//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ

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//RES DAT SRM

Desert Storm

I slowly opened my eyes, blinking away sleep. There were three things that immediately came to the forefront of my mind. One was that my back hurt like hell and my limbs felt like lead weights. Another was that I’d awoken in what would have been a halfway-decent bed were it not matted with blood and filth, sans armor or beamcaster, or any other equipment. My captured flechette gun was gone. I was in a dusty apartment showing signs of abandonment, what with the broken windows and graffiti and all. The third was that I had a needle in my neck with a tube leading to a red-tinged IV bag that had been tied to the headboard.

My ears perked up and my eyes widened. I took note of the fact, with rising apprehension, that I was in the midst of a firefight, if the chattering gunfire right outside my room and out in the street was any indication. Without forewarning, a heavy boot kicked down my door and an armored cleomanni soldier rushed inside, brandishing a flechette gun. I had very little time to react. Seeing as he was wearing nothing on his cranium but a tactical visor with a display eyepiece, I seized a table lamp with a missing shade in a levitation field and swung it like a cudgel at his head, shattering the bulb into a million pieces. He went down hard, bloody shards of glass embedded in his face.

I took up his flechette gun in a levitation field and cloaked both it and myself. Two more soldiers rushed inside, presumably looking for their squadmate I’d just dropped. Two quick double-taps and they were history. By this time, they’d gotten wise. The next thing to pass through the door was a fragmentation grenade. I discarded the gun, ripped the needle out of my neck and leapt out of bed, screaming obscenities as I hurled myself through the nearest window, shattering the glass and the muntin bars and sending bits of them flying. There was a deafening bang a couple seconds later. I’d been spared a gruesome death by virtue of having landed on the fire escape outside, the thick brick walls of the apartment shielding me from the fragments.

My back was a spiderwebbing nexus of agony. The stitches made my skin feel tight. Even the slightest movement was the worst pain ever, to say nothing of the cuts I’d sustained from throwing myself through glass. I was leaking blood. I just sat there and whimpered for a couple seconds, feeling my muzzle and my forelegs dripping red. My newest injuries seared my nerve endings in the way that only fresh ones did. My back felt like a bunch of burly construction workers had merrily jackhammered a hole in it and then taken turns fucking said hole raw with their thick, pounding stallionhoods. I dreamed of neural shunts. Endless morphine drips. Synthetic opioid pills. Anything.

I bit my lip and ignored the pain. I cloaked myself so the assholes that breached and cleared my room wouldn’t get wise and come looking for me. I needed to clear my head and think rationally about this. I was in a moving rail car last night, and then I ended up here, somehow. I had been transported while unconscious, clearly. Placid was reciting some unbearable fauxlosophical Starrie bullshit, and I blacked out. Probably had a blood transfusion, if the medical supplies in the room were any indication. I felt cold. And weak. Like a good half of the fight had been ripped out of me.

“Placid! Bell!” I shouted. “Where the hell are you guys?”

The only response was a burst of gunfire from across the street, pinging against the wrought iron bars of the fire escape. I groaned and whimpered as I hauled myself across the grating. I rolled over into a hole that dropped me a good three meters straight down, into a conveniently placed garbage bin. Unfortunately, there was no garbage in it to soften my fall, so every hostile in the vicinity heard a clipped wail followed by the loud thump of me landing ass-first in an empty, rusty dumpster, which was, in turn, topped off with equally-loud profanity in Equestrian.

“Hurridnek esdonaki ut melludnissar kuk! Nek miestmal!”

Fuck a dog’s bleeding cunt. Fuck everything.

I used a pulse of levitation magic on the dumpster, knocking it over onto its side so I could escape. Unfortunately, this disrupted my invisibility spell. I could hear flechettes ricocheting off the pavement in the alleyway as I bolted across puddles of standing water for the nearest cover I could find, which was the corner of a building exposed to an intersection. I had no idea which direction the cleomanni were assaulting the block from. It seemed like they were everywhere. I felt exposed, in more ways than one.

A flechette pinged off the brick wall next to my head, raining dust down on my mane. I threw myself behind a car, crawling underneath it as more gunfire pelted my position. The supersonic cracks of flechettes whipped past my ears and ripped through sheet metal like tinfoil.

“Fuck me,” I whispered to myself. “Can’t I have a break?”

A pair of tactical-gloved hands seized my hind legs and dragged me out from under the car while I kicked and screamed. I lashed out with a vicious buck, my hoof connecting with a satyr’s shin. I heard his tibia snap in two. Saw a leg bend in a direction that it shouldn’t. He collapsed to the ground, screaming.

I seized the car in my levitation’s iron grip, tipping the vehicle nose-up and rolling it backwards onto its roof. I was rewarded with the shriek of bent metal, the tinkling of broken glass, the whine of a car alarm, and the short, strangled scream of a freshly squashed cleomanni bastard.

I collapsed to my haunches, panting with exhaustion. Some drunken stallion with a light coat and a backwards-turned ball cap poked his head out of an upper-story window in the tenements beside me.

“Hey, that’s my car, you fuckin’ bitch!” He hurled a mostly empty bottle of vodka at me, which shattered against the pavement and sprayed me with glass fragments. “It might be the fuckin’ apocalypse, but that doesn’t mean you can touch my shit!”

“These Confederate sons of bitches are trying to kill me, you asshole!” I shouted up at him.

“Oh yeah? Well, if you’re still there by the time I get down there, I’m gonna fuckin’ choke you to death with my dick and leave you behind a trash can!”

Now I was pissed. “I’m a soldier, you dumb fuck. I’m with the ELF! Try it! Fucking try me, asshole! I had to knock a satyr’s lights out with a fucking table lamp when I got out of bed this morning. I’m not in the mood for your shit, you fucking ambulatory penis!”

His whole demeanor changed for the worse. “You’re with the Liberation Front? Oh, you’re fuckin’ dead, now! Hey guys, look! Dead cunt! Dead fuckin’ ELF cunt!”

The stallion whistled for his compatriots. A griffon packing a flechette gun, wearing the puffer jacket and ball cap that I was told was the standard array of a vandal, walked up to the ledge, sighting me in. A pegasus mare with long, dyed hair and a devil-may-care look on her face peeked out the window, her eyes bloodshot as she snorted a line of some unknown powdery substance off the back of her hoof.

A couple rough-looking earth pony mares in blue winter coats and beanies filtered out of the side streets, baseball bats and machetes in their mouths, tapping their weapons against the street in a threatening manner. Then, a few hulking stallions similarly armed and attired showed up. Then several more.

“Okay,” I said. “I understand this is your turf, right? I’ll just turn around, walk the other way, and find my own way out of this shit, okay?”

The mare with the baseball bat giggled. It was then that I noticed, much to my chagrin, that her wooden bat had the word CUNTFUCKER messily engraved on it, and it appeared, even from this distance, to be soiled with more than just blood.

“You heard the boss,” she said. “Let’s rape this little bitch’s mouth until she drowns in dick!”

“Oh shit!” I turned and broke into a sprint.

I heard the pounding of hooves and howling, sadistic laughter as the vandals galloped after me. I ran back the way I came, towards the apartments and the sounds of the ongoing firefight. I could see streaks of beamcaster fire coming from the rooftop.

I shouted up to them. “Bellwether! Placid! Fuckin’—Sage! You up there?”

Bellwether peeked over the edge. “Get your ass up here, Storm! That’s an order!”

The old stallion took a glancing flechette hit in the chest armor, flinching and growling in pain from having most likely sustained a broken rib, before returning fire with green needles of raw arcane power from the ball-turrets on his shoulders.

I dared angle my head over my shoulder, only to see that the vandals were still right on my ass. I ran into the back alley, to the apartment building’s service entrance, and pounded the door right off its hinges with a two-legged buck. I was in a corridor not far from what I presumed was the lobby. I ducked into the communal laundromat, avoiding a group of cleomanni patrolling the halls with their guns at the ready. I had to assume that the lower floors were teeming with the cocksuckers. I popped open a dryer as quietly as I could and climbed inside, shutting the lid behind me. I cloaked myself for good measure, too.

This was a stupid hiding place, and I felt stupid for even trying it. The vandals filtered into the lower levels of the building. I could tell by the muffled sounds of fighting. The gunfire. The screams. The snarls and grunts of exertion as hooligans armed with clubs fearlessly leapt over the corpses of their fallen comrades and beat the cleomanni troops to a pulp. Within moments, they were inside the same room as I.

“Little fuckin’ cunt probably hid in one of these,” one cruel-sounding stallion muttered. “Let’s start ‘em all up! You guys got any coins? Ahh, shit, I’m getting hard. I call first dibs on her pussy-meat!”

“Eat shit, Knives!” another stallion growled. “I’m gonna fuck her first. I’m gonna lay pipe to that ELF whore until she fucking pops.”

My blood ran cold. They intended to flush me out. I could hear the other machines whirr to life, one after another, until the laundry room was filled with the roar of a dozen dryers and several washing machines. A few bits clinked into the coin chute on the dryer in which I resided. It was go time. I slammed the lid open and hurled my invisible mass into the face of the stallion above me, barging right through him, clambering to my hooves and galloping out the doorway.

“Unicorn invisibitch!” the mare with the crudely decorated nail bat screamed. “She’s the one that was with those ELF cocksuckers who took out one of our western checkpoints a few weeks ago! Bitch killed my brother! Do you hear me, bitch? I’m going to give you a very intimate introduction to the business end of ol’ Cuntfucker here until you’re rid of every drop of blood in your body! I’m going to hold you down and fuck you to death!”

“No thanks, I don’t—” I snickered. “I don’t swing that way.”

I felt around ahead of myself with soft pulses of magic, bounding up a stairwell as quickly as I could. When I neared the top, I could hear a whole lot of heavy breathing. My limbs froze. On the next flight of stairs, I could feel one, two, three, five, eight, no, at least a dozen cleomanni troops. Possibly more. The one at the top was trying to breach through a fire door with some sort of handheld battering ram, but eventually, he gave up and started emplacing breaching charges. The ones at the bottom of the flight had their guns trained on their six, waiting for any signs of obvious hostile contacts. If the breacher succeeded, they’d swarm out onto the roof and engage the surviving rebels, and they’d probably win. I couldn’t let that happen.

I ducked around a corner and decloaked, weighing my options. I had an epiphany. My face split with a mischievous grin. I peeked at the wooden stairway, considering how it had all their weight resting on it. It wouldn’t take very much at all. The spell matrix of a bog-standard levitation field coalesced in my mind’s eye. I surreptitiously gripped onto one of the support members holding up the old-fashioned hardwood staircase’s middle landing, and I gave it a tug, a twist, and a yank. The stairwell yawned and sagged, the men atop it screaming and panicking as it finally gave, collapsing in a spectacular cascading failure.

“I am a fucking combat genius!” I hooted. “That’s what you get, motherfuckers! That’s what you fucking get when you tangle with the best!”

The vandals flooded onto the floor below, seeing only a collapsed staircase and a bunch of writhing, injured cleomanni troops. To my horror, they immediately set about stabbing the life out of the survivors and pulping them with their hooves. If I didn’t keep moving, I was next. I needed to find an alternate route to the roof, immediately. I ran down the hall towards one of the marked exits, one of the side stairwells.

Something shoulder-checked me into a wall, and we both rolled to a stop on the floor. I rolled upright and crossed my hooves in front of myself just in time to block a knife aimed at my face. A cleomanni soldier had emerged from one of the rooms and tackled me. He straddled my midsection, limiting my range of movement and options for a counterattack. He tried using his upper-body mass and both of his hands to drive the knife downward into my neck, while I desperately fought to push him away. I was too exhausted by my ordeal to put up as much of a fight as I could’ve if I were fresh and uninjured.

“Motherfucker!” My limbs felt like lead weights sinking in quicksand; I was struggling, and I was losing. “Mother! Fucker!”

One of his hands slipped past my guard and wrapped around my neck with surprising strength. The buck-toothed, bespectacled, pointy-eared freak was choking the life out of me. Wait, glasses? I wrapped his eyewear in an orange field of levitation magic and ripped them from his head, crushing them and flinging their remains down the hall. He lost his composure for a moment, squinting and flailing and shouting something in Ardun. It was all I needed.

I brought a hind leg up between his thighs and into his groin with crushing force. He collapsed to the floor, dropping his knife and wailing in agony as he clutched his bruised jewels. I wasn’t about to wait around and let him recover. I promptly hauled him up by his shoulders and rammed him face-first into a wall, hard enough to cave in the wainscoting. The rest of his body sagged, his head still stuck in the hardwood, his convulsing, seizing hand just inches from his discarded blade.

I checked his weapons, but quickly discarded them, cursing my luck. They were all out of ammo from the prolonged firefight. It was why he didn’t simply shoot me in the back while he had the chance. I could hear the pounding of hooves as the vandals swarmed the rooms below. I broke into a gallop and entered the stairwell at the end of the hall, only to find myself face-to-face with one of them, watching her grin like a madmare around the length of rusty pipe in her mouth.

“Fuck off, sideshow freak!” I hollered.

I slammed the pipe with a pulse of levitation magic while kicking her in the chest with both of my forehooves. She went tumbling down the stairs, stacking up the vandals behind her like dominoes. I ran upstairs as quickly as I could until I reached the exit to the roof. I tried the handle. Locked. Reinforced stainless fittings with a hint of enchantment. Too tough to simply break it down. I reared up and struck the window at the fire door’s apex repeatedly with a forehoof, watching as spiderwebbing cracks propagated through it. Eventually, I smashed a small hole through the window, pulling back a bloody hoof.

“Bellwether!” I screamed through the hole. “Open the fucking door and let me outta here! Hurry!”

I could see movement on the roof through the gap, but it was too late. A pair of hooves came to a rest on my shoulders, whipping me around and forcing me down to my haunches. It was the bitch with the nail bat, and she’d brought friends. Much to my chagrin, a couple of the stallions were snickering and stroking their glistening erections, but they could not hold a candle to the sadistic beast of a mare in front of me, laughing and exhaling her foul, rotten-egg-smelling breath in my face.

The psychotic mare spat the bat into her hooves and slapped her weapon threateningly against my belly like a giant wooden phallus, thrusting it suggestively against my chin. I felt my gorge rise. The filth-encrusted bat had rusty roofing nail heads sticking out of it, scraping against my coat and pinching my skin, nearly drawing blood. The fearsome thing smelled like blood, putrescence, and excrement, with the faint waft of terror-stricken sex. I felt like I needed a tetanus shot just looking at the thing.

“Toldja I’d fuck you!” She grinned, showing off her rows of crooked and stained teeth, her canines filed to razor-sharp points. “I’ll be nice and give you half a minute to get your pussy nice and wet! Better start rubbin’, or this is gonna hurt even more!”

I broke out in a cold sweat. This was going in a direction that I found very, very unpleasant. I was a soldier. I was always aware of the possibility of being captured. Being tortured. And, yes, that. The dreaded R-word. Never once did I imagine that I’d be held captive by the cleomanni for years, only for them not to lay a finger on me, and then find that my own species had allowed ourselves to descend to such depths of depravity as these.

I’d always feared that some horny alien mercenaries looking for a warm hole to fuck would drag me from the wreck of my machine, beaten and bloodied, and have their way with me right there, atop the pile of smoking detritus, before putting one of their pistols in my mouth in a lethal parody of irrumatio and giving me a bullet instead of their seed. This exact scenario I now faced had never occurred to me. Not even once. Her pussy was shredded like grated cheese by some junkie’s nail bat and she bled to death. It was not even close to being the sort of thing I wanted on my tombstone.

“How?” I muttered.

“How what, bitch?”

I looked down. “How the fuck can you hold that disgusting fucking thing in your mouth?”

The fire door opened outward and I fell flat on my back. While one militia mare hauled me backwards onto the roof, Bellwether unleashed a burst of beamcaster fire that turned the vandal’s head into a steaming crater. He chucked a frag down the stairwell and slammed the door shut. One scream and a muffled thump later, the three of us backed away from the door, panting heavily. Bellwether maintained a ready posture, waiting for another vandal to emerge, but none dared. Bellwether’s helmet was conspicuously missing, showing that his silvery mane was a little thin and scraggly on top.

“What the hell is going on, Bell?” I whimpered, still thoroughly shaken. “Where the fuck is everypony? Why did you guys leave me behind?”

Bellwether frowned. “You were unconscious and going into shock. We didn’t think you’d pull through. I had everypony regroup on the rooftop while Confederate troops overran the lower floors.”

“You assholes fucking left me to die,” I growled. “I guess that’s par for the fucking course in this outfit.”

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I muttered, my expression dark. “After fighting my way through a couple squads of cleomanni and a pack of crazy cannibal rapists, with no weapons and no armor, I’m still alive. It’s a fucking miracle, ain’t it? Speaking of which, you wouldn’t happen to have a spare beamcaster and some protection, would you?”

Bellwether drew his lips into a flat line and wordlessly gestured to a dead ELF mare whose brains had been blown all over the place by a sniper. Her helmet was sitting in ruins a few yards away with tufts of cream-colored synthetic fibers bulging outward from where both sides had been penetrated.

“Fucking nice.” I rolled my eyes.

There was a supersonic crack that whizzed past my ears and Bellwether tackled me to the floor.

“Get down, Storm! That sniper’s still out there!”

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit!”

We huddled close by the ledge, well out of view. For a moment, we sat there, panting heavily. The sniper had ceased fire for the time being.

Bellwether sighed, turning towards me. “Now, I bet you’re wondering, where the fuck is the Commodore? Where are our Chargers? Where the hell are we? Well, the Commodore’s keeping enemy air support at bay. The Chargers are holding the line against enemy ground forces, but their guns have run dry and they’re down to beamcasters and magic. There are multiple Confederate tank platoons closing in from the south. Conquerors and Myrmidons.

“There was a unit of mortar carriers backed up by Rakshasas, too, but I ordered Terror and Sierra to treat those as a top-priority target and neutralize them, else you would’ve found bits of me scattered all over this fuckin’ roof. As for where we are, we’re in the southern tip of the Everfree Urban Zone.”

I took a look around me, scanning the horizon through the nest of ruined buildings around us. I could see the Twilight Tower and Harmony Plaza from here.

“This is vandal territory, isn’t it?” I murmured.

“Yeah, no shit. You almost got yourself fucked and eaten by those animals.”

“Where is the train? My Charger parts.” I pinched my brow with my fetlock. “Is this all going to be for nothing? How many of us are left?”

Bellwether shook his head. “The loco’s fine. We stopped in a tunnel and Osprey and Magpie are holding out down there with makeshift anti-personnel mines covering their asses. Eagle’s got four left, including myself. There are three on Raven, fifteen on Osprey, and six on Magpie. The squad leaders are still in action. Most of us are wounded.”

Sixty ELF militia mares and stallions left Camp Crazy Horse on what should’ve been a cakewalk where we rolled over a local enemy garrison with nerve gas and stole what we needed. Instead, we were ambushed, and over half of us were now dead or missing. Me and the rest of the survivors were limping into vandal territory while being pursued by armored columns and gunships, GARG troopers, and even the damn Confederate president’s own daughter. The Pursuer 6x6 had probably been recaptured by the enemy, and the Bull Runner was a pile of burning wreckage.

I shivered. To top it all off, I felt like death warmed over. I couldn’t stop shaking, thinking about what would’ve happened to me if all the resistance fighters on the roof had been dead already. My last, humiliating moments on this mortal coil would have been spent in gut-wrenching agony.

I shook my head. “This was a total disaster.”

“A very, ah, insightful assessment, there, Sergeant,” Bellwether said. “Now tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”

“What are we gonna do about this fucking sniper?”

“Placid’s on it.” Bell tapped a hoof to his radio, before cracking a grin scant moments later. “Ah, and that was it right there. Sniper-spotter team, neutralized.”

“Damn, she works fast.” I peeked over the ledge but didn’t see or hear any obvious signs of a struggle anywhere.

“She and the other two survivors from Raven have been itching for some payback after last night,” Bellwether said.

“Why the fuck didn’t we just stay with the loco?” I said.

“There’s a clinic down the street, run by Edmara ‘Crazy Ed’ Vinhark. We didn’t have the equipment to take blood donations from any of the other surviving militia, so she sold us the blood packs we needed to keep you alive. Only two hundred gold bits. You’ve run up quite the tab, Sergeant.”

I frowned. “Vin—hark—what the fuck, is that a cleomanni name? You bought medical supplies from a fucking satyr and then put them in my fucking body?”

Bell shook his head. “Not cleomanni. Linnaltan.”

I knew of them. One of the minor races of the galaxy. Avian, like Griffons, but bipedal and slender, and with plumage they could erect to puff themselves up and look bigger. They weren’t direct members of the Free Trade Union. Their government was a protectorate under the thumb of the bug-like xicares.

Many linnaltans were Equestrian sympathizers who protested against the Confederacy’s policy of genocidal war against us. Others were opportunists, like their xicarean masters, following after Confederate invasions and sifting through the rubble of our worlds for the choicest Equestrian trinkets, all in the name of conservation.

Such scavenging operations tended to be quite blatantly illegal, as the Confederacy had placed a moratorium on the importation of certain Equestrian goods, especially those of a magical nature whose properties they could not predict or classify as intrinsically safe.

“A fucking alien vulture, picking over our civilization’s bones.” My scowl deepened. “That’s even worse.”

“You’ve got her all wrong.” Bellwether shook his head. “She’s not just some run-of-the-mill scavver looking for pony artifacts to smuggle off-world and sell. She’s a good street doc. If there’s any foreigner who knows anything about pony anatomy and about keeping us healthy, it’s her.”

I shifted gears. “What’s our plan, Bell?” I gathered the dead mare’s armor and weapon, minus the ruined helmet, and slung them over my withers, clipping the chest protector in place. I winced at the dull ache in my croup. If I moved wrong, that ache turned to a debilitating, sharp pain. I locked the beamcaster in place, activating the backup magic holo-sight. A little targeting square with crosshairs in the middle of it shimmered into view right before my muzzle, following my head movements as I turned.

With a beamcaster, all you had to do to shoot someone who lacked a friendly IFF signal was lock onto the red diamond centered on their torso and fire. The overlapped square and diamond indicated the current locked target, and the crosshairs showed where the actual beamcaster ball-turrets were pointed. There was always a momentary lag between lock and acquisition that had to be taken into account. The lock-on was effective out to six hundred meters. Beyond that, it was difficult for the system to accurately keep track of life signs.

“Survive,” Bellwether said. “And no more running off on your own. This is smack-dab in the middle of vandal territory. You ought to know about the different gangs, so here goes. Out here, in the Southern Quadrant, in the residential blocks, the Ninety-Fours rule the roost. Mostly hardcore junkies and nutcases. Desperate, under-fed and under-supplied. The Riggers crawl all over the eastern expansion, and they’ve got repurposed construction equipment and armored buses festooned with captured Confederate weapons. We try not to fuck with them.

“The Janissaries are a mixed group of Equestrian and Confederate deserters, criminals and rejects, and they hold the north of the city, by the spaceport. In the west, you’ve got the Bombshells, and those mares are as lovely as they are deadly. The Aces control the Harmony District. Real badass sons of bitches. They’ll tear ass out of an alleyway, real quiet-like, and gut you with those hoof-forged longswords of theirs. You won’t even see it coming. Oh, and one other thing. Placid gave me her report on your condition.”

I’d been dreading this. “And?”

“One of your kidneys is straight-up fucking gone. The other one is questionable. You need to go on dialysis as soon as possible. Every day that you don’t, urea and other toxins will keep accumulating in your bloodstream. Don’t run off. Don’t get lost. Don’t try to be a hero. You. Will. Die. Am I clear?” He paused. “How are you feeling right now?”

I smirked, trying to hide my pain and the obvious tremors in my limbs. “Like shit, fresh from the asshole.”

“Storm, you’re fucked up worse than you think.” Bellwether smirked and shook his head. “Before we made for the roof, I had Placid give you a combat stim to try and wake you up and get you on your hooves, because we couldn’t hold the area. If that shit wears off, you’re probably going to pass out again.”

Now that he mentioned it, I noticed that my heart rate was highly elevated, even when I was at rest. It felt like I’d downed ten cups of coffee, with a touch of invincibility bordering on foolhardiness. My face was hot and flushed. To put it bluntly, I was jittery as shit.

“What the fuck is ‘combat stim’ a euphemism for?” I cocked a brow.

Bellwether sighed. “Primary active ingredient? Methamphetamine, intravenous. Just a little, not a lot.”

My earlier behavior—taunting a gang member and shouting boastfully of my skill at killing to anyone in earshot who would listen—started to make more sense in this new and disturbing context. It wasn’t just my injuries making my head swim. I was high as a fucking kite and didn’t even notice because of how panicked I was.

I was irritated that Bell and Placid would jeopardize my health to such a degree, but the alternative was worse. “Fuck it,” I said. “It was either that, or those fuckers drag me off.”

“Right you are, Sergeant. This area’s secure for the moment. We need to move. Stick close.”

I formed up behind Bell and the three other survivors, who glanced back at me resentfully as if I was somehow responsible for this mission going tits-up. I stared at my hooves sheepishly for a moment as I walked. I’d fucked up. I should have stuck to the rest of Magpie like glue when we raided the outpost. Instead, I’d nearly gotten killed. I’d wasted valuable time. Possibly even gotten a few of the militia killed. This mission wouldn’t even have been planned and executed were it not for the fact that Dust Devil desperately needed replacement parts. Were it not for me, our comrades would still be alive.

I put my creeping self-loathing aside with a much-needed dose of rationality. This wasn’t the only doomed operation that the ELF had carried out in recent months. There were plenty of others that had just as many casualties, and they had nothing to do with me. If a good thirty militia members hadn’t been rendered MIA or KIA on this mission, they would’ve kicked the bucket on the next one, or the one after that. One way or another, those lives would have been spent. It was inevitable that we’d have to pay a terrible price in blood for our freedom.

So why do I feel so rotten about all this? I wondered to myself.

Outside the apartment building, moving along the sidewalk, the five of us proceeded north, deeper into the city. There were far-off sounds of a firefight; the crackle of machine guns along with the deeper booms of tank cannon fire.

Bellwether touched a hoof to his headset. “Say again, Commodore?” After a brief pause, he turned to me and the rest of the squad. “The Chargers have engaged the enemy tanks. Enemy close air support has bugged out. We splashed a couple of the fuckers. Layer says she’s spotted the abandoned Redheart General Hospital ten blocks to the north of us. We’re moving up. Crazy Ed gave us a tip that there may still be some good salvage to recover, and we’ve got a lot of wounded who need medical supplies, or they’re not gonna last much longer. That includes you.”

I nodded, biting my lip to stifle the ache in my flanks. My eyes teared up a little. The drugs and the adrenaline rush were starting to wear off, and all that was left was an unreasonable amount of pain.

“Hey Bell, does Gale have any morphine left?” I wasn’t sure how functional I would be without it.

“No, we’re all out. Keep moving. Keep an eye on your surroundings and your mind off of what you’re feeling.”

I put one hoof in front of another, gritting my teeth, trying to ignore the pain that came on in waves. This went on for another six blocks, my fur increasingly matted with sweat, until my legs collapsed under me. “Bell, I don’t feel so good.”

Without breaking his stride, he scooped me up and rested my foreleg over his withers, allowing me to use him as a crutch. We continued for another two blocks before gunfire rang out.

“Contact, front!” Bellwether shouted. “Return fire!”

With a groan, I willed my body into concealment while flechettes whizzed overhead. I peeked around the rear end of a ruined old ’55 Mongoose with busted out windows and let loose with a volley of hot, green death, the twin ball-turrets on my shoulders tracking my head movements as I swept the middle floors of the building in front of us. I ducked behind the vehicle as the return fire swiftly came, peppering the car with flechettes which punched straight through both sides of the car’s trunk, opening up blossoms of torn sheet metal right beside my head.

The trouble with beamcasters was that you had to expose a great deal of your body to use them effectively. I wished I still had a flechette gun on me. For all the drawbacks—the weight, recoil, and relative fragility of their optics—they had a lot of advantages, like being able to shoot at targets while remaining completely concealed. They also had superior barrier penetration capabilities. A typical beamcaster emission might stop in the very first layer of building material it encountered, while a flechette could pass through both sides of a stick-frame house without even slowing down.

Beamcasters were clean, neat, recoil-free death-scalpels, for eliminating exposed targets under six hundred yards away. Flechette guns were brutish implements of oppression, capable of killing you dead at twice the distance, right through a wall. Our tactics and doctrine differed greatly from the Confederate Army’s, as a result. Equestrian tactics emphasized close combat and lightning raids over fighting from entrenched positions, maximizing our strengths and minimizing our weaknesses.

This was, of course, why our ambushers were quickly silenced by the three remaining Raven Team pegasi, who were providing overwatch. They darted down the face of the structure and tossed in grenades. A few loud bangs and some anguished cries later, Placid and her team made entry and presumably finished them off with their knives. I heard a distant, gurgling scream that seemed to pause every now and then from the brutal stabbing its owner was receiving. I dared a peek, but just like before, I couldn’t see a damn thing.

“Is this how it is for the infantry all the time?” I said.

“What do you mean?” one of the militia stallions muttered.

“More than half the time, it feels like we’re shooting at nothing. Muzzle flashes.”

He rolled his eyes. “Well, gee, if I had as many sensors strapped to my body as one of your Chargers, then I bet I’d know where the satyrs keep their porn stash and their fuckin’ lotions.”

“Quiet down!” Bellwether said, slowly standing up from cover. “Clear! Move up!”

We stalked along the eerily empty streets for another few blocks. Soon, I found myself using Bellwether as a crutch again. There were craters from kinetic strike weapons that had turned into stagnant lakes full of rainwater. Every building had dozens of flechette holes and beamcaster burns, and it only got worse the further in you went.

You also had the typical assortment of apocalyptic graffiti scrawled everywhere, with paint pens, rattle-cans, stencils, and whatever else ponies could dig up. No hope. The 94s. Somepony got particularly artsy and rendered the Empress in exquisite, airbrushed detail. She had a demonic grin and blood-dripping fangs and was riding cowgirl-style on the dick of a deceased stallion who had his eyes crossed out, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and flies buzzing around his maggot-ridden head. Above it, they’d painted an old-timey ribbon banner reading You screwed us all, Twilight Sparkle!

“The fuck?” I pointed an outstretched hoof at the mural. “A little on the nose, don’t you think?”

“That’s the Janissaries.” Bellwether nodded. “They have the most skilled artists, and that pyramid-thing there in the corner is their symbol. I’m more concerned that they’re doing pieces like that this far south. Smells like imminent gang war.”

Everfree City occupied the whole valley. We stood amidst hundreds of square kilometers of dense, virtually abandoned urban sprawl. There were towering high-rises with not a soul in or around them, save perhaps for a couple scavengers or a gang of vandals having a pow-wow by the light of a burning barrel. The capital was a ghost town. Row after endless row of steel-and-glass grave markers.

Off to the far north, Old Canterlot loomed in the distance, surrounded by kilometer-high skyscrapers that ringed the foot of the mountain like a fence of swords. Halfway between us and Canterlot was the Twilight Tower, standing a stunning two and a half kilometers high, the crown jewel of the Imperial Palace Complex. To the far west stood the crumpled wrecks of ground-based anti-orbital defense batteries, the barrels of their immense railguns forming dark and jagged silhouettes on the horizon.

If I closed my eyes and concentrated, my horn lit in the gloom, I could feel it. Reverberating currents in the thaumatic field resonance. Death. Death was all around me. Old death. New death. The screams of the dead and the dying blew in on an ill wind. The indignant screeches, resentful babbling, and moans of mourning agony rose to a cacophonous chorus. I was drowning in a sea of souls. My eyes snapped open, my muzzle curling with hatred and disgust.

“Where did everypony go?” I said.

“Who?” Bellwether said.

“The city’s, y’know, the whole population.”

“The Confederacy tried occupying the city and establishing interim governance, but food shortages turned to rioting and chaos. They ended up busing hundreds of thousands of us out of the city, redistributing the population among the smaller towns. The ones who wouldn’t go? They formed an insurgent network and started shooting up Confederate convoys and mining the roads with IEDs. The Confederacy laid siege to the capital, blocking relief efforts. Eventually, some of the rebels turned to cannibalism to survive. That’s where you get the Vandals.”

I suppressed a shudder. The ponies and other creatures who made up the vandals were once a nascent resistance group, proud and honorable. Now, they were little more than carrion-feeders. Starving our capital was yet another crime that the Confederacy had to answer for.

After a few short minutes that felt like hours, we were at the Redheart General Hospital. I’d been here, once, between deployments. Me and Barley were having drinks at the pub and scarfing down unhealthy pub food, and somepony had made my hay burger with a touch of bacteria from unwashed hooves. Having my boyfriend rush me to the hospital in a panic while I’m desperately clenching my muscles to avoid squirting from both ends all over the interior of his car was pretty far removed from what anypony would call a romantic date.

I giggled at the recollection. My illness may have killed the mood, but somehow, me and Barley still found time to fuck afterward. A few hours of fluid support in the form of a saline drip, a couple more visits to the toilet, and I felt pretty much fine. It was well past midnight when we finally got back to his apartment. He protested, saying I should rest, but I wasn’t about to let a little thing like food poisoning get in the way of my libido.

Before I knew it, I’d locked lips with him. Our tongues hungrily explored each other’s muzzles. A sweet strawberry haze descended over our tired and frayed consciousnesses as we melted into a puddle of sex. I always loved Barley’s dick. Even now, I craved to feel his rippling muscles under me as I straddled him. I remembered how we’d roll over and over on the carpet, pecking each other on the neck, inhaling each other’s scents, sighing with satisfaction and giggling delightedly at our shared sensations. We didn’t need drugs; were each other’s drugs.

The sweet memory dissolved with a choked gasp from my throat, my eyes brimming with tears at the cold, empty, bombed-out streets of a dead civilization that stretched before me. The dusty faces of abandoned commercial buildings leered back at me like a salamander reclining on a rock, silently mocking me with its flickering tongue. Every now and then, a gust would pick up a cloud of dust and cast it into our faces. The air tasted like an old ashtray.

“Barleywine, where the fuck are you?” I whispered to myself. “Please don’t be dead. Don’t be another one of their victims.”

When we were in the Army, we took heat-suppressing hormones when that time of year rolled around. Altrenogest, oral. Came in liquid form in a little bottle. You could either down a small spoonful of it if you were brave and could stand the incredibly shitty taste, or you could dump it in an MRE and down it with your hay and mashed potatoes.

All the mares were required to take it once a week towards the middle of the year, even me, even after I became sterile. It wasn’t for regulating fertility alone, but the behaviors associated with it. That irrepressible urge to jump any stallion’s bones, to the point where it threatened to break down unit cohesion. I hated it. I hated what it did to our bodies. Instead of feeling warm and giddy like with a typical heat, I felt like hammered shit.

It took a shake from Bellwether to snap me out of the daze I was in. I finally registered the scene before me. It looked like every other window in the hospital’s lower floors had been shot out. The parking garage had been fortified with sheets of scrap metal and razor wire. Probably the work of vandals.

“We’re going in,” Bellwether said. “Raven will hold the rooftop and keep an eye out for any incoming hostiles. Keep an eye on those upper floors as you advance. Watch out for booby traps when we’re inside.”

Our approach to the front doors was met with no resistance. As we moved into the hospital’s darkened interior, we switched on the lights on our beamcasters. The ball-turrets tracked our heads, illuminating the pitch-black corridors strewn with dust and trash with a faint greenish glow. There was a skeleton slumped over the front desk in the ER reception area, surrounded by flechette holes and dried blood so old that it’d turned black.

“Check your corners,” Bellwether said. “Stick together. Keep an eye out for tripwires, pressure plates, motion sensors on the door frames, things like that.”

I pushed open the door to one of the exam rooms. Nothing. Looted. They even took the bed cushions. I swung open another, and there was a loud click that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I froze in place, my limbs stiff as a board. Bellwether tackled me to the side right before the door exploded outwards with a flash and a shower of splinters.

My ears were ringing; I coughed a few times from inhaling dust. “Fuck!”

“You dumb cunt,” Bellwether growled. “Do you have a death wish? If you lock up like that again, I’m not even going to try to save you. We’ll just have to get another pilot. In fact, I’ll give Dust Devil to Sierra and let her bastardize it like that piece of shit Rouncey of hers.”

I bristled at the insult but was otherwise glad to have all my limbs still attached to my body. Bellwether let go of me and I slowly, shakily stood up. Then, my legs unceremoniously gave out and I collapsed to the floor.

“Bell, I’m fucked up,” I said.

“You hit?” There was some mild concern in his voice.

“No, from last night. I’m fucked up.”

“Can you move?”

“N—no, I don’t think so.”

“Shit.” Bellwether retrieved a small bottle of something from his vest and put a little of whatever it was on his hoof, before proffering it towards my face. “Here, put your nose on this and sniff. Hard.”

“Is that fucking coke?” I frowned.

“Yeah.”

“Where did you get that?”

Bellwether grinned. “I’m a BASKAF agent, remember? We practically ran the coca and poppy fields for light years in all directions.”

“This is some really messed up first aid, I tell ya’.” I shook my head.

I did as my superior instructed and snorted the blow. All of it. My muzzle went numb like I’d rubbed menthol all over it, and in a couple short minutes, the lucid sharpness and feelings of invincibility returned, though they were of a slightly different character than before. I breathed in deep and exhaled all the tension in my body as I rose to my hooves. I felt like a fucking rock star. Like a goddess. It was all about me. Me, me, me. Who needed an Empress to raise and lower the sun, when you had me?

“Alright.” My voice sounded so dopey. “Uh-huh. ‘Kay. I’m up. Thanks, Bell.”

I may not have agreed with his methods, but I was on my hooves again, and that had to count for something. It felt like I was treading a thin, dangerous line. Like I was in limbo. A state of undeath. The darkness at the edges of my vision threatened to swallow me whole at any moment, but for now, I was up and on my hooves. If there was one thing I hated, it was conscious, intentional breathing, and I was doing an upsetting amount of it.

“You know, with my reduced renal function, you really shouldn’t be feeding me all these damn stimulants.” I couldn’t explain why I used the scientific term for things relating to the kidneys or made that connection in my head in the first place; my brain was running a million miles a minute, pulling up half-remembered fragments of my biology classes.

“Shit, you sound like Placid,” Bellwether laughed. “It’s the coke. Don’t worry, you’ll be back to normal dumbass Storm in no time.”

“What makes you think we’re gonna find anything? It’s been three years.”

“What we’re looking for is something heavy and useless to most ponies. They’ll probably have left one behind.”

One of the militia mares kicked down a door to yet another of the hospital’s rooms. “Hey, Bell, I think we’ve got something in here.”

We made our way inside, sweeping our beamcasters’ lanterns over the space, and though the room was missing a large portion of the supplies you’d expect a hospital room to have, there was a dusty, abandoned piece of medical equipment sitting in the corner.

“Gale, gonna need you to ID this thing for me,” Bell spoke into his mouthpiece. “We’re on the first floor, north side.”

A couple seconds later, the pegasus in question kicked in the plate glass window, sending shards all over the room.

“Yeah, that’s a dialysis machine,” Gale said. “I don’t know how to use it. It’s outside the scope of my medical training. Besides, this building has no power.”

“Let’s pack it up and take it back to Vinhark’s place. She might know how to use it, or if she doesn’t, she might know someone who does.”

Sergeant Gale wrapped up the machine’s cabling and hoses and bungee-corded the whole thing to her armor. She exited through the ruined window, jumped a hedge and trotted off down the street, seemingly unencumbered by its bulk despite her willowy build.

My eyes practically bugged out of my head. “That mare must be the strongest pegasus I’ve ever seen!”

“Alright, we’re regrouping back at Crazy Ed’s,” Bellwether said. “Right back the way we came.”

As we headed back towards the entrance, Bellwether motioned for us to hold position. We could hear chatter and hoofbeats back in the lobby.

“More vandals?” I whispered.

Bellwether shushed me and hazarded a peek around the corner. I joined him. Pacing in the lobby while having a heated argument were a mare and a stallion, unicorns both. They appeared to be armed with Confederate handguns, which they floated in the air beside them in the grip of their levitation magic. Without warning, they trained the pistols on our position.

“Who’s there?” the stallion said.

I cloaked myself and rolled low to the floor, slowly crawling forward until I had the pair in my sights. I wasn’t about to ice both of them if I didn’t have to, but I was ready to do the deed regardless, if it proved necessary. The pair didn’t look like vandals. They had load-bearing gear and heavy packs on. They had to be scavengers.

“We’re with the Liberation Front,” Bellwether called out. “Put your weapons down. We’re not hostile.”

“How do we know you’re not with the vandals?” the mare spoke.

Bellwether deactivated his beamcaster, its ball-turrets rotating into the stowage position with the lenses covered. He then stepped out into the open.

“Do I look like a vandal to you?” Bellwether smirked.

“That proves nothing,” the mare said. “You could’ve stolen that armor off a dead soldier.”

“If I were one of the Ninety-Fours, I’d be drugged to the gills and running your ass down with a nail bat in my mouth, not trying to negotiate peaceably.” Bellwether said. “What’s your business, here?”

“We could ask you the same,” the stallion piped up. “What are you doing on our claim?”

“Oh, so that’s what this is?” Bellwether nodded. “You think you’ve got exclusive salvage rights on this building?”

“The whole block,” the mare corrected. “It’s ours. We saw one of your goons run off with some medical equipment. You owe us.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen hundred bits, and that includes the damage to our window.”

Bellwether let out a big, hearty laugh. “Do you think I go into combat with that much loose change jingling around in my saddlebags?”

The stallion was getting pissed, waving his pistol in our direction. “Either you fuckin’ pay us, or I’ll—”

I’d had enough. I pulled the internal triggers on my beamcaster with my levitation magic. The twin green beams converged on a single point right between the stallion’s eyes. The steam explosion took the top of his head off, sending what was left of his brain rocketing into the ceiling.

“Darling!” the mare shouted, aghast.

Before she could react and turn and shoot us, the other members of Eagle advanced around the corner and put a few beams into her, center-mass, with practiced, martial ease. She collapsed face-first, screaming. A small form darted into our field of view. My beamcasters immediately started tracking the new target. With but a single telekinetic squeeze of those triggers, I could’ve ended the life of whatever or whoever it was.

“Hold your fucking fire!” Bellwether bellowed.

“Mommy, daddy!” A small filly bravely threw herself into our line of fire, interposing herself between us and her mortally wounded mother. “Don’t kill my mom, please! Please! Dad? Oh my gosh, no!”

I slowly stood, releasing my invisibility magic. My lips were trembling as the adrenaline started to wear off and the reality began to sink in. I’d fucked up.

“Sergeant Storm, did I order you to open fire?” Bellwether said, his voice low and dangerous.

“I—he was gonna shoot you, Bell!”

Bellwether turned towards me, his eyes like fiery coals. “Gimme your beamcaster.”

“How is this my fault?” I said. “I’m injured, I’m high, I’m practically delirious.”

“All reasons why you shouldn’t be armed, Storm. You’re right. The mistake was mine, for not having done something about this sooner. Now, are you going to surrender your weapon, or am I going to have to put you in a headlock and take it off your unconscious body?”

I unclipped the beamcaster from my armor and hoofed it over to him, feeling somehow naked being deprived of firepower in a combat zone.

One of the surviving members of Eagle looped his foreleg around my neck and gave me an unfriendly noogie, ruffling my mane. “Strike two, pilot. Let’s see if you can go three for three.”

The disrespect for my rank would’ve angered me, but it was the last thing on my mind at the moment. My eyes began to tear up as I ambled over to the center of the lobby while the other members of Eagle filed out through the main entrance. I reached a hoof out to the filly, who was sobbing and draping her body over her parents’ cooling corpses. “Kid, I’m sorry, I don’t—I thought—”

The child sat up and turned towards me, rage in her teary eyes. “How am I s’posed to go this alone? They were my whole world, and you took them from me, just like that! You—you exploded my dad’s head!” Her voice was high and reedy and full of hatred as she opened her father’s saddlebag and proffered it in my direction out of spite. “Here, why don’t you rifle through their pockets before you go? Thieves! Murderers! You rebels are no better than the vandals!” Powerful sobs shook her tiny body. “Don’t leave me all alone. Please. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of walking. I wanna go home. Mom. Dad.” The filly’s words dissolved into incoherent sobbing and babbling.

I felt nauseous. I couldn’t take it. I stumbled outside, propped myself up against a wall in the alleyway and started dry heaving. Nothing in my stomach. Nothing to show for it. I almost wished I had something to throw up, because I couldn’t stop heaving. My guts were starting to cramp painfully by the time Bellwether looped a leg around me and guided me away from the hospital. My back ached like hell.

The other members of Eagle team passed some of the medical supplies they’d scavenged to the other two remaining members of Raven team, and they beat their wings and took off towards the south to make a quick delivery to the locomotive.

There were a few moments of silence between us until I finally spoke up. “I don’t like this, Bell. I don’t like this face-to-face ground-pounder bullshit. I want my fucking Charger.”

“You’re in no shape to fight, Sergeant. It’s not just your injuries. Three years in captivity seem to have robbed you of a lot of discipline. Don’t worry. We’ll beat it back into you, as soon as you’re healthy again.”

“Will I ever be healthy after this? Am I gonna get a transplant and be stuck taking anti-rejection pills?”

“No. Word’s already got back to command about your little predicament. They’re probably going to see about sourcing a bionic replacement. No need to worry about transplant rejection that way, and they’re just as good as organic kidneys, if not better.”

As if my day could get any worse. “Great, so on top of feeding me so much blow that I’ve got manticore blood and Celestia DNA, you’re also planning on turning me into a damn cyborg. I know how this story ends, and I don’t like it, Bell.”

Bellwether grinned and shook his head. “Nopony’s gonna turn you into the Million-Bit Mare, Storm. We just need a pilot and a Charger that ain’t broken. Kinda hard for things to stay in one piece, out here. People, especially. Speaking of which, how are you holding up?”

“Fucking hell, dude.” I wondered if I looked as haunted as I felt. “Fucking hell, I shot some little kid’s father dead right in front of her!”

“I thought you were supposed to be a hardass pilot, launching chemical weapons during the war and shit,” one of the surviving Eagle team mares said. “Heard you executed some vandals a while back, too. Didn’t even hesitate. Just popped them.”

“This is different. That kid needs her parents or somepony to look out for her if she's going to survive out here in this shit. How can you all be so calm about this?”

The one surviving Eagle team stallion other than Bellwether chuckled darkly at my outburst. “You get used to it.”

I blinked and lost time.

I’d passed out on the sidewalk, only to snap awake lying in a bed with some giant toucan poking and prodding me with various metal instruments.

“What the fuck?” I screamed, flailing my limbs. “What the fuck!?”

It felt like I had an ice pick wound in my head, but it was probably just the come-down from the substances that had raged through my body a few hours before. My back seared with pain.

“Shh, it’s okay, pony.” The giant, biped bird ran a feathered hand over my head. “Relax. Mama Vinhark’s got you. I take it you’ve had a difficult time.”

The avian alien spoke perfect—if strangely-accented—Equestrian. Bellwether was sitting across from me. He had some explaining to do.

“Bell,” I said. “What happened?”

“You blacked out. We had to carry you here. The fighting’s died down, so we’re clear to move the loco. Defense teams are pulling up stakes now.”

I leaned up and looked at the reddish tubes running between me and the dialysis machine next to me. I was lying there, catheterized, useless. The room had all the accoutrements you’d expect from some shady street doc’s clinic, with spindly robotic medical devices hanging in the dark corners of the space like spiders suspended from a strand of silk. I collapsed in bed, breathing heavily. I coughed a few times. My lungs burned. I ached all over and I was running a fever.

“So, that’s it, then,” I muttered. “I’m going to live, I guess.”

I winced. Ponies tended to have a lowered life expectancy after acute kidney failure, even with therapy and bionic organ replacements. I briefly wondered how many years being hit by those fragments had shaved off my life, but quickly dismissed those concerns. In our line of work, none of us would have to worry about living to a ripe old age, anyway.

A deep breath sent shooting pains through my whole diaphragm. I snarled in anger. I wondered how many more of my organs the cleomanni would deny me the use and enjoyment of. Womb, kidneys, lung. They should’ve put one between my eyes. My brain was their real enemy, after all, and it kept getting madder with them each and every day.

“We’re not out of the woods, yet,” Bellwether said. “We still need to get that salvage back to base. We sent a burst transmission back with a salvage manifest. Our Charger technicians are already devising a system integration plan. They’ll be putting it into practice literally the very same moment those parts roll through the hangar door.”

“Good.” I sighed. “I’m sorry about earlier, Bell. I’m such a fucking idiot.”

“Nah, he might’ve shot me. It was a risk I was willing to take, but what’s done is done. No amount of moping is gonna bring that kid’s parents back from the dead. I know you’re out of your element. You belong in the cockpit, you do. Just try to stop fucking up. You’re lucky it’s me running this operation and not Captain Garrida, because if you were this insubordinate to her, she would eat you alive.”

I swallowed a lump that had formed in my throat. I’d never met Garrida, but apparently, she was the actual leader of the Crazy Horse cell, and she’d placed Bellwether in charge in her absence as a stopgap measure while running high-risk salvage operations in the North with her own select troops.

The other surviving Eagle Team stallion tapped his earpiece. “We gotta move, Sir.”

“Not yet, we don’t.” Bellwether frowned. “This stuff the Sergeant’s attached to isn’t exactly portable, and her treatment ain’t finished.”

“Sergeant Gale says she saw four Confederate transports touch down in a clearing eight klicks to the southeast.” His voice was tinged with nervousness. “They deployed between fifty and sixty Karks and two squads of Gaffs.”

Bellwether’s eyes widened. “Oh fuck.”

“Karks? Gaffs?” There was a sinking feeling in my chest. “Oh, shit, you don’t mean…”

“Yes, it means exactly what you think it means, Storm. Edmara?”

“Yes, sweetie?” she said.

“I suggest you get in your panic room, pronto. We’re packing up and heading out. Thanks for all the help.”

“But, miss Storm’s dialysis isn’t done. If you cut the process short, her health may be in jeopardy.”

Bellwether got up in Dr. Vinhark’s face as best he could as a quadruped who barely came up to her chest. “The cleomanni just dropped several dozen cybernetically-enhanced living bioweapons based on pony DNA, and they’re headed in this direction. They are accompanied by two full squads of Gafalze Arresgrippen handlers who are no doubt armed to the teeth. If we don’t leave, they’re going to kill us. If you don’t bunker down, they’ll kill you, too.”

A look of horror spread across Edmara’s face. “They may call me crazy, but I’m not suicidal.” She went about the process of putting my juices back in me, shutting the machine off and unhooking my catheters before taping the ends to my chest. “Leave those in. Don’t let them get yanked, or you’ll make a mess all over the place and probably die. Don’t let the caps get damaged, or you might get an air embolism. Keep the catheter site where it pierces the skin as clean as you can. If you see any redness or swelling, that probably means it’s infected and you need antibiotics.”

“Oh, goodie.” I rolled my eyes.

Dr. Vinhark turned to Bellwether. “Remember, Star Crusher owes me the usual fee.”

“You’ll get your money, Ed, don’t worry.”

The linnaltan nodded, waving back at us as she ran to what was presumably her preferred hiding place. “Good luck, ponies.”

The alien street doc punched a combination into a keypad and a section of the wall whirred to life, sliding over on tracks in the floor and shutting with a heavy clank like the door to a missile silo, completely blocking off the hall she’d entered.

I let out a low whistle. “Nice security. Hey, why can’t we just hide back there with her and wait it out?”

Bellwether snickered. “One, Layer has been kicking the shit out of their surveillance drones for hours. They probably know we’re here and will burn the whole clinic down unless they see us leave. Two, the loco can’t hold off a force like that on their own.”

“Fair enough.”

I tried standing, but I didn’t have the strength to move. After a few paces, my legs gave out. My weakness filled me with dread. If those freaks and their little pets had been right on top of our position, I would have been less than useless against them, unable to do so much as flee under my own power.

“A little help, guys?” I mumbled.

Placid groaned with exasperation and tossed me on her back like a filly. “Hold on tight, Storm, and for Celestia’s sake, don’t fall off.”

The eight of us departed Vinhark’s ramshackle clinic in a hurry, galloping hard for the outskirts.

“Why are we going south?” I said, fear creeping into my voice. “That’s where they deployed the Karks, right?”

“The train tunnel entrance is on the edge of town,” Gale said. “We have to get there before they do, or we’re all fucked.”

“Where are the Chargers?” I said. “They should be able to interdict the incoming hostiles, right?”

“The Charger Lance returned to base ages ago,” Bellwether spoke between strained panting. “Falcon team successfully neutralized the enemy tanks, but they need an ammo resupply. They won’t be back for hours.”

“Wonderful,” I groaned. “Fuck.”

The unlit storefronts passed me in an unrecognizable blur. It was strange to feel somepony running in a full gallop while riding on their back. I could feel every muscle in Placid’s shoulders and haunches pumping in a steady rhythm while my own legs hung limp at her sides. It almost reminded me of ol’ Barley. I used to playfully ride on his back while he cantered along, sometimes.

I blushed at the strange feelings I had for this mare. She was damaged. A basket case, a bigot, and devoutly religious to boot. I wouldn’t dare divulge a word of my growing and hopefully platonic affection, but for the time being, I enjoyed her warmth under me. I felt strangely safe and comfortable around Placid, even after she’d held a knife to my neck the night before.

She reminded me of my older sister, Hoodoo. She liked to paint landscapes. My little sister, Windy Mesa, wanted to be a meteorologist. I never saw them much after moving out of home. I wondered what they’d think of me now. Waitress turned pilot turned killer.

There was something wet in my eye.

“Contact!” Bellwether shouted.

The telltale whip-crack of flechette fire pinging off the street barred our passage to the south. It was soon joined by waves of massed pulse rifle fire, blue streams of energy lancing through the air and towards our position. We turned east and darted into an alleyway filled with trash and rubble. The squalling and squawking of the Karkadann echoed through the empty city blocks, alternating between rhythmic hyena laughs and trilling mechanical birdsong.

“No, no, no, shit!” one of the remaining Eagle fireteam militia mares shrieked.

I looked over my shoulder and sorely wished I hadn’t. I saw the glowing orange eyes of two Karkadann as they darted into the alleyway behind us, hot on our hooves. Two became five. Five became eight. Eight became a numberless mob. The way they moved was deeply unnatural. Uncanny, even. Jerky and spasmodic, like puppets of flesh and metal. They chirped and trilled to each other in incomprehensible digital data bursts that seemed to synchronize the movements and intentions of the entire pack.

Two of the surviving members of Eagle squad seized a dumpster in their hooves and strained and grunted as they rolled it in front of the charging pack of Karkadann. This was a mistake. The lead Kark’s armored body punched through the thin sheet metal of the empty dumpster like a missile, its horn impaling one of the hapless militia mares in the throat. She went down screaming and gagging on her own blood as the creature tore the hole in the dumpster even larger before squeezing its entire mass through. It pounced on her, stamping the life out of her with its hooves and dipping its head low to rip great bloody chunks from her helpless body in a frenzy of carnivorism.

The stallion fared worse. Much worse. One of the bigger ones leapt over the obstacle, reared up and slammed him into a brick wall with enough force to leave a pony-shaped indentation. There was something between its legs, where a stallion’s cock ought to be. It was shaped like a bee stinger and colored the hard, reflective chrome of the rest of the creature’s body. In some dark mockery of the primordial instinct, the creature thrust its hips forward and punched the sharp implement into the stallion’s abdomen.

The stallion screamed and foamed at the mouth as he was injected with an orange liquid. His features sagged and collapsed. His flesh rapidly liquefied from his steaming bones. A few of the other Karkadann, seeming tuckered out after their sprint, homed in on the oily, bloody puddle of goo that used to be one of our comrades. They extended ribbed tubes from their muzzles like proboscises and started drinking him. The remainder continued to give chase. The only thing that dampened the horror of what I’d just witnessed was the fact that the ghoulish scene was receding quickly into the distance while the pegasus carrying me on her back fled as quickly as her legs could propel her.

“What the fuck.” My whole body shook with fear. “What the fuck?!”

Bellwether slapped a few pounds of plastic explosive against the brick wall of the alley as he ran, trailing a spool of wire from under his cloak. He bit down on the detonator and there was a flash of light and an eardrum-shattering blast that buried half a dozen of the disgusting creatures in rubble and blocked the path of the rest.

The other surviving militia mare was the first to exit the alley. She came apart in a hail of blue pulse rifle discharges, her body twisting and pirouetting in a gory last dance. We came to an immediate halt and altered course. Bellwether stomped the handle of a service exit door off, stuffing a lump of moldable plastic explosive inside the hole before retreating a short distance and blasting the lock mechanism into slag. With a mighty grunt of exertion, he bucked the door as hard as he could. It caved inward without resistance.

We rushed into the darkened structure, knocking over racks of old clothes and pony mannequins that were in our way.

“Commodore!” Bellwether practically screamed into his radio. “We’ve been engaged. We need smoke at our location!” He hastily fed her a series of grid coordinates.

About thirty seconds later, the street outside the clothing store was enveloped in clouds of thick, gray obscurant smoke from where the heavily armored pegasus had dive-bombed the area with smoke grenades.

Bell and Placid sprinted outside. I coughed violently. The air was thick with small particles of metallic chaff designed to confuse multi-spectral sensors. Ordinary smoke wasn’t enough to hide you from a GARG trooper’s helmet and the battery of sophisticated personnel-detecting devices it contained, which included infrared and terahertz cameras. We crossed the street and made for a series of concrete stairs that took us down an embankment to where the opening to the train tunnel resided, its unlit maw beckoning the foolhardy. We charged into the inky black of the tunnel, towards the pinpoint lights of the other Liberation Front members’ combat harnesses, about a hundred meters ahead.

Placid hoofed me over to one of the other surviving militia members hiding out in the freight car, before hauling herself up into the car and helping Bellwether do the same. The earth pony lookouts and the other two remaining pegasi from Raven zipped in through the open side door, quickly sliding it shut behind them. They looked like they’d both seen ghosts.

“Get this fucker moving, Cinder! Into the tunnel!” Bellwether radioed.

With a soft rumble, the train started rolling, hopefully away from the horrors that pursued us. Placid collapsed to her haunches, panting hard, muttering hateful profanity under her breath. She was on edge, fidgeting and shaking her head. Seeing the Karkadann had her spooked.

“What the fuck was that, Bell?” I spoke, my voice raspy. “What did I see back there?”

“That depends,” Bellwether’s eyes were downcast. “What did you see?”

“One of those things just—it—it dicked one of our guys and turned him into soup! And then they drank it!” Just thinking about it made me sick to my stomach.

Bellwether looked up at me, a hard, angry expression on his face. “They call it nectar. Those things’ brains are always in an excitotoxic state because of the stimulants they constantly pump those fuckers up with and because of their crazy metabolisms.”

“What the hell does that mean, Bell?”

“It means that if they didn’t periodically turn ponies into nutrient sauce with a nanite injection and drink the amino acid and neurotransmitter-rich slurry, their nerves would fry. They’d be palsied up. It’s a form of pre-digestion that increases the bioavailability of specific neuroprotective organic compounds. Or, at least that’s how Crookneck explained it to me with his brand of gobbledygook. Believe me, I had just about the same reaction you did the first time I saw it.”

“The fuck?” I blinked, uncomprehending. “Please, in Equestrian.”

Bellwether sighed. “Karks need to turn us into soup to get the most out of us, or else they’d fall apart.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” The pace of my breathing quickened by an uncomfortable degree.

“No. No, I’m not.”

I shook my head, shuddering softly. “This is fucked. This is so fucked!” I felt the catheter on my chest with my hoof, and with a rush of emotion, the sadness I’d been holding back came gushing out of me like a broken water main. My body heaved with each sob that tore its way out of my throat, my vision blurring with tears. “What if they got my Barley the same way? Or my sisters? What if they fucking juiced them, or worse?” I was hyperventilating, the horror of what Confederate scientists had done to Placid taking on new and terrible dimensions as I considered the implications it might have had for my own family. “My sisters—oh fuck. This is—I can’t—”

Bellwether pulled me into a hug. “Easy, Storm. I know. It’s bad.”

I bawled like a foal into the older stallion’s shoulder, losing myself in his warm embrace. “We’ve got to stop them, Bell! It’s not right!” I felt so tired. So weak. Remaining conscious was a challenge.

Placid Gale slid one of the freight car doors open and peeked outside, into the darkness of the unlit tunnel. “Boss, we got a problem!” she shouted over the roar of wind howling past the open sliding door.

Bellwether and I joined her, following her gaze up towards the overhead, where, judging by the swarm of glowing orange eyes, a dozen Celestia-fucking Karkadann were clinging to the ceiling of the tunnel with their talon-like spurs while keeping pace with the train in a dead sprint. My stomach felt like it dropped through the floor.

“Fuck my life!” I said.

“Quit your bitching, Storm,” Placid said. “I have no idea if one of these fuckers is one of my own kids, and we gotta kill ‘em all or they’ll kill us. Do you see me complaining?”

“We have to collapse the tunnel,” Bellwether said. “It’s the only way. Sergeant Gale!”

“Yeah?” she said.

Bellwether tossed her a brick of plastic explosive. “You and the rest of Raven Gather up as much boom as you can from Osprey. Move to the tunnel exit and set the charges to bring the whole fuckin’ thing down. We’re going to have to time this just right.”

The Raven team pegasi swept through the rail car, collecting bricks of plastic explosive from the other team members in a big duffel bag, before zipping out the side door and flying ahead of the train, into pitch-black darkness.

Bellwether was sweating right through his coat. Nothing about this situation was ideal. “Osprey one, come in.”

“Go ahead, Eagle,” Cinderblock’s voice crackled over the air.

“Speed up the train. On my mark, set off the barrel bombs.”

The swarm of orange eyes receded into the darkness as we accelerated into the tunnel, their chitters growing to a crescendo of angry, inequine protests over their escaping quarry.

“Mark!” Bellwether shouted. “Blow ‘em!”

That was when the four 55-gallon drums that Osprey team had welded to the rearmost car and filled with explosive material, diesel fuel, screws, nuts, bolts and unwanted diesel engine parts were set off with a command detonation signal. There was an earthshaking boom and a shotgun blast of shrapnel accompanied by a roiling fireball that shredded or incinerated everything in the tunnel aft of the train. Half of the Karkadann were blasted to bits or cooked alive right through their armor. That still left at least a couple dozen that were able and willing to continue their relentless pursuit.

One leapt onto the rearmost rail car, chittering and squawking angrily. I could hear its footfalls on the roof of the car from a few cars up-train.

“Not good,” Bellwether said. “Not good!”

“We see it!” Cinderblock radioed. “Decoupling!”

The last ruined, empty car was severed from the rest of the train with another, smaller charge, where it drifted lazily into the tunnel behind us before being swallowed by the darkness.

Bellwether hazarded a peek. “Dammit, it’s still up there! Fucker jumped to the next car before it could decouple!”

Without a moment’s hesitation or fear, Bellwether mounted the ladder to the roof of the rail car, climbed up and faced the beast and the whipping tailwinds head-on.

“Yeah, that’s it, motherfucker!” Bellwether roared. “Come on! Take me if you can, bitch!”

I heard a muffled explosion and a few beamcaster discharges, followed by shouted profanity and grunts of exertion and pain, along with the gruesome noises of sharp objects sinking into flesh, but I couldn’t see what, precisely, happened. When Bellwether climbed back down the ladder and stumbled into view, he was covered from head to hoof in red ichor.

“Bell, you’re bleeding!” I said, sitting up in a half-panic.

He shook his head. “It’s not my blood.”

I just sat there, blinking in shock.

“Raven to Eagle one, charges are set!” Placid’s voice came in over the radio.

“Hold position a safe distance outside the tunnel and wait until the last car clears the exit, then blow ‘em!” Bellwether said.

The Excelsior-type locomotive and its dwindling train exited the gloom of the tunnel and burst into the light of day.

The next few moments seemed to pass in slow motion. The first few Karks neared the exit of the tunnel, and then, a giant flash and a fireball consumed the whole hillside. I was temporarily deafened by the whip-crack of the blast. The rail cars were pelted with rocks, clinking off the roof of the car like hailstones. When the dust cleared, the tunnel exit wasn’t even recognizable anymore. A sunken, smoking crater was all that stood in its place.

Bellwether gazed out of the side of the rail car, his jaw slightly agape. I swore if he stared any longer, he’d pop a demolitions-related boner.

I laughed, breaking down into a coughing fit from my injured lung. “Ya think we used enough dynamite there, Bell?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

The train’s traction motors whirred as we blazed across the countryside.

Bellwether turned to the rest of the ponies huddled in the car. “Okay, assholes. Listen up. We’re reorganizing into two teams. Osprey joins Eagle, we’re the defense team. Magpie joins Raven. They’re the assault team. Storm, you’re on Raven, but take it easy. Formation, everypony!”

Sagebrush’s helmet was missing, and he had a bandage on his head. Shooting Star’s muzzle was caked with dried blood and her dazed, lidded eyes refused to focus on anything. Cinderblock and his fellow engineers weren’t present. They were up in the loco, driving the train. Half of the unit looked too injured to stand. Only Placid had even an ounce of that razor-sharpness we’d all possessed when we set out on this doomed operation. Nevertheless, we formed up as ordered over a chorus of yessir.

I had an exhausted limp. I felt like death warmed over. Bellwether tossed me a beamcaster rig, which I clipped to my armor without a single word of protest, but he gave me a stern look that indicated that if I disobeyed his orders, there would be repercussions. Placid gave me another little shot of meth to top me off. I felt like I was breathing fire at that point, rocking back and forth on my hooves. I had to still the shakes consciously.

“You’d better be listening close, because I’m only going to say this once,” Bellwether said. “Commodore Cake and Sergeant Storm have given us intel on Confederate plans to move hundreds of Equestrian prisoners by train. This train, as a matter of fact. CSF Outpost 17 was a part of their plan. It served as a supply depot with equipment to secure the prisoners. We’ve already thrown a monkey wrench in their shit, just by stealing this loco, but why stop there?”

Bellwether pounded his hoof against the wall of the freight car. “Forty klicks east of here lies Dodge City. The Confederacy have a prison camp there, with thousands of ponies being watched over by some of the worst scum ever shat out by this savage galaxy of ours. With each passing day, more of those prisoners succumb to the brutality of their captors. We have a rare opportunity to put a stop to this.

“I know we’re tired. I know we’ve got wounded. That’s why I’m calling for reinforcements. Some of the best fighters we’ve got. We’re going to ram this train so far up the Confederacy’s ass, they’re going to shit it out their cowardly cunt mouths. Then, we’re gonna walk right out of there with those prisoners, and anything that gets in our way is going to be put in the fucking dirt with extreme fucking prejudice. We’re the sons and daughters of Equestria, and we cannot be stopped!”

A cheer went up. More like a roar in the cramped space. I could tell that not everypony’s heart was in it. We were over-extending ourselves. We were exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and many of us were wounded.

I flexed my hooves, shaking my head. My heart was gripped with equal parts fear and resignation. After all these years, I was finally going home.

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 09//Gridiron Estimated time remaining: 23 Hours, 43 Minutes