“This is Flare. Mission has been accomplished and the site is secure. The cleaning crews can move in,” Swift said in as flat a tone as possible. It wasn’t very convincing, but she didn’t think anyone would blame her once they saw the lair.

Looking up at where she was going, Swift could only see more trees in the unhealthily dense forest ahead. Her satellite connection - low bandwidth as it was - assured her that the skybIke was in a clearing not more than half a kilometer away. She had left the ritual site well over an hour ago, and had spent most of the time during the trek animal spotting. She hadn’t seen much of anything though, that was fine.

Swift pushed past one small sapling and into a clearing so covered barely any moonlight showed through the holes in the canopy. Near the center of the space was a sleek black bike resting upon a bed of broken twigs. Stalking up to the machine and taking a small lap around it to inspect, Swift’s small frown changed into a wry smirk. “He must have something he really doesn’t want to wait for if he’s willing to do this,” she said as ran the backs of her claws gently over the leather seat and up to the ignition.

Lowering the relative force production of her metal limbs back to their normal single-digit numbers, Swift heaved herself over and onto the bike. As she twisted the archaic keys, Swift listened to the soft hum of the bike starting up beneath her. She guided it up past the hole in the canopy and once she was clear of any obstructions she gunned the throttle back toward base.

Flying along in the late Spring night, Swift had an exceptional view across the breadth of Thestralia. She could see from the hill towns and defense stations of the outer wall all the way to the massive space elevator that stood in the center of the country. She studied every detail that she could and committed them to memory; after all, this was probably the last time she would ever see her home from this good of a vantage point.

***

Long after the moon had gone down and the sun had come up, Swift landed the Dewcati on the landing pad in Eyton. Dismounting, she walked over to the elevator bank and pressed the call button, but her claw didn’t lower until the safety doors opened.

Trudging in, Swift tapped the button for the living level and leaned back against a wall. Looking over into the mirrored steel surface, she studied herself. The cuts in her skin had fused shut hours ago, leaving behind only a few tender and fading scars. The bags under her eyes had deepened over the morning into an ugly black color that stood out from even the dark red of her blood-matted coat. Her hair had been whipped into knots by the wind.

Arriving at her floor, she found a small group headed up to the pad. She stepped out of their way off to the side of the hall. The leading thestral winced and looked away quickly on his way past.

She looked over at their shuffling forms and pressed herself against the wall, breaking off a small cloud of dried blood flakes. They all kept walking. She didn’t see anyone else on her way back to her room.

Closing her door on the hallway, Swift collapsed back onto the same bed she’d left yesterday, instantly staining the sheets. She’d left victorious and come back defeated — too drained to appreciate another piece in her plan falling into place. Idly she wondered what the rest were doing even as she fell into an uneasy sleep.

***

The following morning Swift sent the combat data to the Doctor, but it wasn’t until two weeks later that she finally received summons to the extranational operations room. Swift walked into the small room after scanning her newly-upgraded security clearance at the door.

The room was dark but not dingy; lit by the crisp blues of computer monitors and an impressively sized multi-color projection of the world sat in the center. Off to her left, a few thestrals were combing through reports on foreign affairs in their cubicles while straight ahead an almost skeletally thin earth pony waved her over to the holotable.

“Agent. Thank you for deciding to join our esteemed department. You may call me Plausible Deniability. I will be overseeing your operations overseas for the foreseeable future,” he said.

“Can I just call you Ability? Your full alias is rather lengthy,” Swift asked as she ran her claws over the edge of the angled table. She looked over to meet her handler’s gaze. They seemed to be an actual pony going by the fact that Ability was only just a few centimeters taller than her, instead of towering by a head or even a meter. His light grey coat gave him the impression of a specter in the poor illumination of the room, the other tell as to his undead nature was his slitted pupils.

It made sense that a pony would be running surveillance on other ponies she supposed, but it was rather rare for ponies of all species to find their way to Thestralia.

“My name is not an alias Swift, but you may call me Ability I suppose. It is not like there will be anyone else you will be contacting when you call me,” he replied. Slipping off of his seat, he motioned her over to one of the side rooms with a wave of a hoof. Swift followed a few steps behind, her claws clicking across the steel floor to the bridge rhythm of Steel’s latest composition.

In the same vein as the dark office building appearance of the main data center, the briefing room looked like a hospital MRI room. Admittedly, there was plenty of metal on the inside of the room in the form of cables, chairs, and controls, but apart from the presence of metal the room was bare white to the point of featurelessness. A sadly familiar long and tubular machine took up the length of the room.

Swift started to climb into the linking device, only for a hoof on her shoulder to stop her from going any further up the small inbuilt ladder. “Have some patience and get back down here would you?” Ability chastised, “you may be used to learning from those things, but there is not much to go over and I have the full case here on paper. It is much better for your young brain”.

Swift hopped down to the floor and turned to look at him, eyebrow raised. “That’s fine, I just haven’t used paper for much since I left school,” Swift said, pointedly ignoring the dent in the ladder where she had pushed off. Her strength settings would need some recalibration before she deployed. The ponies might notice if she could outperform an earth pony in strength, especially if she wasn’t going to be disguised as one.

“Well you had better get used to using paper again quickly then. The only information you are going to find in Equestria, that is not provided by or sent to us in IntCom, is going to be entirely analog. Or magical I suppose, but that is rare and not generally applicable,” Ability said. “Here is the case file, read it here and dispose of it when you finish absorbing the material. Meet me in the armory after you are finished eating. You will be leaving for Manehattan shortly thereafter”.

“Understood.” Swift saluted. They moved past each other then - Swift to the cushioned control chair and Ability to the door. Swift only opened the folder after the lock clicked into place.

It was plain, without any markings and beige, by any metric it was a typical Manila folder. Upon cracking the seal she was met with three profiles. One for their agent, and two for their family.

The missing agent lived in Cloudsdale as some sort of minor government functionary in the mail office. He had a stay-at-home wife and a daughter about Swift's age that was going to flight camp.

The rest was more minutiae about his life and job: income, coworkers, address, but most importantly for Swift was the false backstory he’d been planted with. He supposedly had a pegasus friend in some coastal city from college that she would be posing as. Looking closer at the descriptions she frowned. There’s no substance to this friend. I suppose they didn’t know if they’d be able to send a shifter after them, but this vagueness is liable to get me found out.

Swift snorted, “Doesn’t matter. Anywhere’s better than here”.

Author's Note

Sorry about the chapters coming out today and not at the start of the month. Also the USAFA-WP game took me away from my PC and sucked the wind out of my sails.

P.S. The interlude for the next set of four chapters is almost done.