//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//READ FAIL

// … error - holocrystal alignment error …

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//READ FAIL

// … error - holocrystal alignment error …

run tapper#xap

-=ThE TaPpER=-

[Don’t use this unless you know what you’re doing! -Jo]

//-h: help, -t: basic tap cycle, -tf [x]: fulltap [rate]

run tapper#xap -tf 1024

//============——————……………

//Stage 1 - 38%

//Stage 2 - 45%

//Stage 3 - 82%

//Stage 3 … Finalizing - 98%

-=CyCLe CoMpLEtE=-

………………………………………….

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

//RES DAT SRM

Desert Storm

I rocked back and forth on my haunches, hissing through my teeth. The apocalyptic scenery racing past the open rail car door seemed way more exciting than usual. I’d just shot meth again, so I figured that had something to do with it. I was in that zombified region between sleep and wakefulness. Once again, I was doing that conscious breathing thing that I hated. My body felt heavy, my limbs like lead weights, but I was full of nervous energy. I wouldn’t dare vocalize it, but my commanding officer was an irresponsible son of a bitch. We were all riding straight into another meat grinder.

I thought of all the ways I would go down fighting. My brain ran in a loop. I foresaw my own failure. One misstep, one slip-up, one gruesome death after another. I scanned the sallow eyes and drooping faces of my compatriots, and though nopony said a word, I could tell they were all thinking the same exact thing. This was suicide, plain and simple. I grinned. I was fucking excited. I’d voided myself of all rationality as of a few minutes ago.

Lucky for us, our prayers were answered when the train came to a halt twenty klicks from our destination. I peered around the side of the rail car. There were some vehicles blocking the crossing ahead. Four five-ton trucks and six Centaur APCs. The Centaur 6x6 was the Equestrian answer to the Confederate Pursuer. Both of the front axles could steer, and the rear axle, spaced further to the rear than the other two axles, had a pair of great big mudders in the back.

The untamed roar of their high-strung twelve-cylinder synfuel engine was very distinctive, which was both a blessing and a curse. It made it easy for friend and foe alike to pick them out on the battlefield. They were fast as hell and armed and armored to the gills, but they were also difficult to maintain and guzzled gas. The engines would always break down every few hundred hours, but they were modular, so a small team of mechanics could quickly rip the whole power unit out and send it to be factory-reconditioned, and then slap in another engine that had already been refurbished. Unit-exchange.

“Reinforcements?” I muttered.

Bellwether peeked around the side of the rail car and squinted at them. “That must be them.”

Placid, Sagebrush, Star and I accompanied Bellwether as he jumped out of the rail car and moved to the head of the train. Standing at the crossing was a loose formation of troops. A good platoon-sized force of Equestrian soldiers. At the head of this group was a big, muscular, dusky-feathered griffon in full combat gear, along with her personal entourage of four similarly attired griffons. Her black beret bore the bars of a Captain. They were all kitted out with both beamcasters and the large-bore slug-throwers that griffons favored. Even from afar, I could see Bellwether break out in a sweat. He was expecting reinforcements, but he hadn’t expected his boss.

“Captain Garrida!” he said, offering a stiff salute that was not returned. “Perfect timing, ma’am. I’ve got—”

The big, intimidating griffon marched up to Bellwether’s face, her beak practically touching his muzzle. “You destroyed my fuckin’ Bull Runner, Bell.” She poked him in the chest with her claw for emphasis. “Half of your platoon is missing, dead, or wounded. You ran like a pussy and didn’t even recover the tags, let alone the bodies.”

“I—we—” Bellwether spluttered. “It wasn’t just CSF! The Confederate Army ambushed us with battlesuits! I—”

“No! No excuses!” Garrida headbutted him into the ground. “Stop wasting my assets, maggot!”

The big griffon put her claws in her beak and whistled, before making a few snappy gestures towards the rail cars. Like clockwork, her troops—disciplined and trained former military, not our militia dregs—raided the rail cars of anything of value, loading the captured materiel onto the trucks. Eight pegasi grabbed the heavy radome from the crashed Confederate patrol boat, spreading its weight among eight pairs of wings.

The transfer was completed in mere minutes. It was mesmerizing to watch. The most injured of us were placed on the trucks and sent home. A few others were doing even worse than I was. A dazed, infuriated Bellwether was escorted off to board one of the Centaurs.

Captain Garrida paced in front of us, eyeing us imperiously. “As of right now, Agent Bellwether is relieved of command of this operation. I’m taking charge. You will address me as ‘Sir’. You shitbirds will do exactly as I say, when I say it, or so help me, I will rip every one of your asses off. You won’t even know what happened. You’ll turn around and be like ‘where’s my ass?’ and it’ll be completely gone. Do I make myself clear?”

“Sir, yes sir!” the survivors and I chorused.

“Good.” Garrida nodded. “I don’t care what units or formations Bell had you in a moment ago. Anyone who’s got wings will join Raptor Team. Everyone else, Team Ostrich. We’re going to assault the Dodge City detention camp and free the captives, but we’re going to do it my way. Combat Engineers, you are to rig every inch of the locomotive with CH. We’re gonna start this bitch off with some big fireworks.

“Immediately afterward, ground and air teams are to begin the assault when I give the signal. This is not a rescue mission. This is a search and destroy op. We’re going to kill every last alien son of a bitch we see. We are not going to leave until they are all rat bait. Any ‘rescue’ of prisoners that happens will be a side effect of their captors being freshly deceased. Move out!”

“Yes, Sir!”

Brick after brick of CH was emplaced inside the engine and the remaining cars. If I had to guess, they probably used over half a ton of the stuff. Their transport trucks must have been filled to the gills with it. A dangerous prospect with enemy air lurking overhead. The secondaries would’ve taken out the whole convoy. Oh great, another nutjob, I mused. No shortage of those in this outfit.

CycloHex, or CH, was the standard explosive compound used in practically all Imperial ground ordnance. It was a 60/40 mixture of cyclonite and polymerized chains of hexanitrocubane with a plasticizer and stabilizer added. The mixture was also triply enchanted for enhanced heat, pressure, and detonation velocity. My father used to tell me this story all the time; in the old days, legions of unicorn factory mares, the so-called Boom Babes, would enchant each batch the old-fashioned way, working in shifts that barely gave them enough time to eat, sleep, shit, and piss.

A few decades ago, they’d switched over production to an automated process that used diagrammatic engines instead, like the one found in a beamcaster, to perform each enchantment on the mixture in sequence as batches moved across conveyors. CH packed a wallop like nothing else. Pound-for-pound, it had over four times the relative effectiveness of TNT. A small brick of the moldable plastique was enough to rip the face off a building. Several hundred pounds of it could level a city block.

The only time that the usage of CycloHex was inappropriate was for space-based ordnance. Anti-Starship Missiles, or ASSMs, along with things like the det-packs used by combat astronauts to sabotage space-based hardware, used an even more potent, more costly HMX-based formulation called LOVAP instead, so named for its much lower vapor pressure. CH, when exposed directly to vacuum outside of a hermetically sealed container, would undergo sublimation and degrade straight from a solid into a gas, limiting its usefulness in space.

When one of Captain Garrida’s pegasus Lieutenants ordered Cinderblock and his crew off the train, set the throttle to full, and accelerated at breakneck speed, the loco’s steam turbine and traction motors doppler-shifted as it roared off into the distance, one thing was made abundantly clear. We were, in fact, going with Bellwether’s plan to use the train as a battering ram.

“All squads, board the vehicles,” Garrida said. “We’re following that thing in. Go, go, go!”

We all hurriedly piled onto the Centaurs. There was hardly any room for all of us, but somehow, we managed to fit, packed into each APC like sardines. Like cat food. The big V12 came to life and the Centaur picked up speed, each bump and pothole in the road lightly jostling us in our combat harnesses. The space in the back of the vehicle was cramped and dark, and my shoulder protectors clanged against the ones of the ponies next to me.

Someone was blasting loud music from a boombox in the corner. The first track was from Neck Bolt, the Baltimare speed metal greats who needed no introduction. The second was by A-Fib, a hardcore punk band who were infamous both for their anti-authoritarian message and for the fact that their lineup had a unicorn front-mare for a vocalist, a cleomanni political asylum-seeker on bass, a linnaltan on drums, and a xicare on guitar.

Love you like a heart attack,
but I know you don’t love me back,
‘cuz I’m not shaped correct,
to get you all erect!

They were banned from numerous venues and loved by dissidents on both sides of the border for their raucous and subversive live shows. There was an infamous incident where they’d went on the run from the Confederate Constabulary across multiple systems both for smuggling their vocalist across the border and for playing an unauthorized gig with their amps and everything on a street corner in the financial district of Kar Hollinvost. The Confederate capital on Ard Doch. The heart of darkness itself.

One thing was certain; they had big stones. Great big ones. The idea that a pony and one or more members or associates of the Free Trade Union races could simply get together and do something as innocent as jointly creating works of art and culture was practically unheard-of, with a few protest groups being the sole exception. Even in the Empire, there were some who thought they were spies. There was simply too much bad blood there. They had to be some of the biggest xenophiles imaginable. People who saw themselves as above the conflict. Beyond it. Some resented them for their lack of patriotism. I, on the other hoof, envied their freedom.

The stallion to my left was cute. Hell, the stallion to my right was cute, too. All of us were musky and sweaty, and the crowded troop compartment reeked of that unmistakable pheromone stink. Cleomanni and the like had broken smellers when compared to ponies. I could smell everything. I could smell my compatriots’ fear, their bloodlust, how horny they were, how healthy they were. Everything.

I wanted to fuck. Badly. My hips were quivering. I wanted to rip off my armor and start blowing somepony right away. I shook my head. It’s just the meth. It enhances libido. Ignore it. My self-control was stronger than some puny chemical substance.

“Hey, guess what, you sons of bitches?” I said.

“What?” someone on the other end of the troop bay replied.

“I’m going home! Dodge is where I’m from! How ‘bout you?”

For a moment, there wasn’t a peep from anyone, the air heavy with a pregnant pause, and then, a soldier with a thick farm pony accent standing to my right piped up. “I’m from Appleloosa. Dodge is shit. Always has been. Was shit back then, and it’s even more shit now. Wha’d ya’ do before ya’ joined the Army? Shovel shit?”

“I waited tables at the Gridiron.”

The whole troop bay broke out in guffaws. The guy to my left was leaning on my shoulder and practically crying from laughter.

“What?” I said. “What’s so funny?”

“Aw, shit!” the Appleloosan soldier said. “Ya’ hear that? A titty waitress! She used ta’ be a dang titty waitress!”

“What’s the matter, hornskull?” another chimed in. “Were the whorehouses in Canterlot too fancy for the likes of you?”

I was fairly certain that I outranked over half of the ponies here. Their insubordination made my blood boil. The balls on these assholes. They knew they could get away with it, too. No tribunals, no MPs, nothing. No such luxuries in an insurrection. I wondered if we had a brig we could throw them in, at the very least. With my own lapses in judgment over the past two days, I also wondered if I was headed there, myself.

Fuck it. I thought. Fuck Bellwether. Fucking spook. He was going to get us all killed. I have no reason to take orders from a spy. This griffon seems to have more gumption than he does, unless she’s all talk.

“We’re coming up on an enemy checkpoint!” the driver shouted. “Get on the sponsons!”

Seven ponies jumped up and manned the six beamcaster ball-gimbals arrayed around the perimeter of the vehicle, along with the thirty-millimeter automatic cannon mounted to the roof. Each weapon was operated with its own, individual remote weapon station with its own screen and operating yoke. Hostiles without an IFF tag appeared as thermal signatures with a bounding box around them, and all one had to do was steer the turret into their general vicinity and pull the trigger. The computer would find a firing solution and do the rest.

Centaurs had four beamcasters broadside and two fore and aft, and a damn autocannon on top. They had substantially more firepower than a rinky-dink Pursuer. Which was a good thing, because as soon as we neared the checkpoint, anti-tank infantry were attempting to sight us in and fire upon us. Vehicle-mounted beamcasters had another neat trick. Without any operator intervention, they could detect incoming ordnance with an array of millimeter-wave radars that ringed the vehicle. The system tracked and locked onto rockets, ATGMs, mortars, artillery shells, tank shells, bombs, and anything else that could threaten us, and it shot them out of mid-air.

The radar warning chimed. “Rocket!” the driver screamed.

The beamcaster arrays instantly responded in kind, swatting it down with needle-thin streams of green arcane energy. I couldn’t see a damn thing through the hull of the vehicle, but if I could have, I would’ve undoubtedly seen the incoming projectile explode over an empty field before it could even get within a hundred meters of us.

The autocannon gave a few thumping reports, signaling that the guard post had been turned into splinters. A 30mm HE shell filled with CH had the same destructive power as a Confederate 57mm. A 40mm CT gun like on my Mirage was comparable to getting hit with a Confederate 76mm shell. Everything about our weapons was superior in every way to their Confederate counterparts. So why did we lose the fucking war? I thought.

A war is not won with wonder weapons alone. First, you needed a strong industry. We didn’t have that. We’d been worn down by centuries of warfare, our colonies plucked away from us one after another. So many defense and industrial corporations we relied on for our manufacturing base had been forced to shutter themselves due to bankruptcy, because their facilities had been reduced to rubble. Even with government subsidies, many of them had struggled to remain afloat.

We rammed through the checkpoint, which had been secured only with a chain-link fence and not bollards, or this would’ve been a very short mission indeed. Confederate guardsmen and regular soldiers alike peeked out of their holes to fire upon us in desperation, but they were put down almost instantly. Centaur sponson gunners didn’t have the information overload of a ring-turret gunner on a Pursuer. They had only their own firing arc to focus on, and that made them acutely aware of anything that entered their field of view. Any enemy foolish enough to leave concealment would be fired upon without delay.

Second, you needed allies to support you. We didn’t have that, either. Equestria had no friends, and the cleomanni forbade others from so much as trading amicably with us. Most of our corner of the galaxy is so afraid of the Confederacy’s wrath, they would comply with any demand of theirs, no matter how outlandish or downright evil. We had been isolated on purpose.

We came to a stop on a grassy hillock overlooking Dodge. “All squads, disembark!” came the command. The troop bay ramps dropped and we all filed out. The winds were picking up. The suburban housing development we found ourselves in was ruined and abandoned, with graffiti and smashed windows being the theme of the day. The dead trees were stripped of their leaves and swaying ominously.

Hundreds of years ago, all this was desert, but with the help of dams and agricultural irrigation projects, the whole valley had been greened years ago. Sadly, all that grass was dead or dying now. The stationary sun had affected the climate. I could see the locomotive off in the distance. A thin, silvery line, streaking into town, the sun glinting off of the loco’s polished metal exterior parts.

Third, you needed the motivation to win. Again, we didn’t have that. Some of us were vicious fighters on an individual basis, but if one were to zoom out and examine the bigger picture, they could plainly see that our collective will had been broken by what the Confederacy had done to us. What we did have were killing fields and bereaved mothers as far as the eye could see. The soul of all ponykind had been flayed and laid bare. We were an entire nation in agony. A gazelle in the crocodile’s jaws. Flopping. Spinning. Bloodied and torn. We weren’t fighting. We were just struggling to survive.

There was a faint speck off in the distance, flapping its wings. One of Garrida’s pegasus troops. The one who’d been driving the train. He’d abandoned it at the last moment, allowing it to run away, unpiloted.

The Excelsior-class engine and its remaining cars entered the switching yard and rolled into Dodge’s Central Station, where it struck the stopblock at the end of the track at full speed and promptly overran the end of the track.

The sheer violence of the event beggared belief. Enemy troops ran and scattered every which way as the heavy fusion-powered locomotive launched itself many meters skyward, landing on the pavement and skidding half a hoofball field while sending up a shower of sparks before finally plowing into the two-story main brick building, leaving a locomotive-shaped hole in the wall in the wall as it went.

Captain Garrida alighted on the roof of the nearest Centaur, flicking the safety cover on the detonator she held. “End of the line, motherfuckers!”

She clicked the detonator, and then, Central was no more. There was a blinding flash and a whole city block ceased to exist. Hundreds of tons of brick, rail, and locomotive parts had been instantly turned into a plume of debris hurtling over a hundred meters skyward. I reflexively covered my ears as I watched the shockwave approach, kicking up dust in its wake. The whip-crack of the blast punched me in the sternum and nearly knocked me off my hooves.

“Celestia’s sweet tits!” the Appleloosan soldier swore.

Captain Garrida lowered her binoculars, lighting up a cigar and taking a celebratory puff. “That explosion just took out over a hundred Confederate soldiers and guardsmen, a few dozen alien mercenaries, and a couple hundred of the staff running the detention camp. While they’re wondering what the fuck just happened to them, we are going to tear them a brand-new asshole! All squads, move in!”

With a battle cry, we formed up and charged down the hill towards the Confederate positions. A couple soldiers at the head of the stampede took flechette rounds to the chest and went down. The rest responded with steady streams of beamcaster fire, keeping the enemy too badly pinned to shoot back. The Centaurs moved up behind us, their guns set to auto-fire mode, letting the computer do all the work of target acquisition and elimination. One satyr after another fell, stacked like cordwood.

Dodge was as I remembered it. It was nowhere. A backwater town with some mid-level brick buildings, and little in the way of high-rise structures. My old apartment was several blocks from here, and my parents’ old house before they moved out was on the other side of town. It hurt my soul to see my city like this. I had a lot of bad memories, here, but also a lot of good ones.

I’d been issued a spare headset to replace the helmet I’d lost. It provided no ballistic protection, but it allowed me access to the local datasphere and the encrypted peer-to-peer data links that we used to relay vital information from one unit to another. The three squads of Ostrich Team followed the nav markers in our heads-up displays. Raptor Team’s squads did likewise, taking to the skies above us and settling down on rooftops to give them a height advantage over the enemy. They were also breaching into the top floors of buildings and clearing out any potential snipers and gun nests as they went. The air was thick with the sounds of rattling gunfire and sizzling beams.

Down below, our squad peeled off from the APCs, turned a street corner and ran headlong into every pony’s worst nightmare. Six damarkind mercenaries moved up the other end of the street in a loose formation, their weapons at the ready.

The tall, bulky bipeds had canine, digitigrade legs, wasp waists, a furred tail, broad shoulders, thick arms, clawed fingers, and practically no neck. They were almost comically top-heavy, like steroidal bodybuilders who’d skipped leg day. Their blunt, ursine muzzles concealed row after row of sharp, ripping, carnivorous teeth. Their noses were piggish and their faces bore whiskers and tusks. Their ears were long and pointy like a guard dog’s, swiveling to track our movements. Every inch of them that was exposed was furred, but their heads had additional prominences of fur that gave them a natural trident-shaped pattern of tufting, with hairs projecting from the sides of their necks and cheeks and straight up from the tops of their heads to form natural mohawks.

Damarkinds were one of the vilest client species of the Confederacy. They had one planet, and little interest in colonizing more. Politically, they were little more than a loose assortment of tribes squabbling over the one, lone world that they had. Many of them lived like paupers in great, stinking hives of brick and soot, like in Equestria’s old industrial era. Others lived in tribal wooden longhouses out in the sticks.

Patriarchal, chauvinistic, and psychotically aggressive, they lacked the domesticity needed for such things as space development. They had only one dilapidated spaceport, in the capital of their largest tribe, sponsored and maintained by their Confederate benefactors. Aside from the satyrs who maintained the spaceport, other species were forbidden to visit Damark of their own accord, unless they came in chains.

Most of what was said of the technologically backwards society on their homeworld was hearsay. However, some individuals who were in-the-know about such matters—members of their species who were patient enough to bother giving interviews to xenologists—had shed some light on their insular culture. What little we knew was the kind of thing you expected to see in a pulp serial horror magazine, not real life.

The most popular television and radio show on Damark centered on the art of woodworking and home improvement. So far, so innocuous. The second-most-popular show on their planet was a game show about releasing convicted criminals and captive sapients of other species into the unforgiving wilds of Damark, forced to brave carnivorous beasts and deadly toxic plant life. Then, they sent in hunters to stalk their terrified victims over the course of a few days or weeks, snare them in traps, bind them up and make gruesome trophies out of them. Only rich damarkinds owned televisions and the only indigenous models were black and white tubes with tiny screens that weighed as much as a bank vault, which was the best their scientists could muster. The rest had to make do with sound only.

Most damarkinds who took to the stars and owned their own spacecraft and other, similar examples of superior foreign technology were hired guns, assassins, and thugs of every stripe who lived a nomadic existence. Some damarkind tribes had forged themselves into mercenary bands that roamed the galaxy, getting fat and wealthy with filthy lucre from contracts with the Confederacy and organized crime bosses, along with the treasure they’d looted from their victims.

One could always tell how successful a particular damarkind pack was by how well armed and armored they were. The ones we now faced were plated from head to toe like living battle tanks, bits of fur peeking out under layers of armor. The helmets they wore were the piecemeal ballistic face masks typical of their kind, with vanity features like openings for their fur to make them look more frightening. All that armor meant they were rich. That, in turn, meant they were good in a fight, else they wouldn’t be getting such lucrative contracts.

I had all of two seconds to ponder all of this, when the lead damarkind snarled and pointed in our direction. We scattered. They scattered. Both sides moved into cover as beams and machine gun fire filled the air. I peeked out and launched a volley of green streams at one of them, only to watch them bounce off of the monstrous creature’s heavy plating. The return fire was swift in coming. I ducked out of sight to avoid having my skull ventilated.

Damarkinds were an entire race of half-witted, murderous, hillbilly space scum. Each and every one of them was born a bounty hunter, a mercenary, and a butcher, clutching a knife straight from his mother’s womb. Unlike the cleomanni, they had no fear of our kind. In fact, they regarded ponies as somewhere between a light snack and a living sex toy. In that respect, they weren’t much different from the vandals, really. The main difference, I supposed, was that damarkinds were a good two-plus meters tall, weighed over two hundred and fifty kilograms, were obligate carnivores, extremely violent and libidinous, and supposedly had cocks the size of redwood trunks. Being mounted by one would be a terrible ordeal, by any stretch of the imagination. Worse still was the prospect of being skinned and eaten alive by those monsters.

They did things like that to intimidate us. To fuck with our heads. To put us on edge. To remind us that we were prey. The best thing to do was to ignore their savagery and press onward. They didn’t scare me. They only motivated me to do everything in my power to avoid capture. It was difficult for me to tell how much of that bravery was the drugs coursing through my system, and how much was my own. If I were sober, I’d probably be terrified out of my wits. My heart raced a mile a minute. I’m not gonna become some mercenary bitch-boy’s personal cock-sock. I’d rather turn my levitation on my own head and break my own neck. They can fuck my corpse if that’s what they want, but I won’t be in my body to experience it.

I was trying to think of what their faces reminded me of. I hazarded another glance, only to duck back again from the crackle of supersonic projectiles snapping past my head.

A beaver. Not a dog, or a boar, or even a bear. A great big beaver that walks on two feet.

I pulled a grenade from a vest pouch, ripping the pin out with my teeth. “Everypony, fire in the hole!” I punched the grenade with my levitation magic, sending it flying down the street on a flat trajectory. The damarkinds ran, jumped and cannonballed through the nearest windows, using the structures’ bulk to escape the frag’s radius long before it went off. With a thunderous report, shrapnel spewed across the street, putting out the windows of abandoned cars and leaving them full of holes.

“They’re tryin’ to flank us!” the Appleloosan said.

True to his word, when the mercs re-emerged, they leaped from the third level of the high-rise structures at our three and nine o’clock, fell several meters, and landed right in our midst, rolling to absorb the impact of their massive bodies, slinging their crude automatic rifles over their backs and drawing their knives. If a damarkind with a gun was bad, a damarkind with a knife was even worse. They weren’t flashy about the way they used knives. They weren’t into any of that martial arts stuff. Their traditional method was more akin to a prison-shanking than anything else. Go straight for the vitals and pump a foot-long, serrated blade into the victim over and over, like fucking them with a sharp, steel prick.

I got a first-hoof demonstration when one of them sprinted in and snatched our very startled squad leader. The giant, snarling beast picked him up by the heat dissipator of his beamcaster—not even caring that his hand was singed in the process—and plunged a fixed-blade knife into his victim’s neck three times before we could even blink. He nonchalantly tossed the screaming, gurgling stallion aside like a bag of groceries, launching himself into a diving roll to avoid a volley of beamcaster fire, sheathing his blade and unslinging his rifle in a single motion. He let loose with a burst of fire at point-blank range that caught one mare in the chest, punching her right in the strongest part of her barding’s plates.

Angered, the big chartreuse earth pony mare roared and charged at the towering brown mass of fur and muscle, tackling his legs. He reflexively rolled with the force of the blow, coming out on top, pinning her with his bulk. He licked his lips demonically as he grabbed one of her forelegs, twisted it behind her back, and dislocated her shoulder with a yank and a wet pop. She let out a bloodcurdling scream as the monstrous alien wrenched her limb out of place while he dry-humped her ass.

“Your cunt is mine!” he roared.

A second damarkind and a third were pushed back by unrelenting streams of beamcaster fire. One found a chink in the first one’s thick, reflective body armor and drew blood. He hissed and backpedaled, suppressing us with a big, ugly, primitive-looking rifle the whole time. The other was trying to use the green-coated mare—who was flailing and screaming bloody murder—as a living shield, attempting to deter us from firing upon him. The situation had devolved into pure chaos. To put it bluntly, we were in deep shit. Six of the galaxy’s deadliest, most hideous predators were hunting us. Like game animals.

I’d hesitated. Frozen up. Horror and desperation crept into my veins. I needed my Charger. I needed more armor. More firepower. I needed something. Anything.

One of the damarkinds roared and charged at me, brandishing a knife. I had a rush of adrenaline. Magic power flowed into my body, supercharged by the fear I felt. The very air seemed to vibrate with the emotions of my comrades. I picked out their anger. Their yearning for justice. I channeled it. It was now or never. It was time to show them how unicorns fought.

I coalesced a levitation spell around the charging damarkind’s feet and forcibly immobilized them. He tipped over and fell flat on his face, letting out an explosive grunt. He snorted and howled as he flailed his arms and tried to right himself. I grabbed a corrugated metal garbage bin off the street between my forehooves, upturned it and brought it down on his head, rancid old trash and all.

“Inmenk grui anli wen siosarr!” I shouted. “Dohuta aspare ut sereinstobor gruire avecare turusa avespad!”

Keep trash off our streets! Throw your alien garbage in the proper receptacle!

While keeping the can in place and blinding him to his surroundings, I seized everything nearby in my levitation that looked nice and heavy and I stacked it upon him, topping it off with a good-size sedan that teetered atop a stack of dumpsters. Judging by the ascending pitch of his pained howls, the weight was simply too much, even for an armored damarkind. He went silent. Something in him popped, like a cockroach might, and he was done.

Before I could take any satisfaction in my victory, one of them charged me from behind, knocking me down. I tried rolling upright to give him a faceful of my casters, but he pinned me with his mass. A clawed hand seized upon my throat, razor-sharp points threatening to tear out my gullet. He straddled me and humped my back softly, right over my injured kidneys. I grit my teeth. It hurt. A lot.

“Every inch of you smells like pussy, pony slut.” His bestial vocal apparatus growled out every single word in surprisingly articulate Ardun. “Don’t fight it. We are what you crave.”

This was getting ridiculous. This was the second time in the past several hours that some freak of nature had expressed a desire to brutally fuck me, with or without my consent. I couldn’t comprehend how I could possibly be worth their attention. When I looked in the mirror every morning, a frumpy-looking, downright average unicorn with a mid-length blue mane stared back. I wasn’t particularly attractive. I was just about the most average-looking mare alive. I was also thirsty as fuck. Three years, no sex. Too many heats spent all alone in a damn shipping container with nothing but my hoof for company.

I couldn’t help it. I was immensely turned on. I hoped he didn’t notice I was quickly soaking through the crotch of my armor. Wait, no. That wasn’t mare juices. It was piss. I’d just fucking pissed myself. That meant one of my kidneys was still kinda-sorta working, at the very least. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head vigorously to clear the cobwebs. It’s the meth. Urinary incontinence is a known side effect. Ignore it!

“In your dreams, fucker!” I rolled and swung a hoof at him, catching him in the muzzle. “I’d never give it away to alien filth like you!”

He growled angrily over the matter of his barked nose. Without hesitation, he took a swing at me, full-force. Damarkinds didn’t hit with pansy-ass little love taps like cleomanni did. They hit like a freight train. When his fist connected with my face, my muzzle burst in a spray of blood. My whole head exploded with agony and I briefly saw white. Trails of red flowed freely from my nostrils and right down the back of my throat. I gurgled and choked on my own blood as he wrapped one of his big, meaty paws around my neck and squeezed like a hydraulic press. Darkness crept into the corners of my vision. I could see stars. With his other hand, he levered my hind legs apart and viciously ground his crotch into mine, the fabric of my uniform pinching my privates.

My mind was awash with terror when I realized that I could actually feel his throbbing bulge through two layers of clothing. He pushed his root against me so hard, he gave me a front wedgie. I felt every inch of him hip-thrusting against me, parting my pussy lips with his girthy shaft. He was no tree trunk, but he was at least as thick as a beer can. He could have easily put many stallions to shame. The hot, humid breath he exhaled against my face was a foul, stinking plume of rot and filth. When I tried scooting away from him, he simply grabbed my hind legs and used them like a pair of handlebars, yanking my crotch back onto his. He didn’t care much about the rest of me. For the time being, all he needed was the pelvis.

“I can feel your damp cunny, and it disagrees, you silly gash!” he roared. “You long for my cock!”

He flicked open a small switchblade and started undoing his belt buckle, keeping me in place by leaning his hips atop mine, pinning me with his sheer mass. The lunatic creature was actually planning on putting a hole in my uniform and raping me right there, not even caring one whit about the lethal beams of magic energy that were, at that very moment, bouncing off his armor.

I was really pissed off, now. Being strangled and sexually assaulted by a towering alien that smelled like a quarter-ton wet dog was pretty high up on the list of things I never wanted to experience in my whole life. I didn’t get paid enough for this bullshit. My magic surged. With a gurgling scream and a flash of tangerine spellpower, I struck him with a focused burst of telekinesis, sending him flying. He left a spread-eagle damarkind-shaped impression in a brick wall, before peeling off like a cartoon character and falling flat on his face. He lay still on the sidewalk, unmoving.

My teeth bared with incipient rage, I levitated the sedan from the top of the stack and turned it upside-down, fully intent on crushing the sick son of a bitch to death. Before I could finish the deed, I had a thunderclap of a migraine strike me and my magic guttered out. While I gripped my head in my forehooves, groaning in pain, I dropped the car on its roof and its windows shattered. I stumbled and fell flat on my ass. Everypony around me was engaged in a melee with the remaining mercenaries. They teamed up, two on one. Two ponies were more than the equal of one of those monsters for strength.

I watched a pair of mares seize a damarkind’s legs and drag him to the ground, before flicking open their boot-knives and stabbing him in the neck over and over again. It seemed to annoy him, more than anything. What were lethal, brutal blows when directed against a cleomanni soldier were mere acupuncture to a damarkind. Their flesh was thick, their arteries deep. The blades were only hitting muscle and soft tissue.

Corporal Shooting Star pulled on one of the fallen damarkinds’ knives with her levitation and ripped its sheath from his harness. “Nice knife, asshole! Mine now!”

She immediately charged one of them down and speared the point of the blade through a gap in his armor above one of his knees and twisted with her magic. Star’s horn lit and she rapidly heated both his rifle and the knife with pyrokinesis. He stumbled and dropped his glowing rifle, his hands smoking as he cried out in pain. He reached for the knife to pull it out, but it was too late. Star galloped up to him and launched herself into a flying kick, driving the blade hilt-deep and straight through his femoral artery with one of her hind-hooves, before backflipping off his thigh and landing gracefully on all four legs. A surprising feat in full body armor. The merc fell onto his back, bawling like a foal.

Corporal Star was laughing like a madmare as she ripped the twelve-inch, glowing, serrated camp knife out with her teeth, leaving behind a carbonized wound. She drove the blade into his neck and sawed with her levitation for several seconds while growling like a mad dog, before ripping off his severed head with her magic, coating her muzzle with a spray of blood. She was laughing dementedly the entire time.

“Hot potato!” She spiked the severed head at one of the damarkinds like a volleyball and he sidestepped it, a look of disgust and fear momentarily crossing his features.

I shook my head. It wasn’t just my imagination. She’s a bigger fuckin’ weirdo than the rest of us put together. She had the right idea, though. One of their knives was just about the right size and degree of lethality to use it on its owner to great effect, if you happened to get lucky enough to disarm one of them and turn their blade against them.

The remaining three, including the wounded one who’d been stabbed repeatedly, shrugged us off and beat a hasty retreat, their primitive slug-throwers barking as they went. One of them had taken one of us hostage. The greenish mare with the broken shoulder. She was screaming, flailing and babbling like a foal in her captor’s unyielding grip, begging us not to let them take her alive.

“Shoot me!” she screamed. “Fucking kill me! Please!”

While everyone else was freezing up, I was the only one who thought to take her up on that. I’d started the process of disabling my beamcaster’s IFF, but it was too late. The mercs rounded a corner into an alleyway and vanished from our sight, but not before letting off a few more rounds of aimed fire from cover. A round caught me in the shoulder protector, ripping it off. I fell face-first, grunting in pain, before rising to my hooves.

I felt my shoulder in a panic, but there was no blood. No penetration. Just the beginnings of a big bruise. My pauldron was ruined. A big splash of grayish metal and a deep indentation decorated the front of it. Large-caliber cast lead slugs. Their weapons were ill-suited for combat against armored opponents. No doubt they’d selected their ammunition for high expansion and limited penetration in order to do more damage to unarmored prisoners. Bastards.

That wasn’t a typical battle. That was a street brawl, and a nasty one. Neither party’s ranged weapons could reliably penetrate the other’s armor, so we had resorted to stabbing and crushing the life out of each other. Our squad leader was surrounded by a pool of his own blood and he wasn’t moving. They’d kidnapped one of us and we had several wounded. Two of ours for three of theirs. A stalemate.

The mercs would’ve had a better chance if they’d avoided a melee. Tangling with ponies in close-quarters combat when we had superior numbers was a guarantee of death. If they’d whittled us down to half, they could’ve taken us one-on-one in a melee, but outnumbered as they were, they didn’t stand a chance. They’d been too prideful and overextended themselves. They were well-equipped, but inexperienced. Probably the reserves in a wealthy mercenary company. Either that, or they were so accustomed to bullying their captives, they’d forgotten how to deal with ponies who actually fought back.

The squad’s medic was busy patching up the rest. She took her turn with me, looked me over, and then started about the process of setting my broken nose with her magic. I let out a soft, pained cry as she clicked something back into place. Then, after a quick appraisal of her work, she nodded tiredly and moved on to one of the others.

“Aw, dammit!” The hick threw his helmet on the pavement in a fit of anger. “They took Cloverleaf! We gotta go get her, or they’re gonna have her for supper!”

“She’s gone, Haybale,” a unicorn stallion shouted. “Forget about her!”

“Shut up, Carillon!”

“Oh, so we’re doing names, now?” I said. “Not calling each other fucker or cocksucker like usual?”

Several pairs of eyes fell on me, glaring. “And who’n the hell are you s’posed to be?” Haybale said.

“I’m Sergeant Desert Storm, Charger pilot. Does anypony here outrank me?” No one raised a hoof, to which I nodded. “Our squad leader is dead. That means the responsibility of command falls to me, now. I’m in charge.”

“Like hell you are, Pilot,” Carillon seethed. “I didn’t come all this way and survive all this time just to be ordered to my death by a fuckin’ mech jockey.”

“Oh yeah?” Haybale growled. “Well, are we just gonna stand around and let Clover die?”

“Enough!” I stamped my forehoof like a gavel. Garrida had saddled me with the exhausted rejects from Bellwether’s surviving militia forces and I couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not. The constant unit-shuffling was a disaster waiting to happen. “This bickering and unprofessional conduct is a shameful way for a soldier to behave! Back when I served, you would’ve all been court-martialed!”

Carillon glared at me. “Oh really? Well, too bad. Last I checked, we ain’t in the Army no more. There is no army. There’s nothing! We don’t have a country. It’s just us and these alien motherfuckers!”

The unicorn put a hoof through a car window for emphasis, drawing back a limb covered in blood and glass shards. He slumped against the rear quarter panel of the vehicle, letting out big, throaty sobs. He seemed to shrink in upon himself as he bawled like a foal. While the medic bandaged his foreleg, I walked up and wrapped my own forelegs around him, slowly running my hoof through his mane to try and comfort him.

“You guys haven’t seen what they do.” His voice was thick with emotion. “Those sick, deranged fuckers raped my wife and daughter and ate them. The damarkinds fucking flayed them alive. I came home and there was blood and cum everywhere. Pieces missing. Great big hunks of meat cut out of their asses. I’d been out of the military for years, but I joined the resistance soon after. With my wife and kid gone, I didn’t have a life anymore, and there was nowhere else for me to go. If Celestia is so powerful wherever she is in the great beyond, if Alicorns are so fucking special, why would they let this happen to us? Where is Twilight Sparkle in all of this? Why would she leave us all alone, just to suffer?”

I perked my ears at the din of far-off gunfire all around me. Of pony and cleomanni alike shouting and dying in screaming agony. Of roaring engines and the mechanical monsters we’d made in order to kill each other more efficiently. My hooves were shaking and my eyes pinned wide open from how drugged-up I was. It was a valid question.

I let go of the soldier. “We’re going after Cloverleaf.”

“Why?” Carillon whined. “Just so we can get killed?”

“Captain Garrida’s orders were to take out every alien son of a bitch in Dodge,” I said. “Some aliens went that-a-way, and we’re going to neutralize them, too. They’re going to use Clover as bait. Try and pull us into an ambush. We’re not going to take the bait.” I levitated up one of the fallen damarkinds’ combat knives; the damn thing weighed a couple pounds and had a spine over a quarter-inch thick, like it was made for hunting bears.

I paced back and forth, looking every one of the troops in the eye. “What we are going to do is we’re going to find them, cut their sacks off and feed them to ‘em. These monsters come to our worlds, they eat our sons and they rape our daughters, and are we gonna just roll over and take it? No! We’re going to strangle these motherfuckers with their own warm entrails!” I raised the knife high. “A garland of guts for every damarkind mercenary pig-dog son of a bitch! Who’s with me?”

The soldiers let out a cheer, pumping their hooves into the air. I stowed the knife and its sheath in my saddlebags. Even among this fractious group of ne’er-do-wells, I’d secured their loyalty for the time being. It was simple, really. I put my analytical mind in the back seat and let the amphetamines do the talking. I took the squad leader’s helmet with its integrated command and control system and lifted it gingerly off his head with my magic, tossing the headset in my saddlebags and donning the helmet and chinstrap. The fallen soldier’s eyes were frozen wide in a haunted stare.

I looked to the medic, but she shook her head. “No breath. No pulse.”

I silently nodded and swept my leg over his eyes, closing them for the final time, before pulling his tags and stowing them. I sifted through his saddlebags a bit and retrieved a commander’s multi-spectral binocular, like the one Garrida used. I whistled softly and put it in my saddlebags, as well. It might’ve come in handy.

“Squad leader, report,” came Garrida’s voice over the radio. “Ostrich Three-One, why haven’t you reached the next waypoint, yet? We are making preparations for the assault, get your asses to the front, over!”

“This is Sergeant Desert Storm, we read you. Our squad leader is KIA. Six damarkind mercenaries ambushed us. They took—” I paused to read off the rank tag in my heads-up display, “Corporal Cloverleaf. Her transponder is still transmitting, but if we don’t do something soon, those bastards are gonna go full-on EFK on her, over.”

“EFK?”

“Eat-fuck-kill.”

Garrida sighed loudly. “Copy that. Squad leader KIA, one MIA and presumed captive. I’m headed over there right now to crack some heads. Those turd blossoms are going to wish they’d never been born. Out.”

“Those fellers had some pretty serious armor on,” Private Haybale said. “I couldn’t scratch ‘em, an’ believe me, I tried.”

“That’s because they’re wearing four-centimeter-thick titanium plating that’s been neuterized by a nemrin priest.” Carillon demonstrated this by trying to levitate one of the enormous cuirasses one of the fallen mercs wore, only for his magic to slip right off the enchanted metal. “It’s a black-market item hot with mercs. They take their own armor and commission a priest to enchant it for them with magic-deflecting wards.

“Nemrin aren’t legally allowed to provide such services to other species, under FTU law. That’s why when you spell one of these bastards, you’ve got to aim for the body underneath the armor. Levitation will pass right through their armor and stick to their body. Arcane beams or beamcaster shots won’t.

“The armor they wear is heavy in the cuirass but weaker everywhere else, to save weight. It exploits a quirk of beamcaster targeting. The computers always aim for center-mass when the sensors get a lock, and most of a damarkind’s bulk is in his torso. Go full manual. Aim for the limbs. Arms, legs. Cripple them first, then finish them off.

“Damark’s loaded with titanium, apparently. More than those freaks could ever use. If we bombed those fuckers back to the stone age and took their world, we’d have enough titanium to build millions of Chargers and thousands of warships, and then some. I don’t think the galaxy would mourn the tragic loss of damarkind culture, either.”

I slowly shook my head; rapey, muscle-bound, knife-obsessed alien mercs were bad news on their own, but magic-deflecting armor made them a real nightmare. “Move out,” I said. “Don’t let them get the drop on us again. And switch to manual targeting, too.” I waved up the squad and we advanced up the street, keeping a close eye on the buildings around us as we moved. I saw movement in a window. A couple of civilian ponies huddling in the darkness, too scared to do anything but fidget where they stood.

“Keep your heads down,” I whispered to them. “We’re with the Liberation Front.”

They nodded silently and ducked into the shadows as we passed. We reached an intersection and I peeked around a corner and saw something that seared my fucking retinas. A big damarkind Pack Alpha with silver-fringed fur was standing atop a barricade, holding a naked Cloverleaf face-up by the barrel with one of his massive hands, ramming her whole body up and down his cock while she kicked and screamed and drooled, trying desperately to push him away with her one good foreleg.

I winced. His balls were slapping wetly against her ass, the sounds of violent copulation echoing off the maze of brick and concrete all around us. He was also leveling a very large belt-fed machine gun in our general direction, one-handed, proving that he could multi-task. Several others were hunched behind cover, their weapons ready to respond to our approach.

“Ge’ out here, ponies!” he laughed. “I need fresh pussy and thissun’s almost spent!”

“Please, stop!” Clover screeched.

The Alpha responded by proceeding to snake his thick, meaty fingers into her mouth until she gagged, and then extending his claws and ripping her cheek open. She let out shrieks and yelps of pain as she tried holding the wound shut with her hoof, to no avail.

“I hope ya’ don’t mind, boss.” One of the others hefted a knife.

“My pleasure, lad.” The Alpha nodded his assent, pulling her off of himself and handing her over.

While Cloverleaf screeched in agony, one of the damarkinds sawed off her limp, dislocated foreleg and then promptly cauterized the oozing wound with a blowtorch, sending her screams to bloodcurdling new heights of terror and despair. They weren’t staunching the bleeding for her sake, I mused. They were saving the rest of the meat for later, like closing up a fucking sandwich bag.

The damarkind who’d robbed her of her leg grinned like a hyena as he idly seared the meat with his torch, twirling the severed limb like a kebab in the blue flame before taking a big, crunchy bite. He grunted with disdain. “A bit furry. Better shaven.”

While Cloverleaf kicked and flailed with her three remaining legs and sobbed openly, tears and snot and blood streaking her face, the Alpha seized her by the barrel and resumed his earlier vileness.

I’d had enough of this. It was showtime. I silently waved a few orders to my squad, and then, I stepped out into the open, much to my comrades’ shock. “Release the hostage, you son of a bitch.”

After a brief pause and a few shared glances, the damarkinds broke out into peals of riotous, cruel laughter in response to my demand. One was so mirthful, he dropped his weapon and practically rolled around on the asphalt behind the barricade, guffawing all the while.

The Alpha snickered, rubbing a hand down his face while leaving Cloverleaf impaled in mid-air, her entire weight held up by the strength of his prick alone. “And who th’ blue fock are you, to tell me and the boys to do anything?”

“I am Sergeant Desert Storm, Charger pilot of the Light Scouts of the 8th Cavalry Division.” I was buying time, trying to keep them from killing Clover. “I’ve torched worlds. Deployed weapons of mass destruction. I’ve executed deserters and killed thousands of Confederate citizens with poison gas. I’ve stepped on cocksuckers like you for fun. Watched you burst under my machine’s hooves.

“You cannot rule me with fear. I am fear personified. I am the subject of every satyr’s worst nightmares. I am the reaper of the desert sands. When they hear the hoof-beats, thump-thump-thump-thump, they know that it means I’m coming for them, and no prayer, no incantation, no amount of begging will prevent me from taking their lives. You think yourselves the hunters, but you are my prey.”

If their growls and snorts of rage were any indication, that got them good and angry. In damarkind culture, to be prey was to occupy a subordinate role. They were obsessed with domination and submission in its purest, cruelest, most immature sense. The strong ate and fucked the weak. The weak got fucked and eaten. Being matriarchal, herbivorous, eusocial herd-dwellers made our species triply inferior in their eyes. For one of us to turn the tables and call them something as lowly as prey was an insult that cut deep indeed.

The Alpha snarled, eyeing me with a calculating gaze that betrayed a certain brutish intellect. “And where’s your Charger, now? All I see is tinned cunny, fresh for the taking.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you where she is.” I smirked, watching the tags on my HUD closing rapidly. “She’s up your ass, bitch!”

I cloaked myself and shifted my position, and just in time, because it was at that very moment that all hell broke loose. The troops I’d sent to flank from an adjacent structure opened fire, enfilading the barricade. Though their beams didn’t do much at first, they were a hell of a light show. Soon, aimed fire started catching the mercs in the exposed joints of their armor, sending them stumbling as beamcaster emissions pierced their tissue and boiled their blood. They panicked and started shooting up at the open windows, hosing the structures down with bullets, their weapons rattling a deadly chorus.

Captain Garrida landed atop a car thirty meters to the front of the barricade. She was wielding a 30mm Grover Anti-Tank Rifle with the inscription Thumper stenciled on the side of the barrel in giant block print. She had a lit cigar hanging from her mouth as she reared up and, without a single word, leveled her fearsome weapon at the damarkind Alpha and put a round into him center-mass with a booming report that shattered windows. A hoof-sized hole was blown into his chest. The exit wound made the back of his cuirass spall fragments into the eyes of the mercs standing next to him, blinding them and making them drop their weapons and wail in agony at their popped eyeballs. As the Alpha collapsed and died, Cloverleaf fell from the monster’s failing erection with a wet plop.

The semi-automatic, shoulder-fired bullpup boomed again and again, the ATR’s barrel recoiling, its extractor sending a big, smoking brass casing flying over Garrida’s shoulder and its bolt picking up another round from the top-loaded box magazine. With each report, a damarkind fell. Limbs were severed with sprays of arterial blood. Chests were imploded by irresistible force. A few of the mercs made a haphazard attempt to fire upon the Captain with their squad’s machine guns, but they were quickly silenced.

The remaining few cowered behind cover, taking potshots now and then. One of the rounds caught Garrida in her body armor. She didn’t even flinch or make a sound. Instead, whilst grimacing with utter contempt, she took her giant rifle’s empty magazine, placed it back in her saddlebags, and replaced it with what appeared to be a solid, inert block of metal with spikes sticking out of it. The unusual device fit into the magazine well and was secured by the catch with an audible click.

“What the fuck?” I whispered.

Garrida took wing, somersaulting behind the barricade and landing with surprising grace for her massive frame. One of the damarkinds tried charging her with a knife, roaring a challenge. She grabbed Thumper by the spade handle that protruded under the barrel and swung the receiver end like a giant cudgel, so quickly that it looked like a blur. She struck the merc in the face with the spiked magazine and caved in his helmet. He whined and dropped his blade, scooting backwards across the ground and whimpering like a foal, his face dripping with blood. With a demonic glint in her eye, the griffon showed no mercy as she brought her ersatz war hammer down upon him again, and again, and again. She turned his head into a mulched slurry of brain, blood, and bone.

The last two of the mercs made a run for it, clearly spooked if their body language was any indication. They only made it a few paces before Garrida drew a sawed-off double-barrel 8-gauge shotgun from her chest holster. It had been loaded with what were presumably magnum armor-piercing sabot slugs, judging by their effects on target. The two shots sounded almost like a single report, both rounds striking the mercs dead center in the back. Her targets collapsed like puppets with their strings cut, paralyzed from the waist down. Their groans were pitiful as they tried crawling to safety, dragging their useless legs behind them, only for the Captain to calmly walk up to them and deliver the coup de grâce to each one with a rifle-hammer blow to the head.

I stood from cover and walked up to the Captain, grinning. “Where do I get one of those, Sir?”

Garrida sat down hard and took a puff from her cigar, letting out a satisfied sigh, leaning her weapon back and resting it against her shoulder. The Grover’s stock had been engineered with a padded, U-shaped faux-leather cushion that actually sat atop a griffon’s shoulder, rather than against it, like a rocket launcher. This was because with a long-recoil action, the weapon’s bolt popped out the ass-end of the rifle every single time it fired, and if the stock had been located there, it would punch the user in the face. The optics were on the weapon’s left side because of this unusual configuration.

“First, I have to like you, and I don’t like you,” Garrida said. “Second, it helps if you’re a griffon. The whole manual of arms and everything needs fingers. Unless you’re a unicorn, which means you can cheat.” She looked around to make sure no one else was looking, and then she smiled and plucked my helmet off my head momentarily to ruffle my mane. “I saw what you did. That was very brave of you. And stupid. Don’t do it again, you understand?”

“Yes, Sir!”

She sat down hard and regarded me skeptically with that strangely penetrating gaze of hers, taking another long drag from her cigar, before nodding and turning to the fallen Cloverleaf. The green mare crawled towards us pathetically with the stump of her missing foreleg scraping across the ground. Garrida sighed and pinched the bridge of her beak, before waving at the upper levels of the structure that I’d had my squad attack from.

“Medic!” she shouted. “Getcher asses down here!”

“Captain,” Cloverleaf sputtered, collapsing to the asphalt. “I’m shorry.”

Garrida took one look at me, and then pulled her double-barrel shotgun from her chest rig, broke the action open, reloaded a couple shells, and handed it over to me. I seized it in my levitation’s orange glow.

“What—what do you want me to do with this?” I said.

“What do you think?” Garrida looked down at Clover. “She’s going to be a drain on resources from here on out. She’s no good to me without a leg, and Crusher doesn’t have any prosthetics to spare. Even if he did, why would we waste a valuable medical device on a complete basket case?”

I stared at the griffon in abject horror. She’s not suggesting what I think she’s suggesting, is she? What made it worse was Clover’s reaction.

The green, heavy-set mare looked up at me, tears in her eyes and blood dripping off her chin. “Do it. Pleash.” Her torn cheek was making her slur her words, and she could see the hesitation on my face. “I can’t live like zhis. Do it before I shange my mind!”

I shakily positioned the shotgun so the muzzle was lined up with Clover’s head, slowly drawing back the hammer. Just one round was all it would take. One single shot. It was certain to end her suffering. It’d be just as easy as when I executed those vandals that attacked the Runner. Clover closed her eyes and let out a soft sigh. She was ready.

Something about all of this felt wrong. I couldn’t really put it into words, but it rubbed me the wrong way.

“No,” I said, my voice firm as I turned and glared at the griffon. “Do it yourself.”

I returned the Captain’s weapon to her, which she took and quickly holstered, smiling softly all the while.

“Well done,” she said. “If you looked like you were going to do it, I would have stopped you.”

“What, do you mean to tell me that was a test?” I glared at her.

“Yes, it was. You passed. See? You may be a volunteer Charger pilot, but you’re not the monster you think you are. You’re still just a pony. Don’t be so quick to throw that away.”

“I had to.” My eyes were brimming with tears. “I had to become a monster, just to cope. The things we did, Captain—I—I can’t—they weren’t good things. Not things any pony or griffon should do. They were the worst things imaginable.”

Garrida let out a dismissive grunt. “Bullshit.” She pointed at Clover. “Did you rape someone? Did you eat someone alive? No? Then obviously, you haven’t done the, quote unquote, ‘worst things imaginable’. What’s unthinkable barbarity to us is like an evening stroll in the park for these sick pieces of trash that we’re fighting. We haven’t even seen the worst of it. Sergeant, I guarantee you, somewhere around here, there’s a charnel house that you’d need a couple dozen barf bags to walk through. If you smell death, if you hear a few too many flies buzzing around, trust me, just turn around and walk away. Let the professionals handle it. You’ll thank me later, kid.”

Garrida took to the skies with a few flaps of her giant wings, leaving me to ponder her words. I hefted one of the damarkinds’ belt-fed machine guns in my levitation. I lifted the top cover and racked the action open.

The thing was astoundingly crude. It was operated by some sort of delayed-blowback mechanism with cams and grooves to keep the bolt in place until chamber pressures had dropped to a safe level for extraction. The receiver was made from stamped metal in places, with a few machined components where added strength was necessary. An indigenous damarkind design. It was surprisingly light, necessitating a very effective muzzle brake to keep it under control.

I sneered derisively as I inspected the thing a bit closer. The Alpha’s weapon had a meticulously engraved wooden stock with a silver inlay, depicting scenes of ponies being terrorized and herded like chattels, beaten and flogged and ravished by their masters, many of whom reclined leisurely on thrones decorated with skulls. It wasn’t an allegory. Damarkinds only engraved things in wood that actually happened. Each of their weapons bore a living record of the owner’s personal history and achievements.

The weapon bore other gruesome trophies. There was a band of pony teeth, drilled and secured to lengths of cord wrapped around the stock. The cheek rest was made of a patchwork of leather that smelled suspiciously like my own kind. There was even a zebra talisman for good luck hanging from one of the sling mounts, though obviously, it hadn’t done any of its previous owners any good.

All I knew was that our enemies were wearing neuterized armor, beamcasters were next to useless against them, and if we were defeated and they took us alive, we would soon wish that we were dead. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the squad caught up. While the medic looked after Clover, I levitated a few of the firearms and their ammunition over to my troops.

“Carillon, you and the rest of the unicorns take the machine guns and any spare ammo you can find on these fuckers. They think they’re clever with their spare-no-expense approach to warfare. I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when we use their own shit on them.”

A couple of pegasi flew by to medevac Clover on a stretcher, carrying her back to the command post that had been set up on the edge of town. She wasn’t in a good way. Not after what had happened. I could see it in her eyes. She needed more than stitches to sew up her ruined face. A stiff drink and a long, long talk with a therapist wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface. These were grievous wounds she’d carry forever.

That was when I realized where I was. I looked up at the street sign beside me. I was on the corner of Pinecone and Seventh. When I turned to my left, there it was. Same as it always was. My old apartment building.

“Squad, move up and enter the building. I need to investigate something. Keep posted by the entrances and raise hell if any more assholes show up.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Haybale said.

They did as directed, following me into the lobby. The place had seen better days. The chandelier in the entry had fallen and there was graffiti everywhere. I made my way up the stairs, to the fifth floor. Unit five-oh-four. The lights were still on in the hall, oddly enough. I supposed the Confederacy brought in some containerized generators to power the town while they occupied it.

The place was dead quiet. Not a sound, other than the din of the battle a few blocks away. Not a soul in sight. It was downright eerie, just being here. There were always at least a couple ponies milling around, back when I lived here. I rapped on the door a few times. No response. I didn’t have my keys, either. I looked left and right. I swore the landlady was watching me, even now, and if I did anything untoward, she’d come out of a closet wielding a broom and smack me on the head and loudly berate me like the stereotype she was.

“Sorry, Miss Persimmon.” I turned around and bucked the door full-force, sending it rocketing open.

The room beyond was like a shadow of my old life. Everything still looked the same. Even smelled the same. All the posters were in the same place. My stereo and all my holodisks were right where I’d left them. The bookcase had been rummaged through, however, and the kitchen showed signs of recent use. Somepony had been in here in the intervening period. Someone other than me.

I expected this. I’d given my sister Hoodoo the key and let her stay at my place as long as she kept up on rent while I was on deployment. I paid half, and she paid half, and we got to keep our place. There was nowhere else for me to put all my shit, anyhow. She and Windy had gone off to be with mom and dad and taken a tour of the colonies, looking for inspiration, leaving the apartment vacant and essentially as storage, but I had a strange, creeping feeling that somehow, some way, they’d wound up back here. She was into the whole starving artist thing and had converted an unused corner into her studio, with an easel and everything.

There was a painting on the easel. Not one of her usual landscapes. It was the three of us. Me and my sisters. Smiling and thriving in spite of the ruins all around us. At some point, the background trailed off, and she’d scrawled the words We miss you, Stormy in calligraphic script.

I sniffled softly. “I miss me too, sis.”

Sitting on the floor at an odd angle was a leather-bound journal. I picked it up in my magic and started flipping through the pages. It was Hoodoo’s. I felt guilty, spying on her stuff without her permission, but I needed to know where she had gone. The journal entries stopped about three months ago. The dates were current. My breathing quickened as I read her final entry.

I don’t know what’s going on. The satyrs are marching down each block. Kicking in doors. Dear Celestia, they’re taking everypony. I saw heavily armed mercenaries accompanying them. It’s just me and Windy up here. We don’t have any weapons. Nothing to defend ourselves. Just me and my paintbrushes. Please, someone, anyone, help us. I’m so scared!

My lips curled back in anger and I threw the book across the room, crying out in utter frustration. They’d taken her. She’d been here as recently as a few months ago, and they’d taken her. If I’d come to Dodge earlier, she would be safe. Safe with us. She and Windy Mesa both.

“Fuck! Those fucking bastards!”

I needed to gather my things. I needed to leave. There was nothing left for me here. I went to my bedroom and lifted up the rug in the center of the room, moving a section of the floorboards away which I’d sawed into and modified into a hidden compartment without Persimmon’s knowledge. I punched in the combination and unlocked the low-profile floor safe underneath, retrieving my heavy stash of a thousand gold bits, and a further four thousand of the digital kind, stored on bit chips. The chips were probably useless. I doubted that the electronic banking network would validate them, given the ruined state of our planet’s infrastructure. I took them anyway, just in case.

I also retrieved my favorite multi-tool, which contained a folding set of pliers with hardened jaws, a knife, a saw, a can opener, and various other implements that were useful when magic did not suffice. Some unicorns preferred simply summoning tools when needed. Those unicorns were snobs. And they also studied magic more than I did. I also pulled out the spare keys to my motorcycle and a civilian Orbit covered in stickers of things like smiley faces and travel destinations.

Orbits needed some explanation. The short of it was that they were drones, but that didn’t quite cover it. They weren’t battery-operated. They were an enchanted, spheroidal, hoofball-shaped metal frame with a crystal focus in the middle and various electronics arrayed around the outside. A unicorn could pour some of their magic into it, and it could levitate itself and store the magic energy for later, to be discharged all at once. They were magic capacitors. With the help of a focus, like the one contained in an Orbit, unicorns could cast more powerful spells than we could without one, generally speaking.

Military-grade Orbits had things like built-in beamcasters, offensive focuses, and even their own power generation systems, but my Orbit, being a consumer-grade model, only had cameras, speakers, a holodisk drive, a magic holoprojector for running typical consumer applications, an all-spectrum focus with mild amplification, and a data relay. It could still be useful for things like spying around corners, or sending it a hundred meters straight up for an overview of the battlefield, or annoying my newfound friends with my stupid music.

Orbits were also autonomous and contained a very basic AI. This allowed them to be set to follow their user around automatically. Sustaining multiple Orbits took considerable magic power. The most the average unicorn could manage was around three, but an alicorn with magic power as prodigious as Twilight Sparkle’s could probably manage a couple dozen of the things.

No need to juice up this bad boy from a wall socket. As long as one could do magic, they could easily charge an Orbit. I gave it a quick jolt with my horn, and then spoke the command phrase. “Boot up, Lucky. Follow mode.”

The Meteor Juke 1300—a good mid-high range Orbit that cost eighteen hundred bits brand new, so-named for its Jukebox Mode—beeped a few times and then bobbed into the air, settling into position and hovering above me and to my right. My own personal shoulder parrot.

“Time to go. Not coming back here ever again. Fuck this rotten place.”

I threw a few holodisks from my favorite bands into my saddlebags, along with the contents of my hidden stash, slamming the door shut as I departed, only for it to drift back open a crack from the ruined latch mechanism.

“Do I care if scavvers get the rest of my shit?” I mused aloud to myself, peering over my shoulder. “No. They can have it. Enjoy, fuckers.”

I slipped out into the back alley, still strewn with trash and standing water as always. Surprisingly enough, my 650cc parallel-twin Stampeder with the big-bore kit, big carb and rephased crank was still where I’d left it.

I’d had this bike since I was a kid. I did some of the basic maintenance work on it, but my father, who used to run a muffler shop on the other end of town before moving on for greener pastures, was the one who’d dismantled the whole thing, repainted it and built it up to my specifications, after much begging and pleading and puppy-dog eyes and all that.

I’ll buy the parts and everything if you’ll just put together this—

No.

But Dad!

I don’t do charity, Storm.

“Gee, that’s a sight for sore eyes.” I put the key in and tried starting her up. Nothing. I pulled the gas cap and peered into the tank. “Motherfucker, some prick actually siphoned the gas but left the bike. As if my day could get any worse!”

I wheeled my motorcycle out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. My troops saw me and exited the building, a couple of them shaking their heads and giving me blank stares.

“Oh, so that’s what this was all about,” Carillon said. “You actually had us hold position so you could go grab your shit in the middle of a firefight. You know what? You’re an asshole, Pilot.”

I clicked my tongue. “Oh, get stuffed, you—”

That was when the brick facade of the Rarity’s across the street from my apartment exploded outward and a clanking, riveted steel monstrosity drove out of the rubble, its tracks screeching and debris clattering off of its armor. Their fog lamps were turned up full-blast and were blindingly bright, like the eyes of some terrible beast. The turret of the tank slowly turned towards us.

“Ravager!” Carillon shouted. “Damarkind Ravager tank!”

A plasma blast lanced from the vehicle’s main gun turret with a thunderous report and a flash of blue that smelled of ozone. Carillon didn’t even have the time to scream. He simply exploded, his body turning into an omni-directional spray of atomized gore centered on a steaming crater in the street.

I was pelted with the fragments of his armor and splattered from head to hoof with his blood and innards. It dripped off my muzzle. It was in my eyes. My mouth. All over the seat of my Stampeder. He tasted like copper and burnt hair and smelled like bile and shit and everything else that was in his gastrointestinal tract a few moments ago. He’d been utterly obliterated right before my very eyes. A good quarter of him was now draped over my helmet and my withers.

I screamed and fell back onto my haunches, dropping my motorcycle. The armored vehicle was turning its turret towards me. The message was clear. If I didn’t do something, I was going to be vaporized next. We were all next.

“Fall back!” I shouted. “Everypony, get to cover, now!”

I turned myself invisible and sprinted for cover. Just in time, too. The street behind me was cratered by another plasma impact. Lucky bobbed and dived as it struggled to keep up with my movements. The Ravager crew opened fire with their coaxial guns and a mare fell, screaming and bleeding from the neck, her helmet rolling away from her as she struggled to staunch the wound with her hoof.

The bastards veered off the street and deliberately ran her over, flattening her instantly. Even over its roaring engines and clattering tracks, I could hear a chorus of muffled laughing reverberate through the vehicle’s hull. Me and the remaining squad members bolted, sprinting down a side street as fast as our legs would carry us.

“Where’n the hell are the damn Centaurs?!” Haybale yelled.

Another wall collapsed in front of us, a storefront falling to pieces as a tank simply drove through it from the inside of the structure, likely from having penetrated into the structure from the other side of the block. It was a second Ravager, configured much the same as the first. They had us cornered.

I came to a skidding halt. “Oh no, oh shit, oh fuck.”

Me and my remaining squad members dived into an alley and galloped as fast as our legs would take us.

“Captain!” I shouted into the radio. “Ostrich Three-Six to Raptor One-One actual. We’ve been engaged! Two enemy Ravager tanks in the AO! Sending grid coordinates now, over!” I punched one of the four shrouded buttons on my helmet, pinging Captain Garrida with our location.

After a brief pause, there was a response. “Sergeant, have you and your squad make your way four blocks east, one block south. Just follow the nav marker on your heads-up display. We’re holed up in the Gridiron Bar.”

Because of fucking course they were. “Copy that, we’re on our way—to the Gridiron. Shit.”

We made our way there with all possible haste, avoiding contact with the enemy. The other two Ostrich squads arrived around the same time we did. We stepped over the corpses of over a dozen cleomanni troops outside the squat, truncated pyramid of the Gridiron and made our way inside, past the Raptor guys who were accompanied by Garrida and her griffons. The Captain nodded when she saw me.

The Gridiron was exactly as I had remembered it, with dark, moody lighting and a musty-smelling floor. Aside from drinks, when I worked here, we’d served the usual fare. Grilled vegetables, hayburgers, onion rings, all the greasy, artery-clogging shit our patrons could possibly want. All the liquor had been cleared out, sadly, but at least the looters had left the other amenities intact. The pool tables, pinball machines, arcade cabinets and the rest of the cool stuff was still there.

The place was built like a bunker with these stupid stuccoed insulated concrete walls that the owners made us pressure-wash every summer because the two of them were too cheap to hire a real cleaning service. Apparently, the spacious two-story building had been some tech startup’s office that had been foreclosed on when they went out of business and then bought up on the cheap.

The owners, Grease Fire and his wife Coriander, were trailer trash to the bone. Ol’ Greasy used to get drunk and stumble around wearing a pit-stained wife-beater over his portly frame and feel me and the other waitresses up, right in front of the customers. Give our rumps a little tweak with his hoof and then chuckle with that bassy voice of his. Hur, hur, hur, just checkin’ the firmness.

Coriander seemed to have a deep and abiding hatred for anyone and anything that wasn’t her. The cockroaches in the back. The patrons. The glasses. Even the glasses were wrong. This is chipped! It wasn’t chipped. She threw it on the floor in a fit of anger. Now it was chipped. Chips. Plural. Every time I saw her gray beehive mane poking up from behind a countertop, I knew we were officially in the shit.

The patrons were all very loud and very bro, and I hated their fucking guts. Their constant whistling and catcalls. Their leering eyes. What, was I not clear enough when I said I had a boyfriend?

“Listen up, people,” Garrida said. “We’re only regrouping here temporarily before moving on to assault the detention camp. Unfortunately, the mercs are counterattacking while the Confederate survivors are trying to evacuate. We’ll have to repel them before we can initiate the next phase. Get to your posts and secure the perimeter! They’ll be on us any second, now. Me and the rest of Raptor are headed to the roof. Good luck and Celestia’s protection to you all!”

While Garrida, Placid Gale and the rest of the winged soldiers headed for the stairs, what few unicorns were left on my squad, including myself, smashed the butts of our purloined damarkind machine guns through a few windows and set up firing positions, using the sturdy walls of the structure for cover and the deep windowsills as a place to set up in a bipod-supported position. The medic tossed me a kerchief, and I used it to wipe the blood and mess off my face and my armor, before tossing the saturated cloth aside and getting into position behind my weapon. I wrapped my hooves around the pistol grip and the buttstock to keep it steady and ensconced the trigger in my levitation’s orange glow.

Marching down the street, weapons at the ready, were two squads of twelve damarkind mercs each. They weren’t even using cover. They had full faith in their body armor to resist our beams. What they didn’t realize was that we weren’t exclusively using beamcasters.

“Here they come!” I shouted. “Squad, weapons free!”

I pulled the trigger on my weapon, the staccato racket of our machine guns filling the air as we released short, controlled bursts of fire into the enemy. Three of them were struck immediately and fell dead on the spot. The rest scattered with unbelievable quickness, disappearing into cover. That was when we started taking accurate fire.

The stallion to my left took a round in the face and slumped over, a pool of blood spreading around his head, his weapon going fallow. Another unicorn simply shoved him aside and took his place while another squad’s medic checked to see if he was still breathing or not.

A bullet slammed into my chest protector, punching right through the first plate and embedding into the synthetic fiber backing. I rolled backwards and fell away from my weapon and onto the floor, lying on my back, clutching my chest in pain. The back face deformation felt like it broke one of my ribs.

I slowly sat up and felt a strange heat spreading through my chest, and then, I noticed a smoky smell and a faint glow. The burn got more intense with each passing second. I looked down to see that I’d literally been set aflame. An armor-piercing incendiary round had punctured my plating in a bad area and the laminated composite weave underneath had started smoldering.

“Shit!” My eyes widened. “Isn’t this supposed to be fireproof? Shit, shit, shit!”

I ripped on the quick-release and ditched the armor, finding that I now sported a small second-degree burn and a big contusion on my chest. I then resumed my position, sans armor, letting off bursts of suppressive fire that were quickly joined by tracer rounds and green beams lancing out from our positions. Firearms weren’t like beamcasters. Not clean. Not recoilless. It was a visceral experience. My whole world vibrated. The ammo belt of my weapon shook like a thing possessed as it snaked into the action, spitting out links and brass on the other side. The air was filled with the acrid stink of gunpowder.

I heard a loud boom from the rooftop above. Garrida’s Thumper, no doubt. I saw one of the mercenary positions go silent. Griffon rifles started opening up and I could see puffs of dust from the rounds impacting the enemy’s cover. After popping the top covers and slamming fresh belts into our weapons, we waited until there was a lull from the griffons and then we opened fire again.

“Eat shit, motherfuckers!” Haybale yelled, blasting away with his casters. “Eat shit, motherfuckers!”

Bellwether was behind the bar, fiddling with some blocks of CycloHex, smoking an ill-advised cigar and ducking when the occasional incoming round sailed into his area. Corporal Shooting Star was a natural with her machine gun, laser-focused on the enemy, not a word of protest emerging from her lips. Cinderblock and Sagebrush, the latter of whom I’d taken to calling Swampy because of his demeanor and coloration, were both crewing a Tatzlwurm launcher, with Sage firing missiles at the enemy positions and Cinder and his big frame quickly reloading the heavy tubes by hoof. It was a good thing Tatzlwurms were soft-launched by design, otherwise, the overpressure from the backblast would’ve blown our eardrums out.

I gave my Orbit a boost with my horn, topping off its charge. “Lucky, on my eyepiece. I wanna see what you’re seeing.” The Orbit beeped twice and a picture-in-picture image appeared in my heads-up display over wireless video link. “Lucky, go high!”

The Orbit flew outside the building and then jumped a hundred meters straight up, giving me an overview of the area. There were still a good fifteen or more of the mercs plugging away at our positions, and those Ravager tanks were coming down a side street, hoping to get the jump on us.

Ravagers were an indigenous damarkind design that I’d encountered—and engaged and destroyed with my Charger’s weapons—plenty of times before. Riveted steel, not welded steel. Rivets. Like an old boiler. Their tracks lacked skirts and were completely exposed on top, like something from a museum. The prime mover was typically an underpowered radial engine, and the main gun was a weak seventy-six-millimeter piece. A breech-loader, not an autocannon. It was not even fit for the battlefield. That was, however, in their standard, factory configuration. Mercenaries always customized their tanks extensively, incorporating all kinds of scabbed-in alien tech.

If these were anything like the ones I’d fought during the war, not only had the main gun been replaced with a big plasma pulsecannon, it probably had electric motors and a Confederate diesel genset for propulsion. These modifications would just barely bring a Ravager up to par with a Conqueror tank, and even then, they were no match for one in a stand-up fight. To employ a vehicle so primitive in an effective manner, one needed a superior grasp of tactics, and tactics required patience, something damarkinds were severely lacking in.

“Captain,” I spoke over the radio. “We’ve got enemy tanks at our two o’clock. They’re going to be on us in a few moments.”

“You have an Orbit?” Garrida sounded surprised as her voice crackled over my headset. “Wait one. Yeah, good eye. I see ‘em. Good job, Sergeant. I’m sending the Tatzlwurm teams to the adjacent rooftop. Those assholes are in for a little surprise.”

About twenty seconds later, over Lucky’s feed, I witnessed one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. A pair of white trails streaked from the roof of an 18-story tenement building, striking the Ravagers. One of the missiles was blown out of the air by an active protection system that activated at the last moment, blasting it with a spray of shrapnel before it could contact the tank’s armor. The second tank didn’t have one, perhaps because they couldn’t afford it. Their failure to equip themselves properly for the modern battlefield would prove a fatal error.

A split-second after the bright flash of the missile impact, their pulsecannon capacitors turned into bombs. They didn’t even have a chance. The secondaries blew their turret clear off the hull, leaving a sparking bonfire coming from the turret ring. Before our ATGM crews could reload, the other tank peeled off and sped away from our position as fast as they could. At the same time, the mercs that had formed firing lines in front of the Gridiron got up, turned tail and ran, letting off strings of suppressive fire as they went.

“That’s right, fuckers!” Haybale hooted. “You ain’t takin’ us!”

I had Lucky pan east, over the detention camp, approximately six hundred meters from our position. The other Ravager was pulling back to that location at top speed. They were going a paltry thirty or forty kilometers an hour. They might’ve had upgraded propulsion tech and were a good three times faster than a stock Ravager, but the tracks could only handle so much.

Dodge’s railway yard had been converted into a concentration camp with a sand-filled gabion blast wall that had been topped in razor wire surrounding the whole facility. I could see a few Confederate troops running around in a panic, as well as the assets they had in the main yard. Containerized generators, a medium-range anti-air missile system and radar, and various other pieces of equipment were lying around, unmanned and unguarded. Enemy infantry were bracing themselves for a desperate defense.

Garrida and the rest of Raptor ambled down the stairs. The big griffon’s armor was covered in blood. She cradled a wounded griffon in her forelegs, setting him on one of the larger tables so the medics could see to his injuries. She walked up to Bellwether with an unlit cigar in her beak, and the two touched cigars to ignite hers. I was sweating bullets. There was enough explosive material on top of the bar to turn the Gridiron into a rising cloud of concrete dust.

Bellwether gathered up the explosives and passed them out to our squads, handing me a few bricks and a detonator with a scowl on his face, as if he’d rather be planting them himself. I stowed the CycloHex charges and walked up to one of our dead and relieved him of his chest piece, and one of his pauldrons, strapping it onto my armor. The fit was a little loose, as it was sized for a stallion, but a quick adjustment of the straps cured that problem.

“So, on to the next phase of the operation.” Garrida turned back to us. “We’re advancing with the Centaurs and assaulting the detention camp directly. The Centaurs will ram the main gate and take on any infantry and armor they see, and the ATGM teams will back them up. The frontal assault is a diversion. Air teams will also assault from above, and ground teams will breach through the compound walls in the locations I’ve marked in the datasphere. Check your sight lines, watch the crossfire.

“Eliminate all hostile targets. Any cleomanni you see, any mercenaries, anyone who raises a weapon in defense of that place, they are to be shot on sight. Enemy non-combat personnel are discretionary targets, but focus on the armed ones. They’re the real threat. We don’t have the transports or the facilities for large numbers of prisoners.

“As soon as the fighting dies down, you are to round up any enemy personnel who haven’t escaped and execute them on the spot. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, herd them into a sealed building and throw in OA-13 or some incendiary grenades, or whatever you have handy. Let’s get this shit done and go home, people.”

The Centaurs pulled up to the outside of the Gridiron. Our units poured out of the structure like ants, mounting the ladders on the sides of the vehicles and getting up on their roofs. As the vehicles sped off, we rode them tank desant, unprotected on their exterior, our weapons arrayed outward and ready to respond to any threat that emerged. Lucky kept pace overhead, giving me a bird’s-eye view of our surroundings, only coming down to ground level when it needed me to top off the charge with my horn. When we neared the walls of the compound, we dismounted the vehicles.

“Go, go, go!” Garrida shouted. “Breach in!”

The Captain took wing and sighted in the facility’s generators. With a few shots from Thumper, she put their fancy containerized fusion gensets out of commission. The lights on every block went out. The buildings on the inside of the compound were plunged into darkness. With Lucky’s directional microphone, I could hear the satyrs guarding the base collectively yelp in fright before getting into what sounded like heated arguments amongst themselves. Then, the battery-operated backup diode lighting kicked in.

The lead Centaur rammed the main gate, all according to plan, opening fire immediately after breaching inside. It sounded like they’d come under heavy fire, their active protection systems taxed to the limit while shooting down enemy missiles. Whether or not they’d engaged the other Ravager was unclear. I’d lost sight of the damned thing.

The incoming fire helped our guys locate their missile teams, however. Tatzlwurm missiles streaked from the rooftops of the buildings overlooking the compound, blasting into the enemy fortifications and wounding and killing the defenders. The aerial guided missile teams struck relentlessly and without mercy. Me and my squad made our way to the marked nav point, planting bricks of CH on the blast walls. We moved back. Way back. Even blast walls weren’t capable of resisting a charge this size.

“Fire in the hole!” I hit the detonator.

With an ear-shattering blast, tons of sand, razor wire, and shredded gabion baskets were launched skyward. The windows of all the businesses and residences nearby were shattered. Car alarms on abandoned vehicles started blaring. My squad poured in through the hole. We’d caught the defenders with their pants down. Several cleomanni guards, dazed from the blast, stumbled around in the open. They were stunned when they saw us. Completely unprepared. Our beamcasters went through them like a scythe through wheat.

We kept up the tempo, surging past them as they fell. We leapt into the dark, yawning maw of the shattered windows of the railway line’s offices. The buildings were partly lit on the inside by strings of work lights running off backup power, but the halls were mostly bathed in shadow. There were Confederate rear-line personnel and civilian contractors, huddling together in the darkness. Instruments of our oppressors. Khaki-wearing devils. They whimpered and cowered in fear when they saw us. We were the reapers, come to take their lives.

“Kill them all,” I said.

Haybale scratched his head. “But, Sarge, didn’t Garrida say to focus on—”

I wheeled on Haybale. “I don’t give a fuck! If they didn’t want to die, they wouldn’t be here, on our planet, kidnapping our people! Waste these assholes!”

On my orders, my squad and I mowed them all down, heedless of their screams of terror, advancing in a slow march as all of us emptied our beams into the crowd. The room flickered green in the darkness. When we were done, there was nothing but a steaming pile of corpses, flash-cooked from the inside out. We left none alive.

We kept moving through the structure, clearing rooms. Doors would open. An unarmed cleomanni would try making a run for it, begging for their lives, only to be beamed in the back.

One of their stalli—no, men, was huddled in a corner, mumbling to himself. “Please! We tried to stop them, I swear! We tried telling them not to!”

I marched up to him. “Not what?” I spoke in broken Ardun interspersed with my native tongue. “Who? To not what, hemekenna? Bastard, answer!”

He was too scared to speak, his whole jaw shaking. I ended his jaw problems personally when I liberated it from the rest of his face with a point-blank beamcaster blast.

When we’d ascertained that the structure was clear, we exited the other side of the building into a great courtyard with brick pavers. Diagonally across from us and to our nine o’clock was a skybridge connecting one office building to a strange structure with a corrugated metal exterior. At our twelve o’clock was another large office building.

Under the skybridge, in the gap between the structures, I could see the main railway station, or what was left of it. The whole building had been reduced to an unrecognizable pile of rubble centered on a crater the size of a hoofball field. The air assault teams were specks off in the distance, attacking enemy positions from above. We were fairly isolated from the rest of the units.

To our direct front, I glanced upward at a crashing noise right as the upper-floor windows of the structure were broken out by rifle-butts. It was the damarkinds. They opened fire on our positions with armor-piercing incendiary rounds. We quickly scattered and moved into cover behind a number of planters in the courtyard, which had sturdy concrete block walls. My troops returned fire with their beamcasters, but it was useless. No way to target their extremities from down here.

“Squad, hold position here and keep the pressure on them, I’m going to see if I can flank ‘em! If you can’t hold position, draw back into the offices we just cleared and see if you can hold them back from there.”

“Aye, Sergeant!”

I cloaked myself and my Orbit and moved out, heading straight for our attackers. They couldn’t see me at all as I entered the lower levels of the structure, Lucky in tow. I had to know what was in that building. The one at the other end of the skybridge. It looked like a prison with all the windows and exits barred and access via the skybridge only.

The lower level of this office building was completely abandoned. I made my way up the stairs to the second story. The skybridge itself was on the level above this one. There was no one around. No cleomanni. Nobody in sight. I let out a sigh and uncloaked myself, walking down a dimly lit hall, past a vaulted atrium and towards a staircase that would take me to the third level.

A big damarkind—one of the biggest I’d ever seen—draped from head to toe in more armor than a battle tank and great big belts of ammunition, slipped out from behind the corner at the end of the hall. I gasped. He was grinning. Grinning and wielding a Confederate fifty-caliber machine gun that he’d apparently modified with a pistol grip and stock. Another Alpha. A veteran who clearly outranked the one we’d encountered earlier. He leveled his weapon at me and opened fire, the sound deafening in the enclosed space.

I cloaked myself and Lucky and bolted through an open door and into an office, even as the walls around me were ripped to pieces by armor-piercing rounds. If I took even one single hit, I was done. A hit to a leg would take that leg right off. A hit to the torso would pulverize my innards. A hit to my head would pop it like an overripe tomato. The low cubicles typical of pony offices had been replaced with cleomanni-height ones. This helped conceal my position a little bit, but the damarkind who was stalking me was a good eight feet tall and could see right over them. He was a giant. He had to hunch over and blade his massive body sideways to get through the doorway.

I could hear the tromping of his plated boots as he chuckled darkly to himself, following me into the space. “So, ye wanna play hide and seek, pony? Good. I like it when they resist. Makes me hard as a fookin’ diamon’.” His accent was so thick, he was almost unintelligible. “I’m straining at my trousers just thinkin’ about all the fun we gonna have together. ‘Urry up and get caught. Your holes are as good as mine, anyway. I’m so pent up, I could fuck the exhaust pipe of a tank while the motor’s still runnin’!”

As he crept around, peering over the tops of the cubicles, I slowly snuck around him, trying to stay in concealment the entire time even though I was cloaked. He had a strange headpiece on that was emitting a faint clicking noise that intensified when he faced me.

“Fuck,” I whispered to myself. An in-air sonar. He could see me even while I was cloaked.

“Ye think your spellery and parlor tricks will keep ye hidden from me?” he muttered. “It’s useless. Surrender, pony. I promise I’ll let ye finish first. I got a big tongue. Works wonders.”

I cracked a small, wicked smile. I’d saved an audio file on Lucky’s internal storage, one that I might’ve used if anyone had ever attempted to break into my apartment while I was inside. Now was the time to use it.

“Lucky, hold position and play taunting-dot-vox,” I whispered.

The Orbit immediately started playing the voice recording. “You think you can come into my place and fuck with my stuff? You’re in for it now, pal. I’ve been trained by elite BASKAF operatives and I can kill you in any of a hundred different ways, and that’s just with my bare hooves.”

Trying to avoid giggling, I snuck away and left my Orbit in a stationary position, watching as the damarkind tromped up to the source of the sound, expecting me to be there. He swept his weapon around, finding nothing. He had his back to me. It was now or never. I sprinted towards him from behind, leaping and clambering up onto his back, onto the plates of his crimson armor. While he cried out in shock, I drew out the big damarkind camp knife I’d looted earlier, gripped it in a fetlock and drove it downward into his neck, between his cuirass and his helmet.

On a reflex, he reached back and grabbed me, throwing me away full-force in a panic. Me and my armor crashed through several cubicle walls, knocking them over, sending computer monitors, staplers, and rotary business card files clattering to the floor. With a groan, I clambered to my hooves and galloped away as fast as I could. He swept the office with booming heavy machine gun fire, setting the cubicles aflame with incendiary rounds.

“We coulda had so much fun together.” He pulled the knife out of his neck, tossing it aside, before slapping a quick-clotting bandage in its place. “Now, it’s over. I’m gonna pluck your beatin’ heart from your chest and devour it right in fronna ya’. The only fookin’ you’re gonna ge’ is when I widen your sphincter with my blade and then fist ye to the hilt until ye split like a hot dog left in the microwave too long! You’re dead, pony! Dead!”

After that pronouncement, he hosed down the office with more machine gun fire. Bits of cubicle material and drywall formed a cloud of particulates that hung in the air. It took everything I had to stay well to the side of him, avoiding being struck by fragments or, Celestia forbid, the actual bullets themselves.

I couldn’t take this guy. He was too prepared. Too well-armed. I had to run.

“Lucky, on me!” I shouted.

The Orbit zipped after me as I fled the office, making for the stairs leading up to the third level. I placed a brick of CH on the stairway as I went, and when I got to the top, I ran to a safe distance before blowing it. Pacing back, I peered over the third-story balcony into the atrium and examined the stairwell below. The whole thing had completely collapsed. The veteran Alpha was milling around down below, his weathered crimson armor gleaming in the light that streamed in through the windows.

He stamped his feet angrily. “Pony coward! Flee! Flee for your worthless little life!” He turned and swept his weapon over the balcony. “There you are!”

I yelped and fled as the glass panels on the balcony practically exploded from being struck by the fifty. I made for the skybridge. I couldn’t let that son of a bitch find me, or it would all be over. I noticed movement beyond an open window in the adjacent office building. I mounted an end table next to a couch and peered through the glass, pulling my binocular out of my saddlebags. I set the microphone on the thing to sound-enhance, trying to pick up the conversation the two figures held. The veteran was still stalking me, so I had to make the most of what little time I had. The intel would be worth it, I hoped.

“Lucky,” I said. “Record everything.”

Every pack of damarkinds had a supreme leader, the Alpha-Superior. The big boss. The Seg’jakha. This one could easily be picked out by how well-dressed he was. Unlike his scruffy underlings, his snow-white fur was neatly slicked. His brass-buttoned uniform of deep crimson with golden stripes was adorned with a fancy embroidered white cape and gold-fringed epaulets. He paced back and forth in the command center, his fists clenching and unclenching, clearly furious. His employers were none too happy, either.

“What the fuck are you doing, Broggas?” The cleomanni bitch of an officer standing next to him screamed and berated him, adjusting her square-rimmed glasses, a pencil propped in her ear, her shaking left hand clutching a clipboard to her chest. “They’re inside the fucking perimeter! They’re killing everyone! We didn’t pay you guys for protection because you were good, but because you’re cheap! It’s just some fucking ponies! They’re just animals! What’s the big deal? Why can’t you keep the situation under control?” She gesticulated madly, sweeping her hand in our general direction.

“What do you know about fighting the tonnanen, you sheltered Confederate whore?” Broggas roared, wheeling on her. “I’ve watched those little demons drag my boys away and slit their throats. I’ve seen them work witchcraft that would chill your bones! The contract was for securing your pissant concentration camp from breakouts, not incursions like this. Now, may I please speak to your commander? Where is Colonel Degyetoch?”

I was surprised. He’d actually deigned to use the formal name of our species, in our own language. Not the Ardun Ekkestreuni. He’d actually said tonnanen. That was a sign of either grudging respect or fear, and damarkinds rarely felt either one of those things.

The Confederate Lieutenant didn’t say anything. She just stood there with her lips trembling, staring off into space, mumbling quietly to herself.

“Stupid bitch, answer the question!” Broggas snapped his fingers in front of her face.

“Degyetoch is dead!” the cleomanni woman whined. “Are you a complete moron? Did you not hear? Did you not see? They rammed a train filled with explosives into the station and it killed everyone. Why couldn’t you stop them? What the hell are we paying you goons for?”

This Broggas fellow looked like he’d had just about enough. He grabbed her by the neck and lifted her off her feet with one outstretched arm. She dropped her clipboard, gagging and clutching for her throat.

Broggas seethed, his eyes like fiery coals. “If I’d known we were about to be attacked by a fucking bomb-laden locomotive, and then stormed by three armored personnel carriers backed up by an entire platoon of heavily-armed rebels, I would’ve put derailers on the lines heading in and out of this gods-forsaken city and set up machine gun and guided missile nests in every fucking building and landmines on every fucking street! I also would have asked for more money so I could, at the very least, cover the cost of the munitions it would take to fight such a battle.

“This, all of this, happened because you satyrs love to keep your precious little secrets. You didn’t share even a single piece of intelligence from your air assets, or the earlier attack on your outpost where insurgent forces seized a train and spent all morning eluding your supposedly elite Gafalze Arresgrippen super-soldiers. I had to get the report by word-of-mouth from one of your grunts half an hour ago! I would be well within my rights to squeeze the fucking life out of you, you ignorant, useless female!”

He tossed her aside like a sack of potatoes, leaving her to gasp and choke on the floor. “My brother—” she gasped and wheezed. “They buried him—in rubble!”

“I don’t give a shit about your brother!” He threw in a savage kick to her midsection for good measure, knocking the wind out of her, leaning down patronizingly with his hands on his knees like he was speaking to a child. “The tonnanen have slain dozens of my kin, on this occasion and others, but you don’t care at all about us, do you? No, you think we’re your convenient little army of interchangeable wind-up toy thugs and our lives don’t matter. You dare make demands of me, even as my boys, my own son among them, are fighting and dying in the streets? What will you have me do next, your esteemed ladyship?” He clasped his hands together mockingly. “Run down a fucking Imperial battle tank with my sword in hand? Do you not understand that I fight for money? I can’t spend it if I’m dead, you stupid cunt!”

Even the most erudite and sophisticated damarkinds were still nasty brutes, through and through, but he had a point. The cleomanni were probably just about the worst employers in the galaxy. If I were in his place and had knowledge of our earlier attacks withheld from me, I would’ve been just as virulently angry.

He bared his teeth as he leaned down to address her. “Now, you’re going to pay extra for the damages my company has incurred, if you want me to repel thi—” He turned, sniffing hard. “I can smell them. They’re watching, the stinking little cunts!” He marched up to a cubicle and snatched up his rifle, shouldering it and aiming it directly at me. “I can see you, Equestrian!”

“Oh shit!” I stowed the binos and ducked below the window just in time, shards of glass flying over my head as he opened fire.

I ran for the adjacent building, panting hard as I picked up speed. Bullets penetrated the wall beside me as I passed. He was trying to estimate my position as I ran and shoot through my concealment. I cloaked myself as I ran across the skybridge, uncloaking to conserve my energy once I was behind cover again. The doors at the end were chained. I ripped the padlock off with my levitation and pounded them open. As I crossed the threshold, a smell hit my nostrils such that I’d never before experienced the like. There were cages. Cages stacked one atop the other, all the way to the ceiling, such that the occupants above were forced to relieve themselves on the ones below.

I walked out onto the steel catwalk, my jaw going slack with horror and disgust. Garrida had tried to warn me. It was worse than I could have possibly imagined. The place was a slaughterhouse. A vision of Tartarus itself. There were spatters of dried blood on the floor in the expansive warehouse space below.

The flayed bodies of several ponies hung on chains and hooks on a rusty steel rack, some still dripping. They swung and rotated slightly, like wind chimes blown by a nonexistent breeze, their chains clinking, the red of their muscles exposed to the air. They’d been skinned alive and left to bleed out all over the floor.

A writhing mare was bound to a table, moaning softly, her hindquarters stained with blood. I scanned the miserable faces of the caged prisoners all around me. They stared back in silence. Not a single one of them spoke. They were too broken. Too beaten to do so much as cheer their would-be rescuers on.

That was around the time I realized what I just saw. I did a double-take at the sandy-coated mare, her limbs strapped down to the table, her lips and her nether regions encrusted in blood and filth. A pang of fear gripped my heart.

“Hoodoo,” I whispered.

I broke into a sprint, bounding down the steel stairway to the floor below, panting harder and harder, my breaths interspersed with sobs. Not my sister. Not my fucking sister.

The cleomanni’s words echoed in my head. We tried to stop them, I swear! We tried telling them not to!

I ran up to the table. It was so tall. I felt like a foal next to the steel slab. I couldn’t see her. I shrieked in frustration as I tried clambering up the side, to no avail. My hooves could find no purchase. I turned and saw a white step ladder next to one of the cages. Without a word, a mare stuck her hooves through the bars and rolled it on its casters in my direction. I nodded to her and took it, climbing up and taking in the ruin that was my older sister’s body with a startled gasp.

Her limbs had been secured to the slab with leather straps that were pulled so tight they dug into her flesh. Signs of hideous abuse and torture, both past and recent, physical and sexual, covered her entire body. Taking inventory of them felt like a knife in my guts.

There were so many. So many wounds. She had patches of fur missing, infected bite marks, burn marks, and little cuts and bruises all over. One of her eyes was blackened. Her face was swollen like a tomato and her lips split from where she’d been savagely beaten. My eyes traced downward. That was a mistake.

I was hyperventilating, consumed by panic. I couldn’t bear to look at her. My horror and disgust were absolute. Scenes of unparalleled sadism coalesced in my mind’s eye, and no matter how hard I tried to banish them, they persisted in tormenting me.

Cruelty. Pure, childlike cruelty. Cruelty for its own sake, and nothing more.

More urgently, she also had a knife sticking out of her chest, buried very nearly to the hilt in her sternum and surrounded by a puddle of blood. She’d been moving, earlier. Why isn’t she moving now? Don’t do this. Come on. Don’t do this to me!

I put my ear to her chest, listening for a heartbeat. That was when she gasped awake, her eyes wide open, dried blood encrusting her chin.

“S—Stormy?” she croaked.

“Where’s Windy?” I said. “Stay still, Hood! I’m gonna get you out of here, but I need to know where Windy is!”

“Gone,” Hoodoo breathed, every word making her wince in pain. “Auctioned.”

My heart practically skipped a beat. “Who took her?”

“Damarkind. Ship. Captain. Week ago.”

The worst possible answer. My little sister. My dear Windy. A slave to such filth. Probably used up and then murdered. A bit of temporary fun. A disposable implement. Basted in seed until she was too broken to scream, and then barbecued for supper. It was too much. I leaned onto the slab and screamed. And then, I screamed some more. I sobbed into my sister’s blood-stained belly. So cold. Colder by the minute.

“Medic,” I muttered into the radio. “Medic! I need a medic over here!”

Static and gunfire were the only response. They were still pinned down in the courtyard.

“Dammit!” I ripped off the communications helmet and threw it across the room, watching it clang against a cage, its pony occupants huddling together protectively.

Hoodoo grimaced. “Don’t—bother.”

“I’m gonna get you out of here. Hang on, sis!”

I tore her straps off with my levitation, cradling her in my forelegs.

“No—no, you’re not,” she said.

“There’s so much I wanted to say,” I whispered through my tears. “I thought you hated me. I thought you all did.”

She smiled wistfully. “No—Stormy. No. Can’t. Speak for the others. But I? I—” She broke into a coughing fit, speckling my muzzle with blood.

“Stay with me!” I begged. “Please!”

“I never—hated you. I hated what you chose to do—with your life. You were always my little Stormy. My brave little sis. I always—knew—you’d come looking for me.” She coughed, her lips tinged bright red, her eyes misted with tears. “I just—I just wish you’d come sooner.”

Hoodoo’s eyes rolled into the back of her head, her body going limp in my grasp. I cradled her in my forehooves, sobbing as I nuzzled her neck. She was so light from malnutrition. The Hoodoo I knew was a well-built pony. She used to wrestle me, and she’d always win. It didn’t feel like I was cradling a full-grown mare’s body, but a foal’s. Her legs were so thin. So thin and still. I set her down on the floor and closed her eyes with a gentle sweep of my hoof, my head hanging low.

Five damarkinds burst into the other end of the room, leveling weapons. “There she is, the little cunt!”

It would be the last mistake of their lives. I wheeled on them, my teeth bared with rage. I ripped the knife out of my sister’s chest, cloaking both it and myself with invisibility, breaking into a full gallop straight at their position, stumbling and half-crawling a few steps. My movements had been rendered bestial with raw anger, like I’d been possessed by the soul of a lion. With a roar, I punched the blade into the side of one damarkind’s knee, and he fell. Then, I punctured his neck. Right in the carotid. He collapsed hard, blood fountaining from his wounds.

I’d never driven my levitation so hard. It was a skill, thrusting a knife with telekinesis instead of merely floating it around. It took a mind filled with sheer, unbridled hatred to impart that much magical force over such a short span of time, which was just as well, because I was literally seeing red. I felt like an animal. Not a person. If I had the capacity to reason at that moment in time, I would’ve been ashamed of myself. It’s the meth. Irrational, extreme mood swings are a known side effect. Stay focused and ignore it!

The drugs in my system, combined with my mental state, were affecting my magic. I couldn’t cohere a proper invisibility spell anymore. Instead of cloaking my whole body, I phased in and out of sight, patches of my armor briefly exposing themselves. The others turned and opened fire wildly, hoping to hit my ghostly form with a stray round. The prisoners screamed and ducked, narrowly avoiding being shot. I seized one of the mercs’ weapons in a magic field, tilting the barrel into its owner’s mouth and forcing him to pull the trigger with his own finger. His brains painted the ceiling.

They got wise. “Back out! Frag the place!”

They backpedaled into the hall and tossed a grenade into the room. Not so smart. I simply grabbed it with my levitation and tossed it back. They only had a split-second to scream before two of them were pulverized with a loud bang, the last one leaping back into the room into the prone position and covering his head before he could be mulched like the others. I stood before him, uncloaked, my eyes filled with death, my heart hammering in my chest at two hundred beats per minute.

He slowly stood, drew a knife out and charged. I slipped between his legs and lashed out at the side of his knee with a vicious buck, breaking it. He stumbled a few paces and then collapsed, his knife skidding across the concrete floor.

He rose to his knee, groaning in pain. “Dirty slag! Pony fuck-meat! I’ll get my finger in you and rip you open from the cunt forward!”

I charged him again and he laid into me with a punch that sent me flying. I slammed into one of the cages, dribbling blood from my head. This only enraged me more. With a defiant roar, I seized the step ladder in my levitation and charged at him again, rearing up and raising my forehooves just in time for the flying step ladder to intercept my grasp.

With all the power my back muscles could muster, I brought it down upon his head with a sickening thud, hard enough to bend the sheet metal steps. I brought it down a second time with an explosive grunt of exertion. A third. Its all-metal construction became a twisted wreck. I tossed it aside and it clattered and skidded across the floor like a shopping cart.

As he lay there wailing in pain, he tried pulling a handgun. Some great big seventy-caliber doom cock of a revolver. A garish, nickel-plated, engraved thing of obvious damarkind make. I thought of the bones in his hand, and how fragile they could be, and how I regularly did things like applying hundreds of pounds of force with my levitation. I focused all that energy into his sausage-like fingers, bending them over backwards, hyperextending and dislocating them. Simultaneously, I also twisted his weapon such that the trigger guard wrapped his index finger around it a couple times.

He dropped the revolver before he could even get off a single shot, screaming over and over again and clutching his hand. I ran up and punched him in the jaw. A great big haymaker. I could feel his lower mandible snap under my hoof. Then, I was on him, mounting his massive chest while gripping his collar with a fetlock and raining blow after blow upon him.

“You.” I struck him. “Mother.” I broke his nose. “Fuckers!” I shattered the orbit of one of his eyes. He gurgled, his eyeball hanging loose down his cheek. “Why?” I muttered. “My family, you cocksuckers! You fucked with my family!”

He just sat there, shaking and moaning, saying nothing, occasionally coughing and retching between pants. I needed his full attention. I needed him focused. I grabbed his eyeball with my fetlock and ripped what was left of his dangling optic nerve out of his head. He yelped and yelped. They were these short, pathetic little yips that sounded like they’d come from a creature much smaller.

“Where is she?” I pummeled him again. “Where’s Windy you piece of fucking desiccated dog shit?” I roared into his face, my spittle dotting his brow. “Pray! Pray to whatever heathen gods you worship, because if you don’t tell me where my sister is in the next three seconds, I’m going send you to meet them, bitchfuck!” I wound up my blood-drenched hoof to hit him again, but it was too late. He’d passed out.

I heard the sound of a pair of big hands clapping behind me. I turned and steered my gaze upon the source of the unlikely applause. It was the Alpha-Superior. He was standing there, leaning casually against the door frame, grinning. Grinning and clapping. He was apparently unarmed except for the big saber he carried in an ornate jeweled sheath.

“One pony. Five of my boys. Impressive. You know, for all your talk of family, you don’t seem to care so much about anyone else’s. That’s my own son you’ve got there.”

I was mildly shocked. He was speaking my language, and not Ardun, the lingua franca of interstellar trade. No translator. He knew how to speak Equestrian. I sized up his kin. Everyone was someone’s family. It mattered little to me, at that moment.

“You don’t seem too broken up about it,” I said.

Broggas shrugged. “He was weak and stupid if he let one such as you pluck his eye. Weak, like his mother.”

“Why aren’t you attacking me?” I said. “Isn’t violence what your kind specializes in?”

“Please. You flatter me too much. Besides, ponies are more than capable of inflicting grievous harm when they get a little hair up their cunt. Case in point, you and these five morons here. As for your silly question, we’ve canceled. As of right now, hostilities have ceased. I saw you eavesdropping, so you probably got a good half of it, but you didn’t get the other half. The important half.”

“And what was that?” I glared at him.

“We had a deal, us and the Confederate Colonial Authority. An intel-sharing clause right in our contract, stipulating that the Army was to divulge all they knew about insurgent movements. Can you believe the nerve of the satyrs? They didn’t honor it. They kept their incompetence secret from me. It’s like they all wanted to die. So, I suppose congratulations are in order. You little shits actually won this round. I thank you for the entertainment, by the way.”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean, ‘entertainment?’ Nothing about any of this is entertaining. I have never seen anything as barbaric as what I’ve witnessed today!” I looked at my bloodstained hooves. “I’ve never done anything as barbaric, either!”

“Nonsense!” His black lips worked up and down, his eyes glowing with a sort of incomprehensible cruelty. “The train! Oh, the train! It was glorious. Like something from a movie. Did you know that I had this big argument with Colonel Degyetoch the hour before, where I expressed my disappointment over the lack of intelligence-sharing, and he completely stonewalled me? I said to that patronizing fool, I kid you not, ‘If you don’t tell us what the Liberation Front are up to, one of these days, they’re going to drive a whole train so far up your ass, you’ll look like a scarecrow’.

“Well, an hour later, I was sitting there, in a top-floor apartment a few blocks from the station, and I got a front-row seat to the carnage. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. I’d assumed you lot would commandeer one and use it as a troop transport while masquerading as a shipment. I never thought you’d do anything as audacious as converting one into an ad-hoc cruise missile!” He broke into peals of laughter. “The power was out after the blast and it blew out all the windows in the building, so I got a little propane camp stove and sat there on the balcony eating my sausages and laughing while the dumb cunts tried putting out the fire and digging through the rubble looking for their officers. It was a completely pointless exercise in futility. The stupid twats were all dead! Oh, you ponies put on the best shows!”

“Enough of this twaddle,” I said. “Even if the satyrs deserved it, I’m not interested in how you get a great big chubby from watching our handiwork, you fucking ghoul. If I wanted a recap, I would’ve squeezed your big fat head for it. Where is she? Where’s Windy?”

He grinned like a shark-toothed devil, his eyes wide with interest. “Windy? Windy Mesa? What business have you with her?”

“My sister. And so was she.” I pointed to Hoodoo’s corpse.

“Ahh, I can see why you’re angry.” He put a hand on his hip and stroked his chin. “Hmm, Windy. Ah, yes. Sold. About a week ago. I placed a bid on that one myself. I liked her blue eyes. I liked the childlike fear in them. So much unlike yours. You reek of hatred. Your eyes are filled with killing intent. I’ve only smelled and seen that on one other tonnanen. A former Charger pilot.” He grinned. “You wouldn’t happen to be one, would you?”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. I piloted a Charger during the war. And almost everypony I know thinks I’m a freak because of it.”

I had no idea how I could so easily settle into a conversation with this monster. My sister’s body was lying right behind me, not even fully cold. He was partly responsible.

I didn’t think it possible for anyone to smile so wide, but he managed. “So that’s what it takes for a pathetic four-legged herbivore female to pilot such a fearsome killing machine. They’ve got to be a mutant like you. Fascinating.”

“Where. Is. She?” I growled, not taking my eyes off him for a moment.

He smiled, holding out his hand. “Pay up.”

My jaw hung slack. “Are you kidding me?”

His lip curled with anger. “Well, do you want to know where she is, or not? I’m in this business for money, not sport or honor or whatever these other cretins do it for. Running a mercenary company isn’t cheap. I have a Ravager tank and numerous sets of expensive body armor to replace. You want to know where your sister is? Empty your pockets, pony.”

I sized him up. Somehow, I doubted I could take him. He didn’t carry himself like the others. He wasn’t an expendable amateur equipped by a wealthy bastard of a merc boss. Broggas was the rich merc boss. That sword looked long. And it was probably quite sharp. And he looked like he knew how to use it. He wasn’t a ‘roid rager like the rest. His proportions were more normal for his kind, with a slight wizened hunch from advanced age. There was a scar on his brow that parted his otherwise pristine white fur. He looked like the kind of guy who got it from dueling. Could I go for the revolver? Put him down before he could get close with that toothpick?

“Did you preside over all this?” I pointed a hoof over my shoulder. “The torture? The murders?”

He scoffed and waved a hand. “I don’t give a damn what the boys do for fun. I don’t eat or fuck ponies myself if that’s what you’re asking. I think your kind makes for better servants. Good, strong and loyal laborers and attendants. Easy to train. Easy to keep in line with false hope. Not enough meat on the bones, anyway. A little too lean for my tastes. I am a being of culture. I hunt proper game. The kind that yields a good quantity of meat and hides. Go big, or go home, as my father always used to say.”

“Why the fuck are you assholes enslaving us?” My eyes welled up with tears. “How in the fucking fuck is any of this legal?”

“Completely legal,” Broggas sighed. “The FTU does not recognize the personhood of Equestrians. Also, I resent your accusation. I may own slaves and treat them well, but I’m not in the business of slaving. Not here, not now. That’s the satyrs’ gig. As of late, stallions are wanted as menial laborers. Asteroid miners and whatnot. High-risk, high-workload tasks. They collar ‘em, so they don’t have much of a choice in the matter. Send them into places no cowardly satyr would dare go. Let them suffer and die in their place. Mares? Hah. Frankly, it’s awful. You’re in high demand all over the place, but mostly for sex.

“Though I have abstained, myself, it is whispered among those who traffic in such things that there is no creature in the galaxy more erotic, more satisfying, more pleasing than a pony female. Fur like a soft mink coat. A warm, round ass like a cushion. A wet vice grip of a cunt, one with no equal in the universe. To put it bluntly, you’re the living fuck-pillows upon which a portion of the galaxy has chosen to rest its head, feet, cock, whatever. When someone wants their nerve endings stimulated until sweet, sweet release, they reach for a mare.

“It’s the latest fad among the elite, both in the underworld and so-called polite society. Their wives are jealous of you lot, you know, because of all the time their husbands spend buried dick-deep in their warm, tight little pony whores instead of their own rotten flaps. You? You’re money.” He rubbed his fingers together. “Big money. That’s why they haven’t killed you all. That’s why they haven’t dropped the hammer on this world and left it a cratered desert. They need a stable breeding population so they can farm Equestrians, the Confederacy’s latest premium biological robot and fuck-toy. Whether it’s heavy lifting one needs, or simply a place to keep their ejaculate, there’s no better alternative than a pony.”

Throughout his little spiel about the degrading treatment my kind had suffered, my jaw had gone progressively more slack with each despicable word that passed his lips, but by the time he’d finished, I was gritting my teeth so hard, I felt like I was fixing to bite straight through them. My hooves felt tight. If I had fingers, I’d be making fists.

To say that I was angry would be putting it mildly. I was livid. Shaking with rage. My cheeks were aflame with raw shame and embarrassment. My legs were trembling. Broggas didn’t have to put it that way. Any of it. I could see his wicked smile. He enjoyed twisting the knife. Watching me squirm. I had to fight the typical pony impulse to collapse in a bawling, neurotic fit. I had to stand tall before this vile alien, as a champion of my species. Nevertheless, it took me a few moments to gather myself before I could speak.

“How. Fucking. Dare you.”

“Easily. You see all of them, back there?” He pointed his finger at the prisoners behind me. “Over a hundred million credits of product. I could buy eighty Conqueror tanks with the proceeds of such a sale. Instead, I’m stuck with a couple beat-up Ravagers, taking a loss on a bullshit protection contract on this deplorable shithole of a planet. These Confederate twats are fucking me even harder than they’ve fucked the lot of you, and I’m not gonna take it any longer. I’m going home, and the first thing I’m gonna do is get me and the boys a round of drinks and rashers of bacon. They deserve it for putting up with this baloney.”

I slowly shook my head in disbelief. “Why do the cleomanni forbid ponies from representation and legal recognition on the galactic stage, but they give sick fucking monsters and deviants like you free rein to roam all over the place as you please?”

Broggas got a faraway look in his eyes. “Ahh, the million-credit question. The simple answer to that is that, well, I don’t know. I’ve asked the same question, believe me. They always get evasive about it. It’s complete poppycock. You are obviously, transparently sapient. There was a time when Damark was regarded as too savage to be allowed contact with the wider galaxy. My kind, most of us, we can’t help what we are. Our bodies produce such concentrated hormones, it drives us insane with lust and madness. A terrible adaptation for an untamable world. On Damark, you breed fast and you fight faster, or you die a horrid death. Sadly, this maxim doesn’t apply to civilizations with modern technology.”

“You seem personable enough, to me,” I said. “Obviously, some of you can choose not to be complete assholes all of the time.”

He frowned, leaning down and touching his neck. “I have a regulator implant. Reabsorbs and breaks down the excess chemicals. That’s why I’m talking to you and not bending you over. Sadly, that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of us are dirt-poor and pegged as savages, forced to take the crummiest, shadiest jobs just to get by. I’m an outcast even among my own kind. I could never go into politics on my world. They regard damarkinds with augs to help moderate behavior as ‘not damarkind enough’, and then they go right back to licking the meat of sapients off their bones.”

“What do I care?” I muttered. “What makes you think you can come to our planet and lecture us about your stupid problems, even as you torture and murder us? I’ve met some ballsy motherfuckers in my time, but you? You take the fucking cake.”

Broggas huffed. “I am alone among my associates in thinking that the galaxy would be enriched by the presence of Equestrians among us, perhaps even as equals. Some of you are exceptional fighters, but I can’t even legally employ you. What’s a businessman to do, when a perfectly good asset is sitting right in front of him, and he can’t even pay them a wage?” He checked his pocket watch. “Sorry, but we’re going to have to cut this mutual philosophizing short. Do you want to know where your sister is, or not?”

I reluctantly fished through my saddlebags, and there it was. My stipend. I wasn’t about to give this son of a bitch any of my own money that I’d earned waitressing, just the Liberation Front’s. I’d stuffed the baggie partly with styrofoam so the coins didn’t clink. “Are you sure you aren’t a cleomanni in a damarkind suit?”

“You wound me, madam,” he said, plucking the small drawstring coin purse out of the air. “You really do.”

He inspected the gold bits, giving one a bite and even weighing it on a pocket digital scale and zapping it with a portable terahertz scanner just to be sure they were of a high enough purity that they could be legally exchanged for the FTU’s credits. Any coins or bullion below 23 karat were outlawed in the Confederacy as too adulterated to exchange, legal only as scrap.

“Yes, this is enough.” He grinned. “Smart. You sound-dampened them, like a proper smuggler. Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you, since I doubt you can do anything about it, and, quite honestly, I wish you luck finding and killing the fetid sack of redundant protoplasm who bought her.”

“Who?” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“She went to an old rival of mine with deep pockets. Gormos Ralfas, that big, fat oaf. An addition to his little harem, I presume. I tried rescuing the fair maiden from his grasp, I tell you. Alas, he went a bit beyond my budget with his final bid. You know, I hear he’s got a cock the size of my arm. My whole arm!” He held out his fist and waved up and down his arm with his other hand for emphasis. “Apparently, he likes to get high as a kite and then rail ponies with it until they snap so badly that they can’t speak, only babble like newborns. His twisted appetites are completely, utterly insatiable. She’s probably halfway across the galaxy by now, suffocating beneath his undulating rolls of lard. Did that answer suffice?”

I snarled at him. “Perfectly.”

“Now, if you’ll excuse me.” There was a rush of wind, and suddenly, he had his injured son slung over his shoulders. “I have a ship to catch out of this pathetic backwater.” He offered a mocking little wave goodbye. “Have fun with your crusade, Charger-Girl. May we meet again under better circumstances.”

I was too flabbergasted to speak. I hadn’t seen him move. He’d stopped time somehow, or my perception of it. It had to be some black market nemrin magtech bauble of some kind. Some sort of foreign magic. The residual signature was distinctly non-Equestrian. If I’d attacked him, he would’ve slit my throat without hesitation, and there would have been nothing I could have done to stop him. Even as it was, I was surprised he hadn’t retaliated right there in revenge for his subordinates that I’d felled. He had a personal code of honor, unlike many of his species. Regrettably, it didn’t seem to extend to the ones in his employ.

There was something tucked in the neck of my armor, its corners scratching my skin. I pulled it out, staring at it in mild shock. It was a business card. I couldn’t read the Ardun script on the front, but it had Broggas’s picture on it. I turned it over. He’d written something on the back with a marker, in Equestrian. If you want a real killer’s job with real killer pay, we’re hiring. For you, I’d be willing to go under the table. -Emlan Broggas, Tarrasque Security Solutions

I huffed. “So he is a cleomanni in a damarkind suit.”

I turned back to the room, to the disapproving glares of the captives, watching me let an enemy of our species walk away unscathed. To the flayed corpses of several ponies, hanging in chains. To the lifeless body of my sister. No amount of whimsy or mystery Broggas exuded could have excused these atrocities. I’d made a deal with a literal devil. A pact with a beast whose soulless hirelings had raped and murdered my elder sister in cold blood and sold my younger sister to be the concubine of a monster.

The smell of rot and maggot-ridden flesh was too much. Above all, the overwhelming guilt of having paid that son of a bitch for information was more than I could bear. I stood and leaned against the wall as I threw up all over the floor. My guts spasmed again and again, streams of projectile-vomit splattering at my hooves. I could recognize bits of the barely edible rations I’d eaten earlier, on the ride over from Everfree. My bones ached. I felt sick to my stomach. Sick and dehydrated. I didn’t have time to mope. That would come later. For now, there was work to do. Like a member of the undead, I silently went around in a trance and unlocked all the cages, ripping the padlocks and their shackles off with my magic. I passed around the cup-and-pin pliers so suppression rings could be removed. Soon, a few more unicorns joined me in my task, setting the rest free.

Eventually, the survivors from my squad arrived, beaten and ragged, many of them sporting fresh wounds and gunshot marks on their armor. They gave a quick report. The battle had ended abruptly when the mercs on the fourth floor of the second office building had suddenly ceased fire and pulled back, landing a pair of heavy dropships on the other end of town to evac their remaining forces, leaving their employers to rot. Garrida was already directing the firing squads, the rhythmic beamcaster fire in the distance unmistakable.

Based on the altercation I’d seen between Broggas and the Confederate officer, as well as his own account, they’d been unable to renegotiate the contract, convincing Tarrasque and their motley assortment of circus freaks to run off with their tails between their legs. It was just in time, too. They could have overrun our fireteams.

After my squadmates caught a whiff of the cocktail of death and excrement that permeated the torture chamber, a few of them took a moment to empty the contents of their stomachs all over the floor out in the hall, just as I’d done.

One mare kept hurling and hurling so hard, I thought she’d never stop, and when her stomach was empty, she gagged and dry-heaved some more, for at least a good four minutes. Our team’s medic patted her on the back and asked if she was okay, prompting the sickened mare to collapse to her haunches, sobbing loudly.

I held Hoodoo’s body in my hooves, stroking her mane in silence, tears running down my cheeks. A big yellow claw came down on my shoulder, breaking me from my trance. I looked up at Captain Garrida’s concerned face. I didn’t know what she saw in my expression at that moment, numb as I was, but the slight curl of her beak told me all I needed to know.

“Family?” she said, her voice quavering.

I nodded silently, hugging my sister’s body closer.

“Dammit.” Garrida let out a sigh. “Do you need a minute?”

“Yeah.”

Slowly, the prisoners and my team filed out of that horrible place. Captain Garrida was the last, holding the door as she spoke. “Make it quick, Sergeant. We got enemy gunships on the way.”

When she shut it behind her, allowing me some small measure of privacy, I screamed harder than I had in my entire life.

I screamed my throat raw.

// … // … // … // … // … //

On the lonely hilltop overlooking the town, we hastily dug holes with our entrenching tools. After the battle was over, there was only one thing left to do. Bury our dead.

The gunships would be overhead in under half an hour. We had to move quickly, or they’d spot us.

My limbs were trembling as I lowered Hoodoo’s body into one of the shallow graves, her forelegs crossed over her chest. She looked so peaceful. For her, the struggle was over.

I levitated the bloodstained knife that had been used to murder her. I used the point of the blade to carve over the gaudy and insulting engravings in the stock of one of the light machine guns the mercs had brought to the battle. It was slow going, and the text looked ragged as hell.

“No, no, you’re doing it wrong,” Shooting Star said. “Allow me, Sarge.”

The Corporal heated the knife with pyrokinesis, turning the tip of it into a hot soldering iron. I nodded and returned to my work with the glowing red implement, burning my marks into the wood as I went. Hoodoo, 2152-2181. Died for nothing, like many others. Deserved a real headstone instead of this piece of shit. Then, I buried the end of the barrel at the head of her grave, standing the weapon up vertically.

I stepped back, exhausted from the terrible task of heaping dirt atop my sister’s body. I saluted. It wasn’t proper decorum. She was never in the military, but she had suffered and died in one of the worst ways imaginable while we were in combat with the enemy. I didn’t know what else to do, or any other way to honor her the way she deserved. I held that posture for some time, my lips trembling, before my leg went slack and I moved to join the others in boarding the Centaurs.

Hundreds of captive ponies crammed themselves into the backs of the unarmed cargo trucks, taking shelter under their canvas tops while the soldiers guided them in. I got in the rear bay of the lead Centaur with the rest of the troops, the hydraulics of the ramp whining as it retracted behind me. I sat down hard in one of the bucket seats and buried my face in my hooves, which were still smeared with dirt and blood.

This was a victory, but in so many ways, it felt like a defeat. We didn’t have enough trucks for all of them. Only fifteen casualties on our side, in exchange for hundreds of dead satyrs and their merc buddies. Sadly, there weren’t as many Equestrian prisoners as we thought there would be. Four hundred captives retrieved, hundreds of others liberated. Some, we had to let loose to go find their own transport out of the city or flee for the hills on the hoof in all directions, evading enemy air. I’d convinced Garrida to strap my old motorcycle to the tail of one of the cargo trucks. Took some finagling, but when I told her about its sentimental value and potential usefulness for scouting, she caved.

We had been too late. The horrid fate of my sisters notwithstanding, they’d already shipped two-thirds of the prisoners off-world. To be their slaves. To be their meat. To take the superior traits of our species—our strength, our cunning, our eroticism—and selfishly, cruelly turn them towards their own economic advantage while leaving us with nothing but toil and humiliation. We lived and loved harder than they did, and those soulless, unfeeling, empty, limp-dicked satyr sons of bitches were taking that strength and making it their property.

My little homecoming had given me nothing but heartache. I was never going back again. I couldn’t. Not after today. Getting Dust Devil back together was my first and only real priority.

I was going to make those fucking monsters pay dearly for what they had done.

// … // … // … // … // … //

The drugs were wearing off. I was starting to get the shakes all over. I felt feverish. Not a soul riding in the back of the Centaur said a single word as we trundled along the bumpy dirt road. By the looks on their faces, they’d seen a lot of things they wished they could quickly forget, and so had I.

“S—stim,” I muttered. “I need a stim. Please.”

Garrida shook her head. “That’s a negative, Sergeant. We’re not going into combat. We’re going home. Stims are under lock and key. Besides, you look like you’re about to fall over.”

“Captain, Sir—I—I’ll never ask you for anything like this ever again. I just—I need it. Now.”

“The answer’s no. If you ask again, the next thing you’re gonna feel is my leg around your neck when I put you to sleep.”

I didn’t want to be insubordinate. I didn’t. I wasn’t in my right mind, at that moment in time. “Don’t you understand?” I growled. “I don’t wanna feel like this! Gimme the fuckin’ meth!”

“Naptime, Sergeant.” Garrida did exactly what she said she would. She shot up from her seat, the others quickly parting to allow her passage in the cramped space. Though I briefly tried fending her off, she was skilled and sober, while I was injured and addled. One of her powerful legs snaked around my neck in a textbook choke. I saw stars, and then, darkness.

// … // … // … // … // … //

When my eyes flickered open, I felt like hell. I was on a hospital bed in a white room that looked like an indistinct blur. Ponies around me were shouting things, but it sounded like they were underwater.

“Get her on dialysis immediately!” Argent Tincture yelled. “Her blood pressure’s crashing! And get me the fucking implantable auto-dialysis unit!”

“Multiple drug toxicity,” somepony else muttered. “Serum metabolite levels are way, way too high. Are those—are those marks on her neck? Who did that?”

Argent shook her head. “We’re going to have to cut out her good kidney for this thing to fit. Dammit.”

I looked to my left and watched them open an olive drab polymer hard case with stickers with matrix barcodes on the outside. They lifted a shiny, Y-shaped chunk of titanium and plastic out of the case’s shock-absorbent foam liner and started tinkering with it.

My eyes fluttered shut, and when they reopened, the hands of the wall clock had advanced by several hours. I was in bed, and almost too weak to sit up. I groaned in pain. My back burned. It felt stiff and hard on the inside, somehow. Heavy, like there was a big chunk of rock in it. I could smell antiseptic and feel the stitches, the shaved patch on my back drawing a slight chill.

Bellwether was sitting in the chair across from me, hoofing through a magazine, like he usually did when I was laid up. I was his asset. He was always watching me like a hawk. Making sure his little make-work project didn’t go dying on him, at which point he wouldn’t have anything to justify his participation in all this.

“What’s the damage this time, Bell?” I said.

“This one’s gratis, surprisingly enough. Turns out, Crusher’s guys have got a whole bunch of these auto-dialysis implants sitting around in crates and very few kidney injury patients. Just so you know, that thing’s power supply is good for ten years, after which it needs to be serviced. It’ll ping you if there’s something wrong with it, though.”

“So, did they replace just the damaged kidney, or what did they do?” I said.

“Both your kidneys have been replaced, and it’s a permanent replacement. The operation takes about five years off your life expectancy, on average, but a lot of ponies live a normal lifespan with ‘em. You were really fucked up, by the way. All that shit you were taking was backing up in your system with no way out. Also, you’d ripped open your stitches from all that running around. I know it probably sounds trite at this point, but you’re very lucky to be alive, Storm.”

I collapsed against the pillow, hard. “Fuck.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I sat all alone in the corner of the infirmary at Camp Crazy Horse, my eyes wide. I didn’t feel comfortable in the bed, somehow, so I’d chosen the floor as a place to sit. I was shaking. Shaking from head to hoof. The stims had long since worn off and I was experiencing the withdrawal. Any shred of confidence or bravado I’d had was long gone. I kept seeing it all. All of it. Stuck on replay. Playing over and over in my head. Granthis, cutting a mare in half with her plasma bayonet. The Karkadann, killing and liquefying our comrades. The damarkind mercenary grinding into me, holding me down with his massive body. Clover being raped and dismembered. Carillon exploding, showering me with his innards. Our squad massacring the cleomanni. My sister’s lifeless form on a cold concrete floor. My hooves coming down on one of those monster’s faces over and over until his eye fell from its socket. My teeth chattered, my eyes misted with tears.

“No.” I muttered softly, over and over. “No. No. No. No!”

Hoodoo wasn’t a soldier. She was a painter. She had been completely innocent and powerless to defend herself from the armed thugs who dragged her away and did those wretched things to her. With the flick of a wrist, they’d extinguished the little candle that was her life, with so much of the wick left to go. She’d expected me to come save her, but I was too preoccupied. Too obsessed with my own glory to do something as basic as going looking for my family when they needed me the most. I had failed her. Completely and utterly.

There weren’t words for the violation I felt. I didn’t want to be in my body. I didn’t want to be in my head. I didn’t want to be here. I wished I could leap into another dimension. One where such suffering did not exist. But the pain was real. It could not be ignored. The figments of that pain and fear took the form of damarkinds who kept gripping me by the shoulders and rubbing their huge bodies against me. As I lay helpless in a daydream I couldn’t escape, imaginary ponies suffered and died all around me. I could hear their screams. Their hateful accusations of treachery. I didn’t fight the enemy. I just paid him off. A bribe to get my way. An insult to our dead and mutilated. A reward for unthinkable brutality. I curled up into a ball. Made myself smaller.

I felt fragile, somehow. Like my sense of equilibrium just wasn’t there. The room was spinning. I wished it would all just go away. I wished I was young again. A young mare, frolicking on the grounds of my old high school. The specter of normalcy loomed over my past. A reality that was torn from me and replaced with this hell. And somewhere, me and my sisters were a part of that memory, and we were happy and healthy, too. Not broken. Not sent adrift. Whole. Alive.

Hoodoo! Windy!

// … end transmission …

Next Chapter: Record 10//Penitence Estimated time remaining: 21 Hours, 57 Minutes