//------------------------------//
// Chapter Three: Officers Discourse 
// Story: Rising Storm 
// by Arrenius 
//------------------------------//

	Gale looked toward the call out. His hopes that Private Shield had exaggerated the size of the enemy force were immediately dashed. A good 600 zebra were up on that damned hill to the south. Gale hadn’t even had the time to decide upon a course of action when Dwaal Klip, the stations attaché from Die Leër van Oranje, trotted over.  He was an earth pony, unremarkable in appearance by Equestrian standards. Dwaal’s light brown mane  verged on blonde, and his coat coat sat somewhere between brown and a dull orange. “Are we really going to do this meneer? We still have time to disengage.”
                Gale looked at him. “Dwaal, either we hold here or Vrystaat falls. I explained that to you.”
                Dwaal had a grim look on his face. “And I explained to you what the zebras do with their enemies. The concept of a POW is completely foreign to them. Once they engage, it’s fight, run, or die. No surrendering with the honours of war.”
                “I get it Dwaal. You expressed your concerns quite well earlier at the O group, and when I said ‘duly noted’ I didn’t mean buck off, I meant duly noted. We don’t need to hold them indefinitely, just until the army mobilizes and sends a relief column our way. That ought to scare the zebras right off.”
                The earth pony looked unconvinced. “Whatever you say Luitenant. You’re sure that the Coalition will send a column?”
                Haha, no. Gale thought. 150 infantry ponies, led by a junior officer with only two years commission? And a pegasus to boot? They’d sooner send a relief column to extract Prince Blueblood from a bad mane day. Naturally though Gale had to pretend that that wasn’t the case. “I’m sure. Nopony gets left behind. It may take them a while, but they’ll get here.”
                Dwaal looked at Gale a little longer, as if deciding whether he believed him. The Boerperd sighed after a minute and realized that he’d have to be content with what he’d been given.
                “Very well Gale. I must say not many ponies ask me to fight for my damn life against impossible odds the very same day they meet me.”
                Gale smiled. “Dwaal, I took you for the type who would take kindly to such an introduction.”
                “I never said it was unwelcome. Zebras are the enemies of my blood. I’ve been fighting them since I was a colt old enough to strap on a cuff. I’m just not so sure about this whole ‘facing them in open field’ business.”
“Isn’t the point of this whole mess to make it so that colts don’t have to strap on rifle cuffs and fight zebras?” Gale replied with an air of skepticism.
“Bloody lot of good it seems to be doing. Peace through negotiation only works when everypony is willing to negotiate. How do you expect to end a centuries old-”
“Politics later.” Gale said as he turned his head back towards the zebra formation. “They’re coming.”

*****

        Shining Armour was trotting about the castle, as he often did. His job as a Captain of the Royal Guard, while exhausting at times, could also be unimaginably boring. The weeks before his wedding had been an anomaly. The duty of casting the protection spell coupled with the oversight of the guard deployment had been almost too much. Though, in retrospect, there were other reasons that that particular period had been draining to him.
Shining shuddered as the memory came to him. He had spent nearly three weeks with... a fake. Chrysalis had threatened everything he loved, his nation, the soldiers under his command, his family, his wife. Cadance had been imprisoned for weeks, cold, hungry and alone in the crystal caves, and her ‘knight in shining armour’ didn’t do a damn thing.
Because he had been fooled.
He should have noticed the second something was wrong. The first time ‘Cadance’ had acted... strangely. That night when she had been out for too long, he should have gone looking.
Shining groaned. He continued to go over it all in his head, and it was becoming a nuisance. The honeymoon had been exactly what he needed after the ordeal, but he had nearly ruined it with all this ‘navel contemplation’ as Cadance had called it.
The honeymoon had been amazing, it was a nice little cottage in the mountains. Princess Luna had been put in charge of setting it all up. Just Shining, his wife, and the platoon of elite guards that Venture continued to swear up and down that he hadn’t sent. Shining had spent a lot of time on the balcony just looking out at the scenery with Cadance. His daily routine had been so different from military life that he had some trouble with it. The first morning he woke up, turned over to wake his wife, and remembered that Cadance (along with basically any other civilian pony in Equestria) wasn’t actually fond of waking up before her aunt had risen the sun. He then had to spend a whole three hours exercising and hiking around in the forest, when he came back, Cadance still wasn’t awake.
He fell into a proper civilian routine quickly though, welcomed the rest and most of all the solitude. Shining’s entire job consisted of talking daily to ponies who thought of him as a resource to be deployed. He’d go over operations orders, training schedules, deliver endless ‘security readiness reports’ to the Council, who understood none of it. Under such circumstances the company of other ponies can quickly become tiring.
Except one, he thought with a smile. Well except her and the guards, but they had been subtle enough that he could pretend not to notice that they were around. Shining had been annoyed at first, but he knew Venture was just being cautious. The Changeling’s weren’t gone after all.
        The Changelings, one of Equestria’s most dangerous threats. Even though they had been defeated, they were still out there watching, waiting. The general population of Canterlot was ambivalent to their presence, but that was only because of the false sense of security that had been created when Shining and Cadance had ‘vanquished’, as the state newspaper had termed it, Chrysalis. Shining knew the real truth. The only reason the Equestrian government hadn’t implemented anti-changeling measures on a mass scale yet was because they had no idea how the hay to develop any.
        Ever since his return from his honeymoon Shining Armour had been in charge of developing some kind of defence or countermeasure. He had ideas, some of them even plausible, but he hadn’t been able to try anything yet. For ideas to become reality one required money, resources, manpower, and time. All of those things the Security Council was unwilling to provide without absolute proof that it would succeed.
        “Shining, I was just looking for you.” Iron Venture’s voice cut through Shining’s musings. He turned to see his peer, serious as usual.
        “Iron, I thought you were watching the Antechamber for the Princess, something wrong?”
        “Oh, just the usual, General Thorn and Procurator Courser were getting in a row,”
        Shining laughed. “I’d be more worried if Courser and Thorn weren’t fighting if I were you Iron.”
        Venture nodded, “Business as usual I know but it got bad this time. I thought Courser was going to tell me to arrest him.”
        Shining cocked his head dismissively. “I say let ‘em have it out one of these times. Maybe it’ll teach them both to shut their damn mouths.”
        “Easy for you to say, as long as you’re rutting with the big boss’ niece, you’ve got a job. Me? One buck up on my watch and it’s back to the weather patrol.”
        Shining laughed again. Venture’s dry pessimistic humor never failed to brighten his day, ironically.  “Anyways, you need something else?”
        “Well, Princess Luna spoke with me yesterday evening, wanted to know about any kind of countermeasures...”
        “I’ll tell you what I told her last week, what I told Thorn and Cuirass two days ago, and what I told my sister a month ago. Until the Security Council decides they actually want to commit to it, I can’t start anything up. I’m not even allowed to organize some kind of committee without permission. It’s a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy, and until one of them gives me something to work with-”
“I know, I know, buried in paperwork. Luna’s mane, within a month they’ll want to know why we haven’t been doing anything about this too. I can hear it right now, ‘Her majesty made you a captain so that you could exercise your initiative’”
Shining nodded grimly, the Council liked to make things appear to be the military’s fault by ordering action taken post factum.
Venture continued, changing the subject. “Anyway, no sense worrying about it now... Have you seen any of those new telegraph machines?”
Shining scoffed at the sudden change in topic. “Really Iron? Distracted by a shiny new machine?”
“Buck off. They’re brilliant. It’s like having a dragon but better.”
“How is it better?”
“Because it doesn’t eat all your food or try to burn your house down. Or grow into a rampaging death machine.”
Shining’s skepticism showed. “I don’t get why we need them really, we can use dragons or pegasus couriers instead.”
“I just explained why dragons aren’t okay, plus, how many dragons enlisted last year? I think that number may have been just shy of zero. As for pegasus couriers, they take time; we’re fast, but not here to Transvaal in a day fast. Also the machine doesn’t need to eat or sleep.”
“The operator does.” Shining scoffed.
“Which is why the good Celestia invented shifts. At any rate, you really need to learn how to work these Shining, apparently they’ll be standard for all stations before long.”
Shining groaned. That meant a qualification course, which meant two days of sitting in a classroom as opposed to doing his job. “Fine, let’s go play with your new toy.”
“Yaaaaay!” Answered Venture in a mock colt’s voice.  “It’s in the east wing of the guard barracks, on the second floor.”
Shining rolled his eyes and followed his co-captain.