Ace of Aces, Dust to Dust
Steel Division shuffled down the grey hall annoyedly. He would have gone faster to escape the crowds and the acrid air, but the ceiling was low and the path was thin. He was in the hive-city of Vraks, surrounded by Changelings, each shuffling in their own manner and subconsciously forming nearly-perfect single-file lines which he could see easily from being so much taller than virtually everyone. The exception was Winter Mustang, the burly white unicorn behind him. The sound of shopkeepers, distant machinery, sludgy rainwater rushing through gutters, and above all hoofsteps, permeated the environment.
Steel hated having to mingle with the bugs, but he was on a mission. He pulled off the way into a side-store made of concrete surfaces and wooden shelves. It was filled with backpacks, meat so processed that it would never spoil, advanced mechanically-woven cone hats made of plastic fibers, and most importantly, postcards. On a rack, there were a number, mostly in Equestrian and Severyanan with a few still in their native Changeling. He browsed them, but none stood out. Winter tapped him on the back and said, “It’s for your marefriend. Let’s see if I can’t get you the good stuff.”
He slid up to the tiny bug behind the counter and confidentially whispered, “Srata, manieri ne toia norano, eh?” Her smile widened slightly and she nodded. Her horn lit up and a box was lifted from a shelf behind her. A number of glossy postcards were spread out on the countertop. This time, they were all in Changeling and depicted some less-than-pleasant figures amongst the scenery. Steel put his hoof on one depicting someone he thought he recognized. This would be one heck of a collectable. Winter levitated a number of Marks out of his pocket and placed them onto the table, and the shopkeeper waved them goodbye as she put the contraband postcards back up. The business concluded, the pair exited the store.
“Guess she’ll be seeing the military police soon. Where’d you get some Marks, anyways?” Steel asked once they were out of earshot and back in the crowded road.
“You and I both know that Berry’s smoking habit is becoming an issue. It’s not like he can sell them back, either…” Winter replied. Hiding that he could read Changeling (and sometimes speak it) so that he wasn’t turned into an interpreter was one thing, but this was a bit different.
“That’s mean, but I won’t stop you.” Steel decided, looking at his postcard. Sure enough, it depicted Carnara, that dirty thing who could often be found on the radio trying to entice the youth into stabbing their local government-aligned cop and talking about the good old days when children were sent into battle to fight tanks with swords. He was standing in front of a scenic view of the city, or as scenic as existed in his hellhole. The picture even had his black overcoat. There was a collection of squares inked onto the top. “What does this say, anyways?” He asked.
Winter looked over his back. “Vraks is the military heart of our new… ‘kingdom’. Undercaptain Carnara. Except they used the Griffonian word ‘reich’ transcribed instead of ‘kingdom. Darkies, right?”
“Yeah.” Steel answered, looking up. He put the card away and found a place to turn off the road. “And how about this one? What does it say?” He asked, waving to a poster on the concrete wall. It displayed a new twist on a now-worn concept: a Tiger 1, surrounded by dark-coated fanatics and covered in pony’s bones, as they overran an occupation military position.
Winter squinted. “Huh. ‘Matador raids again, Sicarus saved from foreign extermination. Join the Vhy and save your race.’ ‘Matador’ is also a transcribed word. Isn’t it Sicameonese, though?” He looked at Steel as if he would have a clue.
“Guess we’ve got two things to report to the military police when we get back.” Steel said. He hoped they would get home as soon as possible. The smell of the bugs and their living condition was starting to get on his nerves exactly on time.
Steel Division looked out the shuttered window. The glass just beyond was caked in unnaturally viscous Vraskian acid rain beneath a noxious Vraskian daytime night. In the distance, he could see the nonrepeating patterns of concrete towers and arches and flats and domes, leading to the innumerable strings of black smoke of the hive’s eastern districts, barely visible from the smog. Somewhere in the opposite direction was a giant pyramid that terminated between the sheet of mind-numbing stone and rebar and the blanket of toxic fumes. He thought it was insanity that the changelings lived like this, but he held the postcard up in a hoof and the view was nearly identical barring the different position, so at least they knew the monster they’d created.
He heard a door close behind him, which signaled that he should turn and salute the officer. His cohorts – the gunner Winter Mustang, the driver Berry White, Jade Scrape the loader, and “Stars” the radio operator followed suit. “At ease,” the Lt. Colonel said. He was a gruff blue pegasus, worn out by the last years of his job. He took his seat at the desk, Steel sat across from him, and the others found their own places to sit or stand. “I’ve got an odd mission for you,” he continued. “Search and destroy with a twist. What do you know about tank aces?”
“They’re not real. It’s about your commander putting you in a better part of the battlefield while having a better tank more than your own individual skill.” Steel replied, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. It was hard to do without bumping into one of his crew in the cramped room. “Unless you’re operating without enough orders and with the same vehicles as the bad guys. Plus, you’re relying on your crewmates too, and you can’t even really tell which kills you got and which you didn’t.”
“Yeah, they’re just propaganda devices.” Winter added.
“I know that Commander Steel is technically a tank ace,” Stars said, making everyone look at her. “What? I’d take that credit,” she continued.
“Well, boys, I normally agree with you.” The Commander took out a cigarette and lit it. Berry looked jealously. “When this came across my desk, I looked into it to figure out why we never did that stuff and the Changelings did it all the time, and that’s what I thought as well. Anyways, you’re going to be hunting a tank ace.” He pulled out a picture and put it on the desk heavily. The tankers crowded around it. It was a picture of a Tiger 1 with some extremely unusual modifications. Nobody was even sure what they were. The turret bore the number ‘004’ in the Changeling’s triangular script. “This is a picture of what ‘Matador’ is doing now.”
“Wait, ‘Matador’ is real? I thought it was just a propaganda piece. And what kind of tank even is this?” Steel asked.
“Yeah, it’s real. The tank's a Tiger 1X. We’ve never destroyed one, mostly because only six were ever built and four even saw combat. Three got destroyed by equipment failure, and this one is the last one left. By now, we can only assume that the crew themselves know how to maintain it, since everyone else is missing or confirmed dead and the foundry it was made in is in our hooves. In other words, it is truly irreplaceable and unique.” The Lt. Colonel explained. “This thing is still running around, too. It’s with the Horseshoe Coalition now, since the X-tanks were a Vhy Project and the crew’s been operating it since the start of the Great War.”
“…Did you say this tank is from before the Great War?” Jade chimed in.
“Yes, I am. We know because it’s in pictures of the Battle for Acornage, the Battle of the Shire, the Battle for Canterlot, even Operation Balance. This thing survived the Crystal Grind. It’s estimated to have over three hundred armored kills by now.” For a tank that had been running for five years, that was a respectable number. But the sheer experience of the crew was concerning. The Lt. Colonel continued. “To make things better, it’s undergone a renovation. Now it’s showing up in everything from propaganda posters to civil uprisings – and covered in the skulls of our guys. I shouldn’t need to tell you that that’s not fun for the soldiers on the ground when it’s there for real.”
“And we’re going to kill it, I presume.” Steel suggested.
“Damn right you are. It might be scary, but it’s still a Tiger 1, just with a few bells and whistles that the production teams didn’t want to handle. Your Ursa Minor can crack it just about anywhere as long as you hit it dead-on.” The Commander gruffly stated. “For you, you’re being given a temporary command just for this. The total amount of resources we’ve been able to wrangle are three Comets and four infantry squads.”
“Wow, the higher-ups spent enough to get an Ursa Minor with a skilled crew, three Comets, and a platoon, but couldn’t spring for an actual officer.” Winter snarked.
“We’re at peace, remember? I know it doesn’t look like it since we’re still fighting all the same bugs with all the same tech, but we can’t just go around blowing stuff up and acting like a conquering army just because the enemy has heavy armor and machine gun nests there.” The Lt. Colonel snarked back. “Anyways, the key ingredient here is that the intel guys think they’ve found out where the thing is based, and it’s not particularly strongly defended. It’s enough that a platoon and three Comets is considered overkill for this. They say that besides the obvious problem, it’s just herders with a few bolt-action rifles, a machine gun or two, and a lot of outdated crap they probably will be digging up when they see you.”
“Alright, what about the tank itself?” Steel asked.
“That’s the last piece of the puzzle. You’re going to some herding station with a permanent population of a few dozen. We can take it over whenever we want… as long as the Matador is out of the picture. If you see it in the repair bay and you put a shot through the engine block from a kilometer away, you can go home early. If you’ve taken the town square but the thing’s running around the woods, then your job isn’t done yet. The real kicker is that it’s got MEAT rounds. One of the few tanks to ever use them, the reason we can track it so well, and the reason we think it’s the crew who are maintaining it themselves. For you, it means that your armor won’t do so much against it either.” The Captain put out his cigarette. “That’s why you need four tanks. So how about it? One last op before that whole ‘peace’ thing kicks in and you can go home.”
Steel looked around at his crew. None of them seemed to have any apprehension. He leaned over the desk and said, “You got us.”
Outside of the hives, the Changeling Lands were almost beautiful. At the best of times, the beauty was marred by the wildlife, and at worst, by the locals, but as he sat at the table of the improvised bar, feeling the fresh natural air and watching the gentle swaying of the rolling plains and verdant forests, he wished that this region was still owned by a decent species. If it was, he might have moved here. In reality though, he didn’t like to be in this country and not in his tank, which was currently on a train bed just down the way, being unloaded for a cross-country drive. It was an early morning hour, and he had been part of the cargo as this mission headed out west to where Matador was to be found. The entire force was here right now, waiting for all the equipment to come off so that they could get moving. For now, though, Steel was content to ignore the chatter around him and watch the nature in between writing more words onto his newest postcard. He wished he was back in Equestria, but there wasn’t much to do for it besides keep going from place to place and wait out the clock.
The haunt of the day was a bar with no name, since it had been created last night when word arrived that the task force would be using it as a disembarking area. The entire village was, in fact, a “herding station”, low-maintenance sets of concrete structures designed to be uninhabited for most of the year and be used only when any of the semi-nomadic herders brought their families and flock through the area. The target area was another herding station, built to an extremely similar pattern. Steel was currently on the outside ring, made of concrete buildings one or sometimes two stories tall with no set purpose until someone arrived there. The outside was just an open field in all directions, but inside was a paved roundabout where trucks could come by to pick up the meat and mail. Inside the roundabout was a sizable but short building that served as the large indoor space for whatever was needed. The road was inset into the ground by a good meter or two so that the basement of that central complex filled with water over time, and herders could open it to let their animals and themselves drink.
And since the locals were a few dozen herders right now, the bar’s menu was mostly alcohol one step above what could be made in prison and vaguely-edible plant matter that had been growing in that water reservoir, plus whatever prepackaged goods were laying around. Frankly, since every other adult in the village was armed with something in between “quaint” and “embarrassing”, he wouldn’t have found it too surprising if one of the ingredients in one of the meals was black powder. He’d been in this country for a year and had never gotten used to the fact that these bugs still used hoof-cannons and crossbows, especially out here. At least a few of these ones had guns that fired cartridges. The straw cone hats and rough grey overcoats, both of which were nearly universal outside the hives, didn’t help the image.
Berry White and Jade Scrape were still by the Ursa Minor, helping to unload it, but the train had special crew and material to make it easier, so most of the soldiers and tankers were out here, enjoying the booze-swill. Winter was… somewhere, probably downstairs practicing his language. Stars was looking out at the same view as Steel except with a cup of the foul liquid clutched in one of her brown wings. “I can smell that stuff from over here, you know.” Steel said.
She turned and smiled sarcastically. “You can probably taste it, too.”
“You need to get some standards. I don’t think there’s anything you won’t put in your body.” She stifled a laugh. “Not like that, that’s more your mother’s speed.” He continued, causing her to bust out laughing. She had an annoying laugh, but not so annoying that it wasn’t satisfying to hear from your own joke. “How much alcohol is in that, anyways? We’ll be fighting in a few hours.”
“Barely any, sir, don’t worry.” She chuckled. “At least by my standards.”
He’d take it.
The crowd around them, all on beat up wooden stools if not just old crates, suddenly got very rowdy. He looked around worriedly, but they weren’t angry, and soon one of the older adults came up the stairs, hauling a 12.7mm M2 machine gun, their overcoat covered in a layer of ammo belts. They held it high in their magic and yelled triumphantly. Steel was once again worried they might fire the thing into the air, but they had the restraint not to. The other changelings, all grey-coated and straw-hatted and completely interchangeable, crowded around as the central one showed of its prize.
A bluish unicorn sat besides Steel. He’d forgotten his name ever since the brief meet-and-greet from before they set out, but it was the commander of Comet Red, one of the three Comets and the newest one. “What’s up with them?” Steel asked.
The unicorn turned. “Oh, that? Our trip got a supply run tacked on to the back. Apparently this place has had a problem with the da-… I’m sorry, the Vhy. They’ve been coming out here and taking potshots, stealing the animals, that kind of thing. So the self-defense force got, among other things, a cherry M2 and five hundred rounds.”
“It’s okay to call them ‘darkies’, everyone else does.” Steel commented.
“Sorry, sir, but my CO was very specific about not using made-up names for the locals.”
Stars snorted. “Your CO isn’t here right now. His replacement is sitting right in front of you, and once told a changeling to her face that her entire race smelled bad.”
Steel turned around to face her. “Now when the hell did I do that?”
“In fairness, you were very tired, and she was standing in between you and some sleep.” Stars added.
“Oh, Celestia, it was that time where we were at INSEC 1 for two days straight, wasn’t it?” Steel moaned. Forty hours of being under constant surveillance to try and wear down the intruder and it turned out that it didn’t even exist, someone had just accidentally poured gasoline mixed with rainwater into the APC and didn’t want to admit it. Steel turned back to the unicorn, who looked appalled. “Listen, call them whatever you like. As long as you do it somewhere I don’t hear about it afterwards, it’s fair game. Besides, nobody in this crowd likes the darkies.”
The unicorn thought for a second. “Are the, uh, darkies, the reason why all the buildings have chicken wire over every window?”
“Bingo.” Steel pointed to him for emphasis. “That keeps out the grenades. Of course, grenades are usually a brownie thing, but this is brownie territory, too. The darkies kept all the lightning guns… which that stuff also stops.”
“Wait, they have a tank AND magical weapons?”
Steel shrugged. “Yeah, sometimes. Then the old army broke up, the darkies kept the good guns, the gnats kept the good tanks, and the brownies didn’t have anything before the war except muskets so they just kept the training and the willingness to blow themselves up. Don’t worry, most of the good stuff is buried somewhere since they don’t need it and they don’t want us to have it.” Steel instinctively reached for the glass of dark liquid in front of him, but remembered it was for Stars and let her snatch it away.
“You know, they said in training that the Changeling Lands had a proud and ancient culture and we weren’t supposed to denigrate it.” The unicorn said. “I’m starting to see why that’s such a recurring issue.”
“You’re getting it.” Steel replied. A changeling waitress came by and deposited a waffle cone with a scoop of ice cream into his hoof. He looked at it quizzically before noticing that Stars and the unicorn had one too. “Now what is it?”
“That’s actually what I came here for, sir. I was hoping to tell you ahead of time so you could enjoy everyone else being surprised. When the folks here heard that we were giving them the MG and what we were heading out to do, they said they were going to go give us all free ice cream.” The unicorn explained.
“Ice cream? But what’s the cream?” Steel sniffed at the cold ball of off-colored substance on top of the cone.
“Pig milk,” The unicorn answered cheerily.
Steel passed his cone over to Stars, who picked it up in her other wing.
The Ursa Minor was a strange thing as far as tank designs went. Most nations had gone for something fairly boxy and stout, largely because of influence from the Changelings and their early-war success. Or they were Stalliongrad and had fifteen variations on the same medium tank with sloped armor. The Ursa Minor, by contrast, seemed to have a bit of DNA from the old trench-crossers. It was short in height and the extra interior space was found by making the thing long front-to-back. The profile was not helped by the fact that the tracks created a cul-de-sac where they kept running ahead of the frontal hull, which already put the driver and radio operator around two meters away from the turret crew. But that was all the basic model’s features. The Ursa Minor was given a bigger gun and a bigger engine specifically so it could fight the factory-made Tiger 1’s, themselves descendants of his tank’s current target. The thing was deceptively fast, and scarily big. Right now, Steel Division was sitting in the open hatch as the Ursa Minor rolled along the plains at a good pace. It had been four hours of driving.
Ahead were three Comets, spread out to watch for threats. The Comets were much lighter, and he felt some concern that they shared an odd resemblance with the Tiger they were hunting despite being in a completely different weight class. They had the same angular and boxy design and about the same outline with their saddleboxes, they were just green instead of Panzergrey. The wheels were different, but they were covered up by the long grass here. Oddly, the Comets had the same 155mm gun as the Ursa Minor and were faster to boot, they just had much worse armor. Steel had to suppress a laugh that, for hunting the Matador down, every Comet had the same chance of killing it and the same chance of surviving a MEAT round as his Ursa Minor, command had just assumed they were less capable because they were cheaper.
Behind them all were four truckloads of infantry. Steel barely knew any of them, they mostly had bolt-action rifles with a few sub- and light-machine-guns. They were just here to pin down or clear away all the bad guys who had anti-tank grenades, anti-tank rockets, or anti-tank cannons, although the latter wasn’t going to be making an appearance.
A voice rang in his headset. It was the commander of Comet Red. “Just saw a wolf dart into the forest. Had to be taller than a pony.”
Steel spoke into his mic. “Yeah, the animals here make the changelings look nice. The brownies have guys who train them. Once had the column we were driving with get attacked by one of those wolves with a bug riding it, spear in hoof.”
“So much for superior changeling science!” Red quipped.
“Don’t laugh. When they ran back into the woods, one of the half tracks was missing its machine gunner.”
There was a pause. Steel could see the unicorn commander of the leftmost tank crawl out of sight. “Getting back into the tank now,” Red didn’t quip.
“That’s a mean thing to do to the new guy.” Comet Blue said.
“I have to agree,” Stars chimed in from the radio operator’s chair down in the hull.
“Maybe.” Steel said. “But stow it, the target’s just over the next ridge. Slow down on this side of the hill five degrees left, and let the infantry dismount.”
The tanks rolled to a stop, the growl of their engines slowing down, and the teams of infantry clambered off the back of the transport trucks. One walked up to Steel’s tank. “We good?” He called up.
“Yeah, take up position and we’ll cover you.” Steel called back.
The captain nodded and his men trudged up the hill. In a few minutes, a radio-bearer broke the relative quiet. “Map’s accurate. There’s a town right up there, same shape. Don’t see any prepared defenses, but there’s enough windows and blind spots we're probably wrong. Don’t see the target, but again, there’s plenty of places it could just be hidden.”
“Alright.” Steel turned the report over in his mind. “Operation’s on, everypony. Let’s not do anything reckless, we aren’t on a time limit. Comets, make sure you have HE loaded to start, we’ll have AP. If you see the target, you don’t need to wait to put a shot through it.”
A collection of acknowledgements came through the radio. “Driver, take us over the hill slowly,” Steel commanded. The engine once again roared and the entire tank shook back to life. The hulking construct moved with a cold patience as it crested the long grass of the hill. For a moment, Steel Division could see the field before him. The three Comets, each spread out across, the squads of infantry in one long row even further ahead and advancing slowly. Up ahead within a kilometer was the town, surrounded on all sides by vast plains. Sure enough, it the town was the same as the one they had just been in with a slightly different layout and no train station. One paved road that ran a circle around a central building, a ring of smaller structures around that… These things were made as much as possible in factories before being assembled, and it showed. Steel took a moment to marvel at the soul-crushing feeling of being able to travel for hours or days or even weeks and still see nearly-identical ugly grey concrete blocks ringing asphalt roads.
But only for a moment before Steel crawled down the hatch and entered the cramped yet safe turret of his Ursa Minor. Sitting here in the steel chair, surrounded by steel devices and steel sounds, he was just behind Winter, who’s eyes were to the gun sights. From his own position, he could still see what he needed through the viewports, but not much more. The radio came with another message from Comet Red. “I notice that your Ursa Minor is in the back, commander. Think all that armor isn’t enough protection?” He said jokingly.
“If I was in front, you’d all be worrying about an attack from the rear.” Steel joked back. “Now I said stow it, we need all eyes forwards. We don’t exactly know what we’re dealing with.” He put up his microphone and muttered, “We shouldn’t have agreed to this.”
“It’s just the pre-battle shakes, Steel, you’ll look back on this whole thing as just another story in the end.” Winter replied from just in front of him. “Besides, that’s why you sent that card back with the train.”
The world became silent except for the rumble of the tank’s engine as Steel kept his eyes peeled as aggressively as possible. From a few hundred meters away, he couldn’t see anything at all, just the buildings and the forthcoming inevitable moment when shots started coming from the fenced windows. The infantry seemed to crawl forward, and the tanks didn’t dare go in front of them. Somewhere ahead was something like a Tiger 1, and the uncertainty was welling up in Steel’s mind as he mentally went through every contingency and outcome he could think of. Every second, they inched closer to the town, and nothing continued to happen.
Until it did.
The first sign of combatants was when the infantry was scarcely a hundred meters out, when a heavy machine gun opened fire from one of the windows. The infantry dropped low and the Comets started blasting HE shells through the windows and into the buildings, each shot drowning out everything else. “Hold fire,” Steel yelled into the tank’s circuit, watching for the real target to appear. He couldn’t be sure from inside his metal box, but the amount of white smoke coming from the village implied that the defense was mostly armed with black-powder weapons. He had learned that enemies having muskets or hoof-cannons or swords did not preclude their friends from having weapons worth being scared of, like the panzerfausts or MG-00’s. Such was the Changeling Lands.
A white speck appeared for an instant and touched Comet Blue off to the far left, causing it to shatter into pieces like glass, flinging its turret far away as all the ammo went up in the same instant. That was a Magical-Explosive Anti-Tank round, the sign of his target. Comet Green stopped dead and the Ursa Minor nearly rear-ended it before Berry backed up and navigated around, while Comet Red seemed to not have noticed the shot go out. “It just fired through the windows!” Comet Green called out over the radio.
“Winter, put a round through the building front, right of the gateway! Aim for the window, it’s all made of concrete!” Steel yelled. There was a loud grinding as the turret rotated into place, followed by an explosion that shook the world. The Ursa Minor lurched backwards and the inside filled with harsh smoke as the gun breech launched inside the turret. Steel could barely hear Jade trying to manipulate a new shell in over the noise of the gunfire and engine.
The reply, a few seconds later, was another loud bang, this time causing a cascade of smaller crashes as pieces of Comet Green slammed into the hull. “No injuries in here!” Berry called out from the front of the tank.
Steel gritted his teeth, they were already two tanks down and hadn’t seen the target once. “Driver, break for that entryway! Top speed!” The tank accelerated as much as it could, the driver barely looking to make sure it didn’t run over any allied soldiers. A confused Comet Red nearly ran into it as it tried to change position entirely in a panicked response to its commander discovering that they were the last Comet on the field. For its trouble, a shell came from the window that the Ursa Minor had once fired into and cleared it out of the way. Steel’s tank was the last tank now, but he had just seen where the enemy was firing from.
“Swing the gun to cover the right corner!” He ordered, and the entire turret shifted ponderously to fulfill his order as Winter turned the wheel as fast as possible. “Watch for it!” The tank crushed some wooden fencing to fly down a short and downward-sloped concrete hallway, and the barrel nearly scraped the wall until they were in the inner roundabout of the town. Even against the rapidly-moving and grey-dominated field of view, Steel could make out a metal box moving even faster, and shouted, “Fire!”
The main gun launched another round, which was short and hit the building behind the Tiger. It had been using the lower interior to let it fire through the windows, but now the tanks were on even ground. It was retreating and ducked around the central complex just after. “Berry, right! Follow the road as fast as you can! Winter, if you see a shot, take it!” He shouted, causing the tank to lurch harshly before resuming its quick pace as his entire field of view rotated to follow the back of the Tiger. They ran in a straight line before lurching to the left a bit as it followed the curve of the roundabout, which Steel caught sight of the foe intermittently as they chased it around, with the sharp angles of the building sometimes obscuring more or less. But they were catching up to it, slowly.
Steel had nearly a minute to try and figure out what it was doing as they chased each other in fits around the central complex, re-orienting to keep moving ahead in sets of straight lines. The back of his mind noticed that there was no more gunfire, but the front had another concern. The Tiger was retreating, but what was its goal? Probably to leave the same way the Ursa had arrived and get a shot off in the brief moment before it was in the hall, and if it missed, it could go to the left or right and have a fifty-fifty chance of ambushing them when they followed. “Winter, watch for it to try and bolt the way we came in.”
“Got it, sir.” Winter replied as the turret shifted slightly. The tank drove past bushes, road stripes, and a few market stalls before they made a complete circle and caught full sight of the Tiger again. It was just as predicted: its turret was traversed to look directly at the Ursa Minor, but the tank itself was making a beeline for the cover of the buildings near where they had rushed in. Things happened quickly. The Ursa was once again rocked by the 17-pounder firing. There was the loud “clang” of a hit being made. The Tiger fired back. There was an explosion, which did not rock Steel’s world, but his entire universe.
When Steel Division woke up, he had the sense that he had not quite been sleeping. It was more like he had been forced from his brain for a second or two. He got his bearings, waited for the ringing in his ears to subside a bit, and readjusted his headset. In front of him, he could see Winter coming to, and to his left across the gun’s receiver was Jade doing the same. “Stars, status report.” He said into his headset. The engine of the tank was idling dutifully and causing a slight shake, but nothing was happening. Everything else was dead. He looked out his viewports and didn’t see any movement ahead, or anywhere at all. “Stars, status report.” He repeated. Jade got up from where he had bent over in his seat and touched him to get his attention. When he looked over, Jade grimaced and nodded his head, “no.”
That was a problem that Steel would deal with later. For now, if the radio and driver were dead, then the tank was not safe. He reached up, took a second to let his balance return a bit more, and opened the hatch to look around for himself.
The first thing he noticed was that there was a changeling standing just besides his tank, to the left and off the road slightly. It was wearing a gas-mask, and a dirty all-black tanker’s uniform. By its legs was a used panzerfaust. It had been staring in the direction of the Tiger, but was alerted to Steel by the sound of the opening hatch. Both drew their sidearms. The bug was first, but what he pulled out with his magic was a flintlock pistol that fired with a dead click rather than with a loud bang. As he pulled out a second flintlock, Steel lined up his shot and put one through its head with a piercing crack. It fell to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, and a pool of blood started to form around its head.
Now, as Steel’s brain finally put itself back together, he crawled all the way out and dropped to the ground on the side not facing the buildings with all the shooting. He still saw and heard nothing to imply there were any combatants left, so he took a closer look at his foe. Sure enough, it was a darkie tanker, black uniform and all, and it had two flintlock pistols and an anti-tank rocket instead of a normal gun. The purpose of the gas mask eluded him. This was darkie and brownie territory, and both of those groups were the ones that were completely opaque to normal species. Maybe he thought the filter meant he didn’t have to breathe the same air as ponies or something.
Winter fell down beside him, and Jade stood on top of the turret of the Ursa Minor, which now had a big black scorch mark on the front of the left side. “Controls are busted, commander.” Jade said. “We’re walking out of here.”
“Not yet. We need to make sure the target’s down first.” Steel replied.
“Seriously, sir? I think we’re the last ones still here.” Jade complained.
“Then there won’t be anyone shooting at us. Besides, the quickest route back the way we came involves clambering over the thing if it’s dead. Now get out your pistol and follow me.” Steel ordered. He wondered if he should reload the magazine of his Colt 980, but he only had one spare, and the difference was one round, so he decided against it. He circled around the Ursa’s hull, pistol at the ready, as Jade did as he was told and drew his own and Winter joined them by holding his pistol aloft in a field of deep blue magic. The latter was looking at Steel as if to ask if he was sure this was a good idea. The trio walked to the nearest entry into town, the unpaved one they had come in on. The only sound left was that of their idling engine and occasional gusts of wind.
The Tiger was only a few dozen meters or so away, and they could quickly see where it had been hit. There was a large and pronounced hole in the engine compartment. It wasn’t dead-on from the side, either, it looked like it ended in the crew area, but he couldn’t be sure, not from out here. Steel did some quick math to try and figure out the odds that the engine could be replaced. It was a prototype, but if they could get another Tiger’s engine then they could slot it in fairly easily… Figuring how many of those were laying around were the step he was at when he was interrupted by another set of odds, those which determined whether the thing’s crew was still alive. There was an automatic burst of fire from a submachine gun, and the trio ducked into building, rushing through the lockless wooden door and its concrete frame. “Why don’t we have a submachine gun?!” Winters grumbled. The other two agreed.
They spread out in the entryway, which seemed to be the hub of the house, with two doors on one side and another, alongside the stairs to the roof, on the other. Five ways in with the front door. Great. It was a mid-sized room, made of grey, unpainted concrete, with decoration in the form of colorful tapestries on the walls and a pony’s skull on one of the shelves, surrounded by feathers and intricately-braided strings. Steel looked around and found two dead changelings in a pool of blood by the mesh-covered window outside. They were the crew for an improvised heavy machine gun, which was made mostly of wood and scrap metal and had rotating barrels like it was designed decades ago. One changeling had a hole in its eye, and the other had it in the neck. Their small arms were a spent musket, a broken single-shot rifle, and a sword. No good. Just when he turned around, he saw the barrel of an MP00 come out from the stairwell. Small puffs of white smoke and ear-piercing shrieks emanated from it. He and his crew lifted their guns and fired back, striking the changeling it was attached to until it fell over. As the ringing left his ears again and Steel gained the presence of mind to drop his empty magazine and replace it with a new one, he caught Winter out of the corner of his eye, standing over Jade, who was motionless on the ground. Damn.
Steel ran over and got down besides Winter. Jade had been shot something like ten times in the torso and was bleeding thoroughly. He seemed surprised but wasn’t looking at anything in particular. Winter was gritting his teeth. Steel was doing everything possible to avoid considering that his crew of five was down to a crew of two. His mind went back to the mission quickly. He grabbed the MP00 off of the bug’s dead body, also dressed in a well-worn tanker’s uniform, replaced its empty magazine with the only spare he could find, and motioned to Winter that they had to get back into gear – if just to leave. Now they had a submachine gun. And it still seemed that there was no one else left. No one… except any remaining members of the tank crew. There had been at least one. Why only one? Were the other three also running around? Why would only one attack them, then?
He looked out the door cautiously. The town was still dead. There was no movement. Not for an entire minute. He turned to Winter, who was watching from the other side of the frame, and nodded.
The remaining pair left the building out the front uncomfortably. They had, after all, left behind two fresh corpses. Now they were much more alert, turning sometimes all the way around whenever one got the sense they were being watched. There was still no clear sound besides the wind and the continued idling of their tank. The distance they covered was rather short, just around the front door and onto the Tiger as part of climbing over it. Up close, Steel got a good view of the decorations that had made it infamous. It originally had been a mostly-normal Tiger 1 in appearance, but now metal spikes were welded to the turret as part of anti-HEAT add-on armor in various states of jury-rigging, and immaculately-cleaned skulls were on the ends, themselves with charms of feathers and beads tied to them. A similar fashion idea had a few islands around the hull, and there was a net with nearly a dozen such trophies in a net hanging from the end of the barrel. Steel caught Winter looking extra intently at them. “I don’t think these are meant to be frightening,” Winter said.
“Didn’t scare us away.” Steel said back. He clambered onto the turret and realized that the hatch was open. Inside, he could see a dead changeling slumped over in his chair. “I’m going to check what it looks like on the inside real quick. Cover me.” He took an irritated grunt as an affirmative and maneuvered in.
The inside of the turret was much like his own tank in principle. It was a complex machine dominated by metal objects at odd angles, leaving just enough room to crawl through without hurting yourself if you were careful and the tank wasn’t moving and you were wearing your tanker's uniform right. The day was bright enough that he could see on the inside from the open hatches and ports. The dead changeling was the loader, cigarette still in his mouth, killed by perforations in the back legs and body. On the other side, Steel’s eye was caught by the number of strings of beads hanging from wherever there was a convenient place for them. As he looked them over, at least a dozen sets, he inadvertently caught sight of a crude painting of a changeling smiling and holding a bouquet of flowers, drawn on the hull nearest the gunner’s sight. The specific details in some parts of its face led Steel to worry that one of these things had already reproduced. In the hull, there were more sets of ornate decorations and charms, and the glowing blue tips of the MEAT rounds, alongside the dripping body of the driver just up front. The radio hatch was also open, presumably so that its user could ambush their tank with a rocket. So there was only one crew member unaccounted for. Steel could justify simply leaving at this point and started backing out of the turret.
There was a loud pop and the sound of thudding on metal that could be felt through Steel’s hooves. He jumped the last few centimeters out of the turret and looked up, seeing a changeling pistol floating in a green cloud in midair near the edge of the roof of the building they’d come from. He fired a few shots at it and most didn’t even strike anything, but the gun pulled back anyways. Steel scrambled to where Winter was lying dead and found that the MP00 had fallen and gotten wedged in between the tank and the opposite building. He turned and fired a few more shots at the roof, catching a glimpse of the last tanker as he did it and causing them to duck back again. The dust bounced when he fell off the Tiger to get back inside.
As he ran to the door, he heard the bug scrambling down the stairs. He peeked around the corner and had a few more shots fly in his direction, the bullets chipping the concrete as they impacted it but didn’t go through. He blind-fired a shot before realizing that he only had one round left, not just in the magazine, but at all. He could hear the bug scurrying around inside. He cursed under his breath and rushed into the room, gun aimed in front of him. It was just as he had left it barring a few new shell casings on the ground and the pools of blood being a little bigger, and one of the side rooms now had its door slightly ajar. He hadn’t heard any door close, so he knew the bug was in that room.
He stared at the empty doorway, with the wall beyond being barely two meters further, thinking how he wanted to do this. He could try and catch the bug through the space between the open door and the frame, but why hadn’t the bug already done the same? He could rush in and hope for the best, but that was just risky. As he stood there for one of the longest seconds of his life, he took a second look at the door and smiled. There was a slight dark spot on top of it. He got nearby before turning around and kicking it all the way open with as much force as he could. He heard the noise of a flailing bug and kicked again, catching it in the chest and causing it to crack against the concrete wall and fall to the ground. When he looked at it, he could see that it was the last tanker, and it was grimacing and squirming in pain. Its magic reached for the P00 pistol it had fallen with, but Steel stepped on it and slid it away. He leaned on the bug and put his Colt under its chin, it being too weak to put up more than a token resistance after that hit. It was time to finish this.
It took him a moment to realize he hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. “Why… are you still fighting? Everyone else… is gone.” The bug forced out through harsh breaths. It looked directly at him, but he couldn’t be sure that what he saw was fear, or if the bug had known this was a long time coming.
“I have orders.” Steel replied.
The bug looked deep into his eyes. “Then shoot, friend.”
Steel fired. One last time, the slide ran back on his Colt, and it stayed back, a wisp of smoke flowing from the empty chamber. A large green stain was splattered across the floor, and the changeling beneath him feel still. Its limbs flopped onto the ground, and there was a visible flow of sickly green blood coming from under its chin and through the new hole in its head. Steel got off of it and stumbled into the next room, adrenaline starting to pound his mind into a pulp. How long had it been since the shooting started, even? Ten minutes? Five? He sat down as his head spun, and realized he was besides the dead body of Jade Scrape, his loader. He was sitting in a pool of one of his friend’s blood. And just outside was Winter Mustang, and Berry and Stars were in pieces in the Ursa Minor not fifty meters away.
He grabbed a Colt magazine from Jade’s remains and replaced his empty one, chinning the slide release. He wasn’t safe. The darkies or brownies or gnats or whoever owned this collection of hovels had fled and would come back soon now that the shooting was over. He consciously managed every step out the door. Damn these bugs! How he wished he could kill every last one of them himself! He leapt onto the Tiger and gingerly stepped over Winter, and then went over the turret and down the front of the hull, outside of the village. He didn’t even want to be in this miserable, cold, poor country filled with insane savages. Nobody did. Not even they did. He navigated around a Comet’s turret that had landed in the fields, the entire assembly stained a dark black from the fire. How many ponies had died today over five Celestia-damned techno-barbarians? More than this entire disgusting race was worth!
He reached the crest of the hill they had come in on and found that all the transport trucks had been taken. He was stuck in the middle of herder territory with one magazine, no food, an Equestrian tanker’s uniform, and a four-hour drive that he had to retrace on foot. The sun was high in the sky, but he laid down and stared at it blankly. The world receded before his eyes as his mind took over his senses.
He wished he was home.
