//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

Hoodoo chuckled happily and grinned at me. All pearly white teeth. Somehow, the teeth stuck out in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t make out much more of her than that. Just twisting shadows. She turned back to her work, lifting a paintbrush in her lovely cerulean magic. From behind her, I couldn’t see what she was working on. I was so sure it was something beautiful. It had to be. She had supreme talent. Her paintings were a cut above what most ponies could muster.

I ambled up to her easel. She’d perched herself on an emerald-green hilltop overlooking Dodge, using the cityscape for reference. Hey, whatcha workin’ on, Hoodoo?

My smile fell from my face when I got closer and saw the painting. It was Windy Mesa, her countenance a mask of pain and humiliation. Dodge vanished, replaced by a black void. When Hoodoo turned back to me, her eyes slipped out of her head like egg yolks and maggots crawled out of the empty sockets. Hoodoo’s vengeful ghost slapped her hooves down atop my shoulders, forcing me to the ground with otherworldly strength. The spine-chilling sound that issued forth from her gaping maw was like the buzzing of a great swarm of flies.

I gasped awake, my heart pounding in my chest. I stared wide-eyed at the infirmary around me, that faint antiseptic scent crawling up my nostrils. For a brief moment, nothing felt real. I didn’t know what had happened to me, or where I was, or even who I was. At that moment, if somepony had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them something as basic as my own name. Reality came flooding back as a patchwork of painful truths. Memories I didn’t want. Guilt I couldn’t accept.

I took a deep breath. I shoved it down. There were more important things to do than sit around feeling sorry for myself. For one thing, I had to pee. Very badly.

I threw the sheets off, my legs briefly getting tangled and prompting me to growl in frustration. Finally succeeding, I swung my legs off the bed, my hooves clicking against the hard floor. My back ached, my stitches pinching and itching my skin, the air cold against the shaven patch above my flanks. My muzzle hurt from where my nose had been broken and then magically set. I’d cast very nearly to the point of burnout, and as a result, my head felt like someone had stuck it in a vice and tightened the jaws until my brain wanted to pop out of my skull. My chest felt like two stallions had taken turns bucking it like a hoofball kickoff, just to see how far they could launch me. The burn from the incendiary round had taken a small patch of fur off my chest and left behind a nasty blister. I had bruises all over my body from being shot, punched, body-slammed, and thrown through cubicle walls.

I stumbled into the infirmary’s bathroom, avoiding looking at myself in the mirror—what little I saw looked like hell, and I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to be melodramatically smashing mirrors just yet. I climbed up onto the toilet, sat my ass down and strained, my back throbbing in time with my pulse. I let out a soft little groan as I started to release, first as a trickle of watery blood, and then running clear. My back felt like knives. I could faintly perceive the soft whirr of machinery, the pumps in the auto-dialysis implant filtering my blood and quickly refilling my bladder from the backlog. My limbs shivered as I took another long, achy piss, only to have the cycle repeat a second and then a third time. The ordeal left me a shaking, whimpering mess.

“I’m not even fully pony, anymore,” I muttered. “Can’t have kids. Can’t even pee right. I’m just a half-robot piece of shit. Why not go all the way? Make me into an Anima and stuff my soul in a Charger? This fucking body has almost had it.”

I pulled out my toothbrush and swept the taste of vomit and blood and filth out of my mouth, spitting in the sink, rinsing and gargling a couple times with an old bottle of mint mouthwash that had been diluted to stretch it out. Argent had told me not to take a bath. My stitches weren’t up to it. A light rinse was allowable, however. I stepped into the shower and turned it on, letting the warm, pure water wash the stench of copper out of my coat. I sighed softly as I let it soak in, soothing my aches and pains. I still had bits of Carillon stuck in my fur and my mane. I felt something hard in my hair, sweeping it out and inspecting it only to find that it was one of his teeth. I tossed it in the trash, sneering with disgust.

You’re an asshole, Pilot.

He was right. I was an asshole. My senseless delay had gotten him killed. It had paid off later, however. I had my money, my Orbit, and my motorcycle. It wasn’t worth a life or two, but it was something. I also had a vague clue as to where Windy Mesa was. I’d never be able to follow up on that lead. Not here. Not while working for the ELF. I would practically have to go AWOL to even begin looking for her. I had no means of transport off-world, no connections, and no resources that would allow me to track down a member of the underworld and his victims in Confederate-controlled space.

Emlan’s words reverberated through my consciousness. She’s probably halfway across the galaxy by now, suffocating beneath his undulating rolls of lard. Did that answer suffice?

While I dumped a couple ounces of shampoo into my hooves and lathered up my whole body, I reviewed what I knew about Windy’s kidnapper. Gormos Ralfas. Damarkind. An Alpha-Superior, like Broggas. Has his own ship. His own tribe. Wealthy. Obscenely overweight. Drug addict. Collects mares like toy dolls as a hobby. He also fucks them. It wasn’t much to go on. Could I trace his drug purchases? No, everyone does drugs. Someone buying case after case of plus-sized condoms? No. Why would he even wear one at all? He can’t get his victims pregnant anyway. Probably spends all day raw-dogging them, the swine.

My thoughts went to that, and then on to darker places. I shook my head. “The more I tempt fate, the worse everything seems to get. Can’t one fucking thing look up for me? Just one?” I quit rinsing my mane, blinking a few times. “Aw, shit. I just did it again, didn’t I? Today’s gonna be like shotgunning a broken sewer line now, isn’t it?”

Someone started banging on the bathroom door, very nearly hard enough to knock it off its hinges. I huffed with indignation. “Yeah, yeah, gimme a minute.” I turned the water off and stepped out of the shower, my head wrapped in a towel. When I opened the door, Captain Garrida’s immense frame towered over me, with Argent Tincture right behind her. My eyes slowly traced upward to the expression that she wore. She didn’t look very pleased at all.

“Uhh, Sir?” I offered. “Is there a problem?”

I wasn’t too sure what happened, because a split-second later, I saw stars, then little birdies floating around my head. She’d slapped the shit out of me, hard enough to send me sprawling. I scooted back against the bathroom sink cabinet, holding my cheek and looking up at her fearfully.

“Don’t rough up the patient!” Argent shouted, only for Garrida to look back at her with a death glare that silenced her immediately.

“You thought you could get away with it.” Garrida pointed at me accusingly with one of her claws. “You stupid little fuck.”

“Am I in trouble?” I mumbled.

“You broke formation. Disobeyed Bellwether’s orders. Murdered a scavver in Everfree South.”

“I was looking for the damn salvage! And that scavver was a case of self-defense!”

I shrieked as she slapped me again.

“You shut your cunt mouth. You open it again, I’m gonna hit you again, you understand?”

“Yes, Sir!”

“You fuckin’ dilly-dallied and went scavving unauthorized instead of getting to your assigned nav point. You cost the lives of members of your squad.”

“Sir, it was my apartment and they were my things. My Orbit helped in the battle that followed!”

Slap.

My sister was dead. My Charger was in pieces. My commanding officer was treating me like a criminal. My world was falling apart all around me. There was nowhere to escape. I’d fucked up. I was going to face the music. My breathing quickened and my blood pressure shot through the roof from the stress and the panic.

I was a perfectionist, at times. Things like this were the topic of some of my worst nightmares. Getting chewed out by Captain Garrida, someone who I’d come to respect and look up to in the brief time we’d known each other, was like one of those dreams where I was a foal again and I’d shat my diapers in a shopping mall, screaming and crying while all the patrons stared at me and my shit-stained ass. That was what every excruciating second of this felt like.

“That’s not why I’m here,” Garrida said. “If it were just that, I might’ve been able to let it go. But no. I have eyewitness testimony from numerous sources that you bribed Emlan fucking Broggas, that disgusting creep. Have you no fucking shame at all? Was I wrong about you, Pilot?”

I was crying, now. Leaning up against the cabinet and crying. “It wasn’t a bribe. Those freaks kidnapped my sister. He was offering information about the fucker who took her! How could I let the opportunity slip away? My sister, Cap! My fucking sister!”

Garrida had wound up her almighty pimp hand to strike me again, but her leg went a little slack, her eyes widening in newfound understanding. “What?”

“It’s all on Lucky. My Orbit. I had that fucker record everything.”

While Garrida eyed me suspiciously, we stepped outside the bathroom and I pulled the Juke 1300 from under the bed, gripping its metal frame between my hooves as I charged up my horn and gave my Orbit some juice. “Boot up, Lucky. Playback mode.”

I fast-forwarded until I arrived at the exact spot where Broggas went on his little spiel, offering information in exchange for money. We sat and reviewed the recording in silence. The entire time, Captain Garrida regarded the projected holoscreen with an unnerving, unblinking stare.

We all watched as Emlan walked up to me and tucked his business card into the neckline of my armor while I stood frozen in place, unable to respond in any meaningful way. Somehow, I’d had the presence of mind to keep Lucky cloaked the entire time, or else Broggas probably would’ve smashed my Orbit to keep his secrets.

“Mindstop,” Argent Tincture whispered. “Probably coming from that round thing on his belt.”

“Nemrin magic?” I said. “Some sort of talisman?”

“No,” Argent said. “No magic. It’s completely technological. The xicares make them. They’re manufactured exclusively by underworld roguetech consortiums, like the Kiki’turruk Collective. Very expensive and very illegal. Interferes with consciousness by direct wireless transcranial stimulation. Makes you enter a trance-like state and not remember even a second of it. Perfect for kidnappers, slavers and other scum. Some of those devices are powerful enough to cause lethal seizures.”

Roguetech. It was what the FTU member races colloquially called outlawed technological artifacts that violated either the Stellar Code or the Confederate Guild Charter. Technically, all magtech was also considered roguetech by its very nature.

“That doesn’t make any sense, Doc.” I knit my brow in confusion. “I sensed a magic signature. It wasn’t mine. Wasn’t pony, either. I didn’t recognize it at all.”

“Were you casting continuously when you got hit, Sergeant?”

“Yeah, I was cloaking Lucky. I left the lens uncloaked so the camera could still see. Kinda hard to do that selectively with eyes. Magic just naturally tries to stick to and cover living things. Easier with cameras and the like. What does that have to do with anything?”

“That was your own residual signature.” Argent shook her head. “A Mindstop does weird things to a unicorn’s magic. You might keep casting as normal, even while in a trance, but on a thaummeter, the magic will look like it came from something without a brain. The signature would be almost completely blank.”

I stared at her, wide-eyed. “Fucking weird.”

Argent turned to the big griffon. “Captain, if the Sergeant had attacked Broggas, he would’ve killed her, and there would’ve been nothing she could’ve done to prevent it. He could have slit her throat while she stood there, helpless. Or, he could’ve simply turned up the mindstop puck until her brain shut down permanently.”

“I can see that.” Garrida was biting her claws in idle concentration, not taking her eyes off the footage.

“I gave him a couple hundred bits for the info,” I said. “I caught him on video slapping around a Confederate officer and then spilling the beans about how he canceled the contract and left them all to die at our hooves. I also caught him on camera using highly illegal roguetech. Do you realize, Sir, you can blackmail the fuck out of Emlan with this footage? If we spread this around, that son of a bitch would never get another contract ever again. He’d be lucky to find a career as Emlan Broggas, traveling gigolo and man of mystery.”

“Nicely done, Sergeant.” Garrida chuckled. “Heck, you’re almost a better spy than ol’ Bell, at this rate.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.” I scratched my head. “But I do try.”

“Fun fact, Sergeant.” Garrida looked me straight in the eye. “Did you know that Percheron Solutions once tried to sue Tarrasque Security Solutions because they both had Solutions in their name? Yeah, that didn’t get far. Turns out, mother of all surprises, ‘animals’ can’t file lawsuits in Confederate space. Not even for trademark violations. Not even if the defendants in the suit are the real animals.”

I laughed. “Don’t, like, half of all those damn PMCs have something harmless-sounding like ‘solutions’ in the name that makes them sound like traveling space plumbers or some shit?”

“Who says they’re not?” Garrida laughed. “They sure know how to lay pipe!” When she saw my scowl, she peeked through her claws, her hand dropping down and covering her beak in horror when she realized the full implications of what she’d just said. “Sorry.”

“Sir, Broggas told me that some fucker named Gormos Ralfas has my younger sister,” I said. “She’s all I’ve got, Cap. I don’t think my parents survived the fall of Meadowgleam.”

“If Gormos has her, you’ll never find her, or him.” Garrida shook her head. “There are over a hundred damarkind Condottieri that ply the stars, and he is one of the richest and most secretive.”

“Condottieri?”

Garrida waved a claw. “Contractors. Mercenaries. The words the damarkinds use for titles don’t translate exactly into Equestrian. The word Jakh means something like ‘machismo’ or ‘valor’. A Jakha, what we call an Alpha, could also be translated as something along the lines of ‘follower of Jakh’, ‘bossman’, or ‘big cheese’. A Seg’Jakha is literally a ‘supreme Jakha’. In other words, an ‘overboss’ or ‘alpha-superior’. Not all Seg’Jakha are what the satyrs would call Arume Accontrodati. The leaders of Contractor Armies. The vast majority of the Seg’Jakha are politicians and councilors on their world who answer only to the oldest and wisest of chieftains. The ones who lead mercenary armies are the dregs and vagabonds of their society.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Fuck.” Garrida exasperatedly slapped her forehead. “Gormos, of all the motherfuckers. Wow, you sure know how to pick ‘em, Storm. That guy is one sick puppy.”

“Dammit,” I muttered.

“I know what you’re thinking. Don’t even think about going off the reservation to go looking for her, or you’ll be in bigger trouble than you already are. It’s not safe out there for lone, traveling mares, anyway. They’ll just grab you like the rest, and then, you’re fucked. Literally. Safety in numbers, Sergeant. We need each other more than ever. It’s a lesson you could stand to learn. If I see your hot-dogging ass playing lone wolf or negotiating with the enemy again, you’re fucked. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Sir!” I said, saluting. “Does—does this mean I’m off the hook?”

“No,” Garrida muttered, giving me a nasty look. “It means you get one month brig. If you hadn’t been able to prove your innocence of the charge of conspiracy with the enemy, you would have gotten six months brig and been cut out of all further salvage missions. In addition, you would’ve been busted to Corporal and then undergone a short trial that would have invariably ended in you being caned until your ass looked like a cherry tomato. If we were still in the Army, rather than caning, you would’ve been convicted of treason and then dragged out back and shot. Good thing you had the presence of mind to bring a camcorder, eh, Sergeant?”

I was shivering from head to hoof. “Uh, yeah! Yeah, that’s right!”

Captain Garrida let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t like doing this. Not after the shit you’ve been through, kid. But let’s face it, you need at least a month to heal up, anyway. Our cells are more spacious and hygienic than the barracks, and we need the infirmary unoccupied. It’s partly for your protection, too. There are some ponies who really don’t like you, Sergeant. Not after the shit you pulled. Sagebrush sounded like he was gearing up for you to have a blanket party, and I’m not going to have one of my pilots beaten up while she’s recovering from surgery. He needs some time to cool off, and so do you.

“I’m going to send some ponies by to drop off reading material so you don’t go nuts in there. Use that time wisely. That’s right. You’re going to study. You’re going to kneel and ritually unfuck yourself, Sergeant. You’re going to stop being an obstacle and start being the team player Bell thinks you are. Do I make myself clear?”

I hung my head. “Yes, Sir.”

Garrida rested her claw on my shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your sisters, Storm. I really am. I can’t imagine what you must be going through, right now. It’s hard for me to get a fix on you. You have acted with equal parts valor and foolishness. You know how to become one with the chaos of the battlefield. How to make that chaos yours. However, we are a paramilitary organization, and as such, we require some measure of order. I hope you appreciate that fact on your next mission.”

“Next mission?” I said.

“We’re getting something lined up for you, Sierra, and Bell. It’s going to be a bit more covert than you’re used to, at least for the insertion phase. The details are kinda sketchy right now, but rest assured, you’ll be briefed in detail when the time comes.” Garrida nodded to the two griffons that seemed to materialize out of thin air at either side of me. “You two, escort the Sergeant to her cell.”

Argent Tincture shook her head angrily. “She needs to be checked on periodically to make sure there aren’t any complications with the implant.” She turned towards me. “Did you produce any urine this morning?”

“Yes,” I said. “Lots. Actually, like, three bladders worth. It hurt, too.”

Argent facehooved. “See? Already having issues. The filtration rate needs adjustment. I also need to come by and do blood draws and urine collection to make sure the damn thing is doing its job. This is going to take at least a couple weeks before I’m comfortable with letting her return to duty.” Argent produced a portable computer and ran a link cable from it to the port above my cervical spine, linking into my neural lace—apparently, it been connected to my new implant. “Thirty milliliters per kilogram per hour? What brainiac set it to that? No wonder why her back teeth were floating. It needs to be less than half that.” She fiddled with the remote a little bit more. “There we go. Tell me or Gauze Patch if anything weird happens, okay, Sergeant?”

I smirked. “Well, if my rear half explodes in a shower of blood and piss like some poor schmuck in a splatter flick and paints the inside of my cell every color of the rainbow, you’ll be the first to know, Doc.”

Argent gave me a stern expression like she didn’t find me particularly funny. “That can’t happen. The implant has safety measures so you don’t get lethal embolisms. If it detects that any part of the loop is over-pressurized, guess what? It has a relief valve. There are data ports and other access ports in your skin that you need to be mindful of, too. They’re lined with rings of enchanted silver to keep bacteria away, but those won’t do anything if you go wallowing in feces. Keep those areas clean and dry so they don’t get infected, okay?”

“Where?” I tried craning my neck over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see them. Argent hoofed over a mirror, which I lifted in my magic to look at my back. There they were, just as described. Two shaved patches on both sides of my spine, with multiple circular titanium ports sticking out of them, each rising a couple millimeters out of the skin.

I blinked a few times, having a hard time adjusting to the new realities of my body. “So, Doc, what you mean to tell me is that if this thing malfunctions, I have a blowhole on my back that shoots a spray of atomized piss?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Wow.” I grinned. “Cool! Just what I always wanted!”

“Uh-huh,” Argent Tincture snickered. “Just try not to be standing next to me if you feel like a water balloon about to pop, okay? Nopony wants your germs in their mouth, Sergeant.” Argent unplugged me and turned to Garrida. “She’s all yours, Cap.”

One of the two sneering griffon males nudged me in the side with the butt of his rifle. “Let’s go, high-roller.”

Without a word, I followed them to the base’s detention area and sheepishly walked to my cell. The hall was sparsely lit and ill-maintained, the floor a mosaic of old stains. When we got to my cell, they gave me a stiff push inside and then slammed and locked the door behind me. I had flashbacks to the shipping container on Ahriman Station. I hyperventilated a little from a mild panic attack, only to clutch my chest and take a few deep breaths.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “They coulda at least given me my fuckin’ Orbit. No tunes? No movies? This fucking blows.”

They knew I didn’t know how to teleport, so they hadn’t bothered suppressing my magic. The accommodations were sparse, but the cell was very roomy and spotlessly clean, in sharp contrast to the hall outside. There was a canvas cot in the corner, a toilet, a sink with no mirror, and a small desk with a chair and a diode wall sconce above it, and that was about it.

I leapt into the hard, uncomfortable cot and sprawled my legs out, sighing softly. It felt good to be unclothed. To not have a uniform rubbing and pinching my fur. This wasn’t a punishment. This was a much-deserved vacation. That was how I chose to perceive it. I knew that if I closed my eyes for any length of time, I’d see some shit in the back of my eyelids, but I felt completely exhausted. A little nightmare or two was nothing.

// … // … // … // … // … //

It wasn’t nothing. After five hours of non-sleep, waking up with a start every hour, I resolved to stare at the ceiling instead. I grit my teeth, my lip curled with undying anger.

You’re money. Big money. That’s why they haven’t killed you all.

“Slaving bastards,” I whispered. “So, that’s all this was ever about, huh? That’s all they ever wanted from us?” My lips trembled. Equestria had so much to offer to the galaxy. Scholars. Poets. Visionaries. They didn’t care. They wanted our meat, muscles, and orifices. That was all. They were willing to settle for something so basic. So primitive.

Even with as greedy and grasping as the satyrs were, reducing ponies to livestock didn’t make good business sense. Emlan was right. We ponies didn’t have much meat on us. Carnivores and omnivores preferred eating large herbivores not for their taste alone, but for the simple fact that they converted a greater portion of the calories they ate into edible tissue. Ponies were small, highly energetic herbivores. We downed the calories, but we also burned most of them with our hyperactive metabolisms, staying roughly the same weight regardless of what we stuffed our craws with. Not ideal when raising creatures for meat. It meant one needed more crops to feed them with. Simple physics. The very idea of pony meat was an unnecessary, insane extravagance that bordered on paving streets with gold and wearing purple silk for every occasion.

As for using us as laborers, it stood to reason that robots were more economical for asteroid mining duties than stallions in space suits. For one thing, machines didn’t need edible rations or breathable air. They didn’t get sick, or tired, or go stir-crazy and start pounding on the walls of their cramped dormitories with their hooves. Industrial robots and drones were predictable. If something went wrong, they simply broke. Spare parts were shipped in, the machine was serviced, and it went right back into action. They didn’t need pep talk or head-shrinkers. They didn’t try sneaky shit like sabotaging airlocks or mysteriously misplacing valuable tools to try and undermine their captors. Machines just worked.

If the cleomanni had annexed us and let us live out our lives in peace, they would’ve had exclusive control over the distribution and sale of our magtech. They would’ve made a killing. They would never do that, though. The FTU had banned magic for thousands of years, long before we made first contact with them. They only made exceptions for the nemrin, and even then, mostly for anti-magic; suppression rings, large-area dispelling devices, and other such things—most were entirely of nemrin manufacture, with few exceptions. Why are they so afraid of magic? What the hell is there to be afraid of? We can’t help it. It’s just what we are.

What they used stallions for was an eyebrow-raiser, but there was no excuse for what they did with mares. Sex slavery. Using us as hosts for the Karkadann. My mind would twist into knots just thinking about it. I tried to rationalize it. Tried to find an explanation, a reason why anyone would do anything so fundamentally warped, and each time, I ended up at a logical dead-end, being taunted by the figment of a laughing, mustache-twirling, tie-the-damsel-to-the-train-tracks villain. It was incomprehensible evil. Evil so profound as to be alien in itself.

Bit by bit, drop by drop, years and years of guilt were dissolving out of me like brine. I was beginning to feel like the things I’d done during the war were entirely justified. I didn’t want to feel that way. There should have been absolutely no excuse for those things, either. There should have been a special place in Tartarus for all of us. But there it was, staring me in the face. A reason to not feel like shit all the time. I was damned if I took it.

There was a soft click as my cell door was unlocked. Wind Shear, the pegasus stallion and Charger mechanic, was holding a veritable crapload of binders in one of his forelegs, his other leg shaking from the sheer weight. I shot up from bed. “Whoa, buddy! Lemme give you a hoof!”

I snared most of them in my levitation just before his other foreleg gave out, making him faceplant on the concrete and sending a few binders skidding across the floor.

“Ow,” he croaked.

“What is all this stuff?” I said.

Wind Shear didn’t appear to be all that angry at me. He mostly looked tired, if anything. “Charger manuals. Mechanical shit. Military stuff. Magic textbooks. Captain Garrida told me to bring you these, with explicit instructions to read them all cover-to-cover, or else. So, enjoy. I’ve got some work to do. See you around, Sergeant.” As he turned to leave, he looked over his shoulder. “And, honestly, I thought you fought pretty good out there, for a pilot. It’s always a fucking shitshow. They just needed a scapegoat, this time.”

As Wind Shear vacated the cell, shutting and locking the door behind him and leaving me to ponder his words, I stared at the pile before me, levitating up the glossy book on top.

Mirage A202 Pilot’s Manual.

TOP SECRET - CODE EPSILON

I flipped to the first few pages. The preamble was a bright red sheet indicating special handling information under Code Epsilon. How the manual was to be kept in a safe when not in use, with the combination known only by authorized personnel. How any copying of any part of the document was strictly forbidden. How any violation of the rules could lead to prosecution and prison time. I rolled my eyes and hoofed through the fine print until I got to the meat of things. The introductory part of the manual was a basic primer on how Chargers functioned.

First, there was the frame. The chassis of the unit. The frame of every Charger was made up of solid titanium alloy pieces constructed using powder bed additive manufacturing techniques in giant magtech beamwelder machines. These house-sized devices used a principle similar to a beamcaster, only instead of shooting thin streams of arcane energy and piercing body armor and soft tissue, they fired focused, millimeter-thin streams of pyrokinesis to melt powdered metal alloys into solid parts. This unique construction allowed Charger frames to have hidden, weight-reducing voids that would be impossible to make with traditional casting methods.

For added strength, many of these voids were filled with a kind of titanium foam during the manufacturing process. Marrow for the bones. The rough parts were then milled out with computer numerical control to very precise tolerances and then coated to protect them from wear and oxidation. The standard Charger frame coatings were typically a titanium nitride ceramic material bonded directly to the metal in giant sputtering machines, leaving behind a super-thin, diamond-hard finish in either black or gold.

The voids in every Charger’s frame were filled with a substance called Tetrafluid. In olden times, magic was thought to be innate, or perhaps drawn from the world around us. In time, our science had disproven every single one of the old theories that sought to describe the source from which our magic came. In truth, the reality was somehow more mundane, but no less fascinating.

All magical creatures secreted a substance from our amygdala which our science referred to as quintessence.

Quintessence was a fluid suspension of calcareous crystals which possessed bizarre non-Euclidean properties. There were regions of topologically warped space within them. The special properties of these crystals allowed for the probabilities of events to be altered directly when the crystals were exposed to energy and the resulting emanations guided towards a course of action. The amygdala secreted quintessence as a stress response. The more stressed a pony was, the more powerful our magic would temporarily become. Like being dry-humped and menaced with a knife by a 250-kilo alien with sharp tusks until you blast him with telekinesis hard enough to dent a brick wall, I mused, shaking my head in disgust.

This substance coursed through practically every single pony’s bodily fluids. Every pony alive, aside from those with congenital disorders of the magic-insufficiency sort, had a few grams of quintessence in their system at any given time.

In earth ponies, it was concentrated in the blood and the frogs of one’s hooves, taking residence in the many blood vessels located there. It allowed them to channel their energies into the rock and soil beneath them, making plant life grow faster, or breaking boulders with but a touch.

In pegasi, it was found in the highest concentrations in the lymph, in nodes at the bases of the wings, giving them additional lift and the ability to manipulate the weather as they desired.

In unicorns, it was found in the highest quantities in our cerebrospinal fluid, surrounding our brains and spinal cords. A unicorn’s brain tissue actually extended ever-so-slightly into the bases of our horns. Unicorn horns were a natural all-spectrum spell locus, allowing us to cast a wide range of spells with very precise and specific effects. If a unicorn’s horn were broken off in the middle, we would not lose our magic. Rather, it would become unfocused, raw, and imprecise.

The energy to perform magic came directly from a pony’s metabolism, from the breakdown of adenosine triphosphate, like the other natural processes in the body which required a potent chemical energy source to sustain life. Quintessence was less like a reservoir of magic and more like a muscle that could be flexed to exert arcane power. The more a pony exerted themselves, the more likely they would burn out, and it was exactly the same sort of burnout a weightlifter might experience, with copious sweating and panting involved. Casting spells burned calories exactly like aerobic exercise. The best way to recharge one’s magic was to simply eat something. Scratch that, a lot of things.

Tetrafluid was synthetic quintessence, a toxic, greenish-metallic, highly conductive substance that was far less efficient at converting energy into magic than the natural equivalent. That was why a very skilled unicorn exerting only a few hundred watts of metabolic effort could level an entire city block with their spells. Quintessence—the real thing—could convert even small quantities of energy into many thaums of magic power. Ponies were capable of exerting outsized effects on our environment despite the intrinsic limits on the wattage our bodies could exert.

However, when Tetrafluid was fed with several kilowatts—or even megawatts—of electrical energy, it could emanate a magic field just as powerful as the ones that the most powerful unicorns could produce, if not more so, in spite of its inefficiency. If this field was then directed with a spell locus or diagrammatic engine, it could radiate thousands of thaums of deadly energy across the battlefield. Summoned forces of nature, focused arcane beams, nightmarish hallucinations, or whatever was required to neutralize a specific threat.

This was the principle behind the electro-magical transducer, a device which consisted of a junction box feeding electrodes into a Tetrafluid reservoir, producing raw, shapeless arcane power by running a current through the liquid. Practically every magtech device in existence, aside from those powered by enchantments or other passive means, used what was called a thaumatic chain. An electrical power source was coupled to an electro-magical transducer feeding energy into a Tetrafluid reservoir, which, in turn, released the amorphous thaumatic field which was then shaped and directed by a diagrammatic engine or spell locus.

The source of power could be anything. A diesel generator. A gas turbine generator. A fusion reactor. A nuclear bomb. It didn’t have to be electrical. Thermal energy, kinetic energy, or ionizing radiation could be used to energize tetrafluid, just as with a pulse of electricity. The energizing process could be destructive—like a brick of explosive wrapped in a tetrafluid reservoir—and yet still release an omni-directional thaumatic field, much like an electromagnetic pulse. Tetrafluid reacted to physical blows by solidifying much in the same way a mixture of corn starch and water might. Even holding a torch against the stuff or hitting it with a hammer would make it glow with a thaumatic field, same as the glow from a unicorn’s lit horn.

Diagrammatic engines were much like spell locuses, but configured to operate according to a magical blueprint of sorts. They were artificial unicorns. Instead of having a mind to direct the magic, they had patterns etched into enchanted holocrystal. Locuses were simply magic mirroring devices; a diagrammatic engine, but without the diagrams. One simply attuned their magic to the locus and the thaumatic field produced by the energized Tetrafluid would multiply their own spellpower, like a powered exoskeleton for one’s magic. Locuses were tuned to function only with specific wavelengths—or spectra—of magic, corresponding either to one of the six schools in the Modern Craft, or a combination of any two of them, which were fifteen sub-schools in their own right.

With the magic properties of Tetrafluid, EMTs, Diagrammatic Engines, and Spell Locuses aside, the chassis of a Charger had other attributes, as well. The leg frame components were connected to each other and to the torso by powerful levitation bearings which were enchanted to prevent metal-to-metal contact, gliding on a field of magic, instead. As a result, they required no lubrication to function, but most techs gave them a shot or two of grease just in case, to prevent any shavings from accumulating if they temporarily exceeded their load limits.

Depending on the model of Charger, these bearings were either the simple, circular kind, allowing a single axis of motion, or they were ball-jointed, spherical bearings that could move in any direction like the skeleton of a living creature. Ball-joints were more common on Coursers and Rounceys, while most Destriers used plain bearings instead, due to the reduced flexibility requirements and higher load capacities.

The limbs of a Charger were sheathed in Duostrand, layers of artificial muscle composed of alternating rows of electro-active polymer muscles and twined carbon nanotube ones. They rested in a gelatinous polymer matrix that was vaguely like silicone but with greater tensile strength, surrounded by conductive pathways and filled with vascularized micro-fluidic channels that allowed the electro-active polymers to be triggered by electricity and the twined carbon nanotubes to be contracted by the presence of rapidly heated and snap-cooled synthetic oil. Focused pulses of electricity, pyrokinesis, and cryokinesis were what activated the muscles of a Charger, and electro-magical transducers and diagrammatic engines placed at key positions throughout the frame were what made that possible.

The process for manufacturing duostrand was very complicated. In short, they were woven together on great robotic looms and then embedded in a shock-absorbent matrix. The vascularized polymer matrix was created essentially by casting channels into the polymer by molding them around cords of a special compound with a low melting point and then removing those cords by heating and melting them out, leaving behind veins and arteries in the polymer, like a living thing. Lastly, superconducting wires were added to the outermost layer, to activate the electro-active components.

The muscles were bespoke. They were different for every single model of Charger. As a result, replacing them often involved setting up fabrication labs with duostrand looms in the field, to produce spares and replace damaged ones, or re-tune the muscle setup for different loadouts. The different muscle groups had to be created according to exacting specifications and then attached to the underlying frame in key locations.

Atop the muscles went the cloth covers—a heavy-duty, fire-retardant, waterproofed canvas material that protected the Charger’s internals from moisture intrusion. The outermost armor plating of a Charger was made of LAMIBLESS, a laminated composite that, true to its name, had been blessed. It was a very simple material consisting of layers of graphene impregnated with a highly stable low-volatility resin based on a synthetic version of changeling secretions. The uncured rolls of the material were then given benedictions with protection against dark magic. The blessing was mostly so that the battlefield could be saturated with allied dark magic without inflicting friendly fire on our own vehicle crews and embarked troops, something that had considerable tactical advantages. After that, they were enchanted for additional stiffness and fireproofing before being sent to factories and fabrication labs to turn them into armor pieces by pressing them into molds and curing them.

The resulting composite material was a shiny black carapace-like substance that could be further coated to alter its appearance. On military vehicles, it was typical for it to receive a two-part matte polyurethane finish in camouflage colors. The composite was much stronger than steel for a given thickness and many times lighter, outperforming aramid weaves for tensile strength and carbon fiber for ductility. The stuff was ubiquitous, too. Most Equestrian armored vehicles, aircraft, and spacecraft were completely covered in LAMIBLESS paneling. It enabled our craft to be lighter and faster than their cleomanni equivalents without compromising on armor in the slightest. The material generally wasn’t used for body armor, however, because the changeling-derived resin was mildly neurotoxic. LAMIBLESS plates were a persistent environmental contaminant and not only unsafe to handle bare-hooved if frayed or damaged, but also had to be disposed of in specialized recycling facilities.

The glacis armor of a Charger—the chest piece on the torso, often found bearing the sword-in-horseshoe insignia of the Imperial Army—was constructed of something a bit tougher than LAMIBLESS. Mithrium armor, enchanted by the Empress herself.

Titanium, even non-neuterized titanium, was highly magic-resistant. It channeled magic away from itself. These properties, ironically enough, made it highly useful in the construction of magtech devices. It acted akin to the control rods in a nuclear fission reactor, as a magic moderator capable of altering the thaumatic field flux. Devices consisting of hollow titanium vessels acted like magic resonator cavities, amplifying and directing the flow of raw magic.

That was why Mithrium consisted of alternating, sandwiched layers of enchanted synthetic ruby, graphene, and high-purity monocrystalline titanium. It was the magic properties of the material that gave it its incredible stiffness, tensile strength, and resistance to kinetic energy. Mithrium worked by magically decrementing the force of projectiles that struck it, like reactive armor. It often did this with such spectacular efficiency that not only did long-rod penetrators fired by tank cannons not penetrate, they simply exploded in a shower of molten metal without even leaving so much as a scratch. A mere hundred and ten millimeters of the stuff was equal in kinetic energy resistance to over two meters of steel, while possessing an average density of only about four-point-three grams per cubic centimeter.

Mithrium was light. It was incredibly strong. It was highly scarce. Only the Empress knew the secrets of its creation, and she guarded them jealously. Twilight Sparkle had produced every single batch of the material herself, with her own magic. That was why it was only to be found in the glacis plates of Charger torsos or high-end battle tanks, protecting the most critical components from frontal penetration. It was also why pilots were advised to keep the fronts of our machines facing the enemy at all times. Not only did it present a narrower profile, it also presented the strongest armor. The presence of Mithrium in our vehicles meant that a little piece of the Empress’s will was carried with us onto the battlefield every time our lances sortied, and that, in itself, was a boon to morale.

The torso armor of a Charger was, with a few exceptions, rigidly attached to the frame, but the limb armor was attached through flexible struts protruding from the frame and through the duostrand, using the artificial muscle itself as a kind of flexible padding. Chargers could actually tighten their muscles in anticipation of a hit, like a pugilist stiffening up to receive a blow. It allowed them to absorb more kinetic energy than they would otherwise.

The basic layout of every Charger consisted of a head, torso, and legs, with various pieces of equipment mounted on the interior or exterior of those components.

On a Courser, the legs held the pyrojet boosters. Most Destriers had auxiliary torso thrusters to help spread the load. A pyrojet was, to put it bluntly, a type of jet engine with magic as both the impeller and heat source instead of a turbine and combustion chamber. Being powered by electro-magical transducers and diagrammatic engines, they were entirely electrical and needed no combustible fuel to operate, giving pyrojet-powered atmospheric fighter-bombers with fusion reactors virtually unlimited range. However, they needed air as a working fluid. They did not function in outer space or a thin atmosphere. Under those conditions, Chargers would have to carry their own reaction masses for their pyrojets to eject, essentially converting them into closed-cycle rockets. Usually, this mass came in the form of heavy tanks filled with powdered beryllium.

These reaction mass tanks were large, easy targets and threw off one’s center of mass, but could be quickly jettisoned when no longer needed. Pyrojets also gave away one’s position something fierce every time we used beryllium propellant, creating massive, directional plumes of metallic powder that arced high into the sky and created sizable radar returns; pilots derogatorily called it Glitter-Bombing. The hooves of every Charger were reinforced and weighted both for stability and to cause extra damage in a melee. It was an entirely acceptable practice for a Charger pilot to simply kick, buck, or stomp enemy vehicles into piles of debris.

My Courser had eight pyrojets. Four large boosters at the apex of each leg, and four small gimbaled thrusters in the shoulders and hips. This was a fairly typical configuration for a Courser, allowing for both high-speed dashes and rapid lateral movement to the tune of several gees of acceleration. Rounceys had a similar configuration, although the boosters tended to be smaller, lower-output and better-armored than on Coursers, while Destriers had additional pyrojets because of their sheer mass.

The torso was—just like with an actual pony—where most of the real fun happened. The hump behind a Charger’s neck was where the upper entryway of the cockpit was located, extending down into the torso, with the pilot seated above and behind the glacis, such that it would intercept rounds fired from tanks in front and below, shooting at an upward angle. Direct shots from enemies of equal height, like an Ifrit, had to get through the head to get to the pilot, and the head was also well-armored. What it lacked in resilience compared to Mithrium, it made up for in sheer thickness.

Most Chargers had a fighter-like cockpit with a central saddle, hoof controls, panels with toggle switches for the various systems of the vehicle, an array of multi-function displays to monitor the equipment statuses and respond accordingly, and a holotank where one could consult with a visual representation of the Charger’s Anima. Some of the largest Destriers had such amenities as a pilot’s quarters with a cramped bunk, food preparation area, and lavatory, along with a med station that doubled as an emergency crew transport area, for rescuing ejected pilots and such. Behind the cockpit, roughly where the stomach would be located on a pony, were the reactor, cooling systems, oil pumps, auxiliary power unit, computer core and Anima systems, and all the redundant backup systems that made up every Charger’s basic power generation and life support equipment.

The reactor traditionally used in Chargers—as well as some tanks and aircraft—was a hundred-megawatt polywell. A proton-boron polywell was a type of aneutronic electrostatic confinement fusion reactor of a fairly common design. Weighing only a few tons and occupying a relatively small area, the device produced a hundred megawatts of electrical power by ionizing and accelerating gases to fusion conditions in a vacuum chamber through the use of electron guns and a magnetic confinement grid, or magrid. A typical magrid was made up of six donut-shaped coils arranged in a cubic configuration, creating an ideal flow of particles. These reactors had no heat cycle. No steam turbines, no condensers, no water, nothing. Instead, gas was puffed into the reactor and ionized and then power was produced by direct conversion from the energy of the ions straight to electricity, producing a current that was drawn straight from the reactor with no intermediate steps and then fed into a network of breakers, voltage regulators, and busbars that provided power for the Charger’s electrical loads.

Because there was an optimal size for polywell magrids, it was typical for Chargers to be designed with additional hundred-megawatt reactors if more power was needed. Most Coursers, including mine, had one polywell. Rounceys had two, and Destriers had three or more. More electrical power meant a Charger could support more electro-magical transducers, more powerful muscles, higher yield beamcasters, and other such toys. Heavy beamcasters of the type mounted to Chargers and used as primary anti-armor weapons were very power-hungry, sucking down many megawatts of juice. Since the energy in question had to be pulsed, it was usually stored in large capacitor banks before it could be used, with the cycle time of the weapons limited by the size and capacity of the banks and the rate of recharge.

Heat was another concern. Chargers weren’t walking barbecues like most Goliaths. Under ordinary conditions, on a world with a normal, breathable atmosphere, there was no chance a Charger could cook its operator alive, even with all the stops pulled out. Operating in a vacuum—say, on a moon or planetoid—was a different story. Vacuum was an excellent insulator. Heat management under such conditions was crucial. One couldn’t simply blast away with their heavy beamcasters without ending up dripping with sweat from head to hoof as cockpit temperatures soared over forty degrees Celsius. That was why on vacuum or low-atmo missions, we typically carried ammunition-based weaponry instead of the heavy casters. Autoloading cannons and the like.

In addition to the head-mounted secondary and tertiary armaments, almost all Chargers had back-mounted primary torso weapons that would unfurl like pegasus wings, with a stowage position nestled against the shoulders and an active position where they extended and provided slight azimuth and elevation. The head of a Charger was like a turret with limited traverse and elevation. Aiming the back-mounted weapons often required turning the whole vehicle to face the target, however. Missile racks tended to be mounted in upward-angled hip-boxes attached to the hindquarters, which were disposable and designed to be jettisoned once fired, shifting the Charger’s whole center of gravity closer to the vehicle’s actual center, enabling the rear side-thrusters and improving the balance. They were used in opening salvos. Before any assault, one would typically dump the missiles into their targets, jettison the racks, and then advance, not engage in close combat with vulnerable and highly explosive missile racks hanging off their hips.

The crown jewel of the entire system was the Charger’s head. Multi-spectral sensors, phased-array radars, encrypted radio and satellite communications systems, anti-infantry casters, autocannons—it was all located in the head. The spell locus was situated up there, as well, right behind the upper armor plating, along with the main radome. Any time the locus amplified the pilot’s magic, a literal glowing halo of thaumatic energy would materialize over a Charger’s head, between the twin radio antennae. It was from that location that any ranged magic attacks would emerge, often with extreme violence.

After reading the overall outline of the basics, I hoofed through a few pages until I got to the specifics of my particular Charger.

The Mirage A202 was an assault-reconnaissance model. Too heavy and well-armed and armored for pure recon. It was an all-rounder, almost more of a small Rouncey than a Courser. A purpose-built harasser, slipping into gaps and cracks in the enemy lines and knifing them in the back. As if its anti-armor suite wasn’t enough, the Mirage was also a fantastic self-propelled anti-aircraft gun system, capable of spitting out dozens of proximity-fused forty-millimeter shells in the blink of an eye. If air power was the bane of mechs, then my Charger was the antidote, swatting flies from the sky with contemptuous ease.

The Mirage was no tool of an honest warrior. It was an evil machine. A cloaked assassin. All of the pilots selected to test the prototypes were skilled at Illusion magic, and almost every pre-production Mirage was equipped with an Illusion locus to help us camouflage ourselves. Invisibility wasn’t all we could do. We could appear as an entire army, charging relentlessly towards our foes. We could even assume the guise of an enemy unit, mimicking a Confederate assault walker’s appearance only to suddenly drop the magic disguise and slay the satyrs on our right and left.

It was for this, and other reasons—such as our usual loadout including nerve gas artillery rockets—that the pilots for the Mirage prototype program were selected specifically for our anti-social personality traits. We all took tests with results that stated, in no uncertain terms, that we were as twisted and malevolent as the Chargers we were due to pilot. I’d looked at my score, and I couldn’t believe it. I was shaken to my very core. There had to have been some sort of mistake.

I’d dropped my mask. I’d answered honestly. I’d outscored every other pilot on every single metric. Manipulativeness. Narcissism. Sociopathy. I’d broken the scale. The examiners had eyed me with hateful glares. In their eyes, I wasn’t even a pony. I was more of a machine than a Charger. Not a pilot. A component. A missing bundle of industrial-grade nerves that went in the cockpit, was affixed there permanently by bolts pasted with thread-locker, and, ideally, did not come loose and fall out, lest it pollute everything with its toxins.

My every action, my every waking moment since the day of that exam, was filled with doubt. How could someone like me ever love someone else? Was I even capable of love? As I sat in silence, my tears dotted the paper of the manual sitting on the table before me. I closed the book and buried my head in my hooves. There had to have been some sort of mistake. I wasn’t that mare. I couldn’t be. There were ponies I’d loved very much. It wasn’t my fault that this world kept taking them from me.

I looked up at the wall of my cell, and there, beyond the drab concrete, I saw the rising fires of war, the flames licking up and threatening to consume all.

If all that was left for a wretch like me was hatred, then so be it.

// … // … // … // … // … //

There was a commotion outside my cell. I peered through the slot in the door. A pair of griffon hens were laughing and tittering as they ran through the cell block, looking over their shoulders like they were playing hide and seek. Not long after they passed on by, Garrida showed up, hot on their heels. She was wielding a pair of vibrating wands like a couple maracas, wearing a sombrero instead of her trademark beret and belching like a hippopotamus. If her movements were any indication, she was extremely, unbelievably drunk. She was also wearing a glistening pink strap-on that was about the same length and girth as one of my forelegs.

“Two pussshy!” Garrida slurred, shaking the wands suggestively. “Two pussy!”

She went chasing after the other two griffons in a weird, dancing, bipedal run that was half-sprint, half pirate jig. I stood there, rearing up against the door, jaw agape, the corners of my mouth curling upward with mirth as I watched her round the corner at the end of the hall and disappear. “What the fuck?”

Bellwether stumbled along next, taking swig after swig straight from a bottle of tequila. He was absolutely plastered. I heard the swipe of a keycard and the click of my cell door unlocking. He came inside and shut and locked the door behind him.

“Storm, I—” he began. “Shit. The fuck am I doing?”

“What’s this about, Bell?” I said.

“I miss—hic—I miss my dad.”

My eyes widened. Just when I thought I’d seen all of him, he found new things to surprise me with.

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I do, too,” I said. “I mean, don’t we all?”

Bellwether looked me straight in the eye, his gaze lidded, his jaw slightly slack. “Can we fuck?”

I sharply drew in a breath, my cheeks flushing hot with embarrassment. The question was so abrupt, I didn’t even know how to respond. For a few seconds, I simply worked my lips up and down in silence. I didn’t know how to feel about it, but after a moment, I settled on gratitude. After all, he had the decency to ask nicely, unlike the last two people who wanted to fuck me. Third time’s the charm.

I had been reduced to a stammering mess. “Oh! So—uhh—so that’s what this is about. I mean, wow. Just—wow, Bell. I had no idea you were even interested. I mean, you’re way older than I am, dude.”

“Saw the footage,” he mumbled. “Saw what you did.”

“What footage?”

“Ya left your Orbit unlocked. Five damarkinds. Five. Just one of you. With a fuckin’ knife. I’m pretty good, but I dunno—hic—if I coulda done that.”

“Oh geez.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s not—it wasn’t anything heroic. I was mad. Drugged up on stims. I was out of my damn mind. I don’t even know how the fuck I pulled that off.”

“Bullshit,” Bellwether declared. “You’re cute. You’re strong. I respect you more’n most. You don’t take shit from anyone, not even me. If I had an army of you, I could win the damn war.”

“You don’t know me too well, then,” I said. “I’m just a soldier, Bell. Just one soldier. There’s only so much any one of us can do.”

“Do you wanna, or not?” he said. “I’m so fuckin’ lonely, Storm. I’m so tired of all this shit. I’m tired of this fuckin’ place. This whole fuckin’ world, too. Nopony knows how to treat anyone right, anymore. Makes me sick.”

“I—” I bit my lip. It hurt to see him like this, somehow. Bell was a self-absorbed dickhead, but I knew suffering when I saw it. What should I tell him? I was scared. I was hurting. I’d just had a member of my family die in my legs, and now, I was being hit on by my boss. This was altogether too much. It wasn’t the right time, for me. If I could’ve eased his pain and maybe got a little something out of it myself, I would have, but I had other obligations.

“I can’t.” I averted my eyes sheepishly, rubbing one foreleg with the other. “I have—I was engaged. I was supposed to be married.”

“You know he’s dead.” Bellwether drew in a big, snotty sniff. “Like everypony else.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know that. I’m not giving up hope just yet. I owe that much to Barley.”

“You know he’s dead,” Bellwether repeated, mumbling incoherently as he stumbled forward, falling face-first into my forelegs’ embrace.

“Bell?!” I held him for a moment, checking him to see if he was okay. He was snoring. Fast asleep.

I gingerly dragged him over and placed him on top of my cot, tucking him in like a young colt. It took some doing. He was heavier than he looked, dense with earth pony muscle. I glanced around to make sure no one was looking, and then I planted a small, motherly peck on Bell’s forehead. Honestly, he smelled nice. A hint of near-elderly male musk beneath a vague waft of peppermint oil. I couldn’t decide if it was disgusting or amazing, so I settled on nice. He wasn’t too bad-looking, either, for an older guy.

There was a slight stirring of temptation in my loins, but I refrained. No way I could jump his bones on such short notice. Not only had I not confirmed Barley’s survival or his whereabouts, Bell hadn’t taken me out to dinner even once, unless one counted the kind of stomach-turning feasts damarkinds put on. Having trysts in the brig must’ve violated all kinds of protocol. I smirked. The lengths Bell would go to for pussy were mildly impressive.

Aside from mister super-spy prancing around and barking orders at me, I had no idea if we had anything in common or not. There was no chemistry there that I was aware of, other than the drunken kind. There was, however, that dirty little voice in the back of my head, trying to convince me to cheat on my fiancé. A cock is a cock is a cock. Get you some. “Nah,” I whispered to myself. “Not today, it ain’t.”

I lifted my magnifying glass in my magic and returned to my studies, quietly flipping through a binder on Charger engineering basics while Bellwether snored away in the background.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Chargers were assembled with thousands upon thousands of bolts and fasteners of all shapes and sizes. Any Charger lab would be filled to the brim with all kinds of specialized tools for inspection and repair work, and many of them were specific to Chargers alone. For one thing, they required special torque wrenches and torque multipliers to put together. These tools were rare and expensive. Going over the manual, I pored over all sorts of diagrams pertaining to the Mirage and each of its pieces, as well as the torque specs for each one.

There were procedures for all manner of maintenance operations. One of the first ones listed was the standard method for suspending the body and removing the legs, a tricky process that required a sizable crane for the torso and great big chain hoists for the legs. Other chapters went into things like dismantling the torso to remove the reactor module, and then taking the reactor apart for servicing. Every part of a Charger’s polywell had to be sealed for a very hard vacuum. Any part that penetrated into the vacuum chamber, like the electron guns, needed to be re-gasketed and torqued down to exacting specifications every single time it was dismantled.

It was around the time that I started mentally equating the electron guns to dicks and the gaskets to rubbers that I realized I was insanely sex-deprived.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Several hours later, Bellwether shot bolt upright in my cot. I set my studies aside, turned around and eyed him with a sly grin. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. Wide-eyed and haunted as hell.

“All sober, now, eh?” I said.

“This never happened,” he said. “I wasn’t here.”

I giggled as I watched him throw the covers off and march to the door. “Sure, whatever you say, Bell.”

Without another word, he slammed the door shut behind him, leaving me all alone. And very much un-fucked. I looked down at myself and pouted a little bit with disappointment. Fidelity was a bitch sometimes.

// … // … // … // … // … //

The opportunity to fuck my boss had come and gone. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my jaw set in anger. That last detail had been a defining aspect of my imprisonment. Anger came more easily to me. The enemy was out there. I was in here. Being useless. Being punished. I wanted to make a difference. No, I wanted to get even.

I could feel a heat coming on. It was around that time of year. I wasn’t fully immersed in its depths, as yet, but I was still much, much hornier than usual. I ached and throbbed between my hind legs.

There was no helping it. I needed release. I started calling up fantasies. An army of laughing, smiling studs with big, glistening erections. Maybe a mare or two, just for some variety. It was an incontrovertible fact that I mostly liked dick, but before I’d met Barleywine, I wasn’t particularly opposed to the occasional sampling of pussy, either. Perhaps I could’ve eaten some cutie out while getting mounted. Getting plowed. Tasted her sweet honey while being pleasantly stretched and filled.

I sighed and spread my hind legs a bit, reaching down and working over my rapidly engorging clit. My head felt light. My breathing quickened and deepened. The air felt colder and more refreshing, somehow, filling every nook and cranny of my lungs. There was a slight pinch in my diaphragm from where they’d dug shrapnel out of me. I ignored it. It felt so good to feel myself. To breathe so deep. To feel alive, for a change.

I arched my back slightly, growing very slick and puffy down below. I shut out everything else. I let my whole world become my pussy. My slit. My needy cunt. I tried stifling a soft moan, but as I started working myself over a bit harder, I abandoned every pretense of concealing what I was doing. I spread my hind legs even further and cried out in pleasure. I didn’t care if ponies thought I was the biggest slut in the universe. Their opinion didn’t matter. Only pleasure mattered. There was no reason to be alive, unless living was bliss. To deny oneself was the same as death.

Some ponies got that wrong. Some members of the Star Cult lived as hermits, abstaining from every vice, engaging in ritual ablutions, and venerating Celestia every day of their lives, all in the hopes that they would be rewarded by escaping the misery of this existence and joining her in the afterlife when they passed on. Those ponies were delusional. It was no wonder they worshiped the dead. They lived like denizens of the grave.

Spirituality was an illusion. Guilt was a lie. Life was pleasure. Life was pain. There was nothing else.

I’d tried avoiding it. Tried denying it. I’d found a new, unwanted visitor in my inventory of lewd fantasies. Hoodoo. The damarkinds. My morbid curiosity was insatiable. I wondered what it must have felt like. Being strapped to that table. Screaming. Begging. Pleading. Humping, sweaty, drooling, grunting, stinking bodies closing in on me over and over again. The smell of their fetid breath. The feeling of their tongues dragging across my fur like iron rasps. Their sheer massiveness pinning me down, crushing my ribcage. Hands pawing, squeezing, groping, pinching, twisting. Contorting my body and trying to escape the inevitable, only to be blasted full of their cream, over and over and over again.

The way I envisioned it, it was a strangely, terrifyingly erotic and primal affair. I let out a naughty squeak as I pictured being dominated so utterly. Prey. I am prey. They are predators. I am nothing. I thought I had a right to my own life, my own body, my own future. I thought I had a right to live for myself. I was wrong. I was born to be consumed. I was panting and gushing all over my hoof, my pussy winking like crazy.

They’re gettin’ close, boys! Cut that whore and let’s go have ourselves some real fun!

No! Please!

There was a glint of steel. The knife came down. My sternum split. My aorta was pierced. Only the love I had for my little sister could keep me alive long enough to even say goodbye.

I had to stop. Had to re-orient myself. “That’s so fucked,” I muttered. “I’m such a sick freak.”

If I didn’t stop thinking about it, I was going to burst into tears, and then, my lovely endorphin high would’ve been ruined. I settled into a rhythm with other, more normal fantasies. I was in a sweet, grassy meadow. With lots of horny guys in it. Horny stallions with oddly perfect teeth.

My imaginary lovers lapped at me hungrily, caressing me up and down my limbs with their hooves. They pushed their cocks into me with wet squelching noises and masculine groans of pleasure. They gave me ample room to splay my limbs. To experience total relaxation. To reach the heavens. I bit my lip, almost hard enough to draw blood.

I was so close. So close. “Oh, fuck! Oh shit, I’m gonna—”

When I came, I got to experience what it was like for the muscles of my back and pelvis to clamp down on what felt like a hunk of jagged metal. The auto-dialysis implant. My very own internal spiked chastity belt. “Ow! Ow!” I cried out in pain over and over again, every spasm like a scalpel plunged into my spine. Every ounce of pleasure, overridden by agony. The pain was soon replaced with rage.

“Fuck this!” I got up, grabbed my cot and threw it across the cell. “Fuck it! Fuck it all! Son of a bitch!”

Sexuality was a fairly fundamental aspect of most mammals, and mine had been crippled by surgery. I’d been robbed of my right to a proper orgasm. To say I was mad would be the understatement of the century.

I galloped up to the slot in the door, rearing up and shouting at the top of my lungs through the narrow opening. “Argent, you piece of shit! You fix this fucking shit right now, or I’m going to hold you down and piss in your fucking mouth! Argent!”

There was nopony there to hear me, or so I thought.

“Shut up, you silly bitch!” some stallion shouted back. Whether he was a prisoner or a guard, I couldn’t tell. Wherever the voice came from, I couldn’t see the source.

After washing my hoof off in the sink, I ambled over and grabbed my overturned cot, setting it down right-side-up and throwing myself atop it with an angry huff. I resumed staring at the ceiling, shaking my head with disgust.

// … // … // … // … // … //

It was a day later when I had a follow-up with Argent Tincture. She tinkered with the settings on my implant, reviewing the data from the past week of usage. It felt kinda funny to sit there while Argent had a cable running from the back of my head to a portable computer that she was punching data into with a look of stern concentration on her face. Gotta program the meat robot.

“You’re looking good,” Argent said. “This data shows that there aren’t any major red flags. Everything okay with the implant so far?”

“Uhh, no,” I said.

Argent looked up at me, a concerned expression on her face. “What do you mean?”

I looked over my shoulder, as if someone might be listening in, but the two of us were completely alone in my cell. To hell with my earlier delusions of libertinism that I’d used to enhance my fantasies. I felt guilty just talking about it. Just thinking about it. I looked up at Argent’s piercing gaze and worried that she might somehow discover how I fantasized by plucking the memory out of my head against my wishes, and then, she’d forever see me as that unimaginably sick fuck who beat clitty to the idea of taking her dead sister’s place as a kidnap victim.

“I don’t really know how to put this delicately, but, well—” I coughed. “I did the thing.”

Argent sat there, blinking at me in confusion. “What thing?”

I started talking out of the side of my mouth. “The thing mares do when we’re almost in heat and there aren’t any stallions nearby. You know. The thing.”

A few more blinks of incomprehension from her, and then, it finally clicked, causing her to blush furiously. “Oh! Well, how did that go?”

“Badly.” I rubbed the back of my head with my hoof, averting my eyes from her judging gaze. “I had pain radiating through my back and hips when I climaxed. Like a nine out of ten. Like, seriously bad pain.”

“That’s normal. You just had a very invasive procedure done. There’s all sorts of tissue we had to cut through to get into the space with the kidneys, and you’re still full of stitches. Avoid masturbation for the time being. Say, a month or two. The pain should go away. If it doesn’t, we have things for that. Don’t hesitate to report how you’re feeling, okay? We want you to have a healthy sex life, too. That’s kind of important. For any patient.” She smiled.

I had tears in my eyes. Two months. No sticky hooves for two whole months. When I was locked up in Ahriman, I couldn’t go two days without touching myself. Scheherazade and those bastards running the CCTV system got an eyeful the whole damn time I was there.

I broke down crying, wrapping my forelegs around Argent and weeping into her shoulder. It was too much. There were too many things that were indescribably fucked about the course my life had taken as of late.

“Hey,” Argent said, returning my embrace despite the impropriety of it all. “It’s okay, Sergeant. Let it all out. I’m going to schedule you to see the therapist. Is that okay with you?”

“Yes. Please. Oh gosh, why? Why did they have to kill her? She never did anything wrong!”

Hoodoo and Windy had just been trying to live, scavenging what food they could and waiting to see if I’d ever come back to Dodge. In a sane world, the unconscionable things that happened to them would never occur. Argent held me like that for several minutes. I cried until my eyes were red and puffy. Until I could hardly see straight. Hoodoo deserved more than my tears. She deserved to live.

Her murderers deserved worse than death.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Argent had shown up a few days afterward to remove my stitches. My relief was palpable. The itchiness went down immediately. I had an infection from the surgery, so she’d given me an antibiotic shot, as well. The redness had cleared up overnight.

Some of the other books that Wind Shear had brought were tomes on such topics as small unit tactics, soldiering, mechanical engineering, treatises on practical magic, and all manner of things that a polymath might enjoy. Some of it was so dry and boring, I passed out on top of it and left strings of drool on the paper. Other parts contained math that was way too advanced for me. I took one look at the algebraic formulae and started to go cross-eyed. The next time Wind Shear showed up, I asked if he had a remedial algebra textbook. He gave me a funny look, but he knew better than to give me any lip about it.

A few hours after he’d plunked that on my desk, I was drooling idiotically over that, too. “I was a waitress! I tended bars! I’m not a fucking particle physicist, dammit!”

I heard another commotion outside, and what sounded like a fucking guitar. When I hazarded a peek through the slot in the door, I saw Garrida, once again wearing that giant sombrero and sloshed as shit, leading a dance through the cell blocks, a very drunken Bellwether and several revelers in tow. Thankfully, she wasn’t wielding sex toys this time. Instead, she was strumming away on an acoustic, swaying around and singing a slurred, tuneless shanty.

Oh there once was a satyr and I bashed in his head,
cut off his junk and I threw him in my bed,
fucked the hole in his taint with a stale piece o’ bread,
and then I made him eat a couple ounces of pooorridge!

I was giggling my ass off. “The fuck?”

Maybe she was trying to cheer me up. Maybe they were so drunk, they didn’t realize where the hell they were going and just happened to stumble through this part of the base. Either way, it was working.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Then, just like that, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working because I’d started blaming myself for what had happened. Again.

I leaned against the wall, propped up by my forehooves, muttering curses under my breath. “Fuck. I was with the Liberation Front for weeks. Months. She was still alive. She and Windy were both free mares. Then, those bastards snatched them up. Right out of my fucking apartment!”

The cot was already showing signs of abuse, the frame dented slightly from me throwing it all over the place. This time was no different. It had a few new scars already.

“I could’ve gone down to Dodge, picked them up. Had them join us here, where it’s safe. They could’ve piddled around doing odd jobs for Bell or Garrida. They wouldn’t have had to fight. They could’ve signed up as logistics personnel and shuffled cargo around or something. Instead, I let those fuckers take my fucking sisters and fucking fuck them to death!”

I bashed the cot against the wall. I fell backwards against the frigid concrete of the cell and slid down to my haunches. I buried my head in my forehooves. I’d been doing a lot of that, too, as of late. I didn’t cry. Didn’t sob. Didn’t make a sound. I had shed my tears. I’d run dry. All I felt was a cold emptiness in the pit of my stomach.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I paged through a manual on magic, trying to distract myself from how I felt utterly dead inside after a month of near-solitary confinement that mainly reminded me of my captivity in the Confederacy’s hands. In order to understand how to use magic, it was necessary for one to appreciate the sheer variety of spell types, as well as their varying thaumatic signatures and frequencies, much akin to the different wavelengths of visible light.

Arcane magic dealt with raw magical energy in non-elemental form. Pure magic, in other words. It was one of the most basic kinds, covering such disciplines as levitation, arcane blasts, the manipulation of gravity, kinetic energy, and the fundamental forces of nature. Beamcasters fired pencil-thin streams of arcane magic. A unicorn could perform the same exact spell with their horn, but unless they had an implausible amount of training and discipline, the resulting emanation would be blunt and unfocused, capable of breaking bones, causing contusions, and toppling brick walls, but not piercing armor and flesh and boiling the tissues with rapid heating like an infantry-scale beamcaster did. Beamcasters were not lasers. The beams were kinetic and had apparent mass, but with little to no inertia or recoil. They heated things simply by transferring large amounts of kinetic energy into them over very short timescales.

Elemental magic represented the natural elements, like Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. Innate earth pony and pegasus magics were generally attuned to the elemental wavelengths, and the most skilled and distinguished of unicorn sages knew how to do things like channel Earth magic into their hooves and break boulders like an earth pony, or give themselves wings of fine gossamer or control the weather like a pegasus by channeling Air. In many ways, the uniqueness of earth ponies and pegasi was superficial, but we unicorns pretended that it wasn’t in order to humor them.

Light magic covered things such as illumination, healing, the removal of curses and placement of blessings, the discovery of evildoers by tracking the signs of their misdeeds, and other such things. It was a relatively esoteric discipline, practiced by Celestia-worshipers and healing practitioners more than anyone else. Some said that they felt a stronger connection to Celestia and the realm of the divine when they practiced channeling the spectrum of Light.

Dark magic represented the sphere of spells once considered evil and forbidden to use, such as those that concealed objects, manipulated minds, raised the dead, inflicted curses, tampered with thaumatic emanations—or souls, as some might call them—and defiled the laws of nature. In modern times, Dark magic was simply taught as a fairly standard discipline, within reason, to those few who could temper its power with pragmatism and self-control. My own invisibility magic borrowed from the Spectrum Vile, and it was said that the darker one’s personality was, the more powerful the illusions they could cast and hallucinations they could inflict upon others. The most depraved and skillful practitioners of Dark magic could dominate a pony’s mind completely and force them to do their bidding.

Order magic governed such things as anti-magic, dispelling, silencing, binding the energies of other magics and restraining them, the thaumatic field gestalt, the scrying of the threads of fate that bound souls together, divination, golemancy and so on. In olden times, when blended with the power of Celestia’s Light, it was called Harmony magic, but over the centuries, like many things in our society, all the joy had been sucked entirely out of it and replaced with cynicism. Rather than being a central facet of our society, as Harmony magic was said to have been, Order magic was just a tool. The magic practiced by the nemrin bore a striking resemblance to Order magic on a thaummeter.

Chaos magic was the exact opposite. It was a raw and untamed kind of magic that dealt with such matters as transmutation, charming minds to subtly influence them, removing harmful or beneficial enchantments from objects by scrambling them, and affecting the entropy of objects, like making water grow hot over time and other such improbabilities. There were outlawed weapons called Warpers that replaced the standard Arcane-based matrices of an ordinary beamcaster with a Chaos-based one. When fired upon a person, the eldritch energy inflicted terrible sores and perverted the flesh, mutating it over and over into undifferentiated masses of cells.

These six aspects of magic formed the six primary spectra from which fifteen different combinations were derived.

Arcane and Elemental magic was Torrential magic, where the elements ran wild with viciousness and fury, summoning firestorms, lightning storms, tornadoes, hurricanes and other such powers to scourge one’s foes.

Arcane and Light magic combined were Benedictions, shielding one from the influence of darkness, undeath, and abominable magic.

Arcane and Dark magics were Hex magic, the reverse of Benediction magic, and covered such things as cursing objects with ill luck, or placing magical traps and seals that would swallow the unwary whole.

Arcane and Order magic was Enchanting, used on many everyday items, magtech or not, to enhance their usefulness.

Arcane and Chaos magic was Unbinding, or the removal of enchantments, a tricky process usually performed to prepare objects to receive a different or superior enchantment.

Elemental and Light magic was Celestial magic; weaponized starlight, attuned to the powers of our sun and strengthened in the presence of the stars in general.

Elemental and Dark magic was Umbral magic, the power of the moon and of the night, the power to swallow and consume one’s enemies in choking smoke and unnatural darkness.

Elemental and Order magic was Summoning, the conjuration of objects made out of congealed elemental force that seemed to have form and solidity while possessing neither in reality. With summoning, one could create weapons and tools from nothing that were just as good as the real thing, in theory.

Elemental and Chaos magic was Sundering, the acceleration of entropy and decay and the stripping of atoms and molecules from objects—or people. In traditional Equestrian science, there was no distinction between elements and chemical compounds. Molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles were treated as the same general category of thing. All matter was materia. Those principles, though somewhat outdated, were still useful when it came to enchanting or dissolving matter.

Light and Dark magic was Displacement magic, a mysterious discipline that few understood, one which allegedly had to do with warping spacetime directly. Apparently, it was practiced as a means of attaining enlightenment by a cult of mountain sages who disappeared hundreds of years ago.

Light and Order magic was Harmony magic, the more pleasant counterpart to raw Order magic, binding the thaumatic emanations of multiple individuals together such that their concentrated power could overwhelm even the mightiest of foes.

Light and Chaos magic combined was Charm magic, which dealt with such things as affecting ponies’ decision-making and cognitive processes on a level more subtle and indirect than outright plowing into their mind with Dark magic and hypnotizing or mind-controlling them. If Dark magic manipulated the brain, then Charm magic manipulated the soul.

Dark and Order was Illusion, my own field of expertise, and naturally, it covered the art of turning invisible or creating visible apparitions by quite literally bullying the electromagnetic radiation around oneself into submission.

Dark and Chaos magic was Void magic, some of the darkest, evilest magic there was, involving such things as ripping souls out of ponies and introducing them into decaying flesh or inanimate objects. It was also critical in the creation of a Charger’s Anima, since their artificial intelligences were soul-imbued in dark and secretive rituals led by that old, creepy codger, Cicatrice, the Conclave Magister who’d taught us Dark Magic and was a master of that particular spectrum. Golemancy in general often involved Void magic in addition to Order magic for the basic seals, and golems were viewed with suspicion at the best of times, even if, technically, a Charger itself was a very advanced kind of golem.

Order and Chaos combined were Divination, which dealt exclusively with observing the flow of causality and attempting to predict the future.

Twenty-one spectra. Twenty-one different kinds of spell locuses. If one cast the wrong kind of magic through one, they’d get headaches and nosebleeds from the feedback effect. They had to be tuned and calibrated with the help of a thaummeter wielded by an expert on spectra. In certain tomes from the old Kingdom, it was said that all six of the primary spectra of magic combined formed a very powerful all-spectrum emanation art called Rainbow Magic, but hardly anyone in the modern era understood how to unlock its unfathomable power.

There were other disciplines outside the Modern Craft, as well. Earth pony druids hidden in the wilds. Witches and hedge mages of every stripe, who concocted bizarre and unknowable sorceries. There was alchemy of the Canterlotian kind that focused on the isolation of pure materia, and alchemy of the Zebrican sort, which was more concerned with potion creation from natural, organic materials. There were those who practiced empathic magic of wavelengths outside the conception of the Modern Craft, as well as traditional Golemancy practitioners who tamed and used wild spirits—free-floating thaumatic emanations—to power their creations. Many such arts had waned with the introduction of modern technology and modern medicine, but in some circles, especially in the more rural regions of the galaxy where advanced tech was in short supply, they continued to thrive.

In olden times, it was fairly typical for unicorns to cast without the aid of incantations, arias, or seals of any kind. We simply imagined the shapes of the magic we wished to cast, lit our horns, and performed the spells in question. That was still the standard method for the vast majority of casters in the modern era, but those well-acquainted with the Modern Craft—the Magisters and their Battlemages and such—were versed in a range of incantations, seals, and diagrams that could enhance and focus one’s power.

There were even devices called Grimoires that stored diagrams and seals so complex that one could never hope to memorize all their aspects. These consisted of a Tetrafluid-based neural interface connected to a holocrystal holding the relevant information. To use them, Battlemages of Grandmaster-grade would connect the Grimoire directly to their neural laces and use the device to synchronize their spellcraft, acting as though they were one, immensely powerful unicorn. These Grimoires were some of the most dangerous items in the whole Empire, kept in spell-locked briefcases akin to the ones that would be used for the codes to a nuclear weapon. The reason for this was simple.

When properly utilized by highly trained magic practitioners, the yield of a Grimoire was enough to flatten an entire metropolis and instantly kill millions of people.

The method to achieve this varied depending on the Grimoire and the spells it contained. Sometimes, it was a hurricane with unnaturally strong winds. Sometimes, it was configured to teleport the whole target area into space, or summon a meteor to smash everything to dust. Occasionally, it was enough pyrokinesis magic to create a mushroom cloud, like an actual nuke, but most ponies found that too boringly practical to send a proper message to our enemies. Whatever manner of spell it was, the intensity of a Grimoire’s spells would increase by the power of two depending on how many ponies were hooked into it. Two ponies was twice the power. Three was four times. Four was eight. Five was sixteen, and so on. The increase in thaums was not linear, but exponential. That was how a dozen unicorns were all it took to obliterate a city.

There was also the matter of the thaumatic field gestalt effect. Any time ponies bonded with one another on an emotional level and remained in close proximity, their quintessence quality and magic power was greatly enhanced. Emotions affected magic spectra on a more fundamental level, as well. Feelings like love, happiness, fear, and hatred would shift one’s magic closer to those emotions’ respective domains, and unicorn magic was rendered more potent both by the mastery of one’s own emotions and by maintaining strong relationships with others. In addition, pony emotional states were, in many ways, transmissible in an extrasensory fashion, even through walls of solid concrete.

The kidnapped ponies. I could feel their raw misery in the air before I even opened that damn door. It was like eating a cupcake filled with broken glass.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A few days later, Garrida showed up in the doorway to my cell, that same stern expression on her face as always. The one she wore when she wasn’t partying or trying to console someone who’d just lost everything.

“Month’s up, Sergeant,” she said. “Come on, let’s ditch this stupid place and get you some chow.”

Remaining silent, I followed her outside. In the blink of an eye, my world had gone from four walls in a dark cell to the wider, better-lit spaces of the base. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was free at last. We paced a couple hundred yards to the mess hall, where Bellwether was playing darts and being taunted by Sierra and Night Terror for his shitty score.

“Fuck this game!” Bellwether shouted. “You unicorns are cheaters! Cheaters!”

My eyes widened at the spread on the table. It was a far cry from the stale rations I’d been choking down for the past month. There was a toasted bagel with alfalfa sprouts and cream cheese that made my eyes water with gratitude.

“Oh my gosh!” I dived headfirst into my meal.

Garrida didn’t even have a chance to say anything. She lifted a finger as if to speak, and I’d already inhaled the whole bagel, panting happily like a dog and very nearly barking for more.

“Damn, you were hungry,” the big griffon said. “More where that came from.”

Garrida snapped her claws and Crookneck Squash rolled up a cart laden with delicious eats. He was wearing a chef’s hat and grinning wide. Apparently, he had talents other than engineering. For Garrida, there was a whole roast chicken and skewers with deep-fried squirrels. I cringed a little bit, but hey, Griffons gonna Griffon. Bell and the base’s two other Charger pilots sat down to eat, as well.

“So, Sergeant,” Garrida began. “Things have been proceeding as planned, as regards the restoration work on your Charger. For the past month, the techs have been working overtime on dismantling that salvaged Confederate patrol boat radar for its components. I hear it wasn’t exactly a proper fit for a Charger, so they’re scavenging the parts and fabricating a whole new housing for the arrays.”

I nodded. “Sounds about right. The radome in a Mirage’s head only has so much room.”

“I see you’ve been studying.” Garrida smirked. “What else did you learn about Chargers?”

“Well, for one thing, they weren’t a straight-across reverse-engineering of Confederate Goliaths. There were things about those that we didn’t have the tech to copy, back when the Sword Bayonet was brand new. The Conclave had to come up with all kinds of kludges. Ways to fill the gaps in technology with magic. Those principles became a substantial part of the foundation of modern Magtech.”

Garrida shook her head. “That’s all well and good, but technology doesn’t win wars.”

I blinked a few times, somewhat shocked. “Excuse me?”

The Captain shrugged a bit, picking her teeth. “Let me rephrase that. Technology is vitally important to warfare, but technology alone is useless without tactical and strategic supremacy, and that part of warfare begins and ends inside all our heads.

“What do we know about the enemy? What are their weaknesses we can exploit? What sorts of material advantages or disadvantages do they have? What about their friends? Can we turn their allies against them? Can we sow the seeds of doubt in their own population and get them to mistrust their leadership? Can we mislead them with misinformation and get them to overestimate our strength? Those are the questions we should be asking.

“Then, at the battlefield level, it’s all about keeping your head in the game. Don’t falter, don’t hesitate. Be flexible enough to respond to changing conditions, but consistent enough to act upon your orders. As an NCO, you need the trust of your squad. You need ponies who’ll follow you into hell and back. To be a winner, you have to think like one. Don’t be afraid to pull back if you’re dealt a losing hand, but be bold and press the advantage when you sense it.

“If you let your mind go, if you let defeatism creep in, you’ll start finding yourself making mistakes over and over again. Little mistakes that pile together and become big ones. It happens in private industry, it happens in state bureaucracy, and it happens in the military. Now, we’re not in the Army anymore. The Liberation Front is a whole lot less formal, but that doesn’t mean the risks aren’t the same. This may not look it, but this is a job, what you’re doing. It has the same kinds of occupational risks as any other job, and then some.

“In the capital, back during the war, there were stiffs who’d spend all day tabulating casualties, and these figures included not only civilian deaths and soldiers who were killed by enemy action, but also ponies who’d incurred injuries in training, or simply cracked and gone off the deep end. Fighting is stressful, difficult work. Your most valuable resource in any battle sits atop your neck and it’s called your damn head. If your head comes apart in the middle of a fight, you’re going to lose. In this fight, you and I both know damn well what the consequences of losing are.”

“This is about the shrink, isn’t it?” I rolled my eyes. “The one Argent recommended.”

Garrida nodded as she took a bite of skewered squirrel. “Weathervane. She’s an expert on combat trauma, or so I hear.”

I nodded. “And then what, Sir? When I return to duty, what do we have on the menu?”

Garrida smirked. “You’re pretty eager to get back out there, even after your first little taste of what it’s like to fight a rebellion against an occupying force. That’s good. Well, do you like snow, Storm?”

My eye twitched. “About as much as I like herpes. Why?”

“You’re in for a lot of it. We’re sending you and these two idiots here to the Crystal Mountains. There’s an old base up there that hasn’t been raided yet, but the Confederacy have their eyes on it. They’re going to try and scrap all that hardware so we can’t get our paws on it. Your team is to perform recon. Find ways of penetrating into the base and getting around the automated defenses. There might be a real nice haul in there, and we can’t afford to let the opportunity slip away.

“The Camp Crazy Horse cell is a logistics unit. Our primary operations involve salvaging equipment vital to the resistance and distributing it to the other cells. We don’t know what the exact strength of the other cells are, due to compartmentalization, and I’m not sure what the hell Bell here’s been telling you, but I can tell you right now that we’ve reconditioned and shipped out over half a dozen Chargers since we started this shindig a few years ago. When it comes to troops, we mostly get the bottom-of-the-barrel washouts. A considerable portion of our personnel are technicians and mechanics. That doesn’t mean our job is any less important, however.”

“What are we expecting to find at the base?” I said.

“We’re not exactly sure.” Bellwether shrugged, chewing on a bit of celery. “Might be something good. Might just be crap. The armory and motor pool could be stocked to the gills, and who would even know if we didn’t go looking? Everything we do is a gamble in this outfit, Sergeant. That’s just how salvage jobs are. Sometimes you win big, and other times, you get nothing.”

I nodded along silently, my mouth too stuffed to reply. I was halfway through a plate of hayburgers and onion rings when I noticed the fully stocked bar at the back. I’d been in the mess hall before, but I’d never quite paid much attention to my surroundings, since I was still settling in. It was as if it had materialized out of thin air.

I grinned and glanced from one of my compatriots to the next, and then I shuffled over to the bar. “You guys ever had a Dragon Shot?”

I levitated Bellwether’s lighter out of his coat pocket. He seemed none too pleased about that.

“Hey, give it back!”

I ignored him, grinning as I gathered up my ingredients. “Watch this, guys!”

A small crowd of base personnel gathered around the front of the bar. They stood back a safe distance and watched with amazement as I set out a couple dozen shot glasses and mixed 190-proof grain alcohol with rum, bitters, and a tiny touch of orange juice in several cocktail mixers which I proceeded to juggle and spin in my levitation magic’s grip like some showmare. I emptied the mixers into the shot glasses, put a swig of the near-pure grain alcohol in my mouth, flicked the lighter, contemplated my life choices, and then blew a perfect gout of flame over two dozen shots with a sweep of my head, lighting them all.

A riotous cheer went up, ponies grabbing the flaming shots off the bar, blowing them out and then downing them one after another. Bell exchanged a surprised glance with the rest, a genuinely excited smile creeping onto his face. While he and the others offered a round of applause, stomping their hooves on the floor, I levitated one of the shots over to him, along with his lighter.

I held up one of the shots. “A toast, to freedom!”

“Freedom!” the cheer went up.

I downed the shot and grabbed another. “To the Empress!”

“To the Empress!”

I slugged that one back and grabbed a third. “And to my—to my—” I sniffled a bit. “To my sister, Hoodoo. Rest in peace, sis.”

The tone became a bit more somber after that. No one said a word. I saw them all share a look. We’d all lost someone. We all knew what that felt like. I stared into the bottom of my shot glass, before downing it.

“Rest in peace,” the bar chorused.

Things picked back up after I almost killed the mood. Ponies started partying. Captain Garrida played something folksy on the guitar while a bunch of soldiers sang along with her. Bell and Sierra were having a little contest in a darkened corner of the mess hall, apparently to see who could snort the most cocaine. Bell waved me over, grunting energetically. I joined them. Whatever, fuck it. I stuck a straw in my nose and sucked up a whole line, and then stuck it in my other nostril and did another.

Hard narcotics that the rest of the galaxy balked at and outlawed were deemed socially acceptable in the Empire, largely because ponies had a very hardy constitution and experienced fewer negative side effects. As a result, it wasn’t unusual to see opium, cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines and other such substances being enjoyed openly in bars and lounges the world over. Some jurisdictions outlawed certain recreational substances, especially the potent and dangerous synthetic opioids the Confederacy favored, while others were more lax. In the Army, it was conditionally allowed in the form of stims and such. Shooting methamphetamine before going into combat was par for the course in some outfits. The Resistance had a more libertine attitude regarding substance use and fraternization and so forth, but morphine and meth were limited-access because they were in short supply and needed for reasons practical rather than recreational. With that in mind, until recently, I wasn’t really a fan of that sort of thing, myself.

After a few hits of the ol’ white, I was talking a mile a minute, and every bit of it sounded dopey as fuck. My buzz from the liquor had vanished completely. I honestly preferred being drunk to being coked up, if I had to choose between the two. It wasn’t long before I started whining about Hoodoo again, only this time, I sounded stupid even to myself. I was being a killjoy piece of shit to ponies who wanted to hear none of it. They didn’t care about my problems. They just wanted to party. While I bawled idiotically into a table, Sierra gave me a back rub. Then she licked my ear. Why the fuck did she lick my ear? Dumb, trashy lot lizard slut.

“Don’t lick me with a mouth that’s blown long-haul truckers, Sierra,” I muttered.

“Why not?” she pouted. “It’s just a little bit of cum.”

“There’s no such thing as just a little bit.” I let out a huge burp. “Truckers, Sierra. It doesn’t dilute. Any amount—’s too much.”

About ten shots later, after watching Garrida and the rest of the Griffons engage in a bout of ill-advised drunken line-dancing, the coke had started to wear off and I was seeing double. I excused myself to the restrooms, where I was given strange looks by the blurred forms around me. I immediately stumbled into one of the stalls, gripped a toilet bowl with both of my hooves and hurled violently into it. My throat burned with acidic juices. Gosh, I was so sick and tired of throwing up.

“Hey.” Bellwether tapped my shoulder.

I jerked awake, slowly lifting my head to make eye contact with him. “Huh? Wha—”

I’d passed out face-down in the bowl, my mane and muzzle completely covered in toilet water. Also, this was the room for colts.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A few days after we drank ourselves silly, I found myself pacing back and forth in front of the therapist’s office. Apparently, she’d been trucked all the way down from Vanhoover to come see us. Some specialist of a pegasus named Weathervane. I couldn’t see or hear what was going on in her office, only muffled voices and drawn blinds.

I let out a soft gasp when her other patient stepped out of the office right in front of me several minutes later. It was Corporal Cloverleaf, her prosthetic hoof clicking loudly against the concrete every fourth step. She had a bionic replacement limb in place of her missing right foreleg, all shining chrome, contrasting heavily with her green coat. Either Garrida had lied about the shortage of limbs, or the situation had changed in the intervening time. Clover also had a nasty, ragged scar running across her left cheek from where her mouth had been ripped open. The stitches had left behind a pattern like a zipper. She looked up at me with a lidded, tired gaze.

“Oh, it’s you. Hey, Sarge.”

I smiled a little. “You doing okay, Corporal?”

She stared straight down at the floor for a few seconds, smirking and shaking her head and letting out a disdainful snort, before looking up at me and fixing me with a hateful glare. “Why couldn’t you just—you know—pull the damn trigger?”

My smile fell from my face. I didn’t say a word or even turn to look as she walked right past me and down the hall.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I shook off the feeling of dread that had come over me. I’d worked up the courage to enter the office over the past several minutes, and my little encounter with Clover had my nerves frayed again.

With a shaking hoof, I pushed the door open, walking inside. The room had warm, cozy lighting relative to the rest of the base, courtesy of a floor lamp with a glass mosaic shade. Seated across from me in one of two plush-looking recliners was a pegasus mare with a medium-grayish coat and puffy, silvery mane. She had a cutie mark of an old-timey bronze weathervane. No surprise there. Her eyes were lidded and her brows arched, and she had dark circles beneath her tired gaze. She looked like the very personification of a rain cloud.

I felt a shiver of trepidation run down my spine. I didn’t know what it was about pegasi. In their judging, reproachful stares, I felt something of the essence of my father, and that always put me on edge. In truth, this almost scared me more than combat.

“Come on in and have a seat,” Weathervane said.

I shoved my fears aside and did as directed, sinking into the plush chair with a sigh.

“I’m Weathervane.” Her cold gaze melted into a beaming smile that didn’t look entirely sincere. “And you?”

“Sergeant Desert Storm, Charger pilot.”

“Sergeant, I hear you’ve been through a difficult time, recently. Would you like to talk about it?”

“Yes, I would.”

I held my breath. We had a tense staredown for a few seconds until Weathervane chose to break the silence.

“So, you were one of the ones involved in the raid on Dodge City?”

“It’s not just that. I was formerly a resident of Dodge. Before I enlisted. My former place of employment was one of the buildings we fought from. And, to top it all off, I found out that my sisters, Windy Mesa and Hoodoo, had been living in Dodge, in my own damn apartment. That is, they were living there, until a few months ago, when they were kidnapped and taken to the concentration camp the Confederacy had set up in town, at the train station. Upon further investigation, I discovered that Windy was sold into slavery. Hoodoo had been tortured for days or weeks and then mortally wounded in the course of the fighting. She died right in front of me. I was minutes too late to save her. Minutes.”

The way I said it, so clinical and detached, it didn’t sound real. It sounded like something I’d read in a book somewhere. I sounded like a liar even to myself. I almost worried I wouldn’t be believed. It’s her job to believe me, isn’t it?

Weathervane showed the first real emotion I’d seen since I walked into her makeshift office. She gasped a little and her eyes got a tad misty. Whether it was out of any sympathy for me or simply general despair over ponykind’s lot as of late, I couldn’t tell.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” the gray pegasus said. “Were you three close?”

I smirked, shaking my head and pinching my brow. “You know, to tell you the truth, not really. When I said I was joining the Army, my dad was all like ‘I thought I raised you better than this’, and then both my parents left for the colonies. My sisters, who’d been rooming with me, agreed with them, or so I thought. They left me all alone. All alone with my guilt over my decision to go to war.

“After they’d practically disowned me, I left my empty apartment behind and went to basic training, and that was that.” I looked up at Weathervane with a sneer of disgust. “But even so, they were family. I don’t have to tell you what these freaks do when they get their hands on mares. I can see it in your eyes. You already know. It’s not something I’d wish on anypony, least of all my fucking sisters.”

“Obviously not.” Weathervane nodded.

“It’s weird,” I said. “I could go weeks or months without thinking about my sisters. Shit, I thought they were dead. Now, they’re all I can think about. Windy’s still alive. Some bastard has her. Some alien who collects mares like toys. It’s exactly as bad as it sounds.”

“I’m guessing you’ve been told about the consequences of abandoning your post to go looking for her?”

“Yes, I have,” I muttered. “Still pissed about that.”

“Good. There are other ponies who need you.”

I looked up at her, my face slowly warping into a scowl. “What?”

“Some of them are ponies you talk to every day, right here in this base,” Weathervane continued. “They’re depending on you to be a leader. Maybe you just don’t realize how valuable they are to you, yet?”

I bared my teeth at her, my ears pinned back. “What the fuck do you know about me, asshole? Almost everypony here hates my fucking guts.”

She could see this was backfiring, and so, she tried salvaging it. “No, they don’t. That’s catastrophic thinking. You’re assuming a worst-case scenario where none exists. Some may dislike you, yes, but others do not. The key is to approach them rationally and see if you can strengthen your bond with those among them whose personality suits yours.”

I glared at her. “Do you think you’re talking to a foal? Someone so ill that I’ve regressed to a fucking pre-teen mental age? Were you a high school guidance counselor in a past life, and you’re only moonlighting as a real therapist now that civilization as we know it is dead and gone and accreditation is a thing of the past?”

Weathervane bristled at the insult. “I’m only trying to make this easier on you. If you want me to start swearing like a sailor and expressing base hostility, I’m sure I could accommodate you.”

I huffed and crossed my forelegs, looking exactly like the petulant child I insisted I wasn’t.

“The things I’ve seen recently, well—I don’t quite know how to say it,” I muttered. “It’s like, all that guilt I used to feel over what I did in the war? About using weapons of mass destruction? About hunting deserters or taking part in suppression missions? It’s like it doesn’t affect me anymore. Why doesn’t it affect me? What the hell am I supposed to be feeling?”

“Suppression missions?”

“It’s classified, I’m not supposed to be talking about it, but—ah, fuck it. It wasn’t just deserters we hunted down. There were protests and riots, okay? Halfway to the frontier. Ponies who wanted the war to end. Ponies who didn’t understand what we were facing, or the horrors the Confederacy were inflicting on us. Heck, there were things we soldiers were kept in the dark about, too. We knew about the mass graves, the massacres, that sort of thing, but nopony told us anything about slavery or experimentation.

“Anyway, when there was nothing more important for us to do, they had us out there on riot control duty, out in the colonies. In our fucking Chargers. Holding back millions of ponies. Tear gas, electroshock shit, spells, dark magic, we—fuck, you know what? I don’t want to talk about this shit anymore. There’s so much shit I’ll never be able to get out of my head.”

“Like what?”

I licked my dry lips a bit before looking squarely at Weathervane. “You ever see a pepper ball bust right through a mare’s eye? You ever see her lying screaming on the ground while her kid’s crying over her and begging someone to help them? Not even a rioter. A fucking bystander. Stupid cops missed! No one would help her, so I had to call an ambulance myself.”

“So, you feel somehow responsible for police misconduct.” Weathervane shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could.”

“No, I didn’t! Those ponies, they just wanted the same fucking thing I was fighting for. Peace! Except I did it by killing the enemy in the hopes they would be intimidated enough to back down, and they did it with hoof-painted signs and sit-down strikes. We all wanted the same thing. There was no reason for us to be fighting one another!”

“That’s not true, you were just—”

“Following orders?” I growled, finishing her sentence for her. “Let me tell you what ‘following orders’ looks like. It looks like ponies in impermeable overalls hosing the blood, gore, and residual nerve gas off your mech in a great big decontamination airlock! I stepped on people, every damn day! I stepped on Confederate troops like they were fucking bugs! Why don’t I fucking feel bad about that? Why don’t I feel a Celestia-fucking thing?

“Were the satyrs really these fucking monsters all along? Was that what we were fighting? Slavers? Rapists? Why didn’t they fucking tell us? I know a hoofful of my own fucking shipmates who blew their own fucking brains out because they couldn’t take the fucking guilt anymore! If the higher-ups had told us the truth, those ponies might still be alive! Those rioters might’ve gone to their local recruiter’s office, instead of getting their skulls cracked open by the cops!”

“Storm, you—”

“Incompetence!” I screamed. “Incompetence is what put us here! Incompetence and cowardice! I’m fucking through! If you sons of bitches won’t do what needs to be done, then I’m going to go out there and strangle every motherfucking satyr piece of shit with my bare fucking hooves!”

Weathervane looked shocked at my outburst. I could tell her report wasn’t going to be a very sunny one.

I took a few deep breaths, calming myself down. “Uhh, Miss Weathervane? There was one other thing I wanted to talk about.”

The pegasus nodded. “Go ahead.”

My eyes widened. “It’s Cloverleaf. I think she’s gonna try and off herself.” I drew a hoof across my neck while making a croaking noise. “I’ve seen this shit before. Way, way too many times.”

“I can’t discuss the other patients.” Weathervane frowned. “We have confidentiality rules. For the time being, let’s focus on y—”

“For fuck’s sake. She’s gonna wind up hanging herself or putting a caster in her mouth, and you’re gonna just let that happen? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I can’t talk about it,” she said.

I stood angrily, making for the door, turning and looking over my shoulder as I departed. “Schedule me for another session when you’ve grown a fucking brain.”

I slammed the door to Weathervane’s office as I left, marching down the hall. I was mad as hell, but my eyes were filled with remorseful tears. I wasn’t going to let another one die. Not on my watch.

As I walked down the hall, I encountered Sagebrush. He didn’t even look at me, his eyes hidden by the brim of his tanker’s helmet as always. He acted like I wasn’t even there at all. The feeling was mutual.

I huffed. “With friends like these, anyone would wanna off themselves.”

I was alone among strangers. I missed my transport ship. I missed my unit. I missed everyone so fucking much.

// … // … // … // … // … //

It happened just as I said it would. In a fucking janitorial closet, of all places. At least we caught it right after it began. At least she was still struggling. That was a good sign.

“Help me get her down from here, dammit!” I shouted, trying to hold up Clover’s dangling, kicking hind legs on my shoulders while balancing with my hind legs on the edge of a mop sink. “Somepony, gimme a fucking knife!”

One of the Charger techs hoofed over a multi-tool. My multi-tool, actually. The one from my stash, with my name engraved on it. I frowned at him and shook my head. At the very least, my stash of bits, my Orbit and my other stuff had remained largely unmolested, but I’d wondered where the hell my Leathermare had gone. I wished they wouldn’t touch my shit, but this time, I was glad at least one of them had the presence of mind to bring it with him.

With my magic’s orange glow, I flicked open the saw and cut the rope that Cloverleaf had used to hang herself. I caught her surprisingly heavy body on my withers and gingerly set her down, feeling for a pulse. She was still breathing and she still had a heartbeat. That was better than the alternative.

“Get fucking Argent Tincture or Gauze Patch or one of the damn medics and a stretcher over here, now!” I shouted.

The two stallions nodded and ran full tilt to the infirmary. I gasped, startled, when a metal hoof reached up and gripped one of my forelegs.

“You did it again, Sarge,” Clover rasped, her voice scratchy from having just strangled herself half to death. “You fucking did it again, damn you. You stupid bitch. Why can’t you just let me die? Just let me die, dammit. It’s what I want. It’s my life, not yours!”

I pulled her into a hug, squeezing her tight. “It’s okay, Corporal. I got you.”

She started squirming, trying to push me away. “Let go of me! I don’t want anyone touching me! I can’t—I—” She started sobbing, hitting me lamely with her forehooves, alternating between her soft natural one and the relatively harder, heavier, and more painful metal one.

I didn’t let up my grip. Perhaps I should have, but I didn’t want her going anywhere in this state. I knew exactly what manner of demon was rifling through her head. I was a mare, too, after all. I hoped that would be enough to make this close contact tolerable for her.

“You’re safe, Clover,” I said. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise.”

There was no intelligible reply, at first, but she’d stopped fighting me, leaving only crying and incomprehensible babbling to resonate in the cramped space.

“Don’t let them take me, please!” Clover screamed to no one in particular. “Please!”

I could see the distant look in her glassy eyes. She wasn’t here. She was back there. In Dodge. Suffering in the grip of evil. I softly shushed her and slowly rocked her from side to side like a foal. It was working. She was still sobbing, but she was quickly calming down.

When Argent Tincture showed up with a stretcher, her form casting a shadow into the room, she was confused as hell. “What’s going on here?”

I didn’t say a word. I simply pressed my lips into a straight line and pointed above my head, where a thick, braided rope had been looped over an exposed drainpipe. Argent Tincture was chagrined, to say the least.

“Mother of Celestia,” she muttered.

“I fucking told Weathervane.” I shook my head. “I told her this would happen. She wouldn’t listen to me.”

“She can’t talk to you about it,” Argent said. “There are rules. Now, let me handle this. I got her.”

Argent gathered up Clover and put her in the stretcher, before wheeling her back to the infirmary.

As she disappeared down the hall, I sat there on my haunches in a dirty closet full of mops and cleaning supplies. I felt like shit for acting against Clover’s wishes. In a way, she deserved the peace she sought. We all did.

// … // … // … // … // … //

The cherry red paint would have to go. The gloss was too high. It’d give away my position. I let out a heavy sigh as I worked the sandblasting nozzle back and forth over the tank of my Stampeder 650, erasing my father’s handiwork. It felt like I was blasting the last vestiges of my old life away.

“Sorry, dad,” I muttered. “It needs a new coat of paint.”

After spending hours masking off and meticulously re-priming my bike, I mixed up a batch of some military-grade olive drab polyurethane two-component paint that would leave a nice matte finish. After making sure the lid on the can wouldn’t come loose and send paint flying everywhere, I started the shaker.

I filled an HVLP sprayer with the mix and started to coat the tank, the seat trim, the rounded tail, and everywhere else that needed it. While waiting between coats, I turned away from the paint booth, pulled up a seat and watched with rapt attention as the techs hoisted the new radar system up onto the head of my Mirage and aligned it with the mounting studs. Occasionally, one of them would scream profanity and order the hoist operator to stop lowering a component, presumably because one of the studs wasn’t aligned with the hole properly and they were dropping all that weight on top of the stud.

“Don’t fuck it up,” I whispered to myself. “They don’t make these things anymore.”

The new finish on my motorcycle had turned out surprisingly even and smudge-free. Bellwether walked up, sipping from a mug of black coffee held in one hoof.

“Lookin’ good, there, Sergeant.” He smirked. “You planning on taking that baby out for a spin?”

I shook my head. “I need to do something about the muffler, too. This bitch is way, way too loud. It’ll give away my position.”

“I’m sure one of the mechanics can do something about that.” Bellwether nodded.

I got an idea while I was sitting there, admiring my work. I moved my goggles up onto my forehead and turned to look straight at him. “Hey, Bell. Do you guys have any more prosthetic forelegs of the same exact model as Clover’s?”

“Yeah, just got in the shipment a few weeks ago.” He raised an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

I smiled. “Can you bring me one?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I visited the infirmary and, as luck would have it, Clover was still convalescing from her failed suicide attempt. I held the package behind my back, looking to the mechanics at my left and right. They’d worked in a hot rod shop back in the day, and they’d helped me out with some of the detail work. They nodded to me as I rapped a few times on the door. Gauze Patch was the one who responded. She looked like the living dead. She was wheeling around a cart with a plastic bin full of various instruments and tools.

“Oh, hello, Sergeant,” she said. “Argent has me suicide-proofing the infirmary. That means no scalpels, nothing that can be turned into rope, nothing.”

“Can we see the patient?”

“Absolutely out of the question!” Gauze Patch frowned. “She’s in a very fragile state, emotionally-speaking. No visitors are allowed!”

I held out a long, gift-wrapped cardboard box with green wrapping paper and a pink ribbon tied into a bow on top. “We have a present for Clover, ma’am. I think she’s going to like it very much.”

Gauze made a few faces, but then, she finally relented. “All right, come in. But be quick about it. If Argent catches you guys, she’ll wring both your necks and mine.”

I walked up to Cloverleaf’s bedside and she slowly looked up at me with an apprehensive frown. “What do you want?” Clover muttered.

“Corporal, uhh—” I blushed a little bit. “Me and the boys came up with a little something for you. We thought you’d like it.”

She gave us a deadpan expression before snatching up the package and starting to undo the wrapping. When she opened the box and pulled out the contents, sending a mess of packing material everywhere, her eyes widened with surprise.

It was a bionic foreleg, like the one she wore, only we’d done a custom job on it. It had been painted green to match her coat color, with floral pinstriping in yellow. Down the outer side, it bore the word Unbroken in pale yellow paint, and when she rotated it so that the inside faced up, the inscription on the other side read Unbowed.

Clover started to cry. First as little sniffles, and then, full-blown sobbing. She held the leg close to her chest like it was a security blanket. “Th—Thank you, Sarge!”

“Get well, Corporal,” I said. “If we want to give those bastards some payback, we’re going to need all hooves on deck.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Clover saluted.

Gauze Patch was almost too shocked to speak. I patted her on the shoulder as we left, whispering in her ear, “Sometimes, the best medicine doesn’t come in a bottle.”

The mechanics filed out, and I followed them, only to encounter Sagebrush leaning against the wall beside the doorway.

While the mechanics hurried off, getting back to work, I turned to look straight at Sagebrush’s expressionless face, watching as he dropped to his hooves. He spat a wad of tobacco and pushed up the brim of his helmet, and for the first time, I saw the pain in his eyes. The pain of years and years of constant fighting.

I raised my hoof as a peace offering, and he slapped his hoof into mine, holding it in his iron grip.

“This doesn’t mean I like you, Storm,” he said. “But it’s a start.”

I didn’t say anything. I simply smiled and nodded.

It was a small victory, but I’d take it.

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 11//Arsenal Estimated time remaining: 20 Hours, 33 Minutes