//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM READ TIMED OUT
//CRITICAL ERROR

// … %aeokbs7gnsxf^ja2kn*prilj% …

// … %rvnkv9tlkmg#stlde7xsdhs% …

// … %eoxnm4tngsx*agfke3dfdt% …

Desert Storm

It was around the 34-hour mark that I first passed out for real, with snores and everything. I was startled awake when Bellwether socked me in the head, hard enough to knock the brim of my helmet onto my muzzle.

“No sleeping, dumbass!” Bell said.

“Huh? Wha—” I scrambled to reposition my comms helmet on my head so I could see, the overlays from the retinal projectors resolving as a bunch of friendly contacts in my field of view. I’d kinked my neck and it took me a couple seconds for the blood flow to my brain to resume so I could figure out what the hell I was seeing.

I was still sitting on the tail gun of the Skimmer. We were on overwatch while the recovery teams swarmed Pur Sang Arsenal, looting everything in sight. The local datasphere allowed me to keep track of their positions with their IFF transceivers, even when they were inside buildings.

There was one team that specialized in recovering documents and holocrystals, as well as cracking safes and collecting IDs, blueprints, CAD drawings, tech specs, and other security-sensitive information for collation and, in the case of duplicates, disposal. They were busying themselves ransacking the command center.

There was a second team whose specialty was weapons and supplies. Their role was inspecting and transporting all the missiles, ammunition, guns, and nukes, along with all the rations and medical supplies and other stores at the base. There were crates and crates of personal infantry casters, anti-tank guided missiles, and portable air defense systems. Thousands of them. There were also much larger containers that contained complete cannon systems and medium and heavy beamcasters for vehicles, including Chargers.

The third team was hard at work reactivating and recovering the Chargers and ground vehicles. The Whirlwind fighter-bombers, we didn’t have any pilots for. The big flying wings had pyrojets for atmospheric flight and fusion thrusters for SSTO transfers to orbiting carriers. Over the comms, I could hear them contemplate scuttling them, but Garrida relayed a message from Crusher that suitable pilots were on their way, so, the techs kept the fighters intact rather than turning them into piles of smoking wreckage with CycloHex charges.

The Minotaur tanks and Manticore SPGs were up and running. The tanks took part in the patrols of the base perimeter while the artillery stood by for potential targets. I’d driven a Minotaur before, when I was a tanker. The driver’s compartment was as cramped as could be, but in all other respects, they were generally superior to Conqueror tanks. Faster, more heavily armored, and more heavily armed than its Confederate counterpart, the Minotaur was a hybrid design that used a pair of powerful multi-fuel generator sets as its prime movers.

The tank’s turret hosted twin auto-loading 120mm cannons that could deliver a ferocious one-two punch, and the rear deck of the tank possessed a powerful Mark-84 rocket artillery system that could be fired until empty for the opening phases of an assault, and then jettisoned to reduce the vehicle’s weight and profile. Not only did it feature medium beamcasters for anti-infantry and light anti-vehicle use, it had an all-aspect LBC-based active protection system for shooting down incoming rockets, ATGMs, and projectiles, just like a Centaur.

The Chargers, we couldn’t find pilots for, unfortunately. Some of the base’s pilots were among those few strong-willed individuals who rebelled against Colonel Rune Ward, and they’d died in the ensuing riot, but most of them were already deployed in battle when the capital was overrun, and they’d gone down fighting in a last stand against overwhelming numbers and impossible odds. A few others had survived underground, but after their ordeal, they weren’t in the right headspace to take the controls of a Charger. They’d been evaluated by the medics and then evacuated with the rest.

Just thinking about the Colonel made my gorge rise. I had no idea why he tried taking us captive in the middle of a battle, with Tiamat’s Wolfhounds standing by, no less. Perhaps he thought the battle was over after the first three Vurvalfn were defeated. Maybe he was just insane. Regardless, the best the techs could manage was to have each Charger slowly amble up to a Bull Runner and kneel on the flatbed for transport. Sierra and I volunteered to spin up a couple of the Chargers, but our request was denied. Apparently, Garrida decided we were more valuable on the Skimmer.

The fourth team was a loose assortment of lab-coated scientists and black-armored pegasus Stormtroopers. The Airborne Pegasus Commando Corps were an elite force of highly skilled spec-ops soldiers, second only to the Dragoons in combat ability. They specialized in orbital insertions, aerial assaults, and weather manipulation warfare. The Stormtrooper appellation was more literal than figurative. They were trained to relentlessly pelt our foes in rain, sleet, and hailstones, bogging their vehicles down in the mud. This last group was highly secretive. They didn’t talk to anyone, and all they did, the entire time, was go around collecting SILVER SCALPEL-related intel. They had cameras out and were documenting every little thing. Every footprint the Vurvalfn had made in the snow, every hole they’d made in a structure with their plasma discharges, and every bit of debris from the dropship; all of it was photographed and catalogued in obsessive detail.

They were led by a pony in a long cloak. Some old unicorn, by the looks of him. He had a hunch in his back. Something about him was very, very familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. I pulled the binoculars out of my saddlebags and zoomed in close on him, watching as he pulled his hood back to reveal his gray mane and weathered face.

“Cicatrice,” I muttered, lowering the binos. “Bell, that’s fucking Cicatrice down there!”

“The Ninth Magister?” Bell angled his head in the cloaked pony’s direction. “Oh shit, sure enough.”

“Mind if I go say hi?” I said.

“Are you out of your mind?” Bellwether’s eyes widened.

“That’s probably not a good idea,” Sierra said. “One, he looks very busy, and two, you don’t just ‘go say hi’ to one of the Twelve Magisters. Especially not a cranky dark magic practitioner. If he decided he didn’t like you, with a wave of his hoof, he could literally make you try and sniff your own butthole, for hours.”

“But I was one of his students.” I thumped my chest confidently. “I knew him personally. We used to hang out in the cafeteria back at the academy. Hey, Cicatrice!” I waved at him, raising my voice to a shout so he could hear. That got him looking in my general direction.

Sierra let out an explosive sigh as she pulled us in close and I hopped off the Skimmer. Bellwether was beside himself, making unintelligible noises of frustration and anger as he watched me canter off towards the old codger in the black robes. There were a couple stern-faced bodyguards who moved to intercept me, but Cicatrice recognized me and waved them off.

“Ahh, Desert Storm!” Cicatrice smiled. “One of my former pupils. I had a feeling somepony like you would be mixed up in all this.”

“Been a long time, Your Excellency,” I said. “How have the years been treating you?”

He shrugged. “Well enough, I suppose. Say, this is a very interesting rock.” He reached down in the snow and hefted a hoof-sized stone, idly tossing it in the air and catching it. “Wouldn’t you agree, Storm?”

I raised a brow. “I’m—I’m not sure I follow.” I slowly started backing up when it dawned on me what he was about to do. “Wait, you wouldn’t—”

He cast a spell on the rock. I didn’t see him cast, but I could feel it. He knew how to mask the signature from his horn and turn its glow invisible, a very advanced technique that took years to master. The stone started to roll of its own accord, right off the tip of his hoof and across the snowy ground. “Oh, look at that! It appears to be capable of self-locomotion!” With his trademark sadistic grin plastered on his face, he cast another spell on it, one far more complex. “That rock is a very important specimen, now! I’m going to need you to collect it for me for later study!”

I could not resist the compulsion that fell upon my mind. It was far too powerful. I desired that rock more than anything in the world. It was an all-encompassing sort of desire. A kind of greed bordering on maniacal lust. I wanted to possess the rock in every way it was possible to possess it. I wanted to put it on a velvet pillow in a display case on the mantelpiece. I wanted that ordinary rock more than I wanted sex. If it was a stallion, I would’ve torn my armor off and fucked it on the spot.

Before I could stop myself, my tongue lolled out of my head and I barked and panted like a dog, setting off to fetch the rolling stone. My body was completely beyond my control, my limbs moving of their own accord, my rationality a passenger in the back seat of my mind. The stone adjusted its pace accordingly, so that it always moved at the same exact rate I did. The spinning rock took a lazy loop around the end of the runway before turning back, settling on a circular path a good kilometer in length or more.

A come-to-life spell and some variation of want-it, need-it, cast on the same object. It sounded simple on paper, but it was very difficult in practice and required very skillful casting for it to be self-sustaining. Not only did I not know the method to dispel it, I lacked the ability to reason; even if I knew the counter-spell, I wouldn’t have been able to consciously cast it, impaired as I was. As I outwardly panted and drooled and galloped through the snow, incredibly excited at the prospect of recovering the rock for my master like a good doggie, some small, suppressed part of me in the back of my mind was indignant.

Damn you, Cicatrice!

// … // … // … // … // … //

Bellwether

I watched, transfixed, as Storm stepped off the Skimmer and walked right up to the Magister without my approval. Predictably, he had her bewitched and off playing fetch in about ten seconds flat. In all fairness, Sierra did try warning her. Cicatrice had gone easy on her, in my opinion. It was well within his power to make her do any number of far, far more embarrassing things. A little run in the cold would do her some good. Keep her sharp.

When I approached, I made damn sure not to share in her fate.

“Cicatrice, Your Excellency,” I said, bowing slightly in deference. “It’s an honor to have you here.”

“Oh, what now?” Cicatrice whined. “Can’t you ponies see I’m busy, here? This, all of this, is highly classified. No, I’m not answering questions about our work. Would you care to join Storm on her hunt for the elusive self-rolling stone, or would you prefer to kindly fuck off?”

I flashed my ID. “Agent Bellwether, BASKAF. I’m cleared for SILVER SCALPEL.”

“The Vargr, yes.” Cicatrice nodded. “What about them?”

“We have a name for them, now?” I was surprised at this news.

“To the best of our knowledge, that’s what they’re called. We’ve dug through hours of intercepted Confederate comms and noted the word’s relation to their movements. We’ve also managed to record some of their own communications, as of the past twenty-four hours. These channels were highly encrypted and impossible to crack, until we got our hooves on an intact radio transceiver from this crashed dropship, here, and with it, a working knowledge of their comms. Want to hear what we’ve picked up?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “Let’s hear it.”

Cicatrice held out a portable recorder and hit the play button. The guttural speech that poured from the speaker was as unfamiliar as it was unnerving.

“Secutu Saix, rokon.”

“Saix ken, rokonin. Allekleer.”

There was a long pause and static, before a very concerned-sounding and unmistakably feminine voice cut in. “Secutu Nonen, wei commeas downe tropfskip, haw rok?”

“Nonen, wei ken. Es Linvargr VURVALFN tryall. No thinge ye be conkern, komand.” The tone was conciliatory, reassuring.

Whatever was said by the underling reporting back, it pissed off the female commander something fierce. “Es allewayes conkernes hwahn tropfskip es downe by broetheri! Deie comme posineg herre oure speeke ef deie rekedas sza tropfskip radyo, moroni!”

Another voice, older and male sounding, added its input. “Alle kanel, coude kange.”

Cicatrice clicked the stop button. “That’s all they let us have before they changed the codes, rendering our captured radio set useless. Even though we have some of our best translators and AIs working the problem, we only have a vague idea of what they were talking about. Based on how heated it got and how we lost contact shortly thereafter, I’m guessing they got wise and realized there was a possibility we could hear them.”

The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. I had to consciously still my rapid heartbeat. We had tentative translations of a few of their words, based on recovered fragments of their written text. That was likely how Tiamat’s advanced heuristics had been able to figure out what Vurvalfn meant. This was the first time, to my knowledge, that anypony had ever heard them actually speaking their language and lived to tell the tale.

“Have we learned anything else about these bastards that might come in handy?” I looked over the wreck of the dropship.

Cicatrice smiled. “A number of things. They got sloppy, here. Very sloppy. They weren’t in their usual form. If they were, we would have nothing. We know that they’re roughly cleomanni-sized. The seating and controls of the dropship seem to indicate as much.”

“What’s this stuff I hear Tiamat’s been saying about antimatter? Isn’t that stuff made in particle accelerators? How the hell are they able to obtain militarily-significant quantities of it?”

That put a frown on Cicatrice’s face. “We don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not a damn particle physicist. I’m the foremost expert in dark magic and soul-binding in the whole Empire. We didn’t find any antimatter in the wreck, and we don’t know why that’s the case. The only one I know who could even come close to deciphering any of this is her.”

“The Empress, I assume,” I said.

Cicatrice grunted in annoyance and disappointment. “If we had Twilight Sparkle with us, right here, right now, we would know everything about how their weapons and propulsion systems work, at the very least. She’s an engineering savant. We need her. More than you know.”

“How goes the search?”

“Not here,” Cicatrice growled. “Not in the open. If you want the details, we can discuss it later. In private.” He looked over my shoulder at Storm making her third lap of the runway, a perverse smirk etching itself on his face. “See that, Agent? That’s what a hero looks like, right there. Young, optimistic, and filled to the brim with piss. She’s a nice piece of tail. You should tap that before it goes to waste. Ponies like her don’t live to be my age.” The dirty old stallion roared with laughter.

“She’s already taken,” I said.

“Who’s the lucky stallion?”

“Some guy, I don’t know. He was in the capital when it fell, or so I hear.”

Cicatrice let out another round of hearty laughter. “He’s dead! Do ponies even realize what a calamity Everfree was? By my estimates, less than ten percent of the population survive to this day, many of them enslaved. Less than a hundredth still live there! You need to give her the talk, my boy.”

“I think she’s still holding out hope.”

The Magister sighed. “Ahh, where would we be without optimists? Probably dancing on the rubble of Kar Hollinvost. The Empire could’ve done with a few more cynics. Like me.” Cicatrice put his hoof on my shoulder. “Well, it’s been a pleasure, but we must cut this short. Resume your patrols. The last thing we want is to be caught out of our sheaths by more of the fucking Vargr.” Without missing a beat, he raised a hoof and the self-rolling stone came to a halt right under it. A panting, exhausted Storm dipped her head down and tried picking it up with her mouth, like a dog. Cicatrice lifted her helmet with his levitation and ruffled her mane with his hoof. “Aww, good girl!”

I grimaced at the spectacle. Storm said he was a pretty sketchy guy, but I had absolutely no idea.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

I drew a blank as the dirt-encrusted rock fell from my lips, leaving an earthy taste on my tongue. Cicatrice was nowhere in sight. My face warped into a hateful scowl. “That. Mother. Fucker!”

Bellwether stood next to me, snickering. “Sierra and I both told you. Don’t pester dark mages.”

“I am a dark mage, dammit!”

“Not one of that caliber, you’re not,” Bell said. “Come on. Party’s over. Let’s get back on overwatch.”

I looked down at the rock, shaking my head. I needed Cicatrice to teach me that trick, sometime. It could’ve come in handy. When he wasn’t so busy as to not even give me the time of day, I remembered him as a patient and thoughtful instructor. Rather than being particularly angry, I was already thinking of the practical applications of such spells while also wondering when I became such an egghead.

Chargers were unkind to the uneducated, and most pilots, even ones with modest academic backgrounds, ended up a fair bit nerdier than the average grunt. I felt a drip of fear-sweat bead on my forehead. Am I a nerd? I looked over my shoulder at Sierra in all her repulsive sleaziness, leaning up against the skimmer and babbling back and forth with Bellwether. I couldn’t let her know, or I’d never hear the end of it.

As we mounted back up on the Skimmer, I could feel exhaustion creeping into my bones. My helmeted head felt heavy, like a lead sinker on the end of my neck. I was tired. Tired and horny, but mostly tired. I hated being tired-horny almost as much as being horny and sick, and in the past day, I’d been all of the above. I could feel a wrongness creeping up behind my eyeballs. A fatigue hollowing me out from the inside. I needed to see Argent about getting my implant fixed, or I was in deep shit.

The rattle of the electrokinetics was giving me a throbbing headache. I was achy all over. I could’ve sucked down four tablets of ibuprofen and not felt any better. Another couple hours went by, slow as molasses. Nothing eventful happened. Just salvage crews milling around. Just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, Garrida waved us down from the ramp of her landed Roc. We touched down beside the VTOL and she marched up to us.

“You three are done for the day,” she said. “Good work. Go get some shuteye in the bird. The techs will take care of chaining up the Skimmer for transport. We’ll rotate you out and rotate some pegasi in.”

With a groan, I stumbled and nearly fell flat on my face. Garrida rushed up and steadied me. “Damn, Storm. You look like you’re gonna fall over. You okay?”

“No, sir. My implant’s fucked up. Got hit by some kind of electromagnetic pulse those creatures put out. Got shocked pretty bad, too. I had to defibrillate myself shortly before you guys entered the AO.”

She raised a brow. “Defibrillate yourself?” A smile slowly crept across her face. “Are you fucking with me?”

“Nope. My suit’s heart monitor went V-fib. I used the Coloratura’s AED on myself, and it shocked me back to normal rhythm while I was still conscious.”

The corners of Garrida’s beak fell. “What in the rat-dick fuck? How are you still alive, Sergeant? How did you not pass the fuck out and die?” She looked me up and down. “How are you still on your hooves?”

I looked over my shoulder, and then back at her. “I don’t know. I’m just as weirded out as you are, believe me.”

The griffon pointed her finger at the Roc. “Well, get in there and get some damn rest, before you go croakin’ on us, Sergeant! And by the way, don’t bother Cicatrice again unless he specifically solicits your attention, or your ass is grass!”

Me, Bellwether and Sierra ascended the boarding ramp into the dropship’s spacious hold, finding a few canvas cots that had been set up there for the units overseeing the base’s decommissioning and salvage retrieval. After shaking the snow off my hooves, I set my helmet aside and threw myself onto one of them, sighing as the tension soaked out of my muscles.

Bellwether sat down, put a pot full of water on an electric stove between the cots, and started making packets of textured vegetable protein and noodles into soup. I was famished, sitting up and looking at the concoction with teary eyes. Bell nodded and grunted in the affirmative, as if to imply that I’d get some of it, too, and waved his hoof for me to settle down. I leaned back against the cot and stared at the structural stringers in the overhead and the crisscrossed bracing between.

“Hey, Bell,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“D’you think the Confederacy will ever leave us alone?”

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” he said.

“We can’t beat them the way things are. It’s not possible. Hell, we can hardly even delay them. Sooner or later, we’re going to crack, and that’ll be all she wrote. And those fuckers who attacked us here? I don’t even want to know what nightmares those crazy bastards have brewed up for us. It feels like the whole galaxy wants us all dead. What do we do? How do we survive? How do we win this?”

Bell shook his head. “We don’t. Realistically, I don’t think any of us are gonna live another year. It’s like you say. When our numbers are up, that’s it. We’re done. And Celestia help those poor fuckers they made into chattels. But I’m not going to just roll over and present my ass. I plan on making those freaks pay a heavy price for every one of us they take. How about you?”

I smiled. “The same. Fuck all of these motherfuckers. Who gave them the right to colonize us? To steal us from our homes? To consume us like a product? Nothing about this war is acceptable. They don’t see us as equals. They never did. As if taking our land wasn’t enough, those greedy bastards actually have the nerve to think our bodies belong to them, too. I don’t get it. How far are their heads lodged up their own asses? If they tried this with anyone else, any other intelligent species, they’d face censure from every corner of the fucking galaxy. But picking on us is okay, because we don’t have hands. What the fuck? What the fuck kind of logic is that?”

Bellwether shook his head. “I’ve spent years and years of my life trying to figure out the answer to that question. I gave up about twenty years ago. It just doesn’t matter to me anymore. They’ll never recognize our right to autonomy. We just have to keep fighting them until either we break, or they do.”

“Do you think they’ll make me use OA-13 again?” I said, my tone darker. “I don’t know if I want to. I mean, a part of me is furious about my sisters, and yeah, I’m mad enough to kill over it. But now, it almost seems like it’s not enough for me, anymore.” I smiled, slowly baring my teeth. “Poisoning them is too clinical. Too clean. I want it to hurt. I want to feel their warm guts splash my hooves. I want to taste their fear. I want to watch them run, only to be reduced to puddles of gore.

“I don’t want it to be easy for them. I don’t want them to enjoy a quick, dignified death, as befits a soldier. I want to slaughter them like they slaughter their animals. I want them to fucking wallow in their blood and guts and then piss and shit themselves before they die. Seriously. That’s all I can think about these days when I see a satyr bastard. I want him to wallow in his blood, guts, piss, and shit. Was Broggas right? Am I a predator, like him? Am I gonna start eating people, like the fuckin’ Vandals?”

Bell looked at me with wide, perturbed eyes. “I don’t wanna fucking hear talk like that. If you’re going psycho on me, Storm, keep it to your-fucking-self. Seen enough ponies crack to last me a lifetime. Either shut your fucking hole, or go to Weathervane and get your shit unfucked with some pills, but don’t bother me with it, you understand?”

I hiccupped a little bit, and sobbed, and then I sobbed a little more, my eyes filling with tears. “Bell, I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired. I wish it didn’t have to be like this. I wish I could be normal. This isn’t a way for any pony to live. We aren’t killers.”

Bellwether quit stirring the soup pot for a moment, frowning hard. “That’s wrong, too. Both extremes are wrong. Or did you forget in your three years on that station? You know, you’re not the only one who’s seen some shit. I was a combat engineer for years and years before I became a spy. Soldiers don’t kill because we like it, or because we hate it. We do it because it’s our job.”

“Bullshit!” I shouted. “You don’t spend years of your life killing alien cocksuckers without forming an opinion on killing. That ‘oh, it’s just my job’ talk is—what’s the word? Sophistry. And if some ponies need to lie to themselves to stay sane, then good for them. But I’m done. I’m done with lies. You know what makes our enemies special, Bell? They’re predators. They eat meat. They were born to kill. It doesn’t come so easy for us. It’s not an instinct. For a pony, it’s a skill. It takes practice. And Sierra? Yeah, I see you over there, listening.”

She shook her head. “Not involved. Just here for the soup.”

“Fuck you, miss ‘Storm doesn’t know her history’, because I do know my history. I know it very well. And you know what? It’s only right for us to poison those bastards, because they’ve poisoned us. Them and their predator ways. Their predator wars. They infected us! This? All this shit? This isn’t our culture. This is their culture. And if the Empress were standing right here, this Celestia-fucking minute, she would agree with me. You know why? Because she was alive back then. Back when ponies were still building gingerbread houses, or whatever the fuck, instead of concrete pillboxes with machine gun nests!”

Bell stood up and forcefully pushed me back in my cot with one hoof, pointing at my face with the other. “Listen. Nopony wants to hear your shit, Sergeant. We’ve all had a very, very long day. You’re tired? Sleep. Hungry? Wait for the soup to finish. But if I hear one more word of this garbage out of you, I’m going to find out where they keep the duct tape on this Roc, and it’s going over your mouth and ‘round the back of your head. You got it? Shut. Up.”

After a few tense moments of glaring up at him with resentment, I slowly nodded, sniffling a bit. As I lay flat, I realized how exhausted I felt. The lack of sleep was getting to me. It was a toss-up whether or not I’d have enough energy to stay awake for the food to finish, but I was so hungry, I would’ve been willing to suck Bell’s dick for his share of the rations. It was kinda hot when he got all bossy like that. It made me wanna whip it out of him with a switch. He’d probably squeal real nice. He looked like a squealer.

Altrenogest. I needed it. Badly. Or I wasn’t sure I’d make it through this heat without doing something I’d regret.

I picked up the comms helmet in my hooves, set it atop my head and dialed it in. “This is EIDOLON, do the salvage teams read me?”

The radio crackled, before the harsh, grating voice of a rough-hewn mare came through. “Who the fuck is this? You just blasted everyone’s ears! Clear the fucking channel, you dumb bitch!”

“Naw,” some guy in one of the other squads said, before continuing, “I wanna hear what she has to say. This is Hairpin One, go ahead, EIDOLON.”

I let out a sigh, adjusting my comms. “Since Colonel Clusterfuck decided to knock up every mare in this base, I’m guessing there’s a bunch of unused heat suppressors around. You got any for me?”

“Yeah, sure! Let’s see, we’ve got—me, Crossguard, my buddy Bo, here. Lots of options. Hey Crossguard, when was the last time you got laid?”

“At pussy o’clock!” a mare squealed.

“Classic Crossguard,” the squad leader said. “And you, Bowtie?”

“Like about five hours ago,” Bowtie said in a mock-suave voice. “I run a rotating schedule of ladies. My own herd, if you will. We’re always looking for fresh volunteers. To jump my dick.”

I snarled. “Fuck you, assholes! I’m tired of this shit! I’m tired of everything getting all weird and sexual every time I turn around! I need it for my health. Trust me, I’d rather not drink that disgusting shit. I’d rather lie around in a field all day eating flowers and frolicking in the sun and fucking like an animal, as I’m sure all of you would if you had half the chance, but I’ve got a job to do. Now, have you got the shit I need, or are you gonna keep yanking my fucking chain until I come down on you shitheads like a sack of bricks?”

There was raucous laughter on the other end that lasted several seconds before they finally got back to me. “Yeah, you guessed right. We’ve got crates and crates of that shit, Sergeant. Want a few bottles?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Who the hell else in this outfit would have a creepy callsign like EIDOLON? That’s totally Storm. Heard ‘bout what you did here, Sergeant. That was some good shit. Turn invisible and ghost some Con-fed fuckers for me, will ya’?”

“Cut the chatter and get back to work, dipshits!” Garrida muttered over the channel. “Work like gunships could be overhead any minute, because for all we know, they’re on the fucking way. Sergeant, I’ll send a medic over to check up on you. Keep you in fighting shape in case we need to get moving. Now, stop bothering my salvage teams, turn off that hyperactive brain of yours, and get some sleep. Or do you want another one of my patented rear naked choke lullabies?”

“Sir, no sir!”

“That’s what I figured. Out.”

I put aside the comms helmet and rubbed my hooves together in anticipation as Bell started ladling some soup into our bowls. “Fucking finally.”

I stirred the piping hot noodles with my spoon, sticking my face in the bowl and inhaling the steam to clear my sinuses. After I’d indulged in a few deep sniffs and ahhs, Sierra got pissed. “If you don’t cut it out, Storm, you’re gonna be wearing those noodles on your head.”

One of the medics showed up with a bottle of altrenogest a minute later. “Perfect timing,” I muttered. I snatched the bottle of liquid hormone juice from his hooves, poured some into the cap, and then upturned the contents into my mouth like a shot glass. It tasted like chemicals. Like ground-up and liquefied multivitamins for foals. The flavor was indescribable, but the primary notes were somewhere in the vicinity of rotten old grapes and battery acid.

“Oh jeez, that shit’s so gross,” Sierra said. “Why don’t you just put it in your food like a normal pony?”

I let out a sigh. “Because I’d rather deal with the nastiness up-front and wash it down with my food instead of eating funky-tasting soup.”

Bellwether grinned. “That’s kind of a microcosm of your whole philosophy, I notice. You wanna take all the bad shit on now, so you don’t have to deal with it later. One of these days, you’re gonna get burned out like that. Like night before last. You took on a lot of responsibility, goin’ for the Destrier like that.”

I smiled a bit as I gazed down into the oily broth. “I wouldn’t be a pilot if I did things bite-size.”

“You’ve got to learn to rely on your team more,” Bellwether said.

Sierra smirked. “Yeah, we’re all in this together.”

“As if I couldn’t infer that from the context,” I whispered under my breath.

“I still need to do your checkup,” the medic said.

I frowned. “Can it wait till after I’m done eating? My soup’s gonna get cold.”

The medic fixed me with a scowl. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but then thought better of it. I decided I wouldn’t hold him up any longer than necessary, in case he had other ponies to attend to. I practically inhaled the noodles in well under a minute. I was beyond famished, even after I was done. The medicine and the food felt like a lump of lead in my guts. I was shaky as I proffered a hoof for the medic to look me over. He quickly hooked up a portable terminal to my armor’s life sign monitoring system and then strung a cable around to the port on the back of my neck.

“Well, that’s not good.” He turned the screen on his diagnostic slate around to face me, pointing to the yellow region in the middle of my back. “It says your implant’s fucked. Partial function, if that.”

I laughed. “You don’t say? I’ve been trying to tell Bell the same thing for the past thirty-something hours since I ran a self-diagnostic test.”

“Let me tell you what’s gonna happen, ma’am,” the medic said. “You’re gonna get edema from water retention, and then you’re gonna start throwing up, and finally, your heart is going to stop from electrolyte imbalance.”

I blinked a few times, pressing my lips into a thin line and raising my brows, the universally recognized expression for when nothing could be done about a situation. “Welp, guess I’ll die, then.”

The medic turned to Bellwether. “The Sergeant needs an evac back to base as soon as possible, or her health and combat-readiness will continue to decline until she’s of no use to anyone, least of all herself. I can’t service an auto-dialysis implant here. I don’t have the parts, or the tools, or the necessary skills. That shit is very arcane. Only a few ponies in the whole resistance know anything about bionic implants. Argent is one of them.”

Bellwether looked back and forth between the medic and I, his consternation apparent in the grimace he wore. It was clear that he was disappointed at the prospect of his team being down a mare, but at the same time, he cared enough about my wellbeing that he didn’t want to lose me to illness, either.

“We’ll get her back to Crazy Horse as soon as we can. We’re almost done with the first stage of the salvage operations. She’ll be in that convoy. Shouldn’t be any more than forty-eight hours before we head home.”

“If it were my choice, I would recommend flying her on this Roc direct to Crazy Horse, immediately,” the medic said. “But hey, if you wanna take a chance on her life, Bell, that’s up to you. It’s possible to survive a week or longer with total kidney failure, but it’s not pleasant. In any case, I estimate she’ll be laid up for a couple weeks after the surgery to fix the busted implant.”

“You hear that, Sergeant?” Bellwether said. “Sounds like you’re gettin’ another vacation.”

I let out a heavy sigh. “Can’t fucking wait.”

“Let’s rest up,” Bellwether said, slurping up the last of his soup. “We’ve got more shit to do in a few hours.”

As the medic headed out and left the three of us alone, we tucked into the canvas cots, tossing blankets over ourselves and leaving our armor on in case we needed to haul ass. This was going to be one of the less comfortable sleeps I’d had in a while.

It was only a few minutes before Bell and Sierra were sawing logs, but as I lay back in my cot, I grew aware of the fire in my loins and the way it slowly, ever-so-slowly, guttered out. Soon, I felt hollow. Empty. Like there was nothing left for me to live for. The bubbly feelings of a typical estrus cycle had fled me almost entirely, but so had the pain and the nausea. I had to be careful. Some mares were known to engage in suicidal ideation shortly after a dose. The potential for severe depression was a known side effect, one often masked by the fact that our line of work was intrinsically depressing.

I felt cold and angry. Instead of folding in on myself, I focused all that negativity outward, into my thoughts of the Confederacy, as well as their allies and everyone else who assisted them by harming our cause. I thought of Hoodoo’s killers and Windy’s kidnappers. My missing and quite possibly deceased mother and father. My utterly absent fiancé. I ruminated about all of these things until my hatred was sharpened to a razor-keenness.

“Is this all I am, now?” I whispered.

I sighed and closed my eyes, leaning back into the cot. It wasn’t enough. This wasn’t a life. It was a sick parody of existence. We were the last ones. The last pillars of our society. If we were to bend, if were to break, they’d come crashing down on the rest. The ones who couldn’t protect themselves. The last remnants of ponykind would be snuffed out in an orgy of violence to shame the whole galaxy.

The ones who remained wouldn’t even be ponies any longer. They’d be a product. Things. Stripped naked of our identities and sold as everyday commodities. Stallions to work to death. Mares to spread and fuck. Meat. Meat, and nothing more.

And then, there were the monsters we’d faced night before last and their mysterious masters. In mere minutes, those abominations had scythed through hundreds of innocents and reduced them to puddles of gore. They’d nearly killed me. They had, in fact, brought down my Charger with their augmented bodies alone.

This was a foe that possessed transports that fired beams of antimatter, with shielding that could resist a sustained assault from a Destrier and several Omni-turrets. An enemy depraved enough to take sapients—awful sapients, but sapients nonetheless—twist their minds and bodies with surgery and bionic implants, and turn them into living weapons to use against us. An enemy that had chosen to attack us utterly unprovoked.

My lips trembled in wordless horror. One tear worked its way down my cheeks, and then another.

Celestia help us.

With my levitation magic, I slowly, shakily pulled out one of the medals that Star Cross Wraithwood had awarded to the three of us, holding it tight to my chest like a magic charm. I closed my eyes and carefully controlled my breathing. Stilled my trembling limbs. Tried to relax. Let all the accumulated stress and pain go.

After a minute, my eyes flickered open. I could feel it. A vague hint of actual magic emanating from the silver medal. I turned it over, inspecting it closely. There was some kind of mechanism embedded in the back. I realized with a start that the whole reverse face of the medal was some sort of dial. I decided to play with it for a bit. I fiddled with it for a few minutes, seemingly to no end. Finally, I figured it out. I rotated it until it clicked, and then rotated it back until it clicked again, and then forward again. The rear of the medal popped out and hinged open like a locket.

There was text embossed on the inside, along with a small, shrouded red button. AETHERIC RESPONDER BEACON – IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, DEPRESS BUTTON AND PLACE NEAR YOUR LOCATION. DRAGOON ASSAULT TEAMS WILL RESPOND AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

I looked over the medal with newfound awe, wondering why the Star Cross hadn’t told me about its special feature. I closed the back of the medal and locked it back up, glancing over at Bellwether. I would need to tell him about this after we’d rested up.

// … // … // … // … // … //

My sleep was very broken, interspersed with nightmares where I’d gasp awake, sit up, and scan my environment to make sure that the cargo bay of the Roc hadn’t been infiltrated by the enemy. The Vurvalfn had me on edge. In my dreams, I could see their razor-sharp claws lash out from the darkness. I could hear them hiss and growl, the pitter-patter of their drool splattering the floor. In reality, the three of us were left undisturbed the entire time.

As I lay on the cot, staring at the ceiling through bloodshot eyes, I occupied my mind with various thoughts, like what Cicatrice’s presence here meant. The Twelve Magisters of the Twilight Conclave were the most skilled magic practitioners in the whole galaxy, responsible for leading the teams of researchers that developed all of the magtech that we used.

Over the centuries, the Conclave was responsible for the development of beamcasters, locuses, grimoires, and Chargers, among countless other inventions. Every magic-obsessed unicorn filly’s dream was to become one of them. Not only were the Conclave responsible for research and development of magtech devices, the unicorn Battlemages and Charger pilots attached to the Imperial Army were all Conclave-trained and administered.

The Imperial War College in Baltimare and the attached Fort Solstice military base was a sprawling jungle of concrete and glass that covered over a hundred thousand hectares of deciduous forest, with ranges for tank and Charger training that included mocked-up urban environments and complicated live-fire exercises. The Running of the Leaves at Fort Solstice was an annual marathon that was, oddly enough, open to the public. Contestants raced along the outer perimeter of the base, on a dirt road just outside the fence. The Mages’ Academy, where all Charger pilots were trained in the use of spell locuses and the necessary magic, was a part of the College itself. There, the class divisions in our society were clear as day.

Low-born unicorns at the academy were not held in high regard, and volunteer Charger pilots even less so. The place was a playground for stuffy nobles to bully and hound their lessers. The blue bloods were mean as sin, and the mares were the worst of all. It was like high school, but worse. Hazing was a serious problem at the academy. It was funny how they called it bullying when we were kids, but for adults, it was hazing. The word changed, as did the supposed intent behind it, but the experience was generally the same.

Sometimes, they’d pretend to let you in their special club or clique or sorority or whatever, but they never really meant it when they said I could be one of them. By the time I got out of that place, I’d been held upside-down with my head in a toilet, had my ass hanged by my skirt in a dorm closet, been dunked in the fountain in the courtyard, and doodled on with permanent markers in my sleep several times.

We all went to the Mages’ Academy before going through basic training. I always felt that particular institution would’ve benefited from that sequence being the other way around, with students only being put through magic training once they’d learned some discipline and proven their physical aptitude, but the nobles had a lot of pull; if their precious little foals couldn’t hack it as soldiers and washed out of training, well, at least they learned magic on the state’s dime. I couldn’t wait to get out of that hellhole and go to Basic.

The Battlemages-in-training always looked down their noses at us. They thought that us pilots weren’t even real mages, because most of us never had the opportunity to fully master magic in the way that they did. Instead, we allegedly let machines do all the work. None of it was true, of course. Although we had an accelerated training schedule due to the desperate state the country was in, our job had its own risks, and synchronizing one’s spells with a Charger’s locus was no walk in the park.

I was technically a Military Occupational Code 22, Charger Operator, though I also held a Conclave certification as a Silver-rank Illusionist, with high marks for my sustained use of invisibility. I was also a Bronze-rank Arcanist, owing to my slightly better-than-average use of precision telekinesis. The rankings in magic aptitude went from Bronze, to Silver, to Gold, to Platinum. All mages of the Imperial Army carried cards that signified our rank in each school of magic, plated in the metal corresponding to the rank. All of the Magisters were Gold-rank in multiple schools of magic, and of Platinum rank in at least two. My cards had been in my quarters when our transport was shot down, along with my uniform and my bomber jacket. As a matter of fact, I was pretty sure my cards were in my jacket’s pocket. I liked that jacket, dammit.

I couldn’t believe Cicatrice had completely snubbed me like that, sending me off on a wild goose chase so I wouldn’t occupy his time. I pondered the aftermath of my little escapade. I hadn’t been very winded after my run in the snow. I’d felt exhausted, but not particularly out of breath. Months ago, I’d been thrown out an airlock with no pressure suit, and I’d stayed conscious for nearly a minute. I’d also had a severe heart attack within the past two days but remained plenty lucid enough to do the unthinkable and use an AED on myself.

I was working on a theory. As an experiment, I drew in a deep breath and held it, just to see how long it would take before I felt the urge to draw another.

I held it. And I held it. And I held it. Minutes ticked by. I watched the digital clock above the doorway to the cockpit. Nervous beads of sweat dripped from my forehead as I passed records held by mares who did extreme-depth free-diving. I had no urge to breathe. No air hunger. Nothing.

“I don’t need air,” I said.

Bellwether sat up, blinking away sleep, his brow knit with tired confusion. “What?”

“I’ve been holding my breath for the past twenty minutes.”

He turned and stared at me, concern etched into his features. “Oh, that’s great. That’s just great. You’ve finally lost it completely.”

“No, I’m serious.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what the fuck either, Bell. I don’t need to breathe!”

Bellwether sighed and leaned back in bed. “Nope. I’m going back to sleep. When I wake up, there had better be a whole lot less crazy in the back of this fucking Roc, or my report to Garrida will include recommending you for a psych-eval.”

I clammed up at Bellwether’s threat, deciding I’d be better off leaving such matters for Argent’s purview. Bell wasn’t a doctor. He didn’t know a damn thing.

I briefly fascinated myself with how the intricate, delicate-looking struts in the overhead wrapped around the fuselage, before letting out a big, long yawn and falling fast asleep.

// … // … // … // … // … //

It felt like I’d only been snoozing for a few seconds when someone thumped my chest with their hoof. “Storm, get up!”

“What is it, Bell?” I was still groggy, half-in, half-out.

“Huge fucking Confederate force!”

That got me wide awake, my eyes bugging halfway out of my head. I sat up and quickly donned my helmet, throwing on my Orbit and my saddlebags. “Where?”

“Down in the valley. They’re headed towards one of our convoys trucking supplies out of the base.”

I glanced out the Roc’s ramp. There was a great deal of commotion outside as my fellow Liberation Front members rushed to respond to the threat. The self-propelled guns were already sending shells downrange, the rhythmic bass thumping of the artillery shaking the whole cargo bay of the Roc.

“How many?”

“Lots and lots!” Bellwether’s face was lined with anguish. “Unknown number of foot-mobiles, but at least ten thousand. Scout pegasi counted well over a hundred tanks and a couple dozen Ifrits, and there are probably more on the way. There are one or two whole enemy armored divisions out there, and they have gunship support!”

I drew in a long, panicked gasp. My eyes began to water. We were outnumbered by at least twenty to one, maybe forty to one, maybe worse. I shook my head. “Is this it? Are we screwed?” My thoughts drifted into dark territory. “I won’t let them take me prisoner. Not again. Not after what I’ve seen. No way. If it comes to that, I’ll just eat a fucking grenade.”

“We’re going to survive this,” Bell said. “We have to.”

A pang of dread gripped me, my heart squeezing in my chest. I tried to tamp it down before it got away from me, but I couldn’t quite manage to catch it. My feelings cascaded and fled my control, like a runaway engine. My ears rang, long and low, a gong heralding doom. My equilibrium was shattered. I felt like I was going to die, right then and there.

“You okay, Storm?” Bell said.

I screamed, gripping both sides of my head with my hooves. Fear. All I felt was fear. Raw and primal. When I was in combat, I was tense, but focused, and the prospect of my own death was the furthest thing from my mind. This was different. It was like a feedback loop inside my head, my terror building and building of its own accord until what occupied my every nerve was a hurricane of emotions completely beyond my control. I was having a full-fledged panic attack, for the first time in over a year.

“I don’t wanna die!” I shouted. “I don’t wanna—”

Bellwether wrapped his hooves around me, pulling me into a hug. “I’m here, Storm. I’ve got you.”

In a burst of adrenaline, it ended just as quickly. The pressure in my head was lifted. Sudden relief, followed by confusion, and then shame. I hated losing control like that. It made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Like I was an ill mare. Like I was too sick to do my job. But the sickness wasn’t with me. It was with the unconscionable world that I was born into, with horror and death dogging my heels every step of the way.

As I returned Bellwether’s embrace, I was inconsolable, tears streaming down my face. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Sergeant. It happens to the best of us.”

“I don’t wanna end up like my fucking sisters, Bell. It’s different for stallions. They just kill you, or they use you for hard labor. They don’t—”

Bellwether grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a few stiff slaps across the face. “Snap out of it! We’re gonna go fuck them up, together. I need you to be focused on the mission. What’s in the past doesn’t fucking matter!” I could see the tears in his eyes. “If I spent all my time thinking about everything that’s happened to me and my family because of this dumb fucking war, I wouldn’t be able to keep going. You have to let it go. There are ponies who are still alive, and they need us, you understand?”

After a moment’s hesitation, I flipped my helmet’s lens up and wiped the tears from my eyes, nodding in affirmation and steeling myself with newfound resolve. “All right. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“You sure?” Bell dipped his head to look me squarely in the eyes. “Because you didn’t look okay a moment ago.”

I gave him a death glare. “I’m fine. Let’s just fucking go.”

Sierra rushed into the Roc’s bay, motioning vigorously with her hooves. “Come on! Skimmer’s all chained up and I don’t know where the fucking keys to undo ‘em are!”

Bellwether and I marched out of the Roc. It was pure bedlam outside, ponies scattering every which way. We moved across the snowy ground and arrived at the flatbed truck where the Skimmer had been secured for transport.

“Where the fuck is the Captain?!” I shouted.

“Artillery!” one of the soldiers screamed. “Get to cover!”

I heard the screech of a plummeting shell and reflexively grabbed Bellwether and dived into the snow, shielding him with my body. The heavy mortar round landed right under one of the engine nacelles of the Roc at an oblique angle, shredding it instantly and sending fragments and debris everywhere. The transport’s fuel ignited, promptly engulfing the whole thing in a massive fireball.

I slowly stood, my hearing muffled and every nerve in my body burning. I let out a soft little gasp of pain. I felt around on my side, my hoof coming back bloody. When I looked down, there was a thirty-centimeter chunk of jagged wreckage sticking out of the side of my armor. Like a cartoon character hanging in mid-air off a ledge and sparing one last glance at the audience before gravity kicked in, there was a latent period of painlessness before the delayed realization of my injuries suddenly plunged me into a pit of gut-churning agony.

I rolled off Bellwether and onto my back, my screams full-throated and earsplitting in pitch and volume. My blood quickly stained the snow red. My whole left side felt like it was on fire. I was in so much pain, my entire barrel spasmed, drawing my legs together. I shriveled in on myself like a dead spider.

Bellwether was chagrined to see me so badly wounded, to say the least. I was his little project, after all. “Dammit! Don’t you go dying on me, now!”

He grabbed the shrapnel with his teeth and yanked it out of my side. My screams stopped. The pain was beyond comprehension. I made these soft little hiccups, my eyes wide and teary. “Oh fuck.”

Bell peeked in through the hole in my armor. “Looks like your rib stopped it.”

“You can see my rib?” I croaked.

After a pause, Bellwether shook his head. “I see something that might be a rib.”

I groaned and leaned back into the freezing snow as Bellwether pushed a syringe full of clotting gel into the wound. “Hold still. This is going to feel like shit.”

He depressed the plunger and I gritted my teeth, trying not to scream like a pussy. It was like the pain from a styptic pencil, jammed inside every cubic centimeter of a gaping hole in my torso. It felt like being injected with a balled-up lump of barbed wire. It felt like knives ripping me open from the inside. When he was done, he slapped a dressing on top of it.

“Best I could do,” Bellwether said. “Argent will have to do the rest when we get back. Don’t move for about ten seconds. The gel needs time to harden, and if it falls out, you’re probably gonna bleed to death.”

I could feel the enchanted Hemogel heat itself to slightly above body temp as it quick-cured into a semi-flexible, gelatinous lump of wound packing. Bellwether helped me to my hooves. I was shaky, but I was up. I could feel the radiant heat from the burning Roc. I was glad no one was in it. I was even happier that we left it when we did. If Bell had to console my whining ass for a minute longer, we’d both be a couple of well-done pony steaks.

“You have my thanks,” Bellwether said. “Didn’t have to shield me like that, but you did. You’re somethin’ else, Storm.”

I hissed in pain. “Don’t mention it.”

Sierra popped up over the top of the Skimmer from where she’d dived for cover behind it. “Over here, you two!” The ratty unicorn motioned to the locks for the transport chains. “I can’t get ‘em open. We’re sitting ducks on the ground, you guys. We need some altitude, and right the fuck now!”

Bellwether put tiny lumps of plastique on the locks and rigged them with detonators. “Everypony, stand back.” We took cover in front of the flatbed’s traction unit and Bell flipped the cover on his remote detonator. “Fire in the hole!”

There was a muffled pop as the tiny charges split the bodies on the padlocks in half. Bellwether and Sierra grabbed the chains and yanked them through the frame of the Skimmer, freeing it. Sierra mounted up in the pilot’s seat, Bellwether took the middle as usual, and I slowly, painfully climbed into the tail gunner’s seat, charging the action on my autocannon. The Skimmer’s reactor hummed to life and the contragrav bike rattled as it lifted the three of us skyward. When we cleared the ridge south of the runway, I gazed down into the valley and spotted a good two dozen Ifrit-class goliaths.

The big, headless Confederate walkers had saucer-shaped bodies and spindly limbs. They were slow and ungainly, their movements lacking any semblance of grace as they tromped along at a mere thirty kilometers per hour, about half of their maximum speed. The right side of their body was equipped with a fixed plasma pulsecannon that was used to snipe targets from afar, and the left side had a manipulator arm with a giant plasma sword of the barrier-destructor type, designed to eliminate tank traps and flatten buildings. It could also be used in close combat in a pinch, but it was much too slow to hit a Charger unless the pilot on the receiving end was totally unprepared for it.

Their swords’ emitters glowed bright blue in the twilit gloom, making them easy to spot. The roof of an Ifrit’s torso featured an electro-optical sensor turret for target acquisition and ranging, along with an auto-loading 120mm heavy mortar for indirect fire support. Like clockwork, the Ifrits rattled off a salvo of mortar rounds, the shells arcing high into the air before screaming down from the heavens and shredding the base facilities below us, leaving dozens of dead and dying resistance members in their wake. The rest moved for the cover of the subterranean bunker network, sheltering in place.

“Agent Bellwether to Captain Garrida, please respond!” Bell radioed. There was no reply.

“Fuck me,” I whispered. “This day just keeps getting better and better!”

“Yep,” Sierra said. “Comes with the territory, so suck it up, Stormy.”

I shook my head vigorously. “Bullshit, Sierra! Bullshit. If a battle this size is an everyday occurrence around here, then I’ll eat my fucking boot.”

Bellwether motioned towards the mountain pass on the southern end of the base. “Sierra, take us down through the pass! That’s where the convoy went, and we need to see if they’re alright!”

“Was the Captain with them?” I said.

“No,” Bell said. “No idea where Garrida is right now. The convoy’s not responding on the damn radio, though. I’m worried they made contact with the enemy.”

“Where the fuck is Cicatrice and the Stormtroopers?” I said.

“They left hours ago. It’s just us and the salvage and recon teams. A few tanks and artillery pieces, too. We don’t have enough in the way of numbers or firepower to repel an attack like this.”

I grimaced. “Dammit. This isn’t good.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Storm.”

We swung down through the pass, the snow-covered trees a blur all around us. The tire tracks in the snow led down towards the valley. There was smoke off in the distance, quickly resolving into a smattering of fires and a whole lot of debris. The supply trucks were unrecognizable; a chunk of bodywork here, a bit of axle there, and a bunch of scattered truck tires lying in the snow. There were bodies everywhere. The recovery crews had been exceedingly unlucky. They’d been hit dead-on by a mortar salvo, or something of that nature. There were no hostiles in sight.

“Are there any survivors?” I said.

When we brought the Skimmer to a halt, I hopped off and started surveying the damage.

“Storm, get back here!” Bellwether shouted.

“I wanna see if there are any—”

That was when we noticed it, over the din of far-off gunfire. There was an ethereal howl in the air. Bell and I shared a horrified glance before we both slowly turned and looked straight up. There was a Confederate drone swarm circling overhead, their rudimentary AIs coordinating their movements like a flock of birds. It wasn’t artillery that took the convoy out.

“Screamers,” Bellwether whispered. “Storm, get back on the damn Skimmer, now!”

I limped over to the Skimmer, ignoring the ache in my side as I climbed onto its frame. As I tried lifting my hind leg to mount the seat, there was a stab of raw agony in my guts and I slipped, crying out in pain. Bellwether grabbed my hoof and yanked me up onto the Skimmer.

“Sierra, go!” Bell shouted.

Sierra poured on the thrust, and just in time, because the swarm decided right then and there that we were a juicy target, diving towards us, the shriek of their propellers doppler-shifted. The Skimmer’s superior speed drew them into a long, thin line, and I exploited this by unleashing a hail of explosive autocannon rounds straight into the drone swarm’s formation. Several of the Screamer drones fired their terminal intercept rockets to catch up to us.

“Evade!” I said.

Sierra pulled hard to the left, nearly sideswiping a tree. The Screamers’ explosive charges detonated and sprayed the area with shrapnel as they tried airbursting as close as possible to us, stripping the limbs from the trees behind us. There were a few stragglers, but hitting them dead-on with the cannon was out of the question. It simply wasn’t accurate enough to pop something so small.

“Sierra!” I yelled.

“I know!” Sierra swung the Skimmer around and engaged the remaining Screamers with the forward beamcasters. In a matter of seconds, her precision gunnery made short work of them.

“Is that all of ‘em?” Bellwether said. “Are we clear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re clear. Sierra, let’s swing back around to the site where the convoy was attacked. I want to make sure we aren’t leaving anypony behind.”

Sierra brought the Skimmer around and headed back, bringing us down in the midst of the wreckage and debris. The three of us stepped off and searched the area. There wasn’t anyone moving. Nopony breathing. I checked the driver’s pulse. I lifted his foreleg and looked underneath it. A shrapnel wound had taken out his left lung and heart.

“Dead,” I growled. “They’re all fucking dead.”

Sierra grimaced. “Great, what do we do now?”

My gaze fixed itself on one of the containers the trucks had been carrying. It had busted open and there was a long, tubular object inside. I walked over to it and shoved the heavy lid aside, inspecting the contents. Inside was a two-meter-long munition with a bone-white metal casing and guidance fins at the back. One of the fifteen-megaton fusion bombs from Pur Sang. The device was hundreds of pounds. I could’ve moved it a short distance with my levitation, but not all the way back to the base.

“Shit.” I gritted my teeth. “Bell, we’ve got a problem. One of the nukes is here. Could be more, for all I know. What are we gonna do?”

Bellwether looked off into the distance, shaking his head as he set his jaw. “Storm, I take full responsibility for what we’re about to do next. Garrida will fucking kill me for this, but it’s the only way.”

I smiled. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were about to suggest we nuke the fuckers down in the valley, right?”

Bell gave me a stern look but didn’t say a word.

I stopped smiling. “Oh fuck. You’re serious.”

The grizzled old stallion plugged Tiamat into his armor’s computer. “Tiamat, you hear me?”

“Go ahead, Agent,” she said.

“You got the codes for the nukes?”

“Yes. Why, thinking of arming one? You need dual authorization to—”

“What I’m about to do, Storm, Sierra, never do this, ever,” Bellwether said. “Anima matrix override, sigma two-seven-nine-seven.”

The virtual representation of Tiamat’s personality matrix projected in our eyepieces instantly turned a deep red hue, the dragon’s expression locked in an uncanny, dead-eyed stare. “Code accepted. Matrix override confirmed. Diagnostic mode online.”

“Retrieve memory block.”

“Specify address.”

While I looked on in wonder, and no small amount of fear, Bellwether rattled off a string of hexadecimal numbers. What the fuck are we doing? I pondered. Are we really doing this? Nukes? Fuck me.

“Confirmed,” Tiamat said. “Executing. Returned zero-nine-seven-one.”

Bellwether opened a side panel on the fusion bomb, revealing a small display, data port, and keypad. He ran a cable from his suit computer to the data port.

“Tiamat, inject zero-nine-seven-one.”

“Zero-nine-seven-one, arming code accepted.”

“Arm and set yield, three hundred kilotons, delay, six hundred seconds. Disable barometric, disable impact, disable global positioning. Put a synchronized timer in our heads-up.”

“Confirmed,” Tiamat droned mindlessly. “Yield, three hundred kilotons. Barometric fuse disabled. Impact fuse disabled. GPS and guidance fins disabled. Time delay fuse activated. Delay, six hundred seconds.”

My blood ran cold as a ten-minute timer appeared in our heads-up displays and began to count down. He unhooked the cable from the bomb and reeled it back into his armor.

“Tiamat, end diagnostic mode,” Bellwether said.

The anima’s holographic avatar turned back to her original greenish-black color. She shook her head vigorously, shaking out the cobwebs. “What the heck just happened? Bell, have you been a naughty boy?” She noted the timer, her expression growing angrier by the minute. “What the hell did you do?”

He unplugged Tiamat’s core from his suit computer and stuffed her back in his saddlebag. “None of your fucking business is what.”

“There’s no turning back.” Bellwether looked me squarely in the eye. “No way to disarm it if something goes wrong. In ten minutes, this son of a bitch will go off and this mountainside will look like Celestia herself dropped the fucking sun on it.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “Holy shit.”

Bellwether reached out a hoof. “If we don’t make it out of this, I just wanted you to know, Storm, you’re a hell of a soldier. I wouldn’t say these past few months have been fun, but it’s been an honor to fight by your side.”

I smiled, taking his hoof and giving it a shake. “Don’t get sappy with me, Bell. Let’s go blow these fuckers to Tartarus and then go home.”

“Why don’t you two lovers find a room?” Sierra said.

I was immediately on the defensive. “We’re not! I mean, are we? Yeah, I don’t think so.”

Bell and I looked at each other, blushing a bit. We gazed into each other’s eyes, his sapphire pools met by my tangerines. He took in a deep breath as if to say something, but his confession, or whatever it was going to be, was interrupted by the sound of gunfire. There was a scout helo a couple hundred meters from our position, the co-pilot leaning out the door with one foot on the skids and popping off rounds with his flechette gun. It was one of the stealthy Asp gyrodynes with the low-noise rotors. We didn’t even hear it coming. We dived for cover as flechettes ricocheted off the container holding the nuke.

“You fuckin’ Con-fed cockbites!” Sierra shrieked.

She dashed over to a spilled crate of mortars, kicked one into the air like a hacky sack, caught it in her hoof, wound up, and threw it with all her might and a cry of exertion. I watched in stunned silence as it twirled and arced high into the air and then hit the cockpit of the scout helicopter dead-center, blowing the canopy to smithereens and sending the whole thing crashing to the ground in a giant fireball. Bellwether said nothing. He was too astonished by what he’d just seen.

I blinked a few times, my jaw agape. “What. The. Fuck. Sierra?”

“Lots of earth pony in the bloodline,” she said as she dusted her legs off with a few pats.

A couple more scout helicopters crested the ridge and fired off rocket pods, white trails streaking through the sky.

Somewhat cognizant of the fact that it was becoming my own personal catchphrase in these trying times, I screamed, “Oh shit!”

I dived into the snow and covered my neck. Explosions and shrapnel and waves of heat and pressure washed over us. I could feel some of the frag bounce off my armor, crying out in pain at the sting. Bellwether looped some transport chain through the eyes on the corners of the container, and then through the frame of the Skimmer. He quickly rigged the eyes up with small explosive charges to sever the chain at the precise moment. He jumped onto the seat of the Skimmer behind Sierra, who was already at the controls and taking off.

“Storm, get on!” he shouted.

“Wait, I—” I limped towards the Skimmer and watched in shock as Sierra gunned the throttle and they started leaving without me.

Without thinking twice, I jumped into the container holding the nuke as it passed. I raised my head over the edge of the container, climbing up and straddling the bomb between my hind legs, shouting loud and vehement profanity all the while. The scout helicopters closed in and opened up on us, raking the container with their gun pods.

I covered my head with my hooves, not believing what was happening. “Shit, shit, shit!”

The Skimmer was towing a container with an armed fusion bomb inside it like a fucking sleigh. I was sitting on top of the damn bomb, being shot at by enemy gyrodynes. The container weaved from side to side through the snow, lacking any skids to stabilize it. I fired off a volley from my beamcasters at the hostile air, and they responded with even more gun pod fire. A round caught me in my barding and I grunted explosively and crumpled over in pain, a giant welt growing under my chest protector.

“Ow, dammit! This is completely fucked!”

With a loud two-stroke roar, a pair of Confederate snowmobiles jumped a nearby ridge and joined the pursuit. They each had two crew members, one to drive, and one hanging off the back hefting a submachine gun, because of course they did. They closed in on us from behind and sprayed us with gunfire as I slid off the bomb casing and dived inside the container for cover. Bullets pinged off the thick metal container, not penetrating or even making a dent in it.

“What the fuck is this spy movie bullshit?!” I shouted. “Bellwether, you better not be jerking off up there!”

“Too late!” he shouted back. “Already nutted!”

“Do something about these guys, you prick!”

Bell climbed back into the tail gunner spot where he should’ve been the entire time, cycled the action on the gun, and took aim at the snowmobiles. “Eat this, motherfuckers!”

The autocannon sang its deadly chorus, the muzzle blast nearly deafening me as I crouched in the container downrange. One of the snowmobiles sustained a direct hit to the fuel tank and then promptly burst into flame and rolled over, its occupants screaming as they tumbled through the snow. The other wisely peeled off before it met the same fate, and so did the gyrodynes.

“Bell, they know we’re here,” I said. “They know we’ve got a nuke, too!”

“Dammit, I know! We’ll think of something. Chill your tits!”

“My tits are chilled!” I said. “I’m so fucking cold, my nipples are fixing to rip a hole in my fatigues!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “There it is. Typical bitching Storm.”

“Oh!” I dragged the word out in derision. “I see how it is! So, all those compliments and lovey-dovey eyes and stuff were just bullshit, eh?”

“Well, we’re not fucking married to anything other than this bomb, so quit bickering like we are!”

When we crested the next ridge line, we were greeted by endless rows of enemy tanks and assault walkers and mechanized infantry supported by armored fighting vehicles, marching in formation across the twilit plain. Mamba gunships loomed high above, providing close support for the formation. We were descending straight at them down a long, snowy slope at considerable speed.

The lead Conqueror MBT fired off its hundred-forty-millimeter gun, the sabot dart making a deafening crack as it missed me by a hair. One of the actual sabot petals embedded itself in the side of the nuke’s container, leaving a massive indentation. If that thing had hit me, I would’ve died instantly. Instead of swearing, I simply screamed and pressed myself down into the container, as low as possible. There were no words that could have articulated the gut-wrenching fear I felt.

“Storm, cloak!” Bell shouted.

Sierra angled us towards a hole in their formation. Taking a deep breath and putting aside my fear, I quickly lit my horn and sheathed us, the Skimmer, the bomb, the container, and the chains in invisibility magic.

“Not gonna last long like this!” I said. “It’s too complex! One minute, tops!”

“One minute is all we need,” Sierra said.

“This is Agent Bellwether,” Bell radioed. “Any friendly units, get underground as quick as you can. Find cover and shelter in place. Do not go south of Pur Sang! Do not get within line of sight of the enemy, or you will die!”

The timer in my HUD read five minutes. We were running out of time to reach a safe distance, and we hadn’t even emplaced the damn thing yet. If it went off with me right next to it, I wouldn’t feel a thing. I’d be conscious one moment and see darkness eternal the next. It wasn’t the worst way to die in this war. Not by a long shot.

I could hear them. The rattling of Conqueror tracks. The stomping of Ifrits. Their angry shouts as squad leaders ordered their troops to search the area for us, warning of the grave threat we posed. They knew what was coming. Some of them panicked. They cried out in anguish, expecting the end to come at any moment. They had no way to know if this was a suicide attack and the bomb was set to explode seconds from now. All they knew for certain was that they were all dead men walking.

I reached out with my magic and felt around as Sierra pulled us into the cover of a copse of trees and set the Skimmer down. My magic nearly exhausted, I uncloaked us, ducking low as searchlights scanned the forest.

“Storm, not gonna say it again,” Bell said. “Get on the fucking Skimmer, now!”

I jumped out of the container and took up the tail gunner position as Bell scooted towards the middle. I latched my fall protection gear to the eyes on the Skimmer’s frame. Bellwether clicked the trigger of his remote detonator, severing the chain with a bang, leaving the nuke in place. He then patted Sierra’s shoulder twice, signaling her to take off.

We made for the nearest ridge, seeking out cover. Small arms fire sliced through the air at us, snapping and cracking. Autocannon rounds missed us by a hair. A Vulture dropship swooped in, trying to intercept us. They took up formation on our left side, their door gunner opening fire on us with his mounted machine gun. Sierra pulled us into a sharp climb and evaded hard left, trying to get above them and out of their firing arcs.

When I looked back and down, through the canopy of the dropship, I could see the face of Mardissa Granthis looking up at me, pointing furiously at us, urging the pilot to do a better job of intercepting us. Sierra throttled up and the pyrojet flared up like a torch, giving off waves of heat, its blue exhaust sharpening into a long string of shock diamonds. We quickly outpaced them, pulling far ahead of the Vulture as we dived below the line of the next hill.

The Vulture pilot was good. He descended straight towards us, maintaining nap-of-the-earth flight with his weighty bird almost brushing the treetops. They opened up with the chin gun, which, unlike the Orca’s, was thankfully of the conventional variety and not a positron gun. It seemed almost quaint compared to the monstrosities I’d had to face night before last. This was just like old times.

“We have to get over the next ridge!” Bellwether shouted. “We have to, or we’re fucked!”

The timer ticked down the last remaining seconds. No point in staying on the gun and getting myself blinded. I turned around in my seat, hugging Bellwether’s back.

Nine. Eight. Seven.

I looked over my shoulder. “We’re too fucking close!”

Six. Five. Four.

“Come on!” Sierra yelled. “Come on, you fuckers!”

The Vulture was closing with us again, its mass plowing through the thin mountain air towards our much smaller hover bike.

I stared breathlessly at the numbers in my HUD, my eyes watering.

Three. Two. One.

We crossed the next ridge, diving down the slope. The Vulture just barely maintained its pursuit, but they were at a higher altitude, and thus more exposed.

The timer hit zero.

The shadows on the trees seemed to stretch into infinity. The dark and snowy Crystal Mountains flared red, as if a second sun had erupted behind us. The ground heaved far below us, snow dusting the air from the shockwave.

“Bell!” I shouted, holding him tight and squeezing my eyes shut. “I lo—”

There was a sound unlike any I had ever heard. A pressure wave slammed into my back and shook every organ in my body. I was thrown from the Skimmer by the force of the blast. Bell got knocked off, too. My harness caught me and snapped taut. As Bell flew away from me, seemingly in slow motion, I reached out and caught him, finding myself looking down at his terrified face. We were still well over a hundred meters off the ground. If I dropped Bell, that would’ve been the end for him. I couldn’t lose him. Not like this.

I was hanging from the Skimmer by one fall protection strap. The other had failed. While steadying myself with one foreleg, I held onto Bell’s forehooves with the other, holding up his earth pony weight and all his armor and weapons with every last ounce of my strength. I was completely deafened by the blast, my ears ringing continuously. My muscles burned with exertion. I couldn’t even hear myself scream.

I seized Bell in my levitation, slowly lifting him up and into his seat, setting him down as best as I could. I reached up to him, and he gave me a hoof to help me climb back aboard. When I turned and looked back, there was a mushroom cloud rising over the Crystal Mountains, the terrain painted an apocalyptic red hue. The whole forest had been lit ablaze for many kilometers in all directions, even in the areas well ahead of us.

The enemy dropship had been hit by the blast wave and radiant heat from the nuke. It spiraled into an uncontrollable descent, its fuselage aflame and engines smoking. We were lucky to have been in the shadow of a mountain, or else we would’ve been burnt to a crisp by the thermal pulse. Slowly, ever-so-slowly, my hearing returned. The air rushing past us sounded as if I were underwater.

“We did it.” Sierra looked back at us, grinning. “We fuckin’ did it! We—”

That was when the Skimmer’s power finally crapped out from the reactor control circuits being fried by the nuke’s electromagnetic pulse. It was amazing that it’d lasted any longer than a split-second. The electrokinetics flickered and died and the Skimmer dipped low and to the left, quickly spinning out of control.

“Hang on!” Sierra shouted.

I gritted my teeth and held on tight. The ground came up fast. Too fast. We hit the snowy earth at an oblique angle, catapulting us from our seats as the Skimmer tumbled end over end through the snow. As my world spun, I watched Sierra smack headfirst into a tree, hard enough to shake all the snow from every single one of its branches.

When I struck the ground, I was knocked unconscious.

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 13//Weltanschauung Estimated time remaining: 17 Hours, 21 Minutes