In a world filled with misery and uncertainty, it is a great comfort to know that in the end, there is a light in the darkness.

I idly wondered if the ponies and zebras of the Old World would have declared peace on day one of their war if I went back in time and showed them an example of what their descendants would be eating. I wasn’t even talking about Cram or Sugar Apple Bombs either. Even the ‘fresh’ food that was grown on Republic farms around here was apparently a far cry from what had once existed. Arginine spent an hour dutifully trying to explain why modern day apples grown in the valley tasted so radically different from the tart green fruit I was currently holding in my hoof. I’d drifted in and out of the lecture, but I remember that it’d had something to do with radiation from the balefire bombs and adaptation to a dryer climate both contributing to a whole new kind of fruit that wasn’t technically an ‘apple’ anymore. Genetically speaking. The same went for the onions, potatoes, and everything else that was being grown in Neighvada.

Prior to today, I’d have sworn up and down that Republic foodstuffs were head and shoulders above anything else you could find to eat in Wasteland ruins. Now, after having tasted authentic Old World food, I knew that even what modern farmers grew was complete garbage. I was actually a little worried that I’d never be able to look at a bowl of vegetable stew the same way again.

I also now understood why Sugar Apple Bombs never quite tasted like apples. Turns out that the ‘problem’ was that apples no longer tasted like apples! Who knew?

If nothing else, it’d been an exceptional last meal.

“Hope that keeps you quiet for a while, kid,” I mumbled as I lapped morosely at the last little dribblets of apple that had soaked into my coat. In theory, Arginine’s stable still had plenty of seed stock that could be evacuated before we scuttled the place. In practice, those seeds just couldn’t grow in Neighvada anymore. Not without a lot of help from pegasi weather teams.

Maybe, if we survived this, my next quest should be to contact the Enclave and arrange some sort of arrangement? Starlight had told me that, once long ago, the pegasi had made a deal to control the weather for ground ponies in exchange for food. Maybe I could broker a similar deal again?

Eh, those were concerns for Future Windfall. Present Windfall had other things to keep her mind occupied for the time being. Specifically: performing the last few checks on their defenses.

Not that there was a whole lot that I could really offer in the way of advice and suggestions on that front. What did I know about machinegun nests and trench lines? Honestly, I felt like the most useless pony here. Foxglove had raided the stable’s supply rooms for every talisman, spark battery, and spare beam rifle that she could get her hooves on. The latter was especially difficult to pry from the hooves of the mercenaries who were intent on claiming as many of the newly manufactured weapons as possible as part of ‘their share’ of the loot.

“You can either let me slap it on a turret to do the shooting and get shot at, or you can get shot at; which’ll it be?” Funnily enough, that proved to be all the convincing that the mercenaries needed to let the violet unicorn have her way.

Starlight spent the day going through the unicorn populations of the mercenary companies and selecting the more promising among them for what she called “Abbreviated Magic Kindergarten”, teaching them to cast a shield spell and giving them a few other lessons on unicorn magic fundamentals. There’d been no shortage of fuming and eye rolling at first from among her ‘students’. But, after only fifteen minutes, it became pretty clear to everypony that Starlight’s knowledge was leagues above everypony else’s and I could tell that some of those mercenaries took her lessons to heart. Not a lot of them, but some.

Even Arginine was tagging up with the medical staff from the companies, making sure that they were all given equal shares of what was in the stable’s clinic. He was also acting as something of a liaison with the ponies from his stable who were electing to join in the fighting. I’ll admit, that had actually been the biggest disappointment in all of this: the number of ponies from the stable who’d offered to join us. In my deluded optimism, I’d thought we’d see hundreds of the ponies here volunteering to help once they’d learned that everything about their stable and their ‘mission’ had all been a huge lie. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

I suppose that really had been too much to hope for, in hindsight. Lie or no, it was the ‘truth’ that they’d known for their entire lives. It’s what they’d been taught while growing inside those maturation tubes. I couldn’t really expect them to change their whole worldview in a few hours. A lot of them even seemed perfectly content to continue on with that mission! I only hoped that they wouldn’t be a problem when we scuttled the stable.

In all, the complement of stable ponies ready to fight for our side numbered just below fifty. Less than a tenth of the stable’s population. Honestly, I got the feeling that most of them were just hedging their bets: waiting to see who came out on top in this fight before ultimately deciding if it was worth the effort to try and continue that whole grand crusade for perfection of theirs. Still, I was grateful for those that did join.

My feelings on Arginine turning them into something of a quasi-honor guard for me on the other hoof…

“I trust you to know how best to employ them effectively in the upcoming fight,” the stallion had said to me when he’d made the announcement, “and you are likely the only pony here who would not be immediately dismissive of their newly professed loyalties.”

While I was dubious about the former―what did I know about leading troops in a battle?!―it was hard to argue against the latter. I noticed to wary looks the other ponies gave to the few dozen new recruits from the stable. I couldn’t exactly condemn them for their skepticism either. As for myself, I trusted Arginine, and I trusted his judgement. If he said they would help us, then I believed him.

Whether this would all be enough in the end…

I glided down through the narrow gorge, alitting near where Yeoman issuing orders to his lieutenants. The Housecarls had been tasked with occupying the trenches on the stable’s right flank. Arguably the more defensive side of the narrow valley we were in, as it consisted of a lot of rocky outcroppings that would make an all out assault by the enemy difficult, at best. A few of Griselda’s griffons were helping him to plot out the fields of fire for his machinegun emplacements and automated turrets. The stallion glanced up at me and nodded briskly, “Windfall. We’re nearly all set up here,” he frowned and glanced around at the high wall of the narrow canyon, “I can’t say that I like being boxed in like this though.”

“Yeah, I know,” I nodded in sympathy. If anypony could appreciate feelings of apprehension at being constrained, it was a pegasus, “but at least this way we only have to worry about being attacked from one direction.”

Why reassurance was met with a bitter smile, “and we have the option to retreat in exactly zero,” he pointed out.

“Frankly, if we don’t stop Constance here, there won’t be anywhere to retreat to for long,” I pointed out, receiving a gruff nod from the mercenary captain, “anything else you guys need?”

“A megaspell to wipe out the enemy the moment they arrive wouldn’t go amiss,” Yeoman said with a dry chuckle before shaking his head, “nah, we’re about as ready as we can expect to be,” he patted the wall of the trench, “as long as we can keep them from getting a hoof in here, we should be secure enough,” he looked to the left and frowned, “it’s the river bed that concerns me.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, looking in the same direction at the left flank of our defensive line, “we’re working on that. In fact, I’m headed there now.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you,” and with that the stallion nodded and returned his full attention to the rest of his company while I flitted further along the trench line.

It wasn’t difficult to see what had the earth pony concerned. Unlike the rough and rocky terrain that he was holed up in, the other side of the narrow valley consisted of the dried up riverbed. It was quite flat, and faced a great deal of open terrain. If Constance was going to push anywhere, this was going to be it, because there just wasn’t much cover to be had. Even with the deep furrows that had been carved into the ground to form a deep trench, the ponies within would still be vulnerable to grenade lobbed by the attackers. My biggest concern was that Constance would just launch a full on assault on this side of the gorge and overrun the defenders with sheer numbers. At that point, Yeoman's ponies would be pinned up against the cliff with nowhere to go and being fired at from multiple sides.

Steps were being taken to mitigate the danger of that happening, but there was only so much that could be done. The same terrain features that provided our biggest advantage, in the form of a confined fighting space to limit the number of attackers that could be thrown at us at one time, was working against us by severely limiting the number of defenders that we could effectively array against them. We’d doubled up with both the Harlots and the Hacate, but the narrow line had them almost shoulder to shoulder. A few well-placed grenades would devastate the defenders. However, thinning their numbers meant we might not have enough guns keeping Constance’s forces back.

It was enough to give me serious doubts about my plan. Not that we had enough time to do anything about it.

The one saving grace that we had was the Razor Beaks. Griselda had her fliers spread out all over the sides of the gorge, nestled behind outcroppings and in little caves all along the cliff walls, ready to rain fire down on the enemy from above. With luck, they’d be able to dart in and harass enemy from the skies and keep them from wanting to get too bold with their attacks. If we whittled them down enough, they’d eventually get to the point where they no longer had sufficient ponypower to launch a proper attack. The Razor Beaks were our ace in the hole.

For now, at least. I stared down at my pipbuck and bit my lip, debating on whether or not I wanted to roll the dice on making this call. As much as not knowing for sure was gnawing at me, I wasn’t certain that I wanted to risk getting genuinely bad news.

Much to my―debatable―relief, Homily made the decision for me. My pipbuck signaled that I was receiving an incoming transmission from McMaren. With bated breath, I accepted the broadcast, “Homily?”

“Windfall!” the distant radio personality exclaimed in relief, “thank the goddesses; I assume the battle hasn’t started yet?”

I felt myself break out into a small smile despite the tension that was hovering in the narrow valley like a fog, “not yet. Soon though,” my eyes darted towards the sky, looking for any signs that one of Gresilda’s scouts was on their way back with news, “please tell me you have some good news?”

“Roger that!” I felt a wave of relief crash through me. Maybe there was some hope yet, “my techs have finished up everything both here and at the Hangar. Everything’s all powered up, we’ve got a solid connection, and the transmission tower is all set to go. The system’s just finishing up its last self-check and Moonbeam’s ready to plug herself into the network. In a few minutes we’re going to have her try and power up one of the drones to make sure everything’s solid, but every diagnostic and test we’ve run is showing a green light, so there’s no reason to think that anything’ll go wrong when we try it for real.”

“That’s amazing, Homily, thanks! You have no idea how much I needed to hear this,” having a thousand Nightmare Moon combat drones descending from the heavens upon Constance’s army would pretty much guarantee our victory. I almost didn’t want to acknowledge it out loud for fear of jinxing everything!

“Thought that might be the case,” I could hear the satisfaction in the earth pony mare’s voice through the speakers of my fetlock-mounted computer. It was only right that she should be proud too. This was as much the fruit of her and her ponies efforts as it was anyponies. I idly wondered if ‘Miss Neighvada’ was going to be spreading out the credit when she made her next broadcast? “Oop! Last diagnostics done; I’m going to hop off and let Moonbeam know. I’ll call you back in a few minutes to let you know your calvary’s on its way!”

“Roger that, Homily. Windfall, out,” I closed the connection, feeling myself beaming from ear to ear with a satisfied grin.

Hopefully, the mere sight of a sky full of those drones would be enough to convince Constance to surrender. Okay, maybe that was being a little too hopeful, but I could at least take solace in the fact that our victory was assured now. I looked around to see if I could spot any of my friends and let them know the good news.

Unfortunately, that was when I caught sight of a very motivated-looking pegasus flying towards us from the east end of the gorge. It was one of Griselda’s scouts. Specifically one of the scouts that was keeping an eye out for Constance’s army. If he was coming back here…

My smile curdled immediately and I winged over onto an intercept course. I wasn’t the only one either. The metal-beaked griffon hen that the scout was here to report to was very quickly at my side, and her expression was just as grim as mine was. The crimson pegasus pulled up short into a hover, snapping a brief salute at the older griffon, which she did not return. I was actually a little shocked to see that level of professionalism from a mercenary. Then my eyes caught sight of the burned-in scaring on his flank in the shape of a cloud and lightning bolt. A Dashite. An exile from the Enclave. Ah, that answered a few questions.

“Enemy sighted,” the pegasus stallion snapped sharply in a brisk military fashion. You could take the pegasus out of the Enclave, apparently, but the reverse didn’t seem to take quite so well, I observed, “estimate that they’ll be at the mouth of the valley in an hour,” almost imperceptible through his professional tone, my ear twitched at the slightest hint of...worry? I suppose that was to be expected. Constance’s forces outnumbered us more than three-to-one, taking our recent volunteers into account. Those were hardly the kind of odds that even an experienced military sort would take lightly. The stallion looked between the two of us, visibly concerned now, “they have armor support.”

I very nearly fell out of the sky, “what?!”

The pegasus nodded, “they have armor. Six M3 Strongheart light tanks. They look to be in good condition, all things considered. No idea where they got them,” both the stallion and Griselda were looking expectantly at me now, as though assuming that I’d have the answer.

“Well don’t look at me! Nopony ever said shit about them having tanks!”

“You sure as fuck acted like you knew everything else about these damn ponies,” the griffon spat, sneering at me with a withering look, “what, you’re telling me that the Overmare here never clued you in to that little detail? Imagine that,” she shared a dour look with her scout, who was looking just as unhappy.

“What do you know about these strongfarts there, ‘Claver?”

The stallion dutifully hid away a brief grimace at what was likely an intentional mispronunciation and supplied the requested information, “quite a bit, actually. A few Steel Ranger chapters around the Badlands have managed to keep some in operation, so Enclave military personnel in the area get briefings on them. The M3 was a late-war model light tank, designed to get in and out of operations areas quickly. It was outfitted to support infantry against other infantry. It’s main gun is just a 2-inch, but it’s got a fast cycle rate. Has a pair of side-mounted fifty-cals too, each with a one hundred and eighty degree firing arc. The good news is that those don’t have great elevation, so they shouldn’t be a huge threat to us,” the hen seemed to relax a little at that, “it’s armor isn’t all that thick, since it needed to cut down on weight to keep up its speed, but we’re going to need more than grenades to get through it, and we’re really light on missiles,” he pointed out, “our mines won’t do much more than scratch its paint either.”

“They can just steamroll right over our left flank,” I hissed, already bringing up my pipbuck to pass on the bad news. I just had to figure out who I wanted to call first. I finally settled on Foxglove. If anypony knew how to get a little more ‘oomph’ out of our ordinance it would be her, “Foxy! Constance is here, and she brought tanks.”

“She brought what?!” the unicorn exclaimed. I mentally noted that her ‘what’ had been a near-perfect match for mine but refrained from commenting on it.

“Tanks. Small ones, but big enough to hurt us. Badly. We need something that’ll stop them up for a bit. Homily called me a minute ago and said our air support will be on its way shortly, but if those tanks get through our lines first, it might not be enough.”

“I―bu―how―argh!” the unicorn sputtered through the speakers of my pipbuck, “what exactly do you expect me to do here, Windy?! Stop them? I don’t even know what they look like, how big they are, how powerful they are, or anything! I can’t even begin to imagine what I’d need to build, and if they’re already within sight of us, then I sure don’t have any time to build it anyway,” it was actually difficult to tell if Foxglove was more distraught or furious, “Windy...I don’t know how to help with this!”

I bit down on my lip. It certainly wasn’t what I wanted to hear from the pony that I had come to depend on for coming up with material solutions to our problems. Not that I could really fault her on this. She was right: we didn’t have time to come up with a comprehensive counter to tanks. I looked back at Griselda and the pegasus, “pass the word along about what you saw and try to get as much of our heavy ordinance to the left flank trenches as possible―that has to be the side those tanks’ll hit. I’m going to get some answers about where they came from,” I turned to fly back to the stable but hesitated to issue one last order, “and keep an eye out for any more surprises!”

My hoof was already dialing in another pipbuck tag to communicate with as I left the pair of mercenaries, “RG, I need to speak with Zara. Now,” I growled into the mic, “meet me at the stable entrance.”

A second later, I received a response from the stallion, “on our way.”

I arrived long before the pair of stable ponies, which gave me plenty of time to both fret and fume over the information that I’d just received. So many questions were whirling through my head. Nopony had mentioned a thing about these ponies having any sort of serious hardware like that back at Shady Saddles. Ramparts hadn’t mentioned anything about it either during his last update―

I blinked in surprise. With so much else going on, I hadn’t realized just how much time had passed since the former Republic courser had made a transmission. Maybe he was observing radio silence to avoid detection? Still, news like Constance getting her hooves on armor support should have been cause enough to make even a risky call in order to make sure we had that kind of information. A stallion like Ramparts would have had to know how devastating those new additions to Constance’s forces could be to coming at us cold like this.

A cold knot of worry began to grow deep in my gut as my brain quickly came up with a short list of very depressing reasons that Ramparts might not have called in a warning ahead of time. It was a list that I didn’t have all that much time to consult as a pair of ponies came into sight from within the stable. I focused my attention on the smaller mare, glaring at her, “Constance has tanks with her. I need to know where she got them and why you didn’t tell us about them. I’d also appreciate a run-down on any other surprises she has in store for us.”

To her credit, Zara managed to look genuinely shocked and confused by the news, “tanks? What are you talking about? We don’t have anything like that,” she insisted, “we’re only capable of manufacturing small arms and barding on site.”

Had we been anywhere else, I’d have assumed she was lying to me. However, I knew enough about the ponies here to know that they weren’t that good at lying. But that didn’t mean that she was telling me the whole truth either, “I never said they were made here. I asked you where she would have gotten them.”

The Overmare looked at me helplessly for several long seconds and shrugged, “I haven’t the slightest idea,” she said, “you read the same records that I did. None of them mentioned anything about equipment like that.”

I had read the same records. I knew about the stable’s origin as a means to produce an army for Equestria to strike at the zebras from beyond the grave. That was why this stable even had the kinds of resource collection and fabrication facilities that it did: to outfit that army. Zara was right though. Nothing that I’d seen here suggested that this stable was capable of building heavy equipment like that. I also hadn’t seen any records detailing caches and depots that were designed to be used by the army that was grown here.

Though, I had to admit that that would have been a good idea. If you were building a stable to field a secret army after the nation suffered catastrophic damage, you wouldn’t want to rely on having anything left to work with from the Old World. You’d want to either have the infrastructure to rebuild on your own, or make sure that there were plenty of supplies and equipment hidden away for later use. And when you already had the ability to construct nigh-impregnable bunkers, why not capitalize on that advantage and build a few more, filled to bursting with everything an invading army would need?

But that still didn’t explain why there hadn’t been a record of those bunkers, or how Constance could have found out about them if there was. Though, thinking on it, I could come up with some theories about the former, “it’s possible that Moondancer deleted or hid away some of the details of Operation Overrun in order to keep any elements of the Ministry of Wartime Technology from executing the protocol once she’d decided not to go through with it. I don’t remember seeing anything that went into detail about its planning: routes of attack, timing, specific targets, or anything like that. Those sorts of things should have existed, but they didn’t. Some stuff had to have been deleted,” and those detailed plans would certainly have listed any supplies that had been set aside exclusively for the operation.

“That is a fair point,” the Overmare admitted, her features scrunched up in thought.

“But then how did Constance find out about it? Was there ever a time that she was rooting around in the stable’s files? She could have come across it then.”

The mare shook her head, “there’d have been no reason for her to be in the archives. The educational software that was used to train her for her leadership position would have provided her with all of the information that she’d need to lead our armies.”

That whole concept still sounded crazy to me. Getting information just downloaded right into your brain. Constance might have looked like a filly, but she could have known as much as all of the Old Equestria generals combined, for all I knew. There was no telling what her head had been filled with that the MWT thought their future commanders would need in order to pull off the plan that they had in mind―

Oh, horseapples…

“She knows the plan,” I whispered under my breath, drawing a look from both Zara and Arginine. I looked at the Overmare, “you said she was trained for her leadership position,” the mare nodded, “I assume that means that she got a different training program than all of the regular soldiers?” another nod, “this training software; is it stuff you ponies developed yourselves? Or was it with all the other equipment; like, was it built in to the chambers?”

“The hardware was certainly integrated,” she said, “along with a selection of educational suites so that not only soldiers, but various technical jobs could be filled to support the stable.”

“The fact that the regular soldier software still exists means that Moondancer probably didn’t mess with any of that stuff, even after she decided not to go through with Overrun. Their stable would still need a few security ponies anyway,” I looked between the two ponies, “that’s where Constance learned about the tanks. The MWT did set up additional depots somewhere, filled with everything that they thought their army would need to invade the zebras. While the files on the computers with that information were deleted, that same information would have also been part of whatever training the army’s leaders got.

“Why waste time with mission briefings and stuff when you can just give everypony who needs it the information directly? Constance always knew about the tanks.”

“Then why did she not bring them to Shady Saddles?” Arginine asked.

“She’s spent the last few weeks completely dominating the White Hooves without them,” I pointed out, “after a string of victories like that, she probably thought it’d be a waste of time and effort to get them,” I frowned, “but then…”

“Then we defeated the contingent she left to take the town.”

I nodded, “either she realized she was getting complacent and decided to get serious, or she’s using them to make up for the losses in her forces until she can get reinforced from the stable. In any case, we’re in a lot of trouble and we have no idea what else she might know about that was in that training software. We can’t take any chances.”

“She may have gotten access to other weapons that were not manufactured in this stable as well,” Arginine pointed out.

My thoughts went almost immediately to missile and balefire egg launchers, and what such weapons would be capable to doing to our defensive lines. We needed Moonbeam to get here as soon as possible. I brought up my pipbuck and keyed in Homily’s tag, “Homily, it’s Windfall. How long before Moonbeam can get those drones here? Constance has some Old World tanks she recovered from an MWT bunker, and we think she might have a lot of other serious weaponry too. We need serious firepower of our own.”

The response that I received was not from the McMaren radio jockey, but from Moonbeam herself as she jumped onto the frequency using her own integrated communications array, “System checks have just finished. Everything checks out and is good to go. The interface reports good telemetry and we’ve got plenty of bandwidth. I’m plugging myself in now. You’ll have your air support in five minutes, and absolute victory in six,” the level of confidence the mare had did wonders to soothe my own rising concerns. One prototype Nightmare Moon drone had been enough to beat back a full on White Hoof assault on Seaddle. A thousand finished models should have no trouble sending Constance packing.

“Glad to hear it, Moonbeam,” I responded breathlessly, grateful to just hear genuinely good news today, “hopefully just seeing all of those drones will be enough to get her to stand down,” that much I wasn’t very confident about, but I liked to think that maybe the soldiers with her would have enough sense to recognize a senseless battle and surrender even if she refused.

I looked up from the pipbuck to Arginine and the Overmare, “I’m going to go and pass on the good news. In the meantime, let’s make sure that we’ve got what heavy weapons we have spread around as much as possible. I’d also appreciate you smart ponies coming up with ways to stop or at least slow down those tanks,” dealing with things like that wasn’t anything that I had any sort of experience fighting. Fortunately for the Wasteland in general, raiders didn’t tend to have armor support.

The pair nodded and I flew off back towards the trench lines. I frowned as I looked them over, wishing now that we’d opted to make them a lot wider. As they were now, those tanks would probably be able to just drive right over them without a second thought. There wasn’t anywhere near enough time to do anything about that now though. Spark grenades might be able to do something against them, but those tanks would have to get a lot closer than I was comfortable with in order to be in range for that.

The speaker on my pipbuck crackled and Moonbeam’s voice came through, “alright, hooking up now. Connecting to the hangar. Connection’s good. Bringing the drones online and linking up―AAAARRRRGGGHHHH!” I very nearly stalled out as I was assaulted by a scream so loud that it created feedback with the pipbuck’s microphone. As quickly as I could, I dove for the ground and landed, looking down at my pipbuck with concern.

“Moonbeam?” No response, “Moonbeam?” I felt my gut begin to chill with every passing second that I didn’t hear from the mare. Had something gone wrong with the connection after all? Had Homily and her technicians missed something vital somehow? “Moonbeam, are you alright?!”

Finally, there was a burst of static, but that was it. I double-checked to make sure that the frequency was still open and that I was even connected to her. My pipbuck insisted that everything was working just fine, which actually made me even more concerned. I would have much rather the silence be attributed to a fault on my end. Then I heard another short burst of static. Only, I realized, it wasn’t static that I was hearing. I was crying. Faint, muffled, crying. I turned up the volume as much as I could.

“...Moonbeam?”

“...I can’t,” I was finally able to make out, “it’s too much...too many,” she gasped, “all those eyes, all those legs, all those wings...it’s too many!”

I let my rump fall to the ground with relief. She was alright. Thank Celestia! “It’s alright, Moonbeam. We probably don’t need all one thousand anyway,” I assured her, not sure who I was trying to convince more: her or myself, “a few hundred should be more than enough. I mean, look at what one of you managed to do to those Steel Rangers, right? Just try to get as many as you can―”

“You don’t understand,” the other mare snapped through the static, “I can’t do ‘a few hundred’ either! I can’t put myself in that many places at once. It’s too overwhelming...too much information coming in for me to make sense of it. I’m suddenly seeing with hundreds of sets of eyes, and feeling with thousands of sensor inputs. It can’t do it, Windfall!

“I can manage maybe two or three, but I’m not sure I’d be able to do it well,” she spat, bitterly.

The despair was back. If that was all that Moonbeam felt she could control...then, frankly, there wasn’t even a point to it. She might as well have been here herself, “I don’t understand. You said that everything was working fine. Is there something wrong with the equipment that the system check couldn’t detect or―?”

“It’s not the hardware,” Moonbeam replied with irritation, “it’s me. I can’t handle that many inputs at once. It doesn’t make sense though,” she snarled, “I was fucking designed to do this! Like, this specific thing was why the Ministry of Awesome did all of this to me in the first place! The surgeries, the computer plugged into my brain, the AI program that they―”

Moonbeam’s words cut off mid sentence, but not do to any technical reason. I had a fair guess as to what had just occurred to her that caused her train of thought to derail. I’d had a similar epiphany at almost the same moment. One that the other mare put into words: “It wasn’t me. I wasn’t the one who was meant for this. Selene was.”

She was right, I realized. The MoA hadn’t intended for the little filly that was Moonbeam to be the command and control node for their drone army. She’d just been the raw materials for the actual platform designed to use them: Selene. A hyper-advanced software program that exceeded the hardware limitations available to the MoA for their secret project. So they’d opted to forego synthetic circuits in favor of organic ones in order to get the processing power that they’d need. Selene had been meant to control the drones, using Moonbeam’s brain as the platform it operated from.

And we had locked the AI away in a part of Moonbeam’s electronic brain where it specifically wouldn’t be able to interact with anything that wasn’t her life-support functions. Selene was completely cut off from the drone control systems. Those drones were not useless to us. Our trump card was gone, before we’d even been ready to use it.

Horseapples.

I brought the pipbuck back up to my lips, but my mouth moved wordlessly. What did I even want to say right now? I could ask her to come back here so that she could help on her own, but I genuinely doubted that the presence of even her single advanced drone chassis would do anything to shift the odds significantly. She’d just end up dying with the rest of us. No, the best thing was for her to stay put in McMaren and help the ponies there. Once we fell here, Homily and the others would be the only ones left in the valley to get the word out and try to mount a second line of defense against Constance’s invasion.

I doubted very much that she’s want to stay though, knowing what was going to happen to us. To her mother. I had to convince her to stay though. To survive. I was about to say as much when my pipbuck chirped, signalling another incoming transmission that was addressed specifically to me.

The sender was identified as being Ramparts.

Without hesitation, I flipped to the other channel. I had a hundred different questions for the Republic soldier. Some of them even didn’t have anything to do with his long silence. If anypony had advice on how to stop armored vehicles, surely it would be the experience military officer! However, before I could get a word out, I was cut off by the sender of the signal.

Anything I might have said died on my lips as I heard, not the deep baritone of the courser, but rather the familiar voice of a very young mare coming through the speaker, “As a courtesy, I will grudgingly acknowledge that you have proven yourself marginally more capable than I had allowed for. But be mindful that this is more of a critique of my own performance than a commendation on yours. It is also not an oversight that I will make again.

“I am contacting you now to issue my terms for your surrender: your forces will lay down their arms and assemble themselves in an orderly fashion so that they may be summarily euthanized. Stable resources will be made available so that this process can be conducted as painlessly as possible. You have five minutes to comply.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but the signal went dead the moment Constance stopped talking. I stared at the pipbuck for several long seconds. It hadn’t been a coincidence that Constance had used Ramparts’ pipbuck to issue that demand. She had a pipbuck of her own. That act in itself had been a not-so-subtle message to me: she’d caught―and very likely killed―the stallion and the others with him. That small force had been doing everything that it could to avoid a confrontation with her, and she’d still wiped them out; and she’d done so quickly enough that Ramparts hadn’t even managed to get a warning out.

She wanted me to know that our group here wouldn’t fair any better.

My features hardened as I continued to glare at my pipbuck, as though it had somehow offended me on its own. Ramparts had been a good pony. He’d been fair, and stuck to his word. He’d told me what I’d needed to hear, rather than what I merely wanted to hear. He was a friend. He deserved to survive this and make it back to Yatima and his son. He deserved a happy life. A lot of ponies did.

Constance was bent on depriving them of that.

She couldn’t honestly have expected us to surrender, not after everything that we’d gone through to stop her. That ultimatum had to be just another part of the mind game that she was playing with us. I still had very little idea of how extensive her training had been while hooked up to the stable’s education software, but I could recognize when somepony was trying to get under my skin. She wanted me angry. Making mistakes.

Though it wasn’t like I couldn’t make plenty of mistakes while feeling perfectly at ease.

Fortunately for all of us, it wasn’t just me making the decisions.

I sought out Foxglove. I needed the guidance of a smart pony. I managed to find two. The violet unicorn mechanic was surrounded by long sections of steel beams, a welder’s mask covering her face and a bent piece of metal pipe and a metal pick of some sort clutched in her telekinetic grasp. Somehow she was using those tools and an array of spark batteries to attach several of the beams to one another, building an ungly-looking wad of angled steel. Behind her was Starlight, who was using her magic to slice much longer steel beams into more manageable pieces for Foxglove to weld together.

I used a wing to partially shield my eye from the brilliant bead of light that she was producing and called out to her, “Foxy!”

Foxglove glanced up. The bead of light vanished and the shielded mask was flipped up over her head, revealing a very haggard and grime-covered mare who looked as though she was daring me to give her more to do. I felt myself gnawing on my lip a little. I suppose that I had been leaning on her pretty heavily over the last few hours, but hardly any of the stable ponies who’d joined up with us were engineers of any sort, leaving Foxglove as the only one who knew how to build most of what we needed. She’d been hard at work putting together as many turrets as she could before I diverted her not too long ago. It looked like she was fully expecting me to redirect her attention again.

“Uh...hey,” I said awkwardly, looking over what I took to be the fruits of her more recent labors, “these look...nice?” I stared at the amalgamation of hastily-welded steel struts, “what are they?”

“The best I could come up with the stop something like a tank on short notice,” she nodded her head over the side of the trench towards the enemy, “Starlight’s teleporting them into the valley, halfway burying them in the ground. The tanks shouldn’t be able to push them aside, and they can’t drive over them. I’m not going to be able to build a solid line of them in the time we have, but I might be able to force them to make a lot of turns and slow them down that way.”

I glanced over the lip of the trench and spotted the couple dozen sets of steel beams that were poking out of the ground at odd angles, looking like hideous metal weeds. There were some pretty substantial gaps between them, but for as long as Foxglove had been at this new project, it was impressive that she’d managed to do as much as she had. Hopefully it would count for something.

“Constance is going to attack in less than five minutes,” I informed the pair of unicorn mares as I retracted from the trench’s edge. The dread was pretty clear to see, but I continued on, “...I’m pretty sure they got Ramparts. She just called me using his pipbuck,” now for the worse news. I glanced towards Starlight, “Moonbeam can’t control the drones after all. Not without Selene.

“We’re not going to get our backup.”

Both mares went noticeably pale and exchanged glances, “do they know what the problem is?” Foxglove asked, “maybe there’s still time to fix whatever’s wrong.”

“It’s not a hardware issue. Moonbeam thinks that she was never meant to be able to control all the drones,” I locked my gaze with Starlight, “she’s pretty sure it was meant to be Selene,” understanding blossomed across the faces of both mares.

“...so what’s the plan now?” Foxglove asked.

I looked hopefully towards Starlight, “maybe we could Sing? A half dozen of us managed to take on the Lancers that way. We should be able to beat Constance’s army no problem too, right?”

The pink unicorn looked up from where she was still working and scowled at me, “of course Singing won’t work!”

I balked, “why not?”

“Because we don’t have enough pegasi,” she said, sounding as though the stated reason should have been plainly obvious. I was somewhat gratified to see that Foxglove was looking at the other unicorn with just as much confusion as I was. This only seemed to compound Starlight’s annoyance though. She facehoofed and sighed in exasperation, “right, they don’t even have magic kindergarten anymore…

“Look, we don’t have the time―and I honestly don’t have the patience―to get into a long-winded and detailed lecture about arcano-equine resonance, magical frequency harmonics, and ethereal equilibriums. So you’re just going to have to trust me when I say: it just won’t work.”

“Well what do we need to do to make it work then?” I demanded, not quite appreciating her tone. Okay, I got it, she was really smart and knew a lot about magic. Not being able to go to school for decades was hardly my fault! I’d be asking her a lot fewer ‘stupid’ questions if she took the time to at least explain the fundamentals to me.

Starlight snorted, “either find me another hundred pegasi or kill a couple hundred of the other ponies on this trench line,” again, both Foxglove and I balked at her response. At least that kind of reaction from the other unicorn seemed to make her slightly more accommodating where an explanation was concerned.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly before addressing the two of us―mostly me―in a cool tone, “remember how I told you that all ponies had magic; not just unicorns?” I nodded, “and how Singing brought that magic together and made it usable?” another cautious nod, “well, that only works when the kinds of ponies that the Singing is drawing from is roughly balanced. It doesn’t need to be exactly balanced―though the more balanced the more potent the Singing will be―but it needs to be at least somewhere in hoofball stadium.

“In Santa Mara, there were two unicorns,” she gestured at herself and Foxglove, “a pegasus,” she jabbed her hoof at me, “and earth pony―Ramparts―and whatever the fuck Arginine counted as. A two-one-one-onish ratio. I can work with that,” now the unicorn became noticeably more exasperated, “out here we have a, I don’t know, a unicorn-earth pony-pegasus ratio of: hundred-hundred-ten...question mark? Plus close to fifty of whatevers from Arginine’s stable?

“I can’t possibly work with that. Nopony could. And even if we tried,” she hastily added just as I opened my mouth to ask exactly the question she seemed to anticipate, “the leyline interference pattern that would crop up from the imbalance would actually be more likely to help the enemy than our side!

“So: no. No Singing.”

Horseapples. It wasn’t the answer that I wanted to hear, especially not after getting the news about Moonbeam and the drones, but that was hardly Starlight’s fault. We’d just have to try something else.

“In that case, I guess our new plan is the same as the old one,” I offered in with a wry smirk that suggested a level of confidence that I simply wasn’t feeling in the wake of receiving so much bad news in the last few minutes. The enemy having equipment that we weren’t anticipating, Ramparts likely dead, no miracle Old World super-weapon coming to save us all at the last minute, no unexpected victory through Song...nothing was going our way, it seemed like. In hindsight, maybe that wasn’t such a huge surprise. The ponies of Arginine’s stable had been working towards this for decades. I’d thrown together an opposition in less than a month with an appalling lack of vital information. All I’d known is where their stable was. Little else.

Now we were all going to pay for my juvenile optimism, “we’re just going to have one less part of it. We have good defensive ground,” I gestured around the narrow gorge, “we have this trench. We should be a pretty hard nut to crack. I mean, as long as Constance doesn’t have any other surprises up her fetlock.”

Why was a tiny little cerulean blue pegasus mare with a chromatic mane dramatically waving her hooves and mouthing for me to ‘shut up!’ over and over again?

My ear twitched. I cocked my head to the side as I picked up the distant sound of...something. It was a pretty low tone that had a somewhat ‘hollow’ quality to it. I peered eastward as I realized that it was coming from the direction of Constance’s army, so it probably wasn’t a good sound for us.

The speaker on my pipbuck crackled suddenly to life with a burst of static and Yeoman's voice came blaring over the open frequency, “mortars! Get down! Everypony get down!”

I cocked my brow at my pipbuck and glanced at the other two mares, “isn’t that a kind of tooth?”

Starlight shook her head, “no, that’s a molar,” she tapped her chin in thought, “I think a mortar is―” what was that whistling sound?

All three of us dove for the ground and covered our heads with our hooves as an explosion erupted suddenly from just a few dozen yards away. It wasn’t just a single isolated explosion either. A second followed on the hooves of the first. Then a third. The next three burst so close together that it was difficult to distinguish them from one another. Clods of dirt and rock started raining down, covering us in a film of grime as we kept ourselves as low to the ground as possible.

While I couldn’t see the explosions, I could hear and feel them just fine, and so I was aware that they weren’t all happening in one isolated area. They were occurring all along our line, falling short of the trenches we’d dug by less than a dozen yards on average.

Then, as suddenly as they’d begun...everything went silent. For several long seconds, none of us moved though, just in case more were coming. Eventually though, I risked poking my head up over the lip of the trench. My eye widened as I beheld the reformed landscape and the scores of new divots that hadn’t been there five minutes ago.

Starlight coughed and shook the dirt out of her mane, “as I was saying: I think mortars are a type of artillery. Great.”

“They have to be at least half a mile away,” I didn’t appreciate that my protest came out in a tone that was very reminiscent of a whine, but, “that is totally unfair!”

“All’s fair in war.”

I just about jumped as I whirled around. Yeoman was behind me, his gaze fixed in the direction of the enemy. He looked over to Starlight, “now would be a good time to round up all those ponies you were teaching shield spells to. We’re going to need them soo―” his head jerked back towards Constance’s forces and then he dropped, “get down!”

None of us hesitated as we once more collapsed to the ground and covered ourselves. A second later there were more explosions. However, this time they were happening behind us. Just as before, they were not far off, and we got a second helping of dirt and shattered rocks in our manes as the light artillery sent up fresh plumes of earth into the air. A minute later, it ended again, just as abruptly.

Yeoman got back up to his hooves, sneering, “they’ve got us bracketed now. Their next barrage will land right in the trenches,” he turned towards Starlight again, “we’re going to need those shields, and soon! If they chase us out of the trenches, we’ll have no choice but to fall back to the stable or die.”

The pink mare had a worried look on her face, “we don’t have enough trained unicorns to protect the whole line, and there’s no way that any of the others are magically strong enough to deflect more than one―maybe two―of those blasts!”

“We have to try,” I said now, “he’s right: if we get pushed out of this trench and into the stable, it’s all over anyway. Have the defenders group up if you have to so that they’re easier to protect. Something. We have to hold this line!”

Starlight looked like she wanted to protest, but then thought better of it, letting out a frustrated sigh instead as she ran off down the trench line, muttering something about getting blood from stones. Right now my focus was more about trying to keep our blood inside of us and off of the stones. I picked up my enclave helmet and shook out the dirt that had landed in it, slapping it over my head and watching as the heads-up-display booted to life and interfaced with my pipbuck.

I was a pegasus. I was going to be a lot more help in the air than I was here on the ground. Besides, I wanted to get a look at these mortars and maybe get an idea of how to go about getting rid of them. Hopefully they weren’t as tough as tanks, and maybe a strike force of flyers could get in quick enough and take them out.

My gaze settled upon the enemy force, which had taken up position at the mouth of the narrow valley. I was easily able to pick out the half dozen brown metal forms that must have been the tanks the scout mentioned. They weren’t particularly huge armored vehicles, but they didn’t have to be to cause us a lot of trouble. We were desperately lacking in heavy ordnance, and their armor looked plenty thick enough to shrug off small arms and even what energy weaponry we had. Some sustained, coordinated, blasts with magical destructive beams might take out their treads of weapons, but they’d have to get pretty close to allow us the opportunity for that kind of precise targeting.

At the moment, they didn’t seem inclined to come that near. None of Constance’s forces did. They were all just waiting patiently far beyond the reach of any weapons that we had. Why shouldn’t they? Apparently we were well within range of their weapons after all.

As though on cue, I was drawn to several spurts of smoke coming from just behind the enemy’s own lines. At least a dozen of them, with pony shapes milling about. Every few seconds, another plume would erupt from the same locations. There had been a hint of coordination during the first appearance, but the puffs quickly became more erratic.

Then I heard the explosions below. As well as the screams.

I glanced down. Yeoman had been right, it seemed. From high above, I could see the pock-marked ground a dozen yards to either side of our trench line. Now, the enemy’s artillery was landing right on top of it. Not every shot fell perfectly within the gully that we’d dug into the earth, but most of them seemed to. Domes of magical energy flared beneath an explosion on occasion, but nearly every time they did, it was accompanied by the brilliant display of that same shield spell shattering. A second later, another mortal would fall nearly on top of where that shield had just been, meeting no resistance as it impacted the ground and detonated.

More screams.

I felt my teeth grinding in my jaw. I glared at Constance’s army as it sat there...motionless. Our forces were getting torn to pieces―slaughtered―and we weren’t even going to get the chance to shoot back. At this rate, Constance would beat us without any of her soldiers getting so much as a paper cut.

The worst part was that there was nothing that I could do to stop it. As much as I wanted to, I knew that if I flew at those mortars, I’d be cut down in an instant by the hundreds of soldiers there with nothing better to do than to shoot at the little pegasus filly. Even if I rounded up the entirety of the Razor Beaks, it was highly unlikely that we’d get through all of them. All I could do...was watch. Watch everypony that I’d led here die.

My helmet’s display flickered briefly, catching my attention. I noticed that a little message had appeared in the upper left corner.

>>Hope this helps
>> DOWNLOADING FILE
>>DOWNLOAD COMPLETE

>>UPDATING OS…

>>INSTALLING N1GH7M4R3 OS v1.34b PATCH(STABLE)

>> … … …

My display went dead briefly, and in a moment of panic I wondered if it had somehow broken. A few seconds later, I heard a low beep and everything began to light back up again. For the most part, everything looked just as it always had. Save for a new icon that was sitting illuminated in the lower right corner containing four letters: CIWS.

>>INSTALLATION COMPLETE

“Kewiss? Ki-wiz? How in the fuck do you pronounce that? What does it even do?”

I was soon provided with my answer as I saw a new round of smoke plumes erupt from behind the enemy’s lines. However, those plumes were not alone. Tiny little red triangles interposed themselves in front of my eye, moving rapidly through the air high up into the sky. I craned my head, watching the curious little icons as they began to slow until finally reaching their peak and beginning their descent. I soon realized that what those little triangles were tracking was the trajectory of the artillery shells themselves. Whatever that update was had given my Eyes Forward Sparkle the ability to track those tiny fast-moving explosives.

…

If my EFS could track them...did that mean that SATS could target them too?

I engaged my Sparkle Assisted Targeting System, and felt time slow down around me. Those same little triangular icons remained, but next to them were now percentages that fluctuated slightly as I looked on. A few that were coming nearer to me displayed rising percentages. I queued up several attacks with my bracers and executed. My hooves lashed out with a series of rabbit-punches, letting loose a short string of brilliant orbs of energy. It was hard to tell which of them hit, but I saw them enveloped by a puff of smoke as they intercepted and detonated one of the small artillery rounds.

There were still plenty more of the mortar rounds arcing through the air, and SATS was going to need time to recharge, but that didn’t mean that I was useless. I could see the icons clearly on my HUD, and if I could see them, that meant that I could shoot at them. Though, the closer I was the better off I’d be. Those rounds were traveling quite quickly, and were spread out pretty far, but the Gale Force rig let me move with considerable speed as well and cover a lot of distance in short order.

I cocked back my hoof and darted for the nearest shell.

It was harrowing, and I knew that I was pushing quite a few technological limits, but I managed to intercept some of Constance’s artillery. Not all of it, of course, that would have been impossible. However, by using my flight assist rig judiciously, and applying SATS just long enough to help me line up the first shot and then using my own skills to follow up, I was able to stop many of those explosives that otherwise would have killed the ponies defending the trench line. Shield-spell-wielding unicorns made up for a little of the shortfall after that.

A lot of shells still got through though. Some of them with lethal results. Worse, it didn’t seem like Constance was short on ammunition either. I began to worry that she’d be able to keep up the barrage for hours. The dwindling gauges measuring the power remaining in my Gale Force and bracers grimly reminded me that I could not. Even if I could, more and more ponies were dying every minute, despite my best efforts. The attrition would catch up with us eventually at this rate.

But what else could I do? I had to try and save as many as I could, for as long as I could. I had to try and protect them. Even if, ultimately, I’d fail.

I whirled around and threw out my hoof, flinching away at the cloud of debris that blew outward from a detonation that had been a little closer than I’d have liked. I felt a few slivers of metal bounce off my helmet’s visor. I shook off the sensation and looked about for my next target; then slapped my wings back and arced upwards once I’d found it, unleashing a stream of shots as I flew to meet it.

The helmet’s speakers crackled with Foxglove’s voice, “that’s incredible Windfall! You can really see those things from that far away?”

“Not even a little bit,” I quipped back, only half paying attention to what I was saying as I veered away from the airburst I’d just created and sought out the next triangular icon I saw, “Moonbeam uploaded something to my pipbuck,” I threw out another series of jabs as I chased the symbol towards the ground. I suspected that it must have been quite a shock to the ponies in the trenches to see me suddenly dive towards ‘them’ and start firing off. A few panicked and scrambled out of the way in surprise. A few seconds later I scored the hit that I needed and looped back upwards, leaving behind an expanding cloud of gray smoke, “now my EFS can track the mortar shells.”

“A software update that lets EFS see the incoming shells?” the unicorn mare said in astonishment, “she has something like that?”

“I guess,” I’d have shrugged, but I was too intent on swiping at another shell that was just reaching its zenith.

I was shocked when the cyberpony’s voice joined in on our conversation as well, “it’s part of the defensive protocol for the drones. They were designed to serve as a home defense force. That included being able to perform balefire missile interceptions too. My systems can tack targets as small as an apple moving at hypersonic velocities.”

“Can you send a copy of that software to my pipbuck too?” Foxglove asked in an excited tone.

“Sure, I guess. But you won’t be able to do much from the ground with just SATS. Your accuracy will be pretty bad. Windfall can get in close,” Moonbeam warned.

“It’s not for me,” the mechanic insisted, “I can use it to reprogram the targeting talismans on the turrets so that they can start tracking the mortars too. With enough of those running the update, nothing would be able to get through.”

That got my attention, “wait, really?” then I cursed as I realized that I’d let a shell get out of range with my hesitation.

“Yes, really. Moonbeam, send me the program; we’re running out of time.”

“Uploading now...done.”

“...got it! Windy, keep us covered for a few more minutes while I update the turrets! Starlight, come with me―” the signal cut out as Foxglove turned her attention from her pipbuck’s transmitter to the task at hoof.

“So keep doing what I’ve been doing,” I grimaced as I burst another shell and veered away, “easy enough…” my gaze darted briefly towards my energy readings. The Gale Force was down to a third of its power reserves remaining, and both of my bracers had less than a quarter. Swapping out the spark packs or the bracers was as simple to do as it was for most typical magical energy weapons. However, the alterations that Foxglove had made to the flight rig made that swap a slightly more involved process. I’d be spending almost a minute grounded while the battery array was replaced.

A lot of damage could be done in a minute by those mortars.

Not to say that a lot of damage wasn’t already being done. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop all of these shells. I was just one pony. Despite my best efforts, some of the mortar rounds got through. A few of those burst just above the ground on shimmering shields of magic, which themselves all but evaporated immediately afterwards. However, far too many for my liking struck home, erupting in columns of smoke, dirt, and―all too frequently―gore.

I reminded myself that we were working to put a stop to it. I just needed to focus on doing as much as I could, for as long as I could, and trust that Foxglove could get the turrets switched over quickly enough to make a difference. So I allowed myself time enough to take a breath, and threw myself towards the next red triangle hurtling towards our lines.

On the ground below, it was bedlam. I caught glimpses of the mercenaries running every which way in what looked like a chaotic fashion, either trying to escape part of the trenches that seemed to be getting hit more often, or to rescue maimed and injured comrades. Ponies stayed low, but kept much of their attention skywards―looking for danger that they knew they’d never be able to see coming.

Whenever I got low enough, I could just make out the din of yelled orders, occasionally punctuated by screams of agony on the tails of an explosion. I focused on pushing those failures from my mind, vehemently reminding myself that it was simply impossible for one little pegasus to keep the whole sky clear of these things, and simply focus on doing as well as I could. Every mortar I stopped was a life saved. I continually told myself that. The screams kept making it hard for me to really believe it.

Adding to my anxiety was the constantly shrinking readings on my remaining Gale Force and bracer power supplies. I tried to be as judicious as possible with the resources that I had left, but it was a constant battle in my head. If I missed a shell with the first three shots, did I cut my losses and move on to the next? Or did I keep throwing out blasts until I scored a hit, throwing good energy after bad? Not every single round from Constance’s artillery was on target, I noticed, so I tried to eyeball some of the arcs in order to gauge which ones were likely to hit near anypony. However, the longer I watched one fly, the less time I had to react to it, and the more time I spent confirming that one shell was going to fall short was less time I spent racing to intercept one that would kill somepony if it hit.

It was nerve wracking. I couldn’t remember feeling this anxious during a fight before. Idly I wondered if this was another pregnancy thing, but that thought didn’t persist for very long. Honestly, the answer was likely a lot simpler than that: I’d never been in a fight where I’d known that the stakes were so much higher than just my own life before. Hundreds―thousands―of ponies were counting on me, whether they knew it or not.

And, deep down I knew, unless something changed drastically in the next hour or so―probably a lot less, honestly―I was going to let them all down by losing here. I was just so far in over my head that it was patently ridiculous. A filly like me had no business being here, let alone trying to pretend that she knew how to lead an army.

I needed Jackboot. I needed anypony who knew what the fuck they were doing. Because it sure wasn’t me…

“Alright, that’s it!” Foxglove announced, “I’ve got the new parameters uploaded to the targeting talismans,” maybe I’d spoken too soon, I thought. I turned my head in the direction of the violet mare’s pipbuck marker, spying her and Starlight standing by one of the automated platforms that she’d built, “I’m going to reboot the turrets now. When they come back up, they should start intercepting the mortar rounds all on their own. It’ll just take a few seco―”

My helmet’s proximity alert system flashed a warning that something was coming very close to me. Before I could even react, I heard the shell whistle by. Had I been hovering a few feet to the right, I’d have been struck square in the back by the plummeting ordnance. I certainly didn’t need SATS this time to track its movement. My eyes locked onto the backside of the four-finned cone as it hurtled onward…

...heading right for Foxglove and Starlight.

“Incoming!” I was screaming at the top of my lungs at the same moment that I was throttling the Gale Force to its highest acceleration. I didn’t know if I’d actually been transmitting through my pipbuck, to be honest. I might have been, or I’d simply yelled loud enough to be heard on the ground. In any case, I saw Starlight’s purple mane whip around as she looked in my direction.

I veered off to the side, throwing out shots as fast as I could. I didn’t want to risk hitting either of the mares. SATS was still recharging from the last shell I’d intercepted just seconds ago, so all of my attacks had to be made manually. The first two went wide, and I felt my anxiety ratchet up even higher. I poured on more shots, but I just couldn’t get the lead right. I was running out of time.

I glanced at my SATS gauge. Energy enough for a single shot had accumulated. The hit probability that I was being fed by my pipbuck was in the upper-eighties. I engaged the targeting assist and queued up the shot…

...only to be denied by the system.

My eyes went wide as I looked back at the shell, now rotating slowly a few yards away from me as the world was slowed by the magic of my pipbuck. I tried several more times to set up the shot, but my pipbuck kept forbidding me. I doubled-checked. SATS had energy enough for at least one shot, so what was the prob―

My bracers were dry.

There was no way that I was going to be able to reload them with spark packs in time.

Still enveloped in SATS’s slow motion progression of time, I turned my head to look at Foxglove and Starlight. Both mares were keenly aware of what was about to happen. The pink unicorn’s horn was sparkling to life. I could already see the faint shimmering sphere of a shield spell beginning to form around her horn as it prepared to expand outward around them. It was moving slowly though. Far too slowly to possibly establish itself in time before the mortar hit.

Foxglove was taking a different approach. She didn’t have a spell to help them, so instead she was in motion. She wasn’t trying to get away though, I realized. If anything, she was getting closer to where the shell would impact. The mechanic wasn’t trying to escape. I could see that her goal was a good bit more noble: she was trying to tackle Starlight to the ground and shield the pink mare from the inevitable blast.

She was a good pony. They both were. They deserved better than this. They deserved better than me.

“I’m sorry,” I said in a whimper as I disengaged SATS and let time resume normally. My wings flipped out and my flight leveled off just moments before I would have hit the ground. My eye was closed tightly as I heard the explosion in my wake. The scream.

I whipped around in a tight loop and circled back. I deserved to be confronted with my failure. I deserved to see what my folley had wrought.

I deserved it, but I still wasn’t ready for it. I’d seen mangled bodies before. I’d created more than a few in my lifetime. Yet, seeing this now...it was so very different. Foxglove lay half-buried by the tossed up debris of the explosion, her flesh torn and wrent. A splatter of blood and gore connected her shrapnel-spackled body to her now-dismembered right hind leg.

Shielded by Foxglove’s body was the pink form of Starlight Glimmer. It was difficult to tell how extensive her injuries were, as she was mostly obscured by the purple mare. She wasn’t moving though.

It felt like I stood there―motionless―forever. In hindsight, it had probably just been a couple of seconds. I was simply transfixed by the pair of bodies of my friends. Ponies who had counted on me to see them through this. Ponies that I’d let down. Ponies who had died because I wasn’t good enough, and had been stupid enough to think that I could matter. Ponies who―

“Uugh…”

My eye twitched as it caught what I could have sworn was movement coming from the pair. Then I saw Starlight open her eyes and raise her head, blinking in confusion. Her movements were stiff and slight, but they were movement! It was only then that I realized that I had neglected to actually check my Eyes Forward Sparkle. I had simply assumed that...well, I’d figured the worst had happened. Sure enough, I spied a pair of amber blips directly in front of me.

I focused on Foxglove, specifically her detached limb. Alive she may well be―for now―but that was very likely to be subject to change if she didn’t get treatment soon. I slapped my pipbuck, “RG! Get here now; Foxglove’s hurt bad!” I was rushing forward in that same moment, tearing off my saddlebags and emptying their contents in an effort to get to what healing potions I could. I tore off the stoppers and upended the vials over her flank before pausing just long enough to make sure that Starlight drank one too.

My attention was distracted for only a second when I heard a series of electronic chirps followed by a gentle humming. I glanced up at the nearby turret just in time to see it come to life. Its barrel jerked a few times from one side to the other before it suddenly tilted sharply upward and began to unleash a steady stream of brilliant white energy. It wasn’t the only one either. All along the trench line, similar torrents of magical energy leapt into the air, ending in bursts of smoke and shrapnel. In those same seconds, all of the sounds of explosions abruptly ceased.

Foxglove had succeeded. Her modified turrets were intercepting the enemy’s artillery.

Then I heard several ponies running towards us. Arginine had arrived and was already floating out several pieces of medical equipment with his magic. He’d taken the liberty of raiding his stable’s clinic prior to the fight to ensure that he was properly stocked on supplies. In addition to vials of purple healing potion and syringes of Med-X that were typically all that field aid consisted of, I saw bags of fluids and lengths of plastic tubing entering the mix. The large stallion paid me only a courteous nod before devoting all of his attention to his patient, which I found to be perfectly acceptable. My usefulness had pretty much ended in this specific situation.

Starlight had regained slightly more of her faculties since drinking the healing potion, but she was clearly still a little dazed. She put a hoof to her ear and made a few awkward sounds before cringing and shaking her head, “that was a close one,” she mumbled before looking over at RG’s purple patient with a concerned expression, “is she going to be okay?”

“I am confident I can save her life,” Arginine responded without looking away from what he was doing, which currently was coating Foxglove’s stump in some sort of yellowish powder, “but there will be little that I can do about her leg,” he briefly jerked his head in the direction of her severed limb.

“That’s fine,” I assured the stallion, noting that I was sounding more than a little rattled myself, “just do what you can,” again I glanced up into the sky to reassure myself that Foxglove’s defenses were going to keep doing their job, “looks like we’re going to be safe for now.”

I took the opportunity afforded to reload fresh spark packs and had Starlight assist me in swapping out the batteries for my Gale Force as well. Just as we got the last of the new batteries in place, I noted that the turrets were no longer firing. Not because they’d ceased to function, as I’d momentarily feared, but because Constance’s mortars had stopped firing at us. Apparently, she’d recognized the futility of it now.

Of course, this was arguably far from ‘good’ news. I knew that if I was in that general’s place and I learned that my long range guns weren’t going to work anymore, I’d move on to my next most serious threat: the tanks. I looked either way down the trench and realized that most of the able defenders were crouched down in an effort to protect themselves. In fact, hardly anypony was even looking out over the top of the trench in the direction of the enemy. Hardly an ideal way for ponies to defend a position like this.

I looked at Arginine and then to Starlight, “help Foxy. Keep an eye on the turrets,” then I finally took notice of the ponies that RG had seen fit to bring with him: my ‘honor guard’. I jabbed a hoof at them, “you’re with me,” if they wanted to be put to use, then I was going to put them to use.

With Foxglove down for the count, we’d effectively lost our ability to make more of those jumbles of steel beams that would deter Constance’s tanks, so we needed something else that would stimy them. To that end, I decided that I was going to take my inspiration from Shady Saddles and what the ponies there had done. None of those gem-hunting tunneling experts from Marls’ clan had come with us―not that I was blaming them; they would just have been really useful to have at hoof right about now―so I decided that we’d have to make do with the next best thing: physically and magically strong examples of Old World genetic engineering.

I led my contingent of stable ponies to a point along the trench that ran through the flatter dried river bed and peeked over the top. The enemy’s mortars were still quiet, but it was otherwise difficult to see much of what was going on from the ground. I knew the tanks were out there though; and whether they were what Constance threw at us next or not, they were bound to show up eventually. All I could do was hope that they showed up later rather than sooner.

I pointed my hoof at the side of the trench facing the enemy, “I need you all to dig some tunnels. Dig out towards the enemy, and then to either side, parallel to our trenches. They need to be wide and close to the surface.”

Most of the contingent of augmented stable ponies frowned―insofar as Arginine ever did―one of them speaking up, “you want us to dig tunnels?”

“That’s what I said,” I nodded. There were additional frowns and a few idle mutters. I cut them off with a wave of my hoof, “Constance is too far away to shoot at, so I don’t need any of you to do any fighting right now. At least by digging you’ll be doing something useful.”

“If those tunnels are too close to the surface they’ll collapse,” another pony pointed out.

“That’s the point: you’re going to be digging tunnels for their tanks to fall into when they come. So make them wide, make them deep, and put them close enough to the surface that a big heavy tank will get swallowed up when it drives over them. Got it?”

Realization dawned over the faces and the group nodded their understanding, setting their rifles aside. Their horns began to glow as matching auras enveloped chunks of earth in the side of the trench and removed them. With nearly two dozen of them working, they managed to dig their way into a new tunnel running beneath the ground in minutes. Once they were out of my sight, I let my attention wander to other matters that would now need to be addressed: such as taking stock of how many ponies had been killed during the shelling. I brought up my pipbuck and summoned the mercenary leaders to a meeting.

Five minutes later, the five of us were huddled in the trench together, and it was easy to see who had gotten the worst of what Constance had thrown at us. Keri, Yeoman, and Hemlock were all covered in dirt and blood―some of which was their own―and their eyes were dull with the horrors that they’d just seen. The latter had made an effort to clean herself up and even redo her makeup, but there was only so much that even the courtesan could manage to conceal after everything that she’d just been through. Of them all, only Griselda appeared to be unmarred by the shelling. Likely because she and her contingent of flyers had simply chosen to keep to the skies, hovering above the destruction being unleashed below them.

“How bad were our losses?” I asked, mentally preparing myself to hear some rather unpleasant numbers.

Hemlock spoke first, “four dead. Ten hurt. Three of them won’t be on their hooves again any time soon.”

“The Housecarls lost seven. Four more are laid up, out of the fight,” Yeoman sighed, rubbing at his muddy brow.

Keri curled his lip in a sneer, “Twelve Hecate slain, twice again writhing in pain. Outlook uncertain.”

The griffon shrugged, “I think one got popped. One of my pegasi went groundside to help an injured pony. Some more of those bombs went off. Haven’t heard from him since,” she reached up and brushed a few moats of dirt off her shoulder disdainfully, “other than that we’re just fine.”

The other mercenary leaders flashed the hen dour looks. If she noticed, she didn’t give any indication of it. For my part, I was much more concerned with the report that I’d just received. I’d come here with somewhere close to two hundred able ponies. More than a tenth of them were already dead and nearly as many couldn’t fight anymore. A fifth of our forces out of action...and we hadn’t fired a shot yet. To say the outlook was bleak would have been an understatement.

If I realized that, then it was a sure thing that the other four did too, “we’ll do what we can for the injured,” I assured them, drawing their attention back to me, “and we don’t have to worry about anything like that happening again. We’ll redistribute our forces to fill in the gaps along the trench as best we can and wait for Constance’s next move. We’ve got things in the works to deal with the tanks, but I want all the missiles and heavy ordnance we’ve got distributed evenly along the trench so we’re ready for wherever they decide to make their push―”

A flutter of wings drew our attention to the sky directly above us. The pegasus sentry that I’d met earlier when he’d delivered the report about Constance’s arrival was hovering overhead, a grim expression on his face, “they’re moving in. Tanks in front with infantry columns arranged behind them,” I felt my chest tighten with the news. I’d hoped that we’d have more time, “not sure when they’ll be in range, but―”

All of us winced and the pegasus stallion dropped instantly to cover as a smattering of ‘booms’ echoed through the gorge. The ground trembled beneath my hooves with every explosion. The sounds were quite different from that of the mortars, which had sounded like very large grenades going off. These reminded more like the magically imbued green-band grenades that were based more upon magic than conventional explosions. Above that din the much more familiar sound of automatic gunfire was also audible. I glanced further down the trench line and saw orange tracers racing overhead, along with much larger green bolts of energy.

“―I’m guessing it’ll be right about now,” the stallion finished lamely with a resigned sigh.

“Horseapples,” I cursed under my breath and then glanced at the mercenary leaders, “get back to your ponies and get them moving. Everypony keep their heads down until we can deal with those tanks!” Not that I had any inkling as to how we were going to manage that. I at least got a collective nod from the others before they ran off. The stallion lingered for a moment longer, looking at me sympathetically before he shot back up into the air and zipped off after his griffin commander.

I risked a brief peek over the top of the trench. The stallion’s description was apparently fairly apt: I could see the tanks advancing slowly, still the better part of a half mile out, with silhouettes of infantry marching along dutifully behind them, using their armor to shield them from any return fire. Not that we were offering any. It was too risky for anypony to expose themselves long enough to get in any good shots at the distances involved. Maybe when they were closer…

Of course, I had to wonder exactly how much closer any of those tanks had to get to ravage us. They seemed to be doing pretty good from where they were. Ultimately, yeah, I suppose that they’d have to come all the way to us if they wanted to completely push us out, since if all we did was just hunker down in our trench and not expose ourselves, nothing would get concluded here. Constance wasn’t interested in a siege. Neither of us really had that kind of time anyway. They’d have to advance in order to finish us off now that they couldn’t get at us with their mortars.

A significantly larger explosion nearby caught my attention and I whipped my head in its direction just in time to see one of the turrets that Foxglove had recalibrated to act as our overhead protection vanish in a flash of emerald light. Seconds later, another turret further down was blown to pieces as well. My eyes went wide. If those tanks took out our turrets, then their forces could start raining artillery down on us again!

It looked like we couldn’t wait for them to come to us after all…

I grit my teeth, and let my head hang in despair. This was really starting to get to be too much. It was all coming at me too fast. I wasn’t a ‘strategist’. I didn’t know how to form grand battle plans, especially not on the fly like this! Give me a few days and maybe I could come up with something, but not with all of this coming at me all at once! What did I know about combating mortars and tanks and hundreds of ponies from a line of trenches?! This wasn’t anything that I’d ever been taught in the Wasteland!

If anything, these were Constance’s strengths. Her brain had been filled with the warfighting tactics of the pony generals of old, who had―in a very literal sense―specifically written the definitive books on those subjects. At the end of the day, I wasn’t going to be able to out-think that filly. It was just...impossible. She knew the rules that governed how fights like this were fought inside and out. If I kept trying to play her game, I was going to lose―we were going to lose, it was as simple as that.

But what choice did I have? What else was I supposed to even do out here? What could I do?

I was certain that I heard the faintest sound of a throat clearing inside my own head. A cyan pegasus was looping about in the air, jabbing her hooves outward in a series of rabbit punches before looking over and grinning in my direction. Be Awesome!

I blinked. She couldn’t possibly be serious. I was one tiny little pegasus. What in the Wasteland was I supposed to do against tanks! I couldn’t just punch them into submission, and I doubted that even my bracers were going to do a whole lot against the armor they had. There was no way that I was going to get through that with anything less than some heavy artillery of my own―which I most certainly did not have.

I mean, they had to be protected by super thick steel or something. The sort of stuff that was meant to stand up against other tanks, and nothing that we had on hoof other than missiles was going to do anything to it. Well...I mean, except for―It Was Under ‘E’!―Foxglove’s eldritch lance. That thing seemed to slice through just about anything. If she had been ready to take it to stable doors, then a tank shouldn’t be a problem, should it?

Another tiny throat cleared and I saw the newest arrival, the purple unicorn mare, standing in front of an equally diminutive chalkboard as she tapped a ruler against a remarkably well illustrated drawing of one of the massive robotic sentinels that I’d fought outside of the Ministry of Awesome hangar complex. Next to it was another drawing, this one of a hellhound that had paws larger than I was.

Okay, so, I suppose that I had gone up against pretty overwhelming opponents in the past, yeah. I felt a need to point out that I hadn’t managed to actually defeat all of those, and certainly not all on my own either. I’d had help. A yellow pegasus gestured to the trench lined with ponies. Point taken: I was hardly ‘alone’ this time either.

...Was I really considering this? Going out there and taking the fight to the enemy? There was no way that was the smartest decision that I could make right now...but it was a very ‘me’ decision. I was a mare of action. I knew that I bordered on the ‘impulsive’ side, and that it had even gotten me in trouble a time or two, but it was still who I was deep down. I had to act, because sitting around and thinking meant that you hesitated and risked letting the opportunity slip through your hooves.

Like right now. The longer I waited to think up a new plan, the more turrets those tanks would destroy, which meant the sooner those mortars would start raining down on us again. If that happened, it’d be too late for anypony to do anything about anything. There was something that I could do about it, but I had to do it now. I had to act. I had to help.

I grabbed up my helmet and popped it on before galloping on down the trench line towards where I’d left Arginine and Foxglove. Much to my relief, the pair was still there, as well as a few other injured ponies who had been brought to the stallion for treatment at what had apparently become a new collection point for the wounded. I spared a look at the still unconscious violet unicorn, noting the bandages wrapped around her haunches. Then I began to rummage through her gear.

Arginine quirked a brow as he looked at me, “Windfall? What are you―?”

“Ah ha!” I exclaimed, holding up the eldritch lance in triumph. Then my expression faltered a bit, “...now how do I turn this on?” I glanced over at the nearby stallion with a hopeful expression, nudging the lance in his direction. Arginine looked between me and the lance for a few seconds before seeming to relent. His horn glowed briefly and the tip of Foxglove’s lance flared to life, “Awesome!” I peered up at the brilliant glowing dot of magical energy for a moment and then looked back to Arginine once more, “...does it get any bigger?”

Another pause and then his horn glowed again for a few seconds. The fiery tip of the lance elongated until it was about six inches long, now occasionally sputtering with searing fire, “that is as long an edge as is recommended if you still desire to use it to cut with. I assume that it the case?” he eyed my critically.

I grinned at the stallion, “You know, I’ve never seen a tank before. I thought I’d go and take a closer look. Maybe ask if I could see what they’re like on the inside,” I hefted the lance in my hooves, getting an idea of its weight and balance. I’d never been much of a pony to use melee weapons like this, but I was hardly going to be using it in direct combat with another. I just needed to swipe it at the important parts of a few tanks. I looked over and winked at the stallion, “this is just in case they don’t want to let me in. I feel like that would be really rude. I don’t like it when ponies are rude to me.”

Arginine balked, looking between me and the direction of Constance’s forces with―for him―wide, surprised, eyes, “you intend to go out there?”

It was sweet that he sounded so worried, I thought as I merely sat and smiled, nodding my head, “like I said: I want to go see the tanks. I know they’re coming here to meet us, but I’m just really impatient like that. So I’m going to go out and meet them, look them over, and peek under the hood a bit.

“Don’t wait up! I’ll be back in a bit.”

I turned to fly off, but I felt something tug on my tail. I frowned and looked back, noting that Arginine had a gentle hold of me with his magic. My annoyance abated when I saw the actually blatant concern in his amber eyes. We were both silent for several seconds until he finally said, “see to it that you are,” the aura around his horn faded as he released me.

For another few moments, all I could do was look at the stallion. His stoic mask had never dropped like that, not even for me. I nodded, “I will. I promise,” that seemed to visibly relax him a bit as he gave a slight nod of his own and then turned back to address a newly arrived injured pony that had been brought to him. I turned back towards the oncoming army, and gunned the Gale Force’s turbines, launching into the air like a missile right through the tracers arcing overhead.

My eyes locked onto the nearest tank that was casually rolling towards the trench line and I veered in its direction. I could see the column of nearly a hundred other ponies marching calmly behind it too. For the moment, their attention seemed to be focused exclusively on the trench line that they were approaching. That was likely to change in the near future once they remembered that pegasi were indeed a thing. That was a concern for later. Right now, I needed to worry about the tank.

The main gun mounted into the turret lurched backwards as it expelled another emerald bolt of magical energy towards our forces. I idly wondered if we’d just lost another of our defensive turrets. With steely determination, I tightened my grip on the cutting lance and dove for the tank, pouring on a healthy amount of speed with the help of the Gale Force. I was very thankful for the integrated levitation talismans that lent their assistance to sharp bank I executed just as I reached the tank’s turret. The lance’s burning tip slipped effortlessly into the narrow groove between the turret’s armor and that of the tank’s main body. I barely felt any resistance at all as I whirled in an arc around it, carving my way through its entire circumference.

I noted a few startled reactions from the dismounted forces behind the tank who were taken by surprise by my sudden appearance, and then drew up into a hover just to the side of the main gun so that I was out of the immediate line of fire of any of them. My lips curled into a thoughtful expression as I wondered if that had been enough to disable the vehicle.

My answer revealed that I’d been partially successful as the tank’s main gun recoiled once more. Only this time, it was not merely the barrel that moved, but the entire upper assembly. Indeed, the force was enough that the entire turret tipped upwards and flipped over completely off the back of the tank, sending a few dozen of the nearer troops on the ground scrambling to get out of the way as a dozen tons of turret dropped towards them.

I was rewarded with the sight of five very surprised ponies inside the tank looking around in stark surprise as they unexpectedly found themselves ‘outside’. Two of them sat a little higher than the others, and were crowded around where the main gun had once been. The other three sat much lower in the tank. One was sat forward, her hooves clutching at controls that I assumed were used to drive the vehicle. The other two were located to either side, looking up from the machineguns that they’d been firing up until they too realized their confines had unexpectedly become far less confined than they’d been a few seconds ago.

It was immediately clear to me that the much greater size of the ponies from this stable were not doing these tank crews many favors. I was honestly a little dubious about how comfortable a crew of five ponies my size would be operating under such conditions. As it was, I very much doubted that any of those ponies could have moved enough to scratch an itch!

All five ponies soon noticed the pegasus hovering to their front. I smiled at them, “looks stuffy in there. Thought you’d appreciate some fresh air. They should have designed those things with better ventilation. I’mma go fix the other ones too!”

With that I zipped off towards another of the tanks. I kept myself low to the ground this time, and actually edged my way towards the back of it, coming much closer to the soldiers walking behind it. As I expected, several white lances of light leapt past me from behind as the troops supporting my last target opened fire and attempted to take me down. A few deft flicks of my wings kept my movements erratic enough to keep their shots from getting too close.

As a consequence of their comrades’ actions, a few of the ponies in front of me were struck by the fire being directed at me. One particularly unfortunate soul received a hit that triggered a complete magical disintegration. The rest of them quickly scattered or dove for the ground as they found themselves under fire from their own forces. Almost immediately, the shooting stopped, and a satisfied grin spread across my face as I leveled back out and directed my full attention back at the tank leading the now scattered column.

I didn’t go for the turret this time, but instead jabbed at the tank’s treads, neatly slicing the tracks into several pieces as I flew alongside towards the front of the vehicle. I turned sharply, flying beneath the main gun―giving it a quick nip with the eldritch lance as I went―and continued cutting along the other track as well, leaving the tank still and stranded out in the open.

Two down; four to go.

“Horseapples!”

Unfortunately, it was looking like I had finally worn out my welcome. The column of soldiers behind this tank had recovered from their shock at being fired upon by their own forces and it seemed like they were perfectly content to let the episode go without reprisal. Indeed, they apparently were ready to place the full weight of the blame squarely on my haunches. I found myself being greeted by the sight of several dozen energy rifles being pointed directly at me.

The Gale Force rig worked overtime to not only halt my forward motion, but also to reverse it. The change in velocity was so sudden that, for a moment, I thought the whole contraption was going to tear itself loose and fly off on its own, leaving me behind. Fortunately, that didn’t happen and I was dutifully carried along for the ride as the powerful thrusters hauled me back towards the safety of the trench line. All the while, lances of brilliant white light passed through the air around me.

It wasn’t just the soldiers either, the remaining tanks took great exception to what I had done to their comrades and focused the fire of their turrets on me as well. It seemed that their main guns had not been designed with the intent of engaging small, fast-moving, targets though. All that they managed to accomplish was to carve out a few more divots in the ground and splatter me with mud. I honestly did more harm to myself when all was said and done.

The phenomenal amount of speed that I was traveling at meant that the Gale Force depleted the remainder of its power reserves mid flight. I’d used quite a bit already darting across the battlefield and it was a very power-hungry device even on Foxglove’s retrofitted ‘cruise’ mode. This mad dash back to safety emptied what was left very quickly, to the point where I received the ‘Low Power!’ warning a mere second before the thrusters and levitation talismans burned themselves out.

Caught off guard as I was, I tried my best to stabilize my flight using my now no longer levitation talisman-assisted wings, but the speeds that I was traveling at were far in excess of what any normal pegasus should have been capable of in my opinion, and the force of the air on them made it hard to adjust my direction of flight. I managed to make a fateful twitch that sent me into the ground. The jury was still out on how ‘lucky’ I was to have been going as fast as I had been. On the one hoof, it meant that I wasn’t left stranded out in the middle of no-mare’s-land without any cover to be easy-pickings for the enemy soldiers.

On the other hoof, I was willing to give quite a lot to ensure that nopony ever again mentioned the series of cartwheels and tumbles that my body did as I bounced my way unceremoniously across the ground, coming to a jarring stop inside the trench with what I could attest had been a thoroughly painful ‘thud!’

I spent the next several seconds with my eye firmly shut as my brain sorted out which direction was ‘up’. Once it achieved a degree of confidence, I chanced a look and learned that my brain had been sorely mistaken in the end anyway. I closed my eye again and anemically let my hind legs―which were hanging above my head at the moment―curl a little further forward so that I might roll off the trench’s back embankment and fall flat on my stomach.

“...ouch.”

Understatement of the decade.

Not that I was going to have much of an opportunity to recover, of course. The battle didn’t stop just because I’d had a rough landing. Even now I could hear the rumble of the distant engines as the remaining tanks resumed their laborious crawl towards our defensive lines. The eruptions of explosions as they continued to target and destroy the remaining defenses that we had left.

“Welcome back. How was your trip?”

It was only then that I noticed that my return had indeed had an audience. I looked over to see Hemlock seated primly nearby as she dutifully reloaded a full magazine into the rifle that she was levitating with her magic. She looked me up and down with a raised eyebrow, “I take it things didn’t go well?” she used her telekinesis to raise the now-loaded weapon over the lip of the trench, along with the mirror from her makeup compact. She squinted up as she used the small reflective surface to help her sight the rifle and then fired off a few shots. With a satisfied nod, she lowered the weapon again and looked back at me for my answer.

I grumbled and flicked the mud from my wingtips, “I disabled two of them, but I’ll need fresh spark batteries to make another run. Is Foxgl―er...do you know where some are?” I hastily corrected, remembering that our mechanic was out of action for the foreseeable future. It would be a tough mental adjustment for me to make, I knew. I’d come to rely on her quite heavily over the last few months.

“Can’t say as I do,” the unicorn replied with a sympathetic shrug, “you might consider calling up Griselda though. I think she has some.”

“She does?” I canted my head to the side, wondering why the griffon would have a stash of spark batteries.

“I assume,” Hemlock said as she lifted the rifle a second time and looked up to line up another shot, “you told her to grab a whole bunch of supplies for that push we’re going to make, right?”

I blinked, “the what?”

The unicorn balked, bringing the rifle down again and looking at me in confusion, “her griffons came by here a couple of minutes ago. They said you’d come up with a plan for a counterattack,” she nodded her head towards the enemy, “while you were out there distracting them, Griselda was supposed to collect supplies and then you’d all be striking them from the air.

“...right?”

I wasn’t listening to the unicorn mare anymore though. My thoughts were instead directed at a griffon hen as I brought up my pipbuck and keyed in her tag, “Griselda! Where are you?!” No response, “answer me!” still no response. I flipped the display over to show a map of the area. She wasn’t dead. I could see her pipbuck tag clear as day.

It was moving. Quickly.

Away.

“Griselda, you fuck; get back here! Get back here right now or I’ll―” what? What was I going to do? Go after her while the battle was still raging? I couldn’t leave. Even if I could, there was no way that I’d be able to catch up to them. Even if I could do that, I wasn’t going to be able to do much to stop their company on my own anyway.

In my impotent fury, I slammed my hoof on the pipbuck and closed down the frequency, glaring up at the sky in the direction that I’d seen her tag moving. She was gone, and so was her entire contingent of fliers along with her, I presumed. Roughly a fourth of our forces had just fled the battle, and they’d taken who knew how much of our precious ammunition and equipment along with them.

Hemlock was reaching the same conclusions that I was, it seemed, judging by the pale complexion on her face, “...I see,” the mare was silent for a few seconds. Then she wordlessly lifted the rifle and compact back up and took another pair of shots over the edge of the trench.

So that was it then, wasn’t it? Hemlock knew it too. She was experienced enough to know that it was all over. The one advantage that we’d had were Griselda’s griffons and pegasi. Their speed and maneuverability could have been employed to outflank our attackers once their armor was dealt with. Now it was going to come down to a ground-based slug-fest. One where their superior numbers and weapons basically assured them of victory.

Hemlock had decided that she was just going to...carry on. She had too much dignity to cower or hide. It’s not like these were raiders that might try to take her alive and rape or torture her if we lost. If there was anything that could remotely be considered ‘noble’ about our enemy, it was that they’d kill us all pretty cleanly once they carried the day. So...that was at least something.

In the meantime, we could try to take as many of them with us as possible.

That was a plan that I could get behind at least. Keep trying until it was all over. Not out of any hope that we’d win. I think even I was ready to write this whole fight off at this point. No, this wasn’t about us getting out of this fight alive. It was about making the next fight―because there would be a next one―a little easier on whoever was attacked next, by making sure they had as few enemies to fight as possible.

To that end, I imagined that taking out a few more tanks would help immeasurably in that department. Gale Force or no, I was going to head back out there and see if I could carve up another one before I finally went down. I looked around for the eldritch lance...and didn’t see it. There was a feeling of panic as I fervently searched the immediate area inside the trench where I’d landed. I couldn’t see it anywhere. Where exactly had I dropped it? I’d had it in my possession up until I’d hit the ground, I knew that much. After that initial impact though, it was anypony’s guess where it had ended up.

I didn’t much look forward to the prospect of having to look around the battlefield for it and exposing myself to fire while trying to find an object the size and shape of a small pole. It was in that moment that a scarlet blur swooped in over the top of the trench and landed in front of me. I drew back out of reflex, but quickly relaxed when I realized that the new arrival was a pegasus, and one that I recognized as well. Though that did sour my expression a good bit. Where I knew him from was being part of Griselda’s mercenary company.

Then I saw that he had something in the crook of his hoof: Foxglove’s lance, “you dropped this.”

Tentatively, I reached out and took the magically powered cutting tool. Experimentally, I repeated what I’d seen Arginine do earlier and was relieved to see that the tip reignited once again. I looked back at the pegasus, “thanks...I’m surprised to see that you’re still here. Won’t your boss be mad at you for lagging behind?”

“Former boss,” the stallion stressed tersely, much to my own approval, “I left the Enclave because I felt they weren’t doing enough to help the surface,” he gestured broadly around us, wearing a wry smirk, “and it looks like you all could do with some help.”

For a few fleeting seconds, I felt my lips spread out in a smile. It turned out to be a fleeting one though, and vanished shortly after, “I appreciate that, I really do. But...maybe it’d be better if you left too. If you stay, it’ll just mean one more dead pony. There are going to be enough dead ponies today.

“You should leave. Get out there and spread the word. Warn ponies about what’s coming.”

“Miss Neighvada’s doing that as it is,” the stallion replied. He didn’t seem to be offended by my recommendation. If anything, he sympathized, “besides, I doubt that you’re going to be winging out of here any time soon either, are you?”

Of course I wasn’t. Not to say that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind a time or two. It’d be a very simple thing to just fly out of this gorge and get away. Constance and her army would never be able to catch me. It’d be simple, and impossible at the same time. I wasn’t going to abandon these ponies to their fate. A fate that I’d led them into. This was my fault―my responsibility! I had to stay. I had to fight.

...and, yeah, I had to die right there alongside them. That was the price of having ponies you cared about―of having friends: you stuck by them.

A little blue pegasus mare in my head agreed.

“No,” I acknowledged, “I’m not. And I’m grateful to have you here…?” I prompted him for a name.

“We can do names and such later,” he chuckled with a smile, “let’s focus on stopping those tanks first. If we do that, maybe we’ll still have a shot at surviving this.”

That might have been some pretty unwarranted optimism on the stallion’s part, but I was open to it right now, “alright then. I’ll hold you to it,” I clutched the eldritch lance a little tighter and stretched out my wings in preparation to go back up into the air. I was still a little stiff from my landing, but not so much so that it should hamper me too much. Honestly, not having the speed of the Gale Force to call upon was going to be the biggest detractor at the moment. Though, since I was going to have another flier with me, maybe it was for the best.

“I’ll fly interference, you carve up those tanks. Sound good?”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. Not a great one, but a straightforward one.

“Stay low and stay fast,” he cautioned, “hang time gets you killed―”

“‘Claver,” I smirked at the pegasus, “I’ve been fighting in the Wasteland since before I could fly. I know what I’m doing.”

The stallion quirked an eyebrow, “judging by how old you look, that’s got to be, what? A year then?”

“Oh ha ha,” I rolled my eye and coiled my legs in preparation to spring up into the air, “just try to keep up,” and with that, I launched myself into the air and arced nimbly over the lip of the trench. My speed flying out to meet the tanks wasn’t nearly what it had been last time with the Gale Force to aid me, but I was still moving at a respectable clip nonetheless.

It looked like the undamaged tanks hadn’t wasted any time to worry about their disabled fellows. Nor had the infantry columns behind them. Those soldiers that had had their tanks taken out of the fight were pressing on as well, keeping pace with the columns that still had their mobile cover. Not to say that the other two columns were truly ‘exposed’. I could clearly see the shimmering amber shapes of several magical shields that had been formed at the head of their formation, flickering every few seconds as a defender got a shot off and struck their defensive barriers.

The infantry weren’t my concern though. As a bolt of magical energy flew by my head, I mentally amended that thought to be: while they might be a concern, they weren’t my target. That was still the four remaining tanks. I just had to get up close to them, carve them up a bit with the lance, and move on. To that end, I started arcing towards the nearest of the armored vehicles.

My companion pegasus proved himself to be an experienced formation flier, which was something that I could not claim to be. I’d simply never had anypony to fly with growing up. The stallion, on the other hoof, was matching every movement I made almost perfectly. At the same time, he was also clamping down on him trigger-bit and unleashing a torrent of bullets at the enemy from the light machinegun slung under his right ring. The weapon was fed under his belly from a container on his left side which served to help balance him out. The spray of tracer-laced led slugs danced across the enemy’s shield spells, even going to far as to crack one of two of them briefly before another of the engineered unicorns brought up a replacement in short order.

He was fulfilling her role though, keeping the attention of those soldiers on himself and off of me as we made our way back across the battlefield towards the tanks. I was actually taking us towards our first target head-on. Such an approach would shield us from most of its local infantry support as well as make it harder for the side gunners of the tank to draw a bead on us. Our biggest concern―in more ways than one―would be the main cannon, which wasn’t really designed to engage small-moving targets like us anyway.

I looked back over my shoulder at the crimson stallion, “we’re going to make a quick stop; stay with me!” he looked momentarily dubious, but he nodded anyway as he nudged his flight path to be a little more behind me.

From this approach, the on-hooves elements of the column in front of us wouldn’t be able to do much to defend their armored leader. Which meant that we would have a few moments respite while we worked before anypony got too concerned about what the pair of pegasi were up to.

Both of us pulled up sharply into low hovers directly in front of the slowly rolling tank, keeping closely abreast of it. The stallion gave our surroundings a quick glance while I went to work with the lance. I jabbed the cutting tip into the armored front end of the tank and worked the tool around until I’d carved out an opening. The slab of steel on the front of the tank fell away, landing in the dirt. Inside, I caught a glimpse of a startled gray mare looking down at me from where she sat at the vehicle’s steering controls. Just behind her, I saw several other ponies in the cramped confines also looking in my direction with raised brows.

“Special delivery,” I grinned as my pinions fished out an apple-shaped grenade from a pocket sewn into my barding. I pulled the pin with my teeth and tossed the metal orb inside. One of the ponies inside was on top of their game though and I saw a horn flare to life as a matching gold magical field enveloped the grenade. I whirled around and slapped the alloyed wing covering of my Gale Force rig over the opening, covering it completely just in time to feel something small and hard bounce off of it, “sorry, no regifting!”

I counted down in my head and pulled my wing away about a half second before a burst of smoke and shrapnel shot out of the carved opening. I winced at the sound of the explosion and then chanced a brief look back inside. I pulled back almost immediately, my lips pulled back in a grimace. The crimson pegasus stallion likewise spared a moment to check on the occupants. He also recoiled slightly from the sight within before looking at me and issuing a grim nod of his head, “are we ready to move on?”

“Yeah,” I replied hoarsely. It was a good thing that I was pregnant, otherwise there probably wasn’t anything that would keep me from crawling back into a bottle of whiskey after today. Damn Constance and the rest of the ponies in Arginine’s stable for making me do that to ponies. Damn this Wasteland.

We flew off towards the next tank in the line, staying low to the ground and weaving about as we dodged the magical energy beams being fired at us by the infantry columns, “Shit!” I blurted as the pair of us were forced to break off from our next target.

The enemy was learning, it seemed. Very unfortunate for us. The infantry columns of the other tanks were no longer marching at their rears, but instead encircling them protectively. They had apparently realized that those Old World war machines which had been designed and built to combat ground-dwelling zebras were not faring quite so well against fast-moving airborne opponents. To that end they were now surrounding them with their infantry element which could provide a much larger volume of fire directed skyward.

The former enclave pegasus and I banked hard as a torrent of energy beams saturated the air around us. We moved as erratically as we could in an effort to make it difficult for any individual shooter to get a proper lead on us, but the numbers that were involved meant that the enemy could pretty much get by with just putting as many bolts into the air as they could in our general area and cause us no end of problems. Evasive flying didn’t really do much against somepony who was firing as randomly as we were flying.

I screamed as a lance of magical energy scored a hit on me, striking the underside of my right wing. My rhythm was instantly disrupted, sending me tumbling through the air. I didn’t have the levitation talismans of the Gale Force to aid me either, as it was still without power. I was going to hit the ground again, and this time I wasn’t going to have the advantage of enough momentum to carry me anywhere safe. I was going to be stranded right out in the middle of the battlefield where I’d effectively be served up to the enemy on a silver platter.

“Gotcha!”

A pair of hooves wrapped themselves around my chest from behind and pulled me out of my dive. I looked over my shoulder to see the other pegasus had managed to catch me and was now hauling me back towards our lines. Though it seemed that he had not gone unscathed either. I gaped at the charred gash that ran along his neck which hadn’t been there when we’d left the trench. Holding me like this had to be utter agony.

“Can you still fly?” he asked in a strained tone.

Experimentally, I tried to flap my wing, only to gasp in pain. I shook my head, “I might be able to manage a glide, but there’s no way I can fly on it. Sorry.”

“S’all good,” he groaned. Then he cried out too, fumbling me for just a brief moment before restabilizing. I could feel his left hind leg shift, now hanging limply. He’d just been hit again. Carrying me like this was slowing him down, making us a bigger, slower-moving, target. The trench line was still hundreds of yards away. We weren’t going to make it.

“Drop me! I’m slowing you down!” I yelled at the stallion, even going so far as to try and anemically struggle out of his grip. However, he only tightened his hold on me.

“I’m not leaving anypony behind,” he replied grimly through gritted teeth, “not again.”

“They’ll kill us both! Let me go and you can make it!”

“Or, counter-argument―” without any warning, he flared his wings and executed a series of backflips in the air that got progressively tighter and faster. I quickly found myself losing all sense of which direction I was moving in. Then...suddenly I was no longer being held by the stallion. I was darting through the air on a direct path to the trench.

He’d thrown me!

I held my wings close in to my sides to keep the drag down and maintain the speed that he’d given me, using only tiny movements to adjust my course and minimize the pain of my injury. I let a smile spread across my lips. Okay, that was actually a pretty neat move. I’d have to keep it in mind for the future. I turned to look over my shoulder and thank him for finding a solution that saved both of our lives.

My heart froze.

He hadn’t been saving both of us after all. While his maneuver sent me on a path for the trench, doing so had meant having to hang in the air for a brief moment in order to counter the momentum of it. It wasn’t long. Just a second. But it was a second that he’d hung motionless in the line of fire of a hundred ponies with energy rifles trained on him.

I turned back just in time to watch his body alight with a white glow...and then dissolve into a cloud of dust that blew away in the wind. Nothing of him remained.

My mouth hung open in shock. I felt the sting of tears behind my eye threatening to spill forth. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Going out here had been my idea. My plan. He’d followed me out here, trusting that I’d get us both through this. He was only in this fight at all because I’d paid his―former―employer to come. I should be the pony who died protecting him.

It was too late now though. There wasn’t anything that I could do. On so many levels there wasn’t anything more that I could do. I returned my gaze forward, my face set in grim lines, and focused on the trench line.

My landing wasn’t―quite―as rough this time, but it wasn’t pleasant either. At least I limited myself to only the one bounce as I hit the ground. It sure didn’t do my wing any favors. I downed a healing potion, which helped a bit, but I was pretty sure that my flying was done for the time being. At least until I got more spark batteries for the Gale Force.

Fighting those three remaining tanks wasn’t going to be an option though. I’d lost the eldritch lance again; and I was fresh out of brave pegasus stallions to bring it back to me from no-mare’s-land.

I grit my teeth, reliving the sight of his body disintegrating as he sacrificed himself to save me. I didn’t even know who he was! He’d died saving my life, and I didn’t know who he was. Honestly, the jury was still out on how ‘saved’ I or any of the rest of us were. The enemy would be here in minutes and we were helpless to oppose them.

Explosions range out along the trench line again as the tanks resumed firing on our defensive turrets.

I let loose a frustrated scream as I listened to our protection being systematically eradicated with no way to do anything to stop it. This was so ridiculous! Would Constance even have her tanks and infantry advance all the way to our trenches or just move them close enough to be able to keep us pinned down in them while she resumed bombarding us with those accursed mortars of hers? Giving us the option of being blown up by bombs falling from the sky if we stayed put or magically rendered to dust by energy rifles if we tried to escape.

Knowing all the while that we were powerless to do anything about it.

My ear twitched as I heard a new sound that I couldn’t place. Like metal rubbing up against rocks. I noticed then that the tanks had ceased shooting at around the same time. I approached the lip of the trench and peaked over the top. My eye widened as I caught sight of the trio of tanks with their rear ends sticking out of the ground. I experienced a brief moment of confusion before realization dawned on me: the tunnels!

The tunnels that I ordered to be dug had done their jobs! We’d trapped the tanks and taken them out of the fight!

I was just about to cry out in jubilation as something finally going right in this damn battle when those same three tanks began to glow with amber light. My elation died a violent death as I watched scores of unicorns use their magic to float the tanks out of the hastily dug trap that had been set for them and float the armored vehicles to the other side. Almost immediately, the engines started back up again and the tanks resumed their crawl towards us, their guns firing just as relentlessly as before.

I turned away and slumped against the wall of the trench. Right. Of course. Why would anything today go as planned?

Constance had won. I was out of ideas. We didn’t have the weapons to beat her, and Griselda had stolen most of our equipment before making her getaway. I’d suggest that we surrender, but Constance was just going to kill us anyway if we did. All that any of us could do was wait to die.

Another round of frustrated screams and thrashing at the ground with my hooves. It didn’t change anything of course, but I needed to vent this ever-mounting frustration somehow. I couldn’t spend the rest of the ‘fight’ doing this though―as tempting as it was.

I got back onto my hooves and got my bearings. There were a couple things that I wanted to get done before we were finally overrun and killed. I tracked down Arginine, who was still tending to the wounded as best he could. Noble of him. Useless, but noble. Constance was just going to slaughter all of the injured when she got here anyway.

Starlight was with him, using her magic as best she could to protect him and the injured ponies that he was treating. Foxglove was still unconscious. My eye lingered on the bandaged stump that was all that remained of her hind leg. On the bright side: I wouldn’t get yelled at for losing her cutting lance. There was a good chance that we’d all die before she ever found out. So...there was that.

The large gray stallion noticed my approach and glanced in my direction long enough to issue a nod of recognition before resuming treating a mare sporting a bad burn on her side. Starlight nodded as well, her expression shifting to one of curiosity as I moved closer to her.

“Is something up?”

“...you should go.”

The pink unicorn balked, “excuse me?”

“You should go. Get out of here. Teleport away as far as you can and leave,” I said with a sigh, “we’re not going to win this fight. There’s no reason for you to die here with us,” I couldn’t save us all, but I could at least keep somepony from dying with the rest of us. I’d tried with the pegasus stallion and failed. I didn’t want to fail again, “go back to Moonbeam. Be with your daughter. Honestly, the two of you should just leave the whole valley. Go to the Bristol Empire or wherever, as long as it’s far away from here.”

“It’s the Crystal Em―never mind,” the unicorn began to correct me with an annoyed sigh before giving up, “and no, I’m not leaving.”

No, not again. I wasn’t going to let another pony die because of my stupidity, “yes, you are!” I snapped, “we’ve lost! We’re all going to die, and you dying here too isn’t going to change anything! So just leave!” to further make my point, I reared up and began shoving her. Not in any particular direction or with any great force. Just ‘away’, and to further emphasize that I wanted her gone from here, “enough ponies are going to die for me today; you don’t have to be one of them!”

There was a flash of cyan light from her horn and then I was tumbling backwards across the trench. When I finally came to a stop and looked back in Starlight’s direction, I found the mare glaring at me, “‘you? You think that all of these ponies are fighting and dying for you? Really?”

I balked slightly at the sight of the mare’s ire, but I otherwise remained firm, nodding my head, “I hired them, I brought them here, and it’s my failed plans that are getting everypony killed; so, yeah, it’s all my fault.”

“Not everything is about you, Windfall,” Starlight retorted, “nopony was brought here at the barrel of a gun or something,” she thought for a moment and then nodded back in Arginine’s direction, “except him, but that was Foxglove’s doing. Anyway, as I was saying: these ponies are here because they chose to be,” I opened my mouth to protest, but the unicorn cut me off, “offering them money doesn’t count as ‘forcing’ anypony to do something. They’re mercenaries. They go around putting their lives on the line for bits―or bottlecaps or whatever―all the time.

“You told them point blank what they were up against,” she went on, “they knew the risks, but came anyway because they decided that they were being offered enough pieces of painted metal to take those risks. That was their choice. They’re here for themselves, not because of you.

“The same goes for me. I could have left at any time,” Starlight pointed out, “from the moment you woke me up, I could have gone my own way. I didn’t. At first, it was because I needed your help,” she acknowledged, a little grudgingly, “I was two hundred years out of touch. But even after that―after I found my daughter again―I stayed to help you with this,” she waved her hoof at our general surroundings, “not because you ‘made’ me. Because I felt like I had to, for my own reasons.

“Two hundred years ago, I helped to perpetuate a war that created this world for all of you,” she said grimly, “while I might not have started it, I had a hoof in it; and I sure wasn’t doing anything back then to try to oppose it. That war took everything from me. My home, my work, my husband...even my daughter. Worse...it robbed future generations of the kind of world that they should have had.

“I’d dedicated my life to trying to build a better world for ponies. I wanted ponies to be happier than I’d been. To feel fulfilled and content in a way that the Equestria I’d known wouldn’t let them…” her words trailed off as she looked around, “...instead, I woke up to this.

“This Wasteland? I had a hoof in it. Instead of helping to create a better world, I helped to destroy it. I had a hoof in that,” she jabbed her hoof in the direction of the enemy, “so you can bet that I’m going to at least try and do something to fix it!

“Even if that means it’ll get me killed,” she shrugged, “the way I see it, I should have died two hundred years ago anyway. This was all a second chance for me to finally do the right thing. Two hundred years ago, I thought the right thing was fighting. It wasn’t. I know that now. I should have run away then. If I had, maybe things would have been different. I don’t know. But right now, I do know that running away is the wrong thing for me to do.

“So I’m going to stay here and fight―and probably die, yeah―but none of it has anything to do with you, little filly,” Starlight finished, poking me in the chest before turning away and returning to her spellcasting.

I sat there for several long seconds, idly rubbing the spot where the pink unicorn had jabbed me, mulling over her words. She was right: it was wrong of me to blindly assume that I was ultimately responsible for everypony being here. I hadn’t forced anypony to come with me. Not the mercenaries, not the Shady Saddles volunteers, and certainly not any of my friends. They were all here because they’d chosen to be. I was sure that nopony outright wanted to die, yeah; but it was wrong of me to assume that I was the only pony here with a reason to fight.

Whether it was for noble ideals, or to protect their homes and loved ones, or just for cold hard caps, these ponies were here because they’d chosen to be. They’d chosen to put their lives on the line, not because of a bunch of rhetoric that I’d fed them, but because their own pasts had brought them to this point. It was wrong of me to put all of this on myself, as though I was the only pony that mattered.

My pipbuck beeped.

I glanced down at the device in confusion. I wasn’t being called by anypony. Then my gaze darted to a message in the upper-left field of my vision that was just fading away:

>> FILE UPLOAD COMPLETE

‘Upload’? What ‘upload’? Did I just receive another software packet from Moonbeam? I didn’t see another little message from her like the last time. Besides, hadn’t my pipbuck said that it was ‘downloading’ a file that time? That meant that this alert wasn’t about something that I’d received, but rather that something had been taken. But what?

I trotted over to Arginine and got his attention, “RG, is there any way for me to see what files on this thing somepony else accessed?”

The stallion quirked his brow at me, “there is. Why do you ask?”

“I think somepony just copied a file on here, but I don’t know who they were or what they copied. I want to make sure it wasn’t Constance doing something sneaky,” in the back of my mind, while that was a concern, it wasn’t where I would have placed my caps in a bet. Pipbuck’s were generally pretty secure, I was led to believe. In fact, I’d only known one pony who seemed to be able to access and mess with my pipbuck on a whim. Given the lack of a message, part of me was actually hoping that it was Constance who’d done something this time.

Arginine motioned to get a better view of the pipbuck and I extended my left leg to him. He tabbed through a few screens before finally getting to where he apparently wanted to be and gestured for me to take a look, “the file at the bottom of this list was the most recent one to be modified. That includes actions like copying.”

I looked at the list. I saw the software patch that Moonbeam had sent me, along with a bunch of other files that had weird and convoluted names that looked like they were very important to how the pipbuck functioned; as well as a few that must have been part of my helmet. That was all doubtlessly the result of the anti-mortar ‘See-Wiz’ or whatever update that she’d given me. However, it was the file at the very bottom that froze my blood in my veins. I recognized that file. I knew instantly that there was indeed only one pony who would have taken it; and I knew why.

GOODNIGHT_MOON.EXE

The program that I’d recovered from the MoA drone hangar. It turned out that it had been a modified version of the real program meant to fully enable the Selene AI living in the computer hardwired into Moonbeam’s brain. Foxglove and Homily had tinkered with it in order to completely suppress the AI so that Moonbeam never had to worry about it again.

Now I found myself wondering how difficult it would be to reverse that process if the original program was used again.

I slapped the pipuck over to its transmitter function and dialed in Moonbeam’s tag, “Moonbeam, come in!”

No response. I called her again. Still no response. Constantly yelling out her daughter’s name did get Starlight’s attention though and the pink unicorn came back over, “what’s going on?”

“Moonbeam took a copy of Selene’s activation program,” I told her as I abandoned trying to get a response from the psuedo-robopony and instead tried for somepony else, “Homily! Moonbeam has the Goodnight Moon program; I think she’s going to use it to turn Selene back on. You have to get down into the bunker and stop her!”

The few seconds it took for the earth pony to respond felt like hours as my apprehension grew, “Windfall, I was just about to call you! An evacuation alarm went off in the MoA bunker. Moonbeam said that a toxic gas was leaking and everypony needed to get out. Then she locked the door behind us,” the mare informed me, “She hasn’t responded since. I guess now we know why…”

“What?” I wasn’t sure if it had been me or Starlight that said it, but I know I was thinking it. I know I said the next part though, “can you get back inside somehow?”

“That thing was designed to survive balefire missile impacts,” Homily responded ruefully, “It’ll take us days to get to her.”

I’d already known the answer to that question of course. The McMaren ponies had been ready to take shelter in the ancient underground facility to protect themselves from a Steel Ranger attack. There was no way that anypony would be able to reach her in time. Besides, it sounded like Moonbeam had been determined to make certain that nopony could stop her from going through with this.

I swapped back over to Moonbeam’s receiver, “don’t do this! If you use that program we won’t be able to bring you back,” I pleaded, “it’s designed to take over your whole brain and turn you into nothing but a squishy computer. You―the real you that matters―you’ll die!”

Still no response. Was I even getting through to her? I’d made contact with Homily, so Constance wasn’t jamming our communications or anything like that. Moonbeam had managed to snag the file in the first place, so I knew that my pipbuck could reach her. Was I already too late? Had she been completely co-opted by the AI? If that was the case, then surely I should have been getting a response from it…

Starlight grabbed my pipbuck and began speaking into it. Her previously firm tone was quavering now, and I could see her eyes glistening, “Moonbeam, sweetie, it’s Mommy. Please answer me. Let me know you’re alright,” she bit her lip nervously as we awaited a response.

“...hey, Mom.”

Both of us released relieved breaths that we’d been holding. I let Starlight continue to be the one to address her, since she’d been able to get a reply at all. Besides, it was her daughter after all, “sweetie, what are you doing? Homily said you evacuated the bunker.”

“I knew somepony might try to stop me. I didn’t want to have to hurt anypony who did. Better that there was nopony around,” there was a moment of silence, and then, “I’m going to help you guys. You need those drones. I can’t control them; but Selene can. You need her back.”

I couldn’t keep silent this time, “don’t do it! We’ll find another way,” I assured her, even though I knew those words were hollow and meaningless. There was no ‘other way’. Those drones were pretty much how we’d intended to win this battle in the first place; and that was before Constance had pulled out those new weapons of hers. Everything else we’d tried up to this point had failed. We were essentially just waiting to die at this point and only hoping to take down as many of our attackers as we could in the process, “don’t use that program!”

“Moonbeam, it’s alright; you don’t have to do this,” Starlight added as well, “this isn’t your fight,” I looked sharply at the mare, unable to help but think it was a little hypocritical of her to use lines like that after the speech that she’d just given me earlier. I guess it was different when it involved somepony she cared about, “you were only a foal during the war. None of this is your fault, okay? It’s not your responsibility―”

“Just because I wasn’t involved two hundred years ago doesn’t mean that I’m not involved now,” Moonbeam said, rebuking her mother into stunned silence, “you had a chance to act two hundred years ago and you regret that you didn’t. I have a chance to act now. What makes you think that I won’t regret it later too if I don’t?

“I’ve spent decades living with the ponies in the Wasteland. What happens to them matters to me. I’m not going to just sit on my metal rump and do nothing,” another few seconds of silence, “I’m sorry that we won’t get the chance to be a real family. I...would have liked to get to know you, Mom.

“But...not everything is about us.”

I received a notification that the communications channel was blocked off completely. Indeed, contacting Moonbeam against no longer even seemed to be an option that was available to my pipbuck. Starlight and I exchanged glances, and I could see that her eyes weren’t merely glistening anymore. The unicorn mare swallowed hard, took a deep breath, ignored her tears, and turned back towards the fighting, erecting her shield spell and deflecting incoming enemy fire just as she had been earlier. She’d grieve later.

That was assuming that we even got a later. The enemy was close now. Just a hundred yards separated the tanks and their supporting cavalry from our trench line. They’d be on us in minutes. Even if Moonbeam got the program to work as intended, and managed to get those drones in the air, it would still take them time to get here from the dump. They’d arrive in time to wipe out Constance’s forces, but they wouldn’t do the ponies fighting any good.

I debated ordering everypony to pull back to the stable. We could hold up in there long enough to let the drones deal with Constance. Except that the time to do that had passed with those tanks as close as they were. The moment we were out of the trenches, we’d be exposed and vulnerable. Everypony would be cut down before they could make it to the safety of the stable. We had to stay in the trench or we’d be killed.

Staying would mean dying too though. There just wasn’t enough time for Moonbeam’s plan to save our lives.

In the grand scheme, I knew that was only a secondary concern. What mattered most was that Constance and her army were defeated. Whether we lived or died wouldn’t change the valley’s fate. Moonbeam would still save Neighvada.

Still, the idea of not doing something for the ponies here, after all that they’d done...my cutie mark wouldn’t abide that.

The little purple unicorn who was a new arrival in my head was back at her chalk-board and was scribbling something on it with the help of the chromatic-maned pegasus―much to the surprise of the other four for some reason. The pair finished up their scribbling and turned the board around so that I could see it. On it were about a hundred various math equations that all surrounded a number written in comically large print and circled several times:

12 MIN!

As though triggering my own brain into action―Be Smart!―I began to factor in all of the variables that I was aware of. I knew how far away the drone hangar was, and how fast they’d be able to move―assuming their engines really were based as heavily on the Gale Force’s design as I was led to believe. Moonbeam―Selene’s―reinforcements would be here in twelve minutes.

Constance’s army would reach the trench in one if nothing changed. If I wanted everypony on our side to live through this, we had to delay the enemy for twelve minutes. Such a miniscule amount of time; but with our current situation it might as well have been a thousand years. There was simply nothing that we could do to fend them off for anywhere near that long. The only thing that would stop the advance of Constance’s army at this point was an order from the general herself.

And, frankly, I couldn’t think of any rational reason that she’d ever give that kind of order when victory was right at her hoof-tips. She’d won and she knew it. Everything she wanted, everything that she’d been literally designed for was about to be achieved. She wasn’t going to pass that up. Nothing would give that pony more pleasure than demonstrating to the whole Wasteland how pathetic our resistance had been, and how indomitable her kind was.

...wait a minute.

A blue pegasus and an orange earth pony in my head exchanged challenging looks and broke out into a full gallop around my head, continually exchanging the lead between them. Meanwhile, a pink pony had acquired an orange and blue outfit with tassels on her hooves and was mutely ‘cheering’ them on. The other three merely sat and watched, sharing a bucket of fluffy white snacks of some sort.

Constance did want to prove that the ponies from her stable were the best―that she was the best. She needed that validation.

Maybe that was the key to stopping her…

I flipped over to Ramparts’ pipbuck frequency and stared off in the direction of Constance’s army, “Hey, Constance. It’s me: The Wonderbolt,” no answer. No real indication that she’d heard me at all really, but this was the only chance I had, as I had no way of tapping into the secured pipbuck network of her forces and had no idea which pipbuck tag could possibly have been hers. She’d used the courser’s pipbuck to taunt me earlier though. Hopefully she still had it close at hoof, “I bet you’re really proud of yourself right now. You think that you’re about to win.

“And yeah, you are; I won’t deny that. I may not be a smart pony, but even I can do the kind of math needed to figure out how this is going to end. Any idiot could do it. In fact, any idiot could do exactly what you’re doing right now: marching an army that outnumbers your opponent nearly ten-to-one right on down the field in a straight line so that they can win in an all-out slug-fest.

“No tactics. No grand strategy. No cunning. Just slamming a lot of armed ponies into a few armed ponies. It’s a plan fit for every other Wasteland degenerate bandit. I should know: I’ve killed thousands of them.”

Still no reply to my taunts, but I had to believe that she was listening. It was our only hope, “but I can understand why you needed to fall back on a hack ‘tactic’ like that: because it turns out you’re actually pretty bad at this. I mean, you remember Shady Saddles, right? Two hundred of your stable’s finest had a quaint little Wasteland town completely surrounded, and we went ahead a trounced them like they were nothing.

“I mean, what kind of ‘general’ fumbles a siege like that? And that badly? I don’t suppose those genetic augmentations of yours came with a receipt, did they? Because I’d want my caps back if I were you. Not your fault, I guess. It just turns out you’re not really all that impressive. I should know. I’ve beaten dozens of your kind. I took down one of your little ‘sorting facilities’ practically on my own,” Foxglove would forgive that dramatic liberty, I was sure, “and two ‘invalid’ surface ponies managed to take down your whole stable.”

“Honestly...you ponies just...kind of suck.

“So, yeah, you’ll kill us all this time; but it’s not because you’re actually stronger, smarter, or ‘better’ than we are. You just had more ponies and bigger guns. Any crazed raider could win a battle with those advantages. So while I may die, I’ll die knowing that, in every fair fight I’ve ever had against you ponies, I came out on top every time, and none of you could even compare. I’ll know that ‘better’ ponies like you were too terrified to even think of facing me one-on-one.

“So have fun trying to overrun the Wasteland. Try not to get outwitted by a radroach while you’re out here.”

With that, I closed down the channel again and waited. Constance might not have heard any of it. Maybe she did and had a lot more self-control than I was giving her credit for. However, I’d met the filly. She had quite the superiority complex from what I remembered, and she was a lot more emotional than ponies like Arginine―granted a can of Cram was more emotional than Arginine. So I gave it even odds that―assuming she heard any of that―I could goad her into―

“Such petulant taunts are proof of a weak mind,” came the voice of the young filly through my pipbuck’s speakers.

“This ‘weak mind’ penetrated your stable’s defenses in under an hour,” I shot back, a smile spreading across my face. I had her, “the same stable that spawned you, I might add. You’ll forgive me for not being impressed.”

“Do these insults bring you comfort in your last moments, inferior wretch?”

“I’ve got all the comfort I need remembering how many of your soldiers I’ve killed over the months. Fuck, I just junked half your tanks in ten minutes,” I allowed myself a hardy chuckle, “what have you managed to do? Oh, right; you lost a fifth of your army in a siege that any other pony could have won in their sleep. I know I could have won it.

“Because that’s the difference between a filly like you and real leader like me: I can actually do things. But that’s because I know I can do things. You’re pretty much helpless―seeing as you were thrown out of your tube before you were done―but that’s okay. It’s not your fault that the ponies in your stable panicked the moment a mare like me showed up and proved just how pathetic all of their ‘superior’ ponies actually were.”

“We crushed the painted ponies―” I could hear Constance’s tone grinding, and I could imagine the searing hatred that had to have been etched on her face. I was getting to her.

“The White Hooves? Pfft! My mother could kill those bitches and she didn’t know the first thing about fighting,” I fought back the image of her headless corpse falling to the floor of the White Hoof tent next to Cestus’ bleeding form and kept my tone level, “White Hooves are what Neighvada ponies let their foals practice on to prepare themselves for real threats,” that was an outright lie, of course; but there was no way for Constance to know that. Arginine’s whole stable actually seemed to have a poor grasp of Wasteland politics for all the observation they’d been doing over the decades.

“Face it, your designers dropped the ball on every level,” time to go in for the kill, “why, I bet I could wipe the floor with your best pony, unarmed, with one wing tied behind my back. And then do it again, and again, and again until I’ve tallied up all eight hundred of your lackies…” now all I had to do was dangle the bait and hope that Constance took it. Otherwise, we all died, “...unless you want to prove me wrong yourself?”

“I assume you’re proposing a duel to the death between us? Let me guess: you would also like to attach terms to the outcome? That, in the unlikely event of your victory, my forces surrender to yours?”

“Please,” I said dismissively, “like either of us could trust the other side to uphold that bet. Your army has no reason not to crush us just because I won, and my side has nothing to lose be fighting if they’re just going to die anyway.

“This isn’t about them anyway. This is about you, and me. I’m giving you a chance to put your caps where your mouth is and cut me down to size with your own two hooves,” the tanks were only a few dozen yards from the trench line now. We’d be overrun in seconds. If this was going to work, it had to work soon. I didn’t let my anxiousness show in my words though. They remained as cocky and self-assured as always, thanks to many years spent smack-talking bandits and raiders in the middle of a fight, “otherwise, we’ll both know how feeble you actually are, and that you were too much of a pathetic coward to fight even a single, tiny, weak, invalid, unarmed, pegasus filly!”

There was no response this time, and for a moment I worried that I’d actually pushed too hard. All of our lives were riding on my ability to goad Constance into a duel. If she made the smart move and ignored me, then we were all dead. Moonbeam’s drones would cut her down ten minutes later, but that wasn’t going to do us much good. Saving our lives relied on her being―

“Fine. You’ll have your ‘fair fight’; though it’s far better than filth like you deserves.”

―just as easy to manipulate as I was! Yes!

“I will even allow you to set the terms.”

Even better. Now I got to draw this fight out as long as possible, “my terms are simple: no weapons, no barding, no flying, no magic. Just you and me and our bare hooves,” even without my wings, I was small and nimble enough to dance around her for ten minutes. My goal was not to ‘win’, but to draw the fight out long enough for Moon―...Selene’s drones to arrive.

A that point, Constance could either surrender...or die. The jury was still out on which way she’d swing when the moment came.

“Brutish and barbaric,” the filly replied disdainfully, “I don’t know why I should have expected anything else. So be it,” my ears perked up as I heard the tanks grind to a halt. Their engines slowed to a low idle. I peeked over the lip of the trench. The other soldiers had stopped advancing further towards the trench line as well, but they were instead spreading themselves out from one side of the gorge to the other. All they had to do was sweep forward and they could end this fight in seconds, “you have thirty senconds to meet me in the field.”

I swapped to our own force’s frequency, “everypony hold your fire. I’m going out to meet Constance. Just...nopony do anything for ten minutes, alright? Trust me. Everything will work out if you just give me ten minutes,” I received acknowledgements from the remaining mercenary commanders, but ignored their requests for details. I didn’t have time to explain everything if I was going to meet the deadline that I’d been given.

I began shucking my barding and equipment, looking over at Arginine and Starlight, “Constance has agreed to a duel. Her army won’t move until it’s over; as long as nopony on our side does anything stupid. Make sure that they don’t,” I stressed, with a look at the stallion, who returned an assuring nod.

“What happens when somepony wins?” the unicorn asked.

“...everypony dies,” I replied with a shrug as I finished removing the last of my gear. I flexed my limbs and wings, getting used to the lack of barding and the Gale Force again, “but if I can keep her busy long enough, those drones will get here and maybe everypony will get to live.”

“Do you think you can beat her?”

I grinned at the mare, “that’s the best part: I don’t have to. I just have to stall her. That much I can do,” and with that, I took to the air. My wing was still quite sore from the energy weapon hit I’d taken earlier, and I was glad that I wasn’t going to be relying on flying to see me through this fight. It was healthy enough to see me to the middle of the field though, where I found a lone figure waiting to greet me. I landed a few yards in front of them...and froze.

An energy pistol was leveled at my head, held in the amber glow of Constance’s magic. The engineered filly was approximately my height, so we were able to meet each other’s gaze without having to awkwardly tilt our heads. In the filly’s amber eyes, I could see a glint of cold satisfaction. All it would take was a twitch of her telekinetic field and I would be reduced to a dust mote. I matched her gaze, almost daring her to take the shot and violate the terms of our deal. I reminded myself that, no matter what she did in the next ten minutes, she’d ultimately already lost this fight and didn’t even realize it.

I’d already beaten her―Moonbeam had already beaten her. All I was trying to do now was to secure a more favorable outcome for our side. So I just remained still and quiet.

The seconds of motionless silence between us both ticked by. Under pretty much any other circumstances, I’d be ready to climb the walls in frustration. However, every additional second actually benefited me in this case. If Constance wanted to spend the next ten minutes standing here with a gun to my head, I was perfectly inclined to let her.

Unfortunately, that was not to be and the gray filly soon smirked and put the pistol away, “perhaps I haven’t given you sufficient credit after all,” she said. While the words could have been taken as complimentary under most circumstances, the young mare’s tone left no doubt that she was still trying to cut me down, “if nothing else, you are capable of maintaining your composure,” she then cast an appraising eye over my figure, noting my lack of equipment, “you also seem to be a mare of your word. Color me impressed!”

“I’m planning to color you purple and blue, grayscale,” I chided the filly, “maybe with a little bit of red for good measure.”

The general’s lips pulled back momentarily in an annoyed sneer before she regained her composure, “how drole. We shall see which of us comes away the worse for this fight,” she holstered the weapon and then used her magic to unfasten the pistol belt and floated it a couple dozen yards away from the two of us. Now she too was devoid of equipment, as per the rules that we’d agreed to, “is there some sort of signal that you would like to use to begin things?”

I smirked at the filly, “by all means, kid, come at me whenever you’re―horseapples!”

For a pony without wings, Constance moved fast! I’d have accused her of using her magic to teleport, but my experiences with Starlight had demonstrated that such spells involved hefty light shows, and I’d seen not so much as a flicker coming from this pony’s horn. Either of them! It was all that I could do to pull out of the way to avoid her initial attack. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything I could do to move out of the way of her follow-up. A double-buck caught me square in the chest and pitched be backwards flank over whiskey bottle into the dirt.

She wasn’t the type to let an advantage go unused either, it seemed. I’d barely landed when I found myself being pummeled by a relentless onslaught of jabs from her forehooves. I flailed in an effort to throw up any sort of defense or counter, but the younger mare just danced around me and resumed her attack on an unguarded part of my body. I was helpless and defenseless, and this mare was going to tear me apart right here and now!

Then, just as suddenly as her attack began, Constance stopped, bouncing away lightly on her delicate hooves, cackling as she did so, “ha! I spoke too soon! It turns out that all of that bluster earlier was just that: bluster. You claim to have taken down dozens of our soldiers? I find myself quite dubious at the moment. I’ll need to take a closer look at those action reports for myself.”

I rolled back onto my hooves, wincing as I did so from the dozen throbbing points on my body that would no doubt become bruises in the next minute. There was at least one cracked rib in there too. This wasn’t ideal. How had she done that? I’d fought scores of ponies from their stable, and none of them had moved like that, or had her skills.

She must have read the confusion on my face, because the little general let another boudt of mirth roll out of her throat as she provided an answer to my unasked question, “surprised, are we? Confused? Allow me to enlighten you, little fool: I’m a Nu Strain,” her lips pulled back in a vicious grin. It was the sort of slasher smile that would be right at home on one of the Wasteland’s more sadistic gangers, “pound for pound, I’m stronger than any of those pathetic Lambdas of Kappas. My speed, reflexes, and hoof-to-eye coordination have also all be vastly improved.

“I could run for a hundred miles, beat the snot out of a hundred of the toughest invalids the surface has to offer, and then run another hundred miles before I even thought about getting tired!” to make her point she coiled back and burst past me. I barely had time to react before she was behind me. On the way, she’d kicked me in the hip, causing me to stagger, “and on top of all that,” another gray blur out of the corner of my eye and my elbow buckled beneath a blow from her hoof, “I have been given the knowledge of a half dozen of the most lethal and effective forms of hoof-to-hoof combat known to both pony and zebrakind.”

Then she was on me again. I was more prepared for her, but the injuries from her initial assault left my movements sluggish. More hits got through, and I felt more ribs crack as Constance focused on my sides and joints. She wasn’t trying to kill me. Not yet. She wanted to humiliate me. Make me suffer. She wanted to demonstrate how wrong I’d been to challenge her and think that I was her equal. She wanted to draw my death out.

So be it. All I had to do was survive. If I could do that, then we all got to live.

Again the filly pranced away just as I collapsed to the ground with a pained groan. My limbs were reluctant to move after the beating that they’d received. I wasn’t positive, but it felt like one of my hips might be dislocated entirely. It certainly wouldn’t bear any weight.

I couldn’t stay down though. If she felt I was finished, she might kill me and end the fight. I needed to drag this out a little while more. I needed to get back up. I needed to Be Enduring!

The sight of my lamed leg as I fought to stand once more elicited more mirthful chuckles from Constance. The filly began to slowly circle around me, taking grim delight in my own stiff efforts to turn so that I could remain facing her, “I came out here because I was promised a fight,” she said, sneering at me, “part of me is actually a little disappointed that all of your earlier prattling amounted to nothing,” now her expression soured as the engineered pony flashed me an annoyed look, “this is a waste of my time.”

She charged me again.

This time, Constance wasn’t looking to ‘play’ with me. She was coming in for the kill so that she could end this fight and get on with the slaughter of the rest of the mercenaries in the trenches. I couldn’t allow that to happen. Our duel couldn’t be allowed to end; not yet.

I had underestimated Constance. I’d assumed she was like every other pony from their stable that I’d faced up to this point; and that was in spite of being told repeatedly that she wasn’t. I hadn’t really understood what that meant; her being a ‘new strain’. Now I did. She was objectively a lot more physically impressive than the ponies like Arginine had been. She was more knowledgeable too. Her fighting style had been amazing, and every hit had felt like it struck something vital that caused me a lot of pain. She knew how to fight.

Six different forms of combat, she’d said. The best styles that ponies and zebras knew.

I had a hunch that there was one style that they didn’t: and that was my style. A hybrid of the White Hoof techniques that Jackboot had taught me augmented by the maneuvers that my wings allowed. It was a style that was all my own, and while it might not have been a perfected style, but it was still a tried and true battle-tested one that I’d been honing for nearly a decade. If nothing else, it should throw the filly off her game.

I’d promised Constance no flying―and an orange earth pony appreciated that I was going to hold myself to that promise―but I hadn’t said that I wasn’t going to use my wings at all.

Constance surged forward. I slid my rear hoof back, the one that I wasn’t confident could bear my weight any longer. The filly’s eyes darted briefly as she noted my change in stance and I caught their glint of satisfaction as she too subtly adjusted her approach, believing that she’d caught my ‘tell’. It was an effort to keep my own expression neutral as I played dumb. If I’d gone with the block that my footing now suggested, I had no doubt that the other mare would have been able to bypass it and take me down. She was ready for it and knew the appropriate counter.

What she wasn’t ready for was for my wings to flip out and give off a powerful stroke that pivoted my whole body around my forward foreleg. None of my hooves left the ground, gliding smoothly over the hard scrabble, so it would be hard to claim that I’d used my wings to ‘fly’ in any meaningful sense. Indeed, Constance’s final leap that had been intended to take me to the ground meant that the filly saw more airtime in this fight than I did. It also meant that she was completely unable to maneuver out of the way of my own wing-propelled charge at her exposed flank.

The general’s surprise was total as my hooves drove hard into her ribs this time. Her body, effectively t-boned in midair, was sent rolling to the ground. She recovered quickly of course, and was on her hooves again almost immediately, but I still got the satisfaction of seeing the indignant rage painted across her face. There wasn’t any sign that I’d hurt her particularly badly, but that was okay. I’d denied Constance her flawless victory and proved that I could land a solid blow through her recently vaunted ‘superior techniques’.

However, if I thought that the unexpected nature of my maneuver would give the filly pause and buy me another hoofful of precious seconds, Constance immediately proved me wrong. She charged again with an enraged snarl. I reared up, crossing my fetlocks across my chest to block her attack. Then, at the last second, I flipped out my wings again. A stroke of my left set me spinning around, while my right wing slipped beneath the filly’s belly and heaved upwards. Constance was sent tumbling through the air end over end. Not being a pegasus who frequently found themselves up in the air, the mare had little concept of how to contort her body to counteract such motions. Nor did she have wings to stabilize herself. Apparently, none of those fancy combat styles of hers taught a lot of landing strategies either.

Unless there was some sort of ancient zebra technique that preached the value of landing head-first and tumbling onto your backside. Given the pained grunt and the humiliated expression, I suspected that was not actually the case.

Constance still didn’t appear to be particularly hurt―physically―by my deflection, but the sight of her finally failing to land any further blows on me was doing wonders for my confidence. I refrained from pressing my advantage though. It wasn’t worth the risk. I reminded myself that beating her would actually constitute ‘losing’ this fight for the purposes of everypony else’s survival. Her being alive was the only thing keeping her forces from finishing us off. I had to keep her―and myself―that way until Selene made it here.

As long as I stayed away from her, I could do just that.

The gray filly rolled quickly back onto her hooves and glared at me before letting out another enraged scream as she attacked again. This time I didn’t do anything fancy, I simply propelled myself backwards out of her reach as she unleashed a series of lunges and kicks. We hadn’t bothered to set up any sort of boundaries for this fight. I idly wondered if I could just keep backing up and lure Constance all the way back to Shady Saddles like this.

Apparently that thought put a smile on my lips that I wasn’t aware of, because Constance ceased her onslaught and resumed sneering at me, “you find this all amusing, do you? I, for one, find it pathetic!” she spat as she charged and made another swipe at me. Another flit of my wings and I was out of her reach, “you asked―demanded―that I fight you; and now I find that you refuse to actually engage now that you’ve seen how outclassed you actually are.”

Another ineffectual attack, “now, here you are, dancing around like a coward!” she screamed at me, seething, “what do you hope to accomplish with all of this? I’ve already told you that I don’t tire. You can’t wear me out,” another lunge, “all you’re doing is wasting time―!”

The mare suddenly stopped, her eyes growing wide with realization, “...you’re wasting time. That’s it, isn’t it?” Oh, horseapples. Her mind really did work a lot faster than I appreciated. Constance was glaring at me now, “you don’t want a fight...you want me here, distracted, for some reason. Perhaps while your forces make some sort of escape or to await reinforcements?

“No matter,” the mare relaxed her stance, her expression smoothing back into the look of perpetual disdain that it had been wearing during my first meeting with her, “I came out here under the false pretenses of a fight. As you have failed to provide one one way or the other, then I see no reason to entertain this farce any longer,” the filly general tapped at her pipbuck and brought the device to her lips, “All commanders, resu―”

I had no choice. A purple unicorn had been frantically hitting a chalkboard with a big number “5” circled a dozen times on it. I hadn’t looked at my pipbuck to confirm how much time had actually passed, but the tiny little figment of my imagination looked very sure of herself. Selene certainly wasn’t here yet, so however much time was left, I couldn’t let Constance order her forces to attack.

I charged.

My wings added a burst of speed that no other grounded opponent would have been capable of. I had hoped that would give me an edge―an element of surprise―during my attempt to interrupt the filly.

It didn’t.

Constance knew I was going to come at her. She knew that I didn’t have a choice. So of course she was ready for me. My own unique style or not, a punch was still a punch. There were only so many ways to throw them, and the filly knew more than enough ways to block mine. She didn’t stop there either. She blocked, trapped, and then used my momentum to throw me around this time. I tried to use my wings to keep her from sending me exactly where she wanted me to end up, but there was only so much that I could do while she had hold of my leg.

Despite my best efforts, I ended up on the ground again. The impact forced the air from my lungs and cost me a few precious seconds of reaction time. In the span of those seconds, I felt something come down hard on my left wing. Then I felt something give way inside of it. Then I screamed.

Constance wasn’t through yet though. My trapped foreleg was twisted next. The pain I felt was nothing compared to the nauseating sensation I felt as my humerus left the socket and begin to float freely. I wanted to fight back. To resist. I needed to. We would all die if I didn’t. Yet...I couldn’t. All rational thought left me in moments. All that remained were those baser, more primal, concerns that I’d been doing my level best to suppress: protect my baby.

I curled up into a ball, my working limbs and wings coiling inward over my belly. It was patently ridiculous. Futile. If I didn’t fight Constance off, she would inevitably killed both me and my child. The smart thing to do was to try and fend her off. Yet I couldn’t. I was in too much pain. There was too much fear. A fear that I’d never felt before when I used to be half-drunk all the time throwing myself at raiders.

It was a fear borne of the realization that I was going to fail. I was going to fail and there was nothing that I could do to stop it.

Constance kept up her assault for a while longer, breaking more ribs and cracking more limbs. For a moment, I thought she was just going to pummel me to death. Then she finally abated and took a step back, “Pathetic,” she scoffed, “this ‘duel’ is over,” her horn glowed, a matching aura surrounding the energy pistol that she’d brought with her and bringing it over to hover in between us. The barrel was leveled at my head.

Four more minutes and we all would have lived. That was probably the worst part of all of this: to know that I’d come so close...only to ultimately fail to save everypony. There was some comfort to be had in knowing I’d tried my best. Some, but not much.

I waited for the last sound that I was ever going to hear: the magical whine of an energy discharge.

Instead I heard a sneeze.

Despite myself and everything that was going on, I turned my head and look up at Constance with a raised eyebrow. Only to find her looking around as well. Then our eyes locked and the two of us exchanged a brief moment of solidarity in our shared confusion. I certainly hadn’t sneezed, and it was clear that the other mare hadn’t either. There was nopony else around though.

So then who…?

Then we heard the disembodied voice of a gruff sounding mare, “all of those potions you’ve got, and none of them is an antihistamine. Really?”

My ear twitched. Something about that voice sounded very familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. The sneeze too, come to think of it…

“Who’s there?!” Constance demanded, brandishing her energy pistol as she scanned the area fervently. Her Eyes Forward Sparkle had to be showing her the same lack of contacts that mine was though, “show yourself!”

“Don’t mind if I do!”

The mare appeared out of thin air. A silver unicorn. A quite sturdily built silver unicorn. Pritchel! The bounty hunter that I’d encountered a couple of times in recent months. Neither of those previous meetings had been under what I would have termed ‘pleasant circumstances’, but she was most certainly a welcome sight right now. Mostly because I couldn’t conceive of any reason that she’d be here to help out Constance of all ponies. I mean, a bounty hunter like her didn’t strike me as the altruistic type to risk her life to come and help me unprompted either, but I wasn't really thinking much about that at the moment.

One thing that I did notice about the mare that struck me as different from our previous meetings was that while she was still wearing bulky metal barding, it wasn’t the same obviously custom-forged job that I remembered. She was dressed in proper Steel Ranger power armor now. Power armor that was accented with green paint.

“Surprise!” the mare was grinning as her horn flared to life. Her massive hammer flew around and came smashing down on Constance’s pistol, crushing it into a flattened smear on the ground.

The startled filly general backpedaled, her eyes still wide with confusion at the unexpected sudden appearance of the mare who had somehow managed to sneak onto the battlefield past her lines undetected. I, however, had some idea of how this had been accomplished, and those theories were confirmed as I sensed somepony nearby just as a hoof pressed itself against the back of my head. At the same time, another hoof materialized in front of me. A striped hoof, holding a vial of milky white liquid.

“Drink,” I heard Medica instruct me with a voice that sounded like he was struggling to hold back another sneeze. I found myself in agreement with Pritchel: this zebra could make a potion that would drive mares to sleep with the nearest thing that had a penis, but he couldn’t make allergy medication? Ridicule later; potion now. Whatever he was trying to give me, I wasn’t going to question it.

I should have questioned!

I found myself screaming and writhing as my bones suddenly began to crawl around inside of me. My ears echoed with snapping and popping sounds as my limbs rearranged themselves back into their proper places and knit themselves back together. Within seconds, I was whole again.

“Thank you,” I panted, struggling to get back up to my hooves. I was whole, but I still hurt. On the bright side, it didn’t look like I was going to have to fight any time soon. Pritchel was taking full advantage of the other mare’s surprise and pushing her back. Constance was managing to avoid actually getting hit, but she was still quite obviously on the defensive. For the moment, “not to sound ungrateful, but why are you two even here?”

The zebra sneezed, throwing the hood of his stealth cloak back off of his head and revealing his rather annoyed looking face as he rubbed at his nose, “we have been hired to help you,” he informed me.

“Hired? By who?”

Before the striped stallion could answer, Constance retreated well away from her new attacker and brought up her pipbuck to once again issue her forces the order to resume their assault. My eyes went wide with fear once more. Pritchel wasn’t going to be able to stop her in time either.

Suddenly, before the filly could say anything, there was a crack of thunder and her pipbuck erupted in a crackle of brilliant sapphire light. The general swore, smacking at the now unresponsive device. Pritchel launched another attack, swinging her hammer around to bring it down on the filly. This time Constance did not jump away, but instead glared at her attacker. Her horn flashed and a golden shield materialized, stopping the other unicorn’s attack cold.

There was another thunderclap followed almost instantaneously by an eruption of blue lightning. Constance yelped as she shield vanished and she was forced to make an undignified leap backwards before the hammer could crush her.

For a moment, I thought that the sapphire flashes were Pritchel’s doing. However, I soon realized that I recognized them as well: they were almost exactly the same reaction that occurred when I used to use the customized ammunition that Foxglove made for me. Somepony was firing pulse rounds at Constance.

It was at about the moment I had that realization that Medica directed my attention to the top of the cliffs lining one side of the gorge, “that one.”

I squinted in the direction that he was pointing. The figure was a few hundred yards away, so it was impossible to make out any details. However, I could immediately tell that they looked a lot larger than any pony should at that range. They were also wearing an orange jumpsuit. The sort worn by the Steel Rangers when they weren’t wearing their power armor.

Hoplite.

It seemed that she was trying to make good on the rest of the debt that she felt she owed me. As far as I was concerned, as of this moment, I owed her! I whipped my head back around toward the fight going on between Pritchel and Constance, “don’t kill her!” I yelled at the silver unicorn, “if she dies, her army might start shooting again!”

“I’m not trying to kill her,” the mare growled in frustration as she made another fruitless swing of her hammer, “I’m just trying to hurt her. Hold still you little―!”

“Our employer suspected you would feel that way,” Medica explained nasally, “our instructions were to rescue you and capture the other,” as he spoke, the zebra withdrew a glass sphere filled with yellow fluid from the pack on his back and lobbed it at the engineered filly. Constance effortlessly blasted it out of the air with a zap of her horn, only for its contents to rain down upon her before she could get out of the way. The filly glanced at the droplets of yellow fluid for a moment, as though expecting them to begin to dissolve her flesh or something.

However, it turned out that it was not acid that the zebra had showered her with, but something else entirely. Before my eyes, the yellow substance began to fizzle...and then it exploded suddenly outward in an expanding cloud of foam which very quickly hardened, trapping the other pony inside.

“...That’s helpful,” I remarked dumbly, still trying to process the fact that I wasn’t about to die. Well, not right now at any rate, “how long will that stuff hold her f―”

A burst of amber light erupted outward from Constance’s spongy tomb, blowing the substance away and knocking all three of us off of our hooves. I landed rather unceremoniously atop my striped rescuer, covered in flecks of yellow foam, “oh...that long,” I groaned.

“Are you sure we can’t kill her?” Pritchel asked in a haggard tone as she got back to her hooves, fetching her hammer with her magic, “because right about now I’m debating on how much I really want this payout…”

“As if a brute like you even could best me,” Constance snorted derisively. The armored unicorn seemed to take that personally and charged at the smaller filly. Now I got to watch how she fought from the outside looking in, and I didn’t feel quite as bad about how thoroughly I got my flank trounced earlier. Constance moved with a grace that belied her caustic nature, sidestepping swings and landing blows like it was all part of so well-rehearsed performance.

I’d spent years learning to fight, and additional years putting that instruction into practice. I considered myself to be pretty damn good at fighting. That wasn’t all ego speaking either, as I wouldn’t have lived nearly as long as I had if I wasn’t good.

Watching Constance now though...she fought better than I flew. This was because, unlike anypony else who had to learn their skills through some amount of trial and error, the filly had had the knowledge hardwired directly into her brain. She was a living embodiment of a hoof-to-hoof combat style, coupled along with a body that had been given the perfect body build to perform all of those moves without any issue. She stepped fluidly around any blow that she cared to, casually brushed aside any swings that she wanted to, and struck back with potent precision whenever she desired. Pritchel, as big and powerful as she was―as well protected as she was―was systematically broken down just as easily as I had been.

It was simultaneously both gratifying―at least I knew it wasn’t just me!―and disheartening to see. I debated briefly whether or not I should try to help, but I wasn’t sure how much ‘help’ I would actually be. Constance had already beaten me with ease just a minute ago, and I wasn’t wearing powered barding. Not that it seemed to be doing Pritchel any good.

The silver unicorn’s hammer came around in yet another futile attempt to sweep the smaller filly off her hooves, only to be stopped cold by a magical barrier. A moment later there was ‘crack!’ of rifle fire and a burst of blue light and the barrier dissolved midsts tendrils of electro-magical energy. Pritchel’s hammer once more resumed its arc with a grunt from the mare. Constance seethed briefly at the disruption of her magical shield, but otherwise didn’t lose a step as she caught the hammer in her hooves and deflected it away, rearing up on her hindquarters and deftly twirling the weapon in her hooves before directing it back at a soundly surprised Pritchel. Both the mercenary and her newly returned hammer went tumbling past me and her zebra companion.

Constance spared only a brief satisfied glance in our direction before glaring balefully at the lip of the gorge where the marksmare lay, “you are beginning to irritate me,” she said through gritted teeth. Her horned flared to life once more. As did several dozen small stones on the ground, which began to slowly rise upwards. Then, with a suddenness that startled me, the stones rocketed away one after the other in rapid succession with a speed that was fast enough for them to sound not all that different from gunfire. A second later I saw the ghoul mare scamper away from her perch as dust and debris was thrown up by the makeshift torrent of suppressive fire.

Suddenly staying out of the fight was no longer an option. Hoplite had been pushed back and Pritchel was down for at least a few seconds while Medica got her back on her hooves. All that stood between Constance and her army now was me. Again. I had no reason to believe that another fight between us would go any differently. But that didn’t matter. I was the only one available.

So I attacked.

Almost immediately I was tumbling through the air end over end. I righted myself and shook my head to stop the world from spinning around me. That certainly boded well. There was no help for it though. I had to keep her here. Keep her distracted. Keep her from giving the order to resume the attack and wipe everypony out. I had to attack.

Or, at least, I had to keep her thinking I was. I once more reminded myself that I didn’t actually have to beat her. If I kept her busy, we won. So on my next dive, I did something rather unexpected: I intentionally missed. My pass was close enough to convince Constance that I meant to try to land a blow, but much to oblique to have possibly succeeded in the end even if she’d remained motionless. This had the advantage of also keeping me just out of reach of her own blows as well.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take her long to catch on. After only a few passes, the young pony merely stood there, glaring at me, “I grow weary of your puerile displays. You’re deaths have been postponed for far too long. No more,” she glanced down at her pipbuck, scowled at its blank screen, and then closed her eyes. Her horn flared. Not golden this time, but red. The brilliant crimson light fired upwards into the air, rocketing high above the battlefield, where it finally burst in a shower of slowly falling crimson rain.

I stared up in horror, and looked immediately towards the trench line, “No―!” I shot off in the direction of the battle that was soon to resume. Already I could hear the sound of weapons fire making its way across the field. I had to get back there. I had to save as many as I could...

I tried to get there anyway. I didn’t make it a foot before something wrapped around my tail and hauled me roughly to the ground, slamming me to the surface with a force that pushed the air from my lungs. A hoof was immediately at my throat. Constance’s ashen face looking down at me with her contemptuous amber eyes, “while it is ever so tempting to keep you alive long enough to witness how completely all of your futile efforts have failed you...you have proven yourself far too resourceful in the past,” her hoof began to press harder against my throat, cutting off both my ability to breath and pinching off the flow of blood to my head. My vision was already starting to grow cloudy. I couldn’t even muster up the strength to push her off.

“It’s easier just to kill you now―”

“DESPAIR MORTALS! FOR THE ETERNAL NIGHT IS UPON YOU ALL!”

In an encore of our prior abrupt and unexpected solidarity, Constance and I, again, shared a confused blink and looked around. You wouldn’t think that much could have made me forget about the fact that my neck was just moments away from being snapped by a genocidal madmare, but it turned out that a midnight black alicorn with a billowing silver mane made the list! Her and her―I was going to hazard a rough guess of about nine hundred and ninety-nine―companions.

“What in the―?!” Constance’s consternation was ended abruptly by a sudden blast of cyan magical energy to her chest by the new arrival that sent her skidding across the ground. In a brief moment of panic that had no defensible justification, I found myself clambering back up to my hooves and rushing over to see if the younger mare was still alive. To my surprise―and somehow, relief―she was. Stunned and disoriented, but alive.

Nor was she the only one to be caught off her guard and so firmly rebuked. A flock of alicorns―though perhaps swarm was more fitting given their number―descended upon the gorge and stunned any of the attackers that so much as twitched in response to Constance’s skyborne cue to resume the fighting. I saw quite a few energy bolts being fired up to intercept the Nightmare Moons as well, but these too were ruthlessly muted by the alicorns.

It was only a matter of seconds before the narrow battlefield was silenced, the winged black forms hovering overhead, keeping the engineered army from taking any further hostile actions. Meanwhile our own forces were just as confused, I was sure. They knew to expect drone support, but it had never occurred to me to tell them that those drones might show up in the form of a black alicorn with a glowing mane. Mostly because I hadn’t thought that’s how they’d show up either. There was little reason for Moonbeam to bother with covering the drones in their intended anti-zebra psychological camouflage.

No reason for Moonbeam to, but it was entirely in keeping with Selene’s own protocols, I realized.

I felt myself tense up as I looked at the singular drone that was continuing to descend further down towards us, coming to a soft landing overlooking Constance and I. A small part of my brain noted that the wing movements hadn’t been quite right for a landing like that, but I guess that aesthetics had taken a backseat to appearances during the design phase for the illusion talismans. The rest of me was caught up in an emotional tug of war between hoping that Moonbeam was somehow still in there, and knowing better than to let myself think that could be the case.

Still…

“Moonbeam?”

The drone cocked its head, its expression impassive. Then I saw a cursor appear in the corner of my SATS as the drone made its reply. At a volume that was much more appropriate to our close quarters, I was gratified to find, “contact with primary established. Ceding protocols,” My pipbuck beeped, prompting me to glance at the display.

>> N1GH7M4R3 COMMAND AUTHORIZATION TRANSFER COMPLETE

>> GREETINGS, MINISTRY MARE WINDFALL

Ministry Mare? That wasn’t right, “what’s going on? What are you talking abou―”

I was abruptly tackled to the ground by a rather enraged gray filly who no longer seemed to be enthralled with the appearance of the alicorns. The attack took me by surprise, as I’d actually pretty much forgotten about Constance at that moment, so it wasn’t difficult for her to put me down into the dirt again. She didn’t get very far though before another blast of magical energy flung her back.

“ENEMIES OF EQUESTRIA SHALL BE SHOWN NO QUARTER!” the drone screamed, interposing itself between me and the filly.

“Don’t kill her!” I yelled out of reflex. It wasn’t like the previous conditions of our fight were still in play. Her army was stymied. We’d ‘won’ already. Whether or not Constance died wasn’t going to change any of that. Arguably, it was a more tactically sound decision to kill her now and remove the threat that she posed.

It was a point that an obviously aching―and quite thoroughly peeved―Pritchel was keen to make, “on the contrary: killing that one is exactly what we should do. Even if she is a filly…”

“No,” I affirmed, getting back up onto my own hooves again. Constance was getting up again too, though much more cautiously, and with a wary eye on the large black alicorn staring her down, “enough ponies have died today. This fight’s over,” I declared, looking to the general to be certain that she understood that fact.

“Do I need to remind you that, not thirty seconds ago, she was trying to kill us?”

“You tried to kill me once too,” I pointed out to the unicorn, shooting her a pointed glare, “I don’t remember you complaining when I not only spared you, but then saved you from a hoard of angry townsponies,” the silver unicorn at least had the good sense to look a abashed about the reminder. She grumbled something about how it was different because she had been paid, and so it hadn’t been personal; but she seemed to understand that I was unlikely to recognize a huge distinction there.

Medica was busy trying not to wet himself as he stared unblinkingly at the drone. He looked as though he believed that making any move at all would draw its attention and lead to his immediate vaporization. He still sneezed though.

I turned my attention back to Constance, “here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to tell your forces to drop their weapons and stand down.”

“And if I refuse?”

I sighed and shook my head, “then I’m just going to have them all rendered unconscious and take their weapons anyway. I’m just giving you a chance to do this the easy way.”

Constance straightened herself up, glaring down at me, “I’d sooner die than surrender to the likes of you. Just kill me and be done with it.”

“Fuck it,” I groaned in exasperation, looking over at the drone, “hey, you can do the whole ‘voice mimicking’ think that Moonbeam could do, right? Can you do her voice?” I pointed at the engineered pony.

The midnight black drone regarded Constance for several seconds, and then, “sufficient sampling present,” it sounded like a dead ringer for Constance. The filly’s face blanched.

“Awesome. Broadcast a message in her voice to every pipbuck from her stable telling them to surrender and disarm,” the drone nodded. Though she said nothing further aloud, I suspected that a lot of ponies were receiving exactly the message tat I’d asked to be sent. Meanwhile, I sent out one of my own, “this is Windfall. The stable ponies are going to be dropping their weapons and surrendering. We’re accepting it.

I thought for a moment, grimacing. I would have liked to believe that the mercenaries could remain professional enough to be trusted to behave themselves in the face of a surrendered foe. On the other hoof, Griselda’s example was still fresh in my mind and, at the end of the day, they were just ponies. A lot of their comrades had died in this fight. The same went for the Shady Saddles volunteers.

It was honestly best not to risk it. Fortunately, I did have another option, “Arginine, have that ‘Honor Guard’ or whatever you put together gather Constance’s army and move them back to the mouth of the gorge,” I trusted our attackers to obey the orders of their ‘commanding general’ for the moment, but I didn’t want them close enough to cause any problems while we finished wrapping things up. It would be too tempting for our own survivors to want to exact revenge, I felt.

I looked back to the incredulous filly and smiled despite myself, “sorry: it looks like neither of us gets to die sticking stubbornly to their ideals today!” I glanced back at the alicorn, “escort the general to her army,” while to the pair of bounty hunters apparently turned outright mercenary I said, “you two go check on Hoplite and then meet me at the stable. The fight may be over, but our work isn’t…”

It took hours just to sort things out along the trench line, it turned out. Accounting for ponies, gear, weapons, the whole lot. A suitable force of a few hundred alicorn drones―no longer sporting their Nightmare Moon motifs―ringed the surrendered stable ponies at the mouth of gorge. Keeping them and Constance honest while myself and the remains of our own army got matters taken care of. Specifically the completed evacuation of the stable.

This included those ponies who were currently in the midsts of their maturation. That had been another sensitive affair. Nearly a thousand more ponies that needed to be watched over who emerged quite a bit confused, given that they’d been in the midst of receiving whatever in-vitro education regiment that the systems had been programed to give them. I had another couple hundred drones escort them to yet another part of the gorge until something could be figured out with them.

Then began the laborious process of systematically dismantling its infrastructure and eradicating its computer archives. I didn’t want any trace of the work that had been done here to survive. The idea of simply scuttling the whole subterranean structure was entertained―quite thoroughly―but ultimately dismissed. I felt that I was doing enough to these ponies. Without the machinery and the archives, this place was just like any other stable: a safe place for ponies to live.

It wasn’t nearly big enough to house over two thousand ponies, of course. But it could easily manage a few hundred in the stable’s interior; and there was plenty of room on the surface to construct additional housing for the rest. If the ponies here were so inclined, this place could turn into a major Neighvada settlement practically overnight!

The inclination of these ponies was the big question though. Zara was doing her part to share the true origin of their stable’s guiding directive: the zealous rage of a grieving mother out for vengeance. It was an uphill battle though. She was up against a mentality that had―in a very real way―been directly hardwired into the brains of her stablemates. The only reason that the others probably even humored her in the first place was because she was their overmare. If I’d tried to spin that story they’d have discounted it out of hoof. It was honestly a miracle as many ponies were willing to listen to her as their were.

She vowed to keep trying though, for as long as it took, to convince them that this crusade of theirs was a lie and should be abandoned. I wished her luck.

I wasn’t going to depend on it though.

Of the weapons and equipment that were confiscated, and divided up amongst the mercenaries as the promised bonus for agreeing to come with me, enough was set aside for the ponies here to defend themselves from bandits and monsters. Not a whole lot. A couple dozen rifles and sets of barding, along with a hundred spark-packs or so. About what one could expect to find a stable’s security force to possess, Foxglove assured me.

Her recovery was gratifying to see, though Arginine cautioned me that if would be a few weeks before he’d be willing to let her off bed rest. Her leg was a lost cause of course. Though, that evening, I caught her with a paper and pencil sketching out what looked to me like design schematics for a prosthetic one. You can’t keep a good mare down, I suppose.

Nor bad ones, I learned.

Unlike her followers, Constance did refuse to even listen to Zara. She didn’t care whether their quest for extermination of the surface ponies was the original directive of their stable or not. She’d come to the conclusion on her own that the world would indeed be truly better off with her kind at the helm. Constance didn’t even seem to care that her precious ‘Omega Strain’ was now impossible to create. She was dead set on completing her mission.

A lot of ponies counseled me to kill her. They made a lot of compelling arguments too.

She was a very smart pony. It was entirely possible that she could find a way to restart what we’d stopped here today. It could take her years―decades even―but there was little doubt that she was determined and capable enough to see it through. Letting her live could mean that a future generation might have to deal with this same threat all over again. A threat that would have learned from the mistakes made this time around.

Not killing Constance could end up putting the world in more danger.

Could.

That was the only thing that stayed my hoof on the matter. She could become a renewed threat. She could rebuild this misguided genetic superiority program. She could.

She might not though. There was the possibility―an admittedly small one, granted―that she’d eventually give up. Constance was capable, but she was also young. Young ponies often made impulsive and rash decisions that mellowed with age and experience. I served as my own example in that regard. I was not the same Windfall that traveled with Jackboot. Nor the same little filly that used to herd brahmin. Life changed me. I had to have faith that it could change Constance too.

If there was a saving grace, it was that fewer than a hundred ponies from her stable seemed inclined to join her when she left. These ponies I did not let have any weapons to ‘defend themselves’ with. I was optimistic. I wasn’t a complete moron. If Constance wanted to rebuild her forces, then she’d have to do it the hard way: with her bare hooves.

Honestly, even money was out on how many of the mercenary companies that had fought with me would ‘just happen’ to run across Constance and her followers in the next day or so and finish them off just to be on the safe side. That I couldn’t control.

I watched Constance’s group leave from the mouth of the gorge. Arginine and Hoplite were standing beside me. The former had been one the biggest advocate for her execution, the latter understanding of why I’d refused. I didn’t hold it against Arginine. He hadn’t been speaking from a place of malice. The stallion had simply been advising me of the most practical solution to a potentially serious problem down the road. The former Ranger hadn’t actually weighed in on the discussion at all, but had made it clear that after the fact that she admired it.

“That is a level of compassion that I wish I’d seen more frequently in my youth,” the ghoul had told me, “perhaps things would have turned out differently.”

I was unconvinced. Honestly, I was unsure that I’d actually done the right thing. I wanted to believe that I had, but...how was a pony as young as I was supposed to know what was really best? Six tiny ponies in my head had all wholeheartedly agreed with my decision, but that was hardly reassuring. Comforting, but not reassuring.

“I’m just so tired of ponies dying,” I sighed, emotionally drained by the day, “how many lost their lives because of all of this brahminshit? Some mare fifty years ago lost her daughter to a group of raiders, and so thousands more had to die decades later. It’s stupid. I’m over it.”

Hoplite let out a raspy chuckled, “I’m sure that, if any of us ever learned the root cause of the Great War, we would likely find that it an equally silly reason for so much death and devastation. It is too much to hope that the first war in a thousand years was fought for genuinely noble and worthwhile reasons.”

“Nothing that causes so much grief could possibly be ‘noble’,” I snorted.

“True enough,” there was a moment of silence, and then the ghoul looked to the alicorn drone that was perched nearby, monitoring Constance’s withdrawal, “and what of you? What ‘noble purpose’ will you use these machines to fulfill?”

I winced. That was a question I’d been considering for most of the day. The options that I’d most seriously entertained...didn’t thrill me.

Foxglove and Homily had―tragically―confirmed that Moonbeam had indeed executed the Goodnight Moon program that she’d taken from my pipbuck. However, not before making a few key alterations to it. They’d been relatively minor ones. She hadn’t spared the time to make the sweeping changes that had been applied to the same program in order to isolate Selene. Instead, Moonbeam had focused on dialing back their lethal force protocols, making subduing the enemy the default setting. Using outright lethal force apparently would only be used upon receipt of specific orders to do so. I’d appreciated that.

Much less appreciated was the other change that had been made to the program. A program that itself had already been a modified version of the software trigger that the Ministry of Awesome had intended to use when the project was ready to be implemented. The program that I’d found in Nightjar’s office had been intended to be used by some agency from outside the MoA, and so slaved control away from the intended command structure. Moonbeam had further modified this alteration to divert sole control over Selene to a single, specific, pony:

Me.

I was now Selene’s master. She would do whatever I told her to, no matter what it was. A thousand of some of the most powerful and sophisticated combat drones that had ever been developed by the Ministry of Awesome―if not all of equestria. On a pound-for-pound basis, they weren’t as powerful as something like an ultra-sentinel, sure, but they were far and above much more effective―and lethal―than the average robopony. They could exceded the speed of sound, were capable of working in concert with one another, moving with a singular mind and purpose, and had weapons capable of defeating just about any conceivable threat they might encounter.

I didn’t know much about the Enclave’s capabilities, but Hoplite had admitted that my army of drones could easily wipe out any Steel Ranger chapter that she knew about. While perhaps biased, the former Ranger was also insistent that the Rangers could easily hold their own against an equal number of Enclave forces in a fight. How accurate that assessment was, I couldn’t reasonably guess, but I couldn’t imagine any force of pegasi that could stop the sort of firepower that I’d seen Moonbeam employ against the Steel Rangers the last time they’d tried to ambush us.

That meant that I now had control of the most powerful military force in the Neighvada Valley, if not the whole Wasteland. A force that had been designed with the intent to repel even the most aggressive zebra military incursions.

In the course of an hour, I’d become a superpower on par with the Steel Rangers or the Enclave.

That was a lot of responsibility to put on a teenager. I was only half-sure I was ready for motherhood, for Celestia’s sake!

It was a lot of power for one pony to have. A lot of temptation.

“The drones present a unique opportunity for you to fulfill your ambition,” Arginine ventured calmly, “with a single command, every raider, bandit, and slaver in the valley might be removed in an afternoon.”

There it was. The idea that I’d been wrestling with the most fervently for the last few hours put into words by somepony else. I could make the Wasteland a safer place. All it would take was a word from me, and a horde of the deadliest roboponies ever conceived would spread throughout the Wasteland and reduce every ne’er-do-well to a pile of ash. Crime would be eradicated overnight, everywhere. Even in places I’d never heard about.

The Wasteland fixed, overnight. Right?

That’s how that worked.

Right?

I wanted to give that order so bad. I could feel in my bones the desire to rid the world of banditry with a clop of my hooves. A flick of a pinion…

A month ago, I might have done just that―already have done just that. But now…

A shattered foal laying beside his slain mother flashed through my head again.

Misdirected death wasn’t even my biggest concern. I was sure I could trust the sophisticated threat-analysis systems of an advanced artificial intelligence a lot more than my own adrenaline-hyped brain. No, that wasn’t what kept me from deploying Selene. It was a lot simpler than that: “It wouldn’t matter,” I sighed.

“There’d just be more bandits and raiders in a month. Killing the ones that exist now doesn’t erase whatever made them bandits and raiders in the first place,” I relived that moment in the dream that I wasn’t so sure had been merely a dream anymore in my head. A stallion reduced to robbery to provide for a starving wife and children. I knew that wasn’t why every bandit was one. I’d met plenty of ponies that simply...liked killing.

As sophisticated as Selene might be, I didn’t believe that it was quite that sophisticated. How would I weed out the raiders who raided to survive from those who raided for the thrill? And even beyond that: how did I stop more ponies from becoming raiders for either reason? In the time it took for anypony to solve those root problems, how many ponies would end up being slaughtered by Selene?

How many ponies would I kill? Was I really ready to unleash death on that kind of scale? Was I prepared to live with that, under the guise of ‘helping’ others? Did killing one pony to save another really change anything? If I did nothing, a pony would wind up dead anyway. The world remained unchanged. Did it really matter, ultimately, whether the ‘right’ pony died in the exchange?

I was no longer so sure. Not if there was the possibility of another solution. Starlight had showed me that Reform Spells were a thing. I was still on the fence about how ethical it was to forcibly change a pony’s personality like that, but it had at least demonstrated that killing bad ponies wasn’t the only option that existed. Who knew how many other options existed that I didn’t know about. For no other reason than that I’d never bothered to look for them.

I wasn’t going to default back to dealing death if there was the possibility that another way existed. I might not know what it was yet, but I owed it to myself―and those ‘bad ponies’ who could be saved―to at least try and find it.

“I’m not sending Selene out to kill,” I stated firmly, leaving no doubt that I couldn’t be swayed in this. Arginine nodded his acknowledgement.

Hoplite smiled, “a defender then? Of that town you’ve been nurturing? McMaren?”

A more palatable choice, to be sure. I was less averse to killing violent ponies who came at me and left me no alternative. All that any bandit would have to do to not die was simply...stay away. On the other hoof...it wasn’t like bandits were the only ponies who inhabited the Wasteland.

“Concentrating such a potent force might give other groups the wrong idea,” Arginine cautioned. This time I found myself agreeing with the stallion, “it is possible that others will not believe it likely McMaren keeps such an army for purely benevolent purposes.”

He was right. Selene had been designed to protect a whole country. It was hard to imagine anypony thinking that we’d want such an overwhelming military for ‘self-defense’. The Steel Rangers would almost certainly want to try and either destroy it or take it from us―as per their mandate. The Enclave would probably be either nervous about having such a threat lurking nearby, or simply want to lay claim to Ministry of Awesome technology that they might see as their own rightful property. I was led to believe that there was a strong connection between the Old World ministry and the current sky-dwelling nation.

Whether it be out of greed, pride, pseudo-religious zeal, or even out of fear, McMaren could become a target by having Selene there to defend it. In such a case, how many ponies would die because they hopelessly threw themselves at McMaren’s defenses for reasons they wouldn’t have otherwise?

The bottom line was that, at its heart, Selene was a weapon, developed during the war, specifically designed to kill and destroy. It wasn’t anything more than that; and likely could never be no matter what I wanted. I’d have just as much luck finding a benevolent application for a balefire bomb. Which brought me around to the third option that I’d been tentatively considering. Though I was wary of this one for very different reasons:

Destroying Selene and the drones.

Remove the temptation. Remove the perceived threat. Get rid of just one more relic from a war that never produced anything that ever benefited the world. That too was just a command away. Order selene to fly out into the middle of nowhere and overload the very potent reactors that beat in the heart of each and every one of them.

What caused me to hesitate there was the knowledge of what having Selene at all had cost us: Starlight’s daughter. A pony had given her life to bring these drones to us. Casting them aside, after just a few hours, couldn’t feel to me like anything more than spitting in the face of Moonbeam’s sacrifice. The immediate goal of that sacrifice―stopping Constance―had been accomplished, yes; but surely the life of a mare like that, one who had been put through so much suffering, was worth more than victory in a single fight?

Hoplite spoke up again, “perhaps a variation on the first idea? Stopping threats, but with the drones’ non-lethal capabilities? Simply frustrating bandits might be enough to dissuade them, and it would still bring an unheard of level of tranquility to the Wasteland.”

That was a tempting notion. No deaths, but still stopping violence. It had every quality that appealed to me. Well, almost every quality, “it still doesn’t address the root cause though,” I frowned. I might have to bite that bullet. Hoping to have my Cram and eat it too was probably asking for too much right out the gate. Perhaps a triage approach was needed then: a tourniquet to stop the bleeding first, and a more permanent solution could follow.

Policing the whole Wasteland like that would probably be impractical though. A thousand drones was a lot, but it was just a drop in the bucket when compared to the vast size of the whole continent. The Neighvada Valley was reasonable though. Especially when the source of most of the bigger threats―the White Hooves―were already effectively destroyed. Selene could quite easily patrol the main trade roads with little trouble.

Peace in Neighvada. Finally. Not that mercenary groups like The Housecarls and the Hecate would appreciate it much. They made their livelihoods off of doing exactly what I’d be ordering Selene to do. They’d hopefully find other work. After all, a truly peaceful Wasteland would see them out of work anyway. Ideally.

The only hiccup that I could see, honestly, was wariness on the part of the ponies who nominally ruled in the valley. The Casino Barons of New Reino would almost certainly not be fans of what could rather easily be interpreted as me ruling over them through having de facto military control over the area. Every time McMaren asked anything of New Reino, from having more favorable trade caravan access to negotiating for better prices on goods, it would be done with the impression of McMaren holding a figurative knife to New Reino’s throat. How did you negotiate in good faith with somepony who could crush you under their hoof and just take what they wanted if you said ‘no’?

That kind of potential leverage couldn’t breed anything but animosity and distrust. Hardly the sort of feelings that would usher in a new era of harmony. Ponies had to genuinely have the option of working together for any cooperation to actually matter. Selene would always be a form of at least implied coercion, even if it was never actually used that way. McMaren and I would be exercising military control over the whole valley, plain and simple. Even if it wasn’t lethal control, it was still enforced control.

Control didn’t nurture harmony either.

I didn’t want to control ponies any more than I wanted to hurt them. I just…

I wanted a better world. I wanted harmony.

I probably wanted the impossible.

Damn me if I didn’t care.

“Ponies have to be able to choose to do the right thing, or it doesn’t matter,” I finally said. There was a bitterness to those words, resting just beneath the hope. A bitterness borne of fear that I was making the wrong decision. That I was about to doom so many more ponies than I could ever possibly hope to save. I was a child―a condition that was subject to change the next time somepony treated me like one. It was unreasonable to expect me to make the right choice in a matter like this. The fact that I felt like I was being influenced by six figments of my imagination didn’t help much either.

Yet, in my heart, I knew that I wouldn’t feel comfortable making any other decision than the one that I was about to make. Ponies had to be allowed to choose. To feel like they could choose. Some of them would choose poorly. We were ponies; we made mistakes. Ponies would surely get hurt―and worse―during that process. Just as they always had. I’d protect who I could. That was all that anypony could be expected to do.

But I would not allow myself to be looked upon by the outside world as a dictator―even one with a benevolent track record. It would undermine everything that I hoped to accomplish to bring genuine change to the valley. An army wasn’t going to fix the world. Not when two had destroyed it.

“An admirable thought,” Hoplite said.

“It’s a stupid thought,” I muttered, pawing at the ground.

“‘Idealistic’ is the more polite terminology,” Arginine offered.

“Yeah,” my voice sounded a little haggard now, with the weight of the decision I’d reached finally starting to bear down on me, “Admirable, idealistic, stupid, naive,” the barest ghost of a wan smile tugged at my lip, “definitely sounds like a decision I’d make though, doesn’t it?”

“At least none of us said it was the wrong one,” the stallion noted.

“We’ll see how that holds up to hindsight,” I quipped, dryly. I now turned to face the nearby drone, intent on getting this over with before I lost my resolve, “Selene?”

The drone regarded me with its impassive glowing silver eyes, issuing a faint chirp of acknowledgement. I hesitated now. Not due to any faltering conviction. Not really. Just...a futile hope that I’d spot some sign of her. Some hint that, maybe, despite everything I knew otherwise to be true, Moonbeam was still there. Somewhere.

She wasn’t though. Homily’s ponies managed to get back into the facility once I ordered Selene to lift the lockdown that Moonbeam had imposed. They’d run a check on Moonbeam’s drone body, and the filly inside of it. Their findings confirmed what we’d already feared: her brain was completely occupied by the artificial intelligence. Even if we ran the program that had been modified to prune Selene back, all that would be left behind was an empty shell. Everything that had made Moonbeam Moonbeam, was gone. Forever.

Starlight...had not taken the news well. I hadn’t actually seen her since. Nopony had.

“Selene...I want you to fly back to the hangar―all of you,” I amended, “and I want you to detonate your reactors. Do you understand?”

The drone chirped again, “directive to initiate Enemy Denial Protocols acknowledged,” Selene replied in an eerily calm tone, “please confirm command to initiate protocol execution.”

Another vain hope that I’d see a pink flash of light behind those glowing eyes. Nothing. I’m sorry Moonbeam; and thank you, “...do it.”

There wasn’t a pause. No hesitation. The drone simply spread its metal wings, its levitation talismans lifted it off the ground, and then it rocketed away once it had achieved a safe level of clearance above us. Nine hundred and ninety-nine other drones zipped by in its wake. I idly wondered if I’d feel a slight tremor in my hooves in, oh, about...twelve minutes?

It had just been two words, but it felt like my whole body had been drained by the effort to speak them. In sparing an unknowable number of raiders, had I doomed an unknowable number of innocents? Had I just made the greatest mistake in all of pony history since the Great War?

Was I crazy?

...Maybe.

Footnote: End Credits

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