Summer of My Human Soldier

by KFDirector

The Procession

The chariot descended through the clouds, borne aloft by the two pegasus ponies in gray uniforms.

“Where shall we set down?” asked the senior of the two, to their unicorn passenger.

“The library. Ah, it is…” Foggy Night peered down at the town below. “…that large tree, there.”

“A library, Comrade Commissar?”

“Yes.” The old unicorn frowned. The Golden Oaks Library had once been an annex of the Royal Canterlot Library, sometimes holding rare books for it—and the Royal Canterlot Library was not in good shape. Revolutions, lost records, lost personnel, deliberate sabotage—no evidence of the Elements of Harmony was to be found in Canterlot anymore. But simply saying that would not be enough to satisfy Her Majesty Comrade General Secretary Nightmare Moon Luna.

Wheels touched down on the grass, and Foggy Night disembarked.

“Do you require an escort, Comrade?”

“In a library? I should hope I can handle myself. Keep watch over my chariot, Comrades.” The pegasus ponies saluted, and the unicorn trotted up to the door of the great tree, adorned with windows and greenery and balconies and other expansions—a product of a much older time, fashioned as much by earth pony magic as by nature, given that the tree still lived despite being hollowed out.

He pushed the door open with his hoof and trotted right in.

“Uuuuwaaaaah!” a small purple unicorn mare cried inarticulately, jumping up onto her hooves. Next to her was a human, brown in mane, clad in denim blue garments. It stood up, quietly, respectfully. They had apparently both been seated at a low table; there were two cups of some hot drink between them.

Foggy Night peered at the human. “Identify yourself.”

After a moment’s hesitation, it blurted out: “Dexter, Christopher George, Private, 078-05-1120.”

He blinked, recalling the name. “You were assigned to labor at Sweet Apple Acres. Why are you here?”

The unicorn mare started speaking quickly. “Comrade Applejack simply sent him over to retrieve a reference guide on orchard management!”

“This required tea service?”

“No, we just—I had never had a chance to—I mean—”

Foggy Night smiled, though more like a wolf than like a pony. “At ease, Comrade. This is not an inspection. Have you gotten the human his book?”

She stammered. “Er, no, not yet, I just—”

“Then provide him with it, so that he will not keep Comrade Applejack any longer.”

The mare hurriedly ran to a shelf, summoning a book down and letting the human take it. “Oh! And she’ll want these other materials, too….” Another pile of loose leaf documents was set atop the book, which the human was holding up too high for Foggy Night to see clearly. “That…should be everything! Okay, bye!”

He watched as the human carefully stepped out, and then turned his gaze back to the mare. “I will aim to make this quick, Comrade. Provide me with all materials this library has regarding the Elements of Harmony.”

She smiled nervously. “I’m…not familiar with those.”

“Then check the card catalogs. I can wait.” He sat, and stared at her. She gulped, and moved to the card files at one end of the room, opening drawers with her magic. As she flipped through them, he nodded, speaking. “You are Twilight Sparkle, are you not?”

“Um…yes,” she said, distractedly, as she magically shuffled through the cards.

“Your older brother was…a Shining Armor, I think. Perished during the Revolution, no?” He didn’t wait for a confirmation. “I remember now, yes. Cadet Shining Armor; killed in battle by revolutionary forces while failing to defend Princess Cadence from her deserved fate. His parents—your parents—met a similar end, I recall?”

His eyes were not strong, but he thought he could see the tears in hers, as she lifted out a card and walked to a shelf.

“I am not my family,” she said, her voice thick with stress, as she pulled down a thick tome. “I am a member of the Lunar Republican Party in good standing.” She plopped the book down in front of him.

“Of course you are, Comrade. Hmm. Elements of Harmony: A Reference Guide. How shockingly convenient.”

“It was under ‘E’.”

He flipped through the book’s pages, finding where the last known location was—a former royal palace, now located within the Everfree Forest. If it were there, wouldn’t Luna have already found it? “I will be checking this out, Comrade Sparkle. I expect my Commissar status will adequately substitute for my lack of a library card?”

---

“There you are!” Applejack cried, trotting up the lane to Dexter, as he approached, carrying a book. “I heard you ran off, so I was gonna send Rainbow Dash after you, but then I heard you were gonna go see Twilight Sparkle, so then I was just mighty baffled. What happened?”

“I…” he began, walking alongside her back towards the farm, “…have had a very confusing day.”

“You’re a thousand miles from home, a prisoner of war alongside a species that ain’t yours, and talking to Twilight makes it a confusing day.” She puffed her cheeks, and then exhaled. “Yep, I could see that.” She looked up at his face; it seemed still contorted by thought. “Well, did it all make y’all feel any better?”

“Not so much better as different, ma’am. But I can work, ma’am.”

“Then help me work on some fences and talk to me about what happened,” she said, worried. She herself couldn’t nail down why—maybe he was in danger, maybe he was the danger—but she at least knew that she was worried about him.

---

“You are the human I need,” Celestia said, as the two stood weightless in an endless field of twinkling stars.

She waved a wing, and a pool of stars began to swirl in many colors, and then within that pool images began to take shape. He knelt by the pool, and peered into it, as she continued to speak.

“If humans and ponies did not share a world, then your problems would be yours and pony problems would be ponies’, and each of us we would solve our own. But we share a world, and there are no human problems and no pony problems: there are only our problems. And to our problems, there can only be our solutions. Time and again and again.

“Sometimes, your role is very great indeed.” Her horn glowed, and the pool showed a world of centuries past—tree-covered hills surrounded by red badlands, and zooming into that image, a great battle taking place—thousands of humans against hundreds of dragons. Dexter peered closer, and he began to hear sounds, as well, coming from the pool.

The largest dragon snarled, slamming a great claw on the ground, which narrowly missed a man, dark-skinned and dark-haired, clad in light hides for armor and wielding a long spear. “You treacherous human! You dare attack us during our sacred time, during the Great Migration?”

The human danced to one side to avoid a breath of flames. “You did not leave humans alone during their sacred days, their seasons set aside to peace, diplomacy, marriage or birth!”

He rolled underneath the dragon’s belly, and then all the way out the other end before the dragon’s claws could pin him there. “No longer will we stand aside, Thunderbirds, giving you leave to make your nest in the lands of our children’s children while you ravage the villages and camps of innocent people in faraway lands.”

With one strong hand, he grabbed a horned scale on the dragon’s side, and hurled himself up onto its back. “Remorseless, destructive, and greedy, no spark of conscience moves your stone hearts.”

The dragon thrashed, but he held on, methodically working his way up to the back of its neck, still holding his spear. “Every living Thunderbird is gathered here this day, and I swear this, Eldest One: every living Thunderbird will fall this day at the hands, arrows, slings and spears of the Seven Council Fires!”

“Were it not for humans,” she said, as the image dissolved, “such an extreme measure may or may not have been necessary—but were it not for them, such an extreme measure certainly never could have been possible. At other times, your role has been smaller, though necessary: buying us time, for instance, against some great evils.”

In the midst of a great desert there was a great white city—the humans who lived there were fighting and fleeing a great swarm of winged and horned quadrupeds, perforated and glossy black. Looking closer, at a great square inside the city, at the center of an arrayed horde, there was a raised dais—and on that dais, there stood a tall bearded man in a long white robe; beside him, picking herself off the ground, was a woman dressed similarly in white.

The tallest of the glossy black quadrupeds, wearing a mane of sickly blue, stalked towards him, licking her lips with a forked tongue.

The man clutched his heart and spoke, glaring into her eyes. “Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, once allowed the lands of His children to fall into the hooves of the faithless ponies, to test our commitment to struggle in His name. He has allowed this day to come—for me to be surrounded by my foes, and foes wearing the faces of my friends—and this test I will endure.”

He turned for a moment and looked at the monsters swarming over the city, the fires growing. “You have taken from me my army, my fortress, my city, my sword, and my rifle all. But you have left me armed still with three things: Allah; my faith in Him; and my love. In this, you have erred fatally, O Evil Queen.”

He clenched the hand of the woman, and together they stood, looking fiercely into the eyes of the queen.

“My bride, stand beside me: together, our love shall see an end to this foe.”

“Did that work?” Dexter couldn’t help but ask, softly, as the image faded.

“It…delayed the changelings. Sufficiently. And, at other times still, humans are catalysts—the problems would be solved entirely by ponies, but the presence of humans helps to cause ponies to solve them faster.”

In the midst of a vast, ice-covered cavern, three ponies—one earth, one unicorn, one pegasus—walked free, while many others were trapped frozen in wintry prisons of ice as cold as their hearts. And among the three ponies who still roamed free, there stood one man, pale in skin, blond of hair, wrapped in furs and laughing uproariously, as he looked upwards—upwards, at a circle of ghostly horses, their every hoof beat and every snort pushing out a deadly chill.

“Scream all you like, beasts, stamp at the sky with your flint hooves and snort your fire and frost—for I am Norse! The winter’s breath and death did not frighten me when I was an outlaw among my own people! Nor when I came viking in the distant shores beyond Greenland! And it frightens me still less now, surrounded by good friends as I am—talking tiny horses colored like the spring flowers though they may be—with mead and cider sufficient to see me and us through the final twilight.”

He heaved with breath, and threw back a tankard of cider, wiping it off his beard and laughing. “So rage on, you beasts! Your fury brings me laughter! Smart Cookie, stoke the hearth; and Clover the Clever, another round—the Sagas say this night will last three years, and we will not spend another moment of it cold or sober!”

“Those three ponies would have come across that solution sooner or later, but the human’s presence brought them to it much faster, saving them all a lot of pain.” Celestia waved her wings, and the pool dissolved back into colors. “When ponies already have all the pieces to deal with a problem, sometimes a human is needed to make them come together to solve it before there can be too much more pain. Sometimes I need a catalyst.”

“You need…me?” he asked, quavering.

“You will make something happen that otherwise would take too long.”

“No—no, that’s not me. I’m…not a courageous man.”

She smiled softly. “You say that as if to convince yourself. I have used your family before, and the blood of Jack Hartmann still runs in your veins.”

“You what?”

A fresh image conjured in the pool, one Dexter could scarcely understand—a giant bear and a time-traveling unicorn seemed to be involved. He shook his head.

“There have to be thousands of other American prisoners of war. You want a warrior, a hero like Jack—look to them.”

“If I needed a warrior, I knew where to find one.”

“Well, if you want a man of peace, you need to look somewhere else, too! They called me a pacifist, but I couldn’t stand up for those beliefs; I was too afraid of prison and I couldn’t convince them that my beliefs were sincere.”

Her wings pushed strongly on his shoulders, twisting him in the weightless ether so that he was staring eye to eye with her. Celestia’s eyes burned deep into him, and her voice became stronger, less of air and more of fire.

“If I needed a true pacifist, or a charismatic and convincing speaker, I knew where to find one of those, too. I am here to call you, Christopher George Dexter. You are the human I need.”

---

He very likely shouldn’t have told Applejack all of that, but he was a long way from home, a long time from seeing a face he considered friendly, and though he was no stranger to keeping his thoughts to his self, the isolation had pressed deeply—and this orange earth pony seemed a friendly enough ear.

“But y’all didn’t believe it?”

“It was unicorn magic. That could’ve been anything, I guess—hypnosis, mind control, whatever—I wasn’t going to believe it until your grandmother started talking about the exact same things Celestia showed me.”

Applejack quietly regarded whether the word of Granny Smith would be enough to get her to believe something really strange, but decided not to push it. “So whaddaya reckon Celestia wants from ya?”

---

“The first thing is simple,” she said, trotting through a hall of mirrors, each showing other places, times, and worlds. “A world with humans is necessarily a world without dragons. In a world without dragons, my most faithful student lacks an important assistant. Without that assistant, she struggles to make the friends she needs to do something important.”

---

“She wants y’all to help Twilight make friends,” Applejack deadpanned. “Princess Celestia, Goddess of the Sun, had to personally come and talk to y’all so our librarian could make some friends.”

“Probably not,” Dexter admitted, twisting wire through a fence post. “She said that was the ‘first thing’, implying there are others—but she doesn’t want to tell me them yet, or maybe at all—whatever it is she really wants, I do this first and that probably puts me in place to do what she really wants.”

“And are y’all gonna do that?” She tested the tautness of the wire with her hoof, and smiled briefly in satisfaction.

“If you let me.”

Applejack paused, taken aback. “What? What’s my say-so got to do with anything? I mean…oh, right. Well, yeah…we still got work to do and all, but I guess in your free time…shoot, I hate this.”

“Ma’am?”

She took off her hat and spat on the ground. “This stupid arrangement they’ve got. Why can’t y’all just be a farmhand, live-in hired help here for the season? Why you gotta be a—dagnabbit. Why’s there gotta be a war to make things all twisted up like this?”

---

“Rise and shine, my little ponies! Welcome...to the Ranch!”

Light shone into the darkness as a human guard pulled down the back flaps of the truck. Two others extended the back ramp and let it slam into the hot dust. A fourth waved the ponies forward, and one by one they got to their feet and trotted out. One loud, chubby human in a white cotton suit spoke lazily from his shaded porch as the guards maneuvered the ponies into line.

“Y’all are Uncle Sam’s personal guests at the world’s first and only facility capable of hosting pegasus ponies, earth ponies, and unicorns alike.”

Thunder Lane stumbled in the dust, trying to keep his balance with a set of leg chains.

“Now, I don’t know how well y’all got along with each other back home, but we got all kinds here, and you’re going to fit in real good. Of course, in case you get rabbit in your blood, and you decide to take off for home, you get shot at until we catch you, and a quad of leg chains to keep you slowed down just a little bit more. Now, for your own good, you’ll learn the rules. It’s all up to you—I can be a good guy, or I can be one real mean son of a bitch. It’s all up to you.”

A prod with a rifle evened up Thunder Lane’s place in line, and he idly tested his wings—he could move them, barely, but he couldn’t spread them properly, feeling some kind of resistance.

“Rule one, no flying, no magic. If you’re of the pegasus persuasion, y’all might’ve noticed some little metal bands on your wings. Now, the feel of them will get familiar real fast, but even if them come off, it’ll take a little while for you to bend them back into flying shape. We’ve lost one featherbrain already—fella didn’t realize that, jumped from the water tower trying to escape, thinking his wings would still work. Or, hell, maybe he was trying to end it all. We’ll never really know what went through his mind—except the ground itself.”

He glanced up and down the row—other pegasus ponies, but only a few from his unit. No sign of Sergeant Meadow Song. Thunder Lane wouldn’t have figured on his sergeant, already weak from poison, to have survived, but he quietly hoped that he at least took a few more bastards down with him when he went.

“As for the unicorns—not that we’ve got any on this bus—well, we’ve got a little something for them too, that works wonders. Suffice to say, we catch any of y’all trying to get them rings off their horns, we call that an escape attempt, and that...well, that just ain’t healthy.”

That…is really bad, Thunder Lane realized. If the humans have developed a countermeasure to unicorn magic…that’s really bad news.

“Rest of the rules will come. You just pay real close attention to them, and you’ll get through this war all safe-and-sound. And ain’t that just what we all want?”

The white-suited human took his seat again, and the line was set to moving again by the guards, towards the third of a row of low, squat stables.

Thunder Lane marched with the rest of the ponies, panting through the sweltering heat—parts of Equestria got this hot, and parts got this humid, but he didn’t think anypony lived somewhere that was so bad on both ends. The shade of the stable, while not air-conditioned and thus as humid as the outdoors, was a positive relief.

Here, along with the guards, another chubby human in a white suit was waiting—Thunder Lane assumed it was a different one, though it could be hard to tell humans apart; they came in so few colors—and tossing folded clothing at them. Striped, cotton, light blue: shirts and pants both.

“Them clothes got laundry numbers on them. You remember your number and always wear the ones that has your number. Any pony forgets their number spends a night in the box.”

107459, Thunder Lane tried to memorize, as the human threw a set of gray towels down on a wooden table in the stable hallway.

“These here towels you keep with you to wipe your muzzle after chowing or drinking. Any pony loses their towel or shows me a dirty muzzle spends a night in the box.

“There’s no playing buck-ass or fighting in the buildings. You got a grudge against another pony, you fight them Saturday afternoon. Any pony playing buck-ass or fighting in the buildings spend a night in the box.

“First bell’s at five minutes of 8:00 when you will get in your stall. Last bell is at 8:00. Any pony not in their stall spends a night in the box.

“There is no smoking over any straw-covered surfaces, in or out of doors. To smoke you must be over a solid cement or asphalt surface. Any pony caught smoking over straw-covered surfaces spends a night in the box.”

Thunder Lane wasn’t aware, personally, of any ponies that smoked. But apparently it was something very important to the humans; they always made provisions for it: even their Red Cross parcels had has cigarettes.

“Your stalls get two sheets. Every Saturday, you put the clean sheet on the top, the top sheet on the bottom, the bottom sheet you turn in to the laundry colt. Any pony turns in the wrong sheet spends a night in the box.”

One of the other pegasus ponies from Thunder Lane’s unit began to speak, apparently confused by the sheet-in-a-stall concept—sheets went on beds, straw went in stalls—but the human’s speech plowed straight ahead.

“No pony’ll sit or stand in the stalls with muddy hooves. Any pony with muddy hooves sitting or standing in the stalls spends a night in the box.

“Any pony don’t bring back their empty cider bottle spends a night in the box.

“Any pony loud talking spends a night in the box.

“You got questions, you come to me. I’m Carr, the floor walker. I’m responsible for order in here. Any pony don’t keep order spends a night in...”

The human glared at Thunder Lane, who had started to mutter the end of the human’s sentence for him, and walked right up to him, hard-eyed.

“...the box. I hope you ain’t going to be a hard case.” He blew a puff of cigar smoke into Thunder Lane’s face.

Thunder Lane silently shook his head.

“Where the hell are we?” he managed to ask one of his fellows, as the chubby human walked out of the stable.

“America?” the orange pegasus colt replied with a shrug. “And they called this place ‘the Ranch.’”

“Right but—it’s a big place, America.”

“Florida,” was the reply of a big brown earth pony, trotting into the room. “And past the fences, there’s a swamp full of lizards that can eat a pony in two bites, in case you aren’t clear on what kind of place Florida is.” The pony, a stallion with a steel I-beam for a cutie mark, eyeballed Thunder Lane. “Sergeant Beam, Second Mareland Heavies; captured four months ago in Texas. You?”

“Thunder Lane, Corporal, Fifth Pegasus Recon.” He glanced around. “Raid on an armory in Nebraska. It was either a set-up or the humans have some new sensors we weren’t briefed on, because it was a slaughter. How bad is this place?”

Sergeant Beam gestured with his head, and Thunder Lane and the orange pegasus pony followed him to the stable’s back exit, out into the yard. “The weather would get pegasus ponies brought up on charges if it ever happened back home, the wildlife past the fences would fit in the Everfree, and you’ll be pulling a plow for Uncle Sam six days a week, eight hours a day, sunshine permitting. The food’s pretty bad, but there’s plenty of it; nopony goes hungry unless they’re just that picky an eater.”

“Anypony ever escaped?”

“A few cleared the fences back when I got here. The lucky ones got caught by the guards. The unlucky ones got caught by the ‘gators. The really unlucky ones got caught by the guards’ dogs. Word of advice: stay clear of the unicorns. The humans don’t have a handle on what all unicorns can do, so they get pretty jumpy.”

Thunder Lane snorted. “Hell, I don’t even know what all unicorns can do.”

“Whatever it is, it’s not enough to get us out of here—past whatever trick the humans did to them—but it’s enough to make them nervous. You won’t get tagged for a ‘special security interview’ if you’re never seen talking to a unicorn, I’ll put it that way.”

“And if I want to escape?”

“Then leave me out of it; I’m more a fan of surviving until a prisoner exchange. C’mon, I’ll introduce you to some of the others.”

---

“Move it, human!” shouted a guard, unnecessarily, as Michael Kurier jumped up into the train car. He nodded at the five men already seated, and sat on the bench next to them. The guard kept his battle saddle trained on them, while another earth pony in uniform checked the cuffs on their hands and feet.

“All secure,” the second guard said, while eyeballing Kurier. “They’re ready to move out.”

The two ponies stepped out of the train car, and a third guard on the outside shut the side door of the train car with ponykinesis.

The six men sat for a moment in the dimly-lit train car; it was meant for cargo, not passengers, with the benches clearly welded in later.

“Anyone know what the hell’s going on?” another man asked—David Portillo, one of Michael’s fellow corporals from their unit.

“We’re being sent to Fillydelphia,” Michael replied, testing his cuffs. “They think we might be a security risk.” Click. “Looks like they might have been right.”

The wheels of the train whined on the track as the distant engine began to chug to life.

David stared at Michael’s cuffs, now clearly undone. “We got a plan?”

“We sit tight for now. Let the train take us north for a while, while we get everyone quietly unshackled. Sometime tomorrow, we should be near Canterlot.”

David nodded. “You’re senior here, and you know what you’re doing. Lead on, Mike.”