Corporal Stardust Painter was shivering his ass off, sitting under a tree, overlooking a mud puddle the size of a lake, “The lieutenant wants us to do what…?!”
Sergeant Amethyst Flare had just told her three companions, Cpl. Painter, Spc. Hemp, and Pvt. Mercury Rise, that they were going to sneak into the city. It wasn’t welcome news, considering Port was overrun by creatures at least 10 times their size. They were a few days into their watch over the Centauri Army, and the four of them were exhausted.
“This also comes from Canterlot, on high…” Amethyst munched on a piece of dried fruit; her eyes were a little baggy, owing to her lack of restful sleep. “We have a new plan, and… well, we need to break into a secret bank vault… among other things. There’s a reserve under the city; it was ‘secret’ until this morning.”
The three stallions gawked… What?
Specialist Hemp snorted, “Really?”
Amethyst picked up on his skepticism; she didn’t see the harm in telling him, “I'm quite serious... Equestria is a rich continent, Specialist… I imagine we have caches all over the place. Wars don’t last forever, after all. They’re probably so well protected, they could survive an invasion… any disaster… the Apocolypse… If anypony was alive—and if gold and silver still had any value here or abroad—it would help us rebuild.”
“You sound like you’re guessing, Sergeant,” Cpl. Painter’s teeth chattered; he’d been out in the rain, as they took turns in keeping watch.
“Well, I am, partly,” Amethyst swallowed a slice of mango. “I know they exist, and there’s one here, it seems. We’re going in.”
Mercury respectfully raised a hoof, “Uh… why, ma’am? It seems odd for us to do such a thing.”
She was never bothered by Mercury’s uprightness and civility, while some others felt he was “too stiff”—though he was likely the most easygoing soldier many had ever met. He was a good soldier in most ways conjurable, besides being a fairly innocent kid (who happened to be a walking, talking weapon, unbeknownst to him and all but a few ponies). All he lacked was experience.
Amethyst nodded, “It is odd, Mercury… but nothing’s normal about any of this. We’re entering for the same reason anypony would want to… for the gold and silver.”
Specialist Hemp contemplated, a sneer turning the corners of his mouth, “I don’t think any of us would mind stuffing our pockets on a happier occasion, but why do we need it?”
Amethyst, not the easiest pony to leave aghast in most cases, suddenly appeared almost ill, “Pvt. Sapphire, he… came up with a new strategy. And it should more than keep the centaurs occupied in the pass. We can’t very well utilize the geography of the pass to bury the centaurs, as has been discussed, so we’re resorting to thermal warfare; there’s more oil beneath our hooves than we could use in a millennium, so…”
“Blood?” Corporal Painter blanched, realizing what the smartest pony on his team had devised, “He’s making magic conductors, isn’t he?! Oh, God…! He plans to light up the pass! That’s why we’re after silver and gold and lead and copper!”
“That’s right,” Amethyst replied, sounding better than she felt.
Specialist Hemp was floored, “No… You gotta be kidding us, Sarge…”
Amethyst shrugged, a grim frown on her face, “He’s done such things before… to dragons… We need to move at dusk.”
“What’s going on?” Mercury wondered; he was listening, but it was going over his head.
Corporal Painter sputtered, “They’re planning on pulling oil up from the ground… and lighting the Centauri Army on fire…”
Mercury was horrified, “What?! Is that even possible?”
Amethyst sighed… Yes, Mercury was a kid, alright… Good and scared...
Not that anypony should’ve been gleeful over such a thing. The sergeant herself was… really beginning to question just about everything she’d ever done in life… more than usual, at that.
The near-middle-aged mare put a hoof on Mercury’s shoulder, “It’s possible, Mercury… and it’s our best hope in keeping the centaurs in the north. We need to set up a grid of conductors to pull the oil from the shallow ground, and… moving the oil between the surface and underground, we’ll be able to… run the pass like burners on a gas stove…”
Amethyst shuddered at her own words.
Mercury grew pale, “This… This is…”
“War is Hell, kid,” Cpl. Painter broke in before Amethyst did. “Don’t dwell on it.”
Mercury swallowed hard, and he nodded, “Right, Corporal…”
Specialist Hemp’s scarred face contorted, not at Amethyst but at the situation, “So… what exactly do we have to do, ma’am?”
Amethyst, her mind spacing a bit, took a few seconds to respond, “Give me a minute to look over the location again. When I was scouting out the city before the big fire, I got a pretty good layout figured. We want to be in and out in a few hours if possible.”
She asked Cpl. Painter, “Do you know how to render metals out of alloys? Separate them?”
He nodded, “Yes… I’ve done it before, I mean… It’s just about knowing what temperature you need to reach… and separating them…?”
Amethyst hummed, “That’s about the basics of it. I’ll walk you through if we need to do it, but I think we’ll be able to get more-or-less pure metals. We need to get everything on the list, and we want to get as much pure elemental metal as light in weight as we can. We need to find some forged steel, on top of the other four metals.”
“They need steel, too?” Cpl. Painter was wringing out a leg of his rain-saturated uniform.
Amethyst said, “If we don’t bring back a fair stack of good steel, we’ll be making stakes out of more than half our swords.”
“I see your point,” the corporal conceded.
“They suggest we find a cart, but I’m not counting on using one,” Amethyst figured. “It’s not that we couldn’t get a working one, it’s our mobility I’m worried about—that and our keeping hidden. The centaurs can’t know we’re there… that anypony’s alive up here. We carry only what we can carry… And we’re horses, after all; we’ll be able to carry plenty.”
“Sounds manageable,” Spc. Hemp contended.
“I think so, Specialist,” the mare responded. “I was concerned when the lieutenant told me what we’d need, especially in finding the gold and silver. Copper won’t be hard to find; we could go into the bowels of most of the buildings and yank up some pipes. What concerns me the most is lead.”
Mercury asked, “Why lead, ma’am?”
Amethyst sighed, “The only place to find pure lead is probably in the armory.”
“Shit…” Cpl. Painter bemoaned.
The other two stallions realized what this meant, too.
“‘Shit’ is right, Corporal…” Amethyst lamented. “If we had the food, I’d bet you a week’s worth of apples they’ve set up shop in there… perhaps even their headquarters… We didn’t destroy it, and the forge is still partially intact.”
“That’s right,” Spc. Hemp recalled. “I helped with that detail… There’s no way the forge could be used, but it would definitely work just to keep warm. It’s one of the few places in the city with a working heat source.”
The four of them all had the same passing thought: if the Centauri leaders were together in a warm place, they could kill them all… It was possible. But they all dropped the idea before a one of them spoke out. They were to stay hidden and secret.
They’d get the centaurs… at the pass.
Amethyst decided it was time to begin, “I’d love to get a fire going—have some hot chow—but we can’t afford the risk. Still, eat well; we’re not coming back here, but save enough food for another meal. Then prepare to break camp; we move in one hour. Once we’re done, we’re heading right to the pass via the same trails that brought us here… I’m hoping they’re usable; we need to stay off the level ground, as not to leave any tracks leading back. We clear, for now?”
The three stallions said together, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. I’m going to do some thinking about the best point-of-entry…” she was about to go sit alone for a time as she hashed things out.
But there was one more thing.
“I have to ask, ma’am…” Mercury inquired. “Did you know about stuff like this? These places like the vault?”
“Like I said, I knew such things existed,” Amethyst smirked. “Special Agent Peridot Shadow knows a lot… but she sure didn’t expect to find one here.”
Sometime later, in the early evening, Amethyst led her crew towards town. The rain had mostly let up, so they had that going for them. Presently, they were slogging down the hill they’d been up, where they’d been watching Port City.
“What the Hell kind of name is ‘Phlogiston’, ma’am?” Spc. Painter whispered, right behind her.
They’d been discussing further their task.
The mare said quietly, “It depends on the language, Spc. Painter… Before oxygen was discovered, it was a chemical thought to be given off during combustion, but, of course, there’s no such thing… For most purposes, think of it as… ‘inflammable’… the noun, not the adjective.”
Inflammable? Spc. Painter and the others were perplexed.
Mercury wondered, “So… ‘not flammable’?”
Amethyst chuckled, “Language is a funny thing, Mercury… ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ mean the same thing, it turns out. Don’t ask me why…”
Specialist Hemp pouted, “I hated language class in school… All those rules and grammar…”
Amethyst agreed, “I struggle to this day with using commas… But we need to stay quiet—keep alert.”
They all quieted down and reached the bottom of the hill before long, encountering no real difficulties.
The forest surrounding the city on the actual river delta wasn’t looking terribly forest-like, but the ponies had seen that already. In an effort to keep warm, the centaurs had been chopping down every tree available and burning them. The greenwood gave off a heavy smoke that choked the air.
Despite the amount of smoke—almost fog-like—pouring from every bonfire in the city, they weren’t afforded much cover. All they had were the stumps of trees, darkness, and the centaurs’ likely lapse in attention, due to the fact they were the only sentient beings alive in the area.
Amethyst and the stallions saw no centaurs, but they could hear them as they stuck to the stumps, moving closer to the edge of the city.
The sergeant whispered, “Looks like they’re getting more restless. I can hear them fighting again.”
The rest could definitely hear it. The centaurs had been stuck in and east of the city for a week. They were tired, hungry, and miserable, just as the ponies were. But there were a lot more of them and less space than was needed.
The platoon was fortunate; 54 ponies sharing a network of caves was more than manageable. Tens of thousands of centaurs crammed into the ruined city, with more trying to press in from the cold, muddy prairie over the last week, made for some tight quarters. And there were still at least 5,000 centaurs still on the ships, the ponies figured; there was simply no room to put them all ashore, and those on the ships were at least likely drier than those caught in the rain.
The ponies had even witnessed a few killings between the monkey-carcass-horses, spilling into their sight, when tensions boiled over or when there was a spat over food or shelter.
“Buncha savages…” Cpl. Painter hissed.
Amethyst shrugged, “Maybe… But we’d be little better in the same situation. Many of them are without a roof of any kind.”
The centaurs couldn’t even set up tents in what was left of the forest, much less the city. Their tents—as large as warehouses—filled the prairie east of the Sprawl, but did little to keep out the worst of the heavy weather. It was a clusterfuck, really… and the ponies had seen the clumsy creatures light their own shelters on fire, desperate to keep warm.
Too many bodies… too little space… led to havoc.
Time would tell, but Amethyst figured the centaurs would soon move, if only to get away from their suffocating surroundings. And the rain was almost over, and the snow wouldn’t be far behind.
The platoon and Canterlot had concluded they had a few days before the centaurs mobilized. Mobilizing didn’t mean they’d move immediately; it meant they’d prepare to move, and that would take a few days.
The centaurs sure weren’t showing any signs of such; they were just hunkering down, hating existence. It would possibly still be a week before they were heading for the pass.
Amethyst, looking around the now-unfamiliar landscape, saw where she wanted to go, “C’mon… Let’s move.”
The sun had just gone down fully, and they were ready.
South of the Sprawl, at the eastern edge of South Port—their old domain—was a drainage pipe. This was where they’d enter the city.
Too small for a centaur to even attempt to enter, Amethyst felt fairly secure in their being there, “I just hope it’s still clear; I guess we’ll see…”
They entered, Amethyst in the lead, lighting up her horn. It sure was dark…
The ponies had discussed the plan prior to heading down the hillside: the pipe they were about to enter was how Amethyst had navigated the city when she’d been scouting early in the whole operation… when their division was still whole. She’d chosen it because it was the most navigable route she’d established in her various activities—theft, mostly—before the entire mess started, back when she did things for her own and Zip’s benefit.
The plan wasn’t terribly complicated: the pipeline they’d follow led right under the North Port branch of the First Equestrian Bank. The vault they sought out was built into the very foundation of the bank, and it was accessible (without blowing a hole about 20 feet deep in the floor) from the sewer.
They’d have to open an access-door that led to nowhere but clay, it being under the guise that it would serve as a path for utilities to a building that was never constructed, as the bank took up two lots instead of one. This had been intentional, of course, but the bank would never need the second path.
They’d have to dig through the clay—15 feet of it—to find the access-door to the vault, unless they missed the door and just blew a hole in the side, instead… But their orders were to preserve the integrity of the vault; after all, the ponies might survive this yet, and those in the know didn’t want a bunch of muck mucking up the billions of bits worth of gold and silver in there.
This would be their first stop, though it was the farthest away from their point-of-entry.
Along the path chosen, was a pub the ponies had frequented. The owner had been proud as Hell of the renovations he’d completed in the spring: he’d replaced most of his cast-iron plumbing with copper, above all.
Upon reviewing the demolition schedule from the systematic destruction of Port City, it was found—for the sake of efficiency—they’d only demolished the above-ground portion. The basement was largely undamaged as was the plumbing. Had they the inclination and could take the extra weight, the wine-cellar was very likely safe and ripe for the taking. Sadly, they hadn’t the capacity to take anything, though they had the desire.
This would be their second stop, obtaining copper, and it would be the easiest, they reasoned.
Currently, the ponies were passing under the armory. That would be where they’d obtain lead and what forged steel they could carry. It would involve climbing out of the plumbing, taking a bunch of lead-ingots, and hopefully finding a few steel-beams.
The only easy thing about getting the metal into the sewer was the big drain used to pump out used cooling-water from the forge; they could drop something the size of a garden-shed down the hole… The hard part would be avoiding the centaurs, if they’d indeed taken up in the armory.
This would be their last stop.
In fact, Amethyst wouldn’t wait to find out if the armory had been taken over. Before they finished passing underneath, Amethyst called for a halt.
Mercury whispered, presently being right behind her, “What is it, ma’am?”
Amethyst spoke to herself more than to him, “We should find out first…”
Corporal Painter, behind Spc. Hemp and lighting their path from the rear, breathed, “Sergeant! This isn’t part of the plan!”
Specialist Hemp and Mercury hadn’t made up their minds about changing the plan in these few seconds, but they agreed when they heard Amethyst’s reason.
The mare said, “There’s probably no other place we can get pure lead, but there’re about 12 places to find forged steel between here and the pub—including a cache of swords I once left a couple lines over.”
Corporal Painter had no argument, “Sorry, ma’am…”
She smiled, “No reason for it…”
“How do we proceed?” he asked.
“I’ll proceed. Think you boys will be alright a few minutes?”
Mercury had to stop from laughing; her tone was hilarious. Spc. Hemp buried his face in the crook of his leg to stifle his own giggles.
Corporal Painter grinned, “We’ll be fine, ma’am…”
And they would be. Amethyst turned around and ascended into an overhead chute as easily as she might sit in a chair.
The stallions’ jaws dropped… Amethyst could climb like a monkey, it seemed; she hadn't even used magic.
“Oh, I hope we don’t have to go up the same way…” Mercury worried.
Specialist Hemp, stunned at the show, clapped him on the back, “Oh, you’d be fine.”
“No, I wouldn’t…! Did you see that shit?” Mercury was amazed.
Corporal Painter bopped the two on the backs of their heads, “Quiet, you two… Worry about that when the time comes…”
The corporal and the specialist figured Mercury would be able to do what Amethyst had just done, despite all three of them being ignorant to Mercury’s physical constitution. But they themselves? They weren’t sure.
Before they could mull about much else, Amethyst dropped back down amongst them.
“Yipe!” Spc. Hemp was tough, but not unshakable.
The other two had jumped, too. Amethyst had made quite an entrance.
“Sorry, fellows…” Amethyst regretted; she had already figured things out. “I’ve got good news and bad news…”
“Sounds like it’s all bad news, then, if there’s any bad news,” Cpl. Painter quipped.
Amethyst smirked, “No, there’s some good news.”
“What’s the bad news, then?” Mercury raised a hoof.
Amethyst was practically beaming, “The armory is packed with those things—to the fucking gills! Not even room to sit, really. That’s the bad news…”
“That’s not bad news... that’s terrible news…” Spc. Hemp sneered in a mixture of disgust and confusion. “Why are you smiling?!”
“Be at peace, Specialist,” Amethyst simpered. “I said there was good news.”
“And what’s the good news?” Mercury asked.
“They’re drunk… Like, really, really, drunk…” Amethyst chortled.
The stallions sighed with relief; the news wasn’t the best, but they’d take it.
“Okay,” Cpl. Painter voiced. “I suppose this might work out.”
“Yes, I think we’ll be fine,” Amethyst felt the same way. “We’re sticking to the plan. The vault… the pub… and then the armory. In case we have trouble with the armory, we can pick up the cache I left; either way, we’ll have all we need but lead by the time we’re back here. Follow me.”
The four ponies moved on, further into the bowels of the city, which they’d collectively—and lovingly—called home, work, and their stomping grounds. They had quite a night ahead of them.