One of the many benefits of being part of the Equestrian Information Service was that you got to travel in style. The Bande d’Or was the most expensive hotel in Zanzebrica Land, a resort right on the beach. I’d arrived in disguise and with the paperwork for a half-dozen identities, dropping my bags off in a suite bigger than most apartments in Canterlot and wasted no time getting to work.
As part of my reassignment, I was supposed to meet with the local agent in a bar near the palace to get caught up on the situation. It would be difficult to determine who they were, as I hadn’t been given any information about them, but I had a challenge phrase to use to ensure I wasn’t speaking to an enemy agent.
The bar was far from empty. Any one of them could be the pony I was supposed to meet. Maybe it was a zebra. A zebra would be able to fit in with the locals. They could even be in disguise. Was it the minotaur? If it was a shapechanging spell or an illusion, how would I know?
I started to panic. Was that griffon hiding a weapon with that newspaper? The zebra in the corner was staring at me. I wiped sweat from my brow and cursed when I saw the streak of black on my hoof. I was ruining my own disguise!
“Over here!” somepony yelled.
I turned slowly, trying to look casual. A unicorn in a shirt so loud it managed to be blinding and deafening at the same time had his hooves up on a table along with a half-dozen glasses. He took off his sunglasses and waved me over.
“You must be Matty,” he said. “I’m Timber Sycamore, you can just call my Timber, Tim, or whatever you want as long as it’s not before noon. I’m not a morning pony. Sit down, I’ll order the first round. This bar makes pretty decent drinks.”
“I’m just a simple visitor,” I said, gritting my teeth and giving the first part of the passphrase. “The sun is shining.”
“Wow, we’re really doing this?” he rolled his eyes. “Let’s see, uh…” he pulled a small codebook from his pocket. “...sun is shining… and the ice is slippery.”
“You can’t just carry secret documents around with you!” I hissed.
“Oh please,” Timber snorted. “Hey everybody! I’m a spy! So is she!”
I froze up.
“See?” He shrugged. “Nobody cares. Everyone here is a spy. The griffon in the corner is with the Talon’shiar.” He waved, and the griffon did something called ‘flipping the bird’, an extremely rude gesture in their culture. “The mino at the bar is a retired Layris agent who likes to keep in touch with old friends. Most of the zebra are with the local groups. There’s three flavors of secret police, some mercenaries, and rebels.”
“You can’t just out me and use my real name,” I protested. He moved a chair with his magic and motioned for me to sit down. I did, hoping it would keep him from making a scene. “And don’t call me Matty. It’s Agent Matrix if we’re in private, and I’d appreciate if you’d call me Papillon to keep my cover.”
“About your cover,” Timber said. “You, uh, really went for the whole disguise kit, didn’t you?”
“It’s important to be hard to recognize.”
“You painted stripes on your face and legs.”
“My cover is half-zebra.”
“Well you should be aware they’re starting to run in this humidity,” he said, nodding towards my fetlock. I looked at it and swore. Black streaks were dripping down towards my hoof. “You shouldn’t have gone with the cheap dye.”
“I’ll fix it later,” I mumbled.
“If you forget, at least you’ve got a great look going. Sort of like running mascara but all over. My daughter back home is going through a goth phase. All the pictures I get she looks like she’s about to cry. Reminds me of that.”
I glared at him.
“Oh! Right!” He waved down a waitress. “Bring me a refill and get my friend here a round on me! She needs something to help her relax.”
“It’s against regulations to drink on duty.”
“You’re right.” Timber looked at the waitress. “Make both of them doubles.” The waitress walked away to get drinks that I didn’t want and shouldn’t have anyway. “So I heard you had some problems in Canterlot before you got reassigned out here.”
“...I was involved in an operation that went badly,” I said.
“From what I hear, you broke into Princess Luna’s bedroom.”
“We were trying to evaluate if she was still a danger to Equestria! I found what I thought was valuable intel, but…”
“But it was her homework,” Timber finished, patting my shoulder. I batted his hoof away with a wing, glaring. “Hey, don’t kill the messenger. You’re lucky it was kept out of most of the papers.” He tossed a local tabloid, the Nightingale, onto the table between us.
The headline story was about a feral batpony foal that had been found in a cave, but right towards the bottom I saw it. ‘EIS Operation targeting the Diarchy?’
I groaned and took the drink when the waitress came back with it, downing half of it. I barely tasted the tart berry, orange, and tequila.
“See? You need to relax,” he said “Not bad, right? Called a Bull Shark. Garrick over there recommended them to me.” He nodded to the griffon.
“You’re not supposed to have unofficial contact with enemy agents.”
“And I can tell you haven’t worked in the field much. How about you take the day, go swimming, and we’ll meet for lunch?”
“I’d rather get to work,” I said.
“You’re very dedicated. Good trait. Grab a shower and wash those stripes off, and we’ll head over to the embassy.”
“I’m sure I have my passport somewhere,” Timber muttered, going through his pockets. Pocket. He only had one on his shirt.
“Really?” I grumbled. “You didn’t bring any ID?”
“Hey, honey, I’m a spy. Bringing ID is usually a terrible idea. It’s a habit you have to break. If you get found where you’re not supposed to be, and you’re carrying an EIS badge, they just take you out behind the shed and get rid of you. If they don’t know who you’re working for, it buys you a little more time to figure something out or get rescued.”
“I don’t have time for this…” I groaned.
Somepony politely cleared their throat. “Well, Mister Sycamore, are you having problems again?”
I looked past the security guard at a well-groomed pony in a tasteful grey silk outfit that hovered somewhere between a poncho, dress, and shirt. The kind of clothing that was almost certainly cultural somewhere else and just slightly exotic.
The kind of thing that a pony wore when they wanted to remind you they weren’t from around these parts, not that any of us were.
“I can never find my ID when I need it,” Timber said. “It’s a good thing the local bartenders all know me on a first name basis or I’d never get served!”
“It’s alright, you can let him in,” the pony said. “I’ll vouch for him, at least for now.”
“Matty, I want you to meet one of our local representatives from the Equestrian Foreign Affairs Department, Black Cherry.”
“I prefer Miss Black,” she said. “Miss… Matty, was it?”
“Agent Disposition Matrix. EIS, Section Two.” I said, shaking her hoof.
“Oh yes, I remember the memo. I wasn’t expecting you quite so soon. Hopefully you’ll find this post as relaxing as Mister Sycamore does. I don’t remember the last time I saw him do any honest work.”
“Darlin, I’m with the EIS. We aren’t in the business of honest work.” He felt around in his pocket and pulled out a slim wallet. “Wouldn’t you know it? I had my ID all along! Last place you look, am I right?”
“Of course,” Black Cherry sighed.
I rolled my eyes and flashed my own badge for the guard to see, Miss Black leading us inside the walls of the Equestrian Embassy. It looked almost like a slice of Canterlot, but with more palm trees and flatter streets. MIss Black took us through the cobblestone paths and into the main building.
“What’s with all the extra security?” Timber asked. I followed his gaze around the embassy. There were dozens of guards posted, some of them just drilling in the courtyard, others standing watch at every door and along the walls.
“It’s not normally like this?” I asked. Timber shook his head.
“We had to increase security,” Miss Cherry said. “Extra troops were stationed here in case of local unrest. There’s some concern about an uprising from the local rebels.”
“Rebels, huh?”
“Miss Matrix, have you been briefed about the situation here?” Black Cherry asked.
“The current ruler is one General Soupe a’L’onione, He was democratically elected after the previous ruler, Emir Legumes, was forced out of power.”
“Right.” Timber said. “So the previous ruler, Emir Legumes, he was getting ready to join up with the LGA, that alliance the Saddle Arabians have been shopping around to keep tight control on certain exports by setting prices and negotiating as a block.” Timber rummaged around in his shirt pocket and pulled out a flask. I was starting to think it wasn’t a normal pocket.
Also I was starting to think Timber had a drinking problem.
“Zanzebrica Land is one of Equestria’s major trading partners for certain crops,” Black Cherry said. “While they’re quite small on the world stage in terms of absolute economic and military power, the climate is perfect for sugarcane and some types of exotic nuts, and both are excellent exports. The LGA and Equestria have been on rocky terms as of late, and our projections indicated that the price of raw sugar in Equestria would double, and that would have a cascade effect on many other goods.”
Timber took a long drag from his flask before he spoke again. “We kind of shopped the idea around that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get rid of Legumes. General a'L'onione staged a coup, and for a couple years things were pretty good. Sugar prices were down, the zebras here were happy, win-win.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Turns out there were some other problems.” Timber emptied his flask down his throat and stopped at unmarked door, pushing it open.
Inside, paperwork covered the walls, two desks, and most of the floor. Black Cherry stopped at the door, not walking in.
“Sorry about the mess,” Timber said. He trotted over to one of the desks and started rummaging through the drawers.
“What kind of problems?” I looked at Miss Black.
“Unfortunately, General a’L’onione has some very expensive tastes,” Miss Black said. “We assumed he was just enjoying his victory, and he did start instituting some policies that were in line with what we were advising, but his appetites grew faster than his means could support.”
“You’ve met Prince Blueblood, right?” Timber asked.
I nodded.
“Well this guy makes Blueblood look like a tasteful gentleman. There was a famine last year because he ordered the farmers growing food to grow commercial crops instead. Sugarcane is technically food, but you sort of need grains in your diet. Meanwhile, he was having feasts every weekend.”
“Sounds like a great guy,” I muttered.
“Now he’s trying to turn it into a cartel operation. You know, strict controls, no sales except through him, driving up the prices. We’ve been paying through the nose and it just keeps getting worse.”
“And what’s worse?”
“Well he’s started getting rid of his political opponents. But don’t worry, he’s totally against capital punishment. They’re just exiled.”
“That’s not too bad. That’s what Equestria does, too.”
“Except General a’L’onione exiles them to one of two places. If it’s nothing personal, you get to go on the long walk into the desert with no food or water. If he’s in a bad mood, you’re exiled over the side of a boat in international waters.”
Miss Black sighed. “It’s one of the major issues Equestria has with his leadership. We’ve offered to take the prisoners for free from him, but he’s refused. He says that his methods are for deterrence, but…”
“Yeah, deterrence,” Timber snorted. “Cherry, you and I both know he just doesn’t want us talking to any of his enemies in case they have dirt on him.”
“And I know you’ve rescued quite a few zebras, despite orders not to interfere,” Black Cherry said, smiling a little. “I had to write a few emergency visas as I recall.”
“So what are we doing about the situation? This guy sounds like a monster.” I leaned against the wall and watched Timber and Miss Black give each other sideways looks at what was evidently a dangerous question to ask.
“The Foreign Affairs Department is negotiating,” Miss Black said.
“But you know what diplomats are like,” Timber interrupted. “They even attend some of his parties. They’ll smile and make apologies and never get anything done.”
“Our options are limited,” Miss Black said. “Our first duty is keeping lines of communication open. Even if we hate what he’s doing, we have to be able to talk to him or we can never do anything about it.”
“Sounds like you’d be better off talking to a brick wall,” I said. “If he’s executing his own citizens he deserves to be locked in a dungeon himself.”
Timber nodded and pointed at me. “You got it, Matty. So we’ve tried a couple things to, uh, get somepony more friendly in charge here.”
“And this is the part where I leave,” Miss Black said, raising a hoof. “I know I’m not cleared to know about these operations and I want to be able to deny knowing about them if I’m under a truth geas.”
“Hey, can you set up a driver for us?” Timber said when she turned to go. “I’ll probably need to take Matty on a trip out of town tomorrow.”
“To anywhere in particular?”
“Oh you know,” he smiled. “Just getting the lay of the land, or whatever excuse you want so you don’t have to know I’m gonna go talk to some terror-”
“Lay of the land,” Miss Black interrupted loudly. “It’s good to see the country once in a while. I’ll make sure someone is waiting for you. A local.”
“Thanks, Cherry.”
She nodded and left, and I stepped in and closed the door to give myself and Timber some privacy. “What have you tried so far?”
“Take a look.” He pulled out a file and a bottle, giving me the file and refilling his flask from the bottle.
“Let’s see… Operation Nettle... you poisoned his food?”
“Nothing really serious. It was a special tonic designed to make his mane fall out. He cares a lot about his image and we thought it’d make him abdicate if he couldn’t be seen in public. Didn’t work, but it makes his food-tasters easy to recognize.”
“Exploding cigars?” I raised an eyebrow.
“That one wasn’t my idea. They didn’t work anyway. All they did was annoy him and make him paranoid.”
“You booby-trapped a tree?”
“Hey, trees fall on ponies all the time! This one missed, unfortunately.”
“What’s ‘Operation Showerhead’?”
Timber hissed, inhaling through his teeth and looking away. “That one is sort of a sore point. We were going to pin this whole illegal arms cache thing on the General but, uh, things sort of went sideways.”
“Let me guess, he took the weapons and used them.”
“That’s not too far off but, uh, you took a wrong turn on your way to the market, to coin a metaphor. Anyway, you’ll probably figure it out once we take that little trip out to the countryside.”
“Why?”
“Hey, you know the EIS motto. Have friends everywhere, especially when they’re your enemy.”
Zanzebrica Land really was a beautiful country. It was a sliver of dense green caught between the desert and the ocean, just barely hanging on thanks to a natural line of hills that acted as a rain wall, allowing for jungle and desert to be only a few miles from each other.
From what I knew about the history of the area, the desert had started forming something like a thousand years ago when the tides and wind changed. Back then it had all been forest, then the lakes dried up, the forest died, and it all turned to sand. Some of that sand was nearly perfect fertilizer from the bottom of those dry lakes and the broken-down remains of the old jungle. A quirk of nature made most of it fall right on Zanzebrica Land, turning the narrow land into one of the most fertile places in the world. Almost half of the world’s sugarcane was grown here, and Equestria needed that sugar.
The road we took out of the city quickly turned from asphalt to cobblestones to dirt.
“So when we get where we’re going, let me do the talking until the introductions are over,” Timber said. “Don’t get me wrong, these are great guys. I just want to make sure that you make a good first impression and don’t get shot.”
“You still haven’t told me where we’re going.”
“And you came anyway! That’s a terrible habit, Matty. You shouldn’t trust anypony in this business. What if I was a double agent?”
I gave him a look. One of the patented ones that my instructors always gave me. He seemed a lot less scared than the look usually made me feel. “If you’re on two payrolls I expect you to do twice as much work, not half.”
Timber started laughing, patting me on the back.
By the time we actually got where we were going, the sun was getting low in the sky and my back felt like I’d been sitting on a wooden bench for hours and getting bounced around in a cart that had been made before the invention of shock absorbers.
Timber tapped my shoulder. “See that up there?” He pointed. A plume of smoke rose up from a collection of ramshackle huts.
“Looks like a real nice place,” I said.
“Nah, sort of a shithole,” Timber said. “But they’re gonna be our best friends. They’re the local rebels.” He tossed a couple bits to the zebra driving the cart and jumped down, walking towards the camp.
“Wait up!” I flew after him, catching up before he’d gotten too far. “Local rebels?”
“Technically it’s one of those collectivist revolutions,” Timber shrugged. “You know. Smash the state, everypony - or zebra in this case - is equal, redistribution of wealth, big on self-reliance.”
“And they’re our friends.”
“Sure! We’re big on making friends.”
“So why do we have extra troops at the embassy?”
“Well, Foreign Affairs and the EIS have some different ideas on the best way to go about making friends,” he said. “Speaking of, I think you’re about to meet some of mine.”
Two zebras melted out of the brush, invisible until they moved thanks to cloaks that seemed to actually have moss and lichen growing on their surface. They were carrying crossbows that were so beaten up I wasn’t sure if they’d fire or just snap when they pulled the triggers.
“Hey, guys!” Timber smiled and waved. “Is Guava in? I wanted her to meet my new partner and show her around a bit.”
The two zebras looked at each other and there was a wordless moment of communication, and they lowered their weapons, one motioning for us to follow with a toss of his head.
“These guys are big on respect,” Timber said. “So treat them like you would members of any other government. Especially Guava. Officially, she isn’t the leader because they don’t have a leader, but unofficially she says ‘jump’ and they ask permission to come down.”
I nodded, keeping my eyes open. Collectivists or not, the camp was like any other military camp I’d ever seen. There was a mess tent, a bunch of shacks made of corrugated metal and plywood being used as barracks, crates of supplies, an armory…
“Timber,” I said, grabbing his tail to make him stop. “What the buck is that?”
I pointed to the armory, and more specifically to what was sitting in it.
“Oh, yeah. Well, uh…”
“That’s a Griffonian flechette cannon,” I hissed.”Using them is a war crime!”
“Technically it’s not a war crime to use them against airships,” Timber said.
“Zanzebrica Land doesn’t even have airships! And that’s a tanglehoof grenade! Where did they get all this stuff?”
“The cache was captured, from the hooves of corruption: better in ours.” The voice was as smooth as butter but with an edge of hardship and roughness, so maybe more like butter with gravel mixed into it.
The zebra who’d spoken was beautiful, in a sort of wild rebel warrior way. One of her eyes was ice blue, and the other hidden behind an eyepatch. Stripes of red and blue paint were mixed in with her natural black and white, and beads were braided through her mane under a forest-green beret.
“This is Guava,” Timber said. “She’s the one I was telling you about. She’s brilliant. I’m sure you two will get along, or kill each other, you know, one or the other.”
“It’s a pleasure,” I said, holding out a hoof to shake. “I’m Matrix. Disposition Matrix.”
Timber patted me on the back. “Matty here is a great kid. She’s got the gumption to take on just about any mission, even really poorly thought out ones, which is great because I don’t like to actually do anything myself.”
Guava shook it. “Have you come to help? Or just drink like your partner? Much talk from this one.”
“I’m still trying to understand the situation,” I said. “I wasn’t really briefed on the situation. They got me out here as quickly as they could.” I said it with a tone that implied the haste wasn’t because they wanted to get rid of me.
Guava shrugged and was about to say something, but we were interrupted by a commotion from outside. She scowled and stormed out, shouting something in a language I didn’t speak, but you don’t really need to be able to translate to know she was demanding to know what was going on.
Two zebras were on their knees, with a sack full of vegetables in front of them. A few of the other rebels were standing over them with drawn crossbows. There was a quick conversation and a lot of pointed hooves.
“That’s not good,” Timber muttered.
“What’s going on?”
“Those two in the middle were stealing from local farmers,” he explained. “That’d be bad enough, but they told the farmers they were doing it under orders.”
“Were they?”
“No, and that’s why it’s not good for them,” Timber said. “She’s going to order them to be executed.”
“Executed?!” I shouted, and everyone turned to look at me. “Hold on!” I stepped forward, and some of the rebels pointed their weapons at me instead of the prisoners. “You can’t just kill them!”
“They diminish us and by their crimes are we judged, lone wolves gone rabid.”
“If you go around killing ponies, you’ll hurt your own cause. People here don’t want another tyrant that might execute them. You have to lead by example.”
Guava met my gaze for a long moment like she was trying to look deep into my soul. Or maybe, just maybe, she was looking at me because I was making a good argument and I was fairly attractive. I tried to subtly strike a pose and look more enticing just in case it was working.
She shouted something back to the other zebras and walked away.
“...Farmers will decide - we send them back to meet the fate from those they harmed.”
“Good work, Mattie,” Timber whispered. “Quick thinking.”
Guava called back over her shoulder to us. “The evening grows dark. Break bread with us as allies. We are all friends here.”
“Operation Showerhead,” I said, once we were alone, sharing a meal of pulled jackfruit and wild rice with so much spice it brought tears to my eyes.
Timber sighed. “Go ahead and yell it louder.”
“You said it went sideways.”
“Yeah… you want the long version or the short version?”
“The version that’s the truth.”
“Matty, come on, you can’t ask for the truth in this business! You end up with all sorts of answers!” He sighed. “You want some rum? It’s good with--”
“Don’t change the subject. And until I know what’s going on, it’s Matrix, not Matty.”
“Okay so, I told you that Operation Showerhead was basically about an illegal arms cache? Well, we put it together from stuff we confiscated from arms dealers, faked some paperwork to make it look like General a’L’onione bought the whole lot from somepony we have in custody already, and the plan was we’d tip the local reporters off, they’d find the cache and paperwork, then we’d say we were investigating and find the dealer with our usual amazing swiftness--”
“Because you had him on ice already.”
“Right, but we’d wait a week before we paraded him around. He’d sign a confession about selling them in return for a quiet extradition somewhere nicer than a dungeon, and we’d use that as an excuse for whatever we wanted to do next. Sanctions on trade, blockades, maybe even a military intervention.”
“What went wrong? That’s not a terrible plan.”
“Well, uh, so the local reporters we tipped off were actually feeding intel to the Collectivists. They seized the cache before we knew anything was wrong, and we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
“Like you told Guava, you can’t support the Collectivists while they’ve got the cache.”
“I told you things went sideways.”
I ate some of the food quietly while I thought about it. “I see why they sent me. This place is ready to explode.”
“Exactly!” Timber nodded. “Very delicate situation.”
“And we need to set it off.”
“Okay, now we’re talking in opposite directions. Matty, the problem is this place is explosive like nitroglycerin. It’s ready to go off if somepony breathes too hard! We need to cool things down so we can plan things out.”
“There’s an old saying in Hippon. ‘In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.’”
“First, I don’t think that’s actually Hipponese.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“Second, we don’t have permission from the top to do anything except play nice and make friends. Technically we shouldn’t even be out here.”
“But we are out here, and we can’t just go back to the embassy with nothing to show for it. What we need to do is set this off like a shaped charge. We sculpt it just right and set it off and it all goes in the right direction.”
“Well, we go back to the city, we send a few letters, pull strings…”
“Nah, there’s another saying I like. ‘Ask forgiveness instead of permission.’”
“That’s the kind of saying that got you here instead of cooling your hooves back in Canterlot.” He smirked. “Sure, kid, let’s do it.”