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

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

Revenant and I advanced deeper into the cruiser’s forward engineering section, keeping our eyes peeled and our heads on a swivel. The loss of Haybale had hit us like a freight train. We were all running on fumes as it was, without the additional burden of a buddy’s gruesome death weighing on our consciences. There were an unknown number of Karkadann and other hostiles occupying the compartments ahead of us.

I tried projecting an aura of confident badassery, hefting the Confederate 10mm PolyBren B10, but my heart wasn’t in it. To tell the truth, I was exhausted, injured, and frankly terrified out of my wits. It took most of my energy to hide it. The remainder, the portion that kept me on my hooves and moving, was made up of sheer, unbridled rage.

Windy was held captive and Hoodoo was dead because of Wertua; according to everything I’d been told, she was one of the Con-fed freaks who originally advocated the idea of enslaving my kind and selling us as commodities. Were it not for her orders, the concentration camp in Dodge would never have existed. Ahriman Station would never have been used to experiment on me and thousands of other captive Imperial Army personnel. There wouldn’t be nearly as many Karkadann in the field. Thousands of ponies had been subjected to unspeakable indignities in the past three years, and it was all because of her.

Wertua Naimekhe was exceedingly lucky that she’d been marked for capture and not for neutralization. If the latter had been the case, I would have taken my time with her, and I would have done it well out of sight of my comrades. They didn’t need to see that side of me.

I narrowed my eyes. Wertua’s screams would be like music to my ears as I broke every bone and dislocated every joint in her miserable body.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Mardissa Granthis

I couldn’t help but think of how adorable she looked when she gave her little speech. Underneath the imposing shell of her armor, the Sergeant was, like every other Equestrian, a bug-eyed, velvety-soft fuzzball. Even at their most pragmatic, ponies were like mythical creatures out of a demented children’s storybook. Hearing her barking promises of violence was absurd. If one was not familiar with her species, then at first glance, just about the only thing one could reasonably expect a pony to say was that she had a coin slot somewhere on top of her head, hidden underneath her mane, and if one inserted a handful of tokens, they could pet her for ten-minute blocks of time. And then, just like that, Storm’s words had reeled back and punched me in the stomach. I had to remind myself of the essential truth. I was here, fighting by the Sergeant’s side, for a good reason.

Ponies were people. There was absolutely nothing humorous about their predicament. It was horrifying. Their appearance and physiology made them the target of exploitation.

Ponies were as colorful as peacocks and as soft as mink. One could make fur coats out of them in every color of the rainbow without dyes. Their bodily substances were psychoactive and had profound scientific and paraphysical applications. Ponies were physically powerful and well-suited to hard labor, despite their lack of manual dexterity. They had high-energy metabolisms and didn’t bulk up much, which made them unattractive for their meat, thank goodness. That didn’t stop damarkinds from using them as a light snack, but damarkinds would happily cook and eat anyone, anywhere, at any time, so that wasn’t too out of the ordinary for them. Some reputedly used them for sexual gratification. The very idea that so-called civilized people saw fit to eat and fuck unwilling ponies made my skin crawl. In my travels with the Sergeant, I’d discovered that Mil-Int and the CSF had conspired to exploit Equestrians for even more blatantly immoral things that beggared belief, such as using captive mares to breed the Karkadann, or even stealing the brains out of their skulls and stuffing them in new-generation Assault Walkers alongside extremely illegal roguetech.

They were the ideal cash crop. They were also fellow sapients.

I felt sick. All the time. So damn sick. For a time, I feared that the Sergeant would never accept me. I feared that maybe my kind had hurt her species too gravely for us to ever be close. And yet, whenever she was at her most emotionally vulnerable, it was me whose arms she fled into. It was my shoulder she cried against. After all, she carried a great burden, too. She was one of the ponies that Twilight Sparkle had chosen to be one of her deadliest executioners. There was no telling how many cleomanni she’d slain in the past. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear a concrete number. Regardless of all that my kind had done to hers, and everything that she’d done to mine, she was willing to make room in her heart for me.

Desert Storm was a friend that I felt I did not deserve. A part of me wished we could’ve gotten even closer. Another part of me wanted to push her away for fear of hurting her even more. When she was happy, I was happy. When she wasn’t, I wasn’t. Maybe I didn’t know what friendship even was, but it felt like it should’ve been something like that. I didn’t have friends, before. I had family. Having family is easy. They’re your own blood, and they’re right there from the start, and you can’t choose who they are. Friends are hard to make, and even harder to keep.

The distant hissing and chittering of the Karkadann made my wandering mind snap to attention. I gripped Thumper tighter, balancing the heavy griffon rifle atop my shoulder. I blinked my tired eyes a few times, trying to stay focused even though my arms and legs felt like taffy.

It was a dangerous gambit, what the Sergeant was doing. We were aiming to run a gauntlet of Karkadann and Gafalze and who knows what else, in the engineering spaces of a damned Bannerman. Of all things that could happen, I was quite sure that this was the worst possible thing. Then again, for all I knew, the pony penchant for melodrama was rubbing off on me.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Shooting Star

So, little ol’ Haybale finally bought the farm. Everypony around me was acting all choked-up, like they suddenly grew a conscience after seeing one of us bite it. I couldn’t bring myself to give two shits. They didn’t care about him when he was alive, and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to do their share of caring now that he was dead. It sure woke them up, though. Thank fuck for that. I wasn’t sure I’d be getting out of this alive, either, but now that everypony was running on a meaner shade of adrenaline, we were sure to pull through.

I didn’t like the Sergeant. I didn’t like Charger pilots in general. Fucking around in their great big armored ponies. Chargers didn’t make life easier for the militias. No matter how ponies tried to spin it, they weren’t really fire support. They were weapons of mass destruction. The only commonsense response to multiple Chargers entering the fray was to turn and run in the other direction, otherwise, we’d get crushed underhoof, blown up, or have a building brought down on our heads. Desert Storm was the most annoying Charger pilot I had ever met. Fuck betting. I would’ve paid money to watch that insufferable Oracle SCS bitch twist Storm’s neck from now until the stars explode. The highest form of entertainment. Now, the crazy fucker even had Prima wrapped around her hoof. Too bad. I hoped someone would have enough leverage to extract the Sergeant’s head from her ass, but it was just about fucking impossible. Her ass was a great big black hole of bullshit, sucking us all into its singularity.

What the fuck was that fucking speech? Has she finally fucking cracked? No, don’t answer that question. You won’t like the answer. I traded barbs with myself in my own brain. The irony wasn’t lost on me. It wasn’t just her. We were all near our respective breaking points.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Hexhead

I wasn’t shocked or surprised that we’d lost one. I was numb to it. The killing. The dying. It was good to keep one’s eyes forward, fixed on the goal. Not optimistic. Realistic. Leave optimism for the bleached skeletons in their muddy graves all around us.

Letting one’s mind wander was an invitation to miss vital details. A mechanic’s job was to look for things that were out of place. Rust and pitting. Torn rubber seals and worn piston rings. Bearings scraped down to exposed copper. Things that did not belong. Things like a slagged handle on a dogged-down hatch leading into a compartment below us. I’d nearly tripped over it.

“Ma’am?” I said. “Check it. Someone sealed this off.”

The Sergeant never took her eyes off her surroundings, even as she sidled up to the hatch. After all, she had an eye for the details, too.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

Those Karks were still out there. At any time, another half-dozen of the fuckers could swoop down on us from the vents. I kept my gaze flat and level as I approached the door in the upturned bulkhead that Hexhead had indicated. There was a red band painted across the door. A restricted area of some kind. Wertua could have been hiding in there. No, she’d never back herself into a corner like that. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that this was gonna be another fucking charnel house. We, the lost little carnies, had gone backstage. One never asks a griffon how the sausage is made. One never opens a door that Con-fed fuckheads had seen fit to seal off. I ignored my instincts.

“Hex, torch it open,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.” Hexhead nodded, unlimbering her breaching torch from her back and levitating it over to the door.

Unlike the cheesy acetylene torches that were typical combat engineering kit, Hexhead’s was a specialist’s microfusion-powered unit with a pyrokinetic cutting tip. The cutting lance and its backpack power supply had to have weighed over a hundred kilos, but she toted it around like it was nothing. The tip of her cutting torch howled and sparks flew as she made a square cutout in the door big enough for us to fit through, before punching out the ruined chunk of door with her hoof, leaving a glowing hole behind.

We were immediately assaulted by the scent of rotting flesh. I let out a long, exasperated breath through my nostrils. Yep, charnel house. I had Clover pass me her medical kit, and I pulled out some gauze balls and fashioned them into nose plugs.

“Want some?” I proffered them to the others.

Most took a couple, but Ket and Shooting Star declined. We tied off rope and climbed down into the upturned compartment. As my headlamps scanned over the space, I caught sight of empty cages, as well as stacks of body bags piled up against the far bulkhead, along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down. Shattered fragments of what looked like laboratory glassware and other bits of detritus littered the area.

“The fuck?” I whispered.

I climbed down towards the piles of body bags, shuffling across the filthy, inclined deck. When I got close to the pile, the stench was overwhelming. I bit my lip, slowly unzipping one of the bags, the glow of my levitation magic casting a dim orange hue on the hellish scene. It wasn’t long before I found the decomposing corpse of a stallion staring back at me.

“Lucky, record video,” I said, my voice wavering. “Head tracking.”

The Orbit beeped in acknowledgment, hovering over my shoulder and following my head movements exactly. There had to have been at least fifty body bags. Mardissa held a hand to her mouth, eyes wide with horror and disgust.

“You think they killed ‘em before we got here, ma’am?” Hexhead said.

“Something else is going on here,” I said. “They’ve been dead for a while. Days, at least.”

“What if they had some kinda virus or something?” Clover’s brows knit with worry. “Are we gonna get sick, too?”

I looked around the space. Some surgical trays, gurneys, and other equipment lay scattered about. I shook my head. “No. This isn’t a biolab. No filtration. Nothing. It just goes right to the same ventilation trunk as everything else. They wouldn’t bring something dangerous like that aboard a command cruiser, where there’s a risk of contagion jumping species accidentally and infecting the entire crew. So, what the hell?”

I reached down with my levitation and manipulated the deceased stallion’s head, inspecting it. There was a hole in his forehead, right where his horn would’ve been if he was a unicorn. Someone had removed his horn and drilled all the way into his brain. The lump in my gut turned from lead to tungsten.

“Any ideas, Mar?” I turned towards the only cleomanni woman I saw fit to call a friend, who looked like she was trying desperately not to lose her lunch.

“I couldn’t even begin to venture a guess, ma’am,” she said.

I didn’t like this. Not one fucking bit. I thought I’d gotten used to atrocities by now, both inflicting and receiving them. This had a touch of darkness and cruelty that went a step beyond the usual Con-fed bullshit. My sense of unease was palpable. It felt like a predator’s eyes were boring into the back of my head. As it turned out, they were.

The air was split by hisses and warbling, digital shrieks. When me and the squad turned back towards the entrance we’d made, we saw the glowing eyes of a half-dozen Karkadann pour through the hole like roaches.

“Contact!” I shouted. “Weapons free!”

I kept my pistol in reserve, sending caster pulses downrange as I lunged for cover. The Karkadann were maddeningly difficult targets, jumping and speed-crawling along the empty storage racks, hissing like snakes, pulsing their bizarre audio data bursts at each other. I could barely maintain a lock. Adrenaline and exhaustion vied for control of my body as my targets slipped from my aim. I was getting a little emotional, watching them come at us without a hint of fear as we unloaded on them.

I gritted my teeth. “Motherfucker. Motherfucker!”

Prima, that unyielding death goddess in the shape of a pony, teleported front and center, and in so doing, she proved that she was mortal after all. Six Karks screeched and pounced on her from six directions. Their armored bodies slammed into her, knocking the wind out of her with an explosive grunt and sending her sprawling. I watched them all roll across the inclined deck in a big ball, three of them trying to seize her by the haunches and the shoulders, their bladed tails flickering in our headlamp beams. If Prima went down, we were all as good as dead. Mar took a knee and lined up Thumper, but she didn’t have a shot. She could’ve put a hole in Prima if she wasn’t careful.

However, what happened next defied explanation. Prima let out a roar of pure rage as she teleported out of the dogpile of Karks, bringing one of them with her as she rematerialized in mid-air, stabbing it in the neck as the two of them fell. She pivoted so she landed on top of it, driving her knives into its neck over and over with her levitation. She levitated a grenade off her vest, ripping the pin out and letting the spoon fly free. Then, Prima did the wildest fake-out I ever saw. She put the grenade in her hoof and cocked her leg back as if she was going to throw it. The Karkadann watching her reacted immediately, swarming away from where she aimed. She performed the whole motion of throwing the grenade, but she teleported the grenade off her hoof mid-course. I didn’t see where the grenade went, until one of the Karks exploded violently from the inside-out with an ear-shattering bang, showering three others with its own shrapnelized armor.

I waved the squad forward. “Go, go, go! Kill these motherfuckers!”

We moved in on them, aiming to put the pressure on and seal the deal before they had a chance to recover. Me and Shooting Star charged up the middle, with Clover and Hexhead taking the right and left flanks around the pile of body bags and Mar and Ket hanging back and providing support. The Karks writhed on the inclined deck, chunks of their armor missing. There was blood all over. Lucky was already pouring fire on them from over my shoulder, the flash of the green caster beams almost blinding me. I switched my caster to manual, eye-tracking mode, and then shot the Karks in the exposed fleshy bits. Hexhead leapt into the fray, slinging her cutting torch. The big mare fearlessly tackled one of the Karks, bringing her pyrocutter’s tip down on its head, rapidly burning through its skull and into its brain as it shrieked and struggled.

I drew out my knife and rammed it hilt-deep into the mess of shrapnel-ruined flesh that one Kark’s neck had become. I pumped the blade in and out with my levitation, going for the arteries. There were things in there that belonged in no flesh-and-blood being. My knife bounced off silicone hoses; artificial vessels carrying unspeakable fluids. The creature writhed on the floor as it whined and bled, its tortured physiology a mockery of the prosthetics that kept me alive. I snuffed out its twisted existence without a hint of remorse.

I rose to my hooves, my chest armor covered in spatters of blood and off-white ichor. The others had just neutralized their chosen targets. One of the creatures had been turned into a smoldering husk by Shooting Star’s pyrokinesis. Two more Karks remained, circling like hungry manticores. Just when I thought we might’ve had a fighting chance, a dozen more of the things poured through the hatch.

My blood ran cold. “Pull back! Fire and retreat!”

We were backed into a corner. There were no other obvious exits to this compartment. As we withdrew and they rapidly advanced on us, climbing down the storage racks, the utter hopelessness of our situation became apparent. Thumper erased two of Karkadann and their warped lives, but that still left many more. One in the center of their formation, one of the Bull Karks, was physically larger and more imposing than the others, clinging to the inclined deck with its magnetic boots.

The creature’s hot breath puffed visible condensation into the cold air as it snorted through its nostrils. Like the rest of its body, its face was completely covered in reflective armor, with tiny cameras in place of eyes. For all I knew, they were its actual eyes, its real ones having been surgically removed. It moved with a dark and unknowable intelligence, communicating what seemed like orders to the others.

They advanced on us, our caster beams bouncing off their heavy plating. The Bull Kark’s shoulder plating unfurled, revealing what could not have been mistaken for anything less than a pair of glowing orange caster emitters.

“Cover!” I shouted.

Scintillating columns of orange energy slammed into Hexhead’s chest protector. She let out an explosive grunt as the force of the impact struck her like a hammer, sending her sprawling. The Bull Kark had a hump on its back that could only have been a power source for a beamcaster of Confederate make.

There were things on its back that I vaguely recognized as life support devices. Titanium hoses and what looked almost like a dialysis pump. Then, it hit me like a sack of bricks. The Confederacy didn’t know how to make diagrammatic engines. Either they’d somehow figured out how to get these vile creatures to latently perform magic, or there was a pony cyberbrain slaved to this Karkadann’s systems.

Along with the stress of the situation I found myself in, something about the idea of being a living brain trapped inside a Karkadann’s armored body made me violently ill. I gagged and dry-heaved, but nothing came up.

Prima keyed her radio. “Tiamat, we need your Wolfhounds, right the fuck now, over!”

“Rally Point Gold,” the Anima radioed back. “Come and get ‘em.”

Prima teleported out, and then teleported back a couple seconds later with the three Wolfhounds we’d recovered from Pur Sang Arsenal. Pure chaos ensued as the Karkadann charged us, the Wolfhounds immediately springing into action with their powerful MBCs, cutting down three Karks in the blink of an eye. The Bull Kark burst into a gallop and caught me off-guard with its sheer swiftness, tackling me and ramming me into a steel bulkhead with a loud clang.

“Ma’am!” Cloverleaf cried out.

The thing’s huge body physically overwhelmed me. I was being crushed. The Karkadann drooled and huffed in my face like a mindless beast, smashing its chest into mine. I saw a flash of chrome in my lower peripheral vision. A sharp, metal prick like a cross between a syringe and a male bedbug’s genitals unfolded from the monster’s groin. I was moments away from the most gruesome and painful death imaginable. I levitated out my knife, my ringing ears filled with the sounds of the beast’s growls and my own terrified, adrenalized screams. I couldn’t see anywhere to stab on its body. It was completely covered in armor. If I tried, I’d roll the point of my knife.

I flipped my blade around in my levitation and desperately smashed the pommel into the thing’s armored skull, making nary a dent. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

The huge thing jostled forward and humped against my underbelly like a big dog, trying to find the ideal angle to spear through my gut and pump me full of corrosive nanomachines. I couldn’t help but think, this is it. I’m going to fucking die. The Archons awaited their newest plaything. They’d been denied long enough.

I summoned the deepest reserves of my nearly exhausted magic, forming a partial barrier over my abdomen that the thing’s gunmetal doom-prick thrust into. It bounced and slid off. I watched a 30mm ATR barrel lower itself into my field of view, leveled straight at the Kark’s neck. “Wai—” I had just enough time to cover my face before my words were cut off by an earsplitting boom and I was showered with gore. The Kark’s disembodied head was launched several meters away in a spray of blood and twisted metal armor. Its decapitated body collapsed atop me like a puppet with its strings cut, its jagged neck-hole flopping over into my face and decanting its vital fluids all over me like a dingo’s tipped-over wineskin.

I quickly learned that Karkadann have two circulatory systems. One natural, with red, iron-based blood like ours. One unnatural, with a milky white synthetic substance that smelled like pus-filled gauze wraps. It was all over my face. It was in my nose. It was in my mouth. I retched and I retched, my eyes watering. Mardissa offered a hand that I gladly took, and she helped me up. I slowly, shakily rose onto my hooves and spat repeatedly, scraping the blood and gunk off of my tongue with my teeth.

Karks were tough, but Vurvalfn they were not. Our automata made short work of them, their red energy claws slicing through the creatures’ armor like butter. The inclined deck ran audibly with rivers of red. A babbling brook of blood. Even with the aid of climbing gear, Clover’s hooves struggled to keep her upright on the slippery slope. It was a damnable mess.

“Sound off!” I said.

Hexhead slowly rose to her hooves, tossing her ruined chest protector aside. “I’m okay.”

I eyed Hexhead’s mangled Bulwark armor. The Confederate caster made a wide and shallow crater in the plate. They hit hard, but they were unfocused. The Djinn’s casters had the same exact thing going on. Hexhead was damn lucky the Confederacy hadn’t yet figured out how to dial them in for a tight-focused, penetrating beam. Their reverse-engineered caster tech was primitive at best.

“Everyone’s accounted for, ma’am,” Mar said.

“Tiamat, do you read me?” I coughed and sputtered, hoping she could hear me through her Wolfhounds.

“Yes, Sergeant?” Tiamat responded through one of the Wolfhounds’ speakers.

“Got a Bull Kark,” I said. “Need a scan on this thing, right now.”

“Bull Kark?” Tiamat said. “We call them Liquefiers, but I suppose Bull Kark is catchier and has fewer syllables, which always appeals to the rank and file.”

I smiled half-heartedly. “I feel like I was just damned with faint praise.”

One of the Wolfhounds walked up to the fallen Kark and ran its multi-spectral sensors over it, its head scanning up and down. “What the shit?” Tiamat said. “This thing’s got magtech, and lots of it. I suppose the Confederacy don’t give a damn about their own laws anymore.”

“Any cyberbrains in there?” I said.

“One. In the back.”

“Alive?”

“Yes, but not for long.” The Wolfhound turned its head towards me. “Life support system’s failing.”

“Fuck.” I shook my head. “Fucking hell, guys. They’re shoving pony brains in these things, too.”

“Any way to keep that brain alive?” Prima said. “I have some questions I need to ask it.”

“I bet you would,” I muttered.

Prima shot me a glare. “We’ll do our best to save their life and restore their body, if we can.”

“Yeah, as a Total.” The slang for full-body conversion cyborgs was a double entendre, having the senses of both total replacement of the body and a totaled car. “You and I both know that level of chrome does weird things to your head.”

“I’m nearly an FBC myself,” Prima said.

Yeah, and you’re fucked up. I shrugged, trying to avoid saying the quiet part out loud.

One of Tiamat’s Wolfhounds walked up to the Bull Kark’s corpse, extending a probe into a port on the back. There were a few tense moments before we finally had the answer we sought.

“Ah, good,” Tiamat said. “Idiots didn’t even change the connection standard, they just copied it right off our casters. I can bypass the failing power cell and use the Wolfhound’s instead. Should last long enough for Prima to teleport the whole shebang back to base. Shouldn’t do it for more than a few minutes at a time, though. The amperage is a little bit more than this probe can reasonably handle, and it’s starting to heat up.”

Prima charged up her magic and teleported the Wolfhound and the dead Kark back to the mines with a flash of green. “Done and done.”

“They’re using pony b—brains?” Clover mumbled nervously. “Is that what the dead ponies are about?”

I bit my lip. “We don’t know that, yet. Tiamat, need another scan.”

“On what?”

“The bodies. We need to know what the fuck the Confederacy were doing here.”

“Working on it.”

Tiamat had the Wolfhound pass its head over the corpses. There were no laser beams, no cones of sizzling energy slewing up and down, nothing dramatic of that sort. The Wolfhound simply nodded its head over the bodies a little, and then, it was done. Can’t see T-waves. All those dumb Applewood movies had tricked me.

Tiamat’s prognosis was grim, and I could tell by how the Wolfhound carried itself that it wasn’t too enthused, either. “Their brains are present, but scrambled. No thaumatic signatures detected. Looks like they harvested their quintessence.”

Me and the squad shared very unnerved glances. All those lives, just for powder. This was barbarity of the highest order.

I gritted my teeth. “What. The fuck. For?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Tiamat said. “That Liquefier there has a caster. Confederate scientists obviously don’t know how to make diagrammatic engines, so they use pony cyberbrains and slave ‘em with a neural lace. So far, so awful, right? It gets worse. It seems they don’t know how to make tetrafluid, either. So, they boost the cyberbrain’s thaumatic output with reservoirs containing a gel suspension of actual Quint instead.”

Cloverleaf was mad. I could see it on her mug. The curl of the lips, the wrinkle of the nose. She was about to say something she’d regret. She turned and stamped over towards Mar, getting in her face.

“Why couldn’t your species just leave us alone?” Clover said. “Is this vileness worth it? Don’t you have enough wealth without adding our bodies to the pile?”

Mardissa, for her part, wilted with shame, squeezing her eyes shut and drawing her neck in. Chin touching her chest. Arms straight up and down at her sides. Fists balled. I was becoming adept at recognizing the way bipeds expressed emotions. Similar to us, but different.

I shook my head. “Corporal, I know you’re angry. We all are. Mardissa didn’t do this, so don’t take it out on her. Ease off.”

Clover slowly nodded, sniffling miserably. Prima teleported out and returned immediately with the third Wolfhound. The techs at the base had taken custody of the Kark’s corpse and were undoubtedly hard at work recovering the intact, living brain inside.

The lead Wolfhound walked up to me and addressed me directly with a feminine and slightly robotic voice. “Ma’am, we’ll provide support.”

“What’s your name, soldier?” I said.

“Hound Two-Eight-Nine-Nine,” the Wolfhound replied. “They don’t give us fancy names like y’all.”

“But you’re a person, right?” I thumped the machine’s chest with my hoof. “You’ve got a full-fledged Anima system in there, don’t you?”

The Wolfhounds glanced at each other, and then back at me. Hound-2899 nodded her head. “Yes, we do, but because of the source of the souls and the grade of the core—”

“Convicts, right?”

“I don’t know. Probably. We don’t have any memories of our past lives, so it’s not like it really matters where the souls come from.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Alright, that settles it. Your name is Ripper from now on. Got it? It’s ‘cause you’ve got those claws. They rip stuff up pretty damn good.”

The war automaton tilted its head quizzically. “Whatever you want, ma’am.”

“Tiamat, can we keep her?” I said. “We’re down a soldier. We lost Haybale. This way, I can keep in close contact with you, too.”

Mainly, I just wanted to see if Tiamat was amenable to putting one of the Wolfhounds in my squad. We were something like seventy percent less likely to die with one of those things watching our backs. They were just that awesome.

“Wait one, I’ll run it by the Captain,” Tiamat said. After a few moments, I had my answer. “Captain Garrida says it’s fine, for now, so long as you reimburse her. The techs need some parts to fix a few of my other Wolfhounds that were deemed repairable, and she wants your team to go get ‘em. Not now, of course. You up for salvage hunting, later?”

“Yes,” I said. “Tell her yes.”

“Then you have your bot. Take good care of her, Sergeant.”

“Hey, Ripper,” I said. “You’re the new Revenant Four. Welcome to the team.”

“Glad to be here.” A tinge of nervousness in the golem’s voice indicated that she was anything but.

“Tiamat, can you patch me through to Captain Garrida?” I said. “I’m having trouble raising her on comms.”

“She’s in a bad way, Sergeant,” Tiamat’s voice crackled over my headset. “We’re not sure if she’s going to make it.”

“What?” I shook my head. “She was fine a few hours ago. What the fuck’s going on?”

“Peritonitis,” Tiamat said matter-of-factly. “A sword through the bowel tends to do that. My records show that you sustained a similar injury very recently, Sergeant. You organics need to take better care of yourselves.”

“Can’t be helped,” I said. “There’s no rest for—uh—for—” I trailed off as everything went dark.

I awoke a few seconds later to Mar gripping my shoulders and shaking me. “Sergeant! Storm, are you okay?”

I blinked a few times. Microsleep. Totally uncontrollable. I was so exhausted. My body had just about fucking had it. I’d only had a couple hours of sleep in the past few days. Just keeping my eyes open was a struggle. An awful weariness had seeped into my bones. I hated being so tired that I was acutely aware of my body. I felt like a heap of tormented meat wrapped around a calcium frame, the whole assemblage struggling to animate itself. It was a deep and thorough fatigue. On top of that, my magic was nearly depleted. I held a hoof to my head, gritting my teeth. I had a splitting headache, like someone had taken an electric whisk to my brain.

I couldn’t let Wertua get away. Not when we were so close. We needed her as bait to lure in Veightnoch. We needed to rescue the Empress. We needed Twilight Sparkle. She would fix all this, somehow. She had to, or everything we’d done was completely pointless.

I let out a sigh. “I’m fine, Mar. Just a little tired, is all.”

“More than just a little, by the looks of things,” Mardissa said. “We’ve got to finish this, and quickly.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. “Tiamat, mark this compartment as a point of interest. What happened here requires further investigation, and we don’t have the time to do it.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Squad, let’s move,” I said. “Back into the passageway, let’s go!”

After I had Lucky take a few more snaps of the grisly scene, we clipped onto our ropes and climbed back out of the compartment, up the heavily inclined deck and out into the engineering access corridor. We made our way deeper into the engineering spaces, coming across a large, open gallery that looked surreal turned on its side. We climbed through a hatch and out into the dark, cavernous space, struggling to get our bearings.

“Lucky, Ripper, I want scans, now,” I said. “No surprises.”

My Orbit beeped a few times and zipped through the space, making a quick pass with its basic camera feed. I saw nothing on the picture-in-picture view in my helmet. The image was rather dark, aside from the emergency lighting.

Ripper nodded her head up and down and side to side. “Coast looks clear.”

“Keep moving,” I said.

We climbed down to the lowest point of the gallery, mantling up and over railings and making our way to the far end of the space. There was smoke pouring from the hatch directly ahead of us. We took a detour. Prima teleported up to the entrance to a passage above us and threw rope down. It was quite the ascent. A few stories straight up. The Wolfhounds scaled the bulkheads with the help of powerful electromagnets in their feet, crawling up the steel walls like spiders.

Ketros was the last one to the top. “You could just teleport us up, couldn’t you?” He gripped Prima’s hoof and she helped him up.

“And what? Waste my magic?” Prima smirked.

“How does that work, anyway?” Ket said.

“It’s tied directly to a unicorn’s metabolism, Private,” I said. “We eat to recharge.”

“Really?” Ket grinned. “You just nosh on a snack, and poof, just like that, you’re good to lift boulders with your mind?”

“Well, you’ve got to give it time to digest,” Hexhead said. “But yeah, that is how it works. Big magic, bigger appetite.”

Ket doubled over laughing. Shooting Star cocked her head at him. “What’s so funny?”

“I—” He immediately lost it and broke out in peals of laughter again, bent over with his hands resting on his knees; we all stopped and waited until he was done.

“Go ahead, Ket,” I said.

“I couldn’t help but picture Twilight Sparkle wolfing down like twenty thousand calories, dirty plates stacked high around her, and she keeps pounding her hooves on the table and demanding more food like a big baby.”

Mar rolled her eyes. Shooting Star groaned and deliberately ignored him. I giggled a little. “Interesting, Private. Very interesting.” It was very dull, but I feigned interest nonetheless so he wouldn’t feel like the whole world was against him.

Ket shrugged. “It was funnier in my head.”

We advanced further down the passageway, focusing on our surroundings. I sent Lucky to scout ahead. My Orbit’s mics picked up a heated argument echoing from further down the passage.

“Bring her out!” Whoever it was, they were mad as hell. “We know she’s in there. Wertua put us in this fucking mess. She deserves to get what’s coming to her.”

A large crowd had formed and Confederate Security Forces were struggling to keep the vessel’s crew at bay with non-lethal methods, raising their stun batons high and trying their best to look menacing in that laughable blue armor of theirs. “Back! Get back, or you’ll be charged with mutiny!”

“By whom? The tunnies marched all the bridge officers off with their wrists tied. It’s just you and us, and there’s more of us than there are of you!”

I wrinkled my muzzle at the odd slur. “Is that really what they’re calling us, now?”

Ket made an exaggerated nod, his face and neck strained as if resisting the urge to burp. “Indubitably.”

I shook my head. “Fuck me. The sass is coming at me from both ends.”

I peeked around the corner and got eyes on the crowd. They had gotten physical with the CSF. This was about to become a bloodbath. I could just feel it. I had to intervene.

I put on my most authoritative voice and shouted down the passage in Ardun. “Knock it the fuck off!”

The struggle came to a halt, all eyes turning towards us. I approached them with my caster emitters shut, stepping out of the shadows and into the light with my Orbit perched over my shoulder. Disdainful looks adorned all of their faces when my identity became clear.

“And there they are, now.” One of the engineers gestured at me. “Tunnies. Like clockwork.”

It was obviously a corruption of the word tonnanen, warped to sound as diminutive and mocking as Ardun would allow. I brushed the derogatory remark aside. It would not avail me to complain, and I had to keep up appearances if this was to work out.

“We’re not here to kill you,” I said. “We don’t want to harm any of you unless forced to do so. We want Wertua Naimekhe. Give her to us, and you will spare yourselves a lot of unnecessary hardship.”

“They can talk?” One of the engineers had a look of dawning understanding and then incipient rage on his face. He turned back towards the CSF goons. “You told us they were constructs.”

“Don’t listen to that thing!” one woman shouted. “It’s got you under its spell!”

I stamped my hoof. “Shut up!” That got them good and quiet. “This thing is on fucking fire, and here you are, bickering like a bunch of foals. I passed multiple compartments belching smoke. Do you want to burn to death? I have had enough! All I want is to have some chow and sleep like a dead mare for sixteen hours straight. Hopefully, the doc will find something busted in my fucking spleen and demand I get bed rest. I’m tired. I’m hungry. If you don’t get out of my way in ten seconds, I am going to ram my leg down each of your throats, pull your stomachs out of your mouths, and see if there’s a bite of salad left in any of them!”

After a few moments of stunned silence, one of the engineers snickered, pinching the bridge of his nose to alleviate his newfound stress. “Yep. That’s a person.” He walked up to one of the CSF guardsmen and patronizingly clapped his hand on the man’s shoulder. “You should look up what the word atrocity means. Could come in handy at your trial.”

“Arboka sent me,” I said.

“She’s alive?” one of the engineers said.

I nodded. “She has not been harmed. She’s safe and has been detained along with the bridge crew. We’re trying to get everyone off this thing alive. We don’t want your lives. We just want Wertua. We have a lot of very pointed questions to ask her.”

“Well, that’s a fairer shake than these CSF cunts are giving us. Oy, lads! The Equestrians want the same thing as us; that vile bitch clapped in irons. Truce, for now.”

One by one, the engineers gathered at my side. The rest of my squad joined me, standing resolutely in the face of evil. The intercom beside the upturned door the CSF were guarding crackled to life.

“Traitors!” Wertua spoke. “A millennium of warfare, and we stand on the cusp of total victory over that wretched species. You would undo all of that progress, and for what? Because your heart faltered at the last moment? Because you couldn’t bring yourself to do what must be done?”

“We did destroy them!” One of the engineers was distraught, gesticulating in an exaggerated way to drive her point home. “Have you looked outside at that wasteland? There’s rubble and bones everywhere, as far as the eye can see. We blew them up once already. Why do we have to blow them up twice? I’ve seen things. On here, even, on this very ship. What are we doing to these poor people that would make them so desperate?”

“You’re young,” Wertua said. “Young and foolish. You haven’t seen the Equestrians at the height of their power. You don’t know what they’re capable of. You haven’t the slightest inkling of their paraphysical abilities. Look at them. They have no suppression rings on. It’s highly likely that your minds have all been infected by this brief contact alone.”

She was trying to manipulate them and get them back on her side in the most obscene way possible, by misrepresenting both our magic and our physiology.

“That’s not true!” I shouted. “I have not used any magic at all. This is all them. They have eyes. No one likes being lied to, Wertua.”

“Speaking to you at all is beneath me,” she said. “You filth. You vile little animal. You will be silent!”

I beat my hoof against my chest. “Come out and make me, you gaping cunt.”

The mutinous engineers burst out laughing. The absurdity of a pony swearing so roughly in their own language was just too much for them.

“Can I adopt her?” one said.

“You fools. You’ll pay dearly for this.” Wertua cut the transmission.

“Could she be any more of a stereotype?” Ket wondered aloud.

“Just wait till we find, like, a billion skeletons in her closet,” Cloverleaf muttered. “We’ll open the door to her walk-in and get buried in skellies.”

I let out a deep sigh. I was getting tired of finding skeletons. It seemed like every mission we went on was capped off with a gruesome and demoralizing discovery of some kind. Every beamcaster blast and every bullet hole slowly peeled back the Confederacy’s mask to reveal the rot underneath. It was never clean, and it was never simple.

That pile of corpses was only the beginning. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that we were about to walk onto the scene of another crime, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.

“Now, I want you to think.” I directed my attention to the CSF goons. “I want you to use those two little BBs in your skull that you call hemispheres, and I want you to decide if any of this shit is worth losing your life over.”

The guardsmen looked at each other, and then back at me. They knew damn well who I was. I could tell by the looks on their faces. The Confederate Army brass had probably issued a detailed dossier on me by this point. Word was getting around. I was quickly becoming public enemy number one.

Without a word, the guardsmen tossed their weapons to the deck and stood aside. We outnumbered and outgunned them by a considerable margin. It wouldn’t have been a fight, but a massacre.

“Smart,” I said.

After Hexhead breached the door, we climbed through the hole her torch left behind after the edges had cooled sufficiently. We were in the main engine room. The Bannerman’s giant diesel generators were in full evidence. They were hanging sideways, but were never designed to. One looked like it was ready to shear its mounting bolts, come undone, and fall into the other.

As we walked beneath them, my face was assaulted by the waste heat like a blow dryer. It had to be at least thirty degrees Celsius in here. The main engines were shut down but had a lot of residual heat left over. An emergency generator rattled away in a far corner.

“Isn’t this your space?” I said. “How the hell did they lock you out?”

One of the engineers nodded. “We were ordered to rally at the nearest egress point, but we never received the order to abandon ship. Those CSF bastards locked the doors behind us.”

As we advanced through the space, dozens of the ship’s engineers in tow, two Gafalze Arresgrippen supersoldiers stepped out from behind the machinery at the far end, accompanied by a half-dozen Karkadann that slithered out from behind cover. One of the Gaffs was armed with a pulse rifle and the other with a monomolecular sword and a heavy ballistic shield.

“This is as far as you go, Equestrians,” one of the GARG Troopers said. “Bold of you to test Ordinator Naimekhe’s patience to this extent.”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Cloverleaf was flabbergasted. “You attacked us. You tested us. You failed. We in the Liberation Front showed you that there are consequences for the evil shit that you do.”

“You will not prevail,” the other GARG Trooper spoke. “Turn around and walk away.”

I stepped out in front of the others, addressing both my squad and the ship’s engine crew. “Do you all know where these creatures come from?”

“Fine beasts of war, aren’t they?” the first Gaff said. “Cloned and grown in artificial wombs. Purpose-made to hunt and kill your kind.”

Mardissa stepped forward, next. “If that’s what you’ve been told, then you have been lied to. I know my biotech and genegineering. The tech to make artificial wombs has been lost since the fall of the Concord. Despite many years of active investment and research, it was never rediscovered.”

I turned towards the engineers. They were young cleomanni, like Mar. Young and impressionable. Though I wasn’t particularly good at written Ardun, my grasp of spoken Ardun was improving every day. I’d been practicing with my Orbit with a language program and listening in on Mar and Ket’s conversations. Translators were convenient but speaking to them in their own native language seemed to grab their attention better, opening up all sorts of opportunities for demagoguery. I could play a damn good carnival barker when required, and these kids all had free tickets to the freak show.

I paced in front of them. “Why do you think we resist you so desperately? Why do you think we refuse to lay down our arms? This is what you have all been fighting for, for so many years. This is what your parents and grandparents fought for. This is what your children will fight for. To persecute us. To enslave us. To rob us of our bodily autonomy and reduce us beneath livestock. Doesn’t that bother you on a fundamental level?”

The looks on their faces were uneasy. One raised his hand to get the others to settle down. “What are you talking about?”

I struck a hoof out at the slavering, mindless Karks, their forked tongues flickering at us. “They’re called Karkadann. Every single one of those creatures is the product of a hideous crime committed against my kind. They use us. They kidnap us to use our bodies as hosts for these fucking things. They’ve been doing this to us for centuries. Maybe even since the very beginning. Maybe this is how it all began. Without your knowledge and certainly without our consent, your government has been taking mares and putting those things in our fucking bellies.”

The reaction was immediate. Horror. Disgust. Anger. Some were so distressed, they were doubling over and trying not to throw up. Others hunched and balled their fists in rage, like coiled whips about to lash out. Most cleomanni were normal people, and normal people became deeply angered and perturbed when they heard uncomfortable truths such as these, especially when they shared some degree of culpability in acts so heinous.

“There is no excuse!” one woman shouted.

Both sides were adopting an aggressive posture. I glanced back and forth between the crowd of nameless engineers and the two Confederate supersoldiers. This had the potential to turn into a bloodbath very quickly. I assessed my forces. Three Wolfhounds, Prima, some very tired soldiers, and a crowd of renegade Confederate crewmen armed only with makeshift clubs, like pipe wrenches and pieces of actual pipe. If the engineers were the first into the fray, then they were going to be slaughtered. I had to do something.

I squared up with the Gaffs, keeping my distance. “Your boss is little more than a kidnapper and slaver. Does she deserve your undying loyalty?”

“How did you do it?” the GARG with the pulse rifle said. “I see you've got them all wrapped around your hoof nice and tight. What kind of magic did you use for that?”

I thought back to when Night Terror manipulated several Gaffs into killing themselves and each other with his magic during the attack on Camp Crazy Horse, a rising sense of nausea in my gut. I knew dark magic, too. It was essential for concealing objects. The spells that formed the foundations of the Illusion school were originally used in antiquity by unscrupulous mages, shambling necromancers, and mad kings to conceal hidden passages in their lairs. I had no way to prove that I hadn’t used magic to manipulate the minds of these cleomanni and force them to be sympathetic to our cause. Once again, I found myself gripped with dread at the implications. They had no reason not to suspect me. To suspect us. The engineers had not been difficult to persuade. I chalked it up to them being young and idealistic and having a bone to pick with Wertua, but I secretly wondered if there was something more to it. Perhaps our magic charmed them by some passive mechanism unknown to our science. Or maybe it was something more mundane. Some of them seemed to find us irresistibly cute, like house pets.

I found this line of thinking deeply perturbing. There was a sharp delineation between those who had magic and those who didn't. Our enemies had fine dexterity, and we had our spells. A fair trade, it was not. Magic was vastly more powerful than having fingers, in several key ways, not least of which was because it both replicated and excelled over the manual manipulation of objects with the varying forms of levitation. There were so many ways a unicorn could bend reality to our will. If I wanted, I could rip a pin off an enemy’s grenade on his vest, or manipulate the controls of his weapon, putting it on safe or jarring out the magazine from afar. Unicorns more skilled than I at Arcane magic could snap a neck just by looking at someone funny. Shooting Star could make someone’s rifle glow cherry-red and brand their hands with her pyrokinesis, or heat a blade and inflict grievous wounds by carbonizing tissue. Prima was a murder machine, teleporting herself, teleporting explosives, and stabbing with levitation more forceful than any pony I’d ever seen.

Just about the only thing that stopped the average pony from using our magic for violence was mere social convention. Most ponies were simply not cut out for inflicting gruesome death on others. Remove that one last mental barrier, replace idealism with pragmatism, and we became some of the most frightening creatures in the whole galaxy.

I took a deep breath through my nostrils. “There is no greater magic than the truth. You can lie, cheat, and gaslight people all you want, but sooner or later, there is a tipping point where they thirst for answers to their pain. Once that happens, you cannot stop them.”

“What would you know about the truth?” the one with the shield said. “You’re a terrorist.”

“A terrorist?” I let out a long and low cackle. “Between us, which one lives in terror of the other? Which side has hired literal monsters to skin ponies alive and tear us limb from limb? You are the undisputed masters of terror. Every single pony in Tar Pan who is still alive is cowering in a dark hole as we speak, all because of what you’ve done here. Don’t you get it? You’re in the wrong, just like you’ve always been. I stopped you. We stopped you. It’s over.”

The GARG trooper with the pulse rifle grunted dismissively, his faceless mask offering not even the slightest hint as to his reaction. “You think your insistence alone will get you through us without a fight?”

I shook my head. “I know you won’t be swayed by an emotional argument, so let’s try a logical one. You walk away, we take Wertua, and that’s the end of it. Or, you can slaughter your own countrymen to get at us, and even if by some miracle you stopped all of us, we are not the only team clearing the wreck. There is no conceivable scenario in which you walk away from this.”

The Gaff shrugged. “Maybe so. Regardless, we have our orders.”

I took a deep breath, letting it out with a sigh. “I understand. I also have mine. Squad! Contact, front! Spread out and engage!”

Revenant scattered, taking up positions in cover. The dust covers on my caster snapped open upon my half-squeeze of the triggers, emitters flaring green. The GARG troopers were faster. Much faster. The one with the sword and shield charged, while the one with the pulse rifle raked us with fire. Pulse rifle projectiles were a little slower than gunfire, but not by much. I had only a split-second to react as I poured my magic into a unidirectional barrier spell. An orange wall of energy snapped into existence in front of me.

Blue plasma slammed into my barrier, smearing over it. I gritted my teeth as the shock was transmitted to my horn. It felt like someone took a hammer to my skull. The engineers were stunned by the sudden outbreak of violence, faltering and stumbling as they tried hiding behind my barrier. I turned and looked back at them out of the corner of my eye.

“Get back!” I said. “My barrier won’t hold forever!”

A few gave me odd looks, never expecting a pony to protect them from others of their own kind. The satyrs scrambled to their hooves and retreated to cover behind a step in the overhead that had turned into a bulkhead. There were tools strewn all over the place, fallen roll-away chests having spilled their contents onto what was now the deck.

A monomolecular sword bit into my barrier, shattering my magic in an orange spray of fragmented arcane energy. The Gaff followed up with a horizontal slash. I hit him with a body-seize spell as I ducked, forcing his arm muscles to spasm and limiting his control over his blade. He almost took the tip of my horn off, regardless. Without hesitation, he propelled himself forward and rammed his shield into me, sending me tumbling away and slamming into a stanchion with a ringing noise that reverberated through the cruiser’s hull. The blow knocked the wind out of me. I coughed, and when I did, I could taste blood. The GARG trooper planted his ballistic shield in the deck and concealed himself completely behind it. He sheathed his sword and planted a directional antipersonnel mine in front of it. I groaned in pain as I willed my uncooperative body to roll up, over and behind a tool chest. The blast rattled my teeth, my ears ringing loudly.

I keyed my radio. “Ghost One, bring the Commodore here, now. Wolfhounds, you’re on Kark duty. Go!”

Prima radioed back, “Sergeant, the Commodore is busy leading her own team.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck! Teleport her here, now!”

“Yes, Sergeant.” Prima’s words were laced with a hint of venom.

I tracked the movements of the Karkadann, watching with open-mouthed horror as they leaped onto the Landcruiser’s giant diesel engines, scrambling across them before diving towards the helpless crowd of Confederate engineers.

“Ripper!” I shouted. “You and the other ‘hounds, protect the crew!”

The Wolfhounds sprang into action, firing their medium casters and striking two of the Karks broadside, practically blowing them in half. The skirmish was brief and bloody, the Wolfhounds pouncing with their energy claws aglow, tearing two more of the creatures asunder with screeches of torn metal and splashes of gore. The remaining two Karks retreated sinuously to their perch atop the Bannerman’s engines, snarling and chattering before turning tail and disappearing from sight.

“Dammit!” I didn’t like the idea that they could reappear from almost anywhere without any warning at all.

The GARG trooper with the sword mounted the tool chest, thrusting his blade down at me. I rolled out of the way, the point of his weapon ramming into the space I’d occupied moments before. He kept up the tempo, advancing as I desperately retreated, his deadly monomolecular-edged sword slicing through the air. As I rolled to my hooves and backpedaled, the tip of his blade caught me in the face, nicking my cheek. I unloaded my casters on him point-blank, howling with rage. His ballistic shield deflected the green kinetic pulses effortlessly, leaving glowing pockmarks in the aluminum deck plates.

He raised his blade, ready to deal the killing blow, when a whitish blur slammed into his side, tackling him into a steel wall with a tremendous clang. As I staggered backwards, I caught a glimpse of Commodore Cake wrestling with the GARG trooper in the darkness, trying to get her hooves around his helmet so she could end it quick by snapping his cervical spine. He shimmied out of her grip, rolling to his feet and making some distance. The Commodore’s overdriven casters pounded into his shield, but they may as well have been flashlights for all they did to scuff the slab of armor in his hand.

“Sergeant, go!” the Dragoon said. “I’ve got this one.”

I nodded, wiping the blood off my face with my hoof and moving up to where the rest of Revenant were taking cover from the other Gaff’s accurate fire. Ket was taking potshots with his flechette gun while Mardissa reloaded Thumper, glancing out from behind cover to look for an opening.

“Frag out!” Clover threw a grenade, which rolled across the deck towards our adversary’s feet.

The GARG trooper lashed out with an armored boot, kicking the grenade back at us like a hoofball. I gasped in shock as the live frag rolled to a stop next to me. I wrapped it in a tight ball of barrier magic immediately before it exploded. The barrier stopped the fragments, but the concussive blast knocked three of us right on our asses. As I righted myself, the two remaining Karks pounced from one of the massive diesel engines above us, aiming to take me, Clover, and Shooting Star while we were disoriented from the blast. Prima leaped and tackled one of them in mid-air, leaving the other to land right in our midst, swiping at us with its talons and its bladed tail. I did everything in my power to avoid being slashed. One blow left a gouge in my chest protector, but didn’t get down to into my meat. I tackled the creature and wrestled with it, trying my damnedest to pin it down. It had alarming strength in its limbs, aggressively thrashing on the deck and trying to twist and throw me off. Its jaws snapped at me like a wild gator.

“Cook its fucking brain!” I shouted.

Shooting Star hit the thing’s head with her pyrokinesis, its armor starting to glow cherry-red, and then bright orange. As it screeched and struggled, I did everything in my power to avoid burning myself on the hot metal barbecuing the creature’s cranium. A volley of blue plasma bolts slashed past my head. I tucked and rolled behind a fallen tool chest. Prima had just finished stabbing the life out of the last Kark. She moved to cover as well, avoiding the incoming fire from the GARG trooper. A pulse volley grazed Shooting Star’s back, and she screamed and toppled over behind cover. She flailed and ripped the segment of molten armor off her body with her levitation. It took a patch of skin and burnt-smelling fur with it.

“Ghost One,” I said. “Teleport me behind that fucker! Revenant Six, get ready to charge, on my mark!”

“What?” Prima said. “You serious?”

“Now! Do it now!”

A magic field coalesced around me and displaced me over fifteen meters to my front. The sensation of being teleported was unpleasant, to say the least. It felt like someone had stuffed me in a glass jar before uncorking it and depositing me flat on my ass on a cold steel deck. It turned my stomach.

Without hesitating, I surged forward, wrapped my forelegs around the kneeling Gaff’s shoulders, and hit him with a body-seize spell, paralyzing his limbs. “Six, cut him up!”

With a frenzied roar, Hexhead bounded from her hiding place, closing the distance in a matter of seconds, her torch ablaze. She rammed the nozzle of her ad-hoc weapon into the GARG trooper’s chest and began slicing open his power armor while sending gouts of molten metal inside his suit. Sparks flew everywhere, accompanied by the tangy smell of vaporized metal. He tried moving his limbs, but I wouldn’t let him. I could feel him shake in my grip, crying out in pain.

“Should’ve fucking surrendered!” I said.

The Gaff’s agonized screams soon gave way to desperate last words over his radio. “Ma’am, we can’t hold this position! Seal—the Citadel!”

Over my shoulder, I heard the alarms of a blast door closing. I let go of the dying GARG trooper. Prima immediately took my place, teleporting in and nonchalantly stabbing him in his armor’s joints with her levdaggers while he was down. Commodore Cake seemed to have finished up with the other one, right on time. I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d done, but she was holding the other Gaff’s severed head in one of her wingtips, so whatever it was, it was quick and gory. I eyed the fallen GARG trooper’s armor. No yellow stripe. Initiates. Not Officers, yet. They weren’t nearly as heavily augmented or as skilled as the one that had given the Commodore a hard time after the outpost raid, months ago. That was something we could all be thankful for.

“Nice moves, Sergeant,” Prima said.

The door to the cruiser’s central citadel was closing rapidly, its hydraulics whirring and a klaxon sounding. I had no idea what possessed me to do it, but in that moment, I was sure that if I didn’t move immediately, we’d be cut off from ever reaching Wertua before she found some alternate exit. I broke into a gallop, the closing blast door dead in my sights.

“Sergeant!” Prima called after me.

I ignored her, picking up speed. The door, which ordinarily closed vertically, was closing to one side. I kicked off the bulkhead and vaulted through the gap, only to find a sheer drop on the other side. With a fearful wail, I struck out my forelimbs and caught a railing. I was hanging over a black abyss. With a grunt of exertion, I pulled myself up and sat uncomfortably on the rail, my chest rising and falling as I caught my breath. The crew in the ship’s CIC had not fared well. The large, open space, dominated by a central tactical holoprojector, was riddled with mangled corpses. Many of the Landcruiser’s officers had fallen from their seats at their consoles and piled up on what was now the deck, far below me. The splatters of blood, broken limbs, and twisted necks offered a grim warning of what awaited me if I were to lose my footing now.

I steeled myself, shimmying along the railing and towards what looked like the entrance to the officers’ quarters on this deck. It was eerily quiet, except for the far-off alarms and occasional muffled gunfire. A wail of agony pierced the silence. Someone was still alive, a few stories below me, buried under her own fellow officers.

“I’m trapped!” she said, her voice muffled. “Help!”

Not our mark. It wasn’t her voice. Wherever Wertua was, she was well enough to use the cruiser’s intercom, earlier. I couldn’t get down to where the officer in distress was, in any case. She would have to wait for the rescue teams.

“Wertua?” I said. “Come on out. It’s over. You’re done.”

There was no reply. I took a few steps forward, climbing into the lounge. There were some broken bottles of expensive liquor lying around. There was also a windowed cabinet at the bottom of the compartment with a few bottles that were still intact. Sweeping away the broken glass with my hoof, I levitated it open, pulling out a bottle of Ardrian brandy. I bit the stopper, yanked it out, and took several swigs straight from the bottle. My eyes practically rolled back in my head as I swirled the delectable spirit on my tongue. I heaved a long, contented sigh. I’d been feeling parched for the past hour or two, and my shoulder was hurting like a son of a bitch from where I’d been shot. I realized that I’d lost track of my Orbit. It must’ve still been in the engine room or the corridor leading there. I was all alone.

I levitated out my captured 10mm Auto, keying my radio. “Ghost One, status. Why can’t you teleport the rest of us in?”

After a brief pause, the reply came through half-garbled by all the steel between me and her. “Can’t—tele—neuter—blessing. We—cu—through the door, over.”

I quickly gathered the seriousness of the situation. The citadel had neuterized walls. It was impossible to teleport through. It made perfect sense. Some unicorn battlemages had been known to teleport themselves into enemy vehicles and fortifications, emplace some very potent explosive charges, and teleport out. Prima frequently performed a more basic version of this maneuver with her grenades. Realistically, there was little defense against this tactic other than by neutralizing magic. I was cut off from the others, at least until Hexhead had sufficient time to cut through the intervening blast door.

“Dammit!” I was about to throw the bottle of brandy hard enough to smash it open, but I stopped myself. Liquor abuse was against my principles.

I climbed further into the space, making my way inside the officers’ quarters and into a passage leading to what I assumed were Wertua’s retrofitted accommodations. There was a door at the end of the passage. I heard a whimpering voice, low and male, and saw light coming through a crack in the door.

“Hello?” I said.

There was no reply. I inched forward and stuck out a hoof, pushing the door open and climbing into the room. I almost couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing, at first. It was like one of those books full of optical illusions. It took me a moment to gather what had transpired in this compartment, and when I did, my eyes slowly widened in shock, before my face settled into a mask of thermonuclear rage. There was a bed that was now vertical due to the Landcruiser being tipped on its side, and on this bed, a green-coated earth pony stallion was strapped in place, spread-eagle. He was sobbing softly, his lips dry and cracked. The signs were unmistakable. Someone, most likely Wertua herself, had whipped him. If the marks in his coat were any indication, she’d deliberately aimed for his genitals. As best as I could tell, he was about to lose one of his testicles to gangrene. They’d been torturing this poor stallion for days. The sheer depravity of it shocked even me, and I had a strong stomach.

“Hang on! I’m gonna get you out of there!” I made my way over to him and started undoing the straps binding his legs with my levitation.

“Thank you,” he rasped.

When I undid the last of the four straps securing him to the bed, he collapsed onto me, leaning on me with a substantial portion of his weight, sobbing in agony. He nestled his neck into mine, whimpering thank you over and over again. I wrapped my forelegs around him, softly stroking his mane as he shuddered in my embrace.

“We’ll get you medical treatment, buddy,” I said. “You’re going to be okay.”

With a loud crack, a whip lashed around my neck, ripping me away from him. I growled and jerked my whole body to face towards my attacker. Wertua stood in the entryway to the room, eyes ablaze. I bit the slack in the whip and yanked hard, tearing the weapon from her grasp. I briefly considered using it on her, but even I wasn’t that demented. I tossed the whip aside and leveled my pistol at her.

“You piece of shit,” I muttered. “Don’t you get it? You lost this round. Give up.”

There was something wrong with Wertua’s eyes. They were bloodshot and half-crazed. The expression on her face was like some wild animal. She didn’t say anything in her defense. She merely stood there, chuckling like a madwoman.

“Storm,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Storm, storm, storm. I had you. I had you right in my hands.” She was practically frothing at the mouth and shaking with anger as she made a choking motion with her two outstretched paws. “All I had to do was squeeze.”

“Get down on the fucking floor, hands behind your fucking back,” I said.

“I couldn’t believe it was so easy,” she said. “The answers I’d long sought were staring us in the face all along. I couldn’t believe, in one thousand years, that no one had ever thought to try it.”

Wertua pulled a small tortoiseshell snuff box from her pocket. When she flicked it open, I could see a glittery puff of dust in the air. She placed her nostrils in it and sniffed hard. She tilted her head back, sighing in ecstasy, before her face dipped forward and she opened her eyelids, revealing two glowing, white orbs beneath. Wertua snarled psychotically as the unmistakable glow of magic coalesced around her horns. A vibrating aura of silver energy ensconced her body from head to toe as she adopted a fighting stance.

I lowered my pistol, my heart gripped with dread. “What the fuck?”

The cleomanni woman surged forward with unnatural speed and vitality. I mag-dumped into her with the 10mm Auto. It didn’t even slow her down. The rounds bounced off the coils of magic that twisted around her torso and wrapped around her extremities like a snake. She tackled me to the floor, pounding her fist into my muzzle as she straddled my barrel.

“Who knew?!” she shouted. “Who knew it could be so easy? I’m going to inhale your whole fucking pathetic species!”

The injured stallion lying in the middle of the room let out terrified yelps as he struggled to crawl away from the fight. I had to keep Wertua focused on me. If I let her attention wander, she was liable to kill him just to mess with my head. When it looked like she might go for him, I smashed my hoof into her face like a sledgehammer. Between her augs and the magic hardening her against physical force, all it did was piss her off more.

“Time to correct my mistake.” She wrapped her hands around my neck and squeezed with all her might.

I struck her repeatedly, trying to push her off me, but she did not relent. Darkness crept into the corners of my vision. I hit her with a body-seize spell, trying to paralyze her limbs. All this succeeded in doing was shading portions of the magic field wrapping around her in ugly swirls of black and white. I unleashed my casters on her, point-blank. Though the beams did not penetrate, this knocked her back and loosened her grip a little. I tucked my hind legs under her torso and kicked her off of me, sending her reeling. I quickly rolled upright, fixing my casters on her. Wertua was shaking like she was possessed, her head bobbing atop her neck as if tugged by a puppeteer’s strings.

“Kill you,” she muttered. “I’ll kill you. Vermin. I—we—we’ll exterminate all of your wretched kind, flesh-thing. How d—dare you reject my gift? You pathetic little worm.”

It took me a few moments of dread and confusion before I realized I wasn’t being spoken to by the same person who’d been standing there seconds before. It wasn’t Wertua. It was one of them.

“Arka-Povis.” I curled my lips in rage, baring my teeth. “How?”

“This fool thing practically admitted me into its body, such was her hatred for you,” the Archon spoke using Wertua’s mouth. “The essence this creature consumed provided the substrate. Your own tainted emanations were the catalyst I needed to seize control, however brief it may be.”

“Whatever it takes, I will erase you,” I said. “You can count on that.”

Wertua grinned, her face warping oddly and her muscles twitching as the entity struggled to make her unfamiliar muscles move. “That worked out so well for you, last time, didn’t it? Tell me, how did it feel to be in the grip of an infinitely superior being?”

“Enough, motherfucker!” I roared.

I withdrew all of my stored malice from the brass amulet that Cicatrice gave me, but I didn’t transmute it into magic energy. I reabsorbed it in emotional form. Raw, burning hatred struck my skull like a ball-peen hammer. I propelled myself at Wertua like I was shot out of a cannon, ramming into her midsection with all my might. I smashed her into an upturned wooden dresser which became so many splinters.

I pounded my hooves into her ribcage with furious force. The impact transmitted straight through her ad-hoc barrier, and after a few blows, I managed to snap off one of her ribs and drive it into her spleen. Wertua screeched in agony, releasing a pulse of magic from her horns that sent me flying. I tumbled through the air and smashed into the far wall, collapsing to the floor in a heap with a loud clatter of body armor.

Wertua held her head, doubling over in pain. Her own psyche re-entered the driver seat of her body, the pain having driven the Archon’s influence from her mind. “What’s—happening to me? I can’t—can’t control it!”

Swirling motes of black and white energy wrapped around her horns like a crown before discharging from her head with an otherworldly howl. An arcing, snapping beam of unstable magic tore through a bulkhead, sending sparks and gouts of molten metal flying. Wertua tried twisting her head to direct the unpredictable beam at me, but it slashed towards the helpless stallion lying on the floor. He let out a pitiful wail as the crackling bolts of raw magic set the carpeting on fire and singed his tail. I lunged between the two of them and raised a barrier just in time. I gritted my teeth as Wertua’s chaotic, uncoordinated magic crackled against the sphere of orange light that shielded the stallion and me.

“You won’t kill him,” I said. “I won’t allow it!”

While maintaining my barrier, I formed the matrix of Cicatrice’s counterspell in my head.

Karad, Daggas, Vatorou.

Just as the spell activated, I dropped my barrier. Coils of dark magic slammed into my body, only for their power to be reflected back upon Wertua tenfold in the form of intense thaumatic feedback. The effects were immediate and gruesome. Wertua’s horns exploded in a shower of keratin, blood, and bone. Her screams were bloodcurdling, her hands trembling as she reached up and felt the jagged and bloody stumps atop her head. I let loose a directional pulse of levitation, knocking her flat on her ass. She fumbled with bloodstained hands as she tried retrieving the box of quintessence from her pocket, but I ripped it away from her with my levitation magic. I threw it towards the far corner of the room, where it shattered into a dozen pieces, releasing a puff of Quint that drifted lazily through the air before settling on the floor. I set my jaw as I marched up to her, flipping my pistol around in my levitation so I held it by the muzzle.

“Wertua Naimekhe, you are responsible for the torture, murder, and enslavement of thousands of my kind. My squadmate died at the hooves of those abominations of yours. My sister was murdered in cold blood, all because of you.” I raised the pistol threateningly. “On top of all that, you’ve been harvesting and using Quint, you sick bitch.”

“So what?” she cried. “So fucking what?”

I couldn’t contain my rage any longer. I pistol-whipped her across the jaw. When she fixed her own hate-filled eyes on me, I did it again. And again. And again.

“Say it!” I shouted.

“Say—wha—”

I smacked her in the face again. “Say ‘I’m a sick, demented bitch’.”

Blood dribbled from the corners of her mouth. “Go—f—fuck—”

I took the top mount position and I struck her with my hoof. I kept hitting her. And hitting her. And hitting her. In spite of her augs holding her together, her face looked like a squashed tomato, reddened and streaked with blood. I kicked and growled as a pair of arms hooked under my forelegs and pulled me off of her.

“Sergeant, ma’am, it’s over!” Mar said.

My anger did not subside, nor did the tears that rolled down my cheeks. “Fucking bitch! You cunt! You’ll get what’s coming to you, along with anyone who’s complicit in what you’ve done! You all will! I’ll make fucking sure of it!”

Mardissa gingerly put me down, pulling a cloth from her pocket and wiping the blood off my face. The rest of Revenant stood there, gawking at the ruin I’d visited upon Wertua’s face and her horns. I sniffled and wiped away my tears, just barely managing to avoid a complete breakdown. I had dipped into reserves of energy I didn’t even know I had, and now that the primary objective was complete and my adrenaline high had subsided, I felt like I was on the verge of passing out. I took a few deep breaths, my legs shaking as I struggled to remain standing. My guts hurt. For all I knew, I needed to be operated on again. I watched as Ket slapped zip-ties on Wertua’s wrists. Even as injured as she was, she glared daggers at me, her eyes promising nothing more and nothing less than bloody vengeance for this humiliation.

The rest of the Landcruiser was secured without much incident. There were a few small pockets of resistance, but the majority of the crew surrendered when they heard that Wertua had been captured. Once the wreck was secure, firefighters from Tar Pan moved in and tackled the blaze, rescuing any trapped crew they could find. Twelve hours later, they managed to put out the fire completely. The reports of mortar and artillery fire across the plains slowly dwindled to nothing as the remaining Confederate elements were neutralized or retreated far south.

The Battle of Tar Pan was over. We’d won.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Down in the depths of the salt mine, I lay on my back in a bed in the infirmary, wincing and slowly breathing in and out. I was the kind of exhausted that a single night’s sleep didn’t fix. I stared at the ceiling, trying to take my mind off the pain. Argent had needed to put me under the knife again. I had torn my stitches internally and was running a fever. She’d dug a few more bullet fragments out of my shoulder, as well. I was so tired, I had that strange tension and anxiety in the back of my mind; that sense that if I fell asleep, I might never wake up. I coughed a few more times, shivering with chills. On top of everything else, I had a cold.

Eventually, I drifted off into a blissful sleep. As I slept, my dreams were vague and not lucid at all. I was in a desert that stretched off to the horizon on one side and abruptly fell off into the sea on the other. The land was brighter than the sky, white sands stretching as far as the eye could see. There were no people, no ponies, no living creatures anywhere. Only the howl of the wind and the crashing of waves against the shore. Then, I realized with growing unease that I wasn’t alone after all. I could have sworn that there was a hooded figure standing in the distance, staring out over the sea. A lone seagull squawked and landed in the center of my field of view, its head twisting about as it eyed me expectantly. It ruffled its blindingly white feathers, preening itself and staring at me with one eye, and then twisting its head and fixing its gaze on me with the other. By the time I’d returned my attention to the figure in the distance, they were long gone.

I awoke, and as I did, it felt like I was crawling out from underneath a boulder, or swimming towards the surface from the briny depths. My limbs felt like lead. For a few seconds, I had to fight to open my eyes. My eyelids were practically glued together.

I took in my surroundings, recognition escaping me for a few moments. I frowned. I was still in the infirmary. I felt even worse, if that could be considered possible. I reached for the call button, which was little more than a radio at my bedside on some boxes that had been stacked up to form a makeshift nightstand. I held down the transmit button with the tip of my hoof, my horn aching too much to be of much use.

“Argent.” I coughed a few times, my throat dry and scratchy. “Water.”

“I’ll be right there,” came Argent Tincture’s voice from the other end.

I leaned back and rested my head against the pillow with a sigh. I glanced across the infirmary. The stallion I’d rescued was there, too. My hunch had proven correct. He had bandages wrapped around his groin. Orchiectomy, debridement, the whole works. The infirmary stank of pus and decay, earlier. I would never get those wails of pain out of my head.

Most of the casualties from the battle were being treated at Tar Pan’s actual hospital, which was miraculously still intact. The only reason that the stallion and I were being treated here was because we saw something we shouldn’t have, and we had yet to be debriefed on it. A couple minutes later, Argent showed up with a cup of water held aloft in her levitation magic.

I nodded and shakily took it from her with my forehooves, taking a sip. I had a sore throat and it felt like broken glass going down.

“Feeling better, Sergeant?” she said. “Something wrong with your horn?”

“Near-burnout,” I rasped. “Hurts. Got any orange juice?”

Argent shrugged. “Sure, Sergeant. I’ve got a whole crate of whiskey, cocaine, and vibrators, too, if you’re interested. We can get crossfaded together and masturbate until we pass out.”

I sat up halfway. “We do?!”

Argent gave me a lidded stare. “No.”

I collapsed back in my pillow. “Dammit.”

“Cicatrice wants to speak with you as soon as you’re able, Sergeant.”

I turned and looked over Argent’s shoulder. Cicatrice was arguing with Prima and Commodore Cake in the cavern outside. I was only able to catch bits and pieces of it, but the general gist of it was that the cyborg and the Dragoon were trying to make the argument that I was on death’s door and should be allowed more bed rest before giving him my report, and he wasn’t having any of it.

I sighed. “Send him in.”

Argent stepped out briefly. Not half a minute later, Cicatrice marched up to my bedside.

“I have questions and I need answers, Sergeant,” he said.

I nodded. “Shoot.”

Cicatrice stiffened, his expression one of dismay. “You had a GeFRASE event. You dropped completely out of contact and disappeared from our scopes shortly after leaving the mine with Black Devil. Drone assets saw your machine vanish in a flash of light. Your Charger’s cockpit recorder shows nothing but static for a brief period. Then, the recording resumed and you engaged tanks belonging to the Boarhead Company. You were gone, Charger and all. Vanished from this plane of existence. I want to know how, and why. Where you went, and what you saw.”

“I saw a goddess,” I said.

Cicatrice stared at me unblinkingly. “What?”

“Her. The Martyred Maiden. And it wasn’t the first time, either. Damn Starries were right all along. She’s real, Your Excellency.”

Cicatrice was getting more and more perturbed by the minute. “Do you mean to tell me you spoke with Celestia?”

“I made a deal with her.”

“You moron!” Cicatrice roared. “If a Manticore opened his jaws, would you offer your fucking head? Never make deals with spirits, ever! Not once! They are never what they appear to be! The spirits of the dead long for the sweetness of the life they no longer have, and they will lie and cheat and manipulate the living just to taste of it once more. You don’t know the spirits like I do. You have no idea who, or what, is pretending to be Celestia. You have absolutely no idea what their motives are, or which deceased the spirit actually came from, do you?”

His rebuke stung. It really did. I thought Celestia was trying to be helpful. Now, I wasn’t sure what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

“But, Celestia—”

“Is dead!” he finished. “Dead! Do you understand dead? Do I have to show you a decomposing corpse for you to get the hint? No shortage of those around here!”

“N—no, Your Excellency.”

“Spirits are not people. They don’t function the way we do. Their motivations are completely unknowable. What conditions did it impose? Did it call on you to make a sacrifice? What did you agree to? Answer me, fool!”

“I didn’t—she just—she just told me not to kill anyone who wasn’t actively resisting.”

Cicatrice rolled his eyes. “Oh, great. That’s a perfect fit for a Charger pilot. I’m sure you’ll be able to honor that bargain for a considerable length of time, Sergeant. What did she promise you in exchange?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing bad, I mean. She taught me a blinding light spell that I’ve been using like a flashbang. Gave me a refresher on barrier magic. She sealed my curse so I don’t have to perform the ritual we usually do.”

“What was the price for breaking the pact?”

“If I disobeyed, she’d just take her gifts away, not punish me or anything. At least that was how I understood it.”

Cicatrice’s expression softened. “And? Anything else?”

“Noth—oh, wait. Yes, the locus! The one in my Charger. She upgraded it, somehow.”

“Upgraded?”

“It’s a Universal. You can feed any spectrum of magic into it and you won’t get feedback.”

Cicatrice rubbed his chin. “I was wondering how you used barrier magic to shield your Charger in the recordings. That explains that. Storm, that’s—it’s incredible. You have no idea how significant of a breakthrough this is. We must analyze it!”

I nodded. “I know. Take it. I don’t want the damn thing. Too valuable. You lose me and Black Devil, and you lose it all.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it back as soon as we figure out how it ticks. Hold on a minute.” Cicatrice pulled the sheet back and ran his hoof over my abdomen. “There’s something here. I can feel it.”

“My gut?” I raised a brow.

Cicatrice ignored the sarcastic quip and lowered his horn to my belly, hitting me with a spell. It tickled, more than anything else. I would’ve giggled, but that would’ve sent me into coughing fits, and I didn’t want to get the Magister sick. Cicatrice gasped. I looked down at my navel, and I quickly saw what had left him awestruck. There was a symbol of a sun on my abdomen with an eight-pointed corona swirling around it. Cicatrice released his spell and the symbol vanished.

Cicatrice slowly grinned. “It’s real. It’s her. Somehow, it’s her!”

“Is that good or bad?”

“This changes everything. If we had some way to harness this, maybe—no, what am I saying? I was about to propose binding her soul to an Anima core. That’s insane.”

“Cicatrice,” I said. “How do souls think without a brain?”

“They use yours,” he replied without hesitation. “You can’t get around needing a substrate. The brain is like an antenna and receiver set for the soul, and that includes yours. Any time you’re communicating with a spirit, it’s using your brain as the hardware to run itself.”

That matched what Celestia herself had said, about being inside my mind. That still left a few unanswered questions. “Is it superluminal? The communication between a spirit and a brain, I mean. Can it go faster than light?”

“Possibly,” Cicatrice said. “We’re not completely sure about that. The trouble is trying to figure out where a soul actually is. You can’t validate the speed of information transmission if you can’t determine their location. Not with the technology we have, anyhow. You try and get a reading and it seems to be coming from everywhere all at once. You can’t definitively say that a soul is on another planet or right next to you. As best as we can tell, they don’t have an exact location in three-dimensional space. Aetheric Responders work on similar principles. They can exchange data instantly over extremely long distances because they behave like something akin to artificial souls. In summary, from our perspective, souls don’t travel because they’re already everywhere at once.”

“Then why do Greater Archons move slower than light? You said they were incorporeal. Are they physical, or not?”

Cicatrice huffed, as if he were mildly angered that I’d seen through his rhetoric. “Normally, I wouldn’t tell just anyone this, but since you already know too much about these things, and you wouldn’t understand the answer anyway, I’ll humor you. Yes, they are physical, but it involves states of matter that you’d need a physics degree to even begin to understand. We use ‘incorporeal’ as a much-abridged description of the phenomenon. To put it bluntly, if you can see something, it’s physical.”

“Even a drug-induced hallucination?” I said.

“Yes, even a hallucination. What do you think your neurons are doing when you’re high? Having a tea party? No. They’re moving ions in and out. Everything that living beings experience is physical, one way or another.”

“Can souls experience anything if they’re not associated with any physical matter at all?”

“That’s a very good question,” Cicatrice said. “The answer is indeterminate. It was an area of ongoing study in the Conclave.”

“Why do ponies lose their memories when you make their souls into an Anima?”

Cicatrice’s expression was grave; he looked as if hesitant to give me the answer. “We wipe them.”

“What?” I glared at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Cicatrice took a deep breath. “We have to. These are ponies who died, Storm. The soul doesn’t remain fully intact when unbound from a brain. Not without an extraordinarily strong will. Any memories they do have are partial. Fragmented. Just echoes of the living thing they once were. Not to mention, most of their memories involve inhabiting an organic body. If you bring them back without wiping their memories, they go crazy. Instantly. Poof. It’s not pretty. The first question they always ask is why they can’t breathe and why it feels like they’re drowning, and it immediately gets worse from there. Much worse. We don’t do that anymore. Not even experimentally.” Cicatrice knit his brow in contrition. “It’s too cruel even for me.”

“Oh, I see,” I muttered. “That’s still messed up.”

“The Anima is one of our most powerful tools, far more advanced than any mere AI. They are fully self-aware people. The sync system in a Charger does not merely link your neurons with the Anima’s computational substrate through your neural lace. To some extent, it interfaces your soul with that of the Anima. That’s part of how they can read your intentions so quickly. You become two souls sharing a single mechanical body. We were planning on taking it much further than that, but the war put an end to those ambitions. Oh, that reminds me. There are a few things that still don’t add up that I need clarification on. What in the blazes happened with Wertua?”

I took a deep breath and let out a stressed sigh. “Cicatrice, the Confederacy are harvesting quintessence. There were ponies aboard the Landcruiser. In body bags. Their heads had been drilled. Tiamat did the scans herself. Go ask her for the data on that.”

Cicatrice frowned. “What the hell happened in there?”

“Wertua used Quint,” I said. “She insufflated quintessence and it gave her the ability to do magic. Very uncoordinated magic, but magic nonetheless. An Archon briefly possessed her, though I have no idea how. Her horns blew up when I hit her with a counterspell.” I pointed to the green stallion in the bed across from me. “He saw everything.”

“Fucking hell.” Cicatrice started pacing, rubbing his chin with his hoof. “This is bad.”

“No shit,” I said. “The fuckers can snort our brain powder and shoot death rays from their heads. That’s one more reason for them to treat us like a commodity, and it’s invariably fatal for the ponies involved.”

Cicatrice nodded. “Yes, yes. I can see the whole evolution there. Not good. It’s even worse if they figure out how to direct and control magic, or refine the process somehow. I get the feeling that simply using quintessence as a drug is not the most efficient way to coax magic out of it. Imagine if they had bionic implants that ran on Quint.”

I grimaced. “I’d rather fucking not.”

“Was there anything else, Sergeant?”

“How could an Archon speak through her without her being infected?” I said. “That was some freaky shit. It was like she was possessed.”

Cicatrice nodded. “A known side effect of excessive quintessence use. The practice is such an abomination, it attracts and affixes evil spirits to one’s own soul. In time, the alterations to one’s psyche may become permanent, possession or not. You’ve already met someone with a similar affliction.”

I looked Cicatrice in the eye. “The mare with the white mane.”

“Yes, her. She went missing in the past day or so. Damn incompetent militia couldn’t keep watch over our prisoners and defend the base at the same time. Such a missed opportunity. We were planning on analyzing her condition further. If you see her out there, you’re to detain her and bring her back.” Cicatrice frowned and rubbed his head like he had a migraine coming on. “It would be a disaster if Quint usage became widespread in the Confederacy. The Archons would use it as an opportunity to greatly expand their influence.”

Feeling my anxiety spike, I hastily changed the subject. “The crew from the Landcruiser. I told them they’d be well-treated. Most of them had no idea what was going on right under their noses.”

“Yes, Sergeant. We know. They are proving very cooperative, unlike Ordinator Naimekhe and Colonel Ravetaff. We may even be able to convince some of them to defect, provided we can check their background and confirm that there aren’t any troublemakers in their midst. Accepting a Mil-Int plant into our ranks would be a fucking disaster.”

I squinted and rubbed my brow. “Where’s Hekkasten Arboka?”

“Being questioned, with the others.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is she one of the good ones?”

“Nothing unusual came up when we checked her background. To the best of our knowledge, she’s not a spy, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Any way you could send her in? I wanted to see her. And Bell, too. Please.”

“Agent Bellwether was injured in the fighting.”

That got my attention. I sat bolt upright, eyes wide. “What? What the fuck? How badly?”

“Nothing serious. A couple gunshot wounds.”

“Nothing serious, my ass!”

“He’s fine, Sergeant. I checked on him personally. He’s at the hospital in town. They gave him a small blood transfusion and last I saw, he was awake and alert. No organ damage, just extremities. Like your shoulder, there, see? Nothing to worry about.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and settled back into my pillow. “Dammit, Bell.”

“I’ll send in Engineman Arboka. You get some rest, Sergeant.” Cicatrice smiled. “You’ve more than earned it.”

“Thank you, Your Excellency.” I frowned. “Oh, there was one other thing.”

“Yes, Sergeant?”

I looked him right in the eye, since I knew I’d have to be assertive for this one. “We need better casters than PF-27s. I’m tired of Revenant putting on a fucking disco laser light show and our enemies having no steaming guts to show for it. If you could get us a dozen Ultima Arcanum Mark-fourteens, I promise we’d put them to good use.”

Cicatrice shook his head. “No can do, Sergeant. Trust me, every squad in the ELF wants the same thing. We don’t have the casters to spare. Not at the moment. Dipping into the Stormtroopers’ stash would make me very, very unpopular, I assure you. The Rex is a great caster, sure. Everypony wants one, yes, without a doubt. However, most don’t consider the disadvantages. It’s heavy. A great deal heavier than a Phoenix Fire. It raises your center of gravity and affects your stamina, and we have years upon years of research papers and field-testing reports to prove it.”

“I know. But the things we’re fighting? Regular small-bore casters just bounce. They don’t do anything. It’s very unnerving. Hell, Haybale would probably still be alive if—if he—”

I averted my eyes from the Magister in shame. I felt personally responsible for Haybale’s death. There were so many ways the raid on the fallen Landcruiser could have gone better. We could’ve waited for reinforcements, but we risked having Wertua find some way to escape. I shook my head. I was being too hard on myself. Technically, what we did was insane. We charged headlong into a burning wreck with an unknown number of hostiles inside. We were lucky we sustained as few casualties as we did.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Sergeant,” Cicatrice said. “Persuade Commodore Cake and the Stormtroopers to train you and the rest of Revenant. Have your unit pass the qualification requirements for the upgraded armaments. Then, we’ll issue you the weapons you desire.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Good.”

Cicatrice stepped out of the infirmary. The coughing fit I’d been suppressing took hold of me right at that moment. I winced, sniffling a great big glob of snot. A little while later, the redheaded engineer walked in.

“Damn, you look like shit, orange,” she said.

I seamlessly switched to speaking Ardun. “Feel like shit.”

“You going to be all right?”

I sniffled hard. “I’ll live. Had worse, trust me.”

Hekkasten smirked. “I find that very hard to believe.” Her expression turned grim and she looked around, as if checking to make sure we were relatively alone; we were, aside from the stallion in the bed across from me. Aside from the occasional groaning from him, he seemed to be fast asleep. “Sergeant, I don’t have the words to express what I’m feeling right now.”

“I take it you spoke with the others?”

“Yes. Dear gods. If I’d known it was like this, I don’t know what I’d have done. Certainly not enlist in the Navy.” She rubbed her temples with her hands. “I feel sick.”

“Common reaction. You’ll get over it. The important thing is deciding what you want to do now that you know. Ponies are people. We have always been people. We’re not biological drones or anything like that. We’re being systematically enslaved, tortured, and consumed by your government. What are you going to do with that information?”

Hekkasten clenched her fists. “I’m going to fight this.” She took a deep breath through her nostrils, waggling her index finger. “Some way, somehow, I’m going to—”

“What? You’re going to what? Keep us alive all by yourself?” I looked her in the eye. “Mardissa thought the same exact thing. You can’t. Not alone. Not by yourself. It’s not possible. Sooner or later, you’ll have to turn your weapon on your own countrymen, and if you don’t have the stomach for that, then you won’t last long.”

“What—what should I do?”

“What you do best,” I said. “We need mechanics to fix things just as much as soldiers to break them. Tell me, have you ever worked on an Assault Walker?”

Hekkasten nodded. “Ifrits? Plenty of times. It’s what I did before transferring to the Crimson Warden.”

“The what?”

“The Bannerman you flipped. That’s its name.”

“Oh, right.” I blushed a little.

“You didn’t see the name? It’s painted right on the side in big block letters.”

“I can speak more than a bit of Ardun, but I can’t read it very well.”

“You should work on that,” the engineer said.

“I know, I know. I’ve been busy with other shit. Maybe I’ll ask Mar to help me out.”

“How did that happen, anyway?” Hekkasten cocked her head quizzically.

“What? How did what happen?”

“You and Mardissa Granthis, of all people.”

“Nude boxing.” I nodded sagely.

Hekkasten blinked a few times, the look of confusion on her face slowly melting into a mirthful grin. “Okay, you got me. No, but seriously. How?”

“Did I fucking stutter, Engineman Arboka?”

Now she was really confused, silently working her jaw open and shut as she deliberated on what to say. “I suppose not.”

“So, you’ve worked on Ifrits.” I smiled. “You ever work on a Charger before?”

Hekkasten smiled back.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Before long, I had a stack of binders piled up around my hospital bed that the Charger techs had brought me. I was showing Hekkasten Arboka the ropes. Nothing classified, and nothing beyond her area of expertise. Just the basics.

“So, no hydraulic lift bearings?” Hekkasten said.

I shook my head. “What? No, they’re magic. The joints generate powerful repulsive levitation fields that provide an essentially frictionless and wear-free bearing surface. They’re only lightly greased to keep them from rubbing when they overload the fields.”

“How do the thrusters work?”

“Magic. The polywell reactor puts out electricity, electro-magic transducers convert from electric to thaumatic, and diagrammatic engines suck in air, compress it, and heat it in stages, and then it expands and provides propulsive force when leaving the exhaust. It’s just like a turbine except there are no moving parts. The efficiency does go up if the inlet is force-fed air, like a ramjet.”

Hekkasten looked surprised. “No fuel?”

“Nope. No fuel. Just air. There’s no actual combustion going on so there’s no need for fuel stoichiometry or any shit like that. It’s all about the mass flow rate. Low-velocity air in, higher velocity air out.”

“If there’s no combustion, then what’s with the light show? They look like a damn rocket engine.”

I shrugged. “Ionization from the inner workings of the pyrojet. That’s why the thruster plume is bluish-purple.”

Hekkasten combed over the files for a few minutes before she frowned, clearly having found some discrepancy. “Where’s the gyro?”

“What?” I said.

“The gyro, to keep it upright.”

I shook my head. “There isn’t any. At least not in Coursers and Rounceys. Maybe in a couple older Destrier models. Our fire control systems have small gyros to take readings and keep the guns steady, but there’s no large-scale gyro for stability or anything like that. Why do you think Chargers move the way they do? If we had a gyro, we wouldn’t be able to change our attitude so quickly. It’s all dynamic gait and posture adjustment. It’s all in the muscles and the thrusters. If we start tipping and the muscles can’t compensate, the thrusters right us automatically.”

Hekkasten stared down at the manuals, mouth agape, like she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. It flew in the face of everything she knew as an Assault Walker mechanic.

It wasn’t long before she had another question. “What’s a diagrammatic engine?”

“Artificial unicorn. Enchanted holocrystal with the matrix of a single spell permanently burned into it. Thaumatic energy goes in, specific spell comes out. They’re used in everything. In duostrand muscles. In beamcasters. Everything. A beamcaster is actually one of the most straightforward applications, since all it does is take electricity and turn it into a very tightly focused form of the spell known as Arcane Blast. Any unicorn with even the slightest magical training can do the same spell, it just won’t be focused enough to pierce body armor.”

I demonstrated by lowering my head and hitting my water cup with Arcane Blast. A burst of orange magical energy smacked into the plastic cup and left a smoking dent in it, sending it flying several feet away.

I held my head. “Oof, still not quite back to normal. That’s just a fraction of what I can normally do.”

Hekkasten was taken aback by the demonstration. “You can shoot energy beams from your friggin’ head? What do you need the beamcasters for, then?”

“Because not all of us are unicorns, and for combat, casters are better in every way. I don’t usually use Arcane Blast in battle because it’s a waste of energy better spent on other things, and I’m not that good at it to begin with.”

“Not good? I wouldn’t want to get hit with that!”

“Kastie, look,” I said. “I’m a Bronze-rank Arcanist. If I were an actual Unicorn Battlemage—and trust me, you can immediately tell who they are by the gold horseshoes, fancy caparisons, peaked hats, and polished horns and shit—that cup would no longer exist, nor a good chunk of the wall behind it. If Twilight Sparkle let loose with a serious Arcane Blast in here, there would no longer be a mine. All this shit would collapse on our heads. All of it. Every tunnel for a hundred meters in all directions would be gone.”

Hekkasten looked around in astonishment. “No way.”

“Yes, way. Welcome to magic.”

I spent the next three hours answering Engineman Arboka’s various questions about Chargers and their operation. She listened with rapt attention, and it was clear that the subject was an area of intense interest for her. I had a feeling that she’d be a useful addition to the small army of mechanics who worked on Black Devil, as long as I could trust her.

A few hours later, a couple of militia stallions came by to question the pony I’d rescued from Wertua’s clutches. They asked him what had led to him being tortured by Wertua. He didn’t know. He’d been her personal servant and did everything she requested of him. A month ago, she’d seemed relatively normal, but in recent weeks, she’d become more and more deranged, until she snapped completely. Her use of quintessence coupled with her knowledge of my recent victories had precipitated a rapid decline in her mental health, turning her sadistic and nasty, even more so than usual.

I heard somepony weeping outside the infirmary. I craned my neck up to look, and I saw Briarwood and Cookie Crumble sitting on a bench, the latter crying into the former’s lap while my cousin consoled him, rubbing his head. I knew that wail. Cookie had lost someone dear to him. I took a deep, shaking breath, and I silently hoped I had nothing to do with it.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A month had passed since the Battle of Tar Pan. There were excavators, bulldozers, and crane trucks roaming the city, clearing away wreckage and looking for bodies. Construction materials were trucked in daily; flatbeds stacked with bricks and cement trucks with spinning mixers. Captain Garrida was still recovering from her injury. Fortunately, it seemed like she’d pull through, although she was in no shape to lead from the front. After an especially tense meeting, the Oligarchs had come to an agreement with us. They were frightened by the boldness of the Confederacy’s attack and grateful for how we repelled it. Their crews were already hard at work, rebuilding the damaged areas of the city. The Vanhoover cell had established a fabrication lab outside the salt mine where Crookneck, still in disguise, was assembling a team to crank out the second generation of his Palfreys.

One of the larger work details, easily numbering in the hundreds, was combing over the wreck of the Crimson Warden like a swarm of ants. Rumor had it that they were planning on righting the Landcruiser, though I didn’t see how it was possible. Another team was working on a thick concrete wall that would encircle our new base, with gun and missile emplacements made from gear salvaged from Confederate vehicles that were otherwise too damaged to repair and put into service.

The mine shaft was being lined with concrete to turn it into an actual bunker. The fallen hunks of salt from the battle were cleared away and the collapsed tunnels dug out and reopened. Large steel-reinforced concrete hangars and Charger stables were being erected on the western plateau, with lifts to take damaged Chargers down into the mine for more extensive repairs. Significant work was being done with earthmovers to level the terrain, fill in craters from the shelling, and build an airstrip. Over the past few days, I’d seen four Rocs flying personnel and materiel in and out. A small army of ponies in lab coats were escorting various artifacts hidden under tarps.

I was rebuilding myself, too. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead as I did my twentieth pull-up. “Imrah koh, imrah kolah, imrah kovan, imrah koseh, imrah—” I struggled to pull off the last one, my legs shaking with sheer exertion. “Vakoh!”

I dropped from the bar and onto the floor, panting heavily. I looked down at myself, raising a foreleg and admiring my progress. Layer Cake’s routine actually worked. My chest, abdomen, and legs were getting noticeably cut. Cut wasn’t enough, though. I wanted to get ripped.

After resting for a few minutes and regaining my strength, I positioned myself underneath the weight rack, hunkering down and shouldering the bar. I counted the hundred-kilo plates. Nine to a side, eighteen in all. Two metric tons, including the two hundred kilo bar, which most cleomanni would struggle to lift by itself with no plates at all. I steeled myself, and I began to push. I gritted my teeth. I could feel the bar sag over my back, the sheer mass attached to its ends making it arch noticeably. My legs practically vibrated as they struggled to lift the tremendous mass. Eventually, the ends cleared the rack. I’d done it. Two tons for one rep. I slowly let the bar back down, my muscles burning. When it set down, I let go of it and moved out from under the rack.

Commodore Cake was standing in the corner, reared up against the wall, her forelegs crossed, watching my every move. “Very good. If I saw a performance like that from a pegasus, I’d recommend she submit her genetic stock to our ovum banks.”

“Really?” I said.

“Indeed. Unicorns are capable of growing a bit stronger than the average pegasus, but you fall short of an earth pony. Most unicorns don’t bother lifting with their muscles when they can lift with their minds. A tremendous waste.”

I breathed a sigh. “You’re not still mad at me over Dartwing and Wraithwood, are you?”

Layer Cake winced. “I could stay angry with you and accomplish nothing, watch you go off to your death and probably drag good ponies down with you. Or, I could train you to be less of a fuckwit. Between those two options, which one makes more logical sense?”

I craned my neck down and looked between my forelegs. “Pretty sure my brain isn’t in my legs.”

“Nonsense. You do your best thinking when your body’s in tune. Nothing makes you dumber faster than a sedentary lifestyle.” Commodore Cake flicked her mane. “So, rumor has it that you’ve been looking to upgrade your kit. Rexes for Revenant, or so I hear.”

“That’s correct.”

“If you can get your squad as fit as you are right now, I’ll put you through the training and certification process.”

I smiled and nodded. “Yes, ma’am!”

“Good. Now, keep going.”

I set some weights on my back and started doing push-ups, my face dripping sweat on the floor.

// … // … // … // … // … //

They let Bellwether out of the hospital a couple days later. He was in worse shape than Cicatrice had told me. When I saw him ambling towards the main road to the base after being let out by a Centaur shuttling personnel back and forth, his right foreleg was in a cast. I couldn’t help myself. I ran—not walked, ran—up to him at damn near a full gallop and scooped him up in my forelegs like a foal. I swung him in a circle, hugging him tight and cooing at him.

“Put me down!” he said. “My leg!”

I set him down and nuzzled his cheek. “Dammit, Bell! You had me worried sick! You’re doing better, now, right?”

He ignored the question and looked me up and down, his eyes widening. I was wearing a stretchy nylon training bodysuit that the Commodore had given me, and it was obvious to even the most casual observer that I was getting very buff.

Bell let out a low whistle. “Damn. You’re hard as a rock!”

I grinned, flexing my foreleg. “I thought you liked rocks, Gneiss.”

Bell snorted derisively. “You kidding? I hated the blasting business.”

“Aw, that’s too bad.” I smacked my flank with a hoof, grinning perversely. “I was about to suggest you blast this rock-hard ass of mine.”

Bell winced. “Yeah, no.”

My worry spiked a bit when I saw the uncomfortable look he gave me. “Is something the matter between us?”

“No, nothing,” he said. “Just not in the mood. Leg still hurts. They got in a lucky hit. Broke the bone.”

I pulled him into a hug. “We did it. We fucking made it.”

“That we did, Storm,” Bell said. “That we fucking did. The Confederacy have pulled back for now. You, Sierra, and Night Terror really spooked ‘em. I think they expected to roll right over us without any resistance at all. Now, they can’t even orbital-strike us. Not when we have hundreds of ‘em held hostage. And the cherry on top? Word’s getting around. About what the Confederacy have actually been doing. A lot of the prisoners have defected to us. In other words, our hostages now work for us.”

I let go of him and nodded. “Last I heard, they redeployed near the ruins of Manehattan, clear across the fucking country. Somebody’s scared.”

Bell and I walked together towards the mouth of a cavernous hangar that had gone up in record time. It was longer than a hoofball field, enough to completely enclose a truly giant craft. The concrete had just about set up and they’d already rolled in a ton of heavy equipment I barely recognized.

“We’re still in a very tenuous position,” Bellwether said. “If the Confederacy come in greater numbers and with better air support, we’re screwed. If the Vargr show up, we can kiss our asses goodbye.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. My legs were shaking.

Bellwether turned around. “Storm? Oh no.”

I collapsed to my haunches, shivering. My heart was pounding in my chest. An irrepressible dread was asserting itself over my psyche. My vision narrowed. My ears were ringing. A few seconds longer, and I’d take off at a dead sprint while screaming at the top of my lungs and utterly embarrassing myself.

Bell wrapped his forelegs around me. “I’ve got you.” He rubbed my head gently with his hoof. “You’re okay.”

I carefully controlled my breathing as I practically wilted into his embrace, whimpering softly with shame. Even with as strong as I was, there were some wounds that were too deep to heal by willpower alone. I had scars that would only fade with time, if ever.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” Bellwether said. “What did it? What sets it off?”

“Vargr,” I said. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t ready for it.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

I shook my head, slowly rising to my hooves. “Not right now. Later.”

I gazed off into the distance, my jaw slowly dropping as I watched the Bannerman roll up onto the plateau, its clanking tracks leaving deep impressions in the dirt as it approached, seemingly getting larger every minute.

“Are we in the way?” I said. “Should we move?”

Bell and I gave each other a look before we backed away and out of the metal behemoth’s path. The ground quaked beneath our hooves. A couple minutes later, the giant Landcruiser rolled past us and into the hangar that had been prepared for it, its stacks belching black smoke. I could hear its screaming turbochargers winding down, silence reasserting itself. We cautiously made our way over to the hangar. Pony and cleomanni engineers filed out of the Bannerman’s side exit ramps, between its track pods. Work crews were already running out hoses and cabling to the enormous machine. The cables were undoubtedly intended to run the Landcruiser’s lighting and other electrical equipment off the base’s own power while its engines and generators were shut down.

I stopped a passing earth pony mechanic. “What are the hoses for?”

The pink-coated and very grungy-looking mare in overalls grinned back at me with rows of bad teeth. “Gotta pump out all the fuel before we start cuttin’!”

I wished I’d brought popcorn, or at the very least a few beers. The spectacle that ensued was borderline absurd. A few large tank trucks pulled up, and they began pumping the Landcruiser’s fuel into them, but someone screwed up with securing the hose fitting on one of the trucks and a hose blew off and sprayed diesel everywhere. They stopped pumping almost immediately, but not before one mare was half-covered in diesel. She was sitting on her haunches and letting out a keening wail, rubbing her burning eyes madly. Another mare came unstuck on the work crews, letting them have it with a profane tirade. She ushered the unfortunate diesel-covered mare off the scene, admonishing her to rinse her eyes and her coat thoroughly and go see the doctor in case symptoms of poisoning developed.

“Cancer,” Bellwether muttered.

I shot him a glare. “Not if she cleans off thoroughly.”

After an hour or two, a small peanut gallery formed around where Bellwether and I were sitting. Somepony brought a cooler full of beer, as if they’d read my mind. I cracked open a cold one and tossed it back. The cleomanni spectators had an electric ration heater and MREs that looked like mashed potatoes mixed with some kind of nasty processed sausage. They kept daring me to eat one, proffering it eagerly. After I initially refused, they broke into a chant. Eat it, eat it, eat it!

I swallowed hard as I stared down at the packet of meat-potato mush in my hooves. I was hungry, but I wasn’t sure if I was that hungry. Eventually, it became a matter of pride. Then, I had no choice. The cleomanni cheered as I raised the MRE packet to my muzzle and took a bite. Some of them couldn’t believe I was actually eating it. I winced at the flavor. My chewing slowed with each passing second. The mashed potatoes were watery and sludgy and tasted like smushed, soggy potato chips. The meat was greasy and salty.

I think I actually teared up, it was so awful. I couldn’t believe I was eating the flesh of some creature that had once been alive. It wasn’t so much the taboo that got me, but the sheer wrongness and otherworldliness of it. The thought of what was going down my gullet each time I swallowed made me cringe. I was taken by surprise as one cleomanni rolled me onto my back and gave me belly-rubs. He said it was for good luck, whatever the hell that meant. Some of them had taken to calling me Storm the Ironbelly. Apparently, they found their rations disgusting, too.

Somepony had the sense to bring fresh produce from Tar Pan and we all had buttered corncobs. Our cleomanni guests were enthralled, and it was generally agreed that our food was better than theirs. We watched, transfixed, as pegasus work crews began cutting into the Landcruiser’s hull. Teams of unicorns were levitating out various pieces of fire-damaged equipment. They pulled out the entire engine-generator sets through a slot in the hull specifically cut in their shape.

As some of the work crews went to take breaks, I left Bell and the others behind and walked up to one of the project leaders, a unicorn mare in overalls with a lime green coat.

She did a double take when she saw me. “Shit, I thought you were an earth pony for a minute, there!”

I held out a hoof. “Sergeant Desert Storm.”

She gave me a wary look. “Oh, the Charger pilot.” The mechanic shook my hoof. “Specialist Pina Colada. Glad to have you with us, ma’am.”

I gazed up at the hulk of the Landcruiser, watching as engineers carved it up like a school of piranhas. “Okay, we’ve been watching this for the past couple hours, but what the fuck are you guys actually doing?”

“What does it look like? We’re stripping this Landcruiser down. The generator sets are going in the base, as emergency generators.”

“Is that all?”

“Hardly. The cruiser is getting an extreme makeover. Wanna help?”

“Yeah.” Kind of befuddled, I uncrossed my forelegs and moved to assist them. “Well, what are we doing?”

“Just follow the foremare’s instructions.”

The next few hours made the full use of my strength, physical and magical. I worked up one hell of a sweat, moving materials around as ponies in overalls barked instructions at us. I levitated out burned-up junction boxes, empty fire extinguishers, and heaps of scrap metal. Some compartments in the cruiser stank of advanced decomposition.

“What the fuck is that smell?” one stallion shouted.

“There are still bodies on this thing that are unaccounted for,” the foremare said. “We think a few of the crew crawled into ductwork or other recesses to try and escape the flames, and then asphyxiated.”

I cringed visibly. “Oh, fuck me sideways.”

That was one hell of a way to go. Not to mention, we still had to go after the rotting corpses. It wasn’t a duty that I particularly relished, but sooner or later, I found myself doing it. They gave me my own overalls, a hard hat, and a headlamp, and I crawled into a duct that reeked of death.

Several meters in, a turn at the bend, and there he was. Poor cleomanni bastard. He was bloated and blue and his lips were peeled back to reveal his teeth. I wrapped what was left of him in a levitation field and dragged him out, and he left a slug trail of who-the-fuck-knows-what the entire way. We had a cart with five bodies already stacked on it, and six was very nearly one too many.

“Don’t we have a cleanup crew for this shit?” I muttered.

“Yeah,” one mare said. “It’s us. We’re it, ma’am. Not enough bodies to go around. Moving ones, I mean. Plenty of the other kind.”

“So, what the fuck are we doing and what’s the goal here?” I said. “Are we scrapping this thing?”

The brown-coated mare frowned. “Dunno. I don’t think so. We don’t have all the project details yet. It’s kinda hush-hush so far.”

After shaking my head at the noncommittal answer, I made my way out of the partly dismantled cruiser for a drink of water from one of the coolers on the hangar floor. I spied something in the far corner. There were a couple dozen large pieces of machinery covered in tarps, along with what looked like a set of oversized pyrojets. I made my way over to them, pulling back one of the tarps with my levitation magic.

The thing beneath was at least four meters tall, comprised of hoses and cabling and tubular framework and what looked like an immensely powerful EMT reservoir and diagrammatic engine. The crystal was the part that made my jaw drop. It was hemispherical, slightly oblate and larger than I was, polished to an opalescent sheen. The whole assembly was on a rolling cart to keep it from touching the floor and possibly damaging it.

“What the hell is this?” I wondered aloud.

“The future,” Cicatrice said.

I turned towards the Magister, watching as he levitated the tarp back in place. “What is it really, though?”

“Something that the recovered Vargr dropship wreckage and your little spell locus from Celestia finally made possible, after years of false starts,” Cicatrice said. “A real eureka moment. We finally completed the enchantment. The housings and machinery date to an old and unfinished Conclave project. The crystals were just burned in last week. The raw materials were hard to obtain.”

“What does it do?”

He smiled. “You’ll see. It’s a little surprise for our human friends.”

It took conscious effort to steady my breathing. “We barely fended off a half-hearted Confederate assault and now, we’re going to war with the Vargr, too?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“What about secrecy? Are you saying that we’re about to brief everyone on SILVER SCALPEL and what they really are?”

“We no longer have a choice.” Cicatrice shook his head, fixing his gaze upon me intently. “Several weeks ago, they took Baltimare. They are operating out in the open, with impunity. It’s not the Linvargr, either. It’s the Hastavargr.”

“What does that mean in practical terms?” I said.

“The ones you contended with near Pur Sang were mere researchers and scouts. This is their military arm we’re talking about. Ponies are asking uncomfortable questions for which we have no satisfactory answers.”

I bit my lip. “I’ve seen the footage. Briarwood gave me a copy. They had something that—I don’t know. It melted ponies.”

Cicatrice nodded. “They deployed offensive nanomachines. Dissolvers. They’re not quite like what Liquefier Karks use. They’re highly contagious and genetically targeted.”

“How contagious?”

Cicatrice’s expression was grave. “It spreads like a virus, in a cough, sneeze, or the slightest physical contact with one of the infected. If even a few of the things get in or on you, you’re as good as dead. It could be days or even weeks before the symptoms of nanosis show. By the time it’s noticeable, it progresses to death in under an hour. The nanites quickly and selectively consume muscles, ligaments, cartilage, skin, and adipose tissue while leaving the internal organs mostly intact. The infected literally come apart at the joints.”

I winced. “Is there an antidote? Some kind of counter-nanotech we can use?”

Cicatrice shook his head. “No. It’s invariably fatal and there is no cure. You may have seen bits and pieces and can probably surmise what’s going on, but I doubt that you realize how dire the situation is. We have ceased infantry operations in Baltimare as of three weeks ago and established a cordon on the outskirts of the city. If anyone attempts to leave, we shoot them on sight. This is not a game. Millions of lives are at stake. If one infected pony makes it to another settlement, thousands will die gruesomely, and it could spread much further from there. The Vargr are consolidating their position and have constructed a command post near the city center, but they haven’t gone on the offensive yet. It’s only a matter of time before they do.”

I shuddered, averting my gaze from the Magister and trying to take my mind off of what he’d just said. I looked up at the Landcruiser, watching as the techs meticulously dismantled every part of the thing that they could get their hooves on. Work scaffolds had already been erected and overhead gantries were moving materials back and forth from the cruiser’s deck. It suddenly clicked what we were doing.

“You’re gonna make it fly,” I said.

“Only about ten to twenty meters off the ground, maximum,” Cicatrice said. “It can’t go very high because it needs a surface to repel from, but it’s orders of magnitude more power-efficient than an electrokinetic repulsor.”

“What the hell are we powering it with?”

“We have a captured Confederate starship fusion reactor that puts out enough juice to run a couple million houses. Fitting the cooling equipment and all the other systems in will be a challenge, but with the ponies we have, I’m confident we can do it in a reasonable time frame.”

“You crazy sons of bitches.” I slowly grinned. “What the hell would you even call such a thing?”

“What we’d always planned on calling them.” Cicatrice nodded. “They’re craft that go aloft on levitation fields, so they ought to be called levitors.”

I scanned the hulk of the Crimson Warden fore and aft. I had this sinking feeling in my gut that we’d just entered a completely new era of ground warfare, free of limitations like basic fucking sanity. Hover-tanks were an entirely different regime from legs, wheels, or tracks. Even though I’d never operated one myself, since we didn’t have any back when I’d served, I envisaged numerous scenarios involving their use. Their speed was limited only by the unevenness of the terrain and by atmospheric drag, and by how much space their pilots or helmsponies afforded themselves to apply reverse thrust and stop. One could cruise right over pressure-activated mines without setting them off. Hovering enabled movement in any direction, rotating and translating at one’s leisure. The Vargr used hovering tanks to the exclusion of any other kind of locomotion technology. I’d seen the footage from Baltimare; many of these tanks did not have turreted main guns, but casemate guns instead. The whole vehicle was, in a sense, a turret, rotating to face targets and present the thickest portion of its armor to them at all times.

It was hard to imagine something the size of a Landcruiser turning quickly enough for all of its weapons to be forward-fixed. In the days that followed, I would be proven correct in my assumptions. I happened to catch sight of a tablet with the Levitor’s blueprints and paged through them. They lined up perfectly with the various markings the engineers were making on the hull where cuts and welds were indicated. I recognized Crookneck Squash’s writing style in the many annotations in the design documents. The thing they intended to build using the Landcruiser as a framework was stunning. Magnificent, even. It wasn’t as simple as making the thing fly. The entire cruiser was being fundamentally resculpted, with stress fractures from the rollover repaired and reinforcement added in key areas so it wouldn’t collapse under its own weight, a completely redesigned and vastly more aerodynamic bow, and a weapon complement that sent chills down my spine. They were going to arm it to the teeth with all manner of missile launchers and turrets.

The cruiser was in bad shape after tangling with us. There were cracked weld seams all throughout the thing. Flipping the cruiser over on its side had really done a number on its structural integrity. Me and the other hastily conscripted workers were given a crash course in hull inspection and confined space entry, some very bright diode headlamps, and rubber boots. Then, we were instructed to crawl through unbolted hatches into pitch-black voids in the hull barely large enough for a pony to fit in. In every spot where we found a crack, we had to report it. The way we did that was by circling each of the damaged areas with a fluorescent yellow paint pen and then marking them off on a sheet on a clipboard with a pencil. The work took hours and hours, and as we went, each compartment we’d just departed was inspected by another team with a gas analyzer and given a gas-free certification. Teams of engineers moved in afterward, cutting holes and emplacing the hydraulic rams that would be used to take the twist out of the hull before welders moved in behind them and patched everything up. The process was efficient and assembly-line-like.

While we were on break, I visited the compartment where a few of the militia ponies had built a small shrine near where Haybale had fallen. His portrait was there, along with other portraits and small, low-power holo-projectors displaying the faces of numerous other ponies who’d died in the defense of Tar Pan. Flowers, lit candles, and personal effects had been left there to honor the dead. One officer had insisted that the candles be put out due to the risk of fire on deck, but it was agreed that the shrine would remain in place and that candles could be lit and replaced for as long as the retrofit project allowed, at which point it would be moved to the base itself. I lit a candle and placed it next to Haybale’s portrait, staring silently at the framed photo. It was from before I joined the Liberation Front, from a time of relative peace. His comrades were hanging their forelegs on his shoulders and they were all smiling.

“Ma’am,” someone behind me spoke.

I turned slowly to face the voice’s source, soon realizing that I was staring into the face of none other than Jury Rig. His neck and shoulders were badly scarred, his expression glum beneath the featureless Argus Panopticon implant that stood in for his eyes. I stood frozen in mild shock as one of the two manipulator arms of his Hecatoncheires implant slowly extended towards my face with a mechanical whirr. He gently flicked my forehead with one of his cold, robotic fingers, smirking all the while.

“Miss me?” he said.

I smiled, resting my hoof on his shoulder. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Private.”

“Glad to be here. Alive, I mean. Shame about Haybale.”

I was choking back tears. Jury Rig was just a kid. A teenage boy. He had his whole life ahead of him, and he didn’t deserve to be brutally maimed like this. I pulled him into a hug, if only so he wouldn’t see me crying over him.

“Ma’am?” he said, clearly confused.

“That was a brave, stupid thing you did.” My voice was shaking, even though I tried to hide it. “Never again. We fight together, or not at all. You understand?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Good.” I let go of him and wiped my tears away with the back of a foreleg. “Fall in, Private. We’ve got work to do.”

We had a meeting with the foremare that morning, where we were each assigned our tasks for the day. There were more than a few cleomanni, this time. We’d taken our time questioning them while our crews carefully swept the cruiser for any loose items we could find. We’d established a Lost and Found where the defectors could come retrieve anything that belonged to them. The cleomanni were very surprised that we’d chosen not to loot their things. We wanted their transition into the resistance to be as comfortable as possible, to assure their loyalty.

After the meeting, I insisted on bringing Rig along with me. It wasn’t long before they had us doing more hull inspection work. Jury Rig’s augmentations proved invaluable in engineering tasks. The Panopticon was far more powerful than I gave it credit for. He could see the cruiser’s damaged welds and fittings in pitch-darkness, the single blue light of his implant’s visor tracing back and forth.

“There.” Rig pointed his hoof at a weld seam. “Crack in the weld nine centimeters long.”

I leaned down with my headlamp and took a closer look. It was barely visible. Just slightly disturbed paint and the rippling line of a parted weld in the steel.

“Mark it down,” I said.

While I used a paint pen and my clipboard, Jury Rig rotated and tapped a dial on the side of the Panopticon with his hoof, wirelessly sending the location of the damaged weld through the local datasphere and into the foremare’s databanks. He gave me a thumbs-up with one of his bionic arms. I always found it odd how pegasi made gestures akin to those made by other species’ hands using their wings. As it turned out, the Hecatoncheires system could replicate those gestures with ease.

At the end of our shift, we made our way outside, descending one of the cruiser’s main boarding ramps where techs were milling around and moving materiel in and out. There was a bit of a commotion outside. A crowd gathered to watch as an Imperial Command Shuttle descended from the skies on a column of flame with an earsplitting roar. I stiffened with apprehension at the sight of it. The sleek craft had a purple, white, and gold livery, and possessed distinctive markings that indicated that it belonged to the Imperial Navy’s 1st Fleet. The SSTO gently touched down on a landing pad beside the main runway, its engines spooling down.

A sense of dread came over me. I couldn’t help but shake this feeling that everything in my life was about to change in a fundamental way. The shuttle dropped its ramp, and out walked a white-coated stallion in full dress uniform. Even from this distance, over a hundred meters away, I could have sworn that he turned and regarded me directly, and judging by his body language, he was not happy.

Admiral Star Crusher, the leader of the rebellion, had arrived.

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 24//Trial Estimated time remaining: 3 Hours, 42 Minutes