As Mayhem gazed at the plotter, the unicorn mare found herself hard-pressed to think of a time when she’d ever seen it displaying so many vessels at once. In addition to the two hundred odd WarShips provided by the Dragon Clans, there was also quite the JumpShip fleet as well, all of them laden down with DropShips full to bursting with BattleSteeds, combat vehicles, cavalry, and all of the munitions and supplies that they would need to―hopefully―conquer Equus. It was an armada unlike any assembled since Spike led the Celestia League Defense Force out of the Harmony Sphere. Indeed, many of the ships present here today had participated in that exodus.

Now they were about to jump back home after half a millennium spent away.

There was something poetic in that, the mare thought to herself.

“All Squadrons reporting in,” her Operations officer announced, “Division is ready to jump.”

The general nodded, glancing to her communications officer, “Signal Division Two ready for jump.”

“Signal Division Two ready, aye,” the mare answered.

Even after all this time, General Mayhem couldn’t help but nurture a small internal smile as she watched her command crew go about their duties with impeccable martial composure and diligence…while dressed like rejects from a fashion show run by the colorblind. She was proud of them though, all of them. They’d kept their faith in their mission, in spite of none of their predecessors having seen hope of ever reaching this very point. Generations of Disciples had come and gone before them, and they’d not come any closer to attaining their goal of unseating Chrysalis from her throne on Equus. Even she’d found herself wondering, on occasion, if she wasn’t just going to be another in a long line of dead generals whose task was nothing more than to ensure her successor wasn’t left worse off than she’d been when she'd inherited the job.

But, there was finally a light at the end of the tunnel. They were ready to jump to the Faust System. In just a few days, Chrysalis would be gone…

…Or the galaxy would be completely and irrevocably doomed, the unicorn acknowledged silently to herself.

“Signal from the Fleet,” the comms mare announced, “All divisions ready; jump on…your mark, general.” The young mare glanced over at Mayhem with a look of mild surprise.

It was understandable, the general supposed. After all, she wasn’t technically in charge of the overall fleet. That honor had gone to Star Admiral Cinder. Mayhem was merely in charge of one of the WarShip divisions that made up the whole fleet. However, the dragoness was perfectly aware of the Disciple leader’s…unique nature. Presumably, she was hoping that Mayhem would sense whether or not their mission could safely proceed now or not.

“Very well, lieutenant. Message for the fleet: Jump on my mark…”

Mayhem’s right calf quivered.

The unicorn’s pause was brief. Anypony not paying close attention wouldn’t have noticed it. Those looking at her might have spotted the slight widening of her eyes and the blanching of her features. It wasn’t a portent of doom that the mare was sensing through her ‘gift’ though. Not as such. She didn’t feel that failure awaited them on the other side.

However, what she did feel was…that this was the last time she would ever be giving this order.

There was a lot that could mean, of course. Plenty of scenarios existed where the invasion succeeded, but where Mayhem herself never again ordered a ship to execute a jump. Some of those scenarios didn’t even necessarily involve her own death either.

Regardless, nothing that the unicorn was feeling suggested that their endeavor wouldn’t succeed. So she gave the order, “...Jump.”

It was difficult to immediately recognize that they’d reached their destination. Compared to the wild and wonderful scenery of Havoc, one field of stars looked very much like another. And given that they’d only traveled a little over two dozen lightyears from their point of origin, only a particularly perceptive astronomer would have noticed that the starfield was any different. They’d been staring at the stars around their intermediary rally point between Lameduck and Faust for a week, and Mayhem saw no difference between the arrangement of the stars then and their arrangement now.

The planetary system on the other hoof…

Faust was a particularly curious phenomenon in the galaxy. General Mayhem was aware of a great many theories relating to its origin, and each seemed just as plausible as the last; but none had been outright confirmed to her knowledge. Likely it never would be. All that was known for certain was that Faust was a wholly artificial creation.

By whom, and for what purpose, none knew. Any record of such a reason, if any had ever existed, had long since been lost to time. All that was known was that it was a fabricated star system. Which was plainly obvious to anycreature the moment they studied a map of the star system. Because Faust was the only solar system which technically wasn’t a ‘solar system’. Definitionally, it was a planetary system, in that it wasn’t heliocentric, but geocentric.

The star that provided life-sustaining light and heat to Equus had been discovered to be an artificial creation by Twilight Sparkle shortly after spaceflight had been achieved. This had been assumed to be the norm…until doctors Finder and Keeper had developed their jump drive technology and explored the first alien system.

After going centuries without charting another system like Faust, the conclusion had been reached that the system was a unique creation. Twilight’s best theory was that it had been ‘built’ by an ancient lost civilization of alicorns. However, since no records or sign of such a group’s existence had ever been found, that was a theory that would forever remain unproven.

It was the star system’s very nature that made it nearly impossible for JumpShips to access though. Jumping into a system required going from one gravitationally neutral location to another. A star’s zenith or nadir points were the ideal locations, as they were extremely large targets that experienced relatively negligible movement. A star’s leisure course through the galaxy was easy to chart and predict when making jump calculations. Usually.

Not in the case of Faust’s primary though. Since the star orbited the planet, and not the other way around, it moved a lot. Making a successful jump into the Faust System was impossible without knowing the exact position of the star in its orbit around Equus.

Fortunately, since Twilight Sparkle was the very alicorn who had created the magic that cemented the star’s orbit and removed the necessity of an alicorn ‘raising’ and ‘lowering’ it every day, she had a fairly decent idea of exactly where it would be, so long as she was provided with the exact time of day in Canterlot at the time the jump was being made.

Clearly the alicorn had known what she was doing, since the fleet had arrived successfully.

“Message from Fleet,” the comms officer announced, drawing General Mayhem’s attention back to the present, “Reform divisions and proceed along directed course,” As the mare spoke, the bridge’s holographic plotter produced a dashed line heading from the fleet’s current location to Equus.

“Helm, plot course and give me an ETA for intercept,” Mayhem ordered.

The stallion at the WarShip’s helm and navigation console issued a curt nod of his head, “Plotting course, aye,” a moment later, “Time to orbital insertion at indicated acceleration and turnover is…forty eight hours,” he announced.

“Signal all squadrons to form up and proceed in,” Mayhem ordered. Then her attention turned to the moon orbiting Equus. Specifically to the shipyards that were located there. This was also where the fleet of ComSpark WarShips was anchored. The unicorn mare studied the cloud of contacts hovering near the orbiting shipyard complex. It would be a couple minutes yet before detectable emissions from their recently arrived vessels were picked up by the sensor operators on those ships. Mayhem idly wondered what the reaction of those changelings on watch would be.

The Disciple general was curious to know how they would react. While the sudden appearance of the better part of a thousand hostile ships in the system was certainly likely to facilitate the voiding of a bowel or two, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out the vast majority of those new arrivals were unarmed JumpShips. Only a little over two hundred of them were WarShips that posed any significant martial threat. Certainly more armed vessels than ComSpark was going to be fielding in this fight, but not necessarily an overwhelming number. The force disparity was such that Mayhem wasn’t quite ready to dismiss the inevitable confrontation with them as a foregone conclusion, at any rate. It was conceivable that a competent enough tactician could find a way to, if not outright win, at least trim down their numbers enough to make it difficult to enforce their blockade of Equus during the invasion.

A lot of their ability to achieve their goals during the invasion relied on being able to keep the changelings from moving their planetary forces around via DropShip; which meant maintaining a comprehensive blockade of Equus’ orbit with their WarShips. If the changelings managed to achieve even marginally better than a one-for-one trade in WarShips during the battle, the remains of the fleet that reached Equus might not be enough to effectively restrict DropShip deployments. Mayhem had run the numbers with Star Admiral Cinder, and the two had agreed that they couldn’t afford to lose more than fifty WarShips prior to the invasion if they wanted to ensure dominance over space around the planet.

If the fleet of Dragon Clan ships had one thing going for it, it was that none of the senior ComSpark officers―indeed, no ‘ling at all―possessed any practical experience conducting WarShip combat. It had been hundreds of years since the Harmony Sphere had seen any action involving WarShips, and even those engagements had not involved ComSpark forces. Every member of the changeling crews would be going into this fight with absolutely no idea what to do or to expect. Not really.

Meanwhile, the same thing could quite be said for all of those serving aboard the Clan vessels. There were still a few senior officers among the dragon crews who had served in the Celestia League Defense Forces prior to following Spike into exile. Those few experienced captains among them might not represent a decisive edge, per se; but they were an edge. Perhaps even enough of one that they and the squadrons they led would be able to summarily outfight their opponents.

It just remained to be seen whether or not the changelings possessed a particularly crafty officer or two…

By the time General Charon received official notification concerning the arrival of the enemy fleet, she’d already known about them for the better part of half an hour. She wasn’t sure if that was indicative of incompetence, or if it was simply a matter of herself not being nearly as high up on the list of “Important ‘Lings to Tell About Serious Problems” as she had assumed. Likely a combination of both. In fact, there was a better than even chance that those first ten minutes had been spent by the sensor techs trying to determine whether their systems were faulty or not.

After all, every changeling ‘knew’ that it was impossible for anycreature from the Harmony Sphere to reach the Faust System, due to its peculiar and unique geocentric nature.

Never mind that any changeling with more than two functioning brain cells had to realize that if anycreature other than a changeling knew how to reach this system it would be the fucking alicorn princess that had ruled from here for over a thousand years! Of course the Dragon Clans, led by the real Twilight fucking Sparkle would know how to get here!

Then again, if those techs had more than two functioning brain cells, they wouldn’t have been mere techs, Charon supposed…

In any event, the changeling general was glad that she had made arrangements to have the system’s sensor net tied into her own personal console in her quarters. It had allowed her to begin putting her plans into motion. Or, at least, make sure that all of the orders were ready to be transmitted at the earliest ‘proper’ moment. After all, the general knew that if she began to take action prior to being ‘officially’ informed about the situation, that risked raising serious questions about how she’d come to know about something which no other changeling had believed was possible. Those were questions that she didn’t need asked when all of this was over, no matter how it ended.

Especially since it wasn’t the actions of the attackers that the general was responding to. Not really.

Even a novice navigator knew that it would take the better part of two days for the invading fleet to reach Equus. Time enough that acting an extra thirty minutes early wouldn’t make a significant difference when it came to mobilizing forces and preparing defenses. In that respect, Charon knowing about the arrivals as early as possible wouldn’t have mattered at all.

However, while it might have only taken the powers that be a half an hour to see to it that the general was informed about the WarShip fleet heading for the planet, it would take a great deal longer for the changeling to receive her marching orders. Charon wanted to make certain that she had things well in motion before that happened, because she knew that whatever her superiors decided was the ‘best course of action’ was almost certainly not going to align with the general’s own plans. They’d want her divisions stationed at the capital to protect the queen.

Which was the last place they’d be able to do any real good, Charon knew.

One of two things was going to happen in the next day or two: either the Clan fleet was going to be stopped dead when they were sandwiched between the ComSpark WarShips here and the ones Admiral Gossamer would be bringing in once he was informed of the invasion. Or, the Clanners would manage to punch their way through to Equus and launch their invasion. If the former happened, then it wouldn’t matter where Charon’s divisions were, because they weren’t going to be needed anyway. If the latter turned out to be the case, then the last place the changeling officer wanted her forces was locked down on the planet.

She wanted them with her here, on the moon. From here they could either be deployed to Equus as needed to repel the invasion, or they would be poised to be withdrawn from the Faust System entirely. Which order she gave would be entirely dependent on how it looked to her like the fight was going to turn out.

However, in order to ensure that her forces would be left here on the moon, General Charon needed to make certain that as many of them were up here and downloaded as possible before she received any formal orders to the contrary. That way, she could point out that there was no way for her to comply with any instructions to relocate her divisions to the capital in the timeframe available.

Her own superiors would gnash their teeth, she was sure; but there would be nothing that they could do about it. When this was all over, she would either be reprimanded for ‘recklessly’ moving her forces around without first seeking approval from on high, hailed as a hero when her tactical redeployments to the surface turned the tide of the invasion and save their queen, or she’d be ready to rendezvous with Gossamer’s remaining ships and head out of system.

No matter which way this invasion ended, General Charon stood to lose nothing. Indeed, in the two latter scenarios, the changeling stood to gain quite a bit.

General Mayhem stifled a yawn as she stepped back onto her command bridge, the half-empty mug of coffee floating beside her was brought to her lips once more. Despite knowing that nothing ‘exciting’ was going to be happening last night, the yellow mare had found herself unable to get any particularly restful sleep. Which was doubly unfortunate, since things were definitely set to get a lot more lively in the next six hours. The Disciple leader glanced at the large plotter in the center of the room in order to confirm what she already knew from last night: that the changelings were coming out to meet them.

It was to be expected, of course. Even though they were fielding an inferior force, no naval commander wanted to fight and battle in space with a planet at their back. It deprived them of both the initiative, and seriously hampered their maneuvering options. The hundred or so ComSpark WarShips had formed up and set an intercept course within hours of the arrival of the combined invasion force, despite their inferior numbers. It wasn’t like they had much of a choice, Mayhem noted. One way or another, the two fleets were going to come to blows.

To the changelings’ credit, they were even doing so much more aggressively than Mayhem might have otherwise anticipated, meeting the Clan fleet well away from the planet. If the Disciple general had been forced to offer up an explanation as to why this was the case, the unicorn would have suggested that the intent behind the changeling commander’s thinking was to meet the Clan WarShips as far out from Equus as possible and then fight a delaying action at range. A close-in confrontation would obviously go poorly from them, but it was at least plausible that exchanging fire at longer ranges offered ComSpark the opportunity to inflict losses without sustaining too many of their own in trade.

Unlikely, in Mayhem’s opinion, but she probably would have gone for a similar strategy if their positions were reversed; so she couldn’t fault the changeling over there who’d made this decision.

Admiral Cinder had reformed their fleet to account for this tactic, putting the ships with the longest range guns at the forefront. The dragoness wanted to be certain that, if there was going to be a protracted exchange of fire at long range, she had more―and bigger―guns doing the shooting. Meanwhile the swarm of DropShips carrying their ground forces were being kept well to the rear, safe from any possible attack. Once the WarShips smashed the ComSpark fleet and secured the orbital space around Equus, they’d be brought in to commence their landings.

Indeed, so far, everything looked like it was going exactly as planned―

Mayhem’s tail twitched.

The Disciple general’s heart just about leaped up into her throat as she processed the sudden tremor. For just about any other pony in the galaxy, such a minor event would have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon. However, for one General Mayhem of the Disciples of Discord, there was no such thing as an ‘unremarkable’ body tick. Every little itch, twitch, tremor, or ache, was significant. Sometimes it was something minor that would affect only herself. Other times those little events heralded an often unpleasant fate for those around her.

Considering the high degree of improbability that something was going to drop onto her head from the ceiling of the WarShip’s command center, Mayhem deduced that what she was feeling pertained to others. The question now became: who?

The unicorn’s eyes darted over the clusters of holographic blips on the plotter. Looking at the wall of Clan WarShips headed towards Equus didn’t evoke any additional feelings from her tail. Nor did she sense anything amiss with the DropShips trailing them. However, when her gaze passed back to the JumpShips waiting above the system’s star…

A tidal wave of overwhelming dread washed over the mare, disrupting her telekinesis and sending her ceramic mug crashing to the deck below where it shattered. Every head in the room turned suddenly in the direction of the Disciple general, even as the mare began to scream in near panic, unable to maintain any shred of composure in the face of the horror that comforted her.

“Signal the JumpShips!” General Mayhem yelled frantically, her eyes locked onto their collection of dots represented on the plotter, “Tell them to leave! Get them out of there! Now!

“Helm, bring us about! Full burn back towards the JumpShips! Relay to all squadrons in the division to do the same!”

Even as she was giving her orders, the unicorn mare knew how useless her commands were. Barely a fraction of those vessels had any of the reserve batteries that would allow them to make a second jump without waiting the week necessary to properly recharge their drives; and they’d all just transitioned into the Faust System not even a full day ago. Barely any of them would be able to leave at all. Those that could might not even be able to do so in time either. Even with a full charge, it took time to plot and execute a jump out of a system. Time that those ships almost certainly didn’t have.

Nopony on the bridge could have expected the sudden outburst from their commander. She hadn’t even known that she was going to give orders like these. However, there wasn’t a Disciple on the Maelstrom who wasn’t aware that their general possessed something akin to ‘precognition’. She was a vessel for the Spirit of Chaos. She knew things that could not be known, and that was just the way it was. There was rarely an explanation for the things that she said or did; but there was always a reason. Even if Mayhem herself didn’t know what it was at the time.

The officer at the comms station didn’t waste a single second. The moment General Mayhem demanded that the JumpShips be ordered to leave the system, the pony at the console was cuing in the frequency for a general broadcast to the JumpShips and issuing the directive for all of the ships that could to depart as quickly as possible. As quickly as the communications pony reacted though, it wasn’t an instantaneous operation. And, of course, the speed at which the JumpShips reacted was contingent on their comms officers reacting appropriately to the transmitted orders, passing them up to their commanders―who might not even be awake, because what matters could possibly come up that would concern them any time soon?―and then the ships’ engineers being able to spool up any charged Finders-Keepers Drives that existed in the fleet.

Which was all to say that, while the crew of the Maelstrom did all that they possibly could to save the lives of those JumpShip crews, not a single one of the massive ships left the system by the time the first crimson blip appeared in their midst. Nor had any left when the second blip appeared. Or the third. Or the thirtieth.

When the first icon representing one of their JumpShips did vanish from the plotter, General Mayhem knew that it wasn’t because the ship had transitioned out of the system. It was because the unarmed, and barely armored, vessel had been destroyed. A second blue icon vanished seconds after the first. Then a third.

Then a thirtieth…

The several light-minute distance between the JumpShips and the rest of the fleet meant that, by the time the Maelstrom received many of those initial distress signals, the vessels which had sent them had already been destroyed. For the rest...they could do little more than listen to the last desperate pleas for help from frantic crews.

The complete destruction of their JumpShip fleet took less than an hour. Not a single one of them managed to make it out of the system to safety. A few had tried to flee using conventional drives, but JumpShips had never really been intended to move very far from a system’s primary. Their engines were mostly designed for station-keeping operations, not for evading incoming fire from attacking WarShips. It was a slaughter.

It also looked like it might turn out to be just the first of many.

The arrival of this new, second, ComSpark fleet changed everything. Instead of outnumbering the changelings, it was the Clans who now faced unfavorable odds. Worse, their fleet was sandwiched between two forces. They were outgunned and outflanked. They were also effectively trapped in the system. Even if they somehow managed to avoid contact with the ComSpark WarShips and make it to a suitable jump location, there was no way for them to take most of the DropShips with them. Jumping out of Faust would mean leaving nearly the entire DropShip fleet behind, and the million and a half soldiers embarked on them.

All of this would end up being for nothing and Queen Chrysalis would be able to reestablish her hold on the Harmony Sphere largely unopposed until the Clans could rebuild and try again…likely in another five hundred years. If at all.

Their initial plan was a bust, Mayhem knew. They wouldn’t be able to crush the ComSpark WarShip fleet in one blow and take their time invading Equus. Which wasn’t to say that there wasn’t still a way to conduct the invasion. There was, but it was going to mean shortening their initial timetables. Considerably.

It also meant taking some additional risks with their forces, both WarShip and DropShip alike. Mayhem had already taken the first step by detaching her division from the rest of the fleet and turning them around to meet the new arrivals. She was taking a group of about fifty ships to meet a force that outnumbered her three-to-one. However, their goal was not going to be to achieve an outright victory in this instance. Their mission was to conduct a delaying action and buy the rest of the fleet some additional breathing room.

Meanwhile, the rest of the WarShips and the DropShip fleet would increase their acceleration beyond what was capable of arriving at Equus in a parking orbit. At least, not directly. They would be adjusting their courses somewhat so that they could slingshot around the moon and bleed off some of their acceleration that way before looping back towards the planet. They’d run the numbers, and the changeling fleet would be hard-pressed to decelerate and return to the planet in anything less than an additional twenty-fours hours after their own arrival at Equus. Which would mean that they’d have a little less than a day to take Canterlot and either kill or capture Queen Chrysalis before the Clans lost orbital control of Equus and the invasion was inevitably doomed.

If the task of taking the capital under their original timetable had seemed ambitious, cutting the operational window down to less than a single day made it sound outright impossible. However, it was also their only option. Because twenty-four hours after the Clans made landfall on Equus, the changeling WarShip fleet would be arriving in orbit of Equus in numbers that the Clans would simply not be able to overcome. From there, the WarShips could either break and run for the sun’s zenith and make their escape from Faust, leaving the forces on the ground to be slaughtered…or they could stay and everycreature could die.

Neither felt like a particularly appealing option.

Of course, before they got to the point where making such a decision became relevant, Cinder’s group first needed to punch their way through the changeling fleet coming to meet her. Meanwhile, General Mayhem and her division would be doing their best not to get themselves killed too quickly. The longer they held on, the more time they would buy for the DropShips.

“Cruiser Squadron One through Four are to take up flanking positions around the DropShips,” Cinder ordered, jabbing one of her clawed fingers at the indicated DropShip cloud, “They’ll run interference when we punch through the enemy’s formation. Squadrons five and six are going to help give them a hole to fly through. I want Battleship Squadron Three and Four to focus their fire on this point to soften up the enemy wall.

“The moment CruRons Five and Six get themselves wedged in there, I want those DropShips pouring on every last hundredth of a G they can wring out of those engines! Remind squadron leaders to keep their formations tight; this is going to be rough!”

Star Admiral Cinder’s eyes didn’t leave the plotter as she watched the formation of her fleet shift to comply with her directives. The wall of red blips denoting the ComSpark fleet rising to meet them from Equus was on parity with hers, as a result of Mayhem’s division hanging back to delay the newly arrived second fleet. The dragoness had very nearly ground her teeth into powder when they appeared.

Obviously the most logical explanation for why the changelings were using double the slipways necessary to properly maintain their WarShips was because they possessed double the WarShips! She’d allowed herself to place too much trust in their changeling informant. She wanted to blame him for this debacle; however, she was forced to grudgingly acknowledge that Slipshod had reminded her―repeatedly―that he’d never been in a position to receive comprehensive information about the disposition of ComSpark’s WarShip fleets. He could only report on what he’d directly seen.

The burden of properly interpreting the raw intelligence had been on her and her staff; and they’d screwed up in spectacular fashion.

Not that operating under the assumption that the changelings had a second WarShip fleet tucked away outside of Faust would have changed too much. This would still have been their best chance to make a play for Chrysalis. She hadn’t had an extra five hundred jump batteries laying around, nor the facilities to integrate them onto those JumpShips anyway, so they’d still have been lost. At best, she could have ordered them operated with skeleton crews and ensured they were transferred to the WarShips as soon as they entered the system. That would have saved the crews, but the vessels themselves would still have been lost and this mission would have still been a one-way trip.

Cinder wasn’t sure if knowing the real stakes ahead of time would have made things better or worse though. While the dragoness could attest that the Dragon Clans would have come here knowing that, she was less than certain about the three armies operated by the Harmony Sphere powers. It’d taken a lot of cajoling to get them this far when they thought that withdrawing would be a relatively simple and painless affair.

Nothing about the next few hours was going to be ‘simple’ now though.

The star admiral reached out for one of the nearby consoles and tapped out a series of commands, “TacOps, send these firing orders out to the fleet,” she barked. As Cinder spoke, the plotter updated with her proposed plan of action, denoting the sections of the enemy fleet that would be prioritized by the forces under her command. She glanced over at a nearby griffon hen, “FlightOps, what’s the status on our fighter screen?”

The griffon glanced at her terminal briefly before responding, “Eighty percent, ma’am.”

Cinder snorted in mild annoyance. At the rate that things were progressing, they’d have their full fighter screen up and in place in time. It wouldn’t be as far out as she might have liked, but it would be there, “Have them focus on cruisers and frigates. Anything that’s maneuverable enough to potentially fuck with our DropShips.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

The dragoness’ lip twitched as she became aware of a decidedly annoying ‘clicking’ sound coming from somewhere nearby. She looked around and was very nearly about to bite the head off―perhaps even literally―of whoever was making that distracting racket, when she looked down and noticed that it was just the sound of her own talons tapping nervously on the surface of the holographic plotter. Cinder sneered at the offending fingers before balling her hand into a fist in order to bring the noise to a stop.

She was doing everything that was expected of her under the situation, and yet she couldn’t suppress the feeling that she wasn’t doing nearly enough. The dragoness supposed that was just what ‘command’ felt like. She’d given the squadrons their orders and every one of her downtrace commanders understood her intent for this confrontation. Her job was done, for the most part. It was now up to the individual ship captains and their crews to fight their ships to the best of their abilities…and hope. There was nothing more for the star admiral to do unless the enemy underwent some change in their deployment that needed to be accounted for.

Otherwise all Cinder could do right now was watch the plotter for the next three hours. That was when she’d find out if she’d issued the ‘right’ orders…

Slipshod very nearly jumped out of his shell when he heard the klaxon blare on the bridge of the Zathura. He’d initially thought that it indicated that one of the fast approaching ComSpark ships had acquired a weapons lock on their fragile little DropShip. Aileron reached out with a wing and swatted at a nearby panel, immediately silencing the alarm, “Proximity alert,” he announced to the rest of the bridge’s occupants. A brief glance at his console and then, “Respite’s getting a little close. Shifting to port, down z-axis,” He glanced back over at Squelch, “It’s getting a little crowded around here, commander.”

The sage green unicorn’s lips were pressed together in a grim line as she studied the sensor displays around her. It was very much a ‘damn if we do; damned if we don’t’ situation from what the mare could tell. It was clear that the DropShips would be a primary target of the ComSpark forces, and there was fuck all that even a larger Princess-class DropShip would be able to do against a ‘dinky’ corvette-sized WarShip more than ten times its size. A single hit from one of those oversized naval autocannons would be enough to obliterate a DropShip. Which meant that the swarm of DropShips carrying the soldiers and ‘Steeds that would actually be fighting the battle needed to be shielded by the Clan WarShips who actually had the ability to shrug off a hit or three.

However, even a WarShip was only so big, and there weren’t really all that many assigned to run interference for the DropShips. Cinder was going to need a lot of her fleet fending off ComSpark after all so that the changelings weren’t focusing the entirety of their fire on the DropShips. With that fact in mind, it was actually pretty generous of the dragoness to have allocated two dozen WarShips to cover the DropShip fleet on their way through the enemy wall.

“High Gain, please send out a reminder to all DropShips to watch their spacing. We may need to take some evasive action here in a little bit,” Squelch noted as she nodded at the holographic plotter, and the haze of crimson specks that was fast approaching them. The sunflower comm tech nodded and got to work sending out the appropriate broadcast. Squelch wasn’t entirely convinced that it was going to help much. None of the creatures in those DropShips had ever been asked to fly their ships right through a fleet of enemy WarShips. A nerve or two was bound to become at least a little frayed.

“ETA to contact?” She asked the mare at the sensor station.

“Ten minutes, commander,” Doppler replied.

Squelch took a long, deep breath and forced herself to settle back in her command chair. She very nearly reached out for her nearby terminal and summoned up Mig to once more confirm that all of the Zathura’s systems were functioning nominally. However, she had asked the engineer that exact question no fewer than three times in the last hour. The sage unicorn was pretty sure that if she did it again, she was going to push the overworked kirin over the edge into full nirik.

Her crew had already done everything that they could to prepare their ship for what lay ahead―as much as a dinky little Mustang-class DropShip could be prepared for something like this, anyway―and Squelch just needed to accept that everything was largely out of her hooves now. She’d spent years putting together a crew of some of the most skilled ponies in the Harmony Sphere. It was time for her to just sit back and let them do what she’d hired them to.

The unicorn glanced over her shoulder at one of their ship’s latest additions: Lieutenant Keely. Because the Zathura was carrying only three out of a maximum possible four BattleSteeds for deployment, the extra stall in their ‘Steed Bay had been co-opted by the Clans for use by the young silver dragon and his platoon of power-armored Elementals. Squelch didn’t really have any problem with this either, as she did acknowledge that it would largely have been a waste of available space to descend to the planet with an unoccupied stall. The dragons had also done very well about keeping out of Mig’s way as she and her technicians went about their usual duties.

“You may want to get to your platoon and make sure they’re secure,” the unicorn said, “I suspect that things are going to get very ‘lively’ in a few minutes.”

The dragon’s lip briefly twitched with veiled amusement before they nodded and left the bridge. Squelch stared after him for a few seconds until the door closed, and then looked over at Slipshod, “talkative sort, ain’t he?”

“I haven’t heard him say two words since he got on board,” the changeling stallion admitted.

“Strong silent type; I can dig that,” High Gain quipped, flashing them a brief grin from her station.

“How about you ‘dig’ putting out a ship-wide announcement to secure vac-suits?” Squelch countered as the unicorn levitated over her own helmet and began to put it on. All around the bridge, other ponies secured their own helmets in anticipation of possible upcoming decompression events. Of course, given what they would be encountering soon, any hit which might breach the ship’s hull had a better than even chance of simply destroying the Zathura outright. At that point, being mostly protected from the vacuum of space wouldn’t really make all that much difference in whether they survived the battle or not.

A few moments later, the klaxon sounding ‘general quarters’ began to blare throughout the DropShip.

After putting on his helmet, Slipshod double-checked the harness which secured him into the chair he'd selected on the bridge. That harness was just one more thing that wasn’t going to be much help if a cannon shell the size of a truck ripped through the DropShip, but it made the changeling feel just a little bit more reassured. With nothing else remaining that he could do to increase his own chances of survival, the changeling stallion turned his attention to the plotter sitting in the middle of the bridge.

The converging clumps of colored dots were quite deceiving, Slipshod thought to himself. If one were to judge things by the raw numbers alone, it was conceivable that they’d be deceived into thinking that the allied forces of the Clans and the Harmony Sphere had an overwhelming advantage. After all, their ships numbered well over a thousand. And that wasn’t even factoring in their fighter screen, which consisted of another couple thousand small craft. There were so many ships being tracked at this moment that Slipshod was honestly a little impressed that the Zathura’s computers were able to account for all of them on the plotter.

What was less obvious at a glance though was the disparity in the quality and firepower of those ships. While, numerically, their forces outnumbered ComSpark’s nearly five-to-one, the quality of the firepower that a DropShip could bring to bear against a true vessel of war was negligible. Against the thick armor that coated a WarShip, the miniscule lasers and autocannons of a DropShip had about as much chance of doing real damage to them as a pony had of bucking their way through a BattleSteed’s ablative plating.

Which was to say: none. WarShips were simply in a class of their own during a serious fight.

“Contact in two minutes,” Doppler announced.

The sensor tech’s voice was far steadier than the changeling might have anticipated, given the cobalt earth pony mare’s current emotional state. Granted, she was about as nervous as everypony else in the room; including himself.

The proximity alarm sounded again, drawing out a stifled curse from Aileron as he once more sought to adjust the position of the Zathura within the formation. Squelch too grunted in annoyance, muttering a comment under her breath regarding the shortage of vertebrae among the other DropShip pilots, “If they’re having trouble flying straight now, I can’t wait to see what happens when the shooting actually starts…”

Star Commodore Spline sneered at the tactical display in front of him, “Call up Reprisal and tell them to get back in formation,” he snapped at his comm tech, “They’re dropping too low!”

“Aye, sir!”

The charcoal black dragon continued to glare at the screen until he saw the dot denoting the errant vessel drift back into its popper place within the squadron. Once it had been done, he let out an annoyed snort and returned his focus to the approaching enemy fleet. This only served to prompt his frown to deepen though. Already he could tell that ComSpark had identified the ‘true’ threat present within the oncoming allied forces: the DropShips. A number of the changeling WarShips were adjusting within their own formation to be able to concentrate fire on the fragile and largely defenseless transport ships.

No matter how hard he and the rest of his squadron of four cruisers tried, it simply wasn’t going to be possible to entirely shield the DropShips they were escorting from the enemy. Their ships just weren’t broad enough.

“CIC, reprioritize targets based on the change in the enemy formation,” Spline didn’t―quite―bark the command, silently cursing his own nerves. Despite this being everything that he had trained his whole life for, this would be his first taste of ‘real’ combat. The same went for the rest of his crew as well. Despite having participated in Clan Timberwolf’s invasion of the Harmony Sphere, the star commodore wouldn’t consider anything that they’d done there as being ‘combat’. Mostly since nothing that the Sphere defenders had mustered against his ship could reasonably have been classified as a ‘threat’. Not really.

Those oncoming changeling WarShips on the other hand…

“New targets coming through based on the latest threat profiles,” the dragoness star captain serving as the OIC of the Warspite’s Combat Information Center announced. A second later, Spline saw his display update, several of the changeling WarShips which were positioned nearest to the intended breakthrough point becoming highlighted. His comms officer received an identical report and passed it onto the other ships in the squadron.

The charcoal dragon curled his lip. While he couldn’t fault his CIC OIC’s selections for any technical reason, the star commodore was certainly not looking forward to putting his squadron of mere cruisers up against a pair of battleships and their frigate escorts. From what he could tell, the other three squadrons tasked with shepherding the DropShips weren’t going to be facing odds that were any better. The changelings had clearly recognized that there were a lot of DropShips on their way to Equus, and so had elected to task ships which possessed an abundance of weapon mounts to intercept them.

Spline performed some brisk calculations based on the speeds of the rapidly converging fleets and deduced that there was going to be a period of approximately a minute and half where it would be practical for them to exchange fire with each other. It wasn’t a lot of time in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but when each side was throwing explosive shells the size of groundcarts at each other and firing lasers powerful enough to vaporize a light ‘Steed, it was time enough for a lot of creatures to lose their lives.

“Heat spike!” His sensor tech called out suddenly, “Missile launches detected. Many missile launches.”

The star commodore let out the breath he’d inhaled upon hearing the initial announcement. He didn’t relax completely though. While missiles weren’t necessarily a significant threat to his own squadron, they did pose a serious danger to the DropShips; so they couldn’t be completely discounted, “Alert the DropShips. Helm, put us between the missiles and the rest of the formation. We can afford to take those hits more than they can.”

“Aye.” “Aye.”

“Enemy fighters coming in! They’re making a run on the DropShips!” The sensor tech warned.

Right on the heels of that announcement came an update from the comms officer, “Friendly wings moving to intercept.”

Spline nodded, but added, “Let’s give them a hand. Tell our own missile crews to identify targets and launch ordinance,” the comms officer acknowledged his order and relayed the information to the cruiser’s gunnery crews. Seconds later he saw the alert flash across his display indicating that the Warspite was launching a barrage of missiles towards the incoming ComSpark fighters. A second later, the rest of the cruisers in his squadron followed suit.

“Message from the flag: they’ve engaged.”

Despite the overall tense atmosphere on the bridge as the crew focused on the ongoing skirmish with the incoming fighter craft, Spline felt the overall level of anxiety spike suddenly. Star Admiral Cinder’s flagship was at the forefront of the fleet’s formation, as Clan leaders directed their forces from the front. This meant that her vessel was a good few seconds ahead of the rest of the Clan WarShips. That the Rockhoof was firing at the changelings meant that, in the next few seconds, every ship would be engaged directly in combat.

Indeed, that thought had only just finished forming in Spline’s head when he heard the deep ‘thrum!’ of his cruiser’s autocannons opening fire on their designated targets. Though he couldn’t see it on his display, the star commodore knew that the changeling WarShips coming to meet them were firing also.

That thought passed through his head less than a heartbeat before the command couch he was sitting in heaved beneath him. The lights illuminating the bridge winked out for a second, and then flickered back on. Klaxons began to scream. Half of the warning lights on the consoles around the bridge glowed crimson and amber. A din of voices rose up from around the room.

“Hit amidship! Reactor Two scrammed! Reactors One and Three holding. Damage control dispatched―”

“Forward starboard turret lost! Dorsal missile tubes knocked out; working to bypass and restore them to―”

“Breaches reported on Deck Two, Three, and Four! Mechanical failures reported in emergency bulkheads on Deck Three; venting atmosphere―”

“Starboard engine inoperative; losing acceleration―”

It was difficult for Spline to make out every one of the overlapping reports. However, the terminals and displays that were available to him directly were able to give the star commodore a general idea of what had just happened to his ship: They’d been struck by just two of the much more massive naval autocannons of one of the battleships moving to engage them. One hit had struck them almost directly on top of their forward autocannon turret on the ship’s starboard side, completely obliterating it and the three guns mounted there. The detonation had reached deep into the Warspite and gone on to damage quite a few other systems.

The second hit had actually been more of a ‘graze’, but had arguably done a lot more to hurt them, as the shell had clipped one of their main engines and knocked it out of service. It was difficult to say whether the damage was ultimately repairable, but he highly doubted that there was going to be much that his engineering staff would be able to do about it in the next sixty seconds. By that time the battle would be over with and they’d be through to the other side of the changeling fleet.

“Roll the ship!” Spline yelled out over the blaring alarms, “Bring our port guns to bear! Order Commodore Lucerne to take point; the Warspite will take up the rear position in the squadron. Concentrate all fire on that battleship! I want it gone!

“And somecreature shut off those damn alarms!”

The noise died down and Spline felt the ship begin to roll slowly on its axis as the lateral thrusters worked overtime to rotate three-quarters of a million tons of WarShip. The dragon could still both hear and feel the cruiser’s massive guns pouring on the fire as fast as they could. His lips set in a grim line as he recognized that the weapons of the enemy were likely responding with equal vigor, though of a significantly larger caliber.

“Status of the rest of the squadron?” He posed to his tactical officer.

“Reprise is moving to take the lead position as ordered,” the younger officer confirmed, her tone shaky as she looked over her displays, “Will-O-Wisp is reporting light damage. She’s still battle-capable. Tristan is…gone. She foundered, sir.”

“Damn,” Spline cursed under his breath, “Condition of the enemy battleship?”

“I’m seeing evidence of significant damage along its ventral quarter,” his sensor tech replied, “Power fluctuations…” her words trailed off as she squinted at the readings flowing across the screen of her terminal, “Its acceleration is reduced by a third.”

“Hurt but not down,” the star commodore surmised, “What about its escorts?”

“Two of the frigates are coasting. No power emissions. The third looks mostly untouched―”

“Will-O-Wisp is reporting a serious hit!” The comms officer interjected suddenly, “They’ve lost main power and are adrift!”

“Sir,” the dragon at the tactical operations station said, turning to face the star commodore, “the DropShips…” As their words trailed off, Spline followed their outstretched claw which was pointing towards the main plotter. The charcoal dragon looked at the display and grimaced. The cruiser formations that were intended to screen the DropShips were in shambles. Over a third had been destroyed or disabled, and another third were heavily damaged. All the while, additional changeling WarShips were angling to close in on the largely defenseless craft.

Spline did some rough math in his head, and didn’t like the results that he got. The cloud of DropShips wasn’t going to clear the wall of changeling WarShips in time before being intercepted. Not at the speed that they were going.

“Signal to the DropShips: redline your engines immediately,” the charcoal dragon snapped far more tersely than he’d meant to. The stress was getting to him, “Reprise is to bear starboard and intercept those two frigates,” He directed, jabbing a claw towards the indicated contacts on the plotter, “We’ll focus fire on the battlesh―”

Again the chair he was sitting in heaved and the lights flickered.

“We’re losing our cover!” Doppler warned from her station on the bridge of the Zathura. Squelch’s fetlocks curled in tight around the armrests of her command couch as she felt her helmsmare take the little DropShip through another roll in an effort to keep them as difficult to hit as possible, while simultaneously doing his best to avoid colliding with any of the other wildly dancing vessels in their vicinity. Both Aileron’s wings and hooves were dancing all along his station controls as he fought to keep them all alive.

Through the window, the sage green unicorn saw an eruption of brilliant orange fire as a Friendship-class DropShip several hundred meters ahead of them exploded. Seconds later, she felt the Zathura shudder as it blasted through the debris cloud. A particularly high-pitched ‘clink!’ announced that one of those pieces had even struck the viewscreen of the bridge. It, fortunately, hadn’t penetrated, but the unicorn could clearly see the crack that it had left in the outer layer of the reinforced transparent material.

“Two more frigates coming in from starboard!” the cobalt mare warned them; not that Squelch was entirely sure what it was expected that she would do with that information. Their pilot was already keeping the ship jumping around like a drunken parasprite! As far as she was concerned, if they got shot out of space at this point, it couldn’t possibly have been anything approaching an aimed shot. It would just have been fate making it clear that this was their time to go.

“Message coming in, commander!” High Gain called out, “we’re to redline our engines!”

Squelch couldn’t help but flash a dubious look at the other mare, even though all she was doing was simply relaying the message that she’d been given, “Have we not?!”

“Mig has already sent me two messages warning me about engine temps,” Aileron managed to grunt out as he took the Zathura through another series of jukes and rolls, more to avoid colliding with other erratically moving DropShips than to avoid being struck by enemy fire. Even as he did so, Squelch winced as she spotted two DropShips through the viewport clip each other, one of them breaking apart as the stresses caused it to lose structural integrity.

“Take us starboard!” Squelch called out to her pilot. To High Gain she said, “Tell all nearby ships to follow us in at best speed―that includes any nearby fighters!”

“Starboard, ma’am?” Aileron asked, sounding certain that he must have misheard her, and followed it up with a clarification in case the unicorn had not heard one of the earlier important announcements that had been made by Doppler, “There are two enemy frigates that way!”

“I know,” the sage mare agreed, which didn’t seem to do much to assuage the pilot’s concerns, “We’re going to get in closer. Their turrets will have a harder time tracking us if we’re pulling a lot of Gs and close in.”

The expression on the pegasus stallion’s face was still more than a little skeptical, but he had his instructions. With a shrug and a resigned sign, the helmsmare said, “Eh, why not? Never ‘mapped the world’ on a WarShip before…”

Squelch felt herself pulled to the left side of her command couch as the pegasus stallion turned their ship towards the oncoming frigates. On the holographic plotter, the unicorn mare saw a small cloud of sapphire dots following in their wake. Ahead of her, through the window, she could spot signs of the frantic battle going on around them as Clan WarShips sparred with ComSpark.

It wasn’t going to be a pitched engagement this time. Each side simply possessed too much momentum for that. It would take hours for them to decelerate down to a low enough velocity to meet each other like that, and the Clanners had had no intention of obliging a superior force that way. One way or another, the fight was going to be over in another thirty seconds or so, as the relative velocities of each side carried them out of each others’ effective firing range at tens of thousands of meters a second.

However, those thirty seconds were enough time for a lot of DropShips to get killed in, and Squelch felt that they’d lost more than enough already. Those two frigates had cut hard to the side, pouring on a lot of acceleration of their own in an effort to put themselves right through the center of the cloud of smaller ships. With plenty of lightly-armored targets flying by at oblique angles, those two frigates would have had an easy time picking off dozens of DropShips before they were out of range. Hopefully by getting in close enough, they could move by too quickly for the turrets to adequately track them.

Or they’d just make it impossible for the changeling gunners to miss.

Squelch soon managed to catch visual sight of the frigates in question through the Zathura’s viewport. Even for being ‘lighter’ WarShips, those vessels weren’t all that much smaller than some JumpShips. Faced now with the very guns which were so intent on destroying them and close enough that she could make out individual autocannon barrels, the sage unicorn mare felt herself questioning the merits of her plan.

“Hold on!” Aileron called out as he took the Zathura into a spin.

The turrets of the frigates belched out their ordinance.

Much smaller explosions peppered the hull of the WarShips as the fighters and DropShips with them returned fire with weapons of their own. Even the Zathura’s own turrets responded as the gunnery crews sought to try and exact at least some sliver of vengeance for all of their fellow DropShips which had already been shattered by ComSpark.

Something must have managed to penetrate through the much thinner―for a WarShip, anyway―frigate armor, because a plume of orange fire erupted out of the top of the vessel…directly in the Zathura’s path.

Aileron’s wings lashed out to slam down on several controls at once. The little DropShip screamed as metal strained against the sudden forces being applied to its delicate frame. Mig would surely be giving the pegasus a sound thrashing later for all of the work that he’d just created for her and her crews during their next overhaul. Assuming that they all lived through the next ten seconds, of course.

Despite the ship’s vehement protests, it acquiesced to the whims of its pilot and launched ‘up’ above the worst of the geyser of fire and debris. He then forced the ship back ‘down’, dipping behind the frigate and using the bulk of its engines to avoid being tracked too easily by any of its remaining functional turrets as they continued to speed away from the WarShip.

Squelch’s eyes were glued to the plotter as she watched other small clouds of DropShips slowly squeeze their way through the changeling fleet. It was impossible for her to truly count how many of their number had been lost since the start of the engagement, but the unicorn wanted to believe that the number of DropShips she saw now didn’t look too much smaller than how she remembered it being five minutes ago. There would be time enough for a firm count later, she knew.

Only when Doppler announced that they were finally outside the effective range of the enemy WarShips’ weapons did the mare allow herself to breathe once more, “Status report?”

“I think I managed to void every warranty this ship had left,” Aileron quipped as he too finally allowed himself to begin breathing normally again, slumping limply back in his chair.

“At least we still have a ship,” Squelch pointed out, “Thank you, Ails.” The pegasus grinned and issued her a salute with one of his wings, “High Gain, get together a count of the survivors. Doppler, how’re the WarShips doing?”

“Most of Cinder’s forces made it through,” the sensor tech reported, “I’ll need time to put something more definitive together,” she qualified, “but, at a glance, it looks like she gave a lot better than she got. Maybe a two-to-one exchange? At least three-to-two from what I can see right now.

“Both fleets are deceling, though Cinder’s fleet is doing so a lot slower.”

“She’s going to set up a second screen to keep ComSpark from just coming right back in after us,” Squelch informed the other mare. Her eyes then darted to General Mayhem’s division, which hadn’t engaged quite yet. They were still in the process of slowing down in order to meet the second ‘surprise’ ComSpark fleet. The unicorn studied the plotter for several long seconds as she considered the possibilities that the next few hours might produce. Especially where the two changeling fleets were concerned.

If she were in command of the ComSpark forces, she would probably try to merge her fleets on Mayhem’s and crush her whole division with overwhelming force. It would mean giving Cinder’s forces and the DropShips a completely clear path to the planet, sure, but they’d only have a few days leeway before the―now much larger―fleet of changeling WarShips got back to Equus. Cinder wouldn’t have a hope of holding out against greater than three-to-one odds. She’d be forced to pull back and abandon the DropShips and troops on the surface. At which point, everycreature would be crushed. Invasion over.

That would be the smarter option for the changelings.

However, it was also possible―and Slipshod had suggested that it was even likely―that Chrysalis would demand that her WarShips return to Equus as quickly as possible in order to get Cinder’s fleet out of orbit. Victory against the fleet they’d just fought in a prolonged engagement wasn’t a given, Squelch admitted, but there was at least a chance. Whether Cinder’s fleet could destroy both the first ComSpark fleet and whatever survived contact with Mayhem later…that was anypony’s guess. Hopefully, by that point, they would have control of Canterlot anyway and wouldn’t need to find out.

They’d know in the next few minutes which option ComSpark was going to be going with…

“...Enemy fleet continuing hard decel,” Doppler announced after another minute, “Projected zero-zero is well short of Mayhem’s division,” the cobalt mare looked back at Squelch, “They’re coming back for us.”

Squelch nodded and sighed. It was the option that gave them the best chance at victory, sure; but that was only if Cinder managed to decisively win that next fight. If she was either driven off, or lost too many ships to effectively blockade the planet…their ground forces might not have time enough to take the capital.

“Aileron, revise calculations for as hard a decel around the moon as you can,” the sage unicorn instructed, “I want as much time in orbit before the changelings can catch up to us as you can manage.”

The pegasus stallion was nodding slowly, “I think I can get us a few more hours if we aerobrake around Equus too. I’ll have some concrete burn times and Gs for you in an hour.”

“Good. In the meantime, stand the ship down from alert status. Give everycreature a break before our next 'five minutes of Tartarus'.”

As she spoke, Squelch moved the focus of the holographic plotter on the bridge away from their current position, and onto Equus’ moon…and the shipyard orbiting around it. Not one of them believed that it was going to be undefended. Which meant that their upcoming swing around the little moon was going to be anything but leisurely…

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