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

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

An indeterminate amount of time later, I awoke face-up in the snow. I groaned and held my head in my hooves. I felt like I’d been bucked in the head by a mare with horseshoes on. My extremities were numb, a sickness tingling in my core. I hoped I wasn’t glowing in the dark. My armor had a built-in dosimeter in case of nuclear weapons use or radiological accidents. I was almost too scared to check it.

“Sierra!” I cried out. “Bellwether! Sound off! You guys okay?”

I crawled over to them. Bell was moving, but just barely. Sierra wasn’t moving at all. She was hardly even breathing. She had a gaping head wound dripping blood all over her face. With a hit like that, skull fracture wasn’t out of the question.

“Oh fuck, Bell, Sierra’s wounded! It’s serious. She needs a medic!”

“Keep it down, Storm,” Bellwether groaned. “There could be Confederate patrols surrounding us. That crash was everything but quiet.”

“Don’t they have bigger fish to fry after the nuke?” I said.

Bellwether turned towards me, his expression slowly resolving into one of shock.

“Storm!” He leaned up, panicking.

There was a loud humming noise behind me. I rolled to the side as the plasma sword smashed into the ground where I previously lay, the snow instantly hissing into great clouds of steam.

As I scrambled back, I turned to face my attacker and was greeted by the enraged countenance of Captain Granthis. She was clearly wounded and aggravated, one of her legs afflicted by a noticeable limp. Her pale skin was covered in dirt and soot, chunks of her armor charred and cracked. The thermonuclear explosion and subsequent crash of her transport did a number on her.

“You!” we shouted at each other simultaneously.

“Yeah, we do have some fish to fry, and you’re the biggest fish in the sea!” Granthis said. “I should’ve known it was you, blue-mane! You’re becoming a real thorn in my side, you know that?”

I looked over my shoulder at the mushroom cloud rising over the ridge to the east. “Just a thorn?”

“A pain in my neck!” Granthis yelled, making a fist. “A crick in my cunt!”

I nodded. “Better.”

“You idiots.” She seethed. “You detonated a weapon of mass destruction in an occupation zone. My father will use this as an excuse to rain death on this planet, and he’ll blame me for forcing his hand!”

“We had no other choice,” I said. “It was either that, or we let you assholes overrun us.”

“You do have a choice!” The albino cleomanni glared at me, leveling her Eliminator squarely at me. “Surrender! Surrender and submit!”

“Submit to our own genocide?” I said. “Submit to being enslaved, eaten, and experimented upon? Give our lives and our bodies into the groping hands of deviants and madmen?” In spite of my own injuries, I stood tall before the oppressor. “No! Not for any fucking price. Go home and tell your bastard father that Equestria lives free or dies free. There is no alternative, no substitute, no compromise that you can offer with that snake tongue of yours that any true Equestrian will accept!”

Granthis was flabbergasted. “Why won’t you surrender? You’re a pony! Ponies are supposed to be weak and cowardly! You should be begging for your life!”

I pulled all the fragmentation grenades from my harness with my levitation. “You got a limp, girlie. How would your dear old dad like it if I pulled the pins on all of these, ran you down, and pasted both of us across this field? You think he would miss you?”

“I don’t understand you ponies. Why would you do that? Why would you sacrifice yourself so easily?”

“Because I’m a soldier of the Imperial Army and you’re just a Confederate piece of shit! You’re not gonna take me captive just so you can give me to the damarkinds!”

There was a brief look of confusion on Granthis’ face. “What?”

“You sick motherfuckers have been selling mares to those creeps!” I roared. “You sold my sister to a damarkind mercenary captain. How would you feel if that was your sister, forced to lie beneath one of those hairy, smelly, drooling maniacs, day after day, until she lost the will to live?”

Granthis was silent, her weapon dipping towards the ground, her eyes darting around as the gears turned in her head, her expression growing more horrified and disgusted by the second.

I grinned, pleased to have struck a nerve. “I see daddy doesn’t tell his precious little girl everything about the family business, or does he?”

“I don’t know what sort of sick, degenerate mind games you’re trying to play, pony, but you’ve impugned my honor, and that of my family.” Granthis’ face warped into a hateful scowl. “This is an insult I will not bear.”

The cleomanni tossed aside her weapon, stripping off her ruined power armor until she was down to just her bodysuit. She adopted a fighting stance, holding her hands up like a boxer. “In our culture, there is the tradition of the Diwa Gagarum, the Duel of Honor. First, the wager. If I win, you’re a liar and a coward. If I lose, there may yet be merit to your claim. Cast aside your weapons and fight me, pony! Let our strength be the test of truth!”

“Don’t—do it,” Bellwether said, clutching his chest and groaning in pain. “She’s just trying to trick you into letting your guard down.”

I ignored him, my eyes locked on my adversary, regarding her with a disdainful sneer. “I accept your challenge, Confederate bitch.”

I unlatched my Bulwark armor, removed my helmet, and shrugged my caster and my Orbit into the snow, until I was down to just my fatigues. I sized up my opponent. A cyborg, like me, except her augments were for more than just keeping her alive. They enhanced her strength. Without them, she would have been no match for a pony. With them, she was at least on-par or better.

The muscle suit, on the other hoof, was a problem. It amplified her strength beyond even that, enabling her to hump weapons like her Eliminator over long distances without getting winded and to fire it without shattering her arm. She’d taken off her breastplate, however, which meant the micro-fusion reactor on her back was exposed. That would be my first target. She wouldn’t just turn her back of her own accord. I would have to make an opening.

“You think I won’t stuff you and mount you on my dad’s wall?” Granthis grinned. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Kinky,” I said.

The albino cleomanni glared at me, those shockingly white eyebrows of hers curling into a frown. “That’s not what I meant!”

“Suit yourself.”

“On the count of three,” she said. “One, two, three, fight!”

We charged at each other, our speed hampered by our injuries. I reared up and threw a right hook at her face. She caught my forehoof, grinning as she slowly overpowered me, bending my leg back with her twice-augmented strength. She wasn’t the only one who could cheat. I lit my horn and fired off a telekinetic pulse that sent her reeling, but she quickly recovered, using her long, thin, whipping tail expertly to shift her balance.

The satyr turned and pivoted on her hooves into a spinning back kick that caught me right in the muzzle. I was lifted off my hooves and skidded several meters across the snow from the force of the blow. I saw stars. Felt my equilibrium go topsy-turvy. I had to shake my head to clear the dizziness and get back in the game.

I rolled over just in time to avoid a powerful axe-kick. Just like a satyr to kick someone while they were down. Sensing the opportunity, I lunged for the gap between her legs and got behind her.

“You slippery little cunt, you—” Granthis snarled.

I had a clear shot. It was now or never. I seized her suit’s fusion power pack in my levitation and pulled, tearing it from its mounting. Unfortunately for Granthis, this ripped the back of her bodysuit off with it, baring her shoulder blades and the crack of her ass to the biting cold. I blinked a few times, mildly embarrassed at what I’d done.

“Oh, uh, damn,” I said. “I can see why you guys wear so much clothing.”

Granthis wheeled on me, furious to the point of froth. “You think I’m ashamed of my body?”

I squeezed my eyes shut in exasperation. “Oh no, here it comes.”

The cleomanni grabbed the collar of her no doubt very expensive and very much ruined artificial muscle suit, and then she ripped off every last scrap of what remained until she was stark naked. Aside from the hair atop her head and the white fur that covered both of her legs, the cleomanni woman had a light fringe of fur that ran from her shoulders and down the outsides of her arms. Other than that, there wasn’t much else, nor was there anything left to the imagination. She looked cold. Cold and fleshy.

I could see the faint outlines of her augs poking through her skin, along with the traces of surgical scars and access ports all over her body. Her right leg was matted with blood from her injuries. She had a mild burn mark here and there. If she was in pain, she didn’t show it. I could see her shiver ever-so-slightly, but she was startlingly adept at concealing that, too. Every centimeter of her was stacked with rock-solid muscle. She may have had the soft face of a spoiled brat, but the rest of her looked like it had been chiseled from stone.

“Gaze upon me in awe!” she said, spreading her arms wide. “Gaze upon the form that shall conquer the whole universe!”

“Really?” I muttered.

“You’re not impressed?”

“So you have a penchant for the dramatic. Two can play that game.” I unzipped my uniform, undid my saddlebags, and let the remainder of my clothes fall to the snow. “You see this? This is the body of the people that you alien freaks are trying to claim as your property. If you cared that we were sapient, then you wouldn’t care what we were shaped like. You would respect our right to freedom and autonomy regardless. But no, you covet our bodies. Our flesh and bone.” I advanced on her, watching as she grew increasingly unsettled.

Granthis broke out in peals of nervous laughter. “People?” She pointed at me. “You weird little bug-eyed things don’t even have fingers! What manner of people don’t have those?”

“Or maybe you’re just afraid,” I said, coming to a halt. “Maybe we remind you of something you wish you could forget. How you’re part-beast yourselves.”

The cleomanni shook with rage. “Silence, worm.”

I allowed myself a devilish, toothy grin. “What if those hooves and all that fur were to crawl up your torso and swallow up the rest of you, until you were just another lowly animal, like me? Would the rest of the galaxy see you as fit to enslave, then?”

Captain Granthis charged at me, roaring in wordless anger. She lashed out with a wild kick, but I brushed it aside and grabbed her injured right leg. With a yank and a twist, I sent her to the ground. Bipeds were so poor at balancing. I tried getting her in a leglock, wrenching her injured leg, but she kicked me in the head with her other one and shimmied out of it. As she attempted to crawl away and right herself, I charged into her side, knocking her onto her back.

I mounted her midsection and rained blow after blow on her face, grunting with exertion each time. Cleomanni weren’t nearly as strong or as tough as ponies. They were soft. They broke easily. Their bones shattered like glass from impacts that would leave a pony merely bruised and annoyed. I avoided using the full extent of my strength, not intending to kill her. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to kill her so badly, my legs shook with adrenaline. My vision narrowed to a tunnel, ringed black around the edges. I had to hold back my rage. Instead of pulverizing her entire face, I merely broke her nose. I went for her jaw, next, but when my hoof connected, it felt like I’d punched the frame of my motorcycle. My whole hoof throbbed from the impact.

I gritted my teeth. “Dammit! How much of you is metal?”

“More than enough,” Granthis said.

The cleomanni took advantage of my hesitation, reaching up and gripping my broken rib, twisting it in her hand. The pain was debilitating. I cried out and crumpled like a wet noodle. My foe rolled me over onto my back, clambering onto my chest and laying into my muzzle with fierce punches. The blood from her busted nose dripped off her chin and into my eyes. She tried strangling me with those little hands of hers, digging like knives into the muscles of my neck. She hauled me up into the air, my hind legs dangling, and then choke-slammed me into the ground, knocking the wind out of me.

My forehoof smashed into the side of her head, knocking her off me, quickly followed by a kick from one of my hind legs that sent her stumbling back. I tasted blood. She’d split my lip. One of my eyes was swelling shut. I rolled upright and kicked off with my hind legs, screaming a battle cry and propelling myself like a bullet into her midsection, tackling her and sending us both rolling through the snow.

The fight was neither flashy nor glorious. It was an animalistic and primal struggle, testing the limits of our flesh. We grunted and screeched as we wrestled and struck each other with savage blows, quickly finding ourselves coated in flecks of each other’s blood. Bitch, whore, slut. We called each other everything under the sun.

I was fighting an enraged cleomanni cyborg in the freezing-ass wastes while my boss looked on in slack-jawed wonder at two naked girls beating the pulp out of each other, all set to the backdrop of a rising mushroom cloud. What the fuck is my life anymore?

“You little monsters!” Granthis screeched. “You turned one of our prison camps into a bloodbath! You murdered hundreds of innocent civilians!” She struck me with all her augmented might, knocking the wind out of me.

“It wasn’t a prison for rebels,” I said. “You bastards were kidnapping random ponies and letting your merc friends fuck the life out of them and then eat them for dinner!” I kicked off the ground with both of my hind legs and slammed both my forehooves into her midsection, making her double over and knocking the wind out of her in an explosive cough.

“You liar!” The bloodied and beaten Guild Marbo champion stumbled backwards, fell flat on her ass, and tried crawling away from me, her expression panicked. “You lying, perverse little creature!”

“You want me to stop killing satyrs?” I scooped Granthis up in my forelegs, lifting her struggling form high into the air as I reared up. “Then stop fucking killing ponies!”

I body-slammed her into a tree, hard enough to cover us both with heaps of snow. I collapsed to the ground, panting hard. A psychological reaction, I knew. The air was unnecessary. I didn’t need to breathe.

Granthis, bruised and bleeding from several places, shakily tried to stand, only to crumple against the trunk of the tree I’d thrown her into. I slowly got to my hooves and walked over to her, raising my hoof to strike her again.

“I yield!” she said. “I give up. You win, damn you!” She was shivering more profoundly, now. “You win.” With her anger dissipated, she seemed less proud of her nudity and more lost and afraid than anything else.

“I don’t care about your stupid duel.” I licked my stinging lip, hocked and spat blood. “Your people have been systematically kidnapping and enslaving mine. Can’t you understand why we’re angry? Are cleomanni physically incapable of self-awareness, or what? Am I speaking to a fucking child?” I raised my hoof. “Is this what it takes to get through your skull? A pounding? We are not animals. We are not your property. We are not your playthings to toy with, you dense motherfuckers!” I stomped her bare cunt. “Fuck off!”

Granthis rolled off the tree trunk and fell on her side, her eyes brimming with tears and her shoulders shuddering as she cupped both her hands over her bruised equipment, gasping and wheezing in shock and pain. “Why?”

“Mauvas?!” I shouted. “Aspare muarecule. Aspare ut redever tinse ut doedi biduakin ia hurridnek eiren ut iuva tewext asrii ut tangawuam. Sem melmuarii hrondes aspare ut kuk ast jats virauade a sprenni eir ut a kartar!”

I told her that she was an asshole. That the merc pieces of shit that her people hired had murdered and raped their way across my hometown. That a little booboo on her puss was nothing compared to the degradation we had to suffer. Watching her subsequently shrivel and whimper like a child quickly filled me with a strange sense of remorse.

Granthis wasn’t a real soldier. She wasn’t anything. She was just a spoiled brat playing dress-up on daddy’s dime. I looked down at my shaking, blood-smeared hooves. The power to crush someone with such ease was not a thing to be taken lightly.

The wounded cleomanni slowly rose to a sitting position and wiped her bloodied nose against her arm. “You little liar. My father is a righteous man. He would never sanction the things that you’re accusing him of.”

“Oh really?” I said. “Then explain this!” I limped over to where my Orbit lay in the snow. “Lucky, boot up! Playback mode, charnel-house-dot-vid.”

I gave my Orbit a quick charge with my horn, making sure to fast-forward the recording past Broggas’ imbroglio with the Confederate officer—it was valuable leverage I could’ve used against him at a later date and time, if necessary. Then, I tossed it to the president’s daughter. She caught it out of the air, holding it gingerly with both of her little paws.

“What’s this damnable contraption?” she said.

“An Orbit. A personal aerial drone designed to follow and assist the wielder. You’d know that if you’d studied your enemy enough to call yourself a soldier.”

She gave me a skeptical look, before returning her gaze to the holographic projection of the recording I’d taken in Dodge. I made sure she watched every second of my grisly discovery and subsequent fight. She was lucky that my Orbit didn’t have smell-o-vision; that feature only came standard on top-end models. The enchantment was too complex for most consumer-grade Orbits like the Juke. Otherwise, she would’ve smelled the combination of blood, bile, piss, and shit that saturated the filthy warehouse where the damarkinds had been butchering my kind. However, that proved unnecessary. The visuals were plenty enough.

When the recording came to a stop, Mardissa let the Orbit drop into the snow. She tucked her knees against her chest and buried her head in her hands, sobbing piteously. The sight of it wrenched my heart out of place. I had half a mind to join her. Watching my sister die wasn’t getting any easier. If anything, it was harder each time.

“I don’t know what your father—what your people—have been telling you about my kind,” I said. “Whatever it is, it isn’t the truth. You want my perspective? I’ve been alive for twenty-seven fucking years, and every single one of those years I can remember, I’ve felt nothing but powerlessness. Except for those sparse and terrifying moments where I was in combat, I cannot think of a single day of my life where it felt like I was actually in control of anything.” I gripped one of Granthis’ horns, twisting her face towards me. “And to think, I could’ve had a real life, if it weren’t for you fuckers. Millions, no, billions of ponies could’ve led decent lives, if you assholes had simply left us alone. You destroyed our civilization. Our culture. You took our future away from us. You ruin everything you touch. All you had to do was nothing!”

“Oh gods,” Granthis whined. “I didn’t know they were abusing prisoners! I swear!”

“Ignorance is not an excuse. Your ignorance is what just killed thousands of your countrymen. That’s the thing about you fucking satyrs that’s always ticked me off. You whitewash everything. You like to dissemble and pretend you’re doing something different from what you’re actually doing. No, that’s not the anguished cries of concentration camp victims. It was a flock of geese. No, we didn’t extract every mineral resource we could get our hands on. These are just some shiny rocks. Well, guess what, sunshine? Fuck you!”

“They said your magic would destroy the universe. They—they told us you were dangerous animals that needed to be controlled, for all our sakes!”

I let go of her horn. “The history of ponykind stretches back thousands of years. If that were possible, don’t you think it would’ve already fucking happened by now? No, it’s just another half-baked excuse to treat us like garbage.” I pressed my muzzle into her broken nose, making her wince. “Your species are a bunch of cruel, sadistic morons, and you are a fucking fraud who couldn’t take one injured mare bare-handed even with millions of credits’ worth of augs! Get off my fucking battlefield, you sheltered bitch!”

“I’m—I’m sorry, I—”

I leaned back. “Are you in fucking politics like your father? Can you change even a single fucking thing about your country? Anything noteworthy? Anything at all?”

The white-haired Dochnast stared at me with wide, haunted eyes before casting her gaze downward. “I don’t have any political power. Guild Champions forfeit the ability to hold a public office for a period of ten years after our service is complete. We live to serve the Guilds and act as their representatives on the battlefield. We don’t have a say in anything.”

“Then I don’t give a fuck how sorry you are. Go back to dear ol’ dad and tell him everything you’ve seen here. Let’s see how sorry he feels. I guarantee you, he won’t give a dying rat’s last shit.”

I grabbed the remains of Captain Granthis’ power armor undersuit, ambled over to her and draped it over her shivering form. She looked up at me, her eyes red and bleary, her face streaked with bloody snot.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Eat shit,” I muttered. “I only did it because having Salzaon’s daughter freeze to death on a mountainside while buck-naked and bloody all over isn’t a good look.”

“Oh.”

I gathered up my uniform and my armor, donning them as swiftly as I could with my injuries, which wasn’t very fast. “Ow.” I softly hissed in pain. My face felt like mashed potatoes. Granthis could throw a mean punch.

I sent my Orbit up to survey the area for hostiles and perhaps reveal a way back to the base. Bellwether had bandaged Sierra’s head and treated the rest of her wounds to the best of his ability. He’d also fashioned a makeshift sled and harness from the Skimmer’s wreckage and some paracord, using it to tow our wounded pilot through the snow.

“Right, let’s move out,” Bell said. “See if we can’t find our way back from here.”

Sierra was one of the last survivors from my old unit. We were never particularly close friends, but I didn’t want to see her shuffle off this mortal coil so soon, either. She needed medical attention, and soon. We took a few steps into the woods and quickly realized that we were lost. The EMP had knocked out our helmet radios and we couldn’t access the local datasphere. The way my Orbit seemed practically unharmed was a total mystery to me. It was a civilian model. Suffice it to say, EMP-hardening didn’t come standard on those.

“Just keep on livin’ up to your name, Lucky,” I muttered.

“Who’s Lucky?” Granthis said.

She was following us, jabbering at us as we marched through the snow. I rolled my eyes in exasperation. I’d had enough of her to last me a lifetime. I wished she’d picked another path through the forest. Anything but tagging along with us. Aside from her, our surroundings were eerily quiet, and we had nothing but dead trees and grayish boulders for company. And snow. An endless, white hell of snow.

“My Orbit.” I waved a hoof skyward.

The cleomanni woman smirked. “You named your drone?”

“Yeah. What’s it to you?”

“Nothing. I just think it’s funny. I’m so used to seeing them as completely disposable.”

“It’s not a fucking Screamer. It’s a personal entertainment unit. I wanted to have something to blast tunes with when I was on my break at my old job. You used to see ravers and stuff with these things all the time.”

“How did it survive the electromagnetic pulse?”

“No fucking idea. If I had to guess, I’d say it was magic. Maybe the spell locus warped the EMP flux and kept it away from the electronics? I have no clue.”

Granthis frowned. “So, you’re saying that thing’s roguetech?”

“Yes!” I said. “Everything’s roguetech. Almost everything we make uses magic in some form or another.”

Granthis came to a halt next to her discarded weapon. “Huh. Well, my transport went down a few hundred meters from here, in the woods. See the smoke?” She pointed with one of those bony fingers of hers.

I looked towards the southeast and nodded. “I see it. Kinda hard to spot with how little sunlight we get up here, but yeah, I see it.”

“Let’s head that way. We should be able to salvage something from the wreck. Maybe build a fire. I don’t know.” Her teeth chattered together. “I don’t wanna turn into an icicle out here.”

I huffed with amusement. “Then don’t start a nudist colony in the Crystal fucking Mountains. Leave that to the people with the fur all over. You look like a fuckin’ chimp with alopecia.”

“Oh, drop dead, you miserable creature,” the cleomanni groaned.

“You first.”

Captain Granthis sighed as she idly reached for her Eliminator lying in the snow. Bellwether bared his teeth at her.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m doing nothing. Do you know how much this thing kicks? I can’t shoot it without the suit, anyway.”

“Good.”

The cleomanni woman grumbled as she slung the great big gun-sword over her shoulder, adopting a non-threatening posture. Bellwether shook his head at me, giving me an unblinking stare. I nodded. The meaning was clear. Granthis was probably leading us into a trap.

“Dammit, I still can’t believe you actually tore the reactor off my power suit!” Granthis whined. “You can’t buy those. They’re issued to us. Do you know how expensive those things are? My salary wouldn’t pay for it in two hundred of your years! I’d be well on my way to retirement by then!”

I came to a halt. “How long do you cleomanni live?”

“Five-hundred-something on average, but my twenty-fourth-great grandfather was well over six hundred when he passed. I’m—well, I’m barely any older than you, even. By about four of your planet’s cycles. I’m just a baby, pretty much. I have a long, boring life ahead of me, so long as I quit picking fights with lunatics like you, I suppose.”

I gave her a look of sheer astonishment. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’m quite serious. Why? Don’t you ponies live basically forever? I know your Empress had apparently been kicking around for at least a thousand years.”

“No, we don’t. She’s an alicorn. They’re special. For the rest of us, it’s like, seventy, eighty on average. Maybe over a hundred if we’re lucky.”

“Oh.” Granthis’ eyes widened. “Wow. How unfortunate.”

“Now I have something else to hate you fuckers for! You don’t need all those years, so give me some!”

The two of us roughhoused for a moment, ending in fits of giggles. It was all very strange, how easily we got along, still sporting the marks of our vicious brawl. The young cleomanni had quickly wormed her way into my confidence, and I into hers. My smile fell as I looked at her warily out of the corner of my eye. She seemed almost like a different person from when I’d first met her. She’d made me dance with explosive slugs, cut a mare in half with her sword, and attacked us with spider-bombs. Where did all that typical cleomanni viciousness go? What the fuck is her angle?

“Quiet, you two. We’re coming up on the crash site.” Bellwether squinted. “Contact, one Confederate soldier. By the campfire. No others that I can see.”

“It’s just me and the pilot,” Granthis said. “The rest died in the crash. I see the fire’s already built. Perfect.”

There was a distraught-looking fellow resting his chin on his hand and sitting by the fire on what looked like a jumpseat recovered from the wreck. Since my helmet’s EMP-hardened eyepiece was still functioning but had lost its radio link, I had Lucky come back down to ground level using an orbit recall spell. I played back the footage of our immediate surroundings.

There didn’t appear to be any hidden hostiles lying in ambush, as one would expect. Scattered all around the pilot were the debris of the Confederate Vulture dropship, its smoking engines a grave marker for the soldiers unfortunate enough to have been in the troop bay when it ate shit. It looked like it came down on its belly, rolled over, and the rear section of the fuselage had snapped off and tumbled hard while the cockpit section remained mostly intact. Mardissa’s backseat driving was what saved her life.

When the wayward pilot looked up, his face spread wide into a grin. “Mar! You’re back, did you—” His expression dissolved into one of disgust and horror as he drew his sidearm and leveled it at us. “By the Makers! Stay back! Stay the fuck away!” He was more frightened than anything, almost stumbling over the seat as he backpedaled.

“Ket, they’re with me, relax!” Granthis said.

“They’re fucking Equestrians! Oh gods, did they wipe your brain with their magic? You won’t get me, you little freaks!”

I was about to fire off a retort, but my memory of my earlier encounter with Cicatrice was summoned to the forefront of my mind. My chat with Mardissa and this dropship pilot’s stark fear of us made me realize a couple of things about the cleomanni that I never quite noticed before. It hit me like a sack of bricks.

One, cleomanni longevity—which I might’ve heard of in passing but never gave much thought—would have exerted enormous pressure on them to behave in an expansionist manner. They seemed to reach sexual maturity and have offspring at roughly the same rate ponies did, but then, they continued to linger on for centuries afterward. This meant they could either institute draconian policies to limit births and avoid overpopulation, or they could expand outward through conquest and colonization. They had chosen the latter.

Two, Equestrian magic was a fearsome thing from their perspective. Ponies were magic. We were its living avatars. We violated the laws of the natural world with contemptuous ease. We warped the fabric of spacetime to suit our whims. To us, it was normal and natural. An intrinsic part of our minds and bodies. To them, it was like ionizing radiation. Once cast, it could not be seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or touched. An invisible poison that disfigured its victims and rendered them insane.

I had no way to prove that I hadn’t mind-controlled Granthis into being an obedient puppet, thus having her persuade the pilot into dropping his guard so I could kill him. To the cleomanni, each and every one of us was like a living nuclear weapon, to say nothing of the actual nukes and other tools of devastation we possessed. Ponies were a proliferation hazard. We were something to be tamed, corralled, and controlled. The very thought of it made me feel somehow ashamed.

Mardissa marched up to him, her fist clenched, not caring that she was still half-naked and chilled to the bone. “You dumb fuck!” She dropped the Eliminator, grabbed his pistol and clocked him hard enough to send him into the snow, disarming him in the blink of an eye. She removed the magazine, cycled the action, and then stripped the handgun down to its components for good measure, casually tossing them aside.

“It’s me, you blithering idiot. I’m in full control of my faculties. How dare you suggest otherwise?” Granthis’ statement seemed absurd in light of the fact that her only clothing was a tattered muscle suit draped over her shoulders. “You’ll quit it with this nonsense at once, or I will beat the living shit out of you!”

“Yep,” he groaned. “That’s you, ma’am.”

“Kinda bipolar,” Bellwether whispered in my ear as I suppressed a chuckle.

“Oh no, I think I like her,” I said.

“Ma’am, your armor!” Ket said. “Did they—”

“It was an Honor Duel.”

“Did you win?”

“No.”

Ket looked at us with renewed awe and horror. “How? How could they take you in a fight, ma’am? You’re augmented!”

“They’re much, much stronger than their diminutive size would indicate.” Granthis sighed, turning to me and straightening herself. “You fight well, if a little dirty. That’s twice you’ve bested me, blue-mane. I would have your name.”

“Sergeant Desert Storm, formerly of the Imperial Army. Now, a member of the Liberation Front.” I wasn’t sure if I trusted her enough to tell her what unit and role, yet. She might’ve gotten pissed. “We’re the freedom fighters that you’ve been hunting doggedly for the past several months.”

“I am Captain Mardissa Mavali Taffalstriak Granthis, Champion of Guild Marbo and daughter of Salzaon, president of the Cleomanni Confederacy. This ruddy little Zinsar fellow here is Lieutenant Ketros Armagais, Vulture pilot.”

Ketros waved at us nervously, clearly upset at the idea of a cease-fire, however temporary. Next, Granthis turned to Bell, an expectant look on her face.

“Agent Bellwether, BASKAF.”

The cleomanni briefly made eye contact with each other before they both doubled over laughing.

“What?” Bellwether said. “What’s so funny?”

“My translator must be malfunctioning because of the nuke,” Ketros said. “Did he actually say his name was Castrated-Leader?”

That got me fucking rolling, too. Bellwether stood there, practically vibrating with anger as the three of us had a hearty laugh at his expense.

“It’s—it’s a codename, it’s not even my real name! It’s one of those spy callsign things, like Deepthroat or—” he grumbled. “You know what? Fuck you assholes.”

The three of us laughed even harder. I had to wipe the tears of mirth from my eyes. “Oh, Bell, you’re adorable when you’re mad.”

“Why are you all so upbeat about all this? I mean, look at you two over there.” Bell waved his hoof at the cleomanni. “You’re in pretty good spirits considering we just fucking nuked you.”

Both of them frowned at us. Ketros inhaled sharply to deliver his retort, but Mardissa raised a hand, making it clear he should hold his tongue.

“We’re not happy about it, no,” Granthis said. “I lost a number of my most valued subordinates today. They knew the risks, but none of us anticipated a disaster of this magnitude. Point is, I’d rather not think about what just happened, because it’s too fucking overwhelming. I have a hunch that the rest of you feel the same way. What do you say? Truce?”

I shrugged. “I need a breather, and I don’t care if that means calling time-out and having tea with some satyrs or whatever, because that would be substantially less insane than everything else that’s happened. Besides, none of us have any idea when we’re gonna be rescued or by which side. We’re basically fucked. There’s no food out here. No drinking water, unless you melt some snow. If we split up, we’re probably all gonna freeze to death up here.”

“Truce it is, then.” Granthis’ bruised face widened into a wild grin. “Did someone say tea? I have just the thing! It was in my locker on the Vulture. Oh, I hope it’s not scattered all about the place.”

Mardissa pulled a disappearing act. I glanced at Bell for some moral support through the medium of body language, and when I turned back, she was gone. Me, Bell, and the dropship pilot ambled over to the smoking wreck. The three of us shared some very confused glances as we watched Granthis cursing and dragging corpses from the dropship’s severed aft section. Not to rescue them from the smoke. Her soldiers were already quite dead. No, she just wanted them out of her way, since they were stacked up like cordwood in the dropship’s bay.

A few minutes later, she reappeared from the yawning maw of the doomed craft, dressed in suspendered mechanic’s overalls and sporting a wide grin on her bandaged face. She was holding a bundle of her personal effects in her arms. She rushed over to the campfire with almost childlike glee. I watched her unfold the legs on what I quickly realized was a camp stove, and then set a kettle boiling on it.

“Teatime, everyone!” Granthis waved us over.

We were standing in what was practically a damn blizzard, at perpetual dusk, in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, and the Confederate president’s daughter, who I’d just beaten within an inch of her life, was cheerily inviting us over for tea.

I had to still my breath. I was starting to hyperventilate and wheeze. I walked over to Bellwether and seized him by the collar. “I’m about to have another nervous breakdown.”

“Why?” He said.

“I take back what I said about needing a breather. Nothing is making sense today, and I’m sick of it! Did we survive that nuke? Is this hell?”

“No,” Bellwether said. “It’s an intel opportunity. Follow my lead. Oh, and keep an eye on Sierra’s vitals. We don’t want to lose her.”

He pulled the sled with the casualty over to the campfire. I followed him and checked on our stricken pilot. She still had a pulse and her chest was rising and falling, but she was unresponsive. Not good. I took my helmet off and set it by the campfire. Damn thing was on the fritz, anyway. Granthis had brewed a pot of some manner of loose-leaf tea of a species I’d never seen before. She poured four cups, one for each of us, except for the one who was comatose, obviously. I watched closely to make sure she hadn’t poisoned any of them. Her tea set was one of the gaudiest things I’d ever seen. Every single cup and saucer and even the kettle itself had some crazy gold filigree on it.

When she handed me mine and Bell’s, I hit both the beverages with an adulterant-detection spell that I’d sometimes used when tending the bar at the Gridiron and suspected that some loser was trying to roofie one of my patrons. I’d personally given more than a few stallions some savage beatings over that. They were bigger and stronger, sure, but no one can handle an enraged unicorn mare swinging a barstool at their head with levitation, followed by the rest of the bar dogpiling them until the authorities arrived. Nothing like customer loyalty.

There was nothing. No poison, no sedatives. Nothing. Granthis seriously, no shit, wanted to just kick back and have tea with us, no strings attached. I sat there, wide-eyed and sullen, as I took a few shaky sips to ward off the surreality of it all. It was dark and strong whatever it was, with a hint of cardamom. It wasn’t bad at all.

“So,” Granthis began. “Just so you know? That was it.”

“What?” Bell said. “What was what, now?”

“That force. That the three of you little maniacs just bombed into dust. That was it. That was all I had on this damn backwater planet. We were tracking your transports’ movements on radar. I thought, well, they’re up in the mountains, and they’re obviously up to no good, so, maybe I can take them out all in one go. So, I sent everything I had. Wait, did I say I sent everything? No, Colonel Ashoram sent ‘em. I didn’t do a damn thing of any use. I just tagged along on typical bullshit Guild Champion observation and cheerleading duty. But I think he’s dead, too, so, yeah. I’m all out. That was it.”

“Why are you telling us this?” I said.

Bell shot me a glare, pissed that I’d suggest Granthis show discretion. He clearly sought to take advantage of her loose lips and frayed emotional state.

The satyr woman clapped her hands on her hips. “No point in keeping it a secret, because it doesn’t make much of a difference. I’m basically screwed. You know you kicked over a hornet’s nest with that thing, right?” She pointed at the mushroom cloud. “I have absolutely no clue what sort of reinforcements are on the way, only that they’ll come in numbers fit to blacken your skies. Me? I’ll probably get sent home. Home is, in a word, boring. Very fucking boring.”

“Sucks to be you,” Bellwether said.

“Yeah, it does suck to be me.” Granthis shook her head. “Dad’s gonna fucking kill me!”

“You’re not the only one around here to ever disappoint her father,” I said. “Join the club.”

Granthis gave me a knowing look but chose to ignore that comment. “This has already been a very politically-embarrassing and costly occupation. No one can figure out why the hell we’re even here. I think there was some talk about setting up a gemstone mine? The contract fell through. No one would take it. Too far to transport.”

“So, you can’t even profitably sell the spoils of war,” Bell said. “What a shitshow.”

Captain Granthis jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “We conquered a ball of dirt that we can’t even use, because it’s literally in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, a hundred light years away from the nearest trade lanes. We’re so undermanned and under-supplied, we’re going fucking stir crazy out here. Dieslan Veightnoch has his head up his ass. I’ve never met a narcissist such as he, and I possess several full-length mirrors. He’s sniffed his undies so hard, he’s high on the smell of his own sweaty taint. He dreams of becoming planetary governor over this pathetic little ball of dirt, but he’s sweating bullets because he can’t find any commodities here that anyone could conceivably want.”

“Except us,” I said. “He’s selling us.”

The satyr raised her hand as if to say something, but then thought better of it, resting her chin on her knuckles as she composed herself. “Well, that would explain the sheer desperation in your tactics. I think that was probably more Naimekhe’s idea than his. I hate that fucking bitch. I wish she’d choke on a chicken bone.”

I bristled with rage. “Emlan Broggas told me you fuckers were selling mares into sex slavery. He said we were a hot-ticket item in Confederate space. How could you not know about this, with as highly-placed as you are?”

Granthis leaned back. “Oh, come on. He was fucking with your head. He’s a damarkind. That’s what they do. Or the smart ones do, anyway.” The satyr pinched the bridge of her aching nose. “Or at least I think he was fucking with you. Oh gods, that’s so gross.” She sighed heavily. “Rest assured, I had nothing to do with it. I’ve been busy. Guild business. Livestock isn’t Marbo business. Weapons and consumer goods are. Many of the major defense conglomerates fall under our aegis. What is it you think a Champion does? I’m the face of the whole Marbo brand. My likeness is a commodity. I’m on cigarette packs, I’m in commercials.”

“Oh, no way,” I muttered. “Cigarettes?”

I watched with great incredulity as Granthis pulled a pack of cigs from her pocket and waved it around. Sure enough, her smiling, pigtailed face and pearly white teeth were front and center, framed art-nouveau-style. “Presidents.” She pulled one out and lit up, taking a few drags, before she handed one to each of us. “Gods, we had to film a spot just the other day. They had the worst camera crew I’d ever seen, flown out here on a budget. They fucked up everything and we had to retake the whole damn shoot. Reminds me, I kinda need my face intact. It’s valuable.”

I cringed as I watched her grab her thin little broken nose and center the cartilage back up by hand with a click and a grunt of pain. She was weirdly insensitive to her injuries.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I said.

“Why, do you want it to?” She glared at me.

“Well, maybe not.”

“My bionics are, well, they’re all over. I’m almost completely chromed up, but it’s all hidden under living skin. Very spendy. One of my augs is a pain canceler. Intercepts those pesky nerve impulses before they ever reach the brain and register. GARGs have something similar, but it’s more in-depth and fully modulates behavioral impulses as well. That’s part of why they’re so fearless. I’ve got major skeletal reinforcement and artificial muscle enhancements. I also have an adrenal auto-brewer and numerous other tweaks to keep me sharp.”

I laughed. “You know, the last time I saw you, you weren’t so, uhh—”

“What? Nice?” She let out a huff. “I was basically high on all kinds of stimulant compounds generated by my implants. Dialed them up on purpose. I was probably a sight to see. How about you? Got anything?”

I looked down at the cig. I’d never really smoked tobacco. Weed, once or twice, but that was never really my thing, either. Like my frenemies used to say, I had no chill, and no amount of pot would fix that. Bell had already lit up his. I put the cig in my mouth and tapped the end of mine to his, lighting it up. Bell smirked, clearly intrigued by the gesture’s connotations.

I drew in a breath of smoke, coughing and hacking a few times from the irritation to my airway. First time I tried tobacco, and it was a Confederate cig, while sitting amidst wreckage of a Confederate bird, shooting the shit with some satyrs we’d just nuked. What a weird fuckin’ day this turned out to be.

“Just a standard military neural lace and nanomachine colony,” I said. “And a big hunk of metal in my back that replaces my kidneys and lets me vacuum piss out of my bladder through a tube, apparently. If I want drugs, I have to take them the old-fashioned way.”

“Suck,” Granthis muttered. “I guess they don’t really care about augs in Equestria.”

“Dragoons have augs,” I said. “Most ponies don’t need ‘em. We’re strong enough as it is. It would be cheating.” I smirked.

Granthis laughed. “You’re not strong. You’re ridiculous. When I hit you, it felt like I was pounding a squishy sack full of oobleck. Right under that soft, furry exterior, your insides are dense and leaden. What the hell are you made of? Are you telling me you’re mostly flesh and blood?”

“To my knowledge, yes.”

The satyr ran a finger along her jawline. “If I didn’t have titanium under here, you would’ve broken my jaw. You weren’t even trying, either. I could tell. Do you realize that if you actually took a swing at the average woman, her face would look like a broken jar of ligadtze?”

I had, in fact, taken a swing at more than a few straight-meat cleomanni in my life, and knew exactly what the results were, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. “Liga-what?”

“Lingtberry jam. It’s an engineered hybrid from the early days, back when Guild Marbo had a bigger stake in agricultural products. You know, genegineered seeds and weed killer and all. However, I digress. That vid you showed me. You took five armed damarkinds with a knife and a returned grenade? Are you kidding me?”

“What’s your point?”

“You’re dangerous.” She sighed. “There’s no two ways about it. You ponies are a dangerous, savage species. If you were a part of wider galactic society, how would non-ponies deal with pony criminals? You could be drinking at the bar, getting along merrily with the other patrons, when eventually, as things occasionally do in the course of an evening, a brawl erupts, and before you know it, there’s blood on your hooves and you’re surrounded by twenty dead people. That’s just the physical part. If we include magic, it’s even worse.

“If one single pony actively used magic for force or fraud, to deceive and discombobulate, to warp minds towards some unknown and lofty purpose, it would be a disaster; a pony con artist skilled in the art of mind control could have a trillion-credit pyramid scheme up and running at the word go. Individually, you could unravel the very fabric of our entire society. Collectively, you’re a nightmare.”

I was mad. Livid, even. I had to bite my lip to hold back what I was thinking, because it was laced with all sorts of profanity. “So, that’s the line they’re feeding you people? That we’re a threat to the peace, simply by existing? How can you say that when you’re standing on the grave of our civilization? Are you satyrs really that paranoid, that you can annihilate another species with a clean conscience, and you neither notice nor care that we were obviously never even a real threat to you?”

Granthis blinked a few times. “I’ve never really heard those words in that particular configuration, but when you put it that way, yeah, I suppose so.”

I got to my hooves, marching up to her angrily. “You killed us. You destroyed our cities. Bombed our factories and military bases. You brought everything we built to ruin. Your people are in the process of enslaving mine as we speak, for purposes too hideous to contemplate. And yet, you still have the nerve to say to my face that I’m the danger?”

“But, your magic—”

“We have magic. So what? The nemrin have magic, too, some of it quite dark and nasty, and I don’t see you beating down their door. The things we do with magic, you do with technology. A spell can control a mind. So can an AI algorithm that feeds targeted ads at people. The tools that you’ve used to shape your society and allow it to prosper aren’t any different from ours. Your excuse for our destruction does not hold water!”

Granthis was shaky as she took a sip of her tea, her eyes darting around as the wheels turned in her head. She took an uncomfortably long stare at the mushroom cloud. “Teatime is supposed to be a time to relax. This is getting kinda uncomfortable.”

I threw my forelegs into the air. “Welcome to my entire life! The fact that it took a barely-educated mare from a dead-end town like me to put a rich, spoiled brat like you in her place is the saddest fucking thing I’ve had to deal with all year, and I had a death in the family!”

“You’re an autodidact,” Granthis said.

I cocked an eyebrow. “A what?”

“You may lack a formal education on general topics, which I’m honestly not sure how much is true and how much is just you being in denial and clinging to some small-town sentimentality about your class identity, but judging by the way you speak, you read, and you read a lot. You have a penchant for violence. Certainly enough to take me on with your bare hooves. You’re also very politically-minded.” Granthis fixed me with eyes that were piercing and predatory; less her cutesy, fakey mask, and more of the real cleomanni oppressor that I suspected she was, deep inside. “I can see why Broggas wanted you for his traveling carnival of death, pilot.” She spat the word.

“You know?” I muttered.

“Of course I did. You admitted to it on camera. Bright in some ways, but dull in others, I see. But then again, I suppose it’s been rough, what with the trauma and all. Have any brain fog, lately? Difficulty remembering basic details?”

I rolled my eyes. “Fucking hell. The president’s daughter is a better shrink than our base’s actual shrink. I give up. This is too weird.”

Granthis doubled over laughing. She put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m just fucking with you, come on.”

The two of us shared a bout of genuine, honest laughter. More than I thought possible when in the presence of our species’ mortal foe.

“Oh shit, you had me!” I said.

“It’s one of the few things I’m actually good at,” she said. “You know how fortune-tellers work, right? They just say generic things that could apply to almost anyone, and half-wits actually lap that drivel right up. Politics is much the same. Having to sit around listening to politicians and CEOs and other insufferable cretins, you pick up some people-reading skills. I had to get away. I was tired of it all. I needed adventure.”

My smile fell. Adventure. The word roiled my consciousness. She’d just fucked up. We had been getting along so well, too.

“So, your idea of adventure was to take up arms, travel halfway across the galaxy, and kill people that you don’t even know, just for sport?” I said.

“Wasn’t it the same for you? Why did you enlist?”

I stared at the ground, shaking my head, before fixing an angry glare on her. “I joined because my people were under attack. I joined because I didn’t think there was going to be a ponykind in a few years, the way things were going. I had a job. I had steady, if meager, income. I didn’t need to do this. I wanted to. To defend my people and save them from destruction. How does that even compare to your cooped-up boredom?”

Granthis was shaking, spilling drips of her tea. I could see the dread in her eyes. The reality she’d tried desperately to ignore was staring her right in the face.

“You’re not an animal,” she said.

I nodded eagerly at her to continue. I liked the way this was going, and I urged her along this train of thought. She was thinking the unthinkable. Saying the unsayable. The forbidden words. They all knew it. After all, non-sapients didn’t build starships and mechs. They’d chosen to deliberately deny our intellect and capacity for reason, against all evidence.

“You’re a person.” She looked me up and down as if I had suddenly grown another head. “Oh gods.”

Ketros shook his head angrily, like he was disgusted with her for turning traitor right in front of him. He knew the truth, too. His loyalties, however, were stronger. I could tell that Salzaon’s daughter resented him enough to defy his will. She was a weak link. She could be exploited. I briefly felt disgusted at myself for thinking it. It was like something a satyr would think. This, however, was no mere chat with the enemy. This was a continuation of the battle by other means.

“Congratulations.” I said, clapping my hooves together in a slow, mocking manner. “I look forward to when Mil-Int finds out about your little epiphany and you commit suicide with two bullets to the back of the head.”

“What?” Granthis was aghast.

“Really? You don’t know?” I chuckled darkly. “Your intelligence service assassinates dissidents all the time. You can’t keep billions of people from recognizing the sapience of an alien species without propaganda, and where propaganda fails, murder shores it up.”

Granthis stiffened with anger. “So what you’re saying is that you believe there is a conspiracy that was hatched by Confederate Military Intelligence to kill our citizens for expressing themselves in a free society?”

“Yes.”

“That is an extraordinary claim.” Granthis loudly clinked her teacup against her saucer. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“Right. And if I were you, I’d keep a lid on being a pony sympathizer, unless you want your dear ol’ daddy to put you in a cage and throw away the key.”

“We cleomanni believe in democracy,” she said. “If there is a problem with our foreign policy, it ought to be put to a vote. I may be willing to recognize the personhood of Equestrians, however, it is an unavoidable fact that your government was an oppressive and dictatorial one. Twilight Sparkle was a bloodthirsty lunatic. You let an undying mad scientist rule unopposed for centuries. What did you expect? That the galaxy would welcome you? You, yourself, are a Charger pilot. No doubt a fugitive and a war criminal. I’m supposed to take you in for interrogation, not give you succor. Terrorists and WMDs are a nasty combination. In spite of it all, I am forced to acknowledge the simple fact that you’re a threat to the peace.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “All the democracy money can buy. Look at you. You have enough invested in your augs to feed a thousand families for a year. You carry a gold-inlaid tea set into battle. Our government was strict and authoritarian out of necessity. It took every single resource, every scrap of labor, everything we had, just to resist the tip of the Confederacy’s finger. Do you know what that means? It means that our public works were robbed to pay for weapons. We had to live like dogs, just to secure our independence. We had to sacrifice everything, just to survive. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? You spent your entire life in luxury. This isn’t a war for you bastards. It’s an all-expenses-paid vacation.”

“You wretch.” Granthis’ eyes narrowed to slits. “You’ll not speak to me that way, or demean my country so.”

I chuckled darkly; this conversation mirrored the one I’d had with Broggas, except now, I was the cackling creature on the other side of it. “I can and I will. I’ve lived the kind of life that you only pretend to live. You know, it’s ironic. You style yourself as some warrior-princess, but I bet if we compared body counts, I’d be on top, too. Just like I beat your ass black and blue. What made you think you could keep up with a Charger pilot for killing? I bet I’ve killed more people before breakfast than you’ve managed in your entire career. I’m better than you at everything. Cuter, even. That white hair makes you look like an old nag. That’s why you had to mash up my face. You’re jealous of my good looks.”

Granthis stood, her hands balled into fists. “Your people may have some legitimate grievances that have not been addressed, but you? You are contemptible, petty, and arrogant beyond belief. You might be one of the most distasteful people I have ever had the misfortune to make the acquaintance of, and I’ve sat in on meetings with heads of state. Is fighting all you know? Have you forgotten how to behave? How to be a person?”

“Rich of you to complain about that, when all of two seconds ago, you hadn’t yet acknowledged that I was one!” I shouted at her, my tears flowing free. “You’re out here, casually cutting ponies in half with a plasma sword with the help of a fortune in augs, because home is too boring. I’m out here, fighting with every last ounce of strength and willpower remaining in my failing body, because if I don’t, my people will be reduced to living as your fucking pets! There are fundamental, irreconcilable differences between you and me, imp. The more you compare yourself to me, the angrier I get!”

“You snuck in, in the dead of night, into one of our outposts, with intent to murder my comrades in their sleep.” Granthis pointed at me accusingly. “You got the whipping that you deserved!”

“Ladies, calm it the fuck down.” Bell turned to Ketros. “Aren’t you sick of this shit, too?”

“Just shoot me already,” Ket sighed. “If I’d known I’d be crashing my bird and then listening to this much pony melodrama today, I would’ve chugged a whole bottle of sleeping pills and checked out.”

“I dunno,” Bell said. “Looks like the Captain can whine up a storm, too. No pun intended.”

“Good to see women are the same everywhere.” Ket snickered.

I fixed him with a glare. “Shut up and stay out of this, you scrawny little prick.”

“Bite me, you sopping cunt.”

I practically invaded his personal space, to which he shrunk away in terror. “Oh, you wanna go, too, string bean?” I said. “You want me to beat both your asses, is that it? Huh?”

“Leave Ket be,” Granthis said. “He is no match. You’ll break him like a twig. I will take this fight. I want a rematch. Certainly, it is impossible that there is anything like honor or virtue in one such as you. Your victory had to have been a fluke. A mistake. I will rectify this.”

Granthis rolled up her shirt sleeves and adopted a fighting stance, well away from the campfire, where we wouldn’t trip on it at the very least. I squared up to her, my whole body practically shaking with rage. Bell and Ket decided to step back out of the way, giving each other mortified looks at what was soon to ensue.

Bellwether shook his head. “Sergeant, Captain, we don’t have enough medical supplies if one of you is seriously wounded. All we have is just what’s in the wreckage of the transport. Do you want us to try and find our way out of here with a broken bone slowing one of you down? Because if that’s what ends up happening, then guess what? I ain’t pulling a sled with you on it. Either of you. You can die in the fuckin’ cold for all I care.”

Both of us ignored him. Granthis swept her hands in an upward motion, swinging her arms in a circle. I guffawed like a maniac at this pathetic display. “Is that some martial arts thing? Are you trying to incapacitate me with laughter, flapping your wings like a fucking chicken over there? You’re a joke. The hell are you even doing, besides a pretty good impression of a windmill?”

“Turning all the augmented reality sliders on my combat augs up to max,” she said, her head twitching a little as her eyes tracked things I couldn’t see.

My smile slowly evaporated. We circled each other for a few seconds, sizing each other up. Then, we lunged. She closed the distance faster than I expected, her rising knee slamming into my chin and sending me tumbling back. My muzzle dripped blood into the snow, tinging it red.

“That’s the way you wanna play?” I wiped my nose. “Fine!”

I cloaked myself and launched myself into a full gallop, circling around behind her, fully intent on clambering onto her back and putting her in a choke. Instead, her hand latched around my neck and she twisted and slammed me to the ground, my invisibility faltering.

“How?” I croaked.

“I can see your prints in the snow, dipshit,” Granthis said. “Circular impressions from those big, dumb hooves, clear as day. What, you didn’t think the daughter of a hunter could track? I used to make plaster casts of animal tracks and collect ‘em!”

“Wow.” I rolled my eyes. “What a dumb hobby.”

“We ate well.” She licked her lips. “Very well.”

“Fuckin’ carnivores. You’re all the same.”

She dragged me up and clobbered me with a haymaker, making me eat dirt. “Say what you want, salad-munch. I miss the taste of venison. The other day, I saw a deer that talked. Great big ten-point buck. He nibbled on some berries and then he started jawing at some other forest critter. Couldn’t work up the nerve to shoot him since he was neither armed nor resisting, and my guys went hungry that night. Thought I was losing my marbles, but I guess this planet does that to you.”

“You should’ve stayed home.” I slowly stood, nursing my wounds. “Nopony wants you or your kind here. Just go. Leave us in peace.”

“So you can start another huge arms buildup and come after us later? Do you seriously think I’m gonna let you little rainbow pastel freaks cart off those nukes and sneak them into our population centers?” Granthis raised her fists. “I’ll put you in the fucking ground, first!”

“There it is,” I said. “Your paranoia overrides your basic decency, mercy, and common sense. Yeah, we’re gonna build ships and tanks and Chargers when we have places with no electricity, no running water, and no functioning hospitals that aren’t alley docs. No wonder the Diplomatic Corps made no headway. You fuckers can’t be talked to. You’re sympathetic and understanding one minute, and the next, it’s completely vanished from your head and replaced with scheming and malice! Maybe you’re the threat! Maybe you people are a danger to the galaxy, and we ponies need to save it and everyone in it from being bullied by you!”

Granthis gesticulated madly, jerking her finger at the mountain range. “You just killed an entire division of my troops with a fucking nuke!”

“Oh yeah!” I said. “I bet they were some real family men, raining down mortars on a rescue operation! That base’s bunkers had thousands of non-combat personnel trapped in them for the past three years! Why’d you attack us in the first place? You wanna enslave them, too? Huh, bitch? You worthless bitch! They’re out of your reach, now! You’ll never have them!”

Ketros rubbed his chin, sitting on a rock side-by-side with Bell. “You know, this kind of raw xenophobia between our species never really occurred to me, but seeing it in this context, it’s like, wow, how did I not notice it before? This is just plain ugly.”

Bellwether sighed and unscrewed the cap on a metal flask. “I don’t usually drink on the job, but today, I’ll make an exception. Can’t handle this shit sober.” He took a big long swig and then hoofed it over to Ket.

“What’s this?”

“Gin. Other half’s yours.”

Ketros winced and wiped off the neck of the flask, before chugging the last of it. “Never thought I’d swap spitback with a pony.”

“Hey.” Bell frowned. “Code of manliness. We don’t talk about the backwash in the liquor. Besides, the alcohol kills everything.”

“Yeah, including my dignity.”

I reared up and both my forehooves smashed into Granthis’ upraised palms. We struggled like that, hoof-to-hand, trying to overpower each other. With a savage roar and a fit of froth, the cyborg got the upper hand, pushing me back. My hind legs tried finding purchase, but I was digging furrows in the dirt. Then, she headbutted me, sending me reeling. She didn’t let up the pressure. She dashed up and drove her fist into my broken rib. The pain was debilitating, even through my armor. I fought the urge to cry out in agony. I had a pain-blocker, too, but mine had to be activated manually, for specific zones of the body, and was far more primitive and riskier to use.

I made some distance between me and my opponent and then ran the cable from my armor to my spinal port, plugging it into the back of my neck. “VoCom, salve zone C2!”

“C2, neuro-salve active,” my armor’s onboard computer buzzed.

A stinging pain filled my side, like a swarm of wasps had gotten to it. I let out a little shriek, stifling it through gritted teeth. Soon, a burning numbness coated my ribs and I sighed in relief. Everypony’s body was split into zones, according to the vital sign monitors in our armor. A1 was the head, followed by B1, B2, B3, and B4, which were the right leg, right chest, left chest, and left leg, C1 and C2, which were the right and left halves of the abdomen and the back, and D1, D2, D3, and D4, which covered the haunches and the hind legs, again, from right to left. The system monitored the status of every part of my body with the help of my nanomachine colony. A medic could read it out and get a general idea of one’s injuries in moments, allowing for prompt treatment. I reached up with my forehooves and cracked my neck from side to side.

“I’m gonna enjoy beating you to a pulp,” I muttered.

“Try me, you little whore!” Granthis grinned. “I bet your sister loved the dicking she got! I bet you’re jealous you didn’t get some of that alien dick when you had the chance!”

My heart surged in my chest with rage the likes of which I’d never felt. I wanted to rip her face off and wear it. However, in an instant, it dissolved into a cold nothingness as the rational half of my mind took over. I looked up at her with concern on my features.

“Captain, you’re not the same person I was talking to a moment ago. Those augs are no good. Walking around and making yourself chemically-imbalanced at the flick of a switch can’t be good for your brain.”

“I didn’t have a choice!” The corners of her mouth frothed, like a mad dog. “They don’t let me fight without them!” She fell to her knees, burying her head in her hands. “They don’t let—they don’t let soldiers fight without them, unless you’re a man.”

I thought back. Delved into my memories. I’d never really seen any female cleomanni on the battlefield. The occasional security officer, medic, or non-combat personnel, sure. They weren’t a primary component of the infantry. Not like mares were for the Imperial Army, which had a far more equal gender ratio. I’d never really pondered the implications up until this very moment.

“Are you serious?” I said. “I thought we mares had it bad, what with the damn heat suppressors and all that annoying bullshit. Are you telling me they won’t clear you for front-line combat unless you agree to be chromed up like a hot rod, just because you’re a woman?”

She nodded, sobbing all the while. “Yes.”

“What else don’t they let girls do in your fucked-up country?”

“Hold a job. If we’re married. It’s against the law. We’re expected to do housework and manage our husband’s property. It is a grave dishonor to him if a man’s wife earns more than he does.”

I felt a cold emptiness in the pit of my stomach. It took me several mortified, teary-eyed seconds to formulate a cogent response. “That’s fucked.”

Granthis looked up at me, indignant, shaking with anger. “How much can you lift?”

“I dunno.” I shrugged. “I mean, I can bench like eight hundred kilos, at least, but I’m kind of not in the best shape anymore. Most I’ve ever had on my back was when some construction dudes in Baltimare dared me to see if I could balance an I-beam on there. Why?”

“Without my augs, the most I could bench was sixty, maybe seventy kilos. With them, five or six hundred. Your natural strength is an order of magnitude greater than ours.”

I was taken aback. They were so weak. Back at the Gridiron, we regularly carried serving trays of beer stacked almost all the way to the ceiling on our backs. No magic, even. “Sixty kilograms? That’s nothing!”

“To you, sure. For us, it’s something. Even a strongman who’d trained all his life could never match an Equestrian’s strength. You’d shatter him like a porcelain doll, if you really tried. You’re just like a godsdamned damarkind, at a fraction the size. You’re an abomination. Aberrant and bizarre!”

I marched up to her, my anger boiling over. “So, you’re insecure about your biology, you’re paranoid about the threat we allegedly pose, you’re motivated primarily by boredom and listlessness, and your country is a chauvinistic hellhole?” I looked down on her with the utmost contempt. “You’re such a waste of fucking space, it’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for you. I used to have nightmares about you people.” I poked her chest with the tip of my hoof for emphasis. “I had no idea I was fighting an army of weak, lily-livered, selfish, ignorant, spineless cowards!”

Granthis seized my right foreleg and yanked it with all her might, pulling me to the ground with her. There was a brief struggle, the two of us wrestling for a few moments, trying to gain purchase. She wrapped her legs around me, using her whole body as a lever, twisting and pulling. I cried out in pain as my leg got away from me. There was a sickening pop as my shoulder dislocated. I screamed and I screamed, my adrenaline flowing in lightheaded, agonized terror. As she let go of me and stood up, I writhed on the ground, sobbing and panting, trying to steady myself.

“I’m not gonna let you take me,” I said. “You’re not gonna take me alive!” I scrambled for the grenade on my vest. A pair of hands came down and clasped around the metal globe. We fought over it, punching each other bloody, her with whichever arm she chose, me with my good leg. I was losing. With every blow that struck home, I sank further and further into unconsciousness. Bested by the president’s brat and her fancy, expensive bionics. How humiliating.

When her fist came down for what must’ve been the eighth time, rather than taking it on the muzzle, I spread my jaws wide and latched around her wrist, biting the hell out of her. I refused to lose. I was a daughter of Equestria. I was more than the equal of any satyr, no matter what trickery or surgical improvements they possessed. She started freaking out, thrashing around and trying to free herself as I bit down harder, tasting her blood on my tongue.

“Let go of me, beast! Bug-eyed furry freak!”

I twisted her arm up and back with my neck, wrestling with her until I’d gained the top mount position. With my left leg, I struck her in the ribs, grunting explosively and kicking her over and over with every ounce of strength in my body, her metal innards clanking and crunching until finally, something snapped. Her screams were the sweetest music to me. I wanted to break her more. Crush her like aluminum foil. Pop her head like bubble wrap. I wanted to recreationally destroy her, piece by bloody piece.

“Alright, cut it the fuck out!” Bellwether said, interposing himself between me and my mark and forcing us apart. “That’s enough! Break it up!”

I rolled off of Granthis, my left eye swollen completely shut, my insides protesting. My right shoulder burned like hell.

Bell glared down at us disapprovingly. “Are you two happy now? You pleased with yourselves? What do you think this does for our chances of survival, with the two of you fucking each other up like this? We have a wounded and unresponsive mare, here. We don’t know when she’s going to be treated. We don’t know when we’re going to be rescued, either. We need every resource at our disposal, and our health is one of them. Knock it the hell off!”

I dragged myself over to the cleomanni woman, crawling on top of her and draping my foreleg over her neck. Not quite a hug, or an embrace of any kind. I slumped onto her, our bodies warm against each other in the cold snow.

“Give ‘em back,” I cried. “Gimme my sisters back. It’s not fair. You had no right.”

Mardissa’s bloodied hand slowly, shakily reached up and caressed the back of my head. “I’m—sorry,” she rasped. “Sorry—about your loss.” She swallowed a mouthful of blood. “I have siblings, too. I can’t imagine what I’d do if something so terrible happened to them. I just wanted to do something my family would be proud of. I don’t understand. I did everything right. Why did it turn out—like this?”

Ketros sighed and shook his head, still perched on a rock several meters away. “Ma’am, if you two are gonna do what may be the first interspecies lesbian kiss in the history of their kind and ours, then just get it over with, already.”

“Fuck off, Ket,” Granthis said.

“Yeah, fuck off,” I concurred.

“It’s been a thousand years since our two species collided,” Bellwether grumbled under his breath. “It’s happened before, trust me.”

I stood, steadying myself on three legs, gritting my teeth in pain. “VoCom, salve—” I broke down in fits of coughing.

“Please state the zone you wish to neuro-salve,” my armor’s onboard computer spoke.

I just stood there, shaking and crying. I couldn’t think of any specific one. I was chilled to the bone and hurting all over. Physically. Mentally. My very soul ached.

“Zones B1 and B2,” I said.

The suit let out a chirp. “B1, neuro-salve active. B2, neuro-salve active. Warning; excess use of neuro-salve may lead to permanent neuropathy. Please discontinue use immediately and contact a healthcare professional.” This synthesized voice was followed by a pre-recorded message of Twilight Sparkle’s actual voice, which I’d always found hilarious. “Avoid demyelination sickness, soldier. ‘Cause my—elin’s impor—tant!” She sang from my suit’s external speaker.

I snapped a branch off a tree, stuck it in the bars of my mouth, and bit down, hard. I steadied my breathing, staring straight ahead. I gripped my dislocated leg in my levitation, my chest tightening in anticipation. This would have to be quick. I applied more and more force, pushing the joint back into its socket, until there was a loud, juicy pop. I screamed. Even with my nanites clustering around my nerve endings and blocking most of the pain signals, it was pure agony. After spitting the branch out, I tested my foreleg, finding the mobility satisfactory. There would be some serious soreness later, but that was par for the course.

I sat down hard, right next to my opponent. Didn’t even look her in the eye. Couldn’t. She’d leaned up and was clutching her abdomen where I’d beaten her severely. The two of us sat there for a minute, breathing heavily and staring out into space.

“Captain,” I said.

“You can call me Mar,” she said. “Everyone else does.”

“Okay, then. Mar?”

“Yeah, what?”

I huffed a couple times, almost a laugh, staring up at the partly dispersed mushroom cloud that hung silently over the frozen peaks. “Do you think this is just going to keep going on forever like this? Ponies and satyrs. Hurting each other. Forever. Huh?”

I looked her in the eyes, wearing the best pleading expression I had. Our gazes locked together, her obstinacy in retreat before mine. There was only one thing I could detect in the countenance she wore.

Fear. Overriding, all-consuming fear.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Mardissa Granthis

I reached my hand out to touch Desert Storm’s cheek. Her beaten, miserable face didn’t move a muscle. I rubbed the light orange fur between my fingers. My hand retracted in mild shock. It was like velour. Impossibly fine.

“Soft,” I said. “Soft and warm.”

A memory filtered through, up from the doldrums. An instructor tapped his stick against the blackboard, pointing to the anatomical features of a pony drawn in chalk. They use their innocuous appearance as a weapon. To manipulate and deceive. Consider the poison dart frog. It, too, appears colorful and harmless at first glance, but the colors are a warning. They say, ‘I contain a deadly toxin.’ These are not beings that any sane person would want to get cozy with.

“Aren’t you tired?” Storm said. “When does the killing stop? For both of us? When do we go back to what remains of our normal lives? What will that take?”

These creatures possess a power known in their culture as magic, but to our science, broadly, as Equestrian Paraphysicalism, or EP. It is much like the paraphysical phenomena wielded by the nemrin, but far more potent and more dangerous. The unicorns are the ones you want to watch out for. Beware their horns. A skilled practitioner of EP can inflict a wide variety of disturbing and lethal conditions upon their victims.

“I’m tired of the killing. I’m tired of fighting. There’s nothing left for me to even fight for. It’s all gone. Everypony is dead!”

Should you come into contact with one, you may be violently torqued or crushed with telekinetic powers, hypnotized, set aflame by paraphysical means, or even have security-sensitive information stolen directly from your mind. If you are taken captive, reveal nothing. Do not respond to their verbal prompts. Concentrate on the idea of an empty, white room. This will prevent your mind from being pilfered of classified data.

“I’m tired.” The grief-stricken Charger pilot shook her head slowly, tears dripping off her chin. “I’m so tired!”

An Equestrian may try pleading with you for its life. This is a trick. Our neuroscientists have determined that these creatures are non-sapient and have no internal experience or qualia. Everything they do is an automatic response to danger. What appears to be learning and cognition is nothing of the sort. They will lie and deceive you until you betray your allies, or subtly manipulate you with their magic until you become mentally disordered. If that happens, you may be quarantined until you can be medically cleared to return to duty, once qualified personnel have determined that you remain free of the taint of paraphysical phenomena.

In defiance of all logic, along with everything I’d been trained to do in this situation, I reached out and swept my arms around the unicorn, pulling her tight to my chest.

I’d expected to be bitten, to be crushed, or to be brainwashed with powerful and inscrutable magic if I ever made the mistake of getting this close to a pony. Instead, the strong, determined, brave, and fully sapient person in my grasp slumped against me, her tense, abused muscles relaxing, her wounded body trembling in the cold as she tearfully returned my embrace.

I cried like I hadn’t done since I was a child.

// … end transmission …

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