“Ember? Hey, wake up.”

I groaned as I felt talons shaking me and tried to fight them away. “Five… fifty more minutes…”

“Ember, for the love of…” The talons stopped shaking me, and I sighed as I began to curl back up to continue my nap. Getting slapped on the nose, however, put an end to that.

“Fuck!” I cried, jolting upright and clutching my nose. After waiting for the pain to subside, I opened my eyes to find Dacie standing in front of me in the middle of the cockpit. “The shit was that for?!” I shouted, rubbing my poor nose and trying to blink the tears out of my eyes.

“We’re here,” Dacie said, pointing out the window. “Well, within a few miles of it. You told me to let you know when we got here, and here we are.”

Rubbing my eyes, I grunted and managed to stand up, Dacie shuffling out of my way in the cramped cockpit. In front of us, the rocky tops of the mountains suddenly gave way to the steep walls of a canyon about a mile or two away. At the very end of that canyon, underneath the starry night sky, the harsh and almost blinding glow of the Bastion’s lights lit everything around it like it was daytime. I was surprised that the Bastion’s emergency power could even provide that much illumination.

“Good,” I said, turning around and flopping back into my seat. I noticed that the clock on the holographic display said 0551 and inwardly groaned. “Nearly six in the morning? How long were we flying for?”

“About two hours,” Dacie said. “This thing moves surprisingly fast.”

“I can believe that,” I muttered, frowning as I studied the screen, looking for the radio controls. Were all of Equestria’s pilots computer geniuses? I don’t know how they’d be able to navigate this shit in the middle of a combat situation. After a minute of searching, I finally found the radio, and quickly set it to the frequency Sig told me to. “Well, here goes nothing.”

I opened the channel and attempted to hail the Bastion. “This is Private First-Class Ember hailing the Bastion. I, uh, have mission critical information to relay. Over.” When I didn’t get a response after a few seconds, I tried again. “This is Private First-Class Ember hailing the Bastion, please respond, over.”

Dacie did that thing that griffons do where they grind their beak while we waited for a response. Frowning, I looked at the display again. Did I put in the right frequency? Sigur said 364.2 MHz, right? Or was it 362.4? Should I try other frequencies around that?

Just then, the radio crackled to life. “PFC Ember, this is Operations Control. We have you on record as deployed to the Pie Quarry until dawn. Please inform why you are breaking radio silence before the end of your deployment, over.”

I sighed in relief and slumped back in my chair (or tried to, rather) and smiled at Dacie. At least we wouldn’t have to go walking! I turned the radio on again and leaned forward into the mic. “We saw an opportunity and we took it,” I said. “During our stay at the quarry, the Crimson came to investigate via ringbird. We were able to eliminate the Crimson soldiers that came with it and stole it.” Smirking, I added, “Sergeant Sigur thought it’d make a big difference in the fight against the Crimson, over.”

The radio was silent for a while after I finished transmitting, and I just shared a happy look with Dacie. I could only imagine the confusion and possible excitement going on back at the Bastion. “Say again, Private, did you capture a ringbird? Are we hearing that right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Figured that it’d be a good idea to let you know before we flew up to the Bastion. I’m not particularly keen on getting blown out of the sky, over.”

I heard some chatter on the other end of the radio, and the operator’s voice came back on the line. “We’re ordering the artillery batteries to stand down. You are to fly the ringbird into the canyon, set it down in front of the Bastion, and power off the aircraft before emerging and awaiting further instructions, over.”

“Yeah, copy that, we’ll be right over. Over,” I said, grinning at Dacie. Dacie just grinned back at me and squeezed herself into the pilot’s seat, powering up the engines in a few seconds.

“Just fly toward the light, then?” she asked once she got her headset on.

“Yeah,” I said into mine. “You heard what they had to say. Set it down right in front of that huge steel wall and power it down. They’re probably just making sure that it’s not a trap or something to get them to lower their defenses before an attack.”

The ringbird lurched as Dacie revved the engines and put it into the air, then began to fly toward the lights at the end of the canyon. She took us down into the canyon, with the sharp walls of stone rising up on either side of us, and I thought I saw her quickly rub her eyes in awe as we approached. “That’s the Bastion?” she asked, completely enthralled by the huge steel wall jutting out of the rock face in front of us. “It’s huge!”

“That’s just the surface,” I said, smirking and looking the thing over. I had to admit, it was pretty amazing. I hadn’t really seen much of the outside in my time there so far. “It goes who knows how far into the rock, and then down into the earth. It was supposed to resist orbital bombardment.”

When we were finally within reach of the Bastion, Dacie put the aircraft into a hover and lowered it to the ground a lot more gently than I expected. Apparently she’d honed her skills while I was passed out in the back seat being anything but useful. Touching a few options on her holographic screen, she shut the engines off and lowered the ramp behind the ringbird. All we were left with was the whistling whine of the rotor ring slowing down above us as we made our way out of the craft.

My hooves crunched on dry, brittle grass, and I sighed as I staggered out into the bright spotlights of the Bastion. “Home sweet home,” I joked, slowly limping in front of the machine and sitting down in front of it. “Please, somepony take me to the infirmary,” I moaned into the night as I looked at my bandaged midsection and my broken leg. “I’m fucked up real bad.”

Dacie stood by my side and blocked some of the harsh light with her talons. “Where are they?” she asked, squinting just to see anything of the Bastion in front of us. I had to admit, those lights were really painful, and I couldn’t see fuck all because of them.

Then I heard the sounds of wings flapping, and I raised a hoof over my eyes to try to block out some of the light. Ten shadowy figures leapt off of the Bastion’s upper walls and were flying down towards us in wide circles. Dacie started as they landed in a circle around us and the ringbird, one’s hooves actually making metallic clanks as they landed on the ring of the aircraft itself. “You! Hands up, wings out!” One of the pegasi shouted to Dacie, and the frightened griffon immediately complied.

Groaning, I sat up and supported myself with my hooves. “She’s from the quarry, she’s with me. She’s actually the one who flew this thing back here.” I watched as the silhouettes of pegasus Sentinels moved toward us, while the rest moved toward the ringbird itself. “Can I get a ride to the infirmary or something?” I asked, pointing to my leg. “I really don’t want to walk.”

Suddenly the earth shook around us so violently that it started rattling the teeth in my skull. The spotlights on the Bastion moved away, allowing me to see, and after exchanging an alarmed look with Dacie, I looked forward at the front of the Bastion. There, an enormous door was opening, granting access to the staging hangar immediately inside of the base. When it finally stopped moving, it left behind a gap in the wall big enough to fit the ringbird into with lots of room to spare all around.

I almost didn’t see the ponies marching out the front door, as it were, until they were right on top of me. I suddenly found the bright lights on the walls blocked by a middle-aged unicorn mare in Sentinel armor staring down at me, with an assortment of other Sentinels at her flanks. “You still live?” Fusillade said in what I’d since learned was an incredibly thick Prench accent. “Magnifique. And you even stole one of Carrion’s ringbirds?”

I managed to weakly salute her. “Yes, ma’am. We went through a lot of trouble—”

“Where is sergeant Sigur?” the unicorn commander asked. Her eyes narrowed on Dacie and she pointed a blue hoof at the hen. “Who are you?”

Dacie swallowed hard. “Dacie, ma’am. I’m Sig’s sister.”

“Sig’s still at the quarry,” I said. “They had to evacuate before we left, otherwise the Crimson were going to kill us all. He’s making sure they stay safe until the morning.” I felt a stickiness around my stomach, and I realized that my bandages were starting to turn red. I guess I reopened my claw wounds when I tried to sit up. “Listen, I can explain everything, but can we save it until I’m not bleeding out?”

Fusillade nodded once and abruptly turned to the soldiers on her right. “Get a stretcher and bring her to the infirmary. I will wake Commander Rampart and Acting-Commander Zip for a debriefing.” Then she spun to her left and pointed to Dacie. “You two, take her to detainment until we hear the private’s report. Treat her well.” Then, clearing her throat, she stomped on the ground and raised her voice. “The rest of you, secure the ringbird and move it inside as soon as possible. I want preliminary analysis done before noon.” Then, nodding to the sky, she added, “The sun is going to be up soon. No time to lose.”

Dacie looked over to me, a little bit frightened at being separated in an unfamiliar place, but I just smiled at her and waved my hoof. “You’ll be fine,” I assured her as the two soldiers encouraged her to move toward the facility. “I’ll see you when I’m done, okay?”

She just nodded and finally began to follow the soldiers, leaving me to lie on the ground, clutching my stomach and trying to stem the bleeding. A minute later, two unicorns trotted up to me, bearing a stretcher, and set me into it before carrying me into the base.

I’ll spare you the details, but half an hour later, I found myself reclining in a really soft chair, my hind leg set in an enchanted cast and receiving some kind of magical treatment that’d have the bone fixed in a few days, and a doctor sitting over me as he painstakingly fused skin and muscle back together with his magic. It was really uncomfortable and really itchy, but he’d already restrained my limbs so I couldn’t scratch while he was trying to work. Apparently that could result in him accidentally fusing my hoof to my stomach, and that sounded like something I really wanted to avoid, so I willingly let him and the nurse strap me down until he was finished.

About halfway through the second of the three claw wounds in my chest, the door opened, and in came Fusillade, Rampart, and my beautiful orange angel. Just seeing Zip again after all I’d been through, after nearly dying out there without her, made me really happy. I suddenly wished I wasn’t strapped down so I could throw myself out of this big chair and hug her. At least Zip looked like she was struggling to refrain from doing the same, if that was any consolation to me.

The three leaders sat down in chairs opposite the doctor, just within my sight. Weakly smiling at them, I turned my head to the side. “I’d salute, but I’m a little tied up at the moment.”

Zip just rolled her eyes and suppressed a smile, while Fusillade looked at me like I needed to do fifty pushups now. For his part, Rampart remained passive as ever. “I’m glad to see you’re still mostly in one piece,” he said, nodding to my wounds. “If Commander Thunder’s recommendation for your actions at Hard Point Beta wasn’t proof enough, I think it’s safe to say after tonight that you can hold your own when duty calls.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I hope you liked my present.”

“We’ll have our engineers take a closer look at it, find out if we can exploit any weaknesses in its design for the attack on the dam,” Rampart said. “You’ve done an invaluable service to us by recovering it. But I need to know what happened there. So,” he said, nodding to me. “Report.”

And I did. I told him everything that happened since Sig and I arrived at the metal pad in the middle of the forest. Running into his brothers on the ascent to the quarry. Meeting Kerzin, and his refusal to join us. The hostility that the griffons showed us. Then Kerzin’s betrayal in the middle of the night, how he sold us out and nearly got us killed. How Sig’s siblings saved us and secured the ringbird. The battle in the quarry that ended with Kerzin’s death. All of it.

“When we left,” I was saying, “Sig was going to take all of the griffons from the quarry into the forest to hide until the Crimson left. Carrion’s troops should’ve arrived at the quarry while Dacie and I were still flying back here. Once daylight comes, Sig was going to move the flock to the pad so that they could be teleported to safety here.”

“We barely have an hour until dawn,” Zip commented, looking at Platinum Rampart. “We should make sure the mages are ready to go. Teleporting the entire flock is going to take most of the day.”

Rampart nodded and turned to Fusillade. “I’ll entrust that duty to you, Commander. Make it happen.”

The mare nodded and stood up, skirting around me and the doctor as she made her way to the door. When she was gone, Rampart turned his attention back to me. “I apologize for the risk that we put you and sergeant Sigur in on this mission, but that’s simply life. We had no way of knowing that the griffons’ elder had forged ties with the Crimson, but I’m glad that it worked out in the end regardless.”

“Assuming the Crimson don’t find them tonight, sir,” I said. “But barring that, you’ll have hundreds of griffons on your doorstep for the foreseeable future.”

“A number the Bastion is well-equipped to house, I assure you,” Rampart said. “I will have the preparations made for their arrival. Hopefully, with volunteers from the flock, we will finally have the numbers we need to launch our operation. If a hundred volunteer, we’ll have more than I hoped we would just a few days ago.”

He stood up and nodded to Zip. “Take care of her,” he said, a small smile forming on his lips. “I couldn’t think of a better pony for the job.”

Zip blushed and saluted Rampart. “I-I will, sir.”

“Good,” he said, momentarily placing his hoof on her shoulder. Then, turning to me, he actually gave me a salute. “You’re a hero, soldier. Take as long as you need to rest and recover. I think you’ve paid off your obligations for the time being after everything you’ve done tonight.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I will.”

Rampart nodded once then turned around and walked out the door, leaving me alone with Zip and the doctor. Fluttering to her hooves, Zip moved to my side and looked over the wounds in my gut. She made some sort of face and shuddered. “That’s disturbing.”

“It is what it is, Commander,” the doctor said, not even taking his eyes off my stomach for a second. “Growing and repairing tissue by horn is time-consuming and tedious.”

“Not to mention really itchy,” I hissed, doing my best to not squirm as the doctor worked around my bellybutton. “Consider yourself lucky.”

“Stitches and staples too primitive?” Zip asked, angling her head as she tried to see around the doctor’s muzzle.

“If I wanted to leave lasting abdominal injury and risk her intestines bursting out of her gut like a horror movie the moment she tried to exert herself, then no,” the doctor said, honestly sounding a little bit annoyed. I wonder how many times he’d heard questions like that before. “She’s lucky to even be alive, honestly. Another inch deeper and those talons would’ve ripped her viscera into pieces. The only reason she lasted this long was the Stabil-Ice somepony poured into her wounds before bandaging them.”

“Right here, you know,” I muttered, frowning at the two of them.

But the doctor just continued to ignore me. “So, in order to keep her alive and all of her organs safely within her body, I have to manually repair the damage done by growing the tissue to fill in the gaps. This means growing muscle and connective tissue, as well as her dermis and epidermis—not a simple task, as anypony with any experience in magical tissue repair will tell you.”

“But it’ll be good as new, right?” I asked him.

“In terms of functionality, yes,” he said. “The muscles will work, the skin will maintain itself. Your hair won’t regrow, however, and there won’t be any feeling in that area, so you will have noticeable scarring to your abdomen. After stringing together the neural network that will allow you to properly innervate the repaired muscles, I’m not going to take the extra effort to manually place hair follicles and nerve endings in your skin.”

Kind of disappointing, but not really too much of a price to pay to keep my intestines inside of me. “And my ear?” I asked, wiggling the stump that remained on my head.

“Don’t be such a foal,” the doctor said. “I’m not going to waste time and energy on that. It’s not bleeding anymore, and I already treated it for infection. It still functions, and you have a perfectly good right ear. You’ll be fine.”

Then, grunting, he slid his chair back and stood up, the magic from his horn undoing the restraints around my limbs all at once. “There. Good as new. Don’t put too much pressure on your leg over the next three days, and in fact I’m going to order you to stay off it entirely for twelve hours. Come see me after three days and we’ll remove your cast.”

I grunted as I sat up and looked at the scarring on my chest. Three pink lines stood out amongst the black hairs on my gut, and like the doctor said, when I poked them, I couldn’t feel my hoof. “Thanks, Doc,” I said, offering him an appreciative smile.

The doctor just straightened his lab coat and turned away. “Yes, yes, you’re welcome. Now go so I can prepare for the rush later today. I had to process almost every single one of the slaves liberated from the Fort, and I can only imagine that Commander Rampart is going to want me to do the same with the hundreds of griffons they’ll be bringing back today. Me and the other doctors have to get ready.”

Unwilling to provoke the doctor’s fury, I rolled off of the chair and landed on three hooves, keeping my broken leg held against my stomach. Zip was at my side in a flash, offering her support and wrapping her wing around my back to steady me as she guided me out the door. Only when the door hissed shut behind us did I finally feel like I could start to relax. “Who was that?”

“Hacksaw,” Zip said, and I could feel her shudder against my side. “He’s a medical genius, and he’s saved all our lives several times over—mine included. He’s just… impatient.” Then, stopping in the middle of the hallway, she buried her face in my mane. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” I said, rubbing my cheek against hers. “I never thought I’d see you again.” I remembered the absolute terror that’d gripped me when the Crimson sat me on that ledge and aimed a gun at my head. The remains of my left ear would be a constant reminder of how close I came to dying tonight.

She touched my chin with a feather and guided my muzzle toward her waiting lips. The kiss was sweet and tender, made all the more amazing because I never thought I’d feel her lips on mine again. When it finally ended some seconds later, we touched our foreheads together and looked deep into each other’s eyes. “I’m glad you’re back,” Zip whispered.

“I’m glad I am, too,” I whispered back, smiling. That smile quickly fell apart into a yawn, though, as my exhaustion suddenly slammed into me like a charging earth pony. Groaning, I rubbed at my eyes and shook my head. “Sorry, I’m on like… three hours of sleep, maybe, in the past twenty-eight hours.”

“Well, let’s get you somewhere quiet then, alright?” she asked, and I lethargically nodded. Smiling softly at me, she led me down the hallway, past a number of open and vacant operating rooms to the central staircase in the Bastion. With a little bit of her help, we made it up the stairs to the C block without too much effort on my part. I was too tired to realize where she was taking me until I saw the number ‘38C’ painted on the wall next to a door.

“That’s not my barracks,” I mumbled, really struggling to fight off my exhaustion.

“I figured you could use someplace quieter than your barracks,” Zip said, opening the door and ushering me inside. She didn’t step away until she’d laid me down on her bed and pulled the covers over me. “Get as much sleep as you can, okay? I’ll be helping move the griffons to their quarters once they start to arrive.”

I nodded, already feeling the thick tendrils of sleep starting to pull me under. “Zip?” I asked before the pegasus could step out of the door, and she stopped in the door frame, framed by the light outside like an angel. “Five minutes? Please?”

Zip smiled softly and stepped back into the room, shutting the door behind her and bathing us in darkness. I felt the mattress shake as she put her weight on it and the covers shift as she slipped in next to me. Kind forelegs and downy wings wrapped around me, holding me close to her warmth as we fit our bodies together. “Okay,” she whispered. “Five minutes.”

“Thank you,” I whispered as I nuzzled her mane. I didn’t hear if she made a reply or not; I was already gone.