//RCV STRM
//TST CODEC
//DCD OK
//MODE R13

070 078 081 032 071 066 032 070 078 076 032 086 071 070 032 066 073 082 069 032 065 066 074 032 085 082 069 082 032 080 066 090 082 032 071 085 082 032 085 072 065 070 032 067 086 080 088 032 078 032 070 086 081 082 032 067 086 080 088 032 078 032 070 067 066 071 032 085 082 069 082 032 080 066 090 082 032 085 082 069 082 032 080 066 090 082 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070

[09,

Your Excellency, I have prepared an after-action report, attached to this digimail. I am speechless. I’d heard the rumors, but I thought they were just that. Rumors.

Where did you find someone like this? What pit of Tartarus did you pull her from, and are there more down there that we can still use?

Respectfully,

-PR]

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

Mardissa Granthis

Their vanguard was here. My people. My brethren. Maddened by our loss at Pur Sang Peak, they had come to exact vengeance on the Liberation Front. As I listened through an open viewport, gunfire and far-off screams could be heard in the city center as the first wave of enemy troops and personnel carriers flooded in, uninhibited.

We had no armored vehicles to spare on offense and were stuck defending the mine as a result. We’d pulled back to the dark, craggy, gravel-strewn hilltop above the mine, firing sensor mortars as fast as we could to try and track Confederate ground movements within Tar Pan. The mortar thumped over and over on the roof of the Centaur, right above our heads, the noise almost enough to give one a minor concussion.

“Mast, up!” Secunda deployed the Centaur’s antenna boom, wiping sweat from her brow, her expression tense and anxious in the glow of her monitors.

Prima and the rest of Revenant—all except for the gravely wounded Jury Rig, who was still convalescing—sat beside me, their faces showing clear signs of fear and tiredness. We’d hardly had a chance to rest after the last engagement. Ket was manning the Centaur’s gun, panning the turret around to scan for hostiles.

“Gonna be hard, shootin’ our own people,” Ketros said. He didn’t bother to turn his head to check my reaction.

“Fuck them.” My eyes brimmed with tears. “Fuck all of this. The Equestrians just want to live.”

Ket rubbed his nose. “Yeah, well, so do these kids. Besides, think about what you thought you knew about ponies a few months ago. That’s all they know.”

I stared at the floor of the APC, eyes wide. A few months ago, all I knew about ponies was that they were dangerous sub-sapients with savant-like automatism and paranormal abilities. This was a blatant, bald-faced lie. The tonnanen were fully sapient beings with rich personalities who happened to be trapped in quadruped bodies that limited their manual dexterity and stratified their society into a caste system dependent on whether they had wings or a horn or neither. The ponies at my sides had despondent looks on their faces like they knew they were going to die, but that was nothing new. There was always a moroseness and grim resignation about them. We had hurt them so badly, and for so long, we’d warped their species into shadows of their former selves and robbed them of their innocence.

What we’d done to them was beyond atrocious. It was an abomination before the Gods. If we had any sense, we’d fall down on our knees before the Equestrians and beg their forgiveness.

I clasped my hands together and bowed my head. “I pray to Father Ogios, that he may bless our arms and fill our souls with his holy light. I pray to Tirantia that her law be just and her judgment of our undertakings fair. I pray to Garamsaram that his sweet spices and incenses make us forget our hunger and ease our pain. I pray to Cuichmanu that he may stumble our enemies and make their path rough and filled with rocks and boulders.”

“Cuichmanu?” Ket said. “You prayed to The Highwayman? Oh, I bet your dad would love that.”

“The occasion calls for it,” I said.

Cuichmanu, or Chuchmanush, was the patron of thieves and tradesmen alike, who made supplication to him for protection when traveling, to block the way of one’s pursuers with landslides and the like. His worship was very nearly banned and his name struck from the pantheon numerous times because of how unseemly his sash-wearing, roguish worshipers were. Cuichmanu cults had made the roads unsafe for the citizenry out in the colonies since ancient times.

I gazed out one of the Centaur’s viewports as the militia towed a strange contraption on wheels to the top of the hill, the one in the lead harnessed to the thing in the manner of a draft animal. They pulled a tarp off of it, revealing a hemispherical and squat-looking thing studded with what appeared to be caster emitters on all sides.

“What’s that?” I pointed at the odd device.

Corporal Shooting Star gave me a lidded stare, and then peeked out the viewport. Her lips slowly pulled into a grin. “I’ll be damned. A Puckwudgie!”

“A what?” Ket said.

“Puckwudgie C-RAM.” Shooting Star nodded. “Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar. Shoots down enemy shells in mid-air and can handle dozens at a time. Didn’t even know we had one! That’ll make the artillery boys’ day.”

“Garrida’s pulled out all the stops,” Cloverleaf said. “Now, where’s our boss?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

“What the fuck?” I lifted the checklist in my magic, finding I had it upside down, before turning it right-side-up. “What the fuck is this?”

“Your new FCS was salvaged from a downed Ifrit, reprogrammed, and wired into the main PLC,” Black Devil said. “It’s actually higher-spec than the Imperial one, with algorithmic stabilization and acquisition that’s better than anything we’ve ever made.”

“I find that very hard to believe.” I frowned. “Confederate stuff is junk.”

“It’s capable of levels of accuracy down to zero-point-zero-one milliradians,” BD said. “You can almost shoot the wings off a fly from a hundred meters away.”

I perked a brow. “Whoa, really? That’s an order of magnitude better than ours. No wonder they’re so dead-on with those plasma pulsecannons of theirs.”

“It’s not the electronics that are the problem with the Ifrit. It’s the actuators and the traverse rate of the whole platform. They can’t keep up with fast-moving targets. We can.”

I looked up at the salvaged Confederate Goliath’s Marbo ShootRite gun director, shoehorned into a slot lining the overhead of my Charger’s cockpit. It had lettering in Ardun, much of which had been hastily pasted over with adhesive labels in Equestrian, underlining the purpose of each toggle switch and indicator light. The thing’s scuffed cyan paint job visibly clashed with everything else in the cockpit. I went over the checklist one more time before I started flicking the toggles one by one, all except for the main arming switch. I didn’t want to collapse the mine on all our heads by accident.

“Huh, it’s almost the inverse of the arming procedure for my old one,” I said. “Check the fuses first, and then power on.”

“It’s easy to overload one of these and blow it up if there’s excessive surge power,” BD said. “The techs installed a power conditioner in-line with it. Kinda fragile.”

I looked over the indicator lights on the thing, blinking away happily. “Seems to be in good shape.”

I gave the rest of my displays a once-over. Everything was humming along smoothly. Reactor was running steady, all EMTs were in the green. Ammo load was complete. They’d even had time to strap some artillery rocket boxes to my hips. Unitary HE, not cluster munitions, thank goodness. I wasn’t sure if I was ready, emotionally speaking, to get straight back to gassing people. Besides, that attracted the wrong kind of attention.

“Are we cleared to fucking go, or what?” I said.

“Wait one,” Black Devil said. “Okay, you’ve got the green light from command.”

I keyed the radio. “Revenant One to Command, my callsign is EIDOLON. We have completed our checks and are ready to unleash hell.”

After a brief pause, I received a reply from Captain Garrida. “Affirmative, Revenant One. We have enemy fast-movers incoming. You are to exit the mine and engage the hostile contacts. Give ‘em all you’ve got, Sergeant!”

I took a deep breath. “Here we fucking go.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

Mardissa Granthis

The Equestrian Chimera SPAAGs on the hill atop the mine rotated their turrets and tilted their guns skyward, first launching their mid-range surface-to-air missiles, and then firing their 40mm CT cannons as their targets got closer. The racket was unbelievable. Their weapons’ cyclic rate was so high, it was like a solid sheet of noise that assaulted my senses even through the hull of the Centaur. Tracers arced towards the sky, proximity-fused cannon rounds exploding in the air in long strings of bright flashes like fireworks. The Manticore 155mm SPGs opened up on the far-off enemy formations, adding their bass to the chorus. It was only a matter of time before counter-battery fire started sailing in.

As predicted, the Confederacy’s response arrived mere minutes later, heralded by the chilling cries of air raid sirens emplaced around the perimeter of the mine. The Puckwudgie, the Equestrians’ towable disco ball of death, immediately went into action, its radar tracking the incoming shells with millimeter precision. It began blasting enemy artillery shells and rockets out of the air with seconds to spare, long columns of green caster fire lancing skyward in a light show that was as blinding as it was seizure-inducing. The explosions in the sky made Haybale shake nervously. Poor guy was on the verge of cracking. I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t mind infantry combat, but he didn’t like sitting in a metal coffin with shells incoming and nothing to do. None of us did.

“Where the hell is the Sergeant?” I said.

“Incoming!” Secunda shouted.

I opened one of the Centaur’s top hatches and climbed halfway out, raising my binoculars to my eyes. I could see them out on the horizon. Two Corvus SSTO Fighter-Bombers, coming in fast and low, but staying under our guns. The Chimeras desperately repositioned, finding they couldn’t depress their turrets far enough to engage the threat. The way they were flying, it had to be the Blackbird Squadron. The best of the best. The fighter-bombers’ weapon bays opened and they each let loose a fifteen-ton Damocles bunker-buster, the munitions large enough for me to see them from this far away, in Tar Pan’s perpetual twilight. The Puckwudgie opened fire, but the hardened earth-penetrating tip of the bomb deflected the medium caster pulses with ease. I clenched my eyes shut. It was all over.

The howl of pyrojets and the tooth-chattering slam of thirty-seven tons of Charger landing in the muddy earth before us made my eyes flash open. I looked up, and Black Devil towered over us, its back to us as it faced the threat, its pyrojets flaring like a messenger of the gods themselves. I grinned wide.

Storm was here.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

“BD, give me a firing solution on the incoming bombs!” I yelled. “Arm the forties, gated proximity mode!”

“Working on it!”

The radome in my charger’s head began tracking the incoming ordnance. It was a small target, a little bit larger than a cruise missile. With this new FCS, it was almost trivial to get a lock. As the optical and gyro-stabilization system sighted in the guns, the beeping of the radar resolved into a solid tone.

“We’ve got lock,” BD said.

“Firing!” I gripped the triggers in the hoofcups and squeezed.

A long burst of forty-millimeter rounds arced skyward, the shells giving off bright flashes as they burst high in the air, tracing their way towards the target. I adjusted my aim, walking my fire onto the bomb. The first of the two bunker-busters exploded, the blast nearly blinding me as it completely filled my display. The other one was already too close for guns, coming in hot. I shifted position, standing directly in its path.

“BD, I need your help!”

“Oh, fuck no,” Black Devil said. The Anima knew a small measure of my thoughts and intentions through the link. “We can’t use the rear maneuvering jets! The SSMs, remember?”

“No time to argue!” I braced myself. “We’re doing this!”

All living beings were limited in our decision-making capabilities and our ability to react to our environment by the speed of our natural reflexes. For an unaugmented pony, those reflexes were on the order of a tenth of a second, at the absolute best, limited by the rate of our nerve impulses and the chemical reactions in our muscle tissue. I had to be faster than that. I had to give myself over completely to Black Devil and let her do most of the work on this.

“Tell me when,” I said, crouching my Charger low to the ground and winding up.

A few tense moments passed as the bomb grew closer, its guidance fins resolving in my display as they twisted back and forth, nosing it towards the GPS coordinate it had been programmed with. One hit was all it would’ve taken to collapse the salt mine and kill everyone inside. I had to do this. I had no other choice.

“Now!” BD said.

I performed a duostrand-assisted leap and jump-jetted a hundred meters straight into the air with my boosters, the acceleration forcing me down into my saddle. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the bomb sailed straight towards me, its midnight-black casing growing in my viewscreen. As I ascended, I fired the shoulder-mounted pyrojet thrusters in opposite directions and spun clockwise to build up momentum, the bomb briefly leaving my field of vision as I rotated through three hundred and sixty degrees. I extended my hoof, my thoughts melding with those of my Anima. Pony and AI combined as one, in absolute symbiosis. Ion channels in my nerves spiked. My muscles burned with exertion, adenosine triphosphate breaking loose its chemical bonds. As the bomb came back into view, mere meters from my cockpit, my Charger’s left foreleg began to extend, my machine’s armored hoof stretching out to meet the tail of the Damocles bunker-buster right in front of my face.

My pyrojet-assisted kick landed dead-on, smashing the tail of the bomb and sending it twirling end over end. The heavy bunker-buster struck the hilltop sideways, bounced off the crest of the hill, and sailed over the top of the salt mine, landing in a muddy field hundreds of meters away. Then, its time delay fuse went off, the shockwave from the blast rattling my skull. As I descended, I fired my pyrojet boosters to come to a soft landing. Small rocks and chunks of dirt landed on top of my hull, ringing it like a gong.

I heard hooting and cheering over the radio, the cacophony soon resolving into a rhythmic chant. “Sergeant Storm, Sergeant Storm, Sergeant Storm!”

“Knock it off!” Garrida’s voice crackled over the radio. “Clear the fucking channel!”

I gazed out over the horizon. Off towards the southeast, there were a good six full-blown tornadoes meandering back and forth, their giant funnels drooping from cloud formations that were anything but natural, all thanks to Cicatrice and the Airborne Pegasus Commandos. Lightning and thunder lashed the far plains. On my scopes, I could see the Confederacy trying to use recovery vehicles to drag their tanks out of the muck, only for a tornado to come along and assail the combat engineers as they ran for their lives. It would’ve almost been comical if the situation weren’t so dire. Rounds from our Manticore SPGs landed in the enemy’s midst, our guns launching deadly MRSI assaults by gradually altering their trajectory and charges. The Confederacy hadn’t even reached our lines, and they were already having a bad day.

I licked my lips, eager to hunt my prey. “Just like old times, eh, BD?”

“Just like old times,” she said.

This was it. This was what I’d waited for, during all these long months of misery and powerlessness. I would repay the suffering a hundred-fold.

I brought up the map, pulling in the latest enemy troop movements through the datasphere. Revenant had done a good job with the unattended sensors. I could see at least sixty percent of the enemy force on my map. The rest were further south and had yet to come into range. Night Terror and his Selene were already engaging the enemy from the eastern flank. I would take the west. One of the westernmost mechanized infantry groups broke off from the main force and tried crossing the open ground, closing the distance as quickly as they could. They wanted the cover of the buildings and the hard pavement under their tracks so they could escape the artificial inclement weather, even if it meant that they’d lose the advantage of strength in numbers. I was going to punish them for this mistake.

I pulled up the feed from one of the unattended sensors, watching the formation of approaching IFVs with a keen eye. If they were allowed to disgorge their troops in the city, that would cause major problems for us. The lead vehicle struck a mine that blew one of its tracks off, bringing the formation to a halt. Our engineers had emplaced anti-tank mines earlier to slow their advance. In response, they moved up a strange-looking combat engineering vehicle with an erector-launcher of some sort. I’d seen these before. A mine-clearing line charge system. The picture-in-picture display on my viewscreen flared orange briefly as the missile on the erector-launcher ignited and took off over the minefield, dragging a long rope of plastic explosives behind it. The line charge landed in the field, looking like a giant garden snake. Then, there was a huge, linear string of explosions along its length, one that destroyed our mines and opened a corridor. The IFVs started moving again. I grinned. They’d just choked themselves into a narrow single file.

I sheathed my Charger in an invisibility spell, my powers channeled through my machine’s Illusion locus. The outside world turned dark as all electromagnetic radiation passed straight through my Charger, the paths of the photons bent and redirected out the other side. Since I’d cloaked my antennas, this included radio waves, temporarily limiting my communications to teleported aetherbits. I fired up the pinger and began surveying my surroundings with magic echolocation, sending off subtle waves of kinetic energy that bounced off the buildings and the terrain all around me. The acoustic receivers converted it to point cloud data, the image in my viewscreen resolving into an eerie amber monochrome due to the lack of satellite feeds to color-correct it. I broke into a gallop and advanced towards the enemy lines, searching for an ideal firing position. I found it in a public park a kilometer south of the mine.

“BD, I want projections on the movements of those units in the grids directly south of me,” I said. “Get the latest updates over aetheric, if you have to.”

“Working on it,” Black Devil said. “No good. I’m not getting it on aetheric.”

I begrudgingly uncloaked my Charger’s antennas briefly to increase the bandwidth. Slowly, the enemy’s position began to resolve in my display, as well as their projected future locations based on their rate of travel and the flight time of my Mark-76 surface-to-surface missiles. I painted an evenly spaced grid over the enemy formation, focusing on the enemy tracked vehicle support units. The Invader IFVs had turrets with 25mm automatic cannons and anti-tank guided missile launchers. They could carry a good half-dozen troops into battle with moderate protection. They hadn’t dismounted yet. The mechanized infantry planned to move into the city, dismount, and dig into the buildings, likely with ATGM squads. I narrowed my eyes. Their intentions were as plain as day. They planned to hunt down and neutralize what little armor we had. I wouldn’t give them that opportunity.

I turned the arming key, opening the safety cover. Then, I depressed the launch button. With eight thumps that shook my chest, eight Mark-76 SSMs rocketed away from the disposable box launchers pinned to my Courser’s hips, arcing skyward on columns of white rocket exhaust. Their payloads expended, the launchers automatically jettisoned, exposing the thrusters on my machine’s hindquarters and improving its balance. This was standard operating procedure with a Charger like mine. Find a firing position. Expend the artillery missiles. Jettison the launchers and move into knife-fighting range. The Charger was an all-spectrum combatant. Artillery, direct fire support, anti-aircraft. We performed all of these tasks and more. Though mine was a Courser and not as well-armed as some Chargers were, my Mirage was no exception.

I moved out of the firing position and broke into a gallop down a side street, soon achieving a bounding gait, my pyrojet boosters driving me back into my saddle and accelerating me to over three hundred kilometers an hour in a matter of seconds. I watched on my forward viewscreen as the projections of the missiles’ course showed them descending towards the enemy formation on the augmented-reality view, leaving white dotted lines behind them. I didn’t have to see the missiles on my visible-spectrum cameras or receive any tracking signals from them in order to see where they were. My machine’s electronics did all of that automatically, tracking the missiles’ estimated positions based on the trajectory and time since their launch and automatically generating a computer model of their flight paths.

The Mark-76 SSMs streaked down from the heavens and detonated right in the enemy’s midst, sowing chaos and confusion. According to my sensor feed, armored vehicles in the rear of the formation were bunching up against the destroyed tracks in front of them. They were caught in the midst of the minefield, with nowhere to go but in reverse. I veered off course slightly, intending to circle around behind them and hit them from the rear. The mines wouldn’t affect me; they had smart coded IFF features and could not be triggered by any Equestrian vehicle. After maintaining my bounding gait for another kilometer, I pulled into a hoofstand turn, twirling on my machine’s forehooves and braking myself to a stop by applying the boosters. I uncloaked and took in the devastation I’d wrought. My missiles had dug deep craters in the muddy, tornado-beaten plains south of Tar Pan. A couple dozen burning vehicles were blocking the enemy formation’s advance. A good fifty Invader IFVs were stoppered up behind them, their dazed troops dismounting to see what the matter was. None of them were pointing their turrets this way. Some of the enemy soldiers saw me and began pointing and panicking. Turrets began to swing ‘round. It was already too late.

I squeezed my triggers and raked the enemy formations with my 40mm CT guns, putting short, disciplined five-round bursts into their rear armor. I pressed my lips into a thin line. The dismounted troops didn’t even have a chance. When the HEMP rounds detonated near them, the blast and fragmentation were sufficient to tear their heads and limbs from their bodies. Before the Invaders even had a chance to bring their guns around, I’d already smoked ten more of the tracked armored fighting vehicles. They opened fire on me with their autocannons and ATGMs, trying desperately to fend me off. Their vicious combined salvo tore into my LAMIBLESS armor, ripping into my Charger’s hull and turning my machine into a flaming wreck. Or rather, that was what they believed they saw happen. Of course, it wasn’t actually me. It was a decoy forged by my magic. In reality, I had already repositioned to the front of their formation, at their backs again.

“BD, arm and extend HBCs,” I said.

“Affirmative,” Black Devil said. The heavy beamcasters clanked as their erector arms extended and they elevated and traversed ever-so-slightly to track my targets. “HBCs extended and armed.”

I hit a toggle that reduced my autocannons’ rate of fire and put staccato bursts from the forties into the enemy armored fighting vehicles, also letting loose with the heavy beamcasters. Breakers closed, capacitors discharged, and purple columns of light flared bright on my forward viewscreen. Eight more Invaders were flaming wrecks from receiving the gentle caress of my forties. The pair that were struck by my HBCs were basically vaporized, their tracks blowing outwards and their turrets lofting a good thirty meters into the air. No tank could survive such firepower.

Again, they swung their turrets ‘round. Again, they engaged a decoy crafted by my magic, one that reacted realistically to being shot. Again, I cloaked, repositioned myself, and struck their formation from another angle, hosing them down at point-blank range. My mind games had them in a panic. I had destroyed three dozen of the surviving IFVs in total by the time the enemy Ifrits a few klicks to the south noticed what was happening and peeled off to engage me. Heavy plasma pulsecannon fire streaked past me as I boosted away from them, pulling into a high-gee evasive slide. My first two magazines had run empty. I cloaked and circled around the enemy formation yet again.

“BD, reload the forties!” I shouted.

The empty 40mm CT magazines cycled into their stowage positions and a pair of fresh drums snapped into place with a resounding clank, their feed mechanisms letting out a hydraulic whine as they reconnected and cycled the rounds through the linkless feed system until they were indexed in the guns. I let loose a few bursts on the surviving IFVs, decimating what remained. Too depleted in numbers to carry out their mission, the remainder began reversing from their doomed position and they retreated back towards the rest of the division. That was my cue to leave, too. I’d successfully blunted their little offensive, but I was badly overextended. The longer I remained, the more vulnerable I’d be. Soon, they’d start shelling this position. With half a dozen Ifrits in tow, I pulled back towards the mine, picking up speed as I retraced my vector. I made a sharp turn off the street and set an ambush for them halfway back, lying in wait as the lance of Goliaths moved closer.

When they proceeded past my hiding place, their footfalls shaking the buildings around me, I uncloaked and surged out of concealment, letting out a maddened cry as I tackled one of the enemy walkers with my machine’s forehooves, pouring on the boosters. The Ifrit struggled to escape my grasp, its feet sliding across the pavement. I rammed the enemy mech straight through a brick building. The outer wall of the structure imploded with a great plume of dust that obscured my sensors. The building collapsed inward, completely burying the enemy walker in rubble, loose bricks pinging off my hull. I’d lost count of how many Ifrits I’d given an urban burial like that over the years. It had to be dozens by now. I pulled the triggers, the breakers closed the firing circuits, and I blasted the downed Ifrit point-blank with my HBCs, ripping through its armor and sending gouts of molten metal into the air. He wouldn’t be getting back up. The others were just beginning to turn, realizing that I’d engaged and destroyed the rearmost unit in their formation. Too slow. Too late. They never could keep up. Not now, nor years ago, when I’d faced them last. They shouldn’t have closed the distance. Smart Ifrit pilots remained at the rear and employed skillful fire support to harass us from a distance. Stupid ones moved into close-quarters combat with a Charger in an urban environment. Experienced pilots could’ve managed their inertia, coordinated their formation, and attempted to fan out and surround me. For these greenhorns, it was practically a death sentence.

One of them had just barely managed to get a lock, but I boosted sideways at several gees, the plasma pulsecannon shot going wild and blasting chunks of molten concrete out of a building next to where I’d been standing a split-second before. I was a blur of motion to them, my dark and indistinct form marked only by the bright purplish-blue fingers of pyrojet exhaust that blasted from my machine’s hips and shoulders. The sound of my booster ignitions echoed through the city streets like gunshots. Finding myself directly behind one of the Ifrits, I wrapped my Charger’s forelegs around the ungainly machine, dragging it in front of me as it flailed around helplessly.

The one with a good firing position hesitated to shoot, what with me using his comrade as a shield. I extended my HBCs and fired them over the top of my impromptu shield, blasting the other fucker dead-center in the chest. The Ifrit toppled like timber, collapsing face-first into the street, flame billowing from the machine’s cockpit. In the narrow space between the rows of mid-level apartment buildings, there was no room for the enemy to evade. I lined my struggling captive up with another one of the assault walkers, boosting forward with enough momentum to send us both sliding across the street. I released the Ifrit at the last second, turning and bucking it with both of my Charger’s hind legs. The two Ifrits slammed into each other and both went down, one collapsing atop the other. I put an HBC pulse into the back of the uppermost mech in the pile, aiming for their internal mortar ammo stores. The Confederate walker exploded, showering the area with bits of armor and debris. Both Ifrits were obliterated in a single shot.

After witnessing the very demoralizing sight of four Goliaths being downed in less than a minute, the other two tried to make a run for it, turning and trying to circle around the block and head back to their lines. It was much too late for that. They were already in too deep. I built up momentum and jump-jetted into the air, putting a good thirty 40mm rounds into the back of one of them before my hooves even touched the ground. The mixture of HEMP and APDS rounds to the thinnest part of their armor staggered the Ifrit, making them trip and sending them skidding through the sodden earth. I boost-jumped and landed directly on their back, crushing them flat into the ground, squashing the cockpit and the very unlucky cleomanni inside. The last surviving Ifrit in the lance broke into a desperate sprint, pushing his actuators to the limit.

The frequency interdictor picked up and decrypted his comm chatter. “Oh gods! Help me, help me!”

I tuned in to his freq and set the digital encoder. “If you were afraid to die, you should’ve thought about that before invading my country!” Whilst perched atop the crushed wreckage of the first runner, I put a pair of HBC beams right into the back of the last one, coring him out like an apple. As he fell, I could see right through the molten, dripping holes I put through both sides of him.

My radio and electronic warfare gear intercepted yet more of their frantic communiques. “Quad-demon! Enemy Charger in the AO!” For having a voice like an iron rasp, the individual on the other end was clearly panicked. “It’s a little one but watch your back. This freak can cloak. Stay at range and don’t let them get close. They have to be low on ammo by now. I want close air support lined up on that thing, right this minute.”

Another was eager to protest. “What the fuck? Sir, that thing just lit up the western quadrant and—and it killed three hundred of my fucking men! I’m getting reports from the east that there’s another one ripping through our armored divisions like tissue paper!”

“Don’t bellyache, just stay in formation and do as you’re told,” his superior replied. “Lieutenant, tell the commander of the air wing that I want the gunships back here, now!”

That had to be Colonel Ravetaff. I slowly drew my lips into a grin, tapping a few buttons and isolating his frequency. “Auramin Rafettafe. Biduakine ut wen tonnai, kartare ut Harredo, ia karta sendes asrii ut cule. Asrii bidu aspare, maldes niskatharc hemekenna!”

Aurman Ravetaff. Murderer of my people, tormentor of the Great Herd, and pain in my ass. I will kill you, you miserable, honorless bastard!

“Sir, they’ve compromised our command frequencies!” The radio picked up someone’s voice in the background in whatever passed for their command post. “Permission to scramble the codes?”

“Silence.” Colonel Ravetaff reprimanded his subordinate, before addressing me after a brief delay. “What do you know of honor, savage? You’ve even turned the president’s daughter against us with your foul witchcraft.”

I gazed out over the field of battle, contemplating the lives I’d just taken. That lie, again. Always the same lie. Mardissa would never be allowed any agency for her choice. Her people would never allow it. The president’s daughter, a traitor? Unthinkable. She had to be brainwashed. It was the only thing that made sense to them. The alternative was that she’d made the choice to defect on her own, and that, in turn, tugged on a thread that threatened to unravel the whole Confederacy. After all, if one of them could do it, so could others.

“We did nothing of the sort,” I said. “She joined our cause willingly, once she realized the depravities your kind had visited upon mine.” I turned my Charger’s head and watched, tears in my eyes, as Confederate artillery blasted an apartment block to rubble a kilometer to the west of my position. “You’re killing us, and for what? So you can sell us. Like toy dolls. You are on the wrong side of history. Generations yet unborn will cry out for justice because of what you’ve done to us.”

“The delusional ravings of a misbegotten, four-legged beast. It’s galling to imagine that you have thoughts in those tiny brains of yours beyond deciding when next to eat grass and fertilize the fields with your bare, naked arse.”

“I’ll tell you what’s delusional, you silly prick,” I said. “What’s delusional is this idea that you seem to have that I won’t find out where you’re hiding, tear your head from your fucking shoulders, taxidermize it, and use it as a hoofball!”

I cut the comms before he had a chance to reply, turning and heading back to the salt mine. When I arrived a couple minutes later, the AA gun and artillery crews greeted me with cheers and waves. I’d had our side patched in and they’d overheard everything. I gave as good as I got. As I descended into the darkness of the first level of the mine, I encountered a hastily erected Charger refit station in the cavern. A pair of robot arms and a pile of ordnance sat at either side of me. As I knelt down, the technicians immediately got to work.

“Welcome to Pony Joe’s,” one of the Charger techs said over the radio. “Would you like the old fashioned or some sprinkles?”

“Old fashioned,” I said. “Unitary HE, no frag bomblets and sure as fuck no gas. Collateral damage is a concern. Also, four new mags for the forties, if you please.”

The armorer shook his head. “Damn if you don’t go through it right quick.”

“They’re sending gunships,” I said. “I’m gonna need the anti-air firepower.”

“All HEMP or fifty-fifty HEMP and APDS?”

“The mix. I could still encounter light or medium tracks along the way.”

“Same load as before. You got it, Sergeant.”

The robot arms exchanged my empty 40mm drums, loading me up with fresh ones. Eight more Mark-76 SSM box launchers were installed at my Charger’s hindquarters. Within two minutes, I was ready to rejoin the battle.

“Good hunting, ma’am!” the Charger tech said.

I departed the mine with a fresh load of ammo, only to be immediately confronted by a pair of Conqueror tanks that had run right over our outer fence and were lobbing 140mm shells into our sandbagged defensive positions. I saw a pony fly sky-high, or what was left of him. His gun nest was completely obliterated. I promptly put a beam from my HBCs into each of the main battle tanks, blowing their turrets clean off.

“Where the fuck are the Minotaurs?” I radioed. “We’ve got enemy armor breaching the perimeter!”

“We’re doing the best we can,” Sergeant Sagebrush replied over the radio. “Not all of us get to play the game with pieces like yours.”

I switched the channel. “Shut up, Sage,” I muttered under my breath. “Raven One, I need a scouting report of the grid three klicks west of my position. Sending nav points now.”

“On it,” Sergeant Placid Gale said. “We’ll fly over and take a look.”

“Watch out for enemy air,” I said. “They’re sending gunships.”

“They’ll never get a bead on us, Sergeant.”

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose in my fetlock. “That’s what they always say. Next thing you know, there’s a screaming pegasus who’s short a couple wings.”

“What’s that?” Placid said. “Didn’t quite get that.”

“Never mind.” I clicked to the next channel. “Osprey One, Cinder! You read me?”

“Go ahead, Revenant One,” the big unicorn stallion replied over the radio.

“Ghost Two should be patching the feed from her console into the local datasphere. I want the enemy comms decrypted. Run it by Tiamat. I want updates on troop and vehicle movements. Everything you’ve got.”

“I copy. Analyzing the feed.”

“Ghost Two, I need some more sensor mortars out there,” I said. “I want to know if they’re trying to slip around from the northwest.”

“On it,” Secunda said.

Though I wanted to advance south again and hit their artillery division from behind, I didn’t want to get encircled and cut off, and I didn’t want the enemy to overwhelm the base in the meantime, something they were threatening to do. My decision to attack or defend would hinge on the scout reports and the sensor readings. There was no point in bothering to reposition to fire my surface-to-surface missiles. The entire enemy force was well within range.

I picked out one formation that was breaking off from the pack and moving north towards the city. I marked them for death, feeding their coordinates into my missile fire control computer. I released the safety cover and depressed the pushbutton with my magic. Eight missile ignitions shook my Charger’s hull as they propelled themselves from their canisters and towards the heavens. Eight sets of explosive bolts fired as those launchers once again self-jettisoned, leaving me more agile. Though a few red dots on my map winked out minutes later, there was no way for me to know if I had good effects downrange without having someone sweep the area.

As I watched my scope with a keen eye while Secunda’s sensor mortars set down and booted up, I spotted a few transient contacts to the northwest. The red dots representing enemy movement kept fading in and out. They were headed this way, trying to outflank us. Probably trying to defang our triple-A.

“The fuck?” I keyed my radio. “Revenant One to Command. Unknown contact, two klicks northwest. Moving to recon the area.”

“Affirmative, Revenant One,” Captain Garrida replied. “Use caution. Our support assets won’t be able to cover you very well in that location.”

I picked up speed, crossing the hilltop and avoiding stepping on our Centaur and its deployed mast. I descended the opposite slope, firing my thrusters as I went to avoid slipping down the gravel. The dirt access road on the western side of the mine led into a narrow defile studded with gnarled and dead trees. One of my armored hooves came down upon one of them, crunching it flat. I turned my cameras skyward, watching as two Confederate Vulture dropships with yellow-striped livery ascended from a clearing deeper in the dead forest.

My muzzle drew into a snarl. “Gafalze Arresgrippen. They think they can pull a fast one on us.”

Sure enough. Seconds later, a quartet of Rakshasa battlesuits burst from the woods, laying into me with cannon and guided missile fire. Their autocannons were little more than a nuisance, chipping away bits of LAMIBLESS. The ATGMs were a substantially bigger threat. I boosted rearward at a few gees, putting space between me and my attackers and giving my automated caster-based active protection system enough time to track the incoming missiles and zap them out of the air, blowing their nosecones off and sending them pirouetting out of control.

Something burst from the trees and rammed into my side. I exhaled sharply as the wind was knocked out of me by the sudden acceleration. I rolled across the ground, using my boosters to stabilize my Charger’s spin and rise to my hooves. I turned to face the threat as I slid across the dirt, eventually coming to a stop with me and my attacker squaring off in an empty, flat clearing.

I quickly sized up the enemy assault walker, studying it with an eye honed by years of combat. The mech was a headless biped with a broad, armored torso, like most Goliaths. When I scanned the area, the Raks were nowhere to be seen. They’d withdrawn, wary of my inevitable counterattack. It was just me and this thing, whatever the hell it was. It was big and wide. A couple meters taller than an Ifrit and sturdily proportioned, with well-armored and flexible legs. It had a pair of circular openings in both sides of its torso that could only have been the muzzles of weapons of some kind, its shoulders fitted with recessed short-range rocket launchers. In its right manipulator hand, it held a twin plasma pulsecannon of unknown make, and in its left, a short and agile-looking plasma cutlass. The way it towered over me, it had to have weighed at least as much as a heavy Rouncey, or a light Destrier.

“What the hell is it, BD?” I said.

“I—don’t know. No database match. Never seen one of these before.”

This was something entirely new, and that meant it was impossible to assess the threat it posed without seeing what it could do, first. That gave the enemy an intrinsic advantage. The unidentified Confederate mech pointed its plasma cutlass at me threateningly, as if to taunt me, before suddenly rotating its torso to face me. Only my quick reflexes and a sideways evasive boost from my pyrojets kept me from being sundered by a pair of bright orange energy beams that turned a row of dead trees behind me into matchsticks.

“What the fuck?!” I yelled.

“Thaumatic signature detected,” Black Devil said. “Those things in its chest are heavy beamcasters!”

I was so shocked by this revelation, I almost failed to react in time when the enemy Goliath boosted towards me with its own pyrojets, aiming to cut me down with an overhand slash from its sword. I ducked away from the swing, only for the enemy machine to reverse its swing and attempt a horizontal sweep. I raised a pair of armored hooves to intercept the thing’s arm. LAMIBLESS and metal armor slammed together in a brutal clash, my actuators and pyrojets straining to keep the much larger mech from overpowering me.

The Confederate machine reared back and kicked my Charger in the midsection, sending me hurtling away and tumbling end over end. I cried out in fear and nausea from the sense of acceleration and the differential in centripetal force between my head and my hooves, bracing myself for the inevitable impact. Black Devil slammed into a cliff with enough force to trigger a small landslide, jerking me against my sync arm and nearly knocking the wind out of me. I quickly re-oriented myself, regained control, and leapt out of that mess before it buried me.

“Pyrojets and duostrand, too,” I said. “That thing’s no ordinary Goliath. It’s got reverse-engineered Charger tech in it!”

“Highly illegal,” Black Devil said. “The laws of the Confederacy and the FTU specifically forbid the manufacture and dissemination of magtech.”

“No, really?” I deadpanned. “I thought the satyrs put that shit in all their children’s toys.”

“Is that sarcasm I detect?”

“Please. I’d never stoop so low.” I pushed the stirrups forward, picking up speed. “I’ll never be beaten by a fucking imitation!”

I ripped off a thunderous rapid-fire salvo of 40mm rounds from my autocannons, tearing chunks of the thing’s armored bracers off its arm as it shielded its face to protect its sensors. The enemy mech responded with a salvo of its own; a deadly barrage of 70mm folding-fin rockets from the launchers in its shoulders. I fired my boosters and went evasive, just barely hurling myself out of the rockets’ path as they streaked into the ground where I’d been standing moments before and dug craters in the earth.

I fired my boosters into the dry, cracked ground, the bluish-purple fingers of my pyrojets’ exhaust kicking up dust that obscured my position. I lit my horn and focused my magic through my Charger’s Illusion locus, letting loose a magical decoy and sending it sprinting straight towards the enemy mech. I split off and circled around behind the target. As the enemy pilot unleashed multiple plasma pulsecannon shots against the decoy to no effect, they quickly realized they’d been had. I fired my boosters, pouring on the throttle and outstretching my forehooves, intending to pounce on them from behind.

The pilot at the controls of the Confederate prototype was no fool. They wouldn’t fall for a simple trick like that. Just before my hooves could land on their target, the enemy mech delivered a savage turning kick towards the rear, driving their foot straight into my Charger’s front glacis. My ass-end kept going, pivoting beneath the blow until I landed flat on my back. The worst position for a Charger to be in.

The enemy mech drove its foot downward, pinning me, before raising their pulsecannon and aiming it straight at my machine’s exposed neck. I was completely helpless. I drew in a sharp breath, anticipating the end. Instead, we held that posture for several seconds that felt like an eternity.

“Give her back,” the enemy mech’s PA speakers sounded, the voice female and stern.

“Give who back?” I replied.

“My little sister, you alien filth.”

The wheels turned in my head for a few moments until the answer came with a flash of dawning awareness. “You’re Mardissa’s sister?”

“Her name is not for your tongue, creature. You brainwashed her. You alienated her from our father. I want her back.” She pressed the muzzle of her pulsecannon harder against my Charger’s neck. “Inferior beings like you are meant to serve us. You would all be treated with fairness and dignity, if only you learned the value of submission. Instead, you continue to endanger the unity of my people with your stubborn resistance.”

I let out a mad chuckle, long and low. “Is that what they told you? Have you seen the camps? Have you seen what they’re doing to us?”

“You mind-control sapients with your twisted supernatural powers! My sister isn’t a traitor. She would never betray her nation, her family, for a bunch of pathetic, furry little runts like you! I can’t believe Veightnoch wants a stable breeding population of you things. You’re demons in the shape of little horses. You planted thoughts of treason in my sister’s head. I just know it!”

“I showed her,” I said. “I showed her the truth. I didn’t do a fucking thing to her head.”

“You lie!”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” I punched a few keys on my radio panel, patching my PA system into the feed from the Centaur. “Revenant Seven, I got someone here claiming to be your sister. She’s got a gun pointed at my neck. You mind saying hi?”

After a moment’s delay, Mardissa’s voice came in through from the other end, verging on the mildly frantic. “Silassa? How—how did—why? Why are you here?”

“Mardi!” The enemy mech slackened slightly. “It’s me. I heard from father what happened. He’s very disappointed in you. We all are. Come home to us. Please. You’re breaking my heart.”

“I’ve made my decision,” Mardissa said. “My place is here, with them.”

“Why? What did they ever do for you? Did the ponies hold you and rock you to sleep? Did they tell you stories before bedtime?” Silassa’s voice was cracking. “What could they possibly have to offer you that compares to my love for you?”

“Nothing,” Mardissa said. “They have nothing to spare. They have nothing left. We already robbed them of everything they had to give, and now, as they beg and plead for us to stop, we’ve come for their lives. Their bodies. The only thing they haven’t relinquished yet. Sila, you have eyes. Can’t you see this is wrong?”

“I—”

I saw an opening. I didn’t let Silassa finish her reply. I batted her weapon aside with one of my Charger’s forehooves and fired my boosters. My Charger’s Mithrium glacis emblazoned with the sword-in-horseshoe of the Imperial Army slammed into the enemy mech’s torso, punching a hole in their cockpit.

I was beyond mad.

As I rose to a standing position, Silassa thrust with her cutlass, but I stepped into the blow, reared up, and boost-kicked the outstretched arm, severing it at the elbow and leaving a sparking hole in its place. She brought up her pulsecannon to try and deliver a shot center-mass, but I placed my charger’s hoof atop it and rammed its muzzle into the ground. Using the taller mech’s outstretched arm and grounded weapon as a ramp, I pivoted and bucked her dead-center in the torso, liberating the pulsecannon from her grasp and sending her staggering backwards.

“Die, pony filth!” Silassa roared, letting loose an alpha strike from both of her machine’s beamcasters and the remainder of her rockets.

I was too close. I was in her dead zone, my Charger’s hull narrower than the gap between her weapons. Both the caster beams and the rocket barrage flew right past either side of me to no effect.

I’d had enough.

“Fuck you!” I boost-slammed both my forehooves into her mech’s torso, sending her reeling.

My machine’s duostrand muscles strained against hers as we grappled in the forest clearing, our melee impacts echoing through the woods. We fired our pyrojets, each trying to overpower the other, our thrusters kicking up long rooster-tails of dust and dirt behind us.

“Your sister is still alive,” I said. “We’ve treated her like a fucking princess. How dare you? How fucking dare you whine about family? My family’s gone, all because of you motherfuckers!”

Our boosters vectored downward and we both took flight, skirmishing in mid-air. Silassa aimed a kick at my midsection that was answered by a boost-driven hoof to the torso, crumpling her mech’s chest plating. Hand met hoof over and over again as our machines’ limbs crashed into each other’s armor. I’d never met a Goliath that was my equal on the battlefield. This was different from anything I’d ever experienced before. It was violent and raw. Our pyrojets on the verge of overheating, we both touched down some tens of meters away from each other. No more games. I precision-fired my HBCs such that they converged upon a single point, blowing apart one of her mech’s legs at the knee and sending it toppling to the ground.

“No!” Silassa shrieked. “No, damn you! You animal!”

She propped her mech up with its remaining right arm, firing her HBCs. The twin orange beams struck me dead-on in the Mithrium glacis, the toughest part of any Charger. The power behind those paired lances of energy was enough to blow the glacis plate clean off of my Courser’s chest and throw me backwards a good ten meters.

I slowly stood, my ears ringing and my vision dim. I coughed a few times. There was smoke inside my cockpit. Through my cracked viewscreen’s feed, I saw my glacis plate sitting face-up several meters away. Between me and Silassa, the symbol of my nation’s army lay scorched and indented by the savage force of my enemy’s weaponry. Such was the strength of Mithrium, enchanted personally by Twilight Sparkle herself, that the armor plate would rather tear free from its foundation than be penetrated.

I squeezed the triggers in my hoofcups, unleashing a several-second burst from my forties that tore into my fallen foe. I let out an adrenaline-laced scream as I held down the trigger, hosing my enemy down with every last bit of firepower I had left in my magazines. I showered Silassa’s mech with 40mm HEMP and APDS rounds, taking chunks out of her armor and kicking up big plumes of dust. When my magazines clicked on empty and the dust began to clear, I was still holding down the triggers, panting heavily.

“Ease off, Sergeant,” Black Devil said. “The target is neutralized.”

As I stared at the fallen enemy mech, hardly believing that the battle was over, I slowly began to realize what I’d done. If I killed Silassa, I would never hear the end of it. There were still the Raks out there to worry about, too.

I pounded a hoof into my machine’s console. “Shit. Dammit! How the fuck did they make something like that?”

“My guess is, expensively,” Black Devil said. “Oof, dammit. That hurt. Just kidding. I can’t feel pain like y’all.”

I ambled over to the fallen Confederate mech. There was a hole in the cockpit. I hoped one of the 40mm shells didn’t find its way inside. My acoustic receivers picked up the sound of coughing. Wounded and bleeding, Silassa climbed through the hole and staggered out of her machine. She was taller than her sister. Tall and attractively proportioned. Her right arm hung limply at her side. It was broken and frag-wounded so badly, the bone was showing. She slumped against her mech’s armor, coughing over and over.

“BD, open the lower cockpit hatch and bring us down,” I said.

“But, boss, the area’s still crawling with hostiles.”

“Just do it!” I shouted.

“Your wish is my command.”

I grunted in pain as I unlatched my syncsuit from the sync arm in a crash-desync that lit my nerve endings on fire. Alarms started going off in the cockpit, warning me of sync loss. I hit the silence alarm button a few times to shut them up, grabbed my bomber jacket and threw it on over my syncsuit, and then picked up one of the aid bags under my saddle with my magic.

I descended through the lower cockpit hatch vestibule and dropped into the dirt, running up to where Silassa lay. When the satyr saw me, she drew her pistol and cocked the hammer without hesitation, even though her aim was shaky and imprecise with her uninjured left hand. There was blood leaking from her right ear where the 40mm autocannon warheads had ruptured one of her eardrums.

“Get away from me, beast!” she cried out. “Alien devil! You won’t warp my mind and pollute my soul, too!”

I stared at her, my unblinking and furious eyes locked with hers. “Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. You sound just like Mar on a bad day, you stupid drama queen fuck. I have an aid kit, here. I’m going to patch you up, so long as you call off those fuckers in the forest over there. And put that damn gun down, or I’ll make you put it down.”

I nodded to the dim marker lights of the spec-ops Rakshasas hiding in cover a couple hundred meters to the north. Silassa waved them off, and I watched as they cautiously retreated deeper into the woods. The wounded enemy pilot reluctantly holstered her weapon and clipped the the strap over the back of the grip.

When I got closer, I could see she was in a bad way. She was dazed and concussed, her mouth and nose bloodied. I pulled out some supplies, using my levitation to tear open a few packages. I ran a disinfectant pad over her wounds, using Hemogel and a bandage roll on the worst of them. I carefully splinted her arm, like Gauze Patch had shown me, once. When I was done, I let out a deep sigh and collapsed to my rump with exhaustion, still facing my wounded foe.

Silassa inspected her arm, biting her lip. “A wasted effort. They probably won’t bother saving it. They’ll just replace it with chrome. Easier than regenerative therapy, these days.”

“Yeah, well, at least you won’t bleed to death. Mar would wring my fucking neck.” I looked up at the hulk of her ruined mech, taking in its unique features. “What the hell is that thing supposed to be?”

Silassa grinned. “The Djinn. The first of the new-generation Goliaths. Once we have enough, there will be nowhere left for you creatures to hide.”

“That thing has magic in it. Isn’t that against the law?”

The Cleomanni woman’s smile eroded right off her face. “What do you mean? This is the finest technology our engineers could come up with! It doesn’t have any of your filthy alien witchcraft incorporated into any part of its construction!”

I pointed a hoof at the loose fibers hanging from the ruined mech’s left elbow, blowing like spiderwebs in the wind. “That’s duostrand, or a Confederate copy of it. Your torso guns are casters. They have a thaumatic signature. My Anima picked it up right away, through her sensor suite. Your thrusters are pyrojets. Where the fuck do you think the fuel comes from? The fucking aether? Oh, right. It doesn’t need any.” I stepped closer and climbed into the hole in the cockpit. “What else is this thing hiding?”

“Hey!” Silassa yelled. “You can’t go in there! It’s top-secret!”

I gave her the side-eye. “Now ask me if I give a fuck.”

I took a quick look around the smoking, battle-damaged cockpit, covering my nose to shield my nostrils from the acrid stink of burnt electronics. Not much different from a Charger. The seating was optimized for cleomanni physiology, and they used that awful bright cyan paint of theirs, supposedly to improve pilot alertness. That was about it. The layout was basically the same, otherwise. A clear copy. I was just about to leave, when I stepped in a strange, squishy substance.

My eyes traced upward, to a shattered metal casing sitting behind the main console. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

After the shock subsided, an eerie calm descended over my nerves. I picked up the ruined piece of equipment in my levitation and dragged it through the hole in the cockpit as I crawled back out. When I released it from my magic’s grip and plopped it in the dirt next to Silassa Granthis, she recoiled with horror.

“What in the blazing hells is that?!” Silassa said.

“The finest technology that Confederate engineers could come up with,” I said.

Silassa tentatively stuck her hand in the reddish slop from where the thing had cracked open like a coconut, cringing at the texture. “Oh, eww! Is that—is that brain? Where did you get that?”

“Not just any brain.” I turned the smashed, dripping device over in my magic and showed her the spiraling horn sticking out of it. “You guys figured out a way to manufacture a decent enough Charger facsimile, but you didn’t have a way to control it, or regulate the magic circuits. We have unicorns enchant all that shit. You unbelievably sick freaks stuffed an actual unicorn’s brain and horn in there, quintessence and all.”

“No!” Silassa shook her head in denial. “No!”

“Who was he? Or was it a she? Yeah, probably a she. I wonder, did she beg when the sedatives went into her veins? Did she cry when the bone saw spun up to a shrill whine?” With tears in my eyes, I scooped a hoofful of bloody gray matter out of the destroyed cyberbrain and rubbed it across Silassa’s shaking forehead. “There. There’s your fucking fairness and dignity. There it is, all over you, you fuckin’ liar.”

I’d broken her. Silassa couldn’t even blink. She stared straight ahead at nothing, her eyes wide, her lips trembling, gore dripping down her face.

I shook my head. “You know, the veneer of civilization over your fucking Confederacy is so paper-thin, I’m amazed that so few of you see through it. It’s not like you have to look under every rock and every tree to find something heinous. It’s right under your nose. Blatant fucking evil.”

“I’m—I’m not—I wasn’t—”

“I used to think you people knew, and you just went along with it. But you don’t. Evil isn’t a deliberate lifestyle choice for you. It’s background noise. I’m amazed. You can actually rationalize all this shit away and live a relatively normal life where you presume that you’re a decent enough person, and it’s all because you’re a delusional fuckwit living in a genocidal death cult pretending to be a legitimate government, like all the other delusional fuckwits I killed today.”

I took the cyberbrain and wrapped it up in a roll of canvas cloth from my Charger’s supplies, taking it with me. As I wiped my syncsuit’s boots off in the dirt a few times before I climbed into BD’s open cockpit hatch, I paused and looked back at my defeated foe.

“Mardissa made her choice,” I said. “You make yours.”

“Wait!” Silassa reached a shaking hand out towards me. “Who—who are you?”

I smiled. “Just another little alien devil.”

I left the bewildered elder Granthis sister slumped against the destroyed Djinn as I sealed the cockpit hatch behind me. I tossed the brain into one of the storage bins at the rear of the cockpit. “Book ‘em, Blacko.”

“What?” BD said.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

I stowed my jacket and mounted back up in the saddle, hissing in pain as the sync arm latched into place over my spine, my nerves melding with my charger’s systems. Fearing an ambush, I immediately cloaked, my Charger completely fading from sight. The enemy contacts receded further into the woods, wisely deciding that they didn’t want a piece of me. That was a good thing, too, because I wasn’t sure how well I could handle a front hit at the moment.

“Ma’am, you didn’t kill her, did you?” Mardissa’s voice came in over the radio.

I waved a hoof dismissively. “Pfft, you should’ve seen it. Blood and brains pasted everywhere.”

“Sergeant!” Mardissa’s voice was laced with anger and fear.

“Relax, Mar. They weren’t hers. I’ll tell you everything when this is over.” I switched the channel. “Command, this is Revenant One.”

“Go ahead, Sergeant,” Garrida replied.

“Enemy Goliath engaged and neutralized. We’ve got Raks and who knows what else lurking out here to the northwest, though. Could be Gaffs or Karks. Patch me through to the technicians.”

After a few moments of static, I heard the voice of the chief armorer on the other end. “Yes, Sergeant?”

“I’ve thrown my fucking glacis plate.”

“We don’t have another one of those, but we do have something else I think you’ll like. Mark it for retrieval and head on back. You’re vulnerable without your front armor.”

I let out a deep, stressed sigh as I marked the location of my fallen armor plate for later pickup by the recovery crews. I also marked the wreckage of the Djinn. If the Confederacy were smart, they’d scuttle that thing before we had a chance to take a look at the pieces. If they weren’t smart, they’d evacuate and leave it behind. I hoped they’d take the stupid option. My brows creased in a deep frown. I’d barely been able to hold that monster off, and it was obviously just a pre-production prototype. If they started cranking them out by the dozens, we were in big fucking trouble. Not to mention, they would need ponies to convert into cyberbrains for their little pet project. That meant more kidnappings, more concentration camps, more shipping ponies off-world.

“Over my dead body,” I muttered.

The techs didn’t understand how important that salvage was. We needed it. All of it.

I switched to the Magister’s frequency and keyed my radio. “Cicatrice, Your Excellency.”

“Yes, Sergeant?” He sounded a little annoyed. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I’ve engaged and destroyed a new type of enemy Goliath. They call it a Djinn. Silassa Granthis was piloting it. She’s still alive. I’ve marked the valuable salvage and the POW in the datasphere and I’m sending over the coordinates right now.” I punched a few more keys with my magic. “There are Raks and Gaffs in the area. I thought you might want to send over a detachment of Stormtroopers to secure that salvage and capture a POW.”

“You thought correctly!” He was ecstatic. “You have no idea how badly I’ve wanted the specifications on the Djinn. It’s blacker than black. Not a hint of intel on any of it, other than that it’s a thing that exists. What can you tell me about it? Briefly, if you please. We’re both quite busy.”

“It has pyrojets and duostrand. For weapons, it carries a twin-pulsecannon and a plasma knife, with a torso fitted with two HBCs and two seventy-millimeter rocket launchers. Moderate armor. Better than an Ifrit, but still a little thin. Less firepower than a Destrier. Looks overweight for the loadout.”

“How in the hell did they make the diagrammatic engines?” Cicatrice sounded perturbed.

“It doesn’t use any. I’m also sending you Black Devil’s recording of the fight and all the telemetry data from my sensors.” I typed a sequence on one of the keypads to the right of the console with my levitation. A picture-in-picture view of the Djinn’s silhouette appeared in my viewscreen, with the sources of magic highlighted. “Look at the thaumatic overlay. No distributed diagrammatic engines. The hot spot is right in the center of the cockpit.”

“What the hell is it?”

“A captive pony cyberbrain drives all the systems.”

There was a brief pause as Cicatrice went through the same moment of shock that I did. “Bastards. Bastards!”

“No shit.”

“Do you have it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Got it in a storage bin on my rig.”

“It was wise of you to bring this to my attention. This information is absolutely vital to the resistance. A tactical, scientific, and propaganda victory in one. Well done, Sergeant. You are to be commended for this.”

“Thank you, Your Excellency.”

“I have work to do. We’ll discuss this later.” Cicatrice signed off.

The entrance to the mine was looking a little worse for wear. Our fixed defenses had been engaged in the last couple assaults, and this one was no exception. Small arms fire steadily poured forth from the buildings downhill of the mine, flechettes and bullets slamming into sandbagged fortifications. I saw a lot of wounded and dying ponies on the ground. When one of the militia ponies running a belt-fed machine gun got shot, another one would quickly take their place, while others dragged their comrade away from the gun nest for the medics to take care of them.

I saw one sandbagged gun nest with a recoilless 105mm gun get blown sky-high by a salvo of FFARs from a pair of Black Mambas. I swapped my 40mm magazines, the heavy drums clanking into place, and then I turned and dropped my cloak, sighting them in.

“Fuck the fuck off!” I shouted.

With a couple short bursts, the enemy gyrodynes were reduced to a pair of flaming streaks that nosedived into the ground. I descended into the mine once more, positioning myself in the refit station, between the giant robot arms. Ponies took up positions at the operating consoles for the station.

I keyed my radio. “Lay it on me. What have you got?”

“Chameleon applique kit and some extra drums,” the chief armorer said. “I’d love to give you sixteen drums, but I can’t with the HBCs on there. Eight’s the best I can do.”

“Fuck yes. Let’s do it.”

The robot arms strained as they lifted the heavy reactive armor frontal plating segments and connected them to my machine’s forelegs and torso with explosive bolts. My duostrand load indicators blared a warning alarm as the heavy chest plate and frontal ballistic shields were installed, one that only got louder and more insistent as four additional 40mm drums—a double load—were added to my reserves in external ammo pods. I depressed the alarm silence pushbutton a few times to quiet it down.

“Aw, no,” Black Devil said. “We’re going Chameleon? Really? It’s no substitute for Mithrium, you know. This stuff’s ordinary reactive armor.”

“I know, but I’m not going out there without something to keep the cockpit from getting frontally penetrated.”

“Got it, boss,” BD said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “No cockpit penetration. No cocks penetrating pits. No pit o’ penetrating cocks.”

“You know, for an AI, your mind is always in the damn gutter,” I said.

“Hey, we’re like, melded together,” she said. “I can feel what’s on your mind, you know. So, who’s the lucky stallion?”

I blushed furiously. “None of your business, BD.”

“Must’ve been good, whatever you two got up to. Your sync rate is ninety-seven percent.”

My jaw dropped at the sheer audacity of it. “Are you trying to imply that I should procure some dick before every mission?”

“There seem to be no downsides to it that I can recognize, Sergeant.”

“You have nerve.”

BD’s hologram flared up in the tank, looking a mite peeved, the little devil-pony crossing her forelegs in consternation. “I don’t. I literally don’t. Nope. Not a single nerve in my body. Which you’re trashing. Again. I guess that leaves living vicariously through you, since you never take me anywhere fun.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch. All you ever do is bitch.”

“I’m scared!” Black Devil’s voice cracked with emotion.

I was briefly taken aback by this statement. The natural impulse was to think of an Anima as a piece of equipment, but they weren’t equipment. They were people, of a kind. A soul from a living being, bonded to a computational substrate by powerful necromantic magic. In a moment of grim clarity, the hypocrisy of it all was laid bare. We bottled up minds to make our machines, too. Volunteers, death row convicts, the terminally ill. All they had to do was sign on the dotted line, and when they passed from this world, the Conclave would make them into things, like Tiamat and BD. All for the promise, no matter how disingenuous, of some form of continued existence beyond death.

I’d heard about this, sometimes. On long campaigns, occasionally, vital maintenance would get put off, and someone’s Anima would snap and express some combination of hostility towards a pilot and resentment for being trapped in a giant metal coffin with them. Our Anima cores went in for servicing every now and then, performed by the experts at the Conclave. They did something to them, to drug the fear out of them electronically. A little tweak to the personality matrix here and there. BD hadn’t undergone such servicing in years.

I bit my lip, very nearly hard enough to draw blood. “I am, too.”

“I’ve never known love, boss. Not like you have. I don’t have anyone except you. We need to take better care of each other. I don’t remember what it was like to die, but I’m not keen on experiencing it again any time soon. The glacis plate is gone; there’s just that applique and a few millimeters of frayed composite between us and oblivion.”

“Shit. Way to inspire confidence.”

“I’m not kidding. One bad hit, and you and I are going to burn to death. We’ve done good so far. Splashed a couple helos, downed several goliaths, and shot up dozens of medium tracks. We also kept the base from being bombed. There’s no need for you to do everything yourself, Sergeant. Use every asset at your disposal.”

“What assets?” I waved my hoof at the front viewscreen. “A tiny little artillery battery and a couple of tanks ain’t assets. They’re liabilities. I wanna go out and hit those fuckers, hard, but I’m stuck defending this fucking hill!”

“Hey, they’re coming!” somepony shouted over the radio.

“Command to Revenant One, have you finished rearming?” Garrida’s voice came crackling over the line.

“Yes, sir!”

“Then fucking deploy! Big wave of gunships coming in. They’re trying to take out our artillery and self-propelled AA. Bring them down!”

“Yes, sir.” I pushed the hoofcups forward, letting out a grunt of frustration as my machine struggled to attain even a small fraction of its previous speed. “Been a while since I’ve used a Chameleon kit, hasn’t it?”

The thermal tiles integrated into the Chameleon applique system used a grid of electric heating elements to produce whatever thermal image the control computer decided would reduce our signature and make us difficult to detect and lock onto. The thing took our camera, terahertz, and millimeter-wave feeds and passed them through a custom algo filter to accomplish this. The bulky armor plating mounted over the streamlined LAMIBLESS gave my rig a chunky and square appearance, like some damn Rouncey. Made it weigh as much as a heavy one, too. The system put stress on the frame and greatly reduced our mobility for some extra protection and firepower.

As we slowly ascended out of the mine, we were confronted by the horrifying reality of what was happening to us. Entire city blocks were vanishing in columns of fire, smoke, and dust that reached high into the air. Long strings of tracers from the Chimeras crisscrossed the skies. Through the enhanced sensory input of the neural link to my Charger’s systems, I could hear the screams of the dying all around me.

From the south, a wing of enemy gunships appeared on my scope as white dots silhouetted against the sky on thermals, like a string of angry gnats. From this distance, a couple kilometers away, one could just barely make out the Black Mambas’ rotors slicing the night air. Products of Guild Marbo. Mardissa’s clan. Marbo. MOREBO. Monsanto, Remington, and Bosch.

There was a sinister human hand behind the Confederacy and their entire existence. I didn’t know much about humans—who they were, what they did for a living, how they amused themselves—and yet, I couldn’t help but feel that the cleomanni were less their usurpers and more their unwitting protégés. Their mercantile culture, their conquering way of life, they owed it all to their former masters. They’d tainted us with it, too. We had all been cursed with humanity. Perhaps it was my own madness spilling over, but I suddenly felt like I knew the truth of this world, for once. The Concord were the architects of it all, for better or for worse, and the Vargr were their shadow.

In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to tear this despicable evil out by the root.

I would test the much-vaunted accuracy of the Marbo ShootRite against their other products. I turned my guns to the skies, I squeezed the triggers, and I let loose with a long, sweeping burst. At two thousand rounds per minute, the forties let out a steady roar, the sound of each report blending into the next. Seconds later, the gated proximity rounds sprayed the enemy helos with fragments, tearing their rotors to shreds. Over a dozen fireballs plummeted towards the ground. There was no gallantry in any of it. It was war, in all its cold and clinical brutality. They didn’t even have a chance. From their end, I’d looked like a Centaur on thermals, because that was the image my Chameleon plating was displaying. Hardly a worthy target, or so they’d thought.

Colonel Ravetaff was a moron, sending rotary-wing craft to deal with a Mirage, a Charger specifically designed with a brigade anti-air role in mind. There was no hiding from me, or the radome in my mech’s head, or the feeds from the rest of our aerial search radars on the SPAAGs that were fed directly into Black Devil’s computer through the local datasphere, the separate readings networked and fused together automatically by AI algorithms.

“Enemy Goliaths, directly east!” came Placid Gale’s report over the radio. “I repeat, enemy assault walkers are headed our way!”

My breath hitched in my throat. I hoped there weren’t any more Djinn. I needed mobility to fight one of those, and Chameleon gear was the opposite of mobile. I was relieved when a pack of Ifrits poured single file from the avenue to the east of the mine. I had them all lined up perfectly. It was, as a carnivore might say, a total turkey shoot. And yet, from the front, my forty-millimeter ammo would be wasted against their amor. To deploy my HBCs, I’d have to shed the Chameleon gear.

There was a third option. One the Chameleon kit’s engineers had never imagined in their wildest dreams. It was a tactic I’d employed before, at great risk to myself and my Charger.

“Undo the limiters, BD,” I said.

“Oh fuck. You’re pulling a New Isfahan, aren’t you, boss?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Canceling load limiters on the actuators. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

As long as I avoided excess lateral loads and moved in a straight line, this maneuver wouldn’t destroy my legs. I poured on the boosters, slowly pushing the stirrups all the way forward. I watched the speedometer as I built up momentum, crossing eighty kilometers an hour, then ninety, and then a hundred, the enemy lance of six Ifrits growing in my field of vision. Through their thermals, none of them could explain why a Centaur APC was coming sideways at them through the dark. None of them realized what was happening until it was too late.

I braced myself as my ballistic shields and sixty tons of armor smashed into the torso of the lead Ifrit, bowling him over backwards and sending him hurtling into the one behind him, and the second into the third. Three Confederate Assault Walkers went down like dominoes from my mad charge, their collapse sending up plumes of concrete dust and shaking the very earth. I fired my boosters and pounced on them, one after another, crushing their cockpits under my mass. The others quickly came to their senses and recognized the threat right in front of them. I took a plasma pulsecannon round straight to the chest, the heavy reactive Chameleon plating blowing outward to neutralize it, chunks of my armor ablating as I took hit after hit to the front without even slowing down. Sparks and motes of glowing metal dust filled the air.

With a grunt of exertion, my cockpit shaking from the forceful impacts of the enemy fire, I squeezed my triggers and unleashed long bursts of 40mm rounds right into their legs. I cut the fourth one off at the knees and he went down, his actuators failing to keep him upright. The fifth and sixth began to retreat, predictably enough, though they kept facing their front armor towards me as they slowly backpedaled away. The incoming fire got to be too thick, even for me. I was losing plating faster than I would’ve liked, leaving me poorly balanced.

My drums ran dry. “BD, reload!”

As my autoloaders cycled the drums, I popped smoke, filling the area with obscuring gray clouds. I boosted around the block, hitting them from the flank. I rammed one into a brick building, boost-kicking the enemy machine in the front torso over and over again, watching as their armor crumpled inward from the savage impacts of my applique-clad titanium hooves. The Ifrit collapsed face-down, its pilot crushed to death.

Just as the other brought his weapon to bear, I boosted backwards. Slowly, with the weight of my armor, but just fast enough for his pulsecannon to miss my machine’s head by a hair. I ripped into his side armor with a long burst from the forty. His ammo load exploded, rattling my jaw and pelting me with a spray of fragments that tinkled like raindrops against my hull.

“Fuckin’—there you go!” I wasn’t even sure what the hell I was saying, between the adrenaline and everything else. “You wanted it, you fuck!”

My millimeter-wave detectors blared a warning, but it was too late. An enemy ATGM slammed into me from the side, ripping chunks out of my actual LAMIBLESS. The engagement range had been too short for the APS to acquire it and shoot it down. It must have been launched by an ATGM squad in the building across the street. The cockpit of my Mirage flared red with warnings, alarms blaring in my ears. I was practically bowled over onto my side.

“Fuck! Fuck!”

“HBCs are going critical!” BD said. “That one hit the regulators! Jettison, jettison!”

I punched a few buttons in sequence, firing the explosive bolts for my heavy beamcasters. Powerful chemical rockets lofted them skyward at over ten gees, sending them hurtling away from my Charger. And just in time, too. A damaged HBC wasn’t a gun. It was a bomb.

The air sizzled with the whine of arcane energies beyond containing, the entire city block bathed a purple hue. With a ripping shriek of magic, the jettisoned casters and their capacitors exploded, producing a shockwave that flattened sidewalk trees for a hundred yards around and sent parked cars hurtling end over end.

A formation of Confederate Conqueror tanks decided to take advantage of my sudden lack of anti-armor firepower, surging out from a public park, their 140mm shells blasting huge chunks out of my Chameleon gear. The HESH rounds did not penetrate, but they sent spall flying around my cockpit, damaging my electronics. I caught frag in the side, right through my syncsuit. I shrieked in pain, whimpering at the burning sensation that crept into my guts. I was half-concussed, my ears ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear a damn thing.

“Oh fuck, I’m bleeding!” I said.

“Pull back, your vitals are all over the place!” Black Devil said.

I fired my boosters and pulled into a hard retreat, taking care to keep most of my frontal applique armor facing the enemy the entire time as I jump-jetted in several backwards hops that left me dazed from the fierce impacts of my Charger’s augmented mass. Each time I landed, I let off a burst from the forties to deter my foes. Once I was satisfied that I was in relative concealment, I stifled a whine as I undid the sync arm, shakily rising from my saddle and making a beeline towards the rear of the cockpit. As I let out little yelps of pain, I opened one of the bins and hastily dug through my medical supplies with a bloody hoof, sending some of my gauze and disinfectant scattering onto the deck.

I slowly undid my syncsuit, pulling it down to check the damage. My heart hammered in my chest. There was a gaping hole in my side. It was practically a full-blown gunshot wound. I was so shocked at the sight of it, my blood ran cold and my ears pinned themselves against my head. My hooves quickly grew red and slick from handling the wound, moving faster and faster in a rising panic. My juices were visibly pooling on the deck under me.

“Oh shit! Oh shit, no! No, no, no!”

Yes, a baritone voice in my head whispered. Yes, yes, yes. That’s the way, little one. That’s the way closer. Closer to your new abode and your new owners. We’ll be close together for a long, long time. Closer than you could possibly imagine. The closeness will overwhelm you.

I could practically feel the Archon’s breath on my neck as I levitated out the Hemogel and pushed the applicator tip into the wound. I squeezed the whole damn thing in there. It hurt. A lot. When I was done, the wound was packed with fast-hardening clotting agents. I was lightheaded from blood loss, but at least I wouldn’t bleed out. The applicator clattered to the deck as I released it from my magic.

“I did the ritual,” I wheezed. “I did the fucking ritual. Why can I still hear them?”

A dark chuckle filled my mind, low and long. You think that your begging and your meager incantations can keep us away from the sweet taste of all this death? For a lump of proteinaceous sludge, fully aware of your nature as such, the evidence of it leaking all over your stumpy little appendages, you are hopelessly naïve. Go on, animal. Kill.

“Why? Why are you doing this to us?”

“Who are you talking to?” Black Devil said.

“Shut up, BD. I mean it.”

Ah, a common question with a simple answer. What seem to you to be unspeakable acts of cruelty are mere necessities to us. Without tending our garden—guiding and shaping the world of mortals towards violence and tyranny and despair—there would be nothing for us to eat. I could draw an analogy from your primitive mind. Imagine if your dairy cattle and chickens wandered off from the farm. Where would you get your milk and eggs? How would you bake a cake? You see? All it takes is allowing the disease of utopianism to spread just a little, and our meal is spoiled.

I shivered, feeling cold deep inside. “That’s all we are to you? Food?”

Most baryonics, yes. You, however, are different. I sense that you are an artisan of death and mayhem. Rare, for an herbivore. You have my grudging respect. Do not squander it.

“Who are you?”

Kreuss-Korvass, the Chronicler. You act, I document. I like what I see. Do more animal things, if you please. It excites me.

“You want death?” I gritted my teeth in rage, throwing the medical supplies back in the bin before mounting back up on my saddle. “I’ll give you a buffet of death. I’ll make you choke on it!”

Once I’d reestablished my sync with Black Devil, I reloaded the forties with the last of the extra drums, the feed system clanking as it slotted them in place at the rear of my Charger’s head. Two pairs remained. The standard load. I flipped a sequence of toggles and mashed a big red pushbutton. The ruined Chameleon kit’s explosive bolts popped one after another. The applique armor blew off, revealing my battle-damaged hull underneath. The readings on my status panel weren’t looking good. My front torso armor was gone, and thirty percent of the hull was exposed. I punched a few more buttons that bypassed my damaged electronics and put me on the backup circuits. A couple relays remained red on my monitor, but they were non-essential.

“Sergeant, you should pull back,” BD said. “Please.”

“Fuck it!” I shouted. “I’m gonna send these fuckers packing if it’s the last thing I do!”

“You need some support, Storm?” Sagebrush spoke over the radio.

The four Minotaur MBTs that rolled past me looked like little tiny toys from my vantage point, but I knew from my experience as a tank driver that they were anything but.

“We got Conquerors, directly east,” I said. “I’ve lost my HBCs and need heavy support. Back me up, I’m moving to engage.”

I cloaked myself, my Mirage shimmering out of sight. Cicatrice was right. Thanks to the curse, my dark magic affinity was much stronger than before. With my spell locus aiding me, I felt only a small portion of the strain I usually would by this point. The price I’d paid for this boon was dear indeed.

I waited for the Minotaurs to get into position, moving up the street and taking up firing positions near the park. 140mm shells sailed in from the Conqueror tanks on the other side of the block, but I’d positioned myself such that my APS had a clear shot at the incoming rounds. My casters automatically blasted three of them out of the air with streams of scintillating magic. The enemy was just beyond the tree line at the edge of the park, but I couldn’t get an exact fix on them.

“Drones, up!” I hit the toggle to release a pair of Parasprite XKS recon Orbits, powered remotely by specialized sub-locuses in my Charger’s head.

Soon, I was receiving a full-color feed of my surroundings, even while cloaked, with just the tips of my antennas exposed. With a swipe of a hoof, I could cycle through thermal and terahertz readings, too. There was movement inside the buildings on the other end of the park. No way to tell if it was enemy or civilian. That was the problem with relying too much on through-wall sensor readings when a direct visual was impossible. High-resolution terahertz imagers like the ones on my drones had another neat trick, however. They were excellent spectrometers.

With a few more sweeps of my hoof, I filtered the sensor feed to just those readings that were in close proximity to large quantities of gunpowder and explosives. My mech’s sensor fusion systems automatically overlaid an augmented-reality representation of the results on my main viewscreen.

There were obvious openings that had been recently made in the marked structures by breaching charges, and within those openings, there were four ATGM nests with operators frantically exchanging the ammo tubes on tripod-mounted Pilum launchers. I ranged the outer wall of the structures on that block, and then set the fuses on my forties to a few meters beyond that. I put bursts into each of the ATGM nests, one after another. Over my audio receivers, I could hear the frightened cries of ponies downrange, but they were in adjacent apartment units and thus unharmed. They were merely startled by the noise as dozens of 40mm shells exploded a couple rooms away from them.

One set of screams was bloodcurdling in pitch, however. A Confederate soldier stumbled towards one of the openings, clad in the blue armor of the Confederate Security Forces, the auxiliaries in this fight. His forearms were stumps, the fragments from my autocannon shells having severed both his hands at the wrist. His neck was hanging by a string of muscle and nerve, his head practically draped backwards over his shoulder. He was gurgling and choking on blood. I had no idea how he was still conscious. It must’ve been a side effect of the combat stimulants they often used. He took a few stumbling steps towards the hole in the side of the building, not seeing where he was going, and then, he tripped and fell several stories. His cries were silenced with the wet thud of sixty kilos of meat wrapped in another twenty kilos of body armor striking the concrete as he landed in the street far below.

I took in a deep breath through my nostrils. “Damn.”

“That’s life,” BD said. “Pretty fragile, all things considered. Entropy always wins in the end.”

I ignored Black Devil. I had recently found myself regarding cleomanni as actual people, and I was having a hard time keeping my emotions in check.

“Enemy ATGM squads are neutralized,” I spoke into the radio. “Your turn, Sage!”

“Unleashing one can of whoop-ass,” he said. “Hang tough.”

Two of the Minotaurs—Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad and I Had Another Nightmare Last Night—mounted the curb, their Mark-84 launchers elevating and tracking. They unleashed a volley of 70mm folding-fin rockets, sailing across the park and overwhelming the Conqueror tanks’ active protection systems, peppering them with blasts that damaged their APS, optics, and communications gear. Their ammunition empty, the launchers auto-jettisoned, leaving the Minotaurs’ turrets free to rotate 360 degrees as normal.

Sage’s tank lined up on the first Conqueror. Ba-bang. The Minotaur’s twin 120mm Pyroguns propelled a pair of sabot rounds downrange at extreme velocities, punching neat holes in the Conqueror’s turret. Pyroguns used powerful pyrokinesis magic instead of conventional primers to ignite their gunpowder, yielding enhanced cartridge pressure and a velocity that occupied a middle ground between a conventional ignition gun and a coilgun or railgun, without any of the unnecessary complexity or maintenance requirements of the latter two. The Conqueror stopped moving, its crew either dead or too wounded to continue. The second Conqueror’s crew tried firing while reversing, but they were quickly caught in a pincer as the two Minotaurs encircled and defeated them with several direct hits. The last round must’ve hit their ammo stores, because the Conqueror’s shells immediately started cooking off, one after another. A gout of flame roared from the tank’s crew hatch. Without a doubt, the crew had been cooked alive.

My threat sensors blared a warning. When I looked up, a pair of Black Mamba gyrodynes had pulled into a hover above the park. A salvo of FFARs streaked down towards our tanks, the Minotaurs’ active protection systems just barely managing to shoot them all down. I put a couple bursts from my autocannons into each of the gunships, watching them crash into the rooftops below.

I surged out from cover, remaining cloaked as I crossed the open ground. On the next block over, there were four Invader IFVs and several dozen troops following them in a loose formation. I squeezed my triggers without hesitation. My fire control computer beeped a few times as my ammo counter ran down to twenty, then ten, then nothing. One sweep from the forties, and the entire enemy platoon was immediately reduced to fish food, their vehicles burning in the night. I quickly put the wounded out of their misery with a few more bursts from my head-mounted medium beamcasters.

“Last drums!” BD said.

I nodded. “Give ‘em to me!”

The final set of 40mm drums locked into place with a resounding clank, the motors and hydraulics whining as the first rounds were indexed. As I ran down the street, building up speed, my boosters pushing me over two hundred kilometers an hour, my cloak began to fade. I struggled to keep it up, but with the pain and exhaustion, I just couldn’t do it.

An Ifrit leapt in front of me from behind a building, firing their plasma pulsecannon at me. I jump-jetted into the air, narrowly avoiding the blue stream of energy, twisting and flipping and expertly firing my thrusters such that I ended up landing behind my opponent and facing backwards, throttling up my boosters to slow my rearward slide. I put a few bursts into their back, ripping their spine out and sending the enemy Goliath tumbling to the ground. I was panting, my heart rate more than twice the norm. BD was saying something, but it sounded like it came from underwater, whatever it was. My ears were ringing from the noise, the sound of my autocannons and the acrid stink of gunpowder creeping through the cracks in my hull.

A wing of gyrodynes fired their anti-tank air-to-ground missiles at me, strafing me with their cannons. I kept up the pace to throw off their lock, their missile and cannon fire going wide and striking the buildings around me, sending chunks of rubble into the street. I turned my machine’s head to the side as I ran, getting a lock on them with my radome as they moved to keep a lock on me in turn. I sent a couple long bursts skyward, my ammo counter beeping. Thirty, twenty, ten. My last remaining magazines went dry. The gyrodynes went down in flames, all except for one; the big guy in the back. The massive intermeshing-rotor Taipan heavy gunship tracked me as I ran, trying to lead me with its rockets. I was only briefly visible to them in the gaps between the buildings.

Directly ahead of me was the tallest tower in Tar Pan. The 57-story Flimflam Building. The crown jewel of the Flimflam Corporation’s mining and agricultural equipment empire. I poured on the boosters, my speedometer hitting 300 kilometers an hour.

“What the hell, boss?” BD said. “Dead end!”

“Up! We’re going up!”

I fired my boosters and jump-jetted at an ascending angle, my Charger’s armored hooves connecting with the outer wall of the building, scrambling for purchase as concrete and glass shattered beneath my machine’s hooves. I throttled up my boosters. The pyrojets adhered me to the side of the structure while negating the effects of gravity. My sprint straight up the vertical surface of the skyscraper’s exterior was no more difficult than traversing a horizontal plane. The number in my altimeter began to climb, the pinnacle of the structure growing closer with each passing moment as the excess heat in my pyrojets began to push the limits of their engineering.

The Confederate Taipan circled around the structure while slewing sideways, less than seventy meters above me. They opened fire with their automatic cannon, pockmarking the building’s exterior. I was too fast for them, their weapon fire blowing chunks out of the tower’s exterior beneath me, but never quite hitting its mark. My lips curled into a sneer. I had them exactly where I wanted them. In a matter of moments, I’d passed them and continued skyward by a matter of another twenty stories. Just before I reached the top, I crouched to gather energy and then leapt off the side of the structure.

There was a sense of weightlessness as I fell like a skydiver past the dim gray hulk of a low-lying cloud. The Confederate heavy gunship rapidly grew on my main viewscreen. With an adrenalized cry, I drove my machine’s right forehoof downward, straight through the Taipan’s rotors. In the first few moments of contact, there was a great crunch of torn metal and composites as the blades slapped into my hoof one after another. The rotors exploded into a shower of confetti, their stumps bent and hanging at odd angles, utterly incapable of flight. The moment after that, my hoof connected with the cockpit, crushing the canopy and the gunner instantly.

The gyrodyne twirled out of control, slamming into a building before falling like a stone. I fell right beside them, pulsing my thrusters to bring me over an ideal landing zone. The pilot fired their ejection seat, just barely managing to get clear of the thing before it slammed into the ground. I fired my nearly overheated pyrojets at the last moment, slowing my descent, but it wasn’t enough for a soft landing. I braced myself, the impact practically crushing me into my saddle and jarring my brains. My cockpit briefly went dark and the G-protection system’s indicator light came on while its alarm blared. When the Mirage’s systems rebooted, the first thing I saw on the main viewscreen was that my hooves had left craters in the street, concrete dust rising into the air.

“That was fucking crazy,” Black Devil said.

I shrugged, wincing in pain from my wound. “Sometimes, you have to improvise.”

It had started to rain, making a pitter-patter on the roof of my Charger’s hull. On my external cameras, raindrops flashed to steam as they struck my cannons and my overheated pyrojets. The pilot of the Taipan was sitting twenty meters away, trying desperately to disentangle himself from his parachute.

“BD, arm the casters,” I said. “Stream mode.”

As I marched up to him, his image resolved more clearly in my front viewscreen. He was an older cleomanni. Not elderly, but whatever passed for middle-aged with their ridiculously long lifespans. Grizzled and mustachioed. On his flight suit, he wore the insignia of the Ogiad with two pips beneath it, signifying the rank of Colonel. My eyes widened when I realized who I was looking at.

“Colonel Ravetaff!” I shouted through my mech’s PA system. “Don’t you fucking move, or I’ll burn every scrap of meat off your bones!”

Slowly and reluctantly, he knelt down and put both of his hands behind his head. He’d been either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to confront me directly, in a fucking Taipan of all things. Even with all my ammo gone, all I had to do was bait him into range of my hooves, and that was all she wrote.

I keyed my radio. “Sage, move up the tanks. I’ve got a prisoner for you.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I sat on top of my kneeling Charger’s back, wearing my bomber jacket over my syncsuit to stave off the cold. I was back atop the hill above the mine, next to the Centaur and the Chimeras. I sniffed at the air a few times. Clouds of smoke that carried a sickly-sweet charred smell with them were wafting from the south. Revenant Team stood below me, staring off solemnly in that direction. I could see the look on Mardissa’s face. I could tell she was deeply worried about Silassa, though she said nothing about the matter.

I heard that Night Terror had just finished mopping up a good portion of the enemy’s rearguard after they’d been thrown into disarray by Colonel Ravetaff’s capture. The majority of their forces were in full retreat, broken and demoralized. There were at least a couple enemy artillery batteries further south that were still going at it. Whatever happened on the southern plain, it was brutal. Far more intense than my skirmishes with the forces that had made their way into the city.

The smell was unmistakable. Flesh. Burning flesh. Lots of it. It smelled like Griffons barbecuing in the backyard. I was inhaling particles of ash that used to be cleomanni servicemen, cooked alive in the wreckage of their armored vehicles. With a shaking hoof, I reached in my jacket pocket and pulled out one of the packs of cigs that Mardissa had given me and a spare Hippo lighter that Bellwether had gifted to me, and I lit one up. If I was to breathe smoke, it’d be the smoke of my own choice.

There was a crowd gathering at the entrance to the mine. A great throng of beaten and battered civilians, some of them grievously wounded. Many of them bore cuts and bruises from being struck by debris. Collateral damage from the fighting. They were undoubtedly seeking shelter from the sporadic shelling that continued throughout the night.

I reached back and picked up the cloth-wrapped object sitting behind me, turning it over in my hooves. I set my jaw, my brows curling into a hard frown. These ponies deserved the truth. The full truth, and nothing less.

I dismounted from my Charger’s back, sliding down onto the loose gravel of the hill above the mine, making my way down towards the assembled crowd.

“Someone’s coming!” a mare towards the front of the herd said.

Her head had been bandaged all the way ‘round, with blood soaking through the bandages where one of her eyes used to be. Destroyed by shrapnel, without a doubt. The crowd came to a halt as I stood tall before them. None of them said a word. Some of these ponies may have counted themselves among the numbers of the very same ones who were protesting our presence mere hours ago. The ones who’d physically assaulted me as I tried entering the base. Now, they had looks of desperation on their faces.

“Ma’am, I have—I have a daughter,” the mare with the missing eye said. “Please, please. They’re going to keep coming. For Celestia’s sake, end this insanity. Call for a truce. Something. Anything!”

There was a pregnant pause. None of us breathed or moved a muscle. I merely stared her down with a tired, disapproving scowl etched onto my face. I pulled the cloth off of the cyberbrain, and I hoisted it high into the air. Some in the crowd gasped, others silently shaking in fright, their faces working through the various stages of fear, disgust, and then anger.

“You see this?” I said. “You see this thing? It came from one of their mechs. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art war machine. The Confederacy’s latest and greatest. Only, their engineers weren’t good enough. They needed a little extra kick. A little secret sauce. This is what they intend for your sons. This is what they intend for your daughters.” I turned to the one-eyed mare, whose lips were trembling in horror. “This could have been your fucking child. This will be your children, if you don’t help us! What’s it going to take, to make you understand? When the second-to-last one of us is taken, and this planet is left a barren husk, will the last free mare or stallion alive weep for what they could have done, if only they had the will to act? Will they?”

The mare at the head of the crowd was breaking down in tears. “Ma’am, I—I don’t—”

“What’s it going to be?” I roared. “Choose! Freedom, or death!”

One tired-looking stallion with a reddish coat stepped forward, sidling up next to me and facing the crowd. He raised a hoof. “Freedom!”

One by one, they crossed that threshold, facing back towards the crowd, adding their voices to the chorus. The few that abstained looked guiltier and guiltier, until they, too, took my side. Their voices rose higher by the minute.

“Freedom, freedom, freedom!”

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 21//Riposte Estimated time remaining: 7 Hours, 27 Minutes