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

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … decoding …

// … error - unexpected drive unmount …

// … please reinsert media to continue …

// … resuming operation …

Desert Storm

The next two hours of our journey were spent in silence, save for the muffled chatter between the technicians in the rear of the cab, which I could barely hear due to the soundproofed partition between us. I practiced with my levitation magic on a mug of cold, stale coffee that someone had left in the cup holder, until I was satisfied that I’d no longer be dropping things. I wasn’t going to take a month to recover my levitation magic. Not if I could help it. Suddenly, Bellwether brought the Bull Runner to a halt.

“What is it?” I said, peering over the dash.

The agent’s steely gaze was fixed on a roadblock a hundred yards ahead of us. There was a makeshift gate across the highway made from corrugated siding and a guard tower with a machine gun. A unicorn levitated a cleomanni rifle. A few of them wore salvaged beamcasters, but most bore fairly crude weaponry of the gardening tool variety. They were all clothed in heavy parkas and armor made from cut-up and taped-together bulletproof vests. As the lead unicorn waved them forward, a gaggle of ponies and griffons started advancing on us. About six more ponies emerged from the drainage ditches along the highway, much closer than the others.

“Well, that’s not good,” Crookneck said.

“Contact, twelve o’clock!” Bellwether yelled. “Everyone, down!”

Bellwether flicked the switch that lowered the ballistic shield over the windscreen and pulled hard on the throttle lever, putting the Bull Runner in reverse. The drive motors emitted a high-pitched whine as they were loaded to the limit. I ducked below the dashboard. I could hear the guard tower’s machine gun opening fire and the sound of bullets pinging off the vehicle’s exterior.

“Who’s attacking us?” I said.

“Vandals,” Bellwether said.

I frowned. “They’re ponies. Why the hell are they shooting at us?”

“Hunger does strange things to a pony’s mind,” Crookneck yelled over the din of gunfire.

“What, are they gonna pawn off everything we have for a few sacks of potatoes?”

“Actually, they’ve been known to settle for just eating travelers instead,” Bellwether said. “Especially the griffons.”

“You mean they’re cannibals?” I said.

“Well that’s just it,” Bellwether said. “Out here? With these freaks? You never know what they want from you. Nothing good. It’s never anything good.”

After we’d reversed a few hundred yards, Bellwether pushed the throttle forward and turned the yoke hard left, taking us off the highway and into a forest of tall, dead conifers. We made it a few hundred meters in, but after we’d traveled about a kilometer from the roadblock, the path narrowed until we were surrounded by trees on all sides. Dead end.

“Well, genius, looks like your special agent training really paid off this time,” I said.

Bellwether flashed me an evil glare which melted into a worried look as a pair of dull thuds sounded through the roof of the cab. I could hear the shrill voice of a griffon above us.

“Shut off the engine and get out, before I toss a thermite grenade in the bed of your penis-compensating truck and call it a day!”

As Bellwether turned the key in the dashboard and the turbine slowly spooled down, he motioned his head in my direction, as if giving me a signal to act. I nodded, knowing exactly what I needed to do. As he opened the door, I closed my eyes and focused, thinking back to the Magister’s words during my training. Become as a grain of sand in a vast desert. As the invisibility spell coalesced around me, I was plunged into a lightless void.

All wavelengths of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, from radio all the way up to ultraviolet, were redirected around me, leaving me completely transparent to radar, thermals, and the naked eye. I used my levitation magic to feel the environment around me, probing for obstacles in every direction, using my magic like a plethora of walking sticks. I was still a little rusty, after spending years with a suppression ring on my horn. I had barely half the spatial resolution I was used to.

I could hear the griffons drag Bellwether and Crookneck from their seats. As they left the cab, I went with them in lockstep while remaining invisible, slowly hobbling out the driver side door before they could shut it behind their captives. Another one, perhaps one of the ponies who’d attacked us, opened one of the rear doors to the cab.

“No one in back,” she said.

“Keep looking,” one of the griffons grumbled.

Quietly as possible, without disturbing the dead foliage too much, I walked around behind the griffons, tracking their position by their breathing, being careful not to poke them too hard with my levitation magic and spook them. I knelt in the dead grass and concentrated.

“What do you want from us?” Crookneck said.

“Me and my companions haven’t eaten in three days,” an unfamiliar female voice said. “We thought we might like to borrow your truck. Find some new hunting grounds. Right, boys and girls?”

I probed around until I found the one who’d spoken last. I felt around with a few light taps of my magic around her cranial area, and yes, there was a horn. The unicorn in charge. The one I saw on the wall brandishing the Confederate flechette gun. The rest of them had arrived as well, their beamcasters humming and at the ready. They were pretty fleet-footed for starving ponies.

“You can’t just walk away with our Bull Runner,” Crookneck said. “It’s a vital component of the Resistance’s activities in this region.”

“You’re with the Equestrian Liberation Front?” The unicorn’s voice took on a darker tone.

“Who else do you think would be driving around in one of these things in a Confederate-controlled airspace?” Crookneck said. “You think I do this for my health?”

“Hah, and people think we’re crazy.” The unicorn’s words were tinged with bile. “You fucking morons are going to get us all killed. There are so few of us left. What do you suppose the point is in fighting anymore? It’s over. The Empire is done. Through. Look at us. Look at me! I used to be an actress on Bridleway. My family and I lived in a mansion. Now, I hold ponies at gunpoint for canned fruit, just to stay alive!”

She’d made one fatal mistake, which was that nobody present here gave one solitary fuck about her sob story. Least of all me. While keeping invisible, I felt around on one of the griffon’s waists, finding a holster with a pistol inside. I slowly drew out the weapon with my levitation magic without arousing any suspicion, before ensconcing it in a magic field to render it invisible. The griffon had her rifle trained on Bellwether and Crookneck, so she wasn’t paying very close attention.

“We only have emergency rations,” Crookneck said. “We weren’t planning on being out here long.”

“Well, that’s too bad for you,” the unicorn said. “Because my griffon friends here need something a little more substantial than canned goods. What do you think, Gertrude?”

“These two look too old and sinewy. I like ‘em young and supple.”

I hovered the invisible gun along the ground and swept it up and behind the unicorn’s head, feeling out the orientation of the muzzle. I estimated the position and orientation of the unicorn’s flechette gun. She was standing a few yards behind the griffon I’d stolen the pistol from, with her gun pointing in the same general direction. Perfect.

“You’re too damned picky,” the unicorn said. “Just stew ‘em for several hours on low heat until they’re nice and tender.”

I pulled the trigger, splattering the unicorn’s brains with a deafening report while simultaneously pulling the pin on the thermite grenade the griffon had on her bandolier. I failed to properly anticipate the recoil, and the pistol flew out of my magical grip. I had prepared for this possibility. As the unicorn’s flechette gun fell when her magic vanished forever, I caught it with my levitation, turned the muzzle towards the griffon, and released a short burst of fire. It was surprisingly difficult to keep the magnum-caliber automatic weapon under control, but I maintained my grip on it because of its larger surface area relative to a sidearm. I also turned the weapon invisible, so its position could no longer be tracked by the enemy.

The griffon dropped low to the ground, the flechettes having missed her by a hair. Then, a few seconds later, the thermite grenade went off, starting her parka on fire. I could hear her screams as she writhed on the ground in agony. I silenced her with another burst from the flechette gun. Immediately afterward, a number of things happened simultaneously. Though I could not see, I could hear—and, with my magic, feel—Bellwether draw his combat knife with his mouth and go about the messy business of gutting the other griffon like a fish, delivering a series of deadly thrusts to her neck even as he bludgeoned her with his sharpened horseshoes. I hadn’t noticed those, before.

The technicians, who had been hiding inside the Bull Runner, popped up out of cover and over the edge of the truck’s flatbed, their beamcasters spewing hot death. I felt out the rest of the assailants with my magic, some of whom were just arriving. It was time to go loud. I used a modified levitation spell to release bursts of kinetic energy into the air at strategic locations, producing a series of loud clicking noises that radiated omni-directionally, and then used another spell to read the resulting reflected sound waves. Active echolocation magic. Definitely not something they taught ponies in basic.

There were approximately eight ponies, too paralyzed from the shock of being waylaid by an invisible attacker to even react properly. I swept the flechette gun across them, raking their position with full-auto suppressing fire, even as the technicians provided accurate fire from the relative safety of the Bull Runner’s lightly armored hull. The vandals realized their mistake and ran for the cover of the trees, but it was too late. The firefight was over in under half a minute. I released the invisibility spell and stood. The area beside the giant twelve-axle truck was littered with corpses, or soon-to-be-corpses.

“Good work, Sergeant,” Bellwether said. “It’s a good thing they didn’t think to look in the passageway between the bed and the crew cab. That’s where we keep our beamcasters for shit like this.”

“Oh, they did think to look,” one of the Charger mechanics said. “We took her out nice and quiet, though.”

I inspected the cleomanni weapon, going over what I knew from my equipment recognition classes. It was a projectile weapon, not too unlike what the griffons used. The weapon was hefty by any standard. The muzzle was fitted with a compensator, to direct combustion gases upward and negate some of the muzzle flip. The barrel was fluted. The heat shield and parts of the lower receiver made extensive use of composites and plastics dyed Confederate blue, but the upper receiver was CNC-machined and ceramic-coated steel. To withstand the chamber pressures of the powerful 10x70mm cartridge, it had to be.

The weapon was also fitted with a ballistic computer with grid-finder functionality. Not only was it forgiving to the untrained marksman, it could even paint targets for airstrikes and artillery. A soldier armed with this weapon had no need to mark targets with smoke. All they had to do was point it at the enemy and press a button, and indirect fire assets would do the rest. Compared to a cheap griffon-made rifle, it was extravagant, to the point where it probably cost twenty times as much to manufacture.

Belt-fed machine guns and automatic cannons were common in Imperial Army service, but only as crew-served or mounted weapons. For personal weaponry, beamcasters were preferred by ponies and used more widely than anything else. I depressed a button on the side of the lower receiver and pulled the magazine free. Empty. These weapons needed to be reloaded often, unlike beamcasters, which had a fusion power pack and electro-magical transducers that were good for thousands of cycles before they needed to be serviced.

I walked over to where the unicorn mare lay, gasping, flailing, choking on her own blood. I recognized her face. Sleetmane. By Celestia, I’d watched this mare singing in front of a crowd of hundreds in Manehattan, once. Even now, having sunk so low as to become a bandit, she still took the time to do her makeup, something I hadn’t done in years. She wasn’t so pretty anymore, though. The full metal jacket military ball round from the griffon’s pistol had entered the top of her head and exited through her cheek on the opposite side. Her eyes were looking in two different directions. A good portion of her brain’s left hemisphere had probably been turned to mush. I levitated a magazine out of one of the pouches she wore, loaded the flechette gun, charged it and put one right between her eyes.

At point-blank range, the effect of the flechette’s sintered metal body undergoing fragmentation was devastating. I reflexively blinked as my face was splattered with gore. When I opened my eyes, I could plainly see that her head was splayed open like an overripe melon that recently had a hot date with a power hammer. Not what I was expecting, but it would do. The Charger technicians watched with horrified expressions on their faces as I methodically walked up to each of the wounded vandals and double-tapped them. One earth pony stallion protested as I descended upon him.

“Wait, it’s just my leg! Don’t kill me!”

Oh, but I did. Then, I shot the mare lying next to him. I savored her screams as I took my time with her, working my way up from her abdomen, to her chest, before finally putting one in her brains. I was laughing. Trembling and laughing. Better that she die at my hooves than be taken alive by the Confederacy. Worthless cannibal scum.

Bellwether put a leg over my shoulder. “That’s enough, Storm. What’s gotten into you?”

A few more chuckles escaped my throat as I let the weapon clatter to the ground, falling on my haunches. Their blood was splattered all over my muzzle. I looked like a feral hound, fresh from the kill. Crookneck walked up and offered me a kerchief, which I promptly used to clean my face off before the blood had a chance to stick to my coat.

“You heard them,” I said. “What they were going to do to us. We can’t let them live. They’re like a festering wound. The longer you let it go, the blacker the limb turns until it’s gangrenous. That’s when you amputate.”

“When I exert lethal force, it’s to neutralize a threat, not toy with the lives of others.” Bellwether flicked open his chromed Hippo lighter, lit a cigar and took a puff, shaking his head in disgust.

He tossed me the lighter and I snatched it out of midair with my levitation magic, turning it over to inspect the unusual hexagram logo on it. It was BASKAF-issue, that much was certain. I was somewhat surprised that they’d allow their agents to carry objects with identifying marks on them, but I figured that any pony caught deep behind enemy lines by the cleomanni would be an assumed spy anyway, so it didn’t make much of a difference.

“Take a good, long look at yourself,” he said. “Decide if that’s the pony you want to be.”

I scowled at him for a moment, but then brought the lighter close and stared at my blurry reflection in its mirror finish, at the evil glimmer in my eyes. I was still trembling from the adrenaline rush. When did I become like this? I couldn’t remember. There was so much that was lost in the haze of the war. So many friendships that soured. So much time I’d wasted wallowing in procrastination and pain. We were an embittered, hopeless people. The cleomanni had made sure of that.

I had passions, once. I wanted to travel the farthest reaches of Equestria, but I never had enough money. I wanted to live a quiet life, far away from the war, but nowhere in the galaxy was safe. My desires had given way to feelings of utter futility, until every waking moment felt like it would be better spent banging my head against the wall of my apartment in a drunken fit. When staring into the void that was my future became an unbearable exercise, when my life felt empty and purposeless, I’d signed up for another tour of duty, and just like that, I gained a purpose again. I had a reason to live, once more.

We all lost something. We all lost a piece of ourselves. What did I lose? Why couldn’t I remember? Oh, there was that one thing.

“Barleywine,” I muttered.

“All we’ve got is cider,” Bellwether said. “If you’re lookin’ to drown your sorrows, that is.”

“My fiancé. Barleywine. He was in the capital, three years ago.”

“Well, then. Sounds to me like you’re out of luck, killer.”

My gaze fell to my hooves. “That’s what I figured.”

I took the VB-10 Flechette Gun, turned the fire selector to safe and set it across my withers, pulling the sling tight. It sagged uncomfortably, being made for a biped to operate. I also levitated the spare magazines and stuffed them into my saddlebags. I paused and pulled one of the cartridges out. They were caseless telescoped rounds, with the nose of the subcaliber flechette dart held in the mouth of the cartridge by a plastic sabot. Very light cartridges for their size and power.

The magazines held only twenty rounds each, so the weight of the magazines was more of a problem than the weight of the cartridges themselves. That aspect of the standard cleomanni infantry weapon always puzzled me. A higher-capacity mag would’ve made more sense than simply carrying more mags. I put the cartridge back in the magazine and placed it in my saddlebag as well. After we had finished looting our assailants for anything of value, we climbed back into the Bull Runner’s cab and continued our journey.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Not a word was shared between us, and there was nothing to do for hours but gaze out at thousands of acres of empty farmland as we passed one abandoned town after another. I closed my eyes. I could hear the whine of the turbine. Feel every bump in the road. For a moment in time, I felt as though I had become one with the machine. It made me yearn for the opportunity to pilot a Charger once more. An opportunity that was fast approaching.

We stopped. When I opened my eyes, we were at the edge of the bog. I opened an access hatch leading into the rear of the Bull Runner’s cab, where the technicians were huddled, formulating a plan of action. They looked up at me as one, doing that annoying meerkat-like group stare that I’d grown accustomed to receiving from ponies.

“Oh, great,” one blue pegasus stallion with a cutie mark of diagonal pliers said. “Look who decided to join us.”

“Cut the patronizing bullshit,” I said. “Are you gonna stand around all day playing with your dicks, or are you gonna get my Charger loaded onto this thing so we can get the fuck out of this swamp and get back to base in time for dinner? Would you prefer to tear open and rehydrate those packs of dried textured vegetable protein we brought? Mmm, soy. Soy with a side of soy. Soy, lentils, soy, apple-shaped tofu-substitute, and soy-shaped soy drizzled with soy sauce. I dunno about you guys, but I’m no doomsday prepper. I like my fruits and vegetables fresh.”

That got them moving. We all piled out into the small passageway connecting the rear cab to the truck’s enormous bed. There were hazmat suits, beamcasters and toolboxes arrayed on racks in the cramped space. I briefly considered arming myself with one of the beamcasters, but relented, deciding that the gun slung over my shoulder would be enough for now. Didn’t want to look too greedy. Besides, all I really needed was my Charger. My stitched-up legs ached from my encounter with the Karkadann. I winced. Every so often, I’d move my limbs wrong and the pain would nearly take my breath away.

We exited the passageway and stepped out onto the bed itself. It was difficult to articulate just how large the truck’s bed was. A couple main battle tanks could have sat end-to-end atop it. We had already backed into position at the edge of the mire. I motioned towards the head of my Charger, sticking up from the swamp.

“You see that?” I said. “That there is the machine that got me through my last tour, before everything went to hell. Dozens of successful high-risk ops. Hundreds of confirmed kills against enemy armor and aircraft, and Celestia knows how many infantry. You’ll treat her with the utmost of respect. Is this understood?”

They nodded in unison.

“Now, mister, uhh—” I trailed off, pointing a hoof at the blue pegasus stallion.

“Wind Shear,” he said.

“Right. Wind Shear, can you get me up on the head of the Charger?”

“No problem, Sergeant, ehh, what was it again?”

“Storm. Desert Storm.”

Wind Shear snickered. “Sounds like a pegasus’s name.”

“My father was a pegasus. I’m the youngest of three sisters, fairly close together in age. All unicorns. Mom’s genes were just too strong. She always used to tell me that dad wanted a pegasus, and a son, to boot, but that he gave up after round three. Oh, and before you ask, as far as I know, they’re all fucking dead, except me, and I don’t plan on living forever, so let’s get going.”

“Tragic,” Wind Shear muttered. “Hop on my back, I’ll wing you over there.”

My foreleg was too injured for me to be lifted by my legs, so I straddled his back, being careful not to obstruct his wings too much. He experimentally flapped his wings, finding that they brushed up against my saddlebags.

“Uhh, no,” he said. “Those have got to go. It’s too much weight, and not enough clearance for my wings.”

I grumbled under my breath as I unlatched the saddlebags and unslung my VB-10 and set them aside. And then, I was airborne. I hugged Wind Shear close as the blood rushed to my head, finding the sensation more than a little disconcerting. It’d been a long damn time since I’d ridden on a pegasus’s back. I was a little filly, and it was with my dad. Before I knew it, we were perched atop the Charger’s head.

“Thanks,” I said, before dismounting his back. “Nice taxi service.”

“Don’t get used to it,” he laughed.

I fumbled around in the darkness a bit, before using a spell to create a magical flare that hovered with me as I traversed the uneven surface of the Charger’s head. I brushed my hoof against the composite plating of the radome above the main sensor cluster and inspected the feed mechanisms for the twin autocannons. The lightweight fiber-reinforced armor over the cannons was cracked and frayed in places. There was no repairing that. Once composites were cracked out, that was it. You couldn’t cut out the damaged section and weld in a new one like you could with sheet steel. The whole shroud would have to be replaced or patched over somehow.

“I’m sorry, DD,” I whispered.

I wove my way around to the back of the machine’s head, perilously close to the muck, and quickly found what I was looking for. An emergency escape hatch. Since the main cockpit entry hatch on the Charger’s back was buried in the mud, this was my only way inside. I placed my hoof on a circular depression in the center of the hatch and turned. A red light winked on next to it in response.

“Sergeant Desert Storm, security code zero-one-nine-six-eight-four-two-five-seven-five,” I said. “Open the sarcophagus.”

“Voice print analysis, confirmed,” the speaker next to the door crackled to life. “Security code, confirmed. Passphrase, confirmed. Thaumatic signature, confirmed. Welcome—back—serge—” The speaker popped and crackled its last.

Great. Another thing that needed fixing. After a few seconds, the light turned green and the hatch’s locking mechanisms clicked open, allowing me to swing it out of the way with the help of the heavy-duty gas struts mounted to it. I recalled my training, and how I was never particularly fond of the emergency ingress and egress part. I squeezed my hindquarters into the exceedingly claustrophobic space beyond the escape hatch. The opening was just barely wide enough for a pony to fit through it by crawling. It didn’t help that I was descending vertically through the passage due to the Charger’s orientation in the bog. As I moved down the ladder and into the pitch-black space beyond, my hind hooves touched water.

“Fuck, it’s flooded!”

I crawled back out. Wind Shear hovered above the hatch, looking at me expectantly.

“Bring a pump over here. Cockpit’s full of water.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, before darting back over to the Bull Runner to retrieve the tools we needed.

In the blink of an eye, a couple of pegasus technicians were lowering a gas-powered portable air compressor onto the Charger’s head. As the compressor rattled away and built up pressure in the reservoir, Wind Shear hooked up a small diaphragm pump and hoofed over the hose leading to its suction side. I picked up the end of the hose with my levitation magic and fed it down the escape hatch and into my Charger’s waterlogged cockpit.

I nodded to the blue pegasus, and, in response, he opened the valve to supply the pump with air. The small diaphragm pump sputtered and chugged away, pulling water out of the cockpit and discharging it over the side and into the bog. Most Chargers weren’t exactly submersible, but they were sealed up pretty well. I was betting that the rate of leakage was so minuscule that it took three years just to fill the cockpit up completely. There had to be a pinhole somewhere. That was bad. Charger cockpits were supposed to be resistant to nuclear, biological, and chemical threats.

Now, all we had to do was wait. And wait. And wait some more. As minutes turned to hours, I periodically fed the hose deeper into the cockpit, just to be sure that I was getting every last drop. I heard more than a few bored or exasperated sighs, both from myself and the technicians. Two and a half hours later, the pump stopped discharging water. Wind Shear secured the pump and disconnected the air line. I descended into the Charger once more. I crawled into the cockpit through a small recess at the front of the compartment.

As I lit up the cockpit’s interior with my magic, I found it acceptably dry, aside from a couple muddy puddles here and there. Arrayed in a semi-circle to the front and sides of the pilot’s command saddle were a plethora of toggle switches, display panels, pushbuttons, sticks, levers and gauges. It was easy for even a layperson to see why only unicorns were qualified to operate these demanding vehicles. I mounted the Charger’s cushioned, motorcycle-like seat, placing my hooves in the stirrups.

I wasn’t wearing a Syncsuit, so this was going to be a royal pain in the flank. I’d have to do everything manually. I went over my mental checklist. First, I reached out with my levitation magic to the cluster of controls associated with power generation and propulsion, and turned on and keyed in the auxiliary power systems; I was surprised that the backup batteries had lasted long enough to gain me access to the electronically-secured emergency hatch. A bunch of lights in the cockpit flickered on, some fading out and dying, probably shorted out by moisture. It was the best I could do under the circumstances. Almost as soon as the power came on, red lettering flashed over a monochrome display; WARNING: SAFETY INTERLOCK FAILURE A3-D7.

My eyes widened as I recalled that Systems A3 through D7 included the cannons. “Oh no, no, no!”

A series of rapid thumps reverberated through the cockpit as the autocannons on the Charger’s head fired uncontrollably, without any input from me whatsoever. The fire control system had suffered critical damage, either from the reentry and subsequent impact or from water infiltration, or both. In a panic, I used my magic to pry off the panel covering the fire control circuits and then I ripped out the bundle of wiring underneath, severing the connection between the controller board and the relays. The autocannons ceased their distinctive bassy report. I could only hope that no one was downrange when they opened fire.

“What the fuck?!” Wind Shear shouted down the hatch. “Are you trying to kill us?”

“Sorry,” I said. “FCS failure. My baby’s pretty beat up. I had to pull some wiring to get it to quit.” The electronics on newer Chargers had proprietary fireproof and waterproof sealant coatings all over the circuit boards and components to keep humid air or water intrusion from frying them, but they were not meant to be fully immersed for years on end. The coatings had obviously degraded. “In fact, I think half of the electronics in here are in highly suspect condition.”

“Oh, well, yeah.” He sounded almost disappointed. “That makes sense, I guess. We’re all hooked up on the outside, and we’ve moved the compressor and the pump back to the Bull Runner. Ready to winch ‘er in. How are things on your end? Think you can get it to move?”

I knitted my brow. “I don’t know if I can do it without fucking her up any more than she already is, but I’ll try.”

With the flick of a switch, the main wrap-around widescreen display lowered into position above the main control console. I did a diagnostic systems check. An upsettingly large number of damage zones were reading red in the main display. I booted up the Anima System.

“Hey, DD, you all there? Where is that damned succubus, anyway?”

A holotank lit up with a small whirlwind that coalesced into the impish form of a goblin-eared pony with leathery, dark-veined wings and a pair of devilish horns. The cleomanni weren’t the only ones with the benefit of artificial intelligences.

Every Charger had its own unique Anima, a self-aware and fully sapient creature that was part AI and part living spirit. It was rumored that their creation involved a dark magic ritual where a once-living being was sacrificed and their soul was captured and embedded in a magtech phylactery with a necromantic spell.

Some said that the Conclave used mortally wounded soldiers, magically preserved and transported from the front lines and into their ritual chambers, but nopony knew for certain where they got the candidates from, and few desired such knowledge. Regardless, the finished Anima had no recollection of their past life. The Charger’s AI matrix was their new brain. The machine’s hull, their new body. A Charger wasn’t just a giant fighting robot. It was a person in its own right. A mighty war golem. The very pinnacle of the magtech arts.

“You called?” DD said.

“Thanks for letting me in.”

“Not a problem, boss,” she said, her expression immediately turning to one of shock. “Whoa, shit! We’re underwater, and the system clock is reading three years since last boot-up. What the hell happened?”

“War’s over, technically,” I said, my head dipping low. “We lost. Up until very recently, I was held prisoner on a cleomanni science station in orbit.”

“Well, my partner in crime, I’m sorry to hear that.” The devilish pony shrugged. “After all, we gave ‘em hell.”

I looked up at her and smiled. “Yeah, we certainly did. But we both know this isn’t over for either of us until I’m six feet under. I was damned lucky to find you so soon, my friend. Intact, no less.”

“Uhh, ’intact’ isn’t the word I’d use to describe the condition I’m in. Actually, I’m pretty far from combat-ready.”

“How far?”

“Very far. Our readiness level is down to twenty-seven percent. Fire control system is offline. Did you do that? Huh. Active sensors are totally fried. So is cockpit climate control. About half of our cameras are out. We can only use two-thirds of the artificial muscles due to blockages in the micro-fluidic channels and damage to the power conduits. Booster pyrojets are clogged with mud, but they’ll function if we purge them. Actually, everything is clogged with mud. The self-diagnostic smart materials are indicating that there’s also some moderate corrosion and pitting around the joints and main bearings.”

I grimaced. Yep. I had found my Charger, all right. What was left of her.

“Enough, I get the picture, DD. Just one question: can we move?”

“How far?”

“Just to the Bull Runner a few hundred yards away. They’ll winch us in, but the bog is too deep for them to do it alone. They need us to supply a little of our own propulsion to get us back on dry land.”

“That’s a pretty dicey proposition.” DD tapped a hoof to her chin, clearly fretting. “Normally, I’d say don’t touch anything. Just exit the cockpit, and let the eggheads take care of the rest.”

“That bad, huh? How’s the reactor doing? Vacuum chamber still intact?”

“It’s not at atmospheric, but it’s not a perfect vacuum, either.”

“Start the pumps, then. Pump it out, and then let’s fire up the reactor.”

“Wow, you’re actually doing this.” Dust Devil shook her head.

The AI clapped her hooves together and vanished. An indicator appeared in the main display, showing the magrid, collector, electron guns and ion sources of the hundred-megawatt polywell-type fusion reactor at the Charger’s heart, as well as the capacitor banks and electro-magical transducers that provided clean power to the electrically-activated contracting polymer strips. Also, using pyrokinesis and cryokinesis-based heat exchangers, the transducers magically controlled the temperature of the fluid running through the vascularized channels that ran between the heat-activated twined nanotubes in the Charger’s muscles. Together, the electrically activated polymers and the temperature-activated nanotubes made up the artificial musculature of every Charger. Fast-reacting and slow-reacting muscles, just like a living organism.

I brought up another picture-in-picture display that showed the status of the muscles and fluid channels themselves. Not good. Several groups were almost completely out of commission. Our movement would be unstable. Worst-case scenario, a joint might collapse and sink the head of the machine into the bog, condemning me to a slow death in the muddy depths as the cockpit ran out of breathable air. It was a morbid thought.

The devil-pony’s hologram flickered into view once more. “All done. Vacuum chamber integrity is good. Just a slow leak in through the seals, is all. Should have those replaced ASAP.”

I double-checked the display, verifying that the vacuum chamber was reading less than one-ten-thousandth of a millibar. Well within acceptable bounds.

“Prepare for beam injection,” I said, alerting the Charger’s Anima to my intent.

“Aye. Circulating coolant through magrid. Prepping ion guns.”

“Mark.”

I lifted the safety cover with my magic and pressed the reactor startup pushbutton. Aside from a faint electrical buzz, the thing was eerily silent as it crept up to rated power. All was seemingly as it should be. If anything, a noisy polywell was bad news. The electron guns’ red outlines lit up green on the display, and then the magrid itself.

“How are we doing, Dust Devil?”

“Good. Electrostatic conversion rate within design parameters. We’re making full power. Purging radiator outlets now. Operating temperature is stable.”

“Prepare to take on the load,” I said.

“Got it.”

“Mark!”

I used levitation magic to depress a few more buttons to transfer the power to propulsion. I heard the thuds of closing breakers and the faint buzz of electrical transformers. The electro-magical transducers rose to a shrill, ethereal whine as power was applied to them. The diagnostic overlays disappeared, replaced by the augmented reality view from the broad-spectrum imagers in the Charger’s head. There was a great big spiderwebbing crack in the armored lens that partly obscured my field of view. I flipped the toggle that activated the public address system.

“We’re good to go! Start pulling!” my voice boomed from the loudspeakers hidden in the Charger’s armored head.

I felt a slight tug from the Bull Runner’s winches, but it wasn’t enough.

“Tires have broken loose,” Wind Shear yelled down through the hatch. “This is where we were at last time.”

“You might wanna get inside and seal the hatch,” I said.

The pegasus did as instructed, closing the hatch and crawling through the escape passage and into the cockpit. He watched intently as I went about extracting the armored behemoth.

“Get clear!” I shouted through the PA system.

I pushed the hoof-cups forward, increasing the throttle. The locomotion system hummed and groaned as the Mirage’s legs began to move, paddling through the mud and lurching forward. All of a sudden, a joint gave out with a squeal, causing the head of the machine to dip forward. Just what I was afraid of. Before the machine’s torso could sink into the bog, I used my magic to punch the booster controls. The eight pyrojets on the Charger’s shoulders and flanks let loose a thundering roar as they sucked in air, compressed it with telekinesis and heated it with pyrokinesis. With fifty-five tons of thrust at our disposal, we ascended skyward, slowly but surely. I smiled. It always felt good to fly without wings.

The boosters burnt out as we neared the top of our arc. Whether they failed or overheated, I couldn’t be certain. I felt the contents of my gut accelerate upward as we rapidly lost altitude. Wind Shear screamed like a filly and hugged my shoulders close, but I shoved him aside. I couldn’t have anyone interfering with my control over my machine. Cleaning sprayers cleared the mud from the central camera in the Charger’s head, just in time for me to see on the main viewscreen that we were descending directly towards the Bull Runner’s bed. I gasped and splayed my legs out and the Charger responded in kind, reacting just in time before the machine’s four giant metal hooves slammed into the earth, making a small quake.

My Mirage stood hunched over the Bull Runner, its legs spaced just far enough apart for the bed to sit between them. The giant truck rocked back and forth from the shock of the Mirage’s hooves merely landing near it. If we had actually landed on top of it, the Bull Runner would be so much scrap metal. The impact had wrenched my injured leg. I shrieked and moaned in excruciating pain, feeling my cast grow damp from within.

That was when a loud pop and a cloud of billowing smoke filling the cockpit signaled that one of the transformers had failed. Wind Shear yelped and coughed sharply. One by one, the electro-magical transducers in my Mirage’s legs overloaded with a rapid snapping, crackling sound much akin to a runaway fireworks display. The Charger’s legs gave out and it collapsed onto the Bull Runner’s bed with a screech of twisted metal.

“I told you, Storm,” Dust Devil spoke. “Twenty-seven percent.”

The cockpit lights, main display and holotank went out as the Charger’s systems lost power, plunging us into darkness. I used a light spell, filling the cockpit with an orange glow. To add insult to injury, an overhead multi-function display’s mount came loose and it clattered loudly to the deck with a glassy crunch, probably breaking it in the process. I buried my face in my hooves, groaning exasperatedly. An interminable day just got that much longer.

// … // … // … // … // … //

After another half-hour, we had the Mirage secured to the Bull Runner’s bed with high-tensile steel cables. It was a real pain in the ass loading the damaged Charger’s legs onto the heavy transport truck’s bed. We’d just barely managed to winch them aboard. When I resumed my station in the Bull Runner’s crew cab, I wasn’t feeling well at all.

“Uh, Bellwether?”

“Yeah? What is it, Sergeant?”

“I’m slightly messed up here.”

“What do you mean?”

“My leg. I think I tore open my stitches. I—fuck, I’m bleeding all over the place, here!”

Bellwether sighed explosively. “Keep pressure on it and keep it elevated. And try to stay conscious.”

As the minutes passed, the pain mounted. I started to shake. I fished through my saddlebags for some painkillers. I upturned the bottle into my hooves. Nothing. I was out.

“Fuck it.” I grimaced, hurling the pill bottle angrily into the hull of the Runner.

I could hear Bellwether using the radio. “This is Dark Star, come in.”

“This is Papa Wolf. Go ahead, Dark Star,” a voice came over the encrypted channels, big and bold, like the voice of a film narrator; almost as much of a cliché as the codenames they’d chosen.

“I am requesting to have our contacts at zero-six relocate to zero-four. Their assistance will be required.”

“Understood. However, there will be a review to determine placement of qualified personnel. I cannot guarantee that they will be able to stay for very long.”

“Copy that. Dark Star, out.”

“What was that about?” I said, my voice strained.

“The surgeon that patched you up and her assistant are going to pay Camp Crazy Horse a visit for a little follow-up appointment with you, and to treat some other casualties we have coming in from the front, before they’re recalled elsewhere. Anything else you wanted to know?”

“Yeah.”

“And what is that?”

“Are we there yet?”

The sky dimmed as we headed further south, my question left unanswered. The steel hull of the Bull Runner felt more and more like the walls of a coffin. I felt cold inside. Cold and tired. But there were miles of empty road left ahead of us. To stay conscious, I checked and re-checked my captured rifle obsessively. For the time being, I would simply have to mind my training and persevere as I had in the past. This wasn’t my first rodeo.

// … // … // … // … // … //

“Gear up! We drop in five!” The Commander’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers.

The Charger Bay of the Endless Summer was host to a great commotion as hundreds of ponies milled back and forth in front of kneeling metal behemoths that resembled crosses between ponies and praying mantises, each festooned with more armaments than an entire tank platoon. The titanium beasts were asleep in their hangars, secured to their platforms with high-tensile steel cable. Various test stands and pieces of diagnostic equipment were wheeled out of the way.

In his haste, one technician carelessly knocked an oxygen bottle off a cart, his partner berating him as he moved to keep it from rolling across the deck. They all went stock-still when we emerged from the blast doors at the end of the bay, decked out in our neon green syncsuits bearing the dreaded unit patch of an 8-ball pierced by a sword, the symbol of the Eighth Cavalry Division. We were each like a personification of death itself, and we commanded just as much fear and respect. We quickly donned our helmets, flicked our communications microphones into place, and fanned out to our respective Chargers, boarding them with a degree of deftness and coordination that could only come from years of experience.

I straddled Dust Devil’s command saddle, strapped down my safety harness, plugged in my syncsuit and booted up my Charger’s control computer and fusion reactor. An AI hologram of a small, demonic-looking pony greeted me with a sarcastic bow.

“Storm, ready to roll,” I spoke over comms.

Other voices came through on the radio, one after another.

“Sierra, good to go.”

“Sunnyvale, ready for drop!”

“Comet, ready for drop.”

“Barrage, ready.”

“Barricade, ready for drop! Damn, beat me, bro.”

“Capodastro, ready.”

“Lieutenant Terror, ready to kill. Just getting this locus dialed in.”

The voice of Operations came last. “Red Lance, One through Four, you are cleared for drop. Hold until we reach the target area. Gold Lance, stand by and await further instructions.”

Klaxons sounded, yellow strobe lights providing ample warning to the vessel’s crew as to what was about to happen next. The technicians quickly cleared out of the workshop as each of our Chargers’ platforms moved along rails, deeper into our respective hangars. Robot arms assembled and fitted our re-entry shields and installed the explosive bolts that held them together.

Each of the four podded Chargers in my lance were tilted ninety degrees nose-down, giant airlock doors closing behind us before the spaces our machines occupied were depressurized. The four massive external drop bay doors silently slid open in the vacuum of space, revealing the upper atmosphere and distant surface of the planet Cain IV, a guild-owned world that contributed substantially to Confederate industrial power.

“Coming up on the drop zone in ten, nine, eight, seven, six,” the drop coordinator counted down.

Magtech launch rails extended, their levitation fields building to a steady blue glow.

Sunnyvale sounded like she was practically humping her seat in anticipation. “I fucking love this part!”

“—five, four, three, two, one, drop!”

The four drop capsules were flung free of the Charger-transporter at a breakneck acceleration of over six gravities. Our capsules assumed a loose formation based on their pre-programmed autopilot data, attitude rockets making small burns to adjust our trajectory. We streaked towards the ground like meteors. Our re-entry shields began to glow red, then yellow, and then white-hot.

Our approach most likely did not go unnoticed. I would’ve bet anything that on the ground far below, a team of Confederate commandos had already picked up the white trails in the sky with their binoculars, along with the characteristic sonic boom of the capsules’ descent. Nothing about orbital insertions was subtle.

“Drogue deploy,” I said over the radio, receiving a green acknowledgment light in my heads-up display.

A small chute re-oriented my pod’s descent, before being released.

“Capsule jettison, re-entry shield jettison.”

Explosive bolts separated the walls of the capsule from the re-entry shield like five giant flower petals, revealing my Mirage A202 and its stabilizing platform with guy wires underneath. The capsule walls flew away with some violence in the whipping winds of our rapid descent, tumbling into the air before rapidly vanishing into the distance as five black specks. The nose of the capsule soon joined them, revealing the daylight beyond. Dust Devil’s computer switched from the now-absent capsule altimeter to my Charger’s own instrument cluster and navigation system.

“Platform jettison,” I said. “Altitude, twenty kilometers.”

At a pre-determined moment, the cables securing my Charger to the platform were released with explosive bolts. My Charger’s pyrojets were fired momentarily to propel it and the platform away from each other to avoid a mid-air collision. After descending in freefall for a while longer, an alert sounded in the cockpit.

“Warning: Altitude,” Dust Devil spoke. “Altitude. Altitude. I love saying that over and over again until my pilot goes crazy. Altitude.”

“Quit joking around, DD. It’s all business today.”

“Aww. Spoilsport.”

I waved a hoof to scroll the map in the picture-in-picture view in my HUD. “That park, there. Plot our descent so we come down in the middle of it.”

“Roger, roger.”

“Contact!” Lieutenant Night Terror called. “Enemy SAM sites are tracking our descent. Evasive maneuvers!”

I applied short bursts to the gimbaled thrusters in my Charger’s shoulders, slipping sideways at a few gees to avoid a missile lock. I tilted Dust Devil nose-down and poured the coals to her, increasing my rate of descent with the main boosters. Shortly after crossing three hundred meters a second, there was a sonic boom that shook my machine like a thunderclap. When I hit five hundred, it sounded like every fastener in the cockpit was trying to rattle itself loose.

“Missiles, incoming!” DD said.

“DD, arm the forty! Set fuses to gated proximity, radar range!”

I gripped the triggers in my hoof-cup controllers with a fetlock and unleashed a ten-round burst that intercepted the first surface-to-air missile, turning it into an orange bloom of fireworks. I applied another lateral thruster burst at the last moment to avoid the second missile. After streaking past me, it started to pull a one-eighty, curving down towards me to try and intercept my descent from above.

“Damn, those fuckers have good tracking, don’t they?” I muttered. “Well, so do I.”

I rolled my Charger onto its back as I continued to descend, my cannons facing skyward. My reticule locked on and turned from blue to red as I bracketed the incoming missile, the rhythmic beeping of the radar tracking resolving into a solid tone. Another ten-round burst, and the second missile was in pieces. The warhead didn’t even go off. It simply separated from the rest of the casing and aerodynamic forces rapidly disintegrated the rest. I rotated upright, and just in time, since there were only a few thousand meters left between me and the ground. My evasive maneuvers had shaved off a lot of speed, but we were still dropping fast.

There were orange flashes from the ground far below. Tracers from anti-aircraft gun fire. I applied evasive side bursts and pulled my Mirage into a high-speed roll, the autocannon rounds streaking harmlessly by. The staccato popping of airbursting shells rattled my skull, but the fragments were deflected by my Charger’s armor.

“Ten seconds until touchdown!” DD called.

I rotated the main boosters to face towards the earth and I applied maximum thrust; my rate of descent rapidly decreased, from a hundred meters a second, to fifty, and then ten. The ground came up fast. “Three, two, one, hooves down!” There was the jarring thump of four metal hooves slamming into the dirt, my Charger’s legs bending at the knees like a free runner to absorb the fierce impact. The pyrojet boosters dug furrows in the terrain, sending up great clouds of dust that helpfully obscured my position.

“Dust Devil, systems check!” I said.

“One sec,” she said. “Reactor, nominal. All actuators, nominal. Radar and detection suite performing within spec. Active protection system armed and ready. All weapon systems, nominal. Operational readiness, one hundred and three percent.”

“What’s the three percent?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Recent maintenance has increased performance slightly beyond baseline specifications.” DD’s hologram snickered, covering her mouth with a hoof. “It’s complicated, but I’ll make it simple so you can understand, boss. By my estimation, every percent above a hundred is equal to one whole blowjob you owe our techs.”

“Fuck off.” I smirked, clicking on my radio. “This is EIDOLON, checking in. DD and I are hooves-down and moving to engage. We’re going quiet, out.”

I cloaked my machine, my magic funneling through an Illusion locus that magnified its effect. My Courser’s entire 37-ton bulk turned completely see-through, with not even a shimmer to hint at its presence, save for the communication aerials I left uncovered so I could still send and receive radio signals. I launched my recon drones and fired up the magtech acoustic detection suite, pinging the tree line ahead. Point cloud data was fused with images from the satellite and drone feeds and the picture slowly resolved itself into a flickering, pointillist color image of my surroundings. I was in a mildly forested stretch of parkland bordering a large industrial zone, if the footpaths and wooden benches were any indication. There wasn’t a soul in sight. To the west stretched row after row of faceless concrete commercial buildings. Research centers, administrative facilities, and warehouses as far as the eye could see.

“DD, where are those AA guns located?”

I couldn’t launch my surface-to-surface payload if there was even the smallest chance of the enemy intercepting it mid-flight. I had to knock the Confederate AA out, and then, I had to go after the SAMs.

“My drones have detected their heat signature. Their gun barrels are still red-hot. One-point-two klicks, Northeast. They moved into the wooded area for concealment.”

“They can’t hide from me.”

I pushed the hoof-cups forward, throttling up to a steady eighty-kilometer-an-hour trot, moving into the tree line. Four titanium hooves beat against the soil like a drum. I applied the boosters, the legs of my Charger scything through trees like blades of grass. From the outside, it would have appeared as if an invisible giant troll had swung its mighty limbs in a fit of rage and paved the forest flat as it sprinted from one end of the park to the other.

I spotted the two self-propelled anti-aircraft guns’ heat signatures. Two Confederate Arbalest-model tracked AA units with 20mm rotary-barrel cannons. The vehicles were swinging their turrets around frantically, trying to get a lock on me based on where the forest had been freshly clearcut in the shape of a Charger. With plumes of hot, sooty smoke spewing from their exhausts, they started moving off, trying to move deeper into the forest to conceal themselves.

“Too late,” I laughed. “You’re mine, motherfuckers!”

I extended the twin back-mounted heavy beamcasters and put two full-charge shots downrange, right on target. Two circuit breakers slammed shut with heavy thuds. Twin columns of blinding ultraviolet lanced out into the woods with a crack of thunder. The tracked SPAAGs simply ceased to be. A little bit of roadwheel went one way, and their tracks went the other, and their turrets were blown ten meters into the air on an ascending column of fire. There were two flaming peepholes through several layers of foliage that were rapidly turning into a full-blown forest fire.

A forty-megajoule beamcaster pulse was nothing to be trifled with. Any tank struck directly with that level of firepower, even a formidable Conqueror MBT, would instantly pop its turret into the air like a jack-in-the-box. With its meager armor, an Arbalest didn’t stand a chance. There was no defense they could muster against my weaponry, save for putting either several meters of dirt or a couple city blocks between their hull and my beamcasters’ projector lenses.

“Was that it for the AA?” I said. “I could’ve sworn we were being shot at by more than two measly guns on the way down.”

“Wait one,” DD said. “Contact, nine o’clock!”

I reflexively applied the boosters as a burst of twenty-millimeter cannon fire sailed past where my Charger had stood just moments before. The Confederate Army weren’t stupid. Even if they couldn’t see me directly, they could infer my location based on a number of things, like the way my movements disrupted the foliage or created Charger-shaped holes in clouds of smoke, dust and debris, or by tracing my weapons’ fire all the way back to the point of origin.

The heavy beamcasters were still cycling. One of the disadvantages of the new-generation, lightweight, Courser-compatible models was that they had a much longer cycle time compared to the ones found on Rounceys and Destriers, to keep from overheating. My guns were about seventy percent done cycling. I just had to keep dodging and weaving. More twenty-millimeter shells ripped through the forest. They were firing randomly, now. Trying to see if they could graze me.

Twin chimes alerted me that the beamcasters had finished their cycle and were ready to fire. “Finally.”

I swung the hull around with a thruster-aided sliding stop and put a shot each into the Arbalests. They were as good as done.

“Alright, we clear?” I said.

“Not seeing anything else on the scope at the moment.” DD’s hologram tapped her chin with a hoof. “Those SAMs are located on a rise about three klicks north, but there’s nothing between us and them that should pose a threat.”

“Good, that should be an ideal spot for us to launch our own missiles from.” I was dripping with sweat, both from magical exertion and the Charger’s own waste heat radiating through the cockpit. I released the invisibility spell and set off towards the north at a hundred-kilometer-an-hour gallop. “Keep scanning for hostiles. I don’t wanna get blindsided on the way over there.”

All it took was a couple of minutes, and we were up the hillside and right on top of them. The top of the rise was several acres of leveled dirt with a good view of the horizon, currently occupied by three erector-launchers linked to a command truck and a radar array, forming a SAM complex. There were panicking missile technicians running every which way, screaming ‘reneztaffal’. Quad-demon. Charger. One desperate SAM crewman tried firing his pulse pistol at my vehicle, but it did nothing other than scorch my glacis armor black. He wasn’t even wearing body armor, just overalls. I didn’t even bother wasting any 40mm ammunition or heavy beamcaster shots. These were the softest of soft targets.

“Arm anti-infantry casters,” I said. “Stream mode.”

“Ooo, feeling diabolical, are we?” DD laughed.

I smiled. There were three different kinds of beamcaster in Equestrian military service. Pulsecasters were the most common, and they fired a needle-thin beam of arcane energy that penetrated armor and heated and carbonized tissue. Widecasters were like beamcaster shotguns and were used by close-combat specialists. Streamcasters were fundamentally different from the other two types. They did not fire arcane beams. Their diagrammatic engines were tuned to emit focused, unrelenting streams of pyrokinesis. The stream-type emitters on my Mirage’s head weren’t nearly as ferocious as those on a Fire Drake-model Rouncey, but they were good enough for this kind of work.

I pulled the triggers on my hoofcups and the SAM crewman was engulfed in a stream of plasmatic flame. He didn’t even have a chance to scream. His tissues disintegrated and his bones burned black in a fraction of a second, and what was left of him fell right where he stood. I swept the head of my Charger over the crew cabs of the vehicles, instantly cooking their occupants alive. Next, I turned their radar arrays into puddles of molten metal. And then, for the coup de grâce, I swept the streamcasters over the missiles themselves. Their fuel exploded immediately, setting off the warheads in a massive conflagration that shook the hilltop and pelted my Charger’s hull with debris. When the tinkling of raining rocks and dirt had ceased, I scanned the area. No survivors.

“All right, are we clear now, DD?” I said.

“That’s affirmative. No other enemy ground units for many tens of klicks in all directions. You’ve got hostile air incoming, though. ETA about fifteen minutes.”

“Fuck it. Now or never. You got the coords locked in, right?”

“Sahyer Industrial Park, twenty kilometers to the southwest.”

I took in a deep breath and let out a shuddering sigh. I hated this part. I really did. There would be hundreds of employees milling about. There was no telling how prepared they were, or if they got the memo that the airspace had been penetrated by Imperial Army assets and they ought to run screaming. Regardless of their state of preparedness, I was about to condemn potentially dozens or even hundreds of Confederate civilians to a choking, miserable death.

I aligned the hull of my Charger with the target area, the vertical bracket in my main display turning green. “DD, arm the surface-to-surface package.”

“Storm, your heart rate is highly elevated.” The tiny hologram looked up at me with concern from her tank. “You okay, boss?”

“It doesn’t get any easier, does it?” I rubbed my brow with a hoof. “DD, are we clear to engage?”

Dust Devil was silent for longer than usual. I found it disconcerting. Then, Lieutenant Night Terror’s voice came through on the radio. “EIDOLON, this is WIDOWMAKER. You are clear to engage. Fire when ready, and then regroup on our formation five klicks due east of your position.”

“Acknowledged. Firing.”

With my levitation, I turned a key in my Charger’s console and a magic-shielded flip-up cover exposed a red pushbutton, which I promptly depressed with my magic. One after another, the eight Mark-76 SSMs roared as they departed their tubes with a flash of light, leaving a white rocket plume behind as they ascended skyward on a ballistic trajectory.

As soon as they reached the target area, the protective covers would be blown off and the nerve gas bomblets would be flung out to blanket a wide area. Their contents would combine to form clouds of lethal OA-13 that would engulf the Sahyer Industrial Park in a shroud of death.

One of the bigwigs at Sahyer was Aressa Baltoritz, a developer of sensor equipment for Confederate contragrav drones, and one of the leading minds behind the push for new-generation thaumosensitive systems that could detect the magic aura of ponies, even through solid objects.

Our intel indicated that she and her closest associates would be present at the facility at this very moment, caught outside at the security checkpoint during shift change. For the Empire to live, they all had to die. As the Empress commands, so let it be done.

“This is EIDOLON,” I said. “Missiles are away. I’m regrouping on the rest of my lance, out.” I clicked off the comms, shaking my head. “Run, you goat-legged bastards,” I whispered to myself. “Run from what’s coming.”

With their payloads expended, the empty launch tubes automatically jettisoned from my Charger’s hindquarters, exposing the rear pair of thruster gimbals. The process shed some weight and improved my maneuverability.

I turned to the east and jetted down the hillside, picking up speed. There were four basic gaits that every Charger was capable of. In order of ascending speed, they were walking, trotting, galloping, and bounding. Anything below forty kilometers an hour was a walk. Above that was a trot. Towards their maximum cruising speed, a Charger’s gait shifted to a gallop, and beyond that, with the boosters active, the gallop became the bounding gait, the fastest of all.

In a bounding gait, a Charger’s hooves would briefly touch the ground before soaring into a leap with a two-second hangtime that crossed over a hoofball field’s length. It wasn’t so much a gallop as it was a series of jumps; an endless chain of parabolic arcs intersecting the ground. This was how Chargers overcame the limits of legged locomotion and the need to wait for gravity to accelerate a limb towards the ground. They periodically became aircraft.

I poured the boosters on, working my way up to a bounding run. I watched the digital speedometer climb to two hundred, and then three. The world outside was reduced to a blur. I crossed an abandoned street and flattened a lamppost. Even with the strength of a Charger’s artificial muscles to dampen each landing, every impact with the ground jarred my skull.

Research had been done on vertebral deterioration and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in Charger pilots, but it was inconclusive. Standard wisdom was that four years of Charger duty was the safe maximum limit for one’s health. Most pilots exceeded that, by simple necessity. The war hadn’t been kind to us.

I was shaken from my trance by the frantic voice of Dust Devil. “ATGM, incoming!”

There was a white orb on my scope trailing glowing orange rocket exhaust that couldn’t be anything other than a wire-guided missile, and it was closing in fast. Then, there was a concussive thump and a muffled hiss of rocket propellant as the APS automatically fired an active countermeasure, slapping the incoming anti-tank missile out of the air with a blinding flash and a deafening bang.

I applied full reverse boosters and came to a skidding halt, digging trenches in the mud. Snapping flechettes and streams of blue pulse rifle fire lashed out from a string of sandbagged positions a few hundred yards to my direct front, pinging and scorching my armor. One of DD’s cameras took a direct hit, cracking the lens.

“Range the target!” I shouted.

“Four hundred and thirty-two meters,” DD said.

“Lock it in.”

“Range lock.”

“Set the fuses on the forty to airburst, with a thirty-meter dispersion.”

“Affirmative,” Dust Devil said. “Arming.”

I tracked my targets patiently, elevating the guns slightly to put a burst of rounds right over their heads, before pulling the triggers with my levitation. Eight rhythmic thumps shook the Charger’s crew compartment. Eight forty-millimeter shells arced through the air like white-hot darts of death on the thermal view. Four puffs of smoke appeared over one of the positions I was taking fire from. Over a dozen cleomanni troops were killed or wounded instantly by high-velocity shrapnel. I quickly repeated the process with the others. The incoming fire petered out to nothing.

When the smoke cleared, I noticed that the enemy troops had been guarding an obelisk of some sort.

“What’s that?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Dust Devil said. “You’re going to have to get closer for me to get a better reading.”

I opened up the throttle and cantered over to the object in the clearing. I had my Charger kneel and exited through the lower hatch, armor plates unfurling to allow my passage. My hooves hit the dirt and I rolled upright, taking a few tentative steps towards what lie in the center of the clearing. There were no bodies. Not a trace of violence. Instead, there was a three-meter-tall monument of black marble with an embossed metal plaque of some sort.

The text was in multiple languages. Ardun, Linnaltan, Xicc’en, Nemrin, even that ugly Damarkind scrawl, but not Equestrian. Never Equestrian. If I stared hard enough at the foreign letters, they seemed to rearrange themselves into something I could understand. I read it aloud.

“In memory of the one million souls who perished in the terrorist bombing of—”

The rest was illegible, but I could see my surroundings more clearly, now. What I thought were strangely shaped rock formations were actually the bones of impossibly old skyscrapers, crumbled almost to dust and covered with overgrowth.

“Uh, Sergeant?” Dust Devil spoke over my syncsuit’s communicator. “We should get going. We’ve got contacts. Lots of them.”

In the depths of the ruins, glowing orange eyes flickered open. Thousands of them, all focused upon me with clear malicious intent. I turned back to the monument, and it was gone. In its place was a snarling Karkadann. I recoiled in abject terror. They looked so much worse in the light of day, like something that ordinarily dwelled in the deepest oceans. The skin between the gaps of their armor was dark and leathery and ridden with surgical scars. It was as if the head of an anglerfish or some dread lizard had been sewn onto the body of a pony. The beast was a blur of chrome as it coiled and pounced, letting out an unearthly screech while tilting its head to latch its jaws around my throat.

I gasped awake. I was in the Bull Runner’s cockpit. I hissed. The pain from my injured leg had returned with a vengeance.

“You okay there, Storm?” Bellwether looked me up and down. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“I dunno,” I said. “I feel like shit. Damn.”

“Well, just keep it together. We’re almost there.”

I frowned as I tried recalling details from my dream. It was all a jumble of half-remembered figments. There were so many things that didn’t fit. Aressa Baltoritz wasn’t a drone engineer. She wasn’t even a cleomanni. She was a linnaltan talk show host and Equestrian sympathizer. The unit composition was wrong, too. Major Capodastro wasn’t even in my unit. It was a bunch of fragments, all stapled together in the wrong order, but it was a damn close approximation of a typical mission.

No, on further reflection, that wasn’t quite right, either. An orbital insertion would have alerted our targets to seek shelter from the gas. OA-13 only did the job right if you had the element of surprise. If we’d been detected that early, the only way to get the job done would’ve been to shift to a full-blown search-and-destroy operation and assassinate the targeted individuals directly, along with whatever defenses they could muster, be it mercenaries, guardsmen, or even the Confederate Army.

I’d done it myself, more than once. Launched SSMs only to get the call from the forward observers that we had negative effects on target, and then we marched our Chargers straight into the clouds of gas, fought our way through the perimeter, pinged the structures at the target area with deep-penetrating scans and found the bastards hiding in a safe room with masks on, at which point the standard procedure was usually to bring the whole building down with some well-placed heavy beamcaster salvos. Sometimes, nerve gas was only useful insofar as it pinned our targets in place, making them seek shelter in a fixed location instead of trying to slip away in a vehicle.

“Hey Bellwether,” I said, shaking the residual grogginess.

“Yeah?”

“Where the hell is Cain IV? The planet?”

He gave me a haunted, wide-eyed glance, before returning his eyes to the road. “Where the fuck did you hear that name, Sergeant?”

“It was something I dreamed just now. Seriously. Not sure where I heard the name. It could’ve been from the terminal in my cell.”

“They let you guys have terminals?” Bellwether raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, they did,” I said. “They were mostly loaded with propaganda. Heavily censored and compartmentalized from the station’s secure networks. I think they had ‘em in there mostly just to taunt us. Like, ‘here’s a terminal, but you can’t hack it or do anything useful with it except read about how great we are’, or something.”

Bellwether seemed to relax a bit, before letting out a long sigh. For several long seconds, he didn’t say a word.

I leaned over to size up his features. “Is there something you’re not telling me, boss?”

He fixed me with a glare. “Stop asking stupid questions. That shit is way above your pay grade.”

I relaxed back into my seat, shivering in the cold.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Hours later, the Bull Runner pulled into Camp Crazy Horse. I was drifting in and out of consciousness. I had been propping myself upright with my captured flechette gun, but as the vehicle came to a halt, the last of my strength left me. I collapsed face-first on the floor of the recovery vehicle, too weak to even lift a single limb.

“Sergeant! Stay with us!” came an unfamiliar voice.

A light beamed into the claustrophobic space. I squinted, the intolerable brightness of it very nearly causing me physical pain. I was seeing double. I could barely feel it as they strapped me to a stretcher, raised me aloft on their backs and carried me into the facilities at the rear of the subterranean structure. I watched as the technicians secured the Charger to the overhead gantry, raised it, and then drove the truck out from underneath it in the span of less than a minute, like a highly trained motorsports pit crew.

I closed my eyes. The next time I opened them, I was lying in bed in a room painted sterile white. There was a small shaven patch on my neck where an intravenous line delivered various fluids through a catheter. Most concerning was the pack of blood. Ponies had shitloads of different blood types, to the point where finding the correct match was practically impossible. One basically had no choice but to transfuse whatever they had and hope that it didn’t cause a reaction. Bellwether was sitting to my right on a folding chair, hoofing through a magazine.

“I’m probably worth a lot more to you guys alive than dead,” I mumbled. “I know what you’re gonna say. It was reckless of me, what I did, but hey, we got my baby back in one piece, and I’m alive. For now. That’s what counts.”

Bellwether huffed. “Not many unicorns left out there who know how to pilot a Charger, or the vagaries of invisibility magic. It’s a real game-changer. We don’t exactly have the luxury of time, either. The Confederacy could be bearing down on this location any minute. Or they might not be.”

“Oh, so now, after I’ve learned my lesson, you’re the one who wants me to rush headfirst into this shit. Figures.”

“You’re lucky that we had enough blood to spare for a transfusion,” a silver-coated unicorn mare standing in the corner of the room said.

“And who the hell are you, exactly?” I croaked. I recognized her from the Regence Hotel; one of the ponies who had patched me up and extracted the tracking chip.

“Argent Tincture. I believe we’ve met once before. You were out cold, though. That makes twice in two days.”

“I really oughta take better care of myself—was what you were going to say, right?”

“That just about sums it up, yes.” She shook her head disapprovingly.

“Just one of the risks of the job, Doc.”

“Risks can be mitigated, if you care to learn how.”

“I don’t always have the luxury of avoiding action entirely,” I said. “However, I like not having my legs broken. I also prefer not being shot, or at least having armor impervious to small-arms between me and the ones doing the shooting.”

“Don’t worry,” Bellwether said. “Your wish will be granted just as soon as we get the parts together to fix your rig. You just stay focused on your, uh, convalescence. Okay?”

“The meds,” I said, staring at the catheter line. “What did you guys pump into me this time?”

“Hydroset,” Argent Tincture said. “The Confederacy’s standard in care for fractures. Well, that and morphine. And blood. Fluid support, too.”

I started and leaned upright. “Well, great. Uhh, did you guys test it to make sure I wouldn’t have a deadly reaction to it? Because last I checked, I’m not a satyr.”

“That’s not necessary, in this case. The substances they use to make it are biologically-inert.”

She moved closer and passed a black wand-like device over my injured left foreleg. I sharply inhaled as a tingling, swimming sensation ran from my hoof to my shoulder.

“There. Now, we just wait for it to set up before we move on to the next layer. The paramagnetic, osteophilic nanomaterial passes harmlessly through undamaged blood vessels and automatically sticks to bone, filling gaps, forming a healing scaffold and allowing new bone to grow into it. Then, it degrades over time, before being completely absorbed and excreted by your body. All the surgeon has to do is introduce the material into the patient’s bloodstream and then wave an electromagnet over the injury site. The procedure is one hundred percent safe and simple enough to perform in any field hospital.”

I hoped I looked as skeptical as I felt. “How do you know so much about cleomanni medicine?”

“Trust me, this isn’t the first time we’ve used this stuff. Hydroset has been used by cleomanni medics for something like a hundred and fifty years, under various trade names. Hydroset, Magnaset, it’s all the same stuff. Everything you want to know about it is available on their public datasphere. I’ve even downloaded and read the translated white papers of the scientist who developed it. It’s completely compatible with pony physiology.”

“It’s not as good as a Bio-Accelerator,” a white earth pony mare standing in the doorway said.

“No, Gauze Patch, it isn’t. Except it’s like a hundred times less likely to give you cancer.”

A Bio-Accelerator. An Equestrian magtech medical device consisting of an ensorcelled band placed around an injured body part which emitted healing energies that stimulated the body’s own natural growth factors. Which, sadly, included tumors, often necessitating screening and follow-up procedures. But they worked, and they worked fast. During my first tour, I was in and out of a field hospital in an hour thanks to one of those. After I started puking my guts out, they had me back in there a week later for a few rounds of hyper-immune therapy, too, which sucked beyond belief. At least we had a reliable cure for cancer, too.

“No Bio-Accelerators,” I whimpered. “Please.”

“Lucky for you, we don’t have any. At least not any functional ones.”

“Good. Very good.”

“Pfft, whatever,” Gauze Patch said. “Hydroset can cause fatal clotting over a matter of minutes to hours if used improperly. You have to meter the dose carefully and spread it evenly over the injury site.”

I felt the blood drain from my face.

“How long will she be out of commission?” Bellwether said, clearly quite eager to make use of my unique skillset again at the earliest opportunity.

Argent Tincture frowned. “She should avoid any strenuous activity for at least six weeks. The bone needs to be stabilized to heal properly. If not, her leg could end up permanently deformed. She’s already jeopardized her chances of making a full recovery as it is.”

Bellwether threw the magazine he was reading across the room and stood from his chair, his face locked in a scowl. Without another word, he stormed out.

I rolled my eyes. “That was a little huffy.”

As Gauze Patch and Argent Tincture left the room, I leaned my head back, shut my eyes and tried catching some rest. But even with the drugs coursing through my system, I found it hard to fall asleep. I spent the rest of that night staring at the ceiling.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A week later, I was up and about, allowed to freely walk around the medical wing of the facility with the aid of a wheeled cart supporting my forelegs. I felt on-edge. The painkillers had worn off, and I needed to pee. Badly.

The journey down the hall was laborious, my hind hooves clicking against the cold, hard concrete. I was momentarily taken aback as I peered into a conference room window. The space had been cleared of desks and chairs and turned into a makeshift infirmary, jam-packed with ponies on cots in varying states of distress. Casualties were still pouring in, and I was forced to move out of the way as Argent Tincture, Gauze Patch and several medics pushed gurneys that held uniformed patients who were in dire need of care, if the way they moaned and bled was any indication.

Bellwether stumbled into the hall, his fetlock gripping a fifth of hooch. He tilted the bottle back and took a long swig, nearly tripping over his own legs in the process, steadying his wobbly gait with the nearest wall that presented itself. His eyes were puffy and red, his mane and coat were disheveled, and he looked sweaty, like he’d just ran in a race. I had never seen this side of him before. The former ORACLE agent was never one to show any discernible weaknesses.

“What happened?” I said. “And what are you drinking? Is that gin? I thought you said all we had was cider. Gimme a swig of that!”

Ignoring my request, he glared at me, as though I had picked open a freshly hardened scab. “A raid went bad, and some mare I was havin’ a fling with bought the farm. Satisfied?”

My standoffish demeanor softened somewhat at this. I reached my good foreleg out and rested it on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He took another drag from the bottle, nearly choking as he angrily sputtered, “And I never even got to fuck ‘er!”

And just like that, any sympathy I’d gained for the old coot had been kinetic-strike’d all the way through the planet’s crust and straight on to Tartarus.

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 05//Initiation Estimated time remaining: 27 Hours, 18 Minutes