Of Aerial Dominance

Chapters

Chapter 1 - The Element of Surprise
Chapter 2 - Call it a Bluff
Chapter 3 - Never Bluff Twice
Chapter 4 - Death From Above
Chapter 5 - Disaster and Protocol
Chapter 6 - Rules—Like Airships—Are Meant to be Broken
Chapter 7 - Aftermath
Chapter 8 - Remnants
Chapter 9 Forced Transit
Chapter 11 - Blending in
Chapter 12 - Word of the Wind
Chapter 10 - Out of The Icebox And Into The Storm

Chapter 1 - The Element of Surprise

“How do you know they can’t see us, Captain?” The navigator’s breath tickled her ear and she gave it an irritated flick.

Slipstream kept her hooves firmly clasped on the wheel, keen eyes peering out the front window panels and into the thick clouds ahead. “Because they’d be shooting us if they knew we were here,” she whispered quietly, though not sure of exactly why they were whispering.

“Slipstream!” A blue-coated stallion panted, dropping from the hatch in the roof to the wheelhouse, not even bothering with the ladder. His hooves banged down on the thin metal floor, the impact vibrating through to her hooves. “Intelligence from the Friendship suggests the enemy has reason to suspect our attack!”

She growled under her breath. Briar was the only pony that dared call her without the title of captain and not fear being thrown overboard. “And?” she asked lackadaisically, purposefully not making eye contact. Instead, she cast a glance to the compass mounted on a pedestal beside the wheel.

Northwest.

“We have reason to believe, Ma’am, that we may have lost the element of surprise.”

She turned back to look him in the eye, tilting her head down to peer at him over the black aviators adorning her face and brushing away her crimson locks of mane with a forehoof. “We have not traveled three hundred miles across barren mountain terrain with a fleet of twenty-six airships to simply turn back because somepony suspects we may have been detected.”

Briar rubbed the back of his neck and shifted his stance in a solicitous manner. “Slipstream, let me remind you that the enemy’s fleet rivals our own by at least—”

“I am aware,” she said dangerously, “of the risks.” She glanced the gauge linked with the anemometer and bit her lower lip for a second, thinking. “We’ve got a tailwind,” she voiced aloud, not talking to anypony. Ignoring Briar, she turned to her navigator, an orange colt with a slight limp a black mane. “Are we still on course?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, magically running his compass across the map for another check of their coordinates. “Estimated forty minutes before arrival at the maintained speed of thirty-four knots.”

Through periodic breaks in the clouds skimming across the plate glass windows, Slipstream was afforded with glances of other ships in their fleet. Accompanying the Departure on either side were two massive dirigibles, each spanning six hundred feet long. To save on weight, they had not bothered with any paint to cover the fabric coating apart from the reflective layer of silver. The exception of excess paint was the name of each ship painted in purple cursive and the Equestrian crest on the envelope and fins. The one on the right was named Strider, the one on the left, Friendship.

Slipstream had to refrain from rolling her eyes every time she read that name. Friendship—the airship was a floating cliché.

The radio buzzed from the console, a stallion’s voice crackling to her from the speakers. “Captain Slipstream, one of our battlecruisers is reporting a break in the cloud cover west of the fleet.”

She grabbed up the receiver and fumbled for the switch at the base of the little pedestal-mounted speaker. “Stupid technology,” she grumbled. “Acknowledged!” she yelled.

“Take it easy,” the stallion replied. “It’s a radio, not a ninety foot pipe.”

Slipstream flared her silver wings, rolling her eyes. She would never get used to radios. How ponies managed to make her voice move through the air, she would never know.

“I recommend we remain in cloud coverage for as long as possible,” Briar advised from over her shoulder.

She nodded and eyed the altimeter, then grabbed for the radio receiver again. “Proceed to seventy-two hundred feet and hold.” She reached over and yanked back one of the many bronze levers along the console, then leaned over to a steel pipe jutting from ceiling; they were more her style. “Save the ballast tanks for combat! Vent gas into the foremost cell!”

“Aye, Captain!” The mare’s heavy, Trottingham accent returned from the pipe.

She turned to the colt stationed on the elevator wheel portside the wheelhouse. “Six percent incline.”

He nodded without a word and gripped the wheel.

Slipstream sat back for a moment, and as she waited, the airship began to rise, nose leading the ascent. The other crafts remained in formation, climbing slightly behind the leading airship.

The enemy might have them on numbers, but nopony could beat Equestria’s finest aerial fleet, or so she liked to tell herself.

Slipstream had been stationed on this very airship for six years now, though the war had only gone on for four. Before the war, Slipstream had flown her as a passenger vessel, and the Departure had been later drafted and weaponized for military use; she had refused to hang up her captain’s hat, and so joining the aerial forces as an airship captain had been her only option.

Equestria had never deeply considered the idea of a foreign threat, nothing of such magnitude. But shall something exist, others shall want it.

Damn Longcoats.

They were ponies from the north. Equestrian analysts believed that the feral ponies instigated the war for resources such as coal, or gemstones, or the newfound liquid gold: oil, or possibly even their research on an experimental new fuel made from Zap Apples. Equestrians had adopted a suiting name for them: Longcoats. These ponies originated from up north, and had lived in the harsh environments for so long that their coats had thickened and grown longer to serve as protection from the cold—henceforth the name.

They had been the first to weaponize dirigible airships, and the first to use them in a state of battle, which is exactly why the Longcoats’ initial raid had leveled part of Canterlot before ponies had even had the chance to duck. Of course, faced with such threats, Equestria had provided, and the age of aerial warfare was born.

The Longcoats, mysterious in nature and customs, might as well have been from another planet in Equestria’s eyes. Their presence had been known, though not deeply acknowledged as anything more than a group from the north that wasn’t worth tying into the trade route. Their motives had been unknown as well, though later interpreted as violent means of seizing resources, most likely oil. Attempts at compromise with the Longcoats had been demolished, attempts at contact denied. Where the enemy acquired supplies and materials for what seemed to be an ever-growing aerial fleet was unknown, and although attempts had been made to find out, none had succeeded. The Longcoats held Equestria on the defensive, stunned from the initial strike, and had held that grip up until a week ago, meaning that nopony had ever been more than a hundred miles over what had been vaguely established as enemy lines.

From there it had only gotten worse.

The Longcoats seemed to have rewritten every page in the very large book of war tactics, and Equestria, while familiar in tactics, had been left scrambling to keep up with methods that had never been known to exist. Attack after attack had played out, and each time the Longcoats would deliver a heavy punch and be gone before Equestria could recover enough to swing back.

The Departure crested the clouds and slowly leveled out, the reflective outer dome shining in the sun’s bright rays. The rumble of the engines seemed quieter out of the claustrophobic hold of the clouds. On both sides, the other two identical ships sliced through the fluffy white surface, then followed four smaller ships on either side of them, then the six battlecruisers, long and sleek and loaded down to the very last pound with offensive ornaments. Finally was the small fleet of eight-pony crew gunships, small and agile and specifically designed to get under the enemy’s skin.

This would be the raid to end the war. It was rumoured that the Longcoats’ entire fleet would be found at the ahead coordinates, fueling and restocking for another bombing run while the airships’ crews took the day to whatever it was Longcoats did. If Slipstream and the other captains played their cards right, the Longcoats would never be crossing another border.

“Ready your crews,” she said into the radio, remembering not to yell. “Time’s short.” One hoof drifted to the set of throttle levers on a brass console to the right of the captain’s wheel. There were eight levers—taking the main control lever connected the smaller, she guided it forward, hearing the growl and feeling the vibration through the floor as propellers spun up.

She turned back to Briar. “Rouse our crew and set them to their stations.” She scanned the surface of the clouds thirty feet below them. “We’ll be leaving our cover soon, and once we’re in the open, we’ll make nice and shiny targets.”

Briar gave her a quick salute and dashed off, disappearing up the ladder and through the hatch in the roof.

The familiar churning in the pit of her stomach returned; it drove her to squirm a little where she stood and switch her balance to her right legs. It always felt this way before battle, whether it be a drunken tavern brawl or standing behind the wheel of an airship in the final stand for her nation, the feeling was identical. Apparently, this was why Celestia had assigned her to lead this mission. “I need a pony who knows how to handle themselves, but is not arrogant. Nothing is more powerful than fear.” Slipstream recalled the words of the princess.

“Captain Slipstream.” Her navigator looked up from the mapboard. “It is advised that we begin our descent to strike at the proper altitude.”

She gave him a brief nod, then leaned over to the pipe sprouting from the ceiling of the glass gondola. “Bring us to fifty-two hundred feet! Casual descent!” She was purposefully avoiding use of the elevator fins for the time being.

“Aye, Captain!” the same Trottingham mare yelled.

Slipstream swallowed an uneasy lump in her throat as they dropped back into the clouds, the dark, fluffy whiteness once again surrounding the gondola as the nose sunk into the white sea. It was always a tense sensation: dropping through the ceiling. A good half of their crew were pegasi, and in the very-possible case of an ‘abandon ship’, or destruction, any pegasus crew member caught in a fall would be saved by the clouds below; this was known from personal experience. At this altitude, a pegasus could easily overexert themselves in the thin air and pass out.

It was a whole new world up here, beyond the mountains. Below, there was nothing but snow and empty space. A lost pony here would most likely die in the white wastes—even pegasus ponies had trouble flying hundreds of miles in the freezing cold with nothing but the work of their wings and woolen aviation jackets for warmth.

She could do nothing but sit in anxiety, staring out the front windows while listening to the palindromic thurm of the eight engines as they carried the ship onwards into suspense.

“Can't see a bloody thing in these clouds,” a mare said over the radio. Slipstream chewed the side of her tongue anxiously. That mare had been Wilted Wings, the captain of the Friendship and the only captain in the fleet that wasn’t a pegasus, apart from Darius. She had never liked being called Captain Wilted, or Captain Wings for that matter, so she had slapped them both together.

“Be ready, Wiltings,” Slipstream replied, a tone one lower than she would normally speak. “You and I both know how things like to pop out at you through the clouds.” She fought the urge to snicker.

“My navigator has confirmed there are no mountains of this altitude within a two hundred mile radius,” Captain Wiltings replied, voice layered with satisfaction and a little bit of irritation.

Slipstream cracked a tiny smile. Wiltings had lost a battlecruiser to a mountain before, and had been wary of mountains ever since.

The Departure was the very first to break the cloud ceiling.

And the very first to be spotted.

“Captain Wiltings,” a pink mare squeaked, poking her head down through the hatch in the ceiling, “your presence is requested in the conflict room.”

Wiltings, who had been slumping a little on the wheel, shot erect, shaking her brown mane away from her eyes. Self-consciously, she turned towards the hatch in the back of the gondola, trying to pat down a mint-green tuft of her ruffled coat where her chest had rested on the wheel. “Conflict room?”

“Thats what Grid Point is calling it for the time being.” The mare gave an upside down shrug. “It’s the spare room inside the envelope we use to store fabric patch sheets.”

Wiltings blew air out her nose and cast a look to the Departure, which hummed along to the right, the nose leading the Friendship by about fifty yards. She turned to her navigator: a yellow stallion with a brown mane and a small twitch in his right eye. “Keep her straight. Fetch me if anything goes wrong.”

His head shot towards her like a cracked whip. “Aye, Ma’am,” he said in a grating, high-pitched voice, hoof snapping to a salute.

Wiltings tipped her hat and made for the ladder near the back of the gondola, following the pink mare. If this wasn’t good reason to call her from the wheel, Grid point would be walking back to Equestria. “Do you know what this is about?” she asked, scaling the ladder as the mare withdrew her head.

The mare closed the hatch once Wiltings was through. “No, Ma’am, but he said it was very urgent.” She nodded towards the gondola below and shook her head. The message was clear: not for all ears.

“It had better be urgent.” Wiltings flicked her tail as she set off across the small catwalk running between the massive, inner framework of the Friendship, the pink mare taking up the behind. In the semi-gloom cast by the reflective skin stretched over the fame, a small, aluminum room rested a hundred yards ahead, just above the gunnery cabin, which was fitted into the frame and hung below the ship.

The pink mare left Wiltings halfway and shot a quick salute. “I’m getting back to my station, Captain.”

Wiltings acknowledged her with another flick of her tail, continuing on. She set a brisk pace, not liking the idea of her being away from the wheel and leaving it in the hooves of her navigator, who she was... pretty sure had received flight training. She winced. On a thirty foot vessel.

For a moment, all that mattered was the drum of her hooves on the steel and the hum of the eight engines, the vibration they sent through the frame—much less than most other vessels; the ponies who had balanced them had done a very fine job—almost soothing.

She paused just outside the aluminum door to the flimsy room, thinking of what expression she should wear upon entry. After a short moment, she decided on mildly-irritated, and kicked open the door.

He had set up a makeshift table with the use of a sewing board, which he had unrolled a telegraph sheet across. The windowless room was lit from an oil lantern dangling from the ceiling by the handle, swaying to and fro ever so slightly with the airship. The room was a mess; lengths of string and fabric and other tools hanging from hooks on the walls surrounded her on all four sides, and three out of the four corners were heaped with piles of fabric. In the only fabric-free corner was a large, industrial sewing machine.

Grid Point’s orange and light-purple mane hung around his face as his eyes scanned a series of marks on the sheet, lips moving silently. Fittingly, his cutie mark was a rectangular grid with a single, red point in the upper left corner, outlined by the green of his coat.

He barely looked up as she closed the door behind her. “Good, you’re here.”

She flicked her tail—it seemed to be becoming a habit. “What was so important that you couldn’t address it with me back in the gondola?”

He only shook his head and beckoned her over. “Look.” He ran his hoof down a line on the telegraph sheet.

She deadpanned and flicked her ears, snapping her eyes up and sideways to give him a flat look. “I don’t know how to read dots... Why did they send us a telegraph? Can’t Celestia do her magic thing where she sends us a letter with the green fire?” She had seen it done before on missions, the letter usually received by an experienced unicorn.

He rolled his eyes at her, and was very lucky she decided not to smack him for it. “Apparently, her magical reach only extends so far. Anyways, one of our ponies near the border picked up an encoded enemy broadcast and forwarded it to the castle. Translators did the best they could with it, but it wasn’t much.”

“Get to the point,” she groused.

“There’s reason to believe that the enemy has knowledge of our planned assault.”

Wiltings blinked, glaring at the dots like they had wronged her. “What?”

“Intelligence suggests that the enemy has made preparations for our assault on their docked airships.” He raised one eyebrow at her. “Celestia hasn’t called anything off, but asked we proceed with caution.”

“Does the crew of the Departure know?”

A nod. “Yes, Ma’am. They should have received the very same message we have.” He paused. “In the end, the decision is up to Slipstream whether or not we continue with this raid. She’s ordered to pull back if she feels the mission may be a failure.”

Wiltings sank to her haunches, thinking. “The only ponies who knew about this raid up until yesterday were the captains and Celestia herself... There’s no way word could have gotten out.”

“Maybe they’re just paranoid?” he suggested meekly. “Keeping on their guard.”

“I don’t know...”

“Maybe you’re just paranoid.”

She gave him a dirty look. “There’s no other way they could have found out.”

Grid Point rolled up the paper sheet, purposefully not looking at her. “We don’t even know for sure if they really know. And if they did manage to find out, it doesn’t mean a pony gave us away; they could have intercepted one of our radio broadcasts or something, just like we did thiers.”

“No.” She shook her head. “We never spoke about it on the radio. Celestia, two of her consultants, Slipstream, Thrush, and I, all held a private meeting about this day. The meeting only took place because it was our last resort. If word of it got out—”

The door behind her burst open and in charged a gray mare. “Captain, you’re needed at the helm.”

Wiltings gritted her teeth. “Acknowledged. Now return to your post.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Just as fast as the mare had arrived uninvited, she was gone, leaving the door open as her hooves clattered away.

Wiltings fixed her eyes back on Grid Point. “Keep posted. If you get anything new, show me.” She trotted halfway out the door, then stopped and looked back at him. “And bring the news to me next time.”

She closed the door on him before he could respond. Adopting a swift trot, almost a gallop, Wiltings headed back for the gondola. The sooner she was back at the wheel, the sooner the twitchy, yellow navigator wasn’t. With every passing second, leaving the wheelhouse seemed like it had been worse and worse idea to her.

She was almost at a full gallop by the time her hooves skidded her to a stop on the dimpled steel. Running in the framework was particularly dangerous for her, considering the fact that she was an earth pony. She was pretty sure there was a betting pool somewhere amongst the crew on how long it would take until she hurt herself in the maze of narrow catwalks and ladders. She had found a paper about it once; it had been filled out with different times—two months, a week, three days, an hour. She had been rather insulted that there hadn’t been a single bet for never—that just wasn’t fair. It was also a sign of disrespect, which she was sure originated from the fact that she unwittingly given the commands that had led to the destruction of a battlecruiser and the death of her entire crew.

She threw open the hatch and scaled the precarious ladder down into the gondola, expecting to see a mountain looming down on her. She cringed, raising her hooves to cover her face.

She blinked. “Oh...” The colt sat up on his haunches at the helm, eyes affixed firmly ahead as he steadied himself with the wheel. The Friendship still maintained perfect position in the fleet beside the Departure.

Wiltings moved up beside the buck and tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Great work.”

He flashed back to his post, somehow making a beckon towards the wheel in the process. “It was a pleasure, Captain!”

She took her place at the wheel and set her hooves on the brushed wood and aluminum. The altimeter caught her eye. “Why’s our altitude different?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “Orders from Slipstream, Captain. She raised the entire fleet above the cloud cover to remain undetected.”

She ran her tongue across her teeth for a moment, mildly surprised that she had only just noticed the change in altitude. “Nice job...” She gave her head a little shake. “What was I requested here for?”

He jerked his head towards the radio. “It’s Thrush: she wants you on a private frequency.”

“Private frequency?” She squinted at the radio box fitted in the console below the controls to the right of the wheel. Curiously, she turned the dial on the left of the black box to the frequency she knew belonged to the Strider. “Thrush?”

“Wiltings?” Thrush replied. “You’re the only one listening, right?”

Wiltings turned back to the navigator. “You’re not here.” She knew the buck was loyal, and it was more of a gesture for him to keep his mouth shut about anything said. “Yep,” she said to the receiver mounted on a small stand by the wheel.

“You got that message from Canterlot, right?”

“Yeah, just heard about it... why?”

Static filled the channel as Thrush hesitated on the transmission. “Well then Slipstream had to get it too.”

Wiltings glared at the speaker. “Yeah...?”

“Well, we haven’t received any word from her. From what our scouts have seen, we know that the enemy force is three times ours. What if they do know?”

Ahead of her, the Departure began to descend into the clouds, and Wiltings matched its course. “We’re going to have to find out. Slipstream’s the one calling the shots, and if she thinks we should continue on, then we will. We do nothing until she gives the order.”

“But what if she makes a mistake? What if they are expecting us?”

Wiltings growled at Thrush, her vocals traveling through the air, through the skin of the Departure, and threateningly out of the speakers of the Strider’s wheelhouse radio. “I’ve been under Slipstream’s wing for two years now. I would trust that mare with my life, and the lives of my kin, and the lives of my kin’s kin. You speak afoul of her again and I will personally make sure to break your wings and throw you off your airship.”

There was a good ten seconds of silence. “I don’t doubt her,” Thrush replied hesitantly, “but this is all of Equestria we’re talking about... not just a battle. Is it safe gambling Equestria on the whim of one mare?”

Wiltings keyed the transmitter one last time. “I suggest you watch your step and stay in line.” She dialed the frequency back to the channel the fleet shared and looked back to the yellow colt. “How much of that did you hear?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t hear a thing, Captain.”

She smirked and turned her attention back out below the bow of the ship’s framing. “Good.”

The clouds, they were menacing. Flashbacks of rocky mountain faces looming out of the murk shone in her vision, implanting themselves in her iris as an ugly, green shape that hovered, transparent wherever she looked. She blinked a few times, but it only made it worse.

Fifty-seven ponies... to a mountain.

A little tense, she flicked the transmit switch. “Can’t see a bloody thing in these clouds.”

“Be ready, Wiltings.” Slipstream’s voice crackled from the radio, a playful-dark tone to it. “You and I both know how things like to pop out at you through the clouds.”

Wiltings’ grip locked on the wheel and she threw a nervous glance to her navigator. “A-are there any mountains around here?”

He ran a compass across the mapboard, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth a little. “Nothing of this altitude within two hundred miles.” His horn ceased to glow has he returned the compass to its cup on the table.

She huffed and rolled her eyes, keying the radio. “My navigator has confirmed there are no mountains of this altitude within a two hundred mile radius.”

Through the clouds, Wiltings watched the Departure break out into the open sky. She narrowed her eyes and squinted ahead out the glass shielding, trying to spot something, anything.

The gondola of the airship sliced through the final wisps of cloud and Wiltings tensed, bile rising in her throat. She swung blindly for the transmit switch, missing three times, unable to tear her eyes away from the sight ahead. “Sweet Celestia!” She paused a second to gape. “They’re everywhere!”

Author's Note

Thanks to JustAnotherTimeLord for helping me proof a few little things.

And thanks to RavensDagger for liking this enough to actually want this to be canon to Of Steam Gears and Wings.

Chapter 2 - Call it a Bluff

Slipstream’s eyes stretched wide and her jaw went slack. She felt her steady grip on the wheel loosen and she slumped against the stand.

The Friendship brushed out of the clouds beside her. “Sweet Celestia!” Wiltings screamed over the radio. “They’re everywhere!”

Slipstream took a long and shaky breath, eyes picking out every threat in the sky. The Longcoats had been ready for them, lined out in strategic defensive positions. Small gunships were in great supply, dotted around the sky like cotton in an Autumn's breeze, pegasi combatants around them to add. They had ten battlecruisers, each painted a menacing maroon color and streamlined in shape and design. Three of their ships Slipstream didn’t even know to name. There were two which almost doubled the length of her own vessel, and there, nestled in the center of their forces, was the most menacing flying machine Slipstream had ever seen in her life.

It was painted maroon, like the others, only the nose was styled with sharp ribbons of gold, and foreign, unreadable text. It must have spanned three times the length of any other vessel in Slipstream’s own fleet, and supported two, massive balloons on either side so it appeared more as three, massive airships tied together. Across the top of the center ran a long strip of wood with a small railing on either side.

Slipstream grabbed for the enchanted, brass spyglass and extended it to its full length, peering down the magically magnified barrel. She grabbed for the radio with the other hoof, missing twice. “Anypony else seeing this?” she asked.

“Seeing what!?” a nervous-sounding stallion replied.

“The top of that massive airship.” She eyed one of the strange machines on top. Through the spyglass, she could see a few Longcoats on the upper platform. “They’ve got some sort of contraptions on that long and top deck... They’ve got stabilizing wings on the left and right and a propeller on the front... what the hell are they? They haven’t got anywhere to store lighter-than-air fuel.”

“Well if they’ve got a propeller, then theoretically, they’re meant to fly?” Wiltings said skeptically.

Slipstream looked closer through the spyglass. There were unicorns on deck, two of which had their heads bowed, horns glowing in the direction of the machines. “I don’t see how they can.”

“Why don’t you worry about the ship,” a mare grumbled. “You’ve got to be kidding, it’s big enough to be a small town.”

From one of the enemy ships, an air raid siren began to blare, then another, then two more. Slipstream’s breath grew tight in her chest as she watched ponies begin to flock to their stations aboard the enemy vessels. Harpoon and gun barrels swiveled in the carriages, and shadows of ponies raced to and fro between windows. Pegasi by the dozens took to the sky, soaring around the vessels like flies.

She grabbed for the radio. “Their fleet is a lot bigger than ours. Stay together! If they separate us we’re done for!”

“This is insanity!” a mare cried, the captain of one of their battlecruisers—Minnow.

“You will hold your rank!” Slipstream howled back. “I doubt this is the half of their fleet! If we don’t knock them out now then they’ll hit us with three times this on our own turf! Then it’ll all be over!”

“Y-yes, M-ma’am,” the mare replied shakily.

“How did they know?” Wiltings questioned. “They knew we were coming.”

“Ponies,” Slipstream addressed them all before acquisitions could start to fly. “Chances are a lot of us are going to die here today.” She took a long pause to frown at her cliché remark, hoof on the transmit button. “You’re all the bravest ponies I know, and serving with you is the greatest honor any commander could ever experience.”

The gunships of the enemy fleet begin to assemble in a rough wedge, like a flock of geese, moving out ahead of the larger ships.

“Their maneuverable vessels outnumber ours three to one!” a heavily-accented stallion yelled. “Captain Slipstream, what is desired action course?”

“They’re expecting us to send our gunships out to meet them...” She paused, thinking. “Take up the lead by three hundred yards to draw the fire and we’ll push forward—take them by surprise.”

“Aye, Captain!”

“I want the battlecruisers to hang back just behind the fleet leaders,” she instructed, watching as the small gunships began to float into a leading rank. “We’ll take any hits for you until we can get you close enough to the fat mares to do any damage.”

“Acknowledged!” the head captain of their six battlecruisers voiced. Slipstream shook her head slowly, trying to recall his name; she was blanking.

“All pegasi combatants stay on board. We’ll be moving too fast for you to do any good.”

Slipstream suppressed a shudder as both fleets formed their ranks, her captains maneuvering their vessels behind. Estimated, It would only be another thirty seconds until the initial clash. No matter what, she had to keep the enemy gunships away from her battlecruisers. Battlecruisers were offensive vessels; they could outpace any other dirigible of their size and pack a punch like a sack of bricks, then get out before the enemy could even turn their guns, but their weapons were meant for big damage, not accuracy. A single gunship could do a great number on a battlecruiser. For assault vessels, nailing a small and maneuverable gunship was like trying to shoot a fly out of the air with a slingshot.

Briar burst back into the gondola, panting. “All forces are at their stations, Captain.” His eyes swept the scene of maroon death ahead of them. “This is a suicide mission...”

She shook her head slowly. “Not if we play our cards right.”

He swallowed loudly. “You’ve got the aces but they’ve got a full house.”

Her eyes narrowed in determination. “Then in the name of Celestia, let’s give these assholes a royal flush.”

One of the Longcoat gunships was the first to fire and the sound reached her ears as a deep snap. A moment later their ranges crossed one another, and it began.

Almost immediately, one of their rookie captains called over the radio. “Left fuel cell punctured and fire’s spreading rapidly!”

Slipstream grabbed madly for the receiver, her eyes picking out the gunship in question. Jackrabbit. “Order abandon ship, Rookie! Now! Any second it’s going to reach the forward hydrogen—” Slipstream winced as a flash of of fire lit up the cloudy sky, the whole front portion of the burning gunship going up in an explosion of fire.

Small gunships possessed the ability to fly on helium, but hydrogen was still used as a primary to carry the extra weight of the one-inch ammunition. In an onboard fire scenario, it was protocol for the captain to release the sixty gallon hydrogen tank to give the crew time to either evacuate or dump off enough weight to stay afloat on helium.

Slipstream pounded the console. The rookie hadn’t dropped the hydrogen tanks. She clicked the receiver. “You’re dead, rook.”

The Jackrabbit blasted apart like an over-inflated party balloon, the flame washing over both Equestrian and Longcoat vessels alike and setting them afire. None of the crew of eight had made it off.

It was a small sacrifice.

The Longcoats had played exactly into her plan though. “All vessels, full forward!” she screamed into the radio receiver. She pulled one hoof from the wheel to slam forward the throttle lever, coaxing an angry roar from the engines.

The enemy had left all of their fleet—except for the high percentage of their gunships—hovering back, awaiting the results of the first battle. In their confident state, they had not been expecting the Equestrian forces to fly so tactlessly into the battle. But now, they had left the majority of their gunships locked in combat, completely unprotected from the advancing, greater force.

The floor below Slipstream’s hooves shook as the pony operating the six-inch cannon fired from the deck below, the recoil reduction spells in place on the cannons the only reason the frame wasn’t being jarred apart. Slipstream watched as the projectile ripped through the air in a trail of smoke and smacked clean into the side of the carriage on an enemy gunship. She hoped it had done some damage, though none was apparent apart from a gash in the steel.

“Captain Slipstream!” Wiltings called on the radio. “I recommend we slow our advance. We’re topping forty knots and—”

“Hold your course!” It was a bluff. She was betting the majority now, and if the enemy didn’t play into it, they could all be doomed.

Her bluff payed off. The enemy gunships scattered, breaking their frontal stance and turning the small airships for retreat.

“Open fire!” Slipstream called to the radio.

The enemy gunships, in their unorganized retreat, had now exposed themselves broadside, making much easier targets. Slipstream whooped as the ponies aboard all seven leading ships opened fire with the frontal cannons, sending twenty trails of smoke through the air with a series of deep detonations.

Six enemy gunships were hit, the force of the weapons’ impact knocking them sideways and tearing apart hunks of gondola and steel framing. A smile crept across Slipstream’s face as pony silhouettes began to enter the sky, abandoning their wounded vessels. The smile quickly vanished as a burning maroon ship pitched on its course and crashed broadside into one of their own; they both went up in flame.

The two teams of gunships between the much larger dirigibles now held no order. silver-white and maroon battled it out as the Equestrian forces advanced. Although the enemy was retreating, that didn’t mean they couldn’t shoot. Three more Equestrian gunships fell, two dropping dangerously in altitude, one going up in flame. It was only a small relief to see a number of pegasus ponies of Equestrian origin retreating, flying towards the nearest vessel to access the small landing platform on one or the other side. The relief was masked by the sight of others, non-pegasi, falling to their deaths, mere black specs as they raced to the ground like stones hurled from a cliff. Slipstream had once tried to commission parachutes or magically enchanted emulates that decreased a pony’s falling speed, but all funding possible had been going to a new fleet of battlecruisers at the time; of the twenty-two built, three remained today, two of which with her now and one stationed in Canterlot.

“Side gunners ready!” she howled into the steel pipe by her head. At the rate they were traveling, they would overtake the enemy’s gunships, which were still too numerous to count effectively. Slipstream winced internally. She could count their own.

Nine.

She had another problem; they were about to fly right into the rear of a Longcoat vessel that was only just spinning up both portside propellers to get under way. It was sure they would survive the impact with a vessel only a tenth as large as the Departure, but not without substantial damage to the nose that could not be afforded in a state of battle.

“Captain!” Briar stressed.

“I know!” She grabbed the wheel and spun it hard to the left, shifting the two rudders at the end of the vessel.

That was the thing about dirigibles... steering them was difficult and sluggish, and the more weight onboard, the worse it got. She clenched her teeth as the nose slowly changed course, the lighter tail end drifting out slightly to the right.

Fifty feet. Twenty-five feet. Ten feet.

The Departure roared past the enemy vessel so close to the gondola that Slipstream could make out the face of the portside gunner, eyes stretched wide as he looked down the crosshairs of the multi-barreled anti-personnel one-inch machinegun—it was by some aid of Celestia that he forgot to shoot. The starboard and rearmost propeller swiveled much too close to the small ship, spinning so fast it might as well have been a solid disc of steel.

The stern of the Departure shuddered dangerously as the tri-blade propeller hacked the tailfins off the maroon aircraft in a flurry of red and silver fabric, then proceeded to open up the rigid outer frame like a jury-rigged can opener. Something vital snapped in the bracings when the spinning blade struck a support inside the small dirigible, and the whole engine nacelle tore free from the side of the Departure with a metallic groan and a shearing of bolts. The still-howling propeller shattered like ice struck with a hammer and the entire engine went into a spin, smashing into the maroon gunship to disappear into the gas chamber. It exploded out the opposite side a second later in a ball of flame, taking a whole sheet of fabric with it.

Wiltings cackled over the radio. “Is that your method of saving ammo?”

Slipstream drew back on the portside rear engine to compensate for the loss of propulsion. Satisfaction surged through her very veins and arteries, warming her heart with bloodlust. These ponies threatened her way of life, and they were all going to die for it. The massive rigid frame above her shook as the crew onboard lining the gunning posts opened fire on the retreating Longcoat gunships.

“Commander!” It was Thrush, captain of the Strider. “The enemy is advancing. If we don’t break off now then we face separation!”

She was right. The enemy was advancing, specifically with their battlecruisers. As much as she would have enjoyed to stay in the midst of the enemy gunships, shredding them, on this current course they would be in range of the deadly frontal cannons of the enemy battlecruisers in less than a minute.

“Break left and raise altitude five hundred feet!” She yanked the wheel around drew back on the throttle for the portside engines, milking as sharp of a turn as she could from the massive airship. Their ranks had broken slightly, but still held their basic outline as the seven airships swung into a right turn, spewing trails of smoke from the hardworking engines while the battlecruisers stayed on the inside, shielded from possible enemy fire.

An enemy gunship she had been confident they were going to pass over began to catch her eye. Water poured from both ballast tanks in a furrowed stream cast astray by the ship’s propellers. It was on a direct intercept with the Departure on its current heading. At this angle, if it continued to rise the way it was now, they would strike the tail end.

“Pull up!” Briar yelled to the colt on the elevator wheel.

“No!” Slipstream intervened. “Down. The gondola will be crushed against their frame.”

The colt at the wheel compiled and heaved the massive wheel to the left. The Departure began to drop, nose first, heading directly for the starboard side of the enemy gunship.

“What are you doing!?” Briar yelled in her ear. Adrenaline blotted out his voice as Slipstream kept her eyes straight ahead, willing the airship to continue its course. The prediction she had calculated came true; the maroon gunship continued to rise, already having let out much more water than it could lighter-than-air gas, and the captain could not compensate for the sudden change in the Departure’s course.

The nose of the Departure struck the protruding, lower tailfin of the enemy gunship, and the entire frame shook, knocking everypony in the gondola to the floor. Metal screamed from above as the much-heavier dirigible batted the gunboat out of the way, tearing off the entire tail section of the craft when it tangled in the nose bracings. The enemy gunboat went into a hopeless spin, but not before the starboard gunner could do some damage. High-velocity personnel rounds tore through the glass plating portside gondola, exploding the armored glass and spray it about like shrapnel. The navigator, poor colt, who had managed to get back to his hooves quickly, was shot topside of the shoulder. The round took with it six inches of coat and flesh upon exit through his belly, just behind the foreleg. He stood for a second in shock, then fell onto the mapboard, dead as a doornail.

The Departure fell into formation at a slightly lower altitude than the rest of the fleet. Slipstream glanced back at the crippled ship they had left in their wake, now going into a nosestand. “They’re mad,” she breathed to herself.

Wiltings’ voice crackled over the radio. “Is that thing you’re flying a dirigible or a battering ram?” she scolded. “You’ve got a Longcoat’s tailfin sticking outta’ your nose.”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Slipstream growled back over the wind now filling the gondola. She took a short moment to breathe, burning off the adrenaline still trickling through her veins. “Casualties?”

“Six gunboats,” the heavy accented stallion said.

“What damage did we do to the enemy?” she asked nervously, hoping for a good answer. “I can count four or so that I saw go down, and two confirmed by us.”

“Fourteen.”

Slipstream thumped the wheel in triumph.

“We took a nasty dozen rounds through the envelope and a few to the gasbag chamber, but we’re cherry,” Thrush said, voice a little jittery.

“All battlecruisers are accounted for and unharmed.” The connection clicked, and Slipstream recalled the voice of her fleet commander.

“Good to know, Darius.” The stallion’s name had come back to her now that she was able to calm herself a little.

Darius was probably the only pony who had been in the business longer than she had, since before the war.. Like her, he had migrated to the aerial forces, and somehow, like her, he was still alive after four long years of airborne warfare.

Slipstream rested her head on the wheel for a moment. This was far from over.

There was a throaty bang from the distance and Slipstream looked up in time to see the smoke trail from the top of the enemy mothership as a pony-sized projectile rocketed past the gondola, rocking the aluminum shell in its bracings and managing to shatter a cracked pane of glass.

Slipstream knew it. Somepony was dead—lots of ponies were dead. It had hit something. Still, she had heard no sound of impact.

“What the hay was that thing!?” Thrush yelled from the radio. “Those rounds must weigh a ton apiece! How can they even mount a cannon that big!?”

Slipstream shook her head for the sake of confusion, trying to clear it. “Just one of those rounds could spell the end for an entire ship!” They had to push, or the battle would never last. She had thought them out of range, but they were very much n range. From here, she could already see the ponies on the platform of the massive airship struggling to reload the long-barreled cannon which had fired the round, six unicorns levitating a massive round as big as they were. “Pass above and to the left! Open a slot; I want a battlecruiser on both sides of me and I want them flanked by the Friendship and Strider! Remaining gunships take the lead and the rest of you try and keep the leading airships between you and the enemy!”

A cacophony of “Yes, Ma’ams” and “Aye Commanders” returned to her one by one from the radio, and the fleet began to circle back to the cluster of maroon airships.

In any normal case, this would usually be the time in which captains sent out their aerial combatants, pegasi trained in the art of airborne battle, but the enemy showed no intentions of doing so. It seemed they wanted it over and they wanted it over now.

The enemy compensated for the Equestrian’s advance, matching their altitude. Slipstream balked as the engine pods on the enemy mothership—she had taken to calling it—swiveled and turned downward, using propulsion for lift.

“What else do they know that we don’t?” she whispered quietly, hardly registering the two battlecruisers taking up the sides of the Departure. Minnow’s airship had her left, the oldest battlecruiser in the fleet. Ironically, the newest battlecruiser in the fleet had her right, captained by Streak, a pink pegasus.

The enemy commander must have heard her question, because the answer came. A small shape sped up on the ramp atop the massive airship and barreled towards the nose end. Slipstream blinked a few times, staring in unmasked and worried curiosity as the winged shape hurled off the end of the semi-rigid airship. She gasped when, instead of falling, as she had predicted it to, the maroon thing took to the air, and made a turn towards her.

“Is that thing flying!?” Wiltings cried over the radio, aghast.

“Well it’s not falling,” Thrush snapped back.

Slipstream tightened her one-hoofed grip on the rudder wheel. “I don’t care what it is—shoot the damned thing out of the sky before it can do whatever it’s meant to do.” Disdain washed through her as three more went through the same process, taking to the air behind the first.

“They’re birds!” Minnow yelled. “They’re mechanical birds!”

Slipstream tried not to focus on the flying machines, keeping her eyes fixed on the enemy vessels ahead; if one of them was trying to get the up on them, she would be ready for it. Over the sounds of the other airships’ in their fleet opening fire, Slipstream picked out the distinct rat-a-tat-tat of the bow gunner letting loose from atop the rigid frame at the first enemy aircraft to come in range.

Slipstream couldn’t help but watch. The enemy aircraft banked, exactly like a bird, and from her spot behind the wheel, Slipstream picked out a blue mare in the tiny fuselage, working madly at the controls. Their gazes met, and she could see that the mare was frightened, frightened to death. Her eyes were wide behind her aviator’s goggles and her expression read grim, and for a moment, Slipstream felt sympathy. This was war, for everypony. That mare hadn't started the war; she hadn’t chosen to start this battle. There were bigger ponies in charge, away from the front lines, using them all like pieces on a chessboard.

The sympathy vanished as fast as it had come when two weapons on either side of the aircraft’s churning propeller lit up, pinprick rounds hacking through the Departure’s envelope. The aircraft howled past the gondola and hurled back towards its other companions.

“How many of those things have they got?” Slipstream asked the radio.

“I see two more hanging from below their smaller vessels!”

“I can not hit them!” the gunboat commander yelled. “They are too fast and much too small! Could I suggest sending the pegasi out to intercept?”

“No,” Slipstream answered. “They’re too fast and those guns are deadly. Our ponies’ll get destroyed out there.”

The enemy was succeeding; they were drawing Slipstream’s attention away from her advance. Now the enemy vessels were changing their formation, taking up the front with half of their battlecruisers interwoven between some of their larger, gunned vessels. The only vessel away from the front line was the mothership, which hung back a good five-hundred yards, playing it safe.

She swallowed the apple rising in her throat and grabbed for the radio, betting it all. “All leading forces, full throttle!”

“They’ll shred us!” Thrush screamed.

“They’re trying to play it safe.” To serve as a leading example, she cranked the throttle lever forward. “They’ll try to evade us.”

“And what if they call your bluff?” the lower caption questioned, breaking procedure, much to Slipstream’s irritation.

“Then we crash.”

Chapter 3 - Never Bluff Twice

The engines of the two battlecruisers filled the air with a diesel-fueled roar, trails of putrid, black smoke fanning from the exhausts in the turbulence of the propellers.

Five hundred yards.

“Ready yourselves for fire,” she growled, one hoof on the transmit button and the other on the main throttle lever. “There’s no doubt about it—we’re going to get hit.” She turned back the the colt stationed on the elevator wheel. “Be ready.”

Four hundred yards.

The enemy vessels emulated her, forming a straight line that flaunted their dominance in in firepower and numbers. A pitch reached Slipstream’s ears—a different type of sound, a different type of engine—as the enemy, as one, throttled down.

Three hundred yards.

Slipstream watched the bow cannons mounted below the dirigibles’ framing swivel to align with the Equestrian forces’ battlecruisers. She hesitated a grab for the radio. If they were aiming for the big guns, then they were afraid of loss... They would dodge. Still...

“Battlecruisers,” she instructed brashly. “I know you’re out of range, but aim and estimate. Set thirty percent lift on the elevators! You’re primary targets!”

Two hundred and fifty yards.

The two Equestrian battlecruisers were the first to shatter the air, the frontal cannons discharging with a throaty bang that sent a small shockwave over the surrounding vessels. Smoke rings tried to form against the wind, but where whipped away and immediately decimated by the propellers. Slipstream clenched her teeth as the elevating flaps fitted within the tails of both ships folded up thirty degrees. The streamlined shapes caught the fifty mile-per-hour headwinds and the vessels groaned as aerodynamics and the pull on the flaps lifted the noses.

The enemy returned fire, the cracks and bangs of their assorted cannons slicing the air as they doubled the number of projectiles fired at them. The opposing projectiles reached one another in mid air, smoketrails crossing as the six-inch rounds hissed by each other at the three-quarter-way mark.

The Equestrian’s eight rounds were the first to strike. Four from the left airship completely lacerated the gondola and cabin of a Longcoat battlecruiser, blasting the streamlined aluminum to streamers. The four rounds from the right vessel weren’t as lucky; one slashed a trough through the envelope of a battlecruiser, splitting the steel framing before shearing away and whizzing into the abyss. The other two missed completely and the last tore through the gas chamber of a gunship hanging around behind the rest of the fleet.

Slipstream prayed her last-minute bellowed instructions had saved their own airships as the smoking projectiles from the enemy dirigibles arced through the sky towards them. She had been right about one thing—the enemy had been aiming for the battlecruisers and the battlecruisers alone. Perhaps they weren’t aware of the two, six-inch, forward-facing cannons mounted within the lower, forward cabins of her own vessel; perhaps they disregarded them as a high threat.

The enemy’s first six shots completely missed the left battlecruiser as it made its twenty degree and steepening climb. The remaining, however, hacked at the lower envelope and tore sections out of the elevating fins, blasting entire panels of the fragile fins to smithereens. Still, the gasbags located within the airship remained unharmed.

The Equestrian’s right cruiser never achieved the steep climb effectively. The crew of sixty never had time to flee.

Every round hacked through the vessel lengthwise, blowing out the internal workings and setting flame to the hydrogen gasbags. The tailfins blasted apart like shattered glass as the rounds burst out the tail end. The captain abandoned the wheel and beelined for the exit hatch, never making it. The gondola and cabins further back blasted apart like an overpressured steam pipe as a slow-moving round hacked through it in a casual ark. Aluminum flew, peppering the side of the Departure, and the sky grew bright as the airship went up in a ball of flame. In mere seconds, the fabric stretched over the metal skeleton was scorched away and the smoldering frame began to drop, cabin still aflame.

One down, five remaining.

Things were worse. The wall of maroon ahead of her that she had been expecting to break, did not. The plan had been to break them up and shoot through, maintaining the same speed and direction; the chances of that were completely gone. Now she had been left with a single option: turn or crash headlong into the enemy. Considering the maroon airships’ lack of forward momentum, they probably couldn’t maneuver fast enough to dodge if they wanted to.

She’d been called.

“Orders, Captain!?” Thrush half-yelled, half-squeaked.

Breath stabbing at her chest, she grabbed for the mic. “Break formation!” She cranked the wheel around to the left and waved for the buck behind her to raise the elevators. “Take evasive maneuvers to avoid collision!”

Their attack had just gone from a coordinated advance, to every crew for themselves, a giant free-for-all of shoot and don’t get shot.

The enemy’s four, winged aircraft had now circled back around as well, all focussing on the Departure—the commanding vessel. The four aircraft formed a line, banking directly towards the wheelhouse.

Slipstream could only pray her topside gunner would shy them off. There was no coordination to either side’s attacks. As the Equestrian forces scattered—the worst possible thing for any fleet commander—the enemy airships moved in clumps to compensate, banking left and right to intercept the airships’ headways.

She drew back on the throttle, judging with how many yards she would be able to clear the maroon battlecruiser off the bow.

“Captain!” Briar yelled. “Incoming!”

“Run!” she yelled to Briar, hearing the machineguns on the enemy’s winged propeller as they chattered to life. She kept an eye on them, praying they would shear off, but it was their job to single out the commanding vessel—it was airship warfare one-o-one. “Abandon wheelhouse!” The two, twelve millimeter machineguns mounted under each wing were no joke, and she wasn’t about to treat them like they were.

Frantically, Slipstream grabbed the radio box and yanked it out of its port, slinging the satchel strap around her neck, and right then, the panel before her went up in a shower of sparks, bullets hacking the equipment to scrap. She stumbled back at the close encounter, then hitched to the back of the wheelhouse and scaled the ladder behind Briar.

Spark and flame lit up the little room she had just left, tearing holes in the floor and blasting apart the Captain’s wheel. Slipstream sat just above the hatch, wincing at the metallic sound of destruction. Worry welled up in her throat more and more as the roar of the third flying machine subsided to be replaced by the fourth and final. The clatter of the machineguns grew loud, then quiet again once it had ripped past. What followed was an eerie silence, broken only by the protestant groan of metal.

Slipstream shook her head, eyes stretched wide as saucers as she looked down through the hatch that should have lead to means of controlling the airship. Now it was chicken wire. She took two astounded steps back, then sprinted the distance towards the gunnery cabin, calling out to the radio in the process. “This is the Departure; we’re a dead fish.”

“Acknowledged,” Wiltings said glumly. “I can see you from here. Your rudders are waving in the breeze and you’re starting to drifting to starboard... You might want to hang onto something. It looks like your tailfins are gonna’ take a bite of maroon envelope.”

Slipstream didn’t have time to brace. The jarring smash knocked her against the railing and she grasped it to avoid falling from the catwalk, wincing at the stinging in her shoulder. A dizziness took over her head as the Departure changed direction at the tail end, spinning slowly. Ignoring the juicy jaws, she pushed on.

She burst into the cabin to the sight of thirty ponies in a frantic. Smoking brass shells littered the aluminum floor; ponies dashed about carrying heavy weapon ammunition. The cabin was fogged with smoke, and the whole place choked her with the odor of gunpowder, so thick she could taste it. Two ponies staggered by under the weight of a wooden box full of four-inch ammunition, one of them shouting directions to the other around clamped teeth.

“Captain!?” An orange mare smeared with gunpowder residue thundered up to her. It was the Trottingham mare. “I just lost all control from the gondola an’ I was coming to—”

“We’ve lost the gondola,” she said, interrupting the mare. “It’s swiss cheese; the wheels are gone and the cables have snaked down the line,”

The orange mare’s features went from flustered to horrified in less than a second. “You sayin’ nopony’s flyin’ this lug!?”

The battle had begun to rage around them, the throaty blasts of high-caliber cannonfire and raucous roars of dozens of diesel engines drowning the air. Slipstream threw constant glances out the gunports. They were drifting slowly now, sideways, tilting ever so slightly to starboard. For every Equestrian airship amidst in the close-proximity battle, she spotted two more maroon ones.

“Enemy battlecruiser crippled and losing altitude!” Wiltings yelled blissfully over the radio.

“We’re sittin’ ducks here, Captain. Shall I give the order to abandon ship?” The Trottingham mare looked at her expectantly. “Captain?”

The body of the airship jarred violently as they were struck by something. The Trottingham mare ducked and looked up around her horn at the ceiling like she feared it would fall.

“Orders, Captain?” It was Wiltings. “We’ve got to take up some sort of formation!”

“I have no orders, Wiltings,” Slipstream replied in emotional agony. “I can’t see what’s going on from here... Asses the situation and give them yourself!”

Slipstream slammed her hooves on the floor. She couldn’t go out this fast and this early without having fired more than a few shots. Only half of the ponies about this airship were pegasi... an abandon ship now would spell their death’s.

“Captain!” the Trottingham mare hollered. “Can’t ya’ hear me yellin’ at ya’!?”

The Departure no longer held any of its previous heading. The remaining momentum had faded off, and now the crippled airship was floating in the midst of the chaos.

“Captain! We need to abandon ship, now!”

Slipstream put the Trottingham mare aside, racking her mind for anything that could aid the situation. Airships would always battle close and stay in tight clusters; the tactic was to try to keep as much of the enemy around you as possible in a compromising situation; nopony wanted to shoot at you and accidentally punch a hole in another ship of their own fleet. This often resulted in tight clumps of enemy ships all purposefully sticking close to one another, both sides afraid to fire upon the other with anything more than short-range weapons. This usually led to the trained pegasi crews leaving the vessels and battling it out in the air, the primary objective to reach sabotage or destroy the enemy vessel.

“This is Captain Minnow!” The radio crackled. “We’re being boarded!”

And, at times when airships battled in close proximity to one another, one side would often try and board the enemy’s airship.

The realization hit her like a train.

Starboard of the cabin, a maroon battlecruiser hovered, spinning slowly as the guns on all four sides pounded. The ship was at the same altitude as the Departure, and no more than a hundred yards away, showing them its starboard side.

Slipstream didn’t realize she was leering until the Trottingham mare gave her a hard nudge, having read Slipstream’s intentions from her eyes. “Better than half the ponies here falling to their deaths?” she asked. “It’s worth a shot if any.”

Slipstream could only nod, running ideas and outcomes through her head.

“Stop firing on the battlecruiser!” the orange mare yelled to the cabin. “We’re chanin’ airships!”

“Better do it fast!” a stallion yelled, “or that ship’ll have us shredded in a minute’s time!”

Slipstream keyed the radio. “Do not fire on the Longcoat battlecruiser beside the Departure. We are boarding!”

“You’re mad!” Thrush laughed.

The orange mare lolloped to a long, tubelike weapon mounted starboard center of the cabin. “How’re things going up there?” Slipstream asked, eyes tracking the progress.

Thrush’s tone switched. “We’re getting our tailfins handed to us! They’ve got us all spread out!”

“Well regroup!”

“We’re trying to! They’re holding us apart!”

Slipstream growled. “Well stick to them like glue so they can’t use their big guns.”

The orange mare let loose with the harpoon gun. Gunpowder banged as the packed barrel fired, flinging the five-foot, clawed hook towards the cabin of the enemy gunship. The desired effect was perfect, the steel hook plunging into the side of the cabin, the woven steel cable snaking violently after it as it unwound from the spool mounted below the barrel of the harpoon rifle.

The orange mare pumped a hoof triumphantly and set the cable lock. “Best shot in my class.” She unfolded the handle and locked it into place. Placing both hooves on it, she began to turn. “Don’t know why they never put enchantments on these blasted things,” she said with a grunt, the wheel locking device clicking madly as she pulled the slack out of the line. The cable went taut and the grappling claw’s reverse hooks stabbed back through the cabin wall.

“They’re hooked, Captain!”

The cable groaned dangerously as the captain of the enemy airship tried to pull the vessel away. Frantically, Slipstream scrambled for the other harpoon rifle starboard front of the cabin, dodging between ponies and stacks of empty cartridge boxes. Practically falling onto the device, she yanked back the arming mechanism and took aim for the front of the enemy’s cabin. She pulled the firing lever and the clawed harpoon exploded from the barrel. Just as the first one had, it stabbed through the side of the enemy craft, leaving a tendril of heavy cable in its wake.

Slipstream set the locking gear and began to yank the handle round, drawing out the slack to take the weight off the first cable. Another pony at the other end of the Departure’s cabin fired a third harpoon.

More ponies began to flood to the cabin as word crossed the ship of their plans to board the enemy vessel, their yells and shouts reaching mostly-deaf ears from cannon blast after cannon blast. “Can I help you, Captain,” a pegasus stallion with a deep voice asked.

“Yes.” Releasing the handle, she left the weapon to the stronger stallion and went back to trying to focus on everything at once. “Do that!” she yelled over her back.

“Arm yourselves!” Briar voiced, setting an unsteady gait to a crate set up against one of the supports. By the woven handle, he yanked away the lid and it clattered to the floor to reveal rows of 7.8 millimeter, bolt-action rifles, all fitted with seven inch bayonets.

It never made much sense why ponies decided to measure cartridges in both inches and millimeters. Slipstream rolled her eyes with a little shake of her head.

The entire cabin rocked as the enemy battlecruiser fired upon the Departure, blasting holes through the cabin walls and skewing a few unlucky ponies through the air. Slipstream ducked her head to the shrapnel, feeling it pepper her face and neck where the aviator’s jacket provided no protection.

The clumsy weapons went up for grabs; the unicorns, best at handling them effectively, took first pick.

Briar trotted out of the throng of ponies with a rifle slung under either wing and tossed Slipstream one. She raised her forehoof and reared up to catch it, the weight of the weapon taking her a little off guard. “How long’s it been since we’ve been in a real fight?”

A cannon barked from close range and the Departure shook violently, some of the metal panelling ripping free of the roof.

Slipstream hefted the rifle’s weight experimentally, rearing a little onto her hind legs. “Last time we were using swords,” Briar replied smugly. “I think we’re getting old.”

Leaving him, she rushed to a starboard firing slot and propped the rifle in the large, steel frame, sitting down and bracing it awkwardly against her shoulder; unicorns made it look easy. She hated these things. You shot cannons at airships, that didn’t mean you downsized the cannon to something you could hold and shot it at a pony.

The others with weapons followed her example, bracing themselves in the windows and taking aim. She lined up a purple unicorn with a scraggly main and coat operating a four-inch cannon, and fired. The rifle bucked her like a mule and shot out a puff of smoke. From this range, Slipstream could still hear the meaty ‘thwack’ as the bullet struck him square. With hardly a yelp, he went down.

Slipstream winced. It wasn’t very often she actually shot ponies, and she wasn’t particularly enthralled to start again. It didn’t seem like much of a difference, but it was a very big leap from giving the order to shoot a pony, and doing it yourself.

Small-caliber gunfire filled the air, snapping like popcorn in the kettle as the crew of the Departure opened fire, peppering the side of the enemy battlecruiser. A few shots of multi colored magic bolted from both vessels, concussion and disorientation spells fired by unicorn crew members. The pegasi didn’t dare disembark early, not with the enemy armed and ready for confrontation.

“Form up on me!” a stallion said sternly over the radio box slung from her neck. It was Darius, rallying forces. “Target the battlecruiser with the damaged tail!”

Clumsily, Slipstream jacked a new cartridge into the rifle and took aim at a stallion trying to hack at one of their javelin cables with a saw, but another pony nailed him before she could shoot. The stallion slumped and flopped out the window of the battlecruiser, wings unfurling limply as he twirled towards the ground.

Although the battlecruiser’s engines rumbled and the propellers spun, the lighter airship could not pull away from the much-heavier Departure. Now, there was only ten yards of open air spanning the gap between the two airships, that space slowly closing.

“We’re on fire!” A stallion yelled, stumbling out of a hatch in the roof. “It’s spreading through the envelope!”

The dirigibles’ two frames clashed as they met with a bang and a groan of steel. There was a groan as the framing settled and the grappling cables pulled taut, leaving only five yards of space between the two cabins.

Slipstream hoisted her bayonet and cantered to the loading ramp center of the long cabin. Reaching up, she yanked on the ramp lever. The mechanism released and the ten foot boarding ramp dropped and slammed into place right below a small landing pad for pegasi on the adjacent ship. The same sound reached her from further down on either side as the other two ramps were deployed.

Her breath heaved from her lungs, adrenaline surging through her body. It had been years since she had left the cockpit, so to speak. And now, as a sign of loyalty, she would lead her crew to battle.

“For Equestria!” She reared and charged, tucking the rifle into the crook of her foreleg and leading with the bayonet. Fueled by rage and fear, she pounded across the ramp, the rest of her crew flooding out behind her. A red stallion blocked her path, hefting a steel pipe, but she parried it and lead the bayonet into the side of his neck. His eyes stretched wide and her looked at her, face reading a combination of shock and annoyance. She yanked the rifle to the right, and tossed him from the bridge.

A large buck charged her, leaping the gap with a short sword in his mouth. Thinking fast, she hopped back and braced the butt of the rifle against the ramp. His momentum didn’t allow him to stop in time. The bayonet disappeared into his chest with the sickening-familiar sound of steel on flesh. She pulled the trigger and the rifle blasted him backwards, toppling two of his comrades.

The adrenaline may have well made her invincible. She raised her head and screamed as the ponies aboard the Departure surged around her, charging into the enemy cabin. It was a feral outburst, a release of hate and anger that also served as motivation for her crew, and fear in the state of the enemy. Bayonet clashed bayonet, and the havoc unleashed. Ponies of both parties dropped from fatal wounds, Longcoats and Equestrians alike hurled from windows. Above her, the pegasi of her crew soared over the gap, sieging the ponies occupying the top-mounted turrets.

Lost in shock, she jumped from the Departure’s ramp to the enemy vessel and cast a look back at her wounded airship. Six years. Six years, and here it was now, flames licking from inside the envelope, burning away the fabric layering. The once-proud vessel began to sag, and the cables began to groan as they increased tension.

The battle behind her didn’t matter, at least not for the moment. “Goodbye old girl,” she whispered, flaring her wings and bowing her head.

The flame reached the hydrogen chambers and the whole front end of the Departure went up in a brilliant flame of orange and light-green.

Six years...

“The Departure is down!” Wiltings informed on the radio. “Slipstream, tell me you made it off!”

She hesitated, but eventually took the receiver. “We made it off.” The first cable snapped like a massive, over-tuned piano string and shot back towards the Departure like a whip, slashing a clean line directly through the side of the cabin. The others followed seconds later. With the release of the final cable, the enemy battlecruiser rolled back to balance.

The Departure fell away in a ball of flame.

She snapped back to attention, becoming once-again aware of the raging battle within the ship’s quarters. She grabbed for the radio. “To all forces! The crew of the Departure is onboard the enemy battlecruiser with the golden swirl painted on the fins and we are attempting to seize control! Do not fire!”

“Three of our gunboats remaining!” the accented stallion screeched into his radio receiver.

Slipstream tensed as the deafening bang of the mothership’s cannon split the air. Seconds later, the abandon ship alarm cut through the air. She recognised the two-tone cry—it belonged to one of their battlecruisers.

Darius confirmed her fears. “Airship down!”

Slipstream threw her rifle aside, tired of the burden, and scanned the foreign cabin. Everypony was engaged with everypony, the crew of the Departure outnumbering the Longcoat’s two to one. Bayonet and blade battled it out and rifles fired in the small space, only adding to the smoke and choking scent of gunpowder.

She picked out a single, gray-coated Longcoat, slinking around on the edge of the battle. He tossed a sly gaze out the window and wrapped his hooves around the handles of a three-inch cannon, just small enough to be operated by a single pony with the use of a few weight-reduction enchantments. A quick look told her the target was the Friendship, which was currently locked in a battle with two smaller airships fifty feet above and three hundred feet away

Hollering, she hurled herself at the longcoat. Her yell startled him, and he reared up to meet her. Throwing all of her weight into the air and flaring her wings, she drove all four of her hooves into the stallion’s chest. Het let out a ‘oof’ and collapsed backwards under the force of her impact. Taking advantage of his shellshock, she wrapped her hooves around the heavy cannon’s handles and steered the long barrel away, attempting to sight in one of the airships engaged in battle with the Friendship.

The longcoat struck her from the side and tackled her to the floor, wrapping a foreleg around her neck and the opposite sided hind leg around her belly. She choked, trying to pull away, but he held her tight against his body, rough, wiry coat rubbing hers like sandpaper. She flared her wings, forcing against his forelegs and managed to relinquish his grasp on her neck. She spun on him and tackled him to his belly, placing a forehoof on his back and using the other to yank his foreleg around. His wings beat haplessly as she held him down, smacking her across the face. Trying to still him, she bit down near the base of his wing and pulled. He actually screamed, like any pony would scream, and for a second she was sure she would lose her nerve.

He tried to roll away, but she didn’t budge, instead, his wing did. She felt the bone in the wing her jaws were clamped down on shift in her mouth, and the humorous let out a dull pop as it dislocated. He screamed again, this time in agony.

Unbinding his cutlass and taking it, she left him there, writhing. Going back to the cannon before anypony else could catch her off guard, she heaved it around to line the distance sights up with the airship circling the Friendship.

The cannon nearly knocked Slipstream to her tail as it discharged, leaving her senseless for a second as the sound around her was lost to sound-shocked ears. The projectile arced beautifully through the air and blasted diagonally through the gunnery cabin of the Longcoat airship, taking with it out the other side an entire cannon and firing crew. The ammunition stored in the gunship fired off, and the cabin blasted apart, raining ponies and debris like confetti, setting the gasbags inside the canvas fuselage aflame.

“Whoever that was, thanks for the assist,” Wiltings breathed over the radio channel. “Blast the other one while you’re at it!”

It was all a blur as she threw herself into the battle, fighting alongside her crew for control of the cabin. She swung and slashed, seeing nothing more than blank faces of the living and soon-to-be dead. Blood ran from a cut upon her forehead, and another on her flank. Once they were gone, still, she spun, looking for more through blood and tears.

“The ship is ours!” the Trottingham mare yelled, hefting her rifle into the air. A series of jeers called back to her as others joined in.

“Go on! All of you!” The orange mare danced happily over to one of the massive starboard-side cannons. “Clear the rest of the vessel!”

Slipstream’s hoof brushed against something and she looked down. It was a sword, the blade thin and curved and polished to perfection, probably dropped by one of the longcoats. Almost lazily, she stooped down and lifted it by the handle with a forehoof, surprised at how expertly balanced it was. How many ponies had this blade alone killed? How many more would it kill?

“Captain!” It was the orange mare. “They still have control of the gondola. We have to seize control before they attempt sabotage.”

She shook her head, reaching back and sliding the blade into one of the pockets on her jacket and stabbing it through the back end, creating a makeshift sheathe.

There was a ship to clear.

“You sure aren’t going to believe this,” said Thrush over the line. “One of those buzzlies took a bite of our tailfin and lost. One down, three to go!”

Slipstream wasted no time in mounting the ladder bolted center of the cabin. Briar right behind her, she pushed through the hatch in the roof and into the envelope of the battlecruiser.

Four hundred feet of steel framing and supports spanned around her in the semi-gloom. The maroon paint adorning the outside of the battlecruiser blotted out what little was left of the sunlight after its trip through the clouds, and what light did make it through was a menacing crimson glow that provided only just enough illumination to see. She was unaccustomed to this; the sun shone through the Departure’s skin, only filtered of the heat and harsh rays that could heat the gasbags to dangerous temperature.

This ship contained four gasbags, two on both ends of the vessel, providing an equal distribution of weight between front and rear. Slipstream started out over the steel plank running along the bottom of the cylindrical envelope. Trembly ladders ran up to catwalks crossing to and fro above, which were nothing more than one-sixteenth inch steel planks welded to a lightweight frame which in turn, was welded to the support struts. The walkways, barely a half a foot wide, served unsuitable for any race but pegasi, who preferred to use them over flying. One thing most non-pegasi did not understand was that flying around inside the envelope of an airship while spoken airship was moving, was the most disorienting thing one could imagine—kind of like running around in a circle looking up a broom handle then trying to fly between girders and spiderwebs of steel cable that could snap a wing in two; it wouldn’t end well.

She could hear fighting above, most likely the ponies of her crew battling with the few ponies set at gunning stations upon the envelope. On this type of battlecruiser, a frontal cabin hung near the nose, just behind the gondola, and as counterbalance, another was mounted at the bow. Hopefully, these stations had already been commandeered, and if not, hopefully the crew of the late Departure were in the process of doing so.

She set a canter towards the stern of the airship, towards the gondola. By now, it was obvious the captain knew that the ship had been boarded—he was probably attempting to disable the ship at the very time.

Reaching the hatch she knew would be there, she braced one hoof on the handle and looked back at Briar, the only one who had followed her. “What do you say, wingpony?” she asked, attempting humor.

He turned his head back and pulled out a bayonet detached from the front of one of their rifles, and clamped the base in his teeth, giving her a brief nod.

Slipstream took a breath, readying herself, giving the hatch the lightest of pulls to make sure it wasn’t secured; it would be rather silly to yank on the handle only to fall flat on her face because the door was locked from the inside.

It was unlocked.

Before she could think of an excuse to hesitate, she drew her adopted sword, hurled open the hatch, and jumped.

Three ponies jumped as her hooves crashed to the floor, two stallions and a really bulky mare that looked like she had gotten a very large dose of testosterone. Both stallions drew swords and the mare, lacking a weapon, smirked; her body seemed weapon enough.

Slipstream charged stupidly at the first stallion, the sword in her mouth jittering. Behind her, Briar dropped and hit the ground running. The stallion wearing the captain’s hat parried her charge and immediately swiped downward at her head. Slipstream dodged just in time for the captain's blade to pit the steel where she had been.

Briar went directly for the mare, letting out a growl between his clenched teeth as he charged with the bayonet. The mare, while bulky and intimidating, was not fast. She tried to dodge, but the bayonet stabbed into her shoulder and buried to the bone. She let out a howl of pain and swung her other leg, beating Briar across the head with it. The stallion stumbled backward, leaving his weapon stuck in the mare’s shoulder.

The captain of the battlecruiser barked something to the other stallion, but it was so heavily accented that Slipstream couldn’t make a word of it. Trying to use his distraction as a benefit to her, she stabbed with the sword, but again, the captain blocked her.

“Captain Slipstream!” Wiltings yelled at her from the radio. “If you’re behind the wheel of that hijacked battlecruiser I’d suggest you turn, now! You’re about to broadside us!”

Slipstream couldn’t go for the receiver. The captain was looking at her with narrowed, amused eyes. “No kill,” he said in an accent so foreign it was barely understandable.

Briar yelled something along the lines of a battle cry and lunged back at that big mare, who was more or less cringing, attempting to avoid him as she searched for time to pull the blade from her front shoulder. He crashed into her front and bit down on the bayonet. With a tug, he pulled the bloodied tip out of the mare, and lashed out again almost immediately. This time it stuck in her neck. The mare’s eyes went wide as the gray steel disappeared into the side of her neck, buried to the last two inches.

While Slipstream tried to defend herself from the captain, Briar backed away from the mare as she slumped. The other stallion in the gondola howled something, probably profane, and lunged at Briar, cutting the air with his curved blade.

“Slipstream!” Wiltings screamed, voice breaking up on the radio channel. “Change course!”

The captain stood between her and the wheel. Out the window ahead, she could see the port side of the Friendship, locked in a grapple with a slightly-larger enemy dirigible.

That had been the captain’s plan. He would kill every Equestrian on his ship and take down one of the leading vessels as well.

Sucking up her fear, she charged the stallion, not even bothering to lead with the sword. He stepped aside to try and swipe at her legs, and she dodged the best she could. The tip of his blade skimmed across her side, sharp as a razor, slicing a thin line from her right side middle all the way to her rump and through her cutie mark of a lead balloon.

She screamed—somehow managing to hold onto her sword—as her hooves wrapped on the wheel. Immediately, she drew back on the throttle, and had barely cranked the wheel around a quarter turn when the captain tackled her to the floor. Before she could even blink, Slipstream found herself on her back, the raggedy-looking battlecruiser captain holding a sword against her throat. She pinched her eyes shut as the thin pressure increased on her neck. He wasn’t going to hesitate or gloat like they did in the movies.

Right when she was sure her skin would break, or would come the ‘shlick’ of the blade as it slashed through her windpipe, the pressure released and the blade fell away. Something hot and wet dripped onto her belly, driving a shiver from her. Slipstream dared open her eyes. The captain glared down at her, only his eyes were distant as the life faded. Briar stood above him, face contorted in a scowl as he tried to pull the sword from the captain’s back. Slipstream glanced down. The tip of the sword gleamed from the captain’s chest, drizzling blood like a slow faucet.

Slipstream threw the captain off her. “Thanks.”

Briar held out a hoof to her. “I couldn't go and let my captain die, now could—” There was a wet, tearing sound, and he stopped suddenly and gasped. His hoof dropped back to the floor.

The stallion who had managed to pull to his hooves behind Briar, fell back to the ground, one hoof still clasped over a stab wound in his chest, trying to quell the flow of blood.

“No!” Slipstream screamed, scrambling to her hooves.

Briar’s entire diaphragm heaved, and his eyes rolled. He coughed and blood ran from his lips, staining his chin. All at once he slumped and dropped to the floor like a flour sack, revealing the last inch of a bayonet protruding from his right flank.

Slipstream wasn’t sure what drove her to pick up the captain’s sword and stab it through the injured Longcoat’s belly, or what caused her to do it ten more times, each one more violent than the next. On the eleventh, the blade stabbed through the aluminum flooring and stuck fast, pinning the stallion to the floor.

“Slipstream!” Wiltings screamed, so loud that Slipstream might have been able to hear her without the radio. “Turn the damned ship!”

Shaking madly, she crossed to the wheel and yanked it the rest of the way around. A quick eye of the distance told her that the battlecruiser would clear the Friendship, five more seconds, though, and they would have had themselves a well-done, dirigible T-bone steak.

Abandoning the wheel, she rushed to Briar’s side. He lay on the floor in his own blood, beside the stallion Slipstream had made mince out of. His eyes had already glazed over and his chest heaved up and down in the occasional, quick jerk. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. The edges of her vision began to shimmer.

He was alive, but not really.

He tried to lift his head, but failed after the first inch. Slipstream winced at the fact that she could do nothing for him. Slowly his lips parted, and his sightless eyes rolled a little in their sockets. “F-f...” He drew a rattling breath. “Don’t s-sc-screw... this... up.”

Weeping silently, she stood up straight and gave Briar a stiff salute. “I won’t.” The words had been Briar as he always was—crude and straight to the point.

His chest heaved, then he was still.

Chapter 4 - Death From Above

Thrush fought against every single screaming nerve in her body as they begged her to draw back on the throttle. Her amber hoof remained planted on the brass-coated lever, shaking slightly as her wide eyes stared out the front windows of the gondola. The wall of maroon death was growing ever closer.

The battlecruiser to her left fired, and a few seconds later, the enemy fired back with double the firepower. Thrush could only stare, mouth agape, as the enemy rounds banked towards her. Her chest seized up and she pinched her eyes shut.

She heard the whoosh of fire and the very distinct sound of a projectile hacking through the framing of a dirigible. She knew it was hers. Any second the fire would hit the gondola and she would roast like a turkey. When that second did not come, she dared to look.

The battlecruiser to her left had gone up in a ball of flame twice the size of the ship, the nose beginning to dive as the airship lost its source of lift. Ponies dived from the cabin windows as flame overtook the interior, scorching anything and everything. Only the first ten or so made it out okay; the others were either on fire when they jumped or never jumped at all.

Relief washed through her every vein, relief that made her belly squirm and heart ache like she wished to do nothing more than turn a rifle on herself. She was relieved because other ponies were dead and she wasn’t; it was disgusting, selfish and cowardly.

Flame from the deteriorating battlecruiser’s frame licked at the side of the Strider, blackening the silver paint. Hurriedly, Thrush adjusted the wheel and and guided them away from the flames, then back again once it had fallen below her altitude.

“Damn...” She fumbled the receiver switch. “Orders, Captain!?” The enemy hadn’t broken their ranks, and in a matter of seconds it would be too late to avoid a collision.

“Break formation!” Slipstream’s voice, terrified, returned from the radio. “Take evasive maneuvers to avoid collision!”

Thrush allowed herself a second’s thought. This was it, the beginning of the end for them. They would scatter amongst the enemy forces, and one by one they would drop like flies. Sure they might take a Longcoat or two with them, but three versus one never worked in favor of the latter.

She cranked her head around and threw a commanding hoof at the young mare waiting with her hooves clasped on the elevator wheel. “Forty percent lift!” She ripped her head back around, black mane waving out around her head like an umbrella, eyes analyzing the scene. There was a battlecruiser ahead on the left, veering off to the left, and directly ahead of her was one of the enemy’s much larger vessels that she didn’t know to name. It hadn’t plotted a course yet, and still held straight bearing. Chances were the captain was readying to turn.

She guessed, wrestling the wheel clockwise.

The captain of the dirigible directly across from her had also guessed, and on a strike of unluck, had turned the ship left and up, right into her projected path.

Collision unavoided.

Desperately, she used her entire body weight to crank the wheel back straight. “Level!” she yelled to the mare. The airship ahead of her and steadily growing nearer shifted the same direction, dropping lift and rudder.

Thrush was reminded comically of two ponies trying to pass one another in a hall, the both of them continually trying to step around each other, only succeeding in stepping into each other’s way each time. Accidentally, this was turning into a psychology game. If she turned the wheel left, there was a very good chance the captain of the enemy ship could do the very same thing trying to avoid her. Or maybe, she could stay straight and let them move, but that also left the chance that the other captain assumed the Strider would turn and maintain heading, which would also resort in a collision.

“All the way!” she screamed to the mare on the elevator wheel. “Full elevation!”

No chances.

The mare gave a tiny shake of her head like she wanted to argue, but that could compromise the frame! Thrush’s look silenced any protest that may have arisen.

Despite the knowledge of the risks, she wrestled the wheel left, bracing herself against the floor for leverage as the the elevator fins at the rear of the airship battled with the wind.

“Help!” she cried to the navigator as the wheel threatened to lift her off the ground. She kicked her legs in the air as a gust of wind on the elevators pulled her off the ground; her wings flared and she beat them with a grunt, pushing her hooves back to the floor. The colt abandoned his navigation station and rushed over to her. Placing his hooves over hers on the wheel, the two pulled the wheel around another half rotation.

Thrush prayed to all that she stood for that they wouldn’t experience a cable snap, which was very well possible with such strain on the elevators and the geared cable system. The Strider groaned as the tail dropped and the streamlined nose began to steer them into the air at thirty degrees vertical and climbing. Somewhere in the framing above, she heard beams groaning and snapping under the pressure, every sound drawing a wince from her.

She grasped the wheel for leverage as the nose titled. A half-empty mug of coffee she had left unattended on the console slipped from the smooth surface and shattered on the floor, the black liquid within running across the metal to the back of the gondola. Her eyes darted to the instrument for measuring ascent, though it only read it up forty-five degrees and the needle now hung out over open air. The pitch of the engines increased as they struggled with dense air, the blades now moving much faster than the craft. Sparing a hoof, she locked the throttle in the full forward position, setting the engines’ tone from angry to raving mad.

The top of the enemy dirigible loomed just ahead, barely in view from the bottom on the gondola windows. Thrush wrapped both hooves around the wheel as the slope of the floor threatened to pull her to the back of the gondola and muttered a silent ‘sorry’ for the ponies in the cabin; they were probably making like pebbles in a rainstick right about now.

Her focus shifted solely back to the airship before her and that airship alone. The captain had lowered the dirigible’s nose, but it would still be close.

Robbed it of its momentum by the unreasonable incline, the Strider stalled, the airspeed meter dancing somewhere around the four-knot mark. The enemy captain seemed to take grasp of the situation. No longer fed by momentum, the equal weighting in the ballast began to pull the tail of the Strider up, nose dropping in compensation.

The enemy dirigible went into a dive.

Thrush’s hooves deadlocked on the wheel as the maroon airship rocketed under the gondola, tail leading higher than the rest of the ship. “Drop your tail!” Thrush screamed at the glass, panicking. With no momentum at all on the Strider, she was helpless but to watch as the maroon tailfins came within spitting distance of the gondola.

At what very well could have been the last second, the elevators folded upwards and the tail of the maroon vessel dropped drastically, whipping just below the gondola with a sound like a hurricane, jarring the suspended cabin in framing as it rocked back and forth, metal creaking and groaning.

Thrush almost collapsed with relief as the Strider pitched and slogged back to level. She tipped an invisible hat to the captain of the other vessel. “Another day.”

Things had only just begun.

About two ship-lengths below her, the battle was forming. Maroon mixed with silver and the hell began. Thrush thanked Celestia for her luck. Above all of the fighting, she could drop in anywhere and do some real damage.

Though, now, without speed on her side, she would have to rely on the ballast tanks for altitude. Flipping open the little door on the steel pipe upper left of the wheel, she yelled, “Bring us down right above them! Gunners ready!” She drew back on the throttle, conscious of the fact that the eight temperature gauges on the console were dancing dangerously in the red, the engines sputtering and coughing.

She had exerted the engines. The eight propeller engines were designed to hold an airship at speed, and were equipped with air-cooling systems; throttled fully down with an airspeed of about four knots, propellers straining against the heavy air, the engines had been strained beyond purpose without any means of cooling. She winced as the forward right rev meter wound down to fall against the pin.

“Repair crew to engine two!” she called to the pipe. “I think it’s stalled.”

Steering altitude with hydrogen and ballast tanks was always a harder process because it required close communication between the captain and crew. She threw continual glances out the right and left windows at the mess of airships below her. She wasn’t too much worried about being fired upon, since airships never had large cannons mounted above the framing due to the fact that the frame could not support such strain. Although, many of the port and starboard cannons mounted within the Strider were specifically designed to swivel down fifty degrees.

She was death from above.

Her belly swirled the tiniest bit at the feeling of weightlessness as the ship began to lower, hydrogen vented from the gasbags. Two cannons portside of the ship let loose, and her eyes darted to their smoketrails. “Yes!” She thumped the console as both shots hacked gaping tears in a maroon gunship that had been encircling Minnow’s battlecruiser. The small vessel pitched to one side, frame collapsing on itself, and began to drop.

“This is the Departure.” Slipstream’s voice caused Thrush’s ears to perk. “We’re a dead fish.”

Thrush jumped like the floor was electric. Abandoning the wheel, she threw herself against the glass right of the gondola and pressed her face against the cool surface to look down.

The Departure was almost directly below her, the tail end swirling out to the side as the rudder and elevator flaps hung limp in the wind. “No...”

“Acknowledged,” buzzed the radio in the form of Wiltings’ despondent voice. “I can see you from here. Your rudders are waving in the breeze and you’re drifting to starboard... You might want to hang onto something. It looks like your tailfins are gonna’ take a bite of maroon envelope.”

Thrush couldn’t stand the sight of the crippled, lead airship. In battle, the commanding airship was supposed to last as long as possible: command the battle. It was foreshadowing in the worst regard losing their commanding ship first.

It did not spell a good end.

She growled, eyeing the four, small aircraft that were swooping away from the crippled Equestrian vessel. “That’s enough of that,” she muttered. “Ready your weapons!” She screeched into the pipe beside her head. “We’re dropping right on top of them!”

“Captain!” a gruff stallion yelled back. “That’ll put us in range!”

“And it’ll give the gunners more accuracy! Now do it!”

“Aye... Captain.”

“Release ballast on my order!”

She gave the order only fifty yards above an enemy battlecruiser. A quick glance over each side told her that the Strider was directly over the enemy vessel, which meant it wouldn’t be able to shoot them, and they wouldn’t be able to shoot it. Ironically, the safest place to be in an airship battle was directly above or below the enemy.

“Enemy battlecruiser crippled and losing altitude!” Wiltings cheered to the radio. Thrush’s eyes picked out the Friendship, which was circling just outside the midst of the fighting. Behind it, a maroon battlecruiser was rolling to one side in the air, the front cabin and gondola aflame. As she watched, a burning chunk of debris fell from the cabin and spiraled dangerously away.

An idea struck her, and the tiniest of grins played at the corner of her mouth. She craned her head to speak into the pipe. “Wrap one of the center weights in spare fabric and light it! Throw it out the starboard cabin!”

“Captain?” the stallion asked.

“Just do it!”

Thrush could almost feel the realization smack him in the face a hundred feet away. “Yes, Ma’am!” His words became muffled as he shouted orders.

Thrush wished that they had provided a radio for gondola-to-cabin communications, but that didn’t leave enough available frequencies for every ship. There was always the option of running an intercom system down a wire, but that had never happened, and Thrush still didn’t understand why. It would be lighter and more effective. Electricity definitely wasn’t an issue with the eight difference engines.

“Release combatants?” It was the armory major from a different pipe.

“Hold!” Thrush returned.

It didn’t really matter as long as it worked, but technology always made everything better.

The battlecruiser below her began to pull away, its nose opposite of the Strider’s. “No, not yet,” Thrush hissed through clenched teeth. She reached up and, going against every word of training she had ever received, slammed the engines into reverse. The temperature gauges, which had been fading out of the red, jumped a notch in inflammation, all but the one belonging to the dead engine.

When stalled, there was no means of restarting an engine from the gondola. There was a line of kill switches far off to the right, where they would be hard to accidentally brush against, but no way to start an engine without the means of an electrical line.

Looking down through the peephole in the floor, she tried her best to keep the enemy vessel below her, though steering an airship backwards was like trying to push a pencil across a desk, and the very possibility of cable break was at full climax while in reverse. All it would take to tear a rudder right off the fins was for the wind to catch one at an odd angle and fold it against the side of the fin. Thrush tried to hold the wheel as straight as possible.

“You’re crazy,” the mare at the elevator wheel muttered.

Thrush ignored her, ignored everything, even the battle at hand. All that mattered was a spot atop the enemy battlecruiser directly below her. The enemy ship’s captain must have noticed something was up, because they were now trying to shake the Strider, just starting to bank for a right turn.

“We are ready, Captain!” the gruff stallion called to her.

“Throw it!”

There was a second’s hesitation where Thrush feared that they had missed, but then her eyes picked out a burning mass, as large as a pony, hurling through the air. She tensed her grip on the wheel as it rolled slightly in the air, flame threatening to lick out. It crashed into the top of the enemy vessel ten feet away from center and disappeared into the frame.

Thrush bit her lip. What if they had missed? What if—

Flame lapped at the black hole left by the weight thrown from the cabin of the Strider, but was gone a moment later. Thrush made sure to cover her eyes as the outer frame of the battlecruiser blasted apart, the maroon fabric burning away like pine needles tossed atop a fire. As she had intended, the burning weight had struck the forward hydrogen sack.

Slipstream threw her right hoof into the air and cheered. “Death from above!”

“Captain!?” It was one of Thrush’s tail gunners, away from her post.

Still smiling a little, Thrush idled the engines and turned towards the blue mare. “Yeah?” The feeling of victory surged through her veins like liquid power.

“The pipe must be damaged. I couldn’t reach you!”

Thrush was reminded guiltily of the damage she may have done to the inner framework.

The mare practically threw herself on Thrush. “Crippled enemy vessel, starboard side! We’re on a collision cour—”

Thrush felt her hooves leave the ground, and next thing she knew, she was soaring backwards towards the back of the gondola, then followed a crash.

She moaned into the coat of the tail gunner she had landed on. All around her, steel groaned and the very world shook like a paint mixer. Rolls of maps and navigation equipment rained from the shelves above, the delicate instruments shattering on the steel floor.

Once the initial crash had settled, Thrush picked herself up, leaning heavily on the wall as the Strider rapidly changed course, threatening to throw her back to the floor. “What the hay was that!?”

The tail gunner picked herself up and folded her ears. “I moved as fast as I could, Captain...”

Chapter 5 - Disaster and Protocol

The yellow mare, her coat dappled with small specks of silver, took her hooves off the wheel and cut power to the engines, which were rapidly beginning to overheat. There was no point in trying to flee now that they had been roped. She wasn’t even able to count the cables drawing taut between the enemy airship and hers.

She keyed the transmit button on her reciever. “This is Captain Minnow!” she said, a pleading air in her voice. “We’re being boarded!” In her left peripheral, she caught a flash of movement that caused her to jump backwards. In an explosion of glass, the harpoon ripped into the gondola where she had been standing just a second before. The silver steel whizzed by her chest and sheared off a corner of the wheel. It changed direction on the impact, and gored right through the gray mare who had been in charge of the elevation wheel. A strangled gasp escaped her lungs and she fell against the mapboard and the navigator looked at the speared mare with horror.

The bloody, clawed last foot and a half of the harpoon snapped open into a tri-headed hook and the cable that had entered the gondola in its wake snapped taut beside Minnow’s hoof.

She threw herself onto the wheel, desperately lifting her hooves off the ground. One edge of the tri-hooked harpoon stuck in the floor and the other gashed at the console, obliterating the expensive radio. Steel groaned and the hook tore a gash in the floor as the cable drug it along, the gray mare haplessly sliding with it in a smear of blood, speared like a river trout.

Minnow tried desperately to balance herself on the wheel as the hook drug by below her, slicing through the floor like the claws of some monster. It stuck to the wall portside gondola, slamming the gray mare up against the glass.

The mare’s eyes rolled in her head as the three claws broke through the glass around her, sticking in the framing and pressing all their weight on her chest. Her frame convulsed and her neck twitched, blood beginning to run from both nostrils.

It all happened in a second. The steel wall of the gondola groaned and the glass cracked alongside the mare’s ribs. With an almighty squeal of metal, the hooked javelin ripped out the entire side of the gondola, knocking Minnow to the floor and leaving her to gaze helplessly after the gored pony as she fell away like a fishing lure cast to sea.

Now Minnow had a plain view of the side of the enemy vessel which rivaled her battlecruiser by at least two-hundred feet, the cables drawing her ship and crew ever closer.

The sound of the battle waging between their two vessels reached her ears, a whole chorus of shouts and gunfire, the distant roar of other engines fogging the air and providing wartime ambience. It was something one would very well expect to read about in epic novels of adventure and war. Only this wasn’t exhilarating; this was horrifying.

“She just... died,” the navigator said absently.

Minnow rolled to her hooves and ran a distressed hoof through her shimmery, silver-orange mane. “Give it five minutes and we’ll be like that too.”

He hugged a long scrollcase to him like it was some sort of armor. “Then what—”

The door leading to the inner framework of the battlecruiser practically exploded open as a burly, brown mare butted it at a gallop. “Captain!” She nearly bowled into Minnow, momentum carrying her. “The enemy’s boardin’ our ship!” Her Manehattan accent shone through painfully strong.

Minnow wished to slew a hoof across the mare’s face and scream, ‘No, really!? It’s not like I didn’t see the big ass MAROON AIRSHIP!’ She nodded. “What are you telling me for!? You’re big. Get back there and fight!”

The mare gave a short salute. “Yes, Cap’n!” Like the one hundred and fifty pounds of raw mare she had entered as, she barged back out through the door and disappeared into the gloom of the inner frame.

Minnow flared her wings and tried to smooth the ruffled feathers. From her suspense and irritation, many stuck either which way, and a part of her wanted to sit back and preen them right now to calm herself down. She wasn’t able to fancy this thought for more than a few moments, however, before she was rudely interrupted by the sound of banaging near the back of the gondola. Glass shattered and tinkled across the steel, and a shadow blocked out the filtered light allowed to shine through the thick layer of clouds.

Her navigator voiced her mind for her. “What was that?”

There were four heavy thuds, all within a second’s proximity to one another, and into her vision stepped a gray pony, eyes almost hidden below his thick, gray-black mane. He held a short blade in his mouth, taking a threatening step towards her as he furled his large, strong wings. “You nice pony,” he rumbled, accent thick and heavy.

Minnow swallowed. She didn’t like the look in his eye; it made her sure he had been chosen specifically as a scare tactic. She backed up until her rump hit the wheel. Tossing her head about, she looked for means of defense. Her sword hung from a hook on the wall by the door. She could actually see it from where she stood, handle glinting ever so slightly. The only issue was she couldn’t get to the door.

The young navigator stepped into the Longcoat’s path. “Stop!” He yielded a scrollcase like a sword, the strap at one end wrapped around his right forehoof as he balanced with the left.

Amusement played on the Longcoat’s face and he grinned around the blade in his jaws. He didn’t even slow.

“What are you doing!?” Minnow howled to the foolishly-brave pegasus. “In Celestia’s name, get back!”

The buck threw a look back at her. “I am sworn to my captain!”

Minnow slammed her hooves on the ground, angry at her utter defenselessness. There was another thud as yet another longcoat, this one red, filed in behind the first. The gray one lunged at her navigator, and miraculously, the buck blocked the attack with the wood and canvas tube.

“Go!” he howled as the Longcoat tried to dislodge his sword from the scrollcase. “Get the hay out of here, Captain!” The sword unburied itself from the scrollcase as the Longcoat gave a hard tug. He swung again, and again the buck blocked the attack, the scrollcase bending in his grasp, the cedarwood cracking and splintering.

Minnow took a step towards the hole left in the side of the gondola, shaking her head. “But what about—” Damnit. She was captain of this ship. They can’t just—

“Go!” he bellowed, hooves sliding across the steel below as the larger pony pushed him backwards. The red Longcoat moved up beside his gray companion, wielding a larger sword.

Minnow’s belly lurched, and she turned away, flaring her wings and jumping in one fluid motion.

It was sick—a captain abandoning their wheelhouse.

She flew alongside her airship towards the tail end, beating her wings as hard as she could to keep up speed and raise herself up at the same time, dodging around the steel cables snaking from javelins that had punctured the skin. All around her, pegasi fought, sparring mid-air, and aboard both ships, ponies exchanged fire, taking potshots at the combatants.

How had she let herself be trapped in this situation? There would be no help; every other airship was engaged. The Friendship was only about three hundred yards away, but Wiltings was in no shape to aid, currently caught up in her own situation.

Something whizzed by her ear and tore through the battlecruiser’s skin to her left. Involuntarily, she jumped, and her right wing caught the air at an awkward angle, flipping her sideways. Two more rounds whizzed by her, each seemingly closer than the last. She stopped, knowing she was making an obvious target as she climbed.

Recovering, she spun frantically, looking for the source. She was too exposed here. She was a yellow speck against a big sheet of white-silver. The Longcoats were probably sitting in their comfortable cabins and betting bits on who could hit her first.

She eeped and ducked her head as two pegasi raced by overhead, an Equestrian in pursuit of a Longcoat.

Somethething grazed her tail and that was the last straw; she had to get out of fire. There were pegasi all around her, maybe only half of them hers. It would only be a moment before a longcoat spotted her bright form, defenseless, and went for the kill.

It seemed a silly idea, but she’d seen it done before. Minnow threw herself against the horizontal skin of the battlecruiser, feeling as it bowed slightly under her weight. A little above her, she spotted a small tear in the fabric, most likely caused by some sort of projectile. Quickly, she shimmied up the battlecruiser’s skin and stabbed the end of her hoof at the slit torn by the bullet, and yanked it wider, straining against the strong fabric. She tore a spot wide enough for her head and crammed it through, beating her wings and wriggling her shoulders, trying to shove the rest of her body through. The fabric tore again with a dry sound, and she fell forward, careening into the semi-gloom.

She yelled, flaring her wings in an attempt to find out which way was up. Her back struck something thin and taut, most likely a nacelle suspension cable, and she cried out as she flipped around in the air, changing directions, shoulderblade stinging like mad. Chancing it, she flapped her wings, the action bringing stability to her form. After a moment, she stabilized herself and looked around the inner framework. She had stopped just short of a series of small beams that helped support the cabin.

Little patches of light appeared periodically around her, torn in the outer skin by stray weaponfire. Bullets pinged off of metal supports, often close enough to spray her with small shards of shrapnel.

She didn’t know which was more dangerous: being shot at or being in the middle of everypony shooting at everypony and waiting for a stray bullet to peg her.

She carried herself through the framework, looking desperately for a place to land. Spotting it, her hooves crashed to the catwalk that ran perfectly center through the envelope of the cylindrical ship. She was near the bow end, and below and a little behind her she could see the gondola supports. The gasbags, four on either side in a tight bundle, placed three-quarters of the way from either end, were still intact. The ponies assigned to them flew around the bloated shapes in a flurry, patching holes whenever they would pop up.

Minnow took a moment to stand and despair. She was losing her ship.

There were screams and shouts from below, accompanied by the sharp clang of blade on blade and the chatter of bolt-action fire. Minnow shifted her stance, trying to coax her mind into action. She hoped to it all she didn’t have to begin the compromise procedure. In fear that an airship would be commandeered by the enemy, it was the captain’s duty to give the order of sabotage so the vessel could not be used by the enemy.

Minnow feared she would have to give that order before she lost the chance to.

There was a bang from below as one of the cabin hatches burst open. “Retreat!” a stallion yelled, pulling himself up through the hatch. “Retreat to the framework!”

Her heart sank. The clatter of hooves and shouts and yells roared up from below, and Minnow peered out over the edge of the catwalk to see countless shapes of ponies running about far below. There was a bright flash of yellow-white as one pony fired a rifle down through the hatch at a Longcoat ascending the ladder.

A mare slapped the colt who had fired the rifle across the back of the head. “Are you trying to kill us all!? One leak in those gasbags and this thing’s a bomb!” She smacked him again for good measure. “No ignition source!”

“They’ve killed the captain!” another mare yelled. “What do we do!?”

Minnow could no longer deny it: the ship was compromised. “Abandon ship!” she yelled down the length of the envelope. “This is your captain! Abandon ship!”

Her heart locked like it had been squeezed in a vice. It didn’t matter how many training runs she had performed, nothing could have prepared her for this.

Swallowing hard, she reared up and cantered for the bow of the vessel, where the maintenance ponies were still patching the gasbags. One pony, a blue pegasus colt, gave her a squinted look as she ran up. “Captain, w-what is it?”

Minnow flared her wings and glided down to the platform thirty feet below, looking for the release device she knew was there. “We’ve lost control of the ship!”

The other three ponies gathered around the mare on the catwalk above. “So,” a mare asked, “we’re doing it?”

Wiltings nodded her head, eyes picking out the small lever that held the gasbag bracings. She pulled it, and the connection snapped apart. Immediately, she went a little light-headed as she took a breath of concentrated hydrogen. The disconnected gasbag took off, soaring upwards within the frame until it collapsed against the frame ceiling, the invisible hydrogen within spreading out above.

Hurriedly, she pulled the second, then the third. The fourth did not come easy, however. Halfway out, the handle lodged in place and Minnow stumbled. Growling, she braced both hooves on the mechanism and pulled.

It wouldn’t budge.

“Forget it,” she breathed, vision swimming. Normally, ponies performing this task would be wearing a mask. She backed away and scaled the small ladder back to the catwalk she had previously occupied, beating her wings to help her in the climb.

The battlecruiser’s frame groaned as the shift in hydrogen changed its center of balance, the bow teetering casually to the left.

Now the entire bow end was a bomb; all it needed was a spark. She set a fast canter away, tossing a look back over her to realize with a rush of horror that the four ponies remained at their post trying to release the bag she had abandoned. “No, come on!” she yelled, never slowing. “It’s good!” She watched long enough to make sure they left the task.

Her eyes drifted down and ahead to where ponies were now fighting in the framework, the Longcoats flooding up from the cabin. “Abandon ship!” she repeated, not sure if any of the ponies could even hear her.

Minnow’s eyes picked out a single pony in particular, a Longcoat. The shag-coated mare had reared up on her hind legs on the ground floor below, aiming a hefty-looking rifle directly at Minnow, who would be passing above her shortly.

Her eyes widened, and her hooves skidded on the catwalk as they carried her to an unplanned stop.

The longcoat aimed the rifle, and even from here, Minnow could see her take a breath to steady, aiming down the sights with both eyes open. Just then, a burly, brown shape hurled itself out of the shadows behind the mare. Minnow recognized the large mare from earlier. The mare butted the Longcoat right in the back of the head, and the both of them fell forward.

The rifle discharged.

Mouth falling open, Minnow swore she could have watched the bullet as it spiraled through the air. Far behind her, back where the gasbag bracings were located, the bullet pinged off the railing with a little spark that was quickly snuffed out by the rush of hydrogen fumes.

“Captain!” a buck was yelling, running towards her, away from the bow. His voice seemed slow, and distorted like a cassette played on low batteries. “Let’s get the—”

A pop loud enough to shatter eardrums ripped through the envelope as a brilliant, orange flame lit the gloom.

Minnow reared up on her hind legs, half turning as the gale-force winds sucked at her mane, pulling it towards the flame. The inferno lit up in Minnow’s eyes as she watched it in awe. There was a certain beauty to it as it spread and consumed the one gasbag she hadn’t released. The buck’s hooves slipped on the catwalk as the rush of air hit him, though Minnow’s eyes were hardly facing him. They were traveling up to the hollow framework above. The hydrogen she had released flashed across the upmost part of the frame, having already mixed well with the oxygen, spreading over her head in a snake of brilliant, orange-green flame.

This is how she would die. Already the hair on her coat was curling and singing at the tips from the heat, and the flash was mere seconds from engulfing her.

The buck ploughed into her at the exact same time the wall of fire washed by.

She was faintly aware of crashing to the ground, her entire body burning like she had been dipped in boiling water. All that she could hear was the rushing of air and, eyes pinched shut, the orange glow of flame was all that seemed to exist. That smell, that horrible smell, assaulted her nostrils: burnt flesh and hair.

Just like that, the dragon’s roar that was the inferno was over. Still fueled by adrenaline and panic, Minnow began to writhe, fighting the limp shape that pinned her to the piping hot catwalk. With a grunt, she pushed it off and staggered to her hooves.

The colt was black, not black as in covered in ash, but black like a marshmallow caught on fire and then blown out. His crusted eyes, still swiveling in their sockets frantically, saw nothing.

All around her, fire burned, gnawing hungrily at the skin of the vessel, leaving nothing but framework in its path. Steel began to groan and lurch as the battlecruiser sagged on the bow end. Behind, fire swirled like the depths of an angry furnace, sucking in who, or whatever was unfortunate enough to be too close.

Minnow forced herself to move, to run, to flee the burning mass. Her hooves slammed on the catwalk as she fled the flame, mind barely registering the feeling. All of her consciousness was focussed on her, on the pain. The right side of her face burned like she had just poured vinegar on a particularly nasty sunburn, and she was aware that her mane no longer licked at her neck like it had, that her tail felt lighter. Every breath brought to her the putrid scent of charred hair, unique in its sort of greasy-musty way, like burnt popcorn, but sickening.

A bracing beam to her right folded in two with an angry squeal as several rivets popped, and the entire system of cables squealed as all the weight was left to them. One by one, they began to snap like gunshots, flicking away like angry cobras, tangling and wrapping with beams or cables. The catwalk Minnow ran upon lurched as the bow of the battlecruiser dipped more.

It was getting harder and harder to run as the incline steeped with every step. The stern gasbags, still holding the ship, struggled under the weight, threatening to tear at the awkward angle.

Ponies screamed, running to and fro in the framework, Equestrian and Longcoat alike, no longer enemies, but beings seeking means of escape.

Before she knew it, she was climbing, digging frantically with all fours at the grated steel, breath needles in her chest. Ponies screamed around the sound of the airship deteriorating. Steel beams and tools blasted by, clanging loudly as they bounced around inside the framing like some massive game of pachinko

Soon, Minnow could run no more. Her hooves slipped and she slid five feet back the way she had come. She managed to catch the railing support with a forehoof and she jarred to a stop. Desperately, she pulled herself up and hugged the bar like a teddy bear.

Looking up the almost now-vertical airship was almost as terrifying as looking down at the fire below. The bar a mare and a stallion had been clinging to snapped under their combined weight and the two went tumbling down the catwalk head over hooves, bodies slamming painfully against the metal. The stallion rolled by, screaming, until his head met a support for the railing. He went silent and continued his tumble down the near-vertical ramp as a ragdoll.

The pink earth pony behind him had managed to slow herself by clinging to the floor of the catwalk above. Minnow watched her hopefully as she reached for the railing with a shaky hoof. Her back hooves slipped and she fell. The mare screamed, and so did Minnow. Again she managed to slow herself by grinding her hooves against the rippled surface of the catwalk. She slid to a stop right beside Minnow.

The two exchanged a horrified glance. The pink mare clung tight to the flat surface of the walk, hyperventilating madly, eyes round saucers. “H-h-h-help,” she whimpered.

Minnow took a long breath and reached for the mare. The pink mare took her left hoof from the catwalk to grasp it, then lost her grip. Screaming, she slid down another four feet. She cried and hugged the floor of the catwalk that had just about become a vertical wall of steel. Her knees bled, shredded from the grated steel. She clung to the surface and shook her head.

“You can’t stay there!” Minnow yelled over the inferno below, rapidly rising. “It’s gonna pitch you off!”

The mare shook her head again. “N-no!”

Minnow flared her wings as she hung, testing them for flight. However, after two beats from her right side, she clenched her teeth and let out a sharp gasp. Her right wing, it was...

She spared a look to it.

Burnt.

The feathers were charred and blackened, shriveled, the flesh and sinew peeking through as red as an Autumn leaf in the more ravaged spots. The woolen jacket she wore was the same way; hopefully it had shielded most of her coat from the same fate as her wing. It struck her that the only reason she hadn’t been crisped was because of the colt who—whether intentionally or not—had thrown himself upon her at the moment of the blast.

Now hyperventilating herself, the searing air of the fire below charring her lungs, she lowered herself from where she clung to the railing support, clinging by the crook of her leg, hind legs dangling fearfully. She reached for the mare, coming up a foot and a half short. The pink mare watched, eyes glazed from the heat, though she refused to blink.

Silently scolding herself, Minnow lowered herself more until she hung only by her hoof. Her reach was still six inches short. “You’re gonna have to jump!”

The pink mare shook her head. “I c-c-can’t!”

Minnow snarled. “Jump!”

The mare pinched her eyes shut, and jumped, shoving off from the catwalk with all the strength in her hind legs.

It was far enough. Minnow’s hoof wrapped around the mare’s as she took her weight.

The pink mare screamed again, kicking the air with her forehooves.

“Stop squirming!” Minnow growled through clenched teeth. The mare weighed more than she had initially judged, and hanging now by one hoof was becoming quite a task.

The steel framing gave the most excruciating of squeals, bending and folding at key structural points. Minnow felt tears streak her face, evaporated almost immediately by the intense heat rising from the burning hydrogen fed from the tanks and fabric skin. Ponies screamed, clinging desperately for life just as she, steel raining all around them. Some fell, like moths into flame, unable to hold any longer, swallowed into the hungry fire far below. The pegasi flew, riding up the updrafts and trying to dodge falling debris; some refused to leave the safety of structural beams.

The pink mare looked up at Minnow’s strained face in utter horror. “Are you okay!?”

Minnow nodded, the muscles in her neck strained as he hung at the awkward, sideways angle. “Y-yeah.” Her hoof slipped and she yelled in horror. The pink mare lost grasp on her forehoof and fell, though somehow managed to grasp Minnow hind leg as she fell.

“Celestia save me!” she screamed, squirming, kicking, crying out.

Minnow lunged for the bar with her now-free forehoof, though fell just short. “Stop it!” she yelled down to the mare hugging her leg. “You’re gonna pull me off!”

The mare was gone. It was drowning pony syndrome, self-preservation fueled by panic and instinct. She squeezed Minnow’s hind leg below the joint like a vice, trying desperately to pull herself up.

Minnow tried again to reach for the bar with her dangling hoof, but with her body pulled sideways by such a weight, reach was impossible. And as the pink mare continued to squirm and jerk, Minnow shuddered at what she would have to do.

Her forehoof was beginning to slip.

“Stop!” she repeated. There was no other choice. Closing her eyes, she raised her free leg and brought her hoof down, hard. It struck against something soft, and there was a scream that followed.

The mare lost her grasp for a second, and she slid down past Minnow’s knee.“N-n-no!” she begged. “Please don’t!”

Minnow shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. “I’m sorry!” She kicked the mare again and the weight disappeared. Gasping, she swung her body upwards and wrapped her spare hoof around the bar, hauling herself up until she hung by the crook of her leg.

One scream rang out amongst the others, drawn out until it was cut off with a strangled yelp.

Minnow couldn’t look down, not after that.

There was an almighty crash, and something in the framing snapped. The bow of the battlecruiser tore free at the midway point, beams snapping one after another. Minnow screamed, clinging tighter to the catwalk as cables and framework ripped by her like a freight train. Then, just like that, the ship was gone, though she wasn’t falling.

A quick glance up told her that, while the frame had given way, the catwalk remained fastened about a hundred feet above, dangling from what was left of the stern half amongst snakes of cables and twisted beams.

Minnow now hung in open air, the battle raging all around her. Below, the burning remains of half of her ship spiraled away in a ball of flame. Farther below it, and a few hundred yards to the diagonal right, was a much larger ship, having already fallen. From what was left of the frame’s shape, she could tell that it was an Equestrian vessel.

“Celestia,” she whispered, breath lodging in her throat and driving her to wheeze as she looked to her ruined wing, floating breezily in the air, “save me.” She hardly expected such prayers to be answered after what she had just done.

The catwalk above her groaned as she swayed to and fro in the wind. Minnow clung tighter, shivering as her hooves hung just at the edge of the abyss. She caught a glimpse of the enemy’s massive, tri-framed airship, drifting away from the midst of the fighting. “Cowards!” she howled, voice throaty, vocals charred.

The wind gusted her, threatening to pull her from the catwalk. The sudden blast of freezing air on her cooked flesh sent her into a state of shock, and her head began to spin. “Celestia,” she repeated as the catwalk lurched and dropped a foot and a half. Above her were ponies, pegasi, fleeing the stern end of what had used to be an airship. Others, not pegasi... fell. A stallion whipped by her, screeching like a siren, his voice fading to nothing as he drifted away. Minnow might as well have been one of them.

The catwalk above her twisted, and the steel stretched like a very rigid form of taffy.

The wind gusted again, much stronger than before.

The icy wind in her mane, in her eyes and ears and mouth, set off her body’s self-defense mechanism and locked down her lungs. She tried to take a breath, but it stuck just at the back of her throat. Her right wing, useless, flared to the wind, only threw her off balance. Little spots of black and green and red and blue poked her irises like needles, and purple blobs began to blot her peripherals.

Last thing to register in her mind was the way her hooves released the bar on their own accord, and the way her body tingled like an acupuncture session.

She fell.

Chapter 6 - Rules—Like Airships—Are Meant to be Broken

“Come on!” Slipstream fiddled with the dial on the radio fitted in the console. None of the readings made any sense. “Come on!” She pounded the top of the device. She could hear the enemy speaking back and forth, but couldn’t understand a word of it. They spoke Equestrian, though it was heavily-accented and spoken so quickly that every one of them might as well have been professional auctioneers.

She tried not to look at the bodies on the floor behind her.

With a growl of annoyance, she yanked the radio from its slot on the console and hurled it out the shattered pane of glass to the left. She pulled the box off her back and set it haphazardly atop the navigation console since it wouldn’t fit in the slot filled by the old device.

Her eyes drifted to the controls. At least Equestrian and Longcoat vessels had one thing in common: they both operated in the same fashion. There was a rudder wheel and an elevator wheel, and ten throttle levers, all tied into a main lever.

During their boarding, the vessel they had boarded had fallen below the midst of the fighting, and no matter where Slipstream looked, she could see nothing, though the air carried the sound of the battle above to her ears.

“Altitude,” she said quietly to herself. “Let’s see here...” Her eyes flicked about the wheelhouse. “Altitude...” She picked out something that struck her as odd.

On the wall was a grain-yellow box, about a foot tall and a half-foot wide with a series of silver switches and a little button under what appeared to be a speaker.

Maybe it worked like a radio.

She reached out and hit the button. “Hello?”

“Be this the captain?” came a voice a moment later; it was the trottingham mare. Slipstream smirked; it was nice to know the mare had survived the fighting.

By now, she had realized that this was the intercom system Thrush had mentioned in their previous meeting. “Yes it be.” She cleared her throat. “How’re things going with the airship?”

“As well as I think it can be. There’s things aboard this ship I never seen. We’re trying to reverse engineer things here.”

Slipstream guided the main throttle lever forward, and was glad to find that the engines responded with a growl. “Well hurry up and find a way to get us altitude. I don’t know how long it’s going to be until they figure out we stole one of their battlecruisers.”

“Right, Captain!” The trottingham mare took a moment to snicker over the intercom. “I can’t believe we hijacked an enemy vessel!” The intercom died as she released the button.

Slipstream grinned a little, then immediately remembered Briar. He was still behind her... dead.

Briar.

Consultant, childhood friend, one hell of a second mate... occasional lover.

She swallowed the bile rising in her throat. ‘Not right now, Slips. Keep your head on the job at hand and it’ll work out.’ His voice rang in her head, clear as day, as if he were standing behind her.

The silence of the gondola struck her as odd. She was normally used to radio chatter. ‘The radio.’ She tapped the beaten device, checking over the readouts even though she didn’t know what they meant. She flicked a few switches, thinking maybe she’d bumped one during the midst of all the fighting. Apparently, she had done something right, because there was a quick burst of static, then the familiar radio chaos met her ears.

“—Minnow’s airship!?” Darius was calling.

“It’s floating around looking like a grain silo,” Wiltings replied. “I think it’s hers at least... Celestia... the whole bow’s gone.”

There was a moment of silence. “Is there a little fish painted on the upper tailfin?” Darius asked.

“Yeah,” Wiltings muttered dejectedly. “...I hope at least the pegasi made it out.”

“We are being destroyed!” the gunboat fleet leader howled. “Three gunboats remaining. To preserve forces, the remaining dirigibles under my command will escort the Friendship.”

Slipstream flipped the transmit switch. “This is fleet commander Slipstream! My crew has successfully boarded and commandeered an enemy battlecruiser...” She took a long breath. “Callsign: Sacrifice.” She cleared her throat. “Status report.”

“Four remaining battlecruisers,” Darius said contentedly, as if the number were a good thing.

“The Friendship is intact and in full operational order,” Wiltings said, her voice tense.

“Compromised!” Thrush yelled. “Severe damage to the portside envelope and a ruptured gassbag. We had to dump most the ballast to compensate.”

“Two,” a gruff mare growled. “Two of our four remaining support vessels.”

She tallied them in her head as they spoke. Eleven...

Her stomach curled into a knot and she doubled over for a second. This was all her fault. “And what of the enemy?”

“Thirty,” Darius replied in monotone. “And their commanding semi-rigid airship.”

Slipstream’s mouth opened, but no words came. They’d already lost over half... and the enemy was hardly suffering. Hoof weighted with lead, she reached for the transmitter.

It was the call no commander ever wished to give through the course of their entire life. It was the order that killed countries and destroyed armies.

“...Retreat.”

“Slipstream...” Darius sounded shocked, actually shocked. “There’s got to—”

“If we’re destroyed here, nothing will stop them from destroying Equestria from above! For Equestria, we must live today, to fight tomorrow.” She closed her eyes, resting her head on the wheel. “All forces... fall back!”

The command hurt her very soul. Little did she know what she had actually set into effect.

She slammed the throttle forward, and was almost knocked off her hooves by the forward momentum. “What do they do to these things?” she muttered to herself. “It’s like starting a wagon.” No wonder they were losing the battle.

“Captain!” the intercom blared. “We’ve found the ballast tanks.”

Slipstream shook her head and pressed the button on the little box. “No need. We’re retreating.”

“Captain...” The trottingham mare sounded just a shocked as Darius had.

“Prepare the guns for a strategic retreat and try to cover both the fleet’s and our escape.” With hardly a grunt, she spun the wheel around to the right until it locked and drew back quarter way on the right side engines. Leaving the main wheel, she moved over to the elevator wheel, trying not to look at the bodies as she stepped over them. Just as easily as the rudder wheel had turned, this one acted the very same as she spun it right.

The battlecruiser, much lighter than the Departure and with two extra propellers, handled like a jackrabbit. After flying the Departure for so many years, and learning its every feature and attribute, flying such a lighter and more maneuverable vessel was like trying to learn to fly a dirigible all over again. The wheel spun too easily, and the airship reacted too quickly, leaving her prone to overcorrection.

Once the nose began to tilt, Slipstream was able to grasp the full magnitude of the battle. The radio transmissions had made the situation sound only dire. This, what she was looking at right now, was enough to drive the most battle-hardened mare or stallion to shock. Somehow, the fighting had been condensed to little more than three square miles of sky.

She was reminded rather cruel-humouredly of bumper carts at the carnival. Whatever it counted for, she could no longer see the flying things that reminded her of dragonflies. Maybe they had returned to the mothership, or maybe they had all been shot down. What she did see, however, was maroon, and a lot of it, much more than there was white.

The only ship not in the battle was the enemy mothership. The massive dirigible was playing it safe, hovering about a mile away from the general fighting. It angered her that the ship wasn’t in the battle with the rest of its fleet, but she understood the enemy’s tactics. By now, it was obvious that the mothership was in fact the mothership—the dirigible that served as very epicenter of the enemy fleet; there was no way they were about to just let it sit in battle and take the chance of a lucky shot destroying something vital.

She cursed the enemy fleet commander for being logical. She had been hoping the enemy would grow overconfident and make mistakes, but they had played it smart all the way through, and had succeeded.

Slipstream contemplated flopping over on the floor and staying that way. They had never had a chance. Their assault had been about as effective as a plastic spork was for anything but flinging pees across the lunchroom.

The battle was lost, and even as she watched her remaining dirigibles break away, shattering what attempts of formation they had been trying to achieve in the midst of the battle, the enemy fired, giving the forces attempting to flee hot tailfins.

Slipstream couldn’t believe the Strider was still in the air. The entire left side envelope was torn open and the frame below was decimated, giving a clear view of the hollow, inner vessel. Somehow, Thrush had managed to tweak and bend the entire frame as well.

“Thrush,” Slipstream said into the radio, peering up at the ship as she climbed, now just below the parting battle. “What did you do to the Strider?”

“Air collision,” she replied, tone blunt.

“You bent the frame right down the middle,” she whispered quietly to herself.

“I’m in a bit of trouble here.” It was Wiltings. “They’ve got me surrounded.” She spoke calmly, as if she had simply been purchasing a cup of coffee and was asking the pony behind her for an extra bit.

Slipstream scanned for the Friendship, and found it. Wiltings’ tone had severely undermined her situation. It hovered, separated from the rest of the fleet, the cabin semi-obscured in a cloud of cannon smoke. The fact that the Friendship was away from the fleet wasn’t the problem; the problem was that it wasn’t alone.

The airship was flanked on all sides but the stern. The engines were dormant, propellers twirling in the breeze that was beginning to pick up.

She grabbed the receiver absently. “How’d you manage that of yourself?”

Wiltings breathed over the airways. “Do you remember scenario twenty-seven?”

Slipstream blinked.

“Scenario twenty-seven!” A grizzled stallion stabbed his hoof at a number on a chalkboard. “If, in a state of battle, your fleet enters a state of retreat, any airship that would require rescue from the enemy is to be shot down.”

A young mare near the back of the room raised her mint-green hoof. “Are you saying that we kill our own, Sir?”

He glared intently at her. “Yes, trainee.” Slipstream slumped in her seat. Nopony interrupted a lecture, ever. “What’s your name, earth pony?”

The mare swallowed while the other ponies in the room shifted and ruffled their feathers in discomfort. “Wiltings, Sir..."

Slipstream jabbed for the switch and nearly knocked the radio off the console in the process. “Wiltings, no!”

“You know there’s no chance!” Now the apathy was gone, replaced by anger. “Get yourselves out of here so you can fight another day!”

Slipstream sized up the rest of their fleet. Most had already fled the battle; the ones that remained were either at a safe distance or crippled to the point they had been abandoned. The Friendship could have been thought abandoned, had it not been firing back at the enemy.

“Captain Thrush?” Her hoof felt numb as it worked the transmit switch.

“Yes, commander?”

“Is your airship still in operating order?”

There was a pause. “Yes, Ma’am. We’re gored and off-balance, but she still flies fine.”

Slipstream’s breath tightened in her chest as she gripped the wheel. Retreat and safety was a simple turn to the right. A turn to the left would take her to the Friendship, and the lives of sixty other ponies to possible death. “You are now fleet commander. Proceed with the retreat and do not engage the enemy apart from means of defense.”

“Slipstream!” Wiltings snapped. “I know what you’re thinking. Don’t!”

“A-are you sure?” Thrush asked timidly.

It was as if a fog had settled within her brain. “That’s an order, Thrush!”

The mare sobered up. “Yes, Ma’am! All remaining forces full throttle due south.”

Slipstream fixed her eyes on the Friendship, then the enemy vessels surrounding her. It would only be a moment or two.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Slipstream,” Wiltings said warily.

She clenched her teeth. “I don’t. All I know is that I owe you a favor.”

“Slipstream!” Wiltings’ voice cracked, distressed. “You are not risking yourself or your crew for some sort of stupid pride trip! You owe me nothing! Think of your crew.”

For a moment, she drew back on the throttle, options and thoughts spiraling every which way. She pressed the intercom button. “I have a question for the crew... Wiltings is in trouble, and if we leave her, she and her crew will die. If we try to help, there’s a very good chance we won't make it out. Now I will not put my crew on the line for pride, so I’ll leave the decision up to you...”

She waited

“Slipstream?” Wiltings asked.

The intercom buzzed. “Us ponies in the gunnery cabin say, save the crew of the Friendship,” the trottingham mare said. A chorus of shouts, male and female alike, backed her up in the background.

“The four of us here in the tail second that,” a stallion added.

“I’m with you no matter what, Captain.”

“Slipstream?” Wiltings asked again.

Slipstream wrestled the wheel around to the left and keyed the radio. “I’m coming for you!” Using her right hoof, she slammed the throttle forward, keying the intercom button with the other. “Ready on the starboard cannons! We’re going to cut low alongside the cabin of the enemy vessel portside of the Friendship.” She eyed the scene ahead, picking out the largest ship set tail-end to their current position. “The longest one.”

It was rather difficult keeping the airship both level and aligned the way she wished it to be, whilst the eight engines roared away. Twice she stumbled over one of the bodies on her way from the rudder wheel to the elevator wheel, and twice she was reminded painfully of Briar.

It wasn’t fair. Why did it have to be him?

From the way she had planned it, they would sweep past between the enemy vessel and the Friendship. At this speed, their window of firing opportunity would be about ten seconds. Any longer and she chanced giving the enemy chances of firing back accurately. Not only would this hopefully do some damage, it would draw fire from the Friendship. She did not yet know if the enemy knew she had hijacked one of their battlecruisers, but if they didn’t, they were about to find out.

“Shoot anything that isn’t the Friendship!” she ordered, once again feeling the adrenaline surge that came with the feared anticipation, a tingly, excited-fearful sensation.

If the Longcoats had seen her coming, they hadn’t had time to compensate. The tailfins of the Longcoat vessel whipped by, and Slipstream yowled in excitement when the entire battlecruiser pitched as the portside cannons fired off. Any timidity that had remained inside her withered and died as the larger vessel to her right began to fragment under the heavy blows of the cruiser’s six-inch, magically-enhanced cannons.

Ahead was a gunship, small, much smaller than the battlecruiser.

She adjusted her heading.

“You’re mad!” Wiltings’ voice said from the radio.

Not sparing a hoof to reply, Slipstream kept her eyes locked ahead, right on the combined cabin and gondola of the small, maroon vessel.

The maneuverable battlecruiser banked right as it sliced a course for the gunship. The captain of the small vessel tried to compensate by dropping both ballasts, but Slipstream’s hijacked ship, with the benefit of speed on its side, easily compensated for the rise in elevation when she cranked the elevator wheel.

She didn’t see it, but she felt it. There was a crash like the mighty hammer of a blacksmith and the entire vessel shook like an earth stomper. Slipstream found her hooves in the air, and next thing she knew, she was on the ground propped awkwardly against the rudder wheel at the front of the gondola. Her peripherals picked up raining shards of steel debris and fabric through the plate glass as the remnants of the gunship rained around the gondola.

She would have never attempted something as damaging with her own airship, but this wasn’t hers. The maroon color that surrounded her was as disgusting as wearing the warm and bloodied pelt of an animal just skinned. Hurting maroon with maroon almost seemed glorifying.

“You’re driving that thing like it’s a rental!” Wiltings said, an air of laughter to her voice despite the situation.

Slipstream picked herself up, then picked up the radio, which had fallen to the floor. “You know what they say,” She smirked, ignoring the spinning in her head, “if it ain’t mine, then it ain’t my problem.” She sighed and the moment vanished. “How’s our nose looking?”

“Ruined,” Wiltings replied tensely. “Watch your speed or you’ll tear off what’s left of the fabric and the wind’ll pull the ship apart from the inside out.”

“What’s your status, Thrush?” Slipstream wrestled the wheel around all the way right, a little worried that the battlecruiser was no longer maneuvering as smoothly as it had been. When she was only a filly, her favorite game was to smash her toy wagons together, line them up and then race one at the rest really fast, then giggle at the carnage that ensued. She had wondered why they had stopped working right after a while. Maybe that had been fate’s way of foreshadowing.

“We have a mile on you, Slipstream... I really hope you make it.”

“...Yeah, me too.”

“Listen,” her voice crackled a little with distortion. “We’re heading out of range of the communication radios. If I don’t get to talk to you again, I want you to know that you’re the bravest... and maybe the craziest pony, I have ever met.”

The enemy had begun to return fire, probably realizing that the maroon battlecruiser attacking them wasn’t replying to any radio transmissions. Slipstream tried to keep them just out of range as she brought them around, trying to draw fire from the Friendship. “Thanks, Commander Thrush. I hope you take some pointers from me.”

“You’re not dead yet.” Her voice was becoming harder and harder to make out over the static.

“Never hurts to have a backup plan.”

“Well then... you—make it out of—see...” Static took over.

A smoking projectile whizzed past the bow, drawing Slipstream’s attention to the source. It had come from the vessel they had just fired upon. Most of the cabin was in flame, and it was beginning to sag to one side, though, apparently, there were still guns in condition to return fire.

Though her efforts were genuine, it didn’t stop the Friendship from taking fire. Slipstream watched a projectile hack into the envelope and tear a particularly nasty chunk out the opposite side.

The battlecruiser proved very hard to control while the cannons aboard were being fired. With every discharge, the airship pitched and swayed, wanting to do nothing more than change course. Keeping the nose pointed the right direction required vigilance and at least one hoof on the wheel at all times.

Cutting low across the Friendship’s bow, she actually caught a view Wiltings at the wheel, head darting every which way. Up close, the Friendship dwarfed the marron vessel Slipstream piloted. The only thing it didn’t match or rival was speed and armament, which seemed scary belonging to a smaller vessel.

While the first pass had provided her with the benefit of surprise, after banking widely around the bow of the Friendship and returning the way she had come along the silver airship’s starboard side proved to be much less rewarding. The battlecruiser flanking the Friendship’s starboard side returned fire as soon as they were in range, and the floor beneath Slipstream’s hooves rocked; they had taken a hit somewhere.

It was an effort not to think about what damage the impact could have spelled, though she forced her eyes to stay on the narrow gap between friend and foe. Adrenaline hazing everything, she was faintly aware of passing the scene and readying to bank back around spell of destruction.

“Substantial frame damage, Captain!” cried a stallion from the intercom.

Three-quarters of the way through her turn back for a third assault, the radio crackled for her attention. “Slipstream, don’t! They’re going to be ready for you this time. We’re too crippled to flee anyways. Get out of here while you still can!”

“Forward fuel tanks ruptured!” crackled the intercom. “Oil’s running everywhere in here! Only what is left in the lines remaining!”

“No can do, Captain,” Slipstream replied to Wiltings. She goosed the throttles, coming out of the turn at full pelt. As the crippled battlecruiser surged back towards the mass of smoke and carnage, she felt and heard one of the foremost engines as it began to splutter, sucking what was left in the line dry. Steering once again became difficult as the onboard cannons began to fire. There was a flash of light from somewhere aboard an enemy ship as she neared the Friendship, and next thing she knew she was on the floor, one hoof still hanging on the wheel.

Panting, she picked herself up, trying to asses the situation. The gondola was still connected to the frame, and she was still alive, so it couldn’t be too bad...

The wheel was slack in her hooves. Having felt it too many times before, Slipstream knew exactly the origin of the problem: it was a cable snap. Like a late-night resident leaving the Stumble-Inn, the airship began to pitch left, no longer receiving any feedback from the rudders.

Absently, Slipstream removed her hooves from the wheel and took up the receiver. “Wiltings... Prepare for impact.”

“Impa— Prepare for what!?” the mare snapped back.

Slipstream swallowed hard. Looming towards her on the left was the starboard side envelope of the Friendship. She keyed the intercom. “Abandon airship! Collision close!”

“Capt—”

“Get the hell off the ship!” She focussed back on the radio, trying not to look at the rapidly-growing sheen of silver-white out the left-front glass panelling. “We’re compromised, Wiltings. Cable snap. We’re heading right for you.”

“Time to impact!?” she asked frantically.

“Four seconds.”

“Oh...” Wiltings’ voice returned in a dejected manner, if not a little confused. “Well shit.”

Slipstream ducked down and braced herself against the wheel. The initial impact wasn’t as bad as she had expected it to be, more like extreme turbulence than an actual collision. A terrible ripping sound filled the air, complemented with the groan and squeal of metal. Her hooves left the ground with such the intensity that the gondola shook, then her hooves slipped from the wheel.

Adrenaline had masked the severity of the collision. The second she lost her grasp, her body hurled to the left like a ragdoll and thudded against the aluminum wall. Bouncing like a sack of corn, she crumpled to the floor on her belly, the bodies of the other three non-living occupants raining around her. In vain attempt, she tried to gain her hooves, but the gondola lurched and she soared into the air without the use of her wings. Her head smacked the ceiling and spots filled her vision. Again, she hit the floor, then the right wall, then the left again. Broken glass peppered her like sand blowing in the wind, hacking at her lidded eyes.

The black spots worsened as the grinding of steel filled her brain, loud as thunder. Through what was left of her fading vision, she picked out beams of sunlight through tangles of framing steel, remnants of silver fabric hanging in strands from twisted metal.

“Abandon airship,” she groaned, tasting copper. The command had been too late.

The gondola came to a jarring-near halt and she slid across the floor on a bed of shattered glass, the shards tearing troughs in her back. She barely registered her head smacking against the pedestal on which the wheel was mounted, and from there everything went fuzzy. She blinked a few times, but upon the fourth, all that she saw through her open eyes was a murky green-black.

Her eyes rolled, and consciousness left her.

Chapter 7 - Aftermath

Slipstream rolled in her bed. Her body shivered, the cold of the night penetrating her coat. Sometime in her sleep, she had kicked off her covers and was much too tired to wake herself up fully and pick them up off the floor. However, her nose itched, itched very badly. With a groan, she moved her left hoof to scratch it.

Pain like a million white-hot needles shot up the length of her hoof and settled in her brain as agony. Her eyes flashed open and she screamed, ceasing the movement immediately.

Faint, blue light met her eyes, and there was a low, mournful whistling in her ears. Body shaking, she let out a long breath from where she lay sprawled awkwardly on her side, steam of the heat from her body and the moisture on her breath fanning out in the air.

She must have left the window open. She turned her head to look towards where the window sat in its frame, but her vision was still blurred from sleep and she couldn’t make anything out apart from blurred figures and silhouettes.

Her neck felt stiff, like she’d slept using a cinder block as a pillow. In fact, everything felt stiff. What wasn’t sore hurt like fire and what didn’t hurt was numb. She smacked her lips a few times, metallic copper assaulting her tastebuds.

She sat up with a grunt and a grimace. The aviator glasses that were still on her face were twisted and had left cuts where they rested on her muzzle, the right lenze missing completely. Sorely she pulled them off her face with a bloodied and cut forehoof and her vision cleared a little more.

Another shiver racked her, and she tensed up to the cold. Looking down to examine herself, she followed the lines of more cuts and bruises on her hindlegs and rump.

Snow. She was sitting in snow. Now that she focussed, she noted it was everywhere, all over her coat, speckling her wool-lined aviator jacket.

She rubbed her head, which was—unsurprisingly—sore. “What the...” The corner of a black box about four feet away caught her eye. As not to anger her nerves, she ambled carefully over to it and pawed the snow away. It was a radio, the readout on the front bashed and broken, half of the switches and buttons missing.

Everything rushed back to her and she nearly jumped in surprise. “Sweet Celestia!” She threw her head left and right, blinking frantically in the gloom. All around her was snow and the occasional piece of scattered wreckage. Ten or so feet away, a long, twisted I-beam stuck out of the snow, a tendril of maroon fabric waving from it like a flag in the wind.

“Where am I?” Slipstream spun two complete circles. She remembered up until the crash, but that was it.

A thought struck her: she could fly up to get a grasp of her location. She meant to flare her wings, and her brain sent the command, but all that met her senses was numb. A dagger of fear began to whittle away at her brain as she assumed the worst.

She looked back. Her wings were still there against her silver coat, though they were caked in frost. She tried to flare them again, focussing on the muscles she knew were there. Her left wing stayed stuck to her side, but the right extended rather lackadaisically.

Slipstream whimpered. The feathers were clumped together with a crackled layer of ice created by her body’s heat against the snow. She had been lying on her left side, so the other was bound to be worse—probably why it wouldn’t even unfurl. She swallowed heavily, legs now shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering like a typewriter.

The next phase was death. She had to find shelter, and quickly, though there was nothing around her. She spun another circle, looking up at the sky in hopes of spotting a silver airship. “Hello!?” she called. “Anypony else?”

Only the wind.

The sky was completely hidden amongst the clouds, and as she stood and panicked, the wind was beginning to pick up, carrying snow with it across the ground in snakes of biting, white frost that licked at her legs like sandpaper.

By some trick of luck, she spotted it: a tendril of gray smoke whipping away in the wind, the source just over a hill. Letting her excitement flow, she started up the snowy hill as fast as her limp would allow. Already, her hooves were going numb from sinking through the one-foot top layer of fresh snow on the ground. The wind bit into her coat, parting the silver strands and icing her flesh.

Climbing the gradually-steepening snowbank was two steps forward and one step back, every foot gained counteracted by a half a foot of backward slippage. Though the tedious climb worked her heart, it seemed to do nothing to warm her body, and by the time she finally hauled herself over the crest of the bank, belly brushing the snow, she was on verge of collapse.

There were still ponies.

Ahead was the hulking frame of what was left of the Friendship. The last hundred feet of the tail rose into the air like a crooked tower, the rudders waving in the turbulent winds. Wreckage lay scattered everywhere, massive sheets of maroon and silver fabric waving about like a pseudo forest fire. And there, amongst the carnage and debris, was a faint, orange glow.

Slipstream guessed her distance to be about five hundred yards, though it would be easier to travel downhill.

As Slipstream lumbered her way downhill, she passed wreckage of other vessels, broken equipment, unfired rounds... She shivered, but this time it wasn’t from the cold. Flashbacks of the initial attack on Canterlot clouded her mind. They had never seen it coming, had never been prepared. So much destroyed, so many dead, and only in a matter of minutes.

Her hoof collided with something beneath the snow and she fell forward into the freezing pillow of white. Cursing around a mouthful of snow, she swam back to her hooves and tried to shake the cold out of her ears. Bringing her head around, she looked to what had tripped her.

A brown stallion’s face looked up at her, having been unburied in her stumble, eyes wide open, dead and frozen. Slipstream gasped and backpedaled, only to trip again. Stomach convulsing, she scrambled away, mouth going juicy like she’d been sucking rocksalt. They were everywhere. Ponies of every color lay around, dead, some simply frozen, others terribly ravaged, staining the snow crimson-black.

Her breathing quickened, breath misting from her nostrils to be swept away by the wind. She’d never seen them before, not like this, not after they fell. Usually, they were just specs that disappeared into the clouds or out of sight... Now they were too real.

One of them stood out more than the others, having not yet been buried by the snow. A golden-yellow coat, uniquely spotted with silver along the spine. “Minnow?” Slipstream whispered. Panicked with worry, she trudged over to the rigid mare and placed her forehoof the Minnow’s yellow coat, peering down to look at her face.

Slipstream’s heart lightened the tiniest bit. The mare still had warmth to her. “Minnow!” she hissed, shaking the warm—yet still terribly cold—mare, hoping for even just the tiniest twitches of movement.

She shook harder. “Minnow!”

An ear twitched. It was a small, usually-dismissible movement, but in this case, it was a shining light in the darkness. “Minnow!” she cheered, brushing the snow off the mare.

Minnow’s eyes fluttered, but still nothing.

“Help!” Slipstream howled. “I need help!”

Though she dreaded the truth, it was undeniable: there would be no help coming for her. The increasing wind and snow whipped her words away before they could travel more than a hundred feet.

Despite her drastic need for shelter, Slipstream bent over and fastened her teeth in Minnow’s aviator jacket. “I’mth gettinth you helpf.”

It had been slow going in the thick snow before. Now, limping on an injured hoof and dragging an unresponsive pony through the snow, the pace was agonizing. Every ten feet it seemed, Slipstream threw a look backwards, and the light was closer, but at such a rate she believed it might as well be moving with her.

Unsure of how long she walked backwards dragging Minnow, Slipstream went on, breath coming in shorter and shorter gasps, each step smaller than the last, until, finally, she gave. Hooves collapsing, Slipstream fell onto Minnow’s limp shape, now colder than before.

“No!” she hissed, trying to regain her hoofing, hooves lost to the numbness and shaking madly. She looked back. The light, whatever it was, glowed bright behind a large sheet of canvas erected amongst the debris, so close she could make out little tears in the fabric.

She collapsed again. “Help!” she screamed, the word clumsy and slow, formed by numb lips. “We’re here! Somepony help!” A third attempt to stand up only caused her vision to fade. The numbness had now seized all four legs, and was penetrating deep within her chest, fighting its way to her fluttering heart.

There were voices, ones that didn’t belong to her, and shadows of movement in the orange light. Slipstream only watched through murky eyes as they moved around her, speaking words she didn’t understand.

“Help,” she breathed, brain swimming in murk. Like someone had draped a blanket over her senses, they smothered.

She took another drink of her coffee and looked at Sudsy over the outdoor diner table, half-closing her eyes against the afternoon sun that washed down between the buildings, warming her coat and face. “All I’m saying is, he shouldn’t treat you like that. You know?”

Sudsy clumsily nodded her large, gray head and shrugged. “Well, I don’t exactly have too many options, you know. I mean, my cutie mark is a bar of lye soap; I clean dishes at a resturaunt.”

Slipstream looked up, searching for a semi-familiar growl she knew too well. No dirigibles would be scheduled to pass over Canterlot, so why was she hearing engines?

“Are you even listening?” Sudsy scolded.

Slipstream flushed. “Sorry, Sudsy... I’m sure I can hear something.” She kept her ears perked.

“You’ve always got your head in the clouds,” the gray mare teased. “When does your shift start anyways?”

Slipstream shot a sneaky look up when Sudsy went for a sip of her drink. “In about an hour.” She reached for her mug, and missed as the entire table shook like somepony had kicked the base, splashing her, and Sudsy’s coffee all over the decorated surface.

Though it wasn’t only her table. Ponies sitting around them let out indignant cries as the ground shook for a violent second, knocking tables around and stumbling ponies in the street. There was silence for about a second, ponies hushed at the sudden disturbance, before the quiet was interrupted by a throaty rumble from the distance.

“What in Celestia’s name was that!?” a stallion yelled.

The day was broken by a loud, worried murmur of dozens of ponies conversing frantically.

Slipstream could hear the growl from above. It was louder now, more demanding, and it seemed to be coming from all around.

“Slipstream,” Sudsy asked, sounding flustered, “what in the hay are you looking for?”

She spotted it. Over the gutter of a building across the street from her, she picked out the distinctive shape of a dirigible nosecone. The massive airship traveled at a steady thirty knots, Slipstream estimated, traveling about five hundred feet above the rooftops.

The envelope blotted out the sun and its warmth, and the street went from golden to gray in less than a second.

Everypony had gone quiet.

“Why’s it red?” a mare asked quietly. “Do we have any red air thingies in Canterlot?”

Slipstream shook her head, keeping her eyes on the maroon vessel, eyeballing the cabin as it passed almost directly above. “No,” she replied dejectedly. “Equestria doesn’t even have red dirigibles.”

“S-so who’s is it?”

Six panels along the bottom of the cabin folded open, revealing bays loaded with large, cylindrical shapes. The ground shook again at some sort of disturbance somewhere else in the city, and Slipstream finally realized exactly what must be happening.

“Run!” she bellowed, flaring her wings and hovering up above the street. “It’s a bombing run!”

“What’s that!?” a stallion shouted back to her.

The first set of bombs began to drop, wobbling clumsily in the air for a moment before forming a nosedive and straightening out.

“What are you talking about?” Sudsy asked, looking up at Slipstream from the ground as if the mare had sprouted an extra hoof from her chest.

She had to tear her eyes off of Sudsy’s worried face and flee. She rocketed down the street as fast as her wings would allow, ignoring all of the ‘pegasi, please do not fly’ signs. Fire lit up the street behind her, and the earth shook again, this time much stronger than before.

Her eyes turned to the sky, stretched wide and unbelieving. There were maroon airships everywhere, silver tubes raining from every one in a coordinated assault.

This was war.

Slipstream opened her eyes. An orange fire burned before her, protesting the wind as it whipped and bit at the tip of the flame. She lay on her left side, again, hooves drawn close to her.

Minnow was nowhere to be seen.

She panicked. In a flurry of hooves, she tried to scramble to a stand, but collapsed almost immediately on rubber muscles.

A hoof patted her on the flank. “Take it easy, you’re hurt, bad.”

“Minnow,” Slipstream croaked, “where is she?”

The hoof pointed towards a spot on the other side of the fire between where two ponies sat. The shape of Minnow lay immobile, a pony leaning over the poor mare. “She was lucky to have a heartbeat when we found her.”

“Help me sit up.” Slipstream grunted as the hoof wrapped around her foreleg and helped her roll to her haunches. “Thanks,” she said after she had positioned herself semi-comfortably in front of the tantalizingly-warm fire. Five other ponies sat around the fire, all Equestrian by the looks of their coats.

Slipstream looked to the owner of the hoof. “Wiltings?” she breathed, cracking a wide smile.

The mare bowed cheekily. “At your service.”

Slipstream shook her head slowly. Wiltings had survived the landing as well, how so was impossible to guess—the wreckage of the Friendship advertised the fact that the landing had not been smooth in the slightest regard. Though, Wiltings had not gone without harm. There was a nasty cut on her cheek that had been clumsily stitched with a snag of her own tail, and her left front foreleg was swollen at the knee. She had taken three strips of framing and cinched them to her leg with steel twine to form a brace. The flank of her jacket had also been torn, causing Slipstream to wonder of the injuries beneath.

Slipstream looked down at herself. Bandages had been wrapped around her middle, where the sword had gotten her. Her jacket, she spotted, hung on a steel beam stabbed in the ground by the fire. All of the much smaller cuts peppering her body must have been too numerous to treat, so they had been left to scab on their own.

“Is this it?” She looked around at the six ponies, herself, and Minnow who was unconscious in the snow. The way the firelight cast their proportions in the dark seemed to illuminate the wounds most of all, causing them to show most apparent; nopony was unscathed.

“There could still be others,” Wiltings answered, grabbing up a can and pouring oil into the firepan. “We had to set up shelter before the storm hit.”

Slipstream eyeballed what Wiltings had called their shelter. They had taken beams from the remnants of the Friendship's framing and set them up in a full circle around the fire, then wrapped canvas around them and used more canvas to cover half the roof, leaving part of it open to the sky to allow the putrid oil smoke to leave. Slipstream was also grateful of the canvas which she lay on, protecting her from the icy snow.

“Though, after this storm... if they can’t find shelter, there might not be. We found others, but they were so badly injured, we couldn’t move them...” She trailed off and motioned towards a stack of rifles against the canvas wall near the entrance.

Slipstream didn’t recognize any of her crew around the fire. Her heart swelled up in her throat. This was her fault. She had caused this. “I’m so sorry,” she breathed apathetically.

Wiltings sat down beside Slipstream, shivering from the cold despite the fire. “We were going down no matter what.”

Her chest hitched. “I led them to that battle. I led them all to death.” She couldn’t bring herself to cry, no matter the screaming agony in her gut of the combined guilt of hundreds, possibly a thousand lives; the most she could form upon her face was apathy.

Sighing, Wiltings reached out her good forehoof and wrapped it around Slipstream’s waist, pulling the mare close. “You did what you had to do,” she whispered. “It’s okay.” Slipstream felt the mare beside her shiver, shaking like a filly blind with fear. “We’re going to die out here,” she murmured absently, staring into the base of the fire.

Slipstream was unsure if Wiltings had meant her to hear that last part, though now it seemed her turn to give comfort. She unfurled her left wing, which must have defrosted, and slung it over Wiltings’ back, returning the embrace. “We’ll find a way.” She had trouble believing it herself when she spoke the words, and judging by the way the others shifted uncomfortably around the fire, neither did they.

Wiltings felt warm, not warmer than the fire, but warm in a different way, a more comfortable way. It was warmth in a way that soothed her body and nerves, letting the troubles relax so she could simply be.

“Sage,” Wiltings said suddenly.

The pegasus mare who had been fussing over Minnow looked up. “Yes, Captain?”

“How’s she looking.”

“She’s warmed up now, but it’s up to her body whether or not it wants to wake up. I can’t really do anything about her burns though. She’s going to lose a lot of flesh later, and it’s going to hurt.”

“Burns?” Slipstream asked. “I found her in the snow.”

Sage looked up, showing her cobalt mane and pink coat. “It must have happened before she fell. She’s burnt off most of the feathers on one wing; that’s probably why she fell in the first place.”

Slipstream looked back to the fire. As easy as it was to sit and stare, to stop caring, something had to be done. “Ideas,” she demanded suddenly, giving WIltings, who had been dozing off against her, a little shake. “We’re stranded in the middle of snowy nowhere. From our last coordinates... uh.” Initially, she would have turned to her navigator, but he had gone down with the Departure. “How far are we?”

“From the last point of Equestrian civilization, about four hundred and twenty miles,” a white stallion said. He shrugged when Slipstream raised an eyebrow at him. “I was navigator aboard the gunship Aspen.”

Slipstream sighed. “So, walking isn’t an option. We’d be lucky to average ten miles a day in this snow, and as far as I’m aware, we have no food.”

“Well,” Wiltings intervened, “there was a box of ration crackers aboard the Friendship. After the storm, we can see if we can retrieve it.”

Slipstream pointed to her. “That’s good, but still, not enough to get us four-hundred miles.” She pinched her eyes shut as a pain throbbed intensely in her head for a moment. “Okay, um... barding, warmth. Our jackets aren’t going to cut it.”

Wiltings clicked her tongue. “That’s... going to be a little harder.”

Slipstream took a deep breath, and was suddenly struck by how tired she was. She felt like a filly trying to pull an allnighter, and realizing at six-AM just how tired they were. She slumped against Wiltings and her muscles laxed.

“You okay?” Wiltings asked, now supporting most of Slipstream’s weight.

“Yeah,” she murmured, slumping further. Wiltings was a firm, yet comfortable thing to lean against, her earth pony traits shining through in forms of strength. “I can’t... I just can’t do this right now.” She buried her muzzle in the mare’s side. “Not right now.” Her flesh burned, having gone completely numb and now exposed to heat, heat that felt so great, yet stabbed like needles soaked in allergens.

Wiltings shifted uncomfortably and patted Slipstream with the hoof she had wrapped around her waist. Seeing the commander in a state such as this was not the most reassuring, but Slipstream didn’t seem to care what she or the others thought. The normally-strong and commanding mare closed her eyes and sighed a long breath, then she was out like a light

“Now what?” a stallion asked cynically.

Wiltings leaned back, and with her slumped against a might-as-well-be unconscious Slipstream. “Call it a night, and we’ll organize in the morning. Hopefully the storm will have passed by then.”

Chapter 8 - Remnants

All she could hear were the screams, the cries of anger and agony, shouts for order that only added to the entropy and mobocracy as they scurried about like ants in a frenzy, a monstrous hoof having stomped the mighty mount to oblivion.

She plodded slowly down the center of the cobblestone street, stepping over rubble and furniture blasted from buildings... bodies. What buildings hadn’t been leveled to the ground were aflame, city workers far too busy to give the soaring flames even a second glance, leaving the hopeless task to the owners. Though, even the ponies invested in the burning property didn’t seem to bother. Unicorns and pegasi and earth ponies alike just sat back in the street, staring, family members and friends caressing, all dusted a similar color of the dirt spectrum from soot and debris.

A mare ran frantically from group to group amongst the chaos, tears streaming from her eyes as she searched for something, the task proving as easy as finding a needle in a haystack.

She stopped as the frenzied mare ran up to address her. “Have you seen my foal!?” she yelled, despite the close proximity. The mare waited a whole quarter second before dashing away without receiving an answer, panting like a steam engine.

A large, four story building—one of the older ones—gave away at the foundation, and like a finished game of Jenga, came toppling down in a cloud of brown dust and crumbling brick.

When she squinted, far ahead down the street, was a maroon airship, crippled and turned onto its side, having clipped a building and crashed to the city of Canterlot below.

Anger flaring in her chest like a dog kicked one too many times, she flared her wings and barreled forward, growling under her breath. She did not know who they were, or what had been their motives, but they would pay.

“Slipstream.”

Slipstream’s eyes shot open. Wiltings looked back at her from where she lay on her side, their muzzles only a few inches apart, her deep, cobalt eyes alert and wide. “Wha—”

Wiltings pressed a hoof to her muzzle in a sign of silence and mouthed, “Longcoats.”

Slipstream blinked, then looked to the left and right. White light filtered in through the opening in the makeshift roof, the angle of which suggesting it was about nine in the morning. The diesel in the firepan had long since burned away, and left now only a metal tin and the charred canvas below.

The others were still asleep.

She heard it from the other side of the canvas shielding, the sound of shuffling and low mutters

Wiltings shifted the tiniest bit and turned her head towards the stack of rifles four feet away. “Are you sure?” Slipstream mouthed to her.

Wiltings hesitated, eyes darting to her brace, then back to Slipstream. “Can you?”

Slipstream shifted her weight, and quiet as a mouse, rolled to her belly, suppressing a gasp of pain as she applied weight to her left leg. There was no doubt that she had injured it to the extent of no more than a crack or sprain, and while she didn’t need a brace, moving it the wrong way often resulted in rather unpleasant pain.

The noises from beyond the canvas continued as Slipstream made her way to the weapons. Throwing a look back, she eyed Wiltings, who was dragging herself across the ground to rouse the others. Slipstream, careful not to coax any noises from the weapons, gathered three, one under each wing and another hanging by its strap from her mouth.

Wiltings had roused two by the time Slipstream had made her way over to them. Slipstream shook as she gave out the rifles, praying her body wouldn’t fumble and make a noise. Chances were, if the ponies outside were sneaking up, then they knew there were ponies within the canvas, which also meant that they thought they were sneaking up. As seemed a second time, Slipstream had the element of surprise on her side, and sacrificing it could very well cost her the lives of everypony here.

Ambling back over to the pile on the tips of her hooves, she grabbed the last two rifles, one of which had a cracked stalk.

The sound shifted, moving around to the open entrance. With a quiet hiss, Slipstream set the one rifle down and took up the other. She hated trying to aim. One would think somepony would have thought up a rig by now capable of making aiming and shooting a little easier. Behind her, she heard the minute sounds of three other rifles readying, the ponies wielding them working the slides as quietly as possible.

An orange head poked its way around the canvas flap and stepped out, freezing comically at the greeting party.

It was a Longcoat, stallion, and a young one from the way he carried himself. The rifle levitated beside him was pointed to the left, useless, and he knew it.

Two rifles discharged simultaneously and the Longcoat went rigid as he was struck. His levitation died and his rifle fell; he tipped after it, twitching and bucking, hooves digging troughs in the snow as the life left his body through the two bullet holes in his chest.

The other head that had been emerging quickly popped back right as Slipstream fired. Her shot missed, sending up a little spray of snow fifty feet away.

The ponies around the fire who had not yet been awoken sprang to life, all minus Minnow, who rolled over with a groan.

There were three loud snaps from beyond the canvas, accompanied by three new holes in the windbreak as the bullets whizzed through their makeshift shelter. “Get down!” Slipstream yelled, dropping immediately. Years of strategic experience paid off when four more rounds followed the first three. “We have to get where we can see them or they’ll just shoot until we’re dead,” she hissed loudly. Pulling her hind legs up beneath her, she pushed forward and slid herself towards the opening in the canvas, climbing over the Longcoat who bled out in shock.

Wiltings tried to follow, but she was no good with her leg sticking out awkwardly. “Dig in,” Slipstream whispered. Wiltings nodded and started to paw frantically at the soft snow, digging herself down below the surface.

“Damn rifles,” Slipstream breathed, awkwardly handling the weapon she held wrapped in one hoof. Had it not been for the fact that the Longcoats were using projectile weapons, she would have gladly taken a sword.

“They must be a search team,” Wiltings said, positioning herself so she could aim her rifle.

“Why?” a stallion asked.

“The Equestrians retreated—that’s forfeiting the battlefield. Of course the Longcoats are going to send crews down to look for their survivors and salvage.” Now beyond the flap of the makeshift tent, she looked around, head only a few inches off the ground. Six feet away was a rather large snowbank cast by their shelter; that was probably her best bet. She couldn’t see any of the enemy among the wreckage, though it was most likely they had taken cover and set up position.

Slipstream looked back. Three ponies sat behind her, hunkered close to the ground. Wiltings had forfeited her rifle to Sage, who sat protectively beside Minnow. “Okay,” she whispered. “Defensive positions.” She waved her hoof towards the snowbank and nodded once, narrowing her eyes.

She flared her wings and gave them a powerful flap that carried her to her hooves. Pushing off with her hind legs, she threw herself forward. Landing primarily on her right leg, she half stumbled the rest of the way to the snowbank and dropped heavily into the semi-frozen snow.

Two shots rang out from somewhere across the snowbank and she ducked instinctively. A green stallion dropped down to Slipstream’s right and a bright orange mare took her left. The white stallion whom she remembered as the navigator from the night before bedded left of the orange mare.

“I spotted three,” said the green stallion to Slipstream’s right.

She looked over to him. His long mane, dark green, hung around his lighter green coat in a tangly mess. “Is that it?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, peering up. There was the very loud whiz of a bullet and his ears folded flat to his head. “There may be more.”

Slipstream rolled her front shoulders and propped the rifle on the snowbank. “What’s your name?” she asked absently, looking experimentally down the sights as the rifle aimed upwards into the cloudy sky. The remnants of the storm had passed, though the wind was still biting and it carried with it the threat of more snow.

“Price,” he whispered, ruffling his wings. “Aerial combattant squad leader.” He sounded like the trottingham mare aboard the Departure, only his accent was thicker and a bit more slurred.

Slipstream’s heart plummeted for a second. The orange mare was probably a body in the wreckage of the battlecruiser, wherever that was. “Origin?”

“South Trottingham, Equestrian citizenship running on four years now.” He laughed nervously. “Got myself a mare and two foals back in Manehattan.”

She poked her head up, sighting the rifle. Three ponies looked back at her from maybe thirty yards away, rifles trained. She ducked and two rifles discharged, pitting the snow above her. Jumping up, she took aim.

The two who had fired were frantically working the bolts on their rifles. She aimed for the one still sighted, knowing very well she was an immediate target. He fired before her, though somehow the shot missed. Slipstream took an extra second to aim as he went for the bolt, and when she fired, the sound of impact was clear as day. He yelled as he went down, writhing in the snow.

Slipstream dropped back down as the other two took aim. “One down,” she breathed, working the bolt. His grunts and groans reached her over the rush of wind in her ears, the mutters of his companions disconcerted. The orange mare to her left and the stallion beside her returned fire.

“There’s two more on the horizon,” the orange mare hissed. “They must have heard the shots.”

The ponies running at them with no cover were easy targets. Slipstream dropped two from sixty yards; her three companions added the count up to five.

“Rightside!” Price snapped.

Slipstream swung her rifle right and sighted a short mare levitating a rifle, part of a group of three who had been attempting to flank them through the wreckage of the Friendship. Slipstream’s rifle bucked and the mare dropped onto her face, the bullet in her forehead quelling even the death throes. Price dropped the second member of the group, but before either Slipstream or the green stallion could reload, the last of the attempted sneak attack fired. He missed both of them.

A choked cry turned Slipstream’s head. The stallion hadn’t missed. The orange mare dropped her rifle into the snow and held her hoof against her neck, blood seeping around the wound.

To her right, Price ended the perpetrator.

“I’m dead!” the orange mare said, gasping, a million thoughts flashing through her eyes as she was carried off somewhere else.

“Let me see,” Slipstream commanded, placing her hoof over the mare’s.

“No.” She resisted, panicking.

“Let me see!” Slipstream yanked the mare’s hoof away. It was just a graze, a thin line cut through the flesh along the side of her neck. “It’s only grazed you.”

The panic faded from the mare’s eyes. “It is?” She placed a hoof over her chest.

“Yes.” Slipstream picked up the mare’s rifle and shoved it back into her forehooves. “You’ll be fine.”

The mare shuddered and grasped the rifle. “Hell, I thou—” Her head jerked like it was on a whip and the side of her face went to pulp. Blood sprayed Slipstream’s face and splashed into her eyes, stinging like acid. She cried out held up a hoof much too late. Spluttering, she wiped her forehoof across her face, blinking the blood out of her eyes.

The orange mare was on the ground now, dead. A shudder racked Slipstream’s body; she was wearing the mare like paint. Her eyes traveled to the source of the deadly bullet.

A Longcoat mare stood on the left, face panicked as she tried to fix the bolt of her rifle, a cartridge jammed halfway up the ramp.

Slipstream trained her rifle and fired. The bullet pitted the mare’s shoulder and she stumbled, but stayed up. Slipstream chambered a new round and fired again, this one hit her dead center of her neck. Her body emitted a crack and she dropped to the ground.

Slipstream ejected the spent cartridge. The smoking brass landed in the snow and melted a hole through it, disappearing below the surface. She tried once again to wipe the blood from her face. “Ouch!” She winced at a sharp pain in her cheek. Running her hoof back over more carefully, she found the source to be something hard and sharp-edged lodged in her face.

Carefully, with her hoof, she eased it out and held it in front of her eyes in curiosity. it was white and square, sharp on one end, the outside coated with blood.

A tooth... Oh Sweet Celestia and Luna above her tooth was in my face!

Her stomach heaved, and before she knew it, she had emptied the very-little contents of it into the snow. She dry heaved two more times, but there was nothing left to throw up.

“I’m empty!” Price ducked into cover and set his rifle aside.

In a bit of a daze, Slipstream grabbed the orange mare’s rifle and held it out by the barrel to the green stallion. “Here.” Her voice seemed to come to her from down a tunnel. “There’s blood on it.”

Price’s eyes widened the tiniest bit at her face, then darted to the limp shape of the orange mare. He nodded and took the rifle, checking the load.

“Left flank!” the white stallion yelled.

Slipstream took up her rifle. Her ears rung, reducing the sound around her to a shallow murmur. She barely paid the rifle in her hooves any mind as it seemed to aim itself. She watched it point, and kill two others, directed by her hooves.

“There’s too many!” It was Price. He no longer took any cover. Instead he stood, reared onto his hind legs as he covered from the center and right. “Celestia, we must be against a whole fleet!”

“I’m out!” The white stallion patted his coat down for more cartridges, then cursed. “Where are they all coming from!?”

Slipstream’s final round savaged a mare who had been running up the bank towards them. Working the bolt, she ejected the smoking casing and deflated. The loading ramp was empty.

Something whizzed by her head and that was her queue to duck. The white stallion, face panicked, hefted the bayonet end of the rifle. “Not like this,” he growled.

Before he could even attempt something similar to a valiant end, two bullets struck him clean in the chest, one after another. He went down, jaw working like a fish out of water.

“Three shots!” Price yelled.

From where Slipstream hunkered, she could not see where his aim led, though when he fired, she heard the sound of impact.

“Two!”

“Slipstream!”

Slipstream looked back. To her horror, Sage had emerged from what had been their nighttime shelter, rifle primed. “Get down!” She waved her hoof frantically at Sage. “Run!”

The cobalt mare seemed to be in controversy. She swung her head this way and that, pink mane waving about her face. Gritting her teeth, she raised the rifle, then took an immediate bullet to the left of her chest. The rifle in her grasp jerked upwards and fired, the recoil knocking her off her hooves.

“Empty!” Price yelled. “I’m empty!”

Slipstream’s eyes never left Sage as she writhed in the snow, spreading a sheen of red over the white surface, face contorted in agony. A stallion—a red one she hadn’t been introduced to—poked his head out of the shelter and made a beeline for her. He wasn’t more than halfway when a markspony in the hills scoped him out.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

Slipstream turned away, breath fluttering in her chest. She found her eyes on Price; his teeth were clenched and his chest heaved in fear. He was an aerial markspony with no ammo left for his weapon; it must have been torture.

“Now what?” he asked, voice scarcely more than a whisper.

All around she could hear yells and shouts, the ruffling of hooves in the snow as they were encircled.

Heart thudding in her chest like a diesel piston, nerves screaming, anger soaring, she sat up on her haunches.

“Get your head down!” Price snapped, tugging at her forehoof.

Slipstream took a deep breath and balanced on her haunches. Raising her forehooves, she placed them on the back of her neck and closed her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, hoping Celestia would forgive her. Never before in her life had she ever thought about uttering the very word on the tip of her tongue. “Surrender!” Her voice cut through the air like a knife, silencing the yells and shouts and the gunshots all around.

Price, looking like he had just been slapped with a dead fish, slowly rose up to his haunches, mouth half agape. He looked at Slipstream unbelievingly. “We don’t know what they do to prisoners.”

She refused to speak as she watched the ponies that had kept them surrounded form up into a group. There were eleven of them, maybe more that had remained hidden. She refused to blink as they neared the snowbank, the ones in front running out ahead. She remained perfectly still as a yellow Longcoat ran right up to her and swung the butt of his rifle.

She sprawled out, blood painting the snow from the reopened cut in her brow. Resisting the urge to scream, she clenched her teeth until she felt her jaw would fracture.

All she knew was denial as a weight settled on her back, pressing her into the firm snow. Price was thrown down beside her, only he growled and snapped at his assailant. More of the Longcoats ran by, one of them shouting orders in heavy accent, the others following. They formed a ring around the entrance to the tent, then four of them moved forward.

Slipstream’s mouth went dry at the shouts and yells from inside. A moment later, a Longcoat mare pushed backwards out of the shelter, dragging Wiltings by the scruff, the confused and panicked captain writhing in distress. They brought Minnow out next, the mare barely conscious, muttering things in a state of semi-sleep.

The both of them were thrown into the snow in the same manner Slipstream had been and held down.

It was only now that Slipstream could identify their figure of authority. He was a tall, thick-coated, silver stallion, his short brown mane cut and shaped. “Four,” he said in a scratchy voice. He turned to a brown mare. “Where does it put us, in numbers?”

The mare checked a clipboard on the side of her barding. “Twenty-two, Sir.” Her accent was strong, though understandable.

The silver stallion eyed the four ponies in front of him and grinned. “We are lucky with these ones.” He pointed to Slipstream. “She is fleet commander.”

Slipstream went stiff as a board. She had forgotten to remove the rank from her coat. In the situation, all of them had.

His eyes moved to Wiltings next. “Second in command.” He moved to Minnow. “Captain.” He hesitated on Price, giving him a long, hard look. “You’re a fighter, yes?”

Price growled and gave the stallion his best eat-shit-and-die look.

One of the others of the group trained a rifle on Price. “Orders say official only for interrogation.”

The silver stallion held up a hoof. “But he knows battle.” He shook his head. “No, we take him.”

“Sir!” A mare who had been rummaging around their camp looked up and waved for the stallion. “This one is still alive.”

Slipstream gasped. It was Sage; the mare had survived being shot.

The stallion flicked his ears. “Bring her over.”

With the help of another Longcoat, the mare lifted Sage brought her over to stand drunkenly before their superior. Once she was standing on her own, the two Longcoats backed away, leaving her facing the silver stallion.

“What is your rank?” the stallion asked boredly.

Sage’s head drooped a bit before she looked up, blood matting her chin. “Medic,” she gasped. Her pink mane hung around her face, eyes firm and determined. Every breath seemed to be agony to her as liquid rattled in her throat, blood running from one nostril.

The silver stallion tutted and shook his head. “She has suffered a punctured lung.” He flicked his tail. “Injuries are too great for resources.”

A rifle clicked somewhere.

Slipstream writhed under her captor. “No!” she screamed, battling against the weight much more than hers.

Sage’s eyes widened in realization. They flashed for a moment in fear, but sank immediately after, replaced with cold, hard realization.

The low caliber shot sliced the air and Sage flopped over in the snow.

Slipstream screamed, voice burning her throat and cracking her voice box. She squirmed and writhed, ignoring the pain in her leg. “I’ll kill you!” she bellowed, trying to lash out for the stallion who only looked down at her calmly. How dare he act as if he had done nothing!

He would die. That’s all that mattered. He had just ordered the death of a mare and not flinched a bit. “I’ll kill you!” she repeated.

The stallion sighed and looked down at her. “This, commander, is war.” He spoke to her like he would a curious child. “Exceptions can not be made.”

Slipstream hissed, wishing he would come just one step closer so she could tear his throat out with her teeth. “You’re scum!” From her position on the ground, she spat, and managed to land a glob of her saliva on his foreleg. “You’ve no right to live!”

There was a searing pain in the back of her head as her muzzle was shoved into the snow, and her ears began to ring. Somepony had hit her—that much she could derive. But after two more lashes of pain, she wasn’t sure of anything. A final blow sent her once again into the sea of black.

Thrush sat in the captain’s private quarters aboard the Strider. It was possibly the only room that fit even the meekest definition of nice. It was four feet by five, a single bunk taking up the entire wall left of the door and a combination dresser and desk on the other. Thrush sat with her head upon the desk, feeling the tilt and unsteadiness of the airship around her. During the battle, her possessions of trinkets and doodads had been scattered. So far, she hadn’t bothered to pick them up, and every time the vessel shifted, they went rolling and bouncing around her hooves, bumping into one another in a sort of mournful game.

She lifted her head, sorrowful eyes focusing on the oak paneling that covered the walls. She looked down to the documents she had spread out before her, orders from Canterlot, captain’s logs, battle procedure and fleet instructions.

Where had they gone wrong?

It wasn’t her fault. But, it wasn’t anypony’s fault. Had they put Celestia herself in command of the fleet, she too would have failed. The Longcoats had been simply too well-equipped and too prepared to fall in a battle against such an unprepared assailant.

But now what would they do—what would she do? She was now captain of an entire remnants fleet. This was something she had never anticipated. She had wanted more time, needed more experience. Being the third in command meant that you were important, not that you were ready to command all of Equestria’s aerial power.

In one fatal minute, Slipstream and Wiltings had both taken the fiery plunge. Thank Celestia she hadn’t seen it happen, but she had heard it all over the radio from the tail gunner of the lend vessel. There had been a collision, and both airships had gone down. Just like that, decades of experience had gone down the drain and the fate of Equestria had been handed to a timid mare with less than five-hundred hours of flight experience and less than twenty minutes of battle experience, not counting today.

The radio she kept on the side of the desk crackled. “This is captain Salt…” There was a moment of hesitation from the mare. “We’re not going to have enough fuel to make it back.”

Thrush’s heart sank a little further as she reached for the receiver. “Captain Salt, what is your current status?”

“We’ve got about four tons of fuel remaining. We lost a tank during the battle and the other reserve was drained to keep balance since we’d already lost the ballast. It’s a support vessel, not as maneuverable as the cruisers.”

Thrush swore under her breath. “Windspeed and direction?”

“Approximately four and a half knots north, northwest.”

“Understood.” She released the button. No airship can stretch that little fuel against a headwind. After a moment of thought, she addressed the radio. “Shut down two of your engines and try to make it as far as you can. When the time comes, evacuate whatever crew members aren’t needed for essential flight and try to put her down as nicely as possible. If we’re close enough to the border, we might be able to come back for her.”

“Understood, Commander.”

Thrush closed her eyes and returned her head to the desk. What would this come to? The enemy had let them escape, so it seemed. A few of their more maneuverable vessels had given chase, but only for about twenty miles. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to waste the fuel.

She had left her second in command at the wheel, and were she needed, he would call. For now she needed some sort of rest, even if she couldn’t sleep. She needed to calm her nerves and take her body out of overdrive. It was over, for now.

For the longest time she sat there, listening to the rumble of the engines and the hiss of air as it raced around the gored shape of the airship. No war was worth this much pain, and that’s what she kept telling herself.

There was a heavy knock at the door.

Thrush picked her head up and wiped her expression clean. “Come in.”

A tall buck pushed into the cramped room. “Captain,” It was her communications expert, “we’ve been in telegraph range of Canterlot for the past ten miles. They’re demanding the outcome.”

“Tell them… tell them we’ll return in an estimated four hours and I will give my summary.” She stood. “This is not a story I can tell with a button. “

He turned to leave. “Yes, Ma’am.”

She stopped him with a forehoof. “Do tell them one thing.” A counter attack could very well be imminent on the horizon.

His ears perked. “Yes?”

“Tell them to prepare.”

Author's Note

Let me know if this is getting too... mature. I have it on teen right now, but I'm not sure how far until teen stops being teen considering the fact that I grew up from age eight watching R rated movies.

Every comment helps. It really does. This story is my favorite yet, and I love to hear what people think of it.

Chapter 9 Forced Transit

Slipstream landed down on the side of the maroon airship's cabin.

The airship had come down directly in an intersection. From what appeared to have been the case, the lower envelope had caught the steeple of the Canterlot grand library and the vessel had been pulled into a nosedive. Too late to correct itself, the nose had struck the street and the entire airship had keeled over onto its side. Now, it lay where she had come across it, crippled, all but one engine having stalled as the propellers spun down.

Her coat burned and tingled like a million tiny needs had been stabbed into every gland and every nerve. This very vessel had just finished releasing a load of heavy ordnance on the city of Canterlot.

On innocent civilians.

There was no time for rational thought. Somepony was going to pay.

She plodded along the aluminum siding for a moment, hooves banging loudly as the lightweight metal oilcanned under her weight.

Other ponies were now converging on the crash, amongst them civilians and royal guards alike. Some sat back and just balked, unsure of exactly what to think. Others began to scale the wreckage, just as enraged as Slipstream was herself.

Beside her landed a red pegasus in the royal armor. He grasped a spear in his teeth, eyes angry and determined. She gave him a little nod and he nodded back before flaring his wings and jumping down into the cabin through a window.

As she watched, her belly churned in mounting fear. This vessel wasn’t Equestrian. The frame was built differently, it was painted the wrong color, the type of metal they used was different along with the engine in the nacelles. This was truly an attack, an attack from some sort of foreign force big enough and confident enough to be a threat.

But why attack civilians?

There was the very distinct crack of a musket from inside the quarters and Slipstream thought immediately of the guard. Unthinking, she flared her wings and hopped down into the dark of the gunnery cabin, flapping them slowly to make a steady descent.

The entire place was a wreck. Guns and canons lay scattered everywhere, and many of the support beams had either bent or snapped. The fact that the cabin was tilted ninety degrees from normal operating conditions threw off any sense of coordination Slipstream possesed. The only thing that kept her flying upright was her internal sense of gravity.

She heard the crack again. Suddenly, something sparked off a steel beam to her immediate right. A numb pain filled her rump and her wings faltered. Half-spiraling towards the ground, she landed on a pile of ammunition with an impact that knocked the air out of her. Gasping for breath, she rolled onto her back and lifted her head to look at the spot on the left of her haunches.

There was a lead ball embedded right in the center of her cutie mark, the flesh around it torn and bleeding. Examining the wound, it was clear she had been struck by a ricochet, for the ball hadn’t penetrated much further than the outer layer of flesh. Her jaw tremored, though only for a second. Her cutie mark would scar. The distinct shape of a dirigible balloon covered in riveted plates of lead that adorned her flank was now barely visible under the lazy flow of blood flowing from the wound.

She gasped and flopped back down, head hitting the brass casing of a three-inch round. Metal clashed somewhere close and ponies yelled and jeered. More muskets cracked and snapped somewhere very close, possibly within the cabin, though this section was dark and seemed deserted. A faint, orange glow reached her from further back, most likely the origin of a fire.

That’s when she saw it. The guard she had seen earlier: his body was slumped on the ground maybe ten feet away, a thin trail of blood trickling down the sloped steel of the cabin wall to pour out a window to the pavement below. Then she noticed the pony who stood over him.

As slowly as she could, slipstream rolled over onto her belly to get a better view, not daring to move for fear that the ammunition under her would shift and make noise. The pony who stood over the dead guard was different. His coat was snow white, though, it looked as thick as a dog’s. His wings were large and the feathers thick, almost like some glorified pegasus one would see in a painting. His amber mane was cut short, though it was as thick as a throw rug and tangled around his neck. His tail, on the other hoof, was long and thick and just a little bit bushy.

But his eyes were what really put her speechless. They were blue, bluer than the sky and as bright as the moon, a deep cobalt that that reflected light like a mirror.

Slipstream couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was some sort of superior being.

She gasped as his steely eyes found her. Expression hardening, he cocked his head and tossed aside the smoking musket.

“Ouch!” Slipstream flailed as she was jolted awake. Groaning, she wrapped both her forehooves over her head and held them there until the stinging of the impact went away. Once the stinging had calmed to a dull throb, she opened her eyes and let them drift.

She was in a cage.

“What in the name of Celestia?” She placed her forehooves on the steel bars and glared through them into the darkness. The steel floor of the cage below her vibrated and shook with the soft hum of what Slipstream knew no better than to be engines.

She was hit with two questions. Question number one was, why was she in a cage? And question number two was, why in the name of Celestia herself... was she in a bloody cage?

“Well this is rich.” The accounts of the morning were clear as day in her head, and already her brain was piecing together the puzzle. She had been knocked unconscious, that much was clear. The Longcoats hadn’t killed them because they were taking high-ranking officers. She was now in a cage in the dark aboard what she was sure was an airship. “Damnit...” She pressed the top of her head against the bars and sighed. Nothing good could come of this.

“Is she awake?” a voice asked.

“I think she is,” came another.

Slipstream’s ears perked and she looked around, unable to see much of anything in the dark. Faintly, she could make out the square shapes of other cages and the silhouettes of ponies inside them. “Hello?” she asked in a voice like gravel.

“Slipstream?”

Slipstream perked her ears. “Wiltings?”

“Yes.”

“Where are we?”

There was a pause from the darkness. “We’re aboard a Longcoat transport vessel. It picked us up maybe half an hour after they knocked you out.”

Slipstream nodded to herself. “Who else is here?”

“I’m here,” came the voice of Price to her left.

“Minnow isn’t doing so well,” Wiltings muttered. “She was awake for a while, but she’s real bad off. She’s got frostbite on her burns for Celestia’s sake. She’s lucky to be alive.” A shaky sigh pierced the air. “Sage... How could they do that?”

Slipstream rubbed her eyes to see if they would adjust any better. Her coat was matted and ruined, and she remembered the blood. She dry heaved, suddenly feeling very hungry when absolutely nothing came up. She rubbed her hoof at her face, chips of dried blood flaking out of her coat and raining down to the steel floor of the cage below.

“Are there others?” she asked after a moment.

“From the way they were speaking it sounded like they had others,” Price said. “Though they aren't on this vessel, or at least this part.”

They all shared a moment of silence and gave Slipstream time to think. She could only assume what remained of her fleet had made it out alright. Though with what remained of the Longcoat’s once the battle had broken...

Chances of recovery were slim.

She was jarred out of her thoughts when her entire cage jolted, the steel gate rattling against the lock. She had barely laxed when there was a second, sudden jolt. A swift gain in altitude knocked her to her belly, then, like an elevator coming to a fast stop, she flew upwards and crashed against the top of her cage. Her cage lifted as well before crashing down on its side. Slipstream fell against the steel bars and let out an eep of pain as the cage began to roll, not yet settled from the bounce. Her world spun for a moment until her cage crashed to a stop and settled at a diagonal angle.

Hooves flailing for purchase, she righted herself according to gravity and tried her best to sit at the new angle. “Blast,” she hissed, rubbing the back of her head which was still sore from the rifle butt, and now even moreso from the top of her confinement.

“Slipstream?” It was Wiltings’ voice, now much closer.

Slipstream leaned forward and pressed her head against the bars, tilted sideways to look through the five-inch gap with one eye. It appeared her cage had landed up against another cage, and inside she could make out the obvious shape of Wiltings and her distinct, earth pony form. The shape shifted and a mint-green head moved into Slipstreams tiny sight range. Brown eyes lost to the darkness, even her whites were gray.

“Yeah.”

Wiltings breathed a rough sigh. “Turbulence.”

The airship gave a series of rough shakes and Slipstream’s cage threatened to tip again.

She shivered and rolled up to her haunches, clinging her meager accessory of a jacket to her with crossed forehooves. “You think they’d at least tie down the cages.” Shaky breathing was all she could manage, the fog of her breath misting from her muzzle and dissipating into the dark. “Sweet Celestia, it’s cold.”

“We’re in the storage bay—why heat cargo?” She breathed fog onto her raised forehooves and pressed them to her cheeks. “It’s night time now, so the air’ll be colder.”

“I’ll kill every one of those bleeders.” Price’s voice echoed through the storage bay, accompanied by the clash of hooves on steel. “Go and shoot us down in the middle of bloody nowhere, if that’s not already enough. But no, they’ve got to hit us on the ground as well and execute our very own right in front of us!”

Slipstream took a deep breath. “Price, they—”

“They’ve no honor!” he bellowed, making himself well-heard over the rumble of the engines through the frame.

Slipstream winced, worried about the noise. “Price...” They were in enemy hooves after all.

“I’ll kill every one!” Again came the sound of his cage rattling. “Why don’t one of you bastards let me out of this cage so I can tear your bleeding throats out!” The stallion was now howling, his voice threatening to give. Though Slipstream couldn’t see Price, by his tone she knew he was positively raving. He was furious, this much was obvious, but something about his rage seemed fake, overdone possibly.

There was a slamming of something solid against aluminum near the front wall. “Shut up!” a stallion yelled to them in a voice like he’d gargled nails and taken a heavy whiff of helium—it would have been funny had he not sounded so angry.

“Why don’t you bring your furry flank in here and make me!?” Price fired back.

Wiltings hissed through her teeth. “Price, you shouldn’t—”

The aluminum door at the front of the cargo bay exploded open and slammed against the wall. A tan stallion stomped in, his barding nothing short of a brown jacket with two ammo belts—as unorthodox as they were—slung over each shoulder. A carbide lamp was strapped to his neck on the right side, the flame encased completely in a glass dome that shaped the flame into a yellow cone.

“I said shut up!” he repeated in the same, scratchy voice like he had a bad head cold.

The glow of his lamp gave Slipstream an opportunity to observe her surroundings. Her cage was near the starboard wall center of the cargo bay, leaning heavily on Wiltings’ cage. Price was located portside of the enclosure, which proved to be only ten or so feet wide, though appeared even smaller due to the boxes and empty cages stacked all around.

Her real attention was on Minnow. The mare was now sitting up on her haunches—which was a good sign—with her forehooves planted firmly on the cage floor. Though she was sitting, she had slumped against the bars and her head was hung. Her once beautiful golden-silver mane, charred and stringy, hung around her face like some ammerature barber’s hackjob attempt at a bob. Her coat was patchy, like an old jacket left to hang in the elements for a year then beat dry and rubbed all over with vaseline... She looked a real mess.

“Make me!” Price snapped, snarling like a pit dog through the bars of his cage.

Slipstream was almost glad Price was in a cage.

The Longcoat stomped towards him and pulled the rifle from its holster on his side. “I said!” With both forehooves, he threw the butt of the rifle through the bars and the barely-padded end struck Price clean across the brow, forcing him into what appeared to be submission. “Shut!” Price went into defensive mode, covering his head as the Longcoat stabbed with the rifle again. He instead drive the butt of the weapon into the green stallion’s ribs. “Up!” He made to deliver another blow to Price’s head.

It had been a trick, Slipstream quickly realized, as Price sprung up with a smug sneer on his face. The rifle butt missed and hit the cage floor below the green stallion. Swift as lightning, Price grasped the rifle with both forehooves and jerked it towards him into the cage. The Longcoat reacted in shock and wrapped both hooves around the grip half a foot forward from the breach to keep Price from seizing the weapon.

He realized just a second too late that the barrel was aimed at his jaw.

Price slammed the firing mechanism with his hoof and the Longcoat’s head snapped backwards as the bullet exited out the back of his neck. The shot longcoat released the rifle and stumbled backwards. He staggered in a confused circle, blood dribbling from his shattered jaw and pattering to the floor as his breath gargled and hissed in his throat. His eyes fixed on Price, angry and utterly flabbergasted before they rolled to the top of his skull. He dropped to the floor like a sack of flour, his carbide lamp coming to settle on Price where he sat with the smoking rifle, looking more surprised than anything.

“Price!” Wiltings hissed. “They’ll kill us!”

He worked the bolt and ejected the smoking shell, which spun away through the air and tinkled to the ground somewhere in the dark. “Not if I can help it.”

Slipstream could hardly believe her eyes as she watched the veteran combatant line the rifle up with the padlock on his cage and brace his hoof on the firing lever. With a loud crack and a spark, the center of the lock blew out and the latch clicked open.

There were shouts and the pounding of hooves on the floor above.

Slipstream tapped her hoof impatiently, jittering with nervousness. “Price, you’d better make this fast!”

The pegasus struggled to remove the shattered lock from his cage, and after two fumbled attempts, got it to fall away. Butting out the cage door, he hefted the rifle and half flew to Slipstream. “We’re getting out of here.” He lined the rifle up with the lock on her own cage and fired.

Slipstream awaited eagerly for him to pull her lock away, but when the stallion cursed under his breath and slammed his hooves against the steel casing, she realized he must have missed, probably miss-aimed in the darkness.

“No!” Slipstream commanded as he struggled to load another cartridge under the pressure. “Go!” The shouts were growing louder.

“But, Command—”

“Go, now!” She gave him a shove through the bars. “You can come back for us!” She doubted her own words the second they left her mouth, but anything to keep him from staying and getting killed in the process would do.

He fixed his eyes on her, and for a moment it looked as if he would protest, but he gave a brief nod and backed away.

Slipstream wrapped her hooves tightly around the bars of her cage and gritted her teeth as Price put the rifle in his mouth and made a beeline for the one door leading out of the cargo bay. “Go, go, go!” she hissed through clenched teeth, shaking the bars.

He was ten feet from the door when two ponies appeared in his path, a mare and a stallion, rifles already trained and ready to fire.

Though the rifle was in his teeth, he made no time at all in getting it back in his forehooves, rearing up to aim and flaring his wings for balance. With the benefit of darkness on his side, they hardly saw the movement.

Price fired and Slipstream heard the distinct thwack of lead on flesh as the stallion on the right of the door keeled over. The shot Longcoat fell against the mare, who turned towards him with a face reading confusion and shock—that was when Price drove the bayonet into her shoulder at full pelt.

The steel blade sank to the bone and snapped off at the hilt with a clang barely muffled by the mare’s scream as she was pitched sideways. Price swung the rifle around and clobbered the mare across the side of the head with the stalk. His shoulder threw her aside as he released the rifle and ploughed through the doorway, leaving it to clatter to the ground beside the unconscious mare.

Slipstream held her breath as she lost sight of the combatant pegasus. There were more yells, thundering hooves, and six, maybe seven gunshots. All she could do was clench her hooves and listen. There was a loud yell from Price, whether in pain or anger she was unsure, but it set her even further on edge.

It all stopped. There were four more rifle bursts, then still, followed shortly by the tromping of hooves and angry yells.

From the next room, two voices conversed loudly and Slipstream looked just in time to see two stallions race into the cargo bay, still yelling things to one another too fast for her to make out.

Slipstream tried her best to look insignificant as the two paused to scan the inhabitants of the three cages with accusing eyes. The two muttered something, and one headed over to the stallion with his jaw shot off and began to look him over. The other, a smaller stallion with a green coat, made straight for Slipstream. He stopped just in front of her and grinned cruelly.

“Your friend should have known not to try to escape.”

She swallowed and her eyes widened. Wiltings watched silently, shaking.

“He should have learned to obey.” He turned without another word and went back to the other stallion. Together, they drug their companion across the floor, blood trailing behind him like water from a mop.

The door slammed shut behind them and the room was plunged once again into black.

“S-slips...” Wiltings said after what very well could have been hours, the time mulled by shock.

“Yeah?” she replied, voice dry.

“Do... do you think they got him?”

Slipstream swallowed a lump in her throat and choked back a soft whimper. “I... I don’t know.”

“Slipstream, even if he got off the ship, we’re in the middle of the—”

“Shut up!” she snapped. “Okay!? Just shut up!” She sighed. “I don’t want to hear it...”

Wiltings remained silent for a long while after that. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I’m just worried... Are you alright, Minnow?”

Slipstream opened her mouth to reply, only to realize she wasn’t being spoken to. She shut her mouth and listened eagerly, hoping to hear the battlecruiser captain’s voice.

“Minnow?” Wiltings repeating.

Slipstream squinted. She could see the shape of the mare, still sitting against the side of her cage. She was sure she could see Minnow shaking her head.

“Minnow, you hear me?”

Minnow nodded her head and tapped her hoof against the floor of her cage.

Slipstream turned to Wiltings. “I don’t think she can talk...” She remembered a thought that she had meant to bring up earlier; now it would serve as a good diversion from the shock of what had just happened. “So, I think we both know why they want us.”

“Secrets,” Wiltings said darkly. “Interrogation.”

Slipstream slumped against the back of her cage. Her eyes drooped and her head bobbed slightly. She was tired, more tired than should have been normal. “We tell them nothing, understood?”

Wiltings breathed a long sigh. “What if... what if these ponies allow torture?”

Slipstream shook her head. “They can’t... there hasn’t been torture since before the princesses themselves.” She nodded off, then jumped back awake and shook her head.

“I sure hope so...” She began to fiddle absently with her forehooves. “But if they’re taking us where I think they’re taking us—to a city, some sort of base—then, we’re officially an issue of their security if we’re alive.” She took a long and shaky breath. “Wherever they’re taking us... we won’t be leaving.”

His cobalt eyes studied her, looking her up and down. Teeth clenched, Slipstream pulled herself to her hooves despite the musket ball in her flank. Pushing past the fear bubbling in her belly, she glared at the stallion, acting a lot braver than she felt. She bet he could snap her like a toothpick if he wanted to.

“You killed him,” she growled.

He stopped a few feet in front of her. Fires were starting to burn around the destroyed cabin, and his eyes lit up with the orange flicker of the firelight. His wings folded out halfway and his eyes darted briefly to the port windows above that allowed light to pour into the cabin.

She eyed the musket he had discarded near the body of the guard. “You tried to kill me, and missed.” Her eyes flashed at him and she took a pained step forward.

There was a small explosion somewhere close and the metal below her hooves shook. A few cannon cartridges dislodged from somewhere and went clattering down the gradual incline.

He looked at her. “This ship is hydrogen—it may explode.”

“You just bombed a civilian city!” she snapped. growling, she lunged at him.

He batted her away with one forehoof and she thumped to the floor. “I did not give the order.” His accent was deep, strange.

He was going to kill her; she already knew it. He was only humoring her with her own life. She wasn’t going to show him weakness. “But you followed it!” She picked herself up again and flared her wings, hurling her body at him again, and again he threw her back to the floor.

“Do not make me kill you,” he said wearily.

She lifted herself, slower this time, struggling to pull her haunches up. “What, you can drop bombs civilians and families and foals, but you can’t kill one mare face-to-face?” She spat at him. “Coward.” A rolling wave of nausea struck her and she nearly keeled over on the spot.

He actually smiled the tiniest bit, and she oh so wished she could hit him repeatedly for it. “You are strong-willed.” He made a single step towards her. “You will be strong, and dangerous. I should kill you now, but I can not bring myself to.”

“I do not want your pity!” she hollered, shoving her muzzle in his and fighting the dizziness that threatened to overwhelm her.

“It is not pity!” he spat back. “It is respect.” His wings flared out fully. “We are enemies, and if we ever meet again it will spell the end of one of us. I hope to not regret this.” With that, he took flight. springing off with his forehooves and taking to the air.

Immediate relief washed through her, and although her heart still pounded in her head, relief made itself apparent. Her body shook as she watched him disappear into the dark and smoke. Her life hadn’t flashed before her eyes, but it might as well have.

Other ponies would be across her soon. The sounds were getting louder, and through the smoke and dark she could see movement.

“Hydrogen!” somepony yelled. “Gas is leaking. Get out!” There was a whole clamour of shouts and yells before another authoritative voice took over.

“Leave the scum! They’ll die on their own. We need to go, now!”

As Slipstream flared her wings and made flight for the windows at the top of the cabin, wincing at the pain in her rump, she would have never figured what this would tie her into.

Chapter 11 - Blending in

“Is that all you got!?” the stallion screamed at her. “My grandmother could fly faster than you with one wing tied behind her back!”

Slipstream groaned and picked herself up off the cloud she had landed it. Clouds, in general, were very soft until you crashed into them. She couldn’t help but sit up and shoot her drill instructor a pointy glare. She turned her neck right, then left, coaxing a series of pops from the joints as she recovered from the crash.

“Move, move, move!” he screamed, flying a few feet above her as he continued his mental beration, face red, spittle spraying from his lips. “I’ve seen shit that flies better than you!”

Slipstream flared her wings and gave them a strong flap. Without warning, a stab of pain shot up her spine from her right wing and she almost fell back over on her side. Growling under her breath, she raised a hoof and rubbed the shaved mane along her neck, taking a deep breath.

Again, she tried to lift off, and again a stab of pain shot through her body. Now it was a clear fact that she wasn’t getting back up on her own.

“Sweet Celestia on a fucking stripper pole, you're dumber than a box of rocks!” He lowered himself a bit farther to yell in her ear. “Move your soggy flank, right now!”

“I can’t, Sir!” she yelled, taking a moment to grit her teeth.

“Bullshit!” he hollered back. “Private Slipstream, unless I see that wing come off, you are going to fly or you are outta here!” He regained his normal height and waved towards the group of pegasi flying ahead. “One of you haul your lazy flanks over here and give Private Slipstream a hoof!” He glared down at her. “Apparently, captains are soft like that.”

The pony that came to her aid was a somewhat bulky light blue stallion. He landed beside her and smiled softly. “Which wing is it?”

“Right,” she said with a wince.

He moved over to her left side and stooped down a little. “Okay. Come on, we’ll get you back.”

Slipstream nodded. As she pulled herself onto his back, she couldn’t miss the smile he gave her from the side.

“What’s your name?” he asked after a moment. With a flap of his wings, he carried them both off the cloud surface.

Slipstream couldn't help but grin a little. “Slipstream. What’s yours?”

“Briar.”

“Food.” Slipstream groaned and rolled over as Price’s voice invaded her dreams. She squirmed on the hard floor, trying to get comfortable, though any chances of continued sleep were ended when a hoof jabbed her sharply in the bruised ribs. She hissed under her breath and sat up with much more effort than it should have taken, blinking sleep from her eyes.

“What?” She yawned, ears folding back to her head as she stretched her forelegs in the process. Her stomach grumbled at her and she gave Price a sheepish look.

The others were already up, and judging by the position of the sun just out the window, it was almost noon. They’d slept for a good five hours.

Price dropped four tin plates to the ruined floor in front of each pony and they formed a rough square in the corner of the room, Wiltings and Minnow leaning against the wall while Slipstream and Price sat proper. “I found food,” he said gruffly, a little air of satisfaction in his voice.

Slipstream kicked off the rug she had used as a blanket and immediately wished she hadn’t. The room hadn’t gotten much warmer, even with the afternoon sun. And it was just pure torture that there was a fireplace they couldn’t use for fear of being discovered.

Price thunked a can of beans as wide around as his hoof down before the four of them and stabbed a shard of glass through the top. He made quick work of the can and licked the blade clean when he was done. “Sorry if it’s cold.”

Slipstream held out her plate eagerly as he poured her a ration. “It’s food, isn’t it? I’m starving.” Her ears perked. They were honey beans, and although the honey had begun the crystallization process, they still looked pretty delectable in her ravenous state. “Where’d you get them?”

“Back of a cupboard. They’re probably ages old.”

Wiltings eyed here pile of cold beans with skepticism. “Are they safe to eat?” Her stomach growled.

Price dug into his food with a shrug. “Safer than starving.”

Slipstream found herself watching Minnow between bites as she ate her ration, which was surprisingly delicious despite the fact that they were cold and old. Minnow ate in small, timid bites, as if she were afraid she would throw up her food at any moment, which could very well be true.

She had been distant so far, with everypony. Getting burned must do that to ponies.

“Are you okay?” Slipstream decided to ask after a long moment.

Minnow looked up from her food and nodded slowly, the eye on the side she had been burnt pink and bloodshot. “Never better.” Her voice was quiet and raspy, nothing like her old one.

“What exactly… happened?” Slipstream asked, maybe a little less tactfully than she had wished. “I know you went down, but… how?”

Minnow sighed and closed her eyes. “They boarded us, grappled us and pulled my vessel to theirs.” She swallowed with a grimace of pain. “I was forced to abandon the helm, forced out of the gondola. We were compromised, so I scuttled the vessel, let loose the gasbags. I was still in the envelope when a spark set it off… all of them were… they all burned…” Twin tears streaked down her cheeks and she tenderly wiped them away. “It all gets a little cloudy from there. I was in and out of things, then I woke up in a cage.” She lowered her head to study the floorboards. “We lost… didn’t we?”

“I gave the order of retreat.” Slipstream hung her head in shame. “One hell of a commander I am.”

Wilting threw her good foreleg around Slipstream and pulled her into a soft hug from the side. “It was all you could do, Slips.”

The commander tensed at her pet name. The only pony who had ever dared to call her that was Briar. “It was the only call… but I still should have done better.”

“Slipstream,” Price interjected. “I was out there in the fighting the whole time with a rifle in my hooves. There were too many of them and not enough of us. The only fault falls on the ponies back in Canterlot who sent us on this suicide mission.”

Slipstream skimmed her mind for a new topic, anything to get away from this area. Her ears perked as she remembered something. “You came back,” she said suddenly, turning to Price.

“Of course I did. What, did you just expect me to leave you lot held up in cages?”

Slipstream shook her head. “Of course not. But how’d you do it?”

Price opened his mouth, then choked on a swallow of beans. He smacked his chest with a forehoof a few times, then swallowed with a small shake of his head. “It’s a good story,” he said in a choked voice.

“So, after I escaped that vessel we were caged on, I realized that I was in the middle of a fleet. They had spotlights and running lights flashing up like mad trying to find me. I couldn’t fly for more than a few moments out there in the wind, the bloody air was icing up my feathers. I had to get out of the air, and besides, keeping up with the airships was killing me as it was. So I made my way over to the nearest airship. It was easy as rutting to get aboard in the dark. It was just a watcher, small support vessel. I tossed out the bloke on the tailgun—never even saw me—and that’s where I got the combat armor.”

Price had since removed steel-plated armor he had worn from before, and it now sat tossed in a corner. “Armor’s heavier than you’d know,” Price said with a soft laugh, “but it was insulated and I was freezing my icy tail tail off. I’ve not an idea how the Longcoats can wear that barding and not lose mobility.” He shrugged. “So I rode on that airship ‘till they’d spotted their gunner was missing and sounded the alarm. I bailed before shots fired—hid out in the envelope atop one of the gasbags. It was maybe a few hours before they docked and I watched them ready to unload you three. I stole the explosives from a demo kit in the envelope, and I think you all know the rest from watching.”

Slipstream gave him her best, warm smile. “Congratulations. If we make it out of here, you’re promoted to the highest damn thing I’m allowed to promote you to.”

He chuckled. “After this, I’m done. This is all enough excitement for an old stallion like me. It’s time to settle down and be a part of my family again.” He turned to Wiltings. “What about you?”

Wiltings looked up. “Huh?”

“When we get out of here.”

She seemed to hesitate as if the question were attempting to trick her. “I’m going to open a restaurant and serve the best beans in Equestria.” She pushed away her empty plate, looking a little sick.

Slipstream snickered, along with the others.

Wiltings couldn’t help but crack a smile at the reaction she received. “But in all seriousness,” -she wiped away her smirk- “I’m going to head back to Baltimare and open up my own pizza place. I know it sounds silly, but it’s a dream. And hey, if I survive this, I might as well chase a dream; that and I’ll probably get a bonus big enough to swim in.”

Slipstream turned to Minnow. “What about you?”

The charred mare actually gave the smallest of brittle smirks. “Skin grafts.”

They didn’t laugh as much as that one.

Minnow let the smirk fade off into a distant smile. “I’m going to find that special somepony and have that foal I’ve always wanted.” Her eyes drifted up to the ceiling on their own accord. “If it’s a filly, I’m going to name her Silver, and if it’s a colt… well, I’ll just have to get creative.”

The four ponies shared a silence that left them smiling for a moment. Slipstream silently hoped the conversation would move on without reaching her. She didn’t want to give her answer, mostly because she didn’t have one. The war was all she knew; without it, what would she do? Best bets were she’d go back to living by herself, working day to day and having some fun on the weekends. But she was getting older and she didn’t have many years of that left.

“Slipstream,” Minnow said after a moment.

She looked up. “Yeah?”

“Could I ask…” She paused, seeming to fight a battle with herself. “I know my entire right side is charred. I know it’s going to get worse as the flesh dies… I haven’t seen a mirror yet. Is… is my face okay?” She turned her head to the left.

Slipstream looked, looked closely for the first time. Minnow had lost all of her eyelashes and a good amount of the hair from her right ear. The right side of her face had gotten it, not nearly as bad as her body, but it had gotten cooked. The very distinct pattern of the grated catwalk had been burnt faintly into her face, red in the middle and black around the edges. It ran up her neck where her mane had burned away and across most of the side of her face.

Minnow winced and closed her eyes, and Slipstream realized she had been staring for much too long. “I-it’s bad, isn’t it?” she whimpered.

“It’s probably going to scar, but you’ll keep the flesh and all the hair should grow back.”

A more awkward silence fell this time, the occupants of the room hovering in tension around the burnt mare, none sure whether they should speak and break the mourning silence.

Minnow was the one to break the trance. She pinched her eyes tight shut and lowered her head. “No stallion is ever going to want a mare who looks like me.”

Slipstream winced at the mare’s doused tone. “Hey... that’s not true.”

Minnow looked up and glared. “Right, let me reword that—no stallion that isn’t a complete nutcase is going to want me!” She choked on something in her throat and made a rather unsightly motion of clearing it.

“Minnow, if he cares, if he really cares, he won’t care about how you look.” Slipstream patted the mare on her unburnt shoulder. “You’ll find one.”

Minnow sighed and looked up. It was a sad smile, but an accepting one nonetheless. “Thanks, Commander.”

“Name’s Slipstream.” She returned the smile. “We’re all equals here.”

During their talk, Price had ambled his way over to the corner window. “We can’t stay here. We’re too close to the airfield and these beans were hardly what my stomach needed.”

Slipstream forced herself to her hooves and crossed the creaky floorboards to him. “Yeah, but we can’t just go prancing down the street. We look different. Some of those ponies have coats so thick they look like they’re wearing rugs. We’re too lean and too smooth coatwise.”

“There are some short-coated ones.”

“Even if we could pass with short coats, they’ve got stronger hindquarters and thicker necks. Wiltings might get away with blending in, but we’re going to look out of place out there. I’ve only seen civilians on the streets but if we draw their eyes I bet the guards come next.”

Wiltings perked her ears. “Was it just me, or were the streets too empty yesterday for a city this size?”

Price ignored her, instead shooting Slipstream a sideways grin. “I’ve got an idea.”

“This is ridiculous,” Slipstream hissed.

Price looked over at her and chuckled. “You look like a shaggy dog.” He gave his head a little shake. “Look, Slipstream, we’re just four ponies heading to the market to sell rugs.”

They had gathered up every rug and window curtain in the old house and left looking like bundles of cloth. Minnow carried the least for obvious reasons, though they had still tried to conceal her burns the best they could; it was too much of an identifying characteristic to let go. She had cried silently as they’d draped the diamond patterned rug across her back.

Still, rugs. How Price came up with an idea as ridiculous as it was effective, she would never know.

“Do you know how much we stick out?” she hissed, eyes darting around as they strode down the near-deserted street.

Where is everypony?

Price rolled his eyes at her. “This place screams poverty like no other.”

A pair of dirty foals ran by, giggling like mad, a rucksack clamped in the jaws of the lead one. An old stallion hobbled after them, summoning up insults that Slipstream assumed was Longcoat for ‘you’re all dead’.

Price grinned at the sight. “Case in point.” He turned his head towards the middle of the street, keeping it low under the rugs he wore over his back and neck. “I doubt if there’s an authority figure within a quarter mile of here.”

Slipstream perked her ears. All they had to do was find food, then find a place to hide... and do what? Wait until the war was over? Yeah right. They needed to fabricate a plan that would get them out of this ash-heap of a city and to safety. Even then, what were they going to do, walk to Canterlot? The Crystal Kingdom was closer, but the terrain was much more difficult and Cadance would throw an almighty fit if Equestria brought the war to them. There was a reason they had stayed out of the war; it wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, it was simply that they couldn’t. The Crystal Ponies had simply been through too much after the whole Sombra thing to need any more problems. The Crystal Kingdom remained isolated, which meant that they were not an option.

Well, they were certainly drawing attention, but none of it seemed to be negative. And while heading further into the city seemed suicidal, it made sense. The Longcoats would have set up barriers and checks all around the city. In theory, the Longcoats would be expecting them to try to escape. And really, what ponies in their right mind would run into the heat?

A shadow washed over them in the afternoon sun as an airship passed low overhead, a trail of black smoke in its wake.

“Would you look at that,” Wiltings muttered, eyes drifting upwards. “Remember the days when those flew in Equestria?”

Like the ones she had seen from the docking platform, the vessel resembled a sailing ship, minus the mast and sails, hung above was a dirty, gray gasbag. It swayed and creaked in the wind as the two propellers whooshed it on, steam hissing from the escape valves.

“I remember flying one of them.” Slipstream chuckled. “I thought it was the most advanced piece of technology I’d ever seen... Now they’re practically obsolete.”

Things were starting to get a little tense. Slipstream could feel every eye on her. She swiveled her ears, trying to catch snippets of conversation to see if they were a centerpiece. She picked up a snatch of conversation from two stallions as they trotted alongside at a faster pace.

“Any news on the revolution?” one asked in a rusty tone, head hung low as if the subject were a punishable one.

“What’s there to be news on?” the other asked shortly.

“How much longer do you think they’ll last under the queen’s army?”

“Not long. I tell you, they’re going to bite it soon.”

Price gave Slipstream a nudge. “You hear that?”

“About the resistance?” She snapped out of observation mode and turned her attention back to Price.

He nodded. “I think there’s more to this than we know.”

Slipstream would have replied, had she not bumped directly into a furry chest. She found herself staring at a grimy, yellow unicorn stallion.

“Good day to you lot,” he said in a cheerful voice.

Slipstream bowed her head in acknowledgement. “Good day,” she muttered.

The stallion furrowed his brows at the four of them in confusion. “What doing with all the carpets?”

Slipstream recalled the stallions back at the loading dock and tried best to emulate how they had sounded. “Sellin’em,” she grunted.

The unicorn immediately levitated a small sack from around his neck, eyes drifting over their assortment. “Oh, how much for the one with the frizzle?”

She looked back to the particular rug on Price’s back that the stallion was eyeing. “Um, five b—” She had almost said bits. “F-five.” The rug wasn’t exactly in good shape. It sounded fair.

The unicorn’s eyes practically shot open. “Five shards you say!?” Without a moment of hesitation, he levitated five oblong silver coins from the little sack he’d produced. He lifted Slipstream’s forehoof with his own, slapped them into her possession, then levitated the rug of his own accord and gave her a bow worthy of a princess. “Thank you for your service.” He turned tail and made a fast pace away, shaking his head. “Jokes must be crazy. Five shards.”

The last thing Slipstream heard was his snicker as he disappeared back into the crowd.

“Too low,” Price hissed. “That was way too low.”

Slipstream eyed the grimy coins she had received. “That rug had more holes in it than swiss cheese.

“Still, raise your prices. We don’t want a mob on us.”

“Right...” She pocketed the five bits—no, shards. “Let’s just hope nopony else wants to buy something from us.”

Three hours had gone by in a fly. When one didn’t even have time to think, things went that way. The foursome was now much farther into the city, huddled up in the corner of an alley between a dumpster and a large brick building. They had laid out their four remaining rugs on the ground simply to avoid sitting in ash. It seemed rather silly, but rugs must have been in very high demand. Price had swiped them a head of lettuce—how the Longcoats grew it in this environment, she would never know—and it was now proving as a rather delectable meal.

Slipstream hefted the bag of shards she had been paid for the rugs that they had sold, a little less than willingly. It had occurred to her that the house they had stolen them from might have been owned and they had probably robbed a pony silly. The bag contained roughly three hundred shards, which had seemed like a lot until she’d learned that a single loaf of bread was about a hundred and twenty shards. As far as she could tell, one Equestrian bit was worth about forty.

“Okay, intel time,” Wiltings said, hugging the rug she and Minnow shared as a blanket closer to her. “That stallion said this city is Praeclarus, whatever that means. We know that they use ‘shards’ for currency. But, what do they call themselves?”

Price turned his eye on her. “What do you mean?”

Wiltings stopped fidgeting with the frazzle on the carpet to give him her full attention. “I highly doubt they call themselves Longcoats. Chances are they have a name like us, like how we’re Equestrians.”

Minnow cleared her throat for attention. “Well, according to Equestrian history, all ponies are Equestrians.

Slipstream frowned. “But remember, they call us Equestrians, which only means that they go by a different title.

Minnow only closed her eyes and slowly shook her head. “Celestia’s rein spans everywhere. She even has influence in zebra lands, did have some over the griffons until things got tense with them... How did it never make it here? Why was this place never on any maps? Why weren’t these ponies ever noted in history? Who are they? Where do they come from?”

Wiltings seemed to be joining in on the bafflement. “Maybe they were at some time. I mean, they speak our language, they seem to share most of our customs and culture. Maybe we just... forgot about them?”

Price put the kibosh on both of them. “There is no way you can just forget about an entire region! There’s got to be something more going on here.”

“I believe it,” Slipstream argued. “Look at how far north we are. I’m freezing my tail off here. A pony would have to be crazy to come this far, let alone live here. Air travel is a recent advancement, and there’s no way you’d be able to get a railroad all the way out here. I can see how these ponies were completely overlooked.”

Price huffed. “Bloody brilliant. We’ve found snowy Atlantis.”

Slipstream nodded towards him. “Precisely. Only this Atlantis doesn’t want to stay hidden anymore, and it wants something from us.”

“Resources?” Minnow suggested.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Slipstream said. “But why not ask? Why not try to negotiate first? Equestria would have been happy to set up a trade route. Instead, they directly attacked the capital. There’s something else they want, we’ve known this since the day they bombed us.”

Price huffed. “Because they’re strong enough to beat us in an air war. He who controls the air controls the ground. Why trade when you can take?”

Slipstream groaned and clasped her head in her forehooves. “I’m a fleet commander, not a wartime specialist.” She hung her head. “I’m just a mare with more flash-judgement than brains.”

Price shook his head at her self-beration. “The rug idea’s wearing out. I never expected we’d actually end up bartering them off. Now that we’re not packing them around by the bundle, if we go back out there wearing a rug each we’re just going to look like a band of gypsies.”

Slipstream batted a lump of coal towards him. “What, you don’t know how to tell the future?” She frowned at the mark on her hoof the coal had left and wiped it on her other foreleg, leaving a streak of gray across her silver coat.

Price watched her with a small grin, mouth opening for a reply. “Slipstream, you’re a genius.” He scooped up the bit of coal in his hoof and ambled over to her.

“Excuse m—” She let out a yell of discontent and turned her head away as he smeared her with coal dust. “Price!?”

He shoved the piece of coal back in her forehoof, then trotted over to a pile of ash and embers that had been dumped from an ashtrap on the second story of the building proper. “A lot of the ponies here must work at coal plants.” With a knowing smile, he scooped up a hoof-full of ash and hurled it at Slipstream.

She got up a hoof in time to cover her face, but the rest of her was layered with soot. Snarling, she jumped to her hooves, ready to play the commander card. “Price, what the—” Her words stuck in her throat and a slow smile spread across her face.

Price grinned back. “Well it’s about time you caught o—” Slipstream hit him square in the chest like a sack of winged bricks and they both fell backwards into the heap of ashes. Slipstream tried to keep on top of the stallion as he squirmed, but he was stronger than she was, younger and faster too. He writhed and kicked below her, churning up a black cloud of soot that billowed around them as Slipstream beat her wings to keep her balance. Her resistance was only short lived. In one quick move, Price grasped one of her forehooves and threw her onto her back. Firmly, but not roughly, her body was yanked around until she was pinned on her belly with a face full of soot. Price’s firm weight pressed down on her from behind.

“Two years combat training,” he murmured smugly in her ear.

Slipstream coughed up a mouthful of soot and tried to shrug him off. “Get off you lump!”

Price released her and pulled her up to her hooves. “You put up a good fight.”

“I’m not as young as I used to be,” she replied with a small sigh. “If I didn’t have a few years on you I’d have smeared the ground with your face.”

Wiltings sat back, cackling as the dust settled around them. “Good show you two!” She stopped to breathe as Minnow wheezed beside her, face contorted in laughter as she leaned on Wiltings for support. “Though now you two look like a couple of ash babies.”

Slipstream looked down at her coat. Her normal sleek, silver coat was ruffled and smeared with black soot and ash. Her mane and tail were just as bad, the crimson color hidden by black. “How is it?” she asked. “Do we look like Longcoats?”

Wiltings sat up. “I can barely recognize you.” Her eyes widened as Price and Slipstream grinned at one another. “What?”

Slipstream took a step forward, scooping up a pile of ash, Price following suite. “Your turn.”

Wiltings slumped and rolled her eyes.

Chapter 12 - Word of the Wind

Pre note: This chapter is a little more gruesome than the previous, depicting mild scenes of torture and interrogation. This chapter is not essential to the storyline and may be skipped if need be.

Equestrian intelligence agent West Winds had always been a tough cookie. Off duty, she was known to her friends as the pony you could share anything with and the mare you never wanted to sit across from at the poker table. It simply wasn’t in her nature to betray information. Even liquored off her wits, she kept her mouth as tight as a vice when it came to what was said behind closed doors.

It was for this reason that Princess Celestia had specifically seeked her out once the war had started. West Winds had been willing, of course. The pay was good and the chance at excitement was one to rival anything she could have ever amounted to in her life. Sometimes, things were just meant to be. She was meant to be a snoop and a safeguard, to know everything and tell of nothing unless it was at the benefit of Equestria and its ponies.

Training had been long, a whopping three and a half years long, and not a single day of it had been a stroll in the park. For three and a half years, she had undergone random, but almost bi-weekly stress and mental pressure scenarios in order to test her ability to cope in a massive range of situations. On top of this she had received pain endurance training daily, minus Sundays. She had been waterboarded more times than she could count, trained in the best methods to avoid panic and to put aside pain, taught to block magical memory intrusion spells, and even steal memories for herself. She still held almost every academy record for longest time in torture based scenarios, all minus a particular stillness test where said pony is placed within a small, enclosed space and surrounded with sharp objects. Everypony had to have some sort of a minor phobia or intolerance. West Winds’ was the lack of ability to remain still, sadly. Her time there was only two hours.

It was because of this training that West Winds held her head high as she was led by four armed guards to a rather large single story building that took up almost two blocks of the massive Longcoat city. There was no label above the door, nor markings of any sort apart from the emblem of an icy swirl embezzled beside one of the double doors. Obviously, it was government property, and probably a shady branch at that.

They had brought her to their city. Had she not been captured and was still on her reconnaissance mission, to come across this place would have been a dream come true. But this was rather grim. They had not blindfolded her, had not bothered to hide anything from her, which only meant they never intended her to leave. It didn’t matter her training, she was still scared, and she had every right to be.

There were good chances this is where she would die. The thought was cold in her mind, though not panicky. It manifested as a churning in her gut that made her want to cough up butterflies.

She was herded through the doors of the building and down a series of hallways. Left, right, right, left, through a door, then another left. She made a note of it. Finally, they entered a room that could have only been near the back of the building.

It was about as cliche as a capture and interrogation could be. She was set down in a square room with a single rectangular, metal table before her in the perfect middle of the room. The walls were white, and to her direct left a sheet of one-way glass covered most of the smooth surface.

The door bwonged close menacingly, and then she was alone.

Quickly and as discreetly as possible, West Winds swept her eyes over the scene. There were two fluorescents that hung from two inch chains on the roof and that was literally the room’s only trait. They buzzed quite loudly; she took particular note of this. The buzzing was intentional, created by a circuit in a small box on top of each light. There were most likely microphones hidden about to catch any ramblings or self-reassurances she would make to herself, but of course, she wouldn’t utter a peep. They were watching her behind the glass, of this there was a one hundred percent surety in her mind. It was most likely they were studying her body language and reaction to the room as to determine how best to deal with her.

And who said school didn’t pay off?

Her eyes fell on her own reflection in the glass. An unhealthy, scrawny, steel gray mare looked back at her with a tiny smile from the corner of her mouth. There was an enchanted ring clipped and epoxied to the base of her horn to prevent her use of magic. Her short and raggedy auburn mane that shared in tamer resemblance of Shirley Temple’s hung around her ears and swished down the back of her neck. Her hazel eyes flashed. The mare looked scared. Her body language was calm and contrived, but her eyes screamed. Her cutie mark—a pair of scissors cutting a dotted line—was half obscured by her medium length tail. She was usually proud of that mark, but not today.

“They’re going to kill you no matter what,” she said to her reflection. Don’t tell them anything.

It was a full hour—a suspense tactic—before the door opened and in stepped a pine green stallion. He wore thin, square reading glasses—a psychological reassurance in character—and kept his brown mane short and messy, just like her.

He sat down across from her as if they were having casual lunch and gave her a little bow of his head. “Good day,” he said in almost perfect accent.

“State your business,” she said flatly. The Longcoats were trying too hard. They should have sent in a real interrogator and not this guppie. Either they had underestimated her or they were testing her.

He frowned at her, tapping his forehooves together then patting down his mane. “Well...” He began to talk, but West Winds didn’t focus on what he was saying; her eyes were watching the tiny flecks of his brown mane as they fluttered to the tabletop.

“Why did you cut your mane?” she asked firmly, cutting him off mid-sentence.

He blinked a single time. “Excuse me?”

“Well for one, you’ve recently cut your mane because it’s flaking.” West Winds reared up and placed both forehooves atop the table, leaning towards her interrogator. “To add to that, your mane doesn’t naturally stand like that. It used to be long and the ends are flaked because you heated it too soon.” She sat back with a smug expression. “And you smell like odorless hairspray.” She turned her head to the glass. “My point is, I want you to talk to me and stop playing these stupid phycology games.”

The stallion who sat across from her turned his head towards the glass and gave his head a shake. Shrugging, he stood up and left the room without a word, leaving West Winds to look after him and wonder whether she should have taken a more subtle approach.

Her request was answered a second later as a blue mare burst into the room, her long coat bristling. West Winds’ eyes found their way to the Longcoat’s rump and her cutie mark of a snake wound around an upraised and disembodied forehoof.

“How much training have you received?” the mare asked in an equally flat, accented voice, stopping at the other end of the table.

West Winds shrugged. “More than you.”

The blue mare nodded in submission. “So you and I both know that verbal interrogation will provide nothing?” Her gaze hardened. “You send a radio broadcast to your government from deep within our territory using our own broadcasters.”

West Wings cracked a cheeky grin. “Creative, no?”

“Yes, well your plan may have worked better had you used a better encryption.”

“So you broke it?” She swallowed her worry.

The Equestrian mare’s grin widened. “Yes, we did.” The blue mare flicked one ear. “The language you spoke does not exist on record.”

West Winds hid her surprise with a casual twitch of her jaw. She had relayed the message in Zebra just as an extra precaution. The encryption she had been provided with by Celestia herself was supposed to be unbreakable, but the language barrier had been added as a small backup. So it seemed she had come upon a bout of luck that the Longcoats could not identify zebra, nor they knew it existed.

“Because I made it up,” she snapped. “Do you think I’m so stupid as to rely only on an encryption?”

“So what you were sending was important?” The mare’s eyes flashed.

West Winds’ mind surged with panic for a short second. She was getting cocky. She was letting things slip. She had gone through years of training for this and she was botching it because she was getting cocky!

“For all you know I could have been sending a telegram.” She raised her hooves like looking at a little card and closed one eye. “Dear Equestria, this place sucks like a brothel mare and the air is as cold as my grandmother’s snatch, wish you were here.”

“You have a sense of humor.” The mare sat down. “Tell me. You say you are a professional, but you have already revealed that the information you have sent is of top priority. You have made mistake after mistake and you have only been in our custody for thirteen hours.” She bared her teeth. “We will snap you like a twig.”

West Winds felt her heart sinking. The mare was making a point; she had screwed up, big time. She had allowed the message to be snatched by the enemy, she had allowed herself to be captured, she had allowed this mare to read her like a book, and she had let slip enough information to lead the enemy to press her for more. Some sort of a professional she was.

A certain resolve set itself in her mind right then. She would reveal nothing more.

The mare had watched the mental debacle with a small smirk. “You do know the next step if verbal interrogation fails to yield your secrets?”

“Torture,” West Winds answered with a small twitch of her right ear.

The mare nodded. “This can be made easy.” She leveled her gaze. “Because no matter what, agent West Winds, we will break you.”

They knew her name! How had they found out her name? “I will not speak.” Despite the fact that torture did not sound inviting, she held her ground. This was no training exercise; the fate of the war rested upon her shoulders. The info she had sent in the transmission could very well turn the war. The date was soon. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut for long enough.

The blue mare slumped and shook her head. “I like you. I really do.” She gave her hoof a swift tap on the table. “I do not wish for us to be in this war, but what is, is what is. And maybe you and I could be friends under different conditions.” She stood up and turned to face the glass. “Do what you must with her. What she sent is very important to her. Radio in and inform them of the high risk until this is resolved.”

The door slammed open and two stallion Longcoats tromped in. West Winds struggled a little as they jerked her around and then marched her towards the door.

“Do not let her die,” the blue mare said after them. “We need what she knows.”

That was the second to last time West Winds had seen the blue mare from the interrogation room, and as they led her away down the narrow hall to where Celestia didn’t even know, she would have wished she had spoken right then and there. But no, she had started the game, and would stay with it as long as she could.

The days to follow went on like months, although, she wasn’t even sure of the days. With no clocks nor sunlight to see by, time became nothing but a foreign object. Time was punctuated by events, and there were a lot of events.

The Longcoats used different methods of physical interrogation that her academy had trained her on the basis of. It was apparent after two hours of magically assaulting her mind that the memories could not be obtained from her by force, so they started immediately with physical abuse.

It was simple enough. She was shackled to a wall and smacked around by a burly mare who kept asking her questions that resembled, “Tell us what you sent”. That had gone on for maybe an hour, until the mare was tired, and West Winds’ chest and face had gone the color red.

Next they poked needles into her spine. Unlike the burly mare and her iron horseshoes, a stallion in wide-rimmed spectacles performed this. He would strike nerves she didn’t know existed and lean in close and hiss vulgar things in her ear. It was so much worse than what the mare had done. He would poke one way and she would stop feeling her legs, then the other and she’d scream in pain as a migraine ripped her skull in half. Though she refused to budge. Nothing would get her to speak. She had to keep telling herself that they wouldn’t need her anymore if she told them, and then she would die. She contemplated lying about what was said in the message, making it believable, but they were smarter than that; they would use truth spells on her.

Soon the stallion with the needles left her and she was given a break. It must have been at least three or four hours, but for all that it mattered, it might as well have been a minute.

They started to pull her teeth out next. A cute little mare with a white mane and sharp brows performed the task with a very strong horn and a pair of needlenose pliers. She would ask West Winds for the information she wanted, wait four seconds, then pull and ask again. After about four or five of these, the tooth would come out and she was then forced to swallow it upon failing to answer the same question.

West Winds found herself hating her trainers more and more. They had taught her to deal with pain and avoid physiological games. Having one’s teeth pulled out was a whole new kind of pain. The Longcoats were playing no games; they were as blunt and straightforward as a baseball bat. The message was clear: “Tell us or more pain you shall receive.”

It was six teeth later—two molars near the back and the four that had once belonged to her smile now nestled in her stomach—that the needlenose pliers mare shook her head with an amused smile.

West Winds was carried away, in too much agony to carry her own weight.

She was given time to recover, possibly a good half a day. West Winds didn’t really know; the time had been spent in and out of nightmarish sleep.

Next they let the stallions have at her. For anypony this would have been a problem; for West Winds, however, it was too much. She considered herself specifically a mare’s mare, and had stayed that way since birth. Both of them were rather large, quiet. She had cried, tried to ignore it though was purely unable to. When they were done, she might as well have been dead. She had lost everything.

Again, she was left alone, and in that time the pitifulness and sadness transformed into anger. She yelled, shouted, cursed the ponies she knew were listening in on microphones to oblivion. It was all she could do, though nothing helped against the anger. She wanted them all dead, wanted to do nothing more than line up every Longcoat to ever live and slit their throats one by one.

Half of this was Equestria’s fault, for not training her properly, for sending her on this mission. Who in their right mind would trust a mare with such weight on her shoulders? Still, she was sworn to Equestria, and all she had to do was hold out a little longer. A little longer and the war would be over. She’d be saved and the war would be over and every Longcoat would rot in a ditch.

They pulled more teeth, though this time West Winds wasn’t able to count. She passed out after the first one. They weren’t even asking her the questions anymore. They were only hurting. Why did they want to hurt her?

After another long period of confinement in her little room, a stallion came in and told her that she was being taken to the quiet room. She hid from his approach, cowered in a corner. Stallions could no longer be trusted, not after what they’d done to her.

Another one came in and they took her anyways, no matter how much she squirmed and screamed.

The quiet room was the worst.

The. Very. Worst.

Everything seemed pretty ordinary as the door was closed and West Winds was left to sit in the only chair available, bolted down in the center of the room. She’d seen something like it before. Fiberglass wedges covered the walls, specifically designed to absorb sound.

It took less than ten minutes for things to get bad.

She could hear her own heartbeat. She turned her head and the very audible creak of her muscles met her ears. Her hungry stomach gurgled and she swallowed, the sound of her throat working almost deafening in her head. A wave of nausea hit her and she doubled over, gagging. Nothing about this was right.

Waterboarding: she could handle that. Teeth pulling: that too, even if it was life scarring. Anything but the sound of her own fucking heartbeat! She whimpered and the sound penetrated the silence. Her stomach gave another angry growl and she clutched her hooves over it. There was no noise, nothing! It was just her.

She screamed and pounded the door, ears ringing in enervation. “Let me out!” she slurred around missing teeth.

It was hopeless. She backed away from the door, ears folded flat to her head. “Please...” She backed herself into a corner and curled into a ball. They were all watching her no doubt, laughing, the stallions.

She began to count the seconds, hiding her head in the crook of a forehoof. Somewhere around five minutes she started to hear things, other voices. She fumbled the count twice, but at somewhere around ten minutes she could feel them too. They stood all around her, laughing, poking at her, judging.

She exploded to her hooves, swinging out at them with bruised forelegs.

They weren’t there. But their voices were. West Winds bared her teeth and snapped at them, backing herself up into the corner. They wanted to hurt her more. She wouldn’t let them. She’d been trained to take enough abuse for six ponies, but this had gone too far. They had pushed her past her limits.

Eyes going unfocused, she fell to her rump and swallowed. No more. She would do anything, anything to stop the voices.

Then the door opened.

West Winds screamed and threw herself into the corner. It was another one of the stallions here to hurt her. But it wasn’t a stallion. It was the blue mare from the interrogation room. She had been nice; she wouldn’t hurt her.

The mare cracked a warm smile and reared up to spread her forehooves.

West Winds bawled and threw herself into the mare’s embrace. She was so warm, and soft. And West Winds knew, that here, in this mare’s grasp, everything would be alright. It had to be.

“Shhh,” the blue mare hummed softly. “I can make it all go away.”

The words were true; they had to be. If they weren’t she might as well be dead. West Winds’ breath hitched and she sobbed into the mare’s neck.

“On one condition,” the blue mare spouted coldly.

West Winds’ ears perked. “A-anything!” At least the room wasn’t so quiet with the door open.

“Tell me about the broadcast and it will all go away.”

She winced and shook her head. “N-no!” Her eyes widened as a metal device was placed over her head, two magical coils pointed at either temple. “I can’t.”

“It’s okay,” the mare purred, giving West Winds a soft pat on the back. “You don’t have to say anything. Just think, let it be in your mind. You’ll hold your vow.” She tossed a look over her head to a short stallion with glasses that stood just outside the door, a headset slung around his neck as he fidgeted with a few knobs on a glowing device full of magical tubes and coils. He looked up and gave her a nod.

West Winds shook her head again, closing her eyes as a vibrative humming filled her head. “No...”

“This is the wind,” West Winds said in a hushed voice. “Think nothing of it.”

“How’d you get this channel?” a stallion demanded back, though West Winds knew this was the confirmation signal.

Though she spoke in zebra, her own mind did the translation for her, “I have in my possession, knowledge that could severely cripple the Longcoat fleet.”

The channel beeped once. It was a sign of acknowledgement.

She continued. “Starting at zero-hundred hours in precisely fifteen days is a Longcoat Celebration. The most I’ve learned that it has something to do with an authority figure, but it’s big. Their entire military staff will be in attendance and all airships will be docked at...” She read of a series of coordinates. “Number of airships is unknown, but the skies will be unguarded.”

The channel beeped twice, then the stallion came back on. “Terminate this transmission at once or you will be fined by Equestrian law.” He paused. “Keep your head in the clouds.”

West Winds’ heart surged. That was the sign. She would receive a set of coordinates to meet a team to get her out of here. Mission successful.

The transmission paused.

West Winds sat back and grinned. “West Winds,” she cheered quietly under her breath. “Secret spy and savior of Equestria!”

She snapped out of the memory drooling like a dog. The blue mare smirked down at her and removed the device from her head. “Did we get it?” she asked the stallion.

He levitated a brightly-glowing tube of purple light from machine, the air around it fizzling and distorted. “Got it.”

West Winds rubbed her forehoof across her snout, blood smearing her coat from both nostrils. What had they just done? What had she done? Had they seen her memory!?

The blue mare flicked her tail. “She is no longer needed. Take her to solitary, basic rations. She does not leave.”

West Winds could only scream out in rage and fear as she was dragged away. It wasn’t right. She had never been cut out for this. She had failed.

She had failed Equestria.

The evacuation of West Winds had initially been arranged to take place two days before the attack in order to confirm her intelligence prior to the operation, but a misfiling in paperwork had assigned a team that did not exist to the operation. West Winds was never picked up. Even with lack of intel, Celestia had given the go-ahead in desperation.

Five days after West Winds’ unknown breach of silence, Equestria’s aerial fleet carried out the first ever attack on Longcoat territory, led by the undefeated Commander Slipstream. They were supposed to have come across a field of docked airships, but instead they had met an army.

Chapter 10 - Out of The Icebox And Into The Storm

Golden sunlight cast itself across the floor of Slipstream’s cage as the engines of the Longcoat vessel hummed at an idle. Through the vertical slash in the siding of the storage bay, she could spot nothing but the golden shine of the sunrise. The light did serve one purpose, however; she could now see Minnow and Wiltings, both asleep.

Minnow had curled herself into a tight ball, the remainder of her tail hiding her muzzle and eyes from view. Wiltings had slumped against the bars in a sitting position, her head tilted back and mouth ajar as she breathed heavily.

Shouts and yells of ponies reached her ears over the gentle sounds of the engines. She had spent too much time as a docking hand not to know the scenario. They were landing the airship.

Up until this point, the space around her had been filled with a morbid sense, the kind that made you want to curl into a ball in a dark corner and pretend life wasn’t real. Now the feeling was panic. She was a filly caught shooting spit wads in the hall sent on a treck to the principal’s office. Here she was now, staring into the frosted glass that was the door to death, the cold, hard realization that she had been caught rooting into her soul and sucking the life out of it. Any minute he would open the door and life as she knew it would end.

The floor below her hooves bumped softly to the assumed ground and a moment later the engines began to shut off one by one.

Wiltings stirred. “Wha... what is it?” She lifted her head and stared around with puffy eyes. Wincing, she put her forehooves on her head and twisted it around, forcing a collection of meaty pops from her vertebrae that sent a shiver down Slipstream’s spine.

“We’ve landed.”

Wiltings yawned and sat up.

“What... it’s morning?” She twisted her head the other way and got two more pops, much to SLipstream’s discontent. She huffed out a breath of steam and hugged her forehooves close to herself. “It’s colder than the outskirts of the blasted Crystal Kingdom in here.”

Slipstream shivered. “Why’d you have to bring it up?” She huffed and rubbed her hooves together. “Now I’m thinking about being cold all over again.”

Wiltings shrugged. “Just be glad they let us keep the jackets.” She looked down to her still-swollen foreleg. “And my brace...”

“So they can bury us in them,” she muttered under her breath. She inhaled sharply as three hard knocks reverberated from the outer wall. A second later twin lines of blinding light appeared as a door on the starboard wall began to open with a squeal. The hinges protested as it dropped and met the ground without resistance, a resonating bang echoing through the cargo bay.

Slipstream covered her eyes with a forehoof, hiding from the rays of warm sunshine. The brightness fogged her eyes, made them water, and when she closed them a green overlay remained, strongest whenever she blinked.

Two ponies stepped into view, nothing but silhouettes of black. “This them?” one asked in a deep voice.

The other grunted. “Be them. Orders say to move.”

Slipstream listened with interest as they spoke. They seemed to cut their sentences in half lengthwise, only using words necessary for understanding. They spoke much unlike the commander she remembered.

She tried to glue the pieces together in her head. It was most likely they were the blue-collar type if they were unloading a docked airship, so it was possible that what they were speaking was a working-class accent.

Another pony came forth dragging a cart behind him. “Stop wase’n time.” He struggled to pull the cart up the ramp and the other two moved up to help him. “T’want to eat this hour.”

Slipstream scrunched up her face as the burly, deep-voiced one moved up to her cage. He smelt like a dead fish marinated in rotten meat. “Look’t this one.” Slipstream tensed as he and the other stallion lifted her cage into the air and hurled it onto the cart as unceremoniously as possible. “She’s thin as my neck.” He laughed as his eyes looked over her.

Slipstream steadied herself in the cage and moved away from him, pressing against the bars on the opposite side.

The other stallion laughed as well. “Don’ye get any ideas.” He prodded Slipstream’s rump through the bars and the mare gave an eep, hopping away in repulse. “You’d split’er in two.”

Slipstream swallowed the bile rising in her throat as the two chortled and moved away. Stallions had always joked around with that kind of stuff, and usually it was all in good sport—it was their nature. But this... they weren’t stallions—they were big, furry worksponies who could probably snap her like a toothpic. She knew all too well how much big stallions liked lithe mares. She gagged again and found herself wishing she were ugly and built like a refrigerator.

Wiltings’ cage clattered down next to her own, and Minnow’s was tossed somewhere on top.

The pony who had hauled in the cart waved his hoof at the two stallions. “I’ll take them. Unload the boxes.”

Now that the stallion that smelt like death was no longer near her, Slipstream got a good whiff of the environment. Coal. She smelt coal like one often did aboard Equestrian passenger trains.

The stallion struggled with their cart for a moment before pulling it to a start and riding up on the handle as it rolled down the airship ramp. The wheels thudded to the steel ground of the loading dock and the stallion hopped back to the ground.

Slipstream peered into the light, eyes still adjusting. “Can’t see a thing.”

Wiltings seemed to be going through the realization phase now, for she held herself close. “What do we do?”

The golden white of the sun had become somewhat bearable now and Slipstream used this time to look around, still blinking rapidly.

The sun peeked just over snowcapped mountains in the distance, casting its rays across the valley. After a moment, she realized that they had been unloaded atop a multi-story docking tower, maybe a good ten stories into the air.

Her jaw fell open. She had expected civilization, but nothing like this. Crowded buildings spanned on for miles in all directions, almost every other sporting a chiney pouring black smoke. Away, far in the distance, six massive smoke stacks spired into the air, smoke as black as plain coffee pouring from the unfiltered tops and spreading out in the air as a thick sheen of yellow smog.

It was apparent why she smelt coal. “Sweet Celestia...”

Wiltings looked just as shocked. “It’s massive.”

Dirty-looking non-rigid airships floated around above the city, wooden structures slightly resembling sea ships suspended from sooty gasbags.

Slipstream opened her mouth to speak, but her first attempt was silence. “What...” She closed her eyes for a good four seconds before opening them again. “Everything’s coal...”

Wiltings only shook her head as the cart they were on continued to roll across the platform. “Equestria’s already advancing from the coal age... it’s old technology.” Her eyes drifted from the astonishing sight and over to Slipstream. “I thought they were more advanced than us?”

Slipstream shook her head. Far in the distance, she spotted a thin line traveling lengthwise down a mountainside, a black jet of smoke rising into the air from the front. “Coal is cheaper.”

“But look at this place!” she hissed under her breath. “It’s raining ash! They’ve over-stressed the environment.”

Slipstream nodded in agreement. Though all the roofs of the buildings were covered in snow, they were varying colors of yellow or gray. “Celestia... look at that though. There’s more than we could have ever thought. I doubt this is the only city!”

The pony pulling the cart gave Slipstream’s cage a light smack. “Prisoners are not supposed to talk.” He spoke slowly, as if he were thinking about his words.

Slipstream turned towards him and found herself staring at his rump as he pulled from the harness collar. “Are there more?”

He looked back at her, showing his trim face and thick blue coat. “There are more.” He looked away. “They will kill me if I make speak with prisoners.” He gave his head a shake. “Don’t.” He rolled the over the crest of a platform and stopped. Reaching over, he cranked a wheel around and the valve above it gave a hiss. With a little jolt, the platform he and the cart was on began to lower.

She pressed anyways. “What is this place?”

He grunted and looked towards the sun. “Praeclarus.”

Slipstream racked her mind and tried to bring herself back to school where she had learned the bases of pony language. It had something to do with magnificence. Looking back to the stallion, she noticed for the first time the short blade strapped to his underbelly. He was armed, most likely for the chance they tried to escape. He was giving off more of a guard aura than a yard worker.

“Where’re you taking us?” Slipstream asked as firmly as she could bring her voice to sound as the lift jolted to a stop at the bottom of the tower.

It appeared to be an airbase. There was no better word for it. Tarmac spread out for a good three hundred yards in all four directions, mostly flat apart from a sag here or there where the ground had settled. Longcoats trotted about in a busy, most in groups but some alone, all in uniform. As the stallion started out over the tarmac, breathing heavily under the strain of pulling the cage-laden wagon, Slipstream only watched. Two ponies crossed their path up ahead hauling a truck of three inch ammunition. Seeing the rounds on a cart made her doubt the actual relevance of such large ammunition aboard airships. If they could get something to explode, set off the hydrogen...

The bustle of the place reminded her of the average Equestrian airfield, though much smaller than the one she had taken off from. Just above, a five hundred foot cargo vessel was sweeping in for a landing. Just below it hung a rather large piece of salvage from four cables: a sack of sixteen cylinder engines, most likely gathered from the scene of the battle; the Longcoats seemed to have wasted no time at all to get that out of the way. Pegasi flew around the airship in a tight ring, each with their own guideline tied off to the envelope of the ship as they helped steer it manually in for a landing. Short billows of water escaped the stern and bow ballast tanks as the airship stabilized itself, splashing down to the cold tarmac below. About thirty feet from the ground, more ropes dropped from the cabin for the ground crew to grab and pull taut, the ponies shouting orders and positions to one another.

Slipstream had seen too many landings to know that this was a mint setdown in progress. She had also watched this process enough times to know when a pony was out of place. So far, everypony but one was where they needed to be. A green pegasus hovered in the shadow of the gondola, trying his best to look busy and utterly failing.

It’s Price. “What do you think he’s up to?” Slipstream said lowly to Wiltings. It has to be Price.

Wiltings frowned across cages, then looked back to the descending airship. “The green one, under the gondola?”

“Yeah.”

“Stop talking!” The cart puller panted forcefully, working hard to keep up his pace of a brisk trot.

Slipstream bit back a snappy reply and kept her eyes glued to the shifty pegasus. The major lack of security around her made her wonder if the Longcoats really realized that they had the Equestrian fleet commander and her second-in-command in the same place at the same time. It would have only made sense to receive a full army escort, but instead she was being treated as cargo.

Somepony had made a mistake, and a big one at that.

The only thing that made her wonder if the green pegasus really was Price was the fact that he was clad in gray combat armor and had wrapped most of his head in bandages. She didn’t get her hopes up, though. There were equally great chances he was just a new recruit who didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Though as he slipped up behind the gondola and pulled a small package from his left saddlebag, she started to suspect something greater was up.

Something was definitely up. There was no doubt about it as the pegasus planted the little package upon the envelope then sprang away in a quick flight towards the stern of the airship.

What did little, mysterious packages usually have in common? They blew up.

A loud snap reverberated through the brittle air. Steel and fabric flew in shredded ruin from the place the package had been placed, then it started to rain. A solid pillar of water poured from the ruptured ballast tank. Slipstream’s eyes flashed. She’d had nightmares about this happening to her. Ponies yelled and dodged out of the way as the wall of freezing water crashed to the ground below, creating a small tidal wave that spread out in a circle. All talk across the landing field rose to a clamour, and an alarm bell lit up the air from somewhere aboard the cargo vessel.

Slipstream could hardly believe her eyes. The trouble to come next was something she’d only heard of in tavern stories told by ponies who had been fired for similar accidents.

The nose began to lift, gradually at first, but with even more speed as the entire stern ballast poured onto the tarmac. Ponies all around yelled and shouted, the pegasi taking to the air and leaving the rest to gallop towards the unfolding chaos.

“Get weight on that ship!” a stallion decorated in rank yelled. Pegasi filled the air, swarming around the vessel, gathering ropes and trying to pull the vessel steady while the crew struggled with the rising breeze, the ponies on the ground being lifted into the air by the ropes they clung to. The smart ones let go, knowing very well that too much had been lost from the ballast for body weight to make any difference, while the stubborn and stupidly-brave held on. A mare who had been dangling from one of the further most ropes to the front decided that she wasn’t taking that flight once she had been carried twenty feet into the air. She released and screamed her way to the ground, and although she landed on all four hooves, only one of them held her, the other three letting out muffled cracks and pops.

Slipstream winced.

“We need help!” a mare bellowed across the airfield.

No, really? Slipstream scoffed. Four Longcoats were clinging in futility to one rope as it dragged them like yarn across the tarmac. The cargo vessel was now on the verge of a catastrophic tailstand, the cargo below threatening to rip free form the tetherings.

“You!” the decorated stallion yelled, pointing to their wagon puller, who had since stopped to balk at the carnage. “Get your flank in there and help pull!” were the words of the stallion who hadn’t lifted a hoof to help.

The stallion in the harness made a few conflicted movements towards the ranking pony, showing plainly that his cargo could not be abandoned, but a stern and ignorant eye forced him into submission and he pulled out of the harness to race over and attempt some sort of earth pony magic.

The captain should have dropped the bow ballast tanks earlier, but now it was much too late to prevent a full-on tailstand.

Slipstream jumped to her hooves and flared her wings in the barely-enough space. “We have to find a way out of these cages.” Feeling more futile than ever, like a rat in a cage, she shook the bars before her and the lock rattled in the latch.

Wiltings sighed and slumped her shoulders. “What’re you gonna’ do, bite through the bars?”

“I don’t need any sarcasm right now!” Slipstream snapped back.

“Well then what the hell do you want!?” Wiltings glared. “There is no way a stomper like me, nor any pegasus, can get out of a steel cage on their own!”

“I know that!” Slipstream snapped back, groaning and clasping her head in her forehooves. “Where’s one of those hornheads when you need them?” Her cage shook as a heavy pair of hooves came down on top. “Minnow?” she asked with an ascending squint to the roof of her cage.

The inhabitants of the airfield raced around like frenzied ants, too worried about the chaos to give the three caged ponies on a discarded cart any notice. It all seemed too good to be true.

Hoofsteps clanked across the top of her cage and she heard Minnow mutter something from above, though quiet and forced, then a pony dropped down from the front and wasted no time in fitting himself into the harness. Better yet, it was the green stallion who had sabotaged the cargo vessel which was now on the brink of utter destruction. He grunted and beat his wings, pushing off with his hooves to get the cart moving.

It has to be Price. It even looks like him. Suddenly, the fact that Price had died seemed a whole lot more unbelievable. Why had they continued to fire aboard the transport vessel if they had gotten him? Why had the security on the remaining three of them been tripled? It was all making sense now. “Pric—”

There was a tremendous grating of steel from the stern of the cargo vessel as the tailfins hit the tarmac and began to drag. Steel and fabric twisted and tore as the rough ground hacked the delicate fins to shreds, and even as it moved, the weight of the vessel forced more of it into the ground. From this perspective, it reminded her of a giant block of airship-shaped cheese sliding across a cheese grater.

Everything seemed to be prospering against the Longcoats as the wind gusted, carrying with it ash and the smell of sulfur. Maybe it was fate’s way of lending Slipstream a hoof.

The green pegasus who was now almost ninety percent confirmed as Price had managed to haul them up to a fast trot’s pace, but the Longcoat pulling the cart before had made it look easy. Unfortunately, they were also drawing eyes. By now, it was apparent that saving the airship was a lost cause, and the ponies that weren’t still dangling from ropes were beginning to look around in anger and confusion. Though somehow, no alarms were thrown; the Longcoats simply watched as if the escaping prisoners were nothing more than obnoxious foals making too much noise on one’s street.

There was no doubt about a rescue now. The pony pulling their cart was undoubtedly Price and they were actually going to make it out of here easily. Slipstream, you always have been a dreamer. No matter the case, she positively squealed in delight at the wonderful carnage unfolding before her very eyes. The captain of the airship had just made one mistake after another. Now, signified by the sudden drop in altitude, the derpy pony behind the wheel had most likely vented the hydrogen chambers—another bad idea in the chain of bad ideas spoken aviator had already carried out. However, the dirigible now stood directly on its tail end, having wedged into the ground and been lifted by the hazardous winds. All that venting the hydrogen did was add more weight to the frame. Then it buckled like an old grain silo a little bit above the ground and began to keel backwards.

“Get away!” a mare screamed, putting as much distance between herself and the groaning airship. Others followed suit, abandoning whatever tasks they were performing and making like athletes for the edge of the yard. The internal supports gave, and like a film reel played in slow motion, the entire frame mimicked a tin can underhoof as the vessel turtled, pointing its belly to the smoggy sky. Welds and rivets snapped like popcorn, and the cargo hung below snapped free of the cabin and crashed to the ground, pistons and steel parts flying as the sixteen cylinder engines were introduced to gravity. The top of the envelope fell against the tarmac almost like a comforter would settle upon the bedsheets. Better yet, the structural design of the entire airship did not permit upside down flight—or landings for that matter—and with another snap and a groan the entire cabin collapsed down into the envelope of the ship.

“Yes!” Slipstream screamed to the heavens, pumping one hoof forward. She closed her eyes for a second. “Hydrogen ignition, hydrogen ignition,” she chanted. “Come on, just one little spark!” A muffled pop signified that her prayers had been answered. A second later the remnants of the airship went up in brilliant flame of red, lighting up the morning like a second sun. Slipstream covered her eyes and winced as the heat washed over her, even from this distance.

“Serves ‘em right,” Wiltings gruffed from her cage.

After everything they had been through, seeing such disaster at the Longcoats’ suspense filled her with joy she knew she shouldn’t be feeling. Ponies had probably died in that fire, but right now she couldn’t kill the smile. “Yes!” she yelled again, then quickly fell back as a bullet rung off of one of the bars of her cage. “I mean, oh darn,” she corrected flatly, eyes darting about for the shooter.

It was the wagon puller. He had gotten a rifle from somewhere and was using a mare’s back as a deadrest as he took aim at them from a good hundred or so feet away. “Them!” he shouted, pointing with the bayonet of the rifle. “Equestria ponies!”

Slipstream’s hopes for a smooth escape suicided as every ear on the airfield perked at the word ‘Equestria’. Now she was no longer smiling, and suddenly, she felt very exposed in her little cage with four inch gaps between the bars. The gunshots started and she cried out, imagining all the different places she could be shot. The most she could do was curl herself into a ball at the back of her cage and hope they didn’t ventilate her.

“Alive!” the stallion hurriedly corrected. “We need them alive!”

Slipstream breathed a sigh of relief and dared a look as the gunshots subsided. “We have to get out of these cages,” she told the assumed Price.

“Working on it!” the pony grunted in Price’s accent. He dug his hooves into the tarmac and pulled them through a rolling gate that was in the process of rolling closed, around a sharp corner, and into a cobbled street.

Slipstream yelped as she was thrown up against the side of her cage and shaken like paint in a can. At least they were finally out of the airfield, even if their problems did remain. They’d exited the base onto a mostly deserted cobblestone street. The problem was that the wagon they were on had rather small wheels designed for smooth surfaces, and cobblestone was in no way smooth.

The city streets reminded her a little of Canterlot after the bombings. What wasn’t made of wood was stone, and whatever stone was either gray or ash-black. The only white the Longcoats probably ever saw was the side of an Equestrian airship and fresh snow.

So far, Minnow hadn’t made much of a fuss or a sound, and Slipstream worried for a moment that she could have been shot. Of course, there wasn’t blood raining around her cage, so that was a good sign. Minnow was probably just being quiet, like she usually was since had been toasted.

What could only be called Longcoat civilians pointed and muttered and adorned concerned or worried faces as the odd foursome passed. The yells and shouts that followed the chattery cart served as warning enough that they were still under chase. A mare that stood out in front of a pasty shop with her foal gasped and drug the young pony to safety.

Price whipped them around another corner and came to an unexpected halt against a cluster of trash barrels. He tripped and ate cobble, leaving the cart to hop to the left and auger into the corner of a building. The cart stopped dead, however Slipstream did not. Her cage slid across the cart and nailed the wall, knocking her up against the bars for a second time. Minnow’s cage was a bit more explorative; it sheared off the wall with a clank and tumbled to the ground, the mare inside bouncing like a deflated volleyball.

Price didn’t stay down for long. Comically enough, he emerged with a banana peel draped over his head and rotten lettuce peppering his coat. He wasted no time in rushing over to Slipstream’s cockeyed cage, only pausing a moment to undo the bandages that had been concealing most of his mane and face.

He sure was a sight for sore eyes.

“Price!” Slipstream exclaimed.

He reached back and pulled a set of compact bolt cutters from his saddlebag. “You told me to come back,” he gruffed, fitting the jaws of the device over the padlock ring. “I wasn’t about to disobey orders from my commander.”

“But... how?”

“No time.” The lock snapped and he yanked it out of the loop, then moved right on to Wiltings.

“Down there!” a mare shouted from the street. “They went down there!”

“No, no, no!” Slipstream threw open her cage door and stumbled to freedom, immediately stretching her legs and flaring her wings. One thing was for sure: she did not do cages.

Wiltings exploded out of her cage before Price had even had time to back away. She bowled the green stallion onto his back and ripped the bolt cutters from his grasp, slicing a line straight to Minnow’s cage. “You okay?” she breathed, seizing the jaws of the tool onto the lock.

Minnow only nodded as she struggled to her hooves on shaky legs at the same time Wiltings all but ripped the cage in half trying to get past the simple latch.

Slipstream had made this observation before, but Minnow really looked bad; all of them did, but she was the worst. Wiltings had her swollen knee and improvised brace which probably wasn’t fully functioning. Price seemed dead exhausted, almost falling asleep where he stood. Minnow was a walking shishkebab. And she herself had more cuts than hairs in her mane. Now all they needed was a cheesy name and they’d be the ragtag squadron of battle rejects.

“Come on!” Price butted her firmly in the rump. “Stop daydreaming and move!”

Then they were running. Well, as close to running as the four of them could achieve. Wiltings lolloped along on three and a half legs and Slipstream ran in a similar fashion. Minnow wasn’t doing much running at all; Price half carried her, and although her hooves kicked feebly at the ground to show she was giving the effort, she really wasn’t doing anything.

“There they are!” Slipstream pushed herself harder at the voices behind her.

The four staggered around a corner to come to the sight of a wall ten feet ahead.

Price spat and nearly dropped Minnow. “What’s this nonsense!?” He skidded to a stop. “What Twisted idiot would build an alley shaped like an L!?”

Slipstream started to ring up options as her eyes seeked. There was a balcony, and nothing but, three stories above. She turned to Price. “Think you can fly Wiltings?”

Price darted his eyes to her. “You can’t?”

“She’s too heavy.”

Wiltings glared with a hurt look. “Hey...”

“I can,” Price said quickly, then nodded towards Minnow. “Be careful with her.”

Without hesitating, Slipstream flared her wings and trotted to the shallow-eyed mare, very aware of the pounding of hoofsteps around the corner. “Are you doing okay?” she asked softly, despite the current gravity of their situation.

Minnow nodded her head. “It hurts.” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.

Slipstream nodded, the hoverd and took position over the mare. She lowered herself and wrapped her hooves around the mare’s body.

Minnow whimpered and shook.

“I’m sorry.” Slipstream gritted her teeth. Minnow’s right side felt wet and raw, utterly disgusting. With a few strong flaps from her wings, she lifted Minnow off the ground, the mare letting out a gurgled scream as she hissed and writhed in Slipstream’s grasp. Slipstream tried to be gentle, but she had to squeeze to keep the mare from slipping, feeling like some sort of cruel torturer. Price carried Wiltings just beside her, looking strained, the tendons in his neck sticking out.

“B-big boned earth pony,” he grunted as WIltings dangled below him, looking a combination of tense and insulted.

Slipstream was the first to reach the balcony. She released Minnow an inch from the ground and the mare dropped into a quivering heap, her mouth stretched wide in a silent wail as tears streamed from her eyes.

Price dropped down beside her with Wiltings, panting softly. “Stupid balcony.”

Slipstream tossed her head to the side to look at him. “The stupid balcony that just saved your rump... unless they’re pegasi...”

“Up there!”

Slipstream ducked involuntarily, then remembered that they weren’t allowed to shoot her and she was tempted to poke up her head and wag her tongue at them, though for some reason the wooden railing exploded where her head had been a moment before. She didn’t even jump this time, instead just tensed her shoulders as her wide eyes drifted up. “They’re shooting at us!” she hissed, dropping to her belly and starting to crawl towards the double doors ahead.

“What did you expect?” Price snapped back, keeping pace with her. “Water pistols and foam dart guns?”

Under normal circumstances, she would have given him reprimand for being a cheeky jackass, though she didn’t feel like too much of a commander right now and her statement had been pretty unorthodox. Really, she felt less like a commander than she ever had, more like a grunt going through training. Although she had trained to be a captain, every pony went through the same basic training before splitting off into specialized fields. She’d learned to fight, run, crawl, and be a supposed killing machine. Just like then, they were all equals; rank was a thing of the past that no longer mattered.

Upon bursting through the doors into the building, they stumbled upon a family who had probably been enjoying a rather meager breakfast. Mom exploded to her hooves and wrapped the young colt beside her up into a crushing embrace. A much older colt—young, but old enough to pass as an adult—flipped the table and snapped up a knife in his jaws. Even as he looked at the three Equestrians, his legs trembled and fear ran through his eyes.

“Take you resistance and get out!” the mare screeched at them, hurling a salt shaker that Price was forced to duck. It exploded on the wall behind him. “All you ponies are is trouble!”

Slipstream squinted at the mare. “Resistance?”

Price grabbed her by the back of the mane before she could receive an answer and half threw her towards the opposite doorway. “Keep moving or they’ll trap us in the building!”

The four of them barged out into the hall and ran, Wiltings fully carrying Minnow as the mare groaned and closed her eyes. The pain of being lifted by her burnt flesh must have put her into shock again.

Slipstream lost track of all the twists and turns. She simply followed Price’s tail as he tore them through rooms and down three flights of stairs.

By the time they had begun to slow, Price lowering their speed in the presence of semi-safety, Slipstream’s legs were jelly. She wasn’t a soldier anymore, she was a captain, and boot camp had been a long time ago.

Somehow, Wiltings had managed to carry Minnow on her back, all while only running on three hooves; it had to be something to do with her earth pony traits, because Slipstream knew for a fact if she had attempted that she would have eaten the cobblestone minutes ago.

It just plain wasn’t fair. Longcoats were bred bigger, faster, stronger... The half of them made her feel like a toy in their presence, a Border Collie beside a St. Bernard. Slipstream may have been a tad on the small side for a mare, but Longcoats were built like earth ponies that had been ploughing rocky fields all their lives. Of course there was still diversity of small and large, but they had the advantage.

It wasn’t fair.

Neither is war.

Price pointed off ahead to an old, rickety two-story house that gave the impression it would fall over in the wind and looked like it had been pulled directly directly out of a horror movie and slapped on a street corner between two empty lots. “Think it’s empty?”

“No... more...” Minnow choked. Apparently, even the treatment of being carried was slowly killing her.

Slipstream shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. If there’s ponies there we’ll bind and gag them if we have to. We can’t keep running like this.”

A very ominous ‘condemned’ sign had been nailed to the door and the latch had been comically padlocked with a riveted device the size of a pony’s hoof. The unorthodox lock really didn’t do anything to stop Price from kicking in the door. With the rusty squeal of a few screws, the latch ripped out of the door and the flimsy piece of wood screeched open.

The inside of the home somehow looked worse than the outside. The wood had turned gray from age and abuse, and the windows on either side of the threshold appeared to have been shattered, boarded up, broken into, then boarded up again. The vaulted stairs directly across the entryway looked as if they’d been used as a tumble chute for concrete blocks and roughly resembled the world’s most splintery slip ‘n’ slide. The banister was a thing of the past, having long since broken away and fallen into the hallway below, which in turn was in the process of collapsing into the basement. Slipstream was afraid to look at the roof. Through a door to the right she could see a shattered bathtub in what was left of the kitchen, having fallen from the floor above.

Price led them up the stairs which creaked and groaned dangerously as the ponies ascended, and to a room at the far end of the house down a short hall and around a corner. The room was completely empty aside from a coat of dust and a vacant fireplace set in the wall, which somehow hadn’t collapsed through the floor. The room was at the corner of the house, and a window was set in either wall overlooking the intersection below; miraculously, the glass panes were still intact.

Now what? I wish I knew. “We wait,” Slipstream said with a small cough. “They’ll be looking for us.”

Minnow curled herself into a ball, shaking like a wet dog. “I-I can’t tell if I’m h-hot... or if I’m f-f-freezing.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Slipstream whispered, patting the mare softly on the neck. “We all are.” Her eyes drifted out the window to Celestia’s morning sun. How can she let her sun shine on such a place? She knew they were here... why does she still spare them the warmth of her sun and not freeze their sorry flanks back to the icebergs they crawled out of?

We’re going to be okay. Slipstream closed her eyes, then opened them again, watching the rising sun.

“Please.”