Daring Do seemed to be doing okay, but Tarnish was still worried. The four of them moved through the snow as one, with Rainbow up front, Tarnish just behind her, Vinyl on the left, and Daring on the right. Vinyl held the arm cannon coil gun in her magic, and it was a long, ungainly weapon at a little over six feet in length. Tarnish kept his coach gun tucked under his cloak and its heavy bulk was somehow reassuring to him.

The wreck of Ol’ Gertie was in sight, but Tarnish was in no big hurry. They were being cautious, and that was fine, just fine. Yesterday’s battlefield was still awash with the gleaming brass corpses of automatons, far too many to count. Dozens, by Tarnish’s estimation. Plus all of the reinforcements that had come during Vinyl’s lone engagement.

With her hoof, Vinyl made a circular motion, and Tarnish understood it.

“Hey, Rainbow, skirt the edges and circle around.”

“Gotcha.” Her head darting from side to side with every step, Rainbow moved along at a careful pace and began to walk along the edges of the field of scrapped mechanoids, many of which were missing their heads. Rainbow chuckled as she scanned the piles of scrap, wary for any signs of danger, like one of them suddenly jumping up at them.

A ways in, Vinyl stopped and made a gesture for the others to stay put. She crept forwards, looking about, and stopped to examine one of the wrecked bodies. Lifting her hoof, she pointed and then gave her companions a nod. A second later, her slate was out and she was writing down a brief message.

This body is trapped.

Then, as quick as it had appeared, the slate vanished.

Rainbow resumed her lead and the four companions kept to the edges of the battlefield, each of them looking in different directions. Tarnish’s superiour height held some advantage, and his long, flexible neck allowed him to look beyond his rear. In no time at all, the wreck of Ol’ Gertie was on their right, instead of in front of them.

Near a smouldering, smoking tree, Vinyl stopped to have a look. It was clear that one of her trapped bodies had exploded and there were pieces of scrap everywhere, including some that were lodged in the tree. This gave Tarnish pause, and he spoke up to give voice to his thoughts.

“So, they came to reclaim scrap and got blown up. All this valuable metal, and they haven’t come to clean it up. Do you think they stopped?” Snorting, he kicked away a mechanoid arm and then took a step back.

“Should they be this smart?” Rainbow asked.

“I don’t know,” Tarnish replied. “They follow a set pattern of behaviour. It’s clear that they came to do a cleanup job, and then got blown up. I guess they just… quit? I dunno, something about this bothers me, and I don’t like it.” Looking about, Tarnish noticed the sledge, which was covered under a light dusting of snow. “We should check the sledge for traps when we get over there.”

“Quick,” Daring Do said, her voice creaking, “check for changelings! Mister Teapot is being cautious.”

“Oh, ha ha…” Peering around, Tarnish checked for danger, then looked Daring right in the eye. “You’re a real funny mare, Miss Yearling.” Beneath his scarf, Tarnish grinned. “Funny looking, that is.”

In a rather unexpected move, Vinyl went into the wreck. Tarnish followed, worried, with Rainbow Dash and Daring Do moving to catch up. There was a puddle of frozen blood on the floor, which belonged to Daring Do. She looked down at it as she stepped over it, and then lifted her head to stare at Tarnish.

Vinyl moved through the smashed wreckage, the rear end of the ship was in bad shape, and when she came to a barrier, she yanked it out of the way with her magic. It wasn’t long before the companions found themselves in the remains of the engine room, and Tarnish wondered what they were doing here.

Coming to a halt, Vinyl paused among the many brass pipes and began looking around. Tarnish, also glancing about, began to wonder if the precious metal from these wrecks was being reclaimed by the automaton scrappers. He didn’t know why Vinyl was here, and she hadn’t bothered explaining herself, a common problem with the fickle, eccentric mare.

Then, Vinyl began pulling off bits of the piping system, causing Rainbow and Daring to exchange a glance with one another. Tarnish suspected that Vinyl was being brilliant, something she was prone to doing. He had a very general idea of some of the stuff she was grabbing, as he had learned a bit about engines since becoming an adventurer.

A pressure regulator, an overflow tank, a release valve, a pressure indicator gage, and several other gleaming brass bits were all pulled, leaving Tarnish quite puzzled. Was Vinyl rigging up a steam organ for some music? A calliope? Just what did Princess Celestia teach in her school for gifted unicorns, anyhow?

“Why do I get the feeling that something incredibly dangerous is about to happen?” Rainbow Dash asked in a hushed whisper, fearful of interrupting Vinyl’s concentration. “That’s a weather factory grade overflow tank rated for three thousand pounds per square inch pressures.”

“Maybe it’s the same reason I keep thinking that every unicorn that Princess Celestia graduates from her school is a living, breathing weapon of war?” Tarnish replied.

Rainbow, nodding, had this to say: “Hmm, that explains a lot about Twilight…”

Filled with anticipation, Tarnish watched as Vinyl attached various brass bits and pieces to a section of octagonal, reinforced steel pipe that was about a yard long, something she had pulled from the ruined steam engine’s heart. There was a tank on one end, some gauges, some levers, and the entire thing was scary looking.

Skyreach Valley was peaceful, more or less. It was quiet, there were no birds here, but there were animals. Tarnish could sense them, but didn’t see them. It was a sunny, beautiful winter’s day and the temperature was hovering somewhere just below zero. The sledge was ready to go, and Vinyl had already cleared a path through the booby trapped battlefield for the sledge to pass through.

“Tarnish, do you think we could survive a night away from our cave?” Daring Do asked, her voice crinkly like old parchment.

Shrugging, Tarnish took a while to think before answering, and his prolonged silence didn’t seem to bother Daring Do in the slightest. He looked at the snow for a while, chewing on his chapped lip beneath his scarf, and was very careful to consider quite a number of things. His first instinct had been to simply say, ‘No.’ But thinking about it gave him ideas.

“If we built an igloo and all huddled together… maybe… but it wouldn’t be pleasant.” After a bit more thinking, he added, “We’d need to build a deep tunnel down into the snow, as deep as possible, so the cold air has a place to sink to and the hot air can rise for convection. If we can generate enough heat and get enough convection going, we might be okay. Mind you, this is all theory based on stuff I’ve picked up in my travels.”

“My worry is that we’ll explore too far, and not make it back to the cave before nightfall.” Darning reached up and with a gentle touch, she rubbed at her throat through her protective outerwear. “It itches already, inside and out.”

“I take a lot of pride in what I do,” Tarnish admitted in a small voice. “I have a lot of faults and shortcomings, and I know that… I think about them all the time, and they bother me. But I can stitch a pony back together… I’ve brought back ponies and others from Death’s doorway. I pulled an arrow out of a minotaur’s lung and he lived. In another life, maybe with another cutie mark, I might have been a doctor.”

“I dunno, Tarnish… a lot of doctors in hospitals, they don’t deal with gunshots and arrows and sword injuries and stuff.” Rainbow Dash leaned over a bit and patted Tarnish on the leg. “Battlefield medicine is completely different than hospital medicine. I wish I had paid more attention in my classes involving Wonderbolts history so I’d have something meaningful to say.”

“Thanks, Rainbow.”

“Don’t mention it, Big Guy.”

Vinyl held her contraption out for Tarnish to look at, and he was baffled by the very sight of it. Written on her slate was some very simple instructions. Fill tank with steam to 2000 psi.

He understood the instructions, but that scared him. Then again, it was rated for three thousand pounds per square inch pressure. Could he make that much steam? Sure, maybe. Perhaps. Concentrating, he went to work, summoning steam inside of the ribbed, reinforced tank. At first, nothing seemed to be happening, but then the needle started to move. One-hundred, two-hundred, three-hundred, four-hundred, and five-hundred were all marked on the gauge. After that, it went to one-thousand, one-thousand five hundred, two-thousand, two-thousand five hundred, and finally, three-thousand.

After a moment, the needle jumped a bit and rested near the three-hundred marker. The brass tank began to steam a little bit in the cold and Tarnish could feel the faint heat rising from it. The contraption began making pinging sounds as the metal began to heat, like a steam radiator getting warm.

While he waited, Vinyl pulled a lever, there was a clang, and she dropped a large brass ball down the front end of the barrel. Tarnish took note that this mechanical menace loaded like a musket, and his confidence was not assauged. The same lever, Tarnish now thought of it as the loading lever, was pulled again, locking the ball in place. Vinyl was being very deliberate in showing him how this worked.

One-thousand pounds per square inch and rising.

The metal was humming now, which scared Tarnish to no end. Vinyl had just cobbled this together, and she had made the brass balls herself. He had watched her do it, melting brass into a bubbling, boiling liquid with her magic, shaping it into a ball, and then holding the shape when she plunged it into the snow. Ding-a-ding, the metal sang, a happy song of mass destruction.

Holding up her slate once more, Vinyl wrote out the words, At 2000 psi, all you need to do is keep it hot. That should be minimal drain for you.

Tarnish nodded, but said nothing. He was too scared. At the moment, he and Vinyl were each standing on either side of an improvised bomb that could erase them. At this point, if there was a breach, the steam coming out would be invisible and travelling at more than the speed of sound. An invisible, unseeable, dreadful force would simply erase he and Vinyl from existence.

As he stood there, shivering, but not from the cold, he thought about Vinyl’s idea for a steam powered sword, a sword whose blade was covered from end to end with microjets to release high pressure steam—a weapon for him to wield. It was a weapon that was too terrifying for Tarnish to even imagine, a blade with an edge made of steam-spewing microjets would cleave through soft flesh like butter and with high enough pressures, even metals. Maybe even rocks.

It was a fine idea, but Tarnish liked his own idea better; a needler cactus that was modified to hold the scent glands of a skunk. It seemed kinder somehow, a bit more gentle than a steam powered sword, which was a mad, mad idea. He and Vinyl had all sorts of mad ideas, which might be why Princess Celestia spent so much time worrying about them both.

At two-thousand pounds per square inch, Tarnish extinguished his magic and waited.

Vinyl, careful to show Tarnish, pulled a short lever near the tank and there was a low whistle from the cannon as it was primed. The lever, which had a spring, snapped back into place. Holding it level, she took aim at a nearby mechanoid corpse, and Tarnish felt fuzzy magic wrap around his ears. This made his asshole and his urethra clench up tight as could be with anticipation, in fact, the muscles were so tight that his dock spasmed.

With the gun primed and ready, Vinyl released the loading lever, and maintaining her careful aim, she pulled the makeshift trigger, which was located on the side of the gun. A great number of things happened all at once. There was a muffled boom that Tarnish felt in his teeth, a huge cone-shaped section of snow in front of the modified steam cannon melted in an eyeblink, and the torso of the mechanoid that Vinyl was pointing at ceased to be with a clanging sound that was very much like the bell in Ponyville.

The gun now read just a little below two-thousand pounds per square inch and no doubt, could be fired again.

“Vinyl, no mare has ever loved me enough or trusted me enough to give me a cannon,” Tarnish said to his mute companion. The sound of running water could be heard, the sound of snow melt, but the water was still too hot to freeze just yet, though it soon would.

Holding up her slate, Vinyl scratched out a few words. We have a lot to talk about on the way home. Let’s go.

Author's Notes:

Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns teaches science.

Much to the dismay of many.