I blinked, stars in my eyes, as everything went pitch black. Whatever had just happened had been the main event to the first vworp. Underneath my panic about being lost in deep space and unexpected combat, I still couldn't decide how to describe the noise. Maybe it had been vlorp like I originally thought.

I could still feel the familiar spartan interior of Midnight’s cockpit, still smell the familiar stench of ten years of battle and spilled instant meals baked into the seat. The harness still cinched me down in that painful but comforting way. I pulled my helmet down over my head and mashed the control panel blindly for the power button. Years of panic had taught my hands where to find it, even in the dark.

"Please enter start code." My computer's far-too-calm female voice chided. I was too busy being annoyed at my computer to be thankful that it was there and running.

"Thank you, Midnight," I managed through clenched teeth. Stupid computers and their needing passwords. Once the helmet had synced with my brain I could see the standby lights of my cockpit. My hand danced across the keyboard and the 85 tons of steel that make up my Stalker came to life.

"Reactor: online." My seat rumbled and the cockpit hummed as my Stalker slowly spun up it's massive gyroscopes and stood to full height, using my inner ears and sense of balance to stand. The dashboard glowed to life and the various screens lit up. Everything where it should be.

The expected clinical lighting and angled steel beams of our dropship were not outside my cockpit however. My surroundings had been somehow replaced with inky black. The floating feel of being on a dropship had been replaced with the steady pull of planetary gravity. It looked like I was now on a planet, and it was night. The kind of blackness that you only get on planets without cities. Dead, middle of assfuck nowhere night. I fought against the overwhelming feeling of panic and kept working. My throttle hand mashed the control panel to start the sensors and weapon systems. My driving hand grabbed the joystick with a deathgrip. My fingers hovered over the weapon triggers. Heat vision and night vision would let me see, but my weapons would keep me alive. I pushed aside the obvious question of ‘what the fuck happened to my dropship’ for the more immediate ‘where the shit am I’.

"Sensors: online." Three other blips showed up immediately. Rolf's kodiak, Dan's atlas, and Hiro's catapult. Just where we had stood in the dropship hangar bay. At least I still had my lance.

"Weapons: online." My four PPC's booted up, followed by the twin lasers and twin missile packs. My take on the Thor’s Hammer rebuild of a stalker had seen us through several hairy battles. Whatever was about to take us was gonna hurt before they could.

"All systems: nominal." The quick checklist printout on my screen read green across the board. Which was good, because the shit, as predicted, had definitely gone down. With a flick of my wrist on the control stick, Midnight looked around.

I could barely make out the Tiger in the darkness as it stood up and looked around too. Hiro always was quick to react. My other hand mashed for the switch to kill the interior lights and turn on heat vision.

"Thermal optics: engaged."

The world slowly came into monochrome view. Still nothing. No, that wasn't right, there were heat signatures on the ground. Short ones, a herd of animals, surrounded by trees.

It was a forest clearing, just big enough for about a hundred people and a stage. Instead, there were about thirty heat signatures and something out of a halloween movie. A witches cauldron sat over a small fire in the center of everything, lit up on heat vision. The figures on the ground were turning and moving toward our mechs. I winced at what was coming next. Stupid animals usually know better than this. Only humans were dumb enough to run toward giant scary things. Animals had the sense to know danger and get the fuck away.

My fears were right. Sensing an ambush, Ninja mashed his throttle in backwards and stomped his jump jets. Four streams of plasma erupted from the back of the Tiger with enough force to throw sixty five tons of steel into the air. They scorched the ground below, instantly barbecuing one of the heat signatures. He rocketed up just above the treetops, twisted around, and came crashing down out of sight. It was his signature move. He'd pop up again in a few seconds once the jump jets recharged and disappear somewhere else. I felt bad for the animals for a moment.

"Ninja to Atari lance!" Hiro's panicked voice called out in my ears.

I thumbed for my mic switch. "Omega here Ninja, keep calm and stay hidden."

"Roger!" Predictably, the swarm of animals that had been crowding the Tiger ran away, only to come back once it was gone. They crowded around their cooked compatriot and…bounced. They were rearing up. When I bothered to look at my secondary sensors monitor, I saw sound outside. I tapped my keyboard and routed the external mic into the cockpit.

Cheering.

Fanatical cheering. We had been, I could only guess here, teleported out of our dropship onto the surface of an unknown planet. Now these four legged things were cheering after we had killed one of their own. My world had become the plot to a cheesy science fiction movie. With no immediate danger to react to, I sat in stunned silence for a moment.

"Omega, you seeing this?" Reaper finally saw fit to pipe up.

"Seeing, not believing."

"Orders?" Bear's gruff voice barked, ever the level headed one.

"Atari lance, single file, let's get out of this forest. Ninja, you have a reading on the easy way?"

"Ninja, one second." The roar of Tiger's jump jets slammed my ears as the mic adjusted the volume to compensate. He flew up a few dozen meters, then dropped back into the forest and disappeared again. "My left, magnetic north by my compass."

"Ninja, you have point. I don't like this at all. We find open ground and figure out who the hell wants us here."

A chorus of 'roger's came through the comms. Followed by a voice on the ground.

"My brothers! My sisters! The monsters from Tartarus are here!"

My eyebrows about came out of my helmet. They could talk? In english? 'Monsters' was an accurate enough description of our machines though. "Big Bear, you read books, Tartarus?"

"Greek hell, Omega."

I shook my head. Why would talking horses refer to human history? "Keep marching." Why weren’t we being shot at? This had to be some kind of elaborate prank. The Tiger flew over our heads, landed gracefully in front of Midnight, and charged through the forest. Flashes of laser could be seen as he cut trees in his way. I gunned my throttle and followed. The atlas and kodiak followed closely behind me.

Reaper spoke up, confused. “Greek?”

“Old Terra country, pre industrial,” Rolf recited. “They had different gods and mythology.”

"Follow the monsters! Our revolution begins!" Between the thundering of our footfalls, the voice on the ground continued ranting with all of the terrible passion of a pastor.

"I'm not a monster, am I Omega?" Reaper whined through his mic even as he followed me closely. Dan was taking this seriously as usual.

"You're the kindest, gentlest grim reaper west of Outreach," I shot back. I could practically hear Rolf rolling his eyes.

Cheers followed us for about five minutes as we crushed our way through the forest. Most humans couldn't run 50 kph. I'd seen a few of the clan's 'elementals' keep pace, but there's no accounting for power armor. When the noise died down, I looked around but saw the heat signatures still with us.

"Who the fuck are they?" Reaper asked, getting over his confusion just enough to be angry about it.

"Horses," Big Bear commented calmly. He was doing a better job of taking this in stride than I was, but that was why I kept him on payroll. Well, that and being deadly on the battlefield.

"I don't see the guy talking."

"I don't think there is a guy, Reaper," I said, still looking for the owner of the voice.

“Where the fuck are we?” Reaper continued.

“On a planet, Reaper.”

“Thanks Commander Obvious.”

“Some of the constellations are matching Terra,” Ninja piped up.

“This is not fuckin Terra,” Reaper said, “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Not all of them, but some of them. Don’t ask me how that works,” Ninja replied.

“So we’re kinda on Terra, but not really?” I tried to summarize, but wound up as confused as the others. “Keep walking, maybe we’ll find something here that explains things.”

---

We had cleared the forest by about five minutes when the sun, in all of it's blinding fury, rose to our left over the horizon faster than I have ever seen a sun rise. I had to kill the heat vision to be able to see again, and it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. The green grassland and gentle rolling hills lit up in golden morning sun met my eyes when my vision cleared. I briefly thought what a nice looking planet it was. Shame to bring a war to it.

"Form up, diamond," I barked. Diamond meant I took the side to snipe, Reaper up front where the Atlas's twenty some-odd tons of armor plating would do its job, Ninja nestled safely behind three assault mechs, and Bear on the other side. We were in position in five seconds. A well choreographed and practiced dance that I insist upon. It's how I justify charging the big bucks.

A booming female voice, the likes of which only come out of stacks of speakers at rock concerts, filled the air.

"Stop."

It echoed across the plain. It was a command. A compulsion. We all pulled our throttles back to zero, though I started scanning the skies, and Reaper's arms came up and started tracking aerial targets.

And oh god, were there aerial targets.

Formations, plural, of fighter wings blurred overhead at near mach speeds from the north. Two wings, then two more, then a fifth by itself, trailing yellow and black smoke. Finally a sonic boom, followed by…a rainbow smoke trail as a lone fighter buzzed us, mere wingspans above the deck. It left a rainbow in its wake. The lone fighter corkscrewed and pulled an immelmann and came back over the top of us, apparently not having lost any speed. I was still pondering the physics of that one when the source of the voice became apparent.

Another flier, blindingly bright like the sun, hovered in front of us. Perhaps a gunship. The horses at our feet began to wheel around and scatter, only to reform behind Bear.

"By order of the Princess you will state your business,” the voice proclaimed again. The form lost its glow, landed, and shook her mane. It was a pegasus. A talking, riderless pegasus who could glow like the sun. She, apparently a princess, was immediately flanked by a company of spear-horses. Lancers? I stared dumbly at the scene while my brain tried to process the paradigm shift. I had to be dreaming.

The rainbow fighter swooped down, and in a complete disregard for physics dropped from supersonic speeds to nothing, hovered in front of Reaper's head, and kicked the metal skull between the eyes. "That means you, ugly! You better listen to the Princess!" She shouted gruffly. Also a pegasus. A blue-coated, rainbow-maned, talking pegasus.

"Wow. That just happened, right?" Reaper laughed over the comms. "She actually registered damage!" Now that we weren't lumbering across the landscape with three hundred plus tons of walking steel, I could hear the mumbling of the beings at our feet.

The preacher from before spoke up again. "We are the discontent! We herald the coming of the will of Tartarus! Our titans will overthrow Equestria!" That was enough to shake me out of my confusion. Oh no no no no. You so did not just claim I was on your side, crazy talking horse.

The voice of the princess permeated our very souls as it boomed across the plain again. "Surrender and you will not be harmed."

I keyed my mic to the rest of the lance. "I don't like where this is going."

"I didn't sign a contract," Reaper replied.

"You wanna shoot a princess in cold blood?" Bear asked. It was both a philosophical query and an order request.

The forms at our feet were forming ranks. Unicorns, I could see that now. We had been teleported to fantasy land, and it didn't look like a happy place. Then again, around Mechs, most aren't happy. Several of the 'discontent' at our feet began to glow with a pale sheen, then lasers shot from their horns into the princesses honor guard. Several keeled over instantly, and the lancers charged.

"Orders Omega?" Ninja was just sitting there, and I didn't blame him for being antsy.

"Don't move, do not fire unless in danger. We're not part of this. Don't give them any reason to think we are." This was turning into a public relations nightmare.

There were lasers, teleportation spells, I thought I saw one of them turned to stone. It all seemed very terrible, if you weren't piloting several dozen tons of walking tank. We were fine.

A flash of light and then movement behind where the princess was flanked, undoubtedly by her generals, caught my eye. Several more horses, all in wildly different coat colors, stepped forward. Their magic begin at their horns, then began swirling around each other. Somewhere in the chaos, the rainbow pegasus had slipped away to join them. I wondered what was happening just before the voice of the princess filled our souls again.

"End this," the princess proclaimed.

Everyone stopped moving. At the center of the swirl of magic was a purple unicorn, eyes glowing white hot like flares. The entire field of battle turned purple with a magic aura, and the alive and dead alike were suspended several feet in the air. I heard my leg actuators creak.

Slowly, the royal guard were separated from the ones we'd started with. The guard were situated in such a way that they surrounded our original hosts, and our mechs. "Arrest them.”

The purple glow vanished. A bright flash to my right, in the center of where all of the horses were gathered, and the voice of the holy man laughed, loud and terrible. There was a flash of white, and then they were gone. The live, the dead, all of the ones not in the Princesses armor just disappeared.

Which left us surrounded by lancers.

"Is this a good thing?" Reaper asked. I shook my head. I didn't have to answer.

"Elements of Harmony." The soul-voice of the princess again. It was a signal. The swirl of magic strengthened. I could see what was going to happen next, and I wished I had seen it sooner. Whatever weird freaky powers the beings of this place had, they could teleport hundreds of tons of mech from deep space to planetside, and I had no desire to see what a point blank blast of the stuff could do.

I mashed at the keyboard on my console until I turned on the external speakers.

"Wait! Wait! Truce! Parley! Time out!" I ran through every synonym I could think of. Reaper had the presence of mind to lift up his Atlas's arms in the classic surrender position. Bear followed suit. Stalkers and Catapults don't have arms, so Ninja and I couldn't join them. The swirl continued, but we weren't blasted into oblivion. "We're people," I continued, "Not hell-beasts, we’re not with those guys, we're not from Tartarus or wherever, we don't have the slightest damn clue what's going on, and we want to talk."

"Your Highness," Big Bear added over his external comms.

"Your Highness," I amended, and did my best Stalker-bow.

"Well." The glowing giant pegasus, who was also apparently a unicorn now that I had a closer look, stepped forward and spread her massive glowing wings. "Well mannered monsters not-from-Tartarus. Welcome to Equestria." She seemed pleasantly surprised, but not the least bit calmed.

"You just surrendered us to a unicorn princess," Reaper shot.