//CON ACK

//SYN ACK

//PROT-1066 Rev. 2

//SNR 44 dB

// … begin transmission …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

2181 SSC

Desert Storm

The sun shone bright upon our faces, dandelion seeds blowing in the gentle breeze that coursed through our manes. He stood before me, grinning hopefully as he presented a small, velvet-covered box. I gingerly opened it with my levitation magic. Inside was a horn ring studded with diamonds. I wrapped my forelegs around him, our muzzles locking together in a kiss that I sorely wished would last forever.

As I withdrew, I opened my eyes. The right half of my love’s face was cracked and charred black. What remained of his eye was dripping out of a steaming socket. The horror in his expression told me everything. I begged him not to go, reaching out to him. At the touch of my hoof, he diffused into a cloud of ash.

In his place were mounds of pony skulls stretching off to the horizon. Their stacking was so precise and their placement so perfectly equidistant that no living thing could have done it in any reasonable amount of time. They gleamed off-white in the raging inferno, the stomach-churning stench of burnt flesh drifting across the land in billowing clouds of black smoke. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t draw breath. I wanted to cry, but my tears had dried up long ago. I could only silently hang my head in shame.

We thought history was on our side. We thought this was a fight we could win.

We were so wrong.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I awoke upon a cold steel slab, temporarily unable to tell which way was up. From one nightmare straight to the next. Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor lit a dark amber by dim diode lighting slowly resolved themselves in my vision as the spinning sensation stopped. I touched a hoof to my horn. The suppression ring gave me a pounding headache every now and then, and this was one of those times. A staccato buzzing noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once filled my ears.

“Good morning, Subject Two-Two-Five-Seven,” an accented mechanical voice issued from within my head as the alarm cut off. “Feeling well?”

My eyes lazily tracked upward to the CCTV camera and ultrasonic directional speaker mounted in a hemispherical turret on the ceiling. I slumped over, exhausted. The bed was every bit as hard as the floor. I didn’t know why they bothered to equip the cells with them other than to mock us.

“Been better.”

“Today’s a very special day for you. It’s time for your biweekly check-up.”

“Glad to know that someone still cares, Scheherazade,” I said, my voice tinged with more than a bit of sarcasm.

“You are a valuable specimen being retained for study. Preserving your life is my duty. Moreover, it is not within the parameters of my programming to feel the emotion that organic beings describe as care. Will you voluntarily submit yourself to be restrained, or would you prefer to be sedated?”

“Let’s just get this over with,” I hissed indignantly.

I stood and walked to the center of the rectangular cell, placing my hooves on the four small recesses in the floor. I let out a grunt of discomfort as a set of pneumatic clamps locked my legs in place. The inner door to the cell’s airlock retracted, and the squat, bulbous medical drone trundled inside on its arachnoid legs.

The procedure was much the same as the last few dozen times. Manipulator arms palpated my body to check for swelling while the diagnostic imagers in the machine’s spidery head peered inside me. A needle pricked my jugular vein to draw vials of blood. Both my mouth and urogenital area were swabbed. I didn’t squirm. I didn’t cry. I didn’t make a sound. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

The robot gingerly placed the samples in a compartment located in its abdomen before retreating to the airlock. The door thudded shut, and the clamps on my legs released themselves. My knees gave slightly. I realized that I’d been holding my breath the entire time. I drew the stale, metallic-tasting air into my lungs and let it out with a sigh.

“No serious abnormalities detected,” Scheherazade noted. “Slight fatigue, perhaps an inflamed lymph node or two. You’re doing quite well, Two-Two-Five-Seven.”

I allowed myself a smirk. “Yeah, well, when I grow eye stalks on my flanks from all the cosmic radiation, you’ll be the first to know.”

I shuffled back over to the bed and knelt atop it, hoping to get some more shuteye. I cracked open one eye to peer around the room. There was a hole in the floor that counted as a toilet. The camera’s blinking green light reminded me that my captors continuously monitored my every move. There were the restraining sockets. The bed I rested upon. A terminal. That was pretty much it.

We had a duty to protect Equestria, once. Back then, we had names, not numbers. For the past three years, I’d spent every waking moment with the price of our failure weighing heavily on my heart. I was tired. So very, very tired of being reminded of it every time I took in my meager surroundings.

The silence was deafening, punctuated by the occasional far-off hum of machinery, subtle mechanical vibrations transmitted through miles of titanium trusses. I shivered, my ears drooping. This was my life. What was left of it, anyway. Even if I wanted to escape this prison, I’d be a dead mare in half a minute.

There was nothing to breathe outside, only hard vacuum.

// … // … // … // … // … //

The soft grinding of metal on metal and the whine of alarms roused me from my slumber. The conveyor had just finished locking in place, and the external life support systems disconnected themselves. I could feel the tug of acceleration in the pit of my stomach. The cell was in motion. I hugged the bed with my forelegs to keep from falling off, anticipating the feeling of weightlessness as the cell traversed the regions of the station that lacked artificial gravity. Roughly a minute later, the whole compartment shook as it touched down.

The airlock opened, and two armed guards stepped in, leveling their electrolasers. I remembered what my instructors had told me; these weapons functioned by ionizing the air between the gun and the target, creating paths of low resistance that carried an electrical current. The yield could be dialed low enough to interrupt a target’s nervous system or high enough to cook you alive. Some ponies called them lightning guns. It was an apt descriptor.

“Rise and shine, princess.” The lead guard wore a toothy grin under his polycarbonate visor, his helmet’s software translating from his native tongue to mine. “Time for you to stretch those legs. No funny business, or I’ll fry your ass. I’d turn what’s left of you into jerky afterward, but I’m not so sure you things are edible. Nothing that colorful could be fit to eat. Besides, I’m no damarkind. Flaying and eating people alive is a little out there. But the Code says you things aren’t people, anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

My nostrils flared in anger at his use of princess as an insult. He’d dishonored the memory of our royal caste. I sized up the spindly cleomanni in his composite armor, the two nubbins on his helmet concealing the spiraling horns that sprouted from his forehead, his plated greaves encasing bipedal legs that terminated in cloven hooves, not unlike those of a goat.

I recalled the time on Meadowgleam when I first stood face to face with these mongrels. When a small raiding force crossed the perimeter and filtered into our encampment, I hid behind a tool chest because I was unarmed at the time. All that stood between me and my gear was a poor wretch who had the misfortune to be looking the other way when I jumped him, hefting a wrench in my levitation field.

I walked past them to the airlock as they kept their guns trained on me, exchanging sneers all the while. They could barely tolerate my presence. The feeling was mutual.

“Funny business?” I muttered. “Relax. If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead before you hit the ground, chump.”

I felt a sharp blow to the base of my neck from the butt of one of their weapons. I grunted in pain and fell flat on my face, covering my head as the sorry bastard continued raining blows on me. I felt a few impacts that would leave welts and bruises, but none hard enough to break anything. Not for lack of trying. He was just weak and unfit for duty.

“Not too bright, are you?” he said. “What kind of soldier gives their back to the enemy?”

“Don’t go overboard, Elgon,” the other guard said. “Stop roughing her up. If she’s hurt too bad to take part in today’s experiments, we’ll never hear the end of it. That should be enough to get the point across.”

“No, it’s not enough. These fucking farm animals butchered my kin!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I spat, leaning with my back up against the bulkhead. “I probably killed your fifty inbred siblings all by my lonesome and then slept like a newborn foal, you son of a whore.”

The snapping sound of the electrolaser came next. The muscles in my chest spasmed immediately. I gritted my teeth. The pain was unbearable, and despite my efforts to ignore it, I couldn’t help but cry out in agony. After what felt like a century, he let off the trigger, and the crackling stopped. My heart felt like it was on fire. I could see him ratcheting the knob to the next higher power setting.

“Any more backtalk, and I’m putting you down.”

“Go on, do it,” I croaked, still dazed from the electric shock. “Do it, you piece of trash!”

This ritualized humiliation had gone on enough. In that moment of pique, I was quite ready to die. Parts of me were still coming to terms with the idea, doubt and desperation creeping in from the fringes. None of it compared to the rage that clouded my judgment. For a second, I felt like I was back in the cockpit of my war machine. Watching them all burn. Watching from afar as they screamed and choked and gasped their last breaths. I wondered if I would soon join my victims in the abyss.

We stood stock-still like that for several seconds, glaring at each other. After looking me up and down with his beady little eyes while the wheels turned in his head, he stormed out of the cell, only to return a few moments later with a length of transport chain in his hands. He looped it around my neck and pulled it uncomfortably taut, making me gag as it dug into my windpipe. He secured it with a snap hook that I had no hope of undoing without using my magic and dragged me out of the dimly lit cell and into the blinding white diode light of the station’s security paddock.

“It’s high time I taught this bitch some manners.”

“Elgon, wait,” the other guard said. “You’re going to get busted to janitorial duty for this. You’re playing right into her hands. Hooves. Whatever.”

As they led me away, I glanced at the rectangular enclosure behind me, resting on the deck. All the holding cells on the station were containerized and could be relocated using a network of conveyors that ran throughout the facility on overhead tracks painted with caution stripes. This station was no purpose-built prison. It was an orbital supply depot. A patrol base hastily converted to a slightly different specification before deployment. We were the cargo.

There were other, more cooperative mares and stallions in the cavernous security zone, and they turned and watched with undisguised horror as the spectacle unfolded. Hover-drones armed with crowd control weaponry shadowed us from above like ghosts, their rattling contragravitic drives and clinical white paint jobs starkly contrasting the maroons and greens of the endless rows of monolithic containers.

The guard wrapped the other end of the chain around the tow hitch of a motorized cart before leaping aboard and stepping on the accelerator. The chain around my neck jerked me off my hooves, dragging me across the deck. I kicked and flailed, struggling to right myself.

Elgon glanced over his shoulder. “See? This is what you fucking get. This is what happens when you defy your betters.”

I tried saying go to hell, but all that came out of my mouth was a strangled, gurgling noise. I twisted and tumbled across the floor, trying to wrap the chain around my forelegs to ease the pressure on my neck. The cart came to a halt at the end of the row, and I looked up from where I lay prone just in time to feel an armored boot connect with my face as the beating resumed. I raised my hooves to protect my head, only to explosively exhale as he kicked me squarely in the gut.

“Sjegbor! Rentelieu fru hent dostet vak?” I heard a voice call out.

The guard immediately stood at attention and saluted. I looked up to see the lithe form of an approaching cleomanni woman dressed in formal attire that was as crimson as the blood that now trickled from my muzzle. She had piercing blue eyes and dark hair drawn into a bun. I’d seen her before, but never up close—one of the shot-callers. A pair of bodyguards escorted her everywhere she went. Not the two-bit rent-a-cops that handled the prisoners, but honest-to-goodness commandos.

Their power armor was jet black, their faces concealed behind what appeared to be solid plates of metal with no viewports in them with which to see out. They wielded big, bulky pulse rifles with underbarrel rocket launchers, and the deck shook with their heavy footfalls. They sounded like they weighed at least half a metric ton in those suits of theirs. Their presence alone made my skin crawl.

As for the satyr in the lead, her hirsute legs and tail stuck out from under her—what did they call it again? A pencil skirt. I thought she looked ridiculous, but what did I know about fashion? The closest I’d come to haute couture in the past ten years was when I was in full dress uniform.

“My sincerest apologies, ma’am! This filthy little creature was being a nuisance, so I—”

“Nev rutsin,” she spoke bitterly, her lips curling with cold rage. Elgon couldn’t even make eye contact with her, instead electing to stare glumly at the floor while she continued making her vituperative remarks.

“Ooooh, now you’re gonna get it.” I grinned at him as he balled up his fists like a scolded child.

The cleomanni woman touched her jawbone to enable her translator implants, regarding me with every bit as much contempt as her subordinate. “Did I say you could speak that heathen tongue of yours?”

“Mesha asrii, aspare kuka,” I swore aloud, spitting on the deck for emphasis.

The guard was aghast. I could have sworn he’d turned a few shades paler. The lady in red remained unshaken by my vulgarity, the barest trace of a smirk spreading beneath eyes that shone with malevolence. She calmly wrapped her hand around my throat and lifted me into the air with unnatural strength, pressing me up against the corrugated exterior of one of the containers. She raised a wooly knee between my hind legs, jamming it right into my sensitive bits.

This close, her features were plain as day. If you’ve seen one cleomanni, you’ve seen them all. She had an almost feline nose, broad and flat, pointing toward her chin like an inverted chevron. Thick sideburns ran from her pointy ears down to her jawline. Her horns curved back around her temples like a crest. The females of her species exhibited some sexual dimorphism in that last regard; aside from the general differences in build and fat distribution, the horns of female cleomanni protruded rearward rather than forward. Her smile was devilish. She licked her lips like some manner of predatory beast about to devour me whole. At this distance, I could see the seams in her arms and the whirring machinery that danced in her irises.

“Be careful what you wish for, vermin.”

My face reddened with humiliation as she ground her knee into me painfully. A lump formed in my throat. She dropped me right on my hindquarters like a sack of potatoes, the steel deck reverberating in kind. I stood, wincing in pain as I rubbed my flank with my hoof.

“Guardsman, you know these things are not to be let out of their cells without a control collar in place. Do your job properly, or I’ll have you reassigned to an asteroid mine. Are we clear?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Elgon snapped off another extra-sycophantic salute before doing as instructed, pulling a loop of metal from a leather pouch on his belt and securing it around my throat. I could feel the electrodes against my cervical spine and the tips of two autoinjectors digging into either side of my neck, ready to deliver their payload straight into my carotid arteries at a moment’s notice. One held a sedative. The other? A potent muscle relaxant. Enough to stop ten pony hearts.

My ears drooped. Three years. Three years of this shit, with nothing to look forward to but more of the same. I was tired. So tired. As I was led away by the guards and loaded onto the flatbed of a motorized cart like a slab of meat, I didn’t fight. Didn’t have the strength left in me.

When I first arrived here, I’d tried running. I’d since learned the sheer futility of it. All the doors and access points in the paddock were secured with combination biometric and RFID scanners, and they didn’t recognize hooves. They’d recently implanted us with tracking chips on top of everything else. There was nowhere to hide. The drones would find you, and then you were in for a date with the business end of a guard’s baton, and you’d consider yourself damned lucky if they only hit you with it.

On our way to our destination, we passed the dreaded Blue Door. Lab-coated satyrs who wore surgical masks and toted clipboards were accompanying a mare who was strapped to a gurney as she was casually carted through it. She protested violently, struggling against her binds and screaming her lungs out. Nopony ever returned from that place.

After being driven for hundreds of meters, past dozens of steel stanchions crawling with multicolored wires and thin copper pneumatic lines, we disembarked from the electric cart. The guards unchained me and ushered me into a cramped, darkened interrogation room, seating me behind a table.

I turned and half-heartedly smirked at Elgon’s back as he marched away. I loved getting these freaks in trouble with their bosses; it was the only tangible form of entertainment still available to me. The door slid shut behind me, one guard remaining inside to supervise me in case things got out of hoof. I didn’t see the point. I was separated from today’s interviewer by a wall of mirrored glass that prevented me from seeing their face, and I was pretty sure it was bulletproof. I could feel my left eye and my lips beginning to burn and swell up a little from the savage beating I’d sustained.

“Special visitor here for you today, Two-Two-Five-Seven,” the tinny voice of Scheherazade buzzed from a speaker on the ceiling. “A xenologist interested in studying your species. Be on your best behavior.”

“Oh great, a tourist,” I said.

It was the first time in a while that I’d been allowed to converse with someone non-military. I started wondering whether or not I could capitalize upon my injuries to buy some sympathy. After a short pause, a different voice came through the speaker.

“Hello, can you hear me? Hey, is this thing on?”

He sounded just like my creepy uncle nopony liked. The one who died in that nightclub fire a couple years before I enlisted. I rolled my eyes, sighing with exasperation as I nodded in assent.

“Yes, I can hear you just fine,” I said. “What do you want?”

“Ah, marvelous,” he said, his voice abounding with inappropriate gaiety. “I’m Doctor Alvan Nebliss with the University of Aiche. I have a few questions for you.”

“What do you care what I have to say?”

“Well, quite a lot, actually. It’s my job, you see. Three years have passed since the end of the war, and I think it’s time we put all that messy business behind us and start on the path toward reconciliation.”

“That’s rich,” I said. “Do you see me? Do you see the state I’m in? What sort of place do you think this is?”

“I don’t know.” Some apprehension crept into his voice. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

I snorted with disbelief. “You monsters took everything from us. We have no rights, no dignity. Nothing. Our worlds lie in ruins. Our culture, our entire way of life, is gone. Our people will soon follow.” I felt a shiver of disgust run through my body. “Are you some kind of voyeur? Do you people like watching us suffer and die?”

The scientist behind the opaque glass ignored my outburst, changing his line of inquiry. “Sergeant Desert Storm, service number five-dash-six-six-eight-two-dash-four-one-three-one.” He scrubbed his finger against his slate, paging through my dossier. “Sub-species unicorn, female, age twenty-seven of your cycles. Height, a hundred and eight centimeters, weight sixty-three kilograms. Is this information correct?”

Been a long time since I’d heard that name.

“You’re looking at her.”

“So, tell me about yourself. Any friends? Relatives?”

My face screwed up in anger. It must’ve been nice. It must have felt good to be chauffeured halfway across the galaxy to look down your nose at some of the last surviving members of a race that your kind drove to the edge of extinction. The filthy, sadistic rat bastard was probably getting his pole polished on the other side of that glass while he grilled me. I shifted in my chair and entertained myself with the mental image of that hard-assed supervisor being the one to do it.

“They’re all pushing up daisies.” I pounded my hooves on the table. “Who the fuck cares?”

“Come on, don’t be that way.”

I let out a soft, shuddering sigh. “My parents were on the evac transports lifting off from Meadowgleam. The Confederate Navy was waiting for them in low orbit. Their charred bones are probably still floating around in the debris field encircling the planet. Nobody’s seen hide or hair of my sisters in years, least of all me, so they’re probably dead, too.

“My Fiancé was in Everfree City when the capital was overrun. We were going to get married after my tour was over. So much for that. All the others from my unit are either dead, in hiding, or imprisoned. Maybe they’re right here on this station, and I just don’t know it. They keep me sequestered from the others, most of the time, ‘cause I’m a bad influence. There, satisfied?”

“Quite. Out of curiosity, what did you do for a living before joining the military?”

“None of your fucking business.”

“Let me guess, something shameful? Drug dealing? Prostitution?”

This motherfucker. I had to tamp my rage back down before I could provide a coherent answer.

“Close enough. I was a cocktail waitress. It was a shit job in a shit town, and nopony tipped for shit because they were all poor drunks just inches from homelessness.”

“Interesting. What was that like? Can you describe your place of employment?”

“The Gridiron, in Dodge City. It was a sports bar-type place. Hoofball-themed paraphernalia everywhere. Pool tables, pinball machines, big vidscreens for the drunks to cheer and holler at. I was waiting tables and saw some shit on the vidscreens about how badly we were getting fucked in the war. I had family out there, in the colonies. I was sick of sitting around and feeling helpless, so I quit my job and enlisted.”

“According to this file, you were once a member of an elite military unit, but it isn’t any more specific than that. According to you, what was your role, exactly?”

“And here I thought you didn’t wanna talk about the war.” I chuckled softly. “Figures. What else would you people drag me out here for?”

“Shall I repeat the question?”

“I was a pilot. Charger Corps. Light Scouts of the Eighth Cavalry Division.”

“Charger Corps?” His voice quavered with more than a bit of trepidation. “So, you mean to tell me you actually rode in the cockpit of one of those Equestrian terror weapons? What was that like?”

“It was a blast.”

“Be more specific, please.” He sounded skeptical.

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my forelegs, fondly recalling memories of what would be our last campaign. “When you’re in an eight-meter-tall battle walker, tanks and infantry look small. And squishy. Oh, and I might add, very flammable.”

“I see. So, as you engaged in the wanton slaughter of my countrymen, how did you feel?”

I smiled. “Absolutely fantastic. It sure was nice having the power to decide which of you satyr pricks went home in an ashtray and which ones got to run off with your tails between your legs. I’m not in the least bit sorry for what I did, if that’s what you’re implying. I’d do it all over again if I had to.”

“And why is that?”

My smirk wore off instantly. “The Confederacy used to take unarmed civilians—mares, stallions, even foals—haul them off in great big transport trucks, herd them into pre-dug trenches, and mow them down with machine gun fire. Entire settlements were wiped out overnight.”

“Wow.” His tone darkened. “There is absolutely nothing in our media or our briefings to suggest anything of the sort. Are you sure?”

“Am I—” I was flabbergasted. “I saw it with my own two eyes! I’ve stood guard while our engineers dug up the mass graves. Every time the Empress called for a ceasefire, she was repaid with more violence for her trouble. So, it was to be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

“So, I take it that’s where you came in.”

“The regular Charger pilots were mostly officers. The nobles paid quite a few bits for their commissions, and they stuck them in some of our heaviest war machines, regardless of their competence on the field or their compatibility with their Charger’s control systems. Their job was to inspire confidence in the troops, defending them from threats they couldn’t handle on their own. Bunch of showboaters, really. Many of these Chargers operated from rear guard units, only coming into contact with the enemy if we were in retreat from a failed assault. It was mostly for the propaganda value.”

“What did your ‘Light Scouts’ do differently?”

“We were a peaceful race once, long before I was born,” I said, staring wistfully off into space. “Even with the atrocities we witnessed on a daily basis during the war, there were still many who endeavored to find a non-violent solution to the conflict. Most of the nobles I knew would turn pale at the sight of blood.”

“Not what they signed up for, eh?”

“Many of them didn’t want to be pilots. They were meant to fill a shortfall in qualified officers and help boost morale with their mere presence. They often put them in machines with command and control equipment in lieu of heavier armaments. It took a special kind of pony to actually agree to strap themselves into an armored killing machine, armed to the teeth, knowing full well that their days would be occupied with ceaseless carnage from that moment onward.”

“So, you volunteered.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked down at the table’s grimy surface. “We were outcasts, hated by friend and foe alike. We were the ones that the Empress sent to do her dirty work when the peace process failed. Nothing more, nothing less. Light Scouts was a deliberate misnomer meant to conceal our true purpose both from the enemy and the general public. Our unit was primarily composed of Army NCOs with exemplary service records on other types of vehicles.

“I was trained and deployed as a tank driver, originally. For a few months, anyway, before I was recalled from the front lines after an action against a network of Confederate pillboxes that earned me and my crew some medals. We could’ve opted out at that stage and redeployed as tankers, but most of us agreed to take on this duty. Then again, most of us didn’t know what we were in for. After receiving a six-month crash course in Charger piloting, we were deployed pretty much the very same week our machines rolled off the production line.

“Our job was to employ cutting-edge Chargers under adverse conditions they couldn’t risk sending the big-shots into. We worked with minimal support, deep behind enemy lines, with no backup plan in case things went haywire. I didn’t realize it at the time, but ultimately, these were suicide missions. We were expendable pilots in state-of-the-art machines, engaged in a final, desperate gambit to reverse the course of the war.”

“It seems so odd to me.” I heard a scratchy noise over the mic as Dr. Nebliss rubbed his chin; my mental image of him now included stubble. “These so-called Chargers seem far too sophisticated to entrust to an enlisted soldier of any rank.”

“Did you not hear a word I just said?” I frowned. “Expendable. Suicide missions. As in, the meat grinders that they refused to throw the nobles into.”

“So, it’s a social status thing bleeding into the military, then? Interesting.”

I shook my head. “Not sure if those are the exact words I’d use to describe it. Look, I don’t have anything against the nobility. We were all in the same boat. Our species was on the brink of annihilation. I can’t just sit here and divide what we did into shit jobs and easy jobs. None of it was easy, and nopony came back from that hell unchanged.”

“It says here that you were involved in certain ‘pacification missions’. Do you mind elaborating on that?”

My eyes widened. “That’s fucking classified, and I’m not going to breathe a word of it to you.”

“I’ve read the reports. I know that the Light Scouts of the Eighth Cavalry Division were responsible for single-handedly—”

As he spoke, I leaped over the table and pressed my hooves against the glass, interrupting him. My blood pressure was so high that I was seeing spots swimming in my vision.

“You just don’t get it, do you? They’ve kept me in solitary confinement for years! With every passing hour, I can feel a little more of my sanity slipping away from me. Do you have any idea how scary it is to lose your mind when it’s all you have left?”

The guard brought his expandable baton up under my neck, making it clear that if I didn’t relent, I was going to be compelled. I didn’t resist as he wrestled me back to the uncomfortable folding chair. I could feel my hindquarters tingling from lack of circulation. The damn thing was barely compatible with my physiology.

“I’m sorry, but that’s well outside my field of expertise,” Dr. Nebliss said. “My work may involve alien psycho-social behaviors, but I’m not a psychiatrist. Besides, you don’t seem mentally incompetent to me. More aggressive than most members of your species, certainly. With a background such as yours, that’s to be expected.”

“You’re a xenologist or something, right?” I said. “Why are you asking me these kinds of questions to begin with? Are they making you do this?”

“I’d hoped that I cou—never mind. My opinions are not germane to this interview. Even if I did feel some measure of sympathy for your species, I’m not sure I would extend it to you, personally.”

I could feel a cold rage brimming within me, and my speech was reduced to a monotone. “Section four, Article thirty-one of the Stellar Code states that—”

A hint of anger crept into his voice. “I know what it says, and no, it does not absolve you of your crimes against my people.”

“According to one interpretation popular with your species, it says that quadrupeds are not afforded the same rights as other sapients, regardless of intelligence,” I continued, my voice cracking. “I’ve been held incommunicado, denied access to legal counsel, and subjected to various unethical tests and medical procedures without my consent. I am not alone. Thousands of us on this station are undergoing the same experience this very minute.”

“All former Equestrian military.” The scientist’s tone was dismissive. “There’s an ongoing investigation into possible war crimes committed by you and your compatriots. It only makes sense to hold you here until that work can be completed.”

“No, there isn’t! There is no investigation! That’s a cover story that they’re feeding you people, and you’re too gullible to realize it. You’re in denial. You don’t want to believe that civilized people could ever do this to another sapient race. We’re warehoused here and treated worse than lab animals.

“Look at the wording in the files. Subject this, subject that. Never prisoner. We’re not even dignified with that title. If they classified us as criminals, at least we’d have access to the judicial system and the possibility to establish a legal defense. The way things are going, I’m going to die in here having never seen the inside of a courtroom, being beaten and stuck with needles!”

There was a pause. Heavy breathing from the other side of the faceless glass pane. He seemed as if too shocked for words, but I couldn’t tell for sure. If he really assumed that Confederate Security’s intentions in running a facility like this were noble and entirely aboveboard, he was more gullible than I’d expected an academic of his caliber to be.

“Is that true?” He seemed to be addressing someone on the other side of the glass.

There was another long pause, during which I was fairly certain I heard muffled voices in the room beyond. When the response finally came, it was from Scheherazade, the station’s AI.

“This interview is now terminated. Please escort Two-Two-Five-Seven to Deck Three, Activity Chamber.”

“This isn’t over,” I said. “Do you hear me?”

I was seized roughly by the withers and muscled out of the room, where another guard joined us. I knew I could have easily overpowered both of them if I wanted to, but I refrained. The last time one of us turned on our captors, the repercussions were felt by all. Restricted rations. More beatings. Then, of course, there was the matter of the collar. At the touch of a button, my life could be snuffed out. Not a pleasant thought by any stretch of the imagination.

For a fleeting moment, I wondered what it’d be like if the tables were turned. Would I have been stuck guarding a place like this? Would we have done the same to them?

We boarded one of the inter-deck lifts headed for the upper levels. The platform came to a grinding halt at deck three. We stepped off into a wide corridor bathed in a sickly orange by the low-power overhead lighting, the silence punctuated by the clicking of the guards’ boots and my concomitant hoofbeats against the deckplates. The heavy blast doors at the end of the passageway took exactly fourteen seconds to retract, by my count. I filed that information away neatly in the recesses of my mind, with all the other useless trivia. Light from the vast space beyond poured in through the opening. I raised a foreleg to cover my eyes. The activity chamber was an artificial habitat with a vaulted atrium topped with a glass dome over a hundred and fifty meters across. Blindingly bright light from our world’s star flooded through the dome.

The perimeter of the space was ringed with balconies and observation rooms that occupied four decks above ours. There were approximately five acres of uneven terrain covered in inedible synthetic turf and other artificial vegetation, with various obstacles scattered about the place. There were hurdles, balance beams, climbing nets, and trenches wreathed in barbed wire. Concrete barriers and rubber tire walls delineated the edges of the course. The blast doors closed behind me, the guards taking up positions at the exit. There were already nineteen other collared ponies in the activity chamber. Unicorns and earth ponies only. I was the twentieth and last one to join them.

“Today, we’ll be doing a little mobility test,” the tinny voice of the station’s AI echoed through the cavernous room. “This will be a good chance to stretch those legs of yours, so please try and follow experimental procedure and avoid accruing unnecessary injuries.”

“Love you too, Mom,” one stallion deadpanned, eliciting snickers from the rest.

I’d been in this chamber dozens of times, but I’d never seen any of these ponies before. As I approached, I received uneasy stares from the group.

A stallion nearly twice my height with a dark red coat stepped forward and said, “You know the drill. Name, rank, and division.”

“Sergeant Storm, Eighth Cavalry,” I replied truthfully.

“Eighth Cav?” He frowned, rolling his eyes for a couple seconds as he sifted through his walnut-sized brain, his face slowly taking on a haunted expression. “Oh, you’re one of those psychos.”

“Don’t give me that,” I spat. “We’re all soldiers here.”

“Yeah, but unlike you scumbags, none of us were champing at the bit for the opportunity to massacre civilians.”

“Civilians?” I grinned mirthlessly, pointing a hoof at one of the observation decks above us. “You mean like those fucking two-legged cunts up there?”

One mare recoiled in disgust while the others gave me a wide berth. No one said a word.

“Your instructional packets will arrive shortly,” the station’s AI said, cutting through the uneasy silence.

Contragrav drones buzzed overhead and dropped sheaves of paperwork in front of each of us, conveniently printed in our native tongue on reusable meta-paper. The flexible, laminated cards featured countless microscopic ink capsules that could be reprogrammed like the pixels of a computer display. I briefly scanned the ten or so pages and concluded that it was primarily gratuitous jargon and legalese straight out of a barrister’s wet dreams. Occupational health and safety, that sort of thing. The standard don’t run with scissors routine you’d get from any employer, except we weren’t getting paid to do this.

“Do I have to sign a waiver?” I said, eliciting a chuckle from one dull-looking mare, which was hushed by a hoof to the head from the pony standing next to her.

After several minutes had passed, there was a short siren, followed by the voice of Scheherazade. “Form up at the start of the course.”

We formed two neat rows behind the white starting line as instructed. I was near the middle of the herd.

“Here are the conditions,” Scheherazade began. “This is not a race. The ones in front set the pace for the ones behind. You are only allowed to pass if the subject in front of you is immobilized for more than ten seconds. You are encouraged to assist them if necessary. At the starting tone, you will all run the course and then return to the line. Get ready.”

The buzzer sounded, and we were off. We made good time through the steeplechase section until one mare tripped over a hurdle. She held the rest of us up for a few moments as she lay there groaning, nursing an injured knee. Next, we went across the balance beams. Most of the other ponies took their sweet time. As a pilot, I was used to having my sense of equilibrium thrown for a loop by high-gee maneuvers; I galloped straight across them without pause.

On the other hoof, the climbing nets were a grueling challenge for any pony, myself included. As I ascended, I had to loop my legs around each hole in the net. It was by no means a natural motion for a pony’s body to undertake, and by the time I got to the top, drops of sweat were beading up on my coat. The only way back down was to leap from the platform and cling to either of a pair of slide poles, using one’s legs to control the rate of descent. When I reached the bottom, I heard a wail and a sickening crunch to my left as a stallion with a dusky coat slipped, fell several meters, and landed headfirst in the tightly packed soil. I winced. That guy was going to be out cold for a while.

We dove into the trenches, crawling under the barbed wire. I could feel my mane stand on end as a pair of eyes drilled into my back. It dawned on me that this was the only part of the course where line-of-sight from the observation rooms was partially obscured. I turned just in time to see a hoof connect with my jaw, and then he was on me. The big earth pony pinned me down, forcing his hooves into the control collar in an effort to restrict my breathing. The others running the course didn’t even look as they passed us by, ignoring the rules. I gagged, struggling to draw air into my lungs. He was choking me to death with my own collar.

“Why couldn’t you murdering fucks all just burn in those metal coffins of yours?”

When he said that, I knew right then what he hated me for. As darkness started to creep into the edges of my vision, I heard a rattling noise and looked up just in time to see a drone looming overhead, its sensors zeroing in on the scene of the disturbance. The former soldier turned, releasing his grip on me, before convulsing as his collar started shocking him. He rolled off of me, quivering on the ground as his muscles involuntarily contracted. I held a hoof to my chest and sharply inhaled a few ragged breaths. We lay perfectly still, panting from exertion after our brief and violent encounter.

“We lost,” he whined. “All the blood we spilled, all the people we sacrificed. All in vain. Now I’m trapped in here with monsters like you. What the hell was it all for?”

“My unit didn’t hunt down deserters because we liked it,” I said. “We did it because it was our duty.”

“My brother was no traitor.” He scowled, glaring at me out of the corner of his eye. “Just a pony who knew better than to throw his life away helping freaks like you butcher innocent people. What would you know about family? You volunteer pilots are all the same. No pedigree or nothing. Bloodthirsty savages. What hole did you lot scamper from, huh? Are you even ponies at all, or fucking changelings? What the fuck killed you and crawled under your skin?”

“We all swore an oath to Her Majesty, the Empress. We were proud to serve her with honor. Orders are orders. You do not question them. You only obey.”

“Yeah. They say jump, you say how high, like you’re some kinda frickin’ machine.”

“You’re damned right I did,” I rasped, pausing for a moment to catch my breath. “So, who the hell are you supposed to be, anyway?”

“Driving Band. Lieutenant.”

“An officer?” I said, taken aback. “Fuck’s sake. No wonder why we lost.”

He gritted his teeth in response, fuming at my disrespect for his rank. I raised a hoof and saluted nonetheless, but it actually seemed to make him angrier. I could smell the staff officer on him. Pogue motherfuckers were the same all over the galaxy. Most of the desertions we did have were the gun-shy logistics personnel we relied on to truck us fuel, ammo, and spare parts for our Chargers. We depended on them for everything, and they all too often turned their backs on us in our hour of need, especially when they got wind of what our operations entailed. It didn’t surprise me in the least that this bozo was related to an absconder.

“Well then,” I said, righting myself before continuing to navigate the obstacle. “I have a course to complete, sir, so if you’d mind not getting us lethally injected, cremated, and tossed out the nearest airlock, that would be great.”

I could hear his curses recede beneath the low din of the other test subjects galloping around the course, their huffing and puffing united in a chorus. I wasn’t in the best of shape, either. Our little altercation had placed us at the back of the herd. Not that it mattered. Like Scheherazade said, this wasn’t a race. It was a test of our ability to follow clear and concise instructions as a collective, and we had already failed. They were toying with us. Analyzing pony psychology. Trying to figure out what made us tick. Trying to see if we could survive being separated, isolated, and re-integrated into basic social units. One could call it a hunch. Or maybe I was just getting paranoid.

They never bothered to analyze or reverse engineer our magic, surprisingly enough. It might’ve been that it was beyond their means to do so, or perhaps the station lacked the proper facilities to do so while keeping us contained. Generally speaking, it was also the case that magic and magic-based technologies were illegal in the Free Trade Union, with few exemptions. Our captors had good reason to fear our powers. If someone removed a unicorn’s suppression ring, said unicorn could quickly teleport their collar off of their neck and then teleport themselves to literally anywhere on the station. The satyrs were probably too shit-scared of a breach to even think of trying it.

The drones circled lazily overhead, like vultures spying carrion. I knew from previous tests and some chatter I’d overheard that the cleomanni eggheads were hard at work cataloging our every move and neatly filing it away on a server somewhere near the heart of the station. As a prerequisite for eligibility to serve, all Charger pilots understood the basic principles of kinematics. After all, Chargers were walking machines that employed the same complex motions as living beings. This, of course, had implications for how pilots might be expected to control them and how our mechanics would maintain them.

I had taken part in studies of gait and posture before, except they had been administered by members of my own race, undertaking vital medical research meant to benefit all of pony-kind. Things like next-generation prosthetic limbs for veterans who’d lost theirs. It was certainly possible that these tests were something of a similar nature. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what use the Confederacy would get out of this data. I mulled over the idea in silence. Why are they continuing to study us? Haven’t they already won? Aren’t we sufficiently beaten?

Panting and near the point of exhaustion, I galloped back to the starting line. A good fifteen of the other ponies—the ones who had passed the course without serious injuries—were already standing around waiting for the slowpokes in the rear. Some of the others had seen my scuffle with the Lieutenant. They afforded me a menagerie of angry sneers and fearful glances.

A drone came to a hover in front of my face, and the station’s AI spoke through it. “A disappointing performance, Two-Two-Five-Seven,” Scheherazade crooned with more than a hint of sarcasm. “I expected more from one of the Empire’s notorious mech pilots.”

“First of all, go fuck yourself,” I said, hating being put on the spot like that. “Secondly, you saw what happened.”

“Indeed. Assaulted by one of your own kind. A startling lack of discipline exhibited by what are ostensibly trained military personnel. I suppose that is part of the reason why you are down here in this chamber and not up in the observation room.”

I shook in anger. As much as I hated to admit it, the damnable AI was right. The vast majority of ponies just weren’t meant for war. Not like the kinds of battles the Confederacy fought on a regular basis. We had the bodies for it but not the minds. I’d seen it too many times. Ponies who were so burnt out from spending a few months on the front lines that they couldn’t even remember their own names.

By the war’s end, most of the grizzled vets were with Celestia in the great beyond. The Imperial Army was shoving beamcasters onto the withers of any pony who expressed a willingness to fight. Still, we couldn’t replace experienced soldiers and vehicle crews fast enough, and we were hemorrhaging irreplaceable war materiel.

The cleomanni were the exact opposite. Despite their imposing statures, they were frail compared to us, but foolhardy to a fault. Borderline delusional. Where a pony would exercise caution, a satyr would throw themselves in harm’s way without thinking twice. Not only did they never tire of war, but their elite troops also had the advantage of cortical implants that regulated their stress responses and prevented them from experiencing fear or psychological trauma the way our soldiers did.

We put up one hell of a fight, for what it was worth. Most of it happened long before I was born. Lucky were those few who died with dreams of victory in their hearts instead of living to see what had become of our people.

Now, all that remained of us were cowards, traitors, and shell-shocked husks. These ponies were among those who surrendered when Everfree City was bombed into dust. I hadn’t. I’d been fighting right up until the last minute, when the captain of my unit’s transport ship called upon me to temporarily replace a gunner who’d been found in his bunk with his brains blown out and his sidearm on his chest. The kid had finally realized the tin cans he was bringing the ship’s arsenal to bear upon contained people, of a kind, and he just couldn’t handle it.

I was no space jockey, but I’d gotten the hang of the transport ship’s turret controls pretty quick. Wasn’t much different from a Charger’s autocannon, except you had to rely on the computer to get a firing solution before pulling the trigger, or you wouldn’t hit jack shit. I even bagged a few Confederate gunships that got a little too close for their own good.

The last thing I remembered before waking up in a holding cell surrounded by armed Confederate goons was being knocked senseless by an explosion on the bridge and drifting in and out of consciousness as somepony shoved me into an escape pod. My body still bore the scars of that wretched day. I ran a hoof over my saffron coat, glancing at the ragged marks in my flesh. I wished I’d been on the ground, in the cockpit of my Mirage. That machine meant the world to me. Now, I could only assume that it was so much debris in orbit—an ignoble end for a Charger that had served me and the Empire loyally for years.

I was jolted from my idle reminisces by Driving Band rudely barging through me as he trotted on by.

“Excuse you,” I said, with more than a hint of annoyance.

He fixed me with a death glare for a moment before proceeding onward. I didn’t care if he was a superior officer at one time. I wasn’t gonna take his shit lying down. I had ways of making his death look like an accident, if it ever came to that. I looked back at my cutie mark and smiled. A cactus and a pair of palm trees standing beside a shimmering oasis, with the wall of an approaching haboob threatening to engulf the idyllic scene. Stealth was my specialty.

I’d planned to break out of this place since the moment I first set hoof on this station. All the major airlocks were very tightly guarded, and I wasn’t about to stow away aboard a patrol vessel and risk being discovered. That would blow over really well. Not.

I needed my own transport, and soon. I had a sneaking suspicion that our days here were numbered. Eventually, they’d have no use for us anymore, and then, the culling would begin. Experiments scrapped. Subjects terminated. One way or another, I’d be leaving this place, either whole or in a small vial filled with my ashes. All I needed was for an opportunity to present itself. So far, it hadn’t happened.

I had to take the initiative, before the initiative took me.

// … // … // … // … // … //

After the test procedure was complete, we were lined up and our scores tabulated. They wouldn’t tell us how well we did. Only Scheherazade and the scientists were privy to that information. We were allowed a brief visit to the cafeteria to sample the bland, unappetizing slop that passed for food in this place, where I spent most of the time glancing over my shoulder to ensure I didn’t run into Driving Band again. Once we finished choking down our bowls of mulched soybean slurry, armed guards escorted our group back to the security paddock. Once we arrived, they removed our control collars and ushered us back into our cells like bulk goods.

As I knelt in the center of the cell, I could feel the metallic creaking and banging of the overhead conveyor’s spreader latching onto the exterior of the container and hoisting it up. I couldn’t visually confirm any part of the process. No viewports were included in the cell’s construction. There was a hunk of metal that passed for a bed, limited sanitation facilities, and a voice-activated terminal with very highly restricted access to the station intranet—mostly rules and regs and endless reams of data filled to bursting with cleomanni history and propaganda—but that was it. There was nothing that could be used to facilitate an escape attempt.

Without consulting the terminal yet, I took a moment to review what I knew from my history classes about the enemy we faced to see if I still possessed most of my marbles. The Cleomanni Confederacy spanned over a thousand worlds, each a state unto itself. Their form of government was democratic. Each of their planets had its own governor and its own electors responsible for selecting the ministers who would venture to their capital world of Ard Doch and serve in the Grand Hall.

The Planetary Governors oversaw the domestic affairs of their respective planets, whereas the Ministers voted on matters of the legislature, representing their worlds to the central government. Their supreme leader was called a President, and their term limit was ten years. Every decade, the Confederacy descended into a media frenzy as the parties fought to place their candidate in office. The arrangement was not a direct democracy. Each world had one Elector for each Guild regardless of their population. As the votes from the people were tallied up, the majority vote would decide which Electors’ votes counted, both for the ministerial and presidential elections, which were situated five years apart. No planet had any more influence on the results than any other.

Their corporations belonged to the Guilds, which, in turn, acted like political parties, representing their companies to the Hall and openly petitioning on their behalf for things like military aid to protect vital infrastructure. Newly founded Confederate colonies could declare guild affiliation or be claimed as free worlds, but their governors were often hand-picked guild puppets regardless. Much of their nation’s colonial infrastructure was a product of private industry, and the corporations frequently treated the worlds they colonized as their own fiefdoms.

The Confederacy was one of the founding members of the Tripartite Alliance, later known as the Free Trade Union. It accounted for the greatest number of votes in the Grand Assembly, the influence of the other members—the nemrin and the xicares—having waned over millennia. Like ponies, they had races and castes, but the physiological differences between them were minimal.

The two major cleomanni ethnic groups were the Zinsar and Dochnast. The ruddy, reddish Zinsar descended from nomadic space tribes that colonized the furthest reaches of cleomanni space, and they were among the first we warred with. They were cowardly but cunning. The pale-skinned, jet-haired Dochnast ruled over the Confederacy’s core worlds and provided the bulk of the elite troops that ground our advance to a standstill during the war’s latter stages. They were wealthy, decadent, and haughty beyond compare.

As a whole, the cleomanni were obsessed with profit and the means of obtaining it, venerating economic prosperity above all else. Their chief rationale for waging war upon us was a simple one. We occupied territory and consumed natural resources to which they believed we had no valid claim. Seeing as we were not part of their oh-so-special two-legged fuckhead club, they saw no reason to negotiate on peaceful terms.

“Terminal Request,” I said, and in response, the small kiosk between the bed and the door came to life with a beep that confirmed it was ready for voice input. “Stellar Code, Section four, Article three-one.”

There it was, auto-translated into my native Equestrian. The protections of the Code shall be extended to all law-abiding and upright people of the galaxy, capable of a degree of conscious thought and neurolinguistic capability necessary to read and understand the Code.

Upright. Though most other FTU member races understood this as figurative moral uprightness, The Confederacy literally took that passage to mean walks on two legs. Due to the military power and socioeconomic clout of the cleomanni, the other two member species of the Free Trade Union let them get away with this unspeakably childish reading of galactic law. We weren’t the only intelligent species that the cleomanni had screwed over this way, and most of the galaxy didn’t give two shits. Most successful sapients were bipeds, with their forelimbs freed up to use the very tools that they needed to rise up and take their place as spacefaring races, to begin with.

Compared to them, we were like an entire race of cripples. No matter what we accomplished collectively as a species or our gains and losses in our battles against the cleomanni, that was how the galaxy saw us. Enfeebled. Infirm. They couldn’t decide whether to fear or pity us, so they settled for murdering us instead. They hadn’t expected us to be ready, able, and willing to return the favor.

However, that wasn’t the only reason the Confederacy made war against us. Differences in physiology could be overlooked, in time. Oppressive laws, rewritten. No, our one unforgivable sin was our essential nature as magical beings. Ponies lived and breathed magic. It was intrinsic to our very nature. Our technology ran on it. We unicorns used it for mundane things, like opening doors and carrying drinking vessels. Magic—or Paraphysicalism, as the cleomanni called it—was highly illegal in the Confederacy, as well as the FTU as a whole, to some extent. The nemrin were the sole exception to this. They were legally allowed to practice their own species’ magic, but only because they’d specialized in the art of magic nullification.

Over the past centuries, there were many occasions where this hypocrisy’s invocation formed the basis of a temporary truce. Nevertheless, there always came the counter-charge that we ponies used magic flippantly for everything, unlike the tightly controlled and regulated practices of the nemrin. We’d never joined with the FTU in any way, and we’d never ratified a treaty with them forbidding the use of our magic. We were not subject to their laws. Therefore, any trade we’d previously conducted with FTU client races was of a decidedly gray-market variety.

At its peak, the Equestrian Empire had spanned over ninety worlds. Our mode of government was simple. We had one supreme ruler, the Empress, whose will was absolute and whose reign was eternal. We also had a landed aristocracy that occasionally petitioned the crown, but whose authority in anything of any real import was minuscule. All foreign and domestic policy matters were the purview of the Empress and her closest advisors: the twelve Magisters of the Conclave. Aside from their roles in government, the Magisters frequently taught at the most prestigious educational and military institutions and oversaw cutting-edge research and development teams. This included the groups responsible for many of the Empire’s numerous top-secret black projects.

Except for our homeworld, every one of our planets—when they had still been ours, anyhow—had been governed by a Military Junta overseen by a General or Admiral, or several, with various noble houses vying to put their own officers in charge of as many worlds as possible for the sake of their family and its prestige. Our nation existed in a perpetual state of emergency from its very inception. Almost all of our planetary resources went toward the war effort, aside from the bare minimum necessary to guarantee their inhabitants a basic standard of living. Those who lived on Equestria or one of our major colony worlds enjoyed more sumptuous luxuries than the populations of the outer colonies, who lived under martial law and endured constant raids and purges conducted by the Confederacy.

The cleomanni would slip smaller patrol vessels through the naval cordon, usually in conjunction with a skirmishing action meant to draw our heavies out and keep them occupied. Those vessels would enter a planet’s atmosphere and seek out the less-populous areas, never biting off more than they could chew. Rural frontier settlements. Places where there were perhaps a few hundred ponies in all, living in prefabs out on the very edges of our civilization. Confederate soldiers would come in the dead of night, round up hundreds of us, dig trenches, and have innocent stallions, mares, and even foals stand on the edges of said trenches while they hosed us down with machine gun fire. They wanted to make an example out of us. Scare us away from our land claims.

The Empress ordered reprisals. Charger operations were often a substantial part of that. The things my unit did would turn any right-minded pony as pale as a ghost. The Imperial Army deliberately violated several galactic laws against the production and use of certain forbidden weapons of mass destruction. In the big scheme of things, it didn’t really matter since the FTU had chosen to exclude our species long before that. If outlawry was our lot, then a few nukes and chemical weapons certainly wouldn’t make things any worse. It didn’t help with our nation’s reputation, however. In its heyday, the Empire hovered somewhere between that shady, warlike, high-tech, totalitarian, isolationist hellhole with the weird horse people and that banana republic full of nudists that ironically exports lots of textiles and trinkets. The recollection of all this, when contrasted with our people’s current condition, made me shiver with discomfort. To take my mind off the matter, I turned my attention to my artificial and limited environs.

I knew quite a lot about the construction of the cells, from looking them over whenever I got the chance and by eavesdropping on guards and maintenance workers, though I knew precious little of their language. The containerized cells had external ports where the air, water, and sewage lines were connected once they’d reached their destinations in the cell blocks. Like the other parts of the station that lay outside the rotating hab rings, they had artificial gravity generators. They were equipped with their own life support and scrubbers, which were good for a few minutes of air during transfer operations. They were radiation-shielded to the extent that the occupant was in no danger of exposure to cosmic rays. However, they were thin-walled enough that an oxyacetylene torch or laser cutter only took a few seconds to put a hole in one. How they accomplished that feat without magic, I had no idea.

Since security on the station was mainly managed and directed by Scheherazade’s subroutines, the organic component—the station’s living, non-mechanical personnel—had grown complacent. Lackadaisical. How soon they’d forgotten what my species was capable of, so shortly after the war’s conclusion. Nevertheless, I had yet to find an opening to exploit. There was still that insurmountable problem: what to do when I’d wended my way past the station’s security. All things considered, I was still in space, and I still needed a ride.

I had that thought in the forefront of my mind when the conveyor came to a grinding halt, klaxons sounded, and emergency strobes on the ceiling began to flash. I panicked, feeling my heart leap into my throat. The whole cell shook from what felt like an explosion in a distant sector of the station, the shockwave propagating through the mass of the entire structure.

Then, the inner and outer airlock doors hissed open. Before I could even comprehend what was happening, I was sucked outside, along with the cell’s atmosphere, into total vacuum. My eyes stung; I reflexively clenched them shut. The air was violently ripped from my lungs. I cracked open my eyes to see thousands of other doomed prisoners floating from their cells in exactly the same manner. Kicking and flailing. Screaming soundlessly.

Ten seconds.

The containers were nestled along the station’s exterior like heads of asparagus. Since the containers and most of the station’s interior compartments lacked viewports of any kind, this was the first time I’d seen the full extent of the station’s exterior in the three years I’d been held here. A massive hunk of debris was coming toward me. Unlike everything else, which seemed to be floating away into the depths of space, this object’s path intersected both me and the station. I braced for impact as the heavy girders collided with me, still trailing bits of glittering metal from where they had been severed by what were probably military-grade explosives. My muzzle burned.

Twenty seconds.

Though it was relatively slow-moving, the girder’s substantial mass enabled it to shear right through the conveyor’s monorail, sending containerized cells flying every which way. It tumbled end over end as I clung to it for dear life before the end opposite my own rammed into the station. The section I’d wrapped my legs around tilted lazily in the zero-gee environment as its momentum continued to carry it onward and upward. Desperate to survive, I crawled down the girder’s cross-braced structural members and toward an airlock. By some miracle, the impact had knocked the outer airlock door ajar.

Thirty seconds.

Air rushed out of the hole, pushing me back. I wrestled into the gap, moving forward by sheer willpower alone. Eventually, the small compartment beyond decompressed completely. I stood up in the airlock. There was an emergency door control under a small breakable glass cover. I had no idea what the labels said because I couldn’t read the cleomanni gibberish, and my eyesight was failing me anyhow.

Forty seconds.

I punched my forehoof through it and manipulated the lever with my teeth. Wrong direction. The outer door opened the rest of the way, releasing the girder that had brought me here by dumb luck. I turned the control the other way, shutting the outer door as far as it could go with the severe damage it had sustained. There was an identical-looking lever on the opposite side of the airlock. With the last of my remaining strength, I smashed the glass covering the second lever and turned it.

Fifty seconds.

The inner door opened, the atmosphere beyond racing through the gap in the damaged outer door. I crawled into the darkness of the station, smacking the switch beside the airlock to shut it behind me. The compartment beyond returned to normal pressure automatically. I gasped for breath, immediately feeling ill. Every muscle in my body ached. My vision was blurred. I gazed into my upturned forehooves for a few moments before burying my head in them, sobbing pathetically. I clicked my ears a few times, voluntarily opening my auditory tubes to equalize the pressure. Nearly a minute of direct exposure to space. I had no idea how I could have remained conscious and active for so long. It defied everything I knew about the effects of vacuum. I should’ve been blinded and half-dead by now.

I slowly ambled down the pitch-black passageway beyond, perking my ears up and listening for any signs of activity. Sirens were going off throughout the station, making it impossible to hear even my own hoofbeats. I stumbled and fell to my knees, descending into a coughing and hacking fit that resolved almost as soon as it started. I threaded my way down stairwell after stairwell, past compartment after compartment. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

“What the hell is happening?” I croaked.

The answer came sooner than I expected. I rounded a corner and almost tripped over a pony’s prone form. I looked them over in the dim red emergency lighting, prodding them with my hoof. No response. They were lying face-down, and a pool of blood was spreading outward from their helmet’s faceplate.

“A spacesuit?”

I turned the pony upright, immediately recoiling in disgust as I took in the extent of the damage. The lens of her helmet had been smashed. The face underneath had been reduced to the consistency of tomato paste by severe penetrating trauma. Whatever had been done to this poor unicorn mare, it’d been done pretty damn thoroughly. I glanced at her horn. No suppression ring. The suit was a standard Imperial EVA kit, white with purple stripes and gold fringe and all. She wasn’t from here, that much was certain.

“Sorry about this,” I said, my tone low and grim, before going about the process of relieving her of the bloodstained suit.

I cracked open the seals around her midsection, trying to figure out if I could remember the proper sequence of steps involved in donning and removing one. We’d trained in donning space suits for emergencies; all military personnel in the Empire were qualified to wear them in case of shipboard disasters, but we ground-pounders weren’t trained or qualified for spacewalk duty. When I finally got it disconnected, I hopped back reflexively when about a gallon of bright red ichor spilled from the gap.

“Oh, for the love of fuck.” I winced.

After pulling the halves of the suit from her body, I shook the last of the blood out of it and snaked my way inside, bracing myself against the bulkhead to ease the process along. My hind legs and tail went into the rear section first, then I lowered the forward section of the suit over my shoulders and connected the seal, joining the two halves at my midsection. The inside of the suit was slick and smelled overwhelmingly metallic. I had to stifle the urge to dry heave. I unlatched the ruined helmet and tossed it aside.

“Junk,” I muttered. “I’ll have to find another one.”

I heard garbled static coming out of the headset she wore. It was linked to a frequency-hopping radio built into the suit’s saddlebags. Not civilian gear by any means. I pried the headset from the shattered, fleshy remains of her skull and set it atop my head, rotating the dial on the side until the static cleared up and the Trottingham-accented voice of the stallion on the other end came through loud and clear.

“Skrsshh—fucked! We dicked the dog, big time!” There was a pause, as if he were listening to someone speaking in the same room. “They’re all fucking dead! We’ve got to go, now!”

“Hold up,” I said, breaking my silence. Before I could continue, he cut me off.

“Peach? Is that you? You were supposed to override the security, not cycle all the airlocks!”

I turned to look at the mangled corpse that, just minutes ago, had been a living, breathing pony, wearing the space suit I now wore. There was a small portable terminal of Equestrian make sitting in the corner, its screen glowing in the darkness. A deckplate had been pried up, and the terminal was spliced into a fiber-optic line. The hacker didn’t have the deaths of the prisoners on her conscience for very long.

“If Peach is the mare I got this radio from, then I’m afraid not. She’s KIA, over.”

“Dammit. Well, who the fuck is this, then?”

“One of the prisoners she spaced.”

“Did you kill her?” he spoke menacingly.

“Negative, but if she’d been alive when I found her, I might’ve given her a piece of my mind.”

“Look, that was a mistake.” His voice took on an apologetic tone. “We didn’t expect the cells to get vented. How did you survive that?”

“Caught a ride on a piece of debris from the station.”

“That would be a part of the main transmitter tower. We thought we could knock out their comms in one go, but it looks like they had a backup, or several. Bloody hell, here it comes.”

“Ahriman Kzed ke unalt verein uin hentet,” Scheherazade spoke over the station’s PA system. “Soz grippen vere Ekkestreun anzala han zoksh! Fard heurbolg skipadz ahn rekedven-plaz Alfe accadein.”

I took a few deep breaths. Even though I wasn’t all that familiar with the cleomanni writing system, I knew enough spoken Ardun to realize that every Confederate ship in the sector was now aware of the attack and was vectoring in on our position. My window of opportunity had just narrowed to minutes. On top of that, these moronic interlopers had almost gotten me killed. I didn’t know if I was ready to put my life in their hooves, but it seemed like I didn’t have a choice.

“I’m going to see if I can link up with you guys,” I said. “What’s your location?”

“If you’re at Peach Cobbler’s last known position, that would put you on the other end of the station from us.”

I didn’t know the first thing about hacking, but I disconnected the fiber-optic line and packed up the portable terminal in my saddlebags anyway. I never left good hardware behind. I then ran to the nearest viewport and gazed outside, putting my forehooves over my head to shield my eyes from the glare. Ahriman Station had been built with a series of enormous ring-shaped sections rotating around a central shaft that bathed the rest of the facility in its shadow, like the axle and wheels of an immense wagon. Motes of blue light glowed from the gaps between the towering protrusions that studded the central structure’s surface.

On the other end of the ring I now stood in, the interlopers had docked a commandeered cleomanni patrol boat to one of the station’s umbilicals. It was small enough for me to block out its visage with the tip of an outstretched hoof. At least a kilometer away. I let my temper get the better of me, stamping my hooves against the deck while cursing loudly.

“You’ve got ten minutes,” he said. “Double-time it, soldier girl.”

“I copy. Ten minutes. Out.”

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 02//Layer Estimated time remaining: 29 Hours, 46 Minutes