Ruby Beacon awoke to a feeling of dread in her chest. A glance around her tent saw Field Beacon absent. With a little sigh, she took off her armor. Each piece was inspected for damage after it was laid out on her sleeping mat. Then, she checked herself, felt for bites, growths, anything. She was grateful when nothing bristled against her hoof other than fur and skin. She redonned her armor.

Field Surgeon stepped in as she tightened her peytral around her chest. Hello, they both said. Field Surgeon sat beside her as Ruby finished going over herself, taking a sharp edge to a block of chocolate. “You know,” she said, whittling a strip off the edge which she popped into her mouth. She let it dissolve before speaking. “If they made this stuff taste worse, it would last longer.” Ruby glanced back at her.

“Probably right,” she muttered. Field Surgeon’s features softened at the exhaustion in her face. She asked if Ruby slept well. Ruby said she hadn’t. Field Surgeon asked why, Ruby explained it was nightmares. The conversation went on with slow, off-kilter beats. Then Field Surgeon put the block of chocolate back into the satchel on her barrel.

“Looks like we’ll be settled in for the night. Too dark to be out and about on the surface,” Field said without meeting Ruby’s eyes, poking at her hooves. “We can get an idea of what this refugee camp is like, see if they know about any others.” So we can burn them out, Ruby finished. The hair on her back stood on end at the idea. She told Field she was going to go find out what food the refugees were eating. Field decided to follow. Ruby appreciated the confidence her presence provided.

The soup kitchen was up several flights’ worth of rope bridges near the top of the causeway, where the surface entrance sat. The big, circular brick tunnel had duckboard floors laid out and salvaged furniture being used for a rough kitchen setup. Ruby would go so far to call it homey if the grander context of the situation wasn’t crushing her spirit.

The bleeding Pegasus staring down the bore of a long tube held by a biped wasn’t solving her poor mood either. There was tension in the air as she trotted up to the frozen kitchen. The tube’s end began to click, when a second biped put a glove on the tube and pushed it down—a placating gesture? Something. The sick ponies at the kitchen, wrapped in cloaks and bandaging to conceal themselves from sight and easy identification, were huddled against the counters, bowls spilled and dripping on the floor as the two bipeds in the door stared down the newcomers. What in the name of Cerberus’ prick have I stepped in the middle of?

When one of the tubes turned to her, she found diplomacy the first thing that came to mind; there was an uneasy foreboding in her chest that warned her against hostility. The way it held the strange contraption in its… hand, carried a force with it, an air of violence. She called out to the biped with the handheld contraption that held a cylinder behind a long tube. A weapon. Why else would it brandish the thing like that. It turned to her, and lowered the thing, and began barking at its companion. The beak on its face was a mask, that was clear. It muffled their speech—what language is that? Ruby furrowed her brow and scrunched her muzzle. The one holding the long tube with the pilot light at its tip lowered its device and made some kind of awestruck sound, tapping their companion’s shoulder to point at Ruby. The two bipeds stared at one another—their body language betrayed annoyance on one end. Military?

Then Field Surgeon began cycling through greetings—Equish was a no-go, she skipped ‘hello.’ Next was the Diamond Dogs’ dialect. Ruby knew the word for hello, which Field then cheerfully barked at the bipeds. No response. She tried Yak. Nothing. Then Griffonian—bingo. That got a tilted head. The shorter one with the one-handed contraption began returning the speech at Field. Ruby tried to follow, but she knew only a few words and the conversation felt lightning-paced to the junior officer. The short biped ran a glove down their mask and shook their head with recognizable disdain. They turned, barked an order. Another one came up behind them. The bleeding Pegasus was flinching at the sight of the lot of them. Ruby looked to the handheld contraption, then to the pony. Her muscles tensed.

“Field, I don’t think these are… friendly creatures,” she carefully whispered to the surgeon as she trotted over to the wounded Pegasus. The aging veteran flashed a smile at her.

“I noticed. Be calm, let’s not rouse them to violence. They have muskets and pistols.” Ruby shot her a glare, questioning. Field caught the look. “The diamond dogs guarding the ground level had pistols, they put holes in ponies. I’ve seen it before. This,” she gestured subtly to the bleeding Pegasus as she sat beside her and fished through her saddlebags, “is a hole from one of their pistol balls.” Ruby hoped the tension would bleed away from there.

She was not relieved to find it only grew with time, as two more of the bipeds filtered in before shutting the door behind them. They sat on the lip of the wall across. The one with the handheld cylinder-actuating weapon was the one who spoke to Field, the rest stayed quiet. Leader, Ruby noted. Every few sentences, Field graced Ruby with a translation, though kept her eyes on disinfecting the Pegasus’ bleeding shot wound.

Why are they here? Came to steal from the ruins. Correctly judged there was a pandemic killing everypony, decided to take advantage and get bearings.

Why did they shoot the Pegasus? Wanted to follow the trail. They surmised she was sick, wanted to see if she led them to a leper colony when she ran. They weren’t wrong.

Why are we not gathering the mares and running these bastards through? They shot a pony. Because if they hadn’t, we would have done worse to them.

The last answer made Ruby shudder. By then, most of the ponies had cleared out by request of Field and by barked order from Ruby. Only the Pegasus, Windy Slope, remained, and she was out of it from blood loss. The question of ‘what now?’ brought no reply from Field as she continued to idly chatter with the leader of the bipeds. It made Ruby antsy, but Field seemed to ignore it.

When Field Surgeon left the Pegasus on the ground with an unbandaged leg, Ruby gave her a confused look. Field Surgeon gave her a renounced smile. “She was dead when she got here, infected and all that. I only made her comfortable. Why don’t we take advantage of our new friends and their,” she paused to turn back to the leader, asking a question in the Griffonian tongue before repeating the answer to Ruby, “flamethrower?” Ruby felt a pit growing in her stomach.

Unterofficer Faris Quirke had a similar pit in her stomach as she followed the pastel pony down a series of rope bridges toward the bottom of the drainage funnel. There were a pair of bipedal dogs at a far tunnel eyeing her and her weapons with something akin to lust and a dozen or so more of the armored ponies with her. Nat, ever the talker, was quick to pipe up. “They’re so cute, unt’! Can we keep them?!” The woman was all but whisper-yelling in her ear, and was only deterred with a swiped jab at her stomach.

“Quiet, Nat. And get your shit together, things might get ugly.” Nat snorted. For them, maybe. The arrogance on the flametrooper astonished her superior. She was a regiment veteran—she was no Old Murmurs, mind, but she was certainly less green than most of the infantrymen she was with. She expected the woman to more serious, but Faris supposed that was foolish in hindsight. She was a big, muscular teddy bear with a heart of gold… and a flamethrower, of course. For better and for worse, I suppose. She turned to the pale doctor pony who had identified herself by the rank of field surgeon. “Burners, I take it?” The pony bobbed her head, spongy hair bouncing a little with the motion.

“Yes sir, that’s us. Her Majesty, Princess Celestia’s best and hardest veteran royal guardsponies… or, that’s the line, anyway. Truth is most of the young bucks who they’d toss the job to normally are sick themselves or busy with patrolling the capital.” Faris sucked her teeth. Right, I see. “And, uh, I suppose by the masks and the PPE, you must be some manner of burners yourselves?”

They reached ground level, and Faris noted with disdain the body-catchers at one end of the small canal in the center of the open-top ground level, and the myriad corpses caught within. “Yeah.” Faris shook her head and followed along behind the field surgeon. “We are Sanitarii. We have, uh, periodic outbreaks like this, though never this bad before—at least, not since I’ve been in the service.” The field surgeon nodded along as she trotted over to a small village of tents. More armored ponies, maybe two or three dozen. They began popping their heads out, gathering in a rough formation. The field surgeon turned back to smile at Faris in a way that made her uneasy. That’s a full house if ever I’ve seen one. She shared an uneasy glance at Nat, whose body language shared her disdain.

There’s thirty of them and five of us. The field surgeon trotted on up to Faris again, looking up from the waist-ish height she stood on all fours at. The second pony—an officer of some kind judging by the regality on their armor, kept eyeing the five sanitars uneasily. “What’ll it be, doc?” Faris dropped her sidearm into its holster and hung a hand on her sling. The field surgeon smiled and pointed toward the tunnel with the two dogs guarding it. Her smile faltered at the sound of a lock snapping, and the alerted stances the dogs took up before drawing their rudimentary flintlock pistols. Faris’ mouth moved in tandem with her hands as she drew up her carbine. Nat took up position with her assistant flamer between the dogs and braced against the flimsy piece of plywood they called a guard post.

The glow of the bloomers eyes backdropped against the filtered light from the tunnel around Faris and Nat was the signal to go. Faris barked an order. Nat stanced up while Kalin Rylee held the flamer’s tubing against his body with one arm to prevent bunching in the tube, the other raising up an automatic pistol. Nat’s flamer went click-click-click.

Author's Note

Shooting to upload chapters every other week; we'll see how that goes.