We Sail For Celestia

Dear brother,

We have won ourselves a victory out here! A small one perhaps, when we look back on it later, but it is a first blow against these invaders. The Yakfrost Pass has held, and the Kirin are on the run, at least for now. We are advancing steadily, regaining some lost ground. Naturally I cannot add much more than that, for our regimental censor is quite diligent in his or her duties. Suffice it to say, we are coming for you, brother. Wherever you are right now, know that help is on the way. How long it will take to arrive, I cannot tell you, but it is coming.

It is damnably cold up here in the mountains. I hope you are warmer than I am, though I doubt it. Nowhere in this Sun-forsaken land seems to be warm. At least your ship has heating that might actually work! Steam from the boilers, isn't it? Ah, to be in a boiler room or some other fine place, just to be warm for a few minutes!

I hear that uncle has finally been appointed Rear-Admiral. About damn time, I say! I know he was content to stay in the Manehattan Squadron, but he deserves this promotion. Such a hard worker and a kind and nurturing soul. I hope we shall see him again soon, and father too. But it is you I miss the most, my dear brother.

Until we meet again,

Greenshield

Another letter written. Greenshield's unit did, at least, have a functioning mail service, for they had access to the outside world. After the victory at Yakfrost, he had written several letters, one to his father, one to his uncle and one to his brother. The first of those would be easy enough to deliver; down the line aboard the evening mail train, all the way to some sorting office, thence onward to a civilian dispatch centre, eventually finding itself inside the mailbag of some postmare or other. A message to his uncle would be a bit trickier. Green Haze's promotion had been announced quite publicly and his appointment to command the Third Division of the Home Fleet had been mentioned in the papers and over the military radio station which provided news and light entertainment to units and bases. A letter to the Home Fleet would require a bit of luck and good timing to be delivered while they were actually in some port or other and not sailing on the open ocean, unreachable. The letter to his brother, the one he wanted delivered the most, would be pretty much impossible to get through.

He pondered over it as they marched southeast, letting his mind wander to distract from his ill-fitting boots and the winter chill that gnawed at him through his winter jacket and scarf and gloves. He doubted if Greenwood would actually receive the letter; maybe after the war, it would show up fluttering through his letterbox back home. He knew that occasional ships of the Equestrian merchant marine were trying to, and sometimes succeeding in, running the Kirin blockade and delivering vital supplies to Harmony Bay, which included mail. But several cargo ships had already been sunk in the attempt, their brave crews drowned or captured as a result, and there was no other physical link between Harmony Bay and the rest of Equestria. He had addressed the letter to Junior Lieutenant Greenwood, abd. ENS Defiant, Northern Fleet, Harmony Bay. He had no idea that his older brother was not aboard his ship. He was in Tartarus.

The interior of Fort V no longer even resembled anything military. It was a morgue, all clinical concrete and metal and death.

Greenwood sat half-slumped in a corner, a mostly empty bottle of vodka clutched in his hand. All he could smell was cordite and blood, for they were practically the only smells that still existed in this strange, compressed little world. His hand shook as he raised it to swig the liquid, as much to clear his throat as to feel the hot kiss of alcohol pouring down it.

For the last four days, while the Home Fleet had been desperately coaling in New Zebrica and fighting off rebellion in its midst, the Kirin had been hurling themselves at Fort V. Their guns pounded an incessant drumbeat, hammering the thick earth and concrete roof, pounding at the walls like a wolf trying to get inside. When the artillery stopped, the Kirin came again, ghostly flames of anger enveloping their bodies, their eyes glowing white, their guns chattering. They came once a day, at least, and on the third day, they had finally breached the fort, bursting through a heavily defended breach in one of the walls, caused by the Kirin's railway gun or whatever monstrous cannon they had out there behind their line.

Their flamethrowers had led the charge, just behind a rain of grenades, and for the next day all Greenwood could smell had been burning flesh. The breach was not far from the gun-gallery where he had been stationed with his ad-hoc crew of sailors and soldiers; the smell had wafted through the ventilation ducts. Not long after that, they had been pulled back and redeployed, abandoning the guns after setting off thermal charges to burn through their barrels and render them useless to the Kirin. The enemy was inside; they could not be allowed to progress any deeper into the complex. The fort must hold, and so long as there were ponies alive inside, it would.

Now that the outer works had finally and definitively fallen, it was the turn of Equestrian gunners to open up on Fort V. With their own troops inside the thick concrete, it was only Kirin that they would find with their shells, and they hammered away at the former no-pony's-land to try and impede the enemy bringing up reinforcements and supplies. Inside the fort, things had rapidly descended into Tartarus.

In the narrow, cramped tunnels, hallways and galleries, pony and Kirin had locked horns. It was combat of the most primitive order; there was no grand sweeping strategy here, just guns and knives, fists and feet, clubs, cudgels, the sharp edge of an entrenching tool. The Kirin led with their flamethrowers; the ponies countered with their magic, hurling crackling bolts of lightning in every hue of the rainbow, depending on which unicorn was firing. When the Kirin were advancing down a narrow tunnel, the Equestrians would station several Pegasi at the other end to flap their wings in unison as hard as they could, creating an effect very much like walking down an alleyway in a hurricane. The Kirin, unable to advance against the winds, would fire their guns at random. Grenades were hurled in copious quantities; each Kirin stormtrooper carried at least three, and some of the regular infantry would bring up crates filled with them from the rear, so that the supply never ran out. The concussive effects of repeated explosions in the cramped confines of the fort were devastating. Ponies found their lungs bursting from the overpressure, their eyeballs leaking blood, the air sucked from their throats, their ears ringing, half-deaf and half-mad with fear.

Greenwood and his ponies had been repositioned to one of the interior corridors, just off of the generator room that powered one wing of the fort. Here, behind sandbagged barricades, they positioned themselves to make their stand. Ammunition was plentiful, and a machine gun had been set up to cover the hallways. One led from the breached chamber, and another branched across it from one of the ammunition supply rooms that fed the heavy-calibre guns. Gunfire had rattled from up ahead for some time before ragged survivors began to stagger down the hallway, uniforms soaked in blood, torn and frayed from shrapnel. One unicorn came levitating the charred but still groaning corpse of one of his fellow soldiers whose identity was unknown to the horrified sailors, partly due to being from a different unit and partly because most of his, or her, face and mane had been burned away, a hideous red and black mass of fused and knotted tissue replacing it. The medical station to the rear in the belly of the fort would do what it could, but that would amount to little more than injecting a couple of vials of morphine and offering a quick prayer to Celestia.

The Kirin had come an hour later, pushing and probing, flamethrowers leapfrogging from cover to scant cover. The corridor itself had been stripped of anything that might offer protection, and there were only a few protruding pillars and pipes, as well as a mount of rubble where a section of the ceiling had caved in. The Equestrian shooting had been murderous, cutting down dozens of Kirin, the machine gun working its way rhythmically across the hall from one wall to the other, then swinging back again, and again, until it had to be reloaded. After a brief pause, the killing began again.

The Kirin had suddenly burst forth from the other tunnel, charging forward, eyes ablaze with white-heat, a cold fire burning around their bodies, war cries on their lips. Accurate rifle fire slowed them, bodies tumbling, but they made it almost to the barricades before the machine gun could be turned about and brought to bear. This allowed the Kirin in the other tunnel to push forward in turn, dividing the attentions of the defenders. Reinforcements were rushed forward, a platoon of infantry with submachine guns and grenades, and the fort had echoed to the sounds of bloody, relentless combat for the next three hours. Only then did the Kirin finally withdraw, leaving their dead slumped over the barricades and curled up in the tunnels, blood running like rivers into the drainage runoff cut into the middle of each hallway like a shallow trench.

The next day passed in much the same fashion, with the Kirin launching assaults not just on the same spot as the day before, but also against the other wing of the fort, trying to push across the central courtyard. They had been repelled, but it had cost the defenders almost fifty casualties. They were ponies that the defenders could ill-afford to lose, cut off as they were from any direct reinforcement. The Kirin, meanwhile, continued to move up reinforcements, using the Equestrian's own railway against them, that single track to safety that no longer brought mail or supplies or visitors to the city, but merely more and more invaders each day. With the fleet still bottled up in Harmony Bay, and their occasional small patrols being harried and pursued by Kirin ships until they returned to port, nopony had been able to interdict the flow of Kirin transports that were still ferrying soldiers and materiel over from their homeland. The navy had dispatched several submarines to the area, and two transports, unbeknownst to the fort's defenders, had actually been sunk, but Kirin destroyers had chased the Equestrian boats away, sinking one and forcing the other three to skulk about out of range of detection, but also out of range of their targets.

The Kirin assault was repulsed, the survivors crawling back into the depths of the fort, and an uneasy stalemate had developed as darkness fell in the mid-afternoon. The Kirin occupied portions of the underground, some key corridors and chambers, including one of the large armouries and some of the sleeping quarters. The Equestrians still held most of the fortress, however. After dark, a party of Kirin tried to sneak around and attack the fort from the rear. Finding the main entrance heavily guarded, they attempted to cut through barbed wire for a better approach. To the eternal regret of the Kirin with the wirecutters, the protective barrier had been electrified, and until two of his fellows pried him away with a broken tree branch they found, he slowly cooked as the deadly current ran through him. A hailstorm of fire from machine guns then drove the rest of the Kirin away at the cost of eight dead, including the unfortunate wirecutter. That night, Greenwood, not alone with his troubles, had found a bottle and tried to while away the hours until sleep, or death, finally claimed him.

The next morning dawned bright and crisp, at least outside the fort. Inside, it was like a crypt, the darkness thick and stygian. The fighting had damaged the generator room and the entire wing was without power. Only in a few rooms was there any light from outside, either thanks to shell damage or the provision of firing ports or gun galleries. Though things felt no less cold, a slight thaw meant that snowmelt was now dripping through a thousand minuscule cracks and fissures in the walls and ceilings, water pooling on the smooth concrete floors of each chamber and tunnel. The feeble wicks of lanterns flickered with each nearby shellburst, as the air displaced by the explosion caused a tremor of imperceptible movement to waft through the atmosphere below ground.

Greenwood sat in the darkness, his gun clutched in his hands tightly. Though he wore a pair of woollen gloves and another leather pair over the top, his hands still shook. His greatcoat, once fancy and now practically ruined by dirt and sweat and smoke, lay wrapped about him. His breath condensed with every exhalation, a cloud in front of him, as though he were smoking a cigarette. That would be a luxury now- the fort had run out of cigarettes. Evidently nopony bothered to assign much priority to them when they were stocking the bunkers with supplies, though the abundance of alcohol made up for that oversight.

He was not drunk now, though. He was sober, and cold, and scared.

The Equestrian shelling had redoubled in the past hour, which could only mean that the pony spotters had noticed an increase in Kirin movement. That, in turn, surely heralded another incoming attack. His unit had lost seven ponies in the last one; four stallions and three mares, all dead. Greenwood had scavenged a submachine gun from one of them. He had his pistol and his sword- normally ceremonial, but potentially quite useful in this sort of close combat- but a submachine gun was better. More firepower, deadly at close range, perfect from tunnel fighting.

The shelling continued outside, as monotonous as the drip-drip-dripping of water from some pipe overhead. Luckily the splashes were not landing on him. Not since he had moved, anyway. He crouched behind the jumbled sandbags, restacked since yesterday when most of them had taken a tumble during the fighting. They were waiting, ears straining, for any sound above the background thrum of explosions. Signs that the Kirin were advancing down the tunnels again. Junior Lieutenant Tracer, his bunkmate on the Defiant, squatted nearby, peering into the dim darkness ahead. If we ever get back to the ship, Greenwood thought, I'm going to spend a lot of time looking out of that fucking porthole. Oh, for some proper light!

There was no light ahead, but there was a slight discoloration, a shimmer deep in the gloom. It was almost like looking at an oil slick on the surface of the water, something you might not notice at first, but which would become more perceptible the longer you looked at it. There was definitely something out there.

Somepony shone a flashlight toward it as they readied their weapons, the machine gunner gripping the firing handles in anticipation. But there was nothing there after all. Just a light white smoke, filtering through the vents and shell-holes from the bombardment above. It drifted gently, carried slowly forward by the prevailing air currents inside the bunker. Smoke, but no Kirin.

"Stand down," Greenwood ordered, as the ranking officer present. Nervous fingers were removed from triggers, though eyes and ears did not rest, just in case the Kirin really were lurking in the darkness. He took a swig from his water flask, the fluid more precious than ever now because the water distillation plant had been knocked out by severe vibrations from the bombardment. The fort would slowly but surely run out of water, something that the presence of no amount of vodka and whiskey and rum could offset. Fumbling with the screw-cap, Greenwood hooked his canteen back onto his belt. He would have to make the rest of its contents last.

Two small outer posts lay about ten yards ahead of the main sandbagged line. Clusters of ponies with submachine guns crouched there behind rubble and upturned metal shell-carts. Seemingly for no reason, one of the stallions suddenly jerked up, looking around. He staggered to his feet, coughing and stumbling, leaning on the wall like a drunkard. Greenwood looked over curiously. Was he ill? Had the stress finally caught up with him, as it had with the pony he had seen running out into the snow toward the Kirin lines?

If he had gone mad, he was not alone, for now a mare was exhibiting similar behaviour. She clawed at her throat, dropping her gun and moving back toward the main position. Several others began coughing, signalling to the rest that something was wrong with frantic arm movements. Greenwood surveyed the scene with a puzzlement that rapidly turned to horror as the reality began to dawn. It wasn't just smoke from the bombardment. It was something far more insidious, something that the Kirin had not even been known to possess, something which had been outlawed by treaty in the rest of the world. He caught an incongruous whiff of a newly-mown meadow, permeating through the dank stench of the tunnels, and for a split second he almost panicked, caught himself, and, drawing in a mighty breath, he bellowed out a warning as loud as he could. One word, repeated three times, the signal for alarm that he had never imagined he would ever have to use.

"Gas!" he roared. "Gas, gas, gas!"