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Desert Storm

I needed a refresher on Beamcaster full-manual aiming. It was an art form in its own right. One had to fix their gaze directly upon whatever they wanted to shoot, centering their target in their field of vision. Manual mode locked the turrets’ motion to the user’s eyeballs, using sophisticated eye-tracking tech. One couldn’t just let their eyes dart around willy-nilly and expect to hit anything.

I slapped my hoof down on the big red button in my lane and a loud buzzer in the firing range’s ceiling sounded. Holographic representations of aggrieved cleomanni started streaming towards me. I would score more points the faster I could engage and eliminate them. A target that was allowed to close the distance was worth substantially less. If any were allowed to reach the line, it was game over. I’d set my Phoenix Fire 27 to training mode, firing non-lethal, low-power pulses that were just enough to actuate the targets. This prevented wear and tear on the caster itself and avoided damaging the range or hurting careless bystanders. Not that anyone else was present. It was just me, practicing by my lonesome.

We didn’t really have an armorer on the base, unless one counted the Charger techs; just an armory and a bunch of random weapons that we could help ourselves to, once we were entered into the base’s biometric scanner system. The caster I was wearing was no exception. The lack of proper inventory control was something I despised, and I took out my anger on the simulacra of several Confederate jackasses who charged the firing line. One after another, I struck the targets center-mass, their images vanishing and the targets resetting themselves automatically.

Though I’d never admit it out loud, I secretly loved it. No fucking around waiting for the armorers to issue me a piece. I just walked right in, grabbed what I wanted, and went, and just like that, I was armed. Fantastic idea, what with all the psychos and drunks and druggies and suicidal shell shock victims having free run of the place. No way anything bad could’ve happened, there. Nope. Not in a million years.

Occasionally, I’d get sloppy and let one of my targets get too close. I grit my teeth. I had to push myself harder. It was an unavoidable fact that the battlefield favored species with hands over those with hooves. Fingers and opposable thumbs were used for more than just gripping weapons, but also for mundane tasks that were difficult or exhausting to perform with hooves. Digging trenches, cleaning and maintaining one’s kit, emplacing barricades, climbing ladders, moving supplies around, tidying one’s spaces, and so on. Magic was a crutch. One would think that spells were enough to offset the difference, but their use was so exhausting for the untrained that they weren’t nearly as useful, on average, as actually having a few good sets of hands. I couldn’t let my relative lack of fingers become an obstacle to victory. I am no cripple. I am an Equestrian. I am whole.

Hands were also used for grappling in close combat. My enemies saw every part of my body as a handle waiting to happen. My ears were a handle. My horn was a handle. My mane, if not tucked away properly, was a handle. My legs were each a handle. My tail and my dock were also handles. If one was facing a damarkind, one could add the rearmost holes to that tally. I allowed myself a sardonic smirk. I figured they saw my pussy and asshole as being kind of like the finger holes on a bowling ball. All they had to do was pick me up by the keister and then bowl a strike, with my squadmates as the pins. Every part of my body was a liability in a melee, if I was stupid enough to put myself within easy reach without a struggle.

I thought of how easily Clover had been taken out, shaking my head angrily as I engaged one simulated threat after another. She’d charged towards one of the mercs and tried knocking him over with her raw, undisciplined pony strength and mass, but he was bigger, heavier, and stronger. A walking slab of implacable xeno muscle. He’d prepared for the blow, recovered, and then got a leglock on her, breaking her shoulder like a twig. I could still hear the disgusting thwock in my head. He’d broken her fucking shoulder. That sort of shit just didn’t happen when somepony was fighting a satyr, unless said satyr was wearing power armor. A damarkind didn’t need to wear power armor. A damarkind was power armor.

Then, as soon as she was too crippled to continue resisting, they took her and they raped and dismembered her right in front of me while she begged them to stop. They took her to pieces. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I imagined what it would’ve been like if it had been me. If they’d taken me, instead. If I’d been slow, weak, and stupid and allowed myself to be taken. I’d come inches from having it happen to me, too. None of the squad liked me very well, and they probably wouldn’t have stuck their neck out to try and save me from those freaks. Not like I did for Clover, anyway.

The mercs might’ve gone much further than one leg. Maybe two, or three, or all four. Maybe they’d have left me a worm with four bloody stumps, mocked and scorned by their snarling faces, screaming and crying and squirming and struggling to inch away from them with my neck and barrel alone, only for their leader to snatch me up and pleasure himself with my maimed and tormented body even as his underlings feasted greedily upon my legs.

The things our enemies did to us were horror itself. I needed to be sharper. I needed to be stronger. Faster. Complacency meant that I would get to experience overwhelming pain, humiliation, and despair, followed by a drawn-out, dramatic, and very messy death. None of us wanted that to happen to any of us, but sometimes, it couldn’t be avoided. If the only thing I could do for a comrade was a mercy killing, I would’ve hated to be the one to pull the trigger.

I fired my weapon at target after target, my acute hatred animating my movements. I was using the pull-rings, simulating what I’d have to do if my magic burned out. The trigger cables reeled out of the front of the caster unit like the cable on the back of a pull-string doll, magnetically clamping to my armored boots. When the rings were released, the reels were spring-loaded to snap them back in place, hanging at one’s shoulders. One could seamlessly switch from one trigger method to another without interruption, from the shrouded lev-triggers on the back of the power unit, to the pull-rings. Some unicorns liked to remove the rings entirely, but I preferred to keep them as a backup.

The standard technique was to reel out the pull-rings, stand on them, and then use one’s whole body to shoot, simply by straightening one’s forelegs a little bit, but that disrupted one’s aim in manual mode. It was also possible to rear up and actuate them by simply giving each one a tug, with a kicking motion. The left ring fired the left emitter, and the right one fired the right. PF-27s were more than capable of full-auto fire; pulling one of the rings out all the way and holding it past the trigger point would unleash a continuous burst of lethal arcane energy pulses. If one slightly staggered their trigger pulls, they could even double their effective fire rate. Nevertheless, I practiced with semi-auto fire as well. I alternated shots, zipping out several at a time while keeping my head rock-steady, felling one target after another.

A simulated damarkind charged at me with a knife. The first in the simulation. I gasped. The flashback was impossible for me to resist. Two rough, callused hands were choking me so hard, I was blacking out. A clothed crotch was grinding painfully into my helpless body, pinching and abrading my most sensitive parts. I shrieked and stumbled backwards, the approaching holo-emitter’s speakers letting out a canned monster roar sound effect as the hologram brought the knife down. The entire figure faded to nonexistence with a static fizz the second it struck the firing line. A loud buzzer sounded, punctuating my failure. My final results for the round were displayed as a floating scoreboard in the air. 4,780 points. Enough to get me to eighth place out of ten on the list of all time high-scorers. I thought I’d done worse than that. My hesitation had cost me dearly.

Someone behind me clicked their tongue. “Looks like that dingo merc got you, Sergeant.” Captain Garrida blew a short raspberry and gave me a thumbs-down. “That means you’re his personal cock sleeve. You’re gonna be living in a kennel and eating nothing but jism for the next few weeks until he gets bored of fucking you and spits you over a fire for din-din. Try again, and don’t get raped this time.”

I turned and spotted the big, dusky griffon who led our resistance cell, watching as she strutted up to the firing line. She was hefting her personal cannon, of all things. I snapped off a quick salute to the Captain and then smashed the red button to get the holograms going again.

Damarkinds were referred to by a number of jocular slurs that seemed to blunt the sheer horror of what they were and how they comported themselves on the battlefield. Just as cleomanni were called satyrs, imps, devils, hoof-men, greed goblins, and sideburns, damarkinds were variously called things like dingoes, dildos, dogheads, dorks, dicks, dick-dudes, dimbulbs, dummykins, and so forth. Low on intellect, high on aggression. No grasp of tactics or strategy, but a firm grasp of wanton brutality. Easy to outmaneuver. Difficult to overpower.

We may have joked about how slow-witted they were, but there was nothing particularly humorous about them. I’d had my fair share of nightmares regarding the horrible creatures, and that was years and years before Dodge. Hell, before high school, even. Hoodoo’s death had dredged up memories I’d tried to suppress. When I was nine, I’d happened upon some magazines that weren’t exactly age-appropriate, with accounts of the conflict and interviews conducted by war reporters with the traumatized survivors of damarkind attacks.

The brutality of their actions was beyond despicable. It was absolutely abominable. Stallions were flayed and gutted, their entrails strewn all over, their meat cooked and eaten, their skins and skulls taken as gruesome trophies. Mares suffered even worse humiliations, their legs tied to their own bedposts as dozens of the monsters took turns ravishing them. Even foals weren’t spared. They liked to eat fillies like me alive, right in front of our parents, savoring the adults’ terror as they stripped morsels of flesh from our screaming little bodies. They strung our little hooves into necklaces when they were finished devouring the rest of us.

I was a tearful wreck. I inquired of my mother as to what, exactly, the word rape meant. I knew what war meant. Armed conflict, obviously. Even at that age, I’d studied the history of Equestria’s ancient wars intently. The concept of war rape, on the other hand, eluded my understanding. It was such an odd-looking word, almost violent and suggestive by its own nature. She turned as pale as sheet. She demanded to know where I even heard such a vile word. When I showed her the magazine, she broke down sobbing and explained a few unpleasant facts about the world to me. Mom had to repeat herself a few times because I asked her to drop the euphemisms and be honest. I was precocious that way. My curiosity was insatiable.

Mom sat me down and explained the birds and the bees and how sometimes, violence came into the picture. She was even brave enough to impart painful memories of an encounter from her youth that turned foul when her date wanted to go all the way and she didn’t, and she framed it as a cautionary tale. As she spoke, my anger and confusion had deepened. I couldn't comprehend it. Everlasting trauma inflicted on somepony else, just for a little temporary pleasure. My newfound knowledge made my whole world seem somehow darker and more hostile.

My mother implored me to find a responsible stallion like my father, and not to make the same mistakes that she did. All the while, I tried reassuring her that she didn’t do anything to deserve what was done to her. Turning the lecture back upon her had felt strange, at the time, like something that I was much too little to be doing. It felt very adult, consoling someone more than twice my size. She tearfully accepted my youthful wisdom, calling me her little treasure, not caring one whit about the attachment issues she was unwittingly causing. I had no anchor. I had no one to rely on but myself. I craved guidance and nurturing but was given platitudes and meaningless praise instead. I needed someone to relate my own problems to. I needed a real authority figure in my life. And yet, I realized the truth while far too young. My parents were just as lost and adrift as I was.

After that little talk, all throughout the rest of middle school, I was paranoid around colts. Before, I never paid the shape of my reproductive organs much heed. Afterward, I felt vulnerable. Exposed. It felt like I could be mounted at any time, without warning, for no good reason at all. My self-esteem went into the toilet. My grades suffered. Anxiety became the defining condition of my life. When I started having my big, sloppy heats, that changed. Big time. I started pursuing the opposite sex, and hell, even the same sex. I’d already bedded five colts and one filly by my sophomore year of high school, and the fucking only intensified the year after. Everypony in school thought I was the proverbial town bike, but it wasn't like I gave a damn that they were having less fun than I was.

It was all fun and games, of course, until I got knocked up.

My father and I had an argument over it. It was contraceptive failure. The condom broke, that was all. I was just a dumb teen. I didn’t know any spells that could’ve prevented my pregnancy. That sort of magic was out of my league, at the time. After it happened, I got a test kit, and my suspicions were confirmed. I wasn’t very far along, but I did have a foal on the way. My father was furious. He screamed that I was a dumb slut who loved getting mounted bareback by colts I’d only just met, so I could feel it when they nutted in me. He pushed me down the stairs. My world tumbled end over end. I could see the shock on his face when it dawned on him what he’d just done, and then darkness. When I woke up, he was crying beside my hospital bed and apologizing profusely and begging me to forgive him over and over.

I could somehow find it in me to forgive that stallion, but not that other one. Not the one that he turned into sometimes. Not the drunken lunatic with the wild, hellish eyes with the whites on top. I loved my father. I practically worshiped him. My thoughts at the time were a jumble, like a crossword puzzle I couldn’t piece together. Like a bad refrigerator magnet poem that clung to every inch of me. Why would he hurt me like that? Why would he hurt my foal, why was I empty inside, why was I bleeding, why was I hurting, why—

What did I do that was wrong?

Somehow, he managed to talk his way out of it. Somehow, he managed to talk me out of accusing him, too. Together, we made it look like an accident. I didn’t want him to go to prison. In spite of what he’d done, I didn’t want him to suffer for it. That was how much I loved him. I didn’t want to tear the family apart and leave my mom and my sisters penniless, either. It wasn’t them that he was shitting all over. He loved them. It was just me. Just the black sheep.

I could take it. I could take the pain, for their sake. I figured, hell, he’d just expedited things. Except he hadn’t. It wasn’t his choice to make. It was mine. Even now, just thinking about it made me nauseous. I took my seething rage out on the nearest holo, gritting my teeth as I choked back tears. I couldn’t reach back into the past. My magic wasn’t that powerful. I couldn’t erase my own personal hell. Just kill. Kill my problems away, one beamcaster pulse at a time.

When I recovered from my ordeal, it wouldn’t be long before I was asking him for things again. I wanted this, and I wanted that, and I was daddy’s great big spoiled brat. It gave me a sense of control. Of belonging. When he wasn’t getting drunk and beating the piss out of me, he was like a carnival claw. All I had to do was push the right buttons in the right sequence, and out popped my prizes. That lasted until he got sick and tired of me and practically booted me out of the house.

It happened more than once. I’d put in some bullshit résumé, a job offer would fall through, I’d move back in, he’d start drinking again, and then, I’d wave goodbye, get on a bus to Baltimare, and come crawling back through the pouring rain when that one turned out to be a bust, too. Eventually, I gave up and got a job at the Gridiron, which was one step above fucking stripping. Never got the point of stripping, anyway. Ponies didn’t need clothing, so taking it off in a sexy way was like trading one outfit for another. Stupid aliens and their stupid imported cultural artifacts.

In my adulthood, while falling into the routine drudgery of my job—not much of a career, really, just a job—I’d forgotten much of what I’d learned in my youth, spending my days bombarded by news and propaganda and datasphere access bills and taxes and dating and fucking worthless, awkward, under-sexed stallions, living in my ratty apartment in Dodge and trying to accommodate my jobless vagabond sisters. They’d walk out and shop for clothes in the evening, and I’d walk in and fuck some poor, toothless dumbass who had trouble paying his half of dinner. It was the usual stream of nonsense.

Eventually, Hoodoo got some steady income and figured out how to pay her portion of the rent, and Windy bounced around a bit, but before that, dad let them mooch off of me for months and months. Not that I didn’t mind the company. They were always pleasant to be around. Until they weren’t. Until my father filled their ears with lies, that I wanted to sign up for the war because I was a killer at heart. I’d somehow forgotten it all. Things didn’t settle down for me until I found Barley, and even then, it wasn’t long after that I had a war to fight. My unit had become my new family. My real family. The brothers Barricade and Barrage, and their stupid pratfalls. Sunnyvale, the thrill-seeker. Comet, the quiet one. Terror, that despicable asshole. Yes, even Sierra, the unkempt bum. They helped me forget. My duty helped me forget.

Somewhere, deep down inside me, sitting at the very tip-top of the mountain of corpses of all the people I’d slain over the years, there was a little purple chest with a heart-shaped lock. It was where I kept my emotions. If I shoved it all down and focused on the present, then I didn’t have to think about any of it. I could stick it back in the little lockbox and throw away the key. Just like Hoodoo and Windy.

Learning of the scope of our enemies’ atrocities was what convinced me to enlist to begin with, even if none of us had the full picture. They told us about the mass graves, but no one told us a damn thing about slavery, trafficking, or experimentation. They figured it was too demoralizing, apparently. I was wasting myself in that stupid bar, anyhow. That bastard Emlan Broggas said it himself. I did have a knack for killing. That, in itself, I found a tad unusual. Charger pilots and tank crews weren’t trained the same as front-line infantry. I should’ve been all but useless outside a cockpit, and yet, I wasn’t doing half-bad.

We all went through basic, along with our pilot training for the vehicles we were meant to crew, of course, but the rest of our training focused on how to survive if, for instance, we had to crawl from the wrecks of our burning vehicles and escape on the hoof. We were trained in basic martial arts and close-quarters defense, because logic dictated that if the enemy discovered us away from our vehicles, the resulting battle would likely be an ambush at close range.

Escaping the enemy and breaking contact was always a priority in such circumstances. I never had a particularly difficult time with that, what with my magic. Nevertheless, we were all trained as if we didn’t have access to magic all the time, just in case. Escape was an art form in and of itself. One had to be mindful to avoid basic things like light sources at night, but also, the not-so-obvious things, like staying in terrain depressions and avoiding silhouetting one’s body against the sky, and using natural concealment that matched the color of one’s camouflage, or one’s actual coat if they happened to not be wearing anything.

However, we were never put through Advanced Caster Markspony or any gunnery training that wasn’t necessary for crewing a vehicle. I wasn’t trained as a grunt. I was trained as crew. And yet, for months, I’d been doing grunt duty. Aside from occasionally getting tunnel vision and failing to maintain formation, I’d found that I wasn’t as bad of a shot as I thought I was. I wanted to take my training further. I never knew when I’d be trapped behind enemy lines with nothing but my caster and my Orbit to keep me company. When and if that happened, avoiding capture was of the utmost importance.

In my three years of captivity, I had not been severely maltreated, and I chalked that up more to luck than anything. Down here, on the ground, all bets were off, and the consequences of being apprehended on the battlefield by the Confederacy or abducted by mercenaries were of the most dire sort. I needed something with which to end my own life if capture was inevitable.

Captain Garrida stepped up to one of the adjacent lanes, racked the charging handle on Thumper, and started the practice sequence. Her first shot in the enclosed space almost bowled me over. Every single time she fired that monstrous rifle of hers, my eyes instinctively squeezed shut and my teeth were rattled from the overpressure. She was launching inert 30mm rounds downrange, striking one target after another with alarming precision and speed. Her freakishly huge rifle was sending gouts of shredded tires from the backstop flying into the air with each shot.

I decided I wouldn’t bitch about it. I took it as a realistic challenge, trying to stay alert and aware of the incoming simulated hostiles even when the outgoing fire was so distracting. One after another, I blasted the Confederate soldier holograms, double-tapping the armored ones in the chest and then going for the head. When the damarkinds started showing up, I didn’t freak out. I swept my beams over them and punched several holes through their weak spots. The simulation accurately represented how difficult their armor was to pierce with a PF-27. It took multiple precise hits to put each one down.

I wished I had an Ultima Arcanum Mark-14 Rex. A true large-bore pulsecaster, like what pegasus Stormtroopers used. They packed a much bigger wallop at the cost of reduced fire rate and faster power pack depletion. Due to their high output, their range and barrier penetration capabilities were considerable, but they required patience and skill to use correctly, hence why they were issued mostly to elite troops. They were very handy as damarkind-killers. Streamcasters worked wonders, too. One didn’t have to be nearly as precise with a streamcaster as they did with a pulsecaster. Even the slightest hit to an exposed joint could sear ligaments black in a split-second, turning a determined adversary into a stumbling, screaming mess.

Dragoons used non-standard casters which had housings that superficially resembled a Rex, but had neither a recognizable model number nor anything like stock internals, and their output was so great—almost on-par with a medium caster—it would certainly flash-fry any ordinary emitter. The firepower of the average Dragoon was more on-par with an infantry fighting vehicle or battlesuit than an ordinary soldier.

Even with a Rex, there was no getting through neuterized armor unless one used projectile weaponry, and even then, the torso plating most dingo mercs wore was too thick for most bullets or flechettes to pierce. Even with the benefit of a belt-fed machine gun, unless I had a vehicle-mounted fifty-cal, I’d basically be praying that the suppressive fire and the risk that a round might find a chink in their armor would be enough to dissuade them from charging our position and simply foalnapping us right out of our own gun nests so they could snack on us later.

Damarkinds were always a problem. They were never an easy opponent. Some of the worst bloodbaths imaginable occurred whenever damarkinds and cleomanni teamed up in a combined-arms strategy. The Confederacy frequently used damarkind mercs to repel our charges and to keep us at bay while their own, more disciplined troops picked us off one by one at range.

That was how the invasion of Meadowgleam turned into hell itself. Thus denied our close-quarters advantage, we were forced to fight the satyrs on their own terms, at a great distance. They were more than happy to sit behind layers of tank traps and barbed wire and kill us from a thousand meters away with orbital strikes and close air support, with damarkind cannon fodder piling up in front of them to keep us out of their midst. If we were bogged down and denied our ability to conduct lightning raids, we were as good as dead. Maneuver warfare and rapid assaults were central to Equestrian combat doctrine.

Eventually, the simulated GARG troopers started showing up in my lane. Each one was largely impervious to my fire and extremely fast. Only the thinnest slivers of their armor at the joints were vulnerable, and only the parts not covered by their handheld ballistic shields. I managed to bring down two of the simulated targets, but the other three were already too close. The holograms thrust their swords across the firing line. The buzzer sounded. 7,550 points. It was enough to notch me up to second place on the scoreboard.

My eyes tracked up to the name beside the first-place score, and it was Corporal Shooting Star. She had an impossible 11,540 points, ahead of my score by a very large margin. That particular course followed the same program every single time. That would have meant that she’d brought down all five of the simulated GARG troopers before they could reach the firing line, and then continued to engage and destroy more of the targets, perhaps even surviving a full thirty seconds longer. That required more than precision. One needed to be almost supernaturally fast to do it. I made a mental note to ask her about it later.

It was a good thing they weren’t real Gaffs, because none of us, save for an equal number of Dragoons, had a hope in hell of taking them in a fight. The simulation’s depiction of the Gafalze Arresgrippen was propagandistic nonsense, calculated to give trainees the impression that they stood a fighting chance against a GARG trooper so they would stand and fight rather than doing the sensible thing and fleeing for their lives. The reality was that even one GARG trooper would find it trivial to close the distance and cut a pony’s head clean off her shoulders, and that was the case even if the encounter began with both combatants a hundred meters apart and the pony was screaming and firing her weapon the entire time.

Garrida had just about finished up, too. “Dang, that’s a nice score, Sergeant. Good shooting.”

“Permission to speak freely, Sir?” I said.

“Never needed it before,” Garrida muttered under her breath. “Granted.”

“Is Cloverleaf former Army, or one of the militia?”

“The latter. Can’t you tell?”

I nodded. “I figured that might be the case. Does she know that you’re technically not supposed to salute NCOs?”

Garrida gave me a surprised look, like I’d caught her claw in a cookie jar. “Hmm, probably not. Are you gonna give her the talk, Sergeant?”

I shook my head. “Sir, with all due respect, I’m not about to reprimand a mare in an infirmary bed who came inches from taking her own life because of what those fucking animals did to her. I can’t be mad at Clover for something that isn’t her fault. We’re taking ponies who had no prior military experience and sticking casters on their backs and using them as cannon fodder. That won’t bode well for us in the future. Not when we could’ve empowered them with the knowledge and self-confidence to survive, instead. Experienced troops don’t grow on trees.”

“So, what are you gonna do about her, then?” Garrida said.

“As far as I’m concerned, Clover can salute whoever she damn-well-pleases. Only a fucking anal-retentive would give a shit about how an injured warrior chooses to show respect to her superiors. I’m not about to pull that ‘I work for a living’ shit on her. Ponies like her shouldn’t have to be fighting. They should be living their lives in peace. We are their shield. We should be protecting them. To tell you the truth, I’m angrier with whoever promoted her to a junior NCO rank without even teaching her what her actual responsibilities are.”

Captain Garrida sighed, shaking her head, a remorseful look on her face. Apparently, she didn’t mind that I’d thrown some shade on her whole operation. Perhaps it was because she resembled the remark. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, Sergeant, but we’re having a hard enough time just surviving. We do what training we can, but our time and resources are limited. There’s only so much we can do.”

“Of course, Sir. There were a few other things I thought I’d ask, however.”

“Go ahead.”

“First off, do we have any liquid altrenogest?”

Garrida laughed. “Heat suppressors? Nope. All out. I mean, I think we’re all out. You’d have to ask Argent. Why, is it pony breeding season again?”

I blushed severely, but rather than clamming up, I held nothing back; if ever there was a time for honesty, it was now. “I’m on my estrus, yes. It could make me combat-ineffective. I have uterine dysfunction due to an old war wound, and the combination of those two factors is making me nauseous. To be honest, I feel like shit either way, but at least with the hormones, I feel a little less shitty.”

Garrida wasn’t laughing anymore. “Oh. Sorry to hear that. It’d be nice if we could dig some up, but I can’t make any promises. That shit’s getting harder to come by.”

I breathed a heavy sigh. “Second on my list, do we have any cyanide pills?”

“Why would you want one of those?” The Captain gave me the side-eye something fierce.

“In case capture is unavoidable,” I said. “If I had a choice between being tortured or being poisoned, I think I’d choose poison.”

“Cyanide isn’t a good way to go, either.” The big griffon shook her head slowly. “I’ve seen it, up close and personal. Agonal respirations. Pig-snorting and all that. In any case, no, we don’t have anything like that.”

To say I was disappointed would be putting it mildly.

“There was one last thing,” I said.

“Yeah, what?” Garrida kept eyeing me suspiciously, like I was about to call in a favor.

I was sick of the unit-shuffling. I needed ponies I knew. Ponies I could trust with my life. Ponies who would have my back when the fire got thick and the shit hit the proverbial fan, just like old times. The way the Camp Crazy Horse cell of the Liberation Front did things, units were dissolved and formed at the drop of a hat, and squad assignments often occurred on-the-spot, right after mission briefings. This gave them a lot of flexibility in assigning personnel, but it also meant that one would never see any friendly faces when going into combat. That was a recipe for disaster.

I regarded Garrida with my best pleading expression. “I need a unit of my own. Hoof-picked. At least seven. I can’t get anything done if we keep shuffling ponies. With your permission, I would take full responsibility for training and honing them into an effective fighting force. Put them through Basic Caster Markspony, Combatives, Escape and Evasion, that sort of thing.”

Garrida let out a hearty belly-laugh. “A pilot? Putting infantry through drills? That’s rich.”

“They’re not infantry yet,” I said. “They’re poorly-trained militia. Even my own self-defense training for stranded pilots is a big step up for them. Once I’ve got them up to speed, we can have one of our advanced instructors—if we’ve got any—sharpen them up some more, but after that, they’ll be assigned to me. They’ll be my squad. My unit, and mine alone. Ponies I can actually work with. Ponies who can keep up with me in a fight.”

“An interesting concept.” Garrida nodded. “And what, exactly, do you plan to do with this squad?”

I walked over to the big map poster of Equestria taped on the rear wall of the firing range and smacked it with my hoof for emphasis. “We’re going to put the hurt on the Confederacy in a big way. With your permission and support, we would jointly conduct raids on high-value facilities. Cripple the ability of the Confederate Army and CSF to deploy troops and air support in the region.”

The Captain scratched her head, her gaze skeptical. “Huh, that’s a nice idea you’ve got there, Sergeant. It’s not really our job, though. We’re supposed to be keeping our heads down, especially with the heat turned up as high as it’s been lately. You’re probably going to be transferred out of here, anyway, as soon as your Charger is back in action. And then, what use would you have for infantry under your command?”

“Support,” I said. “I need ponies to help mark targets and spot enemies for me. They’d ride in a Centaur and back me up with recon duty. They would also assault and make entry into buildings as needed, to set up forward observation posts.”

Garrida rubbed her chin with a claw. “I like the way you think, Sergeant. That sounds like a fantastic idea. Except, y’know, if things get too hot, you’d basically be stuck escorting them.”

“It’s worth the tradeoff.” I nodded. “I need more eyes, and since we don’t have air superiority, I can’t send up anything except maybe the occasional Orbit. Besides, if I’m close enough, I can always use my locus to hide them.”

“Who do you want for this?” Garrida sighed.

“Private Haybale, Private Jury Rig, Private Ginger Snap, Private Hexhead, Specialist Wind Shear, Corporal Shooting Star, and Corporal Cloverleaf.”

“Wind Shear is one of my better technicians.” Garrida frowned, crossing her forelegs and leaning back, giving me an imperious look. “What reason do you have for wanting to distract him from his other duties?”

“We’re going to be scavving out there, too. We need a tech who can spot the valuable hardware and help us tag it for salvage teams. I also need somepony who’s handy at field repairs, slicing into security systems, sabotaging enemy hardware, that sort of thing.”

“Well, he’s no hacker, but he does know his way around a wrench and a voltmeter.” Garrida shrugged. “He’s a smart kid.”

“We could have Cinderblock train him on security penetration,” I said. “Bring him up to speed.”

“Possible,” Garrida said. “However, it would also be time-consuming. Those are skills you don’t just learn overnight.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m going to be putting all of them through hell, first. With your permission, Sir, I’m gonna make real soldiers out of them.”

“You’re a tenacious one.” Garrida beamed proudly. “I like that. Okay, if you think you can do it, then when you get back from this mission, you can have them.”

“Thank you, Sir!” I grinned, pleased with the progress I’d made. “I won’t let you down. That reminds me of something, though. You sure we won’t need a hacker on this op? Automated base security is probably going to be a real nuisance for us.”

Garrida shook her head. “You kidding me? We don’t have a hacker who’s enough of a wiz to even touch that shit. We’re talking high-level quantum crypto you couldn’t crack in a million billion years. Even Celestia herself wouldn’t be able to spell her way through that shit. If you guys encounter automated security, the only way you’re getting through is if Bell plants brick after brick of CH on whatever the fuck it is and sends it to Tartarus.”

“Oh. Well then, I guess it’s just the three of us.”

“That’s right.” Garrida sighed. “Besides, I’m pretty sure only three of you can fit on the Skimmer, anyway.”

I gave her a puzzled look. “The what?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I muttered.

Electrokinetic repulsors—the centerpiece of all contragrav lifters—were an oddly advanced piece of Confederate tech which apparently used Q-vacuum interactions and generated and accelerated packets of virtual mass through some unspecified energy conversion method.

They gobbled juice like nobody’s business, which was why they tended to be restricted to small, lightweight platforms no heavier than the average commuter car, and even then, those were typically of composite monocoque construction to save weight. Scale effects meant that micro-fusion reactors became excessively large and cumbersome for contragrav aircraft weighing more than a few tons. That was why Confederate gunships and most of their larger vertical-flight assets were compound helicopters, and the much smaller Confederate drones and personal transports were contragravs.

The techs had a little surprise for us, something they’d been building off in a far corner of the hangar. Something that made me question the sanity of this entire organization.

The salvaged contragrav drone from back when Bell and I had gone raiding for medical supplies had been converted into a three-meter-long hoverbike, all TIG-welded aluminum tube-frames and thin layers of fresh LAMIBLESS, with the four electrokinetic contragrav repulsors positioned on moving arms at the four corners of the vehicle and the reactor in the center, tucked under the faux leather seat. It possessed what appeared to be a pair of small pyrojet engines in the aft section, presumably for high-speed forward flight.

The 20mm autocannon had been moved to a pintle mount in a tailgunner position and the nose of the death-defying contraption had been fitted with a searchlight and quad-beamcaster array. The camo job they’d done was countershaded such that it was the light blue of a clear sky from below, and the speckled white of a snowy mountain from above. Apparently, it was operated with an inscrutable array of handlebars, pedals and levers by its single pilot, with just enough room for a passenger in the middle and a tailgunner at the rear.

What the techs called a Skimmer was a contragrav drone meant for ponies to sit on and ride. Exposed. To the open air.

I kept looking back at the Captain, and then at the vehicle, my jaw slack, making these little squeaks of utter dismay.

“Sierra’s flying it,” Garrida said.

I fell to my haunches. “Oh, Celestia, why? Why have you forsaken me?”

“That’s ‘cause you touch yourself at night, Sergeant.” Garrida chuckled.

I hoped she was just guessing about that. “I like being alive, not pasted across the damn countryside!”

“Don’t be melodramatic about it. Just enjoy the ride, Storm. And maybe bring a barf bag. Make that three.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

The Briefing Room was quiet and empty, except for the four of us huddled in the corner. The lights were dimmed and the projector was off. None of us had the time or the patience for slideshows. Instead, me, Bellwether, Sierra, and Garrida pored over printouts of the layout of the base while I helpfully held up the mote of a basic illumination spell in our midst.

“Pur Sang Arsenal.” Garrida’s claw landed on the facility proper, nestled in a pass in the Crystal Mountains. “A combined Charger base and airfield, hidden away in the mountains north of Everfree, at Pur Sang Peak. The runway and hangars at this facility were mainly intended for launching interceptors in case enemy bombers took an interest in the base. The facilities for aircraft are very limited and primarily intended to service transport aircraft coming and going on an as-needed basis.” Her claw passed over a few squarish buildings. “Those old bunkers are sure to have some good shit in them, if anything valuable was left behind. Our scout reports state that the base’s automated defense systems are still active, so that means scavvers are unlikely to have picked everything clean.”

For the next couple hours, we discussed the best way to get through base security, and after some deliberation, it seemed we’d settled on a plan.

“Why can’t we just walk right in?” I said. “It’s an Imperial Army base. We look like Army on IFF, don’t we?”

Garrida sighed, shaking her head. “We have no idea if our IFF codes are still valid, because the planetary datasphere network is down. If you three approach, the automated defenses could see you as friendly, or they could blow your heads clean off. We’re not gonna take that chance. Assume they’re hostile and use caution on the approach. Sergeant Storm, that’s where your magic comes in. You’re going to have to cloak the Skimmer and remain undetected.

“The Skimmer is equipped with audible heading indicators to help with navigating correctly while blinded by Storm’s magic. Sierra has already been trained in their use. You are to penetrate the base defenses at the southern end, the area with the fewest turrets. Once you’ve done this, you are to advance north until you reach the command center.”

Garrida touched the map with her claw, pointing at one of the largest structures. “This structure, here, with the aerials on top. That’s your objective. That facility houses the base’s Core. Breach in, as quickly as you can, using the rooftop access. Gain control of the Core, and you control the base. If you can’t cut the power gently, plant explosives on the core electronics and server machines and knock the whole damn thing out. Then, head down below to the backup core and reactor and knock those out, too.

“Be careful. If you take out the base power completely, even the backups, then the electric automated doors will be stuck, and the hydraulic ones will be limited to emergency accumulator power only, so you may have to blast your way through some of them, or otherwise find a way to breach their locking mechanisms and crank them open manually.

“From that point, assess the base’s inventory and make the call over aetheric for recovery ops to commence, if necessary. If nothing of value remains, then withdraw and return to base. Otherwise, take the Skimmer back up and stay on-station. Wait for me and my recovery teams to link up with you. Keep us informed if the situation changes and we need to be ready for hostile contacts when we arrive. Everyone clear on what your role is, here?”

We all nodded in unison. “Don’t have to tell us twice,” I said. “I’m bringing Lucky along for recon. Sounds like we’re gonna need eyes on the backs of our heads for this one.”

“Then get to it,” Garrida said. “Try and be back home in time for some well-earned chow. Dismissed!”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I held a hoof over my mouth, my stomach lurching and cramping over and over. I leaned up against the autocannon’s receiver as the dead, empty plains on the outskirts of Everfree City sped past me.

“Please, Sierra,” I mumbled. “I’m—I’m gonna throw up.”

I was so sick of throwing up.

“What was that?” Sierra shouted back at me over the whipping winds. “Can’t hear you, Storm!”

She was in love. I could tell. Who am I to question her devotion to raw, breakneck speed and cobbled-together shit-piles?

“Never mind,” I muttered.

Riding on top of the Skimmer—the three of us sitting in tandem, with me facing backwards—felt nothing like being in a Charger, even one engaging in hard maneuvers. It was absolutely nauseating. We were going a good four hundred kilometers an hour while suspended only a few meters off the ground. Occasionally, Sierra would pull up hard and raise us a few meters to surmount the taller obstacles. The rattling contragrav drives churned my guts. The terrain was a blur, rocks and bushes stretching into thin black lines. Streams and flickers of blue phase-shifted energy snapped and crackled in the corners of my field of vision like electric arcs. The only thing keeping us from plummeting to our deaths were the fall-protection harnesses we wore, clipped to eyes that had been welded to the frame.

It was a maniac machine, built from scavenged junk by stressed-out Charger mechanics working under time constraints, for only the most unhinged of rebels to pilot.

My only solace was that I, like my companions, was wearing a heavy winter coat over my armor, goggles to keep the wind out of my eyes, and a balaclava to keep the chill off my fur. I tried closing my eyes and tuning the world out. Tried stilling my cramping stomach. The noise of the Skimmer seemed to fade away.

After a few minutes of silent meditation, that was when I heard it. The faint yet unmistakable whop-whop-whop of rotor blades. Gyrodyne. My eyes snapped open and I scanned the sky, and sure enough. There was a speck in the distance at our six o’clock.

I keyed my radio. “Sierra! We got a Con-fed gunship on our tail, about two klicks out! He’s within gun range! Can we go faster?”

“Four hundred’s all I can do!” Sierra said. “It’s electronically limited! Without the damn limiter, the techs tell me we can go twice as fast, but with nothing but this dinky little windshield in front of me, it’d get real uncomfortable real fuckin’ quick.”

A Marbo Aeronautics MA-986 Black Mamba gyrodyne could do five hundred. They had both coaxial rigid rotors and thrust turbofans and were armed to the teeth with a cannon, rocket pods, anti-tank guided missiles, heat-seekers, and other nasty gadgets like targeting pods, electronic countermeasures, and long-range detection suites.

I saw flashes from the bastard’s wing pylons that couldn’t be anything other than FFARs being launched in our general direction. My heart leaped into my fucking throat.

“Oh fuck!” I screamed into the radio. “Evade!”

Sierra pulled hard right, sending us drifting over a hundred meters sideways. There was a ripple of bright flashes and deafening explosions. The ground erupted with pillars of dirt and clouds of flying metal fragments where we’d been just seconds before. The blasts rattled my teeth.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” My vocabulary tended to be very limited in situations such as these. I knew nothing but utter panic.

“Hang on!” Sierra shouted. “I’m taking us up!”

She cut the altitude restrictor and angled the Skimmer skyward, sending us rocketing upward at a considerable rate of ascent. In spite of the name, the Skimmer was not limited to hovering only a few meters off the surface. We took to the heavens, the ground departing from below us. I clamped my hoof over my muzzle. It was so different from seeing it through a Charger’s cameras. It was visceral and raw, like how a pegasus must have felt. I looked down with breathless wonder at the ground far below. There was nothing between me and a fall of a thousand meters besides two braided nylon straps at my haunches.

Sierra swung us around so we faced the incoming hostile air contact. “Let’s say hello to these motherfuckers!” She opened up with the beamcasters, four pulsating streams of green lancing out at the enemy gunship. They responded by banking hard to the left.

“Where’s his buddy at, Storm?” Sierra shouted.

I scanned the horizon, looking for the gunship’s wingman. That was when I heard the scream of jets. I looked up, and there was a second gunship diving directly at us, letting off a heat-seeker from the tip of one of their pylons. The missile streaked directly at us.

“Above us!” I shouted. “Flares, flares!”

Sierra slammed her hoof down on the flare deployment button in response. I shrieked as golden orbs rocketed out from right under my ass and to either side of me. For some reason, the flare launchers were located underneath my seat. They’d singed the tip of my tail. I winced as I looked down and rubbed my burnt ass. Did those sons of bitches put them there on purpose?

As we juked hard, the missile meandered off-course towards one of the decoys. Sierra pulled us into a high-gee half-loop, firing her casters at our pursuer while inverted, before rolling us level in a picture-perfect Immelmann. We were vastly more maneuverable than our foes.

As we streaked past the gunship and they entered my arc, I carefully adjusted my aim. I depressed the firing lever and my twenty-millimeter cannon joined the battle with a staccato, booming chorus. The spade grips rattled in my hooves. The whole Skimmer bucked violently from the recoil. After a few seconds of walking my fire onto the target, bright flashes rippled across the enemy gyrodyne gunship’s shark-like black hull. Their tail boom snapped off.

“Yeah!” I screamed. “Fucker! That’s what you get, you rat bastard!”

A gyrodyne wasn’t like a conventional helo, where the loss of a tail rotor would send one plummeting straight to the ground. Coaxial choppers had no tail rotor to speak of. The tail empennage provided critical directional stability, however, and after they began lazily drifting in a circle, it wasn’t long before they realized their only option was to shed all their airspeed and descend vertically to the ground. That, in turn, made them a sitting duck. It was all over for them.

Sierra whipped us into a sliding turn, possible only because our craft lacked any airfoils to speak of. We rocketed towards the crippled gunship at a breakneck pace, our beamcasters flaring. With her precision marksponyship, Sierra hit them right in the rotor mast and plucked their main rotors off the top of their fuselage like a sadistic unicorn foal methodically ripping the wings off a fly with her magic. The thing dropped like a stone.

The Mamba pilots punched out right then and there, firing their ejection seats. The explosive bolts that would have ordinarily severed the rotors to allow the crew to safely eject instead chucked the remainder of the rotor mast high into the air, and in what must’ve been one of the unluckiest events I’d ever witnessed in any battle, I watched in stunned silence as the stump of the rotor mast beaned the gunner in the head on the way back down.

The impact made a thunk loud enough to be heard over the din of the electrokinetics and was hard enough to knock his helmet off. As much as I despised the enemy, I winced in sympathy. That had to have hurt like a son of a bitch. The pilot was alert and flailing his limbs, but the gunner hung limply from the cords of his parachute. One down, one to go.

The other gunship launched both of its infrared missiles at us in a single salvo. They weren’t taking any chances. Sierra launched more flares, pulling us into a loop. My tail was actually on fire, this time.

“My fucking tail!” I whined.

We pulled into a dive and I frantically patted at my ass, the air currents putting the fire out. However, there was still something smoking in the depleted flare launcher.

As the smoke rapidly increased in volume, my eyes widened with horror. “Fire! We’re on fucking fire!”

Using my levitation magic, I pulled out the fire extinguisher stowed along the vehicle’s frame, placed the nozzle in the flare launcher and let loose with a blast of halon. The smoke began to subside.

Bellwether, who’d been silent as a ghost the entire time, chose that moment to voice his displeasure. “You crazy bitches had better get us there in one piece!”

“Shut up, Bell!” Sierra said. “We’re doin’ the best we can!”

“That’s insubordinate! Insubordinate!”

Sierra glared back at him. “Do I look like I give a fuck? Bell, you’re gonna shut that ass you call a face and lemme pilot this piece of shit, or we’re all gonna get turned into fucking cat food, you dumbass! You can take it out of my hide later, if we’re still alive!”

“If we’re still alive in the next few minutes, you’re gettin’ a fuckin’ medal!” Bell shouted. “Pull us up underneath this son of a bitch, I got a little something for him!”

Sierra pulled a drifting one-eighty that would be impossible with anything other than a contragrav, following the gunship’s movements as it tried evading us. She poured on the speed, our pyrojet engines burning red-hot, catching up with them before they could lose us. We ascended through a cloud layer, the world briefly going white all around us. As Bell instructed, she pulled us in close to the underside of the gunship’s fuselage. I could feel the rotor downwash whipping against my jacket as I looked up at the gunship’s belly. We were right underneath them.

Bell reached up and slapped a lump of plastique on the underside of the Mamba. I clamped my eyes shut, whispering profanity under my breath. Sierra peeled off, and once we had a good twenty-five meters between us and them, she raised us level with the gunship’s bubble canopy.

The gunship pilot and gunner both did a horrified double-take. Sierra waved her hooves beside her head and stuck out her tongue mockingly, and I gave them the Leg of Honor, slapping one foreleg into the crook of the other, upraised one. As Sierra banked hard, Bell set off the explosives. The gunship’s fuselage was split in half, right under the engines. An instant later, aerodynamic forces tore the rest into tiny little pieces of confetti. There was no walking away from that one.

Sierra reared up and stood as far as the restraints would allow, letting out a jubilant cheer. Her tail flicked back and forth across Bellwether’s muzzle.

“Getcher fuckin’ flyswatter out of my fuckin’ face!” he said.

“Hey!” I shouted. “I changed my mind! I love this thi—”

I turned my head over the edge of the Skimmer, pulled my balaclava down and vacated my stomach.

I’d spoken a little too soon.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I shivered, shaking from head to hoof. It wasn’t so much the wind chill that made me feel cold inside, but combination of that, the overall climate, dehydration, and hunger. I’d thrown up a couple more times on the way over. Facing backwards on a flying platform without an enclosed cockpit was one of the most nauseating things I’d ever experienced.

I didn’t get motion-sick while piloting my Mirage, even when taking it to the limit. This was different. I wasn’t desensitized enough to whatever the hell this was. I had to admit, the techs had outdone themselves. The Skimmer was a beast in combat, and Sierra piloted the damn thing like she’d been doing it all her life. Nevertheless, I would’ve preferred to ride my motorcycle, even if it would’ve taken much longer to get to my destination.

Being on my heat without any suppressors and a fucky, shrapnel-wounded foal-oven certainly wasn’t helping matters, nor did the fact that I was so horny that even after mustering every ounce of my self-control and professionalism, and even after getting sick and losing my lunch over the side of the Skimmer, I still couldn’t fucking help myself.

For the past several minutes, I’d taken advantage of the noise and the fact that Sierra and Bell were looking the other way, and without so much as making a single squeak of pleasure, I humped the damn seat until I left a sticky mess in my uniform. I licked my lips and crossed my eyes a little as I came, but other than that, I didn’t make a damn sound. I allowed myself a wry smirk. As it turned out, invisibility magic wasn’t the only thing I could do that was stealthy. I could also stealthsturbate.

I was immensely proud of my accomplishment for all of two minutes, until we came to a stop for a quick map check, and then Bellwether ruined everything.

“Everypony can smell it, Storm,” the old stallion muttered. “I know you’re suffering, but please leave it for when we’re off-duty.”

If that got my cheeks burning, what Sierra added next turned them thermonuclear.

“Damn, and I thought I was the filthiest mare in the ELF!” Sierra guffawed. “Nice goin’, splattercrotch! The techs are gonna love licking the seat clean.”

I turned my head skyward, swallowing the thick lump of shame in my throat. I could just about die. I could throw myself from the Skimmer and that would be the end of my wretched, embarrassing shit-fest of a life.

I looked up at the snowdrifts clinging to the foot of the Crystal Mountains. It was dark. Dark and bitterly cold. Everything was shaded in a dark grayish twilight hue. Snowflakes drifted lazily from the sky. When Sierra brought the Skimmer to a halt to get her bearings again, the air around us was dead still. The silence was eerie.

Sierra consulted a paper map, looking up at the landmarks and checking her field compass. “Okay, we are here.” She tapped her hoof against part of the western end of the range. “We’re a little off course. We should be about ten klicks east. That’s no problem. I can get us over there in just a few minutes.”

Sierra changed course and started picking up speed. The Skimmer’s roaring pyrojets kicked up a plume of snow in our wake, our searchlight cutting through the darkness. We veered into a tree-lined valley, the mountainsides looming ominously over us as we negotiated a winding, frozen river.

There was a deep rumble from behind and above us. We all turned around in our seats. There was something giant plying the skies to our rear, its fog lamps bathing the valley underneath it an incandescent hue.

“Sierra!” Bell shouted. “Go dark!”

Sierra shut the Skimmer’s lights off and hurriedly landed the vehicle, shutting down the engines to reduce our noise output and visual signature. I cloaked the Skimmer while leaving us uncloaked so we could see, and the three of us unlatched our restraints and quickly hunkered down in a snowdrift. Moments later, we were briefly lit up like Celestia herself had dropped the sun on us, but it passed without incident. To our knowledge, we’d remained undetected. We looked up, our jaws agape as the huge dropship soared overhead, flanked by a pair of smaller ones.

The hulking alien craft were painted white and had glowing blue lines running along the edges of their airfoils. The heavy dropship, the one in the center of the formation, had to be a good hundred meters across. I’d never seen one so large. The smaller VTOLs looked like great seabirds, their capacious fuselages suspended on masterfully crafted wings with control surfaces like great metal feathers. They were at once hard-edged and also smooth and sculpted. They were beautiful, ghostly, and completely alien things. I’d never seen anything like them before.

“Is it the Confederacy?” Sierra said.

“No, it ain’t,” Bell muttered. “I’ve never seen that model of dropship in my life, and I know ‘em all. Imperial, Confederate, nemrin, xicare, linnaltan, all of them. Those are literal UFOs.”

I pulled my binoculars out of my saddlebags, trying to see if I could get a better view of them. As I zoomed in on the dropships receding into the distance, I spotted a strange roundel of some kind emblazoned on the side of one of the smaller ones, surrounded with some manner of alien text I didn’t recognize. A few seconds later, they disappeared into the gloom. I blinked a few times and rubbed my eyes. I was almost certain I’d seen them practically vanish into nothingness, like when I cloaked myself. Their logo was a striated blob on a black background. After I mulled it over a few seconds, it finally clicked.

“Was that a brain in a circle?” I wondered aloud.

Bellwether stiffened visibly. “Oh no. Oh fuck, no. Not them. Not here. Please, no.”

“Who’s ‘them’, Bell?” I said.

For a few seconds, Bellwether didn’t say anything. He merely shook his head, his eyes as wide as saucers. “We need to fucking leave. Abort the mission.”

“Why would we do that?” Sierra said. “Who the fuck are these assholes that we’d abort just because they have a few piddling dropships? Well, not piddling, but you get the idea.”

“I am not at liberty to answer that question, Sergeant Sierra.” Bell turned away from her and looked me straight in the eye. “All I can tell the two of you is that we are all in grave danger. Not just the three of us. The whole resistance. Shit, the whole fucking planet.”

That statement gave me pause. “The whole planet? On account of three weird-looking dropships? What can these assholes do to us that the Confederacy can’t?”

“You don’t wanna know,” Bellwether said.

“I don’t think we need to head back just yet, Bell,” Sierra said. “Based on their course and airspeed, I don’t think they’re headed for Pur Sang. They’re on their way somewhere else, further east. We came all this way. Splashed two gunships for our trouble. Shouldn’t we reconnoiter and see, at the very least?”

Bell deliberated on the question for a few moments, his jaw set angrily. “Maybe. But let’s wait a little more before we get going again. We do not want to be spotted by those guys.”

I frowned. Bell knew something about the mystery aerial contacts, but he wasn’t telling us. It was some spook shit, apparently. The way he was so disquieted by their presence was disturbing to me, in turn. Bellwether was a stallion who could look a Kark straight in the eye and take it down with a knife and some explosives without the slightest bit of hesitation. If something had him freaked out enough to call for us to scrap a mission, it had to be something really, really bad.

I drank a few gulps of water from a canteen and chewed idly on a ration bar while we waited. I had to fill my aching stomach up with something. My head was on a swivel the entire time, looking for any signs that I should hunker back down to avoid detection.

“I think the coast is clear, now,” Bell said. “We’ll continue with the mission, but if they show up again, we gotta go, and we’ve got to do it in such a way that they can’t trace us back. If they do start following us, the smartest thing to do would be for us to simply scuttle the Skimmer and scatter in all directions. I’m not joking. This is not something you wanna fuck around with.”

“Really, Bell?” I said. “Strand ourselves? Just because of some weird brain-in-a-circle guys?”

Bellwether glared at me. “It’s either that, or we condemn me, you, Sierra, and every single pony at Camp Crazy Horse to a horrible death. If we’re compromised, and those ‘brain-in-circle guys’ are the cause, the smartest thing to do would be for me to blow our vehicle into little tiny bits and for each of us to run as fast and as far as our legs can take us and get in the damn woods. That is correct. That’s also why we’re going silent. No radio transmissions, period. Is that understood?”

Sierra and I shared a look of mild shock, and when we looked back at Bell, it was clear he wasn’t joking in the slightest. He literally meant that the wisest course of action, if we were detected and followed by this new, unfamiliar foe, was to maroon ourselves and split up so we couldn’t be tracked.

“Yes, Sir,” I said.

Bell’s contingency plan didn’t make any sense to me at all. The Skimmer was an order of magnitude faster than moving on the hoof. From my perspective, the best method of escape would involve its use, rather than its destruction. The three of us mounted the vehicle and Sierra fired the reactor and contragrav drives back up, the electrokinetics building to their characteristic rattling whine and the pyrojets flaring with ethereal heat. In no time at all, we were back up to cruising speed. I had a lot to ponder on the way to our destination.

After a couple more minutes, we crested a hill and encountered a snow-buried road with dead street lamps, their foundations hidden by a few feet of powder. The upper halves of each of the buried street lights snaked up through a mountain pass until they stopped at a checkpoint with a chain-link fence and retractable bollards. Beyond that loomed a network of ominous-looking concrete bunkers and automated gun towers with faceted, angular armor. Sierra brought us to a skidding halt, facing us perpendicular to the road. I scanned the area over a klick ahead with my binos.

The turrets were still moving. Still scanning for targets. Each one sported a twin-forty, like on the head of my Mirage. They also came equipped with a spinning aerial search radar. In the center, above the autocannons, was the baleful eye of a heavy beamcaster gimbal. The turret was an all-purpose system, capable of engaging armor, air targets, and incoming artillery and mortar shells alike.

Just barely poking out of the top of the snow layer were what looked like the burnt-out husks of a few Confederate Conqueror tank turrets. Some wayward enemy tank platoon had made their way up the pass years ago, only to be fried by the turrets. After that, they probably tried hitting the base from the air, only for the automated air defenses to swat them down. At some point, the base must have been designated as a low-priority target and the invasion force’s efforts focused elsewhere, because the attacks had ceased and the defenses were still standing.

“Fucking Omni-turrets, Bell?” I said. “And they’re still active? Geez.”

Those turrets could fry a main battle tank instantly. If we were engaged by one, we would instantly shatter into a cloud of aluminum, composites, blood, and bone. We were nothing but a great big clay pigeon, and an Omni was like Salzaon Granthis himself with a shotgun full of birdshot.

“Cloak us,” Bellwether said. “We’re going in.”

“Here goes nothing,” I whispered.

I turned to sit crosswise in the seat with my hind-hooves braced against the contragrav’s frame, angling my head forward and balancing my Orbit’s weight on my back. After hitting my stopwatch, I covered us and the Skimmer in an invisibility field, plunging us into darkness. Without an exterior hull to redirect light around, the only way I could cloak us completely was by cloaking our eyeballs as well. We were completely blind. My invisibility magic made us invisible not only to the naked eye, but to radar as well, which was a good thing, since robotic auto-turrets tended to use millimeter-wave, infrared, and terahertz detection systems instead of pure optical recognition. The entire electromagnetic spectrum was nullified, not just visible light.

That also made our radios useless. Only aetheric responders ignored the cloak. Chargers could transmit many kilobytes of data over aetheric because they had numerous aetherbits in their comms gear, and those systems cost as much as a few battle tanks all on their own. For full bandwidth communication, Stealth Courser pilots still had to expose our antennas, however.

I pinged the area around us with my echolocation magic, feeling for the cliffsides at the edge of the pass. The soft, powdery snow confounded my efforts, reducing my effective spatial resolution. I’d never noticed that effect before, but then again, I couldn’t recall having ever used my invisibility magic in the snow, either. The Confederacy preferred arid or temperate rainforest climates over the cold tundra or taiga, and many of their worlds reflected this preference.

“Okay, right eighty-seven,” I said.

Sierra nosed the craft over until we lined up with the road. We were off to a good start.

I let off another ping. “Forward, slow.”

Sierra throttled the Skimmer up a bit, until we were moving at about a cantering pace. I pinged our surroundings again. We were going to run off the road unless we corrected course.

“Left eleven degrees,” I commanded.

Sierra listened closely to the device the technicians had installed, which let off one audible click with each degree of rotation. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. After about a minute, we had moved a couple hundred meters from our original position. I kept adjusting our course, relaying commands to Sierra based on the information gleaned by my magic pings.

My echolocation spells weren’t quite like seeing. They were more like feeling. Everything around us was reduced to a tactile map in my mind’s eye. I could feel the terrain. I could feel my compatriots’ heartbeats. I could feel everything.

Minute after minute passed. I grit my teeth as I struggled to keep the Skimmer invisible. It was such a complex object. So many exposed, skeletal bits. That made it more difficult. Contiguous surfaces were easier to cloak. Trying to conceal objects with large surface areas or exposed porosities was very difficult. I missed my cloaking trainer. It was a one-cubic-centimeter block of titanium foam that was as difficult to cloak as a non-porous object many, many times the size. An excellent tool for practicing and trying to extend one’s magical endurance.

I could feel sweat on my brow from magical exertion, even in the cold, or perhaps it was my imagination. My forehead tingled. My horn began to ache. I silently prayed to Celestia that the turrets didn’t have thaumatic detectors, or we’d be lit up like a Hearth’s Warming tree from my magic, and subsequently, we’d be lit up in a more literal fashion as well.

“Okay, we’re at the bollards,” I said. “Ascend, ten meters.”

There was a slight downward tug into my seat from our upward acceleration, and when we reached our new altitude, I directed Sierra forward, past the guardhouse, through the checkpoint, and over the fence.

“We’re in,” I said. “Those turrets are very much active and armed. Probably why no one’s been up this way. If our IFF’s no good, they’ll turn us into charcoal.” I checked my stopwatch, briefly uncloaking my own head and foreleg to do so. Over five minutes had elapsed since we began. “I’m going to keep us cloaked, but we’ve already burned through something like half of my magic endurance so far. This is kinda hard to do without a locus.”

We advanced deeper inside Pur Sang’s perimeter, winding up through the pass until we reached the windblown plateau at the top. I accessed my mental map of the facility. Based on the maps and diagrams Garrida had shown us, we were at the southwestern end of the facility, working our way towards the northeast. Directly east of us was the open expanse of the airstrip, which ran from north to south. To the north were the rows of hangars and bunkers, including the main command and control facility, sitting astride the length of the runway. As I directed us to the north, I felt around with my magic until I detected a large concrete structure festooned with aerials and dishes on top. That was the main command center, the one from which all the turrets were controlled.

“This is our stop,” I said. “We’re almost to the objective. Left seventy. Ascend twenty meters. Forward—okay, halt. We’re over the roof right now. Nothing is obstructing our descent that I’m aware of. Bring us down slowly until we land.”

We settled down atop the main command and control building, remaining cloaked as we disembarked. The coast seemed to be clear, so I decloaked us. There weren’t any auto-turrets in sight. The roof of the facility was covered in a blanket of soft, powdery snow that crunched under my hooves. After Sierra shut the Skimmer off and secured the reactor, I directed us to the access door. It was an ordinary fire door, unlike the reinforced blast doors at ground level. None of the ponies who constructed the facility ever expected air-mobile infantry to get this close in the first place, apparently.

The dark cliffs of Pur Sang Peak towered high above us. The winds were picking up. The aerials on the roof of the command center sang a phantasmal chorus as the mountain air whistled through them. I couldn’t shake the strange sense of dread that seeped through my nerves. Somehow, all of this felt too easy. I wasn’t about to say anything, lest I jinxed the entire mission with my shitty luck again, but there was something malevolent in the air that I couldn’t quite place.

Bell slapped a wad of plastic explosive on the door. “Breaching in! Everypony get back!”

We all moved to a safe distance, and then Bell hit the detonator, blowing the door off its hinges.

“Wow, that was subtle,” I said.

“Ain’t no other way,” Bell muttered.

The three of us left the Skimmer on the roof and moved in. As we moved down the stairs, my ears perked up at a few angry beeping noises in the hall beyond. “Oh shit!” I dove for cover as a pair of green beams filled the air where I’d stood just moments before.

“You hit?” Sierra said.

“No, I’m fine.” I brushed my hooves over my armor, just to double-check for smoking, carbonized pinhole entrance wounds and the smell of burnt flesh. “I’m okay. There’s a pair of fucking beamcaster turrets at the end of the hall. Well, that just about confirms that our IFFs are no good and those Omnis would’ve torn each of us a new asshole. Fucking things tried to punch my ticket!”

“I hear you’re pretty good at levitation, Storm.” Bell nodded, passing me a chunk of CH. “See if you can move this sucker down the hall.”

“Trivially easy,” I said.

I lifted the plastic explosive in my levitation’s orange glow, moving it through the doorway past the bottom of the stairs, into the hall, and all the way to the end, where the turret gimbals resided, smacking it against the wall and molding it into place. Levitating something so far away always felt funny, like the strange, weightless tickle in one’s skull from hanging upside-down off the edge of a bed.

“Charge in position, Bell,” I said. “Blow ‘em.”

“Fire in the hole,” Bell muttered.

There was a loud bang and in an instant, the end of the corridor turned into a pile of rubble. I took a peek and sized up the situation. The rubble wasn’t completely blocking the way. We could climb over it, if we had to. I peeked further outside the doorway. The path split three ways. I checked the frame of the door above my head. No more automatic caster gimbals.

“Hey, Bell!” I said. “Looks like the coast is clear!”

That was when the klaxons sounded. Fire suppression sprinklers activated, drenching my whole body. The lighting switched from white diodes to red strobes. The whole base’s alarm system had gone off.

“Perimeter Warning,” the base’s intercom sounded. “This is not a drill. Intrusion countermeasures have been deployed. All base personnel, seek shelter immediately.”

Me and Bell glanced at each other, wide-eyed.

“Oh crap,” I muttered.

I undid the straps holding Lucky onto my back, giving the little Orbit a charge and issuing some hurried voice commands. “Lucky, exit the way we came, ascend fifty meters, track movement, send the feed to my eyepiece!”

The Orbit beeped a few times after its rudimentary programming parsed the command. Once it displayed the green light of comprehension on its chassis, it immediately turned and zipped outside. Fortunately, we were in an area that the Omni-turrets didn’t cover, or else Lucky wouldn’t have been so lucky after all. I could see them. Over a dozen of them, at least. War Automata deployed by the base’s defense alcoves.

The quadruped robots were larger than a Karkadann. They were also stronger, faster, and better-armed. To top it off, each one was sapient. A golem piloted by a soul-bound Anima. Almost like a miniature Charger. High-grade automata like the Type-857 Wolfhound were hideously expensive and usually reserved for defending high-value installations, or augmenting spec-ops assaults.

I could hear their voices over Lucky’s feed to my headset as they chattered amongst themselves. “We got meatsacks, boys and girls! They’re trying to break into Command from the roof, and that means they’re going for the Core! Move in, go, go, go!”

“Oh fucking fuck, Bell!” I wiped the sweat from my brow. “We got twelve, no, fourteen Wolfhounds!”

Sierra was wide-eyed with terror. “Fuck. Fuck! They’ll rip us to pieces! Where are they?!”

“They’re entering the lower levels of the building as we speak,” I said. “The defense system is opening the automatic blast doors and letting them through.”

“We’ve got to get to the Core,” Bellwether said. “It’s our only chance. Let’s go!”

I recalled Lucky with a headset command, and it flew back down the stairs and assumed formation over my shoulder. We ran down the concrete corridor, mounting the heap of rubble and making a left at the corner, pumping our legs as fast as we could.

We passed full-height polycarbonate windows that enclosed rows of abandoned offices, paperwork strewn everywhere and seating left askance. Aside from old sticky notes, whiteboards with years-old scrawling caked onto them, and clipboards with outdated reports, there wasn’t even the slightest hint of life. Not even equine remains. I wondered how the base personnel had evacuated, and where they’d gone.

We dashed down another flight of stairs and turned a corner. More auto-turrets at the end of the hall, along with an airlock. Bell passed me another charge and I moved it all the way to the end with my levitation.

“Fire in the hole!” Bell shouted.

With the detonation of another, slightly smaller charge of CH than the last one, the auto-turrets were reduced to sparking, smoldering junk and the outer door to the airlock was forced ajar. We hurried down the corridor and Bell left a pair of five-pound charges on both of the corridor walls, presumably to collapse it and deter our pursuers if necessary. We got to the end and forced our way inside, past the steel and clear ballistic polymer doors. Bell tried manually closing them behind us, grunting and struggling with all his might, but it was no use. They were jammed. Giving up in frustration, he began fiddling with the keypad for the inner airlock door, trying to scan his ID.

There were voices up the corridor from us. “They’re almost in the damn Core! We need to stop them!” The first Wolfhound, one possessing a feminine voice and personality, rounded the corner to the hall behind us, its Charger-like head angling towards us. “What? Ponies? Not the damn satyrs? Never mind, they’re still trespassing and damaging government property!”

Before she could open fire with her beamcasters, without even turning around to look, Bell whipped out the detonator and triggered the explosives, closing off the corridor completely. I gripped the sides of my head, my ears feeling like they’d been stuffed in cotton gauze from the overpressure. Bellwether immediately returned to his task as though he hadn’t been interrupted at all. When he placed one of his other ID cards atop the scanner, the red light switched to green.

“Agent Bellwether, BASKAF,” the reader sang out. “Access Granted.”

We practically threw ourselves into the big, circular core room, onto one of the catwalks on the upper level, our armor rattling against the expanded metal floor grating. A dozen beamcaster gimbals arrayed around the edge of the room locked onto us with a series of frenzied beeps. There was nowhere to dodge, and not even a single scrap of cover. I groaned at the sheer magnitude of our shit-hooved bungling, squeezing my eyes shut and anticipating the end.

“You’re not Confederate troops,” a voice spoke, low and menacing. “Come down here. Leave the damn explosives and detonators in the airlock. All of them. I have terahertz scanners and can sniff the spectroscopic signature of everything in and on your body. If you lie, if you still have some, even if you try hiding it in your ass, I’ll know.”

“I’m not sure if Bell’s all that keen on butt stuff in the first place,” I muttered, getting a nasty look from him in response. “We’ll comply. Don’t shoot. Please.”

I nodded to Bell and he moved to the airlock, dumping his explosives and detonators there as ordered. He stumbled out with a heavy sigh, clearly disappointed at having to leave his ordnance behind.

“Very good,” the voice spoke. “Now, come on down and let’s see if we can’t talk this out.”

The room below us was bathed in a greenish glow. It resembled Scheherazade’s core room, in some ways, but the technology was fundamentally Equestrian. Above a large circular console in the center of the room, there was a floating spherical device over a meter in radius that hummed with power and radiated more thaums than a crowd of unicorns casting all at once. A Quantaetheric Core.

As we worked our way down the stairs, a holotank built into the console lit up. A great horned dragon materialized from thin air and eyed us haughtily.

“I am Tiamat, the Anima of Pur Sang Arsenal,” she said. “Bellwether, I recognize from the ID match, but I’m not sure I know who the two of you are.”

“I am Sergeant Desert Storm, Seredo Twenty-Seven, Service Number five-dash-six-six-eight-two-dash-four-one-three-one. Light Scouts, Eighth Cavalry Division. The other one’s Sierra, also of the Light Scouts.”

Sierra waved nervously. “Hi!”

Tiamat squinted at us, grinning wide and displaying row after row of sharp teeth. “Database matches confirmed. Former military and intelligence. Two Charger pilots, as well. Still carrying on the fight against the Confederacy even after total command structure collapse. Is that about right?”

“We’re with the Equestrian Liberation Front,” Bellwether said. “Any aid you could provide us would be appreciated.”

“Excellent,” Tiamat said. “You aren’t chipped. Your blood pressure and heart rate are normal. That indicates to me that you’re not brainwashed Confederate agents and what you’re saying is the truth. I take it you’re interested in what we have in stock?”

I always found it unsettling how an Anima hooked up to the proper sensor equipment, like terahertz cameras, could peer inside one’s body and determine if they’d been implanted like an infiltrator would be. I shook off the momentary feeling of discomfort and gathered myself.

“Well, that’s not the first thing I wanted to know,” I said. “What I wanna know is, why did the Confederacy give up the assault on the base, for one thing, and for another, where the hell are the base personnel? We need skilled ponies almost more than we need the war materiel.”

Tiamat’s expression fell, her mood growing somber. “For the former, I can’t explain exactly why. After I shot down a few of their stealth bombers and took out several Conqueror tanks approaching the base, they simply gave up, withdrew their forces and moved on elsewhere. As for the latter, twenty-five percent of base personnel are casualty-status. The other seventy-five percent are below. In the subterranean bunkers. I’ve been out of contact with them for some time, but I assure you, they are still alive down there. I can see them on the security feeds.”

“How many?” Bellwether said.

“Seventy-five hundred civilian, four hundred military. There are enough consumables down there to feed the whole base for a decade. Supplies are approximately twenty-five percent exhausted.”

I smiled wide, looking over at Bell, who wore a shocked expression on his face. This was big. Bigger than any of the weapons or materiel we could’ve retrieved here. Nearly eight thousand of the base personnel had survived and were still on-site.

“That’s great news!” I said. “What’s the catch?”

“There were riots.” Tiamat was sheepish, rubbing the back of her virtual head with her claws. “The civilians panicked at the prospect of staying underground for years and awaiting rescue. This escalated into a conflict with civilians grabbing blunt objects to try and overpower the guards and escape the base.

“Over two thousand civilians and nearly a hundred military personnel were killed in the ensuing battle. The underground sections of the base were not equipped with trash incinerators large enough to fit the bodies, so the guards decided to cut each of the deceased into small pieces and flush them down the waste-dissolving lavatories.”

Sierra and Bellwether were utterly chagrined. I pinched my brow, squeezing my eyes shut. “Oh fuck. They’re all fucked up.”

“That’s a very concise way of putting it, Sergeant Storm,” Tiamat said. “Rates of mental illness among the survivors are unacceptably high. They have distributed medication as needed. Anti-depressants, mostly. However, they are running short. They need treatment that I am not equipped to provide. Somehow, I doubt you’re any better off in that category.”

I groaned and rolled my eyes when I thought of my therapy session with Weathervane. She was about to get way, way busier.

“What weapons and materiel do we have on-site?” Bellwether said.

“The motor pool has twenty Centaur armored personnel carriers and four Bull Runners. At the armored vehicle depot, there are eight Gargoyle IFVs, four Minotaur tanks, two Manticore self-propelled guns, and two Chimera anti-air vehicles, along with some construction equipment you may or may not be interested in. There are also two Whirlwind fighters and four Roc VTOL transports in the hangars.

“The Charger stables have seven at full operational readiness. Four Coursers, two Rounceys, and one Destrier. There are a further thirteen Chargers in a state of moderate disrepair, but there exists a large enough supply of spare parts and feedstock on-site that they could conceivably be reconditioned and put into action.

“The arms bunkers contain a number of different weapon modules, upgrades, and spare components for Chargers and other ground and aerial vehicles, along with several thousand Mark-76 SSMs. Additionally, there are six hundred fusion warheads in the ordnance bunkers, fifteen megatons each.”

My jaw dropped. “What the fuck? That’s enough to equip an army! Why weren’t they used in combat?”

Tiamat sighed. “Base personnel were ordered to load the fusion warheads onto the Whirlwind stealth fighter-bombers, penetrate enemy airspace, release their weapons over populated areas, and destroy as many of the occupying forces as possible. Salt the earth, in other words. A final, last-ditch offensive. Using the loss of contact with central command and failure to confirm their orders as an excuse, they refused to carry out their duty. Instead, they chose to retreat into the underground vaults and seal themselves inside, where they have remained to this day.

“If the base was ever overrun by enemy personnel, I have the means to scuttle everything. My own reactor room and secondary Quantaetheric Core, deep below us, possesses a fifty-megaton fusion charge powerful enough to blow the top off this mountain and obliterate all the munitions and sensitive technical information kept here. However, given the lack of a solid evacuation plan that would guarantee the survival of base personnel, that was deemed a last resort.”

“This is huge,” Bellwether said. “We hit the fucking motherlode. Captain Garrida needs our report, pronto. We need to rescue these ponies and recover the equipment, and we’re going to need help, lots of help.” Bell tapped a shorthoof message into his aetheric responder.

DE BW. RCN FIN. JCKPT. VRY LRG QUANT MATRL. 7900 SURVIVRS. SND HVY TRANS TO PR SNG PK.

A few seconds later, we got the reply, in the form of a green light on our headsets strobing in code. DE CG. UNDRSTD. SNDNG REINF. GD WK.

“This could really turn the tide,” Bellwether said. “This many ponies? Who knows how many of them are specialists and technicians?”

“I wonder if there are any Charger pilots among them?” I said. “Maybe we should fire up the whole lance. Set up a perimeter. Any way we can get those ponies to come out of the bunkers on their own accord, Tiamat?”

“Negative,” she said. “They have overridden my controls and purposely jammed the door to the subterranean facility’s western sector. I could have used charges or cut my way inside, but that would have unacceptably breached base security by leaving the bunker network exposed to the base’s exterior. Now that you’ve arrived, that changes things. Presumably after you rescue the base personnel, you have additional plans in mind for Pur Sang?”

“We’re going to recover as much of the materiel as possible to distribute it to the resistance,” Bellwether said. “The nukes will go into Admiral Crusher’s safekeeping. Then, we’re going to make backups of the data. Captain Garrida will decide the base’s ultimate fate, but in all likelihood, once we’ve gathered all useful materiel and intel, we’ll need you to set the base to scuttle to eliminate any residual technical data and keep it out of enemy hands. We’ll pull your portable core, and you can come with us.”

Tiamat almost seemed to cry holographic tears of gratitude. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I thought we were all going to be stranded up here forever.”

“The hard part is getting all this stuff out of here,” Bellwether muttered. “It’s going to take multiple trips. Maybe even dozens. Avoiding detection and interception by enemy forces will be next to imposs—”

There was a low rumble that shook the command building, a few items rattling and falling off of nearby desks.

“What the hell was that?” Sierra said.

Tiamat’s draconic countenance resolved into a look of horror. “I don’t know. There’s a dropship outside. They bypassed the defense cordon entirely. Some sort of cloaking technology. I don’t recognize the model in any of my databases.”

The holotank switched to a view from one of the command center’s external cameras, showing searchlights penetrating the gloom. The nose of the dropship pierced the fog, its lights scanning over the base as it hovered over the runway east of the command center. It was one of the ghostly, white, seabird-looking things we’d spotted earlier. I glanced back at Bellwether, who appeared to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“It’s them,” he whispered. “They’re here.”

“The brain-in-a-circle guys?” I said.

Bellwether was pacing around frantically. “We have to get out of here. We have to get the survivors out, now! They’re trapped like sitting ducks! We—”

On the feed, three sealed metal pods in the dropship’s sides unfurled and deployed three bipedal beings. Once they hit the ground, they did not hesitate. They sprang into action instantaneously. The creatures immediately started scrambling towards the base in a mad dash. They appeared frenzied. Berserk, even. The feed zoomed in one of the strange beings, resolving what looked very much like a damarkind.

“Three dummykins? Is that all? We can take ‘em, Bell.” I grinned, at first, but my lips curled downward in horror as I watched them engage the Wolfhounds, which had been sent by Tiamat to respond to the incursion.

The medium beamcaster arrays that the automata were armed with were the kind that could turn the average satyr’s torso into a cloud of vapor and flying bone fragments, and yet, they bounced off of the damarkinds’ armor completely. Even when the Wolfhounds expertly shifted their aim to their targets’ joints, there was no penetration. No part of them was vulnerable to beamcaster fire.

When the Omni-turrets opened up on them, blue bubbles of force flared around their bodies, deflecting forty-millimeter shells and heavy beamcaster fire like it was nothing. They were completely engulfed in overwhelming firepower, only to emerge from the flames and fragments totally unscathed. They possessed some manner of personal shield system, like on a Dragoon exosuit. One that could absorb firepower fit to vaporize a battle tank. They moved fast. Supernaturally fast.

When the lead Wolfhound charged with its energy claws active, one of the creatures simply slapped it aside, sending the half-ton quadruped robot hurtling sideways, tumbling end over end through the snow. Three more Wolfhounds pounced at the creature, only to be repelled by some sort of omni-directional energy blast that showered the air with electrical arcs. As the creatures closed in, sprinting towards the base at upwards of sixty kilometers an hour, I could make out more details from the camera feed, like the fact that their armor seemed to be embedded in their skin.

“The hell are those?” I murmured.

Bellwether was frantically tapping into his aetheric responder. DE BW. CNTCT SIVSCA. SND ALL DRGNS SVP. The old earth pony collapsed to his haunches, covering his head. He was practically curled up in the fetal position. “Fuck!”

“Come on,” Sierra said. “How do we stop them, Bell? Talk to me.”

“I asked Garrida to send every damn Dragoon we have, but they won’t be here in time. We’d have to fire up the Chargers. They’re already inside the perimeter, brushing the sentry automata aside. It’s too late. If they get into the subterranean facilities—”

There was a smash of shattered polycarbonate and a distant roar. The whole building trembled ever-so-slightly with the faraway tromping of heavy footsteps. There weren’t any windows on the first level. The thing had scaled a wall and hurled itself through one of the observation windows on the second story. I shared a look of horror with my comrades. We all knew what that meant.

“It’s inside,” I whispered. “In the command center. With us.”

“Oh, fuck me,” Sierra said. “How the fuck did it get through the bulletproof glass? You can’t even break that shit with a sledgehammer!”

I turned to the core’s central console, leaning my hooves on one of the desks that protruded from the circle. “Tiamat, can you operate the base’s security system remotely, or do you have to be plugged in?”

“I can do it wirelessly, yes. All I have to do is leave one of my expert programs in the system to manage my affairs and configure it to accept orders over encrypted radio, like the kind built into your armor.”

I nodded. “We’re pulling you. Now. And then, we’re gonna fucking hide, okay?”

The draconic Anima appeared somewhat worried, before her expression turned to one of grim determination. “Do it. I don’t trust the caster turrets in here to stop that thing from ripping everything in this room to shreds, including me.”

Tiamat’s portable core—a cylindrical, metal-tipped vial of quantaetheric substrate much smaller than a Confederate AI core, its hard crystalline center glowing iridescent green with magic—popped out of the center of the console. I levitated Tiamat over to Bellwether and he hooked her data port up to his armor’s computer and then ran both the core and the cable into one of his saddlebags. After that, he dashed up the catwalk to go retrieve his explosives and detonators.

“Where’s the nearest ventilation access?” I said.

Tiamat responded quickly, her voice emerging from my radio headset. “If you’re coming from the upper airlock, that would be to the left of the console, against the wall.”

I spotted the ventilation damper and tugged on the louvered grating with my levitation. I kept applying force until I stripped the screws out of the sheet metal they were threaded into, destroying the linkage for the motorized shutters. The space beyond was just barely large enough for a pony to fit. I gave Lucky a once-over and stowed the Orbit securely over my haunches. It was going to be a tight fit.

“Into the ducts,” I said. “Let’s go!”

“But I don’t wanna go in the ducts,” Sierra whined and pouted. “That’s where the monsters usually are.”

“Just pretend you’re in a B-movie,” I muttered. “Come on, fucking hustle, you two. If that thing finds us, it’s gonna push our shit in.”

Bellwether galloped back down the stairs and followed Sierra and I into the vent after we waved him over. As we crawled into the cramped, dark ductwork, the thin galvanized metal buckling and warping under our weight, he was whimpering. I had never seen him so freaked out before.

“Bell, what’s wrong?” I said.

“We’ve already screwed up,” he said. “They’re going to kill everyone.”

“No,” I said.

“What?”

I grit my teeth in anger. “I said no. They’re not. We’re going to work the fucking problem. We are going to neutralize these shitstains however we can. We are going to rescue those ponies and bring them into the fold. Do you two have my back?” Bellwether and Sierra gave me an intense stare, their eyes glinting with worry in the darkened space, but they both nodded their assent. I nodded to them in return. “Good. No more bellyaching. We are professionals. Let’s get this shit done.”

The three of us crawled what felt like hundreds of meters through the command center’s ventilation system, avoiding blower fans and other hazards. Eventually, we came across an air register in the ductwork’s floor. There were hissing and snarling sounds beneath us. I shushed my compatriots and the three of us quietly inched over to the slats and peered down into the darkness.

The creature was non-verbal. The only sounds that issued from its throat were unnatural trilling and warbling noises and otherworldly, mindless roars, like a Karkadann. A normal damarkind would be taunting the fuck out of us, demanding that we reveal ourselves and prepare to receive his turgid member forthwith, not howling and drooling all over the place like a mad dog.

The strange beast paced around in a circle in the storeroom beneath us, sniffing at the air, occasionally growling and pawing at itself in its madness. After a moment, it paused, its nostrils flaring as if it had discovered a new scent. Then, with a roar, it mounted a storage rack and launched itself straight upward. Directly at us.

The three of us screamed like schoolgirls when the damn thing rammed headfirst into the underside of the exposed ductwork with enough force to dent the sheet metal in the shape of its armored skull.

“I fucking told you!” Sierra said. “Never go in the ducts!”

“Go, go, go!” I shouted. “Fucking run!”

We crawled as fast as we could to the end of the duct as the maddened creature shredded it with its gleaming metal claws. It roared and punched its bladed fingertips through the sheet metal, trying to stab us in the belly as we crawled. I gasped and shrieked, hurrying my pace, my muscles burning, my lungs on fire. My mouth was as dry as a desert, my face streaked with tears of terror.

The creature’s claws punched through the galvanized steel, gripped, and began to pull. The whole duct shook and groaned. The hangers that held it up were audibly strained from being placed under tension. The beast was ripping it out of the ceiling. If it were to collapse, then I’d be down in the storeroom with it, at which point it would swiftly tear me limb from limb. I was panting, my breathing only interrupted by swallowing the lump in my throat and gasping for breath immediately after.

Bellwether and Sierra had already made it to the other end of the duct and were waving me over. With Lucky stowed on my back and the ductwork shaking violently from side to side, I was finding it near-impossible to crawl. The creature quit trying to drag the whole duct down to the floor, and for a moment, I paused, trying to still my breathing so as not to make a sound. It seemed like it had abandoned its assault entirely. Then, its claws punched through and wrapped around my left hind leg, gripping it so hard I could feel the joints pop.

“Bell, help me!” I screamed. “Help me! It’s got my fucking leg! Ah, Keleste, nei! Sadare, nei! Tanminne asrii!” Every variation of please and help escaped my panicked lips.

With the ceiling anchors for the hangers already weakened from the previous assault, the HVAC duct heaved and collapsed atop the shelving, inclining my path to freedom at a thirty-degree upward angle. The creature let go of my leg, letting out an animalistic roar as it circled around to the exposed end of the duct. First, it tried crawling inside. Then, when it failed due to its sheer bulk, howling its displeasure, it shook the whole duct to try and get me to tumble towards it. It was like jiggling a vending machine to dislodge a stuck candy bar, except the candy bar was me, and I was this freak’s idea of a light snack.

“Oh my fucking fuck!” I screamed. “No! Please, no!”

I dug my rubberized boot soles into the sides of the duct, trying desperately not to slide towards the abomination. If I had bare hooves, I would’ve already slid down the duct and been summarily ripped to shreds by the living meat grinder at the bottom. Instead, I inched upward, ever-so-slowly, my legs splayed out at either side of me to tension my torso between the inside walls of the ductwork. I was sobbing, frantic, desperate, my muzzle running with snot.

“Grab my hoof!” Bellwether shouted.

I looked up, and there he was, his sapphire eyes gazing down at me, proffering one hoof while holding onto a length of rope with the other. I didn’t even know he carried rappelling gear. After a moment’s hesitation, I took hold of his hoof, and with his earth pony strength, he hauled us both up the incline with surprising ease. When we got to the top, I was panting like crazy.

“You alright?” Bell said.

“Fuck, dude!” I said. “I could kiss you! That shit was fucked! Screw that professional talk. I nearly fucking shit myself. I wanna go home. Fuck.”

“Stow it, Storm,” he said. “Believe me, I feel you, but we’re not out of the woods yet.” He looked down at the creature as it glared up at us through the end of the duct, hissing and drooling, its struggling having ceased and been replaced with a sinister motionlessness. “Got a present for you, motherfucker.” Bell wrapped a grenade in plastique to boost the yield, and then pulled the pin and rolled it down the incline.

“Oh shit!” I muttered.

The three of us clambered deeper into the HVAC system to escape the blast radius. A couple seconds later, there was an earsplittingly loud bang that slapped me in the face with overpressure. The remainder of the collapsed duct was shredded, giving us a clear view of the space below us. We nervously peeked around the edge, looking down into the darkness. The creature roared, its shield flickering and flaring. It was practically unharmed.

“What does it take to stop these fucking things, Bell?” Sierra said.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Bell and I shared a look of hopelessness before Sierra made us come to our senses. “We’ve got to move, you two. We can’t stay here.”

We crawled through the ductwork for another hundred meters before I hit another grating with a blast of telekinesis and sent it flying, clearing our path to the ground floor of the command center. We were in a main lobby with a vaulted atrium and two corridors leading off to the wings. The security desk was unoccupied, with not a single pony in sight.

“Shit, that was loud,” I muttered. “I hope that thing didn’t hear.”

I heard a far-off roar and the sound of armored footsteps. By the looks on Bellwether and Sierra’s faces, they’d heard it, too. It wasn’t very encouraging, to say the least.

“Where are the damn Wolfhounds?” Sierra said.

“Tiamat, get this damn blast door open!” Bellwether waved his armored foreleg over a security panel and it blinked from red to green.

“Aren’t the other two still outside?” I said. “What about the fucking skimmer?”

“What about it?” Bellwether said. “We can’t just waltz through the fucking command center with that thing in here. The rooftop is a no-go. We have to get underground, with the rest of the survivors. It’s our only chance.”

There was a loud clank and the whine of hydraulics, and the blast doors to the command center slowly reeled open, revealing the dark, frigid wastes beyond. There was a roar behind us and the sound of footsteps fast approaching. We turned and spotted the augmented damarkind, running straight at us down a long corridor. There was no fleeing from it. If we turned and bolted, we would have only made it a hundred meters at best before it caught up with us.

As Sierra and I made a break for it, out into the cold, where the other two of those creatures lurked, a frantic Bellwether held his hoof over the external access panel. “Seal it, seal it, seal it, fuck!”

Slowly, the jaws of the blast door slid together, the beast howling furiously as it lunged and thrust one of its arms through the gap, only for the limb to be lopped off by the force of the whining hydraulics, falling to the snowy ground and painting it hues of red. Bellwether stumbled and fell on his ass, before he, too, broke into a gallop after us.

“Tiamat, what’s the fastest route underground?” I gave her a shout on the radio.

“The way into Pur Sang Sector West was deliberately sealed by the base personnel. They permanently jammed the door by cutting the hydraulic ram itself. I have reports from the security system that there has been a breach in through the vent towers. The interlopers are trying to get to the survivors!”

When I looked up at the corrugated walls of the ventilation towers atop the subterranean bunkers that served the HVAC system to the underground portions of the base, there were smoking, damarkind-shaped holes in them. The creatures, by some unknown means, had burrowed through the metal and into the ventilation system’s interior.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I shouted, picking up the pace, my companions following suit.

After galloping a couple hundred meters through the snow, thoroughly winded from our sprint, we arrived at a blast door leading into the underground bunkers, shaking the powder off our bodies. The door’s mechanism had a hole with a scorch mark leading out of it. The control panel was non-responsive.

“No good!” Bellwether said. “Tiamat’s right. This thing’s fucked and won’t open in a million years. The mechanism’s been torched from the inside. Oxyacetylene, looks like.”

“Allow us.”

Shocked, we turned to the source of the voice, only to be greeted by the facility’s entire pack of Wolfhounds, their crimson, cyclopean mechanical eyes regarding us with derisive stares.

We stood back as the guard automata fired up their beamcasters, blasting out a continuous stream of arcane force that slowly, but surely, began to slag the door. After ten seconds, the blast door was a white-hot puddle of molten metal. Bellwether moved to make entry, but one of the Wolfhounds held him back.

“Caution,” the golem said. “The edges are still white-hot and you’ll be burned severely.” After a few seconds, the metal cooled to red-hot. “Go.”

We moved into the dark interior of the facility’s entrance. There were signs of an old battle, things strewn all over the place, beamcaster scorch marks, makeshift barricades, and other detritus littering the area. We vaulted a barricade and moved deeper inside, with Bell using Tiamat’s security access to get us through the doors.

I ran headfirst into a lit corridor, gasping in shock when I saw the barricade at the other end, a good fifty meters away. There were two armored ponies with a crew-served machine gun, a gunner behind the spade grips and a loader feeding the belt. In the narrow space, there was no cover to hide behind and no way to dodge. If he opened up on us, we’d all be mulch.

“Don’t shoot!” I shouted.

“Don’t you fucking move, fucking looter bitches, or I’ll turn you into fucking chum!” the gunner behind the barricade shouted.

“We’re not scavvers,” I shouted. “We’re with the Liberation Front! We’re Star Crusher’s boys and girls!”

“What?” he said. “Get the fuck on over here, then! Hooves up, no magic, and no funny moves, or we blow your fucking head off!”

When we got close, they confirmed our IFFs, shaking their heads. “Codes are good, but out of date. With the network down, it can’t be helped. Proceed. Colonel Rune Ward’s the base commander, and he’ll want a word with you. We’ll stay here and cover the main entrance.” The base’s soldiers gawked as the Wolfhounds casually walked right on past them. “Fucking Tiamat, really? You let her shit-hounds in here?”

“On the contrary, they were the ones who let us in,” I said. “This is an emergency. There are unidentified life forms inside the perimeter. Threat level, off the charts. Wolfhounds can’t hold them back. Some new kind of enemy bioweapon. They’re inside here, with us. They broke in through the damn vent towers!”

“Oh, that’s great,” the gunner said. “Just fucking great.”

Ignoring his grousing, we moved deeper into the base, the Wolfhounds taking point. We worked our way down long stairwells, deeper into the earth, through one drab, dilapidated, dimly lit concrete corridor after another. One doorway opened onto a catwalk overlooking a large underground storage space four stories high.

I peered into the storage racks below us. There were dozens of Mark-76 box launchers, like the kind that were often found strapped to the hips of my Mirage. The markings on the missile canisters were unmistakable. My old sins were staring me right in the face, sending shivers down my spine.

“Organophosphate,” I whispered. “Binary submunition dispersers.” I thought of Hoodoo, and my face warped into a hateful sneer. “Time to weed the garden again.”

The Wolfhounds had gotten ahead of us. There were sounds of a scuffle in the next area, punctuated by the otherworldly roar of one of the creatures.

“Dammit, the one from the command center got inside the same way the others did!” Tiamat said. “It’s in the space beyond. Hide. Let the Wolfhounds handle it.”

We took up position in a side storeroom, aiming our weapons at the entrances in case it worked its way back. I concealed us with my magic, hitting my stopwatch at the same time.

“I’ve got about five minutes left till I burn out,” I said.

“Hold position, you two,” Bellwether said. “Let’s let the Wolfhounds take care of it, if they can. If not, we’re going to withdraw and lay traps along our path of retreat. Got me?”

“I hear you.” I nodded.

“Invisibility magic,” Tiamat said. “So that’s how you three got in past the Omnis. You’re a Stealth-Recon Courser pilot.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Not just any Courser, but the Mirage. Got any Coursers lying around?”

“Not with Illusion locuses, no.” Tiamat sounded almost disappointed that she had none to offer. “Ours were configured for light attack roles. Elemental magic. Synergistic weather manipulation experiments. One Charger and ten pegasi to do the work of a hundred pegasi, that sort of thing.”

The sounds of the battle intensified, the clash stretching on for what felt like minutes, beads of sweat dripping down my forehead as I neared burnout, until finally, Tiamat gave the all-clear. When I decloaked us and we moved up, two of the Wolfhounds were limping, injured, and one of the creatures—the one with the missing arm from the command center, which had somehow outpaced us to this point—was lying on the floor, twitching and flailing in its death throes as the Wolfhounds poured firepower into its prone form.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” I said.

“It was in a bad way,” Tiamat said. “Half bled-out already from its wounds. Door did a number on the arm, for sure. The others are still fresh enough to be a more serious threat.”

We sidled past the scene of carnage and walked up to a control panel to a heavy blast door leading deeper into the facility. When Bellwether tried using Tiamat’s access codes with his armor’s transceiver, waving a hoof over the panel, the door refused to budge.

“Huh, that’s fucking weird,” Bellwether said.

He tried scanning again, only for the severe-looking face of an older stallion with a long, stringy white mane and beard to flash into existence on the door panel’s screen. He wore an officer’s cap and long coat and bore a look of stern authority. “Ahh, so that’s where you idiots are,” he spoke. “I’ve received a report of ponies claiming to belong to some supposed rebel organization attempting to breach my base’s security. Explain yourselves at once, before I have you shot and your bodies thrown off the premises.”

I didn’t know why, but I had an instant and instinctual dislike of him. Nevertheless, I stepped up to the plate. “Colonel Rune Ward, Sir, I am Sergeant Desert Storm of the Light Scouts, Charger Pilot. I am accompanied by Sergeant Sierra, also a pilot of the Light Scouts, and ORACLE Agent Bellwether. We were sent under the authority of Captain Garrida to conduct salvage operations and search for useful weapons and materiel so that the Equestrian Liberation Front may continue the war effort. This base is under attack by unknown hostiles who pose a grave threat to the survivors. They’ve breached into Pur Sang Sector West. Please, Sir, all we ask is that you allow Tiamat’s automata to assist in the defense!”

“Negative, Sergeant,” Rune Ward shook his head. “Under no circumstances is this door to be unsealed, do you understand me? We have no proof that you are who you say you are, or what your intentions are. You are to hold position until we can send someone to verify your identity, which may be several hours from now. Any attempt to breach our security will be considered a hostile action, and accordingly, our response will be with lethal force. This is your first and final warning. Comply or die.”

Bellwether and I shared a look of disgust. Something wasn’t right, here. I turned back to the door’s control panel. “Sir, we—”

The feed cut off and the door remained unresponsive. “Dammit!” Bellwether shouted. While he kept trying to access the door panel, we heard a loud hiss and crackle on the other side, followed by muffled cries, and then hellish wails of pain and terror from what sounded like a crowd of ponies. There were shouts for help and for reinforcements, beamcaster discharges, bloodcurdling screams, and sounds of flesh being rent asunder, punctuated by the mechanical roars of the half-machine abominations.

Bellwether kept trying to access the door, swiping his leg over the control panel, using his access keys, and frantically swiping all his ID cards. Nothing worked. He pounded his hoof on the console, his grief apparent in his voice. “Damn it all, they’re on the other side, with the civilians!”

The Wolfhounds had just about enough. They were getting ready to breach through the blast door. Suddenly, Colonel Rune Ward’s figure reappeared on the screen. “What in Tartarus is going on down there? What have you absolute, fetlock-dragging, mouth-breathing morons let into my base?!”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” I said. “Unknown hostiles. Inside the perimeter. They breached in through the ventilation towers on the roof of Sector West, and we’re pursuing them with intent to neutralize.”

“Those vent towers are heavy-gauge steel!” he shouted. “The whole bunker is supposed to withstand a proximate kinetic strike or fusion bomb blast!”

“They burrowed right through, somehow,” I said. “We saw evidence of the breach from the outside.”

There was a pause. “I can see the feed,” the Colonel said. “Those monsters are tearing us to shreds!”

I pounded my hooves on the console. “Then let Tiamat and the damn Wolfhounds in to stop them before they kill anyone else, Sir!” I shouted.

“I am doing this under protest!” he said.

With a clank, the blast doors began to retract, the Wolfhounds surging into the gap without a second thought. We almost followed them in, but Tiamat knew better.

“Don’t go in there,” she said. “You’ll die. The telemetry from the Wolfhounds is telling me that the creatures’ swipes and punches peak at over a hundred Megapascals. Suffice it to say, it’s enough to take your head off. Besides, I found out a few things about our new guests. Come have a gander at this.”

“Gander?” I muttered. “What century is this?”

While the sounds of battle in the room beyond the blast door intensified, we ambled back through the darkened concrete hall to where our headsets projected Tiamat’s glowing, draconic figure. She was hunched over the corpse of one of the creatures, the first to fall in battle. What remained of it was scorched by continuous MBC fire.

“I got a scan on it,” Tiamat said. “It’s heavily augmented, to a degree most would regard as both impossible and extremely unethical. If that was a damarkind, it’s not anymore. There’s no way that any damarkind in his right mind would consent to what was done to these things. I am left to conclude that they were most likely unwilling test subjects who were abducted for the procedure, but that’s just idle speculation.”

“And what the hell was done to them?” I muttered.

Tiamat’s projection waved a claw over the dead creature, pointing out the gadgetry hanging out of the stump of its severed arm. “They’ve been completely vivisected and stuffed with bionics from head to toe.”

Glowing holograms were projected into our field of view by our augmented-reality headsets, showing the full extent of the surgical procedures that had been performed on this damarkind. There was so much metal in the damn thing, it probably weighed as much as a car.

“Fucking hell,” I whispered.

Tiamat pointed out each of the augmentations. “Extensive combat stim injector array. Direct vagus nerve stimulation and modulation. A very invasive neural lace, with neuroprosthetics in place of much of the frontal lobe. Skeletal reinforcements and artificial muscle and nervous tissue enhancements. An unknown phased energy generation system. It can repel attacks and even melt right through metal, like my Wolfhounds’ beamcasters.

“Most disturbingly, they’ve been castrated and had their testes removed. In place of their scrotum is a device that seems to function both as a permanent catheter and an extremely potent hormone synthesizer. That’s not even all of it. There are so many individual systems and implants in these things, it would take me hours to document and describe them all.”

“Practical terms, please,” I said. “And while it may be disturbing to you, it’s kind of a relief to me that, at the very least, they’re not packing heat down there.”

“You and every mare in the galaxy.” Tiamat nodded. “They’re stronger than normal damarkinds. Much stronger. They have no capacity for free will or conscious thought. They ignore pain and they hold back not an ounce of their prodigious physical strength. These things will happily put their fists through a brick wall and not even feel it. They can run and jump hard and fast enough to experience ligament tears, and they’ll ignore it and keep moving.

“To top it all off, they can also generate a potent energy shield that takes many megajoules of absorbed energy to collapse, one that radiates so much energy that it is capable of being used as offensive weapon. They weren’t made to last very long, I’d say. This is not a soldier. This thing is a living, air-dropped munition, made to go completely berserk and then burn itself out in a twisted dance of death.”

“Celestia’s blood,” Sierra muttered. “They fucking lobotomized these poor dingoes, just like a big, nasty Kark!”

“That’s a very troubling prospect.” Tiamat’s face warped into a scowl. “Damarkinds are a legally-recognized FTU associate species in Confederate space. Under the Stellar Code, this is highly illegal medical experimentation. Whoever did this, they’re operating well outside the bounds of galactic law.”

I snorted derisively. “They’re fucking damarkinds, Tiamat. If they replaced his legs with a unicycle and his arms with clown horns, it’d be an improvement.”

There was some sort of alien script on the creature’s chest armor. On the left side of the breastplate, above the creature’s heart, was the insignia of a brain in a circle, viewed in profile and facing left, with the cerebrum, cerebellum, pons, and medulla oblongata all clearly recognizable, surrounded above and below by the inscrutable text NDRAS THUAX. Some sort of motto, it seemed. It looked like a unit patch of some kind. On the right half of the breastplate was another word in the same indecipherable script. VURVALFN.

Sierra looked down at the creature, scanning it with an impassive gaze, before looking up at the pair of us, a deep frown etched on her face. “Bellwether, what the hell are we dealing with, here? No more of your ORACLE secrets. We need the truth. Now.”

Bellwether sighed. “What if I told you two that there’s an enemy out there that’s far more insidious than the Confederacy, one that can’t be reasoned with and can’t be stopped?”

That sounded awfully similar to the Confederacy, to me. After all, every attempt at diplomacy with the satyrs had been an abject failure. Still, I was willing to entertain Bell’s charade as long as he coughed up with something more substantive than the noncommittal spook lines we’d been fed.

“Who?” I said.

Bell looked up at me, his eyes haunted. “That’s the thing. We don’t know. We were a fucking intelligence agency. We were supposed to know these things. We weren’t even able to figure out what they’re called.”

Sierra huffed impatiently. “Not even a name? Work with me, here, Bell. What the fuck are these guys?”

“I told you, we hardly know a damn thing about them,” he said. “We’ve never been able to capture one of them alive or bring down one of their craft. Their shielding and cloaking tech is too advanced. All we know is that there have been numerous mass-casualty incidents and kidnappings out on the frontier over the past several decades, typically involving isolated science outposts. It’s like they’re looking for something specific.

“The one thing tying these incidents together is that symbol on that thing’s chest, along with intercepted Confederate communiques that coincided with these events. We think the Confederacy are better at tracking these alien craft, or else they’re collaborating with them somehow and have foreknowledge of these attacks. We don’t know who they are, what they want, or even what language they speak. All we know is that they’re extremely hostile.”

“But they’ve got to have a name,” I said. “Even a codename is better than nothing.”

“SILVER SCALPEL,” Bellwether said. “That’s the code that all these events have been filed under. And you’re not to fucking repeat it to anyone. Either of you two.” He glanced between us, concern evident on his face. “You spot anything SILVER SCALPEL-related, you are to bring it directly to me, Captain Garrida, or one of the Dragoons. Absolutely no one else is to know of this. You’re in the circle of trust, now. Do not betray that trust.”

“As if the Confederacy wasn’t bad enough,” Sierra muttered, tossing her mane and adjusting her watch cap. “Now, you’re telling me there’s another species out there that wants us all dead? What ancient Zebra burial site did we build Everfree City on, anyway? What rotten luck!”

“I mean, it’s right in the name,” I said. “To build Everfree City, they had to bulldoze the whole cursed Everfree Forest. You know, timberwolves, manticores, haunted castles, spooky shit. Were you paying attention in History?”

“Shut up, nerd,” Sierra groused.

I grinned wide. “Make me.”

“If you were as good as you think you are, you woulda been a history teacher and not a waitress.” Sierra laughed.

That hit me right in the sore spot. “I beg your fucking pardon?”

“We’ve got a big huge problem, you two,” Bellwether spoke over the radio; I hadn’t even noticed he’d left us alone. “Major fucking problem.”

We followed Bellwether through the open blast door and into the antechamber, our faces warping into masks of dread at the overwhelming smell of copper beyond.

“Oh geez,” I whispered. “Oh fuck, Bell. No!”

There were hundreds of the civilians strewn about the place. What was left of them. They’d been torn to bloody ribbons by the creatures. Trapped. Confined. Unable to escape the beasts’ aimless wrath and their ripping claws. There were rivers of gore. Blood pooled and ran so loudly, it sounded like a waterfall. The floor was coated with so much red ichor, it looked either like a foal’s amateurish attempt at an impressionist painting, or like a unicorn had levitated a dozen chainsaws and spun them in a circular orbit around herself while walking through a crowd.

In the corners were the maimed and wounded, screaming and crying and moaning and begging for their misery to end. Some had hidden under the corpses, hoping they’d be overlooked, and they raised their blood and gore-drenched faces to see if the coast was clear. Others were so badly destroyed, ripped asunder by teeth and claws, there was nothing they could do but spasm and flail what remained of their ravaged bodies, praying for the end to come quicker. A few of the corpses were smoldering, their skin charred black.

The other two of the augmented damarkinds lay surrounded by a pile of destroyed Wolfhounds, their dark gunmetal bodies shattered to pieces. Only three out of the original fourteen of the base’s guard automata had survived. The rest had sacrificed themselves to protect the base personnel, and they’d brought the monsters down in what must have been a battle terrible to behold, if the caster scorch marks dotting the room were any indication.

“That climactic enough for you, Storm?” Sierra mused.

I winced at how badly her remark stung. She was right. An uneventful, cleanly victorious fight was preferable to this kind of mess, by far.

“Six hundred civilian technicians and thirty military personnel killed or injured,” Tiamat said. “Roughly eight percent of the survivors, casualties. Eleven of my precious Wolfhounds, destroyed. I hope all this was worth it.”

There had been perhaps a thousand ponies trapped in the roughly fifty-by-fifty-meter concrete room, one out of what must’ve been another seven adjoining, equally sized rooms. For years, they’d lived like this, jammed in like sardines with an average of a couple square meters of floor space for each of them. Just enough for a bedroll and their scant belongings. By the looks of things, a number of them had trampled each other to try and escape the two enhanced damarkinds, only to end up dying in great heaps.

I covered my muzzle, my eyes watering from the overwhelming scent of fresh blood, and worse. The room absolutely reeked. Judging by the smell, they’d been lucky enough to have proper sanitation, but none of them had showered in years. I could feel my gorge rise, but I struggled to keep it down. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let myself shrivel up and dehydrate over this, I thought.

This wasn’t a pilot’s life. This was what the grunts had experienced during the war. Day in, day out, face-to-face with scenes of horror and unspeakable cruelty. It was the kind of thing that turned perfectly good mares and stallions into broken husks if they witnessed too much of it.

“They massacred us,” I whispered. “I can’t fucking believe this shit.”

Colonel Rune Ward and his entourage of armed guards approached us, the sneering officer regarding us with contempt. I saw the way the civilian mares looked at him as he passed, shrinking away with fear in their eyes. I noticed, with creeping dread, that a large percentage of them were, to put it bluntly, with foal. My worst suspicions were slowly being confirmed. I made eye contact with one of the mares and then nodded my head in the direction of the base’s commander, and she slowly shook her head in response. It all clicked into place. I could almost predict the words that would come out of the Colonel’s mouth next.

“Oh no, look at that,” Colonel Rune Ward said. “Looks like we’re—”

I stepped up, gritting my teeth in anger as I interrupted him. “Going to have to repopulate?”

He looked me up and down, nodding with approval. “Smart. Good genes.” He sniffed the air. “And even on her heat already. Take her to my quarters.”

His six heavily armed and armored guards instantly complied, moving up with their weapons trained on us. Mostly stallions. Hardly a mare among them.

I snarled in raw anger. Not this fucking shit again.

“I’m infertile, you sick fuck,” I said. “War wound. Got hit by spall.”

There was a look of shock that briefly crossed his face. “Oh, well, in that case, of what use are you to me?”

“It wasn’t claustrophobia,” I said, facing them bravely. “Tiamat knew. She knew and she held it back from us. After you tricked them into following you underground and sealed the exits, you fucking animals murdered those civilians when they wouldn’t go along with your sick, demented harem fantasies.”

The Colonel nodded. “Some regrettable sacrifices had to be made in order to perpetuate the species in this time of crisis. I’m sure you understand the ramifications of our defeat better than anyone. After all, you’ve been on the outside for the past three years. What do you think?” He tilted his head in an inequine way, like there wasn’t much of a pony left in him. “Can we win, without more births? Are there enough of us to make a difference?”

I sharply inhaled a breath to challenge him, but I was at a loss for words.

He smiled wickedly. “Your silence speaks louder than words.”

“There are enough!” I pounded my hooves against the concrete. I was on the verge of tears. “There are enough that you don’t need to do this!”

“Taken a census lately, Sergeant?”

“I—I—”

“I didn’t think so.” He waved a hoof over us. “Take them away.”

This was going pear-shaped in so many ways. I wasn’t about to just stand by and let this iniquity continue, especially not when it involved my own species behaving so shamefully. What can I do? If I cloak, they could hit Bell or Sierra. If I open fire, they’ll riddle me. What do I do?

The answer came on its own in the form of three Wolfhounds, who slammed into the Colonel’s guards with irresistible force, sending them screaming and hurtling across the room and bouncing off the far wall with a wet thud. The Colonel panicked, scrambled to his hooves and ran, presumably back to his quarters. The Wolfhounds fanned out and took up a defensive circle around us.

“Son of a bitch is getting away!” Sierra said.

“Why didn’t you tell us, Tiamat?” I said, knitting my brow in anger. “Why didn’t you tell us the truth?”

Bellwether cleared his throat and stepped forward. “She didn’t because she knew that if she did, you’d be combat-ineffective, because you’d be thinking about the Colonel’s actions and not the mission, because she’s an Anima and she’s a thousand times smarter than you and can read your physiological stress markers right off your face like an optical lie detector.” Bell glanced at Tiamat’s ghostly figure behind us. “That about right?”

“Precisely,” Tiamat said. “However, I regret to inform you that the situation has taken a turn for the worse.”

“What now?” I said, groaning and rolling my eyes.

“More of the creatures, outside. That dropship came back around for another pass and dropped six of them this time. They’re crawling all over the command center as we speak. Six hyper-augmented damarkinds, three Wolfhounds. It took fourteen of them to bring down two, with a seventy-eight percent casualty rate. You do the math.”

I smirked, feeling a rush of sheer crazy take me over. “Oh, I’ve done it, Tiamat. I did the math about five seconds ago. Three Liberation Front members. Three Wolfhounds. Three shortcuts back to the surface.”

I leapt atop one of the Wolfhounds, mounting my steed and petting the back of its head. It shook angrily like a wet dog, looking over its shoulder with its expressionless face. “We guard automata are not vehicles!”

“Bullshit,” I said. “All you’re missing is a saddle. Tiamat, instruct them to take us to the Charger stables, now! Get the Destrier spun up!”

“What are you planning?” the base’s AI said. “That machine doesn’t even have an Anima installed.”

I grinned, looking over my comrades and the civilians who gazed upon me with newfound awe as I rode atop the automaton, addressing the crowd. “Maybe some of you think the war is over. It’s not. For as long as there are people who want to genocide us or turn us into their property, the war isn’t over. This will only end in one of two ways. Either every last pony alive is dead or enslaved, or we’ve sent every last one of these alien sons of bitches home in body bags. This injustice will not stand. Not on my watch. We’re gonna give these alien freaks a proper Imperial welcome. We’re going to punish these motherfuckers. We’re going to make them regret everything that’s happened from the day they were born until now!”

The cheers I received weren’t the roaring chorus I’d expected. The survivors were too broken. Too beaten-down. I could see the looks they were giving me. They saw me as just another member of the military. They identified me and my patriotic rant with the Colonel. Violence had never been particularly fashionable among our species. To the citizenry, my kind were regarded as a necessary evil at best, and predatory mutants at worst. Opposition to the military had increased in recent years, due in part to Confederate propaganda. Moreover, the bodies of these ponies’ friends and family hadn’t even gone cold yet, and there I was, using a literal mound of corpses as my own personal soapbox. All I felt was disappointment. Partly in them, but mostly in myself.

I looked up at the ceiling, and there were two damarkind-shaped holes where the creatures had melted through before dropping down into the center of the room and raising hell. It was like something out of one of the bad horror films me and Barley used to watch. Bellwether and Sierra reluctantly climbed atop the backs of the other two Wolfhounds, settling onto their pointy and uncomfortable lumbar armor with grimaces on their face. I snickered softly under my breath. Revenge. Revenge for making me ride that stupid fucking contragravitic vomit-comet, barf-bolide, fucking Skimmer piece of shit.

“Bell,” I said. “Get up to the ventilation towers and the main entrance and seal the breaches with the last of your explosives! Before you go, gimme Tiamat. I need her. Sierra, you’re on distraction. Get to the Skimmer and draw them off. I’m heading for the Charger stables. I’ve got a little surprise for these fuckers.”

For a moment, Bellwether appeared shocked and appalled that I’d dare to order him around, but when he saw the logic of my plan, he nodded, unhooking Tiamat’s core from his armor’s onboard computer and tossing her to me. “Don’t let those fuckin’ things catch up to you!”

I stuffed Tiamat in my saddlebag after plugging her into my armor’s onboard computer. We went our separate ways, the Wolfhounds swift beneath us, ferrying us at an alarming rate of speed to our respective destinations. It was an uncomfortable ride if there ever was one, like piloting a very small Charger with a very short stride period. The frequency of each of the canine guard robot’s footsteps was positively brain-rattling. I had to duck beneath low overhangs and the tops of doorways to avoid getting my head taken off.

When Sierra and I charged back out into the dark and the cold, the creatures were waiting for us. They took enraged swipes at us as we fired our casters to try and distract them. The Wolfhounds were faster, sidestepping their blows and protecting us from our attackers. My heart was pounding in my chest with abject fear. I looked over my shoulder. They’d taken the bait. They weren’t heading underground; they were following us instead. Some tens of seconds later, there were a pair of explosions that sealed the underground facility and would hopefully make it more difficult for the creatures to get inside.

Sierra split off and headed for the skimmer, her Wolfhound steed leaping and clambering up the side of the command center, clearing its entire height in a single bound while she clung for dear life to its back.

“Wow,” I whispered. “I had no idea they could do that.”

The Charger stables were in sight. Massive, vaulted concrete hangars with reinforced sliding doors several stories high, partly recessed into the mountainside. When I turned to look over my shoulder, I could see quite plainly that the enhanced damarkinds were gaining on me.

“Sierra?” I called out on the radio. There was no reply. “Sierra, they’re onto me! Come on!”

They were fifty meters away and closing, their limbs jittering and their warbling cries filling the air. I sobbed openly as I watched death closing in on me, implacable and inevitable. I thought of the civilians, and how they’d been torn to pieces. This was how they must have felt in their final moments. I cursed my own powerlessness.

“You fuckers!” I turned to face backwards and fired my casters at my relentless pursuers. “Die! Die!” I screamed.

When they closed to within ten meters, the Skimmer blazed past us, with Sierra at the helm. She swung into a J-turn and blasted them with the quad-casters. “Over here, bitches!”

Five of them broke off and followed her, but one would not be deterred from its quarry. After a brief pause, it resumed the chase. Tiamat sent a signal for the hangar doors to the Destrier’s stable to open. We tore ass through the narrow gap before she sent the signal for them to close again, but it was too late. The creature had made it through with us. The Wolfhound leapt back as the crazed damarkind cyborg made a downward slash with its claws, narrowly missing my head. Another swipe. Another dodge. I shrieked in terror. The beast beat its chest and let out a roar as it released an omni-directional surge of crackling blue energy. I screamed as I felt nothing but searing pain from head to hoof. It felt like I had been struck by lightning.

I was flung forcefully from the Wolfhound, rolling and tumbling end over end. I coughed. I was smoking like I’d been shocked severely. My heart was seizing in my chest. I gasped, practically choking on my saliva, rolling onto my back. I had been shocked severely. In fact, I was fibrillating, my armor’s heart monitor beeping insistently and warning me of an abnormal heart rhythm. I was fucked. The creature stalked up to me, raking its claws together like a griffon’s steak knives. Shing, shing, shing. It roared and raised a metal paw above its head, ready to bring it down upon me and cleave me in two. When I looked up, a mighty Coloratura-type Destrier of the Empire stood above me, its gleaming white and gold livery seeming to shine even in the gloom. I smiled and closed my eyes. At least I got to see such a beauty before I died.

Just when I thought the end had come, the beast was tackled from the side by the Wolfhound, sending it flying. The Wolfhound scooped me up and tossed me so that I lay crosswise on its back, and I held on as best as I could while having a heart attack. We ran through the dimly lit stable, our course taking us beneath a gantry holding up a Charger’s disembodied torso in an adjacent stall. The damarkind followed us, running right underneath it. Tiamat released the clamps remotely. With an earth-shaking wham, the spare Destrier torso, which by itself weighed as much as an entire battle tank, smashed to the floor, flattening the creature like a bug and cracking the concrete.

Not even breaking its stride, the Wolfhound carrying me ran up the stairs and onto the crew gantry, the hatch to the Destrier’s cockpit opening ahead of us. I was dumped inside, croaking and crawling and struggling to stand, but failing. The Charger’s hatch automatically closed behind me.

“The AED, it’s your only chance!” Tiamat said.

I crawled to the cockpit’s aid station, unhooking the automated defibrillator from the wall, gasping for breath as I opened the lid and unwrapped the probes. Our defibrillators did not use pads but pointed electrodes instead. They were designed to work without needing to shave one’s coat, which would’ve taken too long for a pony. I rolled onto my back. With my levitation, I opened my armor’s defib ports and jammed the electrodes into my chest and the side of my barrel, drawing a little blood in the process. I collapsed backwards, my breathing reduced to short, pathetic hiccups, tears in the corners of my eyes.

“Analyzing heart rhythm,” the machine spoke. “Shock is advised. Please stand back. Five, four, three, two, one. Administering Shock.”

I wondered how I was still conscious. Ventricular fibrillation usually meant that the victim would pass out almost instantly. It was very unorthodox to attempt to resuscitate someone who wasn’t already half-dead. Though I sincerely wished that I wasn’t, I was awake and aware the entire time as my muscles contracted from the AED’s shock. It was one of the worst things I’d ever felt in my life. I gasped for air, the pain in my chest subsiding. The heart monitor in my suit stopped chiming. My rhythm had returned to normal, the readout showing all-green. I whimpered softly as I ripped the probes out, sat up, and flipped the lid of the automated defibrillator shut. I stowed the AED out of habit, since true pilots never left anything unsecured to go flying ‘round the cockpit of a Charger, and then, I scanned my environs.

I promptly did a double take, my jaw hanging loose as I gawked at my luxurious surroundings. I’d never even been inside a Destrier before, aside from cramped simulators. Spacious didn’t even begin to describe it. The Coloratura R79’s cockpit was a two-seater, with two saddles in tandem, a very unusual configuration for any Charger. I surmised right then that it had been heavily modified. There were two bunks and a kitchenette, an aid station with a folding litter and the defibrillator that had saved my life, and a sizable first aid kit, and there was even a toilet. Everything was painted high-contrast white and trimmed in gleaming, golden titanium nitride, which made it look like a Saddle Arabian pimp palace.

“It’s like a fuckin’ five-star hotel room!” I laughed, every thought of my near-death experience having vacated my head. “Geez, those lucky bastards even had a proper commode. I had to piss in a fucking funnel!”

I levitated Tiamat’s core out of my saddlebags, inspected her for damage, and, finding none, I plugged her into the console. The holotank lit up with her smirking, smug form, sitting perched on a virtual boulder and resting her chin on her paw.

“That’s nothing,” Tiamat said. “I scanned you earlier. You’ve got an auto-dialysis implant. They were planning on making those part of a pilot’s standard aug regime as part of the Next-Generation Charger Program, once they’d figured out how to solve the quality-of-life issues. They’ve been working on that model for over a decade, rolling out new prototypes, and they never quite got it perfectly right.”

I punched a hoof into the magnetically latched drawer beneath the bunks, pulling out the spare syncsuit that I’d expected to find there. It had belonged to another pilot. The name tag said Maj. Springblossom. I knew of her. A Baroness. One of the nobility, and a test pilot. There was no telling what had become of her in the intervening time.

“So what?” I said, angered that Tiamat had peeled back a scab. I’d almost allowed myself the luxury of not even knowing that hunk of metal was in my back. I checked the syncsuit’s size by laying it beside my torso. It was a good fit, so I began the process of stripping off my winter coat and my armor and donning the syncsuit. “What does that have to do with anything?”

I zipped up the syncsuit, patting out the folds before depressing the button that ran the motorized take-ups and cinched it tight around my body. Finally, I pressed a hoof into the back of my neck and clicked the suit’s link plug into the port for my neural lace. I sighed a bit at the tingling sensation that ran from my head to my hooves. The suit had effectively become an extension of my body. I quickly stowed my armor where I found the syncsuit, finding that I had to use significant force to shove it into the tiny drawer.

“Really?” Tiamat cocked her head quizzically. “You don’t know? Pull that hose out from under the pilot’s seat, and I’ll show you how it works.”

Feeling a little queasy at the implications, I looked at the underside of the saddle, and then reeled out the hose located there. “Okay, now what?”

“Plug it into the port on the back of the syncsuit. Upper-right side, above your haunches.”

I pushed the hose into my back with my levitation and rotated it into place with a click. I gasped at the strange pulling sensation, like something was being vacuumed out of me. I also noticed that I’d suddenly lost the urge to piss.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” I said.

“Nope.” Tiamat laughed. “You’re catheterized. It’s permanent. The implant goes all the way down into your bladder. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

“But—but the nice toilet!”

“You don’t need it. In fact, the new-gen Destriers were going to delete it from the design entirely. You hook up the hose when you embark, you leave it in, and you don’t even notice as your insides are evacuated for you. Great for protracted operations.”

I whimpered like a foal who’d lost her favorite toy. I was sick to my stomach. They were making us Charger pilots less like ponies and more like equipment every day, before our entire nation went tits-up.

“But what if I have to shit?” I whined.

Tiamat giggled. “Glad you asked. For number two, well, we had magic zap-away disposal baggies for that. You’d open a port in your syncsuit like a onesie, and then they’d clip onto your ass and you’d—”

“Enough. I get it.”

“Sergeant Storm, you don’t know the half of it. The NGCP included advances in Charger tech so profound, they’d make your Mirage’s standard pre-production configuration look like ancient history. Are you aware of the Brabant program?”

“The Super-Destriers? Yes, I know of them. Crookneck Squash told me all about it.”

“That geezer is still alive, huh?” Tiamat said. “Not all that surprised, to be honest. What if I told you that the Brabant was mostly a psyop?”

That gave me pause. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a distraction.” Tiamat waved a claw dismissively. “Disinformation, mostly. We leaked bits of it to the enemy, to make them complacent. There were black projects that would make the Brabant look like a medieval trebuchet. Oh, sure, we’d probably have ended up building Super-Destriers anyway. You’re sitting in a testbed for one, hence the two-seat cockpit. However, they were far from being the crown jewel of our research programs. Your Mirage is something special. The key, the lynchpin, of a weapon system vastly more powerful than any other Charger in existence. Even Crookneck doesn’t know everything. He just thinks he does.”

I sighed. “Great. Wonderful. I’ll probably never get to pilot whatever the hell you’re talking about. Enough of the chitchat, we’ve got a job to do and very little time to do it.”

Tiamat laughed. “Just passing the time. Main systems are still booting. There.” The rest of the cockpit lighting kicked in, before dimming to a comfortable level, the Charger’s systems humming softly. It was nothing like the unrefined, visceral slamming of breakers and buzz of transformers one heard in a rough-hewn prototype Courser. It was muffled and serene. If one didn’t check the instrumentation, one would hardly know the damn thing started up at all. “Secondary and tertiary polywells online. Ready to synchronize now. Please—” Tiamat conversationally simulated clearing her throat with a mocking tone, since she had no throat to actually clear. “Assume the position.”

I climbed onto the pilot’s seat, which was the foremost of the two, like a fighter aircraft. Presumably, the rear seat was for a gunner or weapons officer of some kind. I had never seen this particular configuration before. Apparently, Brabants were meant to be operated by two crew members, and this Destrier was set up to test that configuration for tactical viability.

“One to pilot, one to run the artillery and adjust the point of impact on the move,” I said. “Clever. Ready to sync!”

The Sync Arm lowered into place over my back and neck, clicking into my suit’s spinal ports and linking the Charger directly to my neural lace, providing direct feedback through the Syncsuit’s haptics and nerve impulse sensors. Without a Syncsuit, a Charger was just a vehicle, operated by hoofcups just like a tank. With a Syncsuit, it felt more like a vague extension of one’s body. When a pilot was synchronized with their Charger, the Anima had a deeper understanding of the pilot’s intentions. With pilot and AI working in tandem, I could quite literally dodge tank shells or vault over obstacles. I took a deep breath, letting some of the tension out. It was time to get to work.

“Sync rate is fifty-seven percent,” Tiamat said. “Oh boy, this should be interesting.”

“What do we have for weapons?” I pretended I hadn’t heard the words that no pilot ever wanted to hear.

“Octuple MBC array and seventy-six-millimeter autocannons in the head, quad HBC in back.” There was a loud ping and a whine of hydraulics outside the hull. “There. Rearming gantry retracted, fresh magazines in place. You’ve got a full ammo load.”

I sighed, satisfied with the loadout. “Perfect.”

The hangar doors to the Charger stable began grinding open, the two massive slabs of steel slowly rolling aside on tracks to a chorus of klaxons and flashing yellow lights. I felt a thrill deep in my core. This was actually happening. I was in the saddle. I was in a syncsuit. I had a hundred tons of titanium under me, loaded for bear. I also had a known set of targets. Five enemy heavy infantry, rampaging around the base. One aerial contact, intermittent.

Only one thing left to do. Win.

“Game on, motherfuckers,” I muttered.

With but a thought, I fired the pyrojet boosters, destructively severing the Destrier from its stabilizing gantries and propelling its massive frame out of the hangar. There was more inertia than I was used to. More momentum, too. It was three times heavier than a Courser, and each motion was three times more sluggish and purposeful. With ice creeping into my veins, I suddenly realized three things. One, before today, I had zero hours on an actual Destrier. Two, my Courser skills were not interchangeable. Three, I had absolutely no idea what in the blue fuck I was doing.

“Wait! Shit!” I panicked as the hundred-ton machine skidded across the snow, before tripping and rolling over onto its right side with an earth-shaking boom. I grunted explosively, gravity tugging me halfway off my seat.

“Epic fail!” Tiamat laughed.

“Are you twelve?” I said.

“Nine, actually.”

“That explains so much.” I rolled us upright with the thrusters, planting my feet purposefully. “Where are those fuckers, Tia?”

The skimmer zipped across my field of vision, with Sierra being pursued by five enraged Vurvalfn. I wasn’t sure if that was what the creatures were called, and I wasn’t even sure how it was supposed to be pronounced, but that was what I’d taken to thinking of them as. Eight strange, unrecognizable, unpronounceable alien letters in an unknown writing system belonging to an unknown and highly advanced species.

I shook my head. It was like the whole universe wanted us dead for some reason. We’d never done anything to these people. We didn’t even know who the hell they were, but they knew everything about us. They didn’t introduce themselves. They didn’t even say hi. They didn’t even knock. They just barged in and started slaughtering us, without warning and without explanation. At least the Confederacy made it clear where we stood with them. They wanted our land, they wanted our resources, and they wanted us as their slaves. These bastards, on the other hand, didn’t even want anything from us. Somehow, I doubted that a race so advanced needed anything from anyone. I grit my teeth with rage.

“Well, that answers that question.” I flicked a few switches for the multi-function displays to enable the sensor overlays and toggled back and forth from white-hot to black-hot on the thermals just to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. “Arm the heavy beamcasters!”

The four HBCs unfolded from their stowage position on the Charger’s back like four giant fingers, motes of violet energy building along their sides. I sighted in the first of the creatures, the one in the lead, the targeting pip shaking as the Charger’s weapons stabilized themselves. When it turned red and acquired a lock, I pulled the triggers in my hoofcups. There was a blinding flash and an earsplitting crack of four simultaneous HBC discharges. The creature’s spherical shield bubble flared bright blue, sputtered, and died.

“Arm autocannons!”

The Destrier stumbled a few steps. I was a poor fit for the great beast of war. My sync rate with Tiamat was only fifty-seven percent. Well below the eighty-five percent threshold needed to qualify for the type. Our personalities conflicted too heavily. My training and experience on Destriers were next to nonexistent. Tiamat herself was familiar with neither me and my neural patterns nor the Destrier itself. It was a mutual, three-way relationship between pilot, machine, and Anima. The Pilot’s Triangle. This one was fundamentally skewed.

“Come on,” I howled. “Come on!”

The Vurvalfn turned and bolted straight towards me, intent on boarding my Charger and melting it into scrap with their energy projectors. They needed physical contact to do it. I needed to put distance between myself and them, in what was quickly turning into the world’s worst game of tag. I tensed my legs and jumped, my pyrojet thrusters roaring as I took to the skies. Snow billowed underneath me, vaporizing into great clouds of steam from the heat. Long plumes of exhaust with Mach diamonds lanced out from beneath me.

I got a targeting lock on terahertz and infrared. The creatures were blazing hot on my sensors, their silhouettes clearly visible on the displays. Nothing about them was stealthy. They practically glowed on my displays. I raked them with seventy-six-millimeter cannon fire, the heavy autocannons thumping out an extended burst of twenty rounds. Big, rippling flashes and puffs of frag tore the base’s runway to shreds.

The 76mm cannons’ heat warning blared, cryokinetics automatically powering on and removing the waste heat from the barrels. Guns of this type tended to have advanced and expensive active cooling systems when mounted on Chargers, unlike the naval versions which typically used seawater instead. The Vurvalfn with the downed shield had crumpled in a heap, its insides reduced to mush by shrapnel and concussive force. The other four kept charging, darting around and parting ways, trying to avoid bunching up and being caught in the same salvo.

I did a one-eighty in mid-air, firing the thrusters to rotate me as I descended. The moment I hit the ground, I broke into a sprint. Or, at least, I tried to. Instead, what happened was that I fucked up the landing and skidded some tens of meters on the Charger’s knees, scuffing the paint against the runway.

“Fuck!” I looked over the self-diagnostic damage reports, which indicated mild impairment in the forelegs’ duostrand caused by the harsh impact. “This shit is all fucked! I don’t know this fucking machine!”

Tiamat sighed explosively. “Neither do I. It’s one thing to know a Charger’s blueprints. It’s quite another to know how to sync with one, even for us AIs. This thing’s my body, right now. Please try not to bust it up.”

I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Being fresh would’ve given me about ten more percent. Having at least a few hundred hours on actual Destriers in training would’ve given me another twenty percent. I hadn’t even gone over the R79’s checklist. The control layout was similar enough, with a few extra bells and whistles here and there, but that was all. The remainder was all down to the pilot and the anima gaining experience and working together over time.

I had a ninety-six percent sync rate with Dust Devil on a bad day. Her core was more deeply embedded in the Mirage’s systems and not conveniently removable, and she’d been practically custom designed for the thing. The ability to plug a general-purpose Anima into any Charger was a backup function, in case the Charger’s own core had been damaged by enemy fire or removed for servicing and the machine needed to be operated in an emergency. This was one such emergency.

I fired the boosters to build to a gallop, quickly topping out at over a hundred. There was no way they could catch me, but I wasn’t confident enough to try and turn at this speed, so I simply ran down the runway in a straight line. I bled off some speed, strafing sideways with the thrusters a bit. I came to a halt by a cliffside and turned around. The Vurvalfn were fast approaching, three hundred meters out and closing.

What they hadn’t realized was the reason why I’d chosen this location to stop. The moment they got within a hundred meters, I turned the Charger’s head and blasted the mountainside with autocannon fire. There was a rumble and then, a rockslide that quickly built into a full-on avalanche. I fired the thrusters and jump-jetted over a hundred meters into the air to avoid being engulfed. The Vurvalfn weren’t so lucky. They were buried in a fast-moving wall of rock and snow. I watched them tumble end over end and disappear beneath the churning white.

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s right, you pieces of shit!”

Without warning, the cliffside erupted in a ferocious conflagration, sending clouds of debris hurtling through the air. A rock smashed into one of my cameras and cracked it, setting off damage alarms. I spun to face the attacker. It was the dropship, back for more. Judging by the scintillating lines of energy building along its sides, it was getting ready to fire its chin gun again.

I fired the R79’s boosters, propelling myself out of its field of fire before it unleashed another pulse of energy, one that vaporized an entire storage bunker, turning it into a cloud of flying concrete. The blast wave from the secondaries slammed into my machine a split-second later, rattling my insides and sending me rolling end over end. I yelped and shrieked as the hundred-ton machine tumbled sideways through the snow, before righting itself with a burst of thruster power. When I turned back, there was a rising fireball the size of skyscraper a couple hundred meters to my rear.

“Holy fuck,” I muttered.

“Welp, there goes a few hundred of the SSMs,” Tiamat said.

I panicked. “Nerve gas, or conventional?”

“Conventional, thank Celestia.” Tiamat sighed. “You think it would’ve been that big of a boom if it was poison? Get real. That was like three hundred tons of TNT equivalent that just went up, there. What a mess. The adjacent bunkers are compromised, too. Don’t stand next to them! If they go, and we’re too close, then we go, too.”

“Got it.” I turned back to the threat, tracking them as they hovered over the airfield and slewed sideways, watching as they kept me in their sights the entire time, as well. “What the fuck are we dealing with here?”

“Can’t get a good reading,” Tiamat said. “Their shielding is blocking my scans!”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I can do something about that,” I said. “Lock HBCs!”

The target pipper squalled and turned red as it locked onto the enemy dropship. I unleashed the power of the quad heavy beamcasters, slamming into their shielding with four columns of blinding purple kinetic energy. A blue bubble flared around the craft. Their shields held fast.

“Dammit! What the hell kinda shielding do they have?”

“That last volley we sent was over three hundred megajoules,” Tiamat said. “Enough to destroy a good thirty-odd main battle tanks. All I can say about their shielding is that they’ve absorbed at least a gigajoule in total so far, from us and from the Omnis. Their shielding is very, very strong.”

The dropship let loose with another pulse of energy, which went wild and smashed into the cliffs. The blast wave rocked my Charger back on its hooves. The rockslide that followed threatened to bury a good portion of the base.

“Fuck, it’s like a bomb going off!” I said.

Tiamat’s holographic representation bit her claws, her every feature tense. “It’s not like a bomb going off. It practically is a bomb going off. Wherever that beam touches, it causes a two-gigajoule explosion, like a half-ton bomb. I’m still running my analysis, but I’m pretty sure that one chin gun on that dropship is more powerful than each of our heavy beamcasters by at least twenty-six times. To put that in terms you can easily understand, what you’re facing has the equivalent firepower of something like six or seven Destriers packed into one single weapon.”

I broke out in a cold sweat. The over-match lethality was insane. No Charger stood a chance against that kind of firepower. My only saving grace was that their gunnery was worse than an epileptic foal’s.

I grinned wide. “I want that fucking gun!”

“Good luck with that,” Tiamat said. “Can’t imagine what the power requirements must be. Must take a city’s worth of juice to run it. How do they cool the damn thing?”

“Tiamat, get the Omnis ready. I’ve got something for these pricks.”

I turned and ran the length of the airfield, the dropship in pursuit, charging their weapon again. I watched them in the rear-view cam, gasping with shock as they vanished into thin air.

“Fuck, they cloaked!”

There was a brilliant flash that painted the entire plateau white. Right when their weapon discharged, I fired an evasive burst of thruster power and watched as the runway ahead of me erupted in a plume of asphalt. The shockwave nearly knocked my Charger off its hooves. When the dust began to settle, there was a fifteen-meter-wide crater where part of the runway once stood. If that shot had connected, that crater would have been me.

“Luna’s tits!”

“An apt summary,” Tiamat agreed.

I spun on my hooves, facing the aggressor as they rematerialized. “Got you right where I want you, now! Fire all the Omnis at it!”

I’d lured the dropship to where the base’s turret coverage was the greatest, in the middle of the airfield. Five heavy beamcaster shots lanced out from the corners of the base, striking the dropship all at once, from all angles. I loosed my own HBC array at that exact same moment. Nine heavy beamcaster pulses, all on the same target. It had to count for something, I reasoned, and it surely did. The dropship’s shield bubble shattered with a flash of crackling blue-white energy.

“Locking cannons!” I shouted. “Firing!” I pulled the triggers in the hoofcups, letting loose with the seventy-six. Ten thumps shook the cockpit as I let off a burst, and then another ten as I fired another.

The dropship’s hull was pockmarked with orange flashes. Something in their right wing started to smoke, but their armor was barely scratched by the autocannon. “The fuck are they made out of?!” I shouted.

Once their shields were down, Tiamat scanned the dropship, bringing up salient information on my augmented-reality displays. “I have taken this rare opportunity to perform penetrating scans of the vessel. New classification; Orca Dropship. My analysis is complete. The engines are inertialess. The wings produce lift by electrokinetic means and are not conventional airfoils by any stretch of the imagination. They can dynamically shift from straight wings to a delta shape using an invisible phased energy field bubble that reshapes itself depending on airspeed. The craft is not only capable of vertical takeoffs and likely hypersonic flight, it can also stop on a dime by turning its invisible force envelope into an airbrake.”

“Who’s piloting it?” I said. “What species?”

“There are no life signs aboard that I can detect,” Tiamat said. “The vessel is apparently an optionally-manned drone with voids indicating internal crew spaces. It is currently operating in what appears to be an unmanned mode. Most alarmingly of all, I am detecting strong gamma bursts at the impact point every time the dropship fires its weapons. Some sort of positron cannon. That thing is shooting antimatter! If we’re hit, we’re as good as vaporized!”

“Gamma rays?” My eyes widened with horror. “Am I irradiated?”

“No, we’re fine. Our armor’s absorbed it. You have to be close enough for the actual explosion itself to be more of a problem.”

I regarded this new, enigmatic foe with newfound respect, and more than a little fear. They had weaponry at their disposal that made beamcasters and pulsecannons look like toys. Worse, they had weaponized the most volatile substance in existence. I bit my lip as I thought of the possibility of being engulfed in a massive explosion if the dropship’s antimatter traps suffered catastrophic containment loss from battle damage.

“Who the fuck are these people?” It wasn’t even a valid question, for I knew there were none who could answer it. It was more like a declaration of my own fear and disbelief.

They started charging up another shot. This time, they were aiming for the bunkers leading into the underground sections of the base. An easy, stationary target. I wouldn’t let them do it. I had to stop them. I pulled the triggers and the HBCs cycled and fired again and again, the booster coils practically smoking from the heat. I focused on the same spot, digging a hole through their insanely tough armor until finally, something inside the fearsome craft yielded, exploding outward with a blue, plasmatic flash. The Orca nosedived towards the entrance to Sector West, its entire hull engulfed in an orange fireball. I wasn’t sure how big the explosion would be when the thing slammed into the ground. I wasn’t about to take any chances.

“Come on, you big bastard!” I wasn’t even sure if I was saying it to the Destrier I was piloting or to the plummeting dropship, but somehow, I willed the machine to rear up on its hind legs, intercepting the craft’s path of descent. The dropship smashed into me with incredible force, sending me skidding backwards on my machine’s hind-hooves. I pulsed the boosters to brake my rearward motion. “Tiamat, suplex!” I yelled, not able to coax the motion out of the Destrier with the neural link due to the poor sync rate.

“Got it!” Tiamat said.

The Anima ignited the pyrojets in sequence, rolling us backwards and flipping the dropship over, imparting momentum to it as we spun. This sent the ailing craft hurtling end over end, where it smashed into a jagged cliffside, rolled downhill, and dug its own snowy grave. Flames and thick, black smoke billowed from the wreck.

“What kind of spell locus do we have?” I said.

“Elemental, why?”

That was exactly what I wanted to hear. “Jackpot. You got a spell diagram for cryokinesis?”

“Of course.”

The holotank flared, revealing glowing blue rows and columns of magic symbols in Old Equish. I charged my horn, carefully reading off the diagram. Ice, instantiation, projection. In modern Equestrian, it would’ve been rendered as the phonetically similar Ordet Imnas Kraista, but Old Equish was still the standard tongue of spellcraft. I minded my pronunciation as I spoke the spell.

“Hordettas, Imanas, Carraistur!” I shouted.

A halo of brilliant white magic coalesced above the Destrier’s head, between the antennae, before blasting outward as a blizzard of ethereal cold. I could feel the power of three polywells surging through my mind as I cast in sync with the Charger’s locus. It was cold and refreshing, like chewing a whole pack of mint-flavored gum at once. I guided the stream onto the crash site, snuffing out the flames in mere seconds, letting out a few more bursts just to be sure. The wrecked dropship was charred black in places, but still recognizable as the original article, its thin and feathery-looking wings not even bent by the impact. Whatever it was made of, it was incredibly robust. I realized, with some alarm, that my horn had iced up. I yelped and tapped it with my hoof, my brain chilled like I’d just eaten a giant spoonful of shaved ice.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“Typical for inexperienced elementalists,” Tiamat said. “You can easily burn or freeze yourself, too.”

“I wonder what we can salvage from the wreck?” I said, knocking the ice off my horn with my hoof. “Could be something good in there, if anything’s still intact. We need to know more about these assholes, and we need to know right the fuck now.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Tiamat said. “Wait—incoming!”

Without warning, one of the Vurvalfn latched onto my main camera, its armored body clinging to its surface and obscuring my view. Its enraged roar shook the whole cockpit. I was startled halfway out of my seat. I was shocked that they’d managed to dig themselves out of the snow so quickly, but given their other feats, I shouldn’t have been. I had been too sloppy and too preoccupied with the dropship to watch my own back. The other three clung to my legs like living limpet mines, releasing plasmatic blue pulses of energy that began to melt through my LAMIBLESS and disable my electro-magical transducers.

“No!” I shouted. “Let go, you pieces of shit!”

I fired the boosters, trying to shake them off, but there was a loud pop and one of the instrument panels began to smoke. The pyrojets went out instantly. Upon landing, the Destrier collapsed to the ground, three of the legs having failed almost entirely. The main camera went out, and then, the multi-spectral sensors. Just like that, they’d accomplished a mobility kill and blinded me. They pounded on the hatch to the cockpit, denting it inwards with their augmented strength. I began to hyperventilate with fear.

“Oh no, oh shit! Tiamat, desync!” There was no reply, and I was growing increasingly agitated. “Come the fuck on, Tiamat!”

The sync arm wouldn’t retract. For some reason, it had jammed. Tiamat was non-responsive and the electronics in the cockpit were failing one after another. First, the MFDs went black, then the controls went dead, and then, the lighting went out, plunging me into the darkness. Out of desperation, I reached back and unclipped the syncsuit’s connection to my neural lace, something that was never supposed to be done when a pilot was still synced. I screamed in agony at the feedback that surged through my body, my legs spasming a few times until the pain subsided. The sync arm jettisoned itself automatically, detecting the loss of synchronization.

I stumbled a few steps, coughing, every nerve in my body on fire. With every blow, the hatch dented further. I could see a crack forming, with frenzied movement on the other side. I hurriedly pulled Tiamat’s core from the console, popped open the locker under the bunk and shoved it into my discarded armor’s saddlebags. I groaned in pain as I pulled myself onto the top bunk, activating my invisibility magic. With one final slam, the hatch busted open. The Vurvalfn flooded into the cockpit. With me.

I didn’t breathe. I didn’t move. I didn’t make a sound. I hoped that the syncsuit would be enough to mask most of my scent. I was sweating bullets. I only had a couple minutes of invisibility left before I burned out. Then, they would see me, and I would be torn to pieces. My lips trembled, tears running down my cheeks as I put a hoof over my mouth and suppressed the urge to sob audibly. I was glad I’d had the contents of my bladder sucked out. I might have simply wet myself right then and there, otherwise. With their acute senses, they would’ve smelled it and discovered me immediately.

I could hear one of them, beside the bunks. Though I couldn’t see it, and I didn’t dare attempt an echolocation spell, I could feel its humid breath against my face as it snorted and growled mere inches from me. It turned its head towards me and I froze. A clawed hand raked across the mattress right in front of me. I pressed myself back into the corner and remained absolutely still, biting my lip so hard that it nearly bled. Not like this, I thought. Please, not like this.

I was having flashbacks to Ahriman Station. A scalpel-like tail lashed at me, slicing into me with ease. A misshapen hoof slapped into my foreleg with overwhelming force, breaking it. These mindless beasts were so much stronger than a Karkadann. So much deadlier. There wouldn’t even be anything left of me to bury. I struggled to maintain my cloak, gritting my teeth with exertion.

The little lockbox in my head flew open unbidden. Age ten. I was huddled in my bed, clutching a plush toy to my chest, my back pressed up against the far corner of the room, the intersection of the two walls cold against my withers. I’d locked the door to my bedroom, because he was out there, and he was half of an entire fifth bottle from sobriety. An angry hoof pounded on the door, so hard it sounded like he’d smash the door frame out of the wall.

Storm, open the fucking door!

Go away, Dad! You’re drunk!

I am at my wits’ end with you, you stupid little cunt! I’m gonna take the lock off this fucking door!

I couldn’t even remember what it was that had driven him to such anger. It was something so trivial, I’d completely forgotten.

Don’t, I thought, at the time, but I didn’t say it. Don’t take the lock off. It’s the only thing standing between me and you. I need to be alone. I need to be safe. I need to be unhurt.

Storm! he yelled. If you don’t open this door in five seconds, I’m going to break it down, and if you make me break this house, then guess what? I’m gonna break you, next! One, two, three—

I’ll call the cops, I swear I will! I screamed, hugging the plush Celestia toy tighter to my chest, silently bidding that her divine power shield me from my father’s wrath. They’ll get me a real dad!

Oh, you will, will you? Now you’re gonna get it, you stupid little bitch. You want foster parents, is that it? Do you know what happens to kids in foster care? Is that how you wanna lose your virginity? Some crusty ol’ foster father, pushing you down in your nice little pink sheets and—

I heard the roar of pyrojet engines, snapping me back into the present. I slowly opened my eyes, even though all I could see was inky black.

“Hey, uglies!” A PA speaker blared. “Get out here!”

I recognized it immediately as Captain Garrida’s voice. Incensed, the Vurvalfn roared a challenge as they departed the cockpit with haste. I crawled out of the bunk, dragging my armor and my jacket with me, and ambled over to the wrecked hatch of the Destrier, releasing my cloak and taking in the proceedings. I gaped in awe at the sight before me. Garrida stood in the open side door of a Roc dropship that I didn’t even know we had, hovering over a hundred meters away, her rifle trained on the Vurvalfn. Sierra and the Skimmer hovered in formation with them.

However, that wasn’t the most shocking thing. Three of Her Majesty’s honored Dragoons were part of the formation, as well. Commodore Cake was there, along with two others I couldn’t identify. The one in the lead bore the unmistakable insignia of a Star Cross. Her white armor was accented black and Twilight Sparkle’s six-pointed star was proudly emblazoned across her chest.

“In the name of the Empress,” the Star Cross spoke, raising her lance high, “smite the evildoers and their wretched abominations!”

The three angled their lances at the Vurvalfn and executed a supersonic dive, accelerating with impossible swiftness. It had to be the doing of magic. A temporary reduction of air density to reduce drag, or the like. The opening move of their assault generated a sonic boom, and the fierce impacts at the end made a thunderous report. The two events happened so close together, they sounded almost simultaneous. Their lances smashed into the creatures’ shields. Drained as they were by the battle, the forcefield bubbles—which seemed to draw from a limited and finite pool of energy rather than regenerating—put up no resistance. The barriers shattered instantly.

The creatures took swipes at the Dragoons with their claws, only to be parried by the Dragoons’ lances and receive broken arms for their trouble. The Star Cross was an expert with her lance, thrusting and blocking in the same move, almost faster than the eye could perceive. The Vurvalfn were fast and strong, but dim-witted and possessed of poorer reflexes. The lead Dragoon’s lance shot out and smashed into her opponent’s jaw, the force enough to spin his head and break his neck. He toppled and collapsed instantly.

Sensing the threat she posed, two others broke contact with the other two Dragoons and slashed at the Star Cross from in front and behind, and she practically did the splits to duck beneath their blows, before sweeping the legs of the one in front of her with her lance and bucking the one behind her into the air, sending him flying. Before he could land, she launched herself skyward with a flap of her wings and a burst of thrust from her exosuit’s pyrojets and front-flipped into a vicious descending lance blow, imploding his chest armor. When she landed, she did a hoof-stand to pull an about-face while simultaneously dodging a blow from the third creature.

Two medium beamcasters nestled in the back of her exosuit unfurled like a second set of wings. The pulse of blinding arcane energy they released was enough to send the third damarkind flying backwards, his chest armor scorched. The beam width had been dialed up intentionally to produce something more like a traditional arcane blast spell, imparting kinetic energy over a larger area and forcibly repelling one’s foe to create distance. I’d heard of exosuit-mounted medium casters before, but I’d never seen one up close and personal. I’d never seen pyrojets so small, either. I didn’t even know they existed.

The Star Cross lunged, her suit’s built-in pyrojet boosters driving her to insane speeds. Her lance was ensconced in a field of blinding white energy that tapered to an impossibly sharp point. She slammed it into the damarkind’s stomach before he even had a chance to hit the ground, impaling him in mid-air. A shower of atomized blood erupted from his back. However, she wasn’t finished. That was just the pinning attack. A prelude to the deathblow, which came when she fired her armor’s light beamcasters point-blank into her enemy’s torso.

They were a model that I’d never seen before. The emitters were square instead of round, composed of what seemed to be a plethora of smaller emitters, like the compound eye of an insect. Rather than sending a pencil-sized beam of arcane energy downrange, they fired a multitude of needle-thin pulses in sequence, at what sounded to my ear like thousands or even tens of thousands of pulses per minute.

With a great ripping noise that lasted only for a second or two, she cleaved the beast in half, right across his chest, the tiny beams sawing him to ribbons and emerging from his back, severing his spine in an instant. He fell from her lance as two heaps of gore, landing in the snow many meters below with a wet plop of spilled entrails.

The last of the creatures decided to try and leap at her from behind, coiling and hurling itself into the air with alarming strength and speed. Commodore Cake and the third Dragoon intercepted it, slamming the points of their lances into its chest simultaneously, reversing its course and sending it flying. The Star Cross was on it, her pyrojet boosters surging as she intercepted the augmented damarkind mid-fall, riding him across the runway like a snowboard as he dug a furrow in the powder. She reared up and brought her hooves down on his head with an audible grunt of exertion, pulping the creature’s skull instantaneously. The three Dragoons instantly resumed formation, their lances arrayed outward to respond to any threat.

I clicked my tongue with disappointment. If I thought I was going to be sitting around watching Dragoons do all the fighting, I would’ve brought popcorn. I’d just about finished stripping off Major Springblossom’s syncsuit when a hoof reached down into my field of view, startling me.

“You okay?” Bell said.

I looked up, accepting Bellwether’s assistance as he helped me to my trembling hooves. “I’m alright. Scored one dropship kill. We know these fuckers aren’t invincible. They can be beaten. They fucked up the Destrier pretty bad, though. Be sure to convey my sincerest apologies to the Baroness Springblossom when and if you see her. How’d you get past the rubble?”

“I wasn’t dumb enough to seal myself inside when the bombs went off, that’s how.” Bellwether grinned, shaking his head. “You’re fucking crazy.” He patted me on the head patronizingly. “Keep it up and you might get on my good side, Sergeant.”

“Bell, that was just one dropship.” I continued conversing as I donned my armor and winter coat. “They nearly took us all out with just one fucking dropship. They had at least one other, and that big huge hoofball-field-sized one, too, remember? If the Orcas could carry such a nightmarish cargo, I don’t even wanna know what the big fucker’s got in it! We need to get the civilians the hell out of here.”

“Orcas?” Bellwether raised a brow.

“That’s what Tiamat calls ‘em. Oh, shit. Speaking of which—” I pulled Tiamat’s core from my saddlebags and plugged it into my suit computer. “Tia? You there? Talk to me.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “The Destrier ain’t going nowhere without a flatbed, though.”

I practically jumped out of my skin when I saw Tiamat’s augmented-reality projection in my eyepiece. “Oh shit, Tia, you’re all glitched out!”

The suit computer was trying, and failing, to represent the three-dimensional model of Tiamat’s body. Her polygons were stretched grotesquely over a distance of hundreds of meters and her eyeballs and tongue were floating outside her head.

“What?” Tiamat said. “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just your suit’s graphics accelerator chip. Took some damage, looks like.” Out of courtesy, she disabled the gruesome visuals. “As for the Charger, the EMTs in the legs are done. They fried like eighty percent of them. Most of the cockpit electronics are ruined, too. It’s going to take months to repair it, if it’s even fixable at all.”

“I thought Chargers were supposed to be hardened against electromagnetic pulses?” I said.

“They are. It’s not EMP that those creatures are putting out. Well, not directly, anyway. I’ve finished my analysis. When those things release a phased energy pulse, the electromagnetic oscillators in their bodies produce a polarized quantum vacuum standing off an immeasurably tiny distance from their skin. This creates a high-energy plasma discharge and extremely powerful radio waves, which can induce a current in electronics.

“The polarized Q-vac effect can phase through any solid matter they touch, so conductive shielding is useless. If that wasn’t bad enough, the plasma discharges can melt through hardened steel at short range, allowing them to bypass all kinds of barriers and pierce straight through EMP shielding anyway. The electric arcs coming off of them are just electric arcs. Stay away. Or don’t, and get your heart going all floppy again. See if I care.”

“Great,” I said. “What the fuck does any of that actually mean, though, Tiamat?”

“It’s something very similar to the principle used by electrokinetic drives to create and accelerate packets of virtual mass, but weaponized,” Tiamat said. “They can repel incoming energy and mass with those forcefields. I’m surprised these things don’t use it to fly, but it could be that they’re incomplete. Something about this tells me that this was all some sort of experiment or live-fire test, or else they would’ve brought more reinforcements in to finish the job.”

I huffed angrily at that. The idea that they were an unfinished product, that they could be refined into something even more monstrous, chilled me to the bone. They were already bad enough the way they were. They had the ability to leap surprising distances into the air. It was as if they could reduce their own weight with electrokinetics and defy gravity. One of them had leapt a dozen meters straight up to clamp its whole body onto my Destrier’s head.

I turned and surveyed the hulk of the collapsed Charger, its legs still smoking from where the EMTs had popped and the LAMIBLESS had burned through. I held my breath as I backed away from the wreck. The acrid black waft smelled like burnt honeycomb. The changeling-derived synthetic resin gave off neurotoxic smoke when it burned. The Vurvalfn were the natural enemy of vehicles and their vital electronic systems. The ability to fly would’ve made them a true nightmare.

I realized with a start that the letters VURVALFN were very similar to their Ardun equivalents. I was very poor at reading cleomanni script, because they used both an alphabet which I mostly knew and a syllabary that I did not, but I could see the parallels.

“One of those things had something etched on its chest armor. Wurr-wholphin? Forvaphn? It looks almost like Ardun lettering, but different.”

“Vur-val-fin,” Tiamat corrected. “Tentative translation, Sholashtonn. Like Sholashwyodhy, Timberwolf, except with Tonna. Wolf-that-is-a-person. Werewolf. We know of this script in our databases. That’s partly why these encounters have been so alarming. We’ve found numerous ancient artif—”

Bellwether unplugged Tiamat from my suit computer and stuffed her in his saddlebags, raw anger in his expression. “We’ve found nothing. You didn’t hear that.”

I looked up at him with a brief, furtive glare, before turning back to the carnage and shaking my head. Too many questions, not enough answers, and typical BASKAF coverup bullshit to cap it all off. ORACLE no longer existed as an organization. We were all on the same team. Bellwether had no right to keep anything from any of us, classified or not. I plugged my armor computer’s cable into the data port on the back of my neck, running a quick self-diagnostic.

I squinted at the glitched text in my eyepiece and gritted my teeth. The implant was reading only partially functional. Maybe one kidney’s worth of filtration at best. Probably from the same hit that sent my heart rhythm haywire. The catheterization was a passive feature and the implant didn’t need to be functional for the drain port to work. However, using the drain hose might’ve introduced unwanted bacteria into my bladder, due to the much-vaunted self-sterilization features of the implant possibly being inactive. There was no telling if the auto-dialysis implant’s condition would continue to worsen. Argent was going to need to dig into it sometime within the next few days or so, or I was fucked, either from a lack of functioning kidneys or from infection. Somehow, I already knew how this operation would end. With me on a stretcher, running a high fever and almost blacking out from sepsis.

As Sierra pulled in low and waved us over, I mounted up on the Skimmer with Bellwether, taking up position on the tail gun. We provided overwatch with the Dragoons as Garrida’s Roc landed and disgorged troops. They immediately went to work with shovels, digging out the rubble from the collapsed bunker entrance until they made a hole big enough to storm inside. The Dragoons and the surviving Wolfhounds rushed in after them, providing support. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Colonel Rune Ward and the rest of the base’s security detachment filtered outside, having been stripped of their weapons and armor. As our ELF boys and girls marched back out, prisoners in tow, we landed the Skimmer and hopped off, covering the area with our casters.

The Star Cross shoved the Colonel face-first into the snow, sending his peaked officer’s cap flying. Her helmet was retracted and her weathered face was a mask of hatred, her eyes lined by crow’s feet so deep they looked like war paint. “You’re going to stand trial before Admiral Star Crusher before the week is out, you son of a bitch. You spilled innocent Equestrian blood, and you’ll pay for it with yours!”

“The Empress ordered us to kill more!” he shouted. “We were one of the last airbases with a functional runway. She ordered us to kill millions! To bomb the cities while our people and our soldiers were still fighting for their lives in them! I refused!”

“You disobeyed a direct order, ignored your duty to the Empress, and turned this facility into a mockery of its prior function, all for your own personal gratification.” She ground her hoof into the back of his head, forcing him face-down into the powder. “You brazenly admit your guilt before all assembled here. You shame us all with your cowardice.” The Star Cross waved a hoof over all of us. “Every mare, every stallion, every pony alive who struggles to restore the Empire, each individual hair on the backs of their heads has more honesty and more courage in it than you do in your entire body, you scoundrel! For your actions, you will face justice.”

The senior Dragoon waved her hoof, and the ELF troops clapped heavy steel hoofcuffs on him and escorted him to the Roc. Captain Garrida leered at him dangerously as he passed, but otherwise said nothing. I winced. She knew what he’d done. He’d be lucky if she hadn’t busted his jaw in five places by the time they got back.

The Star Cross turned to the rest of the base’s garrison, some of whom sheepishly stared at the ground rather than meet the gaze of her fiery yellow eyes and her slitted pupils. I realized, with some surprise, that she wasn’t a pegasus at all. She was a thestral. Her kind were thought to be all but extinct. How one ended up being born and raised within the insular and secretive society of the Dragoons, I hadn’t the faintest idea.

I supposed they were similar enough to a pegasus, except that they were generally said to lack the broader weather-manipulation and cloud-walking powers that pegasi possessed. Their powers were more personal and shorter-ranged, limited to condensing the air around them to generate small obscurant clouds or mists. I wondered if her powers, combined with her suit’s unique features, had something to do with her bursts of tremendous acceleration.

“As for the rest of you,” she began, “you’re not going to escape punishment for your role in collaborating with a depraved coward in turning one of the Empress’s military bases into his own personal fuck-factory. You’re going to gather up the bodies of the fallen and bring them out here for identification and burial. If you leave even one piece behind, then you’re going to draw lots. When the lot falls upon one of you, I shall strike off his head in that very same instant. This process will repeat until either the bodies of the victims are all accounted for, or all of you are dead. You have one hour to deliver unto me the corpses! Go!”

The mortified base guards immediately did as ordered, running back into the bunker to gather the bodies and avoid incurring the Dragoon’s considerable wrath. The rest of the troops went with them, so that they would remain under guard the entire time. The Star Cross gathered up the abandoned syncsuit from outside the Destrier’s wreck, marching over to me with the article in her hoof.

“I am Star Cross Wraithwood,” she said. “I am told that you piloted this Destrier in defense of this base. What is your name, soldier?”

I promptly saluted and stammered out a reply to the best of my ability. “S—Sergeant Desert Storm, Eighth Cavalry Division, ma’am!”

“Well, is it true? Were you the one who piloted it?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

She gazed down at the syncsuit she held, a wistful look in her eyes. “I knew the Baroness. The Empress assigned me as her personal guard for a number of years, due to the importance of her role in the test pilot program. Her skill and penetrating insight into the nature of Charger design and operation was unparalleled.” When she looked back up at me, it was with the eyes of a ferocious predator. “Was there any reason why you, a lowly volunteer pilot, saw fit to wear her uniform, and to bring such incomparable ruin upon one of the Empress’s divine creations?”

I was sweating bullets. Even being dressed down by Garrida was nothing compared to this. If the Dragoon wanted to, she could legally execute me on the spot. The blow would be so powerful that my very soul would ejected from my body at relativistic speeds. I would feel it in the afterlife, if there was an afterlife.

I clenched my eyes shut, trying to hide my tears. “I—I did what I had to do, ma’am! The civilians’ lives were all at risk! I swore an oath to protect them to my very last breath!”

The Star Cross chuckled softly. “Open your eyes, Sergeant.” I did so, watching with bewilderment as she casually tossed the syncsuit aside and rested an armored hoof on my shoulder, beaming with pride. “Bellwether already told me everything in shorthoof over the aetheric. With the full knowledge that these foul abominations were waiting out here to carve you into ribbons with their claws, you three rushed out into the cold, dark night on your own initiative, you deployed a Charger with no support crew and no backup, and you brought down a SILVER SCALPEL dropship.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “I was only doing my duty.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Sergeant. It wasn’t nothing. You drew first blood, against a foe we haven’t so much as scratched in the past. I’ve lost five of my best against them, and yet, you survive. Machines can be repaired. Pilots with your kind of grit are one in a thousand.” The grinning thestral clapped me on the shoulder playfully. “Be proud, Sergeant. I know the Baroness would be, too, even if you did scratch up her steed.” Wraithwood glanced over at the corpses of the Vurvalfn, her expression turning grim. “There is, however, something that I need you to do. The three of you must compile a detailed after-action report on this encounter and pass it to Captain Garrida.”

“Count on it, ma’am.” I nodded.

“Include every last detail.” The Dragoon sighed. “We need every scrap of information we can get about anything related to SILVER SCALPEL. The future of our species depends on it. Our conditions are meager enough that the Confederacy alone poses an existential threat to us all. The presence of this unknown faction only compounds the risk. Oh, and before you go, there is one other thing.”

Star Cross Wraithwood pulled out a small black case, presenting it to me with her hoof face-up. “This isn’t anything like a formal ceremony. My sincerest apologies, but we don’t exactly have much time for those, these days. When I heard the code SIVSCA had been called, my blood ran cold, but I still had the presence of mind to make sure I brought a few of these with me. Dozens of my sisters-in-arms, five of them my own treasured subordinates, have fallen in battle against these worthless bastards. As for the ones who have survived, they are part of an elite group, and that now includes you three. I present to you the Order of the Sterling Lance.”

I took the case and opened it, awed at what I found inside. The silver medal was exquisitely detailed, bearing an embossed image of a Dragoon’s lance, standing point-up and wreathed in laurels. It bore a motto in Old Equish. Anla Noci, Wirda Laus. I quickly translated it to modern Equestrian in my head.

“Anlia Nocire, Virdanen Leus,” I mouthed near-silently. “From darkness, divine light.” It bore no other markings or any indication of what it was awarded for. I held it to my chest, almost overcome with emotion. “This is an unbelievable honor, ma’am.”

“The honor was all mine, Sergeant,” she said. “Go see the medics if you’re hurt, and for goodness’ sake, get some rest. You’ve earned it.”

As she flew over to present the other two medals to Bellwether and Sierra, I closed the case and stuffed mine in my saddlebag. My limbs felt leaden and I wanted desperately to lie down for a bit, but there was more to be done. The LZ wasn’t exactly secure. The other two dropships could’ve swung by at any time, and the results would have been disastrous. I didn’t particularly relish the idea of what came next. We had civilians to evacuate, and a giant mound of corpses to deal with.

// … // … // … // … // … //

While we stayed on station with the Skimmer, providing overwatch and keeping an eye out for more aerial attackers, the soldiers used shovels and a bulldozer from the motor pool to push the bodies into a hastily dug trench. I watched as they struggled to roll the big, heavy bodies of the Vurvalfn into the pit. Two of them, what I surmised were the least-damaged specimens, were placed on stretchers and covered with tarps, hauled into the Roc by two lab-coated ponies that I didn’t recognize. One other detachment of troops wearing gas masks sifted through the wreckage of the Orca, hitting the still-smoldering bits with portable halon extinguishers as they conducted their investigation.

I shook my head. There were so many. So many bodies. It seemed like it’d never end. They dug a trench several meters long and a few meters deep and used the dozer blade to push them over the edge. Once that trench was full, it soon became clear that they’d have to dig another. Many of the bodies were in pieces. I watched a head rolling independently of any barrel. A bit of leg here, a flayed ribcage there. An unrecognizable hunk of meat, plowed through the dirt and pushed over onto the heap. There was a mother screaming for her young daughter. One of the civilians. The soldiers held her back, pinning her down when it looked like she might jump into the pit to try and find her filly’s remains. My eyes teared up. I couldn’t watch. It had only been a month since I’d buried my sister in practically the same fashion.

“Bell.” There was no reply, so I raised my voice. “Bell!”

“Yeah?” he said.

“This is fucking me up.”

He looked back at me, his own eyes brimming with tears like mine. “You think you’re the only one? Keep your eyes on the horizon and shut up.”

After a few hours, the deceased civilians were all in the ground. They heaped the dirt atop the bodies and graded it with the dozer. It would be a good ten hours before the first five-ton trucks and Centaurs pulled into the base, their synfuel engines rumbling up the mountainside. No sign of hostile contacts. Pegasus recon teams reported back with absolutely nothing. The five Roc dropships—one of ours and four of the base’s—had already made several trips before the trucks had even shown up, ferrying hundreds of civilians to the south and troops and recovery workers up north with us. It was almost hypnotic to watch as the heavy transports landed and took off like clockwork, their quad pyrojet nacelles tilting up for a vertical descent during their approach, and then tilting forward for horizontal flight when they departed.

It was dark out. Dark and cold. The sun hadn’t moved even a centimeter from its place below the horizon. I was tired. I was hungry. I would’ve rested my chin on my gun’s receiver and nodded off, but it was unbecoming of a soldier, for one thing, and for another, Bell would’ve killed me. I fought the microsleeps, passing out for two seconds every minute, catching myself with a startled huff. I wished I had some meth, like last time. Either that or a hoofful of caffeine pills.

I watched the trucks and dropships come and go, the hours ticking by as the recovery personnel quickly loaded up the canvas-topped trucks with ordnance and marshaled the Bull Runners’ flatbeds to move the Chargers and the other equipment. One team was using cranes to try and lift and dismantle parts of the damaged Destrier. I came to the slow, horrified realization that this was going to take days. Weeks, even.

Those brain-in-a-circle assholes knew we were here. I had a horrible feeling deep down in my gut that they weren’t about to let us get away with our unexpected victory. I knew their type, thinking they could conquer a whole military base with one dropship and a few harebrained creations of mad science. They would be too arrogant to let it go.

The battle for ownership over Pur Sang’s treasure trove had only just begun.

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 12//Override Estimated time remaining: 18 Hours, 16 Minutes