//------------------------------//
// 23. Air Raids 
// Story: The Red Sun Rises: Homefront 
// by The Atlantean 
//------------------------------//

Looking back at the last two months, the Equestrian army had been the luckiest group of motherfuckers ever to exist. And the most bored. Nothing happened for two whole months. Crimson could swear that was a signal flare for something bad. Leaving the army in the capable hooves of Captain Midnight Shadow, Lieutenant Silver Comet, and Major Crystal Snow, the colonel journeyed from Ponyville to Manehattan for a reunion.

He now stood on the largest pier on Manehattan Island, waiting for Queen Atlanta and the Atlantean Reserve Emergency Army to pull into the harbor. Glancing to the north, Crimson could see the wrecks of the Withersburg and Tartarus bridges behind the still-proud Bricklyn Bridge. He’d stayed awake all night in the harbormaster’s office with the rest of the ponies whose shift was expected to be when the ships came to port. They were less than ecstatic.

Soon, the partially-built fort several miles to the south fired a yellow flare high above the half-frozen lowlands surrounding the bustling city. In response, almost three dozen green flares shot up from just over the horizon. Below them were fifteen more flares, blue this time, signifying their homeland. Crimson recognized it as a challenge-and-reply system that must’ve been put in place by Princess Cadence while the army trained more in Ponyville. Huge clouds of smoke suddenly appeared as the Atlantean ships fired their cannons out to sea.

“Unno, a battle’s startin’ up!” cried a pony next to Crimson.

“Not a chance. The guns’re firing in salute,” he replied. “Prepare for their arrival.”

The massive transports came in first, screened by ships of the line on each side. In the center of the cluster of fifty ships was none other than a flagship. She was painted ocean blue, with golden sails and masts rivaling medium-sized buildings in height. Three not-quite-closed rows of thirty gunports each lined her hull, topped by a fourth row of twenty more on the deck. On her tallest mast streamed the Atlantean naval jack. Just below it the personal flag of the Queen was held to aft by the forward motion of the ship. On the other ships was the same configuration, but Crimson saw the slightest difference in the Queen’s flag, signifying it as the true flagship.

The flagship, which Crimson recognized as the Pearl of Iris, hove to along the pier and coasted to a stop. Her two-hundred-fifty-foot length shocked everypony who came to gawk at her. As she finally halted, her bowsprit came close to poking the harbor facilities by less than twenty feet. She wasn’t as big as Trinity, captained by Crimson’s longtime friend Platinum Starlight who stayed behind for security reasons, but Pearl of Iris was huge.

Crimson watched from the pier as a security detachment trotted down the gangplank. They all saluted and formed a semicircle around him. An ocean-blue alicorn walked gracefully down from the ship, and every Atlantean bowed deeply. Crimson stood straight again and made a gesture that told the queen he knew she was in the guard somewhere. The decoy nodded, casting a spell that showed her to be a pitch-black Unicorn.

One of the guards used her own spell to open the flaps in her armor, letting her wings reappear and spread out. She removed her sunrise-gold helmet and sighed. “You never will be fooled by my decoys, will you, Colonel?”

After bowing deeply, he replied. “Never. The only way for you to fool me would to actually be the decoy. Even then, you have a low chance, my Queen.”

“I know you are… uneasy about commanding an army led by me. I understand. Just do not worry about it.”

“Please don’t read my mind.”

She smiled. “Now where’s the fun in that?”

The two embraced in a familiar, family way. Then they walked towards the city, side by side, while the transports pulled in and unloaded their much-needed cargo. The security detachment surrounded them in a way that wouldn’t impede in Atlanta’s watching where she was going but let the guards easily protect her.

“Colonel Dawn, when may I expect to see Princess Mi Amore Cadenza?”

“A day or two, my lady. She stayed in Baltimare where the weather is less interesting. Her entourage should arrive within the week.”
Atlanta nodded. “While on my way here, I received a message from your daughter. She said something about an unstable gem, a Dragonspire Citadel, and P.O.W.s being forced to work as a labor pool. I haven’t heard anything since.”

“A labor pool. Did I hear you right?”

“I’m afraid so. Andromeda must be included in this, or she wouldn’t have been able to know.”

That night, Cadence’s train pulled into the Manehattan station. The icy tracks kept her from going very fast, but she managed. Here, the temperature difference was even more profound than in Baltimare. The pink alicorn only wished that Hearth’s Warming wouldn’t be the out of whack. Maybe next year. Not next week, sadly. She fell asleep as soon as she walked into the simple room where she would stay for a few days.

The next morning, the princess and queen met, flanked by a few guards. They were in the harbormaster’s office, which Atlanta recognized as a familiar place in a foreign country. They formally shook hooves, declared the alliance, and agreed that Sombra was plain evil. Then Crimson pointed out that good and evil were points of view, and that Sombra might consider himself on the “good” side. They told him he was overanalyzing the system. Sombra was the antagonist, and that was good enough to do something about it.

Suddenly, the roar of ten thousand manticores reached their pricking ears. Crimson raced to the door, swinging it wide open. His mouth dropped in awe as twenty aircraft swooped in from the north. They wove through the tightly packed streets, barely fifty feet off the ground, their engines blasting everything and everyone in the middle of the road behind them. Crimson watched until he realized the obvious objective: the Atlantean fleet and army anchored in the harbor.

“Sound the alarm! Get everyone off the docks! Move it, move it, move it!” he screamed, but his voice was lost over the aircraft noise.

Atlanta galloped to the door and saw why Crimson suddenly started yelling. An aircraft released a missile that sat in the air for a second before accelerating towards a ship of the line. Its crew brought out their small arms and opened fire on the obviously hostile tube. Every single shot missed its mark, and the missile collided slightly above the waterline. The high-pitched cries of the crew aboard were never heard, but the explosion that engulfed them, along with the resulting shockwave, were practically felt.

Atlanta recognized the symbol on the side of the aircraft as an “X” made from a scythe and a hammer. She didn’t know what that meant, but anything with it was an enemy. Her eyes darted to the next missile that was launched. It locked itself onto the fort to the south and took a sizable chunk off the stoneworks. On and on the attack went, destroying many of the ships in the harbor. Whoever flew the craft either didn’t know which ships had troops and supplies or didn’t care, because almost a full third of the wrecks now littering the water were civilian ferries and river barges. But the majority was composed of Atlantean ships of the line and some transports.

Cadence immediately emptied ferries and sent them to look for survivors. Neither ruler was very hopeful, but they had to try. Thousands of ponies had been on those ships. She also sent for the now-fueled American ships and asked them to send a couple to Manehattan. When he heard of the scythe-and-hammer on the planes, Captain Reynolds himself came up with Ticonderoga and another cruiser, along with the destroyer John Paul Jones, to assist, mumbling something about Russians before Shining Armor departed back to the pier.

Hope for anypony left had died by the time the American vessels sailed effortlessly into the harbor. Debris floated in the wakes of the three steel ships as they slowed from their northbound sprint to a measly (to them) five knots. They picked their way to the approximate center of the harbor and spread out, their CIWS guns and five-inches swiveling around for targets.

The next day, the airplanes returned with another full payload. Once again, they went after everything in the water.

“There they are! Feed ‘em into the computer!” Reynolds yelled.

The five-inch turrets swiveled north and opened up. High-explosive rounds were spit from their barrels with a dragon’s flame licking after them. Most missed by a fraction of a degree, and Reynolds gave the order to switch to the CIWS. The ones that found their targets sent the Russian fighters to the surface, enveloped in flames. The “Sea Whiz” fired an astonishing amount of bullets in less than a minute. More of the Russians crashed into the megacity and harbor. Mushroom fireballs plooomed into the air with each plane that was hit.

One of the now less than fifteen pilots left launched his last air-to-surface missile straight at John Paul Jones. An SM-3 was quickly launched in succession at the jet, but almost immediately redirected itself at the much-quicker missile. The sudden course change caused the missile to miss at first, but it did a 180-degree flip, still locked on, and accelerated once again to the Russian missile.

As Reynolds watched with horror, the Russian missile slammed into the destroyer’s bridge, detonating and turning the forward superstructure to blackened, twisted steel. The SM-3 had nearly caught up by then, automatically locking on the heat signature that was the American ship. It exploded in almost the exact spot its Russian target had, warping the steel even more and rocking the ship on her heels. The bow came down, crumpling from the heat and shock of two simultaneous missile strikes and folding inward like a tin can. Luckily, the destroyer still had some life left in her, and didn’t sink. But her exec, on the auxiliary conn, ordered the “abandon ship.” Lifeboats went over the side while damage control tried to put out the flames licking the central superstructure.

The remaining Russian pilots chalked it up as an American victory. They were chased off by three unexpected ships, one of which was disabled, but too close to the others to be worth that last missile. Besides, they were supposed to wreck the disembarking army, not waste weapons on things that weren’t supposed to be there. They flew back north to the Crystal Empire, hoping they hadn’t used too much fuel trying to avoid anti-air fire.