Although it wasn't clear at the time, if I had to pick a single event that signified the beginning of the end of my tour in Fillydelphia, it would be the day my squad won the lottery at our rotation on field duty and was chosen to investigate a potential lead on a robotics facility out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody knew where the lead came from or even what we should expect to find when we got there, but we all knew it was part of the upcoming operation that was too hush-hush for any of the grunts to know anything about. We weren't even supposed to know it existed, but the spreading rumors made it sound like anything from Red Eye announcing that he was going to start turning everyone into alicorns to an attempt at attacking the Enclave to secure their weapons and equipment.

I was too groggy and tired to really take an honest guess at what his motivations were, since I was sure that everyone would be wrong in the end, but whatever it was, it sure felt like it must have been closer to the latter. Our objectives, vague as they were, were to find anything that might have military applications. Failing that, anything of industrial use was our secondary objective.

In any case, it took the better part of a day for us all to fly out to the location from Stonetalon, heading west out over the mountains and flying low to keep our eyes open for what we expected to be an entrance at the ground level on the mountainside.

The weather was cooperating for a change and visibility was good early that morning, so the entrance was comparatively easy to spot once we got close. From high up, it would have been easy to mistake for a garbage dump that had never been used. There was a single broad door set into the mountainside and a section of ground set off by a high chain fence that had been battered and worn into near oblivion by the ravages of time, but aside from the scattered boulders that looked like the result of a rock slide two hundred years ago, there was nothing else to be seen.

We touched down outside of the fence and all took a few moments to catch our breath and form up. Unsurprisingly, there weren't any signs or other indications that we were at the right place, or that it was a robotics facility at all, but I knew we weren't leaving until we got inside somehow.

“Looks like a balefire missile hit this place,” Leigh said, looking for all the world like she wanted to shrug off the radio pack she'd lugged all of the way out here.

It was hard to disagree, given the amount of collapsed rock and stone higher up on the mountainside. Serge stepped forward and squinted as a gust of wind ruffled his feathers. “If a missile hit here, that makes it sound like a military facility alright. Must be what we were looking for.”

I blinked sleep from my eyes and looked over the door set into the face of the rock formation. Maybe the missile just didn't hit dead on, but I was more convinced that the door was half a meter of magically reinforced steel powered by mechanisms that had failed a century ago and would have been protected by some kind of computer system or security talisman even if they were functional. How were we supposed to get past that?

Lita broached that very question on the way up to the door. “Are we supposed to tunnel through the mountain to get inside or something? What if we can't get inside at all?”

“We'll cross that bridge once we get to it. Maybe the door will be damaged enough to let us through.”

Even before we got right up on it, it was clear that something was amiss and that someone had been here recently. A spark battery bank had been set up near the controls, with thick wiring running up to conduits exposed by the partial collapse of the tunnel ceiling. The control terminal glowed with unexpected life when we drew close, and flashed some text in harsh red light.

“Security rerouted to local nexus.”

Serge pointed it out to Leigh, who examined the cables for a few moments. “I'm not sure how, but someone powered up the door and disabled security.” She held a claw over a big green button on the terminal. “Sergeant?”

“Everyone form up. We're probably not going to be alone,” he directed.

Amy, Lita and I took the opposite side to them and stacked up along the periphery of the door. I held my pistol in both claws and blew out a long breath to calm down. There were only two groups I could think of that would have been able to break their way past the security system, and I didn't want to meet either. For a moment I wondered if maybe the rumors about the Enclave were true, and Red Eye had somehow come across some intelligence that they were going to raid this facility soon and so sent us to get there first.

If the Enclave were inside, we weren't going to be coming back out.

I almost dropped my pistol and jumped out of my skin when the door mechanisms ground to life and fought against enough grit to choke a dragon. The gears just behind the wall squealed and crunched for an eternity as the massive metal doors crept open, and continued to grind for an eternity longer even after the doors stopped halfway.

Leigh slinked away from her position with Isaac and Serge to check the control panel. “Must be jammed. I don't think we should try to close it once we're inside.”

“I heard that. I'm not getting trapped in there with whoever beat us to the punch,” Lita grumbled. “Not to mention they and all of their dead ancestors have to know we're here after all of that racket.”

Serge peeked around the corner of the door. “Cut the chatter and move up. Looks all clear up to the elevator ahead.”

One-by-one we filtered through the opening, Lita heading in first with her old rifle and hand held EFS tracker, and with me and Amy at the tail. I blinked a few times to try to adjust my vision to the darkness, but the patch of bright light shining through the door made it hard to focus. There weren't any clear markings to indicate who built the place, or even what it was for. The plain steel hallway reminded me a lot of a stable's interior, and if it weren't for the door being an entirely different design I'd have expected that was precisely what we were inside.

“The elevator has power, but it's locked out by a key card,” Leigh said after we all arrived.

Amy cocked a frown. “Taking it down would alert anyone we were coming anyway.”

“There's no other way, and it's blocking our path,” Serge said. Sure enough, there was nowhere else to go but down, and no exit to any stairs anywhere within the hallway. “Can you bypass it and send it down alone? We can fly down instead.”

“I'll give it a try. Just need to pry the casing off. Ike, can you give me a hand?”

While the two worked at it, Lita turned back to watch the entrance. “Funny, if the elevator's up here, maybe nobody's downstairs. Did someone come by, unlock the door and just leave? What kind of sense does that-”

She was cut off by Isaac growling and snatching something off of the elevator's control panel. He tossed it down the hallway with a grunt and backed away to let Leigh work at whatever she needed to. A few seconds later, after touching a bunch of seemingly random wires together, something clicked and the lift mechanisms squealed to life. The brown griffoness hopped off just as it began to descend into the tunnel below. Dim red-orange light spilled up in its wake as it passed emergency lights.

“Guess there's still some power on the lower levels,” she mumbled.

It felt like a full minute before the squealing of the ancient cables against pulleys finally stopped, whether by it reaching the bottom or giving up on the way, but as soon as it did Serge tapped Lita on the shoulder and started toward the hole. “We'll check ahead. Wait here.”

Several more tense minutes passed while we waited. Leigh busied herself with checking over the panel Isaac trashed, but the rest of us sat still and watched the entrance for unexpected guests. I wanted to say or ask something to break the tension, maybe inquire if this could have been the handiwork of the Enclave, but I'd long since learned that being quiet while in hostile territory was the best thing you could do. That's what Amy was doing, after all, but she didn't say a whole lot anyway. Maybe if-

Heavy beating of wings down the hole interrupted my train of thought, and Serge rose up out of the void. He waved us all closer. “All clear ahead, and nothing on EFS. There are three levels below us but only the next level is open so we're starting there. We're definitely in the right place.”

That was reassuring, and while I'd learned not to completely trust the scanner Lita brought with us, it was usually accurate. Maybe we'd just missed the party and whoever came before us had already looted everything worth having and left ages ago.

I could hope.

The level below us told me two things, one of which I really didn't want to know.

First, this was clearly a RoBronco facility of some kind, judging by labels on the dozens of shipping container sized storage crates lining the room we emerged in. The dim red lighting made it a real challenge to make out much, but my eyes were slowly adjusting.

Second, all of those shipping containers were packed with boxes of robot parts, so clearly whoever was here hadn't finished looting it. And I was under no delusions that it was just a bunch of random raiders that blundered across it, powered up a door and bypassed military grade security just to waltz off without taking anything. Maybe they weren't here and were making repeated trips to loot it all, but that meant they could return at any time.

“What do you make of it all, corporal?” Serge asked as we moved down the room toward the entrance at the far side. Lita had already taken up position at the door and was glued to her EFS tracker like her life depended on it.

“Looks like they were assembling robots here. Probably not manufacturing the parts, since I don't see any raw materials.”

“Anything worth retrieving for Fillydelphia?”

Leigh trotted over to an open container and began rifling through the parts. “Absolutely. These aren't domestic robots. It's hard to be sure what they're for, but I'm not seeing any weapons. Could be for manufacturing or mining, maybe.”

A small surge of hope welled up in my chest. “That's what we came to find, right? Is this all we need in order to report back? It's not like we can haul any of this back ourselves.” Speaking of which, how did the ponies even get these containers down here? Teleport them?

“We should verify that it's safe for any of Red Eye's teams first,” Amy suggested.

Leigh stopped plundering through the box in front of her. “Yeah, and at the moment all of these parts are useless. Unless we can find the data tapes with their programming on it, they won't be any good even if they're assembled.”

I felt like slapping that hopeful little griffon in my head that thought we might be done already. “You sure that's not in here?”

She shrugged. “It could be, but we have to check the rest of the plant first anyway. My guess is that there are programming systems further down. Manufacturing was the level below us, right?”

Lita answered without looking up from her screen. “Yeah, but the door was jammed partway up.”

Serge pointed ahead to the heavy doors at the end of the room. “Then we'll have to look for another way down. Let's move.”

The doors were loose on their hinges, despite the magnetic locking pads at the top of each, so either the base's security system hadn't been tripped, or there wasn't enough power to lock us out. Goody goody.

Amy and I got the honor of being the first through, after one more check by Lita, and just as her EFS scanner predicted, the hallway beyond was empty. It extended off in two directions, each leading to a corner that turned away from us and deeper into the mountain. Without a clear choice, we headed right and formed up at the corner, where we confirmed that the hallway beyond was also clear.

Maybe it was just my imagination, but in the dull red lighting I thought I saw hoof prints in the dust on the floor ahead. Broad trails, just visible and covered by another fine layer. Maybe from a long time ago.

We neared another corner, with Lita and Serge right behind us and Leigh and Isaac behind them. Just as Amy reached the corner, Lita snapped her talons and my heart leaped into my throat. While Amy watched the bend ahead, I crept back to get a look at the tracker screen.

There was probably a science to reading the blasted thing, but all I saw was a single red blob on the screen, with fuzzy edges that flickered and shifted with the static. An indicator showed that the nearest hostile contact was six meters away, but I couldn't tell if that was down the hallway ahead or behind us. Probably ahead.

Whatever the blob was, it didn't appear to be moving. Serge joined us up at the corner and waved us onward. Oh boy.

Amy peeked around the corner, rifle raised, and when nothing shot at her I took that as my cue to shimmy across the hallway and flatten against the far wall. I held my pistol in both claws and pressed forward toward the junction ahead. Whatever the red blob was, it had to be right ahead.

A scratching echoed from the junction ahead, and I froze before looking back. Amy and Serge both shot frustrated glares, so I swallowed my pride and apprehension and inched forward more. The scratching grew louder the closer I got, and the beating of my heart grew even louder in my ears. I lingered at the threshold for an agonizing few seconds, but didn't dare look back for another round of withering glares.

At last, I whipped my pistol around the corner and swept it across…

A stairwell leading downward, but more importantly, at the landing just below was the corpse of a pony.

A fresh corpse too, not a skeleton. More distressing were the laser burns all around the metal wall plates and stair scaffolding, and the pony's body. What the hell happened here? Did ponies come in and have some kind of disagreement before shooting one of their own? He didn't even look like-

The body moved.

I removed my talon from the trigger of the pistol before I had an accidental discharge. The pony was alive somehow, despite the dozen scorch marks on his ragged blue fatigues. Serge would have a cow if-

The pony opened his eyes, and a sickly green glow illuminated the wall ahead. He bared his teeth and lolled his head to the side, where they dragged on the floor, eliciting a ragged scratch that echoed up to me.

It was a zombie. This facility had zombies in it, and someone had already been here and engaged them.

Shit.

My first instinct was to put the thing out of its misery, but the pistol would make enough racket to alert the prowling dead, so I instead doubled back to the rest of the squad. Serge had that questioning look on his face, and I wasted no time in filling him in.

“Really must have been a balefire bomb above,” he whispered as he drew his laser pistol. It would make a lot less noise than a ballistic weapon, so it made sense. “I'll lead, everyone, behind me. Lita, keep on the EFS tracker.”

We all pressed forward, and Serge wasted no time in dispatching the undead stallion on the landing. His pistol only had a crisp crack for a report, and the red beam punched a clean hole through its temple that snuffed the glow from its eyes and the last of its feeble scrabbling.

Serge waved for us all to follow him down, starting with Lita. Worked for me, that was for sure.

As I passed the landing, I took a few moments to scrutinize the laser burns on the walls. They were fresh. Fresh enough for there to still be a lingering odor of roasted rotten pony flesh hanging in the air.

I swallowed hard and thought back to the rumors about what Red Eye was up to. There really might have been Enclave soldiers in here, and if so, we were dead meat.

The stairs went on for longer than I thought possible, descending deep into the mountain. We passed two more zombies on our way down, one of indeterminate sex who was hanging by a hindleg down the center of the stairwell and whose head had been removed by a plasma weapon of some kind, and another dead zombie mare sprawled on her back with empty eye sockets and a smattering of laser burns all over her body.

“At least someone's done the dirty work for us,” Lita whispered as we passed the mare. Talking almost didn't matter at this point, since despite our best efforts it was impossible to remain totally silent while traversing the metal scaffolding.

“Cut the chatter,” Serge hissed anyway as we stopped at a landing with a door. The heavy metal door was devoid of all detail, save a badly worn warning of some kind and text indicating that it lead to manufacturing and assembly. He indicated the control panel and whispered for Leigh to open it.

It must not have been locked, since she only pressed one button before the ancient hydraulics kicked in and the door sank into the floor. I squinted and blinked to adjust my eyes as brighter light poured through the widening opening.

For a moment I thought we'd entered a part of the facility with full power, but it turned out to be coming from a single flashlight laying on the floor. The intense beam reflected off of the smooth metal finish of the far wall and filled the room with harsh shadows in every corner and behind every piece of debris that seemed to litter the floor for as far as I could see.

Someone had been here very recently if its batteries weren't dead.

The room we emerged in appeared to be a staging area where parts were brought down in one of the two cargo elevators set into the walls flanking us on each side. Ahead was a massive partitioned steel door that was stuck halfway open, revealing just enough of the area beyond to discern that it was filled with machining tools.

I sidestepped a toppled crate filled with what I guessed were mechanical hooves and approached the fallen light. It might give away our position if we kept it on, but we might as well take it with us when we went, right? We could turn it off until-

The world spun and I landed on the floor hard, with a resounding crack of composite from my breastplate slamming into concrete. My claw lurched forward and slapped the light, which twirled about and illuminated another dead zombie in the corner, previously obscured by those dark shadows.

Ugh, what did I slip on, anyway? I groaned and picked myself up, not even daring to see how irritated the others were, and saw the robotic hoof I stepped on. Great. Wonderful. Now everyone knew we were here if they were nearby.

“Sergeant, look. Steel Rangers.”

Wait, what? Steel Rangers?

I dragged myself back up to my feet and studied the 'zombie' in the corner, which I could now plainly see was covered in ragged red robes. Actually, more chewed than ragged. The gray unicorn mare's coat was covered in clotted blood from dozens of bites, the worst of which was where something had latched onto her throat and bitten through her trachea.

Amy asked, “How long has she been here? She looks fresh.”

There wasn't any significant odor, so I guessed not long. A quick closer inspection and some prodding with the barrel of my pistol to confirm that she was still suffering from rigor mortis was all I needed.

“At least a day, but no more than two.”

Lita snorted. “We must have won the lottery on the timing. Does she at least have a gun? If we run into someone in power armor we're going to need an energy weapon bigger than Serge's pistol.”

She might have been laying on it if she had something, but in the lighting I couldn't really tell, and I wasn't in a hurry to flip her over to check. “Doesn't look like it.

From further behind me, Leigh added, “She looks like a scribe, so she probably didn't have much. You can bet there were a few knights or paladins with her though, and probably more scribes. If they left her behind it must have been bad in here.”

Now that she mentioned it, there was plenty of other evidence of violence, with more laser and plasma burns on the walls than I could count. There must have been as many Steel Rangers as Leigh guessed, but if we were lucky they just left their comrade here and retreated back up to the surface. Or maybe that would be worse, since they could return at any point and pin us in from behind.

Serge didn't waste much time thinking about it. “Lita, watch the area ahead. Leigh and Isaac, move up and scout the next room.”

Amy and I followed close behind and took up a position behind stacks of boxes to use as concealment, while Leigh and Isaac crawled under the partially shut door. The big orange griffon had some trouble squeezing through, so I really hoped we didn't have to come back this way in a hurry.

“Huh,” Leigh uttered as soon as she was through. “A photonic resonance barrier.”

Serge cocked his head. “A what?”

Lita held up her tracker. “Looks clear ahead.”

With that, Serge ordered us all to move up. As I crawled under the door, the sharp blue glow of the forcefield caught my eye, filtering past and through racks and rows of machinery I couldn't begin to guess the purpose of. Leigh was already fiddling with the controls on the wall next to it while Isaac was scanning the room for any sign of movement.

“Can you disable it?” Serge asked as he joined Leigh at her side.

“Could be keeping the monsters out,” Lita muttered as she took began examining the room.

Leigh popped a panel open and started digging in the wiring. “The Steel Rangers probably turned it back on, but it seems like a bad idea to shut themselves in with the zombies. Maybe something else triggered it.”

By this point I was shining my new flashlight around to get a better view. The machine shop looked like it was in marginally better shape than the delivery room behind us, but there were laser burns pockmarking many of the drills, lathes and hydraulic punches. My light glinted off of a bloody hoof under one table…

“Looks like another casualty,” I announced on the way over. This time I found a blue earthpony stallion in worn out armor curled up beneath the heavy metal slab of a punch press. Like the mare before, he was stiff and recently deceased, but surprisingly he didn't have any obvious bite marks. Instead, there were half a dozen bullet holes in his armor, which had chewed up the Steel Ranger symbol almost to the point of making it unrecognizable.

“A dead knight. Looks like someone shot him.” On a hunch, I turned my light upward, and sure enough, the scrapped remains of a turret dangled from the ceiling by cables and a shredded ammo belt. Its housing looked like it had been partially melted by a plasma bolt.

Amy clicked her beak. “They must have tripped the security systems.”

“Does he have a gun?” Lita asked.

To my surprise, he did. I swallowed my apprehension and grabbed the barrel of the laser rifle. It took a fair bit of pulling to dislodge it from beneath him, and it was covered in sticky, clotted blood, but looked functional. “Yeah. Who wants it?” Not me, thanks…

Serge held up a claw. “Hang on to it for now.”

Dammit.

A crackle sounded through the room and the blue glow from the barrier flickered and faded. “We're through,” Leigh announced unnecessarily.

“Alright, move up. Lita, Kaz and Amalia, you know the drill.”

I was definitely keeping the light on and trained on the ceiling now. The last thing I wanted was to get caught by a turret in the dark. Maybe if we were lucky the Steel Rangers took most of them out.

We passed three more destroyed turrets in as many machining and assembly rooms, and found one more dead scribe amidst a pile of four dead zombies in the last room. Beyond that was a series of offices that we paused to plunder before planning to move on to the stairwell down the hallway, which promised to lead us down further into the ground beneath the mountain and to some testing area.

The offices, as it turned out, were also a small series of labs, the purpose of which I could only guess. Wouldn't labs be for testing? If so, what was the point of a dedicated testing area? Leigh seemed to hope that we'd find the programming tapes for at least one of the robot models, so maybe that was their purpose?

Either way, we finished checking the offices in short order, with nothing to show for it, and by the time we moved on to the labs I was beginning to wonder when we'd find the next dead Steel Ranger. We hadn't seen any evidence of fighting since the last dead scribe, but something shot and killed those zombies, and whatever it was, it wasn't that scribe.

We trickled into one of the labs, which was surprisingly spacious and chock full of dust covered computers, terminals and data tape reels on its walls. As always, the emergency lighting obscured most of the details, but I was sure Leigh could make some sense of it.

At her request, I handed over the light, and tried to find somewhere out of the way to stand while she worked. The floor was kind of covered in debris and… bags and tarps covered in blankets of dust. A programming lab was a strange place for that. Maybe the ponies caught in here after the balefire blast had survival supplies cached here or something? I grabbed a corner of the nearest tarp and lifted it up for a peek.

A puff of dust preceded a ragged groan.

“Contact!” Lita shouted. “Two meters-it's inside the room with us!”

“Zombie!” I shouted in turn, backpedaling and bringing my pistol up to bear.

The slack-jawed mare howled and pushed herself up onto unsteady legs before turning to face me. Her drawn and taut facial features were framed in momentary flashes of light from my pistol's muzzle flash, catching brief still images that lingered in my vision as she shifted and lurched forward.

My ears rang and I couldn't tell what the others were shouting, but my pistol's pitiful flashes were soon drowned out by rifles discharging. The mare staggered and finally went down less than a meter away when someone got a lucky hit that shattered one of those flimsy legs. Even still, she snarled and tried to drag herself forward, but as a much easier and slower target, it wasn't hard for me to line up a clean shot with my pistol that punched most of what remained of her brain out the back of her skull.

She moaned weakly and collapsed into a twitching heap that didn't look like it would stop any time soon.

“Everyone alright? Which way did it come from?” Serge demanded.

“It was under-”

Lita interrupted with frantic waving of a claw. “More contacts, all around! At least… dammit, I don't know, maybe ten!”

Nobody had time to question her. The first zombie rounded the corner and cantered into the lab with us only a moment later, just a moment more before the room exploded into weapon discharges. The rotten pegasus stallion lurched forward and pitched over onto his side with a raspy moan that gave way to the clack of more hooves behind him.

Desperate snarls overtook the clacks as two more zombies fought each other to be the first through the doorway to get at us. Like before, they were met with a wall of bullets that stopped them in their tracks. The unicorn mare screamed something pained and fell forward into the room, while the earthpony mare behind her collapsed and thrashed in the entrance.

“Kill...” the unicorn hissed my way as I lined up my pistol again.

I pulled the trigger. She screamed again and convulsed as the bullet went wide and pierced her side. I pulled it again, and again she shrieked as the shot deflected off of the floor, bounced up and took part of her jaw off.

Dammit, my claw was shaking too much to track her erratic movements. Why couldn't she just give up and-

Another zombie rose from behind her with a snarl and clawed his way over the growing pile in the door way. I raised my pistol-

“More coming up behind! They're going to break the glass!” Carmelita shouted behind me.

“Pinfeathers!” I pointed my pistol at the new zombie ahead and pulled the trigger again and again.

Blam! Clunk.

The first shot struck him in the throat, but he continued on, undaunted as the casing caught in the ejector and jammed the pistol.

“Bloodfeathers!” A deafening cacophony of rifle reports drowned everything out as I dropped the dysfunctional weapon and grabbed the sticky laser rifle slung over my back.

A spray of glass fragments and dust washed into the room from out of my field of view. I couldn't hear the windows shattering behind me, but I felt the thumps as the zombies, alive or dead I didn't dare look back to see, fell into the room.

I pulled the trigger on the laser rifle and nothing happened. The hell? Maybe the battery-no, the safety was-

The mare on the floor howled and struggled closer, forcing me back a step. I blundered into something-no, someone-behind me, but the stallion in a lab coat climbing over his former companions had all of my attention. I flipped the switch that I prayed was the safety and tried the trigger again.

An intense beam of red washed out the previously dim surroundings and struck him in the foreleg. A deep hiss sounded, just audible over the ringing in my ears, and his leg vanished in a spray of red and pink magical dust. His remaining forehoof stumbled and landed squarely on the mare's skull, crushing the softened bone and at least ridding me of one concern.

One of the girls screamed in pain, and whoever was against my back tried to fall back into me. I lost my balance and fell forward onto my belly, in sync with the three legged undead pony in front of me.

“Die,” he snarled, his face contorting into the semblance of a scowl that his decayed muscles still allowed.

I tried to push backward, but had nowhere to go. The zombie growled and glared at me with wide eyes, sunken deep in his grimy orange face. He reached a hoof out and tried to get purchase on a floor tile to drag himself closer…

Another zombie flew overhead and bounced against the far wall before landing atop him. Both squirmed and fought to untangle from the knot, but I wasn't going to give them the chance. I propped up on an elbow and hammered the rifle's trigger repeatedly to send searing beams of red energy into the pile. Hisses filled the air and violet afterimages clouded my vision, but the sprays of magical dust were evident enough to tell me that I'd vaporized both.

By the time I'd scrabbled up to my feet, the activity in the room was dying down. My ears still rang terribly from the gunshots, but I heard the others talking enough that I was confident the zombies must have all been down.

I spun around to see that I'd been pressed up against Amy this whole time, who was now rushing forward to secure another doorway into the lab that was choked with twitching corpses of a variety of formerly colorful ponies. She had to navigate around someone sprawled out on the-

Shit.

Carmelita groaned loudly and repeatedly as she tried to roll over onto her stomach. “Nggg… where the fuck is the medic?”

Isaac shoved a dead unicorn aside so I could get close to her, who skidded to a halt facing me. Fresh blood dripped from the mare's horn, and a few yellow feathers were caught between her teeth. Wait, maybe the blood was from the bullet holes in her temple.

“The patient is over here, feather brain!”

I didn't bother with a reply and tore my attention away from the pony to examine her. Sure enough, she had a serious bite to her right foreleg, and another bite had torn a flap of skin free on her shoulder, which was oozing blood at an alarming rate. Overall, she was lucky. The mare's horn had scratched a nasty gouge out of her side, but the dents and scratches indicated that her armor stopped the pony's horn from penetrating her chest and hitting something much more vital.

If I had more time and a more cooperative patient, I probably would have taken care to apply some potion to some bandages and patches. That would have probably taken care of all of the wounds in a single vial. But, we were possibly about to be swarmed by more undead ponies, so I just did the next best thing and popped a vial open before handing it to her. “Drink, it should take care of the rest.”

The red welts and oozing toothmarks on her leg closed before my eyes, and the bloody gouge on her side sealed moments later. As I feared, it took a second potion, and me applying pressure, to fix the nasty wound on her shoulder, but I was just thankful that's all it took.

Carmelita sighed loudly and finally rolled over. “Am I gonna die? Tell me straight. I got bitten by a zombie.”

“It only works that way in stories,” I assured her, hoping I knew what I was talking about. “If you die, it's going to be because you contracted eleven different kinds of bacterial infections from that thing's mouth.” I finished packing my kit back up. “But some antibiotics later will take care of that.”

Amy snapped her talons, and held up the EFS tracker that she must have snatched from the floor at some point. “Sergeant, I've got more hostile contacts approaching. Can't tell how many, but they're coming from the direction we entered from.”

Serge hopped over another dead zombie and waved for us to follow. “Later is right. Let's get going and try to find another way out.”

Lita coughed and groaned again as she pushed up to her feet. “Right.” Blood that had soaked into her plumage dripped down her leg and pattered against the floor in tiny drops.

The glint of a pistol on the floor caught my eye on the way to follow, and for a moment I considered leaving the cursed thing to rot for jamming so much. But, I never did get another rifle after I ruined mine, so I decided against losing it too. I cleared the stoppage and holstered the bulky laser rifle in favor of it again. If we were going to be on the move, it was probably the best choice in these tight conditions.

It was difficult to believe that there could be this many zombies left in the facility after the Steel Rangers had fought their way inside. We must have killed a dozen just now by ourselves, and had picked our way past another dozen freshly dead ones in our bid to put as much distance between us and the labs as was possible. The offices here could only be so big, but every corner we turned revealed a new hallway, and another one or two corpses.

Amy continued to take the lead with the EFS tracker, while Carmelita was now in the back and watching for anything trying to creep up on us. By now we'd given up on all pretenses of trying to be quiet and were trying to move fast. Amy was confident we were making a big circle and would come back out to the stairs soon, but I was so twisted around I couldn't begin to guess if she was right.

My idle mind stopped trying to piece together where we were going and what we were going to do when the griffon train ahead of me screeched to a halt right after another turn. I half expected more zombies hissing and calling for blood, but instead, I saw Amy, Serge, Isaac and Leigh circling around a long and high caliber rifle of some kind lying in the center of the hall.

“What? What is it?” Lita demanded from behind me.

“An anti-materiel rifle, with a battle saddle mount,” Serge answered. “And a magical ammo feed.”

“So? So what?” she asked, pressing forward and leaving me feeling very isolated at the rear of the group.

I glanced behind us to confirm that the hallway was still empty and guessed “Powered armor? Another Ranger?”

“Right. There must have been a paladin somewhere nearby,” Leigh said. “And they got into some serious trouble.”

Lita shrugged. “Like we didn't? Forget the gun and let's go!”

“Griff-ons...”

I snapped my head around just in time to see the black pegasus lurch up the hallway from behind us. He flared his wings, one of which hung limply at the elbow joint, and howled something primal and furious before breaking into an unsteady gallop.

He pitched forward and rolled head-over-hooves twice after running into a veritable wall of bullets.

“More coming up behind!” Amy stressed.

“Then let's go!” Serge ordered.

I stole one last look back before rushing forward with everyone else, only to nearly run over Isaac as the griffon train came to another abrupt halt.

Ahead, a small mound of groggy zombies lying against a door looked up. One-by-one, they howled, screamed or cursed their dead goddesses as they fought to free themselves of the pile so they could throw themselves at us like all of the others.

“More contacts still behind us!” Amy shouted.

How could there be so many zombies in one facility?!

We opened fire again, but the fusillade of bullets came up short as half of the squad had to reload. I unloaded the power cell in the laser rifle and tried to back away from the mangled undead ponies dragging themselves our way, but stopped when Amy's warning flashed though my head again. We had to move forward, fast!

An orange pegasus mare fell at my feet, smoldering from multiple laser burns to her chest and face. A white unicorn stallion staggered after her and collapsed from a precise shot from Amy that shattered a leg. A green mare of some kind, missing most of her jaw and flesh on her back, gurgled and fell over when another shot shattered her skull. The last, a dingy blue pegasus mare, recoiled back as a thin laser bolt from Serge's pistol drilled through her temple.

The silence that followed didn't last long.

Just as Amy warned, three more undead ponies in lab coats cantered around a corner behind us and broke into a charge. I tried the rifle, but only got an unceremonious beep and flash of LEDs, indicating that its power cell was dead.

Carmelita shouted something that was drowned out in the incessant ringing in my ears from all of the gunshots. Muzzle flashes from her rifle preceded two of the ponies tumbling head-over-hooves, and Leigh nailed the last as she tried to jump the unexpected obstacle in her path.

Silence fell again, and we all took a few long moments to catch our breath and behold the carnage that we'd wrought. Pony blood coated the floor, seeping into the cracks between the metal plates under our feet. At least one of the zombies continued to gurgle and splutter, but none seemed to be willing or able to get up and chase anymore.

“I really wish I had Bitch with me right about now,” Lita quipped as she slowly tracked her rifle between the hallways that met at the corner we stood in.

Serge joined her, keeping his pistol ready. “Amalia, is it clear?”

“Signal's bad, but I think so.”

Lita lowered her gun momentarily and waved for the tracker. “Hey, sweetheart, I'll take that back.” After the two handed it off, she checked it over herself. “Uh, yeah, signal is shit, but I think we're fine.” Amy rolled her eyes.

“Then keep moving. I'll lead. Lita, up here.”

I felt for sure like we must have been headed back toward the central elevators by now, and sure enough, after cutting a few more corners and making a side trip through a small break room with skeletal remains of two unicorns huddled up in a corner, we saw the first sign pointing us back to the “Auxiliary Cargo Lifts.”

We started down one last hallway, but halfway there, Carmelita threw up a claw. “Got something on EFS. Neutral. Wait, it just turned hostile.”

Serge didn't stop. “Must be another zombie waking up. Keep alert.”

Lita held the tracker up in one claw, and her rifle in the other as she and Serge inched forward into the room beyond. “It's not moving. Must be stuck in scaffolding or something.”

We all eased in after them, and to my surprise we found ourselves in an unfamiliar room. This was a pair of two massive cargo elevators set into a cylindrical room that extended up and down for several floors. The emergency lighting was a little better, though still bathed in that same ruddy hue, but I saw a freight elevator paused a floor above us to the right, set into shafts of sparse scaffolding that didn't look strictly safe. Another elevator rested just to our left, but we didn't need that to get up to the top floor.

“I can't get a fix on the contact. Wait, it's moving around this-”

The world exploded.

Everything happened so fast I couldn't even register it all. A puff of blue feathers, a deafening bang, a blinding flash from the floor above, Serge falling back against the wall behind us, a spray of vaporized concrete, it all happened at the same instant.

Everyone else, followed by me, instinctively fell to the ground and tried to scatter for cover. In my stupidity, I followed the nearest moving thing in front of me and chased Carmelita in the opposite direction to Serge to hide behind a concrete pillar. My ears rang so badly I couldn't hear a thing, but I felt my whole body shake with each beat of my heart as reality slowly caught up to me. Lita screamed something I couldn't make out and pointed a talon up to the catwalks above, but I was too distracted by trying to diagnose Serge from ten meters away.

Blood coated the wall not far from the bullet impact. His armor was covered in spiderweb cracks and fractures, so clearly he'd been hit, and hit somewhere in the torso. Despite it all, he tried to push himself upward, and reached for the laser pistol sitting just beside him…

Another boom and flash filled the room, and a concrete pillar on the other side of the room blasted apart in a shower of fragments that made me think twice about the cover we were using. Who was shooting at us? What was shooting at us?

I eased out enough to steal a glance up at our attacker, and saw a massive armored figure shift around in the dim lighting. A Steel Ranger? It had to be. But it also didn't matter! If Serge was hit, I had to get to him immediately.

Without thinking about the probability of being perforated by that hideously loud weapon, I leaped out of cover…

Right as Serge squeezed the trigger on his pistol. Intense red beams speared through the air upward, leaving glowing afterimages in my vision and telling the Steel Ranger right where we were and that he was not dead yet.

I dove forward and felt the air tear past my neck as another bullet sailed by, followed by the boom from the supersonic rifle. Serge fired twice more, but something went wrong. I only caught a glimpse of the crackle of lightning playing across the power cell, but the moment I reached him the weapon detonated in a vibrant flash of red and purple magical sparks that seared my vision all over again. He jumped back in shock, knocking both of us to the ground an instant before another bullet obliterated a chunk of the pillar as large as my head.

The moment I extricated myself from the pile, I rolled over to confirm that the next boom and flash were pointed somewhere else in the room, before ripping my medical kit off and digging for a potion. Serge wasn't fighting to get back up this time, and when I finally took the time to look at him more closely, I saw why. The first shot struck him squarely in the breastplate, which did little to stop the bullet from penetrating his chest and drilling into the wall behind him. Blood ran freely from the wound, and his beak was starting to stain red. He cradled his right claw, but his eyes were unfocused and wandering aimlessly as he moaned lightly.

I ignored his claw for the moment and poured a healing potion into his beak. It wouldn't be enough to heal such a grave injury, but it would keep him alive until I could check more closely, which wasn't going to happen until the shooting stopped! Thankfully, he was at least conscious enough to swallow it by reflex…

The weapon discharges continued, now chewing up parts of the room nowhere close to me, so I crept back to the edge of our not very effective cover to see how much worse things were getting. Leigh and Amy were pouring shots up at the Ranger paladin from opposite sides of the room, taking chances to shoot when the pony's attention was trained on one or the other. I gripped my pistol, checked that I'd cleared the stoppage already, and tried to ignore the sweat soaking my palms. If I flew up now while the pony was distracted, I could get him from behind. I just… I just had to wait for the right moment…

Isaac clearly had the same idea, and launched from the shadows.

He made it halfway up before another bang rang out, and he tumbled downward in a puff of orange feathers. By some miracle he crashed on the other side of the catwalk on our level instead of spiraling down into the depths below, but fucking blood feathers, I didn't have but one super restoration potion, and that was the only thing that was going to keep someone alive if they got shot in half a dozen particularly vital places! For all I knew he was dead already, but I had to get to him to check. Why wouldn't my limbs work!?

Carmelita backed away from her pillar and pointed her rifle up to the ceiling. To my surprise, she opened fire, filling the room with secondary sparks and flashes from her bullets hammering through the catwalk and bouncing off of the pony's powered armor. This was it, she had the pony distracted, so I had to take my chance! I had to-

Her back erupted in blood and she spun around to land on her belly. I felt the bullet blowing through the floor ripple all the way around to me, and stared in mild horror. That was three down with life threatening wounds, and here I was standing like an idiot instead of doing something!

The groaning of the floor above snapped me out of the stupor, and impossibly heavy foot falls boomed overhead as the pony stomped my way. I snatched up my medical kit and spun to flee around the catwalk before one of those massive rounds punched through the ceiling and me. The stomps grew closer and another shot rang out. Then another, and another. The bullets sparked and bounced around me, ricocheting off of the floor and ceiling catwalks.

Ahead of me, another shot rang out. The small bullet rocketed forward and slammed into my breastplate. ...and bounced off. Wait, that was a bolt. From the-

The world was lost in a cacophony of twisting and groaning metal, and a series of massive impacts behind me threw me to the floor. I struggled back to my feet, just in time to see a bewildered Amalia picking herself up too.

Behind me, a feminine voice I didn't recognize groaned, and stressed hydraulics whined. I whirled around and saw the Steel Ranger sprawled out in the midst of tangled steel bars and floor plating. He, no, she, coughed and fought to catch her breath. Her helmet was missing and her blue face was covered in scratches and what looked like bites. Her armor was likewise riddled with dents, dings, scratches, scrapes and more, and one of the cannons on her side, the side facing me, thankfully, had evidently been torn completely free.

She struggled to extract herself from the mangled mess of metal from the collapsed catwalk, but her forelegs were both pinned beneath a collapsed girder. “Gragh, dammit!” Her brown eyes locked with mine, and she gave another heroic heave to free herself, to no avail.

Upon closer inspection, it was clear she was in rough shape, and not even a pony, exactly. Long, droopy ears and a gray muzzle made it clear that she was actually a mule. A mule that looked like she hadn't slept or eaten in days, and who'd been attacked by probably at least as many zombies as we had. I'd seen only a clawful of mules in my whole life, and never imagined I'd see one among the Steel Rangers. How would that even work? Did this chapter accept outsiders or something?

It was too bad I'd never find out. Without hesitation, I crawled over the debris and pressed my pistol against her temple.

For once, the pistol didn't jam.

There was no time to reflect on it. I had three patients to check on, any of which could already be dead. Serge in particular might have just been crushed by the catwalk…

Speaking of which, I had to backtrack around the other way to get to him now. Amy fell in with me, and almost immediately we came across Leigh and Isaac. The big orange griffon was just grabbing his rifle and trying to figure out what was going on when we got there. One of his wings was oozing blood from a fist-sized bullet hole, but he didn't look injured otherwise.

“Ike's hurt, but it can wait. How bad are the others?” Leigh asked.

“Bad,” I answered without stopping. I could feed him a potion later, but I had to get to Lita and Serge right away.

Carmelita was worse than I feared. Blood was everywhere. Soaking her feathers, running down her shattered armor, dripping from the holes in the floor grating and smeared all over one claw. She was still breathing, but her breaths were rapid and shallow. I unclasped her armor and pulled the mangled halves apart, but there was so much blood in her feathers I couldn't tell much more. Based on the entry and exit points of the wounds, as well as the incredible bleeding, I figured she must have been hit in the spleen. There were worse places to be shot, but not very many.

I pulled off my medical kit again and fished out the gently glowing purple potion. I only had one, but only its magic was strong enough to save her under these conditions. Serge had been shot in the lung, and he really needed it too, but Lita had no chance if I didn't give it to her.

A wound like this needed the potion to be administered directly, so I turned her over partway and poured about half of the luminescent liquid onto the glistening wound that dripped blood even as I watched. As I hoped, the hole began to close, but as I feared it didn't fuse completely. I had no choice but to pour the rest of the potion onto the wound, which to my relief, did finish sealing it from the inside out.

I dug three more potions out of the medical kit and handed them to Leigh and Isaac. I directed him to drink one now, and a second if his wing didn't stop bleeding, and told her to give Carmelita the third one if she came to enough to swallow it without choking.

With that, I left her and rushed around to see how bad Serge was. By luck, the catwalk hadn't collapsed this far back, so he was in no worse shape than when I left him, but that was still plenty bad enough. He was still dazed, confused and having trouble breathing, but at least with him I had high hopes that with the three potions I had left, the bleeding would stop and he'd at least remain stable until we got back to base.

Getting back to base was something I hadn't figured out yet, but we'd cross that bridge when we got to it. If more Steel Rangers showed up in the next few minutes, we were all dead.

I poured two potions into the wound, which sent him into a coughing fit that sprayed me and the floor grating with fine droplets of blood, but the coughing did stop, and that was an encouraging sign. He was aware enough to drink the last potion, which I was confident now would keep him alive for at least a day if it came to it.

A closer look at his claw worried me that he might be getting a medical discharge after this mission. He was missing two talons and his thumb, and it was his dominant claw, too.

I sighed heavily and started packing my kit back up. Another bridge to cross when we got to it. Getting back to base was much more urgent than worrying if Leigh was about to become sergeant.

“We don't have any way to radio for medical evac, do we?” I asked after rejoining them.

Leigh pointed upward. “Once we get back to the surface, we should be in range. Too much signal attenuation down here.”

Amy tore her eyes away from Lita. “Are they too bad to transport?”

Probably, but we could if it was urgent. I was more worried that while the four of us were technically capable of ferrying them back home, it was going to be an incredible ordeal, especially since Isaac, who was easily the strongest of us, was injured and could probably barely fly alone, much less with half of another griffon weighing him down.

“I wouldn't if we have other options.” I pointed to Leigh. “You're in charge now, so you'll have to make the call, but they've got a better chance if we can get someone with a sky cart and more medical equipment out here. That would probably arrive before we could get back to base, and if they don't get better treatment, Serge probably won't survive. Lita is iffy.”

She waved Isaac over to grab Serge, and for Amy to help with Carmelita. “Let's go then. We'll fly up the shaft and find our way out. I'll be on point with the EFS. Move fast, everyone.”

With Serge slung over Isaac's back, and Carmelita in Amy's and my claws as we took to the air, we began ascending the central shaft in the room.

Mercifully, we found an entrance to the assembly level at the top, and quickly located a path back to the path we'd already cleared. From there it was just a few agonizingly long minutes back to outside, where we found the entrance and yard beyond to be devoid of any more ponies, power armored or not. We laid the wounded out in the shade of the doorway and took up defensive positions while Leigh radioed back to base.

There was more that I could do, now that we weren't in a zombie infested lab or being shot at by Steel Rangers, but simply put there was no way for me to do the surgery Serge needed under these conditions.

Accordingly, the sound of someone picking up the radio on the other end was the sweetest sound to my ears in years.

Gain Experience – You gain 10,000 experience points for crushing your foes.