The Skyla Pseudonym

by iisaw


21 Falling Into Shadow

Chapter Twenty-One

Falling Into Shadow

We spotted the imperial fleet in the early afternoon. Ao and I were up top, watching the ships come envelope-up over the ragged forest horizon.

"I count twenty-three," I said after a second sweep with my spyglass.

"This one agrees," Ao replied. "Though there may be more behind the main body of the fleet that are yet hidden from us."

"That one in the center is a monster," I observed. "I'm betting it's the flagship."

"It is of a size near to the Great Panjandrum's air palace, in this one's estimation," she said.

"And here I forgot to pack my Grand Pirate Armada," I said out of the corner of my mouth.

We lowered our spyglasses and looked at each other. "So, it has come to this," we both said simultaneously.

We could afford to laugh, because we were much closer to the mountains that held the Black Gate. We might have as much as an hour on the ground before the fleet became a problem.

We were still chuckling a bit when Breeze Drifter landed next to me and saluted. I saluted him back. "Anything to report, Drifter?"

"Yes, ma'am! the imperials have sent ornithopters to flank us quite a ways to the west. They ran just over the treetops to stay out of sight. Ten light 'thoppers and four heavies with fully armored pilots, all earth ponies. They're armed with guns, but no bombs that I could see. At the speed they were making—" He glanced over his shoulder at the dark wall of the mountains ahead of us. "—they should be at the valley any time now."

"Thank you," I said, my mood souring. "Report all that to the captain, and tell her I will be down shortly."

He saluted again and popped his wings open, letting the wind of our passage lift him off the catwalk. One flashy wingover later, he disappeared below Nebula's envelope.

"Good flyer, that one," I observed. I turned my glass to the east, searching without success for Dust Devil, the other scout we had sent out at noon in the opposite direction. "I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a second group to the east, and that we're going to get ambushed as soon as we get well into the valley leading to the gate."

Ao nodded. "It is what this one would do." She did a barely noticeable little double-take and added, "Not to you, of course, Majesty!"

"That's good to hear," I said with a chuckle. "But if you did have nearly thirty quick and nimble flyers with light magic guns, and wanted to prevent me from getting to the gate, what would you do?"

"They have surely learned that Nebula is resistant to magic weapons, and the flyers from this morning would have reported the relative success of the single firebomb that hit us." Ao paused and rippled a bit more energetically as she floated beside me. "This one is puzzled that Breeze Drifter saw no bombs among their armaments. Ornithopters depend on speed to avoid being hit, and so this one also wonders at the armored—" She broke off suddenly, turning to directly face me as her tail lashed the air. "They mean to board us!"

It made sense. The only other possibility was that they were intending to take over the pegasus fortress at the gate and hold it against us while the fleet came up. Taking a fortified position by direct assault took a lot of time no matter how understaffed it was, and I suspected that the rebel blacklips had brought all their best war toys with them when they'd captured the fort, even if they had done it by treachery.

No, there was no way it could be done with less than thirty ponies. Even if the imperial flanking squadrons managed to take the fortress in time, it would be with heavy losses, and it would still leave them facing Nebula's guns as she came up the valley. "I think you're right, Ao! I'm going below. You keep a sharp eye out up here while I speak with the captain."

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Two hours later, we were nearing the entrance to the valley. It was a dark slash through the mountains leading straight northward. The distant peaks were still in sunlight, but the floor of the valley was lost in darkness, a bit of light only on its eastern rim. Loose Leaf had assured me that, if the sun had been higher in the sky, we would have been able to see the gate and its attendant buildings, a league distant. Ao had gone to her post at the tail hatch, and I was standing by the cupola crew with Skyla.

I checked my gear for the third time as we neared the mouth of the valley. "They will come from the west," I said to her. "They'll dive down with the sun directly behind them. A couple might try to sneak in from somewhere unexpected after the main fight begins, so we will have to keep an eye out for that."

She nodded, her eyes on the western sky, even though she knew there was no chance of spotting the ambushers yet. "The anti-boarding nets are slung between envelope and rails, but I don't think they'll risk our main guns."

I shook my head. "No, I doubt they will. They aren't used to open decks like ours, so it might not even occur to them. They'll go for the top, but we still need a fair crew on deck just in case."

"I've made the assignments," she replied. "Sirocco's on the wheel with Star backing him up. Mostly lubbers on the deck guns, but they've had a taste of battle now. I'm sure they'll do fine."

"I hate to have one of our best flyers out of the fight," I said.

She shrugged. "With Nebula an engine short, we need a good pony on the helm, and he's our best." Then she looked over at me and grinned. "Well, our safest, at any rate."

I flicked my tail at her little jab. "I'm not disagreeing, I just wish we had more ponies in the air."

"We'll make do," she replied. "Be careful up there."

I nodded, once again checking the lanyard around my neck where the raptor set hung as well as the chinstrap of my heavy helmet.[1] I wanted to go over the plan again, but she knew it as well as anypony, and it would be replaced by improvisation soon after the imperials jumped us, anyway. "Be careful down here," I said, and leaped into the air.
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[1] I usually only wear my light chamfron while in the air because it affords greater visibility, but being recently shot in the head had altered my thinking on the matter.
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I waved to Ao as I swept past Nebula's tail, and she gave me a very formal bow. That crazy kirin was probably going to enjoy this.

I fell back two furlongs to where the team of pegasi was following in Nebula's wake. Swift Wing took up the wingpony position on my right, with Loose Leaf outside of her. Breeze Drifter and Dust Devil flew to my left, completing the V formation.

Nebula entered the valley and fell into shadow.

Dust Devil had confirmed our suspicions about a second flanking group to the east, but I assumed they would have joined up with their comrades on the western side of the valley by then. Swift and Leaf were still under orders to keep a sharp lookout to the east, just in case. I would have liked to be higher than Nebula, but we needed to be as inconspicuous as possible, so my little squad dipped below the valley's rim as we followed her into the chasm.

We made a little more than a mile before the imperials attacked. From Nebula's perspective, they dove right out of the sun, as I had predicted, but my following pegasus group had no problem picking them out against the evening sky.

"Here they come, over," I said into the raptor set.

"Understood, over," Skyla replied. By agreement, she wouldn't use the set again unless there was an unforeseen emergency. I was to be the eyes for Nebula.

"One furlong," I said, indicating their distance from the ship. "Light ornithopters in front, heavies behind. Three quarters. I don't see any guns on the heavies. One half!"

Our guns, catapults and launchers had been ranged for just that distance, and an instant after I had said the words, the crews at all the dorsal hatches opened fire directly at the setting sun. My group flapped hard for altitude, but we could still see the first part of the battle as it unfolded.

A half-dozen ornithopters broke up and tumbled through the sky. The rest scattered and returned fire immediately, concentrating on our crews at the hatches.

"Heavies still inbound," I said into the raptor set. "Nets… Now!"

The net launchers fired blindly on my order, and even with the heavy ornithopters closely grouped, it was a minor miracle that they hit anything at all. One was a great shot that tangled the lead ornithopter solidly and fouled the one behind it when the parachute opened. Another was a half-hit, good enough to jam the wings of a third machine. The rest were clean misses.

"Five heavies left," I said into the raptor set.

Our net launchers reloaded immediately, but the armored pilots were nearly on top of them. "Crossbows on the heavies!" I yelled to my group. "I'll handle the others!"

The gun crews aboard Nebula had realized that the armored ponies were the greatest threat and were concentrating their fire on them. But that gave the light ornithopters free rein to snipe away. Or it would have, if not for me.

The little machines were much faster than an average pegasus, which meant they were very hard to engage ordinarily. But they were faced with a pony who could use magic. It didn't even take much strength: a little twist of one of the buzzing dragonfly wings, and a flyer spun out of control, smashing into the side of the valley before it could recover.

Then I saw where they carried their magic crystals, and spotted the cable that carried the power to their wings. Just a little twist to pop the cable loose and their wings stopped beating. The machines didn't glide very well, but I think several of them made it to the bottom of the valley intact. I really didn't have time to make sure.

When the ornithopter pilots finally realized what was going on, they tried to swarm me. I dodged and spun, doing my best to avoid their shots as I reached out with my magic to disable them. I'm not exactly an acrobatic flyer,[2] but I was still way more maneuverable than they were.
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[2] I can just hear Rainbow Dash laughing at that gross understatement.
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I was hit twice by glancing shots that my armor easily shrugged off, but a third caught me directly over my right pollex, and even through the wing armor it hurt badly enough that I lost control of my flight for several precious seconds.

The remaining flyers seized the opportunity to dive down on me. It was nearly impossible to grab hold of their power cables or wings when they were charging right at me, shooting, but it was simple to float my blades into their paths and let the pilots run into them.

After I'd cleared the sky, as I pirouetted in the air searching for more targets, my raptor set crackled to life. "Twilight! Get down here!" The urgency in Flurry's voice made me dive for Nebula, ignoring the pain in my wing and heedless of running into friendly fire.

Fire.

Thick, dark smoke was billowing up from Nebula's starboard side just aft of the topmast. A big, tattered piece of her envelope flapped loosely, whipping the smoke into whorls as it emerged from inside the big rent in her side.

Two armored figures were clinging to the envelope forward of the hole, fighting off anypony who approached. I tried to wrench them away with my magic, but they were solidly attached to the fabric somehow. Since they couldn't move to dodge, my short blades quickly made an end to them. Their armor was full and heavy, as the mere scratches left by deflected crossbow bolts proved, but a pony needs eye slots to see.

With the resistance removed, the crew began to battle the blaze. The imperials had ripped big gashes in both the envelope and the number three gas cell, but that was inconsequential compared to their real objective. With Nebula's interior exposed, they'd dropped small fire bombs inside that had spattered burning fluid against the bottom and forward surface of cell three. Nebula was burning from the inside out.

The frantic fire suppression teams threw bucket after bucket of sand into the cell as Nebula began to sink toward the valley floor. The big ballast valves thumped open, and tons of water hissed like a gigantic serpent as it rushed out of the tanks.

The smoke made it impossible to see where the fire was from above, and any delay would give it time to burn through the cell wall and into the next. Nebula might be able to stay aloft with one cell lost, but to lose another would doom her, and she had very little time left.

So I did a very foolish thing: I took a deep breath and dove into the burning cell.

It was very hot for a brief moment as I passed through the ragged opening, then it was almost bearable again, though pitch black. I hit the bottom of the cell hard, hooves-first into hot sand. I didn't know how much time I would have before I passed out, so I worked as quickly as I could to cut a big hole in the bottom of the cell. I peeled back the flap of fabric and a rush of fresh air was sucked in from below.

This had the unfortunate effect of feeding oxygen to the fire above me, but it let me breathe again, and more importantly, it forced the oily smoke up and away so that I could see where the flames were.

I grabbed up as much of the sand as I could levitate and smeared it across the interior of the burning cell, working from bottom to top. I don't know how long it took me, but I did it. I got the fire out. I didn't have any energy to spare for flying, so I squeezed through the hole I'd cut in the bottom of the cell and dropped onto the catwalk below.

"Ms. Ao!" somepony yelled nearby. "She's here!"

My snakey friend was there almost immediately, fussing needlessly. Well, okay, the palliative spells on my burns were very nice.

We had to clear the catwalk so that the repair team could patch up the hole I'd cut, so I clambered to my hooves and let Ao lead me forward to the mainmast ratlines. "Can you fly?" she asked as we approached the opening in the underside of the envelope.

I flexed my damaged wing and winced. "I can glide down to the deck, at least," I replied.

I looked up the interior mainmast ladders and saw that I had been given a lot of help as I battled the fire. A line of unicorns, horn to tail, stretched from the deck up to the topmast truck, floating the buckets of water and mops they had used to cool the fabric from the outside to help prevent the fire from burning through the cell.

I paused to cough up some nasty black stuff from my throat, and then asked, "Where's the captain?"

"On deck, tending to the wounded," she replied.

"I'll go join her," I said. "Get a team to work on the damage topside. Use the keel topsail to fother the hole[3] and get some gas back into the cell as soon as possible."
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[3] Fothering is an emergency technique to temporarily close a hole by stretching fabric tightly across it. It works surprisingly well when used on hull damage in sailing ships, and on airship envelopes, but is only marginally effective on gas cells. But it was better than nothing.
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"Yes, Majesty," Ao said. It was only then that I noticed the blood staining her pure white coat.

"Are you alright?"

She followed my gaze. "Most of what you see belongs to others. This one is well enough."

"Are you certain?" I said.

"Is anything certain in this ridiculous world?" she asked, lifting her forelegs and turning her hooves up as she shrugged. I had to be satisfied that she was well enough to make jokes.

I floundered gracelessly to the main deck, where Skyla was working frantically on a badly wounded unicorn, and added my magic to her own. Healing magic was too delicate and specific to use mechanization, but the same was not true of pain relieving spells, and Cream Puff went from pony to pony with a small gun designed for the purpose, exhausting and dropping gems in his wake.

Nebula's engines were canted nearly straight up and running at full ahead to help keep her aloft. I don't know how Sirocco managed to keep her moving forward, but he did. I'm sure I heard the scrape of treetops against the keel a few times as I worked, but eventually I felt that little bit of heaviness that told me Nebula was climbing again, and breathed a bit easier.

When I had done all I could do, I climbed up to the quarterdeck, where Skyla and Sirocco were easing Nebula toward the dark bulk of the fortress and the gate.

"How are they?" Skyla asked, her voice barely more than an exhausted sigh.

"Stable," I said. "If we can make it through the portal to home, we'll be able to save them all."

"We're almost level with the gate platform now," Sirocco said.

The sky above us shaded from red to deep purple in the sunset. The buildings to either side of the platform had only narrow vertical slits for windows, and the lamplight from within did nothing to dispel the gloom of the valley. A few unicorns had gone forward inside the envelope to the mooring gear platform and were using their horns to light the way ahead of us. Sure enough, Nebula's bowsprit was rising above the broad apron of basalt that lay directly in front of the immense trilithon that framed the gate.

Two pegasi stood before the gate, motionless. I took it as a good sign, but it was still odd that they hadn't flown to greet us. I whistled up the cupola and asked Ao to join us in the bow. Might as well make our entrance as impressive as possible.

Skyla and Ao flanked me as I flew the short distance to the stone platform, and Swift Wing trailed just behind. When we got close, I could see that both of the pegasi had black stripes tattooed on their lower lips; three on the tall, rangy stallion's, and two on the short, muscular mare's.

The stallion looked me up and down like I was something stuck to the bottom of his shoe, and then nodded to the mare. She trotted off toward the building on our left without a word. I did not like how the encounter was shaping up.

We landed in front of the stallion. "I am Twilight Sparkle," I told him without any preamble or theatrics. "I've come here to use this gate to return home. I would very much like to do so with minimal fuss, if you please."

But by then, of course, I knew that things weren't going to go well. The stallion said nothing. He merely stood in our way.

"Curse it," I swore under my breath, before turning to Swift. "Tell all crew to ready their mandalas. Have the big guns target the power gems at the top of the gate, and—"

At that moment, the two-stripe mare returned, and following her was a tall figure in the most incredible suit of armor I had ever seen. It was layered with oddly shaped plates and studded with gems. There was a big hump between the shoulders and even the sharp black wing feathers were interwoven with bright orichacum wire. Every surface was covered with intricate magical runes and matrices.

Three books floated in her magic as she approached, their pages flipping occasionally as a pencil made rapid notes in the smallest. The grooves in her horn were inlaid with metal that pulsed and glowed gently as she walked. When she came to a stop before us, the two pegasi bowed low and then backed away a dozen paces.

The books disappeared in the flash of a brief teleportation vortex, and then the figure's helmet opened, its plates sliding aside and folding back to reveal her—my—face.

"Well, well, well!" Twilight Sparkle said, grinning widely. She leaned forward, ignoring everypony else, and pinned me with her bright, slit-pupiled gaze. "If it isn't the little imposter!"

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