//------------------------------//
// A leaking ship of state 
// Story: Armor's Game 
// by OTCPony 
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A week later, Celestia stared down from the windows of the Hall of Heroes at the gathering crowd below. Behind her next to her throne lay the copy of The Equestrian Mail that she’d dropped in shock that morning. On the front page in huge bold letters was the headline; IS CELESTIA TAKING US TO WAR?

Other newspapers had been more subtle in their headlines. The tabloids had pulled fewer punches. In the final analysis it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Shining Armor’s plans for militarisation had been leaked to the press, and that morning ponies across Equestria had woken up to the news that their nation might be off to war. By ten o’clock, about twenty ponies had gathered outside the palace to protest. It had now swelled to fifty and was getting bigger.

She stared down miserably at the placards. “Make Cake Not War!” read one. “No Foreign Entanglements!” trumpeted another. Most agonising was the one that read “Where Is The Princess That We Used To Know?”

She turned from the window. Luna and Amber Spyglass stood before her. “I want to know who did this,” she said coldly.

“The Civil Service is looking into the leak as we speak,” said Luna. “But it really could be anyone on the Council, not to mention the staff in the Home Office, Foreign Office and Treasury who saw the documents.”

“Amber, I need you to look into it as well.”

The Chief of Intelligence shifted uncomfortably on his hooves. “Your Highness, I’m truly flattered by your willingness to test my abilities. I must, however, remind you that I have no authority in this area. My role is to identify threats to Equestria, not bureaucrats who can’t keep documents safe.”

“The pony responsible must be found, Amber. This leak has terrorised half of Equestria. If it had stayed secret we could have released the details slowly and through the proper channels. Instead we have madness on the streets and madness in the news. There’ll be madness in Parliament as well. And they all think I am responsible for it!”

She sat down heavily on the throne. Luna nodded to Amber Spyglass. “Leave us.”

The Chief of Intelligence trotted away. When she heard the double doors swing closed, Luna sat down next to her sister and crossed her horn with hers. “I’m sorry, Tia.”

“What’s done is done,” sniffed Celestia, nuzzling her. In her hooves she turned over a small piece of acorn-shaped lead. “All that matters now is what we do next.”

“Even if we find the leak, my sister, we have no choice but to stand by the Privy Council’s decision. We may even have to accelerate it. It will not be long before Chrysalis knows we are arming.”

“Which in turn will make us look even more like war-happy despots,” said Celestia bitterly. She looked up at the great stained glass windows around her. The great history of Equestria was immortalised there: the destruction of the Windigos by the Founders; the tyranny, banishment, return and redemption of Discord; the defeat of Nightmare Moon and Luna’s return; Spike saving the Crystal Empire. She and Luna were history, were in history, just as Twilight and her friends were. And today history had been made again.

And as she stared up at history, she recalled a saying attributed to Clover the Clever over two thousand years before:

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

She sighed. “Go now and rest, my sister. You should have been asleep at sunrise. In the mean time, I have an angry Parliament to face.”


***


Prince Blueblood was not in Canterlot Castle. He had spotted the crowd building just as he’d finished breakfast and had hastily sent for his carriage. There was no sense in being kept stuck in the castle all day by the mob.

Sitting in the study of his Canterlot mansion, he carefully folded away that morning’s Canterlot Chronicle. He then opened the folder containing the stories from other newspapers that he secretary had selected for him that morning. From the gutter press Sun and Moon to the respected Manehattan Telegraph their reports on the leak were broadly similar: Plenty of speculation and sensationalism smothering the sole kernel of truth that Celestia wanted to build an army. Even that wasn’t entirely accurate, but that didn’t matter. To Blueblood’s surprised relief, the leak hadn’t even included details about who on the Council had voted for what, so he was free of Celestia’s stain.

For now, that is. The royals had been damaged by this leak, with their exercise of power apparently arbitrary and out of touch. If he remained with them, it would not take long for the dirt to rub off on him.

Of course, Blueblood had never cared much about what ponies thought about him, but there was a difference between being hated for being the social superior to virtually everyone in Equestria, and being hated for making bad political decisions. The former would only cost you invitations to social functions. The latter would cost you power. And Prince Blueblood was very fond of power.

The House of Blueblood had been fairly wealthy when he had been born, but compared to most noble families or upstart nouveau riches, the house that had the de jure right to the throne should anything happen to the Princesses had been impoverished. Instead of the great schools of Eaton or Jarrow, the young Blueblood had been sent to Maneborough, good enough but effectively an inner city slum school to a colt of his upbringing. He had disdained his classmates, disdained those of other families who had gone to those two great schools, for he knew that one day he would possess power over them all.

Then when he was twenty his father, always slightly too fond of drink, had taken a tumble on the stairs while walking up from dinner. A month later he had been invested by Celestia as the new Prince Blueblood.

Yet it had not been as he imagined. Instead of bowing before their superior, his underlings had done all they could to ignore him. His powers were subject to oversight by Celestia, and he had been a marginalised voice on the Privy Council when he thought they should have all leant him their ears.

If he could not hold power there, he’d decided, he would seek it elsewhere. He had taken his father’s hooful of mines and expanded them. He’d found at the University of Manehattan that he had a formidable aptitude for gem-finding spells, and had personally supervised the development of new mines in the Unicorn Range, the Reinines, Foal Mountain, and the Macintosh Hills before he was thirty. Over the past decade he’d been expanding into Horsetralia, Zebrica and Haysia, where employee’s rights laws were a much more esoteric concept than they were in Equestria. He’d built up one of the largest fortunes on Equus and at last, all turned to listen when he spoke.

But it still wasn’t enough. He craved the kind of power only held by Celestia and Luna, those two absolute diarchs, and he wanted it solely concentrated in his own person. And their support for Shining Armor’s military reforms had given him an opening.

He checked the clock on the wall. Three minutes to four. He aimed his horn and sent a jet of magic at the wooden-cased radio on the other side of the room. The speaker crackled to life.

“This is EBC Parliament, I’m Posting Pundit; the time is two minutes to four. In just a few moments, this afternoon’s debate will begin, and from the galleries, I can see that it’s a particularly crowded house. There are over a hundred MPs here, and we rarely get more than twenty for an end-of-week debate. Owing to this morning’s revelations, we can safely say that this will be a very interesting two hours.”

There was a click as a technician switched on the magical microphones in the House of Commons chamber. The hustle and chatter of the MPs faded as the Speaker of the House, Muffled Merkin, spoke up. “Order, order,” he crooned softly.

“Radical Road, MP for Gasconeigh North will begin with a motion to condemn the proposed militarisation plans,” continued the Speaker in that inanely slow Shetland-accented voice of his. There were cheers of “here here!”, far more than a pony like Radical Road would ever get before in Parliament.

“Mister Speaker,” came Radical Road’s voice. Blueblood could visualise the bright red stallion with a Phrygian cap on his flank already. “Members of the House. I address you today so that we might condemn a shocking abuse of power. An arbitrary decision made without regard for Parliament that may well plunge this nation into war. A decision made by none other than the very mare we thought we could trust, our own Princess Celestia!”

There were more shouts of “here here!”, this time louder.

“As we learnt this morning,” continued Radical Road. “Princess Celestia wishes to assemble an army of fifty thousand ponies. Fifty thousand of our colts and fillies trained to fight and die. There was no intention of putting this to vote before Parliament, the ponies’ representatives.

“An army of fifty thousand ponies, formed for what purpose, my friends? What enemies do we have? What conflicts threaten us? None and none, my friends! We are to take fifty thousand of our young stallions and mares away from the prime of their lives, away from education, away from the harvest, to serve in a ridiculously oversized Royal Guard! This plan will only serve to ruin peace and harmony in this fair nation! What threats are there that cannot be faced down by the tried and tested techniques that we have always used? To answer this question, we need only look at the Treasury Bench! Not one member of Their Highnesses’ Government has appeared today to defend this new policy!”

There was a thunderous cry of “here, here!”

“Therefore!” thundered Radical Road. “I motion that we condemn in the strongest possible terms this militarisation plan, and bring a vote of censure against the architect of this plan, Prince Shining Armor!”

There were more cries of “shame!” this time, but most MPs were still cheering for Radical Road. Blueblood had heard enough. Another jet of magic switched off the radio.

He would have to wait for the latest opinion polls, but the wheels were already turning. For an MP like Radical Road, long marginalised as an extremist fool, to get a reception like that in the Commons was proof enough of a major shift beginning. Celestia would still get a war with the Changelings, and Blueblood would still make his fortune (that particular anonymous tip had proved quite fortuitous), but after that, there would be a reckoning before the ponies of Equestria.

And Blueblood would be in just the right place when it happened.