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

//WARN

// … command not recognized …

// … directory write-locked …

//WARN

//EXT DEVICE DISCONNECTED

run killjoy#xap

//KILLJOY - by Killteam

//Enter run killjoy#xap -h for list of commands.

run killjoy#xap -h

//-h: view this list, -s: full scan, -q: quick scan, -n: scan without quarantine, -l <filename>: save log

run killjoy#xap -s

//1 virus found and quarantined:

//Worm.Eohippus64

run holcryreader#xap -r

// … resuming operation …

Desert Storm

When we got back to Camp Crazy Horse, they gave us a heroes’ welcome. Well, Bellwether got one, anyway. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied him posing for the crowd of Charger techs and rebel troops, rearing up and flexing his forelegs. Strutting his stuff.

My first impression of him was all wrong. Here, I thought he was the aloof, mysterious old-timer type, but it was increasingly clear to all concerned that he still had a bit of his youth in him. Too much youth. Playing the part of the brooding loner, I stuck to the sidelines, polishing the lenses on my beamcasters with a cloth before snapping the dust covers shut. My levitation had returned about halfway back to the base, along with a splitting headache.

“Figures,” I muttered. “Magic. Always works when you don’t actually need it.”

“A famous writer once said that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

I whipped my head around to see Crookneck standing beside me, sipping a mug of coffee, his forelegs shaky.

“Damn, you people keep sneaking up on me,” I said. “Trying to give me a heart attack?”

Crookneck ignored my complaints. “You used to hear the anti-war types say it all the time. ‘Violence is the easy way out. Do better than that. Be stronger.’ But is it, really? Look all around you, Sergeant. Radar technicians, mechanics, artificial muscle experts, optics technicians, gunnery experts, officers, intel analysts, infantry, grenadiers, mortar crews, artillery crews, not to mention pilots like yourself. All these unique, diverse and specialized roles we’re divided into. War isn’t easy. Not at all. It’s hard fucking work.”

“Wow,” I grinned. “You actually swore.”

Crookneck laughed. “I have my moments.”

I let out a sigh. “It’s even harder to fight a war when you’ve already lost it.”

“Now, now, we’re not in as dire of straits as you think. Come into my office. I’d like to discuss a few things.”

I shrugged my shoulders, slinging my beamcaster over my withers before following the elderly scientist into the base’s depths. We went through passageway after passageway. The halls got darker. The concrete, grimier. The air turned thick and musty, with a tang of rust. We headed into the oldest, least-maintained section of the base. I glanced at my hooves and the filth that’d accumulated on the floor over the years, and after this momentary distraction, I looked up, and Crookneck was gone.

“Squash?” I said. “Hello?”

I peered around the corner of a concrete stanchion, through the open double doors. I was rewarded with a view of what appeared to be an uncharacteristically warm and inviting living room. The pillars supporting the vaulted ceiling were cladded in wood. Throw rugs were strewn about in sufficient numbers to form what was almost a patchwork carpeting over the concrete. The bohemian space reeked of that same heady booze-’n’-cigs aroma from back at the Regence Hotel. It was very much unlike the bare, utilitarian decor in the other regions of the base. There was a sofa and a coffee table littered with various magazines. Curious, I inspected the covers, and what I saw made my eyes go a-rolling. Lad mags and pop science, naturally. There was also a rather conspicuous pile of books next to the sofa.

“Squash?” I called out, looking over my shoulder.

A yellow form burst from the book pile, startling me. Squash’s face was one of sheer, unadulterated ecstasy. “Finally, the drugs are kicking in!”

The old stallion lunged. I looped a foreleg around his neck and gently wrestled him to the floor, like we learned in combatives training.

“What did you take?” I said.

“Acid. Mostly lysergic acid. And coffee! Lots and lots and lots of lovely coffee!”

“You trying to fuck yourself up, or what?”

“Yes, that’s precisely the idea!” he spoke, slobbering all over my foreleg in the process.

I let him stand and he immediately started pacing around the room, his eyes darting every which way.

“No, I don’t mean in a good way,” I said. “I mean the more permanent kind of fucked up. That combination sounds like a recipe for a heart attack. Both of those raise your heart rate and constrict your blood vessels. A kid can handle it, but someone your age? Come on, man.”

“I—“ The engineer blanched. “Damn, you’re right. I never thought about it that way. Ahh, whatever. I’ve been doing this since I was twenty. I’ve got a bit of resistance, else we wouldn’t be talking like this. Me and you and the colorful little gremlins dancing around your hooves, you beautiful mare, you.”

Hoof, meet face. “Uhh, why? Just why? Why do this to yourself?”

“Where do you think we got the inspiration for all these neat toys? It’s a messy enough business crafting cutting-edge weaponry while high. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to do it while sober!”

“Yeah, great. What the hell is this place?”

“I told you, my office.” He waved me over. “Come, come, there is much work to be done!”

Crookneck led me up the spiral stairs to a paper-strewn loft. There were a couple drafting tables in one corner. Astride the tables sat high stacks of books and binders. On the opposite wall, there was a counter with a hotplate that was heating a vacuum coffee maker. Hanging on the wall were propaganda posters from the war, along with a number of framed group photos. Upon closer inspection, the subjects of these photos were scientists, engineers, and Charger crews. Pilots wearing syncsuits, freshly returned from their test-runs and bearing the sort of shit-eating grin that can only come from putting a state-of-the-art war machine through its paces.

“Who are these ponies?” I said, pointing to one photo with a shifty, restless-looking pilot in the lineup. “I recognize Sierra in this one, but none of the rest.”

“Sergeant, you stand in Test Site 7, today known as Camp Crazy Horse. This very facility was where we designed the prototype Mirage units. Our manufacturing facilities and parts suppliers shipped us the components from abroad, but the final builds were all assembled and tested here, under the utmost secrecy. That includes yours, of course.” Crookneck waved a hoof over the photos, a sullen look descending over his face. “Test pilots. Engineers. I knew these ponies well. Regretfully, most of them will not be joining us today, or ever.”

“I’m sorry.” Pangs of contrition gripped my heart. These were my comrades, too. Even if I didn’t know them, I had once relied on them.

“Not to worry.” He sniffled. “I’m at least sixty percent confident that we’ll be able to find the Empress and free her from captivity with the forces we have. Or will soon have, I suppose.”

“So, I bet you know a thing or two about the history of Chargers.” I hoped to take Crookneck’s mind off of darker things. It was never a good idea to let someone who was high as a kite start ruminating on the bad times. They’d get over-emotional. “They never told us in training where the idea to build ‘em originally came from, except for the usual boilerplate about the unveiling of the very first Charger. They’ve been a mainstay of our forces for centuries, but no textbook I’ve ever read has ever explained where the original concept came from. I was hoping you might shed some light on that.”

Crookneck smiled. “You know of the first Charger, right? The example from which all others are derived.”

“In 1305 SSC, the Twilight Conclave presented the Sword Bayonet H4 to a crowd of cheering onlookers.” I recited it from memory, reverting to that same patronizing tone of voice my instructors had used. “The war had been going for a couple centuries at that point. We didn’t have anything that could counter the Confederacy’s assault walkers. We rushed them with tanks and had pegasus Stormtroopers entangle their legs with steel cable, but it wasn’t enough. We didn’t have anything that could go toe-to-toe with one on the ground. Back then, separate Charger weight classes didn’t exist. The Sword Bayonet would’ve been classed as a Rouncey or middleweight Charger, if there was such a category at the time.”

“Exactly right,” Crookneck said. “We took captured samples of superior Confederate technology and combined it with our knowledge of magic. The fusion of the two produced a magtech vehicle that exceeded the limitations of both. It took decades of research and considerable effort from the scientists of the time. There were major contributions from the Mother of Magtech herself, Twilight Sparkle.” Crookneck withdrew some folded, yellowed sheets of paper from a filing cabinet and set them out flat on a drafting table. “I had these printouts made from the old, archived files a few decades back when I was just starting out. It’s the drawings and technical data for the Sword Bayonet. Take a look!”

Gazing into the prints, I soon realized how little I knew about mechanical engineering. If one were to give me a wrench, I could fix a bicycle easily enough. If someone asked me the fine details about how a Charger actually worked, I wouldn’t be able to give them anything more substantial than a basic overview.

The cross-sectional views of each component revealed layers of complexity that I was completely unfamiliar with. There were wireways and bearings and structural members forming inscrutable arrays that crisscrossed the sheet. There were so many parts, no one engineer could hope to keep track of them all.

“It looks pretty advanced to me,” I said. “Almost like I could take one into combat today.” I smiled uneasily as Crookneck raised an eyebrow at that statement.

“Looks can be deceiving.” Crookneck flipped through the prints and pointed out various features of the ancient Charger. “The H4 had no Anima System. Every part of it was manually controlled. The actuators weren’t duostrand. Instead, hydraulic gear pumps provided motive power. As a result, the unit’s legs weren’t afforded the flexibility or range of motion of artificial muscle. Those early Chargers could adjust their gait for rough terrain but couldn’t handle too steep of grades or too uneven of surfaces. Modern-day Coursers like yours are much faster and more flexible.”

Squash snatched up a small controller in his hooves and clicked on a nearby holo-tank. A full-color image was projected in mid-air. Archive footage of the Sword Bayonet. As he said, its movements were more rigid and clumsier than any modern Charger. The dynamic gait system struggled on hills, the legs flexing and shifting the unit’s center of gravity as it scrambled to gain purchase. It looked more like a giant robot and less like a living thing.

I frowned. “Huh. What did it have for weapons?”

“Back then, infantry beamcasters were still rough around the edges. Vehicle-mounted models weren’t quite ready for primetime. The tech didn’t scale up as well as we thought it would.” The elderly engineer pointed to the head of the Charger on the diagram. “The Sword Bayonet was equipped with a Magforcer in the head, as the sole secondary armament. It was also outfitted with two back-mounted autoloading one-oh-five-millimeter guns.

“The big guns had a reload time of about three seconds, so with alternating fire, it could put a shell downrange every second and a half, but the burst limit was ten rounds a minute, to extend the barrel life. The tertiary weapons consisted of ordinary fifty-caliber machine guns in four turreted pods on the hull, providing 360-degree coverage against enemy infantry. Those had an early auto-targeting system which, while very accurate at tracking life signs, was responsible for some fairly infamous blue-on-blue incidents due to spotty IFF capabilities.”

“Magforcer?” I said. “What’s that?”

“They were before your time, and mine, for that matter. It was an early type of spell locus that greatly enhanced certain kinds of arcane-type magic. It required a lot of specialized training to handle. A skilled unicorn could use it to project powerful pulses of sheer levitation force. Enough to send armored men flying, or flip over a battle tank. An especially masterful pilot could even use it to manifest weapons of arcane force. Giant lances made from magic. Siege crossbows structured from congealed light with bolts made from the same. Things like that.”

“That sounds kick-ass!” I was giddy, grinning from ear to ear. “Why don’t we use ‘em anymore?”

A worried frown developed on Crookneck’s face. “Well, that’s because we found that if a pilot burned out while using one, the sudden arcane tidal forces could actually rip the head of a Charger clean off. That was the best-case scenario. Sometimes, it took the legs off, too. When that happened, usually, you had to call a cleanup crew to hose what was left of the pilot out of the interior of the cockpit. Magforcer feedback accidents turned good ponies, even veteran pilots, into a spray of tomato paste.”

I blanched. “Oh.”

“The descendants of the magforcer are still in use today; they’re the spell locuses found on every Charger. And before you ask, no, they don’t make unicorns explode.”

“Well, that’s good to hear.” I nodded, swallowing the lump of horror that had formed in my throat.

“You’re an Illusion expert, right? I would assume so, given that cloaking is your specialty, and your Charger is equipped with an Illusion spell locus.”

“That’s right.”

“As a unicorn, you should know of the six schools of magic in the Modern Craft,” Crookneck said.

“Arcane, Elemental, Light, Dark, Order, and Chaos,” I rattled off with practiced ease. “Three pairs of opposites. How did ol’ Cicatrice used to say it? Arcane magic’s how you get your credential, and Elemental arts are raw nature’s potential. Light forms the blessed power to heal, while Dark is the curse that conceals. Order makes a firm and stalwart companion, and Chaos leads one into wild abandon.”

Squash laughed. “What a sucky rhyme. Did Cicatrice torture all his students with that fourth-grader garbage, or just you?”

“All of us.” I blushed and scratched my head sheepishly.

“Wow. Well, as I’m sure you know even better than I do, Storm, Illusion magic is a combination of Order and Dark. Probably one of the least dangerous kinds of dark magic to use, actually. It won’t make you go mad, at least.”

“That’s what our teachers said, yeah.”

“Well, for each and every possible combination of two of the six schools of magic, there exists a spell locus. There are also six master types of locus for enhancing magic deriving purely from one of each school. Twenty-one permutations in all. What we found was that the failure of the Magforcer was due to our incomplete understanding of magic at the time.

“The Magforcer was very similar in some respects to a Pure Arcane Master Locus, but ponies were being trained to use it to summon constructs of light. Summoning is a discipline forged by the combination of Elemental and Order magic. In other words, the Magforcer was dangerously out of alignment with the operator’s magic signature, similar to an untuned locus. This is what created the feedback effects seen during spell failure.”

“Wait a minute, Squash. Are you saying that any modern spell locus can make your head blow up if it’s not tuned properly?”

“No, no, no.” Crookneck waved a hoof dismissively. “Have you been listening to a single word I’ve said? It’s impossible. Our predecessors worked with teams of skilled enchanters. They designed all sorts of safeties to prevent that from happening. In the event of spell failure, a modern locus would detect feedback precipitation within milliseconds. At that point, the micro-controller would trip an override and open the breaker, cutting power to the locus instantly. The worst you get is a splitting headache, or maybe a nosebleed. In short, a locus is somewhat like an artificial unicorn. It takes electrical power from a Charger’s reactor and converts it into raw magic that the pilot can direct with their own. It augments your spells.

“You see, unicorns are far more efficient at turning exertion, or work in a thermal energy sense, into magic. It takes many megawatts of electricity to accomplish with a locus, electro-magical transducer, or diagrammatic engine what takes a unicorn only some tens of joules and their own natural metabolism. However, the reactors found in Chargers have more than enough power to spare, efficiency be damned. What made ponies turn into a shower of steaming gore after experiencing spell failure while using a Magforcer was nothing more and nothing less than them playing magical tug-of-war with, well, a hundred-megawatt polywell reactor. Ker-splat.”

Crookneck’s casual description of it made me shudder and gag. That would have been a terrible fate for any Charger pilot. I silently gave thanks to my predecessors for the sacrifices they made to advance the tech to the point where it was safe to use.

Something in the corner of my eye caught my attention. On the other drafting table, there were blueprints for what looked like a new type of Destrier. I squinted at the scale and the dimensions for the machine and quickly realized that it was twice the size of any Destrier that ever existed.

“What the hell is that?” I said, pointing a hoof at the drawing.

“That?” Crookneck tilted his head quizzically. “Oh, it’s something I doodled a while back.”

I frowned. I could tell he wasn’t being sincere with me. This was no doodle. This was the result of months or even years of careful design work and re-iteration.

“No, seriously,” I said. “What is it?”

The engineer’s expression was grim. “Empress Sparkle and the Twelve Magisters put forth some specifications for a new type of Charger. We were undecided on what to call them; a Super-Destrier, or a Brabant. Two hundred metric tons or more. Too big and heavy to move with existing transport ships. We would’ve had to design new ones. It’s a super-heavy assault unit. Something for breaking Confederate siege lines and dealing with their Behemoths.”

I was slack-jawed. “How close were we to building these things?”

“First prototype’s scheduled date of completion was about a year ago. For obvious reasons, it was never finished. As you can see in the drawings, it was supposed to mount heavy rotary railguns that were impossible to fit on anything smaller. The biggest problem with railguns with a muzzle energy over ninety megajoules is dealing with the recoil. That’s doubly true for fully automatic examples. Our recoil mitigation tech based on a levitation-enchanted diagrammatic engine kept running into trouble. It ended up delaying the whole project.”

Squash monologued in great detail about his Chargers, but there was something quite off about his mannerisms, especially the way his eyes seemed to track things that weren’t there. I found it amazing how he could maintain his composure so well while hallucinating.

I frowned. “What’s the problem with the gun, exactly?”

“Well, Sergeant, sometimes, the recoil mitigation system would hold the guns and their components too steady. This would jam the feed mechanism.”

“That’s silly.” I pointed to my horn. “It’s like unicorn magic, right? Just restrict the field to the non-moving parts.”

“That’s the problem. Controlling the field precisely and having it grab onto the support frame itself was no issue. That is, it wasn’t a problem when the weapons were in their inert, disarmed state. As soon as they were armed and then discharged, the electromagnetic interference from the guns disrupted the extremely sensitive levitation field controller. The fields started to roam and seize whatever they wanted, including the linkless feed system.

“One stationary live-fire test went so poorly, the asymmetric forces of the warped levitation field caused the mount for the rotary railgun prototype to tear itself from the test stand. Luckily, it ripped the power cables out when the gun flew uprange. Before it stopped firing, it also put a few holes in the reinforced concrete ceiling of our test bunker. The projectiles came down in a populated area four hundred kilometers away.”

My eyes widened. “Oh. Shit.”

“Shit is right, Sergeant. Deep and especially fragrant shit. The newspaper clippings adorned our bulletin board for months afterward. One very surprised mare had the contents of her shopping cart scattered around the entire supermarket. She told the reporters that her eleven-month-old son had leapt out of the foal seat and she’d gone halfway across the store chasing after him. Then, an explosion shook the building.

“When she investigated, the roof had caved in and there was a crater where her cart was. No injuries or deaths resulted from this incident, but think about the mess it would’ve made if her kid was still in that cart.”

“A crater? Are you serious?”

“Very much so, I’m afraid. You have no idea what kind of a PR disaster that was for us. Rounds escaping a test range? Completely unacceptable. There was an internal investigation, and a few of my best technicians nearly lost their jobs over that one. A couple of them got transferred off the project, somewhere else, working on things less volatile.”

“That’s odd.” I tapped a hoof to my chin. “I thought railgun projectiles were non-explosive?”

“A tungsten dart traveling at seventeen times the speed of sound carries with it the energy of an anti-tank missile. An impact against solid matter releases that energy with a flash of light, heat, and a shockwave, like chemical explosives. If she’d been standing in the same aisle, the fragmentation alone would’ve killed her deader than a doornail. After that whole debacle, some joker spray-painted Grocery Getter on the receiver of the prototype gun.”

I laughed. “I know this probably sounds strange coming from a Charger pilot, but what’s the purpose of such a powerful weapon to begin with? It sounds like it belongs on a cruiser, if anything.”

“Straight to the point, eh?” Crookneck smirked. “We designed these guns to penetrate the armor of a Behemoth at a distance of a hundred kilometers. A burst from the rotary railguns would saturate an area the size of a hoofball field at that range. As long as we had precise coordinates to work with, a hit was practically guaranteed. It would only take a few coordinated volleys to put the target out of commission for good.”

It seemed bizarrely excessive to me, somehow. There should’ve been a simpler solution for dealing with our enemy’s largest walking machines.

“How about going with a standard, breech-loader railgun and closing in to take a precise, direct shot? Why bother with a multi-barrel, rotary design if it produces unmanageable recoil?”

“We thought of that, at first. Our simulations showed that counter-artillery fire from the average Behemoth would have crippled the Super-Destrier nine times out of ten, sometimes before they even had a chance to deploy the guns. No. We needed enough distance to evade early detection, and complete target saturation.”

“Airstrikes?”

“Impossible. Behemoths have long-range surface-to-air missiles, in-air SONAR, infrared warning systems, and anti-stealth radar using entangled photons. Our aircraft were always shot down long before they got close enough to bomb them. Only tasking ships with orbital beamcaster bombardment proved even remotely effective, but behemoth deployments are often paired with orbital fleet cover for that specific reason. Can’t quite knock ‘em out without getting through their ships, first.”

“Dude. Drone swarms.”

“Nope. Behemoths also have a very advanced ECM and anti-drone countermeasure system. They also have mortars that fire non-nuclear EMP charges into the air. The damn things airburst and wipe out the electronics on drones from hundreds of meters away. We had teams experimenting with hardened drones, but it was all tentative stuff.”

“Why not counteract the recoil with a pyrojet?” I offered with a chuckle.

Crookneck froze, dumbfounded. “What?”

“Put one or more pyrojets on the gun assembly, facing in the opposite direction and producing an equal counter-recoil thrust on the same axis as the railgun itself, and there you have it. Recoilless railguns. Maybe have the Charger’s own pyrojets chip in, too. Angle them up to provide downforce and keep the Charger’s feet on the ground when the gun array is level and in direct-fire mode. When the gun is elevated to hit distant targets, angle them down to prevent the recoil from overwhelming the joints and duostrand and crushing the legs flat.”

Crookneck’s eyes were wide as he worked his jaw silently. “Sergeant, has anyone told you that you’re a damned genius? That’s crazy. And it just might work, too. I’ll have to draw it up!”

A pyrojet-based counter-recoil device. I had no idea what the hell I was talking about, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and in his semi-addled state, Crookneck seemed to like it. The more I stopped and thought about it, it was almost like something from a comic book. A rotary gun facing one way, and a rocket facing the other. No subtlety at all. Like an ADHD foal’s crayon drawing.

Equestrian Chargers came in three weight classes. The Courser, the Rouncey, and the Destrier. Coursers, like mine, were light, agile, twenty to forty-ton machines. They were designed for reconnaissance and penetrating deep behind enemy lines. Rounceys were the most common. Middleweight, fifty to seventy-ton Chargers that formed an army’s backbone, augmenting tank platoons with direct-fire support. Destriers were the largest, slowest and most heavily armed, for when you needed to call in the big guns. Monstrosities massing from eighty to a hundred tons, carrying heavy artillery like what you’d find on a starship.

None of them were as big, as heavy, or as slow, as a Confederate Behemoth; massive quadrupedal or hexapod spider tanks that towered over thirty meters high, massed hundreds or even thousands of metric tons, and bristled with guns and missiles of all shapes and sizes, with advanced targeting and detection suites that knew exactly where to direct them. The only way for a Charger to stop a Behemoth was with hit-and-run attacks. Otherwise, we spotted for the orbital artillery that would deal it the killing blow.

They had smaller, bipedal walkers, too. Goliaths, they called them. They came in various models. The Ifrit, with its sloping torso, plasma pulsecannon, and barrier-demolishing plasma sword, was the most common. Goliaths weren’t much of a threat to even the most basic Charger. A skilled enemy pilot could catch us unawares every now and then, but most of the time, they used numeric superiority to try and swamp us. Most Goliaths featured tracking pods and laser designators that allowed them to operate as glorified forward-observer units, their armaments serving to stall us just long enough for Confederate aircraft to carpet-bomb us.

Both Goliaths and Behemoths were classified by the Confederacy as Assault Walkers. The earliest Chargers were partly derived from captured and reverse-engineered examples of AWs. However, over the course of the past millennium, our technology had evolved along entirely different lines. In many ways, our tech surpassed theirs.

For what our Chargers lacked in armor and firepower compared to a Behemoth, they were almost supernaturally fast and agile, leaping through the air and sprinting across the plains with their pyrojet booster exhausts flaring like a pegasus’s wings. But here, right before me, was a design for a Charger that could have taken even a Behemoth in a stand-up fight. I shook my head. If only the war had gone on for a few more years, we would’ve had weapons that could have turned the tide. If only. The very idea made me restless.

“My Charger,” I muttered, gathering up a copy of the laminated parts list from a nearby table. “When can we go hunt down these parts? Because I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting real fucking sick of hoofing it everywhere like some grunt.”

“There’s a lot more walking where that came from, Sergeant. You’ll have access to our captured vehicles and support from the Bull Runner for the insertion phase of most operations. The rest of the time, you’re going to be infiltrating and securing areas on the hoof before we can bring in our heavy equipment to haul the goods out of there.”

“Wait.” I paused. “If you guys have all these technical drawings here, why are the techs out there scanning bits of my Charger’s old armor plating? Why bother reverse-engineering them from scratch?”

Squash shook his head. “We have some old preliminary drawings here, but we don’t actually have the full, final blueprints for the Mirage. After the LRIP run, no copies of the full prints were kept here. Too sensitive. The Mirage has a lot of classified features. We wrote the prints to holocrystal cards and shipped them out under armed guard, to be kept under lock and key in the secure archives of the Twilight Tower.”

“So why don’t we go get them?” I shrugged.

“Nopony goes there anymore unless they have a death wish. CSF patrols comb the ruins for technology to ransack, and there are regular firefights between them and the Vandals. We’ve intercepted enemy reports that state that there are also automated defense systems at the base of the Twilight Tower and in its sublevels that have gone haywire and recognize everything and everyone as hostile. Even the cleomanni are having a hard time unlocking our secrets.”

“Hey, Squash!” a reedy voice of a mare issued from the entryway, the syllables drawn-out and drunken.

I peered over the balcony. Standing in the double-door entrance was a unicorn mare with a stringy auburn mane, a dark gray coat, a bright red scarf dangling from her neck and a green beanie atop her head. Her tattered, fleece-lined bomber jacket bore a dizzying array of pins and patches, some more obscene than others. She looked like a hobo.

I face-hoofed. “Oh no.”

“Oh yeah!” Sierra blew a bubble with her chewing gum and then popped it. “It’s me. The one and only. I heard you were still kicking, so I came to check up on ya’. See if the stories I’ve been hearing were really true. Did you assholes actually crash-land a Confederate patrol boat out in the desert? And you’re still alive after that? Wow.”

“Yes, Corporal.” I rolled my eyes. “They left me all alone, out in the middle of nowhere, with a broken leg. In a burning wreck. And the ponies who were with me are MIA. Still a little sore over that. Any other stupid questions?”

“Yeah. And as of today, it ain’t Corporal anymore. I’m back up to Sergeant. You must be on your ninth life by now. How long can your luck hold, Storm? If you still have some extra to spare, can you give me some?”

“Fuck you, I ain’t got any!” I held up the laminated card and pointed to the list. “Maybe if you can come up with some of these parts for my poor Dust Devil, I’ll see if I can send some good vibes your way, you filthy-ass gypsy.”

“Don’t be such a downer all the time, Storm. Geez. Too bad about Dust Devil, though. Maybe I could use her for parts.”

I was furious. “If you lay one hoof on my Charger, Sergeant Sierra, you’ll be entering a world of pain.”

“I was kidding, Stormy.” Sierra held up her hooves like she didn’t want any trouble. “Bellwether already gave me the rundown, and I’m ready and on-hoof to provide support for your salvage ops. I’ve got Scofflaw with me, and he’s as pumped as I am to rain hot death on some Confederate fuckballs.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Maybe the Confederate troops will take one look at him and go blind.”

“That’s kinda the whole idea. Put their eyes out with some frag.” Sierra chewed idly. “You wanna hang, guys? I’ve got the good shit.”

“More contraband, Sierra?” I pinched the bridge of my snout with a fetlock. “Remember what happened last time?”

“Hey, do you wanna, or not?”

“I will!” Crookneck waved a hoof.

As he started down the stairs, I reached out and grabbed hold of his shoulder, lowering my voice to the level of a whisper. “Do you know how she got busted down to Corporal and almost kicked out of the Army?”

“How?”

“She was high on some kind of synthetic cleomanni drug cocktail that the Zinsar sell out on the frontier. Well, they’d cut it with something bad, catching her a little unprepared. She was also drunk off her ass, and after stumbling into our transport ship’s mess hall—“

“Galley,” Crookneck corrected.

“Right. The galley. After stumbling into the galley on our transport, swearing incoherently at the top of her lungs, she jumped up on a table, pulled off her uniform, and went.” I gestured for emphasis. “Right there. In full view of everyone. Numbers one and two. Both fucking barrels. Oh, and then she upchucked whatever off-brand floor cleaner she’d been drinking, too. Spewed from both ends simultaneously. I didn’t think it was possible for a pony to have that much fluid in their whole fucking body. I watched Barrage, who famously had an iron stomach, nearly lose his lunch from the smell.”

“I—uhh—too much information, maybe?” Crookneck’s face turned as red as a beet with embarrassment-by-proxy.

“And then, get this. The fucking Commander walks in, of all people, and he sees this shit, and he turns around and walks right out. Didn’t say anything. Hell, he didn’t even look perturbed or angry. Just, completely nonplussed, like he was expecting it to happen sooner or later. A few hours later, she’d come to her senses and had the chance to wash up. She was still shaking and crying like a nervous wreck after she realized how big of an ass she made of herself. The Commander called her into his quarters, and bam.” I clapped my hooves together. “Disciplinary action. Busted a rank, not to mention everything else they made her do. For one thing, cleaning all the toilets on the ship for the rest of her deployment. Oh, and running the fucking floor buffer. Everywhere.”

“Good grief.”

“She got a psych-eval, too. Came up clean, surprisingly, but they warned her that if she brought any more dope onboard, that’d be it for her. She’d be discharged from the Army. Pretty much the only reason why she stuck around is because Charger pilots are worth our weight in gold, especially with the Army’s dwindling numbers towards the end of the war. If we weren’t so desperate for skilled pilots, she would’ve gotten discharged on the spot. Hell, the whole damn military’s had a drug problem and lax policies for decades. There’s only so much shit a pony’s brain can take before they start seeking alternative methods of relief, but Sierra takes it a little too fucking far.”

“Well, she didn’t get booted out, and that’s good enough for me.”

I shook my head. “Squash, I’m warning you, right now. You do shit with her, you’re going down a dark path. Make sure it’s just cannabis, and not fucking cleomanni urinal cakes or whatever the fuck that bitch is crushing up and snorting now. I don’t want to come down there and see her chewing your face off.”

“I’m a grown adult, Storm. I can handle my mind-altering substances, thank you very much.”

“You see this?” I waved a hoof towards Sierra, where she was still swaying idly in the doorway on the lower floor, chewing her gum. “Do you see this little fucking nihilist? This is how far a pony can fall when they turn their back on their destiny. This is about as slumped as a pony can get.”

Crookneck shook off my grasp, sighing loudly. “Maybe it’s you who turned your back on her, Sergeant.”

“The way you talk about her, it’s almost like you’re in love. Wait a minute.” I broke into peals of nervous laughter. “Holy shit. Have you two been fucking?”

The wrinkly stallion grinned wider than I imagined possible for a pony’s head. “Maybe?”

“Oh, for the love of fuck.” I shook my head in mock-dismay. “I did not need that mental image.”

He wandered down after her while I pressed my lips into a thin, tight line and shook my head in disapproval. The pair trotted off eagerly, both ready to get stoned out of their minds and fool around. Sierra doubled back and waved, leaning so that only her forward half was visible through the door frame. “Byeee.” She dragged out the vowel to the point where I wanted to strangle her. “You’re no fun, Sarge.”

I raced down the stairs, shouting after them into the hall as they galloped off into the distance. “Don’t forget to use a rubber, Squash! Your dick’ll fall off!”

There was no reply. I huffed. The war had done this to us, towards the end. To hear my parents tell it, decades ago, before I was born, the majority of ponies had never touched a controlled substance in their life. But that was then. These days, many of us would rather retreat into chemical bliss than face reality. Our species was almost gone. Hanging by a tiny thread. The reality was painful. Immensely so. We’d practically allowed narcotics to consume our society. In some ways, the alternative—facing the end of all ponykind while sober and panicking—was so much worse.

Ponies were never hunter-gatherers. We were never that individualistic and prideful. It was our nature as herd-dwellers to flee from violence, not seek it out. We were maladapted to warfare, especially genocidal warfare where the noose tightened around our species’ neck daily. Since we were culturally and psychologically incapable of comprehending what was happening to us, we medicated away the fear, one way or another.

There was never a push for more law enforcement to tamp down on the rising drug crisis. Our state police, in all their utilitarian cynicism, figured out that the cost to society would be greater if they were busy stamping out empire-wide riots from panicking, terrified crowds who feared for their imminent doom, so they let ponies medicate themselves into a stupor. Cleomanni smugglers and opportunists took advantage of the deliberately lax policing. They flooded the market with heroin and fentanyl, among other things. The irony was palpable. I gritted my teeth with rage. Those satyr bastards sold us the very same drugs we needed to escape the pain of what they were doing to us. They lined their pockets with our suffering.

The cleomanni weren’t the sole participants in this seedy sort of economy, however. Out in the fringe colonies, back before the Confederacy wiped most of them out, lots of ponies grew fields of opium and coca. Nothing else offered a good enough value per hectare and the colonies would fail if they didn’t bring in the dough. Any food or supplies they needed, they could buy it from gray market traders while selling off their poppies and coca leaves to itinerant cleomanni for refinement and processing. It was only when our nobles sponsored a colony that they switched to things like cotton, or actual food crops.

And then, there was the matter of Sierra herself. Some ponies called her Hissy Fit, but not to her face. She earned that nickname from when she’d accidentally left her mic keyed in the middle of a battle. She blasted an open channel with a continuous string of profanity while slaughtering an entire Confederate mechanized infantry unit with her Charger’s unconventional ordnance. She insisted the button had become stuck after being gummed up with some kind of filth.

Sierra’s Rouncey was every Charger technician’s nightmare. Scofflaw was a cobbled-together, chimeric mishmash of parts from a half-dozen different Charger models, festooned with choice bits of Equestrian and Confederate vehicle wreckage. Its loadout included improvised weaponry like old mortars and volley guns. Fire control cables hung loosely from the Charger’s legs where they converged on the cockpit and entered the brain of the system. The Charger’s haphazard armaments were just as likely to explode as they were to launch anything downrange with any measure of success. Sierra had customized it herself, over the years, from stuff she’d taken from the battlefield.

They’d written Sierra up for her failure to follow regulations countless times, but the brass went easy on her. More often than not, her bizarre Charger worked, and it worked splendidly. At one point, the Twilight Conclave were even interested in dismantling Scofflaw to figure out why it worked, because as far as they could tell, it shouldn’t. Some theorized that some form of sympathetic magic was the only thing holding the fearsome contraption together. Sierra’s Charger was simultaneously a devastating war machine and also a walking memorial to the vehicle crews, both friend and foe alike, whose sundered machines contributed a tithe of spare parts to it.

What Scofflaw lacked in anti-armor firepower, he more than made up for with the assortment of 80mm mortars and 40mm grenade launchers Sierra had welded to the outside of her machine. Scofflaw could turn any battlefield into cheese with all the frag rounds it spat. Sierra kept the infantry too busy and too suppressed to even think to stop and lock on to us with shoulder-fired anti-tank guided missiles. She played an essential role in my squad. I hated to admit it, but she was an asset.

“What are you doing up here, all alone?”

I froze. I recognized that smooth, slick voice that would make any mare’s skin crawl. I had to still myself, after a moment. My heart was flopping around like a bucket of fish and I was shaking in my boots. The temperature of the room seemed to drop by a few degrees.

A bookcase shimmered and morphed, almost appearing to melt into the floor. In its place stood a suave, indigo-coated stallion. He flicked a hoof at his forelock, arranging it perfectly with the rest of his pink mane.

I saluted crisply. “Lieutenant, sir, I was gathering myself for the next op. Dust Devil’s in no shape to be deployed, yet. We’ve done all we can, but we need some spare parts. I was consulting with Professor Squash to see if we had a plan on how to source those parts. Before I could be suitably briefed, I was interrupted by the arrival of Sergeant Sierra.”

“Ahh, yes.” He grinned. “Don’t you just hate it, Sergeant?” He circled around behind me as I held the salute, before craning his neck over my shoulder. “Don’t you hate it when ponies have fun?”

“No, sir!” I tried not to flinch away from the intrusion on my personal space.

“Really? Define, fun, Sergeant.”

“Fun is priority number one, sir!” My hooves quavered with fear, but I held the salute.

Night Terror smiled in that serpentine way of his. “Very good. So, it seems you do remember. At ease. Walk with me for a bit. Bellwether and his scouts have narrowed down some intel on a possible salvage site. Briefing’s in five.”

I did as directed, falling into formation with him as we both strode out of the lab. I left Crookneck’s copy of the parts checklist behind, since I already had one in my footlocker back in my quarters.

The Lieutenant was a master of hypnosis. His Selene-class Destrier was designed to augment his powers with a spell locus attuned to his blighted magical signature. Night Terror’s magic, his spells—they were a perversion of everything that Equestrian magic stood for. His magic didn’t work the way mine did. I bent light to make myself invisible, even on the move. He fucked with people’s heads to make them see things that weren’t there. Illusion spells weren’t inherently evil, as long as they were used solely to conceal oneself or alter the appearance of objects. But manipulating minds? That crossed a boundary. Full-on dark magic, like the kind used in the Old Crystal Empire.

We all knew how to do it. We’d studied under the watchful eye of the Ninth Magister, Cicatrice. That ill-tempered coot withheld next to nothing from his curriculum. Cicatrice himself could perform the darkest and vilest of dark magic spells with contemptuous ease, but he never came across as crazy. Lecherous and cantankerous, yes, but not exactly evil. Nevertheless, most of his students consciously avoided delving too deep. Without tremendous self-control and emotional stability, dark magic slowly warped you into a monster. An egomaniac, toying with the lives of others without any guilt, and certainly without any remorse.

More than anything, I pitied the Lieutenant. Night Terror had sacrificed his equinity for an unquestioned edge in combat. Psychological warfare was his field of expertise, and fear was his most potent weapon. As for me, I much preferred to stick to chemical warfare. There were far, far worse ways to kill a person than with poison. With nerve gas bomblets, at least you didn’t have to worm your way into your victims’ minds as they died, or share directly in some measure of their fear and pain. Dark magic required both. If you practiced it regularly, you had to learn how to cope with its spell resonance effects, or you would go absolutely mad.

I pawed at the deck nervously. “Sir, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s the supply situation? How is it that Camp Crazy Horse is able to maintain its independence from the rest of the resistance network?”

“I dunno, you tell me, Sergeant. You’ve been here a whole month already. This is some really basic stuff you’re asking me about.”

“Yeah, a whole month confined to the medical ward.” I idly scratched the back of my head with my right hoof. “I feel like a mushroom. Kept in the dark and fed shit.”

“Very well, then. The base runs off a small fusion reactor and we have enough rations, munitions and spare parts stockpiled to keep the fight going for another year or so. We scavenge what we can, so we don’t have to dig into our reserves as much. Charger parts are a bit more specialized than the regular, run-of-the-mill spares, as you know.”

I nodded. “It was a bitch for the mechanics to requisition the stuff when we had intact supply lines, to say nothing of how things are now.”

“That changes tonight,” Night Terror said.

After a few minutes, we arrived at a sparsely appointed, dimly lit room with folding seats arrayed around a U-shaped table. There was a ceiling-mounted projector displaying presentation slides. A far cry from a proper holotank or scryer, but it’d do in a pinch. A few of the infantry team leaders and Charger technicians had already shown up, as did Agent Bellwether, who sighed and rolled his eyes at our tardiness.

“Good evening, ladies and gents,” Bellwether said. “You all know who I am. The gal who just walked into the room accompanied by Lieutenant Terror is Sergeant Desert Storm, who recently escaped from Ahriman Station after a failed raid by Captain Riverdance’s cell.”

“Fuckin’ hell,” one reddish-coated unicorn mare with a cutie mark of a meteor piped up. “You’re lucky to be alive, ma’am.”

“Stow it, Corporal. Sergeant Storm, starting from your left and going counterclockwise to your right are Corporal Shooting Star and Sergeants Sagebrush, Placid Gale and Cinderblock. You already know Wind Shear and the rest of the techs.”

I glanced to my right. The first one, an earth pony stallion, had his gaze fixed straight ahead, not meeting mine. His ruddy green coat was suggestive of a swamp creature. His oversized helmet seemed to sink over his eyes, and he was chewing on something which proved to be tobacco a spit later. Something about the way he carried himself, one could easily tell that he’d killed more than his fair share of satyrs. He probably turned a few of them into fish food with the combat knife he carried in a sheath on his shoulder.

Next was a pegasus mare with a delicate white coat, appearing almost translucent. In her haunted and enigmatic expression, I detected years of trauma and loss. She looked at me keenly, her eyes filled with distrust. She was a wisp of a thing, her limbs appearing thin and fragile at first. On closer inspection, her entire body was wrapped in whip-tight cords of tendon and muscle, ready to lash out and crush a cleomanni’s bones to dust. She looked mildly unstable. Perhaps a few missed doses away from snapping and rampaging through the base. If our situation weren’t so dire, she probably would’ve been medically discharged and sectioned.

Third was the grayish mountain of rippling muscle named Cinderblock. He had the buck-toothed, bespectacled face of a nerd, but a body like his namesake. I had never seen a fellow unicorn so powerfully built in my life. He looked almost uncomfortable and uncertain with himself, how he towered over the rest. He wore a customized communications helmet. He tapped it every now and then and twisted various dials to adjust the frequency, listening for any radio chatter that might rise above the static. A futile, obsessive gesture, given that we were technically underground, inside the canyon wall.

Sitting across from me were Wind Shear and his techs, kind of sitting back from the table, hunkered over in the shadows. I blinked a few times, confused with how they’d chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of us. Corporal Shooting Star, who sat to my left, was an average-sized unicorn mare like myself. There was something dangerous looking about her that I couldn’t quite put my hoof on. All of them looked like they’d kill without hesitation, but in this one’s eyes, I saw what might’ve been the characteristic glint of true bloodlust.

Bellwether cleared his throat. “Sergeant Storm here has a prototype Mirage A202 Courser-weight Charger. That asset could help us turn the tide. A machine and a pilot that can go invisible would allow us to conduct raids on targets where a frontal assault would never work. It would also allow us to expand our recon-in-force ops with extra firepower and mobility.

“Unfortunately, her machine has spent the past few years sunken in muddy water after the transport carrying it was shot down and crashed in a swamp. It needs a shit-ton of damaged parts to be replaced before it can be brought up to operational status. To all team leaders assembled here, I am forming a special task force, and you’re on it. From this day forth, I will be assigning you and your squads on high-risk salvage operations. When the Mirage is combat-ready, you can return to your normal duties.

“Today, at 0400 hours, our scouts happened upon some intel that could prove of use. After Commodore Cake’s commandeered patrol boat crashed in the desert a month ago, the Confederacy sent in salvage teams to recover the most valuable components. Fusion reactor parts and fuel, particle accelerators, communications hardware, computer components. Whatever they could get their grubby mitts on. These parts could be repurposed, modified, or used as scrap material by our techs to replace and possibly even upgrade damaged components on the Mirage.”

Bellwether advanced the slide, showing us a technical drawing of a Confederate ship. The same sort of ship that I’d almost met a fiery end in. The diagram showed detailed cutaways of the ship’s decks, both in profile and in plan view. Tiny symbols represented the locations of airlocks, bulkheads with airtight doors, firefighting gear, the bridge layout, and all the engineering spaces and their relevant equipment.

I hadn’t taken the opportunity to fully tour the interior of the one we’d hitched back to Equestria, but they were a lot larger on the inside than I’d previously thought. A pang of regret came over me. Perhaps they really were large enough to accommodate a rather substantial load of rescued prisoners. Then again, if we’d plowed into the desert with a full load of ponies in the back, the wreckage of the ship would’ve been a charnel house.

Bellwether tapped a hoof against the projection. “Cleomanni Vigilance-class patrol boats of the type used by the CSF are deliberately built under-spec, to reduce maintenance costs and to allow for lengthy counter-insurgency operations without breaking the bank. However, just because they’re relatively cheap to construct and maintain, that doesn’t mean that they’re absolutely dirt-cheap. Nothing on a starship ever is.

“Every single one of them represents an investment of three hundred million FTU credits. That’s thirty-eight million bits, or about the cost of two average Chargers, or between four and ten fighter craft, or a couple hundred main battle tanks. Included in their standard complement of equipment are a set of sophisticated phased-array radar systems. They’re as good as anything we use on our Chargers, and, as luck would have it, they’re right around the same size and output power level.”

“Convenient,” I muttered, crossing my forelegs. “I see we’re not even gonna bother digging around for the original parts.”

“Excuse me, Sergeant?” Bellwether raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t want foreign-made junk shoehorned into my rig, sir. I’m sure Hissy Fit would practically cream her uniform at the opportunity, but I’ll pass.”

Bellwether looked confused. “Hissy Fi—oh, you mean Sergeant Sierra. And no, you don’t have a choice in where we source the parts. You’ll take what you get and say ‘please, sir, I want some more’, like the raggedy-ass little orphan you are, because we’re all orphans here.

“There are no supply lines, no real chain of command. Just whatever we can scrounge up, and how many cleomanni scalps we can take with it. I don’t like it either, but times are hard. Besides, you’re the one who pitched a fit to Crookneck about scavving the patrol boat for parts, so I don’t get what you’re complaining about.”

My muzzle wrinkled with disgust at the idea of Dust Devil—my Dust Devil—being repaired with Confederate hardware. Their equipment was a security risk. They tagged their electronics with hidden GPS trackers, along with all sorts of hardware-level backdoors for hackers to exploit.

“I trust that our techs will go over them with a fine-tooth comb, then,” I said.

Wind Shear nodded. “We’ve got it handled. Like that contragrav drone you brought in, remember? After we met up with you and took it off your hooves, we had our field team strip the boards out of it and desolder the tracking beacons before we brought it back to the base, otherwise, Crazy Horse would be crawling with bad guys right about now.”

I shrugged and gave a hard sigh. “Whatever.”

Bellwether advanced to the next slide, this time displaying a topographical map with what looked like a military base in the center. Hills ringed the edges of the base, conforming with what looked like a railroad. The rail line passed alongside the base, with a loading platform of some kind. That was when it clicked for me. The place had been built around the ruins of a small train station. “This is CSF Outpost 17, about eighty klicks northeast of Ghastly Gorge, along the rail line between Rambling Rock Ridge and Foal Mountain. Our scouts say this is where the patrol boat’s most valuable remains now lie. We have multiple independent confirmations of a heap of spacecraft wreckage being delivered to the base in installments by locomotive. Work crews arrived shortly thereafter and started cutting it up for scrap.”

“Another supply depot raid, huh?” I muttered.

Bellwether laughed. “What you and I did was just a warm-up. Let me be up-front about this: there’s no chance we can just trot in there and waltz right out with what we need. It will take time to search the wreckage, and we don’t have the equipment to transport all of it. We only have one option, and that’s to clear out all hostiles and secure the facility. Infantry squad leaders? That’ll be your job. Your objective is to escort Sergeant Storm, along with Wind Shear and his technicians, to the wreckage of the patrol boat so they can discern what to salvage from it.

“Once the facility is clear, we’ll have a short time before they respond in force. They have a radio check-in with their central command every hour, so that’s our maximum time limit. Worst-case scenario, our team gets into an engagement on the perimeter, and then, we have under fifteen minutes before gunships are overhead, which is why we need to be discreet on the way in.”

Bellwether snatched up a pointer in his teeth, tapping a few points on the map before spitting it out and letting it clatter onto the table. “There are six guard towers and five security checkpoints. Two along each road approaching from either the east or the west, and one guarding the train station on the south side of the base. There are four large storage buildings, a motor pool, two vehicle bays for repairing and refitting Confederate battle tanks, and a dozen barracks.

“The facility is manned by roughly three hundred Confederate Security Force members. Mercenaries. Invaders. Scum. Kill them without hesitation and without remorse. We’re breaking out the OA-13 gas grenades for this op. It’s not every day we have to use them, but we’ve got little choice in the matter. We’re outnumbered five-to-one here.”

My heart skipped a beat. Every time I had bombarded an industrial park or laboratory with OA-13, it had been from kilometers away, in the comfort of my Charger’s cockpit. I never had to get close and examine the effects. All I had to do was press a button.

Bellwether leaned over the top of a folding chair and crossed his forelegs. “As of our scout team’s last report, the locomotive that delivered the scrap is still at the base, awaiting water. It’s a captured Equestrian type, an Everfree Line Excelsior-class combined freight and passenger engine. Now, I used to geek out about locos, so I know a thing or two about this model.”

The old stallion puffed up his chest, beaming with pride. “She’s got a nuclear fusion-powered boiler, steam turbine generator, electric drivetrain, enormous tractive power, and a top speed of over two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. She can pull a couple hundred cars all the way up the mountain to Old Canterlot, unassisted.

“It goes without saying that this superior piece of Equestrian technology is a strategic resource that must be denied to the enemy. Our secondary objective is to blow the train on the way out. A damn shame, I know, but we can’t bring it with us, and we can’t leave it behind for them to keep using, so it’s gotta go. That is, if it’s still there.

“So, this is the plan. The op will take place at ‘night’ when the enemy is sleeping, but this region is in perpetual twilight due to the sun being immobilized, so we won’t be acting under the cover of complete darkness, unfortunately. We’re going to be using the Pursuer and the Bull Runner. I’m going to be on Eagle with Sergeant Sagebrush as my second. Sergeant Gale, you’re leading Raven team. Sergeant Cinderblock will lead Osprey team on demolitions and signals, and Corporal Star will lead Magpie, the recovery team.”

“Why Magpie?” Shooting Star whimpered. “So uncool.”

“We’re going to approach from the southern edge of the base, from the rail line.” Bellwether tapped the map with a forehoof. “Team Osprey will stay behind to secure the train and monitor enemy communications while holding down our escape route. At the same time, they’ll be prepping it for demolition. If the train is not present, then they are to secure the platform instead. The rest will advance and infiltrate the base.

“Magpie will stay behind Eagle and Raven as we move in, bringing up the rear with Sergeant Storm, Wind Shear and the techs. After we secure the train or the rail platform, our first order of business is to clear out the guardhouse near the rail platform without being detected. Knives and spellcraft only. Don’t go loud unless you’re fired upon. After that, Eagle will go west and Raven will go east, circling the camp and neutralizing checkpoints and guard towers along the way, before meeting in the middle at the north end of the base.

“At this point, you are to sabotage any communications equipment present at the site. There’s a small HQ building with a long-range antenna. Plant charges on that and get ready to blow it as soon as we go loud. Then, Eagle and Raven will don our masks, advance on the barracks structures and deploy the OA-13. Any hostile who flees the effects of the gas is to be shot. If you are engaged before you’ve cleared the perimeter, expect heavy resistance from the barracks and remaining guard towers. Organize a fighting retreat and disengage, because the mission is a failure.

“I expect them to panic and try rushing outside. You are to take cover and set up kill zones at the exits of each building. Don’t surround the buildings because that will put friendly units in each other’s lines of fire. Deploy some more gas grenades at the west ends of the barracks, then form an echelon left at the north end, a line in the middle, and a right echelon at the south end, on the east end of the barracks.

“Herd them towards you, but also envelop them and keep them away from the storage sheds to the east of your position. That’s where Magpie and the techs will be while Eagle and Raven clear the base. Pay attention to the direction of the wind! Pegasi are to manipulate the airflow, if need be. Keep our teams upwind of the gas at all fucking times. Understand?”

There rang out a chorus of Yes, Sir, except for me. The grenades weren’t my responsibility, but they would affect all of us if we weren’t careful. It made me more than a little nervous. I didn’t want to be less than two hundred yards from clouds of nerve gas, for crying out loud.

“Again, if we are detected during the approach, the mission is a failure,” Bellwether said. All squads are to fall back to the train platform and suppress the enemy while breaking contact and retreating south. If all goes according to plan, we’ll move up the Bull Runner, load the salvage, and depart. Eagle will board the Pursuer and form up with Raven, Osprey and Magpie on the Bull Runner. Once we’re a few klicks from the base, Sergeant Storm will use her magic to conceal us and the vehicles until the hostile air comes along, makes a pass or several, and then goes bingo fuel and returns to their HQ.

“They’ll probably have infantry sweep the area, but they’re not gonna find jack shit. Sergeant Storm, you are to conserve your magic and only cloak the vehicles when directed to. You are to release the spell when the coast is clear. Sergeant Cinderblock will be monitoring enemy comms and watching the skies for fast movers. We’ll have lookouts posted to keep an eye on our surroundings and help keep us concealed.”

“But sir,” I protested. “I can only cloak myself for thirteen minutes, tops, before experiencing magic burnout. If I cloak another pony, I can’t sustain the field as long. If I cloak something the size of the Bull Runner without the aid of a spell locus, that time limit drops to about two minutes.”

Bellwether seemed annoyed. “Again, in case you didn’t hear the first time, we’re employing a conservation strategy. Only cloak us if we’re close to being spotted. Otherwise, we use conventional concealment.”

“But what if the enemy loiters in the vicinity longer than I can cloak us? It seems like we’re hinging a lot on my abilities. You said we’re expecting gunships, sir? All it would take is one pass, and we’re all dead.”

“Wow, Sergeant,” Bellwether crossed his forelegs. “I didn’t take you for a fucking downer, but if that’s the way you want to play it, fine. I’m all ears, kid. What would you do differently?”

I worked my jaw in silence, shaking my head. “I don’t know.”

Corporal Shooting Star raised her hoof. “Sir, if I may.”

“Go ahead, Corporal.” Bellwether nodded.

The Corporal wore a mischievous smile, as though she knew something everyone else didn’t. “We have a ready-made distraction, if we play our cards right. If that loco is still there, and if it’s serviced and ready to go, instead of scuttlin’ it in place, we could rig it to blow and then send it down the line right as we exfil. Make it look like we stole it and planned on using it ourselves. Maybe pile some unwanted scrap on it to complete the illusion.

“After those dickheads chase it down for a while and try and have troops fast-rope down from the gyrodynes and see if they can retake it, the timer goes off and the whole shebang gets blown sky-high. They’ll assume we died in the blast and spend all day fiddle-fucking with the wreckage, givin’ us a perfect chance to escape.”

“Sounds risky,” Bellwether said. “I don’t like it. If things get hairy, we could use that tactic, but for now, it’s not even Plan C. More like Z. I’ll leave it on the table as an option for Osprey Team, to be used at their discretion, but we’re sticking to the current mission plan for now. And Corporal, stop watching so many action movies, kid. You’ll live longer.”

Shooting Star pouted. Judging by her expression, it sounded better in her head.

I scratched my chin with a hoof. “Will we have Charger support on this op? I’m noticing a conspicuous lack of Chargers in this plan. Nothing a couple Chargers can’t fix.”

Night Terror, who had remained silent throughout the briefing, snickered from the shadows. “That’s a negative, Sergeant. Sierra and I are already on a different assignment, for which we’ve already been briefed separately. I’m just here to watch you cavorting with the grunts, and to gloat at your misfortune.”

My shoulders sagged. My boss was such a dickbag.

“Both of our Chargers are deploying on a supply convoy interdiction mission sixty kilometers northwest of the AO,” Bellwether said. “That operation will take place about forty-five minutes after we infiltrate the base. It’s a diversion, timed to draw their air support off to deal with the Chargers around the same time the base’s sentries fail to perform their scheduled radio check-in.

“We must exercise caution, because we don’t expect them to commit all of their gyrodynes and attack planes to fending off the Charger Lance. They’re likely to leave some in reserve, and those are the ones we should be worried about. As soon as we start to exfil, the Chargers will bug out, drawing the enemy aircraft towards concealed anti-air emplacements we’ve set up. It shouldn’t take the Chargers more than five minutes to engage and destroy their targets.”

“Try three,” Night Terror laughed. “Three minutes, and that Confederate convoy will be a sea of fire.”

Bellwether smirked. “I’ll hold you to that, Lieutenant.” Then he turned, addressing the whole briefing room. “Alright, people. Mission starts in six hours. Rest up, check your gear, and be ready to move. Dismissed!”

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 07//Raid Estimated time remaining: 25 Hours, 52 Minutes