Action: In which truth begins to emerge.
---=={***}==---
The more Zephyr Anemoi thought about what had lead to this point, the more uneasy the gryphon became.
He wasn’t worried about the threat that came with raiding the Kingdom of Equestria; as any gryphon, gone into the wild to prove their mettle, understood, danger was to be faced and fear was to be mastered. In any case, they had been able to make two successful raids, without any losses. The might of the world’s dominant nation was balanced by their alien allies, these Orions, who had might that was out of this world.
Nor was he worried about damaging his personal cause; by ancient gryphon tradition what one did when “hunting” in foreign lands was of little matter next to the wealth and glory you brought back. He wanted to change his home city-state of Tethys for the better, and make the place return to its traditional tolerance. True, hunting wild monsters would have been better, but as their leader, Steel Sulfide, told him at the time, plans change, especially when you get such a good opportunity.
It started after the raid on Cloudsdale. Before, Gilda had been all in favor of “sticking it to the loser ponies,” but after she started getting twitchy. Being from Aleph, Gilda should have been more upset about enslaving ponies than Zephyr was; Tethys’s tolerance had come from being Aleph’s daughter colony. Still, he didn’t think that was the real cause... Something personal had happened in that raid.
By gryphon tradition, you just didn’t BREAK an agreement or alliance, such as his membership in Steel Sulfide’s band. This was as true for an individual as a city-state. You had to formally end it, either in accord with tradition, or in accord with the provisions of the alliance, or by mutual consent of both parties. So Zephyr had given his two week’s notice; he’d serve loyally until the time was up, and leave freely and openly.
At least, if the Orions let him leave... They were getting bossier and bossier, pushing the band into the raid on Canterlot itself, and were claiming most of the best booty. Would they respect gryphon tradition? Or would they...
The more he thought about it, the more Zephyr was nervous. He suspected he had been lied to, but he hadn’t made the last connection, not knowing enough metallurgy; Tethys’s specialization was their fishing fleets, unlike the metal masters of Steel Sulfide’s home of Ilrom-Ziril.
Steel was a form of iron, and the most famous form of iron sulfide was iron pyrite.
Fool’s Gold.
These contemplations were thrust aside as the intruder alarm wailed; Zephyr would soon have a battle to fight, and whatever knives might be pointed at his back, he would face the enemy at his front with all of his ability.
---=={***}==---
Lieutenant Siatt Onehli appeared in a cloud of sparkles, phaser leveled as he looked around the computer core room of the Orion ship. The ruse had worked, and the shield was lowered to let the raiders beam down reinforcements, and beam up those less minded to battle and more minded to collect the booty. The sensors available to Starfleet told them of the discordant response to the attack.
“Clear Ell-Zee,” Siatt reported into his com badge, moving to cover one door as Commander Delilah O’Niel was beamed up. Next to follow were Dash and one of the gryphons from the ambassador’s guard.
“Watch my back while I take over the computer core,” Delilah commanded, moving to her task. She added, as she sat at the computer terminal, “I am, if modesty will permit the boast, in the top five percent of Starfleet’s hackers.”
“And if I were to put modesty aside, I’d drop the word ‘percent.’” Not that she had told Starfleet the full scope of her abilities as a Systems Engineer, before the Vega attack put her on the fast track to starship command.
Delilah sat at the ship’s computer core, spreading equipment from her satchel across the surface of the terminal. There were two data pads, a tricorder, a pair of boxes with blinking lights, and a device that was simply a red button under a plastic shield. A set of cables were pulled out, and each device was connected into a radial network, with the button as the hub. Once set up, she raised her hands over the tools of her trade, bringing to mind the image of a pianist about to perform a masterpiece.
The Betazoid cleared her mind, resting her hands on the terminal. Her eyes closed as she opened her mind. Intelligent, living creatures, with few exceptions, were tool users, turning once inanimate materials into extensions of their wills. This behavior left psychic ‘afterimages’ on those tools. Usually, this was of no import, as the afterimages were often weak, few knowing they were there to seek them out, fewer able to detect them, and fewer still able to interpret them usefully.
Delilah was one of the handful gifted with the ability to understand machines from simply touching them with her telemechanic sense, but it was this gift, combined with her training in computer systems, hardware and software, that made her one of the Federation’s top hackers.
The training required to develop this gift to useful levels had cost her most of her ability to read thoughts in living minds, or to project her emotions or thoughts to the unreceptive. On the other hand, it had been enough to allow her to silently and secretly negotiate with Princesses Celestia and Luna. Delilah had never expected to encounter such powerful minds; Celestia’s combination of protective love and determination was little short of terrifying.
The alicorn sisters were hiding something, but Delilah was willing to help them keep hiding it. For now.
“I’ve disabled some of their internal sensors, and part of the security system,” Delilah announced. “We can beam the rest of the advance team up, and I should have enough time to take over the rest of the ship’s systems.”
---=={***}==---
Equestria was a largely peaceful nation, with too little conflict, internal or external, to create a military full of seasoned combat veterans. However, there was always some need for battle, to maintain the peace and to protect the people of the world’s largest nation.
As an aside, the fact that the local name for the world translated to ‘Earth’ had lead Princess Celestia to consider finding a new name, that could be used to identify their home world and solar system to the galaxy at large.
When a member of a local guard did demonstrate ability in combat conditions they were usually quickly recruited into the Canterlot Guard, which acted as Equestria’s limited army. Those that showed devotion to duty were then taken into the Royal Guard, serving the Princesses directly. Once in the Royal Guard, a pony’s background, whether common or noble, vanished under coat dyes and armor, which built unity among the members and added to the subtle intimidation created by their trained lack of expression.
Since the return of Nightmare Moon, and her resumption of the post of Princess Luna, co-Monarch of Equestria, the Queen of the Night had driven the Royal Guard hard, using her skill with illusions to train them to a higher level of ability and readiness.
All of which was largely moot in Bulwark’s specific case; he was part of that class known as the “military nobility,” and knew, almost from birth, that his place in Equestrian society was in battle. His coat was even naturally white. The two pegasus Royal Guards with him in the front line had risen to their positions by the more typical approaches, and all three were skilled at hoof-to-hoof combat. The civilian earth pony that completed the barrier between the enemy and those behind was less experience, but was faring well. He was sheltered in the personal shield the U.S.S. Judges’s crew had provided, and the veterans were covering his flanks.
Ensign Maya Oasis and Lieutenant Bindalla formed the back half of the battle line with a pair of security ratings and a unicorn member of the Royal Guard, who was armed with a telekinetically held phaser. The five provided covering fire against the slowly organizing raiders, as well as technical and organizational support.
There hadn’t been much plan, going in, because of the unknown arrangement of the enemy. This is where Maya’s gifts came in. She was watching the feeds from the sensors worn by the ponies in the fight, snapping orders to lead them to where the enemy was weak, while using her own phaser to fight the gryphons and Orions, defending herself and others directly.
With her guidance, the first half of the pony force had split the majority of the raiders away from their captives, sheltering those victims while the second half focused on that rescue. She gave them the coordination the raiders lacked, and they were capitalizing on it.
The last of the group defending the rescue team was Pinkie Pie, who had dived in amongst the enemy, bouncing around with her usual enthusiastic abandon, unpredictably moving and firing her party cannon randomly. While she drew attention and fire from the Orion raiders with energy weapons at hand, none of them could track her long enough to HIT her, and she managed to move so that the misses struck either the stone of the cave or other raiders, never her friends working to help the captives.
---
Despite being the highest ranking officer available, Lieutenant Commander Vulzy Raat wasn’t leading the fight. He wasn’t as well equipped with Ensign Oasis’s battlefield awareness, and his medical skills were needed in the group actually rescuing the captive ponies. He was able to apply what he had learned studying Rainbow Dash to good use. The raiders had used hand disruptors set to stun in the attack on Canterlot, so there were few grievous injuries, overcoming the lethargy the weapons had left often took his expertise. Most of The treatments included precisely calibrated energy fields from his medical tricorder, with only a few needing an injection of stronger stimulants.
With him was Applejack, who was using her physical might and skill with her hooves to buck open the cargo containers that the ponies had been put in. The crew of the U.S.S. Judges still didn’t understand how the earth ponies managed to make their hoof-strikes so selectively destructive, but the results were clear.
Following the Champion of Honesty and the Lieutenant Commander was a group of pony search party members, with a pair of Starfleet medical orderlies mixed in. The ponies gave the freed captives reassuring faces, while the medical orderlies built on Raat’s work in getting them on their hooves. The captives were being lead out the side exit the search party had used to invade the cavern.
---
Zephyr was not a veteran gryphon, but even he could tell that this surprise attack was quickly turning into a Charlie Foxtrot.
The gryphons were reacting faster than their Orion allies, the off-worlders “beaming” up and down to and from their ship. The officers, mostly female, were beaming up, taking the best of the jewelry and other treasure with them.
The speed of the attack, and the focus on the “Captive Inprocessing Operation” meant that none of the filled “cargo” containers could be beamed up.
Just thinking about the sanitized terms filled Zephyr with self-loathing for having fallen in among such. Apparently the Orions would enslave each other as well; the gryphon didn’t know if that made them better or worse.
Crew from the ship was beaming down, in theory to help quell this attack, but they were so disorganized they were materializing in open view of the enemy, and the ones in the second line were using their energy weapons to attack the glittering clouds, striking down reinforcements before they could join the battle.
“We’ve still got the numbers to win this,” a voice said at his side. A glance confirmed it to be his leader, Steel Sulfide. “We just need time to organize.”
Zephyr nodded, then asked, “How do we get that time?”
Steel grinned at the young gryphon. “You buy me that time. See that one, with the blue hair?” He pointed at a figure in the second row. “That one is coordinating things. Take her out.”
Zephyr did not respond, only leaping into the air between the cave roof and the combatants, his spear in hand. The fingers of stone dripping down from the marble ceiling meant he had to weave back and forth, both gaining cover and dodging incoming fire. He bore down on the intruders, eyes narrowing as he picked out the blue-haired female leading the battle.
---=={***}==---
While the sensors should have been disabled completely, that wasn’t something to rely on when they needed to be stealthy; thus, only the two remaining members of the Gryphon Ambassador’s guard, and Ensign Tarah, had joined the advance team on board the Orion starship, watching Commander O’Niel’s back as she took over the computer systems.
“What I’m doing wouldn’t work on a secure system,” Delilah said, as her hands flew over the ship’s core’s console and her collection of data pads. “I’m mounting the ship’s storage core as a drive on my data pads, and adding an account to the system files so I have root authority.” The absent tone in her voice revealed that she was speaking to herself, not to her allies guarding her back.
“Military secure systems tie the drives into the computer hardware to the point where they can’t be used on other computers without re-formatting them, making file access like this is impossible. Because of some spectacular security failures on starships often named Enterprise, Starfleet has learned to make it harder to seize control of our mil-spec ships by subverting the core like this. Cardassian and Romulan ships tend to be similarly secure. Cardassian because ‘efficiency’ being a distant second to ‘ability’ which sometimes led to their designs incorporating multiple system-wide control setups (often poorly documented as the crew of Deep Space 9 could tell you). Romulans put, well, before the supernova, had put a lot of energy into their petty internal conflict, and their paranoia led them to designing extremely secure systems. Despite their pretentions, the Orion Syndicate is still a pack of pirates, not a nation that can fund a proper military, which is why this will work.”
“What I’m doing now,” Delilah said, raising her voice slightly to indicate that people should actually listen for this part, her hands still flying over the input pads, “is creating a set of cascading commands to disable as much of the ship’s control systems as possible, keeping the crew from using the ship’s weapons, drives, shields, or sensors. However, once I start the sequence, they’ll know we’re here, and may start using manual overrides. So I want to shut down as much as possible at once, then we beam the others up and start securing the ship. Pressing the big red button will activate the queued commands; I set that up in case we were int-“
Delilah broke off mid-word, as the wave of emotion hit her empathic senses. She turned the swiveling chair of the computer terminal, still sitting, to see the opened door, having missed the sound of its opening under the sound of her voice. There stood a gryphon, female, looking surprised.
“Gilda,” Rainbow Dash growled, bracing herself to leap on her traitorous friend, “I’m gonna beat you-“
“Dash, wait.” Delilah didn’t raise her voice much, but she was able to infuse it with the tone of command she had developed, adding in her weak empathic projection in hopes of getting the pegasus’s attention. She raised one hand stopping Lieutenant Onehli from pressing the panic button.
It was enough. “Wait for wh-“ she began, only to be interrupted as Gilda broke down crying.
“DASH I’M SO SORRY!” she wailed, tears flowing as she fell to the deck.
“Wait,” Delilah repeated, “for her to decide how she feels.”