Captain Danube crept slowly through the dim corridor, the only light being provided by the glow of his and Lieutenant Remmy’s horns as their telekinesis held their weapons aloft. His eyes were fix straight ahead even though he couldn’t really make out much detail at all beyond a few meters. His ears maintained a near-constant swivel as they sought out every possible sound. However, he couldn’t hear much beyond the sounds of the four sets of hooves of his team tapping along the steel deck plating.

A shape darted through the shadows in front of him. Almost on instinct, Danube fired his weapon. The muzzle flashed three times in rapid succession. From up ahead came a pained gasp immediately followed by the thud of a body collapsing to the floor.

“One Tango down,” The unicorn stallion announced to the rest of his team, “Twelve o’clock.”

The quartet continued making their way cautiously through the dark hall. Beside him, Remmy spared a quick glance at the creature that he’d downed, murmuring, “ComGuard.”

Danube suppressed a desire to roll his eyes. Obviously it was going to be a member of the ComGuard, the stallion thought privately to himself. They were deep inside a ComSpark HyperSpark Generator. Who else did Remmy think they were going to run into down here?

A few meters further down, the unicorn stallion called a hushed halt to the rest of the group, “Doors. Both sides. Remmy, up with me. Gretel, Jasper, check them out,” Danube spared a quick glance over his shoulder to confirm that his commands had been heard and understood. The griffon and earth pony behind him both issued curt nods. He then looked over at Remmy beside him and motioned with his hoof for the two of them to move past the doors so that they could keep the corridor covered while the other two checked to see what lay beyond the doors. Hopefully one of those rooms was their objective.

Once more, Danube focused his attention ahead of him, looking for any signs of additional movement in the shadows. Behind him, he heard the metal doors sliding open. Seconds felt like minutes in the darkness as he waited for the pair to give their report. The griffon hen was the first to reply, in her raspy tenor, “Nothing.”

The earth pony stallion reemerged a moment later, shaking his head, “No dice.”

“Understood. Move out,” The unicorn stallion ordered as the column once more began their steady march deeper into the facility.

The further they made it without encountering another ComGuard soldier, the more nervous Danube felt himself growing. He’d expected to find them encountering much heavier resistance this deep into the bowels of a HSG. ComSpark typically guarded these things pretty jealously. Yet they’d only met with three of them so far. The unicorn had to wonder if the bulk of them weren’t hunkered down in the control room that his group were currently trying to reach.

If that was the case, it would certainly make the last little stretch of their mission quite the exciting affair, wouldn’t it?

Another shadow darted into the corridor ahead of them from somewhere. Just as before, the unicorn stallion depressed the trigger of his rifle with his magic, sending two successive bursts into the source of the movement. A feminine scream echoed down the hall, followed by silence. He didn’t see any other movement. Once more he reported having engaged a singular target.

Danube frowned. Why did they keep doing that? Darting around in the dark one at a time, just begging to be shot? It hardly seemed like a worthwhile strategy. Then again, he supposed that ComGuard didn’t exactly see a lot of regular action during their careers. It was probably a bit much to expect them to possess a significant level of skill and experience.

Still, he wasn’t sure what they hoped to accomplish other than giving him brief spikes in his heart rate.

He trudged past the body. A moment later, the unicorn stallion missed a step and halted. Remmy hadn’t given her usual report on the identity of the target. He glanced right, and it was only then that he realized the mare wasn’t at his side anymore. Had she fallen behind for some reason? His head turned further around to peer over his shoulder.

Jasper wasn’t there either, the stallion realized numbly. Gretel was still with him though, regarding the unicorn with a bored expression.

Danube couldn’t exactly say why it was that his intelligence appeared to have dropped by half in those moments. He figured that it had to be a result of the surprise at finding half of his team suddenly missing for reasons that he couldn’t immediately conceive of a reason for. After all, the unicorn and the earth pony had both been there just a few seconds ago, and it was impossible for them to have managed to get themselves lost after just ten meters of straight corridor!

He did fully acknowledge that he deserved whatever ridicule he received for what he said next though, “Where are the others?”

“Dead,” The griffon replied in a nonplused tone. A very deep male tone. The hen then proceeded to lift a pistol clutched in their clawed hand and pulled the trigger.

Danube recoiled from the shot, crying out in agony as he went to the ground, clutching at the center of his forehead where he’d been struck by the shot. An eruption of emerald flames illuminated the corridor, leaving behind a dusky jade changeling when they receded, “Just like you.”

A recently promoted Colonel Slipshod, head of Her Royal Highness’ newly minted Training and Doctrine Command, tossed away the pistol still clutched in the crook of his fetlock and stamped two times on the ground, yelling out, “Index!” over the string of curses and epithets that the unicorn stallion was still sputtering from the ground.

A second later the overhead lights of the massive BattleSteed hangar the mock HyperSpark Generator had been constructed in came to life, illuminating their surroundings and allowing for the still writhing captain to finally see what had become of the rest of his team. Remmy was a couple meters back down the corridor, and Jasper a few more meters beyond her. Both had their mouths sealed and their hooves bound by some sort of translucent green goo.

Almost a full ten meters back, Danube saw that the real Gretel was only just now managing to wriggle out of the room that she had been instructed by him to check earlier, similarly bound and gagged. Her amber eyes were making a valiant effort to, on their own accord, kill the changeling where he stood with a most potent glare.

A hippogriff and a pegasus were also present, raising themselves up off the floor and wiping the bright yellow marking paint from their ComGuard uniforms. Other creatures emerged from various sections of the mock facility as well, also sporting ComGuard attire. Still others were sequestered above them along the gantries and catwalks of the converted ‘Steed Bay where they had been watching the exercise play out.

Slipshod hoped that at least one of them had managed to learn a thing or two from the squad’s failures, “Who wants to tell Captain Danube how he got his team―and himself―killed?” He asked the gathered onlookers. He spared a moment to glance at the two nearest opfor members and gestured for them to go and free the three restrained members of the doomed team.

“They weren’t watching each other,” One of the creatures above them called out.

Slipshod nodded, “Got it in one. Captain Danube let a member of his team leave line-of-sight of anycreature else. Now they’re all dead.”

“It was for, like, two seconds!” The unicorn stallion sputtered, massaging the center of his forehead where the paint round had struck him. It was most definitely going to leave a welt for the next day or two, the changeling observed. Good. Perhaps it would serve as a reminder to both himself and everycreature else here about this exercise’s lesson.

“Actually, it was five seconds,” Slipshod corrected soberly, “And look what I managed to do with those five seconds!” He gestured towards the bound and gagged griffon who was still yet to be freed as the hippogriff was having some difficulty peeling back the resin from her feathers. The changeling sighed and fired off a trio of obliging blasts of green energy from his horn, instantaneously dissolving the organic restraints. Oddly enough, while the hen had a great many words to offer him, none of them approached anything that could even charitably be described as “gratitude”.

“And the five seconds after that,” A few more blasts freed the earth pony stallion, “And the five seconds after that,” The unicorn mare at least had the good graces to mutter a ‘thank you, sir’ under her breath. Slipshod now looked down at the captain, “I trust I don’t need to reiterate what I did to you five seconds after that?”

“No...sir,” the stallion grumbled.

Slipshod turned his attention back up to the rest of his ‘students’. Every one of them was a Disciple officer who would be leading a team on an assault at a ComSpark HSG in the coming months. His job was to teach them how to protect themselves from his kind, so that they in turn could pass that knowledge onto the rest of their units. The timetable that they were operating under meant that there wasn’t a lot of time for that; and the longer it took the creatures here to learn, the less time they’d have to teach others.

If it seemed like everycreature was a little on edge, it was because they were all aware of that as well. And it certainly wasn’t as though they weren’t trying, Slipshod admitted to himself. He could tell that they were taking the information that he was putting out seriously. The issue so far was that, of the over a dozen mock raids like this one that he’d set up so far, not a single group had managed to survive to reach their goal.

And they were just facing off against one changeling. In a real HSG facility, there’d be hundreds.

The changeling let out a heavy sigh, “You cannot―even for ‘two seconds’―let a member of your team be out of sight of any other member of the team,” he reiterated. Even as he spoke, Slipshod’s mind returned to the hidden HSG on Colton. Blood Chit had told him of the specifics about how Tig had met her end. How he’d watched, helpless, as an unsuspecting Tig had let her guard down around the pony that she had ‘known’ was there to protect her. Fusilier had probably only been out of her sight for a matter of seconds as well. Yet, obviously, it had been long enough for the changelings to deal with him, assume his form, and get the drop on the unsuspecting engineer.

“If a changeling catches a glimpse of you for even a second, they can become you. If they hear you utter a whisper, they can sound like you. Never, for a moment, assume that a friend who has left the sight of the group is still your friend when you see them again.”

“So, what? Are we just suppose to shoot anycreature who comes back from around a corner?” Another of the onlookers asked skeptically, “What if we get separated from the group? How are we supposed to let anycreature else know it’s really us?”

“That’s why I’ve been encouraging you to use code phrases,” Slipshod reminded them.

“We used code phrases and you still kicked our flanks,” a pegasus stallion piped up, absently rubbing at the side of his neck where Slipshod had put him into a rather unforgiving headlock.

“That’s because you kept yelling out the same code phrases every three seconds,” The changeling said, casting a frown in his direction, “It’s not a very ‘secret’ code phrase if everycreature can hear it all the time.

“You need to use a progressive code phrase. Something interactive that rarely repeats―preferably never, if possible.”

“So we should memorize a code novel and just recite it a word at a time?” Gretel chided, half joking.

“That actually would work,” Slipshod acknowledged, giving the griffon a nod, “I doubt a raid will last long enough to need a whole novel, but a decently long sonnet might do the trick as long as the whole team can memorize it well enough to stake their lives on knowing the next word.”

More than a few of the creatures present exchanged dubious looks. The changeling glanced at his datalink and noted the time, “I’ve ‘killed’ enough of you today; we’ll pick this up again tomorrow. Report back to your commanders. Be back here at oh-eight hundred, tomorrow. Dismissed.”

Slipshod made his way out of the maze of corridors that had been setup to run their drills and headed for the bay’s open doors. It had been a long day for all of them, whether those junior officers believed it or not. He wasn’t used to changing forms so often in a day, and this group had hardly been experiencing anything close to ‘high spirits’ for him to passively draw on to keep up his energy. He’d been working at least as hard as they had been, but the difference was that the changeling hadn’t been able to capitalize on the benefit of getting a ‘lunch’ at midday.

As though he was in possession of prescient knowledge regarding the changeling’s thoughts, Slipshod spotted a striped stallion standing just outside the ‘Steed Bay, waving in his direction. He could taste the good vibrations from here!

“Hey, Xanax; just the zebra I needed right now,” Slishod said, flashing the other BattleSteed pilot a warm smile.

“I figured,” the striped equine grinned in return, “So how was school?”

As if on cue, a steady parade of thoroughly disenfranchised and bruised Disciple officers trudged by. Gretel shot him a particularly nasty glare as she glided past. Xanadu noted the overall mood of the dispersing trainees and began to nod, smirking over as Slipshod, “I see, I see; so not a great day then?”

“Not ‘great’, no,” The changeling agreed, “But it’s only been a week. They are getting better,” He added as an afterthought.

“How much better?”

“Ehh…” Slipshod raised a hoof and tilted it from side to side.

“Cool, cool...And how much longer until we have to hit those arrays?”

If there was one drawback to this plan, it was that it had a pretty loose timetable; which was usually something not conducive to the quality execution of a massive, galaxy-spanning, multi-vector assault. The HyperSpark Generators had to be struck―ideally―within hours of each other; two days at the absolute most. At least, if the first attacks went poorly. If the initial raids were successful, then it honestly didn’t matter how much time there was between attacks. In fact, it would be to the benefit of the subsequent insertion teams to delay their assaults so that there was a chance they’d find out Twilight’s virus had been injected into the network and any additional attacks were pointless.

On the other side of the c-bit, if the first few attempts to get into the HSGs failed, then the rest of the teams would suddenly find themselves racing against the clock to make their own insertions. Worse, there really wasn’t any way to know how much time they’d have before every HyperSpark Generator facility got the warning to go on high-alert. A message―even one sent with the highest priority level possible―could take a few days to get from one side of the galaxy to the other. But it needed only minutes to make it to any neighboring system within fifty lightyears.

They’d done everything that they could to make sure that the selected targets to be attacked were as spread out as they could be, specifically to avoid running into a situation where an HSG array received a warning about Disciple attacks within a few hours, thereby―hopefully―giving every team a fair shot at catching ComSpark by surprise.

However, there was still the minor consideration of deploying the DropShips and their assault groups throughout the Harmony Sphere so that they could all be poised to strike at about the same time. That was going to be Tirek’s own bitch to coordinate. A consideration that was only compounded by the fact that they needed ‘Chrysalis’’ message to go out as close to after the defeat of the Clan’s invasion force as possible. They needed to be sure that they got out the message they wanted the galaxy to hear, and not have to worry about the changeling queen laying the groundwork for anything she might try to leverage out of stopping the invasion.

Of course, they had no way of knowing exactly when the attack on Buckwheat was going to happen. The Clan’s were running that side of things, and they weren’t exactly on speaking terms with Twilight anymore.

“Nocreature really knows,” Slipshod admitted, not making an effort to veil his obvious displeasure at the notion.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. You know, I was under the impression that most ’plan’ things had, you know, timetables and stuff. When everything is being done from the flank, it’s less of a ‘plan’ and more of an ‘improvisation’.”

“Oh, I’m well aware,” The changeling agreed, “It’s honestly not quite that bad. We have a pretty general idea of approximately when the Clans will reach Buckwheat based on how fast they’re advancing. At least to within a two week window.

“That’s still too wide of a margin for our purposes, but it’ll let us get the teams close enough to their targets that they can hit them within a day or two of getting the ‘go’ order.”

“And the time for the ‘go’ order would be…?” Xanadu prompted.

“When we have confirmation that the Clans have been halted by ComSpark.”

The zebra frowned, “I can’t help but think that that’s something we won’t learn about through regular channels until ComSpark tells the galaxy about it; especially not while we’re all the way out here. And ComSpark’s not going to break the news until they’re ready to put the spin they want on it,” he added.

For his part, Slipshod was already nodding in agreement. This had been something of a frequent issue that was brought up at the meetings Twilight had been having with her new command staff. So far, the only way that any of them had been able to figure out in order to get word of the outcome of the fighting on Buckwheat was to have the Maelstrom physically present in the system, ready to jump out and get the Peregrine via Havoc as soon as the battle was over.

From there, it was a simple matter of sending out a standard, properly coded, HyperSpark message to all of their poised DropShips in the Sphere. Their message to launch the attack would be going out to all of their teams at about the same time that word of the outcome at Buckwheat was only just arriving at Equus. It would take the changelings time to craft how exactly they wanted to paint the victory of the ComGuard over the Clans. Time enough, hopefully, that the assaults would be well underway by the time they were ready to send it out.

While using the Disciple WarShip was the most expedient way to get the information that their operation needed, it wasn’t without its risks. Paramount among them would be having a WarShip present in a star system that was about to be the site of a massive battle that didn’t belong to either side. While the changelings would almost certainly assume that the Maelstrom was simply another Clan vessel and not feel that anything was too out of the ordinary, the Clans would doubtlessly feel different if they spotted General Mayhem’s ship. They would certainly know that the Disciples weren’t there to back them up.

While Smolder and her followers might dismiss the vessel as a threat, Star Admiral Cinder was another matter. She was clever enough to figure out that, if the Disciples weren’t there to help with the fighting, then they were there for some reason that benefited them, and not the Clans. Whether or not the dragoness would manage to correctly conclude that the battle was a trap was too much to speculate on; but it also wasn’t a chance that they could afford to take. If the Clans decided to simply not try and invade Buckwheat, then most of what they were intending to do fell apart.

Without first soundly defeating the Clans, they lost the pretence for ‘Queen Twilight’ to condemn the impotency of the other star nations and demand their subordination to ComSpark and herself. To say nothing of the fact that it would be nearly impossible to expect the Successor states to be able to mount any sort of worthwhile offensive on Equus while having to also worry about the intact Clanner fleets still marauding around the Harmony Sphere.

Understandably, there was a concerted effort being made to try and arrange for an alternate means of receiving word about the results of the confrontation at Buckwheat as quickly as possible. However, that was for somecreature else to worry about. Slipshod’s area of concern was making sure they had teams ready to go who would at least have a chance of successfully breaching a HyperSpark Generator facility and uploading the virus.

“We’ve got a lot of the bigger parts of the operation moving along as well as we can hope for,” The changeling defended to the zebra, “Thanks to Triton, we have enough DropShip crews to get all of the teams situated. We even have a couple JumpShips of our own now, not counting the Maelstrom, which will help us get those teams to their staging points. As best we can figure, as long as we head out in the next three weeks, they’ll be ready to strike in time.

“Given the months that will be required to transit to their targets, the teams will have plenty of time to practice what I’m teaching their leadership here,” Now the stallion cringed, “The question is whether or not they’ll actually be able to learn it in time…”

“Three weeks isn’t a lot of time to learn how to properly fight an enemy as capable as changelings,” Xanadu noted. A point to which Slipshod had to agree, nodding along with the striped equine’s assessment.

“That’s why I’m not pulling punches. I don’t have the time to gently nudge them up to the level they need to be at. I’m hitting them with every dirty trick I can come up with right off the bat, because that’s what the ComGuard are going to do too. Even if I don’t have enough time to teach them everything, I can at least expose them to the more difficult challenges they’ll be facing.”

“I’m sure they appreciate that,” Xanadu said, flashing a smirk at the changeling, with a nod in the direction of the clearly disgruntled Disciple officers still trudging away from the training site. Then he elected to change the subject, “Anyway, I’m here to let you know that Channel Lock is hosting a ‘Bad Movie Night’. I figure you could use a ‘good vibrations’ boost as much as anypony.”

That actually did sound to the changeling like exactly what he needed right now, “Abso-fucking-lutely, I could. Lead the way!”

By the time Danude returned to the dining table in the mess hall where the other trainees from his class were sitting, he found that he was just in time to catch Gretel’s latest scathing review of their instructor, “―don’t understand why that fucking bug’s walking around free in the first place; let alone ‘training’ us,” She smeared while gnawing around a rib bone, “Are changeling’s the enemy or not?”

“He’s a defector,” Remmy reminded the griffon calmly as her telekinetically-held spoon nudged around a glob of unsettlingly firm ‘oatmeal’. She was clearly second-guessing her choice in entrees.

“Changelings can’t ‘defect’,” The hen retorted, wagging the thoroughly-gnawed bone at the mare, “Their queen has the ability to control their minds,” she insisted.

“I don’t think that’s how that works,” Jasper said skeptically.

“They live in a hive, which means they have a hive mind,” Gretel insisted, casting the bare rib aside in favor of one that hadn’t been stripped of its meat yet.

Danube’s eyes were already rolling as he sat down to join them, “Does that mean that because you’re a bird, that you have a bird brain, lieutenant?”

Remmy had the good grace to hide her chortle beneath a poorly-disguised cough. Jasper was less fortunate, as he had been drinking his soda at the moment that the newly arrived captain delivered his quip. The griffon was just about to make a comment regarding the unicorn stallion that would almost certainly fall outside the bounds of ‘conduct becoming’, but found her attention very abruptly―and messily―diverted by the shower of fizzy black liquid that was snorted in her direction from across the table. The flustered hen was clearly unsure of who deserved her ire more: the superior officer who’d insulted her, or her peer who had just seasoned her dinner with snot-infused cola.

Fortunately, the unicorn mare took the opportunity afforded her by the brief indecision to redirect the conversation somewhat, “The bottom line is that both Princess Twilight Sparkle and the general both vouch for him. Mayhem’s word is good enough for me,” she glanced pointedly at the griffon, silently defying the feathered lieutenant to voice her lack of faith in the mare who wasn’t just their senior officer, but also the mare who―in the view of the Disciples―had been effectively ordained by Discord Himself to lead them.

While the Spirit of Chaos might not have made his presence known in the galaxy for the better part of five centuries, it was a well-established fact within the Disciples that Discord’s will still made itself known to them through its appointment of their commanding generals. The vestige of his power which lived within Mayhem―as it had with every commanding general before her―was taken as nothing short of divine providence that she knew what was best for the Disciples. It was why such leaders had been given the gift of Foresight, so that they could make the correct choices in order to keep the resistance alive and flourishing.

To doubt General Mayhem, was to doubt Discord’s own will in the galaxy. To doubt their whole cause. Such a thing was only slightly more frowned upon than keeping a well-organized sock drawer on Havoc Station.

As obstinate as the griffon might generally be when she felt that something rubbed her plumage the wrong way, even Gretel was prepared to go quite so far as to question General Mayhem’s decisions. As such, the hen merely let out an irritated snarl and cast a baleful glare in Jasper’s decision. The earth pony offered reconciliation in the form of as many of the napkins as he’d been able to pluck from the dispenser on their table.

To Danube, all she offered was a cursory, “Griffon’s aren’t ‘birds’...sir.”

“But the colonel is your superior officer,” the unicorn stallion reminded her as he finally began to pick at his own meal. He’d hoped to avoid Remmy’s misstep and had opted for the barley cakes, which had at least looked more enticing. However, the unnervingly metallic sound that they made when he tapped the deceptively heavy roll against the table left him more than mildly concerned. Experimentally, he dropped the barley cake on the floor behind him. Despite having known the impact was coming, the stallion still felt himself jump slightly in his seat at the unexpectedly loud ‘CLANG!’ the ‘bread roll’ made as it struck the steel deck plating. More than a few creatures at nearby tables similarly jerked in surprise, whipping their heads around to observe the source of the racket.

“~one fell off the table, and killed a friend of mine~” Somecreature a few tables down sing-songed in the stunned silence which had fallen over the cafeteria. A brief chorus of laughs and chuckles rose up in reply, and then the typical din of a dozen concurrent conversations returned to the dining hall. Danube returned the ‘roll’ to his tray with considerable care and turned his attention to the―presumably more edible―vegetable medley.

“It’s not his fault you let him get the drop on you,” The captain continued.

“Says the pony who got shot in the fucking head,” Gretel retorted.

“He got all of us,” Remmy reminded them diplomatically, “And not just us. He got Tannerite’s and Palisade’s teams too; and both of them lead sapper units. Those guys have performed ops against multiple ComSpark HSGs in the past, and the colonel still took them out.”

“Yeah, what was up with that?” Gretel asked, frowning, “Major Palisade’s crew should have been able to squash that bug!”

“Demolition isn’t the same as infiltration,” Jasper pointed out, “The sapper teams almost never have to go very far into one of those discrete arrays. They usually just drag a nuke in the front door and blow it right there on the bugs’ doorstep,” The earth pony explained matter-of-factly, “Usually does enough damage to take the place offline.”

“So we’re supposed to be able to do something that nocreature has ever done before? Awesome,” the griffon grumbled.

“Isn’t that kind of the point of all of this?” Remmy inquired pointedly, “Nocreature has been able to take down the changelings like they are now. But we’ve always known that it was going to be up to us, for the most part. The Disciples exist to do this very thing,” she reminded them.

The unicorn mare was the consummate ‘True Believer’, Danube knew. While every member of the Disciples understood and accepted the cause that they were fighting for, it was also a fact that most were resigned to the idea that theirs would be a near-eternal struggle. After five centuries of conducting little more than ‘inconveniencing’ raids against ComSpark, it was understandable that many might begin to see ultimate victory as something that lay beyond their grasp.

This wasn’t the case for the most devoted among their numbers though. Creatures like Lieutenant Remmy Red possessed complete faith in what they’d come to describe as ‘The Will of Discord’; this notion that the chaotic magicks of the long-disappeared draconequus were still active in the galaxy, and working towards the ultimate downfall of Chrysalis and her changeling brood. That was certainly the official rhetoric of the Disciples in any case. How deeply its members believed in that notion tended to vary, of course.

For Captain Blue Danube’s part, while he acknowledged that Discord’s power was obviously still at work―General Mayhem’s abilities were clear proof of that much, at least―he was less than convinced as to how potent it was when it came to toppling ComSpark. The changelings simply seemed so monolithic at this point, that it was difficult to conceive of anything which could hope to usurp their command of the Harmony Sphere. While the invading Clan forces certainly appeared to have the galaxy on the ropes for the moment, Danube and the other Disciples knew that this was only because Chrysalis hadn’t chosen to unleash ComSpark’s true military might against them. And why should she? At the moment, the only ones suffering due to the invasion were creatures that the changelings largely regarded as no more important than vermin.

At best, the creatures of the Sphere were chattel to them. Certainly nothing that they were likely to risk too much to protect. As soon as Equus looked like it could fall under genuine threat though, that was when the Clans would cease to find their advance to be quite so seemingly unopposed.

The changelings had the military might to heave the Clanners right back to the other side of the Periphery whenever they chose to. It was difficult then to see what the much less militarily-capable Disciples of Discord could hope to do against them. They didn’t have vast WarShip armadas, or legions of assault-tonnage BattleSteeds. They had to security afforded to them by Havoc Station, and the deployment flexibility that only the Maelstrom’s chaotic drive could provide, and those did mean a lot in terms of tactical capabilities; and it meant that the Disciples were largely undefeatable by the changelings.

However, just because Chrysalis had no feasible way of easily defeating the Disciples, that didn’t mean that the Disciples would be capable of beating her either.

Unless, that was, one was of the mind that Discord would manifest their ultimate victory when the time was right. In spite of his lack of corporeal presence in the galaxy, of course. That was where the more devout―like Remmy―differed from himself, Danube knew. He simply lacked that faith that victory would be effectively guaranteed to them, just so long as they continued to devote themselves to the cause. As long as they held to their mandate to oppose the changeling threat.

Honestly, as little as a year ago, the good captain would have considered himself in line with the way the majority of the Disciples felt: he acknowledged the importance of the cause, but doubted that ultimate victory ever could be achieved―certainly not unless something radically changed to tip the balance of power. Then something had happened which had seen a resurgence in faith among many Disciples: the real Twilight Sparkle had been found.

A lot of Disciples who’d been ‘on the fence’ saw that event as being what would ‘tip the balance’ in their favor. Being the only creatures in the Harmony Sphere who knew the ‘Twilight’ reigning on Equus was a fraud, it was common knowledge among the Disciples that the real Twilight was out there somewhere waiting to be found. Or so they’d been led to believe for as long as the Disciples had existed.

Established doctrine held that, prior to his disappearance, Discord had made one thing indisputably clear to those he tasked with commanding the Disciples in his absence: Twilight Sparkle was alive. For reasons beyond Danube’s understanding, the draconequus hadn’t been able to disclose the location of the missing princess, but he’d purportedly been adamant that the alicorn couldn’t be dead. The unicorn stallion had personally been of the mind that this could have been little more than a grief-fueled denial on Discord’s part. After all, if the Spirit of Chaos was omniscient enough to know Twilight was alive, then why were his seemingly limitless powers unable to simply teleport to her?

The captain had engaged in a few private discussions along such lines of reasoning with Discord apologists. During such conversations, it had been pointed out that, while vast and potent, Discord’s powers weren’t actually without limit. Quite a few materials and artifacts were known either stymie or outright rebuke the draconequus. Any number of circumstances could have existed which might otherwise keep the demi-god from locating Twilight, while his omniscience still allowed him to know of her persistent existence.

That was the prevailing belief, at least.

Obviously, that ‘belief’ had been quite thoroughly substantiated in recent months with the discovery of the misplaced princess. Along with her discovery had come something of a renaissance in the spirituality of the Disciples of Discord. After all, the draconequus had been proven correct: Twilight had still lived. As a result, many had taken this discovery to be a sign that, with sustained devotion from themselves, and unwavering dedication to their cause, the Spirit of Chaos’ lingering magic in the Sphere would see them through to ultimate victory.

It was...a pleasant thought, Danube agreed. Tempting, even. He certainly understood why the notion appealed to Lieutenant Remmy and the others. The unicorn stallion was simply...more cynical, he supposed. Too jaded by centuries devoid of tangible progress towards unseating Chrysalis.

Which wasn’t to say that he wouldn’t work as hard as he could to ultimately bring about the end to the rule of the changelings over the Harmony Sphere. He was just less convinced that it was something that he’d live to see.

If Danube was ‘cynical’, Gretel was outright heretical. The griffon hen was certainly in the minority of Disciples with her privately-held dismissal of the draconequus’ primacy within the organization. She was obedient enough of the orders that she was issued, and at least demonstrated the public deference that was due to her superiors―Colonel Slipshod’s ‘special’ case notwithstanding. However, to say that she believed in the cause of the Disciples would have been a lie.

Gretel maintained her commission for one purpose, and one purpose only: to kill changelings. Restoring the Celestia League―or any semblance of order―to the Sphere wasn’t anywhere even on her list of priorities, let alone near the top of it. She despised changelings, plain and simple. The griffon would move the stars and planets to exterminate them too.

The unicorn stallion could sympathize with her desire, seeing as how he suspected he’d have a similar laser-focused desire if he’d lost his whole family to ComGuard forces. One after another, the griffon had watched her siblings die to enemy action. With each lost clutchmate, her visceral hatred for the changelings had continued to grow until it finally reached its current level of unbridled antipathy.

Until recently, Danube wouldn’t have believed that such intense feelings of loathing could ever prove to be of a detriment to the griffon. Her rough edges might have meant that she’d never see any significant advancement among the ranks of the Disciple’s officers, but Gretel would have been the first to tell you how little promotions mattered to her. Indeed, the unicorn stallion was a firm believer that the hen would have turned down any advancement which might have taken her out of the field, depriving her of the opportunity to kill changelings with her own two clawed hands.

Now that the gruff lieutenant was expected to both listen to and learn from a changeling though, he was finding himself wondering if Gretel's deep-seated hatred wouldn’t end up costing her the opportunity to do what she desired to most: kill changelings. Thus far, none of their appointments as strike team leaders for the upcoming operation had been guaranteed. Indeed, such positions were specifically contingent on Colonel Slipshod assessing them as being suitable capable of countering the greatest threats posed to their teams by the changelings. If the griffon continued to antagonize him, Danube seriously doubted that the changeling would give her a passing mark.

At least not without her demonstrating genuine ability at avoiding being deceived by changelings.

“Doing a thing, and that thing being easy to do, aren’t one in the same,” Jasper pointed out, his lip curling in a slight frown, “That said: I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be quite this hard to walk down a corridor,” his frown morphed into a wry smirk as he glanced at the others.

“The colonel said that Lustra’s team was on the right track with their use of code phrases,” Danube reminded them, “They just didn’t have enough variability." He began rubbing his chin pensively as he considered how best to approach the issue.

“Coding a progressive series of code phrases into a machine would be one thing, but organic beings aren’t quite that sophisticated in their thinking,” The earth pony stallion reminded him, “It would have to be something like memorizing a novel, or a really long sonnet.”

“Even then, we could end up running into trouble if it was something well known enough in the Sphere that the changelings recognized it and caught on anyway,” Remmy added.

“The more obscure and unfamiliar it is, the harder it’s going to be to get our soldiers to memorize good enough to keep them from screwing it up and getting fratricided,” Gretel said with a scowl.

“Something simple, yet unpredictable. Memorable, but niche,” Jasper flashed a mirthless grin, “Should it be loud, but also quiet?”

“We’re going to need more heads involved in this,” Danube reasoned, letting out a resigned sigh, “Somepony will have an idea that’ll fit the bill.”

He hoped so, at any rate.

It had taken her considerably more wheedling that Cinder would have liked to get her field commanders to divulge exactly what was driving them to divert from their primary targets so frequently to the secondary―and even a few tertiary―Harmony Sphere worlds, but the star admiral leading the Timberwolf fleet had finally managed to learn where it was that was everycreature was so dead set on reaching: Buckwheat. A little more wheedling and many hours spent scouring through the raw intelligence reports filed by her officers on the ground before they’d been filtered through several layers of aggregation by her staff had also managed to uncover what about Buckwheat made it so specifically enticing a target.

Now the dragoness found herself sitting in solitude in her office aboard the Rockhoof, weighing the heavy decision ahead of her: did tell anycreature what she knew?

At first, Star Admiral Cinder had been just as enthralled as the rest of the leadership at the prospect of a world which had been designated to safeguard so much of the Harmony Sphere’s hoarded wealth. Such a thing only made too much sense to her dragon sensibilities: protect your hoard when it looked like it would be threatened. If it was clear your adversary was far too powerful to resist through direct force, then protect it through deception and obfuscation.

It hardly took any sort of tactical genius to see that the military might of the invading Clan forces far outmatched anything the Sphere could throw at it presently. So it only made sense that, if the residents of the Harmony Sphere wished to keep their more treasured possessions secure―at least for now―then they would be best served keeping those treasures on an out-of-the-way world which would normally not have drawn much attention from the Clans in the first place. If any world was likely to be overlooked by their invasion fleets, it was a virtually uninhabited planet like Buckwheat.

Reviewing the rough outline of what forces had been set aside for the inevitable invasion of that world, Cinder saw that only a pair of BattleSteed stars and a minimal strength support detachment had been set aside for the task. That would have constituted only a couple hundred soldiers in total. Far too few to do any thorough reconnaissance of the planet; but why should that have been a concern? Everycreature knew there was nothing there, and no reason to think that there would have been! It wasn’t even a planet that had warranted one of ComSpark’s hidden secondary HSG arrays.

The perfect hiding spot for the galaxy’s treasures.

Or so the leadership of Clans Smoke Jaberwock, Ghost Ursa, and Jade Roc had concluded. Cinder very nearly had too.

The cobalt dragoness cringed and quietly admitted to herself that there’d been nothing ‘nearly’ about her belief in Buckwheat’s designation as a ‘treasure planet’. At least, not at first. Even she had completely bought into the notion that all of the others had. It had simply made too much sense, and appealed to her instincts on too visceral of a level, for the dragoness not to believe it.

Then she’d seen the raw reports. Those reports had contained a few minor details which had failed to make it into the final briefings that she’d received, and the same was almost certainly true for the other Clan senior officers. Broadly speaking, it was completely forgivable that such minor considerations got filtered out as the reports had been aggregate and refined to be more ‘easily digestible’ by senior officers who simply didn’t have the hours in the day to spend reading through literally thousands of pages of after action statements and such that were generated on a weekly basis by the officers leading troops on the ground. Inevitably, some things simply weren’t going to make the cut; and while there was a whole cadre of specialists whose job it was to recognize what bits were significant and which were chaff, nocreature was perfect.

Those same intelligence officers were also not necessarily in constant contact with one another on every issue; nor did they give every issue the same level of significance.

For example: The intelligence officers of Cinder’s Seventeenth Destroyer Group, Detachment Four, Team Two, had very carefully noted the names and classifications of the various DropShips which the pair of vessels had destroyed in orbit above Silver Shoal in the Renoir System. Those names and classifications had managed to remain intact through every layer of report consolidation right up until about the moment the Seventeenth Destroyer Group passed them on to Third Fleet Command. At that point, all that had made it to Cinder’s desk was a count of DropShips and types which had been destroyed by the Third Fleet in the past seven days. Which was fair. The star admiral would hardly have been one to care about the name of every ship that was destroyed by her fleets on any given day.

However, this was also the version of the report that was made readily available to the intelligence officers of her galaxy commanders; and vice-versa. Which meant that, when Star Commander Coke’s report about the Friendship-class DropShip Garden allegedly hauling several hundred tons of gold bullion off of the planet Creedmoor-II in the system of the same name reached the eyes of the Fifth Galaxy’s intelligence division, they had no way of knowing that that same DropShip had been destroyed a week later by one of Third Fleet’s destroyers in a system that was fifty lightyears in the opposite direction that Buckwheat lay in. Nor did anycreature in Third Fleet know that the ship which they’d blown up was too far away from its last reported position.

So, by the time those reports made it to Cinder’s staff, nocreature even knew there was a discrepancy which bore further investigation.

Cinder had investigated though. Entirely as the result of a ‘mis-click’ by one of her subordinates, who accidentally CC’d her while sending up an unrefined report. She’d been assured by the offending officer’s superior that it had been ‘firmly’ instilled in them how important it was to ensure the chain of command was properly adhered to. The star admiral felt her lips forming into a mirthless smirk as she considered how much it was going to undermine that lesson when she issued the junior officer a commendation for accidentally bringing it to her attention that Buckwheat could turn out to be a trap.

Though, that was the question that the dragoness found herself wrestling with now: did she reveal that it was likely a trap? Strictly speaking, she didn’t know for certain that it was. She was also on the fence as to whose trap it might be.

The simplest answer in that regard was ComSpark, of course. Bringing the entirety of the Clan invasion fleets together only worked as a ‘trap’ if the one springing it could muster together the forces that it would take to defeat them. Only the changelings were capable of fielding such numbers at the moment. However, ComSpark was frankly unlikely to have risked the sorts of errors like one that Cinder had stumbled across. It was obvious that either the registry of the destroyed DropShip, or the spaceport flight data, had been faked. The latter was more likely, as there’d have been no reason to fake the former. However, ComSpark would frankly not need to have faked either. The changelings had the agents and resources in place to genuinely organize a faux ‘relocation’ of the purported treasures of those worlds. It would have been no imposition on ComSpark at all to have hundreds of DropShips fly to a from the worlds in question with completely empty holds while their agents spoofed the other information required to convince the Clans those ships were full of gold and gems.

That would have completely removed the risk of a ship being reported in two places at contradictory times.

This suggested that the group behind the deception wasn’t actually the changelings. It was too well coordinated to be a scheme hatched by the Successor States though. The same went for any of the major mercenary companies as well.

Strictly speaking, Cinder could only think of one group with the reach and resources to execute this scheme, and who also would want to work against the Clans at this moment: The Disciples of Discord.

The dragoness knew through her contacts in Clan space that the Disciples had officially renounced their association with the Clans in protest of the full-scale invasion that had been launched over their objection to it. She had also recently come to learn that Princess Twilight Sparkle had assumed tacit leadership of the Disciples. Cinder didn’t quite know what the alicorn hoped to accomplish by stopping the Clans in their tracks, and perhaps even giving Chrysalis the opportunity to gain the upper claw...other than simply putting an end to the deaths of millions, of course.

It was conceivable that Twilight was hoping simply to sabotage such broad military action against the Harmony Sphere in an effort to convince the Clans that such a tactic was wholly unworkable. If they were confronted with proof that a direct military confrontation with the Sphere wouldn’t succeed, the other Khans would be forced to consider less drastic means of defeating Chrysalis in the future. Such as Twilight’s original hope of using one of the friendlier Successor States to provide them with a corridor directly to the threshold of the Faust System itself.

At the moment, of course, it was considerably unlikely that the Pony Commonwealth would be willing to entertain any sort of ‘cordial’ relationship with the Clans after what had been inflicted upon so many billions of its citizens in the last few months. However, it wasn’t as though the Clans were constitutionally incapable of exercising patience―Smolder and her followers notwithstanding. They could recede and wait a few more generations for tempers to cool and make overtures to whoever succeeded Archon Victoria, or one of the other major powers.

The point was that losing to the changelings now didn’t represent an unrecoverable defeat for the League-in-Exile. A potentially significant setback, obviously, but not a deathblow to their cause.

If she let that happen.

The notion galled at her something fierce, and not simply because―as a military commander―she was opposed to the notion of deliberately letting herself be defeated. While that did go against the grain, it wasn’t what bothered her most: it was the idea that she’d be betraying...well, everycreature.

She’d be betraying the soldiers who had followed her into battle. The other Dragon Clans. Her princess. Her oaths. Cinder would be casting aside every loyalty to every creature that she had.

But maybe―maybe―she could save lives by doing so. That was no small thing. Not to her.

While her duty might have been to her princess and the orders that she was given, Cinder’s heart had always been set on helping those helpless souls kept under thrall by the changelings. That had been the overarching goal of her father, and the reason that he had worked so hard to smuggle out as much of the CLDF as he had. Her service was dedicated to the creatures of the Harmony Sphere just as much―if not more―than it was to Princess Flurry Heart and the Dragon Clans.

The dragoness smiled wanly to herself in her empty office. It seemed that she’d made her decision on what to do then, hadn’t it? She’d keep what she knew to herself and let things play out as they would.

...No. No, Cinder reconsidered, that was too easy. She could do at least a little bit more to help make up for what she’d been party to during this invasion. The star admiral reached into a drawer in her desk and withdrew a sheaf of parchment, a quill and inkpot, and a red wax candle. She snorted out a little jet of flame to light the candle and set about dutifully writing out a letter.

Half a galaxy away, a purple alicorn who was sipping wine while she reviewed the latest progress notes on the crewing and refitting of the Disciples’ recently acquired ‘DropShip fleet’, found that her attention was drawn rather abruptly to a flash of emerald light. Princess Twilight Sparkle blinked in mild surprise at the neatly rolled scroll that was now sitting on her datapad, closed by a wax seal. She opened it up and began to read...

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