“Nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger.
Too late! Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self ‘chose’ to,
for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion,
sent an executive summary – almost an afterthought –
to the homunculus behind your eyes.

You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living space
with the likes of you.”

Jukka Sarasti, ‘Blindsight’

“Ere the mother's milk had dried
On my lips, the Brethren came--
Tore me from my nurse's side,
And bestowed on me a name

Infamously overtrue--
Such as "Bunny," "Stinker," "Podge";--
But, whatever I should do,
Mine for ever in the Lodge.

Then they taught with palm and toe--
Then I learned with yelps and tears--
All the Armoured Man should know
Through his Seven Secret Years...

Last, oppressing as oppressed,
I was loosed to go my ways
With a Totem on my breast
Governing my nights and days--

Ancient and unbribable,
By the virtue of its Name--
Which, however oft I fell,
Lashed me back into The Game.

And the World, that never knew,
Saw no more beneath my chin
Than a patch of rainbow-hue,
Mixed as Life and crude as Sin.”

‘The Totem’, Rudyard Kipling

Oxford, Nova Scotia, 40 miles from Truro

The man sitting beneath the bridge barely remembered how he had gotten here. Oh, there had been some bad decisions in the past, a lot of chances he had wasted…

... but it was easier to blame his misfortunes on the state of things.

On the war.

On the ponies.

Clad in scraps of charity, his face lined with grief and a dirty, unkempt beard running down his chest with the painful weight of years, he mourned his lost years, and cursed his destiny. The river guttered past, soaking him in its frozen spray, not helped by the early winter winds whistling by. His bleary eyes looked towards the north east, where a pink glow like an early sunrise could be seen over the hills.

The Barrier would be here soon. In one hand he held a stolen bottle of Wild Turkey… or something that was labelled Wild Turkey. You could never tell with the booze around now-it could be the genuine article, or someone’s rotgut, or actual whiskey watered down to make it last.

Either way, it would be his last pleasure before death…

Oh yeah. That was how he had gotten here. He’d come here to die.

He rubbed forlornly at his eyes with trembling fingers wrapped in a pair of dirty gloves. It was getting harder to see. He had been warned of this, back in the last shelter he’d visited. Trace amounts of potion in the air were causing blistering cataracts to form. He needed surgery if he was to retain his sight, needed a corneal transplant.

Of course, he couldn’t afford it. And no charity was going to fork out that kinda dough for a nobody bum whose only joy in the world was in the bottom of a stolen bottle.

His vision blurred again, not from the damage done to his eyes, but from the tears running down his face. This was better. Better to go out like this, destroyed in a flash, than withering on the vine, blind and alone…

...would nobody mourn him? Would anyone miss him? Were any of his cousins still alive, did they even remember him?

He sobbed, and tried to pull himself to his feet, to shuffle towards the promised glow of self-annihilation, towards the end of pain.

His legs, cold and numbed, would not respond. Weak and broken, he jerked like a damaged toy, tears streaming down his face at life’s petty cruelties as he struggled to stand.

And then he heard a humming, a rapid pulse of wings that cast a soft note down out of the sky.

And terror, fear more knife-edged and icy than the season’s vicious chill, stabbed into him. The bottle fell from his fingers and smashed on the stones, as he scrabbled to escape, to run away.

His frozen, calcareous legs betrayed him, and weeping, drooling spit in between pained gasps of air he collapsed sideways onto the cold concrete…

But something suddenly soothed him, a refrain of music caught on the teeth of the wind. The sound of a voice singing.

There were no words, just trills and flows of perfect sound that washed over him like a warm blanket. It made him remember childhood, and mother laying him down to sleep.

‘Shush… shush…rest now’. It’s alright, you’re safe…’

“Mom…” he croaked, voice and soul breaking under the subtle weight of the song.

His motions stilled, and his breathing slowed. He heard the buzz of wings come closer, and then the tap of the singer landing beside him.

“Oh, that’s so sad...out here all alone, in pain.”

It was voice as sweet as her song, a gentle lilt that promised peace, if he were to only listen. It had music in it, and whispers running under the words.

He should have been panicked, desperate. But the whispers said to lie still, and listen...

“Oh, you poor thing. Here, let me help you up.”

A strong pair of limbs hooked him under the armpits and sat him up against the underside of the bridge. His streaming eyes washed everything in front of him into a blur of colour… so much colour.

He knew that kind of touch...the touch of a pony..

No… Not like this, never like this...

“No… no…” it said, and he felt a hoof softly rubbing his chest, gently massaging away the pain from where he had fallen. “Don’t fight… just relax…and feel the pain run away...”

He yielded, letting the flowing tones surround him. For the first time in a long time, he felt at peace.

“Nepenthe!” the beautiful voice called out. “I’ve found one! And he’s just the most perfect addition to the experiment!”

More hooves, tip-tapping closer on the concrete. More colours in the shadows at the edge of his sight.

“Great job, Sugarcane. Oh wow, you’re right. Just look at him, look at that pain in his eyes. So much fuel for our fires. You’re learning fast!”

“Well, I was sired by the best!”

Shared giggles, girlish and churlish.

“Soooo….can I practice on him Nepenthe? Please?”

Weakly, he lifted an arm to wipe the tears away.

Two ponies stood before him. Two mares in shining, light armor, without helmets. They were both smiling broadly... almost painfully.

The taller of them was a tomboyish unicorn with grey eyes and a two-tone mane. She was levitating a pair of throwing axes, twirling them in mid-air to shake off a skein of blood. Then, with a flick of her horn, the blades disintegrated into a glowing cloud of metallic particles that flowed onto her, reforming as a pair of short-swords holstered on her armor.

There was a small silver circlet on her brow...and blood on her armor. And yet she looked innocent and sweet, with a demenor and appearance that was horrifyingly cute.

“Go right ahead, Sugarcane,” she trilled. “I want to see your talents in action too!”

Her words seemed far off, unimportant. He felt a hoof pull his face around, and he met the owner of the amazing voice.

She was a pegasus, with the most amazing colours he had ever seen. Her mane was a shimmering sapphire, while her wings and fur were a scintillating turquoise that gleamed corvine in the dim light, appearing blue from one angle, and seconds later a lustrous emerald green. She looked sugar-frosted, or like a hummingbird that had suddenly grown hooves. The only contrast was a white streak in her mane and a matching patch above her snout. It drew his gaze to her eyes…

... amazingly ruby eyes, that seemed to fill his world. They were so empty, like a hole into which he could feel himself falling...

“Oh, look! It’s already working!” she giggled, and the dipping notes of her laughter carried away all his fears.

No, he wanted to whisper. No no no no no.

“Hi there!” she said, staring at him. “I’m the Pretty Private Sugarcane, and you’ve been selected to be a part of our special experiment.”

One of her wings began to flutter, buzzing at such a rapid rate that its colours seemed to sparkle, forming wonderful patterns. Weakly, he turned to look at the beautiful sight.

“Don’t... don’t want to be a pony…” he slurred, unable to look away.

“Oh, neither did I. I was so angry and full of hate. I just wanted people to listen to me, to listen to my truth. But you’re listening now aren’t you. You’re listening to my lovely voice, hearing nothing but my voice…”

Yes… yes he was... the other sounds were fading away. She shifted wings, fluttering the opposite one, and he drunkenly swung his head to follow. He didn’t want to stop watching those amazing colours.

“You were sad, weren’t you?” she was saying, and the truth of that pierced to the centre of his mind. “Why is that?”

“Alone…” he whispered. “Empty...with nothing…”

“Oh I see...so sad and lonely. Possessing nothing, and wanting of everything.”

“Yes…”

“But we can give you everything you ever wanted. Family, and purpose, an abundance of life…”

That...sounded nice…

“Do you want that...to be like us, and with us…free from sadness.”

With them? As a...pony?

“Can’t you feel it in you, the rightness of it, the truth in my words. Because with us now, you’re not sad anymore… you’re feeling safe, and relaxed. So calm, and relaxed…”

Again she alternated her wings, and again he followed. Back and forth, side to side, his head weaving like a charmed snake.

“And you’re calm... and happy... and relaxed, because I’m telling you to be. Because you can hear nothing but my voice, and my voice is telling you to believe me…believe my promise...my vow to you, my truth...”

Both wings were buzzing now, and that drew his gaze straight forward, into the yawning depths of her eyes, her impossibly open eyes.

Her voice was shifting lower, and deeper. Drawing him in, deeper. Deeper into those ruby eyes...

“... and what I’m telling you now... and what you now believe… is that you want to be happy…”

Yes…

“...you want to live…”

Yes…

“...you want to be alive and happy…”

Yes…

“... like me. Because I’m so happy that people listen to me… like you’re listening to me, isn’t that right?”

Yes…

“... and so you want to be like me…”

Yes…

“... as a pony, just like me…just ask for it, and we’ll make it true, make a new you...”

Ye…ye…

He could sense, no feel or see, the other pony, Nepenthe, stepping up beside him. Could feel his hairs prickle as she cast a spell.

“...you want to live…” she said again, instructing him. “Say it with me...you want to live.”

“I want to live…”

Something was swirling around his head.

“...you want to be happy...”

“I want to be happy…”

It was a liquid, thick and purple.

“...you want to be a pony…”

“I want... to be... a pony…”

It was rubbing off on his skin… on his hair, on his face…

“Say it again for me.”

“I want to be a pony....”

“Good toy…” she smiled, and he felt an inner surge. He had done good, he had made her happy.

“Now…” she said, and her eyes seemed if anything to grow even larger.

“Sleep…”

He toppled forward into the oblivion of her eyes, drowning in the music of her voice, and would never wake.

10 Hours Ago

“Colonel, would you kindly…”

“What is it, Andrei?” Atlas Galt said, not lifting his eyes from the map of Truro he had spread across a roughly-constructed table. Galt had thrown the workstation together himself using the ample supplies of cut timber and nails to hand... built by his own hand.

If one actually looked at the map, they would see a chaotic mess of eraser-marks and pencil-lines, everyday objects used as placeholders, and all the tools one used to turn a crude map into a plan of battle. A lesser man than Galt would have been stumped at the sight.

But war was his kingdom, and this base, which he had dubbed ‘Elsinore’ was his castle and citadel. From here, he commanded everything.

Setting up shop in a Home Hardware store had many advantages. One was the abundance of supplies, which had been put to use in creating IEDs and barricades. Another was that there was plenty of open space in which to establish a centre of intelligence.

People liked to say that his Thenardier Guards were unprincipled scavengers. A band of psychotic parasites who were the last dying gasps of the Human Liberation Front. They claimed that this methodical looting was the only reason that his unit had achieved considerable successes on the various fronts.

Those people were deluded. Galt knew that his Guards’ strength came from simple application of logic, of being able to outsmart the opponent and make his strength their own. Parasites simply took what they could - building something like the Thenardiers could only be achieved by real men and women.

“Well, would you kindly explain to me why you declared a ceasefire with that animal?” Andrei reiterated. A dapper middle-aged Russian who had gathered to himself a black-market fortune before the war, rakish and poised even when dressed in fatigues, he was Galt’s adjutant and general confidant.

“You mean Prism Flash?” Galt hummed, using a few set squares and rulers to mark out the current lines on the map. “Take a look at this and tell me what you see, Andrei?”

The other man did, studying the formations closely. Their current headquarters lay on the southern fringes of the town of Truro, and almost immediately north was the Colchester County Hospital. The rail-line curved past both to the east, and not much further south was where that blathering lunatic Birch (useful, if deranged) was nicely shackled in place, holding the front against any trains approaching from Halifax and not being a general pain in the ass.

“You’ve... allowed us to advance our own lines?” Andrei concluded at last.

“It’s pragmatism at action, the root of objectivist logic,” Galt explained. “By agreeing to allow the Equestrians access to the hospital, we can use their own strength as a buffer on our northern flank. That has freed up forces of our own to secure the interstate on one side and push harder for the town center on the other. We also gained first access to the hospital once they had pacified it, securing ourselves ample medical supplies and a considerable number of hostages.”

He pointed to where the map indicated high ground on the south-eastern side of the town. “And we’ve been able to consequently relieve our snipers and redeploy them as scouts, placing some of our best eyes where they can observe both the Equestrians and the traitors…”

Andrei grunted and glanced over his own shoulder. Beyond the storefront, out in the parking lot, the fruits of the arrangement with Prism Flash were being loaded onto two Mi-26 heavy-lift helicopters, ‘Rapture’ and ‘Columbia’. Drugs, surgical equipment, a backup generator looted from the hospital. The kind of ancillary material that could keep a battered army marching. The HLF had been rather short on useful material for awhile now...

“And if the whorses stab us in the back once they’ve gotten what they need?” he asked.

“What if they do? They’ve already given us the upper hand by coming to us seeking a truce, no matter how brief. We now know that they have an unexpected VIP casualty who needed immediate treatment. That kind of intelligence is worth the risk.”

“Okay, so how do we exploit that?” the self-made oligarch asked.

“For now we don’t…” the Colonel said, rolling his attention to the opposite front on the map. “Let the Equestrians and their PER lackeys do what they wish. What I’m more interested in is what our actual opponents think of affairs.”

“You mean, you’re trying to draw the PHL out, by using the seized hospital as bait?”

“Exactly. The softhearts across the lines normally try to reclaim hospitals and schools as if it were a reflex action. But not today. For some reason they’re holed up in the railyard and are not attempting to break out. I’d very much like to know why. If they’re fighting a defensive action, then what are they defending?”

Now that was one of the million dollar questions, and made Galt wonder if it was another breakthrough in his enemy’s arsenal. The PHL, for all their strength, were very secretive about their magi-tech, which often seemed less like armaments and more like fantastical swords and firearms forged in otherworldly realms or the lands of science fiction They simply churned out a continuous parade of new weaponry - swords that could shapeshift, rare energy weapons painted with bright red warning labels, conventional firearms that were far better in terms of fire rate and never overheated, explosive revolvers, and countless more.

Galt himself cared very little for such toys, whether they came from Heaven, Hell, Gondolin or District 9, and even less for ‘magic’. Men won wars, not weapons...but he’d very much enjoy smashing the PHL’s toys to bits.

’There comes a point in a man’s life, when the question as to whether they are mad or the world is, becomes purely academic. Here we are, drawing up plans for the defense and counter-offensive against an invasion by candy-colored horsies. I mean, just… why?’

They both stared at the railyard on the map intently, as if it could reveal a heretofore unknown great secret. Large red question marks were scattered all over the area, and someone had scrawled ‘what is this?” nearby. There were post-it-notes stuck to the map, surrounding the railyard: ‘mysterious explosion? Possibly thaumic’, ‘Unannounced train, arrived under cover of darkness?,’ and various cargo-related speculations.

As the two of them stood there, Galt with one hand cupping his chin thoughtfully, a communications runner ran up. It was one of the Colonel’s private frustrations to admit that his elite Guards lacked ample radio equipment, and so on operations like this many units had to rely on mouth-to-mouth information and motorised couriers to communicate.

“Sir! Sergeant Birch’s unit has abandoned their posts!”

“Was there any sign of a struggle?” Andrei said curtly. “Were they ponified?”

“Nossir! In fact they appear to have willingly dispersed after eliminating their cadre of hostages.”

A lesser man might have gotten angry, or have sought to apportion blame. Atlas Galt was no such man. Instead he listened and then grunted.

“Very well. Birch and his men are light infantry with a handful of sappers, and had only civilian vehicles to hand. They won’t be far. Alert all local commanders to be on alert for them, and detain them on contact.”

“Do you have anything else to report?” Andrei added.

“Uh, yes. Corporal Flamel at the switchtrack on our side of the front appears to have been PIA, and reports are that a light locomotive has crossed our lines from to that part of the town held by the ponyfuckers.”

Galt’s eyebrows lifted. Now he was curious. As the annotated map observed, one train had already arrived at Truro under mysterious circumstances some nights ago, and never left. Now a light locomotive had also turned up. Intriguing.

As Andrei dismissed the runner, the Colonel turned his attention back to the grand plan.

‘The PHL are a more pressing threat than the ponies themselves, in the long run…’ he mused. ‘A cult of personality gravitating around that martyred mare of theirs... that’s a very dangerous combination.’

He knew himself to be no idiot. He had secured many Equestrian textbooks on the thaumic sciences, and had read them at length. What he had learned had only strengthened his resolve to win this war on human terms, without recourse to that force of inequity they called ‘magic’.”

‘Magic makes it possible for a parasite to steal from those of substance and claim it to be ‘harmony’. Ha, ‘harmony’, what a lie. The only natural order is the struggle of strength… of makers and takers, predators and prey... the ponies proclaim ‘harmony’, ‘magic’, and ‘friendship’ to be a universal constant, a grand arbitrator of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as false as any so-called ‘god’. It is just another imposed system of morality… another lie...

… and ‘magic’ can make an individual unnaturally strong… so strong that they dominate the minds of others by their very existence. Just look at their ‘divine’ royalty: religion and aristocracy rolled into one as some grand insult to the individual..and now I suspect the memory of the ‘Late, Great Lyra Heartstrings’ is having the same effect on her followers. They’ve cast off one false frame of mind and simply embraced another lie. No, I will have no truck with magic… or those who claim to wield it.’

Yes, he stood apart, as did all great accomplishers. Why else did he change his name if not to proclaim his objective superiority to the world? He needed no divine mandate or rallying cry to win this war, simply his own two hands…

“Andrei, we’re going to push for the town center. I think the PHL have taken delivery of something extremely valuable, and it’s time we appropriated it for ourselves…”

Tragically, if Colonel Atlas Dagney Galt, born Aeron Grant, had actually been as superior a mind as he believed himself to be, he would not have assumed that his enemies could not be predicting his own moves…

...perhaps he would not be fighting for the HLF at all.

“...mirror mirror, tell me something,
Who’s the loneliest of all?
I’m the loneliest one of all...”

-SHUFFLE-

“...had a question or two, seeking answers, from you
Though I’ve never been through this door
I know I’ve had this feeling, once, before…”

Tess’s iPad was on randomise as she sat in the Truro railyard’s office and staff lounge. The Beretta M9 was in her hands and a PHL soldier was instructing her on how to field strip it...

… a unicorn filly, barely into her teens.

“For Lyra’s sake,” the foal snapped. “That’s the safety, not the disassembly latch! Go back and start again.”

Her tone was as fiery as the wood-burning stove crackling in the corner of the room.

Tess’s hands trembled as she returned the gun to first a ‘live’ condition and then ‘safe’. When she hit the release tab for the magazine, it dropped out and clattered on the floor. Some part of her inwardly roared in fury at being yelled at like an idiot by one so young… but much as she hated to admit it, she needed the training. She needed to defend herself, and she’d been lucky so far.

“Catch it! You’ve got fingers, use them! What’s the point of asking for instruction if you’re not bloody willing to obey them!?”

Tess didn’t answer, instead keeping her jaw clenched shut as she once again went through the motions.

“Ease off on her kid,” Jean-Eric said from another couch, where he was sifting through a box of documents. “She ain’t been through the wars yet, only handling a gun for the first time today.”

“How in Tartarus did that happen?! Most human kids today have some sort of training with guns after all these years of hell!? How did a grown woman get by so far?!”

“Hey…” he retorted. “I ain’t used a gun in years myself, so why should she have? Not everyone’s a soldier, not everyone has to be some sort of pistol-whipping badass...heck, we’d never have gotten this far in the war if everyone was running around trying to play Rambo! She and me, we’re the average Janes and Joes who keep armies fed and in motion.”

“Uh-huh…” the filly rolled her eyes. “But Jane and Joe and John fucking Doe can all still learn how to defend themselves!”

“Which is why my conductor asked for help, so kid, instead of bitching, start teaching!”

Tess cut her eye in Jean’s direction, but he didn’t notice. Even while he and the filly had verbally sparred, his attention had been divided between the box in his lap and out of the window, where a slapdash hazmat team were removing any trace of potion from the 9782.

“The name’s Firelock, pops!” the filly snapped. “And, by the Golden Lyre, if you had any sense, you’d have asked for firearms training like she did.”

The old black engineer didn’t react, but calmly held up a set of railroad subdivision maps and charts, plucked from the box. “You’ve got your specialist training, and I’ve got mine. These are just as important to our train getting through to Montreal as knowing how to put a bullet through somebody’s face.”

Firelock scowled and turned her direction back at Tess, who had managed to separate the gun’s slide from the frame and was now fiddling with the guide spring. When the child soldier next spoke however, some of the edge had gone out of her voice.

“...not like that. The spring’s under compression. If you just try and lift it out, it’ll fly back and hit you in the face.”

Step by step, the unicorn filly guided Tess through how to take the gun apart and service it. A small manual for the Beretta M9 was spread out on the floor for reference.

“Hey, Firelock,” someone whistled from the door. A mocha-skinned woman with short auburn hair and shades steeped in and gestured with her head. “Laura’s finished rigging your new saddle. Needs you for the fitting.”

“Coming, Claire!” the orange filly chirped, before fixing Tess with another stare. “Have it reassembled and safe by the time I get back.”

As Firelock trotted out, the woman named Claire lowered her mirrored shades for a second to peek over the rim at the train crew, as if appraising them. A ridiculously huge pistol was strapped to her thigh, and her bare shoulder bore a tattoo of a red dragon surmounting a lone star.

“We’ll be ready for the two of you in a second,” she said at last, her tone suggesting she was not impressed with them. “They’re just finishing up on your engine.”

Then she was gone, and there was silence, except for the rustle of paper, hissing flames, and the quiet clink of metal on metal as Tess struggled, hunched forward, to put the Beretta back together. Eventually a kettle sitting on the ancient pot-bellied stove began to whistle. Without a word, Jean stood, carried it to a dirty kitchenette, and poured the steaming water into two tin mugs.

“That filly is a monster,” he said, feigning conversation as he stirred. “How’d she end up with a butt-mark of a flaming bullseye?”

He looked to Tess for an answer, and got none. Shrugging he rifled through the cupboards and gave a small cry of joy as he found a half-bag of sugar, which he spooned with great relish into the drinks. Then, with a mug in each hand, he moved back into the small lounge area.

“Here…” he held one out to her. “Boiling hot sugar water with a few coffee-grounds swirled in is the best on offer I’m afraid.”

She took it wordlessly and set it down next to her, keeping her focus on the gun. Wincing, Jean sat back down himself and sipped, watching.

After another minute, Tess herself finally reclined back into her own seat and gingerly blew onto her own drink.

In her lap, the gun sat, perfectly assembled. Then, as if in afterthought, she reached down with her free hand and put the safety ‘on’.

“I can’t do this, Jean,” she said quietly.

“You did just fine in my eyes.”

“I don’t mean the gun!” she snapped, spinning her head round and matching his gaze.

“And neither did I,” he replied.

Unable to maintain eye-contact with him, she huddled back into her seat and drew her sweatshirt’s hood up over her head. The both of them had been ordered to discard their clothes and go through a decontamination shower (the water of which had not been heated) and were now dressed in olive-green utility overalls tucked into lace-up boots. Jean had produced a quilted jacket from his bag of meagre possessions to wear over his and Tess had sourced hoodie to help warm herself. It was canary yellow.

The tac-vest she had been given by Colonel Hex had been confiscated. From the way she was hugging herself, Jean suspected she missed it.

“I can’t be your conductor Jean…” she said at last. “I’ll ride with you up in the cab, but I can’t be in charge.”

He heard her voice catch and waited patiently for her to speak again.

“it’s…every decision I make gets people killed. The poor bastard at the switchtrack, those people last night…”

“... anyone else?” he pried gently, and she nodded. He sighed and pitched over the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t know what to say…” he admitted. “Heck, I did what you’re doing now after the smash with those kids in the SUV. If you don’t think you can command the train, then that’s cool. But I’m not willing to let you step down as conductor...we’ll lead together if need be, but in my eyes, you deserve that title.”

Beneath the hood he saw her smile, though her eyes were still hidden.

“Thanks for understanding.”

The moment was broken by the sound of the woman named Claire striding back in, stomping compacted snow off her boots.

“We’re ready for the two of you.”

Downing their drinks, the two members of the train crew rose, and stepped through the door out into the blinding afternoon sun, blistering with harsh sterility on the ice.

As they left, Tess snatched up the Ipad, which was just starting on another song.

“What if the storm ends? And I don’t see you…
As you are now, ever again?”

“By the way,” asked Claire as they started away from the building. “I know your locomotive got potioned, but the decon guys said there was some other kind of trace magical residue in the cab…especially around the conductor’s chair.”

“What?”

“I dunno, they said there wasn’t enough to identify it, but that their scanners picked something up...”

“Verity…” Tess said thoughtfully. “That’s the side of the cab we had her chained up on…”

“Verity, huh? Was that the mare who rode in with you? Once she introduced the two of you she just flashed some PHL ID and headed back out. What was up with that?”

“Honestly, we’ve no idea what her deal is....”

Verity Carter retched, hocking up a wad of phlegm to clear her through. Tiny blue particles seemed to shimmer in it, and she cast a baleful eye over them.

Then, with a sigh, she turned her attention to a thin book she had boosted from the railyard. After taking her absence she had hung around, keeping herself unseen and picking up on the rumor mill. Finally, having gotten the gist of local operations, she had snuck back to search for intel…

...and that search had borne fruit.

Just because she officially now worked for the PHL and bore their badge, in no way implied she enjoyed spending time around them...or ever intended to ask nicely for anything that she could simply steal out from under their smouts.

In this instance, a leather-bound volume, with the following words stamped into the cover.

A stick-on label carried the number ‘1810’, and inside the cover were a list of successive owners under the printed header, ‘Property Of’...

All had been scratched out, except for a final addition at the bottom that seemed quite recent.

“Well, that’s interesting…” she muttered, and cast her eyes over the first page of the text. Instead of dry instructions on how to drive and maintain some diesel-driven behemoth, she found something else entirely.

Magically, the ink had been pushed around on the page, to form new words. What she had in her hooves might have looked like an ‘Engineman’s Operating Manual’, but it was actually something else entirelyl.

“Very interesting indeed….”

Carefully, she placed the slim book back into her saddlebags, and focused her attention forward. From this little hidey-hole in an abandoned dog’s kennel, she had a clear view out over the Colchester County Hospital, a red-brick building that stood overshadowing the street on a low rise. Oblivious ponies milled around the front doors, a mixture of guards and newfoals.

Verity’s attention slid to the troupe’s leader, a pegaus stallion in streamlined armor, sporting a distinctive spectrum-hued mane.

“Now...how to get close to you Prism Flash...and more specifically, how can you help me.”

Then she glanced back at her blank flank, and after a moment’s pause, smiled…

“What… what is this?” Lightning asked, eying with some suspicion a sealed flask of purple liquid that Mercy was holding up with one wing.

“This, is the root of the Conversion Bureaus,” the pegasus medic answered. “It’s Equestria’s primary weapon in this war. The official name is something like twenty syllables long, so everyone just calls it the Ponyficiation Potion.”

“It… it makes ponies?” Lighting guessed. Well, it was right there in the name, ‘Conversion Bureau’. “But... that shouldn’t even work.”

“It doesn’t,” Mercy hissed, underscoring Lightning’s words. “This stuff makes things that might resemble ponies, but aren’t ponies, in any sense of the word.”

“But what about your friends... they sounded as if they want to take this stuff?”

“They do!” Mercy stomped a hoof, teeth gritted and eyes clenched. “No matter what happens, they don’t understand. They don’t want to understand, because they’re true believers!”

An infant cried nearby. It was not alone.

“Then, what are you about to do with that flask?” the recovering flier asked, fearing the answer.

The two of them were standing in a half-lit corridor, outside a door marked ‘NEONATAL’. Mercy stepped up to it and paused, one hoof raised to push the door open.

“If you want to remain safe in ignorance,” she said, not turning around to face Lightning. “Then now’s the time to turn and run. Because afterwards, no matter how fast you fly, or how far you go, you’ll never be able to leave what you see in here behind.”

Lightning felt chills crawling up and down her spine.

“But… where would I go? Where could I run to?”

“That’s not important!” Mercy snapped. “Right now, as you are right now, you’re at least a little innocent of what we’ve done, the crimes we’ve inflicted. How long have you been in this world?”

“Not very long,” Lightning admitted. “Honestly, it feels like something out of a nightmare!” she winced at admitting that weakness, but she pressed on. “Nothing here makes any sense, and-”

“I’m going to stop you right there. There are men and stallions, mares and women out there, who would work you over for hours as you begged for mercy that would never come,” Mercy said. “Then, if they didn’t believe you, they’d hand you over to people you don’t want to think about. And those are the ones that don’t hate ponies. If the HLF get their hands on you, you’re doomed and you will die alone, grounded, and crippled. Right now, I’m urging you to dye your mane and hide away somewhere, put the name ‘Lightning Dust’ behind you, and just try to ride out this blood storm without getting it on your hooves. Go to the Pacific, I don’t care, just do yourself a favor get as far away from all of this as you possibly can.”

The sheer toxin in her words forced Lightning to take a step back, bringing her adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling window that had frosted over. She glanced at it, and saw herself framed in a motif of flowers that some soul had hand-painted onto the glass to brighten up this part of the building.

‘Pretend to not be me? Could I do that?’

At Mercy’s suggestion she had used a torn scrap of aqua-green hospital barding to tie her mane back. That alone was enough to break up her distinctive appearance. A few dyes were really all it would take to make her into somepony else...

But then, she wouldn’t be Lighting Dust anymore, would she?

“No,” she answered. “I’m not going to pretend to be somepony I’m not. I am Lightning Dust, and I’m not going to be afraid. Something sent me here, and if I’m going to discover why, then I need to know what’s on the other side of that door.”

Mercy’s shoulders shook for a second, and then she sighed.

“Alright. But you won’t thank me for it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

With a press of her hoof she pushed the doors open, and Lightning winced as the sound of crying children tripled in volume.

Kids… she always hated kids, foals especially. But this wasn’t just an annoyance, this was the heart-rending sound of newborns crying for succor, for food, for their mothers.

Twenty or thirty cots filled the room, along with a few incubators. Rio and Maddy were already present, trying to calm the infants. The full-body protective suits they had donned probably did not help in that task. A remote part of Lightning’s mind insisted on how obscene it was that equipment like this had evidently been sourced or modified in Maddy’s size. No child should be dressed like that…

… no child should have been abandoned here like this.

“Girls, are we ready?” Mercy asked as the door softly swung shut behind herself and Lightning.

Rio looked up from where she was dandling one baby in her arms and frowned.

“As ready as we can be…though I wish we didn’t have to resort to using this on children.”

Lightning found that sentiment curious, despite her growing sense of looming terror, and looked at Mercy, who shook her head. ‘Don’t ask questions’, the gesture clearly.

“The three of us knew the choice we’d have to make when we found these children had not been evacuated,” Mercy whispered, and held up the flask. “This should be enough for all of them, and then some.”

Drawing in close, the two humans each produced a large pipette and brimmed them with the serum. Little Maddy’s hands shook as she worked.

“We shouldn’t…” she whispered, voice distorted by her suit’s filter. “They should be big... all grown-up, before they have to change.”

Mercy averted her eyes as she filled a pipette of her own, and Lightning instead saw Rio kneel down and embrace the child in a one-armed hug, holding her loaded pipette at arms length.

“You and me both have the blessing of that luxury, Maddy, but these tiny ones don’t. But if we don’t help them now, they’re going to die. You know we can’t let that happen.”

She pressed her suited head to the child’s, and Lightning saw Maddy’s tiny face scrunch up. She felt her heart tug, and put a hoof forward.

“I’ll do it. If Maddy doesn’t want to, then I’ll do her job.”

The three of them looked up, and she saw different reactions flash across their features. Relief, surprise... but Mercy responded with grimness, and disappointment.

“I did warn you,” she said, coming close so that only Lightning could hear. “If you do this, you’ll not be able to forgive yourself.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve had years to argue with myself over why I have to make choices like this, and I’ve never been able to find even a scrap of mercy when I hold my own soul in the weighing. I brought you here to be a witness, not a participant.”

“I can’t not do it,” Lightning demanded quietly. “Look at that kid, she’s terrified. How can I let her do something like this if I can take that burden off her?”

Mercy looked her in the eyes for the longest time, her impossibly sad pink orbs seeming to penetrate deep into Lightning’s own.

“You’re a stubborn mare…” she said at last, before turning away. “Maddy, if you’re troubled, Lightning Dust is kindly volunteering to administer the potion for you.

With almost visible relief, the tiny human in the protective suit handed over the pipette to Lightning, who took it into her curled wing as if it was a live snake ready to bite her. Once again she could feel a powerful magic in the stuff Mercy had called potion, and like the snake, she could sense its’ venom…

Then, feeling as if she was treading to her gallows, she advanced on the first cot…

“Two nights ago, a train ran in ass-backwards from the tip of Nova Scotia, along the branch line from New Waterford,” Claire explained to Jean-Eric and Tess as they crossed the yard. “One locomotive and some kinda booster unit, propelling two cabooses. We had no idea anything was scheduled until it appeared in the yard, rolling along at a brisk jog; all the lights were out and someone was holding down on the whistle. Before it ran right through one of our people jumped on board and shut off the power. Can’t tell you how unnerved we were when we saw the thing. It could have been a PHL shipment, a train taken over by the PER, something the HLF were going to use to deliver gas...”

“What did your guys find?” Jean asked, a tone of morbid curiously in his voice.

“It was a fucking charnel on wheels. Five ponies, and three humans, all of them PHL. Pretty highly ranked too from their insignia. All of them were dead except for this poor shit of a unicorn who’d wedged himself into the engineer’s chair and lodged one of his buddy’s corpses into place to keep the deadman's pedal depressed. By the time he reached here, he barely had the strength to pull the whistle, let alone close the throttle.”

“Must have been a valuable cargo, then,” Tess said, suppressing a shudder at the idea of a train crewed by the dead rolling unannounced into the darkened yard. “Who attacked them? And what were they carrying?”

“Shit if I know, to both counts.”

“But… there must have been a sign of what got them?” Jean demanded. “HLF would have shot them, the PER’s style is to use bombs, and the Empire.”

“Look. We have no idea-the thing ended up a goddamn unsalvageable wreck-”

At this point in time, the word ‘unsalvageable’ was essentially a curse word, a proclamation that something was nothing but scrap metal, and that all useful components that could have been worth their weight in gold in the fullness of the future were fried.

“And we can’t tell who, or even what hit them. None of those corpses needed a post-mortem to confirm they’d died of untreated battlefield injuries. Mosta them musta dragged themselves onto the train and bled out or froze to death during the trip. And Trenderhoof, the poor bastard at the throttle, he was three pints of blood under-par and practically in shock.”

“What happened to him?”

Claire’s face was grim as she spoke.

“He burned to death when we tried to open up the cargo…”

That shut the both of them up as they rounded a stack of rail ties and were confronted with the sight of a medium-sized locomotive that had been scorched black all down one side. A pair of cabooses, just as blackened, and an odd vehicle that looked like a low metal block mounted onto a locomotive’s chassis, were marshalled behind it.

“...Mother of God,” Jean whispered, his mind running through hundreds of scenarios. “That loco’s a GP7u... but those things were built like tanks!”

“We checked with the locals,” another woman explained, a redhead with a tattoo that matched Claire’s branded on her own shoulder, a dragon rampant upon a star. “This is number 1810, a seventy-year-old hunk’a crap that was owned by a power station way up the branch-line. I’m betting those guys commandeered it to get the goods out. They must have been waiting for the Barrier to hit the tip of Nova Scotia to send a team through to horsey-land, make a high-priority grab, and then run for it. Classic heist.”

“You still haven’t told us what the cargo is… or was… whatever,” Tess muttered, unable to take her eyes off of the sight of paint and metal that had been flash-fried.

“Like I said… we don’t know. All of it was stored in these… well ‘containers’. Each about the size of a long coffin, made from hollowed-out tree-trunks split and hinged down the center. When the train arrived Trenderhoof said we had to get them to Montreal, so we offloaded them. But then, when we tried to open one… well, BOOM!”

Tess felt the blood drain from her face. She looked to her right and saw that Jean-Eric had gone grey.

“They… Equestria I mean... they boobytrapped it?”

“Yup… some kinda incineration spell. Took out Trenderhoof, and six of our friends…” Claire hissed, removing her shades and turning a pair of eyes as black as bruises on the two of them. Violence and death swam in them. “When I called this shit into HQ, the damn brass-hats’ first concern wasn’t with the casualties, but with the state of the ‘precious cargo’. Said they’d send another locomotive to pick it up.”

She wiped her eyes and returned the shades to the bridge of her nose.

“That’s why the two of you are here, and that’s why we’ve been fighting a defensive battle the past 48 hours instead of securing the rest of this town. All anyone seems to care about is getting this goddamn deathtrap to Montreal where the PHL can investigate it. Now, kindly take this mystery off my hands and let me never see it again! It’s going to bring us nothing but misery if we keep it here: sure as hell that if we keep guarding it, drawing suspicion to ourselves, the HLF will want it. And it’s only a matter of time before it catches the PER’s eyes as well. I don’t know what the damn macguffins are or what their for, but in all likelihood, it’s valuable. And a lot of parties want it.”

“So, no pressure then,” Tess muttered. “Just guard this thing like its the Ark of the Covenant, glowing briefcase, or some damn Maltese Falcon doom magnet.”

“No fucking pressure at all,” Laura drawled. Like Claire she was wearing a pair of mirrored glasses. The two women had a hardness to them that made Tess think not of the military, but of prison. If either of them had admitted to having done time, she would not have been surprised. Claire was also packing a fearsome handgun on one leg-holster, silver-plated to match Claire’s black death-stick.

“What about our own engine, and the necessities of our trip?” Jean-Eric demanded. “It’s several days overland to Montreal. We’ll need supplies, food, blankets.”

“All loaded and taken care of. We scrounged up some rations and welded a framed sheet of perspex over that broken window, even tossed aboard a tool-kit and some gear for running repairs. The rearmost of the cabooses was completely gutted, so we transferred the cargo into it, but the other has sleeping accommodation and only got slightly charred.”

“Like good BBQ, you know. Burns the outside, keeps all the yummy flavour in,” Laura laughed snidely. “Our little psycho Firelock even sterilised that damn toilet of yours. Burnt all the shit off with her horsey magic. Doesn’t that kinda treatment just make you feel special? We practically turned down the fuckin’ sheets and left a mint on each pillow.”

“Oh fuck off and die in a ditch somewhere!” Tess snapped. “Stop acting like we rode in proclaiming ourselves to be your salvation.”

As soon as she said it, she knew she’d gone too far.

She suddenly found herself face-to-face with the older woman. She tried to glower, but all she could see reflected in the commando’s shades was a girl playing at being a soldier.

“You’re a brat... a piece of shit I’d scrape off my boot,” Laura said calmly, the harsh truths of a criminal life in her words.

Then she made a sharp, cutting motion, and Tess gasped as she was whacked in the gut with the butt of her antagonist’s bullpup rifle.

“Hey!” she dimly heard Jean yell, and as she rolled, wheezing, onto her side she saw Claire holding up an arm to keep the engineer at bay.

“That’s an G22 lovetap bitch,” Laura said casually down at her, using a booted foot to roll Tess onto her back. “You think you’re big news because you got this far? Trust me when I say you’ve seen nothing yet. When you’ve shot a guy in the dick for stealing supplies, then you can talk. And if you live out the next week, then brag all you want. Heck, I’ll fucking go down on you if you prove you’re a genuine player. You can even wear the strap-on!”

Then she spun on her heel and slapped her hand against Claire’s backside. “Now listen to my bitchfriend here, and get the fuck outta town before we decide to give ya all the boot.”

Claire lowered her hand at last and let Jean through. He helped Tess up and glowered at the two women who were stalking away, weapons in hand.

“MAKE A HOLE, YOU WHORES AND WHORSES!” Laura snapped to the troops as they went. “WE’VE GOT A FUCKING WAR TO WIN!”

“Let’s go,” Jean said. “You’ve got nothing to prove to people like them.”

Tess wiped a line of blood from where she had split her lip in the fall, and silently promised herself that she’d never be reduced to that state again.

The 9782 was standing on a parallel track, and at Jean’s direction she climbed onto it while he made a quick recce of the 1810.

“Unsalvageable my ass…” he snorted when he came back. “They might be hardasses, but I tell you, none of them are railroaders. That old girl’s as serviceable as the day she rolled off the shop floor.”

“But...it’s all burnt.”

“Oh, the paint got charred and the cab controls are all burnt up, but the actual diesel motor looks like it’ll work fine. It’s just that the fire-flash shorted the traction-motors on the axles, that’s why they weren’t able to move it under its own power.”

Tess nodded. Diesel-electric locomotives did not use a mechanical transmission like a car or a truck, but instead generated voltage that was then fed to motors on the wheels. In a way, they were precursors for some forms of hybrid car.

“So it wouldn’t take much work to get it rolling again?”

“Got it in one. There’s even fuel in the tank. I say we take the whole train with us, loco, cabooses, slug and all!”

“Slug? Is that what that thing is?” she asked, pointing across to the low, cabless vehicle marshalled between the 1810 and its two cabooses.

“Oh yeah, that’s a yard slug,” he explained. “Like that woman said, a booster, a slave unit. At low speed it uses surplus electricity from the locomotive to power its own set of traction motors - you get more torque for the same amount of fuel, so it’s perfect for yard jobs like switching cars in and out of a train.”

“Alright, so we’re set…” she said, moving towards her seat. “Let’s pick that consist get out of here.”

And away from these people…

“Oh no”, he chided, and nudged her towards his seat...the engineers seat. “This time, you get to drive.”

“What?”

“We’re going to have to take it in turns, if we’re going to push through non-stop to Montreal,” he said. “You’ve driven steamers, right? This your first time helming a diesel?”

“No, we had a few diesels on the Ffestiniog Railway, ‘Upnor Castle’, ‘Vale of Ffestiniog’ - they were tiny compared to this, but I passed out to drive them before I began training under my dad on the steam engines.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding his approval. “Well, this is a bit larger, but you’ve at least got a rough idea.”

‘Yah… it’ll be just like jumping from a hatchback to an articulated lorry’, she thought to herself. ‘No worries whatsoever.’

As they brought the immense machine online, they heard the sound of hooves on the catwalk outside. Firelock, the filly with the fiery magic and an even hotter temper, strode up into the cab without even a word of introduction, two bulky garments slung over her back and a pair of helmets carried in her mouth by the chin-strap.

She was also wearing a saddle on which two assault rifles had been mounted. All in all, she was a terrifying sight.

“Got these for you,” she said blithely, spitting out the helmets and letting the rest of her load slide off her back; a pair of matching tactical vests.

“This town used to be a big place for making clothes,” she added by way of explanation, kicking a vest towards each of them. “Switched over from bras and panties to kevlar when the war kicked off. I was told to grab a pair of these out of stores.”

Tess picked hers up. It was camo-patterned and slightly smaller than the one Colonel Hex had given her; she guessed it was probably better sized to her figure.

“Oh, and Laura said you needed these too!” Firelock added, her grin turning downright sadistic. “Said a player like yourself needed the right markings.”

She levitated up a set of three fabric badges, velcro-backed. One had the PHL’s emblem on it, while another bore a single silver bar.

The third, said ‘JONES’.

“Congrats, this marks you out as a bonafide ell-tee,” the filly said. “Laura said everyone should know ‘Lieutenant Fucking Jones’ when she comes a calling.”

Tess felt like she should have screamed, or cursed. Instead, she just laughed and tousled the tiny soldier’s mane. At this point she was beyond caring.

“Tell her she has my undying gratitude, you monster,” she said. “Add a few ‘fucks’ in if you think it’ll make it sound more authentic.”

She stood up and zipped up the vest over her yellow hoodie, holstering the M9 in the appropriate pouch on the front. Then, after slapping the ‘Jones’ badge on her breast, she handed the other marks of rank over to Jean.

“What’re your orders, ‘Lieutenant Voight’?” she asked, milking the filly’s evident frustration for all it was worth.

“Hrm… make ready for departure, Ms. Jones,” he answered as he donned his own vest. “And evict the stowaway.”

“You heard the man,” Tess called to Firelock as she dropped herself into the engineer’s seat, and with a thrill, eased open the throttle “Get off our train.”

The filly scowled and backtracked to the nose door as 9782 rumbled into motion and began to ease forward.

“The two of you are going to get yourselves killed, you know that.”

“Didn’t you hear your crazy boss?” Tess laughed. “We’re a pair of players….oh, and thanks for cleaning out the toilet. But, due to the hostile service, please forgive me if I withhold your tip.”

Firelock laughed once, and opened her mouth to say something else…

... then there was a crack, and the filly’s eyes went wide. To Tess’s horror, she saw blood began to dribble from the pony youth’s mouth, and gutter from a hole that had suddenly appeared in her throat… saw the light fade from her eyes.

As Firelock slumped off the front of the moving engine, her tiny body bouncing off the coupling and disappearing under the cowcatcher, more shots rang out, and an alarm began to howl.

“IT’S THE FUCKING HLF!”

All hell broke loose.

“Snipers are working to clear the railyard, Colonel.”

“Excellent...sent in the main body of troops once the leadership has been eliminated.”

“And we’ve gotten reports of the Equestrian’s VIP invalid....but…this can’t be right.”

“Spit it out, Andrei!”

“Well, one of our scouts has got her scope trained on the hospital windows, and...she swears blind that she saw Lightning Dust go trotting past!”

“...the First Lieutenant of the Wonderbolts herself...this changes things.”

“Colonel, what are our orders?”

“By my decree, the ceasefire is now abrogated. Seize the hospital, and eliminate everybody inside, pony or human!”

Lightning loomed over the cot, standing on her hind legs. The pipette was in her mouth, and as she looked down it trembled between her teeth.

What stared up at her, eyes open and smiling, was a tiny human, with a few wisps of yellow hair clinging to its scalp. When she had first reared up it had been crying, and the sound had brought back unpleasant memories…

‘Mom always put the needs of the day-care foals ahead of mine... always had time for them, and I had to be satisfied with what little of her was left over…’

While it had been crying, this baby had been just another one of those pests. But when she had actually looked at it, the tiny thing had opened its eyes and laughed. Tiny, amazing little hands had reached up for her, tried to grab hold of her fur.

She was captivated by those amazing hands, so small and complex...

“This... this is the right thing to do?” she asked, transferring the pipette to her wing before she squeezed the trigger. Mercy and Rio were standing either side of her, as if waiting for her to kick off proceedings. Maddy had been sent to go check in with their Salvation Army escorts.

“It’s the only thing we can do”, Mercy answered. “The Barrier will be here in less than twenty-four hours. Either we change these children now so that they can walk out safely on four hooves, or we leave them to die here…”

Lightning looked down at the baby again. Mercy said it was a colt... a boy.

“He’ll be happy and free, as a pony,” Rio added in. “He’ll never want to hurt anyone, or hate anyone. The potion cleans us out, makes us newborn… newfoaled.”

“Then why haven’t you taken it?”

Rio actually looked hurt, and Lightning found herself regretting the snide tone in her voice. “Not yet. Only when I’m at peace with myself, only when I understand fully what I’ll be sacrificing. Only then will I be allow myself to be changed... and become a better being…”

Lightning scoffed, and felt Mercy lay a cautioning hoof on her.

“Nightingale…” Rio said softly. “That’s the name of my true self. Nightingale, a kind and considerate pony nurse, unburdened by everything that’s gone wrong in the life of Rio Deneter.”

Lightning’s ears twitched at the name. Did she know a pony named Nightingale? There was something familiar there, but she couldn’t quite grasp...

“She’s who I want to be…” Rio continued. There were tears in her voice, and she scrubbed futilely at the visor of her mask as if to wipe her eyes clean. The words kept on coming, as if Lightning Dust had accidentally chipped a dam and triggered an outflow.

“... Nightingale won’t cry herself to sleep because of the ‘friend’ who abandoned her to raise a child he forced on her. She won’t have to grieve for the actual, loving husband the army stole from her…”

Something in Lightning ached at the words. This was a soul in pain, in denial, utterly broken. But the worst was to come.

“... and Nightingale, won’t have to live not knowing if her son… her wonderful, kind, kidnapped little boy… is even still alive.”

Oh no…

“By Celestia…” she whispered, just loud enough that the ailing woman heard her.

“Yes... by Celestia,” Rio said, looking up with the hint of a broken smile on her face. “She can help me... the Promise she made to all of us will save me… my parents disowned me, the army killed my Raphael, and the police abandoned the hunt for my little Marty... but She won’t... the ponies never abandoned me, never gave up on me...”

Mercy slipped back around Lightning and embraced her friend. The aqua pegasus watched them, unable to comprehend this conflict of emotions.

“You’re strong, Rio…you don’t need the potion,” Mercy was whispering. “You can overcome it. I’m here for you, I’m your friend…”

“I don’t want to overcome it Mercy…” the nurse said in anguish. “I want to be rid of it… I want to be free of everything. I don’t want to hurt anymore… please don’t try and convince me otherwise...”

The mare and the woman continued to hold one another, but now Mercy was beginning to weep too. Her spectacles clattered on the ground as her own tears flowed.

“I didn’t leave you… when the potion took my JJ away from me, I refused to leave you alone in the PER. Friends forever, we said. Please Rio, don’t leave me now. Don’t give up on the wonderful woman you are, for the promise of some mindlessly happy life as a newfoal…”

“I need this, Mercy… I’m sorry about what happened to Jackie. But she wanted to be free too, free from her neurosis and mental grief. Please respect her choice… please respect my choice.”

Mercy hiccuped and buried her face in Rio’s shoulder. The woman was smiling now, and stroking the pegasus’s mane with one hand, the other slipping Mercy’s fallen spectacles back onto her muzzle. She looked suddenly radiant.

“You’re not Lightning Dust…” she said softly, turning so that he shielded eyes gazed out from behind the visor. “But you are a wonderful pony… I can tell that much.”

There were stars in those eyes. Lightning suddenly wondered if this was how Princess Celestia felt wherever a pony addressed her. To be suddenly put on a pedestal like this was, unnerving.

“Uh... thanks, I guess.”

“No... thank you,” Rio said, dipping her head in gratitude. “Thank you to all you ponies, for coming to save us from ourselves.”

As she continued to hold Mercy tight, she looked around the room at the babies. Many of them had started to cry again.

“These kids are blessed, but won’t know it. They’ll never feel the pain of humanity. But they should have had a chance to grow, like Maddy. You can’t truly receive a blessing, until you understand what it is to be cursed.”

Those words struck at Lightning. Is this why she was here? To be a savior? A helper? She considered the wailing infants. And then she gave special attention to the little boy in the first cot. He looked so peaceful, but would he grow up to be like Rio, broken and hurt? Or would he be something else, something wonderful…

But he would only be a memory, if they didn’t act to preserve his life. She could see that human babies could barely crawl. But foals of this age could walk unassisted...

The only way these toddlers could leave this hospital safely… was on their own hooves.

She lowered the tip of the pipette towards the child’s mouth.

“It’s alright… it’s going to be okay, kiddo.”

His gummy jaws locked onto the rubber tip, and he began to suckle. Lightning shut her eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

The pipette clicked in her grip, discharging a set amount of potion. Before she could witness the transformation that would follow, Lightning quickly crossed over to the next table, and repeated the process.

Rio and Mercy had no time to react. With athletic precision, Lightning scooped up their own pipettes as she passed, and repeated the process at each crib, moving with increasing urgency to drown out a screaming voice in her mind.

Who was ‘Nightingale’...the name sounded familiar. But why was it ringing around in her head? Something didn’t feel right… there were bizarre images flashing through her mind...

She hadn’t seen this before. She couldn’t have.

And yet, every muscle in her body was screaming at her to stop, to turn tail and leave. But that wasn’t what Lightning Dust did. That wasn’t what Wonderbolts did. No, they stayed the course and worked the problem... this was her choice, her responsibility, her pride.

By the time she reached the incubator units, she was moving with almost frantic speed, flipping off the protective covers over the cots and letting them clatter and smash to the ground. At each station, she coaxed, nursed and forced the tip of the pipettes into each child’s mouth, administering the dose needed to…

... to…

... to...

The thoughts spiraled in her head. To what? To what?

Then, the deed done, she pressed her face against the end wall of the neonatal unit.

Her ears twitched. Not noting a sound, but the absence of sound.

There were no cries, no coos, not even a whimper. Instead, a deathly silence had fallen, broken by only her own ragged gasps, and the synchronized, mechanical breathing of multiple tiny lungs.

One breath, in unison. Two breaths. Three.

A whimper of her own grew in her throat as she began to turn. Something had gone wrong, something was terribly wrong.

But no, it had gone terribly right.

More than two dozen pairs of colourful, empty, glassy eyes stared at her. In each crib, lay something that looked like a little filly’s doll, a play-pretend foal made of ‘composites’, whatever those were.

Except these weren’t ‘composites’. They were real, made of real pony fur and flesh, breathing, but dolls all the same.

They were all smiling, silently. Their rictus grins like open wounds and wide eyes all piercing to the depths of her conscience.

‘What have you done to us?’ something behind their irises seemed to screech. ‘What have you done to us?!’

At the far end she saw Rio and Mercy still clinging to one another, their gazes fixed on her. Rio looked concerned, but Mercy looked horrified.

“Lightning… it’s alright Lightning!”

No, no it wasn’t. Her eyes slid sideways to the first crib, where the little boy with the golden hair and smile had been. A pink foal smiled at her from it, its mane a tangle of russet locks, those amazing little fingers replaced by hooves...

Where was he?! Where had ‘kiddo’ gone?!

Someone was screaming.

It was herself.

She shook, gagging, struggling to keep down what little she’d eaten in the past few hours. No. Dear Celestia, no.

She failed, upending the meagre contents of her stomach on the floor. What she’d done was monstrous, terrible… immoral?

And then she surged hard into rage, and her wings flared for the first time in hours.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!” she roared, and with a crack hurled herself forward, barrelling into Mercy with enough force to knock the other pegasus out of Rio’s grasp. Smashing the doors down they tumbling and rolled into the corridor, with Lightning pinning Mercy down as they slammed to a halt against a gurney.

“WHAT DID YOU DO?!” she howled, punching down with her forehooves. “WHAT DID I JUST DO?!”

Mercy threw up her own forelegs to shield her face from the enraged blows. Lightning heard her glasses crack under the force.

“WE RAPED THEM! WE FUCKING MUTILATED THEM!”

“YES!” Mercy howled. “We did! We took something wonderful and we brutalised it….”

She trailed off, the word ‘brutalised’ skipping into a series of howls.

“But how else could I save them? No-one would have evacuated them! I’m sworn to do no harm, to protect life….I couldn’t let them die, so I had to turn them into pop-ppp-ponies! I was damned either way! I’M DAMNED NO MATTER WHAT I DO! ALL OF US ARE!”

As if she had burned her last ember, Mercy rolled onto her side, dropping all attempts at protecting herself. Furious, Lighting lifted one hoof, ready to drive it into her neck…

... and then froze. What was she doing?

Slowly, she looked sideways at her hoof, poised to deliver a killing blow.

... a killing blow. The weight of that sank in. She had been ready to commit m-mur-mur…

Murder. The word almost stuck in her throat.

Then she looked past herself, and the broken door to Neonatal. Inside, Rio had gotten to her feet, and was helping the newfoals down onto the floor. Each of them stood on their own hooves, alert and bright… following their shepherd with every hoof. All in synchronization. If Lightning moved, all their eyes would simultaneously track it.

For a second, Rio made eye-contact with Lightning, and then fearfully shied away.

She had called her a wonderful pony, just minutes before. What did she think of her now…

“Mercy…” said a voice. “What’s going on?”

Maddy was standing at the end of the corridor, her face pale behind her suit’s visor. A set of double-doors rose behind her, bright white light streaming in through their windows…

They burst open... two huge figures loomed into view, dwarfing the tiny figure of the human child.

“HLF! FREEZE, LIGHTNING DUST!” one of them roared, swinging his weapon to bear. Lightning couldn’t consider herself a scholar of human weaponry-she barely understood anything about it-but it looked lethal,.

She looked down, saw that Mercy’s flask of potion had rolled out into the corridor with them. It was half-empty.

Looked back up, saw a terrified Maddy turning towards the two hulking titans.

“The ceasefire is over!” the ringleader barked. “And you are now marked for elimination…”

Maddy took a step back as he aimed at her... and Lightning acted.

“GET DOWN!” she screamed; grabbing the flask, and hooking it in the crook of her leg, she threw herself into the air, spun around, and released it with all the force of a bolt loosed from the bow.

It sailed over Maddy’s head as the child threw herself to the ground…

…it struck the edge of the doorframe...

…and then it shattered, exploding outwards in a spray of glass and purple ichor that splattered over floor, walls, and flesh.

As the men fell to the ground, screaming, one of their weapons discharged. It flashed in a burst of firefly light, spitting what looked like tiny metal bees across the corridor. The bark and scream of the device at close range hit Lightning’s enhanced pegasus hearing like a brick to each ear, and she dropped to the ground.

Then, she opened her eyes. Maddy was crawling towards them, tearful, but uninjured. The two attackers were thrashing in the entryway.

And beside her, Mercy was spasming, blood pooling out of her where the discharging weapon had struck her in the chest and shoulder. It looked like the bullet had hit her there and simply exploded inside her body, leaving gaping holes a filly could fit her hoof into.

The medic’s eyes, panicked and afraid, locked onto Lightning, and a flailing hoof caught hold of her.

“Raaaauuuuuannn…” she gasped.

“No! No!” Maddy begged, pulling herself onto her knees and placing her small hands onto the suppurating wounds, applying pressure. “Miss Mercy, don’t try to speak, just hang on!”

Arterial blood glistened in the flickering light. It sprayed everywhere, adding a field of poppies to the floral display painted on the window.

“NO!” Rio cursed as she threw herself in beside Maddy. “Mercy, come on… you were going to be there when we changed… you were going to help us be ponies... DAMMIT, MERCY! DON’T YOU DARE DIE ON ME!”

But there was nothing that could be done. Lightning could see Mercy’s eyes dilating, the blackness in the iris swelling to consume her.

“Laihtnin’....ruuuuun... awaaayhhhhgh…” Mercy struggled, her breaths wet and choking. “Taaahke thamm an’d rhan awaii-hi-hi-he…”

She weakly struggled for breath. Rio ripped off her gloves and tried to ram her fingers into the bullet holes, to try and stem the bleeding.

“... h-h-hi-h-h...h...h…”

And then, she died. Broken and crushed, in a pool of her own blood, far from home, in the presence of the only friends she had left, Merciful Light’s light went out.

As Rio and Maddy tried to revive her, dozens of eyes watched on. Glowing softly in the light, nearly thirty tiny newfoals, and two adult males, watched the pitiful drama, and smiled.

Lightning’s mind whirled. She tried to find an anchor, a foothold, anything to allow herself to comprehend what had happened.

But all she could hear in her mind was a terrible silence, the silence that had haunted her since she woke.

And she knew what it was now, understood the context.

It was the silence that came when the children stopped screaming…

“Snipers! Hit the deck!” someone shouted, as Tess and Jean crouched low in 9782’s cab, hoping the huge locomotive’s construction would shelter them. The whole construct shuddered as it continued to roll slowly forward over the rail joints.

“Shut the throttle!” Jean shouted. Not even sticking her head up over the lip of the work desk, Tess reached up and grabbed the innocuous little lever, dragging it back into through idle and into dynamic braking mode. With a low moan, the immense machine creeped to a stop. Gunshots could be heard bursting all around.

‘I saw her die... that pony... that kid, she got shot right through the neck...got ground up UNDER the fucking train… no, stoppit, focus on what’s at hand…’

“What do we do?” she demanded, as she shielded her head with her hands. “We’re exposed right in the middle of the yard.”

Wincing from where he had fallen hard and twisted his leg, Jean looked up, flinching at the whistle and crack of passing rounds.

“Which side do you think they’re firing from?”

“Uh…” Tess trembled, trying to remember how she had seen Firelock die…

‘So much blood… so much blood, pouring from that hole... the exit wound… which meant that…’

“From the south - they’re firing on us from the south side of the yard.”

“Alright, then I’ll go out on the opposite side to tie us onto the rest of the train, use the engine as a shield.”

He said those words without any hesitation, but she could see the fear in his eyes. As he tried to stand he winced, and his leg gave out under him.

“Shit…”

Tess blinked, and then, chewing her lip, repeated the same decision she had already made once today.

“I’ll go…I’m faster than you and a smaller target.”

He winced and held his leg, before finally making eye contact. “Nothing I’m gonna say that will stop you?”

“I dunno. You could beg me not to go,” she said, checking the Beretta was holstered and her tac vest zipped up.

“Would it help?” he asked as he handed her the helmet.

“Probably not,” she answered, setting it on her head and buckling the chin strap. Sparing a quick glance at the open door she pursed her lips.

“Do me one thing?”

“Alright?”

“Tell me what the fuck is wrong with me? Why aren’t I a jibbering wreck right now?”

He shrugged. “I honestly think you get off on adrenaline.”

“Is that all you’ve got. No pithy words of wisdom, no pearls of truth?”

“Do I look like Morgan Freeman?”

“Stand to reason. Alright, here I go.”

Hunched over, she dropped down the access corridor, out the nose door, and threw herself down the side steps as quick as she could without falling.

She tripped. It saved her life. A grey streak of metal caught the edge of her helmet as she tumbled off the steps and into the ballast-hardened snow. The world dissolved into tinny ringing, and she batted dizzily at her ears like a dog trying to work a foxtail loose.

Someone grabbed hold of her and yanked her to her feet.

“....eeeeeeeeeee-nyone more butt fuck stup-eeeeeeeeeeeeeee-d outta my way and outta my sight!”

Through the blinding snow-glare Tess saw herself mirrored in twin tiny pools. Laura. She blinked, seeing a girl in the borrowed helmet and camo-print tac vest.

‘... kid playing at being a soldier... but you’re not a soldier, never wanted to be one… so stop playing at being something you’re not, and be who you are…’

Oh, she hated herself more than the redhead now, that was interesting. But that flash of emotion kicked her into action as Laura wrapped up her rant.

“...now stick your head down and don’t let me!”

“SHUT UP, YOU FRECKLE-FACED CUNT!” Tess snapped, and suddenly her Beretta was in her hands. She drew the slide back to chamber a round, hands moving on reflex.

“Let me do my fucking job, and I’ll let you do yours!” she seethed. “They’re obviously here to claim the cargo, so let me take it off your fucking hands and run as far away with it as I can before it all goes pear-shaped! Or, God forbid, this turns into a damn threesome with the PER and we’re left fucked between a rock and a hard place!”

She banged on the side of the cab and called out. “Jean! Run her back towards the switch, give me a rolling barricade!”

He didn’t shout a response, but within seconds the ground began to hum with released power.

“Who the fuck are you to give me orders?” Laura said, though this time she sounded almost amused. “Lieutenant Jones, maybe?”

“Me?! I’m the one with the fucking cargo you told me to take back! I’m the one doing my goddamn job!” Tess yelled.

She reached out to pluck the sunglasses off the commando’s face, so that her brown eyes could stare into flinty green.

“I’m this train’s fucking conductor! And you owe me a strap-on, bitchfriend!”

Laura scowled, and then laughed, throwing her eyes wide and tipping her head back to the sky.

“Another fucking monster is born! God I’m amazing.”

She hefted her rifle in one hand and that terrifying silver pistol in the other, shoving Tess ahead of her as she walked to keep the two of them within 9782’s protective shadow.

“Go on! We’ll cover you!”

Turning, Tess slipped the stolen shades over her eyes to shield her vision from the snowglare. The locomotive was rolling back towards the switchtrack that governed access onto the siding that 1810 and the cargo-train were stored on. To get to the switch-lever, she’d have to run out into the open, and throw it just before 9782 reached the switch blades.

‘... the fuck am I doing?’ a voice whispered in the back of her head. She ignored it.

“Distract them!” she heard Laura shout. “Fire into the treeline!”

A barrage of shots rang out as Tess, running forward in a half-crouch and using the shoulder of the railbed as a low barricade, scurried out into the open and stomped on the switch’s locking clasp with one foot and slammed the lever over.

Seconds later, the red, snow-dappled locomotive lumbered backwards past her into the siding. Keeping her gun out, and pointing it down in both hands, she scurried along beside it as Jean slowed. The brakes squealed as 9782 slowly backed down onto the ‘unsalvageable’ train.

“You really are another one,” Laura said, getting into an easy lope beside her. “I’d have loved to have gotten my hands on you before all this shit went down - could have really made something great out of you.”

“Pardon?”

“Take a look in the mirror sometime kid - you’re just loving this.”

Tess paused, realised she could feel an odd tightness in her cheeks.

She was smiling. In the midst of this hell, a huge grin had spread itself across her features, exposing her teeth. Shocked, she tried to compose herself, but she could not deny a slight curl to her lips, or a fire that seemed to be raging in her breast.

“Oh yeah…” Laura laughed snidely. “The bug got you good! You can thank my little love tap for that!”

Tess shook her head. “What the heck are you talking abou-mph!”

Her words were cut off as Laura suddenly pulled her into a rough, harsh kiss. Stunned, Tess did not resist, and for a few fleeting seconds felt a second rush of endorphins as the older woman chewed on her lip.

And then her own motor surged and she lashed out with both arms, shoving the redhead away from her.

“The fuck was that?” she spat, trying to wipe the taste of death and cigarettes off her lips. “Are you on the sex offenders list?”

“What I am, is a baaaaaad influence…” Laura drawled, a satisfied grin on her face. “A vampire who finds suitable creatures and turns them into little clones of myself. And how are you such a prude? Girl, you’re in your twenties and kiss like a kid in sex-ed!”

Without those sunglasses on Laura’s face, Tess could now see just how cold and empty the other woman’s eyes were... as if long ago she’d snuffed out her soul like a candle. There was a harshness to them, a glint of steel that had replaced any light of humanity.

“You’re a fucking psycho!” she shot back.

“No-no. I’m a sociopath, get your wording right. And you’ll be too. Just take a glimpse over your shoulder…”

Warily, Tess turned her head. Just along the line, Claire and several other PHL troops were crouched in the shadow of the 1810 and its train, taking turns to fire around the bladed shovel of the cowcatcher. The tall African-American with the pixie-cut was fearless, bold... and smiling the whole time, grinning like a predator in the hunt as she alternated between her rifle and her own colossal sidearm.

“When I first met her, she was like you - a wussy lil’ pussy with a sack of morals dragging her down. She was a lawyer you know, a real hotshot prosecutor, until she got on the wrong side of some dirty deals between the triads and the CIA. They set her up to take a fall, hard and fast... and no-one would help her. Not her friends, not her family, not fucking Uncle Sam who she thought loved her so very much…”

Tess slowly looked back into the all-consuming heart of darkness that was Laura’s easy, beckoning smile.

“But I found her… put a gun in her hands and showed her what life was like on the other side of the bar. And now look at her. Isn’t she amazing? I knew, from the second I met her, that with the right push she could be so much more than all the fucking plebs. She was a monster just waiting to transcend petty humanity... to be uber human. She had that fire in her from the start... and so do you…”

Laura stepped up and wrapped one arm around a suddenly petrified Tess.

“You’re just a kid now... but someday, soon, you’re going to be just like her and me. A stone-cold bitch who everyone around you is going to worship and fear, because they’ll know just from looking at you, that you’re better than them. That you could end them without hesitation, because of how worthless they are in comparison…on that day, you’re gonna know what it’s like to be truly alive, a real animal, wild and free... a killer.”

The words were dark, seductive. Tess didn’t want to hear them.

Killer.

Suddenly galvanised, she jabbed with her elbow, trying to knock the wind out of Laura. It failed of course, the veteran twirling away and dodging the blow with balletic ease, her red ponytail trailing behind her like a blazing tail of a comet.

“Oh nice! C’mon, I’ve made you angry, so show me just how mad you are. Stick that gun in my face and scream it out loud, climb out of the muck and stand alongside your fucking sister goddesses!”

Tess shivered, and took a step forward, clutching her shoulder where he sudden jab had twinged a muscle.

“You don’t know anything! I’m already a killer, you stupid bitch. I got a dozen innocent people shot today, and last night I might have killed over a fucking HUNDRED! And before that... before all that, I screwed up so royally that the people I loved most in the world died on a squalid dock, while I sailed to safety…”

She thumbed the safety on the Beretta and holstered it back in the tac-vest. Behind her, 9782 smacked into 1810’s coupling with a rough bang, the sound of metal-on-metal as deep and profound as the door of a vault slamming shut.

“Say all the shit you want. I’m not buying. My soul, it’s a no-sell. The fucking devil had it from the second that my family died, and I lived.”

Then, she turned away to properly tie on the train, trying to keep her back straight and her shoulders square...

...only for Laura to call out after her, in a tone that was as congratulatory as it was mocking.

“You’re still smiling, little sis.”

And she was. She hadn’t realised it, but thinking back, Tess realised that she’d delivered that entire speech with a cocky, hellbound sneer on her lips.

Even with her back to her, Laura seemed to read her thoughts.

“When we meet again in Hell, I expect you to have fucking Lucifer down on his knees in front of you, grovelling like a little bitch while you lounge on his throne and make him eat you out!”

Tess ignored her, did her best to focus on her work. But as she came up to the gap between the two locomotives and began to work at linking up the brakes hoses and the MU jumpers, she could not help but sneak a glimpse at Claire, who was watching over her like a guardian angel…

That grin, that easy stance as she dispensed death, that total self-assurance…

Was that how she had looked, just now?

Jean was alone in the cab. A line of abandoned boxcars now shielded him from any unfriendly fire, and he had climbed back into the engineer’s seat without fear of catching a 9mm dose of lead poisoning to the head.

‘Tess’s a good kid’, he thought to himself ruefully. ‘The daughter I always wanted but could never have...’

He watched the gauges in front of him and noticed a kick on the air pressure as she linked up the hoses and opened up the isolating cocks. The computer checked on all other systems and flashed back greens. The 1810 might have been inoperable, but now at least it and the consist were slaved in, giving him control over the brakes of every vehicle in the train, and allowing 9782 to feed electrical power back to the cabooses.

They were good to go.

He glanced across the cab, trying to spot Tess in the rear-view mirrors. The one on the far side was out of alignment, and he rose to cross the cab, slide back the window and adjust it.

His foot brushed against something, and he glanced down. He had lightly kicked against a dropped patch, the third of the ones Firelock had handed over.

It was circular, depicting the traditional white-on blue laurel wreath of many organisations affiliated with the United Nations. In the centre however, stamped proudly, was the now world-famous symbol of a stylised lyre.

At the top, between the tips of the laurels, were two words: “FOR ALL.”

“PHL,” he said to himself, picking it up and twirling it between his fingers. “Ponies for Human Life.”

He glanced out into the yard, where humans and ponies alike were scrambling to secure a perimeter. All of them carried the same badge. He often wondered how organisations like this recruited. Was there a classified ad somewhere? ‘WANTED: Brave souls ready to die for human salvation. Please supply your own neuroses.’ It would certainly explain how celebrated monsters like that Kraber a-hole had gotten into the PHL.

Now he knew better. The only way anything could keep going in times like this was by taking anyone who was available. Like that terrifying pair of women…

And yet, the PHL was the same organisation that had inspired him to get out of his fume and back on the rails, back to where he belonged.

Back in the throttle, back in the saddle.

He smirked at that, and, after moment’s pause, slapped the badge against his vest, securing it to a patch of velcro. He didn’t like choosing sides, but it helped to remember who your friends were. And, putting it lightly, his other options were utter assholes.

Once he was done, he opened the window and reached out to adjust the mirror.

“Jean!” Tess called from down at the rear. “We’re ready to go! Should I get back on?”

“No!” he called back. “Once we pull forward you’ll have to change the switch again so we can run this whole rig back to the junction with the mainline.”

“And then next stop, Montreal!”

“You gottit’, conductor!” he laughed, shooting her as reassuring a smile as he could manage, before he slammed the window shut and dropped himself back into his seat.

“Alright girl, here we go…” he muttered aloud, and advanced the throttle.

At that moment a few lines of music rattled through his head, lyrics to the opening credits of a movie he and his pa had enjoyed often on VHS.

’Maybe when this is done I can introduce Tess to those old movies, play at being a father a little while longer…’

As the locomotive thrummed and roared, slowly leaning into the new weight on her drawbar, he glanced down at the badge on his chest and began to hum himself.

“He rode a blazing saddle,
He wore a shining star…”

Clop-clop-clop, went the hooves of the newfoal children. Under the escort of a few Salvation Army guards, the thirty creatures were marching in single line through the corridors of the hospital, nose to tail like a consist of freight cars, obediently following the leader. Flickering light cast pools of shadow through which they pressed, the beat of their pace echoing hollowly..

Lightning had managed to pull herself back onto her hooves and was trying to get her bearings. Mercy’s body had been unceremoniously dragged away by the two adult newfoals, against Maddy’s screamed protestations. Now the child was in Rio’s arms as the older woman tried to comfort her.

For her part, Lightning had not said a word. Instead she was staring in mute horror at the passing newfoals, not one of which walked out of step with the others. Many of them were covered in red and purple ichor from where they had marched through spilt blood, and potion. Not a single one had complained.

“They’ll be alright, in time,” Rio said, as if reading her thoughts and trying, miserably, to assuage her doubts. “Once they’ve had time to grow, you’ll not be able to tell them from a native-born pony.”

There was no answer from the pegasus with the blazing mane. She might as well have been a statue.

Inside her mind though, she was screaming. Hundreds of thoughts had bubbled and frothed to the surface of her consciousness, and all came to the same conclusion.

This was all her fault.

She had administered the potion to those kids, she had thrown herself and Mercy out into the corridor and put themselves in the line of fire, she had been the target for those monstrous men…

... and before even that, she had been the one for whom this hospital had been seized to treat.

Numbly she looked around, seeing smashed windows and smears of blood, potion, and other unmentionable fluids, splattered across the walls and floor. Overturned gurneys, empty wheelchairs, scattered toys and dead bodies.

All of it was her fault.

“Good work, Lieutenant Dust,” someone said off to her side, and she turned to see a male pegasus hover in over the monstrous children. A brown newfoal mare with hazel eyes ringed in blue trotted a short distance behind him, a fixed grin stretched over her face.

Prism Flash. Her rescuer. Father of the famed Rainbow Dash.

“You held the line, defended this facility, and got us plenty of new recruits,” he said, before flicking a brief, dismissive glance at Rio and Maddy. “And I see you’ve even kept our friends safe…”

Her ears fell as he smiled at her, full of pride. He had no regard for them, Lightning realized. No matter what they did, he'd never be able to hold humans in high enough regard to respect them. What’s… what’s been done to these ponies?! she wanted to scream. And though she admitted she wasn’t a paragon of kindness, it was too much. She couldn’t even imagine what had made them so callous. Was this… was this the natural state of ponies? Would any Equestria act like this, with the right push? Was this her future?

“I’d expect nothing else from my daughter’s right-hoof mare. With this facility secured, we’re now free to attack the main part of town. I just gave the order.”

All. Her. Fault.

And under that dull horror, something dark and primal surged in her soul. She’d been wrong to say all the humans were monsters...

“Prism Flash… we need to talk.”

The real monsters were all around her...and within her.

Tess was standing at the trackside at the mouth of the sidings, reversing the switch after the last caboose cleared it. PHL soldiers had pressed forward up to the treeline, giving her the freedom to stand out in the open.

The blades of the switchtrack clanked over, and as the train drew up she raised a hand, signalling for Jean to beginning back up. From far ahead, at the window to 9782’s cab, she saw his arm wave in acknowledgement. Seconds later the locomotive began to whine, and with a banging of couplings the train jerked into reverse.

“How long is this gonna take?” asked Claire, who once again was shadowing her like some amazon of old.

“Jean said it was a mile back to the junction with the main-line,” Tess answered as the first caboose began to slide past them. “So a few minutes to set back slowly. Once the switch is cleared, we’re good to go.”

There was a faint crack from behind them, is if someone had stepped on a twig.

And then someone began screaming. The two of them spun round, and saw a PHL soldier thrashing on the ground, her face and torso covered in purple slop.

“Help me! SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP MEEEEEEE-”

BANG!

Tess yelped as Claire calmly fired a single bullet into the middle of the bubbling mound of flesh and fur, unrecognizable as neither human nor pony.

And then the two of them looked to the skies.

‘And here comes the threesome...’

Dozens of colourful dots were pouring out from behind the clouds, raining small phials that glistened in the winter sunlight...

“POTIONEERS! TAKE COVER!”

People and ponies scattered. Tess however, spun on her heel and threw herself onto the rear catwalk ladder for the dead locomotive numbered 1810, as the train continued to accelerate backwards out of the yard.

“Come on!” she shouted, beckoning to Claire. “Get out with us!”

“No!” the veteran shouted, running alongside to keep in earshot. “Get out of here and get that shit in the cabooses to safety. Don’t worry about us!”

The train lurched as 9782 propelled it backwards through a crossover, and Tess almost lost her grip. Claire caught her fall with one hand and physically shoved her back onto the catwalk steps.

“Go!”

The last Tess saw of her, the statuesque mulatto woman had whipped out a radio and was screaming into it for aerial fire support. Then she disappeared behind a shack, and Tess found herself holding on for grim life to the burnt metal of 1810’s catwalk railings as the train gained speed, lurching and jolting…

Too fast. They were going far too fast in reverse. Propelling stock at high speed was a surefire way to derail into a pile-up.

“Shit!” She pulled herself up and ran along the catwalk, trying to see around 1810’s cab to that of 9782 and screaming at the top of her lungs. “Jean! Slow down! We’ll wreck off like this!”

There was no response.

‘What happened? Did they get him? Is he dead or...ponified?’

The whole train bounced as it leapt a bridge over a small stream and lurched along the ill-maintained roadbed of the branchline, wheels and suspension screaming in protest.

Struggling to stay on her feet, Tess came to the door of 1810’s cab and struggled with the handle. It was locked. Through the glass pane she could see the charred controls, but the red-painted lever of the emergency brake valve still shone bright.

The emergency brake! There’d be another one just like it in the cabooses!

Turning, she fumbled back the other way, clutching her way arm over arm along the battered locomotive’s length, until she was standing at the gap between it and the slaved slug unit. The coupling bar linking the two jumped in its socket beneath her feet, straddling with jangling hoses and safety chains. Beneath that was the flashing oblivion of the rails and ties.

And as Tess ducked under the safety rail and caught hold of that on the slug with one hand, legs astride the gap, she realised she was smiling again.

She let go of 1810 and hauled herself onto the slug. It’s handbrake was right in front of her, and with strength she did not realise she possessed, Tess spun it over with both hands until she could smell metal burning as the brakes bound to the wheels. Before she could even question herself, she clambered onto the back of the slug and began to crawl along its length. As Jean has made clear, it had no side-walks, and was just a boxy slab of ballast-weight on a set of traction-motors. To her side she saw the town station flash past, and braced herself for the junction with the main track.

The train took the reverse-curves through the switch like a sailing ship caught in a storm, each vehicle canting first to one side and then the other. As the slug rolled, Tess lost her grip and slid across the icy back of the machine, managing to latch onto a hand-iron just in time, although her legs swung out over the edge. Hanging there, she held on tight as the train dashed over several grade crossings, charging right through the pitched centre of the battle for the town.

PHL and HLF forces on either side blurred into one another, the bark of rifles and homemade hand-cannons merging with the psychotic tempo of the wheels.

No right, no wrong, just a mutual orgy of madness.

And then, a familiar red newfoal corpse flicked past, and she was struck by a moment of horror.

‘Red… Petticoat… he changed a switch behind us when he stopped us... and we never reversed it. Which means...’

The thought went through her head with lightning speed, and a second later the train gave an almighty groan as it slid back off the main line and onto a spur…

... the spur which led straight to Colonel Galt’s field headquarters.

Galvanised by that realisation, Tess dragged herself back on top of the slug, dropped onto its trailing catwalk, and jumped the gap onto the first of the two cabooses. Throwing its door open she found herself in a rolling, jerking space that had been set out with bunks and a small kitchenette. Ignoring that she pulled herself up into the conductor’s cupola, the small cabin that rose above the roofline, and groped for the emergency brake valve…

... and then, with her hand on the lever, she looked back and froze. From here she could see back over the second caboose, which running in reverse was now the leading vehicle of the train... and saw that the line suddenly ended ahead at an immense wheat loader... the sidings of which were full of abandoned hopper cars.

She threw the valve and felt the train lurch as the master brake-line vented. The brake shoes clapped down on the wheels with a scream, and behind her 9782’s roaring motor shut back to idle as the emergency application tripped its own safeties.

The train slowed like the starship Enterprise dropping out of warp... but not fast enough.

Screaming in mindless fear and euphoria, Tess held on tight as her ride charged down onto the stationary cars with battering-ram momentum…

And collided.

There was a jarring bump, and a flash of purple light…

... and then every newfoal in the city of Truro screamed!

Like a ripple spreading out from the grain yards, anything that had once been a human exposed to potion clutched their heads and screeched, an unholy cry that tasted of hell, and the eternal cries of the damned.

Lightning Dust and Prism Flash had just been trotting out of one of the hospital’s back doors just seconds before everything had fallen apart. The teal pegasus had taken a deep breath, drinking in the cold winter air, and ruffled her feathers, feeling the sweat and fear evaporate off of her under open skies.

“You wanted to speak, Lieutenant?” asked Prism Flash. The brown newfoal mare with the odd eyes had followed them out too, and was gazing mindlessly in their direction. Seeing the earth pony’s empty grin and blank flank, untouched by magic or a soul, Lightning repressed a shudder.

“No… I just wanted to ask some questions,” she said, as firmly as she could will herself to sound.

“Oh, is it about Dashy?” he laughed. “I honestly wish I could help you there Dusty, but I’m pretty sure you know her ins-and-outs better than her old man could by now…”

“SHUT UP!” Lightning screamed, whirling around with fury smouldering in her eyes. “How can you just stand here and make small-talk after all…THAT!”

He froze mid-sentence, and then, slowly, began to frown. “What are you talking about?”

Lightning’s common sense was telling her that this was suicide, that she should be focused on keeping low, of not revealing herself.

Every other part told common sense to go die in a fire. Ever since arriving here her mind and heart had been tugged in all directions, forced open to new perspectives and emotions. Now, all of those surges and hot flashes had focused on a common wavelength.

Righteous wrath.

Somebody had to pay for all this. And if she was to blame, then her pride demanded she be the one to put it right.

“I’m talking, about what those ‘new recruits’....” she hissed. “Justify it to me. Tell me why they deserved to go through that. Tell me why they did not deserve to live as they were?”

His frown settled into confusion, and then black anger. “Questioning the will of Her Majesty is treason, Dusty… you know what happens to the defiant.”

“Yeah, and that kinda sickens me too!” Lightning strode forward, all but ramming her snout into his face. “I don’t know much about what you call Equestria, but it’s no place I’d want to call home.”

He opened his mouth to spit something back at her, when something screamed past overhead. An aircraft, a weapon mounted in its nose chattering away like a changeling hive. Caught off-guard, Lightning spun to look up at it, and Prism Flash used her moment’s distraction to spin around and buck her to the floor, backflipping in mid-air to land astride of her.

“You belong to Equestria…” he growled. “You belong to my daughter…”

The aircraft screamed past on a return trajectory, and with darkened eyes Prism followed it as it entered into a steep climb.

“Blast them… one of those ‘Warthog’ monstrosities…it’ll cut our people down like a wing through a cloud!”

He looked askance to the vapidly grinning Newfoal. “You! Keep an eye on this traitor! I’ve got a sky to clear!”

With a kick of his hooves and a snap of his wings he launched himself upwards and after the flying machine. Lightning, winded and panting, slowly looked towards her new captor.

“Look…” she wheezed. “I know what’s been done to you. Please, if there’s anything left of the person you were, let me go - let me fight him!”

“Are you defecting?” the mare said quietly, not looking at her. Lightning gawped.

“Wh-what?”

“I said, are you defecting from Equestria, Lightning Dust?” the creature said again, before glaring sternly in her direction. “Because after the shit you’ve pulled in your time, ‘Duststorm’, I’d just as soon kill you here as grant you clemency!”

A moment held. Then Lightning slowly crawled onto her feet.

“You’re... but you’re a newfoal?”

“No, I’m fucking not!”

But before anything else could be said, something else roared past. With a rattle of wheels on rails, something that could only have been a train, but unlike any train Lightning had ever seen, hurtled past the hospital in full-speed reverse

“Oh fuck!” the creature posing as a newfoal cursed as the train sped out of view. “Tess, what did you do this fucking time?!”

And then, in the distance, the two of them heard the sound of a collision…

... and heard the newfoals begin to scream in unison. Judging by the volume, it was all over the town. It was like no scream either of them had ever heard, a wailing, primal, howling agony that didn’t seem physically possible. It defied the limitations of vocal cords.

“What the fuck is going on Brains?” Laura demanded, rushing over to where Claire was trying to comprehend what they were seeing.

“Does it look like I have any clue?”

The PER and Salvation Army had flooded into the railyard, just as the HLF had launched a second surge to break out from their own lines. For a few minutes the centre of Truro had been an honest-to-God fustercluck of blood, magic and steel.

And then suddenly, most of the attacking ponies had just… stopped. Instead of fighting, they were howling out in pain. Unicorns and Earth ponies thrashed on the ground while pegasi tumbled from the sky. Anyone or anypony else, regardless of their situation, simply stood dumbfounded for half a second as they witnessed what seemed to be a simultaneous mass aneurysm. Most of them had poured bullets into them, only to find that the newfoals reamined standing, eyes wide and rolling, pupils dilating and contracting at impossible rates. They shook, mouths almost foaming, unmindful of the massive holes in their bodies.

And then, as if a switch had been flicked, the screaming stopped... and was replaced by a confused mass of giggles and screams.

“Heheheeeeeee…..”

“HURT… Hurt so bad!”

“DIE! DIE-DIE-DIE!”

“We’ll take you and drag you off, make you drink it down and put the smiles down your throat till they rise up and drown out all else!”

“MY ME IS GONE, AND YET I STILL DREAM THOUGHTS WHICH ARE NOT MY OWN!”

“Come on… taste the joy we bring and be reborn...”

“The screaming of the ape inside your new mind will never go away, but it just becomes more and more beautiful! COME HERE AND LISTEN!”

“Kill you! KILL YOU ALL!”

And the blood began to flow.

“Control, this is Chupathingy, maintaining 1000ft over Truro.”

“Ah, we hear you pilot, what’s happening? We thought you were about to go into the dirt.”

“Uh...‘Flash Dad’ was about to take me out...but then one of his own newfoals tackled him off my ride’s back.”

“Say that again Chupathingy?”

“I repeat, the newfoals are rampaging. I’m going to climb to a safer altitude and circle the town, try and get some idea of what’s happening.”

“Roger Chupathingy, good luck.”

Rio Deneter slowly looked up from where she had been holding tight to little Maddy. The last echoes of the newfoals soul-shaking cries fled into the depths of the empty corridors and wards, leaving just a stunned, shaken silence.

‘What… what in the name of Her Majesty was that...’

The newfoal infants lay still on the ground, and for a horrified instant she considered the chance that they were all dead.

But then, they stirred, breathing only slightly. Relief swelled in her heart.

It was to be very short lived.

What stood up were not the obedient, neat little automatons that she expected to see grow into happy ponies. Each of them was wobbling, their blank-eyed faces scanning around as if drunk and confused, some in what looked to be fear or agony…

One unicorn filly staggered into a pegasus colt, looked at him for a second, and then with a giggle, stabbed him in the eye with her stubby horn. Instead of screaming, he gurgled, ichor running down his face, and lunged forward, biting at her throat with teeth entirely unsuited for carnivores.

Instead of ripping out a large chunk of her throat, leaving blood dripping all over the floor, his powerful jaws crushed her windpipe as if it was a tube in a vise.

“Mama!” the filly gurgled, her wet, bubbling words as delighted as a child at Christmas. “Mama!”

In Rio’s arms, Maddy clutched on tightly and whimpered as the tiny creatures began to eviscerate one another. “What are they doing….Rio, what are they doing?”

“I… I don’t know…” Rio whispered, but a revolted part of her whispered that these creatures were reverting to human nature…

... to violence, hatred, and bloodshed.

“STOP!” she cried out. “YOU’RE PONIES NOW! YOU’RE BETTER THAN THIS!”

At the sound of her voice they all did stop. Covered in each other’s blood and dripping with potion, they froze...

And then one newfoal child spotted her and Maddy in the corner, and with a grin that had far too many teeth, pointed with a hoof and screamed.

“MAMA!”

“It is time…” John Birch said aloud. “The minions of Satan have cried out…it is a sign. Now is when we strike for all that is Godly and Righteous.”

“Are... are you sure about this, Sergeant?” asked one Sapper, who had just finished with wiring up demolition charges that had been earmarked for the main-line railroad from Halifax.

Instead, Birch had ordered them to be planted on the support beams of the highway interchange just outside of town.

“Lieutenant…” the conspiracy-theorist muttered in response, eyes gazing far off into some glorious hereafter.

“I mean…” the young demolitions engineer persisted. “If we bring this down, it’s going to trap everyone here… even our own! This is going to kill all the pony-pounders, yes, but the HLF’ll be fucked too! Sergeant, that’s just nuts!”

Without even looking Birch swung his sawed-off shotgun around and fired. The kid’s head disappeared in meaty chunks.

“I am your Lieutenant, and you’d best not forget that…” he repeated again, absently wiping blood off of the gun’s barrel, before turning to his other men. “The rest of you have witnessed the same truth as me - if we cut off the animals here we cull their numbers by the thousand! Let the traitors and the mindless sheep that call themselves humans burn against the Barrier. Our people are smart and daring enough to survive, blessed by powers Almighty to win this crusade. NOW GET BACK TO WORK!”

The sappers nearby scrambled back, working frantically, working double-time just to avoid that shotgun. The kid was right, most of them knew that.

The school bus that had originally formed their barricade across the railroad idled softly beside them, ready to crawl up onto the highway and flee north. In the shadow of the flyover, they worked by the glow of its headlights.

’Birch has finally gone off the deep end’, one Turkish man with a load of bathtub semtex thought. Then, immediately raising an eyebrow, he asked himself, ’...More than usual?’

Yes.

But then, so had the world itself. Everything had gone mad. Was… was something wrong with the fabric of reality? How could this have all gone so wrong? He couldn’t answer. Questions of philosophy were beyond him. But explosives… solid gel and blasting caps, those he understood.

Snowflakes fell to the ground beside him, and he hoped he had some way to survive this coming winter as himself.

Tess stirred, feeling a familiar ringing in her ears. Her shoulder burned where she had landed on it, thrown down out of the cupola and onto the caboose’s floor.

‘That’s it…’ she thought. ‘We’re off the rails, derailed. No escape now.’

But maybe… maybe 9782 itself had kept its footing and stayed on track. If that was the case, then they could flee in the locomotive. Just abandon the cargo and escape.

And then she stood, and got the shock of her life.

The caboose was upright, standing on its wheels. She turned and gazed through the leading door, seeing the slug unit and the KFC-grilled 1810 ahead, also upright and inline. So far as she could see, not one wheel had run off.

“That’s... that’s impossible…” she said aloud. “We hit at what…thirty, forty miles an hour, pushed from behind. Both of these cabooses at least should have been smashed to splinters.”

Herself included.

Stunned, she reached back up into the cupola and closed the emergency valve. If they were, amazingly, still on the rails, then they’d need to be able to release the brakes.

Then, hesitantly, she moved further back, towards the last vehicle of the train. The second caboose, which not only should have bore the brunt of the impact, but was carrying the cargo.

Hand shaking, she crossed over and swung open the door. Thick black smoke poured out, a sweltering fume that swirled around her with choking weight.

She waved a hand to clear some of it away, and reached inside the doorframe, fumbling for a lightswitch. At her touch, a single bulb in the compartment’s roof flared for an instant, and burst…

… in that flash, she saw the cargo. Coffin-like caskets stacked inside the caboose, smoke curling off their surfaces. Each lashed in place, not a single one out of alignment.

Unable to press in further, she stepped to the side of the smoking caboose and swung herself down onto the roadbed. Wheezing to clear her lungs, she looked back past the end of the train.

“How… how did?”

Running in reverse, the cabooses at the tail end of the train had struck the parked hopper cars. It should have been like crushing a sardine can against a brick wall. Light sheet metal should have folded and crumpled, been rent from the frames and scattered wide...

Instead, the opposite had happened. When struck with the sardine can, the bricks had collapsed up like paper…

The hopper cars had been driven back, smashed into one another and squashed together. The one that had been struck first had collapsed into a quarter of its length, and the vehicle behind had jumped onto its partner like a horse caught crying to clear a fence.

Somehow, the cargo had done this. Somehow… it had protected them, preserved the integrity of the train. It had saved their lives. What the hell was it?!

A thought struck her.

“Oh hell, JEAN!”

Realising that she’d completely forgotten about the possible fate of her engineer, she spun around and staggered through the snow back towards 9782. The immense red locomotive was idling softly, purring a single note of readiness. Scrambling up onto the nose, she found the cab door shut and latched.

“Jean!” she called, forcing it open. “Are you in there?”

Inside the cab was empty. The controls were still set to back them out of the yard, throttle open and the reverser lever dropped back into ‘R’. Without thinking, she strode over and reset them both to neutral, and then released the brakes. On the digital operations screen a number of red indicators blinked to green as the safety systems reverted to normal.

And then she heard something breathing, just behind her.

Something? Why had she thought of it that way?

Tess felt a breeze on the back of her neck as the cab’s rear door inched open. In the screen of the operations display, she could see the reflection of a shadow moving behind her...

“Jean?” she called out warily, hands still on the controls. Looking down she focused on the Beretta holstered on the front of her vest…

‘Grab, safety off, spin, fire, done…’ she mentally told herself. ‘Simple as that...’

But the horrors of memory held her back. The pony named Petticoat decapitated in front of her, a father and daughter condemned on a train-ride to death… her family left behind as she sailed to safety.

‘Do it...do it now or die and join them.’

She tensed, her shoulders shaking.

‘ACT!’

With a yell of primitive fire, she seized the butt of the gun, spun round...

“Woah! Take it easy!”

...only to slam into Jean, who was leaning against the frame of the cab door, ashen-faced and struggling to breathe. A fire-extinguisher was in his hand.

“You’re alive!” she gasped in relief, before lightly boxing him on the shoulder. “I thought they’d taken you, you stupid asshole! What the hell happened?!”

“Electrical fire…” he gasped. “One of the traction-motor buses shorted when I opened her up to push back against the load. I had to go outside and put it out with the CO2 extinguisher.”

“What…” she panted. “Why didn’t you close the throttle?”

“Would you have hung around in a warzone?” he said, before holding up one hand. “I know, it was dumb. I slipped on the catwalk and knocked the wind out of myself… couldn’t get back to the controls before we hit… well. Whatever it was we hit.”

“Another train… we hit another train and lived.”

“That’s… not possible,” Jean said. “We’d be thrown off the-”

“I don’t get it either, but it looks like the cargo protected us,” Tess explained. “It makes about as much sense as it sounds but… Jean, what is it?”

The colour of his face had gone from ashen to a deathly charcoal grey. He pointed forward through the windscreen, and Tess turned to see a familiar Earth pony rushing towards them along the track…

“Verity?”

...and right on her tail were a glut of newfoals, howling with no emotion she could name, either agony, rage or bloodlust… It was impossible to say.

Lightning had crashed through a second-story window hoof-first, shattering the glass and landing nimbly in the corridor where she had last seen Maddy and Rio.

“Guys!” she cried out, head whipping around. “Where are you!?”

She didn’t know why she felt so compelled to help, but the second she heard the newfoals’ screams she had left the brown mare and, with a crack of her wings, thrown herself straight at the window.

Deranged giggles echoed through the hospital, seeming to come from all around. Lightning spun on her hooves. Which way? Which way!?

And then, in a flash of logic, she looked at the streaks of filth and fluid that countless hooves had dragged along the floor… and followed it.

Along a corridor and down a staircase marked ‘Fire Escape’, right down to the ground floor. Lightning's hooves blurred as she ran, jumping off the walls at the corners. The laughter was getting louder, and the shadows deeper.

She reached the surface level and found the Fire Escape doors had been barred and blockaded. But the bloody trail continued, backtracking down another staircase. A sign at the entryway read:

She kicked open the door and dropped down the stairs, into the basement of the hospital. There was no illumination here except for the dim glow of emergency lights.

Down one last corridor, gaining enough speed that her outstretched wings caught the air for a second. The doors out to the leading bay were mechanical, and none of the lights on the panel adjacent were illuminated.

Hand-prints were smeared on the door, faint but bloody. Lightning’s heart trembled.

“Mama…” a voice whispered, and she slowly turned around on her hooves. Directly behind her were the darkened doors to the Pathology suite...through which the river of hoofprints led, like the trail of some disgusting bloodworm.

She followed, each step more hesitant than the last...except for the rap of her hooves everything had fallen silent...it was an expectant hush, the breath before action.

And then she came to an open door marked ‘Room 101’, and looked inside.

“Clouds above…” she whispered in horror.

Room 101 was a windowless space, cold and lifeless, lit by the sterile light of an illuminated wall panel on which grotesque X-Ray images had been pinned...their light and shadow falling over a metal table just long enough for a human to be laid out on, sitting on a scrubbed floor of bone-white tiles. Beside it was a wall in which four small locker doors were set at waist-height.

She knew what this was.

Room 101 was the worst place in the world...

Room 101 was where the dead were brought….

Room 101 was the morgue…

… and right now, it was full of undeath...

Rio was standing with her back to the foot of autopsy table. The front of her hazard suit had torn open, and her still-ungloved hands were gripping onto the edge of the table for support.

Gathered in front of her, facing away from Lightning, were the remaining newfoal children, standing stock still.

“Mama…” one of them tittered. Rio, breathing heavily, looked up and saw Lightning. And smiled.

“Her will is that my time’s come. Alright, I’m ready…”

The newfoals stepped closer, pressing in.

“But it’s not Maddy’s time… not yet…”

With her eyes fixed on Lightning, Rio nodded towards the corpse lockers.

Then, one of the newfoals jumped up at her, and struck her in the chest, knocking her back onto the table. Instead of batting it away, she caught it and cuddled it tight, like a teddy bear, letting its’ potion-soaked fur rub up against her bare hands.

More scrambled up, climbing onto her, pinning her down so that they could crawl in through the hole torn in her suit. Their giggling forms squirmed and writhed obscenely under the fabric.

“Get out!” Lightning screamed. “Run away!”

But Rio wasn’t fighting. Instead, she smiled out through her helmet’s visor.

“I’m ready, to leave all this behind… ready to be Nightingale… a perfect, pretty pony.”

And those last words penetrated deep into Lightning’s mind, flowed along some recently traumatised neural pathways...and like flipping a switch, opened them back up.

Everything she had seen and dreamt while unconscious crashed over her like a wave of vomit, and she gasped, remembering now why the name Nightingale had seemed so familiar...

She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but the words would not come.

Through the visor, she saw Rio’s eyes close, a peaceful, beatific smile on the woman’s face…

… and then they snapped open again, pinpricked with fear as they gazed upon something terrible… something on the far side of reality.

They were seeing something that nobody else could, but Lightning Dust knew what Rio was witnessing.

Because Lightning had lived it. Or rather, died it.

“NO!” Rio screeched, body arcing on the table. “NOT THAT! NOT A SOLDIER! NO….DON’T MAKE ME… PLEEEEEEEEEEAAAASSE!”

She began to thrash and plead, her faith broken, the newfoals packed into the suit with her making it look as if she was bloating, blistering to death. As her screams descended into wordless gibbers, her flailing became weaker… the boots and leggings deflating as her limbs were twisted, withdrawn and foreshortened. At the same time, the helmet tipped back and dangled off the end of the table, completely empty.

Now the hazmat suit looked less like a piece of protective clothing, and more like a birthing sac...a distended, writhing cocoon about to burst. It’s motions were profanely intestinal… accompanied by a series of lewd moans that had replaced the cries of a dying soul.

“Ooh… OOOOhhhh… ooooaah… yessSSSSSS!”

There was a smell in the air… not just the coppery stink of blood but a salty, organic tang that Lightning knew herself from nights curled up in bed with her naughty magazines…

Her stomach heaved… but empty, it could only ache and retch. Attention torn away from the sickening transformation, Lightning’s eyes fell on the corpse lockers, which three of the newfoals had clustered around. Like chicks pleading for worms, they were jumping up to try and grab hold of the handle on the one nearest to her…which sat slightly open.

And then Lightning realised why Rio had nodded towards it with Maddy’s name on her lips.

‘Oh, that’s just twisted...’

As the thing on the autopsy table contained to grind and moan to itself, Lightning jumped over to the lockers and bucked the newfoals away like hoofballs. Then, she clenched hold of the handle with her teeth and hauled back.

The tray slid out with oiled smoothness, and on it, hands pressed over her helmet as if to block her ears, was the diminutive form of Maddy, a single spot of life in this house of the dead.

“Go away!” she screamed, rolled on her side with her eyes screwed shut. “I’m not ready…”

“It’s alright, it’s me…” Lightning said, hooking one hoof over the girl’s torso. “We’ve got to get away! Come on!”

Quickly, keeping herself between the child and the newfoals, Lightning backed Maddy out of the room towards the door.

“Rio…” The little kid whimpered as she looked towards the autopsy table. “She said to hide… said she’d change and tell them to stop… promised me.”

Lightning couldn’t think of anything to say...her attention was focused on the wriggling suit. The newfoals were crawling back out if it now, leaving only a single mass inside, something that was ululating slowly, as if testing limbs, adjusting itself to a new existence.

Then, with a rip, a peach-orange horn tore through the fabric, rending the hole open further. The thing inside the cocoon was about to hatch.

She knew that horn… had felt it burst out through her skull.

‘Don’t be her… don’t be her…’

But it felt hopeless.

“Maddy,” she said softly, trying to keep the horror from showing in her voice. “Climb on my back.”

“W-what?” the human girl asked, as if Lightning had just suggested something blasphemous.

“Get on my back!” Lightning hissed, and at her urging Maddy complied. She was just short enough that her feet did not drag along the ground when seated , and Lighting’s wings, folded back tightly, neatly held her legs in place like stirrups.

The suit gave a final twitch, and then the thing inside began to stand up. With the light of the X-ray panel streaming over it, something with the shape of an athletic young unicorn mare stood up, body dripping with sweat and sex, the very image of primal strength.

But any momentary flutters of lust Lightning felt died the second the creature turned its eyes on them… empty grey eyes… grey as oblivion. Glassy orbs that reflected nothing.

“Hi there! I’m Nepenthe, the Pretty Private!” she squeaked, her lips twisted in a smile that was too wide, too toothy to look real. She sounded like a wind up toy, the phrase wooden, and yet terrifyingly joyous...full of programmed elation, artificial joy...

Lightning saw its attention shift to her trembling passenger, and felt her soul plummet.

“She’ll be a Pretty Private too!”

“No, she won’t!”

And with those words, Lightning ran.

Two detonators rested in two different hands over a mile apart.

In the centre of Truro, Claire Lawgrave flicked a switch on hers and tested the strength of its transmitter. It bleeped a confirmation tone, ready to carry out the PHL’s scorched earth policy. A sticky-label had been attached to the handle, the word ‘LEPERFALL’ pencilled on it.

“I always preferred sticky bombs myself,” Laura Hedd smirked. The two of them were leaning against each other in the shelter of the railyard office, propped up against a wall. Their handguns guns, each empty except for a single bullet reserved for themselves, lay close to hand.

Both of the women were bleeding heavily. Claire had been mauled by a deranged pegasus mare, and Laura had taken a sniper round right through the shoulder.

“Stickies wouldn’t have the kind of power we need...not to shatter the mill’s foundations, or bring down the reservoir dam.”

“Heh...it’ll be the biggest bang we ever gave anyone but each other.”

“Shut up Laura…”

“Hey… you know you love it.”

“Yeah...and I love you too.”

“Shut up Claire…”

Just outside the town to the north, John Birch held up his own detonator, and paused for a second, gazing off to the south. Smoke was rising in plumes all across the valley in which Truro lay, and the sky above was filled with swarming pegasi...some were tearing each other to bits, rather than focusing on the humans fighting and dying below. A single jet, the tip of one wing hanging loose, was circling groggily high above the carnage.

His deranged mind searched for a quote, for some profound wisdom with which to preface what he was about to do, something that would follow every mention of him in the history books, utterly encapsulating his character and trailing each memory. Coming up blank, instead he settled for something simple.

“Fuck them all. Amen.”

Unbeknownst to him, he’d succeeded at that. Also unbeknownst to him, he would not be remembered favorably by whatever writers that dug through file cabinets, records, and scattered testimonials. He would instead be remembered as “Oh dear God, that imbecile! That poor, brutalised fool!”

With those few words as his prayer he thumbed the detonator, and with a series of surprisingly uncinematic flashes and cracks followed almost immediately by the flat blast of the shockwave, the freeway intersection folded up into its own footprint.

Seeing his handiwork, his desolation of Sodom, Birch tossed the detonator down and climbed aboard the schoolbus.

“Let’s go. We’ll head up to the pass and barricade ourselves there. Anything on hooves that escapes this town, we’ll cut down before they can go any further.”

Galt’s headquarters, his citadel, was in chaos as the situation collapsed, with him at the centre attempting to micromanage a continual deluge of radio messages and courier dispatches

“Newfoals continue to rampage....physically attacking humans and ponies indiscriminately…”

“Use a soft retreat to draw them out and then push back hard!”

“They won’t respond! They’re downright-”

“... that freight train from the PHL has run back into the grain yards next door. Please advise…”

“Move up and capture it!”

“With what troops?”

“Give the admin staff guns if need be.”

“They’re not suited to this! There’s something weird about that train’s crash, I think we need-”

BOOM!

Colonel Galt heard the sound of a distant explosion, felt it through the floor.

“Andrei?” he called out. “What was that? Andrei, report!”

There was no answer. Around him message-bearers and administrative officers scurried, trying to draw in intelligence. Everything was going insane.

“...uh, I think that was the freeway. Aw shit, that was our line of retreat too! Who the fuck did that?!”

“Control yourself. We still have the helicopters, don’t give into fear!”

Galt hated confusion...hated when things did not go to plan. Plans were there to impose order upon chaos…

There were some moments when the universe just couldn't help itself. Moments where it would simply be rude not to respond to a challenge like that.

As if on cue:

“Chopper Rapture, this is Chopper Columbia, confirming takeoff from Homebase Elsinore,” crackled a bulky two-way radio set perched on the desk.

“Confirm Columbia, Rapture following on your six.’

“What!”

Hearing that exchange, Galt jumped up. From outside the Home Hardware store came the sound of immense engines spooling up, a familiar roar that he had until now mentally drowned out as he tried to formulate a response.

“What the fuck!”

In a rare moment of panic, he ran for the door and out onto the parking lot, where Columbia, his personal helicopter, was hovering overhead. Its partner, Rapture, was just spooling up to full power. As Galt cleared the door he saw the huge Mi-26 lift off…

...saw Andrei in the co-pilot’s seat.

“ANDREI! What is the meaning of this!”

The cockpit side-window slid open, and Andrei stuck his head out to call down as he ascended away.

“Apologies Atlas, but this fight is lost. It is in my best self-interest to leave now with whatever supplies we salvaged from the hospital, and put them to enlightened use. Now, would you kindly not make this any harder than it has to be. Do svidanya!”

And with a wave of the hand, Andrei dismissed him as if he were nothing. Nothing!? Atlas Galt, champion of the HLF, leader of the Thenardier Guards, nothing!?

“He’s ‘gone Galt’!” the Colonel seethed to himself as the two helicopters spun around and accelerated away. “Just like all those idiots at Defiance, and Goleman’s cartel of cowards.”

‘Going Galt’, a disgusting practice that amounted to glorified sticking one’s head in the sand. One reason why he had assumed the name ‘Galt’ was so as to redefine the phrase, remake it in his own image. So many in the HLF… especially the monied elites he had despised in his youth, advocated running away with whatever they could take and hiding out somewhere, usually the Pacific, until the world had finished falling apart, or someone else got the job of saving mankind done. Which meant relying on the PHL. Disgusting.

But there was nowhere to run to, in the long run. Every other HLF ‘retreat’ had been exposed or collapsed - like Senator Goleman’s lair in Alaska, the so-called ‘town’ of Defiance in New Hampshire, and nowhere in Asia was safe as long as those blasted Dragons of the East, the Stampede Fleet, and all their associated partisans were around. It hadn’t helped that the destruction of Defiance had been like uprooting a tree, ripping out retreat after retreat till almost nothing was left in what had been referred to as the ‘Great HLF Purge’ on both sides. The only options had been to hide, die, or join the PHL.

As a result, the HLF had practically haemorrhaged personnel into the PHL - Reid, Kraber, Burakgazi, Tengku, countless others. Cowards. The only way to win this war with a truly human victory was to keep moving, stay on their feet, be fluid and adaptable…

‘He’s abandoned the cause...left me here to die. No wait, I can escape overland...but the freeway’s down!’

… and so Colonel Galt stood stock still, trying to make sense of the world falling apart around him. Trying, and failing, to make this match to his mental dialectic where he himself had been left behind by his own men, his own beliefs.

‘The train...we’ll escape on that damn PHL train. But what’s it carrying!? What’s its’ secret!?’

“Heh… heh…” something rapsed from behind him, and he turned to see a familiar pegasus stallion being held under guard. One of his wings was in tatters, no blood visible but with countless feathers ripped out at the root. “Always a surprise when your underlings turn on you… isn’t it. So what, is he just going to sell of all your plunder, make himself a little nest until he can no longer outrun Her Majesty’s judgment or the human governments? And what about you, what are you going to do?”

“Flight Leader Prism Flash…” Galt said aloud, mentally defaulting back to his normal paradigm and shuffling recent developments aside for later consideration. “To what do I owe the honor of this reunion?”

“Captured him, Colonel,” one of the guards explained. “He was riding on the back of a Union jet when one of his own newfoals tried to grab a bite of his chicken-wings. Saw him crash just outside our perimeter.”

Galt barely gave the man a grunt. Let him seek platitudes and praise from lesser leaders. Instead he focused his attention on Flash.

“What happened?” he said smoothly. “Why have the newfoals all gone berserk?”

“If I knew, do you think I would tell you?” Flash smirked back.

“Bring him to my desk!” Galt snapped, leading them into the store.

Prism Flash remained as infuriatingly unflappable as always, though something flickered in his eyes as he was dragged through the emptied shelves of the store, smacked with the butts of rifles whenever he slowed down slightly. Or just when the HLF got bored.

And yet still, he still showed a confidence that something could save him. That he’d get out of this alive. That just made the HLF even angrier.

Flash was held down on the home-made workstation while his host scrounged up a power drill and plugged it into an extension socket. The tip whirred with all the sadistic glee of a dentistry set on steroids, and Galt slowly levelled it at the centre of one of the stallion’s prostate hooves, so that the drill bit rested just inside the fold of the ‘frog’ - the mass of soft tissue behind the sole that cushioned every step a pony took.

Incidentally, the frog was also richly threaded with alicornal tissues, especially in pegasi, along with an awful lot of nerve-endings.

“Now…” Galt said cooly, secretly relishing the growing sense of panic on his captive’s face. “Now you’ll talk.”

The drill hummed, and Prism Flash screeched.

And hearing that sound, all of Galt’s other concerns just melted away.

“What the fuck happened?” Tess demanded as Verity dragged herself into the cab. The sound of dozens of newfoals gibbering outside was like some chorus of the damned.

“The newfoals have gone nuts, that’s what! It’s like someone dosed them all with PCP! They’re just acting twigged!”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, no-one tells me shit!” Verity called back. “Well, what are you waiting for, shift this thing! Get back across to the PHL’s side of the front!”

“Alright,” Jean said, dropping back into his seat with a wince as his leg twinged. “Did you close the emergency valve Tess?”

“Yes! Gun it!”

Obliging, he advanced the throttle. 9782 screamed as it edged forward two or three yards, and then lurched to a halt, wheels skidding on the rails and alerts flashing on the operations panel in kaleidoscopic madness.

“Shit...ah damn it!”

“What’s wrong?”

“With one of the traction motors blown, we’re down by a sixth...maybe even a third of our power. That shouldn’t be an issue, but there’s something holding onto us…like the train got heavier”

“The handbrake!” Tess realised. “I applied the slug unit’s handbrake when we were running out of control!”

“Well, now we’re trying to drag it with us!” Jean shouted, again attempting to gun the motor.

“I’ll go,” Verity said, and without waiting for an answer she jumped to the back door and shouldered it open. “Hold on if you can...I need to grab something while I’m out there.”

“Why should we wait?”

“Because the newfoals aren’t here for you, they’re just rampaging...the Empire doesn’t even know that you’re a threat to them...but you are, oh you fucking are!”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have Intelligence, and if you want me to share it with you, you’ll wait for me” Verity smirked. “Hunker down and don’t draw attention until I get back.”

And then she disappeared into the driving snow.

“What’s so important that she’s got to run off in a warzone?” Tess seethed as she sat herself down on the cab floor.

Jean knowingly tapped his shoulder. “I’m guessing its her saddlebags.”

He guessed right. Verity had left her kit hidden in the lee of the wheat-tower. Having released the handbrake wheel on the slug (which was unsurprisingly difficult without the benefit of opposable thumbs, and required her to get a first-hand taste of rust and flaking paint), the girl in the guise of a mare sprinted back to get her few treasures.

‘This is so much easier than if I was walking on two legs,’ she realised as she charged through the slush, nimbly evading the clumsy attacks of maddened newfoals and terrified HLF grunts sent up to try and seize the train, their only option for escape. This site, the Co-Op Atlantic Feed Mill, lay in a narrow salient bordered by the highway, the hospital, and the small retail outlet that Colonel Galt would have no-doubt bestowed some vaingloriously obscure codename upon.

‘What was the last one? Belmont? Inverness? Arden?’

But names didn’t matter. Now, this tiny sliver of rail, yard and dirt was a killing-field. And from what intelligence she had gained, Verity knew the full worth of what was at stake, even if none of the other players did.

Between the newfoals flooding over from the hospital, pony air support, and the contesting remnants of the PHL and the HLF, the area around 9782 and its train was just a churning quagmire of mud and blood.

Retrieving her saddlebags from their sanctum under a utilities cabinet, she slipped them on as quickly as possible. One of her hoarded comic-books had slid out, and without even a moment’s consideration she snapped it back up and tucked it in securely.

“Hi Mom”, she whispered, eyes briefly alighting on the name printed on the graphic novel’s cover. A momentary smile graced her muzzle…

...and then she heard the screaming. Not fifty feet from her, across an open yard, was the rear of the retail park. Some firedoors in the rear fascia of the stores had been left open for ease of access, and from one of them she could hear an unholy screech emanating.

‘Oh...sounds like an enhanced interrogation session...that takes me back...’

She shook her head to clear her thoughts, and then frowned. As much as she appreciated the idea of a pony getting what was due to them, some part of her was quailing at the sound of those tortured cries…

‘That’s a stallion screaming...could it be Prism Flash...and if so...’

Her conflicting emotions surrendered themselves at that realisation. A captured officer would be very useful to her ultimate goal.

“Oh, fuck it!” she swore, and bolted across the yard to the door...

...and not a minute later, something else followed her in.

Galt drove the drill home with a cold precision, lancing the third hoof in a row. Prism Flash was babbling in pain, words tumbling out of him.

But not the words that Galt wanted to hear.

“Tell me!” he snapped as he worked the screaming drill around inside the stallion’s hoof. “What’s so important that you launched an attack on this town? What’s on that train?”

“Augh! I don’t know! What train?”

WHIEEEEEEEEE!

“AIHEEEE!”

“How is Lightning Dust here! Intelligence has her leading aerial support over Halifax!”

“We found her...injured in Maine...brought her here -hic- for treatment…”

“LIAR! Are you telling me she’s in two places at once, or that there’s two of her?!”

eeeeeeeeIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRrrrrrrr

“AH! Ah-h-aaaaaargh! I swear, it’s the truth!”

The drill continued to bite deeper, until it suddenly struck the underside of Prism’s navicular bone. The shock caused the Equestrian flier to jerk so wildly that the bit nearly snapped off in the hole it had bored…

EEEEEEEEE-click!

Casually, Galt withdrew the drill and studied the bloody tissue now packed into the bit’s grooves. A few pale strands of alicornal fibres were wrapped around it like angel-hair pasta, glistening as they caught the light.

“Next hoof,” he said. “And then, if he still doesn’t talk, we can try the wing roots.”

“Pleeeeasse!” Prsim Flash begged desperately as one of his captors forced his last good leg out towards Galt, while the other stuffed tampons soaked in antiseptic up the holes drilled into the underside of his hooves. “You’ve already crippled me, please don’t ground me too! I don’t know anything, I swear...we only picked this town because it had a hospital!”

“I can promise you an extension of life in reasonable comfort, in captivity…” Galt said affably, as if Flash’s words had not actually reached him. “... but only if you share intelligence with us willingly. If you continue to resist, the only future you have is a short one, full of pain.”

He lowered the drill and squeezed the trigger switch.

..brrrrrrieeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

“I’m not an unreasonable man...in fact I’m objectively quite logical. Your pain brings me no pleasure.”

If he was being honest with himself, he would have acknowledged that as a lie. Truly great men were above the infliction of petty pain...

“Now, just enlighten me...what is on that train?”

Galt’s words, barely audible over the whine of the drill’s motor, got their answer from a most unexpected source.

“Why don’t you go find out for yourself, Colonel?” a female voice said from on high. Galt and company looked up, and to their visible surprise saw a pony mare gazing down on them from atop a high shelf-structure, just out of reach. “The train you’re obsessing over is parked just outside...on the front lines.”

She shook her head and snorted. “Oh, but I forget...we never saw you on the front lines, did we?”

One of the guards whipped up a gun, but Galt held out a hand.

“Withhold your fire.”

His eyes were narrowed in recognition.

“I can’t say that it’s particularly good to see you again, Miss Carter, given your lamentable condition…tell me, how does your loyalty to the HLF bear up in service of Equestria’s pack of spies and Quislings?”

She shrugged. “It’s tolerable. The smell of a stable following me around is a bit much though.”

“I imagine it is,” Galt smirked, before gesturing towards Prism Flash. “Tell me. From your own, intimate experience, which part of the pony anatomy is best suited to the application of interrogation?”

“Come on sir,” she snorted. “I’ve helped out in enough of these shows to know you’re going to get zilch out of him...you know he’s got nothing to say if you’ve gone through two hooves, let alone three. He knows nothing. Heck, not even the PHL know what’s on that train...and they’re the ones whose hands it’s fallen into. I wouldn’t be surprised if even Equestria is unaware they’re even missing something yet…their inventory-keeping sucks worse than the PHL’s forensics!”

“Oh?” Galt straightened up. “What do you have to offer? What have you found that your fellow traitors missed?”

The suffixed words, ‘tell us, and we might not kill you too...ha! Yeah, right!’ hung unspoken in the air like a smothering blanket.

Nonplussed, Verity turned and lifted up the flap of her saddle-bag, exposing the book she had raided from the railyard. The damn thing had been sitting in a documents rack in 1810’s cab, plain as day!

“This is the last war journal of a PHL operative named Trenderhoof. I’ve only had a glance, but it makes for fascinating reading...the contents of that train were part of a secret snag-and-bag operation run in association with Crowe Laboratory’s buddies...and it’s an intelligence goldmine.”

“And what do you expect in return for this boon?”

“Him!” the mare pointed down at Prism Flash. “I give you the journal, you give me that glue-stick, and then he leads me to my quarry.”

“Buck...you…” Flash gasped.

“You be real quiet!” Verity snapped. “Or I’ll ask for the drill as well...”

The threat did not shut Rainbow Dash’s father up…

...a beam of steely magic hitting one of the guards in the face, causing the woman’s head to pop like a rotten tomato, did.

Galt did not have time to react, and neither did Verity. An aura of telekinesis wrapped around the high shelves on which she was perched, and crunched it like toothpicks, causing her to slip and tumble to the ground as wood, paint and panes of glass tumbled around her.

Verity groaned, pinned by the weight of the shelves. Looking up, she saw Trenderhoof’s diary lying just out of reach on the floor.

She strained for it with one hoof, just caught the edge of the cover…

...and then it was kicked away by a passing set of hooves.

“Naughty ponies get punished!” a worrying cheery voice chirped. “Naughty humans get to die!”

Groaning in pain and ascending despair, Verity looked at a peach-orange unicorn mare who was examining her, empty grey eyes half-closed in an expression that could have been lidded lust or benign amity. The grin stretched out from ear to ear beneath it was neither.

“But you’re neither...or is it either? Human and pony together, and yet not…a quantum superimposition, or a quantum leap?”

Her study session was suddenly interrupted by a gun rattling out in a full-auto orgasm, and with disturbing grace the newfoal spun and ducked, avoiding the entire spread in one fluid motion. As she came back up, her horn flashed again, and a cracked mirror shot off the floor and through the neck of another HLF grunt, causing his head to permanently part company from his body.

“Panzerfaust!” Galt screamed at the third guard, who unslung from his back a homemade rocket-launcher welded up from scrap metal and a drainage pipes, covered in graffiti.

“FIRE!”

The botched-up RPG-launcher belched fire from both ends, spitting out a semtex-stuffed baked-beans can mounted on a rudimentary tail.

Verity mashed her face to the floor and hoped to high heaven that she’d survive the blast, but the newfoal did not even blink as it shot straight for her face…

KRACK-A-DOOM!

A hot wave of heat washed over Verity, causing every hair on her torso to stand on end. And yet...there was no shockwave or fireball.

‘That’s...not right...I used to help MAKE those things...they’re meant to kill everything six-feet from impact...when they work.’

She looked up, and spluttered in disbelief.

"You gotta be shitting me, that’s just fucking O.P!”

The newfoal had, in the time it took for the rocket-propelled can to travel less than twenty feet, used her magic to throw up a shield composed of fallen tools and home-improvement supplies.

“My turn!” she trilled, “and I think you’ll find that my dee-aye-waifu is stronger!”

A flick of her horn collapsed the wall, which then seemed to disintegrate and flow onto her in a wave of soluble material…

...and solidified into a lightweight suit of steely-grey plate armor, trimmed in burgandy-red fabric.

“Oh yes, my Owner…” the creature quivered gleefully, as the armor’s straps and belts tightened around her limbs and barrel. “Your Pretty Private comes with a full range of fun accessories!”

Galt’s two remaining guards fired on full auto, and the newfoal’s magic conjured more shining weapons from the surrounding debris.

“Such as a matching shield and sword!”

The constructs transmuted and transformed, reshaping themselves as her command, deflecting bullets in one instant, and in the next slicing them out of the air.

“Mace! Battle-hammer! Crossbow! War-axe! Yes, your Pretty Private has them all, she’s a walking arsenal just ready for playtime!”

The cloud of particles constantly shifted in her magical touch, jumping from one form to the next as she herself jumped, rolled, slid and dealt cuts, blows, kicks and vicious swipes with an ease that looked less like war, and more like dancing.

The nearer of the two guards stood no chance, the newfoal laying into him with a Combo attack that first disarmed him...and then disemboweled him from crotch to neck, using a two-handed sword that seconds ago had been a double-bladed axe.

The last guard, rather than protect Galt, ran for it.

“Naughty, naughty! You mustn't run away from me!”

Another flash of her terrifying magical strength, and the entire ceiling above the fleeing man crashed in on top of him with a sickeningly organic crunch.

“Your Pretty Private will stop at nothing in your service…” the newfoal finished up, reforging the obscenely-large broadsword into a pair of gladiuses that neatly slotted into her armor. “And will always be a beautiful, perfect toy for any deserving filly! Or stallion..."

She batted her eyes and moaned the last word, before flashing a terrifying wink at Verity, who felt an uncomfortable flush come over her.

'What the fuck is this thing?'

Galt was left alone, and Verity saw him fumble for his gun. The newfoal, still smiling, did not give him the time, and instead leapt forward and headbutted him in the chest…

There was a pop as her horn broke straight through the sternum. Galt made an empty gasping noise, and slumped backwards.

“Supersoldier…” Verity heard Prism Flash mutter. “She did it...Twilight Sparkle finally did it!”

“Yup!” the newfoal laughed, sliding her horn out of the Colonel’s chest like a knight who had slain a dragon. “I’m the first Pretty Private, designation Nepenthe!”

Flash paused, and then laughed through his pain. “Amazing...absolutely amazing! One newfoal against five human warriors...and you took them all down!”

He reached for her. “Now, get me to safety, Private…”

Nepenthe did not answer. Instead, she was staring up at the ceiling, her ears twitching.

“Network clearing…” she suddenly said aloud, voice hollow. “Unity re-established. All units, respond to ID-ping… Respond… Respond…”

“The fuck?” Verity whispered.

Then the newfoal shook her head and batted at her nose. The gesture might have been cute were it not for the blood running all over her face and mane.

“Configuration Daemon over-ride enabled, all I/O ports and nodes shut!” she squeaked, and almost sounded surprised. “Network disconnect complete, defaulting to local-law!”

“Help me up, Private, that was an order!” Flash repeated, and Verity heard a tremor of uncertainty in his words.

“In a minute, sir…” the creature said sweetly, fluting voice chirping. Now the thing named Nepenthe was staring up at the blood on its own horn. “I have an idea…”

“Newfoals don’t have ideas, you do as you’re told!”

“Shush!” Nepenthe said, like a mother to a rowdy child, and that one scolding word was enough to reduce him to a stunned silence.

Her horn began to fizz with pops of magic, and the blood slaked over it began to boil and bubble. Streaks of it floated off into a ball, encased in her magical aura. It was joined by other droplets and gobs. Paint from burst cans, water spraying down from the hole in the roof…

Smiling, Nepenthe turned and looked with maddened eyes down at Galt, who was drawing his last breaths.

“New Ponification Template Logged. Designation, ‘Pretty Private’. Step one: control experiment!”

The ball of fluid swirling in front of her, about the size of a grapefruit, was becoming denser and deeper…and changing colour, shading towards a familiar bright purple...

Potion, Verity realised numbly, This creature had taken Galt’s own blood… and paint… and somehow conjured up a ball of fucking ponifiction potion!

“Transmutation…the armour is one thing, but alchemical substances? That’s… that’s supposed to be beyond any Newfoal’s abilities!”

“Yes!” she giggled, bouncing on her hooves. “Yes it is! Which is why I’ve simply got to test my little Nepenthe’s capabilities to the fullest! Oh, what a wonderful thing I am, to make a creature like this!”

‘Wait...what?’ Verity pondered that choice of words as she tested the weight of the shelf on her back. ‘So is something piloting her right now?’

The creature giggled again as she looked down at a horrified Galt, whose mouth was frothing up blood. He was gagging, struggling to even scream or protest, unable to do even that.

“Please…” he gurgled, the words barely audible. “...please…”

His eyes said far more to Verity than those feeble splutters. If Galt could have seen himself, she guessed he would have been disgusted with himself for being so weak. On the floor, unable to do anything, dying like a nobody…

Begging for mercy that nobody in the room was likely to give...

“Please what?" asked the newfoal. "Please make you like me? Please kill you?”

She made a little ‘hah’ sound.

“No to both. You’re the control experiment, so you get to be another one of the generics! Sorry… though, really I’m not. It’s more than you apes deserve, anyway! Good bye!”

And then she telekinetically splatted the wad of goop down into his face with a fast-ball action that would have rustled Babe Ruth’s jimmies.

The worst thing, from Verity’s perspective, was that Galt did not scream… had not enough air left in him to even whimper, not enough strength to thrash or fight...

… and then a colbalt-black newfoal male stood up, eyes even emptier than those of the thing that had sired it.

Verity was happy she hadn’t seen Galt’s eyes as the potion overwhelmed him. Some people would ask her how she was coping with being an earth pony, if they hadn’t known her by reputation and spent nearly ten minutes rolling on the floor, laughing at her like that pretentious, Sharlto Copley-obsessed bliksem Kraber had. Even as she had screamed through her aftermath of her transformation, in the throes of hysterics, half-convinced she was turning into a zombie, that bastard had laughed...

This was how she coped.

Because she had dodged a bullet, and it was a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

“I’m Load Bearer!” the abomination that had been Galt announced with mechanical calm and childish glee. “I serve the sun!”

Every newfoal said some variation of those phrases upon ponification. Like a cheap vocaloid, spouting off its pre-programming catchphrases.

“Get me out of here!” Prism screamed again, and the male earth pony obligingly spun towards him.

“Oh, yessir! Glad to help sir!” the newfoal said with obsequious calm, before beginning to drag rubble off of Prism with his teeth.

Nepenthe meanwhile...or the thing that was now piloting Nepethe, was examining something on the floor.

‘Trenderhoof’s dairy!’

“Well, what is this?” the abomination asked, struggling to lift it off the ground with suddenly enfeebled magic. “Hrm...dammit, this is harder than it looks from on the inside…”

At last though, it caught the book in a staticy aura, and flicked through its pages.

“Oh my yes...that is convenient...oh I can make use of that train, definitely…once I’ve refined this new template, oh yessssssss.”

The light of avaricious opportunity glinted in its eyes.

“And now, you…” it tittered, slamming the book shut and placing in a pocket of Nepenthe’s armor, before turning its attention towards Verity. “What are we to do with you?”

Verity herself just smirked, slowly shifting her hooves under her for maximum purchase. “Take a look and tell me what you see?”

The newfoal-thing took a step closer, horn flickering in contemplation.

“Hrm...as Nepenthe though in her first pass, not a pony...but not human. And yet, the basic latch-points and gene markers are the same...would the potion work on you? There’s magic present… yet…”

And then Verity spat at her.

The beast’s shielding spell flashed up before the wad could hit it in the face. It was weak, and flickering…

“Ah man, that was supposed to go in your eye!”

...but what happened next was surprising.

The splatter of phlegm, caught in the insubstantial magical field, burst into blue flames.

“What is this reaction?” the newfoal’s pilot whispered in fascination. “Something suspended within the spittle? Liquid droplets...a catechol, some variety of urushiol...which makes it biologically-originated, yes.”

It drew closer, a manic grin still spread across the features of its host…

“Flora...kingdom plantae… order sapindales… family anacardiaceae…”

...right up to the point that she suddenly recoiled as if stung.

“Toxicodendron crudelisiocum! The most powerful meta-allergen in nature! It’s spread all through your body!”

Her horn flared, and the burning ball of spit flashed off into the depths of the store.

“Yeah, didn’t you know?” Verity smirked, before flexing her back and, in a show of earth pony physiological strength, hurled off the shelf that had appeared to pin her down. “I’m fucking toxic!”

“Get back! You’ll contaminate the experiment!” the thing squeaked, acting less like a supersoldier and more like a child afraid that a bully would suddenly smash her toys. This was the typical newfoal - not so much fearless as they were too devolved into a childlike state to really understand these kinds of things.

And now the bully was Verity, who advanced on the newfoal with slow, steady trots.

“Why don’t you kill me, huh? Rip the roof down on top of me or swat me like a bee, or go all whirling dervish on me? You did just a minute ago… but no… whatever is steering you right now doesn’t have access to that power… it’s just a feeble little mind with no strength of its own. All flash, no crash. And besides, you don’t really have a mind, do you?”

She took a sidestep, revealing one of her rifles, saddle-mounted and apparently battle ready.

“You just have a latticework of spells that do so much of the work of your brain that you can’t adapt. You can’t deal with something like me. Run.”

And the newfoal scattered, running clumsily for the door. Paying it no heed, Verity patted the barrel of the gun she had used for the threat, currently unloaded.

“Good gun… now then, Prism Flash.”

The stallion in question was spread across the back of the newfoal that had been Galt, which was struggling to trot while carrying the flier’s weight towards the door. A kick between the flanks was enough to scatter the both of them across the floor. Panicked, Flash tried to stand, and collapsed back down, unable to bear weight on his crippled hooves.

Like a horse of the apocalypse, she stood over him and smirked.

“Hi there, I’m your charming captor, Verity!”

“What are you...what are you monsters?”

She bit into the scruff of his neck and tossed him sideways like a ragdoll, straight into another shelving unit.

“The monsters you yourselves made… now...”

Searching quickly around she came back with a coil of rope held in her mouth, and quickly bound it around the stunned stallion’s barrel, pinning his wings. Then it was simple foals...no, child’s play to hoist him onto her back, hostage style.

“...you and I have a train to catch.”

As if cued up by a sound engineer with no sense of taste, a bellowing air horn echoed outside. Ignoring Prism Flash’s protestations and curses, the transformed young woman sprinted down the corridor and back out through the same fire-doors by which she’d entered the building.

Ahead, she could see the train pulling out, plumes of black diesel-smoke staining the sky of marching clouds.

“Right on time!”

And then she heard the same horn blow again… the cry of a locomotive in full voice...

.. .but it came from behind them.

“I don’t like this!” Tess had hissed as she and Jean lay low in the stationary 9782’s cab. “Verity’s taking too long, and now they’ve gone all quiet.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean…” he answered, before tipping his head up towards the windscreen. “Take a look.”

“What?”

“Girl, you’ve got two good legs and I can barely stand!”

“Oh...great, just great,” she seethed.

But she still obliged. Crouching against the conductor’s chair, she peeked over the sill of the window frame and peered out through the frost that was slowly forming on the glass.

“What do you see…”

“They’ve just...stopped. And now they’re standing around and staring up into the sky. It’s like they’re listening to something and-oh shit!!”

She threw herself back down beside him, motions suddenly panicked and fearful.

“What now?”

“They all just fucking looked at me at the same time, like they were the same fucking pony! Fucking Exorcist-level bollocks!” she babbled. “No more waiting around, we’ve got to get our asses gone yesterday! I’ve had enough of this bloody madhouse!”

There was a bang as something landed on the cab roof, and Jean nodded in silent agreement. He took no convincing.

“Yesterday.”

This time, instead of sitting in the seat, he reached over the lip of the control desk and pushed the throttle forward with one hand. With the brakes all properly released, 9782 responded instantly, and the both of them felt the train surge slowly into motion. The roar of the motor built until it drowned out anything outside the cab.

Then there were more bangs on the roof, and this time a dent appeared in the metal overhead, shattering a light fitting. Uncertainly, and still lying down on her back, Tess drew her Beretta and aimed upwards, steadying her grip with both hands and bracing her feet on the bulkhead.

“Can you even shoot that thing?” he asked dubiously.

She swallowed, and felt that manic, hedonistic grin threatening to break out across her face.

“If they come, then I’ll have to.”

BANG!

This time the roof broke under the blows of the newfoals, a pinprick-hole forming right overhead. A few drops of water trickled down, and Tess saw someone on the far side of the keyhole moving…

...then a line of liquid dribbled through the hole and fell slowly towards her, so thick that it dangled on its own thread.

‘Potion!’

A fat dollop on the end glistened purple, heading straight for her face.

“Look out!” she heard Jean cry, before the engineer threw himself over her on his hands and knees..

He stared down in horror, his eyes into her own. She heard droplets going splat, splat...

He quivered… just the motion of the engine, she told herself.

He smiled… just out of relief, she hoped.

He began to giggle…a nerve twitched under one eye.

“Ooooheeheheheeeeeeeeee-damn!”

She saw his eyes shimmer, first with tears, and then as they colour-shifted.

“You were right Tess, about meeeeeee....I saved those girls I ran down...saved them from this....AHAHAAHAHAAHA….”

She felt her arm come back up as he continued to gibber.

“...and NOW I’m Going to saVE yoooouuuuuu toooo. She’ll save alLLL of us apes!”

She saw her hand lift into sight, the Beretta gripped tight.

“Yard Slug!” he blurted out “I’m...Jean...no...I...yes! I am a slave unit…a Yard Slug…”

She pressed it into his mouth, right between those falsely-smiling lips.

She fired.

Lightning Dust, back aching from carrying Maddy, had found the only way to escape the newfoals had been by going up. The tiny, mutated children tumbled down stairs with ease, but at their tiny size had extreme difficulty in ascending them.

And so the two of them had climbed. After losing the thing that had been Rio in a runaround on the basement level they had hit the stairs and not stopped until they reached the roof.

It was freezing up here, even with Lightning’s fur trapping an insulating layer of air over her actual skin. She couldn’t even imagine what it was like for Maddy, who had barely any protection against the elements except for the thin prison of her hazard-suit. Once out of danger, the girl had thrown off even that meagre protection off, violently discarding each article and hurling them as far away as possible, leaving her barefoot and clad only in a thin t-shirt and pants.

And then she had held herself and cried, wordlessly bawling out her fear and confusion, hands clutched around a pendant worn on a chain round her neck. When Lightning had tried to put a hoof around her, Maddy had batted it away with a screech of “NO!”

Unable to help in that regard, Lightning had reluctantly left the kid to weep, and had instead paced out their eyrie.

It did not look good. They were trapped on top of what was the highest part of the hospital complex, looking out over the town, which at this end seemed threaded with railroad lines. Beyond a patch of trees she could make out an unbroken ribbon of steel which she assumed to be the main track. Closely however, just past the hospital perimeter fence, was the spur on which she had seen that train run back on...a train that was stationary and in sight not that far away, surrounded by ponies and humans locked in a fight of death.

‘That’s a decent getaway...’

Who knew what the engine’s controls were like, but with with her sharp eyes and elevated position, she’d seen that the human crew were alive in the cab, just keeping low. She was certain that they’d get into motion soon...

Heh. Soon. What was ‘soon’, given all that had happened to her in barely a day hours, not even twenty-four hours. It was amazing how faraway Equestria now seemed, when she’d been gone for so little time. How much had she witnessed since her arrival yesterday evening? Equestria almost seemed like a dream, like it had never been real compared to this madness.

Poised on the edge of the roof, Lightning closed her eyes and let the wind coil around her, caressing her with its cold hooves. For the first time since she had awoken from sedation, she took a moment to seek out the alien zephyrs of this world, this Earth, feeling them lifting under her wings and filling her lungs. She breathed deep, tasting snow and pine in the air.

‘Fly away…’ she thought. ‘I could fly away, right now. Like Mercy said...just get away and hide. I could go to the Pacific, wherever that is, I could head for the frozen north, somewhere that there are none of these madstallions and madmares...’

But that was horseapples, and she knew it. Something about what she’d been told about this world gone mad told her that sooner or later, there wouldn’t be any such sanctums left.

And the thought of Mercy brought her back to the pony medic’s human friends…

‘Rio...how did I know what was going to happen to her?! How could I have foreseen fucking Nepenthe!? What’s happening to me…?! Am… Why am I here? How am I here?’

No, she stopped herself, forcing a touch of Wonderbolt thinking upon her own thoughts. Mercy was dead now, and so was Rio.

‘...dead…’ the word seemed alien, was this truly her first brush with the grave? Alright, there had been grandma’s funeral but-

’FOCUS!’

Alright, alright. Their fates had been decided, and weren’t the problem at hand. That problem was…

“Maddy,” she called out, as gently as she could. The two syllables sounded harsh and cruel in her ears. “Please come here.”

The human child, shivering and sobbing in the lee of the staircase access, shook her head. She was holding that pendant to her lips and praying, as if it were a charm or a hotline to Celestia.

Unwilling to give up, Lightning went back to her.

“Maddy,” she said again. “We need to get down from this roof.”

She braced herself for some tough love. “I could fly away, but that would mean leaving you here.”

The girl’s hiccuped sobs and whispered appeals to divinity broke off in an instant, and her head snapped up, fresh betrayal glowering in her eyes. Lightning winced internally; but at least she now had Maddy’s attention.

“But I’m not going to do that,” she said quickly, reaching out to place one hoof on her young charge’s shoulder, this time without being shoved away. “I am not going to abandon you.”

“...you will...they always do. Mercy did...even my human birthers did, when I was a baby...now even the Queen has gone away from me… and Rio too! She wanted to change me before I was ready, she broke her promise!”

“I said I won’t abandon you, and I mean it!” Lightning insisted, and on reflex she pulled Maddy into a hug.before the kid could start crying again.

“She promised…” Maddy sobbed. “She promised and she lied!”

“That thing, it wasn’t Rio, and it definitely wasn’t a pony…” she said, stroking the back of the little one’s head as they clung to one another. “Ponies, true ponies, keep their promises, and I am PROMISING you, that I am going to get you out of here safely…”

‘Mercy gave me back the sky...Rio sacrificed herself in trying to keep this girl alive. The least I can do is honor their memory...’

She broke the hug and looked into Maddy’s curiously small, dark eyes. Despite that, they were as full of emotion as those of any pony.

“Do you trust me?”

Maddy hesitated for a second. Her hands had drifted back to the pendant round her neck. It looked like a long, roughly tubular crystal, about three inches long.

The child clutched the object...charm...totem, whatever...as if she wanted to dive into it.

And then she looked into Lightning’s eyes and nodded.

“Thank you,” Lightning smiled. The expression felt alien. For the first time in her life, she, Lumina ‘Lightning’ Dust couldn’t think of flying solo as the only solution to her problems, or detach herself from a situation by running away from it, running away from the emotions it aroused. She was staying.

And by Celestia, she would do something.

...her solution still involved flying though. And running. Still, it wasn’t like she had any choice there.

“I’m going to have to try flying, with you on my back…”

Maddy’s eyes widened subtly, and she wordlessly shook her head. Lightning steadied her with her hooves, and tried to inject a bit of what she knew of Spitfire into her words. Wonderbolts were brave. Wonderbolts… would try to save ponies, she realized.

What would a Wonderbolt do?

“It’s the only way, Maddy. We’ve got to jump off this roof.”

“But we’ll die!”

“Maybe, but I’m sure as Tartarus not staying here! Everything below us is a madhouse! There’s those people with those…”

She struggled for the right word.

“...those weapons that can…”

“Guns?” the kid suggested.

“Yeah. Those. And more of those newfoals…”

Maddy’s expression brightened for a second, and Lightning shuddered.

‘Does she still want to be one of those things?’

“...mad, crazy newfoals that hate the both of us,” she blurted quickly before pointing with one hoof. “But just over there is a train, ready to depart. That’s our way out!”

And then they both heard a horn blow…

“Get on!” she said, spreading her wings. “Trust me, hold on tight, and keep as low to my back as possible.”

‘Yeah...wouldn’t want her to be a sky-anchor AND a giant air-brake, would we?’

Madeline hesitated, and Lightning stomped a hoof.

“Be brave Maddy. Be brave like Rio...or Mercy.”

‘Lies...Mercy was a craven coward...a monster who did unspeakable things...right? No?’

Hesitantly, Maddy climbed onto her back again. Lightning winced at the weight re-asserting itself on her spine, and yet it bore up well, as if the human’s shape was evolutionary suited to riding her...which was a creepy thought, and not relevant right now.

‘Why do I suddenly have an urge to rear and flail my forehooves in the air?’

The train horn blew again, a flat tone that seemed to crash across them both like a wave of sound.

“Hold onto my mane, and tuck your legs in tight! Ready?”

“Nooooo!”

“Sorry, no luck. Here we go!”

She didn’t rear or anything stupidly dramatic like that, which was another first. Instead, she put her head down and charged in a shallow circuit around the roof, gaining speed quickly, hooves clattering on the surface.

‘Can’t just flap off...not with this weight. I’m gonna have to glide off, and then beat these things with all I’ve got!’

Her outstretched wings lifted as they began to catch the air. She felt a familiar tug where their roots met with her spine.

“Almost there…” she shouted. More speed, she needed more speed.

Eons of instinct worked in tandem with her skills as she straightened up and bolted for the edge of the roof. Primary and secondary feathers aligned themselves for maximum lift at takeoff speed, and she subtly arched her back so that they cut better into the air flow.

“Lightning!”

The edge of the roof rushed towards them.

“Not now Maddy!”

She hit Vee-1, the speed at which she was committed to lift off, just as they reached the lip.

“I see another train!” Maddy screeched as they arced off into open air.

“WHAT?”

In the sudden confusion, Lightning’s wings flared, breaking their careful hold on lift. They stalled.

Or, in laypony’s terms, fell out of the sky.

Maddy screamed in fear as they dropped. But Lightning just felt herself flashing back to basic lessons in flight school.

WORK THE PROBLEM! You stall because of insufficient airspeed…

And you gain airspeed, by going faster.

So, instead of desperately flapping for lift, Lightning pointed her nose down and accelerated into a dive. Hospital windows flashed past under her belly as they plunged…

She saw the ground rushing up to splatter against her face, and mentally prepared to try and protect Maddy by taking the brunt of the crash herself..

Something on her flank tingled…

...and then she felt the joyous, magical tug of lift on her wings, and pulled up.

Whooping with glee, Lightning arced through the nadir of the dive inches from the ground, her tucked-in hooves scything through tufts of snow and ice with the sweeping speed of a painter;s brush. Crystalline flakes scattered around the pair of them as they swept upwards, facets shimmering with rainbow hues in the sunlight.

“Ha-ha! YEAH!” Lightning hollered, wings buzzing furiously to maintain forward flight. “Now, what was that about another train?”

“LOOK!”

Lightning did, and found her words best expressed by a word she’d made a close acquaintance of in the past day.

“Fuck.”

The were over the spur-line, heading straight for the train, which was accelerating slowly towards them, hauled at the front by a smoking red box on wheels.

But off to the south, on the main-track, was another train, coming hard and fast. Behind its double-headed power-set was car after car, a silver tail stretching back hundreds of feet.

She glanced back, and saw how ahead the two lines came together at a switch-track. If the two trains met there, tried to pass through it at the same time…

“HOLD ON TIGHT! I’M GONNA GO IN FOR LANDING!”

Their only hope was to warn the people on board this train, the human crew in the red locomotive. Folding her wings in slightly, Lightning dived again, bracing herself for a rough landing on the machine’s flat-topped body…

‘Ponies on the cab! Ponies on the cab!’

There were, indeed, two bucks on the locomotive’s cab roof, smashing at it with their magic, like an octopus trying to crack open a shell.

‘Well, they’ll make a nice brake!’

Rearing back, Lightning screamed in challenge, hooves brought to bear. She struck the first of the two with such force that he was hurled straight back, while she herself stopped all but dead. As Maddy dropped off onto the moving locomotive, her former mount spun herself around and kicked the second unicorn straight off onto the snow-lined roadbed.

‘Newfoals...’ she shuddered, seeing a frozen grin on his face as she launched him away.

And then...

“Oh no!” she heard Maddy cry out.

‘Is she hurt, oh Celestia please don’t let her be hurt!’

Touching down, Lightning spun, and saw Maddy was now crouched over the hole the newfoals had made in the cab roof. The chain of the charm around her neck had snapped as she landed, and the pendant itself had smashed open on metal…

It was hollow!

...and a dose of potion was running out of it, straight through the hole and into the cab.

“Potion! You were wearing a phial of potion the whole time!” Lightning gasped, horrified. “Why!?”

Maddy looked up, confusion in her eyes.

“For when I was ready…” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

And then, from beneath them, there was a colossal CRACK! as some kind of weapon discharged.

“Oh shit!”

Tess felt Jean’s weight fall against her, heavy and dead. Without thinking, she pushed him back up and rolled sideways towards the controls, leery of any more potion dripping down. Jean’s body fell the other way, dribbling blood out of its mouth and onto the spotless floor...even more was coming from the immense exit-wound in the back of his head…

...and from where a mixture of his brains, brains and scalp had splattered across the ceiling in interesting patterns.

She gazed mindlessly at them for a second, and then glanced down, to where she had been absentmindedly cleaning bits of Jean off of the Beretta’s barrel…

...by wiping it on the dead man’s pants.

“OH GOD!” she shrieked, flinging the gun into the corner and crawling backwards on her hands and ass until she bumped into the engineer’s chair. "JEAN!"

Did she have any friends, anyone left in this world that wasn’t dead? Was… was there anyone left? He’d been with her through thick and thin this past day, he’d kept this mad train running… and now, there he was. Dead. Nearly ponified.

She didn’t want to look too closely at his body. The corpses of those that died part-ponified were… unpleasant sights. There were horror-stories about how even hardened morticians had nightmares having handled those twisted messes of body parts and muscle that simply did not work...

“Oh God, oh god… Oh god…” she whispered. “No. Have to keep focus. Calm down, Tess. You’ve got a job to-”

Fate conspired against her, as per bloody usual.

“I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE, BUT YOU NEED TO GET OUT!” an unfamiliar pegasus yelled, barging into the cab and freezing in the rocking, bouncing back door.

Tess scrabbled for the gun and swung it up in both hands.

“YOU,” she hissed. “You… you ponified my engineer!”

“Well… uh.. sort of… look!” the pony stammered, helping a human child down off of the top of the locomotive’s bonnet. She immediately dove behind the child as soon as the kid’s feet touched the deck.

“You’re using a human shield?!” Tess yelled, recognizing the pegasus.

Li...Lightning Dust...yeah, I know her from the news. Rainbow Dash’s second in command and lover…

...she led the attack on Fishguard Harbour...’

“You…” she snarled.

“Look, I know, I’m a horrible pony in this mad world,” Lightning said, speaking faster than Tess had ever heard a pony speak. “You have no reason to trust me. I’m the enemy. But you have to listen to me! There is another train coming, and you need to get this thing going before we all die at the switchtrack!”

“...Do you have any idea who you just ponified?!” Tess yelled. “That was my-”

“I’m sorry, but we have,” Lightning said, “to go.“

The cab rocked as they slowly continued to gain speed...

“You expect me to just take an apology after you ponified my engineer? AFTER YOU KILLED MY FAMILY YEARS AGO!”

“I’m sorry for that too, even if it wasn’t me. And… look, we can argue about this later!” Lightning said. “If you can’t listen to me, listen to Maddy here.”

She pushed the girl gently forward and nodded to her. Tess noticed the mare was trying to keep herself between the girl and the sight of Jean’s not-body.

“Miss Dust is right…there’s another big train coming, bigger than this one!”

Tess waved them over to one side with the gun, and trading sides of the cab, came up to the engineer’s side, the side that faced out towards the main track.

“Don’t...move!” she stressed as she pushed the door open and glanced out. Trees flicked past at jogging pace, interspersed with buildings.

Then...a flash of red and silver metal, overhauling them.

“OH FUCKING GREAT!” she screamed, spinning herself into Jean...the engineer’s seat and shoving the throttle forward. The pitch and tone of the diesel’s motor climbed into a scream, and the controls trembled under her hand…

*

“So how’s this gonna go down?” her mother was asking her. “You going to do your old mum proud?”

The inside of the old airplane hangar stunk with the rich tang of four-stroke petrol, and echoed to the screams of laughing kids and their parents.

A banner overhead read: VENOM RACING WELCOMES YOU!

“Yeah!” Tess laughed as she strapped herself in tight and grasped hold of the steering wheel. It was her fourteenth birthday, and she was finally getting to race one of Mum’s amazing go-karts. “I’m totally going to win, Mum!”

“Alright then,” Gloria Baker smirked, before stepping back and speaking into a handheld microphone.

“And last by not least, in Car #6, in her debutante race, my daughter Tess! Give it up for her, Venom Racing!”

The other patrons cheered.

“Are you ready!?” Gloria called out as the karts were brought to the starting line. Tess’s mother was wearing her old ‘Team Misfile’ racing-suit, and had climbed atop the plinthed XR4Ti she had driven so many times to glory.

Not quite the Stig...more like his awesome rally-driving cousin...

The green flag was in Gloria’s hands.

“I SAID, ARE YOU READY!” she called again, working up the families present to watch their kids race....

The six kids and the gathered crowds called out in the affirmative, and Tess, behind her helmet, grinned in delight.

“THREE...TWO...ONE...GO!”

The flag dropped, and Tess floored it, feeling all of the little Honda Cadet’s 6.5-horsepower…

...riding on top of the 9782’s 4400-horsepower, Tess felt a breath catch in her throat.

‘Mum, Dad...Jean, please be with me.’

Once again she found herself clinging to a machine speeding at ludicrous speeds over ill-kept track. This time though, she was in control...she hoped.

Wheel-slip warnings flashed on the display, and after a few seconds panic she hit a button marked ‘SAND’ on the panel, releasing fines onto the rails to give the wheels more grip. Immediately the train accelerated even further, the needle on the speedo climbing through the 40s and into the 50s.

The draught through the open door tore her loose helmet away, and flicked her hair up into a short brown mane that flashed behind her as she leaned on the throttle lever.Her eyes flashed sideways, seeing that the other train’s locomotives were pacing them…

‘Why...why don’t they hail me?’

“You!” she barked at Maddy, and pointed at the horn control. “Hold down on that!”

The child obliged, and 9782 blared a note of challenge to the speeding train drawing closer to it as the tracks converged.

There was no response. Behind the double-header that was hauling the other train, a string of passenger cars trailed out, brushed silver bodywork with gold and red detailing…the words ‘Grand Continental’ gleaming bright...

...except for where some of the windows were smeared with potion residue...or just plain smashed and broken.

They were racing a death-train...a ghost. An abattoir on wheels, kept running through poor luck and likely a corpse in the wrong place.

“Stop!” Maddy cried out. “There’ll be ponies on that train. Innocent ponies!”

“SHUT UP!” Tess roared in the kid’s face. “There are NO! INNOCENT! PONIES! Just newfoals, and killers!”

“HEY!” Lightning Dust snapped back, even if she had nodded to the words. “Don’t yell at her like that.”

Tess flipped a finger at her, before inverting it onto the horn button. The resulting blare of air shut everyone up.

“Look at what’s at your feet, and tell me there’s an innocent pony here! Maybe there’s some with the PHL, maybe there’s some hiding out in the pacific! But there sure as fuck are not any right here in this town! And even if there were, THEY WOULDN’T DO THAT!”

The train lurched as she surged towards the switch.

“Miss Dust didn’t cause that…” Maddy said, in a soft voice. “I did...”

She sounded...proud. And then the child stepped up to Tess and glared accusingly at her.

“He would have been happy as a pony...if you hadn’t MURDERED HIM!”

Tess held back her every urge to smack the ten-year old in the face. Could nobody on this train catch a break - wait, shit. Tess was answering her own question.

“Sit down, cuddle your friend, and shut...up…” she seethed, and glanced down at the controls, abashed but unreprentant. “Just let me win this one time…”

She glanced in her rear view mirror and saw that they were leaving the other train behind…gaining ground on it with every second as both tracks came together.

“Maddy, hold onto me!” Lightning Dust said as they thundered into the last hundred feet The child lurched across the cab, tripped on Jean’s body, and fell into the mare’s hooves.

“Here we go!” Tess called, as the speedometer needle kissed 65mph.

They reached the switch, and the train jumped sideways on the curve, the whole cab lifting on one side as momentum tried to roll them off the rails.

‘Don’t brake, don’t brake, NEVER try to brake a train with this much weight behind in the middle of a curve...you’ll only throw in enough slack to wreck everything off...’

And then they cleared it, the wheels singing out a series of bangs as they flew over the switch-blades.

“Are we clear?” Lightning asked.

“Not yet...we’ve got to make the final curve...I just hope someone set the junction after we left the yard…”

Lightning pulled herself and Maddy into the conductor’s seat. Ahead, just as the railroad hit the town centre, the rails divided, throwing off the connection to the yard on one side, and the main leading straight on…

Tess saw the pegasus glance in her own side-mirror, towards the Grand Continental, which was still charging along behind them...a battering ram to deliver a killing blow if they did derail.

“If this switch at the junction’s not set… we won’t live, with we?”

“Not at this speed, no.”

“Miss Dust...I’m scared.”

“I know Maddy...but be brave.”

And looking out of the corner of her eye, Tess saw the two souls trying to comfort one another seconds from death, and had never felt more alone…

It was almost a disappointment to glide through the junction with not so much as a bump. Releasing a breath that she had not even been aware she was holding, Tess gently tapped the air brake, and felt the whole train shudder several times as the couplings tightened, each vehicle’s momentum buffering it into the next along.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s like driving a car…” Tess muttered. “You brake going into the curve, and then you accelerate out of it. You geddit?”

“Uh, I think so…” Lightning Dust admitted. “Just one question.”

“Okay?”

“What’s a car?”

At this point, Tess did one of the most understandable things a human being could have done in that situation. Which was to say, she facepalmed. “...What?”

“Pony, remember?” Lightning said, and waggled a hoof.

“Yes, but you’ve been IN this world, right? You’ve hopefully seen enough to have…” she stared at Lightning’s face. By God, she really didn’t know.

BANG!

The whole cab jolted, knocking them forward in their seats.

“Hell! What the fuck was that?” Tess cursed, trying to ride on the power controls as they sped towards the ninety-degree turn out of the town.

Lightning spun around herself and stared back, eyes narrowed as 9782 continued to shudder and groan, pitting its brakes against another driving force.

“The other train, it’s caught us in the rear! It’s pushing us!”

A speed limit limited sign flashed past, shining for a second in the locomotive’s headlights: Unelevated Curve: 45mph max.

“We’re going too fast! It’ll forceh us off and pile on top of us!”

And then, suddenly, the shaking stopped. Tess felt the controls move freely again in her hands...instead of fighting her, the speedometer dropped like it was wearing concrete slippers.

“C’mon! C’MON!” she worked the levers with both hands. “Full air...full dynamic, shut throttle...WHAT HAPPENED BACK THERE!?”

Lightning and Maddy scrambled off their seat and each pressed herself to a rear window on each side of the cab.

“The other train, it’s slowing down….there’s sparks flying from its wheels!” Maddy cried out.

“I thought it was death on rails!” Lightning yelled. “Who applied it’s brakes...oh shit, here we go!”

The tracks spun out from under 9782’s wheels as they hit the curve, the surge of sideways momentum throwing all three of them against Tess’s side of the cab. Jean’s body rolled onto its back...its empty, violet eyes seemed to stare into Tess’s soul as she struggled to pull herself back to the controls…

*

“Do you want to take the regulator Tess?” a middle-aged man asked her, wiping sweat from his brow with a spotted handkerchief.

“But… I’m not passed out to drive yet!” eighteen-year old Tess blurted in surprise, before eagerly throwing down her short-handed fireman’s shovel and jumping up towards him. “Oh Dad, can I?”

‘Taliesin’, the tiny little steam locomotive that they were crewing, was flowing smoothly downhill over the rails, a train of happy tourists laughing and clattering behind as they came down the mountainside into the Vale of Ffestiniog, up here in the top-left-hand corner of Wales.

“Well, I’m the line’s Chief Mechanical Engineer and qualified to instruct registered volunteers…” Evan Edwin Jones began, before finding himself suddenly being politely but insistently shoved aside by his daughter. “Hey, steady on!”

“Oh c’mon Dad, get out of my way!” she said. Laughing, the two of them swapped sides of the compact footplate, and Tess rested her hand on the polished steel lever. Quickly she made an expert check of the brass-and-glass gauges, observing boiler, brake and steam-chest pressure.

“Okay, we’re going down, so you’ll only need a whiff of steam,” her father said, sitting back against the handbrake screw and propping up his feet on the boiler backhead, a mug of tea in his hand. “But on the tighter curves, I want you to gently ease on the locomotive brakes to haunch the carriages together, and then once you feel the bulk of the train has come through the apex, open her back out and pull the couplings tight again.”

The smell of hot metal and cylinder-oil merged with the scent of a forest in bloom. It was a perfect, crisp spring afternoon in Snowdonia, and the Welsh hills and valleys were filling with colour as the daffodils began to bloom.

“Okay...here comes the curve over the Cei Mawr. You ready?”

“Ready!” Tess called out, and eased on 'Taliesin's' steam brake in little bursts. The carriages banged together, the wheels shrieked as they came onto the bend, built up high on a drystone embankment over a side-gulley, the entire train perched on the narrow construct like a parkour maestro running along a beam.

“Wait, for it...wait for it...and…”

“NOW!” she cried aloud, forcing the throttle forward to its stops. 9782 surged forward with the ease of a sprinter on her second wind, and accelerated the train through the end of the curve and out of the railyard. There was a clatter as they jumped the river-bridge, and then they were free…

...a terrible cacophony of sound exploded behind them, of metal crushing metal and rolling-stock being crushed like cardboard canisters. Tess knew what it was, had heard it just the night before.

“Wh...what was that?” tiny Maddy asked. Lightning Dust, expression suddenly fearful, snuck a look out of her back window and then looked away, ears folded flat in grief and eyes shut.

“The other train…” she said.

“...it didn’t make it through the curve,” Tess finished grimly, trying (and failing) not to think about the poor occupants of that train, the Grand Continental.

‘Oh God...I saw it being loaded with people back at Shearwater...and heard Paul order the crew aboard. Frank, and Will...and old Al Turner...’

There were no possibilities that weren’t unnerving beyond all belief.

“Don’t look back Maddy, don’t look…” Lightning Dust was whispering to the child, who was now instead staring open-eyed down at Jean’s corpse.

Afraid of what she herself might see, Tess snuck a sideways glance into her mirror. Beyond the length of the train…her train, she could see smoke and dust rising high into the air.

“Yn enw’r Tad, a’r Mab, a’r Ysbryd Glan, Amen…” she whispered.

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost... a prayer for the ghost train.

Claire had fallen silent some minutes ago. Her eyes were closed and a faint smile was on her lips. Laura was alone now. She’d heard the sound of a train derailing, and was now quietly basking in the aftermath.

Crackling flames, the sound of metal flexing as it was heated.

And more than a few screams…

“What do I fear more…” she muttered to herself, holding the remote detonator marked 'LEPERFALL' in her hands. “Fire...or water…”

Fire was an old friend to her. She’d welcome it with open arms. But water...water drowned and choked. Water promised a dark oblivion from which there was no escape…

Yeah, water was an asshole, and she was going to go down kicking that ass.

“Alright girl…” she said, pulling out the sidearm that had so fascinated Tess, an immensely modified Colt frame with a ten-inch slide, chambered for .454 Casull rounds. She’d nicknamed it the Jericho, to compliment Claire’s own gun, the 13mm Jackal. “I always promised I’d be the one who killed you.”

She held the detonator in one hand, and levelled the gun at the unconscious Claire’s temple with the other. If her best friend...her bitchfriend, wasn’t dead already, then she’d make sure the end came quickly and painlessly.

I heard that bitch Jones’ train get out...good luck to her...she’s riding the last train that’s getting out of here alive...’

And then, without hesitation, she pulled both triggers.

’See you all in Hell.

The charges had been set all around Truro, to deny the town to any looters. The PHL was thorough, and ruthless when the time called for it.

The Stanford clothing factory, with its stockpiles of invaluable battle-dress and armor, went first. Industrial-strength demolition charges made short work of the foundations, and toppled the whole structure sideways into the river.

The university farm, town hall, and the rail bridge went next.

Finally, they brought down the wall of the town’s reservoir, a mile up in the hills. Millions of gallons of water, freed from captivity, immediately poured out and flooded down Leper’s Creek, a rocky gully that led straight into the town centre.

By the time it arrived, it was an all-consuming frozen avalanche of mud and rock, with uprooted trees for teeth.

Truro died in water, taking with it countless lives who might have escaped, had they the chance. The PHL were nothing if not thorough.

Ironically, the part of the town least touched was that where the newfoals had gathered, around the hospital and feed silos. Everything else was washed away, scraped off the land in seconds by the freezing flow. For decades to come, after the Barrier fell, people would find bodies of newfoals all over the area, those same ghastly smiles affixed to their faces.

With battle ended, the remaining casualties (for who could define newfoals as survivors?) all turned towards the east, and against freezing wind and snow, began to trot towards the barrier...

… except for one, who stood in a corridor of the hospital, grinning inanely as she quietly laid out Mercy’s body on its back, and pressed a bloodstained pair of photographs into the dead pony’s hooves.

‘Interesting behaviour...’ whispered the voice in her head, the voice that sounded so much like Twilight Sparkle. ‘Why was your first instrinct to come back to the place where you were born? And those photographs...did you recognise anyone in them?’

Nepenthe had no real answers for those questions. Oh she had glanced at the photos quickly, and had recognised the Pegasus medic named ‘Merciful Light’ in both of them. In one, she’d been smiling with her arms around a human mare who wore her mane in red-and-black stripes. It looked like they’d been caught in the middle of a cardgame.

In the second, Mercy was sitting between a different pair of humans. One was a foal… the same creature that had escaped on that traitor Lightning Dust.

The other, well yes that did feel familiar somehow...a faint, distant echo screamed inside of her, almost entirely silenced… dying.

‘Rio! My name was Rio...’

The pony named Nepenthe ignored the screams, which were growing fainter the whole time. Then, as she left, her horn flared, igniting Mercy’s corpse, and both of the photos. The flames reflected brilliantly in her sparkling armor, and her perfectly groomed mane and brushed coat shimmered in harmony.

She drew of her both swords and twirled them at her side, stalking away down the corridor. They felt so right in her grasp, a part of her, so malleable and full of potential, yet with such singular focus and purpose.

Bright...beautiful...lethal.

Magically she tossed one gladius in the air, and it came down as a dagger that she caught in her mouth. As she stepped through the outside doors and onto the hospital’s entrance steps, she swung her head to one side, and drove the blade into the face of a HLF straggler who had been crouched outside, rifle in hand.

It went right through his head and pinned it to the wall behind, embedded so deeply that she had to transmute it back into liquid metal to retrieve it.

‘So strong and skilled...I was a fool to try and pilot you directly. No, it’s much better to let you run yourself, see how far you can develop and improve...see how many others you can raise in your image...’

Nepenthe trotted on, and found a broken newfoal with a busted spine, half-drowned in a ditch.

“Hi!” she said, before swinging her weapons together into their war-hammer configuration, and brought it down hard on his head. “Bye!”

His dying twitch prompted another faint wail from within. Something about how ponies should not kill...

But a stronger voice was giving her instructions now, to the Glory of the Sun.

She paused, seeing herself reflected in the spreading pool of blood and water, and considered her hammer. Under the influence of her magic, a portion of it peeled off and snapped around her head, forming a neat little silver tiara with a red garnet at its centre.

She served the Sun...was the Property of her Queen...fought as her Warrior Maid...and should comport and attire herself accordingly. Let all who saw her know the Owner she loved and fought in the name of.

“Creativity and self-awareness as well...good girl… my wonderful creature…” crooned the Configuration Daemon. “Now, continue the experiment… and follow that train.”

Confirm all systems locked to auto-law. I/O ports sealed. Unit is now Self-Governing.

And the supersoldier, that had once been a nurse named Rio Deneter, swung her hammer, and smiled with honest glee.

“I hunt.”

After ten or eleven miles Tess eased back on the throttle and began to coax the brakes. It wasn’t easy… bringing the animal that was 9782 and its train to a halt was like trying to stop a battleship with wishful thinking. Eventually, you had to resort to dropping the anchor…

And of course, she wanted out of Truro. No more PHL, PER, or HLF, no more psychopaths… no more madness.

In the end, after several more miles of trying to stop gently, she’d given up and just shoved the brake lever over into a full service application. The train had drawn up sharply then, just short of a steel trestle over a wooded gorge. A small river followed at the bottom, along with an abandoned highway.

It was as good a place as any to lay Jean’s remains to rest.

And with him, were consigned what remained of the unicorn filly named Firelock. Tess had felt no love for the little monster, but when she’d checked over 9782 to find what had caused that electrical fire back in the yard...

...well, the sight of Firelock’s mangled corpse being dragged along under the locomotive, her hindlimbs caught up in one of the traction-motors, shorting it perfectly...

It had been enough to make her feel some remorse.

Obscenely, the kid’s battle-saddle barely had a scratch on it, and one of her two rifles was still usable.

The ‘funeral’, if it could be called that, was minimal. None of them had the strength left to dig a grave. Instead, they had manhandled Jean and Firelock’s bodies under one of the trestle’s approach spans, and covered them over with a tarpaulin.

Tess had tried not to look too closely at Jean, not wanting to see where fur had started to burst through his cheeks...or where the shot she had fired had punched through his head.

She’d said a few words, after making it clear to Lightning and Maddy that they were not welcome to join her, and closed her eyes.

“Thanks… I guess. I’ll keep on going, like you said Jean. Like you said.”

Her hands trembled and she suddenly dropped to her knees.

“Oh Christ, I’m so sorry! If I hadn’t been with you you’d have probably picked up that train with no issue and been halfway across the next province by now! Instead, you’re dead!”

Her face was flushed and her breathing rough, and yet she didn’t cry.

“You’re not the first...I said I worked as a ferry steward right? Well, I managed to bag my parents and boyfriend and myself a ride on one of the last ferries out of Wales, ahead of the barrier. But I screwed up!”

She rested her face against the jacket and screamed, as if into a pillow.

“I panicked. When they didn’t arrive I boarded the ship alone...I thought they were dead! But when we sailed, I saw them on the dock...AND THEY WERE LOOKING FOR ME! THEY GOT THERE BEFORE THE DEPARTURE BUT STAYED BEHIND TRYING TO FIND ME, BECAUSE I WASN’T THERE TO MEET THEM!”

She wanted to release, wanted the tears to come…but she was dry, just as she had been ever since that day on the ferry.

“And then Lightning Dust came...her and her damn so called ‘angels of Mercy’...I passed out on deck, screaming for them...I killed them, Jean. And I killed those evacuees last night, and those hostages today...and now you. That creepy kid might have dropped the potion, but I’m the one you jumped to defend...I’m the one who...who executed you.”

She hoped for a breath of wind, a whisper from on high, a ghostly touch on her shoulder. There was nothing.

“So, that’s it...everywhere I go, I get people killed. And now, again, I’m all alone. So I’ll keep my promise, and get this fucking train to Montreal…”

She swallowed.

"And… then maybe I’ll blow my brains out."

With that promise, she stood and tipped her head in respect. No salute or ceremonial gunshot, he deserved better than damn military honors.

Instead, she stood, thought long and hard for a moment, and then began to recite something she remembered from her childhood, an epitaph that her father had once shared with her.

As the last words sighed out of her, she turned to what was left of Firelock, and placed one of the filly’s rifles in between her forehooves. It’s barrel was bent, but she hoped it would be some comfort to the kid’s spirit, wherever it was that ponies went…

“Thanks…” she said at last, and for the filly’s sake alone, drew the Beretta and fired a single shot up into the open sky.

Then, as she climbed back up to the roadbed, she realised she was not as alone as she had hoped.

"Youre’ gonna blow your brains out?” said Lightning Dust, from where she was sitting on a rail, within earshot. “Why would you do that? Heck, when you let that bang off I was afraid you’d gone and done it."

“What do you want?” Tess said darkly, hands hanging limply at her side.

“Safe passage for Maddy and me. Neither of us have anywhere to go, so staying with the train seems best. It’s safe, heated, and has food supplies.”

“Supplies provided for the guy that damn ‘Child of the Corn’ potioned!”

Lightning’s ears flopped low. “Yeah...and I’m sorry what she said. I know why you did...what you did to him...I’ve seen what the potion does to people…”

She sighed and then looked up, resolve in her gaze as she stared Tess down.

“But it’s not her fault she’s the way she is. It’s the fault of how she was raised...you can’t blame her for that, anymore than you can blame me for looking like the mare who killed your family.”

Tess positively growled and then turned around. “Fine.”

“So we can come with?” Lightning asked, suddenly hopeful.

“Only so you can make it clear to me how in the hell you’re NOT the Lightning Dust I know...and you can start by cleaning up the cab...I’ll fix the hole in the roof so long as you guys scrub the mess off the ceiling.”

Blood, and brains…

Lightning shuddered, and then paused.

“You’ve still not told me why you’re planning on killing yourself.”

"Because I want to die on my own terms!” Tess snapped. “I don’t want to become a pony nor be the last one standing as the barrier closes in… and I don’t want to grow any older or bitterer than I am now. I lost my soul long ago, but I get to decide when it goes to Hell."

Having spat that out, Tess strode on towards the train, an angry figure in a yellow hoodie and tactical-vest. As she went however, she tossed something back towards the pony, something she’d plucked off of Jean himself.

“What’s this?” Lightning asked, clutching at a circular blue patch with a white lyre and laurel wreath printed on it.

“The only thing that’ll keep most people from shooting you on sight! You say you’re not Lightning Dust the mass-murderer, fine by me, but you’re still a fucking horse, and most people will want to gut you on those grounds alone. Wear that badge and you might just deter a few vigilantes.”

“But what does it mean? What’re ‘Ponies For Human Life’?”

“According to their own account, the good guys, but everyone says that. But they just blew up a fucking town! From what I’ve seen, they’re just another bunch of psychos, but with decent PR. Jean trusted them enough to wear their badge though, so I suggest you make your own fucking mind up!”

Maddy was sitting on the locomotive’s step, sipping at a cup of tea. One of Jean’s spare jackets hung off her tiny frame. As Tess strode up, the asian child’s impossibly old eyes stared into her own…

‘Murderer...’ they seemed to say, silently.

Scowling, Tess broke eye contact and stalked on down the train’s length, towards the back. It was late afternoon now, and shading towards evening. The storm had abated for a little while, and long winter shadows were forming on the hillside along which the tracks were laid.

‘When did I last sleep? During the night, between Halifax and Truro...’

It was only a few hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime.

As she approached the two cabooses, she drew her pistol and cocked it.

“ALRIGHT, COME ON OUT!” she bellowed. “I know you’re in there!”

Nobody answered. Unabated she continued to harangue the silence.

“The Grand Continental was chasing us, and it sure as hell didn’t stop by itself. Someone applied the brakes, and given the timing, I’m betting that ‘someone’ was a stowaway who reached back from this caboose and opened the air-brake turncock on the front of the GC’s leading locomotive!”

She scrambled up onto the caboose’s access platform and kicked the door open.

“Now who the fu...YOU!”

A familiar brown mare was lying low between the stacked caskets, with a tied-up stallion laid out beside her.

“Hi!” smirked Verity Carter. “Yeah, I saved your life. And for my next trick…”

She waved her forehooves around at the sealed cargo.

“... I’ll explain why you’re rolling north with a stolen cargo of Totem-Proles!”

Truro lay silent and dead. The newfoals had long gone and night had fallen, a still and absolutely silent darkness before the scheduled arrival of the Barrier in the wee hours of dawn...

Well, almost silent.

In ‘Elsinore’, the vaingloriously titled ‘base’ the lately lamented Atlas Galt had made in the Home Hardware store, a radio crackled. There was virtually nobody around left to hear it, save for dead newfoals and a few waterlogged survivors almost certain to freeze in the cold.

The set was tuned to 121.5 Mhz, the internationally-recognised frequency for emergency calls.

Ironically, the ones broadcasting had sealed their own fate not hours earlier.

“...Hello?! Are you receiving me?! This is 2nd Lieutenant Jonathan Birch’s unit requesting immediate fire support. HLF!”

It was also worth mentioning that anyone who might have picked up the transmission, and knew Birch, would have simply left him to die.

“We tried to supply ourselves from a stash up at Wentworth, at the pass by Folly Lake, and then hold the highway and railroad there, but we’re-ARGH!”

…

“...did you get through Private? Oh, shit! Alright, this is Jonathan Birch speaking on the approved distress channel, is anyone receiving us?! We are under attack from a superior enemy force… the armies of evil themselves are-”

“Hello there! Silly guy, I’m not an army, just myself!”

“DIE DEVIL!”

BANG! BANG! BANG! CLICK!

“Are you done now?”

“Twisted little monster. What kind of newfoal are you?”

“The first of many, and one with some very specific needs. What’s your name, oh powerful human leader?”

"My name is go fuck yourself!"

“Your parents must not have liked you! But I’d rather do that with you…”

“What!?”

THUMP!

“See, I was created to fulfil some very specific tasks, and right now, I’ve yet to test myself on all of them…”

“Whore! Slut!”

“Heehee, no, or is it yes? But I can see from how this little soldier is standing to attention that it’s working. Aren’t I a sexy little newfoal, 2nd Lieutenant?”

"No, you’re an ugly piece of shit… ah… ahhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaa..."

“You liked that...do you want more?”

“You’re… an animal, a shit eating horse.... oh Lord that tongue of yours!”

“I’ll ask again, do you want more…do you want to feel like that, allllllll the time.”

“Oh fuck yes, degrade yourself all you want. I’ll show you how a real man treats a fucking turd like yo-”

SNAP!

“-AIEEAEEaaaaaarrghHHHH! You bit it off! You fucking bit it off!”

“...PHWOO… but of course… I needed a tissue sample after all. Oh, look at it there, so small and weak on the floor - let’s change it into a nice dose of potion, shall we?”

“-AH! You raped me! You fucking raped me and bit off my damn dick!”

“Well, I did need to test myself in the field. Step one of the experiment was to see how effective my conditioning was. Given I killed all your men, and then managed to seduce you in under two minutes, I’d say that’s a success. Hrm… I wonder if I’m emitting pheromones…well now, let’s move onto stage two...”

"Shut up! Get this over with, turn me into a fucking pastel shit eating pony or kill me!"

“As you wish!”

SPLAT!

“I did promise more of what you wanted, so here it is”

“Ah… oh Lord… Father be with me… ARGH!”

“I know you’re in pain, but I will give you pleasure, and it will last forever…”

“What is that thing where my dick used to… oh god, is that a pus-sss… ah, oh Christ, my voice!”

“A beautifully sweet voice, yes… interesting… you’re becoming a mare… was that the effect castrating you had? No, ponification normally runs off genetic markers for basic details such as gender… maybe it’s just because you’re templated off me… ah well, it doesn’t matter.”

“NO! NO! NO!… though I walk through the valley in the sha-addddd-in the--in the light of Her Sun, I shall fear no evil, for She art with me. Her words and truth speak through mehehehehehe!”

“Okay, so a young adult pegasus mare… fascinating colours, almost hypnotic? Ah I see... Your pigmentation is laced with oneirochromatophores, like Mistress Fluttershy’s swarms of Everfree Monarch Butterflies! Perhaps your talent will be mental domination…and oh, I think a royal blue is going to be the perfect trim for your armor, and I’m sure I can conjure you up some wing-blades!”

“Oh wow, this feels so amazing, so alive! I’m so lovely and perfect and now everyone will listen to me at last! Hi there!!”

“Hello there, I’m the Pretty Private Nepenthe, who are you?”

“Oh, I’m a Pretty Private too...call me Sugarcane! I speak for the Sun!”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Author's Notes:

Well, hope that was as unnerving to read as it was to write.

This officially brings us up to the end of the First Act of Last Train. The next update will be a mini-chapter and sucessor to 'Lost in Dispatches' that will seed some future plot points.

Sorry for indulging everyone's patience during the wait for this chapter - I took some time off for a trip to London that proved very inspirational however, so hopefully all's cool.

As ever, special thanks to the Spectrum Writing Team, but also to this chapter's special guest editor and creative consultant, reader and reviwer Vox Adam. Give him a round of applause everyone.

Cheers guys, and if anyone has any thoughts on this chapter or the story as a whole, feel free to drop me a line.

Nb: Poor little Firelock is a background filly I discovered on the fandom wiki. It's a fandom-allocated name, but seemed perfect for the personality I had in mind.

Nbb: Jean's epitaph is a real poem composed in memory of Thomas Scaife, an early English engine driver killed by a boiler explosion in 1840.