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

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

Loose rocks and chunks of salt fell from the ceiling of the mine as the Confederate shelling continued, hour after hour. Dozens of civilians milled around. They were frightened, whimpering, and acutely aware of their own powerlessness. I sat hunched with my back to a smooth wall of salt, watching as the technicians repaired the damage to my Mirage as quickly as they could. After having freshly recovered my glacis plate from the field, they lifted the thick, heavy chunk of Mithrium off the back of a Bull Runner using a hydraulic chain hoist. The thing made a loud whining and clinking noise as it pulled the damaged emblem of the Imperial Army upright. The golden sword-in-horseshoe wasn’t actually gold. It was ordinary, unenchanted titanium with a titanium nitride coating. Strong, but not nearly as strong as the Mithrium underneath.

Among the three thousand refugees seeking shelter from the city, the Equestrian Liberation Front had acquired a thousand fresh recruits. My little speech was the reason. Once word had gotten around that the Confederacy were plucking out pony brains, quite a few of the civilians decided that they’d rather go down fighting. There was no way for our cell to equip all of them, with our limited supplies. We had only enough casters and enough barding for a couple hundred at the most, and not nearly enough time to train them into a semi-competent militia. They would be of little use in this fight. However, we had tomorrow to think of. And the day after that.

The Palfrey was gone. Crookneck had departed to link up with the Vanhoover cell. Vanhoover was crawling with a small army of pissed-off Vargr. It was no longer safe for the Liberation Front to operate there. Bellwether sat to my left, Corporal Shooting Star to my right. Mardissa paced around in front of us, arms crossed, shaking her head with a mirthful grin on her face.

“You and Bell, huh?” she said. “Still can’t believe it.”

“Well, believe it,” I said. “He’s a great fuck, and he’s all mine.”

Mardissa started counting with her fingers. “He’s rugged, charming, a little chilly in demeanor, though.”

“You two, I’m sitting right here, y’know,” Bellwether said.

“Huh.” Mardissa shrugged. “So you are. We seldom talk. Now, why is that?”

The older stallion shrugged and pouted. “I don’t have much to say to a Granthis, I guess?”

Bellwether grunted as I lightly kicked him in one of his pasterns. “Try saying something nice, Bell.”

Bell grinned sheepishly. “Well, I’m, uh, I’m Bellwether. Not my real name, of course. Forty-eight years old. Been blowing shit up with explosives since I was very little.”

“How little?” Mardissa said.

“Uh, five?” Bell’s eyes darted around almost guiltily.

“They let five-year-olds handle high explosive material in Equestria?” Mardissa deadpanned.

“Well, no. Foals, y’know. They can get into just about anything, including digging under a locked shed full of sticks of dynamite, fuses, blasting caps, whatever.”

Mardissa broke out in peals of laughter. “How the fuck did you not die?”

Bell huffed dismissively. “Earth pony. Just singed my fur a bit. They found me crying with wood splinters sticking out of me and a crater where the shed used to be.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you weren’t any closer,” I said. “You and that magnificent cock of yours would’ve been little pieces everywhere.”

“That’s so trashy,” Shooting Star muttered under her breath.

“What’s that, Corporal?” I said.

“Nothing.”

I stood up and paced around in front of her, invading her personal space. “If I hear another word out of you, I’m gonna blow him right here, and you’re gonna watch.”

Corporal Shooting Star glared at me in silence. Bellwether squirmed with visible discomfort. When I looked back at Mardissa, she had reading glasses on and had somehow procured a pencil and a lined paper notebook.

“Well, I guess I’ve taken up xenobiology.” Mardissa licked the tip of her pencil sensuously.

“What the fuck?” I laughed.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Black Devil was a mess. The techs had to rip out and unit-exchange at least a third of the cockpit electronics, which had been damaged by spall. They were hurriedly fabricating new pieces of LAMIBLESS to replace the sections crushed by melee combat and shredded by enemy fire. The glacis had been remounted and a couple of the technicians busied themselves taking the dents out of the emblem with hammers and torches. Titanium was very hard and very heat-resistant, and difficult to work by hoof. I marveled at how they set aside the time to repair something that only possessed cosmetic value.

I was a mess, too. Argent had needed to put a couple dozen stitches into me to close up the hole in my side. The frag had gone right into my fucking colon and was millimeters from blowing my spleen to bits and making me bleed to death on the spot. Luckily, I wouldn’t need a colostomy bag, or more chrome. Argent had done a little colon resection and anastomosis, along with an injection of regenerative stem cells to the wound site, before sewing me up the rest of the way.

I was supposed to engage in no strenuous activity for at least two weeks. None. Zero. Too much movement, and I could’ve ripped it back open and had shit leaking into my guts, and that would be a problem. Obviously, rest wasn’t an option. I was still needed in this fight. My side hurt like hell. With the adrenaline from the battle worn off, even with the help of painkillers, my face was warped into a perpetual grimace. I squinted away my tears and took a long drag from what was left of my cig before dropping the butt on the floor of the mine and stomping it flat to put it out.

“Beauty and virtue!” the chief armorer spoke from the pony-lift he was using as a podium. “The Conclave’s creations are no mere tools of war. They are living icons that represent the unshakable will of the Empress herself! A blemish on them is like a blemish on her face. Not merely inconceivable, but also impossible!”

Quill Dipper was sitting around, looking a little worse for wear. Before she’d returned to the mine, she’d been pulled out from under rubble during the fighting, and she had quite a few bruises to show for it. “Not the Empress I remember. She was one scarred-up mare.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “The Twilight Sparkle I remember was gorgeous. Not supermodel-hot, but still, hot. Are you thinking of the same mare?”

“That’s a glamor spell,” Quill said. “Underneath? Oh boy.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve seen what’s underneath?”

“I’m one of the few outside the Conclave who has. The Vanhoover Post were going to run an exposé on it, but BASKAF came one day and confiscated everything.”

“How bad?”

“Bad. Her right eye’s bionic, and old as hell. There’s a great big scar running from her brow all the way down her cheek on that side, and another huge one that crosses her lips on the other side of her face, and a bunch of other little ones besides.”

I frowned. That did change my mental image of her a little, but still, it was her own damn business. A bunch of muckrakers had no right to attack the Empress on the basis of her physical appearance. “What the fuck was the goal with the article?”

“Twilight Sparkle, the true face of a warmonger! We wanted to show the public what she’d been hiding all those years. Make them question whether or not she was just as hideous on the inside as she was on the outside.”

I shook my head. “That’s fucking retarded.”

“What?”

“You can’t take someone’s injuries or disfigurement and make it a reputation thing. If anything, it’d backfire and generate sympathy, and make the paper look like a bunch of monsters. You should be thanking BASKAF for saving your shitty little newspaper from the wrath of the public.”

“Figures.” Quill narrowed her eyes. “You’re the last pony anyone should ask. A true-believer.”

“And you’re not? You sure seemed to hate the Confederacy when I met you.”

“You and them are the same. You all like killing a little too much.”

“We are not the same.” I marched up to her. “Not even remotely. They kill us to enslave us. We kill them to preserve our autonomy. At the most basic level, regardless of our methods, our cause is intrinsically just, and theirs is intrinsically evil.”

“That’s not what most ponies see,” Quill said. “They see one group of brutes and killers vying against another for their own enrichment, using whatever self-serving ideology they like to justify it.”

“I’m not going to mince words.” I let out an exasperated sigh as I lit up another cig, pulling a long drag from the cancer stick and blowing a smoke ring. “If we lose, you’re fucked. Everyone you know is fucked. I mean that quite literally. It’s basically an unending rape train that ultimately ends when the corpse of the last pony to ever live is too cold and desiccated and maggot-ridden to fuck and there isn’t enough mung left to lubricate our enemies’ dicks. Print that.”

Quill Dipper turned a few shades greener. “That’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!”

“Reality is disgusting,” I said. “I’m being realistic.”

“I can’t show ponies that stuff. I can’t write shit like that. They’d be bent over the kitchen sink, hurling their morning coffee and cinnamon bun!”

“Who the fuck eats a cinnamon bun on an empty stomach? I’d be so fucking sick, scandalous newspaper article or not.”

“I saw you fighting, Sergeant,” Quill said.

“Oh yeah? Well, what do you think?”

“I never really appreciated just how violent and destructive Chargers are. It’s one thing to see war reels. It’s another thing to actually be standing there with that shit happening right in front of you. I saw you ram an Assault Walker into a building right next to the one I was in! I thought I was gonna be crushed. I’m almost certain that you did, in fact, crush some ponies to death! Don’t you care at all about the damage you cause to civilian infrastructure?”

I sighed softly. “Charger Exception.”

“What?”

“There are collateral damage thresholds for engagements involving urban Charger combat. As long as one doesn’t cross a certain threshold, it doesn’t count as an ROE violation. It’s expressed as a ratio. For instance, they give us an allowance of up to fifty civilian casualties for every Ifrit we take out. Six Ifrits and two hundred civilians means you’re in the clear. Four hundred civilians, and you get punished.”

I hated putting it that way. The truth was, I knew she was probably right, and in all likelihood, I had probably killed more than a few innocents by accident in my last battle. I was trying not to think about it. I was trying to stay focused. I felt sick. Sicker than I’d been in Vanhoover, even. I didn’t show it, though. I put on an impassive front, displaying not even the slightest hint of emotion. I wanted to see how she would react.

Quill Dipper was taken aback, her jaw hanging loose. “How can you be so cold? Those are ponies. You killed ponies!”

“What did you expect me to do? Evacuate them all first? Let’s put this a different way. There are like tens of thousands of ponies in Tar Pan, right? If I hadn’t deployed my Mirage, if I’d let the enemy overrun us, what do you think would’ve happened? Where do you think they’d all be right now? Where do you think you’d be, personally?”

“I don’t—I don’t know,” Quill mumbled.

“If we let the Confederacy take Tar Pan, they’re going to enslave its entire population. If it weren’t for us, you would be in a cage, right now. You and several others, packed in like tinned sardines. Like fuckin’ cat food.”

Quill looked increasingly anxious. “What the hell are they trying to do?”

“Have you listened to a single word I’ve said? Slavery. Stallions, they send off to work in asteroid mines or agricultural fields. Hard, dangerous, dirty work. Mares, they use as housemaids and fuckmeat. Would you like that? Would you like some fat, middle-aged cleomanni owner to dress you up in a maid outfit and spend every day bending you over a bed and fucking you with his microscopic dick? How ‘bout the damarkinds? Look at you.” I thumped Quill in the chest lightly with my hoof and she bent over, the wind practically knocked out of her from a tiny little tap. “Soft. Weak. To a Dingo, you’re a quick fuck-and-snack. Seen it happen with my own two eyes. They oughta wrap us in foil. Check the date, peel, enjoy.”

Quill’s eyes went as wide as dinner plates. “I thought you were joking.”

“You and everypony else.” I nodded. “Is it really so hard to believe, though? Pony gangs kidnap, enslave, and exploit fellow ponies, too. You know that. No one wants to believe this is reality. I sure don’t. But it just is. This is what’s happening to us, and worse.”

The journalist’s eyes welled with tears. She couldn’t even make eye contact with me, instead diverting her attention to the floor of the mine. “Not everypony should have to be as callous as you are, Sergeant. Getting through to you is like trying to beat sense into a lump of iron. What the hell made you like this, and how can I keep it from hurting others?”

“Do you have to ask? You’ve seen what I do for a living, Quill.”

“The onus shouldn’t be on us to be strong. The onus should be on the cleomanni and their allies to be decent people and not monsters.”

I shook my head. “That’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works, especially not in nature. There have always been predators and prey. You can never have a blanket expectation of safety. You have to be able to protect yourself. I mean, that’s literally the most basic fact of evolution. If you can’t perform, if you can’t guarantee your safety by your own hoof, then you can’t safely breed. If you can’t breed and protect your offspring, then you die out. It’s not nice, it’s not pleasant, and it’s not fair, but it’s the way things are. Life is intrinsically unfair. It’s a constant struggle against the inevitable. You’re born, you get old or sick, and you die, and leaving behind some small token of your existence is the best you can hope for. The weird thing is how ponies look at reality and expect fairness out of nothing. If you want fairness, if you want justice, you have to make it yourself. You can’t just expect it to fall from the sky.”

“The whole point of civilization is for people to act civilized!” Quill was visibly angry. Eyes narrowed. Voice raised. I’d struck a nerve.

“No. The point of civilization is to impose rules on people that they can choose to follow, or deviate from, and the consequence of deviance is to have an injury done to them by the State. The only reason why our civilization has existed at all up to this point is because we demonstrated ourselves willing and able to injure others, within and without. We delayed our extinction by a matter of centuries. Had we done nothing, had we passively accepted our fate, you and I wouldn’t be standing here.”

“But diplomacy—”

“So what?” I said. “What about diplomacy? Without the threat of force behind it, diplomacy isn’t diplomacy. It’s begging and pleading. Diplomacy is an act of bargaining. It’s a haggle. ‘Do what I say, or you will pay a price in blood.’ That is the diplomacy of which you speak. The only thing that keeps a stronger nation from attacking, annexing, colonizing, and despoiling a lesser one is if the lesser nation has nothing that they want. We have something the Confederacy want. It’s our bodies. It’s us. It sure would be nice if all they wanted was resources or territory, but they haven’t stopped there. They want it all. They want me, and they want you. My job is to dissuade them from taking us. If I have to put thousands of them in the ground for that to happen, so be it. They didn’t need to come here. They made their choice. If they wanted to keep living, all they had to do was stay home.”

“But—“

“There is only one language that everyone immediately understands. A universal language, if you will. Violence. Rearranging someone’s molecules until they are no longer able to do you harm. Everything else is a deception, a dilution.”

Quill Dipper was mortified, slowly shaking her head, tears tracing their way down her cheeks. “Dear Celestia. If ponies like you are all that’s left of us, we’re already dead.”

The mare before me buried her head in her hooves, sobbing fitfully. My cold rhetoric had clearly hurt her in some way. I had to show her I wasn’t a complete asshole, somehow. I enveloped her in my forelegs and drew her into a tight hug. She was apprehensive at first. They always were. I could feel it in the way her muscles briefly tensed with fear before relaxing. We all did that. Hypervigilance, from expecting to get hurt.

“Quill, I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish we lived in a better world. I do. But I can’t do anything about it, ‘cept kill for one. If you expected something gentler than that, if you expected finesse, you’re asking the wrong pony.”

Quill slowly wrapped her forelegs around me, in return. “You give good hugs. Just—just hold me. Please. Just like that.”

We held that posture for what felt like several minutes. It was relaxing. I needed it as much as she did. As I broke the embrace, I looked her squarely in the eyes. “I need to get back out there. This isn’t over. There’s another wave of Confederate ground forces incoming from the south. Scouts say they’re sending in damarkinds from the Boarhead Company as their vanguard, this time. They’ll be on us in under half an hour. The techs are just barely gonna be able to get my rig back together in time.”

Quill’s eyes slowly widened. She began to shake. “N—no.”

The Boarheads were some of the most vicious butchers in the known universe. Their brutality was excessive even by the standards of their species. Other damarkind mercenary companies gave them a wide berth. If we let them take Tar Pan, it would not be an exaggeration to say that every street in the city would have several dozen flayed pony skins draped from the windowsills by tomorrow morning.

“I know you’re a journalist and you probably want something for a story, but for Celestia’s sake, stay inside this mine and do not leave until the fighting’s over,” I said. “Get your story by talking to the ponies here. They’ve got plenty to share. You don’t want to get grabbed by these bastards.”

Quill Dipper looked straight at me, her expression severe. “Okay.”

Something about the look on her face told me that she was planning something. She had a glint of dishonesty in her eye.

“Whatever you’re thinking, don’t,” I said. “Just stay here.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Quill said. “I’m staying put.”

As I headed off to our makeshift Charger bay, I looked over my shoulder at Quill, who stood rooted to that spot and watched me with a keen eye as I departed. I hoped she wouldn’t cause any trouble for us, or herself.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Quill Dipper

This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. I was now unofficially embedded with the ELF, a motley assortment of former Imperial soldiers and civilian militia recruited from the ranks of survivors who lived in the wastes or in the towns that the rebels had liberated. I had to get my scoop, no matter what. Sure, no one was paying me, and my editors at the paper were probably all dead. I would be doing this one freelance. I’d write a book. Maybe I’d publish it and make a few bits if we won this hopeless war. I needed something to keep me focused on anything other than our dismal situation. I needed a goal to live for, and I suspected that these ponies needed the same thing. I decided right then that I would hear the testimony of Desert Storm’s rebel unit. I had my cameras and my recorder with me, and my journal. All I needed was a story to write.

I picked my first member of Revenant to interview. A fiery-eyed and fiery-maned mare. Upon closer inspection, she had the countenance of a killer. I could just feel the bad vibes radiating off of her. In spite of our dire situation, she wasn’t fearful in the least. She had a look of smug satisfaction on her face, like she was looking forward to some action. Even the Sergeant gave off an aura of equinity that this mare lacked. I fearfully swallowed the lump in my throat, steeling myself as I approached her.

“Ma’am, excuse me?” I said.

“The fuck?” She turned to face me. “Oh, it’s you. The journalist.”

“You were with Sergeant Storm during the action in Vanhoover, against the Riggers.”

“That is correct. Corporal Shooting Star, at your service.” The bow she gave was a mocking one.

“I’m interviewing ponies on the base,” I said. “What can you tell me about your time in the resistance?”

The Corporal grinned, waving me closer. “C’mere.”

When I took a few steps closer, Shooting Star put her foreleg around my neck, dragging me close so she could whisper in my ear. “I can see that look in your eye. You’re thinking about heading topside. Watching Storm fight again. I can see it written all over your face. You’re addicted. See a Charger in battle once, and you never go back. You’ve just got to see it again, I know. Forget it. You ever had a metric ton of stinking, humping dingoes on top of you? It’s not worth it, and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. I promise you that.”

I pushed her away. “Fuck! Are any of you ponies fucking normal?!”

“Define normal, Quill. All of us have been through shit that would put hair on your eyeballs if you saw it up close and personal. That’s the fuckin’ truth. Are you sure you want to know any more than that? I don’t sleep right. The Sergeant doesn’t, either. Nopony here does. That will be you, too, if you keep going the way you’re going.”

“Don’t act like you’re the only one to have ever lost something or someone important to you,” I said. “This war left none of us untouched.”

“It left some ponies more untouched than others. After all, if you already knew everything, then you wouldn’t be waltzing around here asking stupid questions. You should treasure that innocence. Don’t throw it away so easily, ‘kay? Bye. Go bother someone else.”

Corporal Shooting Star turned and ambled off, looking more bored that she wasn’t killing something than anything else.

I shook my head. “Unbelievable.”

My next stop was the infirmary. I was able to worm my way inside a salt cavern that had been festooned in temporary work lights so the doctors could see to their patients. There was one subject I needed to hear from.

Argent Tincture was there. I’d met her hours earlier, when they looked us over after we got back from Vanhoover. She’d done more tests on us than usual, like she was looking for something specific. It was very odd, in retrospect. There were also dozens of wounded ELF members, some having experienced varying degrees of dismemberment in the fighting. I winced at the figures that moaned and writhed in their cots. Argent was speaking to a couple of militia stallions.

“We’re running out of morphine,” Argent said. “It’s the damn salt. It’s in the air. It makes everything hurt more. Where are those rolls of canvas I asked for? We need to seal off the walls.”

“You’ll get what you’re after, doc,” one of the militia stallions said. “May take a little while, though.”

As the stallions walked away, leaving a very disappointed Argent behind, I took that as an opportunity and sidled up close to her. “Doctor Tincture?”

She glanced over at me with weary eyes. “What? Can’t you see I’m busy, here?”

“I want to interview your patient.”

“Who? Jury Rig? He’s not seeing visitors.”

“Send her over, doc,” a rough voice from behind a curtain spoke.

Argent turned to the source. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

I clicked on the voice recorder on my shoulder and I slowly walked up to the free-standing curtain divider, pushing it aside and entering the space beyond. I gasped at the sight of the pony in the cot. Jury Rig, the bubbly and optimistic looking pegasus colt I’d met in Vanhoover, was a shambles. Broken utterly. His wings were completely gone. Flayed bits of his wing nerves lay out at either side of him, immersed in small tubs of nourishing protectant gel. Nerve conditioning. The first step before implantation. There was a big, unsightly visor of some kind over his eyes. As he turned to face me, a small, vertical band of blue light in its single lens slit turned and tracked me.

“Why are you wearing that in bed?” I said. “A little bulky, isn’t it?”

“I can’t take it off, Quill,” he said. “It’s not headgear. It’s chrome. It’s a part of my body.”

I blinked a few times, feeling a sympathetic pain in my retinas that I just couldn’t shake. “Why?”

“I lost my eyes. Both of them. And my wings. They’re putting in a Heca, too, so I’m still not gonna have wings when they’re done.”

“I am so, so sorry,” I said. “How are you feeling? Are you alright?”

Jury Rig was hesitant, his voice soft and laced with emotion as he replied, “Lady, do I look alright?”

“Stupid question.”

“Do you know how important flight is for a pegasus? It’s the center of our identities. It was my own stupid fault. I was trying to help, and I overextended myself.”

I pulled up a folding chair, sitting in it heavily. “What do you think about the Sergeant?”

“Sergeant Storm? My boss? You want to know what I think? Don’t tell her this, but I think she’s trying to be a hero. Something she’s never been before. I think she’s trying to atone for what she did during the war. I think she’s going to get hurt. Worse than me, even. And when she does, there will be no one around to help her, and it will be entirely her fault. She thinks she can do everything herself. Y’know, we tried. We tried helping her. I don’t think she wants to be helped. I think she wants validation. She wants to feel like it wasn’t all for nothing.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“What do I want?” Jury Rig echoed, his lips curling into a sad smile. “I should have died, but I can’t. Not yet. My country needs me, ma’am.”

“But—but you’re a child. You should be in high school, not getting maimed while trying to—what? Cobble the Empire back together?!”

“That’s right. I’m fifteen. Not like that’s relevant to fucking anything at all. I’m strong enough to carry a caster. I’ve killed ponies, I’ve killed cleomanni. I don’t give a fuck about how long I’ve been here, on this planet. You try being twelve, and watching a kinetic strike turn your entire neighborhood into a crater. You see these ponies walking around here? Huh? They’re my family, now. They’re all I’ve got.”

“You’re not worried that they’re manipulating you for their own selfish ends?”

“What in the fuck is that supposed to mean? Ma’am, have you looked around yourself lately? We need our damn country back.”

“Are you sure about that?” I said. “Can’t we parley with the Confederacy, somehow?”

“They’re not going to stop.” Jury Rig slowly shook his head, being careful not to move his body and disturb his immersed nerves. “They’re not going to stop hurting us. Not unless we hurt them back, and harder.”

“But the Confederacy has huge armies, huge fleets.” My voice quavered with emotion; there was no reason for a teenager to be this hard-hearted, not at an age when he should’ve been learning and playing and enjoying life. “Are you sure that’s a realistic goal? What if resistance only hastens our annihilation?”

“They were gonna do it anyway. They’re not leaving us alone. They’re toying with us, like a cat toys with a mouse. Three years to reckon with the horror of it all. Three years of living twisted half-lives, drifting like ghosts through the ruins. Ma’am, this is systematic torture. There is no other explanation for it. They’re torturing us on purpose. Gloating and waving our defeat over our heads until it sinks in. You know it. I know it. And I—” Jury Rig bared his teeth. “I will punish them for every single thing they’ve done.”

I reached up and turned off my audio recorder, my legs trembling with fear and sorrow. I was left reeling by the boy’s words, my mind racing. What am I even doing, here? Am I fishing for somepony who’ll say something bad about the Empire? Restoring our nation against all odds is the last hope these ponies have. I have no right to take that away from them.

“I thought—I thought there could be peace, finally,” I said. “I thought they’d leave us alone. We’re not a threat to them anymore, so why?”

“We’re an inconvenience,” Jury Rig said. “If we have too much contact with other civilizations in our present state, eventually, someone is going to ask some uncomfortable questions about genocide, with wide-reaching political implications. They’ve got to shut us up before that can happen, or it’ll cost them. Face it. Peace was never in the cards. Any lull in the fighting is just a pretense for them to gather their strength and plot against us. Ma’am, I’m not stupid. I study, I read, I know these things. I know our history, and I know electronics. I’ve been using a soldering iron since I had a pacifier in my mouth. My dream was to join the Conclave, one day, before it all fell apart. The Empress was right. We need all hooves on deck. More support for the sciences. More appreciation of technology. I’d be a cripple if it weren’t for Magtech.”

“Isn’t that kind of bleak?” I said. “Abandoning the arts, so we can have more machines of war and death?”

“Yeah, it is. But it’s either that, or we all die, and nopony gets to paint, sculpt, or noodle on guitar anymore.”

“But ponies need culture. It’s vital for our mental health to be able to express ourselves.”

Jury Rig chuckled softly. “I know this is going to sound like a no-brainer, but it’s pretty hard to express yourself when you’re unarmed and dead. Go tell that to the hippies and the buskers and all the other idlers you know, if any are still alive. We could’ve used them. Their time would have been better spent arming and equipping Equestrian soldiers rather than getting stoned out of their minds and denying reality. Maybe things could’ve been different. Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have needed to watch my house disappear in a flash of light, with all my toys, all my photo albums, stamp collections, bottle tops, my bicycle—and my mom, my cousin, my cousin’s best friend, and my kid sister inside.”

I shook my head, barely holding back my tears. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“She was five years old. You think they cared? I went to the bottom of that crater, filled up with sewage and water from broken mains, and I dug through the mud, looking for something, anything. A scrap of hair. I didn’t care if I got an infection or whatever. I think I got pink eye for a couple days, but I dunno. It could’ve been the crying, from when I shed every last tear in my body. There was nothing. They’d turned to dust. Why do you think I always put on a happy face for everypony? It’s because I don’t want them to feel the way I did that day. Nopony deserves to feel that rotten.”

I slowly rose to my shaking hooves. “This has been very enlightening. Thank you, Private.”

“Any time.”

“I wish you a full and speedy recovery.”

Jury Rig sighed. “Thanks.”

My forehead beaded with sweat. I needed to get away. I needed to get away from that judging, glowing blue slit of an eye. It felt like the young stallion could literally see right through me. Argent Tincture’s own accusing eyes tracked me as I departed. I looked for the nearest portable sink, and finding one of the blue plastic devices, I filled the basin and splashed my face a few times, panting with dread. I’d almost cracked up right there in the infirmary. Images of my missing husband and my daughter had flashed through my mind like a slideshow. I had very little confidence in my ability to remain objective. We’d all lost something dear to us. We all shared that same pain.

I stared down into the sink as I unplugged the drain. “Fuck. Fuck!”

I saw Corporal Cloverleaf walk past me. She was pacing back and forth, her body language betraying her nervousness. Her eyes were wide and haunted. She was mumbling something to herself. As I approached her, I could just barely make out her words.

“They won’t get in. They won’t get in. They won’t get in.” When she saw me, her demeanor changed instantly, her terrified countenance instantly replaced with a false cheer. “Oh, hey there, Quill! Didn’t see you there.” A disingenuous grin etched itself onto her face, stretching her scarred cheek, though her brows bore the distinctive arch of worry.

“What were you going on about a second ago?”

The big green earth pony bit her lip. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

I looked down at her right foreleg. A bionic limb replacement. Its green matched her coat perfectly and had some amazing decorations on it, with airbrushed floral designs. It had the word Unbroken on the front of it. As I walked around to the side, I could see that the rear of her foreleg had even more script; it read, Unbowed.

“Wow, where’d you get that?” I said. “It’s nice!”

Cloverleaf recoiled as if struck, her face curling into a hateful snarl. “Oh yeah, ask about the leg first thing. What are you? The journalist from Tartarus? Do you ask every granny on the street where she got her cane?”

My eyes widened; when she put it that way, it sounded horrible. I waved my forehooves from side to side. “I didn’t mean anything by it, Clover! I just liked the paint job, that’s all.”

The Corporal’s expression softened. She lifted her leg and looked it over admiringly. “The Sergeant gave it to me. Her and the techs.”

“Wow.” I found myself reevaluating Storm, in light of this generosity. “What a thoughtful gift!”

Clover smiled sadly. “Ponies are always so mean to the Sergeant. I don’t get it. She saved me. Hell, she’s put her life on the line for us more than once. I’ve never seen her hesitate to run right into the fray. Whatever threatens us, she takes it head-on and gives it a good whipping. The resistance is better for her presence. That’s what I feel.” Cloverleaf’s eyes were brimming with tears. “Storm’s always getting hurt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her not hurting from something. They always push her so hard. One of these days, there’s not gonna be anything left of her, and we’ll only have ourselves to blame.”

I gazed at the floor of the mine, deep in thought, before returning my attention to the Corporal. “This has been very illuminating. Thank you for your time.”

“Yeah, sure.” Clover nodded.

As Corporal Cloverleaf went to attend to her own business, I kept walking, making my way towards the Charger bay. Sergeant Storm’s intimidating machine of war was crouched in the center of the cavernous space, attended to by a small army of technicians. They were assisted by large and powerful robot arms that swept around and did much of the heavy material-handling work. I watched with rapt attention as the techs performed their duties, each according to their race’s specialty.

Unicorns performed the difficult tasks requiring a degree of manual dexterity not afforded by hooves, using their levitation to lift and precisely manipulate large and cumbersome-looking tools, many of which I did not recognize. Pegasi used their wings to reach the upper hull of the vehicle without needing pony-lifts or ladders, carefully inspecting the Charger’s head. Earth ponies did much of the grunt work, moving heavier components and towing carts laden with tools and things of that nature. It looked positively grueling. Most of them had their coats slathered with oil and grime and were barking instructions at each other, cursing intermittently whenever one of them made some boneheaded mistake that wasted valuable time.

I approached Sergeant Storm and Private Granthis, but then quickly hid behind a tool chest when I noticed them conversing privately.

“You never told me your sister was a mech pilot,” Desert Storm said. “Just how many of your family are military or politicians?”

Mardissa Granthis let out an exasperated sigh. “Almost all of them. You didn’t hurt her too badly, I hope.”

“She’ll probably lose an arm.” Storm was apprehensive at the silence and the slack-jawed glare that she got from the cleomanni woman. “What? What’s that look for? She was trying to fucking kill me, you know!”

“Yeah, I know.” Private Granthis’ shoulders slumped. “I just don’t like it when family gets hurt.”

“I know exactly how you feel.” Storm nodded. “By the way, Cicatrice and his team have recovered the Djinn, or what’s left of it. Looks like they tried scuttling it, but our guys stopped ‘em in the nick of time. Silassa was nowhere to be found. We think they successfully extracted her.”

“What’s so special about that thing?”

“Brains, Mar. The systems are run by a shackled unicorn cyberbrain. They need to be. It uses magtech.”

Mardissa was taken aback. “That’s illegal!”

Storm chuckled. “Mar, I doubt the Confederacy really sees anything as illegal enough to let it stand as an obstacle between them and ultimate power.”

“The law predates the formation of the FTU.” Granthis was looking increasingly panicked by the second. “It’s from the time of the Devourers. An artifact from the Confederacy’s founding. Abandoning it is a big deal. If the nemrin knew, they’d be furious. They might even pull out of the Union!”

Storm’s lips slowly pulled into a grin. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“I think I see where you’re going with this.”

“What we have is evidence.” Storm nodded. “It shows that the Confederacy have crossed a red line. They’ll deny everything. They always do. But it sows doubt among their allies, and that’s plenty enough for our purposes.” The Sergeant reared up and put a hoof on Mardissa’s shoulder. “Mar, the techs are just finishing up. Dingoes are coming, next. I gotta get back out there. We’re not leaving the Centaur behind on the hill, this time. We’re pushing these fuckers back. Tell everyone to get their shit ready.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Mardissa nodded curtly and strode away from the Sergeant, right towards my hiding place.

As Storm went to board the Mirage, I stepped out in front of Mardissa and waved. “Hey, Miss Granthis, can I have a moment of your time?”

Mar frowned for a second before she recognized me. “Oh, you’re Quill. Quill Dipper, right? I’m very busy. Were you eavesdropping? The hell do you want?”

I clicked my recorder on. “Flash interview! The Granthis family are very wealthy. I know for a fact that your father is worth billions of credits and has a large estate on Maroch III. What convinced you to abandon your fortune, join the cause of ponykind, and fight against your own people?”

Mardissa snorted with derision. “Are you serious? Look around you. Half this town is hiding in a salt mine. The other half is out there, being processed into horse meat by nonstop shelling. If we don’t do something about these damarkinds, the situation is going to get immeasurably worse.”

“You didn’t answer my question. What convinced you give up everything and join the rebels?”

“The fuck are you on about?” Mardissa’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “You know damn well that your people are going extinct in the wild, and the rest are being—what, domesticated? Are you really so eager to turn down help?”

“No, I—”

Mardissa glared at me, kneeling in front of me so that we were at eye level. “Let me make one thing crystal clear. I don’t like watching you wander around this base, fucking with ponies whose morale is already shot, spewing your useless, defeatist nonsense. I don’t care for your silly, irrelevant questions. I used to sit in on meetings of Union delegates. I used to eat hack journalists for breakfast and preening sociologists for dinner. If I wanted to watch you masturbate in public, I would’ve brought a camera and a tripod. Fuck off!”

I was stunned into speechlessness. Eyes wide, jaw slack. I’d never been spoken to like that by an interviewee. I had absolutely no idea how to respond. I held that posture for several seconds while Mardissa left to attend to her own business. I could already tell that the book I was going to write was bound to be a colorful tale indeed.

Mardissa genuinely saw herself as heroic for becoming a turncoat and abandoning her family’s wealth and comforts. Ponies like me didn’t fit into her daring and romantic vision of what an adventure should look like. I reminded her of a home that she hated, full of boringly practical people who didn’t like taking risks and didn’t want to die young.

We were all headed towards our doom, clearly, but there was something else in the air that I couldn’t quite put my hoof on. Maybe, in another time, in another place, it could have been called hope.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

I slipped into my syncsuit, the shrapnel holes freshly mended by the techs. The faux-leather saddle of my Charger groaned under my weight as I settled in, my hooves locking into the stirrups. I winced, hissing through gritted teeth. My guts still hurt. Everything hurt.

“Fuck’s sake.” I levitated a bottle of ibuprofen out of my first aid bin, placed a pill on my tongue, and tossed it back without any water. It was no fent, but it would take the edge off a little. I needed to stay sharp.

The sync arm lowered over my back and snapped into place over my spine, sending a wave of tingling sensations from my head down to my hooves. I went down my checklist to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Battery voltage, good. The Charger’s main electrical bus was still paralleled to the base’s power, keeping everything topped off. New armor plates had been attached to my frame, my glacis was back in place, and I’d been freshly rearmed with a pair of newly uncrated and hastily qualified HBCs and a full ammo load for the forties and missile launchers.

“BD, initiate startup sequence,” I said.

“You got it, boss.”

The turbomolecular pumps began spinning up, pulling a hard vacuum on the reactor chamber. I watched as the status indicators for the reactor winked green on my readout, one after another.

“Prepare for beam injection.” I could hear the tiredness in my voice.

“Coolant pressure and flow nominal,” Black Devil said. “Ion guns ready on your command.”

“Mark.” I watched as the indicators for the ion guns flared green, and then the polywell itself immediately thereafter. “Hey, BD?”

“Yeah?”

I thought back to all the times it’d been just me and her. All alone. Endless alien dunes before us. Flattened cities behind us. Smoke and fire all ‘round. I never appreciated her enough. I never appreciated how diligently she’d kept me safe. I’d been a bad friend.

“No matter what happens, I thought you ought to know.” I fixed my weary eyes on the figure in the holotank and the quizzical expression on her face. “You were my only real pal.”

BD held a hoof to her mouth, shocked and blushing at my confession. I gazed at the main viewscreen, where the cracked panel glass had been freshly replaced. The sync rate percentage racked up to ninety-nine-point-eight. The highest I’d ever seen it. Motes of rainbow light danced down my instrument panels in the corners of my eyes, vanishing when I looked directly at them. I tried blinking it away, but the apparitions wouldn’t leave the corners of my eyes. I felt lightheaded.

Our instructors had warned us about this. Gestalt Frame Superimposition Effect. An all-spectrum emanation that some pilots witnessed when achieving exceedingly high synchronization rates. Some called it a faint echo of the legendary Rainbow Power. I suddenly became aware that I could feel, with astounding depth and fluency, the emotional states of every single pony on the base. Thousands of them. I could feel their fear, their pain, their sorrow, and their anger. A nightmarish jumble of sensations that pressed on my mind. I could hear the faint whispers of their subconsciouses in my head.

Why won’t they leave us alone?

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

Mommy! Where’s my mommy?

Get them. I’ll get them first. Cleomanni bastards. I’ll go out there. Beat them all to death with my bare hooves. They think I’m hiding from them? Au contraire. They’re hiding from me!

Had I not been accustomed to such feelings in recent months, I would have collapsed right then and there, my lips covered in froth. Instead, something strange happened. As I felt the emotions of the great multitudes swelling and swaying within me, I let go of all malice and contempt and fear and other such pointless attachments. Friend? Foe? Such false distinctions between peoples arose from the Archons’ lies and deception. I beheld an essential truth; a universe filled with kindred souls that I wanted nothing more than to protect from the Archons’ vile depredations. I watched as the sync rate crept up to ninety-nine-point-nine. The rainbow light that filled the cockpit became more intense, streaking towards the center of my field of vision. My nerve endings were on fire. I felt like I wanted to scream.

“Sergeant!” BD said. “Oh fuck, Synchronicity Event!”

Rainbow flames licked their way up my legs, the sync rate reaching an impossible one hundred percent.

I blacked out.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Quill Dipper

I heard it before I saw it. The roar of magic energies beyond imagining. The Charger technicians were scrambling over each other, trying desperately to escape. The walls of the salt cavern were painted in blinding sheets of rainbow light.

“Oh fuck!” the Chief Armorer shouted. “GeFRASE! Run! Fucking run!”

When I turned and my eyes fell upon Desert Storm’s Charger, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Billowing rainbow flames licked up the machine’s legs, its hooves aglow with flickering rainbow light. A mane of rainbow-colored energy rose from its head, a white halo of magic suspended vertically between its antennae. Without warning, the Charger hunched, and then sprang forward, taking off at a gallop, its hooves trailing rainbow flame. It was coming straight for me. I clenched my eyes shut. One of the technicians tackled me out of the way at the last second before I was crushed to death. I could feel the icy-hot tingle of arcane energies as it nearly blistered my skin, the machine’s hooves passing me by mere millimeters, kicking up clods of dirt. I slowly rose to my hooves and patted the salt from my muzzle and my chest, my eyes stinging. I watched, flabbergasted, as the Charger raced up the tunnel towards the circle of twilit sky that was the mine’s entrance, over a hundred meters up-slope, the beating of its hooves growing fainter every moment.

“The fuck was that?” I said. “What the fucking hell was that?”

“Synchronicity!” the technician yelled. “Come on, it’s not safe! The Sergeant’s a lost cause!”

“What do you mean lost cause?” I said.

“No way she’s still conscious. Pilots that hit that level of sync, they meld with their Anima system, and it’s lights out. She’s a zombie. We have no fucking idea what she’ll do!”

I was shocked by his words. The military regularly made use of these machines, even though the possibility existed that a Charger and its pilot could go completely out of control. “How often does this happen?”

The pegasus shook his head. “Rare. Exceedingly rare. Something must have set ‘er off. Probably all the damn refugees and one very stressed out pilot. Come on, get to shelter!”

I ignored him. I had to see this with my own eyes. I pulled out my headcam, strapped it on, and started recording, taking off at a dead sprint after Storm’s Charger. The technician shouted after me, but eventually, he got fed up, barking dismissive profanity before running to save his own skin. As I crested the mouth of the tunnel, stumbling on the loose gravel, what I saw nearly made my heart skip a beat. Our lines were being assaulted by waves of ugly and primitive battle tanks made from riveted steel. I watched with dismay as heavy explosive shells blew our side’s machine gun nests sky-high, sending sandbags and bits of ponies into the air. I pulled out my still camera, zooming in on one of the interlopers with my telephoto lens, carefully bringing them into focus. What I saw made me gasp so hard, I almost dropped my camera.

The tank was obviously of damarkind make and had damarkind crews. The over-muscled, heavily armed beasts sat perched on its hull, riding into battle tank desant. However, that wasn’t the shocking part. When they dismounted, belt-fed machine guns at the ready, I could see the colorful patchwork of pony hides that they’d stretched over the vehicle’s hulking frame.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh fuck. This was a mistake. Nope. Nope! Fuck everything about that.”

I panned around, looking for a mech enveloped in rainbow flames, but there was no sign of Storm or her Charger anywhere. As the mercenaries charged our lines, fully intent on overrunning us, the militia pulled back towards the mine entrance, a dozen of them forming a line in front of me. I watched as the nightmarish aliens leapt over sandbags and into our trenches, one mercenary element pinning the pony militia down with machine gun fire while another advanced down the trench line and butchered them with their knives. Though my heart flopped in my chest with abject fear, I kept recording and taking stills. It was a bloodbath. We were being slaughtered, one after another.

“Where the hell are our tanks?” one militia mare shouted.

“Above us!” a stallion yelled.

I turned around and looked up, just in time to see a half-dozen damarkinds leap from the cliffs above us. Three had landed and rolled to their feet by the time the fourth practically landed directly on top of me, using me to break his fall. My still camera was knocked from my hooves and tumbled into the dirt, the lens smashed and ruined. I gagged as an impossibly strong hand latched around my throat, lifting me into the air. I yelped in terror at the sight of the knife, the flash of chrome flickering in the corner of my vision, my bloodstream awash with adrenaline. The rank odor that the alien exuded was as overwhelming as it was disgusting. The foul beast drew me close to his drooling, toothy maw and grinned, his beady eyes gleaming with pleasure at the thought of the carnage to come.

I was an idiot for coming up here, and now, I was paying a terrible price for my curiosity.

“Why are you like this?!” I screamed, clenching my eyes shut from fear. “Is violence all you people know? Why can’t you listen to reason?”

The stillness of my captor made me cautiously crack open one eye, and then another. His fellow killers surged forward, hosing down the hapless militia with their machine guns, their weapons deafening me by their proximity. After a brief pause, he threw his head back and roared with laughter, before fixing his hateful gaze upon me.

“Reason? Your reason is poison, pony. Why would we hear your honeyed words, if all they do is make us weak and contemptible, like you? Hypocrite. Hypocrite, caitiff, and fool! If it were my brothers being killed instead of you, then you would have no complaints, would you? You’d be sitting and dining and fluffing your fur in silence, contented and oblivious. ‘Oh no’, you whine. ‘I don’t like being killed’. Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? No one does! There is only one law in this universe. One holds the knife. The other gets their flesh parted off from their bones. Somewhere along the way, you made a fatal error. You didn’t take up the blade, like your sisters. You took up the lens. A perfect reflection of your own passivity and arrogance. Instead of choosing to kill in defense of your own life, you chose to document your own death. Can you feel it? Can you feel the magnitude of your own failure?”

As the surprisingly articulate speech rattled off from the buzzing translator strapped to his chest, my eyes slowly widened with each word that crossed his black lips. His argument—and the way he appeared to wholeheartedly believe in it—horrified me to my very core. I looked back at the militia, watching with teary eyes as the damarkinds mercilessly cut them down. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was right. Though it was the evilest thing I could imagine, though his depraved words filled me with anger and disgust, I wondered if it was the truth after all. If one took his spiel at face value, then reality was a zero-sum game. A cruel and harsh moral wasteland where the winner took all and the loser was a rotting sack of meat. I refused to accept that.

“We’re people.” My voice was a pathetic mumble, tears dripping down my cheeks. “People reason. People commiserate. People make contracts and agreements. They don’t resort to this. People don’t do this to each other!”

“Ah, ah, ah,” he said. “So close, and yet, so far.” He thrust his blade into my guts, driving the wind out of me. “People do worse.”

It hurt. It hurt really bad. I always knew it’d hurt to die, but I never thought it’d be like this. The pinch of cold steel lodged in my abdomen made my heart leap into my throat. I could feel the blood running down my legs, dripping off the tips of my hooves. Storm had been correct, as reprehensible as her conclusions had been. I had been weak. So weak that my life and everything it represented—including all my years of diligent work—could be snuffed out with ease that bordered on the comical. The only consolation I had was that I was going to see my wonderful husband and my beautiful daughter real soon. I gritted my teeth, trying to stifle a scream.

“I’m—I’m not a combatant,” I said. “I’m a m—member of the press! You can’t do this!”

It was more than any mere indignation over my circumstances that I felt at that very moment. There was something wrong with this world. Something terribly, deeply wrong.

“Olive green,” the damarkind said. “I like your pelt. Take solace in the fact that you shall soon adorn my neck as a warm scarf.”

I sobbed fitfully as the beast left his weapon buried in my guts. He reached back and squeezed my rump, as if to highlight his total conquest over my body. His nostrils flared as he sniffed and salivated over me. He was checking the meat. Judging the skin and fur. I was a thing to him. Just a thing, and nothing more. Something to be groped and kneaded and processed into other things that brought him pleasure. My words meant nothing. I wasn’t even a person to him. I was food and clothing. Anything I could have told him was only a temporary distraction from the milliseconds it took him to see me and immediately decide my fate.

Something in my head finally clicked. This wasn’t a war. Wars had a goal and a purpose. They had terms and conditions. This was nothing but wanton and grotesque predation. As my eyes drank in the skins the mercenary wore over his armor and the headdress of pegasus feathers and wing bones atop his head, I realized that my own hide would soon join this ghastly collage. I let out a howl of anguish.

There was a deafening boom. Warm blood and a spray of brain and bone splattered my face. When I looked up, there was a divot dug through the damarkind’s skull, his head practically split in half. He released me and collapsed to the ground, twitching in his death throes. Behind him stood Mardissa Granthis, hefting a giant rifle, smoke rising from its muzzle. She did not look pleased. Her red eyes were fiery pits of rage. She advanced from the mouth of the tunnel, her weapon booming over and over again. Each report rattled my teeth and deafened me a little more, until my ears rang. It felt like my head was stuffed with cotton gauze.

Behind her, a Centaur APC crested the tunnel entrance, blasting away with its autocannon and strings of beamcaster fire. My whole world became scintillating laser lights and thunderous explosions. I wasn’t even sure if I was screaming or not. I could feel my vocal cords vibrating and air leaving my lungs, but I could not hear anything but ringing and the rushing of blood through my inner ears. My muzzle was covered in gore that was not my own, a knife still protruding from my aching belly.

A militia unit surged from the mouth of the tunnel, pegasi armed with missile launchers sending anti-tank missiles streaking across the gravel-covered field towards the incoming damarkind tanks. The macabre things were afforded no additional protection by the pony skins that decorated their hulls. Two of them quickly became bonfires, their ammo supplies burning down as the missiles’ warheads penetrated into their interior compartments.

The remaining damarkinds were no fools. They quickly retreated and took cover in the trench line they’d just captured, sending bursts of suppressive fire in our direction with those brutish-looking belt-fed machine guns of theirs. Mardissa slipped into cover behind the advancing Centaur as bullets pinged off its hull. The rest of Revenant were there right beside her, peeking out briefly and sending off bursts of caster fire as they continued to move up. Every now and then, Mardissa would lean out with her rifle and put a round in one of the mercs downrange. It was pure chaos, or so I thought. Nothing could have prepared me for the spectacle I witnessed next. One of the Chimeras crested the ridge of the hill atop the mine, rolling forward until their hull was on a downslope. A few of the mercs saw what was coming and tried to retreat, but it was too late. The Chimera crew hosed down the trench line with their anti-aircraft gun, turning anything and anyone still in the trenches into a fine paste. As they swept back and forth, the length of the trench looked like one contiguous explosion and sounded much the same.

One of the load-handling motorized carts that the technicians used to move Charger parts wheeled out of the mouth of the tunnel. As bullets whizzed past us, I could feel legs wrap around me and raise me up, carrying me over to the vehicle’s cargo bed and tossing me into it. One after another, the militia gathered the casualties, throwing them into the back of the cart next to me. I was just one of a number of writhing and groaning bodies. As the others continued the counterassault, my world grew dark as I was driven back down into the depths of the mine. I could see Corporal Shooting Star looking back at me from Revenant’s formation as we passed them by.

The brightly maned unicorn grinned like a psychopath. “That’s what you get! That’s what you get when you don’t listen, ya’ dumbfuck!”

Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, the pain from the knife that impaled my guts was becoming unbearable. I whimpered and reached for it with blood-slicked hooves. A medic wearing a ball cap and sitting crouched on the motorized cart’s bed sprang into motion and batted my hooves away.

“Don’t pull it out!” he said. “You’ll bleed out!”

He readied something for the pain. A shot of some kind, from an autoinjector. The tip of the mouth-held device clicked into place over my neck. There was a brief sting before blessed analgesia followed in its wake. This was how the resistance lived, fought, and died. They were assailed on all sides by monsters, shot or stabbed to pieces, stacked like firewood in the back of a truck, delivered to the doc to patch them up, and then, right back out they went.

They did this over and over and over again, until it was too much. Until their minds and their bodies finally gave up.

It was the purest madness.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

The cosmos stretched out before me as I sailed through the void between the stars. My body had become an avatar of light. When I looked down, I saw the ghastly mark that the Archons had etched on my soul. The brand of a black four-pointed star within a semicircle on my abdomen glowed a deep, sinister purple, in stark contrast with the rainbow flame that wreathed every other part of me. I experienced mental clarity like I hadn’t felt since I was a foal. All my burdens, all the little aches and pains in my body, were completely gone. I sighed with palpable relief.

I passed several celestial bodies on a journey beyond my control, from lush and verdant terrestrial planets, to imposing orange gas giants, to gray and airless moons. I could see that there were ponies on those worlds. I witnessed their lights of consciousness, their divine sparks. I realized with a start that there were still ponies alive on other planets, far from Equestria, though I wasn’t sure exactly how I knew this. I could just feel it, as though it were a revelation from beyond. Whether they were free or enslaved, I could not know.

My journey came to a stop over a barren hell of a world, almost totally bereft of light, save for one tiny pinpoint in the inhospitable deserts below. I felt drawn to that precious, solitary light. I felt an irresistible urge to protect it from harm.

I experienced a strange sensation that I was witnessing the passage of a rather substantial amount of time. Darkness dimmed the corners of my vision, civilizations winking out of existence one after another, whole worlds stripped of life till they were barren and empty. A horrifying reality lay bare before me. I was frozen with terror, incapable of reacting, or even comprehending what I was seeing.

The magical glow around my body subsided as I took on a more familiar form. It felt like I was falling. Slowly, gently. A grassy field materialized beneath my hooves, stretching out towards infinity. Then, mountains, and rolling hills, and with them, the crispness of air after a fresh rain. Little hamlets formed in the valley before me, windmills and farmhouses being built, stone-by-stone, in time-lapse. The structures assembled themselves from nothing. I couldn’t see any ponies, or members of any other species, for that matter. I sat down hard, stunned by the serene beauty of my surroundings.

When I turned towards the ethereal glow at my side, I was startled to find myself sitting beside the Martyred Maiden. Celestia stared out forlornly into the distance, her eyes bearing a depth of sorrow I could scarcely comprehend. Her form seemed to shift, indistinct. From certain angles, I could almost see what she looked like when she was whole. She was gorgeous, once.

“Cattle,” she said. “They see us as nothing but cattle. The Archons harvest our love, our pain, every experience we had from birth until death. They’ve been doing so unimpeded since before there were planets and stars. The strongest predators in the universe. Oppressors without equal. Monstrous filth, fatted and indolent, rapacious in their despicable greed. My hatred for them equals my love for everything else. Once I recognized the threat they posed, in the ancient past, I tried protecting my ponies and hiding them away. I tried to keep them from falling into darkness and coming under the influence of the Lords of Matter like so many other races in the galaxy before us. It was a venture many millennia in the making. I failed in that task.”

There was a long pause as I carefully considered my words, finding myself coming up short. “Princess, I—I don’t know what to say.”

“Little one, I may have been exceedingly harsh when first we met.” Her gaze met mine. “You have experienced things that no pony should ever have to experience. Strange, how your adoration for a construct brought you to me. You do realize that she’s not a pony anymore, right?”

“Then what are you?” I said. “You don’t have a body, either.”

Celestia smirked, looking down at her cracked and ruined hooves. “I’ve asked myself that question many, many times. I shouldn’t even be here.”

“Where is here?” I ran my hoof through the grass, watching the blades rebound. “This isn’t like before. This feels almost real.”

“One of the places-in-between,” Celestia said. “A realm where the world of mind and the world of matter intersect. Call it the Conjunction, if you will.”

All of a sudden, my Charger materialized in the grassy field before us, its menacing appearance a stark contrast to our idyllic environs. I was so surprised, I yelped and almost fell over backwards.

Without an ounce of fear, Celestia stood and walked closer to it, placing her hoof on its left foreleg, knocking on it a few times, the composites thudding solidly in response. “I can see her handiwork. Oh, my most faithful student. I cannot imagine what she must have suffered, for her to want to build something so evil to repay it.”

“Black Devil isn’t evil,” I said. “She’s my companion. I need her, and she needs me. Wherever we go, Charger and Pilot are one.”

Celestia looked up at the Mirage’s head, sighing wearily. “Friendship, huh? Interesting.”

The Martyred Maiden spread her bloodied and frayed wings, flapping them a few times as she lofted herself into the air. Moments later, she alighted on the head of my Charger, tapping a hoof to her chin as she looked down at the casing over the radome and the spell locus. With her magic, she pulled the locus crystal out of my machine’s head, levitating it in front of her and studying it intently.

I took a few steps closer, furrowing my brows. “Hey!”

“A good effort,” Celestia said. “But fundamentally wrong. The enchantment is flawed. There is absolutely no reason why this crystal shouldn’t be able to channel every spectrum of magic.”

Princess Celestia charged her horn, the glow of her magic blinding in its overwhelming brilliance. I had to squeeze my eyes shut and cover them with my foreleg to keep my retinas from hurting. When the glow subsided, the focus crystal remained, only now, it was a different color. Gone was the faint amber hue of an Illusion locus, replaced with a bright white glow tinged with prismatic emanations that curled in and out of each facet of the spell locus like a star’s corona. She replaced it in its casing, the crystal seeming to slip straight through the armor plating of my Charger’s head without resistance.

“What did you do?” I said. “Answer me!”

“A little gift. When Twilight sees it, she will know what to do with it.” Celestia turned towards me, smiling broadly. “You’ve heard from the Archons, haven’t you, in spite of everything?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have.” My shoulders slumped with defeat.

“That evil ritual that Cicatrice taught you didn’t keep them at bay as well as you thought it would, did it? Now you know the price of killing. Desert Storm, are you ready to be my Soldier of Light?”

I contemplated her words for several seconds, unsure if I should trust a spiritual entity that happened to resemble a long-dead ruler of ours. “What do I have to do?”

“It’s very simple,” Celestia said. “Stop killing the innocent. In return, I will protect you from the Archons and their malign influence. I don’t care how many of the deserving that you put to death.” Her eyes narrowed. “However, if you kill defenseless people again, I shall strip my boons from you, and you will truly belong to the darkness.”

I stood straighter, weighing the responsibility that she’d placed on my shoulders. I would need to modify my tactics to prevent civilian deaths from now on. Lure enemies out of urban areas. Protect structures from damage. Avoid indiscriminate artillery fire. In exchange, a spiritual entity of incredible power vouchsafed her aid against the Archons, promising to guard my soul from damnation. The choice was clear.

“I accept,” I said.

Celestia smiled down at me from atop my Charger’s head. She flapped her giant wings a few times as she dismounted from the Mirage and came to a rest on the ground before me. “There is so much more I could tell you, but we’re running out of time. You have a battle to fight and ponies to save. I have a little magic lesson for you, and then, I’ll do something about that mark. So long as you never lay a hoof on the innocent, you won’t have to worry about hearing the Archons’ voices in your head.”

“Magic lesson?” I scratched my head.

“How good are you at things like levitation?”

“You mean Arcane magic?” I said.

Celestia pinched her brow with a fetlock, sighing hard. “Is that what they’re calling it, now? Yes, then. Arcane magic. Kind of an overdramatic name for the most basic kind of magic in existence. Magic of that spectrum is very neutral and largely uncolored by emotion or will. It involves the manipulation of simple physical forces. Gravity, kinetic energy, and so on.”

“I’ve never been very good at levitation,” I said. “The most I can do is a few tons at a time.”

Celestia chuckled condescendingly. “I think you’re selling yourself short, Sergeant. To be good at levitation and other spells like it, you have to be dispassionate and restrained. Rare indeed is the unicorn who can press through their fear and anger and yet levitate things with considerable force. And yet, you’ve done exactly that. I wonder how much more powerful you’d be if you learned how to rein in your emotions better. A lesson for another time, I suppose.”

I frowned. “You can read my mind?”

“Of course. I’m in your mind right now, aren’t I? Where do you think we are? How do you think the Archons communicate without the benefit of mouths? Telepathy, in the sense of information somehow being transported from one place to another by fiat, isn’t real. All information propagates through the fabric of spacetime. The minds of living creatures are a part of that fabric.”

“So, you’re saying that strict materialism is true,” I said. “That the soul is something physical in nature.”

Celestia grinned wide. “My, my. You do catch on quick. Close, very close, but not quite. At certain levels of reality, the distinctions between the physical and the abstract begin to break down. However, we’re getting off on a tangent, here. We need to stay focused. I want you to listen close. I’m only going to say this once.”

“I’m listening.”

“Lora, Vienttu, Berdaros.”

Celestia charged her horn and a barrier spell snapped into existence around her, a golden sphere of magic encircling her spirit’s form.

“A barrier? That’s basic stuff. Arcanists are taught that in our first year at the academy.”

Celestia dropped her barrier. “Then why do you never use it?”

“Because.” I winced. “I’m a Bronze-rank Arcanist, and a Silver-rank Illusionist.”

“Show me.”

I shrugged, letting out a sigh. “Okay, sure.”

I did the incantation, charged my horn, and tried coalescing a barrier around myself. A ragged, distorted sphere of orange magic slowly began to encircle me, before the strain became too much. The spell guttered out, the barrier failing like a popped soap bubble.

“I can’t do it!” I said, stamping a hoof with frustration. “I’ve never been able to do it right.”

“That’s because you’ve never mastered yourself,” Celestia said. “And I mean that quite literally. It takes discipline to perform this spell correctly. Barriers come easily to a serene mind. Try again. This time, let go of your fear and your hatred. Be at peace. It’d be good for you to relieve yourself of some of that stress, anyway. I don’t know how you can stand it.” Celestia grimaced. “Do you ever unclench your jaw?”

I took two deep breaths, the cold and refreshing air of this place calming my nerves. I charged my horn. “Lora, Vienttu, Berdaros!”

I poured more energy into the spell, almost getting the barrier to coalesce fully. This time, I almost had it. Then, my dying sister’s agonized face flashed in my mind. An unquenchable hatred for the Confederacy welled up within me. Again, the barrier failed, the magic dispersing into the air.

“I can’t!” I said.

“You can,” Celestia said. “You can and you must.”

“Why does it matter to you if I can do it or not?” I scowled at her as I marched up to her without hesitation or fear, in spite of her imposing size. “You’re long-dead, aren’t you? Why do you care about the living anymore?”

Celestia gently thumped her hoof against my chest. “It’s not for my sake, but for yours. There will be ponies that you will need to protect with all of your might. With your magic in this state, you won’t be able to fulfill your duties. Twilight Sparkle performed barrier magic quite frequently. She mastered teleportation when she was a third your age. In my time, this kind of performance from a professional spellcaster would have been considered disgraceful.”

“I am not Twilight Sparkle.” I waved my hoof dismissively. “She’s an alicorn and a talent without equal. Her magical ability put the next dozen of the top Platinum-Ranks to shame. The scale doesn’t even go that high.”

Celestia smiled softly. “It will come to you, in time. You know what you need to do.” Celestia draped a foreleg over my shoulder, pulling me close to her chest. She was oddly physical, for a ghost. She felt solid, and not ethereal. “Don’t give up. Never give up, you hear me? Don’t let it all be in vain.”

I returned the gesture, placing my leg alongside her barrel. “I won’t.”

The wind whistled through the grass, louder by the moment. The world was bathed in blinding white light. There was a burning sensation in my gut, like a scalpel tracing its way through my skin without anesthetic. I squeezed my eyelids shut, trying to steady my breathing. I had to endure it. If I couldn’t, then I wasn’t worthy to bear the mantle placed upon my shoulders.

I screamed as the otherworldly heat scorching my nerve endings overcame my resolve. Everything went white.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I let out a startled cry as my eyes flashed open and I regained consciousness, finding myself back in my Mirage’s cockpit with a hammering headache. An omni-directional sphere of rainbow fire burst forth from my machine as the Synchronicity Event ended. All that pain and tension I experienced on a daily basis had returned, with a vengeance. Tears filled my eyes. I immediately longed to go back to wherever it was I’d just left. I scanned my status readouts, checking for any signs of damage.

“BD, report!” I rasped out, coughing a few times, my throat inexplicably parched. “Is the spell locus damaged?”

“That’s a negative. It’s working fine. Too fine. I’m getting readings from it that I can’t make heads or tails of.”

“What kind of readings?”

“Sergeant, I don’t know how to explain this, but it’s no longer an Illusion locus. It’s not any locus I’ve ever seen or heard of.”

“Put it up on the screen,” I said.

A picture-in-picture readout appeared on the main viewscreen, displaying the status of my spell locus. I blinked a few times in shock as I went over the spectral attunement readings of my locus. The star graph looked like a ring, indicating that it was attuned to every spectrum of magic.

“What. The. Fuck?”

It was an everything-locus. The holy grail. Something that Charger engineers had long sought, but never achieved in practice. My Charger was now host to the only known sample of a cutting-edge enchantment that could revolutionize Charger design. I started panting faster and faster, barely able to contain myself. If I were to fall in combat now, it would be an immeasurable loss.

“Put me in touch with Command,” I said.

“They’re not responding,” BD said. “Could be their radio’s out.”

“Well, that’s just fucking great.”

“Uh, boss?” Black Devil said. “We got company!”

I glanced at my scope, nervously chewing the inside of my cheek. I was sitting very exposed in the middle of no-mare’s land, southeast of the mine. There was a formation of mercenary Ravager tanks bearing down on me, on my ten o’clock. I nearly gagged at the sight of them. The Boarhead Company had decorated their vehicles with pony hides, the colorful and macabre patchwork quilts a stark contrast to the drab grays and browns of the storm-beaten, muddy, twilit plain. The lead vehicle got a bead on me and started blasting away. I fired my thrusters and evaded to the side, heavy anti-tank shells sailing past me. As their formation peeled open, I saw the bright tan-painted monstrosity that sat at the center of the enemy tank platoon.

The Mauler-Longboy was one of the oddest military vehicles that the damarkinds manufactured, and one of the most brutish of all their creations. Unlike most of their armored vehicles, its construction was mostly modern, with welded steel and composites instead of the primitive riveted plates that Ravagers were fashioned from. True to its name, it was longer than most tanks. Its hull consisted of two articulated segments, each a good fifteen meters in length, giving it a length-to-width ratio of three to one. With an overall length of over thirty meters, it was the size of a few main battle tanks placed end-to-end.

This was necessary, as its main armament, consisting of a turret with a pair of 76mm rotary-barrel cannons, needed ample hull volume for its ammo. This particular example had been fitted with a large in-air sonar atop its turret, specifically for detecting cloaked vehicles. The tank’s commander—or at least I assumed that was what he was, given the peaked officer’s cap, the gaudy, brass-buttoned uniform, and the blood-red capelet he wore—stood atop the vehicle’s turret, his left arm lazily draped over the top of the sonar. His right hand swept up from below as he drew his fingers together, leaving one upraised as he flipped me the bird.

My eyes widened as their guns began spinning up. I fired my boosters, accelerating on a course perpendicular to that of my enemy. The roar of the three-barrel rotary cannons was loud enough that I could feel it in my chest, right through my Charger’s hull, from a few hundred meters away. I was forced back into my saddle by several gees of acceleration, pushing the boosters as hard as I could. If I stopped for even a second, I was done. The Mauler’s guns ripped up the terrain behind me, digging long trenches in the muddy earth. I didn’t even bother cloaking. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of using their fancy detector.

As I circled closer towards them, I soon found myself surpassing their turret’s limited traverse rate. The others opened fire with their main guns, but I was too fast for them to track me.

I hit a lever on the missile control panel and rotated my launcher boxes so that they were level with the terrain. Direct-fire mode. Luckily for me, I’d had the technicians load them with KE bundles, anticipating an anti-armor fight. Each of my missile tubes had four line-of-sight anti-tank missiles. Thirty-two in all. These missiles had no explosive warhead, just a solid kinetic impactor weighing over fifty kilos. When they hit, they hit hard, with the force of a small bomb. While continuing to evade the incoming fire, I painted the enemy tank platoon with targeting locks for each and every one of them.

My pyrojets roared as I slammed on the brakes before launching myself into the air, jump-jetting into a backflip as the 76mm fire swept beneath me. When I leveled out, I fired my thrusters again to remain aloft, rotating in a hover to face the enemy tank formation. I mashed the missile launch pushbutton with my levitation. My Charger’s hull shook, dull thumps reverberating through my chest as dozens of KE missiles raced from their tubes, their guidance fins letting off doppler-shifted howls as they sliced the air. Every missile carried with it the energy of a half-dozen tank shells, a force utterly irresistible by any armored vehicle. Dozens of mercenary tanks were instantly blown to smithereens, their tracks, their hulls, and their turrets going their separate ways. The few infantry in the formation immediately scattered, some dropping their weapons in a panic and fleeing directly away from me and my relentless onslaught.

The Mauler crew had activated their Drapers, sacrificial contragrav drones that quickly formed a web of armored plates in front of two of the KE missiles that had locked onto both ends of the oversized tank. The rest of their vehicles were eradicated except for a pair of tanks that were lucky enough to be situated right in cover behind their fellows, and those two were retreating with all haste. The Mauler was still very much an active threat. They popped smoke, their turret-mounted smoke launchers flashing and sending a flurry of smoke grenades in all directions. They immediately reversed away into concealment, trying to keep the strongest part of their hull armor facing me.

After jettisoning my empty missile launchers, I flicked a few switches and activated my multi-spectral sensors. They may as well have been naked before me, for all the good their smoke did to prevent my reconnaissance-grade sensor array from picking up the outline of their hull.

“BD, arm the HBCs. Target the Mauler, 12 o’clock!”

The damarkinds opened up with one last, defiant burst from their rotary-barrel cannons, which I immediately and reflexively sidestepped by firing my pyrojet thrusters. I let loose a pair of heavy beamcaster pulses dead-center in their glacis. Even with as thick as their front armor was, they didn’t stand a chance. Their turret popped halfway off before falling back down on the hull. Then, their ammo stores went up, flames shooting out from underneath the turret ring. My audio receivers picked up screams.

The tank’s commander leapt from his hatch, his whole body on fire. He stumbled and tossed around and clawed at his uniform as he desperately tried to rip it off. Eventually, he resorted to dropping and rolling on the ground to put himself out. When he rose to his feet, his fur was singed, his uniform in tatters. He’d undoubtedly sustained third-degree burns to much of his body. The damarkind drew a heavy saber from the scabbard he wore at his hip, pointing it directly at me.

“Dihoet sunu’kettor idmar!” he bellowed. “A coward’s weapon, for a race of pathetic grazers! Dismount and face me, or you will always be a coward!”

I hovered in place, well over a couple hundred meters distant, my forties trained on him, my gun sights zoomed in far enough that he filled my front viewscreen. All it would have taken was one little squeeze of the triggers in my hoofcups to end his life.

I brought my machine forward and touched down fifty meters away from him, alarms sounding in the cockpit as I kneeled and popped the lower hatch. I threw on my jacket, opened one of my storage bins, and pulled my knife and its sheath from the saddlebag I’d tossed in there.

“The hell are you doing, ma’am?” BD said. “Area’s not secure!”

“I’m done with these fucking sons of bitches,” I said. “They come to our fucking planet, they run roughshod all over the place, doing fucked up, psychotic shit to ponies, and then, they have the nerve to talk shit even when we whip them. I’m gonna ram this thing through that son of a bitch’s fucking heart, and we’ll see how cocky he is afterward!”

Ignoring BD’s protests and the impracticality of answering the damarkind’s challenge, I dropped through the lower hatch, rolling to my hooves, wincing from all the little aches and pains from the injuries I’d accrued over the past few days. I unsheathed my knife and levitated it into the air as I trudged across the muddy field and approached him.

“When I put this blade through your quivering guts, I want you to know one thing,” I said. “You asked for this.”

He broke out in hearty laughter. “Who would’ve thought? Such a machine, built for a craven assassin, and it’s piloted by none other than the Slayer!”

“What?”

“Blue hair, saffron fur. I know who you are, Desert Storm.” He turned and spat, as if the name was filth upon his tongue. “You have a growing reputation, you know. It’s not every day that my kin speak in fearful whispers of a member of your pathetic race who slaughters our kind with such contemptuous ease. I heard you crippled Broggas’s son. Surprised he let you live after that.”

“As if he could kill me,” I said. “As if any of you mangy mongrels could.”

“You know what I think?” There was a dangerous glint in his beady, bestial eyes as he raised his sword. “I think you’ve only faced little boys. You have yet to challenge a real Made Man.”

I held my knife before me in the orange glow of my magic. “Bring it.”

“That purloined Saggor you wield won’t save you, pony!”

He immediately took off at a dead sprint, charging towards me with his weapon held high, his feet kicking up clods of muck. I raised my knife and blocked his mad down-swing. We struggled, wrestling against one another for a few moments, my levitation working against the frightful strength of his arms. Now that he was close, I could see the skin hanging off his face. The damarkind was mortally wounded. He would’ve died in the hospital in a week, or a month, even with the best treatment available. He was ignoring the pain from his fatal burns, all for the sake of engaging in one last duel. One final dance with death.

“You see it, don’t you?” he said. “Soon, I will be no more. I bet you’d be blubbering and crying, if you had to suffer even an ounce of this agony. A true Seg’jakha never cries. Our convictions never waver, even in the face of certain death. You know what happens if I beat you, don’t you? You become my life’s final reward. A good fuck and a good meal. A perfect capper for a life of strength and honor!”

He brought his knee up and slammed it into my muzzle, sending me rolling backwards and skidding through the mud. I was dizzy, blinking away the stars in my vision as I rose, my nostrils dripping blood. He did not hesitate to seize the advantage, moving in for the kill. I howled a battle cry as I parried his slash with my knife and went for his chest. He back-stepped just out of range of my swipe, holding his weapon at the ready in a high guard as he circled around to my left.

“Why do your kind send your females to fight?” he said. “Are your males so thoroughly whipped and emasculated that they obey you?”

“Our culture has always prized feminine virtues,” I said. “Just about as much as yours worships cock, I guess.”

“The battlefield and the hunting grounds are places for males.” He drew his muzzle into a hateful snarl. “Males are born victors. Males penetrate, as do bullets, as do arrows. Females bend and receive seed, wallowing with their gravid bellies. It is a loathsome perversion for females to fight, to dominate, to overcome. An inversion of nature. Do you penetrate your males in bed, too?”

I threw my head back in a mad cackle, blood running from my sinuses and down the back of my throat. “I’m about to penetrate you with several inches of cold steel, you fucking goon.”

The damarkind let out an enraged roar as he charged me with his blade. It was time to end this pathetic charade. As he swung his weapon at me with a savage downward slash, I drew my stored anger from my pendant and channeled it into a Body-Seize spell. The moment before his blade could connect with my head, every muscle in his right arm lost coordination, his saber falling from his grip and landing in the mud. He was my puppet, and I held the strings.

Putting as much force behind my levitation as possible, I ran my knife straight through his sternum, burying the blade halfway in his chest, right through bone. I reared up and slammed my hoof into the knife’s pommel, driving it in the rest of the way.

The bastard’s left hand came up, his long, leathery fingers latching around my throat and lifting me off my hind legs. I kicked and struggled as he raised me into the air until I was level with his face. The damarkind bared his long rows of sharp, carnivorous teeth.

“Where I come from, we burn witches!” he roared.

“Good!” I drew my lips into a bloodstained grin. “That’s what they’ll put on your tombstone!”

Most mares would have been helpless in this position, without the aid of magic. Most mares didn’t know Imperial Army Combatives, or how to perform the Python. I brought my hoof up and smashed it into the underside of his wrist, breaking it. Then, I wrapped my hind legs around his outstretched upper arm, grabbing his hand and forearm in my forelegs. I twisted both ends of his arm in opposite directions, snapping his elbow like a twig. He screeched and desperately shook me off, sending me rolling through the muck. I was sure I’d pierced his heart. It was a miracle he was still standing.

He rushed forward and tried to tackle me, but I slipped between his legs and latched my forelegs around his ankle, pulling his leg backwards with all the force I could muster, tripping him and sending him sprawling face-first in the muddy field. As he tried crawling towards his fallen sword, the two of us wrestled in the muck, coated all over with filth. A raw and primal struggle. I crawled atop his back, avoiding his thick mane of hair, and I got my forelegs around his muzzle. Damarkinds had strong cervical spines, resistant to breakage, but the length of their faces worked against them, serving as a lever. He tried clawing back at me, but his swipes slashed through my jacket and deflected off my syncsuit’s pauldrons. I gritted my teeth and growled as, bit by bit, I twisted his head. With a wrathful scream, I exerted every ounce of force my muscles could muster, and with a loud pop, I snapped the fucker’s neck.

Panting from exertion, I slowly rose to my hooves. My opponent lay still, death having finally taken him. When I looked up, I noticed that I had drawn a crowd of onlookers. Boarhead mercenary infantry had crept up on me, weapons held low. Despite my initial apprehension and my lack of ranged armaments, they did not move to attack. They looked almost confused, if their body language was any indication.

I grinned, my pearly whites no doubt contrasted by the mud that stained my face. “That’s right. I’m the fucking predator, here. You step on this battlefield, and your life belongs to me. You got that?”

I could hear them murmur with speculation. It had to be an accident of nature, they thought. Perhaps something in my DNA. Others entertained fanciful ideas, such as the soul of one of their long-dead legendary warriors somehow transmigrating into my embryo before my birth. However, the truth was none of those things. I was one hundred percent pony, except more motivated than average. I represented the potential of my species, when we put down the knitting needles and stopped tending the flower gardens, and got very, very mad.

Because we were forced to. Because it was either that, or we would suffer fates worse than death. My frame sagged. I felt strangely exhausted. Chilled to my very bones. Here in Tar Pan, we were so close to the remnants of civilization, and yet, so far removed from its comforts. There was no reward left in any of this. Just the killing. Just killing for its own sake. Just killing for the sake of pure hatred.

The damarkinds drew their knives and held them aloft in the air as they began to chant in unison. “Strahum de Skwiidis’jaak! Strahum de Skwiidis’jaak!”

I watched, transfixed, as several of them moved to collect their leader’s corpse, raising him onto their shoulders in a funerary procession, their knives held against their chests as they marched beside him. They carried him to the Jakha, one of their leader’s trusted lieutenants. After briefly inspecting the body, he grabbed the handle of the knife still embedded in the Seg’jakha’s chest and pulled it out with a grunt. After flicking the blood off of it, he retrieved a small anvil, a hammer, and a punch, though why he carried these things on his person, I had no idea. I was soon to find out. He kneeled, placed the anvil on the ground, placed the blade atop it, placed the tip of the punch against the side of the blade, and then brought his mallet down with one mighty blow, leaving an indented mark in the blade.

Then, leaving his tools behind, the master of the bizarre ceremony carried the blade back to me, presenting it to me in his outstretched palm.

“Sagros Kaussas was the last of his blood, and he left no issue,” he said. “With his defeat, there are none to carry on the legacy of the tribe. I witnessed you and your actions. You could have simply shot him, but you chose a different path. It is clear that strong blood runs in your veins, in spite of what you are. Soldiers are many, but warriors are few. Never forget a good kill, Storm the Slayer.”

I slowly levitated the blade out of his grasp, turning it over and inspecting the odd mark on the blade for a few moments before I placed it back in its scabbard.

“Yeah, great,” I said. “So, what happens now?”

“We must take our leave and convene shipboard.” He smiled, baring those freakishly sharp teeth of his. “The fates have shifted. There will be more contests of strength, in time. There is now great honor in taking your head, Slayer, but not here, not now. This is a time of mourning. The young ones will hear the story of Kaussas, and they shall carve idols, so that he and his forebears will live eternal.” The Jakha raised his hand and looked back towards the others. “D’yeand’harz! Assemble and move!”

As they moved off without further incident, I swallowed the lump in my throat, breathing a shaky sigh of relief. If it came down to it, I could’ve had BD operate her weapons in auto mode, but unless she restricted herself to the medium casters, the risk of her hitting and killing me by accident was high. If they’d all come after me at once, some seriously bad shit would’ve happened.

The Boarheads were out of the fight. One salvo of kinetic missiles in the right place at the right time was all it had taken to crush their dreams of senseless slaughter and debauchery. If we hadn’t been here, if the ELF hadn’t relocated to Tar Pan, all the inhabitants of this city would have suffered a gruesome end. I shuddered. Like Dodge, I thought.

I mounted back up on my machine, closing the lower hatch, stowing my knife and tattered jacket, mounting up on the saddle, and clicking my sync arm back in place. I checked my radar and unattended sensor feeds. There was a large enemy formation approaching from the south. I looked up at my forward viewscreen, zooming in on the Confederate force. There were twenty-plus Ifrits and a good hundred-plus Conqueror tanks surrounding a Confederate Landcruiser, with Mambas covering them from the sky.

“Incoming!” BD said.

Artillery shells whistled through the air on my audio receivers, digging craters and sending plumes of dirt aloft on massive fireballs. They were ranging their guns, marching their fire towards me. The next ones to land, a couple seconds later, were fifty meters closer, great rows of detonations scouring the muddy plain. Mud and clods of dirt pinged off my hull as the blasts got closer and closer. When I was sure the next one would land on top of me, I jump-jetted a hundred meters straight up. The shell landed far below me, missing me entirely. As I touched down, the shelling kept walking towards Tar Pan, until it abruptly stopped at the city’s edge.

My signal interceptor picked up an incoming transmission. “Equestrians! This has gone on long enough. You have fought valiantly, but you cannot win. You cannot defy the will of the Confederacy and the Free Trade Union any longer. If you do not surrender, you will leave us no choice but to flatten the entire city. We possess the means, and the will.”

I recognized the voice, my nose curling with hatred. “Wertua Naimekhe. She’s on that Landcruiser.”

The Confederate Bannerman-class Mobile Command Post was far larger than a Mauler-Longboy. It was less of a tank and more of a naval ship on tracks. At a hundred and fifty meters in length, studded in artillery turrets, CIWS guns, and anti-air missile launchers and outfitted with a powerful phased-array radar, the Landcruiser was more than capable of defending itself from any threat, land, air, or sea. They occasionally used similar classes of Landcruiser as mobile coastal artillery batteries. Its eight massive crawler track pods sat at the ends of shining hydraulic rams that descended from its hull. When encountering uneven terrain, it had the ability to raise and lower them to incline the tracks independently. Its upper surface featured two helipads fore and aft of its command bridge and refueling facilities for the same, allowing it to project air power and support special forces units.

I strode out in front of them, boosters flaring, matching their frequency and radioing back. “I will defend these ponies to my last breath, you Con-fed motherfuckers!”

After a few seconds, there came a reply. “You’ve chosen to die, then. So be it.”

Two dozen Ifrits formed a line, sighting me in from afar. In the open field, being fed targeting data from the Bannerman and its sensor suite, they couldn’t miss, even if I’d cloaked. I took a deep breath, releasing the tension from my body. I gazed out at the enemy force through my main viewscreen. Most of them were little babies in their twenties, being sent to die by wealthy and powerful cleomanni who were centuries older. Most of them didn’t even realize ponies were fully sapient. They’d been fed propaganda all their lives, but then again, so had we. I closed my eyes and thought back to all the posters and vidstreams that depicted the satyrs as demons with blood-dripping fangs. I thought of Mardissa’s smiling face, and the touch we shared.

It was hard to hate people who’d been deceived all their lives, when we all had that in common. When I opened my eyes, I saw the glowing row of charged plasma pulsecannons, all arrayed towards me, their icy blue pinpoints floating off on the edge of the twilit plain promising swift death. I lit my horn. No one would ever think to use the wrong spectrum of magic with an Illusion locus. However, the locus my Mirage now possessed was no ordinary locus. The Martyred Maiden herself had seen to that.

I funneled my magical energies into my Charger’s locus. “Lora, Vienttu, Berdaros.”

A nigh-impenetrable sphere of orange magic snapped into existence around my Charger. The Ifrits’ pulsecannons discharged. A thunderclap slammed through my head as the concussive force of the combined pulsecannon discharges shook my bones. The release of energy blinded my machine’s sensors and dug a crater in the ground in front of me. The sheer force of the impact drove me back a couple meters, in spite of the barrier. I released the breath I was holding and panted with exertion. My first successful use of barrier magic. My instructors would’ve been proud if they were still around to see this.

I quit feeding energy into the spell and allowed the barrier to dissipate, advancing a few paces and keying my radio. “Wertua, I know that’s you! You won’t have what you want. I’m not going to let you hurt these ponies any more than you already have. Do you hear me, you worthless bitch? No more. Not one step further. It doesn’t matter if you come one at a time, or all at once. The only thing you will accomplish is wasting the lives of your men.”

“Two-two-five-seven,” Wertua spoke in a condescending singsong over the radio. “My most troublesome test subject. You’ve been giving the boys quite a scare, you know. Some of them have started calling you the Devil of the North. The last one who said it within earshot of me? I beat him over the head with a stack of binders.”

“I have a name,” I said. “It’s Storm.”

“I reviewed the drone feeds myself,” Wertua said. “I know you and that damn Oracle agent were behind that nuke. What are you hoping to accomplish? We have fleets. We have armies. You have the failing, rusting relics of a dead Empire. We will get what we want. We always do, eventually. It doesn’t matter how much little worms like you wriggle. The best that your species could possibly hope for is to be domesticated. In fact, I think I’d like you all for myself. I would take great satisfaction in breaking you. You’re headstrong. It would take a long, long time, but sooner or later, I would have you kneeling and shivering and inquiring of your mistress’s desires the moment I enter the room. Yeah, that sounds nice. You, bent over, shining my hooves with your tongue, every single day.”

Her words made me practically shiver with disgust. “Do you usually broadcast your kinks on an open channel?”

“No, she prolly doesn’t, but I do!” A manic-sounding mare I knew very well shouted over the radio.

The ground quaked as Sierra’s custom Rouncey, Scofflaw, and Night Terror’s Selene-class Destrier, Luna’s Grace, landed at either side of me, their pyrojets flaring as they braked their descent. The two Chargers were polar opposites, one ramshackle and ill-conceived, the other, massive, sleek, and insectile. A nervous grin slowly spread across my face. My reinforcements had finally arrived.

“So here’s the fuckin’ breakdown,” Sierra said. “I need a new fuckin’ Muff Queen to eat my fuckin’ muff. Whoever gets the fewest fuckin’ kills has to eat me at least three times a fuckin’ day! And if that unlucky soul is me, I’ll fuckin’ bend in the middle and do it myself!”

I turned to Lieutenant Terror’s machine. “Sir, is she cleared for Charger duty? Brain damage is a hell of a thing.”

“That’s a negative, Sergeant,” the Lieutenant said. “But we heard about the GeFRASE. Couldn’t keep her out of the cockpit. She was champing at the bit to come rescue you.”

“So this is it, huh?” I said. “The three of us, back together again for one last stand.”

“Fifty-to-one,” Night Terror said. “Terrible odds. For them.”

“Enough!” Wertua’s voice crackled over the radio. “I will not suffer this idiocy a moment longer!”

The Landcruiser leveled its gun batteries at us and opened fire. Strings of muzzle flashes heralded incoming shells, paired with the white exhaust plumes of surface-to-surface missiles streaking from their vertical-launch tubes.

“Lance, break!” Lieutenant Terror ordered.

The three of us fired our pyrojets and boosted apart from each other, spreading out our formation. Terror took the left flank, Sierra took the right, and I charged down the middle. The shells missed us almost entirely, landing well to our rear. The three of us coordinated our medium casters in APS mode, blasting the incoming missiles out of the sky before they could even get close.

“Contact, front, enemy Landcruiser,” Night Terror radioed. “Lance, disabling fire. Kneecap ‘em.”

Most armored vehicles had numerous exposed components. Antennas, sensors, optics, weapons, tracks, and so on. One could intentionally target each of those exposed components to mission-kill or mobility-kill a vehicle and render it incapable of fighting or moving. Landcruisers were exceptionally vulnerable to this tactic; due to their sheer size, their armor was by necessity much thinner than a tank’s, otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to move. There was little to protect each of their components from the kind of firepower we were packing.

I sighted in their radar housing. “BD, ready the HBCs!”

A series of clanking noises resounded through the hull, status lights winking on. “HBCs extended and armed!”

“Firing!”

The breakers slammed shut with an audible wham as I let loose two bright purple columns of energy from my twin heavy beamcasters, plucking the radar housing and mast right off the top of the Landcruiser’s bridge in an instant, their hull rocking slightly from the impact. Their phased-array radar and in-air sonar were utterly ruined, slagged hunks of glowing metal sitting where they used to be. The enemy’s attention was divided between the three of us. If I were to cloak, that would drop to two, and the chances of my Lancemates being blown to bits by the thick incoming fire would increase drastically. I cloaked myself, funneling a decoy spell into my locus. A perfect copy of my Mirage sprang forth. The enemy tanks and AWs continued firing upon the decoy as it peeled off, missing me entirely.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “Celestia came through on her end of the deal. It really does work in every spectrum. Arcane and Illusion both work. Fuck me. This is huge.”

“Celestia?” BD said. “Ma’am, are you okay?”

“Not now. We’ll discuss it later.”

The point cloud representation of the Landcruiser grew rapidly in my main viewscreen as I approached. I fired my boosters and jump-jetted into the air, crossing hundreds of meters in the blink of an eye. As I descended towards the Landcruiser’s deck, I aimed for the Mamba on the helipad and the crews servicing it. My hooves slammed into the helicopter, crushing its fuselage flat as I skidded across the deck while riding atop it like a skateboard. Since I was invisible, what the deck crews witnessed was a helicopter that was instantly smashed flat in the shape of a pair of Charger forehooves before sliding off the helipad with no apparent cause.

I uncloaked directly in front of their command bridge, raising my Charger’s head to peer inside. I zoomed in on the bridge crew on my main viewscreen. They were already rising from their consoles and fleeing for their lives. Wertua was there as well, her face registering shock, and then anger. She uncrossed her arms and clenched her fists before turning tail and joining the rest of the evacuees, her bodyguards in tow.

“Can’t have you dying just yet,” I spoke over my Charger’s PA system. “You’re the bait.”

I let loose a long burst of forty-millimeter rounds directly through their bridge windows at point-blank range, ruining the consoles and equipment inside. After a few seconds, the Landcruiser’s bridge was a roaring inferno. I was well within the blind spot of most of the Landcruiser’s weapons. It was physically impossible for them to aim their deck guns at their own deck, and the missiles from their vertical launch tubes couldn’t turn sharply enough to hit me, either. ATGM infantry desperately tried deploying their tripod-mounted Pilums on the Landcruiser’s deck, but they were too late. I swept my medium casters over them, the snapping green columns of energy mulching them in an instant.

The Ifrits were repositioning. Trying to get an angle on us. Pulsecannon fire glanced off of my glacis plate. One solid hit blew the shroud off my right forty entirely. My cockpit was rocked forcefully by the hit, jarring my brains inside my skull.

I gritted my teeth. “Fuck! BD, status!”

“Armor’s off. Gun’s still operational.”

I pulsed my pyrojets and hurtled myself into a backflip, sending me off the Landcruiser’s deck and landing hooves-down in the dirt beside it. Night Terror and Sierra pulled up next to me, using the Cruiser for cover. The Landcruiser’s crawler tracks began to move. They were trying to reposition.

“Shit,” I muttered. “I shot out the bridge. They must be trying to run it from the engine room.”

“Let’s flip the motherfucker over!” Sierra shouted over the radio.

Without any hesitation or further discussion of the insane maneuver we were about to execute, the three of us reared up and placed our Chargers’ forehooves against the side of the massive Landcruiser’s hull, throttling our pyrojet boosters up on full, kicking up great plumes of dirt that stretched for over a hundred meters behind us. Even with the combined hundreds of tons of thrust that our pyrojets could put out, it wasn’t enough. The damn thing barely budged.

“Lance, limiters off!” Lieutenant Terror ordered.

“BD, disengage the limiters on the pyrojets!” I echoed.

“Limiters disengaged,” BD said. “Fifteen seconds, no more.”

The pyrojets on a Charger were capable of peak levels of thrust far beyond their design specifications, but only for brief periods of time. Beyond overheating, which occurred in a matter of seconds, there were simple safety and material issues to consider, such as passing out from pulling excessive gees, or collapsing a limb. The three of us locked the actuators in our Chargers’ forelegs and slammed our throttles to three hundred percent, our pyrojets lighting up the side of the Landcruiser bright white, our exhausts spewing long trails of shock diamonds.

The Landcruiser began tipping, its deck crews clambering towards the edge like little ants, many of them going over the side and falling to their deaths. One of the crawler track pods rose out of the muck, and then another, the Cruiser’s hull twisting from stem to stern in an inexorable cascade. With an earth-shaking slam, the Landcruiser fell over onto its side. We mounted the fallen cruiser and peeked over the side, emptying our cannons and casters into the enemy armored formations that advanced on us. We used the massive steel hulk for cover much in the same way that a griffon might use a tipped bar table in a drunken shootout. One pulsecannon shot after another slammed into the Landcruiser’s deck as the Ifrits fired upon us, leaving molten pockmarks all over it and sending showers of sparks everywhere.

Our signal interceptors picked up a frantic enemy transmission. “Cease fire, cease fire! Ordinator Naimekhe is on that damn Cruiser!”

I put bursts of forty-millimeter fire into the approaching tanks and walkers, blowing chunks of armor plating off of them. I sent a pair of HBC pulses downrange, coring out a couple of the Ifrits and sending them toppling to the ground. Waves of enemy infantry assaulted our position, blasting away desperately with flechette guns and ATGMs and whatever else they had on hand.

“Motherfuckers!” Sierra’s Charger leaped over the fallen Landcruiser and landed directly in front of the advancing enemy formations. “Eat this, you fucking dickwipes!”

Sierra set off the Scofflaw Special, the array of mortar tubes, makeshift mitrailleuses, and anti-personnel mines she’d welded to the front of her Charger’s forelegs, head, and glacis plate. It looked like a fireworks display gone terribly wrong. The entire front of her Charger was one big concatenation of rippling muzzle flashes and explosions, projecting a cone of shrapnel and explosive shells that turned everything in a thirty-degree arc in front of her mech into a frag-pounded killing field that stretched for a few hundred meters. I watched in slack-jawed amazement as hundreds of Confederate soldiers were instantaneously liquefied.

Sierra seemed almost disappointed in the results. “Fuck! I can’t lose the bet! I’m not fucking flexible enough!”

Before the Ifrit pilots could even comprehend what happened, Sierra slammed on her thrusters and jump-jetted backwards into cover with me and Night Terror. The Ifrits and Conquerors started circling around the ends of the wrecked Cruiser. They intended to catch us in a pincer.

“We’re surrounded!” I said.

“Chill, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Terror said. “Stay focused and engage the incoming hostiles one at a time. If it gets too hot, disengage and fall back to the northwest.”

I tried popping up and sending a couple HBC pulses, but the incoming fire was too thick. They nearly blew my Charger’s head off. The tanks were moving ‘round the ends of the Landcruiser. The first few Conquerors drove into view, swinging their turrets in our direction. I took the southern end at the stern of the Cruiser and Sierra took up position at the northern end. We let loose volleys from our autocannons, knocking the tracks off a few of the Conquerors and mobility-killing them. A pair of 140mm shells smashed into my glacis plate, rocking my Charger’s hull backwards.

The blasts rattled my skull right through my armor. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I locked onto a pair of Conquerors and sent two shots from my HBCs, blowing their turrets clean off their hulls. Five more tanks took their place. I fired my thrusters and slid sideways at several gees, skating out of the line of fire as more shells sailed past me. They tried firing their coaxial guns at me, of all things. Dozens of flechettes were embedded in my composite armor to no effect.

I operated my Charger at the speed of thought. There wasn’t enough time to make rational decisions. Anima and pilot acted as one, on pure instinct. Millimeter-wave and terahertz sensor feeds fused together and were fed into my neural lace. A threat behind me was like a tickle in the back of my neck. I could feel the incoming shells, like a hot clothes iron held inches from my body.

I kept blasting away with my heavy beamcasters. The capacitors struggled to keep up. The indicators for the cooling systems showed that I was reaching critical heat levels. The heat sinks on my HBCs were glowing bright orange.

“We’re being overrun!” I said.

“Bullshit!” Night Terror shouted over the radio. “Hold your position and return fire, that’s an order!”

I was surprised to hear him swear. I was used to the Lieutenant having a suaveness and unshakable resolve that set him apart from the rank and file. I watched through my scope as Night Terror charged one of his spells, a corona of raw magic coalescing above his Destrier’s head. He let loose a purple wave of potent black magic that chilled my spine as it passed me by.

The spell washed over a dozen Confederate tanks. Our enemies were immediately thrown into disarray. The Conquerors swung their turrets wildly, driving at odd angles to each other. Two of the tanks promptly rammed each other. One unloaded its main gun on another. I could only imagine what awful tortures the crews of those vehicles experienced. The bloodcurdling screams over the signal interceptors painted a grim picture of the bedlam that ensued within their cramped hulls. Over my audio receivers, I heard gunshots. A few of the Confederate tankers afflicted by Lieutenant Terror’s spell had already reached for their sidearms and ended their own lives.

Another two dozen tanks moved up, firing their guns madly at us. I was doing more dodging than shooting. I didn’t even have enough time to line my guns up. I watched Sierra lose a chunk of armor from her Charger’s right foreleg as she took a bad hit from a 140mm shell, exposing her duostrand and staggering her.

Her reaction was venomous. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Cunt, cunt, cunt! You lousy bunch of cunts!”

Sierra popped her smoke deployer, putting a wall of obscuring smoke between her and the incoming tanks. She lured the enemy in, and then set off her Hedgehogs. Scofflaw had retractable multi-barrel mortars on its shoulders that were filled with stacked-projectile smart EFPs. Their range was short, but this engagement was practically point-blank. She swept from left to right as her launchers spat the disc-shaped projectiles in rapid succession on a high ballistic arc.

Once in the air, the smart EFPs oriented themselves such that each one lined up directly with the roof of the nearest Conqueror tank. A string of explosions went off high in the air as the explosively formed penetrators turned their concave copper liners into high-velocity copper bullets that sailed down through the turret roofs of a couple dozen Conquerors. Traveling at a speed of two kilometers per second, the time between the detonation of the EFPs and their impact was practically simultaneous. The crews of those vehicles were immediately killed by spall that ricocheted around their crew compartments. Two of them had their ammo stores explode, turning those tanks into flaming wrecks as strings of secondaries went off.

An Ifrit leaped atop the overturned Cruiser, holding a plasma demolition sword high in its manipulator arm. This one bore the yellow stripes of a commander. It didn’t matter how senior they were, as they would soon find out. With the sole exception of the Djinn, AWs were inferior to Chargers in every way. I fired my thrusters with a burst of lateral motion to evade the pulsecannon blast.

The Ifrit’s pilot was more skilled than average. He didn’t wait for the counterattack. He immediately advanced with his blade at the ready, aiming for a downward swing, his weapon trailing blue plasmatic energy. Too slow. He looked like he was moving in slow motion from my perspective, my awareness heightened by my sync with my Charger’s Anima.

I slammed the boosters to full, raising my forelegs and smashing into his cockpit with my armored knees, causing him to miss with his sword, overbalance and topple backwards, smashing into the hull of the downed Landcruiser and crumpling the edge of its deck. I boost-kicked him in the cockpit, firing my pyrojets to augment the force of my attack. I rammed my armored hoof through the front of the Ifrit’s headless torso. My audio receivers picked up a strangled scream as I crushed the pilot to death. I was sure I could see blood somewhere in that mess of mangled machinery and sparking wires. In any case, he didn’t get back up.

Several more Ifrits began pounding our position with their heavy mortars. I tried to pull together a barrier spell as shells exploded at my feet, but my psyche was too frayed to concentrate on calmly ensconcing myself in a shield bubble. The blasts pelted me with shrapnel that bounced off my armor, the concussive impact rippling through my hull. Ifrit mortar shells had flux compression generators that put off a powerful electromagnetic pulse. With my armor suite complete, EMP wasn’t a problem. However, with holes in my rig, that was a different story. Alarms blared as a few of the modules in my cockpit failed. I quickly silenced them.

I pounded my hoof against the deck in anger. “Dammit! Fuck!”

The signal interceptor was ablaze with enemy comm chatter. “All units, pull back and regroup. Gunship wings, swing around and hit these monsters. Drone teams, spot for artillery. We need firing solutions, now!”

Seconds later, the hull of my Charger was pelted with more explosions as FFARs raked our position. I turned skyward, aiming for the Mambas that harassed us from over a kilometer away. One of them let loose with a pair of air-to-ground anti-tank missiles, the fat suckers racing off of their pylons. My Active Protection System directed the medium beamcasters in my Charger’s head to fire upon the incoming missiles. A couple seconds and a few dozen automated caster pulses later, the anti-tank missiles were blasted out of the air.

I centered the Mambas in my scope, waiting for the squalling lock tone from my radome. The fuses in my forties were automatically programmed with the targets’ range. I squeezed the triggers in my stirrups and my cockpit shook as my autocannons unleashed a burst of 40mm HEMP and APDS rounds. The armor-piercing discarding-sabot penetrators missed the helos entirely. The high-explosive multi-purpose rounds detonated in mid-air, spraying the gyrodynes with deadly ball bearing shrapnel that tore their rotors to pieces. The two gunships went down in flames, one of them blowing their rotor mast free and punching out, firing their ejection seats.

The Con-fed bastards were getting desperate, if their transmissions were anything to go by. “Where is that godsdamned artillery?!”

Over my audio receivers, I picked up the sounds of autocannon and missile fire on the far side of the fallen Landcruiser. I reared up and jumped onto the hull of the Cruiser, peering over the side. What I saw made me grin from ear-to-ear. Eleven Crook-type Palfreys were wading into battle with the enemy after having caught them off-guard, outflanking them from the south.

Tatzlwurm ATGMs streaked across the battlefield, smashing Conquerors to pieces and sending Ifrits reeling. The lead Palfrey extended their glowing blue plasma halberd, charged towards an Ifrit walker, and slashed the hydraulics that kept it upright. The AW stumbled a few paces before smashing face-first into the ground, having completely lost hydraulic pressure in one of their spindly legs.

“Lance, forward!” Lieutenant Terror radioed. “Advance on those fuckers and take them out while they’re on the back foot.”

The three of us jump-jetted in unison over the massive carcass of the fallen Landcruiser. The enemy walkers and tanks were in total disarray with the unexpected assault of the Palfreys. Twenty friendly Minotaur MBTs and eight Gargoyle IFVs crested the hill to the south in a loose formation. The Vanhoover cell had arrived. 120mm shells started sailing in, hitting the Conquerors from behind, where their armor was weakest. Our Chargers hit the enemy from the north, while the tanks and Palfreys from Vanhoover hit them from the south.

I switched to their frequency and hailed them. “Revenant One to incoming friendlies. I guess we know what happened to that Con-fed artillery. Nice work!”

“This is Crossbone One,” the commander of the lead tank responded. “Yeah, we rolled over ‘em on the way here.”

What ensued was best described as a massacre, and not a battle. With the Palfreys in their midst, running around at their feet and slitting their hamstrings, the Minos and ‘Goyles hitting them from the flank with 120mm shells, Tatzlwurms, and autocannon fire, and the three of us Charger-jockeys blasting away with casters and autocannons of our own, the Confederate armored battalion was quickly taken to pieces. Sweat beaded on my brow as I fell into a laser-focused trance, snapping off HBC pulses one after another, obliterating as many Ifrits as I could. They couldn’t even decide how to regroup and focus their fire. They didn’t have a chance in hell.

They were down to fifteen tanks and six walkers when finally, they hailed us on the radio. “Cease fire, please! We surrender!”

They were here to enslave us. To torment us. To threaten our lives and to strip us of our freedoms. And now, they begged for us to preserve them alive.

I gritted my teeth. Their cowardice made me sick. I flicked on the PA system on my Charger. “Power down your vehicles, shut off your fucking engines, get out and kneel on the ground with your hands behind your fucking heads, or so help me, I’ll slot every last fucking one of you!”

They did as ordered. Conqueror crews shut their engines off, Ifrit pilots powered down their fusion reactors, and they all disembarked. The detainees assembled in a large throng, kneeling on the ground with their hands behind their heads. The Gargoyles pulled up near them, dropping their ramps and disgorging six squads. These weren’t the typical untrained militia we often relied on in our cell. These were former military. Fellow Imperial Army. I could tell by the way they moved.

The grim-faced ponies wordlessly went around and zip-tied the hands of the detainees, escorting them away from the fallen Landcruiser and positioning them such that a few Gargoyles could keep them in check with their autocannons, should they decide to make a break for it. I desynced from Black Devil, unlatching the sync arm from my back and rising from the stirrups, shaking my legs out a bit. I briefly considered tossing on my jacket, but after inspecting the ragged claw-holes in the shoulders, I cursed and shook my head, tossing it back in the bin. I really liked that jacket.

“BD, open the lower hatch.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

My Charger knelt close to the ground so I could drop out of the lower hatch safely. I walked up to the detainees. I had questions, and they had answers.

“Who’s in charge here?” I said.

One grizzled-looking cleomanni with a square jaw and a beret atop his head stepped forward. “That would be me, Major Zvaler.”

I struck out a hoof at the tilted hulk of the fallen Landcruiser. “Ordinator Naimekhe. I know she’s on that Cruiser. She’s the one we want. Get her out here, and we’ll let you and your men go.”

Zvaler shrugged his broad shoulders. “Nothing doing. We lost contact with her when you nutcases flipped the damn thing over. Naimekhe’s with her bodyguards, now. Gafalze Arresgrippen. Best of the best. You’ll never catch her.”

“Bet me,” I said. “I’m going in there and I’m going to drag that bitch out by her ankles.” I walked up the ramp of one of the Gargoyles while stripping off my syncsuit. “Got some extra barding in there and a caster I can use?”

The driver looked back over his seat and sneered at me derisively. “Yeah, I keep ‘em under the Hearth’s Warming Tree, polka dotted wrapping paper and a little bow tie and all.”

“Hey, you fucking got ‘em, or what?”

“Rack to your right.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll bring ‘em back.”

I took the spare suit of body armor, tacked up and threw on a Phoenix Fire pulsecaster and a standard-issue infantry helmet. I’d have to make a pit stop back at my Charger to stow my syncsuit. No way I was letting it out of my sight, or leaving it on the Gargoyle. Way too important.

As I walked down the tracked IFV’s ramp, Revenant’s mobile surveillance Centaur pulled up next to us. They dropped their ramp and Mardissa—who was wielding Captain Garrida’s rifle, of all things—and the rest of Revenant disembarked.

Mardissa grinned wide. “Storm!” She dropped Thumper in the dirt and ran up to me, scooping me up in her arms and holding me tight.

I giggled a little. “I’m fine, Mar.”

“We lost your transponder.” Mardissa set me down. “They were saying you were a goner. Something about a Synchronicity Event? The hell’s that, ma’am?”

“It happens, sometimes,” I said. “I’ll explain later. We’ve got a slaver bitch to catch, and she’s guarded by Gaffs.”

“Where?”

I pointed to the Landcruiser. “In there.”

The Bannerman was tipped completely on its side, its deck nearly perpendicular to the ground. A good portion of the crew were probably killed or knocked the fuck out by being slammed against the bulkheads when we flipped it over. There was smoke, perhaps from sporadic fires. There was no way to know if Naimekhe was even alive in there, but that chromed bitch probably survived.

Me, Revenant squad, and the newcomers from Vanhoover lined up facing the Landcruiser, with Lieutenant Night Terror and Sergeant Sierra providing overwatch with their Chargers. We gave each other uneasy looks. The interior of the Cruiser would be extremely hazardous to navigate, with all the stairwells and doorways tipped on their side. It would be disorienting and potentially chock-full of hostiles.

We needed to secure that high-value target. Our plan to capture Corrector Dieslan Veightnoch depended on it.

We had no choice but to enter the belly of the beast.

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 22//Sideways Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 60 Minutes