//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

This was really happening. A prison break, after three years of this hell. My heart thumped in my chest with uncontrolled excitement. I had to steel my nerves and calm myself.

I surveyed the corridor further down from where the mare whose space suit I now wore had fallen in combat. There were a couple other bodies down the hall. Ponies. Same suits. No weapons in sight. Their wounds weren’t consistent with projectile or energy weapon fire. They’d been stabbed—or, for lack of a better term, gored—by something very hard and sharp. One of them looked partly dissolved. I wasn’t sure what that was all about. I wasn’t curious enough to take a closer look, either.

The entire passageway showed signs of damage due to decompression. One of the nearby viewports had been cut open, patched, and then sealed with VacStop foam, allowing the compartment to recompress. I remembered the stuff vividly from that time one of my lance-mates emptied a can of it into my uniform as a prank. The shit hardened almost instantly into a headless pony statue. They were on latrine duty for days after that little stunt.

Regardless, that must have been how these ponies gained entry to this side of the station. The way they were taken out so quick, I wondered where these jokers got equipment like this. I claimed one of their undamaged helmets and clicked it into place over the neck seal. I gritted my teeth as the suit’s layers automatically contracted with enough force to provide mechanical pressure against my body equal to one atmosphere of air pressure. The suit’s HUD flickered into view, life support systems reading all green. The rebreather was automatically bypassed to draw in the station’s atmosphere instead of the suit’s limited air supply, which was good for a full half-hour.

Where had the Confederate crew members gone? Panic room? Muster stations? I followed the light that pooled on the deck to a corridor resounding with heavy foot traffic. I hid behind an arch as the footsteps passed, briefly peeking out to make sure the coast was clear. Crossing the brightly-lit passageway, I entered one of the exchange vestibules, which had a passage that spiraled from the horizontal to the vertical, with electrokinetic artificial gravity generators to transition from the rotating habitat rings to the spire. I dove under a rapidly closing door that led to a passage in one of the spars joining one of the outer rings and the central spire, flanked by rows of viewports on either side that provided a panoramic view of the station.

I sprinted as fast as I could down a hall that seemingly had no end. A group of cleomanni technicians dressed in orange jumpsuits appeared about a hundred meters ahead, scrambling in my direction. I stopped and pressed myself face-first into a corner as they passed, holding my breath so the suit’s bypass valve wouldn’t make a sound. I dared a glance over my shoulder, but they were already well down the hall in the direction opposite the one I was going. I hadn’t needed to use my magic to conceal myself, which was a good thing, since the suppression ring made that impossible.

I reached the end of the corridor and encountered a T-junction with passages on either side of me that curved around the central spire. The air ducts and cabling grew thicker and the lighting sparser in this area. Color-coded stripes on the deck indicated the paths to specific compartments, but I couldn’t read the legends. After a moment’s hesitation, I took a left turn. While not watching where I was going, I ran face-first into four heavily armed guards. Or rather, my helmet slammed right into one of their groin protectors, causing me to fall flat on my ass.

The guards were clad in imposing matte black riot gear, specially padded and reinforced to resist even the fiercest of blunt impacts, like the kind a pony could deliver. They also had flechette guns. I remembered the outline of the fearsome cleomanni firearms from my equipment recognition classes. These smoothbore weapons projected small, fin-stabilized subcaliber darts of a unique sintered metal construction. First, their tungsten carbide tips penetrated through body armor. Then, they yawed violently and the flechette’s semi-frangible base shattered into a cloud of fragments, forming a massive wound cavity. Typical kinetic energies at the muzzle were in the area of seven thousand joules, producing fierce recoil that was dampened through the use of a large muzzle brake.

These weapons and their ammunition violated several interstellar treaties. Treaties that, incidentally, did not apply to members of my own species. I didn’t have a mirror, but I could feel the look of horror etching itself onto my face. I’d seen hits from these things pluck the legs off even the most heavily armored ponies from hundreds of meters away. To think that they would actually use weapons with such a high degree of penetration on a space station. Are these people insane?

I yelped and dove out of the way as the deafening blasts of gunfire opened up in the corridor, the thick metal bulkheads ringing with each pressure wave that impacted them. Without hesitation, I kicked out a grating and hurled myself into an air duct. I squeezed inside, crawling as fast as I could with the suit’s bulk and inflexibility impeding my progress.

I made a few turns as the ductwork groaned under my weight, narrowly avoiding being blended by a massive recirculation blower. I smashed another grating in the floor of the duct and lowered myself gently into the darkened, cavernous space beyond. I landed with all four hooves on the deck, catching my breath as I tried to get my bearings.

There were computer terminals and worktables everywhere. Cables, server racks, and monitoring stations wreathed a massive column in the center of the room, lit up like a Hearth’s Warming tree. There were no cleomanni guards, technicians, or drones in sight, so I took a few tentative steps toward the center of the room. I could see the space beneath me through the expanded metal deck, appearing as a bottomless pit for all intents and purposes. Security in the station’s core seemed surprisingly lacking compared to the measures I’d seen in the cell loading areas. I quickly surmised that they never expected a pony to make it this far.

Adjoining the column was a console with a cylindrical object inset in it, flanked on either side by various controls. I had no idea what I was looking at, until I noticed the camera overhead swiveling toward me, its mechanical eye zooming in on my features. A voice blared through the speakers in the overhead, startling me.

“So, you’re alive, Two-Two-Five-Seven. I always knew there was something different about you. Such a special snowflake you are.”

“Can it, ya’ damn can opener.”

“A fine choice of metaphors. My masters are on their way to you right now, but my little pets are right on their heels. Oh, and they will open you right up, so I can gaze inside that hairy little sausage casing you call a body.”

I was perplexed by the artificial intelligence’s choice of words. Pets? Did she mean the drones?

“Ah, you’re pissed. Wonderful. I guess I’ll just go around smashing things in here, starting with this.” I pointed my hoof threateningly at the cylindrical object in the console’s center.

“By the end of this cycle, I will have you on an examination table.” Scheherazade’s voice took on an androgynous, almost demonic quality. “I will turn you inside out. I will show your peritoneum to your dying eyes, you gormless, dim-witted, shambling pile of water and germs.”

“Wow, do y—do you spend all day in here practicing that? That’s pretty good.”

Silence.

“A-hah,” I said, grinning wide. “See? You do!”

“The Empire’s power has been broken,” the AI spoke. “My masters saw to that. Your sole remaining world is barely capable of sustaining life. You have no noteworthy industry. No centralized government. Your people live in abject poverty and misery, as they rightly should. You and your rebel friends resist us at your own peril.”

“You’re mistaken about one thing.”

“And what is that?”

“These ponies aren’t my friends. If they were, they would have secured this entire fucked-up rat’s nest of a facility an hour ago without botching the main objective.”

Before Scheherazade could say another word, I used my forehooves to twist and unplug what I assumed was her core from the console, adding yet another layer of harsh beeping tones to the sirens that hadn’t stopped blaring since the breach began. There wasn’t another peep out of her. I grinned. Success! I set the core on my back. Then, I gingerly used my teeth to manipulate the suit’s quick-release tie-downs and hold it in place. After taking one last look around to make sure that there wasn’t anything I’d missed, I bolted to the nearest door and hit the button next to it. Nothing.

“Come on!” I smacked it a few more times with my hoof. I was about to give up and start looking for another exit when the door slid open, revealing the shocked face of the computer technician who’d been sent to investigate the alarm.

“Angatz fe—”

Before she could finish calling for help, I propelled my body forward, turned, and launched myself backward from the deck with my forehooves, twisting as I lashed out with a hind leg aimed straight for her knee. I heard something crack as my hoof connected with the joint, its striking power enhanced by the weight and solidity of the EVA suit’s magnetic boots. The satyr screamed in pain, crumpling to the floor. She scooted backward with one hand and pressed herself up against the door frame, reaching for her sidearm with her other hand as she continued screeching in her guttural tongue for help that would never arrive. Wrong move.

“Mela aspare ut giege!” I shouted.

The look on the cleomanni’s face was one of incomprehension and absolute terror as I straddled her and unleashed the haymaker to end all haymakers. I was almost certain I heard her jaw shatter. She slumped over, either dead or unconscious. I didn’t care, really.

To be absolutely sure the threat was neutralized, I took her pulse pistol from its holster, set it on the deck, and stomped it flat. Its flimsy composite casing and power source fizzed and sparked, releasing puffs of smoke that my suit filtered out so that the foul stench of burnt windings never reached my nostrils. Without the benefit of fingers, levitation magic, or a combat harness, there was no way I could wield a weapon with such a small trigger.

I heard shouts and the sputtering sounds of approaching contragrav drives. Guards and drones. The situation was worsening with each passing moment. I had to consciously control my breathing and remind myself not to panic. A calm operator was a successful one. I needed to think about this rationally. I hadn’t been able to open the door leading from the central server room, which meant that the effects of the hack had been undone, either by Scheherazade or remotely, from one of the security rooms. I glanced at the unconscious technician.

In a monstrous act born of desperation, I drew one of her arms out and brought my hoof down. Twice. Thrice. By the fourth blow, I’d liberated her hand from her body with a squishy noise that made me wince. It was not like she’d be missing it for long.

After picking her severed hand up with my fetlock and stuffing it in my EVA suit’s chest pouch, I took off on a steady gallop in the direction opposite the sound of the approaching sentries. After a hundred meters, I arrived at a closed blast door, panting heavily, more from nervousness than exhaustion.

Oddly, I found that if I held my breath, I didn’t feel particularly starved for air. I pushed that thought to the back of my mind as I withdrew the technician’s severed hand and pressed it to the palm reader. Two rapid-fire beeps that sounded suspiciously like uh-uh, nope, then nothing. The door wouldn’t open. I could feel sweat beading on my brow.

“Come on. Come on! Shit!”

I felt the barrel of a gun against the back of my helmeted head. I dropped the severed hand and slowly raised both of my forehooves.

“It measures vitals as well, you sick little four-legged fuck,” he said.

One of the biggest mistakes any lone, unaugmented cleomanni fighter could make was to get this close to a pony.

I ducked and wrapped my forelegs around the flechette gun, pulling it—and him—with me. After a brief struggle, I wrenched the weapon out of his grasp and kicked it down the corridor. Using my small size to my advantage, I slipped backward between his legs and leaped atop his back, pulling my forelegs tight around his neck and placing him in a headlock.

“Then let’s try this instead,” I said. “Open the door, or I’ll break your fucking neck!”

He grunted with displeasure in response. When I saw him reach for his sidearm, I applied more pressure, wrenching his spine.

“Yesterday, fuckface!” I screamed.

“I’ll do it! Ease up, will ya?”

The guard ran his arm-mounted badge over the card reader and punched in a four-digit PIN. I figured it was a stopgap measure they’d put in place to allow gloved and helmeted crew members to access spaces without removing protective gear to use the biometric scanners. The door’s heavy bolts slammed open, and the thick steel semicircles retracted out of the way by rotating into recesses in the door frame.

“Much obliged.”

I squeezed harder, feeling him squirm and try to shimmy out of the choke, but it was futile. He was out cold in ten seconds flat. Before his buddies could arrive and see one of their number slumped over on the deck, I dragged him through the blast door and into the passage beyond before shutting it behind me. A warm, triumphant feeling washed over me at the thought of buying myself a few seconds by throwing off their pursuit, followed by the icy chill of realizing that I’d left a very conspicuous severed hand on the other side of the door.

I fled down a half-kilometer passageway identical to the one that had taken me to the station’s central spire, only on the opposite side. Keeping up the tempo, it took me a little over half a minute to reach the end. It’d been at least seven minutes since I’d last communicated with the rebels. I had three more left, and that was it.

“Where the hell are you?” My headset crackled with the voice of the rebel leader. “We’ve got contacts on radar and infrared. They’re three thousand kilometers out and closing fast. They’ll be right on top of us in about two hundred seconds. Move your arse!”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said. “Cool your jets.”

It was a bit of an ironic statement. If anything, I was the one having trouble keeping my cool. I heard the staccato cracks of flechette gun fire down the corridor. I turned and watched as a terrified mare with a gunmetal coat and dark green mane angled for a doorway mere moments before her attackers mercilessly cut her down. Three solid hits stapled their way from her shoulder to her neck, leaving ragged exit wounds large enough to fit my hoof into.

She toppled over, skidding into a wall, before slowly and shakily attempting to stand. The doomed mare tried to speak, but her eyes widened as a fountain of blood poured from her mouth and nostrils. She reached out to me with a foreleg, a pleading expression on her face, but I could do nothing but watch as one of the guards drew her sidearm and blew their quarry’s brains all over the corridor.

She had been wearing a control collar, I noticed. Why did they have to kill her? Did my removal of Scheherazade’s core affect the security systems more profoundly than I’d thought it would?

Then, they turned to me, where I stood frozen in the middle of the passageway like a deer caught in the proverbial headlights. Deer sucked at reading warning signs and using crosswalks, the poor forest yokels that they were.

“Atal!” The guardswoman with the pistol shouted and pointed in my direction with a gauntleted hand.

I ran. Anywhere. Away. As fast as I could. A ribbed hose in the overhead got caught by a stray round and fell limply toward the deck, spewing white clouds of gas. A hail of projectiles loudly ricocheted off the bulkheads, slamming into one of the lozenge-shaped skylights that lined the station’s passageways. I heard the whistling sound, but it was too late to stop it.

“You fucking lunatics!” I screamed.

The skylight blew out, sucked into the depths of space. I would’ve been spaced again if I hadn’t activated the EVA suit’s magnetic boots, securing myself to the deck. The guards weren’t so lucky. I watched as they, along with everything else in the vicinity that wasn’t bolted down, including an end table, a chair, some magazines, and a couple of fake potted plants, forcefully ejected themselves from the station. The lights went out and the emergency lighting kicked in, illuminating the corridor with a red hue. Access doors sealed to prevent the atmosphere loss from spreading to adjacent compartments. My route to the ship was now blocked off.

I was so close to freedom, I could taste it. This wouldn’t stop me. I climbed toward the breached skylight, my boots clanking against the deck. I went straight up a ferrous ascending plate along a wall and then clambered out onto the exterior of the station, greeted by miles of bright blue and white armor plating covered in hatches, conduits, and antennae, curving out of view like a metal atoll. I was standing on the inner edge of one of the rotating ring sections, under the influence of rotational gravity. I flipped the helmet’s reflective gold-tinted visor down so I wouldn’t be blinded.

I looked up. Our home, our planet, filled the sky. I felt a sensation of wetness in the corner of my eye. After all that I’d seen today, witnessing the world I’d fought so hard to protect was the one thing that moved me to tears.

Ahriman Station was located in high orbit between Equestria and its moon. Off in the distance, specks of metal trailing columns of blue fire glinted in the sun. The incoming patrol boats were turned with their drives facing us. They were decelerating. Rendezvousing with us. I had to board that ship. It was now or never.

In the vacuum of space, I hadn’t heard the hatch as it swung open behind me. A hand seized my hind leg, trying to drag me inside the station. I grunted from exertion as I kicked and thrashed, barely managing to remain magnetically locked to the station’s hull with my forelegs. I broke free, putting some distance between myself and my attacker. The blue-armored guard climbed out of the access port, leveling an electrolaser. I recognized the face behind the clear visor. My suit-to-suit radio crackled as it locked onto the diplomatic frequency.

“You always were a troublemaker, Storm!” Elgon roared. “Is that Scheherazade’s core? You give that back, you little shit!”

I smiled. “You sad sacks finally started using my real name instead of a number. Getting a little too familiar, aren’t we?”

“Sanwea’s in the medbay because of you, having a prosthetic attached.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I cocked my head quizzically. “Was that your girlfriend? Is she all right? I mean, I hope she still has all her brain cells and stuff.”

“I’m sick of this.” There was pain in his voice. “I’m tired of cleaning up after you savages and the messes you make. I can’t believe she convinced me to drop out of college to come work here in this dead-end backwater. You fucking things. You Equestrians make my gorge rise. There’s something dreadfully wrong about the lot of you that I can’t quite place, especially you. It’s like you’ve been worming your way into my head since I got here. You make my skin crawl. I hate you miserable, contemptible creatures so bloody much!”

“You know, if you hate your job so much, then you don’t need to fight me,” I said. “You can just turn around and walk away.”

“Yeah, I’ll get around to it, just as soon as I’m done shoveling what’s left of you into the incinerator.”

He turned the weapon’s dial to its highest setting and pulled the trigger. Warning diodes on the side of the stock lit up bright blue, and then, there was nothing. There were no flesh-frying arcs of electricity lancing out at me. He tried smacking the weapon with the base of his palm, perplexed.

“Maybe if you’d stayed in school, you’d know that electrolasers don’t work in space,” I said, wearing as patronizing of a grin as I could manage. “And even if you did manage to get off a shot, this suit’s non-conductive. It wouldn’t do shit.”

Infuriated, he threw the bulky, rifle-shaped weapon at me. As I ducked under it, he charged and drew out a large combat knife with a serrated spine. I raised my forelegs and braced myself. The impact knocked me flat on my ass. All four of my hooves were now free of the station, meaning that the only thing keeping me from tumbling off the edge of the ring was the fact that I was wrestling in an airless environment with a maddened alien hell-bent on punching a twenty-centimeter piece of sharpened steel through my vital organs.

He thrust the blade toward my chest, trying to breach my suit. I knocked his hand aside with my hoof. He was having trouble getting a good enough footing to deliver a proper thrust, but on the other hoof, it still took everything I had just to keep him from stabbing me. Every move I made felt unnatural without air resistance and with the bulk of the suit holding me back. My unit never drilled on EVA fighting, and that meant I was deep in unfamiliar territory. Business as usual. You had to improvise your way around gaps in training, or you were dead weight.

Just when I thought I’d seized control of his arms, he headbutted me. A few more hits like that one could have smashed my helmet’s visor. He angled the knife toward my side. I swatted at it with one of the metal boots encasing my hooves, knocking it out of his grasp and sending it twirling off the edge of the ring. He drew his pistol. I gripped it with both of my forelegs. He fired. The round would’ve struck my helmet if I hadn’t wrestled the muzzle of the weapon away while flinching my head in the opposite direction. He fired again. Another miss. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, O2 saturation warnings in my heads-up display blinking red. Every gulped mouthful of saliva, every labored breath, every desperate shriek; I had no idea that hearing nothing but the sounds emanating from one’s own windpipe during a fight could be so stressful and claustrophobic. The whole world was silent, except for me.

Fed up with my resistance, he resorted to looping an arm around my neck and heaving me toward the edge of the ring. Simultaneously, I managed to wrest the handgun from his grip, pinching it between my hooves. I flailed my hind legs around, my limbs trying to find purchase as I tumbled across the station’s smooth hull. The impacts made me lose my grip. The pistol was knocked out of my hooves, spinning off into the darkness. Just before I went over the edge, my forelegs touched down on the station’s hull, my magnetic boots thudding into place. I peered over the edge of the ring. The Confederacy used ring habitats like these to save on electric power. Every square meter covered by in-deck electrokinetic generators drew several kilowatts, and for a habitat this size, the number of additional solar panels or larger reactors would be less economical than simply making the whole damn thing rotate.

I quickly did the math in my head. In order to generate one gee in the central deck of the habitation area, given a centrifuge of this radius, we had to be rotating at over one-point-four revolutions per minute. I eyeballed the distance to the other inner edge. About eight hundred meters. Multiply by Pi to get the circumference of about two-point-five kilometers, then divide by the number of seconds to complete one revolution. My tangential velocity had to be in the area of fifty-nine meters per second, which was how fast I would be flung sideways off the edge of the station with the direction of rotation if I fell off and my linear motion was no longer constrained in a circle.

Elgon uncrossed his arms, coiling his body as though he were about to lunge for me. He’d expected me to fall off the edge and careen off into space. Before he could adequately prepare himself, I broke into a gallop and tackled him into a radio antenna, which crunched under his armor’s mass. While we pirouetted over the station’s hull, he punched me in the ribs, knocking the wind out of me. After Elgon came out of the clash on top, he hunched over me, grabbed my helmeted head, turned me face-down, and smashed my visor into the station’s metal plating over and over. After the fifth hit, a small, spiderwebbing crack appeared in my helmet’s reflective outer lens.

I let out an animalistic growl as I swung a foreleg behind me, striking the side of his helmet with substantial force and denting the armor over his temple. The blow stunned him temporarily, and he let go. It would be his last mistake. I righted myself and wrapped my left foreleg around the back of his helmet. I could see the fear in his eyes as I viciously drove my right hoof through his visor, polycarbonate fragments flying every which way.

Elgon clawed at his face, appearing to gag as the air was sucked out of his lungs. I turned and bucked him in the chest with both of my hind legs, sending him flying off the edge of the hab ring in the general direction of Equestria. I stood there, catching my breath as I watched him recede into the distance, where he would become part of the twinkling debris field that encircled our planet.

“What’d I tell you?” I muttered into the radio, though I was certain he could no longer hear me with the inside of his helmet vacuumed. “Dead before you hit the ground.”

I turned and ran along the inner surface of the ring until I arrived at an access hatch less than a hundred meters from the docked ship. I peered over the edge. The boxy patrol boat bristled with weapons, antennae, and surveillance gear, but a front-line combat vessel it most certainly was not. Even the powerful anti-capital torpedoes and stand-off armor plating typically found on ships of this class had been deleted from this particular design, presumably to cut operating costs. I tried the handle, but it was no good. There was no way to override the lockdown from the outside. I decided to radio the ship.

“This is Sergeant Storm. I’m at a locked exterior hatch near the umbilical. Can you guys get this fucking thing open? Over.”

Static. I waited about ten seconds, glancing at the approaching engine plumes of the returning picket craft.

“What’s the holdup? They’re almost here.”

Another ten seconds passed. Still no response. I gritted my teeth as my insides churned. My annoyance at having come this far only to be ignored slowly built into a seething rage. I pounded my hooves on the hatch.

“Open. The. Fucking. Doo-”

I was cut off by the hatch opening in my face and a pony in a black spacesuit peeking out, his shoulder-mount weapon gimbal tracking his head movements as he swept his eyes over the station’s exterior. I saw the battle-worn and faded logos plastered on his armor. A black silhouette of a rearing horse within an orange diamond. Percheron Solutions. A highly successful, centuries-old private military company that provided VIP protection and security services at the height of the war. It went without saying that they were most likely dissolved in the war’s cataclysmic conclusion, their members scattered to the winds.

Seeing me, he motioned for me to follow him into the cramped airlock, which I did after a moment’s hesitation. The hatch slammed shut, and the vertical, cylindrical, and quite cramped compartment pressurized. The access door at the base of the airlock slid open. We each let go of the ladder, and in turn, our hooves landed on an elevated catwalk with a thud.

As we made our way down about twenty stories of stairs, the gravity subtly shifted as we descended toward the ring’s edge. My jaw went slack as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and I took in what was happening before me. The cargo bay below was utter pandemonium. In the midst of a murky darkness punctuated by thick clouds of smoke and red emergency strobes, my cleomanni captors were engaged in a protracted gun battle with the intruders. Flechettes ricocheted off the barricades the ponies had hastily erected. I watched a pony in mechanic’s coveralls try and move from cover to cover, only to catch a flechette round in the face, peeling off her jaw with a spray of red mist. I could hear her incoherent screaming over the gunfire.

Using the superior vantage point, the stallion standing beside me on the catwalk took aim at the cleomanni guard who had exposed himself to make that shot. He placed his forehooves in the magnetic pull-rings under his shoulder-mounted beamcasters and drew them down and back, pulling the cords about halfway to the trigger point as he leaned over the railing. The twin ball turrets in the shoulders of his armor glowed like the eyes of a manticore in the darkness, swiveling to track their target.

He yanked the pull-rings downward. Motes of emerald light swarmed over conduits leading from the beamcasters’ saddlebag power supplies and the weapons discharged. The two pencil-thin beams of green-tinged magical energy converged and caught the guard in the chest in the same spot, right over his heart. He fell and did not move a muscle. As his comrades swept their tactical lights over their fallen squadmate, I could see a small cloud of smoke and water vapor rising from the hole in his armor. The rest scattered and took cover, some elevating their aim in our general direction.

The return fire was swift in coming, and the stallion looped a foreleg around my neck and heaved me out of the way as flechettes pinged off the catwalk, visibly deforming the handrails and metal grating. We galloped down the stairway at the end. I missed a step and took the last half-flight sliding on my belly.

As I approached the barricade, sidling up to a stack of metal crates, I saw a pony bleeding heavily from the leg, his armor partially undone to give a unicorn medic better access to the wound so she could apply clotting agents. If he hadn’t been wearing knee pads, the flechette would have taken his leg clean off. As it was, the wounded area bulged gruesomely, the bone underneath shattered and tissue avulsed. The flechette impacts grew thicker. The green beams lancing out from the barricade were thinning in number. We were losing, and badly.

Just when I thought it would never be safe to make the mad dash to the umbilical linking the station to the commandeered patrol boat, a silver blur flashed in the corner of my eye. Four hooves impacted the deck, wings held high. The pegasus was covered from head to hoof in curvaceous white armor with silver accents. Their face was obscured by a helm that resembled an ancient armet from Pre-Imperial times.

Both sides stopped firing, absolutely dumbstruck, as was I. The newcomer was standing between the barricade and our attackers, right in the open. They were suicidally exposed. It was then that I noticed the heraldic emblems on their gleaming suit of armor and the black form-fitting layer visible between the gaps in the outer plating. This individual was wearing an exosuit emblazoned in the markings of the Dragoons.

The cleomanni guards opened fire, but their flechettes streaked harmlessly around a transparent bubble of purple-hued magic that ensconced the armored pegasus. No pegasus could perform such a feat with their intrinsic magic. I knew very little about Dragoon exosuits, but what I knew of magic as a unicorn told me that such a barrier must have been the product of a powerful enchantment. Her attackers ceased fire, their magazines expended to no effect. The pegasus had a lance mounted to the side of their combat harness, which they raised high in the air in an intimidating display.

“Sem akeh ast pleueve den Rehr Aisseste neimlaros a tarre!” the armored mare bellowed in Equestrian. “Awile Eune! Awile Keleste! Awile Renleus!”

It was the war cry of a fanatic who could never be bargained or reasoned with. That which is blessed by Her Majesty cannot be broken. Hail Luna. Hail Celestia. Hail Twilight. I felt a slight pang of sympathy for the poor cleomanni prison guards who were the subject of her wrath.

As the satyrs prepared to unleash another volley of flechettes, the Dragoon flapped her armored wings and lunged like she was shot out of a cannon, her lance catching one of the guards in the throat. She kept charging forward, pinning him to a bulkhead that let out a shriek of twisted metal from the sheer force of the impact. She dislodged the lance from his severed spine by lashing out with both forehooves, pulping his helmeted head like a ripe watermelon.

In under three seconds, she had rocketed twenty meters, impaled a guard’s neck, and crushed his skull like it was nothing. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I’d never seen violence of this magnitude up close and personal. It was always through the exterior cameras of my Charger, which provided a sense of clinical detachment from the outside world.

The armored mare was a savage blur as she swung the lance wide, sending her hapless foes hurtling through the air. I averted my eyes from the carnage. From the opposite end of the cargo bay rose a chorus of bloodcurdling screams and wet crunching noises that made my gorge rise. As we hid behind the crates piled up on the storage racks, I simply stood there and shook my head in disbelief. I immediately re-evaluated the intruders’ capabilities based on this new information. If they had someone like this with them, they weren’t fucking around.

“They used to call us volunteer Charger pilots freaks and monsters,” I said. “So, what does that make her?”

“You’re a pilot, eh?” my black-armored stallion companion said in that reedy South Zebrican accent of his. “Looks like this is our lucky day. Nice job making it this far on your own.”

“These Confederate pukes can’t find their ass with both hands,” I said. “The fact that you guys are taking casualties at all is unacceptable. You spaced the fucking prisoners, too! What if one of my lance-mates is now a desiccated mummy?”

“Hey, not all of us know our way around a beamcaster. We had to drum up some extra hooves for this op. Some of them only had a week’s worth of training.”

“A week, or a month, or a year,” I said. “Makes no difference with some ponies.”

“You can say that again.” He cocked his head quizzically. “Hey, what’s that thing on your back, there?”

“The station’s AI core.”

“You—huh—but—” he stammered. “Wow. The Captain will want to see that thing, pronto.”

We darted past the barricade and toward the junction leading to the umbilical. I stopped myself, turning and glancing at the wounded and dying ponies at the barricade. I’d seen this before. So many damned times. Never felt right leaving them behind. Hell, these ponies weren’t even soldiers. They were untrained militia being herded around by hardened guns-for-hire and used as meat shields. Against my better judgment, I hustled over to the nearest fallen mare, looped my forelegs under hers, and started dragging her toward the umbilical, ignoring her groans of pain.

“The hell are you doing?” the black-armored stallion said.

“Help me get the wounded to safety,” I said.

“Leave ‘em. They’re useless.”

I was irate. “You get your ass over here and move these casualties to the ship, boy, or so help me, I will thump you so hard, you’ll look like one big bruise with legs!”

“This is crazy!”

“They didn’t swear any oaths to the Empress. They owe you nothing, and yet, they were willing to give up their lives pursuing your ignorant little errand. Whoever’s in charge of this clusterfuck has their blood on his hooves.”

“We don’t have the time for this,” he said. “Those picket craft are right on top of us. They probably have us locked and are readying a firing solution as we speak.”

“They won’t shoot.” I waved a hoof dismissively. “Not while we’re docked to the station.”

There was a distant explosion and a rumble that shook me to my core. I felt a growing sense of dread. The merc’s eyes locked with mine. Based on the look of utter chagrin spreading across his face, I could see he shared my feelings on the matter.

“W—would they?” I said.

I heard the shouts of a stallion and approaching hoofbeats at the junction behind me. “Run! They’re coming!”

It was Driving Band. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to make it out of the cell blocks. While me and the occupants of the cells on the station’s exterior had been spaced, there were probably quite a few still at the paddock when the security system was breached. Lucky bastard.

“Oh, it’s you,” he muttered angrily. “I thought you were vacuumed with the rest.”

“Would you lend us a hoof, sir?” I said.

“You’re out of your gourd.” He turned a few shades paler right through his coat. “I’m not sticking around to get killed by those things.”

“You mean the cleomanni? We’ve got a Dragoon with us. She can handle them.”

“No, not them, they’re these fucking—” He stopped himself to catch his breath, absolutely terrified out of his wits. “They’re things. Okay? They’re not ponies, whatever they are. Or if they were, they’re not anymore.”

“The fuck are you on about?” The merc took a few strides toward Lieutenant Band.

At that moment, the lights in the corridor went out. After five seconds, the backups failed to kick in. I felt a lump forming in my throat. In the darkness as black as pitch, I could hear the scrape of metal talons on the deckplates and an eerie and unnatural mechanical clicking and gibbering. I let go of the wounded pony, and we all backpedaled from the source of the noise. Seconds later, I heard the sickening sound of teeth ripping flesh from bone and the gurgle of air escaping a torn windpipe. My heart racing, I turned and bolted for the umbilical as fast as my legs could carry me. Driving Band was not far behind.

As we neared the airlock, I heard screams and the sound of beamcaster fire behind us. The merc in the black armor hadn’t been fast enough on his hooves to outpace whatever it was that doggedly pursued us. I punched the controls for the airlock and cycled us through the vestibule, feeling the artificial gravity flicker under my hooves as I transitioned from the influence of one generator to the next. We boarded the ship and moved quickly through the mess hall and up to the bridge. I could see the tip of a pony’s mane just barely protruding over the headrest of the oversized command chair. I pulled my helmet off and kicked it aside.

“I wanna know what the hell you people were hoping to accomplish here,” I said to the pony who was responsible not only for the deaths of most of the soldiers held captive on Ahriman Station but his ill-fated subordinates as well.

The Captain—presumably the pony I’d been in communication with since I picked up the dead hacker’s radio—didn’t even bother to turn around. I bared my teeth angrily, taking a few steps closer and peeking around the back of the chair. The unicorn stallion’s ribcage was exposed, his entrails torn and splattered all over the nav console. I could hear heavy, almost metallic breathing. I turned and looked at Driving Band, who stood stock-still, his lips trembling in terror. There was something dripping on the deckplates. Saliva?

Our eyes tracked upward in unison to the overhead, where twelve orange eyes glowed in the darkness. Three of them. They had been clinging to the ceiling in near-silence, waiting to ambush us. A mechanical roar filled the compartment.

“Move!” I shouted, propelling myself through the doorway with Driving Band in tow. I threw my limbs around the stallion in a bear hug, sending us careening into a recess in the dimly lit mess hall with U-shaped sectional seating running along the bulkhead.

We crawled under a small dining table. I wrapped my limbs around Band’s back as I hunched over him. I slowed my breathing, trying to calm myself while silencing the whines and protests of the cowardly Lieutenant beneath me by reaching down and holding my hoof over his mouth. I could hear them as they approached. The chattering of the creatures made a chill run down my spine. The vocalizations were too rapid, too mechanical to be any natural language. It had to be some kind of code—a digital shorthand. For a moment, I wondered if they were entirely flesh and blood, or something else.

They were getting closer. Even if they couldn’t see us from this angle, they could still smell us. One of them stopped just a few meters from the table and started advancing toward us, making those rapid clicking noises between sharp, rasping inhalations. I held my breath. I could feel the wetness of the stallion’s tears on my hoof and his muscles tensing up as he squirmed underneath me. I rolled my eyes. If we were going to die, the least we could do was die with our honor as soldiers intact.

I was in the process of coming up with a hastily concocted contingency plan when I heard a loud bang and a pained screech. We both turned to peek out from under the table, immediately finding ourselves face-to-face with something out of a nightmare. The crimson stallion underneath me screamed into my hoof at the sight of it.

If one were to judge the creature only by its silhouette, one could have almost mistaken it for a pony. Beyond the creature’s quadrupedal body plan, the similarities ended. The thing’s gnarled and mutated form was coated in segmented plates of chromed steel. It had four small fiery orbs for eyes, two in tandem on either side of its sloping, reptilian head. A forked tongue slithered forth from a maw ringed with row after row of razor-sharp teeth. Its legs ended in cloven hooves, a bizarre talon protruding rearward from each of its fetlocks. Atop its armored head was a horn of steel, sharpened to a needle-fine point. This was no unicorn horn. It could only have one purpose, and that was to kill in the messiest way I could imagine.

Its bladed tail flicked around menacingly as it turned just in time for a hard-driven lance to pierce the roof of its mouth and exit through the top of its skull. The abomination kicked and flailed, swiping at the white-armored Dragoon with its tail as it struggled to free itself. Another clambered onto her back and latched its jaws around her neck, its teeth slipping off the magical barrier field generated by her armor. She wrenched her lance from her initial target and performed a wing-assisted backflip, the momentum flinging the attacker on her back into a far wall. Before it could recover, she charged, firing the auto-targeting beamcasters on her shoulders with a momentary thought relayed via her implants.

Twin purple beams of a higher, more intense magical spectrum than the standard-issue green variety crackled like thunder, and a significant portion of the moisture in her target’s body instantly flashed into steam, with appropriately gory results. Bits of armor and charred flesh flew everywhere, a whitish-red cloud left in their place. The one that had been speared in the head lay on the ground, kicking at the air for a few moments until it eventually went still, the trauma to its cranium too great to recover from. The air hung heavy with the metallic stink of ozone.

I crawled out from under the table and opened my mouth to voice my appreciation for the timely rescue, but I soon realized my mistake. Something swiped across my cheek. My face seared with unimaginable pain. The things’ tails were as sharp as scalpels, and the incisions they made were like the worst paper cut multiplied tenfold. The tail whipped around in my field of vision, slicing into my shoulders, trying to wrap around my neck and slit my jugular.

I just barely managed to raise my hooves in time to block it, but the pain of the thing’s tail ripping through my EVA suit and digging into my forelegs was almost unbearable. I tried to buck the abomination in the legs as it mounted my back, but it rammed its forehooves into my spine. My face connected with the deckplates. Dazed and concussed, I could feel my mouth filling with blood. I spat out half of a broken tooth. To say that the thing rang my bell would be an understatement.

I rolled over, screaming and kicking madly, desperate to keep the monster from crushing me to a pulp. The fork-tongued not-pony casually swatted my left foreleg. One of my cannon bones snapped like a twig. I gasped in shock, momentarily stunned by the sheer agony I was experiencing. The thing pounded my chest, and for all I knew, it cracked a rib in the process. In the jumble of half-formed thoughts that raced through my mind, I picked out the most salient one, which was that I didn’t want to die.

Right when the bionic beast dipped its head to tear out my throat and end my misery, the Dragoon’s lance speared it in the side. She reared up and stomped its head repeatedly in a gruesome display, each blow like a power hammer, crushing its gleaming chrome skull a little more and a little more until there was nothing left but the faint glimmer of shattered metal beneath the gore.

I felt like I wanted to pass out, but somehow, I managed to stay conscious for the time being. I rolled upright and tested my broken leg. Bad idea. I hissed, biting my lip to stifle a scream. The Dragoon rushed over and cradled me with her hooves to keep me from collapsing. Her helmet split into individual pieces that retracted into her armored gorget, revealing the pegasus’s blue eyes, lilac coat, and salmon-tinged mane with white stripes.

She was perfect, unblemished in every way, her coat seeming to shimmer even in the dimly lit mess hall. She could have been a supermodel were it not for the fact that her sheer symmetry bordered on the uncanny, like a painting by an overconfident amateur, or a porcelain doll. I knew the Dragoons were enhanced in utero before they were born into a lifelong regimen of ceaseless, grueling training exercises and rituals. However, seeing one up close and unmasked was unsettling. I would’ve been jealous of her good looks if the point was to look like a plastic surgery victim.

“You should’ve stayed hidden,” she spoke, her Trottingham accent even stronger than the deceased Captain’s was. “Normal ponies can’t deal with these creatures.”

I glanced at the remains of the abomination that had almost turned me into a wet stain on the deck. “What th—” I coughed and hacked, spitting up blood. “What in the everloving fuck were those?!”

“Karkadann.”

“What?”

“It’s classified.” The Dragoon shrugged. “Bad for morale.”

Back in the day, I’d heard of entire infantry squads going missing without a trace, save perhaps for the occasional pool of blood or discarded helmet. During a few of those ill-fated missions, I’d witnessed intermittent contacts on my Charger’s sensors that seemed to vanish so quickly that I thought it had picked up a bird or malfunctioned or something. I had never imagined that something like this was the cause.

The Dragoon helped prop me up as we walked to one of the sectional seats, where I promptly collapsed, still breathing heavily, my body taxed to its very limit. I checked Scheherazade’s core to ensure it wasn’t damaged, but there wasn’t a scratch on the damnable thing. Every time I swallowed, it tasted like copper. Before, I’d been able to ignore all the little aches and pains I’d accumulated in my sprint to the patrol boat, but now, I felt like I’d been thrown down a flight of stairs or ten. Driving Band was still under the table, whimpering and trembling in fear. The only thing that had changed was that he was now surrounded by a puddle of his own reeking urine. Typical.

The Dragoon started off in the direction of the bridge, but I stopped her, saying, “He’s dead. Don’t bother.”

She turned back to me, a worried look etched onto her face, before wrinkling her muzzle and averting her eyes. “Dammit, I told the Admiral this was a disaster in the making.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

The Dragoon pointed her hoof at me. “Identify yourselves.”

“I’m Sergeant Storm, formerly of the Imperial Army. The guy soiling himself under the table in front of me is Lieutenant Band.”

“I am Commodore Layer Cake of Her Imperial Majesty’s honored Dragoons. I hold the title of Dragon Knight, and I am charged with the sacred duty of defending the Empire and its subjects in these times of crisis.”

I saluted and held that posture.

“At ease, Sergeant,” she said.

I nodded. “With all due respect, ma’am, I’d say this is well beyond what you’d call a crisis. The war’s been over for three years now. All our major industrial and agricultural centers are dust. Everfree City is a graveyard. Any ships trying to break through the naval blockade encircling Equestria are destroyed in minutes. It’s amazing what you overhear when you’ve got nothing to do but listen to the gossip of a bunch of cut-rate zookeepers for a few years.”

“And yet, we made it this far, didn’t we?” She craned her neck to look at the cylinder on my back. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes.”

“Ooo, jackpot.”

“Yeah, I’ve been getting that a lot.” I sheepishly ran a hoof through my mane, trying to ignore the excruciating pain I was in.

The impact of heavy weapons fire shook the eighty-meter-long patrol boat, making my teeth rattle. Luckily, the deflectors held.

“A few more like that, and we may as well put our heads between our hind legs and kiss our own asses goodbye,” I said.

“Sergeant, I need you on the scanner, pronto. Captain Riverdance may be KIA, but he wasn’t the only one who trained on this vessel’s controls. I’m going to fly us out of here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, getting up and hobbling toward the bridge, trying not to put any pressure on my left foreleg. “I’ll do my best.”

As I made my way there, a couple of the survivors from the battle in the cargo bay came through the airlock. They made an about-face and trained their beamcasters on the vestibule nervously. I could hear them muttering amongst themselves about how those things had mulched that mercenary stallion and left bits of him strewn all about the corridor.

“What’s your specialty?” Commodore Cake said.

“Charger pilot, ma’am. Light Scouts.” As I leaned up against the bulkhead while she set about the unenviable task of dragging Riverdance’s corpse off the bridge and sweeping his guts from the nav console, I kept talking to stay alert and conscious.

“Ahh, one of the housecleaners,” she said. “It was always a pleasure to see you fellows tidying up after us.”

I ignored the bitter sarcasm in my superior’s voice. “And it was always good to have your support laying the groundwork for a major operation. Remember the Zoroaster Dam mission on Kabelaced III?”

“Yes, vaguely. I read the after-action reports, anyway. That was the Red Banner detachment. Not my Dragoons. Different unit.”

“I was there in my Mirage-type.” I paused to spit out a mouthful of blood. “You guys went in ahead of us, cut through their rear lines, and set the charges on the dam. By the time those Confederate bastards realized what was happening, it was too late for them to pull back. Flooded the whole valley and drowned most of the defenders.” I laughed. “It was one of the most badass things I’d ever seen.”

Her expression was grim. “There were also several mechanized platoons of our own soldiers in the valley who perished that day, either because they couldn’t hold their fighting positions or because the water swept them away,” she solemnly intoned.

I held my tongue. A dark and twisted part of me wanted to say it was their fault for being too slow on the uptake when Admiral Star Crusher gave the order to withdraw, but I refused to stoop that low. They really did give it their all, and their sacrifice paved the way for the Imperial occupation of Kabelaced III.

We were forced off that planet a few months later when Confederate reinforcements from the 7th Interdiction Fleet and their infamous Blackbird Squadron made landfall. Nevertheless, we had achieved our primary objective. We drew their front across several sectors by occupying Kabelaced III and a few other worlds in adjacent systems, spreading them thin. This enabled a full-scale assault on one of their key production centers, a hellhole of a planet called New Isfahan.

The Empress, desperate to find something that would give us an edge, had summoned some manner of demon from the abyss a few decades prior to the war’s end, and the engagement on New Isfahan was the first and only time I had seen him. He was easily the size of my Charger, his magic potent enough to level cities. How our esteemed ruler had managed to gain the loyalty and trust of such a beast, I had no idea.

Was Driving Band right? Was all this for nothing? Were we the villains after all? No, impossible. There were no good guys or bad guys in this war. Only slaughter. Mechanical and precise. Efficient. People like me were the keys to that efficiency. But was it right? Was it just?

My thoughts swam in circles. Thin rivulets of blood leaked from ragged holes in my suit. I felt like I was on the verge of losing consciousness.

“Can you hur—hurry up, ma’am?” I said.

She turned and shot me a nasty look that softened when she saw the state I was in. “Are you sure you can do this?”

“I’ll try, but I’m not making any promises,” I said.

The Dragoon ran a gore-soaked rag across the controls one more time, clearly miffed that it seemed to be leaving more juices behind than it was removing.

“Right, that’s as good as it’s going to get,” she said. “You ready?”

I limped over and sat down at the radar and comms station while Layer took a seat in the command chair. I reached out to hit some toggle switches with my levitation magic and was rewarded with a pounding headache as the spell fizzled out. In the haze of my injuries, I’d almost forgotten.

“Uh, ma’am, you wouldn’t happen to have anything to remove a magic suppression ring with, would you?”

“Nope,” Commodore Cake said, deftly flicking a few toggle switches on overhead control panels with the tips of her hooves and wings. “One of our technicians had the special pair of pliers for that specific purpose, but we lost her when the first wave of counter-boarders showed up. Her body and her gear are still on the station, and it’s too late to go back and get it. If you want to try, Sergeant, you’re welcome to. We would, however, be leaving without you.”

“What about the other survivors?” I said, mulling over how the Lieutenant escaped the detention area. “There might be more captives still alive on the station. We’re just gonna leave them behind?”

“Do you honestly think these two enemy patrol boats will wait patiently while we go looking for them? Besides, this op may not be such a failure after all, as long as we can get that AI core to a safe location. It might have valuable intel that could finally turn things around for us. If you ask me, these past few months have been pretty grim.”

“Shit,” I muttered. “Well, that’s just great.”

“Hold on, they’re hailing us. Sergeant? Patch them in.”

The voice that came over the ship’s PA system was deep and smooth and more than a little angry. “Attention, rebel vessel, this is Ordinator Fedrahan of the Confederate Security Force. This will be your only warning; you will power down and surrender immediately, or you will be fired upon.”

“Lieutenant, sir!” I turned and shouted back into the galley. “You mind coming up here and giving them our response?”

Slowly, Driving Band ambled into the cockpit, fidgeting like he’d seen a ghost. He sat down at the weapon station, fumbling with the controls for a bit until he put two and two together and realized he could aim one of the exterior manipulator arms with the aid of a small joystick and switch between them with a series of toggles marked in the inscrutable script of the satyrs who built this ship.

I watched as he awkwardly gripped the joystick between his hooves and took aim at the nearest enemy patrol boat on his scopes, the fire control computer and rangefinders automatically calculating the distance and velocity of the target and indicating how far he’d need to lead them to score a hit.

He pulled the trigger. The ship shook as the recoilless inline cannon unleashed a burst of five twenty-centimeter shells in under a second. Each disposable carbon composite, titanium-lined recoilless gun barrel carried five electronically-initiated stacked projectiles ready to fire, and the entire weapon was discarded and reloaded by an autoloader mechanism that passed the guns from an interior magazine to one of the four hydraulic manipulator arms on the hull. The weapon could fire five rounds before jettisoning the gun tube and replacing it with another. No overheating or vacuum welding to worry about. Just discard the entire gun, barrel and all. The heat would go with it. Primitive but effective.

Many of the smaller Confederate ship classes had powerful robot arms on the hull that could be used to wield various types of ranged weaponry, like rocket pods, missile launchers, particle beam guns, or inline cannons. They could also be used to grapple with ships or debris. They could even be equipped with repair or shipbreaking tools for patching up the large capital ships or salvaging their swiss-cheesed hulks. The Vigilance-class patrol boat we found ourselves in was no different. It had four manipulators that the gunner could switch between and control with a mini-stick.

I knew from my unit recognition studies that this wasn’t the standard configuration. It was a cheap, flea-market version for the private security outfits. The Confederate military version of the Vigilance-class not only carried anti-capital torpedoes and powerful gun turrets, it also had a two-seater telemanipulator station where two crewmen controlled the ventral and dorsal pairs of manipulators as though they were their own arms. This version had just the one rinky-dink joystick for all four.

I mulled these details over as the explosive canister shells released a shotgun-like spread of smaller warheads that splashed over the incoming patrol boat. The enemy ship’s deflector shields flared bright blue but held for the time being. The radio crackled to life once more.

“Wrong answer, Equestrian scum!” The cleomanni patrol boat captain said, before the radio cut off in a burst of static.

“Hey, can you get us the hell out of here?” One of the pony mercs who’d survived the assault nervously approached the bridge.

“I’m going over a checklist to make sure we don’t die,” Layer’s eyes calmly scanned over a small wire-bound, laminated booklet. “Until then, we’re not going anywhere, got it?”

Figuring out the controls for the radar console was trickier than I thought it would be. All the cleomanni scribbles in the world still didn’t mean a damned thing to me. Luckily, most of the graphical interface made use of pictograms with relatively unambiguous meanings.

“And we’re off,” Layer said.

A maneuvering thruster fired, violently forcing us away from the station, severing the umbilical and snapping off one of the station’s robotic mooring arms in the process. Judging by the icon with a blue field covering approximately one-fifth of the hull, our shields were at roughly twenty percent. We’d narrowly avoided an incoming cannon salvo that would have torn through the upper decks had it connected. My left foreleg hung limply at my side, my right one a blur of movement as I tried figuring out the method to lock on to the enemy contacts and pass firing solutions to the weapon command console.

Layer brought us up to full power and pushed the throttles as far forward as they’d go. The acceleration drove me back into my seat. The mercs, who hadn’t thought to secure themselves, went skidding across the deck. We were heading straight toward the attacking vessels. A particle beam lanced out from the rearmost enemy patrol boat, glancing off our shields.

The bubble of force protecting our ship crackled and failed with a string of ear-shattering pops that reverberated from the emission units all the way through the hull. I set my jaw as the other ship turned and fired its particle beams as well. Our patrol boat shook violently and lurched with enough force to nearly throw me to the deck. Damage indicators blinked on my console, warning me that the shot had penetrated through the starboard maneuvering thruster and part of what appeared to be the main shield generator itself.

“Holy shit, holy shit!” Driving Band screamed.

The Commodore used the control yoke to steer the ship toward the planet. Our homeworld. With one of the maneuvering thrusters out, the vessel only sluggishly corrected course to zero-seven-three by one-five-two. We blazed past the enemy ships, and they immediately rotated to train their forward weapons on us.

Driving Band kept whimpering, saying, “We’re gonna die! We’re all gonna die!”

“Not today,” I said. “Put some pressure on them, sir. See if you can fire off another salvo. I’ll pass you the targeting data!”

Driving Band fiddled with the toggles until the lights on his console flashed green. “G—gun ready,” he stammered. “Firing!”

Explosive canister shells rippled across the bow of one of the enemy vessels, smashing through their shields and sending gouts of flame and vaporized metal spewing into space. The crippled enemy ship immediately rotated away to put their crew compartment out of our line of fire. I shook my head angrily. That was one kill we wouldn’t be chalking up today.

The other ship’s particle beams ripped through our main drive cluster, taking out one of the sub-units and cutting output by ten percent. This shifted our center of thrust and made us veer off-course.

“Sergeant, do something!” Layer said. “Our nose is drifting to the left after that last hit!”

“On it,” I said.

Using the engineering panel’s controls, I shut off the opposite engine to compensate, putting us down twenty percent. With their drives at full power, the enemy patrol boats would soon intercept us, grapple onto our hull with their manipulators, and then latch on airlock-to-airlock. Then the ship would be full of boarders, and we’d be solidly fucked. Well, Layer might have survived an encounter like that, but everyone else would be stone dead. We only had one option left.

Layer set the throttle to the neutral position, cutting the main engines. Then, she fired the port maneuvering thrusters and yawed us a full hundred-eighty degrees so that the patrol boat’s nose was facing away from its direction of travel. She lined up the forward particle beam cannons with the engines of the craft that had turned tail on us, watching as the reticule flickered and danced in her heads-up display before locking on and turning red. She pulled both of the control yoke’s triggers with the tips of her armored hooves. A pair of ghostly white particle beams lanced from our patrol boat’s bow and punched out neat holes in their engines. That vessel wouldn’t be making full burn again today.

Lieutenant Driving Band let loose with another inline cannon salvo, and the other pursuing vessel evaded with an emergency firing of their starboard thrusters, causing them to translate to port. This inadvertently lined them up with our particle beam guns, and Commodore Cake was only too happy to return the favor. While I fed her a firing solution from the scanner, she activated the particle beams yet again, a small graphical readout in the engineering quadrant of my console indicating that the synchrotrons were in danger of overheating and failing, perhaps permanently.

We hit one of their manipulators and sheared it off, prompting them to turn tail and apply full burn to disengage from the combat space. Layer turned us back toward the planet and made some minor course adjustments. Driving Band nervously wiped the sweat from his brow, giggling madly. After the two mercs had collected themselves, they let out a whoop and hoof-bumped each other, but the celebration on the bridge would be short-lived.

“There’s a fire spreading from engineering,” I deadpanned.

The gravity generator went out as the fire overtook its wiring, and I could feel myself turn weightless. The mercs panicked, flailing their limbs around and yelping as they drifted toward the overhead. I braced myself against my chair to avoid floating away from the scanner console. From the galley aft of the bridge wafted the appalling odor of an electrical fire. After a few more minutes, all of our remaining oxygen would be replaced with smoke. I motioned the mercs inside.

“Seal that fucking door!” I shouted orders, which they immediately complied with.

I didn’t know how to vent the compartment since I couldn’t read the labels on what were presumably the life support controls and didn’t want to vent the bridge by mistake. Briefly vacating the scanner console’s seat, limping to the door between the bridge and the mess hall, I reached out and pulled an oversized red-and-white T-handle, which I assumed would activate the fire suppression system for the galley and mess. Sure enough, a siren went off, and I could see cloudy streams of what appeared to be either CO2 or Halon fill the compartment through a viewport in the bridge access door. We weren’t in the clear, though. The fire had heated the metal to the point where it could reignite wiring and insulation if the inert gas smothering it was lost through a hull breach and replaced with air during re-entry.

“Buckle up, everypony,” Layer said, punching a few controls. “We’re going to burn at five gees for a while. It won’t be pleasant.”

“What about the naval cordon?” I said.

“They’re beyond the usual path of the moon,” Layer nodded. “There should be nothing between us and the surface.”

The mercs braced themselves against the aft bulkhead as best they could since there weren’t enough crew chairs for them. Layer pushed the throttle as far as it would go. I gritted my teeth as I was forced back into my seat. For the next half-hour, we were squashed against the backs of our crew chairs. Equestria was getting larger on the front viewscreen with each passing minute. There was a brief respite from this literal torture as we hit 88 kilometers per second. If we remained at this velocity, we’d burn up in the atmosphere long before we reached the ground.

Commodore Cake nosed the vessel away from our direction of travel, throttling back up and burning retrograde at five gees for another half-hour. Driving Band looked like he could pass out at any moment. The mercs were practically non-responsive. I was a Charger pilot. Our machines regularly maneuvered at six gees laterally. I could take it.

Once our velocity had been reduced sufficiently, Layer swung the nose of the patrol boat back around and aimed for the terminator, the line dividing our world between day and night, toward the continent that was home to our nation’s great capital. As we entered the atmosphere, the air heated and decomposed around the vessel’s bow, prompting Layer to close the shutters over the viewscreen to preserve our eyesight.

“Hold on!” I shouted. Everyone else was screaming incoherently, except for Commodore Cake, who serenely chanted a traditional prayer of her order.

“Adru uspair siskhaidon, wen torjbol inmenkan. Meirtu lorran ut ferdas, neimse tarre iknan.”

Born for battle, our oaths we keep. Bonds forged in iron cannot be shattered by the faithless.

We plunged through the atmosphere like a meteor, descending from sixty down to forty kilometers in mere moments. Too fast, and Confederate patrol boats weren’t designed to enter a planet’s atmosphere in the first place. Layer fired the retro-thrusters to flatten our approach angle and reduce airspeed, but the ship just couldn’t take the abuse. Part of the bridge tore away from the air resistance, and the weapon control console was sucked out of the breach.

Driving Band would’ve gone with it and plummeted to his doom if the Dragoon hadn’t leaped from her seat and caught him with her forelegs. He and the armored pegasus were thrown free of the vessel, tumbling out of control into the clouds. The howling wind and ferocious heat in the cockpit made our screams inaudible as the ship streaked toward the desert floor with nopony at the helm. The port sponson made contact with a rocky mesa and was ripped free of the vessel, skewing our course so that we came in nearly sideways.

The ventral section hit the ground hard, and the ship rolled violently. While the impact fortuitously sealed the hole made during our descent by literally crushing the hull closed, it also tossed me and the mercs around the bridge like cats in a clothes dryer. The last thing I remembered before blacking out was my head connecting with a steel beam.

// … // … // … // … // … //

When I awoke, thick smoke filled my lungs. I spasmed and coughed, rolling over, trying to find an air pocket underneath the billowing black clouds. The skeletal titanium frame of the ship’s bridge loomed over me like a ribcage. I crawled from the burning wreck, shoving aside hunks of smoking debris, ignoring the pain. I shielded my eyes from the blazing sun with a foreleg, scanning the featureless scrubland and red buttes surrounding me.

The eighty-meter Confederate Vigilant-class patrol boat had been cut in two by the impact, chunks of red-hot armor plating, ruined manipulator arms, and smoldering engine components strewn across the landscape. The crash had dug a furrow in the terrain that was the length of four hoofball fields. I ducked and covered my head as one of the inline cannons cooked off from the heat of the blaze, letting loose a deafening report as it painted the barren landscape with a deadly spray of high-explosive canister shells that each weighed three times as much as a pony. The rounds dug craters in a nearby hilltop, causing a small rockslide. When the crackling and popping of burning munitions stopped, and I was sure that it wouldn’t resume, I stood.

“Lieutenant!” I called out, placing my hooves over my mouth to amplify my voice. “Commodore Cake!”

No response. Nothing but the echo of my own voice against the wind-worn cliffs. But there were tracks. Two sets of hoof marks leading away from the crash site. The two mercs were still alive immediately after the crash, but Celestia knows what became of them in the intervening time. After a brief search of the wreckage, I found an intact locker that had been thrown free of the ship. I didn’t have a lockpick. Didn’t know how to use one, anyway. I pounded on the part of the door nearest the lock with my good foreleg until I sheared the thin steel bolt. Three tries, and I was in. Clearly, it wasn’t built to withstand the strength of a pony.

Inside was a small medical bag with gauze, disinfectant, and sutures, a portable strobe light, some kind of canned meat that made my stomach turn just looking at the label, a compass, and a uniform meant for a biped, among some other personal effects that once belonged to the captured ship’s former crew. Scheherazade’s AI core was gone, but I still had the hacker’s portable computer terminal, for all the good that did me out in the middle of nowhere with no wireless access and no power outlets for hundreds of miles in all directions. Annoyed beyond all reason, I tossed the portable computer face-down in the dirt, only to see that the entire back of the device was a photovoltaic panel. I rolled my eyes in irritation, feeling pretty stupid right then.

I reeled out the interface cable from the back of the device, pushed my mane out of the way, and plugged it into a small port at the base of my skull. The datajack implanted along my spinal cord was linked to my military-issue neural lace. What I was about to do was something that should only be done in emergencies when there was nothing else available.

Pharmaceuticals were far safer and had fewer side effects, but this time, I didn’t have a choice. I simply wasn’t functional in this state. I moved the rotary dials with my hooves and pulled up the medical diagnostic program, and then I highlighted the red area over my left foreleg. The break had been detected and classified by my medical nanomachines. I tapped the button to administer a neuro-salve, gritting my teeth and letting out a pained shriek.

“Fuck!” It felt like somepony had stabbed a dozen dull kitchen knives into my leg.

The pain gave way to tingling, like my circulation had been cut off and my leg had fallen asleep, which, in turn, gave way to a cold numbness. I flexed my left foreleg, wincing a bit at the damage. My cannon was bending in a place it shouldn’t. I unplugged the terminal from my datajack and stowed it away, sighing heavily.

After stripping off the tattered and torn EVA suit and stowing what little gear I possessed in the unused compartments of the medical bag, I dressed my wounds to the best of my ability. Then, I looked for a suitably sized piece of debris. Finding a broken steel spar that wasn’t too heavy, I set it next to my equally broken leg and wrapped a strip of cloth I’d bitten off from the uniform around it, testing the makeshift leg brace to see if it would hold my weight. Satisfied, I slung the bag over my withers and set out in the direction the other crash survivors had taken.

Over a thousand years had passed since the return of Nightmare Moon. Equestria lay in ruins, one half of our world a scorching desert bathed in perpetual day, the other, a wintry wasteland of eternal night. We were leaderless. Rudderless. Stripped of all power and denied even our basic dignity and rights as sapient beings, our lands kept under the watchful eye of a powerful interstellar government that feared and despised us.

But no matter how hard they’d tried to kill us, we were still alive, and this fight wasn’t over. The cleomanni would pay dearly for what they’d done to us. Every scrap of land they’d claimed from us would be retaken. Every humiliation, every ounce of cruelty that they visited upon us, would be repaid tenfold.

I greeted the barren wastes with the ghost of a smile. My war had just begun.

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 03//Sandstone Estimated time remaining: 28 Hours, 54 Minutes