Without hesitation Rose rang out “gun crewed” followed by “aft”. When she turned back Sunset was gaping at her. “What?” she yelled over the increasing thunder of the engines and resulting racket in the ship’s structure. “We’re already here, aren’t we? I’ll load.”
The younger mare blinked, then shoved the binoculars into a protective bin bolted to the trusswork and shut the lid with a hoof. “Uh, yeah.” She skittered around the breech of the gun and settled her barrel and belly on the cradle mounted to the carriage’s right side. One forehoof struck at a big toggle, unlocking the gun; the other landed near, but not on, the trigger pedal. Her hind hooves briefly danced left and right on the checkered deck plating. The long, slender tube obediently swung back and forth. “Gun unlocked. Traverse good.” She shifted her weight to force the gun up and down slightly. “Elevation good.” Her head ducked for a look through the spiderweb sight. “Sights clear.”
Behind her the bell signaled “gun ready” and “aft”, followed by a sense of movement as Rose went to the starboard ammunition rack and pulled out a clip of rounds. The corner of her eye caught the clip being snapped onto the deck cleats that would hold the set of rounds in place, within easy reach for loading but unable to roll across the possibly unsteady deck.
Her breathing hitched, then resumed, faster and shallower. Before it had been training and theory. Now she almost certainly was about to fire her first shots in battle. Tachypsychia and the floating, unreal feeling of stress and fight-or-flight set in. Her eyes dilated and sweat erupted across her entire hide despite the freezing cold.
Rose, predictably, didn’t miss the signs. “You okay?” she shouted as she offered a mutated pair of range plugs from her personal gear.
“Y-yeah. I think so.” Sunset levitated the hearing protectors to her ears, stuffing them in and adjusting them with a grimace.
The wing brushed along her back again and Rose’s holler came thin and faint through the earplugs. “It’s tough, I know, but every life on this ship depends on how well we all do in this fight. You can do this.”
Sunset took a deep breath, nodded, and hunkered down both physically and mentally as Rose crammed another pair of range plugs into her own ears.
Comet dropped, if not like a stone then far more precipitously than any airship should. Even so Galea put on a bravura display of talent and experience, trimming the interceptor straight and level as it stooped, a silver-gray falcon. Just off the port quarter, seemingly close enough to touch, the top of a far larger envelope appeared nearly bow-on over the rim of the broad aft gunport in front of Sunset and Rose.
A distant bell, barely audible through their range plugs, ordered “fire as you bear”. The pegasus scooped the top round off the stack and slammed it into the breech. Already the enemy airship loomed ominously; it would be a mere moment before the other gondola came into view and the crew spotted them in return.
They cleared the lower curve of the enemy’s gasbag. Showtime.
The first rounds flew from port and after guns almost simultaneously. Alchemical tracers glowed angry red as they shrank to pinpoints with distance. Sunset had time for only a single snapshot image of the deck. Frantic crew running to action stations with their distinctive gorilla-like gait. Stacks of supplies—and a last array of bombs awaiting an upcoming fire mission. A . . . tapestry, dangling from rigging and whipping in the slipstream, rust-brown stains smothering the rich embroidery of its tattered lower reaches.
Fragments of memory flooded her mind. A visit to the palace with a group of other new students, now a decade or more past. Hide-and-seek in the corridors. Wriggling behind the self-same wall hanging with muffled giggles. Canterlot burning so much more recently, the white towers and wings of the palace glimpsed through shreds of smoke. Thick blue-gray haze over a town littered with bodies. An innocent filly dead of her wounds and a rough journey away from her ruined home, laid alone and bereft under a pile of stones beside the railroad tracks.
Imagination crowded in as well. Celestia still and dark as Discord once was. Twilight missing, captured, killed on some nameless ground. The nation of her birth decapitated and trampled by intruders, struggling to cope. The explosions and havoc of combat, already diminished by hearing protection, faded completely. The hiss of her breaths and the pounding of her heart filled her ears, her whole body. The fleeting seconds oozed by one after another as she and the portside gunner threw round after round at the larger airship, gradually elevating the tubes as their ship fell toward the sheltering cloud deck below.
One of the high-explosive rounds found the bombs. A massive blast ripped open the boatlike hull’s topdeck and starboard tumblehome. Flames licked across the surrounding wood and steel. Cables parted, flailing and deadly. The battered gondola fell with a jerk, left dangling at a sharp angle. Fragments, crates, and crew members living or not slid off and rained down. The crippled enemy began to veer ponderously with loss of steering. Then they were past.
Rose was shouting at her. Rose wasn’t loading. Sunset’s alicorn lit. The remaining rounds in the ready stack lit up as well. Sunset leaned, raising the gun’s muzzle as far as it would go. Without looking back Sunset fumbled the first round into the breech and fired again. The round arced up, glanced off the bellied curve of the hull’s underside, exploded gaudily. She loaded another and sent it on its way. This one missed the other ship’s gondola entirely, instead plowing into the envelope and bursting within.
Rose shoved closer, metal wing covering the breech. Sunset dropped the rest of the rounds to clang and roll on the deck in favor of wrenching at the wing. Rose’s face contorted, a nightmare mask of pain, anger, and scars. The other wing came up and slashed horizontally. Sunset’s alicorn vibrated painfully and her whole head rang; the levitation popped like a bubble. Rose was inches away, mouth working with another shout, breath hot on her face. Abruptly the roar and tumult surrounding her burst in again, tinny and faraway through the plugs, accompanied by a steady high-pitched tone that faded only gradually.
“—cease fire! We’re done! Shut it down!” Rose was livid with fury far beyond any she’d shown the young unicorn before.
She stared uncomprehendingly. She wasn’t done destroying the enemy, blowing to oblivion those who’d sown such horror and grief in so many—in her.
“That’s enough, Sunset. Get off the gun now.” The officer’s command voice was hard as iron, but more controlled than before.
Sunset trembled as the grip of rage and adrenalin loosened. Her eyes squeezed shut. Bile rose. Shocky shivers rolled in waves down her body. Rose helped her off the gunner saddle. She staggered, rubber-legged, before collapsing on the deck in the corner where the portside bulkhead met the ammunition rack, blind with tears.
When they reached the cloud deck, fog rolled in to dim the brightness of high-altitude sunlight. The ship steadied, though the engines’ rumble abated only slightly as the pilot raced to put distance between them and the site of the brief, bloody ambush. At last the noise reduced to a growl as they resumed cruising, but they did not regain altitude.
Less than a minute later Galea stalked into the aft gun position. At sight of her expression Rose braced to attention. Sunset still sprawled on the cold deck.
“Ms. Brass,” the captain snapped. “Did I or did I not ring ‘cease fire’?”
“You did, Ma’am.” Rose’s voice was leached of all emotion.
“Then what in Tartarus was that?” A skinny arm waved at the gun and the port.
“No excuse, Ma’am.”
“Were you shooting or loading, Ms. Brass?”
Rose swallowed. “. . . Loading, Ma’am.”
Galea stepped closer. “If anything like that happens again, Ms. Brass, we set down at the nearest settlement and all three of you are off this ship. I will. Not. Tolerate. Breaches in discipline of that magnitude. Is that clear?”
Rose stiffened even more, gaze well above her commanding officer’s head, and barked, “Ma’am yes Ma’am!”
The old unicorn’s mouth compressed and she searched the younger pony’s face. “It’s your job to tell them that. And make it stick.” Without another word she wheeled and left.
Rose sat with a thump, damaged wing dangling, and looked over at the exhausted, withdrawn unicorn filly still artificially half-deaf from the range plugs. “Oh, Sunset,” she whispered and shook her head.
A tentative Sunset stepped into the greenhouse cockpit and squinted against the sunlight slanting through the portside glazing. “C-captain?” she asked in a small voice. “Permission to enter?”
Galea, poring over maps on the compact chart table, looked up. “Ms. Analemma,” she acknowledged coolly. “Permission granted.” The pilot and engineer studiously kept their attention on their instruments, doing their best to ignore the byplay—and tension—behind them.
The younger unicorn straightened. “I want to apologize. Ma’am. I . . . I let my temper—” Her voice faltered and she bit her lip, then inhaled deeply. “I have no excuse, Ma’am.”
The old colonel’s face might have softened by a hair. “Ms. Analemma, let me tell you something. Getting worked up to start shooting is hard enough, but another reason for military discipline is t’ make sure folks stop shooting on command even when the situation’s confused—or they’re confused. You failed.” Sunset lowered her head and looked down at the deck.
“Now, you haven’t had the training Ms. Brass has, or I have, or some of the hired crew have,” the dispassionate voice continued. “But you’re a smart filly. You knew full well what you were doing, and what you weren’t doing. I gather you’ve had trouble with your temper before, and you’re trying to work on that. Good for you. Try harder.” The last words were firm, almost harsh. “Dismissed.”
“Y-yes, Ma’am.” Sunset turned and retreated through the heavy curtain separating the small chamber from the rest of the gondola. Glumly she trudged aft to the central open space everypony had taken to calling “the plaza”.
Rose lay on her belly at its middle, her right wing fully spread beside her. One of the earth-pony mechanics leaned over it intently, operating on its bent pinions and stripped gears with the finest tools on the ship. Cook sat nearby, watching with a resigned expression.
Sunset caught her breath, and her eyes swam again before she blinked away the moisture. She advanced into the plaza, an oasis of light through the port waist gun’s curtain with the airship once more scudding along above the clouds. “Oh, Rose—I’m so sorry,” she choked out before sitting in front of the older mare.
The pegasus came back from her preoccupied reverie and looked up. “Ana. What happened?” Her tone was as emotionless as Galea’s.
“Uh—when? Just now or, um, earlier?” Sunset’s brow furrowed in honest perplexity.
Rose’s mouth twitched before she tamped it straight again. “Now that you mention it, how about both?”
Sunset’s ears flagged. “Captain Galea gave me a lecture. Then she dismissed me.”
“Mm-hm.” That seemed exactly the answer Rose expected. “And?”
The unicorn looked away. “I lost my temper. There was a . . . a tapestry hanging from some of the cables. With blood on it.” The dam burst. In a rush Sunset described the memories sparked by the horrible trophy, the thoughts and images tumbling through her head, the pain and wrath, the burning need to strike back, the ugly satisfaction as she did. By the time she finished, her head drooped and her voice had fallen to a whisper in shame. “And then I hurt you. That feels even worse than all the rest of it put together.”
“Apology accepted.” If Rose’s voice hadn’t regained its warmth, at least it had thawed. “That makes more sense. It caught you by surprise, didn’t it? The tapestry, and the way it pulled everything out.”
“Y-yeah. I really, really wasn’t expecting that.” Sunset shook her head. “I thought I was ready for anything, and I could deal with it. Then—”
“Okay,” Rose interrupted. “I get it. But how do you feel now?”
Sunset thought long and hard about that. “I don’t know. I feel all mixed up.” She looked up again, searching for answers in the other’s scarred face.
“Of course you do.” It was Rose’s turn to think. “Try this. What you’re feeling now is like a rope. Tell me about the braids in the rope, and the threads in the braids.”
The mechanic worked on repairing Rose’s wing. Rose worked on repairing Sunset’s state of mind. Cook sat by almost silently, venturing only an occasional response to a question from one or the other of the mares; hints of his inner disquiet occasionally glinted through the guarded mien of his profession.
Other ponies came and went, few staying for long in the sometimes stormy mood hovering in the plaza. It was evening, with the sun just set, before both efforts were finished. “Good as new,” the earth stallion pronounced with exaggerated heartiness. “Shouldn’t have any trouble with it now—at least, the mechanisms. Can’t speak to the spellwork.”
“I think it should be fine.” Sunset’s tone was diffident. “It doesn’t seem to be damaged, at least. I’m sorry, Rose. I really am.”
“I know,” Rose told her with a sigh. “You were out of your head when you did it.” She nodded at Sunset’s wince. “It’s an expensive, difficult lesson. Make it worth the cost.”
“I don’t want any more of those.” Sunset managed a brief, fragile smile. “It feels like I’ve had enough for a lifetime.”