fleet to undock,” he said, “best time approach for Colton. Lieutenant Brisk, work out a rotation with the other flight-ops officers. I want a squadron on alert and ready to launch within five minutes at all times,” the commander cautioned, “damned if I’m going to be caught by a Legion fighter wing out here in the black.”

“Yes, sir,” his ship’s own fighter operations officer assured him.

“Good,” the kirin stallion stood up and glanced over at the stoic-looking mare standing nearby, “Stival? Walk with me,” she nodded and quickly fell into step behind and slightly to the left of her commander as they left the bridge and began making their way towards the lower decks of the large, spherical, DropShip.

After a few minutes, and descending four more decks, they reached the gantry level of the ship’s beam-spanning BattleSteed Bay. The massive metal cavern served as the holding pen for the full company of ‘Steeds being transported in the ship. At the moment, all twelve were securely stowed in their service stalls as they and their pilots waited for their small flight of DropShips to make planetary orbit. There was hardly any activity going on at the moment, as none of the ‘Steeds required any serious servicing, and the routine service that was performed on them took place only at eight hour intervals and required less than an hour to complete for the entire bay.

Which made the location perfect for conducting conversations that were best held away from prying ears.

Which was not to say that Brumal felt that he couldn’t trust the other members of his company, or especially his command staff. However, he had posed some questions to his second-in-command which could end up having...implications, if his suspicions proved founded. Implications that might end up―perhaps even rightly―giving his crew reason to be concerned. There was ‘concern’ enough floating around the battalion as a result of their operation in general. They didn’t need his paranoia needlessly adding to it.

If he was wrong, that is. If it turned out that he was right to be concerned...that was a different story. And it might even prompt him to take different actions.

“Were you able to find out anything about our ‘specialists’?” the stallion asked, keeping his tone low despite their isolation―the ‘Steed bay had a proclivity to echo―but not hiding the distaste that covered his words. He detested working with ‘contractors’ on operations. However ‘professional’ or ‘experienced’ they might be, that didn’t mean that they knew―or even cared to follow―established Light Pony SOPs or protocols. In his mind, if those pilots really were the caliber of pilot that they insisted they were, then they’d already be working for one of the larger mercenary companies, and not freelancing as a tiny independent outfit that couldn’t even manufacture their own ‘Steeds. Having to instead rely on stitching together battlefield castoffs in order to field even a lance of working BattleSteeds.

Brumal Storm didn’t have any respect for those types.

Even so, somehow the fact that these mercs who’d been attached to his battalion at the last minute seemed to be in the possession of ‘Steeds that looked to be in genuinely superb condition actually bothered him more than if they’d been obvious salvage. Those mercenaries had either enjoyed an unseemly profitable career to be able to afford to buy ‘Steeds like that...or they had a benefactor with better connections than even the Nirik Light Pony did.

He wasn’t sure what he thought of the implications of the latter…

“Other than a sublime career as premier mercenaries?” his second responded, using her magic to pass him a datapad containing the information that she’d been able to dig up. Her tone suggested that she was already aware that her superior wasn’t going to appreciate her findings, “their pedigree is impeccable,” she noted.

“Dromedary Defense...Invasion of High Peak...the Clover Blitz?!” Brumal Storm’s disgust at the latter was borne of pure envy, if he was being honest. That particular campaign a decade ago had been a feat of tactical genius that was likely to become a subject of required reading at ‘Steed academies across the Sphere in due time. If it wasn’t already. A single regiment had managed to take control of a planet in less than a week with minimal friendly losses. Unsurprisingly, it had consisted of only the top-tier units in the Sphere…

...of which it seemed their guests had been one.

If the information was reliable, at any rate, “this is accurate?” this was not meant as a slight against the mare’s capabilities or intelligence, but rather a clarification on the efficacy of her sources.

“MRB confirmed,” she nodded, not taking any offense at the skepticism. The kind of outstanding record that the company in question had understandably invited a healthy level of skepticism. After all, it wasn’t like no mercenary company had never ‘exaggerated’ their portfolio before.

Brumal Storm’s scowl only deepened further. A company could make any sort of grandiose claims that they wanted, alleging ‘being kept off the official’ reports by employers who didn’t want to share credit. Such a thing was known to occur. Whether it was the truth or not came down to how trustworthy the creature making the claim seemed. Even if they presented ‘proof’ in the form of an accolade, or payment receipt, those sorts of things were easy enough to forge if the desire to inflate their reputation was strong enough. However, nocreature could fudge a Mercenary Review Board record. ComSpark maintained a rigid integrity of their records that was held up as a gold standard for the rest of the Sphere. Something that their apolitical affiliation allowed them to accomplish with little issue.

If the MRB had a record of the contract happening, then it had happened exactly as the report alleged.

Whoever these pilots were, they appeared to genuinely be very accomplished mercenaries.

While those findings helped to assuage his nervousness regarding how truly competent the mercs that had been attached to him were, it didn’t alleviate all his misgivings. If anything, he was now even more concerned about how willing the attached company was to ‘be a team player’. If the stallion was being honest, these freelancers had more renowned careers than he did. Not that he’d ever admit it to them.

He let out an annoyed grunt and passed the datapad back to his second, “damn,” he muttered, “I’d have liked a reason to justify keeping them from making the drop with us,” he admitted, “I was sure they were just going to get in the way. Still am. Their commander hasn’t participated in a single briefing since they docked with the Jump Ship!”

The mare nodded in sympathy to her superior’s misgivings, “at least if things don’t go well, you’ll have plenty of fodder to shift the blame,” she pointed out.

“‘If’,” Brumal Storm let out another―significantly more―annoyed grunt, “a battalion against...whatever is already on the ground on Colton,” he spat, “it’s a damned suicide run!” he snapped. He turned away from the mare a second later, recognizing that he was unintentionally taking out his mounting frustrations with the operation on her, as though his subordinate had had anything to do with it. Another reason why he’d wanted to have this discussion away from prying eyes and ears: he’d needed to vent.

“We’ll lose kirin just getting through the blockade,” he pointed out rhetorically. The other mare was already well aware of how high the odds against them were stacked. The stallion slumped over the railing, exasperated, and started massaging his brow, “...I’m not even sure it’s worth having our DropShips try to take off again. We can keep them grounded,” he mused aloud, “use them for a makeshift beachhead. Hold out for reinforcements.”

“Our orders are to assault the spaceport at the capital,” the mare reminded him.

Brumal Storm nodded, still massaging his brow, “I know, I know!” he hissed, “and we can probably even take it,” he conceded. They’d reviewed the plan for the operation’s assault, and it was a sound one. Even if they exaggerated the enemy’s anticipated presence at the spaceport, it was still doable―though with significant losses, “but holding it...we can’t do that,” he said, shaking his head, “they’ll push us back out within the day.

“They can bring in hundreds of ‘Steeds from other regions of the planet to throw against us,” the stallion pointed out, “meanwhile, we’ll only have what ammunition we’re carrying with us or can salvage from the spaceport―and you know they’ll blow the magazines the moment it’s clear we’ll take it!” the mare nodded in agreement. It’s what they would do, after all. Tactics one-oh-one: deny the enemy warfighting material if at all possible. It was piss poor planning to allow the adversary to use your own missiles against you later. Especially when all it took was one well-placed autocannon round to solve the problem.

“We can’t hold the position,” he reiterated, not feeling all that much assured to see his second nodding along in agreement with his estimation, “and I refuse to fight to the death defending an objective that won’t even gain us anything. If I knew that it was at least possible that we’d be getting help within a day or two, I’d have us make a go of it, but…” he let out an exasperated sigh, shaking his head.

“Weeks? Whoever ends up jumping in later is just going to need to take the spaceport all over again! It’ll be like we’d never even tried,” he spat, “...so I have to wonder why I should even bother in the first place.”

That was a very dangerous comment to make out loud, Brumal Storm knew. Had he thought for a moment that there were any other kirin within earshot, he wouldn’t have made it either. However, his second had his complete confidence.

Besides, if he couldn’t trust his own daughter, then the stallion was pretty sure that he had failed far more seriously in life than merely as a strategist.

The younger mare’s expression softened now as she felt herself falling out of her role as her commander’s ‘second-in-command’, and into the far less frequently exercised persona of Brumal Storm’s filly, “other than because that sort of insubordination will get you busted back down to engine tech?” she pointed out rhetorically.

“Better demoted than dead,” the older stallion murmured grumpily, his gaze softening as he looked towards the mare, “especially if there’s no point!

“What’s accomplished by holding the spaceport for a day; weeks before we’ll receive any help?!” his tone had ratcheted up an octave in his desperation for a genuine answer. One that he was fairly confident he wouldn’t be receiving any time soon. He let out a dry cackle of a laugh, “unless they taught you something at those fancy Equus academies you’d like to share with your dear old dad to help put my mind at ease?”

The kirin mare smiled up at him, nodding in sympathy, stepping over closer to her father and throwing her hoof around him, bringing him into a firm hug. The stallion sighed, reveling in the embrace and desperate to use it to disperse the ball of stress welling up in his gut, “we can’t go through with this landing,” he said to her in a low whisper, “it’s pointless.”

“The queen’s will is never pointless.”

Brumal Storm blinked in surprise and pulled away from his daughter. Well, he tried to pull away, at least. However, he quickly found that she was holding him in what was very nearly an iron grip, “wha―?! What’re you talking about? You mean Queen Twilight? What’s she have to do with thiiiiAAAAHHH―!”

His last word ended upon an abruptly punctuated ‘THUD’ as his body hit the ‘Steed Bay deck thirty meters below. The kirin mare peered over the railing, briefing inspecting the mangled corpse of the―now former―commander of the 3rd Striker Battalion. A title that now officially fell to her. The young mare―who was not entirely a ‘kirin’, per se; but had played one quite convincingly for the last five years―strolled over to the far end of the catwalk she and her ‘father’ had been standing on and opened a cabinet there. After a few moments of rummaging she withdrew the impact driver that she’d stashed there earlier that morning, and sauntered back to where the two of them had been standing. A few diligent applications of the power tool later saw a segment of railing tumbling downwards as well, very nearly hitting the kirin stallion’s corpse below.

The mare smiled, walked away, placed the impact driver back in the cabinet―she’d return it to the appropriate tech’s toolbox that evening―and began tapping out a brief set of commands on his datalink. A moment later, she heard another mare’s voice respond over the bud nestled in her ear, “how’d the talk with ‘daddy’ go?”

“He got cold hooves, just like we thought he would,” she replied flatly, “but I dealt with it. We’ll make our landing on schedule.”

“Are we concerned about pushback from the crew?” the mare on the other end of the call asked, “he’s probably not the only scale-back with two working brain cells,” they pointed out.

“It would be helpful if the crew received an ‘update’ from their command letting them know that they could expect a relief force within a day of landing,” the not-kirin pointed out acridly, “any chance we can set something like that up?” this was something that wouldn’t have been an option while Brumal Storm had still been alive. The kirin stallion’s rank and position had allowed him unfettered access to the uptodate locations of every major mercenary force in the region. There’d have been no way to convince him that those ‘unanticipated’ relief forces were forthcoming.

“There’s an HSG on Colton,” the other mare noted, “I’ll comm them, and have them bounce something out of system and back to the Jump Ship that can be relayed to us. That should work. We can have word of ‘miracle’ reinforcements enroute within the hour.”

“Perfect. Do that,” the mare detoured into a nearby latrine and stepped over to a sink. She wet her hooves and delicately dabbed around her eyes and cheeks, “now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to tell the rest of the battalion about the change in leadership...and have myself a good cry to really seal the deal. Then I’ll be typing out a memo reminding the maintenance teams that they need to inspect the ship much more thoroughly.

“You just never know when a bolt or two are gonna loosen up on you...” she said while wearing a wicked grin.

“Have fun!” the mare cackled before signing off.

The kirin took one last look at herself in the mirror, inspecting the dampness around her eyes. It was a good start, and would soon be supplemented by the real thing. In less than a second, the otherwise disinterested expression on the face of the kirin morphed into one of such pain and distress, that it could easily have been used as a pictorial definition of ‘grief’. She swapped over her datalink to broadcast on one of the DropShip’s internal frequencies.

“Medic to the ‘Steed Bay!” she screamed in near perfect hysterics, “my father’s hurt! Please, somepony; help!”

She was already galloping out of the latrine and heading towards one of the nearby stairwells that would take her down to the ground floor of the ‘Steed Bay so that she could be found sobbing appropriately over her father, who had died ever-so-tragically when the railing he was leaning on gave way, due to loose bolts which had been neglected by the monthly inspections of the ship’s interior structure for far too long. Somepony would be spending a week in the brig for horn-waving their inspection reports. She wasn’t sure who yet. Probably that cyan mare who gave her the stink-eye last week for sleeping with her coltfriend...

Slipshod slammed a hoof down on his console, silencing the rather obnoxious alarm that was―rather redundantly, in his opinion―warning him about the loss of the last of his ablative plating along his Chrystal Cavalier’s left barrel. He was perfectly aware that what had effectively been a triple-broadside from a Shrek PPC Carrier was one of the few combat vehicles in existence which could do serious damage to even a ‘Steed like his.

It had been his own fault, really. He’d failed to heed his own advice and allowed himself to be drawn too deeply into the enemy’s lines. Several minutes of effectively one-shotting lighter armored units had caused him to grow complacent. Before he knew it, the targets he was picking out had changed from the light and medium Scorpion Tank varieties to much heavier hitting models of vehicle like Demolishers with their type-twenty autocannons and Shreks, boasting a trio of prismatic projector cannons. They were slow moving, and their turrets couldn’t track fast moving targets, but if they hit you, you felt it!

His Cavalier had ‘felt’ far more hits than he cared to, and it honestly wouldn’t take being tagged by too many more to send him down for good.

Twilight was faring much better, at least. Her Rainbow Dash’s jump jets were allowing her to dart out of the firing arcs of the vehicles far too quickly for them to get a good firing solution on her. Xanadu was managing to hold his own as well. The zebra pilot had finished mopping up the last of the missile carriers and was closing in with his two heavier cohorts to help them mop up the last of the vehicles.

Another piece of good news was that the engineers were safely out of the area, and moving unmolested back to friendly territory. As far their obligation to the Gray Lines Legion was concerned, they could call in the Zathura at any time and withdraw. In fact, there was quite a bit of wisdom in that particular plan of action, truth be told. However, there was still the unofficial objective that the Irregulars had assigned to themselves while they were in the area, which had yet to be accomplished.

On that note, Slipshod hastily keyed in the DropShip’s frequency, “High Gain, any sign of that damn generator yet?!” as he spoke, he wheeled his ‘Steed around and cycled through all four of his emerald-hued medium energy cannons, pouring them into the forward facing armor of the Shrek. It had little effect on the heavily armored vehicle, but at least it made him feel better to do something to it in retaliation.

“Still trying, commander,” came the earth pony mare’s own frustrated reply, “Doppler’s having trouble pinning it down; there’re too many thermal signatures in the area.”

Slipshod let out an aggravated growl as he drove his Cavalier headlong at the PPC carrier in an attempt to crush it. However, much to his chagrin―and as he’d feared―the vehicle actually managed to stand up to the weight of his ‘Steed. Not too surprising, he supposed. It did weigh more than his own ‘Steed did, after all. The changeling noted in the back of his head that there were unlikely to be fewer thermal signatures in the area any time soon, seeing as how just about every target they took down effectively created another heat bloom as it started to burn…

“What are the chances we can get them to make a broadcast while they’re in the area?” he heard the unicorn sensor tech muse sardonically over the frequency.

The stallion just rolled his eyes and kept his ‘Steed moving in an effort to make himself a harder target. The coil of rainbow light that zipped across his field of view informed him that it was working. A tremor which shook his piloting couch and an alert regarding the amount of plating left on his ‘Steed’s right barrel prompted the changeling to revise his assessment downward to ‘mostly working’, “you want I should call ‘em up and ask real nice; changeling to changeling?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Doppler observed.

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that shit…” Slipshod muttered as he slammed down on the decelerator of his Cavalier, threw it into reverse, and yanked savagely at the steering yokes. A third PPC bolt slammed through the thicket in front of him, missing by meters but still fizzling out the icons on his HUD. Fortunately, the distances involved made those scarlet brackets rather redundant. His ‘Steed reversed and turned, bringing his―finally recharged―heavier weapons to bear on the Shrek. The stallion unleashed his own projection cannon and both pulsed energy weapons, which proved to be up to the task of finishing off the carrier, birthing another blossom of heat to further confound the ship’s perhaps too sensitive sensor suite.

He spurred his Cavalier back into forward motion and triggered a brief reboot and degaussing of his HUD to clear the lingering effects of the Shrek’s PPC hits and near-misses. When it came back online, all the markers were once again crisp and solid. There were also blessedly fewer of them. Though they were still somehow yet to catch sight of two particular signals, “has anypony spotted those Twittermites yet?”

“I’ve been playing grab-flank with something out here that keeps dropping on and off my radar,” Xanadu reported, audibly annoyed, “I think it’s trying to draw me in somewhere, because it doesn’t chase me past Nav Hayseed.”

“It’s absolutely trying to lure you into a trap,” Slipshod confirmed, “either its partner, or maybe a Demolisher or something lying unpowered deeper in the valley. Get back here to me. We’ll mop up the rest of what we can see here and then go in together. Whatever they’ve got should be able to take all three of us on, or they’d have brought it out already,” he noted.

“Roger; moving!”

“How’re you holding up, Twiggie? Any missiles left?”

“Negative on missiles,” the purple mare informed him, “and down to my last three AC rounds.”

“Understood,” Slipshod had figured as much. Her twenty-pack LRM launches did burn through ammunition rather quickly, and the Rainbow Dash only carried a couple tons of missiles to feed them. She still had her own PPCs, but not much else once those last few autocannon rounds were spent. His and Xanadu’s ‘Steeds were almost entirely energy-weapon fitted, so they didn’t have to worry about running dry; but with Twilight’s punching power cut by about half, it would reduce their lance’s overall offensive capabilities by quite a lot. Especially at range.

They should have enough firepower to take on a pair of light ‘Steeds though. The real problem there was forcing a confrontation. The pilots of those Twittermites had the upper hoof in terms of speed and visibility. They’d get to pick the terms of the engagement, and that wasn’t ideal. They’d also be free to withdraw the moment things stopped going their way. If those pilots were good enough, they could extend this encounter into a series of inconclusive skirmishes that went on for hours.

And it wasn’t a guarantee that they’d have that kind of time. The Legion could end up giving them a withdrawal order in order to redeploy and help somewhere else on the planet. Who knew when they’d get another shot at trying to raid this site again?

They needed to compel the Twittermites to come to them...

“Stick close,” the changeling instructed his lancemates. He peered at the navigational map of the area on his console and started plotting out a basic search pattern, “we’ll start sweeping the area for the HSG.”

“What about the Twittermites?” Xanadu asked.

“They can move faster than all three of us,” Slipshod pointed out, “and they’ll see us coming long before we’ll see them. They won’t engage us until they have to.”

“...and they won’t ‘have’ to until we threaten the HSG,” Twilight added, catching on to the stallion’s line of thought.

“Exactly.”

“But the sensors on our ‘Steeds aren’t sensitive enough to detect the facility,” the zebra pilot pointed out correctly. Then he added, “I mean, not without us being almost right on top of it anyway…”

“True,” Twilight said, “and the moment it looks like we’re about to stumble onto it, those ‘Steeds are going to swoop in and try to either chase us off or draw us away.”

“They’ll know we’re just doing a blind search,” Slipshod acknowledged. Anycreature who watched their progress for more than a few minutes would be able to clearly see that the three of them didn’t know the exact location of the HSG facility, “but the fact that we’re doing a search at all should freak them out a little. As far as they’re concerned we were just sent here to rescue those engineers, remember?

“But now those engineers are safely out of the area and there’re no more serious threats around. We should be leaving here too…,” Slipshod couldn’t help but smile slightly at the thought of what would start going through the heads of the changelings in the area in a few minutes, “...and it’s going to make them very nervous that we’re not.”

“Almost like we know there’s something here to find…” the stallion was able to detect a similar mirth in the alicorn’s words as well, and he approved.

Vesper was one very unhappy bug pony, and she was having a very bad day.

Part of her had to wonder if this day hadn’t been the manifestation of some sort of cosmic retribution for all of the silent complaints that she’d had regarding the assignment. Being Facility Director for a secret HyperSpark Generator sequestered in the middle of nowhere on a middling border world was never going to be a particularly ‘glorious’ assignment, after all. It certainly wasn’t any sort of detriment to the career of an operative in Her Majesty’s service, by any stretch. Many tens of thousands of drones worked in such places across the galaxy. There was even a fair amount of upward mobility available to her.

Until today, Vesper had every reason to believe that she was well on her way to being promoted to Regional Facility Coordinator within the decade, with the possibility of becoming the Operations Manager for the entirety of KIRCOM. She could have been making personal reports to The Queen Herself within thirty years! A respectable position―even an envious one―for a mere drone, to be sure…

...Just not an exciting one.

Wake up, review the previous evening’s HyperSpark traffic, review the scheduled traffic the day, file her report with her superiors, rinse, repeat. As a Regional Facility Coordinator, her duties would have been just as dreary: review several dozen nearly identical reports from the Directors that reported to her, consolidate them into a singular report for the Operations Manager, and forward whatever directives said Ops Manager sent her to be disseminated to the HSGs under her purview.

A career full of mind-numbingly dull monotony.

Oh, how she envied that monotony in this moment! The last twelve hours had proven to be far too ‘exciting’ for her tastes.

It had all seemed like a simple enough problem to solve when those damnable engineers first arrived: simply ignore them and do nothing. Just like she always did whenever some random group decided to wander through the area. Usually such groups consisted of contractors scouting for resource deposits on behalf of some materials firm or other. If it looked like they were going to find something worthwhile, she just placed a call with her contacts in the planetary government and an appropriate environmental injunction against any sort of digging or drilling in the area was filed through the courts. The contractors were gone within the week.

She hadn’t known why those engineers were here at first. Then they’d started surveying blasting sites in order to construct a dam. The last thing she needed was ponies setting off bombs right over her head. Unfortunately, the planetary government was going through something of a ‘restructuring’ at the moment, thanks to the unscheduled invasion of Colton, and so Vesper wasn’t able to make use of her preferred method of dealing with interlopers. She’d been forced to get ‘creative’.

Not that she had a lot of tools at her disposal in the first place. However, they had just been unsupported engineers many miles away from serious reinforcements. She had confirmed with her other sources on the planet that every military unit that was part of the invasion was accounted for, and currently wrapped up in assignments that it was unlikely they’d be withdrawn from to help out one little engineering battalion in the middle of the wilderness away from any strategically important locations.

So she’d ordered the security elements under her command to be hastily painted up to look like local militia forces and sent them out to chase off their unwanted guests. Everything had even been going quite well too, at first…

...then a light lance of BattleSteeds had dropped in out of nowhere. One that hadn’t been on any of the earlier intelligence reports that she’d received. Apparently they were newly arrived mercenaries in the system.

As was to be expected, those ‘Steeds―of which two were suspiciously rare models―had managed to soundly trounce her vehicular forces. Fortunately, it had seemed like the purpose of those mercenaries had simply been to help cover the withdrawal of the engineers. Vesper had decided that she could live with the loss of so many of her security staff, so long as the goal of clearing the interloping force out of the area remained accomplished. With luck, whoever was in charge of deployments would be unwilling to send out unsupported groups again into the region, and it would be some time before genuine military forces could be spared to protect them. Long enough, hopefully, for her contacts on the planet to contrive reasons why returning here was unwise or unnecessary.

Then the lance had, for some reason, decided not to pull out with the engineers!

To Vesper’s immense consternation, it looked like they’d even elected to begin conducting a systematic search of the area. Perhaps to locate whatever base the ‘militia’ units had come from? Possible, the changeling supposed. That didn’t make it any less frustrating though.

Nor did it help with her dread where the contents of her report for the day was concerned. Bad enough that she was going to be forced to report the near total loss of her security forces―as well as having to put in a request for replacements to be smuggled in. Now she was likely going to have to explain what she could have possibly done wrong that would prompt a lance to ‘search’ for her facility. Even though it was just a coincidence that the lance was looking for anything in the area. After all, there was no possible way that they could know about the second HSG on Colton…

“Ma’am, secure communique coming in for you,” one of the techs called out from his station.

Vesper massaged her temple and let out an annoyed sigh. Nothing in her experience suggested that any calls she was likely to receive at a time like this was going to be welcome news. However, avoiding the message wasn’t an option either, unfortunately, “put it through,” she commanded, then regarded the holoprojection table in front of her as the local map and the trio of crimson blips tracking the errant ‘Steeds was replaced by the head of a changeling mare, “this is Director Vesper of the Colton HSG; what can I do for you…?”

“Colonel Myrma, of Her Majesty’s 41st Special Reactionary Force,” the other mare introduced herself, “we’re here to solve the Colton issue for you. However, we’re going to need some assistance from your facility to make our job easier.”

“What sort of ‘assistance’?” Vesper asked cautiously, not certain that she liked the sound of that. Typically, reactionary forces were the ones doing the ‘assisting’, and she could certainly use some of that right about now to deal with those BattleSteeds roaming around on the surface.

“The Light Pony force up here is a little hesitant about making a drop on Colton without assurance that reinforcements are on the way,” the colonel explained, “we already had to deal with one commander getting cold hooves. Too many more could undermine the whole mission,” the hologram cast a knowing look at the Facility Director, “an HSG message letting them know help is just a day or two away would be greatly appreciated.”

Vesper’s frown deepened, “as much as I’d love to help you, colonel, we have something of a ‘situation’ down here at the moment,” she admitted reluctantly.

Myrma’s eyes narrowed, “what kind of ‘situation’?”

“A lance is poking around on the surface.”

“They’ve found you?”

Vesper shook her head, “we don’t think so, but they’re engaged in a search pattern. We don’t know what they think they’re looking for, but the last thing I want to do is draw attention to ourselves by sending out a HyperSpark message.”

The hologram frowned now, “‘Steeds sensors can’t detect HyperSpark transmissions,” she pointed out, “and any DropShip in orbit won’t be able to pin down a source either. They’ll assume it was from the primary array in the capital,” Vesper was about to voice her concern regarding the risk involved, but the other changeling seemed to have anticipated her reluctance, “but, if it will make you feel better, we can deploy one of our lances to help you out.

“However,” the colonel stressed, “we’ll need that message first in order to make the drop. Understood?”

The changeling in charge of the facility sighed and nodded her head. It would be a stretch to say that she was thrilled about the plan of action, but it did sound like it was the best option available to her. Besides, technically, she didn’t really have the authority to refuse the colonel’s request. Her job was to protect the secrecy of the generator and coordinate requested HSG traffic, not determine what messages were and were not reasonable to transmit.

There was room to argue, perhaps, that transmissions could be delayed if she felt that would contribute to the secrecy of the facility. However, like the colonel had pointed out: BattleSteed sensor suites were not capable of detecting such transmissions in the first place, and any DropShip that wasn’t fitted with its own HSG was unlikely to be able to triangulate such transmission sources either. The risk posed by complying with the other changeling’s request was minimal.

Vesper was just letting her nerves get the better of her, she knew. So she took a deep breath to clear her head and looked back to the projection, “you’ll have your message, colonel. I do ask that you expedite your relief all the same, if you please.”

The BattleSteed commander smiled now, “excellent! We’ll be touching down in twelve hours. Sit tight until then. Myrma, out.”

Facility Director Vesper grumbled as the projector table reverted back to its topographical depiction, and once more displayed the choreographed movements of the lance of ‘Steeds moving above them. Twelve hours was a long time. More than enough for yet something else to go wrong for her today. At least she could rest assured that that ‘something else’ shouldn’t be the ‘Steeds picking up the HyperSpark transmission.

She looked back towards her signal tech, “let’s give the colonel what she needs. Bounce a message off the Gallipoli relay, letting the Light Pony units in this system know that the…” she pulled out her datapad and quickly skimmed through the latest reports that she had regarding the Nirik Light Pony’s deployments in the area, so that she could cite a group that was believably close to the region, “...that the 50th Heavy Cavalry is on its way. Explain that they made a Jump Ship transfer to shave a week off their transit time and will be in-system tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Vesper forced herself to take her eyes off of the map. It was only continuing to make her nervous for no good reason. She’d likely be forced to face some harsh criticism from her immediate superiors regarding the loss of nearly all of her security forces, but it was nothing that would be career ending. A single blemish on an otherwise spotless record that shouldn’t keep her from receiving her due promotions. At worst, she’d prolonged her journey to becoming the head of KIRCOM by a few years. Hardly a concern at all really.

Once that transmission went out, her problems would be well on their way to being solved...

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 28: Warrior - Riposte

Squelch sat in quiet seclusion in her apartment on Aether. Her eyes scrutinized the next in the series of articles that she had spent the better part of the week reading with great interest. Well, if she was being perfectly honest, dread was the more apt description for what she was feeling at the moment.

The sage green unicorn had to admit that she hadn’t been as up to date on Our Worlds League politics as she could have been. Perhaps most clearly demonstrated by her ignorance to Moonlight Radiance’s absence from the capital. However, it seemed that she hadn’t been the only pony in the League who’d been unaware of quite a few of the goings-on. Even quite a few of the government’s entrenched bureaucrats were getting caught off guard by recent―very recent―events.

Yesterday, much to the utter shock of nearly every citizen of the Our Worlds League, Stellar Nova, one of the previous captain-general’s several foals, had made their reappearance back onto the public stage. Moonlight’s aunt had proven herself to be exceptionally, erm...prolific, where her progeny were concerned. To the point where Parliament was genuinely concerned about the possibility of a succession crisis between her many possible heirs.

When it had been her niece, of all ponies, who’d declared herself to be the next captain-general in the wake of her untimely death, there’d been a mixture of relief and surprise among the political elite of the League. On the one hoof, it looked like it could head off a grisly multi-part civil war, with the better part of a dozen heirs all vying for domination. On the other hoof, Moonlight had ostensibly been so far down the list of possible heirs that many worried if she would be able to hold onto her power for long.

From what Squelch saw now, it seemed that those latter concerns were quite well founded.

Not only was Stellar Nova regarded as one of the last captain-general’s more competent foals, he had also been very prominent on the political scene for a great many years leading up to his mother’s death. He’d been working very closely with Parliament, creating numerous inroads with the movers and the shakers there. At a glance, it seemed obvious that he was being groomed for his mother’s position. He had even been serving as regent until last year…

...Right up until he’d been presumed killed, along with his mother and older brother, in a bomb blast.

However, now it seemed that the reports of his death had been premature. What was more, was that the stallion had produced a document written by his late mother which explicitly named him as the designated heir to the captain-generalcy.

Ostensibly, that should have been the end of any question as to who was in charge of the Our Worlds League. However, there were quite a few legal tangles that fowled up the works. By design, the title of captain-general was one which was nearly impossible to revoke once it had been bestowed. Generations of holders of the title who had been wary of sibling pretenders trying to usurp the position had seen to it that it took more than merely being well-liked by the government’s Parliament to ascend once somepony already held the position.

Which wasn’t to say that it was impossible to revoke the title either. It would just take an overwhelming quantity of support from the Leagues representatives. Support which Stellar Nova was very quickly gathering about himself. Nopony in the League seemed to doubt that he’d be granted his cousin’s position within the year. It was especially not helpful for Moonlight Radiance that they were halfway across the galaxy at the moment, bogged down in a politically divisive planetary conquest.

Squelch had been half tempted to try and secure a meeting with Stellar Nova in order to discuss the ‘changeling matter’ with him, since even she saw no chance of Moonlight retaining her title. However, then she’d started reading into his history in an effort to learn more about the sort of stallion that he was, and get a better idea of how to approach him.

...That was where things had started to look bleak.

A year ago, she wouldn’t have batted an eye at a resume like his as being anything unusual or concerning. On the contrary, it made for the appearance of quite a competent and well-rounded pony with excellent leadership potential. However, given what she’d come to learn, the unicorn found herself nursing quite a few suspicions. To the point where she had to wonder if Stellar Nova’s apparent competence hadn’t been by design...

While he’d never gone to Equus specifically in his early life, Stellar Nova had worked at numerous HyperSpark Generator complexes throughout the Our Worlds League. He’d even served aboard a ComSpark survey vessel for a number of years. If that hadn’t been enough to make her suspicious of his nature, then the fact that Stellar Nova himself was crediting his miraculous survival of the bombing which had killed his mother to ComSpark agents, and a lengthy ‘recovery period’ on Equus…

There was no doubt in Squelch’s mind that a changeling was about to be placed in charge of the Our Worlds League. The only reason that it hadn’t happened yet was because of the procedural hurdles that yet impeded it. Hurdles that they were crossing one by one with every passing day.

All hope wasn’t quite lost yet, though. If Moonlight Radiance made it back to Aether quick enough, and with news of a decisive victory against the Kirin Confederation, she might be able to muster up the support she needed in the government to firmly bar Parliament from rescinding her title. While it was unlikely that she knew of her cousin’s return yet, that knowledge would surely be making its way to her through the HSG network in short order. Hopefully that meant that, once she received the news, she would be motivated to wrap up her invasion of Colton and return as quickly as possible.

Perhaps Squelch would be able to secure that earlier meeting with the captain-general after all. Especially if she could find some way to let Moonlight Radiance know that there was more going on with her cousin than she might yet suspect. How better to get an ally against the changelings than to prove that the stallion trying to take your title from you is one?

They might still have a chance at pulling this off after all!

Doppler’s eyes nearly burgled out of her head as the display she was staring at so intently lit up like a tree on Hearth's Warming. She’d honestly begun to lose hope that she’d be able to find anything at all that might suggest where the hidden HyperSpark Generator was supposed to be located. Even though such equipment required considerable power to operate, it wasn’t difficult to hide the emissions of their reactors by burying them deep enough underground. If the changelings didn’t want it to be found, then it wouldn’t be, in her opinion.

Even with the finely tuned sensor suite that Valkyrie had created for the Zathura, it would have been the next best thing to impossible to pick out the masked thermal signature of a buried reactor amidst the dozens of burning wrecks that Gallop Lance had littered the area with during the fight. The whole valley was now effectively covered in a warm smokey haze that created an almost homogeneous ‘cloud’ of warmth that made it difficult to pick out anything distinct at all.

The unicorn mare had seen no feasible way that she was supposed to locate the facility.

Then it made a transmission.

While the principles under which Jump Ships and HSGs operated were largely similar―cutting through normal space in order to bridge vast distances instantaneously―there were still significant differences between them. Most noticeably were the power requirements. A Jump Ship had to carry its own bulk of hundreds of thousands of tons, as well as the tens of thousands of tons that made up the DropShips it was lugging around, through hyperspace. An HSG carried only information in the form of electromagnetic pulses. As a result, it could create points that were much further apart, using much less energy, through ‘jump points’ that were much smaller, and thus harder to detect. Indeed, some transmissions could last for as little as a single millisecond, and would often be automatically flagged as an ‘anomalous reading’ by the ship’s computer and never even shown on sensors to the crew.

That automated ‘scrubbing’ was one of the many ‘quality of life’ features that Valkyrie had stripped from the Zathura as part of her effective redesign of the sensor suite. Which was why even the brief transmission was picked up by the DropShip at all. The increased sensitivity of the sensors, combined with the fact that Doppler had already had them trained over the valley at the time that the signal was detected, also allowed for her to get a very precise point of origin.

She’d found the HSG!

The unicorn’s horn burst to life, quickly tapping out a sequence of commands, “High Gain, we got a hit!” she announced excitedly, “sending you the coordinates now. Aileron? I’ll have a landing zone picked out for you in just a moment,” she assured the ship’s pilot as she finished passing the information to the comms tech and began to scrutinize the terrain layout nearby.

Now that she knew exactly where to look, she was able to tighten up the view on the ship’s scopes and get a clearer image of the local area. She soon let out an amused snort, “looks like an ‘abandoned’ mine entrance,” she noted. Further scrutiny revealed that there were quite a few tread marks that looked very recent...and like a few dozen tanks had all rolled through the area, “but it seems pretty lively to me.”

Their pegasus pilot was already pulling up a duplicate screen of the sensor tech’s view for himself to look at and nodded his head in agreement as he considered the scene, “I’d say you’re right,” he massage his chin idly with the pinions of one of his wings, “...I think I can bring us down right on top of the entrance,” he said, “we can use the forward guns to cover your insertion,” he turned his head to peer behind him at where the crimson pegasus had been standing near the rear of the bridge, waiting for exactly this revelation.

Blood Chit nodded firmly, looking over the image as well, “no telling how far in the facility itself is,” he said in a somewhat wary tone, “but I can’t imagine it’ll get too intricate in there. An HSG is an HSG,” he noted, “I’ll get my ponies ready. Let us know when we hit atmo.”

“You got it,” the other pegasus responded, giving a winged salute.

The head of security for Rayleigh’s Irregulars made their way to the Zathura’s garage at the nose of the ship. It had been chosen as the staging area for the insertion team that would be entering the changeling facility. That ‘team’ was made up of twenty-two ponies, consisting of the entirety of the companies security and recovery teams, as well as Tig and one assistant tech that she was bringing along as both a knowledgeable set of hooves to help her disable the HSG’s reactor and also as a backup...just in case.

The team was conducting final checks of their weapons, magazines, and charge packs. For nearly all of them, this would be the most significant engagement of their lives. There might be the odd pony who’d served on the front lines during some skirmish or other during a prior career with the planetary militia or House Guard, but for many of his ponies, serving aboard the Zathura was their first taste of ‘military life’.

It was certainly the case for himself, if Blood Chit was being honest. His prior work history consisted of search and rescue jobs, which rarely involved violence of any kind. Landslides, floods, structure fires, that sort of thing. It was fulfilling work, but not the greatest paying. Nothing that would comfortably support a family. This job would though. Of course, most jobs that offered high pay did so because of the considerably higher risk involved.

Like storming a fortified changeling base.

At least he didn’t seem to be the only pony who was about to lose their ‘firefight virginity’. The cyan kirin mare was standing off to the side of the garage, trying to hide how much she and the other tech were having getting their armored barding to fit right. They’d likely never had to wear anything like it before, the stallion supposed.

He stepped over to the pair, “your barrel straps need to be tighter,” he said, already reaching out with his wings to start making the indicated adjustment to the fit of the kirin’s armor. Tig jerked slightly at the sound of his voice, but quickly calmed herself, flashing the pegasus a sheepish smile as she allowed him to make the corrections to her outfit.

“Be gentle,” she cautioned in an effort to make a joke to relieve the tension that she was feeling, but her tone trembled slightly in a clear indication of her heightened anxiety at the situation, “it’s my first time.”

The other tech started coughing in an effort to avoid making a comment that she obviously wasn’t sure whether or not would be appreciated by her kirin supervisor. Then busied herself tightening her barding in a similar fashion to what Blood Chit was doing.

“You just have to play with it a little bit so that it’s easier to work with,” he flashed her a broad grin, and had the satisfaction of hearing both mare’s start to laugh in a far less nervous fashion.

“I wish more stallions were as knowledgeable as you,” Tig remarked, smirking. Her mirth was short-lived though, as the sounds of ponies chambering their weapons and the high-pitched whines of charging energy rifles made their way over to the trio, reminding them of their upcoming mission.

She swallowed back her nervousness, her rosy pink eyes darting away from the security ponies back to the pegasus again, “how dangerous is this going to be?” she asked, all signs of her previous joviality gone, replaced now by a sort of desperate need for a reassurance that she didn’t really believe would come.

Blood Chit let out a resigned sigh. He could have told the pair of technical equines all manner of lies to set them at ease; but he didn’t think it was a good idea to send them into a dangerous situation after understating the risk involved. Mig and Tig would certainly never assign a repair job to one of their techs without making sure that tech wasn’t also sully aware of the dangers involved in the job, after all, “one of the riskiest and toughest kind of fight that has ever existed in the history of warfare has been assaulting a fortified position,” he stated flatly, “traditionally, they have the highest casualty rates, and the lowest success rates.

“If we’re not fast enough, and don’t hit hard enough, we might even be pushed back right at the door,” he admitted with a wan smile, hating himself for causing the rather frightened exchange of looks between the techs. The pegasus then reached out with both his wings, placing one around each tech reassuringly, “but, even if that happens, my ponies and I will do everything we can to keep the two of you safe. Without you, there’s no mission at all,” he reminded them.

Blood Chit then looked up and whistled towards the other team members, “Fusilier, hey! Come over here!”

A periwinkle thestral stallion trotted over to the trio, “s’up, sarge?”

The scarlet pegasus looked back at the techs, “Corporal Fusilier here is one of my best. He’s former Lunar Guard and has seen more action than the rest of my ponies combined,” he now turned back towards the batpony, who was already smirking at the praise, “corporal? You’re personally responsible for making sure that both these mares make it to that reactor. You get them there alive, you get them out alive, got it?”

“An escort mission?” the leather-winged pony waved his hoof dismissively, grinning at the other three ponies, “Pfft! I could do that with my eyes closed, sarge,” as though to prove his point, the thestral closed his eyes tightly. A moment later his tongue clicked and then his ears trembled. The stallion then reached out with one leathery wing and picked up Tig’s pistol from where it lay on a table, along with a full magazine. He proceeded to load and ready the weapon in a single, smooth, motion before tossing it into the air such that it actually managed to land in the kirin’s open holster. All while keeping his eyes closed.

Fusilier then opened up one twinkling eye, grinning at the techs who were staring at him in awe, “see?” His wing reached out and snapped the pistol’s retaining strap. He looked over at Blood Chit, “and here I expected you to give me something hard to do!”

The pegasus stallion found himself on the fence regarding the thestral’s bravado. On the one hoof, he supposed there was nothing wrong with confidence. It was certainly preferable to the anxiety that the pair of techs were experiencing. As long as that confidence was merited though. In Fusiliers, the flier figured that it probably was. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that the batpony had seen more combat than the other security ponies.

Honestly, that was what had Blood Chit most concerned.

It wasn’t that he questioned their competence. Far from it. Hotheads like Breech Block and Sabot aside, everypony on the Zathura’s security and recovery teams had prior experience in either law enforcement or some variety of military/paramilitary service. They knew their way around a weapon, and the basics of security procedures. Every one of them was more than up to the task of keeping the ship orderly and providing security for salvage and pilot recovery operations.

...but none of that was real combat. Most of the salvage sites had already been pacified by Slipshod’s lance, leaving behind little in the way of imminent threats. They’d had a ‘hot retrieval’ or two, sure; but even those had been brief affairs and involved little ‘active fighting’ on the part of the recovery team―what was a rifle going to do to a BattleSteed a half a kilometer away anyway?

This mission was going to be so fundamentally different from anything that they’d ever done. Worse, like he’d admitted to Tig, this was objectively one of the riskiest and least likely to succeed type of operation. These ponies were going to be thrown right into the deep end of a very unforgiving―hydra-infested―pool.

...how many letters would he be writing to next of kin tonight?

Would somepony be writing to his―?

“Atmo!” Aileron barked over his earpiece, drawing the pegasus out of his reverie. Blood Chit felt the deck plating beneath his hooves starting to tremble as the DropShip started hitting thick enough air to offer resistance, “touchdown in three minutes!”

The crimson stallion took a breath and let it out, steeling his nerves. Woolgathering was best left to sheep shearers; his attention would best be served focused on the fight ahead of them, “alright; form up! Team One, get in position; unicorns up front. Teams Two and Three: you stop for nothing. The moment we hit that door, assume they’re priming that reactor to blow,” he warned them, “which means we’re on the clock.

“We do not stop; we push. We push hard,” the pegasus took up position just behind the half dozen ponies who made up Team One, their primary assault force, consisting of four unicorns and two earth ponies. Behind him would be the ten ponies of Team Two. Their job would be to break off and secure corridors to keep them from being cut off from retreat if needed. Team Three was Tig and her escorts who would split off and go for the reactor while Team One secured the command center.

If Tig found that an overload had been triggered which couldn’t be aborted, there might be time enough to extract a few important files before they needed to evacuate. At least that way they wouldn’t need to leave completely empty-hoofed.

All three teams organized themselves and formed up into two even columns of ponies in the ship’s garage, their attention focused on the forward ramp that would be lowered once they’d landed. Hopefully Aileron would manage to land the vessel so that the entrance to the mine was directly ahead of them and they could just charge ahead without needing to be slowed down by a sharp left or right turn at the bottom of the ramp.

“Sixty seconds,” came the update from the pilot, “objective will be at one o’clock.”

Blood Chit repeated the message so that the rest of the assault force could hear, receiving nods of acknowledgement from the ponies around him. A soft right turn was fine. It wouldn’t cost them much momentum.

The stallion’s right pinions danced over the trigger mechanism of his rifle, almost as though he were making sure that it was still present. He saw a few earth ponies briefly raising a forelimb to surreptitiously reconfirm that their own weapons were slung to the preferred side of their withers. Only the unicorns didn’t seem to be fidgeting with the rifles floating in front of them. Though Blood Chit had to wonder if maybe there wasn’t some anxious equivalent that they were doing with their telekinesis. He’d have to remember to ask one of them after all this was over.

“Fifteen seconds!”

Even as the crimson flier yelled out the warning, he felt himself growing slightly heavier as the ship’s ventral thrusters ignited and started to slow their descent. He forced himself to take deep, steady, breaths. Just as he found himself having to do every time he’d dropped out onto a ‘Steed to facilitate a recovery. Even during their practice drills.

This would go as planned. His ponies knew what to do, and they would get it done. He was aware of that. He merely needed to convince his subconscious to believe it too.

“Touchdown!” the pilot called out over the earpiece just as the vessel trembled with the impact of its landing gear touching down on the ground. In that same moment, the forward ramp dropped away. Normally the hydraulics would force it to slowly lower down so that nothing was damaged upon hitting the ground. However, those hydraulic lines had been intentionally disconnected for this specific operation, as they didn’t want to wait the nearly full minute it took to open up the garage under normal operations.

“Move out!” Blood Chit yelled. The twin columns of armored ponies surged ahead, charging loudly down the ramp, the pounding of their booted hooves on metal being drowned out by their own battle cries and yelling. They pegasus easily spied the entrance to the mine, and their formation veered in its direction.

A hail of bullets poured forth from the opening.

The earth pony directly in front of Blood Chit seemed to go suddenly limp and tumbled to the ground in a heap. He leaped over the downed mare, forcing himself not to look back and make sure that the rest of the formation managed to avoid being tripped up by the body as well. He had to trust that they would manage. Besides, there wasn’t anything he’d have been able to do for them even if they had been delayed. Instead, he focused on taking advantage of his brief rise in altitude to swing his own rifle forward, cupped in his right wing. He snapped off a burst in the direction of the mine entrance. It was unlikely he’d hit anything, but it would hopefully make whoever was there at least a little more hesitant.

Even as he fired, brilliant streams of emerald and sapphire light flashed overhead. The Zathura’s forward batteries burst to life as their gunners endeavoured to help suppress the enemy. The potent beams of energy designed to strip away the robust armor of BattleSteeds and DropShips alike were more than up to the task of sanitizing a doorway.

Mostly.

Blood Chit heard a pained cry from somewhere behind him over the din of gunfire being exchanged by the assaulting Irregulars and the creatures intent on holding them back. Two down, and they hadn’t even made it to the threshold. The pegasus grit his teeth as he fired off another burst.

This was going to be a rough fight.

“Contact left!”

Slipshod’s hooves were in motion almost the same moment he heard Xanadu’s call-out over his helmet’s speakers. The linked sensor systems of their lance’s BattleSteeds meant that what one pilot’s suite picked up, was instantly relayed to the displays of the other two pilots. The changeling had seen the crimson blip appear on his HUD at about the same instant the zebra had picked it up.

His Crystal Cavalier heaved to the left as quickly as it could, but getting sixty-five tonnes of hardware to move with anything akin to genuine grace simply wasn’t going to happen. Well, at least not without rocket thrusters built into the ankles of each of its limbs, the stallion supposed as he saw Twilight Sparkle's heavier Rainbow Dash pirouette in a bit. The cyan and gold ‘Steed snapped off a helix of chromatic energy from one of its prismatic projector cannons…

...and missed the Twittermire that had emerged from the treeline almost right next to their lance by less than a meter. Xanadu’s Philomena was similarly trying to track the swift-moving light ‘Steed with his machineguns, as it was moving too swiftly for him to do more than score a brief graze with the beams of his energy cannons. However, even then he only seemed to get in a smattering of hits before it vanished into another line of dense forest and fell off the radar of all three ‘Steeds.

The Cavalier lurched and an alarm briefly chastised the changeling pilot for allowing himself to be outflanked as the second Twittermite revealed its proximity by unloading five missiles into the rear of his ‘Steed, “contact rear!” he yelled into his mic, though he already knew that it was a futile announcement. It had already fallen off his screen before he could begin to turn around. He let out a frustrated snarl, silently damning the infallible tactics being used by the ComSpark pilots.

“If this keeps up much longer, they’re going to whittle us down,” Twilight pointed out. It was hardly a groundbreaking observation, of course. This was the third such strafe that they’d been subjected to in the last five minutes. None of the ambushes had caused anything that could be classified as ‘serious damage’, to be sure; but it didn’t take an ace pilot to recognize that when the enemy was doing at least some damage to their ‘Steeds, and their lance had yet to inflict any...this ‘fight’ was only going to ultimately have one conclusion.

Slipshod’s eyes darted to the map, and the massive blue icon denoting the location of the Zathura. Not for the first time, the changeling ‘Steed pilot weighed the idea of returning to it and using the DropShip’s weapons to help them deal with the pair of light BattleSteeds. However, he also once more dismissed the thought as being too risky. The DropShip was their only means of retreat, and it was extremely vulnerable right now. Those Twittermites would have barely any trouble at all scrapping it’s main thruster assemblies and grounding the vessel permanently. The crew was much better off with him and the other two pilots keeping those ‘Steeds far away.

Not that that plan was proving to be particularly sustainable either, “I’m open to suggestions,” he said as he once more turned his Cavalier to cover his assigned sector and wait for the next pass from the masked enemy ‘Steeds.

“We need a way to mark the Twittermites,” the purple alicorn continued, “then we can get a lock, and the Zathura can unload with their LRMs.”

In theory that was a perfectly sound plan, and a solid solution to their current problem of trying to use slower and less maneuverable BattleSteeds to shoot smaller, more agile, targets. Long ago, equipment that would allow them to clearly mark those Twittermites in spite of their ECM suites had even been developed. Equipment like the NARC, a launchable beacon which attached itself to a target and acted as a homing beacon for tracking-capable missile launchers. Even a ‘Steed mounting stealth hardware would be easily trackable on sensors.

However, like most advanced systems that had been developed by the now-defunct Celestia League, none of the factories in the Harmony Sphere had the schematics to produce them any longer. Some ComSpark ‘Steeds used them, and Slipshod had little reason to doubt that the Dragon Clans still retained knowledge of the technology. However, it wasn’t anything that the three of them had access to at this precise moment. In fact, he knew of nothing that their own ‘Steeds had that could help them in this moment.

“Well, if you have any idea on how to do that―” the changeling began, only to find himself interrupting his own snide remark when an alert flashed across his HUD. According to his console, a member of his lance had ejected and their emergency tracking beacon had been automatically activated as a result. His eyes widened, and he immediately feared the worst.

Then he frowned in mild confusion. While his ‘Steed’s console insisted that a distress beacon had been activated, the status display for the other two members of the lance assured him that both ‘Steeds were still functional. The stallion peered more closely at the information that he was being fed, “Twiggie, what are you doing?”

“I assume that means you’re picking up the signal?” came the alicorn’s reply.

“Yeah…” he said, prompting the other mare for some sort of explanation. However, before he received one, High Gain’s voice was in his ear, sounding understandably concerned.

“Gallop Leader, I’m reading an ejection; are you okay?”

“I honestly don’t know―”

Twilight jumped onto the frequency now, though her transmission sounded different than it had a moment ago. Slipshod soon realized that this was because it wasn’t being relayed through her Rainbow Dash’s communications suite, but rather through her helmet’s mic exclusively. He knew this to be the case because he saw a purple alicorn wearing ‘Steed pilot barding flying past the front of his cockpit, “I’m fine,” she first assured everypony before finally explaining her plan, “High Gain? I need you to contact the gunnery crews and have them lock on to my ejection beacon. Be ready to fire when I give you the signal!”

“Lock on to―fire?!” the earth pony mare exclaimed, aghast, “what are you―”

It finally clicked for Slipshod what Twilight was trying to accomplish now. Creative, the changeling thought to himself with a smirk, “do it,” he instructed the Zathura’s communications tech, “get the lock, and have all launchers on stand-by.”

The alicorn herself had flown out of visual range within a few seconds, but the stallion was still able to track the position of her ejection system’s locator beacon with his helmet’s HUD. He saw it rise high up into the air and seem to hang there for several more seconds as the purple mare scored the ground for signs of the Twittermites. She must have spied one, because there was a sudden twinkle of violet light in the sky, and the next thing he knew the beacon was over a kilometer away.

“Target One marked!” Twilight declared over the communications channel, “fire!”

“...firing,” High Gain confirmed, though she still sounded audibly anxious about complying with the order.

Slipshod watched the navigational map on his console as the beacon’s signal continued to meander through the valley, moving at about the speed expected of one of the light BattleSteeds. However, before he could watch how it fared against the incoming hailstorm of sixty long-range homing missiles arcing its way, the changeling found his attention drawn up to the hatch above him.

Had...had he heard a knock?

He jerked in surprise a second later as a helmeted purple head popped down from above, right outside his cockpit. The alicon peered inside for half a second, and then vanished in a flash of magical light...only to materialize right next to the stallion.

Slipshod maintained that he did not, in fact, ‘yelp!’.

“Yelp! Hey, how about you warn a pony first, huh?!” he snapped at his unexpected guest.

“I knocked!” Twilight protested and then immediately began to rummage around the edges of his piloting couch, “aha!” she exclaimed moments later, right before the changeling―who was finding himself becoming increasingly more irate with her intrusion into his cockpit―heard what sounded to him like something that Mig was going to be yelling at him about later, “got it!”

The alicorn sat back up, holding a locator talisman in her telekinetic grasp. A second later, a slightly panicked High Gain was crackling over his headset, “Slip, are you okay?! Doppler said she picked up your rescue beacon―”

“I’m fine,” Slipshod said in a resigned tone, having anticipated getting a message very much like this once he’d realized what the purple mare was going after, “but go ahead and get a lock on my beacon with the LRMs now, okay?”

“...yes, commander.”

“Poor mare’s Narc,” Twilight quipped, taking the talisman in her hooves.

“Quick thinking,” the changeling pilot acknowledged, “stay safe.”

After a nod, she was gone in another flash of light.

Vesper was the epitome of an unhappy bug pony as she scowled at the camera feeds on the massive screen in front of her. While most of her attention was dedicated to doing everything that she could to address the rapidly unfolding situation, the back of her mind was consumed with persistent thoughts as to whom she would burden with the blame for this catastrophe. Because Queen knew it wasn’t going to be herself that took the fall for this!

It did not escape the facility director’s notice that the Mustang-class DropShip had descended directly on top of the location of the ‘secret’ changeling HyperSpark Generator mere moments after she transmitted the superliminal message requested of her by Colonel Myrma in order to aid the company commander’s invasion efforts. As impossible as it should have been, the only rational explanation was that the DropShip had, in fact, been able to triangulate the source of the transmission.

However, even if that had been what happened―and it was still not a certainty that it had―it didn’t explain how the DropShip had been able to respond and launch a ground assault so quickly. Things like that didn’t just happen on a whim, especially not with ships that had such small crews. That strike team had been ready to go, probably before even the BattleSteeds had been deployed earlier. Which meant that whoever these ponies were had already known―or at least strongly suspected―that there was something here to assault.

Again, she entertained the notion that they were looking for the ‘militia base’ that had served as the garrison for the force which had attacked the interloping engineering battalion, but Vesper had to doubt that a mere two dozen troops would have been used to try and secure an entire military base, if that was really what they expected to find.

No, they’d known that there was something else in the area that wasn’t nearly as mundane as a firebase.

The question then became how? How could a minor-league mercenary outfit have possibly been aware that a clandestine HSG existed here?

As impossible as it seemed, they had to have known that it was an HSG before they’d dropped. Because even a ship which could detect hyperspark pulses had to at least be already looking in the general area in order to have gotten a fix on the origin as precise as these ponies had. Which should not have been information that anycreature should have had access to.

Vesper was going to make it abundantly clear in her after-action report that there was absolutely no way that knowledge of the existence of the secondary HSG network being leaked to an outside party could possibly have been anything that she had been involved in. These mercenaries had to have known about that before they even arrived in orbit...somehow.

However they’d learned of it though was sort of a secondary concern for the facility director though. Of more immediate consideration was how she was going to repel the insertion team which had managed to breach the entrance and was advancing deeper in as she watched.

The fact was that, unlike publicly accessible primary circuit arrays, this―nominally―hidden facility didn’t have a large internal security force. After all, who exactly would they be securing the grounds against? The combat vehicle and light BattleSteed forces were onsite to dissuade interlopers that couldn’t be put off by litigation and government mandates, such as smugglers and the like. However, these arrays were not genuinely designed like the genuine fortresses that primary array facilities were. Those places had to be ready to deal rebellions and overeager invasion forces, after all.

Vesper’s ‘lings weren’t supposed to be getting into ‘real’ fights. They certainly weren’t supposed to be getting invaded!

The attacking force had been whittled down some at the entrance, but that had also been where she’d dispatched most of her paltry security elements to the moment she’d been alerted to the approaching DropShip’s projected landing site. Now they were blitzing through the corridors, and there was little question as to what their destinations were: the main generator and the control center. Both had been ordered sealed, but the doors that were in place weren’t anything that couldn’t be blasted open with a little bit of high-explosive.

The changeling mare cursed vehemently under her breath as she watched one of her last remaining security teams get gunned down in an intersection that served as one of the last obstacles between the invaders and the main generator. They’d be in control of the facility’s power production in less than a minute. Once that was done, it was only a matter of time before they controlled the whole complex, since they could then wait around for reinforcements to arrive if they so chose to.

She might not have to concern herself with writing that after-action report after all, Vesper thought bitterly to herself. Her horn illuminated and her magic tapped out a brief command on the terminal in front of her. A moment later, a stallion’s voice answered her, “generator control. What do you need, ma’am?”

“Initiate the overload sequence,” was her flat command. A few heads around her in the room briefly glanced in her direction, but quickly resumed their work. The shift in overall mood was impossible for a changeling to miss, of course. However, her drones knew what their duty was, and they would not shy from it. How these invaders had come to learn that the facility existed in the first place was neither her business, nor her concern. Prevent tangible evidence from being recovered from it was.

Vesper may have failed in many ways in order to have been brought to this moment, it could be argued; but she would not be known for failing in this regard!

“...understood, ma’am.”

The channel went silent. A quiet that seemed to permeate the room that she was in as well. Even the background din of console commands being tapped in had become muted. There was a difference, Vesper supposed, in knowing one’s duty, and relishing it.

Which hardly changed anything, of course, “begin scrubbing the system,” she instructed the ‘lings in the command center, “purge everything,” while the reactor blast should be more than sufficient to effective vaporize most of the facility’s contents, there was the possibility that some circuitry might yet survive. Modern systems were designed to be pretty robust in an age of near-constant warfare, after all. If that happened, then at least there wouldn’t be any data left on it which could be recoverable.

Her staff voiced their acknowledgements and began working.

Vesper let out a resigned sigh. That prospect of a boring career was looking a lot more appealing right now…

Fusilier felt his lips break into a pervasive little sneer as his fetlock pulled back on the trigger of his assault rifle. The burst that flew from the weapon tore cleanly through the barding and flesh of the pair of changelings which had made the mistake of coming around the corner in that moment. The thestral’s ears flicked about as he listened for any sign that others were coming, but he heard nothing more. He glanced over his shoulder and jerked his head, signally for the pair of techs to move up to his position, “clear!”

He’d missed this.

It wasn’t something he’d realized about himself before, the batpony recognized. In fact, he’d sought out the security job with the Steel Coursers―now Reighlay’s Irregulars―over employment with another genuine military outfit specifically because he’d felt like he wanted to ‘take things easy’ for a while. He’d seen his share of action with the Lunar Guard. There was even room to argue that he’d seen significantly more than ‘his share’. At least, he assumed that was what the pile of awards and decorations he’d been given by his superiors had been intended to showcase.

The stallion had never considered himself to be particularly ‘valorous’, or ‘heroic’, or whatever else the names of the medals he’d been given were meant to signify about his performance. He’d just...done what needed to be done to achieve the stated objectives. No more; no less. It had been a job to him; but a job that he’d intended to do well.

Everything he’d heard, and that he’d ‘known’ about ponies who had been through what he had, suggested to him that he needed a ‘change of pace’ and to take on calmer employment. Something that wouldn’t further agitate the PTSD that he assumed he’d acquired during his years in the military. A largely ‘ceremonial’ stint as a security pony working for a small mercenary group on a DropShip sounded like it would fit the bill. Something well within his skillset that wouldn’t place him in many active combat situations.

It was nice work. The crew was amicable enough, he got to travel to plenty of interesting places, the pay was phenomenal. There really wasn’t anything about the work that he could have complained about. He’d liked the job well enough.

But he loved this!

This whole day had been something of a revelation for the stallion. The anticipation of a dangerous mission. The thrill of a hotdrop. The fast-paced action of a breach and clear. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it, and how much he thoroughly enjoyed it! Truthfully speaking, the thestral found himself genuinely considering tendering his resignation with the Irregulars and going back to the Federated Moons to reenlist―

His ear twitched.

“Down!” he snapped out a fraction of a second before the barrel of a gun peaked out from an intersection. His wings snapped to his sides and he dropped out of the air in an instant. The unicorn mare accompanying him and the two technicians hadn’t reacted quite as quickly, needing his warning to alert her to danger. She’d almost managed to get her defensive shield up before the shots rang out.

Fusilier had the butt of his weapon tucked into his shoulder even as he hit the ground and was returning fire. The changeling that had peaked out screamed and crumpled to the ground in a heap, green ichor splattered in the wall behind him. The batpony stayed still for a moment longer, listening for any further sign of trouble. When he heard none, he glanced over towards his partner and was about to ask if she was alright, but stopped short.

The vacant expression on the face and the crimson pinhole in her forehead just beneath her horn was all the answer that the stallion needed regarding the cyan unicorn’s condition.

He hopped back into the air and looked back at the technicians. The kirin’s eyes were locked on the dead mare in front of her, her eyes wide with horror. This wasn’t the first body that the ‘Steed mechanic had seen today, and Fusilier suspected that she wouldn’t be the last either, “ma’am. Ma’am,” he repeated, louder. She jerked and numbly looked in the thestral’s direction, “we need to move,” he jabbed the barrel of his rifle towards the intersection where the changeling’s body was lying, “reactor should be right up here.”

Tig swallowed back her fear and nodded, “yeah...yeah…” the other technician wasn’t looking any less pale that his supervisor was, but he seemed to have a slightly easier time repressing his apprehension as he gently nudged the kirin to accompany him. The thestral supposed that not everypony was made for this sort of thing the same way that he appeared to be.

Sure enough, the door to the reactor room was just around the corner. Fusilier held the pair up behind him as he chanced a brief glance. He pulled back just as a burst of rounds ricocheted off the wall, missing him by inches. He clicked his tongue. Three changelings. Narrow doorway. There was no way that he’d be able to simply charge them. They’d be able to hold the position even against a dozen ponies like this.

The batpony alit on the ground and fished out a small cylinder from his barding with one of his leathery wings. He used his teeth to pull out the pin and then deftly tossed the object around the corner. It bounced and rolled along the floor before coming to a stop. In the meanwhile, Fusilier ejected the mostly empty magazine from his weapon and inserted one of his two remaining full ones into it. He retained the other to use later, if the need arose.

“Hold this position,” he cautioned the technicians, “wait for me to give the all clear,” he tilted his head, listening to the soft hiss that could be heard from around the corner. His nostrils tingled from the acrid smell of smoke. He waited another few seconds and then chanced a second brief glance around the corner.

No shots rang out from the reactor room this time. Understandable, given that nopony could be expected to see anything through the thick cloud of white smoke filling the corridor. The thestral clicked his tongue. The three changelings were still exactly where they had been a moment ago. One of them was even still leaning his head obligingly around the doorway, staring down the sights of his weapon, waiting for an attacker to come bursting out of the smoke.

Fusilier grinned and brought up his rifle. A single shot rang out, and the changeling fell over dead. He darted forward now, plunging himself into the smoke. His hind hoof lashed out and kicked the grenade, which was still actively spewing forth more of the obscuring cloud, right into the generator room itself. The thestral continued to hover, concealed in the smoke, keeping tabs on the two remaining changelings with intermittent clicks of his tongue. Once he was confident that the room itself was filled with enough smoke to hide him from sight, he darted in.

He wheeled to the left, bringing up his weapon once more and sighting in on the aural outline of the target that his brain formed from the returning echoes of his high-frequency clicks. Then the batpony hesitated. Something was off. The outline of his target had changed. It wasn’t the smooth surface of a horned changeling any longer, as it had been only a second ago. The horn was gone. The hide was fuzzy. The ears were tuft at the tips.

The wings were no longer gossamer, but...bat-like...

He was sighted in on a thestral!

Fusilier depressed the trigger of his weapon, and a dozen rounds ripped into the body of the changeling in front of him. The security pony flapped his wings and spun around in the air to acquire the last remaining target.

The bullet that tore through the side of his head killed him before his hyper-sensitive ears heard the shot.

Tig focussed on controlling her breathing. She found herself spending a great deal of her attention forcing herself to either slow down her respiration, or restarting them entirely, depending on the situation. She’d never been in a real battle before. At least, not this close to one. The DropShip got shot at every once in a while, and sometimes those shots would inflict damage on the ‘Steed Bay. But that was a very different matter from having bullets whizzing past her head at the speed of sound.

There was a reason that she was a ‘Steed mechanic, and not a ‘Steed pilot.

If there was any consolation to be had, it was that this whole ordeal was nearly at an end. They were at the reactor control room. Once Fusilier was done clearing it, the two of them could go inside and make certain that it wasn’t going to blow up the whole complex with them inside. Blood Chit’s team could secure the control center and take the time they needed to extract all the data that there was to get.

The kirin idly wondered if High Gain was going to be needed to be brought in to access any protected systems that were bound to be present. The yellow earth pony mare was unlikely to be any more used to seeing bodies than Tig was, the cyan mare thought to herself―

She nearly jumped out of her scales when Fusilier poked his head back out around the corner and looked at her, “Celestia!” she gasped, clutching a cloven hoof to her chest, “you scared me! Is it clear in there?”

The stallion briefly glanced at her and the other tech before nodding and waving for the pair to precede him into the room. Tig let out a relieved sigh and started walking. The corridor was still extremely hazy from the smoke grenade that the thestral had thrown to conceal his advance. She stepped gingerly over the changeling corpse in the doorway and slipped into the room.

Just as Slipshod had assured her: the model was indeed the standard design used in the Primary Circuit relays. That meant that checking for any signs of overload would be a trifling matter. Even if it was currently working itself towards a meltdown, there would still be a considerable window where things could be corrected before a point of no return was reached. She’d know almost immediately once she looked at the status displays.

Tig reached for her comlink, “Blood Chit? We’re at the reactor. Checking it now for…”

The kirin’s voice trailed off.

Being a much more spacious interior than the adjoining corridor, the smoke in the reactor room had begun to dissipate much more rapidly than what she had walked through previously. It was like standing in a light fog at the moment. Barely an inconvenience at all.

Which was why she was able to make out Fusilier’s corpse on the floor a few meters away. The corpse of the same pony who had just come out to get them a few seconds ago. The dual thunderclap of gunshots erupted from behind her, even as the kirin spun around to call out a warning to the other technician. She was already collapsing to the ground, most of her face missing due to the much more gruesome nature of exit wounds.

Tig’s horn lit up, her magic wrapping around the grip of her sidearm. Her eyes went wide with mounting horror as she saw ‘Fusilier’ turning the assault rifle that he’d used to kill her tech on her. They widened even further as she realized that the pistol in her holster was resisting her efforts to withdraw it. It wouldn’t come out! She looked down at the holster, crying out in fear and despair, her magic flaring even brighter as she yanked at the stubborn weapon with all of her telekinetic might; and still it refused her.

Her gaze locked on the retaining strap, which she had neglected to undo.

The cyan kirin became acutely aware of something hovering very close to her head. She glanced up, her rosy eyes focusing on the barrel of the assault rifle pointed directly at her face. Her magic failed her in the wake of the fear and despair that overwhelmed her, her whole body going numb.

She closed her eyes, unable to bear to watch the end come.

Blood Chit and the surviving members of his team fanned out through the control room, weapons trained on every downed changeling. A few shots rang out here and there. Whether because they had seen movement, or because they didn’t want to take the chance that any of the changelings were simply ‘play dead’, the crimson pegasus wasn’t sure. He focused on clearing his own sectors and waiting for the other ponies with him to announce their findings.

A sting of ‘clears!’ sounded out from various parts of the command center, finally culminating in Blood Chit’s own, “all clear! Frappe, Whipple, secure the entrance! The rest of you, find a terminal and download whatever you can. Until I hear from Tig, assume we have minutes, so don’t waste time sifting through anything. Grab files as you find them.

“Not like any of us would know what’s ‘useful intel’ anyway,” he muttered. A couple ponies who were close enough to make out that last little bit echoed the sentiment.

The feathered stallion turned his own attention to what was probably the console for the changeling in charge of the facility. Unlike the other changelings in the room, this one had opted to take its own life, the gun that she’d used to shoot herself in the head laying in a pool of green ichor. Probably so that she couldn’t be taken alive and tortured for what she knew.

Blood Chit sat down at her terminal and started tapping out commands. He soon found himself scowling at the display. He might not have been a ‘wiz’ with computers, but he didn’t have to be to recognize that hardly any files seemed to be left; and the ones that were appeared to be vanishing quickly. He cursed under his breath.

“They’re wiping the system!” he announced, “new plan: crack open the consoles and pull the drives themselves,” again, he wasn’t a deft hoof with this sort of thing, but he’d had friends in various law enforcement agencies back when he worked for emergency services who had regaled him with stories about being able to recover files which suspects had thought they’d deleted.

The pegasus suspected that the changelings likely had more thorough means of destroying digital data than might be available to the average Harmony Sphere denizen, but there was also the equally as likely possibility that the Clans had their own means of negating those more robust deletion methods. It certainly didn’t hurt to try.

Ponies quickly set about prying off panels in order to get at the internals of the consoles in front of them. Now all that remained to be seen was how badly they could mangle the hardware while trying to extract it…

Blood Chit’s comlink buzzed and a mare’s voice sounded in his ear, “Blood Chit? We’re at the reactor. Checking it now for…” Tig’s voice trailed off, prompting the stallion to frown as he waited for her thought to finish.

Then he heard gunshots. A second later, he heard the kirin cry out, followed shortly by more gunshots.

The stallion was on his hooves now, his eyes wide as he peered at his comlink, “Tig?” there was no response, “Tig?!” the frantic pegasus looked up at the large nearby display screen which was alive with well over a dozen camera feeds. He scanned through them until his gaze finally came to rest on the segment titled “GEN CON-1”. His heart fell.

He could see clearly the bodies of Tig and the other tech. Just a few meters away was the corpse of their thestral protector. His doppelganger stood over all three of the bodies for a few more seconds, before a flash of sickly green flame revealed the changeling that had been lurking beneath the disguise.

It took more self-control than the pegasus had thought he was capable of to suppress the urge to order a team to the generator room. He could tell from here that all three were dead. Never mind that their team had been twice that size to begin with anyway. Too many ponies had already died in this effort. If they remained any longer, none of them might end up making it out alive.

Besides, with the deaths of both the creatures who knew anything about how to keep the reactor from going critical, there was now only one order left for him to give anyway, “pack it up, ponies!” he yelled to the room before bringing up with comlink again and addressing the entire assault team, “all ponies: withdraw! I say again: withdraw! Back to the Zathura, now!”

He looked up again at the ponies in the control room, some who were still tugging at hardware embedded in the consoles, “now!” he yelled, “this place could blow at any moment; we’re leaving now!” that seemed to get their attention. All further efforts to extract drives ceased and the team reformed to precede back down the corridors and exit the facility. Blood Chit tried to feel at least some measure of satisfaction that he saw a couple ponies stuffing data drives into the pouches of their barding.

However, he had serious doubts that whatever could be recovered from them would prove to be worth the price that had been paid for it. As they withdrew, he signaled the DropShip, “Zathura, we’re returning to base. Be advised…” he felt his voice catch slightly as he very carefully chose how he wanted to phrase what he reported next, “we will not be able to avert the reactor breach.”

He’d relay the specifics as to why that was the case himself. Mig deserved better than to be told about her sister over a comm line.

“Understood,” came High Gain’s sober reply.

At some future date, Blood Chit was confident that he’d be able to look back on this moment with some measure of amusement. For, while their infiltration of the facility had been executed with meticulous coordination and precision, the teams moving with the speed and grace of seasoned veterans; their departure was nearly the opposite. It was the next best thing to a mad dash for the exit, with only the briefest care given towards checking corners and maintaining sectors of fire.

This paradigm shift wasn’t the result of any sort of panic, per se, but more so because while they knew the facility was likely going to suffer a catastrophic reactor meltdown, there was simply no way of knowing when it would happen. The crimson pegasus wasn’t going to insist on deliberately keeping their retreat slowed and risk having the rest of his team getting wiped out in the imminent explosion. Enough of them had died as it was.

They picked up the various ponies which had been left behind at crucial junction points to secure their exit route as they ran by. By the time they reached the vast garage area that had lay just beyond the entrance, Blood Chit had accounted for less than half of the ponies who had gone into the facility with him. More than a dozen casualties in almost as many minutes…

They reached the ramp leading into the DropShip. Several technicians were just making the final connections of the ramp’s hydraulics so that it could be closed again. Normally it wouldn’t have been a huge deal whether the ship’s garage was properly sealed against vacuum. Nothing in there was particularly vulnerable to the airless nature of space. However, this time there would be.

“Unload your weapons and place them in the cabinets,” Blood Chit called out as he trailed the last of the members of his team into the ship. By way of example, he withdrew the magazine from his own rifle and ejected the round from the chamber with a deft flick of his hoof. The crimson stallion then placed the firearm into a sturdy cabinet which usually held tools for the vehicle mechanics, but had been cleared out for this specific purpose today. One by one, the other ponies on the team hoofed over their firearms and grenades to Blood Chit so that he could lock them away.

Once the weapons of every surviving pony had been accounted for, the pegasus closed the cabinet and engaged the electronic lock. Even he didn’t know the code to open it again, “make yourselves comfortable, everypony. We could be here a while.”

Once bitten, twice shy. Though, Blood Chit supposed that the crew had actually already been ‘bitten’ twice where changeling infiltrations of the crew was concerned, between Slipshod and Doc Dee. In any case, they were going to make every effort to ensure that there wasn’t a third such instance. So, until such time as either Slipshod or Twilight came by and magically screened them for additional changeling infiltrators, Blood Chit and his team would be remaining sealed in the ship’s garage.

The pegasus knew that none of the ponies who had made it with him to the control room could possibly have been replaced during the mission, but there had been several cases where only a single pony could be spared to watch a corridor intersection. He’d have preferred to mandate that no pony ever be left alone―and there were more than a few reasons why that was a ‘best practice’ even when not worrying about being replaced by shapeshifters―their small numbers had made that an unrealistic proposal. Their options had either been to leave their exit route completely uncovered, or to risk having a crewmate being replaced by a changeling. Blood Chit wanted to believe that he’d chosen the least worst option.

Of course, now that he had the benefit of hindsight, the crimson stallion suspected that what he should have done in lieu of either of those choices, was to simply have scrubbed the mission entirely.

Nine ponies had come out with him alive. Nine. Twenty-six had gone in, to include Tig and her fellow tech. The stallion slumped down next to the wheel well of Squelch’s limousine, his head falling back and thumping lightly against the waxed fender. He felt numb. Empty.

Seventeen dead ponies. He wanted―desperately―to believe that it had been worth it. That they’d managed to collect material that would indeed prove worthwhile to the broader mission to usurp control of the galaxy from the changelings. He wanted to believe that. He needed to believe that.

Someday he even might.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 29: Warrior - Coupe

“Where are they headed? Can we predict a landing site yet?”

Moonlight Radiance tried to keep her tone even and detached, as though she were asking about some routine itinerary information. She felt like she even mostly succeeded in that regard. However, any pony who was watching the progressively increasing distortion of the projected terrain hovering above where her hoof was pressing into the surface of the table would have been left with little doubt as to the heightened levels of anxiety that she was feeling. Only when the nearby mountain range began to flicker out of existence did the captain-general withdraw her hoof and plant it stoically on the ground.

The arrival of the interloping Jump Ship hadn’t caused the leader of the Our Worlds League much concern initially. Even when they’d confirmed that the vessel was flying under the direction of the Nirik Light Pony, the pet mercenary force for the Kirin Confederation, she’d hardly batted an eye. Of course the Confederation would be massing forces for a counter-attack. That was to be expected.

What hadn’t been expected was for the Light Pony DropShips to undock and begin making their way towards Colton almost immediately upon arriving in-system. Four Friendship-class ships would only be able to hold a single battalion of BattleSteeds, along with limited support personnel and equipment. That assumed that one or more of those ships wasn’t loaded down with infantry or vehicles in lieu of ‘Steeds, of course. In any case, such a force would hardly be up to the task of uprooting the multiple brigades of BattleSteed groups and their support that were currently securing the planet.

The smart thing for the Light Pony ships to do would have been to hold their position near the zenith of the system primary and wait for the arrival of additional allied forces until they had at least an equal number of BattleSteeds with which to confront the Gray Lines Legion troops securing the planet. Ideally―for them―they would have done well to wait until they had at least double the number of ‘Steeds that Moonlight possessed.

Yet, the small flotilla of DropShips had not seen fit to do the sensible thing and wait. They were speeding their way towards Colton, their fighter screens in place, clearly intent on making planetfall. The unicorn stared at the plotter, trying to decide if the commander of those forces was merely insane, or if there was some grander strategy at play here that she couldn’t grasp. As much as she would have loved to disparage the quality of the Light Pony’s commanders, the truth was that they were a respectable outfit who didn’t put outright morons in command.

So, unless whoever was over there was feeling particularly suicidal...there simply had to be a side to this that she wasn’t seeing!

This apparent ignorance was helped not at all by the recently received―and deeply unpleasant―news that she had received less than an hour ago. Her cousin, Stellar Nova, had turned up on Aether. Alive. Worse, he’d even managed to produce a writ authored by Moonlight’s aunt which specifically designated him as her preferred successor.

Under most circumstances, Moonlight Radiance wouldn’t have been overly concerned about any of that. She had already been granted the title of Captain-General, and that position was nearly impossible to revoke. Of course, there was ultimately quite the world of difference between nearly impossible and actually impossible. Hypothetically, if a stupendous majority of the members of the Parliament were to enact a resolution declaring Moonlight ‘unfit’ for the position, the title could be stripped from her and passed on to her cousin.

As much as it pained her to admit it, the unicorn knew that she had not been particularly well-liked by the entrenched politicians of her government. She’d not had the benefit of being groomed as an ‘heir apparent’ like Stellar had. However, there had not been quite enough blatant opposition to block her ascension, so Moonlight had managed to acquire her nominal rulership of the Our Worlds League upon her aunt's tragic demise. She’d sought to galvanize additional support within Parliament by proving her mettle. She’d been able to conceive of no better way to do this than by personally expanding the influence of the League.

It had somewhat shocked her how much the notion had been opposed by some in her government―and her own military too. The unicorn had attributed that hesitance to cowardice. After all, politicians weren’t soldiers like she had been. War and fighting were things that they didn’t understand, and so they were afraid to embrace them. The same went for many of her senior officers, who were little more than political appointees themselves, and hadn’t sat in a BattleSteed cockpit since their academy days on Equus. It was no wonder to the mare why they had resisted her ambitions.

Ultimately, that was why she was relying so heavily on Gray Lines Legion forces for this operation. She intended to prove to her generals that war with the Confederation was nothing to fear. That they could be ousted from a world with little real effort by even a moderate-sized force. Once she had completely secured Colton, Moonlight would return home in triumph, fire all her current generals for their cowardice, and install her own fresh cadre of like-minded officers.

There was an argument to be made for simply doing just that in the first place, but Moonlight had been so incensed by the reticence of her military leaders that she had been utterly determined to humiliate them before sacking them.

Of course, with the return of her cousin from being dead―apparently―the unicorn was feeling herself being placed under additional pressure to deliver. Before, if the invasion had failed, she could have laid the blame at the hooves of her incompetent and unhelpful generals. However, now that she’d taken sole command of a mercenary detachment to unilaterally lead the surprise invasion of Colton, there was no doubt in her mind that her cousin and the Parliament would be able to twist any failure into a sign of her incapability to lead competently. They’d almost certainly include it in whatever articles of impeachment that they drafted to remove her from the position of captain-general and replace her with her cousin.

The unicorn mare felt her teeth grinding as she continued to gaze down at the plotter. Colton was hardly a major industrial hub. It was barely better than a backwater world. She’d chosen it partially because of how undeveloped―and thus how poorly defended―it was. An easy target to make for a smooth invasion in order to prove her point regarding the vulnerability. Naturally, any half-way decent military-minded officer would see that being able to conquer a world like Colton was hardly indicative of the overall vulnerability of the Kirin Confederation, but it wasn’t the military that she was trying to impress with this feat.

It was the public. The easily pliable and gullible masses who were largely ignorant of such distinctions as the difference between a fortified and a peripheral territory. Moonlight Radiance would be able to frame herself as one of the greatest military leaders in League history by merely having to point out that she was the first captain-general in centuries to lead the conquest of another world. It would technically be the truth, and a massive source of popular support.

She could ride that popularity out until the next election cycle, pushing for the replacement of difficult ministers of Parliament by her own supporters. Once she had a legislature that supported her, she’d be unstoppable!

The mare glared at the quartet of crimson blips traversing onwards the planet.

But, if she lost Colton…

If she suffered even a significant setback that the pundits back on Aether―and her cousin especially―could exploit for long enough to get her ousted…

“Course plotting completed, Ma’am!” one of her command staff announced. A moment later, several different dashed lines appeared in the holographic display, “if they divert in the next hour, they can make an orbital insertion at―”

“―and get shot out of the sky in minutes,” Moonlight snapped, not bothering to hide her annoyance that the possibility had even been suggested. These new arrivals might be brazen, but they couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to try and enter planetary orbit for any real length of time. It was obvious to even a moron that Gray Lines Legion forces control the space around Colton, with far more DropShips and fighters than could be fended off by a force of four ships and their paltry escorts.

“Where are they landing?!”

There was a brief pause as the second dashed line finished being plotted to a point on the planetary surface, “the capital spaceport, Ma’am.”

Of course; that made sense, Moonlight thought to herself. It was the obvious point for establishing a beachhead. It contained many of the warfighting materials that the Legion forces on the planet were using to finish securing the planet, which would certainly become quite the boon to any expeditionary forces which sought to lead the counter-attack. Simultaneously benefitting theme, while hampering her own forces on the surface. The spaceport facilities would also allow them to unload any followup forces and supplies much more efficiently than landing out in the wilderness. Depending on what they brought with them, they might even be able to dig in deep enough to become impossible to remove until their inevitable reinforcements showed up.

Her forces still controlled the planetary orbitals, but with a direct line to the surface, the Light Horse units that followed these first four DropShips might not need to wedge her out in order to grind down her forces trying to secure the planet. She could eek out an eventual victory, likely, but if they took the spaceport it would set the invasion back quite a lot. Enough perhaps that her detractors back on Aether could use it as a sign of her invasion’s ‘death kneel’. Long enough to place her cousin in charge, at any rate.

The unicorn turned away from the plotter and accessed a nearby console, “what units do we have that can be pulled back from the front―”

Moonlight didn’t finish her question, her eyes widening. No. No, that was the easy solution. The coward’s solution, the mare realized. Redeploying forces from active engagements to snuff out this attempt to outflank her was far too obvious a response. It almost certainly had to be what the commander on those DropShips was counting on. She’d pull back forces, reducing pressure on the planetary militias.

What if this was what those militias had been waiting on? This moment when the pressure let up? Up until this point, driving them back had been a patently easy affair, as was to be expected when sub-par part-time BattleSteed pilots were put up against hardened Gray Lines Legion veteran mercenaries. She’d thought nothing of it.

What if that was the point? What if they’d been pulling back in order to lull her into a false sense of security?

Moonlight recalled the ambush of her engineers by a previously unknown force. She had assumed they were smugglers, or some such. What if they had been additional, previously undetected, planetary defense forces? What if they weren’t the only such force hiding out in the wilderness? Entire divisions of troops could be hiding out, just like those had been, waiting for the right moment to strike. A moment like pulling ‘Steeds off the front lines, making them vulnerable.

No. She wasn’t going to risk that. She wouldn’t pull back forces. It was too much of a risk.

Besides, it wasn’t like all of her forces were on the planet already. There was still one group which had not been committed: hers. Herself and her personal guard.

The mare’s lip curled in gleeful satisfaction. Besides, what better way to cement her capabilities as a leader of the Our Worlds League than by personally leading the force which crushed the counter-attack? She’d save the invasion and prove her mettle to the skeptics back home. Once the spaceport’s security was ensured, she could then return to Aether and put down the little coup that was brewing before it got too far along.

This time, she’d make certain that her cousin stayed dead. With her own hooves, if necessary.

Never trust a bomb to do what truly needs done, the unicorn sneered.

“Ma’am,” one of her aides began, respectfully, “perhaps if you were to lead―”

“Prepare my Star Hunter,” Moonlight snapped, turning away from the console and already heading for the command center’s exit, “alert the House Guard. I want them to be ready to drop within the hour.”

The aide blinked with mild surprise, initially, then quickly recovered and nodded, hiding a smile, “of course, Ma’am,” as they watched the captain-general head for her quarters in order to don her pilot’s barding, they offered silent thanks for making the task of convincing her to go down to the planet herself so much easier.

It seemed that, sometimes, plans just moved along with hardly any issue at all. They turned back to their station and tapped out a quick set of commands that would see to it that a properly discrete message was transmitted on a coded frequency, updating their superiors on the state of matters.

Minutes later, a kirin mare reclining in the command chair on the bridge of a Nirik Light Pony DropShip received a notification from a nearby console. She glanced over, read the brief report, and smiled.

Slipshod canted his hind hooves back on the throttle pedals of his Crystal Cavalier as he eased it into the ‘Steed Bay of the Zathura. No sooner had the tail end of his BattleSteed cleared the bay door than it started to close behind him. He could feel the vibrations through his piloting couch of the DropShip’s ventral thrusters idling. The ship would be going airborne the moment the last of the ‘Steeds was aboard in order to avoid the possibility of being caught in the blast of the changeling’s secret HyperSpark Generator facility.

The golden stallion let out a deflated sigh as he brought his Cavalier to a stop and began to power down its systems. He’d hoped that they’d be able to successfully secure the facility so that they could study its files thoroughly. However, he’d recognized that that outcome had hardly been a sure thing from the outset. Hopefully Blood Chit’s team had been able to retrieve some information of value though.

He finished powering down the ‘Steed at about the same time that the gantry reached his cockpit hatch. Extracting himself from his harness, the changeling opened the hatch and climbed out. The stallion started to remove his helmet, but paused halfway through. Something was off. The mood of the ship was sour. Very sour.

His first instinct was to attribute it to their failure to secure the HSG. However, Slipshod had made it clear that doing so was hardly a deal-breaker where their overall resistance to Queen Chrysalis' control of the galaxy was concerned. Getting the information there would have been a huge help to them, but failing to do so wasn’t going to set them back or anything, so no big loss. This level of almost outright despair simply didn’t make any sense.

Slipshod was so distracted by the despondent emotions permeating the ship that he nearly lost his balance when the Zathura lurched upwards, heading for orbit. He managed to recover and scampered off the head of his Cavalier and onto the waiting gantry. It didn’t take him long to see confirmation of the somber state of things among the crew when he caught sight of the faces of the nearby techs trotting towards his ‘Steed. Their gaits were mechanical and stilted; their eyes haunted. A few were even red from...crying?!

The stallion felt his gut suddenly tie itself into a knot.

Something had gone wrong. Very wrong.

He wanted to pull one of the technicians aside and find out, but Slipshod recognized that he wasn’t quite finished with his duties yet. He and Twilight were due at the garage the moment they’d returned to the ship, so that they could clear Blood Chit and his team to enter. Besides, who better to give him answers to his questions about what had gone wrong with the mission than the pony who had led that mission?

The changeling stallion caught sight of Twilight Sparkle as she emerged from her Rainbow Dash. It didn’t seem to be lost on her either that something was off about the demeanor of the technicians. The pair exchanged glances, and then the alicorn hurriedly shucked her helmet and glided towards the ‘Steed Bay exit, heading for the garage. Slipshod galloped after her.

A pair of guards stood watch of the garage entrance, stepping aside and unlocking the door when they saw Twilight and Slipshod arrive. They rushed inside. Slipshod froze.

The grief was almost stifling. The changeling threw up emotional blocks to keep it from overwhelming him completely. It hardly took him a moment to discover why, of course. He didn’t even need to conduct a hard count in order to see that there were far fewer ponies here than there should have been. Barely a third of Blood Chit’s team was present.

Slipshod’s jaw was slack. How could so many have not returned? He’d specifically told them to abandon the mission if it looked like they’d be facing too much resistance! It would have been unrealistic to expect than nopony would get hurt or killed, of course; but to lose over a dozen?! To a failed mission? What had Blood Chit been thinking?!

The golden stallion’s eyes locked on the pegasus head of security, slumped against Squelch’s limousine, his eyes glazed over. The activity at the entrance to the garage had only just caught the crimson pony’s attention before Slipshod was upon him, “what the fuck happened?!”

He hadn’t meant to yell, not really. He’d simply been so overcome with the shock of seeing so few members of the team returning. Especially when he’d specifically cautioned against the need to take such losses. This had been the farthest thing from an ‘at all costs’ kind of mission. Clearly something had gone horribly wrong, and the changeling had to know what it had been.

“We failed,” was Blood Chit’s flat, detached, response. He’d barely reacted to being accosted by Slipshod at all, seeming almost listless.

“Why didn’t you withdraw?” the changeling demanded glaring now at the pegasus, “I thought I told you this mission wasn’t that important?”

That got a rise out of the crimson stallion. In a flash, the head of security went from listless to incensed. His wing lashed out and knocked Slipshod’s hooves away from him, his eyes glaring daggers into the changeling, “No, you told us that the information in there could save billions of lives! How could you possibly think that ‘wasn’t that important’?!”

The response caught Slipshod momentarily off guard, causing him to take a step back from the now irate pegasus. Then his own expression hardened once more, “well I didn’t mean for you to go and get everypony killed!”

Blood Chit was on his hooves now, his eyes burning with rage, and glistening with barely restrained tears, “Oh, I’m sorry; I must have missed the part of the briefing where you put out a hard limit on the number of ‘acceptable casualties’!

“What was that number, by the way?” the pegasus went on, his words burning with fury, “should I have turned everypony back when Currants got downed in front of me in the first five seconds? How about when Thistle bought it before we reached the entrance?

“How many, Slip?! How many dead ponies to get the intel to save billions of lives was ‘too many’?!”

Slipshod didn’t respond. He couldn’t. He was still processing that two ponies had been killed before even making it inside the HSG. He’d known it would still be somewhat defended, but he’d hoped that they’d meet less resistance than that from the outset. Of course, if anything, that should have been a sign that the mission was much riskier than they’d thought, and an indication to abort it entirely.

“You should have aborted the mission,” the earth pony finally affirmed, “if you lost two before even getting in, you should have known than you didn’t have the forces to take the facility,” he looked hard at the other stallion, “you shouldn’t have just thrown away more lives like an idiot―”

Slipshod was very nearly spun around by the left cross to his face, and went tumbling to the deck, “fuck you! Billions. Of. Lives,” the pegasus seethed, glaring down at the earth pony moaning on the ground, “that’s what you said!

“Now, I get that a changeling like you probably doesn’t think the lives of other creatures are worth a damn, but they matter to us! Don’t you dare say that I ‘threw them away’! Those were my friends who died out there, trying to complete the mission you gave us!” Blood Chit was screaming now. Fortunately, from Slipshod’s perspective, he wasn’t throwing any more punches.

Nonetheless, Twilight decided that it was best to intervene and ensure that remained the case. The larger purple alicorn interposed herself between the pair of stallions, facing the irate pegasus, “Blood Chit, you have every right to be upset,” she said. Her amethyst eyes surveyed the room, seeming to take note of who wasn’t there, rather than who was, “we’ve all lost ponies important to us today, and we know you did everything you could to keep them safe…”

Slipshod gently touched his cheek, wincing slightly at how tender it felt. His lip felt inflamed, and he could taste a little bit of blood with his tongue. That pegasus had a pretty solid left hook. The changeling spent a few seconds listening to the alicorn feed Blood Chit a litany of platitudes and soothing words. To her credit, he could sense that she even meant most of them sincerely. The head of security was calming down―slightly―as she spoke. The changeling fought back the impulse to contribute. He suspected that his own efforts to soothe things over wouldn’t be particularly appreciated right now.

Besides, he seemed to be off his game at the moment anyway. He hadn’t meant to aggravate things with Blood Chit like that. He’d just…

It had been very obvious who hadn’t returned from the mission.

He wasn’t paying much attention to what Twilight was saying anymore as he slowly got back to his hooves. Numbly he headed for the exit. He got the impression that Twilight was trying to say something to him now, but he didn’t feel like dealing with it. He waved a dismissive hoof behind him in her direction and left. She’d be more than up to the task of sifting through the survivors and ferreting out any changeling infiltrators among them. After all, there was less than half the number they’d thought they’d have to screen.

The mission you gave us…

The changeling winced. Had...this really all been his fault? Had he set up ponies to die because of something he’d told them again? It had dug at him enough when it had just been Valkyrie. Slipshod dreaded how long this was going to bother him now that so many others had perished.

Of course, that begged a good question: why did it bother him so much?

Blood Chit had hit on another good point―besides his cheek―after decking him: he was a changeling. He was separate from the other members of the crew in just about every respect that really mattered. His race was already responsible for an unfathomable number of deaths among the other creatures of the galaxy. Why should a dozen more bother him so much? They were the ones who really stood to gain from overthrowing Chrysalis, so why shouldn’t they be the ones who got to decide how much they were willing to risk to do so?

Obviously, Slipshod did have some chitin in the game. Winning meant getting his revenge, and losing meant his certain death; but those were paltry stakes compared to what so many others had on the line, and especially what they stood to gain. If the creatures of the galaxy wanted to sacrifice themselves by the thousands―even the millions―to end the reign of the changelings, that was their prerogative.

It shouldn’t matter to him how many of the ponies on this ship got themselves killed.

It shouldn’t...but it did. It did matter to him; and he hated that it did.

The creatures on this ship shouldn’t have held such importance for him. He was a changeling. That meant that other creatures were nothing more than a source of food and resources for him to exploit to his own ends. Their wellbeing shouldn’t matter to him beyond what a rancher might feel for their herd of cattle. He worked to keep them happy and safe, sure; but only because doing so guaranteed a ready food supply for himself. The individual members of that herd shouldn’t matter all that much. Each one lost was easily replaceable.

Lose a Valkyrie, get a Xanadu. Easy. Simple. No further thought on the matter required.

Ponies could be replaced. After all, the galaxy was rife with the little morsels.

It shouldn’t matter that Tig and so many others had died. Squelch could just hire on more security ponies and BattleSteed techs at the next major port they reached. The holes in the roster could be filled in a day. It would be like nopony had even died.

…

Slipshod slammed a hoof against the wall of the empty corridor. The sound of it echoed in the silence around him. His lips pulled back in a sneer as he inwardly cursed himself for refusing to actually feel the way he wanted to. The way that he was trying to convince himself that he was supposed to.

They were just ponies. They didn’t matter. Not to a changeling. That wasn’t how this whole thing worked. He lived among them, used them, and tossed them aside when they ceased to be relevant. That was the way of things for a changeling like himself. The whole crew could get wiped out, and he’d just find another to sustain him. At the most, it would be a minor inconvenience.

Even if they all died because of something he’d done, it shouldn’t bother him.

And yet...it did. Damn him if it did bother him, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why! They were just fucking ponies!

Another pound against the wall.

He was seething through clenched teeth, raging at himself for his inability to remain rational. If he didn’t know any better, he’d have thought that he was grieving too, at the loss of so many members of the crew. That would have been ridiculous, of course. Changelings didn’t ‘grieve’ over dead ponies. Or kirin, for that matter. That was what lesser creatures did.

Yeah...that was it, Slipshod thought to himself as he managed to steady his ragged breathing and begin to get himself back under control. This wasn’t how he actually felt, it was just the emotional feedback from the rest of the ship’s crew. He’d thrown up a few hasty mental barriers to blunt the worst of the negative emotions that had been permeating the garage, but those slapdash measures could hardly be expected to fend off the despondency of half and hundred creatures in close proximity.

That thought firmly in mind, the changeling sucked in a deep breath, straightened his posture, and firmly rebuked those feelings that were threatening to overwhelm his sensibilities. He reinforced his emotional barriers and buried those pervasive thoughts away. Death was what happened to creatures who were part of mercenary units. Dwelling on how many―and especially who in particular―had died served no productive purpose. The crew would recover from the losses, and Squelch would hire replacements to rebuild their company’s numbers.

In no time at all, things would get back to normal and it would be like nothing had ever happened.

Slipshod had only just managed to solidly affirm that thought in his mind when a yellow light began to strode from above. A heartbeat later an abrasive alarm began to echo throughout the ship.

The changeling’s first thought was that they’d come under attack. However, this notion was quickly cast aside, as the alert that signalled the crew to assume their appointed stations during such a crisis sounded different, and the strobe would have been red in color. This wasn’t an attack; but it was an alarm that indicated something almost just as imminently lethal for a crew about a space-faring vessel: a fire!

Once more, annoyingly, Slipshod assumed that some system had been damaged and had shorted out or exploded as a result. Of course, they’d certainly taken no damage since lifting off―they’d have all felt it if that had been the case―and he hadn’t heard any announcement from High Gain while planet-side that the Zathura had been struck by any enemy fire. Whatever this was wasn’t connected to military action. It was likely an accident of some sort, which certainly happened from time to time on a vessel. Things broke. That was the nature of time and wear where machinery was concerned.

Of course, that hadn’t been the nature of things on this particular ship since he’d come aboard. Mig and Tig ensured that the techs kept every system running cleanly and efficiently, and any of their staff who let scheduled maintenance fall by the wayside risked bringing―literal―fire and fury down upon them. Which wasn’t to say that an actual manufacturer’s defect couldn’t still have crept in and caused an issue.

Slipshod glanced down at his datalink and summoned up more specific information regarding the reported fire. He discovered that it was coming from the ‘Steed Bay. Perhaps something had gone wrong while the techs were assessing or addressing the battle damage on their BattleSteeds? If that were the case, he felt it best to go down there himself and see what was going on. They’d probably end up needing those ‘Steeds fairly soon. There was still an invasion going on, after all; and who knew when Moonlight Radiance was going to want to call on them again.

The changeling cantered to the DropShip’s ‘Steed Bay, passing a few responding ponies hauling firefighting equipment as he did so. When he emerged into the massive hangar bay, the first thing he noticed was that all three of the BattleSteeds seemed to be perfectly fine―battle damage notwithstanding, of course. If anything at all was odd about them, it was that there weren’t nearly as many techs crawling over the ‘Steeds and getting to work repairing the damage as he expected there to be. They’d only been back aboard for less than ten minutes, sure, but he’d at least expected Mig to have her assessment crews taking stock of everything that needed to be addressed. She knew that it was only a matter of time before he and the other two pilots might have to go out again.

He didn’t have to look far to find the Bay’s ‘Steed techs. Or the apparent source of the fire, for that matter. A sizable crowd had gathered around one of the storage closets where some of the more frequently replaced parts for the ‘Steeds were kept, for ease of access. Slipshod could see visible tendrils of smoke creeping out from around the doorframe. Something was clearly bruning in there.

However, much to the changeling’s chagrin, it didn’t look like any of the gathered techs was at all interested in actually going in there and doing anything about it. What was even more annoying was that a few of them had very clearly already retrieved fire extinguishers of various shapes and sizes to be used to put out the fire. They just weren’t, well, puting it out.

“What are you waiting for?” Slipshod snapped, causing a few of the ponies nearest to him to jerk in surprise, “put out the damn fire!”

Without waiting for a response from the apparently unmotivated technicians, the golden stallion scooped up one of the fire extinguishers and began marching towards the door. Unbelievably, one of the techs actually interposed herself between him and the door, blocking his progress. His shock must have been rather plain to the unicorn mare who’d stopped him, because she winced slightly but remained solidly in his way, “sir, it’s not a fire...it’s Mig.”

Slipshod blinked for a few seconds, not quite understanding at first what the other mare was talking about. If their boss was inside a burning room, shouldn’t that have been even more of a reason to go in there and put out the flames?! Now that he was closer, the changeling could even hear the sounds of somepony screaming coming from inside the parts room. He was about to rebuke the mare for stopping him from rescuing the company’s senior technician when he realized that the screams he heard weren’t the cries of somepony burning to death.

They were the anguished wails of a pony in the throes of unassailable grief.

Mig wasn’t screaming; she was crying. And she almost certainly wasn’t a ‘kirin’ anymore.

That certainly explained a few things.

Confronting a raging nirik wasn’t a wise move for anycreature that was even remotely flammable. The kinds of burns that one could suffer from even being in close proximity to them were nothing to sneer at. Similarly, because of the internal, and magical, nature of their ‘fire’, things like foam-spewing fire extinguishers wouldn’t do anything more than make the nirik in question even more pissed off than they were, while still remaining just as on fire.

Indeed, there typically wasn’t anything more that could be done for a kirin in Mig’s condition than simply waiting it out and addressing the damage after the fact. Once upon a time, Slipshod might even have acknowledged that the other technicians should do just that. However, they did have other options available to them right now that he didn’t have to keep hidden from the crew any longer. And there was the fact that they needed their ‘Steeds to be fixed sooner rather than later.

Slipshod dropped the extinguisher and concentrated for a brief moment. A burst of green flame and a collective gasp later, and the earth pony that had been standing among them was no more. In its place now stood an amber-scaled dragon a little smaller in size than Cinder was. The list of creatures that could withstand the intense fires of a nirik was short, but it was a list that did include dragons at least. A lava wyrm would have been a little awkward to try to wriggle through the narrow door.

The dragon whelp that had once been an earth pony motioned for the techs to stay back as he approached the door. He listened for a few seconds, waiting for a moment where it sounded like Mig was catching her breath before launching into another bout of her grief-induced rage. When he felt that moment come, he opened the door and quickly ducked inside, closing it firmly behind him to ensure that as much of the smoke and fire within remained contained.

A pony would have almost certainly started choking to death within seconds of entering the room, Slipshod thought to himself. The air was thick, not only with smoke, but the lingering fumes of several combusted materials that would have proven toxic to most other creatures. Apparently nirik were not among them. Dragons certainly were not, their physiologies adapted to endure the plethora of highly poisonous gasses that normally went hoof-and-hoof―well, claw-and-claw, perhaps―with the volcanically active regions that served as their preferred habitats.

When compared to things like hydrogen-sulfide and sulfur-dioxide, a few dioxins from burning plastics were hardly an issue. As a result, Slipshod found that he had no trouble at all breathing in the smoke-clogged closet. Seeing was another matter though. The thick haze of the room made things considerably darker. Fortunately―sort of―Mig’s inflamed nirik form managed to stand out quite clearly even through all the smoke.

Slipshod didn’t say anything at first. Instead, he started by peeling back just a bit on the emotional walls that he’d just finished reinforcing a couple minutes ago. He needed to get a ‘lay of the land’ before he went trying to manipulate any emotional states. It didn’t take much reduction for him to get a very clear―and vivid―appreciation for what Mig was going through.

Some of it was mundane and to be expected: grief, loss, despair; the emotions that went part and parcel with the death of a close loved one. The regret that she was putting off was common enough too. Though, he wasn’t entirely certain about the focus of it. Usually the regret that surviving friends and relatives felt was more externalized. They regretted not saying certain things, or spending as much time together as they should have―that sort of thing. Mig’s regret was directed much more inwardly.

The guilt was a little surprising too. Again, this was something that was typically expressed not nearly as inwardly as Mig was doing so. If Slipshod hadn’t known any better, he’d have thought that Mig was genuinely holding herself responsible for her sister’s death. Which didn’t make any sense of course. Blaming the changelings, or Blood Chit, or even himself, would have been far more understandable a reaction.

But, that’s not what was happening. She was taking sole ownership for Tig’s death. No wonder she’d gone full nirik.

Mig’s inflamed gaze fell on the dragon intruder. For the briefest of moments, there was visible confusion. Understandable, as there weren’t any dragon members of the crew. It seemed though that, even in her ragged emotional state, the ‘Steed tech was able to piece together who it was that had come to speak with her beneath the scaly disguise. Not that his presence felt like it did much to quell her broiling feelings of guilt or loss.

The rage was new though.

She charged him.

Slipshod flinched away reflexively, even though he was―mostly―sure that the nirik shouldn’t have been able to inflict any particularly grievous injuries upon a dragon with just her bare hooves; and she wasn’t wielding any power tools with her magic that he could see. She was hurting, and that pain needed an outlet. His dragon form afforded him considerably more durability than even an earth pony possessed. Besides, as the individual who bore responsibility for putting into motion the series of events which had brought this state upon the mare, the very least he could do was endure a few punches from a nirik in crisis.

Besides, the ‘Steed pilot got the impression that it wasn’t specifically him that the mare was pissed off at.

“They killed her!” she screamed as she reared up, her cloven hooves raining down a successive hail of blows upon the dragon whelp’s chest and shoulders. Slipshod braced himself with a shift of his clawed feet, not shying from the assault. Almost immediately, he could feel her ire bleeding away even as the first hit landed, “those monsters killed Tig!”

In the back of his mind, Slipshod wondered who’d told her about her twin’s death. Blood Chit wasn’t the kind of stallion to break that kind of news over a radio, and he hadn’t left the garage yet. Of course, as close as the two kirin were, the changeling had little doubt that the first thing that Mig would have done upon hearing about the assault team’s return was reach out and try to check on her sister.

It wouldn’t have taken a creature as intelligent as a genius mechanic to figure out why they weren’t getting a response.

The blows continued to come down on the dragon, though the force of their impacts lessened dramatically with every hit as her rage bled back into grief, “she’s gone...and they took her from me…” and, right on schedule, the guilt made its return, “I shouldn’t have let her go. It should have been me…”

A half dozen trite and cliche platitudes presented themselves to Slipshod. The usual suspects: “it wasn’t your fault”, “there was nothing you could have done”, “these things happen in war”, “we’ll make them pay for what they did”, the typical go-to’s.

The lines you expect to hear said to a creature in crisis after a loss in vid, or when reading a story written by some hack.

The things that never actually help to hear in real life. Mig had just lost her sister. Her closest and most intimate companion. A part of her. No trite, vapid, sentiment from him was going to lessen the pain that she was feeling. Which wasn’t the same as saying that she didn’t need to hear something from somecreature. An affirmation that she wasn’t alone during such a vulnerable time.

Slipshod wrapped his arms around the nirik and hugged her to him tight, “we’re here for you,” he whispered, “we’ll always be here for you.”

And, with that little bit of tactically applied emotional pressure...the dam broke. The rage fell away, and the tears came out. The transformation reversed itself, and a rose-coated mare with a scaled backside was soon draped over the dragon where an inflamed nirik had been only a moment before, “she’s gone!” the words were barely even comprehensible through the mare’s bawling, “she’s gone, and it’s all my fault…”

“The changelings killed her, not you.”

Mig began to shake her head fervently, “you don’t understand,” she managed to get out between sniffles, her head still buried in Slipshod’s neck, “I cheated…I knew Tig was going to choose pegasus. She always throws pegasus when it’s something she doesn’t want to do.

“Most of time I’ll go unicorn so she doesn’t have to,” she admitted, “but...this time…” her grip around the dragon tightened, another wave of sobs wracking her body, “I didn’t want to go, so I threw earth pony and made her go instead!”

Ah, so that was the reason for the guilt. More than mere survivor’s guilt, because it had a twinge of remorse over her act of dubious ‘cheating’. She’d taken advantage of how well she’d known her twin in order to manipulate Tig into doing something dangerous. Something which had ultimately gotten the other kirin mare killed. As a result, she felt that she bore responsibility for the death.

An ultimately irrational and ridiculous conclusion, since there was no possibility that Mig could have known how poorly the mission would go. Nocreature could have.

...Well, that didn’t necessarily have to be true, the changeling supposed.

Mig didn’t deserve this guilt. Tig’s death was not her burden to bear. And it didn’t have to be. Not when there was a much more deserving target for the blame close at hoof.

“Tig dying wasn’t your fault,” he began, already feeling the kirin starting to shake her head as she prepared to reaffirm her stance on the matter. However, what he said next stopped her, “it was mine. I lied about the mission. I knew it would be a suicide run.”

Mig pushed herself away from him, her eyes staring wide in shock into his, searching. Doubt reverberated within her...at first. She’d obviously assumed that he was being as irrational as she was, and ascribing blame where none had any right to be duly applied. However, if changelings were good at one thing, it was faking their emotional states. Not that he needed to ‘fake’ all that much. He’d proposed the mission, after all. Maybe the reality had been that he’d genuinely believed the facility would be depleted enough of defensive forces to be taken by the Zathura’s small security detachment; but if it could be of benefit to others that that wasn’t the case…

Whatever Twilight or Blood Chit might believe to the contrary, he knew perfectly well that he was a monster. Monsters deserved to be hated.

“Honestly, it’s a shock any of them made it out,” the changeling continued on in a detached tone, his gaze cold and unfeeling. The rosie kirin withdrew from him even further, taking a few steps back, her mouth agape in shock even as she still fought to process what Slipshod was saying.

Finally, she found her voice, “wh...why would you do that?” she sputtered, aghast, “why would you send them in there if you knew they couldn’t do it?”

“I didn’t expect them to survive,” he correctly coldly, “but I thought there was a decent enough chance that they’d still be able to get me some useful intel before they died,” the dragon shrugged dismissively, “guess I overestimated them.”

Even through his dragonhide, the slap across the face he received from the kirin stung. He bore it though. Already he could feel the mare’s focus for her grief shifting. It was no longer herself she blamed, but him. Good. The more she hated him, the less self-destructive she’d be over her twin’s death.

“...Get out,” Mig seethed.

Wordlessly, Slipshod turned away from her and headed for the exit of the cramped parts closet. He’d briefly debated making one additional heartless comment to really sear in the animosity he was nurturing in her, but decided against it. Mig was hardly the sort to let what he’d said just now remain exclusively between the two of them. She’d let members of her maintenance team know how he’d admitted to ‘suckering’ their friends into the deadly mission to take the changeling HSG, costing them their lives. From there, it would get out to the rest of the ship.

In less than a day, the whole crew would have a productive outlet for their feelings of loss: him. Their resident changeling. The monster who’d crafted a lethal mission to further his own personal agenda; one that merely happened to compliment their own objectives of defeating Chrysalis. What little trust he’d managed to rebuild after having been outed as a changeling would suffer, yes―perhaps even be wiped away entirely―but he didn’t need the crew to ‘trust’ him to accomplish the mission. He needed them focused.

With a readily available outlet for their negative emotions, they’d recover from this crushing blow to their morale in days, instead of weeks or longer. They’d galvanize their resolve, and perhaps even grow stronger as a result. More determined than ever to rid the galaxy of his race. Which was what was best for them anyway.

There was nothing more to be gained here. So he left.

There were mixed schools of thought among the BattleSteed piloting community when it came to the subject of selecting ‘appropriate’ color schemes for their paintjobs. The joke went that, if you were to place two ‘Steed pilots in a room, they’d emerge with three ‘perfect’ color palettes.

On the one hoof, there were many pilots who were ready to point out that the idea of trying to ‘hide’ a ten meter tall, sixty ton, BattleSteed using paint was patently ridiculous. You could slather even a smaller ‘Steed, like a SneakyShy, with all the greens and browns that you wanted; but it was never going to be mistaken for a tree. So, that being the case, the argument was that it made more sense to go with vibrant and garish colors. Colors that would do the opposite and make the ‘Steeds stand out, making it easy for commanders―and their subordinate pilots―to tell friend from foe in the middle of a chaotic firefight.

Similar to how militaries of old would dress their soldiers in brightly-colored tabards and caparisons.

On the other side of the debate, those who championed subdued, earthy, ‘terrain-appropriate’ tones pointed out that a pilot could see objects that were at a much greater distance than even the best sensor suite could achieve a target lock. And while no targeting computer would be fooled by a millimeter-thick coating of sable paint, a pilot doing a quick visual sweep of a desert might overlook something that is the same color as the hundred other ‘rocks’ around it while conducting a patrol. The same went for an aerospace pilot cruising at a couple thousand meters above the ground traveling at near supersonic speeds.

Seeking out any kind of advantage in a fight, no matter how fleeting it might be, was never regarded as a wasted effort. Especially if it helped to place a pilot in the position to fire the first shot. Sometimes landing that first hit was all that it took to turn the outcome of a fight into a foregone conclusion.

Of course, in the predawn darkness, it hardly mattered what color a ‘Steed was painted. As long as their running lights were turned off, even a ten meter tall robot was the next best thing to invisible until you were standing nearly on top of it. This worked both ways though. Which was why it paid to have a network of hundred of surveillance satellites in orbit that could aid in reconnaissance.

Though in order to be genuinely useful, it was necessary for the ponies pulling data from those satellites to be at least halfway competent...

“Orbital Control, do you have that tracking data yet?” Moonlight Radiance growled into her helmet’s mic from inside the cockpit of her Star Hunter. By her own estimates, the enemy DropShips had to be at least close to entering the atmosphere by now. If she knew what direction and declination to look, the unicorn could probably have seen their reentry from her cockpit.

The command lance, composed of her BattleSteed, a Shining Armor, a Riflemare, and a Wild Bronco, were poised in wait on a ridge overlooking Colton’s primary spaceport. The rest of her House Guard were seeded throughout the spaceport’s facilities so that they could respond to, and converge on, any location that the Nirik Light Pony forces ended up landing. However, the sooner they knew where precisely that was going to be, the better off the defending forces would be. If they received the precise coordinates early enough, it was possible that they might even be able to converge on the DropShips and destroy them before they even had the chance to disgorge their ‘Steeds.

That would be the ideal, of course. However, even if her Guard couldn’t manage that clean of a sweep, they would still have an undeniable advantage by virtue of being able to surround the invaders and attack them from all sides. This whole area was poised to become a deathtrap for the Light Pony forces.

“Targets Apple through Donkey making steady approaches towards pads One thru Four. ETA: fifteen minutes,” came the response from the stallion on the command platform, “Bronze Wing has been intercepted by enemy fighter screens and was unable to make contact with the DropShips.”

The unicorn mare sneered, though she certainly could not have honestly said that she was surprised by the news. The entire purpose behind fighter screens was to intercept any aerospace fighters sent to harass descending DropShips, after all. Still, it would have been some rather pleasant tidings to learn that at least one of the approaching companies of ‘Steeds had been shot out of space on their way towards the planet…

Nor could she say that she was shocked that the approaching DropShips appeared to have elected to land at the pads themselves. They were readily available landing areas clear of obstructions with ample space around them to deploy ‘Steeds. Which was the purpose of a landing pad, after all. Any DropShip attempting to drop off their lances anywhere near within sight of the spaceport was hardly going to need to avoid any less fire than they would if they were heading for the spaceport proper.

Though, now that they had more specific coordinates, Moonlight could begin to redeploy her House Guard, “Sword Company to Pad One, Spear Company to Pad three, Axe Company to Pad Three, Bow Company to Pad Four,” she barked out over her mic, “nothing makes it off those DropShips, is that understood?” the pink unicorn listened for the acknowledgements from each of her company commanders.

She then finally allowed herself a soft sigh of the closest thing to relief that she’d felt all day and relaxed on her piloting couch. There should be no realistic way that this misguided assault by the Nirik Light Pony forces ended in anything other than a complete disaster for them. Moonlight would have her newly conquered world, as well as proof that she could rebuff any attempts by the kirin or their lackeys from taking it back. Those doubting MPs back on Aether would have no choice but to recognize her greatness, and her mandate to rule.

It would still behoove her to figure out a more long-term solution where her cousin was concerned though. Stellar Nova wasn’t simply going to fade back into obscurity after this. He’d continue to undermine her position from the sidelines. Moonlight needed to arrange for another ‘incident’ at some point in the coming months that would address that potential problem.

One that ComSpark wouldn’t be able to ‘miraculously’ save him from this time…

That part still nagged at the mare, if she was being honest. Why would ComSpark forces have intervened in a domestic disaster like that? What had they even been doing close enough to the bombing to have been able to respond quickly enough to save Stellar’s life? Why keep his survival a secret for so long too?

They were glorified mail delivery ponies! What interest could they possibly have in galactic politics?

It was a thought that made the unicorn mare decidedly uncomfortable. Moonlight Radiance knew perfectly well―as did nearly every other political-minded creature in the galaxy―how powerful ComSpark could become if they elected to capitalize on the wealth of information that passed through their proprietary facilities. The Queen’s mandate for her organization to remain impartial was all that kept them from shaping the political landscape.

...Or were they?

Moonlight found herself wondering about that now. Too many coincidences were occurring for her to blindly accept that they were coincidences. Events that were all quite easily explained by ComSpark taking a much more ‘active’ role in things than they claimed to be.

The unicorn made a mental note to look into the matter once she returned to Aether.

Her attention was drawn away from her thoughts and towards the distant spaceport. Unusually a well-lit facility, the pink unicorn gaped as she saw it growing dark. The mare jabbed at her communications suite and raised the main control tower, “Spaceport Command, what is going on?! I gave no blackout order!”

A few seconds later, a very staticy and slightly garbled response was barely audible over her helmet’s headset, “Apologies, Captain-General,” a mare replied, “a transformer blew when we powered up the turrets! The whole defense array is down and we’re on reserve power.”

Moonlight’s hoof lashed out in frustration and slammed into a nearby bulkhead. The loss of the spaceport’s considerable turret system took more than half of their firepower along with it, to include dozens of LRM launchers that might have been able to disable or destroy at least one of the DropShips before they even reached the ground, “when was the last time somepony checked on those turrets?!” It was too late to do anything about the system now, of course, but the unicorn intended to make an example out of the pony who’d failed to do their job properly when all of this was over with.

“The array is tested every morning, ma’am,” the mare on the other end of the radio insisted defensively, “and the transformer that blew was just serviced yesterday afternoon in anticipation of the attack!”

The Captain-General resolved to have those techs shot at dawn. Obviously they’d done something very wrong while working on the equipment. In the meantime, they’d just have to make do without the turrets backing them up. She informed her company commanders of the situation. As much of an inconvenience as it was, her forces should still be able to manage and achieve victory. They had a great number of advantages in their favor, after all.

As long as nothing else went wrong, at least…

There was a brief flicker of movement on her navigation map.

Moonlight Radiance squinted at the display, but the errant signal was gone before she could discern what it was. There shouldn’t have been anything else in the area, so she was tempted to write off the anomaly as nothing more than a sensor ghost. However, the unicorn had already reached her limit today where ‘surprises’ were concerned, “Regal Four, go see what that contact at out six was.”

“Roger, ma’am; moving out,” the stallion replied soberly. A moment later, Moonlight saw the icon representing her lance’s Wild Bronco moving away from their formation to conduct a sweep of their rear arc. It would probably turn out to be a civilian ground cart out for a drive through the countryside. Moonlight wanted to be sure it wasn’t anything far more dangerous though.

The unicorn returned her attention back to the now-dark spaceport. Far above it, she could also make out four pinpricks of orange light that she assumed must have been the incoming DropShips. They’d be on the ground in moments. Her hind hoof began to tap nervously on the deck of her cockpit as she watched the fiery orbs growing bigger in the sky. She continuously assured herself that the battle would go in her favor and be hailed as nothing short of a resounding success.

How could it not?

The Wild Bronco’s beacon ceased transmitting.

Moonlight balked, scowling at the electronic display, “Regal Four, come in. Your IFF is malfunctioning. Report status,” she listened intently for several seconds, but received no response. Becoming even more annoyed―and perhaps a little concerned―she addressed one of the other members of her lance, “Regal Three, try to raise Regal Four.”

“Wilco, ma’am,” the mare responded.

While she waited for Regal Three’s report, the captain-general took a moment to confirm that the rest of her battalion was where they were supposed to be. All four companies looked to be in place around the landing pads identified by Orbital Control. There should be little to no chance at all that any of the enemy’s ‘Steeds would make it off their DropShips. Perhaps the Light Pony mercenaries would recognize the futility of their assault and simply offer to surrender right then and there? Capturing a battalion of kirin mercenaries would certainly prove to be quite the feather in her cap when she returned to Aether―

Streaks of orange light lanced through the air off to Moonlight’s right. Her head whipped around to see what the source could possibly have been, her hoof ready to activate her radio and chastise whichever member of her lance had been stupid enough to break the light discipline that why were observing by firing their weapons. She looked just in time to see the Shining Armor next to her―Regal Two’s ‘Steed―explode as its reactor detonated.

The unicorn’s eyes went wide with shock. Years of combat experience took over and the mare all but subconsciously took hold of her Star Hunter’s controls and throttled it forward into a gallop, bringing it around to face their attackers. She certainly wasn’t going to be able to outrun whoever this was in her Star Hunter, and she’d survive a lot longer with her heavier front plating absorbing hits. The Shining Armor hadn’t lasted very long being hit from behind, after all.

“Contact; rear!” She barked out over her House Guard’s primary frequency, so that every pilot under her command could hear her, “Regal Lance under fire from the east! Send backup now!”

Even as she yelled out her orders, the unicorn’s mind raced to come up with an explanation for what could possibly have taken down a Shining Armor so efficiently. Even against the relatively thinner rear ablative plating, the heavy ‘Steed should have been able to take a hoofful of hits from a PPC before outright exploding! Not that those flashes of light had looked anything like the distinctive chromatic double-helix of a prismatic projector cannon. In fact, those orange bolts of fire hadn’t looked like any weapons that she was familiar with. They’d been moving too swiftly to have been any sort of missile, and no magical energy weapons were that color.

The Riflemare at her side was pouring autocannon and energy fire into the woodline. Trees splintered, fell, or merely burst into flame. Moonlight joined in, sweeping the area with a pair of medium energy cannons and letting out a stream of unguided LRMs in the hope that they would at least give whoever was attacking them pause.

Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to be what ended up happening at all. Instead, the captain-general saw four more of the strange weapons appear to fire as four more orange bolts of hypersonic fire leapt from the dark interior of the forest. The quartet of bolts all converged on the Riflemare’s core, appearing to slip through the plating on its breast with hardly any effort at all. The heavy ‘Steed staggered, ceased firing, and then exploded in a cloud of smoke and purple fire.

Moonlight Radiance gaped in shock. While a Riflemare’s reputation for being something of a ‘glass cannon’ was well-earned, the unicorn still found it to be inconceivable that one of the sixty ton ‘Steeds could be brought down so cleanly with just four hits from any weapon. Yet she had seen just that happen.

The leader of the Our Worlds League was alone now. She stamped hard on her throttle pedals, roughly reversing the direction of travel of her ‘Steed. Charging the woodline was a death sentence. Again she put out a frantic call for help from the rest of her guard. Several of her subordinates assured her that help was on the way, and the unicorn was able to confirm that much on her navigational map. No fewer than three lances had been peeled away from the spaceport and were heading for her position at a respectable pace. They’d be with her in less than five minutes.

However, that was likely to be four and a half minutes too late to do anything for her, Moonlight suspected. She continued to fire blindly into the forest, which was growing brighter by the moment as the fires started by her energy weapons grew bigger and brighter.

Then she saw it: the death which had come for her. Four heavy ‘Steeds prowled slowly from within the dark confines of the forest, out into the firelight. An orange glow danced over the matted gray surfaces of the quartet of BattleSteeds. They were designs that Moonlight didn’t recognize, and neither did her targeting computer. She could see that they weren’t equine in appearance, the way that most ‘Steeds were. Their heads were broad and bulbose, situated low on broad shoulders. The forelegs bowed outwards slightly, ending in massive clawed paws. The body was almost teardrop shaped as it swept back to a pair of smaller hindlegs.

Almost like a giant, metal, Diamond Dog.

Armed with an odd-looking autocannon that the unicorn hadn’t seen before. Tendrils of electricity began to collect around the barrels of those weapons.

Moonlight didn’t hesitate. She was already reaching for the ejection controls even as the four enemy ‘Steeds fired their impossibly potent weapons. Few things could outrun the detonation of a ‘Steed’s reactor core. Fortunately, a pilot’s ejection system was specifically designed to be one of those. The unicorn mare was thrown violently upward just as the top of her cockpit was blown away by strategically placed explosive bolts. Beneath her, the mare could see the expanding sphere of violet flames racing to try and catch her, but they soon fell away as her couch’s thrusters carried her high into the air.

Just as she reached the pinnacle of her ascent, a parachute deployed from a compartment near the couch’s front. The unicorn breathed a sigh of relief as she began to descend slowly back towards the ground. She felt some initial lingering concern that she might end up drifting into the growing forest fire, but those fears were waylaid as she noticed that the wind was carrying her gently away from them. She saw the four strange enemy ‘Steeds still stalking around on the ground, almost like they were waiting for her.

The unicorn sneered. No doubt their intent was to capture her and force her to surrender. That would certainly be a less than ideal situation. Aside from the blow to her pride, it would almost prove to be the death kneel of her short-lived tenure as captain-general. Once news of her status as a prisoner reached Aether, Parliament would almost certainly hold a vote that same day to strip her of her title and uplift her cousin to the position. She’d be less than nothing to anypony at that point.

Her only hope was that those reinforcements of hers got to her before she could be captured. Which wasn’t entirely out of the question, the mare supposed, as she turned her head in the direction of the dozen spotlights bobbing their way towards her position. The enemy pilots couldn’t possibly have any infantry on the ground who would be able to actually affect her apprehension, so all she had to do was scurry off into the woods and wait for her House Guard to drive the enemy away.

As concerning as those strange ‘Steeds and their terrifyingly potent weapons were, there was no possibility that a single lance could fend off a whole company. All she had to do was wait for her forces to achieve their inevitable victory. Then she could get on with destroying the Light Pony intruders.

Then she would find an appropriate pony to execute for not warning her about the enemy lance that had managed to sneak up on her―

Cteniza allowed herself a satisfied smile as she watched the pulsed indigo light vaporize the slowly descending piloting couch and its occupant. The changeling pilot glanced down at her instrumentation and confirmed that each of the four components of the Command Lance had indeed been dealt with. Only then did she open up her secure communications frequency with the pony that she was to contact on the orbiting station that served as the command center for the Our Worlds forces on Colton.

“Complete.”

There was little need to elaborate on ‘what’ it was that had been completed. The agent on the other end of the message knew perfectly well why her lance was here, after all, and what their object was. All that was left for her lance to do was to withdraw back out of sight and wait for their DropShip to come by and collect them. While Drop Pods offered a very convenient way for BattleSteeds to make planetfall without needing to draw all the attention that a DropShip landing would, there was still only the one way to get a lance of ‘Steeds back off a planet.

The changeling mare did pause for a few seconds though, keeping her eyes on the beacons which denoted the position of the reinforcing lances that the―late―captain-general had summoned. They should be receiving their withdrawal and stand-down orders momentarily. However, there was always the possibility that one or more of them would get a wild hair up their flanks and commit themselves to ‘avenging’ their dead commander. If that happened, she needed her lance to be ready to meet them so that they could be dispatched before being able to report back what they were seeing.

Her Majesty wanted these Diamond Dog heavy BattleSteeds designs to remain a secret from the wider galaxy.

While it took longer than Cteniza would have liked, eventually the three approaching lances of House Guard ‘Steeds turned around and headed back for the spaceport. She could also see that those forces which had remained at the landing pads were pulling back as well, apparently now content with allowing the DropShips to land and digorge their Light Pony cargo.

The changeling idly wondered if the arriving mercenaries were going to be at all disappointed that there wasn’t going to be a fight after all? The order should already be going out to all of the Our Worlds troops on the planet to cease all further operations and instead begin packing up in preparation to leave the planet. It was an order that would be found to have been rather fortuitously prophetic when word reached the local commanders here from Aether that the soon-to-be-captain-general Stellar Nova wanted his armies back in Our Worlds space where they belonged.

The Our Worlds military would be permitted to leave unmolested, the Nirik Light Pony mercenaries would regain control of Colton on behalf of the benefactors, an appropriate restitution would be agreed upon between the League and the Confederation, and the galaxy could go back to working the way that it always had. The way that their queen decreed it to.

While it was not Cteniza’s place to question―nor any drone’s, for that matter―the changeling did find herself wondering why Her Majesty had not seen fit to install agents as the direct heads of state before now? Having a drone serving as the captain-general in the first place would surely have prevented something like this from happening in the first place.

The drone shook her head roughly, sweeping such thoughts aside. They were unbecoming of one of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects. She would be better served continuing with her assigned mission.

“Nightshade Lance, withdraw to the extraction point.”

The door chime didn’t even go off before it opened this time. Slipshod’s once more earth pony lips quirked into an annoyed scowl, but he declined to move from where he was laying on his bunk. He hardly needed to in order to determine who it was that had come to yell at him―and he could distinctly feel that they were going to be yelling at him in short order.

Only one pony on this ship constantly radiated that particular mixture of superiority and fatigue these days, “what the fuck is this I’m hearing about you ‘sabotaging’ the HSG mission?!”

“Good afternoon, Princess. Please do come in,” the stallion responded with flippant detachment. He’d been waiting for this conversation for the last hour.

“Oh, fuck you!” She spat.

“You know, your cursing has greatly improved over the last few months,” the stallion pointed out, pointedly ignoring the crux of her question, and taking some small measure of delight in noting that it had the desired intent of making Twilight even more incensed, “we’ll make a proper ‘Steed pilot out of you yet!”

“Slip!”

The changeling felt himself wrench from the cot by the purple mare’s powerful telekinetics. He didn’t fight it. He didn’t resist in any way, and not simply because he recognized the futility of trying to contest the magical will of an alicorn. The stallion simply let it happen. In less than a second, his limp body was dangling in front of Twilight. The taller mare glared balefully into his eyes…

...Then her ire bled away. He could feel the shock in her as she finally caught sight of his own expression. One that he wasn’t putting on as a front. He was allowing himself and his emotions to be seen quite plainly right now.

Resignation.

It wasn’t what she’d expected to find, and so she wasn’t prepared to address it. He was prepared for her though, “go on,” he insisted, “do something. Hurt me. Punish me.”

Apparently Twilight finally found a way that she was going to respond: disgust, “oh, Celestia; you have got to be fucking kidding me...is that what this was all about? You think this was all your fault?” the mare’s magic evaporated, dropping the changeling unceremoniously on his flank as she turned away, “unbelievable…”

Slipshod winced, rubbing his sore hind end. “The mission was my idea,” he pointed out, feeling a little annoyed himself that this encounter wasn’t going the way that he’d quite anticipated. Twilight, of all ponies, should be more than willing to punish a changeling who was responsible for the deaths of other creatures, “thus it’s my fault that it all went wrong.”

“Okay,” the purple mare responded dismissively, issuing him a flat look as she walked over and sat down by his cabin’s small desk. There were several moments of lingering silence in the quarters, each pony looking at the other expectantly, before the alicorn finally made an indignant wave with her hoof, casting an expectant look at the earth pony, “...And?”

Slipshod frowned at the purple mare. Of all the ponies on this vessel, he expected her to be considerably more empathetic towards his situation. She’d made decisions and choices that resulted in a ‘considerable’ number of deaths too, after all, “And so there are consequences,” he insisted.

“Yes,” she agreed, soberly, “the consequence is that ponies died who probably wouldn’t have if they’d never gone on that mission,” once more her eyes landed expectantly on him, “And now you have to decide what you’re going to do about that.

“And, for the record: wallowing in self-pity isn’t an option available to you. I’m not going to allow that.”

The changeling glared at the alicorn, “you don’t get to tell me how to feel about what happened,” he snapped, “what c―” the stallion slammed his mouth shut on what he had just been about to say. For a brief moment, he’d forgotten who he was talking to.

However, Twilight had apparently caught on to the line that he’d about to use, and her expression shifted to one of amusement. Though the feeling behind that look felt anything but ‘amused’, “I’m sorry, were you about to ask me what I could possibly know about how you’re feeling? Maybe ask me if I knew what it was like to have ponies I cared about die because of my own poor decisions?

“If I’d ever fucked up and gotten everypony killed?” Those last words were dripping with disdain. For him. For his presumption that he was alone in making deadly mistakes.

“Well you’re in luck!” The mare’s expression and tone shifted once more, if not her underlying feelings on the matter. The changeling’s clear perception of the diametrically opposed physical and emotional presentations made the combination perhaps a little more off-putting than it might have otherwise been to a non-empath. Like seeing a pony wearing a manic grin who was insisting that they were genuinely ‘happy’, “You happen to be in the presence of the resident expert on the subject of: ‘Fucking Up and Getting Everypony Killed’!

“I also know more than a little about dealing with losing close friends,” the alicorn added, “so I can help you with that too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the stallion insisted, “none of those ponies were my ‘friends’. Changelings don’t ‘do’ friends.”

Twilight’s faux affectation of exuberance at the prospect of imparting wisdom to a creature in need of enlightening evaporated almost immediately, and she was scowling at him once more, “Okay. That? We’re done with that. I’m done with that.

“I have put in way too much work just to have you backslide on me,” the alicorn snarled at him, “I’ve dealt with a lot of obstinate creatures over the centuries―believe me. So I was mostly content to wait for you to come around to finally having your long-overdue personal epiphany in your own damn good time. That sort of thing can take weeks, months, even years; but with enough probing and prompting, the walls of emotional constipation inevitably crumble.

“There’s even almost always a brief little ‘self-destructive’ phase where they push creatures away as a last desperate effort to avoid confronting those feelings that scare them so much,” Slipshod was almost positive that he didn’t appreciate the condescending tone the purple mare was using at the moment, “remind me to tell you about this dragon I knew who hid himself away in the mantle of a dwarf planet for half a century.

“However, we don’t have fifty years for you to finally experience your emotional revelation―and we sure as shit can’t afford to have you sabotaging every last relationship you have left in the galaxy! You’re barely recovered from your last period of isolation; how long do you expect to survive if you turn the ship against you a second time?!”

“It doesn’t matter,” the stallion insisted with a rueful snort, “they’ll get along better without me―”

An intangible force of violet magic clubbed him over the back of the head. Slipshod let out a brief hiss of pain, more because he hadn’t expected it than because any serious damage had been done to him. It hadn’t really ‘hurt’ all that much; but it had certainly been quite unexpected.

“Yes, it matters. Yes, you matter. And no, they won’t!” Twilight seethed, glaring at the earth pony stallion. Apparently realizing that she was letting her frustration get the better of her, the alicorn closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

Her hooves came up and began massaging her temples, “I get that you’re hurting over what happened, and that you feel responsible for the deaths of your friends,” despite her eyes still being closed, the purple mare must have heard Slipshod take in a breath in preparation to rebuke her for the label that she’d used to describe the ponies who’d died, because she cut him off, “If you say they weren’t your friends, I will hit you again, you dense motherfucker.”

Those magenta eyes shot open again, glowering at the changeling stallion, “they were your friends. Because if they weren’t, their deaths wouldn’t be affecting you this much,” the alicorn pointed out. Slipshod kept his expression impassive, but inwardly he was forced to acknowledge that there was some measure of truth to that observation―maybe.

“And while I would love nothing more than to take the time to ease you into this, we don’t have that luxury,” the mare withdrew her hooves from her head and planted them back on the floor, straightening up and staring down at the smaller stallion with an almost imperius expression, “So we’re going to do this the hard way:

“Repeat after me: They were your F-f-f-f…”

Slipshod averted his gaze and closed his eyes, shaking his head defiantly, “No. They weren’t that. Changelings don’t have those.”

“Says who?” The alicorn mare asked in a bark of dry laughter, “Chrysalis?” The name stung the stallion, eliciting a sharp wince. He wasn’t sure who he resented more at the moment: himself for allowing the queen that he’d so vehemently renounced to retain even that minimal level of control over him even after all this time, or Twilight for managing to correctly identify the source of his reticence, “Did she tell you caring about others would make you ‘weak’? That having friends made you vulnerable? Something like that?

“Even after everything that you blame her for, you trust her to have been honest with you?”

Slipshod felt compelled to respond now. To offer up a justification for his attitudes. Of course, he couldn’t admit that he had, in fact, allowed himself to give Chrysalis’ rhetoric on personal relationships credibility. At best, that would have made him a hypocrite. At worst, he’d have been a moron. Truthfully, he was quite likely to be both, a rather scathing part of his mind noted with sardonic mirth.

His jaw worked wordlessly for several seconds before the changeling finally abandoned his efforts to offer up a laughably pathetic justification for his denials. Besides, even if he were to acknowledge the―hypothetical―validity of Twilight’s observation, “What does it matter? It won’t change anything.”

“It changes everything!” Twilight exclaimed, clearly exasperated, “Friendship is literal power! It is a form of actual magic that can directly impact the material plane; more powerful than any spell that even an alicorn can cast!

“Forging those bonds―embracing those feelings―is how we’re going to be able to defeat Chrysalis. A fleet only gets us to Equus. A hundred DropShips and a thousand Big Macs won’t be enough to actually take down her and the changelings, and you know that. Not if she knows we’re coming.

“And after chowing down on love for five hundred years, Chrysalis is certain to be far too powerful to defeat through conventional means,” Twilight pointed out soberly. Slipshod added his own nod of reluctant agreement. Perhaps even better than Twilight, he knew exactly how powerful the queen of the changelings was, “Which means that we need Friendship.”

“Fine. You need creatures who are ‘friends’,” the changeling acknowledged with a sigh, “What does any of that have to do with me? There are plenty of creatures on this ship who are friends with one another.”

“But they’re not changelings.”

“So?”

“‘So’ I need a changeling for my plan to work,” Twilight stated bluntly, “specifically one who is capable of being genuine friends with other creatures. You represent the chink in Chrysalis’ armor. You―and your connection with the crew of this ship―is how we’re going to win.”

Slipshod felt his brow rise in surprise. He hadn’t quite expected the alicorn to be this manipulative, “...you need me to convince ponies to be my friends?”

“No,” the purple mare corrected him pointedly, “I need you to be their friend. I need it to go both ways―you need it to go both ways.”

The stallion felt his gut grow tight with trepidation. He started shaking his head again, “that’s―”

“―Dangerous,” she finished for him, nodding along in understanding, “I know. Changelings need to ‘consume’ love in order to sustain themselves; so they constantly retain the feelings of others. Giving it out freely with no guarantee that more will be incoming places you at great risk.

“If you were to admit how you felt about somepony you cared about―if you expressed those feelings―only for them to not return those feelings in kind...I’m sure the prospect terrifies you,” Twilight said, her words soft and full of empathy now. A tiny smile pulled at the corner of her lips, “it’d be like taking an EVA suit off the rack and stepping out the airlock with it, without doing a full check yourself: placing your trust―betting your life―on somepony else. Blindly. Completely. No turning back once the deed is done.

“Anycreature would be afraid under those circumstances,” she assured him.

“But you can’t keep suppressing these feelings,” the alicorn insisted more sternly, “it’s not just hurting yourself anymore. You’re hurting others. And, no, I’m not talking about the ponies who died in the HSG raid. What you’re doing is hurting all of the other creatures on this ship who lost somepony down there. I know you think you’re helping them, but you’re not.

“They need to grieve; and you’re stopping them from doing that by trying to turn their sorrow into rage and directing it at yourself.”

“Anger can help creatures focus,” Slipshod defended.

“They’re plenty angry already,” Twilight assured him, “at the changelings. The ones who actually killed their friends. You are just trying to be selfish and punish yourself because you feel bad for screwing up.”

“So...what? I’m not allowed to feel responsible for what happened?” the changeling scoffed, “I created that mission! I promised them it would be easy!”

“And you were wrong,” Twilight retorted, entirely unmoved by Slipshod’s words, “that happens. You’re not omniscient―nocreature is! You fucked up; ponies died. Making yourself into a fucking pariah won’t change that and doesn’t help anypony; least of all the crew.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do then?”

“Make those deaths mean something. Learn from them. Do better next time,” she replied coolly, her eyes growing distant. Slipshod wasn’t entirely certain that she was merely speaking about him anymore, “work to earn the forgiveness of your peers.”

The changeling snorted, “First you tell me I need to make the crew my friends, and now you’re telling me I need them to forgive me? I thought forgiving each other was a thing that ‘friends’ did for each other automatically?”

“They might,” she conceded evenly, “but receiving forgiveness and earning forgiveness aren’t the same thing. Part of the latter involves being able to forgive yourself as well. And that...well, that’s a lot harder,” Twilight added in a softer tone, “trust me.”

“Maybe some things aren’t worth forgiving,” the stallion countered, “you wouldn’t honestly consider forgiving Chrysalis for everything she’s done, would you?” he flashed a sardonic smirk in the alicorn’s direction, ready to receive her acknowledgement of his example; and was shocked to not only see that she appeared unconvinced, but also to feel that Twilight was genuinely entertaining the notion, “...you’re not serious?”

“If Chrysalis immediately backed down and started to actively make amends...yes,” she said, almost reluctantly; obviously quite aware that this would not be one of her better-received decisions, “I would. I would forgive her, and petition to spare her life; on the condition that she continue to make amends.”

Slipshod gaped at the alicorn, uncomprehending, “She’s responsible for the deaths of billions,” he pointed out―he hoped―unnecessarily, “what could she possibly accomplish in a million years that could even come close to making up for that?”

“Probably nothing,” Twilight responded with an anemic shrug, “but a galaxy where a truly repentant Chrysalis is working to make life better for others is better off down the line than a galaxy where we petrify or kill her.”

“And what about justice for her victims?”

“Do you believe that what the dead crave is more death?” Came Twilight’s simple response, and then an addendum which drew the changeling up short, “how many changeling bodies will satisfy Tig’s spirit, do you think?

“No matter how many creatures Chrysalis has already killed, killing her doesn’t serve ‘justice’; it merely sates our own desire for revenge. Does ending her single life truly balance the scales on the billions who died?”

The alicorn grew quiet for a brief moment, then, “...and is she solely to blame? What of the mare who could have done something to stop her from ever escaping again? Is she as culpable in those deaths? Would ending her life bring more balance to the scales?”

Twilight looked to the changeling, her features wan and drawn, as only the expression of a being who’d spent many thousands of hours contemplating those notions could be, “‘Justice’ is a funny thing. Define it.”

Slipshod balked briefly before managing to stammer out an answer, not having quite expected the question, “it’s...what's right,” he insisted, “it’s what somecreature who did something wrong should receive as punishment.”

“To what end?”

Again the changeling hesitated, frowning now, “...to make things right. Make them even.”

“And how does one make death ‘right’?” Twilight asked, “Is it really with more death?” Hers wasn’t any sort of critical tone, but a socratic one. As though she was genuinely unsure of the answer, and was hoping that the changeling stallion could provide her with the correct response.

“Does Chrysalis dying once ‘make things even’ for the billions she’s killed?”

“It makes them more even,” Slipshod countered.

“Maybe,” the purple mare acknowledged with a slight nod. Then she flashed another weak smile, “but if she was allowed to live, and at a point in the future managed to keep two creatures from dying―preventing two deaths that otherwise would have happened―wouldn’t that make things even more even?”

The changeling stallion scowled. He wasn’t certain that that was how math worked when it came to things like death. Perhaps though, that was the alicorn’s point: that death wasn’t a numbers game, even when it was in pursuit of justice. He wasn’t sure how much he really believed that. The desire to punish killing with death simply felt too visceral to be the wrong answer.

“Tig was just one death. Those scales can be balanced with one death too,” he insisted.

“But the changeling who killed Tig is already dead,” the alicorn pointed out.. Then she hastily continued before Slipshod could respond, holding up a hoof to stay his words, “and they ended their life on their own terms.

“One could argue that they actually managed to ‘elude’ justice―that they weren’t ‘punished’ in any meaningful way, as nothing was done to them by others on Tig’s behalf. So was any ‘justice’ actually served in her name? Can justice ever be served for her?”

The changeling’s mouth closed without saying anything. He hated that thought. It was hard to argue against it from a philosophical perspective, and the idea that Twilight was right―that Tig’s killer could and would never actually be punished for their crimes―galled the stallion. It wasn’t right. Tig deserved justice. Somehow.

“I suppose you could kill another changeling as a sort of surrogate,” Twilight muse aloud, rubbing her chin. She observed the changeling’s response out of the corner of her eye.

He shook his head, “that’s not how ‘justice’ works,” he protested bitterly. If only life were simple enough to allow for substitutes in such important matters, “you can’t punish some random creature for the crimes of others.”

“...So then you shouldn’t be punished for what some random changeling did,” The alicorn concluded, casting an aside glance at the changeling. Slipshod grimaced, silently acknowledging that he had been largely tricked into helping Twilight make her argument for her. He briefly argued that he wasn’t an entirely ‘random creature’ in this specific case. He’d been involved. Of course, he suspected that the purple mare was ready to list off the names of half the creatures on the ship who had been ‘involved’ in the mission; and then ask him how they should all be punished as well.

He still despised the notion that Tig wouldn’t ever get to see ‘real’ justice. At least, not the way that he’d defined it. Perhaps he was wrong though, and there was some other aspect that he had missed. It was possible that he’d find some means of satisfying his desire for seeing her death avenged in the fullness of time.

...Of course, Slipshod recognized that he needed to survive long enough for that to actually happen. Which meant not allowing himself to throw his life down the drain here and now. The stallion suppressed an amused smile as he found himself wondering if Twilight had actually been crafty enough to manipulate him into coming to that realization, or if he was giving her more credit than she deserved. Either way, he supposed that he needed to concede defeat on one front.

“...I think I need to speak with Mig.”

“Finally; some progress,” Twilight smirked down at the stallion, “Xanadu is with her right now, smoothing things over. When she’s calmed down enough, you two are going to have another talk,” the alicorn narrowed her gaze at the stallion now, “and I’m going to supervise. Make sure you don’t pull anymore stupid, self destructive, stunts. Fair?”

“Fair.”

“Good,” she nodded, “then you can sit and talk with Blood Chit,” Slipshod winced again, recalling that his last conversation with the crimson pegasus hadn’t exactly gone very well either. For a creature that was supposed to have superior control over his own emotions, the changeling was certainly having quite the off day. Admittedly, it wasn’t every day that he lost fr―

The changeling stallion’s breath caught in his throat as he instinctively beat back the thought. His chest tightened. His brain screamed all sorts of warnings at him about how dangerous that word was for a changeling. Of course, he recognized something about that voice now, that had never really occurred to him in the past, now that Twilight had pointed it out to him:

That admonishing voice sounded an awful lot like Queen Chrysalis. Her warnings. Her cautions. Her will. Even though he’d cast his allegiance to her aside, he’d subconsciously clung to the parts of her instruction to him and the other changelings that he’d felt made him a changeling. Staying hidden. Manipulating the feelings of others. Surviving off their manufactured love and affection for him. Regarding other creatures as ‘inferior’ beings to be fed upon.

Things that felt like they defined his species.

Of course, now that he was actually taking a step back and reflecting upon those ‘tenets of changelingdom’, Slipshod realized that they were merely how Chrysalis had chosen to define their race. He didn’t have to live by her rules. He didn’t have to let her indoctrinations control him.

He didn’t have to feel guilty about regarding other creatures as his equals. He was allowed to care about them. It wasn’t ‘wrong’ just because somecreature else he’d once respected told him it was.

Not that having a cognitive grasp of that concept made it significantly easier to overcome the decades of practiced unease at entertaining the thought. Slipshod found himself having to take a deep, reaffirming, breath just to get out, “I’d like that. I...I think we could both use a friend right now.”

Twilight beamed proudly at the stallion, and was about to say something when Slipshod’s datalink beeped at him, alerting the changeling to an incoming message. He peered down and saw that High Gain was attempting to contact him about something. He reached down and acknowledged the transmission, “what’s up, High Gain? Is something wrong?”

“I just got off the comm with the new League commander,” the earth pony began. Already Slipshod’s brow was creasing with confusion. ‘New commander’? He exchanged glances with Twilight, who was also looking quite perplexed by the wording that had been used, “Captain-General Moonlight Radiance was killed ten minutes ago,” the news hit the pair like a blow to the gut. The leader of the Our Worlds League―the mare they were supposed to recruit to their efforts to confront Chrysalis―had been killed?!

“She’s dead?” Slipshod blurted, “How?!”

“They aren’t giving out many details,” the company’s comm tech responded, “They said she was killed when a force from the Nirik Light Pony made planetful. All Gray Lines Forces are being ordered to retreat from Colton...and our contract has been pronounced complete and paid out.”

Slipshod sighed and hung his head. His free hoof started massaging the side of his head as he tried to process the news that High Gain was delivering. The League mercenaries were really just going to pack up and go, just like that? Also, what Nirik Light Pony force? If there’d really been an incursion by the Confederation’s mercenaries large enough to push Moonlight’s troops off of the planet so quickly, he felt like Doppler would have said something to him about it by now even if the League hadn’t seen fit to make him aware.

“Thanks for the info, High Gain,” the stallion finally said. There wasn’t anything more they could do in this siter now anyway, he supposed. If Moonlight Radiance was truly dead, and the League was pulling out, then it was best that they leave too and meet back up with Squelch to discuss their next steps. Maybe the next Captain-General would be receptive to their plans?

“Have Aileron plot a course for the system primary and arrange for transport out of the system. Let’s start making our way back to Commonwealth space.”

“Roger, Commander.”

Slipshod closed the channel and looked over at the alicorn. Twilight was scowling, looking like she’d just bitten down on something sour.

“Well...fuck!”

Her cursing was indeed much improved.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 30: Impetus of War

“I’d heard that love can make a pony crazy; but this seems a little excessive.”

Nacht Belle saw his older brother’s broad grin reflected in the standing mirror, so he knew immediately that it was a jest, but the Pretender to the Federated Moons’ throne also knew his brother well enough to recognize that there was a significant amount of genuine unease within the elder batpony. Truth be told, Nacht wasn’t entirely comfortable with the entire revelation either. Under different circumstances, he might have thought that Victoria had somehow become consumed by madness during her time in the Periphery. However, the newly-minted Archon of the Pony Commonwealth had seen fit to send a considerable amount of evidence along with her message to back up her allegations.

Evidence that, thus far, he had shared exclusively with his brother, and nopony else; and not merely because Victoria had cautioned him against disseminating the contents of the courier’s delivery with anypony he didn’t trust with his life. Quite frankly, he’d wanted a second opinion as to whether he was the only one who had initially found her claims to be wildly outlandish.

Menulis had agreed that, yes, the notion that a shapeshifter replaced Queen Twilight Sparkle many centuries ago and was now using a secret network of doppelgangers to control nearly the entirety of Harmony Sphere politics had sounded patently absurd at face value. However, he had also conceded that the holographic messages of both a dragon―of all creatures―and one of the alleged ‘changelings’―in their true form―which corroborated her allegations, had been quite convincing. The elder batpony stallion had also cautioned that the information should not be spread any further within the Federated Moons.

“You think we shouldn’t go through with it,” the younger sibling said, veiling his disappointment as he anticipated the verdict of his prince, “You think it’s too dangerous.”

Menulis’ grin waned now, settling into an expression more befitting the serious nature of the discussion as he continued to don his BattleSteed barding. Word had reached the palace just that morning about a force of Aris Highlander mercenaries laying siege to one of the Federated Moons’ border worlds. An agricultural center whose loss would have significant ramifications across the rest of the star nation. In a galaxy where relatively few settled worlds were genuinely suited to large-scale farming, the loss of even one such world to even a nation as large as theirs would have far-reaching consequences.

The First Prince would be leading the Fourth Belle Guards, along with a mix of regular military and mercenary groups to defend the planet. He would be away for several months, at the least. Meaning that Nacht would be negotiating with Victoria largely on his own, without the older brother’s counsel to lean on. Given the contents of her message, there was little doubt in either of them as to how serious the ramifications of any decision that they made could be.

“A week ago,” the elder batpony began, “I’d have told you to go for it without a second thought,” he turned away from the mirror briefly, managing to muster up another wan smirk, “a wiley mare like that? You could do worse for a wife. And with her at the helm of the Commonwealth, we’d be hard-pressed to do better for an ally!”

He sighed now, shaking his head as he resumed donning his barding, “but now…? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I think any less of her, or that I don’t want an alliance with the Commonwealth,” he qualified adamantly, “But it turns out that none of us understood the broader ramifications of such a union...or what might have ended up happening to us―to you―if we’d gone through with it.”

Nacht frowned as he recalled the multitude of thoughts that he’d recently entertained along those same lines. If Queen Twilight―or Chrysalis, or whatever her name was―really was dead set against any of the five Great Houses casting aside their mutual animosity for one another and coming together in any sort of alliance, then what would ComSpark have done when his marriage to Victoria was announced? Would he have simply turned up dead one morning? Strictly speaking, the younger noble didn’t suspect that it would have been anything quite so direct.

Him or Victoria dying shortly after partaking in their nuptials wouldn’t have been enough in and of itself to undo an alliance between the Moons and Commonwealth on their own. Seeds of distrust―or outright animosity―would have to be sown. Whichever one of them was killed, ComSpark would have likely been inclined to make it look like the other had been behind it, perhaps disguised as a bid to seize power over both nations. Then any changeling agents within the government of both nations would start drumming up opposition to the alliance among the public, using that death as a catalyst.

“It sounds like she’s committed to throwing her lot in with the Clans against Chrysalis no matter what we choose to do though,” Nacht finally pointed out, “We just need to decide whether we’re going to help her or not.”

“I assume that you would very much like for us to help her?”

“I’d rather help her than fight her,” the younger batpony said, smirking at his prince, “and that’s what we’ll have to do if we don’t side with her. There’s no way that ComSpark is going to let the Commonwealth assist the Clans and not be punished for it. One way or another, you have to know they’ll manipulate us into fighting the Commonwealth.”

“That’s a good point,” Menulis conceded as he finished strapping on the last of his piloting barding, “But I have one last question for you,” He turned from the mirror and approached his younger brother, looking Nacht in the eye with a stern expression, “Are you prepared to accept the consequences if we side with Victoria and lose? Because it won’t just be the two of us that will suffer if that happens. We have the welfare of the entirety of the Federation to consider.”

It was a fair point. His personal feelings towards Victoria weren’t enough to justify making any decision that would affect the lives of billions. Joining with her would mean dragging the citizens of the Federated Moons into a war. One that would be waged against a powerful enemy, and likely see a monstrously high casualty rate.

One the other hoof, “I don’t want our ponies to live as slaves to the whims of some monster on Equus. If there’s a chance that we can free them from that, then I think we should take it.”

Menulis remained silent for several long moments after his brother’s response, maintaining his hard stare at the younger batpony. Nacht held his gaze, unflinching. He had meant what he had said. If his brother disagreed, that was his business, but he wasn’t going to shy away from how he felt about the matter.

He was a little surprised though when the First Prince of the Federated Moons’ features broke into a broad grin, “good!” He slapped the younger noble on the shoulder affectionately and strode past him, heading for the door, “I expect to see a formal treaty on my desk for me to sign by the time I get back,” He paused at the door and glanced back over his shoulder, “and a nephew named after me at your earliest convenience,” he added with a wink.

“I’ll be sure to bring up that provision during our negotiations,” Nacht assured him, wearing a smirk of his own as he regarded his brother. His own concerns got the better of him though as the brief moment of levity’s tenuous hold evaporated, “Stay safe out there.”

The First Prince let an amused snort escape him, nodding his head, “It’s just some Highlanders causing problems. Nothing I haven’t dealt with before, and something I expect I’ll be dealing with for many more decades to come,” he added with a roll of his eyes. Once again he turned towards the exit and left his private chambers, heading for his ride to the spaceport, and the waiting DropShip that would ferry him to the rest of the Fourth Belle Guard, who were already mobilizing near the border.

Nacht spent the better part of the next minute closeting away the last of his apprehension. He reminded himself that his brother was correct: this was not Menulis Belle’s first sortie against the Aris Highlanders. The First Prince was an accomplished BattleSteed pilot―certainly Nacht’s better in every sparring match they’d ever held between them. There wasn’t much to be concerned about. Debatably, it was he who was going to be placed in greater peril, as he attempted to forge a secret alliance that―by all accounts―a hidden cabal of shapeshifting assassins would do most anything to stop.

There were hardly any shortage of means that he could come up with for a shapeshifter to do him in. Being left alone in a room with just a single other pony could result in his death. And that was assuming that ComSpark saw no point in being circumspect about the whole thing. An organization with the kind of reach, influence, and power that they had would have no problem arranging for ‘accidents’, especially if they didn’t have any particular qualms regarding collateral damage.

If word of what he was about to engage in with Victoria reached the ear of the wrong pony―or even a pony who just happened to later talk to a ‘wrong pony’―Nacht would never see his end coming.

By the time he finally left the private chambers of the First Prince, Nacht found himself wishing that he were the one about to ride off into battle while his older brother was the one dodging sniper bullets, knife blades, and cartbombs…

All eyes in the room were riveted to the display screens. Usually the large cafeteria’s entertainment screens were tuned to a multitude of different stations in order to appeal to the tastes of as many diners as possible. Comedy shows, dramas, and even a few local news broadcasts would be thrown into the mix, creating a curious hum of background noise that hung just below the din of several hundred hippogriffs chattering away as they ate.

Not today though. While no changes had been made to the settings of the individual displays in order to coordinate what they showed, there had been no need to. It was highly doubtful that there was a single broadcast on the whole planet of Tortoise Bay that wasn’t dedicated to showing the same thing: the invasion.

As chilling as that description made the whole ordeal sound, there was really only the one way to describe what was happening. Nocreature knew who they were, or where they had come from, or what they seemed to want. Three days ago, a half dozen Jump Ships had materialized in the system and disgorged their DropShip loads. Dozens of massive Princess-class DropShips made their way to the system’s only inhabited world, escorted by what were later determined to be WarShips―as impossible as that might have sounded.

Impossible or not, there wasn’t a griff on Tortoise Bay who hadn’t seen the images snapped by the planet’s orbital platforms which confirmed the massive vessels couldn’t be anything else. Plus, there was nothing else that had ever been built that could have mounted the gargantuan naval cannons which had shot those same platforms out of the sky. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians had been wiped out in the blink of an eye as a coordinated assault by the WarShips had scrapped every significant space station in planetary orbit in less than a minute.

Nothing had been left to oppose the enemy DropShips as they descended to the planet’s surface and deployed their forces. Three of those ships had made their landing just outside the capital city of Summit. Now those first waves of BattleSteeds from those ships were making their way to the city, and the only thing that stood between them and the civilian population was the Eighth Light Talon.

Raven’s attention was drawn from the display screens, which were showing footage from a skirmish that was happening a few hundred kilometers to the south at the outskirts of another major city. Her eyes looked onto the rank insignia molded onto the armor a second before the call went throughout the room, “On your feet!”

Every hippogriff in the cafeteria sprung up from their seats, turning away from the displays and their depictions of ongoing battles and facing their commanding general. The grizzled old hen issued a dismissive wave of her talons at the observed formality, “As you were,” only a few individuals actually seemed to relax noticeably, and it had very little to do with the high ranking officer in their midsts. The general spared a moment to note the video streaming across a nearby display and her beak pulled back in a deep frown, “I’m not going to waste anygriff’s time.

“We still don’t know who these creatures are, or why they’re here. Whoever they are though, they seem to have a lot of expensive toys, and I’m not just talking about the WarShips. There are confirmed sightings of several ‘Steed models that haven’t been in wide circulation since the Celestia League collapsed,” she looked around the room, making sure to meet the gaze with as many other hippogriffs as possible, assuring herself that they had understood the implications of what she’d just told them.

Raven understood. In the first turbulent decades following the collapse of the Celestia League, vast swaths of infrastructure had been utterly destroyed. This included many manufacturing facilities that produced the cutting edge BattleSteeds and weapons of the time. The equipment, designs, and skilled minds behind many of the top-of-the-line warmachines developed by the Celestia League’s engineers were effectively wiped from existence. A few examples turned up every now and then, recovered from an old bunker or newly rediscovered League fortress; but there were not many such relics in circulation. Their rarity made them closely guarded treasures more than anything.

The notion that there was apparently a power out there who possessed a significant number of those rare battleSteeds, and was fielding them on the front lines of a planetary assault was...troubling. To say the least.

“The forces heading for Summit are fifty kilometers out,” the general continued, “The better part of three brigades of mostly assault and heavy tonnage-range ‘Steeds are heading out way.”

Raven felt her chest grow tight at about the same time that a murmur could be heard starting to buzz around the room, growing in pitch as more and more griffs contributed to it. Over a hundred BattleSteeds, with most of them in excess of sixty-tons? That easily outmassed everything that the Eighth had combined by at least double. Factor in that the enemy reportedly was making use of more advanced ‘Steed designs, while their own forces had only two lances of light ‘Steeds and a single lance of heavies, plus support vehicles and infantry?

This wasn’t going to be a ‘battle’ by any definition that she knew the word by…

A call went out from one of the general’s aides demanding silence, and a hush returned to the cafeteria. The senior officer was nodding her head, apparently in understanding of the trepidation of the gathered soldiers, “I know. But I also know that there isn’t a griff here who actually thinks that we should tuck our tails between our flanks and run. Am I right?”

This time it was more than a mere murmur that went around among the gathered soldiers. Raven joined in the affirmation, knowing that, in spite of her own fear, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she didn’t at least make an effort to protect the populace. They had the advantage of occupying fortified positions, at least. BattleSteeds weren’t typically well-suited to prying out sufficiently dug-in troops. With some luck, it might even be possible to take down enough of those heavier ‘Steeds that it would cause their attackers to rethink whether or not this invasion was worth the effort.

“Excellent,” the general continued, “Report to your section leaders and move out.”

Half an hour later, the APC that Raven was riding in with the rest of her squad finally arrived at their designated position. The rear door dropped down, and the dozen hippogriffs within made their exit. Three other nearby APCs were unloading the rest of the platoon that would be holding down this section of the defensive line.

The soat-colored hen spared a moment to survey the bunker. She’d been here a number of times over the past couple of years since enlisting, as part of the various training exercises that they engaged in. It was immediately clear that a lot of work had been put into this place over the past seventy-two hours. Cracks in the concrete had been patched, walls had been thickened, the turrets had been refurbished. It almost looked new, if Raven was being honest.

“First Squad, set up inside,” her platoon sergeant barked.

Raven repositioned the larger than usual pack slung across her back and glanced briefly behind her towards the younger golden terciel that had joined up with their squad only three months ago, and had been assigned to serve as her A-gunner. His pack was larger than her own was, and had to weigh almost as much as his small frame did. She motioned for him to follow her as she made her way inside the bunker with the others.

The two of them wound their way through the cramped interior of the fortification, eventually making their way up a small flight of steps which brought them into a small circular casemate. Raven shucked off her pack and opened it up, revealing the components within that were intended to be easily assembled into a pseudo-static energy weapon emplacement. She immediately set about connecting the pieces together; a task made stupendously simple by the fact that the components had been numbered according to the order in which they were intended to be affixed to one another, and could only be attached in a singular configuration.

Well, unless the enterprising soldier in question insisted on bringing power tools into the equation, Raven supposed. So-called ‘private proofing’ couldn’t account for particularly determined privates armed with impact drivers. She was halfway through getting the weapon assembled when she heard the sound of equipment hitting the concrete floor. The hen glanced over to see that her assistant had managed to fumble a couple pieces of the power adapter that he had been working on putting together. He was already cursing himself and scrambling to pick up what had slipped from his grasp.

Raven could see his talons were trembling rather badly. It was no wonder he’d dropped what he’d been working with.

“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” the charcoal hen repeated the mantra which had been repeated to her by her instructors many times during her training. Even Raven had to admit that the words seemed contrary initially. If something was being done slowly, then how could it be fast? She later came to realize that a more accurate phrase would actually be ‘deliberate is smooth, smooth is fast’; but the former wording certainly rolled off the tongue better. It might actually have been prone to less misinterpretation. Not everygriff truly understood what ‘deliberate motions’ were.

“Sorry,” the more lightly-colored terciel apologized as he picked up the pieces and once more set about connecting them, “I’m just…”

“Scared?” Raven finished.

“No!” The younger griff insisted defiantly. She might have even been tempted to believe him too. Had it not been for one key fact:

“Well I sure am!”

The frank admission seemed to stun the other hippogriff, who gaped at the more experienced hen in shock. She smiled over at him as she connected the final component for the weapon and proceeded to mount it to the pintle built into the casemate’s gunnery port, “Why so surprised? You heard that briefing: There are over a hundred BattleSteeds heading right for us, and the heaviest thing we have to support us is an old Riflemare!

“Being scared’s a perfectly natural reaction.”

The terciel glanced down at his trembling talons and folded his claws together briefly in an effort to get them under control, “...I don’t want to die,” he intoned softly, almost in a whisper.

“I’m pretty sure most creatures feel that way,” Raven nodded. Her tone wasn’t pithy. Ridiculing the younger hippogriff was hardly going to be productive. Besides, everything he was saying were thoughts that she either had had, or currently was having. It would thus be pretty hypocritical of her to come down on him for it. The only difference between the two of them, in her opinion, was that she was keeping those thoughts to herself so that she didn’t fan the flames of his own fears.

Finally she turned from her mounted weapon and faced the terciel, fixing him with her gaze, “I can’t promise you that you’ll make it out of this alive,” the younger griff winced visibly, “But, I can promise to do everything I can to keep you from getting killed. If you’ll do the same for me. Deal?”

The other hippogriff nodded slowly, his talons picking up the components that had yet to be assembled and managing to get them together properly. Raven helped him out, and soon enough the pair had the energy cannon connected into the bunker’s generators. The backup power supply was also at the ready, in case the small fortress lost main power. All that was left to do now was watch their sectors, and make sure that they were ready to engage the enemy the moment they came into range.

Both hippogriffs set themselves up with binoculars, scanning the horizon for signs of movement. The enemy should have been about a dozen or so kilometers out by now. Which meant that they should be coming into view at any moment.

Raven heard the call over her helmet’s comms before she made visual contact, “BattleSteed on the horizon at two-five-five!” a hen called out. She and her assistant gunner both swung around and peered in that direction. Raven felt the tightness in her chest and gut return as she caught sight of the pair of lumbering Big Macs cresting the rise the better part of ten kilometers west of the bunker. Seconds later, she could see other large ‘Steeds coming into view through the trees, many of them designs that she didn’t recognize.

They’d have a few more minutes yet before the enemy was in range. Those ‘Steeds were big, yes, but they were also pretty slow. It would take them some time to close with the bunker. Time enough for her to get in one last full check of the energy cannon’s systems. She started going through the checklist again, but paused when she her her partner mumble something.

“...The fuck is that…?”

Initially, Raven assumed that he was remarking on one of the several unusual BattleSteed designs that were heading their way, and was going to tell him not to be overly concerned with putting a name to the lumbering shapes. However, when she glanced up to say just that, the hen noticed that her assistant gunner wasn’t looking at the enemy ‘Steeds anymore. He was looking in the same general direction, yes, but his binoculars were angled far to low. Whatever he was talking about, it was a lot closer than ten kilometers.

Raven slid over beside him and picked up her own binoculars again, “what’s what?” She asked, only to have her question answered almost immediately as her unaided eyes spotted...something moving about in the treeline only a few hundred meters out. She peered through her binoculars, but found that they didn’t allow her to form any more of an explanation.

As absurd as the notion seemed, Raven felt like she was looking at a collection of really tiny BattleSteeds. While the objects were clearly metallic in nature, and possessed a lot of the features that were usually associated with ‘Steeds, there was no way that they could be. Accounting for the distance, and comparing them to the trees that they were moving through, they couldn’t have been much more than two meters tall. They certainly weren’t three! ‘Steeds that small simply didn’t exist. How would you even fit the pilot in them?

Were they being piloted by newborn foals?!

Whatever they were, they were heading for the bunker, and needed to be reported. Raven activated her comm, “Sergeant, Tower Two has movement in the trees at two-six-eight. Unknown contacts.”

“Understood, Tower Two. I have eyes on,” her sergeant replied a moment later, “Snapping so pics to pass on to the intel guys. Your orders are unchanged: something that isn’t a friendly comes into range: kill it.”

“Copy, sargeant,” Raven stepped back from the opening and took up her stance behind the energy cannon. She cycled the power on and listened for the telltale whine that the capacitors were charging properly. She leaned in and peered down the sights, focussing on the treeline and the strange not-’Steeds. She had eyes on ten of them, whatever they were.

She was leaning towards the idea that they had to be drones of some sort. They certainly weren’t piloted by anything vaguely equine, as they were moving on two legs. They were pretty well armed for their size, too; better so than some lighter ‘Steed designs that she knew about. The hen could make out what looked to be an SRM mounted on the shoulders, and each arm possessed a weapon mount of some type, though it was hard to identify the specific weapon at this range.

Dark gray streaks of smoke shot through the air as the defensive bunker’s primary turret unleashed its LRMs. Whoever was directing the turret must have been made aware of the new smaller arrivals, because that was what the missiles were tracking. Or, at least, trying to track. They seemed to be exceedingly well-equipped with more than just weapons. Not every missile was moving like it had a solid lock, and those that were tracking targets missed their marks anyway as the mini-’Steeds jetted out of the way at the last moment, dodging the missiles.

A pair of those enemy contacts answered in kind, launching a quartet of short-ranged warheads back at the bunker’s turret. Raven braced herself against her weapon as the concrete floor beneath her trembled. The lights flickered briefly. Debris fell from the sky, littering the ground in front of the casemate. They’d just lost their turret.

More missiles were flying now, impacting along the reinforced concrete fortification. Raven’s ears were ringing from the sound of over a dozen thunderous explosions. Something hit her from the side. For a brief moment, the hen thought that she had been struck by debris, only to find that it had actually been her assistant gunner who’d tackled her. She blinked in stunned confusion, looking around.

It didn’t take her long to see the large opening in the casemate’s wall only a meter from where she’d been standing. The terciel must have seen the missile coming and tackled her out of the way. She heard him groan as he started to rise off of her, clearly sore from the experience. He was bleeding a little from where chunks of rock had found flesh on his mostly-armored body, but none of the wounds looked particularly serious.

“Check the power,” Raven said as she staggered back onto her own shaking limbs. She conducted a quick inspection of the weapon and noted that it was still functional, if considerably dirtier than it had been a moment ago.

“We’re good!” He assured her.

The hen braced herself against the weapon once more and peered down the sights, drawing a bead on the nearest target, “get fucked!” She sneered as she depressed the trigger.

A beam of ruby light crossed the distance between the barrel of her weapon and the armored target almost instantaneously. It struck home solidly on the right hip, but didn’t seem to even stagger the tiny pseudo-’Steed.

Her shot did manage to attract its attention though.

Raven’s was hardly the only shot going out by now. Rifles crackled and energy weapons whined. Tracers and columns of lights of all manner of colors crossed through the air between the bunker and the attackers. It was bedlam. The pair of hippogriffs in the casement were all but oblivious to the wider battle raging around them though. All that their attention was focused on was their specific target.

Muzzle flashes erupted from the bipedal contraption’s left hand. Raven flinched away as she became aware of the torrent of lead slugs strafing across the concrete facing of the casemate. Flecks of rock speckled her helmet from where several of those ricochettes got particularly close. She ignored the danger though. If she allowed herself to be suppressed by the machinegun fire, then she wouldn’t be able to return fire with one of the heaviest weapons that their squad had left with the turret destroyed.

The indicator light near the sight flickered from red to green. It was charged up again and ready for another shot. She depressed the trigger and fired off another shot. This time she hit her target square in the chest. It staggered―slightly―but was otherwise undeterred, advancing steadily as it continued to lay into her position with its machinegun.

Something punched her in her right shoulder and knocked her to the ground.

It wasn’t her assistant gunner this time, Raven noted as she glanced at the location of the impact and noted the rather intimidating looking dent in her armored paldron. In the back of her mind, she made a note to write a very complimentary letter to the manufacturer regarding the quality of their barding. While her joint was understandably sore, there was no sign that the bullet which had hit her had managed to actually penetrate.

Her assistant gunner was at her side, reaching out with one hand to help her up. The hen gratefully took the offered limb and allowed herself to be helped back up onto her feet. She was only halfway up before there was a brief flash of crimson light, and then Raven found herself rather abruptly dumped back onto her flank. She was about to chastise her assistant gunner for his clumsiness when she noticed that he had apparently fallen down too. It took her less than a second to identify the reason:

Half of his head had been burned away by an energy beam. Raven jerked her hand out of the fresh corpse’s limp grasp, flexing her talons as though doing so would somehow get the feeling of death off of them. She glanced at the rear wall of the small room, and noted the thick black line that had been scorched into it...save for a portion that looked mostly untouched. About as wide as her assistant’s head had been.

Raven took a deep breath to try and refocus herself. A lot of griffs were going to get killed holding the line. She’d known that before she even boarded the APC. Of course, ‘knowing’ something and actually being confronted with the reality were two different things. Still, she had a job to do, and she couldn’t do it while sitting on the floor.

The hen got up on her own and gave the power coupling a cursory inspection before getting back onto the weapon emplacement. She’d barely gotten her talons back onto the grips when she froze in utter shock.

It seemed that, in the last ten or so seconds since she’d been knocked down, the enemy had gotten closer to the bunker. A lot closer, in fact. Raven had stood up just in time to find herself staring at one of the armored not-’Steeds which had positioned itself practically just outside of her casemate. It was certainly less than ten meters away.

Up close, it was far more clear what the contraptions actually were, as absurd as the notion initially sounded: they were some sort of hyper-advanced power armor.

Raven was vaguely familiar with the concept. Back in the twilight years of the Celestia-League, there had been experiments conducted to see if BattleSteeds could be effectively ‘shrunk’ down to the point where creatures didn’t ‘pilot’ them, so much as wear them like barding. The practical applications where infantry were concerned were immediately apparent. However, as she had understood things, none of those early designs had ever seen wide circulation. By the time there were workable models, the League was falling apart, and none of the major powers was willing to invest in what was still ‘untested’ technology when there were plenty of tried and true weapons already out there.

The idea of using such powered suits of armor eventually went away completely as most technological development stagnated.

Obviously, somecreature out there had not only retained the knowledge of such designs, but greatly improved upon them.

The charcoal-hued hen surmised all of this based upon the fact that, at this close range, she could clearly see a visor mounted into the head of the suite standing in front of her. She could also see the slitted pupils framed by a scaled face glaring hungrily at her through that visor. It was difficult to know if, given enough time, Raven would have been able to deduce that the being within the suit of battle armor was a dragon. Likely not. It wasn’t like anycreature in the Harmony Sphere had ever seen a dragon before anyway.

In any case, the hippogriff gunner was not given that time. Her killer took advantage of the hen’s surprise, saturating the casemate’s opening with far more machinegun rounds than were necessary to end her life. The battle armor’s occupant took another few seconds to survey the interior of the emplacement before confirming with their point commander that no enemy presence remained. Then they moved off with the rest of their point to clear out the next pocket of ‘resistance’.

It made the dragon chortle to have even thought of what these hippogriffs were doing as ‘resisting’. Nearly all of them were armed with nothing more than some manner of light arms. He could have stood still in his battle armor all day while they fired at him and probably have been in no real danger. Why were they even bothering to mount any sort of defense at all of this was all that they were bringing to the field?

Honestly, the dragon felt a little cheated. He’d been promised a real fight, and a chance at some valuable spoils. What kind of worthwhile treasures could there possibly be in the Sphere if it was all being guarded by junk? On the other claw, this was one of the outer worlds, near the Periphery. Maybe they were keeping all of the advanced and valuable tech closer to their capital?

The residents of the Sphere had best hope that was the case. Because if he and his clutchmates had really come all this way for nothing...well, they were certainly going to find some way to amuse themselves; and the other creatures of the galaxy probably weren’t going to like how they did so…

The cobalt blue dragon didn’t so much as twitch as the large brown earth pony stallion plopped into the chair across the table from her. Timberjack’s arrival had been anticipated. If anything, the stallion in charge of leading the Timberwolf’s Dragoons was running a little late for their daily meeting.

“You don’t realize just how vast the Harmony Sphere is until you have to cross it without the luxury of a jump bridge,” Cinder muttered while nursing a glass of brandy in the lounge of the Great Wyrm, Timberjack’s command DropShip. They’d already been traveling for the better part of two months, and still had a few more weeks to go before they finally arrived at the capital of the Hippogriff Combine and their meeting with Thera Novo, daughter of the star nation’s current ruler.

By all accounts, Thera was a clever tactician and a respectable diplomat―for a military officer. She was also supposedly a lot more reasonable to deal with than her father, Trade Winds, who had grown quite ‘antagonistic’ in his old age. Not that anycreature in the Sphere who valued their hide would ever make such an observation within earshot of him, of course. While trying to negotiate what they needed from the Combine with Trade Winds would be about as productive as trying to snuff out a star with a wet tissue, the hope was that his daughter would be a little more receptive.

To that end, the dragoness had been taking advantage of the considerable downtime available to her to construct a compelling speech in order to sway Thera to help them.

The issue―fortunately―wasn’t going to be one of believability. On the contrary, between herself―a bona fide dragon whose species hadn’t been seen in the Sphere in centuries―and the changeling prisoners still in the DropShip’s brig, they had ample physical evidence of their claims regarding changeling infiltration of the various Harmony Sphere governments. Thanks to the efforts of the Disciple cells in the Sphere, they could also produce any number of documents that would prove the nefarious nature of ComSpark and the imposter ‘Queen Twilight’ on Equus.

No, proving what they were telling her was the truth wasn’t going to be their biggest hurdle. It was going to be convincing her to sign on to fight against it. Of all the star nations in the Sphere, the Combine was one of the most insular. Unlike the majority of the other Sphere powers, the differences at play with the Combine weren’t strictly ideological or political in nature. The Our Worlds League, the Pony Combine, the Federated Moons, and even the Kirin Confederation, were all primarily populated by―and governed―by at least one variety of ‘pony’. That wasn’t the case with the Combine.

Over time, this allowed for the hippogriffs to be ‘othered’ from the rest of the Sphere, and vice-versa. Presently, the Combine maintained nothing more than the barest minimum of diplomatic relations with the other Sphere nations, consisting of a singular mission in the capitals of the other major powers, headed by a consul, rather than a genuine ambassador. They had no treaties or truces with the other Great Houses, and had never expressed an interest in establishing any.

All of this meant that Cinder anticipated fighting an uphill battle when it came time to entreat Thera to commit hippogriff forces to fight alongside the Commonwealth and―hopefully―the Federation. It was entirely possible that she would prove herself to be almost too practically-minded and simply want to take advantage of the opportunity that sitting out the fight presented to her. If the Clans succeeded in defeating Chrysalis, then they would surely have suffered considerable losses in pursuit of their victory, leaving both the Pony Commonwealth and the Federated Moons in greatly weakened states. An uncompromised Combine would have no better opportunity to swoop in and gobble up as much additional territory as they wanted.

Even in the event Chrysalis proved ultimately successful and fended off the Clans, the result might actually prove even more advantageous for the Combine. Not only would the militaries of both the Commonwealth and the Federation have been devastated, but Chrysalis’s forces might also be left weakened enough for the hippogriffs to ultimately defeat. Even if the changeling queen wasn’t left quite that bad off, it was possible that ‘Queen Twilight’ would be receptive to the idea of giving the ‘loyal’ Combine control of the traitorous regions of the Harmony Sphere.

Either way, the Combine stood to benefit. Or, at the very least, not lose everything. Not opposing Chrysalis, at worst, simply left them just as they were now. Defeating the changelings, meanwhile, didn’t necessarily leave the hippogriffs any better off.

Cinder had―very briefly―considered pressuring the Combine to join in with them, threatening to unleash the fury of the Clans upon the hippogriffs if they refused to help. While that might have worked in the short term, the farther reaching implications could have ultimately done more harm than good. Aside from Princess Twilight Sparkle’s certain disdain for the notion of using threats to procure allies, the animosity that the experience would doubtlessly leave the hippogriffs with would undermine efforts to reforge the Celestia League. Not just with the hippogriffs either. Word would get around that the new League was not above using threats to get what they wanted.

Hardly a good way to start the rebuilding of a nation seeking to be based upon the principles of Friendship and Harmony…

Yet, despite over a month of deep thought on the issue, the star admiral was still unsure of how best to gain the voluntary cooperation of the Hippogriff Combine. Which was why she had been working her way through a second bottle of Princessador Solar Reserve while waiting for the Dragoon commander to arrive.

It seemed as though the powerfully-built earth pony wasn’t having a day that was much better than her own though. He had been scowling before he’d sat down, “We lost another prisoner this morning.”

Cinder nodded, sympathising with the stallion as she finished off the remainder of her glass. The dragoness refilled it from her bottle, and then pushed the freshly poured serving towards the earth pony, “...And then there were two. How long do we think they’ll last?”

Timberjack pinched the glass of offered brandy between his hooves and tossed it back, grunting hoarsely as the alcohol burned its way down his throat, “Vi gives them a week. Two at the most.”

The star admiral sighed and massaged her brow. The princess wasn’t going to be very pleased to hear about that. Not that Cinder was particularly concerned about being ‘blamed’ in any way for the deaths of their changeling prisoners. Per her decrees, they were not being tortured or mistreated in any way. At least, not in any direct fashion. Strictly speaking, one could make an argument that they were being starved to death, but that wasn’t the result of anything specific that was being done to them maliciously.

It was simply a matter of being unable to locate a single member of the crew who felt any positive feelings for the prisoners. Nor were either Timberjack or Cinder going to even suggest that a member of the crew should be presented to the changelings to be forcibly fed upon.

Any future thought that the dragoness might have been willing to give to the issue in that moment was pushed aside by the simultaneous alerts that came across both her and Timberjack’s datalinks. The pair exchanged looks before taking note of the messages that they’d received.

Cinder felt her jaw go slack as she looked over the contents of the message. First, because of its origin. This had not been something which had come over traditional communications channels. It bore a Clan signature, and had been sent through their own HyperSpark Generator network. Which was the second surprising element about this.

The Clans did not possess a static HSG relay network within the Harmony Sphere. Outside of their settled systems, all HSG traffic was handled by ship-mounted generators. Meaning that, in order for her to have received this message, there had to be a Clan ship―either Jump Ship or a WarShip―within fifty lightyears of their position. That shouldn’t have been the case. At least, not since the bulk of the Timberwolf’s Dragoons fleet had been left behind in the Commonwealth.

Not that the star admiral believed for a moment that this message would have been sent from within the Dragoons. Seeing as how it was specifically addressed to the Dragoons. Moreover, it was not a message that they should have been receiving at all, as far as Cinder understood things. Not yet anyway.

“Recall?” Her earth pony companion blurted in shock, looking over at the dragoness, as though she might have more insight than he did, “The Dragoons are being recalled?”

It wasn’t merely a ‘recall’ order either, Cinder noted as she read through additional details in the message. The Dragoons were being pressed into service under the direction of Clan Timberwolf. Their reconnaissance mission was officially at an end. There was only one reason for that to be the case that the star admiral could think of: the Clans were going to war. Now. Or at least in the very near future; and they wanted all their forces made available for the task.

The dragoness’ mind raced with the implications. It was too soon. Princess Flurry Heart had promised to give Twilight a year to secure a safe corridor of travel for their fleets, so that there was no need to invade Harmony Sphere worlds in order to secure their supply lines. Clan forces would be able to fly unimpeded to Equus and confront the changeling stronghold directly, with the full might of their armies intact.

Twilight had already accomplished that much, well ahead of schedule. Archon Victoria would allow the Clans to pass through Commonwealth territory. Now their efforts were focused on using the extra time that they had left before the deadline to secure the cooperation of additional allies. That cooperation was far less likely to be secured if the leaders of those other nations saw the Clan forces invading without first being given context; to be assured that the other worlds of the Harmony Sphere weren’t the targets. That it was only Equus which would be attacked. While Victoria had effectively already agreed to allow for Clan ships to pass through her space, Cinder was mostly certain that the archon would have still preferred to be given formal notice of precisely when those Jump Ships and the troops that they ferried were actually in her space.

Even if the princess had been motivated to speed up the timetable as a result of the intelligence leak perpetrated by the changeling mole aboard the Zathura, Cinder would have expected to have received notice about the change. Coordinating with Victoria so that the Commonwealth might be able to contribute some of their own forces to the fight would require time. An entire star nation’s military couldn’t just be mobilized at the drop of a hat!

It seemed, however, that she and Timberjack were not finished receiving information updates. The DropShip’s bridge contacted the Dragoon commander a few moments later. Cinder only caught his side of the conversation, and at first thought that it was an exchange regarding the recall order.

“This is Timberjack...What?! By who?” the earth pony’s gaze shot towards Cinder, glaring at her almost accusingly. The dragoness was actually taken aback by the look, wondering now what he was being told by his bridge crew. It turned out that she didn’t have to wait long to find out. The stallion turned towards a nearby viewscreen in the lounge that had been showing a program discussing various economics markets, and changed it over to one of ComSpark’s dedicated news networks.

“―latest estimates put the death toll at the time of broadcast at around ten million. We ask our viewers to keep in mind that those numbers are estimates, and may change as additional information is made available to our network. However, all regular communications traffic from Tortoise Bay ceased within hours of the first DropShips landing. The identities of the attackers are still unknown, but it is clear that they represent a serious threat…”

As the announcer spoke, snippets of video footage played out on the screen depicting some of the fighting that had taken place on Tortoise Bay. The dragoness suspected that ComSpark actually did know who was behind the attack, given the nature of who she knew ComSpark to truly be. However, she recognized that there was also no publicly available explanation for the source of that knowledge as well. So, in the meantime, their news announcers would have to play dumb until a plausible source of the knowledge was made available to them.

Cinder knew too, of course. There was no mistaking the paint patterns on the BattleSteeds visible in the footage. To say nothing of the Elemental battle armor that featured in numerous shots as well. No Sphere or Periphery power possessed such technology. Only the Dragon Clans did.

Those were the forces of Smoke Jabberwock.

“Similar reports of large fleets of ships of unknown origin have been received from the worlds of Everywhere and Hamlet; both of which are located in the Pony Commonwealth near the Periphery. Nothing is known about the origin of those fleets at this time either. But we do have these images provided to ComSpark by local orbital observatories in those systems.”

The star admiral’s mouth went dry as she recognized the images of the ships displayed now. As before, the emblems on the bows of the WarShips left little doubt as to who they answered to. The massive roaring face of a star-studded ursa major denoting Clan Ghost Ursa...and the snarling head of a timberwolf. Her father’s Clan―her Clan―was invading the Harmony Sphere. It was almost impossible for her to believe that her sire―Twilight’s oldest and dearest friend―would be party to an invasion that didn’t need to happen.

She was briefly inclined to insist that these broadcasts were complete fabrications. That ComSpark had invented them as part of some nefarious plot to villainize the Dragon Clans and frame them for atrocities so that they would be resisted when they actually did arrive in the Sphere. It was a much more palatable explanation than the alternative.

However, the fact that she and Timberjack had received encrypted messages on Clan frequencies that had also suggested an invasion by the Dragons was imminent meant that this wasn’t some changeling misinformation or smear campaign. Oh, she had no doubt that the changelings would distort the facts regarding the invasion at every turn―she suspected that a zero or two had been added to Tortoise Bay’s death toll, for starters―but the invasion was obviously real enough.

Which didn’t exactly make it any easier to understand. They’d been promised a year. Even if a couple of the Clans let their impatience get the best of them...that didn’t explain what Clan Timberwolf was doing at the invasion’s forefront. Her father should have been the last of them to engage!

“Did you know about this?” Timberjack finally asked.

Cinder could only shake her head numbly, “I didn’t,” she could understand the stallion’s suspicions. She was the daughter of a Clan Khan in addition to being a star admiral in her own right. If anycreature was going to be ‘in the loop’ regarding the change in the invasion’s timetable, it would have been her. Indeed, the dragoness was decidedly not pleased that she was finding out about this the way that she was. Cinder realized that she wasn’t exactly that easy for coded Clan messages to reach while flitting around in the Sphere, but still…

“So what do we do now?” The stallion’s dissatisfaction with the new situation was palpable, “Something tells me that it’s going to be a lot harder to get the Sphere onboard with helping the Clans...seeing as how they’re going to be occupied soon fighting them…”

The Dragoon commander wasn’t wrong. The presence of Clan fleets in two Commonwealth systems worried Cinder in particular. If those fleets chose to invade the worlds in those systems instead of merely continuing to jump closer to Equus...it could wipe away Victoria’s good will. Twilight’s entire endeavor to foster cooperation with the Successor States could very well end up taking a giant step back. If not outright collapsing. There was every chance that they might even end up having to fight the entirety of the Sphere.

To say that would ‘jeopardize’ their objective of eliminating Chrysalis would have been a gross understatement.

However, while the broader implications of what was happening might not have been particularly ‘appealing’―to either of them―there was little doubt in the star admiral’s mind what their next course of action had to be:

“Alert the bridge. Ensure that the recall order is disseminated to the rest of the Dragoons,” Cinder began. The words tasted like ash in her mouth. She’d believed―truly believed―that Twilight’s mission to unite at least some of the galaxy against the changeling threat in aid of the Clans could have worked. However, it was obvious that Princess Flurry Heart and the khans of the Dragon Clans did not share that optimism with her, “Then set up a rendezvous so that the Dragoons can reform with the rest of the Clan Timberwolf fleet. From there we’ll likely receive orders in regards to our roles in the upcoming operation.”

Timberjack was staring at her in shock. It actually took him a few moments to find his voice again, “Are we abandoning our mission, star admiral?”

Cinder shot a glare at the earth pony, “our mission is whatever our superiors say it is, commander. We have been given orders to rendezvous with the fleet, and so we shall.”

“Ma’am, no disrespect, but my mission is to help the Disciple cells collect intelligence on the changelings to aid with the invasion of Equus and the defeat of Chrysalis.”

“And now that invasion has begun, commander,” the dragoness quipped smartly. She was not one to disobey an order, and so she was not particularly thrilled to hear Timberjack balking at the notion of following the instructions that they had just been given.

“Has it?” the earth pony asked skeptically, “When was the last time you looked at a star chart?”

He raised his hoof and tapped out a series of commands on his datalink. The ComSpark news coverage vanished, replaced by a map of the Harmony Sphere, “Tortoise Bay...Everywhere...Hamlet,” as the stallion spoke, three points of light appeared along the top of the map. Timberjack glanced over at the star admiral, who was doing her best to keep her expression impassive as she watched the three very spread out markers appear.

“Now,” the stallion continued, “it’s been a while since I saw a draft of the invasion plan. I’ve always known that some aspects were going to change―based on the very intelligence reports about Sphere military and mercenary deployments that I routinely send back to the Clans. However,” he looked hard at the dragoness, forcing her to meet his gaze once more, “unless there has been a very drastic change made recently that you’d like to fill me in about: the plan has always called for a narrow supply corridor.

“Has the definition of ‘narrow’ in Clan space recently broadened to include three hundred lightyears, star admiral?” Timberjack finished, jabbing a hoof at the screen, and the vast distance between the three highlighted systems.

“It’s possible that some or all of these attacks are diversionary, meant to keep the changelings from massing their defensive forces along any specific approach,” she defended.

Timberjack seemed unmoved by her theory, adding in quieter but equally firm tones, “I saw Smoke Jabberwock and Ghost Ursa ships on those feeds. I bet you a million c-bits that Jade Roc ships appear within the week,” Cinder looked away again. She instantly understood where he was going with this, and wouldn’t be taking the mercenary commander up on his bet, “Tell me: has Khan Smolder changed her tone any in the last few decades?”

The star admiral winced. She remained quiet on the matter though, not willing to acknowledge out loud that, if anything, the burnt orange dragoness had gotten much worse regarding her Greed Induced Bigness rhetoric. Of course, her silence proved to be a perfectly sufficient answer for the stallion.

“I thought so.

“I’ve lived among the creatures of the Sphere for decades, star admiral,” the earth pony informed her, clearing away the map and deactivating the display entirely, “most of them are decent folk. They just want to go on with their lives. It’s not their fault that they changelings keep them in the dark about what’s really going on. They don’t know any better.

“The inhabitants of the Sphere are not the enemies of the League-in-Exile,” Timberjack affirmed, “I won’t be party to a ‘plan’ that sacrifices them by the millions.”

“You don’t honestly believe the numbers that ComSpark is putting out, do you―” Cinder began to protest, but the stallion cut her off.

“You honestly don’t believe Khan Smolder cares about civilian casualties, do you?”

The dragoness’ mouth shut with an audible click. The earth pony continued to eye her critically for several more seconds in silence before finally letting out a resigned sigh and nodding, “...I thought so. I don’t have to believe those numbers are exact to know that the casualties are going to be high.

“I’m not going back.”

Cinder felt her blood run cold, “Refusing to follow a direct order from your superior is mutiny, commander!”

Timberjack nodded his head slowly in acknowledgement, “I know. But I bet I’ll still be able to get a full night’s sleep with ‘mutiny’ weighing on me. A few Tortoise Bays on the other hoof…” He shook his head.

“Twilight’s plan was the better one,” he stated flatly, “it should have been Princess Flurry Heart’s from the start.”

“We couldn’t risk approaching the wrong creature in power,” the dragoness blurted, “the price of discovery was too great.”

“I’ll remember that when all of this is finally over and we’re tallying up the dead,” was the earth pony’s grim reply, “My ponies aren’t going to be a party to this slaughter.

“I honestly wouldn’t have expected you to be okay with it either,” he added, casting an aside glance at the dragoness.

The comment hit Cinder like a PPC to the gut. Once more, she couldn’t look the stallion in the eye, “...I have my orders,” she responded, sounding far meeker than she would have liked. Even her own words rang hollow in her ears. Yet…

“I swore my duty to the Clans...and to the Princess of the League-in-Exile,” she managed to stammer out, even as she tasted the bile in the back of her mouth as she silently acknowledged what she was committing herself to. Even as she tried to rationalize how and why her own father would be a participant, “I will not forswear myself.”

“What about your commitment to Twilight?”

“My oaths were to the Princess.

“...Twilight’s just a mare.”

After what seemed to her like an eternity, Timberjack turned away and headed for the lounge’s exit, “I’ll procure you a shuttle that’ll let you depart for the Timberwolf fleet.

“For what it’s worth, star admiral: I hope you aren’t ordered to kill anycreature you know.”

Cinder hoped so too.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 31: Hearts of Chaos

The former princess of the Celestia League had her work cut out for her, Slipshod thought to himself as he walked through the ship after the latest in what had turned out to be a series of ‘Feelings Forums’, as she had dubbed them. She’d cast a knowing glance in the changeling’s direction the first time she’d invoked the name, but he had no idea why. The alicorn had found something amusing about his inclusion in them though. Which he supposed was no small thing for any creature aboard the Zathura these days.

The botched raid on Colton had taken its toll on the crew’s morale. Which was, perhaps, putting things lightly. With so many lives lost on a single mission, it felt like there wasn’t a single being on the ship who hadn’t lost somecreature who was important to them. Whether it be a close friend, a lover...or a sister. There was a miasma of depression permeating the whole ship that was giving Slipshod something of a migraine, in spite of the emotional blocks that he’d been erecting around himself.

Over the past few weeks, that oppressive sensation had begun to subside, but it was a slow process since there wasn’t really anything that was going on which could distract the crew. In the past, he and Doc Dee had tended to be the ones who took proactive steps towards combating feelings of loss after missions that went sour. Slipshod had assumed that the unicorn physician did so as a matter of his own training. It had made sense to him that a ship’s doctor would be concerned with the mental health of the crew, as well as their physical wellbeing. Obviously, he now knew that there had been more nefarious motives involved. The same selfish desire to obtain a palatable meal that had prompted himself to get involved―

The changeling suppressed a scowl as he reflexively batted the thought aside. He might not feel like he was getting any better about not having those sorts of thoughts in the first place, but the stallion did allow himself to acknowledge that he was getting better about recognizing and stopping them. That was part of his ‘homework’ between sessions with the former princess: to be aware of when he was thinking about his changeling nature in a negative way and put a stop to it. He was also tasked with documenting the thought in question and the time he’d had it.

Slipshod wasn’t certain whether that last step was supposed to actually help him in any way, or if the purple alicorn simply liked having quantitative data to review for the sake of reviewing it. The former Celestia League monarch might not be a bona fide psychologist, but she certainly took notes like one. It seemed like there wasn’t a moment during any of their meetings where her quill wasn’t moving.

She also wasn’t half bad at playing therapist. For a creature that didn’t have the innate ability to sense emotions like a changeling, Twilight had proven herself remarkably adept at discerning how others were feeling and helping them to trace those emotions back to their source. She’d managed to zero in on his own feelings of self-loathing quickly enough.

The stallion was still on the fence regarding her theories on their origin: ‘Inadequacy born from his failure to attain affirmation from his mother’ seemed just a little on the nose in this instance. On the other hoof, he was hard-pressed to deny that being cast aside by his former queen hadn’t at least precipitated a few of his more potent self-destructive tendencies.

First and foremost was probably his desire for revenge, to the point where he was ready to endanger his life and the lives of others in order to attain it. To say the least, that wasn’t exactly a ‘healthy’ coping mechanism.

And neither was his constant ‘othering’ of himself in comparison to the rest of the crew. Yes, he wasn’t really a pony. However, Twilight had reiterated numerous times that not being a pony didn’t automatically make him a monster. There were quite a few non-ponies on the ship.

The same went for the fact that he was possessed of a significantly divergent diet when compared to ponies. While the Zathura specifically didn’t have a significant non-herbivore population, it was hardly a secret that griffons and hippogriffs didn’t live exclusively on oats and dandelion sandwiches. The fact that they ate meat and fish didn’t make them ‘monsters’. So neither should his nature as a psychovore. He couldn’t help his physiology, and shouldn’t feel ashamed about it, or a need to apologize for it.

These had all been easy concepts to grasp on an intellectual level, of course. Any foal would have rolled their eyes at how obvious those facts should have been. However, it was hard to remain objective while simultaneously carrying around the associated emotional baggage that had come with his history. Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, his life hadn’t been as objectively difficult or ‘traumatic’ as what other creatures might have experienced; but those events had still been important to him.

He’d been taught for years―decades, even―that changelings were superior beings, above all other creatures in the galaxy. That his species controlled everything that happened in the Harmony Sphere and made the other denizens in it bend to their will. Nothing significant transpired that wasn’t the direct result of Queen Chrysalis and her loyal changeling servants pulling on the strings behind the scenes.

Obviously, being a changeling and thus a shaper of events in the galaxy, any time something went wrong, it was clearly because he had screwed something up. Things in the galaxy happened only because changelings made them happen. If a mission failed and creatures died, it must have been because he made it happen somehow. It was his fault. He’d screwed something up and precipitated the deaths and failure that followed.

An irrational thought process, he acknowledged, when viewed from the outside. Yet...one that he’d ascribed to for far too long to simply ignore.

While it was true―and even Twilight had acknowledged as much―that any leader bore some measure of responsibility for the decisions that they made, that wasn’t necessarily the same thing as being at fault. If every decision was made in good faith, then any subsequent failure was outside of their control. Nocreature―not even changelings―could genuinely manipulate every variable. Everycreature was fallible, and could make mistakes. Sometimes, those mistakes got other creatures killed.

Slipshod had conceived the mission and ordered its execution, but he’d done so from a place of good intentions. He had genuinely believed that the operation could be conducted with their small numbers given everything that they’d done to try and minimize the defensive force in place. Obviously he’d been quite wrong. He’d misjudged the HSG’s security staffing, and how much of an advantage the defenders would have. Because of those oversights, seventeen members of the crew had not returned from the mission.

Slipshod bore some responsibility for those deaths, but that didn’t mean that he had caused them. Punishing himself, or manipulating others into hurting him, was both unproductive and unnecessary. What he’d done hadn’t been a crime. If he were an officer operating as part of a formal military and had organized a mission that had failed spectacularly like this one had, he’d have almost certainly been relieved of his command, but he wouldn’t be prosecuted or imprisoned.

A month ago, Slipshod would have scoffed at the notion that thinking of himself as being too ignorant to be punished would actually help in any meaningful way. Indeed, when Twilight had first floated the idea at the Feelings Forum, he’d let out quite the hardy derisive laugh. But, when she’d asked him if Squelch deserved to be punished for allowing Doc Dee to fool her and pass on all of the information that he’d gathered on the Clans to Chrysalis, he’d begun to understand her position. Squelch hadn’t known that there was anything wrong with the doctor, and he hadn’t known there was anything wrong with the mission. Punishing either would accomplish nothing productive.

Accepting responsibility without taking on excess guilt. It was a difficult line to walk.

Nor was he alone. As the pony who had organized and led the raid itself, Blood Chit bore a great deal of the responsibility for how it had all played out too. However, executing such missions was not something he had an abundance of experience doing. Not directly. Some of the search and rescue tasks he’d performed prior to signing on with a mercenary company had been ‘more exciting’ than others, true; but he had been a participant in such operations, and not tasked with planning them out or leading them.

There was apparently quite the gulf between the two distinctions.

To put it simply: the pegasus hadn’t been experienced enough to reasonably be expected to plan an operation that dangerous. Likewise, the rest of his team had not been expertly drilled in storming hardened facilities. Their area of focus lay in operating in much more open areas; large enough for a BattleSteed to move around it, for example.

With the benefit of hindsight, they’d had no business conducting that sort of operation. After everything they’d been through recently, they’d both been thinking a little highly of themselves, perhaps. Reviving the ruler of the defunct Celestia League, learning the truth about the Disciples, Clans, and the changeling threat, tracking down the not-so-dead heir to the Pony Commonwealth and helping to install her as archon…

It was easy to forget that, in spite of all they’d been party to, they were still just a middling little mercenary lance. They’d been doing a lot with a little up to this point thanks to possessing superior ‘Steeds; but that advantage didn’t extend to their security forces. Perhaps it would have been possible for a single platoon of elite shock troopers equipped with top-of-the-line weapons and gear to take the generator; but that wasn’t what they’d had. Or used.

Mistakes all around. Responsibility aplenty.

Minimal ‘fault’.

That’s what Twilight insisted at those forums. Slipshod wondered how long it would be until he didn’t have to force himself to believe it?

The stallion’s datapad beeped at him. He glanced down at it and fought down the chill that filled his gut. No amount of Feelings Forums could adequately prepare him for this upcoming moment. Twilight had given him several ‘pep talks’ on the matter as well. Slipshod was ambivalent regarding how much confidence that they’d filled him with.

With the alicorn’s help, the changeling had been able to come to an understanding with Mig over the roles that they had both played in the death of her twin, and how nothing about any of it had been malicious. Their relationship wasn’t what it had once been, but the stallion could see them returning to something as close to what they’d shared eventually. Once they’d both managed to come to a place where they could move on from Tig’s loss.

He and Blood Chit had mostly reached the point of complete recovery, having had a lot more common ground to share regarding how they’d failed to more carefully consider the operation and its risks. Both had been able to acknowledge being unfair towards the other in the wake of the disaster. Especially Slipshod. The pair of stallion’s even hung out and spoke outside of their mediated meetings with Twilight. Which was a stage further than he was with Mig at the moment.

However, there was one more pony that the changeling had ‘wronged’ with whom he had not yet reconciled.

A pony who would only be learning about what had happened to the members of her crew in a few short minutes. While Slipshod had dutifully typed up the after-action reports and scripted the notifications for the relevant next of kin, there had been no way to get the information to Squelch before her arrival. Anything that was transmitted through the Harmony Sphere’s HyperSpark Generator Network would have been read and reviewed by the changelings.

While the changelings certainly knew that one of their secret arrays was out of action, there was no reason to supply them with all of the relevant details about had it had been found and why it had been destroyed. Nor was there any pressing need to deliver that information right into their pocked hooves.

All that Squelch knew about their mission to Colton was that it was something of a ‘successful failure’. While they had been paid out for their contract, it had been terminated prematurely due to the death of Captain-General Moonlight Radiance. This had not been the result of any fault or lack of performance on the part of the Rayleigh’s Irregulars, hence the payout. However, it was impossible to ignore that their overall broader mission to secure a commitment from the leader of the Our Worlds League against the changelings was unmistakably a huge setback.

A setback that was compounded by the news regarding the new captain-general and where he’d been for the last year. Slipshod and Twilight had both agreed almost instantly that Stellar Nova was, at best, a deeply devoted changeling sympathiser. More likely he was a changeling imposter who was replacing the genuinely dead heir apparent.

Planting one of her drones right at the head of state was a departure from Chrysalis’ normal modus operandi. Such individuals were in the public eye almost constantly. Everything that they said and did would be scrutinized by the entire galaxy. Slipshod and the other infiltrators had been afforded many years to properly research the host’s families and social network so that they could avoid making any obvious faux pas. Given how long ago the bombing had happened―what was with Great Houses and bombs, anyway?―the changeling agent who was standing in for Stellar Nova couldn’t have had more than a year.

Slipshod expected that, for the near future, Stellar Nova would be spending a lot of time ‘working’ out of sight of the press, and away from close friends and family as well, so that the changeling could avoid making any glaring mistakes while they completed adapting to their new role.

Not that any of that mattered much to them or their objectives. The Our Worlds League was off the table as an ally regardless now.

They probably weren’t going to be the only ones either.

Nopony on the Zathura had an explanation for the Clan ships invading Harmony Sphere worlds. Twilight had been near-apoplectic when she’d seen the initial reports, and her attitude hadn’t improved much in the following weeks in that regard as more planets fell. She maintained her composure during the Feelings Forums well enough, but Slipshod could sense her apprehension simmering just below the surface, even while she smiled at them and gave them advice and encouragement.

If there was anything approaching ‘good news’ about the whole ordeal, it was that it was―hopefully―looking like only four of the Clans were involved. For the moment anyway. Others might be working their way through the Periphery to hit other parts of the Sphere, so it would still be some time before either Twilight or Slipshod felt confident that there weren’t others. However, there was no way for them to confirm any of this. They couldn’t exactly get a message to Cinder, who was supposed to be their liaison with the Clans; not without alerting the changelings anyway.

Timberjack and the star admiral were likely going to find themselves having a difficult time convincing the Hippogriff Combine to help the Dragon Clans fight against Chrysalis while Clan forces were actively invading their territory.

There was also the matter of the many―many―messages from Victoria Blueblood that were waiting in Squelch’s inbox. With nearly ten Commonwealth planets currently being occupied by Clan troops, Slipshod was venturing that they weren’t exceedingly polite invitations to a nice dinner.

The changeling stallion took a deep breath and finally acknowledged the message he’d received, notifying him that Squelch’s transport had docked with the same orbital platform that the Zathura was currently moored at. It wouldn’t be long now before their employer was back aboard and ready for an update on everything that had happened in her absence. Slipshod fully expected the evening to not go ‘well’ for him.

If there was anything approaching a silver lining to be had: it was that hopefully Squelch had some idea of what their plan of action was going to be now.

The Clans had seemingly abandoned Twilight’s plan, there was no chance at all that any of the Great Houses were going to help the same forces invading their territory, and Slipshod was ready to bet that at least one of those messages from the archon was a declaration that the Commonwealth would no longer be having anything to do with Twilight or their company, regardless of how much they had helped her in the past.

They needed a new plan.

Slipshod went to his quarters to get cleaned up and changed. Squelch was going to be in a bad enough mood as it was. The very least the stallion could do was see to it that she wasn’t further irritated by him greeting her all disheveled. Besides...this meeting was actually going to be something of a first for him with her. Kind of. A good impression wouldn’t hurt.

An hour later the stallion was standing by the DropShip’s airlock doing his best not to fidget in his uniform. A small part of that was due to the few little feelings of nervousness that refused to be cast aside. Most of it was because the uniform didn’t fit right anymore. It had been tailored for an earth pony after all.

His wings, especially, were bothering him, being restrained by the jacket that had not been designed to accommodate them. So they were left to be pressed uncomfortably against his backside. He’d need to put in a request for pegasus-cut uniforms and barding when the opportunity came up.

The door finally opened, revealing a jade green unicorn mare with exceptionally drawn features. Fatigue, brought on by both the long trip and the stress of the Clan’s recent antics, wafted off of her. She opened her mouth to greet the earth pony stallion, but her words caught in her mouth and her fatigue was quickly replaced by shock. The feeling subsided quickly, leaving the mare with a somewhat amused curl in her lip as she examined the individual who had come to greet her. Then there was a spike of anxiety as the unicorn mare quickly glanced over her shoulder, confirmed that nopony was around her in the transit tube, skittered through the airlock, and finally sealed the entrance behind her.

“New look?” she asked finally, smirking at the changeling.

“Trying it out,” Slipshod shrugged, “At least while I’m on the ship,” he amended, “I’ll obviously be a pony when I’m out in public.”

“You look…” the mare seemed to briefly struggle for the word that she wanted before finally saying, “like you.”

“Thanks. So...how was the trip?”

“Long,” the unicorn sighed, “and now it’s over and I can get back to work. We need to talk. All of us,” she added, already stepping past the stallion as she proceeded deeper into the ship, “You, me, Twilight, Mig, Tig, Blood Chit―the whole command staff. Call Cravat too, since I still haven’t gotten us a new doctor yet―”

“Squelch,” the changeling cut in, hesitantly as he felt his apprehension about the mare’s probable reactions mounting, “first there’s something that we do need to talk about. In private. About the last op…”

Half an hour later, both of them were sitting in silence in Squelch’s cabin. She’d been remarkably quiet and patient as the stallion recounted the mission on Colton. Some parts she’d already heard about, obviously, like the captain-general’s death. The rest of it was all coming at her for the first time though.

Squelch didn’t respond at first. She leaned on her peaked hooves, staring past the changeling with unfocused eyes. Inside she was...numb. Processing. She was hardly new to the concept of losing members of her crew. Theirs was an inherently violent and dangerous profession, after all. Death happened. However, this was the latest in a litany of deaths that it was difficult to deny were tied to him.

Valkyrie. Flechette. Debatably Doc Dee. Now over a dozen others, including Tig. The changeling may not have pulled the trigger in any of those instances, but he certainly was involved.

Finally the unicorn mare began to slowly nod, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. She hurt; he could feel that much. However, she was also a professional, and there was work to do, “...You said that some data was at least recovered from the facility?”

“Some drives were recovered,” Slipshod corrected softly, “Three of them. We can’t read anything off them though. Could be encryption, could be corruption. Blood Chit said they’d initiated some sort of mass data wipe protocol. For all we know, there’s nothing usable on them at all.”

Another acknowledging nod, “alright. I assume that changeling encryption algorithms are way above what the computers on this ship can crack?” The changeling nodded, “And you don’t know the decryption keys, do you?” He shook his head.

“In that case, we’ll put them on the backburner,” Squelch concluded. She took another cleansing breath and changed the topic, glancing at her computer terminal, “I assume that these aren’t love letters that Victoria’s been sending me?”

Slipshod frowned, “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say about―?”

“What do you want me to say, Slip?” she snapped. Far more loudly than even she had intended, it seemed. Her next words were markedly quieter, but held the same grit, “Seventeen of my employees are dead. A few friends among them. I’ll grieve for them on my own time, in my own way. Right now, I’m on the clock. Which means I only care about business.

“So we’re going to talk about business. Okay?”

The changeling continued to regard the jade mare. She did hurt at least as much as he did, though for different reasons. She had none of the guilt. Only regret. Regret at being away. Possibly regret at leaving him in charge when he was obviously woefully unqualified to lead. It was difficult to really pin it down while the unicorn was actively working to suppress those same emotions and replace them with determination.

He decided that it was best not to continue to press the issue here, but it was probably worth speaking to Twilight about including Squelch in their subsequent Feelings Forums. In the meantime, it was clear that the unicorn needed him to help her focus her mind on other things, “Okay.

“No, they’re probably not love letters,” the stallion confirmed, “I haven’t read them, but I can guess at their gist. I think every broadcast station has daily updates on the invasion, even the entertainment channels.”

“Invasions,” Squelch stressed the plural slightly, earning a raised brow from the stallion, “I don’t believe these are a coordinated effort.”

“Despite the fact that they timed their arrivals almost perfectly?” Given the many hundred of lightyears separating the fleets, it was quite impressive that they managed to hit their intended targets within days of one another. The notion that it hadn’t been coordinated was actually much harder to believe.

“Let me rephrase: I don’t think the fleets are working towards a unified goal,” Squelch corrected, “They definitely timed their arrivals, maybe; but they’re not expressly working with each other.”

“How do you figure that?”

“There’s no unified strategy. Each Clan has their own way of doing things. Target priorities, unit compositions, battlefield conduct. If they were all working together as part of a singular invasion effort, then they’d all be using the same tactical doctrines. But they’re not.”

It was true that each of the four distinct Clans which had been identified so far invading the Harmony Sphere had their own ways of doing things, Slipshod acknowledged. Clan Timberwolf seemed to be limiting itself almost exclusively to military targets, avoiding engagements near populated areas whenever possible. They hit methodically, thoroughly securing one area before moving onto the next most significant pocket of resistance. The worlds they secured retained much in the way of their infrastructure and industrial capacity.

Clan Ghost Ursa seemed to hit everywhere all at once when they landed, their divisions breaking up into smaller units almost immediately. One would have thought that spreading out their forces like that would make them vulnerable, but the speed at which they moved onto their targets robbed the defenders of their initiative. Waiting to gather their forces to strike the Clan at one location meant risking the loss of a dozen other strategic points. Defending commanders felt compelled to spread out their own troops to try and protect everywhere at once. However, the less advanced ‘Steeds of the Harmony Sphere were no match for Clan Ghost Ursa’s complement of heavy and assault-weight lances.

Jade Roc, meanwhile, seemed to prefer a mixture of both combined-arms fighting involving the integration of aerospace fighters, as well as the seemingly counterintuitive practice of honor dueling, of all things. It wasn’t unheard of for Jade Roc commanders to blatantly comm defending leadership and offer to wage a one-on-one fight, with the condition that the loser’s forces would surrender to the winner’s. It struck Slipshod as stupidly reckless for the Clan commanders to risk losing their more advanced ‘Steeds and weapons to the Sphere defenders in such a way. On the other hoof, he had yet to hear of an instance where a Clanner had lost such a duel; and it had thus led to the Jade Rocs managing to capture the most warfighting material intact compared to the other Clans.

Then you had Clan Smoke Jabberwock. They were, in a word: ruthless. Anything that resisted was crushed. Military or civilian, it didn’t matter. A Jabberwock unit would level a city just as soon as they would a firebase. It almost felt like their goal was to cause as much collateral damage as possible. Perhaps it even was. If so, it had certainly proven itself an effective strategy in its own right. Worlds in the vicinity of their latest invasion had a tendency to start evacuating to systems further away. By the time the Jabberwock fleet made it to the next target on their list, there was hardly anycreature there to defend it any longer, leaving them with an easy time of mopping up the stragglers.

There was nothing at all similar about how the Clans waged their wars. Still, “Having different strategies doesn’t mean they aren’t a coordinated invasion effort,” Slipshod countered, “Maybe it’s meant to make them harder to react to? Using a variety of tactics means that one singular strategy can’t be developed to repel them.”

“If that was the case, then they’d all be varying the strategies they used from one planet to the next,” Squelch said, “Make themselves less predictable that way. As it stands, it doesn’t matter that each Clan fights in a different way if a defending commander knows exactly what Clan is going to be coming their way.

“Besaides, it’s not some sort of brilliant tactical edge that’s letting the Clan forces sweep through their targets,” the mare pointed out, flashing the changeling a sardonic smile, “their ‘Steeds are bigger, with better weapons, and they’re hitting some of the most poorly defended planets in the Sphere. The Great Houses all keep their elite units stationed on strategically valuable worlds―none of which have been hit yet―and their pet merc companies are all concentrated along the borders they share with other Successor States.

“It’ll take months for the Combine and Commonwealth to mobilize a counter-attack with their genuinely well-equipped units. When that happens, we’ll see how serious of an advantage the Clans actually have in a fight with their tech.

“ComSpark is already putting up contracts backed internally to fight the Clans. The Clans will be stalled within a year.”

“Not if more of them show up,” the changeling stallion pointed out.

“That’s a big ‘if’ right now,” Squelch cautioned, “I think we’d have seen other Clans if they were coming. At least any time soon. If they wait too long to start their campaigns, it’ll be too late. The whole point was that the Clans can’t afford a protracted war with the Sphere. Tech advantage or no, the Sphere has a massive industrial capacity advantage. If the Clans can’t deliver a knock-out blow within the first year, they never will. The Great Houses will be able to throw a nearly infinite supply of ‘junk’ ‘Steeds at them until the Clans’ forces are whittle to nothing.

“Even if it costs the Sphere twenty Derpies for every Clan Big Mac they bring down, I bet that’s a price that Chrysalis is willing to pay, right?” She looked at Slipshod expectantly, and the changeling stallion nodded reluctantly. His former queen wouldn’t hesitate to grind down the Clan forces with as many pony bones as it took. Changeling ones too, now that he thought about it, “Something tells me that the dragons won’t be quite as willing to get every last one of themselves killed trying to do whatever it is they think they’re doing.

“Once they lose their momentum, I fully expect they’ll pack up and go home.”

The unicorn’s last sentence dripped with resignation, and Slipshod could feel the mare’s despondency. It wasn’t difficult to imagine why either. Twilight felt mostly the same way most days now. The invasions by the Clans were almost certainly doomed to fail. They were too spread out, and hitting too wide of an area to advance on Equus fast enough. They were a month into their invasion and hadn’t even pierced fifty lightyears into the Sphere. Barely a tenth of the way to the Faust System at its center.

Squelch had also almost certainly been correct that this was likely the quickest the Clans would be able to move. They hadn’t been meeting much meaningful resistance yet. No significant threats existed in the Periphery―certainly none that wanted to risk bringing down the might of one of the Great Houses down around their ears anyway―so the worlds along the outer edges of the Harmony Sphere didn’t possess more than militia forces equipped with outdated equipment. They weren’t meant to resist dedicated invasions, just pirate incursions and Disciple raids.

The moment the Clan forces moved on to a world that was defended by regular BattleSteed regiments, they’d find themselves not having quite such an easy time of things. Which wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t inevitably win those fights, Slipshod conceded, but it would take them far longer to secure those worlds than a week; and the longer they spent bogged down on one heavily defended world, the more time the defenders would have to fortify the next planet targeted for invasion. Slowing them down even further.

Eventually, attrition would finally claim too many of the Clan ‘Steeds for them to spare forces for an invasion. Especially if they wanted to continue holding what they’d already conquered. Every world they invaded meant that there were fewer troops they could bring to the next. The Harmony Sphere was a stupendously vast expanse, containing thousands of inhabited worlds. The Clans simply didn’t have the numbers.

Which was why Twilight’s plan to secure a safe corridor to pass their invasion through had been so essential for success!

That was the part of this that Slipshod didn’t get: why were the Clans effectively throwing away their best chance at bringing down Chrysalis?! It didn’t make any sense! Princess Flurry Heart was going to end up losing her one chance to bring down the changelings and rescue her mother. What could have possessed her to order this kind of reckless attack?

Squelch turned back towards her personal terminal and began to skim through the missives that she’d received from Victoria Blueblood, “well, she hasn’t demanded mine or Twilight's head on a pike, so that’s good news. However, she had understandably revoked her offer to allow the Clans to pass through Commonwealth space.

“So…” the unicorn mare leaned back in her seat with an exasperated sigh, “we lost the Commonwealth, the Our Worlds League is a bust, without the Commonwealth we don’t get the Federated Moons, the Combine probably isn’t going to want to work with the forces actively invading them,” she was shaking her head, “Even if the Confederation accepts for whatever reason, it’d be too little too late.

“Oh well,” she said with a dismissive flip of her hoof as she tapped out a command to bring up a map of the galaxy. Slipshod noted that she was focusing it on several Periphery regions, “time to move on, I guess.”

The changeling balked, “we’re abandoning the mission?”

“We’re not ‘abandoning’ shit,” Squelch growled at his insinuation, “the Clans are the ones who reneged. The invasion’s a wash.”

“You still have a contract with Twilight,” the stallion pointed out, “you’re not seriously going to break it, are you?”

“I accepted that contract with the understanding that I’d be receiving a ludicrous amount of money at the end,” the mare countered, still not sounding at all too pleased at Slipshod’s implication that she was acting in bad faith, “money that Twilight would only have if she restored the Celestia League.

“Invasion’s a wash,” she reiterated, “which means we can’t beat Chrysalis, which means Twilight can’t restore the League, which means we can’t get paid what we were promised.

“The Clans broke the provisions of the contract. Not me. We did everything we reasonably could to help out, and now it’s all gone to shit. Not our fault, and not our problem.

“What is our problem will be finding somewhere we can go and make a living,” the unicorn said with a frown, “the Harmony Sphere’s right out,” she noted, “what with the changelings putting a big old target on our heads. That means heading for the Periphery.”

Squelch paused and tapped her chin in thought, then her lips spread into a smile as an idea occurred to her, “those zebras seemed pretty hard up for BattleSteeds,” she mused, “I bet we could land some sweetheart deals seeing as we’d have two of the most advanced chassis in the whole Periphery! We could probably set our own price…”

“There’s no way that Twilight’s going to go along with that,” Slipshod said, shaking his head, “and I doubt she’s going to just give us the Rainbow Dash―”

“She doesn’t have to; it’s already mine,” Squelch cut it, flashing a hard look at the changeling, “Under the statutes of just about every salvage law ever written, that ‘Steed belongs to me. I just happen to let Twilight pilot it. And if she doesn’t want to come, that’s her choice. I’ll drop her off wherever,” she said with a dismissive shrug before refocusing the map on her screen on the Farisian Empire.

“You know,” the jade mare mused, not looking away from the screen, “it might actually be a better idea to sell the Rainbow Dash. It’s a powerful ‘Steed, sure, but with the money we could get for it I bet we could buy a whole lance worth of medium and heavy ‘Steeds…”

Slipshod wasn’t giving up on convincing his employer to stay though. They’d come so far, invested so much effort―so many lives―in trying to bring Chrysalis down. If they left, it would all have been for nothing, “And what about wanting to make the Sphere a better place? That’s what you said you ultimately wanted, remember?”

“Well I guess I’m going to have to settle for making the Periphery a better place,” the mare growled.

“You can’t just―”

“What?” Squelch snapped, turning to scowl at the changeling, “What can’t I do, Slip? Leave? Sure I can; it’s easy. I just book a docking collar on a Jump Ship. Simple as that.

“I don’t have your hate-boner for Chrysalis. Or Twilight’s, or Flurry Heart’s. Alright? I don’t care about any of this. I can leave, and not lose a moment’s sleep. It’s not. My. Fight.”

They held each other’s gaze for several moments in silence before Squelch finally turned away. In a more subdued tone she added, “You don’t have to come with us either. You can get off with Twilight and the two of you can get yourselves killed fighting a lost cause or whatever.

“Not my business how you want to die.”

“You don’t actually want me to leave,” Slipshod stated bluntly. She might consider it unfair for him to be reading her emotions right now, but the changeling hardly cared at this point. He was getting really tired of lying. His lying to others, their lying to him―the whole concept of falsehood in general was really getting under his chitin these days. It was responsible for so many of the problems in his life and he was done with it, and wasn’t very much inclined to let others continue to do it around him either.

“...No. I don’t,” Squelch admitted softly, “but I’m also not going to die for your petty revenge,” she affirmed, “And I’m not going to stick around to watch you die for it either.”

“I have no intention of dying,” Slipshod insisted, “this fight isn’t hopeless yet,” it wasn’t a lie if he actually believed it, the changeling thought to himself. While he acknowledged that things were looking rather bleak, that wasn’t the same thing as saying that all hope was lost, “we still have a shot.”

Squelch turned around and leaned back in her seat, favoring the stallion with a skeptical look, “Oh? How do you figure that? None of the Great Houses or mercenary companies are going to help us fight ComSpark while the Clans are invading.”

“You’re right; they won’t. Which is why our new plan is going to be to help ComSpark.”

The jade mare raised a skeptical brow.

“Are you crazy?!”

All things considered, Twilight was actually taking his proposal pretty well, Slipshod thought. He’d known that Twilight was going to be the hardest one to sell on this idea when he’d initially conceived of it. However, he was confident that, ultimately, the alicorn was intelligent enough to give his plan fair consideration based wholly on its merits, and not succumb to her biases. No matter how well-founded those biases might actually be.

“Just hear me out,” he pleaded patiently. The purple mare looked like she was prepared to do anything but, he could also feel her trying to gain control over her reflexive distaste for the premise of his idea. After a long moment consisting of her face morphing between varying degrees of distaste, the alicorn finally grunted and waved her wing at him to continue with his explanation.

“The Clan invasion is a pretty big threat,” the changeling stallion explained, looking more broadly around the conference room at the other gathered members of the ship’s command staff. Squelch had called the meeting after he’d managed to get her on board with his proposal so that they could see if he could sell it to the rest of the ship. Not exactly an essential step, honestly. Squelch was willing to give it a try and so she could simply have decreed that it was what they were going to do. However, there was quite a lot to be said for working with a crew that believed in the course of action they were taking as much as the commander did.

“For the moment,” Twilight grumbled. It was hardly lost on the alicorn, just as it hadn’t been with Squelch, that the assault was ultimately doomed to fail at achieving the goal of defeating Chrysalis.

Slipshod acknowledged the observation, “exactly. The invasion is doomed to fail, but,” he stressed, “that’s only if the Harmony Sphere puts aside their differences and works together. If the Great Houses refuse to help each other, then the Clans actually might have a chance of conquering them the way they’re going about it; even with just the four Clans that we’ve seen so far.”

“So...what? You’re saying we need to sabotage any attempts the Great Houses make at forging alliances?” Blood Chit asked, sounding dubious, “Isn’t Victoria Blueblood planning to marry Nacht Belle to create an alliance between the Commonwealth and the Federation? How exactly do you propose to stop that from happening? Because I thought we weren’t big on outright assassinations?” The pegasus glanced over at Squelch.

However, it was Slipshod who supplied the answer as he firmly shook his head, “nononono, that’s not it at all. Shit, a month ago ComSpark would have been the ones backing an assassination to stop that from happening!” The changeling noted that he was smiling as he said that, and that the expression was perhaps subject to being misconstrued, so he hastily continued, “but now? Chrysalis actually can’t kill either of them! She needs them to work together against the Clans!

“She’s going to need to get every Successor State cooperating with each other in order to stop this invasion,” the stallion was wearing a broad grin as he looked around the room for signs of comprehension.

It was Twilight who seemed to catch on first, her earlier expression of contempt for his proposal melting away, “...Which is exactly what ComSpark has been working to prevent for centuries,” she realized, her eyes growing wide as the implications began to dawn for her as well, “but now she and ComSpark are going to have to actually encourage the whole Sphere to work together!”

“Exactly!” Slipshod said, “A unified Sphere, working together to defeat a common enemy. The moment the Clans are driven back, we couldn’t ask to be in a better position to oust Chrysalis. All we have to do is turn the Great Houses against ComSpark.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?” This time, it was Mig who spoke up, “ComSpark’s going to come out of this fight looking like a damned hero,” the rosie kirin mare pointed out, “they’re already putting up self-backed contracts calling for joint ops between the major merc outfits. There was also a news broadcast the other day talking about ‘new breakthroughs in technology’ that ComSpark scientists recently made with weapons and such.

“Nocreature’s going to turn on ComSpark in a year.”

“They will if ComSpark cuts them off from all HSG access until they agree to become ComSpark protectorates.”

Blood Chit frowned, “why would ComSpark do that? I thought the changelings already had effective ‘control’ over the Successor States with all of the spies or whatever they had scattered throughout the governments?”

“They do,” Slipshod acknowledged with a nod, “but their leadership and the wider public doesn’t know that,” he reminded the stallion, “they don’t know anything about the changelings, or what ComSpark is really up to. They think they’re all independent and masters of their own destinies. So when they think ComSpark is trying to seize control in the wake of the chaos caused by repelling the Clans, I bet they’ll be pretty pissed at Queen Twilight for trying to take advantage of them.”

“That still doesn’t answer why ComSpark would cut off HSG access,” Twilight said, having lost the plot again.

“I mean, they obviously won’t,” the changeling admitted, “but if we can get the Harmony Sphere to believe they did...”

There were a lot of thoughtful expressions visible around the room. HyperSpark communications technology wasn’t just a convenient way to send mail across the galaxy, it was the backbone of Harmony Sphere infrastructure. Planetary economies relied upon the large transstellar corporations that shipped and produced goods among their multiplanet factories. Those transstellars, in turn, were entirely dependent on being able to send messages back and forth across the black at faster-than-light speeds. If they suddenly had that ability stripped from them, production schedules would slip, and profit margins would plummet.

In short order, the planetary economies that relied on those companies would collapse. There’d be chaos and pandemonium across the galaxy.

For this reason, HSG facilities were not only generally classified as being ‘off limits’ during any fighting going on between the warring factions in the Sphere; but they were also built up more like military fortresses than part of any sort of civil infrastructure. They were also exceedingly well defended, just in case whatever mercenary company operation in the area got a little ‘carried away’ during an operation.

Taking out one of them would be no easy feat. Nor would just hitting one or two of them really have much of an effect on anything beyond those specific worlds. Crippling the hundreds of HSGs that made up the Primary Circuit would require a coordinated strike of unmitigated proportions. Frankly, there was no conventional force that could possibly pull such a thing off. So it was forgivable when the question was asked:

“How?”

“Our old friends: the Disciples of Discord,” Slipshod’s grin was back, “they have forces scattered all through the Sphere, and they even know where just about every secondary generator is, in addition to the Primary Circuit. If we can get them to organize coordinated strikes on all of ComSpark’s HyperSpark Generators, we can collapse the array and stop all interstellar message traffic.

“But not before getting out a broadcast from ‘Queen Twilight’,” the changeling motioned towards the alicorn, “giving the Successor States an ultimatum to either submit to her will, or be forever barred from using the HSGs.”

Squelch finally spoke up, pacing around the edge of the conference room, “The heads of the Great Houses will be livid,” she concluded, “after all, it’ll have been their forces fighting and dying to repel the Clan invasions. Officially, ComSpark doesn’t have forces of its own beyond HSG security elements, so they won’t be able to contribute significantly to the fighting directly. But to have Twilight turn around and demand submission from the same creatures who have ostensibly died by the millions to keep her safe?

“They won’t stand for it. Especially if we’re putting enough bugs in enough ears while the invasion is still ongoing. Laying the groundwork, so to speak.”

The alicorn was grimacing now, “Well, I can’t say I’m very thrilled about what this plan involves doing to my reputation. On the other hoof...it does sound like it could work in uniting the whole Sphere against Chrysalis.”

“Well, probably not the whole Sphere,” Slipshod acknowledged a bit unhappily, “‘Stellar Nova’ isn’t going to turn on Chrysalis, no matter what. If anything, he’ll be the first one to bend his knee.”

“Four out of five’s better than what we were looking at a week ago,” Squelch pointed out, “which makes this the better plan. It’ll also let us add in at least three of the Houses’ pet merc companies too―something tells me the Dragoons are going to have other allegiances. Without a working HSG network, C-bits are less than worthless, so they have no reason to accept any ComSpark contracts against the Successor States, no matter how much money Chrysalis offers them.”

“Fine,” the purple alicorn relented, “it’s a solid plan. We’ll do it. What’s the first step?”

“Making contact with the Disciples,” Slipshod said, “there’s no ‘plan’ at all unless we get them onboard. Now, they’re an extension of the Clans and the League-in-Exile, so it’s hard to say how willing they’ll be to support all of this, seeing as how it kind of hinges on the Clan invasion failing. I’m hoping that they’ll be able to look past that and focus on the bigger picture of bringing down Chrysalis.

“However,” the changeling stressed a little uneasily, “I have no idea how to make contact with them. Cinder or Timberjack probably would, but…”

“They’re Clan,” Squelch finished for him, locking her gaze on Twilight, “they owe allegiance to Flurry Heart, not to you. We can’t trust that they’ll support what we’re trying to do if they learn what it is. Again: we need the Clans to lose the fight for this to work. For all we know the Disciples won’t help us because of that either, but we don’t have much to lose by asking.

“Besides, if they really are the successors to that ancient recon unit you mentioned, then it’s possible they’ll be more willing to follow you, personally, whether you’re their official ‘princess’ anymore or not.”

Twilight nodded, “you’re right, it’s worth a shot. And…” she let out a defeated sigh, “I also agree that the Dragoons probably won’t be willing to help us,” there was a second, much more profound pause, “Cinder either. She’s incredibly devoted to the League-in-Exile and her Clan. She won’t abandon them.”

The loss wafting off the alicorn was palpable. She might as well be grieving over the death of a close friend. In a way, Slipshod suspected that, perhaps, she was experiencing just that. Star Admiral Cinder was the daughter of her oldest and dearest friend. In certain ways, Spike and Cinder were perhaps the closest thing to family the mare had left in the galaxy. Aside from Flurry Heart, obviously, who was a genuine blood-relation. However, unlike the pink princess of the League-in-Exile, the pair of dragons didn’t actively loath Twilight.

And now she was effectively turning her back on them in pursuit of a higher goal. It had to be tearing her apart inside. Loyalty was an Element of Friendship. One of her core values. Now it was being tested: her loyalty to her family, versus her loyalty to her―former―subjects. Right now, supporting one was looking like it meant forsaking the other.

He didn’t envy the alicorn at that moment.

“It’s decided then,” Squelch concluded, “we’re seeking out the Disciples.”

“They’re currently to your south, advancing northwest on a heading of three-one-eight,” High Gain informed their lance, “They shouldn’t come closer than ten klicks to your position, but Squelch recommends you remain powered down just to be safe.”

“Understood. We’ll stay put,” Slipshod replied from his dim cockpit, “Any luck picking out Disciple signatures?”

“Not yet.”

The changeling couldn’t say that he was surprised by that response, but it still frustrated him a little. BattleSteeds were easier to track from orbit as a consequence of their main reactors putting out a lot more energy than the engines that tended to power ground vehicles. As a result, the Zathura had little difficulty monitoring the lance of mercenary ‘Steeds prowling through the wilderness on Kiso’s northern continent. Trying to locate the group of Disciple raiders that the mercenaries were hunting on the other hoof…

Realistically, they weren’t going to learn where the Disciples were until one side or the other started shooting. At which point, their own lance of ‘Steeds would have until the fight was over to get themselves over there and save whatever remained of the Disciple group. Hopefully, at that point, Twilight would be able to open a dialogue with the survivors and convince them of their noble intentions.

While it was perhaps unwise, Slipshod was actually feeling optimistic about this operation. Things had already been moving along about as smoothly as they could reasonably be expected to. It hadn’t taken Squelch long at all to locate a posted contract to hunt down a group of Disciple raiders which had appeared on a world in Kirin Confederation controlled space. They had not directly accepted the mission however. ComSpark was certainly still monitoring them, and wouldn’t have believed for a second that a ship which had the real Twilight Sparkle onboard would actually consider hunting down her loyal followers.

Instead, they had taken on a brief convoy protection contract on another planet in the system which had gone off without a hitch, and were ostensibly in orbit of Kiso’s primary population center to resupply. Indeed, the Zathura was in orbit waiting to be contacted with a pickup time and location for the ammunition and parts which they had ordered. In the meantime, Slipshod and the rest of Gallop Lance were ‘training’ on the planet’s surface.

The changeling stallion once more brought up the information that they had on the mercenaries that had actually taken on the Disciple-hunting contract. Silent Knights was a smaller outfit―though numerically larger than the Irregulars―that tended to operate exclusively in Confederation space. They were a newer outfit, not even operational for a whole year yet. Their heaviest ‘Steed was reported to be a Thunderlone, but it shouldn’t be part of this operation.

After all: everypony knew that the Disciples of Discord were a joke group of crazy raiders that didn’t come close to posing a real threat to anypony. They were the sort of adversary that were used to blood rookie pilots so they could get in some genuine combat experience without placing them in too much ‘real’ danger. The sort of units that they tended to field wasn’t worth the wear and tear costs of deploying a heavy BattleSteed.

Given the speed that the Silent Knights were moving at, Slipshod expected this to be a group of mostly light units with maybe a medium-weight chassis being piloted by whatever senior instructor was supervising the performance of the others. The moment Slipshod’s lance showed themselves the other mercenaries should simply scatter. They had come out here to hunt down Scorpion Tanks and Harrier Hovercraft, not to tangle with line-worthy ‘Steeds. ComSpark wasn’t offering anywhere near the kind of money that was worth risking death over to hunt down Disciples.

“Heat spike!” High Gain announced across the comlink, “Doppler’s confident it’s weapons fire. We don’t know who’s shooting at who, but it looks like that’s your cue. Twelve kilometers out on heading two-oh-seven. Transmitting nav data now.

“Good luck, Gallop Lance!”

Slipshod’s hooves were flying across his console as he initiated the start-up sequence the moment High Gain had gotten out the first two words. His weapons were charging up by the time she’d finished, “Good copy, High-G; moving out. Lance, report status?”

“Twiggie ready,” Twilight responded.

“Xanax primed and ready, Bug! Let’s rescue some terrorists!”

“They’re not ‘terrorists’,” the alicorn protested.

“One mare’s ‘terrorist’ is another mare’s ‘freedom fighter’,” the changeling stallion quipped as he throttled up his Chrystal Cavalier into a full run. A brief glance at his sensors informed him that the other two members of his lance were keeping pace, holding their positions in their simple delta formation. Locked in front of him on his HUD was the hovering beacon of Nav Apple, and the fight that they needed to get to before it was over.

It would take them the better part of ten minutes to reach the location of the fight. Which was a lot of time for a battle between ‘Steeds and ground vehicles. Slipshod briefly considered whether or not to send Twilight on ahead in her Rainbow Dash. It was capable of moving significantly quicker than his Cavalier, which was definitely the slowest of their trio. The alicorn would almost be able to cut the rendezvous time in half.

That would leave her fighting a one-on-four, but the alicorn had proven that she was a more than capable pilot. Besides, it was possible that the appearance of even just her single heavy ‘Steed would be enough to scare off the Silent Knights lance.

“Twiggie, move ahead,” he instructed, “you’re the fastest ‘Steed here. You’re ‘Steed’s probably the only one that can make contact with the Disciples too,” the changeling pointed out.

“Roger. Throttle to full.”

The massive cerulean BattleSteed lurched ahead of the rest of the lance in short order, outpacing his Cavalier by at least half its own top speed; and that was before he saw her ignite it’s jump jets, giving her an additional momentary burst of forward momentum. In less than a minute, she was a kilometer ahead of him and Xanadu.

“That design seems really unbalanced,” the striped pilot muttered over the comm channel.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Three minutes later, and five kilometers ahead, Slipshod’s HUD displayed sensor contacts for the Silent Knights lance. As he’d suspected, it was a light unit composed of a SneakyShy, Breezy, an Eyeder, and with a RoyalGuard riding herd on the rest. Even on her own, it shouldn’t have been too much for Twilight to deal with if things turned sour. Hopefully that wouldn’t have to be the case though.

It wasn’t just the mercenary BattleSteeds that Slipshod was seeing through Twilight’s sensors though. Her Rainbow Dash was picking up readings on several vehicles in the vicinity. Even as he surveyed the readings, one of them winked out. Something told him it wasn’t because it had managed to evade the alicorn’s sensor suite either. The changeling frowned. He and Xanadu were still minutes away. A lot more Disciples would end up dying before they got there if he couldn’t convince the attacking mercenaries to break contact.

“Twiggie, you try and get on the comm with the Disciples; you’re the only one they even might respond to. High Gain, patch me through her comm suite to the Silent Knights.”

“Understood,” the Zathura’s communications officer replied. A moment later she followed up with, “Ready, Bug!”

Here went nothing, “Silent Knights lance: this is Captain Slipshod of Rayleigh’s Irregulars. You are directed to break off contact with Disciples forces and withdraw. You have ten seconds to comply. If you fail to do so, we will open fire on your lance,” and by ‘we’, he meant Twilight. For the moment, anyway. Hopefully she would be okay with him speaking on her behalf.

At least he very quickly received confirmation that his message had been heard as a rather irate sounding stallion made his presence on the frequency known, “Captain Slipshod, this is Lieutenant Reine, commanding officer of Silent Knights Lance Gamma. You are interfering with a ComSpark-directed counter-terrorism effort. Any interference with our mission will be reported to ComSpark for disciplinary action against your company.

“With all due respect, Captain,” odd that the other stallion’s tone didn’t sound particularly ‘respectful’ in that moment, “it is you who are directed to withdraw.”

This Lieutenant Reine was a professional, Slipshod gave him that much. Strictly speaking, the repercussions that he’d outlined would normally have been enough to convince a respectable mercenary unit to back off. Getting too many black marks from ComSpark meant never working another contract in the Sphere after all. Unfortunately for the good lieutenant here, Rayleigh’s Irregulars weren’t particularly concerned with their Mercenary Review Board rating these days.

“Roger that, lieutenant,” the changeling stallion sighed into his helmet mic, “just remember: I gave you an out. Twiggie? Lame his ‘Steed.”

“Wing or drumstick?”

“I am many things; but first and foremost, I am a leg stallion,” he grinned.

“If you first on us you’ll―” the rest of his threat was lost in a burst of static as his ‘Steed’s electronic systems were presumably briefly scrambled by a strike from Twilight’s Prismatic Projector Cannons. When he was finally audible again, Slipshod could hear him addressing the rest of his lance, rather than Slipshod, “All Gamma units withdraw!
“But don’t for a moment think this is over, Captain!”

Slipshod didn’t rise to the bait. There was little point in making any sort of retort. The Silent Knights were leaving, and the battle was over. Now all that was left was to make contact with the Disciples and figure out if there was going to be any possibility of moving on to the next phase of his new plan to bring down Chrysalis, or if the Irregulars really would be emigrating out to the Periphery by this time tomorrow.

Slipshod finished powering down his Chrystal Cavalier and removed his helmet. He spent another moment simply peering out of the cockpit viewport to familiarize himself with their new surroundings before he actually egressed his ‘Steed. The changeling had seen his share of militant encampments in his time. They tended to follow a very form-factor layout, even between various groups. At the end of the day, several thousand years of experience in setting up camps had resulted in the establishment of quite a few immutable ‘laws’ of camping.

Things such as: keeping food preparation at a higher elevation than the latrines. Reserving the upstream of a potable water source for drinking and the downstream for any other activity. Establishing command and control elements near the center of the encampment. The sorts of things that resulted in a lot of these temporary bases very strongly resembling each other. Strictly speaking, if you learned your way around one military camp, you could figure out any other in hardly any time at all.

Even civilian refugee camps followed a lot of those well-established rules.

Rules which, by all appearances, the Disciples of Discord had somehow managed to not only disregard, but seemed to actually be actively thwarting. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to any of what he was seeing out there. It was as though some colossal being had vomited a collection of tents into the base of the ravine and all of these creatures had come across the mess and simply made themselves at home.

It was the most unruly, disorganized, and chaotic mess of a camp that the stallion had ever seen.

Considering that much of Slipshod’s new plan relied heavily on the Disciples being able to flawlessly organize and execute a coordinated strike on several hundred fortified installations simultaneously...well, suffice it to say that the changeling found himself idly wondering if he should enquire of Xanadu regarding Farasian language lessons. Just in case.

With a final fortifying sigh, the stallion opened the hatch of his ‘Steed and heaved himself outside. Through the benefit of her teleportation magic, Twilight Sparkle was already out and conversing with a trio of Disciples. It was difficult to discern if they occupied any sort of leadership position within their organization, as nothing they wore seemed to indicate rank of any sort. Indeed, most of their garments would barely pass for anything approaching a ‘uniform’ of any kind. It was as though they had all dressed themselves by blindly reaching into a sack full of donated clothing and donning whatever they came away with.

Slipshod had a barebones knowledge of who and what Discord had once been. Even when he’d been ‘evil’, Chrysalis had regarded the draconequus as the antithesis of her own aspirations and ideals. She desired a world ordered to her tastes, over which she might exert her control. Discord, on the other hoof, desired chaos to amuse himself with.

By all appearances, these Disciples looked like they were going out of their way to embrace as much chaos as they could. Which was odd, as Slipshod was given to understand that these ponies were essentially operating as observers for the League-in-Exile, while simultaneously using the crest of an ancient military unit as their emblem. The military was the polar opposite of chaos. It was a contradiction that the changeling stallion would very much have appreciated being given an explanation for.

“Can you believe this place?” a stallion’s voice inquired from nearby. Slipshod turned to see Xanadu making his way closer to the changeling, while his gaze remained mostly fixed on the encampment nearby, “I’m not the only one who sees tie-dyed tents, right?”

There were indeed several tents that looked to have been dyed a multitude of bright, nearly neon, colors. If there was a single canvas structure in the entire ravine that was anything close to an ‘acceptable camouflage color’, Slipshod was certain that it would have simply been the result of an oversight on the part of the Disciples.

“This whole thing may have been a mistake,” the changeling muttered as he and the striped pilot began making their way over to the purple alicorn and the conference that she seemed to be having with the group of Disciples. As they neared, Twilight noticed their approach and briskly motioned for them to join in on the conversation.

“Took you two long enough,” Twilight said. It piqued Slipshod’s interest that, even after having actually spoken with some of the Disciples, the alicorn wasn’t giving off any feelings of annoyance, or frustration, or disappointment. If anything, she was...relieved. For the first time in a long time, “I was just explaining to Colonel Citron here,” she gestured to a dull yellow earth pony stallion wearing a pleated tartan miniskirt and a black leather trench coat, “about your plan to turn the Harmony Sphere against Chrysalis.”

The stallion that Slipshod presumed was in charge of the entire contingent of Disciples on Kiso turned to regard the ‘Steed pilot. It was honestly difficult for him to take the other pony seriously in that outfit, but it helped that he felt no hint of frivolity from the senior officer. Colonel Citron seemed to actually be taking the proposal quite seriously, “It’s a bold plan, to be sure. However, as I was just about to explain to Her Highness,” he nodded briefly towards the alicorn, “we don’t have nearly the numbers on hoof to pull off something like that.

“At most, we could take maybe a dozen at a time,” he went on, sounding almost apologetic, “But the whole network?” He shook his head, “We can’t do it. Even if we spent the whole next year boosting our numbers as much as possible; it can’t be done.”

Slipshod could already feel himself deflating. He’d had no way of knowing the actual strength of the Disciples of Discord prior to developing his new plan. He’d simply assumed that they had to have a rather extensive membership, given that their cells seemed to pop up all over the Harmony Sphere. Apparently, it was a much smaller organization than he would have thought. Capturing or destroying a dozen sites at a time wouldn’t come anywhere close to achieving what they needed to in order to turn the Successor States against Chrysalis. They had to take down all―or at least very nearly all―the HyperSpark generators, or it wouldn’t have the desired effect of plunging the galaxy into turmoil.

“Actually,” Twilight spoke up, “I was afraid that might be the case, given how many generators there are in the galaxy, and I think I might have come up with a solution to that problem. We might be able to get by with just taking control of a few of the facilities.”

All eyes were on the alicorn now. Slipshod was particularly intrigued, as she hadn’t made mention of this new idea of hers to him, “how so?”

“You forget: HyperSpark technology was my invention,” Twilight declared, her lips pulled up in a smug little smile as she took a moment to bask in the obvious genius of her ancient invention and all it had made possible for civilization, “and something tells me that Chrysalis won’t have fiddled with the fundamentals of how it works too much since, if she breaks it, she won’t know how to fix it again.

“I can write a ‘kill code’ that’ll take the whole network offline. If we can get that code into one facility, I can upload it to the whole network and shut the whole thing down.”

Despite his desire to want to breathe a sigh of relief at Twilight coming up with a solution to the hitch in his plan, he had to wonder if her’s had a hitch or two as well, “And you’re sure that you ‘kill code’ won’t be detected or scrubbed by any sort of antivirus that’s in the system?”

“Not if I make it part of the network’s periodic tracking update,” She replied with a dismissive wave of her hoof. Upon seeing a few confused expressions from the other equines around her, the alicorn explained further, “Despite what most creatures think, the stars are always in motion. And they’re actually moving pretty fast, all things considered. Jump Ships are routinely updating one-another’s jump coordinates with positional data. The HSGs do the same thing. Every month or so, a mass update goes out that updates the whole network with all of the current positions of every other generator relative to one another.

“Because of how important this update is to the functionality of the network, it's mandatory, and executes no matter what. All I have to do is write a piece of code that’ll take the generator offline immediately after the next update completes, and make it a part of that update.”

“And that’ll affect Chrysalis’ secondary network as well?” Slipshod asked.

“They have to be getting the same positional data update as the Primary Circuit,” the alicorn reasoned, “or it would have stopped working within a few months of going online.”

Twilight’s certainty was enough to sway Slipshod towards believing the basic premise of the method was sound. However, that did still leave one hurdle they would need to overcome, “as we’ve recently learned the hard way, taking one of their installations intact is a lot easier said than done,” he said grimly.

The colonel was nodding along now, “you’re not wrong there. We’ve mostly given up trying to capture their facilities during our raids. It’s enough of a disruption for our purposes to either blow them up ourselves or push them to the point where the ‘lings push the button for us.

“There’s simply no way to reach the command center in time to make a clean capture.”

Well, that was certainly disheartening, Slipshod thought to himself. It was also an insight that he wished he’d had a month ago. HSG operations simply hadn’t been a focus of his training on Equus. He knew very little about the contingencies their staff had in place in the event of an assault. In any case, it was sounding as though they’d hit another snag that grounded their operation before it could even really start.

Then Twilight spoke up after a few more moment’s thought, “what if we had a pony on the inside?”

Slipshod instantly knew where the former princess was going with her train of thought, and he didn’t particularly care for it. While it might sound simple enough in concept to use a changeling to infiltrate a changeling base, there were significant nuances regarding the practice of competent infiltration that Twilight was either overlooking or flat out ignorant about. He couldn’t simply walk up to a HSG―either covert or overt―and expect to be welcomed in with open hooves just because he flashed a little chitin. There were protocols, and transfer orders, and command notifications―changelings just didn’t ‘do’ spontaneous assignments of personnel.

In order for him to have a chance of getting in the door, Slipshod would need to go in disguised as one of the changelings who already worked there. Counter-intuitively enough, that process would actually be easier if he was trying to infiltrate one of the ‘secret’ HSG facilities located on some planets. The Primary Circuit facilities were public access for the most part. Every changeling in them had a publicly known identity―which had been stolen from the HSG tech candidates who traveled to Equus to learn how to operate such devices. Which meant that, if he were going to pose as one of the ponies working at a Primary Circuit generator for any length of time without raising suspicion, he’d need to learn both the habits of the individual changeling he was pretending to be, as well as the habits of their cover identity.

Both were tasks that would normally take many years―plural―to even become passable at without raising suspicion in those around him. If all he had to do was get in and out, then maybe he could make it work, but that would still necessitate executing a clean capture of a changeling agent who worked in one of the facilities. That was not an easy thing to do against a creature which possessed the innate ability to sense the motives of those around it. If the changeling in question got even a whiff of hostile intent from whoever was assigned to abduct them, then the whole operation could turn out to be a wash.

On the other hoof...it wasn’t like they had a whole lot of options. Him getting inside to upload Twilight’s snippet of lethal code into the central computer would be the most likely method to succeed. Even if the consequences for failure could turn out to be catastrophic―and not just for him, either. If the mission went south hard enough, the changelings could end up with the code in their possession, and they might be able to use it to devise a defense against any subsequent attempts to use it.

Big risk; big reward, right?

Sure, if things went wrong, then he and a lot of other creatures would die. But, if things went right...he’d finally have his vengeance!

“An inside mare would be great,” Colonel Citron mused, clearly skeptical of the likelihood of getting such assistance from any of Chrysalis’ drones, “but I seriously doubt that that’s ever going to―”

Slipshod caught the alicorn eyeing him and instantly felt her intentions. With a resigned sigh and a sincere hope that her expression indicated that she was prepared to deal with the fallout, Slipshod allowed his disguise to lapse. In fairness, lessons of the past had certainly suggested that this was a revelation that was best done as early into the ‘relationship’ as possible.

Though he did note that the promptness of the revelation had not seemed to have much of an effect on the number of weapons that were brought to bear. Fortunately for him and any potential collateral targets like Xanadu, it did turn out that Twilight was adequately prepared to subvert any violent inclinations. Just as quickly as any Disciple within line of sight produced a weapon, the alicorn’s magic collected them into a depressingly large ball of levitating firearms of various sizes and types that hovered high above her head.

Their slovenly dress and haphazard approach to tent organization aside, Slipshod did give the Disciples full marks for their dedication to their duty. Even after confiscating their weapons, Twilight found herself having to also magically restrain quite a few of the garishly-attired ponies in order to keep them from trying to pummel Slipshod to death with their bare hooves.

“Colonel,” the magically potent purple pony said, with the barest hint of strain audible in her voice as her horn blazed brightly in evidence of the not-insignificant arcane power she was manifesting at the moment, “this is Slipshod. Our ‘mare on the inside’,” she sucked in a slow, strained, breath as she cast her gaze around the scores of ponies who had gathered to see what the commotion had been about―many of whom were encased in an amethyst aurora of telekinetic magic, “if you would be so kind as to command your forces to stand down, I feel we can adequately explain his presence here.

“...Or I can simply teleport the three of us back into our ‘Steeds and we can take our leave of you,” she continued in a dour tone, her gaze now looked on the restrained colonel, “but I would take it as a kindness if you chose the former; as I’m contracting quite the migraine at the moment.”

The dull yellow earth pony glanced between Twilight, his unit, and their confiscated weapons. Slipshod could sense his apprehension as his near-instinctive fear of changelings warred with his sense of duty. Twilight Sparkle might not technically be the ‘princess’ of the League-in-Exile anymore, but his organization was descended from those who had given their lives protecting her. Part of their mandate had perhaps even been to seek out and recover her. They’d certainly learned of her existence quickly enough that they had to have been keeping an ear open for even the faintest whisper about her existence among the changelings they were spying on.

Clearly Twilight was no changeling in disguise as well. No ‘ling short of Chrysalis herself would be capable of performing the sort of magical feat that the alicorn was putting on display right now. To the point where Slipshod found himself wondering if that hadn’t been part of Twilight’s intent in her prompting him to reveal his true nature so brazenly. In a more controlled environment, where there wouldn’t have been an opportunity for the alicorn mare to put her hallmark magical potency on display, it would have been a perfectly understandable conclusion for the Disciples to have made that both of them were in fact changelings.

Xanadu would probably have been rounded up too, for good measure.

As it was, Slipshod was greatly relieved to first feel, and then see, the Disciple commander relent and order his ponies to stand down. Twilight waited several seconds longer, carefully eyeing all of her captives until she was satisfied that they would abide by the orders of their senior officer. Finally, the purple mare let out her own subdued gasp of relief as she ceased restraining the Disciples. Their weapons she held onto for a while longer though, floating them far out of immediate reach.

After a few moments of uneasy silence, Slipshod noticed that quite a few suspicious looks were being cast Xanadu’s way. Eventually, the striped stallion realized that he was the focus of some not entirely flattering attention, and eventually realized the reason for it a few more moments after that, “Oh! No, I’m one-hundred percent bona fide zebra. Slip here’s the only changeling on the ship.

“...Any more,” he added through an uncomfortable cough a second later. He then forced an uneasy smile, “But we’ve checked everypony else for real now. Twice, in fact!” The zebra’s lips twisted into a frown as a thought occurred to him, “though, they do say that it’s the third time that’s the char―”

“Xanax,” Slipshod said sternly, glaring at the striped stallion.

“Sorry.”

“As I was saying,” Twilight began, seizing back control of the conversation now that the worst of everypony’s apprehension seemed to have passed, “Slipshod here is a changeling, and has a bone or two to pick with Chrysalis. He has been helping us―quite reliably, I might add―for some time now. He’s the reason that I was not immediately passed over to Chrysalis upon my revival.

“I trust him with my life.”

“With respect, Your Highness,” the yellow stallion began, his tone deferential, yet reserved, “you’re choosing to trust him with all our lives,” he pointed out. Several other Disciples started muttering their accord with their leader.

It wasn’t as though the colonel’s fears were baseless. A changeling working in opposition to Queen Chrysalis was hardly something that the Disciples had encountered before. Though, how much of that was due to their tendency to vivisect any ‘lings they captured, the changeling stallion wisely chose not to remark on out loud. Tensions were riding high enough as it was all around. He could feel the colonel waiting for him to utter some cliche platitude that he’d be able to easily discard as an obvious line.

Fortunately for Slipshod, he’d recently acquired something far more effective than trite appeals to the emotions of others. He’d learned the value of being honest with others, “I’m not here to help liberate the galaxy from Chrysalis’ control,” he informed the Disciples bluntly, noting the stark surprise from more than a few of them, “my grudge with her is personal.

“However, my goals and yours happen to align on one matter: we both want Chrysalis gone. You to free the Harmony Sphere from the control of herself and my race. But I just want to see her lose everything she holds dear. Her power, her control, her hive. Even her life if that’s an option.

“Once she’s gone…” he shrugged, “I could honestly care less what you all decide to do with the Sphere. Restore the Celestia League, host the bloodiest succession war the galaxy’s ever seen, whatever you want to do; I’m probably not going to be a part of it.

“I’ll have had my revenge, and that’s good enough for me.”

Citron still wasn’t wholly convinced yet though, “‘lings don’t just turn on Chrysalis,” he stated, “What makes you so different?”

“Unlike every other changeling in the galaxy, I ended up stumbling across the chance to actually hurt her,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the violet mare, “trust me; if Twilight wasn’t in the picture, I’d still be keeping my head low playing the part of the good little capstone changeling who’s keeping out of the way of ‘Out Glorious Queen’s’ master plan…”

“Just like that?”

Slipshod snorted, “buddy, I have spent years resenting what Chrysalis did to me. Nothing about what I feel for my former queen happened ‘just like that’.”

“As I have said,” Twilight interjected, not entirely thrilled about her companion’s self-serving motives, “he has assisted us faithfully since I awoke. He will help us stop Chrysalis, and has even come up with a workable plan to do so.

“However, it is a plan that will require the assistance of the Disciples. That’s why we’re here: to enlist your aid. The Dragon Clans have abandoned our initial plan, and Flurry Heart…” a heavy sigh escaped the mare’s lips as she shook her head, “She...isn’t the pony I used to know anymore.”

Citron frowned, “what do you need us for exactly?” he inquired critically, “You know how to write the ‘kill code’, and he can get it to where it needs to go,” he added, gesturing at the changeling standing in front of him, “Where exactly do we factor in?”

“We require the use of your intelligence network so that we know when the best time is to strike,” Twilight replied, “and we will need safe harbor. Chrysalis knows we’re after her, and tracking our DropShip is of little issue for her.”

“...What makes you think we can help hide you?” The colonel asked cautiously.

“Your organization has evaded destruction at the hooves of the changelings for over five hundred years,” Twilight pointed out, casting a knowing smile at the senior officer, “that’s no simple task. Nor is it feasible without some sort of hideout that has managed to evade detection for all this time. Whether that’s because it lies beyond the Periphery in uncharted space, or because it’s mobile, I couldn’t say.

“But I know that we’ll be safe there and―much more importantly―unobservable by Chrysalis’ agents.”

Colonel Citron eyed the alicorn for several long moments before turning his attention to one of the two ponies next to him, an orange earth pony mare wearing an evening gown and a flak vest. After a hushed exchange in which it wasn’t entirely clear even to Slipshod who was advocating one way or the other, the senior officer finally turned back to address the trio of ‘Steed pilots.

“Frankly, Your Highness, I don’t have the clearance to make that call one way or the other,” he admitted, “The General is the final word on who does and does not gain access to our, um, ‘hideout’,” he finished after noticeably struggling a moment for the word; which was not lost on Slipshod.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to be contacting this ‘General’ of yours anytime soon?” Twilight asked.

“Impossible at the moment, I’m afraid,” the stallion insisted, shaking his head, “Complete comms blackout for the next five days. After that, I’ll be more than happy to get her guidance.”

“I see,” the alicorn frowned. It wasn’t the best news that they could have hoped for, but it was far from the worst as well. They’d apparently managed to get the colonel more or less in their corner. It shouldn’t prove too much harder to convince this commanding general of their that helping them was in the galaxy’s best interests, “And who is this general of yours?”

“General Mayhem, Your Highness.”

Xanadu’s brows quirked, “‘Mayhem’? What kind of mare gets a name like ‘Mayhem’?”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 32: Trial by Chaos

The next four days spent at the Disciple camp weren’t actually all that bad, Slipshod decided. Once everypony got over their initial shock of the whole ‘ermergersh, a chernglerng!’ experience, they seemed to settle right into a routine of enmity and passive-aggressive staring every time he allowed himself to come within line-of-sight while sporting his true form. If nothing else, it was at least a little freeing to know where he truly stood with others when he wasn’t confronting them with the ‘mask’ that he was used to wearing.

The emotions his true self evoked were more…genuine, he supposed was an apt word for it.

As a general rule, changelings didn’t need the love that they fed off of to be love directed specifically towards them. There were so many different kinds of ‘love’ that could be imbibed, after all; each with their own flavor and depth. Familial love, platonic love, romantic love, love of self, love of a passion...the list went on and on. All could be feasted on, and all were nurturing for a changeling to one degree or another. However, the most filling and delectable varieties of love were those that were backed by the most substance.

Rigger Brush’s love of her art. Channel Lock’s love for her brother. Those feelings were so raw and so potent that Slipshod rarely ever left their company unsated. It was a state that Slipshod had actually been unfamiliar with during his entire ‘sham’ marriage to Squelch. Which wasn’t to say that it had been a ‘loveless’ one by far. She’d felt quite deeply, in fact. However, there had been something of a ‘blandness’ to it. Nothing that put him off from getting in a good feed, obviously; but it certainly hadn’t been possessed of the exquisite taste that he received from Blood Chit when the pegasus monologued about his fiance.

Eventually Slipshod had stumbled upon the reason for this: Squelch hadn’t actually loved him. In the sense that she had been in love with Slipshod―the ‘mask’ he wore to hide who and what he really was―and not him. She hadn’t even known that ‘he’ existed, so how could she feel any actual love for him?

It had turned out that a lot of the feelings that he’d been sensing from others about himself had been muted, without him realizing it. How could he have? All anypony had ever known him by was his cover identity. He’d never been around anypony who’d known the changeling beneath, let alone anypony who’d had feelings for that changeling.

Recently though, that had all changed. Ponies knew who and what he really was, and so they could finally have genuine opinions and feelings about the changeling in their midst. It was like he’d been wearing earplugs his whole life without ever being aware of it; and then one day they were removed and for the first time in his life, he could really hear. Except it was with emotions, and for better or worse, he was finally feeling them at their most potent.

Most were suspicious. Even among the crew there were a scant few ponies who weren’t at least the tiniest bit apprehensive around him, especially when he wasn’t wearing his ‘Slipshod suit’. They acted and spoke pleasantly enough, of course. Even after the Colton Debacle, the crew had known him for too long to treat him with outright hostility just because he wasn’t a ‘pony’. They were just put off by his unusual appearance.

Twilight assured him that it was just because it was a change from what they’d grown used to. Change always rubbed creatures the wrong way―some more than others―and it could take them a while to get comfortable again. There was some merit to that, Slipshod supposed. Changelings―funnily enough―weren’t always comfortable with change either. Case in point: his walking around in his changeling appearance. He didn’t like how vulnerable and exposed it made him feel. Always in the back of his mind was this little nagging voice warning him that he was doing something fundamentally wrong by letting others see him as he was.

He was breaking rules, and putting himself in danger. He was defying her. He was a very bad changeling and he’d be punished for being bad!

It was a voice that was steadily growing quieter with every passing day, but it was still there to fill him with doubts and keep him more on edge than he might otherwise have been.

Even so, even with all the negativity being directed at or around him that hung around like a feted fart, there was something liberating about knowing that they were all emotions that represented how others felt about him, rather than the earth pony persona that he’d been forced to adopt all those years ago. It was...validating.

Besides, today the Disciples were far too busy tearing down their abomination of an encampment to pay him the level of attention that they had been for the last few days. Today was ‘moving day’! By which was meant that this was the day that the Disciples would be leaving the planet’s surface so that they could rendezvous with the Jump Ship that would ferry them out of the Kiso System. It was actually a pretty convoluted extraction routine, as far as Slipshod was concerned. It had a lot of moving parts which felt to him like they required a level of sophistication and attention to detail that the Disciples did not appear to possess.

That was the key word though, he’d learned over the last few days: appear. It turned out that the Disciples were very ‘appearance oriented’, and with good reason. They were indeed going out of their way to look as unorganized and non-threatening as possible; because ‘real’ threats drew ‘real’ attention. If they looked like a joke, they’d be treated with the seriousness of one. Which was why they dressed like brain-addled vagrants and formed their encampments to look like rat warrens―which was honestly pretty unfair to rats, in Slipshod’s opinion.

If they fell in battle, or the camp was overrun, there would be nothing to suggest that the Disciples were actually a sophisticated military organization. At least, that was the official narrative that Colonel Citron had given when the changeling had finally broken down and begged him for an explanation regarding their abysmal fashion sense. As a being that was innately mindful of appearances, their dress-style had offended something deep within him that demanded answers.

However, his abilities as an empath had suggested that there was something...almost spiritual for them about those routines. It was more than a mere modus operandi designed to hide the threat they truly posed to the changelings. It was a cultural observance.

Every time he had tried to press a Disciple for more information on that font though, they’d very brusquely shut him down. They had even been tight-lipped around Twilight after he’d entreated her to ask on his behalf. While the alicorn had been intrigued, she had also been mindful that they needed the assistance of the Disciples too much to risk alienating them any further than they already had by asking them to allow a changeling into their sanctum. She felt that was a big enough intrusion into their way of life as it was, without also trying to extract information that they clearly weren’t comfortable sharing with outsiders.

Which meant that the group’s odd sense of ‘organized chaos’ would continue to remain a mystery for the time being. Standing in stark contrast to things like the complicated choreography that was to be their departure.

As Slipshod understood things, the Jump Ship which had carried them to this system had jumped right back out the moment their DropShip was clear of its wake, making use of a rare and expensive bit of technology that effectively allowed a Jump Ship to carry a ‘double charge’ of collected energy. A ship outfitted with such a device could make two jumps nearly back-to-back without needing to wait the typical seven day period in order to charge its systems back up.

The downside was that it would then take two weeks for the ship to be ready to make another such in-and-out pair of jumps. All the while, the Disciples that had been dropped off would be left in the system with no way to leave it.

They usually tried to accomplish their objective as quickly as possible, preferably before the changelings realized that they were on the planet. This meant that they had usually accomplished all of their objectives by the second or third day of their two-week stay. The rest of the time was spent trying their best to stay hidden until it was time to leave, and hope that no mercenary companies responded to ComSpark’s request to hunt down and exterminate their strike team. All the while, their DropShip spent its two week stay hidden in the shadow of a convenient planet or moon.

Once the clock finished counting down to the final hours of their two weeks, the DropShip would leave its hiding place and set a course to rendezvous with the ground team. The Disciples on the planet would ensure that they were packed and ready to board the DropShip, spending as little as fifteen minutes on the surface. Once loaded, the DropShip would lift off from the surface and speed towards the nearest Lagrange Point. If they managed to time everything right, they’d arrive at the prearranged coordinates within minutes of the Jump Ship entering through the ‘pirate jump point’, dock, and jump back out again within minutes. Leaving minimal time to be tracked or intercepted.

Slipshod had been more than a little skeptical about the sequence of events when Citron had first revealed them. It seemed like an absurdly tight schedule to keep, especially without access to any sort of HyperSpark Generators to exchange message traffic with. The colonel had cryptically responded that HSGs wouldn’t have been of any use even if they were available, which only served to further puzzle the changeling.

Everything about this sort of timed-to-the-minute exfiltration clashed with the Disciple’s outwardly disorganized nature. The stallion couldn’t wait to see it in action, if he was being honest. The coordination was simply daunting to think about.

It was likely going to prove to be an even more daunting task as a result of the inclusion of a previously unanticipated variable. Namely: the Zathura. While Citron assured them the the Jump Ship had ample docking space to accommodate the second DropShip, there was almost certainly going to be a longer than usual delay in leaving the Kiso System as General Mayhem was consulted and entreated for her blessing on ferrying the Zathura and its crew to the Disciple’s hideout.

There was every possibility that the general would simply issue a flat ‘no’ and jump out of the system without even letting Twilight get a word in. Even if she listened, Slipshod fully expected her to stop giving the matter serious consideration once she learned that a changeling was coming along as well at the least. If either of those things happened...off to the Farasi Empire it was!

In the interest of drawing as little attention to the Disciple encampment as possible, the trio hadn’t powered up their ‘Steeds since arriving, and only transmitted brief updates to the ship regarding their status and the plan for rendezvousing with the Disciple Jump Ship. The Zathura would be touching down along with the Disciple’s DropShip so that all personnel and equipment could be loaded simultaneously, and then they’d head for the Lagrange Point.

With a little bit of luck, this time tomorrow they’d be...well, wherever it was that this General Mayhem mare was currently at, and hopefully well out of reach of Chrysalis and her agents so that they could make preparations for their new plan of action in peace.

In fairness, Slipshod had known that thought was a mistake the moment it had entered his head. Which was why he was wincing with dread even before his datalink chirped to alert him to an incoming message. At almost the same moment, the changeling sensed a shift in the overall tone of the camp. Agitation. Fear. Resolve.

A fight was coming.

CONTACTS APPROACHING. ONE-THREE-FIVE. TWO LANCES. HEAVIES.

Slipshod was immediately up and on his hooves, scooping up his barding as he flitted towards his Cavalier. Xanadu was running at a gallop towards his Philomena, and the hatch on Twilight’s Rainbow Dash was in the process of closing. The alicorn had likely simply teleported into her barding and then her cockpit. Slipshod briefly morphed into a hippogriff in order to make use of their talons to help expedite his own dressing efforts while not having to miss a single flap of his wings. Though the transition from the rapid hum of his gossamer changeling wings to the feathered limbs which required only periodic flaps was a little jarring.

It was hardly the most extreme adaptation he’d been forced to make between transformations though.

As he neared the hatch, now fully suited up save for his helmet, he shifted back into a changeling. His attention was briefly drawn to the motor pool, and the sounds of several dozen massive engines roaring to life. If there was one saving grace for this attack happening on the eve of their departure, it was that all of the Disciple vehicles had already been staged in anticipation of being driven on the approaching DropShip. The only change was that they would be getting driven out slightly earlier than anticipated...into battle.

His helmet went on and he slapped the hydraulic controls to begin closing the hatch, “―pproaching from the southeast,” Colonel Citron’s voice was mid-announcement on his headset, issuing orders to his column. In the interests of teamwork, cooperation, and not stepping on any more hooves than was absolutely necessary, Slipshod had agreed to place Gallop Lance ostensibly under the yellow earth pony’s command, bowing to the pony’s greater experience and specific knowledge of what needed to happen to make the Disciple’s method of extraction work more smoothly.

“First Platoon, flank right,” the Disciple commander continued, “Second Platoon, flank left. Third Platoon hold back and provide indirect fire on targets as I give them. Gallop Lance, you’re front and center. Put those ‘Steeds to work.”

Slipshod grimaced. Of course, his lance would last much longer and stand a better chance of coming out of this alive than any of the Disciple’s combat vehicle groups; so it was hard for the changeling to find any objective fault with the tactical aspects of the order. He simply wasn’t a huge fan of being the center of attention for two lances of hard-hitting enemy BattleSteeds. His Crystal Cavalier wasn’t that tough!

“Gallop Lance acknowledges,” he replied over the open command frequency, “I don’t suppose your ride’s going to be able to up their arrival time any?”

The Zathura was already in orbit and could be on the ground within minutes of a call for extraction. The Disciple vessel on the other hoof was still on approach to the planet from its hiding spot. It was due in less than an hour, but Slipshod was hoping that the ship had been conservative with its acceleration up to this point and that that estimate could be whittled down some.

“That’s a ‘roger’, Gallop Lance,” the changeling was relieved to hear, “They started red-lining their drives two minutes ago. New ETA: twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes was a lot of time, Slipshod thought bitterly. Time enough for a lot of ponies to be dead by the end of this. Hopefully he wouldn’t be among them, “Understood. Any PIDs on the targets?”

“Confirm two BattleSaddles, three Riflemares, two Party Cannons, and a Thunderlane.”

Slipshod cringed as the roster of enemies was read off. That was a lot of firepower heading their way. The Party Cannons had him especially concerned, as those chassis were essentially trotting missile platforms. Between them and the Riflemares, they would prove to be quite the hazard for any inbound DropShip. If those ‘Steeds were close enough and still operational when their DropShips came in for the pickup, there was no guarantee that either vessel would make it back into the air again.

It was not lost on the changeling stallion that a pair of lances which heavily favored chassis that were ideally suited to dealing with DropShips was making an appearance at almost the exact time his lance and the Disciples were supposed to be collected. He discounted the notion of a spy or other informant passing on information to ComSpark though. The general area of the continent was already known as a result of the runin they’d had with the Silent Knights the other day, which gave them a good head start on where to have units deployed.

Though that still would have potentially left thousands of square kilometers to cover―far too much to cover with any force smaller than a whole BattleSteed regiment―the Disciple’s own DropShip would have pointed almost directly to their exact position. They couldn’t risk entering orbit, lest they be shot down by one of the planet’s spaceborne platforms. Which meant having to go for a direct touchdown on the surface from space. Plotting out their projected flight path was something even a novice navigator would be capable of, and would have been able to do so the moment the DropShip entered sensor range hours ago. Once they knew where the DropShip was going to be touching down, all they had to do was direct their forces already in the area to the projected landing site.

Holding off two lances of heavy BattleSteeds for twenty minutes might prove unrealistic, Slipshod mused. Though it wasn’t like they had much of a choice. If they cut and run here, they might lose their shot at getting that much-needed Disciple support. On the other hoof, there was something to be said for living to fight another day.

The changeling’s hoof hovered briefly over the console as he seriously contemplated calling in the Zathura for an immediate pickup of his lance. If they cut and run now, his lance could be loaded before the approaching forces entered weapons range. Leaving the Disciples to die might not have been the ideal course of action, and Twilight certainly wouldn’t be at all happy about it. He could probably make the prospect more palatable by offering to evacuate a few of the Disciples on the Zathura. None of their vehicles could be taken, obviously, but at least―

Actually...that wasn’t a bad idea!

“Colonel, how attached are you to those tanks of yours?”

“What?”

“The Zathura’s already in orbit, and we can have her on the ground in three minutes,” he reminded Citron, “there’s room enough for your ponies onboard. The environmental systems can hold out under the strain long enough to reach the Jump Ship, no problem.

“Scuttle your vehicles and dump your gear. Nopony’s dying today.”

“It’ll still take time to get my ponies aboard,” the earth pony reminded him.

“We can buy you what you need,” Slipshod assured the other stallion, “we’ve done this before,” though that time there had been considerably heftier reinforcements coming to their aid than one Mustang-class DropShip. Still, they wouldn’t need to hold out for very long.

He opened up a channel with the Zathura, “High-G, tell Squelch we’re changing around the pickup a little. We’re ditching the vehicles and taking everypony on the Zathura. We need an extraction ASAP.”

It was Squelch, and not the ship’s comms officer who responded, “Picking up ponies and not ‘Steeds means we’ll need to land for real,” she reminded him. The changeling frowned, looking around at the dense woodlands around him which the Disciples had been using to help hide their camp. The Zathura wouldn’t be able to reliably touch down here, “the nearest clear landing site is a lot closer to those approaching ‘Steeds.”

That was also true, and it would greatly increase the risk to the Zathura. She was a sturdy vessel for her relatively small size, but hardly tough enough to weather sustained fire from several heavy ‘Steeds for minutes. He doubted that there was much that his lance could do to keep the attention of all eight enemy BattleSteeds. In fact, there were exactly three ‘Steeds among the approaching force designed for brawling other ‘Steeds, and Slipshod didn’t for a moment think that was a coincidence. They were there to keep their ‘Steeds occupied, while the Party Cannons and Riflemares shot down the DropShips unmolested.

Which meant that Slipshod couldn’t guarantee the safety of the DropShip and its crew.

Landing out in the clear wasn’t an option. Fortunately, it wasn’t the only option left to them either. Once more he reached out to Colonel Citron, “Colonel, before you scuttle all your tanks, use a few of them to knock over some trees. About a hoofball field’s worth. The Zathura’s going to need a place to touch down.”

“We already have some Scorpions working on it, captain,” the Disciple officer replied.

It was always refreshing to work with competent ponies. Now all that was left was to deal with the approaching lances with a lot less fire support than they had available to them five minutes ago.

Huzzah.

“Alright, lance, new plan: Xanax, you and I are going to play tag with those BattleSaddles and the Thunderlane. Twiggie? Swing wide and try and get in behind them. Focus on their support ‘Steeds. Your Rainbow Dash has the punch to take them down quick.”

“Yeah, okay, pit the Philomena up against a pair of assault ‘Steeds. I see how it is…” Though his tone sounded outwardly dry, Slipshod did recognize it as an attempt at humor, “Whatever it was I did to piss you off, I wholeheartedly apologize. Can I go help clear the landing zone now?”

He did have a point though. His medium-weight BattleSteed wouldn’t be able to stand up against the PPCs of those BattleSaddles for very long, “Tell you what,” the changeling said wryly, “You promise to keep the Thunderlane interested, and I’ll dance with those BattleSaddles, alright?”

“Deal,” the zebra might not have sounded overjoyed at the prospect of having to stand against a ‘Steed twenty tons heavier than him, but it was certainly a more appealing fight than opponents nearly double his weight and two classes higher.

Twilight was a little more hesitant, “Are you sure you can handle them on your own?”

“More sure than I am about the Zathura’s chances against all the missiles those Party Cannons are packing. Five gets you ten, those are C4 variants with the larger missile racks,” after all, these lances had been sent out of here for a very specific purpose.

“Sucker bet,” Xanadu quipped.

“Feel free to take your targets out quick so you can circle back around and help us, by all means!”

“I’ll see what I can do,” the alicorn replied, “Moving to flank wide.”

The icon denoting her Rainbow Dash on his navigational map began to move quickly away from the camp, making good use of terrain to keep herself out of sight of the approaching lances. The changeling studied the approach of the incoming lances. He selected a segment of low ridge that should run parallel to their line of advance and transmitted the newly created nav point to the zebra pilot, “We’ll stage there. Get the drop on them while they’re walking by.

“Once we’ve made contact, we’ll use fallback plan Donkey,” Slipshod tapped out the command that automatically populated a series of additional markers on the shared maps for their lance. Their time with the Disciples had not been spent idly. A follow-up attack after having convinced the Silent Knights to back off was something that they had all been anticipating. Several contingency plans had been created based upon the size and direction of attack of the incoming force.

Had an attack like this come yesterday, then they would absolutely have approached this upcoming battle the way that Citron had initially ordered. Which was why those had been the orders that he’d given. Evacuating onto the DropShips would have been largely useless, as there wouldn’t have been anywhere in the system for them to go that was both safe, and close to the meeting point where the Disciple Jump Ship was going to be arriving. The pirate point that was going to be used was only about three minutes from the planet’s surface at maximum acceleration. The ring and moon systems of the gas giants where they could reasonably hide, meanwhile, would be days away.

The only reason that they could even consider loading the Disciples onto the Zathura and making a run for it was because of how close they were to the anticipated arrival time of the Jump Ship…

Slipshod suddenly felt uneasy.

This was either an incredible stroke of luck, or...whatever the opposite of luck was.

ComSpark had been dealing with the Disciples for centuries. It was entirely possible that their agents knew a lot more about the group’s tactics and doctrines that had been released to the public. After all, ComSpark knew that the Disciples of Discord weren’t mere ‘cultist raiders’. Could that mean that they knew about the two week turn-around for their Jump Ship, and that the pickup would be coming today?

They’d timed it nearly down to the hour if that was the case. Had this attack come much earlier, they wouldn’t be trying to run either, as that would simply leave them sitting in space for far too long without protection.

The chances of that being a coincidence, well...ComSpark didn’t ‘do’ coincidences, of course.

“Zathura? What’s the orbital traffic up there look like?”

Squelch responded a few seconds later, likely after having asked Doppler for the sensor tech’s insights, “Nothing significant, Bug; what’s up?”

“I don’t like the timing of this,” he admitted, “I think they might want us to run.”

Another brief pause, then, “It would be a lot simpler to take out two DropShips than trying to hunt down an armor battalion in the forest if you wanted to ensure a clean sweep,” Squelch acknowledged, sounding pensive, “What do you think we should do?”

What could they do? They had to get off the planet eventually. If the Disciples didn’t leave today, there wouldn’t be another opportunity for two more weeks. They wouldn’t last that long. Even if the two lances coming for them now didn’t wipe everything out, there would be more sweeps coming in the future to ensure the job was completed. They had to go.

“Nothing we can do,” the changeling finally sighed, “But it’s probably a good idea to make sure the weapons are primed and ready, just in case.”

“I’ll put the gun crews on alert and have High Gain listen in on the planetary defense frequencies.”

That was really about all that could be reasonably done, Slipshod thought to himself, still feeling a little more stressed than he had been a minute ago. Of course, at the end of the day, he was a ‘Steed pilot and couldn’t do anything about whatever might be waiting for them in orbit. That was for Aileron and the ship’s gunnery crews to concern themselves with. He had plenty on his plate as it was.

He and Xanadu throttled up their BattleSteeds and headed for their ambush site. It didn’t take them all that long to get there. Slipshod stared intently at his tactical map, tracking the movements of the eight hostile ‘Steeds heading their way. He could see too that Twilight had managed to get herself around behind them. She was prowling in the wake, just outside of their sensor range, while her own superior CLDF electronics suites kept the rest of the lance acutely informed about where the enemy was.

Slipshod took a deep breath as the first of the incoming ‘Steeds entered within one kilometer, “Alright, Twiggie: we’ll strike first. Once we get their attention, move in and pound those support chassis from behind. Xanax, that’ll be our cue to withdraw to the next phase line. The only thing that’ll be able to catch us is that Thunderlane, and hopefully they’ll be too busy trying to chase off Twiggie.

“Everypony ready?”

“Ready,” Twilight replied.

“You’re sure it’s too late for me to just clear the landing zone?” Xanadu asked in a mock whine.

The lead enemy BattleSteed was just five hundred meters away.

“Go!”

Slipshod’s hind hooves flex as he throttled up his Crystal Cavalier into a run. Xanadu’s Philomena was galloping beside him. They crested the ridge within seconds and suddenly found themselves looking down on the lead lance. A BattleSaddle was out in front of the diamond formation that was the standard for Harmony Sphere ‘Steed lance arrangements. Flanking it to either side and about fifty meters back were a pair of Riflemares. Marching at the rear was one of the Party Cannons, easily identified by the massive boxy bulks mounted to its back which contained the multitude of missile launchers they were renowned for.

His fetlocks squeezed around the trigger assemblies on his control yokes, unleashing every weapon he had on the left side of the BattleSaddle’s chest. It didn’t outmass him by all that much. A Cavalier was only a few tons shy of being classified in the ‘assault’ tonnage range. It wasn’t even that much more heavily protected than he was. In a straight up duel between their two ‘Steeds, Slipshod actually considered himself to have an upper hoof because of his heavy pulsed energy cannons.

However, this wasn’t a duel; the BattleSaddle wasn’t on its own. It was also tough enough to survive that initial hit intact. It was hurt, and even staggered by the shock of Slipshod’s prismatic projection cannon. Just about every scrap of armor on the affected side of its chest had been peeled away by the devastating onslaught of magical energy weapons though.

The enemy lance stuttered, surprised by the ambush, and presumably unsure about exactly how many other ‘Steeds or other units might be following Slipshod’s Cavalier over that hill. They all likely had some idea about the expected strength of their opposition based off of whatever report the Silent Knights might have made. For all they knew, a whole company of Scorpions were about to roll over that hill and hit them at nearly point blank range too. While heavy ‘Steeds generally had nothing to fear from any combat vehicle smaller than a Shrek or a Demolisher, there was a lot of damage that a Scorpion’s main gun and SRMs could do to such relatively lightly-armored targets like Riflemares and Party Cannons.

They flinched and veered away from Slipshod’s approach to buy themselves some distance in case any Disciples sprang on them. Only the BattleSaddle pilot held their ground, pivoting to return fire with their own complement of energy weapons.

That was when Xanadu chose to make his own move. He’d held his shot initially, but he made it now. A Philomena was nearly half the tonnage of a BattleSaddle, and its single heavy energy cannon and pair of mediums weren’t a threat to just about any ‘Steed classified in the assault tier. Not initially certainly. The zebra’s weapons were basically powerful enough to scorch the thick ablative plating of a BattleSaddle.

...Or finish removing the last stubborn bits that had managed to weather Slipshod’s attack.

Sapphire and emerald beams burned their way across the assault ‘Steed’s chest. The last of the platting melted away beneath the weapon’s destructive light, exposing the more vulnerable internal systems of the BattleSteed. Xanadu continued to charge ahead at the much larger opponent. Slipshod’s weapons were still cycling, so he couldn’t exploit the opening. But his zebra lancemate hardly needed help doing that.

The machine guns mounted in his ‘Steed’s shoulders erupted to life. Twenty-millimeter slugs and their interspersed incendiary tracers tore into the BattleSaddle’s internal systems. More specifically, they chewed their way into the two tons of short range missiles that were housed there to feed it’s SRM launcher. Like LRMs, nearly the entire structure of such weapons are constructed from a high-explosive material. While this has the advantage of being able to build highly destructive missiles that are individually small and lightweight, it also means that they are exceptionally volatile.

Especially when subjected to a sustained attack from the burning phosphorus of twenty-millimeter tracer rounds.

A BattleSaddle was a formidable ‘Steed. It’s eighty-five ton frame could carry a commendable quantity of weapons. Slipshod had watched Victoria Blueblood use such a chassis to great effect in the Minos System. They could weather a lot of punishment, even when compared to many other ‘Steeds their weight. They were fitted with almost as much armor as a whole Breezy weighed.

Unfortunately, all of that armor wasn’t able to do much to mitigate the harm that could be done by what was essentially a two kiloton bomb going off right next to its reactor.

The BattleSaddle was split nearly in half by the dual detonations of first the stored missiles, and then the main reactor. Slipshod didn’t see an ejection. He did see the flash of magical fire coming from a few hundred meters further afield that indicated a second BattleSteed’s reactor had exploded. A quick glance at his tactical map confirmed that Twilight had managed to down one of the enemy ‘Steeds in the rear lance. Things seemed to be going well for them so far.

“Xanax, pull back,” the changeling stallion barked, already turning his own ‘Steed away from the engagement. They were still outnumbered two-to-one and the zebra’s Philomena was outmassed and outgunned by just about everything else out here.

“Twist my leg, why don’t’cha,” Xanadu quipped, and Slipshod saw his ‘Steed bolting for cover almost immediately. Not a moment too soon either, as the Riflemare pilots seemed to deduce that there wasn’t anything else coming at them from the direction of the ambush, and so they pivoted to engage. Energy beams raked the smaller ‘Steed, but few lingered in any one spot long enough to perform any substantial penetration of his armor. The type-five autocannon rounds were a bit more concerning, but the striped pilot was moving fast enough to make himself a harder target to track. Those shells that didn’t fall short led him to much. He was back over the low ridge and out of the line of fire in seconds.

Slipshod, however, couldn’t leave just quite yet. He had to make certain that he had the attention of the other two brawler BattleSteeds first. Unfortunately, both of those looked to have been part of the trailing lance, which Twilight was engaged with. Between his cavalier and the alicorn’s Rainbow Dash, it was going to be particularly difficult to convince those pilots that his much more distant ‘Steed was the threat more worthy of their attention.

“Twiggie, back off,” he instructed. Her ‘Steed was significantly faster than anything else involved in this battle. Trying to chase her down would be a futile effort, and the enemy pilots would be forced to acknowledge as much. They’d have to let her go or risk having their lances be split too far apart to far be able to support one another. Once Twilight had disengaged, Slipshod’s Cavalier would be left as the center of attention.

It would still be obvious to the enemy that her Rainbow Dash was still out there, waiting in the wings for another chance to strike. However, they also wouldn’t be able to simply ignore the heavy ‘Steed that was tearing apart their more lightly armored companions in the lead lance. The Riflemares combined barely possessed the same amount of protection that the changeling’s ‘Steed did. He’d be able to make short work of them with only a couple salvos apiece, unless something was done to dissuade him.

Like a pair of ‘Steeds that were designed for close in combat bearing down on him, being supported by four other chassis from afar.

Slipshod turned his ‘Steed towards the nearest Riflemare and opened fire with his pulsed energy cannons on its right side. They easily burned away the miserly amount or ablative plating shielding the weapons mounted on its shoulder. The shell loaded in the autocannon there detonated in the chamber, shattering both that weapon and rendering the energy cannon paired with it inoperable. The better part of half of its offensive capability had been seared away in one hit.

Realizing their danger, his target throttled up and turned to flee. Slipshod’s quartet of chained emerald beams scoured the other ‘Steed’s right barrel, but did no significant damage. The other Riflemare sought to cover their comrade’s retreat, opening up with a barrage of all of their own weapons. The changeling was rocked by the blow, and several armor facings flashed yellow and orange as plating was battered and burned away by the hits. His response was a riposte with his freshly charged prismatic projection cannon. The helical beam slapped the Riflemare square in the center of its chest.

Plates of layered alloy dropped away like metal rain as they broke apart and became dislodged from their mountings. This was not an indictment of its quality, but rather exactly what a BattleSteed’s armor was designed to do, absorbing all of the damage and energy at the expense of its own integrity. This buffets the kinetic impact of the massive autocannon shells to help keep ‘Steeds steady and on their hooves. It also keeps them from receiving excessive thermal transfer from energy weapon impacts that might otherwise compete to be dissipated by the ‘Steed’s already overtaxed heat sinks.

Case in point: while Slipshod’s Crystal Cavalier featured the more advanced heat sinks that had been developed during the height of the Celestia League, and subsequently become nearly impossible to find on the open market since its collapse, his console was warning him that those systems were having trouble mitigating the buildup of excess heat in his reactor. Normally, this would be easily addressed by simply waiting a few seconds between volleys so that his heat sinks could bleed off the thermal energy produced in abundance by his energy-based weapons.

Unfortunately, letting off the trigger wasn’t something that he could afford to do right now.

He was already cycling through another round of his medium energy beam cannons, scoring hits on the legs and joints of the Riflemare that had fired at him when he was rocked by a staccato of explosions along his ‘Steed’s left side. Streaks of smoke whizzing by his cockpit, and the plethora of explosions erupting from the ground and trees around him announced the source of the attack as being the remaining Party Cannon only a couple hundred meters away. He was too close for a truly effective missile lock but, at this range, it was easy enough to score hits with a purely ballistic launch.

LRMs were individually smaller and less powerful than their traditionally unguided cousins, the SRM, and so they did less harm on a per missile basis. However, two score of LRMs still represented a not insignificant amount of damage, even if only half of them managed to hit. Much of his left flank-facing armor went into the red almost instantly. Another hit like that would almost certainly prove fatal to his Cavalier, if not him as well.

Slipshod rolled his left heel back, pivoting his ‘Steed to the left as it slowly backed up. Again he let loose with a burst of pulsed sapphire energy just as the weapons recharged, doing his best to ignore the automated warning from the ‘Steed’s computer system about the dangerous quantities of heat building up in his reactor. Those beams pummeled the overlarge boxy missile launcher mounted to the Party Cannon’s right side, rendering it inoperable according to his sensors.

Another strike sent a tremor up through the piloting couch of his cockpit. For a brief moment, his HUD blinked out as the system went through an automated reset. When his console resumed full operation, it was indicating significantly more damage had been inflicted up his ‘Steed’s chest. The reason for this became apparent as he noticed his tactical map showing that the BattleSaddle and Thunderlane had finally engaged him.

“Alright, I’ve got their attention,” the changeling muttered into his mic through gritted fangs as he increased the speed that he was reversing away from the fight, “Feel free to come back anytime…”

The heavier ‘Steeds were still just outside the effective range of his lighter weapons, so he didn’t waste the effort firing those at the approaching BattleSaddle. Instead he concentrated the four emerald beams on the Riflemare whose chest armor he’d decimated earlier. Though those beams obviously cut deep, they did not instantly down the other ‘Steed. The enemy pilot did begin to turn away however.

It didn’t make it far as a brilliant line of indigo light crossed in front of him and drilled the rest of the way into the Riflemare’s main reactor. It flared and sparked. A second before it detonated, Slipshod caught sight of a portion of the ‘Steed’s head rocketing upwards into the heavens as the pilot ejected.

“I’m liking this whole ‘batting cleanup’ thing,” Xanadu remarked cheerfully over the comms, “Can this just be how we do it from now on? You get shot at and soften them up while I get the credit for the kills?”

“We can discuss it,” Slipshod replied, unable to keep himself from smirking, “Over drinks. Which I will insist that you buy.”

He finally snapped off a reciprocating PPC at the approaching BattleSaddle, frowning as he watched the ‘Steed shrug off the blast with seemingly little effect. His sensor readings of the target indicated that the plating on his shoulder had only been mildly scored by the blast. Audible alarms began to blare inside his cockpit, alerting him to the state of his reactor and its perilously high temperature. The changeling reached over without looking and silenced the klaxon.

“Zathura,” he snapped, “update!”

High Gain’s voice responded a moment later, her nearly frantic tone clearly indicating that she was well aware that time was an acute factor at the moment, “Roughly half of the Disciples are aboard. We need another two minutes!”

Slipshod scowled. He was genuinely doubtful that their small group could buy the DropShip those two minutes, but he refrained from saying as much. They were moving as quickly as they could already. No comment he could make was going to expedite the process of packing a few hundred ponies into the DropShip any further.

Besides, they didn’t need to wipe out the enemy completely. Frankly, they’d probably already done plenty. One Party Cannon was down, the other was crippled. The same went for the Riflemares in the lead lance. Given the current approach that he could see Twilight’s Rainbow Dash making on the Riflemare that had been left behind in the trail lance, it would soon…

The icon vanished, an accompanying explosion visible in the distance.

That should be more than sufficient to protect the Zathura, the changeling thought to himself. He announced as much to the lance, “alright, that’s enough; start pulling back to the DropShip!” It would take them the batter part of two minutes to make it back to the landing site anyway.

“You sure you can’t help me get the hat-trick?” The zebra said in a faux pleading tone, “I’ve never gotten one before…”

“Maybe for your birthday. If you’re extra good this year,” Slipshod quipped as he heaved his Cavalier to the left and throttled up to a run. Missiles, energy beams, and kinetic shells, raked his previously undamaged right flank. The armor facings rapidly fell into oranges and red as they were beaten by the assaults of four unopposed enemy ‘Steeds. He cursed under his breath as his eyes watched the hits rapidly stack up and his protection wither away.

He wasn’t quite fast enough to outrun many of the opposing BattleSteed chassis that were pursuing him. The Thunderlane and the Party Cannon also possessed LRM launchers that would be able to harry him for a long while. Between them, they could conceivably do enough damage to down his Cavalier before he reached the DropShip.

The changeling let loose a frustrated snarl as he once more turned his ‘Steed around, sacrificing valuable time and momentum as he returned it to a significantly slower backwards trot. The BattleSaddle and Thunderlane were right on his heels, chasing him over the shallow rise. He opened fire with every weapon at his disposal, immediately undoing all of the good that the brief respite from shooting had done for his reactor temperature and prompting another alarm that he needed to silence. Again his strikes did not seem to do much more than inconvenience the BattleSaddle as the eighty-five ton ‘Steed pressed on towards him.

“If it’s not too much trouble, I could use a little cover here!” Despite his efforts otherwise, the changeling stallion could hear the anxiousness that had crept into his tone. Not unsurprising given the quantities of armor facings that were showing up as red on his display.

Twenty plumes of smoke crested the rise and arched over the advancing enemy ‘Steeds as the Party Cannon launched a volley of missiles parabolically. Slipshod winced and tried to shield his cockpit from any direct hits with a sharp turn to the side. He was moderately successful.

The last of the plating on his right shoulder was blown away, exposing the more delicate internal structure and myomer musculature beneath. One missile, however, did strike his cockpit, cracking part of the transparent shielding. His ears were ringing from the impact, but he shook away the mild disorientation and continued to fire, focusing exclusively on the BattleSaddle as he desperately tried to drill his way through its thick plating. This wasn’t an easy task in the slightest. ‘Assault’ chassis were aptly named, as a primary purpose of their role was to charge headlong into enemy fire and be able to survive long enough to reach their target.

In short order, the heat building up in his reactor as a result of his sustained weapons fire reached a point where it began to trip several integrated safety mechanisms. In an effort to avert an outright spontaneous breach of the core, it began an automated shutdown process. The process would be brief. Around only ten seconds or so would be needed for an inert core to vent most of its built up thermal energy. During that time, his Cavalier would be motionless and without weapons.

He would effectively become a stationary target for the enemy ‘Steeds to assault uncontested. For ten seconds. More than enough time for the advancing pilots to line up shots on his cockpit and outright vaporize him.

The changeling reached out and depressed a button that was shielded by a protective cover so as to prevent its frivolous use. It was a manual override for the shutdown process. Heavily discouraged by ‘Steed techs due to the risk of severe damage that could be done to the BattleSteed as a result of prolonged exposure to such excessive internal temperatures. Indeed, his own cockpit’s climate control systems were lagging in their ability to keep the small cabin at a comfortable temperature.

Of course, his ‘Steed shutting down also carried a risk of causing ‘severe damage’. In the form of being blown apart by the enemy.

The Thunderlane lined up a shot with the heavy energy cannon mounted on its right side. If it landed the shot, there was every possibility that it would cripple his Cavalier. The changeling cringed, bracing for the hit even as he prepared to unleash with whatever weapons survived the strike the moment their recharge cycles ended.

The other heavy ‘Steed’s shot went wide as its backside was pummelled by a barrage of missiles. The Thunderlane staggered briefly. Then it buckled as its left hind leg had its knee joint blown out by a solid hit from an autocannon shell. Successive hits from a pair of prismatic projector cannons on the mid-joint of its right forelimb caused that limb to buckle as well. The heavy ‘Steed rolled lamely to the ground, crippled beyond its ability to fight any longer.

Slipshod had been spared being slain by the Thunderlane; however, its larger and more powerful sibling was still barely scratched. The changeling’s Crystal Cavalier was no more likely to survive a strike from the assault ‘Steed than it had been the felled one. His eyes briefly flicked to the gauge listing the temperature reading from his reactor. He was far enough above the threshold that letting loose with everything he had would create a very real risk of melting down his reactor outright. Meaning that if he fired, he could die. Not firing didn’t seem like it was going to entail a significantly different outcome either.

He started turning to the right to present at least a little more armor towards the imminent attack. The BattleSaddle unleashed everything it had…

...And caught Xanadu’s Philomena squarely on its barrel.

A prismatic projector cannon blast, half a dozen convergent beams of jade light, and half a dozen short-range rockets hammered at the left side of the medium ‘Steed. While a sturdy chassis for its weight, it was summarily outclassed by the BattleSaddle in every respect, and had never been intended to face such an opponent in open combat.

Armor disintegrated. Weapons were reduced to slag. Myomer muscles shredded and melted. At least one SRM struck just below the jawline of the ‘Steed’s head.

The Philomena listed hard to the side, its legs nearly tripping over each other as it became perilously imbalanced by the force of the onslaught of hits. Just before it reached a critical angel, Slipshod saw the cockpit separate and rocket skyward. The inert medium ‘Steed fell to the ground, out of action.

The changeling’s heart sank. There wouldn’t be time enough to conduct a retrieval of the zebra pilot. He’d be left behind on Kiso. Worse, he’d almost certainly eventually be found by the local authorities, and tied to their lance and their intervention on behalf of the Disciples. That would go...poorly for Xanadu, to say the least.

That was, of course, assuming he even survived to be found. Slipshod wasn’t so certain of that however. Something was...wrong. He hadn’t seen enough thrusters firing during the ejection from the Philomena, and even now only one side of the small pod seemed to have working rockets carrying it away, throwing the little capsule into a perilous spin. When they finally burned out, and the ejection pod entered into ballistic flight, the changeling also didn’t see the chutes deploying to slow its fall.

He scrambled for his mic, “Twiggie, I have negative on chutes for Xanax! Repeat: no chutes!”

Xanadu wasn’t even going to live long enough to be executed.

And he wasn’t going to live long enough to mourn the zebra’s loss. The Philomena may have absorbed that hit for him, but it was far from the last volley that the enemy BattleSaddle was capable of delivering. The extra few seconds had bought Slipshod enough time to vent a little extra heat and allow for him to blast away with another volley though.

“Go for the legs, Bug; now!”

The changeling didn’t hesitate. He didn’t understand what the point was going to be though. His weapons might―might―have enough punch to disable one of the assault ‘Steed’s legs, but that was it. At best it would slow it down. It certainly wouldn’t be enough to take the BattleSaddle out of the fight altogether. Still, if that was what Twilight needed for whatever it was that she was going to do, so be it.

Fresh alarms and alerts which seemed quite redundant given that the temperature in the cockpit was creeping up just past the point of ‘sweltering’. His weapons all managed to connect with the approaching assault ‘Steed’s front left leg. As the changeling had feared, he managed to peel away every scrap of armor protecting it, and even snipped a few bundles of synthetic sinews beneath, but he didn’t remove the limb completely; and it still seemed to be functioning, if only jerkily.

The BattleSaddle was suddenly darkened as something eclipsed the sun above it. That something, Slipshod soon found out, had been Twilight’s Rainbow Dash. She’d vaulted her ‘Steed high into the air, arcing over the pair of damaged enemy ‘Steeds between her and the assault chassis, and landed upon the larger BattleSteed’s backside.

Part of what made BattleSteeds so much more capable was their myomer ‘muscles’. The synthetic fibers acted like organic musculature in almost every respect, except that they performed even more efficiently. It was how BattleSteeds were able to support a much more proportionally large tonnage of weapons compared to ground-based combat vehicles. Those muscles could withstand the incredible strain of moving a hundred tons of ‘Steed at speeds approaching sixty kilometers an hour. Significantly faster than that if the power of the reactor was stepped up.

These muscles, of course, required firm frames to anchor themselves on though. Just like how organic muscles relied on the presence of sturdy bones. If a bone became fractured, the strength of the limb became severely diminished. To the point that excessive strain might even break it.

Just as the added strain of an additional seventy-odd tons of Rainbow Dash exceeded what the BattleSaddle’s myomer could support without breaking the compromised limb. Where Slipshod’s weapons had fallen short of the mark, the assault ‘Steed’s own mobility systems finished the jobs, snapping internal structural supports as the myomer sinews contracted in an effort to support the near doubling of its burden.

The moment the first limb snapped, the dominos began to fall as the stress imposed on the undamaged legs was dramatically increased past their own tolerances. In quick succession, the other three legs of the BattleSaddle crumpled and shattered as the ‘Steed was driven to the ground beneath the hooves of the Rainbow Dash.

“Cover me!”

Slipshod jerked in mild surprise. Cover her? She and her ‘Steed were in far better shape than he was! Why did she think she needed cover from the two remaining damaged ‘Steeds? He was about to ask as much when he caught a glimpse of a magenta flash from within her cockpit. She had teleported away.

The changeling hardly had to imagine where the alicorn had gone to. He set his jaw firmly and spurred his ‘Steed towards her, and the two heavy chassis that yet remained, honing in on the enticing target presented by the motionless Rainbow Dash. This time the stallion did not fire away wantonly with his weapons. His reactor was still flirting with a meltdown. The opposing BattleSteeds were each already significantly damaged, and neither was designed to sustain significant damage on the battlefield. It should be enough to merely pepper them with shots to encourage them not to get too bold.

Indeed, it seemed that the remaining Riflemare and Party Cannon had come to the conclusion that, whatever the reason the Rainbow Dash wasn’t moving for the moment, it was unlikely to be a condition that lasted perpetuity. Eventually it would reanimate and, when it did, neither of their already damaged ‘Steeds would last long. Besides, they had to realize that there was no way that they could accomplish their mission anymore.

A Mustang-class DropShip was a far cry from any sort of dedicated combat vessel, but it was hardly defenseless either. Two lances of ‘Steeds could have easily destroyed it, but two individual crippled‘Steeds, even heavy chassis, barely registered as a threat at all. If they were still in the area when the Zathura arrived to collect their ‘Steeds, that Riflemare and Party Cannon would be done for.

So, recognizing the better part of valor, those two remaining pilots exercised their discretion and withdrew.

Seconds later, Slipshod spotted another purple flash of light from Twilight’s cockpit a moment before her voice came over the comm channel, “Zathura, medical emergency! Xanax is hurt bad! ETA to pickup?”

“In the air now, Gallop Lance,” Slipshod felt himself breathe a sigh of relief when he heard High Gain’s announcement, “We’ll be there in thirty seconds. Medics will be standing by.”

Slipshod threw off his helmet and ignited his horn so that his own telekinesis could start undoing his barding. He was panting hard in an effort to cool himself down, debating whether or not he wanted to shift into something that could sweat in order to expedite the cooling process. However, in the end, he settled for simply leaving the oven-like confines of his cockpit and emerging into the much cooler interior of the Zathura’s ‘Steed Bay. His lips creased into a frown as he looked down at the deck below. The mismatched clothes worn by the hundreds of ponies milling below made it look like the DropShip was preparing to play host to some sort of wild nightclub rave.

The changeling’s attention was drawn to the far side of the bay, and the flash of purple light where Twilight had just teleported to on the gantry. She was cradling a very battered-looking zebra in her hooves, “Medic! Where’s the―here!” Cravat and another pony were already in the process of running out along the suspended walkways of the ‘Steed Bay to meet her and collect the patient that they’d been warned to expect.

They may have lost a ‘Steed today, but at least Xanadu had been saved. Machinery was easier to replace than competent pilots.

...And, of course, friends couldn’t be replaced.

Any sigh of relief that Slipshod wanted to be able to experience was going to have to wait though. They weren’t out of danger yet. Not until they’d jumped out of the Kiso System. At this moment, they hadn’t even left the atmosphere. He hesitated long enough to let the pair of medical ponies assess Xanadu and carry him off to the ship’s clinic before following them down the catwalk and out of the ‘Steed Bay. Twilight cantered at his heels. There wasn’t anything else that she could do in there either.

The ship’s bridge was a hive of activity as the pair of them emerged onto it, “―me a count,” Squelch was barking, sparing just a second to see who it was that had intruded before turning back to Doppler, “And a time to intercept.”

The sage green unicorn didn’t sound particularly happy. Slipshod didn’t need to wait long at all to find out why as the ship’s sensor tech gave her the information that the other unicorn had requested, “Six Transgressor-class heavy fighters. Accelerating hard. They’ll be on us in three minutes,” Doppler informed them.

“Sooner than that once we hit turnover in…” the sage unicorn glanced at the console near her command chair, “forty-five seconds and begin our decel,” Squelch muttered ruefully.

“We’re not at max thrust,” Aileron noted in an even tone, “if I red-line the engines, we can hit turnover and our intercept with the Lagrange Point twenty seconds sooner,” that might not have sounded like a lot of time; but during ship-to-ship combat in space, it was very nearly the entire length of a battle.

“We’d leave the Disciple DropShip behind,” the sage unicorn reminded her pilot, “they’re risking an engine burn-out as it is.

“We stand a better chance sticking with them. More weapons, more targets for them to shoot at to hopefully spread the damage around,” Squelch reasoned. While nothing in her voice suggested anything of the sort, Slipshod could sense her internal dread. While it could hold its own against a couple of ‘Steeds, a Mustang-class DropShip wasn’t exceptionally well armed when it came to ship-to-ship combat, and it certainly had never been intended to fend off a squadron of aerospace craft on its own.

Indeed, the standard layout of a ship like the Zathura sported hangar space at the front of the vessel for it to carry around two fighters of its own to deal with threats like this. However, those hangars had been refitted to serve as an expanded vehicle garage long ago. Not that Slipshod was particularly confident that two light fighter craft would have been able to adequately defend them against a fighter group this large even if they had kept the hangar.

The unicorn mare leaned forward slightly in her command chair and peaked her hooves together. Her mind was racing, trying to find them a way through this fight. Slipshod was hopeful but, while he acknowledged that the unicorn was a lot smarter than he was, he doubted that she was smart enough to suddenly materialize a lot more weapons and armor out of the ether.

Slipshod very nearly turned to leave the bridge and go back to the ‘Steed Bay. Under any other circumstances, he’d have suggested taking the ‘Steeds from the bay and walking them out onto the hull of the ship so that they could add their firepower to the fight. However, even if his Cavalier wasn’t shot to tartarus, there was no way for them to fit the several hundred Disciples currently crammed into the ‘Steed Bay into the pressurised areas of the ship.

They couldn’t open the ‘Steed Bay’s exterior doors without killing everypony they’d just rescued.

On the other hoof, one good hit from those fighters would be all that it would take to breach the hull and open it to vacuum anyway. There certainly weren’t anywhere enough suits to pass out to keep them alive in case a breach happened. This whole thing could still end up having all been for nothing!

“Engine cut-out!” Doppler blurted in surprise. The tensions of everypony on the bridge ratcheted up as their minds all assumed that the sensor tech had been referring to their engines. Aileron especially was shocked to hear somepony other than himself announcing a change to the status of his engines. Of course, any sudden change in the Zathura’s acceleration would have been felt by everypony present, so it very clearly wasn’t their engines that Doppler was talking about. A point the unicorn quickly clarified, “The Disciple DropShip cut their engines!”

“Fuck! They did burn them out,” Squelch snarled, now finding herself faced with trying to figure out some way to rescue a vessel twice the mass of her own ship with a half dozen enemy fighters bearing down on them. She turned to her pilot and was about to order him to cut their own thrust and begin backtracking towards the other DropShip. If they managed to attach some sort of tow line and started decelerating soon enough, the Zathura’s engines might be able to slow both ships enough to rendezvous with the Jump Ship.

However, High Gain called out before she could give that order, “Ma’am! It’s the Disciple DropShip,” she gasped, turning towards her employer, “They said they’re going to intercept the fighters on their own!”

“What? Put me on comms with them,” the earth pony comms officer tapped out a short series of commands and nodded towards the unicorn, “This is Commander Squelch of the Zathura; what do you think you’re doing? You’re no match for those fighters on your own!”

She wasn’t wrong, Slipshod thought to himself. While a Friendship-class DropShip was a lot bigger than a vessel like theirs, it really didn’t pack that much more firepower. A few more missile launchers and an additional PPC were the only weapons of note that a ship like that had over the Zathura. It was a ‘Steed transport, just like theirs, not a dedicated combat vessel.

“If we stick together, we might survive long enough to―” Squelch didn’t get to finish her plea before a voice interrupted her.

“Hello, Commander,” came the resigned response over the bridge speakers from the other DropShip’s captain, “I’m Captain Hollandaise. Though your comms officer has been perfectly pleasant to talk with, I’m glad to have gotten the chance to speak with you directly. It gives me the chance to thank you personally for your assistance in collecting our ponies from the surface. I have no doubt that, had you not done what you did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.”

Slipshod felt understanding blossoming within Squelch, and saw the helpless expression on her face as she recognized what was about to happen. The changeling understood it too. The Disciple captain’s mission was to get the ground team back to the Jump Ship that would soon be arriving to carry them out of the system. If the Irregulars’ DropShip was destroyed, then she would have failed in that mission. However, if her ship was able to delay the pursuing fighters long enough to allow the Zathura to get away then, even if her vessel was lost, she would still have carried out her orders successfully.

“Get them the rest of the way home, Commander. My crew and I will do what we can. Hollandaise, out.”

The bridge was silent after that, as every pony on the bridge processed the fact that the Disciple DropShip had chosen to sacrifice itself to ensure their own safety. Beside him, Slipshod could feel the pain radiating off of Twilight as she internally railed against the impending loss of more ponies dying in order to protect her, while she was powerless to do anything to stop it. This whole situation must have been painfully familiar to her, the changeling supposed.

“I’ll start teleporting them out―” the purple mare began, but Squelch cut her off.

“Even you can’t possibly teleport ten thousand kilometers,” the sage unicorn countered sternly, not even looking in Twilight’s direction, “and that’s exactly how far away we’re going to be in a matter of seconds.”

She then focused her attention on their pilot, “How much longer can we accelerate for if we red-line the engines for the decel?”

“Another five seconds,” Aileron replied almost immediately, having already performed the relevant calculations at around the time he’d pitched the idea of leaving the other DropShip behind.

“Do it,” the unicorn ordered softly. It was clear that this still felt to her like they were ‘abandoning’ the other ship and its crew.

“Acknowledged,” the pegasus said, sounding almost just as resigned. Even though he’d suggested something very similar to this course of action, that didn’t mean that he relished the consequences, “engine cut and flip in fifteen seconds...Ten seconds...Five.

“Engine cut,” Aileron’s announcement was accompanied by a slight ‘lurch’ as the deck felt like it was pulled back ever so slightly beneath their hooves, “Flip,” the starfield visible through the forward viewport began to ‘fall’ downward, like snow, as the DropShip flipped upward onto its back, “Decel burn,” this time the deck was jerked forward as the compensators fought to counteract the increased thrust of the ship’s engines. They were being pushed to their limits now; which Slipshod was sure Mig wouldn’t be very happy about the next time she went to service them.

“Lagrange Point rendezvous in one minute, fifty-four seconds,” the pegasus concluded, his work done for at least the next two minutes.

All eyes were locked on the bridge’s forward viewport. Not that there was anything that could be seen apart from stars and the shrinking blue planet in the distance. However, though it was impossible for any of them to see it, they all knew that a fight was about to take place in front of them.

Without a word, Squelch’s horn lit up and her magic tapped out a sequence of commands on the bridge’s holoprojection table. It sprang to life, and illuminated with a rendering of the local planet and its moon. A few more inputted commands, and the focus narrowed to show seven icons. One was a blue circle, with six red triangles quickly approaching it. All eyes locked onto the projection, except for the unicorn working at the ship’s sensor station. She already had a clear view of what was happening.

Doppler began commentating on the fight, “Captain Hollandaise’s ship has opened fire with her missiles,” she announced, “Enemy fighters cutting thrust...decelerating to engage,” a haze of tiny dots departed the DropShip’s icon and headed for one of the triangles. It vanished the moment they made contact, and Slipshod could feel the hearts of everypony around him swell with hope. For a brief moment, they all allowed themselves to believe that it was possible the Disciple DropShip might survive the battle. Even he was guilty of that thought.

For a brief moment.

“Enemy fighters firing.”

The blue dot disappeared as fifteen heavy energy cannons all converged to burn a hole straight to the Friendship-class DropShip’s main reactor.

The ‘battle’ was over.

“Fighters resuming acceleration,” the indigo unicorn mare announced, her voice hollow, “time to turnover: ten seconds. Time to intercept: one minute.”

Squelch closed her eyes and sighed in resignation. Despite the sacrifice made by the other DropShip, they would still be caught well before their rendezvous with the Jump Ship’s anticipated arrival location. It was also worth noting that they had no way of knowing exactly when a Jump Ship was supposed to manifest there. As a result of their need to make a hasty departure from Kiso, they were the better part of an hour ahead of what would have been the original rendezvous time. Assuming that the Disciple Jump Ship desired to spend as little time in the system as possible in order to minimize the risk it faced from enemy forces, it stood to reason that they would be waiting some time for their ride to appear.

A DropShip twice their size and better armed had lasted exactly one volley. There was no rational expectation that the Zathura would survive any longer than the Disciples had.

“Forty-five seconds to intercept,” Doppler might as well have been counting down the number of seconds that they all had to live, Slipshod thought ruefully.

Squelch reached out and depressed a button on her chair, opening up a shipwide broadcast, “Gunnery crews, standby. Damage control teams to your stations. All hooves brace for impact,” then, like Aileron, the sage green unicorn leaned back in her chair and patiently waited. There wasn’t anything more that she could do to avert disaster. Even if she directed the pilot to start accelerating again, those fighters were capable of greater acceleration than the Zathura. All they’d accomplish was dying one minute later than they were going to now.

“I can project a shield around the ship,” Twilight announced, resolutely, “I can protect us―”

“For how long?” Squelch interrupted, “A minute? An hour? Forever?”

“I can teleport the ship―” the alicorn stammered, her voice trailing off as the unicorn commander flashed her a bored look, “Look, there has to be something that I can do to save us―” A thought occurred to the mare. She scrambled over to High Gain, “Call them and tell them I surrender!” she pleaded with the comms officer frantically, “Tell them I’ll give myself up if they let you go!”

“And why exactly wouldn’t they just kill us all anyway the moment you’re off the ship?” Slipshod asked her. He didn’t enjoy acknowledging that there wasn’t anything more they could do than she did, but he wasn’t about to start deluding himself with vain hopes of pulling some sort of miracle out of his flank.

“Thirty seconds to intercept.”

Not a lot of time left, the changeling mused. Though, he might as well make the most of it. He looked over at Twilight and cleared his throat, “While there’s still time...thanks. For not killing me the first time we met, and saving my life a few times, and helping me like you did. They’re not things I thought anypony would ever do for a changeling.”

She sighed, shaking her head, but also managing a wan little smile of her own, “yeah, well; I guess deep down I’m just an old sof―mm!”

There was probably more that Twilight had wanted to say on the matter, but she was having difficulty getting any of it past the changeling tongue that had been shoved rather abruptly down her throat. They were shockingly long, it turned out. When Slipshod finally let her come up for air, the purple mare coughed and sputtered, “What the fuck?!”

“Sorry. I’ve made out with a lot of highborn mares, but never an actual princess before,” the stallion grinned impishly, “bucket list and all that,” he briskly turned away from the baleful glare of the outwardly furious―and internally conflicted―alicorn to look at Squelch. She was regarding him with an amused expression.

“No ‘goodbye’ kiss from me until you wash that mouth out,” she quipped, still smiling, “I don’t make out with mares, even second-hoof.”

“Fifteen seconds,” Doppler managed to get out, souring her own brief-lived levity at witnessing the event.

“One minute until rendezvous,” Aileron added, looking over at Squelch with a wry smile as he pointed out the shortfall.

“No kiss,” Slipshod assured her, “I just wanted you to know that…” he fumbled the words, inwardly chastising himself. Was he really worried about how she’d react at a time like this? He just needed to spit it out. With a final preparatory breath, he began again, “Squelch, I honestly do lo―”

“Jump event!” Doppler blurted out in abject shock, “Jump event at the Lagrange Point!”

“You’re shitting me,” Squelch snorted in disbelief, looking away from the equally stunned and now muted changeling. Every other eye on the bridge was also keenly focused on the projection table, and the new contact that was displayed there. It was an exceptionally large vessel, far greater in size than a DropShip.

And it was broadcasting a Celestia League Defense Force identification signature.

“The Maelstrom?!” Twilight blurted out, “but that ship was assigned to―”

“Additional contacts,” the sensor control officer’s ongoing announcements drowned out whatever startled outburst the alicorn was making, and nopony on the bridge had time to spare for her observations anyway now that they had more pressing concerns, “fighters―many fighters! At least a full wing; launching from the Jump Ship―!”

Doppler had barely gotten out her update before High Gain was clamoring for Squelch’s attention too, “Signal coming in from the CLDF vess―”

“On speakers!” Squelch roared, very nearly lunging out of her chair, her eyes locked onto the symbol of their imminent salvation hovering above the projection table.

“Unidentified ship, please state your―”

“Colonel Citron’s unit is aboard!” They didn’t have time for ceremony and protocol. The five approaching enemy fighters would be in range in seconds. There wasn’t enough time to waste having any sort of deep conversation. The Disciples needed to save them, and that meant giving them the motivation to do so, “We are being pursued by ComSpark fighters and we have Citron’s forces and Princess Twilight onboard!”

Honestly, it was anypony’s guess as to whether those aerospace craft were genuinely being piloted by changeling agents or if they were kirins operating under orders passed onto them by Chrysalis’ agents; but the semantics of their allegiance hardly mattered, given that the net result was the same either way. Besides, the point was that the Disciples needed to use their fighters to protect the Zathura.

There was a pause that lasted far too long for the sanity of everypony on the bridge. Then, “Understood. Moving to assist. ETA: Thirty seconds.”

That was exactly twenty-five seconds too late.

Squelch wheeled on the purple alicorn, and near-manic glint in her eyes, “you said you can make a shield right?! You just need to buy us thirty seconds!”

Twilight’s features set in grim determination, and she closed her eyes. Her horn flared with amethyst light so brilliant that it was almost painful to look at directly. Through the viewport, the space around them took on a rosy pink hue. Only a moment later, the barrier wavered as it was stuck simultaneously by more than a dozen rays or destructive sapphire light. Twilight cried out in obvious pain as she was forced to direct a stupendous quantity of magic through her horn in an effort to sustain the protective bubble around the ship. Her hind legs gave out completely, and her forelimbs were wobbling terribly. Slipshod rushed over to prop her up. He didn’t need to feel her pain to be able to tell how much of it she was in. From the expression on her face, the alicorn looked like she was being put through a trial more harrowing than his interrogation by that psychopathic griffon.

Seconds later, Twilight let out another anguished cry and collapsed fully. An alicorn and a powerful wielder of magic in her own right she may be, but the weapons that she was up against traced their genesis back to magicks that she developed for the explicit purpose of defeating Tirek; himself a immensely powerful being that was capable of matching the combined might of several alicorns. In a very real sense, she was up against herself in this moment, trying to resist the very tools that she had devised in order to slay a monster far more powerful than she was.

That she’d lasted this long was honestly a miracle in itself.

However, two volleys seemed to be her limit, and Twilight collapsed to the deck, moaning and panting with effort. Her horn blackened and wafting smoke. Slisphod’s nostrils curled at the scent of scorched flesh and bone that hung in the air around the fallen mare. She wasn’t giving up though. The changeling watched her continue to struggle, moving her uncooperative limbs in an effort to get them back under her body and stand up once more. Her eyes were furiously blinking away the tears that were blurring her vision. Her horn sparked and sputtered, but refused to ignite. Through the viewport, the crisp blackness of space was clearly visible.

Their shield was gone.

“They’re coming around for another pass!” Doppler warned them, her words hollow and empty; mirroring the fatalistic acceptance that was once more creeping into the hearts of everypony else on the bridge.

Slipshod very nearly gagged on the sensation. It tasted like the emotional equivalent of bile. Beyond the bridge, he could sense the ratcheting feelings of fear and panic from the rest of the ship. Beyond this room, nopony knew exactly what was happening. Not specifically. They only knew that they were in danger. In the absence of detailed knowledge, their imaginations were filling in the missing pieces. The results of such speculation very rarely led to measured emotional responses.

The changeling knelt down, looking fervently at Twilight, “you have to get that shield back up!” It was a worthless statement of course. The alicorn was well enough aware of how dire their situation was, and that she was the only one capable of keeping them alive long enough to be rescued.

Her horn continued to spit, spark, and sputter, but no magic manifested. She wasn’t giving up, but she was shaking her head all the same, “...there’s nothing left,” she told him, “I’m burned out! I need...help…” The alicorn’s eyes darted around the room, lingering briefly on Squelch and Doppler, the only other unicorns nearby. The only available sources of additional magic that she could draw on to power the shield spell. For the briefest of moments, she thought about asking for their help…

...But it would have been a useless and futile effort anyway. Twilight possessed more magical energy that probably every other unicorn on the whole ship combined, and had only lasted for two volleys. Whatever energy she could have hoped to draw from the pair probably wouldn’t have even been enough to manifest another shield, let alone allow it to hold fast against the next attack. All that the purple mare would end up accomplishing was to inflict painful mana burn upon Doppler and Squelch before they were inevitably killed. Robbing them of at least the mercy of being pain free before dying swiftly in the impending reactor core breach that would envelop the Zathura when the fighters fired.

Twilight couldn’t get the energy she needed from the unicorns on the bridge. They didn’t have enough to give. Unicorns, by their nature, only had so much magic available to them at any given time. When they hit their limit, it was like coming up against a hard wall. It couldn’t be passed. They were beings of flesh first, and magic second.

That was not the case with changelings though.

Changelings could change who and what they were on a whim. Their physical forms were inconsequential to their nature. Food wasn’t even strictly required for them to survive. They subsisted off of the emotions of others. Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. As Twilight had once explained to him: Friendship―feelings, emotions―were tangible sources of power. Emotions were energy. The ways that changelings were capable of manifesting that energy were many and varied.

With the right knowledge, training, and experience, Slipshod might have been able to sustain the sort of shield that Twilight had conjured. He had none of those things, of course; nor was there time enough to acquire those things. Only Twilight possessed them.

He had the energy though. He had stores of emotions meant to sustain him for weeks or even months if he was careful enough. Slipshod wasn’t sure of the exact math on the matter, but he had to wonder if the amount of magical energy capable of sustaining a life for months was capable of sustaining a barrier for just a few more seconds.

The ship’s bridge was briefly bathed in emerald light. When it waned, a second purple alicorn mare was kneeling next to Twilight. The original stared up at her copy in brief consternation upon seeing her form usurped by the stallion. Slipshod touched his new horn to Twilights, “Take what you need,” his amethyst eyes darted briefly across the bridge, and the ponies looking on in confusion, before returning to the former princess again, “Take it all if you have to. Just save my friends…”

Before Twilight could respond, Slipshod tapped into his reserves and began to forcibly transfer vast quantities of those stored emotions into the other alicorn, converting it into usable arcane energies in the process. Twilight let out a surprised gasp upon initially experiencing the unusual sensation of magic being forced into her body like this. She’d accepted help from other unicorns and alicorns in the past, but she didn’t recall ever being inundated with such quantities all at once before.

Slipshod was vaguely aware of Doppler yelling “Energy spike!” But it sounded like a distant, muffled, thing. His focus was exclusively upon converting and channeling everything he had into Twilight. He could feel her reserves of magic grow as his own dwindled. Then there was a sudden outrush from the mare. Her shield spell being cast. The effort very nearly depleted her again. Slipshod redoubled his efforts, siphoning off more of himself.

The changeling’s instincts wailed for him to stop what he was doing. Giving away all of this valuable, life-sustaining, power was the very antithesis of what it meant to be a ‘changeling’. Still he persisted. He wrestled his fear and terror to the ground and continued to give Twilight everything he had. Every fiber of his being pleaded with him to stop, but he knew that he couldn’t.

He wouldn’t.

What he was doing right now was tantamount to slitting his pasterns. He was allowing raw energy to flow freely from his body without regard for what would be left―if anything―when this was all over. He was transfusing his very life into Twilight Sparkle. It could kill him.

But...he owed the ponies on this ship that much.

How many times had Squelch ordered the DropShip and its crew into harm’s way―right into the line of fire―in order to recover him from the battlefield? How many times had the individual members of this crew risked their lives to save his? He’d never thought to count. More significantly though, the changeling suspected that...neither had they. Because friends didn’t keep ledgers about who owed who how many favors. No matter how unbalanced the scales might objectively be, a true friend wouldn’t hesitate to help again and again.

For years, Slipshod had pretty much exploited this fact. He’d capitalised on the ponies around him continuing to give and give, without expecting much of anything in return. And they had. Unflinchingly. When he’d thought that the only reason they’d been willing to do so was because they believed he’d been a pony like them, he could discount their altruism. He could rationalize it as ‘ponies helping ponies’, because that’s what ponies did. They’d obviously never do that sort of thing for him if they’d known he was actually a changeling.

And then...they had.

There’d been bumps along the way, sure. Nothing and nopony was perfect. But, for the most part, the ponies around him had demonstrated that, even though he was a changeling―a member of the race that had intentionally plunged the galaxy into turmoil―they were willing to risk everything to help him. Squelch had kept faith with him. Blood Chit had defended him. Xanadu had taken a hit meant for him.

Now, it was his turn to do something for them.

Another sharp depletion as Twilight resisted an assault by the attacking fighters. Another infusion by Slipshod. He was nearing his own limit now. There wasn’t much left for him to give. His instincts clawed at him, urging him to reverse the flow. Drain Twilight of all she had left and save himself. It was the nonsensical whim of a fearful mind of course. Twilight was the only thing keeping any of them alive right now. If he reversed the flow, they’d all die. If he stopped the flow, they’d all die.

The only chance any of them had was if he maintained the flow of energy into Twilight. In which case, he might die. Even if that happened, that didn’t necessarily mean that all of the others would be lost too. Not if he helped buy just enough time…

Slipshod felt himself growing weaker as he approached the last dregs of his own reserves. He was lying on the deck next to the other alicorn now, unable to support his body. His head felt heavy, and seemed to take a monumental effort to keep erect. If his horn lost contact with hers…

He threw his hooves around Twilight’s neck in an effort to anchor his horn to hers. To maintain the contact. He felt her resisting him now. She could sense his growing weakness, and understood what taking too much of her energy could mean for the changeling. He wouldn’t allow her to stop him though. Not until he knew his friends were safe. He wouldn’t let them all die because he was holding back, “take it...all…” He pleaded, the volume of his voice barely above a whisper.

A mare was saying something. Not Twilight. Doppler, he thought. He might have just been hearing things. It was getting hard to think; his mind was wandering. His efforts to give Twilight the last dregs of his reserves were stymied by his own failure to focus. He could feel himself losing consciousness, but he fought against it as hard as he could. She needed every last iota of that energy to keep his friends alive. He had to give it to her, even if it was the last thing he did.

The alicorn was still fighting him though. She was winning this time too. He didn’t have the strength―the magical power―to overcome her resistance any longer. Twilight was keeping him out; refusing to take those last little motes of energy that he had left. It was perhaps just as well, the changeling thought to himself. There wasn’t enough left to manifest the simplest of cantrips, let alone maintain the sort of defensive shield the ship needed to weather the attacks of those fighters.

He’d tried, at least. He hoped that the others understood that he’d tried…

Voices. There were more voices. Some he knew―he thought he did, at least―other he was convinced that he didn’t. The voices were very loud. There was an emotion behind them, but he couldn’t feel it anymore. He was too weak for even that much. Fear, most likely, the changeling figured. He was out of energy, Twilight was once more depleted as well. The Zathura and its crew were doomed. Fear made sense.

He was being moved now. He thought so anyway. It was difficult to tell. His body was numb, but something in his brain was still capable of perceiving his orientation, and it was changing. Either that or he’d actually just lost control of his sense of orientation. That happened when he got drunk sometimes. He’d close his eyes and feel like he was tumbling away from the world. So this could have just been one more sign that he was spiralling the drain towards death as his body ran out of the last vestiges of usable energy with which to sustain itself.

Please know I tried…

As last thoughts go, that hopefully wasn’t a bad one to have, the changeling hoped. Although, perhaps his musing about his ‘last thought’ actually counted as his ‘last thought’, now that he thought about it.

...Slipshod couldn’t tell if that last bit of near-nonsensical musing was further evidence of his impending demise or―no, his thoughts were actually feeling like they were getting clearer. Which was odd, given the state of his depleted…

His counter-intuitively increasing reserves of emotional energy!

Joy, elation, gratitude, was actively flowing into him! Slipshod learned the source soon enough as more of his senses started to return to him. Somepony was holding him. Somepony was kissing him! Awkwardly. The passion was there, but it was tinged with slight feelings of reservation. Beyond the direct infusion of all those positive emotions, the changeling began to sense much of the same from around the room. Along with a great deal of amusement as well.

He finally opened his eyes.

His view was taken up by the familiar sage visage of Squelch, who was holding him fast in an embrace, the likes of which he’d not received from her since long before their dvorce. Just past her, he could make out the holographic projection in the middle of the bridge. It showed their ship surrounded by a cloud of green triangles. Not a single crimson spec was visible. The enemy fighters were gone.

They were safe.

“If you don’t stop being Twilight right now,” the unicorn kissing him murmured around his lips, “I’m going to start strangling you.”

“And I’ll help,” another mare said from nearby, hiding her own veiled amusement beneath a faux-stern façade.

He didn’t exactly have a lot of energy stored back up just yet, but Slipshod was confident that he could spare what was needed to revert his form if it meant that he’d continue to receive more love and affection. The bridge crew, at least, seemed to be in quite the ‘giving’ mood at the moment. A ripple of jade fire erased the second violet alicorn from existence, leaving a thoroughly exhausted changeling in its place. One who quickly found himself the recipient of more kissing. These were also noticeably awkward, though for significantly different reasons.

Squelch pulled back slightly, smirking at the stallion, “no offense, but that shell of yours feels really weird.”

“I know, right?” Twilight added, “It’s like making out with a hoofball helmet!”

Slipshod rolled his eyes and was about to comment, but was interrupted by the sage unicorn nuzzling up against the side of his head, her hooves wrapping around his tight, “...thank you. You saved the ship.”

He hesitated for the briefest of moments. It felt unusual to him to be the direct recipient of so much gratitude. He almost wasn’t sure how to react. Obviously, of course, the proper response was to accept what was being offered. It still felt weird though. But a good ‘weird’.

Slipshod hugged her back, and was especially glad to find that he once more had the ability to do so. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that his energy reserves were at a level he was comfortable with; but they were certainly trending in that direction thanks to all of the positivity around him, “Well, you know,” he said, “I couldn’t let everypony die just yet. Especially you,” he felt the swell of gratitude from the unicorn. His face broke out in a grin as he went on, “Tomorrow’s ‘payday’, after all!”

The punch to his shoulder was well earned, and thankfully quite playful in nature, “Har har,” the mare affected a dry laugh as she pulled away from him once more, “Well, since you seem to be fine, some of us still have work to do,” she derided playfully as she stood back up and returned to her command chair.

“I like what you’re doing with your wings there, by the way,” she added as she took her seat, “It’s a good change; you should keep it.”

Slipshod frowned in confusion. He wasn’t doing anything with his...wings? The stallion peered at the transparent appendages in mild surprise. They were indeed significantly different from how he recalled them looking. Which shouldn’t have been the case. While he was certainly capable of making any part of himself look however he desired, he hadn’t intended to affect any sort of change in his appearance upon reverting out of Twilight’s form. He should have returned to his natural state.

In fact, he was trying to do so now. Nothing was happening though. It wasn’t due to a shortfall of energy either. He had enough now to change his form―more than enough to make simple alterations. However, there still wasn’t anything happening as he continued to try and assume his ‘default’ appearance. It was like his body now thought that these new wings were part of his natural form. Odd…

Slipshod lifted his hoof to rub his head in confusion, only to be drawn up short as he caught sight of the limb. It was a subtle thing. He almost hadn’t noticed it at all, attributing it to the bridge lighting. However, he’d been on the ship’s bridge many times, and had seen himself―even in his natural state―under many varieties of light. None of them had ever given his chitin a sheen like this. Again though, it was something that didn’t register as a deviation from how he was ‘supposed’ to look as a changeling.

Very odd, indeed.

He caught Twilight regarding him with more than passing interest, and was about to ask if she knew anything about what might be going on with him, but was interrupted as a mare’s voice came across the speakers, “Unidentified ship,” she began, sounding a little amused. This was not the same voice that had addressed them before, Slipshod noted. This pony didn’t sound quite so rigid, “now that the excitement has died down for the moment, perhaps you’d care to explain who you are, and how you came by my colonel and his battalion? I was also under the impression that the princess had been escorted out of the Sphere...”

“My name is Squelch, captain of the Zathura and commander of the Rayleigh’s Irregulars Mercenary Company,” the sage green unicorn mare began, “We managed to evacuate Colonel Citron and most of his unit from Kiso before they were overrun,” she paused for a brief moment before adding, “I regret to inform you that Captain Hollandaise and her crew were lost...trying to protect us.”

“She was a good mare,” there was a long pause, then, “I recognize your name. Should I assume that Princess Twilight was disinclined to wait out in the wings, so to speak?”

“You may,” it was the alicorn who spoke up now, “I believe that Flurry Heart and the Dragon Clans have...lost their way. They aren’t the League I remember. What they’re doing is wrong. I believe I―I believe we’ve,” she amended, glancing at Slipshod, “found a better way, but we’re going to need the help of the Disciples to do it.”

“...Well, I suppose that the least I can do for the ponies who’ve been gracious enough to help us is to hear out their request. Dock at Collar One. More fighters are launching from the planet. We need to depart quickly. Mayhem, out.”

“You heard the general, Aileron. Dock the ship,” Squelch ordered.

The Dropship turned around once more as it thrusted towards the Disciple vessel that had jumped into the system. It was not a Jump Ship, as Slipshod had been expecting. It was a WarShip. That shouldn’t have been too surprising, the changeling supposed. Cinder had come to fetch them on one as well the last time they’d sought refuge from ComSpark. Somehow though this vessel looked even more massive than the Rockhoof had.

As though reading his thoughts, Twilight answered his unasked question as she stood beside him looking out the viewport, “The Maelstrom. Discord’s flagship. It served as the base of operations for the Ninth Force Recon, allowing them to easily be deployed anywhere they were needed.”

“Discord’s gone,” the changeling reminded the alicorn, “So how did this ‘General Mayhem’ get her hooves on his ship?”

“I can’t wait to find out…”

Muted metallic ‘THUNK’s echoed through the deck as the DropShip was clamped to the WarShip’s mooring point, “Hard dock achieved,” the pegasus piloting the ship informed them.

“Confirmed hard dock,” the Disciple comm pony from earlier said over the speakers,“Jumping...now.”

In a flash of blinding white light, the two ships vanished from the Kiso System. When the flare subsided, and Slipshod finished blinking away the last of his disorientation, his jaw went slack. He’d expected to be looking out the viewport into a nearly identical field of stars. Jumps were limited to a range of about thirty lightyears. Little about the orientation of the stars and common constellations changed over such a comparatively short distance. To all but the most astronomically-versed creatures, nothing looked remarkably different between the departure and arrival point.

Usually.

This was unusual.

There were no stars. There wasn’t even any space―not as the changeling understood the concept anyway. Where there should have been black void and twinkling dots of light, there were only pink and magenta swirls of...something. Ether, perhaps. It certainly wasn’t a vacuous void. It was moving around too much. Could they be inside of a nebula, perhaps? That would have been the most logical explanation for their brightly colored surroundings. However, the changeling also knew that for a Jump Drive to work, both the origin and destination points had to be gravitationally neutral. That was why either star zenith and nadir points, or Lagrange Points, had to be used as entry and exit vectors.

A nebula wouldn’t have those things, unless there was some sort of proto-star nearby, but Slipshod couldn’t see one. Where they were made no sense.

“Crew of the Zathura,” Mayhem’s voice announced over the bridge speakers, “welcome to Havoc.”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 34: The Price of Glory

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 34: The Price of Glory

Cinder’s face was a mask of detached interest as she looked over the latest reports from their front lines. It wasn’t lost on her that she wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about the absolutely phenomenal rate the invasion was progressing as she arguably should have been. Her forces were cutting through the Harmony Sphere’s defenses like dragon fire through a cloud. Their losses were negligible―ninety percent of their own casualties were the result of common accidents rather than enemy action. Their victories were decisive. Their conquests swift.

This operation’s swift progression was a clear and concise validation of their warrior’s training and her own leadership in every conceivable way.

And she despised every moment of it.

This invasion was wrong. This loss of life could have been avoided. The deaths, the destruction―all of it―never had to happen. Twilight’s plan had been a workable one―a good one! They could have bypassed the innocent worlds of the Sphere and struck right at the heart of Chrysalis’ base of power: Equus. Everything could have been over in a single battle.

One fight, that was all that it would have taken. A confrontation where all of the casualties on the enemy’s side would have been changelings. No innocent ponies who were doing nothing more than defending their homes would have had to die.

Unfortunately, as high as her rank might have been, it wasn’t high enough to set policy for the Clans. She didn’t get to decide whether or not the invasion happened. Her duty was to see it carried out as ordered. All that she could do was guide her forces towards conducting the conquests as ethically as possible.

For all the good it was doing.

The cobalt dragoness’ clawed hands tensed, scratching up the ‘claw-resistant’ display screen of the data tablet clutched in her grasp. She managed to toss the offending tablet away before she actually snapped it in half―a fate its predecessor had suffered just the week prior―letting out a frustrated snarl.

Damn Smoke Jabberwock, the star admiral thought bitterly to herself, her gaze darting briefly back to the pad and the casualty reports that it was displaying.

Her directive for Clan Timberwolf was that an offer of surrender would always be extended to any force that they went up against prior to the start of actual combat. To her knowledge, each of her downtrace commanders were honoring that directive; however, the defending forces they encountered had yet to accept, always electing to fight instead. Hardly any even allowed themselves to be taken alive as prisoners, with ‘Steed pilots choosing to detonate their cores in an attempt to take one of their attackers out with them as they died. Combat vehicles and infantry often conducted some manner of suicide charge into Clan forces, leaving little option left but to defend themselves with lethal force.

In the depressingly few instances where a prisoner was able to be taken alive―usually as a result of being too gravely wounded to fight any longer, and also nearly impossible for Cinder’s medics to ultimately save―it was revealed that they’d heard stories of what became of ponies who surrendered to the dragon invaders. The allegations had sounded horrific to Cinder, and she’d made inquiries to track down the origin of such obviously fictitious rumors.

Only to discover that they had not been mere rumors. Nor had they been fictitious.

If there was a single mote of ‘good’ news, it was that the bulk of the atrocities seemed to be constrained to Smolder’s clan. Mostly.

Cinder had been utterly horrified at the findings. She had also been incensed that more of her commanders hadn’t been as appalled as she was. Those who had expressed anything even approaching condonation of what Smoke Jabberwock forces were doing on the worlds they took had found themselves transferred to non-combat related postings. She wanted her officers leading the troops into battle to not even give a moment’s thought towards such heinous acts.

Unfortunately, it seemed that that was about the extent of what she could do to mitigate the harm being inflicted on the Sphere. And while her current invasion commanders were, by all accounts, conducting themselves with integrity and treating any prisoners they took with decency, that didn’t change the overall reputation of the Clans in the eyes of the Sphere’s defenders. Nearly all of whom saw little distinction between the individual Clans. They didn’t consider that each one was largely autonomous, and so assumed that each followed similar conduct on the battlefield. As a result, they had been insistent on fighting to the death far more often than not no matter who they were actually up against.

Which led to repulsively high casualty rates for their forces even when combating the more benevolent Clans like Timberwolf, with most being wiped out to a pony. The reports of those rates inevitably made their way off world, further fueling the notion that all of the Dragon Clans weren’t in the habit of taking prisoners. Which further motivated the defenders on the next world to not even consider the possibility of surrendering; vowing to fight to the bitter end. Which, of course, only led them to become the next set of damning statistics.

It was a cycle of death that Cinder didn’t see a way to break. Especially not while there were units in Smoke Jabberwock which were actively validating the perceptions of the Harmony Sphere defenders.

Despite her best efforts, her forces had become just another meat grinder that ponies were dead set on throwing themselves into. And her ‘Steed pilots were only too happy to oblige, as they saw their kill counts soaring into the stratosphere. How could she blame them? Their job was to fight, and the ponies weren’t backing down.

She cradled her head in her claws, letting out a rattling breath as she fought to maintain her composure. She’d been sent here to free these ponies. That had been the mandate passed down to them by her parents when her father had smuggled what he could of the CLDF out of the Harmony Sphere. Their mission was to save the Sphere, not burn it to the ground themselves.

Where had it all gone so wrong? How had they managed to lose their way like this?

Was there even any way back?

Cinder didn’t know.

All she knew was that she had her orders: wrest control of the worlds of the Sphere from ComSpark’s grasp, planet by planet. She was doing all that she could to accomplish that mission while inflicting as little damage as possible, but it was clear to her that was going to be a near-futile endeavor. Still, she had to try, and she would continue to.

Even if it was hard to see what the actual benefit was of taking the worlds from the changelings, if so few of the pony inhabitants were being left alive and free,

However, no matter how much she might disagree with what was happening, she had sworn her loyalty to her Clan. She wouldn’t―she couldn’t―turn her back on them. They were her Clan, her family, and they had asked for her help. The dragoness could do no less than give it.

Devotion to your Clan.

Loyalty. An Element of Harmony. It was one of the guiding principles of their whole society. To buck any of those tenets was to rebuke the very core of her own being.

Which was why even the very thought that the galaxy might be better off if the Clans were ultimately defeated and driven out of the Sphere felt like bile in her mouth. Yet, at the same time...Cinder believed that she could bring herself to live with being defeated if an adversary capable of doing so eventually came along.

That day might even come before the casualty totals reached nine figures…

...She hoped.

Cinder drew in another ragged breath as she banished that traitorous thought. Smoke Jabberwock and their atrocities could be dealt with in the fullness of time. Chrysalis was the greater threat. Defeating her and ComSpark needed to be the focus, to the exclusion of all else.

She reached out and retrieved the data pad, quickly tabbing away from the casualty totals to the next set of reports: force deployments. The star admiral didn’t expect to see much here that would set her off like the previous collection of information had. Most of it had been rather mundane for the past couple of months. Her task force commanders already had well fleshed out lists of targets that they were to invade, and routes had been planned out well in advance.

In fact, so sure was the cobalt dragoness of her findings that she very nearly tabbed past the reports after giving them the briefest of glances. However, just before she did so, she caught sight of a notation attached to one of the otherwise unremarkable reports. It was a notice that a task force was diverting to a secondary target in lieu of a primary.

There were numerous reasons why something like this could have been the case. Supply considerations, outdated jump charts, or a plethora of other mundane occurrences that might require a commander on site to deviate from the established plan. That was why there even was a list of secondary invasion targets that could be substituted if the need arose.

A lot of those targets had been selected prior to the invasion commencing. Most with the understanding that they represented less well-defended worlds that a force could divert to if the commander wasn’t confident that they could succeed in capturing a better defended primary target. That way, the invasion could maintain momentum while reinforcements were dispatched to the understrength unit.

During initial planning, casualties for their forces during the invasion had been pessimistically projected, in an effort to avoid being unpleasantly surprised by any losses they might suffer. Of course, reality had demonstrated that even their most optimistic projections had apparently been grossly understated. No force commander had found a need to divert from the primary list.

Until now.

Cinder frowned as she pulled up the report in question and read through it. As she had assumed, this was not a decision that had been made because the commander had sustained too many losses to confidently take the next world on their assigned list of primary invasion targets. However, the star admiral was unable to find anything approaching a comprehensive explanation. The commander had simply cited: ‘Acting upon new intelligence’ as the motivation for making the change.

She pondered the note as she drummed her claws on the table pensively. Clan Timberwolf afforded even its junior commanders a great deal of autonomy in the field. Commanders were expected to utilize their best judgment when a situation changed, instead of allowing themselves to become bogged-down, always waiting on orders from higher echelons. It allowed Timberwolf forces to be flexible and adaptable. Cinder also trusted her commanders enough that she permitted them to make those changes without prior approval from her, and merely notify her of the changes.

Like had happened now.

It was a little curious to her that the commander in question hadn’t felt a need to elaborate on what the ‘intelligence’ was. Though there were any number of reasons why they might have declined to do so, including a desire to confirm their findings before submitting a comprehensive report.

Cinder made a note to follow up on the matter, and then tabbed to the logistics reports.

The sound of the door opening drew the attention of the entire flight control staff towards the new arrival. Of course, at the moment ‘the entire flight control staff’ consisted of just a single earth pony mare minding the room. Under normal operations, the number of flight controllers working here would have been closer to a dozen, both day and night. Not that anything in the region had been ‘normal’ for the past several months.

Since the start of the invasion by the forces of the Dragon Clans, the spaceport had seen quite the dramatic shift in traffic, in both directions. The mad flurry of activity as refugees from worlds that had fallen to the Clans. Lulls in traffic as the populace waited with baited breath to see who the next victims would be in the invasion. Another round of chaos as it became clear that Tilly would inevitably become the site of an invasion in the near future.

They were now soundly in the middle of another lull where spaceport traffic was concerned. Which meant that the staffing for the spaceport’s primary flight control tower had been reduced to only a single officer. It also meant that the room, which was normally a buzzing hive of chatter and activity, was deathly quiet. Thus the usually imperceptible sound of the door’s hydraulics pushing it aside were able to easily draw the gaze of the sole occupant towards the new arrival.

The lilac earth pony mare’s amber eyes widened in mild surprise as she saw a bored looking unicorn stallion magically wheeling in a mop and bucket. His steel gray coveralls immediately identified him as a member of the spaceport’s custodial staff. During normal operations, they too were in abundance around the facility both day and night. That was what made his arrival unusual to the mare: these were not ‘normal operations’. To the best of her knowledge, the entirety of the cleaning staff had been more or less dismissed. Those which hadn’t already long since fled the planet with their families anyway.

Yet, the stallion barely even paid the flight controller any attention as he stepped into the room, save for an initial nod in her direction that served little more purpose than to demonstrate that he acknowledged there was another pony in the room. Other than that, he seemed content to ignore her and focus exclusively on his bucket and mop. His head bobbed gently to the beat of whatever music was playing over a set of headphones that he was wearing.

For a brief moment, the mare considered asking what the stallion was even still doing in the spaceport. Again, she had been under the impression that they effectively no longer had a custodial staff. However, she ultimately thought better of asking the question. Presumably, nopony would know better about the spaceport’s custodial staffing levels than, well, the custodial staff. That stallion surely wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t supposed to. Chances were that, like herself, at least some members from every department had been retained to continue working.

If nothing else, he might even just be here because he had nowhere better to be.

Everypony with the means and opportunity to do so had pretty much already gotten themselves offworld. Few remained except for military personnel and essential staff. As well as those who were too poor or not well-connected enough to get off the planet. Most of those unfortunates were huddling at home with their loved ones. Those without any loved ones to speak of on the planet were doing what they could to occupy their minds. Such as going about their normal routines. Or as close to normal as the circumstances allowed, at any rate.

The mare could hardly blame this stallion for that, if that was the case here. She certainly wasn’t opposed to the company.

The flight controller felt herself unexpectedly stifling a yawn. She hadn’t even been feeling all that sleepy just a few minutes ago. It probably wasn’t tiredness so much as it was boredom.

The spaceport was seeing scant little traffic. Maybe―maybe―one DropShip would show up once a day or so. Usually a craft ferrying supplies around within the system as weapons and warfighting supplies were reorganized as various militia and planetary defense force commanders got around to submitting accurate inventory reports and not merely assuring their leadership structures that they had everything they were supposed to. Unsurprising to many familiar with how such things worked, the moment that news broke that there might be actual fighting in the near future, a lot of units suddenly―and quite unexpectedly, they promised―found themselves not being quite as topped up on material and ammunition as they had been regularly insisting they were for the past, well, forever.

Funnily enough, unit commanders were suddenly a lot less concerned about being punished for ‘losing’ equipment that they’d been made responsible for. Similarly, the powers that be in the higher echelons were also a lot less concerned about issuing reprimands or statements of charges for the misplaced supplies that were suddenly missing from inventories. Such things could be sorted out later. Provided any of them survived the imminent invasion by the Dragon Clans.

Judging from the few accounts that made it to other worlds, even ponies who surrendered to the Clans were more accurately classified as ‘victims’ than ‘POWs’, based on what became of them. Soldiers defending worlds attacked by clanners were―unofficially―encouraged to make sure they always kept a bullet reserved in their weapons for use on themselves if―when―defeat was imminent.

She yawned again, much to her own annoyance. Maybe some coffee would help to perk her up again…

The lilac earth pony flight controller felt herself jerk unexpectedly, as though she had just caught herself falling asleep in her chair. That was exceptionally odd. She’d only been on shift for a few hours, and had gotten what should have been more than enough sleep the night before. She shouldn’t be...the least bit...tired…

The unicorn stallion―who had never worked as a custodian a day in his life until an hour ago―watched as the lone flight controller slumped limply back in her chair, snoring softly. He ceased casting his lethargy spell and set about performing the job that he was actually here to do. One which didn’t involve mopping the floors with what―in retrospect―he was now pretty sure wasn’t actually floor cleaner. In his defense, the cleaning solutions in the closet hadn’t been very clearly labeled. The most defining characteristic of any of those bottles had been the color.

Perhaps he should have gone with the purple stuff instead?

He stepped over to a nearby console and began to access the spaceport’s flight logs. Once he’d made his way into the database that he wanted, he took out a portable drive and plugged it into the terminal. Almost immediately, a series of files uploaded into the system and began to dutifully insert themselves into the appropriate arrival and departure logs. The already crammed traffic control logs got a little bit more crowded as the better part of two dozen additional DropShip arrivals and departures were amended to the existing logs, along with their manifests.

None of those ships existed, of course. Nor did their cargos. However, over the past week, a team of agents which included himself had been hard at work across Tilly putting the pieces into place in order to create something of a ‘second exodus’ across the planet. Not an exodus of ponies, but of possessions. Records had been manipulated at just about every level to suggest that the planetary governor had put into place a plan to round up the world’s most valuable treasures and smuggle them offworld so that the encroaching Clan invaders wouldn’t be able to get their claws on them.

Such a deception would typically have been much more difficult to pull off, the unicorn knew. There were simply too many checks and balances―too many sets of eyes―to sustain a deception on this scale for very long. Under normal circumstances, all it would have taken was just checking one of the registries of the falsified DropShips against the ComSpark database, and anypony would instantly recognize it as a forgery.

Of course, with imminent doom on the horizon, hardly anypony on the planet was particularly worried about audits and record integrity reviews. Right about now, just about anypony could alter the official record to say whatever they wanted, and chances were extremely good that nopony would notice the discrepancies before the Clans invaded. And after the invasion, nopony would be around to care that a few official logs were wrong.

The Dragon Clans certainly weren’t going to notice anything odd about the falsified data. If anything, they were going to be incredibly intrigued by what it showed. Their instinctual greed and avarice was going to motivate them to not question it either. A dragon didn’t want to hear that a horde didn’t exist; only where it was located. If they interrogated any prisoners about it, the genuine claims of ignorance by the pony captives would probably only further convince them of how true the data was, otherwise the ponies wouldn’t be so determined to deny knowing anything about it!

A few prisoners would likely be tortured to death in order to get them to divulge further information about the nature of the treasures smuggled off world. The unicorn felt a little bad about that. Of course, it wasn’t like he bore any responsibility for these invasions in the first place. Heck, what he was doing right now was step one in the plan to stop the dragons from conquering any more of the Harmony Sphere than could be helped. He was part of one team of many, spread across dozens of worlds, planting the evidence needed to get the Dragon Clans to focus their advance towards a single goal:

Buckwheat.

‘The Vault of the Sphere’.

At least, that was what the Dragon Clans were going to believe the world was regarded as. To the best of the stallion’s knowledge, the world wasn’t particularly remarkable in any real way. It wasn’t a significant center of industry or commerce, or heavily trafficked, or even notably resource-rich. It was just...convenient. A world that lay mostly in the path of the advancing fleets of the four invading Clans. It wouldn’t be hardly any inconvenience whatsoever for each Clan to divert from their pre-planned invasion corridor to Buckwheat.

That was the purpose of the first phase: get all four Clans in one location with the bulk of their forces.

Step two was a little trickier, in that there was very little that he and the other Disciple agents operating in the Sphere could do directly. Mostly, they had to hope that ComSpark was still as capable at information gathering as they always had been and notice the shift in Clan activity on their own. They also had to notice it without really learning why the dragons were doing it. Obviously ComSpark would know that no vast stockpiles of wealth and treasure were being hoarded on Buckwheat. Learning that the dragons thought that too soon would likely prompt the changelings to start investigating what had led the Clans to believe such a preposterous thing. If they learned that the Disciples were behind it―a group that they knew to be the allies of the Dragon Clans―they’d almost certainly assume that Buckwheat was being set up as a trap for ComSpark, and not the Clans.

If the Clans took Buckwheat unopposed, and found no signs of any great hordes of treasure, it was highly unlikely they’d fall for any similar plot a second time. Which meant that it would be nearly impossible to get all four of the massive armies to converge again where they could be soundly defeated in a single battle.

So ComSpark had to notice that the Clans seemed to be unusually keen on taking Buckwheat, and that they were going to be launching a joint operation to do it. All without catching a whiff of Disciple involvement. Once they saw the opportunity that this provided, it should be a no-brainer that this represented a golden opportunity to stop the Clans dead in their tracks in a singular confrontation. ComSpark could take the lead in the defense, cripple the Dragon Clans, and cement themselves as the ‘Heroes of the Sphere’.

It was a golden opportunity.

Once the Clans were stopped, then they could finally begin preparations to launch the third phase of the plan.

The terminal beeped at the stallion, signaling that all files had been uploaded and sorted appropriately. The unicorn retrieved the drive and closed down the terminal. He then walked back over to his mop and bucket, and wandered out of the traffic control room. The mare continued to snooze at her station as the door closed behind him.

Victoria stirred, murmuring unintelligibly as her mind began to cross the foggy boundary between sleep and the waking world. She was hit almost immediately by a wave of annoyance as she sensed that something was amiss. Specifically, it was far cooler in the bed than it should have been. Her eyes still closed, the mare lethargically pawed at the far side of the bed, but found nothing more than the tangled remains of empty sheets that she was distinctly under the impression should have held a batpony.

The absence of the stallion in her bed spurred the ivory pegasus towards something approaching wakefulness. Her bold blue eyes fluttered open, and immediately confirmed the absence of her bedmate. The mare frowned and propped herself up in the bed, looking around the room for any sign of him. She let out a mildly annoyed sigh when she spotted Nacht Belle seated in front of her bedroom’s terminal. She immediately recognized that he was once more tinkering with the treaty that the two of them had been working at―sporadically―for the past two weeks.

Of course, whatever they wrote up here would naturally have to be passed through the diplomatic corps in both of their governments to ensure that all of the appropriately verbose legalese had been used. Lest they had accidentally agreed to cede all of the territories of both the Commonwealth and the Federation to the Our Worlds League somehow through a punctuation error.

“I assume there’s a good reason why that couldn’t have waited for a more reasonable hour than…” the mare glanced over at the time, “after sunrise, at least?”

The batpony glanced over his shoulder, smiling at the pegasus, “I was struck with inspiration during the night,” he remarked, “I think I found a way to reconcile integrating our existing legal systems into a unified court.”

Victoria stifled a yawn, drawing an amused smirk from her fiancé, “Sorry, that wasn’t because I was bored. I’m still tired,” the ivory mare assured him as she began to extract herself from the bed, “somepony kept me up most of the night.”

“To think that my sleep apnea might have continued to go undiagnosed without your help,” Nacht said, grinning at the mare as she walked up and nuzzled him, “I’ll be back to bed in a bit,” he assured her, “I just wanted to get this down while it was fresh in my mind.”

“I can appreciate that. Why don’t you tell me this brilliant idea of yours?” She purred as she snuggled up next to her beloved.

The batpony placed one of his leathery wings around her, giving the mare a peck on the cheek before turning back to the console to begin giving his explanation of the notion that had come to him during the night, “So, you know how we weren’t sure how to go about reconciling judge selections between our two realms? Well, I realized that we could solve the problem by just―”

The terminal beeped at the pair, interrupting the batpony. Both ponies glanced at the screen, and saw that the reason for the alert had been that a priority message had just been received by the palace. One that was addressed specifically to Nacht Belle. The stallion frowned as he regarded the notification, paying special attention to the listed sender of the message.

REGENCY COUNCIL of THE FEDERATED MOONS

It took only seconds for the batpony’s confusion to resolve itself. At which point Nacht Belle felt himself overcome with numbness. The main advisory body to the First Prince was the Privy Council, made up of the realm’s highest-ranking military advisors and the Federation’s cabinet ministers. It was only ever rebranded as the ‘Regency’ Council when transitioning between Princes.

The bat pony opened the message.

Nacht knew what it was going to say of course. Maybe not exactly the wording that would be used, or the specific circumstances that it was going to outline. But he was certainly aware of the ultimate purpose of the message: his brother was dead, and he was being summoned back to the Federation so that he could be officially crowned as the next First Prince.

His gaze passed stiffly over the words, taking them in as he made his way through the seemingly endless litany of prescribed formalities that protocol required of such high-ranking government correspondence. Finally he managed to make his way to the portion that he had been both seeking out, and dreading to read: the details of his brother’s death.

It was of surprisingly little comfort to the batpony to learn that it had been in battle, or that it had been the result of an act of heroic self-sacrifice in order to ensure the successful defense of the Federation world which was being attacked. Menulis had held off an enemy assault almost on his own, buying time for the defender’s lines to reform behind him after they’d been forced to fall back. By the time his brother’s Big Mac had fallen, the defending Federation troops were ready to counter-attack, and they apparently did so with ruthless efficiency, devastating the invading Highlander forces and driving them off the planet entirely.

He initially derided his brother’s actions. Instinctively, he lamented that Menulis hadn’t simply ordered others to hold back the hippogriff attackers so that he could fall back with the rest of his forces to help organize them. He’d have likely lived under those circumstances. Of course, Nacht knew that there wasn’t a single pilot among his brother’s units that could match him in skill, and so it would have taken several ‘Steed pilots to do what he had accomplished on his own.

Nacht wondered if he would have been able to order several of his subordinates to die for him. Obviously his brother had not. He’d shouldered the risk himself. Noble for an individual, perhaps. Reckless for a First Prince, to whom an entire nation looked for guidance and leadership.

Then the guilt hit him. His brother was dead, and all he could do was criticize Menulis’ valor? It wasn’t his brother who deserved Nacht’s scorn, but those pitiless hippogriff mercenaries and their Combine masters! His inaugural act as First Prince would be to launch a campaign of retribution against them. They’d pay in blood for what they’d done!

“Nacht?”

The word startled the stallion, who only now realized that Victoria had left the bed and made her way to his side. The inflection in the word made it clear that this was not her first attempt to get his attention. One of her wings draped themselves cautiously over his shoulders as the mare looked from him to the message on the terminal. Her touch seemed to bleed away some of his newfound anxiety. Not all of it, of course; but it helped some nonetheless. His own leathery wing lifted to touch hers in reciprocation.

“My visit’s going to be cut short, it seems,” he began, noting how stilted his words were coming out as he tried to rein in both his grief and his rage, “I’m needed back at the palace.

“For my coronation.”

He felt Victoria tense the moment that last word was out of his mouth. She recognized immediately what had happened. In the next moment, her other wing moved in as the pegasus mare enveloped him in a consoling embrace, “I’m so sorry…”

Nacht leaned in to her, relishing the touch of his lover. Not much else was said between them in the next minute. Not much was needed. Both had lost family in the past, and both knew well how abruptly the mantle of leadership could pass from one member of a House to the next. It was doubtful that there was a member of any noble house anywhere in the Sphere who wasn’t familiar with such things. They were a way of life.

“Should I come with you…?” the ivory mare asked finally, letting the offer hang in the air as an option if he needed it.

He wanted her to, but, “Best you not,” he finally said, reluctantly. “Too many might see the Archon of the Pony Commonwealth ‘chaperoning’ the Crown Prince of the Federation as meaning that I’m being ‘controlled’ by you. It certainly won’t help if they see that, and then immediately hear my proposal for a union between us,” his bitter tone made his displeasure at having to keep such petty politicking in mind clear, “It might undermine my legitimacy with some of the political factions back home.

“Nopony outside the Privy Council and the diplomatic corps even knows I’m here now,” he pointed out.

“Fair enough,” Victoria agreed, sounding equally as exasperated by the unavoidable machinations of The Great Game as her beloved was, “I’ll arrange for an envoy to depart around the time the Commonwealth can be expected to have ‘officially’ heard about your ascension. They’ll be able to work on getting the specifics of the alliance in place until enough time has passed to make announcing our betrothal seem ‘uncoerced’, or whatever.”

“Shouldn’t be more than a year, I hope.”

Neither was happy at the prospect, but the Archon didn’t voice an argument to the new timetable. Both already felt like they’d waited more than long enough at this point, and were champing at the bit to finally make things official regarding their relationship. Light had finally been visible at the end of the tunnel when Victoria had returned and claimed her throne from her uncle. No longer ‘playing dead’ in exile, it had looked like the pair could finally tie the knot under the guise of Nacht being served up to the Commonwealth as a political token for an alliance.

As was the common purpose of family members among Noble Houses.

Now, however, he had ceased to be a mere ‘member’ of House Belle. His brother’s death had propelled him to its head. An alliance through marriage with the Commonwealth was still on the table, yes, but announcing it in his position as First Prince too soon after his coronation would have political consequences, and raise many questions among the more cynical of the noble court. That sort of political instability on the precipice of a confrontation with the Clans―and perhaps ComSpark―was the last thing either of their realms needed.

And so that tin can had to be bucked down the road a little further. Again.

At times, Nacht felt like the universe itself was conspiring to keep them apart in perpetuity. It had become something of an inside joke for them, even, “So I’ll schedule the next postponement of our wedding for twelve months from now?” The pegasus asked, flashing the stallion a sardonic smile.

“Fourteen,” he countered, “it’ll take two months for me to get back home; so twelve months from my coronation.”

“Ah, of course. Fourteen months then,” she leaned in and kissed him deeply, purring softly when they parted, “Until the next galactic crisis pushes things back.”

“Obviously until then,” he agreed, grinning.

“Do you want some time alone?” She asked, gesturing towards the message.

Nacht clasped his wings firmly around the mare and shook his head, “No. This is exactly the kind of thing I need you to be a part of: my heartaches, as well as my joys,” he told her, placing his head against hers, “I’ll get through this better with you than without you.”

“In that case,” Victoria said, snuggling up to the batpony, “why don’t you tell me about him? I want to hear all about the brother-in-law I almost got to have…”

The string of epithets that echoed through the nearly empty ‘Steed Bay was significantly louder than the banging of metal that had preceded it, Blood Chit noted. The crimson pegasus glanced up at the Crystal Cavalier nestled in its stall. Most of the ablative plating had been removed from the heavy BattleSteed, leaving behind an emaciated-looking monstrosity of struts and myomer muscles. Like some sort of skinless metal goliath.

Standing bedside it was Twilight’s Rainbow Dash, which was in a similar state of disassembly. Both were surrounded by cranes and machinery that the technician crews used to aid them in the repair and refit of the company’s ‘Steeds. All of those pieces of equipment lay dormant at the moment though, because the crews that usually operated them were fast asleep in their temporary quarters aboard Havoc Station. The interim security chief would have been in his quarters asleep too; except that sleep wasn’t a thing that came easily these days.

To help with his newfound insomnia, the pegasus stallion had taken to walking around. However, walking aimlessly didn’t actually seem to work well on Havoc Station itself―too mundane, he supposed―and the station kept routing him into a lounge. So he’d instead sought out the Zathura and its more familiar corridors.

This had been something of a mixed blessing, as it turned out. While the DropShip didn’t morph its layout as he traversed it, he’d found himself experiencing sudden pangs every time he passed by the assigned quarters of a member of the crew who’d died during the raid he’d led on the hidden changeling HyperSpark Generator. No matter how many times others told him―or how many times he told himself―their deaths hadn’t been his fault, it was still difficult for Blood Chit to truly internalize that idea.

He’d led the mission. He’d made the plan and given the orders. How could he not be responsible for all those lost lives? The changelings may have pulled the triggers, but he’d walked his friends right into their gunsights in the first place.

The crimson stallion had been about to leave the ship, and its haunting reminders, when he’d heard noise coming from the ‘Steed Bay. It was somewhat comforting to know that he wasn’t the only one having issues sleeping.

“If I ever meet a descendent of the pony who designed this piece of shit,” a mare was snarling as she extracted herself from the Cavalier’s innards, idly rubbing at her gnarled horn, “I’ll slap them so hard the sheet’ll fly off their ancestor’s ghost!

“Fucking engineers never for one moment consider techs when they’re deciding where those bolts go,” the kirin continued to mutter as she noisily stomped across the gantry to fetch another tool from an open cabinet before stomping back towards the ‘Steed, “Now I have to take apart half the fucking frame just to get at one fucking melted wiring harness because they buried the retaining bolts so far up their own asses…” The rest of her annoyed tirade became too muffled to make out as the chief technician crawled back inside the BattleSteed.

Blood Chit couldn’t keep his lips from spreading into an amused little smile as he witnessed the first little smidge of normalcy that he’d seen in a long while: Mig working on a ‘Steed. He fluttered up to the gantry and landed just in time to have to dodge an impact ratchet that went hurtling his way.

“Fuck crystal ponies and their fucking Imperial measurement system!” Came a shout from within the dark interior of the Cavalier, “Why couldn’t they have used metric like everypony else in the galaxy?! If I strip another bolt because eleven is too small and twelve has too much fucking play, I’m just going to tear this whole thing down and rebuild it with proper bolts,” the mare snarled as she once more poked her head out into the light of the ‘Steed Bay.

The kirin stopped up short when she finally noticed that she wasn’t alone in the Bay, “...Oh. Hey.”

“Hey.”

Blood Chit felt his throat grow a little dry all of a sudden. It had been a subtle thing, but the stallion had heard the faint note of strain in the technician’s voice, and he could see her eyes dart away from him briefly. The two of them hadn’t had a proper conversation since he’d returned from the raid. In fact, the last time the two of them had spoken at any length, had been when he’d gone to collect Tig for the mission.

He’d promised the rosy mare that he’d look after her sister and bring her back safe and sound.

The silence that hovered between them now felt like it lasted an eternity. What exactly was either of them supposed to say to the other? Anything that Blood Chit could think to say in the moment felt incredibly forced and contrived; and yet the growing length of the silence extending between them only served to make him even more anxious. He had to say something, even if it wasn’t particularly enlightening.

“Working on a ‘Steed, huh?”

The stallion mentally facehoofed. Frantically, he strove to recover some semblance of tact by expounding further on what could only charitably be looked upon as a ‘thought’, so that he didn’t come off like a complete idiot, “―Alone, I mean. I thought you had a whole team to help you with that?”

“They’re on the station,” Mig explained, still appearing to have trouble looking the pegasus in the eye, “It’s been a while since they got some leave.”

“Same with my team,” Blood Chit managed to say in a far more natural tone, as he found their conversation shift to a topic that he could actually contribute to, “We’ve been pulling double shifts since―” the crimson flier’s words caught in his throat, and he could only bring himself to say, “...we found our team short-hooved.”

He still winced slightly. Mig’s hoof rubbed uncomfortably at her leg. Somehow, trying to phrase things more ‘delicately’ had actually made Blood Chit feel worse. It was almost like he’d cheapened what happened to those ponies on his mission. Like their deaths didn’t matter beyond what they’d done to the security department’s staffing roster. The reality couldn’t have been farther from the truth; yet it was still difficult for the pegasus to just outright say: ‘―since seventeen ponies died.’

“That…” Blood Chit struggled for the words, but kept finding himself coming up short, “Mig, that wasn’t how I meant…

“I really suck at this. I’m sorry.”

More uncomfortable silence.

When Blood Chit felt like he couldn’t stand it anymore, the pegasus decided that retreat was the better part of valor, and gave up on fumbling this conversation even further. He turned and spread his wings to fly away and resume his walk someplace else. However, Mig’s words stopped him, “Did you know this was Tig’s favorite ‘Steed?”

He turned his head back to look at the rose-hued kirin, and found her gaze locked on the partially dismantled BattleSteed. The faintest ghost of a smile was trying to form on her face as she talked about her twin, “Not just on the ship. Like, if Tig could work on one ‘Steed, out of every model they ever built, it would be a Crystal Cavalier.

“It’s not because they’re particularly amazing, from a technical standpoint―not in my opinion anyway―it’s because Tig was fascinated by more than just the mechanics of a BattleSteed,” the kirin tech continued, talking to Blood Chit while only barely seeming to acknowledge he was even there. She mostly just wanted to talk about her sister; and needed somepony else there to hear how amazing Tig really was, “She saw these things as physical manifestations of history itself. They’re like interactive museums, almost. To her, at least.

“She loved reading about their histories. About the company that built it, the lead engineer who designed it, the little stories about why certain choices were made one way or the other; things like that. For her, they were an insight into a completely different time and way of thinking.

“Take the Cavalier, for example; and I don’t mean the six-bee variant, or even the six model. I’m talking about the OG ‘CY-CVL’―before they thought they’d even need to slip model numbers in there. That model was completely unarmed.” She finally broke her stare with the ‘Steed to look at Blood Chit now, gaging his reaction to the revelation; and the pegasus did have to admit that he was genuinely surprised by it. The idea of a BattleSteed carrying no weapons was an absurd concept to the stallion, “They were armored all to Tartarus―to the point that they carried more plating than even a Big Mac―but not so much as a single machine gun.

“The idea was supposed to be that they’d fight like pre-League crystal knights from thousands of years ago or whatever: charge at the enemy and hit them with their big, pointy, lance,” she waved her hoof at the dismantled weapon laying on the deck at the ‘Steed’s hooves, sniggering at the absurdity of the notion that battles might have been fought like that.

“It’s obviously stupid sounding to us now, but it actually made sense to those engineers that that was how ‘Steeds would fight, because that was how their flesh and blood soldiers still fought! Weapons tech lagged so far behind everything else back then, because it hadn’t been needed for hundreds of years. All of Equus had been united as a singular coalition of species for centuries, so armies didn’t exist anymore.

“We were flying through the stars in massive spaceships colonizing worlds...and the most powerful weapon a guard pony carried was still a spear,” Mig was shaking her head, chortling mirthfully. Blood Chit likewise was chuckling at the anachronistic image such a thought produced in his own head.

“...And that’s what this ‘Steed represents: an insight into that simpler―maybe more naïve―time in our history, where we’d never thought about fighting. Not with each other, or anycreature else.” The mare’s features darkened now, and her smile melted away, “At least, that’s how Tig explained it to me once. Me? I don’t feel quite that way about it. When I look at this Cavalier, I just see the engineering, the technical hurdles that had to be overcome, and even the design flaws that were either overlooked at the time or just accepted for the sake of meeting a design deadline. No matter how long or hard I look at one of these things, it’s just technology to me.

“To her, they were art. And I miss being able to see them through her eyes that way.”

There was another silence, but this time Blood Chit did have some idea of what to say, “I miss her too. I miss all of them.”

Mig was once more idly rubbing her leg, “...I didn’t know a lot of the other ponies on the mission that well,” the kirin admitted softly, “The security details were always just sort of...there, you know? They sort of blended into the structure of the ship, if that makes any sense? After a while, I even stopped really ‘seeing’ them.

“I hate the way that makes me sound,” Mig said, cringing deeply.

“Nah, you’re good,” the pegasus assured her, even finding some way to manage a warm smile for the mare, “That’s just sort of how things got for ponies in jobs like that: security, janitorial, food service. We’re used to being just sort of a uniform that ‘exists’ in the moment, and then gets forgotten about the moment we’re out of sight. It doesn’t make you a bad pony.”

“You knew them though, didn’t you?”

Blood Chit swallowed back a lump in his throat, but his words still came out a little more hoarse than he would have liked, “I did. I knew them.”

“Well?” She asked. The stallion nodded silently.

“I don’t think I recognized a single other name on the list of the dead, other than my sister and the tech I sent with her,” Mig admitted somberly, “and I barely interacted with that tech off-duty. I don’t…” she hesitated, letting out a resigned sigh, “I don’t think I like that about myself.

“It just...never really felt like it mattered if I got to know the ponies on this ship or not, you know? Tig and I weren’t here because we loved the mercenary life, or needed the money, or anything like that. We didn’t feel like we needed to get to know anypony here, because this wasn’t going to be a long-term thing,” Mig admitted, “All of this was just to piss off our mother. Once we’d made our point, we were going to go back home,” that last bit was said with a note of bitter ruefulness as she flashed the stallion with a mirthless smirk.

“Nopony was supposed to get hurt.

“But now we’re involved in something that is way above our heads…” another pause, this one mixed with a worried look on the kirin’s face, “and I haven’t heard from my family in months.”

Blood Chit’s expression had grown more sober as well as the mare spoke, “I haven’t heard anything from Chanterelle since PEA-02-UX,” he informed her, unable to keep the worried tone from coloring his words, “I know we were promised that the Disciples―or Clans, or whatever―were going to get them out of the Sphere so they’d be safe from the changelings...but now that we’re also kind of going against them too?” He shrugged helplessly, almost feeling overwhelmed by his inability to do anything about the situation.

“He’s probably not safe no matter who has him,” the crimson stallion acknowledged, “and I have no idea when I’ll see him again,” Blood Chit couldn’t bring himself to say ‘if’ he’d see his coltfriend again, even though he couldn’t help but think it in the back of his mind.

“All I can do,” the pegasus affirmed, taking a breath and doing his best to favor the kirin mechanic with a reassuring smile, “is keep moving forward and trust that I’ll see him again someday, safe and sound; and that we’ll be able to build or life together like we planned.

“That’s all any of us can do: keep moving forward, and trust that things will eventually get better.”

“Presumably because they can’t get much worse,” Mig retorted softly. The pair were quiet for several long seconds, then, “Do you really think any of us are going to make it through this? Honestly?”

“The way I see it: if I give up, then I’m definitely not going to get my happily ever after,” Blood Chit said, somehow managing to affect a positive outlook in spite of his own fears. Only an idiot wouldn’t have been acutely aware of how heavily the deck was stacked against them right now. They were signing on with an under-equipped faction in order to go up against two of the most powerful forces that the galaxy had ever seen. There were going to be more bodies before this was all over; of that much the stallion had no doubt.

He also couldn’t bring himself to guess at which of his friends and shipmates wouldn’t be there at the end. So he actively chose to believe that they all would be. As would their friends and families back in the Sphere. It was the only way he knew to keep the fear and dread from crushing his spirit entirely.

“I guess you’re right,” the rosy mare acknowledged. Her gaze drifted back to the Crystal Cavalier, “I don’t know what a ‘happily ever after’ looks like for me right now though. I sort of always assumed that Tig and I would have time to figure out what it would be. Never gave it much thought. Never had to.

“One day we would just go back to the Confederation and become ‘proper heiresses’ for our House. Never occurred to us that might not be something that happens,” she sighed, “Didn’t bother coming up with a ‘Plan B’.”

“You may not have to,” Blood Chit said, “If everything works out, you’ll probably still be able to go back home and pick up your life where you left off,” he assured her.

“I hope you’re right,” the rosy kirin sighed, rubbing the back of her head fretfully. Finally she managed to muster up something resembling a smile, looking thankfully in Blood Chit’s direction, “Thanks for that, Chit. I appreciate you coming by. I should get back to work though,” Mig said, looking around for the impact driver that she’d thrown in her earlier fit.

“Could you use a hoof?” The stallion offered.

“You know how to rebuild ‘Steeds?”

“Not even a little bit,” he said with a broad smile, “but I can hold a flashlight with the best of them!”

Chapter 35: Mercenary's Star

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Chapter 36: Binding Force

“I don’t suppose the expression, ‘if something seems too good to be true, it probably is’ existed in your time; did it, Your Highness?”

The Once and Current Princess of what might one day become the Second Celestia League looked away from the video feed on the monitor in order to briefly scowl at the commanding general of her recently acquired military. Not that any of what was currently bothering the alicorn was in any way Mayhem’s fault, of course. Twilight instantly regretted taking out even that tiny amount of her frustrations on the fuschia unicorn mare, but it was getting difficult for her to keep herself fully composed after the events of the last few hours.

Mostly because Twilight had a distinct loathing for being led around by her nose in order to accomplish somepony else’s objectives. Or, as this specific case might be: somehippogriff’s. Perhaps what annoyed her even more was that all of General Triton’s scheming appeared to be having the effect of making Twilight’s goals easier to accomplish!

It wasn’t that she loathed somecreature being helpful―far from it! However, she at least would have preferred to have some amount of say as to the quantity and quality of the ‘help’ being provided.

“I’ll admit that the general has been a lot more conniving than I might have expected, based on his dossier,” there was another brief aside glance at the unicorn at the mention of the intelligence which Mayhem’s agents had gathered on the hippogriff they now had in their custody, “But the fact remains that he seems to be cooperating with us.”

“The ‘seems to be’ part is what concerns me,” Mayhem grumbled as she too looked back at the monitor. The unicorn mare chose to overlook the slight against her operative’s intelligence efforts where Triton’s personality was concerned. The fact was that those reports were considerably out of date, seeing as how the Red Reiver commander had ceased to be a significant concern regarding their Harmony Sphere operations for some time. Who was to say what ruling over a band of marauders did to a creature’s temperament?

“I don’t suppose you’re getting any Pinkie Senses about him?”

Mayhem shook her head, “It doesn’t quite work that way, Your Highness,” she said, “All I can tell you for sure is that he probably won’t kill us all in the next thirty seconds,” the mare flashed a lopsided smile at the alicorn.

“Good to know,” Twilight replied in a droll tone. The purple princess took a deep breath and sighed, “Then I guess it’s going to be up to our resident changeling to figure out what’s going on.”

As though on cue, the display screen showed that a second figure had entered the small interrogation room. The amber hued earth pony stallion stepped over and took a seat opposite the hippogriff and began speaking…

“―eetings, my name is Commander Slipshod,” the stallion began in an even tone, his gave locked on the older hippogriff sitting unconcerned on the other side of the table, “I’ll be conducting your debriefing.”

General Triton snorted derisively, “Don’t tack it up, boy. You can call it a ‘torture session’. I’m a big ‘griff; I can handle it.”

Slipshod kept his expression passive as he digested the response, and compared it against what the hippogriff Reiver wasn’t saying. While the bluster might suggest that the―now former―general wasn’t concerned about the process or outcome of the interview, the changeling was acutely aware of Triton’s deeper feelings of apprehension. Despite whatever his features were showing, the hippogriff was feeling the next best thing to terror, deep down. The fact that those darker emotions contained hints of attachment and even love suggested that Triton was afraid for somecreature besides himself.

However, the changeling also noted that those fears of Triton’s weren’t being directed in his direction. He genuinely wasn’t particularly worried about what Slipshod might do to him. He was mindful of what might happen to those he cared about as the result of somecreature else’s actions. The question there was whether he was worried about what other Reivers might do to his loved ones, or…

Slipshod played a hunch, “Neither General Mayhem or Princess Twilight permit tortute aboard the Maelstrom,” he assured the hippogriff.

As he’d suspected, there was a marked ratcheting up of those suppressed fears at the mention of the WarShip. Though it was quickly tamped down and none of it showed outwardly on his beaked face. Slipshod filed the observation away to be added later in his report to the princess and moved on to the questions that he’d prepared for the interview, “Using a remoted ‘Steed for a duel is pretty dirty,” He said aloud, “Probably right up a pirate’s alley though,” Slipshod amended with a shrug.

He felt Triton’s ire raise at the insinuation that he’d intended to cheat in what was supposed to be an otherwise honorable fight, but once more the hippogriff made an effort to keep any outward appearances of those feelings suppressed, saying only, “It was insurance; and not against your princess.”

“Right,” Slipshod nodded, “You were trying to bait your lieutenants. It’s clear that you surrounded yourself with quality officers…” The golden stallion didn’t bother hiding the biting sarcasm in his tone, as he was once more trying to provoke another reaction from the hippogriff.

Triton chose to take the bait, glaring at the pony sitting across from him, “They were decent at their jobs,” he defended stiffly, “It’s hard enough to find competent ‘Steed pilots out in the Periphery as it is, let alone ones who can think tactically enough to be leaders. As long as I kept the money coming in, they stayed loyal enough.”

Slipshod could taste the resentment. Not directed at him, or the question, though. Instead, the general seemed to be taking exception to himself, or at least the situation that he was in. Hardly surprising, the changeling supposed. The general’s prior vocation in the Combine’s own military would have seen him surrounded by more patriotic-minded souls. Pilots who were fighting for more than just money. Where the only backstabbing that he’d have to concern himself with was of the political kind in order to secure promotions or transfers to more desirable postings.

Such Harmony Sphere machinations were rarely lethal though, just inconvenient. Meanwhile, infighting among raiders and bandits could easily turn deadly where wrestling for control of a group was concerned. As had been the case earlier that day.

“How much resistance to Princess Twilight’s assumption of control do you anticipate from the rank and file of the Reivers?” Slipshod asked.

“That’s going to depend on your princess,” Triton responded grimly, leveling his gaze at the stallion, “A lot of them won’t care who they’re fighting for―or against―so long as they and their families are comfortable. They’re loyalties are pretty malleable like that. However, if she tries to take too much away from them, they’ll fight back.”

Slipshod kept his features impassive as he made a notation on his datapad. To the hippogriff, it likely seemed as though he was jotting down the general’s response. In a way, he was. Though what he was recording was actually Triton’s feelings of fear at the thought of how many might die in the efforts to subdue any sort of general resistance to Twilight’s control over the raiders.

“Would you be willing to produce a list of Reiver ‘Steed pilots who participated in the slaughter of civilians?”

“...That’s going to be a long list,” The hippogriff replied soberly.

“Is your name going to be on it?”

There was a moment of hesitation as a knot of fear formed in the general’s gut. He suppressed it quickly though, and then replied with a soft, “Yes.”

The changeling regarded the Reiver for a few seconds, taking a thorough read on the hippogriff’s emotional state. He was obviously concerned about the likely consequences he might face as a result of his admission, yes; but just beneath that fear was a thin veneer of regret. Not for his answer, but for the deaths. Nor did Slipshod get the feeling that Triton was feeling remorse for killing any specific creatures directly. It was a more generalized guilt than that.

He was holding himself responsible for the deaths that had resulted from the actions of other Reivers, as they had clearly been acting on his orders.

There was a brief internal struggle within the ‘griff as denial tried to do battle with that remorse; but his guilt won out in the end. The general had clearly been struggling for a long while with trying to justify his actions, and the broader actions of the Red Reivers, for a while now; but he kept circling back to the same conclusion: the civilian casualties were ultimately his responsibility, whatever facade he might try to hide them behind in order to escape culpability.

Slipshod made a note of this too. It was a pressure point that could be used to convince Triton to support them: offering him an opportunity to demonstrate contrition for the death’s he was holding himself responsible for, and perhaps achieve some measure of penance.

“Let’s move on to materials,” the earth pony said, sounding as though he was changing tacks, “How many ‘Steeds, approximately, do the Reivers have in operation…”

Several hours later, Slipshod was sitting in the small conference room aboard the Maelstrom with Twilight, Mayhem, and Squelch in attendance. The room in question was intended for the commanding admiral of whatever fleet that the WarShip was leading to be able to confer with her staff officers during various mission planning meetings. To that end, it was mostly serving in its intended capacity as the changeling―no longer wearing his pony disguise―delivered his findings after completing his interview with Triton.

“He’s terrified,” Slipshod began, his chitinous lips pulled taught in a frown, “And he’ll do whatever he thinks he has to to keep you happy,” He informed the purple alicorn sitting across the table from him. The changeling slid his datapad towards her, which was quickly enveloped in Twilight’s telekinesis, “This is a list of every Reiver that has had a hoof in the slaughter of civilians.”

The alicorn princess regarded the―soberingly long―list of names, saying nothing at the moment.

Mayhem spoke up though, “No doubt it’s a list of more of his opponents,” the fuschia unicorn grunted.

“His own name’s on it,” Twilight said, passing the tablet to the Disciple general, who took it in her own magic as her features twisted with surprise. The alicorn resumed looking at Slipshod, gesturing for him to continue his report.

“He acknowledges his responsibility in those deaths. He regrets them, after a fashion,” The changeling explained, “But has consistently tried to convince himself that it’s just ‘the price of doing business’.”

“There’s a difference between accidental collateral damage and what happened on Capensis,” Squelch pointed out, an edge in her voice. The mercenary commander was no stranger to the concept of non-combatant casualties. Every contract that they took as the aggressor had the potential to lead to civilian deaths, no matter what precautions they might take to prevent them. That was one thing.

However, she was also well aware that there were mercenary groups out there which actively encouraged their pilots to cause as much wanton destruction of a given target area as possible, with the intent of ‘sending a message’ on behalf of their employer. Whether such a message was specifically requested or not. Squelch was of the mind that there was no regard low enough in which she could hold such organizations.

She had routinely stressed to the pilots under her employ that outright seeking to kill civilians was a non-negotiable cause for immediate termination. She couldn’t ‘blacklist’ such individuals within the Mercenary Review Board; not in her own capacity anyway. However, she could keep track of what contracts such pilots were taking with their new employers, and leak their identities to the personnel of any facility that they were stationed at who might have known one of the pilot’s previous victims.

Showers could be slippery places. Ponies feel and hit their heads on occasion. Sometimes even with lethal results. Such things happened, and who was to say really how many times their head had been struck was a ‘reasonable’ number where ‘falling’ in a shower was concerned?

Slipshod nodded in agreement, “And he knows that deep down.”

“So why allow it to happen?” Mayhem challenged, putting the pad down.

“It’s not so much a question of ‘allowing’ it; and more a matter of not being in a strong enough position to stop it―at least in his mind,” The changeling explained, “The Red Reivers aren’t a professional organization, like a standing army―or even a mercenary outfit. Their command structure is a lot more...fluid,” he said with a wave of his hoof.

“He’s their leader only so long as the Reivers keep bringing in plenty of wealth and avoid taking unacceptable losses,” He paused briefly and sighed, “And so long as the majority of the pilots are enjoying their time in the Reivers.

“If they aren’t enjoying themselves, they don’t exactly tender their resignation. At least, not with a written notice,” He flashed a wry smirk at the other mares.

“In his defense―such as there is of it―Triton’s foremost desire is for the worlds they’re preying upon to pay the ‘protection fees’ the Reivers demand of them. He, personally, would rather not have to conduct ‘reprisal raids’,” The changeling sensed and headed off the objection that Mayhem was about to raise as the unicorn opened her mouth, “And he does have to,” he informed her, “or he’ll lose the confidence of the other Reivers and risk getting deposed. Then somecreature else more bloodthirsty than he is might come into the picture.”

“He sees himself as the ‘lesser evil’,” Twilight concluded.

“For the most part.”

“Is he?”

Slipshod shrugged and shook his head, “That I can’t say for certain; not without interviewing any of the remaining likely contenders among the Reiver leadership that might end up taking his place if he was removed. He certainly believes he is though. And if those three pilots who attacked us after the duel are any indication, he very well may be,” He saw the alicorn nod in acceptance of the answer.

“Can we trust him to trot the line if we leave him in charge?” Mayhem asked, sounding doubtful.

“So long as the Maelstrom’s in orbit, Triton will do whatever we tell him,” Slipshod said, “Like I told you: he’s terrified. He knows what a WarShip like this one can do to a planet’s population, and there are creatures down there that he genuinely cares about. Likely a family of some sort. He’ll do whatever he has to to keep them alive.”

Twilight was grimacing now, and the changeling could feel the disappointment emanating from the purple mare, “Not exactly the kind of ‘Loyalty’ I’d hoped for,” The alicorn muttered.

“You’re not going to receive better from murderers like the Reivers,” Mayhem pointed out, drawing an annoyed look from her monarch, though it was short-lived as Twilight was forced to concede the point.

“Still,” the alicorn princess said, “At the end of the day, obedience gained at the point of a spear only goes as far as the spear does; and the Maelstrom can’t stay parked in orbit of Peregrine forever. Besides, I’d never actually order such a thing in the first place,” she admitted.

“I don’t want the creatures following me doing so under false pretences. Especially when that pretence is fear,” Twilight’s features twisted in disgust at the very thought, “I won’t to sink to Chrysalis’ level in order to defeat her.”

“It could be our only option, Your Highness” General Mayhem cautioned her new monarch, “You were right that it’s not enough for us to take their DropShips; the Disciples don’t have enough experienced ship crews to operate them. We’re going to need Reivers to work for us; and we need them to cooperate long enough to complete the mission.

“Holding their families hostage would accomplish that.”

“No,” Twilight snapped, glaring now at the fuschia mare, “I refuse to go that route. Any Reiver working with us has to be doing so voluntarily.”

“Good luck getting ‘volunteers’ while you’ve got the Maelstrom,” Squelch chimed in again, drawing the attention of the other two mares, “Like Slips said: Triton’s already feeling coerced, and you haven’t even explicitly told him that he’s being pressed into your service. If you send him off to get you some Reivers to crew those DropShips, I can guarantee you that they’re also going to be operating under the assumption that the lives of their families are in balance, whether you come out and say it or not.”

“The whole reason for bringing the Maelstrom in the first place was to basically scare the Reivers into surrendering,” Mayhem reminded the princess, “Well, mission accomplished: they’re scared. However much you might want to, it’s not going to be easy to convince anycreature down there that this WarShip was just ‘for show’; especially after we also demonstrated what just a few shots from our autocannons can do to a surface target.”

Slipshod watched the purple alicorn’s head fall into her hooves as she was forced to recognized the truth of the general’s words; internally bemoaning how her efforts of avoid the excessive bloodshed of an outright conquest had also managed to undermine her desire for untainted cooperation from the locals. She resented even more that there was likely nothing that she could do about it in the immediate future. Nor was it likely that she could undo the damage that she’d done in a timely enough fashion to matter.

While their backs weren’t up against the wall quite yet where the timetable for their objective was concerned, they also didn’t exactly have the luxury of spending the next several months rehabilitating the Reivers. Not if they wanted to be able to move ahead on the hocks of the battle between ComSpark and the Clans that was growing ever more imminent.

Which meant that Twilight’s only options were to accept that any Reiver assistance would be coerced, or to try and find another source of experienced personnel to crew the DropShips. A process that could end up taking a considerable amount of time, which they didn’t have an abundance of.

Slipshod wondered how much the alicorn was willing to put at risk for the sake of adhering to those Elements of hers. From the feeling that he was getting from her, Twilight was currently debating the exact same thing.

Finally, Twilight let out an exasperated sigh, rubbing her temple with one of her hooves, “Let’s end the meeting for the day,” the purple mare said in a defeated tone, “I...need to think about some things.”

“What do you want us to do with Triton?” Mayhem asked.

The princess thought for a moment before finally saying, “Keep him on the ship for now. I’ll probably want to speak with him later.

“I’ll let you all know when I’ve decided what we’re going to do next.”

By the time Slipshod returned to the cabin aboard the Zathura, Squelch was already hunched over the small desk, peering intently at the display screen of her terminal. The sage green unicorn didn’t look up at the sound of the door opening, but she did acknowledge his return by lifting the empty coffee mug sitting beside her with her magic and extending it out towards him. Slipshod wordlessly levitated the full carafe that he’d been carrying and topped off the offered mug, which then floated back over to Squelch, who took a generous sip of the liquid.

The changeling set the carafe on the nightstand before proceeding further into the cabin towards the small private washroom on the far side. At times, Slipshod was still beset with feelings of bemusement at how seamlessly the pair of them had managed to slip back into their old routine from before the divorce. They’d been nominally estranged for over a year, but the last couple of months left him feeling a little like that had all been some sort of awkward dream. Like their time apart hadn’t been real.

Part of that was doubtlessly because their separation had largely been ‘nominal’. He and Squelch had continued to see each other almost daily, working closely together like they’d always had. All that had really changed between the two of them had been their living arrangements, and the fact that they exchanged a few more verbal barbs than usual. Other than that, the pair had maintained a pretty close working relationship for the most part.

Which meant that all that ‘getting back together’ had entailed was his moving back into her cabin.

The changeling stepped into the cramped shower stall and turned on the water. Magically heated warm water immediately began to cascade over his carapace. He glanced over to the tiny cubby containing mostly fur conditioners and levitated over a small bottle of what was essentially detergent.

Slipshod didn’t possess fur in his natural state, and so there wasn’t much point in using typical shampoos designed to tend to it. He didn’t sweat, and his chitin didn’t secrete any sort of oils that needed to be washed away. It was enough to simply apply a light cleaning detergent to help rinse away dirt and dust; not unlike what was used to clean most of the ship’s inorganic surfaces. He did at least go with one which had a pleasant scent though.

He paused briefly while washing one of his forelegs to observe his carapace. If there was one thing that he was still getting used to, it was the shift in color that he’d seemed to go through since their escape from Kiso. His carapace had used to be a dark matte gray. Now it was an almost luminescent deep jade. More puzzling was that, despite his attempts to do so, he wasn’t able to forcibly transform himself into his old appearance either. He could still effortlessly change his shape into any other creature or race...except for that of a changeling.

He’d confronted Twilight with the conundrum, and had been informed―much to his surprise―that the reason that he was no longer able to take on the appearance of his old self was because the form that he’d associated with being a ‘true’ changeling was actually a corrupted version of a changeling brought about by their transformation magic being contaminated with pilfered―and thus tainted―love. Changelings weren’t supposed to look like that at all; and had only done so because of using tainted magic.

Essentially: every changeling was casting their shapeshifting spell ‘wrong’ when they assumed their ‘real’ form.

Which meant that, in order to look like his old self, Slipshod would have to find a way to deliberately screw up the transformation; likely through trying to power it with stolen love as had always been done before.

For better or worse, the more genuine love that Slipshod was exposed to, the less like his old self―and the more like a truly Reformed Changeling―he was going to look. Though, he supposed that, in light of Twilight’s revelation to him, it was technically more correct to consider ‘Reformed’ Changelings as being actual changelings, while the alternate form was a Corrupted Changeling.

Squelch, at least, appeared to approve of the change. Though Slipshod suspected that most of that approval stemmed from the fact that he now looked almost as green as she did.

As though summoned by the changeling’s thoughts, the ship’s captain opened up the door to the shower stall and squeezed herself into its already cramped confines, inserting herself beneath the shower head and immersing herself in the warm water. Her telekinesis reached out and turned the knobs, ratcheting up the temperature a fair bit to the point where it was nearly―but not technically―scalding hot.

She picked up the bottle of her own preferred shampoo and floated it back to Slipshod, who wordlessly took it and applied a squirt to her backside as the sage green unicorn used her magic to tend to her mane, “Any luck?” Slipshod asked conversationally as he began massaging the soap into her coat.

“Not really,” Squelch sighed, “The zebras don’t have much of a merchant fleet, so there won’t be a lot of experienced DropShip crews we can recruit from them. Maybe enough for two or three ships on short notice.”

The changeling nodded, “Mayhem thinks she can scrounge up about that many additional crews, if she’d willing to divide up the existing experienced crews she has, and then flesh them out with trainees,” He suspected that the frown on his face matched the one that Mayhem had worn when the Disciple general had floated the idea. While such a move would let them crew additional DropShips, it also meant that those ships would be a lot less capable in a high-stress situation―such as inserting a strike team onto an enemy position under fire. It would be difficult enough for ponies new to the concept to operate a DropShip under ideal conditions, without also throwing in the possibility of combat into the mix. Frankly, doing that was just asking to get a lot of ponies killed.

“That leaves us with, what? Nine ships? Ten including the Zathura?”

“At the most,” Slipshod confirmed, “Which, to be fair, only one of them has to succeed for the plan to work.”

“You caught ComSpark with their saddles off and their defensive forces out of position on Colton and the relay still couldn’t be taken,” Squelch countered, “It’s going to be nearly impossible to do it if they have all their defenders present and ready.

“Honestly, striking their hidden relays is going to be more difficult than hitting the ones on the Primary Circuit in some cases,” the mare continued, starting to rinse out her mane, “The Primary Circuit relays are out in the open, and vulnerable to attack from all sides. The secret ones are almost all buried in mountains or underground, right? Which means the entrance is a bottleneck for us.

“But those public relays are fortified to tartarus and back. A single DropShip worth of ‘Steeds and soldiers might not be enough to break through their defenses in time to keep them from breaching their reactor cores.

“We’re going to want dozens of teams operating nearly simultaneously, just to be safe. We only get one shot at this.”

Slipshod was forced to concede the point. The more teams they had conducting raids on HSGs, the better; and fewer than a dozen may very well not be enough to guarantee that at least one of them reached the core of the facility and uploaded the virus.

Squelch turned around and sat under the shower head, letting the hot water start to rinse away the suds from her mane and coat. The expression she was looking at the changeling with approached resignation, “I just don’t know where we’re going to get the crews for the ships we need if not from the Reivers; and I don’t see how we’ll be able to get the Reivers on board without threats. We can’t trust them without some kind of collateral keeping them in line.”

He sighed, a frown plainly visible on his face as he considered problem facing them, “Twilight won’t go for it,” he informed her, “She plans on telling Triton tomorrow that, under no circumstances, will she bomb any target from orbit that isn’t presenting an active military threat to Disciple groups working with the DropShips.

“And that nocreature down there has to help us if they don’t want to.”

“She’s going to let them off the hook entirely,” the sage mare didn’t sound entirely pleased about the notion. Then added after a brief moment’s thought, “Not that it’s our job―or business―to go around meting out justice, or whatever. We came here for ships and material.”

Slipshod nodded in agreement, “That’s about how she feels, yeah. She doesn’t like the idea, mind you. If we had the time, I think that Twilight would genuinely prefer to stay on Peregrine and try to rehabilitate every raider down there; even if it took generations.”

“One of the perks of being an immortal alicorn princess, I guess,” Squelch snorted, smirking wryly at the stallion, “It probably would take generations, honestly,” she added in a more melancholy tone, “I don’t even want to think about how long it would take to get the whole galaxy back to the way things used to be under the Celestia League. Centuries, maybe? A millenia?”

Again the changeling was nodding, “I believe it took decades for her to unite just Equus. And that was just one world. The Sphere has thousands.”

“So, tens of millenia then,” she corrected, shaking her head, “Why even bother at that point?”

“It’s important to her. Fixing things. Getting them back to how she remembers them; where everycreature was safe and happy,” Slipshod shrugged, “There’s worse ways to spend eternity than trying to make your dream come true.”

“I guess,” Squelch acknowledged the point with a sigh. She cast her gaze downward now and Slipshod felt one of her hooves wrap around his and lift it up, bringing the deep jade green chitinous limb up for closer inspection. Her other hoof traced its way over the leg’s shell. The changeling simply watched in silence, taking careful note of the swirling emotions within the unicorn.

In many ways, Squelch was still getting used to his ‘new’ self too; and Slipshod didn’t just mean the color change that he’d recently undergone. Despite his offer to maintain his earth pony disguise when they were together, she’d insisted that he didn’t need to do that. That, if they really were going to make things work between them again, he had to be his real self from now on.

Besides, Squelch had pointed out with a malicious smile, his earth pony form wasn’t nearly as ‘ruggedly handsome’ as he’d thought it was.

That didn’t mean that she found his natural state more appealing though. He knew that she wasn’t actively repulsed by it either, at least. It was simply...different. Something to get used to, like a fresh beard or a new manestyle. It was simply aesthetic, and didn’t change who a creature was inside.

After what felt like a minute of quiet contemplation, Squelch released the changeling’s limb and looked back up at him, a small smile on her face, “I really missed this, you know? The two of us, talking things over like this, working the problem. We didn’t always come up with the perfect solution,” she added by way of a qualifier, prompting a snort of agreement from Slipshod, “But we didn’t need ‘perfect’.”

This time it wasn’t his hoof that the unicorn reached for, but his cheek; drawing the changeling in for a kiss. This too was still taking a little getting used to. Changeling mouths weren’t quite as supple as pony ones, after all. But, like Squelch had said: they weren’t shooting for ‘perfect’. Which didn’t seem to create much of an issue, judging by the amount of love that Slipshod could feel flowing into him through their embrace.

The stallion was far more judicious with the emotions that he gathered from others these days. Though he still found himself briefly fighting his initial apprehension at the thought, thanks to a lifetime spent considering the notion to be anathema to his very nature as a changeling. However, overcoming that niggling little initial bout of anxiety was getting progressively easier as time went on. Indeed, Slipshod didn’t even find himself hesitating for more than a heartbeat to siphon off a tiny portion of the love that Squelch was feeding him for himself, and then returning the rest of it right back into the unicorn, buttressed by his own feelings for her.

Their embrace gradually became more passionate as both of their feelings for one another were harmonically reinforced by the act. The pair had discovered, on more than one occasion, that when a changeling was involved, a little peck on the cheek had the potential to quite easily escalate into a marathon of passion. Not that either complained much. At least, not in the moment. The smells, mess, dehydration, and chaffing, that both of them experienced the following morning was significantly less enjoyable though; if no less worthwhile.

Through a force of will that Slipshod greatly admired in the sage green mare, Squelch―very reluctantly―managed to pull herself away from the changeling. If only just to catch her breath. Her magic finally shut off the flow of water from the showerhead; and while she didn’t resume their embrace, she did lean her head against his chest. Slipshod took her into his hooves, and the pair sat in the cozy little stall, still dripping wet, for some time.

As had happened on occasion before, the changeling felt Squelch’s thoughts turn more melancholy. He’d noticed a tendency for this to happen after they’d been intimate. She’d never said anything about what prompted those thoughts, and anytime that he’d asked if she was feeling alright, the unicorn would simply respond that she was ‘fine’. She was perfectly well aware, of course, that he knew she wasn’t. Whatever was bothering her though, she obviously didn’t want to share with him, and he was willing to respect her privacy.

This time though, it seemed that the mare had decided that her thoughts needed to be voiced aloud, “When this is all over, which of us are you going to choose?”

Slipshod blinked in confusion, glancing down at the unicorn. However, she didn’t meet his gaze, staring instead off at something that only she could see. At least she seemed to sense that he needed more context for her question and elaborated for him, “When this is over―and if we survive―you’re right that Twilight’s going to have a lot of work ahead of her.

“Work that I’m not sure I want to be a part of. I can’t promise you that I’ll keep following Twilight. She’s just a client, and we’re just under contract with her. When the Irregulars and I leave...are you going to be coming with us?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I’ve seen the way you are with Twilight―”

“It’s not like that,” Slipshod said, almost automatically, vehement in his denial of any indiscretion, “I would never even think about―”

“Shut up, you dumb bug,” Squelch snorted, half amused and half annoyed, giving the changeling a playful swat on the chest with her hoof, “I know you’re not cheating on me; that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about how passionate you are about defeating Chrysalis.

“I know that most of that is because she fucked you over and you want her to pay; I can respect that as much as the next mercenary. But I also know that there’s more to it,” she continued, pulling back now so that she could look up into his face. Slipshod could both feel and see her obvious concern now. Concern that she might lose him, “I’ve heard how you talk about those ‘Elements’ of hers lately. About being honest and upfront with others.

“You’re becoming a True Believer; I can see it. What you do for her is more than I’ve ever seen you do for another client; and it’s way more than you have to do to bring down Chrysalis.

“It’s not exactly surprising,” she scoffed, “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that she hasn’t taken a special interest in you too. She’s turned you into some sort of ‘project’, or something; and I’d say it’s working out for her,” He could feel the mare’s budding ire towards the alicorn mounting. Seeming to recognize the feeling within herself, Squelch fought it back down, looking away as she took a moment to once more collect herself.

“Now you admire her,” she finally said, almost timidly, “You admire what she wants to do for the galaxy.”

Slipshod said nothing as the unicorn spoke, recognizing that everything Squelch was saying was accurate. He’d done quite a lot to help Twilight and her cause; risked much more than might strictly have been necessary in order to merely achieve a military victory against his former queen. Nor could he deny that he was motivated exclusively by simple revenge any longer. He obviously still wanted Chrysalis to lose everything she had; but these days he also found himself wanting more. He was finally starting to look beyond victory, towards what would inevitably come after it.

“So I want to know: Would you go with her, if she asked you to?”

He didn’t respond immediately. Mostly because he wasn’t sure of his answer. He’d never really considered it before; but he did now. Would he be tempted to remain at Twilight’s side after the conquest of Equus and aid in her crusade to reform the other creatures of the galaxy the way that she’d been working to reform him? Probably.

That realization caused the changeling to inwardly flinch. Because he fully recognized that it was the response Squelch was afraid that she’d get. It also wasn’t the one that she wanted.

“...You want to help her, don’t you?”

Slipshod sighed and looked down at the unicorn with a wan smile, “I thought I was the empath here?” he managed an amused chuckle, though it lasted for only a brief moment before he let his own sense of her budding disappointment drown it, “It’s...not that simple.”

“Isn’t it?” She countered, her words growing hard now, her eyes cold as she struggled to contain her feelings of resentment from showing overtly, despite what she knew he could feel from her regardless, “You don’t owe her anything,” Squelch insisted, “You could stay with me; if that was what you really wanted.”

The hurt in both the mare’s words, and the pain that she was fighting to keep hidden were almost too much for the changeling. He stepped closer to her, shaking his head, “No! That’s not what I mean,” he assured her, reaching out a tentative hoof to her cheek, “You know that I care about you,” he reminded her, “I know you can feel it every time we touch.”

Even as he spoke, Slipshod allowed for a trickle of his love for her to bleed into the unicorn. In response, the mare turned her face into his hoof, relishing its touch. Though it only seemed to add to the pain that she was feeling as she recognized that he did feel that strongly about their relationship...and yet was still contemplating abandoning it.

“And the reason that you can…” The stallion continued, “Is a big part of why I think I need to help her.

“I’m not the same ‘ling that I was before we met Twilight. Because of her―because of what she taught me―I know I’m better than I was. I know that I’m stronger than I was.

“I’ve come to realize that that wasn’t a coincidence,” His own words had an edge to them now, though none of the mounting antipathy had anything even remotely to do with Squelch. Every ounce of his contempt was reserved exclusively for his former queen, “Chrysalis knows full well that changelings―as a race―would be stronger, and better off, living the way Twilight’s showed me.

“But, instead, she lies to us. Corrupts us. Raises us to be monsters. All so that we’ll feel dependent on her leadership and guidance―so that she can feel more powerful than she knows she is.

“She’s been manipulating my whole race, using us to torment the galaxy and everycreature in it for her own sense of sadistic pleasure,” the changeling was actively seething now at the thought. It had been bad enough when Slipshod had held Chrysalis in contempt for the wrongs that she’d committed against him specifically. Now that he’d acquired a genuine sense of compassion for others since learning to share his emotions, he’d begun to feel that same ire on behalf of the millions of changelings who didn’t know what he did. Who were trapped in servitude to a banal and corrupting ‘queen’ without realizing what she was depriving them of as a result of the ignorance she forced upon them!

“Defeating Chrysalis won’t be enough,” he explained, “Without the proper guidance―without an example of what they could be―the changelings that survive will still think the way that she’s taught them to. They’ll still be out there, manipulating creatures and creating animosity in order to gain the power and control that they’ve been taught to believe they need in order to survive!

“I can prove to them that there’s a better way for changelings to live. I can show them that we’re better off without the lies that Chrysalis fed us,” Slipshod took hold of Squelch’s shoulders with his hooves, forcing her to meet his gaze.

“You want to help the Sphere too, right?” He reminded the unicorn mare, “Well that’s the way we could do it! Spread the Elements, teach creatures Harmony―really work to make a difference!”

Squelch sighed, “It’s not going to be that simple, Slip, and you know it. One little ‘Steed company can’t change anything; it never has―”

“Because Chrysalis never let it!” The changeling interjected, “Of course it seems like nothing can change the galaxy, because changelings have been working constantly to make sure things don’t change! That’s the whole point,” he reminded her, “But when Chrysalis is gone, and the changelings aren’t calling the shots behind the scenes anymore, then things can finally start to change.

“One company―or even just one little lance―of BattleSteed pilots in the right place, at the right time, could end up changing the fates of billions of lives for the better,” Squelch actually started to find herself being drawn up into the changeling’s monologue. The unicorn mare felt herself being almost overcome with a sense of confidence that she couldn’t recall experiencing since she’d first founded the Steel Coursers all those years ago. Slipshod’s determination and optimism was intoxicating, “It happened once before, you know? When a group of changeling-piloted BattleSteeds chased Twilight away from her meeting with the leader of the Lunar Republic, it set in motion the chain of events that brought us here.

“Who’s to say we couldn’t nudge things back in the other direction? Help me be that ‘nudge’, Squelch. Help Twilight―help us―fix the galaxy!”

Squelch sat and stared at the changeling, speechless. The sage green mare was just about to agree with him and take the stallion up on his offer, but then she caught herself. There was no doubt in her mind that she was feeling caught up in the moment, but that was no reason to make a rash decision, no matter how much the notion of dedicating her life to undoing the damage caused by Chrysalis appealed to her―

Wait. Did that notion appeal to her? Why was she so personally offended by the damage caused by Chrysalis? She’d never even heard that name until a few months ago, and had long since rationalized that she didn’t actually care who was manipulating the political strings behind the scenes. Whether it was a giant bug queen, or the allegedly benevolent Twilight Sparkle, it was Squelch’s experience that political leaders rarely felt genuine empathy for the denizens they nominally ruled over. It was one of the reasons that she’d taken it upon herself to try and improve the stella-political situation of the galaxy through the independent contracting she did. If the unicorn had believed that any one leader was genuinely morally superior to another, she’d have signed an exclusive contract with one of the major star nations years ago.

The unicorn mare blinked and then shook her head, clearing it. No, shit didn’t care about Chrysalis. So why had she felt like she did just now?

She narrowed her gaze at Slipshod, “...Can you push emotions other than love into ponies?”

“Huh?” The stallion looked genuinely startled by the question, “I mean, yeah. An emotion’s an emotion. Love, hate, sadness; if I can siphon it, I can push it,” He answered absently, seemingly oblivious to what might have prompted the mare to ask him about that facet of his empathic abilities, “Why―? Oh, fuck!” The changeling withdrew his hooves from Squelch’s shoulders as though he’d been burned, glancing in a near panic between the sage mare and his offending limbs.

“You bastard,” Squelch seethed at the changeling. Her magic reached out and wrenched open the small sliding door to the shower stall, very nearly dislodging it entirely, before shoving her way forcefully past the changeling. After a shocked pause, Slipshod clambered out after her, nearly slipping on the wet spots left on the floor by Squelch’s sopping wet tail.

“Wait!” He sputtered, “I’m sorry! I didn’t even know I was doing that, I swear!” He vehemently insisted.

The sage green unicorn ignored him, her telekinesis snagging a couple of towels off of a nearby rack. One wrapped itself around her mane while the other proceeded to begin drying her barrel. The changeling dashed in front of her, forcing her attention even as he continued to plead with the mare, “Squelch, please. You have to belie―”

“I can’t believe you tried to manipulate me like that!” She sputtered, her fury plain and evident in her features as she glared at the changeling, “Is that what you’ve been doing this whole time?! Making me think I loved you, you piece of shit?!”

“No!” His vehement denial was both loud―and visceral―enough to give the sage mare pause despite her agitated state, “It doesn’t work like that,” Slipshod assured her in a much more controlled tone after a brief pause, “Yes, I can push emotions into somepony, but I can’t actually ‘manipulate’ how they feel,” The changeling assured her.

“You just found why that can’t happen,” He pointed out, “You felt my hate for Chrysalis, yes; but you immediately realized that you didn’t hate her the way that I do, and so the emotion didn’t ‘stick’. Changelings can control the flow of emotions, not thoughts.”

Slipshod reached out a hoof to caress Squelch’s cheek once more, but the mare flinched away. The feelings of anger and distrust weren’t quite as strong as they had been before, but they still simmered in the background of her mind, much to the stallion’s disappointment. His features visibly wilted, “I can make you feel my love for you; but I can’t ‘create’ any feelings you have for me. Those are your own. They always have been.

Squelch continued to glare at him for several more seconds as her emotions continued to settle. Eventually though, she managed a resigned sigh, finally seeming to be over the shock of it all, “It was just...weird to feel something that strongly that didn’t make any sense to me,” she admitted, “Sorry if I overreacted.”

“I don’t think you did,” Slipshod assured her, relief evident on his own face, “I get that we have a...not exactly ‘great’ history where my regard for your feelings is concerned,” he managed a wan smile as the mare rolled her eyes at him, “I genuinely didn’t mean to let those feelings out,” He assured her once more, “But, again: Nothing I let you feel is capable of actually changing how you feel.

“Unless you’re already inclined to feel that way,” He amended after a brief moment’s thought, flashing the mare a mischievous grin, “Which is why when we kiss and I feed you a little love we―”

“Yeah, yeah; you’re a real smooth operator,” Squelch rolled her eyes once more, in an even more exaggerated fashion even as she tried to keep herself from blushing upon recalling how often mere kissing led to more vigorous bedroom antics, “But even if those emotions don’t take, I’d still prefer you not saddle me with your baggage, fair enough?”

It was only now that Squelch realized that Slipshod had actually ceased paying her any attention, his eyes wide as he stared off into the distance, slack-jawed, “...Slip?”

He looked at her now, though his expression still testified to the fact that the changeling had clearly been subjected to an epiphany of some sort, “I know how to recruit the Reivers.”

“Huh?”

“I know how we can find out which Reivers would be willing to help without needing to be coerced!” The changeling repeated with considerably more enthusiasm. Without warning, he reached out and took Squelch up in a rather strenuous embrace. Though initially shocked, it didn’t take long for the influx of emotion to prompt the unicorn to more vigorously reciprocate. Managing to leave her with a feeling of disappointment when Slipshod broke off the kiss just as abruptly, “Thanks for the idea; I need to go find Twilight!”

Her irritation had returned, “Really? You’re just going to kiss me like that then rush off to see another mare?”

Slipshod stopped short at the door, blinking as he looked back at the obviously disapproving unicorn. He pondered over his response for several moments before blurting out, “...apparently!” Before dashing out of the cabin and into the DropShip’s corridor.

Squelch continued to glare at the empty doorway for several seconds until the door finally closed automatically behind him. She closed her eyes and let out a long-suffering sigh, “He’s so fucking lucky I love him,” she grumbled before returning to drying herself.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 37: Betrayal of Ideals

“Do you really think you can do it?” The purple princess inquired of the changeling who’d appeared at her door a few minutes ago asking for this meeting.

“An emotion’s an emotion,” Slipshod began, launching into the same explanation that he’d given to Squelch only a few minutes ago, “If I can siphon it off, I can push it out―”

“That’s not what I meant,” the alicorn interrupted, shaking her head, a smile on her lips, “I’m well aware of what changelings are capable of,” She pointed out to the BattleSteed pilot, who in turn flushed under her gaze; seeming to only now recall how much about changelings that she’d actually taught him in recent months, “What I was referring to was whether or not you felt up to the task of pushing emotions into a large group all at once.”

The changeling bit his lip now, his hooves shifting sheepishly beneath him, “It’ll be tricky,” he acknowledged, “but I should be able to do it.”

Judging by the expression on Twilight’s face, the alicorn seemed to have at least some idea of how much Slipshod was underselling the difficulty of what he was proposing. Physical contact made sharing emotions easy, but it was hardly a requirement. So long as he could see his target, he could interact with their emotions. Distance didn’t really affect things either.

Numbers, on the other hoof…

Because of the unique nature of individuals and their personalized emotional states, interactions also had to be tailored to the creature in question, to a point. Drawing love from Rigger Brush hadn’t been exceptionally different from drawing it out of Blood Chit, but neither had those feelings been identical. Like colors and smells, emotions possessed very subtle variations that couldn’t just be overlooked, depending on the circumstance.

Asking somepony for ‘blue paint’ would likely get a different result than asking for ‘something to color in the sky in this picture’, for example. There were as many types of ‘love’ as there were shades of blue, in much the same way.

If Slipshod had tried to draw out ‘love’ from a whole group at once, he’d honestly probably have been less successful―and harvested a much smaller amount―than if he’d singled out a specific pony and drew upon their love for a specific individual or activity. It wouldn’t be so different trying to push emotions into others. If he pushed Rigger Brush’s love for drawing into Blood Chit, it wouldn’t reinforce the pegasus stallion’s love for anything at all. At best it would leave him confused, and at worst frustrated.

However, in the specific instance that Slipshod was proposing, that was a facet that would actually play to their advantage in many ways. By pushing out a general feeling of remorse and a desire for redemption, they would see only a response from those Reivers in attendance with whom those feelings and desires resonated.

The real issue was going to be in regards to the source for those emotions that he was going to use. While Slipshod did feel a genuine desire to help take down Chrysalis, it wasn’t because he felt like he had anything to make up for. He didn’t ‘regret’ being a pawn in her schemes, he resented her for making him such a pawn. Currently, all he wanted to ‘make up for’ was his egregious error on Colton. Neither of those feelings would resonate with the demographic of Reivers that they were interested in recruiting.

Slipshod therefore couldn’t push his emotions into the raiders. He’d need somepony else’s. Somepony who felt that they had wronged others through their actions―or even their inactions. Somepony who had dedicated themselves to doing whatever it took to make up for their mistakes, and was willing to risk everything to make things right again.

“...You need to be the one to speak to them though,” Slipshod finally said, a little hesitantly, “It’s your remorse that I intend to use.”

The purple mare was silent for several seconds as she processed what the changeling had just said to her. Then her lips cracked into a wan little smile, though the stallion couldn’t feel much within her that she had to smile about, “I suppose if anypony has enough angst inside them to fill a hundred other creatures, it would be me, wouldn’t it?”

Her expression then shifted slightly to one of mild concern, “What if you take too much though?” She asked, cautiously, “If we’re not careful, I could end up losing my own sense of fault.”

“That’s actually going to be the trickier part,” Slipshod acknowledged with a nod, “But I’m hoping I can draw out enough of something similar from the crowd to feed back into you.”

“So you’re saying that there’s the possibility that I could come out of this feeling even more angsty?” This time there was a note of genuine amusement in Twilight’s question. Slipshod merely shrugged, wearing a wry smirk of his own, “Well, I’ll at least wait to see how things turn out before I start stocking up on black manedye.”

General Triton watched the pair of ponies entering the small conference room with a guarded expression. Despite the fact that he’d found himself treated better than he could ever have expected to be during his time as a prisoner of the Disciples, there was little use in hoping to shake his persistent feelings of trepidation. He was the leader of one of the most reviled bands of raiders in the Periphery. The crimes of which he was guilty would have earned him an expeditiously carried out execution in most jurisdictions, without the benefit of even going through a show trial.

He’d known that from the outset. Had expected it really. The moment that WarShip had appeared in the system―and he’d recognized it as a WarShip the moment the sensor profile had been transmitted to him―the hippogriff had known that he was living on borrowed time. The Red Reivers couldn’t stand up to one of those monstrosities. No power in the Periphery could. One of the Sphere powers might have been able to, but only if they’d known it was coming and could have massed together enough DropShips to swarm and overwhelm the vessel with uncontestable numbers.

His only goal from the moment they arrived had been to ensure that as few creatures on Peregrine died as were necessary to appease the newcomers. So he’d gathered together those officers that he knew would be obstinate enough not to realize when they’d been beaten and made sure they were at the duel with him. With them out of the way, more moderate voices would have a chance to shine in his absence. Any lingering grumbling should be effectively silenced after the first round of summary executions, he supposed.

At least he’d secured the alicorn’s assurances that noncombatants would be spared. The hippogriff supposed that was really the most that he could have hoped for, under the circumstances.

That first physical meeting had certainly been quite the shock, Triton admitted. He’d assumed that the holoprojection had been a fake, designed to put him off of his game even more than the WarShip had―a little excessive, he’d thought at the time. Seeing for himself that it had genuinely been an alicorn―and that they’d looked remarkably like Queen Twilight Sparkle…

The Red Reiver general wasn’t certain what he was really supposed to have made of all that. Like many―well, most―Harmony Sphere residents, he’d never given the Queen much thought. After all, she was little more than the pony who oversaw ComSpark and the Mercenary Review Board. He wasn’t a mercenary and it wasn’t like Twilight was personally overseeing every single bit of HSG message traffic any more than a trans-stellar corporation’s CEO was signing off on every single inventory check. Broadly speaking, the alicorn sitting on the ‘throne’ in Canterlot hadn’t really mattered to him.

Now that the idea had been floated to him that she was an imposter...he felt conflicted. Knowing that Queen Twilight Sparkle wasn’t the ‘real’ alicorn princess probably wouldn’t have changed much of his perspective in the grand scheme of things even if that had been information he’d known years ago. On the other talon, there was still the visceral unpleasant reaction at the thought of being lied to. Even then, it wasn’t the lie itself, per se. Creatures lied all the time about all kinds of things. What often mattered most was the reason creatures lied.

To that end, the hippogriff felt a pit in his gut when he thought about why somecreature might lie about being Twilight Sparkle, especially when that creature was in control of the flow of pretty much all of the galaxy’s information. He might be a warrior first and foremost, but the former Combine officer was perfectly well aware about how potent a weapon knowledge could be. If employed correctly, the right piece of information at the right time was worth a battalion of BattleSteeds.

Not that any of these revelations were going to matter to him for much longer, Triton opined. His crimes were too many and too egregious to be overlooked. Once the alicorn was done debriefing him, his value―and by extension his life―would come to an end.

“General Triton,” the purple mare greeted with a curt nod of her head as she took her seat across the table from him. The earth pony stallion who’d accompanied her stood off to the side of the room, nestling himself in amongst the armed guards who escorted the hippogriff here from his cell.

“Princess,” the Red Reiver general inclined his head briefly in a shallow nod, “How can I help you today?”

“I’m hoping, actually, that we can help each other,” the alicorn began, eliciting a raised eyebrow from the hippogriff, “I’ve reviewed your dossier; both the one compiled by the Disciples while you were employed with the Hippogriff Combine, and the records of your time spent with the Red Reivers.

“Honestly, it’s like reading about two different creatures,” Twilight said, eyeing the general as she withdrew a datapad and began to scroll through some of the information contained within. The other stallion was finding it difficult to meet her gaze now. He knew better than most how divergent those accounts likely were.

“Awards and commendations for gallantry, bravery, and selfless service,” she began reading out; each word sending the hippogriff’s head into a lower and lower bow of self loathing, “A citation for valor for holding off a lance of pirates on Marianas IV―on your own―while both civilians and the rest of your lance were evacuated,” The mare paused, looking up from the pad, “According to this, you didn’t make it to the DropShip with the others. You were forced to eject from your ‘Steed and were actually taken prisoner by the pirates.

“It was almost six months before you were rescued. I can’t imagine what you went through during that time.”

It was all that Triton could do not to reach up and touch the scar that had blinded his right eye. It was a wound that he hadn’t received during the fight itself.

“You were offered a discharge at that time. You turned it down. You went on record as saying, ‘If I leave, somegriff else will have to go through that in my place. I can’t let that happen’.

“Help me understand how that ‘griff became who is sitting in front of me now.”

Triton surprised himself when he let out a derisive snort. He remembered saying those words. They haunted him. Of course, he’d just been a young, brash, stupid, lieutenant back then. Naive and full of more testosterone than sense. He’d learned since then, “One day at a time, Princess. One day at a time.

“It wasn’t like I made the conscious decision to do it,” The general offered with a shrug, “When they dismissed me after that ambush, I bounced around a few merc outfits in the Sphere. Became a liability to most of them though. I was a ‘disgraced warrior’ in the eyes of the Combine. They didn’t give top contracts to outfits employing ‘griffs like me.

“Eventually I ended up in the Periphery. Tried to get work with some of the legitimate groups out this way, but there wasn’t a lot of money or openings going around. Then a griffon approached me, offering to cut me in for a ‘share’ in their group’s little ‘protection’ racket.

“On the face of it, it wasn’t so different from what mercenary work in the Sphere was like: you either paid a company top c-bit to protect you, or somecreature else paid them to hurt you,” Triton threw up his talons and meke little shrug.

“Honestly, we rarely did any actual fighting. If a group has a fearsome enough reputation, they don’t need to flex much. Creatures get the idea and do whatever they can to come up with the money,” His features darkened, “...But sometimes they fall behind.

“Again, it’s not so different from how things work in the Sphere,” he insisted, though only halfheartedly, “Convoys get hit all the time. Civilian drivers die. Same with miners, factory workings, dockhooves...if you work at a potential target for industrial espionage, dying in a mercenary attack paid for by a competitor is just one of the risks you take on doing that job,” Triton almost managed to make himself believe that too.

“The Reivers hit a convoy here, a factory there...the occasional farming community,” again the hippogriff’s face darkened. He finally managed to raise his head and look at the purple alicorn, “You rationalize it. They knew they hadn’t paid up. They knew what was going to happen.

“Nothing stopped them from evacuating before we even got there. Right? Anycreature who was still there by the time our ‘Steeds hit the ground was just too stupid to live.

“Right?

“Of course, it’s not always that simple, is it?” The general went on, letting out a deep sigh, “Where exactly were they supposed to go? Buy passage off planet with money they didn’t have on passenger ships that weren’t there? The average creature in the Periphery doesn’t have thousands of c-bits lying around in their account, and any Sphere spaceport sees more ship traffic in a week than most of those planets get in a year.”

The last was said in little more than a bitter sneer. Directed as much at himself as it was at the situation he was describing. Though there certainly had been times when he’d been directing that irritation at his victims. After all, he wouldn’t have been able to kill them if they’d simply been somewhere else! He’d been sent there to level the buildings; whether they’d been occupied or not. Why couldn’t those morons have just left! He could have been demolishing empty structures.

But no; those fools had stubbornly―and stupidly―stayed behind, and now he was being forced to slaughter a whole host of innocent creatures! He didn’t want to be a mass murderer; they were leaving him no choice!

Such thoughts had been the only rationale he could cobble together in order to maintain his sanity during those raids. Every time he’d thought about not participating, he knew that it wouldn’t have made a difference. Some other Reiver would have gladly done it in his stead; and all that would have happened at the end of the day is him losing his ‘livelihood’, such as it was. Punishing himself wasn’t going to help those poor bastards; so what point was there to doing it?

“Then you get this wild idea,” Triton went on, shaking his head, “that if you work your way to the top, you can ‘change things’! You can reform the Red Reivers,” It would have been impossible for the hippogriff to keep the sarcasm out of his words, so he didn’t even bother. He was perfectly well aware of how that ‘grand plan’ had worked out, after all.

“Only, by that time you’re in too deep! You’ve slaughtered your way through tens of thousands of innocents, and the creatures supporting you were right there to see you do it. They were following your example! How are you supposed to convince them you didn’t want to do it? How do you make an argument to scale things back without finding a gun put to your head in the middle of the night because another Reiver doesn’t want to make do with their share of the loot shrinking?

“Nocreature ever tells you it’s actually worse at the top,” he snorted, “When I was just one of their goons, I could get away with letting a truck ‘escape’, or skipping over a house or two. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

“But as the Red Reiver General, I couldn’t let a non-paying ‘client’ get off light. I couldn’t order a raid on an inconsequential target. Every move I made was being scrutinized by every Reiver waiting for an excuse―any excuse―to remove me and take my place.

“And now there was nocreature on the raids who might otherwise have let that truck go or overlooked that house the way I’d been,” The hippogriff said with a defeated sigh, leaning his head into his hooves. He was silent for several seconds before taking a deep breath and straightening up in his chair, regarding the alicorn with a pained expression.

“You want to know what happened to that good ‘griff in your file? He died by a thousand cuts; until he eventually became this,” he gestured broadly to himself with his left talon, the disgust in his voice leaving little doubt as to how even he appraised himself now.

Twilight Sparkle sat in silent contemplation of the general for several long seconds. Triton might have been forgiven for believing that the purple alicorn had simply been struck silent with revulsion at his pathetic excuses for why he’d drenched his claws with so much innocent blood. Except that, try though he might, the old hippogriff couldn’t see a sign of that expected hate and malice anywhere on the youthful pony face sitting across from him. If anything, she looked almost understanding somehow.

“In diplomatic circles,” the purple mare began, catching the hippogriff off guard with the seeming non-sequitur, “they teach that compromise is the key to success. It’s selfish to think that your side will get everything that they want, and that the other side will get nothing that you don’t want them to. Such deals don’t exist,” the mare thought for a moment, cocking a wry smirk, “At least, not without the threat of a really big stick being held at the ready.

“But, threats notwithstanding, the secret to getting what you want, is to be willing to give up a little bit of what you have,” Another pause, her features growing cooler now, “What tends to be learned through experience, however, is that you need to be sure you’ve taken very careful stock of how important what you’re giving up is. That what you’re sacrificing isn’t the core of who you are.”

The alicorn turned her gaze back upon the hippogriff. Her amethyst gaze bore into him, “Was what you gave up worth what you got, Triton?”

So fixed was the former Red Reiver general on the princess’ gaze, that he didn’t notice the earth pony in the corner looking at him much more intently than he had been a moment ago. Triton swallowed under the weight of her glare, feeling like a foal caught with his talons in the sweets jar. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, regret welling up within him.

He’d sacrificed quite a bit to get to where he was today. His honor, his morals, his own sense of self-respect. All so that he could last another day in comfort, because he’d been too proud to let himself recede into the obscurity of a menial existence. He hadn’t had to remain a ‘Steed pilot after leaving the Combine’s service. Nothing would have stopped him from starting a new career somewhere else, doing anything else.

Of course, a ‘hero’ like himself deserved more than that, didn’t he? ‘Griffs with chests full of medals didn’t fade away; they went on to achieve even more greatness on the battlefield!

Or so a younger―dumber―Triton had believed, all those years ago. How wrong that stubborn hothead had been. Thinking that he’d be able to fix things and make it all better. That it could all go back to the way things were by just hoping hard enough. He’d relied on what he’d thought he was good at, and gave up little pieces of himself time and time again in the desperate hope that he wouldn’t have to change.

Now he was here. Nothing of the ‘griff who’d vowed to hold the line against overwhelming odds to protect others remained. He was just another pirate flailing about the galaxy, waiting to get what he deserved; and now he was going to. Good.

“No,” He said, feeling an odd sense of relief at the admission, “And I’m not just saying that because I’ve already lost everything anyway,” Triton assured the alicorn, flashing her a sardonic smile. Then his expression became more melancholy, “Truth be told, I’m actually glad it’s all over. If anything, it’s a pity that death didn’t come for me sooner.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes at the hippogriff, “Do you think that after all you’ve done, you really deserve to get off that light?”

Triton jerked with shock at the question. How was being executed ‘getting off light’? It was hard to imagine a higher price to pay than one’s own life!

The former Reiver general felt a small little knot of guilt forming in his stomach. He did suppose that, through a certain perspective, hoping for death did represent something of a ‘coward’s way out’. It would mean a release from his own guilt. In a way, it was even an escape from accountability. His death would hardly directly benefit any of his victims. Even those who lived in the Periphery would hardly concern themselves much with the death of a single Reiver, whatever his position.

Strictly speaking, was it even a ‘punishment’ if you meted out exactly what the guilty party was content with receiving? Traditionally, a punishment was something to be feared, or at the very least something dreaded. Triton didn’t dread death anymore. If anything, it was the prospect of having to be continuously confronted with his past crimes which terrified the hippogriff.

No. He didn’t deserve to die; if only because he hadn’t earned that kindness.

“If you really do regret what you did, Triton: prove it,” The alicorn declared, once more drawing a stunned look from the hippogriff, “You can’t bring back the dead, but you can dedicate yourself to improving the lives of the living.

“It won’t make up for what you did, not entirely,” Twilight warned him, “But it’s the least that you owe to the galaxy.

“I won’t force you to help us. Compelled contrition isn’t contrition at all. But I will give you the opportunity to help us make the galaxy whole again.”

Triton blinked, still in shock at hearing the proposal being extended to him, “You want my help? You would trust me?”

“I need the help of every willing creature I can get my hooves on,” The alicorn replied, shooting him a wry smirk, “As for ‘trust’...” She glanced back over at the earth pony stallion, who merely returned a curt little nod in response to her unasked question. The purple mare looked back at Triton with a much warmer expression, “I’m willing to give you a chance to prove you’re worthy of it.

“A good place to start will be tomorrow. I’d like you to join me in addressing the Red Reiver DropShip crews…”

Charon stared out over the factory floor that stretched almost endlessly beyond the window in front of her. Massive pieces of machinery danced about with carefully choreographed grace as they set about assembling BattleSteeds at a breakneck pace. She’d have been more impressed with the sight if those ‘Steeds had been of the latest and greatest Pharynx, Sombra, or even the massive Ahuizotl assault chassis. Heck, the mare that had found herself placed in charge of this operation would have been content with some simple top-of-the-line Riflemares at this point!

In a way, the ComSpark general thought acidly to herself, she was getting some ‘top-of-the-line’ Riflemares. They just weren’t ‘top-of-the-line’ by changeling standards. At least, not as advanced as they could have been. Charon had at least managed to make the case successfully that some ‘new breakthroughs’ could be permitted without tipping their hooves too much; under the guise of ‘prototypes’ being pressed into the field years ahead of when they would officially be ready for broad release.

No commander liked the idea of being sent into battle with equipment that they knew to be inferior to the enemy’s. Those reservations tended to get deeper when the equipment being provided was deliberately inferior. Charon understood the reasons why her forces were being effectively hamstrung, and she even agreed with them. That didn’t mean that she liked them.

Queen knew the Clans weren’t going to be holding back where the quality of their ‘Steeds and weapons were concerned!

The consequence was that ComSpark was going to need to rely on quantity to assure themselves of victory in the coming fight. If there was one silver lining to be had, it was that it was starting to look like only a single battle would be needed to decide things. This was a considerable windfall, in Charon’s opinion. It effectively eliminated the risks associated with fighting a holding action across a large front, and facing the risk of being outflanked by an unfortunate breakthrough in their lines. Something which would have been all but unavoidable thanks to the Clanners fielding their fleets of WarShips.

While ComSpark had comparable vessels of their own, it would be impossible for them to hoof-wave their existence in the same way that they could obfuscate the ‘new’ technological innovations their BattleSteeds were outfitted with. The perception of the rest of the Harmony Sphere was―and always had been―that ComSpark was not a significant military power. Possessing a vast armada of heavily-armed WarShips ran counter to that carefully manicured facade. After all, ‘everycreature knew’ that both the technology and the manufacturing capacity to produce such vessels simply no longer existed in the Sphere.

Charon let out a frustrated sigh and shook her head. No, this fight would need to be settled on the ground, and not in orbit. Which meant being ready and able to meet the Clans where they chose to land, and to do so in force.

It had been a prospect which the changeling general had been dreading for a while now. The better part of a hundred inhabited worlds lay along the advancing Clan battle lines. There was little warning as to which would be invaded next, which made it logistically impossible to coordinate any sort of substantial reinforcement effort. They’d have to either spread out their forces everywhere―which simply meant the Clans would be able to concentrate their attacks and defeat any defenders in detail―or they needed to pick a few specific worlds and dig in like the galaxy’s most stubborn tick!

Of course, if they looked like they’d be able to effectively repulse an invasion by a Clan fleet, nothing really stopped the invaders from simply...moving right on by. The Clans were more than capable of bypassing a particularly stubborn-looking world, conquering all of the relatively undefended planets in surrounding systems, and leaving the entrenched defenders now trapped behind enemy lines, unable to reinforce any other world being attacked or even be resupplied. From there, it would only be a matter of time before the dug in garrison would be forced to simply surrender.

Their only hope for achieving any sort of victory under the conditions that they were faced with was to find a world to make a stand on which the Clans simply couldn’t afford not to invade if they wanted to press forward with their offensive any further. Unfortunately, there were scant few such ‘crossroad systems’ along the invasion corridor that were of such paramount strategic importance.

It had honestly been looking quite grim, in Charon’s opinion. A view that had actually been held by several of the officers on her staff as well―albeit quietly. Not a one of them wanted to risk the Queen getting wind that they were concerned about the efficacy of the Clan’s invasion. Officers who didn’t have full faith in the inherent superiority of the changeling race and their indomitable might tended to find that their careers were becoming anything but ‘lustrous’.

Of course, that would undoubtedly happen to the general who failed to stop the Clan threat dead in its tracks, exactly as Charon had been ordered to do, whether her doubts were voiced or not.

Charon finally turned away from the view of the assembly area and looked around at the faces of her command staff. These officers had been hoof-picked by herself both for their demonstrated ability, and the fact that they had shown themselves to be as practically-minded as herself. The changeling general had no time for officers that were more interested in spewing propaganda than they were at respecting the threat posed by a worthy adversary. Which was probably why nearly every one of those faces wore expressions as grim as her own.

She glanced at her Chief Intelligence Officer, “Do the latest reports on their fleet movements show any change?”

“No, ma’am,” The colonel said, shaking his head. The stallion’s lips were creased by a deep frown. As the ‘ling in charge of aggregating and analyzing the vast quantities of information being fed to Charon’s command from ComSpark’s operatives, Lumen usually had a firm grasp on both what was happening and especially why it was happening. The thorough saturation of the Harmony Sphere by changeling agents as a result of the Equus academies’ replacement and infiltration programs meant that pretty much no organization―from the Great Houses running the Successor States, all the way down to the smallest municipal agency―could make a move without ComSpark knowing what was going to happen ahead of time.

In fact, more often than not, major events unfolded in the galaxy only explicitly because ComSpark desired them to! This had allowed Lumen―and pretty much every other ‘ling in the intelligence community―to go about their day with a very nearly prescient understanding of anything going on in the Sphere. Even the most well-grounded individual could easily acquire a sense of alicorn-like superiority under such circumstances, and the colonel hadn’t been much of an exception in that regard, in Charon’s opinion. He was generally tolerable to work with though.

However, the intelligence officer was finding himself in a very novel position these days where the Clans were concerned: only being able to guess what was happening after reading through second-hoof accounts. While these were the conditions under which officers in his position were typically required to function in every other military in the galaxy, it wasn’t anything a changeling CIO had ever had to contend with. A combination of the excess workload and not being able to give definitive answers had left the colonel in something of a sour mood for the past few months.

Today wasn’t going to be the day that it improved either, judging from the irritation in his tone, “While the Clans are still systematically conquering all planets in their path, they are all clearly moving towards a singular target: Buckwheat. Moreover, ComSpark Intelligence recently released a report that seems to suggest this actually represents some sort of ‘change’ in their original invasion plan.”

Charon raised an eyebrow. That was new information, “Explain.”

The colonel nodded and deftly punched in a few commands into his terminal at the holoprojection table. A massive star map focused on the region of the Harmony Sphere being invaded appeared in the air. “From the outset of the invasion, the target was pretty obviously Equus,” Lumen began. As he spoke, stars began to glow red, indicating that they’d been captured by the invaders. Initially, a vast arc spanning hundreds of lightyears at the outer edge of the Sphere was aglow. However, as the fleets penetrated deeper and deeper into Pony Commonwealth and Hippogriff Combine space, the line of advance began to narrow, trending towards the center of the Harmony Sphere: the Faust System.

“This was hardly much of a surprise,” The CIO said before tapping in more commands into the terminal and updating the floating map, “Then, for reasons that we have yet to fully understand,” he said in a near growl of annoyance, “their focus shifted, if only slightly.”

As more stars deeper into Sphere space went red, Charon had to acknowledge that it was a rather subtle thing. While the overall direction of the invasion was still undeniably trending in the direction of Equus, and the line of advance was continuing to narrow, that narrowing had become significantly more pronounced in recent months. Even the general could see that if the trend continued, the invasion fleets would converge well short of their supposed target.

“And there’s been no indication as to why this shift occurred?” She was well aware that Lumen had nothing concrete as far as facts went, but at this point she wouldn’t have been averse to well-reasoned speculation. “They must be responding to something,” Charon pointed out. The Clanners were hardly morons, the general knew, nor had they displayed any hint of irrationality―until now anyway. Something had happened, clearly.

However, said ‘something’ was not necessarily an external stimuli, the changeling commander conceded. It very well may be that the Clans had changed their invasion profile in response to something happening within their own command structure. Charon knew perfectly well that plans could change due to a host of factors. Perhaps the Clan’s logistics had suffered somehow, and they no longer believed they could support as large a front as they had hoped to?

If it was the case that the Clans were heading for Buckwheat because of something happening within their own command structure, then the reality was that ComSpark would never know what it was until such a time as they achieved a military victory and captured some intelligence sources. On the other hoof, if it was an externally motivated change, then maybe there was some way for them to exploit it. There was also some hope that information on a possible external source could be identified through ComSpark’s intelligence network.

“At the moment, nothing substantial enough to justify this diversion has been identified during the indicated timeframe,” Lumen admitted reluctantly, “Our best guess,” he said, sounding as though the word had genuinely left a rancid taste in his mouth, “is that the Clans have identified something of high value on Buckwheat,” As though anticipating his commander’s follow-up question, the CIO continued, “However, nothing of tactical significance has been able to be identified by our own operatives.

“Every indication is that Buckwheat is nothing more than a backwater agrarian planet.”

Charon was frowning by the end of her CIO’s report as well. She studied the map still hovering above the conference table. The changeling general briefly considered that the Clans might be of the opinion that Buckwheat’s position offered some strategic value as a forward supply base or other mobilization hub that could be utilized during the final push towards Equus. However, the system was over two hundred lightyears from here. A best time course from Buckwheat would take two months for an invasion fleet to traverse, leaving little chance of arriving with any measure of surprise that might give their invasion an edge. A smart commander would consolidate and stage their invasion force at a system within one jump from Equus―two if every Jump and WarShip were equipped with jump charge batteries.

Neither did Buckwheat possess the extensive orbital infrastructure that a decent staging area for an invasion of Equus would need. The Clans certainly had to know that the Faust System wouldn’t be the trot in the park that every other one of their targets had been up until this point. Those exiles knew perfectly well that the changelings were in possession of a WarShip fleet. The approach to Equus would not be uncontested, like it was in the rest of Sphere space. They would need to come at the system with their full strength all at once. That meant that whatever planet they grouped at would need to be able to support and berth dozens―if not hundreds―of DropShips simultaneously.

Buckwheat could not do that. Not unless the Clans were prepared to spend years specifically building all of that infrastructure from scratch.

No, the system could not possibly have been of any significant strategic value. Though, Charon mused, that didn’t mean that it might not still have some tactical value that they weren’t aware of. It was true that the world didn’t possess any measurable advanced industrial capacity. Certainly nothing that an invading military force could use to replace any lost or damaged war materials. Buckwheat wouldn’t be a source of ammunition or replacement parts for their armies.

At least, not that they knew of…

“Have your ‘lings cross-checked Buckwheat against CLDF records?” The general asked, her hoof rubbing her chin idly.

“You suspect a hidden cache?” Lumen correctly concluded. The mare nodded and he quickly consulted his notes, “I entertained a similar notion,” he said, “but we weren’t able to find any mention of a base or depot on the planet.”

“On the other hoof, our CLDF records are incomplete,” Charon pointed out, receiving an acknowledging nod from her head of intelligence. It was well known that one of the last acts of the departing CLDF forces which managed to escape before their queen could launch her coup was to erase as much information as they could about many of the Celestia League’s strongholds in the Sphere, “They’d always intended to come back; it would only make sense to have left themselves a few goodies. In that regard, a world like Buckwheat would make perfect sense. After all, how much attention have we paid to that world in the last five centuries?”

“Effectively none,” Lumen was nodding along now, his own brain working through possible scenarios in step with his superior, “It’s far enough away that we wouldn’t have been concerned about it, but close enough that any supplies left in a hidden cache wouldn’t have too far to travel in order to fully outfit a fleet staged for an invasion closer to Equus. That very well may be what we’re looking at here, ma’am.”

“They want that planet,” Charon mused, “They very well may even need it,” she corrected herself after a moment. At Lumen’s questioning look, she gestured a hoof at the map, “Think about it: Their initial invasion corridor would have taken them to Buckwheat anyway,” the general pointed out, “There was no need for them to focus on it, or divert more of their forces towards it. Like we just said: it’s a backwater planet. Which means it’s practically undefended. A battalion of standard armored units could ‘conquer’ that world if anycreature was inclined to waste the c-bits to do so,” she scoffed.

“So why divert so many additional units there?” She barely paused before providing the answer to her own rhetorical question, “They’re employing advanced BattleSteed designs, which means that the obsolete parts available on their conquered worlds won’t be enough to keep them in perfect working order. We know they aren’t taking significant losses during their invasions, but that doesn’t mean that their ‘Steeds aren’t taking significant damage,” Charon stressed.

“It’s feasible that their stockpile of parts is running low,” The general posed, “And their front lines are a lot further from their home systems now―wherever they are―than they were at the beginning of the invasion. They might be faced with the prospect of having to stall their invasion in order to wait on essential parts. In their position, I know that I certainly wouldn’t want to give up any of the momentum that my invasion had been enjoying up to this point,” She glanced over at the colonel, “How would you remedy a shortage of battle-capable units waiting on parts while simultaneously not giving up the initiative?”

“...I’d shorten my line of advance, so that I didn’t need to commit as many units to the fight at once,” The CIO confessed, one corner of his lip turning up in an understanding smile, “While I might not be taking as many objectives at once, I’d still be advancing just as quickly towards my goal. And...if I knew a source of those essential parts existed,” he glanced towards the map as well now, using the terminal in front of him to highling Buckwheat, “say, a hidden cache I’d left behind on my way out of the Sphere...I’d focus on getting there as quickly as possible while I still had enough combat-capable forces to do so.”

“Exactly,” Charon nodded with approval, “That’s quite possibly what we’re seeing play out here. If so, then we may have just been given that golden opportunity that we’ve been hoping for. If Buckwheat is as important to them as we think it might be, it might mean that they can’t afford to pass it up.”

“Or,” Another mare spoke up now, casting a pointed look in her commanding general’s direction, “The Clanners might just want us to think they can’t pass it up.”

Charon paused, looking at the member of her staff who’d spoken up. Brigadier General Scythe served as her Chief of Operations and had been heavily involved in studying the invasion reports in order to come up with defensive tactics and strategies that might best counteract the invader’s current doctrines. As Charon was well aware, her COO’s biggest challenge was coming up with ways to defeat a technologically superior force with an inferior one without costing them too much in the way of casualties. Scythe was also her staff’s foremost expert on Clan tactical doctrine.

“You suspect this could be an attempt to lure us into a trap?”

“I believe it’s worth considering,” the brigadier nodded, “They have to know that we have a significant defensive advantage here in Faust. Drawing our forces out to meet them provides an opportunity to whittle down our numbers without needing to contend with our WarShip fleets

“They have to realize that we’ll be forced to hamstring ourselves in an open confrontation like that,” She pointed out, “If we pile on our forces like you’re proposing, ma’am, it would be a prime opportunity to pulverize them from orbit. While losing all of that junk out there won’t hurt us much,” the brigadier waved a dismissive hoof in the direction of the production floor, “it would still cost us a lot of good pilots.”

Charon grunted in acknowledgement of the point. It was certainly no small consideration. Whether this was genuinely a trap or not, there was no overlooking that the attacking Clan forces would have undisputed control of the skies above the planet, and be able to bombard it uncontested. Her forces would never be able to dig in deep enough to withstand protracted shelling like that.

The general glanced back to Colonel Lumen, “Colonel, write up a proposal to include Quarray Eel missiles on the list of ‘miraculous new developments’ that ComSpark’s going to be unveiling. We have time to get them deployed into planetary defense silos on Buckwheat if we act fast. That’ll keep their WarShips out of orbit at least,” She turned back to Scythe now, “While I concede that it could be a trap, I personally feel it’s unlikely.

“Unless you’ve observed anything that you didn’t include in your reports to me, nothing about how the Clans have been operating so far suggest they are anything but direct and brutal. They know they have the numbers and the tech,” she pointed out, “so they don’t have a lot of need to orchestrate convoluted reverse-psychology entrapments.

“Again, I’m not saying the possibility doesn’t exist,” Charon repeated with an acknowledging nod towards her COO, “Just that what we stand to gain from taking this chance outways the detriments if it does turn out to be a trap. While your point about the possible cost in terms of experienced personnel isn’t without merit,” she conceded, “The fact is that Her Majesty is not going to wait forever for us to do something about this invasion. I’m certainly not going to tell her that we think the best time to confront them is when they’re knocking at our door. How about any of you?” Charon glanced around at the sea of faces that were suddenly rather hesitant to meet her gaze.

“I didn’t think so.

“We’re not exactly gambling away the whole hive with this either,” the commanding general continued after a brief moment’s pause, “We can afford to lose the quarter million combat personnel allotted to this command.”

“Will we be reinforcing with any mercenaries?” The question was asked by Major Pogrom, Charon’s personnel chief, who oversaw the staffing requirements of the command.

The general shook her head, “We will not. Not directly at least. Contracts have been drafted and assigned to shore up defenses of some of the genuinely more strategically important systems along the invasion corridor. Places that it would be...impolotique for ComSpark to garrison without raising a few eyebrows.

“The defense of Buckwheat will be entirely in the hooves of our own forces.”

Brigadier Scythe scowled now, “Then why are we being coy with our equipment? If we’re going to be the only ones on the planet, then let’s just send over a few divisions of Alhuizotls and be done with it! If we’re worried about witnesses, the planet can be harvested afterward and we’ll just blame the extermination of the local population on the Clans!” She sneered, sweeping aside the imagined population with a dismissive wave of her pocked foreleg.

“Even if we defeat the Clan forces invading Buckwheat, that doesn’t mean we’ll completely wipe out their entire invasion force,” Lumen pointed out to his fellow staff officer. “Video feeds of the fighting will get out.”

“That’s part of the plan, actually,” Charon added, catching both of her officers by surprise. Indeed, the only changeling in the room who didn’t seem to have been surprised by the news was her Chief of Communications, Colonel Daguerre, with whom this matter had already been discussed in detail. Now seemed to Charon like an adequate time to brief her other staff officers as well, since related directives had been finalized only that morning, “The Queen does not like the disquiet the Harmony Sphere is experiencing right now, as a result of the invasion. Academy attendance has dropped off significantly as influential families see the invasion steadily working its way to Equus with no sign of being stopped any time soon.

“Nopony believes that ComSpark will be able to hold off the Clan forces any better than the professional armies of the Commonwealth and the Combine are. After all,” Charon added with a sardonic smile, “ComSpark is simply a lowly little communications broker. What could we possibly know about real combat?

“Her Majesty feels that a demonstration of our force’s willingness to go out and not only meet the Clans on the field of battle, but show that ‘lowly little’ ComSpark can beat them, will initiate a resurgence in academy attendance the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades. If we can put the Clans on the back hoof, it might also create the opening that the mercenaries need to start pushing them back. It’ll certainly buy us time to properly space out a few more ‘novel breakthroughs’ to pass out to the Sphere in order to narrow the technology gap a little.”

“We’ll stop the Clans in their tracks and pad out our larder at the same time,” Daguerre grinned at the others.

Brigadier Scythe didn’t look quite mollified yet, “We’re still going to have to find a way to beat the Clans with obsolete ‘Steeds,” she pointed out, “It’s going to be like confronting a laser rifle with a damn flint-tipped spear,” she spat.

“It’ll be challenging, but hardly that bad,” Charon said with an understanding nod, “As the defending party, we’ll have the advantage. Engineers are already mobilizing to install a whole host of nasty surprises for our guests,” She assured the brigadier, who did look a little mollified by the news, “Hidden turrets, minefields, the works. The Clans are going to pay for every inch of Buckwheat in blood.

“Then, when the dust has settled and the Clan’s invasion forces lie battered and broken on the field, we can start making our plans to rally the galaxy for a counter-attack. I’m sure Her Majesty will be willing to allow ComSpark to reveal all sorts of ‘new’ innovations to the Sphere so that their forces can be brought up to par with our enemies. Then we can throw them at the Clans in an invasion of our own!”

“We’ll be able to wipe out the last bastion of resistance to changeling dominance of the galaxy, once and for all…” The general’s hungry grin was mirrored all around the room.

The seafoam hippogriff mare sat in silent contemplation as she slowly digested the new information that had just been laid at her talons. The galaxy had seemed like a much smaller and simpler place less than an hour ago, she mused. It had certainly felt like the decisions that she’d be asked to make had possessed much more forthright answers, at least.

Thera Novo, heir to the Coordinatorship of the Hippogriff Combine and the current leader of its military in her capacity as Deputy for Military Affairs, smiled mirthlessly as she contemplated how much difference an hour could make in how one perceived the universe. She had woken up that morning with―what she had thought was―a crystal clear understanding of who the Combine’s enemies were, and what needed to be done about them. Now all of that had been thrown into question, and the Combine’s ranking military officer was faced with quite a few very difficult choices to make.

“This would have been a lot easier if your evidence wasn’t so ironclad,” Thera couldn’t keep herself from chuckling in a humorless tone. The mare glanced away from the sprawling cityscape visibles beyond the window of her office, looking over her shoulder at the broad-withered earth pony stallion standing on the other side of the desk, “I could have just dismissed it all out of claw and sent you on your way. Even now, I think I preferred my ignorance,” the last was uttered with a scowl.

“You’re not the only one who wishes this wasn’t the way things were,” Timberjack replied in a softly dejected tone of his own. The constant reports over the last several months regarding the progress―and especially the death toll―of the Clan invasions had weighed especially hard on his conscience. After all, the Clans were ‘his’ comrades. It was difficult to separate himself from their atrocities, even when he himself had no hoof in them.

He might have been able to distance himself from those feelings under most circumstances. Perhaps if it had just been Clans like Smoke Jabberwock, Ghost Ursa, and the other more belligerent groups causing all of this destruction, he could have. Unfortunately for Timberjack, Clan Timberwolf―his own Clan―was leading one of the invasion’s fronts. It was a buck to his core to see that happening; especially when his whole purpose here had been in part to help devise a way to avoid exactly this kind of broad, destructive, conquest. He’d believed in that cause.

Now he couldn’t help but feel betrayed by his own leadership.

Thera sighed, shaking her head, “You know, when all of this started, my father was convinced that Tirek had somehow returned,” The hippogriff commander said, sounding almost wistful, “That this was all being perpetrated by forces of great evil against the ‘good’ creatures of the galaxy.

“The Combine has something of a mythical regard for the CLDF forces that Admiral Spike took out of the Harmony Sphere all those centuries ago. Many of us believed he did this so that they could train and build their forces in secret, so that they could avoid being drawn into our own petty squabbles and return only when a true threat emerged.

“My father told me just last week that Admiral Spike and his ‘glorious fleets’ would be here any day now to sweep those invaders from the Sphere. A part of me believed him too,” she admitted in a sad tone, “It was a comforting hope; and we’re in desperate need of hope these days.”

She directed her piercing golden eyes at the stalwart earth pony stallion. It was almost, but not quite, a glare, “Now you’re telling me that the avenging heroes whose return we’ve been praying for to come and save us, and the monsters butchering their way across our space, are one in the same. Where exactly are we supposed to turn to for salvation now?”

“We have a plan,” Timberjack assured her, though the stallion was finding it difficult to sound as reassuring as he would have liked. Partly because there was no escaping the fact that this was yet another hastily cobbled-together ‘plan’ that had needed to be assembled after their last plan had been smothered in its metaphorical infancy by the invasion. Which was itself a diversion from the initial plan which had been in the works for hundreds of years.

This effectively meant that they were now operating on the contingency of a contingency. Which was hardly the sort of notion that inspired a lot of confidence. Thus far, Timberjack had managed to avoid explicitly bringing up the matter of the heavy reliance this new plan had on the capabilities of the Disciples of Discord. Given the intentional efforts of the group to mask their true capabilities behind a visage of incompetence and ineffectiveness, the earth pony doubted mentioning them by their more commonly known title would have done much to help his cause in this instance. Instead, he’d simply mentioned that his mercenaries would be working closely with other groups operating in the Sphere which had been embedded by the Clans just like his had been, but also disavowed the invasion decision and had pledged to work to stop it.

“I’m sure I can’t wait to hear it,” Thera scoffed. The hippogriff sat herself down at her desk and folded her talons together beneath her chin, leaning her head on them as she regarded the stallion expectantly, “By all means, enlighten me on how we’re going to do anything to stop this invasion short of trying to literally drown their forces in the blood of citizens? Because at the moment that’s about the only workable ‘strategy’ any of my advisors have been able to come up with: confronting them with so many targets that we run them out of ammunition and eventually beat them that way.”

Timberjack cringed at the very idea of such a thing. Mostly because he was sure that the Commonwealth had to be thinking along the same lines by this point. At least Victoria might soon be able to find herself getting help from the Federated Moons, giving her double the access to personnel and material than the Combine had. Hopefully that meant that she wouldn’t be forced to become quite that desperate any time soon. Though, all that likely meant was that Commonwealth and Federation soldiers would be dying in equal parts as the Clans continued to push onward.

Of course, with a little luck, it shouldn’t come to that, “The Clan issue should―hopefully―be resolved in a couple more months,” The stallion assured her. Even Timberjack wasn’t privy to all of the details of that plan. Mostly because he’d only been made aware of it a few weeks ago when Princess Twilight finally managed to make contact with him through the Disciple’s agents operating in the Sphere. It was then that he’d been given his own new marching orders on what the alicorn needed from the Combine, and any other group he could convince to cooperate, “We have something in motion that should halt their invasion.”

The hippogriff regarded him carefully for a moment as she processed what he’d just told her, “...But not drive them out?”

He winced slightly, “Our plan doesn’t call for that, no,” he admitted before hastily adding, “We honestly need them―or at least their WarShip fleets―to remain in the Sphere. At least for now.”

Thera obviously wasn’t a fan of that, “I can only assume then that you’re not here to help us execute a counter-attack to reclaim our lost territory?” She watched the stallion shake his head, feeling her frustration mounting. Somehow though, she managed to keep her tone moderately level as she asked her next question, “So what is it that you do need us for?”

If the nominal commander of the Combine’s military had been unhappy with how this meeting had gone up to this point, Timberjack imagined that she was going to be more than a little ‘put out’ by what he said next, and braced himself accordingly, “...We would like you to pull the bulk of your forces back from your front with the Clans. Especially your heaviest and more capable units. It’s important that you retain as much of your military as possible for when the time is right.”

“Oh, is that all?” She said in an almost flippant tone, though the smirk on her face was anything but amused.

“We also want you to do the same along your border with the Federated Moons.”

As he’d anticipated, that was the ‘step too far’ where Thera was concerned. The hippogriff was no longer hiding her ire behind even a veneer of propriety now as she lunged out of her seat and slammed both her clawed hands down on the table, gouging deep scars into the polished surface, “Are you out of your tiny pony mind?! You’re asking me to leave the whole Combine basically open to a wholesale invasion on all fronts!”

“The Clans aren’t going to be a problem much longer,” Timberjack began, “You must already be getting reports that they’ve stopped pushing in along your borders and have shifted their focus deeper into the Sphere.”

That fact didn’t seem to assuage the hippogriff as much as the earth pony might have hoped, “I’m also getting reports that the Federation is amassing forces along their border with us. I can only assume that First Prince Nacht isn’t too happy with his brother dying in a Highlander attack earlier this year and is looking to make his displeasure known,” Thera growled.

“I can’t pull my forces off the Federation front. If anything, I intend to reinforce it!”

“Deputy, please, I need you to understand―” Timberjack began, only to be ruthlessly cut off by the hippogriff screaming in his face.

“No! You need to understand: If you expect me to expose the Combine like that, then you need to give me one Tartarus of a good reason. All I know right now is that you don’t need my forces to fight the Clans, and it’s obviously not to stave off the Federation―so what exactly am I supposed to be holding my forces in reserve for?!”

Timberjack didn’t respond at first, which only stoked the hippogriff’s anger further. The stallion was conflicted, as he understood perfectly well that much of what little he knew about Twilight’s plan wasn’t meant to be revealed to members of the Sphere at large. If Chrysalis or her agents got even a whiff of what the Disciples were planning, then everything could be undone in an instant. Telling Thera as much as he already had about the true nature of ComSpark had been a significant risk as it was. However, it was simple enough for the hippogriff to keep such knowledge to herself, with no need to share it with other members of her staff.

On the other hoof, he could understand that her senior officers would require some sort of justification as to why the head of the Combine’s military was taking actions which left the Combine vulnerable to its enemies. Withdrawing from the front with the Clans could be explained away as an effort to conserve and gather forces for a counter-attack; but it would be much harder to use that same argument regarding the Federation, as the Combine was largely on equal military footing with them.

If Thera shared what he was about to tell her with any of her other officers, it might very well doom the whole galaxy. On the other hoof, if Timberjack couldn’t ensure that the star nations of the harmony Sphere had the forces they’d need for the last part of Twilight’s plan, then it would all be for nought anyway, wouldn’t it? If the invasion of Equus failed, Chrysalis would win no matter who knew what.

“...You’re going to invade Equus.”

Judging from the expression of blatant shock on her face, whatever response Thera might have been expecting from the earth pony, clearly that hadn’t made the list. Her slack beak worked wordlessly for several seconds before the Combine’s Deputy for Military Affairs managed to find her voice again, “You want the Combine to launch an invasion of Equus? Why, in Celestia’s name, would we ever do something like that?”

Again Timberjack hesitated. This time, however, he did choose to exercise discretion. It was one thing for her to know the target of the proposed invasion. On its own, that information slipping into the changelings’ hooves shouldn’t be enough to topple everything Twilight and the Disciples were planning. It could be dismissed as the Combine’s aging Coordinator getting reckless in his advanced age―which he arguably was. At worst, Chrysalis might have her agents manipulate a distraction of some sort. She might even wait until after the Clan threat was dealt with, which would suit him just fine anyway.

On the other hoof, Thera knowing why the Combine would be motivated to invade would undermine everything. So he elected to be vague on that point, “You’ll understand when the moment comes,” He informed her, “Trust me that you won’t need to worry about convincing your officers or your father to commit to an invasion of Equus when the moment comes. I strongly suspect that you’ll even be directed to organize it,” Timberjack flashed a sardonic smirk of his own at the hippogriff.

“What’s important is that you have the forces available to act. Which means avoiding losing as many as possible to combat for the next couple of months. Whatever worlds you lose to the Clans―or even the Federation―in that time can be retaken later. But we won’t get a second chance at defeating the changelings.”

The seafoam figure let out an annoyed grunt, receding from the earth pony and slumping back into her seat; clearly still unhappy, but no longer seething with rage. She reached up and massaged her temple with one of her talons, “Pulling back from the front with the Clans will be easy enough to justify,” she conceded reluctantly, “We’re just feeding our forces into a meat grinder in that regard anyway. But the Federation…” she shook her head, “I simply can’t do it. Not while there’s an active military build-up on their side of the fence.

“If you can get Nacht to stand down, I’ll see what I can do; but as things stand: whatever I pull off the front with the Clans will almost certainly be expected to go to the Federation border.”

Timberjack frowned, nodding along in understanding. It was hardly ideal, but it was hardly an inexcusable situation. If there was any silver lining to be found, the stallion supposed, it was that the changeling’s would hardly find it suspicious that the Combine was pulling forces away from the fight with the Clans in order to respond to a threat from one of their longtime rivals―

The earth pony jerked with sudden realization: it wouldn’t be suspicious, would it? In fact, it might be one of the least surprising shifts in its military deployment that the Combine could make under the circumstances: pulling forces away from a font that was cooling down in order to meet a more immediate threat. More than that, the Federated Moons would also be pooling much of their available military power in the same area simultaneously! Two large military forces, from two of the Successor States, primed and ready for a massive fight at a moment’s notice…

This could end up being a golden opportunity. Timberjack looked to the hippogriff, “Do it. Send whatever forces you can to the border with Federation space,” he insisted, “and while you’re at it: take the Timberwolf’s Dragoons with you under contract.”

Now it was Thera’s turn to look surprised again, “Just a minute ago you wanted me to avoid combat with Nacht; now suddenly you want to help me fight him?”

“Truth be told, I think I might be able to keep a fight from breaking out at all,” He admitted, earning a dubious look from the Deputy, “Or at least postpone it long enough for...things to happen. Things that might even put Nacht Belle off of avenging his brother for a little while.”

Thera looked even more doubtful now, “I can’t think of much that would be more important to the First Prince than that. Unless you know of another Clan invasion coming his way,” Her tone held a note of hopefulness to it. Hardly surprising, Timberjack supposed, for the hippogriff to wish that her enemies would become as ‘inconvenienced’ as her own nation was.

The earth pony continued to sit on the details however, saying only, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll understand when it happens. In the meantime, let’s discuss my hiring fee for the contract you’re going to be taking out today. Don’t worry, I’m willing to give you quite a bargain, given the circumstances…”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 38: Embers of War

Captain Danube crept slowly through the dim corridor, the only light being provided by the glow of his and Lieutenant Remmy’s horns as their telekinesis held their weapons aloft. His eyes were fix straight ahead even though he couldn’t really make out much detail at all beyond a few meters. His ears maintained a near-constant swivel as they sought out every possible sound. However, he couldn’t hear much beyond the sounds of the four sets of hooves of his team tapping along the steel deck plating.

A shape darted through the shadows in front of him. Almost on instinct, Danube fired his weapon. The muzzle flashed three times in rapid succession. From up ahead came a pained gasp immediately followed by the thud of a body collapsing to the floor.

“One Tango down,” The unicorn stallion announced to the rest of his team, “Twelve o’clock.”

The quartet continued making their way cautiously through the dark hall. Beside him, Remmy spared a quick glance at the creature that he’d downed, murmuring, “ComGuard.”

Danube suppressed a desire to roll his eyes. Obviously it was going to be a member of the ComGuard, the stallion thought privately to himself. They were deep inside a ComSpark HyperSpark Generator. Who else did Remmy think they were going to run into down here?

A few meters further down, the unicorn stallion called a hushed halt to the rest of the group, “Doors. Both sides. Remmy, up with me. Gretel, Jasper, check them out,” Danube spared a quick glance over his shoulder to confirm that his commands had been heard and understood. The griffon and earth pony behind him both issued curt nods. He then looked over at Remmy beside him and motioned with his hoof for the two of them to move past the doors so that they could keep the corridor covered while the other two checked to see what lay beyond the doors. Hopefully one of those rooms was their objective.

Once more, Danube focused his attention ahead of him, looking for any signs of additional movement in the shadows. Behind him, he heard the metal doors sliding open. Seconds felt like minutes in the darkness as he waited for the pair to give their report. The griffon hen was the first to reply, in her raspy tenor, “Nothing.”

The earth pony stallion reemerged a moment later, shaking his head, “No dice.”

“Understood. Move out,” The unicorn stallion ordered as the column once more began their steady march deeper into the facility.

The further they made it without encountering another ComGuard soldier, the more nervous Danube felt himself growing. He’d expected to find them encountering much heavier resistance this deep into the bowels of a HSG. ComSpark typically guarded these things pretty jealously. Yet they’d only met with three of them so far. The unicorn had to wonder if the bulk of them weren’t hunkered down in the control room that his group were currently trying to reach.

If that was the case, it would certainly make the last little stretch of their mission quite the exciting affair, wouldn’t it?

Another shadow darted into the corridor ahead of them from somewhere. Just as before, the unicorn stallion depressed the trigger of his rifle with his magic, sending two successive bursts into the source of the movement. A feminine scream echoed down the hall, followed by silence. He didn’t see any other movement. Once more he reported having engaged a singular target.

Danube frowned. Why did they keep doing that? Darting around in the dark one at a time, just begging to be shot? It hardly seemed like a worthwhile strategy. Then again, he supposed that ComGuard didn’t exactly see a lot of regular action during their careers. It was probably a bit much to expect them to possess a significant level of skill and experience.

Still, he wasn’t sure what they hoped to accomplish other than giving him brief spikes in his heart rate.

He trudged past the body. A moment later, the unicorn stallion missed a step and halted. Remmy hadn’t given her usual report on the identity of the target. He glanced right, and it was only then that he realized the mare wasn’t at his side anymore. Had she fallen behind for some reason? His head turned further around to peer over his shoulder.

Jasper wasn’t there either, the stallion realized numbly. Gretel was still with him though, regarding the unicorn with a bored expression.

Danube couldn’t exactly say why it was that his intelligence appeared to have dropped by half in those moments. He figured that it had to be a result of the surprise at finding half of his team suddenly missing for reasons that he couldn’t immediately conceive of a reason for. After all, the unicorn and the earth pony had both been there just a few seconds ago, and it was impossible for them to have managed to get themselves lost after just ten meters of straight corridor!

He did fully acknowledge that he deserved whatever ridicule he received for what he said next though, “Where are the others?”

“Dead,” The griffon replied in a nonplused tone. A very deep male tone. The hen then proceeded to lift a pistol clutched in their clawed hand and pulled the trigger.

Danube recoiled from the shot, crying out in agony as he went to the ground, clutching at the center of his forehead where he’d been struck by the shot. An eruption of emerald flames illuminated the corridor, leaving behind a dusky jade changeling when they receded, “Just like you.”

A recently promoted Colonel Slipshod, head of Her Royal Highness’ newly minted Training and Doctrine Command, tossed away the pistol still clutched in the crook of his fetlock and stamped two times on the ground, yelling out, “Index!” over the string of curses and epithets that the unicorn stallion was still sputtering from the ground.

A second later the overhead lights of the massive BattleSteed hangar the mock HyperSpark Generator had been constructed in came to life, illuminating their surroundings and allowing for the still writhing captain to finally see what had become of the rest of his team. Remmy was a couple meters back down the corridor, and Jasper a few more meters beyond her. Both had their mouths sealed and their hooves bound by some sort of translucent green goo.

Almost a full ten meters back, Danube saw that the real Gretel was only just now managing to wriggle out of the room that she had been instructed by him to check earlier, similarly bound and gagged. Her amber eyes were making a valiant effort to, on their own accord, kill the changeling where he stood with a most potent glare.

A hippogriff and a pegasus were also present, raising themselves up off the floor and wiping the bright yellow marking paint from their ComGuard uniforms. Other creatures emerged from various sections of the mock facility as well, also sporting ComGuard attire. Still others were sequestered above them along the gantries and catwalks of the converted ‘Steed Bay where they had been watching the exercise play out.

Slipshod hoped that at least one of them had managed to learn a thing or two from the squad’s failures, “Who wants to tell Captain Danube how he got his team―and himself―killed?” He asked the gathered onlookers. He spared a moment to glance at the two nearest opfor members and gestured for them to go and free the three restrained members of the doomed team.

“They weren’t watching each other,” One of the creatures above them called out.

Slipshod nodded, “Got it in one. Captain Danube let a member of his team leave line-of-sight of anycreature else. Now they’re all dead.”

“It was for, like, two seconds!” The unicorn stallion sputtered, massaging the center of his forehead where the paint round had struck him. It was most definitely going to leave a welt for the next day or two, the changeling observed. Good. Perhaps it would serve as a reminder to both himself and everycreature else here about this exercise’s lesson.

“Actually, it was five seconds,” Slipshod corrected soberly, “And look what I managed to do with those five seconds!” He gestured towards the bound and gagged griffon who was still yet to be freed as the hippogriff was having some difficulty peeling back the resin from her feathers. The changeling sighed and fired off a trio of obliging blasts of green energy from his horn, instantaneously dissolving the organic restraints. Oddly enough, while the hen had a great many words to offer him, none of them approached anything that could even charitably be described as “gratitude”.

“And the five seconds after that,” A few more blasts freed the earth pony stallion, “And the five seconds after that,” The unicorn mare at least had the good graces to mutter a ‘thank you, sir’ under her breath. Slipshod now looked down at the captain, “I trust I don’t need to reiterate what I did to you five seconds after that?”

“No...sir,” the stallion grumbled.

Slipshod turned his attention back up to the rest of his ‘students’. Every one of them was a Disciple officer who would be leading a team on an assault at a ComSpark HSG in the coming months. His job was to teach them how to protect themselves from his kind, so that they in turn could pass that knowledge onto the rest of their units. The timetable that they were operating under meant that there wasn’t a lot of time for that; and the longer it took the creatures here to learn, the less time they’d have to teach others.

If it seemed like everycreature was a little on edge, it was because they were all aware of that as well. And it certainly wasn’t as though they weren’t trying, Slipshod admitted to himself. He could tell that they were taking the information that he was putting out seriously. The issue so far was that, of the over a dozen mock raids like this one that he’d set up so far, not a single group had managed to survive to reach their goal.

And they were just facing off against one changeling. In a real HSG facility, there’d be hundreds.

The changeling let out a heavy sigh, “You cannot―even for ‘two seconds’―let a member of your team be out of sight of any other member of the team,” he reiterated. Even as he spoke, Slipshod’s mind returned to the hidden HSG on Colton. Blood Chit had told him of the specifics about how Tig had met her end. How he’d watched, helpless, as an unsuspecting Tig had let her guard down around the pony that she had ‘known’ was there to protect her. Fusilier had probably only been out of her sight for a matter of seconds as well. Yet, obviously, it had been long enough for the changelings to deal with him, assume his form, and get the drop on the unsuspecting engineer.

“If a changeling catches a glimpse of you for even a second, they can become you. If they hear you utter a whisper, they can sound like you. Never, for a moment, assume that a friend who has left the sight of the group is still your friend when you see them again.”

“So, what? Are we just suppose to shoot anycreature who comes back from around a corner?” Another of the onlookers asked skeptically, “What if we get separated from the group? How are we supposed to let anycreature else know it’s really us?”

“That’s why I’ve been encouraging you to use code phrases,” Slipshod reminded them.

“We used code phrases and you still kicked our flanks,” a pegasus stallion piped up, absently rubbing at the side of his neck where Slipshod had put him into a rather unforgiving headlock.

“That’s because you kept yelling out the same code phrases every three seconds,” The changeling said, casting a frown in his direction, “It’s not a very ‘secret’ code phrase if everycreature can hear it all the time.

“You need to use a progressive code phrase. Something interactive that rarely repeats―preferably never, if possible.”

“So we should memorize a code novel and just recite it a word at a time?” Gretel chided, half joking.

“That actually would work,” Slipshod acknowledged, giving the griffon a nod, “I doubt a raid will last long enough to need a whole novel, but a decently long sonnet might do the trick as long as the whole team can memorize it well enough to stake their lives on knowing the next word.”

More than a few of the creatures present exchanged dubious looks. The changeling glanced at his datalink and noted the time, “I’ve ‘killed’ enough of you today; we’ll pick this up again tomorrow. Report back to your commanders. Be back here at oh-eight hundred, tomorrow. Dismissed.”

Slipshod made his way out of the maze of corridors that had been setup to run their drills and headed for the bay’s open doors. It had been a long day for all of them, whether those junior officers believed it or not. He wasn’t used to changing forms so often in a day, and this group had hardly been experiencing anything close to ‘high spirits’ for him to passively draw on to keep up his energy. He’d been working at least as hard as they had been, but the difference was that the changeling hadn’t been able to capitalize on the benefit of getting a ‘lunch’ at midday.

As though he was in possession of prescient knowledge regarding the changeling’s thoughts, Slipshod spotted a striped stallion standing just outside the ‘Steed Bay, waving in his direction. He could taste the good vibrations from here!

“Hey, Xanax; just the zebra I needed right now,” Slishod said, flashing the other BattleSteed pilot a warm smile.

“I figured,” the striped equine grinned in return, “So how was school?”

As if on cue, a steady parade of thoroughly disenfranchised and bruised Disciple officers trudged by. Gretel shot him a particularly nasty glare as she glided past. Xanadu noted the overall mood of the dispersing trainees and began to nod, smirking over as Slipshod, “I see, I see; so not a great day then?”

“Not ‘great’, no,” The changeling agreed, “But it’s only been a week. They are getting better,” He added as an afterthought.

“How much better?”

“Ehh…” Slipshod raised a hoof and tilted it from side to side.

“Cool, cool...And how much longer until we have to hit those arrays?”

If there was one drawback to this plan, it was that it had a pretty loose timetable; which was usually something not conducive to the quality execution of a massive, galaxy-spanning, multi-vector assault. The HyperSpark Generators had to be struck―ideally―within hours of each other; two days at the absolute most. At least, if the first attacks went poorly. If the initial raids were successful, then it honestly didn’t matter how much time there was between attacks. In fact, it would be to the benefit of the subsequent insertion teams to delay their assaults so that there was a chance they’d find out Twilight’s virus had been injected into the network and any additional attacks were pointless.

On the other side of the c-bit, if the first few attempts to get into the HSGs failed, then the rest of the teams would suddenly find themselves racing against the clock to make their own insertions. Worse, there really wasn’t any way to know how much time they’d have before every HyperSpark Generator facility got the warning to go on high-alert. A message―even one sent with the highest priority level possible―could take a few days to get from one side of the galaxy to the other. But it needed only minutes to make it to any neighboring system within fifty lightyears.

They’d done everything that they could to make sure that the selected targets to be attacked were as spread out as they could be, specifically to avoid running into a situation where an HSG array received a warning about Disciple attacks within a few hours, thereby―hopefully―giving every team a fair shot at catching ComSpark by surprise.

However, there was still the minor consideration of deploying the DropShips and their assault groups throughout the Harmony Sphere so that they could all be poised to strike at about the same time. That was going to be Tirek’s own bitch to coordinate. A consideration that was only compounded by the fact that they needed ‘Chrysalis’’ message to go out as close to after the defeat of the Clan’s invasion force as possible. They needed to be sure that they got out the message they wanted the galaxy to hear, and not have to worry about the changeling queen laying the groundwork for anything she might try to leverage out of stopping the invasion.

Of course, they had no way of knowing exactly when the attack on Buckwheat was going to happen. The Clan’s were running that side of things, and they weren’t exactly on speaking terms with Twilight anymore.

“Nocreature really knows,” Slipshod admitted, not making an effort to veil his obvious displeasure at the notion.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. You know, I was under the impression that most ’plan’ things had, you know, timetables and stuff. When everything is being done from the flank, it’s less of a ‘plan’ and more of an ‘improvisation’.”

“Oh, I’m well aware,” The changeling agreed, “It’s honestly not quite that bad. We have a pretty general idea of approximately when the Clans will reach Buckwheat based on how fast they’re advancing. At least to within a two week window.

“That’s still too wide of a margin for our purposes, but it’ll let us get the teams close enough to their targets that they can hit them within a day or two of getting the ‘go’ order.”

“And the time for the ‘go’ order would be…?” Xanadu prompted.

“When we have confirmation that the Clans have been halted by ComSpark.”

The zebra frowned, “I can’t help but think that that’s something we won’t learn about through regular channels until ComSpark tells the galaxy about it; especially not while we’re all the way out here. And ComSpark’s not going to break the news until they’re ready to put the spin they want on it,” he added.

For his part, Slipshod was already nodding in agreement. This had been something of a frequent issue that was brought up at the meetings Twilight had been having with her new command staff. So far, the only way that any of them had been able to figure out in order to get word of the outcome of the fighting on Buckwheat was to have the Maelstrom physically present in the system, ready to jump out and get the Peregrine via Havoc as soon as the battle was over.

From there, it was a simple matter of sending out a standard, properly coded, HyperSpark message to all of their poised DropShips in the Sphere. Their message to launch the attack would be going out to all of their teams at about the same time that word of the outcome at Buckwheat was only just arriving at Equus. It would take the changelings time to craft how exactly they wanted to paint the victory of the ComGuard over the Clans. Time enough, hopefully, that the assaults would be well underway by the time they were ready to send it out.

While using the Disciple WarShip was the most expedient way to get the information that their operation needed, it wasn’t without its risks. Paramount among them would be having a WarShip present in a star system that was about to be the site of a massive battle that didn’t belong to either side. While the changelings would almost certainly assume that the Maelstrom was simply another Clan vessel and not feel that anything was too out of the ordinary, the Clans would doubtlessly feel different if they spotted General Mayhem’s ship. They would certainly know that the Disciples weren’t there to back them up.

While Smolder and her followers might dismiss the vessel as a threat, Star Admiral Cinder was another matter. She was clever enough to figure out that, if the Disciples weren’t there to help with the fighting, then they were there for some reason that benefited them, and not the Clans. Whether or not the dragoness would manage to correctly conclude that the battle was a trap was too much to speculate on; but it also wasn’t a chance that they could afford to take. If the Clans decided to simply not try and invade Buckwheat, then most of what they were intending to do fell apart.

Without first soundly defeating the Clans, they lost the pretence for ‘Queen Twilight’ to condemn the impotency of the other star nations and demand their subordination to ComSpark and herself. To say nothing of the fact that it would be nearly impossible to expect the Successor states to be able to mount any sort of worthwhile offensive on Equus while having to also worry about the intact Clanner fleets still marauding around the Harmony Sphere.

Understandably, there was a concerted effort being made to try and arrange for an alternate means of receiving word about the results of the confrontation at Buckwheat as quickly as possible. However, that was for somecreature else to worry about. Slipshod’s area of concern was making sure they had teams ready to go who would at least have a chance of successfully breaching a HyperSpark Generator facility and uploading the virus.

“We’ve got a lot of the bigger parts of the operation moving along as well as we can hope for,” The changeling defended to the zebra, “Thanks to Triton, we have enough DropShip crews to get all of the teams situated. We even have a couple JumpShips of our own now, not counting the Maelstrom, which will help us get those teams to their staging points. As best we can figure, as long as we head out in the next three weeks, they’ll be ready to strike in time.

“Given the months that will be required to transit to their targets, the teams will have plenty of time to practice what I’m teaching their leadership here,” Now the stallion cringed, “The question is whether or not they’ll actually be able to learn it in time…”

“Three weeks isn’t a lot of time to learn how to properly fight an enemy as capable as changelings,” Xanadu noted. A point to which Slipshod had to agree, nodding along with the striped equine’s assessment.

“That’s why I’m not pulling punches. I don’t have the time to gently nudge them up to the level they need to be at. I’m hitting them with every dirty trick I can come up with right off the bat, because that’s what the ComGuard are going to do too. Even if I don’t have enough time to teach them everything, I can at least expose them to the more difficult challenges they’ll be facing.”

“I’m sure they appreciate that,” Xanadu said, flashing a smirk at the changeling, with a nod in the direction of the clearly disgruntled Disciple officers still trudging away from the training site. Then he elected to change the subject, “Anyway, I’m here to let you know that Channel Lock is hosting a ‘Bad Movie Night’. I figure you could use a ‘good vibrations’ boost as much as anypony.”

That actually did sound to the changeling like exactly what he needed right now, “Abso-fucking-lutely, I could. Lead the way!”

By the time Danude returned to the dining table in the mess hall where the other trainees from his class were sitting, he found that he was just in time to catch Gretel’s latest scathing review of their instructor, “―don’t understand why that fucking bug’s walking around free in the first place; let alone ‘training’ us,” She smeared while gnawing around a rib bone, “Are changeling’s the enemy or not?”

“He’s a defector,” Remmy reminded the griffon calmly as her telekinetically-held spoon nudged around a glob of unsettlingly firm ‘oatmeal’. She was clearly second-guessing her choice in entrees.

“Changelings can’t ‘defect’,” The hen retorted, wagging the thoroughly-gnawed bone at the mare, “Their queen has the ability to control their minds,” she insisted.

“I don’t think that’s how that works,” Jasper said skeptically.

“They live in a hive, which means they have a hive mind,” Gretel insisted, casting the bare rib aside in favor of one that hadn’t been stripped of its meat yet.

Danube’s eyes were already rolling as he sat down to join them, “Does that mean that because you’re a bird, that you have a bird brain, lieutenant?”

Remmy had the good grace to hide her chortle beneath a poorly-disguised cough. Jasper was less fortunate, as he had been drinking his soda at the moment that the newly arrived captain delivered his quip. The griffon was just about to make a comment regarding the unicorn stallion that would almost certainly fall outside the bounds of ‘conduct becoming’, but found her attention very abruptly―and messily―diverted by the shower of fizzy black liquid that was snorted in her direction from across the table. The flustered hen was clearly unsure of who deserved her ire more: the superior officer who’d insulted her, or her peer who had just seasoned her dinner with snot-infused cola.

Fortunately, the unicorn mare took the opportunity afforded her by the brief indecision to redirect the conversation somewhat, “The bottom line is that both Princess Twilight Sparkle and the general both vouch for him. Mayhem’s word is good enough for me,” she glanced pointedly at the griffon, silently defying the feathered lieutenant to voice her lack of faith in the mare who wasn’t just their senior officer, but also the mare who―in the view of the Disciples―had been effectively ordained by Discord Himself to lead them.

While the Spirit of Chaos might not have made his presence known in the galaxy for the better part of five centuries, it was a well-established fact within the Disciples that Discord’s will still made itself known to them through its appointment of their commanding generals. The vestige of his power which lived within Mayhem―as it had with every commanding general before her―was taken as nothing short of divine providence that she knew what was best for the Disciples. It was why such leaders had been given the gift of Foresight, so that they could make the correct choices in order to keep the resistance alive and flourishing.

To doubt General Mayhem, was to doubt Discord’s own will in the galaxy. To doubt their whole cause. Such a thing was only slightly more frowned upon than keeping a well-organized sock drawer on Havoc Station.

As obstinate as the griffon might generally be when she felt that something rubbed her plumage the wrong way, even Gretel was prepared to go quite so far as to question General Mayhem’s decisions. As such, the hen merely let out an irritated snarl and cast a baleful glare in Jasper’s decision. The earth pony offered reconciliation in the form of as many of the napkins as he’d been able to pluck from the dispenser on their table.

To Danube, all she offered was a cursory, “Griffon’s aren’t ‘birds’...sir.”

“But the colonel is your superior officer,” the unicorn stallion reminded her as he finally began to pick at his own meal. He’d hoped to avoid Remmy’s misstep and had opted for the barley cakes, which had at least looked more enticing. However, the unnervingly metallic sound that they made when he tapped the deceptively heavy roll against the table left him more than mildly concerned. Experimentally, he dropped the barley cake on the floor behind him. Despite having known the impact was coming, the stallion still felt himself jump slightly in his seat at the unexpectedly loud ‘CLANG!’ the ‘bread roll’ made as it struck the steel deck plating. More than a few creatures at nearby tables similarly jerked in surprise, whipping their heads around to observe the source of the racket.

“~one fell off the table, and killed a friend of mine~” Somecreature a few tables down sing-songed in the stunned silence which had fallen over the cafeteria. A brief chorus of laughs and chuckles rose up in reply, and then the typical din of a dozen concurrent conversations returned to the dining hall. Danube returned the ‘roll’ to his tray with considerable care and turned his attention to the―presumably more edible―vegetable medley.

“It’s not his fault you let him get the drop on you,” The captain continued.

“Says the pony who got shot in the fucking head,” Gretel retorted.

“He got all of us,” Remmy reminded them diplomatically, “And not just us. He got Tannerite’s and Palisade’s teams too; and both of them lead sapper units. Those guys have performed ops against multiple ComSpark HSGs in the past, and the colonel still took them out.”

“Yeah, what was up with that?” Gretel asked, frowning, “Major Palisade’s crew should have been able to squash that bug!”

“Demolition isn’t the same as infiltration,” Jasper pointed out, “The sapper teams almost never have to go very far into one of those discrete arrays. They usually just drag a nuke in the front door and blow it right there on the bugs’ doorstep,” The earth pony explained matter-of-factly, “Usually does enough damage to take the place offline.”

“So we’re supposed to be able to do something that nocreature has ever done before? Awesome,” the griffon grumbled.

“Isn’t that kind of the point of all of this?” Remmy inquired pointedly, “Nocreature has been able to take down the changelings like they are now. But we’ve always known that it was going to be up to us, for the most part. The Disciples exist to do this very thing,” she reminded them.

The unicorn mare was the consummate ‘True Believer’, Danube knew. While every member of the Disciples understood and accepted the cause that they were fighting for, it was also a fact that most were resigned to the idea that theirs would be a near-eternal struggle. After five centuries of conducting little more than ‘inconveniencing’ raids against ComSpark, it was understandable that many might begin to see ultimate victory as something that lay beyond their grasp.

This wasn’t the case for the most devoted among their numbers though. Creatures like Lieutenant Remmy Red possessed complete faith in what they’d come to describe as ‘The Will of Discord’; this notion that the chaotic magicks of the long-disappeared draconequus were still active in the galaxy, and working towards the ultimate downfall of Chrysalis and her changeling brood. That was certainly the official rhetoric of the Disciples in any case. How deeply its members believed in that notion tended to vary, of course.

For Captain Blue Danube’s part, while he acknowledged that Discord’s power was obviously still at work―General Mayhem’s abilities were clear proof of that much, at least―he was less than convinced as to how potent it was when it came to toppling ComSpark. The changelings simply seemed so monolithic at this point, that it was difficult to conceive of anything which could hope to usurp their command of the Harmony Sphere. While the invading Clan forces certainly appeared to have the galaxy on the ropes for the moment, Danube and the other Disciples knew that this was only because Chrysalis hadn’t chosen to unleash ComSpark’s true military might against them. And why should she? At the moment, the only ones suffering due to the invasion were creatures that the changelings largely regarded as no more important than vermin.

At best, the creatures of the Sphere were chattel to them. Certainly nothing that they were likely to risk too much to protect. As soon as Equus looked like it could fall under genuine threat though, that was when the Clans would cease to find their advance to be quite so seemingly unopposed.

The changelings had the military might to heave the Clanners right back to the other side of the Periphery whenever they chose to. It was difficult then to see what the much less militarily-capable Disciples of Discord could hope to do against them. They didn’t have vast WarShip armadas, or legions of assault-tonnage BattleSteeds. They had to security afforded to them by Havoc Station, and the deployment flexibility that only the Maelstrom’s chaotic drive could provide, and those did mean a lot in terms of tactical capabilities; and it meant that the Disciples were largely undefeatable by the changelings.

However, just because Chrysalis had no feasible way of easily defeating the Disciples, that didn’t mean that the Disciples would be capable of beating her either.

Unless, that was, one was of the mind that Discord would manifest their ultimate victory when the time was right. In spite of his lack of corporeal presence in the galaxy, of course. That was where the more devout―like Remmy―differed from himself, Danube knew. He simply lacked that faith that victory would be effectively guaranteed to them, just so long as they continued to devote themselves to the cause. As long as they held to their mandate to oppose the changeling threat.

Honestly, as little as a year ago, the good captain would have considered himself in line with the way the majority of the Disciples felt: he acknowledged the importance of the cause, but doubted that ultimate victory ever could be achieved―certainly not unless something radically changed to tip the balance of power. Then something had happened which had seen a resurgence in faith among many Disciples: the real Twilight Sparkle had been found.

A lot of Disciples who’d been ‘on the fence’ saw that event as being what would ‘tip the balance’ in their favor. Being the only creatures in the Harmony Sphere who knew the ‘Twilight’ reigning on Equus was a fraud, it was common knowledge among the Disciples that the real Twilight was out there somewhere waiting to be found. Or so they’d been led to believe for as long as the Disciples had existed.

Established doctrine held that, prior to his disappearance, Discord had made one thing indisputably clear to those he tasked with commanding the Disciples in his absence: Twilight Sparkle was alive. For reasons beyond Danube’s understanding, the draconequus hadn’t been able to disclose the location of the missing princess, but he’d purportedly been adamant that the alicorn couldn’t be dead. The unicorn stallion had personally been of the mind that this could have been little more than a grief-fueled denial on Discord’s part. After all, if the Spirit of Chaos was omniscient enough to know Twilight was alive, then why were his seemingly limitless powers unable to simply teleport to her?

The captain had engaged in a few private discussions along such lines of reasoning with Discord apologists. During such conversations, it had been pointed out that, while vast and potent, Discord’s powers weren’t actually without limit. Quite a few materials and artifacts were known either stymie or outright rebuke the draconequus. Any number of circumstances could have existed which might otherwise keep the demi-god from locating Twilight, while his omniscience still allowed him to know of her persistent existence.

That was the prevailing belief, at least.

Obviously, that ‘belief’ had been quite thoroughly substantiated in recent months with the discovery of the misplaced princess. Along with her discovery had come something of a renaissance in the spirituality of the Disciples of Discord. After all, the draconequus had been proven correct: Twilight had still lived. As a result, many had taken this discovery to be a sign that, with sustained devotion from themselves, and unwavering dedication to their cause, the Spirit of Chaos’ lingering magic in the Sphere would see them through to ultimate victory.

It was...a pleasant thought, Danube agreed. Tempting, even. He certainly understood why the notion appealed to Lieutenant Remmy and the others. The unicorn stallion was simply...more cynical, he supposed. Too jaded by centuries devoid of tangible progress towards unseating Chrysalis.

Which wasn’t to say that he wouldn’t work as hard as he could to ultimately bring about the end to the rule of the changelings over the Harmony Sphere. He was just less convinced that it was something that he’d live to see.

If Danube was ‘cynical’, Gretel was outright heretical. The griffon hen was certainly in the minority of Disciples with her privately-held dismissal of the draconequus’ primacy within the organization. She was obedient enough of the orders that she was issued, and at least demonstrated the public deference that was due to her superiors―Colonel Slipshod’s ‘special’ case notwithstanding. However, to say that she believed in the cause of the Disciples would have been a lie.

Gretel maintained her commission for one purpose, and one purpose only: to kill changelings. Restoring the Celestia League―or any semblance of order―to the Sphere wasn’t anywhere even on her list of priorities, let alone near the top of it. She despised changelings, plain and simple. The griffon would move the stars and planets to exterminate them too.

The unicorn stallion could sympathize with her desire, seeing as how he suspected he’d have a similar laser-focused desire if he’d lost his whole family to ComGuard forces. One after another, the griffon had watched her siblings die to enemy action. With each lost clutchmate, her visceral hatred for the changelings had continued to grow until it finally reached its current level of unbridled antipathy.

Until recently, Danube wouldn’t have believed that such intense feelings of loathing could ever prove to be of a detriment to the griffon. Her rough edges might have meant that she’d never see any significant advancement among the ranks of the Disciple’s officers, but Gretel would have been the first to tell you how little promotions mattered to her. Indeed, the unicorn stallion was a firm believer that the hen would have turned down any advancement which might have taken her out of the field, depriving her of the opportunity to kill changelings with her own two clawed hands.

Now that the gruff lieutenant was expected to both listen to and learn from a changeling though, he was finding himself wondering if Gretel's deep-seated hatred wouldn’t end up costing her the opportunity to do what she desired to most: kill changelings. Thus far, none of their appointments as strike team leaders for the upcoming operation had been guaranteed. Indeed, such positions were specifically contingent on Colonel Slipshod assessing them as being suitable capable of countering the greatest threats posed to their teams by the changelings. If the griffon continued to antagonize him, Danube seriously doubted that the changeling would give her a passing mark.

At least not without her demonstrating genuine ability at avoiding being deceived by changelings.

“Doing a thing, and that thing being easy to do, aren’t one in the same,” Jasper pointed out, his lip curling in a slight frown, “That said: I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be quite this hard to walk down a corridor,” his frown morphed into a wry smirk as he glanced at the others.

“The colonel said that Lustra’s team was on the right track with their use of code phrases,” Danube reminded them, “They just didn’t have enough variability." He began rubbing his chin pensively as he considered how best to approach the issue.

“Coding a progressive series of code phrases into a machine would be one thing, but organic beings aren’t quite that sophisticated in their thinking,” The earth pony stallion reminded him, “It would have to be something like memorizing a novel, or a really long sonnet.”

“Even then, we could end up running into trouble if it was something well known enough in the Sphere that the changelings recognized it and caught on anyway,” Remmy added.

“The more obscure and unfamiliar it is, the harder it’s going to be to get our soldiers to memorize good enough to keep them from screwing it up and getting fratricided,” Gretel said with a scowl.

“Something simple, yet unpredictable. Memorable, but niche,” Jasper flashed a mirthless grin, “Should it be loud, but also quiet?”

“We’re going to need more heads involved in this,” Danube reasoned, letting out a resigned sigh, “Somepony will have an idea that’ll fit the bill.”

He hoped so, at any rate.

It had taken her considerably more wheedling that Cinder would have liked to get her field commanders to divulge exactly what was driving them to divert from their primary targets so frequently to the secondary―and even a few tertiary―Harmony Sphere worlds, but the star admiral leading the Timberwolf fleet had finally managed to learn where it was that was everycreature was so dead set on reaching: Buckwheat. A little more wheedling and many hours spent scouring through the raw intelligence reports filed by her officers on the ground before they’d been filtered through several layers of aggregation by her staff had also managed to uncover what about Buckwheat made it so specifically enticing a target.

Now the dragoness found herself sitting in solitude in her office aboard the Rockhoof, weighing the heavy decision ahead of her: did tell anycreature what she knew?

At first, Star Admiral Cinder had been just as enthralled as the rest of the leadership at the prospect of a world which had been designated to safeguard so much of the Harmony Sphere’s hoarded wealth. Such a thing only made too much sense to her dragon sensibilities: protect your hoard when it looked like it would be threatened. If it was clear your adversary was far too powerful to resist through direct force, then protect it through deception and obfuscation.

It hardly took any sort of tactical genius to see that the military might of the invading Clan forces far outmatched anything the Sphere could throw at it presently. So it only made sense that, if the residents of the Harmony Sphere wished to keep their more treasured possessions secure―at least for now―then they would be best served keeping those treasures on an out-of-the-way world which would normally not have drawn much attention from the Clans in the first place. If any world was likely to be overlooked by their invasion fleets, it was a virtually uninhabited planet like Buckwheat.

Reviewing the rough outline of what forces had been set aside for the inevitable invasion of that world, Cinder saw that only a pair of BattleSteed stars and a minimal strength support detachment had been set aside for the task. That would have constituted only a couple hundred soldiers in total. Far too few to do any thorough reconnaissance of the planet; but why should that have been a concern? Everycreature knew there was nothing there, and no reason to think that there would have been! It wasn’t even a planet that had warranted one of ComSpark’s hidden secondary HSG arrays.

The perfect hiding spot for the galaxy’s treasures.

Or so the leadership of Clans Smoke Jaberwock, Ghost Ursa, and Jade Roc had concluded. Cinder very nearly had too.

The cobalt dragoness cringed and quietly admitted to herself that there’d been nothing ‘nearly’ about her belief in Buckwheat’s designation as a ‘treasure planet’. At least, not at first. Even she had completely bought into the notion that all of the others had. It had simply made too much sense, and appealed to her instincts on too visceral of a level, for the dragoness not to believe it.

Then she’d seen the raw reports. Those reports had contained a few minor details which had failed to make it into the final briefings that she’d received, and the same was almost certainly true for the other Clan senior officers. Broadly speaking, it was completely forgivable that such minor considerations got filtered out as the reports had been aggregate and refined to be more ‘easily digestible’ by senior officers who simply didn’t have the hours in the day to spend reading through literally thousands of pages of after action statements and such that were generated on a weekly basis by the officers leading troops on the ground. Inevitably, some things simply weren’t going to make the cut; and while there was a whole cadre of specialists whose job it was to recognize what bits were significant and which were chaff, nocreature was perfect.

Those same intelligence officers were also not necessarily in constant contact with one another on every issue; nor did they give every issue the same level of significance.

For example: The intelligence officers of Cinder’s Seventeenth Destroyer Group, Detachment Four, Team Two, had very carefully noted the names and classifications of the various DropShips which the pair of vessels had destroyed in orbit above Silver Shoal in the Renoir System. Those names and classifications had managed to remain intact through every layer of report consolidation right up until about the moment the Seventeenth Destroyer Group passed them on to Third Fleet Command. At that point, all that had made it to Cinder’s desk was a count of DropShips and types which had been destroyed by the Third Fleet in the past seven days. Which was fair. The star admiral would hardly have been one to care about the name of every ship that was destroyed by her fleets on any given day.

However, this was also the version of the report that was made readily available to the intelligence officers of her galaxy commanders; and vice-versa. Which meant that, when Star Commander Coke’s report about the Friendship-class DropShip Garden allegedly hauling several hundred tons of gold bullion off of the planet Creedmoor-II in the system of the same name reached the eyes of the Fifth Galaxy’s intelligence division, they had no way of knowing that that same DropShip had been destroyed a week later by one of Third Fleet’s destroyers in a system that was fifty lightyears in the opposite direction that Buckwheat lay in. Nor did anycreature in Third Fleet know that the ship which they’d blown up was too far away from its last reported position.

So, by the time those reports made it to Cinder’s staff, nocreature even knew there was a discrepancy which bore further investigation.

Cinder had investigated though. Entirely as the result of a ‘mis-click’ by one of her subordinates, who accidentally CC’d her while sending up an unrefined report. She’d been assured by the offending officer’s superior that it had been ‘firmly’ instilled in them how important it was to ensure the chain of command was properly adhered to. The star admiral felt her lips forming into a mirthless smirk as she considered how much it was going to undermine that lesson when she issued the junior officer a commendation for accidentally bringing it to her attention that Buckwheat could turn out to be a trap.

Though, that was the question that the dragoness found herself wrestling with now: did she reveal that it was likely a trap? Strictly speaking, she didn’t know for certain that it was. She was also on the fence as to whose trap it might be.

The simplest answer in that regard was ComSpark, of course. Bringing the entirety of the Clan invasion fleets together only worked as a ‘trap’ if the one springing it could muster together the forces that it would take to defeat them. Only the changelings were capable of fielding such numbers at the moment. However, ComSpark was frankly unlikely to have risked the sorts of errors like one that Cinder had stumbled across. It was obvious that either the registry of the destroyed DropShip, or the spaceport flight data, had been faked. The latter was more likely, as there’d have been no reason to fake the former. However, ComSpark would frankly not need to have faked either. The changelings had the agents and resources in place to genuinely organize a faux ‘relocation’ of the purported treasures of those worlds. It would have been no imposition on ComSpark at all to have hundreds of DropShips fly to a from the worlds in question with completely empty holds while their agents spoofed the other information required to convince the Clans those ships were full of gold and gems.

That would have completely removed the risk of a ship being reported in two places at contradictory times.

This suggested that the group behind the deception wasn’t actually the changelings. It was too well coordinated to be a scheme hatched by the Successor States though. The same went for any of the major mercenary companies as well.

Strictly speaking, Cinder could only think of one group with the reach and resources to execute this scheme, and who also would want to work against the Clans at this moment: The Disciples of Discord.

The dragoness knew through her contacts in Clan space that the Disciples had officially renounced their association with the Clans in protest of the full-scale invasion that had been launched over their objection to it. She had also recently come to learn that Princess Twilight Sparkle had assumed tacit leadership of the Disciples. Cinder didn’t quite know what the alicorn hoped to accomplish by stopping the Clans in their tracks, and perhaps even giving Chrysalis the opportunity to gain the upper claw...other than simply putting an end to the deaths of millions, of course.

It was conceivable that Twilight was hoping simply to sabotage such broad military action against the Harmony Sphere in an effort to convince the Clans that such a tactic was wholly unworkable. If they were confronted with proof that a direct military confrontation with the Sphere wouldn’t succeed, the other Khans would be forced to consider less drastic means of defeating Chrysalis in the future. Such as Twilight’s original hope of using one of the friendlier Successor States to provide them with a corridor directly to the threshold of the Faust System itself.

At the moment, of course, it was considerably unlikely that the Pony Commonwealth would be willing to entertain any sort of ‘cordial’ relationship with the Clans after what had been inflicted upon so many billions of its citizens in the last few months. However, it wasn’t as though the Clans were constitutionally incapable of exercising patience―Smolder and her followers notwithstanding. They could recede and wait a few more generations for tempers to cool and make overtures to whoever succeeded Archon Victoria, or one of the other major powers.

The point was that losing to the changelings now didn’t represent an unrecoverable defeat for the League-in-Exile. A potentially significant setback, obviously, but not a deathblow to their cause.

If she let that happen.

The notion galled at her something fierce, and not simply because―as a military commander―she was opposed to the notion of deliberately letting herself be defeated. While that did go against the grain, it wasn’t what bothered her most: it was the idea that she’d be betraying...well, everycreature.

She’d be betraying the soldiers who had followed her into battle. The other Dragon Clans. Her princess. Her oaths. Cinder would be casting aside every loyalty to every creature that she had.

But maybe―maybe―she could save lives by doing so. That was no small thing. Not to her.

While her duty might have been to her princess and the orders that she was given, Cinder’s heart had always been set on helping those helpless souls kept under thrall by the changelings. That had been the overarching goal of her father, and the reason that he had worked so hard to smuggle out as much of the CLDF as he had. Her service was dedicated to the creatures of the Harmony Sphere just as much―if not more―than it was to Princess Flurry Heart and the Dragon Clans.

The dragoness smiled wanly to herself in her empty office. It seemed that she’d made her decision on what to do then, hadn’t it? She’d keep what she knew to herself and let things play out as they would.

...No. No, Cinder reconsidered, that was too easy. She could do at least a little bit more to help make up for what she’d been party to during this invasion. The star admiral reached into a drawer in her desk and withdrew a sheaf of parchment, a quill and inkpot, and a red wax candle. She snorted out a little jet of flame to light the candle and set about dutifully writing out a letter.

Half a galaxy away, a purple alicorn who was sipping wine while she reviewed the latest progress notes on the crewing and refitting of the Disciples’ recently acquired ‘DropShip fleet’, found that her attention was drawn rather abruptly to a flash of emerald light. Princess Twilight Sparkle blinked in mild surprise at the neatly rolled scroll that was now sitting on her datapad, closed by a wax seal. She opened it up and began to read...

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 39: The Killing Fields

Star Captain Snagg couldn’t have kept the smug expression off of his scaly snout even if he’d wanted to. It was impossible not to feel sheer elated joy at the knowledge that he and his trinary of fifteen heavy and assault BattleSteeds would be one of the first Clan forces to make landfall on the treasure world of Buckwheat. Which meant that they also stood a better than even chance of securing the vast hoard of wealth that lay hidden somewhere upon it. If that happened, he and the rest of his trinary knew perfectly well that everycreature else in the orbiting fleets would be forced to rely on their account of exactly how much treasure was actually found.

How much they skimmed for themselves, nocreature would ever know…

“Two minutes to drop,” the mare announced over his helmet’s headset.

Snagg felt himself nodding, his lips still pulled back in a stupidly hungry grin. All that lay between them and the Greed-Induced Bigness which that mountain of gathered wealth would provide were a few paltry ComGuard divisions. The dragon had little regard for changelings. Their shape-shifting abilities wouldn’t prove to be any benefit to them from inside the cockpit of a ‘Steed. Furthermore, all of their intelligence suggested that ComSpark had left their most advanced and capable BattleSteeds back on Equus, and were electing to resist the Clans with units comparable to what the rest of the Harmony Sphere was fielding. To say nothing of the fact that, for all the ComGuard might be able to boast having the ‘best training’ available in the Sphere, they possessed next to nothing in terms of actual battlefield experience.

Meanwhile the forces under Clans had been winning one battle after the next in a nearly nonstop parade of victories. Their units were well-drilled, battle-tested, and at the controls of the most advanced technology ever developed by sentient beings. As far as Snagg was concerned, that all meant that their victory here was a foregone conclusion. Buckwheat would be theirs within the week, and a giant mountain of gold and gems would soon be his not long after that.

The Princess-class DropShip soon touched down. It’s massive doors opened up, disgorging the fifteen ‘Steeds and dozen combat vehicles that it had carried to the target site. Approximately ten kilometers to their west lay a ComGuard firebase. It was Snagg’s task to wipe it from existence and secure the area. All over the region, other DropShips were deploying similar strike units tasked with eliminating other firebases which formed a loose perimeter around a much larger ComGuard base in the mountains. It was a fairly likely location for at least part of the cache of wealth in the star captain’s opinion.

The rust-hued dragon began snapping orders the moment his forces disembarked, “Apple Star, flank north across the bridge. Hold position there to cut off their line of retreat and intercept any reinforcements. Bronco Star, travel south and hit them from the top of that ridgeline. It should let you fire down almost on top of them. Cider Star and all Dog elements, follow me in. We’re going to steamroll these bastards.”

Snagg was already throttling his Orthus to its maximum speed even before he’d received acknowledgements from his subordinates. It wasn’t as though the gargantuan hundred-ton BattleSteed was at risk of outpacing the rest of his command. While far from the slowest ‘Steed ever built, it wasn’t any faster than an older model Big Mac. It did, however, mount a considerably more extensive weapons loadout. Its four heavy magical energy cannons, augmented to fire at longer ranges than any comparable weapon in use in the Harmony Sphere could, were backed up by a pair of type-five rapid-firing ultra-autocannons. The devastation that those two systems were capable of almost made his ‘Steed’s ten-count LRM launcher an afterthought.

The dragon suspected that an enemy wouldn’t even get close enough for him to need his lighter medium pulse cannons.

As he’d expected, the other four pilots in his star of five BattleSteeds were easily able to keep pace with him in their―relatively―speedier heavy frames. The tracked missile launch platforms in their wake found little to slow their progress as they followed behind the massive BattleSteeds lumbering their way through brush and forests. Snagg didn’t anticipate using those artillery units much in today’s ‘fight’. He’d conserve their missile payloads for the siege of the larger ComGuard fortress that they’d be hitting tomorrow.

A few picketing units appeared on their radar along their approach, but none of them survived long after their profiles drew the attention of a Clan ‘Steed’s fire control system. Snagg felt himself smirking anew as he thought about how surprised those ComGuard changelings crewing them must have been when they learned that they weren’t ‘safely out of range’ of the superior Clan weapons after all? The dragon had to wonder if the changelings had really made any serious technological progress since his own ancestors left the Harmony Sphere. After all, surely they would have at least been exercising tactics that would at least be effective when going up against what their own ComSpark engineers were capable of building.

Perhaps invading Equus wasn’t going to be as difficult as some of the Khans had been worrying about. Snagg suspected that Khan Smolder had had the right idea after all. It was a good thing that Princess Flurry Heart had seen the wisdom in her invasion plan.

The dragon found his musings interrupted by the appearance of a column of smoke to his north. It seemed that Apple Star had encountered some minor resistance as well. Perhaps they’d even caught some sort of vanguard element that was on its way to relieve the firebase after the DropShip had been detected making its approach. It would hardly have taken a tactical genius to deduce that the contents of a Princess-class DropShip could easily overwhelm a firebase’s garrison. Snagg could have easily accomplished this part of the operation with a trinary of light ‘Steeds backed up by infantry.

Whatever Apple had met with, it must have been something considerably larger than the scattered scouts that his own star had stumbled into thus far, given how much smoke he was seeing. Large enough that he would have expected Star Commander Citrine to radio him with at least a cursory update on what they’d found. Frowning in mild annoyance, Snagg toggled over to their proprietary frequency, “Apple Lead, this is Trinary Lead; report.”

Only static greeted his request. The dragon commander’s frown deepened into a scowl as he repeated the request for an update two more times. Still not receiving a response, Snagg toggled over to one of the pilots in his own formation, “Cider Five, divert north and make contact with Apple Star. Find out why Citrine’s giving me the cold shoulder,” he growled.

“Acknowledged lead,” came the voice of the dragoness pilot at the rear of his star, “Moving out,” On his tactical map, Snagg saw the little blue dot shifting out of formation and heading towards its top edge.

His attention then swapped over to Bronco Star, “Bronco Lead, report status,” Hopefully at least one of his junior officers was paying attention to him.

“Bronco Star is one thousand meters out from designated nav point. We’ll be in position in moments,” Snagg heard the scratchy baritone voice of his other star leader respond almost instantly, “I can already tell that we’ll have nearly total line-of-sight on the objective. They’re more exposed than a freshly-hatched whelp!”

The star captain let out an amused snort, “Copy that, Bronco Lead. Fire on anything that looks particularly ‘explody’ when you’re in position. Weapons free,” He wasn’t going to deny his officers a little fun, especially if the enemy was going to be so obliging as to leave themselves so vulnerable to an attack like that.

“Copy weapons free.”

It was becoming progressively more clear to the dragon commander that these changelings had grown more than a little complacent after spending so many centuries dealing with the low-hanging fruit that were the typical inhabitants of the Harmony Sphere. They’d set up not a single phase line of resistance leading into their firebases, they’d apparently built their outpost just below a ridgeline, leaving them exposed to plunging fire from above, and they’d even left themselves only the single bridge over which to retreat through. A bridge that would be so easily secured by even just a single heavy BattleSteed, if Snagg had been inclined to be so stingy.

This base was practically asking to be overrun!

A red blip briefly turned up on his HUD. Another light recon hovercraft that had peaked above the crest of a hill to try and get a bearing on his star. Snagg snapped a shot off with one of his heavy energy cannons, snuffing out the barely-armored vehicle from over a kilometer away. He couldn’t tell if he was more amused by the ease of this mission, or disgusted with how pathetic of a challenge this was all going to turn out to be. In his opinion, most of the Periphery worlds they’d invaded had put up a more worthwhile resistance.

Less than a minute later, Snagg heard an update from the officer commanding Bronco Star, “Bronco Lead, reporting star in position. Beginning our bombardment of the―HOLY FU―!”

The shear cliff that Bronco Star had been dispatched to perch on was clearly visible off to Snagg’s left side. At about the same moment that the transmission from his subordinate cut out, the star captain saw what appeared to be a series of extremely potent missile impacts along the cliff, just a few meters below the precipice. The detonations destabilized the entire cliff, causing several kilometers of the rocky precipice to come apart and begin to slide down. It was just barely possible to make out the five brightly colored BattleSteeds that were tumbling down along with the rest of the avalanche of rock. They were easily dwarfed by most of the boulders around them.

Snagg lost sight of Bronco Star about halfway down, as a massive cloud of dust rose up into the air at the base of the cliff and obscured any sign of them. The star captain let out a string of curses directed at the changelings in the firebase who must have spotted the BattleSteeds and launched missiles at the cliff face in order to bury them, rather than try to futilely batter at the thick armor of the ‘Steeds with their pathetically small missile salvos.

However, after a few moment’s thought, Snagg realized that the explosions that he’d seen had been far too large to have been caused by typical LRMs. Furthermore, there was no sign of any sort of smoke trail suggesting that any missiles of any sort had flown in from anywhere.

It hadn’t been a barrage of missiles at all. The star captain’s jaw grew slack with shock as the realization of what must have actually happened began to sink in: Bronco Star had been caught in a trap!

If it wasn’t missiles which had caused those explosions, then it could only have been purposely planted explosives. However, setting up planted charges like that with the intent of reshaping a whole fucking mountain wasn’t something that could be accomplished to such devastating affect in an hour or less. There was no way that ComGuard could have set up those bombs in direct response to Bronco Star’s observed maneuvers. That landslide had been planned for days, maybe even weeks in advance of his trinary’s arrival here.

The changelings hadn’t set their firebase down at the base of a cliff which would provide an attacking enemy with a perfect vantage point out of ignorance, Snagg realized. They’d done so deliberately, in an attempt to sucker him into sending units specifically to that point so that they could be buried in one fell swoop. And it had managed to work out perfectly...for them.

The dragon’s teeth ground against each other. He wasn’t certain whether or not he was more infuriated at the changelings for destroying an entire star of his BattleSteeds―which he knew he was most certainly going to detest recounting in his after-action report later―or himself for getting suckered the way that he had.

His rage still had a firm hold of him when Snagg received an incoming radio message from Apple Five, “Da fuck do you want?!” The star captain almost immediately cringed once he realized that he was about to receive a report which he had specifically requested from his dutiful starmate. While it wouldn’t do for him to apologize and risking losing face, it would still be appropriate for him to make it clear that the ‘Steed pilot in question hadn’t been wrong to call in, “It had better be news about Apple Star,” he added in a much more controlled tone―though he certainly wasn’t any less frustrated with the current situation.

“They’re gone, sir,” the dragoness reported, sounding a little shaken by the news, even as she delivered it.

“What do you mean ‘they’re gone’?! ‘Gone’ where?” Snagg was having trouble even contemplating what the pilot could be talking about. He initially assumed that Star Commander Citrine must have actually bypassed her objective entirely and continued to push deeper into enemy-controlled territory in an effort to beat the rest of the trinary to ComSpark’s main fortress in the area and procure the choicest pieces of loot for themselves.

However, it was soon revealed that this was not the case. Snagg found himself privately wishing that it had been, “ComGuard took out the bridge while Apple Star was crossing it,” the pilot reported. “They fell into the gorge below. I can’t raise any of them on comms,” It was clear that the dragoness harbored little suspicion that any of them had actually survived the fall. She was probably correct, Snagg thought privately. The reported depth of the gorge, according to their orbital surveys of the area, was over a hundred meters. Even with jump jets, maneuvering around in such tight confines so unexpectedly would have been effectively impossible.

Two of his stars were out of action, and his trinary had yet to fire off even a single shot at the firebase. He heard the sound of cracking plastic and looked over in time to see that his claws had been etching grooves into the control yokes of his Orthus. Snagg released the controls and spent several seconds methodically clenching his fingers into fists and relaxing them in an attempt to relieve some of his mounting frustrations before he ended up breaking something important. Two thirds of his BattleSteeds were out of action, and he was definitely going to get chewed up one side and down the other by his superiors when this was all over; but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still salvage this operation―and hopefully, by extension, his career―by accomplishing his objective: eliminating the firebase. His mix of five assault and heavy BattleSteeds, along with their support elements, would be more than sufficient for that task, and they were only a couple kilometers away.

There were no bridges or cliffs along the way for the changelings to rig with explosives either. So unless ComGuard had―

Snagg’s HUD flickered for a brief moment. There was a crimson blip which appeared on his sensors, but it seemed impossibly close to be some sort of combat vehicle that had managed to approach them. It was also fairly weak in his estimation. Whatever it was, it wasn’t far. In fact, the star captain suspected that he’d be able to see it from where he was.

He canted his head to try and catch a glimpse, and found himself quirking a brow in confusion. It wasn’t a vehicle at all, he quickly realized, but instead appeared to be some sort of relay tower. Strictly speaking, such a thing shouldn’t have pinged his ‘Steed’s sensor suit unless it was putting out some sort of active radar or a considerable amount of electromagnetic radiation. There was no reason for a tower like that to be doing so either, given the ranges involved. If it was some sort of ‘hidden’ early warning post, even a low-power radio transmission would have reached the firebase.

The dragon felt himself flinch with a brief shot of panic down his spine and quickly snapped his weapons over to dust the tower with a burst of fire from his autocannons. It had almost certainly been some sort of target designator for missiles located at the firebase. Snagg toggled his radio to reach the remainder of his severely truncated ‘trinary’, “Keep alert for hostile target painters. I think they’re trying to sight us in for some sort of artillery,” he warned, “Make for the firebase at best speed,” He received the dutiful acknowledgements and began to once more throttle his own BattleSteed into a run.

He had made it less than a hundred meters before the ground itself lashed out at him.

Snagg was thrown hard against his harness as the cockpit lurched suddenly to the left. He was nearly deafened by the thunderous explosion which had rocked his Orthus. His clawed hand reached out and flailed wildly at the controls to silence the alarms, as he considered himself to be firmly aware that something rather serious had happened to his ‘Steed, and found the shrieking klaxon more than a little redundant. It did, however, take him a few seconds to figure out exactly what it was which had gone wrong. The dragon at first thought that his instrument panel was misinforming him; because it was reporting that his ‘Steed’s right front leg was missing.

The star captain was fairly confident that it had been there a moment ago.

Before his rattled brain could entirely parse out what had happened, Snagg heard a second cacophonous explosion off to his left. He looked out of his cockpit’s viewport in time to see Cider Two’s Cragadile lose both of its left legs and plow snout-first into the ground. Another explosion felt like it had rocked him from behind and to the right, followed almost immediately by another from the same direction. On his tactical map, Cider Three’s blip vanished entirely.

His headset was a din of alarmed voices all shouting at once in near panic.

“―der Two is down! Both left legs gone! Cannot―”

“I’m hit! Going down; will try to right myself once I―ZZZT!”

“―is Four reporting Cider Three KIA! Fuck me, they got blown to―”

“Cider Five requesting SITREP; are you okay? I’m seeing multiple detonations all around your loca―”

“Dog Lead going full stop! Requesting instructions!”

“Everycreature shut the fuck up!” Snagg roared over his mic in an effort to finally bring silence to overlapping message traffic. The moment he heard silence, he began to try and restore some semblance of order to his unit, “Dog Lead, did you see what hit us?”

“Negative, commander. No sign of incoming.”

The dragon felt himself scowl. He had a pretty good idea of what happened, given what had been befallen the rest of his unit so far, “Minefield,” he informed the rest of his operational units tersely, “Has to be. All units stay put. Dog Lead, send up those hovercraft of yours to scout us a path out of here,” Snagg glanced over at his console and reviewed the damage that his Orthus had sustained, as well as contemplating the other two ‘Steeds in his star which had been removed from play as well. Cider Two was at least alive, and it was possible that both ‘Steeds could be salvaged later. So there was that.

All of which was likely to come as cold comfort to what he was sure would soon be merely ‘SteedWarrior Snagg by the end of the day. At least he’d be alive, and perhaps he’d someday have the opportunity to regain some of his lost rank in the coming campaigns. Better demoted than dead, at any rate. A mere warrior might not get as big a share of the treasure, but at least it would be a share.

It was still going to be one tartarus of a bitter pill to swallow acknowledging that the ComGuard had managed to get the drop on his whole command like this. The dragon wondered if he should be hoping the other assault teams were having better or worse luck than he was. While it certainly felt a little uncomfortable to desire other units in the Smoke Jabberwocks to suffer a catastrophic number of casualties, as he had; it would at least provide a glimmer of hope for his own future if it turned out that he’d somehow managed to come out of this fiasco as the most intact trinary of the day.

Neither prospect left a particularly good taste in Snagg’s mouth.

General Charon stood on the observation deck of one of the fortress’ upper tiers. Her talons clutched a pair of computerized binoculars, holding them up to her eyes. Griffons were possessed of superb visual acuity, but even they couldn’t make out details at over twenty kilometers away unassisted. The changeling senior officer had watched with satisfaction as the initial phase of the ground war progressed along in accordance with the expectations calculated by Brigadier General Scythe’s top strategists.

As had been anticipated, the Clanners had elected for their usual ‘Shock-and-Awe’ approach to ground wars. To their credit―as loath as she was to give them any―Charon supposed that she had to concede that such direct actions had worked out well for them thus far. There was little reason to have believed the same strategies which had benefited them so well in the past few months would suddenly turn around and bite them in the flanks now.

But bite them it had, the general thought to herself with a whicker sneer as she scanned over the crumpled wrecks of over a dozen massive BattleSteeds which had been approaching the eastern perimeter. Each of its elements had split off exactly as predicted―indeed, exactly as would have been prudent! Had Charon been the one tasked with leading a similar assault, she very likely would have been of a mind to deploy her forces in a nearly identical fashion. However, she liked to believe that she would have been at least a bit more aware of the possibility that if an opportunity looked too good to be true, then it probably was.

In any case, she supposed that it was time to finish off the remnants of that little offensive of theirs. The griffon lowered her binoculars and glanced over her shoulder at her aide, “Inform Major Poppler that he may commence with his bombardment. Sectors one-three thru one-five should suffice.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the changeling immediately keyed in their comlink to speak with the commander of the base’s heavy artillery.

Meanwhile, Charon directed her gaze down to the lower terraces of the mountain stronghold, and the massive Big Tom Mobile Artillery pieces that had been staged upon them. In her estimation, ‘mobile’ was something of a misleading term. While it was true that the gargantuan tracked platforms could be moved from one location to another, it wasn’t as a single unit. Capable of launching metric ton shells at targets dozens of kilometers away, Big Toms were far too large for any singular vehicle to hope to be able to move around. So it was that each ‘individual’ artillery piece was broken up into six different components, each with their own independent drivetrain.

The six components would assemble themselves at their designated location and only then become a functional artillery piece.

What Big Toms lacked in swiftness of movement and brevity of deployment, they did more than make up for in destructive power, in Charon’s opinion. Her faith in their capabilities were why she had ensured that this fortress was built with terraces spacious enough to fit at least one Big Tom each. It had taken days to get each of them in place and erected. Now they were about to see if that effort had indeed been worth it.

Cannon barrels ten meters long began to move, appearing almost sluggish as the multi-ton tubes slowly and deliberately elevated and turned. General Charon could physically see four of the weapon platforms from her perch, and she looked on as those barrels directed themselves nearly simultaneously. Soon they were all oriented towards their distant targets. Then they began firing.

The concussive force of the bombardment shook General Charon almost painfully to her bones, but it was a sensation that she relished all the same. For she knew that, in a matter of minutes, there would be nothing left of the group of BattleSteeds which had been pressing in on their position from the east. Which meant that she could devote her attention to the attacks which the Clans had launched along other avenues of approach.

Once more she spoke to her aide, raising her voice considerably in order to be heard above the din of the artillery barrage, “Have we received any further reports from Brigadier Pilum?”

“Yes, general,” her subordinate replied, consulting their datalink, “He reported that he’s currently withdrawing to Phase Line Rodeo, in accordance with the approved battle plan. The Clan forces are estimated to have suffered approximately twenty-five percent casualties, however he has lost over a third of his own forces,” There was a brief pause, then, “He is unable to guarantee that he can hold at Rodeo.”

Charon didn’t take her eyes off of the thundering artillery as she issued her orders for her aide to relay, “Pilum will hold his position,” she said simply, “Further withdrawal is prohibited. Then contact the commanders of the three-oh-third and two-fifteenth mechanized and order them to redeploy along the access roads linking Phase Line Palomino to Rodeo. They are to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.”

She awaited the acknowledgement from the other changeling, but when she didn’t hear one immediately, she turned to look at her aide, prepared to repeat her orders if it turned out that he hadn’t heard her over the roar of the Big Toms. However, when she saw the changeling’s expression, it was clear to her that he, in fact, had heard her orders, and was simply hesitant to relay them. Her critical expression invited an explanation for his hesitance.

“...Ma’am, the enemy pressing in on Brigadier Pilum are heavy and assault-weight BattleSteeds,” he said, as though under the impression that this was information that General Charon were hearing for the first time, “Mere mechanized infantry units are―”

“Equipped with anti-armor ordinance,” the griffon-changeling finished sharply, glaring at the aide.

“Ma’am, those weapons are intended to repel only lightly armored vehicles―”

It again sounded as though the subordinate changeling was under the impression his commanding officer was somehow ignorant of this information. General Charon found this to be...vexing. All the same, she kept her voice cool and calm as she once more cut off his misgivings, “But they are perfectly capable of damaging even a BattleSteed’s ablative armor. They’ll just need to hit them a few more times.

“I expect they will take heavy casualties in the effort,” Charon conceded, “but they should still be able to degrade the enemy force enough for Pilum to be able to hold off whatever eventually makes it to his new position at Rodeo.

“Now pass on the order,” she concluded in a far icier tone, leering at the other changeling.

The aide visibly swallowed, “Y-yes, general,” he stammered out before keying in his comlink and passing on her orders.

Charon continued to glare at the other changeling for several more seconds before she received an urgent alert on her own datalink. It turned out to be a message from Colonel Lumen informing her about additional incoming DropShips from orbit. The general’s brows rose in mild surprise when she noticed that the message went on to divulge that these DropShips were not from Smoke Jabberwock’s fleets, but rather from Jade Roc’s. It seemed that the dragons were, in fact, not going to ‘take turns’ as she had originally suspected.

The way the Clan fleets had arranged themselves upon entering Buckwheat space had suggested that they would be assaulting in waves, one Clan after the other. However, if this report was accurate, then it looked as though the dragons were far less patient than she’d thought. Whatever was on this planet, they were ready to trample over even each other to get at it.

Fascinating…

It was also somewhat troubling. Her strategies for this operation had revolved around fending off singular waves from one invasion force at a time. It was known to the changelings that the Clans were not a truly ‘unified force’ and were actually more analogous to a loose coalition with similar goals. They had never been observed coordinating multiple Clans against a single target. Cooperating with each other was not something they were going to do any time soon.

Which was why she hadn’t expected something like this. It was tactical lunacy to conduct multiple invasions with multiple, independent, uncoordinated forces. That was just asking for incidents of ‘friendly fire’ and other battlefield chaos. Charon idly wondered if the Clans were really willing to risk ending up firing on each other just to be the first to take Buckwheat?

Tactically unsound it may be, it was still going to cause her forces trouble in the short term. The fact was that she didn’t have the forces in place to hold off multiple Clan invasions simultaneously. Not with the technology imbalance that she was being forced to operate under.

Worse, the Jade Roc force seemed to have learned from Jabberwock’s missteps and showed little interest in landing their forces away from her fortress and walking them in. Those DropShips were headed almost directly for her position, and she possessed neither the troops on hoof to repel a direct assault, nor the static defenses to keep such DroShips at bay.

She looked over at her aide once more, “Major Domo? You will take personal command of Fourth AeroWing and intercept the incoming DropShip group.”

The changeling blanched visibly, “...I beg pardon, ma’am?”

“You’ve been checked out on most aerofighter designs,” Charon pointed out simply, “So I’m ordering you to take personal command of the Fourth and intercept those Princess-class DropShips headed our way,” she now narrowed her eyes at the other changeling, “Now.”

The major’s jaw worked silently for several seconds as he frantically scanned through the information that he’d also received from Colonel Lumen. Somehow, the changeling turned even paler in appearance without the need for transformation magic, “ma’am, those DropShips are being escorted in by a massive fighter screen; the Fourth AeroWing will be outnumbered three-to-one! It won’t be able to fight off that many opposing fighters on its own!”

“I’m not asking you to engage their escorts,” Charon countered in a nonplussed tone, “I’m directing you to intercept the DropShips.”

“If we simply ignore their fighter screen, our own pilots will be cut down in minutes!”

Still the general didn’t look particularly concerned, “That sounds like more than enough time to reach the DropShips and deal with them.”

“If they were Friendship-class DropShips, perhaps,” the major agreed, though he still looked quite pale at the thought of even that, “But the armor on Princess-class DropShips is―”

“Is no match for a forty-five ton aerospace fighter slamming into their engine pylons at supersonic speeds,” Charon finished simply, her proposal stunning the other changeling into silence, “There are only slightly more than a dozen Jade Roc DropShips flying in,” She continued, conversationally, as though the prospect of outright ordering suicide attacks against the enemy hadn’t bothered her in the least.

Which was because it hadn’t. Their Queen had ordered the Clans halted here at Buckwheat ‘at all costs’. Charon was keen to follow those orders. Strictly speaking, exchanging a few dozen fighters and their pilots in exchange for the DropShips, their crews, and the defenseless BattleSteeds nestled in the stalls of those vessels, along with their hapless pilots, was a more than equitable trade, in the general’s opinion, “I predict only two successful impacts would be needed against each vessel to take out sufficient thrusters to put them into freefall. As long as half of Fourth AeroWing survives the screening fighters to reach the DropShips, there will be plenty of craft left to take out the required number of engine pylons.

“And I want you leading them to ensure that my orders are carried out,” That chilling note was back in the general’s voice once again, “Am I clear, Major Domo?”

For a brief moment, the other changeling saw the changeling-griffon’s eyes dart past him. Without turning around, he knew what she had glanced at. Even if he had somehow been unaware of her briefly diverted gaze, the sound of armored hooves unslinging rifles would have left no doubt in his mind that failure to comply with the orders he had been given would be dealt with...harshly. The major took a deep, steadying, breath and forced himself to snap to the position of attention, rendering a salute to General Charon.

“Yes, ma’am,” His throat was perceptibly dry as he spoke, but the changeling officer continued on regardless, “Permission to report to the hangar, general?”

Charon returned the salute with one of her clawed hands, wearing a satisfied smirk, “Dismissed, major; and good luck.”

As Major Domo turned to leave, he could hear the general speaking into her comlink, “―oing to need a new aide. Do try and find me one that is more ‘agreeable’ this time, hm?”

Star Admiral Cinder stood in the Rockhoof’s Combat Information Center, her eyes staring at the tactical plot projected in front of her. All around her was a buzzing din of voices as other officers relayed reports and coordinated the attacks of the various ground forces assaulting Buckwheat on behalf of Clan Timberwolf. While they possessed no direct operational control over the armies of the other Clans, they were still patched into the tactical networks of those forces, and thus could track their progress. The dragoness suppressed a cringe as she reminded herself once more that this had not been a courtesy afforded to the other Clans by one another in order to better coordinate their efforts in securing the planet, but rather as a means of ‘bragging’ to one another about how much progress their specific Clan was making in the attempt.

At least, that had been the initial intent. The cobalt dragoness very much doubted that the commanding officers of any of the other Clans were going to be in a position to do any bragging any time soon. Certainly not Clan Jade Roc, whose last DropShip from their initial spearhead just winked out of existence a few seconds ago as it plummeted to the ground at terminal velocity, just like all of its fellows before it. Cinder knew that those DropShips had been carrying the bulk of Jade Roc’s heavy and assault tonnage BattleSteeds. They would be reduced now to fielding their lighter chassis, and depositing them using much lighter DropShip frames as well. For all intents and purposes, this setback had largely taken their entire Clan out of contention, in Cinder’s opinion. Given the troubles that Smoke Jabberwock and Ghost Ursa were having pushing their forces in on their objectives even with their heavy units, it was highly unlikely that light and medium ‘Steed frames would fare any better.

Clan Timberwolf’s forces were encountering slightly fewer outright catastrophes, but it wouldn’t be at all accurate to say that their own assaults were going ‘well’. The dragoness admiral’s gaze once more flickered towards the status board, and the disheartening quantity of blacked out unit IDs upon it. Cinder was forced to once more bite back hard on her desire to order a full withdrawal from the surface. It tore at something visceral, deep down within her, to sit back and ‘allow’ this slaughter of the soldiers and pilots under her command to continue; but at the same time, she also knew that it had to happen.

There were several reasons for that too. Not the least of which was because, at this point, she wasn’t really in effective command of her own military anymore. Oh, she was still the ranking senior officer, and nothing approaching even an unofficial memorandum from home had suggested anything to the contrary of that. However, the technicalities and trivialities of such ambiguous notions like ‘rank’ and ‘protocol’ and ‘discipline’ had all been whisked away like a puff of smoke in a strong breeze once word had permeated the Clans that stupendous quantities of treasure were interred on Buckwheat.

That notion had only been further cemented in the minds of her soldiers when they’d arrived to find that none other than ComSpark themselves had taken it upon themselves to fortify the planet. Even Cinder found herself at a loss to explain away the implication there. She’d been prepared to as well, laying the groundwork for convincing her forces at least to back off from the assault by exposing the discrepancies that she’d found in their gathered ‘intelligence’. However, once it had been confirmed that ComGuard troops were garrisoned on Buckwheat, all of her findings had been overwhelmingly discounted.

Obviously the reason why Cinder had found such errors was because ComSpark had doctored the records to try and hide the fact that they’d gathered the galaxy’s valuables on this planet by planting evidence that those ships couldn’t have hidden it. It was a stupendous act of subversion that the cobalt dragoness couldn’t hope to reason out of existence.

Besides, if there wasn’t treasure here, then why was ComGuard here? It simply made too much sense that the military arm of ComSpark, whom everycreature ‘knew’ to be impartial, would be the only group that could be genuinely trusted to safekeep the valuables of so many different worlds and organizations. It wasn’t like Hippogriff Combine forces could be counted on to return any of the treasure taken there from Pony Commonwealth worlds. Similarly, with so many different groups storing valuables there, who was supposed to be the one solely responsible for contracting out mercenary protection? It certainly wouldn’t have been feasible to organize hundreds of smaller, individual, protection contracts.

ComSpark only made sense as the party to whom responsibility guarding a consolidated treasure trove could reasonably fall to. And here they were, dug into an otherwise worthless planet they had no business being on.

Unless they were here to guard a massive horde of gold and jewels.

At least, that was the mindset and rationale of nearly every one of her subordinate commanders. As well as nearly the entire officer corps of the other three Clans as well. Not that Cinder was aware of any of the other senior commanders for Jabberwock, Roc, or Ursa, entertaining the sort of doubts that Cinder herself had. They were as firmly invested in the idea of an unfathomable treasure being on that planet as their soldiers and pilots were.

Cinder was firmly of the mindset that, if she’d declined to participate in the invasion, that she’d have faced an outright mutiny. At least by paying lip service to the invasion, she could keep herself in a position to maintain order if―when―Timberwolf found themselves pruned back to the point of near disbandment. She was also in a position to exercise at least some degree of tactical control that would allow her to―hopefully―keep her forces from being as thoroughly gutted as Jade Rocs had just been.

Though even that looked like it was only going to be a near thing, the dragoness thought to herself with a sneer as she stared at the tactical plot. With an irritated snort, the dragoness reached out and snapped her clawed fingers at a nearby griffon star captain. Once she had the hen’s attention, she jabbed a claw at one of their ‘Steed binaries on the map, “Get that commander on the comm right now and redirect them to this route,” the star admiral furiously traced out a nearby highlighted pathway, “They’re too close to that woodline,” Cinder explained, “It just screams ‘ambush’!”

The griffon officer looked over the plot and then consulted something on her tablet, “That’s the One-Oh-Fifth under Star Captain Trunnion. He requested a redirect in order to cut off what he identified as an isolated ComGuard force trying to retreat. Star Colonel Redwing gave him the okay,” she explained, as though it was supposed to placate the dragoness.

Cinder stared at the griffon with a deadpan expression, “...Did it not actually occur to anycreature that an ‘isolated unit’ heading in the direction of an ideal ambush location might―just possibly―be a trap?”

Somehow this revelation didn’t actually seem to trouble the griffon all that much, “All other contacts in that region have been light combat vehicles and mechanized infantry groups, ma’am. Star Colonel Redwing doesn’t think anything ComGuard might have could threaten the One-Oh-Fifth. They’re a heavy-medium mixed binary,” the hen added, as though the star admiral was somehow unaware of that fact.

The dragoness was in the middle of taking a deep preparatory breath when the tactical plot updated and showed a collection of previously undiscovered ComGuard contacts along the woodline that Cinder’s claw was still hovering over. Almost simultaneously, three of the ten beacons for the BattleSteed binary winked out. Notations next to the newly appeared hostile signals indicated that sensors on site had classified them as ‘heavy combat vehicles’. Likely designs specifically intended to combat heavier ‘Steeds.

The retreating ‘isolated force’ had also made the decision to double-back at almost the same moment. They were no longer very ‘isolated’ either. It seemed that the rest of their comrades had been waiting in a powered-down state just beyond a hill. Almost as though they had anticipated their ‘retreating’ fellows to be in need of imminent aid.

To her credit, after only a couple seconds of staring at the plot with slack-jawed shock, the griffon immediately dashed off to get on the comms with whoever it was that she thought she might be able to get ahold of to relieve the One-Oh-Fifth, and hopefully manage to save at least some of those pilots and their ‘Steeds.

Cinder, for her part, merely shook her head and let out a long-suffering sigh for several long seconds. She knew for a fact that she’d trained her pilots better than this. She’d selected her officers to be more competent than this too. At least, she’d thought she had. However, it seemed that months spent effectively steamrolling anything put in front of them had made her forces more than a little complacent and overconfident. That sense of―admittedly earned―superiority, combined with the sense-clouding prospect of obtaining enormous personal wealth, was proving to be a fatal combination.

What none of her commanders were appearing to grasp was that ComGuard was a completely different animal than the defenders that they’d encountered up to this point on the worlds that they’d conquered. And she wasn’t just talking about the fact that these were changelings either. They were possessed of an entirely different tactical and philosophical doctrine. ComSpark’s commitment to the defense of Buckwheat, and the temperament of their forces, were simply fundamentally different from anything that they’d faced up to this moment, and nocreature―aside from herself―seemed to consider that significant. Assuming that anycreature had actually even recognized that difference in the first place.

On every other world that they’d invaded thus far, they had come up against one of two kinds of defenders: locals and mercenaries. The latter fought for money and prestige, neither of which was of any particular value to the dead. Thus they would only fight right up until the point where defeat looked probable. As soon as it was clear how outmatched they were, mercenary units would make every effort to withdraw and conserve whatever personnel and material they had left. They almost never fought to the last creature. Even if escape became clearly impossible, they’d typically just surrender or eject and scuttle their ‘Steeds.

It wasn’t quite so different for the former either. A few of them would fight to the death, simply because they’d bought into the rumors that Clanners didn’t take prisoners. However, Clan Timberwolf had managed to eventually convince their target worlds that surrender was a viable option. At which point it rarely took more than a few decisive military victories to compel capitulation. Such victories also didn’t always take a lot of effort either. Most of the opening volleys of their more advanced assault-weight BattleSteeds were so terrifying to troops on the ground that a couple of salvos were usually all that were needed to convince the survivors that resistance was useless.

Watching half of your company go down as the result of a single alpha-strike from the enemy force would dissolve the morale of anycreature.

Besides, all of those soldiers had families or loved-ones that they hoped to see again. They had something to go back to if they lived, and were assured that those same loved ones would live. At that point, there was little else that remained for them to fight for.

None of this was the case with ComGuard. They weren’t fighting for money or fame. They weren’t fighting to protect their families. They were here because their Queen had commanded it. Because disobedience to her would not be countenanced; and would be punished with equal parts expediency and brutality. They could either face the possibility or near certainty of death here, or the absolute certainty of death if they refused.

Which was why the Clans were consistently seeing things on Buckwheat that they had rarely ever encountered before: large scale suicide attacks. Entire brigades of troops fighting against overwhelming odds without retreating back no matter how many losses they took―to the point of being wiped out completely in more than a few cases. The losses that the Clan forces were taking were bad, yes, but Cinder noted that the ComGuard were absorbing many more losses.

However, it was clear that ComSpark was perfectly prepared to pay whatever blood price was asked of them in order to defang the Clans here and now. Even if they had to sacrifice ten of their own to kill even a single Clanner, it was clear that the changelings would absorb those casualties. It was what their Queen had commanded, after all. Service to her was their entire purpose in life; so what value would their lives have if they didn’t agree to die at her whim?

Meanwhile, the Clan armies had no such fatalistic convictions. They would obviously risk a great deal for a chance of stupendous riches, but they would absolutely not allow themselves to be ground into dust merely on the orders of their superiors. As soon as they realized―however reluctantly they might do so―that they couldn’t break ComGuard’s resolve, they would break instead. They’d fume, and they’d grouse, and there would be a gnashing of teeth as the Clans had never known, but―eventually―the Clans would withdraw from Buckwheat and recede back into their conquered territories while they rebuilt their forces for another attempt.

Such a rebuilding would take years, Cinder knew. Each of the four invading Clans had stripped every one of their planetary garrisons down to the bone in preparation for this assault. They’d pulled forward their heaviest units and their most outstanding fighters for this endeavour. Every exemplary officer and decorated BattleSteed pilot who had disguised themselves in action during the invasion was here on Buckwheat right now. More than half of them likely dead at this moment, the star admiral supposed.

While the ‘Steeds and materials would be easy enough to replace with their stores back in Clan space, the same could not be said for their experienced soldiers. The warriors themselves could be reconstituted easily enough―the Clans had been vat-growing their soldiers for a while now―but effectively leadership and battlefield experience were both things that took time, and lots of it. It would be decades before they’d manage to rebuild back the well of experience that they’d lost here. More than enough time for the galaxy to be ready for their second attempt at galactic conquest.

Cinder predicted that, by the time the Clans felt themselves ‘ready’ for another offensive, they would actually find themselves fighting on the defensive as the galaxy sought to take back what had been stolen from them. To that end, the star admiral was confident that the Clans would be able to mostly hold what they had―their WarShips gave them a decidedly significant advantage in repelling DropShip fleets after all. However, it would be folly to think that they could set aside enough forces to orchestrate a push deeper into Sphere territory while also holding off the sort of combined force which ComSpark could organize against them.

No. This was as far as the Clans would ever get, the dragoness thought to herself with a resigned sigh. Not even two hundred lightyears from Equus. A pathetic showing, if Cinder were asked to give her honest opinion.

She doubted that she ever would be though.

The star admiral waved over another of her surrounding officers, a young pegasus, “Would you mind getting Redwing on the comm for me? I have a new assignment for the star commander…”

Spike’s gaze lay fixed on some distant point in the sky as he lay reclined in idle contemplation on a chaise lounge overlooking the grounds of the Dragon Lord’s palatial estate. An as of yet untouched glass of brandy sat on a serving tray next to him near its nearly full decanter. The pair of ice cubes had long since melted away in the summer heat, leaving the beverage in a watered-down state which would doubtlessly have offended the sensibilities of any respectable lover of alcohol had they been present to bear witness. Fortunately, no such individual was present, meaning that the consort to the Dragon Lord was permitted to conduct his listless staring in near-perfect silence.

Whether or not that lack of distraction was of a genuine benefit to himself, the purple dragon wasn’t entirely certain. While it certainly produced a far more peaceful atmosphere, it also meant that there was nothing to distract him from his thoughts.

Thoughts such as how their daughter was faring. How the invasion was progressing. Whether Twilight was still alright…

...Whether she was ever going to forgive him.

Of the latter, Spike was confident that his dear friend would forgive him his failures―in the fullness of time. After all, there had been no malice involved in what he and Ember had done. Indeed, it had all come from a place of good intentions. From where they’d been sitting at the time, ‘adjusting’ the Elements of Harmony had felt like the surest way to keep the dragons from abandoning the Harmony Sphere entirely.

After Chrysalis’ usurpation of the Celestia League and its subsequent collapse, there had been more than a few rumblings from among the ranking leadership of the dragons. The members of his species were possessed of extremely long life, which brought along with it long memories to match. A great many of the older and more respected dragons recalled what their lives had been like, not simply before the League’s fall, but before the existence of the League itself―even the existence of a unified Equus.

They remembered Greed-Induced Bigness. They remembered the elation that they’d felt while in possession of such size and power. In the darker recesses of his own mind, Spike too recalled what it had felt like during his own brief encounter with the phenomenon. The immense satisfaction that had come with growing his horde. The feeling of invulnerability that his colossal size had filled him with. The desire to make everything in the world his…

Spike flexed claws and forced himself to take a deep breath, dispelling those ancient memories. They could still burn strong if he allowed them to, and he’d only known that feeling for less than an hour over a thousand years ago.

There were dragon khans today who’d known that feeling for centuries before being ‘requested’ to give it up by the Dragon Lord and embrace Friendship instead. The purple dragon could imagine what they found themselves feeling when they were left alone with their thoughts.

Fortunately, as potently as they might recall what GIB was like, they were equally mindful of the respect and obedience that was due to their Dragon Lord. Their own sense of pride in acting as a dragon ‘should’ when the holder of the Dragon Lord’s Staff made demands of them had thus far kept them in line. Spike found it more than a little ironic that it was the older and more stubborn of their race which had elected to remain behind and not participate in the invasion of the Harmony Sphere. While Ember had specifically not forbidden the invasion, the Dragon Lord had ‘asked’ that the khans not take any rash action. The elder khans had interpreted this as a tacit ‘order’ from their Dragon Lord and acquiesced.

It had been the younger khans, like Smolder and Garble, who had pointedly ‘declined’ to sit on their claws and wait for Ember and Princess Flurry Heart to give the explicit order for the ‘official’ invasion to commence. Dragons who, while they had lived their lives only ever hearing stories about GIB, and never actually experiencing it for themselves, also had not grown up under the rule of a firm-clawed Dragon Lord like Ember’s father had been. Former Dragon Lord Torch had not been a cruel tyrant by any stretch―his choice to voluntarily cede power once he felt he’d held his title for long enough proved that―but he had certainly ensured that the other dragons knew who it was that held power and, more importantly, that they obeyed that source of power.

No dragon who’d grown up under Torch’s rule would have―for even a moment―entertained the notion of declining any request made of them by their Dragon Lord.

By contrast, Ember’s tenure as Dragon Lord had been conducted with a much softer approach, temperance by the Elements of Harmony and Friendship. She had never invoked the staff’s ability to dominate the free will of her subjects, and so none who’d grown to maturity under her rule had ever experienced the utter horror of having their desires forcibly supplanted in favor of the whims of another. Smolder had never known what it was like to feel fear at the mere thought of upsetting a being who could dominate her will on a whim, like so many of her elders did.

For better or worse, she and the other dragons of her generation―Spike himself included―had been predominantly raised to know Friendship, and to do what was best for the whole of society, not because it was demanded of them, but because they wanted to be of help to their friends whenever they could. It had always been a choice. A choice that they’d always accepted…

...Until now.

Now they’d seen Friendship and Harmony fail. At least, that was what it felt like to them. Spike hadn’t seen it as a failure; it was just another brief setback, like so many that he’d known before growing up. The purple dragon acknowledged that he was very probably playing fast and loose with the definition of the word ‘brief’ in this instance. However, he was resolute in his view that―eventually―Chrysalis’ reign of terror would end and peace would be restored once more. He knew that Harmony would always win out in the end―as it always had before―because nothing could ever truly destroy it. Not really.

Spike had kept faith that Twilight could lead them to victory again. He always would. ‘Galaxy’s Best Assistants’ always kept faith in their friends, after all.

However, he admitted that he had slightly less faith in himself. Or Flurry Heart, for that matter. He found it difficult to truly fault her decline, considering what she’d been forced to witness. Not that Spike himself hadn’t had nearly identical experiences at the same time that she did. Twilight might not be a blood relation, but the alicorn was undeniably as much family to him as Cadance had been to Flurry Heart. Each of them had lost somepony extremely important to them back then.

However, whereas Spike had thrown himself into his other close relationships, as he had done with Ember, Flurry Heart had walled herself off from others. She’d turned inwards...and bitter. Spike had tried to help as best he could, but the Princess of the League-in-Exile hadn’t exactly seen him as an ‘innocent’ party in all that had happened.

After all, he’d realized relatively early on that something had been wrong with ‘Twilight’, and yet he hadn’t come forward and outed Chrysalis immediately. In Flurry Heart’s mind, he’d ‘let’ the changeling queen win.

Spike had thought along those same lines for many years after their exodus from the Sphere. He’d doubled, tripled, and quadruple-thought himself up one side and down the other. Wondering if he’d made the right calls. Maybe he even hadn’t. There might have been better choices that he could have made. Certainly, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, he’d even identified a few things that he could have done differently. Of course, he hadn’t had that same information back then. All that he’d known for sure was that the smallest misstep could have undone everything.

His latitude of movement and action early on after Chrysalis had replaced Twilight had only been because the changeling believed that Spike wasn’t aware of the deception. Maintaining that charade had been his only hope to avoid being replaced earlier than she initially intended. Which meant feigning ignorance about her true identity and not revealing it to anycreature who might already have been replaced with one of her agents. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, and had greatly limited the creatures that he was willing to risk contact with.

For better or worse, he’d chosen to say nothing to the other alicorns. In his mind, those would have been Chrysalis’ first targets upon returning to Equus. Spike specifically avoided them as much as he could based on that assumption, in order to protect himself.

It was possible that he’d been wrong, of course. Celestia, Luna, and Cadance, might have all been themselves and not changeling agents. That was entirely possible. Had he gone to them immediately, they might have been able to take out Chrysalis before she grew too powerful.

Maybe.

Five hundred years later Spike still wondered about that. Wondered if all of this was his fault because he’d been too scared back then. One word to Celestia might have averted all of this.

Spike downed his drink.

No point in those thoughts now. Going back wasn’t an option; there was only moving forward.

The purple dragon was vaguely aware of movement behind him before a cyan hand reached out and grasped the neck of the decanter. He turned in time to see his wife and Dragon Lord chugging down nearly the entirety of the contents in a series of long and uninterrupted gulps. Spike looked on in stunned silence as the amber fluid steadily vanished from the crystal vessel.

Finally, Ember looked to have had her fill and slammed the bottle none-too-gently back on the table. She then threw herself upon another nearby chaise lounge, burying her head in one of the pillows and letting out a very poorly muffled long-suffering scream of frustration.

“...I see the meeting with the khans went well,” Spike quipped cautiously as he checked the decanter for cracks before pouring himself another glass before Ember decided to finish off the rest of the bottle.

Ember raised her head just far enough above the pillow to glare at her husband out of the corner of her eye. Then she let out an exhausted sigh and rolled over onto her back, “The reports from the invasion front keep coming in, and they’re so damn overwhelmingly positive that it’s making it really hard to keep the rest of the khans in check.” The cyan dragoness hadn’t―quite―whined.

“Ah.”

“I mean,” the Dragon Lord continued in her exasperation, “back when it looked like fighting the whole Sphere might be an actual fucking challenge, it was easier to convince most of the khans that it might not be a great idea to risk all of our armies on such a longshot invasion plan. I could remind them of the ‘bigger picture’ and make them question how much of their militaries they were willing to sacrifice for some ‘hypothetical’ amount of treasure. But now…” she trailed off, shrugging helplessly.

“Now the receipts are coming in and it turns out the Sphere is a lot easier to conquer than we thought,” Spike finished for her, flashing his wife a lopsided smile.

“Yup,” Ember acknowledged. “Now the rest of them want in too,” she glanced over at Spike, her own expression a matching wan smile, “and that ‘appeasing’ stunt of yours is blowing up right in our snouts.”

Spike let out his own sigh and allowed himself an acknowledging nod. Sending his own clan in, despite the Dragon Lord’s caution to the khans to hold off and wait for Twilight Sparkle’s signal, had been a risky move to make. On the one claw, neither of them wanted it to look like the Dragon Lord’s will was actually being defied―because no ‘true’ Dragon Lord would have allowed that. The tacit support by Spike with the inclusion of Clan Timberwolf in the invasion had made it clear that the Dragon Lord was not explicitly barring any khan from participating, if even her own consort was a part of it.

It had also been intended as a means to―hopefully―curtail the worst of the possible atrocities that the invading Clans might commit. At the very least, Spike and Ember would have a proxy in the Sphere that could act as they needed them to if something came up, rather than having all of their forces trapped months away from responding.

Now though, given the lightning-fast pace of the invasion’s advance, and the stupendous number of systems which had been conquered so swiftly with so few casualties, it was probably looking to the khans who’d remained―at Ember’s behest―like the Dragon Lord had been trying to specifically keep out too much more competition while she let her consort amass a horde on her behalf.

Exploiting other dragons for personal benefit wasn’t exactly something that was traditionally unheard of for a Dragon Lord to do, but it was also hardly the optic that either of them wanted to present. Truth be told, a part of Spike had hoped to be able to present the high casualty rates of his clan’s forces as evidence that Twilight had been right to wait. Even he’d been caught off guard by how woefully outclassed the militaries of the Sphere were compared to the might of the Dragon Clans.

Which wasn’t to say that he still didn’t think that an outright invasion of the whole Sphere could ultimately succeed. Because he didn’t. As one of the overall commanders of the Celestia League Defense Force’s fleets prior to the exodus, Spike was well aware of how many WarShips had been left behind in the Sphere when he’d left; and he couldn’t imagine that Chrysalis would have let many of those precious vessels go to waste in the intervening centuries. Similarly, he very much doubted that ComSpark had exactly none of the more advanced BattleSteed chassis on hand that had been developed during the fight against Tirek.

It honestly wasn’t particularly surprising that the changeling queen wasn’t using any of her more powerful assets to protect the ‘lesser’ beings of the Harmony Sphere. What did Chrysalis care about the Dragon Clans killing ponies and hippogriffs? Why would she be inclined to stick her neck out for them?

Spike and Ember had always known that the real fight would be over the skies of Equus. WarShip would meet WarShip for the first time in centuries. Tens of thousands of the most advanced BattleSteeds ever conceived of would clash on the planet’s surface in a campaign that would make the fight against Tirek look like a spat between toddlers. Chrysalis had lost too many times before not to take the possibility of another defeat deathly serious. She’d be dug in like a quarry eel, surrounded by as many ships and ‘Steeds as she could pack into the Faust System. It would take everything that the Clans had amassed since leaving to dig her out.

Which was why wasting any of that precious warfighting material on campaigns like Smolder’s was a horrible idea.

Worse though, would be the Clans turning in on themselves if they found out the Staff of the Dragon Lord was little more than a pretty stick.

“It’s only a matter of time before more khans take their fleets in to carve out a little slice of the Sphere for themselves,” Ember finally said, sounding almost resigned to the notion that their grand plans for taking back the galaxy from Chrysalis was doomed before it could even begin, “When that happens…” The Dragon Lord shrugged.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Spike insisted.

His wife’s laugh wasn’t―quite―derisive, “What? You have a way to keep the khans in line that I don’t know about?”

“Not at the moment,” the purple dragon admitted, “But I know we’ll come up with something before it’s too late.”

Ember narrowed her eyes at her consort, “...I’m still not sure if I find your unflappable optimism endearing or annoying.”

“I prefer the term: ‘ambiguously charming’,” He replied, flashing a broad grin in the dragoness’ direction, earning himself a snort and an eyeroll in response. Spike took a moment to enjoy the brief moment of levity that the two of them were experiencing before his own expression sobered once more under the weight of their predicament.

“We can’t just give up. Everycreature is counting on us. We’ll think of something.”

Ember let out a bark of mirthless laughter, “But will it be something that’ll work?”

Spike couldn’t keep a sardonic smirk from sneaking onto his own snout as he acknowledged the point. Coming up with a plan would be easy. Coming up with a good plan, however…

“I wish Twilight was here,” the purple dragon sighed, “She was the ‘planner’. If anypony could come up with a way to beat Chrysalis with what we have, it’d be her―”

The pair had their attention diverted by Ember’s comlink chirping. Looking annoyed at the interruption, the Dragon Lord nonetheless elected to receive the incoming message traffic. After all, it wasn’t like anycreature would have been willing to bother the Dragon Lord herself with anything that wasn’t incredibly important, “What is it?”

She’d keyed the comlink’s speaker so that the response was easily heard by the both of them. After all, whatever it was that she was about to be told was something that she’d have just repeated to Spike a few seconds later anyway, “A WarShip made an unscheduled jump into the system an hour ago,” the voice on the other end of the line announced, prompting the pair of dragons to exchange intrigued expressions. Ships never made unscheduled appearances in Clan space, “It’s the Maelstrom. Twilight Sparkle wishes to speak with you, Your Lordship.”

Spike and Ember shared a mirrored shocked expression, glancing between each other and the comlink. Finally, Spike cast his gaze upward, “...I wish for a bajillion rubies!” After several seconds of looking around in silence, and seemingly without receiving the reaction from the universe that he’d been hoping for, the purple dragon shrugged, “Eh, it was worth a shot.”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 40: A Bonfire of Worlds

New Las Pegasus was one of the most heavily trafficked systems in the Our Worlds League. A bustling hub of commerce and tourism, it was one of the closest things to a ‘pleasure planet’ that existed in that part of the Harmony Sphere. Creatures from all over the known galaxy would often make what amounted to a ‘pilgrimage’ in order to partake in one or more of the boundless pleasures available to those with the means and money to make the most of them.

Sequestered deep within League space, the visitors who vacationed and the citizens who worked there feared little in the way of the combat that tended to ravage more vulnerable border regions. Even most internal struggles among the transstellar corporations or feuding powerful families tended to avoid bringing any of their troubles to New Las Pegasus. After all, even executives and members of the nobility required someplace to vacation when they felt like getting away from the stress of all their intrigues and machinations.

Which wasn’t to say that there wasn’t a great deal of care taken to ensure that the planet was kept protected and secure. Indeed, while the planet was too important to all concerned for any notable power to risk tainting it by bringing their fighting to its doorstep, the fact that it was a known hangout for many of the Harmony Sphere’s movers and shakers meant that it was also the ideal destination for assassins to go to when looking for their targets. As such, traffic was very carefully monitored and new arrivals were screened thoroughly at its spaceports. No DropShip landed anywhere on the surface which had not been explicitly cleared to do so, and certainly nothing landed that wasn’t at a sanctioned spaceport!

Of course, while air and space traffic was strictly controlled and monitored in the system, centuries without a serious issue had allowed for much of the traffic control officers to largely take it for granted that every craft in their area of operation would comply with the commands they were given and didn’t need to be scrutinized every step of the way. As long as the DropShips were traveling along designated approach vectors, most controllers didn’t pay too much attention to individual ships.

So when Mint Julep completed issuing her approach directives for the latest arrival in her queue, she didn’t even notice by the time that she’d moved on to the next that it had settled into a course along approach corridor NLP-A-013, instead of corridor NLP-A-012, like she had told them to. Even if she had been paying the DropShip a few additional seconds of attention, the error would not necessarily have been immediately apparent anyway. As the designations implied, both approaches were quite close together. Indeed, the course would bring the vessel into the same spaceport in the planet’s capital city, just at a different landing pad.

Such an error would obviously be noticed during the later stages of the approach, but it was also easily correctable. Doubtlessly, a flustered DropShip commander or pilot would simply hop over the occupied landing pad and deposit themselves onto the one which had been cleared and reserved for their arrival. Hardly the first time such a slip up had ever happened, and every controller well knew that it wouldn’t be the last. So, even if it was noticed, nothing much would be thought of the mistake.

It was harmless enough. Certainly nothing that anypony thought worthy of notifying planetary security about.

After all, there was nothing immediately obvious for anypony with nefarious intent to gain by taking the other approach vector. They were still clearly traveling along an approved flight corridor, heading for a certified landing zone. If the vessel were smuggling something, they weren’t going to avoid the customs authorities. It obviously had to be a simple―and harmless―mistake.

That was the thought process that everypony who might have been bothered to even note the error would make, the DropShip’s flight crew knew. They were even ready to comment on the mistake and profess their contrition for the simple error in understanding if they were called on it. However, they never were. The crew and their vessel were permitted to fly along their erroneous vector unmolested, none of the traffic controllers being any the wiser that this had not been a ‘simple mistake’ at all.

For there was one significant difference between corridors NLP-A-013 and NLP-A-012 other than the landing pad at the end: and that was that while both had the DropShip overflying most of the capital’s downtown area, 013 took them over Hurricane Plaza before reaching the spaceport.

012 took them over the planet’s HyperSpark Generator.

On such a highly-trafficked planet, it wasn’t immediately apparent to even the ComGuard garrison station at the HSG that something was amiss. DropShips overflew their facility every few hours every day of the year. Hardly anycreature ever bothered to look up when the sound of engines roared overhead, as it was a foregone conclusion that it was just one more ship on its way to the spaceport. It wasn’t even noticed that the engines in question were considerably louder than they usually were. At least, not right away.

It was difficult to say if it was the intensity of the noise, or the HSG’s proximity alarms which first drew the attention of the guards on duty that day. In either case, by the time the DropShip had dropped to a mere thousand meters in altitude, it was clear to everypony that the DropShip wasn’t on its way to the spaceport after all. Yet, even then, the first thoughts going through creature’s heads were along the lines of either marveling at the spectacular fuck-up that the vessel’s pilot was making, or wondering if perhaps it was suffering some sort of emergency that had prevented it from reaching the spaceport.

In either case, the ComGuard was put on alert, as was the outlined procedure when responding to any unauthorized landing at their facility. Granted, it was a procedure which had seen very little real-world application….well, ever. Unscheduled landings at ComSpark facilities just didn’t happen!

Their soldiers turned out in force all the same, though mostly in anticipation of having to keep the day’s visitors to the HSG away from where it seemed the DropShip was about to make its supposed impromptu landing. A couple crews were trotting out to their vehicles in no particular hurry and a quartet of scowling ‘Steed pilots were just emerging from their ready room after donning their gear. It was clear that most of the ComGuard was more ‘annoyed’ than ‘concerned’ by what was happening. Even the officer in charge of the facility’s security detail was thinking more about how bothersome writing the report on this incident was going to be than anything else.

Even though all eyes were on the DropShip approaching them, it was high enough up in the air that it was difficult to make out the movement of its defensive turrets. Indeed, few thought to focus that hard on where its armaments were directed at; because why would the vessel be pointing its guns anywhere? One of the soldiers stationed in the facility’s northwest guard tower who was watching the vessel had a better vantage point than most, being several dozen meters in the air above her comrades. She did notice that the prismatic projection cannons and heavy lasers were rotating on their mounts, angling down towards the forces waiting on the ground.

It took her a few seconds to fully process this though. After all, like everycreature else watching the DropShip approach, her first impressions had not been along the lines of nefarious intent. Perhaps there was even a benign reason that she was unaware of for what was happening with those turrets. However, she thought it best to at least notify her superiors about what she’d seen.

The unicorn mare―who was definitely a real unicorn and totally not a changeling―toggled her communicator, “Tower Three to Control; be advised: I’ve got activity on the DropShip’s weapons systems. I say again: Tower Three has activi―”

She was too busy reporting her observation to notice that one of the ship’s PPCs had oriented towards her position. Nor was it the only weapon to fire in that opening salvo. Two other PPCs removed two more guard towers in that same instant, while heavy lasers and autocannons raked the courtyard, clearing a landing zone. The first volley of fire took the ComGuard by complete surprise.

Energy weapons carved their way along the exposed lines of infantry who’d turned out to form a cautionary perimeter around the DropShip’s anticipated landing zone. While their armored barding tended to perform fairly well against small arms fire and shrapnel, they might as well have been completely naked for all the good it did against the intense beams of coherent energy that were designed to sear away the thick alloyed plating that coated combat vehicles and BattleSteeds. Little was left behind but scorch marks and the occasional smoldering remains of the odd body part that hadn’t fallen entirely within the brilliant column of destructive energy.

The high-explosive shells of the autocannons swept through the motorpool and the staged vehicles sitting there. Previously pristine hulls of brightly-painted tanks and light combat vehicles which had never before needed to be taken into battle―because who would be crazy enough to attack a HyperSpark Generator controlled by ComSpark?!―were quickly reduced to blown out wrecks by the DropShip’s guns.

For a moment, the whole facility was paralyzed with shock. Things like this simply didn’t. Happen. Nocreature attacked the ComGuard. They certainly didn’t attack a HyperSpark Generator, the backbone of the galactic telecommunications network and an indispensable piece of planetary infrastructure! It was something that had never happened in the history of...well, history!

It was happening today though.

Klaxons wailed. Alarms whined. Orders were shouted. The previously quiet and inert HSG facility erupted into a flurry of activity, like an anthill suddenly beset upon by an invader. While it was a fact that ComSpark’s HyperSpark Generator network stood apart from and above the rest of the Harmony Sphere and its petty disputes―exempt from the machinations of others―the fact had remained that such places were simply too important to be left completely unprotected; lest the temptation to interfere with their regular operations be too great for even the most foolhardy to resist.

Besides, ComSpark knew that the Disciples of Discord existed, and what their true motives were. They were hardly willing to risk making their arrays too tempting of a target for those terrorists.

They had thus been built as robustly as any military fortress, surrounded by towering walls and teeming with defenders. Properly alerted, such a place would have been able to fend off a brigade-size element with little issue at all. Perhaps they could even have survived an assault by a whole division long enough to be relieved by reinforcements.

Such things had, of course, assumed that the attack would have been known about ahead of time, and that the enemy forces would be coming at the HSG from outside of its walls. Defending against even a company-sized group of invaders was going to be considerably more difficult if they were already inside the facility’s more formidable defenses.

The ComGuard troops who hadn’t been burned away in the opening volley, recovered in time to find the DropShip settling in the courtyard, its doors falling open. From within spilled forth a mixed force of infantry, light vehicles, and even a single medium-tonnage Autumn Blaze chassis. Outfitted with three six-count SRM launchers, backed up by a pair of medium energy cannons, the singular BattleSteed was able to dole out a considerable amount of damage very quickly in the relatively confined quarters of the HSG facility. All the while, the DropShip continued to support its deployed forces with its own weapons.

To say that the ComGuard had been placed on the back hoof was an understatement. Quite frankly, they had been caught completely by surprise, and much of their defensive capabilities had been thoroughly demolished in the first minute of the fight. What forces had survived the initial assault prior to the landing were pulling back in the face of the outpouring of attackers from the DropShip’s interior. Indeed, it was looking like the surprise assault was going to result in an outright victory for the attackers.

...Then the perimeter defenses came online.

In order to facilitate their purpose as the backbone of communication across the galaxy, HyperSpark Generators had to be open to the public at large. To that end, ComSpark had also always strived to appear as welcoming as possible to the citizens of the Harmony Sphere. There was little hope denying that anycreature couldn’t feel truly ‘welcome’ in a place that was bristling with guns and automated turrets. So an effort had been made to make an HSG’s defensive measures more discrete. To that end, most of the heavier, more fearsome-looking, turrets were kept recessed within the walls of the facility when they weren’t needed.

Now, however, they were needed.

One after another, turrets bristling with all manner of weapons began to emerge from their hidey-holes along the perimeter wall. With foreboding smoothness, those emplacements oriented themselves to face inward and tilted down so as to be able to fire into the facility’s interior. These movements didn’t go unnoticed by the invaders. The gunnery crews on board the DropShip took aim and began working their way through the turrets. However, the ship had only so many weapons capable of being brought to bear on those emplacements at once. Meanwhile, the newly emerged turrets could all focus on the singular DropShip simultaneously.

The Autumn Blaze’s sensor suite had noticed the appearance of so many more additional hostile signatures coming from all around it too, and the ‘Steed pilot at its controls did the best that they could to cover the vulnerable vessel, pouring missiles into the turrets as quickly as their launchers would reload. One turret erupted in flames. A second. The Dropship snuffed out three more. Yet, that represented only a fraction of the emplacements which had popped out of their berths.

Those that remained fired on the DropShip as one.

The BattleSteed staggered as it was buffeted by the explosion of the nearly four thousand ton vessel. Ground vehicles and infantry who had not managed to quite clear the bay doors were not so lucky, finding themselves either enveloped by the explosion of its fusion reactor, or cut down by the shrapnel and debris created by the vessel’s spectacular death. In all, perhaps a third of the forces carried by the DropShip died along with it. Those who survived did their best to keep their attention focused on their objective: the building housing the HyperSpark Generator itself. As long as they could make it there, the deaths of their comrades could be made worthwhile.

The Autumn Blaze continued to focus on the turrets, cycling through its missile launchers as quickly as they could. Steady progress was being made, but it was clear to even the pilot that it wasn’t being made fast enough. They felt a cold knot forming in their gut as they recognized that, with the DropShip now out of action, those directing targets for those turrets had decided―and rightly so―that the BattleSteed represented the next most significant threat.

The ‘Steed pilot started to find it significantly more difficult to target the defensive turrets as they were forced to do their best to dodge a torrent of fire coming at them from all directions. Hit after hit plowed into the BattleSteed, stripping away plating with terrifying swiftness. It took less than a minute for nearly every ounce of armor to be blasted away from its surface. After that, the pilot couldn’t hardly hear the explosions of missiles striking their ‘Steed through the din of alarms.

They were reaching for the ejection controls about the time an autocannon round pierced the cockpit viewport.

A herd of pony ground troops charged for the entrance to the building housing the HyperSpark Generator. Unicorns floated heavier machineguns with their telekinesis, firing the weapons in order to keep the ComGuard defenders suppressed. Following closely on the hocks of the infantry, lighter combat vehicles now turned their turrets to cover their advance from the turrets.

Unfortunately, those vehicles were nowhere near as durable as the Autumn Blaze had been. The turrets were able to divide their attention, each focusing on their own target and picking them off within seconds of one another.

After that, with nothing to cover them or draw the attention of the turrets, the throng of galloping infantry began to burn.

“Don’t look back, just run!” Danube shouted at the top of his lungs to those who might yet be able to hear him over the cacophony of gunfire and explosions. The unicorn stallion’s rifle hovered at his withers, snapping off bursts of covering fire at the ComGuard forces beginning to gather along the main building’s battlements. At this range, and moving as he was, Danube knew that his chances of actually hitting any of those defenders was slim. However, the presence of rounds striking their cover nearby was at least enough to keep the ComGuard soldiers from exposing themselves long enough to acquire properly aimed shots as well.

A pony behind him screamed, but it was a cry which was cut disturbingly short, halting with eerie suddenness as the beam of annihilating energy which had struck the pony vaporized her lungs less than a second after making contact with her. The Disciple officer caught sight of the emerald column of energy which had killed her out of the corner of his eye as it sliced its way across the courtyard’s tarmac, leaving behind a blackened line of carbon.

The unicorn stallion felt his teeth grinding in frustrated determination as he sought to block out that loss, and focus his attention exclusively on doing everything he could to reach the relative ‘safety’ of the HSG’s main building. It was pointless to consider the many threats which lay within until he and the rest of the forces which survived this perilous sprint across no-mare’s-land actually made it out of the line of fire of those damnable turrets.

His frustration ratcheted up another notch as he witnessed the very portal that was their goal begin to seal. A massive reinforced door was being lowered into place over the main entrance, which was usually never obstructed, allowing visitors bearing their message traffic to freely come and go at all hours of the day and night. The galaxy never slept, after all. ComSpark was closing it now though, and at their current rate of progress, Danube’s detachment wasn’t going to make it in time to get through.

He glanced back over his left shoulder, briefly relieved to catch sight of one of the corporals in his unit keeping stride just behind him. The young stallion was an earth pony, and―more importantly at this moment―one of the ponies who had been assigned to carry some of the group’s heavy ordinance. The portable short-range-missile launcher was still strapped across the earth pony’s back, unused, “Corporal, the door!” Danube screamed.

With barely a hint of a nod, the other soldier rolled to the stop, managing to unsling the personal launcher and take it up in their hooves in a singular, smooth motion. He hesitated for only a second to line up the shot―

A burst of gunfire struck the corporal, starting in his chest, and raking upwards to his head. His barding, while capable of providing considerable protection against lighter munitions and shrapnel, did little to shrug off the multitude of impacts from the heavier-caliber machine gun which had zeroed in on the briefly-stationary earth pony. The corporal’s own shot went high, striking the reinforced concrete wall above the now sealed entrance. Danube cursed under his breath as he continued to sprint towards the same closed door. His head swiveled from one side to the other as he tried to seek out any other soldiers still on their hooves who might have ordinance powerful enough to blast them a way through.

How Danube managed to survive long enough to reach the door and the meager shelter that its associated alcove provided, the unicorn would never know. Nor was he the only one who managed to do so. Several other members of his unit, and a few other lucky survivors from others arrived on his cannons. However, the unicorn captain could immediately see that none of them were in possession of anything powerful enough to blast their way through the door which was barring their path inside.

He let loose a string of epithets. Most of their plan for this assault had counted on being able to get at least some members of the assault team inside before the facility was able to seal itself. Admittedly, he wasn’t aware of the presence of so many turrets being discussed. Had they predicted this level of automated defenses, the unicorn doubted that they would have selected this location as a target. Not that there was any help for it now. They were here, and they were dying. Quickly.

Frantically, Danube scanned the courtyard for an option. The alcove that he and the ponies with him were huddling in kept them from being presently fired upon by the ComGuard troops above them, but that wasn’t likely to last for much longer. They needed to get inside as quickly as possible.

Soon, the unicorn officer noted that one of the light tanks had managed to make it off the DropShip intact, and was apparently still in operation. Currently, it was making a valiant attempt to deal with the turrets up on the wall. However, its crew had to realize that was a futile endeavor. They weren’t maneuverable enough to keep from being hit eventually. They also were in possession of the heaviest ordinance the landing team had left.

Danube got on to his comlink, “Dove Six to surviving Scorpion; I have a team at the door, but we need it open! Requesting assistance, ASAP!”

“Acknowledged, Dove Six,” came the staticky reply of a stallion who sounded as though he was feeling more than a small amount of stress at the moment. However, they managed to get their turret around and plant a shell squarely in the middle of the door, blowing it open in spectacular fashion.

“Much obliged, Dove Six-” The unicorn stallion began, only to feel the words catch in his throat as he saw the SRM strike the tank’s turret.

It wasn’t a particularly big explosion. Honestly, it hardly looked like anything catastrophic had been done to the armored vehicle at all, and that its ablative plating had managed to absorb the worst of it.

Then the hatch burst open, and a column of flame erupted out of it. Along with the screaming. Danube could only look on in horror as some...thing clambered out through the raging inferno. It had four limbs, and what might have been a head. Maybe. It was honestly hard to tell through all of the flickering flames. Whatever it was, it wasn’t very well coordinated, and slipped and tumbled its way off the turret, bouncing off the tank’s treads and collapsing in a squirming, flaming, screaming, heap on the tarmac.

Why wouldn’t it stop screaming?

A hoof on the captain’s withers jerked the captain out of his shock. He turned to see a unicorn mare looking at her with a desperate expression on her face, “Sir, we need to get a move on!” She insisted.

Danube managed to nod shakily in agreement and followed the rest of the hastily assembled ponies inside. Not many of them had made it, the unicorn stallion noted with a resigned sigh, but maybe it would still prove to be enough of them. However, before they moved on deeper into the facility, he supposed there was something that needed to be taken care of first.

“Trot outside and you see the sunshine,” the captain sing-songed, gesturing to the pony nearest him.

The unicorn mare smiled and picked up the lyric, “Something’s in the air today!”

“Sky is clear and you’re feeling so fine!” A pegasus mare crowed.

“Everything’s going to be A-okay,” an earth pony stallion continued, glancing at the unicorn stallion next to him.

That unicorn only blinked in mild confusion, looking at all of the others before shrugging, “Yeah, I have no idea what the fuck you guys are doing.”

Danube hesitated. The voice that had come from the unicorn stallion had been of a much higher register than he would have expected. At least, for a stallion. It would have been perfectly suitable for a mare though, he reasoned.

The captain’s brain was only just beginning to make the connection between that realization and the only logical conclusion when the light machine gun being wielded by the ‘unicorn stallion’ began to fire. After three seconds of continuous shooting, the no-longer-a-pony looked around at the eviscerated bodies and activated their comlink, “Interior’s clear again,” she reported, “Moving back into cover in case another group makes it inside…”

In stark contrast to New Las Pegasus, Long Harvest was a barely inhabited agrarian world in Federated Moons space that saw little in the way of visiting traffic that wasn’t there specifically to service the conglomerates exporting foodstuffs to more urban planets in nearby systems. So the arrival of an unscheduled DropShip with the latest jump tender was noticed almost immediately by system traffic control. It was the conglomerates that went on high alert though, and not the residents of the small Order of the Holy Luna monastery located on the planet’s smallest continent. After all, everycreature knew that they were nothing more than a cloistered religious order that didn’t involve themselves with anything approaching galactic politics.

Two days later, when the DropShip entered orbit, they even saw fit to announce themselves as being part of an independent mercenary company who was there to shut down one of the larger farms on the planet on behalf of a competitor. Confirming that this was indeed what everypony in the system had initially suspected it to be: a raid being perpetrated against one of the transstellar agri-corps at the behest of another. It was one of the most mundane occurrences in the Harmony Sphere and not something that was doubted for even a moment to be the case.

At least, most wouldn’t have thought to doubt the claim’s authenticity. There was one pony on the planet who thought the arrival of the mercenary DropShip was a little odd though. One of the ‘monks’ in the ‘monastery’―who was totally not actually a creature called a ‘changeling’, and certainly hadn’t been monitoring the communications traffic between the DropShip and the farming conglomerate GluTransCorp on a hidden surveillance array located in the chapel’s basement―quickly brought up their most recently updated list of mercenary contracts in the region issued by the Mercenary Review Board. As they had suspected, they were unable to locate any sanctioned contracts taken out against GluTransCorp.

Of course, that didn’t mean that something hadn’t been brokered ‘off the books’. Such things could indeed happen. ComSpark and the rest of the civilized community frowned upon such things quite heavily though, and so the ‘monk’ logged the anomaly for later transmission during tomorrow’s morning update to the network. The breach of MRB protocols would be investigated and the offending parties notified about the penalties being levied against them for ‘unsanctioned’ contracting. Other than that though, not much more thought was given to the DropShip.

At least, not by the changeling drone who had overheard the comm traffic. The drone’s supervisor―who was absolutely nothing more than a simple prior of the monastery―however, took a keener interest in the DropShip, as he reviewed the list of registered mercenary companies operating with a Mercenary Review Board license. His intent was to ensure that his addendum to the report could provide additional relevant context for when an appropriate punishment was meted out by ComSpark. If this was a very new company, for example, it was possible that they could merely be placed on a probationary status. On the other hoof, if the company had been around long enough to know better, a punitive fine, or even censure, might be more appropriate.

It was during this bit of research that the totally-a-real-prior discovered that, while such a mercenary company did exist, they were already contracted out in Kirin Confederation space. A confirmed sighting placed their entire available force at least two months away from Long Harvest as of last week. It was impossible for one of their DropShips to be in this system.

Whoever these creatures were, they were not who they claimed to be.

Most likely, it meant that these were outlaw raiders, the changeling supervisor reasoned. Most victims of a raid would see little worthwhile distinction between getting attacked by criminals when compared to bona fide mercenaries, of course. However, by and large, registered and sanctioned mercenary companies could typically be counted on to abide by the Aris Conventions. Raiders, not so much.

By disguising themselves as a legitimate mercenary unit, this pirate group likely hoped to be able to get away with a few raids before the Federation took notice and dispatched forces to deal with them. ComSpark would need to be made aware of this group so that the damage they ended up causing could be tracked. If it looked like they were getting out of hoof, or posed a threat to any of ComSpark’s ongoing operations in the area, the Federation military could be appropriately tipped off, or a contract taken out by ComSpark directly to deal with these raiders ‘for the greater good of the Sphere’.

He’d compile a report on how excessive these raiders were where their collateral damage was concerned so that those above him in the intelligence network could classify the group accordingly.

No additional thought was given to the ‘mercenaries’ for another couple of hours, until the prior received a priority alert at his terminal from his own chief intelligence officer. The mare was reporting that, in the last five minutes, they’d lost contact with no fewer than three of their surveillance satellites. The prior jerked upright in his chair in stark surprise. That surprise turned to something approaching genuine concern when it was reported to him that the last moments of telemetry recorded by those satellites identified them being approached by aerospace fighters.

A great deal of red flags began to go off in the changeling supervisor’s head at that moment. First and foremost, those ‘surveillance satellites’ in orbit above Long Harvest were technically standard ComSpark traffic navigation beacons. These were typical planetary orbital aids which were present in just about every star system in the Harmony Sphere which ComSpark had ‘generously gifted’ to the governments of every world in order to help them keep their arriving and departing traffic nice and orderly. That they had a secondary function providing detailed information to various ComSpark facilities―both the overt and the covert―was something the rest of the galaxy was largely ignorant of.

Since they were clearly identifiable as being ComSpark property, however, that should have meant that any aggressor would consider them to be ‘off limits’, regardless of whatever else might have brought them to this planet in the first place. Even a band of raiders like these creatures apparently were shouldn’t be going out of their way to antagonize ComSpark. Only an idiot would do something like that. Well, an idiot or the Disciples, the prior thought to himself.

That theory was confirmed less than an hour later when their hidden ground-based tracking stations detected the DropShip on approach towards their location. The site’s director spent a few minutes pondering the situation, weighing the odds that his small staff would be able to repel a dedicated assault on the facility. Ultimately, he concluded that, if the forces aboard a DropShip that size were determined to get inside, there was little that could be done to prevent it.

So be it. The ‘prior’ reached over to the terminal and pressed a key that would activate the complex’s public announcement system, “All hooves: Molt. This is not a drill.”

He said nothing more, as there was no need for him to expound upon the directive. Every changeling in the ‘monastery’―and the HyperSpark Generator buried beneath it―was entirely aware of what they needed to do, and they would drop everything that they were currently doing and carry out his instructions. The prior turned off his terminal and headed for his office’s exit.

Lieutenant Remmy Red strode smoothly―but briskly―along the ancient-looking stone corridor. A rifle hovered beside her cheek, wrapped in the golden glow of her telekinesis, pointing ahead of her. At her rear, she heard the muffled sound of booted hooves walking in her wake as the rest of her squad moved with her. Their team was currently the deepest inside the monastery, making their way through its catacombs towards the entrance to the HyperSpark Generator.

The lack of any activity on her comlink, other than sporadic updates from other teams about their continued lack of contact with any changeling forces during their own searching, had convinced that unicorn mare that two possibilities were likely: Either the ComSpark forces hidden here were laying in wait for them at the heart of the HSG itself in order to be able to force the invaders through a single avenue of approach and increase their chances of holding them off at a choke point, or…

Or, frankly, she and the rest of the teams in here were living on borrowed time.

Either way, it reeked of a trap, and Remmy didn’t care for that.

The wine-red unicorn mare rounded another corner and came to a halt. The rest of the squad behind her paused as well, waiting for her next signal. She hesitated for several seconds as her eyes studied the door a few meters ahead of her. The very modern-looking door. In stark contrast to all of the rest, which had been built of appropriately rustic oak in order to maintain the appearance of a mendicant retreat for the religiously-focused ‘monks’ who lived here.

They’d found the entrance to the HSG.

Remmy activated her comlink, “Team One has located the objective,” she announced. Then there was a brief pause, before she finally sighed and issued a set of orders which hadn’t been previously discussed during the planning meetings leading up to this operation, “All other teams: pull back to the DropShip.”

The young lieutenant wasn’t surprised when the DropShip’s captain spoke up, “Team One, what’s the issue?”

Remmy raised a hoof and waved it forward, signaling to the rest of her team to follow her as she resumed making her way to the door, “They know we were coming,” she pointed out to the stallion on the other end of the line, “But there’s no sign that anypony’s here.

“I don’t think they’re just going to give us this generator, do you?”

The DropShip commander swore, “Then get your team out of there too, lieutenant,” he demanded.

“We don’t know how long we have. It might be too late for us anyway.”

“It also might not!”

“We also might have enough time to complete the mission, sir. If there’s even a chance, I’m going to take it,” Remmy looked over her shoulder briefly, and felt bittersweet relief to see that the expressions of the rest of the Disciples with her confirmed that they were all in agreement with their lieutenant. She loved them for that.

The unicorn mare once more directed her eyes forward, in case it turned out that this was all in preparation for a more traditional ambush, “We don’t know how big of a surprise they might have left though,” she advised the DropShip captain, “So get yourself back into orbit once everypony else is aboard. Just to be safe.”

“...Good luck, lieutenant.”

Remmy and her team finally breached the door to the HyperSpark Generator, and found themselves on a catwalk that spanned across the cavernous depths of the massive machine which was used to warp the very fabric of space itself in order to send messages across dozens of lightyears. The pair of pegasi with her immediately took advantage of their less confirmed surroundings and took wing, spreading out to search the area for signs of changelings. The rest sprinted towards the control room.

Barely any scan was done for changelings as they arrived at the main terminals for the HSG, as it was pretty moot by this point. Remmy Red positioned herself in front of the console which would allow her to upload both the virus as well as the message which Twilight had recorded of herself posing as Queen Chrysalis issuing her ‘ultimatum’ to the Harmony Sphere. The tech sergeant with her made an effort to gain access to the HSG’s diagnostics terminal in order to see what the actual status of the array was.

It turned out to be pretty much what Remmy had already concluded, “The main reactor is already on a runaway to meltdown,” the senior non-com reported soberly.

The maroon unicorn mare didn’t miss a beat and plugged in the data cartridge she’d been given which contained a copy of the virus and the message for upload, “How much time do we have?”

“I can’t tell from here. The reactor’s internal temp has already fried most of the monitoring sensors,” the sergeant admitted, and then toggled their comlink, “Zeph, find the reactor. I need you to tell me what color the reaction is, preferably in nanometers. There should be a spectrograph in a cabinet somewhere nearby.”

Remmy’s gaze was locked on the progress bar for the upload. It would only take a minute or for the program and the recording to be extracted and parsed for distribution. There might not be enough time for her and her team to get out before the reactor exploded, but hopefully they’d be able to get the transmission off.

“Most reactor housing collapses at around ten thousand kelvin,” the tech sergeant informed her superior, “If that reading comes back at under three hundred...”

“How long would we have?”

The response of the non-com was interrupted by a report from the pegasus that she’d dispatched to get the reading, “Sergeant, if I have this thing working right, it reads at two-eighty-four,” the stallion said.

“...Seconds, ma’am.”

Lieutenant Remmy Red’s eyes widened in shock. She’d known that they wouldn’t have a lot of time to work with, but she’d hoped at least that there’d be some. The unicorn glanced back at the display, noting how much longer it would be until the transmission was made. Would the reactor hold out long enough to―?

The former prior―for he no longer had any monastery left to pry, if that was indeed the verb for it―winced and looked away from the sudden eruption of blinding light. Seconds later, he felt the concrete floor of the bunker which he and the rest of the ‘monks’ were sheltering in quiver as the massive explosion’s shockwave reverberated through the ground. Even from miles away, the sensation was intense.

After a few seconds, he once more peered out of the hidden bunker in the hills overlooking the―former―monastery. Nothing remained but a crater and a slowly rising mushroom cloud. In the distance, he could see the DropShip rising into the sky. His lips quirked in a frown. His superiors were not going to be particularly pleased to learn about the loss of the secondary array. On the bright side, it would be some time before he managed to make such a report. Hopefully, by then he will have managed to come up with a way to sufficiently characterize what had happened to make himself look appropriately blameless in all of this.

“Sunspot Three reporting scan complete; breaking orbit.”

“Acknowledged, Three,” came the staticky response from the stallion on board the command DropShip.

The small Lightning-class aerospace fighter’s engine flared to life above the small desolate moon in near orbit of the Ifrit system’s largest gas giant. The craft lifted away from the airless surface over which the fighter had been patrolling as it gained speed, heading off on its new trajectory towards the next moon in the pilot’s queue. It was a patrol pattern which the kirin mare had run a hundred times before. At least, that was what it felt like to her. In reality, the actual number was likely closer to forty or so.

Scanning dead moons was far from the most exciting duty that an aerospace pilot could have been assigned, in Flare’s opinion. However, mere lieutenants didn’t get to choose their assignments. So, if the kirin was going to keep herself from going brain-dead due to boredom, it was left to the pilot to come up with her own means of keeping herself alert and engaged. At least, within the limits of what she was permitted to do in accordance with Kirin Confederation Armed Forces regulations and protocols.

A mischievous little small touched the red-maned mare’s lips as she tapped in a series of calculations into her Lightning’s navigational computer. While the scans themselves might have varied little from one patrol to the next, the complicated orbital arrangement of the no fewer than fifty-six moons in orbit of the jovian host planet meant that she was never forced to follow the same path twice. Indeed, the duty presented the kirin with a plethora of opportunities to practice and refine her knowledge of orbital mechanics.

It was even something of an unofficial competition between herself and the other pilots who could perform their patrols the ‘best’; with scoring taking into account variables such as time, distance covered, and fuel usage. Flare consistently performed in the top three for Sunspot Squadron, but she’d never quite managed to achieve the number one spot. She’d come very close on one or two occasions, but Major Vernal Gale always seemed to be able to eek out a victory.

In some respects, Solar Flare suspected that it was hardly surprising that the most experienced pilot, and the commander of the squadron, should manage to retain her superior ranking. The youthful lieutenant was mostly satisfied to beat out the rest of her peers. Mostly.

However, right now there was every likelihood that Lieutenant Flare was going to be able to seize that coveted top ranking this time. She’d managed to work out a couple of exceptional burns that placed her in low orbits around the airless members of the gas giant’s progeny, granting her an abundance of speed in reserve; and right now she was lined up for an optimal delta-vee transit to the next one. By her own calculations, she was well below her usual fuel consumption for a patrol, and she was definitely performing this patrol much faster.

All that was left was distance; and while she might be diving a little closer to the gas giant than was ‘advisable’, per official guidance, skipping off of the upper atmosphere like she was about to was going cut more than a hundred thousand kilometers off of her trip, boosting her score even further.

She was going to win the competition this time for sure!

The aerospace pilot watched intently as her velocity continued to increase as the supergiant’s gravity dragged her vessel towards it. Her sensor suite performed continuous scans of the gas giant. The upper atmosphere of such planets were far more volatile than those of their smaller terrestrial cousins. Flare was looking to merely ‘kiss’ the thin topmost regions of the gas giant. Going too deep into its atmosphere would cause her to bleed off too much speed and require additional acceleration burns, which would cost her in time and fuel.

Solar Flare’s smile broadened into a grin as she felt her small fighter begin to hum ever so softly as the thinnest wisps of the jovian’s atmosphere reached up to touch her hull. However, she was already screaming past her flight’s perigee, and lifting away from the gas giant on her way to the next moon in her patrol pattern―

Proximity alerts blared out a shrill warning. Flare was firmly convinced that she would have leaped clear through the canopy in surprise if she hadn’t been so firmly buckled into her seat. At first, the kirin thought that some manner of asteroid or other celestial debris had been detected around her, however this was quickly proven to not be the case. Her sensors were detecting a thermal signature. A very large thermal signature.

“Sunspot Three reporting unknown contact in low orbit of Ifrit IV!” Solar Flare blurted out, still trying to recover from her own shock, “Negative IFF; they’re running dark,” she noted quickly as her sensor suite confirmed that nothing had been received in response to the automated requests made by her fight’s computer. The IFF verification process was a completely automated one, and would only have failed if the queried vessel had theirs turned off.

Which no reputable vessel ever would while operating in civilized space.

There was certainly no good reason for a ship to be crouched in low orbit of a gas giant like this. Flare might have lightly touched the planet’s atmosphere, but whoever these creatures were appeared to be deliberately sequestered in it. The only reason that a ship would have buried itself in a gas giant’s atmosphere would have been to hide itself from the passive scans of a system’s traffic control network.

And only pirates or raiders would want to do something like that. The sorts of groups that the sweeps being performed by Lieutenant Solar Flare’s squadron were intended to ferret out.

“―ay a―n, Su―t ―ee.”

The garbled transmission was nearly incomprehensible to the kirin pilot. The mare confirmed that her comms suite was configured correctly and tried to send out her report again, “I say again: Sunspot Three has made contact with an unidentified vessel near Ifrit IV. Requesting support!”

This time she was met with nothing more than white noise. Her craft’s sensors registered a significant level of electromagnetic activity throughout most of the frequencies commonly used for communications. She was being jammed. That seemed like a decidedly unfriendly move on the part of the unidentified ship she’d stumbled across.

While it was doubtless that additional forces would soon be on their way to her position, if for no other reason than to investigate what had caused her to lose contact with her host vessel, Solar Flare realized that, for the moment, she was on her own. Her two most obvious options were to take advantage of her current velocity and attempt to flee, or to try and hold the other ship here until relief arrived.

It was a foregone conclusion that she’d be able to escape if she really wanted to. The other ship was far too large to have a hope of overtaking her, especially considering her already existing excessive velocity. However, if she got too far away and lost sensor contact with this ship, it was unlikely that it would stick around long enough to be picked up by the relief force that was being scrambled right now.

Major Vernal Gale was hardly going to fault the lieutenant for electing not to match her fifty-ton Lightning against another ship that massed a few thousand tons if she chose to retreat. So there was nothing to be lost by choosing discretion in this instance.

...On the other hoof, Flare wasn’t entirely comfortable with the thought of letting probable raiders get loose in the system to cause who-knew what kind of havoc. If they managed to escape now and went on to hit some settlement or other in the system, the lieutenant wasn’t sure if she’d be able to live with the knowledge that she could have done something to stop it.

With a resigned growl, Lieutenant Solar Flare of the KCAF’s One-Forty-First AreoWing, Fifth Squadron, flipped her Lightning around, powered up her weapon systems, and kicked her engine into a full burn.

“Bogey One is decelerating,” the griffon sensor operator announced calmly, “It looks like they’re going to fight.”

Down Range, the earth pony captain of the recently acquired Disciple DropShip Turtledove, frowned at the sensor plot with great annoyance. He was already well behind schedule. They should have been on their way to Ifrit II and the ComSpark HyperSpark Generator nestled in the planet’s capital city six hours ago. However, he’d elected to delay their departure when the fighter had shown up on their sensors and begun its sweep of the moons in orbit of the gas giant they’d been hiding in. This far out from the only settled planet in the system, there was a chase that they could remain hidden long enough to make their way to an appropriate location where they could ‘appear’ on traffic control’s sensors without looking too out of place.

‘Unfortunately’ for Down Range and his team, they’d made much better time on route to their objective than they reasonably should have. Which wouldn’t normally have been too much of a problem, except that it would have proven difficult to explain why their vessel was waiting around in orbit of Ifrit II doing ‘nothing’ for the better part of three weeks. That might have drawn questions from planetary officials or―worse―ComSpark. So he’d elected to have them hide out in the outer reaches of the system until it was time for them to act in concert with the other teams throughout the Harmony Sphere.

Now they had this to deal with.

“Helm, break orbit. Best time course for Ifrit II,” the DropShip’s captain growled, “Looks like we’ll be going in hot. Launch Bucklers One and Two,” he barked at the pegasus stationed at operations. He’d let his own fighters deal with the incoming KCAF craft. The earth pony toggled his comlink, “Colonel Barrister? We’re moving out. ETA to touchdown is…” he glanced over the plot which had only a moment ago been updated with the navigator’s recently calculated course, “eight hours.”

“Acknowledged. We’ll be ready to fight, Captain.”

Lieutenant Solar Flare grit her teeth, rethinking her earlier choice to remain and tangle with the ship she’d found. When she’d made that decision, there hadn’t been two other aerospace fighters in the mix. The kirin considered herself to be a capable pilot, but even the most accomplished aces in the galaxy would hesitate at the thought of tangling with two other fighters on their own, especially when those other fighters were being backed up by their mothership.

However, it was too late for Flare to back off now that those fighters had been launched. While the DropShip might not have been able to match her acceleration, those other fighters would certainly be able to overtake her if she tried to withdraw now. On the bright side, she didn’t necessarily have to get into a serious dogfight with them. Her goal from the outset had always been just to keep in sensor contact with the DropShip so that the rest of her squadron wouldn’t lose track of it while they made their way to her location. That shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes or so, in her estimation.

Even against two fighters, she could play grab-flank for that long at least without much issue.

Her sensors updated her on the status of the larger DropShip, revealing its dramatic increase in acceleration. They were leaving the gas giant. The course projected for it was Ifrit II. It looked like they were going to conduct their raid after all. Flare frowned. That seemed odd to her. She’d have expected pirates to opt for a retreat upon being discovered. They’d lost the element of surprise after all. Whatever their target was would surely soon be on alert and a much harder nut to crack, wouldn’t it?

The DropShip’s intentions hardly mattered much in the interim though. Solar Flare’s primary concern soon became the pair of aerospace fighters closing with her, and keeping herself intact long enough to be relieved by her approaching cohorts. At least, she desperately hoped they were approaching. The kirin threw her little fighter into a series of evasive maneuvers in the hope of confounding the targeting computers of the closing enemy fighters.

Flashes of brilliant sapphire and emerald lightning filled the vacuum of space around her. Alarms blared, warning Flare of incoming missiles. The kirin pilot swiftly discharged a number of flares and cut her main engine. She briefly held her breath reflexively as trails of wispy smoke zipped past her cockpit in the wake of missiles which missed her by mere meters, chasing after the decoys meant to confound them.

Once more her primary engine ignited, flaring to life and plastering her body into her seat. Her hind hooves worked her aerospace fighter’s ‘rudder’, sending her craft into a roll as contrary dorsal and ventral thrusters fired. At the same time, the kirin cut her thrust once more and pushed forward on her control yoke. Her nimble little Lightning threw its back end ‘up’, seeming to dance on its nose as she whipped towards the enemy fighters. As the front of her fighter flashed over top of one of the enemy craft, Flare lashed out with a trio of jade beams from her energy cannons. The destructive torrents of light carved their way across the port wing of her target, shearing it off, along with multiple clusters of the aerospace fighter’s maneuvering thrusters.

The enemy fighter shuddered beneath the strike and began to tumble wildly out of control through space. It wasn’t strictly impossible for the pilot to recover from such a spin, but it would be quite a difficult and―more importantly―time-consuming task for even an experienced pilot to accomplish. For the time being, that fighter was no longer something that Flare needed to be concerned about. It would similarly be another minute or so before the remaining fighter in full operation was able to double-back and come after her.

Once more alarms blared as additional missile locks were detected. Flare felt her blood go cold. While the other fighter might not be able to do anything to her right away, the DropShip could. No fewer than sixty missiles launched from the multi-kiloton vessel and began snaking their way towards her.

The kirin mare killed power to nearly every system that the fighter had, save for the thrusters and her countermeasures. She sent the nimble little Lightning into a continuous roll, while spewing out every last flare that her craft had left. To an observer, she was sure that the sight must have looked quite beautiful, as the stream of brilliant white lights were ejected from the rolling fighter like an artistic imitation of a supernova.

Not every missile was diverted away from her fighter in favor of the flares. That would have been hoping for too much. A few of them did find their mark, detonating against her Lightning’s armored hull. The craft trembled and groaned as the explosions tore away ablative plating and damaged systems. At a glance it didn’t seem like anything too important to the fighter’s operation had been lost. That was a good sign.

Flare set about hastily restarting her systems, making the weapons a priority. Her trajectory would be carrying her across the DropShip’s stern. If she was lucky, she might be able to land a shot on one of its engines which would cripple the vessel and make it easier for the rest of her squadron to catch. She ceased her Lightning’s tumble and lined up a shot with her fighter’s heavy-hitting type-twenty autocannon. The weapon wasn’t very practical against other aerospace fighters, but against lumbering DropShips on the other hoof…

The kirin pilot grinned and snapped off a shot.

“I want all the squad leaders to do one last check on ammunition,” Lieutenant Jasper said, addressing the four sergeants that commanded the squads in his platoon, “I know this will be the tenth time, or whatever, but we all know that somepony always manages to have slipped through the cracks until the last moment no matter how many times we do these things,” the earth pony officer saw the assembled non-coms all exchange sardonic smiles with each other. Each of them knew that they had that ‘one soldier’ in their squad for whom it felt as though they went out of their way to raise a squad leader’s blood pressure through their inexplicable obliviousness.

“Check their magazines yourselves if you have to,” the young officer continued, “I don’t care. We’re going to be deep in the roadapples on this one and I want to make sure all our troopers have the bullets they need to shoot their way out of whatever trouble they get themselves into―”

Lieutenant Jasper and the rest of his platoon were nominally aware of the fight going on outside the Turtledove. They’d heard the alert, and they’d been briefed about the change in plans from Colonel Barrister. Of course, there wasn’t a lot that any of the grunts being ferried by the DropShip could do about anything going on right now. That was for the DropShip’s crew to concern themselves with. Jasper and the rest instead focused on ensuring that they were properly prepared to carry out their duties when it finally came for their part in the operation.

Even if the earth pony officer had been focusing his thoughts on the disposition of the enemy fighter outside, it wasn’t as though there was anything that he could have done about it. So while Jasper knew about the enemy fighter, he and the rest hadn’t concerned themselves with it. They had other things to think about.

Or, rather, they’d had other things to think about. Unfortunately for them, Lieutenant Solar Flare of the Kirin Confederation Armed Forces was a better shot than she’d expected to be. The one hundred kilogram explosive shell that she’d fired from her autocannon actually missed her intended target of one of the DropShip’s nacelles. Which wasn’t exactly a mark against her marksmareship. That she’d managed to hit a vessel―even one as large as a Friendship-class DropShip―at a distance of more than ten thousand kilometers while traveling at a target-relative velocity of over a thousand meters per second was quite a feat! So it could be forgiven that she’d missed her intended hit location by a few meters.

Unfortunately for the Turtledove, while a discrepancy of even a few meters could have meant that the kirin fighter pilot’s shot would have missed entirely if it had gone wide of its mark in a majority of directions, it had done so along one of those few which wouldn’t miss. Indeed, the divergence was doubly unfortunate in that instead of being a hit on one of the engine pylons which would have done little more than cost the DropShip some of its acceleration, it turned out that the armor-piercing shell struck abreast of the main fusion reactor.

Being a vital part of a DropShip, the main reactor core was actually one of the more heavily armored parts of the vessel. Protected well enough plating that even a direct hit from a munition as powerful as the shell of a type-twenty autocannon wouldn’t have been able to penetrate and do any significant damage. However, as fate would have it, Flare had not scored a direct hit on the DropShip’s reactor core itself. The Turtledove would have emerged nearly unscathed if she had, much to the kirin’s chagrin, one could be sure.

No, she hadn’t hit the core. Instead, she had managed to wheedle her shot into something that wasn’t as thickly armored, but was still of vital importance to the reactor: the primary transformer for the reactor’s magnetic containment coils. These were quite summarily destroyed by the autocannon shell.

The DropShip had secondary systems for something so vitally important of course. They were even located well away from the primary system in order to keep both from being knocked out simultaneously by a singular strike. Strictly speaking, any combat damage which managed to destroy both systems during a battle would almost certainly have effectively destroyed the DropShip by that time anyway. Under normal circumstances, those secondary transformers would have been able to effortlessly take over without notice by the reactor and keep it functioning perfectly fine.

In this instance, however, that didn’t happen. For those secondary systems were in the middle of being replaced when the DropShip was stumbled-upon. A routine check had noted that they were sluggish to respond during a test of the redundant transformer. There hadn't been much of a delay in response time, but it had concerned the ship’s chief engineer enough to order the transformer replaced. He’d figured that there would be plenty of time to do so, since it would be hours before the ship was anticipated to head out for Ifrit II. The transformer had definitely needed to be replaced before they started taking fire during the landing at the HSG, after all.

With the primary transformer destroyed, and the redundant system no longer patched into the reactor, the magnetic field which was essential to keeping the miniature sun burning at the heart of the DropShip safely contained...evaporated. With nothing to keep the reaction stable and confined, that tiny little ‘sun’ blossomed into a ‘nova’.

Nocreature was more surprised than Solar Flare when the DropShip exploded less than a second after her shot landed. Because nocreature aboard the Turtledove lived long enough to be surprised.

The griffon hen’s talons tapped diligently across the datapad held in her grasp. She paused frequently to scrutinize the contents on the display, occasionally even bringing her other hand up to massage her beak in contemplation. Reconsidering her last alteration, the griffon reached down once more and tapped out a fresh sequence. After all, one needed to be completely certain that the message which they ended up submitting for transmission by ComSpark’s Primary Circuit was one that they were satisfied with. Sending messages wasn’t exactly cheap enough for the average creature such that they could afford to clarify any mistakes that the recipient felt compelled to ask about.

The hen wanted to be completely certain that her message was as close to perfect as she could get it before she finally took the pad up to the counter for final submission and payment to the courteous and professional ComSpark staff servicing that day’s customers. The griffon was far from the only creature doing this. So frequent were customers who felt compared to make last-minute adjustments to their message traffic, that ComSpark had set aside a respectable lounge space to do so in, complete with a small café.

Briefly, the griffon’s eyes darted up from her datapad as she watched a pale yellow unicorn mare step out of the nearby lavatory. The pony didn’t appear to notice the hen’s brief attention, as she was quickly distracted by having to adjust the placement of her saddlebag before continuing on to get in line at the counter to submit her message traffic.

The griffon saved her most recent changes to her message and stood up from the chaise which she’d been lounging on. She tossed her empty paper cup which had held her coffee as recently as ten minutes ago and made her way to the lavatory. Her gaze didn’t linger on a pegasus stallion exiting the buck’s room for more than a heartbeat before she lost sight of him upon entering the restroom. Unobtrusively, the griffon navigated her way around the mares and hens washing their hooves and hands and slipped inside the far stall.

Once inside, she carefully lifted the lid of the toilet’s cistern and looked beneath it. She diligently removed the last of the five energizer coils which had been taped there over the past week and replaced the lid. Holding the coil firmly in one hand, the other dug around in her saddlebag for the focusing array that she’d found sequestered beneath the lounge that she’d been sitting on only moments ago, as well as the trigger assembly that had been in the coffee she’d purchased, and the battery pack which had looked like nothing more sinister than an eclectically-powered cigarette lighter to the ComGuard security ponies who’d screened her belongings at the main entrance.

All four components snapped neatly together. A barely-perceptible whine of power could be heard as the energizer coils charged themselves from the battery pack. The griffon confirmed that the heavily stripped-down energy pistol was charged and functional before stuffing it back into her saddlebag. She then flushed the toilet and made her exit from the stall, not pausing at the sink to wash her talon on the way out of the lavatory. It hardly mattered to her whether the other creatures who might have noticed her thought poorly of her personal hygiene habits after all.

Once back out in the main reception area, the griffon ensured that she definitely wasn’t looking at the unicorn mare or pegasus stallion from earlier. Nor the hippogriff barista at the café working the espresso machine, the griffon tiercel paying more attention to the news feeds on the large overhead monitors than his message editing, the earth pony stallion trying to chat up a thoroughly uninterested pair of pegasus mares. She simply made her way to queue up and finally send out her message traffic.

The pair of creatures in front of her were serviced with practiced efficiency born from the many years of experience the staff had fielding such requests. It was only a few more minutes before the smiling unicorn mare wearing a ComSpark uniform behind the counter turned her attention to the griffon hen and asked in an impossibly bubbly voice, “Hello and welcome to ComSpark! How may we help you today, ma’am?”

Lieutenant Gretel, an officer serving in the Disciples of Discord, reached one of her hands into her saddlebag, withdrew the concealed energy pistol, and wordlessly shot the mare in her face. The crimson beam of coherent energy bored right through her head and left a blackened divot in the otherwise pristine wall behind her. The mare’s death was so instantaneous that the smile hadn’t even wilted by the time the corpse collapsed to the floor.

For the briefest moment, all activity in the lobby ceased. Anycreature who had been looking in the vague direction of the griffon for whatever reason gaped in shock as their brains attempted to rationalize what they’d just witnessed. After all, nocreature launched an attack on ComSpark personnel in one of their HSGs! Those who hadn’t seen the shot fired with their own eyes picked up on the shift in the room’s mood almost instantly, and it didn’t take them long after that to piece together what was happening from the scene of the griffon hen holding a steaming energy pistol pointing at the black scorch mark on a wall where one of the service staff had once stood.

Before anycreature caught off guard by their shock could react though, a pale yellow unicorn mare drew a nearly identical weapon from her saddlebag with her magic and fired off a shot at another of the ComSpark staff behind the counter. The earth pony stallion’s eyes widened in surprise as the ruby beam drilled through his chest, dropping him to the floor.

Then the screaming started.

An eruption of nearly deafening panicked cries of the dozens of guests and patrons filled the room, causing the thick concrete walls to tremble with the noise. A flood of creatures made a mad dash for the main entrance in a flurry of hives, claws, and wings. The ComGuard security forces standing just outside who had been too busy screening new arrivals to be paying attention to what the patrons they’d already searched for weapons were doing, found themselves nearly bowled over by the throng of bodies making their desperate escape.

A half dozen other flashes of crimson light from the rest of Gretel’s squad cut down the remaining ponies wearing ComSpark uniforms who hadn’t tried to leave with the rest. The hen turned and shouted at the pale yellow unicorn mare, “Daisy, get the door!”

The pony vaulted over the counter, taking care not to trip over the body of the stallion she’d killed moments ago, and began using her magic to manipulate the console in front of her. The other members of the team made their way swiftly towards the counter and their commander, their gaze focused on the front entrance and the ComGuard forces trying to shove their way past the fleeing denizens. However, it was not that door which Daisy and Gretel were concerned with.

“Got it!” The mare called out, coinciding with the ‘whoosh!’ of the door behind the counter opening.

“Move! Move! Move!” Gretel snarled, one hand fervently waving for the other seven members of her team to move through the recently opened portal while she kept her gaze―and her weapon―trained towards the ComGuard troopers still trying to make their way inside. The griffon was the last to follow them through, turning as she did so just long enough to seal the door behind them.

She scanned the hall briefly for any immediate threats. Spying none, she cast an aside look at the yellow unicorn, “...Winter Wrap Up,” she said in what could only ever be loosely defined as a ‘chant’ given the tone she was using.

“Winter Wrap up,” the mare said in a slightly more lyrical tone without missing a beat before looking to the next creature nearest her.

“Let’s finish our…” the hippogriff continued before looking at the pegasus stallion.

The stallion blanched, “Uh...holiday beer?” He stammered, sounding unsure, “No, wait, it was-”

The rest of the squad winced away as a bolt of ruby light passed through the side of the pegasus’ head, dropping him to the ground. Gretel’s diamond-hard expression didn’t so much as twitch before she turned the barrel of the weapon to the earth pony stallion, “Let’s finish our…?”

The pony swallowed hard, his gaze locked on the steaming barrel of the weapon pointed at his muzzle, “...Holiday cheer,” he stressed very carefully.

“Winter Wrap Up.” “Winter Wrap Up.” The two mares said in quick succession, both staring at the corpse of who they truly hoped hadn’t been their comrade.

The griffon lowered her weapon, “Good,” she said with a terse nod of her head towards the survivors, “Riptide, move us out,” Gretel gestured at the hippogriff, “Double-time. We have a virus to upload.”

“Moving, ma’am,” he acknowledged, stepping gingerly over the body of what he was trying very hard to think of as a changeling. In spite of knowing that Shoal had come to him several times over the past week with concerns about committing to memory the rhyme their lieutenant had chosen for them in order to ferret out changeling imposters in their ranks. He’d claimed a mixture of dyslexia and tone-deafness. Riptide had promised to help him in the evenings.

He’d always found himself too busy getting the materials the squad was going to need for the mission to actually do so though.

He chose to believe a changeling had gotten him somehow in the chaos earlier. It was more pleasant than the alternative.

Victoria was working at her desk when her console announced that she had received a priority message from ComSpark. The ivory pegasus raised an intrigued brow. It was exceedingly rare for anypony to receive a high priority message directly from ComSpark. While there was a part of her that grew concerned that somehow the changelings had gotten wind of the brief period where she’d aided the real Twilight Sparkle and the Disciples, and was letting her know how truly fucked she now was, the rest of her fully understood that, if that were the case, Victoria would have been informed of that discovery by way of a bullet through her head.

This was far more likely to be in regards to the Harmony Sphere’s invasion by the Dragon Clans. Up to this point, and in keeping with ComSpark’s long-standing official policy on staying out of ‘Sphere affairs’, there hadn’t actually been all that much direct commentary from ComSpark on the Clans. They had elected to waive contracting fees for any planet posting a request for mercenary assistance fighting the Clans, as well as slashing the fee they charged to the mercenaries themselves to nearly nothing. However, they had of course not taken any direct action themselves.

It was possible that the situation had finally grown serious enough for them to decide that they couldn’t stay out of this matter much longer if they still wanted to have a Sphere to lord over in the future. Hopefully they were pledging direct military or technological support.

The Pony Commonwealth’s Archon put her other work on hold and accessed the attachment, expressing some amusement upon seeing that it was a video file. Those were fairly time-consuming and expensive to send over long distances. Whatever it was that ComSpark had to say, it was obviously important.

Victoria played the video and sat back in her chair.

Her screen was filled with the face of a familiar purple alicorn. However, this one was wearing a rather ostentatious crown and was glowering at the viewer with a coldness that she couldn’t recall ever seeing on Princess Twilight Sparkle’s face during the times they’d spoken.

“Creatures of the Harmony Sphere,” the contemptuous voice all but snarled, as though the mere act of addressing her viewers was an indignity, “ComSpark and Myself have long elected to keep ourselves out of the affairs of the Successor States. We withheld Ourselves as a courtesy to you.

“However, after witnessing how pathetically all of you have performed against the Clans, it has become clear to Us that this was an error. You are obviously all in need of Our more focused guidance.

“We have already eliminated the threat posed to the Sphere by the Clans. They were stopped cold, effortlessly even, by Our ComGuard at Buckwheat less than a week ago. It is a wonder to Us how Our―while superbly trained―untested ComGuard were able to so effortlessly do in a week what none of you could do in six months,” Queen Twilight’s lips turned up if a contemptuous sneer.

“Thus, We have decided that you are all in desperate need of more direct control and guidance. These are Our demands:

“The leaders of the Succession States will travel to Us here on Equus and submit themselves to Us as Our direct and loyal vassals.”

Victoria balked at the demand. She couldn’t be serious. She was claiming to have single-hoofedly stopped the advance of the Dragon Clans and was now demanding to be given direct dominion over the whole Harmony Sphere? She couldn’t honestly believe that Victoria and the other reigning heads of state would agree to that, did she?

“To ensure you take Our demands seriously, We have withdrawn from the Sphere the privilege of using Our HyperSpark Generators. You will be permitted to access them again, only upon your submission to Us.

“Do not keep us waiting.”

The video ended. Victoria stared at the blank screen for several more seconds as the shock worked its way through her system. Then the pegasus glared at the screen where the queen had been a moment ago and reached for her terminal again. She had some calls to make, and a military to mobilize...

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 41: The Ruins of Power

Twilight Sparkle filled her wine glass again. The bottle that she was levitating didn’t contain wine however. She’d finished off the last of that an hour ago and had been forced to move on to liquor. Admittedly, even after having been given a thousand years to do so, she had never felt compelled to learn to make the distinction between the various types of distilled spirits. They’d never been her preferred drink. They still weren’t, truth be told. She found them bitter and aggressive; almost genuinely painful to swallow down. There was simply no comparing a whiskey or even a rum to a nice, sweet, Yakyakistan Muskoxo or an Olenian Zinfandoe, in Twilight’s personal opinion at least.

Unfortunately for the purple alicorn, those particular varieties of wine had long since been imbibed to the point of extinction that evening, leaving her with scant few other options where alcoholic beverages were concerned; and she was far from through with drinking for the evening. Word had yet to reach her regarding whether or not their efforts to sabotage the HyperSpark Generators in the Harmony Sphere had been a success. Strictly speaking of course, if it had been successful, she wouldn’t hear about it any time soon. Making interstellar communication the next best thing to impossible had largely been the point, after all.

In a roundabout way it was creating a counter-intuitive amount of stress. The more time that passed without Twilight hearing any news regarding that operation, the more likely it was that it had succeeded. Yet it was that same exaggerated length of silence which was causing her to worry about whether or not it had worked out. So, here she was, drowning that stress with drink until she received a definitive answer; knowing that hearing that answer too soon would likely mean that their efforts had failed. Which would only lead to the alicorn drinking more as she bemoaned the loss of yet another avenue for victory over the changelings.

Nerves weren’t the only reason that Twilight had for wanting to ‘take the edge off’ with a bit of not-so-light drinking. Though she was certainly more than a little nervous about learning whether or not the linchpin for their plan to unite the Sphere against Chrysalis was in place or not. As vitally important as it was, it wasn’t what had been causing Twilight the most stress for the past couple of months since dispatching the DropShips full of Disciples on their mission to dismantle the Sphere’s primary means of interstellar communication.

Oddly enough, the alicorn was significantly less bothered about the virus she’d developed to tear down the vital information superhighway through the star that she had personally established nearly thirteen hundred years ago, than she was about the message that had been tacked on at the end. It had been the part of this whole plan that she’d wrestled the most with since it had been proposed.

That was because, no matter how much time she spent rationalizing the ‘necessity’ of it, how vital it was that the creatures of the Harmony Sphere saw ‘Queen Twilight’ for the tyrant that she truly was inside, the fact remained that, in the end, when all was said and done: She’d lied to them.

The message had been a lie. More than that, it had been a lie of the worst kind: one meant to manipulate. Honesty wasn’t immutable. Twilight had long known that. There were exceptions to every rule. Telling your aunt that you appreciated the ugly sweater that she’d given you for Hearth’s Warming even though you knew full well that you’d never actually come to like the horrid thing, wasn’t honest―in the strictest sense of the definition―but neither would doing so have been a violation of the spirit of the Element of Honesty. ‘Misrepresentations’ intended to protect and nurture the feelings of love you had for friends and family weren’t anathema to Harmony. They helped to nurture it, in fact.

However, that was not the case with lies which were specifically designed to deceive and manipulate others into doing things that you wanted them to do. Which was exactly the kind of lie which Twilight had crafted with the creation of that message which her virus had propagated throughout the Harmony Sphere, each HSG distributing it to the planetary servers of every world in range prior to burning themselves out and reducing their vital internal mechanisms to little more than melted silicon and shattered gemstones.

No matter how she looked at it, Twilight could not dismiss the fact that she was tricking the creatures of the Sphere into doing what she wanted them to do. She could try and soothe her conscience by reminding herself that she was doing it ‘for their own good’, but that was cold comfort. It was similar to Starlight Glimmer’s excuse for ridding ponies of their cutie marks. Cozy Glow’s motivation to remove magic from Equestria.

It was the rationale of a tyrant.

After all, if it really was in their best interests, then Twilight should have been able to simply come right out and tell that to everycreature concerned, right? She should have been able to travel to the capitals of every major power and get the leaders to agree that uniting together and defeating Chrysalis was the correct course of action.

She could have done that. It would have been the ‘right’ way to do things. The Harmony way. The fact that it would almost certainly have led to her capture by Chrysalis, and the subversion of any plans that she and the leadership of the Successor States by changeling spies was beside the point. At least, it was in her mind. She had the choice to be open and honest with others about what they were getting into and why. Instead she’d lied to them about who and what they were fighting, and why they were doing it.

Ultimately, it could even lead to bigger problems down the road. How was she supposed to lead once the changelings were defeated if everycreature was convinced that ‘Twilight’ was the leader of the changelings? Even if they learned the truth about who and what ‘Queen Twilight’ really was, how could she expect them to trust her after it came to light that she’d manipulated them into working for her like that? What kind of precedent was she setting for her return to rulership?

...Should she rule again? Had she forfeited that privilege?

Nocreature was perfect, not even an alicorn. It wasn’t as though Celestia herself hadn’t hit a snag or two during her thousand year reign. Her own sister had fomented an insurrection against her! At least Twilight could say that neither Shining Armor nor Cadance had bucked her own rule through rebellion…

However, there was no denying that mistakes had indeed been made during Twilight’s time on the throne. Errors aplenty, if the current state of the galaxy was any indication. The alicorn found herself wondering exactly how long it had taken for the Harmony Sphere to forget about the Elements of Harmony. Had Friendship always held such a fragile and tentative grasp on the hearts of creatures that even the briefest of hardships could snuff it out like a struggling candle flame? Or had it been something that required generations for Chrysalis’ ceaseless toiling to finally erode away?

Would the latter really have made her feel any better, given that the end result was effectively the same?

Likely not, the purple mare thought as she tipped back the glass of brandy.

“Just got a message from Ember,” Spike’s voice disrupted the alicorn’s reverie as he returned to the lounge. The dragon paused in the doorway, his green eyes observing the diminished contents of the bottles collected on the table next to Twilight’s settee. He frowned, but all the same obliged his friend by diverting to a nearby cabinet and fetching a full decanter of more brandy, which he deposited by Twilight’s side before making himself comfortable on a nearby couch, “Flurry Heart and the Clans will meet with you in the morning to hear what you have to say.”

She nodded slowly, refilling her glass from the fresh decanter, “They need to do more than ‘hear’. They need to help,” the alicorn insisted.

“They want to help, Twilight,” Spike assured her, “we all do. It’s just...it’s complicated right now. The Clans that agreed to stay back aren’t very happy right now with how well things seem to be going for Smolder and the others. They’re feeling cheated. If we send them into the Sphere, they’re just as likely to get ‘distracted’ trying to amass hordes of their own―”

“Smolder’s army is gone.” The blunt statement drew Spike up short. The purple dragon gaped at the mare in stunned silence, wondering if he’d perhaps misheard her. Twilight tossed back another swallow of liquor to give herself the courage to give the solemn report that wouldn’t have had time to make it back through the Clan’s own HyperSpark Generator network. Not being part of the Primary Circuit―of the secret secondary one the changelings used for their operatives―the ship-mounted HSGs that the invading Clan fleets used to coordinate would not have been affected by Twilight’s virus, and would still be functional. However, it would still have taken them a week or more to get a message back to Clan space.

The Maelstrom’s ability to jump from Havoc to any position in the galaxy, however, meant that the alicorn would have beaten that message back here. She was going to be the first to deliver this news: “The Clans were stopped at Buckwheat,” Twilight said softly, her gaze locked on the gently swirling amber liquid in front of her. She was unable to bring herself to look at her friend quite yet, “The Disciples helped me lure them into a trap...so that the changelings could destroy them.”

The silence was deafening.

“I probably shouldn’t open with that during the meeting tomorrow, huh?”

Spike looked appropriately horrified, “...Cinder...is she―?”

“She’s fine,” Twilight assured him, though the shrug which followed up her statement did less to put the dragon at ease, “at least she was as of two days ago. Chrysalis wouldn’t have sent WarShips,” the alicorn reasoned, “As long as Cinder stayed on the Rockhoof, she’d be out of harm’s way.

“Whatever troops she sent to the planet, on the other hoof…”

Twilight finished off the rest of her brandy. She contemplated topping off the glass again, but thought better of it. Her telekinesis lowered the glass to the table. She still wasn’t looking at the dragon next to her. The mare knew she couldn’t have tolerated facing the judgement waiting in his eyes. Not yet. She was barely able to face her own rather low opinion of herself.

Cinder might be alive, yes; but many thousands―tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands―of Clan warriors would have perished in the fighting. At least as many changelings as well, if not more. Twilight felt for those losses too. Perhaps the better part of a million lives lost in a battle that she specifically arranged. It was all for the ‘greater good’, of course, but that did surprisingly little to lift her burden. The millions dying to the invasion of the Clans had been a far higher cost, yes, but Twilight had not orchestrated those deaths.

What happened on Buckwheat had been her doing―her design.

Her Plan.

Nor were they the only losses which were going to weigh heavy on her conscience for the rest of the alicorn’s eternal life, “The Primary Circuit is gone too―or, it should be anyway. Hopefully,” Twilight went on, tossing back more brandy. Spike managed to look even more shocked, somehow, “The Sphere should be plunged into a communications blackout right about now. They’ll think Chrysalis did it―well,” the alicorn rolled her eyes, “They’ll think that ‘Queen Twilight Sparkle’ did it,” she amended drolly, flicking her hooves in the air limply to frame the quotations audible in her tone.

“Everycreature is probably doing what they can to mobilize for an invasion of Equus as we speak. It’ll take them a long while though, without the HSGs. They’ll have to coordinate ‘pegasus express’-style, carrying messages physically via couriers. With hundreds of lightyears to cover, it’ll probably be a year or more before their armies are consolidated and in motion.”

Twilight’s face darkened, “...The fighting on Equus is going to make what happened on Buckwheat look like a lover’s tiff.”

Spike didn’t say anything for a good while in response to the news which Twilight had just dumped on him. He took up the alicorn’s discarded glass and the decanter of brandy in his hands. The dragon stopped short of pouring himself out a measure of the liquor though. His gaze shifted from the mostly full decanter and the empty glass which looked much smaller in his claws than he remembered.

He began to drink straight from the decanter.

Eventually, the purple dragon set down the nearly empty vessel of brandy, letting out a discrete burp which created a small gout of flame, much to his embarrassment. He took a deep breath to help settle what the brandy hadn’t, and let it out slowly, “...You’ve certainly been busy.” Twilight’s smile was a sad, wispy, little thing; and gone a heartbeat later. Spike did his best to rekindle it by trying to muster up a smirk of his own. Yet even the dragon’s was a pale imitation of anything approaching actual mirth, “You found a way to unite the Harmony Sphere though. That’s something.”

“It’s only ‘something’ if it lasts past the defeat of Chrysalis,” Twilight pointed out.

“It will,” Spike assured her, broadening his smile a little more. There was even a glint of genuine hope in his eyes now, “You’ll find a way to make it last.”

Twilight had been keeping her gaze focused straight ahead before, not looking at the dragon; but now she actively curled away from him.

Spike’s nigh-unflappable optimism had always been like a beacon of hope for the alicorn. The dragon had stood resolutely by her side through every adversity that she’d ever faced in her life, and risen to meet every challenge thrown their way. He was always the last to despair, if he ever even did. His faith in her, and in their perseverance, had always been a source of strength.

But now it just hurt. She just finished telling him how she’d maneuvered hundreds of thousands of Clan warriors―his own subjects―to their doom. By all rights he should be condemning her―resenting her. Certainly not trying to comfort her. She didn’t feel like she deserved the reassurances the dragon was providing her.

Almost like he could sense her thoughts, Spike began to speak in a softer tone, “You’re reminding me of myself a lot right now. How I was about a month out of the Sphere when I was leading what I’d managed to gather of the CLDF away from Chrysalis.”

The admission prompted Twilight to look back towards her former assistant, finding the purple drake wearing a wan expression of his own now, his eyes unfocused as he relived the memories in his head, “I felt like such a failure. I’d just abandoned my friends―not to mention trillions of other creatures―to the changelings. I kept thinking it was my fault for not realizing sooner what Chrysalis had done. I felt like a coward for running.”

The alicorn’s expression instantly softened and she rolled off the settee, coming closer to the dragon, “Oh, Spike...no. You didn’t ‘fail’ at anything!” She insisted, placing a comforting wing around her dear friend as she took him up in a reassuring hug that she soon realized they both needed right about now, “You acted very prudently,” Twilight stated firmly, “If Chrysalis had realized that you were onto her too soon, she would have stopped you from getting any of the CLDF or the Dragon Clans away. Then where would we be now?

“It must have been the hardest thing in the galaxy to leave our friends behind like that,” she acknowledged, accenting her words with a firm reassuring squeeze of her hooves, “But I know that none of them fault you for it. It wasn’t cowardly, or selfish, or anything like that. Even if it felt like you were being ‘disloyal’, you weren’t. You made a difficult decision because you believed it was what you needed to do in order to save everycreature later.”

Spike leaned into the alicorn’s embrace, encircling her with his own clawed hands, “Thanks, Twilight. I guess you’re right: it’s not just about what we do, but also why we’re doing it that matters; and that we have noble intentions.”

Twilight’s lips curled into a frown as she processed what the dragon had just said, pulling back slightly to gaze at her friend’s expression. She found that Spike was doing a less-than-successful job stifling a grin as he regarded her. The alicorn’s frown instantly morphed into a smirk, “Did you really just…? You’re a lot sneakier than I remember you being,” she said with an amused snort as she released her hold on her friend.

“A thousand years as your Ambassador of Friendship might have taught me one or two things about how to cheer up my friends,” Spike said with a shrug, now letting his satisfied grin beam unfettered.

“I suppose it did,” Twilight acknowledged, nodding, “I’m not a hundred percent convinced that what we did was comparable,” she qualified, waggling a pinion at the dragon, “And I still think it was very wrong of me to lie like I did. I’ll be doing my best to make up for it later,” she promised herself.

“But you’re right: I only did it because I want to help everycreature to live a better life, and not for some other selfish reason. That doesn’t make what I did right,” she insisted, exchanging a pointed look with the dragon until she received an acknowledging nod from him, “But I guess it doesn’t make me quite as horrible of a pony as I thought a moment ago.”

The purple mare wasn’t entirely convinced regarding that point. She felt that Starlight Glimmer might have had a thing or two to say to her regarding the value of telling lies to others in order to ‘help’ them. Honesty wasn’t an explicitly rigid concept, no; but there were certainly limits to how far one could bend around those caveats. Time would tell if she’d crossed the line, the alicorn supposed.

“...Do you really think that we can rebuild the League?” Twilight asked of the dragon after several seconds of silence from the pair of them.

To this, Spike didn’t immediately respond, electing to choose his words with some care, “I don’t know about the ‘Celestia League’ specifically,” he qualified, “But I do think the galaxy will find Harmony again. In time.”

Twilight permitted that distinction with an internal sigh. I very well might have been a little much to hope that things could go back entirely to how they’d been before. After centuries of conflict, the galaxy bore many wounds. While they might heal with time, there would doubtlessly be quite a few scars which might never go away; even if she spent another thousand years trying, “I wish I had your optimism,” the alicorn offered, along with a wan smile.

“It’s not ‘optimism’,” Spike insisted, “it’s history,” he smirked at the puzzled expression on his friend’s face and deigned to elaborate, “Harmony has always seemed to...waiver from time to time,” the dragon pointed out, “But then it comes back stronger

“The three ancient pony tribes maintained an uneasy alliance for centuries; but then that peace fractured and the wendigos chased them from their ancestral homes,” Spike pointed out, giving a much abbreviated retelling of the well known story of the first Hearth’s Warming, “In the end, the tribes grew closer than ever before, forming a unified Equestria.

“But then something drove them apart again, scattering the tribes all over the continent and plaguing them with monsters. Stygius, Starswirl, and the other Pillars drove away the monsters and formed the Elements, bringing the land together in harmony once more and galvanizing it under the rule of Celeista and Luna.

“Nightmare Moon broke up that Harmony again and depleted the Elements, until we came along, restored them, and unified all the creatures of Equus. We went on to build the whole League.”

His expression waned slightly now, “Sure, the League fractured and fell...but whatever gets built back,” Spike favored Twilight with a hopeful expression, “it’s going to be something even grander than what came before. Just like every other time.”

Twilight wasn’t able to keep the dragon’s contagious smile from touching her own lips, though she wasn’t feeling quite as optimistic as he was about their future, “Maybe,” she allowed, “but only if we can figure out where things went wrong before. I know it didn’t happen overnight, but I still don’t like how everycreature managed to forget about Friendship like they did, even with ‘me’ there to manipulate everything.”

“Come on, Twilight; can you really blame creatures for not realizing how important Friendship was after all that time?” At the alicorn’s shocked expression, the drake elaborated, “It’d been a thousand years since the last time anycreaure had experienced anything even approaching ‘hard times’,” Spike pointed out, earning a conceding nod from the mare.

“Nocreature could even conceive of what a ‘bad day’ was like! Let alone how horrifying open warfare was going to be. Sure, they’d heard the stories of the wendigos, and the Pillars, and Nightmare Moon, and The Knights of Harmony; but that’s all those were to everycreature: ‘stories’. No more believable to them than Nightmare Moon was to everypony when we were young.

“At a certain point, history can come to be regarded as myth and legend. More allegory than reality. Especially when there’s no context. Can you honestly say that you understood how difficult life must have been for the Pillars when you were growing up? Before wielding the Elements and confronting monsters of our own? Did you really understand what it meant to fight a hydra or confront a hostile army?”

Spike paused now, awaiting a response from the alicorn. Twilight frowned, slowly shaking her head, “No, I guess I didn’t really. I mean, I believed the stories―most of the stories,” she amended, recalling that while she’d firmly believed that Nightmare Moon was real while most thought her a story; she had been skeptical regarding the ‘Pony of Shadows’ from stories she’d heard as a foal. Yet Stygius had turned out to be just as real as Luna, “But I didn’t know how perilous things could get. Not until I faced them myself.”

Time and literary flourishes had made the adventures of the Pillars somehow seem too fantastical to her, in spite of knowing that the ponies themselves had existed. Their deeds had simply sounded too embellished to have been entirely factual. Thinking back now on the exploits of herself and her own friends, Twilight was forced to concede that it was entirely forgivable that the average citizen of the Sphere had thought the same of them.

The purple dragon nodded, “And I think it was the same way with everycreature in the League: they didn’t have the context that some of us had. You, me, the other Princesses, some of the older dragons, we knew how good everycreature in the League really had it, and how bad things could get if we let Friendship slip away...but the others couldn’t have. To them, our early lives were little more than tall tales.

“What that means though, I think, is that when the galaxy does build back from this―and I believe we will build back―the creatures of this galaxy will do so knowing exactly what not having Friendship and Harmony will cost them,” Spike affirmed with a nod of his head and a knowing look at the alicorn, “They’ll remember the death and the destruction. They’ll remember the suffering of trillions of beings.

“They’ll know―better than any of us ever did―how bad things can really get without Friendship; and they’ll create something even more grand than the Celestia League ever was in order to keep Harmony thriving in the galaxy for as long as they possibly can.”

Twilight was smiling at the dragon as his speech wrapped up. Centuries serving as her Ambassador of Friendship had done wonders for his orator abilities, she thought to herself. He’d certainly gotten her believing in his vision of the future. Though there was one part of it that she had picked up on, “I noticed you didn’t say that ‘we’ would be the ones rebuilding the Sphere…?” She said, prompting him to elaborate.

The dragon offered a wan little shrug, “Well...I figure it won’t really be up to us this next time around,” he said, sounding rather resigned to the notion, “Like how Celestia stepped down to let you unite Equus, it’s probably up to somecreature else to unite―truly unite―the galaxy. I mean, can you honestly say you know what a better version of the Celestia League would look like?”

“I suppose I’d have already created it if I had,” Twilight conceded, acknowledging the point, “Maybe a thousand years is enough time at the reins anyway,” The purple mare paused in thought for a moment, before casting a glance at the drake, “I don’t suppose you’ve given any thought to who we’re supposed to be grooming for leadership this next time around?”

Spike grinned again, “I’ve been brainstorming a few ideas…”

Nacht Belle sat at one end of the overly large―in his opinion―conference table aboard the Princess-class DropShip Wyrm. Arrayed behind him, standing alert and glaring around with suspicious, slit-pupil eyes, were a collection of batponies serving as some of the First Prince’s senior advisors and military commanders. At the opposite end sat his counterpart for these talks: Deputy Thera Novo, and her own entourage of generals and politicos. Seated between the pair was Timberjack, the leader of the Timberwolf’s Dragoons mercenary company, who would be serving as something of a mediator for what the earth pony hoped would be a truly fruitful negotiation.

Of course, ‘talking’ couldn’t have been further from what both of these two potent heads of state had come to the system of Foggy Bottom to do. Both groups had been intent on open warfare―the first of its kind in hundreds of years. Technically, anyway. The machinations of Chrysalis’ agents had always been able to avert direct confrontation between the militaries of any two Successor States in the past; instead getting them to rely on mercenary companies like his own to undertake any hostilities and provide a politically convenient layer of ‘deniability’ that made official declarations of war ‘impolotique’ and largely maintained a static balance of power in the galaxy.

That sort of intervention wasn’t happening now though. Chrysalis’ agents had had their pocked hooves full of late dealing with other more immediate crises. On top of that, a couple of weeks ago, a particularly frightening event had transpired: The HyperSpark Generator in this system had ceased operations. It wasn’t alone either, according to reports from other JumpShips which had traversed the system since then. Every other HSG in the surrounding inhabited systems had also gone dark, with no explanation from the ComSpark staff at those facilities other than: ‘we’re simply performing a maintenance cycle which has gone overlong’.

It was the story being passed out to the general public, but everycreature in this room right now knew that it was a lie. They’d seen the transmission. Presumably the last transmission which had been made by the HSG in this system. Nacht suspected that the transmission had been broadcast to every planetary server and vessel of significance in any given star system. Given the contents of the message, he could understand why various planetary and regional governments might not be eager to openly contradict ComSpark’s ‘official’ narrative regarding maintenance.

After all, if word got out that ComSpark was deliberately halting all interstellar communications because Queen Twilight Sparkle―or, rather, Queen Chrysalis, as Timberjack had revealed to them not long ago―was in a bit of a snit, there’d be general revolts across pretty much every planet in the Harmony Sphere.

Revolts of the sort that were being discussed in this very room, as a matter of fact. For as much animosity as the batpony and the hippogriff might have for each other and their respective Houses, neither of them were quite so consumed by their hostility as to not recognize there was a much greater threat to the galaxy: ComSpark.

With little more than a wave of her hoof, this ‘changeling’ leader had crippled the whole of the Harmony Sphere, throwing entire stellar economies into turmoil. Nacht shuddered to think of the panic besetting various commodities and exchange markets this week. To say nothing of what was doubtlessly happening with the Mercenary Review Board and mercenary companies in general.

While every nation’s economy was―ostensibly―held aloft by their own internal currencies, there was little denying that it was the ComSpark C-Bit which set the standard for market rates across the whole of the Harmony Sphere. After all, HSG communication was the cornerstone of every facet of life in the galaxy, and ComSpark accepted C-Bits exclusively to send that traffic. The values of the Sphere’s various House Bits were inextricably tied to the C-Bit as a result. It was also the only currency that the MRB would use for its contracting services.

However, because the only ‘real’ use C-Bits have for the overwhelming majority of creatures in the Sphere is to pay for sending messages using the HSG network, and that network was now completely inoperable for an unspecified amount of time, it meant that the perceived value of the C-Bit had subsequently crashed right through the deck plating.

Mercenary contracts were now effectively worthless―not that contracts could even be shared, officially accepted, or even redeemed for payment, without access to ComSpark’s HyperSpark Generators. Local currency exchanges were going absolutely mad with speculative trading as various groups effectively ‘placed bets’ on which of the other currencies would become the new ‘gold standard’ for galactic trade. A process made more difficult―and volatile―by the fact that these speculations were going on largely independent of one another on thousands of worlds throughout the Harmony Sphere.

A galaxy-wide economic depression was inevitable at this point. What could yet be avoided―though was still alarmingly likely―were outright collapses of entire regional economies as the trans-stellars which effectively supported them found themselves unable to operate on the scale they had been for hundreds of years and fell into insolvency and bankruptcy.

Enterprising JumpShip captains had already begun filling the new economic niche which had emerged, becoming a modern day ‘pegasus express’; but their rates were criminally high compared to what it had cost with ComSpark. In Nacht’s opinion, they were unsustainable. Yet he also saw little hope of lowering them significantly. The cold fact was that JumpShips were expensive to operate, costing tens of thousands of C-Bits―now several billion given its freefall devaluation in the last two weeks―in terms of fuel, crews, and material, to move between systems.

Simple letters to family members which had once cost the average individual only a single C-Bit or two were now valued at hundreds of local House Bits apiece. This effectively priced the common creature out of the ability to communicate off-world reliably. An imposition that the citizenry was unlikely to tolerate for very long.

At the moment, those denizens were currently―and correctly, in Nacht’s opinion―directing their understandable ire at ComSpark directly. However, it was only a matter of time before they began to look to their local planetary leadership to ‘fix’ the problem and let them speak with their loved ones or engage in business again. Those local governments would naturally turn to the Great Houses who ruled over them for guidance and assistance. Which meant that, sooner or later, this was going to become something which the leadership of the Successor States was going to have to address.

And while the citizenry might be under the impression that resolving the problem should only take a little political pressure being exerted by their governments on ComSpark, Nacht Belle and Thera Novo both knew that it wasn’t going to be nearly that simple. They’d heard the message. They’d heard ‘Queen Twilight’s’ ultimatum. Even if Timberjack hadn’t revealed the truth of her identity to them, their response would have been the same:

“Nuts!”

Even if all of them had been willing to bend the fetlock to ComSpark, Nacht didn’t believe that it was a sustainable relationship. The Queen held too much power. Even within the Federated Moons, First Prince Nacht Belle didn’t rule by diktat like some completely unrestrained despot. Any new law or measure that he might propose had to be submitted for approval by both his small Privy Council, and then submitted for ratification by the High Council, which was made up of representatives from all of the Federation’s member worlds. This meant that a majority of both the nobility and the commoner citizens had to agree on new legislation before it could take effect; and there was little that Nacht could do which might coerce those two bodies into passing measures they disagreed with.

Not without risking a rebellion, at any rate.

The other four Successor States employed some manner of populous representation in their governments as well, in one form or another, which acted as a check on otherwise unrestrained power. This was viewed as a necessary litmus test by the Great Houses to periodically gage how well they were regarded by their subjects. With each House possessing at least two hostile adversaries on their borders at any given moment, none of them could really risk a widespread rebellion fomenting within.

However, ComSpark wouldn’t have to worry about whether the Successor States or the Great Houses approved of any measure that she took, because she’d have the ability to coerce them into agreeing with whatever they wanted by simply threatening to turn off the HSGs of whatever region displease the queen until the resulting economic hardships compelled them to acquiesce. There’d be nothing that they could do about it either. Even if the Great Houses seized the HSGs for themselves, none of them possessed the knowledge of how to even use them. That technical know-how had been reserved for ComSpark employees exclusively. Now that Nacht and Thera knew that all members of ComSpark were changelings, they were pretty sure that it would be the next best thing to impossible to sway them to oppose their queen. Not in numbers that would matter anyway.

If they gave in, Nacht knew that Chrysalis would be able to rule the galaxy with an iron hoof, and nothing would be able to stop her. Mostly as a result of her many changeling spies saturated throughout their respective governments. That had been a rather disturbing thing for the batpony prince to learn. He’d seen the evidence though―and lost three of his closest advisors to the revelation as well. Paranoia was running high through his remaining command staff, and likely was for Thera as well, for whom it was revealed that four of her own confidants were actually changeling agents. In a galaxy with active HyperSpark Generator arrays, those spies would be able to report any plots right back to Chrysalis almost immediately.

However, with the HSGs currently inoperative, there wasn’t any way for changeling spies to report any plots against their queen before it was too late. It would take months to get word back to Equus about anything that was learned by a changeling operative in their ranks, and that was only if a dedicated courier could be found to deliver that message in the first place. If they were going to make any moves against Chrysalis, now was the only chance that they’d have.

Which wasn’t to say that being ‘possible’ was the same thing as being ‘easy’. They did have one thing working for them though, as Thera pointed out.

“Equus is just one world,” the hippogriff noted, “Even if it is heavily fortified, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of divisions to take the whole planet. We could probably do it with what the two of us have with us here,” the hen gestured vaguely around them, her tone dismissive.

It was Timberjack who spoke up this time, “This invasion would be like no other,” the stoic earth pony warned, casting a level gaze at the hippogriff, “Equus does not have a ‘civilian population’ as you know it. It is not a target where the citizens will sit by idly while a few brigades of BattleSteeds buck it out with each other, indifferent to the fighting going on.

“Equus is inhabited by several billion changeling drones. Each of whom will be an active participant in the battle. The meager divisions present here would be overwhelmed within an hour.”

Silence hung in the chamber for several long seconds as both Nacht and Thera contemplated the stallion’s words. It was a novel concept for both leaders. For centuries, ‘warfare’ had consisted of little more than capturing a few key strategic locations until it became logistically difficult for one side or the other to maintain their supply lines; at which point the loser would concede and withdraw.

‘Total war’ like Timberjack was describing wasn’t, and had never before been, a thing. The populations of worlds didn’t take up arms and become partisans fending off invaders. By and large, they tried their best to keep their heads down and wait until the mercenary companies and Great House militaries had settled their latest squabble. Who was collecting their taxes mattered very little to the common creature, after all. It was exceedingly rare that an invading force had to worry about the general populace posing much of a threat.

The idea that any invasion they launched on Equus could be met by billions of armed resistance fighters was...concerning, to say the least. If that was the case, then their troops present here were most definitely not going to be anywhere near sufficient. Indeed, the deployable forces of both of their entire standing armies might not be up to a task like that.

As the pair of dignitaries sat silently processing the revelation, Timberjack wrestled with whether or not he should bring up the presence of the WarShips which Chrysalis had under her control. On the one hoof, it was a threat which could not simply be discounted. It didn’t matter how big of an invasion the Great Houses put together, Chrysalis’ WarShip fleets would eviscerate them long before those DropShips reached Equus. The real Twilight Sparkle was currently―hopefully―in talks to negotiate for the use of the WarShips of the Dragon Clans for the invasion.

If she succeeded, then there was no point in bringing up the matter with Nacht and Thera and giving them a point to needlessly worry over. The changeling WarShips wouldn’t be something which they needed to be concerned with and they could instead focus on the ground campaign. On the other hoof, if Twilight wasn’t able to get the necessary WarShip fleet that they would all need, then this whole discussion became academic anyway because there’d be no point in even attempting to invade Equus. Which meant that there was nothing to gain by mentioning the presence of the WarShips in the Faust System.

Timberjack remained quiet on that point, and continued with their discussion about gathering the forces needed for the invasion itself, “We will need other forces, in addition to your Houses,” the stallion informed them.

“Victoria will certainly join in,” Nacht pointed out, somewhat encouraged by the nod of agreement he received from the earth pony, “So that’s three Great Houses.”

“We can reach out to Stellar Nova as well―”

“The Our Worlds League won’t help,” Timberjack cut in, earning a look of surprise from the other two, “The real Stellar Nova died in a bombing years ago. The creature currently leading the League in his place is a changeling. Informing the League of our intentions will prompt him to reinforce Chrysalis’ armies.”

“Well...that’s concerning,” the batpony prince murmured, cringing at the thought that any one of them could have just as easily been replaced by a changeling as well, “What of the Confederacy?”

“To the best of my knowledge, House Vernal isn’t a puppet of the changelings,” Timberjack said, “I’ll have a courier sent to make contact and ask for their assistance.”

“It occurs to me that we can also put out a general call to action to any and all mercenary outfits we come across,” Nacht pointed out, “With the MRB down, they can’t be any happier about ComSpark pulling the rug out from under them than we are. Probably, they’re actually a lot more pissed off than we are. If that’s possible.”

“Good point,” Thera agreed, nodding her head, “Unlike C-Bits right now, at least our own House Bits are worth a damn. The only reason they’d never have taken on a contract to invade Equus before is because ComSpark would never have posted or sanctioned it―for obvious reasons.

“But ComSpark isn’t doing much of anything right now, are they?” She flashed a grin across the table.

Nacht found himself in agreement with the hippogriff hen. The mercenary outfits in the Sphere had to be feeling rather put out by their sudden inability to operate. While they would normally never have seriously considered taking on a job off of the MRB’s books in exchange for payment in House script, things had changed quite drastically in the last couple of weeks. C-Bits were the next best thing to worthless. The Mercenary Review Board was effectively offline. On top of that, their operating expenses certainly wouldn’t have decreased very much. If anything, they’d skyrocketed.

After all, since the only work that a reputable mercenary could get was through ComSpark’s MRB, and ComSpark paid their contracts out exclusively in C-Bits, that meant that most mercenaries held their on-hoof cash reserves almost exclusively in C-Bits. Which, because of the plunging value of that particular currency, meant that their bank balances had been rendered almost entirely worthless. Food, fuel, and parts, which would have cost them a few thousand C-Bits a month ago would be costing them millions―if not billions―of C-Bits right now as local planetary merchants expressed their reluctance to trade in a currency which was effectively useless to them right now.

House script, on the other hoof, would be holding its value much more reliably on local markets. Meaning that the only way operating mercenary groups could survive for the foreseeable future was to get their hooves on local currency. Which meant taking ‘off the book’ jobs for groups other than the MRB. Of course, given the general disarray that most of the Harmony Sphere was experiencing, even most of their usual employers wouldn’t be looking to employ mercenaries any time soon. The transstellar corporations which were the hay and oats of a mercenary company’s client base were going to be far too busy trying to sort out their own communication and supply chain issues to worry about encroaching on a competitor’s territory.

Nocreature was going to be hiring mercenaries any time soon. Not in the quantities needed to support the industry anyway.

Which meant that mercenaries would indeed be desperate for work―any work―that came their way. Even something that sounded as insane as invading Equus. As long as the pony offering the work could pay in something besides C-Bits.

The Great Houses were uniquely situated to expand their military capabilities right now, Nacht thought with a grin. Even without the support of the armies of the League or the Confederation, the combined forces of the Commonwealth, Federation, and the Combine, with the addition of most of the mercenary outfits in the galaxy, should be more than enough to launch a conquest of Equus that had a better than decent chance of success.

“The three of us will be able to spread the word on that front rather quickly, I think,” Timberjack agreed, “And Victoria as well, once she is informed of the plan. All that’s left is to discuss where the invasion fleet will be assembling at,” the earth pony glanced between the pair for a moment, “...To which I would like to propose: The Lameduck System.”

Thera frowned, cocking her head at the stallion, “There’s nothing in the Lameduck System. It’s got one planet that nocreature even bothered settling because the atmosphere’s toxic,” she pointed out, “While I can appreciate wanting to keep a force build-up a secret from this Queen Chrysalis, an invasion force as large as the one we’re talking about is going to need a lot of infrastructure to support it, and for a long time too.

“Without HSGs to let us communicate across our territory, it’s going to take months―maybe more than a year―for us to gather our forces together. We’re talking about millions of beings that are going to need to be supplied and supported for at least that long. That can’t be done in a deserted system with no infrastructure.”

Nacht was nodding along in agreement with the hippogriff, and was about to name his own proposed location for the assembly area for their fleet when Timberjack spoke up again, “The Lameduck I is uninhabited,” he agreed, “But it’s incorrect to say that there is ‘nothing’ there. Nor is its atmosphere toxic.”

Thera’s frown deepened, as she reached for a datapad, “The survey reports clearly indicate that―”

“Those survey reports were doctored,” Timberjack interjected, silencing the hen and capturing the attention of both dignitaries, who were looking at him with confused expressions, “Specifically, they were doctored by Ambassador Spike before he led half the CLDF out of the Harmony Sphere,” the earth pony explained patiently, “This was in an effort to hide the fact that Lameduck I was intended to serve a very specific purpose―this purpose, in fact.

“The Lameduck System is located nearly sixty lightyears from Equus. Putting it right on the cusp of being reachable in just two jumps. JumpShips equipped with additional batteries can cross that distance in hours from the ‘go’ order.

“From the beginning, Lameduck I was intended to be the point from which the Clans would launch their bid to take back Equus from Chrysalis. To that end, it is equipped with numerous fortifications capable of housing millions of soldiers and containing prestaged supplies to support them. Fuel, weapons, ammunition, spare parts, everything.

“It’ll support your armies for as long as we need,” Timberjack assured the others. Indeed, a not insignificant part of his company’s mission in the Sphere had been to periodically check in on those fortifications and ensure the caches there remained serviceable. He could even provide detailed ledgers of exactly what was available on the planet.

Nacht and Thera exchanged looks as they considered the offer. The two knew that neither of them had a nearby world which had already been prepared as a stepping-off point for an invasion of the Faust System. If the Clans truly had one that was all ready to go…

The First Prince of the Federated Moons looked at the earth pony, “Well...It sounds like we can finally get started then!”

“...We can stop if you want. I’m perfectly fine with stopping, just so you know.”

Slipshod managed to somehow not wince at the sight of Squelch’s sapphire gaze glaring daggers at him, “No fair reading my emotions, Slip; we talked about this.”

“It doesn’t take an empath to see you’re uncomfortable,” the stallion said, undeterred, “We were married for a year. I know when you’re uncomfortable,” The unicorn mare let out an annoyed sigh, but she didn’t persist in denying the accuracy of his statement. In an attempt to be helpful, he offered, “I told you: it’s no problem for me to be an earth―”

“No,” Squelch cut him off insistently. However, at the same time, the mare did cease in her pursuits and rolled off the stallion, crawling up until she was laying beside him on the bed, “Because it is a problem,” the unicorn mare insisted, frowning, “And I need to get over it.”

“You really don’t,” Slipshod assured her. A flash of green lit the room for a brief moment before the amber earth pony laying next to her rolled over and took the unicorn in his hooves, “This is fine. I promise you,” he said, smiling at the mare.

Squelch reflexively resisted his embrace, but only for a moment before giving in and turning in towards the stallion in her bed. Slipshod could feel her pleasure and having his firm, warm body against hers. Then the feelings of guilt rushed in and the mare once more tried to pry herself away from him, if a bit reluctantly. She was shaking her head insistently, “But this isn’t you! If this is really going to work, shouldn’t I be okay with who you really are?”

Slipshod let loose a long-suffering sigh as he allowed the mare the distance that she felt she needed, all the while favoring the unicorn with a wan smile, “I’m a changeling. I’m ‘really’ anything that I want to be!” He emphasized the point by shifting himself into the form of an older griffon mare, “Species, gender, age,” Now he was speaking to her as a pegasus stallion with a plaid coat pattern, “Coloring,” His features split into a grin upon seeing the flat look that Squelch was giving him.

He reverted back to his ‘original’ earth pony shape again, gesturing at his body dismissively, “Changing shape for me isn’t any different than changing clothes for you, and matters just as much. You put on that silk bridle for me,” The stallion nodded his head towards the long-since discarded accoutrement laying on the floor of the apartment suite. He reached out with a hoof and idly ran it over the mare’s cheek, “Let me ‘wear’ this for you.”

For the briefest of moments, the unicorn turned into his touch, smiling. Then her expression faltered again and he felt the doubt return. He did his best to suppress any outward signs of his own frustration with Squelch’s stubborn refusal to accept what he was saying; reminding himself that one of the qualities that he liked best about her was the mare’s principled nature. Even when he found the principal in question damned annoying!

“But even if I accept that, it doesn’t change that you get ‘excited’ no matter what I’m wearing―or not wearing,” she added, flashing a playful little smile even as her telekinesis tugged at his nethers, causing the earth pony to jerk in pleasant surprise, “So...I should be too,” Now she was frowning again, nibbling on her bottom lip furtively.

“Okay, so it’s not quite the same,” Slipshod conceded, rolling his eyes, “But I still don’t care if carapaces don’t ‘do it for you’,” The stallion flashed a broad grin at the mare, “It doesn’t bother me.”

“But it bothers me!” Squelch groaned as she rolled away from him, splaying out on her backside. To her credit, the mare’s exasperated exclamation suggested that she was feeling far more frustrated with herself than with the situation; as though she was perfectly well aware about how much she shouldn’t be bothered by the situation, but still was, “I hate that I’m squicked out by how you feel,” she said with a defeated sigh.

“...It’s like licking one of my pumps.”

“Well that’s an image,” Slipshod muttered. The pair were silent for several more seconds. Then the stallion said, “...But it’s oddly doing something for me. I think you just gave me a new fetish.”

Squelch snorted, and shortly thereafter burst out into a full laugh.

It was a sound that the stallion hadn’t been afforded the opportunity to hear very often over the past year or so. Which was a shame, because he really liked it. Perhaps, someday, there’d be cause for more of it. They had a long way to go to get there though.

Speaking of which…

Slipshod glanced over at about the same time the door alerted the pair that they had a visitor. Instinctively, Squelch gathered up the bed sheet around herself with her magic, glaring in the direction of the door. The stallion contemplated pointing out that neither of them wore much in the way of clothing when they were off duty anyway, but refrained from doing so as he acknowledged that the unicorn’s sudden modesty likely had more to do with what she’d recently been doing while unclothed than with her state of dress in and of itself.

The changeling wasn’t entirely immune to that feeling as well, as he materialized a bedrobe over his body with a flash of green flame while rolling out of the bed, “Coming!”

Squelch closed the door behind him as the stallion stepped out into the apartment suite’s den. He could hear her moving around inside, searching for something to throw over herself that would satisfy her temporary prudishness. Slipshod fluidly shifted into a unicorn version of his ‘regular’ pony self in order to gain access to magic to open the door with. On the other side stood Xanadu, wearing his BattleSteed pilot’s barding and a toothy grin.

“I hope I am interrupting?” The zebra said, wiggling his eyebrows in Slipshod’s direction even as the striped equine looked around the apartment’s interior for any sign of the suite’s other occupant.

“Interrupting what?” Slipshod asked innocently.

“Please, who do you think procured Squelch that bridle?”

The amber unicorn stallion jerked with mild surprise, “Where’d you get something like that from?”

“Mig loaned it to me,” Was the simple reply. Slipshod had thought there was something familiar looking about it. That thought materialized only a moment before the stallion finished processing what the zebra had said, but his question was promptly and accurately guessed by the other pilot, “I saw it in her closet while we were looking through it for something fun to try out together.

“You should see what that mare looks like in a set of crocodile-patterned leather boots. Mm-hmm! Anyway, I thought she’d like it. Was it any good?” Xanadu waited expectantly for a response.

Slipshod opened his mouth to reply as the bedroom door opened, revealing Squelch now sporting a pink satin gown. The grin was back on the zebra’s face, “Apparently…”

“Yes; thank you, Xanax,” The unicorn mare said with a nod in the pilot’s direction as she sidled up beside Slipshod, “I take it the next ‘academy’ is starting today?”

“Two hours,” Xanadu nodded, his demeanor shifting into something slightly more serious as the topic was directed to ‘business’. He glanced in Slipshod’s direction, “We have seven candidates this time. We have some Breezies, Pipsqueaks, and a Jenny lined up for them. I’ll take three of them if you’ll take the other four?”

The other stallion was already nodding along, “Sounds good. I’ll get suited up and be down there in a bit.”

“Good,” the mischievous smile returned with aplomb as the zebra glanced between the two, “So...What was smoother? The silk saddle or Slip’s―”

The door slammed shut and cut off whatever else Xanadu had been about to say. Squelch glared at the sealed portal for several more seconds while Slipshod chuckled and allowed himself to shift into his changeling form. He headed for the bedroom, and the closet containing his ‘Steed barding.

It was an odd feeling being an ‘instructor’. He’d never really envisioned himself as a teacher, certainly not where operating a BattleSteed was concerned. Circumstances, however, had somehow managed to elevate him to such a position. He was, strictly speaking, the ‘best trained’ pilot on the planet, being the only one who’d attended an academy on Equus, or even the Harmony Sphere for that matter. His intimate knowledge of the tactics taught by the Equus academies made him an ideal instructor, since their adversary would be exclusively using those same tactics.

There was also the fact that they would need as many capable BattleSteed operators as possible for the coming campaign. Fortunately for them, the Red Reivers of Peregrine had managed to procure for themselves an abundance of BattleSteeds during their raiding. Far more than they had the pilots to operate. There were also plenty of Disciples on the planet who were available to train to operate them. So the Irregulars had taken to occupying themselves for the last couple of months running prospective candidates through improvised training academies as quickly as Mig and her technicians could rebuild functional ‘Steeds for them to use.

In the grand scheme of things Slipshod doubted that their efforts here would really make a difference. The invasion of Equus would consist of tens of thousands of BattleSteeds and their pilots, along with hundreds of thousands more combat vehicles and millions of cavalrymares. The few dozen pilots that he and Xanadu managed to train up here would be little more than a drop in the bucket in comparison. Certainly nothing that could possibly shift the balance of forces one way or the other in any meaningful fashion.

Training these pilots made him feel a little less useless though.

It was odd, the stallion thought to himself with a wan little smirk. A few months ago, his direct actions had played a not-insignificant part in shaping the future of the whole galaxy. His convincing Squelch to keep Twilight with them. Getting the alicorn to the Disciples and the Dragon Clans. He and the rest of the company were responsible for nearly everything that was happening right now on the galactic stage…

...And yet they’d been largely reduced to irrelevance. Twilight, Ember, Timberjack, and the heads of the Great Houses would be the creatures directly shaping the future of everycreature in the galaxy now. Perhaps as it should be, the changeling conceded. They were the ones with experience doing such things, after all. It still felt a little weird though, to have moved from a position of obscurity executing middling little mercenary contracts, to suddenly affecting the lives of trillions of beings, and then reverting right back to taking a few ponies and griffons by the hoof and claw respectively to teach them how to pilot a ‘Steed.

Fame was fleeting, Slipshod supposed.

The changeling began to idly wonder what the history books would say about this time period in a hundred years. A thousand. Would he and Squelch even be footnotes?

Would it bother him if they weren’t?

For all Squelch had been telling him to give thought to the future, perhaps that was looking a little too far into the future, Slipshod mused as he slipped into the barding. After all, history was written by the winners; and they hadn’t won yet...

General Charon watched the horizon grow progressively darker and more curved through the window of her cabin as the DropShip ascended from the surface of Buckwheat. In just a few minutes, her view filled with starlight, twinkling around the edges of the shrinking world. The changeling commander felt a bitter taste in her mouth as she watched the scene of her greatest military accomplishment fade away; because she knew that her glorious victory had been almost immediately overshadowed.

She would not be praised by Her Majesty upon her return to Equus. Certainly not as she should have been. In fact, the general was fairly certain that she would be chastised for falling for such an ‘obvious ploy’. Despite General Charon doing no more than what she had been ordered to by her queen.

It was just a tiny bit galling to know that she had somehow played right into the hooves of the real Twilight Sparkle, the changeling thought to herself. For they were the only one who could have brought down the Primary Circuit the way that they had. The alicorn who’d invented the devices was the only one with the depth of knowledge necessary to perform such thorough sabotage. Charon had taken the time to review the damage to Buckwheat’s HyperSpark Generator in detail. According to the technicians who’d been on duty when the array had gone down, they’d received a message from another system moments before the HSG sent out an automated response to every other HSG in range and then began to overload. They’d attempted to avert the build up of power, but had found that they’d been locked out of the system through the use of an extremely high-level override.

The sort of override that could only have been executed by one of the original developers of the system in the first place. Charon suspected that she’d only need one hoof to count the number of creatures in the galaxy today who met that criteria.

Coupled with the fact that the message had been timed so perfectly with the conclusion of the campaign at Buckwheat...and had even mentioned the confrontation with the Clans…

That part had not sat particularly well with the general either. She’d been under the impression that the alicorn had been working with the Dragon Clans. So then why would Twilight Sparkle have ordered them to invade Buckwheat? Especially when her message made it sound like she had planned for that invasion to fail? While the notion that the Clans had gone into the fight expecting to lose would certainly help to explain why they’d been so easily baited into Charon’s numerous traps and ambushes, the changeling commander doubted that the former ruler of the Celestia League was actually cold-blooded enough to sacrifice that many of her own forces for the sake of creating a narrative meant to cast Queen Chrysalis in a negative light.

It didn’t strike Charon as being particularly ‘Harmonious’.

Not that any part of the Clans’ invasion up to this point had felt that way either, the changeling conceded. Especially when the general had known for a fact that the real Twilight had recently gone through such great lengths to get Victoria Blueblood installed as the Archon of the Pony Commonwealth. The young pegasus should have been perfectly willing to allow for the Clan fleets to pass right through her territory all the way to the Faust System without any issue. A brute-force invasion shouldn’t have been necessary.

Yet the Clans had still performed one.

The simple answer was that some of the dragon khans had ‘gone off the reservation’, as it were, and weren’t interested in the alicorn’s plans. It certainly explained the seeming lack of interest the invaders had in reaching Equus as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their sudden and keen interest in Buckwheat specifically still puzzled the changeling general, but the message crafted by Twilight suggested to Charon that the former pony princess had somehow convinced or maneuvered the Clans into focusing their forces here specifically so that Chrysalis could defeat them.

Which meant that Charon’s victory here had served Twilight Sparkle’s needs, and probably more than they had Her Majesty’s. That didn’t sit well with the general at all. Especially when the alicorn could now effectively move through the galaxy largely in secret. It would take months for any of their field agents to get word of her activities in the Harmony Sphere back to Equus, and by then the information would be so out of date as to be the next best thing to useless.

Charon could only conclude that the communications blackout that the alicorn had imposed was the prelude to an invasion of the Faust System. While the general had known that it had only been a matter of time before the real Twilight made a play for Equus, there’d at least always been the knowledge that the forces there would be able to see the invasion coming weeks or months out. Almost to the day. After all, a HSG message could travel much further and faster than a JumpShip could ever hope to. The changelings would have known well in advance when an invasion was coming, and how large of a force it would be.

Now though? With message traffic limited to courier vessels using JumpShips, Charon doubted that it would be possible for them to receive any warning that an invasion fleet was about to arrive in Faust. Their WarShip fleets would need to be kept at a constant state of high alert for months. It wouldn’t take long for that level of readiness to wear on the crews. They’d need to be cycled much more frequently than usual to keep them from becoming burned out or complacent. That would mean training up additional crew rotations for their fleet, which would draw significantly from their reserves.

The same reserves that were going to be needed to construct additional fortifications on the planet itself.

The changeling found herself frowning deeply now at that last thought. The simple fact was that Equus didn’t possess a lot of very defensible positions that an invading force could be funneled through in order to give the defenders a clear advantage. This was because, unlike most other worlds in the galaxy, Equus had not been developed over the last few centuries with repelling invasions in mind. After all: who would invade Equus?!

Not that any force would have even been able to make such an attempt in the first place, since only a select few changelings even knew the jump coordinates for the system. Charon herself didn’t even know what they were. The real Twilight Sparkle and the Dragon Clans certainly would know what those coordinates were though.

Since the Clans had appeared in the Sphere and began their invasion, Her Majesty had ordered the planet to be fortified against a possible invasion, but any serious effort would still take time. Buckwheat had only required a few months to prepare, but Charon had had the advantage of not needing to secure any specific part of the planet, and the Clan force that she’d needed to fend off had been considerably smaller than whatever Twilight was going to bring to bear against Equus.

Equus was the site of many dozens, hundreds even, of critical facilities and locations that couldn’t be allowed to fall into the hooves of invading armies. Their BattleSteed factories, their weapons foundries, their ammunition stockpiles, their cocoon larders, locations that―if seized and destroyed in an initial invasion―wouldn’t be able to be rebuilt or replaced in time to help them fend off a second attempt.

The centralization of all of their significant assets in one system had been one of their biggest defensive advantages, giving them an extremely small territory to worry about defending, and allowing them to concentrate their forces in a singular location. However, it also had the downside of leaving them with few outside resources to draw on if the need arose. No additional sources of weapons and materials that they could bring in, or secondary locations which they might fall back to if the worst should happen―

The general cut that thought off. It was a dangerous one for her to have, especially once she met with the queen. If Her Majesty felt even that niggling kernel of doubt within Charon, the changeling would find herself ‘replaced’. With extreme prejudice.

Still…

As one of Queen Chrysalis’ senior generals, it was Charon’s mandate to take whatever steps were necessary to secure the hive and to thwart the efforts of their enemies. She had been granted rather broad authority in that regard as well. She would not have been elevated to the position that she was in if she didn’t have the trust and faith of their queen to act without explicit and direct orders. Especially if whatever Charon wanted to do was genuinely in the best interests of the hive as a whole.

Charon depressed a button that summoned the bridge. A moment later, the DropShip’s captain reported in, “Yes, ma’am?”

“Captain, I want you to send a message to the JumpShip Halifax. I have new orders for them. They are to proceed to Aether, where they will deliver a message to the Captain-General. I’ll have the message for them within the hour.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

The line went dead and Charon went to work drafting the missive that was to be passed to Captain-General Stellar Nova. Or rather, the changeling that was posing as the leader of the Our Worlds League.

They might have access to some additional resources after all, Charon mused.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 42: A Call to Arms

Twilight casually eyed the six-pointed purple star emblazoned on the large doors leading into the throne room. To either side, a pair of massive ponies stood guard, adorned in powered barding which concealed their features almost entirely. All that was visible were their eyes, which were doing their best to look straight ahead, as though the two were completely ignorant of the alicorn standing before them.

The tall purple mare suppressed a smile as she considered the novelty of her situation. Once upon a time, she would have been the one on the other side of those doors waiting for the petitioner to arrive and make their case before her throne. Twilight hadn’t really considered how intimidating a prospect that could be from the point of view of the petitioner. She’d always done her best to make anycreature who came to Court in Canterlot feel as welcome as possible; but it hadn’t really occurred to her before how uneasy simply looking at a door framed by armed guards could be.

Granted, even during the time of the galaxy-spanning Celestia League, her guards had been armed with simple gilded spears and dressed in ornate golden parade barding, while these two wore barding made of advanced composites that didn’t look as though it had been intended exclusively for ceremonial purposes, and the magical energy rifles slung at their sides certainly weren’t ‘just for show’. The alicorn suspected that the distinction would have been lost on anycreature coming to see her a thousand years ago though. An ‘armed guard’ was still an ‘armed guard’, even if their presence was purely ceremonial.

There had ceased to be anything remotely resembling an ‘enemy’ long before the residents of their world had ventured out into space for the first time. Twilight’s Royal Guard had been the closest thing to a military that existed on Equus―and subsequently the Celestia League―and had only been kept around for the sake of tradition. The alicorn found herself rethinking that decision now. While it certainly hadn’t been her intent, Twilight now wondered if she’d been ever-so-subtly undermining her trust with the citizens of the League. After all, if the only place in the galaxy that the common citizen saw armed ponies was when they were interposing themselves between them and their monarch, how did that suggest Twilight perceived those subjects?

It had been the little kernels of doubt like that which Cozy Glow had seized upon to sow her dissension among the creatures of the galaxy. Aspects of the society which Twilight had helped to craft that she hadn’t managed to look at from all the perspectives which she probably should have. She’d kept her guards around because they’d simply always been there in her own memory. It had been impossible to imagine the palace without them. Of course, back then Equestria had possessed enemies. External threats had existed which necessitated a military. When those threats had been forever removed, Twilight should have disbanded the Royal Guard. Or at least repurposed them.

A sad little smile threatened to mar her otherwise impassive features at the thought. As Spike had told her earlier: the galaxy was a different place than it had been when she’d ascended to the throne. It had changed long before being fractured by Tirek, Chrysalis, and cozy Glow too. Meanwhile, perhaps thanks in part to her long life, Twilight’s perception of it was largely still based on how she’d remembered it always being. Nostalgia and habit had blinded her to how society had been reshaping itself throughout the galaxy; which was all the more ironic given that she’d been the impetus behind that reshaping!

A new society―a new paradigm of existence―would require somepony who wasn’t a slave to ‘The Old Ways’ of thinking to lead it, the mare knew. The mantle of leadership would indeed need to be passed on. Just as Celestia had passed the reins of to her.

Before that could happen though, Twilight at least wanted to fix a few of her more grievous errors. The least she could do was give the future leaders of the Sphere a galaxy that was at least already on the road to recovery, rather than passing them the war-torn dumpster fire that it currently was.

Prompted by some signal that Twilight had not been privy to, the pair of guards moved as one, turning inward and each laying a hoof on the door. Both of the towering sections slowly swung open. They didn’t seem to have applied any real force to the door, the alicorn noted; the door was certainly motorized in some fashion, just as it had been at the palace in Canterlot for most of her own reign. She recalled the guards being quite pleased by the renovation back then.

“Announcing Lady Twilight Sparkle,” The magically amplified voice of Princess Flurry Heart’s Sergeant at Arms announced. The purple alicorn took note of the honorific that had been used. While it was true that she’d abdicated her throne to Flurry Heart where the Celestia League-in-Exile was concerned, it was also true that she’d since taken on the title of ‘princess’ while leading the Disciples after their de facto secession from the League and the Clans. Twilight idly wondered if the lack of acknowledgement of her new position was simply to ensure that Flurry Heart retained the more prestigious title, or if it was an indication that the League-In-Exile did not officially recognize the decision which had been made by General Mayhem and her followers.

If it was the latter, that might cause some problems down the line. Especially if her meeting today didn’t go well.

Visible now through the doors was the throne room of Princess Flurry Heart. It wasn’t just the pink alicorn princess and her Court staff who were awaiting Twilight’s arrival though. The League-in-Exile had undergone something of a ‘restructuring’ since fleeing the Harmony Sphere. Thanks to the circumstances of their flight, the Dragon Clans had gained a much more pronounced political position, becoming something akin to ‘co-rulers’; or at least a political bloc that Flurry Heart couldn’t ignore when making important decisions. In recognition of this political union, there was a second throne seated next to the alicorn’s, and it was occupied by a familiar cyan dragoness.

Also present in the room, seated along either side of the grand hall, were the khans of the Dragon Clans. Some of whom, like Smolder and Garble, Twilight recognized. Others she didn’t really know hardly at all. Each khan turned their head in Twilight’s direction, regarding her with expressions ranging from detached interest to outright malevolence. Smolder, in particular, did not look happy at all to see Twilight back in her presence. The purple mare suspected that distaste would only grow once the burnt orange dragoness learned about what had happened to her forces at Buckwheat.

She at least had one staunch ally among the khans in the form of Spike, who was seated at his place beneath a banner bearing a crimson timberwolf head in profile. Her oldest and dearest friend’s face wasn’t the mask of indifference that so many of his peers were wearing. The dragon khan of Clan Timberwolf saw little point in hiding his well-known close ties with the alicorn.

The same couldn’t be said for Flurry Heart and Ember though. Despite her own close history with the former ruler of the Celestia League, the Dragon Lord would have found it politically problematic to show too much outward bias, lest she give her detractors among the khans―like Smolder, for example―any additional leverage during this meeting. She was supposed to act in the best interests of the Dragon Clans after all, and not simply do what would help her friend.

Flurry Heart’s animosity was already well-known to Twilight, of course. It had almost certainly been only at Ember’s behest that this meeting was happening at all.

Twilight filed those thoughts away for later as she stepped through the doors. It hurt that she didn’t have the favor or adoration of her beloved niece―her only remaining family. Part of her would have loved for nothing more than to throw herself at the other alicorn’s hooves, beg for forgiveness, and do whatever it took to make amends. That wasn’t an option though. Not right now.

She couldn’t let her feelings regarding her estranged relationship with Flurry Heart distract her. Twilight wasn’t here to mend fences, she was here to get a fleet of WarShips. For better or worse, that meant that she didn’t need to appeal to the nominal ruler of the Celestia League-in-Exile. Due to the nature of her arrangement with the Dragon Clans, Flurry Heart had no direct authority over the khans. It was Ember who possessed that power.

Or, rather, it was the Staff of the Dragon Lord which possessed that power. What none of the khans―save for Spike―knew, of course, was that the staff no longer functioned as it once had. To the best of Twilight’s knowledge, Smolder and her own bloc of allies didn’t actually ‘know’ that the staff was inert, they just strongly suspected it. However, if too many of the other khans felt inclined to buck any declaration of support that Ember made and insist that the Dragon Lord forcibly compel them to help...that very inconvenient truth would come to light…

...And a great many things would go wrong for all of them.

Which meant that it wasn’t Dragon Lord Ember that Twilight needed to convince to help her. It was the other khans themselves. The alicorn needed them to agree to help her on their own recognizance. They were her audience, and so it was them she would focus on addressing. Dragons respected strength above all else. So today they were not going to see a mare willing to supplicate herself before the Princess of the League in desperate hope of forgiveness.

For the first time in five hundred years, the khans of the Dragon Clans were going to bear witness to: Her Royal Highness Twilight Sparkle, by the Grace of Harmony, Princess of the Celestia League, Duchess of Equus, Countess of Canterlot, Defender of Friendship.

For that was who strode into the throne room that day.

Twilight’s imperious gait was both graceful and measured. A millenia spent as the galaxy’s reigning monarch had granted her plenty of time to not only become adept at ‘walking like a princess’, but to master it! Everything about her posture and her poise as the purple alicorn stepped through those doors suggested that Twilight was not a mere ‘petitioner’ to this hall, but was in fact its returning owner. Her vestments only served to further reinforce that perception, as Twilight had chosen to attire herself in a recreation of her coronation gown, complete with a copy of the star-jeweled crown which Flurry heart also wore.

“Princess Flurry Heart,” Twilight began, issuing the barest hint of a bow in the other alicorn’s direction, “Dragon Lord Ember. Thank you for granting me this opportunity to address the khans,” The alicorn turned away from the pair seated on the throne without waiting for any sign of their acknowledgement. She’d caught the beginnings of a look of consternation on the face of the other princess though. Flurry Heart was not happy with how this had started off.

However, she was not afforded the chance to cut off the elder mare, who was already speaking to the assembled dragons, “Noble Khans, I come before you today to requisition your fleets.”

There was an almost instant shift in the demeanor of the seated dragons, most of whom had immediately sat up a little straighter in their chairs at the alicorn’s presumptuous announcement. Shock and surprise had loosened more than a few jaws as the khans processed the absurdity that was a pony having the audacity to demand the use of their WarShip fleets! That was simply not how things were done in the Dragon Clans. The khans enjoyed a broad latitude of autonomy in how and when they utilized their military might; as had been the tradition for several centuries.

There was a flash of surprise on Smolder’s face. Clearly this was not how she had expected Twilight to go about ‘asking’ for their help. Forgivable, since that certainly wasn’t the typical way that somepony might have gone about it. Of course, little about the situation was anywhere near ‘typical’, now was it? Whatever Smolder or the other khans might have become used to over the years, there were still a few immutable facts which remained as far as Twilight was concerned. The khans just needed some reminding.

“You will dispatch your WarShips to the Lameduck System with all haste. They will mobilize there to be used for the invasion of Equus,” Twilight continued.

Smolder shot to her feet now, glaring at the alicorn, “Who do you think you are, showing up here and acting like you’re in a position to give us orders?” The burnt orange dragoness demanded of the mare. Several of the other dragons, especially those from her bloc of allies, voiced their own irritation with Twilight’s demanding attitude, “We will use our ships as we see fit.

“If you want them, then you’ll have to beg for them,” Smolder sneered at the purple pony now, a cruel grin parting her lips, “With a lot of groveling.”

This too was met with mirrored nods and voiced agreements. Even a few other satisfied smiles from the other khans as then contemplated the image of Twilight supplicating herself before them.

That wasn’t going to happen though. Not today, and not to them. Twilight’s expression grew only more critical as she focused her attention on Smolder, “I’m not going to ‘beg’ you for an army which you no longer have, Smolder,” She stated simply. Upon seeing the look of shocked confusion on the dragoness’ face, the alicorn gave a subtle gesture of her wing in Spike’s direction. The purple dragon took out a datapad and tapped out a few brief instructions. The other khans were almost immediately alerted to newly received messages on their own devices.

“My duty as princess is first and foremost to protect the citizens of the galaxy from all threats,” Twilight very nearly growled at the khans, her narrowed eyes scanning the crowd of dragons as they read over the information which they had just received, “That includes marauding Clan armies. As such, I arranged for the forces of the Clans involved in the invasion of the Harmony Sphere to be ‘pruned back’ so as to no longer constitute a further threat to other worlds.

“The same fate will befall any who seek to harm my subjects!”

Smolder’s face paled as she read over the message she’d received on her datapad. Before leaving for Clan space on board the Maelstrom, Twilight had received one final scroll from Cinder. It contained her after-action report, and a detailed summary of the losses that had been suffered by the Clans which had participated in the attempted invasion of Buckwheat. While each of the four Clans which had invaded the Sphere had suffered significant losses in the endeavour, Clan Smoke Jabberwock’s had been especially staggering. Over eighty percent of their committed forces were out of action―most of them permanently. What they had left in the Sphere would barely be enough to retain what they’d already conquered.

In all likelihood, they would have to pull back from some of the territories which they’d seized in order to ensure they could adequately defend their holdings from counter-attacks by the Successor States they’d taken those worlds from. For all intents and purposes, Clan Smoke Jabberwock was no longer a significant military threat in the Sphere. At least, not in terms of ground-based armies. Their WarShip fleet was still mostly intact, but that alone wouldn’t allow them to secure additional conquests.

Clan Timberwolf had gotten off the lightest during the invasion, with Cinder doing her best to ensure that she lost only enough of her forces to justify a withdrawal from the planet without looking too cowardly. Even then, most of her losses had been in terms of eventually replaceable material, and not personnel. A resupplied of equipment and BattleSteeds would see her armies in the Sphere brought nearly back to their pre-Buckwheat strength.

Of course, since the political status of any Clan was based largely around the strength of the forces at its command, this meant that Smoke Jabberwock’s power base had suffered a significant blow. Smolder still likely possessed significant reserves of troops and materials back here in Clan space, but her force totals would now be dwarfed by many of the other Clans who only a month or two ago would have been her juniors in political rank. The same went for many of the other members of her little ‘pro-invasion’ bloc.

Those allies of hers would almost certainly be looking for somewhere to place the blame for their sudden downturn in power and status. The dragoness who’d talked them into the invasion in the first place would be a logical place for them to start. After all, Smolder had promised them riches enough to grant them Greed-Induced Bigness; and instead they were now objectively poorer than when their invasion had started, having traded some of the most advanced weapons that the galaxy had ever seen for a few dozen relatively impoverished worlds in the Sphere.

“I will retake Equus and defeat Chrysalis,” Twilight stated, leaving little room to doubt her sincerity, “The Queen of the Changelings has fallen to me before, and it will happen again. To accomplish this, the assistance of the Dragon Clans is not required,” Another round of surprised looks from the khans, who now seemed more than a little puzzled by the alicorn’s statements. If she didn’t need their help, then why was she here to try and get it?

“However, seeing as it is the duty of the Khans of the Dragon Clans to honor the oaths made to protect the citizens of the Celestia League, I will interpret any refusal to follow my commands as an implicit act of mutiny, and the Clan in question will be branded a ‘rogue state’, and considered a threat to the Harmony Sphere.”

“Whatever our ancestors might have done,” one of the younger khans spoke up, “Most of us swore no such oaths! We don’t owe fealty to a disappeared ‘princess’! Certainly not to one who gave up her throne,” He gestured towards the seat upon which a now thoroughly stunned Flurry Heart sat. The declaration was met with a chorus of agreements from other younger khans.

“You may not have sworn an oath to me,” Twilight conceded, though her own smile didn’t waver in the slightest as one of her wings extended in Ember’s direction, “But Dragon Law obliges you to obey the commands of your Dragon Lord.

“And Dragon Lord Ember most certainly did promise to help me protect the creatures of the Harmony Sphere. Not an oath to serve the ‘Princess of the Celestia League’, but a promise to always be there to help me, Twilight Sparkle, as a friend.”

“Indeed I did,” Ember said, issuing an acknowledging nod in the alicorn’s direction and exchanging a brief smile with the mare before turning to address her assembled khans, “And Dragon Law is clear. I am bound by the oaths that I make under the Law; and I pledged I would do everything in my power to help.

“If I command the khans to send their fleets, that same Dragon Law dictates you obey that command. Unless...there are any khans here who believe themselves to be beyond the reach of Dragon Law?”

Smolder, at least for the moment, rediscovered a bit of her resolve and glared at the Dragon Lord, “If you’re so worried about us refusing your order, then just use the staff,” the dragoness insisted, jabbing a claw at the Bloodstone Scepter clutched in Ember’s claws, “...If you can, that is.”

The other dragons in her political bloc nodded and murmured, recovering from their own shock as well. It seemed that, despite their losses in the Sphere, they hoped to be able to salvage some of their political clout by exposing Ember’s impotence as Dragon Lord. Twilight wasn’t sure if this was part of a broader bid for Smolder to seize leadership of all the dragons at this point, or just her hoping to drag others down to her level out of spite. In either case, Ember clearly wasn’t about to let herself be suckered in quite so blatantly.

The cyan dragoness glowered at the younger khan, “Any dragon who must be forced to follow Dragon Law isn’t much of a dragon. They certainly aren’t a particularly worthy khan,” she insisted. “How would your commanders feel if it were revealed to them that their khan was so cowardly, that she had to be dragged around by her horn to face mere changelings?”

The burnt orange dragoness blanched, too stunned by the accusation to form an immediate counter.

Other khans who had appeared defiant before now wore unsure expressions on their faces as their sense of honor dueled with their more base natures. Twilight had always seen dragon society as a precariously balanced dichotomy. On the one hoof, dragons were very much a brash and boastful bunch who prided themselves on being strong-willed and independent. Yet, they also took their adherence to Dragon Law very seriously; and this law demanded that they give complete and unquestioned obedience to their Dragon Lord in all things.

The power of the Bloodstone Scepter, which served as the Staff of the Dragon Lord, to control the wills of other dragons helped in this regard, of course. No dragon was powerful enough to resist its magic. Ideally that compulsion wouldn’t be necessary, as a dragon’s own pride in simply being a dragon should be enough to get them to adhere to the tenets of Dragon Law. Ideally.

Twilight wasn’t convinced that they could wager everything on that though. If the other khans had chosen to call Ember’s bluff their entire society might have come crashing down around them, leaving behind only anarchy and bloodshed. So the mare chose to give the khans a nudge in the direction she wished them to ultimately go, “Your ancestors’ entire purpose for relocating to this part of the galaxy,” For it would not do to imply they had ‘run away’ or ‘retreated’, Twilight knew, “Was to build forces with which to defeat Chrysalis,” the alicorn reminded them.

“If there are those among you who intend to renege on that intent, then so be it. I came here under the impression that the Clans were led by dragons; and I don’t need trembling lizards too afraid of a few bugs slowing me down.”

“You dare―?!” Another of the dragons bolted out of her chair, but the alicorn stopped her protest with a look.

“You’re damn right I ‘dare’!” Twilight bellowed, cowing the dragoness to silence and even managing to get her and a few of the other khans to actually recoil. The purple alicorn glared around the room at the other assembled dragons, “You all sat here for five hundred years waiting patiently for the right time to strike and remove the changeling scourge from the galaxy. Then, when that time finally arrived, what did you do? You launch your assault against the very creatures your ancestors were charged to defend!”

Her eyes drilled into Smolder now, pointedly condemning the ‘leader’ of the invasion of the Sphere. Garble and some of the others had the good sense to squirm uncomfortably in their seats. Though far from an advocate for the invasion, Spike too wore a somber expression. He knew that his own Clan’s involvement―while far less destructive―had been far from bloodless either.

“You deliberately skirted your duties in the pursuit of sating your own personal greed,” the purple alicorn growled, “Plundering wealth just as wantonly as the changelings plundered love and lives.

“If you insist on acting like changelings, Celestia help me, I will treat you like the changelings and wipe you from the galaxy the moment I’m finished with Chrysalis!

“I built the Celestia League and the CLDF to protect creatures from harm. If that creation has now become a threat to them, then I promise you that I will absolutely burn it to the fucking ground!

“See if I won’t!”

The chamber echoed with the alicorn’s final threat―her promise. Every dragon khan wore a look of surprise, and more than a few seemed worried on top of that. Flurry Heart too appeared shaken. Meanwhile, Dragon Lord Ember had her head cocked, looking a little intrigued at the notion that the usually quite reserved and non-violent Princess Twilight Sparkle that she’d always known would vow such a thing. Spike looked...conflicted. He certainly didn’t fault the alicorn for taking a confrontational approach when addressing the khans―they’d discussed this audience and how to handle things earlier. However, that wasn’t the same thing as saying that he actually liked seeing this side of his dear friend.

He also held himself at least partially responsible for creating this whole situation. He’d allowed himself to compromise with regards to the Elements of Harmony, and the League-in-Exile found itself facing its current internal problems as a result. He had thought that he was helping to ease cultural tensions between dragons and the rest of the League, but clearly it had only made things worse.

Now his friend was charged with cleaning up the mess that he’d left for her. Fifteen hundred years of time had passed since he was the little dragon whelp living in her home, and somehow Twilight was still having to fix what he’d broken.

Finally, Flurry Heart spoke. Her tone was measured and even, betraying little of what she was feeling in that moment. It was the diplomatically neutral response of a politician, “The Crown has heard your proposal. We will reflect on your words and deliver Our answer tomorrow.”

Without another word, the younger pink alicorn stood up and trotted out of the throne room through the back door leading to one of her private rooms.

An hour later that room was illuminated by a brilliant flash of purple light as Twilight materialized in the midst of her niece and the Dragon Lord. Neither seemed surprised by the purple mare’s arrival, which made sense seeing as how Twilight had been surreptitiously invited here by a scroll she had received from Spike. Presumably at Ember’s behest. Flurry Heart lowered the glass of sparkling wine which she had been sipping from and turned her head to regard her aunt. The pink alicorn looked...well, thoroughly exhausted.

“That was quite the display earlier,” Flurry Heart quipped, “...Would you really burn the League-in-Exile to the ground?”

The question held within it a subtle, fearful note, as though the alicorn was both afraid of the answer she would receive...yet would have expected no other response to it. Twilight kept her own expression stoic. She might not have had an audience of other dragons watching her, judging her every move, but that didn’t mean that she entirely trusted her own resolve in this matter. Making threats like that wasn't something that the older mare was used to doing, “Would you really continue to stand by while your soldiers slaughter their way across the galaxy?”

Flurry Heart winced as though she’d been physically struck, but she didn’t offer up any denials. She couldn’t. Excuses though, those she could manage, “...I endured a five hundred year long regency without having to make a single decision,” the younger alicorn said in a detached tone, her eyes unfocused, looking into the past.

“There wasn’t much to do, after all. I just had to keep the throne warm while Ember and the dragons built up the military for our ‘eventual’ triumphant return,” she said, gestured briefly in the Dragon Lord’s direction with one of her wings, “Before he ‘left’, Discord told us to wait for you to come back. He said retaking Equus wouldn’t work without you.”

It was finally Twilight’s turn to look surprised, “Discord knew I wasn’t dead?” The mare frowned now, mulling over that new information, “...If he knew, then why didn’t he come retrieve me from the wreck?”

Flurry Heart could only shrug, “I don’t know. We asked him the same thing,” she nodded towards Ember, “All that he said was that while he couldn’t actually find you, he knew that you were alive ‘somewhen’. Whatever that meant…” She said, rolling her eyes in remembered annoyance.

Twilight’s own frown deepened as she tried to puzzle out the meaning behind the draconequus’ words as well. Then the realization hit her, “The stasis pod! It works by warping time, effectively ‘teleporting’ the patient to the moment it’s turned off. Which meant that, while I was inside of it, I didn’t really ‘exist’ in the present. From the perspective of everycreature back then, I’d essentially jumped to the future.

“That’s why Discord couldn’t teleport to me: I wasn’t ‘there’ yet.”

“If you say so,” Flurry Heart conceded, clearly not quite being able to wrap her head around the temporal mechanics involved, “In any case: we waited, just like we were told to,” she sighed, “the years stretched into decades, which stretched into centuries...and you still never showed up. We had the Disciples scouring the Harmony Sphere for any sign of you, but they never found anything.

“We made numerous plans to retake Equus,” Flurry heart insisted, “But every time we did, the leader of the Disciples of Discord would show up in system with the Maelstrom and warn us that we needed to wait for you to come back,” the mare exchanged an annoyed look with the Dragon Lord, who also looked like she was recalling past interactions that she’d had with the secretive group with no small amount of frustration.

“So we would wait. And wait. And wait. All the while, I would ‘play’ princess, never having to actually make any decisions or do anything important.

“Then you trotted in here, easy as you please, the pony that everycreature had been waiting for so that we could finally do something important!” Flurry Heart’s words were dripping with hints of disdain now, “Because you were the princess that actually mattered. I was irrelevant. Five hundred years spent as a seat-warmer, expected to bow out the moment a ‘real’ princess showed up to fix everything.

“Like I was still some fucking filly!”

For the briefest of moments, Flurry Heart glared at the elder alicorn, but her fury burned out almost instantly, her head bowing and looking away in shame, “I hated you for that. I wanted to prove I could do this job. The job I’d been doing for five hundred years…

“Then, the first real decision I ever made from this throne as the princess of the League-in-Exile was to let a bunch of marauding dragons go on what turned out to be a ‘murder spree’ across the Sphere. Because Smolder threatened to do it whether I officially sanctioned it or not, and I knew that Ember wouldn't be able to stop them. So I caved.

“Now millions are dead because I was afraid that I’d be seen as a failure for letting the League-in-Exile fracture in my first year of officially ruling it,” She said in a near whisper, her eyes haunted. After several more seconds of silence, the mare finally managed to muster up the courage to meet Twilight’s gaze, “You’ll have your fleet. We’ll make sure of it.”

“Pitty. I could have used some good news today.”

Overcast, the slate gray pegasus mare who served as Stellar Nova’s aide balked, having taken no more than a single step into the captain-general’s office. Her golden eyes darted to the datapad clutched in her wing which contained the latest reports she had aggregated from the various teams working throughout the Our Worlds League to restore HyperSpark communications. She was a little astonished that ComSpark was being so uncharacteristically open with the League’s head of state, given the telecom’s historical inclination towards secrecy. Of course, as the local ComSpark facilities were obviously cut off from access to the resources that would normally be available to them through the use of their communications network, perhaps they knew that they had little choice but to work with local leadership if they hoped to restore the HSGs.

The mare briefly wondered at how Captain-General Stellar Nova could have been so perceptive as to have immediately deduced that all of the reports she had gathered effectively amounted to reaching the same conclusion: repairing the network was functionally impossible. Of course, she supposed that it would hardly have taken a psychic to guess such a thing. It wasn’t like any of the last dozen or so reports she made to him on the subject had hinted at any likelihood of future success.

The mare resumed her approach and passed the datapad into the unicorn stallion’s telekinetic grasp. He scanned over the first few pages, seemingly only to gage its apparent thoroughness, and then glanced back at the aide, “How bad is it?” Less than a heartbeat later, he winced and shook his head, “Ooh, that bad, eh?”

Overcast’s eyes widened in mild surprise as the captain-general once more demonstrated his astonishing powers of perception. She’d been relatively sure that she’d managed to keep any sign of it off of her face, but obviously at least some of her own depression had leaked through to become visible. The mare offered a slow nod, “I’m afraid so, sir. According to ComSpark, their techs have managed to rule out any sort of hardware deficiencies. Whatever is wrong with the generators is related to their software.”

“Obviously,” Stellar Nova agreed, “It’s absurd to think that every generator in the galaxy could have simply ‘broken down’ within days of one another,” The stallion pointed out, casting his gaze over the information on the pad one more time, “There’s nothing they can do?”

“More or less,” the pegasus acknowledged, “replacing a few hardware components seems to be able to bring an HSG back up to an operational status, but only for a matter of hours. Maybe a day at the most. Then it just burns itself out again.”

“Can they restore the software to remove whatever ‘bug’ is causing the issue?”

“They can’t find any trace of aberrant code in the software,” Overcast explained, continuing on quickly as the unicorn frowned at her, “Obviously there is some, somewhere,” she clarified, “but without knowing what code is corrupted, there’s no way of narrowing down what needs to be fixed.”

“They can’t just...reset the whole thing?”

Stellar Nova didn’t need to feign his usual lack of unfamiliarity with ComSpark’s inner workings this time, like he usually did. Being a changeling didn’t grant him an inherent understanding of every little detail of everything that changelings were involved in throughout the galaxy. He had a broad, general, comprehension that went beyond what most creatures would likely know, but nothing too detailed. So while he might have a better grasp of how HyperSpark Generators operated than most as a result of having at least visited the restricted sections of the arrays in his past, Stellar Nova―or, rather, the changeling masquerading as him―genuinely didn’t know everything about how they worked or how they could be fixed.

That knowledge was left up to the changelings assigned to operate and maintain ComSpark’s HSGs.

“I guess not,” the pegasus mare said, offering up an apologetic shrug of her wings, “honestly, they weren’t very forthcoming on the specifics of what was wrong.”

Stellar Nova nodded along, but forced himself to look frustrated. Obviously, he knew perfectly well why the ComSpark agents that his aide had spoken with wouldn’t have been very willing to reveal much to a non-changeling, and made a note to ask them more directly himself later that evening. He’d have liked to have simply done so from the start, but his position required that certain bases be covered. Strictly speaking, there were very few conversations that the Captain-General of the Our Worlds League had with anycreature outside of the League’s executive cabinet. After all, that was the entire point of having a cabinet in the first place; so that he could delegate.

Even for a matter as significant as the galaxy losing the ability to communicate between star systems seemingly out of nowhere wasn’t something that the captain-general was just going to call up the head of ComSpark operations on the planet and chat about in secret. Considering the usually tight-lipped policy that the communications giant observed, that would have raised questions. By going through the ‘proper channels’―at least initially―Stellar Nova would be able to justify knowing about the overall issue. It would help not having to continue to play as though he was completely ignorant about everything happening with the HSGs.

“Not surprising there,” the unicorn said out loud, smirking in the smoky gray mare’s direction, “They mentioned that they can get it working by swapping out parts?” She nodded, “I don’t suppose they happened to say how many times they could do that?”

“No. But I got the impression it’s not many.”

“Oh?” Stellar Nova raised a curious eyebrow at the mare, internally wondering what the aide might have picked up from ComSpark that she probably wasn’t supposed to. Hopefully it wasn’t anything too sensitive. She was quite competent, and he’d hate to have to arrange for her to have an accident. Getting a replacement for her position up to speed would be especially annoying while he was already having to deal with a serious crisis like the League’s economy collapsing.

“Well, when they mentioned that they’d been able to get the generator working for a few hours by replacing some parts, I asked if they’d thought about replacing those parts once a week or something,” Overcast explained, sounding rather proud of herself for the initiative that she’d taken in order to be more helpful for the captain-general, “A few hours isn’t a long time, I know, but I thought that it would let us at least send out all of the really important things that needed to be sent. Official messages and stuff.”

The changeling kept his expression politely interested, but inwardly acknowledged that it was a very good idea. One that he would almost certainly have raised in private with the local ComSpark coordinator if it hadn’t looked like he was about to receive an explanation on that point now. Although he did make a note to touch on this same point tonight anyway to see if alternative arrangements could be made.

“However, the pony I spoke with said that wouldn’t be practical ‘long-term’, was the wording he used. I figured that was the case already, but I asked if it would at least work long enough to coordinate the summit that’s coming up in two months, and he said that probably wouldn’t work either. So, however many parts they have to replace the broken components with, I guess it’s not enough to get the array working once a week for even just a couple months. Six or less?”

Competent, smart, well-reasoned, and she took initiative. The perfect aide, Stellar Nova mused as he hid an appreciative smile behind his folded hooves, “I see. Well, that’s good to know. Hopefully we can talk them into letting us get out one or two of our more urgent messages in the coming weeks. Thank you very much, Miss Cast.”

The mare smiled, blushing slightly at the praise, “My pleasure, sir.”

“Well, I suppose that pretty neatly outlines our options where the HSGs go, doesn’t it? Go ahead and set up a meeting with the cabinet heads for tomorrow morning. If we’re only going to get to send out one or two messages, then we’re going to need to make sure they’re as comprehensive as we can, aren’t we?”

“Yes, sir; right away, sir!” The mare bowed her head slightly before turning and flitting out of the room to go and perform her assigned tasks.

The moment she was gone, the smile of Stellar Nova’s face vanished, leaving behind a rather annoyed-looking stallion. He reached out to the terminal on his desk and tapped out a short sequence which would seal the door and leave a notice that he wasn’t to be disturbed for any reason. Once that was accomplished, he turned his attention to the desk’s lower drawer. A green flash of flame left a changeling mare where the unicorn stallion had been sitting only a moment ago. A pocked hoof placed itself against the tactile scanner on the drawer which no non-changeling hoof would have been able to open.

After a few moments, the panel let out a pleasant chime and the drawer slid open. Within was a small communicator which immediately powered itself on upon being revealed. A few seconds later, an annoyed baritone voice could be heard from the device’s speaker, “What’s the problem?”

It was a fair opening statement, as Limerick―the true name of the changeling who merely masqueraded as Stellar Nova―had been very specifically instructed only to use this device when she perceived that there was a problem which needed ‘outside help’ to address, “The problem is that my aide is a little too good at her job, and that one of your agents is a little too cooperative when answering questions,” the changeling growled.

“What do you mean?”

“How many more spare transmitters does your array have? Is it four or five?” The mare asked acidly. The silence greeting her query was all the answer that she needed, “Now ask yourself why I know that. Because it’s not anything that you’ve briefed me on!”

“...I see,” To his credit, the ‘ling on the other end of the line sounded at least a little concerned. After all, if information like that had made it into the hooves of a non-changeling, what other sensitive information might have also leaked out which ComSpark would find ‘embarrassing’ if it became public knowledge? The telecom was already in enough hot water as it was thanks to the ongoing blackout, “Do you want her removed or replaced?”

“Replacing her raises fewer questions,” Limerick said, “I’ll forward over her latest personnel file so you can brief the agent. It’s not anything that needs to happen immediately,” the changeling mare admitted with a sigh, “So let’s put a one month countdown on it. Plenty of time to get the replacement up to speed.”

“Understood. Find out who spoke with her. Looks like we need to ‘replace’ some of our own personnel too.”

Limerick completely understood the annoyance in the other ‘ling’s voice. After all, thanks to the downed HSG arrays, it meant that getting replacement personnel from Equus was going to take much longer than usual. Perhaps many months. That meant that they didn’t have nearly as much wiggle room where agent attrition was concerned as they usually did. However, any agent suffering from a case of ‘loose lips’ was simply too serious of a liability to make an exception for.

“Will do.”

“While I’ve got you on the line,” her changeling handler continued, much to Limerick’s intrigue, “We received a message via HyperSpark an hour ago,” That got her attention. It didn’t sound like the other ‘ling’ was about to reveal that the communications issue had been solved, but if some other world was sending out HSG traffic at the cost of their own limited stock of replacement parts, then this was surely something quite important.

“It contained a message for you. From General Charon.”

Limerick’s eyes widened in unreserved shock. One of Her Majesty’s senior military commanders was sending her a message? That was rather concerning. After all, the changeling could conceive of only a very short list of reasons that a ‘ling like Charon might have for sending her a message. Clearly it was because she needed ‘Stellar Nova’―or more likely the whole League―to do something for their queen. Given the content of the message that had played right before the HSGs went offline, Limerick found herself more than a little concerned.

It had been immediately obvious to every changeling that it hadn’t really been Queen Chrysalis posing as Twilight Sparkle who had sent that message. After all, ComSpark clearly wasn’t behind the blackout! So the most logical answer was that it had been the real alicorn princess in that video, and who had a hoof in whatever sabotage had been perpetrated. The goal on that front had quite clearly been to turn public opinion against ComSpark―a goal which had more or less succeeded, given that the telecom was most definitely not well regarded by the public at this precise moment.

It would have been practically impossible for ComSpark to deny the authenticity of the message of course. After all, no amount of technical or magical analysis would have been able to detect even the slightest hint of adulteration of the video. It wasn’t a case of somepony pretending to be ‘Queen Twilight’, because it had actually been Twilight! So, unless ComSpark wanted to come out and admit that the Queen Twilight in charge of their organization was the fraud, they had been pretty effectively backed into a corner on that front and were forced to more or less ‘acknowledge’ that the ultimatum was genuine.

Limerick was skeptical as to how likely it was that the leaders of the Great Houses would bow to such a demand. Of course, even if they did, there was no way that ComSpark would be able to make good on ‘their’ bargain and restore the HyperSpark Generators back to full operation. So, even in that case, it would only be a matter of time before the Successor States declared that ComSpark had reneged on their promise and revolted against them anyway. From where she was sitting, it was hard to see how ComSpark could come out on top.

Perhaps General Charon was relaying Her Majesty’s plan in that regard?

“Please send it to my terminal,” the changeling mare said.

There was a brief pause, followed soon by, “Done. I’ll arrange for your replacement assistant, and button up some lips around here. Signing off.”

The channel closed and Limerick sequestered the hidden communicator once more. She accessed her terminal and pulled up the message which General Charon had flagged for her to look over. It was individually encrypted. Not a completely unheard of security measure for most creatures transmitting potentially sensitive documents across the galaxy, of course. Not generally anyway. It was different when changelings did it though.

Strictly speaking, all communications transmitted by a ComSpark HyperSpark Generator were encrypted, as a part of the service they provided for their customers. Since all transmissions sent over HSG were essentially broadcast ‘in the open’ at the destination, anyone with a radio could hypothetically ‘intercept’ the message traffic. So ComSpark hid everything in the whole transmission package behind a layer of encryption for which only ComSpark held the key―and had agents in place who would be the first to know if a Great House got it into their heads to try and work out a decryption key of their own. ComSpark would then decrypt the package on their own systems and relay the assorted message traffic contained within to the intended recipient.

Within those packages might be other, further encrypted, files, done so on the client’s end. ComSpark, as a rule, would keep copies for decryption later―since the various changeling agents they had peppered throughout the Harmony Sphere ensured they also knew what everycreature else’s security protocols were. This was what allowed the changelings to always be one step ahead of all of the events going on in the Sphere and ensure they could maneuver the outcomes to suit Her Majesty’s plan for the galaxy.

Of course, this meant that there was little point―generally―in an internal message going from one changeling to another being individually encrypted. After all, it was already held behind a layer of ComSpark’s ‘unbreakable’ encryption by virtue of being transmitted via HSG. Which wasn’t to say such things never happened. However, they did only happen when the information being sent was intended to be highly compartmentalized for the sake of security. This was usually done for messages regarding only the most serious of high-level operations.

Limerick’s directive regarding her assuming the identity of Stellar Nova had been one such example. A high-profile operation undertaken as a last ditch effort to avert Moonlight Radiance from upsetting the very carefully maintained homeostasis of the Harmony Sphere. A rare operation for which not even the slightest little hint could be allowed to slip out that Stellar Nova wasn’t who he claimed to be. Such operations were few and far between. Maybe even once-in-a-lifetime missions for some agents.

Which meant that it was highly unusual that Limerick would be brought in on two such operations within the same year. As she read over the message, it became quite clear to the changeling as to why this had been double-encrypted. Limerick felt herself growing extremely concerned as she pushed through the contents of General Charon’s message. Halfway through, the mare found herself having to stop and push herself away from the terminal, staring blankly at the screen.

For several long minutes, the changeling mare found herself wrestling with a deep-seated conflict deep within herself. Her initial instinct was to stop reading, reseal the message, and just delete it. After all, if it got out to any’ling, Limerick knew that she’d be fortunate to receive only a moderately excruciating execution. Perhaps sending this immediately over to her contacts in ComSpark would see her life spared? Of course, there would be inevitable questions as to why Charon would have ever sent her a message as damning as this one unless the general hadn’t already felt confident that Limerick would go along with the contained plan.

She’d never even met the general before in her life, of course, and knew her only through position and reputation. That fact was unlikely to save her though. Not if Her Majesty learned of what was contained in this missive. A lot of heads would roll…

...If Chrysalis found out, at least. What the queen didn’t know wouldn't get Limerick’s limbs plucked off like daisy petals!

Did not telling any’ling else about the message mean that she was actually going to go along with the plan though?

...Limerick didn’t have an immediate answer to that question. Which scared her. Did that mean that she was actually considering it?!

...Was that an answer in and of itself?

Besides, it was pretty clear that Charon was going to go through with everything on her end. Given what little seemed to be expected of Limerick, silence on her part would be tantamount to ‘agreement’, given that the general was unlikely to fail in her intended action as long as she wasn’t discovered...or executed during a mutiny. Of course, if the general was including Limerick and the Our Worlds League in her plans, then that insinuated that at least a few of her senior officers supported the course of action she was proposing.

That thought made Limerick even more nervous for some reason. How deeply did General Charon’s support really run? Again, the mare conceded that she likely had something of an answer given her own thoughts on the matter at this very moment. The fact that she wasn’t already forwarding this message to ComSpark seemed to be pretty telling.

…

Limerick let out a deep breath to soothe her nerves and resumed reading the rest of General Charon’s message. All the while reassuring herself that it wasn’t technically ‘treason’ if it was actually in the best interests of all changelings!

Even if Her Majesty might interpret things differently...

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 43: By Temptation and by War

The airlock’s inner door hissed open, revealing the pair of occupants who had elected to disembark from the small shuttle craft. One of them, dressed in the uniform of one of Her Majesty’s commanding generals, spent her first few moments eying the miniscule reception gathered in the corridor. Given General Charon’s rank and status within the ComGuard, such an underwhelming welcoming party would have been viewed as an intentional insult. Under most circumstances anyway. However, in this particular instance, it was the general herself who had specified that only a singular changeling was to meet her when she boarded the dreadnought.

This was, after all, to be one of those ‘unofficial’ visits for which no record would be maintained. Too many senior officers being absent from their posts simultaneously in order to attend a formal reception would have been noticed, and Charon didn’t want to be noticed. After all, she technically had no business even being in this star system, let alone this WarShip. If word reached the wrong ears that she was here, it could cause problems for her, as it could lead to questions being asked for which the general didn’t have acceptable answers.

The young midshipmare who received Charon snapped off a quick salute. It was obvious to the senior ranking empath that the other changeling was more than a little surprised at seeing the rank of the officer that she had been sent to meet, but her professionalism was such that she gave no outward reaction and very quickly tamped down on the emotional response which had slipped out. General Charon returned the salute, suppressing her own amused smile. She considered it a good sign that Admiral Gossamer had told his crew as little as possible about the general’s arrival.

“If you’ll follow me, ma’am?” the midshipmare said, gesturing towards the ship’s bow. Charon nodded, saying nothing, and she and her aide fell into step behind them. The trio marched in silence, the clicks of their booted hooves the only sound echoing through the corridor. There wasn’t even a sign of any other member of the ship’s crew. A screen mounted into the bulkhead displayed an announcement that a mandatory training seminar was being held in one of the hangar bays. That certainly explained why they hadn’t happened by any’ling walking through the corridors, Charon supposed.

The general and her attendant were brought to a door labeled as leading to the admiral’s suite. The midshipmare escorting them, without saying a word, paused long enough to ensure that her charges recognized that they’d reached their destination and then touched the small control pad mounted next to the door. It opened a moment later.

Within was an older changeling stallion dressed in the uniform of a senior fleet admiral. The aged changeling looked first at Charon before noting the other ‘ling with her. The hint of a scowl tugged at his lips before his veridian eyes darted to the midshipmare, “I was under the impression that the captain had made it clear that all hooves were to be at his seminar in Hangar Two?” He growled at the young mare, whose features blanched in confusion, “This sort of irresponsible tardiness is unbecoming of an officer, Miss Gerridae. I’ll see to it that Commander Blithe is made aware of it so that you may be appropriately reprimanded for being absent from a mandatory assembly without having a proper excuse.

“Dismissed!”

The changeling mare blanched, her mouth working soundless for several moments as she tried to process how she could possibly have been in violation of her directives while―presumably―doing exactly what the admiral had ordered her to do! Charon once more found herself suppressing a smile as she felt like she was watching a younger version of herself; recalling exactly how she had felt when blindsided by her first encounter with ‘things that didn’t happen’. She’d been given a week of extra duty in the kitchens for ‘abandoning her post’; and most decidedly not for leaving as ordered so that her captain and a visiting intelligence agent could have a discussion inside the armory she was guarding.

A few weeks later, after the monthly sensitive items inspection was conducted, and it came up a grenade short, she’d been demoted; as it was ruled that the only time the grenade could have gone missing was during her ‘inexcusable absence’.

This midshipmare should consider herself lucky for getting such a relatively benign punishment, General Charon thought to herself.

After a couple seconds, the younger officer seemed to finally grasp what was going on, and why it was going to be this way. If General Charon ‘wasn’t here’, then that meant that she hadn’t needed to be escorted from the airlock to the admiral’s quarters. If there wasn’t anypony for the midshipmare to escort, then what duty could the admiral have possibly had for her that would have kept her from being on time to the meeting every other member of the crew was currently at? Ergo: She was absent without an excuse.

“...Sorry, sir; it won’t happen again, sir.”

The midshipmare didn’t quite snarl as she galloped in the direction of the hangar. The door sealed behind her. The admiral snorted but seemed otherwise satisfied with how the younger officer had handled things. He still seemed to be unhappy with Charon though.

“Now suppose you finally tell me what exactly it is that you’re ‘not’ doing here, general?”

“How many of your WarShips are equipped with reserve jump batteries?”

Admiral Gossamer’s eyes widened in mild surprise at the question, briefly caught off his guard by the perceived non sequitur. At first, it seemed like the fleet commander wasn’t going to supply an answer either, if only to demonstrate their annoyance at having their own question dodged. However, the admiral proved to be far too intrigued by the unexpected nature of the question, and felt compelled to see where it might lead, “...Not many. The technology was relatively new by the time Tirek was defeated and not many of the CLDF’s vessels were retrofitted with them.

“Since that time, there has hardly been any reason for the shipyards in Faust to install them, has there?”

That actually surprised General Charon a little. Her features creased in disappointment, “Why not? I thought they provided a significant advantage?”

“Objectively, that’s true,” the admiral conceded with a nod, “But, as with anything: any potential benefit must be weighed against the investment in cost. Strictly speaking, jump batteries wouldn’t provide any tangible benefit for our ships; thus there has never been anything to justify the cost.”

The stallion chuckled when he saw the other changeling’s look of confusion and humored her by elaborating further, “Our WarShips only make jumps when it’s their turn for regular maintenance and overhauls at the yards. Then they return a month later. Having the ability to make back-to-back jumps wouldn’t help them in any meaningful way,” he pointed out. The stallion shrugged, “So the yard hooves have never installed them.”

“Hmm,” Charon wouldn’t say that she was happy to hear that news, but she couldn’t exactly say that she was surprised either, now that she’d heard the justification. Though, she did realize that she hadn’t yet received a real answer to her question, “So how many ships currently have them?”

Gossamer thought for a moment, “Maybe twenty? I’ll admit I haven’t looked that closely at the rosters for my squadrons; but I sincerely doubt it’s much more than that, if it even is.”

The general’s frown deepened now. That wasn’t nearly enough. It was probably fair to assume that the fleet in Faust fielded a similarly minute ratio, giving them maybe a dozen vessels with the modification. Three dozen WarShips wouldn’t suffice. She would need more, and so she stated as much, “Demand that all future ships going through maintenance be outfitted with jump batteries.”

“I beg your pardon?” The admiral snorted in amusement, initially taking her statement to be some obscure sort of joke which he hadn’t had the context to ‘get’. When he saw that the general was actually serious, his demeanor changed to one of consternation, “You can’t be serious. Even if I could convince the yard hooves to do it, why would I?”

“As a contingency,” The mare responded simply.

“A ‘contingency’ for what?” Gossamer scoffed.

“Invasion.”

The silence echoing in the admiral’s office was deafening. Both senior officers regarded each other. Charon’s expression was determined. Gossamer’s was flabbergasted, “You must be joking,” he insisted, “Who would invade us?”

“You don’t honestly expect the rest of the Harmony Sphere to simply sit back and allow their economies to crumble into dust as a result of ‘our’ imposed communications blackout, do you?” The general challenged, smirking at the naval officer, “They’ll come for ComSpark eventually.”

The admiral finally recovered from his initial shock and grunted in acknowledgement of the general’s prediction. It was hardly a difficult conclusion to draw, after all. He didn’t seem to be particularly concerned at the prospect though, “Let them come,” he sneered, “Admiral Bulwark will cut their DropShips to ribbons with the ship’s he has onhoof in Faust.

“The Successor States don’t have WarShips.”

“The Dragon Clans do,” Charon countered.

Gossamer paused briefly, considering the point, but he still shook his head, unconvinced of any need for particular concern, “Not as many as we do,” He insisted, “More than are in First Fleet, for sure,” was the only concession the stallion made, “but that’s why my Second Fleet is stationed within reach of Faust: so that―if the need ever arises―we can be there within minutes of receiving a request for reinforcements. Our combined numbers easily outnumber whatever the dragons could have at their disposal.”

“You assume,” General Charon cautioned him. The admiral wasn’t happy about the correction, but didn’t remark on it directly. The fact was that they didn’t have any hard or fast numbers for the Dragon Clans, other than what had been brought in by the four Clans which had already invaded the Sphere. Extrapolating those numbers to the rest of the Clans that they predicted existed beyond the Sphere, Charon anticipated anywhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty WarShips at their disposal. More than what was in Faust, but less than what the ComGuard fleet consisted of in its entirety.

Numbers didn’t mean everything though. Charon suspected that axiom was as true for naval engagements as it was for ground-based battles. It was conceivable that the smaller Clan fleet could destroy both of the changeling groups. Perhaps not without sustaining catastrophic losses of their own, but that would hardly matter if they emerged victorious, would it? ComSpark had no other WarShips, and so any invading fleet who managed to defeat the First and Second would have a clear path to the planet.

At which point everything suddenly became her problem.

She couldn’t allow a single battle in space to decide the ultimate fate of her race. That would be unforgivably negligent on her part. No military leader worthy of her forces went into battle necessarily anticipating defeat; but only a fool didn’t make contingencies for the possibility. Even if it was regarded as a remote one. While Charon certainly expected―and desperately hoped―that Gossamer and Bulwark would be able to effortlessly smash any Clan WarShips brazen enough to make a run on the Faust System…

...She needed to know that there would be something left of the changeling fleets in the event that the fight started to turn against them. The possibility to withdraw their WarShips in order to regroup, repair, and―eventually―retaliate, had to be allowed for. If it wasn’t...and they lost…

Charon refused to accept the extinction of her fellow changelings.

“What do you know, Charon?”

The mare grimaced, “I don’t ‘know’ much,” she reluctantly admitted, “but blacking out your adversary’s communications abilities is ‘Prelude to Invasion 101’,” The mare shared a knowing look with the admiral, and the stallion nodded his agreement of her assessment, “And I strongly suspect that Twilight Sparkle has to have some idea of how many WarShips we could have at our disposal,” Another nod from Gossamer. After all, their fleets had, once upon a time, been her fleets. The alicorn had obviously made contact with the Dragon Clans, so she had to have an idea of how much of the CLDF her dragon comrade had managed to abscond with from the Sphere. Doing that math would hardly be a challenge.

“I find it difficult to conceive that she would initiate an assault on Equus if she didn’t think that there was at least a decent chance of achieving victory,” Charon stated.

“She might have ‘some idea’ about our numbers; but we know exactly how many ships left the Sphere,” Gossamer countered this time, “And we know that they don’t have the numbers to do it, or they would have already,” he pointed out.

“We can’t say for certain why the Clans waited as long as they did,” the general said, “But we do know that we can’t count on them having only the ships they left with. The invasion demonstrated that they have ship classes that we don’t in our fleets. They’ve built at least some additional hulls since leaving.”

Gossamer looked like he’d bitten into something sour at the general mentioning that fact. He had long lamented the fact that ComSpark didn’t have the ability to construct new WarShips of their own. While Faust did feature shipyards capable of building new vessels, some of the essential components had been built at factories located in other star systems. Those factories had not survived the first few rounds of fighting within the Harmony Sphere powers after their queen seized power and maneuvered the galaxy into conflict. Along with those factories, so too had the schematics and technical experience been lost to time within the Sphere.

Even if ComSpark had been able to reverse-engineer the technology and construction involved, there was the matter of the limited resources available on Equus. The Faust System’s singular world did not have the ability to support the construction of massive WarShip fleets on its own, and ComSpark would only be able to justify the importing of so much material resources from the outside without raising some rather pointed questions about why they needed them.

Besides, until recently, they hadn’t thought that there was any reason to bother building additional WarShips. It was certainly too late to start now though.

“Very well,” the admiral said, clearing his throat, “what does any of that have to do with jump batteries on my ships? We don’t need them to jump to Faust to relieve Bulwark.”

The younger changeling officer at her side moved very subtly. With the admiral’s attention focused on Charon, he wouldn’t have noticed it. Neither did the general. However, as she knew perfectly well what instructions she had passed on to her subordinate, the mare was mindful of what he was up to. Charon had known from the outset that her meeting today would be a risky one. So, as a precaution, she had taken certain...assurances. The explosive device tucked into the uniform jacket of her companion would ensure that, if the admiral reacted ‘poorly’ to her plan, that she would at least not be forced to suffer through the tortures that Her Majesty would doubtlessly order be inflicted upon the general for her ‘cowardace’.

“No,” General Charon agreed. She paused, took a breath, and then continued, “...But you will need them if you hope to retreat.”

Another deafening silence gripped the office. Admiral Gossamer stood very still as he regarded the changeling mare, his expression impassive, and his emotions very closely guarded from her senses. As hers were from his.

“...General,” the older stallion began, cautiously, “are you suggesting that I might abandon our queen?”

“Of course not. I am, however, pointing out that jump batteries would be necessary if you desired to withdraw from the Faust System in the event that the battle...ceased to be particularly favorable for our forces.”

Another long pause, “I have sworn an oath to serve Her Majesty, even unto death,” He tilted his head as he regarded her, “You swore such an oath, yourself; did you not...general?”

“I did,” Charon confirmed, “I recall my oath vividly: ‘I swear upon my life that I will serve Queen Chrysalis and her hive for as long as I live.”

The stress that the changeling mare had placed upon those three words, ‘and her hive’, had not been lost on the admiral. He chewed thoughtfully on what the underlying implication was and―for the first time in his life―found himself questioning which of the two were of the greater import. After all, if the whole of the hive was lost, then the implication had to be that their queen had perished along with it. However, the loss of Chrysalis didn’t necessarily mean that all changelings were doomed...did it?

Admiral Gossamer suddenly realized why it was that the general had been so insistent that no subject broached in this meeting be uttered to another. It would certainly not do for the queen to catch wind that her officers were discussing the prospect of being defeated in the Faust System...and how the future of the changeling race might best be served, even if Chrysalis herself did not feature in that future. Her Majesty would almost certainly not entertain any ‘defeatist’ attitudes from her military commanders, or the implication that Equus might be wrested from her grasp.

If Charon was right though, there did exist at least the possibility that they might lose the battle. If that did happen, and if no contingency had been made to get what WarShips they could out of Faust before the Dragon Clan fleet could finish mopping up ComSpark’s forces, then the hive was most assuredly doomed. Meanwhile, if it pulled out when defeat looked likely, and withdrew to another system, there was a chance that a future battle would go in their favor and allow them to ultimately repulse the Clans.

Besides, it wasn’t as though he intended to fight his ships any less fiercely during the battle in Faust, Gossamer reasoned. He was merely being pragmatic about the whole thing, and thinking beyond the outcome of a singular battle. Such was the prerogative of an admiral responsible for winning wars.

The older stallion finally said, “I...see that you do recall your oath. Good,” Gossamer sat back down at his desk, “On further consideration, I suppose it would be...convenient...for my ships to have the flexibility a jump battery could offer,” he added, “I’ll be sure that my captains make the technicians at the yards aware of those benefits when their vessels are next up for servicing.”

Charon breathed an internal sigh of relief, “I’m glad to hear that we agree on that, admiral.”

“You know…” Gossamer said after another brief pause, flashing the general a knowing look, “It occurs to me that the techs at the shipyards haven’t really ever conducted a properly thorough overhaul of our docking collars,” He shrugged, “It’s not like our ships would ever had a reason to use them anyway, after all. When would we ever carry DropShips anywhere?

“Still―as any self-respecting admiral would agree―I feel it is my obligation to ensure that every ship in my fleet is fully capable...in every way. To have less than perfectly functional WarShips at my disposal should Her Majesty have need of them would represent a failure on my part as one of her admirals.

“Wouldn’t you agree, General Charon?”

“Yes, Admiral Gossamer, I would agree wholeheartedly. In your place, I would strive to ensure that Her Majesty’s fleet was composed of WarShips which were as fully capable as was possible. I am certain that Queen Chrysalis desires only the finest WarShips in her service. And our queen deserves to have WarShips which are as fully serviced and outfitted as they can be.”

“I’m glad to see that we...understand...each other, general. I look forward to working with you in the future; should that ever come to pass.

“Is there anything else that you would like for us to ‘not’ discuss?”

“No, admiral; I’ve taken up enough of your valuable time. I’ll see myself out.”

As General Charon and her aide―who was grateful that he didn’t have to blow them all to tartarus after all―turned and left the office, the mare was very careful not to smile. After all, that would have been unseemly of her.

The emotional atmosphere aboard the Zathura was a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension that Slipshod found absolutely delectable. Twilight’s return to the Peregrine System with news that her mission to the League-in-Exile had been a success had come as a great relief to many, assuring them that they would have the support of the vast and powerful Clan WarShip fleets. It had also established something of a quasi-firm timetable for their invasion of Equus. Which was why so many creatures were feeling just a tinge of nervousness:

There was now an effective ‘countdown’ to the final confrontation with ComSpark.

At least in loose terms, anyway. While they knew when the WarShips would be assembled around Lameduck I for their push into the Faust System, it was less certain when they would have sufficient strength of arms on the planetside front of things. Space superiority would only take their attack so far, after all. If they didn’t have enough hooves on the ground to get the job done, there wasn’t much point in showing up anyway.

Unfortunately, while Twilight was able to provide them with the precise number of WarShip hulls and their respective classes that would be participating in the invasion, nopony knew how big of an army they were going to be able to field for the invasion itself. Let alone when they would be arriving.

Taking down the HyperSpark communications network had definitely been something of a double-edged sword. While it meant that it would be nearly impossible for Chrysalis’ galactic network of intelligence gatherers to get word to Equus about the mobilization of forces against her, it had the downside of making it the next best thing to impossible to know how successful the Timberwolf’s Dragoons leader’s were turning out as well. At the moment, much of their planning in the next few months would be undertaken on the assumption that Timberjack hadn’t failed to secure the ground forces that they’d need.

It was going to take a lot of soldiers to carry the day. Equus was a world inhabited by billions of changelings, nearly all of whom could be counted on to take up arms in order to repel an invasion in defense of their queen.

While they wouldn’t need to necessarily fight the whole planet all at once, Slipshod conceded, they would need to land a large enough invasion force on the planet’s surface in order to hold off the changeling hordes while they took Canterlot. A feat that would be made more complicated by the fact that the changeling doubted that the capital city could be assaulted directly. It was simply too well defended against direct orbital insertions, in his opinion. In the early days of Chrysalis’ reign, before she had managed to completely secure the control of the WarShip fleets that Spike had left behind, the changeling queen’s paranoia had driven her to build up Canterlot’s fortifications and defenses in case the rest of the planet’s inhabitants caught on to her deception before she could complete her replacement of them.

On the bright side, most of the rest of Equus wasn’t anywhere near as hardened as Canterlot itself was. By the time the changelings had finished securing the whole planet, Chrysalis had also completed her takeover of the WarShip fleets in orbit. At that point, the only way that any invasion force could make it to the surface was by first fighting their way through those ships, and no other force in the galaxy at that time had anywhere close to the numbers needed to do so. Hardening the planet further against ground invasion had simply become redundant, and a waste of resources, so Chrysalis had ceased to concern herself with the task.

So, while Canterlot itself was nearly impregnable from orbit, and even well-hardened against ground-based assaults, the same was not true for most of the areas nearby. In Slipshod’s opinion, their best bet was to take several of the surrounding strategic locations, dig in against counter-attacks, and then make their moves against the capital city. This would make it difficult for Chrysalis to summon reinforcements while the attackers chipped away at her defenses.

He conceded that it would hardly be easy to hold their own lines against attacks from all sides from the rest of the planet, but they would also hopefully have the benefit of fire support from orbit while the changelings wouldn’t. That would hopefully be enough to keep any attempts from the local forces to push the invaders off the planet from enjoying too much success.

Again, this was all contingent on their side having enough forces to secure the regions surrounding Canterlot and hold the line against counterattacks. Given the size of the area in question, Slipshod doubted that any initial landing force smaller than one million troops would have a hope of doing so, and they would need millions more in orbit ready to land and reinforce any vulnerable positions at a moment’s notice. Even then, that would only support a short-term hold on those positions. If the campaign stretched out longer than a few weeks, they’d need upwards of a hundred million to keep from being repelled.

Assembling a force that size was out of the question though. There just weren’t enough DropShips in the galaxy to move that many soldiers all at once. They’d be pushing it with the millions they were already trying to move. While they would have a couple thousand DropShips at their disposal―assuming Timberjack met with the anticipated level of success that they were expecting―they would have only so many WarShips and JumpShip with which to make the assault on the Faust System. According to the provisional numbers which Spike and Ember had given to Twilight, the Clans would be sending just over two hundred WarShips of various classes and twice as many JumpShips. Between those, they’d be able to move approximately two thousand DropShips at once. Perhaps more, depending on what the Great Houses ended up providing.

Slipshod hadn’t looked at a detailed accounting of what the sizes and classifications of the DropShips they’d have on hoof would be, but if he assumed a healthily-balanced mixture between them, that suggested the possibility that their invasion would consist of approximately three thousand BattleSteeds, fifteen thousand combat vehicles, and the better part of two million infantry in total. For the initial invasion. If they did things right, they could arrange for a second wave around half that size within another couple of weeks to help reinforce the attack.

This was all assuming that Timberjack didn’t come through too; which meant it was possible they’d have double that. Maybe even more. Which would put them just at the cusp of that Slipshod anticipated they’d need to be successful. Those WarShips providing fire support from orbit were certainly going to prove to be critical to the success of the invasion.

At least that was one part of the invasion that they wouldn’t have to worry about. Two hundred WarShips would outnumber the hundred and twenty-four the changelings had in the Faust System by nearly two-to-one odds. With their more advanced weapons and designs, the Clan fleet was sure to enjoy relatively easy success on that front, at least.

The ground battle would be tougher though, since the technological edge on that front was nearly non-existent. ComSpark had retained most of the advanced weaponry of the old Celestia League Defense Force, and had even improved on some of the older designs much like the Dragon Clans had. Which was to say nothing of the new BattleSteed designs that changelings had developed as well, which would seriously outclass most Harmony Sphere chassis of equal tonnage.

No, the fight wouldn’t be an easy one. Not impossible―Slipshod didn’t think anyway―but certainly not easy. A lot of creatures weren’t going to be coming back from the surface of Equus. A fact that was hardly far from the minds of the mercenary crew of the Zathura. Likely one that would have weighed far more heavily on their thoughts and brought down the mood of the crew had it not been for one other thing that the purple alicorn had brought back with her from the League-in-Exile:

Letters from their families.

It turned out that, in the intervening time between their ship leaving Clan space for the purpose of restoring Victoria Blueblood to her throne in the Pony Commonwealth, and their breaking ties with the League-in-Exile after the invasion undertaken by the Dragon Clans, the League-in-Exile had made good on their promise to seek out and evacuate the families of the Zathura’s crew. It had taken many―many―months, but those families were safely out of the Harmony Sphere and out of reach of the changelings. Upon learning this, Twilight had approached them and asked them for letters for the crew, which she had delivered just the other day when the Maelstrom returned to Peregrine via Havoc.

The mood of the crew had skyrocketed after that. For nearly all of them, it was the first that they’d heard from their families in the better part of a year. The news that their loved ones were safe and alive was a huge weight off of their shoulders.

This wasn’t the case for everycreature, of course. Slipshod and Squelch were two examples of creatures who had no family from which they could have heard. They were distinctly in the minority though; and Slipshod’s was a rather unique situation besides. By and large, the crew of the Zathura had each received letters from multiple family members, and more than a few had reported composing replies in case the opportunity arose where they could be sent back to League-in-Exile space. The changeling doubted how likely that was, but he wasn’t going to rule it out. They had months yet to go before the invasion would kick off, and a trip to the Clans and back would take only a few weeks using the Disciple flagship’s unique ‘chaos drive’.

Slipshod felt it was a shame that there was only a singular vessel capable of traveling like the Maelstrom, and had once inquired of Twilight Sparkle what it was that had made the WarShip’s jump drive capable of reaching pocket dimensions like Havoc. Much to his own surprise, the purple alicorn had admitted that even she didn’t know how the feat was accomplished. The Maelstrom had, apparently, been equipped with a standard jump drive when it was built, and had only been later modified by Discord himself after it was assigned to him. The draconequus never got around to disclosing the precise nature of the changes that he’d made to the ship. The alicorn was under the impression that it couldn’t have been anything too drastic, however, because from what she had been able to see, the Maelstrom’s chaos drive was otherwise indistinguishable from a standard jump drive.

“Teams of the best thaumaturgical engineers the Celestia League ever produced tried for literal centuries to replicate what his ship could do,” the purple mare had groused beneath a deflating sigh when pressed by the changeling, “but never managed to pull it off.

“She really is one of a kind.”

It was certainly frustrating to have only a single WarShip at their disposal with such an undeniably advantageous drive system; since it rendered the benefit the Maelstrom provided almost meaningless under the current circumstances outside of a few niche areas. With the entire HyperSpark communications network down, physical couriers jumping across the Harmony Sphere was the only way to propagate message traffic. It was a task which could take the better part of a year to get a message from one side of the Sphere to the other, where the HSG circuit could have done so in a little under a month―depending on how much the sender had been willing to pay for priority transmission privileges.

A fully charged and ready Maelstrom could cross those thousand lightyears in less than an hour. A hundred times faster than even the most costly and highest priority HyperSpark traffic speeds. Slipshod knew that the secret secondary network reserved exclusively for changeling intelligence would have taken nearly a week to cross that distance. A fleet of courier vessels with the Disciple flagship’s drive would have revolutionized communications in the galaxy. Meanwhile, a single ship limited them to getting only one important message to one location about once a month. And it was contingent on them knowing where the recipient of that message was going to be before they departed.

Which was nearly impossible to do when working off of months old information.

For example: it would be of a tremendous benefit to make contact with Timberjack and learn of his progress. However, there was simply no way of knowing where in the galaxy the earth pony was at the moment. He’d been sent to the capital of the Hippogriff Combine, but that had been months ago, and it would honestly be a bad sign if it turned out that he was still trying to get the hippogriffs to come around to the idea of invading Equus.

Not that the Maelstrom was useless, of course. Indeed, the WarShip was very good to have on hoof. Its utility was simply limited. Right now, for example, it was going to prove itself to be of great benefit in cutting down the travel time for their forces training up outside the Sphere proper. Getting to Lameduck from Peregrine would have taken more than six months using conventional travel. Admittedly, a lot of their forces and material were already taking the ‘long way around’. However, a portion―the Zathura among them―were going to be able to use the ‘shortcut’ through Havoc.

Which was why the crew was currently going about packing the Zathura full of as much warfighting material as they could cram into her, leaving the vessel a hive of activity. Slipshod himself was just coming off of his own shift helping to move cargo crates into the ‘Steed Bay. While not normally something that a BattleSteed pilot would have been drafted to do, his changeling abilities had allowed him to provide a much more significant contribution to the effort than most other creatures might have managed. A Great Dragon the size of a heavy BattleSteed could lift and transport cargo containers a lot more quickly and efficiently than the standard mechanical loader it turned out.

Slipshod was on his way back to his and Squelch’s quarters when he was stopped in his tracks by the sensation of a rather pronounced drop in the overall emotional environment nearby. Curious, the changeling stallion began to empathically ‘sniff’ around to see if he could hone in on the source of the disturbance. It seemed odd to him that, when so many aboard the DropShip were in the throes of an unprecedented boost in morale thanks to the mail that Twilight delivered, there would be somecreature experiencing such deep depression.

It didn’t take him long to sleuth out that those darker feelings were coming from Blood Chit’s cabin.

As an empath, Slipshod generally went about his day with some provisional mental walls put up in his head, just so that he wasn’t being constantly bombarded with everypony’s passing thought and mood. Leaving oneself completely open was a good way for a changeling to get a headache from the utter cacophony of thoughts being put out by a whole ship full of ponies.

These mental barriers meant that Slipshod was usually only privy to the emotional states of creatures that he paid specific attention to in the moment. Only the most potent and extreme of emotions were capable of overflowing those walls and making themselves plainly felt by the changeling.

However, right now, Slipshod had no trouble sensing the utter sorrow and despair wafting out of Blood Chit’s cabin. He reinforced his mental walls to further dull those depression sensations and emotionally prepared himself to find the other stallion in a ‘less-than amiable’ state.

He touched the alert by the door, “Chit? Everything okay in there?”

A brief spike of surprise, which flowed into suspicion before finally settling into resignation. The pegasus security and recovery head had obviously not been anticipating receiving any company. A moment later, the changeling received a response through the small speaker mounted by the door, “I’m fine, Slip.”

Slipshod tried not to roll his eyes, he really did, “You do remember I’m an empath, right?” His prompt led to a mildly amusing mixture of annoyance, embarrassment, and a tinge of incredulity wafting out from the door. In fairness, it was the changeling’s experience that most creatures didn’t appreciate their thoughts being ‘spied on’. Generally, Slipshod made a conscious effort to keep himself from reading the emotions of others using his mental barriers. However, in the cases of extreme emotional distress like this, the stallion felt that he could hardly be held liable for effectively ‘overhearing’ the emotional states that they were metaphorically ‘screaming’ at the top of their mental lungs.

Squelch never accused anypony of ‘eavesdropping’ on what she was saying when they happened to overhear her loudly coursing about something while they were trotting down the corridor, after all.

Several seconds later, the door opened. Despite having fully expected to see the crimson pegasus stallion who resided in the cabin, Slipshod was still visibly taken aback and surprised by what he saw. He’d known the flier for years. The two of them had spent a considerable amount of time together, and even forged a robust friendship―even if it had initially been under false pretenses. Yet, in all that time, Slipshod could not ever recall seeing the pegasus looking anywhere near as haggard as he did at this moment.

Despite the assurances earlier, even a non-empath would have been able to deduce that Blood Chit was not, in fact, ‘fine’.

“What’s wrong?”

The changeling was forced to wince away as another powerful waive of grief and loss assaulted him. Slipshod threw up much more substantial mental barriers now in an effort to mitigate the worst of the sensations he was feeling from the other stallion. Blood Chit saw the effect that his sudden burst of feelings had had on his friend and immediately felt even worse as a result, nearly precipitating in a perpetuating cycle of misery. For his own sanity and sensibilities, Slipshod quickly ushered the pegasus back into his cabin and guided him towards his cot.

Only when the crimson stallion was seated on the mattress, and the changeling had a moment to gather himself and recover from that latest unpleasant wave of misery, did he have a moment to spare to look at his surroundings. While it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Blood Chit’s cabin had ever been the shiny gold standard of ‘cleanliness’, the changeling would never have used a word like ‘messy’ to describe it either.

It was messy now though.

That ‘mess’ also seemed to be built around a central theme, Slipshod noticed. Specifically involving pictures which prominently featured a large golden earth pony stallion with brilliant green eyes, a strawberry-blond mane, and round cheeks dotted with freckles. Many of the photos in question depicted the earth pony in the company of a familiar scarlet pegasus. Both always looked to be quite happy in the moment. While the changeling was incapable of sensing emotions from an image directly, he was a practiced hoof at reading faces; and the love for each other that those two stallions felt was plainly evident on their faces.

Slipshod didn’t consider himself to be a ‘master detective’; but one hardly needed to be Sherclop Hooves to make the connection between the central theme of the photos spread out around Blood Chit’s room, the flier’s sudden affliction of deep-rooted grief, and the recent news regarding the status of the wellbeing of the crew’s families.

“...The Disciples said that, when their agents got to the apartment, neighbors said some ponies with the ‘Dobson Security Authority’ had come by just a few days earlier asking about Chanterelle, and that they hadn’t seen him since,” Blood Chit offered, his word monotone and husky with grief. He started shaking his head, “The thing is, the DSA isn’t really an investigative agency,” He explained, “They don’t come by and question ponies. Not really. Not directly, anyway. They’re more of an...oversight bureau than anything.”

Blood Chit was silent for several seconds. Then, “The Disciples said it was most likely ComSpark that took him,” He looked up at Slipshod now, his eyes searching the changeling’s―almost fearfully―for confirmation of the theory. The ‘Steed pilot could only nod in agreement. That was almost certainly what had happened: changeling agents had discovered the earth pony’s connection to the crew of the Zathura and had brought him in to squeeze whatever information they could out of him.

Best case scenario, ComSpark had killed him outright when they either got what they wanted or determined Chanterelle didn’t know anything useful. Worst case...they tortured him for a few weeks to make absolutely certain that he wasn’t holding anything back. After which they’d probably have husked him. In either event, Slipshod laid even odds that an agent had been tapped to assume the earth pony’s identity in case Blood Chit tried to reach out to him.

“I’ve been writing him letters,” The pegasus flicked a limp pinion in the direction of his personal terminal, “Every couple of days I write a new one,” His voice was trembling, as though the stallion was just a breath away from breaking down all over again, “I haven’t been able to send any of them, of course. I just...I wanted to make sure everything was fresh in my mind. What we did, how I was feeling, how much I missed him…

“How I couldn’t wait for all of this to be over so that I could see him again―”

That was that last crack that broke the dam. The crimson flier’s words were abruptly cut off as his body was wracked by stifled sobs. He was fighting to hold them back, to keep himself composed; but it was clearly a futile effort. The sorrow and loss buffeted Slipshod like a windstorm. The changeling felt like he was having to brace himself and lean into the onslaught of bitter sadness in order to keep from being blown away by it. The changelings weathered the deluge though. This was hardly the time to bail on a friend who was obviously in need.

Slipshod sat down on the cot next to the pegasus and lay his foreleg over the convulsing stallion’s shoulders. As though on instinct, the flier leaned into the changeling, “It’s all my fault!” He wailed, “I shouldn’t have left,” Blood Chit insisted, “I should have taken up a job planetside. That way none of this would have happened”

Well, it looked like the flier was well into the ‘Bargaining’ phase of grief, the changeling deduced. Considering all of that grief balled up inside of him, it wouldn’t be long before Blood Chit moved on to ‘Depression’. With a little bit of effort on his part, Slipshod was confident that he could help his friend skip right over that unpleasantness and move right on to accepting the loss of his coltfriends and be all better. The key was getting rid of all of those negative emotions. While it would be a little unpleasant, it wouldn’t present any sort of real challenge for the changeling.

Slipshod began to siphon off the flier’s grief into himself, “You’re too smart for that kind of talk, Chit. You couldn’t possibly have known about who and what ComSpark really was,” the changeling pointed out. Drawing on those negative emotions was like swallowing bile, but he pressed forward. His friend needed help.

“But if I hadn’t left―”

“Then Maybe Chanterelle would still be alive,” Slipshod acknowledged, suppressing a disgusted shudder as he took more of Blood Chit’s grief into himself, “But I bet Twilight and I would be dead. Maybe even the whole crew,” The pegasus flashed him a dubious look, “Remember PEA...wherever? When the ship had to do a quick grab at a hot LZ? Like, volcano-spitting-lava hot?

“You and I both know that seconds count in a situation like that. Any other team that hadn’t been so mercilessly drilled by you might have taken twice as long,” Slipshod wasn’t even exaggerating this point. He was quite familiar with how long a BattleSteed recovery operation like that could take. The gold-standard that was taught in the academy was sixty seconds. While it might not have sounded like much, it was a lot of time to be in the crossfire of an encircling enemy.

Blood Chit’s team had done it in less than thirty. Yet, that had still been long enough for the DropShip to sustain several hits that punctured the hull and even destroyed a gun turret, killing its crew. Another thirty seconds of that level of heavy fire could have easily gotten the DropShip destroyed, killing everycreature onboard―including Twilight―and ending this whole adventure before it had really even had a chance to begin.

“I’m not saying that us dying if you hadn’t been here would be your fault,” The changeling amended hastily. He then paused to swallow back a wave of nausea before continuing, waving away a concerned look from the pegasus, “I’m just saying that we can’t know ahead of time how what we choose to do will affect the lives of others.

“You want to sit there and blame yourself for getting Chanterelle killed because you left? What about me? I’m the one who convinced Squelch to keep Twilight on the ship and get us tangled up in this whole thing,” Slipshod pointed out, “If Squelch had turned her over to the authorities on Canis like she wanted to, maybe none of this would have happened.

“Or what about Valkyrie? She was the one who tweaked the sensors on the ship, which was how we found Twilight’s ship in the first place. Or me again: If I hadn’t pissed Dominus off by fucking his wife, we wouldn’t have had to avoid those Dragoons because of the bounty on my head.

“If I hadn’t signed on with the Steel Coursers in the first place,” Slipshod continued ruefully, offering another alternative future to the pegasus, “None of this would have happened if I’d just rolled over and let myself starve to death like I was supposed to,” he spat out with a sneer directed at his former queen.

“I could have been a good little drone and just shot myself in the head the moment I stepped hoof on Simeron. Fulfilled my mission and made the lives of everycreature I know better,” The changeling all but snarled the last little bit, furious with himself for the misery that he’d brought to those he cared about, “Wouldn’t have broken Squelch’s heart. Val would still be alive because I didn’t fill her head with vapid drivel. All those ponies who died on Colton, because I came up with that stupid mission…

“The Clan invasions…”

“How many creatures are dead because I’m alive?” Slipshod asked hollowly, looking at his friend.

Blood Chit wasn’t looking in his direction though. Rather, the crimson pegasus was massaging his temple, a wry smirk on his face as he nodded, “Yeah, yeah, I get the point: The galaxy is a complicated place and we can’t keep second-guessing every little thing we do,” he sighed, “Shanty wouldn’t want me wallowing mike this either,” Something that was almost a chuckle escaped the flier, “Fuck, he’d wallop me good if he saw me blubbering like this; hating myself.

“He’d be the first one to tell me it’s not my fault,” Blood Chit agreed. He reached down and scooped up one of the photos featuring the pair of them as a happy couple and held it close in his pinions, “The last thing he’d want was for me to hate myself like this,” His smile was more genuine now, “Thanks, Slip; I―”

The pegasus’ words caught in his throat as he finally turned back to the changeling, and only now saw the haunted expression on the despairing stallion’s chitinous features, “...Are you okay? Slipshod?”

Millions were dead because of his actions; and there were still millions more bodies to add to the butcher’s bill in the coming months. The extermination of his whole race was another atrocity waiting in the wings that would be staining his hooves in the fullness of time. Valkyrie, the assault team, the victims of the Clan invasions, all of that blood was on his hooves, nopony else’s. All because he was too selfish to let his singular life end when it should have. His refusal to do what would have been best for the galaxy and die had brought nothing but death and misery to the Sphere.

This whole galaxy would have been better off if he’d just flung himself out of an airlock when he was supposed to―

Slipshod’s whole body jerked with a start. He turned to see that a scarlet wing had been placed on his withers. For a few moments, the changeling couldn’t grasp who it was that was touching him, or why they would be. After all, who would want to dirty themselves by making physical contact with a loathsome wretch like himself? A monster to be detested and erased from existence; the best course of action to benefit the Sphere―

Again the changeling shook himself. In a moment of fleeting clarity, the stallion threw up internal mental walls around the roiling ball of guilt that he’d excised from Blood Chit only a minute ago. The thoughts it prompted were both insidious and intoxicating. Especially for an individual who was as familiar with self-loathing as he was. He needed to be careful, lest his psyche be overwhelmed with those thoughts. He still wasn’t entirely over his own insecurities, if the changeling was being honest with himself.

He finally became aware that somepony was talking to him, and recognized the concern in the nearby pegasus, “I’m fine,” Slipshod lied, cultivating a sincere-looking smile, “And I’m glad that you’re feeling better.”

Blood Chit narrowed his eyes slightly at the changeling, initially seeming to be unconvinced; but he could no longer identify anything amiss about his friend’s behavior, “You’re sure? You looked kind of―”

“Just some indigestion,” Slipshod waved away the concern, still smiling broadly at the flier, “Ate a risky oat cake. Probably going to end up destroying Squelch’s commode later,” the changeling winked at the other stallion and chuckled.

“I’m glad you’re doing better though,” Slipshod stood up suddenly enough that it surprised the pegasus, who still looked a little puzzled about the whole thing, “I have somewhere to be; we’ll catch up later!” Before the crimson stallion could say another word, the changeling was walking briskly out the door, his face still the perfect image of contentment.

It was a visage that melted away almost instantly the moment he was in the corridor and heard the door seal behind him. The changeling stumbled and leaned against the bulkhead for support, gasping and sweating with the effort necessary to keep the emotions he’d stolen in check. Dealing with his own lingering self-loathing had been bad enough without compounding the problem by taking on Blood Chit’s burden. However, he was a changeling. If anycreature knew how to compartmentalize and deal with emotions―even the toxic ones―it was him.

Besides, it had been the most expedient way to help his friend. It was worth feeling like he had intestinal cramps to see Blood Chit get over the death of his coltfriend like that.

Slipshod spent a few more seconds letting out deep breaths as he worked to steel himself against the worst of those dark thoughts threatening to overtake him again. If he could keep focus for long enough, he should be able to devour the guilt and finally eradicate it. Truth be told, the changeling wasn’t particularly looking forward to the prospect. It was going to be synonymous to a normal pony eating a saddlebag...that had been seasoned with rotting rat corpses.

The changeling shuddered as another wave of nausea coursed through him, prompting him to gag and dry heave several times. Somehow, despite not having actually eaten anything, Slipshod had a rather foul taste in his mouth. Almost certainly psychosomatic―a not uncommon problem with empaths, to be sure―but the changeling felt compelled to find some way to replace that sensation with something far more pleasant nonetheless. Bracing himself as best he could, Slipshod stumbled his way towards the ship’s cafeteria. He needed a pot of Cookie’s strongest coffee. To start with anyway.

His arrival in the DropShip’s dining hall didn’t go unnoticed, much to the changeling’s chagrin. Perhaps even worse was the fact that Squelch was one of the ponies who saw him. She had apparently been conversing with Xanadu and Mig over dinner. All three paused their conversation to look at him.

When she saw Slipshod stumble into the cafeteria, the sage green unicorn mare rose to her hooves, her face a mask of concern, “Slip? Are you okay?”

The stallion waved off her concern, shaking his head, “Just a stomach thing. Here for some coffee,” He hastened his gait to the carafe and briefly thought about pouring a mug for himself before thinking better of it and just absconding with the whole container. The changeling shifted into a dragon in order to obtain a more favorable tolerance for heat and grabbed up the carafe with a clawed hand and tossed the contents down his gullet. He paused only long enough to swirl the vile bitter drought―Cookie made strong coffee, not ‘good’ coffee―around in his mouth before swallowing it down. On any other day, the overpowering taste of iodine and varnish would have curled his tongue. However, it was like slurping down honey mixed with sugar compared to what it felt like his mouth had been filled with a moment ago.

Slipshod became aware that he was the subject of every pair of eyes in the room. He initially assumed it was because of how he’d inconsiderately monopolized the coffee. The dragon offered up a sheepish smile and shrugged with his free hand, his mouth opening to make a quip regarding his escapades. However, the words he’d selected to add some levity never materialized, as the changeling found that his own attention was very suddenly focused on his own clawed fingers. His very gnarled fingers, covered not in glistening scales, but with patches of sloughing hide and weeping sores.

Wide, surprised eyes, traced their way up from that hand along an equally mangy arm that was attached to a lepric body, “...Oh. That’s...concerning,” he remarked, still in shock.

His first impulse was to shift back into his previous form, but Slipshod fought back against that notion. Another creature might have been forgiven for thinking that the changeling had simply made a ‘mistake’ during his change and wound up with an unsatisfactory shape, much like a distracted unicorn might fumble their telekinesis. However, changeling magic didn’t quite work like that. His kind did not fail to become what they intended to become in that way.

Instead, Slipshod was reminded of a conversation that he’d had with Twilight Sparkle some time ago when the subject of his transition to glittering wings and a pearlescent sheen in his chitin was concerned. The alicorn had advised him that changelings were black with dull wings and pocked limbs, not because it was their ‘natural state’, but because their essence was tainted by the corrupted means by which they obtained the love that they stole from their prey. It was in that way that Slipshod had come to learn that emotions―and the means by which they came to be acquired―could affect changeling magic.

It didn’t strike the changeling as a coincidence that this transformation snafu had occurred only minutes after he’d ‘stolen’ a lot of grief and anguish from Blood Chit.

“I might have fucked up,” Slipshod deduced. If there was a saving grace, it was that the changeling at least didn’t feel nearly as bad as he looked. His gastric issues notwithstanding.

“...Da Fuck happened to you?” Xanadu gaped, wide eyed, at the dragon. Most of the other expressions around the room mirrored the concern audible in the zebra’s question.

“Dietary issue,” Slipshod quipped before beating a hasty retreat, the half-full carafe still in claw.

“SLIP.”

The dragon froze mid-step at the warning note in Squelch’s raised voice. It was an eclectic mixture of a commander exasperated with their wayward subordinate latest transgression, blended in with the resignation of a wife awaiting the fantastical explanation for her husband’s far-from-first―and most assuredly far-from-last―foul-up. It was the sort of vocal inflection that expertly conveyed the unspoken understanding that anything less than a thorough―and completely truthful―explanation would be received...poorly. It also only hinted at the terrible magnitude of the punishment which awaited any who thought to test the unicorn mare’s patience.

A few bystanders made subtle efforts to lean as far as possible from Squelch and Slipshod, lest they end up as collateral damage in the ensuing ‘spat’.

The changeling―briefly―considered his rather scant list of options. He then elected to turn around to face the unicorn mare, flashing her the most charismatic grin he could manage, “Yes, dear?” He asked in what actually sounded like a sincerely innocent tone.

“What...did you do?” The sage mare’s eyes briefly surveyed the decrepit dragon standing in the doorway. Then she added, “And to who?”

“I...helped a friend,” Slipshod assured her, maintaining his affected innocence, “This…” He waved a dismissive claw at the sorry state of his dragon shape, “Is just a small―temporary―side effect,” He assured her, “Nothing to be worried about!” The changeling’s toothy grin lasted all of two seconds before his gut cramped up, both audibly and painfully, eliciting a wince and a hiss from the dragon, “...Maybe,” he amended. Another shudder, “Hopefully…”

Squelch’s expression remained unchanged as she stared down the dragon. Her hoof motioned for Slipshod to come and sit at the table, which the changeling stallion did, with jerky steps as he held his protesting gut. The unicorn mare, aware of the stares of the onlookers, turned her attention to the rest of the room’s diners. She didn’t say anything to them. Her eyes merely conveyed the profound suggestion that their attention was better directed towards their own affairs, rather than hers and Slipshods.

Most creatures decided that they had, in fact, eaten a sufficiently large enough meal and had other places to be. Those who didn’t leave outright diverted their full attention to their meals. Not a word was spoken in idle conversation among them, and not a single head was even facing in the direction of the group of four creatures.

When Squelch was satisfied that they were no longer the overt focus of other eyes and ears, the unicorn―in a much more restrained and quieter tone―once more spoke to Slipshod, “Which emotions; and whose?”

The changeling waited for the latest round of gastrointestinal irritation to pass before hissing out his response, “Grief,” he admitted, “Blood Chit’s. Coltfirend murdered by ComSpark,” he grunted under his breath, wincing at the discomfort inside of him, “He was in a pretty bad way.”

“You...took away a pony’s grief?” the rosie kirin gaped in shock, “You can do that?”

“Changelings can drain emotions,” Slipshod nodded.

“That’s―” Xanadu began, but Squelch cut the zebra off.

“―Reckless and irresponsible,” The mare seethed under her breath, “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“He was in pain!” The dragon protested.

“‘Was’?” Squelch scoffed, “You really think he’s not anymore? He’s over the death of his coltfriend? Just like that? Blood Chit’s completely moved on and will never think about how much he misses his coltfriend ever again, for the rest of his life?”

Admittedly, when the mare put it like that, Slipshod was slightly less confident that his course of action would have the desired effect. Another pang of pain in his gut doubled the dragon over at the table, prompting him to lay his head on its surface as he groaned in pain. He idly wondered if Cravat had any medications that would calm the emotional equivalent of acid reflux? Probably not…

Meanwhile, the sage mare continued to berate him, ignoring his obvious discomfort, “Or...do you think that when he wakes up tomorrow, and thinks about his coltfriend not being around anymore, maybe he’s going to look back on right now, and feel even worse because he’s going to think that he’s a bad pony for not ‘missing him enough’ right now?

“You can’t just go around manipulating how ponies feel, Slip! I thought you understood that?”

“I was just trying to help…”

Squelch let out an exasperated sigh, massaging the bridge of her muzzle with a hoof. It looked like she was tempted to continue deriding the changeling’s irresponsible approach to ‘helping’, but then thought better of it. Whatever the result may have been, it was fairly obvious that there hadn’t been any malicious intent behind what Slipshod had done. He’d encountered a friend in distress and had taken the initiative to assist as best he knew how. That was commendable.

It was merely that his actual approach had been...ill-conceived. The unicorn reconsidered her approach before resuming her critique, “‘Helping’ is fine, Slip,” Squelch continued in a significantly less harsh tone, “But you need to respect the emotional states of other creatures. You can’t just reach in and start...fiddling around in our heads like we’re de-polarized drive coils!” She gestured in the direction of the kirin mechanic.

The engineer raised a tentative hoof, “Um, actually, drive coils aren’t polarized; so they'd never technically become depol―”

“My point is,” the unicorn growled, flashing a brief glare at the kirin and prompting the other mare to stop talking, “that you can't ‘fix’ creatures like that,” Her attention was once more fully on the changeling, “Not quickly, anyway.

“It’s going to take Blood Chit time to make peace with himself. It’ll take all of us time to accept the loss of those who were close to us when it happens. There’s no shortcut that can magically make everything better.

“That’s not how the universe works.”

“Would be nice if it did,” Slipshod murmured, a wan smile on his lips now.

“Tell me about it,” The sage mare was wearing a smirk of her own now too. She sidled up closer to the dragon, placing her hoof on his back in a comforting manner, “It means a lot to me that you wanted to help him. And I get that being a changeling gives you ways to approach situations that other creatures don’t have. But having the ability to do something a specific way doesn’t mean that you need to use it.

“It’s not like Mig goes all fiery whenever she needs to weld something,” The unicorn chuckled as she gestured to the kirin again.

The rosy mare bit her lip briefly before hesitantly saying, “Um...actually, sometimes I’ll―”

“Oh, you are just dead-set on undermining my points today, aren't you?” Squelch shot a feigned scowl at the maned pony. She wasn’t quite so conceited as to not recognize that it was her own fault for making assertions about somepony else without actually knowing for certain whether they were true or not, after all.

“Fine, I admit it: I don’t know a damn thing about what you do or how you do it,” Squelch acknowledged with an exasperated sigh, even while glints of amusement danced in her sapphire eyes, “Happy now?”

Mig snorted, cocking her own wry smile at the unicorn, “I think I might be a little happier if you did understand what I do,” she said, “I mean, how are you supposed to be appropriately impressed by my abilities if you don’t understand how amazing they really are?”

“Well I’m impressed with your abilities!” Xanadu beamed at the kirin. After a beat, the striped stallion winked and added, “And also the things you do with machines and things. What you do with those is impressive too―ow!” The ‘Steed pilot flinched away in exagerated fashion as the mare next to him bapped him playfully on the shoulder with her cloven hoof.

Slipshod perked up slightly, his eyes bouncing between the pair seated opposite him at the table. There was an emotion buried beneath the shared feelings of overall camaraderie that the two held for one another. A sensation that burned a little hotter than mere ‘friendship’. He’d known for some time now that the two equines had become something of an ‘item’. It was rare that the two were far from one another these days. While Slipshod doubted that either of them would deny that it had started out as anything more than some very vigorous ‘stress relief’, it had clearly grown beyond just the physical.

Slipshod was happy for the couple. The dragon raised an intrigued brow, “Well now, when did you two become a real couple?”

Both equines jerked in their seats and stared at Slipshod in surprise. Xanadu stammered out a response first, “I-I wouldn’t say we’re a ‘couple’...” the zebra began, as though not wanting to sound presumptuous. The dragon sensed an internal pang of disappointment from the kirin as he said it though, drawing his attention, “We’re just...y-you know…” His hoof was gesticulating in the air, as though physically grasping for the right words.

“Casual,” Mig supplied in an ever-so-slightly subdued tone, “We just hang out...casually,” This time it was Xanadu who seemed to not be wholly thrilled by the articulated assessment of their relationship by the kirin. Slipshod’s head whipped back towards the zebra this time, a confused look plainly visible on his face. He’d raised his clawed hand and was about to comment, but the unicorn beside him interrupted before he could.

“Slip…” Squelch hissed through her clenched jaw in a warning tone.

“Sorry!” The dragon said defensively, throwing up his claws in mock surrender, “I couldn’t help but sense how they felt about each other and assumed they were an official couple now! How was I supposed to know two ponies who loved each other weren’t ‘together’?!”

Several things happened at once:

His partner and employer face-hoofed.

The zebra and kirin pair’s jaws both went simultaneously slack as they gaped at each other, sputtering in shocked unison, “You lo―?!” “―ve me?!”

A donkey back in the kitchen yelled out, “Who the fuck stole my coffee pot?! Whoever it was is on the ‘special menu’ for a month!”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 44: Imminent Crisis

Two days later the Zathura was floating in Havoc’s pink and purple ethereal void, docked with the Maelstrom as it proceeded through its recharge cycle. Their next stop would be the Lameduck System. While they were here, additional material and supplies would be shuttled aboard from Havoc Station in order to help them to get the various fortresses that had been built on Lameduck I prepared to properly receive their anticipated guests. It had apparently been a few decades since the last visit had been made there by the Timberwolf’s Dragoons, so a decent amount of cleaning up and restocking was expected.

There wasn’t really much that Slipshod specifically was going to be able to do to help while they were in Havoc. At least, not with the supply transfer. Havoc Station’s and Mig’s personnel had that all well in hoof. So, the changeling decided that his time would be better spent laying some of the groundwork for the planning that would be needed regarding the invasion of Equus. Specifically, he was compiling an expansive list of all the planet’s defenses and garrison sizes. At least, what had been present when he’d last been there over three years ago. There was obviously no way that he could be sure it would match up exactly with what was there now, but it would at least give Twilight and the other primary mission planners a firm foundation to build upon when brainstorming their invasion strategy.

The purple alicorn had already passed on a scroll to both Cinder and Spike containing a detailed listing of ComSpark’s WarShip fleet, as compiled by Slipshod. While the changeling had, by no means, been in a position during his tenure on Equus that would have justified his knowing that information, he had managed to get a peak at the plotter on the DropShip that was taking him off planet after graduating from the academy. It hadn’t been for very long, but his natural ability to recall specific details about things he’d seen meant that the changeling was able to extrapolate that data into useful information even now.

Twilight had approached him later after getting a response from Spike. Apparently the dragon had asked for some clarification about the number of occupied slipways at the Royal Shipyards. Slipshod had indicated that he’d never seen any of them empty for a significant amount of time, and the dragon had apparently found that quite puzzling. The changeling stallion wasn’t exactly certain why that would be the case though. He assured Twilight and Spike that there wasn’t any new WarShip construction going on. Being limited to the resources and factories present on Equus, ComSpark didn’t have the capability to construct and properly outfit new hulls for anything larger than a Princess-class DropShip. The shipyard’s slipways were utilized exclusively for performing regular maintenance of the existing fleet, nothing more.

It turned out that that was the specific point which was perplexing Spike the most. According to the dragon, as relayed to Slipshod through Twilight, the number of WarShips that were present in the Faust System should have been adequately supported by less than half of the shipyard’s slipways. So, either the changeling stallion had been woefully off on his estimate of the number of ships in the system―to which Slipshod had reiterated that it had been a count, not an ‘estimate’―or Chrysalis was having her ships overhauled at least twice as often as was necessary for some reason.

Slipshod hadn’t been able to offer the purple dragon any worthwhile explanation for the apparent discrepancy that might have put Spike at ease though. Knowing specific facts, and understanding the significance of those facts, weren’t the same thing. The changeling could only articulate what he’d actually seen going on. If those things existed outside his own narrow focus of expertise―piloting BattleSteeds―then there was very little that he could offer in terms of explanation as to why something might be considered ‘abnormal’ by another creature who did possess a more detailed understanding about the matter.

As far as the changeling knew, the fleet of WarShips guarding Equus had always utilized all of the available slipways for their regular upkeep. If that struck the dragon as excessive, then Slipshod could only suspect that the advanced age of the WarShips in question had to be the cause. Unlike the Clans, ComSpark hadn’t built any new vessels in the intervening centuries. Everything in their armada was over five hundred years old. Perhaps such ancient vessels needed more work done on them than the newer WarShip’s used by the Dragon Clans?

To which Mayhem had pointed out that the Maelstrom was at least as old as every WarShip the changelings had, and it was holding up just fine compared to even the newest designs built by the Dragon Clans. Slipshod could only shrug in response. He had no concrete explanation for the apparent discrepancy.

Twilight had elected to drop the issue, as her own expertise also lay outside of the realm of WarShip operations and logistics. She would leave such matters in the more knowledgeable and capable claws of her number one assistant and his daughter. It would be up to the two of them to decide what the alleged ‘overuse’ of the shipyard’s slipways signified, and how it might impact their invasion plans.

The alicorn chose instead to direct her focus on matters which she did profess some significant level of understanding―and for which Slipshod too was able to explain in more specific detail―such as why the changeling stallion was suddenly looking a lot less ‘shiny’ than had been the case when Twilight had last seen him before leaving for Clan territory.

The tongue-lashing that he’d received from the mare had been almost as bad as the indigestion he’d suffered for the next few days after his efforts to ‘help’ Blood Chit get over his grief.

The berating had been made all the worse by the fact that Squelch had turned out to be quite correct where the consequences of Slipshod’s actions had been concerned. While Blood Chit had indeed been in much higher spirits for the rest of the day, the crimson pegasus had quickly backslid into a much deeper depression the following morning. Specifically for the reason that the sage unicorn had predicted as well: the flier had felt terribly guilty for not feeling ‘sad enough’ the previous day. He’d believed that he'd betrayed his dead coltfriend’s memory by being ‘unmoved’ by the knowledge of his passing. Xanadu and Mig had been slowly coaxing the pegasus back from the pit of despair that he’d sunk into, as both of them were able to empathize with the loss of loved ones.

However, Twilight’s objection to what Slipshod had done was not entirely in regards to the consequences which it had held for Blood Chit. The alicorn seemed to be equally―if not more―concerned with the implications those actions had for himself.

“I thought we were past this,” Twilight sighed, sounding exasperated, “We’ve already talked about your self-destructive tendencies; and I thought we’d come to an understanding.”

Slipshod squirmed uneasily, feeling somewhat like a colt who’d just been found out sneaking oat cakes by his mother. Somehow the changeling found it difficult to meet the taller mare’s eyes. He didn’t like seeing her disappointed in him. A year ago the changeling he’d been wouldn’t have given two fucks about what Twilight’s opinion was of him―about what anycreature thought of him. Now though, it bothered him. Thinking that he’d disappointed any of his friends bothered him.

What was worse was that he did feel like he’d betrayed the alicorn a little. They had talked about his earlier negative perception of himself, and he had agreed to try and think of himself in a better light. In fact, he did! Truth be told, he hadn’t been trying to harm himself by taking on Blood Chit’s negative emotions like that. He’d been motivated exclusively by a desire to help his friend. Any thought to the potential consequences for himself hadn’t entered into his thought process.

He’d honestly believed he’d be able to weather the effects without much issue.

He explained as much to the alicorn, “I wasn’t trying to punish myself,” the changeling insisted, “I just wanted to help Blood Chit! He was full of so many awful emotions and I thought I could help by...taking on some of them myself…” He idly pawed at the deck.

Twilight released a beleaguered sigh, but at least there was a trace of a warm smile on her face, “And that’s commendable, Slip. It really is. Generosity―giving something of yourself to help another―is one of the core Elements of Harmony; and the galaxy would be a much better place if more creatures practiced selflessness like that.

“However,” Twilight stressed in a far more cautionary tone, “there is a fine line between helping your friends, and hurting yourself. Never give more than you can afford to; because all that accomplishes is to diminish yourself. You could have seriously hurt yourself doing what you did, and you know that,” the mare pointed out, evoking a wince from the changeling.

“How much help would you have been to your friends in the infirmary? How bad would Blood Chit have felt if he thought he was responsible for putting you there? How much stress would the rest of the crew be under if they started to think that ‘feeling bad’ around you was enough to make you seriously ill?”

“That’s not how it works though,” Slipshod protested.

“Do they know that?” The other mare countered, “Most of them know you survive off positive emotions, and that’s about it. If they heard you got ‘sick’ after being with a very depressed Blood Chit for just a few minutes, I’m sure they’d draw all kinds of conclusions about it.”

The changeling was skeptical, but not entirely unconvinced. When all that existed was third-hoof rumors and imaginations, Slipshod suspected that all sorts of erroneous conclusions could have been drawn from the hypothetical series of events that Twilight had just outlined; and if he was unconscious in the infirmary, then it would have been difficult for him to correct any misconceptions. Finally the stallion sighed, “Fine. You’ve made your point.”

“I hope I have,” Twilight said, “Because I don’t want to see you hurting yourself like this again. Or others.

“I know that it can be tempting to want to solve the problems our friends are having as quickly and as easily as possible,” the alicorn conceded with a knowing smile, “Trust me; I’ve been there! As a changeling, your ability to affect the emotional states of others puts an incredibly potent tool at your disposal.

“You can remove a friend’s suffering with the clack of a hoof. Turn a frown upside down with little more than a thought! Do you know what a younger me would have given to be able to cheer up my friends in an instant?! To take away their pain and sadness and perpetually fill them with all the joy and laughter that I knew they deserved?”

The purple mare’s grin was as broad as Slipshod had ever seen, and her amethyst eyes sparkled at the memory of her adventures with her bygone comrades. Though the changeling could sense the simmering mote of heartache that lingered deep within the alicorn as she recalled those same memories. Those moments were wondrous, yes; but they had also been shared with close friends who were more than a thousand years dead.

Hers was a lingering, resigned, pain. Every close friend that she had ever made in her life had been a bond forged with the knowledge that it would inevitably lead to sorrow. Yet, Twilight had not even once shied away from an opportunity to make a new friend. Because while their inescapable death would bring those feelings of sadness and loss; it was a price well worth paying for the lifetime of pleasant memories shared with a dear companion that would be hers forever.

“However,” Twilight continued, “just because a problem can be solved in an instant, doesn’t mean that it should be. The quick and easy solution is rarely the right one; or even the best one,” she said, flashing the changeling a wry smile, “You don’t know, but that’s a pretty rich admission coming from me, of all ponies!

“And it’s an even more true statement when it comes to the feelings of others. As commendable as it is that you want to take away Blood Chit’s pain, you can’t do that by, quite literally, taking away his pain. Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t a way for you to use your changeling powers in that situation.

“Except, insead of removing his grief, you should have tried giving your love,” she stressed, “That’s what he needed more than anything in that moment: to know that there were still creatures in the galaxy to whom he mattered, and who mattered to him. To know that he had their help and support, no matter what.”

Slipshod sighed and finally nodded his assent. The alicorn did have a point, he acknowledged, “I guess I’m still getting used to this whole ‘being empathetic’...thing. I mean, being genuinely concerned with how my friends feel. I’ve always wanted other creatures around me to be in generally high spirits, but only because that’s how I knew I could stay reliably fed. I wasn’t really concerned with how it affected them long-term.”

The changeling winced, “Looking back…I don’t like how manipulative I was. I want to make up for it, if I can.”

“And it’s wonderful that you do,” Twilight assured the stallion, beaming at him, “But don’t punish yourself as a form of contrition,” she insisted, “That doesn’t help anycreature. Not your friends, and certainly not yourself. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good!”

The changeling’s mood lightened somewhat and he flashed the alicorn and wry smirk, “And besides, it’s not like I screwed up everything that day,” he pointed out, his expression becoming slightly more smug, “I hear that Xanadu and Mig are getting on like a house on fire!”

“Insufferably so,” Twilight agreed with a lopsided smile of her own, “I don’t know what the changeling equivalent of diabetes is, but I’m pretty sure you’d get it if you hung around them for too long.

“But, yes, they are an example of how changelings can help others,” she acknowledged, adding, “And it didn’t involve you drawing out or pumping in emotions. Just helping to mediate between two creatures who hadn’t been honest with each other with how they really felt. Like I’ve mentioned before: Reformed Changelings thrived as counselors and therapists in the Celestia League.

“I’ve no doubt that you’d do well in that role too, when all of this is over.”

The changeling paused to mull over the mare’s words. While he wasn’t convinced that mediating between creatures was specifically something that he’d aspire to make a career out of later in life, it was the first time he’d even considered the notion about pursuing a vocation outside a ‘Steed cockpit. Being a pilot was all he’d ever known. It was what he’d trained for. Well, that and espionage.

His talents and abilities as a changeling had always been a means for survival. Using them for the benefit of others, and even making a career out of using them, wasn’t a notion that he’d thought to entertain. He was thinking about it now though, and he’d already come up with quite a few things that a shapeshifting empath with perfect recall might be able to excel at doing. Perhaps his post-Chrysalis prospects weren’t quite as bleak as he’d previously thought.

Twilight, satisfied that her latest 'Friendship Lesson’ had been effectively dispensed to her latest pupil, turned her attention now to checking on Slipshod’s progress with his other assignment, “So, how is the tally of Equus’ garrison coming along?”

“Slowly but surely,” the stallion announced, passing the alicorn a datapad with his latest figures, “I’ve gotten down most of what I know regarding the western continent. I’m working on the eastern one now; should have it done by the end of the week. Then I’ll do the southern continent.”

Most of Twilight’s earlier lifted spirits had diminished as the mare looked over the pad’s contents. “...That’s a lot of divisions,” she murmured, uneasy, “And you said this was only the Equestrian continent?” Upon seeing the changeling nod, Twilight let out a long, heavy, breath. She’d known that the invasion wasn’t going to be easy, of course; but the alicorn hadn’t anticipated quite the level of resistance that she was seeing written out here. At present―assuming that the force estimates for the other two major continents on the planet proved comparable―it was looking like they were going to be outnumbered more than a dozen to one.

She started to wonder if their plan was even actually feasible after all…

Sensing the alicorn’s doubt, Slipshod chimed in helpfully, “It’s not like we’re going to be fighting them all at once,” he pointed out, “The planet only has so many DropShips. It’ll take ComSpark time transport divisions from other areas to reinforce their lines where we make our landing. As long as we hit them harder and faster than they can summon their reserves, we should be okay.

“Besides, we’ll have control of the orbital space around Equus, as well as plenty of aerospace fighters for air superiority. If we take out enough of their DropShips, then we may not even have to worry about what’s on the other continents; just what they already have in Equestria.”

That was a fair point, the alicorn acknowledged. Their predicament might not be quite as untenable as the raw numbers made it seem. Which, of course, wasn’t to say that they were likely to have an easy time of it. They’d still be outnumbered about four-to-one; and that was only in terms of dedicated military forces. There would be hundreds of millions of changelings on the continent, each one a potential combatant. If Chrysalis was willing to sustain the losses―and Twilight had every reason to believe the changeling queen would―the changelings might be able to push them off Equus through no other means than by simply running them out of munitions by giving them tens of millions of drones to slaughter…

The purple mare shuddered at the prospect of inflicting that number of casualties, even if they were changelings. After all, the changelings were only trying to survive as Chrysalis had taught them they must. Those drones didn’t know that there was a better way for their kind to live―to thrive! The thought that so many of them might perish in ignorance beyond their own control genuinely troubled her.

For a moment, Twilight entertained the notion of calling the whole thing off―of trying to find a better way to address the ‘changeling problem’. After all, any solution had to be better than one which entailed slaughtering their way through the population of a planetary continent, right? That thought was a fleeting one though. While Chrysalis―and not the drones themselves―might have been the real source of the issue; the fact remained that, in order to get at Chrysalis, they would have to first make their way through her manipulated defenders.

Ideally, Twilight would have liked the chance to confront a group of drones with the truth of the nature of their existence―a chance to prove to them that Reformed Changelings, like Slipshod, were better off―in isolation. However, the only place in the galaxy that had changeling populations large enough to make the effort worthwhile was Equus. And the alicorn was doubtful that a lot of drones would be willing to have a ‘productive chat’ any time soon after Cinder and the other Clan admirals had just finished battering the changeling WarShip fleet into floating debris…

Once Chrysalis was defeated, then maybe a dialogue could be opened. Surely the bulk of changeling resistance would abate once their leader was removed. While those drones might be willing to sell their lives in the defense of their queen, Twilight desperately hoped that they weren’t quite so brainwashed that they’d be willing to follow her into death as well.

Unfortunately, even finding out if that was the case would first require them to carve their way through tens of millions of zealous defenders. The alicorn found herself wondering if, at that point, avenging their fallen brethren wouldn’t be enough of a reason for the rest to continue fighting on.

No matter how they went about things, it was difficult for Twilight to see any simple solution to the problem. She hid a wan smile as she considered that fact, given the subject of the conversation that she’d just had with Slipshod. One way or the other, the ‘changeling problem’ was going to take years―perhaps even decades―to ultimately ‘solve’. A lot of them were likely to die along the way.

The best that she could hope for was that, in time, the benefits of saving their species would make up for the losses that had been suffered thus far. The alicorn fervently believed that would be the case. She needed to.

The Princess-class DropShip, Selene, hung motionless in space just off the nadir of the Lameduck System’s primary. The First Prince’s personal flagship had been among the first of the Federated Moon’s forces to arrive at the designated assembly point. The five other DropShips which had arrived with them had already made planetfall on the system’s only inhabitable planet. First Prince Nacht Belle had elected to have his vessel remain near the arrival point in the system so that he could personally account for the rest of the forces which he had managed to rally. Thus far anyway.

His path to Lameduck had been far from ‘direct’. Without access to functional HyperSpark Generators, the only means of communication was to physically jump ships to other systems. This meant that Nacht could only summon the forces in star systems which were visited by either himself or the other senior officers which he had directed to do so. Taking a more ‘scenic’ route had allowed for the batpony prince to collect as many forces as was practicable and bring them to the rally point with him.

It frustrated him slightly that, in the end, his estimates were that only about a third of the total military strength which the Federation possessed would end up participating in the invasion of Equus. Strictly speaking, it would have been technically possible to gather nearly the entirety of his available military in this system for the effort. However, that would have taken many years to accomplish, given the expansive size of his princedom and the crippling limitations imposed by the reliance on what was effectively ‘word-of-mouth’ to facilitate communications across millions of cubic lightyears of space.

That would be far longer than the timetable which Timberjack had presented to him, so he’d done the best that he could within the constraints he faced. Hopefully it would prove to be enough.

On the bright side, at least Natch knew that it would not be only his forces participating in the fight. Thera had demonstrated that the Hippogriff Combine truly intended to make good on her own promise of military support. The batpony knew that the Deputy Marshal was going to be running into the same sort of communication and logistical hurdles which he’d encountered. But, even if she managed to mobilize only a quarter of what his intelligence section estimated the Combine’s total military strength to be, it would still represent a respectable showing.

Then there was the Pony Commonwealth as well. Natch anticipated seeing a proportionally larger representation from Victoria’s military arriving in this system in the coming months, since the bulk of the Commonwealth’s forces would have already been gathered along their newfound border with the Dragon Clans. While he certainly doubted that the archon was going to pull everything off of that front, the news that the Clans’ militaries had been recently gutted by their fight with ComSpark should make her and her generals feel a little less reluctant about trimming down their garrisons along border systems.

All in all, that meant that they should be able to assemble significant representations of the militaries of three of the Successor States in Lameduck. This would easily be the largest singular gathering of military hardware and personnel since the final confrontation with Tirek five hundred years ago. At least, the batpony amended, as far as that Harmony Sphere was concerned. The invading force assembled by the Dragon Clans last year had probably been about this size.

Natch’s slitted eyes darted to the central holographic plotter on the bridge as another new contact populated. A confirmation of the arrival’s IFF soon after indicated that it was another of his JumpShips. The massive craft began to move away from the star’s nadir point, at the same time it disgorged its docked DropShips. The smaller parasite craft headed in-system towards the planet, while the JumpShip which had ferried them here took up a parking orbit around the star to begin recharging its engines, joining a couple dozen of its brethren.

Normally clearing a star’s zenith or nadir to make room for other potential arrivals wasn’t much of a concern for a JumpShip. The ‘pockets’ of gravitationally neutral space located at the poles of a star, where JumpShips could make reliably safe entries into a solar system, were massive in volume, covering many billions of cubic kilometers. The statistical chances of a JumpShip ‘appearing’ in or on top of another vessel were regarded to be insignificant enough as to not be worth considering. Hypothetically, every single vessel in the whole of the galaxy that was equipped with a jump drive could safely fit within the zenith of a single star with hundreds of kilometers of clearance between them on all sides. Such was the scale of the vastness of space.

However, ‘insignificant’ was not the same thing as ‘impossible’, and few systems saw the amount of jump traffic in a month that Lameduck was going to be seeing over the next few days. With scores of JumpShips from his own gathered forces making the jump to this system from the same origin point, the chances of two of those ships winding up dangerously close to each other was much higher than its usual statistical improbability. This last thing that Nacht wanted to do was risk losing a couple brigades of the relatively few BattleSteeds he’d been able to muster to a random fluke. Especially when all it would take to mitigate that possibility was to just have his JumpShip crews space out their arrival times and move off the jump point a few million kilometers.

It wasn’t as though there was any kind of significant rush. It was still going to be months before they were ready to make their assault. Heck, the promised WarShips hadn’t even arrived yet, from what the batpony could see. At least, not all of them. He hoped.

His DropShip’s sensors had identified one WarShip in orbit of the system’s nearest planet. It was identifying itself as the Maelstrom, and at nearly a million and a half tons in mass, it was the single largest spacefaring vessel that Nacht Belle had ever seen in his life. More than four times the size of the largest dedicated JumpShips that operated in the Harmony Sphere.

He’d seen footage and sensor data collected on similar ships that the Clans had employed during their invasion of the Sphere, but he’d yet to be this close to one personally. Warships were, the batpony decided, an awesomely terrifying weapon. A hit from any one of its primary batteries would be more than enough to completely obliterate his DropShip. Even the Maelstrom’s secondary weapons would have been more than a match for even the most well-protected classes of DropShip operating in space.

The First Prince felt a cold shudder run up his back as he thought about what battles must have been like in the early years of turmoil and wars that followed the collapse of the Celestia League. When states like the Federated Moons, Commonwealth, and others, still retained fleets of such vessels to throw at one another. The carnage in those battles must have been…incomprehensible. Broadside salvos that snuffed out thousands―tens of thousands―of lives in seconds. The modern day practice of using a couple battalions of BattleSteeds to seize a few key strategic points on the surface of a planet and calling it a ‘battle’ felt positively anemic by comparison.

Indeed, when he considered what lay ahead on them in the coming months, Nacht got the impression that he would soon get to learn first-hoof what a real ‘battle’ was actually like when they reached Equus.

“C-Bit for your thoughts, My Prince?”

The batpony monarch was drawn out of his reverie by the sound of the older mare’s voice coming from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of the commander of his personal DropShip, Captain Enceladus. She’d been the Selene’s captain for the better part of two decades, serving under both Nacht’s father and his elder brother. He’d known her for all of his adult life, and a good chunk of his childhood. Since his brother’s death, Enceladus was honestly just about the closest thing that the First Prince had to a confidant.

He could probably use one of those just about now, “Just thinking about how the last time I was involved in a serious fight, I wound up captured by the enemy,” he pointed out, favoring the older mare with a wry smile, “If that happens this time, I’m doubtful that I’ll get off as easily as I did then.”

“Far be it for me to comment on Your Highnesses taste in mares.”

Enceladus’ impeccable straight face and her response’s even tone left Nacht with a confused expression as he tried to parse out what the DropShip captain had meant by her comment. Then he reviewed how he’d phrased his own words. A mixture of embarrassment and amusement quickly took hold of the First Prince and he broke down into a fit of chortled laughter, “Something tells me I’m not her type anyway. Nor she mine.

“From what I understand, this Queen of the Changelings has more in common with a praying mantis than a pony. In more ways than one.

“But thank you for the distraction.”

The batpony mare inclined her head slightly, “Honored to be of service, Your Highness; as always.

“Though, if I might speak more frankly, Majesty…?” Enceladus refrained from saying more until her sovereign gave her his permission to continue, “Perhaps it would be best if your leadership role in this campaign was one that was less…direct, in nature.”

“You mean stay on the ship and coordinate,” Nacht restated in a tone that wasn’t―quite―glib. The DropShip captain acknowledged the correctness of his interpretation and the prince let out a small sigh, “I’ll admit that I’ve thought about that.”

The wisdom of embroiling the highest ranking military commander of a force in the midst of direct combat with the enemy, precluding him from actually directing the campaign in any meaningful way, aside; there was also a looming political issue: Nacht Belle had no children and was fresh out of siblings. His older brother had likewise died before siring any foals. Their father, grandfather, and even their great grandfather, had all been single children. If he died during the invasion, there wouldn’t be any obvious heirs to the throne. Third, fourth, and maybe even a few fifth cousins would all spring up out of the woodwork. Maybe even a few of his surviving generals. Factoring in the recent collapse of the HSG network, it was a foregone conclusion that the Federated Moons would collapse utterly into a collection of warring System-States if he died before producing an heir.

The most prudent course of action was honestly for him to stay in Lameduck and send his generals off to the Faust System to direct the Federation’s part in the invasion in his stead. If things went well, he’d still be credited by historians as being the First Prince of The Federated Moons during their participation in the liberation of the Harmony Sphere from the changelings. If things went poorly…well, at least the Federated Moons would still have a First Prince.

That being said, for all that the changelings appeared to have been content to manipulate the Harmony Sphere from the shadows all these centuries, Nacht couldn’t see them choosing to continue to do things that way after half the galaxy collaborated to assault their headquarters. They’d pretty much be forced to come out into the open and take a more direct approach to things. Which likely meant a counter-invasion.

Unlike the Dragon Clans, the Harmony Sphere possessed no WarShips. Whatever WarShips ComSpark had that survived the attempt to conquer Equus―even if it was only a hoofful of them―would be more than enough to allow the changeling’s nearly uncontested victories. Especially since Nacht doubted that the changelings were going to be particularly concerned with abiding by the restrictions against civilian casualties prescribed by the Aris Convention. They’d be able to bomb any ressitence into dust while tucked away safely in orbit, and then land their troops to mop up the battered and demoralized survivors.

In the event that they lost this fight, Nacht wasn’t quite sure that he wanted to be around to see the sort of devastation that was launched upon the galaxy. Perhaps that was selfish of him; even cowardly. The batpony couldn’t hide the wry smile winding its way across his lips at the thought of leading a planetary invasion from the cockpit of a BattleSteed as being the ‘cowardly’ route.

“And…?” The DropShip captain asked after the prolonged silence from her prince.

“...And I decided that I won’t,” The Federated Moons’ First Prince quipped, smiling broadly at the none-too-pleased mare, “Victoria won’t be staying in orbit. Neither will Timberjack. I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the only one in a leadership position not there on the ground.”

“So, since everypony else is jumping off the bridge…” The mare said with a sardonic sigh, obviously not particularly caring for her monarch’s decision to insert himself into harm’s way.

“At least I’ll be in good company!”

Cinder leaned on the balcony attached to her temporary quarters. They were far from the most luxuriant that she’d ever experienced but, then again, these fortresses had hardly been built with comfort in mind. Nor had they even been intended to serve as any sort of long-term base of operations. The Lameduck System was―and always had been―designed to serve as a staging area for the push into Faust, nothing more. To that end, it was serving its purpose well. After three months of waiting, roughly ninety percent of their anticipated total forces had arrived. Invasion plans had been laid out and were currently being disseminated so that lower echelon commanders could start drilling.

Like her father, Cinder had been dubious regarding the changeling’s count of Chrysalis’ WarShip fleet and the utilization of the shipyards orbiting Equus. They didn’t line up with CLDF or modern day Clan doctrine; and there was little reason for the changelings to have adopted one of their own that was so dramatically different. It was wasteful in terms of time, material, and marehours. The changeling’s had demonstrated themselves to be too calculating and efficient in their manipulation of galactic politics to also be so inefficient where their navy was concerned. Something else was going on, but even Cinder couldn’t put her claw on what it could be. It wasn’t new construction, at least; that much was obvious.

Other than that little hang-up, everything else lined up pretty well with the estimates put together by the Disciples and the Dragon Clans in terms of Equus’ defenses. Neither group had ever been able to conduct any first-hoof information, obviously; but they had managed to glean bits and pieces from the various interrogations of captured changelings over the centuries. Cinder had little reason to doubt the counts and compositions which Princess Twilight Sparkle’s changeling had provided them.

With it, she and the other senior strategists had devised their plan of attack. It would involve three phases.

Phase One was rather obvious: The WarShip fleet, under her leadership, would subdue the opposing changeling fleet, capitalizing on their greater numbers to achieve a quick and decisive victory. Once the way was clear, a three-pronged invasion would be launched on the cities of Manehattan, Fillydelphia, and Ponyville; each prong of the invasion would be led by Victoria Blueblood, Nacht Belle, and Thera Novo, respectively.

Phase Two involved encircling Canterlot by connecting those three beachheads. The goal was to cut Canterlot off from support and reinforcements while it was assaulted from all sides. The invading force was certainly going to have its hooves full as they assaulted Canterlot while simultaneously securing their rears against counter-attacks from changeling forces trying to reach their queen. Fortunately, the allied forces would enjoy plenty of air support from aerospace fighters, and the WarShips in orbit of the planet should be able to keep changeling DropShips from shifting too many of their forces from other parts of Equus. The invading forces should only have to contend with local defenders for the most part. Ideally.

Phase Three was the push into Canterlot itself, once the encirclement had been complete. The planetary capital was a veritable fortress, according to Twilight’s changeling, and wouldn’t fall easily. However, no fortress could hope to hold out for long against a sustained assault from multiple BattleSteed divisions and flights of aerospace fighters.

If it came down to it, Cinder was ready to employ the terrifying destructive power of her navy’s heavier autocannons. Canterlot castle could always be rebuilt. Not where it once was, obviously, since there wouldn’t be much left of where it stood now except a deep crater after such a bombardment. But a new castle could certainly be built somewhere to the alicorn’s liking…

The thought of rebuilding the castle at the heart of the planetary capital prompted the dragoness’ mind to turn to other matters that would need to be tended to after defeating Chrysalis. Indeed, the star admiral was of the opinion that most of the next year or more would be spent securing the rest of the planet. She found the idea of all of the changelings suddenly dropping their weapons and offering surrender upon the death of their queen to be…unlikely. Even if they did; how exactly would the Dragon Clans and their allies go about sequestering several hundred million POWs? They certainly couldn’t be permitted to roam free!

Twilight would doubtlessly seek to reform as many of them as could be; and that was all well and good, but it was an endeavor that would take decades. At a minimum. In the intervening time, they would have to be imprisoned, or as close as could be considering the monumental scale involved. Perhaps it was easiest just to blockade the whole planet and designate it as a temporary penal colony.

There was also going to be the matter of finding a way to ‘feed’ them. They wouldn’t have the steady stream of academy candidates flowing to the planet any longer. As far as Cinder knew, the alicorn hadn’t given much thought to that matter; or hadn’t said anything to the star admiral if she had. Not that Twilight kept her abreast of everything, of course. Still, Cinder had expected the former ruler of the CLDF to have broached the subject of what was to be done with the changelings after Chrysalis was defeated at least in passing. Without clear guidance from ‘above’, it would fall to Cinder herself to make the call.

She had a good idea of what many of her immediate subordinates would suggest. It would also be a lie to say that she wouldn’t be tempted by the idea either: Blockading the planet and letting the ‘changeling problem’ sort itself out over the course of the next few months would be the most practical, in terms of effort and materials involved. Without a fresh source of victims, the changelings on Equus would quickly starve to death. The planet would be cleared of all resistance in a few months, ready to be completely seized by the Celestia League-in-Exile without any additional shots needing to be fired.

It went without saying that proposing such a plan would be immediately shot down by Twilight. She’d want as many changelings as possible to be saved. The dragoness sorted and amended that hypothetical to be that Twilight would want all of the changelings on the planet to be saved. She’d merely be forced to accept saving as many as was possible; because saving them all simply wouldn’t be, no matter what they did. They simply could not provide the kind of sustenance the population would need. Morally or logistically. Twilight would agree with the former, and have to accept the latter.

Besides, it wasn’t like the loss of the population of Equus would represent any sort of genuine threat to the changeling species. There were still many tens of millions of changelings seeded throughout the galaxy. Twilight would have the next several centuries to soothe her conscience in dedication to converting those changelings still at large to the more desirable ‘reformed’ state for their kind.

Even that would only be the first step, Cinder knew. Converting the changelings themselves was one thing. Converting the mentality of the Harmony Sphere where changelings were concerned would be quite another. The galaxy was going to be in for quite the shock when it was revealed to them that many of their friends and family were actually dead, and that a doppelganger had been masquerading around in their place.

Oh! But don’t worry: we promise the creature who had been deceiving you for all of those years or decades is totally not an empathic parasite anymore, and they will stop manipulating your nations into a perpetual state of war that has claimed the lives of untold trillions over the centuries!

Cinder couldn’t wait to be present in the room where Twilight first tried to sell that to the public at large! There was going to be utter chaos across the Harmony Sphere. For quite a long time too. To say that rebuilding the Celestia League―or some other analogue as a successor―would be ‘challenging’ was quite the understatement, in the star admiral’s opinion.

The immortal purple alicorn would have a considerable amount of time to do it in though. And while dragons weren’t quite as long-lived as alicorns, it was at least conceivable that Cinder might still be around to mark Twilight’s progress.

All of that was assuming that they won the upcoming fight, of course. Losing would make all of this fretting moot.

A tone emitted from her datalink drew the dragoness out of her reverie. She let out a cleansing breath and acknowledged the incoming call from her clerk, “Yes?”

“You asked to be reminded about the conference this morning, Ma’am?” the gruff voice on the other end of the line responded.

“Right; thank you.”

“Of course, Ma’am.”

Cinder turned from the balcony and headed back into her quarters. They were as much a workstation as they were a living area, having been purpose-built for whoever ended up leading the eventual invasion. As a result, the table in the dining room doubled as a holographic projector and plotter. The dragoness turned it on. A few seconds later, a collection of heads were floating above it, some of whom she recognized only from the dossiers that she had been provided through her staff. Others, like General Mayhem and Commander Timberjack, she had at least met a few times in the past.

Princess Twilight Sparkle, of course, needed no introduction. The star admiral bowed and paid her deference to the alicorn all the same, before moving on to thank the other members of the recently created ‘War Council’ for being able to attend, “Lady, Novo, Lady Blueblood, Lord Belle; I appreciate your presence for this meeting,” the cobalt dragoness said, “I hope you have found the accommodations acceptable?”

“These are some of the better ‘field conditions’ I’ve ever experienced,” the ivory pegasus archon of the Pony Commonwealth, Victoria Blueblood, replied with a wry smile, “Certainly a lot better than the bases I was forced to operate out of while in the Periphery…”

“They’ve been quite agreeable, Star Admiral; thank you,” Nacht Belle added with a nod.

“Hard to believe that all of this managed to get set up without anycreature else in the galaxy being the wiser,” the hippogriff noted, “The logistics involved must have been quite impressive,” Thera’s words trailed off into an unasked question as to the means by which the building of these secret bases so far inside the Sphere had been managed.

The dragoness merely smiled, “Indeed.” That was all she said on the matter before moving on, “Let us get down to the purpose of this initial conference: Which is to give each of you an idea of your areas of operation during the invasion. In the coming days, you will each receive more detail information to aid you and your own staff in more specific planning; but I want you to at least have a broad understanding of what is expected.

“The first phase of the invasion will be pretty straightforward: Our WarShip fleet, led by myself, will escort all ground forces to Equus.

“From there, we will break up into four invasion components. Commonwealth forces will take Manehattan. The Federated Moons will take Fillydelphia. The Combine will seize Ponyville. Princess Twilight’s mixed force of former Red Reivers and Disciples, as well as Commander Timberjack’s Dragoons,” Cinder went on with a nod towards the alicorn and the earth pony, “will serve as a Rapid Response Force to help deal with any serious counter-attacks from the changelings.

“General Mayhem’s division will provide cover for the DropShip landings while the rest of the fleet blockades the planet.

“Once all three objectives are secured, we can move on to encircling Canterlot in preparation for the final push into the capital. Are there any reservations with the plan thus far?” She glanced between each projected head in turn.

“What are we looking at in terms of a timetable for this invasion?” Victoria asked.

“Much of that will be determined by how effective we are at slowing down the changelings’ ability to redeploy their ground forces,” Cinder replied, “Depending on how intact our WarShip fleet is by the time we secure the orbital space around Equus, we should be able to at least cripple their ability to move troops around with DropShips. This should effectively prevent them from bringing in forces from the other continents to support Canterlot, but that’ll still leave the forces already in Equestria to deal with.

“While there are sufficient forces present in Equestria to significantly outnumber and maybe even overwhelm our invasion force, even our most pessimistic estimates on their response times leave us with at least three days to secure the perimeter around Canterlot before we can expect any significant efforts to push us back off world.”

There were several expressions from among the gathered holograms that suggested not everypony was feeling particularly optimistic about the time frame involved. It was Nacht who voiced those reservations first though, “Three days to secure our lines isn’t a lot of time, Star Admiral,” the batpony stallion pointed out. “And we have to assume that Canterlot itself will be reinforced with additional units before we manage to make landfall.”

The First Prince was not wrong, Cinder inwardly acknowledged. It would take a little over two days for their fleet to reach Equus from their jump-in point. Plenty of time for Chrysalis to summon additional divisions to the obvious target of the forthcoming invasion. Part of the reason for wanting to hit so many vital cities at once was so that Chrysalis wouldn’t be able to sortie out of Canterlot against any one force directly without leaving the city open to assault from another direction. While it was unlikely that the changeling queen would be able to find a way to squeeze enough troops and BattleSteeds into the city to allow her to both defend it and send out assaults against the invaders, that didn’t mean that those additional defenders wouldn’t still make it tartarus’ own bitch to take.

And the same considerations that would make it strategically difficult for the defenders in Canterlot to do anything against the invaders directly also came into play against their own forces where assaulting the capital was concerned: If they pulled too many forces out of any one of the three cities they took in order to press in on Canterlot, they risked making themselves vulnerable to a counter-attack from the changeling forces that would doubtlessly be doing everything in their power to cut through t their imperiled queen. That was part of the reason for Twilight’s response force; so that they could rapidly deploy their own reinforcements if it looked like their own lines were threatened.

“You’re correct, it’s not a lot of time,” Cinder conceded, “But we will be the ones with DropShip and aerospace fighter support, which should give us a substantial advantage. Based on the anticipated strength of the opposition, we believe that the landing force will be sufficient to secure Canterlot in that time.”

“What about the rest of the planet?” Victoria asked.

“It is our belief,” the dragoness began, casting a brief glance in Twilight Sparkle’s direction, “that the bulk of the resistance from the changelings will abate once Canterlot is taken and Queen Chrysalis is…dealt with.” While it was the opinion of the star admiral that the changeling queen would almost certainly not allow herself to be talked down or taken alive, she elected not to voice that prediction aloud. She knew that the purple alicorn was still harboring some hope that Chrysalis’ death wouldn’t be a requirement for ultimate victory over the changelings.

“Even if that turns out not to be the case, however, there wouldn’t be anything to keep us from pulling our forces back off the planet once Canterlot has fallen,” she pointed out, “We will still be in control of the orbital space around Equus and as long as too many of our DropShips weren’t lost during the assault, we will have little issue withdrawing before the remaining changelings can overwhelm our ground units.

“From there, it wouldn’t be difficult to simply blockade the whole planet and starve the changelings out.”

This earned the dragoness an unhappy look from the alicorn, but Twilight refrained from commenting audibly. There was little doubt in Cinder’s mind that the princess hadn’t already thought about that possibility as well. None of the other members of the council seemed like they found the notion objectionable.

Indeed, Victoria appeared to find this to be a preferable course of action, “Why are we not starving them out in the first place?” The Commonwealth’s archon asked.

“Because Celestia, Luna, and Cadance are still alive down there,” Twilight said, finally speaking up for the first time during the briefing, “If we blockade the planet, and Chrysalis realizes that her situation is hopeless, she’ll kill them.”

“What makes you so sure she won’t kill them anyway once we start our invasion?” Victoria posed.

“Because Chrysalis will want them to see her crush their ‘liberators’,” Twilight said in response. There was an edge to her tone as she acknowledged the changeling queen’s penchant for sadistic emotional torture of her captives, “She’ll also want them alive to see myself finally captured and brought to join them.”

Thera cleared her throat, the hippogriff’s words a little hesitant as she spoke, “My apologies, Miss Sparkle, if this comes across as a little cold,” Cinder felt her lips briefly flicker into a reflexive sneer at the omission of the alicorn’s title. However, she reminded herself that even among the Dragon Clans, Twilight Sparkle's official title was a matter of some ‘dispute’. While Flurry Heart was Princess of the Celestia League-in-Exile, the Disciples had nominally seceded from the League and the Clans and declared their allegiance to Twilight. They’d bestowed the title of ‘Princess’ back onto the purple alicorn for their own purposes, but Cinder doubted that any of the others were aware of any of that internal politicking.

“But,” the eagle-headed equine continued, treading carefully as she spoke, “How does the survival of the other alicorns benefit us?” It wasn’t just Twilight who bristled at this; every other creature who had ties to the Celestia League-in-Exile were also quite put off by the sentiment. The other two leaders from within the Harmony Sphere seemed to be in agreement with the raised point though, “From what the star admiral has just said, it sounds like we can achieve a military victory without setting a single hoof on Equus if we choose. That would perhaps save hundreds of thousands of lives.”

“Are those three really worth that cost?”

Cinder could tell from her expression that Twilight wanted to respond to the patently absurd question in the affirmative. Even the cobalt dragoness felt herself having to bite back an initial impulse to insist that the safety and security of the three imprisoned alicorns was of paramount importance. However, when she forced herself to take a step back and attempt to look at things with a little less bias; she acknowledged that the Deputy’s question was a fair one from her perspective. The galaxy she’d known had managed to survive for centuries without any alicorn influence or leadership. Why then was it so important that they be rescued at such a great cost of life?

Twilight as well seemed to recognize the hippogriff’s position, and that she likely wasn’t intending to antagonize her. As a result, her response was a lot more measured and receptive than it probably could have been, given the purple princess’ close personal ties to the other alicorns, “It is my sincere belief that the three of them will be integral to returning Harmony and Friendship to the galaxy,” she replied, “Whether that goal is worth the cost in lives is not something I can definitively answer. I’d like to believe that the sacrifices it will take to free them are proven worthwhile in the fullness of time.”

“My Dragoons will be going down there no matter what,” Timberjack interjected, “If the three of you want to dither around in orbit, that’s your business.”

“Commander…” Cinder said in a cautioning tone, eyeing the stout earth pony before the dragoness turned to address the other three House members, “While a siege is technically possible, it is not preferable; for several reasons,” she explained.

“It cannot be overlooked that, while certainly crippled, the network of changeling operatives in the galaxy is still present,” the star admiral stressed, “The sabotage of the HSG network isn’t quite ‘total’, either. Replacing certain key pieces of hardware allows them to operate temporarily before they burn out again. However, it is more than long enough for messages to be sent out. If we spend weeks, or even months, just sitting in orbit around Equus, that is time that Chrysalis can spend ordering her spies and saboteurs spread throughout your realms to cause all kinds of destruction.

“Infrastructure could be destroyed, family members could be assassinated, coups could be launched,” Cinder ticked off the list of unpleasant possibilities on her claws, watching the discomfort spread across the faces of all three of the Great House members, “By the time you get back to your homeworlds, you might not have much to go back to.

“It is also worth noting that Chrysalis isn’t without allies of her own in the Sphere. Stellar Nova himself is one of the queen’s agents. If you insist on tying up the forces you have here for months on end, you’re leaving yourselves open to invasion by the Our Worlds League,” the dragoness shared a pointed look with Victoria, whose Commonwealth shared a direct border with the League.

“Waiting around for the changelings to starve is not in the best interests of anycreature here,” Cinder concluded. She studied the expressions of the other three, and was relieved to see that they were nodding in agreement.

“Very well,” Thera conceded, “We’ll get this over with quickly so that we can get home as soon as possible. You’re right in that we don’t want to be out of communication for too long.”

All three of them were perfectly aware of how tumultuous the economic situations were becoming without the communications network overseen by ComSpark. Once Chrysalis and ComSpark were dealt with, Twilight would be able to revert the firmware and fix what she’d ‘broken’ with the code. However, until then it was in their best interest to make it as inconvenient as possible for the changelings to coordinate with one another. Whatever damage their operatives in the Sphere got up to could be addressed later.

“Good,” Star Admiral Cinder breathed a sigh of relief, “I’ll see to it that each of you is given maps and force estimates for your targets as soon as possible so that you can work out your operational planning with your own staff. If there are no other questions…?” The dragoness looked around at the gathered floating heads, but all were shaking in the negative, “Then I’ll let you go. I know we all have a lot of work to do. Cinder, out.”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 46: Bred for War

The Zathura was deceptively calm. Indeed, appearances alone might have led an observer to believe that the ship was just leisurely traversing the space between a primary and its destination planet like it had done a thousand times before in a thousand other star systems during its life. Most of the corridors weren’t even filled with all that much traffic as members of the crew kept to their quarters and tried to get what rest they could in the intervening hours.

Judging by the overall emotional climate on board the DropShip, Slipshod found himself questioning the quality of whatever rest was being had. Strictly speaking, the changeling acknowledged that he should probably be getting some as well. It was unlikely that there was going to be any significant time to do so after they rounded the moon, after all.

In the end, he’d probably just have to settle for stopping by the clinic and grabbing some sleep aids off of Cravat. Before he did that though, there was one other pony that he wanted to talk with.

While much of the ship might have felt deserted, the one area that most certainly wasn’t was the ‘Steed Bay. It felt like Mig’s technicians always had something to do on the DropShip, and the massive open bay that took up half of the DropShip served as the hub from which they all operated out of. Add to that the fact that they’d also taken on a platoon of Elementals who had taken up temporary residence in the open BattleSteed stall, and Slipshod found himself feeling like he’d suddenly stepped out onto a completely different ship.

Out of habit, the changeling stallion’s gaze instantly went to the Crystal Cavalier nestled in its stall off to his left. It had overgone a little bit of an upgrade since rendezvousing in Lameduck. While the Dragon Clans had not been able to spare much in the way of BattleSteeds thanks to recent events at Buckwheat, they had still had plenty of weapons, ammunition, and other equipment to spare. Weapons that were far superior to just about anything being used by their Harmony Sphere allies. They’d had some other goodies too, like more efficient heat sinks, anti-missile systems, and more efficient reactors which were significantly lighter than anything being operated in the Harmony Sphere.

Because of the slow trickle of troops making their way to Lameduck as they were mobilized from distant parts of the galaxy, they hadn’t had the time to retrofit every ‘Steed with the new gear. With some of the upgrades requiring the better part of two months to perform, only those ‘Steeds which had arrived early on at Lameduck saw the most extensive improvements. The later arrivals had been forced to settle for having a few of their weapons swapped out with improved variants that afforded them longer ranges.

Slipshod’s Cavalier had received one of the improved reactors, the quartet of medium energy cannons had been swapped out for a pair of pulsed variants, and a state-of-the-art targeting suite had been installed. The latter was certainly quite the welcome addition, as it allowed Slipshod to land shots with pinpoint accuracy on moving targets with hardly any effort at all. The computer did all of the work, factoring in telemetry about both his target as well as his own BattleSteed and creating a leading point of aim for him to use which would guarantee a hit. As long as his opponent didn’t juke suddenly in the intervening fraction of a second between when he toggled the trigger and when the shot hit its target; which was nearly instantaneous anyway.

However, it was Xanadu’s Philomena which had received the manticore’s share of Mig’s attention, the changeling noted. Between the weapon upgrades, the reactor swap, the replacement of the internal structuring with endo-crystalline lattices, and hardened ablative armor, Slipshod assumed that the only part of the zebra’s old ‘Steed that hadn’t been touched was his piloting couch!

The striped equine had certainly seemed to be quite pleased with the changes that were made, and both he and the kirin chief engineer had been of particularly high spirits in the days after Mig had revealed the refurbished ‘Steed. The changeling had found it very ‘filling’ to be around the pair, to say the least.

Conversely, Twilight’s ‘Steed hadn’t received all that much attention. Even though her Rainbow Dash was arguably one of the older BattleSteeds in the galaxy―both in terms of design age and the age of that particular ‘Steed specifically―it wasn’t nearly as ‘out of date’ as one might have suspected. Likely owing to the fact that many of its components had been ‘beyond’ what would have been considered the ‘pinnacle’ of technological achievement at the time. However, as part of Twilight’s endeavor to curb further conflict, the schematics for those technologies had not been distributed and all other ‘Steeds of its class scrapped after the battle with Tirek. As a result, even after a few hundred years of advancement, much of the technology developed by the League-in-Exile had really only just caught up to what Twilight Sparkle’s engineers had originally come up with, before her efforts to roll things back once more had gone into effect.

Which wasn’t to say that nothing had been done for her BattleSteed. The type-ten autocannon had been swapped out for an ultra-variant of a type-five. While the shells were of a lower caliber, the rate of fire was effectively doubled so it didn’t really affect the overall amount of damage that her ‘Steed could dish out; with the added benefit of being able to hit targets more accurately at longer ranges. Aside from that though, nothing else had really been changed about Twilight’s ‘Steed; just some tuning up and other minor adjustments.

Some of which the alicorn was apparently attending to herself, the changeling noted as he looked out across the ‘Steed Bay and noted the purple mare buried up to her withers in a partially disassembled jump jet. Twilight was engrossed enough in her work that she apparently didn’t notice the changeling walking up to her. Not keen on surprising her too badly, in case she was involved in something sensitive, Slipshod was sure to clear his throat a good way off before calling out to her:

“You missed all the excitement.”

Twilight Sparkle retracted herself from the internal structure of the jump jet, several tools hovering around her head, enveloped in the amethyst aura of her telekinesis. She regarded the changeling for a moment before grunting and returning to her work, “I wouldn’t say that I ‘missed’ it…” She intoned, the volume of her words amplified by the shape of the bell nozzle that she was working in.

“I just figured that you’d have wanted to be on the bridge with the rest of us.”

“Why?” Twilight replied simply, not retracting herself from the ‘Steed, “I don’t run the Zathura or fly it. I’m not in command of any of the WarShip squadrons or DropShip or fighter wings. What use was I going to be on that bridge?”

All of those were perfectly valid points, the changeling conceded. He hadn’t really been ‘needed’ there either for all of those exact same reasons either. However, he’d still felt that he should be there; if only to offer moral support. Plus, he wasn’t sure that he’d have been able to stand knowing that the ship was going into a battle without knowing exactly what was happening around them. Slipshod didn’t know how other ponies on the Zathura managed to go on about their duties while completely ignorant of how close they’d come to death at any given moment!

The idea that he might have just been sitting quietly in his quarters―since it wasn’t like he had any station to crew on the DropShip during a fight in space―only to be killed in an instant by an unlucky hit on their fragile little vessel from a ComSpark WarShip’s naval autocannon utterly terrified the changeling stallion. That kind of thing pretty much never happened while you were in a BattleSteed. With the rare exception―visions of a limp Parasprite rolling down a hillside flashed through his head―BattleSteeds never went down from just a single strike out of nowhere.

Fights in BattleSteeds were real fights. Traditional combat vehicles, individual soldiers, and even aerospace fighters, could all conceivably be obliterated with one well-placed shot from a big enough opponent. However, under most circumstances, even a Pipsqueak could weather a hit or two from an opponent two or three times its tonnage. Which meant that, while piloting a ‘Steed, you generally knew that death was coming. You had at least some amount of time to acknowledge and prepare for it, if it was something that was going to happen. Slipshod could feel content with that.

But just walking or sitting around on the Zathura until one moment you were just―suddenly―dead?

The changeling felt a cool chill ripple up his spine. “I don’t know if I could handle being where I couldn’t see what was going on,” Slipshod said in response, “Maybe it’s a changeling thing,” he hypothesized, “Being an empath, even if we’re not looking in somecreature’s direction, we still know that they’re there and broadly what’s going on with them. It’s like having passive sensors working for us at all times. We always see what’s coming at us.”

“I suppose I can understand that,” the alicorn acknowledged, finally withdrawing back into view once more. This time, in addition to the tools that she was telekinetically manipulating, a turbine fan floated out as well. Twilight began to measure each of the turbine’s blades with calipers at various points, “I’m pretty used to trusting others to get things done,” she countered.

Slipshod’s eyes darted briefly between the purple BattleSteed pilot and the partially disassembled jump jet, “...Which is why you’re rebuilding your ‘Steed while Mig and her techs are doing…whatever it is they’re doing?”

Twilight paused, noting the sarcasm in the changeling’s voice. She flashed him a lopsided smile, silently acknowledging how what she had just said would appear to contrast with her present actions, “Mig and her teams are preoccupied. Something about the Zathura not being a racing cart and Aileron knowing better than to fly her like one. She’s not very happy with him at the moment.

“Besaides,” she continued, turning back to her measuring, “this isn’t anything critical. I just…needed something to do.”

The stallion was silent for a good while as he watched the mare continue with her ‘busywork’. Despite what she’d told him, he could feel the kernels of helplessness buried beneath the calm front that the alicorn was projecting. She wanted to be able to do more, but knew that she didn’t have the tactical acumen to direct fleet engagements like the ones that they had just survived. Nor was she experienced enough to justify taking command of the ground invasion. That task had been laid at the hooves of creatures who had lived their lives being groomed exactly to conduct this sort of operation. Perhaps none of the three leaders of those Great Houses had ever imagined that they’d be doing so on such a grand scale, but that didn’t detract from the fact that they both knew how to lead forces in combat, and had the trust of their armies.

Twilight possessed none of those things. For all she was an ‘alicorn princess’, her real value didn’t extend much further than just being a mere BattleSteed pilot. A really good pilot, to be sure; but still just one mare commanding one ‘Steed in an invasion that comprised tens of thousands of them. A far cry from being the mare who was once the center of a galactic government.

That being said, “I think you’ve managed to do quite a lot,” Slipshod countered, drawing a dubious look from the purple mare, “No, I mean it! Okay, yeah, sure, you’re not leading this army; but are you really going to sit there and pretend that you didn’t have everything to do with putting it together in the first place?”

Twilight was already shaking her head, “I barely did anything,” she began, “The others―”

“The others have all been sitting on their flanks for centuries while Chrysalis and her changelings did whatever they wanted,” Slipshod interjected dismissively, “Nothing changed until you started pushing for it,” he pointed out.

“Okay, so maybe you didn’t do everything yourself,” the changeling conceded in a tone that wasn’t quite mocking, “But, unless I’ve grossly misunderstood everything you’ve been trying to teach me, isn’t that kind of the point? That we’re all supposed to help out and cooperate with each other? Everycreature playing to their strengths and making up for the weaknesses of others?

“You lit a fire under the Clans and the League-in-Exile. You got the first of the Successor States on board. You came up with the plan to stop the Clan invasion. You disabled the HyperSpark network so we could surprise Chrysalis.

“This invasion is happening because of what you’ve done. It’s perfectly okay for you to sit back and leave it to others to play their part now.”

Slipshod could sense that the alicorn certainly felt a little better for having heard his reassurances, but it hadn’t quite absolved her of those deep-seated doubts completely. Understandable, he supposed. It was probably a lot to ask of somepony who was used to always being at the center of everything to step back and just sort of ‘follow along’ and expect them to instantly be okay with the concept. Even if it was clear that they’d already done a good job of carrying their own weight.

“I guess you do have a point,” Twilight admitted, favoring the changeling with a more genuine smile this time, “I should be grateful that so many creatures are working together and sharing their strengths.” That brief spark of warmth faltered a bit, “I just hope it’s enough.”

It was a lot harder for the stallion to come up with assurances on that front. Mostly because of what he’d seen while sitting on the Zathura’s bridge. They’d lost a lot of DropShips out there already, and he suspected that those losses would only grow as they looped around the moon. Slipshod ran the numbers through his head, and he found himself not feeling particularly optimistic about their chances now.

In the back of his mind, the changeling recognized that it had always been too much to hope that their plan would go exactly as expected. Something was bound to have gone wrong. Something usually did. All they could hope for now was that things hadn’t gone too wrong. He supposed that they’d find out in a day or so.

“Thank you for this,” Twilight said, “I feel a lot better.” There was a brief pause as the alicorn turned her attention back to the jump jet, “I’d better get this put back together and then see if I can get a few hours of sleep. You should think about doing the same.”

“Sleep would be nice,” Slipshod admitted as he wandered away from the purple mare before she noticed that he hadn’t actually committed to the notion of getting any rest. Even if his own elevated anxiety level might have allowed it, the changeling stallion very much doubted that he’d have been able to relax enough through the crew’s heightened worry and fear to achieve anything that could be charitably considered ‘restful sleep’. It was more likely that he’d just end up lying awake in bed for a few hours fending off the refracted anxiety of a hundred other creatures.

…Maybe not quite that many, the changeling amended as he glanced in the direction of the BattleSteed stall which had recently been co-opted by dragons. Slipshod wasn’t sensing any nervousness from them. Intrigued, the stallion made his way to the otherside of the cavernous ‘Steed Bay.

Squeezing a full star worth of Dragon Clan battle armor into the same volume designed to contain a single ‘Steed had been a bit of an engineering challenge for Mig, but the kirin had come through with a simple and effective solution. The engineer had constructed what amounted to scaffolding within the stall’s area, allowing for five suits of battle armor to be stored on each level. The resulting structure was about as tall as a Big Mac, but as even a smaller DropShip like the Zathura was designed to be able to handle ‘Steeds that big, it didn’t cause a problem.

However, since there was only a single gantry capable of accessing that stall, it meant that most of the tiers of the scaffold could only be accessed by a set of stairs built into its side. Slipshod didn’t envy the pour clansmares who were forced to climb those every time they needed to get to their battle armor and cots.

Squelch had offered to reorganize the DropShip’s crew in order to find enough cabin space to fit the two dozen new additions to their ship’s complement. However, the dragon commanding the small contingent, Lieutenant Keely, had declined the offer, insisting that he and his unit would remain near their gear. Slipshod wasn’t certain if that was just how Elementals did things, or if it was because the dragons didn’t trust Mig’s tech not to mess with their stuff. Likely a mixture of both.

Strictly speaking, Slipshod doubted very much that Mig would have allowed any of her technicians to approach the battle armor anyway. Those suits weren’t any design that the kirin or her ponies were familiar with, or had much idea of how to maintain. They certainly wouldn’t have known how to fix anything if it got broken. As fascinated as the company’s lead engineer likely was about the new technology, Mig wasn’t one to let curiosity get in the way of practicality. If she didn’t know how to fix something, she left the matter to the professionals who did.

Slipshod spotted the charcoal dragon in charge of the group and approached him, “Lieutenant Keely!” the Elemental turned and stared at the approaching changeling. The stallion faltered slightly as he sensed the initial spike of wariness and disgust from the dragon when he saw who it was that had called to him. These emotions were soon overshadowed by deep resignation and he turned to face Slipshod with an expectant expression.

He’d met both Dragon Lord Ember and her consort Spike, as well as their daughter Cinder. All three of those dragons had been of comparable size, standing a little taller than Twilight Sparkle. Intimidating enough for an averaged-sized pony or changeling, but not more so than a hippogriff. Minotaurs stood even taller and more imposing, in Slipshod’s opinion.

However, it seemed that meeting three examples of what he’d assumed had been ‘typical’ dragons had apparently not properly prepared the changeling stallion for meeting these ‘Elemental’ dragons. They easily stood head and shoulders taller than the Dragon Lord had been, and were much broader to boot. They probably weighed twice as much as Ember did, Slipshod estimated. He’d initially assumed that the commanding officer of the little battle armor platoon was just an exceptionally tall dragon; however, it was soon evident that all of the Elementals were just as large as Lieutenant Keely was.

Maybe the other dragons he’d met had just been unusually short for their race?

“I, uh…was just stopping by to see how you guys were doing,” Slipshod began, keeping a pleasant smile on his face in spite of the bitter taste he was getting from the lieutenant’s broadcasted emotions. The changeling stallion got the impression that the dragon officer was deliberately thinking as ‘loudly’ as he could about how much he didn’t care for the changeling talking to him. The ‘Steed pilot didn’t begrudge the Clanner for not liking changelings as a rule, but it still seemed a little uncalled for to be targeting him with that same disdain. Keely had to know that he was on their side, right?

When it became clear that no verbal answer was forthcoming, Slipshod tried again to engage in conversation, “Did you guys need anything? Food? Parts? Tools?” The gray dragon’s features remained impassive as the silence endured, “...An ass de-sticking?” That last little bard at least provoked a slight rise of an eyebrow, but nothing verbal. The dragon officer maintained his wordless stare and emotional barrage for several more seconds until finally turning around the leaving, heading up the stairs to a higher tier of the scaffolding.

Slipshod sighed in defeat as he watched the dragon officer leave, massaging his temple in an effort to ease the headache all of those negative emotions had started to cause. He supposed that, in the end, it didn’t really matter whether or not the group of Elementals got along with him. As he understood things, these Clanners didn’t directly answer to himself or Twilight. The Zathura was just ferrying them to the planet. Indeed, they weren’t even being dropped off at the same location as the ‘Steeds. Once he, Twilight, and Xanadu were deployed, the Zathura was tasked with flying the Elementals further along to regroup with the rest of their ‘galaxy’ or whatever. After that, Squelch was supposed to take the DropShip back up to one of the―hopefully―still-orbiting WarShips in order to transport down additional forces embarked on them.

The changeling stallion was about to turn to leave when he sensed a hint of mirth from nearby. He glanced over and saw an eggshell dragoness sniggering in his direction from where she lay on her cot by one of the suits of battle armor. This dragoness was of the same large build that the lieutenant was, further suggesting to Slipshod that dragons were probably far larger on the whole than he’d initially thought. Upon seeing that her laughter had been noticed, the Elemental waved one of her clawed hands at Slipshod, flashing him a broad grin, “Don’t take it personally. The LT just hates you for what you are.”

She paused for a moment, considering, and then added, “On second thought, I guess that does make it kind of personal. Eh,” she shrugged dismissively.

“Glad to hear it. I thought it was my BO,” Slipshod replied, now wearing a sardonic smile. He didn’t sense the same kind of disdain for his very existence from this dragoness. On the contrary, he was actually picking up quite a lot of positivity and happiness coming from this dragon. However, he was having a difficult time pinning down the source of it. It didn’t feel to him like this dragoness was feeling particularly happy about anything. She was just…happy for the sake of being happy. It was an emotional state that the changeling was admittedly unfamiliar with. In his experience, just about every emotion had an underlying cause. It was extremely unusual for a feeling to be entirely spontaneous.

At least, among the sane…

“Us dragons spend our leisure time lounging in sulfur pits near lava flows,” she said, issuing another dismissive wave of her clawed hand, “Ain’t no BO going to offend our noses. Nah, it’s definitely the fact that you’re the shape-shifting spawn of that Chrysalis bitch.”

Slipshod quirked a brow, “Does that mean that the reason you’re willing to talk to me is because you don’t despise everything about me and what I represent?”

The dragoness flashed another toothy grin in the changeling’s direction, “Don’t get me wrong: I’m looking forward to wiping your whole species from the galaxy. Bring me whatever passes for a baby changeling and I’ll stomp it into mush right here and now,” the amount of pleasure that the dragoness was feeling as she said that turned Slipshod’s stomach a little. Tasting happiness derived from depravity was like biting into a cake that had been baked with salt in place of sugar.

“Sorry, fresh out of pupae at the moment,” Slipshod replied, trying to hide his nervousness behind a smile. He was only mildly successful, which the dragoness appeared to find amusing as well.

“I can wait. This time tomorrow, I expect to be wading through bodies.”

“That’s the spirit…”

“Don’t mind her,” another female voice called down from above, drawing the changeling’s attention just in time to see a golden yellow form fluttering to a stop just about the deck plating before touching down with their clawed feet on the metal surface. The second dragoness didn’t seem to be brimming with quite the same ravoness desire for bloodshed as her compatriot, which Slipshod found refreshing, “She’s just really passionate about her work.”

“Like what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life!” The eggshell Elemental quipped, still wearing her toothy smile. The changeling was starting to wonder if she possessed any other expressive range, since he hadn’t seen her lips close over her teeth once yet.

The golden dragon rolled her eyes, obviously being quite familiar with the personality of her compatriot. Much to Slipshod’s surprise, this new arrival actually stuck out one of her hands in an invitation to shake, “Flux. That one’s Shrike,” from behind her, the eggshell dragoness fluttered her talons in Slipshod’s direction, letting out a chittering hiss through her still-bared fangs.

“Charmed,” the stallion replied, his gaze darting between the two as he accepted Flux’s offer and passed his hoof into her outstretched talons. This one didn’t seem nearly as violence-prone as the other. She also wasn’t nearly as large, having a build that was far closer to that of the Dragon Lord and her consort than either Keely or the broad-toothed dragoness on the cot, “Slipshod.”

Shrike let out an amused snort, leering at him, “Isn’t that cute? It gave itself a pony name!”

The changeling cringed at the retort. The dragoness wasn’t wrong; ‘Slipshod’ wasn’t really the kind of name that a changeling would have. However, it was the name that he’d used since leaving Equus, and changing it would have just confused his friends. He withdrew his hoof, eyeing the seated dragoness warily, “I didn’t ‘give’ it to myself,” he countered, “It’s―it was―my cover identity’s name. I just haven’t gotten around to changing it is all.”

“What was your real name then?” Flux asked.

Slipshod very nearly responded, but then thought better of it, “...I don’t much care for the name the queen gave me anymore, to be honest.”

The pair of dragons exchanged looks. The grinning one on the cot shrugged and laid down; while her golden companion looked back at the changeling, “Fair enough.”

“So…” Slipshod began, eager to shift the topic of conversation, “Why don’t you share your friend’s, uh, ‘passion’ for killing changelings?” He asked.

“Because I’m not a soldier; I’m a tech,” Flux answered easily, “My job is to make sure she can do hers,” she jerked a talon back in Shrike’s direction, “Which, somedays it feels to me like her job is to find new and creative ways to break her shit.”

Shrike looked to not be the least bit bothered by the jab from her friend, letting out a hardy laugh, “Can’t have you techies getting bored, seeing as it’s the Elementals like us that get to have all the real fun!”

The changeling cocked his head in confusion, “Wait, you’re not both Elementals?”

This question only prompted another burst of laughter from the eggshell dragoness, “That half-pint; an Elemental?! Ha! She’s just some natborn with delusions of adequacy,” Shrike stuck her tongue out at the golden dragoness, who merely rolled her eyes in an exaggerated display of annoyance. Meanwhile, Slipshod wasn’t sensing any genuine animosity from the pair. This all seemed to just sort of be how they interacted with each other.

Fortunately, it looked like an explanation would be forthcoming for the stallion’s benefit, “There are two kinds of dragons,” Flux began in a patient tone, “There are natural-born dragons―natborns―and then there are Elementals,” the technician gestured to herself and Shrike respectively, “Because dragons live so long and tend to put off the whole ‘family’ thing for decades, if not centuries, it was figured out pretty early on that we’d never be able to grow the numbers needed for an invasion force fast enough through natural means.”

“Even the other races weren’t boinking fast enough,” The larger Clanner chimed in. “Might have been a different story if that whiny bitch’s mother had made it out instead of her. I’m sure the ‘Princess of Love’ would’ve had those ponies popping out foals left, right, and center!”

“So the decision was made pretty quick to use artificial insemination and cloning to help speed up the process,” Flux continued, seeming to ignore the contribution of her companion, “The powers that be then decided that, since they were going to be producing vat-grown batches of warrior dragons anyway, they might as well see what could be done about making bigger and better dragons.”

“Your words, not mine,” Shrike quipped, her brilliant ruby eyes sparkling along with her grin now.

“Normally, dragons only get bigger as a result of GIB―Greed-Induced Biggness. Essentially, the more stuff that a dragon has that’s of value, the bigger and stronger they get. But, with resources being pretty scarce, especially early on, there was no way that enough hordes could be amassed to create suitably powerful dragons. We couldn’t rely on our innate magic to make us big and strong.

“So, the League-in-Exile’s top mages figured out a way to meld unhatched dragons with aspects of the Elements of Harmony. Creating ‘Elementals’,” Flux gestured once more at the grinning Shrike, who pantomimed receiving an ovation from an unseen crowd of admirers.

For some reason, Slipshod found himself a little put off by the eggshell dragoness’ otherwise happy demeanor now. He also realized why he hadn’t been able to figure out what the dragoness was happy about before. She probably wasn’t actually happy about anything. She was just ‘happy’ because that emotional state had been magically grafted into her very being.

The changeling was sure that his past self would have found this dragoness beyond enticing. She was a psychovore’s dream: a nearly bottomless well of happiness by virtue of the feeling being artificially produced at an intrinsic level. Her happiness was nearly as bottomless as a unicorn’s magic, and in much the same way. He could have lived off of her happiness and love for all of the things around her almost exclusively in a way that wouldn’t have been possible with any other singular creature.

However, he also recognized the drawback: it was an implanted emotion. Which meant that it wasn’t genuine. Life-sustaining, perhaps, but not as beneficial or filling as the real thing. Just as a pony could live off of oats and water as far as calories were concerned, but such a diet was bland and ultimately unsatisfying without flavors and variety. Shrike was the ricecake of emotional meals.

Meanwhile, the Reformed Slipshod couldn’t help but feel a little horrified at the notion of what had been done to this dragoness. Indeed, the revelation encouraged him to push a little bit deeper into Shrike’s emotional state, beyond the ‘happiness’ that was radiating forth from her. It took a little bit of searching, but eventually the stallion found what he was afraid of: Shrike’s anguish and frustration. She knew that she felt happy, but she didn’t know why she felt that way, because she knew that there wasn’t anything that she should be feeling this happy about.

It was like being completely aware of a psychosis that was adversely affecting you, while simultaneously being unable to do anything about it; and knowing that it wasn’t normal. Shrike didn’t want to feel as happy as she was, but was completely helpless to do anything about it. There was little doubt in Slipshod’s mind that this would cause serious psychological trauma for the dragoness in the long term.

If it hadn’t already.

“Bigger, stronger, tougher, and all around better dragons in every way!” Shrike announced in a triumphant tone, her lips spread in that broad grin which the changeling could now not help but see as forced and strained. The sparkle of her brilliant crimson eyes dulled by a hidden plea to be able to express what she actually felt.

The changeling stallion briefly glanced at Flux, noting that the dragoness technician was once more letting out a softly resigned sigh in response to her companion’s boasting. There was no discernable sign that Flux didn’t completely believe the Elemental was being authentic with her boasting. Slipshod wondered now if the golden dragoness genuinely understood the effect that the magical augmentation had had on Shrike―or any of the other Elementals, come to think of it. Likely not, given that she probably possessed little understanding of unicorn magic, or what Flurry Heart’s mages had done to the dragon eggs they’d ‘enhanced’.

“I…see,” was all the stallion trusted himself to say. They were less than a day away from one of―if not the―most pivotal battles that the galaxy had ever known. Now was not the time to go pulling at threads that risked unraveling the invasion to come. It was obvious that, whatever the long-term mental effects might turn out to be, the Elementals were indeed superior fighters. The Clans and the united Harmony Sphere powers were in need of every advantage that they could get just now. Assuming the invasion was successful and Chrysalis was defeated, there would be plenty of time to bring this matter to Twilight so that a way could be explored to undo the magical transmutation inflicted on these dragons.

“Shrike,” a soft baritone announced from Slipshod’s right. The changeling turned his head and spotted what had to be another Elemental walking towards them. The pale teal dragon spared Flux and the stallion a brief acknowledging nod before turning his full attention towards the eggshell dragoness, “Pre-mission brief in an hour. Is there anything you need me to do to help you get ready?”

“Thanks, Pyrite,” she replied, beaming broadly at the more somber-faced Elemental even as she shook her head, “But I’ll be good. Not sure how you’d ‘help me’ hang around and wait for a meeting to start anyway. Unless you can make time go faster or something; hah!” She let out a laugh that sounded much more strained to Slipshod now that he was properly tuned in to the dragoness’ feelings.

“I can look into doing that for you, if it’ll help,” Pyrite offered. Somehow, Shrike managed to level a flat look at the teal dragon, despite her continued broad grin. The other dragon winced slightly and shruggedc, “Right, yeah, sarcasm. Sorry. Just call me if you need anything.”

He turned towards Flux and opened up his mouth, but the golden dragoness tech already had a clawed hand up and was shaking her head, “I’m good, dude. You don’t know anything about the suits anyway―and you don’t need to learn. That’s my job.”

“Right,” There was audible disappointment in the dragon’s voice, but he accepted the denials for assistance by the pair of dragonesses all the same. Likely he was quite used to being turned down if he was consistently offering to do things for others that he couldn’t possibly do. Acting on a hunch, Slipshod reached out with his senses and pressed into the dragon’s emotional state. Unlike the dragoness who was cursed to perpetually wear a vacuous grin, this other dragon wasn’t pumping out a constant stream of counterfeit mirth. Instead his emotional state was best summed up as: ‘self-destructively generous’.

The changeling found himself feeling even more empathetic for this dragon, being able to relate. However, unlike with the changeling, Pyrite didn’t want to go out of his way to help others because of misplaced guilt. Rather, like Shrike, an artificial source of those feelings had been magically grafted into him, and it was not a compulsion that he couldn’t fight. And just like the other Elemental, Slipshod could feel that Pyrite was keenly aware that feeling the way he was wasn’t normal, and he desperately wished he could stop feeling this way.

He turned and walked away once more.

“I’ll, uh…I’ll leave you guys to do…whatever it is you need to do,” Slipshod said, taking a step back as he prepared to make his departure from the group of dragons. Flux offered a brief goodbye before launching herself back up to the third level of the scaffold; presumably where she’d been before descending earlier. Shrike simply grinned at him.

Somehow, the changeling managed to keep himself from shivering in disgust until he was out of the ‘Steed Bay. He was hardly unfamiliar with the concept of creatures projecting emotions that they didn’t really feel. That was how polite society functioned sometimes. However, this wasn’t the same thing. Shrike hadn’t been ‘acting’ happy while actually feeling some other emotion that she was covering up behind a mask. She’d genuinely felt happy; it just hadn’t been her happiness that she’d been feeling. Which had the effect of tainting that happiness with distress and discomfort.

An ‘empty’ emotion, sprinkled with unsettling ones…

The stallion felt a need to cleanse his palate.

Two hours later, Slipshod released a long-suffering sigh of annoyance before he finally propped himself up on his forehooves and looked down at the clearly uncomfortable unicorn mare lying beneath him on their bed. He frowned down at her, noting the swirling vortex of emotions that she was putting out. None of which either of them had been hoping to experience at the moment.

Embarrassment, shame, disgust, and somewhere buried deep beneath all of the detritus was at least a glimmer of love. The stallion proceeded to mentally roll his eyes. Talk about picking the corn kernels out of a turd…

It wasn’t Squelch’s fault. The sage green unicorn had actually been making an admirable effort to get over her physical discomfort. Slipshod appreciated it too; he really did! However, he saw no reason for her to keep up the charade at this point. It just wasn’t healthy, and it wasn’t helping either of them.

The dark cabin was filled briefly by a flash of emerald firelight. When it faded, a now much fuzzier stallion lowered himself back down to the mare and resumed gently kissing at her exposed belly. The unicorn’s barely suppressed grunts of discomfort almost immediately shifted in tone to sounds which indicated that she was finding his ministrations much more provocative now. However, much to his frustration, those feelings were very quickly and violently supplanted by a rush of shame as the mare shot up and reached her hooves out towards his head.

Upon making contact with a full mane of hair and clearly fuzzier ears, the unicorn mare let out a disappointed moan, murmuring: “No…”

Her horn started glowing with pale blue light until her telekinesis found the wall panel which controlled their cabin’s lights and restored the room to full illumination. Once she confirmed that she was sharing her bed with an amber-hued earth pony stallion instead of the slick-shelled changeling drone who’d been there when those lights had gone off, Squelch collapsed back into the bed, covering her face with her forehooves and letting out a very frustrated sound, “Damn it, Slip…”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I don’t care, Squelch!” Slipshod didn’t―quite―yell, but somepony could have been forgiven for thinking that he had. In the changeling’s defense, this was an impasse that the pair of them had been dealing with since deciding to resume the intimate aspects of their previous relationship. For all that Squelch did harbor genuine feelings of love for Slipshod, as he did for her; there was still the not-insignificant factor that the unicorn mare found his changeling appearance physically…unarousing.

Nor was her disinclination―she wouldn’t use the word ‘revulsion’ out loud―entirely restricted to how he looked. She didn’t like the way that his semi-hard shell felt against her body, or the texture of his lips against her fur, or how dry and rubbery his forked tongue was. She even had trouble looking lovingly into his compound eyes while the lights were on.

Slipshod didn’t take any of these things personally. Changelings didn’t put a lot of stock in physical appearance, since they could change theirs as easily as a pony changed their clothes. More easily in some cases, to be honest. He was no more offended by her distaste in his appearance than any other creature would be if their lover said that a specific shirt or set of horseshoes were unappealing. If Squelch didn’t like how he looked as a changeling, then he had no problem turning himself back into his earth pony form―or assuming any other form that she might find more desirable. It didn’t matter to him in the slightest.

However, Squelch had remained emphatic that she just needed to ‘get used’ to his changeling appearance and that―eventually―she wouldn’t find him hideous to look at. Granted, that wasn’t the word she’d used; but it had been the emotion that she’d felt at the time. Slipshod had been dubious at first, but accepted the mare’s insistence otherwise. This was something that she wanted to prove to herself just as much as she wanted to prove it to him.

Now, as far as the changeling was concerned, the experiment had run its course and the results were irrefutable: Squelch wasn’t sexually attracted to bugs. Shocking.

“But I―” The mare began to protest, her face still hidden behind her hooves.

“No. No ‘buts’,” Slipshod cut her off, his tone leaving no room for argument, “We’ve been at this for months, and you still aren’t having a good time. Not even close. Sweet Celestia, I feel like I’m assaulting you!”

This prompted an immediate reaction from the unicorn, who shot back up and reached out for the stallion, cupping his head in her hooves, “No! You’re not; I’m sorry. It’s just…” The mare’s words trailed off as she started chewing on her lip. She was no longer able to meet his gaze.

“How many times do I have to tell you that this isn’t a big deal?” he asked, gesturing at the earth pony form he’d assumed, “I don’t care if you’re more turned on by this body than my ‘real one’.”

“Well I do!” Squelch protested, sounding exasperated, “Because if I really love you, it shouldn’t matter to me what you look like, right?”

“Why not?”

The sage green mare balked, staring at the changeling as she blinked in confusion, clearly not expecting that response. When she recovered, she was sounding a little less sure of herself, “Because love isn’t about what you look like, it’s about who you are as a being. I fell in love with you before I knew you were a changeling, so it shouldn’t matter to me when you look like one; because you’re still that same creature I fell in love with.”

“Now you’re conflating love and sex,” Slipshod pointed out, “You can definitely have one without the other, which means they aren’t inherently connected. It is entirely possible for you to care about me on a deep, emotional, level, and still not want me sucking on your tits,” He let an undeniably changeling-like tongue flicker out of his mouth, prompting a surprised gasp from the unicorn as she recoiled away in disgust. All the while, Slipshod maintained a passive expression, having fully expected that reaction from the mare, based on past experience.

“I know that you care about me,” The stallion assured her, reaching out now with one of his earth pony hooves and softly caressing the mare’s cheek, “I can’t help but not,” he said with a sly smile as his unicorn lover flashed him a lopsided smile of her own at the reminder of the ‘power imbalance’ that existed between them as a result of Slipshod’s ability to inherently know her precise emotional state at all times, while she couldn’t ever know exactly how he was feeling inside.

“And I’ll never think any less of you for thinking that my changeling form isn’t exactly Playmare centerfold material,” he was grinning now as Squelch rolled her eyes, “Although…” The changeling continued, another ripple of green fire passing briefly over his body. When it vanished, the amber earth pony stallion was gone. In his place was a broad-chested ivory unicorn stallion with piercing blue eyes and a mane of flowing golden locks. His white coat was criss-crossed with striking black stripes that somehow seemed to have been specifically tailored to draw the eye from one pronounced bundle of firm, well-muscled, flesh to the nest. As soon as Squelch saw his new form, the changeling noted a brief flare of unbridled lust, which she very insistently―if reluctantly―tamped down and buried.

Slipshod was still beaming broadly at her as he spoke in a much deeper voice than ‘Slipshod’ could ever have possessed, even throwing in a hint of a Trottingham accent, “...there’s no reason you couldn’t have a Playmare centerfold, if you wanted?” He winked at the mare.

Squelch was never going to admit that she hesitated. In spite of the fact that they both know that she did; and they both knew what she’d been feeling at the time. However, much to the mare’s own disappointment―and a little to Slipshod’s surprise―the unicorn shook her head, “Turn back!

“To your real self!” She added a heartbeat later. This too carried with it a hint of reluctance.

Slipshod let out a snort that was more amused than derisive, before finally letting out a burst of laughter. It was a reaction that left the sage green mare equal parts confused and annoyed. The strapping unicorn stallion favored Squelch with a lopsided smile, “What does that even mean to a changeling?” He asked her in a semi-playful tone.

“Tell me you’ve noticed that my appearance―even as a changeling―has been changing for the past year? Our transformations are unconsciously influenced by the emotions we receive from those closest to us,” he reminded her, “The ‘real’ me of today doesn’t look the way I did when I left Equus. Maybe I’ll look even more different a year from now―assuming we all live that long,” he added as an afterthought.

“I’m a changeling, Squelch,” Slipshod reiterated, “The key word there is: ‘change’. I don’t have a ‘real’ self any more than you have a ‘real’ outfit that you wear!

“Do you understand?” He reached out and took one of the unicorn’s hooves in his, bringing it to his currently rather voluminous alabaster chest. As it made contact, he once more felt the involuntary swell of desire from the mare before she quickly swallowed it back down, “That’s all a shape is to me: clothing. It’s not who I am as a creature. It’s a thing that I can change at will to suit the occasion.

“When I’m walking around the ship, the ‘occasion’ is to let the crew know that I’m comfortable enough with them to show my ‘neutral’ state, and to remind them that not every ‘ling is a monster who wants to suck out every last mote of love from their bodies,” He winked at the mare, smirking wryly, “But right now, the occasion is ‘sexy time’.

“So let me ‘wear’ something sexy for you, okay?”

Slipshod could still feel the reservation that the mare held; stubbornly clung to simply because it was a way that she had grown up viewing the world around her: a creature’s looks were as much an intrinsic part of them as their personality. One couldn’t just be disconnected from the other in any kind of relationship, whether it was sexual or merely social. Ponies, like most other creatures, valued sight as much as any of their other senses, and it played a role in selecting partners. Telling a pony that they needed to change their whole physical structure in order to be found sexually desireable wasn’t exactly considered ‘proper etiquette’ in the world she’d grown up in.

It was going to take her time to accept that a changeling like himself didn’t put any stock into physical appearances. Not because he was a ‘better’ or ‘more authentic’ creature than she was, but simply because his species wasn’t as reliant on sight as a primary sense. Among their kind, physical appearance was fluid and transitory. It couldn’t be relied upon to identify others. So they focused on how another creature ‘looked’ emotionally. A creature’s feelings and personality―even those of another changeling―were unique and readily distinguishable; so their empathic abilities were the sense that they relied upon the most when interacting with others.

When he looked at Squelch, he didn’t ‘see’ a green unicorn mare. He saw a being that was determined to achieve success and prosperity―not just for herself, but for others as well. A being that resented the rules that she was forced to operate under, and did so only until she came to possess the means to change them. Someone who didn’t just see the galaxy as it was right now, but looked ahead to the future and what it could become if she gave it the proper nudge.

A pony who loved him, despite what he was and what he had put her through.

Squelch let out a long sigh, bowing her head, “...I’m sorry.” He felt the shame in her. The stink of a perceived failure in herself to not be able to get over her trepidation regarding the physical appearance of his changeling form. To her, it was like acknowledging that she was a vapid and shallow pony.

In response, Slipshod reached out and gathered her into his hooves, hugging her against his chest. He hid a smile as he felt the mare become considerably more excited―and promptly hated herself for it, “Do you like Cookie?”

Squelch blinked in mild confusion, her lust briefly snuffed by the apparent non-sequitur, “Wha-huh?”

“Cookie. The cranky donkey in the kitchen who wouldn’t let me back into the galley until I promised to buy my own carafe because I kept stealing or breaking his?” A thought briefly occurred to the changeling, “...He has actual quarters on this ship, right? Because I just realized he’s always in the galley no matter when I show up―”

“Yes, I know who Cookie is,” Squelch confirmed, still sounding puzzled, “What does he have to do with this?”

“Do you like him?”

“I wouldn’t keep him on the Zathura if I didn’t,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“Would you suck his dick?”

“Ew! Celestia, no!”

“Do you feel bad for liking Cookie and not wanting to suck his dick?”

Squelch grimaced, “Okay, I get it! Can we please stop talking about Cookie’s dick now?”

“Is there anycreature’s dick in particular you’d rather discuss?” Slipshod asked innocently, “I happen to know that one of Mig’s pegasus techs has a really impressive one,” he added, eyeing the mare knowingly, “Like, if he turned suddenly to the left and you weren’t paying attention, Cravat would be treating you for a concus―”

“Slip!” Squelch snapped, reaching out and slapping down the stallion’s hooves, which he had just spaced out an almost comical distance apart from one another. The golden-maned striped unicorn was smiling broadly at her all the same, watching as the mare’s annoyance quickly dissolved into amusement of her own―and just a hint of curiosity, “I get it,” she assured him.

“Do you now?” The stallion asked in a playful tone. He gently leaned the mare back onto the bed, hovering over her now, noting how much smaller she appeared beneath this new form of his. He noted too that Squelch was very much on board with her current situation. All the same, she put out her hoof to stop the stallion from bending his head down to kiss her.

However, before he could muster up another frustrated sigh, she said, “As Slipshod. Earth pony Slipshod,” she amended. Her eyes explored the immaculate unicorn shape with deep longing one more time, “...We’ll do Lanzony another time,” she said, nibbling on her lip in anticipation.

Slipshod snorted in amusement, but nodded all the same, “Fine with me,” he assured her before shifting forms back to that of the ‘Steed pilot she’d always known him to be. The sage unicorn mare smiled up at him and wrapped his torso in her hooves.

The changeling noted the ever-so-brief flicker of disappointment. Not in herself this time, but in what she’d―not―found when she’d encircled him. Suppressing an urge to laugh out loud and managing to stifle it down to a mere snigger, Slipshod briefly closed his eyes and another flicker of flame flashed over him. He was now ‘Slipshod the Earth Pony BattleSteed Pilot’, but if he’d spent a great deal more time at the gym, “Better?”

“Much~”

He heard no further protests from the mare that evening.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 47: Operation Audacity

An alarm chirped, drawing General Charon’s gaze away from the latest after-action report that she was reading through. The changeling mare noted the time. She closed out the report that she had been looking at and began to issue a series of commands to her office’s terminal. Once she was done, she leaned back and waited. After several seconds, the computer sounded a small chime, signaling that it had finished creating the encoded channel that she had asked it for.

A heartbeat later, the general was alerted to an incoming request for a conversation through that same encoded channel. She accepted. Her screen remained dark, as there would be no video element for this exchange. Transmitting video or holographic information took up more bandwidth than a simple audio line did, which meant that a more intense signal was needed. Charon wanted this conversation to go as unnoticed as possible, given the nature of what was going to be discussed.

“Hello, A,” the changeling began, “Are you well?”

“I’m fine, G.” The voice that responded was distorted and unfamiliar. Which was intended. General Charon was confident that she didn’t sound anything like herself to the being she was speaking to either, “There was a little bit of fuss earlier, but it’s been dealt with.”

The general thought back to the report that she’d seen earlier, submitted by Admiral Gossamer, regarding Second Fleet’s action against the breakaway division from the Clan’s fleet. It had been something of a bittersweet outcome. For all the admiral’s ships had outnumbered those of the Clans by a margin of nearly three to one, the better part of half of his ships had been either destroyed or crippled beyond the capacity to participate effectively in any upcoming actions. An additional quarter of his ships were operational, but in serious need of repairs. Only about twenty percent of his WarShips were operating at peak efficiency.

The Clanner division had gone down hard, but it had gone down in the end. Only a few of their lighter frigates and cruisers had managed to break away and escape destruction, fleeing to the furthest reaches of the system. There wasn’t anywhere for them to really run and hide, ultimately. They would be hunted down and picked off eventually, but their survival wasn’t a chief concern at the moment. Those few lighter ships were no longer a threat, but the remaining Clan fleet most assuredly was, and so both of ComSpark’s WarShip fleets had been ordered to pursue them.

“I saw. Will you be busy, or can you stop by later?”

“Why, do you need a ride?”

Charon’s gaze flickered briefly to a datapad on her desk which detailed the latest information on the composition of the enemy ships which had managed to punch through the WarShip screen and were now on their way to Equus, via the moon. They’d taken significant losses too, the general could see, but not nearly enough to truly break them. While she also knew that the shipyard intended to launch a sortie with their own dedicated aerospace fighter wings, the changeling mare was doubtful that it would accomplish much. The Clan fleet had its own fighter escorts mingled in with their forces; and while DropShips could do almost nothing to a WarShip, they weren’t exactly helpless against mere fighters, especially in such great numbers like they were.

The fighters being deployed from the shipyard were simply not going to be enough to seriously impede the oncoming fleet, let alone stop it. The Clanners were going to reach Equus and make their landings. That much was basically a given. What remained to be seen was whether or not their invasion would end up posing a legitimate threat to QueenChrysalis or not.

“Making plans, but nothing’s set in stone,” Charon replied coolly. She wasn’t committed to abandoning Equus quite yet. Indeed, there was still a good possibility that she could end up emerging as something of a hero in the end if she stayed, “I want to bring some friends along; How many could you fit?”

There was a pause, presumably while Gossamer looked over his remaining fleet composition and confirmed which of his remaining vessels had received the battery upgrade which the general had encouraged him to get during their last meeting, “Two dozen.”

The mare felt her face break into a grimace. That was far fewer ships than she’d hoped for. Granted, those were merely the numbers for Gossamer’s fleet. The entirety of the Home Fleet was charged up and able to make a jump out of the system if needed. However, Charon had not approached the admiral in charge of it, as she considered it too risky to involve one of the Queen’s officers who was perpetually in the system. There was too great of a chance that they’d lose their nerve and reveal everything that Charon had discussed with them.

If things deteriorated far enough in the next day or two, Charon might consider taking the risk and revealing her intentions with a few of Home Fleet’s captains to gauge their interest, but she wasn’t going to plan on their involvement either way. So, as things stood, she and Gossamer had twenty four WarShips capable of leaving the Faust System. That meant that there was a maximum of one hundred and forty docking points for DropShips. Likely significantly less, as Charon considered it unlikely that all of those vessels were battleship-sized or larger. Assuming a conservative mixture of hull types comparable to the fleet’s original composition, it was probably closer to sixty docking points.

A not-insignificant portion of her forces wouldn’t be making the trip out of the system with her. If it came to that, anyway. It might not.

The general was unsure of which outcome she would be more relieved by, “Understood. G, out.”

She closed down the comm channel and set about erasing the last few minutes of logs from her computer. Once she’d covered her tracks, the changeling commander leaned back in her chair and steepled her hooves in thought.

General Charon had spent the better part of the last decade personally assembling her brigade and battalion commanders. They were all exceptionally competent officers, for the most part. The units that they commanded were likewise made up of highly capable changelings who had demonstrated their competence during the Battle of Buckwheat. Charon would have liked to take all of them with her, in the event an evacuation proved prudent. Now it appeared that would not be possible. She was going to be forced to pick who could go with her, and who would be left behind to face the wrath of the Clans―

Her terminal beeped, signaling that a new transmission was incoming. A quick glance confirmed that it was not from Admiral Gossamer, but from her aide, “Yes, Major?”

“Sorry for the interruption, ma’am,” the junior officer began, “but General Blatta is on the comm. He says that he has orders for you, ma’am.” There was a brief pause, “...From Her Majesty.”

Charon muffled her derisive snort. She very much doubted that Blatta, the commanding general overseeing the forces permanently garrisoned on the moon, had received orders from the Queenspecifically for her. That wasn’t the correct channel down which her orders were to come. Indeed, most of Charon’s orders often came directly from Her Majesty; especially if she was in the same solar system as the Queen. More than likely what had happened was that General Blatta had received orders from Queen Chrysalis and elected to include Charon in them because he had―incorrectly―assumed that Charon’s forces fell under his umbrella of command because they just so happened to be on the moon.

That wasn’t how things worked, of course. Blatta knew that too―or he should have, at any rate. He was likely just trying to intimidate her into following him, so that he’d get any glory from a victory, while it would look like Charon was merely following his lead.

Charon immediately resolved to not let that happen, “Go ahead and forward the call, Major. Thank you.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

A moment later, she was confronted on her monitor with the face of a rather irritable-looking changeling stallion, “General Blatta, how may I help you?”

The other changeling scowled at what he likely perceived to be an improper level of deference to his position. While their individual ranks were the same, Blatta’s assignment as the head of the moon’s entire garrison, where Charon commanded only a single division, did mean that he technically ‘outranked’ her, it was also the case that he was not, in fact, her immediate or direct superior. He could not―officially―issue her orders. However, if he was of a mind to, he could make her life and career difficult in the long term.

“General Charon, you will mobilize your division and get them on their DropShips and back to Equus immediately! Her Majesty has recalled the garrison to Canterlot.”

It took considerable effort for Charon to keep her expression impassive. Internally, the changeling mare was absolutely reeling from the shock of what she’d just heard. Under other circumstances, she felt like she could have been forgiven for thinking that this was some sort of joke. The garrison was being recalled to Canterlot? Now?!

It was absurd! More than that: it was absolutely the single dumbest decision that anycreature could have made, under the circumstances. General Charon didn’t even have to bring up the latest sensor maps of the system to know that, because she’d been watching them like a griffon eyeing a C-bit for the better part of the morning.

The Clan fleet was not heading directly for Equus, as one might have expected. They were traveling too fast for that, and decelerating too slowly to achieve a direct orbital insertion. However, they were traveling on the correct heading for a slingshot around the moon which would allow them to breakaway towards Equus with a significant reduction in velocity; allowing them to make Equus orbit much sooner than a direct heading would have.

There were still a few hours yet before the fleet reached the moon. Plenty of time for the garrison to board their DropShips and take off without having to worry about much interference from the approaching DropShips. However, those DropShips would be starting from a near standstill, and still in the middle of their acceleration burns by the time the Clan fleet slung around the moon and started making its final approach to Equus…on a nearly identical heading as the ComSpark DropShips. There’d be no way for those DropShips to evade in time, and they certainly couldn’t fend off even the diminished WarShip fleet that would overtake them.

It would be a bloodbath!

“...Excuse me, general; you said that these orders came down from Her Majesty? Is that correct?”

“I spoke with Queen Chrysalis Herself less than an hour ago,” Blatta confirmed, puffing up slightly with pride at having shared words directly with the Queen. Then his smug sneer turned once more on Charon, “She ordered the entire garrison to depart for Canterlot immediately to reinforce its defenses against these interlopers. They’ll crash against us like a wave hitting a cliff, and be just as effective at toppling it,” he predicted, flashing another satisfied smile.

Charon opened her mouth and was about to point out to the other general the realities of space travel and converging courses which he had somehow managed to overlooked…but then thought better of it. If anything, the mare supposed, she should probably be thanking Blatta―as well as Her Majesty―for helping her to make the final decision on the matter that had been weighing on her so heavily these past hours since the Clans had arrived.

General Charon knew that she wasn’t a verifiable genius. Any navigator who’d graduated from the academy―arguably any prospective navigator merely attending the academy―could have seen that departing the moon now would put those DropShips directly in the path of the oncoming Clan WarShip fleet. The time to move Blatta’s forces would have either been about six hours earlier, or when they could be properly covered by the ComSpark WarShip fleet that was about a day and a half behind the Clan ships. That way it could be assured that most, if not all, of the garrison could safely travel to Equus and make planetfall.

The mare didn’t know Blatta’s complete background, and it was entirely possible that he wasn’t good with numbers or course plotting. He was a leader of ground forces, after all, and not WarShips. He very well may not have understood all of the factors involved. However, somecreature on his staff had to! So either they’d kept their mouths shut because they were all a bunch of ‘Yes Mares’ who had been taught never to question their commander, even when he was about to get them all killed; or―more likely―Blatta had dismissed any objections because they’d come from somecreature holding a lower rank than him. After all, if the Queen had told him to come now, then surely it was safe.

Which brought up the other matter: Her Majesty shouldn’t have been operating in a bubble either. She was surrounded by advisors and experts too. Surely one of them had let her know what could happen to the garrison if she recalled it now, right?

Then again…even Charon had to acknowledge that she would have been hard-pressed to contradict one of the Queen’s orders in Her presence. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely improbable that all of the changelings around the Queen had remained mum, even if they recognized the grievous error that Chrysalis was making.

An error that was also likely being made because Her Majesty was panicking. This couldn’t have been an order made after careful consideration of all the facts, after all. This was something commanded on impulse, and heedless of the possible consequences. The kind of order issued by a leader who had lost their nerve and wasn’t thinking clearly.

The Queen was afraid, and she was making mistakes already. It was all the more troubling to see, since their forces were debatably winning at the moment. They’d inflicted serious losses on the enemy, even though they had technically taken numerically heavier ones. Similarly, while the Clans fielded a large landing force, it was paltry compared to the planet’s own defensive garrisons. Overall, at least. The Clans would certainly outnumber any local force when they landed, and there was only so much DropShip capacity at ComSpark’s disposal. It would take time, perhaps, but an eventual victory should be possible without too much trouble. As long as Her Majesty and her senior military leaders kept their wits about them.

However, that was obviously not going to be the case, Charon realized now. If they won this day, it would likely be in spite of the Queen’s leadership, and not because of it. Which didn’t mean that it was impossible for them to achieve victory. If they did manage to carry the day, the last thing that Charon wanted was for Queen Chrysalis to feel like one of her senior generals hadn’t been committed to protecting her.

“I see,” General Charon finally said, “I will order one of my brigades dispatched immediately.”

Blatta scowled now, glaring accusingly at the changeling mare, “I believe I ordered you to send along your entire division, general.”

“And I would most certainly love to do so, general,” Charon assured him in an apologetic tone, “However, several dozen of my DropShips are undergoing maintenance cycles at the moment. It’ll take hours to get them space-worthy again,” she lied, “I only have enough current lifting capacity for one of my brigades. Unless you have additional DropShips my forces could use?”

Charon posed the question as though she genuinely didn’t know the answer, and was even hopeful that Blatta would be able to assist. However, the reality was that the changeling mare knew exactly how much lifting capacity the garrison commander had at his hoof-tips. Strictly speaking, Blatta didn’t even have the ships to move all of his own forces simultaneously, let alone spare any for use by her battalions. At least it would appear like she was doing everything that she could do to comply with the directive from Her Majesty.

“Fine. Send what you can, but send them now, general!”

“I’ll issue the orders immediately, general,” Charon promised. Blatta cut the transmission abruptly, finally allowing Charon to adopt a contemptuous sneer of her own. He was a fool who was about to get tens of thousands of their soldiers killed on the whims of a madmare.

After a few more seconds spent lamenting her lot in life, suffering under cowards and fools, Charon set about selecting which of her own forces she was going to send out to be slaughtered along with Blatta’s lot. She wanted to be sure she kept back her most valuable BattleSteeds and combat vehicles, as well as her newest DropShips. She brought up a roster of her subordinate commanders on her terminal and went about selecting those who had annoyed her recently for one reason or another.

If she had to kill off some of her officers, they might as well be the ones she liked the least…

Twilight Sparkle, Xanadu, and Slipshod all sat in the Zathura’s mission briefing room with Squelch as the sage green unicorn mare brought up the holographic plotter on the table that the ‘Steed pilots were all sitting around. At the center of the diorama was Equus’ moon. Approaching it was a cloud of blue dots representing the combined forces of the Harmony Sphere and the Dragon Clans. Also displayed was another, albiety smaller, cloud of red dots that appeared to be orbiting the moon.

“The shipyards in orbit of the moon launched their fighters about an hour ago,” Squelch began the briefing, gesturing at the red dots, “They’re timing it so that their orbit will allow them to intercept our fleet as we sling around,” Two hashed lines appeared in the holographic projection, illustrating how the elliptical path that the fighters were in would bring them to meet the flyby pass of their own ships.

“The problem is that we’ll still be performing our deceleration burn,” the DropShip commander informed them, frowning slightly, “Our margins are already so thin that if we stopped burning for more than a minute or two, we’ll be traveling too fast to make Equus orbit. We’d bounce right off the atmosphere. By the time we slowed down and got back, the changelings would have their own fleets in orbit of the planet already and we’d be properly fucked.

“Which means we can’t turn our ships to meet the fighters. We’ll be coming at them ass-first; giving them perfect up-the-plot shots on all our DropShips almost entirely uncontested.”

The pilots were all grimacing now as well as they considered the layout of the battle that was to come. It was certainly far from an ideal situation. While most craft did have at least some defenses in place to cover their rearward arcs, it was largely the opinion of most that those armaments represented a ‘token’ allotment, at best. Even where WarShips were concerned. What the DropShips themselves possessed in terms of weaponry certainly wasn’t going to be enough to keep those changeling fighters from scoring enough devastating hits to further deplete their numbers.

Which was where the three ‘Steed pilots came into play. “Mig and Doppler have worked out how to wire the targeting computers of your ‘Steeds into the ship’s sensor feed. It won’t help your effective weapons range much,” the sage green mare admitted, “but you’ll be able to see where the enemy’s coming from more than a couple kilometers out at least.”

“What about our own fighter screens?” Xanadu inquired, “How much help are they going to be able to provide?”

Squelch was already shaking her head, frowning, “Not as much as we’d like. They’re in the same boat as the rest of the fleet: If they stop decelerating for too long, they’ll overshoot Equus’ orbit. Which means no fighter support for the landings, and we’ll want them there to keep the planet-based fighters from harassing us.”

The last was said with a glance cast in Slipshod’s direction, seeking confirmation from the changeling that a not-insignificant number of ComSpark aerospace fighters were present on Equus, and would be keen to raise objections to the Clans landing their DropShip’s there. Cinder’s WarShips wouldn’t be much help in repelling such small and maneuverable craft, and the DropShips themselves would have limited evasive options while landing. Having their own screening force of aerospace fighters was going to prove essential to the landing effort, which meant that as many of them as possible had to stay with the fleet.

So, unfortunately, the majority of the fighting this time was going to have to be done by the DropShips and their embarked BattleSteeds.

“Do we have an estimated closing speed for the engagement?” Twilight inquired curiously.

“A lot of that’s still up in the air right now. It’s going to depend on the changelings,” Squelch said, “But if they don’t deviate too much from how things are right now, we’re looking at between three and four hundred meters-per-second relative velocity at intercept.”

Slipshod and the zebra pilot visibly winced. A stripped-down Pipsqueak or Breezy galloping at top speed along a flat stretch of ground might top out at thirty meters per second. Under even ideal circumstances, it would be quite difficult for even an ace ‘Steed pilot to hit such a target. The idea of trying to engage something moving more than ten times that speed was daunting, to say the least.

Honestly, it would actually be impossible under normal circumstances. The targeting systems on a ‘Steed simply weren’t designed to track targets moving that quickly. Even aerospace fighters moving through an atmosphere rarely moved that fast, as it made engaging ground targets quite difficult. However, thanks to Doppler and Mig working to network the Zathura’s targeting and sensor suite into that of their BattleSteeds, it was possible that they’d have a decent chance of scoring a hit. Maybe.

Fortunately the battle was happening in space, which meant that their weapons would have a substantially longer effective range than they did on the ground. Their energy weapons wouldn’t be scattered by the atmosphere, and their missile and kinetic weapons wouldn’t be fighting against the force of gravity.

“Just do what you can,” Squelch said, flashing the three pilots an appreciative smile. She recognized that this wasn’t the sort of engagement that they had trained for, or had much experience with. These sorts of fights were notoriously dangerous besides. While a ‘Steed’s hooves were capable of magnetically affixing to the hull of a ship, the force of that magnetic grip was hardly infinite. If a DropShips made a hard enough maneuver at the wrong angle, it was hypothetically enough to wrench them off the hull and send them tumbling into space.

And, given the magnitude of the deceleration involved, getting ‘shaken’ off the side of the DropShip would end up with the ‘Steed in question being many kilometers away in less than a minute; swinging around the moon on a completely different trajectory from the rest of the fleet and tumbling out into space. Getting rescued would be out of the question too.

The trio of pilots exchanged looks. None of them was exactly ‘looking forward’ to this fight, but they each understood that it absolutely wasn’t one which could be avoided. If there was a bright side to all of it, it was that the fight would also not be a long one. With the relative velocities involved, it was doubtful that the two fleets would be within effective firing range of each other for more than a minute or two. It would be a minute or two of absolute chaos in one of the most unforgiving environments known to equinekind, yes; but it could theoretically be worse.

“I guess we’d better go do our pre-launches then,” Slipshod said with a resigned sigh, smirking at the other ponies in the room. The other pilots nodded and everypony got out of their chairs. He turned towards the door to follow the others out towards the ‘Steed Bay, but was stopped by a hoof on his shoulder. The changeling turned in time to meet Squelch’s lips as they touched his. His eyes widened briefly in surprise before the stallion reciprocated the unannounced embrace. It wasn’t a particularly deep or passionate kiss, but the changeling was patently aware of the emotional weight that it carried with it.

The anxiety, worry, fear, dread; a whole host of emotions that hadn’t been evident at all on the unicorn’s face during the short briefing she’d just given them, all flowed into the changeling from his lover. In their place, Slipshod fed her hope and courage, reinforcing the unicorn’s fragile resolve. She wasn’t used to battles like this one. Squelch ran a dinky little understrength mercenary lance on small operations. Massive fleet engagements in space weren’t what she was experienced with or used to, and they’d taken significant losses already. She’d already watched DropShips three and four times their size disintegrate before her eyes with all hooves lost. Hundreds of lives snuffed out in an instant, all while aboard a ship tougher than the Zathura could ever be.

It was only by sheer luck that they hadn’t met that same fate, and Squelch was absolutely terrified that their luck would run out at any moment.

“Don’t worry,” Slipshod whispered when he finally broke the kiss, nuzzling the mare gently, “I didn’t come all this way just to die on the fucking doorstep,” he insisted with a defiant snort. “We’re going to make it to the surface. Then we’re going to kick Chrysalis’ flank and save the galaxy.”

“I sure hope so…” Squelch said in a breathless sigh that could have almost been mistaken for a prayer.

“You just remind Aileron to keep a light hoof on the stick, okay? I want to make it to Equus’ surface, but I want to do it at something just a little slower than terminal velocity!” The changeling stallion grinned broadly at the unicorn. He was rewarded with a reciprocated smile of her own. His mission for the moment accomplished, the pilot finally left the briefing room and headed for his ‘Steed. Squelch, meanwhile, returned to the bridge.

The DropShip’s ‘Seed Bay was practically deserted by the time Slipshod got there. Only a few fully vacuum suited technicians were trotting around as they cleared away their equipment in order to allow the three BattleSteeds to launch. Everycreature else, especially the dragons, had been recalled from the cavernous room that accounted for a full third of the DropShip’s total volume in anticipation of it being opened up to space in order to deploy the ‘Steed’s to the ship’s hull. Only those technicians who would be essential to the deployment were present. The rest were presently in the bow of the Zathura where pressure would be maintained.

That being said, every other member of the crew was also wearing their own airtight suits just in case incoming fire opened up inhabited sections of the ship to vacuum.

Slipshod cantered along the gantry towards his recently modified Crystal Cavalier and slipped inside. He double-checked the seal of the hatch to ensure that it was indeed creating a perfectly air-tight seal, and similarly triple-checked that the environmental systems were configured for zero-atmosphere operations. It wouldn’t do to suffocate the moment the bay doors opened, now would it?

Satisfied that the cockpit would serve as a contained environment, the changeling slipped his helmet on and finally lay on his piloting couch. His hooves danced over the controls with near-instinctive motions.

REACTOR: ONLINE.

SENSORS: ONLINE.

WEAPONS: ONLINE. ALL SYSTEMS: NOMINAL.

Slipshod keyed in his comlink to connect with the active channel which had been set up for the lance, “Gallop One reporting startup complete. Standing by for deployment.”

“Gallop Two is ready,” Twilight said a second later.

This was almost immediately followed up by Xanadu, “Y’all really already forgot about our callsign thing, huh? Xanax ready!”

The changeling chuckled, rolling his eyes. He supposed that he must have been more nervous than he’d realized, falling back into old habits because his mind was too busy processing the stress of the situation to remember the change they’d agreed to, “Correction, Stable: Bug reporting startup complete and standing by.”

While Slipshod didn’t hear the audible groan from the purple alicorn, he did pick up a hint of annoyance coming from her direction tinged with resignation, “...Twiggie ready.”

“Good copy, Gallop Lance,” High Gain’s voice crackled over the channel from her station on the ship’s bridge, “Waiting on clearance from Bay Team to commence launch…” Slipshod peered out of his ‘Steed’s cockpit at one of the nearby suited technicians. They finished up whatever it was they’d been working on and waved a hoof at somepony he couldn’t see.

“Bay Team ready to deploy ‘Steeds,” Mig chimed in.

“Understood. Awaiting ‘Go/No-Go’ from Stable Actual,” the bridge’s comms tech informed them before going silent.

“Damn it,” the changeling pilot heard the zebra pilot curse, immediately tensing up at the prospect of being informed about a problem with his Philomena, “I can’t believe we forgot to give Squelch a cool call sign too!”

Slipshod let out a relieved sigh, punctuated with a brief laugh as the tension which had to quickly welled up within him immediately vanished upon hearing what the striped pilot had become distressed by. “We’ll discuss it with her after we take Canterlot,” he suggested.

“When do I get a cool call sign?” The kirin tech inquired in a tone that possessed the faintest hint of an edge at the thought of having been left out of the zebra’s thoughts as well.

Fortunately, it seemed that Xanadu would be able to recover from the perceived slight rather quickly. “Actually, I have a few ideas for one already that I was going to run by you later,” he informed her, “But we can talk about them now, since we appear to have a little time. First, I was maybe thinking ‘Tinderbox’, since you’re so good about getting me all fired up,” Slipshod had to mute his mic so that he could let out his poorly contained choked snort. Somepony else active in the channel didn’t manage to do this though, creating quite a bit of distortion. The changeling thought it sounded a little bit like Twilight, “After the other night, I was also thinking that ‘Banshee’ might fit because of the way you scream when I’m―”

Slipshod―and the changeling suspected everypony else on the channel with him―winced in pain as the speakers in his helmet let out a near-deafening high-frequency tone. It quickly cleared up though. The stallion had only just begun to question the cause of the sudden interference when the kirin technician chimed back in with a flat, “Oops.”

The changeling didn’t get the impression that Mig felt the least bit apologetic for what she’d done.

There was the sound of a mare clearing her throat and then High Gain announced, “Stable Actual says: ‘go’.” If Squelch had heard the last few interactions, the changeling suspected that she’d said a great deal more than that.

“Opening ‘Steed Bay doors,” Mig confirmed in a far more serious tone, quickly switching back into her work mindset. “Watch that first step,” she cautioned.

The lights in the bay dimmed, punctuated by the flashing of multiple orange lights that served to warn anypony in the area of an imminent BattleSteed deployment. Almost immediately, Slipshod heard his Cavalier being buffeted by a torrent of wind as the atmosphere began to cent out of the ‘Steed Bay. Within seconds, the sound of the blustering air dulled into silence, along with the sound of the warning alarm in the bay, though he could still see that the light was strobing steadily.

His ‘Steed quivered as it spun around towards the opening doors. Slipshod felt his heart briefly leap up into his throat as the changeling found himself looking out into the black vastness of space. It was a very disorienting experience, to be sure. Intellectually, he recognized that the DropShip was presently careening through space at a speed well in excess of fifty thousand meters per second. They were also slowing down at a rate that was more than two times greater than that at which a boulder could fall through the air on a typical planet. Both of which were frightening values to try and wrap his head around.

Yet, at the same time, the view that he was confronted with was deceptively calm and placid. The field of stars appeared unmoving. The few DropShips that he could see from this vantage point were likewise hovering in place, by all appearances, as they kept perfect formation with the rest of the fleet. It almost felt like he might as well be looking out at a pristine night sky from a mountain ledge.

A ledge that, if he stepped off of it the wrong way, would send him hurtling through space at incomprehensible speeds, never to be seen or heard from again.

That thought firmly set in his mind, Slipshod very gently urged his ‘Steed forward out of his stall and along the extended ramp. The changeling tried not to think too much about the even more precarious position his Crystal Cavalier was in, now that he was experiencing all of those same previously-mentioned velocities and accelerations, but no longer safely sequestered within the DropShip. He just focused on carefully turning his ‘Steed back around to face the open bay.

He locked his focus onto the lateral hull of the Zathura next to the open doorway he was currently standing on. It took a bit of effort to convince his brain to forget about everything it thought it ‘knew’ about how walking worked as he reared the Cavalier back on its hind hooves and planted the forward pair against the side of the ship. He next detached the rear hooves from the door and swung them around to join the other two on the outer skin of the Zathura. He glanced to his right and saw that Twilight’s Rainbow Dash was likewise just now clamping down against the engine section of the DropShip.

Just beyond her ‘Steed, Slipshod could see the silver moon of Equus, slowly growing in size as they ‘fell’ towards it.

“Twiggie, you and I will station up top. Xanax, you go ventral.”

“Roger.” “Moving.”

With continued mindful diligence, Slipshod nudged his Cavalier ‘forward’ up the side of the Zathura. His stomach just about launched into his throat as he felt the ‘Steed tip ‘downward’ as it slowly crawled onto the DropShip’s dorsal side. Dull ‘thunk’s announced his ‘Steed’s progress across the steel hull as he took up position facing the stern of the ship.

His gaze darted around the revised Heads-Up-Display provided by the newly-installed Clan electronics suite, as well as some of the additional information that was clearly the product of its interface with the Zathura’s own sensors. Clearly marked on the display hovering before his eyes was a beacon denoting the present direction and distance of the swarm of ComSpark fighter craft. The values of the numbers were barely compatible with the layout of his HUD, coming in at nearly forty thousand kilometers.

That number was also dropping absurdly fast. They would meet each other in a little over ten minutes.

Lieutenant Commander Costa studied his sensors closely as he watched the oncoming fleet approach the moon. His squadron would reach perigee a little less than a minute before the Clan vessels did. At which point, his instructions were to have his aerospace fighters pour on as much acceleration as they could tolerate and do what they could to match the other fleet’s velocity and trajectory until they were within effective firing range.

The idea was to prolong the engagement as much as possible so that they could take out as many of the enemy DropShips as was feasible. Actually managing to match their velocity with the other fleet was impossible, given the time constraints and accelerations involved. However, Costa was convinced that his squadron could keep the enemy under their guns for at least ninety seconds or so. Time enough for a dozen volleys. If they managed their targets well enough, that could easily mean a dozen enemy DropShips destroyed; and that was just with his squadron alone!

Between the six hundred or so fighters in their formation, it was entirely plausible that they could down five hundred or more of the enemy’s ships, cutting their ground forces nearly in half.

He watched his display intently as the countdown to their acceleration burn reached the one minute mark. The leading enemy vessels were just over four hundred kilometer away and getting steadily closer. The changeling performed a quick check of his craft’s engines and issued an order for the rest of his squadron to do the same. It wouldn’t reflect very favorably on his squadron if they went for the maximum possible acceleration and burned out their engines because they hadn’t been primed correctly.

Costa also checked that there wasn’t any give in his harness securing him to his piloting couch. He was about to experience the better part of four gravities of acceleration, and the dampening systems of aerospace fighters was far from perfect. The last thing he wanted was to dislocate a limb because he was thrown back violently against a loose harness strap.

“Twenty seconds,” he cautioned anyling in his squadron who might not have been paying attention. His own eyes were locked on the countdown clock on his flight console, “Ten seconds…Five…Four…Three…Two…One…Ignite!”

His hoof yanked back hard on the throttle next to his flight couch. In an instant, his fighter was catapulted forward, compressing him against the harness that was latching him down. His flight suit fought back against the effects of the phenomenal acceleration in tandem with the partially ineffectual dampeners, striving to keep at least some of the blood in his body from being compressed down into his haunches.

The changeling’s jaw was clenched shut as he strived to retain consciousness, his eyes locked onto the new countdown which had just started, letting him know when his craft closed to within maximum effective firing range. The burn was only going to last for about half a minute, but it was going to be the longest thirty seconds of his life.

Finally the new timer reached zero and Costa feebly slapped at the emergency main engine cut-off. Trying to force the throttle forward to a neutral position against that many Gs would have been a much riskier affair. The lieutenant commander felt immediate relief as the force of the acceleration was removed from his body. A quick scan of his systems revealed that all was well…

…And that the lead ships of the enemy’s fleet were less than fifty kilometers away and closing at nearly a half a kilometer a second, “All wings come about!” He snapped into his helmet’s mic, his hoof already pulling back on the flight yoke as he flipped his fighter over to face the enemy, “Look for my targets; fire as you bear! Contact in thirty―”

“―thirty seconds!” Doppler’s voice warned the BattleSteed pilots anchored to the DropShip’s hull. Slipshod could feel the sensor tech’s barely contained anxiety through the deck plating.

After this was all done, the changeling resolved to take the whole crew to a resort spa for a minimum of two weeks so that they could get all of this stress properly worked out of their system. Otherwise he doubted that he’d ever experience a decent meal on the ship again!

Not that Doppler’s concerns were unfounded, the stallion conceded. They did have over six hundred enemy fighters closing in on them.

As he looked out across the Zathura’s hull, the changeling stallion couldn’t help but feel more than a little anxious himself. Part of this was because of the oppressive silence that surrounded him, in addition to the blackness. Even the DropShip itself was hard to see beyond the reach of his Cavalier’s chest-mounted searchlights. Their arc around the moon had taken the dorsal side of the ship out of reach of the local sun’s light. The only source of illumination besides the exterior lights of his and Twilight’s ‘Steeds was the eerie glow of the engine thrust looming in front of him.

Hanging in the sky just beyond that flaming aurora, a small blue and green crescent rising from the dark shadow of the moon’s surface marked their ultimate destination. Slipshod found himself swallowing back a small lump in throat as he stared at the planet. It was the world of his birth, the source of all intelligent life in the galaxy, the traditional seat of power for the Harmony Sphere…

…And where she was. Waiting for them.

Equus was a world that the changeling had once believed would be forever out of his reach. Yet here he was, returned after so many years away. So tantalizingly close that it almost didn’t feel quite real. Maybe it wouldn’t until he finally had his hooves on its surface.

They had to make it there first though, Slipshod thought acridly to himself and he glanced down at his cockpit’s sensor display. And the avalanche of red blips descending upon them with frightening speed.

This had not been an unexpected encounter, and the powers that be much higher up the command chain than himself had been diligently working to coordinate a response for the last few hours. In their wisdom, so as not to leave anycreature feeling overwhelmed by the number of oncoming fighters, each squadron of DropShips and aerospace fighters had been assigned specific targets from within the swarm. The various sensor suites of each vessel had also been networked―a feat that Slipshod was led to believe by Mig had not been especially easy for older ships like theirs to achieve. This meant that all of their defensive efforts could compliment each other, and no ships or ‘Steeds should end up wasting too much of their precious little time shooting at the same target that a hundred others were.

To that end, Slipshod noted that six of the ComSpark fighters were uniquely highlighted compared to the others. The changeling presumed that those six were the enemy targets that the three of them were responsible for fighting off. He quickly divided those half dozen into three pairs and passed four of them off to Twilight and Xanadu.

“Weapons free!” He announced. Both of them acknowledge his order.

Slipshod delicately nudged his control sticks as he lined up his own shots. He was about to fire when he was momentarily distracted by a brilliant orange plume ahead of them. The massive fireball almost immediately started barreling away from the Zathura. It took him a second to recognize that he’d just witnessed one of their DropShips being destroyed, the sight was so far removed from how he’d always ‘known’ such events to look.

The changeling also found that he was losing track of his target, despite not manipulating his controls. This too took him a second to process as being caused by the Zathura taking evasive actions so as not to end up like the unfortunate souls he’d seen just a moment ago. Grimacing, Slipshod did his best to compensate for the added ‘turbulence’ and realign his shot.

He snapped off a blast from his prismatic projection cannon, sending a brilliant chromatic helix of light shooting off into the blackness of space. The distance was over ten kilometers, and the changeling quickly lost sight of the shot. His targeting computer announced that he struck the fighter, denoting a loss of nearly all its armor plating on its starboard quarter. Encouraged, Slipshod blasted away with his pulsed energy cannons.

His computer lost contact with the fighter’s signal.

“Scratch one,” he growled under his breath, moving on to targeting the next one. It was passing within five kilometers already, and it felt like it was taking his PPC forever to charge back up for another shot. He was also finding that he had additional difficulty keeping his Crystal Cavalier aligned with the fighter as Aileron moved the DropShip about.

Suddenly, a massive dark shape hurtled past them, prompting the changeling to let out a surprised curse. He stared after the tumbling object with wide eyes for a couple of seconds, realizing that it had been a Friendship-class DropShip which had been (un)fortunate enough to not be destroyed outright, and had merely lost power to its main engines. It was now careening off towards Equus with no way to slow itself down. Slipshod couldn’t tell if the vessel was going to end up crashing directly into the planet or fly right on past it on a trajectory carrying it out of the system.

He wasn’t sure which fate he’d have preferred in their place.

Slipshod shook off the sympathetic terror and refocused on his target, lining up his weapons and letting loose with all three of his heavier energy cannons simultaniously. He was greeted with the sight of a small fireball speeding by in the ‘correct’ direction.

“Scratch two!” This time his announcement was made over the radio.

“Cleared mine,” Twilight announced.

“Only got one,” Xanadu admitted with some chagrin.

“Not bad for a Philomena, to be honest,” Slipshod assured him. The zebra’s ‘Steed was hardly designed for taking out targets at range, after all.

The changeling jerked again as a nearly blinding beam of sapphire light illuminated his cockpit’s interior. He very nearly called out a warning to the others before he realized that the shot had not been an incoming one, but an outgoing volley from the Zathura’s main dorsal turret. As more of the changeling fighters passed through their formation, the DropShip’s weapons found themselves capable of engaging them.

It did serve as a reminder that it was probably a bit soon to begin celebrating their presumed success, Slipshod conceded as he searched his display for additional targets within range.

The ComSpark fighters had flipped around again, and were now burning in their direction. Physics was working against them, and the distance between the two groups was still growing rapidly, but their acceleration would still serve to prolong the time they remained in effective range long enough to get off another salvo or two. However, those fighters also now found themselves facing directly into the bows of all of those DropShips, which tended to be the firing arc covered by the majority of a vessel’s armament.

Corkscrews of prismatic light and beams of coherent energy burst into existence from what felt like every direction at once as hundreds of DropShips were finally able to bring their weapons to bear on the swarm of fighters and avenge their fallen brethren. ComSpark fighters died in job lots.

They did not, unfortunately, die quietly.

Some of them managed to get off parting shots that hit hard enough to grievously wound several more DropShips ‘behind’ the Zathura. Secondary explosions racked the unfortunate vessels and sent clouds of debris out into space. Once detached from their hosts, those fragments of armor plating and weapons mounts lost the benefit of the constant change in velocity that they had enjoyed while joined with their DropShips. Bereft of any further source of thrust, they became slaves to their own momentum…and rained ‘down’ upon the other DropShips in the formation ahead of them.

A sharp ‘ting!’ echoed throughout Slipshod’s cockpit, startling the changeling. It took him a moment to figure out what could have possibly caused the sound. He had just worked out its cause when the sound of another impact announced itself. Accompanied by the appearance of a crack in the viewport of his cockpit.

“Oh shit…”

The words came out almost breathlessly as a cold chill took hold of the changeling. Fortunately, the transparent viewport of his cockpit was rather robust, designed to be able to withstand impact from some lower-caliber autocannon rounds. Small bits of debris traveling at a couple hundred meters per second weren’t of a particular concern to him, or the Zathura for that matter.

Large bits of debris, on the other hoof…

The stars ahead of him abruptly shifted position. The reason for this wasn’t because the entirety of the universe around him had moved, Slipshod understood. Rather, it was because the DropShip that his BattleSteed was standing upon had diverted slightly in an effort to avoid ramming into the cloud of cast-off debris that had been ejected by the other vessel ahead of them. With the speeds and accelerations involved, Aileron didn’t have a lot of time to react to the threat, and thus the change in course had needed to be sharper than was perhaps prudent under the circumstances.

At least, that seemed to be the opinion of Slipshod’s Cavalier.

It was an odd sensation to be sure, the changeling thought to himself as he watched the hull of the ship seem to lurch suddenly ‘forward’ beneath him. He didn’t feel like he was moving at all, while the surface he was standing on clearly was. Although, the stallion supposed it was fair to say that he wasn’t standing on it. Not anymore.

The sudden diversion in course had apparently created more force than the magnetized hooves of his Crystal Cavalier could manage to compensate for. It had subsequently lost its grip on the DropShip, and now he and his Cavalier were being carried away by momentum. In a panic, Slipshod tried to slam the forehooves of his ‘Steed back down onto the hull of the ship. However, he was already in freefall. Jerking the forehooves of his ‘Steed outward with such intense force had the counter-effect of imparting a backwards spin onto his Cavalier, causing it to ‘rear up’. This meant that the forelimbs of his ‘Steed didn’t get any closer to the hull of the ship.

Indeed, Slipshod was now significantly worse off, as he’d inadvertently set his ‘Steed into a perpetual rearward tumble. He lost sight of the DropShip completely as his cockpit continued to arc ‘upward’ away from the Zathura. All he could see now were the stars, and the criss-crossing display of beams of energy as the battle continued to rage around them. In a matter of seconds, he was likely to leave all of it behind, the stallion realized with mounting dread.

“Help!”

It was hardly the most dignified call for assistance that the changeling had ever issued in his life. It had been more instinctive than anything, and futile besides. What exactly was anypony supposed to do to help him? Even if Aileron completely cut all thrust to the zathura’s engines, it was too late: he was traveling faster than the DropShip. They’d have to stop their decelerating, turn around, accelerate again, catch back up to him, turn around again, and start decelerating again; which would cost them time that they didn’t have if they wanted to get into a proper Equus orbit.

They couldn’t help him, and he knew that.

Slipshod’s body was very abruptly thrown hard against his restraint harness as the tumbling of his ‘Steed was abruptly halted. The sudden cessation of movement had been accompanied by the sound of a dull metallic thud, and a slight reverberation that could be felt throughout his whole ‘Steed. On his display, the changeling could see that one of his Cavalier’s forehooves was reporting that it had acquired a secure magnetic seal once more.

Slipshod stared at the report in stark disbelief. As far as the changeling could discern, there shouldn’t have been anything that one of his ‘Steed’s hooves could possibly have made contact with, let alone achieved a proper seal on!

“Gotcha!” Twilight’s voice announced over the radio.

A few seconds later, the changeling stallion had his questions answered as to what had transpired that saved his life. For while his BattleSteed might no longer have been drifting any further from the ship, it had not been completely anchored to it either. The direction of rotation that he’d been subjected to earlier had been reversed, now that a new contact point existed, and Slipshod found that his field of view had begun to drift ‘down’ as the hind end of his Cavalier started swinging up and over.

The alicorn had seen his ‘Steed lose its footing and become dislodged from the DropShip’s hull. Somehow, she’d also managed to react in time and move along the vessel without becoming detached herself. She’d reared her Rainbow Dash up and managed to latch onto him with one of its own magnetic hooves. The shimmering amethyst glow surrounding their connected limbs suggested that Twilight was using her magic to reinforce the tenuous connection.

Then Slipshod saw the hind hooves of the other 'Steed start to slip along the hull of the DropShip. His eyes widened in fear, "You're gonna fall off too; let go!"

In response, the changeling saw two additional auras of magic manifest around the Rainbow Dash's hind hooves. They instantly ceased sliding along the Zathura's armored hull. The telekinetic field then promptly expanded to encompass both of the enormous BattleSteeds, ensuring that they remained anchored to the ship.

From his new vantage point, Slipshod could see into the Rainbow Dash's cockpit. Twilight's horn shone brilliantly as it radiated magic, her face set with grim determination around exposed gritted teeth. Even an alicorn seemed to be struggling to wrestle with keeping a hundred and fifty tons of BattleSteed immune to the tremendous forces being subjected to them by the maneuvering DropShip. They were safe for the moment at least, it looked like.

The hull plate that Twilight’s Rainbow Dash was anchored to buckled.

Slipshod mentality chastised himself for daring to issue such a challenge to the universe like that.

Twilight seemed aware of the arising issue though, and her magical field expanded to encompass more of the Zathura's hull plating. This proved to be ineffectual however, as all it seemed to do was to create additional points of stress and imminent shearing. The exterior hull of the DropShip simply had not been designed to resist such extreme forces 'pulling' at it.

"Not to alarm anypony," Xanadu's voice crackled worriedly over the channel, "but all this jerking is putting my clamp indicators way into the orange. I feel like I could fly off at any moment…"

The changeling's blood drained from his face. If the zebra's Philomena detached as well, there was nopony left to save him the way Twilight had just done. Slipshod also doubted that the alicorn could apply her magic to the whole ship. At least not for long enough for them to reach safety. Heck, they had yet to get his Cavalier back on the hull! Assuming that there was anywhere safe left for him to be put down, given the state of the distressed plating in the immediate area.

Twilight seemed to recognize this too. She couldn't hope to hold all of them in place, not under these conditions. Even if her magic was strong enough, the materials she was dealing with weren't. Slipshod could already see on his console that his Cavalier’s internal sensors were reporting excessive stress in the limb that Twilight was holding on to. It was entirely possible that, in a minute or so, it would end up ripping off completely. The designers had conducted the limbs of his 'Steed under the impression that all of its weight would be pushing down on it, after all; not pulling up. It simply wasn't reinforced in the right way. Or at least, not the way they needed it to be in this specific situation, Slipshod supposed upon further reflection.

"Hold on, everypony!" Twilight's strained warning came over his headset. Before Slipshod could ask what she was planning to do, the changeling's world was permeated by violet light.

When the stallion could finally see again after blinking away the majority of his temporary blindness, he almost didn't believe what he was seeing: he was inside the Zathura. More specially, he was still inside his Cavalier, which was in turn once more inside the 'Steed Bay of their DropShip. Given the reactions of the assembled technicians, they seemed to have been just as caught off guard by the change in circumstances as he had been.

Nor were he and his 'Steed the only ones which the alicorn had returned to the ship. The Rainbow Dash and Philomena were also both present in their respective stalls, if not quite oriented in them as was dictated by procedure. That was something that Mig and her work crews would have to deal with later.

Relieved that he was no longer in imminent danger of hurtling off into space, Slipshod doffed his helmet and let out a deep, relieved, sigh. "Two weeks at the spa," he vowed under his breath before releasing his harness and shutting down his 'Steed.

He was about to open up his egress hatch when the changeling registered that the technicians outside were still fully suited. The harrowing experience he’d just lived through had completely wiped from Slipshod’s mind that the ‘Steed Bay had been depressurized in order to launch them earlier, and would certainly not have been refilled with an atmosphere, given that it was expected that the bay would have to be exposed to vacuum at least once more in order for them to get back inside after the threat of the ComSpark fighters had passed. Obviously, that last part wasn’t going to be required anymore, so they could go about restoring the atmosphere to this part of the ship once the last of the ComSpark fighters drifted out of effective weapons range.

There was an outrush of air as the atmosphere of his cockpit evacuated the moment Slipshod cracked the seal of his hatch. The changeling stallion climbed out, carefully making his way down to the deck below, as there was no gantry ready and waiting for him. Hardly the fault of Mig’s techs, he supposed; it wasn’t like anycreature had been expecting them to return so suddenly. Most of those technicians were busy fetching chains and winches so that the loose ‘Steeds could be secured properly against any evasive maneuvering Aileron might be engaging in in the near future. The last thing they needed in this bay was for a seventy ton robot to go sliding around along the room and break something essential.

Xanadu was also making his way out of his BattleSteed, looking around in clear bewilderment. Twilight wasn’t anywhere to be seen yet though. “That was convenient,” the zebra remarked, sounding just a little shaken to Slipshod’s ears.

“Quick thinking,” the changeling said. He turned back to examine his Crystal Cavalier’s right foreleg and let out an appreciative whistle as he spotted the signs of visible stress and metal fatigue on the knee joint, “Not a moment too soon either,” he noted. A frown touched his lips as he peered more closely at the damage. While it was hardly anything as extensive as serious combat wear and tear, the changeling found himself wondering if it was something that could be fixed in the next few hours. After all, it wasn’t going to be all that long before they were in orbit of Equus. Swapping out damaged plates of ablative armor was something that could be done with hardly any time at all, but the Cavalier’s knee looked like it had potentially suffered serious internal warping.

The fighting on the surface was going to be pretty intense, to say the least. Going into battle with a bum leg was hardly going to do the changeling any favors.

Still, at least he was alive and on the ship; and maybe Mig could find a way to work some magic of her own and get the ‘Steed back in fighting shape in time for the drop, “Thanks, Twilight.”

He paused, waiting for a response. However, none came. Becoming slightly concerned, Slipshod checked to make sure that he was actually transmitting on the correct frequency, and hadn’t just been inadvertently talking to himself for the last minute. He saw that everything was checking out as being functional and set correctly though. The changeling exchanged glances with Xanadu, “You can hear me, right?”

“I can hear you,” the striped stallion assured him before looking in the direction of the slouching Rainbow Dash as well, “Twiggers? You okay?

“Twilight?”

Okay, Slipshod was getting really worried now. The changeling stallion bolted towards the cyan BattleSteed, clambering up its limbs until he found a perch that let him see inside the cockpit. He could clearly make out the suited form of the alicorn princess in her piloting couch. However, she was listing visibly to one side, and her head was bowed. Scorch marks were visible around the part of her helmet enclosing her horn.

“Slipshod to Medical,” the changeling stallion called out over his radio, swallowing back a lump of worry that was growing in his throat, “Twilight’s unconscious…”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 48: The Last Charge

“How is she, Doc?”

Every head in the conference room turned to the dappled gray earth pony sitting with them at the table. While only a mere medic by trade, and a far cry from a genuine physician, Cravat was the most experienced medical professional on the Zathura, and the de facto ‘Ship’s Doctor’; hence the reason why Squelch addressed him with the honorific title. The young stallion cleared his throat, a little uncomfortable being the center of so much attention, and delivered his report to the ship’s captain.

“She’s resting. It looks like it’s just a moderate case of mana burn,” he informed them. “She should be back on her hooves with no lasting effects by morning.”

Despite the medical pony’s undeniably positive prognosis, the revelation still generated a distinctly unhappy expression on the sage unicorn’s face. “‘Morning’ is twelve hours away,” Squelch observed. “Meanwhile, we’ll be landing in less than six. Is there any way you can get her on her hooves before then?”

Now it was Cravat’s turn to look unhappy, “I mean, I can get her on her hooves now,” he admitted, though it was clear from his tone that the earth pony very much would have preferred not to, “but she wouldn’t be cleared for combat. Ma’am, you have to know that mana burn can’t be alleviated with an aspirin…”

Squelch let out a defeated sigh, nodding her head in agreement with the medic. “You’re right. You’re right,” she acknowledged bitterly, “I just don’t like being down our best pilot right before making a drop. To say nothing about her being our best shot at stopping Chrysalis altogether,” she pointed out wryly. “Having an alicorn in our saddlebag to use against the changeling queen would have been pretty nice. I know I certainly felt a little better about it…”

“In a way, it kind of works out,” Mig chimed in. “The Cavalier’s not viable anymore either,” Slipshod didn’t appreciate the kirin side-eying him the way that she was as the chief technician said that. As if it was his fault that he’d nearly been thrown off the Zathura’s hull by Aileron’s flying. “Its knee actuator is bent all to tartarus, and I don’t have any spares on hoof that are compatible. As it is, the whole leg’s liable to shear right off if it's put under any real stress.”

“I assume that a rebuild’s out of the question?” Squelch asked, her tone indicating that she had already anticipated the answer she was about to receive.

“Day and half,” the kirin confirmed with a helpless shrug, “and that’s if I cut a lot of uncomfortable corners at the testing stages before putting it back together,” she qualified. Slipshod grimaced at the thought. While he respected the engineer’s skills, and that of her staff, he didn’t much care for the idea of taking a BattleSteed into combat that hadn’t had its recently replaced components tested for viability. Especially something as critical as a leg joint. There was a lot involved in such a restoration that could be easily overlooked, especially if the technicians performing the work felt that haste was needed to meet an important deadline.

To her credit, Mig hadn’t sounded like she would have been comfortable with the idea either.

The unicorn mare nodded. She clearly wasn’t happy with the revelation, but recognized that it was hardly Mig’s fault. “We can see about getting parts from one of the other units after we land. In the meantime, Slipshod will pilot the Rainbow Dash for the initial drop. Are we good with that?” She asked with a glance in the changeling stallion’s direction.

Admittedly, while the thought of piloting Twilight’s BattleSteed felt a little bit like he was ‘stealing’ it from the alicorn, there was no dismissing the logic of it all. His Cavalier wasn’t in optimum condition, and wouldn’t be until they’d managed to secure a beachhead or two down on the planet and set up rear logistical areas to conduct repairs and rearmament of their forces. Sending Xanadu out on his own was certainly out of the question too. Using the alicorn’s ‘Steed until she was recovered and his Cavalier was repaired was the most sensible solution.

“I’ll spend a few hours familiarizing myself with the controls,” the changeling promised.

That was the only real issue that had any merit anyway: he’d be going into a fight in a BattleSteed that he wasn’t well acquainted with. While the broad mechanics and functionality of most ‘Steeds wasn’t all that far removed from any other, it was well understood among pilots that every chassis had quirks and characteristics that needed to be understood and respected, or an unwary pilot was going to have a ‘bad time’. Like his old Wild Bronco: it had been a ‘Steed which packed a considerable amount of strength and power in its limbs that a novice pilot could easily inadvertently use to either hurt themselves or seriously damage the ‘Steed itself.

Slipshod had little doubt that the Rainbow Dash would be any different. He’d seen it in action, sure; but even so, the changeling was doubtful that he underwood all that it was capable of. To say nothing of how to get it to perform like Twilight had. The alicorn had overseen the development of that whole class of BattleSteed, and had almost certainly tailored it to her tastes. So while the stallion doubted that he had anywhere near the time needed to truly get himself fully acquainted with the Rainbow Dash and be able to pull off the same sorts of maneuvers that Twilight had, the ‘Steed pilot was confident that he could reach the point were he didn’t face-plant it the moment he stepped off the DropShip.

“Good,” Squelch said with a nod before turning to the next topic of discussion, bringing up a map of their immediate surroundings on the holographic plotter.

Several others in the room immediately tensed as they saw the small cloud of crimson specks materialize, clearly sitting almost perfectly between the signals representing their own forces and Equus. “Another group of fighters?!” Xanadu blurted. Slipshod felt the level of despair in the room ratchet up a notch or two as the others contemplated the prospect of fending off yet another group of ComSpark aerospace fighters. There were still about a hundred or so trailing them from the moon. Though those were unlikely to be able to catch up before the fleet reached the planet, so it shouldn’t impact their intended landings.

“Why didn’t we see them coming earlier?” Slipshod asked, curious. He studied the plotter intently, all the while his mind working its way through a series of hasty estimates and calculations. The force of six hundred fighters that they’d just faced should have accounted for the entirety of the squadrons garrisoned at the shipyards, the changeling knew. It was possible that those squadrons had been reinforced in the intervening years―or that there had existed a secret swarm of fighters somewhere that he’d never known about, as had been the case with the WarShips.

That seemed unlikely though. Equally unlikely was the notion that these squadrons had been launched from the surface of the planet. They’d have detected such a deployment on their sensors. The sudden appearance of these ships like this could only be explained by a launch from the far side of the moon, which wouldn’t have been detectable until they’d rounded it.

“Not fighters,” Squelch confirmed, “DropShips,” the last was uttered with a note of bewildered contempt. Which was understandable, since the revelation didn’t make any sense to Slipshod either. Why would a force of DropShips have been leaving the moon on a course for Equus now, of all times? They had to have known that they’d be overrun by the force of WarShips heading for the planet, right?

“We estimate that they launched some time just before we reached the moon,” the sage green unicorn continued, “We’re not sure why they launched, or what they hoped to accomplish,” she admitted, “Cinder’s rearranging the fleet to let her WarShips take point to deal with them. There shouldn’t be any need for another outing,” she said with a glance at her two remaining ‘Steed pilots; both of whom visibly relaxed at the confirmation. It was Slipshod’s opinion that his close brush with being launched into space had given him an acute case of kenophobia, and even the thought of doing all of that again gave him palpitations.

“Well…that’s a relief,” Xanadu said with a breathless sigh. The pair shared a look, silently acknowledging their mutual disdain for space-combat. They were BattleSteed pilots, after all. If they’d fancied fighting in space, they’d have learned to pilot aerospace fighters.

“Good. Now allow me to give you guys the bad news,” Squelch said, flashing them a sardonic smile as she focused the holographic project not on the force of ComSpark DropShips, but on their own forces. “It’s unlikely that we’re going to face much more resistance before making landfall at this point, which is good,” she began, and Slipshod found himself nodding in agreement.

Equus itself didn’t have much in the way of aerospace fighter garrisons. At least, not in quantities that would give them cause for concern. There were a few thousand DropShips, but those weren’t a threat so long as Cinder’s WarShips were around to provide support. They even still had a few hundred fighters of their own left to provide cover for landings. What they didn’t have nearly as many of, the changeling noticed now, were DropShips of their own. Despite the best efforts of Cinder’s WarShips and their fighter screens, they’d taken serious losses on the way here. He didn’t have an exact number at hoof, but―

“―Since we’re already down to about two-thirds of our initial landing capacity,” the unicorn finished with a resigned sigh. The announcement was met around the room with a mixture of dismay and frustration.

“Can we still pull this thing off?” Blood Chit asked, his tone suggesting that he was harboring more than a few doubts. He wasn’t alone in his thinking either, the changeling could feel. Slipshod himself was even one of those whose faith in the plan had just fractured, as he started running numbers through his head.

“Not as initially intended,” Squelch admitted. “It’s going to have to be modified.

“The heaviest losses were suffered by the Commonwealth,” the unicorn mare explained, “followed closely by the Combine. Neither group has the numbers to take their targets anymore and hold them for any real length of time.”

“Are we just hitting Canterlot directly then?” Xanadu inquired, a slight grimace visible on his lips.

Slipshod was grateful to see Squelch shaking her head, “Wouldn’t do us any good. Even if we made it through the anti-air stacked on the place, Slipshod’s intel on their force strength and turret defenses suggests it’ll take more than an hour to breach that place.

“That kind of timetable means that we’ll need at least some kind of rearward logistics area. Ammunition, parts, replacement ablative armor―we need a collection point to gather and distribute supplies for the front,” Squelch explained. “Given the size of the force we’re talking about supporting and the quantity of supplies involved, only an already established spaceport can handle the throughput we’d need to sustain operations. We have to take one of the outlying major cities.”

“But I thought you said―”

The unicorn mare held up a hoof, cutting off the zebra’s puzzled query. “We won’t be able to take Manehattan, Baltimore, and Fillydelphia,” she conceded, “not all at once. We’re moving from a three-pronged assault to a pincer and a feint. Victoria and Nacht will work together taking Baltimare while Thera and Timberjack hit Fillydelphia.

“Meanwhile, what’s left of the Disciples and the Reivers will perform a series of raids along the changelings’ rears. Which is what we’ll be a part of.”

Squelch transitioned the holoprojection in the center of the conference room into a landscape rendering. Slipshod recognized the area as being part of the Appeloosan region, and almost immediately deduced where the mare was going with this briefing.

“This is Appeloosa,” the sage unicorn confirmed, “and it’s the site of a supply base that would be essential to any counter-offensive coming out of the south against Fillydelphia. Taking it out will keep the changelings from being able to hit the city too hard. It’s also pretty far from other major garrisons in the area, so there should be a window of opportunity to get in, level the place, and get back out again.

“Now, unfortunately, because of how many DropShips we lost on the way here, the Zathura can’t stay on station to pick you guys back up when you’re done. We’ll already be on our way back to orbit to load up another lance from the fleet for deployment. Instead, once the depot’s dealt with, you’ll make your way to a rally point here,” an area on the map illuminated, denoting the coordinates for the rendezvous, “where you’ll meet with additional groups who will hopefully have had a few successful raids of their own.

“From there, you’ll strike at Ponyville. There’s a comms relay there the changelings will be using to coordinate their forces. Taking it out should disrupt their forces in the area and help mask our approach to Canterlot. By then we should be able to arrange a pickup for you.”

“I assume it’s going to be more than just the two of us doing this?” Slipshod inquired, gesturing between himself and Xanadu.

“You’ll be landing with a company of Reivers, yes. Triton has been briefed on the mission. He’s been told that you have operational command on the ground for this one,” Squelch said pointedly.

The changeling stallion felt himself relax slightly. The mission sounded a lot more doable with fourteen BattleSteeds than two, that was for sure! The supply cache would have little more than a token security force, he knew. It should be just about a cakewalk for an augmented company of ‘Steeds to take and destroy it. The push into Ponyville would pit them against much more substantial resistance, but by then they’d likely be at battalion strength or better. In terms of ‘Steeds, at least. He wasn’t clear on what they’d have in regards to additional support units.

Actually, on that point: “Where’s Keely?” Slipshod asked, glancing around the decidedly dragonless room.

“I assume with the rest of his platoon―or ‘star’, or whatever the clans call them,” Squelch replied, “I already briefed his group. They won’t be dropping with you; they’ll be hitting a fuel refinery in Dodge Junction a little bit further west. From there they’ll be moving on to harass supply convoys coming up Ghastly Gorge.”

“Are we really going to have enough ammo on hoof to hit two targets before getting a pickup?” The zebra pilot asked, a faint hint of skepticism audible in his words. It was a fair question, Slipshod acknowledged. The better part of two hundred kilometers separated Appeloosa and Ponyville. It would take them hours to cover that distance, and that meant there was a better than average chance that they’d run afoul of at least one changeling patrol along the way. Between leveling the supply hub and fending off attacks, their group was certain to need a resupply before they could hope to take a place as fortified as Ponyville. Especially since all of the other groups that they were supposed to regroup with before launching the attack on the communications relay would doubtless be as depleted as they themselves were.

“The Reivers will be landing with a couple of supply trucks,” Squelch assured them, “They’ll have enough ordinance for a reload or two for each of you. Armor replacement will be limited though,” she warned them, “so try not to get shot up too bad before reaching the relay.”

That was reassuring, at least. It still wasn’t going to be an easy affair by far, of course. Not that Slipshod had expected any part of this to be. Not being easy was a far cry from not being possible, though; and the changeling couldn’t help but feel some budding optimism as he considered the plan as outlined. This was in spite of knowing the kinds of odds that they would be up against. After all, it wasn’t just the legitimate military forces that they’d be fighting. Every able-bodied changeling between them and Canterlot would be called by the queen to defend her.

As had been demonstrated by the presence of the ComSpark DropShip fleet heading for the planet, clearly drafted from the moon-based garrison.

Slipshod pondered over the significance of such a force, and found himself of mixed feelings over it. It suggested that Chrysalis was panicking and making knee-jerk decisions based on instinct more than rationality or tactical consideration. On the one hoof, that could mean that the defenders would be disorganized during the initial phases of the landing, because they’d still be in the throes of trying to reorganize their forces around the sudden inclusion of so many additional units being summoned in from other regions of the world.

On the other hoof, quantity possessed a certain quality all its own, Slipshod recognized. The changeling forces wouldn’t necessarily need a lot of sophisticated and perfectly coordinated tactical planning to overwhelm the invading forces if they had enough bodies to throw at the problem. Achieving victory by means of target saturation was hardly an ideal option for most commanders, but if it was a choice between that and placing themselves at risk of losing the fight, Slipshod knew which direction those commanders would lean.

There was every possibility that this whole affair was going to turn into a horrendous slaughter the likes of which nocreature had ever imagined, as they were forced to wade towards Canterlot through a sea of changeling blood and corpses. Corpses that Chrysalis surely wouldn’t hesitate to stack as high as the walls surrounding Canterlot itself if she thought it would help.

The thought of his race being discarded in such abhorrent numbers chilled Slipshod to the bone…and boiled his blood at the same time.

“Full house; eights over threes!” Gaster announced with a victorious chitter, slamming down his pair of pocket eights onto the table, very nearly scattering the river. The disgust and resentment wafting from the other players was all the confirmation that the changeling stallion needed to confirm his assumption that none of his competition possessed a superior pair of cards. Not that there was much chance of that, as only a pair of threes could have bested him, allowing their holder to make four-of-a-kind. However, he’d seen the slight quiver in the wing of the only other ‘ling who’d been calling his raises when that second three turned up as a diamond instead of another spade and knew that the mare had been hoping for a flush.

“Drinks are going to have to be one me if this keeps up much longer,” Gaster snickered as he scraped the chips in towards himself. “Since none of you are going to have any money left at all in a couple more rounds!” His gaze lingered on the pathetically small piles arranged in front of the three other changelings who were still a part of the game. Two others had been cleaned out already and had left the barracks to go and soothe their sorrow with something from the cafeteria.

His opponents leveled baleful glares at him, briefly taking down their emotional barriers so that he could feel the full force of their ire. Gaster grinned back at them in response, further stoking the spicy animosity being directed his way. He was about to issue a retort when the PA system let out a sour tone, drawing their attention.

“Alert! All hooves report to your designated assembly areas! This is not a drill!”

Gaster frowned now, glaring in the direction of the speaker. “Well that’s some rotten timing,” he grumbled to himself as the other changelings he’d been playing with all stood up and zipped to their lockers to fetch their gear. He did the same, but also took a moment to stash his winnings in his locker for safekeeping. The changeling stallion quickly donned his barding and helmet before darting out of the barracks.

Outside it was near pandemonium. Or, at least, it didn’t appear to be too far removed from it. While Gaster could sense any outright panic in the air, there was certainly an uptick in the overall tension hovering over the base. It had been ratcheting up steadily since yesterday when the combined fleet of Dragon Clan and Harmony Sphere ships had unexpectedly entered into the Faust System.

Their initial assumption that the pair of WarShip fleets defending the system would be able to thwart the invasion before it could even present a threat to the planet was quickly proven to have been overly optimistic. The stallion would have hated to be the admirals in charge of those forces when all of the dust settled. Their deaths were sure to be drawn out as long as the queen could possibly manage so as to make an example of what the consequences were for failing her.

Such knowledge was all the motivation that Gaster needed to do whatever he could not to fall short of Her Majesty’s expectations either.

The stallion stalled out briefly into a hover as he caught sight of motion to the south, high up in the atmosphere. Two small streaks of dark smoke were visible, descending quickly towards the surface. DropShips making their reentry.

Gaster grimaced. He’d hoped that their distance from the capital would mean that they were unlikely to have to engage the enemy. Mostly because he knew that any invasion by the Dragon Clans was certain to contain a not-insignificant proportion of BattleSteeds. Which weren’t particularly vulnerable to Scorpion Tanks like the one he operated. One-on-one, there wasn’t even a debate regarding who would come out on top, even when discussing a lightweight ‘Steed. When the aforementioned tanks were massed together in large numbers though, that at least offered hope.

The changeling grunted and resumed his flight towards the motor pool, and the rest of his waiting crew, “Glad you could join us, corporal,” Sergeant Chate, the commander of their vehicle, sneered at the late arrival.

“Sorry, sergeant,” Gaster offered in reply before darting to the open hatch in the turret and peering inside. His horn flickered to life with a sickly green light as he set about starting up his console near the main gun’s loading port. He quickly tabbed over to the screen which denoted the tank’s loaded ammunition. Considering that he’d personally loaded up the magazines less than twelve hours ago, the changeling stallion was perfectly aware of what it would say, but he also knew that the senior noncom didn’t want to hear Gaster inform him of what the tank’s gunner thought he’d loaded into it; he wanted to see confirmation, “Twenty HEAT, forty dart, ten canister.” He pulled his head back out of the hatch and looked at his sergeant. “She’s loaded and ready, sergeant!”

“Good,” came the terse reply, “everyling in!” He snapped. The other two changelings piled in through their representative hatches mounted in the forward hull of the Scorpion. Gaster hopped into the turret, seating himself at the firing controls. Sergeant Chate dropped down beside him in the commander’s seat a moment later, sealing the hatch behind them.

“Private Sate, take us to the south perimeter; form up with the rest of the squadron.”

“Aye, sergeant!” Their driver replied, confirming her receipt of the orders. A moment later, the tank lurched forward out of the motor pool, joining the line of other combat vehicles moving out to their respective defensive positions.

“Prep a sabot round, corporal,” Chate instructed his gunner.

“Loading sabot, aye,” Gaster confirmed, tapping out the command into his terminal. Beside him, the actuator made a whirring sound as it grabbed the indicated ordinance from the magazine and slid it into the breach of the tank’s main gun. “Loaded!”

Gaster brought up one of the tank’s exterior cameras on his display screen and started tracking the descent of the two DropShips heading for their area. One of them appeared to be a Friendship-class vessel, which couldn’t hold more than a dozen BattleSteeds. Flying along beside it was a much smaller Mustang-class DropShip, which could only carry a single lance at a time. Which meant a maximum of sixteen ‘Steeds. Of course, there was no way of knowing what tonnage classes those ‘Steeds were going to be. For all Gaster knew, they’d end up having to repel sexteen Big Macs!

That was an image that didn’t fill him with a lot of high hopes about living through the day. He wasn’t sure off the top of his head how many Scorpion Tanks or Strikers they’d need to hold off a metric ton and a half of BattleSteeds, but the changeling knew it was more than the forty they had present!

Through the tank’s armor, Gaster heard the low ‘thump’ing of the base’s turrets opening fire on the incoming DropShips. The range was pretty extreme, even for the farthest reaching of their weapons. To the point where the changeling stallion found himself skeptical as to whether any rounds that managed to make contact with the descending ships would actually even be able to penetrate their armored hulls. Still, he did suppose that it was better than simply having those guns sitting idle…

“What’s the over-under on us getting any support?” Gaster asked aloud, his tone making it clear that he was already doubtful about the likelihood of such a thing happening.

“The whole eastern half of the continent is being invaded,” Sergeant Chate replied acidly, “Fillydelphia called us fifteen minutes ago asking to be reinforced. So…not great.”

“Lovely,” the corporal snorted as he returned his attention back to the cameras and the two DropShips touching down.

Sate maneuvered their Scorpion into a shallow ditch along the base’s southern perimeter. It was one of a whole line of such ditches that most of the assigned personnel―themselves included―had spent the previous evening digging out as a precaution. The meter-deep pit helped to provide some defilade for their armored vehicles, leaving little more than their turrets exposed. Gaster had found the notion a lot more reassuring last night, before he was acutely reminded right this moment that the exposed tank turret was where he was…

Other tanks pulled up to either side of them, nestling into their own conveniently per-dug shallow graves.

He shook the thought from his head. That sort of defeatist thinking wasn’t going to do his nerves any favors. The odds were stacked heavily against them, sure; but that didn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t any way for them to achieve victory. After all, he’d been on the back hoof in that poker game a little less than an hour ago before his luck had turned! Who was to say that newfound fortune wouldn’t endure over the course of the next thirty minutes?

Missiles went flying overhead now, launched from the Strikers and LRM Carriers sequestered deeper within the base. The damage that they were likely to inflict at such a range was negligible, but it should at least keep the enemy from getting too bold. The longer that they could keep the attackers at extreme range, the better. The type-five autocannons of their tanks could reach considerably farther than most of the energy weapons that BattleSteeds were outfitted with. And their own ballistic armaments would be less accurate while in motion, while simultaneously being employed against targets with much narrower silhouettes.

The changeling stallion watched his displays intently, which had begun to populate with additional contacts as the DropShips disgorged their BattleSteeds. He noted the interpolated weight classification of each as the sensors isolated each new contact, feeling himself cringe inwardly every time one was identified as being in either the ‘heavy’ or ‘assault’ ranges. Those were especially worrisome in his mind, as they were more likely to be armed with weapons that possessed both extreme range and hit with enough potency to have a chance of utterly destroying a tank like their with a single direct hit.

Then he saw something on his sensors that took him aback. He performed a quick diagnostic of the computer to ensure that the system hadn’t spat out some sort of error, and then asked the tank’s suite of sensors to re-scan the target. When he received an identical result, he turned to the changeling sitting next to him. “Sergeant, the computer’s reading one of those ‘Steeds as being a ‘Rainbow Dash’. The fuck is that?”

The senior noncom frowned and brought up Gaster’s findings on his own display screen. He performed the same diagnostic and re-scan that the gunner had, with identical results, which only deepened his confusion. “Beats me. It’s moving pretty fast for something that heavy though. Maybe a new dragon design we didn’t know about?”

“If we don’t know about it, how can its profile be in the system?” Gaster pointed out.

“Well I never saw a TRO on the damn thing!” Chate snarled at the corporal in annoyance. “Just shut up and keep an eye on the ranges. I’ll feed you targets as soon as I get them.”

Gaster made sure that he had his face pressed up against the gunsight before rolling his eyes. “Range: three thousand. Enemy closing at sixty KPH.”

“Roger. First target is going to be the lead Gilda on the left.” Chate informed him, sounding a little less gruff than he had a moment ago, his mind focused on his duties rather than his ignorance.

“Gilda on the left, aye!” The gunner confirmed as he rotated the turret and lined up the sights with the medium ‘Steed loping towards their line. It was part of a vanguard lance of three Gildas led by a Blackjenny. He took a reading on the target’s range and aligned the sights with the center of its chest. His hoof hovered over the trigger as he waited for the order to fire.

The range ticked down to eight hundred meters…

“Fire!”

Gaster fired the autocannon. He watched through the sights as the round burst out from the end of the barrel, the sabot flipping away as soon as the round was free of the cannon. The remaining rod of solid shaped explosive material hurled through the air, covering the distance in seconds. It struck the targeted Gilda on the ‘Steed’s left hip, blasting away most of the ablative plating protecting the joint.

His shot wasn’t alone either. Dozens of additional identical rounds converged on the singular medium-tonnage BattleSteed. Not all of them hit, but most did. The Gilda practically vanished behind a cloud of explosions as a little under twenty shaped charges struck home, shattering armor and destroying the vulnerable internal systems that lay just beneath those protective plates. The ‘Steed staggered under the weight of such a destructive volley before falling to the ground in a heap of mangled metal a couple steps later.

Then it disappeared in an expanding sphere of violet energy as its reactor core went critical.

“Target down!” Gaster crowed, newfound excitement bubbling within the changeling as the first of fourteen contacts vanished from his displays.

“Next target: Blackjenny!” Sergeant Chate relayed to his gunner, not content to celebrate quite yet while there were still so many ‘Steeds galloping their way.

The changeling gunner rolled his eyes again, insistent on maintaining his high morale despite the senior noncom’s attitude as he shifted to the next target. He recoiled back from the gunner’s sight reflexively as something extremely bright and colorful momentarily blinded him. “What in the―?”

Gaster felt the turret tremble as their tank was buffeted by a large explosion. The display showing the tank’s left flank showed the reason why: the Scorpion directly beside them had exploded. Fortunately, the shallow trench that they’d been sitting in had directed most of the explosion upwards, so Gaster’s crew didn’t have to worry about too much damage from shrapnel. The changeling gunner caught himself staring at the display for longer than he should have been, the shock of another tank so close to them being outright destroyed by a single hit rebuffing his earlier rising spirits.

“Where’d that come from?!” Chate demanded, already using the external cameras to pan across the battlefield.

“It’s the Rainbow Dash!” Gaster blurted as he found the source first during his own quick scan. He’d been aided in his search by the fact that the ‘Steed in question had fired off a second prismatic projectile, the destructive helix of brilliant light managing to find another of the mostly shielded tanks on their line.

Then he saw a stream of missiles leaping from its backside, right behind its shoulders. They went streaking over the tank line, falling to their rear in the base. Gaster had a pretty good idea what those would be targeting.

The bright cyan and gold BattleSteed wasn’t the only one firing, of course. Other chassis mounting long-range weapons were making their presence on the field known as well. Coils of chromatic light, trails of missile vapor, and the faint cavitations left by hypersonic autocannon rounds were all served up by the attacking force as they exacted their retribution for the slaying of their comrade.

Forty tanks had been needed to instantly dispatch that single Gilda. Meanwhile, the responding volley had claimed half a dozen Scorpions nearly simultaneously. This fight, Gaster acknowledged, wasn’t going to go well…

The changeling gunner took a deep breath and let it out as he put his face back up against the targeting scope, “Targeting the Blackjenny…Firing!”

“Bay’s clear!” The DropShip’s chief engineer announced.

Squelch nodded in acknowledgement from her seat on the bridge, “Aileron, take us out of here,” she instructed tersely, doing her best not to let her anxiety show through her tone. She wasn’t too fond of the look of those LRM carriers in the base, and she didn’t intend to give them a chance to launch any additional barrages their way. The Zathura had only taken some minor hits so far, but it was also hardly the sturdiest DropShip in the galaxy.

Besides, they had another drop coming up shortly, and the sage unicorn mare doubted very much that they’d be able to make it uncontested.

“Don’t have to ask me twice,” the pegasus stallion intoned before throttling the ship out of the dropzone. The vessel executed a few slaloms as it ascended. Not because they were under any sort of active fire, but more as a matter of prudent precaution. It seemed like the base’s defenders had decided that the company of BattleSteeds on the ground assaulting their defenses were a higher priority of concern.

Which was perfectly fine with Squelch. This day had already contained more than enough ‘exciting’ moments, as far as she was concerned. She was very much looking forward to getting their drops over and done with before finally retreating back into orbit with the WarShips in relative safety. Until the ComSpark fleets arrived, at any rate. At which point, Squelch suspected that she would suddenly become inclined to seek refuge planetside again…

Aileron guided the Zathura into the upper atmosphere, well out of range of most ground-based weaponry. Anything capable of reaching them at this extreme altitude was likely to be more concerned with trying to fend off Cinder’s bombarding WarShips anyway, so they were probably as safe here as they could reasonably be, given the circumstances. They weren’t going very far at least, so it wasn’t like they’d be exposed for very long―

“Contact!” Doppler blurted out, cutting off the sage unicorn’s thoughts. “Two fast-movers on approach from astern!”

Squelch bolted upright in her command couch, her gaze intent on the sensor tech’s station. The news was more than a little surprising. She’d been under the impression that there weren’t many more fighters present on Equus. Though, she supposed that it would have been a little too optimistic to assume that every aerospace fighter had already been committed to those encounters on the way to the planet.

Any number of reasons could have explained the presence of these craft. Perhaps they had been undergoing maintenance or repairs when the initial call was put out for them to gather in orbit. These might even be older craft that had been retired from service and had just finished being overhauled. Wherever they’d come from though, they were here now, and that created something of a problem for Squelch and her crew.

“Distance?”

“Fifty klick out and closing fast,” the cobalt unicorn informed her, her tone sounding a little strained now, “They’re definitely coming for us. Computer’s profiling them as light aerospace fighters.”

The sage mare grimaced. It could be worse, she supposed. At least they weren’t heavy strike craft. However, even though they were lightly armed, those fighters would be a lot more maneuverable than her DropShip was. She looked over at High Gain. “Alert the gunnery crews. Aileron, go evasive. Leave the atmosphere if you have to.”

“Aye!” “Aye!” Came the simultaneous acknowledgements.

A moment later, Squelch felt herself being pressed back into her command couch as the pilot pushed the ship’s engines to their limit and strove for altitude. He wasn’t going to manage to outrun them, of course. The unicorn knew that much for certain. Whether in the atmosphere or in space, DropShip of any class wasn’t capable of moving faster than a fighter, especially not ones as light as those. They were almost certainly of a type that was designed to be able to outpace and intercept other fighters. Her ship certainly wasn’t getting away. This was going to come down to a fight.

Fortunately, the Zathura had a lot more firepower than those aerospace craft.

Beams of sapphire light and coils of destructive prismatic energy lashed out from the DropShip, seeking out its pursuers. The nimble fighters bobbed and weaved through the air, narrowly avoiding being struck by the defensive fire. The weapons that they carried possessed a much shorter range, forcing them to move in closer before they could return fire. However, it also meant that they had no reason to fly directly at the DropShip and make themselves a less maneuverable target. They instead were able to fly at oblique angles, frustrating the Zathrua’s gunner, who were not having much luck in getting their turrets to turn fast enough to maintain good track of the harassing fighters.

Eventually, however, the ComSpark craft were obliged to fly directly at the DropShip in order to perform their attack run. They didn’t need much time―just a couple of seconds―so there wasn’t a large window of opportunity for the DropShip’s gunners to take shots at the now no-longer-evasive fighters. But it was a window nonetheless. One that the Zathura’s gunnery crews exploited to no small effect.

One fighter was destroyed outright when a pair of heavy energy beams caught it head-on in its nose-cone and then proceeded to drill right through the center of the fuselage and out its hind end. The cored aerospace fighter exploded an instant later.

It didn’t die quietly though. Its pilot had needed even less time than the gunners who killed them to discharge their own weapons. No fewer than six emerald columns of coherent light converged on the DropShip’s port quarter, raking across the nacelle tucked in along its side. Armor plating melted away without offering up much resistance. More than enough energy was left after cutting through the DropShip’s protective alloy shell to wreak havoc on the more delicate systems beneath. The main port thruster housed within the nacelle flared, sputtered…and then died.

The second fighter escaped death, receiving only a glancing blow to its wing. However, this had largely been due to the pilot seeming to lose their nerve at the last moment and divert, robbing the gunner of their killshot. This meant that the fighter, too, failed to do significant damage, two of the shots lightly scouring the DropShip’s underside, the other four going wide off the ship’s starboard.

On the bridge, alarms were going off. The slate gray pegasus stallion cursed as his hooves and wings both worked the controls at his station in concert. “Port engine’s gone,” he informed his commander through gritted teeth. “I have to throttle back on the remaining engines or we’re going to spin out!”

Squelch was already leaning on her internal comlink, “Mig, can you recover that engine?”

The kirin mare replied a couple seconds later. The unicorn could hear the sounds of klaxons and a lot of yelling happening in the background, “I don’t know yet; I need to check it out. I’m honestly more concerned about that second hit,” she added, much to Squelch’s surprise. “The starboard power regulator spiked for a moment. I’m not sure why. I think it might―hold on…” The chief engineer broke off suddenly, causing Squelch no small amount of worry. When the kirin returned to the mic, it wasn’t to put the other mare’s worries to rest either, “I’ve gotta g―”

Mig closed the channel before she’d even finished signing off. Squelch didn’t care for the implications of that!

Down in the bay, the rosy engineer was galloping over to where one of her senior mechanics had flagged her down. The ‘Steed Bay was effectively a din of alarms and shouting techs as ponies scrambled every which way in an effort to address the damage that had been done. They’d taken a direct hit to one of their larger engines, which was leading to no small number of secondary issues. Fuel lines needed to be closed off, power diverted, thrust rebalanced, the secondary gyros brought online as the mains were recalibrated…there wasn’t an idle hoof in the room.

And naturally every one of those hooves needed her for something; whether it was her expertise on a system, permission to perform an unorthodox bypass or repair, or just to make sure that she was aware of the seriousness of a new problem that was just discovered, Mig’s proverbial dance card was full to bursting; and she could only be in one location at a time. The commander was just going to have to wait for an update on their status when the kirin had time to give her one.

A small part of the engineer’s mind lamented her twin’s absence. Tig’s presence would have been invaluable right now. Both in terms of the skill and expertise that she brought to the table…as well as the emotional support that Mig could really have used a little more of right now. It was bad enough taking a serious hit from enemy weapons in space. The risks and hazards were compounded when it happened in an atmosphere. After all, if they ended up losing all their thrust, the Zathura wasn’t going to just calmly coast through the sky. Gravity was waiting in the wings for any excuse to invite their DropShip to a meeting with the ground; and it was up to Mig and her team to send it a raincheck.

“What’ve you got?” She asked the mechanic who’d summoned her. The kirin suspected that it wasn’t going to be good news, given how the unicorn’s eyes were looking a little ‘panicky’ in the chief engineer’s opinion.

The horned stallion swallowed before he found his voice. His hoof was gesturing to the control terminal his was standing next to, the screen displaying real-time metrics from the DropShip’s main reactor. “I don’t think the breakers kicked in fast enough when Port One died,” he told her. “The main bus suffered a surge, and I think the port regulator got a piece of it.”

Mig leaned in and studied the numbers flickering on the screen. Several of the figures were highlighted in orange, denoting their abnormal values. Most of those values, the kirin noting with some worry, were on the high side. “What about the starboard regulator? It spiked too, right?”

“That was an output spike,” her senior mechanic clarified, “this was an input spike; and while the starboard regulator recovered, the port one still hasn’t. It’s actually getting worse,” he amended, shifting the screen to display a history of the readings for the indicated equipment. “Look: it’s trending further off-normal.”

“Fuck!” Mig very nearly spat. A single power regulator was officially capable of adequately supporting the DropShip on its own, according to all of the technical literature on the subject. After all, that was the point of having redundant systems in the first place. However, that provision was unofficially marked by an asterix. While just one of the ship’s regulators could handle the full power load of the reactors and distribute it across the whole vessel, it was understood that the load in question would be reduced across the board. As in: not under combat conditions where the engines and the weapons were both guzzling power like there was no tomorrow.

The moment they took the regulator offline, the Zathura was going to lose its ability to shoot back at the remaining fighter.

Obviously, that wasn’t an option at the moment. It would hardly matter if they kept the engines powered if that fighter was just going to blow them up anyway. However, it was also clear to her that they were going to lose the regulator any minute now anyway.

They needed a work-around.

“Stay on it,” she told the unicorn, “manage it manually if you have to, but keep it online and out of the red,” Mig added, eying the still-trending readings warily. “I’m going to work on a bypass.”

The kirin elected not to comment on the stallion’s sudden look of professionally-backed horror. She was honestly surprised that she had managed to say those words without gagging in disgust. The prospect of her proposal offended even her own sense of professional pride.

One did not simply bypass a power regulator. Not lightly, at any rate. A DropShip’s main reactor output simply astonishing quantities of power, which was necessary since it turned out that a two thousand ton spaceship required a lot of power. Not all of that ship’s systems needed the same amounts of power though. For example, Cookie’s coffee makers pulled just a hair less wattage than the PPC battery. Which meant that something was needed to throttle the flow of power from the reactor to the ship’s various systems. Otherwise those systems had a tendency to explode.

There were, however, a few systems that required enough power that getting direct access to the reactor’s output would necessarily melt them in ten seconds flat. Fortunately for the ship, one of those systems was the engines. It was conceivable that the thrusters could be routed around the regulators, leaving their remaining good regulator to handle the weapons and secondary systems. Without having to manage the starboard engines, it shouldn’t be under too much of a load.

Mig flagged down a nearby tech who wasn’t working on anything that was likely to blow up in the next two minutes, “Channel Lock! I need about twenty meters of type-B conduit…”

“He’s coming around for another run!”

Trunnion felt his teeth grinding in his mouth as his assistant gunner made the announcement. He pulled as hard as he could at the control yokes, urging the barrels of the heavy lasers he was controlling to swing around faster. It was a largely meaningless gesture of course. The turret’s servos would only move so fast, no matter how much additional pressure he put on the controls. It wasn’t like the gun emplacement particularly cared whether or not he was threatening to break it if it failed to move as fast as he liked.

“How are you coming on that firing solution?” The earth pony stallion all but snarled out around his clenched teeth.

“Working it now,” the pegasus mare responded, her voice not quite cracking beneath the weight of the stress she was under. The fighter was coming around for another low pass on the DropShip. A prudent choice on the pilot’s part, as the Zathura’s ventral side boasted the least weaponry after the rearward arc. Mostly because there just wasn’t a lot of available real estate for turret emplacements. The bigger the guns they put on the bottom of the DropShip, the more ground clearance they’d need, and that meant building lanky―and thus unsteady―landing gear.

A DropShip that buckled and collapsed when it landed wasn’t really desirable. So designers had kept the landing gear stout and stubby, while electing to scale back the weaponry covering that area. It was a completely logical and prudent design choice.

It was also one that Trunnion was finding very inconvenient at the moment, as it meant that his gun was the only one that could align on the incoming fighter from this angle. Unless Aileron was obliging enough to rotate the ship. However, he’d heard the scattered reports over his headset about what had happened to the port engine nacelle. It was unlikely that the DropShip pilot was willing to do anything particularly fancy where maneuvering was concerned.

“Got one!” The mare announced, sounding almost breathlessly relieved as she passed the targeting data to her gunner.

The screen in front of Trunnion alit with a plotted trajectory for the incoming Aerospace fighter, along with a point of aim for him to use in order to score a hit. He wrestled the frustratingly-slow energy cannon into alignment and fired. Indigo light that burned hotter than a star crossed through the sky. The pair of ponies held their breath as they watched the beam of energy lance out towards the incoming fighter…

…And they left out a collective cheer as they saw it make contact!

The small aerospace fighter’s right wing sheared off as the column of burning light sliced through it nearly effortlessly. The ComSpark craft began to roll wildly out of control, no longer able to stabilize itself in the atmosphere of the planet. A scattering of emerald beams lashed out as the changeling pilot controlling it made a vain attempt to hit his target before his craft plummeted to the ground. All of the shots missed by a hundred meters or more.

Trunnion turned and exchanged an exuberant hoof-bump with his partner, each feeling immensely relieved to be free of further threats to the DropShip. Neither were looking in the direction of the doomed fighter. Not that it would have done either pony much good even if they had been. It only took seconds for the spinning aerospace fighter to collide with the Zathura, and it would have taken far longer for the two of them to disengage their harnesses and escape the turret’s confines.

The two of them were still grinning when they perished along with the gun mount they occupied.

Aileron had seen the fighter coming. A chorus of alarms and warning screamed at him, advising that the aerospace fighter was on a collision course. The slate gray pegasus did everything in his power to avoid the impact, but it was just no use. He didn’t have the thrust of the time to change course significantly enough, not in an atmosphere. It wasn’t merely inertia that was his enemy at this moment, the very air that surrounded them had fought against his desire to place the Zathura elsewhere in the sky.

The deck beneath everypony on the bridge shook violently. They all felt themselves pitched suddenly to the right as the DropShip was spun off course by the impact. Midway through Aileron’s efforts to regain control, the screen on his terminal flickered. A second later it died. The pegasus stallion blinked in astonishment as he found himself looking down at a completely dead computer interface. The control yokes went instantly limp in his grasp.

He was about to say something to Squelch about the issue when the entire bridge was suddenly plunged into darkness. More worrisome than the darkness and the loss of power though, was the silence. Under power, it was easy for most of the DropShip’s denizens to unconsciously push the constant low rumbling of the ship’s engines out of their perception. Ponies simply got so used to its omnipresence during normal ship operations that it was easy to forget the sound even existed.

Everypony was very much aware of its absence now though.

Then Aileron felt himself start to rise out of his seat as the DropShip began to enter freefall…

“Pegasi, get flightless ponies to safety! Unicorns, control those tools!” Mig yelled up the top of her lungs as she herself held on tight to a nearby railing. The pegasus stallion next to her was about to fly off until the kirin’s magic snagged him by the tail. “You stay here!”

The technician nodded jerkily, his wings outstretched and fluttering intermittently to keep him fixed in place and oriented amidst all of the turmoil being experienced by the now effectively weightless confines of the ‘Steed Bay. Mig didn’t know how high up in the air the DropShip had been when it lost power, so she didn’t know exactly how much time they had to work with and get things working again. She just had to do what she could as quickly as possible. Either it would be enough and they’d all live, or it wouldn’t. In the latter case, the rosy mare just hoped she died quick.

They had a few things going for them at least. “The reactor’s obviously still online or we’d all be dead,” she pointed out, jerking her head towards the rear of the ship. “Judging by where we took that hit, I’m guessing the starboard regulator’s gone,” this was said with a rather somber expression. Naturally it would be their remaining good regulator that dies first.

“I need you to fly over to the distro panel and lock out the engines and weapons. Then throw everything on the port regulator,” she instructed the flier, “I’ll be standing by to reset it. That’ll get us main power back.” She hoped.

The stallion nodded hurriedly and jetted off. Mig, meanwhile, locked her gaze on the reactor control terminal, which was one of the few consoles that was still functional. It received its power from an auxiliary power unit that was isolated from most of the other ship’s systems. Otherwise, there’d be no way to restart the main reactor if they ever needed to take it offline for any reason. She used her telekinesis to start inputting commands that would reset the regulator. It was a command sequence that she knew by heart, as resetting them was a common maintenance task aboard the ship, and she’d either performed or supervised the task thousands of times during her tenure on the DropShip.

Once the reset was in place and ready to be executed, the kirin looked over towards the distribution panel and saw the pegasus flipped the last of the massive breakers that she’d asked him to. He spun around and waved at her, signaling his completion of the assigned task. Mig nodded and executed the prepared command.

At first, nothing happened. Nor would it. The reset took a full ten seconds to complete so that it could be assured that all of the involved capacitors were properly discharged. It was a ten seconds that seemed to drag on overlong even during the best of time. Now, as the rosy kirin found herself clinging to a railing aboard a plummeting steel brick that was an indeterminable amount of time from catastrophe…those ten seconds took about ten years off of her life.

When she finally counted to ten in her head and nothing seemed to happen, the chief engineer felt a lump of panic begin to form in her throat. If this didn’t work, then they were all going to die and there’d be nothing that she could do about it. They needed power to operate the ship, and this was simply the only way to get it. The port regulator had been damaged though, and she’d known it was unstable. It was conceivable that it had been unstable enough that it simply wouldn’t be capable of coming back online after powering down―

The terminal beeped a melodic tone. A moment later, lights in the ‘Steed Bay began to flicker to life. The ship had power again!

It did not yet, however, have engines.

“Channel Lock, where’s that conduit!”

“Here!”

It took Mig a few seconds to parse out where the call had come from. She eventually found the unicorn mare above her on the gantry, her forelimbs holding tight to a railing. Hovering beside her, enveloped in her telekinesis, was a spool of thick cabling. She looked back at the pegasus stallion she’d recruited to help her. “Get that and hook one end to the J2 socket on the distro panel!”

Mig then turned her attention to a section of wall over to her right. Specifically one panel on that wall. Behind it lay the nearest access point for getting at the power cables heading for the ship’s engines. She used her grip to try and orient herself towards it, and then pushed off. The now entirely weightless and free-floating mare found herself tumbling end over end in the vague direction of her goal. This had likely been a very poorly thought out idea, she realized…

“―dge to Engineering, what’s our status? We have power back but the helm’s not responding.”

How she didn’t go full nirik, Mig didn’t know. It was all she could do not to snap back at the commander that she was perfectly aware that there would be issues with helm control at the moment. After all, the ship’s engines weren’t functional, seeing as how she had intentionally taken them offline right at the source. As for their ‘status’, the chief engineer was pretty certain that it was evident to everypony that they were all currently hurtling towards their demise.

Out loud, she said, “Working on it, commander!” She then ripped off her helmet and flung it away in frustration. It wasn’t like any of them needed to worry about dying from vacuum exposure.

The action didn’t help her situation much though, as it only sent her tumbling even further off course. Mig let out an aggravated snarl as she tried to find something nearby to grab onto and stabilize herself. It was a difficult prospect, it turned out, as her frantic jerking of her head and torso as she looked around only seemed to add entirely new rotational axis to her chaotic drifting. Kirin, the mare deduced, were simply not intended for flight…

Something grabbed her from behind. The rosy mare initially thought it had been the pegasus mechanic that she was working with, but then she felt the material of her vacuum suit bunch up near her shoulders as though grabbed by something with actual fingers instead of hooves. She looked to her left and saw the mechanical manipulator arm of one of the sets of Battle Armor that the Elementals utilized holding her. A few puffs from its integrated jump jets righted the pair and steadied them in the air. Mig turned her head a little further and saw crimson eyes framed by soft-white scales peering out through the suit’s narrow viewport.

“Need a lift?” The occupant inquired through the armor’s external speaker system.

“Yes!” Mig blurted, finally feeling a sense of relief. “Take me there! Second panel from the right!” She waggled her hoof in the direction of the indicated section of bulkhead.

With calculated puffs of her jump jets, the dragoness flew the pair of them to where the chief engineer had pointed and set the kirin down near the panel. There still wasn’t a lot for Mig to hold on to, so the Elemental ensured that she kept a firm hold of the kirin’s suit.

“Okay,” she let out a relieved breath, “to open this we’re going to need a fifteen millimeter driver an―”

The Battle Armor’s other manipulator-tipped arm swung down, grabbed hold of one corner of the panel, and then yanked. Steel shined and screamed as the pony-sized cover was forcibly torn away before the engineer’s horrified eyes. It wasn’t that she was afraid the dragoness was going to destroy anything vital; it was just an instinctive reaction to seeing part of the ship she worked so long and hard to keep in pristine condition torn up with such reckless abandon.

“Oopsie,” the Elemental said. It didn’t sound to Mig as though she was at all sorry for what she’d done though. Neither was the kirin particularly angry. That had certainly been a lot faster than she could have managed with a driver. “Now what?”

“Now we need the other end of that cable over here,” the mare said as an aside as she turned her head for any sign of that pegasus. She found him already flitting towards their position.

As he neared, realization seemed to dawn on the stallion as he finally recognized what his chief was intending. “Um…can’t we burn out the engines doing this?”

“If Aileron red-lines them for too long, yeah,” Mig acknowledged in an indifferent tone as her magic groped for the end of the cable he’d brought over, “but I figure better to melt the engines than let the ship crash,” she quipped. The stallion mechanic offered no further objections.

“Stand back,” the kirin warned as she guided the end of the conduit towards an open socket that had been sitting behind the panel, “this might arc a little―”

The trio winced away as a few tendrils of amethyst lightning cracked around the connector end and its socket. It dissipated as soon as the two pieces were solidly joined, and Mig let out a small sigh of relief. “Good. Now I just need to let Aileron know not to do anything until I can set the flow rate,” her hoof instinctively went for her comlink so that she could contact the pilot, “otherwise it’ll…” Her voice trailed off as she realized that she no longer had her mic on her, having just thrown it away in frustration with her helmet less than a minute ago.

The sudden surge of power that ran through the panel a heartbeat later flung Mig against the far wall of the ‘Steed Bay. Had she been conscious before the impact, the kirin would have been deriding herself for removing her helmet.

Aileron didn’t like that the sound of the earlier eerie silence on the bridge had been replaced with so much noise. Between his recently illuminated console playing a veritable symphony of warning trills, the sound of wind buffeting the hull of the DropShip as it fell through the air, and High Gain’s repeated distress messages, the pegasus pilot found himself thinking that he’d have preferred to die surrounded by darkness and quiet.

Then his control station issued a new sound, this one much more encouraging than the last several: Engine power had been restored! He wasted no time, throwing himself at the controls, throttling the engines up to their highest setting. The roar of their ignition was one of the sweetest sounds that the pegasus had ever heard in his life. Aileron saw the thrust outputs on his display spike at the same time it felt like a giant hoof had reached out and smooshed them all down into their seats.

The slate gray helmsmare was cackling with exuberant glee as he saw their airspeed decreasing. It was a sound that morphed all too soon into one of concern as he noted the almost instantaneous appearance of ‘OVERHEAT!’ alerts by each of his still operational engine status icons. A nearly simultaneous warning that the engines were experiencing a power overload appeared along with those alerts. At first, the stallion wasn’t sure what to make of it all. There was no reason that he could see as to why the engines should already be overheating. They hadn’t even been running for the last minute or two!

More concerning though was the message regarding the overload. He could end up blowing out additional engines if that persisted for much longer, and it wasn’t looking like any of the systems meant to regulate the power were functioning properly.

Then one of the DropShip’s ventral thrusters died. Then another.

Aileron’s hooves and pinions flashed out along the controls in front of him as the stallion manually clawed back the power settings on the engines, reducing their thrust output to near-idling levels. His body regained its earlier weightlessness as the DropShip once more entered freefall. He spent a few seconds of the precious little time they had left running a quick diagnostic, and felt his throat constrict as he saw the report come back with multiple critical failure points noted. There was no longer any automated power regulation controlling the engine output. Worse, he seemed to have only limited ability to do anything about it from this panel. Which suggested a hardware bypass and not a software one.

Whatever Mig had done to get the engines back online had robbed the pegasus of most of the systems he needed to safely fly the ship. The Zathura’s ventral hull was lined with dozens of individual thrusters. He simply didn’t have the physical capability to manually control them all! Even if he did, the control scheme of his station wasn’t equipped to allow for that extended level of micromanagement. The lack of such functionality could hardly be labeled a ‘design oversight’ either, because it would have been sheer folly to even attempt such a thing in the first place. Organic minds just didn't possess the capacity to do all of those hundreds of thrust calculations manually. That was why these ships were largely controlled by automated systems that did the work on the backend.

They might still very well be doomed, the pilot thought to himself. He effectively only had the ability to engage the engines at their maximum physical capacity. As such, he'd only get a few seconds of burn time before they broke down completely. Slowing their descent using constant deceleration wasn't an option. Which was a shame, because the alternative had the potential to be...unpleasant.

Aileron had always found the name for such a maneuver to be morbidly humorous. He didn't know by who, or how long ago, the term had been coined, but the stallion did appreciate its apparent aptness. Or at least, he had. Suddenly the pegasus didn't find himself much caring for the unfortunate implications of preforming a, so called, "suicide burn".

The helmsmare began making the necessary calculations. He didn't like rushing them, but physics didn't seem to be on his side today.

On the face of it, the concept was rather simple and straightforward: objects falling through an atmosphere didn't accelerate forever. Eventually the drag force of the air passing around the falling object would equalize with the force of gravity pulling it down and the velocity would stabilize. At which point, only a very specific quantity of thrust was needed to show that object down to a compete halt. It didn't matter if the object was miles up in the air, or just above the ground, the amount of thrust was approximately the same.

Which meant that, hypothetically, it was possible for him to time a deceleration burn that would bring the DropShip to a complete stop exactly at ground level. He didn't necessarily need to use a constant, lower thrust, burn to ease the Zathura down like he normally did. A few seconds of an extremely hard burn would effectively accomplish the same effect. Which wasn't to say that the two approaches were equally pleasant…

There also wasn't a lot of room for error. If the burn ended too early, they'd begin to fall again, only this time with no functioning engines left to recover with. If the burn ended too late, well...the only practical difference between "landing" and "crashing" really only came down to the amount of downward velocity a ship was experiencing when it made contact with the ground. He really only had a couple meters per second of velocity to play with where the resiliency of the ship’s hull was concerned. Too much more than that, and the DropShip was liable to pancake when they hit.

Of a slightly lesser concern, though still an issue with bearing in mind, was the problem of the ship’s forward momentum. Aileron was hesitant to address it with the engines being in the state that they were in, since he didn't trust the ability of the attitude thrusters to keep the DropShip level if they couldn't engage at anything other than their new "all-or-nothing" setting. Trying to slow their forward velocity could end up putting them into a tumble there would be no way to recover from. It was dropping off steadily as the air around them slowly bled away the ship's speed, but they certainly weren't going to be moving "slowly" by the time they reached the ground.

Still, the pegasus reasoned that they had a much higher chance of surviving a brief skid along the ground than they did belly-flopping into it.

His calculations compete, the DropShip pilot brought all of the necessary thrusters to a "standby" status and kept his hoof at the ready to engage them when the moment arrived.

"This is going to be rough!" He warned his commander.

Squelch nodded. She was perfectly aware that her ship was in dire straights, and that pretty much everything was out of her hooves now. She wasn't the experienced pilot that Aileron was, and she had to trust that he’d be able to land the Zathura in a way that left it nominally intact. All that she could do at the moment was prepare the rest of her crew for what was coming.

She activated the ship's internal announcement system. "All hooves, brace for impact! I repeat: all hooves, brace for impact!"

Elsewhere on the bridge, another mare was also calling out into her mic. "Mayday, mayday; any receiving station, this is the DropShip Zathura. We are going down! Say again: we are going down! Our coordinates are: one-one-five by two-seven. Mayday, mayday…"

The comms tech repeated the distress call continuously as the DropShip fell. Somehow the earth pony mare managed not to let panic get the best of her, keeping her words clear and her tone even. Aileron's hooves and wings moved over his panel with calm precision. Even Doppler hadn't given into despair, constantly feeding both of her fellow crewmates typographical and sensor data for them to use in their respective tasks.

All three ponies were fighting valiantly to save the ship and all those on board. In spite of the very real peril that they faced, Squelch felt her lips crack a tiny smile. She'd assembled a good crew, the unicorn thought to herself. They deserved to live through this, if anypony did. Hopefully fate would recognize that.

Aileron touched his panel. The engines roared to life with a ferocity that Squelch hadn't sensed from them before. The mare felt herself being pressed hard into her seat.

Outside the forward viewport, the rocky Appeloosa desert rushed to meet them. The last thing Squelch remembered was the sound of the collision alert siren going off.

The unicorn mare let out a bored yawn in the cockpit of her BattleSteed as she stood watch over the Timberwolf's Dragoons supply trucks loading up additional supplies from the changeling logistics base they'd just finished raiding. The defenders had been relatively easily subdued, with the Dragoons only suffering the loss of one 'Steed and moderate damage to a few others. The repairs to those 'Steeds were already underway and would be completed in a couple hours. After that, they'd be on their way to Ponyville.

Arrangements were also being made to demolish every last kilogram of supplies that they couldn't make use of, leaving nothing behind that could be of any use to any changelings who might come by here later. While it would have been possible to mostly destroy the base by having their BattleSteeds shoot and/or trample everything around them, using strategically-placed explosives would ensure that the destruction was thorough and complete.

As the unicorn pilot lounged in her seat, eyeing the sensors for signs of any approaching forces that might happen their way, she heard a faint burst of static over her headset. Curious, the mare glanced at the comms panel to see if it had identified any incoming signals. While she did find signs of activity, it didn't look like her 'Steed's electronics were having much luck pulling in any details. This suggested that it was either a very distant, or very weak broadcast.

Concerned that it might be signs of a surveillance team making a report of their activists, the Dragoon pilot quickly set about trying to triangulate the source of the errant broadcast. This proved to be extremely difficult, as it turned out that the signal was both far away and a low-power broadcast. Ultimately, the mare was only able to snag a few bits from the transmitted message: "―inates are: one-one-five by two-se―"

After that, the signal became too garbled to make out much, nor did it seem to go on for much longer. By the time she'd recalibrated the 'Steed's electronics suite to focus more on the indicated origin of the broadcast, it didn't seem to exist anymore. Whoever they were had apparently ceased transmitting altogether.

The unicorn did a cursory search for points of interest at the listed coordinates she'd heard mentioned, but nothing seemed to come up. As best she could tell from the maps they had, it was simply barren desert for miles in any direction. Certainly nothing worth reporting a location for. Not that she could think of anyway.

The mare compiled a short report of the intercepted message and forwarded it up through their intelligence channels. Maybe they'd be able to make some sense of it. Once her brief missive was transmitted, the pilot once more resumed watching crates being loaded onto trucks.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 49: Endgame

“So, is it just me, or are we not getting shot at as much as we thought we’d be?”

One could be forgiven for thinking that Xanadu was tempting fate with his comment, and that it was never a good idea to question when a mission was running unexpectedly smoothly. Under most circumstances, Slipshod would also have held that opinion and told the zebra pilot to bite his tongue and be thankful that they weren’t having to fight tooth and hoof for every kilometer of progress that they were making towards Ponyville.

However, in this instance, the striped stallion had a point: there was an inexplicable shortage of resistance being encountered on their trip. Indeed, with every passing minute that something didn’t happen, Slipshod found himself getting progressively more nervous about it.

This wasn’t right.

Their truncated column of thirteen BattleSteeds was less than two hundred kilometers from Canterlot, one of the most heavily fortified and patrolled areas on the whole planet. Two major cities had recently been invaded and captured in the region that could not be allowed to remain in the hooves of enemy forces, as those cities would allow the invaders to support massive assaults on the capital itself.

By all rights, every changeling in the region should be mobilizing and rallying to launch counter attacks to take back those cities as quickly as possible, drawing in forces from every garrison, firebase, and lookout tower, within a thousand kilometers. This whole area should be swarming―literally―with ComSpark soldiers, to the point where their company was at least occasionally stumbling across some group of changelings, if only by accident.

Yet, somehow, they had inexplicably encountered no resistance whatsoever. It was uncanny. In fact, the only way that Slipshod could explain such a phenomenon rationally was that the ComSpark forces in the area were intentionally avoiding them. But that hardly made any sense either. If their position was known, then so too was their heading and intended destination; and it would have been the height of tactical folly to allow them to get within striking distance of the comm relay located at Ponyville. It was of too much strategic importance to put at risk by letting them get close enough to shoot at it. Even an incompetent commander would be trying to intercept them well short of their destination, if only because that was just sort of what you were supposed to do when you knew where the enemy was: send forces out to fight them!

But, here they were, trotting across the wilderness completely unmolested by changelings.

“It’s not just you,” Slipshod assured the other pilot, “they’re avoiding us. I couldn’t tell you why though.”

“They could be waiting to spring a trap,” Triton chimed in. The aging hippogriff Reiver’s Queen Novo striding in line with Slipshod’s borrowed Rainbow Dash at the head of their group.

The changeling stallion considered the layout of the terrain along their intended route towards Ponyville. He’d entertained the possibility of an ambush for some time, but they’d already passed through the areas where it would have been most advantageous for ComSpark to launch one. Between here and their destination, there wasn’t anywhere that a force could be staged to lie in wait that their group wouldn’t be able to detect far enough out to avoid. At worst, all ComSpark could hope to do was scare them off by showing up with overwhelming numbers.

While that would effectively save their relay tower in Ponyville, it was a strategically poor use of resources, as it would tie up at least a full battalion of ‘Steeds and combat vehicles just to divert one company of attackers. Those would become forces that couldn’t be used to help take back Baltimare or Fillydelphia, because the moment they left, Slipshod and the Reivers would just move in on Ponyville again. Heck, factoring in the larger Disciple group that would be meeting them for the assault on Ponyville, it was more likely that ComSpark would need to keep a couple full regiments in the area. Slipshod knew roughly how large a total force typically existed in this part of the continent at any time, and it was highly doubtful that ComSpark could afford to keep so many of their ‘Steeds tied down guarding this relay and take back the held cities at the same time.

The smarter move would have been to ambush their little company on the way, completely crushing them, before moving on to hit the larger Disciple force. A classic ‘defeat in detail’ strategy. Slipshod had honestly been expecting exactly that sort of occurrence, and so had had a couple of their lighter ‘Steeds out pretty far ahead of their main body to serve as scout/pickets. But the expected ambush had never come, and now they were less than an hour away from their anticipated rendezvous with friendly forces and making their assault on the ComSpark relay.

“They’re up to something,” Slipshod conceded, still frowning at the navigational map. “I wish I knew what though…” The more the changeling stallion tried to imagine what was going through the minds of the ComSpark commanders, the more frustrated he became as he failed to make sense of it all. Either there was something extremely important that he was overlooking that was keeping him from seeing the bigger picture, or their opponents really were a bunch of imcompotent buffoons.

Unfortunately, Slipshod knew for a fact that it wasn’t the latter. Which meant that he was the one doing something stupid, and he just didn’t know what it was yet. Something had to be out there waiting for them, and if they didn’t see it coming in time, they were going to be utterly fucked.

“Xanax, go relieve Reiver Three. I want some fresh eyes up there.”

“Roger that; moving out,” the striped stallion acknowledged. His Philomena sprinted ahead as the zebra took his ‘Steed out to the point position of their formation.

Slipshod turned his attention back to the map once more, plotting out the locations of nearby bases and their typical garrison complements. Even if ninety percent of everything that they usually held had been called forward to participate in the reclaiming of the two cities that had been seized, there should have been enough of a force left over in the area to at least make a respectable showing. Maybe not anything that would be instantly overwhelming, but a large enough force that a commander would have been inclined to at least try to stop their company.

It was highly unlikely that any local commander would be comfortable sitting on their flank, waiting for them to attack Ponyville, only to be later faced with having to answer to Queen Chrysalis why they’d sat back and done nothing to stop them. Trying and failing wasn’t always a good look either, admittedly; but those commanders would have at least been able to point to the fact that they’d been forced to operate with inferior forces after the rest had been redirected towards Baltimare and Fillydelphia. Laying the manticore’s share of the blame at the hooves of those commanders who’d lost control of those cities, while they themselves had valiantly tried to protect Her Majesty’s interests in spite of the odds stacked against them.

The fact that something like that hadn’t happened did suggest that there was something larger at play, but it still didn’t provide the answer as to what that ‘something larger’ could be. There just weren’t the forces available on such short notice to pull off anything big. Not if the changelings wanted to get those cities back, and the spaceports in them that were the linchpin of this invasion. If they took back even one of those cities, then it functionally didn’t matter if the Ponyville relay was taken out, because there wouldn’t be much left of an invasion anymore anyway. Meanwhile, saving the relay wouldn’t necessarily mean that the assault on Canterlot would fail, just that it would be easier for ComSpark to coordinate the defense of the capital…

…A defense which would suddenly be found understrength, with so many of those forces tied down in Ponyville. In which case, they’d arguably be better off letting the relay be destroyed!

What was ComSpark up to?!

Slipshod received his answer a few minutes later when he received a transmission from Xanadu, “Hey, Bug, I’ve got something on sensors.”

The changeling stallion bolted upright on his piloting couch, his gaze darting instantly to his own sensor display, which showed the collective shared data of their whole augmented BattleSteed company. He’d expected to see that the zebra had made contact with the forward elements of the force meant to ambush them, but instead found that there was only a single, and extremely weak, signal. Not only that, but it appeared that the signal in question was well outside of what should have been the typical detection range for Xanadu’s ‘Steed. Given the faintness of the contact, it actually shouldn’t have been possible for the striped stallion to have noticed it at all,

“How’d you find that?” Slipshod asked, the surprise preventing him from masking all of his incredulity.

“Kind of by chance, actually.” The zebra admitted somewhat sheepishly. “I thought to myself: what would be a good place to spy on us from? Then I narrowed my sensor field and focused it in. That’s when I found this.”

The changeling pilot did some rough estimates in his head, based on the strength of the signal and the distance it was from Xanadu’s Philomena. He realized that the zebra would have had to trim his sensors down to a detection angle of a little under twelve degrees in order to have the sensitivity to pick out such a small signal from among the ambient background noise. Tightening up a band like that was really only something that one did when they already had a general idea for the direction of their target in the first place.

Admittedly, the location of this contact was one that was ideal for some sort of low-profile observation of their group. So it would make sense to search there if what one was looking for was low-profile observers. However, Slipshod could also identify a score of other perfectly suitable locations that would have served that purpose. The idea that Xanadu could have gotten to his position, adjusted his sensors, and searched through a decent number of those locations in just a couple of minutes was…far fetched.

“You just…found this?”

Slipshod inwardly winced. He wasn’t sure why he was being so wary. There was no reason to believe that Xanadu was lying, or that this was any sort of convoluted scheme of some sort. The changeling supposed that he was just a little higher strung than usual, given the situation. It was honestly something of a relief to have evidence that ComSpark wasn’t entirely overlooking them.

“Pretty much, yeah.” Xanadu said, now sounding like he also realized how questionable the situation had to seem. “I sort of…I don’t know how to describe it,” he admitted, seeming to be a little annoyed with his own ability to articulate what he’d been feeling, “You know how you get all prickly on the back of your neck when you think you’re being watched? It was like that. I felt like that hill was watching me.

“Turns out I was right. Computer profile says it’s a Swift Wind. Somepony’s keeping an eye on us. Want me to chase it off?”

Slipshod turned his mind from the unlikely nature of the find to considering the significance of the detected vehicle. There’d be time to question the zebra later about the prickliness of his neck and his absurdly keen intuition.

A Swift Wind was an extremely capable reconnaissance vehicle, and it made sense that one would be used to seek out any approaching units. It also helped to explain why they hadn’t even inadvertently come across any ComSpark units in the area. That little scout was more than capable enough of warning any unwary groups away from the area if it looked like they’d be easy prey for the Reiver company. There were probably a couple such vehicles watching the Disciple group they were meeting with too.

Fundamentally, this didn’t really change all that much about their situation. It wasn’t like Slipshod hadn’t already assumed ComSpark knew where they were anyway and was preparing accordingly. Keeping tabs on known enemy forces was a fairly standard principle, and didn’t necessarily mean that an ambush was more or less likely.

There also wasn’t much that they could do about it. As their name implied: the little ground vehicles were notoriously fast, even offroad. Xanadu’s ‘Steed couldn’t hope to actually catch the thing. At most, he could scare it back a few kilometers, but only if he kept close to it, and far away from the rest of the company. Slipshod didn’t care for that idea much. There was no telling whether or not that Swift Wind had any friends nearby, and if the zebra pilot got far enough out, it might take too long to respond if he was attacked.

Although…

Slipshod studied the local topography. As he’d noted, there were quite a few hills in the area that made for good vantage points for scouts. Which meant that there were also a significant number of gullies between those hills. A couple of them were even deep enough to keep a ‘Steed out of line of sight. If he was careful, quick, and kept his emissions low, it was feasible that he could sneak in close enough to the Swift Wind to get the drop on them. If they managed to capture the driver they might be able to gather some information of their own.

“No. Don’t approach. Don’t act like you know where they are. I’ll take care of them.

“Triton: keep the column moving. No deviations.”

Slipshod then deactivated his active sensors and turned off a couple other secondary systems, to include disarming the Rainbow Dash’s energy weapons. Charged PPCs were hard to miss for sensitive sensors, and it wasn’t like he was going to need them to capture an unarmed scout. Once he’d managed to make the seventy ton, bright blue and gold, BattleSteed as ‘stealthy’ as he could, the changeling charged down through the nearest gully.

He was forced to follow a bit of a meandering path in order to ensure that he kept terrain higher than the height of the Rainbow Dash between himself and the target, but eventually Slipshod was able to close within a couple kilometers of the Swift Wind, which still appeared to be unaware of his presence. That was going to come to an end soon though. There wasn’t going to be any reasonable way for him to get closer without being detected. The moment that happened, the Swift Wind’s operator was going to try and make a run for it.

Under most circumstances, they’d have a better than even chance of getting away too. The light scout craft was renowned for its speed and mobility, and could move at speeds significantly higher than even the Rainbow Dash was capable of. In fact, Slipshod could only think of one or two light BattleSteeds that could compete with a Swift Wind, and that was only if they were stripped down and had oversized reactors stuffed inside of them. So there was a good possibility that he wouldn’t be able to catch the scout. If that looked like it was going to be the case, the changeling stallion resolved to ensure it was destroyed before it got out of range.

Despite the imbalance where raw speed was concerned, Slipshod did have a couple of advantages: they were on rough terrain at the moment, and not paved city streets. The Swift Wind was going to be forced to move a little slower than it might have been able to on ideal surfaces in order to avoid flipping over. Meanwhile, BattleSteeds didn’t really suffer much at all running over hills and such when compared to how they handled paved level surfaces. It was one of the tactical advantages that a ‘Steed had over a comparably armed combat vehicle. He also had jump jets, which could provide him with bursts of forward speed for short periods. If he times them right, the changeling estimated that he actually had a daily good chance of cutting off the wheeled truck and forcing a surrender of its occupant.

Slipshod took a deep breath, flexing his hooves as they rested around the control yokes. Capturing the changeling in that Swift Wind was probably going to be his only shot at finding out what ComSpark was up to. It was clear that there was something going on, and he really didn’t like the implications where the invasion was concerned.

“Just don’t fuck this up,” Slipshod murmured to himself. That thought firmly in mind, the changeling reengaged his ‘Steed’s active sensors so that he had an easier time tracking the Swift Wind, and then charged forward at a full gallop.

To the ComSpark driver’s credit, they obviously hadn’t gotten complacent even after spending what had likely been hours watching the Reiver group. Their signal started to move almost as soon as the Rainbow Dash’s active sensors powered on. However, as he’d anticipated, they weren’t able to travel nearly as quickly as their rated top speed might have suggested, having trouble finding solid traction on the dusty hillsides. Meanwhile, Slipshod’s ‘Steed wasn’t missing a step as it ran towards the little scout car.

That wasn’t to say that the Swift Wind was exactly moving slowly though. Even when reduced to a little more than half its possible top speed, the vehicle would have been able to outpace every heavy-tonnage BattleSteed in the Harmony Sphere, and they seemed to be managing a bit more than that at the moment. Of course, the Rainbow Dash he was in was faster than a typical heavy ‘Steed. When everything was said and done, Slipshod estimated that they were just about evenly matched in regards to their effective average velocity.

It was a good thing that he wasn’t exclusively dependent on his BattleSteed’s speed then, Slipshod thought to himself with a grin as he leaped into the air and gunned the jump jets. The resulting bounding leap sent the Rainbow Dash soaring over the Swift Wind. The driver noticed this but the move must have caught them by surprise, because when they tried to veer off, they ended up oversteering and sent the scout car into a skid. They ended up losing just about all of their speed, their wheels spinning as they fought for purchase on the soft ground.

Slipshod capitalized on the other changeling’s predicament as soon as his ‘Steed landed, reaching out with one of its forehooves and planting it solidly on the top of the Swift Wind. The little truck’s suspension, which was rated to support little else besides the eight ton vehicle and a little additional cargo, squealed and protested as additional weight was suddenly added to it. Soon enough there were several distressing snapping and cracking sounds as every single one of its six tie rods and shocks sheared off beneath the added stress. A second later, the transmission cut out in response to losing connection with the truck’s wheels. The scout was disabled.

As an added bonus, when Slipshod removed the Rainbow Dash’s forehoof, he noted that the vehicle’s transmitter had also been left a little more than a crumpled up saucer of aluminum. The driver wasn’t going to be making any further reports, and had likely been too focused on trying to get away to have previously gotten off much more than a message letting their superiors know they’d been discovered and were trying to flee.

“I got it!” Slipshod announced over his radio to the others. “Rally up for a bit while I see if we can learn anything.”

“You should wait until we get there,” Triton cautioned. “They could still be dangerous.”

“Of course they’re dangerous; they’re a changeling,” the stallion quipped even as he set about unfastening himself from his piloting couch. “But so am I. I’ll be fine.”

“Didn’t you almost die the last time you fought another changeling?” Xanadu pointed out.

“Details,” Slipshod muttered as he popped off his helmet and opened the hatch. He emerged just in time to find that the Swift Wind’s driver was of a similar mind, scrambling out of their vehicle in an attempt to flee.

“Oh no you don’t…” Slipshod snarled as he jumped off the Rainbow Dash’s head. A halo of jade flames passed over his body as he fell through the air, and out the other end of the fiery ring flew a teal-feathered griffon. Powerful swings of his wings sent him darting after the retreating ComSpark changeling.

They glanced over their shoulder, easily spotting their pursuer. Slipshod felt shock and surprise at first, followed soon after by a glimmer of concern as they saw the griffon gaining on them, followed quickly by determination to escape. They underwent a transformation of their own, an orange hippogriff popping out of their short-lived cocoon of magical fire. It was a subtle thing, but Slipshod noticed the slight, sputtery, quality of those flames. His sharp griffon eyes allowed him to also pick out the subtly sickly appearance of their newly assumed flying form. It looked almost malnourished.

It was then that Slipshod recalled that it had been months since the last time any group of prospective academy applicants would have arrived in Faust. Which meant that the planet’s supply of fresh creatures to drain would also have been used up weeks ago. Near the end, there probably would have been rationing too. A lowly scout like this one wouldn’t have been anywhere near the top of a priority list. Who knew when the last time they’d had a decent meal might have been.

They weren’t quite ‘starving’, Slipshod acknowledged. The Queen would be using some of the reserves that she’d built up over the centuries to keep that from happening―Chrysalis was hardly about to risk her ‘valiant defenders’ dying off before she could use them as fodder to protect her from Twilight and the Dragon Clans. However, it was clear that this changeling’s transformed forms weren’t going to be as tough as they might have been if they’d been properly fed. Unlike his fight with Dee, who had been enjoying the benefits of living among a crew who were unerringly appreciative of their ship’s doctor.

This was unlikely to prove to be nearly as harrowing a fight as that one had been, Slipshod realized with some measure of relief.

He caught up to the hippogriff quickly enough. He didn’t immediately attack though, instead electing to perform a mid-air somersault. In the middle of it, Slipshod transformed once more, emerging as a great eyeder. The two meter long arachnid continued its tumble through the sky, throwing out a line of webbing as it did so. He heard the hippogriff hen let out a surprised yell, followed by the sound of frantic fluttering and curses just as his new wingless form began to fall back to earth.

Another burst of flames and a stout minotaur crashed to the ground, grunting under the effort of trying not to land too hard on his knees. His powerful hands kept firm hold of the end of sticky rope-like material clutched in his grasp. The hippogriff tangled in the far end of the webbing continued to flap and squawk in frustration, like a misbehaving kite trying to escape its line.

Slipshod grit his teeth and set his hooves. The minotaur took a deep breath, and launched into a powerful spin with its torso, heaving the line of eyeder web with all of his might. The line went taut, followed soon after by a surprised chirp from the ensnared hen, who soon found herself being flung around in a wide circle. Not for very long though, unfortunately for her. Because once Slipshod felt that he’d taken the slack out of the web, he adjusted his grip, briefly arcing the line downward, and then shifting to an up-and-over motion.

The result was that the whirling hippogriff at the end of the sticky rope of webbing found herself going from a wide, circular, orbit around the minotaur, to being flung upwards into the air…and then right back down out of it. The hen let out a shocked, “Eep―!” that was cut off by their sudden impact with the ground, along with their attempted transformation that also hadn’t been able to complete in time.

When the dust kicked up by their impact cleared, Slipshod could see that he now had a timberwolf at the other end of his webbing. Or, at least, some of the pieces to one. The lips of his muzzle pulled back into a sneer as he let out an amused snort. Clever. He let go of the end of the web that he was still holding, flinging the sticking rope away with a flick of his wrist, and began purposefully making his way towards the pile of sticks and twigs that were already starting to clump back together into a vaguely canine shape.

The timberwolf had only managed to mostly reform by the time Slipshod was standing over them. The minotaur reached out with a hand to grab the lumber lupine. By the time it got there, another shimmer of changeling transformative fire had altered the limb from one covered in fur with keratin-tipped fingers to an arm adorned in crimson scales and hands capped by claws. The dragon grabbed the timberwolf by its throat and pinned it to the ground on its back. The cedar canine let out a pained yelp, but managed to get out a defiant snarl soon after.

Slipshod let out a roar of his own in response, allowing a little bit of dragonflame escape his mouth as he did so. The timberwolf went silent now, staring up at him. He saw the challenge in its eyes, but he could also sense the fear within them that simply refused to be masked completely. Just below that though, were the embers of that initial shock and surprise that he’d felt from them when this changeling had seen him exit the Rainbow Dash. It made a certain amount of sense, Slipshod supposed. It’s not like Clans utilized a lot of changelings of their own, now was it?

“Make yourself something less flammable,” Slipshod instructed them, “with a lot more chitin.” The timberwolf didn’t revert to its natural form, continuing to regard him with its defiant stare. Annoyed by their unwillingness to concede what was obviously a lost fight, the dragon let out a warning gout of flame that―lightly―singed the timberwolf’s snout.

The pinned canine yelped in pain. Then, after another fierce glare, it obediently reverted back into a changeling. The chitinous mare dressed in the barding of a ComSpark soldier sneered up at him. Determined to appear brave, in spite of her fear and confusion...and more fear, Slipshod realized.

The dragon cocked his head as he found himself experiencing a little mild confusion of his own. This other changeling was experiencing two separate and distinct sources of fear. The first was obvious, as she was a changeling being pinned by a dragon the size of a Clan Elemental who could incinerate her with one good cough. She’d have to be crazy to not be afraid.

It was the other source of fear that was puzzling Slipshod now though. This feeling wasn’t primal, it was professional. She felt like she’d done something wrong―very wrong―and she was terrified of what her superiors were going to do to her when they found out. At first, Slipshod thought that it had to do with the fact that she’d allowed herself to be discovered and captured. That was certainly unlikely to reflect favorably on her career―assuming that she had one when this invasion was over. However, he found himself doubting this hypothesis, when he probed that feeling a bit more deeply and discovered that it was inextricably linked to her confusion regarding his presence.

Whatever she’d done wrong, it involved him; and it wasn’t because he’d caught her. He’d felt that confusion before she’d been caught, and it had been carrying with it the seeds of this fear even then, he realized. Slipshod leaned in closer to the changeling mare, peering deep into her eyes as he reached out with his empathic senses towards the ComSpark soldier. He needed to know what it was that had her so afraid and surprised. There shouldn’t have been much cause for the latter especially, since she’d been watching them for hours.

Seeming to realize that she was being probed, the mare instantly threw up as many emotional barriers as she could manage and turned away from him. Like her transformations, however, these barriers proved to not be as solid as they might otherwise have been if she were properly fed with love and other strong emotions. While it wouldn’t be quite fair to say that it was easy for him to pierce them, Slipshod did manage to erode them enough to continue to get accurate readings on her.

Now he just needed to trigger some additional reactions from the other changeling to help flesh out the precise nature of those feelings, “You’re surprised to see me,” he murmured aloud, studying her features closely even as he pressed in around her mind, “but ComSpark knows that I’m with the Clans,” he pointed out. “They know I’m the one that helped Twilight escape to Clan territ―”

He cut himself off. There’d been a reaction to the alicorn’s name. The same fear reaction that was connected to his presence. There was shame too. A wound to her professional pride as a scout. She’d fallen short of her own performance expectations. She’d made a mistake. A big one. A mistake that she knew she’d be severely punished for, and rightly so in her estimation.

After all, she’d been wrong…

“...Wrong about what?” Slipshod pressed on, not actually expecting a verbal response from the other changeling. It was enough to feel her wince as she realized that he was still getting a read on her emotional reactions, in spite of her attempts to block him out. He could feel her redoubling her efforts to wall off her mind, but those efforts were undermined by her heightened anxiety as a result of realizing she was inadvertently feeding the enemy information. The result was that her barriers actually became more porous as she started losing focus. “Wrong about Twilight; but how? Twilight’s not even here―” The dragon balked, realization dawning. “She’s not here.” Slipshod glanced briefly back over his shoulder at the Rainbow Dash still standing idle in the distance. Xanadu’s Philomena was watching over it already, and the other Reiver ‘Steeds were visible in the distance.

He looked back at the pinned changeling mare, “You thought you were tracking Twilight,” he realized, a note of bemusement in his voice. “You thought you were reporting on Twilight’s location!” He let out a little snort. It made sense. It was Twilight’s personal BattleSteed, after all. ComSpark could hardly have been expected to know that the alicorn had been forced to sit out the opening deployments of the invasion. They would have continued to assume that she was an active participant, and so would have been keen to follow the movements of ‘her’ ‘Steed.

“Obviously Her Majesty would want to know where the princess is,” Slipshod reasoned, “and how close she was getting to Canterlot…”

It had been just a flicker. The barest hint of an underlying emotion; and he’d almost missed it. Indeed, he would have if this other changeling had been better fed and able to adequately hide her emotions. He hadn’t missed it though. This changeling’s satisfaction at the thought of Twilight getting closer to Canterlot. It had bordered on smugness.

This changeling wanted Twilight to be closer to Canterlot. Why? Surely that would be the last thing that Chrysalis would want. Twilight was easily the one being in the whole galaxy that the changeling queen feared above all else―even if she’d never admit it. The alicorn who had eluded her for five hundred years. The mare who had bested her multiple times in the past, and who was the most likely to know how to best her yet again. By all rights, Chrysalis should want Twilight kept as far away from her as possible!

So then why would this changeling be feeling mirth at the thought of Twilight getting closer?!

And why would she be frustrated to learn that he was actually the one piloting the Rainbow Dash?

Triton’s Novo was trotting up to their position now. In his head, the changeling heard the hippogriff’s earlier concerns: “They could be waiting to spring a trap…”

Slipshod’s eyes went wide. It was a trap. Ponyville was a trap! They ‘knew’ that ‘Twilight’ was on her way there, and so they were setting up an ambush to take her out of the fight―

No. There was more to it than that, the ‘Steed pilot realized. It wasn’t Chrysalis’ style. At least, not the ‘killing Twilight’ part. As terrified of the purple alicorn as the changeling queen might be, her own sense of personal pride reigned supreme above all else. Her internalized sense of superiority that needed to be fed constantly. She hadn’t kept three alicorns alive in the dungeons of Canterlot all these centuries because she was averse to killing her enemies after all.

No, Chrysalis would want Twilight taken alive too. After all, if Twilight was dead, then the changeling queen wouldn’t be able to gloat to her face about how obviously superior she was to the fallen purple princess. She’d want to spend another five hundred years showing the former ruler of the Celestia League what was being done to the inhabitants of the Harmony Sphere.

Slipshod felt a shudder work its way down his spine as he considered how large a force the queen was likely to organize in order to capture Twilight. It was certain to be more than large enough to completely obliterate whatever group was being sent to take out the relay in Ponyville. Which meant that they needed to call off the attack, and now!

He was in the middle of cursing himself for leaving his helmet and its integrated radio suite in his ‘Steed when he noticed that Triton had also left his cockpit. The former Reiver general was gliding in, a rifle held firmly in his talons and at the ready. The barrel drifted cautiously between the pinned changeling and the dragon standing over her, as he was seemingly initially unsure of who was who.

Slipshod smirked. “Chimicherry,” he said over his shoulder towards the hippogriff.

“Cherrychanga.” Triton relaxed visibly at the dragon’s use of the prearranged passphrase, the rifle moving back now to focus exclusively on the other changeling on the ground. “Nice catch.”

“Thanks. I need your radio,” Slipshod informed the hippogriff. “We need to call off the attack on Ponyville. It’s a trap. They thought Twilight was going to be there and arranged for a ‘surprise’.”

Triton winced, instantly recognizing the implication. If ComSpark thought that one of the most powerful alicorn’s who’d ever lived was going to be showing up to Ponyville, then it was unlikely that they were going to ambush their group with anything less than a full division or two of BattleSteeds and support units. Which would have been enough firepower to obliterate the battalion or so of Disciple ‘Steeds on their way there with just a single salvo. Maybe two if their aim was off on the first one. He activated his radio, “This is Reiver Actual. I have a priority message for The Admiral. We have a problem…”

Star Admiral Cinder massaged her brow in an attempt to dispel the latest wave of fatigue that was assaulting her. She’d barely slept at all in the last forty-eight hours, and the dragoness highly doubted that she’d be permitted an opportunity for any decent rest in the next forty-eight hours either. The fact that she’d had nothing to drink that wasn’t coffee so strong that it may as well have been damp coffee grounds hadn’t seemed to help matters much. Her ship’s doctor was also side-eying her every time she asked for another stimulant.

The cobalt dragoness had no doubt that what she was putting herself through was far from healthy but, at the same time, there wasn’t much help for it. She had a fleet to manage, and a planetary invasion to oversee. The situation was simply far too critical for her to take an eight hour long break and just hope that nothing went wrong before she woke up again. She had to be ready to respond to any change in circumstance at a moment’s notice. Even if she was feeling a little tired at the time.

Too much was at stake.

One of her staff officer’s approached, holding out a datapad. “The latest loss reports for the initial landings, Admiral,” the lieutenant said.

Cinder nodded, accepting the pad. She dismissed the junior officer and glanced over the aggregate tallies. A few dozen DropShips hadn’t made it to the surface, with all hooves aboard being lost. Tragic, to be sure, but overall an acceptable number given the scale of the landings involved. Likewise, their losses on the ground weren’t nearly as grievous as she’d feared they might be. The changelings only had so many dedicated military forces in Equus, and they couldn’t have known ahead of time precisely where the landings would occur. Meanwhile, the combined forces of the Clans and the Sphere had been able to choose their insertion points based upon what they’d seen when they entered orbit of the planet, giving themselves a distinct advantage.

The real test, however, would be coming in the next few hours, the star admiral knew. Now that the changelings knew where the landings had taken place, and what sized forces they were dealing with, they could plan their counter-attacks. When those inevitably came, it would be the invaders who were on the back hoof. They were bound to take more losses then, both numerically and proportionally. Hopefully, enough of them would survive for what came next. Otherwise, this was all going to have been for nothing.

The dragoness scrolled through the rest of the report, skimming over the detailed breakdowns of which ships and units had been lost so far. A few of the names she recognized from her own force roster. Others had been part of the groups that one of the three Great Houses had brought along. She made a note to send messages to them to get a better idea of how integral any of those units might have been to their own operational planning.

At least it didn’t look like the Clans were going to be impeded too much by what had been lost―

Cinder paused in her scrolling as one DropShip caught her eye. She looked up, searching for the lieutenant who had brought her the pad and summoned him back to her. “This ship here,” the dragoness said, pointing the name out to the junior officer, “do we know the details on when and how it went down?”

The younger dragon lieutenant peered at the name and then brought out a pad of his own, digging through the originals of the reports which he had aggregated for the admiral. “It looks like we lost contact with that ship some time between its first and second drop,” he told her. “The Elementals they were supposed to drop off never radioed in to confirm they were in position, and the ship never returned to the Rockhoof for their second payload. They’re presumed destroyed.”

“How?”

The other officer scanned through his pad some more, frowning before finally shaking his head and admitting, “we’re not sure. Several other DropShips reported being intercepted by ComSpark aerospace fighters though. Usually single fighters or pairs. Nothing substantial.”

Cinder’s eyes widened in surprise. “Why weren’t the DropShips given fighter cover during their drops if the changelings still had air assets?” She demanded, her tone bordering on accusatory.

“Y-you ordered all our fighters to soften up ground targets around Canterlot, ma’am,” the younger officer stammered, sounding unsure of how to appropriately respond, as it felt like he was effectively being criticized for following her orders as they’d been given. “Besides, the fighter interceptions were very sparse and light. It doesn’t look like ComSpark really had dedicated air wings left to resist us with. They were just throwing whatever they had left in their hangars into the air. It wasn’t anything that our DropShips couldn’t handle.”

Cinder cursed under her breath, mentally berating herself for lashing out at her staff officer as well. He was completely correct of course: she had been apprised of the possibility that the changelings could still have some aerospace assets left on the planet, but that it couldn’t be more than a few scattered squadrons of whatever hadn’t been worth committing to the earlier interceptions. She’d elected to not hold any of their own remaining fighters in reserve, allocating them to close support roles in order to give their landing forces the best possible chance of securing their objectives, since they were going to be invading with far fewer troops than they’d initially hoped.

Even if some of their DropShips were approached by ComSpark fighters, Friendship and Princess-class DropShips were pretty robust and well armed against light interceptors. They shouldn’t have been in any serious danger.

The Zathura hadn’t been one of those larger and tougher classes of DropShip though. She’d been a much lighter and more lightly armed vessel. It was entirely plausible that even a few small fighters could overpower her. The star admiral took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. Besides, “you said that they went down after making their first drop-off?”

Her staff officer nodded vigorously, relieved that his admiral no longer seemed to be angry with him. Cinder mulled over the information as she looked back at the report in her claws. That was what was important, the dragoness supposed. The ship and the platoon of Elementals were a very minor loss, in the grand scheme of things. What was far more important was that Twilight Sparkle had been safely delivered to the surface. Far too much of their current plan hinged on her being in the right place at the right time. If she’d been killed before landing…

The dragoness let out a long, slow, breath to calm her nerves. Their plan would still work. “Thank you, lieutenant. Dismissed.”

The staff officer went rigidly to attention and retreated from the star admiral with noticeably more haste than he had the first time after delivering his report to her. Cinder massaged her temple once more, inwardly chiding herself for letting her fatigue get the best of her again. She’d known perfectly well why the Zathura wouldn’t have had fighter escorts. She’d just been overreacting out of fear that her and Twilight’s plan had come unwound before it had even begun. Fortunately, it seemed like things would still be able to proceed.

Of course, now the dragoness found herself faced with another, albeit far lesser consideration: did she wait to tell Twilight about what had happened to the DropShip after it had dropped her off? Cinder was aware that the alicorn princess had grown attached to the ship’s crew. She hadn’t left them for a larger DropShip and escort when Cinder had offered it prior to leaving Lameduck. There was no doubt in Cinder’s mind that Twilight would want to know what had happened to them.

But that didn’t mean that it was wise to tell her about it now. There was still a lot that lay ahead of them, and it wouldn’t help the alicorn, or the other ‘Steed pilots with her from that ship, to learn that all of their crewmates were dead. There was a strong argument to be made for waiting until everything was over with, so as not to risk introducing any distractions that could compromise performance. Twilight might be mad at her later for withholding the news, but that was something the dragoness could live with. Meanwhile, the star admiral couldn’t see much of anything that could be gained by telling Twilight now.

That seemed to settle the matter, Cinder thought to herself as she set down the datapad. She’d let Twilight carry on with the mission to Ponyville, none the wiser about the fate of the Zathura. The alicorn needed to retain her focus on the mission, and especially on the confrontation that was to come.

The star admiral asked for another pot of coffee to be brought to the flag bridge. She had just poured herself a fresh cup when she was alerted to the incoming message for her from the surface. Initially, she was annoyed, as such a thing was usually an indicator that a complication had arisen. After all, none of the commanders on the ground would be calling directly to her to report that things were proceeding on schedule. Those updates tended to make their way up through the proper chain of command and wind up on her datapad in the form of written reports.

That annoyance transitioned quickly into concern and apprehension when she learned that it was Triton who was calling for her. Anything affecting the group he was with was of particular concern, as it had a direct effect on the plan in place to end this invasion quickly and decisively. More importantly: why was it the hippogriff and not Twilight herself making this call? Cinder found herself immediately concerned about the alicorn’s status as she accepted the transmission.

“This is The Admiral,” she said, her tone containing a thin edge to it as her mind raced with progressively less appealing reasons why the former Red Reiver was the one calling her, “what’s your status?”

“There’s been a complication.” Triton informed her, instantly ratcheting up the dragoness’ anxiety, “It looks like the changelings are going to be waiting for us in Ponyville. In force. We need to call off this part of the attack and reassess.”

Cinder blinked. She was both annoyed and confused now; though those feelings did help to push her earlier anxiety off to the side for the moment. It actually took the star admiral a moment to remember why this information might have been of concern to the hippogriff, as he hadn’t been involved in the planning of the invasion for either the initial, or the revised phases. It was a little odd that Twilight hadn’t thought to clue him in to more of the details by now though. Which was a thought that served to only further confuse the dragoness and pose a more important question: Why wasn’t Twilight the one calling her?

“Put the princess on the line,” she instructed the hippogriff.

“She’s not here. She stayed on the DropShip.”

The entire deck of the flag bridge fell out from beneath her. At least, that was what it felt like to the star admiral when she’d heard Triton’s response. Her whole brain ceased to function as it struggled to process that revelation. Indeed, her insistent denial prompted her to respond with, “Twilight is where? Why didn’t she get off?!”

“She was injured during the battle over the moon,” Triton explained. “It wasn’t anything serious, but she needed to be sedated for a while and wasn’t able to make the drop―”

Cinder was no longer listening to the hippogriff as she searched frantically around the flag bridge for the officer who’d given her the report earlier about the Zathura being shot down, “Find the Zathura! I want to know everything about where that ship was and what happened to it!” When she found that all she was met with were uncomprehending stares, she roared: “Now!”

The room instantly erupted into a flurry of activity as every other officer on the flag bridge began reviewing reports and making calls seeking additional details from the sources who had reported on the DropShip’s loss of contact. Finding that ship had just become the single highest priority of the war effort. Cinder turned back to the datapad in her hand and was about to ask Triton for additional information, only to find that, in her panic, the dragoness had managed to completely crush the fragile device with her claws.

She flung the mangled plastic rectangle away with a snarl. “And get me another pad!”

Squelch was aware of somepony speaking nearby. She couldn’t decipher what they were saying, it was like they were separated by a door, or at least a thin wall. It was annoying. Not her inability to comprehend the words, she couldn’t have cared less what was being talked about in another room at the moment. Rather, what was bothering her was that the volume of the words being spoken was impeding her ability to sleep. And the unicorn desperately wanted to sleep.

Why couldn’t whoever it was that was talking take their conversation somewhere else? It wasn’t like they had to talk so loudly right outside the door to her personal cabin. Didn’t they know that their commander needed her rest? After all, she was so tired that she’d even failed to make it to her bed, and had instead fallen asleep in the chair at her desk.

That was a bad sign. She wasn’t going to feel very well rested for the invasion if she slept at her desk again. That chair didn’t offer very comfortable sleep. The restraint harness didn’t even let her turn her torso to the side so she could lean her cheek into the headrest.

…When had a harness been installed in her quarters? That didn’t seem right.

Squelch forced her eyes to open, despite their reluctance to do so. She closed them almost immediately as she was greeted by the sight of an intense white light shining directly into them. She winced away, snarling out an annoyed, “what the fuck?” Or, at least, that was what she had intended to say. What had actually come out of her lips was something more along the lines of, “ehruh da fuh…?”

Whoever it was that had been talking earlier didn’t seem to be suffering from whatever form of speech aphasia was gripping the sage unicorn mare. “She’s coming around!” A stallion announced, sounding immensely relieved at the prospect.

Squelch lifted a limp-feeling hoof up over her face in an attempt to block the blinding light from earlier before making a second attempt to open her eyes. The room looked much darker this time, much to her own relief. Instead, the majority of her vision was taken up by the crimson face of a pegasus stallion, “Blood Chit?” He wasn’t normally on the bridge, the mare thought to herself. “What are you doing here?”

These questions had obviously come out as comprehensible words this time, as they generated a relevant response. “Damage control and crew recovery operations, ma’am,” the ship’s chief of security replied calmly, even as one of his wings was motioning quite emphatically for somepony to come to assist him. A second later, another member of his recovery team was at her side, a small medical monitoring device hovering in their telekinetic grasp. The new arrival directed the device at the DropShip’s commander and began taking readings.

For a moment, the unicorn mare was even more confused. This hardly seemed like the time for a checkup. Also, what did Blood Chit mean when he said that he was doing ‘crew recovery’? Exactly whose crew was he supposed to be recovering? The Zathura wasn’t due to pick anycreature up for several hours―

That was about the time that the mare began to regain her memories prior to losing consciousness. She knew she didn’t remember everything that had happened, but Squelch was able to surmise most of the rest based on context clues. She recalled the ComSpark fighters, and the DropShip taking a few hits. She’d remembered Aileron saying that their engines had been damaged, and then the ship had started to fall…

Beyond that, Squelch couldn’t recall anything specific. Just that they’d been losing a lot of altitude very quickly. Obviously the ship must have crashed. However, there had to be more to it than that, the unicorn realized. An uncontrolled descent all the way to the ground from the stratosphere of Equus should have meant that there wasn’t much more left of the Zathura than a debris field strewn over a couple of kilometers. Certainly nothing that would have left most of the bridge intact, which Squelch could clearly see was the case. It was unpowered and heavily damaged, yes, but it wasn’t a collection of twisted and blackened steel. Which it absolutely should have been, along with the rest of the vessel.

Whatever Aileron had managed to pull off deserved a bonus the size of which Squelch wasn’t entirely sure she had enough money to pay. Perhaps she could make the compensation in installments over the course of the rest of her life? Speaking of which: “Aileron?” She tried to sit up on her command couch, but the harness was still fighting her. Blood Chit was placing his hoof to her chest and easing the mare back into her seat while the other pony with him completed their assessment of her condition.

“He’s fine,” the crimson stallion assured her, “just a dislocated shoulder.” He edged out of the way and pointed with a wing towards the steel gray helmsmare, who was sitting at his station with his left forelimb in a sling. The ship’s pilot cast her a wry smirk in response and issued a tired salute with his pinions.

Squelch relaxed briefly, only to once more try and sit up and look around. “High Gain? Doppler?”

“We’re good, ma’am!” High gain called out, the sunflower earth pony waving her hoof in the air from where she was sitting up front by the sensor console with that station’s cobalt unicorn. Both looked a little worse for wear, High Gain sporting a bandage wrapped around the right side of her face that already boasted a few dots of scarlet blood seeping through. Meanwhile, Doppler was nursing a cranked horn that prompted a sympathetic wince from Squelch, who knew just how painful such a seemingly superficial injury could truly be. Neither of their wounds looked to be particularly life threatening though, so the sage mare allowed herself to relax again.

If only provisionally. Squelch wasn’t quite so naive as to believe that her whole crew had been as lucky as those on the bridge had been. She looked back to Blood Chit. “Casualties?”

The stallion’s face darkened slightly. “We’ve located twenty bodies so far,” he reported soberly, “another fifteen are seriously injured. Cravat’s doing what he can for them. We’re still trying to account for nine more who are missing.” From his tone, it was clear that the security officer was expecting to revise the total number of confirmed dead upwards in the near future. Nine sounded just about right for the number of crew who would have been occupying the DropShip’s ventral and forward weapon mounts. The Zathura may have ‘survived’ the landing thanks to Aileron’s efforts, but it had obviously hit the ground hard. Hard enough that the ship’s exposed mounts would have been crushed on impact.

Those remains of those nine ponies would almost certainly have to be collected with a sponge.

Twenty nine dead with another fifteen indisposed. That was half her crew out of action. The DropShip as well was a total loss. On top of that, they were behind enemy lines. Which, taken all together, meant that their current situation was: ‘not good’. It was only a matter of time before ComSpark sent a force their way to investigate the crash and see what prisoners or intelligence could be acquired. They needed to be ready to defend themselves until help arrived.

“Ship status,” Squelch asked, “other than it being grounded,” she amended, looking around the darkened command deck once more. The lack of even emergency power wasn’t a good sign. “Do we have any turrets that still work?”

“I imagine most of the lateral and dorsal stuff is still basically fine,” Blood Chit replied with a shrug, “but I’m not positive. I’ve been focusing mostly on personnel, not equipment,” the stallion admitted.

That was fair, the unicorn acknowledged. Mig would be the one to ask for a mechanical status anyway. She glanced down to see if they still had internal communications, and was grateful that it looked like they did still retain limited connectivity between their personal pads. She keyed in the ‘Steed Bay, “Engineering; Squelch. I need a status report.”

It was a few seconds before she received a reply. When she eventually did though, the voice wasn’t the one that the unicorn had expected. “It’s pretty bad ma’am,” Channel Lock replied, “Main power’s gone and we aren’t getting it back. Only one APU is functional and half the emergency batteries were destroyed in the crash. We’re working on something to try and get primary system’s online; but it’s honestly a Hail Celestia. I’m not sure it’ll even work, but I’ll have a better idea in an hour or so.”

While Squelch could hardly say that she was surprised by such a grim assessment, the news was still depressing. She was still puzzled as to why she hadn’t gotten this report from her chief engineer though. “Where’s Mig?” Chances were high that the kirin was just too busy to make a report herself, the unicorn guessed, but―

“Mig’s…” there was a slight catch in the other mare’s throat, “...She’s in a bad way, ma’am. Cravat…he’s doing what he can, but…” she trailed off, resigned and sounding helpless.

The sage unicorn balked, glancing to Blood Chit for confirmation. The pegasus stallion shook his head in slow, somber silence. Squelch closed her eyes and cursed silently. The ship was in the worst shape that it had ever been in, and they didn’t have their most talented engineer to help them. She was hesitant to even entertain thoughts regarding how much worse their situation could get. “Understood. Not to put any pressure on you, but we’re stuck in the middle of hostile territory. We’re going to need power and we’re going to need weapons. Sooner is better than later.”

“...Yes, ma’am. We’ll do what we can.”

“We’re all counting on you…chief.” Squelch closed the link and closed her eyes. Their situation wasn’t completely hopeless yet, but it was getting progressively harder to find silver linings. She was down to half her crew and they were stuck in what amounted to little more than an inert steel box. If they couldn’t get any of the Zathrua’s turrets powered up, then they were going to be forced to defend themselves using small arms, and she knew that they weren’t carrying much in the way of heavy ordinance.

Or, at least, her crew didn’t. She looked back at Blood Chit. “The Elementals?”

“Most of them are alright,” the recovery stallion confirmed with a nod. “Turns out that dragons are pretty tough. Only a couple of them sustained any serious injuries.” There was a brief pause which included a frown that Squelch didn’t like, “Their equipment on the other hoof…” he continued with a sigh. The unicorn mare was already wincing. “Half of their Battle Armor suits are wrecked beyond their own techs’ ability to repair. Part of what got wrecked includes their ammunition for their heavier weapons. They basically have what’s loaded in their suits and not much else.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Squelch said, though the flatness of her tone suggested that even she was having a hard time believing that. Without the ability to reload their ammunition, she doubted that the Elementals would be able to last longer than thirty minutes in a fight before they were forced to fight hoof-to-hoof―or rather claw-to-hoof―with their attackers…who would almost certainly be coming at them in BattleSteeds and tanks. Squelch didn’t care how brave and dedicated those dragons were, there wasn’t going to be much that they could do against firepower like that with just their fists and fire breath.

Her own personnel didn’t have heavy weapons, mostly just rifles, pistols, and a few light machine guns. None of which would deter anything more threatening than unarmored infantry. The DropShip’s security force existed primarily to keep anypony from trying to sneak onboard while they were sitting at a spaceport or temporarily secure a salvage site. They weren’t a dedicated military outfit intended to fend off an assault by armored units.

In fact, it looked like, at the moment, all they had left on the ship that could fill that role was: “How’s Twilight?”

“Better than some, but not great.” Blood Chit answered, prompting a questioning look from the unicorn. “According to Cravat, she came to while the ship was going down. He said she tried some magic to help. He’s not sure if it did anything, but trying to use a lot of magic right on the canons of already having significant mana burn put her right back out again. She’s laid up and unconscious, but otherwise in no serious danger.”

“Well that explains it!” Aileron blurted from his seat, drawing the attention of the conversing ponies. The steel gray pilot flashed a wan smile and elaborated. “I fucked up the calculations and started the burn too late. We were going to hit way too hard. Then, suddenly, the ship’s mass gets cut in half! We bled off speed like crazy at the last second.

“Not enough for a gentle landing, obviously,” he said, gesturing at their surroundings, “but we hit slow enough that we didn’t all die. If it was really Twilight that did that, then she saved our lives.”

Squelch nodded along in agreement with the revelation, though her own expression was more cynical. The purple alicorn might indeed have ensured that the DropShip made it to the ground in―nominally―one piece, but if she was out of action again, then it meant that they were still down their only competent BattleSteed pilot. They still had the Crystal Cavalier in the ‘Steed Bay―which Squelch assumed was mostly functional. It could hardly have been expected to be able to fend off a dedicated ComSpark force on its own, but it would certainly have been the most effective weapon they had.

The sage unicorn briefly entertained the notion of asking somepony else to just get in it and try their best, even if they hadn’t been classically trained. Then she thought better of the idea. Putting a laymare in a heavy BattleSteed with only enough time to teach them which of the many buttons in the cockpit turned it on was tantamount to giving a filly a rifle and sending her out with a front line infantry unit. She was more likely to shoot the ponies to the left and right of her than the enemy in front. Similarly, somepony flailing around in that Cavalier was almost certainly just going to end up stepping on one of them instead of a changeling.

They’d honestly be better off stripping its weapons and mounting them into makeshift gun emplacements. Squelch filed that idea away to pass on to Channel Lock later, once her newly-promoted chief engineer got the power situation sorted out. After all, they’d need that power if they hoped to use those stripped out BattleSteed weapons anyway.

There were a few things that they could get started on right now though, and they definitely needed to, since Squelch was confident that they didn’t have a lot of time before ComSpark came knocking at their door. She looked to Blood Chit. “Have whatever ponies you can spare start working on making fighting positions around the ship.”

The hulk of the Zathura itself was an easy target, and while it was armored, that armor wouldn’t stand up to a sustained pounding. If and when the changelings came for them, they actually stood a better chance of surviving outside the DropShip, occupying foxholes. The wounded would stay inside, deep within the ship’s interior where they’d be the safest, but the bulk of the defenders would be better served encircled around its exterior. That was their best chance of fending off any attack until help arrived.

Which brought the unicorn to her next point to address. She glanced now at the injured High Gain. “When Mi―I mean, when Channel Lock―gets the power situation sorted, I need you to get out a signal to the fleet for an extraction.”

The yellow earth pony mare bit her lip, looking hesitant. Squelch didn’t particularly care for that response, as it suggested there was an issue that she hadn’t been made aware of yet. It turned out that assumption was correct. “The primary transmitter array was destroyed in the crash,” the comms tech informed her. “Channel Lock says she can’t repair it, but she can build a basic antenna.

“The problem with that is that we won’t be able to send unidirectional messages. Just omnidirectional ones.”

Squelch let out a long-suffering sigh. Naturally. “So the moment we call for help…” she began.

High Gain was nodding as she finished the commander’s thought, “...We announce to ComSpark exactly where we are, and that there’s somepony here for them to find.”

“And they’ll definitely be able to get one of their units here way before Cinder can,” Squelch added.

“ComSpark’s going to send somepony to check on this wreck eventually anyway,” Blood Chit reminded the mares.

“Yeah, but right now we’re a crashed DropShip that may or may not have survivors,” Squelch pointed out. “With all of the fighting going on in the area, that makes us a low-priority target, since checking on us could turn out ot be a waste of time and equipment that would be better served defending their bases.

“However, if we radio for help, then they’ll know that there’re definitely ponies here and,” she stressed, “that there’s a limited time to get at us before we’re rescued. We’re a potential source of intelligence. ComSpark’s going to want to get to us before we’re rescued. If for no other reason than to take our places and get informants to the fleet.”

“Maybe it’s better if we don’t send out a signal then,” Dopple suggested, though she sounded like she didn’t care for the notion of being stuck on the surface either. “Sounds like it’s a big risk to the fleet if we do.”

It was Blood Chit who responded to that suggestion, “ComSpark will find us eventually,” he pointed out, “and when they do, they’ll replace us and activate the emergency transponder to signal a rescue anyway. They still might get agents into the fleet. At least if we signal ourselves, there’s a chance we’ll get picked up before we’re overrun.

“If it looks like that’s not going to happen, we can always call off the pickup or…scuttle the ship.”

A long, poignant silence hung over the command deck in response to the security pony’s suggestion. It wasn’t a bad idea, or even the wrong one, Squelch knew. It was just…unpleasant. But, reality was oftentimes less than ideal, the unicorn supposed. He was also right about their best chance for survival: they had to make sure they were the ones who called for help.

The sage mare looked at Blood Chit. “Prepare defenses as best you can. Coordinate with the Elementals.” She then turned to High Gain. “Work with Channel Lock to get that antenna built. I also want you to trim down whatever signal you send out as much as possible. Barest essential information for a rescue only. I don’t want that transmission to last any longer than necessary. If we’re very lucky, it might get lost in the background with everything else going on.”

It was a lot to hope for, Squelch knew, but she was determined to do everything that she could to maximize their chances for survival. “I’m going down to Medical to see if there’s a chance of getting Twilight on her hooves in the next few hours. I’d really like to have a conscious alicorn on our side when shit kicks off.”

She was greeted by nods and acknowledgments as her ponies set off to perform their directed tasks. The pony who’d been examining her finally concluded that she didn’t have any broken bones or dislocated joints. Just a mild concussion and some whiplash that was almost certainly going to cause her absolutely excruciating pain in a couple hours. Pretty much right about the time it was likely they’d been in the thick of battle. So at least the unicorn had that to look forward to…

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 50: A Splinter of Hope

Slipshod sat in somber silence atop the cockpit of his borrowed BattleSteed. He felt listless. Numb. Apathetic to the fate of the entire galaxy. Every star could explode, every planet could burn, and he doubted that he’d care at all. But just below that ambivalence burned the embers of a raw fury that was even now being slowly stoked into a raging inferno of hatred.

Cinder would probably have appreciated that rage if it had been unidirectional, targeted exclusively at the queen of the changelings. Unfortunately for the star admiral, she wasn’t very high up on his list of ‘favorite creatures’ either. Her nor Twilight, as it turned out. Ironically enough, even though he was a member of a race who had long thrived specifically because they’d kept important secrets from others, he didn’t particularly care for being kept in the dark himself.

Granted, that was a very emotional reaction to the news, and some time later he was sure he would―begrudgingly―acknowledge it as being the right call to make. Perhaps even the call that he himself would have made if he’d been the one to come up with the plan. That, however, was the future mental state of a calmer and more composed Slipshod.

Present-Moment-Slipshod was too pissed off to entertain rationality.

As it turned out, in the wake of the serious losses suffered by their ground forces on the way to Equus since entering the Faust System, the invasion plan had undergone something of a ‘downward revision’. Ultimately, it was concluded that besieging and capturing Canterlot was impossible. Especially in the timeline that they had available to them, given the imminent arrival of the much stronger ComSpark WarShip fleet. They couldn’t afford the time needed to bombard Chrysalis’ stronghold so that their available forces could take it. Nor could they have hoped to adequately fend off the repeated counter-attacks that the changelings would launch at their beachheads even if they’d had the time to spend.

Every subsequent attack on Baltimare and Fillydelphia would have whittled away at their forces there, meaning that more of Canterlot’s defenses would need to be battered down to let them take it with their diminished numbers. That additional time would have allowed the changelings to regroup and launch another sortie on the cities, causing even further losses, and creating a need to prolong the bombardments even more. Creating a spiral of attrition that could only favor ComSpark’s stupendous numerical advantage. It, ultimately, was not a workable plan and never had been.

Instead, what needed to be done, since they couldn’t hope to get in to Canterlot, was to draw Chrysalis out of Canterlot. Beyond the heavily fortified walls of Equus’ capital stronghold, the changeling queen was―relatively―vulnerable. Once she was exposed, she could be dealt with, and it was hoped that the defeat of their queen would effectively destroy the will of the other changelings to fight. Especially if the allied forces immediately withdrew from the planet and opened negotiations. It was hoped that whoever emerged as the spokesmare for the changelings in Chrysalis’ place could be reasoned with.

It was far from the perfect plan, but it was at least more likely to succeed than simply trying to wade their BattleSteeds through the ocean of changeling corpses that the queen was certain to try and drown her attackers in.

As for what could possibly possess Chrysalis to elect to leave her sanctuary and venture into a fight that would put her safety in jeopardy, apparently Twilight had already taken care of that. She had made a transmission to the planet through Cinder, addressed directly to the queen. While the star admiral had not seen fit to give him a copy of this message to watch himself, she described the sentiment that Twilight had expressed in the message as: inflammatory. Basically, Twilight had stuck at Chrysalis’ biggest weaknesses: her vanity and pride. Essentially mocking the changeling queen for being a coward, and encouraging her to keep hiding in her hive like a scared filly; because both of them knew that if it came to a confrontation between the two, Twilight would emerge victorious, like she always had.

Slipshod had to admit that if anything was going to draw Chrysalis out of Canterlot, it was something like that. Not that he maintained the same level of confidence in the practicality of the next part of the plan: which was to divert the forces in Baltimare and Fillydelphia to Ponyville…and trap Chrysalis in an ambush. Cinder and Twilight had intended to encircle the changeling encirclement of the Disciple forces attacking the relay. A bold strategy, to be sure, and one that might have even worked…had Twilight been there to confront Chrysalis herself.

She wasn’t though. She’d been aboard the Zathura. A ship that nocreature had heard from in over two hours. A ship that couldn’t be located on any sensors and was presumed destroyed…

…Along with her entire crew.

Those embers of hatred flared again, fanned by grief and loss.

Slipshod drew in a deep, ragged breath, clamping down hard on those emotions, lest they overwhelm him. He needed to be thinking clearly, especially now. There would be time to mourn later. Assuming that they all survived this. If they didn’t, well…the changeling stallion supposed that it just meant there’d be one less thing to worry about.

The changeling stallion wished, at moments like this, he had Xanadu’s optimism. Though it was arguably crossing the threshold into full on naivety at the moment. For reasons that Slipshod couldn’t comprehend, the zebra maintained that the crew was fine. Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. His exact words had been: “Mig’s not dead; I can feel it.”

Of course, the striped pilot hadn’t been able to explain how or why he knew that the kirin chief engineer was alive. It seemed to just be a ‘feeling’ that he had. While Slipshod was perfectly willing to acknowledge that maintaining a level of optimism in the face of adversity had its benefits, the changeling also felt that there were limits to such optimism. Otherwise it could lead to more unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as denial. There would come a point where the zebra would have to accept the same reality that he himself was working on coming to terms with. The longer Xanadu put that off though, the harder the loss would be for him to get over. If he ever did.

His ‘feelings’ simply weren’t going to alter reality, no matter how much he insisted otherwise.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of fluttering wings nearby. He turned to see Triton hovering a few meters away. “It’s almost time to move out,” he reminded the changeling. Then the hippogriff Reiver paused briefly. Slipshod could feel his unease regarding the next question he was about to ask. “Have you thought about what we’re going to do with that other changeling? We obviously can’t let her go.

“If you want I can―”

“No.”

Slipshod wasn’t sure who was more surprised by the refusal, the Reiver or himself. He hadn’t had to hear the full question. He’d felt the building up of the callousness within the hippogriff as he’d begun to prepare himself for the task of ending the life of their captured scout. It was hardly going to be the first time that he’d ever killed a creature in cold blood, after all. Triton probably even though he was doing Slipshod a favor by taking on the burden.

In a lot of ways, it was probably even the logical call in this situation. They weren’t equipped to handle prisoners, and he was correct that they couldn’t just let her go. If she blabbed to Chrysalis that Twilight wasn’t with them, then the queen wouldn’t show up in Ponyville and their plan would be a bust. The changelings would retain control of Equus. She couldn’t be allowed to tell what she knew.

They couldn’t let her go. They couldn’t keep her. It seemed pretty clear what their only course of action was. The changeling pilot found himself morbidly amused regarding the nuances of what made killing an enemy more palatable. He knew that he wouldn’t have hesitated to pull the trigger if he’d been in his ‘Steed and had her unarmed Swift Wind in his crosshairs. No pilot or gunner would have. Even when operating a defenseless reconnaissance vehicle, she would have still been an enemy soldier working against them, and thus a perfectly ‘legitimate’ target for destruction.

All that had changed since then was that the changeling mare was no longer in her Swift Wind. Nothing else was really different. She was still unarmed, and she still possessed valuable information that had to be kept out of the hooves of ComSpark. Putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger shouldn’t feel any different than vaporizing her with a PPC would have.

And yet…

“...I’ll take care of her,” Slipshod said, getting to his hooves and spreading his wings.

He landed near the supply trucks that augmented their small BattleSteed company. The crews there had constituted pretty much the only marepower available to do the job in the interim, but it wasn’t like they didn’t have their own jobs to do. Slipshod looked over to the side of one of the trucks where the ComSpark scout was sitting, her hooves hobbled and two armed griffons watching over her. She looked up at his approach, showing no visible reaction to his arrival. Inwardly though, Slipshod felt her tense up.

She’d have to be an idiot to not have reached the obvious conclusions that the rest of them had.

One of the griffon guards raised an eyebrow in Slipshod’s direction, begging the silent question. “I’ll take her now,” he said in response. The griffons nodded, again wordlessly. One of them noticed that the ‘Steed pilot wasn’t armed and fished his pistol out of its holster, passing it to the changeling. Slipshod took it in his magic, briefly checking the chamber to confirm it was loaded. He then turned to the ComSpark scout.

She didn’t beg. There was no futile pleading for her life to be spared. Just a defiant look in her eye and resignation in her heart. He could feel her welling up with pride for not having succumbed to her despair and managing to face her end with courage.

It sickened him.

This poor changeling was so ready to die in service to Queen Chrysalis; a creature who wouldn’t have wasted the effort to piss on this drone if she were on fire! She was even proud of her service to such a being. This level of blind, misguided devotion might have been funny, if it weren’t for the fact that it was so fucking sad. Slipshod was hard pressed to think of any creature in the galaxy less worthy of this kind of unerring devotion than his own former queen. To see it on display so brazenly in this drone…he pitied her.

Half starved of love, and doomed to die for a ‘leader’ that didn’t care if she had to sacrifice a million drones to secure her own personal safety and continued domination; and yet this scout was still filled with a sense of loyalty. She felt it her duty to die for her queen, even. It was pathetic. It was tragic.

It was heartbreaking.

Slipshod started laughing. He’d surprised even himself with the outburst; and he’d certainly thrown the changeling mare for a loop, as her pride melted away into confusion. The nearby griffons exchanged puzzled looks as well. It was a few seconds before the ‘Steed pilot recovered enough to explain himself.

“Sorry. It just occurred to me that, even though you’re a changeling, and our race thrives by feeding off of love, you’ve probably never actually ever known what it tastes like,” Slipshod said, favoring the scout with a wan smile. “Imagine being so ready to die…when you’ve never actually even lived.

“It’s funny. In a sad sort of way.”

The ComSpark soldier frowned at the changeling stallion, “I’ve tasted love,” she insisted, “We get rations of love all the time; drained from those idiots that flock to our academies. You know that, traitor!”

Slipshod chuckled again, wagging the pistol at the mare and shaking his head. “That swill isn’t ‘love’,” he chided her, “It’s sorrow and regret. It’s the refracted feelings those poor souls had for their friends and families back in the Sphere that they know they’ll never see again. I didn’t know that back then, but I know it now.

“It’s a shit substitute for the real thing,” Slipshod insisted, “and I think Chrysalis knows that. I think that’s why she tells us to hide who we are from everycreature else in the galaxy. Because she’s afraid of how much stronger we would become if we experienced real love.

“Strong enough that we might even realize that we don’t actually need her.”

The scout let out a snort of her own now, sneering at him. “We keep ourselves hidden because otherwise the other creatures in the Sphere will kill us, dumbass!”

“They don’t want to kill me,” Slipshod quipped, gesturing towards the pair of nearby griffons, “do you, fellas?” The pair of feathered felines exchanged confused looks, but then shook their heads. The ‘Steed pilot looked back at the other changeling. “That hippogriff didn’t either. Or the zebra,” he pointed out. He then gestured to his obviously changeling physique. “They don’t care I’m a changeling.”

“Because you’re helping them!” She snapped back. “They’ll turn on you the moment you’re not useful,” the scout insisted vehemently. “They don’t really care about you.”

“I stopped being particularly useful to them a while ago,” Slipshod insisted with a dismissive shrug. “I’ve basically just been tagging along it feels like.

“You’d be surprised how many creatures could care less that we’re changelings. It turns out that, as long as we’re upfront and honest about who and what we are, most creatures are accepting of our natures.”

Another derisive snort from the mare. “Bullshit. The moment they find out that we feed off them they’ll―”

“They’ll give us love freely,” Slipshod finished for her, a wan smile crossing his lips. The pain was there, waiting in the wings for any sign that his thoughts were about to turn in Squelch’s direction. It was a sharp thing that twisted in his heart. Yet, there was a sweetness to it as well, as that pain was accompanied by a reminder of all of the love that he’d felt from her. Of the love that he’d felt for her. If being free of this pain meant giving up those feelings too, the stallion knew that was not a deal he would make. “And trust me, you’ve never felt anything even remotely like it in your life.”

“You keep telling yourself whatever you have to,” the changeling scout replied bitterly. Her defiance still burned bright, but Slipshod noticed the faintest flickering just beneath the surface. The telltale signs of her entertaining the hidden thoughts of: ‘what if?’. The transient doubts that she was trying to quickly discard, but that persisted in the back of her mind. As much as she might want to insist that nothing he was saying could be the truth, she couldn’t overlook some of the plain facts that couldn’t be disputed. Such as his presence, and his obvious good health.

He was a changeling who had been away from the hive for years, and yet was positively gorged on love to a degree that this ComSpark drone could never have hoped to experience. He was the healthiest changeling that she’d ever seen in her life. Confronted with that reality, it was difficult to completely dismiss everything that he was telling her. Of course, since so much of it flew bluntly in the face of everything that she had always been told since she’d hatched, it was also hard for her to accept what he was telling her. Slipshod acknowledged that, a few years ago, he would have been just as skeptical as she was.

Which honestly just pissed him off even more.

Not at this changeling mare, no. Her stubbornness wasn’t her fault. Rather, the blame lay squarely at the hooves of Queen Chrysalis, who had spent centuries feeding her subjects lies. When Slipshod thought about how much better his life could have been if he’d only known the truth that Twilight had shown him from the beginning, he came to resent Chrysalis to a degree he hadn’t known was possible.

When he thought about the life he could have had with Squelch and his friends…the future that he had been looking forward to…

A future he’d been robbed of.

It was the same world of possibility that had been kept from this changeling too, Slipshod knew. She’d never known how good things could have been without the queen’s lies. If she had, then maybe―

The ‘Steed pilot’s thoughts were abruptly sidetracked by the sudden appearance of what would almost certainly be labeled by the leaders of this invasion as a: ‘bad idea’. On the other hoof, he was almost positive that Twilight Sparkle would have wholeheartedly approved of what he was about to do. Of course, the alicorn wasn’t a tactical mastermind; so ideas she endorsed weren’t necessarily what was best for the invasion. She had been the foremost expert on Friendship though, and that did count for something in his mind these days, given his own past personal experiences.

Fuck it.

Slipshod took a deep breath, closed his eyes…and gave the other changeling some of his love.

He shared with her a veritable smorgasbord of emotion, spanning the spectrum. The platonic love he’d received from his close friends as well as deeper and more intimate feelings Squelch had shared with him. A stream of raw, unfettered, and genuine emotion flowed into the ComSpark scout, catching her so completely unaware that she actually gasped in alarm. Her shock passed quickly, and then instinct took over as the famished changeling gladly drank in the offered emotional sustenance. Yet, even as she did so, Slipshod could feel the mixture of surprise and wonder whirling within the mare.

She’d never experienced such potent feelings of love before―had never dreamed that emotions of this intensity could even exist! She was a starving mare who hadn’t just been given a ration of gruel meant to do nothing more than sustain her again, but had instead been graced with a five course meal of the most succulent and delectable foods imaginable. Even those changelings who were sent out into the wider Harmony Sphere to live among the creatures of the galaxy while posing as members of their families had never before known such genuine feelings of love. For these were not feelings that had been had by others towards Slipshod, earth pony heir to the Lackadaisy House; but rather towards Slipshod the Changeling, as himself.

Her form filled out before his eyes. The drone’s carapace took on a glossier shimmer, looking like it had been polished. The light shining off its black surface taking on the subtlest of turquoise hues. The membrane of her ragged wings cleared and their tips rounded. In a matter of seconds, she barely resembled the emaciated matte creature which had been sitting there earlier. It was a transformation that even the pair of griffon guards took notice of.

Slipshod held up a hoof in their direction. “It’s alright; I know what I’m doing,” he assured them. This wasn’t technically a lie, as he did know what he was doing: he was giving her access to power of a potency that the changeling mare had never before known existed. What he didn’t know was what the consequences of this action would be. After all, he had just bequeathed to this enemy soldier enough emotional reserves that she could transform herself into a gargantuan hydra and devastate the whole area, if she so desired. That was one reason that many others would have considered what he’d just done to be a ‘bad idea’.

On the other hoof, it was the simplest and most direct means by which Slipshod could think to demonstrate how she―and indeed all changelings―had been deceived by Chrysalis.

“Wha…what is this?” The ComSpark changeling asked, obviously still taken aback by what Slipshod had done for her.

“That’s love―real love. That’s how other creatures can feel about changelings, even when they know we’re changelings,” Slipshod informed her, smiling, even as the ache of loss plied at him from deep within his heart. He’d shared with this changeling an extremely finite resource after all: the love he’d received from Squelch and the rest of the crew of the Zathura. Now that they were gone, he’d never be the recipient of those exact feelings again. Once he’d burned through Squelch’s love for him, it would be gone forever. He intended to preserve it as long as he could, taking from those reserves sparingly over the course of the rest of his life. Treating it like the last few bottles of a revered vintage of wine.

What he’d just shared with this other changeling had cost him a decade or more of that reserve, assuming he used it sparingly for ‘special occasions’ like anniversaries of remembrance. Maybe that was stupid of him, to ‘waste’ such precious feelings on the enemy, who may not even be able to appreciate their significance. But, as he had come to learn not too long ago: love was not a thing that was meant to be hoarded. It existed to be shared. It was therefore probably right of him to share those feelings. To let others know how strongly his friends had loved when they’d been alive. To let the memories of them endure in others.

The scout swallowed, her eyes wide with awe. “...They felt this way…about you?” Slipshod couldn’t help but let out a wan chuckle as he resolved not to take the question as an insult. “How?”

“It turns out that it doesn’t take much,” he admitted, “you just have to be yourself. Make friends. It’s honestly the easiest thing in the world for a changeling to do with our empathic abilities. Which makes sense, when you think about it: Of course a race of creatures dependent on positive emotions of those around them to sustain their existence would be superbly adept at fostering those positive emotions in others. All I have to do is help make those around me feel happy, and in return I get to experience, well, that,” Slipshod finished, gesturing broadly towards the other changeling, and her processing of the emotions which he’d given her.

“They don’t expect you to do anything for them in exchange for giving you their love?” She asked, only tentatively skeptical, as she could clearly feel the details of the emotions that had been directed towards Slipshod. Specifically their lack of qualifiers and conditions. They’d loved him because they could. Which Slipshod further confirmed.

“All love―real love―is unconditional and unrequited, by its nature. That’s what makes it ‘love’,” he pointed out. “That’s what makes it such a potent emotion: the fact that it doesn’t really need anything to propagate it. It’s limitless power.

“What Chrysalis gives us is a pale shadow of the real thing. It comes with conditions of loyalty and sacrifice. She holds it over our heads like a carrot at the end of a stick, promising us what she calls ‘love’ in exchange for servitude…otherwise we get beat with that stick. Because of how she manipulates us, we go through life thinking that it’s real love; but it’s not. It just keeps us weak and subservient to her―dependent on her. She tricks us into thinking we need her to survive, and that she’s the only source of support that we can depend on in this galaxy.

“But it’s all a lie,” Slipshod said with a sneer as he thought about how he’d been deceived his whole life. The years spent living in fear of others and what they’d think of him if they knew the truth, His faith and reliance on his former queen…until he’d finally seen her true callousness. Until she’d cast him aside the moment he wasn’t of any use to her. Even then it had taken a long time to recognize that he could be loved for who and what he was. That he wouldn’t just be used again.

He’d found that salvation though, in the end. That source of love that would sustain him. The validation of his existence…

…Only for Chrysalis to take it away from him again!

Slipshod was determined to take from his former queen now too. He’d take away her base of power. One changeling at a time, if that was what it took. He stared into the eyes of the ComSpark scout, feeding her his determination and defiance. “Chrysalis doesn’t deserve your loyalty, or the loyalty of any changeling. She has robbed our entire species of its potential, just to satisfy her ego and her pride. She would sooner see the galaxy burn than let even one changeling realize our kind’s potential.

“You know I’m telling the truth, because the one thing a changeling can’t do to another is lie and expect to get away with it…provided the changeling in question has access to powerful enough emotions to keep their senses from being dulled. Now that you do, why don’t you reach out towards Canterlot? Tell me what you feel coming from there?”

The scout flashed him a dubious expression, her features scrunching up with doubt. “Canterlot’s hundreds of kilometers away. No changeling can sense emotions from that far.”

“Under normal circumstances, no,” Slipshod acknowledged patiently, not the least bit dissuaded. “But you’re not a ‘normal’ changeling anymore…and neither is Chrysalis. She’s so glutted with emotions after five hundred years of hoarding them, and you finally have enough genuine love in you to let you unlock your potential. So go ahead: reach out and take a ‘sniff’ of what’s coming out of the north.”

Still looking a little like she expected nothing of any significance to happen, the ComSpark scout rolled her eyes and directed her attention in the direction of the planet’s capital. Her jaw went slack and her tongue poked out for a brief moment. The mare’s eyes widened in mild surprise that was borne equally from her discovery that she was indeed able to sense emotional states from such an extreme range as well as from what it was that she had detected. Her lips pulled back in a grimace, as though she had just tasted something quite bitter. Which, Slipshod knew, she likely very well had.

“See?”

“It’s…vile…” the ComSpark mare remarked, still sounding surprised by the findings.

“It’s conceit and pride, marinated in a broth of malice and contempt. You’ll notice that it’s not all being directed towards the ponies either,” Slipshod said in a flat tone. He’d become very familiar with the ‘stench’ present on Equus since making their landing. It had shocked even himself at first, since he’d never known the world to possess this oppressive emotional atmosphere. It certainly hadn’t felt this way in the past.

At first, he’d thought that it was just a result of the invasion, but the longer he’d been on the ground and the more he’d been exposed to the miasma of feted emotion, the more Slipshod realized that it wasn’t anything focused. It was the result of a general state of being. And there was only one conceivable source of such strong emotions on Equus: Chrysalis.

She didn’t just despise the other races of the galaxy. The queen of the changelings maintained contempt for her own kind as well, it seemed. A callous disregard for their existence. In her mind, her drones existed to service her desires, and nothing else. They weren’t living things, just tools to further her personal goals. ‘Steed pilots showed more regard for their BattleSteeds than the queen did for her subjects.

“The Queen…hates us?”

The betrayal that the changeling mare was feeling right now was palpable, and Slipshod felt for her. Given his own personal experiences, he could certainly empathize with the scout. “In order to hate us, she’d have to first acknowledge that we exist at all,” he countered with a mirthless smile. “She simply doesn’t care about us. She never has.”

The mare’s shoulders slumped, her head hanging dejectedly towards the ground. Sorrow and loss flooded out of her in waves, prompting Slipshod to wince as he was battered by those sickening feelings. The fear followed soon after as the other changeling’s thoughts turned towards the future. She now recognized that their race would never thrive like it should so long as Chrysalis ruled over them. No matter how this invasion turned out, millions of changelings would die, sacrificed by their unsympathetic queen on her altar of narcissism. She knew that her whole existence was hopeless…

“She needs to be removed,” Slipshod stated plainly, almost matter-of-factly. The words certainly contained an air of frivolity to them, like the ‘Steed pilot was commenting on a weed growing where it ought not to be. The other changeling regarded him warily, doubtful at the prospect. After all, Chrysalis was the most powerful changeling in the galaxy, and had been stockpiling emotional energy for literal centuries. Add to that the fact that she was surrounded by a legion of loyal drones determined to die at her whim. It certainly wasn’t like somecreature could just walk up and shoot her in the head and be done with it!

“She’s not invulnerable,” he pointed out, smirking again, “she can be stopped, and she knows it. That’s why she has you out here tracking ‘Twilight’. She believes that the princess can stop her. Which means that she can be stopped,” he reasoned. Even if he wasn’t entirely sure just how they were supposed to do it. Twilight certainly hadn’t told him what her plan was. He assumed that she had some spell or something in mind that she’d used one of the last times the alicorn had subdued the changeling queen. Which meant that it probably wasn’t something he had access to.

Though, while they might not have alicorn magic, they did have a fleet of WarShips in orbit. Uber-powerful changeling queen or not, Slipshod doubted that she could endure a few thousand tons of naval autocannon shells raining down on her from orbit! If they could draw her out of Canterlot, then Cinder’s ships would have a clear shot.

They just needed to do it fast, before the fleet of ComSpark WarShips arrived and chased the Clanners out of orbit.

Slipshod eyed the dejected changeling scout next to him.

It occurred to him that, maybe, they now had a way to do just that, and much more quickly than they’d hoped…

“Out of curiosity,” the ‘Steed pilot asked hopefully, “you wouldn’t happen to have seen the transmission encodings for the Palace Command Network recently…would you?”

It was a longshot, to be sure. Most drones weren’t privy to that information, as it was understandably sensitive. However, as this specific scout had been given the task of tracking the movements of ‘Twilight Sparkle’, it was plausible that she’d been given alternative communication protocols in the event that she wasn’t able to contact her immediate chain of command. The last thing Chrysalis would want is to lose track of the greatest threat to her power because some lower-echelon officer had either gotten themselves killed or was too distracted to pass on an intelligence report timely enough. If Chrysalis was as paranoid as he believed she was, then there was every possibility that this lowly scout had actually been entrusted with some of ComSpark’s most sensitive communication codes.

The ComSpark mare cocked her head in response to the apparent non-sequitur. Then her eyes widened with comprehension. With those communications protocols, any individual would not only be able to listen in to the communications made over that network, but would in fact be able to transmit directly to any specific user on that network. The Palace’s network, in addition to hosting the supreme military commanders for the planet’s armed forces, also allowed for the direct messaging of one other specific individual that was otherwise inaccessible through any other means: Queen Twilight Sparkle, CEO of ComSpark.

Or, as she was otherwise known to the residents of Equus: Her Royal Majesty, Queen Chrysalis of the Changelings.

The changeling scout’s lips spread open in a wide, hungry, grin.

“How are we looking?” The sage green unicorn mare asked her head of security.

The scarlet pegasus wiped at his brow with one of his wings and let out an exhausted sigh. “Objectively? We’re properly fucked if anything more than an infantry company shows up,” he informed his commander bluntly. It wasn’t like sugar-coating anything was going to do any of them any good, after all. The mare grimaced, but seemed to accept that her resident security expert was likely correct and that everything which could reasonably have been done about it had already been done.

“Subjectively,” Blood Chit went on with a mirthless smirk, “we’re as tough to crack as we’re ever going to be,” he assured her. He extended a wing, gesturing at the various defensive measures that the crew had taken since Squelch had made the decision to dig in in anticipation of transmitting their distress beacon to the orbiting Clan fleet. “We’ve got a trench line that just about surrounds the whole crash site. We’ve cannibalized the vehicle weapons from the garage and set them up around the perimeter. Channel Lock also had the techs strip out a few beam weapons from the Cavalier and storage to supplement our defenses.”

Squelch nodded as she took note of the relatively recent additions that had been made to their defenses. In a testament to the high standard of training that Mig and her late twin had held the Zathura’s technical and maintenance crew to, Channel Lock and her truncated engineering teams had managed to reestablish at least partial power to the remains of the DropShip by wiring the systems into the reactor of Slipshod’s Crystal Cavalier. Being a much smaller power source than the core of the ship itself, it wasn’t able to do much more than power internal systems though. It definitely didn’t have enough output capacity to maintain the heavier energy weapons in the DropShip’s turrets for more than a shot or two. Not if they wanted things like sensors, radios, lights, and their medical equipment running at the same time.

However, it seemed like their technicians had found a way to emplace a few of the lighter energy weapons along their perimeter defenses. Although, from what Squelch understood, they would require a significantly longer cycling time between shots. Still, she was grateful to have weapons significantly more potent than machine guns available to use if the situation ended up calling for it.

Ideally, none of this was going to turn out to be necessary and it would all be looked back on as a complete waste of time and effort. However, Squelch had not been willing to rely on that considering where they were. Even at their most optimistic projections, it would take upwards of half an hour to get a rescue team down to them. And that was only if there just happened to be a DropShip docked at one of the WarShips that was ready to go. Otherwise they could easily be looking at needing more than an hour to get picked up.

As long as nothing stumbled across them before they were ready to get off their distress signal, they had a better than even chance of all getting through this.

The unicorn mare took one more look around the defensive line and then returned her attention to the pegasus stallion. “Good work. Let me know if anything changes. I’m going to check on Cravat…and Mig.” She received a tight-lipped nod from her head of security before he flitted off to check with their defenders. Squelch returned inside the DropShip.

The ‘Steed Bay had become their new clinic as the Zathura once again played host to far more injured creatures than its designers had ever anticipated. Unfortunately, this time all of the patients were members of their own crew, and their chief medical officer was far less capable.

That wasn’t meant as any sort of slight against Cravat. Celestia knew that the earth pony medic was doing everything that he could for his patients. He simply just wasn’t a real doctor. His level of medical knowledge didn’t go very far above first aid, as most of his duties had involved stabilizing wounded ponies long enough for Doc Dee to evaluate and treat them. Other than stopping bleeding and administering pain medication, there just wasn’t much more than Cravat knew how to do. He certainly wasn’t about to attempt anything invasive with his patients and risk doing further harm by bungling something.

Fortunately, many of those under his care had suffered relatively ‘simple’ injuries that he knew exactly how to address; like broken limbs, concussions, and lacerations. While many of her crew had been wounded grievously that there was no way they could contribute to the fight, that wasn’t to say that they were in immediate danger of dying. For the most part. While there were some who honestly only needed some rest to recover or wait for their bones to mend, there were a few who obviously needed the skills of a surgeon if they were ever going to recover fully. They were stable for now, yes; but they certainly weren’t going to improve on their own. If anything, a day or two without invasive interventions would see them start to deteriorate.

In fact, at the moment, there was really only one patient that Cravat was having to actively fight to save: Mig.

At some point during the crash, the DropShip’s chief engineer had suffered a grievous blow to her head, visibly caving in part of her skull. She’d survived―if only barely―and Cravat was able to keep her heart beating at a relatively stable rhythm with the use of a defibrillator that was continuously monitoring the kirin’s cardiac activity. A ventilator was keeping her breathing. Unfortunately, that constituted the extent of what the medic knew how to do for her. It also wasn’t going to be enough to keep her alive for much longer.

Cravat had been able to see from the medical scanners that there was an active bleed in Mig’s brain. Not a big one, in fairness, but it was persistent, and Cravat didn’t have anything on hoof that he knew how to stop it with. She needed a real doctor. Otherwise the blood would continue to build up and put pressure on the engineer’s brain, eventually causing irreparable damage―assuming there wasn’t already―and even death if it went on too long.

It wasn’t Mig’s condition that Squelch was the most interested in at the moment though. While the unicorn certainly cared a great deal whether or not her chief engineer lived or died, she doubted that the kirin could play a pivotal role in the invasion beyond this point. Or even the survival of this ship. As brilliant as Mig was, even her nigh-miraculous mechanical expertise wasn’t going to be able to resurrect the Zathura from the state it was in. Frankly, the DropShip was beyond the help of a whole team of yard dogs. The quantity of rebuilding that would be needed to get the vessel space-worthy again was comparable to building a brand new Mustang-class DropShip from scratch.

No, it wasn’t an engineer that they needed right this moment. It was an alicorn. Unfortunately for Squelch, their resident princess was his other significant patient.

According to Cravat, Twilight had regained consciousness briefly during the DropShip’s descent after they’d been disabled by the collision of the ComSpark fighter. She’d almost immediately tried to suspend the Zathura in a giant telekinetic levitation field. Naturally, trying to effectively ‘fly’ two thousand tons of freefalling spaceship had gone about as well as one would expect, even with an alicorn. Her magic had burned out within seconds and Twilight had been rendered unconscious again.

Which wasn’t to say that it had all been for nothing. Aileron was insistent that he’d mistimed their ‘suicide burn’ and the DropShip was set to hit the ground with more than sufficient force to pancake the entire vessel. Twilight’s telekinesis―if only briefly applied―had reduced the mass of the ship significantly for long enough to avoid certain destruction. While their landing had obviously been far from ‘gentle’, Squelch did concede that the Zathura was mostly intact. Completely unflyable, yes, but most of the pieces of the ship were still oriented on or around the crash site with respect to their original locations on the vessel.

Twilight had saved their lives just as much as Mig and Aileron had. It had been a group effort, even if they hadn’t been actively coordinating with one another at the time. Now it was up to her. Even if she didn’t even remotely feel up to it.

Like just about every other member of the crew who wasn’t ‘seriously injured’, Squelch was suffering from moderate whiplash as a result of the crash. Cravat had passed out all of the pain medications that he dared to without risking the faculties of those who were still physically able enough to defend the ship, but so far all those pills had done was take the worst of the edge off. The sage green unicorn still felt incredibly stiff as she walked across the ‘Steed Bay to talk with Cravat.

“Any updates, doc?”

The dappled gray earth pony stallion turned away from where he’d been consulting his datapad and looked towards his commander. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot. He’d debatably been working the hardest out of everypony since the crash, as he really didn’t have much help. Every able hoof was needed to prepare for any possible attacks. Which meant that he’d been the only one available to care for the fifteen patients he had who’d been too severely injured to work. In addition to his efforts to try and preserve the lives of three of the missing ponies who’d eventually been found still alive.

He’d been…unsuccessful. Each time. Their bodies had simply been too mangled. Those losses had taken their mental toll on the earth pony as well. It didn’t seem to matter how many times Squelch assured him that their deaths hadn’t been his fault. He’d taken it as a failure on his part nonetheless.

“Mig suffered another arrhythmia,” the medic said, looking back at his pad. “She’s also trending more towards bradycardia. Her bleed’s getting worse. I know where it is, but trying to get to it…” The stallion shook his head dejectedly, the helplessness plain on his face. He desperately wanted to help his patient, he just didn’t have the ability to.

Squelch could sympathize. There was a lot that she wished that she could do for her surviving crew as well, but the situation was working against her. “I understand,” she assured the dappled stallion, “and I know you’re doing your best. We’re working on getting her help.

“Speaking of which: what’s Twilight’s condition?” The sage unicorn asked, turning her head in the direction of the unconscious purple alicorn. The fact that she was still unresponsive seemed pretty indicative that Cravat’s report wasn’t going to be what Squelch had been hoping for though.

“Unchanged.” Cravat confirmed, turning towards the alicorn as well. “She burned herself out pretty thoroughly this time. It’ll be days before she’s up and about, but she’ll recover.”

“I take it there isn’t anything you can do to get her out of that bed in, oh say, the next fifteen minutes?”

“I absolutely could,” the earth pony admitted without missing a beat, much to Squelch’s obvious surprise. However, he quickly followed up this revelation with some qualifiers. “I could pump her full of adrenaline and amphetamines and have her awake and alert in the next thirty seconds.

“However, she’d be in so much agonizing pain that the amount of drugs I’d have to give her for it would just put her right back out again. So…” Cravat gave his employer an anemic shrug.

“Right; got it,” Squelch sighed, deflating slightly as she massaged her brow in frustration. She’d honestly known before asking that there was little chance of receiving a different answer. She’d just really hoped that there would have been one.

“Keep up the good work, doc. I’m working on getting us out of here as quickly as possible,” she assured the stallion. “I’m about to head to the bridge and see where we’re at with long-range comms. Work on getting me a comprehensive list of all your patients and their injuries that I can have High Gain transmit to the fleet so that their doctors are ready when―”

Squelch was interrupted by a beep from her comlink. She glanced down to see that the ship’s communications technician was trying to reach her. Squelch grimaced, “speak of the Shadow,” she murmured as she accepted the transmission.

“Squelch here; what’s up?”

“Ma’am,” the mare on the other end of the line began, concern clearly evident in her voice, “we have a problem…”

“There it goes again!” Doppler groaned in exasperation, glowering at her terminal’s display.

High Gain looked up from where she was sitting at her own workstation to see what was frustrating her companion. “There what ‘goes again’?” She inquired, curious. “What are you trying to do?”

“I’m ‘trying’ to patch together those early-warning perimeter sensors that the Elementals scattered all around the ship,” the cobalt unicorn mare said, still glaring at the offending computer screen. “But every time I think I finally have a working sensor net, one of them bugs out and throws up a whole bunch of noise! It’s the same one every time too. Pretty sure it must have been damaged in the crash, but every diagnostic I run comes back perfectly fine!

“I’m going to call down and have it swapped out anyway. I can’t get the net up until all the sensors are working.” Doppler keyed in her comlink and set about trying to get in touch with one of their dragon defenders to coordinate a replacement for the misbehaving module.

Not having much to do herself until Channel Lock’s techs completed their work on the improvised transmission antenna for the DropShip, High Gain wandered over towards the sensor operators console and glanced at the readout on her display. She was by no means an expert on the ship’s sensor systems, but was quite familiar with various technical problems where signal interference was a factor. If the issue was in maintaining a consistent line of communication with the sensor module, there might be some insight which she could provide.

She studied the readings from the last report, scanning over the details that the ship’s computer had been able to provide. It didn’t take long for the comm tech to notice something which piqued her curiosity. She gently nudged the conversing unicorn aside and brought up the last few diagnostic reports for the module in question.

Just as Doppler had said, the evaluations had all come back without the slightest indication that there was an issue with the device’s hardware or software. Which meant that there was either something wrong with the diagnostic software, or the device was malfunctioning as a result of some sort of outside interference. The former was certainly possible, but the sort of damage that would have had to be done to the module to make it fail intermittently and affect the self-diagnostics exclusively would have been quite bizarre, given the seriousness of the crash. There was honestly a better chance of it being deliberate sabotage, but even then it was the sort of problem that would have been way too obvious and served no real purpose.

It was curious to the technician that the ‘outages’ seemed to be occurring at predictable intervals. Not regular ones, to be sure. There was a variance in how long the sensor operated before fritzing out again, but those variances followed a very specific pattern, she noticed. Quite interestingly, it was a pattern that the mare even recognized, as she’d seen it before. Indeed, High Gain didn’t know a Harmony Sphere communications specialist who wouldn’t have recognized this timing pattern, as it was a common one: It matched up with standard ComSpark frequency modulations.

High Gain felt her blood run cold. She swallowed, “Doppler…what’s the frequency range that these sensors use?”

“They’re Clanner tech, so they bounce between eighty-three-five and eighty-seven,” the unicorn answered in a somewhat distracted tone, as most of her focus was on her conversation with the Elemental technician she was speaking with on her comlink. A second later the cobalt mare seemed to finally recognize that High Gain was captivated by something on the sensor terminal and redirected her attention. “...Why?”

“ComSpark tends to use eighty-one thru eighty-four,” High Gain answered, her mouth suddenly dry. “They use the higher bands because that’s what the CLDF used to use.”

Doppler was frowning now, her conversation with the dragons forgotten. “So? Even if there’s some overlap, that shouldn’t matter,” she insisted. “I mean, not unless ComSpark literally has a high-power transmitter within a couple hundred me…ters…” The sensor operator’s jaw went slack as realization finally dawned on her.

A moment later the unicorn was unceremoniously shoving High Gain aside as she latched onto her console and began to input a series of commands. The display shifted to a localized map of the area. A few more taps of her hooves and the unicorn altered the map slightly, highlighting a small region just to the south of the DropShip’s hulk. Doppler stared at the region for a few seconds…and then began swearing, once more reaching for her comlink.

“Flux, forget what I was talking about before!” She snapped into her mic. “Get a squad out to fourteen mark seven-nine right now! We’ve been made!”

Her warning sent, the unicorn mare buried her face in her forehooves, letting out a frustrated scream that was only barely muffled. “I’m such an idiot! I was looking out for thermal signatures this whole time because I figured that ComSpark would be sending out a ‘Steed or a truck or something.

“They sent a fucking remote drone!”

“How long do you think it’s been there?”

“For at least as long as I’ve been struggling with those sensor remotes,” Doppler spat, bitterly. “So longer than fifteen minutes.”

High Gain winced and then reached for her own comlink, “Ma’am? We have a problem…”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 51: Illusions of Victory

Princess Twilight Sparkle stood defiantly atop the head of her cerulean blue and golden accented Rainbow Dash, adorned in polished silver barding. Aligned at her flanks was the better part of a full battalion of medium and heavy tonnage BattleSteeds. Just behind her were a trio of assault ‘Steeds, piloted by Triton, Citron, and Star Captain Honeycrisp, along with Xanadu and his Philomena, who would be serving as her bodyguards for the upcoming engagement.

Before them was the city of Ponyville. At its center was the crystalline spire that housed the regional command and control center and helped to coordinate troop movements in the area. Far off in the distance, clinging to the mountainside, was Canterlot Castle. It barely resembled the collection of ivory spires it had once been long ago. These days it was a pyramid of black stone growing out of the cliff face like a blighted tumor. Within it dwelled the source of the cancer infesting the galaxy.

In the next few hours, that source of rot would either be removed once and for all…or they would fail here and now and the galaxy would be forever doomed. The Clans and their allies had done everything that they could to prepare for this confrontation. Victory was far from guaranteed, unfortunately, but it was as close at hoof as they could get it. So long as very specific events went accordingly.

It was time now to see if they could clear the first hurdle.

The purple alicorn―who was absolutely not a changeling disguising himself as the Princess of Friendship―keyed her helmet’s comlink into the frequency which had been provided by the ComSpark scout they’d captured. She applied the access codes that allowed her access to the communications network and then dialed in the address that she desired. A gentle chirp confirmed that all of the provided parameters had been accepted and Twilight now had a direct line of communication to the Queen of the Changelings herself.

The mare’s lips split into a wide satisfied smile. “Oh, Chryssy~! Guess who’s back~!” She sing-songed, pumping all of the self-satisfaction that she could manage into her words. Even from here, the alicorn could feel the sudden spike in fury wafting down from Canterlot. Chrysalis didn’t seem to care for the fact that her adversary was able to intrude on her so directly in the slightest, it seemed. Good.

“I see that you’ve redecorated since I’ve been away,” Twilight continued in an almost conversational tone. She feigned judging the architecture with a critical eye before flicking her hoof dismissively at the castle. “Can’t say I care for it much. Your tastes were always so…pedestrian. I mean, really, basic black? I thought you were supposed to be royalty? Where’s the majesty? The gravitas?

“Not that I should be surprised, I suppose. You always were simpleminded. I mean, just look at how easily I made it back here! Whoever planned your defenses must have been completely incompetent―oh. Wait. Since you’re the queen, doesn’t that mean you planned them? Oh my, how embarrassing for you…”

She could feel the changeling queen’s rage boiling over. There was a stirring of movement within Ponyville. A volley of missiles launched from within the city, arcing high into the air. Twilight estimated that there were several hundred of them, being directed by a collection of dedicated LRM platforms in Ponyville linked in to the city’s perimeter defense turrets. She watched them sail through the air towards her―and specifically her.

As those missiles began their descent, the alicorn felt the first nagging doubts about this plan. After all, the plan would be cut rather short if those warheads found their intended target. Here was hoping that Clan technology was as good as she had been assured that it was…

The missiled got far closer than Twilight might have preferred before a multitude of tracer streams leapt into the air to meet them. Lines of orange specs flew up from the withers and flanks of several dozen Disciple BattleSteeds as their automated anti-missile systems finally seemed to take notice of the incoming threats and did their due diligence in dispensing with the ComSpark warheads. It actually worked in their favor that all of those missiles had been converging onto a single target, as it meant the missile barrage had been concentrated into a relatively confined area that could be made the focus of all of the flack being directed to intercept them.

The LRMs were clustered so close together, in fact, that some of their detonations as the result of being intercepted even took out some of their companions, making the job of the collective AMS units even simpler. In a matter of seconds, the sky was devoid of any further threats. Twilight let out a silent sigh of relief, and then resumed her smug expression as she once more addressed her comlink.

“That was sad. What’s even sadder is the fact that you’re just proving how bad you are at catching me,” Twilight sneered, exuding her contempt for the changeling queen. For just as the alicorn-who-totally-wasn’t-a-changeling could sense the rage and fury―as well as the fear―emanating from Canterlot Castle, so too would Chrysalis be able to sense the stronger emotions that the mare was broadcasting. The best part was that the alicorn didn’t even have to worry about the changeling queen sensing any deception coming from her, as she wasn’t expressing anything that a certain changeling stallion didn’t happen to be in complete agreement with.

“Actually,” the purple mare corrected herself, feigning having to ponder the matter deeply, “now that I think about it…you’ve never captured me before, have you? You didn’t even really ‘fail’ before either, since you didn’t actually try. You were always so scared of facing me that you just sent some of your drones to do it instead.

“I got away five hundred years ago. It stands to reason I’ll get away this time too. Then I’ll come and bring that castle down around you.”

The rage coming from Canterlot finally seemed to boil over. “Fool! I’ve beaten you before, you pathetic mare!”

Totally-Twilight was forced to reinforce her emotional blocks in order to keep the instinctive fear reaction that she had upon hearing the words of the queen spoken aloud from being detected. Unfortunately, it seemed that there was still an innate psychological connection between hearing Chrysalis speak and feelings of unbridaled terror. As it pretty much never turned out ‘good’ for any mere drone who found themselves the focus of Her Majesty’s personal attention, hearing the queen’s voice tended to be associated with imminent death.. Especially when she was angry!

Fortunately, there were still plenty of potent emotional reserves present within the mare that she was able to draw upon and ensure that her mental barriers were as resilient as they could ever hope to be. Paired with the fact that Chrysalis was obviously too pissed off to be thinking straight, it was highly unlikely that the changeling queen had sensed anything out of sorts with the ‘alicorn’ that she was conversing with.

Twilight scoffed. “Oh? And how did that work out in the end, seeing as how I’m standing here?” The mare teased.

Another volley of missiles was heaved towards her from Ponyville. This barrage was dealt with just as efficiently as the first. However, the missiles were not alone this time. A force of ComSpark BattleSteeds and armored vehicles charged out of the city’s walls. Not a particularly massive force, Twilight saw. She wasn’t surprised by that either. If anything, the Ponyville garrison would have been whittled down prior to their arrival, in order to make the city a more inviting target to lure them into the city for ComSpark’s planned ambush.

That plan was obviously no longer considered viable by Chrysalis. Or, more likely, she was no longer concerned with using guile to capture the alicorn. She knew she had the numbers to overwhelm the group of Reivers and Disciples outside of Ponyville, so she was just going to use them far more bluntly.

Twilight grimaced. They had their own reinforcements waiting in the wings to surround the ComSpark divisions prepared to pounce on Ponyville, and in the end they’d be able to win the battle here. However, that wasn’t the plan. It wasn’t enough to destroy the ComSpark forces in the area. There were plenty more on the planet ready to take their place, and they didn’t have enough troops to beat them all. They didn’t have enough time either. The changeling WarShips were on their way, and would be in orbit in less than six hours. Cinder’s ships would have to be on their way out by then, or the Clan fleet would be destroyed.

If they wanted to win, they needed Chrysalis to come out and face ‘Twilight’ herself. She wasn’t going to do that if she sensed that she was being baited into a trap. The forces in Baltimare and Fillydelphia couldn’t be brought in. They had to stay put and continue to look like they were preparing to assault Canterlot.

“Hold on a second, Chryssy; I’ve got some bugs that need stepping on,” the purple alicorn sneered before she hopped down through the open hatch into the cockpit of the Rainbow Dash. She swapped over to their group’s internal comms frequency as she got herself strapped into her piloting couch. As she spoke, her words sounded several registers lower, like those of a stallion. “How bad is it?” Slipshod asked.

“The two companies coming out of P-ville will be easy enough to deal with,” Triton informed the changeling. “They’re a mix of light and medium chassis. But we’re seeing heavier units coming in from the east and west.”

Slipshod glanced at the sensor display. There were only a few lances that had been detected coming at their group from the left and right, but he knew that there would be more coming soon enough behind them. Those ComSpark forces were just out of position for this type of attack and needed time to reform. He could see that those units had heavier chassis than what was in front of them. At least they weren’t quite surrounded. Yet.

“Triton, have the Reivers fall back and make sure we have a corridor to withdraw through,” the changeling pilot instructed the hippogriff. “Don’t let them box us in.

“Honeycrisp, your company has the west. Citron’s Disciples take east. Remind your units not to let themselves get sucked in too deep. There’s going to be a lot more ComSpark ‘Steeds coming. We’ll fall back as needed.”

“What about the units in front of us?” Xanadu inquired.

“Those are ours,” Slipshod answered simply, a smile crossing his purple lips as he looped his fetlocks around the Rainbow Dash’s control yokes and throttled forward.

An alarm warned the changeling pilot that more enemy missiles were forthcoming, but he wasn’t particularly concerned. He eyed the trails of smoke as the warheads raced towards his BattleSteed. Then, as they were about to impact, he nudged the control yokes to the left. Jump jets built into the legs and canards of the Rainbow Dash erupted to life and dutifully shifted the seventy-ton robotic equine to the side with almost effortless ease. Unable to correct their trajectory in time, the rain of missiles impacted the ground, detonating harmlessly.

Slipshod chuckled to himself as he enticed the deceptively agile ‘Steed into a galloping slalom around the plumes of exploding missiles with near reckless abandon. The BattleSteed responded like it was an extension of the pilot’s body, answering with a level of grace that the changeling hadn’t ever considered possible from a ‘Steed.

Once, many months ago during an impromptu duel, the real Twilight Sparkle had managed to completely wipe the floor with him while sitting in this same cockpit. At the time, Slipshod had been led to believe that the purple alicorn had simply possessed an entirely different level of skill from his own. While he was willing to concede that Twilight was a better pilot than he was with more experience at the control yokes of a ‘Steed, the changeling suspected that being in this specific BattleSteed had given her a markedly unfair advantage.

There just simply wasn’t any comparing the Rainbow Dash to modern BattleSteeds. ‘Steeds of today were clunky and lumbering hulks of steel. This…well, this was a pony in robotic form. That was the only way he could think of to describe it. Anything that a pony could do―any way that a pony could move―this ‘Steed could. Except it could also do those things better and faster.

It also had very big guns!

Slipshod’s helmet sounded with a tone indicating that his own missiles had acquired a lock on his target. Slipshod finally launched a barrage of his own in response. Twenty missiles lept from the back of his Rainbow Dash and arc across the sky, raining down on the Striker which had been harrying him up to this point. A second lock was attained within just a couple of seconds on another of the ComSpark missile platforms. Another score of missiles made short work of that target too.

He swung the hind end of his Rainbow Dash around, using the jump jets to allow him to strafe across the front of one of the ComSpark BattleSteeds ahead of him, a Pharynx. Dual impacts from his prismatic projection cannons and a sustained burst from the recently installed ultra-autocannon proved to be far more than the medium-tonnage enemy ‘Steed could handle along the same armor facing. It detonated in a violent reactor explosion.

Nor was Slipshod the only one engaging the oncoming forces either. Behind him, the Big Mac being piloted by the Clan star captain was also reaching out with its missiles and shoulder-mounted heavy pulsed energy cannons, melting medium and heavy combat vehicles with little issue. Triton’s BattleSaddle was dancing around a Pharynx opponent of his own, cycling through the sextet of medium energy cannons clustered in his chest in a manner that allowed the hippogriff to effectively maintain a perpetual beam of emerald light burning into the enemy ‘Steed. While a strike from one or two of those weapons was rarely a significant issue even for fifty-ton ‘Steeds, having an essentially infinite number of them focused on a specific section of armor plating perpetually was a serious problem. It wasn’t long before something volatile in the Pharynx ruptured and the ComSpark ‘Steed exploded. Triton then moved on to another target.

Citron’s Maulwurf was no slouch in this fight either, hanging back slightly as its quartet of light autocannons ripped through one vehicle after another in rapid succession. ComSpark vehicles and ‘Steeds died one after another to the lance of superior BattleSteeds confronting them. However, as well as things might have been going for them against the small contingent which had emerged from Ponyville, it wasn’t indicative of the tide of the wider fight around them.

It wasn’t a couple dozen lighter ‘Steeds and combat vehicles which were pressing in on their forces from the east and west, but rather entire brigades of heavy warmachines. The Clanners and Disciples fought valiantly, taking full advantage of their superior designs and weapons, but there was no point in denying that ComSpark’s quantity of forces possessed a quality all their own. For every changeling ‘Steed that fell, two more arrived to take its place and push the invaders back. Unfortunately, there were no reinforcements available to cover any of their own losses to ComSpark.

With every passing minute, Slipshod saw their troop roster being trimmed down, all while his sensors showed an ever increasing number of crimson dots. He felt his teeth grinding in frustration as his Rainbow Dash darted around the battlefield, snapping off chromatic blasts from his PPCs and peppering the enemy with explosive shells. His ammunition counts were steadily dwindling for both his autocannons and missiles as the fighting dragged on. While his ‘Steed’s projector cannons and lighter energy weapons meant that he would never truly lose the ability to continue fighting, no matter how long this battle went on, there was no denying that his ability to deal out damage would be severely hindered.

The same went for the others as well. Much of the firepower for his lancemates was also derived from ballistic and missile weaponry and their finite munitions. Once those weapons ran dry, the time it took them to kill ComSpark BattleSteeds would grow, as would the time those same enemies had to deal out damage of their own. The tide of the fight would start to turn even more steeply than it already was as fresh and fully loaded changeling forces continued to pour in around the worn down invaders.

This was ultimately a fight that they couldn’t win. Which was something that they’d all known going into it, so that wasn’t so bad in and of itself. They weren’t supposed to have ‘won’ it, not really. They―or, more specifically, he as Twilight Sparkle―were supposed to have simply been the bait meant to draw Chrysalis out into the open.

Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to be happening. Which was something of a serious problem where their plan was concerned.

“They’re pushing us back,” Citron noted. In the background, Slipshod could hear the faint blaring of several alarms that suggested the earth pony’s ‘Steed was no longer in ideal condition. His own Rainbow Dash had taken a hit or two as well, despite the changeling’s best piloting efforts and its design’s unmatched maneuverability. It was simply impossible to avoid all of the incoming fire from the literally scores of ComSpark BattleSteeds that were closing in around them.

“Fourth’s down t’ two thirds strength,” Star Captain Honeycrisp relayed, “and they’re sayin’ another Commy company’s tryn’na swing in behind us!”

“My Reivers are moving to intercept them, but they’ve also taken serious losses,” Triton warned. “I’m not sure how long they can keep the corridor open. We may need to withdraw.”

“For the record: I second the running away thing!” The zebra pilot insisted.

“We can’t leave yet!” Slipshod affirmed as he jumped his Rainbow Dash out of the way of another salvo of missiles. His answering volley provoked an alert notifying him that the last of his own LRMs had just been expended. The changeling let out a muffle curse as he cast a quick glance at his remaining count of autocannon shells. While the type-five’s smaller caliber of ammunition meant that the magazines had been able to hold more rounds than they could have for the former type-ten, its vastly improved rate of fire meant that those more numerous rounds were consumed much more quickly. He was now down to a couple dozen shells. Enough for just a few more pulls of the trigger.

“If we leave before Chrysalis shows up, we won’t have the numbers for another shot at this!”

“Well she hasn’t shown up yet; and in another fifteen minutes she’s not going to need to because we’ll all be dead anyway!” Triton pointed out dryly. “We have to either withdraw or call in the rest of our forces.”

“If we call them in―” Slipshod’s words were cut off as another enemy round struck his ‘Steed, obliterating the ablative plating on the Rainbow Dash’s right shoulder. The armor performed its job admirably and none of the internal systems beneath it sustained any damage. The changeling pilot pivoted around and laid into the assailing ComSpark ‘Steed with both his PPCs and one of his precious few remaining bursts from his autocannon. The enemy Pharynx collapsed as its left limbs were both sheared off. He then jetted away as a Sombra moved in to engage.

“If we call them in now, then she’ll see it was a trap and she definitely won’t show up!”

“She’s not showing up anyway!” Citron snapped. “She probably knows it’s a trap. Though I can’t imagine how she might have figured that out…” The Disciple snarled under his breath, but purposefully loud enough to be picked up by his mic.

“Calli didn’t snitch on us,” Slipshod insisted, referring to the changeling scout that he’d spared and ordered released earlier after she’d supplied him with the communication protocols he needed in order to contact the changeling queen directly. It had been a decision which pretty much nocreature had believed was what one might call a ‘good idea’. In fact, a lot of very disparaging remarks had been made in reference to that decision. Despite Slipshod’s assurances that they had nothing to fear from the scout.

“Because a scout on a mission to report on our activities would absolutely never report on our activities…”

“She promised she wouldn’t say anything.”

“Oh, well if she promised…”

“There’s no changing that,” the hippogriff cut in gruffly, “and bickering’s not helping anything. The fact remains that the queen hasn’t left Canterlot and we can’t remain here much longer. If we’re going to withdraw, it needs to be soon.”

Slipshod let out a resigned breath. The hippogriff had a point. Even if the changeling scout hadn’t revealed anything that she knew to the others, Chrysalis hadn’t risen to the bait that he’d offered. That part had honestly surprised him a little. He had been sure that digging at the queen’s pride like that should have been enough to bring her out to face down ‘Twilight’ in the flesh. Instead, she seemed to be content to let her minions handle things.

Damn.

The changeling pilot grit his teeth and prepared to issue the order to withdraw. They’d need to come up with some other way to get Chrysalis out of Canterlot. Hopefully Cinder had some ideas, because he was fresh out of them.

Slipshod opened his mouth to give the long overdue order, but then hesitated a moment. He found himself glaring in the direction of Canterlot castle. If they pulled out now, it was all but a given that they’d be forced back off Equus and who knew how long it would be before another attempt could be made. If another attempt ever could be made. Twilight and the crew of the Zathura may very well end up having died for nothing.

Squelch―his whole life―gone. Again. Everything he had in the universe had been stolen from him by Chrysalis for a second time. She was going to win, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it…

No. No, he wouldn’t allow that. It ended today. Chrysalis and ComSpark ended today!

He swapped his radio over to the frequency that had been designated for use in order to summon their forces from Baltimare and Fillydelphia. It was a summons which was supposed to only be used once Chrysalis was out of Canterlot, so that those forces could surround the changeling queen and trap her outside her protective fortress. However, as she had been disinclined to obliged him by rising to his earlier bait and was remaining inside the castle, Slipshod was taking it upon himself to modify the plan.

Shifting his pitch back into Twilight’s higher register, Slipshod began his broadcast, “Princess One to all forces: initiate operation!”

A moment later, Honeycrisp was in his ear on their lance’s internal frequency, and the star captain didn’t sound particularly happy, “What in tarnation are you doin’?! Chrysalis ain’t out here!”

“Not yet,” the changeling pilot agreed in his more masculine voice, “but she will be soon. I’ll see to it. We just need to fall back a little, but stay in the area. Draw ComSpark in and let them get surrounded by Timberjack and the others.”

“I’m not sure we could get out of here if we wanted to anyway.” Triton said dourly, “ComSpark cut my forces off. They’re getting in around behind us.”

“In that case, get everycreature circled up. Help will be here in a few minutes. We just need to hold out until it gets here.”

“Oh, well if that’s all we need to do…” Xanadu snorted.

The surviving BattleSteeds from among the Clan and Disciple units bunched in closer together in a tight formation, facing outward against the encircling ComSpark forces. They’d been whittled down in number significantly since the start of this fight, and most of them had either expended all of their consumable ammunition or were close to it. None of their ‘Steeds were undamaged, and quite a few of those still standing were in critical condition. Slipshod noted that Citron’s Maulwurf in particular had a rather pronounced limp. Nor was theirs the only one.

As the hippogriff had warned them, their southern route for withdrawal had been cut off, his Reivers unable to keep the ComSpark flanking units at bay with their own sub-company strength numbers. The lance and change of remaining former pilots were still trying to wedge themselves into the changeling units and open up an avenue of escape, but it was highly unlikely that they’d be able to succeed. They were trapped now, with changeling BattleSteeds on all sides. It was certainly a less than ideal situation.

Slipshod noted that, now that they were grouped up in a singular area, his ‘Steed in particular appeared to be a preferred target for the ComSpark pilots. The changeling sported a wry smile as he focused on darting about the battlefield as best he could, taking shots where he could, but putting far more effort into staying fast and staying mobile in order to keep from taking too many hits. Beams of coherent light crisscrossed the air. The ground bubbled with explosions as missiles and autocannons shells alike missed their targets and struck the earth instead. Occasionally, a violet ball of magical energy announced the destruction of another ‘Steed in their ranks, thinning their numbers even further. The lines would tighten up to account for the fallen pilot, the circle of survivors shrinking a little more.

“Five hundred years and your minions still have trouble hitting the broad side of a ‘Steed.” Slipshod sneered into his mic, once more broadcasting on the communications protocol that gave him direct access to Queen Chrysalis, and in the voice of the purple alicorn whose form he had assumed. “The academies on Equus used to be the best in the Sphere,” he chided, “but I guess you’ve let the standards slip since I left.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Slipshod went on in an almost dismissive tone, even as he leaped the Rainbow Dash into the air and snapped off his final burst of autocannon shells into the spine of a ComSpark BattleSteed, neatly breaking the steel behemoth in half and detonating its reactor. The moment the Rainbow Dash was on the ground again, he jerked it aside, just in time to avoid being struck by a pulsed beam of sapphire light. Honeycrisp’s Big Mac responded to the shooter with a pair of pulsed beams of her own. Those did not miss. “It’s not like you were ever the ‘smart one’ of the three though, were you?

“That was Cozy Glow. Now there was a smart mare! You can’t imagine how relieved I am that it’s you I’m going up against and not her.” Slipshod sneered through his mic even as he sensed the spike in vitriol coming from the direction of Canterlot. It seemed that he was on the right track again. “I guess I lucked out with her being mortal and all. Because if she was the one on Equus, I’d already have been caught. Heck, this whole invasion would have been stopped dead before we reached the moon!”

Another Disciple ‘Steed fell. The circle contracted again, only for a Clan pilot to go down a moment later. There were only a couple dozen of them left now, of a force that had once numbered over a hundred in total. All the while, the ComSpark forces only seemed to keep growing in number. For every energy cannon that fired outward, a dozen seemed to respond. Only a hoofful of seconds seemed to go by before yet another of their number succumbed to the overwhelming firepower being thrown their way.

Slipshod forced himself to sound unconcerned, in spite of his ‘Steed’s own displays beginning to show him more than a few warnings in regards to the integrity of his remaining armor.

“Might have been the case with Tirek too, now that I think about it―being the brawns of your group and all.” He added as though it were an intriguing afterthought. “He was able to suck the raw magical energy out of ponies. Not just their emotions. He also didn’t have to share it. Five hundred years of suckng down pony magic? To include three alicorns? Oh yeah, he’d have totally toasted our fleet in orbit before we could land. Meanwhile, you kind of just…let us walk right in.”

That ire flared once more, bubbling over as the changeling queen’s incredulity grew. She didn’t appear to care all that much for having her competency questioned, and her pride certainly wasn’t going to stand for it. She was the almighty changeling queen, after all. Who was this little deposed princess to question her capabilities and leadership?

His ‘Steed staggered, missing a step as an autocannon shell detonated against the barrel of his Rainbow Dash. Alarms began to blair in his cockpit, and a number of warnings appeared on his console. He’d lost a cluster of jump jets, and his reactor was reporting reduced cooling efficiency. He snarled and wheeled around, pouring out a barrage of fire from his energy cannons and PPCs alike in response. He crippled his attacker, but also spiked the heat in his reactor to dangerous levels. He disregarded the warnings and overrode the automated shutdown in case it decided that it wanted to make a nuisance of itself.

It wasn’t like dying from a reactor meltdown was his biggest concern at the moment.

“Come to think of it, if Cozy was the ‘brains’, and Tirek was the ‘brawns’…what exactly was your role again? Aside from ‘anchor’, I mean?” Rage wafted out from Canterlot now. Along with a fervent desire to demonstrate to the speaker how in error they were. Chrysalis’ sense of pride wasn’t going to be able to take much more of this disrespect. “Because let’s face it: you were definitely the weak link of the three. I mean, look at how useless you were when it came to taking down the Celestia League!”

Slipshod could smell something burning in his cockpit now. Probably quite a few ‘somethings’, given how high the temperature for his reactor was riding. He was down to using just the medium pulsed energy cannons because firing the PPCs even once at this moment risked melting down his reactor and ending his fight here and now. An explosion from beside him caused his ‘Steed to tremble as it heralded the loss of another of their number. Very few blue dots remained on his sensors now.

He looked out through his cockpit viewport at the vast army of ComSpark BattleSteeds still out there, firing away with reckless abandon into their little circle of defenders. It wasn’t like there was much chance of them missing after all. The changeling pilot sneered at them all the same. Defiant. He fired off another blast of pulsed energy at one of the Pharynxes. It wasn’t going to do much, of course. The arsenal of his heavy tonnage BattleSteed had been whittled down to what was effectively less than many lighter chassis. A Pharynx wasn’t in any immediate danger from him any longer.

Then Slipshod saw the rising tide of long range missiles from behind the ComSpark lines. A massive swarm of what had to be thousands of warheads was arcing up into the sky and heading their way. Their group had long since run out of ammunition for their anti-missile systems. Not that there was anywhere near enough of them still standing to have had a hope at fending off such a storm of missiles even if their magazines had been full. Those LRMs would come crashing down upon them like a tidal wave, washing the remains of their pitiful little band away in an instant.

And there wasn’t anything that they could do about it.

Yet, Slipshod still refused to give in completely. He had to get Chrysalis out of Canterlot. “Tirek drove the league to the brink of destruction and formed the first cracks in the confidence of my leadership. Cozy Glow widened those cracks and shattered the League. You…well, you just sort of sat around and waited for them to do all the real work. Then you camped out on Canterlot and did nothing.

“Though, I guess we should all play to our strengths now, shouldn’t we? And you’re certainly the ‘queen of nothing’!”

The missiles crashed down…

…Right on top of the ComSpark BattleSteeds.

Pandemonium struck the changeling ranks as dozens of their ‘Steeds were simultaneously crippled and hundred damaged. An instant later, beams of sapphire light and rainbow coils struck at them from behind. Explosions rippled through the encircling ComSpark forces, who now found that it was they who were being fired at from all sides. Order dissolved as commanders were taken out and a hundred different voices announced a hundred different directions for the incoming fire that was shredding their divisions.

Even between them, the forces coming out of Baltimare and Fillydelphia were vastly outnumbered by the changeling units which had been lying in wait for ‘Twilight’ around Ponyville. However, they had surprise on their side, and their opening salvos had been quite effective, catching ComSpark unaware and from behind. Even when it’s a smaller force doing the encircling, it is usually quite effective.

Slipshod was finally able to adopt a much more genuine smile as he watched the changeling BattleSteeds descend into chaos. The crippled collection of defenders was largely forgotten in the face of the more immediate threat of the fresh units coming from behind. The distraction also proved to be exactly what was needed for the remaining Reiver lance to open up an extraction route. Nocreature wasted any time withdrawing south to safety, or the ammunition trucks for those who were still feeling capable of putting up a fight. Even Slipshod began to slowly back his Rainbow Dash away.

“See? How many divisions are you about to lose here? And you still couldn’t get me. No brains, no power. Just an inept bug sitting on her borrowed throne.

“The only useful thing you’ll have done for the last five hundred years is to keep it warm for me…”

The roar that answered him wasn’t just audible over Slipshod’s radio. It reverberated across the battlefield for all to hear. Several lulls formed throughout the fight as both changeling and pony alike found their attention drawn to the source of the guttural scream audible from within the cockpits of their ‘Steed’s. Many eyes looked towards Canterlot, including Slipshod’s.

It was all that the changeling pilot could do to contain the visceral terror he felt in that moment. The fear knotting inside of him was primal, and far more potent than what he’d felt even a minute ago back when he’d thought a thousand missiles were about to fall right on top of his head. Because what he was looking at right now was far more dangerous and deadly than any LRM salvo.

For five hundred years, the Queen of the Changelings had fed upon the love of untold millions of creatures from across the Harmony Sphere. While some was shared with the rest of her hive, Chrysalis had enjoyed the greater share of the bounty delivered to Equus. That immense reserve of power had required an equally immense container to store it in.

While Chrysalis had once upon a time been not much larger than a typical pony, comparable in stature to an alicorn, she was now considerably larger. Her present size dwarfed even that of a Big Mac, making one of the titanic BattleSteeds look like a Pipsqueak by comparison. Limbs the size of redwood trunks curled beneath her bulk, lined with spines and tipped with pocked hooves large enough to crush a tank like a beetle. Wings the breadth of the Zathura fanned out to either side of her body. Slitted eyes the size of aerospace fighters glowed with ethereal green light, and they were locked upon Slipshod’s Rainbow Dash.

“‘Nothing’, am I?!” The words weren’t coming over the radio anymore. They were being bellowed across the sky, and having little issue being heard from within the cockpit of Slipshod’s ‘Steed. She turned her gaze slightly to the side, eyeing a lance of Timberwolf’s Dragoons BattleSteeds. Her horn glowed with magic. A beam leapt from its gnarled tip and struck the quartet of ‘Steeds.

All four of them were vaporized in an instant.

“Face me, princess! Face me and experience how powerful I have become in your absence!”

Well…that was ‘step one’ down, Slipshod thought to himself.

“Enemy armor at two o’clock!” Shrike called out even as she jetted clear of an autocannon shell, the ordinance missing her battle armor by less than a meter. The ivory dragoness let out a delighted cackle as she avoided being hit.

“On it!” Pyrite called back over the radio.

The cyan dragon bolted for the ComSpark tank that had just narrowly missed his companion, sprinting across the cratered landscape. His approach didn’t go unnoticed, the crew of the changeling tank opening up on him with their machine gun. The rounds weren’t of a potent enough caliber to do significant damage to the protection offered by the dragon’s battle armor however, so he had little trouble closing the distance. Once he was within a hundred meters of the tank, he fired off his last remaining SRM from the mount above his shoulder. The missile crossed the distance almost instantly, detonating against the side of the tank.

It wasn’t a particularly massive-looking explosion. At least, not from the outside. One might have been forgiven for thinking that the impact had been entirely ineffectual as the tank continued to roll on for a few more seconds. Then it gradually came to a stop. A second later, the hatch on top of the turret popped open, releasing a column of thick black smoke and a few flickers of orange flame. A shape could be seen moving within the smoke, emerging from it soon to reveal a changeling scrambling to escape from the internal inferno.

The drone didn’t get very far though. A torrent of bullets cut him down before he’d even managed to clamber off of the top of the dead tank’s turret. Pyrite lowered his right arm and the machine gun mounted there and looked back in Shrike’s direction, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Yeah; kill more changelings!” The dragoness cackled back even as she turned her attention to a group of drones that were flying towards the crashed hulk of the nearby DropShip she and the rest of the surviving Elementals were struggling to defend. She raised her left arm and unleashed a beam of ruby light from her light energy weapon. Two of the charging changelings were sliced neatly in half, but the third veered away at the last moment, narrowly avoiding death.

Only for a moment though. A short burst of heavy machine gun fire from a third Elemental splattered the fleeing changeling a second later. “Your accuracy is deteriorating, Shrike,” another dragoness’ voice crackled over the radio.

“Is that a fact, Cassie? Or did you finally learn how to crack jokes?”

“The former, of course,” the other dragoness assured Shrike before launching a missile as another oncoming changeling tank. The warhead struck at the seam between the turret and the main body of the armored vehicle, and the resulting explosion flipped the main gun up and over the newly formed flaming wreck.

“You’re a riot, Cass. I don’t care what Pyrite says about you!”

“Was I supposed to be saying things about her? What am I supposed to be saying? Why didn’t anycreature ask me to say things?” The dragon asked in a near panic.

“Don’t sweat it, Py. Just keep killing changelings.”

“Oh. Okay, sure! Whatever you need me to do to help!”

Shrike let out an irrepressible snicker and then spared a moment to evaluate their situation. In fairness, it wasn’t quite as desperate as it could have been. Mostly. While they were being beset upon on all sides and there seemed to be no end to the changeling forces assaulting them, thus far the bulk of those forces had consisted of infantry and light armor. No sign of any ComSpark BattleSteeds yet. Whether that was because there weren’t any in the area, or simply because the changelings hadn’t thought they’d need to send any to wipe out the survivors of a crashed DropShip, it was too early to say. The dragoness hoped it was the former. Because if all of their good fortune was the result of the changeling’s holding back, that was likely to change pretty soon once the attacking drones grew frustrated enough.

Which wasn’t to say that things were going perfectly for the DropShip crew either. They’d started this fight with precious few defenders to begin with, and so every individual loss was very significant. Plus the size of the DropShip’s hull meant that there was a lot of area to cover. Casualties tended to open up large gaps in their defensive lines that were hard to compensate for. If one approach was hit too hard all at once, it would be nearly impossible to close the breach in their lines before they were overrun. Once a significant number of changelings got past the trenches, then it would all be over.

A couple of the Elemental squads had elected to deploy forward, intercepting the more significant threats before they could get close enough to threaten the ship directly, while leaving most of the infantry to the ponies back in the trenches. Their battle armor was just about the only thing that could stand up to even the lighter ComSpark vehicles. As long as their supply of SRMs held out, that was.

Those ammunition reserves were dwindling fast, however. Their group hadn’t been supplied to hold out indefinitely. It had been intended that they’d be sustained by stockpiles being delivered to their insertion point by other, larger, DropShips. Of course, Shrike and her companions hadn’t made it to their insertion point. Which meant that the only munitions they had access to were whatever had been on the DropShip at the time. Which wasn’t a lot that was useful to them, and not in the quantities that it appeared they needed.

“Cassie, get us some more missiles,” Shrike said, her eyes studying her battle armor’s HUD, and the collection of additional armor contacts that were approaching their position, “we’re going to need them.”

“Moving out.”

Shrike jetted to the side once more, dashing out of the way of an enemy SRM. She tracked the trail of smoke back to its point of origin, and took note of a drone carrying a portable launcher. It tried to dive for cover, but failed to move fast enough to avoid being cut down by Shrike’s answering salvo of bullets, laughing maniacally as she did so.

“One, little two, little three, little changelings~!” The dragonessed sing-songed as she danced across the battlefield, alternating between extinguishing drones with her energy cannon and machine gun. “Four, little five, little six, little changelings~!” Her count was off significantly from the actual number. The sky was replete with swarming changeling drones, to the point that it was difficult to shoot and not hit at least a couple of them with every burst.

“Seven, little eight, little nine, little changelings! Ten little chan―”

“Look ou―!”

There was the sound of an explosion as something large struck Shrike from behind and hurled her to the ground. A feat that only spoke to the size and/or power of whatever had hit her, given that it took a considerable external force to throw around a metric ton of battle armor like it was a rag doll. The dragoness hit the ground hard, but managed to recover into a roll thanks to her training and innate strength. A burst from her suit’s jump jets put her back on her feet, and she scanned the area for any sign of what had hit her.

Her eyes widened in shock and horror…but only for a brief moment before they once more began to sparkle with unbridled mirth, her lips spreading into a wide grin once more. Standing in front of her was Pyrite. Or, rather, what was left of him. The upper left torso of his battle armor had taken a rather serious hit, likely from an autocannon round. That whole quadrant of the suit was missing, as was most of the dragon’s chest and head. The inert suit of battle armor was squat and stable enough that it didn’t fall over.

Shrike started laughing.

It was all that she could do. Literally. Regardless of the situation, or whatever feelings she might have wanted to experience to the contrary, her every emotional state defaulted to laughter and joy. Even when she was staring at the pulped remains of one of her comrades, all she felt was happiness.

It sickened her. But only for a fleeting moment. Then she was grinning and cracking another joke in memoriam to the dragon who had just saved her life. “Well, at least you waited a whole fifteen minutes before giving your life for me, you generous bastard!”

She then tore her eyes from the sight and looked in the direction that the shot had come from. Another ComSpark tank had emerged over the hill, and it was already targeting her with its next shot. Shrike flashed a far hungrier grin now. “Hi, new friend! Let’s play!”

The dragoness flared her jump jets to their maximum output, rocketing forward even as a second autocannon round raced past her, striking and destroying the remains of Pyrite’s suit. Nothing was left this time. The dragoness crossed the half kilometer between herself and the changeling tank with a rapid succession of jet-assisted leaps as she darted across the field. Tracers from the tank’s machine gun flowed towards her, but the gunner operating it was clearly having trouble trying to account for Shrike’s rapid changes in speed and direction as she bounded towards them.

With one final leap into the air, the dragoness landed atop the tank where none of its weapons could reach her. An armored claw reached down and took firm hold of the top hatch. Servos whined and hydraulics struggled, but the latch keeping the port closed gave way a few seconds later with a sharp snap of steel shearing off. Shrike hurled the hatch aside and then stuck the tip of the machine gun bolted to her other arm just inside the turret. She depressed the trigger.

The occupants within were helpless to avoid being riddled by ricochettes as scores of high-caliber bullets filled the compartment. All the while, a ringing laughter could be heard clearly through the battle armor’s helmet.

Her maniacal mirth was interrupted by an explosion that threw her from the top of the dissabled tank. Her HUD flashed several crimson messages at her. Shrike largely ignored their content as she struggled to right herself and figure out who it was that she had to kill in retribution for this affront. She noted that the tank that she’d been standing on a moment ago was looking far worse for wear, and it wasn’t the result of anything that she’d done. It had been struck by something far more potent than any weapon her battle armor carried.

Her smile soured briefly into a sneer as the dragoness spotted two more ComSpark armored vehicles coming her way, along with at least a full company of drones flying in support. Clearly it was one of those vehicles that had finished off the tank she’d been standing on. Likely in an attempt to hit her. These new arrivals were far too great of a force for her to take out on her own, and Cassie had yet to return.

“Sorry, fellas; I’m gonna need to take a rain check on this fight!” Shrike cackled as she initiated her battle armor’s jump jets and shot off in the direction of the wrecked DropShip. Tracers followed her most of the way as the dragoness bounded across the battlefield, utilizing various destroyed tanks for cover along the way. It wasn’t until just now that the Elemental realized just how far afield she’d managed to get from the rest of her group.

Of the Elementals who’d survived the crash, nearly a third of them had already been killed in the fighting. Now there were just over a dozen of them left, spread out around the DropShip as they tried to hold back the changelings. A veritable flaming graveyard of tanks and APCs was ringed around the Zathura, a testament to the effectiveness of even an understrength star of the potent Clan Elementals. Shrike wore a far more genuine smile as she contemplated the losses that they’d inflicted on the changelings here today.

Once more reformed with the line of other battle armor-suited dragons, Shrike turned around and began to return fire on the enemy. Tracers and beams of searing ruby light filled the air. Changeling drones who were not so well protected as the Clanners they were going up against rained from the sky as they were felled in droves. Yet, it seemed as though the ComSpark fighters were indifferent to the mounting losses they were sustaining, because they simply kept right on coming.

Shrike’s machine gun ceased firing. At first, the dragoness suspected a malfunction. However, a flashing red message in front of her eyes informed her that she’d depleted all of her ammunition. The only weapon left to her now was her light energy cannon. This greatly diminished her ability to lay out suppressive fire. She wasn’t the only Elemental in such a predicament either. The volume of fire being levied against the attacking changelings was continually falling off. Either as a result of running out of ammunition or outright losses. The result was that progressively greater numbers of drones and tanks were able to get closer, unmolested, and press home their own attacks.

The shrinking line of Elementals was pushed back closer and closer to the DropShip and its own organic defenders. The Zathura’s crew was also suffering from attrition and depleting resources, and their own effectiveness was waning. Fewer changelings were brought down with every passing minute, even as more ComSpark reinforcements arrived to fill their ranks.

It was a hopeless fight that they were inevitably going to lose.

Which, the dragoness supposed, was no reason to stop fighting. “Besides,” she snickered to herself, raising her energy cannon and firing off a beam that neatly sliced a drone in half, “where’s the fun in giving up?”

While she might not have had any rounds left for her battle armor’s integrated machine gun, it wasn’t like there was any shortage of weapons laying about the battlefield, courteously donated by the hordes of changeling drones who had so obligingly died up until this point. Shrike reached down and retrieved an assault rifle from the ground and began using it. The clip that was loaded in it didn’t last long though, and the dragoness couldn’t afford to spare the time to rifle through bodies looking for more. So she just tossed it aside and jetted over to the next nearest loaded rifle.

“You are in need of assistance,” she heard Cassandra announce bluntly just before her companion Elemental landed beside her. Clutched in the mechanical hands of the other dragoness’ battle armor was a canister of ammunition for Shrike’s depleted machine gun, as well as a reload for her missile launchers.

“Aww, and it’s not even my hatching day!” Shrike cooed playfully as she turned to accept the offerings. “Now I’m going to have to get you a pres―AARGH!”

Alarms blared even as an incredible pain unlike anything that she’d ever experienced before shot through Shrike’s body. Her legs seemed to give up from under her and she staggered down to her knee. Beside her, Cassandra was laying down a hail of suppressive fire with her weapons. Shrike tried to fight through the pain and stand, but found that she was facing resistance both from her own body, as well as her suit’s systems. Her battle armor was reporting significant damage to most of its backside, to include the power systems supplying the myomer musculature that was what allowed the metric ton mechanical suit to be moved by its operator. Without working myomer, battle armor was basically impossible to move in.

That was all beside the fact that she’d apparently also been physically injured by whatever had disabled her battle armor. Shrike could feel something warm and wet running down her tail. She hoped that it was hydraulic fluid; but the shooting pain in her gut suggested that it probably wasn’t.

Her suit’s systems issued a little chirp and then her HUD went dead. At first, Shrike thought that her battle armor had lost all of its power and gone completely inert. However, a moment later she heard several latches release and the front hatch fell away, opened from the outside. A large mechanical claw reached inside and grabbed hold of the injured dragoness by her uniform, dragging her out with painful disregard for her injured state. The raucous sounds of gunfire and explosions assaulted her ears, which no longer enjoyed their earlier protections against such abrasive noises that the suit had provided.

“You know,” Shrike gasped out through pained cackles, “I heard that ‘pulling out’ wasn’t a ‘safe’ practice; and now I see why!”

“You are injured,” Cassandra stated through the external speaker of her battle armor.

“I prefer to think of it as: ‘my health experienced a downward revision’.” The ivory dragoness insisted through gritted teeth.

“I must get you to medical treatment.”

“Just make sure they’re in-network! I have an HMO!”

The battle-suited Elemental hesitated briefly, “...I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t worry about it; it was funny. Trust me.” Shrike grinned. Then she descended into a fit of coughs which ended up with a few flecks of crimson spittle coming out of her mouth near the end. The dragoness stared at the blood stains on her uniform sleeve and winced. “That’s less funny…”

Without another word, Shrike was whisked off the battlefield towards the DropShip and the field hospital that the ship’s medic had put together in the ‘Steed Bay. The actual clinic on the ship had been damaged during the crash, depriving it of power. Combined with the influx in patients, the dappled gray earth pony had elected to move his operation―and all of his patients―to the wider confines of the BattleSteed hangar. Assisting him with the treatment of the injured were various technicians in between their checks of the heavily jury-rigged power systems and those who were slightly less injured than the rest.

Cassandra jetted inside the bay and landed in one of the more open areas. She stayed just long enough to put her burden down on the floor and inform the nearest pony that Shrike was badly hurt. Then she took her leave and returned to the battle outside. It wasn’t long before somepony managed to get the medical officer’s attention so that Shrike could be properly evaluated.

“Kidney’s punctured,” the stallion mumbled after he managed to get a look at her wound. He waved over one of his assistants. A dark blue unicorn mare hobbled over, nursing what looked to be a splinted hind leg. “Pack this! Hold pressure. I’m going to get some clotting agents and sutures. I think I can close it up and stop most of the bleeding…” He wandered out of earshot, dancing around the see of other patients on the floor of the ‘Steed Bay.

The unicorn pressed her hoof hard into the small of Shrike’s back in an effort to staunch the bleeding. The dragoness let out a pained hiss, but tried her best not to squirm away. She grit her teeth and took in a few deep breaths to help steel herself against the intense discomfort, looking around for anything to distract her thoughts. Her ruby eyes inevitably landed on the one patient in the bay who stood out among all the others: the purple alicorn lying unconscious in a corner of the bay.

Apparently the princess had been injured somehow while they were coming around the moon, and had been unconscious since then. Which was a shame, because the dragoness figured they could sure have used her help during the fight. Things weren’t going very well for them. Hopefully they wouldn’t need to hold out for too much longer though.

Shrike glanced down at the cobalt unicorn, “I don’t suppose you’ve heard any updates on when we’re going to be rescued, have you?” The pony blinked up at her in confusion, seeming to not understand the question. “You know, the distress signal that was sent out when all this kicked off? They were working on building a new transmitter or whatever…”

Comprehension dawned on the mare’s face, but it was an expression mixed with sorrow and loss. “...It never got sent,” she said softly. Now it was Shrike’s turn to look confused. “One of the first places that got hit was the bridge,” the unicorn explained, “and when it did…High Gai―” The mare’s words caught in her throat suddenly, her eyes darting towards the far side of the ‘Steed Bay. Shrike followed her gaze to the unoccupied BattleSteed stall which had been converted into a temporary morgue. The unicorn’s gaze was directed at a bloody sheet covering a body. One which had a golden yellow hoof poking out from beneath it.

“The comms system was entirely destroyed.” The mare resumed once she’d cleared her throat and found her voice again. “We never sent a rescue message. No help is coming…”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 52: Measure of a Hero

“CIC reports that the primary target is in the open!”

The call went out across the flag bridge of the Rockhoof, echoing above the din of Star Admiral Cinder’s command staff coordinating the various fronts of the planetary invasion of Equus. It was an announcement which invited a brief moment of silence from just about every other creature on the bridge, as they processed the implication: the invasion was nearing its ultimate endgame. After all, everything that they had been doing up to this point had been undertaken for the purpose of drawing Queen Chrysalis out of her Canterlot fortress and into the open. Now that she was exposed, the orbiting fleet of Clan WarShips had the opening they’d been waiting for to end the changeling threat.

“Fucking finally!” Cinder all but snarled under her breath as she stood glowering at the plotter in the center of her command bridge. “Time to target?” She asked her tactical officer.

“The fleet is making final orbital adjustments now, star admiral. We’ll achieve minimum firing angle in five minutes, but CIC recommends we wait until we’re directly overhead to maximize the effectiveness of our bombardment,” the junior officer replied.

“How long until the fleet is overhead?”

“Approximately eight minutes, ma’am.”

Cinder frowned, studying the plotter intently. So far, the plan was going about as well as could be expected. They’d taken more serious losses to the ‘bait’ force than the cobalt dragoness might have liked, but they’d always known that those forces would be hit the hardest. Meanwhile, the redirection of their staged forces in Baltimare and Fillydelphia had gone flawlessly and they’d managed to perfectly surround the ComSpark divisions that Chrysalis had deployed to entrap ‘Twilight’. Even though the changeling’s outnumbered them, the Sphere and Dragoon units had achieved near perfect surprise in their opening strikes and were hitting them from behind. The ComSpark units were in complete disarray and falling into chaos.

It was already turning into the next best thing to a rout!

That was the extent of the ‘good’ news, however. Now they had the changeling queen herself to contend with, and it appeared that she had changed considerably from how her parents and Princess Flurry Heart remembered her. Five hundred years of gorging herself on the creatures of the Harmony Sphere had allowed her to grow both in power and in size, it seemed. Chrysalis had already destroyed an entire lance of BattleSteeds with little more than a thought, Cinder noted. Even if the conventional ComSpark units were rendered combat ineffective, the dragoness had to wonder what kind of losses their own forces would end up suffering during those eight minutes it took for the fleet to get into position.

Would their army really be able to hold out against that kind of firepower for long enough to keep the queen’s attention? Cinder had the option to cut that time down to nearly half if she was willing to settle for a ‘less than optimal’ firing angle. However, if her WarShips fired as soon as they were able, there was the chance that many of their shots would either miss their target or not hit with their maximum destructive power. In which case, the changeling queen might survive the initial bombardment and retreat back to her fortress in Canterlot. If that happened, they wouldn’t have the time to pummel the castle into ruin, as the ComSpark WarShip fleet was due to enter planetary orbit in less than six hours.

If they didn’t finish the changeling queen off here and now, they might not get another opportunity.

They needed to make sure that, if this was going to be the only shot they were going to get, they needed to make sure that it counted. Cinder let out a resigned sigh as she watched a pair of ‘Steeds get erased from the board by another of the changeling queen’s magical blasts. A lot of lives would be lost the longer they waited, ture; but she needed to believe that so many more would be saved in the end when Chrysalis was gone.

“Wait until we have an optimal firing solution,” the star admiral instructed. Her tactical officer nodded in somber acknowledgement and began to relay her orders to the rest of the fleet.

“Star Admiral!”

Cinder looked up to see one of her communications officers running up to her and cocked a curious eyebrow, “yes, lieutenant?”

“Ma’am, I’ve just finished reviewing one of the latest reports from our forces on the surface.” The junior officer began. His whole body was shaking with what looked to be barely contained excitement, and a hint of worry. “They contained mention of a distress call from a DropShip in the Appaloosa region during the initial landings, along with coordinates listed in the message.”

Cinder felt her own eyes widen at the news. That was the location and approximate time that they’d lost contact with the Zathura and Princess Twilight Sparkle.

“I had Ops scan the area, and they found the Princess’ DropShip! The ship appears to still be―mostly―intact and we’ve found signs of survivors on the ground.”

The star admiral let out an immense sigh of relief. If the DropShip was largely whole and there were survivors, there was a good chance that the princess was among them. At least, that was what the dragoness chose to believe at this moment, until she was informed otherwise. However, the next bit of news gave her renewed cause for concern.

“We also detected a massive ComSpark presence in the area, ma’am. They’re moving in on the DropShip as we speak.”

“Get on the horn with Flight Ops!” Cinder snapped far more aggressively than she’d meant to. “I want DropShip and aerospace fighter support there yesterday! Recovering that DropShip has just become mission priority number one!”

“Yes, ma’am!” The lieutenant nodded his head in vigorous understanding and immediately sprinted back to his station to relay his commander’s new orders.

The cobalt dragoness turned back to the holographic plotter and redirected it away from the battle unfolding at Ponyville, seeking out the crash site of the Zathura. Her features set into a grim line as she saw the dearth of crimson blips denoting ComSpark units closing in on the grounded DropShip. She saw scores of armored vehicles and thousands of cavalry. Far more than the crew of such a small ship could hope to hold out against for very long. It would take time for the forces that she’d just ordered to be sent to arrive.

Two major engagements, and each teetered on the brink of collapse if she couldn’t get them the help they needed in time…and in both cases she was all but helpless to do anything more than wait. The survival of both of those groups on the ground was entirely out of her claws, and that frustrated the star admiral to no end.

“Just hold out a little longer,” Cinder whispered to the holographic blips hovering in front of her, “we’re coming for you…”

“Another squad; ten o’clock, high!” Blood Chit called out. The machine gun crew beside him wasted no time in swinging the barrel of their weapon around and opening up on the flight of changeling drones that the head of security had just pointed out to them. The earth pony at the rear of the weapon leaned on the trigger, spraying the sky with bullets while the unicorn next to them used their telekinesis to ensure the ammunition belt didn’t kink as it fed into the weapon. The high-caliber rounds chewed into the half dozen changelings diving through the air, killing them in a matter of seconds.

Which was quite fortunate, as the weapon went silent just as the last changeling drone was struck dead. The unicorn assistant gunner detached the empty ammunition canister and began looking around hurriedly for a replacement. However, it soon became clear that none were available. Blood Chit let out a curse under his breath as he recognized that this position had run out of ammunition and was about to put a call out over the radio for a resupply when he heard somepony call out from a little further down the trench line.

“Ammo up!” Squelch called out as she came into view. Two canisters of rounds for the heavy machine gun were balanced on her back and a cloud of magazines for their assault rifles was hovering above her, wrapped in her cyan magical aura.

Blood Chit let out a relieved sigh and flitted over to the unicorn mare, deftly lifting the canisters off his employer’s back and tossing them to the waiting assistant gunner. The other unicorn caught the containers in his own magic and set one down beside him while affixing the other to the weapon. Squelch deposited the mass of small arms magazines on the ground nearby before looking at the gun crew herself.

“Short, controlled, bursts!” She reminded them. “We don’t have an infinite supply of ammo!”

Blood Chit was still finding himself getting used to seeing his employer and commander wearing a combat helmet and barding. She was usually dressed up in something far more ‘business casual’ on any given day. Now, however, she could just as easily have been mistaken for a member of the ship’s security detail. While the current crisis hadn’t spontaneously gifted Squelch with the ability to effectively use firearms, the mare was determined to be of as much use as she could be. And while she was a mare who had spent much of her life navigating requisitions and operating budgets, she wasn’t entirely useless during a firefight of this magnitude.

The sage green mare lifted her combat helmet and wiped some of the sweat from her brow as she took a moment to catch her breath. She was hard-pressed to recall the last time she’d needed to partake in so much manual labor. The unicorn favored her head of security with a knowing look. “We have four more cans of the fifty, and we’re down to our last case of rifle ammo.”

The crimson pegasus felt his blood run cold at the news. He’d known that they had far from an infinite supply of bullets, of course, but he still found that he hadn’t quite been ready to hear that they were very nearly completely out. Especially not when it was clear that so many changelings were still pressing in on their position.

“Understood, ma’am. We’ll try to make it last,” he assured her.

“Right. Just…don’t waste your last bullet on the changelings, okay?” Squelch said with a sober expression.

Blood Chit found himself initially taken aback by the implication of the sage unicorn’s advice. Then he recalled the transmission early on in the fighting announcing the destruction of the Zathura’s command deck, and how it had dashed their plans to send out a signal requesting help from the orbiting WarShips. Even then, there’d been something of a hope that, if they could weather this attack, they might yet find a way to get out a distress call. However, the longer the fight raged on, the less likely it was looking like there would ever be an end to these drones.

In the end, they were going to be overrun. When that happened, the pegasus stallion supposed that it would perhaps be for the best if there wasn’t anything left that was of use to the changelings.

As Squelch repositioned her helmet and turned to head back for the DropShip to fetch more munitions, Blood Chit called out to her. “Commander!” The unicorn paused, looking back over her shoulder at her chief of security. The crimson flier managed to muster up a smile, despite his recognition that their time was limited. “It’s been an honor, ma’am.”

The sage mare offered up a wan smile of her own in return. “The honor’s been all mine, captain.” Then she turned once more and galloped off down the trench.

Blood Chit turned back to the machine gun crew and repeated Squelch’s warning about not using overly long bursts of fire. He then nudged the assistant gunner aside, pointing his wing at the full canister. “Take that to gun three. Tell them it’s the last they’ll be getting.”

This wasn’t entirely accurate, the pegasus knew. However, he suspected that the ponies operating it would be a lot more judicious with their shots if they believed that was the case. It also wasn’t too far removed from the truth either. With four canisters left in the ship, there wasn’t quite enough to give each of their six active guns any more reloads.

“Take some mags with you too. No more than two per pony you see!”

The unicorn nodded and picked up the ammunition that Squelch had brought with her in his telekinesis. He then began moving along the trench line towards the next heavy machine gun, passing out magazines to members of the crew as he went. Blood Chit assumed the position of assistant gunner, pointing out incoming flights of changeling drones.

The unicorn stallion cantered along, his attention focused on his destination and the message that he had been trusted to deliver. So intent was he that he very nearly face-planted when he stumbled over the body of another security pony. He let out a stifled curse and regathered his bearings. Even taking a moment to strip unused magazines from his unfortunate comrade, knowing that bullets were a premium at the moment.

It was due in part to his looting that the unicorn didn’t notice the changeling drone who dropped down into the trench beside him, having crawled the better part of two hundred meters over the ground to avoid being spotted by the ponies who had become quite focused on scanning the skies for his flying brethren. A round to the back of the unicorn’s head created a second corpse over top of the first. A second later, a remarkably similar-looking unicorn stallion was galloping towards the nearest entrance into the DropShip.

Cravat could have sworn that he’d still had suture kits left, but obviously he’d been mistaken. It was difficult for him to recall when exactly it was that he’d used the last one. All of his patients over the course of the last couple hours had all blended together. He was reduced to scrounging the deck in search of lengths of silk that he’d discarded during previous wound closings. Even if each individual length was only good enough for a stitch or two, they would suffice.

He’d just need to make sure to dunk them each in a bowl of alcohol first so as to reduce the likelihood of infection settling in. Weighing the risks, it was far more important that he stop the bleeding of his Elemental patient anyway. Any infections that might crop up later could be addressed with antibiotics. Besides, it would be at least a day before any infection became serious; and they’d surely be back aboard one of the orbiting WarShips by then. Assuming that they survived any of this, that is.

When he finally surmised that he’d gathered together enough bits of string, the dappled earth pony began making his way back towards his most recent patient. Hopefully she hadn’t deteriorated too far since he’d left her side. He’d run out of fluids for transfusions a while ago.

On the way there, he very nearly bumped into a unicorn stallion who stepped into the ‘Steed Bay. “Whoop! Sorry about that! If you’re injured, just go and sit over there, I’ll look at you in a…wait…”

Cravat wasn’t much of a military-minded pony. While his primary duty on board the DropShip―prior to the previous physician’s death―had once been to accompany Blood Chit’s recovery crews on their extractions in case the ‘Steed pilot they were rescuing was injured, the earth pony wasn’t really all that well versed in technical military matters. He knew how to operate a lot of common firearms, sure, if the need arose; but such instruction had always been retained in his mind as a ‘secondary concern’. He never gave it his full focus, because he always saw his job as being one of saving lives.

So it took the medic a few extra seconds to recognize that there was something off about the unicorn stallion he’d nearly run into. While he recognized their face and had shared more than a few meals with this stallion, and the uniform and barding that they were wearing was clearly that of Rayleigh’s Irregulars…the weapon wasn’t quite right. It didn’t look like the rifles that Blood Chit and the rest of the crew carried. Indeed, it seemed to possess an entirely different coloration and style when compared to anything that he’d ever seen the security teams carry with them.

Which wasn’t to say that the weapon was completely foreign to the dappled stallion either. Quite the contrary, it was extremely recognizable. He’d seen rifles like it all the time as a colt growing up. Specifically whenever he passed by the HyperSpark Generator on his homeworld.

The unicorn was carrying a ComSpark weapon.

Unfortunately for the medical pony, this revelation came a heartbeat too late to do him any good. Just as his eyes began to widen in surprise, and his mouth opened to get out a warning, two thunderous cracks echoed throughout the ‘Steed Bay. The earth pony dropped like a stone, a pair of holes in his chest oozing blood.

As the life began to drain from Cravat’s eyes, the earth pony stallion heard additional gunshots, as well as the screams of his patients…

Phage grinned broadly as they watched the first pony drop. The shock and surprise that the earth pony experienced the moment one of his ‘friends’ killed him was intoxicating! It was a sensation that was compounded a second later by the mirrored surprise of two dozen other ponies as they turned their heads to see what the source of the unexpected gunfire had been. Only to see a pony that they all knew standing over a body, and pointing a rifle at them.

The changeling drone began to fire at them as well, planting rounds into the terrified bodies of the lame and injured even as they groped futilely aorund them in an effort to escape. Their surprise quickly gave way to panic and fear as they realized that they were trapped in the ‘Steed Bay with what could only be a changeling infiltrator. However, none of them had any way to defend themselves, since pretty much every weapon and bullet had been carried outside by now in an effort to fend off the hordes of his fellow changelings descending up their crashed ship.

Then the changeling stopped shooting as he caught sight of something that he hadn’t expected he would find here. Especially since, to the best of his knowledge, every report he’d heard suggested that they couldn’t be here. They were in Ponyville, fighting with Her Majesty.

…Except they obviously weren’t. Because it was patently obvious that Princess Twilight Sparkle was lying on a bed right in this very room.

The drone raised his rifle in his telekinesis and was just about to place a round in the unconscious alicorn’s head…when he suddenly thought better of it. Killing her would end any threat that she posed once and for all, yes. Of that there could be no doubt. However, the drone suspected that, if he killed the princess, and deprived Her Majesty of the privilege, he was likely to find himself wishing for death.

It didn’t look like the purple alicorn was going to be going anywhere any time soon anyway. She hadn’t so much as stirred in response to the gunfire that had been happening nearby, after all.

So the drone reached up to the side of his head and keyed in his comlink, “Fetlock-Two-Two-Four to Control. I have eyes on Target One inside the DropShip. I say again: I have eyes on Tar―erk!”

Something large and sharp clamped around the unicorn’s throat, very nearly crushing his windpipe. Before he had time to comprehend that he was being attacked, the pressure removed itself…along with an approximately six inch long section of his trachea, esophagus, and carotid arteries. All of which were gripped rather tightly in the balled up claws of a dragon’s bloody hand. The stallion choked and gurgled as he jerkily staggered around, seeking out his killer. The rifle, unfortunately, fell to the floor as he lost the concentration necessary to utilize this form’s magical abilities.

His strength left him as blood found it could no longer reach his brain and he sank to the ground, First to his knees, and then finally over onto his side, still instinctively trying to draw in breath through a neck that had been stolen from him. He couldn’t form a coherent enough thought to transform either. In fact, the last thought that flashed through his brain before everything descended into blackness was: ‘Oh. It was a dragoness…’

The Rainbow Dash jetted aside just in time to avoid being struck by a blast from the changeling queen, and responded with a shot from one of its prismatic projector cannons. The prismatic coil struck Chrysalis in the shoulder. However, it was immediately clear that the weapon hadn’t done much damage to the larger than life changeling. This didn’t really surprise Slipshod at this point. None of his other previous hits had seemed to do much to injure Chrysalis, why should this last one have been any different?

Indeed, it was looking like none of the weapons of the gathered BattleSteeds were having much luck in doing anything more than greatly annoying the queen of the changelings. Energy cannons, missiles, autocannon shells of various calibers, none of them seemed to inflict any real damage. Mostly due to a combination of the ultra thick carapace of the massive changeling queen and her ability to use her nearly bottomless reserves of hoarded emotional energy to heal even the superficial damage that the more powerful weapons were doing in an instant.

Chrysalis was demonstrating herself to be nigh invulnerable. Much to Slipshod’s frustration, if not the changeling drone’s surprise. He’d known―and warned―from the outset that the changeling queen wasn’t someling who could be defeated with most conventional weapons. Twilight had seemed to understand this as well, supporting his idea that a few divisions of BattleSteeds weren’t going to be a solution to the Chrysalis ‘problem’. The purpose of their ground forces had always been as a means to getting the princess safely to Chrysalis, and not as a weapon to defeat the changeling queen directly.

Unfortunately, the purple alicorn hadn’t been particularly upfront about exactly how she’d intended to ultimately defeat Chrysalis. She’d been able to stop the changeling queen in the past on multiple occasions, Slipshod knew, so the stallion had little reason to harbor any doubts that Twilight couldn’t manage to do so again. He’d also suspected that whatever means she’d used before had been unique to alicorns or something, so there wouldn’t have been much point in sharing the specifics, because it would only be something that she could manage anyway.

However, right about now―as he swerved to avoid another blast of magical energy slicing across the ground towards him―Slipshod was finding himself wondering very much exactly how it was that even an alicorn as powerful as Twilight might have hoped to bring Chrysalis down. Because, quite frankly, the stallion was at a loss. The changeling queen was being powered by the pilfered emotional energy of millions of creatures, and Slipshod was uniquely aware of how potent such energy was, even when compared to alicorn-level magic. It just didn’t seem conceivable to him that Twilight had thought she could go up against this and come out on top all on her own. Even if she’d done so before.

“Hold still!” Chrysalis thundered as Slipshod guided his nimble BattleSteed around another blast meant to kill him.

“What’s the matter, Chryssy?” Slipshod responded over the ‘Steed’s external speaker in his Twilight voice, “Did you get fat and slow while I’ve been away?”

“You insufferable little―”

Chrysalis’ retort cut off suddenly and the queen went still, her expression distant, as though she were listening to a sound that only she could hear. Confusion flashed briefly across her face, quickly shifting to fury before finally settling into a grin which was far more satisfied than Slipshod was comfortable with. She looked suddenly very happy about something, and the changeling stallion was fairly certain that anything which made Chrysalis happy would bode ill for the rest of them.

The queen of the changeling launched herself into the air…and proceeded to start flying away…

“Woah, where the fuck is she going?!” Xanadu exclaimed in obvious surprise as the massive changeling that they spent the last few minutes dancing around disappeared into the distance.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” A masculine-registered purple alicorn princess responded in mirrored bewilderment before changing radio frequencies and voice pitch. “Running away already, Chryssy? I didn’t realize I’d scare you that badly!”

“I will return for you later, you treacherous little runt,” came the changeling queen’s snarled retort. Then the frequency they’d been using went dead. Chrysalis had terminated the communication protocol entirely.

Slipshod balked in confusion. The tone of that last transmission had been entirely different from the previous ones that he’d exchanged with her. As had her emotional state. There were newfound tinges of excitement and outright glee present within the changeling queen. There was also a hunger within the massive changeling. A desire and anticipation to feed that was nearly overwhelming. Wherever she was going, Chrysalis anticipated a particularly delectable meal to be at the other end.

Then there’d been the terminology that Chrysalis had used to address him in that last message: Treacherous? How could Twilight, of all creatures, have possibly betrayed the Queen of the Changel―

“Oh shit.”

It was a completely flat declaration as Slipshod’s brain finally recognized the only likely series of events which could have prompted both that response and reaction from Chrysalis. He slammed his hind hooves down, throttling the Rainbow Dash to its maximum running speed, utilizing jump jets to accelerate the BattleSteed as quickly as possible.

“Now where the fuck are you going?!” The zebra pilot didn’t―quite―whine.

“The real Twilight’s alive! Or at least Chrysalis thinks she is!”

“Ha! I told you they weren’t dead!”

“Yeah, yeah; lucky guess there, Neighstra Donkey. Stay here and take charge, I can’t let Chrysalis get away and I’m the only one with a ‘Steed fast enough to maybe keep up!” Slipshod reverted his form back into that of his changeling self. There was little purpose in maintaining the alicorn disguise at this point if Chrysalis had found him out. He plied the controls of the Rainbow Dash for every last iota of additional speed he could coax out of it, engaging the rear-facing jump jets every time they completed their recharge cycle. Contrary to what her size might have suggested, Chrysalis appeared capable of moving through the air at considerable speeds.

While the Rainbow Dash couldn’t actually fly, Slipshod found that he could convince it to leap and bound exceptionally high and far with a judicious application of its overpowered jump jets. The measured velocity displayed on his HUD was already creeping into the upper hundreds. Still it wasn’t fast enough though. The changeling queen had an impressive lead on him already, and her speed was considerably greater than his.

“Come on…” He begged of the ‘Steed, his hind hooves straining at the throttle pedals in a futile effort to depress them even further than what was clearly their maximum setting. As though applying more force would grant him access to an additional reservoir of speed that the mechanical equine had simply been arbitrarily withholding from him up to this point. “Come on!”

As he crested two hundred kilometers an hour, it was technically incorrect to classify what the Rainbow Dash was doing now as ‘running’. It was more accurate to describe its mechanism of motion as skipping along from one hilltop to the next in great bounding leaps, with its changeling pilot applying additional bursts from the jump jets with every push-off, and at the peak of every jump. In the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but be impressed with the engineering that had gone into this ‘Steed, that its legs were able to move fast enough to keep stride with the speed he was traveling at. Any other BattleSteed this size would have tripped over its own legs and face-planted in spectacular style over a hundred kilometers an hour ago.

But he still couldn’t help but feel like it wasn’t enough!

Chrysalis was going to reach the Zathura and then she was going to kill anypony who was left alive. Just because Twilight had apparently survived, that didn’t necessarily mean that Squelch had, the changeling knew deep down. However, he also knew that there was a chance that she had. Squelch could be alive at this very moment. He might still have a chance to see her again.

But that wasn’t going to happen if Chrysalis got there first. The changeling queen’s reason for going to the Zathura might only be to retrieve Twilight Sparkle, but there was no doubt in Slipshod’s mind that she wouldn’t also kill any and all non-alicorn survivors that she came across when she got there. If he didn’t reach the Zathura fast enough, then he wasn’t going to see Squelch alive again anyway.

He hadn’t even had enough time to process her ‘death’ this first time. The changeling drone definitely wasn’t going to be able to handle losing her ‘twice’ in the same day. So, even if he was already piloting a ‘Steed at speeds he’d never have believed possible if he wasn’t seeing it with his own eyes, he needed to get there and…

Actually, that was a good question: what exactly was it that he planned to do to stop Chrysalis even if he reached the DropShip in time? It wasn’t like the changeling queen was particularly bothered by PPC blasts with the power that she possessed. None of his weapons were likely to harm her enough to drive her off, and he certainly wasn’t going to be able to convince Chrysalis that he was far more worthy of her attention than the unconscious Twilight.

Slipshod cursed under his breath. Even if he got there in time…it wasn’t going to matter. His weapons couldn’t hurt her. Frankly, the changeling doubted that anything short of a nuclear explosion was likely to do any real damage to the changeling queen, and he didn’t have any conventional missiles left, let alone a thermonuclear―

The Rainbow Dash alerted its pilot that the liberal use of jump jets and outrageous speed was starting to drive the temperature of its reactor higher than was recommended. Nothing particularly serious yet, but it was certainly a good thing that Slipshod wasn’t firing his weapons at the moment, otherwise he’d risk pushing the BattleSteed’s powerplant towards critical condition and risk an…explosion…

…Maybe he did have something that would get Chrysalis’ attention after all!

“Coming up the target,” the fire control officer standing by the plotter with Star Admiral Cinder announced, “optimal firing solution for all ships in thirty seconds.”

The cobalt dragoness felt, for the first time in a long while, an almost immeasurable sense of relief radiating through her body at the news. Though she knew that she wouldn’t feel entirely at ease until her fleet had commenced their orbital bombardment, confirmed that Queen Chrysalis had indeed been killed, collected all of their ground forces from the surface of Equus, and begun their burn out of planetary orbit ahead of the approaching ComSpark WarShips. Cinder didn’t entirely trust that the death of their queen would be enough to convince the other drones to completely cease all hostilities right then and there. Obviously, their ‘defeat’ would be inevitable with Chrysalis gone, but that fact wouldn’t keep the changelings from killing more right here and now.

The star admiral allowed herself to divert her attention to the rescue effort being undertaken at the Zathura. She saw the contacts representing the half dozen Friendship-class DropShips and their embarked forces entering the upper atmosphere above the crash site. They’d be on the ground in just a few more minutes. The combat units aboard those ships should prove more than adequate to secure the area around the wrecked DropShip and recover the survivors. Hopefully Princess Twilight was indeed among them. With Chrysalis dead and Twilight recovered, they could return to the League-in-Exile and finally be able to secure the full support of all the Dragon Clans in order to start rebuilding the Harmony Sphere.

Five hundred years of patience was finally about to pay off in just ten more seconds―

“The target is moving!” A nearby sensor tech announced. Almost immediately, Cinder saw that the marker tracking Chrysalis’ position shifted drastically to the south.

“What?!” It wasn’t the most dignified outburst that the dragoness had ever made, but the completely unexpected timing of the report had caught her off guard. The star admiral all but leaped to the closest communications terminal, startling the technician manning it. “What’s going on down there?”

“Unknown, ma’am,” the tech insisted. “Reports indicated that Queen Chrysalis just…left.” He clearly didn’t enjoy being helpless to explain the unexpected change in their target’s demeanor to his commanding officer. “One moment she was engaged with our forces outside Ponyville, and then the next moment she took off and headed south.”

Cinder was already moving towards the nearest sensor operator. “Heading where?!”

“Calculating!” The officer manning the terminal assured her, his talons flying over the controls as he plotted out a course for their quarry. His console chirped, drawing the operator up short, his face a mask of surprise. “Ma’am…Chrysalis’ present course intersects with the Zathura crash site!”

Star Admiral Cinder blanched, the revelation causing a cold lump to form in her gut. The dragoness didn’t know how, but obviously the changeling queen had learned that the real Twilight Sparkle wasn’t outside Ponyville engaged in battle with her, but on board the crashed DropShip. She was heading there to retrieve her prize.

Cinder once more glanced at the section of the plotter showing the six Clan DropShips descending through the atmosphere on approach to recover the alicorn princess. “How long until she reaches the Zathura?”

“Less than five minutes, ma’am. She’s managing to move extremely quickly.”

Five hundred years of hoarding magical energy allowed one to do a great many things beyond expectations, Cinder thought to herself even as she considered her next course of action. The relief DropShips would touch down around the Zathura before Chrysalis arrived, yes; but there was little chance that they’d have enough time to secure the crash site, retrieve the survivors, and escape the atmosphere before the changeling queen was upon them. Friendship-class DropShips wouldn’t have a hope in Harmony of fending her off if she caught them on the ground. She had been having no trouble at all dealing with forces more than ten times the number aboard those DropShips. She’d certainly be able to annihilate the relief forces that were about to land.

Did she recall them? Save who and what she could?

…Or did she take advantage of this new opportunity?

“CIC, give me a new time-to-target for the crash site.”

The flag bridge felt uncharacteristically quiet as the star admiral’s words were processed by the crew. Even the normal operating sounds of the equipment seemed to mute themselves. As though the WarShip itself was uncertain as to whether it could have interpreted the dragoness’ question correctly.

Her subordinates appeared to be hesitant as well. “...Ma’am?”

Cinder’s hands were trembling at her sides, but she was determined not to lose her conviction and balled them into fists in an effort to keep her internal reticence from becoming too obvious to her junior officers. If they didn’t think she was confident in her orders, they might hesitate to carry them out, and it was clear that they might not be presented with a lot of time in which to initiate this bombardment. They’d already missed out on one opportunity. They might not get a third. “The crash site, star commodore,” she reiterated, grateful that her words weren’t wavering nearly as badly as her fingers had been as she gave voice to the thoughts that were disturbing her so, “how long until we’re in position to bombard it?”

The other dragon’s jaw worked silently for another couple of seconds before he became aware of his agape mouth and closed it sharply with an audible sound. He pulled out a datapad and performed a few calculations upon it. He finally looked up. “We can have the fleet in position in eight minutes, ma’am.”

“Do it. Advise the relief DropShips to land accordingly around the target zone. Their orders are to secure the area only. Do not approach the Zathura.”

Another few seconds of deafening silence. For a moment, Cinder had to wonder if one of her officers might question her new orders. A small part of her desperately hoped that they would. She was already so internally opposed to her own proposed course of action, that she honestly felt like any significant pushback would cause her to abandon this wild notion.

Unfortunately, her crew was too loyal to their commander. Even if they didn’t understand―or even agree with―what she was ordering them to do, they trusted her to be acting in the best interests of their Clan, and the League-in-Exile as a whole. They would have followed her to tartarus if she’d asked it of them. So of course they were going to change course and realign their bombardment to target the Zathura and Princess Twilight Sparkle. They had faith that she knew what she was doing.

Damn their faith! Cinder thought bitterly to herself. Damn their faith and twice damn me for what I’m about to do…

They needed Chrysalis to remain relatively still and occupied in order to ensure their bombardment from orbit was successful. She was clearly powerful enough that a glancing blow from their naval cannons wasn’t guaranteed to be enough to bring her down. It had been hoped that Slipshod’s deception would be enough to keep her attention for that purpose. Unfortunately, it seemed that their ruse had been discovered, and Chrysalis now obviously knew where the real Twilight Sparkle was.

While their initial plan had been ruined, Star Admiral Cinder recognized that there was still an opportunity to salvage it. They knew where Chrysalis was going to be, and it was a fair bet that the changeling queen would be hanging around that area for at least a minute or two, if only to gloat over her capture of a fourth alicorn princess. That would provide her fleet with plenty of time to coordinate their bombardment and strike at the changeling queen.

Unfortunately, it was a near certainty that the unconscious Twilight Sparkle would also be caught in the attack. The stupendous quantities of firepower that were to be used to finally kill the empowered changeling queen would definitely be more than enough to kill the princess as well.

Cinder tried to console herself with the knowledge that, had Twilight been conscious, she would have made the decision to sacrifice her own life in the pursuit of stopping Chrysalis without a second thought. That, given the situation they were facing, Twilight might very well have given Cinder the order to do exactly what she was planning to herself. That this was something the purple princess would understand and support. Had she been conscious.

She wasn’t of course. Twilight would know nothing of what was about to happen. She would die in ignorance.

At least she would die a hero though. Perhaps, someday, that little mote of solace would be enough for Cinder.

“Start a new countdown…”

“We’re dry on the north side!”

“Pull back to the ‘Steed Bay!” Blood Chit responded back over his comlink even as he swung the machine gun he was manning to the left and sent a short burst of three rounds in the direction of a pair of changeling drones who were flying around the north end of the DropShip. The drones veered away, returning fire back at him with their rifles. Bullets impacted the dirt beside him, but none of the rounds made contact. This time.

His right wing was pressed in tight against his side where a round from a ComSpark rifle had punched through his barding a few minutes ago. As much as it hurt, the pegasus knew that he’d gotten off better than the earth pony lying dead next to him who’d been struck by the same burst of gunfire. They were far from the first member of his security team that he’d lost today. It was a given that they wouldn’t be the last either.

There just didn’t seem to be an end to these damn changelings!

“Anypony who’s still left: get to the ‘Steed Bay!”

They didn’t have either the personnel or the ammunition to hold the perimeter any longer, the crimson stallion knew. They still had some ammunition for their personal weapons, but that was really about it. His was the last of their heavy weapons that still had bullets left, and he could see that there wasn’t much of this last belt remaining. In another few seconds, he was going to be down to his rifle too. At which point he intended to get back to the DropShip as well. From there…

Another burst of small arms fire tore through the dirt just in front of him. The pegasus snarled in pain, feeling like some massive wasp had just stung him on the cheek. Most likely it had been a fragment of a splintered bullet imbedding itself in his flesh. Blood Chit spotted the offending changeling drone and sent an answering volley of fire their way. He leaned on the trigger for longer than was prudent under the circumstances, but he was feeling rather aggravated as a result of his wound. At least he had the satisfaction of seeing the ComSpark trooper go down.

Unfortunately, just beyond them was a tank, who appeared to take exception to the loss of their fellow drone. Its autocannon belched out a cloud of smoke. Blood Chit hugged the ground as the explosion shell sailed overhead and impacted the Zathura’s hull directly behind him. The explosion peppered him with flecks of shrapnel, not all of which were cast aside by his barding. The pegasus let out a pained hiss as several slivers of glowing steel alloy embedded themselves into his flanks and wings.

Even though it was a pointless waste of his precious remaining ammunition, Blood Chit fired off a burst of gunfire at the armored vehicle. The gun went silent after just two rounds, despite his hoof still holding down the trigger. A quick glance confirmed that the weapon wasn’t jammed. He was finally dry himself. The crimson pegasus let out a frustrated grunt and climbed off of the weapon, grabbing up his rifle as he started limping towards the nearest entrance to the DropShip.

Just before he left though, he noticed that the ComSpark tank did something quite unexpected: it withdrew.

Blood Chit paused, watching in confusion as the tank backed away, instead of doing what he would have expected it to and keep pushing in on the downed DropShip. It could clearly see that the defensive trench line was all but abandoned now. Similarly, the last of the Elementals had been taken out a minute earlier. There was no longer anything left that could pose a threat to the changeling armored vehicles. Now was their best chance to drive in close and start tearing the DropShip to pieces one explosion shell at a time.

Instead it was backing off.

Nor was it alone, Blood Chit noticed now that his attention had been drawn. The sky was emptying of drones as well, and not because they were descending down upon the Zathura. They too were flying away, shadowing the reversing tanks. Indeed, the stallion hardly heard any weapons fire anymore.

Not feeling particularly inclined to tempt fate, the pegasus kept his head low and resumed limping inside the DropShip.

When he finally reached the ‘Steed Bay, Blood Chit was confronted with a whole new set of horrors. It was far more of a madhouse in the cavernous interior of the Zathura than he’d anticipated, with a number of ponies scrambling among the wounded. He looked around, but was unable to spot the one pony that he would have expected to be among those rendering aid. Not feeling that his own wounds were worth drawing attention away from others, Blood Chit contented himself with hobbling around the outskirts of the chaos, seeking out a relatively out of the way section of deck to at least lie down and catch his breath for a moment.

“Oh, fuck, Blood Chit!” A mare’s voice drew his attention. He turned his head and saw that Doppler was limping his way. “Are you okay?!”

“Looks worse than it is,” he assured her, trying to muster up a smile and immediately regretting doing so because of the pain in his cheek. “Cravat can get to me whenever.” The sudden wince on the indigo mare’s face caught his attention. “What’s wrong?”

“Cravat…” Doppler’s voice cracked, prompting her to clear her throat. “A changeling got in. He killed a lot of ponies before one of the Elementals took him down. Cravat was one of them.”

Doppler glanced behind her. The pegasus security chief followed her gaze, and spotted the short row of crimson-stained sheets which covered a few equine shapes; along with one sheet which tried its best to grant some dignity to the dead dragoness laying near them. Her scales looked far more ashen and pale than they should have, even on the deceased, suggesting that she’d bled to death. Not surprising, he thought to himself. It was likely that quite a few of the remaining wounded would go on to die in a similar fashion now that the last of their ship’s medical staff had died. He idly wondered how much longer he had left, given the state of his own wounds.

As Blood Chit’s gaze continued to linger on the collection of corpses that had resulted from the brief infiltration by the changeling drone, his hind legs gave out from under him. The wave of loss ripping through his body felt like it sapped the last of his barely-maintained strength. A changeling had gotten through? Worse, that changeling had managed to devastate their medical treatment capabilities in such a brief amount of time. The stallion felt himself overcome by a feeling of failure. Keeping everypony inside the Zathura safe had been his job, and he’d failed.

Not that there had really been much hope of keeping everypony safe forever, he recognized. This had always been a fight they couldn’t win. They’d just been hoping to last long enough to be saved by Star Admiral Cinder. Though it didn’t look like that was going to be happening either. In spite of the unexpected withdrawal of the ComSpark forces, Blood Chit didn’t get the sense that their chances of survival were going to be increasing any time soon.

“Squelch?” He blurted. “Is she…?”

“I’m here.”

The pegasus jerked with a start as his sage green unicorn employer approached from the other direction. Her hooves and face were smeared with blood from where she had apparently lent her own efforts to trying to help the wounded. The dullness of her eyes suggested to the security pony that those efforts had been met with limited success. If any at all. She briefly scanned over the obviously wounded state of her chief security officer before sending Doppler to fetch what clean bandages she could. Then she looked back at Blood Chit and asked with trepidation, “how bad is it?”

“They’re pulling back,” the pegasus revealed as he allowed the unicorn mare to ease him down to the deck for treatment. “I don’t know why. It doesn’t make sense. We’re finished and they know it. They could overrun us in seconds if they charged in now.”

“Maybe they’re going to call and offer us a chance to surrender?” Squelch theorized, her expression making quite clear how little she relished the notion. “I bet they’d rather have live prisoners to feed on than corpses.”

“If that was the case, they’d have made an offer like that when they first showed up,” he pointed out, “instead they blew up the bridge and started assaulting our defenses.”

Squelch conceded that he’d made a fair point, but she was also obviously at a loss for a plausible explanation for the changelings’ unexpected reversal in tactics. Doppler returned with bandages that were at least more white than red and both mares began doing their best to keep Blood Chit from losing any more blood than he already had using their―very―limited knowledge of first aid. All that they could really hope to do was stop most of the major bleeding. Which wasn’t going to really help Blood Chit for more than a few hours if they couldn’t get him to someplace with real doctors.

“Well, whatever they’re up to, I don’t like it,” the unicorn insisted as she got back up to her hooves, leaving the head of security in her sensor operator’s hooves. “I’m going to go discuss our OPSEC options with Channel Lock.”

The other two ponies exchanged briefly confused looks, not immediately recognizing what insight the ship’s interim chief engineer was going to be able to offer. Blood Chit made the connection first, his eyes widening briefly before resignation calmed his features once more. He nodded at his commander, a sad little smile on his lips. When he saw that the other unicorn was still having trouble understanding Squelch’s intent, he explained it to her. “Intelligence denial. We can’t let ComSpark get their hooves on anything that’ll help them repel the invasion. We’ve been privy to a lot of high-profile meetings, after all.”

“Not to mention one VIP,” Squelch confirmed with a brief nod in the still-unconscious Twilight’s direction. “There’s a lot here we can’t let the changeling’s get.”

With that, the sage green unicorn began making her way towards her current head of engineering and was about to draw her attention when she received a call over her comlink. “Commander! DropShips incoming!” Squelch felt her stomach tighten immediately at the thought of additional changeling forces landing at their position. Was that why their cavalry forces had withdrawn? So that fresh BattleSteeds could move in on them and rip the Zathura apart in order to avoid the pitfalls of shipboard combat heavily favoring the defenders?

The next part of the message dissolved her apprehension and replaced it with profound relief: “They have Clan Timberwolf markings!”

Rescue. Somehow, they’d been found and Cinder had dispatched forces to rescue them. That had to be why the ComSpark forces were pulling back! They’d detected the approaching DropShips and recognized that they couldn’t contend with a few companies of Clantech BattleSteeds.

They might just get out of this alive yet!

“Understood,” Squelch replied over the comlink, unable to hide her relief, “let me know when you’ve made contact with their commander. I’ll start getting our wounded ready to move out.”

“Roger, ma’am! I’ll…hold on,” Squelch paused mid stride as she heard the confusion in the voice of the pony who’d call her up. “Ma’am, they’re landing really far away. Like, at least ten kilometers.”

Squelch balked. That made no sense. She’d seen the terrain around the Zathura. She knew for a fact that there were perfectly suitable landing zones for DropShips even as large as a Princess-class just about right outside their door! There was no reason at all for any of the Clan vessels to land that far away. What possible assistance could they hope to provide from that distance?

“Channel Lock!” She called out, summoning the pink unicorn engineer.

“Ma’am?” The other mare said almost breathlessly as she trotted over. She was stained head to hoof with dirt and grease as a result of working non-stop to jury-rig half of their recent defensive efforts, as well as create a work-around to solve the crashed DropShip’s power issue. Yet, despite her obvious fatigue, the unicorn technician straightened herself up in anticipation of being given yet another almost insurmountable engineering task that needed to be overcome if they were going to manage to live another hour.

“Is there any way you can get us external comms?” Squelch’s tone wasn’t a pleading one, but it certainly skirted right up to the line. “Nothing particularly powerful; just a few kilometers. Timberwolf DropShips are landing on the horizon, and I want to be able to coordinate an extraction with them.”

Channel Lock began chewing her lip furtively. With the news of salvation being so close at hoof, the pink mare clearly didn’t want to affirm that what Squelch was asking wasn’t possible without thoroughly considering every available option. She glanced over at the mostly cannibalized Crystal Cavalier and winced. “We ripped out most of the ‘Steed’s mid-range comms to fix the DropShip’s systems. I might be able to boost the short-wave though. With enough power and some cabling to act as an antenna, I can probably pump a transmission out far enough.

“Assuming ComSpark doesn’t jam us,” the engineer added by way of a qualification, lest her commander feel too optimistic about their chances.

Squelch was just happy that she hadn’t received a firm ‘no’. Still, she did make an effort to temper her expectations. “I understand. See what you can do.” She was about to turn away when she remembered what she’d initially been about to summon Channel Lock for before she’d been informed about the arrival of the Clan vessels. For a moment, she hesitated, wondering if that point had been rendered moot by the change in circumstances. On the other hoof, their rescue hadn’t been guaranteed quite yet. Even if they did get out, it still wouldn’t do to leave behind intact information systems that could be accessed by ComSpark. This ship had seen too much with regards to the Dragon Clans and the League-in-Exile. That information couldn’t be permitted to fall into the hooves of the changelings.

“Oh, and Chief…Just in case: I want you to see what you can come up with by way of a denial protocol. Focus on the information storage systems if you can.”

The pink unicorn engineer nodded. “Understood, ma’am.”

Squelch’s comlink chirped again, indicating that she was about to receive another transmission. Hopefully it was some good news regarding those Clan Timberwolf DropShips. Maybe they’d deployed their ground forces and a couple battalions of ‘Steeds were moving in to secure the Zathura. “Go ahead.”

“Commander, we’ve got something heading our way from the north. Not sure what it is yet, but it’s big and moving fast.” The stallion on the other end of the line reported.

The sage green unicorn frowned. She found herself really wishing that the ship still had functioning sensors. ‘Big fast thing’ wasn’t exactly a lot to go on when it came to making a decision about what to do in response to it. Especially since there was no way of knowing if this was a friendly object or a hostile one. Hopefully it was just another Clan DropShip coming in on approach. Perhaps even the vessel that Cinder had dispatched to come and recover Twilight and the surviving crew of the Zathura, and the other DropShips had simply landed so far away at first to form a defensive perimeter and secure the site to ensure a safe extraction.

Squelch desperately needed to believe that was the case right about now. She wasn’t sure if she was mentally capable of handling any additional bad news at this point. Not after having lost so much in such a short amount of time.

Her eyes scanned the ‘Steed Bay, pausing on each of the sheet-covered bodies that had been dragged into it. She knew that many more corpses lay outside the DropShip, likely never to be recovered even to that extent. Even if they escaped, it wasn’t like they’d be taking any of the remains with them. Depending on the means by which they were rescued―if they were rescued―it wasn’t even a guarantee that they’d be able to take all of the wounded with them. There were far more injured ponies than able ones at this point.

Her crew had numbered over eighty when they’d arrived in Faust. Three quarters of them now lay dead, and half of those left alive might still yet ultimately succumb to their wounds. It would be a miracle if even a dozen of them made it off Equus alive at this point. Squelch had understood that the fight to take down Chrysalis would be a difficult one, yes, but…in her optimistic naivety, the unicorn hadn’t imagined that it would be her crew that would suffer such pervasive losses.

Perhaps that had been a silly notion, the mare supposed. It wasn’t like she hadn’t already seen dozens of DropShips blown out of space right beside her own on their way to the planet. Thousands dead in an instant, with barely enough time afforded to them to recognize that they had been killed. Yet, those tragedies had always been things that happened to other ships and other crews. Deep down, Squelch had never felt like it was something which would ever happen to her ship. Her crew. They would be safe. They would survive. They would emerge victorious, leave this world, and return to their old lives with the fortunes promised to them.

…But that wasn’t what had happened.

Fate had seen fit to disabuse Squelch of the notion that somehow her crew was ‘special’. That they were immune to the consequences of taking on a mission so obviously perilous as invading the seat of Queen Chrysalis’ power. That they’d all make it back home alive. That any of them would make it back alive…

Squelch was forced to spend a moment taking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly in an effort to fortify herself as those more anxious thoughts started to get away from her. It wasn’t a healthy state of mind to be in, given their current predicament. Whether it had been right or wrong to risk her ship and her crew on an undertaking like this was largely irrelevant at this point. They were here now and that couldn’t be changed. It was her job now to focus on how to save as many of them as she could.

“Blood Chit!” The sage green unicorn called out. “Start getting the wounded ready to move out.” Whether Cinder was coming to them, or expected the crew of the Zathura to get to her forces for some reason, it was a given that they couldn’t remain in this DropShip for much longer. The ComSpark forces had withdrawn, giving a chance to escape if that’s what it came to.

“See if any of the forklifts still work; maybe we can use those to transport―”

“It’s not a DropShip!” The stallion on lookout yelled over the still-open comlink channel, interrupting Squelch. Judging from the reaction of other ponies around her, the unicorn suspected that he was making a shipwide broadcast.

She frowned and keyed up her mic. “What’s not a DropShip? What is it?”

“That thing that’s heading for us! It’s not a DropShip―it’s not a ship at all! It’s―”

The ‘Steed Bay trembled as it was rocked by an explosion. At first Squelch feared that the ComSpark forces had rallied and resumed their assault. However, she soon discarded the notion, as whatever weapon that could have been capable of creating a blast that powerful wasn’t anything that the changeling forces had been fielding up until that point. That didn’t mean that it couldn’t have been some sort of long range artillery piece, she supposed, but there were certainly far more appealing targets in the area for them to bombard than an already destroyed Mustang-class DropShip.

The unicorn mare wasn’t given much more time to process the list of possibilities forming in her head before she became aware of the sound of rending metal. She, along with the other ponies in the cavernous bay, all looked up towards the source of the concerning chorus of screeching metal and popping rivets. Squelch would have assumed that that last explosion had done something to destabilize the Zathura’s already precarious structural integrity and bring the room down around their heads…except that the ‘Steed Bay’s ceiling was rising up, rather than falling down.

“Everypony take cover!” She yelled out in warning, herself diving under the torso of the mostly-dismantled Cavalier. While the ceiling might have been going up, there was more than a bit of debris raining down.

As her mind still raced to make sense of what was happening to her ship, the unicorn mare peered up to catch sight of the telltale glow of telekinesis grabbing at the hull of her ship. Somepony was using their magic to open up the Zathura like a can of sardines, peeling away the entire dorsal section. Squelch found herself in awe of the kind of raw magical power that such a feat would require. She had to struggle to use her telekinesis to open up a particularly stubborn jar of peanut butter! But whoever this was didn’t seem to be having much trouble at all unwrapping her DropShip.

With a final great heave of telekinetic force, the top half of the crashed ship was ripped free and thrown aside like a tupperware lid. In the absence of a ceiling, Squelch was now able to catch sight of the source of her ship’s dismantlement. Though she had never before met the changelin’s ruler, nor had she seen any archived images, Squelch suspected that it wasn’t an unfair assumption on her part to deduce that the gargantuan changeling leering over the top of her DropShip was the very Queen Chrysalis that they’d come to Equus seeking.

It only occurred now to the unicorn that she had never thought to inquire of Twilight after the queen’s size. In her defense, it hadn’t crossed her mind that she might have needed to take the initiative on that front. Surely, the mare thought to herself, if Chrysalis had possessed physical attributes of any particular note, Twilight Sparkle would have seen fit to volunteer that information unprompted.

Obviously not.

While Squelch and a good many others were clearly paralyzed with shock as their minds struggled to process what they were seeing, her chief of security proved his worthiness for the position he held by leaping into action. For all the good that it did him.

Blood Chit dove for his rifle, rolling onto his hooves before leaping into the air and interposing himself between the towering changeling queen and his shipmates. He squeezed the trigger of the weapon, emptying the remaining contents of its magazine into her chest. The rounds sparked harmlessly off of her chitin plates, leaving not so much as a visible scratch in their wake. Not appearing to be dissuaded in spite of the obvious futility of his actions, the crimson pegasus retrieved another magazine on his barding and slammed it into his rifle.

Squelch swallowed back a lump in her throat as she watched the flier commit himself to the hopeless effort. She knew that Blood Chit didn’t expect to be able to defeat―or even harm―Chrysalis. That wasn’t why he was up there. His goal was to serve as a distraction and buy the rest of his comrades time to escape. And she wasn’t going to let those efforts be wasted.

She galloped out from beneath the Cavalier. “Everypony out the port side, now! Go, go!”

At the sound of her voice, other members of the crew jolted and began to finally move again, freed from their terrified awe. A few reached out for those who were too injured to move on their own. Squelch bit down on her tongue to keep from telling them not to bother, and to save themselves. Obviously, there wasn’t going to be time enough for any of them to try and save the wounded. There might not even be enough time for the otherwise healthy to escape. Yet, the unicorn couldn’t bring herself to make such a declaration. She wasn’t going to order her crew to abandon each other.

Not when even she wasn’t capable of saving herself.

She didn’t run for the exit initially, instead diverting towards where Twilight lay, still unconscious. There was no doubt in the unicorn’s mind that the purple mare was what Chrysalis had come all this way to find. The changeling queen knew all too well that, if anything could defeat her, it was the alicorn. Chrysalis couldn’t be allowed to claim her prize. All their lives depended on it.

So, while Squelch wasn’t entirely convinced that she’d be able to manage even a decent trot while hauling around the larger mare on her back, she was at least bound and determined to try and―

The sage unicorn’s train of thought was interrupted as something that was both hard and soft collided with her, knocking the mare to the deck with a loud cry of pain. Both herself and whatever had struck her rolled to a stop. Squelch was aware of a pained groan coming from nearby that wasn’t her own. She managed to look over and catch sight of an armored scarlet pegasus struggling to get back on his hooves. His right wing was mangled. Whether as a result of the landing just now or whatever had knocked him out of the air in the first place, it was hard to tell.

It wasn’t just his wing that was messed up either, Squelch soon noticed. The stallion’s hind leg didn’t look as straight as it should either. Blood Chit was letting out slow, hissing breaths as he slowly got back onto his hooves. He glanced back over his shoulder, catching sight of his commander. She hated that she could see the look of shame on his face. The recognition in his eyes that he’d failed to hold off the changeling queen. It was a ridiculous thing for the security pony to have been ashamed of. Chrysalis was an abomination of unheard of proportions, and he was just a pony.

As far as Squelch was concerned, the pegasus had performed well above and beyond what could rationally have been expected of him, and he had no cause at all to feel like he’d failed anypony, let alone her!

The unicorn spared a glance in Twilight’s direction once more. That was a pointless endeavor. She wasn’t going to be able to outrun Chrysalis―with or without the alicorn weighing her down. Likewise, Blood Chit clearly wasn’t going to be able to get the princess anywhere safe either. Squelch saw what was left of her crew making their way out of the ‘Steed Bay, leaving the ship.

The mercenary commander’s features set in a grim line. She turned her head in the other direction, glaring defiantly up at the looming Chrysalis. Squelch knew that she couldn’t save herself, or Blood Chit and Twilight. But maybe she could keep the changeling queen from noticing the other ponies trying to flee if she kept her attention for long enough.

Though she was sore from her collision with the pegasus, none of the mare’s bones felt like they were broken. She was able to get to her feet well enough, her gaze still locked on the sneering changeling queen. Her horn reached out with its telekinetic magic and retrieved Blood Chit’s rifle from where it had been dropped when he’d hit the deck. Squelch raised the weapon up and pointed it at the changeling queen.

“Get off my ship, you fucking bitch!” She pulled the trigger.

It didn’t fire. The unicorn balked, staring at the rifle blankly for a moment. She then glared at the offending weapon as she struggled with her magic to get it to work. A half remembered lecture from Flechette a few years ago that she’d―apparently―not paid nearly enough attention to flickered through her mind. Something about…buckball? It was related to some form of sport, at any rate; she recalled that much! One which involved slapping and…pulling? Pulling was definitely a part of it. Unfortunately, she wasn’t entirely sure exactly what on the weapon needed to have which done to it. After trying unsuccessfully to pull on and smack various parts of the rifle―the latter done with mounting fervor that grew exponentially with each passing moment the weapon continued to remain stubbornly inoperative―Squelch finally just let out a frustrated scream and used her magic to hurl the entire thing at the looming changeling queen’s head.

The rifle arced up into the air…and clattered uselessly to the deck plating of the ‘Steed Bay, not having reached even half the distance to the queen. Who by now appeared to be rather amused by the thoroughly unimpressive display of defiance playing out before her.

“Pathetic…”

A magical force swept the pair of ponies aside, sending them careening into the bulkhead. Blood Chit cried out in pain as his already mangled limbs were further agitated by the blow. Squelch was fairly positive that something of hers was at least cracked by now too. She winced as she made an effort to get back up, letting out a gasp as the pain briefly overwhelmed her, slumping back against the wall. All she could do was look on as Chrysalis returned her focus to the unconscious alicorn, her lips twisting up in a cruel smile.

“To think, after searching for you for five hundred years, you just end up being delivered right into my hooves.” Chrysalis cooed condescendingly as her magic reached out for the purple alicorn. “I’m almost disappointed…” She chuckled. “Almost.”

Twilight’s body began to lift into the air, wrapped in eerie green light, floating towards the changeling queen. “It’s going to be such a touching reunion when I get you back to Canter―”

Chrysalis’ head exploded.

Well, not precisely, Squelch decided once she’d had a moment to process what had just happened. However, that was what it looked like had happened in the moment. One minute the queen of the changelings was taunting an unconscious Twilight Sparkle, and then the next there was a massive eruption of violet magical fire not unlike what one witnessed when a BattleSteed’s reactor suffered a critical meltdown. The force of the explosion was so powerful that Chrysalis was knocked aside, collapsing to the ground, her massive weight causing the deck plating beneath Squelch to tremble. No longer supported by the queen’s magic, Twilight dropped to the floor as well, not far from where Squelch and Blood Chit still lay.

The unicorn mare was still trying to ascertain the cause of the strike that had felled Chrysalis when her comlink crackled to life and a stallion’s voice could be heard. “―ome in! Anypony on board the Zathura: do you read me?”

The identity of the caller was so unexpected that Squelch wasn’t entirely sure she’d heard right. “Slipshod?”

“Squelch?! Oh, thank Celestia you’re alive! Where are you―? Nevermind; I see you. I’m coming in!”

The unicorn mare glanced up in time to see the now-familiar changeling form of the ‘Steed pilot gliding in on his gossamer wings. The drone landed in an almost flat out run, galloping the last few meters to Squelch’s side and gathering her up into his forelimbs. The embrace was so constricting that the unicorn found herself unable to take in a full breath. Yet, she returned the gesture all the same, feeling the tension drain from her body even as a sensation of immense relief flooded into her.

“I…I thought you were dead.”

It wasn’t until she’d heard that catch in Slipshod’s voice that Squelch realized he was crying. As though they had been waiting exactly for that recognition, the sage green unicorn mare felt tears welling up in the corners of her own eyes as well. In the wake of the relief at being rescued by her lover, it was like all of the walls which had been holding back Squelch’s despair and terror that had been building up over the last few hours gave way all at once. She could finally acknowledge to herself how afraid of dying she’d truly been…

…And how much it hurt to know that so many hadn’t lived long enough to be saved.

“...I had a good crew…” She managed to get out in response.

Far too soon for Squelch’s liking, Slipshod loosened his embrace and pulled back, looking around at his surroundings as if only seeming to have noticed them for the first time. His gaze lingered especially long on Blood Chit and Twilight, both of whom were very much unconscious at this point. He was gnawing on his lower lip in contemplation of how he was going to manage to extract three injured ponies all on his own. “We have to get clear. I’m not sure how much time we’ve got, but I bet it’s not much.”

“Time for what?” Squelch asked, confused.

“Time until Cinder levels this whole valley,” Slipshod informed her as he stood up and started dragging Twilight closer to them. He looked around for some sort of cart that he might be able to load all three of his charges into so that he could pull them to safety. Then he noticed that it wasn’t just three ponies he had to worry about. His gaze fell upon the half dozen or so critically wounded―but clearly still alive―crewmembers that hadn’t been extracted by the rest of the able-bodied crew when they had fled earlier.

The changeling felt himself begin to despair again…

…but only long enough to remember that he was a changeling.

“Stand back,” the drone cautioned Squelch as he got some distance between himself and the others. He vanished beneath a wave of viridian fire, emerging a moment later as a dragon, though one of considerably larger size than any of those in the Clans had been. Large enough, certainly, that he could easily manage to carry several ponies in his claws and fly them to safety.

“Okay, now let’s―oh shit…”

Squelch wasn’t sure what it was that Slipshod had become suddenly concerned about at first. Then she heard the rumbling. At least, she had thought it was ‘rumbling’ initially. However, it soon became clear that it was actually a growl. A very―very―angry growl, coming from a very―very―angry changeling queen. The unicorn’s mind raced as she tried to reconcile Chrysalis still being alive after having taken a blow like that.

Then Chrysalis’ head rose back into view above the ‘Steed Bay. It was then that Squelch could see that, while clearly a lethal blow had not been struck, it had at least been one which the queen of the changelings had felt. At least, the unicorn couldn’t imagine not feeling something that peeled away half the chitin from her cheek and jaw. Green ichor dripped from the gaping wound which exposed not only flesh and muscle, but also her teeth and tongue were visible from the profile of her ‘closed’ mouth.

Yet, as the two of them watch, that damage was already beginning to slowly heal itself as Chrysalis drew upon her reservoir of hoarded energy. It was likely that all traces of the grievous injury would be completely erased in a minute or two. Slipshod cringed at the idea of having destroyed the last surviving Rainbow Dash in the entire galaxy and not even having any lasting injury on the changeling queen to show for it.

“Not gonna lie, I really thought slamming a BattleSteed into her head at two hundred KPH would put her down for longer,” Slipshod murmured as he swallowed back his trepidation. As large as he currently was in his bulked-up dragon form, he was still forced to tilt his head up considerably to meet his former queen’s gaze.

Those piercing blue eyes locked onto the large purple dragon standing before her, burning with an emotion that easily transcended mere ‘hatred’. “You…DARE?!”

“I did,” Slipshod replied with a curt nod. “And I do!” He spewed a gout of golden flame right in the queen’s face. It was a surprisingly cathartic act, the dragon thought to himself.

Though it was unfortunately not a particularly effective one. While Chrysalis did recoil away initially from the shock of the unexpected attack, the dragon fire quickly proved not to be anywhere near as potent a weapon as an exploding BattleSteed reactor had been. The changeling queen soon retaliated, blasting the dragon square in the chest with a bolt of magical energy. Not just any magically-charged energy either, but energy that was charged with changeling magic. The queen’s magic.

When Slipshod hit the ground, he found that his dragon form had been forcibly stripped away from him by the attack, leaving him once more in his default appearance. This fight was going to be a lot tougher than he’d originally thought; and he’d already been of a mind that it was going to be the next best thing to impossible to win to begin with. Fortunately for the changeling, he didn’t have to ‘win’ this fight. Not really. It would be enough to just not die in the next minute or two. Which―hopefully―would be all the time it took for Cinder to get her WarShip’s into position.

“Slip!” Squelch cried out in concern when she saw him struggling to get back up.

“Stay back!” He warned. “I’ve got this!” Slipshod leaped into the air, transforming mid-jump into a hydra. Each of his five heads snapped at his former queen. However, Chrysalis barely even flinched at the attack from the massive creature. With a contemptuous snort, she struck him to the ground once more with another blast of her magic. The no-longer-a-hydra changeling drone let out a pained wheeze from where he lay on the deck.

He might not have this.

All the same, he couldn’t afford to give up. Not with so much at stake. Slipshod grunted as he struggled back onto his hooves once more. His carapace ached from where it had been singed by the queen’s attacks. He set his stance, glaring defiantly up at his renounced monarch. Another whirlwind of emerald flame enveloped him, growing into a cyclone that quickly dissipated to reveal a looming tatzlwurm.

This time he at least managed to get in a firm slap across the changeling queen with his tail before she knocked him back down. He didn’t immediately get back up this time. Each of the forms he’d assumed were known for the toughness and their innate resilience to magical attacks. However, ‘resilient’ wasn’t quite the same thing as ‘immune’, and Queen Chrysalis’ magical power was extremely potent. While he was managing to not be killed outright as a result of the toughness of those forms, a lot of damage was still being done. Slipshod wasn’t convinced that he could endure many more such hits at this rate.

He was half tempted to assume the form of Queen Chrysalis herself, if he thought it would have done any good. Unfortunately, Slipshod was aware that the changeling ruler’s current might wasn’t the product of anything intrinsic to her form. It was her reservoir of hoarded emotions that gave her the power she wielded, and that wasn’t something he could mimic. In all reality, he was hypothetically capable of achieving Chrysalis’ level of power in his natural state, provided that he’d had access to such vast reserves of emotional energy.

He didn’t have that access of course. Nor was the changeling entirely convinced that he would have elected to amass it if given the chance. The sheer quantity of emotions that Chrysalis was holding within herself wasn’t the sort of level that could be achieved by sipping sparingly at the offered feelings of others. A changeling could only gather so much if they stole it away by force. And he wasn’t the kind of changeling who could do that to another creature.

“Learn your place, traitor!” Chrysalis snarled as she lashed out at him with another bolt of magical energy. Slipshod had barely completed his transformation into a maulwurf before it struck. The form was stripped away from him immediately. Slipshod’s body bounced across the deck of the ‘Steed Bay, tendrils of smoke wafting off his carapace.

He stirred in an effort to get back to his hooves, but his limbs felt weak. These complicated transformations were taking a lot out of him. His body was briefly wracked by a fit of coughs as he rolled over onto his hooves. Slipshod tried to summon more strength that it felt like he didn’t have, repeatedly reminding himself that he didn’t need to keep Chrysalis occupied much longer. Cinder’s fleet should be in position soon enough. He just needed to hold on a little longer…

Another swirl of jade flames. The sphinx that staggered out of them already looked worse for wear, but it was the best that Slipshod could manage under the circumstances. He coiled back, preparing to pounce―

The blast to his chest sent the changeling drone flying back across the ‘Steed Bay, where he slammed hard against the far bulkhead and dropped to the floor. This time he didn’t immediately get back up. He couldn’t. It hurt too much. Every part of him felt like it was on fire. The parts of him that weren’t completely numb, that was. Slipshod wasn’t sure which concerned him more: the parts of him that hurt beyond his ability to process the pain, or the parts of his body that he could no longer feel at all. It left him idly wondering if he hadn’t lost a limb of two in that last hit…

“―ip! Slipshod!”

He wasn’t sure that he’d actually heard the voice at first. It was hard to hear anything over the pain he was feeling. As a result, it took Slipshod longer than it should have for the changeling to recognize that Squelch was calling his name. She sounded rather distressed. Understandable, he supposed. He was feeling rather put out himself.

Something was moving him. It hurt. He’d have pushed them away if he had the strength to lift his legs. As it was, all he could do was groan and open an eye. The other one was being stubborn for some reason. He wasn’t surprised to see that Squelch was holding him in her hooves. He’d felt her worry and anxiety pouring into him the moment she’d touched him. He tasted her love for him too. He pushed her other emotions aside, but that love he allowed to trickle in. Just a little. She was going to need her strength too in the coming seconds if she was going to escape from here.

The infusion of even that small amount of energy was enough to jolt the changeling back into complete awareness. It didn’t do much for his physical injuries, but at least he was fully conscious again. He was certainly in no fit state to try and go up against Chrysalis again, but he could at least help Squelch one last time. He reached out with a hoof and ensured that the unicorn mare was looking directly into his eyes. The sage green mare fell instantly silent, concerned.

“You have to leave,” Slipshod told her firmly, “Cinder’s fleet will be overhead any second now. They’re going to bomb the whole valley.” Assuming the dragoness was sticking to the spirit of the original plan, of course. He acknowledged that he couldn’t be certain whether or not the star admiral would go through with the attack knowing that Twilight Sparkle would almost certainly be killed in the bombardment along with the changeling queen. But he wasn’t going to bet Squelch’s life on that.

“Get Blood Chit and get out of here,” he pleaded with her, “I’ll hold Chrysalis back.” He had no idea how he was going to manage to do such a thing, but that didn’t change the fact that Squelch had to leave.

The unicorn mare gaped at him, her face shifting through a whole flurry of emotions ranging from grief, to anger, to fear…and then finally settling on resignation. She flashed the changeling a wan smile, “...I’ve never left a member of my crew behind in my life.

“So I’m definitely not leaving my husband!”

Slipshod was tempted to argue with the mare. If only on principle. It wasn’t like he didn’t know the unicorn well enough to recognize when he’d lost a ‘discussion’ before it had even begun. She was the owner of the company, the captain of the DropShip, and his commander besides. When she made a decision, there was nocreature around with the authority to override her. She was going to stay, and there was nothing that he could do to stop her.

Squelch wasn’t going to just sit here idly and wait to die either, he noted. The unicorn mare reached out with her magic and collected a nearby discarded pistol, leveling the sidearm at the changeling queen who was looking rather miffed that her traitorous drone still wasn’t quite dead yet. Slipshod felt his lips crack into a smile as he watched the sage unicorn offer up her token defiance by firing ineffectual bullets into the face of their imminent killer―

Then he saw the pistol cant suddenly downward, away from Chrysalis. Instead, what Squelch appeared to be aiming at was Slipshod’s old―and mostly disassembled―Crystal Cavalier. Specifically, the BattleSteed’s exposed reactor core. In order to hook up the ‘Steed’s otherwise integrated reactor to the DropShip’s systems, a great deal of the Cavalier’s armor plating and internal systems had needed to be stripped away, leaving the reactor extremely vulnerable.

Still, as exposed and sensitive as it was, Slipshod wasn’t convinced that a pistol would have enough power to rupture its shielded casing, and was about to remark on such when Squelch fired her first shot. The round sparked not off the ‘Steed’s reactor casing, but rather off the metal rack holding a green acetylene tank sitting close by, which Channel Lock or one of her technicians had been using in order to cut away the internal structural supports which had been blocking their access to the required ports on the reactor.

…Now that, Slipshod acknowledged, could be breached by a pistol round.

Squelch fired a second time. This time the round struck true and pierced the cylinder of compressed gas. It promptly exploded, as containers filled with flammable gasses stored under intense pressure were want to do when suddenly ruptured by hot metal bullets. That explosion was enough to crack the casing of the Cavalier’s reactor, as well as draw the eye of the changeling queen looming over the partially-dismantled BattleSteed. Chrysalis had just enough time to process what she was looking at before the reactor went critical and exploded.

Slipshod wasn’t sure what he was doing in that exact moment. His movements were instinctual. While the two of them weren’t nearly as close to the explosion as the changeling queen had been, they weren’t all that far away either. Neither him, nor Squelch, nor the other wounded members of the Zathura’s crew were anywhere close to safe from being killed by that same blast. So…Slipshod did what he needed to do in order to protect his friends, as well as the pony he loved.

He grabbed Squelch and rolled her under him even as the transformation rippled through his body. Purple wings flared out to either side of him, as though to protect the sage mare, even as his horn alit with amethyst magic.

The changeling was hardly a master of magical manipulation in his own right, and a changeling drone’s arcane diversity was about as limited as that of the average unicorn. Which was to say that he knew how to use telekinesis, change his shape, and perform a couple other limited spells. A spell that would help them survive the detonation of the Cavalier’s reactor was not among them…typically.

However, while having assumed Twilight’s shape might not have granted the changeling the alicorn’s knowledge of magic, it did grant him her natural versatility with spells. It also just so happened that he was familiar with the casting of a rather robust shield spell as well, thanks to a prior, magically―and otherwise―‘intimate’, sharing of power between them. While giving the purple mare his own reserves of power, he’d ‘touched’ the spell matrix that she’d been using at the time. He’d learned how to invoke the spell, even if the physical limitations of his changeling form wouldn’t permit him to cast it as effectively.

He could cast an equally resilient version as Twilight though.

The barrier expanded outwards, rushing towards the oncoming explosion about as quickly as it was coming at them. The alicorn winced as the force of the explosion he was fighting to hold at bay reverberated back through his shield, threatening to collapse it. While Slipshod didn’t possess the real Twilight’s raw magical power, he did have access to reservoirs of energy that were not entirely his own.

While, generally speaking, he was partial to only taking what was freely offered these days, the changeling was confident that none of those present would object to helping him save their lives. He took only sparingly from the others, not wanting to impact their recovery too badly―assuming they all survived this. As for what he took from Squelch, well, that was apparently not something that he was going to be in full control over it seemed. The unicorn―either because she recognized what he was doing or because she thought they were about to die anyway―was currently kissing him rather deeply, and her love for him was flowing into his body like a river. He similarly returned what he had no use for in the moment, lest she inadvertently give too much of herself to his efforts.

The result was that the barrier managed to hold long enough to endure the reactor detonation, sparing both them and the other remaining injured members of the crew. When it was over Slipshod―reluctantly―broke the embrace and spared a look behind him. Not surprisingly, the Crystal Cavalier was completely destroyed, as was just about the entire starboard side of the DropShip’s ‘Steed Bay. Chrysalis was back on the ground once more, knocked back by the explosion that had occurred nearly right in front of her.

Equally unsurprisingly―though much more frustrating―the changeling queen wasn’t dead this time either. She also didn’t stay down nearly as long, having not taken the hit directly to her head this time. It had at least left another visible mark on her carapace though. So that was something.

Though she wasn’t down for the count, the changeling queen was no longer quite the immediate threat that she had been just moments ago. Squelch’s actions had bought them at least a small measure of time. Time enough for Slipshod to take advantage of his current form certainly.

The purple alicorn’s horn flared again. Simultaneous flashes of violet light enveloped Blood Chit and the other injured crew members. When the light died away, they were no longer lying on the deck. He hadn’t quite been able to get them all of the way to one of the Clan DropShips, but they’d at least now be well outside of the anticipated blast area when Cinder’s orbital strike arrived.

The real Twilight Sparkle remained though. Unfortunately for the unconscious alicorn, her presence was the only thing truly binding Chrysalis to this location. While Slipshod liked to believe that he’d made enough of an impression on the changeling queen that she wasn’t likely to forget him any time soon, he wasn’t quite so self-centered as to think that Chrysalis was willing to forgo capturing Twilight just to teach him a lesson. If he removed Twilight, there was a very good chance that Chrysalis would leave here to go hunt the alicorn down. He couldn’t risk that happening.

Just as he couldn’t risk anything further happening to Squelch. He’d already almost lost her far too many times that he could really bear to think about. He wasn’t going to risk losing her again.

He turned to look at the sage green unicorn, who had just taken note of the disappearance of the rest of her crew. She met Slipshod’s gaze, and instantly recognized his intent. “Oh no, don’t you fucking da―!” She vanished in a flash of purple light.

Slipshod dropped his alicorn form, smiling wanly at the spot where Squelch had been standing only a moment ago. “Sorry. But this isn’t your fight.”

His smile then faded as he turned back towards Chrysalis. The queen was already getting back up on her hooves―for the second time in two minutes, Slipshod noted with a satisfied smirk in her direction. He spread his wings and rose up to eye-level. “You know,” he began, “the real bitch of all this is: that you probably have no idea who I am or why I’m so pissed at you!”

Chrysalis hissed at him, lashing out with a bolt of energy that Slipshod was free to dodge around this time since he was no longer interposing himself to protect anypony else. “I don’t concern myself with the names of traitors!”

Slipshod folded in his wings and dove for the ground as he avoided being hit by another attack. He pulled up just before impact, skimming along the surface. He felt anger stirring within him as he flew over the scattered bodies of hundreds of changeling drones who’d died trying to storm the crashed DropShip. Drones who had perished following the orders of their queen.

And for what? What had they gotten for their efforts? Even if they’d succeeded and taken the Zathura and her crew, what would their reward have been? Perhaps the privilege of getting a small taste of their captives before turning them over to Chrysalis to glut herself. Certainly these drones would have received no lasting gratitude. No drone ever did. Yet they still followed her and did their queen’s bidding without question.

He pitied them for their misplaced fealty. Their undeserved loyalty to a leader who cared nothing for them and kept them living in ignorance. That scout they’d captured earlier had been a window into Slipshod’s own past. A brief vision of what he’d once been like as an ignorant drone, not so very long ago. Then he’d come to experience what Chrysalis had been keeping from her subjects for so long. He’d learned the secret of their birthright that their ‘loving’ queen had sought to deny to them so that she could retain her position of power over them in perpetuity.

When he’d learned that Chrysalis didn’t actually care for her subjects, that she simply sought to exploit them for her own benefit, Slipshod had been furious. At first he’d been mad for purely selfish reasons. He’d been angry that he’d been mistreated and abused. That he’d been neglected. It wasn’t until much more recently that those feelings of personal betrayal had grown out into righteous indignation at the way his whole species was being manipulated.

The way so many of his kind were dying. All in service to a lie being perpetuated by their queen.

While that scout, Callie, had not wanted to believe his allegations at first―that her whole life had been based on a lie―she had acknowledged the validity of his claims when she’d tasted what real love felt like. Changelings were naturally extremely sensitive to emotions. Empathy was one of their senses, as important to them as sight, hearing, or any other sense was to other creatures. The moment she’d felt that example of real love, the changeling mare had recognized the truth of what he was saying. It had taken very little convincing beyond that, even if the others with him had been skeptical about how easily the scout had been swayed.

That wasn’t their fault. From their perspective, all Slipshod had done was have a conversation and share a little of his ‘feelings’ with the drone. A short talk wasn’t the kind of thing that would have changed most other creatures’ whole worldview, and so he understood why they couldn’t conceive of how it would have done so with the scout. However, for a changeling, being shown an emotion was just as convincing a piece of evidence as seeing a picture, or hearing a recorded confession, when it came to proving something was true or not. The feelings of love that Slipshod had shared had served just as well as irrefutable proof that Chrysalis had been lying to her subjects as if the queen herself had confessed the truth―

Slipshod was suddenly struck with an idea.

He was also nearly struck by a stream of emerald light slicing across the ground just ahead of him and was forced to roll rather abruptly to the side to avoid it. Before he pulled up, Slipshod swung by one of the fallen drones scattered around the battlefield and snatched their helmet. He retrieved the comlink from within and discarded the piece of armor. As he climbed higher into the air, the changeling stallion began continuously transmitting over the ComSpark communications network. Thanks to the numerous relay towers strewn across the surface of Equus and the constellation of satellites in orbit around it, this would be a transmission that every changeling in the system could hypothetically hear if they tuned in.

They also wouldn’t merely ‘hear’ what was being transmitted either. ComSpark comlinks, having been designed and built for a race of empaths, were not limited to relaying just aural information. Emotional states could also be conveyed, if not the actual empathic power that could be derived from them. The emotions of a speaker were often just as important as the words themselves to a changeling.

Slipshod rose up to eye-level with the gargantuan Chrysalis, staring her down. “You don’t concern yourself with the names of your ‘loyal followers’ either!” He finally retorted. “What was her name?” He demanded, jabbing a hoof towards the mangled body of a dead drone dressed in ComSpark barding who had perished in the attack on the Zathura’s crash site. “Or how about his?” He pointed at another slain changeling.

“They died for you. What were their names?!”

Another snarl and a bolt of destructive magic which Slipshod ducked to avoid―narrowly. “They fell in service to the hive!”

“They fell in service to you!” Slipshod screamed back at the colossal changeling.

“I am the hive! To serve me is to serve all changelings!” Chrysalis insisted haughtily. “I keep you all alive!”

“You keep us all weak!” He countered even as he dove around another blast from her crooked horn. “You convinced us to hide ourselves away from everycreature in the galaxy; to conceal what we are.”

“To keep you safe!”

“To keep us from ever being loved!”

“You do not need the love of others.” Chrysalis insisted acidly, glaring at the juking drone. “My love sustains the hive.”

“You don’t give us ‘love’, and you know it! Not real love. You can’t. You’d have to actually care about us to do that, and you don’t. You cast us aside the moment we cease to be of use to you.

“What you give us is a cheap imitation.” Slipshod seethed at the queen. “You give us barely enough of something you claim is ‘love’ to keep us going, but make sure that we always have to come back to you to get more! You trick us into thinking that we need you to survive, which you know is a lie!

“I'm proof of that! I'm proof that changelings don’t need you―or any queen!” He declared. “We can’t just survive without you around, we can thrive!

“And that scares the crap out of you, doesn’t it?”

Slipshod only barely managed to avoid the blast Chrysalis responded with this time. “I fear nothing!”

“Then why hide the truth from us, huh? Why keep us from living up to our true potential? Why keep us powerless?!”

“Because you wouldn’t appreciate it!” Chrysalis snapped back, finally seeming to lose her tenuous hold on her composure as her frustration peaked. “Because you would squander that power, as you have before! The power of love is wasted on all of you, because you do not have the ambition―the vision―to use it how it should be.

“You do not deserve love―none of you do!”

“So you are keeping us weak.” Slipshod noted.

“I am keeping you in your proper place!”

“And is our ‘proper place’ dead on a battlefield in service to your selfishness? How many of us will you sacrifice?”

“As many as are needed,” Chrysalis sneered, “All if I must.”

“You would sacrifice the whole hive for your power?”

Slipshod’s tone suggested he wasn’t going to be surprised by the anticipated answer. After all, the drone was already well aware of how self-serving the changeling queen was. Still, knowing something and hearing it were two different things. The latter gave the former a sense of finality. It could shift entire philosophical paradigms.

“In a heartbeat.”

He’d been prepared to hear the words. That wasn’t the issue. What Slipshod hadn’t been ready for though, were the emotions behind it. The utter contempt that the changeling queen had for the lives and wellbeing of her subjects. It bordered on outright malevolence. As though Chrysalis would have thought nothing of personally crushing the life out of every single drone herself if she thought it would gain her more power than ruling over them. Those feelings possessed within them a foulness that nearly overwhelmed the changeling stallion, and left him with the taste of bile in his mouth.

It seemed as though while Chrysalis recognized that the only way to obtain the power she so desperately craved was to exploit the other drones of the hive, she simultaneously resented her dependence on them. The changeling queen viewed her reliance on the others as a weakness. A personal flaw that she would have erased all trace of if she could. She detested the other changelings from making her feel dependent on them, even as she was the one perpetuating that dependency.

The feelings were contrary and twisted, and they felt all the more feted for it.

Slipshod had what he needed now though: the precise emotion that Her Majesty Queen Chrysalis of the Changelings associated with her loyal subjects. An emotion that had been broadcast, along with her words, across the open ComSpark network that Slipshod was using. Now every changeling in the System knew how their queen felt about them.

“You’re a monster.”

Chrysalis sneered. “Your opinion means less than nothing to me. You are a gnat. I can obliterate you with a thought. You cannot defeat me.”

“Maybe not,” Slipshod conceded, “but I don’t have to. I just have to keep you distracted long enough for―”

The shockwave from the explosion buffeted the smaller changeling, flinging him backwards as the turbulent air disrupted his hover. Slipshod struggled to right himself amid the maelstrom. The moment he regained his balance, however, another massive detonation occurred in the same place, and another blast of air slammed into the drone. He dove for the ground, for it had suddenly become far too hazardous to be airborne.

Cinder’s bombardment had arrived.

Multi-ton high-explosive shells and purely kinetic rounds pounded the valley as hypersonic velocities. The raw energy of each impact was only sensibly measurable in terms of millions of tons of conventional explosives. At first it was a few, and then a dozen, and then scores of simultaneous strikes impacting the surface, converging on the singular point that was―that had been―Chrysalis. Wave after wave of ordnance designed to take down WarShips the size of a city carved out a deep crater on the surface of the planet.

Slipshod found shelter in one of the defensive trenches dug by the Zathrua’s crew, and was now quite thankful that he’d teleported the injured away when he had. Even with the protection offered by the wall of the trench, the changeling drone found himself struggling to breathe beneath the stifling heat generated by the nearby explosions. He shifted into a smaller-sized dragon, relying on their tolerance of active volcanoes to help him endure the hellish conditions.

All the while the changeling drone felt a sense of relief washing over him. He’d succeeded. He’d kept Chrysalis occupied long enough for Star Admiral Cinder to get her fleet into position and strike down the changeling queen from orbit! He’d even kept her distracted enough that she hadn’t collected―oh shit!

“Twilight!” The changeling gasped, having just remembered that the unconscious alicorn wasn’t nearly as shielded from the bombardment as he was right now. The dragon leaped out of the trench and ran inside the remains of the DropShip, using his wings to shield himself from the worst of the ongoing shockwaves.

He found the purple mare easily enough, rolled up against the far bulkhead. He had to dig into the deck plating with his claws to keep himself from being blown off balance too badly as he scrambled to get to her, throwing himself over her body so that his tougher hide could act as a shield. She was still breathing at least, but the princess certainly looked worse for wear. At least he’d be able to get her back to someplace with medical facilities soon enough.

The bombardment ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. In that short time, hundreds of destructive shells had landed on the changeling queen’s position, carving out a deep furrow in the ground too deep for Slipshod to see the bottom of from where he was. The changeling let out a long, relieved, sigh as he felt the great weight of their mission lifted from his shoulders. It was over. After all this time…it was finally over.

He almost couldn’t believe it.

Slipshod placed a claw to Twilight’s neck, just to confirm that she still had a strong pulse. Upon feeling the telltale sign of life, he found himself unable to restrain the almost manic giggle escaping from his throat. Chrysalis was dead, Twilight and himself were alive―Squelch was alive…

Somehow, in spite of what had seemed like insurmountable odds, they’d achieved their goals. They’d won.

“Come on,” the changeling murmured as he scooped up the limp alicorn into his arms, “let’s get you back to one of those DropShips.” He hopped up off the deck of what was left of the Zathura’s ‘Steed Bay and took flight.

Slipshod hadn’t taken two wing-beats before he was struck in the back.

The drone screamed, for he was no longer a dragon any longer. Twilight’s body slipped from the clawed fingers he no longer possessed and fell to the ground below. Slipshod fell beside her, hitting the ground hard enough that something in his shoulder felt like it had given way. He screamed again as agony shot through his right leg like a lightning bolt.

“...Your suffering…will be great…”

“No…”

Slipshod wasn’t sure if the nearly whispered word had been an expression of shocked disbelief, or a demand offered to the world that this could not be permitted to be reality. He turned his head in the direction of the newly-dug impact crater, and his eyes went wide as he saw Chrysalis climbing the rest of the way out of it. Her size had been significantly diminished from what it had been. The changeling queen was approximately only about three times the size of a normal changeling now rather than the few thousand she had been two minutes ago.

Not that the distinction made much difference in the moment, Slipshod recognized. Whatever her size, Chrysalis was alive…and she was pissed. She was also coming his way.

It took Slipshod some time to register the sound that he was hearing. It began at such a low frequency that it was easy to miss at first. As its volume and intensity grew though, the drone eventually recognized it as being ‘laughter’. Or, at least, a rough imitation of that sound, coming from his formal queen. It was really more of a manic cackle, he would later reflect.

“Did you honestly believe you could kill me in such a fashion, you pitiful wretch?!”

“Would you be disappointed if I said: ‘yes’?” Slipshod offered up sarcastically. He then let out another pained cry as his body was wrenched off the ground by the changeling queen’s telekinetic aura. He felt her magic pressing in around his body. It was a sensation that was reminiscent of his first encounter with a fully conscious Twilight Sparkle during her interrogation of him.

The changeling didn’t find that very encouraging. He’d only survived Twilight by appealing to her better nature. Chrysalis had recently demonstrated that she didn’t have one.

Slipshod was in the middle of struggling to think of a way out of this current mess when his thoughts were interrupted by a burst of rifle fire. Nor did he seem to be the only one who was taken by surprise by the unexpected sound. Chrysalis likewise jolted with shock. Not just as a result of the noise either, it turned out, but also because she was the one who had been shot! Or, rather, shot at. For all her drastic reduction in size and power, the queen of the changelings was still tough enough not to be laid low by anything as trivial as small arms fire it seemed.

Both Chrysalis and Slipshod turned their heads in the direction that the sound had come from. Both sets of changeling eyes came to rest on a lone drone dressed in a ComSpark uniform hovering nearby, a rifle clutched in her hooves. The queen’s expression shifted from perplexed to infuriated.

Slipshod was simply surprised. “Callidae?”

He’d honestly never expected to see the scout he’d spared again after he’d released her. Slipshod had been fairly confident that the changeling mare wouldn’t be content to return to the embrace of ComSpark after learning the truth that he’d revealed to her, but he’d also not imagined that she would take up arms in active resistance to Chrysalis. Especially not when it was clear that such an act of defiance was not only futile, but pretty much guaranteed to be terminal.

The enraged roar from Chrysalis was primal. The burst of magical energy launched from her horn would surely prove fatal if it made contact, and the changeling mare was too close to avoid it in time.

Another changeling life was about to be snuffed out by Chrysalis. Another of his race was to be slain because of this creature who had essentially enslaved them and deceived them with her lies. Perhaps worse, it was a changeling who had just recently learned the truth and freed herself from that enslavement. She’d been freed of the queen’s control. Free to not throw her life away in service to a false queen.

While, on some level, it did mean a lot to Slipshod that the scout had utilized that freedom to take an active role in the resistance to Chrysalis―just as he had―it grieved the changeling stallion so much more that her new lease on life wouldn’t even last the day. Some might argue that dying free was better than dying in darkness, but Slipshod would have preferred that she not have to die at all.

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right that yet another changeling should have to die because of Chrysalis. Not when he was trying so hard to finally save them all. If he couldn’t protect even a single freed drone from the queen, how could he expect to save the entire race?

It couldn’t be allowed to happen like this. He wouldn’t let it. He would save the changelings. He would save that mare!

“No!”

Slipshod was barely consciously aware of what he was doing. The desire to protect that other changeling awoke something within him, and suddenly he knew exactly what to do. It was like instinct had taken over. He opened himself up, completely and without consideration or reservation. If that mare was going to survive Chrysalis’ attack, then she needed energy and a lot of it.

So he gave it to her. Slipshod dissolved every emotional barrier and empathic attenuation that he had in place. Anything that might have metered the exchange of emotional energy between himself and another. The stallion prepared to give her everything, if that was what it took to save her from Chrysalis’ attack.

He would not allow their queen to harm another changeling.

The outpouring of energy from Slipshod was so intense that it overwhelmed the telekinetic field surrounding him. Chrysalis’ hold on him shattered in an instant. That energy then converged on the changeling scout, whose own attention had been focused exclusively on the bolt of lethal energy headed her way. She stiffened in shock as the outpouring of emotions from Slipshod made contact first, only a heartbeat before the jade bolt struck home…

…And was promptly deflected away, impacting harmlessly on the ground.

The transfer ended, and Slipshod was left free of Chrysalis’ hold and panting in midair…and that was it. In spite of what must have constituted an utterly massive amount of energy flowing from him into the scout mare, he didn’t feel the least bit worse for wear. If anything, the stallion might have actually felt more invigorated than he had a moment ago. That couldn’t be right though, he reasoned. He’d very clearly just given the other changeling some of his love―

Slipshod’s eyes widened in confusion for a number of simultaneous, but quite divergent, reasons.

First: the stallion was completely perplexed by the present levels of his stores of emotional energy. They weren’t where they should have been. In that: they weren’t lower. The love he’d received from Squelch, Xanadu, the other members of the crew, they were all where they had been a moment ago. Which shouldn’t have been the case. It was those stores of love that should have been drawn upon for that transfer of energy just now. They should be lower―a lot lower. But they weren’t.

Second on Slipshod’s list of puzzling developments was the coloration of the limb that he had stretched out in what he’d thought was vain futility when he expected to watch the other changeling in front of him die. While the past year had seen his carapace’s coloration shift gradually from the matte black of a typical changeling to a dark lustress green color, the last few moments had seen his appearance change far more suddenly and dramatically. Gone were the holes in his legs. The formerly dark sheen was considerably brighter now, bordering on mint. His limb had even taken on a glossy aesthetic that almost permitted him to glimpse his reflection in his chitin.

He was barely recognizable as his former self, and yet he could feel in his core that this was how he had always been meant to look.

It was then that Slipshod noticed that he wasn’t the only one who had taken note of his new appearance. The nearby changeling queen was all but gaping at him. He could feel the shock from her. The confusion. The fear. She was terrified of him―of what he represented.

So it wasn’t too surprising when she lashed out, throwing at him a ball of destructive magic so intense that it might very well have wiped any trace of him from existence. It certainly would have too, as Slipshod had no hope of avoiding such a blow while in his own befuddled state. However, just before the blow could land, the changeling felt himself awash with a stupendous quantity of emotional energy that seemed to cocoon him in a protective layer of magic.

Chrysalis’ attack dissipated on contact. Both he and the queen were surprised by how impotent the spell had been. Both of them were likewise surprised when they noticed that the other changeling mare hovering nearby no longer looked like a traditional changeling either. Instead, she had transformed into a creature that looked reminiscent of a changeling, but with a soft turquoise carapace with pink shading along her elytra. She looked equal parts shocked and relieved that Slipshod had survived the queen’s assault.

More fear wafting off of her, Chrysalis found herself taking a trembling step back from the pair of technicolor changelings hovering nearby. “H-how? How is this possible?!”

“...Love is limitless power.” Slipshod murmured. He’d said those words to Callidae just hours earlier, but even he hadn’t quite imagined that they’d been true to such an extent. Though, to be fair, he’d only ever dealt with feelings of love shared between singular individuals. The love between himself and Squelch, himself and the crew…never with the broader sense of desire to protect a whole race―or, indeed, all the races of the galaxy. He supposed that, in hindsight, it made a certain amount of sense that, the broader the target of that love, the more potent its power became.

The love one had for themselves, the desire to save oneself―especially at the expense of another―wasn’t ‘love’ at all. It was selfishness, and so without any power worth considering. The love that an individual felt for another was far more pure and potent. Yet, as noble as such focused feelings were, they paled in comparison to a compassion for―and a desire to protect―many. That latter emotion was the most potent form of love, and so could accomplish far more.

Especially again an individual who could only conceive of the former.

“GUARDS!” The cry was dripping with panic as it echoed across the valley.

Slipshod and Callidae glanced up in time to see a swarm of drones flying in towards them. He felt his throat tighten as his eyes noted the weapons they were carrying. The changeling wasn’t entirely convinced that the pair of them would be able to fend off so many all at once, even with their shared power. He was about to suggest that they withdraw for now. Chrysalis hadn’t been defeated, true, but she was at least drastically diminished from what she had been an hour ago. Maybe that was enough.

He was about to give voice to his recommendation for retreat when he caught a sense of the prevailing emotional state of the approaching drones. There was anger, yes; but also betrayal and a deep sense of loathing…and none of it was being directed at the two more colorful changelings. It seemed that there had indeed been some drones nearby who’d been listening in on his earlier exchange with the queen.

Chrysalis turned to face the approaching wing of ComSpark soldiers, jabbing her hoof in the direction of the pair of pastel changelings. “Kill them!”

Not a single rifle was raised in response. At least, not towards Slipshod and his companion. A fair few were pointed at the queen though.

Even though Chrysalis was still not vulnerable to such weapons, the sheer shock at seeing so many barrels held by her―formally―loyal soldiers pointed at her head compelled the queen of the changelings to back away. One or two drones breaking ranks, sure―there were always ‘exceptions to the rule’; but for well over a hundred of her subjects to turn on her all at once and without warning? It was unfathomable!

…It was infuriating!

Chrysalis’ features became creased with seething rage, her body trembling as the fury at such a monumental betrayal burned within her. She opened up on the new arrivals with a guttural scream that seemed to shake the very ground, and a blast of magic followed in its wake. “Traitors!”

Slipshod and Callidae were both there to lend their support, and their power. They would not allow their brethren to come to harm. Certainly not from a queen who had deceived them all for so long.

Just as before, Chrysalis’ magical assault on her subjects was turned away, much to her mounting consternation. It seemed, however, that she had at least finally recognized the futility in trying to directly attack anyling while there were individuals like Slipshod and Callidae around. So she changed tactics and extracted herself from the situation, taking flight in an effort to get away. More than likely seeking to return to Canterlot and barricade herself in her palace until she could find more supporters. As much as Slipshod might have hoped otherwise, it was likely that not every changeling on the planet had heard Chrysalis’ earlier admission and would still be willing to offer their ruler their loyalty…and lay down their lives in her defense.

Slipshod wasn’t about to let that happen though. He took off after the fleeing queen. “Get back here!” This time he lashed out with a magical burst of his own. The bolt of white light struck Chrysalis and knocked her out of the sky. The scream that escaped her mouth was more anger and indignation than pain, but there was pain in it.

Chrysalis recovered just before she connected with the ground, skidding to a stop on her pocked hooves. Her eyes locked onto the approaching changeling, her lip pulled back in a ferocious sneer. Emerald flames ignited at her hooves, running up her legs and enveloping her barrel. The fire spread out and grew into a raging inferno. When it finally died away, in its place was a jet black dragon that stood as tall as any assault-tonnage BattleSteed. The dragon queen let out a defiant roar, and upon the heels of that echoing sound came a gout of searing crimson fire.

Slipshod was forced to quickly backwing out of the way of those flames, letting out his own frustrated snarl at Chrysalis’ stubborn defiance. She had to know that she was already effectively defeated. If the current disposition of the local ComSpark forces was any indication, the queen had lost the support of a considerable percentage of her military―and likely the planetary population in general. That crippled support would only continue to decline as word of the queen’s true attitude with regards to her ‘loyal subjects’ continued to spread. Her base of power had been swept out from under her, and her carefully hoarded reserves of magic had been depleted by Cinder’s orbital bombardment.

She had nothing left, and nowhere to go. Surrender was the only viable option. It was the only way that she had a chance of getting out of this alive. Yet he could feel her burning rage and defiance. She would not surrender. The thought of losing every last vestige of her power and control was beyond terrifying to her.

He knew that Chrysalis would, in fact, prefer death over capture.

So be it then. If the only way to save the changeling race was to end the life of one more changeling, then Slipshod would bear that burden.

A flash of turquoise and pink caught the changeling’s attention as Callidae dove at the massive black dragon. Several darker shapes followed in her wake as scores of ComSpark soldiers joined in on the assault on their―more than likely former―queen. The better part of a hundred changelings were circling the raging reptile, weaving around her petulant flames and swiping claws. All the while they fired their rifles and blasted at her with bolts of jade magic.

They seemed little more than insects in comparison to Chrysalis’ greater size, and it was clear that their attacks were barely more than bee stings in terms of lethality…but there were a lot of them. And while one or two bee stings might amount to nothing more than a brief inconvenience, a few hundred had the potential to be far more dangerous.

As the surprise at seeing all of those drones take the initiative and attack Chrysalis began to wear off, Slipshod felt it replaced by another emotion: pride. His fellow changelings were actively working to finally free themselves of their oppression. These changelings had already cast off their blind allegiance, just as he had all those years ago. Surely more ‘rebel’ drones would follow suit in the future, whether Chrysalis survived or not. Yet, even so, it was certainly better for not just changelings, but all the creatures of the galaxy, if the queen didn’t escape.

Slipshod dove in to join the swarm of his fellow revolting changelings, lending his own magical attacks to the fray. As was expected, the strikes were not particularly devastating in their own right, but the stallion did notice that each hit was still leaving a mark. Slowly but surely, the swarm was whittling away at Chrysalis’ defenses.

The dragon’s enraged roars gradually began to sound more frustrated and desperate as the changeling queen sensed her power ebbing even further. She’d lost so much already as a result of the earlier bombardment, and now she could feel what little power she’d managed to cling onto being stolen from her as her former servants maligned her. Her own attacks and attempts to repulse her assailants became ever more uncoordinated and ineffectual as her mind became beset by panic that only continued to grow in intensity. It became something of a self-perpetuating cycle as her mounting terror caused her to mistep and create additional openings for the swarm to attack her, inflicting more damaage which further drained her reserves and caused Chrysalis to feel even more terror as she sensed her ultimate defeat growing near.

The emotional imbalance within the queen only served to expedite her inevitable defeat as well. What few reservoirs of positive emotions she had stolen from her victims remained were being steadily depleted to heal her injuries, but all that there was to replace those reserves was her fear and panic. Those darker emotions only served to taint and dilute her power even further, weakening her.

It wasn’t long before Chrysalis appeared to finally reach her breaking point. The massive jet dragon stumbled, falling to its hands and knees. She tried feebly to protect herself with her wings, using them as shields against the persistent barrage of magical attacks being levied at her by the swarming drones circling overhead. Even that lackluster effort seemed to soon fail her.

Slipshod sensed an opportunity, and that the changeling queen might finally be in a vulnerable enough state that even she wouldn’t be able to resist the effects of spells wielded against her. He lashed out with a blast from his horn which struck the dragoness square in her back. Chrysalis roared with pain even as the effect took hold, stripping away her assumed form. When the spell finally subsided, it left behind an emaciated and heaving Chrysalis, barely being supported by her own trembling limbs.

The swarming ComSpark drones collectively ceased pummeling the clearly impotent former queen of the changelings, continuing to circle overhead as though waiting for further instruction. Slipshod as well came to a hover, looking down upon the defeated Chrysalis. Callidae was keeping station beside him, her own expression suggesting that she wasn’t sure what they were supposed to do next. Chrysalis was clearly no longer a threat…but was that enough?

Slipshod touched down on the ground in front of the struggling Chrysalis. The withered former ruler of the changelings raised her head slightly, though even that seemed to take her a great deal of effort. He could see the unbridled loathing in her gaze―and the fear that was lingering just beneath it. The stallion could feel her defiance even now. Even as she was―as broken as she was―somehow her sense of superiority and pride remained intact. It was honestly a little impressive, in its own way.

It was a shame that she couldn’t have found a healthier way to focus such drive and determination. What a leader of changelings she could have been, if only she’d been willing to see the value in those besides herself. She hadn’t, obviously. Now she was reaping the fruits of her many centuries of laboring; which was to say: nothing. She had invested in naught but herself; and so, at the end, she had no other sources of support from which to draw strength. Her hoarded emotions were gone. Her armies had turned on her. She was destitute…

…And Slipshod now found himself standing in a position that, as little as a year ago, he could only have dared to dream of: Chrysalis was powerless. Helpless. Completely at his mercy. The culmination of his quest for revenge was close at hoof. Her life―and the ultimate victory that so many had fought and died to achieve today―was there for the taking. She couldn’t stop it now.

Slipshod caught sight of a magical glow just off to his side. He glanced over and noticed that Callidae was offering him a standard issue ComSpark pistol. The two of them exchanged silent glances with each other. The scout recognized that this moment had only been made possible because of what Slipshod had done―not just for herself―but for all changelings in the galaxy. If any deserved to deliver the final blow and bring the struggle to an end, it was him.

He took the offered weapon.

The changeling stallion had never before held anything in his telekinesis which had felt so heavy. The pistol―and the responsibility that it represented―weighed on him almost immediately. A dozen different visions form distant dreams of this moment played though his head. He recalled the mirth and glee that those fantasies had once filled him with. The excitement at the thought of finally being able to kill the changeling who had wronged him…

Those same feelings made him feel nauseous now.

This wasn’t a moment he should have been excited about. Killing Chrysalis wasn’t a cause for celebration. Slipshod knew now that it was something to be lamented. They should all be mourning the loss of what their queen could have represented. She indeed had been the most powerful single changeling which had ever lived. If she could have been redeemed―if Chrysalis could have been made to feel even the slightest hint of empathy…who knew what soaring heights changelings might have been able to reach with a Reformed Chrysalis leading the way. Twilight’s Celestia League might have seemed like little more than a third-rate imitation of an idealized society if such could have been the case.

It wasn’t though, and it never would be. What Chrysalis could have been was going to be forever lost to the galaxy, and that was not a thing which should bring anycreature relief. Least of all himself.

Slipshod had been where Chrysalis was, after all. He’d lived for himself. Thought only of himself and how to use and manipulate others to serve his needs, with barely a thought to their’s. Without Twilight’s guidance, the stallion knew that he might never have gotten to where he was today as a changeling. But for a twist of fate in a distant star system while orbiting a dead moon, he might have ended up no different than the wretch he was looking at now: depraved, alone, and beyond redeeming any longer.

Chrysalis began to chuckle now, the grating, raspy, imitation of a laugh slowly growing in volume as the former queen of the changelings stared up at Slipshod. “...You pity me…even now,” she rasped, her lips pulling back in a wicked sneer, “you see? You’re weak! Even after all I’ve done, you can’t bring yourself to hate me. You can’t do what needs to be done!”

She turned to face the others, jabbing a trembling hoof at Slipshod. “This is your new leader?! You would have this spineless wretch give you orders?! He can’t even kill one he considered a mortal threat! Only I have the strength and conviction to lead you into glory!” Chrysalis insisted, doing her best to assume an ‘imperious’ stance, despite her overwhelming feebleness due to her severe emotional depletion.

Slipshod heard the murmuring of some of the other drones. He could feel the wavering inside them. Chrysalis may have viewed them with contempt, yes; but perhaps a strong leader needed to feel such things in order to make difficult choices?

The reformed stallion refused to give up the ground that had been so hard fought. “It’s not ‘weakness’ to wish that your leader could have been so much better than they were,” Slipshod insisted. “To feel pity at seeing one they once respected falling so far, and turning out to have never been worthy of that adoration in the first place.

“You’re right: I don’t ‘hate’ you, Chrysalis.” Slipshod confirmed. “I hate what you’ve done to our kind, and to the Sphere. I hate that changelings are going to have a difficult road ahead of them being accepted by the rest of the creatures of the galaxy. I hate that so many of my friends lost their lives because of your selfishness.

“...But you? You’re not worth hating.

“And you’re also right that I do think of you as a mortal threat. You are a danger to the whole galaxy, and I shudder to think of the suffering you would continue to bring to others. But, no, I won’t kill you for that. I won’t kill you out of fear or hatred.”

Chrysalis started to laugh once more, sensing that she was going to manage to achieve something of at least a personal ‘victory’ in this encounter. It was a laughter that died suddenly, cut short by the sound of a gunshot.

The lifeless body of the emaciated former changeling queen slumped to the ground, green ichor seeping out of a hole in the center of her forehead. Over her stood Slipshod, the smoking barrel of the pistol hovering in front of him. The changeling’s expression was the furthest thing imaginable from ‘relieved’. If anything, he looked distraught. Which was because that’s exactly how he was feeling. After all, he’d just ended the life of an individual who’d had the potential to become the greatest of them, and now never would. If only Chrysalis could have been given the help that she needed when it would have mattered.

But she hadn’t received that help, and the window of opportunity to change who she was had passed the galaxy by. It was a tragedy whose consequences would never truly be appreciated by the galaxy, Slipshod suspected.

“...But I will kill you to end your suffering. In that small way, maybe I can make up for the failings of so many others who came before me; who wouldn’t help you when it would have benefited you the most.

“Rest in peace, Chrysalis.”

Slipshod tossed the pistol away, as though it had suddenly become something dangerous to hold onto. All around him, he could feel that a lot of the other changelings were starting to feel a great deal of uncertainty about what they were supposed to do from here. They’d lived their lives in service to their queen. Now she was gone, and they felt rudderless and adrift. As much of a benefit as they were sure to find it in time, for right now, they weren’t used to deciding things on their own.

They needed direction.

While Slipshod had exactly zero desire to assume anything even resembling a position of leadership among the changelings, the stallion could at least start them in the right direction. He looked over at Callidae. “Get the word out that Chrysalis is dead,” he told her. “Tell everyling to stand down. See if you can reach out to the Clans and make contact. They’ll want to negotiate our surrender.”

He wasn’t aware of the pronoun he’d used until after it had escaped his mouth. He briefly thought about correcting himself, but then reconsidered. He wasn’t nearly so reluctant to be associated with the changelings around him now as he had been to be lumped in with the drones following Chrysalis’ orders. Now that she was gone, maybe he’d start to feel more like he belonged with them again.

The scout was hesitant. “Are we sure that they’ll accept our surrender? Chrysalis said they’d come here to exterminate all changelings…” Even as she spoke the words, the changeling mare seemed to recognize that the source of that information might detract more than a little from the voracity of that claim.

“They won’t chase down our forces if they retreat.” There was that ‘our’ word again, Slipshod noted with an inward chuckle. He really had ‘gone native’ quite easily, hadn’t he? He supposed it was only natural to feel like he was one of them again when he’d been the target of so much love from those around him. “Chrysalis was always the target. Twilight wants the changelings brought into the fold more than anypony―oh, shit! Twilight―”

“She’s safe. We’ve got her.”

Slipshod wheeled around upon hearing the sound of the mare’s voice. The changeling stallion was more than a little shocked upon seeing Squelch again, let alone to spy the mare riding upon a light hovercraft. A half dozen more of the fast-attack vehicles were gliding along in the unicorn’s wake. Slipshod felt himself experiencing a moment of panic as he spotted the approaching hovercraft angling their weapons up towards the cloud of ComSpark soldiers hovering overhead. He was about to leap into the air and once more interpose himself as a shield when he saw that all of those yet-unreformed changelings simultaneously dropped their weapons and raised their hooves above their heads.

Squelch touched her hoof to her comlink. “Hold your fire. Stand down weapons.”

The changeling stallion was a little skeptical as to whether Timberwolf soldiers would actually follow the unicorn’s orders, seeing as how she wasn’t at all connected to their command structure. However, none of the Clanner gunners opened fire and slaughtered the obviously surrendering drones, so Slipshod took that as a good sign. Just in case anycreature got a little twitchy though, he instructed the ComSpark soldiers to land; and to not transform under any circumstances, just to help keep tensions to a minimum. Only when he was confident that nothing was going to shatter the tentative tranquility the valley was currently experiencing, did Slipshod allow himself to relax as well and turn his focus back to Squelch’s arrival.

The unicorn, for her part, didn’t look all that much worse for wear compared to how she’d been when he’d teleported her away. She hopped off her chariot and trotted towards the relieved changeling. He could sense a lot of emotions broiling within the mare in such a tumultuous mess that it was a little hard for him to get a read on any specific one of them. Understandable, Slipshod supposed, given what they all had been through recently. He smiled at the approaching unicorn and opened his hooves to welcome her into an embrace.

Instead he caught a firm smack across the snout. “Ow! What was that fo―?!”

“That was sending me away like that!” Squelch said, her features scrunched up into a furious glare. “I do not need your fucking protection! Do you understand?!”

“Ow, yes, Celestia fuc―!” The changeling’s words were stopped short as a result of Squelch’s tongue forcing its way down his throat. Not particularly understanding why the situation had undergone such a favorable change―and certainly not inclined to question it―Slipshod gathered the sage unicorn into his hooves and returned the kiss with equal passion.

When they finally broke contact, she said breathlessly, “and that was also for sending me away like that.” Upon seeing the stallion’s perplexed expression, she elaborated before he could ask for clarification. “I appreciate that you care about me so much. You’re stupid and insensitive, but I know it comes from a place of love.”

“Okay, see, now I’m getting some really mixed sig―”Squelch smacked him again. “Ow! Now what did I―”

“That’s for being a prettier shade of green than me now!”

Slipshod rolled his eyes, but a smile snuck its way onto his face and ruined any chance he might have had at feigning annoyance. Though his expression did become slightly more concerned as he asked his next question. “The crew…?”

That sobered Squelch up a bit more as well, but at least he sensed significant amounts of relief coming from the unicorn as well. “They’re being taken care of. Twilight, Mig, Blood Chit, and a few of the other more seriously wounded are already back at one of their DropShips for treatment. The rest are being moved out soon.

“I don’t know the final numbers yet,” she went on, her expression darkening. The changeling felt her emotions sour sharply as well. “I know we lost a lot though. High Gain, Cravat, Axle Rod was in the garage when we hit―”

Slipshod took the mare into his chest and held her tight. He gently supplanted her mounting grief with warmth and compassion, taking the worst of the edge off. He didn’t erase her sorrow though. She had a right to mourn their friends. Both of them would, for a long time to come. But with everything that they’d just been through―the trauma and terror―Squelch wasn’t in the right frame of mind to process those losses in a healthy manner. Not right now.

“It’s okay,” he assured her as he held her close, leaning his chin on her head, “you did the best you could. We all did. Now it’s over.”

That last bit was a lie, Slipshod knew. Things were far from over. None of it. The invasion and securing of Equus, dealing with the rogue Dragon Clans that were still out there, getting the rest of the galaxy back on track…There was a lot to do.

However, for right now―for them―they had a chance to breathe. They could revel in the knowledge that Chrysalis would never be a threat to anycreature again. They could focus on treating their wounded comrades. They could be here for each other. Just like this. For just a little while longer.

…Until the next crisis comes along.

General Charon’s hooves lightly tapped against each other as she sat in the command chair aboard her flagship. Her eyes stared at the plotter in the center of the flag bridge. The haze of blue dots which represented her fleet of WarShips was ticking progressively closer to Equus…and the knot of scarlet specks in orbit which represented the remains of the Dragon Clans combined fleet.

They wouldn’t be there for long, one way or the other, the changeling mare knew. Most likely whoever was in charge over there recognized the strong disparity in their respective fleet strengths and they would elect to withdraw. They still had some time left before it became impossible for them to escape contact with her WarShips. It was extremely unlikely that those ships would stay in orbit, given the likelihood of certain defeat…but, then again, it wasn’t like Charon hadn’t seen examples of these clanners being willing to sacrifice their ships and crews in the interests of biding time.

It was interesting to the general that, despite making every effort to reach Equus in decent time, it was entirely possible they would still be too late to do any good. Charon didn’t think it was possible for the Clan fleet to successfully breach Canterlot’s defenses this quickly with what ships they had at their disposal, it was much harder to gauge the strength of the ground forces which had been landed. A lot of DropShips had survived to reach the surface, and it was impossible to know what those ships had been laden with. For all Charon knew, they’d each contained a company or more of nothing but Big Macs. A few thousand of those would have little issue breaching Canterlot’s barricades in a matter of hours.

Part of what was unsettling Charon at the moment was the lack of contact from Canterlot Command.

Her fleet was just a couple hours out from being able to deploy their own DropShips and relief forces to the surface. Which meant that they needed to know where, precisely, those forces were needed the most. Yet she had received no clear directive on that front. She had ceased receiving much of anything in the last hour actually. And that was making her very nervous.

“General, we’re picking up a transmission,” Charon’s intelligence officer informed her, “it’s a network-wide broadcast.” The junior officer flashed his commander a knowing look. An announcement being sent out to all receiving stations like that was rarely ‘good’ news. At least, in her experience.

“I’ll take it on personal comms,” Charon informed him. The general thought for a moment, and then added, “signal the rest of the fleet to disregard the transmission.” If there was anything worth informing the rest of her fleet about, she would.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Charon keyed in her comlink and listened in on the transmission.

“―keep us all weak!”

The changeling general raised a brow in curious contemplation as she listened to what turned out to be some sort of personal exchange between an unknown stallion and..Queen Chrysalis! Charon found herself suddenly very glad that she had directed all others to disregard the broadcast. There was no way that the queen would have been intentionally transmitting a private exchange to the entire system like this, which suggested it was being done without her knowledge.

Yet that only raised further questions. This couldn’t have been something being transmitted from within Canterlot Castle, Charon knew. The palace had too many security measures in place to allow for a pirate transmission like this. Which meant that it had to be coming from outside the palace. And that suggested that the queen was outside the palace.

Charon’s gaze went to the plotter once more, focused on the orbiting Clan WarShips. What moron had seen fit to let Her Majesty leave the safety of Canterlot while there was a fleet of enemy WarShips in orbit?! On the other hoof, it wasn’t like anyling who’d tried to stop Chrysalis would have survived the attempt…

Which considerably shortened the list of ‘morons’ who’d been involved in the decision, in Charon’s opinion.

The mare was hard-pressed to think of what it was that could have drawn Her Majesty out of her castle, but clearly something had, and now she was the focus of a broadcast that was capable of being received anywhere in the whole system.

“...I'm proof that changelings don’t need you…”

Oh, shit!

Charon fought to keep her expression passive and her emotional state suppressed from detection by the rest of her command staff as she continued to listen in on the transmission. A rogue changeling had made it back to Equus and had managed to arrange a confrontation with the queen. This could prove…problematic. Especially if the conversation continued to go in the direction that it sounded like it might.

“...We can’t just survive without you around, we can thrive!...”

The changeling general let out a long-suffering internal sigh. Yes, this was most certainly going to prove problematic. Queen Chrysalis’s greatest secret was on the verge of being exposed to the entire hive, and Her Majesty didn’t seem to have a clue.

Months of plotting and scheming, tireless hours spent covering her tracks so that her duplicity wouldn’t be discovered until it was too late for Queen Chrysalis to do anything about it…and the bitch was about to go right on ahead and yank the damn rug out from under herself! It almost felt to Charon like she’d wasted all of her time and effort. Apparently all she’d had to do was just go on living her life for a few more months and her problems would end up solving themselves.

Typical.

General Charon reached out and toggled the controls which would broadcast the incoming transmission throughout not just her own ship, but her entire fleet. If Her Majesty was really so anxious to make Charon’s defection all that much easier, then who was she to argue?

“...In a heartbeat.”

And there it was.

The changeling mare wasn’t convinced that all of the shock she was feeling upon hearing those words from her queen was truly hers. A lot of it was doubtlessly refracted emotions from the rest of the ship. It was still a little staggering to feel the weight of the utter contempt being carried over the transmission though. Almost certainly more so for the lower ranks, who’d only ever entertained the notion that Her Majesty loved and cared for each of them, and worked tirelessly to benefit all of her loyal changelings.

Now they knew what Charon and many of the more senior changelings had learned long ago after attaining their high stations: ComSpark existed to serve Chrysalis, not the hive. Once upon a time, that had been a bitter pill for a more naive Charon to swallow. The years and decades since her elevation had made the general appropriately cynical and accepting of reality. She’d contented herself with the knowledge that, even if Her Majesty was the principal beneficiary of the system, Chrysalis still depended upon the hive, and therefore would surely keep its welfare at least somewhat in mind.

Then she’d seen the aftermath at Buckwheat.

There’d been no sign that Chrysalis cared for the hive. Not beyond what it could do for herself directly at any rate. Each of its members were expendable―all of them were. Charon had learned that lesson then…

…And everyling else had just learned it now.

In a way, it was something of a relief, the general thought to herself. It meant that the order she’d been dreading to give had suddenly become a lot easier to issue. “Helm, plot a course around Equus back to Faust. Best speed.”

Five minutes ago, there would have been members of the crew who might have balked at her order to abandon their queen to the invaders. Charon had been confident that enough of her senior officers would go along with her intentions to leave the system, even against Chrysalis’ orders. The enlisted drones might not have understood what was going on, but they would have followed the lead of their officers.

Now, however, there was essentially no pushback at all. If anything, there was something of a sense of relief felt by the crew at the knowledge that they wouldn’t have to potentially disobey any order that their commander might have given to press on and help their―former―queen.

“Aye-aye, ma’am!” The ship’s helmsmare wasn’t―quite―beaming as she laid in their new course and then relayed it to the rest of the fleet. The WarShip cut its deceleration burn, turned end over end, and then proceeded to put on speed so that it could slingshot around the far side of Equus.

Now all Charon had to do was figure out exactly where they could safely go. Though the general did have a fair idea of where a safe harbor might be found…

“They’re breaking through on the left flank!” Archon Victoria Blueblood proclaimed over the command network as her eyes studied the sensor data being fed to her BattleSaddle. “Colonel Dervish, where’s the Thirty-Fifth?! They’re supposed to be covering that sector!”

“Apologies, My Lady,” responded a rather frantic voice over her headset, “but the Thirty-Fifth is down to just two understrength lances. They can’t hold their position. I’ve ordered the Twenty-Seventh Regulars to reinforce them, but they’re still pinned down by a lance of ComSpark assault ‘Steeds. They’ve lost two pilots trying to break free already,” came the exasperated explanation. It was clear from the colonel’s voice that he was no happier with the situation than his archon, but there wasn’t much more he could reasonably do about it. Victoria found herself torn between relief that she was not in fact surrounded by incompetent commanders, and feeling frustrated that nearly a full third of her forces were on the verge of being outflanked and surrounded.

She conducted a quick survey of her forces, searching for any units that didn’t already look like they’d been stretched dangerous thin. It was rather distressing to the pegasus that she couldn’t find any.

The opening engagements had gone off remarkably well for their forces. ComSpark had been caught completely unaware by the arrival of the staged forces arriving from Baltimare and Fillydelphia. The missile carriers and other artillery platforms which had been stashed at the rear of the changeling formations―where they were supposed to have been safe and protected―had been wiped out in minutes. Then Victoria’s line units continued right on through and slammed into ComSpark’s reserves, inflicting further devastating losses upon the unaware changeling divisions. It looked like it was going to become a full on rout!

Then the changelings had rallied.

The element of surprise had really been just about all that the Commonwealth, Federation, and Combine forces had going for them. Unlike the Dragoons, they didn’t have the sort of advanced technology or BattleSteed designs which could give their forces combat parity with ComSpark units. And none of their groups had anywhere near the numbers to hope to win a stand-up fight―with or without comparable tech. Once the changelings reformed their lines and restored order among their ranks, the tide of the battle had almost immediately begun to turn against the Sphere forces. Now they were just trying their best to contain the changeling division; and it wasn’t going well.

This moment was a particularly pointed example of how close they were to being summarily defeated: If ComSpark broke through where they were just about to, they’d have a wide open corridor that would allow them to feed their forces around behind most of her forces. Once she lost control of that flank, the Federated Moons units which were relying on the Commonwealth to keep them secure would find themselves suddenly surrounded as well. At that point, a full half of the allied Sphere units fighting ComSpark would be effectively wiped from the field. Victoria wasn’t sure how long Timberjack and Thera would be able to hang on after that happened, but she suspected the answer lay somewhere between: “not long” and “no time at all”.

Which was why it couldn’t be allowed to happen. “Major Redoubt, follow me; we’re moving to reinforce the Thirty-Fifth!”

“Yes, My Lady!” The mare commanding her personal guard responded. On any other day, the unicorn charged with ensuring the safety of the leader of the Pony Commonwealth might have objected to her liege charging into combat with a vastly superior force of enemy BattleSteeds. However, in this instance, Redoubt was perfectly well aware―as were they all―that there was no retreat from this fight. Even if they wanted to run, there wasn’t anywhere to run to.

They’d never make it back to Baltimare without being run down by ComSpark forces, even if they left now, before the line was completely broken through. Indeed, the only hope that they had of survival was to keep the changeling divisions contained and continue to whittle them down through attrition until their numbers were more manageable. Which wasn’t going to happen if they punched through the Thirty-Fifth.

The thirteen BattleSteeds piloted by Victoria and her three lances of guardmares galloped down the line towards the weakened point in their lines. The ground spat up clouds of dirt and debris all around them where stray autocannon shells or missiles which had lost track of their intended target impacted. Beams of coherent light criss-crossed the sky all around them. The other comm channels on their network were a din of voices designating targets and calling for assistance with progressively increasing franticness as comrades fell and the ComSpark forces showed no signs of thinning any time soon.

Victoria considered it no minor miracle that she and her bodyguards arrived just in time to watch the last surviving ‘Steed of the Thirty-Fifth Commonwealth Regulars fall, the Thunderlane toppling to the ground and detonating in a fireball of amethyst magic. Beyond the small mushroom cloud of smoke rising from the BattleSteed’s corpse, a lance of purple and white ComSpark ‘Steeds marched into view.

“All units, weapons free!” The archon declared, her own fetlocks tightening around the control yokes in her hooves.

Pillars of sapphire light drilled into the lead changeling unit, fired by no fewer than six of Victoria’s guard units. The Pharynx was felled almost in an instant, three of its limbs sliced off by the potent energy beams. Trails of smoke briefly obscured the small battlefield as a volley of short-ranged missiles crashed against a Sombra. Plates of ablative armor were peeled away, exposing the vulnerable internal systems. Then it detonated as its reactor was breached. Another Sombra was promptly beheaded by a hit from the heavy autocannon of a Big Mac. The last of the ComSpark BattleSteeds, a Grogar, was pummeled into submission by repeated hits from Prismatic Projector Cannons, finally crumpling in a heap as a shot from Victoria removed its left foreleg at the ankle.

…Then an additional two companies of changeling BattleSteeds appeared.

The ivory pegasus archon grit her teeth as she turned her focus towards the new arrivals. It seemed that the ComSpark commanders had indeed been preparing to breach their lines here, and had the spearhead force ready to go immediately. Her thirteen ‘Steeds were now facing down twenty-four attackers.

“Hold the line! Don’t let them through!”

Her guards formed ranks and poured on the fire. Missiles, explosive shells, and beams of light were pumped out as fast as could be against the enemy, and many changeling BattleSteeds fell…but so did Victoria’s guards. One by one, the pegasus mare heard her protectors die. They went down fighting, flinging every last shot they could manage before meeting their end.

Major Redoubt was one of the first to fall. Victoria assumed personal control of the major’s lance, directing their fire. As the changelings pressed in closer, the pegasus soon found herself commanding a lance of three ‘Steeds. Then two. Within minutes, it was just her and one other. The other two lances of her guard force weren’t faring much better. It wouldn’t be long, she knew, before they were completely wiped out. Her sensors already showed additional ComSpark signals moving in behind the ‘Steeds they were still currently fighting.

They had made a good show of themselves though, the archon felt. The twenty-four changeling BattleSteeds had been whittled down to just under a dozen. Including the lance they’d already felled, that was nearly a two-for-one exchange. That wasn’t too bad for being outnumbered.

Not that Victoria was convinced they’d ultimately done much real good. Their mission had been to keep the changelings contained, and they were about to fail in that task. When she and the last of her guards finally went down, those ‘Steeds were going to get through and flank around their lines anyway. The Sphere forces were going to be wiped out after all.

An alarm sounded, warning the ivory pegasus that her BattleSaddle had sustained severe damage to its right foreleg. She felt her piloting couch drop out from under her as her ‘Steed faltered, going down onto one knee. The limb hadn’t been completely severed, thank Celestia; it had just lost function in a few actuators. However, it was going to take the gyroscopes a few seconds to adjust the balance so that she could resume moving around on just three working legs. Until then, she was extremely vulnerable.

“My Lady!” One of her remaining guards called out over the comms, concern clear in her voice.

“Keep fighting!” Victoria insisted. “Don’t let up for even a moment!” To emphasize her point, she snapped off a poorly aimed shot with her PPC. The coil of rainbow light went wide, unfortunately.

Her BattleSaddle was rocked by another hit as a volley of missiles peppered her barrel. Victoria let out an outraged snarl in response, her eyes locking on the offending enemy ‘Steed that had just fired at her. If she lived long enough to right herself, they would be her next target―

The Sombra in question was struck along its neck and head by a seemingly unrelenting torrent of viridian energy. Beam-after-beam of emerald light burned into the heavy ComSpark BattleSteed until they finally succeeded in burning through and melting the internal supports which secured the head and cockpit to the rest of the ‘Steed. The control center of the ‘Steed promptly fell to the ground, followed shortly by the rest of it.

“That’s my betrothed you’re shooting at, fiend!”

“Nacht?!” Victoria wasn’t sure if she was more relieved or surprised that the First Prince of the Federated Moons had seen fit to make an appearance. Either way, she was quite happy to have his assistance. She just hoped that he hadn’t come alone.

The dozen blips and change that manifested on her sensors indicated that the batpony ruler had indeed brought along some friends of his own. Presumably his own personal guard, and probably some relief forces to plug this hole in the lines with.

“I realize I’m slightly out of position, Vicky; I hope that’s not a problem?”

“Not at all! Besides, who am I to tell a prince where he may and may not go?” The pegasus responded. Her ‘Steed finally finished shifting its center of gravity, allowing her to rise back up and resume engaging targets, even if her BattleSteed’s movement was a lot less fluid now.

“As this prince’s princess, you’re entitled to tell me quite a bit,” he assured her, “I may not always listen or actually do what you tell me, but that’s more of a me-being-a-stallion thing than a prince thing.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Victoria felt himself smiling wryly as she noticed Nacht’s own BattleSaddle, wearing the cobalt and silver livery of House Belle sidled up beside what remained of her own white and gold ‘Steed. She found herself considering for a fleeting moment what the primary livery colors of their joint house would be; but only for a passing moment. There was still a fight going on after all.

The arrival of the additional Federation forces was enough to reverse the tide of the engagement and once more push the ComSpark BattleSteeds back, but Victoria had her doubts that this would remain the case. The changelings seemed rather determined to succeed in their planned push. She could already see another two dozen enemy contacts nearing firing range. They wouldn’t be able to hold out for very long.

Victoria noted that the rest of their lines were looking even thinner than they had been before she got here. If things kept going the way they were, the changelings weren’t going to have to force their way through this specific point in their defensive lines. Those lines wouldn’t exist at all in about another hour.

“Invicta.”

The mare blinked in mild confusion even as she turned her ‘Steed to help her fiance engage the Pharynx he was fighting. “What?”

“I think that would be a good name for our daughter: Invicta.” Nacht said, managing to almost sound nonchalant over the sound of the alarms whining in the background of his transmission. “Invicta Belle-Blueblood.”

“Blueblood-Belle.” Victoria corrected primly even as she felt a smile start to work its way across her face, in spite of the tension caused by the battle raging around them.

“You’re right, of course. Blueblood-Belle sounds much better. Invicta Blueblood-Bell―” There was a brief burst of static as Nacht’s ‘Steed was rocked by a PPC blast. The pegasus’ breath briefly caught in her throat, released a moment later when the batpony stallion resumed transmitting. “She’ll be a strong leader someday. How could she not be, with a mother like the archon?”

Inwardly, Victoria thought it a bit overly-optimistic for him to be using the future tense. It did manage to help keep her spirit’s up though, the mare admitted; so she supposed the word choice had fulfilled its purpose. “And if it’s a colt?”

“I honestly hadn’t given much thought to that,” Nacht admitted. After a brief pause to consider, he offered up, “Invictor?”

Victoria let out a snort. “We’ll discuss ideas later,” she promised, continuing on with his charade of presuming they’d get out of this alive. Half of the reinforcements that the batpony had brought with him were already slain, and still there seemed to be no end to the changeling forces coming their way.

“I look forward to that.”

The Pony Commonwealth’s archon felt her throat constrict slightly. It was a nice thought. Planning their future. The future of not just their little family, but of the grand empire they’d hoped to forge. A step towards making the Harmony Sphere whole once more. Perhaps even making it a bit more ‘harmonious’. A nice thought. A nice dream…and all of it was burning down around them one BattleSteed at a time.

Vitoria watched as another Grogar assault ‘Steed stepped out in front of her. The pegasus mare fired her PPC, watching as the chromatic coil evaporated some of the plating on its shoulder. It responded with a high-caliber autocannon shell to her chest. Fresh alarms blared. She could smell smoke in her cockpit. The emotionless voice of the computer listed off a litany of systems and components which were no longer functional. A great deal of her cockpit console was flashing either scarlet or amber lights.

Nacht’s BattleSteed darted in front of her, unleashing a volley of energy beams at the Grogar. The batpony paid for his gallantry with a barrage of missiles along his spine that very nearly broke his ‘Steed in two. Now it was Victoria’s turn to surge forward―or at least lurch―as she responded with a burst of her own energy cannons, though far fewer than there should have been. Again the ComSpark pilot shrugged off her efforts.

She could hear the sounds of her remaining guardsmares on her comlink, struggling to get to their archon. Nacht’s protectors were likely making the same efforts. But there were just so many changeling BattleSteeds all around them. Their bodyguards would be cut down in no time if they just ignored all other threats.

There was no hope for any of them anyway. ComSpark had won. All that remained was to see how many of the changelings they could drag down with them to their graves―

The Grogar’s head came off.

The move was so unexpected that Victoria didn’t believe at first that she’d really seen it. Indeed, it took her a few seconds to realize that she hadn’t seen the other ‘Steed’s head ‘explode’―not really. What had happened was that she’d seen the ejection system activate! Not that the realization made the event any less confusing. She and Nacht couldn’t possibly have inflicted enough damage on the enemy BattleSteed to compel its pilot to eject. The Grogar certainly didn’t explode or anything after the changeling left. It simply stood there, inert.

Nor, Victoria soon noticed, was that pilot the only one who abandoned their BattleSteed. As she stared out across the field, slack-jawed, the pegasus witnessed a veritable exodus as ComSpark pilots vaulted out of their ‘Steeds and took wing, leaving the battle far behind. There seemed to be something of a propagating ripple effect across the whole region, with more and more changeling’s giving up and running away as they saw their companions do so.

It was a rout!

It was a rout that made no sense―seeing as how the ComSpark troops had been on the cusp of a crushing victory over the invaders―but it was a rout! Victoria wasn't inclined to voice any objection over the sudden shift in their favor either.

“...I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for this,” the batpony said, sounding more than a little bemused, “but I know I’d never be able to guess what it is.”

“That makes two of us.”

The pair remained sitting in stunned silence for several more seconds, watching more changelings eject from their ‘Steeds and fly away. Some went towards Canterlot, but most just looked like they were picking a random direction to leave in.

Nacht finally broke the silence again. “So…not Invictor then?”

“Not Invictor,” Victoria confirmed, smiling.

“You don’t have to be here for this,” Slipshod said, regarding the purple alicorn with concern. She could put on whatever brave face she wanted to, but she wasn’t going to fool a changeling. He honestly wasn’t sure what worried him more: the intense physical pain that the mare was feeling, or the apprehension balled up so tightly in her chest that it was as likely as not to cause a cardiac event.

“No, I do. I need to be here,” Twilight insisted even as she staggered on ahead through the corridors of the palace dungeon. In her wake followed a squad of Cinder’s elite cadre of Elementals. Twice as many of the magically augmented dragons had already moved on ahead to ensure that the way was clear.

Taking those guards had been the only way that the Star Admiral was going to allow Twilight anywhere near Canterlot Castle. Not that Slipshod was convinced the cobalt dragoness would have dared to physically restrain the alicorn if she’d threatened to leave anyway. The changeling had felt how Cinder had been walking a tight line between her loyalty to the princess, and her sense of duty as a star admiral. Keeping Twilight Sparkle safe was now her primary concern in the wake of Chrysalis’ defeat, but she also wasn’t about to disobey any order that the princess issued to her either.

This had seemed like a reasonable compromise.

It turned out to have been unwarranted. By the time their forces had reached Canterlot, the city was all but deserted. The changelings had all left. It was hard to say where many of them had gone, even for Slipshod, but none of them had remained behind in the capital. If the changeling had been asked to guess the reason, he’d have suggested that they couldn’t stand the lingering stench of their former queen.

It still remained to be seen how many of the changelings would ‘convert’. While pretty much all of the drones had withdrawn from the fighting, not nearly so many had outright surrendered to the invading forces. Slipshod could sense the lingering fear and uncertainty that seemed to permeate the planet now. The changelings didn’t know what was going to happen now without Chrysalis. They were unsure of how they were going to survive.

The invaders might have succeeded in accomplishing their most critical objectives: defeating the changeling queen and gaining control of Canterlot; but Slipshod knew that they had a long road ahead of them when it came to actually being able to claim Equus.

While gaining back the entire planet was something Twilight wanted to do in the nearness of time, it wasn’t the alicorn’s chief concern at this moment.

“Twilight, I really don’t think―”

“I have to know they’re okay!”

Slipshod’s mouth closed with an audible sound. The alicorn was on the verge of being overwhelmed by her anxiety and guilt. He reached out and did what he could to ease those feelings, and earned a glare from Twilight in the process as she sensed what he was doing to her. The verdant changeling held his ground this time though. If he couldn’t stop her from coming here, then he was at least going to keep her from having an outright panic attack!

Twilight’s nostrils briefly flared, but the alicorn finally seemed to accept that she was going to be subjected to his empathic menistrations. The mare resumed her stilted walk down the dim hall. After some time, their group reached an open door. Inside, a team of Elementals had secured the room. The leader of their little detachment snapped to attention and rendered a sharp salute to the princess as she stepped inside.

The purple mare’s breath caught in her throat. The changeling standing behind her felt her emotional barometer alternating rapidly back and forth between relief and guilt like some sort of bipolar metronome. He peered past her and saw the three changeling cocoons arranged around a raised dais. Visible through the translucent green shells of the cocoons were three alicorns lying in tranquil repose. At least, that was what it looked like from the outside. Within each of their minds, however, there was a veritable storm raging.

Sorrow, grief, anger, helplessness, hopelessness―it was almost impossible for Slipshod to keep track of the kaleidoscope of roiling emotions. They seemed to come and go, as if in a constant state of flux. No conscious creature could have hoped to remain coherent while their mind was afire with such tumultuous strong emotions.

“Nightmares.” He declared out loud, a sense of disgust tickling at the back of his throat. “They’re having nightmares about all of the things Chrysalis showed them she was doing to the creatures of the galaxy. I think they have been for a while.” For certain unreasonably excessive interpretations of the word ‘while’, given how many centuries the three alicorns had been locked away down here for the changeling queen to torment.

Twilight briefly looked back at the stallion, her expression understandably one of horror. She swallowed. “Can you…?”

Slipshod shook his head. He dared not even try to mollify psyches that were so consumed with such dark and powerful emotions that had been festering over centuries. His ability was only useful as the equivalent of an emotional analgesic. He could safely take the edge off of someone’s case of acute and transient sadness. Make somepony feel slightly less despondent.

He couldn’t reconstruct a broken mind. Those three needed real care, and a lot of it. Years―maybe even decades―of healing would lay ahead of them, and even then it wasn’t a certainty that they’d ever really recover completely.

The realization hit Twilight hard. She could barely bring herself to look at the cocooned ponies any longer, her guilt was so great. “Is it silly that, when we began all of this, I imagined that this would be a happy moment? We’d be together and everything would instantly be okay again. Just like old times.”

Slipshod smiled weakly at the princess. “If it is, then I wasn’t any less silly,” he admitted. “I thought getting rid of Chrysalis would be the most satisfying feeling in the galaxy. It wasn’t.”

“No?” Twilight sounded genuinely surprised by the admission.

The changeling stallion shook his head. “Not really. It sure didn’t get me anything I didn’t already have. If anything, it cost me so much more than I ever thought I’d have to pay. Worse? It didn’t even solve anything; not really.

“This wasn’t the ‘final act’; it’s the first,” Slipshod gave an almost exhausted snort. “When I think about everything that still lies ahead of us: restoring the HyperSpark Generator Network, negotiating peace between the Successor States, reforming the rest of the changelings in the galaxy, reintegrating the Periphery Powers, the Clans…” He was shaking his head.

“When does it finally end?”

The purple alicorn smiled again, though it was a visibly fragile thing which looked as though it might disappear if notice was brought to existence. “Harmony doesn’t end,” she informed him, “it’s always a ‘work-in-progress’, and that’s okay. Everycreature should always be working towards a better future for all.

“But you’re right: this fight wasn’t the end. This is where we can finally get started.

“And this time, you’ll make a much better go of it.”

Slipshod frowned. “‘You’ll’? I thought you were going to take control of things? Wasn’t that the plan? To put you back in charge?”

Twilight shook her head slowly. “This isn’t the galaxy I knew anymore. And if I’ve learned anything since waking up in it, it’s that I obviously didn’t do such a great job putting the Sphere together in the first place. If I had, then Cozy Glow wouldn’t have been able to dismantle it like she did.

“No. The reforging of the Sphere needs to be handled by creatures who know the political climate. Who understands what’s dividing everycreature and keeping them from living in Harmony.” The alicorn cast an aside glance at the changeling stallion. “Maybe…somecreature like you?”

“Me?!”

“And Victoria, Nacht, Timberjack―the creatures who stepped up and did the right thing, even when they didn’t have to. That’s the hallmark of a good leader: they lead. Creatures look to them for guidance.

“The changelings are going to need somecreature to guide them too.” Again Twilight eyed the stallion. “And you certainly look like you’d be a good candidate as their mentor on how to reform again.”

“I wasn’t looking to become the next queen―or king, or whatever―of the changelings.” Slipshod protested, already feeling a little uneasy at the thought of ascending a throne.

“Then don’t.” Twilight said simply. “Don’t be their ‘ruler’. Be their Friend. See how that works out.”

The changeling was still skeptical. “You make it sound easy.”

“I make it sound simple,” the purple mare corrected him, “as you already pointed out: nothing about the road ahead for any of us is likely to be ‘easy’. But it’s a road that takes us to a good place, I think. And I’d like to see us get there.

“Don’t misunderstand: while I won’t take the reins on this, I’ll always be around to help.” Twilight assured him. “And it’s not like I won’t be doing anything.” She finally looked back at the other alicorns. “I need to help them. Set things right with Flurry Heart and the League-in-Exile. Help Ember and Spike with the Dragon Clans…” It was her turn to sigh now as she considered the ‘to-do’ list that lay ahead of her.

The alicorn smirked back at Slipshod. “Where am I supposed to find the time to ‘rule’ the Sphere? You see? It has to be up to all of you.”

It was hard to argue her point, the stallion admitted to himself. She was just one pony, and there were a host of other issues outside of the Harmony Sphere that required her attention. Besides, he supposed it wasn’t like they hadn’t already taken the first steps in mending the divide. The Pony Commonwealth and the Federated Moons were on track to merge after Victoria and Nacht had their wedding. Thera was already making overtures at something resembling a permanent treaty between the Hippogriff Combine and whatever grand alliance emerged from the union of House Blueblood and House Belle. That was three of the ‘Big Five’ on their way to ending the war and strife between them. The Confederacy and the Our Worlds League would have to see the writing on the walls at that point and recognize that risking a war against such an overwhelmingly powerful star nation wouldn’t work out in their favor…

Maybe they were already off to a decent start fixing the broken galaxy that Chrysalis had left them. Obviously it wasn’t all going to be sunshine and rainbows starting tomorrow morning or anything, but, “...I guess we could give it a shot and see how it goes,” Slipshod acknowledged.

Twilight raised a slightly unsatisfied brow. “That wasn’t quite as reassuring as I’d hoped…”

The changeling stallion shrugged, flashing a wry grin at the purple alicorn. “But it was honest!” He pointed out.

Author's Note

Whew!

As you can see: easily the longest chapter of the story...Hopefully it's as satisfying as it is lengthy :P

As I mentioned before: there will be an epilogue on the 20th that will tie up one or two things that it didn't make sense to bring up in this chapter. So if there are any burning "Wait! But what about...?!" questions you still have, they might be answered then. If they're not, well...I guess you'll have to answer them in a story of your own then, won't you? ;)

Thank you to everyone who has been with me through this whole adventure, and also to those of you who only recently stumbled onto this story. Heck, thank you to the readers who made it halfway through the first chapter and then bailed and so won't even see this, heh.

Stay frosty, 'Steed pilots! And may your reactors, sensors, and weapons, always be online! :D

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Epilogue

Twilight looked out over the broken hulk of the Maelstrom as it was slowly eased into the slipway. It had taken many weeks to run down the ballistic wreck of the WarShip that had once been the pride of the Disciples of Discord. A bleak hoofful of survivors had been recovered from the ship, all on the verge of death by the time the Search and Rescue teams had managed to finally reach them. It was yet to be determined if all of those who had been rescued would ultimately survive.

The Maelstrom and her crew were hardly unique in that way. Many scores of WarShip, on both sides, had been pounded into drifting hulks by the battles that had taken place in the Faust System. Some of them could be salvaged and repaired, but many more would simply be broken up for parts and scrap. This particular dreadnought had the dubious honor of being part of the former group. The late General Mayhem’s flagship was as tough as they came, and while it had been mercilessly beaten on by the ComSpark fleet, there yet remained enough of it intact that the yard hooves hadn’t immediately written the ship off as a lost cause. They would do their best to recover her.

The purple alicorn felt her lip curl up with mild amusement. While it was a long-standing tradition to bestow feminine pronouns on space-faring vessels, Twilight couldn’t help but feel that such an observance might be a little misplaced in this instance. Where this specific ship was concerned anyway. It was something of a ‘special case’, after all.

She looked back at the pair of Battle Armored Elemental bodyguards which had been assigned to her as a protection detail. Even though the shipyards orbiting Equus’ moon were free of malevolent changelings now, Star Admiral Cinder was still quite anxious where her safety was concerned. In the dragoness’ defense, Twilight did acknowledge that she’d very nearly died and come within a hair’s breadth of capture not that long ago. It was likely that Cinder was going to remain skittish until her alicorn charge was back on her way to Clan territory along with the other three princesses.

Indeed, a rather large part of Twilight had very much wanted to accompany Celestia, Luna, and Cadance. Neither of the alicorns had been awoken from their slumbering state quite yet. The simple fact was that none of the medical doctors present with the fleet were specialists in the sort of care that they would need. Nothing was physically wrong with any of the other alicorns, after all. Slipshod had confirmed that their ills were all psychological, but deeply so. Centuries of mental trauma and emotional torture would doubtlessly have left a great number of wounds that would not be easily mended.

But that her dear friends had simply been physically tormented, Twilight thought bitterly to herself. Bones and flesh could be mended far more easily and quickly than the mind. Their road to recovery would not be nearly as smooth as Twilight’s had been.

Two months out of her hospital bed, and the purple mare felt as fit as she ever had. Meanwhile, those that she had come here to free might well require decades of care before they could ever feel even close to right.

It galled Twilight that she hadn’t been here to help them all those centuries ago. She’d been half a galaxy away, nearly snared in a trap set by Chrysalis. A trap which she had only very narrowly avoided thanks to the timely intervention of Discord’s Rangers. At the time, Twilight had thought the arrival of those forces as nothing more than fortuitous. However, the conversation that the alicorn had shared with General Mayhem on Havoc Station had given her cause to wonder if the presence of Discord’s own special forces hadn’t been just a little too fortuitous.

In order to know what would be least expected, you have to first know what will be at all…

This was a fascit of the draconequus that Twilight had not known about in all her time spent with the demigod. It had simply never occurred to her that Discord’s ‘zaniness’ might be anything more than mere eccentricity coupled with nigh-unlimited magical power. Even when he’d seemed to know and understand things that it didn’t seem like he should have at the time, it wasn’t like she hadn’t known other creatures with such uncanny knacks for anticipating things.

Admittedly, quite a few things made more sense to Twilight in light of the connections that she’d recently made thanks to the new information. Like Pinkie’s ‘Pinkie Sense’, and how the mare had seemed able―if only for a short while―to contain Discord’s power during their fight with Tirek, Chrysalis, and Cozy Glow. Yes, a lot of pieces were falling into place now.

Except for one.

However, the mare now had the opportunity to get that last nagging question answered.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” she calmly informed her protectors. Before either of the augmented dragons could voice their objections, the alicorn fixed them with a hard stare. “If either of you follow me, you will spend the remainder of the week as a cumquat. Is that understood?”

Both sets of powered armor immediately stiffened. One of them even took a hesitant half step back from the purple mare. “...Y-yes, princess,” one of them managed to stammer. Obviously they had weighed the consequences of crossing their charge with whatever punishment Cinder might mete out if she learned they’d let the alicorn out of their sight and had chosen the wiser course of action. At least, in Twilight’s estimation.

“Good,” Twilight nodded. Then she teleported away.

She rematerialized inside the engineering section of the derelict Maelstrom, encased in a protective amethyst bubble of energy. Ahead of her was the WarSip’s Finder-Keeper Jump Drive. To the untrained eye, it didn’t look any different to any other similar model of drive capable of moving a ship between star systems. Indeed, nothing would have seemed off about it to a trained eye either. The reason for that was a simple one: there wasn’t any difference.

An F-K Drive wasn’t capable of crossing the bridge between dimensions. Certainly not into a Chaos Realm like Havoc. No technology had ever been developed by the Celestia League which would have been capable of such a feat either…because Discord had asked her that it not be. He’d cited the inherent dangers associated with such unpredictable regions, especially where normal creatures were concerned, and Twilight had been in agreement with those concerns. Chaos Realms, as their nature implied, were powered by, well, chaos. The feats that the Disciples went to in the course of their lives on Havoc Station were done so to maintain their realm’s existence. To falter and become too ‘normal’, might mean being ejected from Havoc and ending up…somewhere. There was really no knowing.

So, because Discord had asked her not to, and because there wasn’t much of a practical benefit to creating one, Twilight had not pursued the creation of technology which could transport others to one of his realms. This meant that there were only a scant few beings in the galaxy with the magical power and knowledge to cross into such a dimension.

And two of them were in this room.

Twilight glared at the casing of the ship’s inert drive core. “...You’re really going to just sit there and pretend you don’t know why I’m here?”

For several seconds, the alicorn received no response from the jump drive. It wasn’t until she developed a low growl in her throat that Twilight finally got the reaction she had been waiting for. Mostly. Finally seeming to acknowledge that there was nothing to be gained by feigning further ignorance, a tiny little head poked out of the alloyed casing shielding the jump drive’s core.

Discord’s misshapen red and yellow eyes peered up at the much larger purple princess. He was glaring at her as well. “Are you really going to just float there and not knock? That is the polite way to get somepony’s attention, you know…”

“Discord…” Twilight said, her tone acquiring a rather sharp edge to it.

“Ah ah!” The draconequus shook a talon-tipped finger at her reprovingly. “First thing’s first.”

Before the alicorn had a chance to react, the miniature god of chaos darted out of the WarShip’s jump drive core. He zipped around the purple mare several times as he clambered his way to her neck, where he finally stopped…and threw his arms around her in a tight hug. “...I’m glad you’re alright.”

Twilight was stunned into silence. She’d come here with the intent of scolding the draconequus for his duplicity five hundred years ago, ready to hold him accountable for his actions related to Chrysalis’ ascension, and her torment of the wider galaxy. Yet…

…Discord was one of only a scant few friends who had endured the centuries with her. They’d known each other for a thousand years. And while, for her, it had only been a couple years since she’d last seen the demigod, it was likely that he had been well aware of how much time had passed. He didn’t always display his affection for others in the healthiest of ways, but Twilight was certainly able to feel how deeply he’d missed her through the force of his embrace.

Mildly deflated―but far from mollified―by the hug, Twilight reached up with a wing and used her pinions to gently pat the back of the tiny little draconequus. “I missed you too.”

Discord released his hold on the alicorn and slowly floated away, coming to a stop a short distance in front of her face. “I suspect you have a few questions?”

“A few.” Twilight confirmed, her tone more terse once more as the purpose of her visit was once more brought to the forefront.

The draconequus nodded somberly. He pulled out a desk and sat down on the other side of it from her. An unnecessarily bright lamp was hanging from…somewhere…poised just above his head such that it shone into his eyes and forced him to squint. “Let’s get this interrogation underway then. I won’t even ask for a lawyer.”

A lifetime exposed to the antics of the draconequus left Twilight unphased by his eccentricities, and so she began with her most pressing question. “Why?”

The word was almost plaintive. The alicorn was unable to keep it bereft of the betrayal that she had been nursing towards Discord since discovering that one of her dearest friends had had a hoof―or rather a paw―in Chrysalis’ rise to supremacy. Not that this would have been the first time the chaos-natured being would have played a role in bringing the realm to near ruin under the guise of trying to ‘help’―in accordance with his own convoluted logic. However, this would certainly have been the most heinous example of such misguided actions; and the alicorn would have liked to think that Discord had learned his lesson since the last occurrence.

At least the draconequus had the presence of mind to look properly remorseful. “Because it was the only way to keep the galaxy safe.”

Whatever excuse that Twilight had been expecting to hear, that had not been anywhere on the list. The purple mare merely gawked at him, not comprehending. “Safe?” She blurted, her tone rife with consternation and mounting anger. “Safe?! Do you even understand how many millions have died because of what you did?! How many trillions of creatures have suffered for the last five hundred years because of you? ‘SAFE?!’”

Discord barely even flinched away as the alicorn vented her ire. He’d clearly been ready for such a visceral reaction. Not that Twilight could think of any reaction that she could have been expected to have upon hearing such a contrary defense. If that answer had even been a ‘defense’. And yet, the little demon didn’t waiver on his position. “Yes. I know precisely how many have suffered.” He said, still meeting the mare’s furious gaze with his own much more subdued eyes.

“And I also know how many would have continued to suffer, even now, if I’d done nothing.”

Twilight’s anger became briefly clouded with confusion. Then she recalled one of the facets of Discord’s nature that she had somehow only learned of recently, despite having known him for over a millennia. She swallowed back her rage enough to settle her tone, taking a deep breath before she continued. “So, you’re telling me that you distracted me from rehabilitating Chrysalis and the others, because you predicted that I’d fail? You foresaw that I wouldn’t be able to reach them?”

“Actually, you would have done fairly well,” was the draconequus’ unexpected reply.

“Cozy Glow would have been the easiest to rehabilitate. After all, she was already an avid believer in the power of Friendship. She’d even used it to great effect working with Chrysalis and Tirek. Her only failing was her insistence on trying to direct that power inward rather than to the benefit of others. Demonstrating that she’d actually stand to benefit more by empowering those around her would have been a relatively trivial matter.

“Even Tirek could have been saved,” Discord admitted, sounding like even he was surprised to hear himself admit that much. “It would have been a more laborious effort, yes, but it was doable. Mending his relationship with his brother Scorpan would have gotten him most of the way there. In time, he would have agreed to return to his own dimension, and never would have darkened our doorstep again.

“But Chrysalis…” Discord shook his head sadly. “Once, a long time ago, she could have been saved,” he admitted, “but that time passed her by. She would never allow herself to be reformed…

“...But she would have certainly played the part,” the draconequus said in a far more dour tone. “She would have waited, biding her time, until Cozy Glow and Tirek were removed as competition. She would have feigned being your nearest and dearest friend. And you, riding high off of your recent back-to-back victories where the others were concerned, would not entertain the notion that you’d failed on your third attempt.

“Then she would have taken you by surprise. And thanks to spending years learning your mannerisms and quirks, her impersonation would not have been noticed by Spike soon enough. He would not have been able to smuggle out Flurry Heart and the CLDF forces he did. No resistance would have existed. This,” the draconequus gestured vaguely around him, “would never have been achievable. Chrysalis’ rule would have remained unchallenged until the end of time.

“Yes, Twilight, many more would have suffered if I’d not done what I did. I take no pleasure in the knowledge that my actions brought harm to so many; but it is a choice I would make again in a heartbeat.” Discord finished, fixing the alicorn with a hard look.

As Twilight digested his words, she could not help but meet his gaze…and see the pain contained there. It was an unusual sight to behold where the chaotic demigod was concerned, to be sure. While Discord was certainly prone to create amusement for himself often at the expense of others, he had not done so maliciously in quite some time. His many intimate relationships over the centuries had helped him to develop a refined sense of compassion for mortal beings, which had softened him considerably. Along with that compassion had come an aversion to seeing those beings suffer. Compared to his own eternal existence, the lives of other creatures were so short and fleeting that it seemed almost cruel to him now that they might suffer for even a brief portion of it.

While Discord might be convinced that he’d pursued the best course of action, he was not at all proud of what he had done.

“You could have warned me,” Twilight challenged, “you could have―”

“Told you what?” The draconequus countered, bitterly. “Told you that you would fail to make them your friends? The Princess of Friendship? Look me in the eye and tell me that you’d have believed me.”

Twilight disregarded the absurdly large eyeball which had extended out of Discord’s head hovering just in front of her face. It galled her slightly that he’d had a point. She wouldn’t have believed that she would fail to reform even Chrysalis. If for no other reason than it would have been tantamount to admitting that Friendship and Harmony were not nearly as powerful as she had always believed them to be―as she had been insisting to others that they were. She would have tried, no matter what Discord might have said to try and dissuade her.

Still…

“So what was I supposed to do? Leave her locked up for eternity? Kill her?”

“The former was too risky,” Discord acknowledged soberly, “and you couldn’t be allowed to do the latter, even if you could have brought yourself to do it. Which we both know you wouldn’t have.”

Twilight swallowed, hating that she was forced to acknowledge the truth of the draconequus’ assertions. She wouldn’t have allowed Chrysalis to be executed. The alicorn wasn’t convinced she’d have been able to do what Slipshod had, even after all she’d seen since being revived. There was just something…vile about ending the life of a genuinely subdued foe. It wasn’t the kind of pony she was. Not the kind of pony she ever wanted to be. It felt to her like admitting failure―that Friendship and Harmony weren’t the potent forces that she’d always proclaimed them to be.

To execute Chrysalis would have been an announcement to the universe that Friendship wasn’t always the answer. That some problems could only be solved with violence and death.

And who was to make the determination about which issues required one in lieu of the other? Who would she have been to dictate to other creatures that they’d made the wrong choice when they’d elected to kill an adversary over trying to reconcile with them? Was she to have been made the galaxy’s singular arbiter of life and death? Was that ‘ruling through Friendship’?

Yet…if it was true that Chrysalis had been beyond saving, then was Harmony really the answer she’d always thought it to be? Was it actually flawed in some way?

As if having heard her silent questions, Discord spoke up. “You did fail Chrysalis,” he informed her, stunning the alicorn. However, his tone had not been accusatory, but rather apologetic. “But it was a long time ago, and it wasn’t just you. Too many times, she was allowed to escape, and to brood, and to internalize her toxicity and pain. She needed help, but she never got it when it would have done her any good.

“Chrysalis could have been a true friend to us,” Discord acknowledged, “but we didn’t take the initiative.”

“That still doesn’t make what happened right.”

“No. No it doesn’t. It just makes it…what it is.” Discord said with a heavy sigh, shaking his head somberly. “Hopefully things will be better this next time around.”

“I plan to do more than ‘hope’.” Twilight said. Then the alicorn sighed too as she thought about all the challenges that lay ahead for herself, as well as the galaxy at large. “I don’t suppose I’ll be able to count on your support anytime soon?”

The draconequus frowned and shook his head. “Not if by ‘soon’ you mean any time in the next decade or so,” he admitted. “The galaxy’s still quite…charged, shall we say. It’s too risky for me to flex my chaotic muscles. But my Disciples will certainly help wherever they can.” He glanced around the darkened engineering room. “...As soon as they can move around the galaxy again, that is.

“And as soon as their new general gets acclimated.”

Twilight was actually grateful for the shift in topic, and so accepted the redirection of their conversation. “Just to be clear: it’s Xanadu, correct?” Discord nodded, a smile returning to his misshapen muzzle. “I heard from Citron that he’d exhibited a few interesting…insights during the battle. By all accounts though, he’s not entirely onboard with the idea.”

“His thoughts are understandably focused on other, more personal, concerns at the moment,” Discord acknowledged, his expression sobering once more.

Twilight too became much more reserved as she recalled the last time she’d seen Xanadu. According to the nursing staff in the Rockhoof’s infirmary, he hadn’t left Mig’s side in nearly a month. Nor had the kirin’s condition improved much during that time. Her injuries, as serious as they had been from the onset when she’d been slammed head-first against the bulkhead of the Zathura, had not been at all helped by her rough treatment during the vessel’s crash landing or her extraction in the wake of Chrysalis’ attack. It was a genuine miracle that she was still alive at all.

Certainly none knew when―or if―she’d recover from her coma. Or if there would be much remaining of the gifted engineer she’d once been when she did. Well, none of the medical staff certainly. Twilight did find herself wondering if Discord might not―

“The funeral will be in two weeks. Keep your schedule clear.”

The alicorn was taken aback by the unprompted announcement. “There’s nothing you can―?”

“Of course there is.”

When Discord didn’t elaborate any further, Twilight’s expression became somewhat more concerned. “What’s the catch?”

“The ‘catch’ is that if she lives, Xanadu won’t accept leadership of the Disciples. She’ll follow him back to the Farsian Empire and they’ll live out a sickening-sweet ‘happily ever after’ full of love, comfort, and more than a few adorable striped kirin foals. I need an insulin shot just thinking about it,” he said with a faux grimace.

“...Why did you just frame all of that like it was a bad thing? That sounds like a wonderful ending for the two of them!”

“For them, yes,” Discord agreed, “but not for the Disciples. Not for the millions they won’t be able to help across the galaxy until Xanadu finally dies of old age and passes on his gift to the next creature destined to lead them.

“Is securing their ‘happy ending’ worth sacrificing all those others?”

Twilight’s heart hurt. “It’s not fair,” she protested in a tone that wasn’t―quite―petulant.

“No, it’s not.” Discord agreed.

“Well that’s not good enough!” Twilight snapped back at the draconequus. “They suffered enough―all of them have! Damn it, Discord; it’s not right! Pick somepony else! Give it to Citron; he’d be a great general.”

“Would that I had control over who inherited the Spirit of Chaos.” He offered, apologetically.

“How do you not?! Isn’t it a part of you?”

“Oh, hardly.” The draconequus chuckled. “I have no more control over the Spirit than you or your friends did over the Elements. It just ‘is’, as they just ‘are’.”

“No.” Twilight stated, leaving no doubt in the word’s finality. “I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that the Elements, or Spirit of Chaos, or whatever other forces might be out there are so fickle and cruel as to require these kinds of sacrifices from us! Ponies deserve to be happy, damn it!”

“They do.”

Discord’s trite agreement did nothing to soothe Twilight’s ire. The alicorn drilled her accusing gaze into the chimera. She detested him in this moment for the choice he’d presented her with. The happiness of two creatures verses the wellbeing of an unknowable number of millions. Well, unknowable to her, at any rate. The draconequus clearly had some notion. Not that knowing the exact number would make her feel any better.

Twilight hated being placed in a position where she was deciding between the fates of two groups. She’d hated that during the opening acts of the war that Tirek and cozy Glow had begun, and she hated it now. The Harmonious galaxy that she had hoped to fashion wasn’t supposed to be one where she was making these sorts of decisions. Hurting some to help others wasn’t something the Elements would endorse.

…The alicorn’s gaze narrowed slightly. No…it wasn’t was it? This wasn’t Harmony, what she was debating now. Nothing about it was. Had she really fallen so far, so fast, herself? When did it happen? What had led her down this path where she was content to negotiate for the wellbeing of some by trading that which she had no right to? It wasn’t her place to decide who deserved to be happy, because everycreature deserves happiness.

That was when things had begun to crumble, Twilight realized. When she began to bargain with Harmony, trying to parcel it out like it was a limited resource. She’d begun treating it like a commodity, instead of a foregone state of existence that all were entitled to, and which she was not in a position to take from others.

And here she was, about to cross that line again.

“Mig lives.”

Discord raised a brow. “Are you sure?”

“I’m not going to use their happiness as currency,” the alicorn affirmed.

The draconequus shrugged and snapped his fingers. “It’s done. Millions of lives have now been doomed.”

“No, they haven’t,” she countered, “because when I leave here I’m going to go and talk with Xanadu about Friendship, and how important it is to help others who are in need. Besides,” Twilight glanced around the darkened engineering room, “if this wreck needs anything, it’s a lot of TLC from a talented engineer.”

Discord pondered the merits of the purple mare’s plan. After a few seconds, he acknowledged, “that might work.”

“It will.”

“You’re taking a big risk, though, don’t you think?”

“I don’t believe that Friendship and Harmony are ‘risks’. They’re sure things that can’t fail, as long as we maintain our faith in them, and pursue them at every opportunity. The Disciples will have their general, the galaxy will have their aid, and those two will have happy lives.

“Because that’s how Friendship works.”

Discord’s features finally broke into a wide smile again as he regarded the purple alicorn. For the second time during their meeting, the draconequus hugged Twilight. “...I’m really happy to have you back.”

Twilight balked again, and then her gaze narrowed. “Oh, Celestia help me, if all of that was just another of your little ‘tests’―!”

Discord withdrew quickly, a smile still being maintained on his face as he waved his mismatched hands in an effort to calm the mare. “Twilight, I assure you, this wasn’t just a test―” He quickly changed tacts when the alicorn’s glare grew suddenly more intense. “You’ve been through Tartarus and back! I just wanted to make sure your heart was still in the right place.” He was holding a stethoscope up to her chest now, listening intently as he moved the diaphragm around sporadically along her front. Discord then perked up. “Ah! It seems all in order!”

He snapped his fingers and moved the ear pieces from his head to Twilight’s. The alicorn quirked a confused brow as she heard nothing that sounded like a heartbeat, but rather a very invigorated drum solo. She glanced down to see that the other end of the stethoscope was hooked up to a microphone and that said microphone was positioned in front of a full set of drums being played enthusiastically by the chaotic little demigod. She sighed and teleported the listening device back into the aether from whence it had been summoned.

The purple mare took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Discord.” The percussive melody ended on a sour cymbal strike from the wincing draconequus. He removed the drumset and cleared his throat, sheepishly kicking his cloven hoof around. “Thank you…for caring.” The chimera grinned broadly.

“But!” Twilight held up an authoritative pinion, pointing it at the draconequus. “I expect you to work really hard to put all this right again! I’ll be in the Dragon Clans a lot for the next few years, helping Spike and working on rehabilitating the other princesses. Which means you’ll basically be the only member of the ‘Old Guard’ in the Sphere for a while.

“I know you’re limited in what you can do right now,” she acknowledged with a nod, “but I expect you to help Xanadu, Mig, and the Disciples as much as you possibly can. I want to see real progress being made the next time I swing back by this way? Understood…General Discord?”

The diminutive draconequus snapped to attention and saluted, the oversized olive drab helmet on his head making a sound like a struck gong. “Aye, aye! You can count on me, princess!”

“Good.” Twilight said with an approving nod. Then she eyed the tiny embodiment of chaos closely, idly scratching her chin. “Because you’re the perfect size for my bookcase now, and I’d hate to have to turn you to stone for ‘insubordination’...even if you would make a fetching bookend…”

Discord swallowed back a nervous laugh. “Heh…yeah. We wouldn’t want that now, would we?”

The draconequus audibly ‘gulped’.

“The manifest for the latest deliveries, commander.”

Squelch gave a small start from where she was standing on the DropShip bridge, staring out over the vastness of the Royal Manehattan Spaceport that lay stretched out before her. The sage green unicorn mare turned to see an auburn unicorn mare standing just behind her, an offered datapad floating in an aura of golden magic. “Thank you, Hi―sorry―Sergeant Feedhorn.” She stammered, clearing her throat and accepting the offered device from her new head of communications. Slip-ups like that weren’t happening nearly as frequently anymore, but old habits died hard, it seemed.

The other unicorn nodded, hiding an understanding smile as she trotted away, leaving Squelch to review the information on the pad. There was a good deal of it too. It took quite a lot more in terms of supplies and material to operate a Princess-class DropShip than the smaller, blockier, Mustang that she’d been used to. A lot more material, and a much larger crew. She now had more than four times the number of personnel on her payroll. It would be nice to have the greater flexibility when it came to selecting contracts that those larger numbers allowed, but it was also going to take her a little longer to get to know all of them too.

Though, maybe that was a good thing? If she didn’t get too close to the members of her crew, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much when they died during an operation…no. Squelch didn’t want that either. She didn’t want it to not hurt when she lost somecreature. Otherwise she might run the risk of thinking in terms of ‘acceptable losses’ on missions. Maybe that was how real militaries operated, but this wasn’t an army. It was a business. She didn’t command soldiers, she managed employees. They had signed on with her company with the expectation that she would take care of them and get them paid. She wasn’t going to abuse that trust and risk their lives unnecessarily because she thought of her crew as numbers on a ledger rather than real creatures with dreams and aspirations for the future.

Which wasn’t to say that she was capable of managing such a large crew on her own either. Not while also trying to do all of the other jobs she’d held while running the Irregulars when they’d just been a single lance. If she tried to run this recently expanded mercenary company the same way she had before, then between employee evaluations, payroll, and inventory, she wouldn’t have time to actually vet contracts!

That was why the unicorn had seen fit to create and staff separate departments to manage those aspects of the business. She now had additional department heads that reported to her and helped to manage the running of the DropShip and its crew. She looked to her side and waved to get the attention of her new head of Creature Resources.

The topaz changeling buzzed over. “Yes, commander?”

“It looks like the uniforms for Canter and Trot Company finally arrived,” Squelch informed one of the recent additions to her command staff. “Make sure that they get to Captains Hussar and Triton. Also, Chief Channel Lock will want to know about these pulse cannons. She’s been waiting all week for them.”

“Understood, commander. Is there anything else you need?”

“Not right now, June; thank you.”

The changeling mare nodded and flitted away to perform her assigned tasks. Squelch watched the drone leave, her mind still marveling at the notion that she’d allowed herself to actually hire a changeling as part of her crew―let alone seven. One of them was even the new commander of Gallop Company, which the unicorn had felt only fitting, given who it was that had previously filled the role as the leader of the unit with that namesake.

The hardest part there had been finding three BattleSteed pilots who didn’t mind taking their orders from a former ComSpark soldier…

Squelch’s comlink beeped. “Go ahead.”

“The Changeling Ambassador is here to see you, commander.” Came the announcement from her interim head of security, Lieutenant Anzac. Blood Chit was still convalescing; reluctantly. Had it been up to the pegasus, he would have been back performing his duties weeks ago, but Squelch wouldn’t hear of it. By her order, the crimson stallion wasn’t allowed to set hoof on the DropShip until he’d been officially cleared by the doctor overseeing his recovery.

According to the hospital, three bribe attempts had already been made to try and secure an early release.

Squelch tried not to make it sound evident that she was rolling her eyes when she heard the title that was given by the security pony, “Send him up, lieutenant; thank you.”

By the time the lift doors to the bridge opened―as there were far too many levels on the massive DropShip to make stairs practical―the sage unicorn was sitting in her command chair. She glanced over at the sound of the new arrival stepping out onto the deck and flashed her guest a broad grin. “What do you think?” She asked, gesturing around the sprawling command deck that was easily ten times the size of the cramped bridge of the Zathura, and staffed by just about ten times the crew as well.

Slipshod flashed the mare a lopsided smile. “I think it’s just a tad uninspired to have named it the Galloway II. Besides, isn’t it bad luck to name a ship after one that was destroyed or something?”

“Ah, but technically it wasn’t that Galloway that was destroyed. It was the Zathura!” She countered primly. “I liked the old name better anyway; and the only reason I changed it was to avoid getting dinged by ComSpark. But that’s not a problem anymore now that it’s under new management.

“Besides, it’s my ship and I can name it whatever I want,” Squelch finished, sticking out her tongue playfully at the changeling stallion.

“Fair point,” he conceded. The newly-minted ‘Ambassador of the Changeling Conclave’ spared a moment to look around the bridge. For a DropShip that belonged to a mercenary company which had yet to even embark on its first mission, it seemed to be really busy. Though, Slipshod supposed, it likely took a great deal of work to build such a large organization from the ground up. As he understood it, it was technically more accurate to refer to the Rayleigh’s Irregulars as a mercenary battalion, given the numbers they boasted.

Though, now that he thought about it, “Why aren’t you changing the name back to the Steel Coursers then?”

“Because the Irregulars have a much better reputation overall now.” Squelch answered simply, shrugging. “They participated in a few larger campaigns and were never officially blacklisted by the Mercenary Review Board.”

“I thought that the changelings had agreed to let the MRB be replaced? Nacht and Victoria want something that’s not infested with unreformed ComSpark agents.”

“It’s in the works, yeah,” she confirmed, nodding, “but nothing’s been finalized yet. Even when it is, my understanding is that pretty much all of the records from the old MRB are going to be imported to whatever they end up calling the new organization. Which will mean that the Steel Coursers will still have a pretty big black mark.”

“I’m sure they’d erase it if you asked.” Slipshod pointed out helpfully.

“Oh, they definitely would,” the unicorn agreed, “but that would probably look even more suspicious. A lot of organizations would probably still have records of the blacklisting and wonder what kind of backdoor deal the Coursers made to get it removed. It just looks sketchy at a glance, and that’s usually enough for a prospective client to move on to the next candidate for a contract.

“It’s easier just to keep the name we have now. None of the shenanigans we got up to with the Disciples seems to have made it onto the official record thanks to the HyperSpark blackout, and we also have positively glowing reviews from the heads of the Pony Commonwealth and the Federated Moons. Thera also put in a good word on behalf of the Combine. You can’t buy that kind of prestige!”

Slipshod did have to concede that the mare was making some good points where the difference in the reputations of the former and current companies were concerned. Though he could quite keep himself from grinning in response to her last comment. “Have you tried? Even after all of this,” he waved a hoof around the bridge of the DropShip, “you can’t tell me that you’ve put a serious dent in that line of credit Twilight gave you.”

“You’d be surprised. I’d say that, all told, I’ve cashed in about three quarters of the billion C-bits that Twilight promised us for the job.”

“Three quarters?!” Slipshod blurted out the number. “That’s how much this ship costs?”

“Don’t be silly, of course not,” Squelch admonished the other stallion, “this ship was only four hundred million. But I also requisitioned two lances of assault BattleSteeds, four heavy lances, two medium, and a light lance. Also half a squadron of aerospace fighters. Also the fleet of support vehicles for salvage and recovery operations after a battle. Along with enough parts to keep all of them in good working order for at least six months of active operations.

“This outfit has an operating budget of nearly a hundred million C-bits a year now.”

The changeling was stunned into silence at the revelation. He’d always seen the idea of a billion C-bits as being more money than could reasonably be spent in a lifetime, even by a creature driven to excess. Yet Squelch had managed to blow through nearly every bit of her latest windfall in three months putting her new operation together.

Well, admittedly the term ‘blow through’ was a little misleading. It wasn’t like the unicorn had nothing to show for her spending―as evidenced by the massive DropShip he was currently standing in. And she had assembled an entire battalion of some of the most powerful and advanced BattleSteeds the galaxy had ever seen thanks to her access to both ComSpark and Dragon Clan resources. The Irregulars were certainly going to be a force to be reckoned with, Slipshod imagined.

“Impressive. I assume you’re not going to be securing funding by escorting convoys?”

Squelch let out an amused laugh. “Hardly! Actually, Triton was ‘kind’ enough to provide us with a list of systems in the Periphery where other large competing raiding outfits were based.” She informed him. “I figure we’ll be able to collect more than enough worthwhile salvage to keep us in the black hitting those bases.”

“You’re probably right.” Slipshod conceded, even as he winced slightly at the news of the unicorn mare’s intended destination. The Periphery was a long way from Equus. It would take her ship months just to get there. “Any idea when you’ll make it back this way?”

It was the mare’s turn to sober up slightly now. “Probably about nine months from the time we depart.” The pair were silent as they both digested the time that they’d soon be apart. Squelch was the one to break it, tentatively offering, “...You can still come with us. I could give you Gallop Company? I don’t even think Tityus would mind being replaced if he knew I was slotting you in. He’d probably insist! Gallop Lead is a nearly brand new Ursa―it’s a Dragon Clan design that I think you’ll―”

“Squelch.”

The unicorn stopped her pitch. She nodded, not needing the changeling to say any more than that. They’d had this discussion before. A few times, actually. Each time, they ended up agreeing that they each had to go their separate ways―no, that wasn’t quite right. The two of them weren’t ‘splitting up’, or anything like that. They were still officially ‘together’―if only in spirit and not in any legally-binding sense. It was just that they understood that they could do the most good for the galaxy in different ways…and in different places.

There wasn’t anything for Squelch to do on Equus. She didn’t have the talents or skills that the changelings needed. However, if she was out and about in the galaxy with a few dozen ‘Steeds at her command, there were all sorts of ways that she could help other creatures. Such as the pirate extermination endeavors she was planning to undertake once she finally had her mercenary outfit in order.

Meanwhile, Slipshod’s place was on Equus with the other changelings. Out with her, he was just one more ‘Steed pilot fighting raiders. Not to belittle the contribution he’d make, but the sage mare already had three dozen of those on her ship. Pragmatically, he wasn’t going to be of any extraordinary value to the Irregulars, whatever his personal value to her might be.

But on Equus…

Not every changeling had reformed in the aftermath of Chrysalis’ death. Comparatively few any had, actually. At least at first. Most had been inclined to simply withdraw from the fighting and seclude themselves, after a fashion. There’d been more than a few incidents of ‘replacement’ found since ComSpark’s official surrender. Fortunately this seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Still, it was understood among the occupation forces that venturing outside of areas of Equus which had been certified as ‘secured’ was a dangerous prospect. Efforts were being made to reform as many changelings as possible, but Equus was host to a rather significant changeling population, so it was going to take a lot of time to get to them all and convince them that it was in their best interests to renounce the way of life their former queen had taught them.

Slipshod could do that. He’d not only managed to fully Reform himself, but he had shown other changelings the way as well. And while the stallion wasn’t quite so foolhardy as to try and take on converting every other changeling in the galaxy himself, he was still something of a living ‘nexus’ for that change. As the foremost ‘expert’ on Friendship and specifically on how it related to changeling Reformation, Slipshod’s counsel and advice was heavily sought after by his ever-expanding cadre of Reformers, or changeling ‘life coaches’, or whatever it was they were being called. Coming up with an official title hadn’t really been much of a priority.

Which was to say nothing of his other responsibilities on Equus as the provisional representative of the recently founded Changeling Conclave. As his title suggested, while Slipshod had vehemently refused any sort of appointment to a true position of direct ‘leadership’ in the Conclave, he’d been at a loss to explain why he shouldn’t be their representative to the other major powers, especially given that he had an already established relationships with a few of their leaders already. Twilight had personally vouched for him among the Dragon Clans―at least the ones that would listen to her over Smolder, at any rate.

This endorsement had had something of a domino effect where Victoria and Nacht were concerned. They needed a point of contact with the changelings as well, and figured they might as well use the ‘ling that the Clans were. So it was that Slipshod found himself the de facto ambassador of his race. At least for now.

He couldn’t be that ambassador, or the advisor on Reformation for other changelings, half a galaxy away. He had to remain here. It was where he could do the greatest good, for both the galaxy and other changelings.

Both of them knew this wasn’t how their lives would need to be forever though. Someday the changelings could be trusted to stand on their own without him having to hold their hoof. When that day finally came, Squelch would likely still be out trying to mend the galaxy one exterminated raider camp at a time, and she would always be open to welcoming new ‘Steed pilots onto her ship. They would be together again for real someday. Just not right now.

“So what brings you by?” Squelch asked. “Not that I’m saying you need a reason to visit,” she hastily added, smiling at her lover. Both of their respective duties tended to keep the pair rather busy. They rarely got to see much of each other until evening when they retired to the apartment they shared.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” he admitted, smiling at the unicorn, “I’m here to ask if you wanted to be my ‘plus one’ at the wedding next week?”

Squelch raised a surprised brow, but then her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “...If this is your way of coyly asking me to marry you again―”

“Nononono,” Slipshod assured her, only later realizing that he might have sounded a little too vehement while doing it, which he then fumbled in an attempt to correct. “I mean, not that I never would, because―well…” He closed his mouth, took a deep breath, and started again.

“Nacht and Victoria’s wedding,” he clarified, finally. The unicorn’s expression was even more perplexed now, prompting the changeling to elaborate. “I know: absurdly short notice for a ‘state wedding’, or whatever. They were actually trying to work out exactly where they could have the ceremony that wouldn’t ‘offend’ each others’ vassals one way or the other. I think they were going to pick a world on the border between their two realms. Either way, they expected it to be a while before any date was set. A lot of political stuff to work out merging their governments and such.

“However…” Slipshod cleared his throat rather noisily, flashing the unicorn a knowing look. “Those two haven't exactly been ‘celebate’ this whole time, and well…”

Squelch’s hoof went to her mouth, covering an amused smile. “Oh, goodness…”

“Yup. Foal on the way. Victoria found out a few days ago.” The stallion confirmed. “So, they figured that it was best to tie the knot now rather than wait―partly for political reasons and partly because those two are just fed up with waiting anyway.”

“‘Political reasons’?” Squelch prompted.

“They’re trying to merge their realms. While the foal’s obviously both of theirs, it looks a lot better from a succession standpoint if it’s born while they’re married. ‘Bastard’ foals can cause succession issues; especially if there’s other family somewhere that’s feeling a little too ambitious for their own good. As it is, some of the more resistant Federation Houses might insist on not recognizing the foal as a ‘legitimate heir’ of Nacht’s line just to have an excuse not to merge with the Commonwealth when he dies.”

“I assume they’ll have other foals down the line…” she pointed out with an annoyed snort directed at the hypothetical nobles.

“Oh, I don’t doubt that. And those Houses would have no choice but to recognize those other foals…which would also cause a problem. Because the Commonwealth Houses will recognize the eldest foal as the heir, while the Federation might only recognize a younger sibling that was born in wedlock. Bam: civil war.”

“I hate noble politics,” the mare grumbled, earning a sympathetic nod from her beau.

“Me too. Nacht and Victoria aren’t too thrilled about the possible implications either. Hence the shotgun wedding. On the bright side: Equus is pretty firmly in the realm of ‘neutral ground’, so neither side’s detractors can feel the other side got preferential treatment regarding the location of the wedding. So that might have worked out okay in the end.

“To help mollify the more powerful nobles that are going to feel insulted that they weren’t in attendance for the wedding, they’re going to hold additional ‘mock’ ceremonies on each of their capital worlds later. By then they might even be parading around the new heir. Who knows?

“Anyway, that’s why there’s a wedding now. Want to go?”

Squelch narrowed her gaze at the stallion. “Wait a minute…why did you get an invitation and I’m the ‘plus one’?”

“Um, excuse me?” Slipshod puffed out his chest and gestured regally towards the golden sash draped across his chest. “Ambassador; remember? I’m kind of a big deal now.” He grinned broadly at the much more sour-looking unicorn mare. “It would be rude to host a wedding in someling’s capital and not invite its more prominent figures!”

She gave an exaggerated eye roll at the display, but couldn’t quite keep herself from smiling at the changeling regardless. “Fair enough. Yes, I’ll go; obviously.”

“Great!” The stallion then hesitated briefly before venturing: “...I don’t suppose you could cover the cost of the gift? The Changeling Conclave is still kind of working out how it’s going to finance itself―it’s only been around for a month, after all―and so I haven’t technically been paid yet…?”

While the sage mare’s eyes might have been narrowed at the changeling, Slipshod was relieved to sense no actual annoyance behind her gaze. Though there was a fair amount of mischievousness which put him slightly on edge. “I think I can loan you the money,” she offered, “but, I do expect to be paid back,” she emphasized. The stallion raised an expectant brow. “In backrubs. Starting tonight,” the mare grinned.

“...For how many nights after that?”

“The Galloway II is scheduled to depart in another six weeks, so…forty-ish?”

“I think that can be arranged.” Slipshod grinned back at her.

“Good,” she nodded sharply before adding, “and I expect them to be ‘Ambassador’-quality back rubs, Mister ‘Big Deal’!”

“Done!” The changeling stallion leaned over and the pair exchanged a quick peck before he returned to the lift. “I’ll see you tonight, love!” As the doors began to close, he flashed another grin. “It’s still your night to cook though!”

The doors sealed shut before the unicorn could get off a retort, leaving her to reconsider if she shouldn’t have made a different demand of the stallion…

Captain-General Stellar Nova of the Our Worlds League stepped past the pair of guardponies who were holding open the doors leading into the opulent lounge located in the wing of the palace reserved for his personal quarters. The doors then sealed closed behind him, as his staff was aware that any meetings he took in this particular room were to be given the utmost discretion. As was typical of most of the other guests the unicorn had previously entertained in this lounge, a stunningly attractive mare was waiting for him within, stretched languidly across a suede chaise sofa. The saffron red pegasus mare smiled as she saw the stallion enter, though she made no move to get up to receive him.

Indeed, it was the unicorn stallion who paid her deference, coming to a stop before the mare and bowing low on bent forelegs. “General Charon, it pleases me to no end that you arrived safely. When word reached me about the fate of Her Majesty, I―”

“Silence.”

The stallion’s mouth slammed shut, making an audible sound. The unicorn swallowed nervously, keeping his head looking down lest he incur the wrath of the senior ranking officer of what remained of not just of the ComSpark WarShip Fleet, but of the Changeling Hive itself.

While it was absurd to think that any official rules for the succession of leadership had ever been fashioned―for to do so was to doubt the eternal might and majesty of Her Royal Highness Queen Chrysalis―the changeling who had assumed Stellar Nova’s identity in the wake of his assassination could not envision a more logical choice to assume the mantle of leadership of the hive other than it’s most senior drone. So it had been that when word reached him through the recently restored HyperSpark Generator Network that General Charon was taking her fleet to Aether, he’d made the immediate private decision to cede authority to her. While it would be problematic for himself to step down as the Captain-General without raising all sorts of questions among the highest echelons of leadership in his government, Stellar had floated the idea of the general assuming the guise of a noble mare whom he could ‘wed’ as his consort. General Charon would then be able to rule the League through him.

He’d been quite relieved when the general seemed to find merit to the idea. The fact was that the changeling impersonating the late captain-general had been the next best thing to terrified at the prospect of running the Our Worlds League without guidance from Equus. That wasn’t what he had trained for! His mission had been to assume the identity of Stellar Nova and then act in accordance with the instructions he received through ComSpark. Now the queen was dead, ComSpark was in complete disarray, and he’d been doing everything he could not to panic ever since!

It was all good now though. The general was here, and she would know exactly what to do―

Stellar Nova’s thoughts were interrupted by the sudden―and violent―bisection of his brain by a steel pick being plunged into the back of his skull by another changeling. The late captain-general stiffened briefly before collapsing to the polished marble floor of the lounge. Above him stood the real General Charon, sneering as she looked down at the corpse. She’d sensed the sniveling drone’s fear and timidity the moment she’d entered the palace, posing as the mareservant for the captain-general’s most recent ‘guest’. How such an ineffectual drone could have been selected for such an assignment, the general would never know.

Perhaps the rot at the core of the hive had run deeper than even she’d suspected.

She glanced up at the saffron pegasus mare, who had also dropped her disguise, revealing Charon’s Chief Intelligence Officer, Colonel Lumen in their place. The changeling stallion wore an equally offended expression as he looked at the body.

“Signal our agents to take their assigned roles at the earliest safe opportunity,” Charon said, turning towards the nearby decanter as her junior officer did just that. She poured herself a drink and sipped at the amber rum leisurely. It had been a long and arduous journey here from Equus, and she had exhausted her shipboard supply of liquor several weeks ago while alternating between nights of heavy drinking and fits of misdirected rage as she contemplated the many follies of their late queen.

A couple of seconds later, she heard the briefest sound of muffled scuffling occurring outside the doors. Replacing all of her soon-to-be guardsmares with loyal drones had been a no-brainer. A few of the government’s more senior cabinet members and military commanders would be receiving similar ‘retirements’ in the next hour or two, she was sure. By morning, Charon would have undisputed control over the government of the Our Worlds League.

With that, Step One in her plan would reach completion.

Now it was just a matter of figuring out what Step Two was supposed to be...

Establishing a safe haven for the surviving members of the Hive had been of paramount concern, of course. There’d been a few options in that regard. Leaving settled space entirely had been right out, of course. Without victims upon which to feed, her crew would have starved to death before making it barely out of the Periphery. The general had seriously considered establishing herself as something of a Warlord among those backwater star nations. With her fleet, there was little doubt she could have carved out quite the sizable empire, with plenty of creatures on which to feed and sustain her followers.

However, the technological and industrial disparity between the Sphere and the Periphery would mean that she’d never be able to build up her forces beyond what they currently were. Over time, attrition and time would wear down her fleet, as they’d no longer have access to substantive shipyards, or even the economic capacity to build ones from the ground up. In a matter of decades, she’d be no more powerful a force to reckon with than a pirate cartel.

No, she had to remain in the Sphere, where there was the technology and the industrial capacity to not only preserve her valuable fleet of WarShips, but to perhaps even expand it. Which left only one reasonable choice: The Our Worlds League. It had already been infiltrated by changelings to work on behalf of ComSpark, and the propaganda to that effect was already in full swing. It would take hardly any effort at all to push public opinion against that damnable ‘Federated Commonwealth’ which was in its nascency, following the marriage of its rulers.

Efforts would also soon be underway to influence the Kirin Confederation to come over to their side, now that their two nations had effectively been ‘hemmed in’ by the new alliance. Especially with rumors swirling around that the Combine might soon be throwing in with the lovebirds.

Their only saving grace at the moment was the fact that it seemed the Dragon Clans were not entirely giving up on the notion of carving out little realms for themselves to satisfy their greed. Charon could only hope that the reptiles would keep the attention away from the League and her efforts to fortify their borders against what was surely going to be an inevitable incursion. The general could see the clear inclination towards the formation of a renewed Celestia League―or at least something similar. When that came about, the Our Worlds League would doubtlessly be annexed by the rest of the Sphere.

Charon intended for them to be ready for them when that happened.

No, the general corrected herself, she was going to be more than ready to repel an invasion, she was going to prepare the forces of the League for a counter-invasion! Charon couldn’t be sure of exactly how much time she would have, but the changeling mare intended to use every available second of it to get her forces ready.

There was going to be a new ‘Celestia League’ alright, but it was going to be one with changelings at the top!

And not those thrice-damned ‘Reformed’ Changelings either! Just the thought of those abominations made Charon sick to her stomach. She shuddered, suddenly losing the taste for the rum she was drinking. She needed something to settle her stomach.

The changeling activated the intercom next to the decanter. “Send up some snacks,” she said in a register that was a perfect match for the captain-general.

“Right away, sir.” A mare replied.

It astonished even Charon that her late queen had managed to fuck up so thoroughly by the numbers. Clearly Chrysalis had grown complacent and hadn’t conceived of the sort of threat that could be posed by the Dragon Clans or the other major players in the Sphere. She’d been so convinced of her invulnerability after so many centuries of not being challenged, that she’d forgotten what it meant to be truly decisive and ruthless. She’d wanted to ‘toy’ with her prey in order to derive enjoyment out of it.

The general let out a positively derisive snort.

She’d paid for it in the end though, obviously. Charon would not let Chrysalis’ death go unheeded as a warning of what fate awaited leaders who allowed themselves to become too preoccupied with satisfying personal tastes at the expense of what was best for the hive.

The changeling mare’s ear twitched in the direction of the door as she heard a muffled gasp followed by a brief scuffle. A moment later, the doors opened just long enough for a body to be thrown inside. A young earth pony mare dressed in a prim black and white uniform of one of the palace servants slid along the polished marble surface. She came to a stop by Charon’s pocked hooves with a groan. Her eyes fluttered open. There was a sharp intake of air from the mare as she beheld the sight of the recently slain captain-general.

The mare likely would have screamed in horror as she beheld the fresh corpse if given the opportunity. However, before she could, the general grabbed her up in her telekinesis and hauled the mare off the floor, prompting the restrained mare to utter a surprised yelp. The young attendant’s eyes widened in shock and terror as she caught sight of the changeling standing before her. Again she looked as if she would let out a terrified screech in an attempt to summon help, but Charon’s jaws clamping around her throat stifled whatever might have wanted to come out.

The general held her teeth in place upon the earth pony’s neck for several long seconds, feeling the throbbing pulse of blood through her carotid…carrying the paralyzing venom that Charon was injecting throughout the trembling body held in her magical field. The mare’s mouth quivered sporadically, but no sounds came out. Her eyes were opened wide with terror as the pony finally recognized her newfound helpless state.

Charon let the limp body fall unceremoniously to the floor. The mare’s mouth continued to spasm in mute screams, her eyes straining to watch the changeling looming over her with a predatory look on her face.

The general pushed the mare’s fears and anxiety aside, rifling through the servant’s emotions until she finally found what she’d been after: her love. Her desperate desire to return to the safety of her parents, elder brother, and her newborn foal waiting for her back at home with her wife. Charon latched onto the love this mare had for her family…and drew it out of her. The voyage here had been a long one, and they’d not been afforded the opportunity to properly provision their WarShips before fleeing the Faust System.

This was the first decent meal that Charon had had in months, and she was content to thoroughly gorge herself on the absolutely delectable love that this mare had been privy to throughout her life. The changeling scoured her meal's psyche for every last iota of love…and then withdrew.

General Charon let out a satisfied sigh, her eyes nearly rolling up into the back of her head in ecstasy. Even a mare of her lofty rank had rarely been in a position to take in so much raw emotion directly from the source. It was an orgasmic experience, to be sure!

Her expression soured briefly as she glanced back at the floor and beheld the vacant…thing still breathing at her hooves. A disquieting shudder worked its way through the changeling’s body before she retrieved the blade she had used earlier to remove the captain-general and judiciously perforated the servant’s skull a few times to ensure that it was fully dispatched.

Charon shook herself once more to remove her revulsion and turned once more to confront her Chief Intelligence Officer. “Have this cleaned up. Then summon the rest of my flag officers. The HyperSpark Generator Network is being restored, which means that news of what happened on Equus will be getting out soon. We need to reach as many ComSpark agents as possible before the others can! We need to stop them from spreading that ‘Reformation’ crap any further than they already have,” she insisted with a disgusted sneer.

“Do you want me to create a disinformation campaign about what happened on Equus?” Lumen offered, doing his best to hide the drool that had worked its way onto his chin as he’d watched his superior devour such an opulent meal directly in front of his own famished self. There would be time for him to eat later, the colonel knew, and strove to remain composed. “We might be able to foment some significant unrest in the Commonwealth and Federation through our existing agents. They’re both very new leaders,” he pointed out, “they haven’t had time to cement their popularity with their subjects.”

Charon briefly considered the idea, but then dismissed it. “That doesn’t solve our biggest problems right now. Besides, I suspect that Twilight wasn’t in control of as many of the Dragon Clans as she would have liked. The invasion had to have hurt her plans as much as it did ours.” Lumen nodded in agreement, as he’d been the one to point out how counterproductive the dragons’ strategies had been if their objective really had been to take Equus.

“Destabilizing the other Successor States might let the Clans get the ball rolling on their invasions again. Right now our enemies are fighting each other. I want to keep it that way. Besides, it should also keep their attention away from what’s happening here in the League.”

“What about the Confederation?”

“They’re who I want us to look at for the time being,” the general agreed. “We’ll need ‘allies’, and the kirin are our best bet. It shouldn’t take a lot to get them to become more wary of the Federation, especially after they grow closer with the Commonwealth. Get a few plans written up for me by the end of the week.

“In the meantime, let’s focus on consolidating our hold on the League. Schedule a ‘planning conference’ or something. Get as many of the major Houses to Aether as possible. I want them all replaced with our agents. Every last one. No more of Chrysalis’ ‘puppet master’ bullshit. We don’t have time for those kinds of games.

“I want to know that we can count on every resource we have when we need it!”

The colonel bowed his head in acknowledgement. “Yes, general…” The changeling stallion paused, considering. Then his lips spread into a slight smile as he corrected his choice of title. “I mean: yes…My Queen…”

Charon was briefly confused by her subordinate’s last statement, but then the implication behind it finally hit her. She was the highest ranking survivor of the ComGuard that she was aware of. Even if it turned out that she wasn’t, and a more senior general or admiral turned up later, it wasn’t like Charon felt inclined to bow her head to any other changeling. Especially one who'd been appointed based on Chrysalis' idea of competence and skill.

Barely surviving one inept leader was more than enough for a lifetime, thank-you-very-much!

In which case, why should she be content with remaining a mere general? The position was vacant, and Charon suspected that just about any changeling who had the question put to them would be inclined to agree that she was the obvious choice to replace the late, not-so-great, Queen Chrysalis. Any drone who didn’t share such a view on the matter could be properly dealt with in time.

The hive was in disarray. Drones were confused and afraid, unsure of who and where to turn to in these perilous times for changelings. They needed a queen to lead them, not just a ‘general’. And lead them, Charon would; into a glorious future with changelings ascending to their proper place once more in dominion over the galaxy!

She would need to play the part of the good ‘Captain-General Stellar Nova’ for a time, yes. The forces which had invaded Equus had been pruned back considerably, yes, but they were far from impotent. Just like her own. Until she had all of her agents in place in the leadership of the Our Worlds League, Charon dared not to reveal herself as anything other than its proper unicorn leader. Someday, though, maybe it would be possible for them to finally come out of the shadows and reveal their natures to the world.

The changeling mare grudgingly admitted that she might even soon find herself having those damnable traitors back on Equus to thank for that. Once the galaxy became acclimated to the existence of ‘real life dopples’, it would be less of a shock to reveal that there was a second ‘kind’ of changeling; little different from there being different kinds of ponies. Maybe Charon could even play it off in such a way, not letting on that they posed any serious threat to the other creatures of the galaxy until it was too late.

Obviously the Princesses and the Dragon Clans would know better, yes, but the rest of the Sphere already ‘knew’ the Clans were murderous monsters who couldn’t be trusted, and if Charon played her cards right even the alicorns might not be able to move against her. Not if she at least feigned interest in ‘accepting Friendship’. She might even be able to play for the time she needed to prepare for her strike at the rest of the Sphere. Their adherence to Harmony wouldn’t allow them to make the first―unprovoked―hostile move against her hive.

Ooh…Charon did like the sound of that: her hive…

“Long live the queen!” Lumen said, more loudly and emphatically this time. From just beyond the door could be heard a pair of voices repeating the affirmation.

“Yes…” Charon whispered, relishing the future she was envisioning for the―for her―hive. Her lips spread out in a wide, hungry smile, “...Long live the queen,” she purred.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 1: Target of Opportunity

“House Raptor?”

“Nope.”

“House Cheval?”

“It’s taboo on Maresailles, so no.”

“House Satagee?”

“Yes, actually. Both of them, in fact.”

“Both, huh? Right. House Roan?”

“Uh...no; but also yes.”

“What? Okay, you’re going to have to explain that one.”

Slipshod chuckled to himself, idly pulling at the fiberglass fishing pole that was cradled loosely in his hooves. He’d never actually gone fishing before in his life, but when he’d learned the details of this particular operation, and where he’d be spending a few hours with nothing better to do, he’d decided that now was as good a time as any to give it a try. One of the mare’s working in maintenance back on the Galloway frequently spoke about how much she enjoyed sitting on the dock with her siblings and had even offered to loan him her rod for the mission.

The stallion had to admit: so far he didn’t see the appeal. It seemed that all he was doing was just sort of...sitting here. Which is what he’d have been doing anyway. Only now he was doing it while holding an eight foot long pole.

On the other hoof, the maintenance tech had also mentioned that gratuitous quantities of beer had also been present during her own outings. Slipshod was the sort of professional who didn’t drink while on the job, so he’d decided to forgo that particular aspect. He now found himself wondering if that might have been an integral part of this whole ‘fishing’ thing after all…

“Well, it turns out that House Roan doesn’t technically have a ‘daughter’,” he responded over the communications device wrapped around his ear, as the mare that he was conversing with was sequestered almost five kilometers north of his position in order to give him advance warning of any units that might come their way from the local garrison. “So, no, ‘she’ doesn’t have her teets pierced. However, there was a piercing on something else; so it’s up to you how you want to count that one.”

“You’re kidding,” she chortled. Then there was a brief pause on the line as a thought seemed to occur to her. “Hold on, wait, how would you know unless―you didn’t!”

The stallion couldn’t help but chuckle at her obvious surprise. “Hey, I will have you know that, despite those vicious rumors Squelch spreads to the contrary, I am an honorable and respectful stallion of good breeding!” Even as the earth pony spoke the words, his lips were spread in a broad grin that could honestly likely be heard through the mic. “So when I promise a mare a good time, I see the deed through! Even if it turns out that she might not...quite...have actually been a mare.”

“Hahaha!”

“Hey, it would have been pretty awkward of me to have bailed at that point. We’d been fooling around for nearly an hour by the time we got far enough for me to discover the trap.” Even though the mare on the other end of his comlink wasn’t able to see it, Slip still shrugged out of habit as he continued to tease the line a little bit more. After nearly three hours without so much as a nibble, the stallion was beginning to wonder if there were actually any fish in this lake...or even on this planet for that matter. He made a mental note to ask Squelch when they got back on board the DropShip. “At that point, it was entirely my fault; so I just had to swallow my pride and carry on.”

“Oh? And was that all you swallowed that night?”

“A gentlecolt doesn’t kiss and tell,” he insisted primly, though still grinning broadly, “at least not without somepony buying him a bottle of Maker’s Cutie Mark. Seventeen years old, to be specific, if you’re interested in hearing more about that encounter.” Slip pulled up the pole and looked at the bare hook. He frowned at the sight of the wormless curved metal. He’d rebaited it four times already, and he’d made extra certain this last time that the worm wasn’t somehow just wriggling off of it.

Either there was something in this lake eating his bait without so much as twitching the line, or the acidity was concerningly far on the low end of the pH scale. Though that would explain the faint odor in the air that reminded him of the breakfast meal ration packs that were on the ‘risky’ side of their expiration date. In any case, it was hardly like he had anything better to do, so the stallion brought the rod in and went through the process of putting a worm on the hook for a fifth time.

“For now, list another House whose daughters you’ve always wondered about.”

“You could be making all of this up, for all I know,” the mare on the channel with him pointed out.

“I could be,” Slipshod acknowledged, “but you can check the Galloway’s travel logs and find out that we’ve been to every planet with those Houses you’ve listed; and I know you can’t account for my whereabouts during every night we were there.” He paused for a brief moment to let her digest those particular facts, and then ventured in a detached tone, “I mean...if you’re really worried about whose bed I’m sneaking off to while we’re planetside, you could always just keep me all safe and sound in yours…”

“Ha! Talk about needing a bottle of booze―or six,” the mare responded in a tone that wasn’t quite derisive; but the stallion smiled nonetheless.

“What? The heaters on the ship have been known to operate below their rated BTUs; I’m just letting you know there’s an alternative to raiding the linen closet for every spare blanket when that happens. My intentions are entirely honorable!”

“Uh huh. Squelch used a lot of adjectives to describe you when I came aboard. For some reason, ‘honorable’ wasn’t on the list...there was ‘bastard’, ‘gelding’, ‘letch’, and ‘misogynist’. I guess she must have just left out the H’s for some reason…”

“Lies, and slander, and slanderous lies,” Slipshod quipped, his smile waning slightly as the mare listed off words that he had little doubt were genuinely used to describe him by his ex-wife. He never contested them, as he was fully aware that he’d earned each and every one of those adjectives. Much to the dismay of a few ponies on the ship, the stallion didn’t have a similar list of his own. In fact, he knew full well that there wasn’t a pony alive who could honestly say that he’d ever uttered a disparaging word about his ex.

Because he had never done so. Slipshod was a lot of things, and not all of them complimentary; but one fault he didn’t have was that he didn't spread malicious lies just to spite somepony.

And while the earth pony might not have a list of insults that he threw around regarding the mare who commanded their little mercenary outfit, he was careful to avoid any compliments either. He’d been the cause of their falling out, yes, but he was also aware that Squelch was a good enough mare to give him another chance if she thought that he was willing to make a genuine effort to change. There’d been more than one occasion where the two of them had drunk a little more than they should have after getting a particularly nice payout and things had ended up back in her quarters.

After the inevitable ‘frollicing’, the pillow talk started, and the musing about giving their marriage another go…

Eventually they both sobered up, took a cold shower, and remembered why the two of them were much better off as co-workers than spouses and everything returned to business as usual. Which was exactly how it needed to be.

The stallion shook away the creeping thoughts and the feelings that they brought along with them. “Now, come on, make with the House names already, I have a list long enough to keep us going for hours―” an alarm sounded from the interface on Slipshod’s left fetlock. He glanced down at the display, though he already knew what the notification was alerting him to. After all, he’d only set the single parameter. “Oop, never mind. Break’s over, Val!”

The stallion didn’t even wait for an acknowledgement as he tossed the useless fishing pole into the hatch that he’d been leaning back against and vaulted in after it. He grabbed a lever on his way down and hydraulic actuators hissed as the heavy portal was slowly lowered closed until it finally sealed shut. Slipshod landed on the piloting couch below and his hooves began to dance over the consoles in front of him, depressing buttons and flipping switches in a well-practiced sequence that he was now only barely conscious of performing.

Lights blinked on, and a low humming filled the cockpit, fading quickly into the background as an orchestra of beeps and chimes all sounded off to announce the activation of various other systems. The ever-detached cool drone of a synthetic mare’s voice began to make its usual announcements:

REACTOR: ONLINE.

SENSORS: ONLINE.

WEAPONS SYSTEMS: ONLINE.

ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL.

The golden stallion snatched his nearby helmet from where it was hanging and slipped it over his head before making himself comfortable on the piloting couch. Laying on his stomach atop the padded surface, the earth pony ensured that his harness was secured to keep him firmly in place during the imminent scuffle. Then he set his hind hooves into the steering pedals to his rear as his forehooves gripped the weapon control yokes in front of him.

He grinned. “Alright, babe; time to earn our C-bits! Up and at ‘em!”

Ginger Snap stifled yet another in what was becoming a genuinely embarrassingly long line of yawns. The cinnamon mare frowned as she noticed the mildly annoyed look from the stallion next to her in the turret. It wasn’t like it was her fault that she was yawning! She was getting plenty of rest, but these long drives through the Western Caldera were just so damned boring.

“You sure you don’t want some coffee?” The tank’s commander asked of his gunner.

“That depends. Are you going to actually stop this thing when I have to use the little filly’s room in an hour?”

“Nope.”

“Then, no. I’m fine,” she grumbled. Not that she for a moment believed that coffee would have done anything to help with the preeminent cause of her yawning. A point further demonstrated by yet another of the phenomena, on the heels of the last. “I should have brought some vids to watch.”

“What makes you think I would have let you watch 'em?” Her superior inquired, casting her another cool glance.

“Oh, come on, LT! We make this run every week, and the most dangerous thing we’ve ever come across is a rock lizard―a baby rock lizard. You didn’t even notice we’d run it over until I pointed its guts out to you on the treads when we got back to base!” The mare protested. “I get that these convoys require escorts as part of ‘regulations’, but we both know there’s no practical point to them.

“Canopy doesn’t have any political insurgents, the criminal element isn’t involved in anything above unlicensed gambling and pickpocketing, and besides all that: how is anypony going to be able to offload a thousand metric tons of LRMs? Nopony’s going to try anything! So what if I pass the ride watching some vids instead of looking through the sights at, oh let’s just take a look, eh?”

The mare leaned forward and pressed her face into the tank’s gunnery sights, slowly rotating the turret and listing off everything she saw. “Rocks...rocks...more rocks," she ignored the heavy sigh of her commanding officer and persisted in given her 'scouting report', "sulfur pool...ro―SWEET CELESTIA!”

Just as the mare was passing her gaze over the pool of water that had gathered in the pit of the dormant volcano, she witnessed the usually placid liquid surface parting as a giant metal head in the vague shape of a pony emerged, sheets of water pouring off from its sharply angled surfaces. In the back of her mind, she identified its profile as being some variant of Wild Bronco, a versatile medium-weight BattleSteed that was a common sight in all regions of the Harmony Sphere. They could be configured to support a wide array of weapons depending on the mission requirements.

However, in this specific instance, Ginger Snap was only able to identify one of the weapons that the large behemoth mounted: a large directed magical energy beam sequestered in it’s right shoulder. Given another few seconds, the tank gunner would certainly have been able to correctly identify the rest of the weapons complement as well. Unfortunately, she was not given those few seconds. Her view was quickly obscured by blinding blue light.

Thirty megasparks of coherent energy drilled into the front of the Scorpion Light Tank's turret, and nearly instantaneously flash-boiled the forward facing armor. The occupants were vaporized by the intense heat of the weapon a fraction of a second later. Then the fuel ignited and the armored vehicle exploded. Ginger Snap and her crew were dead before the rest of the convoy even realized that they were under attack.

Slipshop didn’t pause to appreciate the armored vehicle’s demise. He had additional concerns that occupied his attention. Specifically, the three other armored tracked vehicles that also served as the escorts for the munitions convoy that he had been contracted to ambush. While his forward facing directed energy weapon cycled through its recharge phase, the stallion flipped his firing controls over to the six-pack short ranged missile system mounted in the center of the Wild Bronco’s chest, teased the controls until his ‘Steed was lined up on the next tank, and fired. A half dozen smoke trails lanced outward, striking the second tank in rapid succession. Like the first target, it too evaporated in a cloud of smoke and fire as its munitions and fuel combusted.

The crews of the surviving tanks were to be commended for reacting as quickly as they did to the ambush. Likewise, their tactics were well-thought-through. Ultimately futile, given what they were up against, but they still seemed determined to make a good showing of themselves. Autocannon shells and SRMs answered for the deaths of their comrades. The BattleSteed lurched with the impacts and Slipshod was thrown against his harness as its straps kept him firmly in place.

The golden earth pony grit his teeth and used his hind hooves to tilt both pedals as far forward as they would go. The background hum of the reactor began to rapidly increase in volume as more power was demanded of it. Fifty tons of steel and ablative armor didn’t tend to react well when put up against the inalienable laws of inertia. He watched as his ‘Steed’s measured speed slowly rose, his piloting couch jostling beneath him as the four massive legs driving him forward went into action, progressing from a walk, to a trot, through a canter, and finally into a full gallop as quickly as physics and their myomer muscles would allow. Though it was less than five seconds until he was running smoothly across the caldera at a clip of sixty kilometers an hour, it felt like a small eternity as enemy autocannon shells and missiles smashed against his accelerating frame.

Slipshod teased the steering pedals as he lined up his ‘Steed with the tank that had veered left. He had a pair of small lasers that were charged and ready to fire in his left shoulder mount, but those wouldn’t be quite up to the task of cutting through a tank’s armored hide. Those were mostly reserved for lighter targets. However, when one was piloting a twelve meter tall, fifty ton, titanium equine robot, it didn’t always take actual ‘weapons’ to defeat lesser adversaries.

One of the Wild Bronco’s forehooves slammed directly on top of the Scorpion. Its turret’s supports protested for half a second, and then buckled beneath the weight of the ‘Steed, collapsing inward. Munitions stored within ruptured and detonated. Slipshod was already wheeling the ‘Steed around, noting the flashing indicator that informed him that his large magical energy weapon had completed charging back up for another shot. He kicked back on the throttle as he depressed the firing controls. The hind legs of his ‘Steed froze mid-stride, drifting over the hard-scrabble ground behind the rest of his Wild Bronco as the whole machine pivoted sharply. The beam of blue light struck out at the ground and proceeded to carve its way across the surface until it sliced across the back end of the convoy’s last remaining escort. The tank’s engine sputtered, smoked, and then set the vehicle aflame.

Slipshod kept his gaze fixed on the tank, his hoof ready to launch another volley of short ranged missiles in case it wasn’t completely out of action yet. However, the turret of the armored vehicle made no effort to rotate and target Slipshod. The stallion just watched as the top hatch popped open. A gout of fiery smoke erupted out of it, quickly settling into a broiling black column, which was then briefly interrupted by an equine form that was consumed by flames scrambling out. From within the cockpit of his ‘Steed, the stallion could hear nothing of the outside world, but he could feel the pain and the panicked desperation of the pony as he watched them wriggle and writhe atop the turret until finally falling to the ground. There they continued to twist in agony as the fire refused to be dashed by their mad thrashing.

Eventually, mercifully, they went still. Whether because they were truly dead, or had simply passed out from the excruciating pain, it was difficult to tell for certain. If it was the latter, they would surely be dead in short order anyway. In any case, it was pretty clear that the last of the convoy’s escorts were no longer a threat.

All that was left to address now were the dozen or so cargo transports and their highly volatile burdens. Those missiles, Slipshod knew, were being shipped to the garrison north of their position so that they could arm the newly constructed array of air-defense turrets there. Those turrets had been built because the planetary defense forces on Canopy were concerned that some malevolent entity had designs on putting an end to their nominal sovereignty, and they wanted to close up the last few gaps in their air coverage to keep a hostile entity from landing an invasion force.

They were quite correct, it turned out: there was somepony out there who wanted control of this world, and its very plentiful gem deposits. Specifically, the Kirin Confederation, who were eager to acquire more resource-rich territory after their most recent disaster of a campaign against the Hippogriff Combine. The Confederation now found themselves in desperate need of new sources of raw material and staging grounds for their inevitable attempt to reclaim their lost possessions.

Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Canopy, they had just become prime real estate, and an invasion force was less than a month out. Slipshod’s job was to make sure that force had the opening that they needed to land their troops. Ensuring that those air-defense batteries, designed to shoot down such an invasion before it could deploy, were without any missiles to fire at such a force did just that.

Of course, the earth pony wasn’t a monster. Just because the missiles had to be destroyed, he couldn’t see any reason the ponies driving the trucks had to go up with them.

Slipshod engaged his communications system and navigated to the frequency used by the cargo trucks whose progress had been halted by the wreckage of the first tank that he had destroyed in his surprise assault. “Canopy convoy, this is Slipshod of the Steel Coursers, under contract with the Nirik Light Pony. We’ve been hired to intercept this convoy and destroy all the cargo it’s carrying. You have exactly sixty seconds to exit your vehicles and get to a safe distance. That is all.” The stallion cut the line and set a timer. Then he took a deep breath and watched the chaos below as dozens of ponies scrambled to get out of the cargo trucks and run for cover.

The stallion waited patiently for the drivers to get clear of the blast area before using the pair of small red-hued laser cannons mounted in the shoulder of his ‘Steed to burn down the vulnerable strapped-down missiles. In addition to being the more compassionate option, it also meant that word would be passed back that he and his ‘Steed weren’t part of some random raider faction. There was at least a certain amount of professional understanding where proper mercenary companies were concerned. They were hired to do a job, and so they did the job. It was nothing personal, and rarely did the mercenaries themselves feel any sort of malice towards their targets.

After all, yesterday’s target was just as likely as not to become tomorrow’s paying client. Not this time, however. The Confederation had been savvy enough to slip in something of a ‘non-compete’ clause into this contract. It was a shame really. The Steel Coursers knew quite a bit about the coming invasion, and could have negotiated for a lot of additional C-bits from the Canopy government for a contract to help fight off the invasion. A little bit more than the additional bonus that had been paid out by the KLP to cover the ‘inconvenience’ of that non-compete clause; but there was something to be said for passing on a higher payout with a lot of associated risk, in exchange for a smaller payout that came with no additional risk.

After all: dead pilots couldn’t spend their paychecks, no matter how large they were.

Once every transport was a smoldering pile of twisted wreckage, he turned his Wild Bronco around and throttled back up to full speed. Somepony had doubtlessly gotten off a message of some sort to that garrison, and a response force was bound to show up within the hour. Slipshod intended to be well away from here and back on the Galloway by then.

“Gallop One to Peepers, op success. Back to the barn.”

“Peepers copies,” Valkyrie replied over the comm channel, “bugging out.”

The stallion flipped over from the shortwave radio to the comms suite that would allow him to communicate with their waiting DropShip. Being much further away, the signal required considerably more power, as well as a bounce off of at least one of Canopy’s local satellites. As such, despite any encryption that they might use, it couldn’t be guaranteed that what they said wouldn’t be intercepted by parties interested in making the tail end of his and Valkyrie’s mission a little more lively. “Stable, Gallop One. Bonfire’s lit; let the guests know the party can start anytime.”

Another mare’s voice crackled over his helmet’s headset, a little rougher than Val’s had been as the result of less than perfect encryption/decryption setups on both ends. There were clear comms, and there were secure comms; but there were no clear secure comms. “Ro―er, Gall―One. An―party cr―shers?”

Slipshod glanced briefly at his navmap, but saw only the pair of blue blips that represented himself and Valkyrie. While the sensor array integrated into his own Wild Bronco wouldn’t have been able to alert him to much that wasn’t already just about within visual range, his partner’s Parasprite BattleSteed had enough radar and lidar arrays mounted on it that Val could likely have heard a sparrow fart from a hundred klicks away. “That’s a negative, Stable. Things still look invite-only.”

“Underst―Retu―to the―arn. Stable―t.”

He smiled and returned to his direct line with his partner. “Squelch’s waiting at the rendezvous. Race ya?”

“Last one to the Galloway pays for the next bar crawl.”

“You’re on,” the golden pony grinned, redlining his ‘Steed’s engine. The twins were probably going to thwack him over the head for it, but it wasn’t their wallets on the line at the moment. Val drank like she could store booze in her flank. Her bar tab wasn’t cheap!

Slipshod finished powering down the ‘Steed and popped the egress hatch. He crawled out and unfastened his helmet with a sigh. He hadn’t quite managed to beat Valkyrie’s Parasprite back to the DropShip. It wasn’t entirely because her ‘Steed was faster though. While her Parasprite could fly across the ground at the better part of twice his own 'Steed's top rated speed, she’d also been about twice as far from the pick-up point. In theory, it should have been a close match. In fact, his ‘Steed would have had a slight edge, since the inertia of his greater tonnage let him crash through trees much more effortlessly, with only a minimal temporary loss of speed. Val would have had to detour to avoid more densely forested regions.

However, he suspected that she had some better terrain data at her hooves than he’d had, as she’d gone a route that should have been heavily forested and slowed her down a good bit, but didn’t. Indeed, she’d actually managed to maintain her top speed as she flew through the valley in a nearly straight line.

It seemed that the locals had installed a highway of some sort in the last few years since the maps he’d been given had been made. That was certainly a point to raise with Squelch where their client was concerned. The intel that they’d been given for this job was supposed to have been the ‘latest and greatest’. Obsolete intel wasn’t generally conducive to successful operations. Obviously, what their employer had could stand to be a good bit ‘later and greater’.

Ah, well. At least he knew it was probably a good idea to hold off on going on any spending sprees any time soon. It appeared that the bulk of his finances were spoken for the next time they made planetfall.

A walkway was being extended to meet him as he stood propped against the open hatch of his ‘Steed. A kirin mare with a rosy red coat and auburn mane sporting a broad smile was at the other end to greet him. “Welcome back, Slip! I see you treated my sweet Widdle Bwonco well,” she said, noting the limited damage to several of the armor plates where the convoy’s escorts had managed to score hits. In the stallion’s experience, emerging from a mission without any sort of scratch was effectively impossible. However, as long as he kept the damage done to the armor he found that the company’s pair of chief mechanics didn’t give him any grief over it. After all, those plates were practically designed to fall off when struck by anything substantial, and were easily replaceable as a result.

What they were likely to have to say to him once they saw what his efforts to beat Valkyrie back to the ship had done to the radiators on his reactor on the other hoof...

“You should see how I treat a mare,” Slipshod replied with a broad grin as he stepped past the scaled equine, coming a little closer to her than was perhaps ‘proper’ where personal space was concerned, but Mig and her twin sister weren’t exactly strangers to him or his forward ways. Honestly, anypony who’d been on the ship for more than an hour was aware. He took a deep breath, relishing the sensation that passed through him as he stepped by her.

For her part, the mare giggled and rolled her eyes. “Oh, we have,” she winked at him, “maybe some other time. Squelch wants Tig and I to get your ‘Steed fixed up ASAP. A JumpShip is going to be heading out of system tomorrow and she wants us to be on it.”

“Your loss.” The stallion shrugged as he continued on down the walkway towards the ship’s interior. He wasn’t surprised by the tacit rejection, nor was he incredibly disappointed. He’d already gotten in a good roll with the pair of kirin shortly after their arrival on the ship once they’d been hired. Since then, he’d considered that box checked and hadn’t seriously pressed the issue. It just wasn’t quite the same with kirin as it was with ponies.

Besides, strictly speaking, he was pretty sure he’d made other plans this evening anyway. He consulted the rota that he used for keeping track of such things. More than once he’d been burned by mixing up who he was supposed to be entertaining on any given evening, and so he'd found it necessary to use scheduling software normally reserved for small businesses that used it to track client appointments. He glanced at the date as he tried to recall which member of the crew was next up.

A quartet of hooves clapped down onto the catwalk just to his rear. The stallion glanced over his shoulder in time to catch sight of an azure pegasus mare removing her own piloting helmet, revealing her closely cropped blond mane and pink eyes. “I wish all of our contracts could be that easy,” Valkyrie lamented as she fell into step beside her comrade. A teal kirin that could have passed easily for a dyed version of the mare that had greeted Slipshod was snapping off instructions to a team of ponies already starting to crawl over a slightly-built bepadel ‘Steed nestled in the stall across from his own Wild Bronco.

Val’s Parasprite was a typical chassis used as a recon platform by ‘Steed outfits, sporting a quartet of radar dishes on its rear that looked vaguely like tiny wings on either side of its bulbous central torso. The pair of medium range lasers that it mounted beneath the cockpit gave it some bite, but it’s true assets on the battlefield were its small size, hundred kilometer plus top speed, and jump jets that let it zip in and out of the engagement zone before most adversaries could hope to react to its appearance.

In this most recent outing, however, she’d been relegated exclusively to lookout duty. While the intel on the mission provided by their contractee had assured them that the convoy’s escort would be minimal and that any responding force would be too far out to give Slipshod and Valkyrie any trouble before they could be on their way back home, no mercenary who’d been doing such work for more than a week was actually stupid enough to take the client’s word at face value. It was a common practice to understate the risks involved in an operation, as that helped to validate a lowball offer.

After all, the greater the danger, the more C-bits an outfit would demand for their services.

In this instance though, it seemed that the information on responding forces that they’d been given had been more or less right on the money. That was probably because this was only the opening salvo in what was going to become a more protracted campaign by the Kirin Confederation to seize control of the world of Canopy. Now that the local government knew that a threat to their sovereignty existed, they’d be more alert to future attacks and step up the escorts on future convoys. Not that it was going to help them in this case. They’d never be able to replace those lost LRMs in time to do any good, and the Confederation wasn’t concerned about any of their other supply shipments.

Yet.

None of that was going to be the Steel Coursers’ problem though. With only the pair of ‘Steeds at their disposal, their outfit wasn’t suited for serious confrontations or protracted battles. Which meant that there wasn’t much more that they’d be able to do in this campaign other than a few additional raids or harassing actions. Both of which became much riskier endeavors when the target was mobilized to fight a war and wouldn’t be able to tell what attacks were just meager little raids and which ones were genuine pushes by enemy assault forces. The last thing they needed was to be conducting a raid on a munitions depot, only to be intercepted by a lance of heavy or assault-class ‘Steeds anticipating a serious attack by heavier forces.

Which meant that their work in this system was done, and it was time for them to move elsewhere in order to seek out work that was within their means to do safely. Probably deeper in the Kirin Confederation interior, honestly. As the Nirik Light Pony started moving more of their forces to Canopy for the conquest, that meant that their ability to police the systems already under Confederation control would be reduced. A perfect time for insurrectionist elements to pop up that were the ideal targets for lower-tiered ‘Steeds like theirs to combat.

Ultimately, where they went off to next was Squelch’s decision though. After all, the Steel Coursers was her outfit and the Galloway was her ship. So she called the shots.

“You and me both,” the earth pony smirked, “speaking of ‘easy’,” he eyed the feathered mare up and down, “you’re sure I can’t convince you let me keep you warm sometime?”

“Never more so,” the pegasus responded easily. “I have higher aspirations than becoming a notch on your bedpost.”

The stallion did a deliberately poor job of feigning exaggerated mortification. “Gasp! I would never marginalize you like that, Dear Lady! Besides,” he added with a waggle of his eyebrows, “I don’t even have a bedpost. I log my paramours in a ledger that I keep in my breast pocket." He tapped a hoof against the front of his jumpsuit. "That’s how us professional ‘letches’ do things.

“But, as you wish. I shall not trouble you on the matter further...until tomorrow, at least,” Slipshod flashed his fellow pilot another brief grin, noting her own thinly veiled amusement. He knew that she wasn’t likely to acquiesce to his overtures any time soon. She wasn’t the kind of mare to go for casual sex; but he also knew that she was still a little flattered by his flirting. It felt good to be wanted, after all.

“Assuming you don’t freeze to death before then,” Valkyrie snorted dryly before changing the subject, “I’m heading to the mess. Care to join me?”

“Ooh, wish I could,” the stallion winced, “but it’s Thursday, so I have other plans.” He turned his head to a nearby unicorn mare that was carrying a bag of tools towards the berthed ‘Steeds. “Channel Lock,” he smiled broadly at the mechanic, twirling about to bring himself right up to her side, “you sneaky little devil, trying to pick up an extra shift when you and I already made arrangements for tonight…” he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

The nearby pegasus pilot watched with a mildly bemused expression as the strawberry hued mechanic returned the gesture without hesitation. She smiled at the stallion, “I’m just dropping these off for Tig. Go ahead and wait in my quarters and I’ll be there in a few minutes. You still remember the door code, right?”

“Of course I do,” Slipshod said smiling at the mare and giving her another peck. Though he did allow that he didn’t ‘remember it’ so much as have it noted in his appointment log. He visited a lot of quarters on the ship, and was hard-pressed to remember which codes went with which ponies as a result. “See you soon!” And with that, the mare resumed heading for the mechanics swarming over the nearby ‘Steeds. Valkyrie noted that there seemed to be an extra spring in her step.

She looked back at the satisfied stallion with a bewildered expression, “I could have sworn that you spent the evening with that earth pony electronics tech on Thursdays…”

“You mean High Gain? That’s first and third Thursdays. Channel Lock is second and fourth Thursdays.”

The mare quirked a skeptical brow. “And what about the fifth Thursday, if there is one?”

Slipshod grinned broadly at the pegasus. “They’re bunkmates. Bunkmates who, after a few Salty Diamond Dogs, are up for doing pretty much anything together.

“It works out for all involved.”

The mare pilot’s eyes widened in surprise, wandering briefly after the unicorn mechanic who was talking with the cerulean kirin before returning to the beaming golden earth pony. “You’re unbelievable.”

“I believe the word you’re actually looking for is: irresistible,” he corrected playfully.

“Oh, I can resist you plenty.”

Slipshod cocked his head to the side, looking at the pegasus. “Aren’t you the least bit curious why so many ponies on this ship don’t though? I mean, two dozen ponies can’t be wrong...right?”

“It is not ‘two dozen’,” Valkyrie corrected tersely, though she did admit―privately―that the number he had just given wasn’t far off the mark from what she’d observed.

“It could be, with your help,” he quipped in return with a sly look. Then he chuckled and trotted off, “but maybe some other time. I already have a date tonight, and a gentlecolt doesn’t keep a mare waiting!”

The blue pegasus watched the ‘Steed pilot trot off gingerly before shaking her head. His reputation as a rake had been one of the first facts about the crew of the Galloway that she’d learned upon signing on with the Steel Coursers. So she’d been properly prepared when the earth pony made an inevitable pass at her. What she hadn’t been prepared for was the fact that it seemed like most of the crew didn’t mind his antics. None of the mares who frequented his bed even seemed to mind that they weren’t the only mares he took to bed!

Well, with the exception of Squelch, anyway. Though, even on that front, the mercenary company’s owner and commander was rather cool on the subject of where and with whom Slipshod slept. It had taken the pegasus by no small amount of surprise when she eventually learned that the two of them had once been married. Less surprising was learning that the reason for their subsequent divorce had been infidelity on Slipshod’s part. Even then, while the spurned unicorn mare had a great many colorful names at the ready to call her ex, Valkyrie never recalled there being any ingrained malice behind them. It was almost like some weird little game that the two of them had going on.

Made all the odder by the fact that she couldn’t recall the earth pony ever using anything even approaching a derisive label for his former spouse and current boss. Their animosity felt almost...obligatory, in nature. To the point where Valkyrie was fairly certain that, were Slipshod not such an overtly promiscuous horndog, the pair could have long since reconciled their differences and gotten back together again.

Slipshod was a good pilot, an amiable crewmate, a handsome stallion, and―by all appearances―a thoroughly passionate lover. Which meant that, after dinner, Valkyrie resolved to douse herself with a vigorous cold shower so as to quash any of those niggling little interests in finding out what all of the appeal was that drew so many other ponies into his hooves. Sometimes she preferred that he were a rebukeable asshole. It’d be a lot easier to brush off his flirting that way. While there was no chance that she’d let him follow her back to her quarters sober, and she was confident that she’d literally die of alcohol poisoning before she was ever drunk enough to do it either, she was still just a tiny bit annoyed at that part of her that blushed when he made his passes at her.

At times like that, it wasn’t hard to see why Squelch had been delusional enough to actually marry him.

Speaking of their employer, the emerald unicorn mare was sitting at one of the galley’s tables when Valkyrie trotted in. She was sipping at a mug of coffee floating in the silvery magic aura of her telekinesis while she read over a pad in front of her. The unicorn glanced up briefly at the newly arrived pilot and nodded an acknowledgement before returning her full attention to whatever it was that she was reading.

Unlike some mercenary commanders that Valkyrie had worked with over her career, Squelch didn’t pilot a BattleSteed herself. In fact, to the best of the pegasus’ knowledge, the company’s owner didn’t even know how to. Certainly something of an oddity in this business. It was fairly typical for commanders to ride with their pilots, sharing in the risks as well as the paydays.

Indeed, Valkyrie knew of quite a few pilots who would never have accepted employment with the Steel Coursers because they’d have felt that a boss like Squelch was ‘cowardly’. 'Leaders lead from the front!', and all that. Personally, the pegasus saw Squelch as more of a mercenary company administrator, while Slipshod unofficially bore the mantle of the more typical ‘Steed commander. His...vigorous...flirting off the job notwithstanding, the earth pony was all business once the flak started flying, and was a perfectly competent pilot in his own right. Between them, Squelch and Slipshod made for two halves of a well-rounded whole. The unicorn found the work, and the earth pony got them paid for it.

While she might not have known how to even power on a ‘Steed, one thing that Squelch was very good at was finding contracts. And not just contracts, but good contracts. Valkyrie had no trouble acknowledging that. A lot of mercenary commanders who were more focused on being an ace ‘Steed pilot than much else―not that that wasn’t a good focus to have when one’s life depended on their skill behind a control yoke―often just sort of...wandered the galaxy waiting for the right work to fall onto their haunches. Squelch, by contrast, spent hours every day pouring over as many news reports as she could get her hooves on, getting a lay of the stellar-political landscape and steering them exactly to where there were contracts that just seemed to be tailor made for their outfit.

This mission was the latest such example.

Seemingly without any sort of rhyme or reason, Squelch had the Galloway catch a ride on a JumpShip headed for New Neighpone. Literally, the day after they’d arrived in orbit of the planet, a contract was put up by the Nirik Light Pony on behalf of the Kirin Confederation asking for a small outfit that could conduct a convoy raid on Canopy on short notice. It very well could have been a stroke of luck for the Light Pony that the Steel Coursers were there, as it seemed like the information regarding the LRMs and the newly built launchers was something that they’d only just learned about, and could have made their intended conquest of Canopy a lot more difficult. It would certainly have been a lot more costly. Not something the Confederation’s retained mercenary company was looking forward to in the wake of a string of recent defeats by the Combine’s Aris Highlanders.

Most mercenary outfits in the area would have been hard-pressed to make the time table being demanded if they were already involved in other contracts, and there wasn’t time for the word to go out on ComSpark and hope to hear back from any outfits before that narrow window to act closed for good.

Cue the Steel Coursers, who were already in the system and ready to catch the next available JumpShip to Canopy with ‘Steeds perfectly suited to do the job being asked of them. Squelch had still played up the ‘short notice’ and ‘inconvenience’ angles during the negotiations though, in order to wring a little extra money out of the deal. It wasn’t like the Confederation had much choice though. It was either pay the rate that Squelch was asking for, or resign themselves to a more costly and protracted invasion.

This wasn’t the first time that Squelch had placed the Galloway exactly where it needed to be either, just the most recent example.

Valkyrie picked up her dinner from the serving line―oat burgers and hayfries―and made her way back to the table where her employer was sitting. While their professional relationship was one of ‘employer and employee’, they’d become fairly good friends in their own right in the six months since she’d been hired on. “Heya, boss. Find any leads for us yet?”

The green unicorn lowered her coffee and regarded the pegasus for a second before sliding the pad over so that Valkyrie could glimpse its contents. “A couple. Increasing bandit activity in the Periphery along the Pony Commonwealth border. TimberWolf’s Dragoons won’t be interested in wasting their own forces’ time chasing after small-fry like that. They’ll want to subcontract out. Why assign veteran pilots to crush small-time raiders when they can offer aspiring mercs a fraction of what the Commonwealth is paying them to do it, and just pocket the rest for sitting on their flanks?”

She flipped the display to the next screen. “Meanwhile, over in the Our Worlds League, Rover Consulting Group, LLC released its quarterly financials, and it looks like they’re buying up a lot of stock in Ferrous Holdings, a large mining conglomerate in the Sirius Cluster.

“Not in and of itself all that odd. Buying and selling shares in other companies is pretty much all that Rover Consulting does, but if you look more closely at who’s on their board of directors…” Another screen, and a biography of a rather dignified looking diamond dog wearing a monocle came up. Squelch pointed at a specific part of the dossier. “...we find that one of them is also on the board for one of Ferrous’ chief competitors in the region: Argent Extractions.

“This reeks of hostile takeover.”

Valkyrie glanced over at her employer, “and you think it might get ‘extra’ hostile?”

“It always does,” the unicorn mare pointed out with a wry smirk, “but they rarely want to go too big on that front. Makes investors nervous if they think a company’s looking to get involved in an outright conflict. War can be profitable, sure, but only if your company is selling war materials and isn’t having their own assets blown up in the process.

“Neither side’s going to be hiring a lance of assault ‘Steeds any time soon, but one of them might splurge for a medium ‘Steed in order to make a point. Either as part of a raid, or to repel one. Either contract would be right up our alley.”

The unicorn tabbed to a fourth screen. “And then there’s the current patriarch of one of the minor Houses in the Federated Moons. His health’s taken a turn for the worse and he’s not expected to last another month. The trouble is that he has no direct heirs, and there are no fewer than six cousins who are positioning themselves to make claims.

“Now, it is a minor House―a very minor one―which means that nopony’s got the kind of C-bits to bankroll genuinely serious firepower, but one or two might be able to afford to bring on some light ‘Steed groups to help with their bids,” Squelch shrugged, “I’m not usually one to get involved in politics, but a six-way fight is likely to drag on for a while, which means opportunities for long-term contracts.

“There’s also the chance that, if we happen to pick a losing side, we could just end up being hired on by whoever beats our employer. We might be able to ride it out all the way to the end, no matter who ends up winning.”

Valkyrie regarded the unicorn for a long moment before prompting, “...But?”

The emerald mare sighed, “But...these kinds of things tend to get very personal for the clients. Whoever does eventually win is going to want to make sure there aren’t any claimants that pop up later to bother their heirs.” She frowned, “I have little doubt that we’ll be asked to assassinate an entire family at some point, foals and all. Probably at multiple points, with a six-way fight going on.

“I run a mercenary company, not a familicide service.” Squelch looked over at her pilot, “you kill who you have to out there on the battlefield. That’s part of the business. But I pay you to fight other soldiers and ‘Steed pilots who knew what they were getting into and are there by choice. I don’t pay you to burn down civilians in their homes.”

The unicorn turned back to her pad and floated it back across the table, studying its contents with a frown. “...I’m probably going to opt for the corporate spat over in Sirius. The bandits will probably be bothering the Commonwealth for months. We can help sort out the hostile takeover and likely be done quick enough to still find raider-squashing work.”

Valkyrie thought for a moment and then nodded in agreement. “Sounds good to me, boss.” Not that the pegasus thought that she was genuinely being consulted on the matter. Like Squelch had just said: she was paid to fight. Strategizing was the unicorn’s job. She settled down to eating her meal before another thought occurred to her, “what world will we be going to exactly?”

“Canis. Why?”

The blue flier grinned. “Just wanted to know where I needed to look up bars at. Somepony has graciously ‘offered’ to cover the tab on my next outing!”

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 14: Far Country

Slipshod slumped onto the bed, utterly exhausted; both physically and especially emotionally. Tensions on the ship were still running high―there wasn’t much that could be done to fully eliminate that, given the circumstances―but he felt like he’d managed to make at least some progress on that front. Enough for him to finally get in a half-decent meal or two over the last week. He was far from sated, but he wasn’t in danger of collapsing from hunger either. Which was about as much as he could hope for right now.

A pair of hooves placed themselves onto his shoulders and pressed down. The earth pony groaned with a mixture of pain and pleasure as he felt the knotted muscles beneath his hide get kneaded out of existence. He’d been waiting all week for this moment, and voiced as much aloud.

The stallion kneeling over him chuckled, “I’ll bet. I don’t think I’ve ever felt you this tense,” Blood Chit commented as he began to slowly, and diligently, work his way down the earth pony’s backside.

Slipshod stiffened briefly as one of his vertebrae gave an audible pop, before immediately melting back onto the mattress, “OoOoOhh...it’s been a long week,” he said, “for everypony.”

“Tell me about it,” the pegasus frowned, “I’ve got a list of massage requests as long as my wingspan. Fortunately for them, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do…”

The earth pony heard the sour note in the head of recovery’s tone. His sentiment was one that Slipshod had been becoming all too familiar with of the last eight days.

Docking with the Disciple WarShip―which had identified itself as the Rockhoof―had gone about as well as could be expected. Text instructions had been relayed to the Galloway about where to dock the DropShip. Then, the moment the clamps were secured, both ships jumped out of the system without warning. Doppler hadn’t managed to get a fix on what system that they had jumped to, exactly; but she had at least been able to determine that it was in the general direction of ‘away’ from the Harmony Sphere.

The same had been the case for the jump that had been made yesterday.

Including their jump to PEA-02-UX, they were now the better part of a hundred lightyears outside of the Harmony Sphere. Deep in the Periphery. Certainly well outside of the part of the galaxy that anypony on the ship knew anything about. Well, at least that anypony knew anything reliable about.

Strictly speaking, even the changelings only had fuzzy data on the regions of space surrounding the Sphere. After all, they could only get their agents properly inserted if the creature whose identity was to be assumed traveled to Equus, along with an extensive record of their personal and professional histories. The middling ‘star nations’ of the Periphery, unsurprisingly, sent in few applicants. Which was to say: zero.

Reconnaissance was periodically conducted, but mostly just for the purposes of tracking whether or not any of the minor powers out in this part of the galaxy might present a genuine threat Chrysalis’ designs on the Harmony Sphere. Thus far, the answer to that question had proved to be a resounding: not in the least. By the best estimates of the changelings, even if the whole of the Periphery were to band together into a singular coalition and invade, they could be thoroughly trounced by any one of the larger mercenary outfits in service to the major powers.

With nothing to draw the interests of the significant political, economic, or military power of the Sphere, little effort was made to reach out and interact with the Periphery, leaving it as mostly an ‘unknown’ quantity. While this didn’t give most of the local denizens the feeling that that region of space was dangerous, per se, it was still a source of wariness. The public’s ignorance regarding the Periphery had certainly proven to be fertile ground where theatrical thrillers were concerned. Whenever a vid’s narrative called for some previously unheard of threat to manifest, having it originate from beyond the borders of the Sphere was a staple of the industry.

The prospect of the same ‘unknown’ quality that served screenwriters so well was currently responsible for a significant portion of the crew’s overall apprehension. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that Slipshod could do about that. If there was a silver lining to be had, it was that the crew was significantly less concerned about the Disciple ship itself as a result.

That, the earth pony concluded, was a phenomenal accomplishment in and of itself.

Of course, there had been something very apropos to outright panic when the Rockhoof had become visible through the DropShip’s exterior viewports. After all, WarShips weren’t a ‘thing’ in the Harmony Sphere anymore, and all that remained were the―over exaggerated―stories about their awesome destructive power. Yes, they were genuinely very potent ships in battle, but it boggled Slipshod’s mind how many ponies on the Galloway believed that ancient battleships like the one currently ferrying them were capable of outright destroying a whole planet!

Questions not unlike Aileron’s proceeded to flurry about the crew: where had a middling little terrorist cult like the Disciples managed to acquire a WarShip?!

It had helped a little―very little―that the ostensible reason why the Steel Coursers were docked with the WarShip was to find out the answer to that very question. At the very least, it then made sense why nopony had a real answer. Theories abounded, of course.

The earth pony’s current personal favorite was that the Rockhoof was, in fact, not a WarShip, but was instead merely a new design of heavily armed Jump Ship.

The golden stallion was not entirely certain what the purpose of that distinction was supposed to be―it seemed entirely semantic to him―but it had gained popularity among much of the crew, and had somehow seemed to help put them at ease.

Fucking ponies…

Armed with that―dubious―assurance, the members of the Steel Coursers had managed to soothe the worst of their trepidation, and were now focused on the next steps of the purported ‘operation’; which was to ingratiate themselves to the Disciples by remaining cordial and offering assistance when asked.

This facet of the ‘mission’ had thus far been phenomenally easy, as the Disciples barely communicated with the crew of the Galloway outside of a request for a daily status report. Which meant that it was next to impossible for the Steel Coursers to somehow inadvertently offend their hosts. The latter directive was just as easily accomplished, as the Disciples hadn’t asked for help with anything.

So, with nothing ‘mission essential’ to really focus on, the crew had fallen back into some of their old routines. This wasn’t the first time the ship had been en route to a destination where the journey was going to take a much longer time than usual. Every once in a while, Squelch would come across a tidbit of information that she deduced would lead to a lucrative contract for the company, but would also require the Galloway to spend over a month in transit to get to the site of the contract.

During such times, the crew turned inward and focused on ‘housekeeping tasks’. Overhauls were conducted on the ship’s drives. In depth inspections which required many of the more essential flight systems to be taken offline were made. BattleSteeds were effectively rebuilt so that any minor deficiencies which had been previously overlooked in the interests of getting the ‘Steed ‘combat ready’ as quickly as possible could be addressed before they became major deficiencies. Just about every cabin and corridor of the ship was scrubbed down to within an inch of its life…

You know: ‘busy work’.

None of which involved Slipshod―except for the cabin cleaning bit.

However, the stallion had been far from bored these last eight days. After all, he had an investigation to conduct. Which was why he’d spent last week getting to know all three of his primary suspects as intimately as he could. One of which he’d inadvertently gotten to know a little more ‘intimately’ than even he’d intended. On the other hoof, it had been a while, and who knew when they’d next be in port anyway…

Unfortunately―or fortunately, depending on how one looked at it―Slipshod’s investigations had not turned up what he’d been hoping to find. Or―more accurately, he supposed―what he’d been dreading he’d find.

The good news was that neither Arc Light, Dustoff, or Wing Nut were changelings. All of them had allowed Slipshod to draw from them, and all of them had turned out to have plausible explanations for their otherwise ‘unusual’ behavior at the memorial service.

It had been revealed that Arc Light had simply had a crush on Rigger Brush and had decided that an ideal time to make ‘first contact’ was while she was mourning the loss of a dear friend. The way the unicorn had described his thought process to Slipshod had been: “I figured she’d need a shoulder to cry on, and I could be it. Besides, when mares get mopy and emotional like that, things happen, you know?” Followed by a wink.

Definitely not a changeling. An empath would have known better. Especially where Rigger was concerned. He’d actually talked to the thestral about it during his next modeling session. They’d shared a good laugh.

By some strange coincidence, the morning after their conversation, a rather unflattering―though impressively drawn―picture of Arc Light had manifested in engineering at about the time his shift came on duty. It very quickly made its way around most of the ship, to the great delight of many of the unicorn’s peers who seemed to find it quite amusing. Arc Light, it seemed, had been less than pleased.

The artist remains unknown.

Dustoff, it turned out, had a wider and more varied circle of friends that he’d have assumed. She’d been a little wary, at first, of the stallion’s sudden recent interest in her affairs, but had opened up soon enough. That was how Slipshod had first become aware of a phenomenon known as ‘roleplaying’―which he had previously only known as a term applied to other activities. Dustoff and several other ponies from vastly divergent segments of the crew met up on a semi-regular basis to partake in some sort of fantasy adventure game.

It was a subject which the pegasus mare was very enthusiastic about, and had been more than happy to regale the stallion with at length. While the initial information dump had made the prospect seem daunting at first, Slipshod had agreed to participate in one of their sessions ‘to see how he’d like it’.

Perhaps it was a changeling thing, but there was something very appealing to him about assuming a faux identity for the sake of entertainment. The others at the session―which had indeed included ponies from among the ship’s ‘Steed mechanics and gunnery crews―had commended Slipshod on how adeptly he had taken on the role as the group’s freshly-minted bard. He’d left that evening with the promise of returning to participate regularly.

Also not a changeling.

Which had left only Wing Nut as his sole remaining suspect.

However, she―it turned out―had been ‘looking for a shoulder to cry on’. She and Lifeline had apparently been something of an ‘item’. There had even been a conversation or two about making their relationship ‘more official’. She’d attended the memorial service intending to find some measure of closure, but had quickly been overwhelmed and wasn’t able to process much during the event. The earth pony mare had then snuck off to go and cry in Lifeline’s old bunk.

The mechanic had been particularly susceptible to offers of condolences in the wake of the loss, it turned out. Slipshod wasn’t often one for pity sex. The emotions entwined with it were bitter and unsatisfying. But with the uncertain prospect of how often he’d be presented with any meals at all at the time, he’d taken the opportunity that had presented itself. Valkyrie likely would not have approved if she’d been around to find out he was engaging in dalliances with the crew―even less so when that crewmember was in a ‘vulnerable state’.

But she wasn’t there, and he was hungry.

The mare had hardly said a word to him since that night, and had certainly not sought out further sexual encounters. Likely for the best. In any case, she too was clearly not a changeling agent.

And, with that, his list of suspects had evaporated. Even he didn’t have the time to devote to vetting every single pony on the ship. There were dozens of members of the crew that he didn’t even know by name, and it’d take days with each of them before he’d be able to try and draw from them in order to determine whether they were a changeling or not. He didn’t know how much time they had left before they arrived at wherever the Disciples were taking them, but he doubted it was nearly that much.

Besides, any changeling on the ship needed a wide social network. Otherwise they risked drawing from any single pony too often, which would produce a noticeable change in the victim. Slipshod knew all of the ship’s other social butterflies who went out actively carousing with the crew. Anypony he didn’t know by name by this point was simply far too introverted to be a changeling.

There wasn’t a spy on the ship.

Which, while that technically fell into the realm of ‘good news’, it arguably made him more uneasy. If there wasn’t an agent feeding information to ComSpark about Twilight, then how had they figured out so much? The earth pony knew that he’d proposed the notion of a member of the crew making an off-hoof remark about a ‘new member of their company who was a purple mare with wings and a horn’ at a public venue in earshot of a changeling. And, yes, that was possible.

But the chances of it were...well, slim. Bordering on nonexistent really. Never mind that setting up the kind of elaborate trap that was necessary to have lured the Galloway to that out of the way system would have required more intelligence about the Steel Coursers and their commander than an off-hoof remark in a pub, or even an official dossier, could provide. It would have required knowing that the only reason that Squelch had taken such a mission in the first place was because the staging system was also the location of a defunct Celestia League outpost.

In fact, thinking back on it, and all of the possible systems that the Aris Highlanders could have used for a staging system, Slipshod had to wonder at whether it was actually a coincidence that it had been one which the Steel Coursers knew to host a CLDF facility. Only a select few ponies on the Galloway knew what systems they were interested in though. That information was certainly not anything that had been made broadly available to the crew. Yet, at the same time, Slipshod was extremely confident that it couldn’t be any of the company’s command staff.

It certainly couldn’t be Squelch. Never mind that he’d been married to her and very nearly husked her during their relationship, the unicorn mare was hardly in a position where she needed to use subterfuge to hoof over Twilight. She could have just...done it. Val wouldn't have gotten herself killed in that ambush if she’d been the plant. Heck, she’d warned them about it. His night of passion with the twin kirin mechanics squarely ruled them out as the agents. While Slipshod had never gotten personally close enough to Doc Dee to try and draw from the unicorn stallion, he knew that the physician rarely ever left the med bay. He certainly wasn’t being social enough to sustain a changeling’s needs, in the earth pony’s opinion.

Yet, that sort of information couldn’t have merely been gleaned from overheard drunken ramblings. It was far more likely that a mole was onboard the Galloway. If not a member of its core staff, then one who had access to the ship’s encrypted files.

And he had no idea who they could be.

Which was the source of much of the tension that Blood Chit was very graciously working out of his body at the moment. The scarlet pegasus shifted to the side and propped one of Slipshod’s hind legs over his shoulder as he started working his hooves over the earth pony’s hanches, prompting another brief grunt of pain, followed by a contented sigh.

“Seriously, this is bordering on unhealthy,” the winged stallion commented as he located a particularly rigid span of muscle, “I don’t know if you need to get laid or what, but you need to find a way to relax.”

“Is that an offer?” the earth pony murmured into the pillow as his leg was manipulated.

The recovery pony snorted, “I don’t think my coltfriend would like that very much.”

Slipshod suppressed a grimace as he felt the feelings of worry begin to trickle down from the pegasus. His coltfriend was back home in the Sphere. Blood Chit, nor any of the crew, knew how long it would be before they saw their loved ones again. The earth pony decided to try and steer the conversation away from that particular topic, “probably not.

“Bet it’s just because it’s been a few weeks since our last round of euchre. Have you found a new fourth yet?” Lifeline had been a regular feature in their games.

The stallion sighed as he continued to massage the leg. Tinges of guilt now, “I honestly haven’t been looking,” he admitted, “replacing her feels...I dunno. Shallow? It’s stupid. It’s not like there’s published etiquette on the appropriate amount of time one should wait before replacing a pony in their euchre group.

“But, still…” he let out a rough sigh.

“No, I get it,” Slipshod nodded, “patching over all of the bits of your life that they were a part of can feel like you’re ‘erasing’ them. Obviously, you’re supposed to ‘move on’, but you don’t want to actually forget that they were there in the first place,” he could feel Blood Chit’s appreciation at his apparent understanding of the pegasus’ dilemma.

“How about this,” the ‘Steed pilot suggested, “we put up an extra chair at the table ‘for Lifeline’ for the next few sessions. Until we feel like we’re finally comfortable enough to play without it. That sound like it’ll help?”

“...yeah, actually,” the scarlet pegasus said, sounding a little more chipper, “it’s a little cramped in the locker room with four chairs as it is, but maybe putting her picture on the table, or an extra shot glass. Something like that.”

“Something that ‘includes’ her in the game,” Slipshod agreed, now able to relax more completely that his masseuse wasn’t feeding him second-hoof tension.

“Yeah. Sure, I’ll put the word out. See if anypony else plays, or maybe wants to learn,” he moved on to the earth pony’s other leg, “so, how are you doing?”

The golden stallion canted his head around, looking at the pegasus with a raised eyebrow, “with…?”

“Val,” Blood Chit prompted, “we haven’t had much of a chance to talk. I know you two were close. Just checking in.”

Slipshod sighed and turned back around to rest his chin on the pillow, “I’m alright. ‘Steed pilots die. That’s the name of the game. It was just as likely to be me as her,” he said, doing his best to feed the other stallion what he was pretty sure he expected to hear, “don’t get me wrong: I’m sad she’s gone,” he affected a wry chuckle, “and not just because she still owed me twenty C-bits from the last Solaris Tournament,” he turned back briefly to wink at the recovery pony, smiling wanly, “but, at the same time...we both kind of knew it’d probably happen to one of us someday.”

“Yeah, I get that,” the pegasus nodded in understanding, “I tried to tell myself the same thing about Lifeline. We’re not in the sauce nearly as often as you ‘Steed jockeys, obviously. Still, we trained for hot pickups like that one because we knew they could happen,” a little bud of pride welled up in the stallion, “and I’m damn proud of my team for how they performed. They hit every beat and came within milliseconds of their best simulation time.”

“Exactly,” the earth pony agreed, “we train to do our jobs, and we go out and do them. But, bullets don’t care about flawless execution,” he soberly reminded the feathered pony, “Val performed admirably. She was on top of her game,” these were all vapid lies, of course. She’d disobeyed his orders, moved out of formation, and needlessly risked her life to accomplish a mission that had long since ceased to matter in the face of the ComSpark ambush. She’d died trying to live up to some sort of noble drivel about ‘placing the mission first’.

Drivel that she’d, admittedly, picked up from him because he’d been trying to affect a change in her mood after a mission. He’d been talking out of his ass at the time, of course. Lying to her. Manipulating her emotional state. It’d worked in the moment. He hadn’t expected words from a feigned ‘pep talk’ a couple months ago to have continued to affect her still. Apparently, she’d really taken his ‘advice’ to heart; and paid the price for it.

The truth of the nature of Valkyrie’s death wasn’t what Blood Chit needed to hear now though. He needed affirmation about what he was feeling, and hearing somepony else echo his own thoughts would help. So Slipshod was going to massage the truth of the events during their last mission to accomplish that, “she managed to help pull off what should have been an impossible shot, given the distances involved. She was exactly where she needed to be, when she needed to be there...

“...and then she was standing in exactly the wrong place for a second too long,” he shrugged, “with the ranges involved, that PPC blast that popped her cockpit couldn’t have been deliberate. Nopony’s that good. It was just some Commie pilot hoping they’d get lucky,” Slipshod let out an appropriately anemic sigh, “and they did. And Val didn’t. Simple as that.

“It was the same with Lifeline,” he added, glancing again at the pegasus, “whoever fired the shot that splatted her wasn’t aiming to hit her. They just missed Purple Rose. That was all it was.

“And that’s...how I deal with it: it wasn’t anypony’s fault. I couldn’t have done anything to prevent it. So instead I focus on moving on with my life,” he concluded. Pointedly ignoring the reality that Val had only done what she did because of how he’d informed her ‘real’ mercenaries acted during a mission.

It wasn’t his fault that she’d believed his lies.

“...I can see that, I guess,” the other pony said with a sigh, finishing up the earth pony’s hind leg and laying it on the bed. A moment later, the pegasus lowered himself down beside Slipshod, propping his head up on his hoof as he looked at the ‘Steed pilot, “you don’t have anypony back home, do you?”

Slipshod shook his head, “Archon wiped out my whole family while I was on Equus. Didn’t even bother going back home. When I made port on Simeron I signed on with the Steel Coursers the next day. Everypony I know in the galaxy is on this ship.”

The pegasus nodded and a wry smile wound its way across his lips, “weirdly enough, I think you’re kind of lucky,” he chuckled when the earth pony understandably raised a skeptical eyebrow, “not because of the familicide; that’s horrible, obviously. Heh, no, I’m talking about everypony you care about being on the ship. It means that, no matter where you go, you’ll never be far from the ponies who matter most to you. Even out here in the backend of wherever the fuck we are,” he gestrued broadly about the room with a wing.

“I’m envious of that.”

“Yeah, well, don’t take this the wrong way: but I hope you don’t end up being like me,” he winked at Blood Chit, “your coltfriend’s too cute to die.”

The pegasus let out a bubbly little laugh this time as he rolled over onto his belly, “I know, right?! He’s adorable; but he’d be the last one to agree with you if you told him that. I don’t know how he can look in the mirror and not see it?!”

“It’s the freckles,” Slipshod nodded sagely, basking in the loving feelings emanating off of the stallion as a result of his thoughts about the pony he cared most about in the galaxy. This could turn out to be one of the better meals he’d had in a while.

“AGH! Those freckles!” Blood Chit veritably screeched with joy, wrapping himself up in his forelegs and wings and rolling around on his half of the bed, “I just want to stare at them all day! The way they move when he eats; I can’t take it!

“I just want to tackle him out of his chair and chew on ‘em,” he flashed a devilish grin at the earth pony. His love was now tinged with more carnal feelings. Still nourishing though, if a little tangier, “when we finally get back home, I’m going to kiss each one individually,” those sweet feelings soured now, prompting a disappointed grimace from Slipshod that he quickly covered up.

“Which, I guess could be a while,” he mused aloud, “we’re not even going to be able to write home for who knows how long.”

“We’ll reach a settled system eventually,” Slipshod pointed out to the pegasus, “that system’ll have corporations, and one of them is bound to own a Jump Ship. I know that when we find one, Squelch’ll hire it out to travel back to the Sphere and transmit some letters back home to the net,” that was something that would almost certainly not be possible, the earth pony knew; but having the crew at least think that letters were getting home would help keep morale up.

He made a note to ask Squelch about feigning that, in the interests of maintaining the crew’s spirits. The happier they were, the better they’d perform―and the better he’d eat. Meals like this one were simply far more sparse than he’d grown accustomed to over the last couple years.

He idly debated if he should try to rope Wing Nut into a more permanent arrangement. While he’d discovered that using a monogamous sexual relationship as his sole source of sustenance was unsustainable in the long term, he’d managed to get a good six months out of Squelch before signs of deterioration had started to become troublesome. He could likely get a lot longer out of the earth pony mechanic, since she wouldn’t be in a position to make life or death decisions involving the crew when the cognitive decline started to manifest.

Maybe he could even get a year out of her before she was past the point of no return and he needed to move on to another crewmember?

Considerations for later, the stallion decided. Right this moment, he had a perfectly delectable serving of loving feelings right here beside him―

The bed quivered for the briefest moment. Both stallions blinked and sat up, looking first at each other, and then around the room.

It was Blood Chit who spoke up first, “did...that feel a lot like―?”

“―damper lag from an acceleration burn? Yeah,” Slipshod finished, noting that the knowledge that his initial assumption was being corroborated by another didn’t seem to be doing much to abate his confusion. The Galloway was still docked with the Disciple WarShip, which was―or until recently had been―holding position near this system’s primary star as it recharged its jump drive. They’d already been there for the better part of a day and a half.

There was no reason for them to be moving anywhere. And yet―

A sour tone blared sharply from where his barding lay crumpled on the floor.

The earth pony rolled off the bed and scrambled for his pad, which had no doubt just received a message containing information that would answer the questions budding in his head. A nearly identical sound from behind him on the bed suggested that the pegasus had received an alert of some sort as well. That actually prompted only more questions, as the two of them were parts of very divergent chains of command.

Slipshod was the mercenary company’s Lance Commander; one step below Squelch herself in the pecking order. His inclusion in any major command decisions, and updates on any important information affecting the outfit were part and parcel of his position. Meanwhile, Blood Chit technically fell under Mig’s supervision, as his recovery team was classified under the broad umbrella of ‘BattleSteed Operations’ over which the kirin held sway. The pegasus wouldn’t be getting the same news that Slipshod was. His marching order would be getting distilled through the kirin mechanic.

Blood Chit’s pad was a lot closer at hoof to the pegasus, and so he finished reading his briefing just as the earth pony untangled his own interface. His stunned comment did at least serve to give the ‘Steed pilot a clue as to what he was going to find waiting for him. Though it certainly raised far more questions than it answered.

“...My team’s being moved to ‘Ready Status’,” the scarlet stallion stated in blunt surprise, He shifted his baffled gaze to Slipshod, “...we have an op? How?”

The earth pony was parsing his own message quickly, and only half heard what the flier had said, “we’re deploying? Where and how?” he now turned to meet the other pony and both shared a brief moment of solidarity in their surprise, “guess I’d better go and find out,” the earth pony said as he began to throw on his jumpsuit.

“Squelch wants me in the conference room. We’ll catch up later, ‘kay, Chit? I want to hear more about your coltfriend’s freckles…”

After all, he was still hungry…

Slipshod was the last to arrive in the ship’s conference room. A result of the combined factors of the distance of Blood Chit’s quarters from the briefing room, as well as the difficulties he’d had getting an uncooperative jumpsuit on. It hadn’t exactly been removed with the greatest of care at the time…

As expected, the rest of the company’s senior leaders were also in attendance. What he had not expected was to find that Twilight Sparkle had been included in the meeting as well. Sans guard. Admittedly, the concept of an ‘escort’ had largely become superfluous, given that it was the Steel Coursers who were effectively the ‘captives’ at the moment.

Slipshod wasn’t sure why it irked him that the alicorn was sitting in Valkyrie’s old seat. Not that the conference room had ‘assigned seats’ aside from Squelch’s. Everypony did tend to sit in the same place during each of their meetings though, having laid a de facto claim to them by virtue of choosing them at some point in the distant past. His annoyance was probably just some subconscious aversion to seeing a pony in the ‘wrong’ place. It passed soon enough.

It wasn’t like Val was going to be using that chair again anyway, whoever sat in it.

“Now that we’re all here,” the sage green unicorn mare began, the edge in her tone suggesting that she was annoyed at how long it had taken the ‘Steed pilot to arrive. At least, that was likely how everypony else in the room would take it. Slipshod knew that there were a litany of reasons that Squelch didn’t regard him as her favorite pony these days. His lack of punctuality wouldn’t be found anywhere near that top of that list though, “let’s begin with some situation updates:

“First off: we finally know where we are,” the ship’s commander said, her horn glowing as she manipulated the console controlling the projection table. Which, Slipshod noticed, had had its surface repaired since the last time he’d been in this room, “during recharges, the Rockhoof has been careful to keep us out of line-of-sight of any possible navsats in the systems we’ve been to. Likely an opsec concern.

“However, now that their ship’s heading insystem, Doppler was able to ping a sat and get a fix on our position,” an image of the Harmony Sphere manifested above the table briefly, before the stars began to shift and move about. Soon the projector had isolated a much smaller section of the settled galaxy. One of the stars was encircled by a bright blue light, hanging within a highlighted cluster of several more stars.

“Capensis,” the company’s owner announced, indicating the star system that the view was centered on, “one of the border worlds of the Farisian Empire,” she looked down at her terminal and briefly entered a few additional commands, “a brief history lesson for those that didn’t pay enough attention in whatever passed for an ancient history class wherever they went to school―which included myself until about fifteen minutes ago:

“After the fall of the Celestia League, several of the more...shall we say, ‘less sociable’ creatures took it upon themselves to emigrate out of the Sphere in an effort to stay out of the fighting that was breaking out. These included―but are not limited to―zebras, minotaurs, donkeys, griffons, felines, diamond dogs, and a host of others I’d never actually heard of before today.

“In any case, these creatures set themselves up with little enclaves beyond what was, at that time, ‘settled space’. They left early enough that there were still a few terraformers in operation. Presumably those have all broken down or are defunk now. But they didn’t have much else.

“Technologically and economically, they are middling, at best.

“The Farisian Empire is a zebra-centric star nation consisting of thirteen settled systems and a population in the single-digit billions. They’re not big, and their GDP is smaller than some major spaceports. Other than that, not much else is known, because hardly anypony back home cares.”

The unicorn looked back up from where she’d been skimming over the records she’d found and once more looked around at her command staff, “now onto more recent events:

“Two hours ago, sensors registered an Finder-Keeper event in the system. Thanks to Val’s upgrades, Doppler was even able to get us a set of coordinates for the jump translation…” she paused and shared a knowing look with the others, as though she was well aware of the sort of reaction that she was likely going to receive, “...the L1 of the only inhabited planet’s moon.”

Slipshod nearly got a headache from the sheer intensity of the shock and surprise that burst out of every other one of the room’s occupants. It was a mercy that he couldn’t experience feedback from his own emotional state, because he hadn’t handled the revelation much better.

“A moon’s L1?!” Doc Dee sputtered, sounding almost professionally offended at the notion, “even if the crew survived, the kinds of spatial stressors an exit like that places on the body are serious! Nausea, migraines, double-vision…” he was shaking his head in clear disgust.

“Who’d be crazy enough to risk a jump like that?” Tig asked skeptically, “you’d need positional data accurate down to the kilometer and minute!”

Squelch shrugged, “Well then they must have had it, because whoever it was made it into the system without misjumping to Celestia-knows-where. Something smaller detached and started burning towards the planet minutes later.

“Half an hour after that, we received a message from the Disciples,” she nodded her head in the direction of the purple alicorn, who now produced what Slipshod initially mistook for the same scroll that she’d received on the ship’s bridge when they’d first made contact with the Disciple WarShip. However, as she unfurled it, he realized that this missive was much longer, and had a lot more written on it than a four word greeting, “they’ve informed us that the planetary government is requesting help.

“The new arrivals are pirates, and this system is undeveloped by even Farisian standards. They don’t have the ability to defend themselves effectively.”

“A backwater system of a backwater star nation?” Slipshod flashed a sardonic smile as he interjected his own commentary into the conversation, “their local militia is probably still armed with spears and hoof-blades…” his slight was answered with a snort from Tig and a frown from Squelch. The earth pony cleared his throat and leaned back in his seat.

Doc Dee furrowed his brow, “...the zebras asked the Disciples for help?”

“Specifically, it seems,” was the unicorn mare’s dour reply. Her distaste was understandable. Not because she found the idea of somecreature rushing to the aid of zebras unpalatable―Squelch was hardly the bigoted sort. No, her displeasure was solely for the implications associated with what a request like that entailed.

First, it suggested that the local zebra government was familiar with the Disciples. Yet, at the same time, was possessed of a vastly differing opinion on the quality of their character. In the Harmony Sphere, a settlement that felt threatened by a Disciple raid would have been inclined to reach out to any local pirates for assistance in repelling them―and likely would have even received it. Even pirates held a dim view on the fanatics.

After all, most raiders launched their assaults for the purpose of obtaining wealth and materials. Understandable and forgivable motivations, given the state of scarcity in the Sphere. Heck, that was ostensibly the reason for the near-constant fighting amongst the Great Houses and their pet mercenary companies. Meanwhile, the Disciples―according to all sources labeled as ‘reputable’ by ComSpark―killed indiscriminately for the sheer glee of it.

Second, was the idea that the zebras might also not be the least bit put off by the fact that the Disciples in the system had arrived onboard a WarShip. It was a notion that made everypony uneasy. After all, surely such ancient weapons of war being controlled by the Disciples of Discord weren’t such a common sight in the Periphery as to be unremarkable…

...Right?

“...which brings us to our part in this,” Squelch continued, her lips curling into a sardonic smile of her own now. She waved a hoof in Twilight’s direction and receded back into her chair, crossing her hooves across her chest as she directed her attention to the alicorn.

Several eyebrows―including Slipshod’s―rose along with the purple mare as she stood up and began to address the room, “these pirates are known to the Disciples,” she explained, referring to the―rather lengthy―unfurled scroll in her telekinetic grasp, “they are ruthless, and formidable. The Rockhoof carries a company of ‘Steeds, yes, but the pirates will be fielding at least as many as well.

“They have asked for our assistance, and―after discussing the matter with your commander―the Steel Coursers have agreed to render it.”

Slipshod wasn’t quite able to keep himself from looking in Squelch’s direction in surprise. However, the unicorn was very pointedly avoiding looking anywhere other than the alicorn’s direction as the purple mare continued talking, “fundamentally, this will be treated as any other paid contract,” Twilight said, “the Galloway is faster and more maneuverable than the Disciple’s own Friendship-class DropShip. If it departs now, it can reach the planet quickly enough to intercept the pirates before they reach the principal settlement.”

The earth pony blinked, looked around the room hesitantly, and then raised a tentative hoof, “uh...you said the pirates were deploying a ‘Steed company...right? As in: twelve ‘Steeds?”

“Obviously, it’s impossible to know until the pirates have actually debarked their forces exactly how many ‘Steeds they will be fielding,” Twilight pointed out, “but that is their standard operating profile for raids like this one, according to the Disciples.”

“No offense, Rosie,” the earth pony responded, continuing to use her pseudonym while in the presence of the rest of the crew, “but even you’re not that good,” otherwise, she wouldn’t have been driven off by Chrysalis’ ambush five hundred years ago, he thought to himself, “two ‘Steeds can’t beat a company.”

Squelch chimed in now as well, “our mission from ComSpark is to ingratiate ourselves to the Disciples,” she explained for the benefit of the rest of the command staff. She and the two ‘Steed pilots knew, of course, that that ‘operation’ was a farce, “helping them out in a jam is a perfect way to begin.”

“And exactly how much use are we going to be to them after both our ‘Steeds get slagged in a hopeless fight?” Mig asked, obviously dubious about the merit of such a mission. Slipshod found himself in agreement with her point.

“Our objective is one of harassment only,” the alicorn sternly informed the gathered ponies, “Slipshod and I will deploy as a screening force with the objective of slowing the pirates’ advance until the Disciple DropShip can land.

“As such, we need not get into any drawn out confrontations. Both the Rainbow Dash and the Crystal Cavalier are fast enough that only lighter units will be able to pursue them,” she looked at Slipshod now, “the pair of us should have little difficulty neutralizing light and medium tonnage ‘Steeds that insist on engaging us, correct?”

The stallion frowned. At face value, that seemed reasonable; but he was experienced enough to know that it was still a risk. All it would take is a couple of lucky―or unlucky, rather―hits to a leg joint, and suddenly any heavier opponents would have little trouble in running the pair of them down. Still, both of them had long-range weaponry that should hopefully afford them enough of a head-start if a withdrawal was warranted. So he nodded his assent.

“Good,” Squelch said, getting up from her seat, “the two of you get dressed and meet with the twins for your pre-launch checklists. We’re undocking in five minutes and burning for the planet,” she started towards the exit, murmuring under her breath, “might as well void the warranty on these engines. Not like I can ever get them serviced at a license dockyard again anyway…”

The pair of kirin mares stood up next, both exchanging frowns with each other, “and we have some reactor housings to put back together in record time,” Tig said with a grimace.

“Literally every time we try to service the mana injectors,” Mig growled, “every. Time.”

“And I guess I should brush up on zebra-pony communicable diseases,” the ivory physician said as he stood up and made to leave as well.

“That seems a little excessive, don’t you think?” Slipshod said, arching his brow at the doctor.

“Hardly,” he replied matter-of-factly, “it's well established medical knowledge that populations which have been isolated from one another can cultivate diseases which are harmless to them, but dangerous to new arrivals. Until I’ve done a few blood screenings of the locals, I recommend against any prolonged physical...contact,” he said the last with a pointed look in the earth pony stallion’s direction, prompting the ‘Steed pilot to scowl.

“Very funny.”

“Very serious,” Doc Dee replied stoically, “no planetside trysts until I say otherwise,” and with that, it was only Slipshod and Twilight in the room together.

The earth pony eyed the purple mare for several seconds before his gaze drifted to the scroll, “so what’s up with those anyway? A bit ‘low tech’, isn’t it?”

The alicorn levitated the rolled vellum up to eye level, her expression growing distant for a brief moment as she stared at the parchment, “...before digital media, this was how I received nearly all of my correspondence: scrolls sent via enchanted dragonfire. Instantaneous transmission of a message from anywhere on Equus―and later, the galaxy―right to my hooftips.”

The stallion cocked his brow, “dragonfire? Not changeling magic? Because the color of those flames…” he let the observation hang in the air between them.

The mare chuckled, “I once conducted a very thorough study on that exact phenomenon. Turns out it’s just a coincidence,” she said with an almost apologetic shrug, as though she anticipated that that was not a very satisfactory answer. From what he could feel, she hadn’t found it to be one either, “or, if there is a connection, it predates any existing written accounts.

“Changeling magic is obviously innate, and so the color it manifests as is the color it manifests as. The dragonfire enchantment is the alteration of the natural order. After all, normal dragonfire is the same color as any regular fire,” she said, her tone and demeanor becoming more analytical. Suddenly, Slipshod felt like he was back in one of the academy’s lecture halls.

He didn’t like it.

“I learned the spell from Celestia,” Twilight continued, seeming to actually get some measure of enjoyment out of relating her ancient academic adventure, “who once told me that she learned it from pre-Equestrian zebra shamans. Now, a lot of zebra rituals weren’t written down; they were passed on through oral tradition. It served as a sort of ‘barrier to entry’ for the position of shaman: they had to be cognitively able to retain a perfect rote memorization of their profession’s oral history in order to be inducted into their ranks.

“Fortunately, I had tutored the great grandmare of one of the stallions on their High Council, and he was willing to recite for me the portion of their tradition dealing with that particular enchantment and its origins,” she frowned now, “unfortunately, it had been on the condition that I didn’t write it down either. I couldn’t even quote him in the citations of the study I wrote up, because that would have counted as a written record.

“My paper was rejected under peer review by the Journal Arcana Equina because of ‘insufficiently supported assertions’. That one really hurt to swallow…” she let out a mournful sigh, but then delved back into her account.

“Anyway, according to him, the zebra shamans of old learned the spell from ancient thestrals, of all ponies!” her uptick in both tone and emotional excitement suggested that Slipshod was supposed to find the revelation as astounding as she had―and apparently still did―however, the earth pony could safely say that he was very unmoved by that information. So he merely regarded the mare in bored silence.

Twilight let out an aggrieved sigh and sought to explain the significance of the revelation to him, “by the time Nightmare Moon rose to power, thestrals were as magically illiterate as pegasi!” she stressed, almost as though this was something that he was supposed to have been aware of already, “but―apparently―thousands of years before that, they were creating high-tier magical enchantments?!

“What happened in their history that erased that level of magical acumen among their race?” Slipshod blinked, and then shrugged, “exactly! Nopony knows; and that’s the point!

“Oh, I was so tempted to revive the study of time magic in order to find out. Of course, I’m the one that outlawed any further research into those sorts of spells after...things...happened; so that would’ve been a bit hypocritical of me…”

“So...not changeling magic,” Slipshod offered by way of succinct summation,

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Cool,” the stallion shook away the sense of detached apathy that he hadn’t felt since his days at the Sandhoof Academy and turned towards the door, “let’s get our barding on; we’re probably already in orbit by now…”

“Hey, you asked!” the alicorn huffed indignantly.

“Orbital scans show the raiders making their way west towards the planetary capital,” Squelch’s voice crackled over his helmet’s headset as the earth pony completed the last of his pre-launch checks. He could feel the turbulence of the DropShip’s atmospheric entry through the Cavalier’s piloting couch. They’d be deploying in a minute or so, “unsurprisingly, local defense forces haven’t been able to do much to slow them down.”

The stallion was unable to suppress a grimace at the news. Not because it signaled any sort of foreboding omens―he hadn’t expected to hear anything different. No, his annoyance was prompted by the thought that any of the local forces would have bothered to even try to stop the pirates. They had to have known how futile and ineffective it would have been to try and stop a company of BattleSteeds with mere ground vehicles.

Unless the vehicle force possessed stupendously overwhelming numbers, or some other advantage, it was nothing but an exercise in suicide as for as the stallion was concerned.

“The Disciple commander says they’ll have their forces deployed and ready to intercept the raiders in half an hour,” his unicorn employer continued, “but you’ll have to keep them from reaching the last phase line for that to happen. Otherwise the drop zone’ll be too hot for a deployment.”

Slipshod reviewed the map of the engagement area, noting the marked points of interest. While Capensis was far from what most ponies who hailed from the Harmony Sphere would consider to be a ‘developed world’, it did still have some of the fundamental amenities like aerial defense batteries. Nothing even remotely approaching the level that one would see on a frequently contested world in the Sphere, to be sure, but enough to give a single DropShip pause and decide it was more amenable to debark their forces outside its coverage area.

As such, the pirates had made planetfall about a hundred kilometers outside of the city. They were proceeding relatively slowly, suggesting that a number of their units were in the upper end of the heavy-tonnage range. On the bright side, it had bought the Steel Coursers the time needed to beat them to the city itself. Though, not by much. Maybe a dozen kilometers or so. Enough that if they got pushed too far back to quickly, they’d basically be fighting in the city itself. At that point, it would be questionable if their actions had actually done any good for the residents.

Phase lines had been established to help him and Twilight track their withdrawals, and gauge how quickly they were being pushed back. They had worked out minimum allowable times for each line of retreat. If they were forced back too far too fast, the Galloway would be called in to retrieve them.

This was a risky operation with a frankly low chance of success given the odds involved. The Disciples seemed to acknowledge and understand that, and they weren’t asking for he and Twilight to defend the city to the death. Slipshod idly wondered if they’d have felt that way if anypony other than their long-lost princess had been one of the ‘Steed pilots involved.

“Remember: this is a delaying action,” she stressed, “no heroics. No getting into brawls if it can be avoided. Pin the enemy down and then fall back when they try to flank you,” Slipshod frowned at the thought of his combat inexperienced boss attempting to explain tactics to him and Twilight. Likely she was saying all of that for her own benefit, rather than theirs. There were obviously quite a few factors at play that made this operation significantly more stressful than similar ones they’d conducted back in the Sphere.

“But if I can’t act heroically, then how will I impress all of those fine and exotic striped mares down there enough to attract a personal harem to take with me for the rest of our trip?” the golden earth pony quipped, looking to inject an iota of levity into the tone of the briefing, “since cleaning out my cabin, I figure I’ve made room for about a half dozen nubile young zebras.”

“...Gallop Two?”

“Yes?” Twilight replied.

“If you see Gallop One in trouble, don’t help him.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Harsh, but fair,” Slipshod said, nodding to himself, feeling a little smile touch his lips.

“ETA to drop: thirty seconds,” the sage unicorn mare said. Even through the distortion of the radio, the stallion could hear that there was a little less stress than there had been a moment ago. Hearing the earth pony making lecherous remarks during an op served to add a level of familiarity that helped to ease some of her tension. She knew how to deal with Slipshod’s off-color commentary, after all.

Slipshod both heard and felt the ventral thrusters roar to life as the Mustang-class DropShip slowed its descent and came to a hover above the drop zone. The doors below his Crystal Cavalier slid open, revealing the dusty brown surface below. Once the ship had come to a stop, the cabling holding his ‘Steed in place released, and both the mechanical equine and its pilot fell out of the belly of the ship. The earth pony braced himself as the ‘Steed’s leg actuators worked overtime to absorb as much of the force of the drop as possible, but he was still significantly rattled by the landing.

Through the cockpit’s forward viewport, he saw the cerulean and yellow Rainbow Dash touch down daintily upon the ground, riding the plumes of its jump jets. He couldn’t help but frown at the sharp contrast of their landings. For a second, he considered asking Tig to outfit his Cavalier with some jump jets of his own, but soon discarded the idea. He wasn’t nearly familiar, or skilled, enough with the use of the thrusters to make any advantages they might be able to provide him in combat worth whatever armor plating or weapons would need to be sacrificed in order to find the tonnage necessary to add them.

Still, they would have been useful in that exact moment.

That thought was pushed aside to make way for more pertinent ones. Specifically, the current location and vector of the incoming enemy BattleSteed company. Without Valkyrie or her Parasprite to provide them with real-time reconnaissance, he and Twilight had been forced to spend the entirety of the trip to the planet planning out their strategy and making contingencies. Fortunately, the Disciples had been able to provide them with decently detailed topographic maps of the area.

They approximated the likely course of the enemy’s forces according to how the terrain would affect their movement, and selected several advantageous ambush locations for each likely route. Their plan was to find the enemy, anticipate which of the routes they were using, and then assume the appropriate positions where they’d be able to launch their attacks.

As Squelch had stressed earlier, the idea was not to get into a prolonged engagement. He and the alicorn simply did not have the firepower for such a thing. They would instead pick out specific targets, attempt to cripple or lame them with their first few volleys, and then fall back to the next ambush site. Hopefully, if they were lucky, they’d be able to lame one or more of the enemy’s ‘Steeds, slowing the whole element enough for the Disciple DropShip to have time to get their forces into position for a more sustained repelling operation.

“Move to Point Apple and see if you can get a look of where they’re at,” the earth pony said. With her jump jets, Twilight’s Rainbow Dash was better served as their scout. She’d be able to ‘peek’ over the crest of the ridgeline long enough to get eyes on the enemy. Hopefully without exposing herself long enough for them to get a good look at where and what she was. They’d certainly get a flash on their sensors for a second or so, but that wasn’t a lot of time to learn much about a sensor contact.

“Will do,” the alicorn acknowledged, her heavy ‘Steed turning and cantering off towards the eastern ridgeline.

Meanwhile, Slipshod turned his own attention to his ‘Steed’s communications suite and tuned his receiver to the channel that they’d been given for the local planetary defense forces. Perhaps they might have some additional information to share that would prove helpful, such as descriptions of the ‘Steeds involved and the formations that they were using.

“―second platoon, withdraw!” a stallion’s frantic voice could be heard yelling over the frequency, “you’ve got hostiles three clicks out and closing fast! LRM carriers are gone; you’ve got no fire support up there!”

“Evac’s not complete,” came a mare responded, “it took us longer than expected to package up some of the ICU patients. We’ll be able to move out in five minutes.”

“Five minutes?!” the incredulity in the stallion’s tone was palpable, “turn your fucking head northeast; you can see the enemy ‘Steeds! You need to leave now!”

“I’m not leaving them behind,” her determination to do her duty would likely be considered commendable by some. Slipshod, however, had to wonder at the ‘heroism’ of electing to die with civilians who wouldn’t be saved either way. He was hard-pressed to conceive of what dying along with them accomplished for anypony.

“You’re a damn fool,” the earth pony found himself in agreement with the stallion’s assessment, “...I’m moving the Partisan into position,” he continued in a resigned tone, “I can’t promise you five minutes, but...I’ll do what I can.”

“Understood, sir. Thank you.”

“You can thank me by trimming down that time,” while the stallion continued speaking, it was clear that the target of his next directions were somepony other than the mare from earlier, “move the partisan forward; target the Gilda! Fire once you have a―shit! They’ve spotted us; get down―!”

Static.

A few seconds later, the mare from earlier could be heard again, “Major Sable? Sir? Shit. I think they hit the CP. We need to hurry up and...oh fuck; they’re here. Everypony, back inside the hospit―!”

Slipshod was unable to restrain his eye roll as a second burst of telltale static monopolized the frequency. After several seconds, it was clear that no other transmitters were in range which were using that channel. It hadn’t been a complete wash, at least; he’d learn the identity of one of the ‘Steed types that they’d be facing. He reached down and brought up a profile for a common Gilda variant.

Large-bore autocannon, medium magical energy weapons, an LRM, and jump capable. A lot of firepower for a medium ‘Steed, to be sure; but it was something of a ‘glass cannon’. If Twilight was able to connect with it with both of her PPCs, that might actually be enough to break it in half, if she hit it right. Though, that was naturally only a possibility if the alicorn decided that she wanted to fight like her life―and the lives of millions of innocent civilians―depended on it.

Personally, the earth pony didn’t particularly care whether this mission ‘succeeded’ or not, so long as he survived it. Which wasn’t to say that he was quite willing to abandon their objectives right out of hoof either. The Disciples would be watching his performance during the operation. Anything but his best efforts wouldn’t do much to help assure them that he absolutely, one hundred percent, pinkie-swearsies, wasn’t a changeling.

So, he was certainly going to give a good account of himself in this mission. Maybe he’d even manage to get a kill or two on some of the lighter BattleSteeds that the raiders had brought with them as vanguard units.

His biggest concern was how much effort Twilight would put into getting him out of any trouble he might find himself getting pulled into. Squelch’s earlier ‘joke’ aside, Slipshod was keenly aware that the purple mare likely felt no great compunction to kill other creatures in order to save the life of a changeling. If things started to go poorly for him, the stallion strongly suspected that he’d be on his own.

Meanwhile, he’d have to do everything he could to bail Twilight out if the situation called for it. After all, if she died, his dreams of unseating Chrysalis likely would die with her. If the Disciples hadn’t seen fit to move against the queen in five centuries, he couldn’t conceive of them doing so at some future date either without the support of the once―and maybe future―alicorn monarch.

“I got a read on an enemy lance,” Twilight reported, her tone tinged with frustration.

The stallion’s brow furrowed in confusion, “‘lance’?”

“They split up,” the alicorn informed him, the source of her aggravation now clear.

It made a certain amount of sense, the earth pony supposed, now that he thought about it. The raiders had to know that this planet didn’t possess much in the way of forces that could offer meaningful resistance to ‘Steeds. With that in mind, keeping their forces concentrated in a single company limited the area that they could cover in whatever timetable that they’d set for themselves.

While splitting their forces made truly ‘stopping’ the raiders, even for a short while, effectively impossible, it also afforded the two mercenary pilots an opportunity to hurt them. Severely. Two ‘Steeds against a full company? That would have been tantamount to suicide.

But...two of the deadliest Celestia League era BattleSteeds ever fielded in near-mint condition against a lance of whatever ‘Steeds these Periphery-based pirates had managed to piece back together from scraps? Slipshod liked those odds a lot better.

“Alright, new plan,” the earth pony declared, “no ambushes. We move in fast, we hit that lance hard. Any mayday that they send off will either prompt the other lances to withdraw off planet or chase us down. Either way we get them away from the city. Sound good?”

“Admittedly, I do find the idea of fighting only four opponents a lot more agreeable than twelve,” she acknowledged.

“Alright, let’s form up. Stay at my four o’clock on the way in,” he began ordering as he spurred his Cavalier up the side of the mountain ridge that Twilight was currently perched on, “we’ll work from lightest to heaviest,” he declared.

There were typically two schools of thought where the matter of prioritizing targets was concerned, and each had their merits.

One was to focus fire on the biggest ‘Steed on the opponent’s side at the start of the engagement. After all, the heavier the ‘Steed, the greater the threat it tended to represent. Removing it removed more guns from the enemy’s side of the fight. This in turn hopefully more greatly reduced the damage that your side took for the rest of the fight.

The downside to such a strategy was that heavier ‘Steeds also―by their nature―took longer to bring down because they tended to be more heavily armored. Which meant that your side was subjected to the full weapons complement of the enemy force for much longer until the target was finally taken out of the fight. Which translated into more damage taken, and a greater chance that something important would be lost.

Like his life.

For this reason, Slipshod tended to prefer eliminating lighter ‘Steeds first. They might not hit the hardest, but they went down much more quickly, and so it was easier to reduce the overall volume of enemy fire much faster. You obviously had to be on your guard for the heavier opponent, who’d be able to hurt you badly if you let them, but it was easier to prance around a heavy ‘Steed than lighter ones. If you weren’t paying attention, a Breezy could get behind you and just drill into your ‘Steed’s rear with impudence. Even an assault-massed BattleSteed like a Radical was easy enough to keep from getting behind you in a melee.

“And, Twilight?”

“Yes?”

“Whoever these guys are, they’re not worth your mercy. Okay? Trust me,” he doubted that she’d been listening in on the same broadcast that he had, and he didn’t really have time to convince her that he’d heard the live massacre of a hospital full of sick and injured zebras.

Honestly, it unnerved him a little too. Mostly because of how unusual this level of malevolence was to see, even among raiders. At least back in the Sphere. At the end of the day, pirates in the Harmony Sphere were out for resources and materials that they could sell for cash. It wasn’t anything personal. So they certainly never went out of their way to kill anypony that wasn’t standing in their way.

If for no other reason than because missiles weren’t free. Massacring civilians, thus, wasn’t cost-effective.

That didn’t seem to be the mindset of this group however. It was a level of depravity that Slipshod hadn’t seen from ‘Steed pilots first-hoof before. Certainly not from licensed mercenaries or House Regulars in the Harmony Sphere. A part of him even felt a little affronted to see ‘Steeds being used for something like this. He was certainly not a noble espouser of warrior ideals or anything like that; but he respected his craft enough to know that you didn’t waste a multimillion C-bit BattleSteed by using it to stomp on helpless bystanders.

It was...unprofessional.

“Set speed at sixty kph,” Slipshod instructed, “nothing fancy; center of mass hits,” while the chest and trunk of a steed were typically the most heavily armored parts of a ‘Steed, and thus could absorb more damage, it was the surest way to bring down an opponent. With lighter chassis, there also tended to not be all that much more ablative plating when compared to other parts of the ‘Steed anyway. A Pipsqueak or Breezy actually tended to have fewer tons of armor on their cores than even his Wild Bronco had had on a leg, “move out.”

The earth pony throttled up his Cavalier to the speed he’d indicated. It was very much near the maximum run speed of his BattleSteed, while still leaving him a little bit to play with if the need arose. Twilight’s Rainbow Dash was capable of quite a bit more, of course.

Both ‘Steeds crested the rise and immediately began galloping down the rocky slope on the other side of the ridge. This was the first time that Slipshod got a clear view of precisely what they were dealing with, though it wasn’t far off the mark from what he’d anticipated under the circumstances. The enemy lance was running a balanced mix of tonnages. A single light SneakyShy was leading the diamond formation, followed by a pair of Gildas, and a Riflemare bringing up the rear. A lot of firepower, to be sure, but not an overwhelming amount to deal with. Especially if they managed to down one or two of the enemy’s ‘Steeds by the time they got into an all-out brawl.

Slipshod selected the light BattleSteed out in front of the formation as his first target and carefully teased his reticle onto it. The distance between them was still well over the kilometer, but that number was dropping fast. He could technically land a hit with his prismatic projection cannon from here, but the chromatic coil of destructive light would have lost a lot of its potency by then. It was best to wait until he was within five hundred meters.

One weapon system that was perfectly capable of striking their target while not suffering ill effects of the extreme range was Twilight’s forty long range missiles. Missiles, the earth pony noted, which the purple alicorn had yet to fire, even though more than enough time had elapsed for her to achieve a firm sensor lock on their first target. A missile barrage like that would ravage a frail ‘Steed like a SneakyShy. If it didn’t destroy it outright, it certainly would have chewed away just about all of the lighter chassis’ armor, and left its internal systems vulnerable to a hit from his PPC or pulsed energy cannons to finish it off.

She wasn’t firing them though.

Slipshod felt his teeth gritting in frustration. While he couldn’t honestly say that he was surprised that the mare wasn’t taking his earlier remark about showing mercy to these raiders to heart, it was nevertheless quite annoying.

It didn’t take the enemy lance long to realize that they had company. Though it did take them slightly longer than the golden stallion would have thought to react to their appearance. Presumably, that hesitation had been the result of their surprise at seeing a pair of heavy ‘Steeds coming at them on a world that shouldn’t have had this sort of firepower at hoof. Of course, these raiders would have been able to do basic math and recognize that they had both a clear numerical and weight advantage, so they probably weren’t terribly concerned about their chances in this fight.

Slipshod did have to wonder whether or not they’d taken into account the ‘Steeds that they were going up against beyond their raw tonnage. The Rainbow Dash would have had little trouble facing off against an assault class ‘Steed on its own. Even his Crystal Cavalier was far superior to most contemporary ‘Steeds of its class, thanks to the Celestia League era weapons and systems that it possessed. They were also in near-perfect condition. While the enemy’s Riflemare had likely been rebuilt from salvaged scraps a dozen times over.

Probably not, he decided as the range to the SneakyShy finally dropped below five hundred meters. His ‘Steed’s side-mounted lance belched forth a helix of rainbow light which struck the lighter opponent, who had been charging headlong at him, squarely in the chest. The impact of the heavy weapon was enough to briefly stagger the SneakyShy, dropping it out of its own sprint. The earth pony’s eyes darted briefly to the display showing his target’s condition. Sure enough, every scrap of ablative plating had been dissolved absorbing that initial hit, leaving little of significance behind to ward off another hit.

He fired both of his pulsed cannons.

To the enemy pilot’s credit, they must have seen what was coming and took commendable actions as a result. Slipshod saw a flare of blue flame ignite from the top of the SneakyShy’s head and rocket upward just before the sapphire pulses of light drilled into the ‘Steed’s chest. The small metal equine’s reactor casing shattered beneath the abuse and promptly detonated in a violet ball of magical fire. The ‘Steed was gone, and likely unsalvageable by even mechanical wizards of Mig’s and Tig’s skills, but the pilot would at least live on to learn from the experience.

And then there were three.

The SneakyShy’s blitzed destruction apparently was enough to inform the raider lance that they needed to adopt a strategy other than ‘charge headlong into the fire of more advanced ‘Steeds’. The Gilda’s broke off in either direction, seeking to flank their opponents from the sides. The Riflemare continued to plod along straight at him and Twilight though, likely trusting that its heavier plating would help to keep it intact after sustaining more than a single alpha strike. Which was probably a fair assessment. It was finally opening fire though.

Slipshod felt his Chrystal Cavalier tremble as autocannon shells struck home. Soon after, the projectiles were joined by beams of indigo light. His armor indicators flashed, but the damage was comparatively light. The Cavalier had been initially built with a lot of armor in mind. Designed to be able to take a heavy pounding as it charged into battle to deliver devastating melee strikes with its lance. While such an archaic combat doctrine had been long since abandoned as the finer points of BattleSteed tactics were refined, and later revisions of the Cavalier saw some of its armor reduced to free up tonnage for more ranged weapons, the design was still much better protected than many ‘Steeds of its tonnage.

He actually had nearly twice the ablative plating of the Riflemare. Half again as much as the Gildas. In fact…

Slipshod had been about to order Twilight to break right with him so that they could concentrate their efforts on one of the flanking medium ‘Steeds and stick to his initial plan of working their way up the tonnage chain, dealing with the Riflemare last. However, that plan had been devised before he’d known that the heavy ‘Steed that they’d be facing was one which was so lightly armored for its weight. The fact was that the Riflemare would go down faster than either of their two medium opponents.

“You break right,” he barked over the radio to his alicorn lancemate, “I’ve got the Riflemare.”

“...acknowledged.”

He saw her blip moving off on his sensor display. This still left the Gilda that had gone left uncontested, but there was no helping that. As though the pilot had sensed his thoughts on the matter, the earth pony received a warning that an enemy had acquired a missile lock on his ‘Steed. Seconds later he was rocked by a succession of explosions as those missiles hit home along his Cavalier’s left barrel. Again his cockpit displays flashed alerts about the condition of his ‘Steed’s armor, but the damage was still minimal. For the moment. The Gilda flanking around him was keeping its distance, wary that he might turn and bring his heavier weapons to bear on them if it proved to be annoying enough.

However, the stallion had locked his focus onto the Riflemare, the pilot of which seemed to have taken note that the Cavalier wasn’t breaking off like the Rainbow Dash had. The heavy ‘Steed slowed to a stop, and then began reversing as quickly as it could. Which, honestly, wasn’t very quickly at all. Its weapons cycled continuously, the dual pairs of energy and projectile cannons mounted to either side of its back spitting out a steady barrage of destructive light and explosive shells. Sapphire beams danced around the earth pony as he guided his Cavalier into a gentle slalom. It wasn’t much of an ‘evasive maneuver’, but it was better than galloping in a perfectly straight line. It at least kept the enemy pilot from being able to easily focus their fire on a single point of his armor.

He lost a good bit of armor on the way in, some segments bleeding into the orange as more than half of the ablative plating was lost beneath the onslaught of fire from the Riflemare. But it was nothing compared to what he inflicted upon the retreating ‘Steed the moment his heavier armaments had recharged.

Again, he started with the PPC. The rainbow helix slammed the Riflemare square in the chest. Twin pulses of sapphire light drilled even deeper still. This wasn’t enough to finish off the heavy ‘Steed like they had the SneakyShy―it wasn’t that lightly armored. But he also wasn’t done yet. Successive viridian columns spat out from the center of his own torso as his medium magical energy cannons were triggered in quick succession. Each of these carved away at the last vestiges of the enemy’s armor, leaving their internal systems exposed and vulnerable.

Slipshod throttled up, squeezing out the last few bits of speed that had been held in reserve. He grit his teeth and braced for impact.

His Chrystal Cavalier’s lance struck home, sinking deep into the bowels of the Riflemare, unfettered by any thick armor plating that might have deflected it away. He outmassed the enemy ‘Steed, and both of them had been traveling in the same direction as well. Physics became the earth pony’s ally as his superior momentum merged with the Riflemare’s, and caused it to be pitched upwards and backwards. Sparks and fire spewed forth from the hole his lance had carved into the heavy ‘Steed’s chest. He wasn’t able to deliver an internal PPC shot the way that he had with the Sombra, but he didn’t need to.

Again, the stallion caught sight of rocket flames out of the corner of his cockpit’s viewport as the raider pilot recognized their doom and ejected. The now inert Riflemare ceased to resist its fate as it fell onto its backside and flopped over limply. The Cavalier’s lance tore free in a shower of twisted steel and alloy frame.

Only two raiders remained.

Slipshod’s cockpit shuddered once more as missiles pelted his ‘Steed’s hindquarters. He grimaced, but wasn’t concerned quite yet. The Gilda was still keeping its distance from him, clearly wary. It was faster than he was though. Strictly speaking, it could easily kite him if so inclined, firing at him with its missiles while keeping itself out of effective range of his PPC. He’d be able to land hits with it of course, but the sturdy medium ‘Steed would be able to weather the greatly reduced damage well enough. On the other hoof, his Cavalier should also be capable of surviving enough missile barrages to run the enemy’s magazines dry.

Meaning that this would turn into a stalemate.

At least, it would if it was just between him and the Gildas. Twilight’s Rainbow Dash was fast enough to keep up with them, and she could double their combined missile output on her own.

The question was whether or not she was willing to use them. He doubted it.

Out of curiosity, the earth pony locked his sensors onto the medium ‘Steed that the purple alicorn was engaged with. He felt a mixture of frustration and satisfaction when he saw that, while it was clear that Twilight was making an effort to avoid outright destroying the ‘Steed and risk killing its pilot, she had managed to cripple most of its weapons. At the moment, it had lost its autocannon and half its energy weapons compliment. Two of its four limbs also showed significant damage. Another good hit or two should be able to effectively lame the Gilda and keep it from escaping.

Unfortunately, that did not seem to be Twilight’s intent, he soon discovered.

Aghast, Slipshod watched as the Rainbow Dash seemed to cease firing altogether. A moment later, the Gilda that she had been tussling with wheeled about and began to sprint away at its maximum available speed. His piloting couch trembled as his ‘Steed sustained another hit, this time from an autocannon. A second later, the other Gilda rocketed past him, riding the flames of its jump jets, as it sped to catch up with its partner. The whole time, Twilight made no effort to finish crippling her target.

She was letting them go.

Slipshod keyed on his radio, “the fuck are you doing?” he snapped angrily, “finish them off!”

“They’re withdrawing,” came the alicorn’s indignant response, “there’s no point in continued hostilities.”

“No point in―?!” the earth pony let out an aggravated groan, “do you have any concept of how many zebras these raiders have killed?”

“Will killing those two raiders bring the dead back to life?” she asked tersely.

“No, of course not―”

“Then killing them serves no purpose,” she concluded, “I have spoken with them, and instructed them to leave without further incident. The matter is resolved.”

Slipshod found himself blinking in utter bafflement. She’d what? That was it then? She told them to go, and now they were leaving, and that was that? Was she serious?

The stallion desperately wanted to point out how ludicrous what she’d said was, but thought better of it. Frankly, they didn’t have time for him to sit around berating her for her naivety. They’d stopped one lance of raiders, yes, but that still left two others that needed to be dealt with before they reached the city and reeked untold havoc on the populace there.

“Fine. Whatever,” he relented. It wasn’t like they were getting kill bounties anyway, “form up and let’s head for...Nav Ferrier. We’ll set up at the phase line there and see what comes our way.”

The alicorn didn’t fight him on that point, at least, and guided her ‘Steed back to his four o’clock as the two of them headed for the designated point. Slipshod took the opportunity to take a closer look at how his Cavalier had held up during the fight. His front sections were roughed up, but not quite critical yet. Another such charge at a heavier ‘Steed was probably ill-advised though. He’d have to keep a closer eye on how often he exposed his ‘Steed’s chest to enemy fire for the remainder of the operation.

His left hindquarters were leaning further into the orange than he’d have liked too. A result of that Gilda having unfettered access to his flank while he’d been dealing with the Riflemare. There’d been no helping it. Honestly, if he’d joined Twilight in her fight with the one Gilda, he’d have probably come out even worse on that flank, as both the other medium and the heavy raider ‘Steeds would have been hitting him in that quadrant. His chest would have been much less scuffed up, but he liked the idea of being a single hard hit away from losing a leg a lot less than having a battered torso.

He just needed to give the enemy his right side to shoot at for a while and he should be fine. For at least the next fight. Hopefully the Disciples would be deployed by then and he and Twilight could withdraw back to the Galloway.

By the time they’d made sensor contact with the next group, Slipshod was feeling much less sure about their chances. This looked to be the raider’s ‘heavy hitter’ lance. The lightest ‘Steed it had was another Gilda, supported by two heavy chassis in the form of an Iron Will and a Shining Armor, with an assault tonnage Ballista in support. Unlike the last group of raiders they had encountered, this lance was more than capable at extreme ranges, and that Iron Will, with its massive alloyed axe clutched in its right hand, would have little trouble besting his Cavalier in a melee tussle if he let it get close enough.

A real fight like last time was out of the question. They had to go for mere harassing actions and hope that they didn’t get roughed up too badly in the process, “keep moving, take potshots when you can, and try to draw them back north,” he advised the alicorn while maneuvering his own ‘Steed to at least attempt to get around to the enemy’s rear.

They saw him coming of course. Missile lock warnings blared, and the earth pony felt his gut tighten as he saw the stream of LRMs arcing skyward from the Ballista. Flashbacks of his confrontation back on Lupine passed through his mind. Hopefully this wouldn’t end in the same manner. He heaved hard on the controls of his BattleSteed and did his best to show the incoming missiles his mostly pristine right side. His command couch shuddered with the impacts. Not every missile scored a hit, but a lot of them did. He snapped off a shot with his prismatic projection cannon, but the shot went wide as he was forced to quickly duck away from a hail of heavy energy cannon fire from the enemy heavy ‘Steeds.

Twilight was having a much easier time evading enemy fire as her jump jets allowed her to strafe from side to side while keeping her forward-facing weapons on target. Her own twin PPCs scored a hit on the Ballista, focused on one of the missile racks. Even the combined firepower of those cannons wasn’t quite enough to take the launcher out of action though, not at these extreme ranges. Another dual blast might finish it off though.

On the bright side, they were proving to be successful in their objective: the raider lance had turned away from the city and seemed content to focus on the pair of Steel Coursers who had showed up. Of course, that silver lining brought with it its own dark cloud in the form of the better part of three hundred tons of BattleSteed firing on them. Slipshod didn’t have a hope of avoiding all of it. His armor was relentlessly ground away beneath the withering hail of enemy fire. As maneuverable as his alicorn companion was, even her Rainbow Dash couldn’t evade such saturating missile and autocannon fire.

The earth pony pilot darted in where he dared in order to score a hit with his pulsed energy cannons, and sought to retreat just as quickly before the enemy could respond with their own heavier weapons. He paid for these sallies though, as more armor was chipped away. The Gilda was proving itself to be exceptionally troublesome. It was the quickest and most agile of the enemy ‘Steeds, and was decently armored to boot. More than once its autocannon found its mark on his Cavalier, and made a good account of itself where his ablative plating was concerned.

They eventually managed to shear off one of the large twenty-count launchers from the Ballista’s back, cutting its bombardment abilities down to nearly half, but that didn’t seem to significantly improve their situation in the short term.

Then things got worse as the third lance of raiders showed up. This one had the same weight class composition as the first, while fielding slightly different ‘Steeds, but Slipshod didn’t believe for a moment that they’d be able to deal with it nearly as easily as the first.

The raiders seemed to be of the same mind on the matter, as the heavier lance began to turn back towards the city not long after the other lance had appeared on sensors. They were confident that the lighter ‘Steeds would be able to finish off the heavily damaged Steel Courser duo without help from their heavier companions. In the stallion’s own estimate: they probably weren’t wrong. Even the Rainbow Dash was looking worse for wear. Slipshod wanted to believe that things would be going better for them if Twilight wasn’t still clearly holding herself back, but that honestly probably wouldn’t have been the case, given the odds against them.

This fight had never been intended as one that they’d be able to actually win anyway, he knew. Their job had just been to buy time. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like quite enough of it had been bought yet. The Disciples were still five minutes out from having their forces deployed. There wasn’t anything notable left of the planetary defense forces to stand in their way.

He and Twilight were it.

Slipshod activated his mic, “you keep playing grab-flank like that with these raiders, and they’ll make it to that city,” he informed the alicorn coolly, “now, I couldn’t give two shits about how many zebras get killed when that happens.

“How much sleep are you going to lose though?”

“If we do enough damage, they’ll pull back to their DropShip and leave,” Twilight insisted, “we just need them to see that whatever they’re trying to accomplish here isn’t worth the cost.”

“And what are they trying to accomplish, princess?” the stallion inquired pointedly, “this isn’t like any raid I’ve seen. Nothing in that city is valuable to them. They should be targeting a military base or supply depot if they’re after salvage worth selling on the open market.

“But they’re going for the city. They’ve already lost more than enough ‘Steeds to make something like this a wash. So why persist?”

“...I don’t know,” she admitted, “but there has to be a point where they’ll decide enough is enough and leave on their own. We don’t need to kill them to get them there.”

“Fine,” the earth pony shrugged, “then let’s withdraw and let the city burn. Let the raiders have their fun until they’re ready to go home. Anything to keep you hooves clean, right?”

“That’s not what this is about,” the mare insisted.

“Well it sure isn’t about protecting the citizens of this world,” Slipshod quipped. His eyes went to the map as he appraised their tactical situation, “withdraw to the next phase line,” he ordered, “we’re not taking this new lance head-on,” he turned his Cavalier around and spurred it into a run for the next pre-defined point on their map. Twilight fell in at his side. The third raider lance turned to pursue them.

They made their way up to the crest of the ridgeline running parallel to the advancing heavy lance. They were extremely exposed up there, but would be able to duck to the leeward side of the mountain range while their weapons charged. Strictly speaking, the raiders could likely simply go on ignoring both him and Twilight, and not have to worry about being seriously hurt any time soon. The range was pretty extreme, and the weapons that they had which could do any damage out that far were few.

But he certainly wasn’t about to take them into a melee, as damaged as they were. Twilight was free to use her missiles if she wanted. She had nearly the bombardment capability as the Ballista. Enough to take out maybe one or two of them if she actually wanted to.

Slipshod fired off a shot with his PPC, striking the bipedal Iron Will in the back of its right shoulder. The heavy ‘Steed paused, turned its torso, and responded with a shell from its autocannon. The earth pony had already veered to the side and dropped below the ridgeline however. He saw the spurt of dirt and rock as the shell detonated harmlessly on the face of the mountain. His eyes darted to his sensors, keeping note of the lighter lance which was circling wide to try and get an angle on them on this side of the ridge. The earth pony didn’t care for the idea of being pincered like that, but it would be difficult to avoid at the moment. Breaking to either side would mean getting into a close up fight with either lance, if only for a minute or two.

The lighter raider lance would be difficult to outrun even then. The heavier lance could be left behind easily enough, but they’d be able to inflict a lot of hurt on the pair of them for the minute or two that they were within range. Maybe even enough to cripple one or both of them. Honestly, the lighter lance would probably be capable of doing that at this point, the scallion thought, looking at the status of his ‘Steed.

Of course, for all his and Twilight’s harrying, the lance of heavier raiders was far from deterred. They were very nearly in range of the city’s outskirts too. Slipshod was sure that evacuations had been underway for a good while by now, and would certainly have to have started from the side of the city that would be struck first. That would hopefully mean that civilian casualties would be kept to a minimum. However, there was no way that the whole city had been cleared out by now. Not in only a few hours. Something like that would have taken a day or more at the least.

His screen was populated by a smattering of new sensor contacts. They weren’t pinged as hostile though. Slipshod soon discerned that these were additional planetary defense units. Their last line of defense, made up of everything that had either somehow survived previous skirmishes, or had been kept in reserve for one reason or another. Tabbing through the list of contacts, he saw that it wasn’t much of a last line honestly. Light recon units, and a few missile carriers. Nothing that would manage to stop the enemy.

Most of them wouldn’t even get a chance to fire if that Ballista got a lock on them.

“They might as well just slit their own damn throats,” the earth pony murmured to himself.

Perimeter turrets emerged from their sequestered mounts as the city’s automated defenses were activated. These turrets had been kept hidden in order to ensure that their targets would be within range of their lighter weapons when they finally deployed. Having them out sooner would have just let the raiders snipe them from beyond the turret’s own range.

As it was, revealing them at the last minute didn’t help much. Each turret got off maybe a single volley before being burned down by the raiders. It amounted to a few scattered hits being scored on the largely untouched ‘Steeds. None of which had been concentrated on a specific point on a single target. For all the effectiveness that they ended up having, Slipshod suspected that the city’s administrators would have been better off not deploying them at all. At least then they wouldn’t need to pay to replace them.

Assuming that there was even enough left of this place to bother rebuilding when the day was over with…

No, there was no stopping these raiders now.

...But Slipshod figured that there might be at least something that they could do to help out that might make a difference. Maybe.

He keyed up his mic, “we’re going to make a pass on the Ballista,” he announced, “and we’ll be targeting the right hind leg,” he added with a sardonic smile that he suspected the mare could hear in his voice, even if she couldn’t see him, “they’ll have to slow down to not leave it behind,” despite their penchant for senseless violence, these raiders had thus far proved that they were tactically minded and well coordinated. Which meant that they likely observed other basic tenets of BattleSteed combat as well. Such as: a lance is only as fast as its slowest ‘Steed.

“Stay on my flank,” Slipshod ordered just before taking hold of the controls and driving his Cavalier back over the ridge. The Iron Will had been waiting for him to make another appearance, but the pilot of the heavy ‘Steed had been a little off in their prediction of exactly where Slipshod would emerge from. A boulder a few meters to his left exploded in a shower of dust and pebbles. He depressed the throttle pedals with his hind hooves, coaxing every last ounce of speed he could out of his charge.

He held his fire even as the rangefinder informed him that his target was entering the extreme of his effective range. They’d only get one run like this. That other lance was doubtlessly on their way up the ridge at this very moment, and would be cresting it soon. Turning around for another pass would mean charging straight at two lances of ‘Steeds. So he wanted to be sure that he got the most out of every one of his limited shots, as each of his weapons would only have time to fire once. The closer he was, the more potent his weapons would be.

The Iron Will paused and turned its whole body to track his galloping ‘Steed. The bipedal bovine fired at him with viridian energy and streaking short range missiles. Some found their marks, eliciting alarms in the earth pony’s cockpit as the last vestiges of ablative plating were whisked away by the impacts. Another reason that only one pass would be possible.

The Shining Armor had taken notice too, pivoting and firing with its own heavy energy cannon. Indigo light burned across his Cavalier’s right shoulder. The pulse cannon mounted there flashed an alert. Slipshod’s eyes darted briefly to his HUD’s weapons status indicator. The weapon had been damaged, but was listed as still being operational. He might just have only the one shot with it anyway, as it turned out.

The range ticked down to three hundred meters. Slipshod’s hooves danced along his controls as he fired off every weapon that he possessed in rapid succession. A double-helix of chromatic energy carved away at the armored knee joint on the Ballista’s right leg. Successive pulses of blue light landed a half second later, clearing away the rest of the plating that had managed to survive the PPC strike. As expected, the damaged pulse cannon winked out of operation as something critically damaged by the Shining Armor gave way under the stresses of a discharge.

No matter, it had done its job.

By now, he was two hundred meters away from the Ballista, well within range of his medium energy cannons. These he quad-linked and fired at the naked joint. Emerald light drilled into the exposed steel skeleton and actuators. Unfortunately, it didn’t prove to be quite enough to do the job of crippling the limb entirely. Twilight’s PPC hit finished it off though. The rainbow projectile punched straight through the weakened joint, severing the leg entirely.

The assault-weight BattleSteed buckled and stumbled, collapsing to the knees of its forelimbs as the gyros fought for balance. It would inevitably be able to carry on with just three limbs, but at a greatly reduced pace. That should buy the city at least a few additional minutes.

A kaleidoscope of weaponized light, sprinkled with tracer fire and missiles, dazzled his cockpit viewport as Slipshod’s Crystal Cavalier sprinted away from the lance of raider ‘Steeds. He and Twilight drove hard for the distant ridgeline and the cover that it offered from the worst of the enemy’s fire. That other lance of lighter ‘Steeds would doubtlessly continue to pursue them even past the crest of the mountains, but there wasn’t anything that they could do about that.

Indicators on his HUD flashed warnings as the last vestiges of his rear ablative plating were chewed away by the barrage. There wasn’t much more that he could do about that other than slalom a little to and fro. Of course, the more drastic the serpentining, the lower the overall speed of his retreat, and thus the longer he spent under fire.

His alicorn comrade was at least able to help cover their withdrawal somewhat. She had turned her Rainbow Dash completely around and was using her jump jets to propel it in reverse in bursts. This allowed her to move much more quickly in reverse than she would have been able to using the normal drive train. The sudden thrusts of motion also helped her avoid being hit by too much of the enemy fire, while still allowing her to lay down covering volleys of her own every time her ‘Steed landed. Slipshod doubted that she was looking to target anything particularly critical on the enemy ‘Steeds―like their cockpits―but her partisan PPC shots should at least keep the raiders pursuing them from getting too complacent in their chase.

They wouldn’t be able to keep it up forever though. The purple alicorn’s lone ‘Steed wouldn’t be able to fend off all four members of the lance chasing them down, and their BattleSteeds were too battered to survive a prolonged conflict. They’d need a new plan, but the earth pony was fresh out of those. He idly considered calling in for another Condition Black. If the Disciples weren’t deployed by now, then they were going to be too late to do much good anyway.

The pair crested the ridge and started down the other side. Which was about the time that Slipshod’s sensors lit up with contacts. A dozen of them. He very nearly slammed the brakes and turned his happy flank back around to take his chances with the eight raider ‘Steeds to their rear. Then the IFF resolved and informed him that all twelve of these contacts were marked as ‘friendly’. Beyond them, the rotund spheroid silhouette of a Friendship-class DropShip was visible.

The Disciples of Discord had arrived.

At least, that’s whom Slipshod assumed they were. The emblem painted on the side of the DropShip wasn’t of a crossed horn and antler though. Instead, it was a six-pointed star. A nearly dead ringer for the bygone Celestia League. The color was a little off though, he thought.

Whoever they were, they were set up in what was quite clearly a firing line of heavy and assault BattleSteeds. Slipshod’s jaw went slack as he marveled at the chassis that he saw. More surprising than the distinctive profiles of the gargantuan Big Macs and fearsome Shadowbolts were probably the BattleSteeds that Slipshod didn’t recognize. Nor was his Chrystal Cavalier’s targeting computer able to make sense of what it was seeing. The Disciples had been designing new ‘Steeds of their own, the stallion realized.

Chrysalis definitely didn’t know anything about that!

The earth pony’s radio crackled to life with an unfamiliar mare’s voice, “y’all’re gonna wanna duck.”

Slipshod felt no compunction to ask for clarification as he wrenched his control yokes and veritably threw his ‘Steed into the dirt. Twilight was a tad more graceful in her efforts, thrusting her Rainbow Dash far to the side, well beyond the limit of the line of Disciple ‘Steeds that had taken up position at the base of the ridge.

A few seconds later, the lance of raiders crested the rise.

Just as his screen had, Slipshod knew that those pilots were seeing a slew of new contacts populate on their sensors. There was no way for them to stop and turn around in time of course. In fact, more than that, in the few seconds it would have taken them to realize that they’d wandered into the wrong valley, their momentum had taken them below the peak of the ridge, and out of direct radio contact with the other lance. They couldn’t warn the raiders marching on the city that trouble was on its way and they needed to leave now.

They couldn’t do that. They weren’t even able to turn their ‘Steeds around and retreat in time to avoid the onslaught of missiles, high-explosive shells, and searing energy which leapt up the mountainside and reduced their doomed ‘Steeds to so much wreckage. There probably wasn’t even anything salvageable left. The stallion had only caught sight of a single ejection too.

“Shit...shootin’ range at the fair was more challengin’ than that!” the same mare barked a laugh, “mighty oblidgin’ o’you to lead’m to us like that,” a brief pause, followed by an appreciative whistle, “y’alls ‘Steeds look rougher’n porcupine’s hind end. Take a load off. I figure we got it from ‘ere.

“Up an’ o’er fellers! We got us more barrels o’ fish to shoot up!”

Apparently, that was command enough for the assembled Disciple ‘Steeds to begin their ascent up the mountainside towards the valley containing the last remaining lance of raiders. Who, Slipshod surmised, still had no clue that their companions had just been wiped out, and that a company of fresh BattleSteeds was on its way to hit them hard from behind.

It was going to be a slaughter.

One which Slipshod was perfectly fine to sit out, honestly. Whoever that mare was, she hadn’t been wrong about the state of his Cavalier: it was rather battered and beaten. Tig was going to have some words for him when they got back to the ship, that was for sure. Especially if they weren’t able to rebuild the pulse cannon. Though, the stallion was willing to wager that the Disciples had, and would be willing to provide, replacement parts for his damaged ‘Steed. He’d spied a Crystal Cavalier or two among their own ranks. Probably even 6b variants like his own.

Though he was definitely far more curious about those designs which he hadn’t recognized. He supposed that he shouldn’t be all that surprised. Any organization that had the resources to maintain a WarShip like the Rockhoof for five centuries surely was in a position to design and build new ‘Steeds. The changelings had certainly been doing it, after all.

Maybe he’d have the chance to get a better look at them once they got to wherever the Disciples were taking them.

In the meantime, he was grateful enough to get a break and be done with the fighting for the day. He keyed in the frequency for the Galloway and commed up to the DropShip, “Gallop One to Galloway, mission complete. The Disciples are landed and mopping up the last of the raiders. Ready for pickup whenever you are.”

“Roger that, Gallop One,” High Gain’s voice responded, “plotting descent course for rendezvous and pickup―wait one…”

The earth pony straightened up in his seat, now more intent on the conversation. He couldn’t conceive of an interruption that would be to their benefit, after all. By the time the earth pony mare resumed speaking to him, he’d already gone through a half dozen scenarios which spelled their utter doom.

“Gallop Lance,” the stallion couldn’t help but smirk slightly at the thought of designating the pair of them a ‘lance’, “we’re picking up a distress signal five clicks from your position. Civilian convoy under attack from two ‘Steeds. Their escort is heavily damaged.”

Slipshod frowned. He could empathize with civilians in distress, but he and Twilight were hardly in any kind of shape to help those zebras, as battered as they were, “send it to the Disciples,” he sighed, “they’ve got fresh ‘Steeds”

“Their company’s moving in the opposite direction,” High Gain noted, “you’re closer, and it doesn’t sound like they’ll last much longer. Obviously nopony up here can force you to go, and Squelch isn’t ordering you to. Technically we’ve fulfilled the contract we had with the Disciples…” the mare’s voice hung for a moment, “I’m just...letting you know.”

The stallion sighed. Squelch wouldn’t order him to help, though she would certainly want him to. The Disciples might call up and request an addendum to their contract; that might change things. Though it sounded like there wouldn’t be time for that, if things were really as dire as High Gain was making them sound.

The bottom line was: there was nothing to gain that was worth the risk. What was the gratitude of a convoy of fleeing civilians when compared to the thanks they would be receiving for saving a whole city?

Then a thought occurred to the stallion. High Gain had mentioned that two ‘Steeds were responsible for the attack? There were only supposed to have been a company of raiders on this planet. Twelve BattleSteeds. Four had just been killed here, four more were being destroyed on the other side of the mountains at this very moment, and he’d slagged a pair during their tussle with that first lance.

The only two raiders that could be attacking the civilians then were...

“Send us the coordinates,” he said to the DropShip’s comm operator, “we’re on our way,” a nav point appeared on his map. He swapped over to the internal lance frequency, “Twilight, we’ve got a distress signal. We’re heading there to help,” sometimes knowledge was even more valuable than C-bits.

And he was going to see to it that Twilight got an education today.

The distance between them and the source of the signal was just under five kilometers. Honestly, Slipshod wasn’t convinced that they’d make it there on time to do any good anyway. Which, frankly, was just fine by him. In a way, that might even make for a more pointed lesson if they did arrive too late. He had to make it at least look like he’d had them make every effort to get there in time to help if he wanted that to stick though, otherwise the alicorn could deflect blame onto him for the massacre.

Sure enough, when they came into visual range of the fight, he found exactly what he’d expected: two Gildas attacking a column of fleeing trucks. What was surprising was the convoy’s escort: a Philomena. The earth pony had thought that the planetary defense forces were devoid of BattleSteeds. Otherwise, they’d surely have been deployed to fend off the raiders, right? What made this convoy so important that it warranted the protection of what had to be the only friendly ‘Steed on the planet?

He supposed they’d have to save them to find out.

The stallion targeted the Gilda which Twilight had already damaged significantly during their first encounter and snapped off a PPC shot. Unfortunately, it went wide, but it certainly seemed to get the other pilot’s attention. The raider diverted from its attack on the badly damaged Philomena and turned instead to face the new arrivals. Or, perhaps, ‘old arrivals’ was more apt?

If Slipshod thought that the raiders would be more skittish about tangling with the same pair of ‘Steeds that had sent them packing earlier, he’d have been wrong. Since that last encounter, he and Twilight had taken quite a bit more damage, while neither of the Gildas seemed to have suffered too greatly in their encounter with the convoy’s escort. The stallion couldn’t disagree that their chances were not quite as lopsided as the fielded tonnages would suggest.

A missile lock warning blared, and a plume of smoke rose from the back of the Gilda facing him. He cringed in anticipation of the hit, idly wondering what systems he’d lose when those warheads landed, because there certainly wasn’t much armor left to absorb the damage.

His cockpit darkened briefly as a massive shadow passed overhead. The cerulean Rainbow Dash arced above him, just in time to catch the missiles meant for him on its backside before it landed in front of him. The alicorn’s ‘Steed retaliated with a missile barrage of her own―finally. Forty LRMs spewed forth from the launchers sequestered behind her ‘Steed’s shoulders and streaked for their target. They drilled home, one after another, in quick succession, obliterating plating and internals alike until one―or more likely several―found the reactor and detonated it.

There wasn’t an ejection.

Twilight wasn’t done either. Her BattleSteed raced on ahead, riding upon pillars of violet fire as its jump jets propelled it forwards towards the remaining medium raider ‘Steed. Her prismatic projection cannons fired a pair of shots that smashed into the Gilda’s barrel, staggering the winged ‘Steed. A puff of smoke and an explosion signaled the impact of an autocannon shell. Finally, the Rainbow Dash itself connected with the smaller BattleSteed.

It split neatly in two as seventy tons of flying metal pegasus met with fifty-five tons of half-eviscerated griffon. The Rainbow Dash emerged from the other side of the crackling ball of electric fire that was all that remained of the Gilda. It was going to need a new paint job, but otherwise looked intact.

Slipshod could only sit and sigh, propping his head up on a hoof as he regarded the sight, “now was that so damn hard?” he muttered to himself. He then reached over to the radio and sought out the frequency for the convoy’s escort. He made sure to include Twilight in on the conversation so that she’d be able to hear what was said, but not transmit, “Somepony call for the cavalry?”

The response was heavily distorted, likely as a result of damage sustained to the other ‘Steed, but it was comprehensible, “Whoever you ar―ou made it just in time. Another ten sec―ds and I’d have been a gone―!”

“No problem,” Slipshod said, doing his best to sound pleasantly amicable, like the true gallant hero he was pretending to be, “glad to help. Did the convoy make it okay?” he intended for the question to sound innocent enough, but this was the part that he wanted Twilight to hear most of all. Hopefully, it was all that he hoped it would be.

A defeated sigh was audible through the crackling. A good sign, “we started wit―twenty-three trucks. There’s...seven now,” the resignation was palpable, but the other pilot was doing his best to stoke even the barest mote of optimism, “but, that’s seven more th―there would have been without you. So than―you! Truly!”

Sixteen trucks loaded with fleeing civilians destroyed by the same pair of raiders that Twilight had let go earlier―against his explicitly stated advice, “damn,” he said, feigning his own resignation, “wish we could have gotten here earlier. We might have been able to save more lives,” he was going to drive this lesson home for the alicorn, and he wasn’t going to be subtle about it.

If she wanted to keep applying her ‘mercy’ to these fights, he was going to ensure that she understood the full ramifications of it.

“Not your fault,” oh, to have been near the mare to feel her emotional reaction to that line, “didn’t think they’d go for u―they were heading for the city last I kne―. Not sure why they turned around.”

“Who knows why raiders do any of the things they do?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, good news at least: the rest of them have been dealt with,” he informed the escort pilot, “I can put in a call to my DropShip and our allies to get some medical personnel and supplies out here. Sound good?”

“I’ll have to check with...well, whoever’s in ch―rge now; but I think that’d be fine.”

“Understood,” Slipshod said before keying over to the channel for the Galloway, “Gallop One to Galloway; convoy is secure. Requesting medical for the survivors.”

“Understood, Gallop One. We’ll coordinate with the Disciples. Hold fast at your current position.”

“No problem, Galloway,” the stallion said, smirking, “we’ve got to debrief anyway…”

Planetary resources were stretched pretty thin at the moment―for obvious reasons. As a result, there wasn’t much that the local government could do to help the survivors of the convoy. Fortunately, between the Disciples and the Steel Coursers, enough supplies and medical personnel were found to provide aid and treatment. The ‘Steed Bay of the Galloway was turned into a makeshift infirmary for the wounded until more permanent arrangements could be made in the city. By their best estimates, it would likely be another couple of days before something was found.

Which meant that ‘Steed maintenance would be getting performed outside―much to the annoyance of the twin kirin mechanics. In fairness, they were far more put out by the quantity of damage that Slipshod and Twilight had “let happen” to their ‘Steeds than the fact that their Bay had been co-opted by Doc Dee and his recently deputized ‘nurses’―which consisted of pretty much any member of the crew who’d taken so much as a CPR course in their youth.

There wasn’t all that much for the two ‘Steed pilots to do though. After the briefest post-mission medical evaluation that Slipshod could remember receiving since signing on with the Steel Coursers, Doc Dee had pronounced both of them “not dying” and immediately moved on to tend to the dozens of zebras who very much were. As the earth pony hadn’t received medical training of any sort before, and Twilight admitted that she’d never bothered to learn healing magic as she had found other schools of arcana more captivating, the pair relegated themselves to just trying to stay out of the way as much as possible. To that end, they hadn’t even gone inside the DropShip yet. Even the parts of it that weren’t serving as triage, treatment, or recovery wards, were clogged with ponies carrying both patients and medical supplies between them.

The Galloway was a full on hospital ship, and neither ‘Steed pilot had any place in it.

They were watching the activity though. Especially Twilight. Her expression was haunted. The guilt radiating off of her was acrid and bitter.

Yet Slipshod found that he was absolutely reveling in every moment of it. It was the best tasting foulness that he’d ever experienced. Sanctimonious vindication turned out to be one tartarus of a spice!

“You could have stopped this, you know,” damn it was hard to not sound smug, the stallion thought to himself as he spoke, “I even told you to finish them off.”

He had the satisfaction of seeing the alicorn wince, her shoulders slumping. She didn’t meet his gaze. She just kept staring off in the direction of the DropShip, “...they said they were leaving the planet,” was her hollow-sounding excuse.

Slipshod couldn’t suppress his derisive snort, “and I’m sure they were going to...eventually. After butchering a few hundred more civilians,” he waved his hoof in the direction of the ‘morgue’, which was little more than some tentage erected over a swath of bagged bodies awaiting pickup by the city’s doubtlessly already overworked mortuary services. Only Celestia knew when those bodies would actually get collected.

Or as much of any given body that was recoverable from the wreckage. Energy cannons were terrifyingly adept at vaporizing anything organic that they struck. Slipshod idly wondered how robust the DNA records were on this planet; because that was the only way that far too many of the dead were going to be able to be identified. When all that was left was the odd hoof or hip, there really weren’t many other viable options.

“It…” the words caught in the purple mare’s throat. She swallowed, “...I never imagined it could be like this,” she admitted, “there’s no reason for it,” she said, as though that statement would somehow undo the past and bring all of the dead back to life.

“Since when does shit like this need a reason to happen?”

Twilight was shaking her head, “you don’t understand: stuff like this didn’t used to happen! Creatures didn’t do this to each other!”

“No, you don’t understand,” Slipshod countered coldly, glaring at the alicorn, “however things used to be? Doesn’t matter. They aren’t that way anymore. The galaxy you knew? It doesn’t exist. That reality? It. Doesn’t. Exist,” he jabbed a hoof once more at the rows of dead bodies, “that is reality now.”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way!” she protested.

“Of course it doesn’t!” It honestly looked like his candid admission shocked the alicorn, “in a galaxy where everycreature ascribes to the Magic of Friendship, something like this would never have happened,” the stallion acknowledged, “but that vanished a long time ago. This isn’t the galaxy you knew anymore. It follows a different set of rules.

“One of those rules is that there are creatures who will kill, if you give them a chance.”

“I can make things better,” the alicorn insisted.

Slipshod shrugged, “and I believe that,” again, another look of shock, “what? You’re an immortal demi-goddess,” the stallion favored the princess with a sardonic smirk, “once Chrysalis is gone, you will literally have all of eternity to work on restoring everlasting peace to the galaxy. I assume that, eventually, you’ll even succeed. Even if it takes a thousand years. Or more.

“However,” he stressed, his expression growing cold once again, “you’re going to need to decide how many innocents you’re willing to sacrifice to build your utopia.

“One way or the other, that ‘better galaxy’ of yours is going to be built on a foundation of blood and bones,” Twilight cringed at the thought, and looked like she was about to protest, but the earth pony didn’t give her an opening, “Chrysalis isn’t going to just roll over for you,” he pointed out, “taking her down will mean a fight. A long one. A bloody one. And not just fighting changelings either. She’ll throw ponies, kirin, hippogriffs, thestrals―whoever she needs to―at you.

“If you don’t fight them, somepony else is going to have to,” he nodded his head towards the DropShip packed with the wounded, “and that somepony else might not be as skilled as you are. And they’ll get hurt or killed. Because you flinched.

“And you want to know what the worst part is?” Slipshod curled his lip at the princess in a contemptuous sneer, “it’s that you’re such a hypocrite about it,” he snorted, “about a lot of things, turns out.

“You’re willing to kill,” the stallion noted, “and I’m not even talking about today, either. You killed during that ComSpark ambush,” Slipshod let out a dry, cackling laugh, “I even gave you the perfect way to disable those ‘Steeds without harming the pilots; and you murdered them anyway!

“So it’s not that you ‘won’t kill’, or that you think it’s ‘objectively wrong’; you just want to be the one to have the final say in who does and doesn’t die,” he deduced, “you really missed having control over everything that much, didn’t you?”

“It’s not like that!”

“Then what is it like? Why did those changelings deserve to die―executed while trapped in disabled BattleSteeds―but those fucking raiders got a second chance to go on slaughtering civilians?”

“I…” the alicorn faltered, her eyes downcast, “...because Chrysalis destroyed everything,” she murmured, “she took my throne and used my image to undo all the good in the galaxy. Everything that’s wrong is her fault!”

“And so every changeling in the galaxy deserves to pay for her crimes? Got it,” he scoffed.

“No, that’s not―”

“Fuck you,” the stallion snarled, cutting the alicorn’s protests short, “and you know what? Here’s the thing: you don’t need to justify yourself to me. I honestly don’t care who you kill, or why,” he said with a shrug, “but what I do care about is you using sanctimonious bullshit to try and validate your pathetic excuses as to why you refuse to give it your all out there in the field!

“I need you if I want Chrysalis gone,” the earth pony growled, “and I need you to take this shit fucking seriously. I need you to understand that half-assing it out there; it leads to this,” another wave at the morgue, “and if it goes on for too long, you’ll create so many of those that there’ll be nocreature left to help you bring Chrysalis down once and for all.

“Or, worse, I might end up in one of those fucking bags,” he added with a sneer.

“So you better get your priorities straight, or the last time you see a field filled with bodies, it’ll be the entirety of whatever army was stupid enough to trust you to lead them to victory on Equus…right before Chrysalis cuts your fucking head off and removes the last remaining threat to her control over the galaxy.”

Slipshod held the alicorn’s gaze...and had the satisfaction of seeing her look away.

The two pilots sat without uttering another word to each other for several long minutes after that. Then the silence was broken by a zebra stallion who was walking in their direction. At first, Slipshod took him for one of the civilians that they’d rescued. It wouldn’t be the first time that evening that one of them had come by and expressed their gratitude to their ‘saviors’. The striped equine had a bandage taped over the side of his jaw, and his shoulder was covered by an elastic wrapping, and his stride showed him clearly favoring the joint. He certainly looked like one of the injured civilians.

However, this soon proved itself to be an erroneous assumption, “hey!” he greeted, “Name’s Xanadu. I know I said ‘thank you’ over the radio, but I figured I’d come and express my gratitude again in person,” the stallion grinned broadly at the pair of ponies, “you two really pulled my flank out of the fire back there.

“Never expected that a pair of ‘Steeds would come to my rescue,” he offered an anemic chuckle, then added, “didn’t really expect any rescue, to be honest…”

Slipshod took the initiative in responding to the zebra, as he could feel from Twilight that she was likely not quite in the right mind to be cordial yet. He was a lot better at feigning the proper emotional state for most interactions, whether he was actually up to it or not, “well, we didn’t expect to be rescuing another ‘Steed! What, are you the only pilot on the planet or something?” he asked, half joking.

“Pretty much, yeah,” the striped stallion said, shrugging with his good shoulder, “I’m a private security contractor. My current―or former, rather―employer was the owner of AgriCorp. They essentially own every farm on the planet. If you buy food on Capensis, you’re buying it from AgriCorp. Everyzebra’s gotta eat, so he could pretty much print money,” the stallion thought for a moment, then added with a chuckle, “come to think of it, AgriCorp uses ‘company script’, so he actually does print money, heh!

“Er, did. Damn,” he frowned.

“Private security contractor?” Slipshod raised a curious brow, “that’s a pretty fancy way to say ‘mercenary’.”

The zebra grinned, “that’s what the title for the position was when I took it. Pretty good gig. Just had to park my ‘Steed at the front gate of the corporate headquarters and then fuck off all day doing whatever. Never knew sitting on my flank would pay so well!

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he hastily amended when he caught the disapproving expression on Twilight’s face upon hearing about what could easily be taken for his lack of work ethic, “it’s not that I’m lazy or anything; it’s just that there wasn’t anything to do. AgriCorp is literally the only source of food on the planet. Nocreature’s stupid enough to fuck with it. A BattleSteed for ‘security’ was way overkill. I was just a ‘status symbol’ more than anything.

“The CEO really did just want my Philomena parked in front of his office,” he snorted, “he even had it waxed to make it look shinier! Who does that to a ‘Steed?

“After three years of that, I almost thought I’d never have to do an ‘honest day’s work’ for the guy,” a heavy sigh, “I’m gonna miss the old bastard.”

“I assume he died in the attack?” Slipshod ventured.

The zebra nodded, “yeah. He was in the rear vehicle. Insisted on being the last one out of the building. He was absolutely vicious at the negotiating table―AgriCorp didn’t always have a monopoly on food on Capensis―but the guy did genuinely care about his employees. He understood that, without them, there was no AgriCorp. So he took care of them real good.

“There’s a shelter he had built for them and their families in the mountains over there,” he nodded to the northeast, “a place to hold out in the event of a raid or an attack or whatever,” the stallion shrugged, “a lot a zebras felt he was being a little paranoid about it. But I guess when you’ve got the kind of ‘do whatever I want’ money like he did, you just...do whatever you want. And he wanted to build a shelter in the mountains big enough to house a thousand zebras for something like six months or whatever.”

The striped pilot smirked, “guess he had the last laugh though. Turns out the shelter was a good idea after all! Probably should have built it a little closer, in hindsight,” he frowned, rubbing the back of his head, “I really thought we were in the clear too...then bam! Two Gildas pop up on our six. Missiles were flying before I could even get turned around.

“CEO and his family died in the first volley,” he offered a wry smile, “probably not gonna mention that on my resume…”

“What’ll happen to his company now?” Twilight inquired.

“D’unno,” the zebra admitted, “a lot of the execs died in the attack. Chances are the ‘next in line’ is some admin assistant who doesn’t know a damn thing about managing a farming conglomerate. It’ll probably go under in a matter of weeks.

“Something’ll obviously pop up in its place eventually,” he went on, still sounding indifferent to the situation, “but I would not want to be around for the inevitable food riots until that happens,” the striped stallion shared a knowing look with the other two pilots.

It was all that Slipshod could do to maintain an appropriately sympathetic expression as he feigned concern for the surviving civilian population, all the while reveling in Twilight’s despondency as she realized that more innocent bodies would soon be tied to her earlier inaction, “yeah, I can imagine those’ll get pretty awful. It’ll probably be months before a relief convoy can be sent, huh?”

“At a minimum,” the zebra nodded in agreement. Then he bit his lip and looked between the pair with a sheepish expression, “so, on that note, not to sound too desperate or anything, but: are you guys hiring?”

Slipshod cocked his head to the side, considering the zebra for a few seconds. He didn’t know nearly enough about this pilot to be able to fairly judge their skills. The catastrophic losses that the civilian convoy had suffered were hardly a fair metric, as it was the next best thing to impossible to stop two ‘Steeds from doing whatever they wanted to in that sort of situation. The fact that he’d lived long enough to be rescued suggested that he had some talent though.

“I’ll talk with our boss about it,” the earth pony offered, “see if she feels like taking interviews. Fair warning though: we’re probably not going to be hanging out in the Periphery long.”

A look of relief washed over the zebra’s face, “no worries there. I don’t have a lot of ties to the Empire these days. Lost any family I cared about in a Reiver raid nearly a decade back. I’m willing to go wherever.”

“‘Reiver’?” the purple alicorn inquired.

“That’s the group that attacked us here,” he explained, “The Red Reivers. Pirate band operating out of a couple nearby systems. They extort a lot of the Periphery this side of the Sphere.”

Slipshod had to admit that even he was a little surprised by the level of candor in the zebra’s tone. He might as well have been talking about this region’s weather. As though such raids were little different from the occasionally destructive storm.

“And they make attacks like this often?” Twilight asked, sounding aghast.

The zebra shook his head, “nah. This kind of thing’s pretty rare, actually. As long as a system is paid up on their dues, they leave you alone,” he looked around him for a moment and then returned his gaze to the pair of pilots with a shrug, “guess the governor fell behind.”

“Why doesn’t anypony do anything about them?”

He frowned at the alicorn, “uh, because we can’t? What you saw here was one of their smaller raiding parties. Their strongholds are just that: strongholds. The Empire doesn’t have the resources to dig them out. It’s cheaper and easier to just pay them off.”

“This doesn’t look very ‘easy’ to me...” Twilight muttered acidly.

“Like I said: attacks like this are rare. Maybe every few years, and only to serve as a reminder of why missing a payment is a ‘bad idea’. Don’t get me wrong: everyzebra would love it if the Reivers were dealt with once and for all―probably a few other local governments as well. But...there’s nothing we can do about that.”

Twilight scowled, clearly not at all happy with what she was hearing. Her amethyst eyes darted in the direction of the distant Disciple DropShip that was visible on the horizon, “oh, I think we can,” she stated resolutely before looking back at the zebra, “tell me everything you know about these ‘Reivers’...”

Author's Note

TECHNICAL READOUT

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 33: Princess of Chaos

The crew of the Zathura soon learned that there was both more―and a lot less―to their surroundings than any of them could have possibly fathomed.

A few dozen kilometers away from their arrival point sat one of the largest space stations that Slipshod had ever seen―and he’d been aboard the Equus Royal Dockyards; the only orbital structure left in the Harmony Sphere capable of constructing WarShips. This station was not designed for capital ship construction though, the changeling realized immediately. It’s primary function seemed to be habitation, given the large and expansive saucer segments that the changeling could see.

They were unlike the features of any station that Slipshod could imagine seeing in the Harmony Sphere. The constant threat of combat looming over nearly every star system made the prospect of building such vulnerable platforms that housed tens of thousands of potential victims terrifying. Once, long ago, such stations had been relatively commonplace though, as Twilight had explained it to him upon catching sight of the station. During the first few centuries of exploration and especially colonization, there had been a need for orbital habitations that would support the terraforming crews.

As the demand for more worlds to inhabit waned, and the threat of warfare started rearing its ugly head five hundred years ago, such stations began to vanish. Either through destruction or so that they could be repurposed for more militant applications. Today, no known examples of a true orbital habitat existed.

Havoc Station was the last of its kind.

Interestingly enough, according to General Mayhem, it was actually even among the first of its kind, as well. That fact had caught even Twilight Sparkle off guard when it was first mentioned to her. Almost as much as she had been caught off guard by the state of the station itself once she stepped aboard.

If any of them had thought that the eccentricities of the Disciples ended with their slapdash approach to clothing, they’d have been frightfully wrong. If anything, dressing like they were all just about to attend a rave was the least shocking aspect of their lives. The station itself, while appearing completely unremarkable from the outside, save for its novel purpose, was a veritable madhouse on the inside!

Stairs that went nowhere. No two lights giving off the same color. Section and room identifier paradigms changing from one corridor to the next. Specific lengths of hallway that mandated alternative styles of conveyance―Slipshod had never once had to skip in his life! It was all completely ludicrous.

Yet, as they soon discovered during their luncheon with the general, it was also completely essential.

“This isn’t actually Discord’s realm...is it?” Twilight asked, managing to maintain an impossibly straight face as a teapot enveloped in the general’s cyan magic poured out a stream of liquid into Twilight’s outstretched cup. Of course, since the alicorn’s cup―like all of their cups―had no bottom, the tea merely splattered messily to the floor...and the tub which had apparently been placed there specifically to collect the wasted tea.

Slipshod was feeling his eye begin to twitch as he fought back his exasperation. He had actually been looking forward to getting to drink some of that tea…

The fuchsia mare ceased her pour for the princess―apparently having decided that she’d wasted enough tea on the spectacle―and proceeded to offer some to her other guests. Squelch and Slipshod both declined. Colonel Citron politely indicated that he would take a cup, and did not seem to react as more of the liquid was poured through his poorly-fashioned bottomless cup. The unicorn mare then set down the teapot and brushed a lock of her sunflower yellow mane away from its neatly tucked appearance so that the strands dropped in front of her baby blue eyes. She shook her head, “No, Your Highness. This is not Discord’s realm. Though it is similar.

“Havoc is...something of a ‘family estate’,” she said, smirking at the purple princess, “But it does function under many of the same rules.”

“Hence the...” Twilight waved her wing at the...everything that didn’t seem to make any sense to the pair of mercenaries.

“Yes.”

Impossibly, that answer actually seemed to satisfy the alicorn. Squelch saved him the trouble of having to speak out of turn by asking what the two of them were talking about, and why they weren’t actually going to be able to drink anything during the meeting.

Twilight was about to answer, when she seemed to think better of it, and deferred instead to their host. The pink unicorn nodded and looked over at the mercenaries. Slipshod was briefly distracted when he saw Citron take an actual bite out of his teacup and start to chew on it! Initially horrified at what that had to be doing to the stallion’s mouth, the changeling was drawn up short by the feelings of pleasure he was picking up. Not unlike how somepony felt while eating sweets. Tentatively, Slipshod brought his own teacup to the lips of his earth pony disguise and touched it with his tongue.

His eyes widened. It tasted like it was coated in sugar!

The purple alicorn began to gnaw on her own teacup. It was made of sugar, the stallion realized.

“Discord’s realm―and by extension, Havoc―are...pocket dimensions. They exist outside reality as most know it, sustained by a very specific kind of magic: chaos magic,” the unicorn general explained, “this magic cannot be directly projected by ponies, or most other mortal creatures. However, it can be simulated through nonsensical acts.”

“Such as dressing strangely and mislabeling room numbers?” Squelch raised an unconvinced eyebrow, but the general merely smiled and nodded.

“Among other things,” she confirmed.

The sage mare was about to ask another question when she found herself interrupted by the loud sound of Slipshod chewing on his teacup. She flashed him an incredulous glare, but the changeling could only shrug helplessly. It was actually even tea flavored! The stallion decided that he could live with certain varieties of chaos. Navigating the station was going to be a nightmare for some time though. He didn’t even recognize some of the alphabets and numbering systems that were being used.

“And the ship?” Twilight inquired this time, “The Maelstrom. Don’t tell me that was inherited.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Mayhem nodded, “After he vanished, Discord’s second-in-command sought to take the vessel someplace safe. It had a Chaotic Drive, but he was unable to utilize it without the draconequus present.

“With no knowledge of where General Discord had gone to, he did the next best thing: he sought out one of his descendants.”

Slipshod balked, nearly spitting out his teacup, “Discord had children?!”

“He’s been married a dozen times or more,” Twilight smirked, “the Spirit of Chaos is many things, but celibate isn’t one of them.”

“Besides, what brings more chaos into our lives than foals?” the general chuckled.

“One of the reasons I nipped that problem in the bud,” Squelch muttered from beside the changeling.

“All told,” the fuchsia unicorn mare continued, “by now there is likely a double-digit percentage of the galactic population that can trace their lineage back to Discord in some way.

“However, that isn’t enough to be able to successfully navigate the Maelstrom. A creature must also possess a hint of his power,” she exchanged glances with the alicorn princess, flashing a wry smirk, “as one might expect, a ‘chaotic nature’ does not conform to most conventional understandings of paternity. As best we can tell, there is only ever one being in the galaxy that inherits it; and only after the current holder has passed away.”

“Like a reincarnation,” Twilight concluded, receiving and acknowledging nod from the general, “Because if there was more than one being with that power, then it risked becoming perceived as ‘normal’.”

“Exactly. Only a creature, descended from Discord, and who has inherited that ‘spirit’, can successfully utilize the Maelstrom’s Chaotic Drive. Otherwise it functions like any other WarShip with a standard Jump Drive, and is incapable of reaching Havoc.”

Twilight Sparkle peered intently at the other mare now, “And that’s you, isn’t it? You’re his descendant.”

General Mayhem nodded slowly, her smile wan, “One of many who live here,” she confirmed, along with a gesture towards Citron, who in turn smiled and nodded, “I just happened to be the unlucky one this time around.”

“‘Unlucky’? How so?” The alicorn seemed genuinely curious as to why the unicorn might feel that way. So was Slipshod, truth be told. It had sounded like being such a creature was extremely useful.

The general let out an exhausted sigh, leaning back in her chair and nibbling upon the brim of her own teacup finally, “Have you ever wondered what the secret was to ‘pure chaos’, Your Highness?” she began, “As in: What it would take to truly be capable of performing acts that were genuinely nonsensical and unexpected?”

“Great power,” the alicorn replied quickly and easily, “Discord was one of the most powerful beings to ever exist. Only a hoofful or artifacts were even capable of containing his magic. By being able to do anything and everything that he wanted, he was always able to interfere in ways that could never be stopped.”

However, the other mare had started shaking her head almost immediately upon hearing the answer, “No, Your Highness. It’s not power. Having power helps, but it’s not the true secret to his chaotic nature.

“To be capable of always doing the unexpected first requires that one know what is expected. At all times, and in all places. It requires a complete and total understanding of the entirety of everything. Everything that is, everything that was...and everything that will be.”

Twilight blinked in shock. Slipshod and Squelch were sitting up more erect in their seats as well, not entirely certain if they had understood the mare correctly. It was the alicorn who spoke though, “You...claim to be able to see the future?”

“If only it was as straightforward as that,” the general scoffed ruefully, “I might be able to stomach such overt knowledge more easily,” she paused for a moment, then allowed her teacup to plunge into the basin of discarded tea, where it began to dissolve amid the now lukewarm liquid, “...Or maybe it would make things more unbearable.

“It’s hard to know for sure,” Mayhem sighed sadly.

The pink mare looked back up at the princess, “A mortal mind is incapable of processing and retaining such vast quantities of knowledge consciously,” she informed the alicorn, tapping her temple with a hoof, “Everything is up here, but…” she shook her head, “I can’t actively reference any of it like it’s an almanac or anything.

“Instead, that innate knowledge of the future...manifests itself through my subconscious. I get...feelings.”

“What kind of feelings, exactly?” Squelch inquired. Meanwhile, Twilight looked on with growing bemusement, her eyes glazed over as if lost in thought. Almost like she even already knew the answer that was about to be provided.

General Mayhem turned her blue eyes to the sage green unicorn, “Feelings like the tingling on my tongue that tells me your companion,” she turned to Slipshod, “is a changeling.”

This time, the stallion did spit up his teacup.

The changeling felt his employer tense inwardly, but she maintained her calm exterior, “Did your tongue really tell you that, or was it your colonel?” She asked, skeptically.

“When was Colonel Citron supposed to have informed me about anything that occurred during his mission?” General Mayhem asked, her expression creased with an amused little smile, “he was on your ship, and in your custody, until the four of you arrived in this room.”

That was true enough, Slipshod realized. There would have been no way for the yellow earth pony stallion to get any news to his commanding officer prior to entering this room. Squelch seemed to realize that too, though her features suggested that she still wasn’t completely sold on the idea that this mare simply ‘knew’ the future. After all, the sage mare perfectly capable of making reliably accurate predictions about things that would happen in the galaxy as well. That was how she had always guaranteed their small company employment by making sure that they were in systems that would imminently be posting relevant jobs for them.

However, Squelch made those predictions of hers by scouring news articles and economics reports. Information that was usually freely available to everypony, but that few bothered to corroborate with additional sources that would allow them to make deductions about where certain events were inevitably headed. Stock buybacks, quarterly growth projections, and a rise in booking fees for local JumpShip transports were individual things that most ponies would discount out of hoof. But, when taken together, it indicated that a company was expecting to see a lot more business in the future...which meant that a rival would need to be seeing less.

In the Harmony Sphere, the quickest and easiest way to slow down a rival’s business was by taking out a contract on their infrastructure. At that point, Squelch just needed to decide if she could get more money signing on with the aggressor early on, or by simply being on hoof when the victim suddenly found themselves in need of mercenaries to protect their facilities, and would likely be paying a premium to get their hooves on whatever ‘Steeds they could.

If she were actually able to predict the future, it would save her an exceptional amount of reading…

Meanwhile, Twilight appeared to be quite willing to accept Mayhem’s claim at face value, “That’s how you were able to arrive exactly when we needed you to be there.”

“Tingly hoof,” the general nodded, shaking her left fetlock in the air. She then looked back at the pair of mercenaries, “The lack of a spasm in my right flank also lets me know that, even though he’s a changeling, he’s not a threat,” Slipshod had wondered why this mare was taking her knowledge of his changeling status rather well.

“Pinkie Sense,” Twilight blurted with an amused snort, “You have Pinkie Sense!”

This statement earned the alicorn a confused glance from Mayhem, while maintaining her raised hoof, “I mean...I don’t have pinkies, so that doesn’t sound like the most accurate way to describe it―”

“Nonono, ‘eye-ee’; not ‘why’,” the purple mare hastily corrected, “Pinkie Pie was a good friend of mine, a long time ago,” Slipshod noted the brief pang of long-numbed loss as she uttered the name, “She had an ability much like yours: she was able to make accurate predictions about the future based on subtle cues from her body. I spent weeks searching for a causal mechanism, but to no avail,” she gave a rueful snort, “I just chalked it up to ‘Pinkie Pie being Pinkie Pie’.

“It never occurred to me that there could have been some sort of link between her and Discord,” Twilight began rubbing her chin, “Though, looking back on it now...that actually explains a few things,” she frowned, “It also raises a lot more questions too.”

“You’re about to get very angry at somepony,” General Mayhem remarked softly before amending her statement, “well, somedraconequus anyway.”

Twilight very well might not have even heard the other unicorn. Her features were mired in thought as her mind began to quickly process the new information that she’d just been given, “Discord’s always been a smug bastard, but I figured it was because of how powerful he was. But if the secret to being perfectly chaotic is being perfectly aware of everything that’s going to happen―”

Slipshod felt the precise moment that something broke within the alicorn. It wasn’t rage, precisely. Almost something beyond it, but combined with the realization that she was powerless to do anything to resolve it. A ‘resigned fury’, perhaps, “...He knew,” she said in a breathless near-whisper, “Discord knew! He knew about Chrysalis and Tirek and Cozy Glow! He knew about what was about to happen!

“That’s why he left his flagship behind when he left,” the purple mare continued. She was out of her seat, storming around the general’s office, “Why he built this station, why he gave your ancestor this pocket dimension that can only be reached with his magic: he knew the war was coming, and he was giving you a place that Chrysalis couldn’t reach so that you’d all be safe! I bet he even told you exactly how to find the next incarnation that would have the power to get here,” Mayhem was nodding, but Twilight wasn’t paying her any attention yet.

“That’s why he insisted his forces supplement my usual guard detail during the summit...he knew…” Twilight turned to the general now, glaring at the unicorn as though the mare had had a hoof in the machinations of her many-times-great grandsire, “So why didn’t he warn me?! We could have stopped all of this before it even began!”

General Mayhem didn’t know the answer to those questions of course. If Discord had explained his motives to anycreature, they’d died many centuries ago without spreading it. All that the unicorn commander could do was shrug helplessly, “I doubt anypony can even begin to explain why Discord does anything. I will, however, tell you this: Knowing the future doesn’t mean you can control it. Sometimes, even when you know that horrible things are going to happen, and you know that you could stop them...you let them happen anyway.”

The fuchsia mare’s features became drawn and pained. She was looking over at Colonel Citron, who was wearing an equally subdued expression, “You let them happen, because you also know that, if you do, then a greater good will come out of them.”

“You knew Captain Hollandaise wasn’t going to be coming back,” Squelch said. It wasn’t an accusation; merely an observation.

Mayhem nodded, bowing her head slightly, “I know when I’m seeing a pony for the last time,” she confirmed, “and I felt that way when Holly left my office after receiving her mission brief for Kiso.

“I also knew that I would be seeing Colonel Citron again,” she went on, “which meant the mission wasn’t completely doomed. I also got the sense that something important would result from the mission. Not precisely what that something was; but that it was important.

“...I trusted that it was important enough to be worth Holly’s life, and the lives of her crew. I don’t know if that was the ‘right’ call; but it was the one I made,” she said, letting out a ragged breath. She schooled her features back into an uneasy smile, “making irrational decisions is a hallmark of Havoc, after all!” Slipshod couldn’t sense the slightest bit of mirth behind the unicorn’s smile. Just grief.

Twilight was still working through those new revelations of hers though. The changeling both deeply desired to be present for her next encounter with the Spirit of Chaos so that he could bear witness to her retribution; but also didn’t want to be anywhere near the star cluster where it occurred, lest he be caught up in the collateral damage when she unleashed her fury upon the draconequus. For his part, Slipshod found himself wondering how he’d have performed in the general’s position. He did know what he’d have done a year ago: sacrificed whomever he needed to without a second thought. Ponies had been tools to employ in order to get what he wanted or needed.

Friends, on the other hoof…

He was hard-pressed to imagine what benefit he could receive that would make him actually consider sacrificing Squelch. The thing he wanted most in life was seeing Queen Chrysalis lose all of her power and control. That thought had been the only thing sustaining him for years. Yet, if he was told that he could achieve that goal by sacrificing Squelch and the others...he wasn’t convinced he’d go through with it. He might be able to settle with continuing to let her ravage the galaxy in exchange for his personal happiness.

Which was probably a reason that the stallion wouldn’t make a good general, he decided.

“Which does bring us to one of the purposes of this meeting,” General Mayhem said, attempting to redirect the alicorn mare’s thoughts, “I’m assuming that you didn’t run into Colonel Citron by chance on Kiso?”

“No,” Twilight replied, still sounding more than a little frustrated, “No, we didn’t,” she waved a hoof in Squelch’s direction, a clear sign that she didn’t feel like she was in the right state of mind to have a rational discussion, and so was going to leave things to the sage unicorn for the moment.

Taking her cue, the mercenary commander straightened herself up in her seat and turned towards the Disciple general, who was looking at the other mare expectantly―almost hopefully. She very much wanted her sacrifice of the DropShip and its crew to prove worthwhile, “You’re aware of the Clan’s invasion of the Harmony Sphere,” this was a statement. After the many weeks that the invasions had been going on for now, if Mayhem didn’t know about it by now, she’d be a pretty useless commanding officer. The pink unicorn nodded as Squelch went on, “And are hopefully aware that this was not the existing plan that was in the works?”

This was less certain to be known to the Disciples, as nopony here could be sure how much information had been passed to them. From what Slipshod understood, Timberjack and his Timberwolf’s Dragoons were supposed to be the intermediaries between the Disciples and the League-in-Exile. Timberjack hadn’t been informed about Twilight’s new plan for securing a clear invasion corridor to Equus until they’d made contact with him in the Sphere. There was no way of knowing how much of the new plan had been shared with the Disciples, as it seemed to the changeling as though very little of the new plan would impact any of their normal operations.

“It does seem to be a much smaller operation than I was led to believe was taking place,” the general acknowledged, frowning rather deeply now, “It’s also more spread out and advancing more slowly than I thought would be the case.

“I take it that the plan has changed?” The pink mare looked between Squelch and the alicorn, both of whom were nodding with differing levels of annoyance. Having felt more personally betrayed by both Flurry Heart and the dragons, Twilight was feeling much more put off than Squelch was. The sage unicorn was mostly annoyed that she would have a much more difficult time getting her hooves on her promised payday than anything else. Though there was some mild aggravation at having such a well-conceived invasion strategy thrown out the window in favor of….well, whatever exactly it was that the Clans were trying to accomplish.

Because they certainly weren’t going to make it all the way to Equus. Slipshod didn’t have to be any sort of experienced campaign strategist to recognize that much.

“Apparently,” Squelch muttered bitterly, “And it’s one that’s doomed to fail unless something drastic changes in the next few months.”

General Mayhem exchanged a brief look with her subordinate, “That was our assessment as well. The changelings are being given too much time to coordinate a response. The Clans are going to be too bogged down trying to hold what they take to have the forces to continue pushing towards Faust in less than a year. Their lines are too broad.

“Is there something that Princess Flurry Heart thinks we can do to help?” It was clear from both her dour expression and the edge in her tone that the general was not looking forward to the prospect of having to find some way to use her guerilla fighters to help with the invasion in a more direct capacity. The nature of their operations thus far had necessitated them being kept deliberately undersupplied in terms of effective front line combat equipment. Meaning that there was honestly little that her ponies could do. Not without taking absurdly high losses, at any rate.

“Not the princess, no,” Squelch confirmed, shaking her head. She hesitated briefly on the next bit, knowing that―however unpalatable more directly helping the Clans’ invasions might be―the general probably wasn’t going to appreciate the first part of the plan they’d come up with, “...And not ‘helping’ either. At least, not the Clans.”

The general raised an intrigued eyebrow as the sage mare continued her pitch, “We think we know a way to turn the galaxy against Chrysalis, but first we’re going to need them to unite against―and successfully push back―the Dragon Clans,” Squelch pressed on, despite the surprised reactions of the Disciple officers in the room, as they both sat up a little more erect in their seats, “That much probably won’t take a lot of effort from you guys. Chrysalis is basically going to have to get the Great Houses to all work together on her own anyway.

“What we’re going to need your help with, is taking down the entire HyperSpark Generator Circuit―both circuits. The public one, and the secret one that the changelings use,” Squelch stressed pointedly, “All galactic communication needs to be disrupted as thoroughly as possible.”

Slipshod suspected that General Mayhem didn’t have an odd body tick that alerted her to such stupendously shocking revelations like that one, given how low her chin was hanging. It took the fuchsia unicorn several long seconds to finally find her voice again, “...You want to shut down the whole Sphere?! That’ll collapse whole system economies! The Disciples are villainized by ComSpark enough as it is; being responsible for something like that will push us well past ‘fanatic terrorists’ into―”

“We plan to hang the blame solely on ComSpark for this one,” Squelch assured her, halting the other unicorn’s protests and once more rendering her momentarily mute.

Realization began to dawn on the Disciple commander, and a tentative smile began to worm its way back across her lips, “...They’ll be out for blood,” she murmured, looking around at the others, “The Great Houses would all revolt.”

Squelch was nodding, “Exactly. They’ll take those armies that Chrysalis just spent months helping them build to turn back the Clans, and they’ll descend on Equus themselves looking for Queen Twilight’s head.”

“Which, by the way,” the purple alicorn interjected, scowling at the others, “is still the part of this plan I don’t much care for.”

General Mayhem was far too preoccupied contemplating the probable result of the proposal that had just been presented to her to hear Twilight’s reservation, and Slipshod could sense that the plan appealed to her. If it worked as intended, it would simultaneously solve the problem of uniting the fractured Harmony Sphere and deposing Chrysalis. Whereas the previous plan of using the Clans to invade Equus really addressed the latter, leaving the prospect of exactly how they were supposed to go about getting the Successor States on board with a new League unaddressed.

Few things forged bonds of comradery than facing a common foe. Such an alliance would not necessarily, in and of itself, likely be enough to keep the factions of the galaxy together forever, but it would at least create a foundation that could be built on for generations to come. It also didn’t quite address how the various smaller factions scattered out in the Periphery would be reintegrated, but that was hardly as immediate a concern as the changelings were. If they succeeded, Twilight had eons to figure out how to get the griffons, zebras, minotaurs, and the like, to ‘return to the fold’, as it were.

“I’m still not sure how we’re supposed to be able to help with this new plan of yours,” Mayhem admitted, “sabotaging the changelings’ hidden arrays is one thing. But the Primary Circuit arrays are better protected than most military strongholds,” the unicorn pointed out.

She wasn’t wrong either. The only places in the galaxy that might be better defended than a ComSpark HSG were the capital palace complexes of the ruling families of the Successor States. Taking on such places would take upwards of a company of heavy and assault-class BattleSteeds. At a minimum. Resources that neither the Disciples, or the Irregulars, had access to anymore.

“There’s also no way we could take out the entire network,” the fuchsia unicorn went on, leaning back in her seat with a wan smile as she continued to list off the many faults in Squelch’s proposal, “the Maelstrom is the only vessel in the galaxy with a Chaos Drive and, other than it being able to enter and leave Havoc, it functions with pretty much the same limitations of any other standard jump drive. To include the week-long recharge time.

“It’s fitted with a ley-spark battery that lets it retain enough charge to make two jumps back-to-back, but it takes two weeks to build up enough charge to make those two jumps. We go in, undock a DropShip, and jump out again less than a minute later. We swing back two weeks later to pick up the team. From there, it’s another two weeks before we can launch the next operation.

“At best, we could take out one HSG every month,” the pink mare said with a dismissive sigh, “it would take us centuries to take out all the public and secret arrays. More than enough time for ComSpark to rebuild what we’re destroying almost as quickly as we’re destroying them.”

“We don’t need to destroy them,” Twilight interjected, once more drawing an intrigued look from the general, “I can create a virus that will take the whole network out of action all at once.”

“You can?”

The purple alicorn flashed a wry smirk, “I was part of their creation,” she reminded the Disciple commander, “I know everything there is to know about how they work, and how to exploit their vulnerabilities.”

“So then what you need from us is to get you into one of the arrays so that you can upload the virus?” Mayhem surmised with renewed interest. Attacking one HSG certainly held a lot more appeal to her than trying to destroy them all. Especially if it meant that launching attacks on the more well defended Primary Circuit facilities wasn’t something that would need to be done.

This time there was some brief hesitation, and not just from Twilight either. Slipshod was feeling uneasy as well. The failure of the raid on Colton was still very much a fresh wound for the changeling stallion. They’d still yet to replace their losses from that fiasco. To say that the prospect of doing something similar wasn’t sitting well with him would have been an understatement.

While the Disciples were obviously more experienced dealing with such facilities, their typical goal was also usually to destroy them in order to disrupt the ability for Chrysalis’ agents to communicate and coordinate with each other. To do what their plan required, an HSG would need to be taken in tact. Which, as the Irregulars had recently learned, was not a task that was to be taken lightly.

The two of them and Squelch all exchanged glances before the sage unicorn looked back at the general, “...This is too important to trust to a single assault,” she explained, “Copies of the virus can be made and distributed to multiple teams,” Mayhem nodded in agreement with the precaution.

“However,” Twilight stressed, “those teams will all have to conduct simultaneous strikes,” upon seeing the general frown and prepare to object, the alicorn continued, “if the first team fails, and the changelings get hold of that virus, they might be able to engineer a work-around. If that happens, a second attempt might not work; and I’ll have no way of knowing what changes they’ll have made to the software once they’ve been shown how it can be exploited.

“At the moment, we’re already operating under the presumption that they wouldn’t have messed with it in order to keep themselves from accidentally breaking a system they don’t know anything about,” the purple mare went on, “they also don’t have any reason to suspect that there are flaws with it. The moment they see that virus, they’ll be on alert.

“We have to succeed before they have time to figure out what we’re trying to do, which means we can’t give them time to react to whatever they learn from failed attacks.”

Mayhem was scowling again, “And I already told you: the best I can do in one attack every month. One every two weeks if I make them suicide runs,” her bitter tone suggested that she was very loath to resort to such a thing.

“I assume that that timetable is based on the Maelstrom dropping off teams directly,” Twilight said, and received a nod from the general, “That doesn’t have to be our only option,” the alicorn pointed out, “Multiple teams can be deployed beyond Chrysalis’ sight and make their way to their targets on their own.”

“The only place that she doesn’t have eyes is the Periphery,” Mayhem stated, which wasn’t a point of dispute, “Which isn’t a huge deal,” she admitted, “But we only have three other DropShips in Havoc. Four counting yours,” she nodded at Squelch, “Is four teams going to be enough?”

Twilight was frowning now, “I’d rather have dozens,” she admitted, “This attack is just too important, and the odds of failing to take HSGs intact is pretty high…”

“I have the personnel to build that many teams; I just don’t have the DropShips to carry them,” General Mayhem said.

“Buying them would be the easiest way to go about it,” Squelch suggested, though her tone indicated that there was a ‘but’ coming, “But,” there it was, “there’s no way that ComSpark isn’t going to know somethings up if they see us buying enough DropShips to transport a whole army. Going to a Periphery power would keep things under the table, but there aren’t any of them with that many spare DropShips they’d be willing to part with. Certainly not anything large enough for our purposes. We won’t be able to do this above-board,” she concluded.

“Stealing wouldn’t go over any better,” Slipshod observed, “ComSpark would be alerted to that many huge thefts in the Sphere. Something on that scale in the Periphery would also become big enough news that it’d almost certainly make its way to Chrysalis’ agents anyway.”

“So, basically we need a source of DropShips that aren’t on any Harmony Sphere register, and that also won’t be missed by their former owners,” Mayhem surmised in a wry tone dripping with sarcasm, “Shall I spread my flanks and reach really deep; or are one of you going to do the honors?”

“That won’t quite be necessary, general,” the purple alicorn said, not sounding like she was entirely appreciative of the sarcasm, “I may have an idea of where we can get our hooves on them. However, there’s a zebra that I’ll want to talk with first to see if he can give me any insights.

“I’d also like to see all of the intelligence that you or the Clans have acquired on a group called: The Red Reivers…”

Many hours later, Slipshod had firmly concluded that while Havoc Station was a fascinating place to visit, he could absolutely not live here. It was simply far more trouble than it was worth to even try and navigate his way around the place. He might have been able to live with the haphazard way that rooms and corridors were labeled, as it was simply a matter of just coming up with his own method of tracking where he was and needed to go. However, it turned out that it wasn’t quite that simple. Whether it was part of the nature of this pocket dimension, or something magical about the construction of the station itself, it turned out that the pathways through the station didn’t remain entirely consistent.

Two hours after locating a washroom just two intersections from his quarters, the changeling had returned to find that it was now a lounge. According to one of the Disciples there, the washroom was only present during prime hours on days of the month which correspond with Fillynacci’s Sequence. Otherwise he had to go in the opposite direction to find it; but even then it would only be there so long as he moontrotted at least half the way.

Still skeptical, Slipshod tested this advice. Sure enough―inexplicably―if he managed to moontrot half the distance or more, the indicated door opened up to reveal a washroom. However, if he failed to go half the distance by so much as a centimeter, the door led to a janitorial closet.

To test his sanity, the stallion had, at one point, returned to the Zathura in order to survey the station from the bridge viewports. From there, he mapped out the station’s observed layout, to include the approximate location of the temporary quarters that he’d been assigned on the station. Infuriatingly, his ‘map’ didn’t last him past the airlock, as he immediately entered into a completely different part of the station than he had been in before boarding the Zathura!

Yet, somehow―and quite impossibly―he was able to find his assigned temporary accommodations the same distance from that airlock. So long as he followed the ‘directions’ on how to reach them, that was. Apparently, it didn’t matter where he started from on the station, so long as he made the turns and used the prescribed methods of conveyance indicated to him by General Mayhem, he would always end up at his quarters.

It turned out that anypony could get anywhere from any starting point by following a brief sequence of directions. No matter where they started from, or to where they were headed. Upon receiving this revelation, Twilight had become instantly enamored with the concept, and had quickly deduced that the only ‘static’ part of the station was a small series of corridors, and that every ‘door’ was actually a portal which would transport ponies to a specified area of the station. What area that was specifically depended upon the ‘ritual’ that was performed by the pony in question immediately before opening the door.

The concept of disregarding where he ‘was’ as being irrelevant to where he was going took quite a bit of getting used to, and Slipshod fully expected that he was going to be spending at least the next few days wandering into janitorial closets before he got used to the idea. To say nothing about getting used to his quarters…

A door chime from behind him drew the changeling’s attention away from contemplating how exactly he was supposed to adjust to living on the station during their stay. Unfortunately, remaining on the DropShip wasn’t an option, as most of its own systems had been powered down in the interests of conserving fuel. It turned out that there wasn’t an overabundance of fuel in Havoc, and it had to be ‘imported’ from normal space.

Slipshod opened the door, and was a little surprised to find a sage green unicorn mare standing there. Mostly he was surprised because he realized that Squelch couldn’t have just ‘happened by’ his quarters. That wasn’t how things worked when traveling through the station after all. She had to have deliberately performed the ‘ritual’ to arrive at his door.

“Can I sleep with you?”

Slipshod’s eyebrow shot up in stark surprise at about the same moment that Squelch seemed to realize what she had said. The unicorn’s blush spread so far across her face that the changeling briefly wondered if she was going to manage to shift the hue of her entire body. She hastily blurted out an amendment to her―unintentionally―suggestive statement before the stallion could comment, “Can I sleep in your quarters,” she stressed haggardly, “with you―not‘with you’ with you,” came another flustered correction, “just in the same general...space, that is your quarters...platonically.”

The changeling did his best to retain an impassive expression, he truly did. However, it was difficult to remain genuinely stoic in the face of such roiling waves of embarrassment coming off of the mare. At least he managed not to outright descend into laughter, so it was something of a victory in that respect. He spared her dignity that much, at least, “...Can I ask why? Is something wrong with your quarters?”

“They’re a ball pit,” Squelch grumbled, starting to recover from her earlier flub.

“You have a ball pit?” Slipshod perked up, no longer struggling quite as hard to repress his amusement, as he now found himself with a justification for it that wasn’t centered squarely on Squelch, “that’s pretty neat. I have a―”

“They don’t ‘have’ a ball pit,” the mare corrected him in a slightly exasperated tone, “they are a ball pit. As in: the whole thing. My quarters are just a half meter deep pit...filled with apple-sized plastic balls. There is nothing else in them. No chairs, no table, no bed...just balls.”

“...Oh.”

“Yeah,” Squelch sighed, “It was fun for the first five minutes, but there’s no way I can sleep in that. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and freak out thinking I’m suffocating or something. So, I’m thinking that I can double-up with you―not in your bed!” Another furious flush of her cheeks as the mare shifted uncomfortably in the doorway, “I’ll pull in a futon or something…”

Slipshod glanced back over his shoulder into his quarters, feeling his features giving into renewed mirth once more as he surveyed his surroundings. He assumed that the unicorn mare hadn’t quite noticed what was beyond him yet, “I mean, you can get a futon if you want, but it might not be necessary…” The stallion stepped out the doorway and nodded towards the interior of his quarters.

The sage green mare blinked, “...Oh.”

“Yeah,” Slipshod sighed, rubbing idly at the back of his head as he watched Squelch take in his accommodations. Unlike his employer―apparently―the changeling did possess furniture. Quite the expansive set, considering the size of the quarters. There was a desk with a chair, a small chaise lounge, and a bed with a nightstand in the adjoining room...All―like the walls and floor―formed of inflated plastic.

“...Your quarters are a bouncy castle,” Squelch chortled, her lips ticking up in a half-smile of amusement now too.

“Yup.”

The mare looked down at the bright yellow ‘floor’ and gave it an experimental prod with her hoof, “That’s actually got pretty good give to it,” she observed, “You’re right: I probably wouldn’t need a futon. Just a blanket and a pillow,” she stepped fully into the room and proceeded to give the surface a couple of experimental ‘hops’, her smile broadening slightly. Then she seemed to remember that she had an audience and cleared her throat as she stopped jumping and allowed entropy to gradually bring her up and down motions to a gradual halt.

“So...are you okay with me crashing here?”

“Are you going to be okay with ‘crashing’ here?” The changeling replied, casting the mare a pointed look. She was once more shifting uncomfortably, finding it a little hard to meet the stallion’s gaze, “Squelch...you do remember that I know what you’re feeling right?”

The sage unicorn was glaring at him now, “So? What does that matter? You think I can’t keep my personal feelings in check?” she all but snapped at the stallion, who was regarding her with a bored expression now. Realizing how what she’d said hadn’t quite lined up with how she’d said it, Squelch grimaced, “I’m a big filly, Slip. I’m perfectly capable of staying the night in the same room as a stallion I have a history with, and being okay with it.

“So, whatever lewd little fantasies are running through that head of yours about what ‘might’ happen tonight?” She went out, narrowing her eyes at the stallion and jabbing him in the chest with her hoof, “Stow ‘em. This isn’t some two-c-bit romance novel,” Squelch snorted, making a show of stepping past the stallion further into the room as though she were already making herself at home.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Slipshod quipped, smirking at the mare as she strode awkwardly with exaggerated motions in an attempt not to be thwarted by the air-filled plastic sacks that made up the cabin’s floor as they shifted beneath her hooves. The mare shot him another glare with flushed cheeks, “what?! I said I wouldn’t dream of it!

“But, come on, Squelch,” the stallion sighed, rubbing the back of his neck, “Are we seriously not going to talk about this―apparently―one-hundred-percent-platonic tension going on here?” The unicorn was very pointedly not looking at him now, “I’m going to sleep in one room, you’re going to sleep in another, and neither of us gets to talk about…” perhaps it was this place finally getting the best of him, but Slipshod was hit with sudden inspiration and executed a quick transformation; which had the effect of causing the cabin’s floor to angle dramatically in his direction, much to Squelch’s audible surprise, “...the thing we’re totally pretending isn’t a thing?”

The unicorn quickly recovered from her initial shock at his sudden change in his shape and resumed glaring accusingly at the stallion―or, ‘bull’, she supposed at the moment, “Oh, ha...ha! Seriously? You’re going to pull foalish bullshit like this while chiding me for not wanting to have an ‘adult’ conversation about this hypothetical ‘us’ that you think exists? Oh yeah, I can see us having a real mature conversation…”

Slipshod rolled his eyes, and was about to respond when he was interrupted by a flash of violet light between them. Both of them stared on in startled surprise as Twilight made her entrance. The alicorn stumbled briefly as she found herself standing on much less firm ground than she had apparently been hoping for. Splayed wings helped her to adjust quickly though.

She let out an exasperated sigh, “I can’t believe this place even affects my teleportation,” the purple mare grumbled in annoyance, “I can’t just pop over to somepony’s room, I have to visualize that whole absurd ‘route’ in order to do it first,” she shook out her mane, sending two brightly colored plastic balls bouncing to the floor.

“Squelch wasn’t in her cabin...I don’t think,” the alicorn frowned, “unless that pit’s a lot deeper than I think it was―oh!” the mare cut herself off as she caught sight of the unicorn mare standing nearby, “there you are! Saves me the trouble of asking Slip where you―why is the floor so til...ted…” Twilight’s words trailed off as she finally looked ‘downslope’ and locked her gaze on the cause of the divot. The mare went silent, her eyes wide, looking between Slipshod and Squelch several times before finally leaning her head down towards the other mare.

“...Am I supposed to bring that up, or would that ruin the bit?”

Squelch facehoofed, “there’s no ‘bit’; Slip’s just being a jackass!”

“No,” the stallion insisted before enveloping himself in another burst of emerald flame. When it dissipated, a buck-tooth donkey was standing before the pair of mares, who were both struggling to retain their balance as the floor leveled out once more, “This is me being a ‘jackass’.”

Twilight cringed, her wings fidgeting, “okay, I’m pretty sure that even five hundred years later, it’s still not okay for non-donkeys to use that word…And I don’t think they have a ‘changeling exception’.”

“We can always ask Cookie…” Squelch growled, glaring at the mule.

Slipshod’s face blanched. Less than a second later he had reverted to being a changeling, “please don’t!” Honestly, it was an instinctive reaction at this point. It wasn’t like Cookie had control over his diet at the moment, or would while they were on Havoc Station. At least, he was fairly confident that was the case.

Best not to risk it...

“You’re unbelievable,” the unicorn sighed, shaking her head. She started making her way towards the door, “I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea―”

However, before the sage mare could actually leave, a field of amethyst light manifested around her body and hauled her back into the middle of the room, “Hold up!” Twilight blurted over the stunned protests of the other mare, “I may not be a changeling, but I can sense Friendship problems from a mile away,” the alicorn briefly paused, considering, “or post-marriage problems...or whatever it is that you two are having. It’s definitely a relationship issue of some variety,” she ignored the epithet from the unicorn and pressed on.

“I finally have the two of you in the same room again, and neither of you is on the verge of death, or having some sort of existential crisis about their ‘true nature’, or wracked with guilt over their dietary needs...” Slipshod was feeling very called out by the purple pony. Her eyes were not leaving him as she spoke, wearing an annoyed expression. The alicorn’s features then abruptly shifted to something more bubbly as she deposited her captive next to the changeling and beamed at the two of them. Though the stallion sensed emotions other than merely ‘joy’ behind the intense smile, “So the three of us are going to have a nice, long, cathartic, ‘chat’ about our feelings―well, your feelings, anyway―until I’m satisfied you’ve worked past your issues!

“And neither of you is leaving here until that happens.”

Slipshod was made uncomfortable by how much that last ultimatum felt like an outright threat…

“This is foalnapping,” Squelch protested.

“Report me to the authorities,” Twilight said, still beaming brightly at the other mare. The unicorn grimaced and sulked, recognizing that she didn’t have a lot of options for relief available to her.

The changeling spoke up this time, “you can’t just stronghoof us into liking each other,” he pointed out.

Twilight snorted, “I don’t have to,” she insisted, “You both already do like each other,” the alicorn pointed out. Squelch opened her mouth to deny the allegation, but Twilight cut her off quickly, “I’m sorry, do you think I wasn’t on the bridge just hours ago to see how quickly you put color back in Slipshod’s face? That was no ‘I just like him as a friend’ kiss, sister!

“And you,” she focused now on the changeling, “I heard what you were about to say to her before the Maelstrom showed up,” the stallion winced, fidgeting uncomfortably now and looking anywhere but the unicorn next to him.

“Are you kidding me with this?” Twilight deadpanned, looking between the pair, “You two were married! What’s with this whole ‘nervous around my first crush’ shtick you two have going on?”

“Exactly! We were married,” Squelch stressed, “There’s a reason for the past tense!”

“Yes, there is,” Twilight agreed, nodding sagely before jabbing a wing at Slipshod, “And it’s because he manipulated you into breaking things off because he was worried he’d hurt you by sucking out all of your psychic energy.”

The changeling was nodding, and was about to voice his agreement with the alicorn when she cut him off this time, “Oh don’t you start! Just this morning we all saw how she was able to give you enough love to bring you back from the brink of death,” she pointed out, “That’s how much love she has for you, you dense motherfuckers!

“And,” the alicorn went on, exasperated, “the other thing well all ‘learned’―except for me, because I knew about this from the beginning―is that you are perfectly capable of giving love back!” Twilight exclaimed at the changeling, “So just do that! If you ever feel like Squelch is running a little low on love, then just give her some!

“That’s what a healthy relationship is! You love each other! And don’t either of you tell me that you don’t,” she said, glaring between the pair, daring either of them to challenge her assertion. Neither did, but the purple alicorn still felt a need to demonstrate her assertion, starting with Squelch.

“You not only kept Slipshod around after he broke your heart, but you also trusted his advice enough to risk everything you have, over your own better judgement,” Twilight pointed out, “Ponies don’t do that for creatures they merely ‘tolerate’. You clearly still respected his opinions a lot.

“And you,” she wheeled on the changeling stallion now, “have consistently sacrificed for her, to the point of being worryingly self-destructive over your guilt for hurting her. Nopony worries about how a mere ‘friend’ thinks of them that much,” the mare paused for a brief moment before adding off-hoofedly, “well, nopony with healthy coping skills anyway…”

Slipshod opened his mouth to make a quip along those lines, but Twilight must have sensed it coming, because she stepped on his attempt at a comment again, “Don’t start. The next words I want to hear out of both of you is an honest expression of how you feel about the other. Nothing else,” She glared at the stallion, “Slipshod, since you want to talk so bad, you go first,” Twilight directed a hoof in Squelch’s direction.

The changeling cringed, and was about to protest, but thought better of it when he saw the alicorn’s glare intensify when he didn’t immediately turn to address the unicorn next to him. He sighed, turned, and finally looked over at Squelch. She didn’t look as nervous as she felt. Which, of course, was par for the course with the mare. She was quite good at hiding how she felt from the world. That wasn’t possible with him though, and never had been. His innate ability to perceive her true nature was what had given him the edge where any other stallion wouldn’t have dared.

She wasn’t as cold as she let others think; not really. It was just her way of protecting herself, after not having had the warmest of upbringings. He’d managed to use his changeling senses to penetrate those defenses though and get to experience the ‘real’ Squelch that lay beneath. He’d liked that mare he got to know. A lot.

“...I know I hurt you,” he finally began, “I know it was wrong, and a bit cowardly, but the truth was that I needed you to hate me...because I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to stop caring about you on my own.

“I could have left at any time,” Slipshod admitted, smiling wryly at the mare, “Conned my way onto another crew. But...then I wouldn’t get to see you anymore. Having you around, even hating me, was a lot more tolerable than the thought of not having you around at all.

“I don’t ever want to not be around you, Squelch.”

The unicorn huffed, flashing a brief glare in the direction of the alicorn for backing her into this position before finally speaking up as well, “Well, in case it wasn’t obvious: I could have thrown you off my ship at any time,” she pointed out, “It wasn’t like you were the only ‘Steed pilot in the Sphere.

“Yeah, it did hurt,” she agreed, glaring at the stallion, “It hurt being cheated on, it hurt finding out I’d been manipulated, but most of all though it hurt finding out that you’d kept secrets from me,” the mare rolled her eyes and preemptively waved off the changeling’s excuse, “yeah, yeah; I know ‘I’m actually a bug pony in disguise’ is hardly the usual kind of generic secret most ponies keep,” she said, flashing a knowing look at the changeling, “but it still really threw me to learn that there was so much about my husband I never knew.

“If―and I do mean ‘if’!―I’m ever going to let somepony back in like that, I need to be able to trust that there aren’t any more secrets like that between us. If you can show me that you’re not going to lie to me any more―about anything,” she stared down the stallion, “then maybe―maybe―we can talk about...not sleeping in separate rooms.”

Slipshod felt himself starting to smile a little more easily again, “I’d like that. And I think I can accept those terms.”

“Great!” Twilight exclaimed in a not-quite-as-exasperated tone, “Awesome! Amazing! At long last, progress,” she sighed, rubbing the bridge of her muzzle, “I swear, I don’t know how Cadence did this for a millennia if every couple out there is even half as obstinate as you two.

“If this didn’t work, I was just going to say, ‘fuck it!’ and cast a ‘Want It; Need It’ spell on the both of you and lock you in a cabin for a week…

“Anyway!” The alicorn’s horn flared bright for a moment and a rather thick folder materialized in her telekinesis. The portfolio was floated over to Squelch, “This is for you from the general. It’s a list of personnel that she’d be willing to transfer to the Irregulars to flesh out the rest of your roster. Including a few of the Disciple’s physicians. Give it a look over when you have the time,” she eyed the pair, “no sooner than tomorrow morning.

“If anypony needs me, I’ll be in the clinic talking to Xanadu,” Twilight informed them before her lips quirked into an annoyed grimace, “...unless I end up in the utility room again. My hoof is going to be smelling like bleach for days―”

She vanished in a flash of amethyst light, leaving the pair looking at each other in mild confusion.

“...So, that was kind of weird, right?” Slipshod asked, nodding his head at where the alicorn had just been standing.

“Compared to what?” The sage green mare quipped, gesturing broadly at their surroundings as she floated the stack of files closer to her and began to look through them. Even if they were Disciples, the Irregulars were quite short staffed, and it would probably be nearly impossible for them to recruit any more personnel from within the Sphere. At least with Disciples, she didn’t have to worry about them asking questions about Twilight or Slipshod.

“Fair point,” the changeling agreed before suddenly looking a little more concerned as he saw what the mare was doing, “Didn’t Twilight specifically tell you not to look at that until morning? I don’t know what a ‘Want It; Need It’ spell does, but I don’t think we want it...”

“I figure she’ll be fine with it as long as we’re doing it together,” she said, glancing back in the stallion’s direction, “If I’m going to make you my business partner again, we need to get you back in the groove of vetting new hires.”

“Partners, eh?”

“Probationally,” Squelch specified, “for now.”

“I can live with that. I’ll swing by the cafeteria and see about getting us some coffee,” Slipshod said, heading for the door. He looked back, adding, “and then the quartermaster’s for a spare futon.”

He was halfway out when Squelch’s voice stopped him, “yes to the coffee; but I think we can pass on the futon actually. We’re not going to be getting much sleep tonight anyway,” at the changeling’s raised brow, the mare smirked and waved the thick collection of files in his direction, “there’s a lot of these to go through!”

She wasn’t blushing this time, but Slipshod could feel that the mare was well aware of how she’d phrased what she’d said…
...And he was confident that it wasn’t going to be exclusively paperwork that might keep them awake tonight.

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around!

Chapter 45: Mane Event

As Mayhem gazed at the plotter, the unicorn mare found herself hard-pressed to think of a time when she’d ever seen it displaying so many vessels at once. In addition to the two hundred odd WarShips provided by the Dragon Clans, there was also quite the JumpShip fleet as well, all of them laden down with DropShips full to bursting with BattleSteeds, combat vehicles, cavalry, and all of the munitions and supplies that they would need to―hopefully―conquer Equus. It was an armada unlike any assembled since Spike led the Celestia League Defense Force out of the Harmony Sphere. Indeed, many of the ships present here today had participated in that exodus.

Now they were about to jump back home after half a millennium spent away.

There was something poetic in that, the mare thought to herself.

“All Squadrons reporting in,” her Operations officer announced, “Division is ready to jump.”

The general nodded, glancing to her communications officer, “Signal Division Two ready for jump.”

“Signal Division Two ready, aye,” the mare answered.

Even after all this time, General Mayhem couldn’t help but nurture a small internal smile as she watched her command crew go about their duties with impeccable martial composure and diligence…while dressed like rejects from a fashion show run by the colorblind. She was proud of them though, all of them. They’d kept their faith in their mission, in spite of none of their predecessors having seen hope of ever reaching this very point. Generations of Disciples had come and gone before them, and they’d not come any closer to attaining their goal of unseating Chrysalis from her throne on Equus. Even she’d found herself wondering, on occasion, if she wasn’t just going to be another in a long line of dead generals whose task was nothing more than to ensure her successor wasn’t left worse off than she’d been when she'd inherited the job.

But, there was finally a light at the end of the tunnel. They were ready to jump to the Faust System. In just a few days, Chrysalis would be gone…

…Or the galaxy would be completely and irrevocably doomed, the unicorn acknowledged silently to herself.

“Signal from the Fleet,” the comms mare announced, “All divisions ready; jump on…your mark, general.” The young mare glanced over at Mayhem with a look of mild surprise.

It was understandable, the general supposed. After all, she wasn’t technically in charge of the overall fleet. That honor had gone to Star Admiral Cinder. Mayhem was merely in charge of one of the WarShip divisions that made up the whole fleet. However, the dragoness was perfectly aware of the Disciple leader’s…unique nature. Presumably, she was hoping that Mayhem would sense whether or not their mission could safely proceed now or not.

“Very well, lieutenant. Message for the fleet: Jump on my mark…”

Mayhem’s right calf quivered.

The unicorn’s pause was brief. Anypony not paying close attention wouldn’t have noticed it. Those looking at her might have spotted the slight widening of her eyes and the blanching of her features. It wasn’t a portent of doom that the mare was sensing through her ‘gift’ though. Not as such. She didn’t feel that failure awaited them on the other side.

However, what she did feel was…that this was the last time she would ever be giving this order.

There was a lot that could mean, of course. Plenty of scenarios existed where the invasion succeeded, but where Mayhem herself never again ordered a ship to execute a jump. Some of those scenarios didn’t even necessarily involve her own death either.

Regardless, nothing that the unicorn was feeling suggested that their endeavor wouldn’t succeed. So she gave the order, “...Jump.”

It was difficult to immediately recognize that they’d reached their destination. Compared to the wild and wonderful scenery of Havoc, one field of stars looked very much like another. And given that they’d only traveled a little over two dozen lightyears from their point of origin, only a particularly perceptive astronomer would have noticed that the starfield was any different. They’d been staring at the stars around their intermediary rally point between Lameduck and Faust for a week, and Mayhem saw no difference between the arrangement of the stars then and their arrangement now.

The planetary system on the other hoof…

Faust was a particularly curious phenomenon in the galaxy. General Mayhem was aware of a great many theories relating to its origin, and each seemed just as plausible as the last; but none had been outright confirmed to her knowledge. Likely it never would be. All that was known for certain was that Faust was a wholly artificial creation.

By whom, and for what purpose, none knew. Any record of such a reason, if any had ever existed, had long since been lost to time. All that was known was that it was a fabricated star system. Which was plainly obvious to anycreature the moment they studied a map of the star system. Because Faust was the only solar system which technically wasn’t a ‘solar system’. Definitionally, it was a planetary system, in that it wasn’t heliocentric, but geocentric.

The star that provided life-sustaining light and heat to Equus had been discovered to be an artificial creation by Twilight Sparkle shortly after spaceflight had been achieved. This had been assumed to be the norm…until doctors Finder and Keeper had developed their jump drive technology and explored the first alien system.

After going centuries without charting another system like Faust, the conclusion had been reached that the system was a unique creation. Twilight’s best theory was that it had been ‘built’ by an ancient lost civilization of alicorns. However, since no records or sign of such a group’s existence had ever been found, that was a theory that would forever remain unproven.

It was the star system’s very nature that made it nearly impossible for JumpShips to access though. Jumping into a system required going from one gravitationally neutral location to another. A star’s zenith or nadir points were the ideal locations, as they were extremely large targets that experienced relatively negligible movement. A star’s leisure course through the galaxy was easy to chart and predict when making jump calculations. Usually.

Not in the case of Faust’s primary though. Since the star orbited the planet, and not the other way around, it moved a lot. Making a successful jump into the Faust System was impossible without knowing the exact position of the star in its orbit around Equus.

Fortunately, since Twilight Sparkle was the very alicorn who had created the magic that cemented the star’s orbit and removed the necessity of an alicorn ‘raising’ and ‘lowering’ it every day, she had a fairly decent idea of exactly where it would be, so long as she was provided with the exact time of day in Canterlot at the time the jump was being made.

Clearly the alicorn had known what she was doing, since the fleet had arrived successfully.

“Message from Fleet,” the comms officer announced, drawing General Mayhem’s attention back to the present, “Reform divisions and proceed along directed course,” As the mare spoke, the bridge’s holographic plotter produced a dashed line heading from the fleet’s current location to Equus.

“Helm, plot course and give me an ETA for intercept,” Mayhem ordered.

The stallion at the WarShip’s helm and navigation console issued a curt nod of his head, “Plotting course, aye,” a moment later, “Time to orbital insertion at indicated acceleration and turnover is…forty eight hours,” he announced.

“Signal all squadrons to form up and proceed in,” Mayhem ordered. Then her attention turned to the moon orbiting Equus. Specifically to the shipyards that were located there. This was also where the fleet of ComSpark WarShips was anchored. The unicorn mare studied the cloud of contacts hovering near the orbiting shipyard complex. It would be a couple minutes yet before detectable emissions from their recently arrived vessels were picked up by the sensor operators on those ships. Mayhem idly wondered what the reaction of those changelings on watch would be.

The Disciple general was curious to know how they would react. While the sudden appearance of the better part of a thousand hostile ships in the system was certainly likely to facilitate the voiding of a bowel or two, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out the vast majority of those new arrivals were unarmed JumpShips. Only a little over two hundred of them were WarShips that posed any significant martial threat. Certainly more armed vessels than ComSpark was going to be fielding in this fight, but not necessarily an overwhelming number. The force disparity was such that Mayhem wasn’t quite ready to dismiss the inevitable confrontation with them as a foregone conclusion, at any rate. It was conceivable that a competent enough tactician could find a way to, if not outright win, at least trim down their numbers enough to make it difficult to enforce their blockade of Equus during the invasion.

A lot of their ability to achieve their goals during the invasion relied on being able to keep the changelings from moving their planetary forces around via DropShip; which meant maintaining a comprehensive blockade of Equus’ orbit with their WarShips. If the changelings managed to achieve even marginally better than a one-for-one trade in WarShips during the battle, the remains of the fleet that reached Equus might not be enough to effectively restrict DropShip deployments. Mayhem had run the numbers with Star Admiral Cinder, and the two had agreed that they couldn’t afford to lose more than fifty WarShips prior to the invasion if they wanted to ensure dominance over space around the planet.

If the fleet of Dragon Clan ships had one thing going for it, it was that none of the senior ComSpark officers―indeed, no ‘ling at all―possessed any practical experience conducting WarShip combat. It had been hundreds of years since the Harmony Sphere had seen any action involving WarShips, and even those engagements had not involved ComSpark forces. Every member of the changeling crews would be going into this fight with absolutely no idea what to do or to expect. Not really.

Meanwhile, the same thing could quite be said for all of those serving aboard the Clan vessels. There were still a few senior officers among the dragon crews who had served in the Celestia League Defense Forces prior to following Spike into exile. Those few experienced captains among them might not represent a decisive edge, per se; but they were an edge. Perhaps even enough of one that they and the squadrons they led would be able to summarily outfight their opponents.

It just remained to be seen whether or not the changelings possessed a particularly crafty officer or two…

By the time General Charon received official notification concerning the arrival of the enemy fleet, she’d already known about them for the better part of half an hour. She wasn’t sure if that was indicative of incompetence, or if it was simply a matter of herself not being nearly as high up on the list of “Important ‘Lings to Tell About Serious Problems” as she had assumed. Likely a combination of both. In fact, there was a better than even chance that those first ten minutes had been spent by the sensor techs trying to determine whether their systems were faulty or not.

After all, every changeling ‘knew’ that it was impossible for anycreature from the Harmony Sphere to reach the Faust System, due to its peculiar and unique geocentric nature.

Never mind that any changeling with more than two functioning brain cells had to realize that if anycreature other than a changeling knew how to reach this system it would be the fucking alicorn princess that had ruled from here for over a thousand years! Of course the Dragon Clans, led by the real Twilight fucking Sparkle would know how to get here!

Then again, if those techs had more than two functioning brain cells, they wouldn’t have been mere techs, Charon supposed…

In any event, the changeling general was glad that she had made arrangements to have the system’s sensor net tied into her own personal console in her quarters. It had allowed her to begin putting her plans into motion. Or, at least, make sure that all of the orders were ready to be transmitted at the earliest ‘proper’ moment. After all, the general knew that if she began to take action prior to being ‘officially’ informed about the situation, that risked raising serious questions about how she’d come to know about something which no other changeling had believed was possible. Those were questions that she didn’t need asked when all of this was over, no matter how it ended.

Especially since it wasn’t the actions of the attackers that the general was responding to. Not really.

Even a novice navigator knew that it would take the better part of two days for the invading fleet to reach Equus. Time enough that acting an extra thirty minutes early wouldn’t make a significant difference when it came to mobilizing forces and preparing defenses. In that respect, Charon knowing about the arrivals as early as possible wouldn’t have mattered at all.

However, while it might have only taken the powers that be a half an hour to see to it that the general was informed about the WarShip fleet heading for the planet, it would take a great deal longer for the changeling to receive her marching orders. Charon wanted to make certain that she had things well in motion before that happened, because she knew that whatever her superiors decided was the ‘best course of action’ was almost certainly not going to align with the general’s own plans. They’d want her divisions stationed at the capital to protect the queen.

Which was the last place they’d be able to do any real good, Charon knew.

One of two things was going to happen in the next day or two: either the Clan fleet was going to be stopped dead when they were sandwiched between the ComSpark WarShips here and the ones Admiral Gossamer would be bringing in once he was informed of the invasion. Or, the Clanners would manage to punch their way through to Equus and launch their invasion. If the former happened, then it wouldn’t matter where Charon’s divisions were, because they weren’t going to be needed anyway. If the latter turned out to be the case, then the last place the changeling officer wanted her forces was locked down on the planet.

She wanted them with her here, on the moon. From here they could either be deployed to Equus as needed to repel the invasion, or they would be poised to be withdrawn from the Faust System entirely. Which order she gave would be entirely dependent on how it looked to her like the fight was going to turn out.

However, in order to ensure that her forces would be left here on the moon, General Charon needed to make certain that as many of them were up here and downloaded as possible before she received any formal orders to the contrary. That way, she could point out that there was no way for her to comply with any instructions to relocate her divisions to the capital in the timeframe available.

Her own superiors would gnash their teeth, she was sure; but there would be nothing that they could do about it. When this was all over, she would either be reprimanded for ‘recklessly’ moving her forces around without first seeking approval from on high, hailed as a hero when her tactical redeployments to the surface turned the tide of the invasion and save their queen, or she’d be ready to rendezvous with Gossamer’s remaining ships and head out of system.

No matter which way this invasion ended, General Charon stood to lose nothing. Indeed, in the two latter scenarios, the changeling stood to gain quite a bit.

General Mayhem stifled a yawn as she stepped back onto her command bridge, the half-empty mug of coffee floating beside her was brought to her lips once more. Despite knowing that nothing ‘exciting’ was going to be happening last night, the yellow mare had found herself unable to get any particularly restful sleep. Which was doubly unfortunate, since things were definitely set to get a lot more lively in the next six hours. The Disciple leader glanced at the large plotter in the center of the room in order to confirm what she already knew from last night: that the changelings were coming out to meet them.

It was to be expected, of course. Even though they were fielding an inferior force, no naval commander wanted to fight and battle in space with a planet at their back. It deprived them of both the initiative, and seriously hampered their maneuvering options. The hundred or so ComSpark WarShips had formed up and set an intercept course within hours of the arrival of the combined invasion force, despite their inferior numbers. It wasn’t like they had much of a choice, Mayhem noted. One way or another, the two fleets were going to come to blows.

To the changelings’ credit, they were even doing so much more aggressively than Mayhem might have otherwise anticipated, meeting the Clan fleet well away from the planet. If the Disciple general had been forced to offer up an explanation as to why this was the case, the unicorn would have suggested that the intent behind the changeling commander’s thinking was to meet the Clan WarShips as far out from Equus as possible and then fight a delaying action at range. A close-in confrontation would obviously go poorly from them, but it was at least plausible that exchanging fire at longer ranges offered ComSpark the opportunity to inflict losses without sustaining too many of their own in trade.

Unlikely, in Mayhem’s opinion, but she probably would have gone for a similar strategy if their positions were reversed; so she couldn’t fault the changeling over there who’d made this decision.

Admiral Cinder had reformed their fleet to account for this tactic, putting the ships with the longest range guns at the forefront. The dragoness wanted to be certain that, if there was going to be a protracted exchange of fire at long range, she had more―and bigger―guns doing the shooting. Meanwhile the swarm of DropShips carrying their ground forces were being kept well to the rear, safe from any possible attack. Once the WarShips smashed the ComSpark fleet and secured the orbital space around Equus, they’d be brought in to commence their landings.

Indeed, so far, everything looked like it was going exactly as planned―

Mayhem’s tail twitched.

The Disciple general’s heart just about leaped up into her throat as she processed the sudden tremor. For just about any other pony in the galaxy, such a minor event would have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon. However, for one General Mayhem of the Disciples of Discord, there was no such thing as an ‘unremarkable’ body tick. Every little itch, twitch, tremor, or ache, was significant. Sometimes it was something minor that would affect only herself. Other times those little events heralded an often unpleasant fate for those around her.

Considering the high degree of improbability that something was going to drop onto her head from the ceiling of the WarShip’s command center, Mayhem deduced that what she was feeling pertained to others. The question now became: who?

The unicorn’s eyes darted over the clusters of holographic blips on the plotter. Looking at the wall of Clan WarShips headed towards Equus didn’t evoke any additional feelings from her tail. Nor did she sense anything amiss with the DropShips trailing them. However, when her gaze passed back to the JumpShips waiting above the system’s star…

A tidal wave of overwhelming dread washed over the mare, disrupting her telekinesis and sending her ceramic mug crashing to the deck below where it shattered. Every head in the room turned suddenly in the direction of the Disciple general, even as the mare began to scream in near panic, unable to maintain any shred of composure in the face of the horror that comforted her.

“Signal the JumpShips!” General Mayhem yelled frantically, her eyes locked onto their collection of dots represented on the plotter, “Tell them to leave! Get them out of there! Now!

“Helm, bring us about! Full burn back towards the JumpShips! Relay to all squadrons in the division to do the same!”

Even as she was giving her orders, the unicorn mare knew how useless her commands were. Barely a fraction of those vessels had any of the reserve batteries that would allow them to make a second jump without waiting the week necessary to properly recharge their drives; and they’d all just transitioned into the Faust System not even a full day ago. Barely any of them would be able to leave at all. Those that could might not even be able to do so in time either. Even with a full charge, it took time to plot and execute a jump out of a system. Time that those ships almost certainly didn’t have.

Nopony on the bridge could have expected the sudden outburst from their commander. She hadn’t even known that she was going to give orders like these. However, there wasn’t a Disciple on the Maelstrom who wasn’t aware that their general possessed something akin to ‘precognition’. She was a vessel for the Spirit of Chaos. She knew things that could not be known, and that was just the way it was. There was rarely an explanation for the things that she said or did; but there was always a reason. Even if Mayhem herself didn’t know what it was at the time.

The officer at the comms station didn’t waste a single second. The moment General Mayhem demanded that the JumpShips be ordered to leave the system, the pony at the console was cuing in the frequency for a general broadcast to the JumpShips and issuing the directive for all of the ships that could to depart as quickly as possible. As quickly as the communications pony reacted though, it wasn’t an instantaneous operation. And, of course, the speed at which the JumpShips reacted was contingent on their comms officers reacting appropriately to the transmitted orders, passing them up to their commanders―who might not even be awake, because what matters could possibly come up that would concern them any time soon?―and then the ships’ engineers being able to spool up any charged Finders-Keepers Drives that existed in the fleet.

Which was all to say that, while the crew of the Maelstrom did all that they possibly could to save the lives of those JumpShip crews, not a single one of the massive ships left the system by the time the first crimson blip appeared in their midst. Nor had any left when the second blip appeared. Or the third. Or the thirtieth.

When the first icon representing one of their JumpShips did vanish from the plotter, General Mayhem knew that it wasn’t because the ship had transitioned out of the system. It was because the unarmed, and barely armored, vessel had been destroyed. A second blue icon vanished seconds after the first. Then a third.

Then a thirtieth…

The several light-minute distance between the JumpShips and the rest of the fleet meant that, by the time the Maelstrom received many of those initial distress signals, the vessels which had sent them had already been destroyed. For the rest...they could do little more than listen to the last desperate pleas for help from frantic crews.

The complete destruction of their JumpShip fleet took less than an hour. Not a single one of them managed to make it out of the system to safety. A few had tried to flee using conventional drives, but JumpShips had never really been intended to move very far from a system’s primary. Their engines were mostly designed for station-keeping operations, not for evading incoming fire from attacking WarShips. It was a slaughter.

It also looked like it might turn out to be just the first of many.

The arrival of this new, second, ComSpark fleet changed everything. Instead of outnumbering the changelings, it was the Clans who now faced unfavorable odds. Worse, their fleet was sandwiched between two forces. They were outgunned and outflanked. They were also effectively trapped in the system. Even if they somehow managed to avoid contact with the ComSpark WarShips and make it to a suitable jump location, there was no way for them to take most of the DropShips with them. Jumping out of Faust would mean leaving nearly the entire DropShip fleet behind, and the million and a half soldiers embarked on them.

All of this would end up being for nothing and Queen Chrysalis would be able to reestablish her hold on the Harmony Sphere largely unopposed until the Clans could rebuild and try again…likely in another five hundred years. If at all.

Their initial plan was a bust, Mayhem knew. They wouldn’t be able to crush the ComSpark WarShip fleet in one blow and take their time invading Equus. Which wasn’t to say that there wasn’t still a way to conduct the invasion. There was, but it was going to mean shortening their initial timetables. Considerably.

It also meant taking some additional risks with their forces, both WarShip and DropShip alike. Mayhem had already taken the first step by detaching her division from the rest of the fleet and turning them around to meet the new arrivals. She was taking a group of about fifty ships to meet a force that outnumbered her three-to-one. However, their goal was not going to be to achieve an outright victory in this instance. Their mission was to conduct a delaying action and buy the rest of the fleet some additional breathing room.

Meanwhile, the rest of the WarShips and the DropShip fleet would increase their acceleration beyond what was capable of arriving at Equus in a parking orbit. At least, not directly. They would be adjusting their courses somewhat so that they could slingshot around the moon and bleed off some of their acceleration that way before looping back towards the planet. They’d run the numbers, and the changeling fleet would be hard-pressed to decelerate and return to the planet in anything less than an additional twenty-fours hours after their own arrival at Equus. Which would mean that they’d have a little less than a day to take Canterlot and either kill or capture Queen Chrysalis before the Clans lost orbital control of Equus and the invasion was inevitably doomed.

If the task of taking the capital under their original timetable had seemed ambitious, cutting the operational window down to less than a single day made it sound outright impossible. However, it was also their only option. Because twenty-four hours after the Clans made landfall on Equus, the changeling WarShip fleet would be arriving in orbit of Equus in numbers that the Clans would simply not be able to overcome. From there, the WarShips could either break and run for the sun’s zenith and make their escape from Faust, leaving the forces on the ground to be slaughtered…or they could stay and everycreature could die.

Neither felt like a particularly appealing option.

Of course, before they got to the point where making such a decision became relevant, Cinder’s group first needed to punch their way through the changeling fleet coming to meet her. Meanwhile, General Mayhem and her division would be doing their best not to get themselves killed too quickly. The longer they held on, the more time they would buy for the DropShips.

“Cruiser Squadron One through Four are to take up flanking positions around the DropShips,” Cinder ordered, jabbing one of her clawed fingers at the indicated DropShip cloud, “They’ll run interference when we punch through the enemy’s formation. Squadrons five and six are going to help give them a hole to fly through. I want Battleship Squadron Three and Four to focus their fire on this point to soften up the enemy wall.

“The moment CruRons Five and Six get themselves wedged in there, I want those DropShips pouring on every last hundredth of a G they can wring out of those engines! Remind squadron leaders to keep their formations tight; this is going to be rough!”

Star Admiral Cinder’s eyes didn’t leave the plotter as she watched the formation of her fleet shift to comply with her directives. The wall of red blips denoting the ComSpark fleet rising to meet them from Equus was on parity with hers, as a result of Mayhem’s division hanging back to delay the newly arrived second fleet. The dragoness had very nearly ground her teeth into powder when they appeared.

Obviously the most logical explanation for why the changelings were using double the slipways necessary to properly maintain their WarShips was because they possessed double the WarShips! She’d allowed herself to place too much trust in their changeling informant. She wanted to blame him for this debacle; however, she was forced to grudgingly acknowledge that Slipshod had reminded her―repeatedly―that he’d never been in a position to receive comprehensive information about the disposition of ComSpark’s WarShip fleets. He could only report on what he’d directly seen.

The burden of properly interpreting the raw intelligence had been on her and her staff; and they’d screwed up in spectacular fashion.

Not that operating under the assumption that the changelings had a second WarShip fleet tucked away outside of Faust would have changed too much. This would still have been their best chance to make a play for Chrysalis. She hadn’t had an extra five hundred jump batteries laying around, nor the facilities to integrate them onto those JumpShips anyway, so they’d still have been lost. At best, she could have ordered them operated with skeleton crews and ensured they were transferred to the WarShips as soon as they entered the system. That would have saved the crews, but the vessels themselves would still have been lost and this mission would have still been a one-way trip.

Cinder wasn’t sure if knowing the real stakes ahead of time would have made things better or worse though. While the dragoness could attest that the Dragon Clans would have come here knowing that, she was less than certain about the three armies operated by the Harmony Sphere powers. It’d taken a lot of cajoling to get them this far when they thought that withdrawing would be a relatively simple and painless affair.

Nothing about the next few hours was going to be ‘simple’ now though.

The star admiral reached out for one of the nearby consoles and tapped out a series of commands, “TacOps, send these firing orders out to the fleet,” she barked. As Cinder spoke, the plotter updated with her proposed plan of action, denoting the sections of the enemy fleet that would be prioritized by the forces under her command. She glanced over at a nearby griffon hen, “FlightOps, what’s the status on our fighter screen?”

The griffon glanced at her terminal briefly before responding, “Eighty percent, ma’am.”

Cinder snorted in mild annoyance. At the rate that things were progressing, they’d have their full fighter screen up and in place in time. It wouldn’t be as far out as she might have liked, but it would be there, “Have them focus on cruisers and frigates. Anything that’s maneuverable enough to potentially fuck with our DropShips.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

The dragoness’ lip twitched as she became aware of a decidedly annoying ‘clicking’ sound coming from somewhere nearby. She looked around and was very nearly about to bite the head off―perhaps even literally―of whoever was making that distracting racket, when she looked down and noticed that it was just the sound of her own talons tapping nervously on the surface of the holographic plotter. Cinder sneered at the offending fingers before balling her hand into a fist in order to bring the noise to a stop.

She was doing everything that was expected of her under the situation, and yet she couldn’t suppress the feeling that she wasn’t doing nearly enough. The dragoness supposed that was just what ‘command’ felt like. She’d given the squadrons their orders and every one of her downtrace commanders understood her intent for this confrontation. Her job was done, for the most part. It was now up to the individual ship captains and their crews to fight their ships to the best of their abilities…and hope. There was nothing more for the star admiral to do unless the enemy underwent some change in their deployment that needed to be accounted for.

Otherwise all Cinder could do right now was watch the plotter for the next three hours. That was when she’d find out if she’d issued the ‘right’ orders…

Slipshod very nearly jumped out of his shell when he heard the klaxon blare on the bridge of the Zathura. He’d initially thought that it indicated that one of the fast approaching ComSpark ships had acquired a weapons lock on their fragile little DropShip. Aileron reached out with a wing and swatted at a nearby panel, immediately silencing the alarm, “Proximity alert,” he announced to the rest of the bridge’s occupants. A brief glance at his console and then, “Respite’s getting a little close. Shifting to port, down z-axis,” He glanced back over at Squelch, “It’s getting a little crowded around here, commander.”

The sage green unicorn’s lips were pressed together in a grim line as she studied the sensor displays around her. It was very much a ‘damn if we do; damned if we don’t’ situation from what the mare could tell. It was clear that the DropShips would be a primary target of the ComSpark forces, and there was fuck all that even a larger Princess-class DropShip would be able to do against a ‘dinky’ corvette-sized WarShip more than ten times its size. A single hit from one of those oversized naval autocannons would be enough to obliterate a DropShip. Which meant that the swarm of DropShips carrying the soldiers and ‘Steeds that would actually be fighting the battle needed to be shielded by the Clan WarShips who actually had the ability to shrug off a hit or three.

However, even a WarShip was only so big, and there weren’t really all that many assigned to run interference for the DropShips. Cinder was going to need a lot of her fleet fending off ComSpark after all so that the changelings weren’t focusing the entirety of their fire on the DropShips. With that fact in mind, it was actually pretty generous of the dragoness to have allocated two dozen WarShips to cover the DropShip fleet on their way through the enemy wall.

“High Gain, please send out a reminder to all DropShips to watch their spacing. We may need to take some evasive action here in a little bit,” Squelch noted as she nodded at the holographic plotter, and the haze of crimson specks that was fast approaching them. The sunflower comm tech nodded and got to work sending out the appropriate broadcast. Squelch wasn’t entirely convinced that it was going to help much. None of the creatures in those DropShips had ever been asked to fly their ships right through a fleet of enemy WarShips. A nerve or two was bound to become at least a little frayed.

“ETA to contact?” She asked the mare at the sensor station.

“Ten minutes, commander,” Doppler replied.

Squelch took a long, deep breath and forced herself to settle back in her command chair. She very nearly reached out for her nearby terminal and summoned up Mig to once more confirm that all of the Zathura’s systems were functioning nominally. However, she had asked the engineer that exact question no fewer than three times in the last hour. The sage unicorn was pretty sure that if she did it again, she was going to push the overworked kirin over the edge into full nirik.

Her crew had already done everything that they could to prepare their ship for what lay ahead―as much as a dinky little Mustang-class DropShip could be prepared for something like this, anyway―and Squelch just needed to accept that everything was largely out of her hooves now. She’d spent years putting together a crew of some of the most skilled ponies in the Harmony Sphere. It was time for her to just sit back and let them do what she’d hired them to.

The unicorn glanced over her shoulder at one of their ship’s latest additions: Lieutenant Keely. Because the Zathura was carrying only three out of a maximum possible four BattleSteeds for deployment, the extra stall in their ‘Steed Bay had been co-opted by the Clans for use by the young silver dragon and his platoon of power-armored Elementals. Squelch didn’t really have any problem with this either, as she did acknowledge that it would largely have been a waste of available space to descend to the planet with an unoccupied stall. The dragons had also done very well about keeping out of Mig’s way as she and her technicians went about their usual duties.

“You may want to get to your platoon and make sure they’re secure,” the unicorn said, “I suspect that things are going to get very ‘lively’ in a few minutes.”

The dragon’s lip briefly twitched with veiled amusement before they nodded and left the bridge. Squelch stared after him for a few seconds until the door closed, and then looked over at Slipshod, “talkative sort, ain’t he?”

“I haven’t heard him say two words since he got on board,” the changeling stallion admitted.

“Strong silent type; I can dig that,” High Gain quipped, flashing them a brief grin from her station.

“How about you ‘dig’ putting out a ship-wide announcement to secure vac-suits?” Squelch countered as the unicorn levitated over her own helmet and began to put it on. All around the bridge, other ponies secured their own helmets in anticipation of possible upcoming decompression events. Of course, given what they would be encountering soon, any hit which might breach the ship’s hull had a better than even chance of simply destroying the Zathura outright. At that point, being mostly protected from the vacuum of space wouldn’t really make all that much difference in whether they survived the battle or not.

A few moments later, the klaxon sounding ‘general quarters’ began to blare throughout the DropShip.

After putting on his helmet, Slipshod double-checked the harness which secured him into the chair he'd selected on the bridge. That harness was just one more thing that wasn’t going to be much help if a cannon shell the size of a truck ripped through the DropShip, but it made the changeling feel just a little bit more reassured. With nothing else remaining that he could do to increase his own chances of survival, the changeling stallion turned his attention to the plotter sitting in the middle of the bridge.

The converging clumps of colored dots were quite deceiving, Slipshod thought to himself. If one were to judge things by the raw numbers alone, it was conceivable that they’d be deceived into thinking that the allied forces of the Clans and the Harmony Sphere had an overwhelming advantage. After all, their ships numbered well over a thousand. And that wasn’t even factoring in their fighter screen, which consisted of another couple thousand small craft. There were so many ships being tracked at this moment that Slipshod was honestly a little impressed that the Zathura’s computers were able to account for all of them on the plotter.

What was less obvious at a glance though was the disparity in the quality and firepower of those ships. While, numerically, their forces outnumbered ComSpark’s nearly five-to-one, the quality of the firepower that a DropShip could bring to bear against a true vessel of war was negligible. Against the thick armor that coated a WarShip, the miniscule lasers and autocannons of a DropShip had about as much chance of doing real damage to them as a pony had of bucking their way through a BattleSteed’s ablative plating.

Which was to say: none. WarShips were simply in a class of their own during a serious fight.

“Contact in two minutes,” Doppler announced.

The sensor tech’s voice was far steadier than the changeling might have anticipated, given the cobalt earth pony mare’s current emotional state. Granted, she was about as nervous as everypony else in the room; including himself.

The proximity alarm sounded again, drawing out a stifled curse from Aileron as he once more sought to adjust the position of the Zathura within the formation. Squelch too grunted in annoyance, muttering a comment under her breath regarding the shortage of vertebrae among the other DropShip pilots, “If they’re having trouble flying straight now, I can’t wait to see what happens when the shooting actually starts…”

Star Commodore Spline sneered at the tactical display in front of him, “Call up Reprisal and tell them to get back in formation,” he snapped at his comm tech, “They’re dropping too low!”

“Aye, sir!”

The charcoal black dragon continued to glare at the screen until he saw the dot denoting the errant vessel drift back into its popper place within the squadron. Once it had been done, he let out an annoyed snort and returned his focus to the approaching enemy fleet. This only served to prompt his frown to deepen though. Already he could tell that ComSpark had identified the ‘true’ threat present within the oncoming allied forces: the DropShips. A number of the changeling WarShips were adjusting within their own formation to be able to concentrate fire on the fragile and largely defenseless transport ships.

No matter how hard he and the rest of his squadron of four cruisers tried, it simply wasn’t going to be possible to entirely shield the DropShips they were escorting from the enemy. Their ships just weren’t broad enough.

“CIC, reprioritize targets based on the change in the enemy formation,” Spline didn’t―quite―bark the command, silently cursing his own nerves. Despite this being everything that he had trained his whole life for, this would be his first taste of ‘real’ combat. The same went for the rest of his crew as well. Despite having participated in Clan Timberwolf’s invasion of the Harmony Sphere, the star commodore wouldn’t consider anything that they’d done there as being ‘combat’. Mostly since nothing that the Sphere defenders had mustered against his ship could reasonably have been classified as a ‘threat’. Not really.

Those oncoming changeling WarShips on the other hand…

“New targets coming through based on the latest threat profiles,” the dragoness star captain serving as the OIC of the Warspite’s Combat Information Center announced. A second later, Spline saw his display update, several of the changeling WarShips which were positioned nearest to the intended breakthrough point becoming highlighted. His comms officer received an identical report and passed it onto the other ships in the squadron.

The charcoal dragon curled his lip. While he couldn’t fault his CIC OIC’s selections for any technical reason, the star commodore was certainly not looking forward to putting his squadron of mere cruisers up against a pair of battleships and their frigate escorts. From what he could tell, the other three squadrons tasked with shepherding the DropShips weren’t going to be facing odds that were any better. The changelings had clearly recognized that there were a lot of DropShips on their way to Equus, and so had elected to task ships which possessed an abundance of weapon mounts to intercept them.

Spline performed some brisk calculations based on the speeds of the rapidly converging fleets and deduced that there was going to be a period of approximately a minute and half where it would be practical for them to exchange fire with each other. It wasn’t a lot of time in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but when each side was throwing explosive shells the size of groundcarts at each other and firing lasers powerful enough to vaporize a light ‘Steed, it was time enough for a lot of creatures to lose their lives.

“Heat spike!” His sensor tech called out suddenly, “Missile launches detected. Many missile launches.”

The star commodore let out the breath he’d inhaled upon hearing the initial announcement. He didn’t relax completely though. While missiles weren’t necessarily a significant threat to his own squadron, they did pose a serious danger to the DropShips; so they couldn’t be completely discounted, “Alert the DropShips. Helm, put us between the missiles and the rest of the formation. We can afford to take those hits more than they can.”

“Aye.” “Aye.”

“Enemy fighters coming in! They’re making a run on the DropShips!” The sensor tech warned.

Right on the heels of that announcement came an update from the comms officer, “Friendly wings moving to intercept.”

Spline nodded, but added, “Let’s give them a hand. Tell our own missile crews to identify targets and launch ordinance,” the comms officer acknowledged his order and relayed the information to the cruiser’s gunnery crews. Seconds later he saw the alert flash across his display indicating that the Warspite was launching a barrage of missiles towards the incoming ComSpark fighters. A second later, the rest of the cruisers in his squadron followed suit.

“Message from the flag: they’ve engaged.”

Despite the overall tense atmosphere on the bridge as the crew focused on the ongoing skirmish with the incoming fighter craft, Spline felt the overall level of anxiety spike suddenly. Star Admiral Cinder’s flagship was at the forefront of the fleet’s formation, as Clan leaders directed their forces from the front. This meant that her vessel was a good few seconds ahead of the rest of the Clan WarShips. That the Rockhoof was firing at the changelings meant that, in the next few seconds, every ship would be engaged directly in combat.

Indeed, that thought had only just finished forming in Spline’s head when he heard the deep ‘thrum!’ of his cruiser’s autocannons opening fire on their designated targets. Though he couldn’t see it on his display, the star commodore knew that the changeling WarShips coming to meet them were firing also.

That thought passed through his head less than a heartbeat before the command couch he was sitting in heaved beneath him. The lights illuminating the bridge winked out for a second, and then flickered back on. Klaxons began to scream. Half of the warning lights on the consoles around the bridge glowed crimson and amber. A din of voices rose up from around the room.

“Hit amidship! Reactor Two scrammed! Reactors One and Three holding. Damage control dispatched―”

“Forward starboard turret lost! Dorsal missile tubes knocked out; working to bypass and restore them to―”

“Breaches reported on Deck Two, Three, and Four! Mechanical failures reported in emergency bulkheads on Deck Three; venting atmosphere―”

“Starboard engine inoperative; losing acceleration―”

It was difficult for Spline to make out every one of the overlapping reports. However, the terminals and displays that were available to him directly were able to give the star commodore a general idea of what had just happened to his ship: They’d been struck by just two of the much more massive naval autocannons of one of the battleships moving to engage them. One hit had struck them almost directly on top of their forward autocannon turret on the ship’s starboard side, completely obliterating it and the three guns mounted there. The detonation had reached deep into the Warspite and gone on to damage quite a few other systems.

The second hit had actually been more of a ‘graze’, but had arguably done a lot more to hurt them, as the shell had clipped one of their main engines and knocked it out of service. It was difficult to say whether the damage was ultimately repairable, but he highly doubted that there was going to be much that his engineering staff would be able to do about it in the next sixty seconds. By that time the battle would be over with and they’d be through to the other side of the changeling fleet.

“Roll the ship!” Spline yelled out over the blaring alarms, “Bring our port guns to bear! Order Commodore Lucerne to take point; the Warspite will take up the rear position in the squadron. Concentrate all fire on that battleship! I want it gone!

“And somecreature shut off those damn alarms!”

The noise died down and Spline felt the ship begin to roll slowly on its axis as the lateral thrusters worked overtime to rotate three-quarters of a million tons of WarShip. The dragon could still both hear and feel the cruiser’s massive guns pouring on the fire as fast as they could. His lips set in a grim line as he recognized that the weapons of the enemy were likely responding with equal vigor, though of a significantly larger caliber.

“Status of the rest of the squadron?” He posed to his tactical officer.

“Reprise is moving to take the lead position as ordered,” the younger officer confirmed, her tone shaky as she looked over her displays, “Will-O-Wisp is reporting light damage. She’s still battle-capable. Tristan is…gone. She foundered, sir.”

“Damn,” Spline cursed under his breath, “Condition of the enemy battleship?”

“I’m seeing evidence of significant damage along its ventral quarter,” his sensor tech replied, “Power fluctuations…” her words trailed off as she squinted at the readings flowing across the screen of her terminal, “Its acceleration is reduced by a third.”

“Hurt but not down,” the star commodore surmised, “What about its escorts?”

“Two of the frigates are coasting. No power emissions. The third looks mostly untouched―”

“Will-O-Wisp is reporting a serious hit!” The comms officer interjected suddenly, “They’ve lost main power and are adrift!”

“Sir,” the dragon at the tactical operations station said, turning to face the star commodore, “the DropShips…” As their words trailed off, Spline followed their outstretched claw which was pointing towards the main plotter. The charcoal dragon looked at the display and grimaced. The cruiser formations that were intended to screen the DropShips were in shambles. Over a third had been destroyed or disabled, and another third were heavily damaged. All the while, additional changeling WarShips were angling to close in on the largely defenseless craft.

Spline did some rough math in his head, and didn’t like the results that he got. The cloud of DropShips wasn’t going to clear the wall of changeling WarShips in time before being intercepted. Not at the speed that they were going.

“Signal to the DropShips: redline your engines immediately,” the charcoal dragon snapped far more tersely than he’d meant to. The stress was getting to him, “Reprise is to bear starboard and intercept those two frigates,” He directed, jabbing a claw towards the indicated contacts on the plotter, “We’ll focus fire on the battlesh―”

Again the chair he was sitting in heaved and the lights flickered.

“We’re losing our cover!” Doppler warned from her station on the bridge of the Zathura. Squelch’s fetlocks curled in tight around the armrests of her command couch as she felt her helmsmare take the little DropShip through another roll in an effort to keep them as difficult to hit as possible, while simultaneously doing his best to avoid colliding with any of the other wildly dancing vessels in their vicinity. Both Aileron’s wings and hooves were dancing all along his station controls as he fought to keep them all alive.

Through the window, the sage green unicorn saw an eruption of brilliant orange fire as a Friendship-class DropShip several hundred meters ahead of them exploded. Seconds later, she felt the Zathura shudder as it blasted through the debris cloud. A particularly high-pitched ‘clink!’ announced that one of those pieces had even struck the viewscreen of the bridge. It, fortunately, hadn’t penetrated, but the unicorn could clearly see the crack that it had left in the outer layer of the reinforced transparent material.

“Two more frigates coming in from starboard!” the cobalt mare warned them; not that Squelch was entirely sure what it was expected that she would do with that information. Their pilot was already keeping the ship jumping around like a drunken parasprite! As far as she was concerned, if they got shot out of space at this point, it couldn’t possibly have been anything approaching an aimed shot. It would just have been fate making it clear that this was their time to go.

“Message coming in, commander!” High Gain called out, “we’re to redline our engines!”

Squelch couldn’t help but flash a dubious look at the other mare, even though all she was doing was simply relaying the message that she’d been given, “Have we not?!”

“Mig has already sent me two messages warning me about engine temps,” Aileron managed to grunt out as he took the Zathura through another series of jukes and rolls, more to avoid colliding with other erratically moving DropShips than to avoid being struck by enemy fire. Even as he did so, Squelch winced as she spotted two DropShips through the viewport clip each other, one of them breaking apart as the stresses caused it to lose structural integrity.

“Take us starboard!” Squelch called out to her pilot. To High Gain she said, “Tell all nearby ships to follow us in at best speed―that includes any nearby fighters!”

“Starboard, ma’am?” Aileron asked, sounding certain that he must have misheard her, and followed it up with a clarification in case the unicorn had not heard one of the earlier important announcements that had been made by Doppler, “There are two enemy frigates that way!”

“I know,” the sage mare agreed, which didn’t seem to do much to assuage the pilot’s concerns, “We’re going to get in closer. Their turrets will have a harder time tracking us if we’re pulling a lot of Gs and close in.”

The expression on the pegasus stallion’s face was still more than a little skeptical, but he had his instructions. With a shrug and a resigned sign, the helmsmare said, “Eh, why not? Never ‘mapped the world’ on a WarShip before…”

Squelch felt herself pulled to the left side of her command couch as the pegasus stallion turned their ship towards the oncoming frigates. On the holographic plotter, the unicorn mare saw a small cloud of sapphire dots following in their wake. Ahead of her, through the window, she could spot signs of the frantic battle going on around them as Clan WarShips sparred with ComSpark.

It wasn’t going to be a pitched engagement this time. Each side simply possessed too much momentum for that. It would take hours for them to decelerate down to a low enough velocity to meet each other like that, and the Clanners had had no intention of obliging a superior force that way. One way or another, the fight was going to be over in another thirty seconds or so, as the relative velocities of each side carried them out of each others’ effective firing range at tens of thousands of meters a second.

However, those thirty seconds were enough time for a lot of DropShips to get killed in, and Squelch felt that they’d lost more than enough already. Those two frigates had cut hard to the side, pouring on a lot of acceleration of their own in an effort to put themselves right through the center of the cloud of smaller ships. With plenty of lightly-armored targets flying by at oblique angles, those two frigates would have had an easy time picking off dozens of DropShips before they were out of range. Hopefully by getting in close enough, they could move by too quickly for the turrets to adequately track them.

Or they’d just make it impossible for the changeling gunners to miss.

Squelch soon managed to catch visual sight of the frigates in question through the Zathura’s viewport. Even for being ‘lighter’ WarShips, those vessels weren’t all that much smaller than some JumpShips. Faced now with the very guns which were so intent on destroying them and close enough that she could make out individual autocannon barrels, the sage unicorn mare felt herself questioning the merits of her plan.

“Hold on!” Aileron called out as he took the Zathura into a spin.

The turrets of the frigates belched out their ordinance.

Much smaller explosions peppered the hull of the WarShips as the fighters and DropShips with them returned fire with weapons of their own. Even the Zathura’s own turrets responded as the gunnery crews sought to try and exact at least some sliver of vengeance for all of their fellow DropShips which had already been shattered by ComSpark.

Something must have managed to penetrate through the much thinner―for a WarShip, anyway―frigate armor, because a plume of orange fire erupted out of the top of the vessel…directly in the Zathura’s path.

Aileron’s wings lashed out to slam down on several controls at once. The little DropShip screamed as metal strained against the sudden forces being applied to its delicate frame. Mig would surely be giving the pegasus a sound thrashing later for all of the work that he’d just created for her and her crews during their next overhaul. Assuming that they all lived through the next ten seconds, of course.

Despite the ship’s vehement protests, it acquiesced to the whims of its pilot and launched ‘up’ above the worst of the geyser of fire and debris. He then forced the ship back ‘down’, dipping behind the frigate and using the bulk of its engines to avoid being tracked too easily by any of its remaining functional turrets as they continued to speed away from the WarShip.

Squelch’s eyes were glued to the plotter as she watched other small clouds of DropShips slowly squeeze their way through the changeling fleet. It was impossible for her to truly count how many of their number had been lost since the start of the engagement, but the unicorn wanted to believe that the number of DropShips she saw now didn’t look too much smaller than how she remembered it being five minutes ago. There would be time enough for a firm count later, she knew.

Only when Doppler announced that they were finally outside the effective range of the enemy WarShips’ weapons did the mare allow herself to breathe once more, “Status report?”

“I think I managed to void every warranty this ship had left,” Aileron quipped as he too finally allowed himself to begin breathing normally again, slumping limply back in his chair.

“At least we still have a ship,” Squelch pointed out, “Thank you, Ails.” The pegasus grinned and issued her a salute with one of his wings, “High Gain, get together a count of the survivors. Doppler, how’re the WarShips doing?”

“Most of Cinder’s forces made it through,” the sensor tech reported, “I’ll need time to put something more definitive together,” she qualified, “but, at a glance, it looks like she gave a lot better than she got. Maybe a two-to-one exchange? At least three-to-two from what I can see right now.

“Both fleets are deceling, though Cinder’s fleet is doing so a lot slower.”

“She’s going to set up a second screen to keep ComSpark from just coming right back in after us,” Squelch informed the other mare. Her eyes then darted to General Mayhem’s division, which hadn’t engaged quite yet. They were still in the process of slowing down in order to meet the second ‘surprise’ ComSpark fleet. The unicorn studied the plotter for several long seconds as she considered the possibilities that the next few hours might produce. Especially where the two changeling fleets were concerned.

If she were in command of the ComSpark forces, she would probably try to merge her fleets on Mayhem’s and crush her whole division with overwhelming force. It would mean giving Cinder’s forces and the DropShips a completely clear path to the planet, sure, but they’d only have a few days leeway before the―now much larger―fleet of changeling WarShips got back to Equus. Cinder wouldn’t have a hope of holding out against greater than three-to-one odds. She’d be forced to pull back and abandon the DropShips and troops on the surface. At which point, everycreature would be crushed. Invasion over.

That would be the smarter option for the changelings.

However, it was also possible―and Slipshod had suggested that it was even likely―that Chrysalis would demand that her WarShips return to Equus as quickly as possible in order to get Cinder’s fleet out of orbit. Victory against the fleet they’d just fought in a prolonged engagement wasn’t a given, Squelch admitted, but there was at least a chance. Whether Cinder’s fleet could destroy both the first ComSpark fleet and whatever survived contact with Mayhem later…that was anypony’s guess. Hopefully, by that point, they would have control of Canterlot anyway and wouldn’t need to find out.

They’d know in the next few minutes which option ComSpark was going to be going with…

“...Enemy fleet continuing hard decel,” Doppler announced after another minute, “Projected zero-zero is well short of Mayhem’s division,” the cobalt mare looked back at Squelch, “They’re coming back for us.”

Squelch nodded and sighed. It was the option that gave them the best chance at victory, sure; but that was only if Cinder managed to decisively win that next fight. If she was either driven off, or lost too many ships to effectively blockade the planet…their ground forces might not have time enough to take the capital.

“Aileron, revise calculations for as hard a decel around the moon as you can,” the sage unicorn instructed, “I want as much time in orbit before the changelings can catch up to us as you can manage.”

The pegasus stallion was nodding slowly, “I think I can get us a few more hours if we aerobrake around Equus too. I’ll have some concrete burn times and Gs for you in an hour.”

“Good. In the meantime, stand the ship down from alert status. Give everycreature a break before our next 'five minutes of Tartarus'.”

As she spoke, Squelch moved the focus of the holographic plotter on the bridge away from their current position, and onto Equus’ moon…and the shipyard orbiting around it. Not one of them believed that it was going to be undefended. Which meant that their upcoming swing around the little moon was going to be anything but leisurely…

Author's Note

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated:twilightblush:

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