"Guys, it's them!" said one soldier.

"Oh shit," I said to myself. I really did not fancy getting shot this morning.

But what happened instead astonished us. The assembled soldiers began laying down their arms instead, in an act of seeming surrender.

"What's going on?" said one of our soldiers.

I looked up over the wall I was behind to see the soldiers wre surrendering en masse before us. "They seem to be surrendering!"

Then one of them spoke. "It's just as the broadcast said! The Princess has returned to liberate us!"

"Say what now?" I asked.

"Put it this way; most of us don't like Gulfstream," said another soldier who had laid down her arms. "So we were holding onto hope that the Royal Family would return to our lands and free us from him. We lacked the strength to do it on our own, but with all of you by our side we have a fighting chance of restoring freedom and democracy to our land!"

It was in that moment I remembered what Opwinden had said to us in the prison cells.

"Luckily, most of the population agrees with you. The truth is that they don't trust the General's regime. They see him as a madman and a threat to their security. Already ponies are protesting the conscription he's introduced, and the populace is deeply worried about being sent to war to fight against the other races."

They didn't see us as oppressors after all of this. In their eyes, we weren't here to control and oppress them.

We were here to save them from a despot.

Gotta say Opwinden pulled off a miracle back there. He turned our awful reputation after the whole no flying thing into the light of hope for a whole new generation. Guess the revolution went a little better than it seemed, huh?

Many soldiers were now in a position of surrender, waiting to be processed to wherever it was. But it was then I had a much better idea.

"Will you join us?" I asked.

"Join you in what?" another queried.

"Join us in liberating Zephyr Heights. Help us in overthrowing the General, and restoring peace to our land. Then life can return to how it used to be. What say you?"

There a momentary silence. Then the entire ground seemed to move at once. The soldiers grabbed their weapons once more, and turned to face the direction of our offensive.

"Yes, Your Highness!" said one of the soldiers, an officer based on the markings on his uniform. "We will gladly fight by your side."

"For the freedom of all pegasi!" shouted another soldier.

"For a brighter tomorrow!" shouted another.

"FOR THE EMPIRE!" shouted a third.

I and my fellows moved up alongside the fellow soldiers who had come with me, adjusting my kit and forming up on the side of the new unit.

"I'm not really one for speeches, but we have a job to do. Let's clean this place up!"

In that moment, the soldiers cheered. "ADVANCE!"

They began sweeping forward almost like a wave of bodies, heading for their targets. We swept across the airbase at speed, our lines dramatically bolstered by the fellow numbers being dramatically swelled by the new soldiers. Our advance was going swimmingly.

Several aircraft parked on the ground were abandoning attempts to move based on all the soldiers moving across the battlefield. I didn't blame them- the land right now wasn't conducive to attempting to get a heavy aircraft off the ground, especially given how ungainly those bombers looked. But we kept up the speed of our move.

Suddenly, I dived into cover alongside a random soldier, as a loud roar of fire had started up nearby. I adjusted my helmet to check incoming fire, and then quickly looked up.

Most of us were now pinned down by enemy fire. A machine gun was entrenched in a nearby tower, and was firing down on us in suppression fire.

"LAY DOWN SUPRESSING FIRE!" I shouted.

Nearby, one of our own machine guns (one of the units that had surrendered to us had one in their equipment collection) was set up, and began to fire back. The operator was hanging below the wall, and was operating the fire button with one hoof. Sure is handy our hooves stick to things, huh?

We continued to stay down as fire continued.

"SURRENDER NOW, YOU TRAITORS!" a voice blasted over a speaker. Sounds as though there are quite a few Gulfstream loyalists inside that structure.

"You can't betray somepony you're enslaved to!" a soldier replied, clearly in the mood for one liners in response to whatever was going on.

I glanced back and forth along the line, and then had an idea. "Does anypony have a bazooka?" I asked.

"What's a bazooka?" asked another soldier.

"A missile launcher? Anti tank weapon?"

"We have a LAW if that's what you mean," said another, adjusting his weapon to reveal a rocket launcher of some description.

"Perfect!" I said. "Get it loaded and prepare to attack."

The soldier nodded, and flipped the weapon open before putting a rocket inside. "Ready to go."

I looked back along the line. "Get ready."

The soldiers nodded, holding down under the withering fire from the machine guns in the walls.

"FIRE AT WILL!"

In an instant, we popped up and grabbed our weapons, firing on the enemy position. It wasn't meant to destroy the position, just to keep their heads down for a bit to prevent them from firing.

Just so our actual heavy hit could smash them apart. The soldier with the rocket launcher then fired, the rocket's red glare streaking across the battlefield and slamming into the tower. With a series of loud explosions, the tower was demolished and collapsed, the heavy gunfire ceasing as the tower fell into rubble.

We waited with baited breath for what would happen. And then we saw it appearing above the ramparts.

The thing we had hoped we would see.

The white flag of surrender was soon waving over the base.

We had done it. We had retaken the airbase with minimal casualties on our side. True, some of the enemy were dead, but that was to be expected. As the survivors marched out to a holding area, their heads low and hanging in shame, it was time to figure out what to do next.

To this end, I consulted my map and gave it a close look. A few lines drawn on it gave a sense of where we were meant to be going, and this was good news, as where we were going next was a place I wanted to go.

"Listen up!" I said, looking at the map. "As stated in the briefing our next target is the airship hanger not far from here. We're joining the assault on the palace itself, attacking from another direction to try and overwhelm the defenders."

"That sounds bad," said one soldier. "Gulfstream and his closest fanatics are in there. Including his Stormtroopers."

"I have experience with those guys," I said. "We have numbers on our side."

But many of the other soldiers seemed less certain. "Those guys were used for violent reprisals," said one. "Including here in Zephyr Heights. None of us forget the Night of the Broken Glass."

"Then we should take the fight to them," I said. "Show them tyrants will not be permitted here."

That, at least, seemed to get them somewhat riled up, and they formed up into something of an order as we began to leave the airbase. We left a few soldiers behind to guard the base and keep an eye on the prisoners in case they tried anything clever. Or anything silly. The two were basically the same at this point.

As we pushed into the city, we could hear scattered gunfire and see smoke rising in places. This was not great, to be honest. It would have been far better if we'd been able to take the city without firing a single shot, but sadly that option wasn't available to us after all.

But Gulfstream's behaviour had me even more worried. Random violence carried out against civilians was another page out of the dictator playbook. Bombing your own citizens is presumably the next step on from that. It wouldn't surprise me if he was burning books and targeting university staff. After all, one of the first things dictators do is silence the intelligent.

We moved onwards, the explosions continuing to serve as background music to the chaos. As we advanced, the doors of the airship hanger loomed in view, but unfortunately the doors didn't look too good. The stained glass had been shot out of them, and was lying in shards all over the floor.

That would be a mess to clean up. Seems like a microcosm of this whole situation.

We formed up outside the doors, and several soldiers readied smoke and concussion grenades.

Now was the time to strike once more.

Author's Note

Welcome back to another battle with Zipp. This time around, we're back on the airfield. The title of this chapter is taken from the Sabaton song Blood of Bannockburn, which is about the battle of Bannockburn in 1314 (the incident where an army under Robert Bruce succesfully drove back the English besieging Stirling Castle).

This segment of the airfield battle is inspired by the assaults on Kronstadt. One of them was an early strategic bombing mission in 1919 in which the RAF succeeded in sinking several Soviet vessels. The MG segment is inspired by an anecdote from the Soviet assault on Kronstadt, where the attackers were held up for hours by entrenched MG positions.

The missile system seen here is a combination of two different systems. The reference to a LAW is intended as an allusion to the M72, a fire-and-forget system used between 1963 and 1983. The weapon often appears in movies owing to the large numbers of expended examples in existance. The other system is STARSTREAK, the standard missile system in use with the British Army at time of writing.

The Night of the Broken Glass is the common English translation of Kristallnacht, a night of violence against predominantly Jewish shopkeepers and civilians carried out by the SS in November 1938. The incident was, in many ways, an ugly prelude to the Holocaust.

Next time; battle for the hanger!