Ministry Row,

Canterlot,

Central Equestria,

And Saddlesbury,

Western Equestria,

And The Celestia Plain,

Central Equestria

The Fourth Earl of Bitter Creek watched intently as the quill danced across the surface of the parchment. The flowing script being left in the wake of the feathered tip was far more grandiose than his usual penmareship. That was because, strictly speaking, it wasn’t his penmareship. The forgery spell he’d cast was diligently rewriting the latest diplomatic correspondence his office had received from the Saddle Arabian Embassy via an envoy just that morning. The Ambassador himself had left Canterlot in protest just yesterday, upon being informed, for the third time, that the Princesses Celestia and Luna refused to see him to discuss ‘The Corsair Issue’.

This was a lie, of course; in a technical sense. Neither of Equestria’s diarchs had ‘refused’ the ambassador, as neither alicorn was even aware that a request for a muzzle-to-muzzle audience had been made. Just as the ambassador was equally unaware that Princesses Celestia and Luna were extremely eager to talk to them about the rapidly deteriorating relations between the neighboring realms. Alabaster Fetlock suppressed a smirk as he internally praised the nature of the ingrained government bureaucracy’s inefficiency.

The swishing feather finished the last ostentatious letters of the Saddle Arabian ambassador’s official title just a moment before there was a deferential knock at the door. “Enter,” the unicorn replied. He floated the quill ink pot to the side of his desk and the freshly finished missive over to a table along the side of his office to finish drying before he rolled it back up.

The wrinkle features of his majordomo poked just inside the open door. “My Lord, Brigadier General Maniple and Senior Operative Nocturne to see you.”

“Thank you, Maitre; see them in.” The older pony bowed his head and withdrew, opening the door all of the way as he did so. The earl’s two guests promptly entered. The commanding officer of Equestria’s Frontier Corps wasted little time in seating himself across from the Foreign Affairs Minister’s desk. The batpony stallion, however, detoured to the brandy and helped himself to a generous glass of the expensive liquor before also finding his seat.

The unicorn suppressed a sneer and said nothing.

Unlike many of his previous encounters with this pair of ponies, this one was ‘above board’, in the sense that it existed on his ministry’s ledgers. Equestria’s principle pony in charge of the nation’s correspondence with their neighbors required an update on what the Saddle Arabians were doing in response to the ever escalating exchange of threats and demands between them. The earl was also eager to hear whether or not the last of their plot’s ‘loose ends’ had been neatly tied up.

Judging from the unusually pleased expression on the military stallion’s face, Alabaster suspected that it had been.

His hypothesis was confirmed the moment that Maitre closed the door. Maniple pulled a missive from his saddlebag and waved it in the air for all of them to see before ultimately passing it on to the earl. “I just received the report an hour ago: Corsair and her crew were apprehended and turned over to Nocturne’s ponies the evening before last.” He looked at the batpony now. “Assuming your spooks did what you told them to, they’re all dead and at the bottom of a lake somewhere. Or whatever it is that you EIS types do with ‘inconvenient ponies’.”

Alabaster took the offered report in his magic and started to read over it. It wasn’t very long, just a transcribed account, likely delivered by whichever soldier had been in charge of the group that captured Corsair. As a result of his reading, it was several seconds before the unicorn realized that Nocturne had yet to take a sip from the glass of brandy that he’d pilfered. The EIS agent’s expression was also best described as: concerned.

“...Is there an issue, Mister Nocturne?”

“There shouldn’t be,” the batpony began, which the earl didn’t find to be an especially comforting qualifier under the circumstances. Nocturne looked to the brigadier next to him. “I just want to clarify some word choices you made there, Manny: ‘ponies’—plural—and ‘spooks’.

“Elaborate.” The batpony simultaneously waved a wing at the earl, motioning for the general’s report. Alabaster floated the paper over with his telekinesis.

The earth pony officer frowned at the use of a presumably unauthorized use of a nickname by the operative but shrug his withers as he delivered his response, nodding his muzzle in the direction of the report that the batpony was now looking over. “The mare who caught Corsair’s group reported that she’d taken them into custody with no resistance and delivered them to the ponies waiting for them in the old barn at Trotters Bend. Her words, I guess. Why?”

Nocturne’s eyes narrowed critically at the report he was holding in his leathery wings. “This report describes the ponies—still not liking that plural,” he mumbled, “as being ‘EIS’. Why did your soldiers think they were dealing with EIS?” He was glaring at the general now. “Did you tell them ‘EIS’ was meeting them at that barn?”

“No,” Maniple denied, though somewhat hesitantly. “All I said was that a group would be waiting at the barn to take Corsair into custody if she and the others were taken alive.” It was the general’s turn to frown now. “You didn’t exactly tell me much about who those ponies were either.”

“It’s called ‘deniability’, look it up,” the batpony quipped, his lips still pulled tight in a deep frown. “But there’s no way my team should have been mistaken for EIS, and they wouldn’t have passed themselves off as them either. And there was only one ‘pony’ in their group.” He continued reading. Then his eyes got wide and his ears pinned back.

“Your ponies fucked up!” He snapped, now glaring daggers at the general. “How in Luna’s name did they mange to fuck this up?!”

The earth pony recoiled in equal parts confusion and shock, stuttering briefly as he struggled to respond to the unexpected hostility. “W-what are you talking about? The report says that Corsair was delivered to the barn in Trotter’s Bend. That’s where you told me to have them taken and so that’s where I ordered them taken! Nothing was ‘fucked up’. Certainly not on my end!” The general had recovered his spine by the end and managed to return the batpony’s vitriol in kind.

“Genetlecolts!” Alabaster snapped at the pair, gaining the silence and attention of both. The earl took a moment to calm his own tone once more too before continuing. He looked at Nocturne first. “Perhaps you would like to explain—calmly—what it is that you find objectionable about the report from the general’s soldiers?”

The batpony thrust the report back at the earl, the tip of one wing folded around to point to part of the message. “The report specifically describes turning Corsair over to the custody of: ‘an unnamed batpony mare, presumed to be affiliated with EIS’. There weren’t any batpony mares on the team I got for this. Which means that Corsair wasn’t turned over to my team.”

He wheeled on the general now. “So who the fuck do your paste-eaters deliver them to?!”

“Corsair was taken to the barn!” Maniple was snapping back with equal volume and vitriol now, clearly not particularly keen at having blame for the latest debacle laid at his hooves. “If your team wasn’t there, then who was and why?”

“A fair question,” the ivory unicorn stallion spoke up once more, injecting himself into the exchange in order to guide their conversation in a more productive direction. He looked at the batpony. “I assume it’s fair to conclude that whoever was waiting at the barn, it wasn’t actually EIS?” The earl prompted.

Nocturne was massaging his temple with a wing, doing a poor job of reining in his frustration, though his tone was at least a bit more measured as he answered the unicorn’s question. “No,” he acknowledged with a snort. “If EIS had Corsair, then we’d all be in a cell under Canterlot by now.

“But my team definitely didn’t have a batpony in it.” Nocturne’s expression was more pensive now. A fleeting thought passed through his mind but he dismissed it as quickly as it came, chalking the notion up to nerves. After all, it would have been an absolutely ridiculous coincidence. Besides, she was dead. He’d left that Ivory Company griffon to deal with—

The batpony agent’s eyes darted once more to the report in his hooves. They were all having to deal with this current crisis explicitly because those mercenaries were positively horrible at killing who they were supposed to kill. If they’d missed five ponies, who was to say they hadn’t somehow failed to ensure that they’d ended the life of a sixth?

But, even supposing that this absurd notion he was bothering to entertain was feasible, one severely wounded mare wouldn’t have been enough to overpower his disposal team and free the surviving members of Bronco Company. There were pieces to this that he didn’t have, and it was bothering him a great deal.

“Regardless,” the earl said, looking now to the brigadier, “it appears that a new search needs to be organized.” Maniple was already nodding when the batpony interjected.

“Don’t bother. That report’s, what, two days old? Even at a leisurely trot, they’d be over halfway to Canterlot by now, and we all know that’s where they’re headed.” He exchanged looks with the other two members of their conspiracy. “Is there anypony here who honestly thinks Corsair’s heading anywhere else?” Their silent grimaces were answer enough. He then shifted his gaze to Maniple specifically, “And how exactly would we explain the need for a new search? Your soldiers think Corsair was passed off to EIS. If we put the word out that ‘EIS’ lost ponies of interest, that kind of thing is going to get back to the EIS.

“Then Em-Dash is going to start making a lot of inquiries about who it is ‘her’ ponies are supposed to have ‘lost’ and why anypony thought they were in EIS custody to begin with. And that’s going to lead to more questions.” His eyes narrowed at Maniple. “Like why you didn’t actually coordinate with EIS to hoof over Corsair when she was in your custody?

“No. We can’t organize another search. But we don’t really need to. We know she’s coming here. We can just put the Canterlot Guard on alert. They won’t know about anything the Frontier Corps got up to,” Nocturne pointed out. “But we need to make sure that if the guard catches her, she doesn’t make it into EIS hooves or, Luna forbid, gets in front of the princesses!

“So give the Canterlot Guard my name as a point of contact. At least then they’ll think she’s being given to EIS.”

“I presume you’ll be arranging for another of your teams to be in the city by then?” Alabaster asked.

“Fuck that,” he said with a dismissive wave of his wing. “We’re well into ‘if you want something done right’ territory here. I’ll nix ‘em. I’ll arrange for a new delivery location and meet the guards there myself. That way nothing gets fucked up. Again.” Nocturne cast a none-too-subtle look in the general’s direction, earning an offended snort from the earth pony.

“Very well, that shouldn’t be too troublesome to arrange, I would think,” the earl said, somewhat relieved that a new plan of action had been put together so swiftly. “I’ll leave these matters in your hooves,” he nodded at the batpony.

Nocturne turned his attention towards the general one last time. “Hey, Manny, go ahead and have the personnel files for these ponies of yours sent over to my office. You’ve had us both believing these soldiers of yours were perfect patsies, but they’re obviously more capable than the average pot-head or they’d have been dead a while ago.”

“As far as I know, there’s nothing special about them,” General Maniple grumbled, “but fine. I’ll have their records sent over.”

The Earl of Bitter Creek took a slow breath and let it out, his gaze darting between the other two stallions in the room. “Very well. While matters aren’t quite as ‘resolved’ as we had all hoped, at least we have a plan in place moving forward. On that note: General,” he focused on Maniple now, “what news of the Saddle Arabian force inside Equestria’s borders? I was under the impression that the battle we had arranged should have occurred by now, but I haven’t seen any reports…?”

Though it was Maniple that he’d sought an answer from, it was Nocturne who responded with a derisive snort. “Reconnoiter’s playing ‘grab-flank’ with the horses,” he spat. “Caught sight of how many Arabians there were and turned her army around in record time. She’s been on the run for the last two days.”

The unicorn frowned. “From what I was led to believe about the general, that sounds like a surprising level of cowardice.”

“It’s not ‘cowardice’ to realize that charging headlong into the better part of three-to-one odds is anything other than suicide,” the earth pony brigadier chimed in, likely only defending his fellow general officer out of a sense of professional obligation more than anything else. Beside him, even the batpony was forced to nod in reluctant agreement. “She’s stalling for time.”

“She’s hoping for reinforcements,” Alabaster concluded, though this only earned a shrug from the general.

“It’s possible," the general said, "but Reconnoiter would know she can’t keep away from the Arabians long enough to get any support. The nearest garrisons are days away, and even if they were notified the moment the real numbers of the Arabian army became known, it’d take them too long to mobilize and reach her. More likely, she’s hoping to find some favorable terrain that’ll give her a shot at surviving.”

“Is that a possibility?” Alabaster asked, noticing that his forehoof was nervously tapping on his desk now. “Could she actually win?” Such an outcome would not help his plan, the earl knew. He was very much counting on being able to point to a tragedy that could be used to whip up public fervor in favor of warring with the Saddle Arabians. A ‘Gallopoli’ of Equestria’s own that would galvanize the common pony. With the ‘unprovoked’ slaughter of thousands of the princedom’s brave defenders by hostile invaders, the nation would be irrevocably set on the pathway towards war.

On the other hoof, if the Equestrians actually managed to somehow win that first battle…

“It’s possible, but not realistic,” was Maniple’s dismissive response.

“Eh, this’ll probably be a better narrative for you anyway, Al,” the batpony stallion offered, once more flashing a fanged smile. “Reconnoiter can be painted as this general who was giving the Arabians every possible chance to break off and go back home, but they just...wouldn’t...take it...” Those last words were pumped full of feigned and exaggerated remorse that it was clear from the stallion’s brightly dancing eyes that he wasn’t actually feeling. “Those brutish and violent horses just wanted a fight—wanted to kill ponies!

“Clearly their race and society are just fundamentally incompatible with Equestrian Harmony,” the batpony’s fanged grin was predatory now. “Why, we’d be doing the whole world a favor by getting rid of them…wouldn’t we?”

“Quite.”

Alabaster Fetlock kept his own features neutral as he delivered his curt response to the batpony stallion. The unicorn’s gaze darted briefly towards the brigadier sitting by the operative, noting the earth pony’s own growing unease. Unlike their leathery-winged compatriot, neither the general, not the earl himself, particularly relished the thought of civilian deaths—even those of the horses. Indeed, the earl seriously doubted that any sort of genuine ‘extermination’ campaign would ever receive the condonation of the Princesses. Nor was that his goal in all of this.

For the earl, it was enough that the Saddle Arabians forfeit their sovereignty to Equestria, giving the princedom unfettered access to the horses’ land and resources. It would give ponies more room to grow and expand, while preempting the sort of issues which led to the confrontation between Apploosan settlers and the buffalo that could have ended in catastrophe, and was only averted thanks to the intervention of the Princess of Friendship and her friends; though she had not been such at the time.

As detestable as Operative Nocturne was as an individual, the batpony was useful to the earl’s plans, and so he tolerated him. If that ever changed…

Well, it wasn’t like Alabaster didn’t have contingencies to deal with threats to his plans.

“In any case, I suppose that there is little more we can do on that front than wait. In the meantime, we have a plan in place to deal with the good Captain Corsair. If there is nothing else pressing?” The unicorn paused and glanced between the other two stallions, both of whom shook their heads in response. “Then I bid the two of you a ‘good day’.” All three of them stood up from the desk. The earl reached out with his telekinesis for the parchment that was now thoroughly dry and rolled it up neatly at his side. “As for myself, I have an appointment to deliver the latest message from the Saddle Arabian Embassy to Their Majesties…”

It was all the minister could do not to smile.

The last fleeting bands of orange light were fading from the sky as Brigadier General Reconnoiter stared west from her perch upon the hill. Luna’s starry night was just beginning to dominate the heavens, but the unicorn’s eyes were focused intently on a very different collection of dim lights. Lights that were more terrestrial in origin, and far more ominous in their appearance.

The distant flames of a thousand small fires glowed in the waning twilight. It was too far away to be able to make out the forms of the Saddle Arabian horses walking between them, but Reconnoiter knew they were there too. According to Major Phlox’s scouts, the better part of ten thousand horses were encamped on the other side of the river, only a few miles away from her own forces. She’d received the reports of a few scattered skirmishes between pickets that had bumped into each other that evening—to the total surprise of both sides most often.

A dozen or so injuries had been reported, none particularly severe. Nothing suggested that any of the Arabian pickets had suffered losses in the encounters either. None of those had been anything close to ‘pitched engagements’ though. The probing groups on both sides had been far more interested in disengaging and reporting back what they’d seen than trying for a decisive fight. Haphazardly thrust lances and partisan arrow shots. Probably with very little deliberately lethal intent behind them either.

It was one thing to impale a haystack dummy while charging with a couched lance. Dummies didn’t bleed, or scream, or lock their eyes with yours in wide open desperation as they looked their own mortality in the face. Dummies didn’t make you flinch away as you saw within them your own terror mirrored back at you.

Reconnoiter would be genuinely surprised if there were even a hundred ponies in her whole command that had ever taken the life of a sapient creature in combat. It had been over a century since the last time the Equestrian Cavalry had met an enemy in the field in force; a couple expeditionary regiments shipped off to stomp out the last of the pirating Barkary States. There was an occasional deployment of an Equestrian battalion or line company to a friendly nation to aid with stability efforts, but nothing particularly serious. The general was willing to wager that she was the most ‘bloodied’ of any mare or stallion in her brigade, and she’d only been in two fights: one barely-skirmish and one bona fide battle.

It wouldn’t be like that in the morning though. In a little over twelve hours, unless something unprecedented happened—like an outbreak of sanity—the shallow ford between the two encamped armies would be running red with the blood of horse and pony alike.

Her subordinate commanders had all assured her that, despite the harried pace the army had maintained for the past two days, her soldiers were fit, fired up, and ready for the fight. It was early enough in the evening that Reconnoiter could hear boisterous chatter coming from her encamped force. Members of her cavalry recounting past exploits that didn’t happen the way they were telling them and promising to stack the bodies of their foes all the way up to Celestia’s Sun; without entertaining even a moment’s thought that they might be among those who were the first to fall in the battle’s opening moments. It was the height of self-delusion.

It was also an essential mindset for her soldiers to have, lest they hesitate in the morning and make those fears of dying a reality.

Reconnoiter’s ear flickered at the subtle rustling of wings behind her, followed closely by the crunching of grass under steel-shod hooves. The unicorn glanced back and nodded in greeting at the familiar pegasus stallion who had just touched down. “Drafty.”

The armored flier removed his helmet, revealing a wry smile on his lips as the general’s use of the nickname she reserved for her aide-de-camp when she expected him to bring her bad news. In fairness to the eggshell pegasus stallion, that was usually the case. Mostly because other officers tended to like to use him as their conduit for delivering bad news to the general. After all, if somepony was going to risk upsetting ‘The Old Mare’, it might as well be a pony that she actually liked.

“It would probably straighten out Colonel Dandy’s mustache if I told him you were alone outside the perimeter,” the stallion remarked in a casual tone as he closed the rest of the distance between him and the older unicorn.

Reconnoiter let out a chuckle at the thought. Then she nodded her horn in the direction of the nearby tree line behind them. “What do you want to bet that Phlox doesn’t have a whole squad of her batponies out there watching me right now?”

“Sucker bet,” the pegasus officer agreed. He fished a wing into his saddlebag and withdrew a thin folder of paper, holding it out to the general. “Courier just made it back from Canterlot. Says this is everything our ponies know about the horse leading that army.” his other wing waved out towards the distant field of firelights.

Her lips were already pulled in a thin line as the faded blue mare took the file in her magic, floating it over in front of her and opening it. It contained two pieces of paper. “I wasn’t expecting a door-stopping biography,” she muttered under her breath, “but two fucking pages? Really?” She let out a resigned sigh but began reading through the sparse documents by the light of her horn.

“We’re probably lucky to have that much. It’s not like we have a detailed file on every officer in the Arabian cavalry,” the pegasus pointed out, earning a conceding grunt from the general.

“There’s a lot of blank space on these pages too,” Reconnoiter noted with an annoyed huff. “His ‘biography’ doesn’t tell me much,” she said as she shuffled the pages, “let’s see about his service his—oh.” The mare’s brows rose in mild surprise. Before the stallion beside her could open his mouth, she looked over at him. “How sure is Canterlot about the accuracy of this information?”

The question her aide-de-camp had been about to ask died a quick death in the wake of his stuttering response. “I-I couldn’t tell you, ma’am. We told Canterlot who was leading the Arabian force, and that’s what they sent back,” he motioned to the floating pages with a helpless shrug of his wing. “It’s either accurate or it’s not.

“Why?”

“Because this says he was in Maregypt twenty-five years ago.” Reconnoiter levitated a page in front of the pegasus, the glow of her magic allowing the stallion to read over the known service history of Miralay Qasam.

The general’s aid squinted his eyes in thought. “The Arabian Revolt?”

The unicorn let out an amused grunt as she took the paper back. “I bet Qasam knows it as: ‘The War for Hayjaz Liberation’, or something like that,” she retorted lightly with a small smile. “There was a horse minority in the old Ottomare Empire,” she began to explain to the stallion. “They started making a real ruckus thirty-odd years ago; but it came to a head in 979 when the horses took up arms.

“Of course, Equestria is and was an ally of the Empire, and we’re all about that ‘better together' Harmony stuff, so when the Ottomares asked for our help keeping their empire from fracturing…” Reconnoiter shrugged. “Meanwhile, the horses reached out to their long-legged cousins in Saddle Arabia for help getting their independence.

“The ‘war’, or ‘revolt’, or whatever you want to call it, didn’t last long. There wasn’t really a lot of opposition among the Ottomare ponies to allowing the horses to ‘go their own way’, as it were. I think there were only three or four major battles worth talking about. The Ottomares won the first, the horses won the rest. Soon enough the papers were being signed giving the horses there their own country.”

The general flashed a smirk at her aide-de-camp. “Give you three guesses which battle I was a part of. Course, I was just a snot-nosed, fresh-out-of-the-academy, lieutenant back then; so I wasn’t exactly calling any of the shots. Just had to get my ponies where I was told to without getting them all killed along the way.

“Must have been the exception that proved the rule, because I managed to get my whole platoon to the fight without getting too lost." There was a wink from the general to go along with her nostalgic smile. Then her expression turned a bit more melancholy. "Even got most of them out the other side alive; by the grace of Celestia...

“Got a medal out of it. And a coffee cup. Could give a flea’s fart where the medal is, but I kept the cup!” The unicorn beamed at the stallion now. Reconnoiter’s face briefly lost its wrinkles and regained a little of its youthful luster as her thoughts turned towards those early years of her career. Before the tedium and political jockeying of the higher officer ranks had ground her down.

It was a fleeting moment of levity though, and soon enough the old mare was looking back in the direction of the enemy camp, her features again dull and worn. “I wonder which battle he was in…?” She finally floated the papers back into the unmarked folder and returned them to the pegasus stallion.

“Thank you, Downdraft. Not sure if it'll make a difference but…it’s something for me to think on anyway.”

The captain nodded and tucked the file back into his saddlebag with a wing. “Any additional orders for the night, ma’am?”

“Not really, no. We’ve planned about as well as we can. All we can really do now is wait until morning…and hope.”

“Fork coming up in the road.” A batpony mare known to the ponies around her now as Rein Doe announced from her perch upon the back of a dappled stallion she was presently comfortably draped over. “There’s a sign: ‘Canterlot, Twenty miles’. It’s pointing right.”

“Twenty miles, huh?” Cravat huffed from beneath her, rolling his neck in the harness which affixed him to the wagon in an effort to get it to lay more comfortably across his withers. It was a futile effort, and the dappled earth pony found himself wondering if it was even actually possible for the leather straps to lay ‘comfortably’ across a pony’s body. His ‘passenger’ wasn’t helping matters either. “That’s what? Five more hours then?” He fully acknowledged the hopeful note in his voice.

“Six at the rate you’re going, corporal,” the older emerald mare harnessed on the other side of the wagon’s tongue chided him lightly.

Though not strictly of the same pony type, crystal ponies were built similarly enough to earth ponies as to make the first sergeant and the company’s medic the two most suited for pulling the wagon they’d acquired back at Trotter’s Bend. They’d been pretty low on available candidates besides. The batpony and Arabian colt had been right out, on account of still mostly recovering from their injuries. Autumn Brisk was a no-brainer on not pulling the wagon—she could barely carry her own weight over a substantial distance without laming herself. Captain Corsair served the group best by keeping a lookout in the sky. Flashover could have pulled the wagon competently enough, but their pegasus commander had decided that, if it did happen that their group was attacked—be it by the authorities or even just a passing bugbear—it was best to have the unicorn ready to respond unhindered.

So it was that the group’s draft team consisted of a thousand-year-old mare and a quasi-noble stallion. With the batpony serving to guide them through the night’s darkness.

“Apologies, first sergeant,” Cravat responded, casting her an aside glance. “My ‘saddle blanket’ is a little heavier than I’m used to.” He jerked his head in the direction of his all-too-comfortably-lounging passenger.

“Aren’t you medic types supposed to be able to carry a wounded pony around without a problem?” the leather-winged mare quipped back in a playful tone.

“The standard in training was a hundred yards,” Cravat informed her dryly. “That came and went thirty miles ago.”

“We’re pulling about half a ton of wagon behind us,” Shillelagh said, as though the medic was somehow unaware of that fact and needed reminding. “The weight of one pony on your back shouldn’t make that much of a difference.” She briefly eyed the batpony. “If she’s too heavy, then maybe you should have kept a closer eye on how much you were feeding her.”

“I don’t think that’s how pulling things verses carrying stuff works, but I also don’t remember enough of my kinesiology lectures to fight you on it,” the stallion admitted. “Or physics, for that matter,” he added after a moment’s thought. There was a much longer pause, and then, “And I’m not going to comment at all on how much the mare with fangs in biting range of my neck weighs.”

“They’re called ‘curves’ and all healthy mares have them,” the batpony affirmed.

“And some very healthy curves they are!” Flashover chimed in from where he was seated at the front of the wagon, earning a glance from the three ponies ahead of him.

“It’s pitch black out,” Cravat noted, only barely able to make out the wagon and unicorn behind him in the darkness himself. “How much can you possibly see from there?”

“The moon pokes out every now and then,” the younger stallion defended. As though to further illustrate his point, a sliver of moonlight emerged from behind the cloud cover long enough to briefly bathe them in soft, pale light. It was enough illumination for Cravat to see that his friend was grinning while looking at his and the batpony’s backsides.

Rein Doe’s tail whipped dismissively at the unicorn.

“Actually,” Flashover went on, “I’ve gotta say: I think you’ve just unlocked a new fetish for me, Doc!”

“Stacked flanks?”

“...Okay, make that two new fetishes.” The dappled stallion just snorted and shook his head. While she kept her reaction quieter, the medic could feel the mare’s belly quivering with a suppressed chuckle of her own. “But I was actually going to say: harnesses. I never really got that whole thing before, but the way that breaching strap’s hugging your flank has awakened something in me, I think…”

"Why is it my strapped flank you've been eyeing?" Cravat asked in a slightly bemused tone.

His brain arrived at the obvious conclusion at the same time that Flashover provided his answer. "Because I'm not actually dumb enough to think ogling Top's flanks ends well for me," the unicorn deadpanned.

"I see you brought both your brain cells this time, private," the crystalline noncom said in a flat tone. "Too bad there wasn't any room left up there for your shame,” Shillelagh cast a dour look over her shoulder at the orange stallion.

“With respect, first sergeant; I didn’t recall seeing ‘shame’ on the packing list for this mission.”

“How about your noise discipline?”

All four ponies briefly jerked before looking up to see the backlit dark shape of a pegasus hovering above them. It wasn’t possible to actually see her expression, but Corporal Cravat could feel his commander’s glower. “I could hear you all the way up in the cloud layer!” She hissed, drawing winces from all ponies concerned, even the senior noncom.

“Sorry ma’am,” Flashover said in a deferential tone, “just trying to play the part of innocuous civilians out on the road.”

“Point one: ‘innocuous civilians’ don’t travel at night in the first place,” Corsair countered. “Only two kinds of ponies would be out here like this: batponies and smugglers, and batponies would be in the air with a skycart.” From atop his back, Cravat felt their resident batpony shrug her wings in acknowledgement of the pegasus mare’s valid point. “And as we are basically ‘smugglers’—seeing as we’re trying to smuggle ourselves into Canterlot—we should act the part and stay quiet!” It was impressive how much force the mare was able to put behind a mere whisper.

“Point two,” she went on after a brief pause, “is that even ‘innocuous civilians’ who were reckless enough to travel at night would know that there’re more dangerous things that guardponies out on the roads at night,” their commander reminded them. “I just got back from bucking in the beak of an owlbear that was stalking you. We've managed to survive two murder attempts. Can we not die by getting eaten by an ursa in the home stretch, please?”

A chorus of “yes, ma’ams” answered the pegasus, who seemed to be modified by the response. Corsair swooped down into a trot beside her senior noncom and, though she spoke in a hushed tone, Cravat was able to overhear her.

“Top, when we get within sight of Canterlot, I want to run some ideas by you on how to get in. I think I know how we can get word out about Gallopoli and the conspiracy without risking going to the wrong pony first.”

The crystal mare issued a noncommittal grunt but otherwise didn’t say anything in response. One of the biggest questions that their group had been mulling over when they finally arrived at Canterlot was: who did they speak to? None of them, not even ‘Rein Doe’, was confident in saying that they knew everypony who was involved in the conspiracy that they’d been swept up in. But some of the names that they did know made it clear that there were ponies high up in the government who knew about it, across multiple departments.

That meant that it was risky to tell anypony, because there was the possibility of them ending up going to another pony who was in on the conspiracy. While none of them wanted to believe that the Equestrian government was saturated with corrupt individuals like that, all it would take is for them guessing wrong one time to likely get them all killed and keep the secret they knew from getting out. Whoever they spoke to, they had to be certain, beyond any possibility of doubt, that that individual wasn’t a part of this.

Unfortunately, that list of ponies was very short, and involved the ponies at the absolutely highest levels of the Equestrian government. Individuals whom ponies like them weren’t in a position to just ‘drop in on’ on a whim. Not without first going through a lot of layers of bureaucracy to get that far in the first place. And every layer they tried to pass through could wind up being a layer that was intent on stopping them from advancing further…permanently.

So far as the medic knew, none of them had come up with a reliable way to get one of them, or their star witnesses, to those upper echelons of governance without risking running afoul of a member of the conspiracy.

“Doe,” the pegasus said in a slightly louder tone, drawing the batpony mare’s surprised attention, “I’ll need your input on this too.”

“Me? How can I help?”

“I’m hoping you can tell me,” the pegasus said. “How easily can you get a face-to-face with the EIS Director?”

“In an official capacity?” The batpony mare asked in a dubious tone before letting out a dismissive snort. “I’d have an easier time getting an audience with Princess Luna; at least she holds a public Night Court.” Even in the darkness, it was possible to see Corsair’s disappointed grimace. Then Rein added through a smirk, “unofficially…I might know how to casually ‘bump into’ her around Canterlot.”

“How reliably?" The pegasus was trying not to sound too hopeful. "Could you manage to do that any time?”

The batpony shrugged. “As long as Em-Dash is in the city I can pull it off eventually, sure. Maybe not in the first five minutes or anything like that,” she tacked on by way of a qualifier. “Why?”

“Because I’m betting on the director of the EIS not being in on this whole thing,” Corsair explained. “Otherwise those probably would have been EIS agents waiting for us in that barn,” she pointed out, to which the batpony on Cravat’s back nodded in agreement.

“I’m going to want to have a talk with you too, Cravat.”

“What about, ma’am?”

“I need you to give me a crash course on noble-ology, or whatever,” Corsair said. “How the whole Peerage thing works with the Noble Stable.”

“Umm…okay?” It seemed that the pegasus had nothing more to add and jumped back into the air to resume her lookout duties, leaving the dappled stallion to puzzle over his commander’s reasons for wanting that knowledge. A possibility that crossed his mind caused him to grimace. “I really hope her plan isn’t to pose as a random noble and just walk into the Noble Stable while they’re in session,” he muttered.

“Why not?” the batpony on his back asked.

“Because that won't work,” Cravat answered simply. “Even I couldn’t do that, and I actually am a noble. Technically. You have to be led and shod first.”

“Leaden shod?” Rein snorted. “That’s a heck of a dress code requirement for a bunch of prissy nobles. I bet if you put lead horseshoes on the envoy back there,” the batpony mare’s wing shot in the direction of the wagon where Autumn Brisk was currently sleeping, “you’d root her in place.”

“No,” the stallion shook his head, “led and shod. It’s a term for being sponsored and accepted into the Stable. Not every noble is a part of the legislature. And you can’t just show up and expect them to let you in just because you’re a Peer either. It’s not the fillyscouts. Only an already shod peer can be a sponsor.

“So if part of the commander’s plan is to put on a fancy cloak and pretend to be Viscount Vought Corsair of Cirruscuse—or wherever—that’s not going to work. She won’t make it in the door.”

“Hmm.” The batpony frowned and returned her eyes forward. “We’re at the turn. Veer right.”

Cravat grunted and shrugged his shoulders again in an effort to relieve the tension in his withers as he leaned into the straps for the turn. They passed under another thin band of moonlight that poked out through a break in the clouds. An instant later, the weight on his back from his passenger was completely gone. At the same moment, he heard an incredulous sputter from beside him that drew his attention.

Rein Doe was now draped languidly over Shillelagh’s back, much to the crystal mare’s surprise—and more than a little noticeable annoyance. The batpony didn’t flinch away as the senior noncom turned her head to glare balefully at the interloper. Indeed, she merely flashed a broad, toothy smile. “What’s the matter? You’re already pulling half a ton of wagon,” the bat-winged mare chided her new mount, “the weight of one little mare on your back shouldn’t make a difference, right?”

First Sergeant Shillelagh snorted hard in the batpony’s face, prompting Rein to wince away and use her wing to make an exaggerated motion of wafting foul breath away from her, but said nothing. Instead, the crystal mare simply looked ahead once more and leaned into the harness straps as she pulled the wagon.

Once they were back on a straight heading, Cravat looked once more between his back at the first sergeant’s. “How’d you do that?”

“Batpony magic,” came the unabashed reply.

“Batpony’s don’t have magic.”

“Says the earth pony, without a hint of irony,” Rein rolled her eyes, but kept an easy smile on her muzzle.

Cravat frowned and then turned his head back to look at Flashover. “How’d she do that?”

Unfortunately, the unicorn stallion was of little help. “I’unno! She was on your back one moment and then on Top’s the next! I didn’t even blink or nothin’...” He offered up a helpless shrug. “She just…teleported.”

“Teleporting is unicorn magic,” the batpony countered. “I shifted. Moved from one moonshadow to another.”

“Batponies can’t do that,” Shillelagh challenged, clearly intending to call the mare’s bluff. “I’ve known plenty of batponies, from back before The Nightmare Rebellion even, none of them could do that.”

“Most can’t,” the batpony acknowledged, otherwise not seeming to be phased by the crystal mare’s statement. “Just like how most unicorns can’t teleport. Some of the more powerful or skilled ones can though. It’s the same with batponies shifting through moonshadow.”

She turned her head upwards and looked around. As the ponies walked, the moon fully emerged from behind a cloud bank. As the light spilled across the pair of ponies pulling the wagon and the crystal noncom’s passenger…the batpony vanished.

—Only to manifest seemingly out of thin air, without so much as a flicker of magical light or sound, right next to Flashover. The orange unicorn was able to modulate his yelp of surprise to a much lower register about halfway through. He also somehow managed to not jump all of the way off the wagon.

“Relax, I don’t bite.” The mare bared her fangs at the stallion. “For free.”

“...That’s pretty cool,” Flashover admitted when he once more trusted his voice not to crack. “Scary as fuck, but cool.”

“I’m going to assume that there’s a reason you can’t just teleport all the way to Canterlot tonight?” The medic asked.

“Shift,” the batpony corrected insistently before providing a real answer to the earth pony’s question. “Range and effort. Some of the really skilled shifters can move anywhere within line-of-sight. I’m pretty middling. Can only go a dozen paces or so.” A satisfied smirk crossed her muzzle. “Nocturne can’t manage more than a few body lengths.” Then her expression instantly soured at the thought of the stallion, her fangs baring in a sneer.

“Still pretty cool,” Flashover offered.

“Thank you, Flashy.” The batpony mare stood up and turned around on the seat, stepping into the dark interior of the wagon. A heartbeat later Shillelagh let out a surprised gasp. Cravat looked over in time to see a dark shape hoisting itself up over the crystal mare’s barrel into the moonlight. The batpony’s face was pinched in a pained wince as she heaved herself up onto the mare’s back, collapsing upon it with a groan. Her wing was idly massaging the still healing wound on her side. “Ouch.”

“So fucking cool,” Flashover murmured from the wagon.

“‘Shifting’ is now also officially contraindicated,” the dappled medic quipped beside her, earning an eyeroll from the batpony.

“Talking is officially ‘contraindicated’ now too!” Came a severe hiss from above. The ears of every ground-bound pony reflexively pinned back as they winced at the clear frustration in Captain Corsair’s voice. “Not another word until sunup; is that understood?!”

Cravat shared a silent look with the crystal mare beside him and was slightly reassured that even the senior noncom looked unsure whether they were supposed to verbally acknowledge their commander or not. It was a question that appeared to plague everypony’s mind, as even Flashover kept his lips clamped shut against any possible sarcastic remarks that might occur to him. Fortunately, their collective silence seemed to satisfy the cobalt pegasus, as she said nothing further to any of them on the matter either.

Author's Note

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