//------------------------------//
// 13: Kiss The Sky 
// Story: Light Despondent Remixed 
// by Doctor Fluffy 
//------------------------------//



Light Despondent Remixed 



Chapter 13



Dust / We’re Sorry / Kiss The Sky



Shouts out to:


Jed, for being willing to talk this over with me


Vox, for editing help


Sledge


And TB3, because - even if this is all original material - I still owe a lot to him








Dancing Day

“It didn’t get any easier from there,” Kraber says, shaking his head slightly. 

Dancing Day nods. She remembers all the chaos in the wake of the Battle of Portland – the rumors that flew about Hadley’s Hope, the Battle of Littleton, the Berlin Break, the all-out war between PER and HLF, that big Emission in rural Maine, and of course, Montreal.

“No,” Heliotrope says. “It really didn’t.”

Kraber chuckles lightly. “Y’know, if Verity was here, she’d be talking a blue streak about how much of it was our fault.”

“How much of it was?” Vinyl asks.

“Well, not that much,” Kraber says. “For what it’s worth, Yael, Heliotrope? Berlin was not your fault.”

“It couldn’t have been,” Heliotrope says, confused. “That was totally out of our control.”

“The fact that you know that,” Kraber interrupts, “Is a good si–”

There is a knock at the door. A human woman with dirty blonde hair and prescription sunglasses walks inside, looking at him.

“Viktor?” she asks. She’s dressed like an off-duty nurse, wearing a nametag reading ‘Heather’. 

“Well, fokdamn,” Kraber says. “Heather!”

He jumps out of his seat, looking excited. “It’s been too long! How’ve you been?”

“Eh, you know,” Heather says, “Nurse duty’s been kicking my ass.”

“Enough you couldn’t see someone on the same base?” Aegis asks, curious.

“To be honest, yes,” Heather says bluntly. 

Kraber and Aegis wander off to talk to her, with her shaking Aegis’ hand. “So, Heather, Aegis. Aegis, Heather…” 

‘Must’ve been one of Mr. Kraber’s friends?’ Dancing Day wondered. 

“Wait,” Vinyl says, “Who’s this?”

“Long story short, this is my friend Heather from college,” Kraber says.

“I heard Viktor had some off time to tell this story,” Heather says, “And I haven’t seen him in years, so…”

“I get it. Look,” Kraber says, “Heather and I… we’ve some catching up to do. Yael, Heliotrope you mind taking over for a bit? I’m barely gonna be conscious for the first fifteen percent of this chapter–”

“Wait, what–” Heliotrope interrupts.

“And I’d kind of like to get back in touch with Heather for a bit,” Kraber says.

Yael shrugs. “That’s a good idea.”





Yael
August 9, 2022

What the Battle of Portland might have lacked in length, it more than made up for in pure chaos. PHL against PER who were disguised as PHL... HLF against real PHL... PER against HLF... local militia against almost everyone.

It was a madhouse.

One that Yael was grateful to be seeing at its tail end.

“...He did it,” Yael breathed, amazed. “He finally did it.”

All around her, the zombies were crumbling. Collapsing to the ground. One of them – the Newfoal that had tried to cut her head off with the axe – crawled up to her, clutching the ruins of its stomach.

“Dad,” it whispered. “Dad, I’m sor…”

It died midsentence, blood oozing out onto the ground.

She looked at the corpses – which were, she was certain, going to stay dead. Then to the few surviving PER.

She didn’t even need to give an order. They all knew what to do...

… 

… … 

… … … 

 … Yael then breathed a sigh of relief, leaning against an ambulance…

… And before she knew it, she was slumping onto the concrete, panting heavily, and wondering if she’d be able to get up for hours.

“Oh…” she wheezed, her back pressing the ambulance’s exterior. “Oh… Tonight was the worst.”

“Affirmative,” Oscar said, collapsing into a sitting position next to her. 

“I… need to sleep forever,” Smoky wheezed, shrugging off his assault saddle and letting all four legs give out under him.

At the entrance to the Maine Medical Center, five figures of different shapes and sizes emerged, staggering, looking as bone-tired as Yael felt. Those who had hands were holding them up. Those with something other than hands walked out in front, vulnerable to attack.

“Who!” Smoky yelped, scrambling for his saddle. “More enemies!? Come on, we can take th–”

“No need,” Bliss’ voice crackled over Yael’s comms. “It’s us, Lieutenant.”

And so they were, all five of them. The humans among them lowered their hands.

There was Bliss, and there was Asian woman with a cheap .32 pistol tucked into her jeans. Ahead of them was an unfamiliar orange unicorn, carrying an unconscious earthpony with a bandaged leg. And finally there was Nebula, missing one of her wings, who looked not just tired, but utterly hollowed-out.

“Sonuvabitch…” muttered Yael. Her joints creaking in protest, she stood up, facing them. “You’re one tough guy to kill, you know that, Bliss? Nebula,” she called to the thestral. “Sitrep. What happened in there? We saw those helicopters blasting the rooftop– Richards Building, was it? Who are these people?”

Nebula tried to straighten herself, her remaining wing barely steadying her.

“Petty Officer Nebula… reporting for duty, Ma'am,” she wheezed. “Escorting Julia Tanaka and Caduceus, nurses at the Maine Medical Center… Survivor count… three.”

“Three, huh?” Yael frowned, glaring at the bandaged earthpony slung over Caduceus’ back. “And who’s he?”

The Asian woman stepped in. “He’s my patient, Lieutenant,” she said firmly. “PER guy, sure, but… Hippocratic Oath, and all that.”

Yael just nodded. “Alright.”

With a weary motion, Bliss tapped his helmet. “...Think I need…. Rest,” he coughed. My… medical opinion… is that my everything hurts.”

“Yeah,” Nebula snarked. “You say that a lot.”

“I ain’t dead yet. It’s just… been a long day. There a bed somewhere?”

Yael turned away to gaze over the burning wreckage. Rubble and metal shards of helicopter were lying strewn about all over the place. None of this felt like a victory. Haddon was dead, Portland was a ruin, and she had failed to save it.

But. The prisoner Nebula had brought in? That was something, at least.

‘And how am I going to expla–’ Oh. Wait. That was on Gardner. ‘Thank God for small mercies. For now, I think Bliss has the right ide–’

Bliss collapsed next to Yael.

“Bliss,” she said. “Bliss, get up.”

“No,” Bliss mumbled, “I like it down here.”





Heliotrope

There was only one reason Heliotrope would ever remember the beginning of the reconstruction. They were in the midst of talking to Colonel Gardner about rebuilding efforts, even as Julia Tanaka and Caduceus ignored their exhaustion to attend the wounded - like Zhang, who miraculously hadn’t died from blood loss - when they made their horrifying discovery.

“... We’ll need to call in a lot of horsepower,” Heliotrope was saying, pacing about the concrete. “The areas near the harbor were the most devastated.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to fix the hospital?” Yael asked skeptically. “We might as well build a new hospital, after all that damage we caused.”

Gardner glanced at her dismissively. “Horsepower, you say, Heliotrope. Can’t you just, I don’t know, magic it back together?”

“It’d take a small army of unicorns, Colonel,” Heliotrope said. “We haven’t got all the specialized construction tools we’d have in Equestria. But I’d definitely advise that we use it as a shelter. Enough of the structure could still be stable. And the first one we’re taking to shelters,” she pointed at Bliss, lain-down on a military-issue blanket, “is that one.”

“Alright, let’s get the armor off him, Nurse,” Yael told Caduceus, who grunted and trotted over. “He’s going to need…”

Her voice stopped cold as Caduceus’s TK expertly pulled off Bliss’ gas mask. It got not further than one or two feet in the air before she dropped it. Because the face she’d revealed was thin, boney around the cheeks, and bearded.

“...That’s Viktor Kraber,” Heliotrope said, jaw hanging open.

Emotions crashed down on her like cresting waves. Fear. Sickness. Revulsion. Anger.

The man that’d shot her in the gut, made her feel crippled for nearly a month, worse than she even knew she could be hurt. Had shot a lot of Stranded in the Purple Winter. Spearheaded the Innsbruck Massacre. The Graz Massacre. And many, many more.

He was there, right there, unconscious.

This man had killed Reaper. He had saved a huge amount of people from the PER in the Medical Center. But from where Heliotrope was standing, there was no way none of this mess at the hospital couldn’t be his fault. He had helped Lovikov hijack the Sorghum, and this city wouldn’t be in such a state without that.

‘Bastard. What gives you the right to lie there so peacefully?’

Someone was yelling behind her.

“... What was he doing?!” Gardner cried. “What was he taking from us? Why was he lying?!”

“What’s going on?” said Summers, running up to them. “Who…”

Then he saw Kraber. And Summers’ fingers very conspicuously brushed against the holster of his Beretta. They moved away soon enough – but still kept very close to his pistol. And he kept looking at Kraber.

Momentarily relieved that Summers hadn’t given in to his trigger-finger – it wasn’t that she was one to talk, though she didn’t have fingers, but she shared Yael’s apprehension for this man – Heliotrope gave Kraber a hard stare.

‘Let him suffer. Whatever we do next, he is getting what he deserves.’

Yael’s voice was rather too calm when she spoke. “We need to detain him.”

“Really now, Ma'am,” Smoky stated, staring at Kraber. “Nobody will miss him if we don’t.”

‘And that is probably true,’ Heliotrope reflected, looking over to the coal-black earthpony. Off the top of her head, she didn’t know much about him, but there was something about him that made her feel uneasily familiar.

“Soldier,” said Yael, “you are not advocating–”

“No,” Smoky replied, but he was glowering. 

Caduceus was staring down at Kraber, the helmet lying discarded before her, a look of cold contempt on her face. Tanaka, alerted, walked up beside her.

“My God...” she whispered.

Her unicorn friend snorted. “I’ll say. I knew there was something wrong about that guy. Taco Day… I mean, seriously.”

‘The Tartarus is taco day?’ Heliotrope wondered.

Tanaka stared at her, face creased with worry. “Whatever he did…” she began. “He still went through Hell to help us…”

“Shut up,” snarled a male voice. “All of you. Let me think.”

Colonel Gardner, it seemed, wanted the last word. He walked from one side of the gathering to the other, one hand in his pocket and the other stroking his chin.

“Alright. Lieutenant Ze’ev is correct,” Gardner said at last, but Heliotrope thought she picked up reluctance in his tone.. “I can’t think of a way it wouldn’t be procedure to detain him for PHL Command. We find a place to stack this piece of shit, then we decide on what to do.”





Yael
August 10, 2022

Colonel Robert Gardner had complained, naturally. Said there was more important stuff to do. Said that the work was never done. But… they’d literally worked from sunrise to sundown and back again. They deserved a rest. So Yael had found herself sleeping until about 11 AM.

A command center had been set up by Gardner in a chain hotel – the Hilton Garden Inn, Downtown Waterfront, in fact. Barely two miles away from the Maine Medical Center. Yael had little prior experience with Hiltons, nor did she get to enjoy it much for the sights before she’d fallen alseep, utterly spent.

But it had been a good bed. While the hotel’s upper floors were lacerated, the building retained regular electricity and running water, with the staff falling over themselves to accommodate the PHL. Not surprising, frankly, seeing as government perks helped places like this keep going a little longer while the world ended.

And the promise of PHL help in rebuilding. That was useful too.

This was 2022. American hotels no longer got Europeans as guests – or Israelis, for that matter. At least the Europeans were lucky to have been given Special Administrative Zones on the Eastern Seaboard. How unsurprising that in the End of Days, America had finally let down its Zionist allies, and the Slattery Report’s proposal to create a settlement for them in Alaska had ended up getting implemented at last.

Yael had been there once before, and hated every minute of it. Hated the rueful jokes about Michael Chabon. Hated the cold. Hated the fact that there wasn’t any of the skiing Cousin Nny liked that could keep the cold bearable. 

Then again, she’d been alright with all of those things in other places she’d been, like Tunisia or Turkey. The problem was, in all likelihood, that it wasn’t home. And that it was a miserable, wind-bitten, freezing place full of prefabs and towering gray Modernist concrete blocks. It felt more like somewhere that Jews were meant to escape from, not to. 

Anyway, this was how it was.

They had requisitioned a conference room in this former hotel, using a video-chat function to link up with PHL Command and the USMC. Thus Yael, with a stomach of bad scrambled eggs, had found herself in this four-way meeting between Commandant Cheerilee, Colonel Gardner, Lieutenant-Colonel Northwoods along with her zebra adjutant Asani, and USMC Brigadier-General Joseph Thompson Ernest Raleigh – Gardner’s direct superior.

Asani stood silently in his screen’s background, wearing a frown that looked like it’d been etched on his face at birth and left there for the rest of his life. Yael knew from Heliotrope’s experience that someone of his size would be considered intimidating by equine standards, but… well. Being near six feet, he still felt short to her.

Northwoods took a look over at Asani. The rather heavyset zebra’s face was unreadable.

“I just finished that call for you, Colonel,” Asani said. “He’s going to be pissed when he gets back to you, though.”

“Who was that?” Cheerilee asked, looking into her respective screen’s camera.

“One of our suppliers,” Asani said, impassive. “Nothing to worry about.”

It was only on the fourth syllable of that sentence that Yael realized she’d thought she’d seen a flash of panic in Northwoods’ face. It’d disappeared too quickly for Yael to really analyze it, but she felt absolutely certain it was there. 

‘A vague answer. Panic. What are you–’

This was lost in the tirade that Northwoods soon unleashed.

“Because of you,” Northwoods said.  “There’s reports of PHL ponifying people. Helping PER, even helping HLF. There’s people on the Internet saying we wanted this to happen to Portland and that it’s a false flag. Others saying that by having ponies, we have to be so infiltrated that we can’t possibly be trusted.”

Heliotrope stared at Northwoods on the screen, perturbed. “Good Luna.”

“That,” Gardner said, through gritted teeth, “Was not my fault.”

“Really?” Northwoods asked. “Because it looked as if you couldn’t negotiate for the life of you. Like you were egging Leonid on. This is a goddamned mess. A city destroyed. Reports of a super-Newfoal, PHL traitors. Everything making us look like utter fools! This is a complete failure, Colonel Gardner!”

Yael looked surprised by the venom in the shorter, doll-like Swiss-American’s voice. Then again, everyone was short compared to Yael.

“Gets worse than that, too,” Northwoods said. “That yellow paper we hate? Samizdat?”

Gardner growled. “I wish we could burn down that fucking yellow rag so much.”

“First Amendment,” Raleigh said, surprising everyone. “I don’t like Samizdat, but there’s nothing we can do.”

“Nothing we should do, Brigadier-General,” Cheerilee said, gently.

Raleigh was silent for a few seconds, before nodding in agreement. “Absolutely correct.”

“Well, they acted fast,” Northwoods said. “We had barely put out the hospital fire before they went and started another one. It’s everywhere. They’re claiming the disguised PHL weren’t PER with stolen uniforms, but PHL that went traitor. They’ve identified a few who we have determined to be PER spies, but…”

“But?” Yael asked.

“You’re not going to like it.”

“We can take it,” Heliotrope said.

“They doxxed PHL,” Northwoods said. “Gave contact info and a bunch of other stuff. One of them had to bring his family onto an airbase to hide, and there’s a riot outside of it. The commanding officer threw one man who advocated shooting them in the brig, but...”

Yael stared at the screen in rapt attention, horrified.

“They… framed some of the people working with you, Ze’ev,” Northwoods said. “Including Chinook, Walker, and… Mikkelsen. They used a photo of his real face, too. Mention that you trusted him, and that clearly, ‘it’s a typical judgment call for First Lieutenant Ze’ev.’ Their words, not mine. ”

Something broke within Yael. 

‘Oscar?’ She thought. ‘OSCAR? He’s so skittish about his appearance, and they’re going to draw an Internet mob on him!’

“Whoever is leaking this to the public,” Yael said, “I am going to hurt them.”

Gardner nodded. “I want to be around for that.”

“Not how I would have put it, Lieutenant Ze’ev,” Cheerilee said, with a tone of voice reserved for someone maneuvering the tiniest jigsaw piece into place, “But it’s true. This is a catastrophe. For PR, and a lot more.”

“Robert,” said Brigadier-General Raleigh, “did the best he could at containing it. We’ve got plenty of HLF and PER in custody thanks to the perimeter he established, and it was because of his decisive action that we were able to contain the super-Newfoal threat.”

Anger surged in Yael. As usual. ‘Another white man, saying he deserves credit fo–’

“Not entirely true. A lot of that was Ze’ev,” Gardner said. “I maintained the perimeter, she helped hold the hospital. Isn’t that right?”

A surge of gratitude flowed through Yael. Even in the IDF, that wasn’t something she was used to hearing as a biracial woman. And it wasn’t just whiter Israelis who’d take credit – once or twice during the Europe Evacuation, it had been an Ethiopian officer, having clawed his way up the ranks, brute-forcing his way into command, who had said;

“She’s white anyway. Let a black man get credit for once.”

The fact that Yael had avoided a disciplinary hearing was one of the few things that kept her believing even in these troubled times that miracles could happen if she believed in herself.

And then gratitude gave way to fear, as Yael thought about that insistence in Gardner’s voice... What would happen if she didn’t agree and thus credit Kraber, or undercut her commander. She knew, at this point, that Gardner was a hair’s breadth away from losing his command. That finding out a lone HLF man, one of the worst, had done this much while Gardner had been off maintaining his precious perimeter…

Well, it would destroy her. Destroy Gardner. Maybe even separate her and Heliotrope, leave Quiette Shy in the bowels of some godforsaken PHL lab on a ship in the Arctic Ocean or the Pacific or some forgettable part of the globe, and Oscar back with them, in a place where they would

That last one was too horrible to consider.

“Yes,” Yael said. “That’s correct.”

“Brigadier-General Raleigh is right. The best with what I was given,” Gardner retorted. “I had to face down terrorists. Madmen that, for all I know, would’ve done this anyway.”

“You can’t know that you couldn’t have reasoned with Lovikov,” Northwoods said.

“Actually, I can,” Gardner said. “I read Lovikov’s psych profiles. As compiled by one FBI Special Agent Garrett Nichols.”

A sigh that could only have come from pure pain ran through Cheerilee’s body. Yael personally didn’t feel it. Garrett was a good detective, the best profiler she’d ever known, and probably one of the smartest people she’d ever met.

“He very well might have done this no matter what I said,” Gardner said. “We know that when his unit and the Thenardier Guards claimed to be herding ponies into a bank vault in Wabush ‘for their own safety’, they shot them all anyway. Lovikov hates ponies, and almost anything that reminds him of the fall of the Soviet Union, with a passion. There is no telling when he would have lost his composure and just shot the city anyway.”

“Regardless,” Raleigh added, “I’ve seen what these madmen are doing. I’m not demoting Gardner until I see these bloodthirsty psychopaths who are a greater threat to Earth than Equestria punished. Gardner stays.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gardner said, nodding and smiling.

Cheerilee looked somewhat apprehensive, but she nodded slightly. “Very well, then. Even so, it remains my stance, and that of the PHL High Command, that the Solar Empire must always be treated as our foremost priority. This in-fighting we’ve seen flare up time and again on Earth can, in the end, only serve their interests.”

Everyone, both those physically present in the conference, listened quietly and attentively to the titled Commandant of the PHL, Ambassador Heartstrings’ official successor. Best laid plans of mice and men, the saying went, but it could have applied to ponies as well. It still lay fresh in Yael’s memory how despite Heartstrings’ precautions, the loss of the Ambassador had, back in February and March, left the PHL feeling practically headless. There’d been a feeling even among PHL that they’d lost their momentum. Pushes from other offshoot groups like the Chinese People's Liberation Army Conversion War Defense Group2 and the mostly griffon-run1 Russian “Division E” to take over. And even a few war hawks from the US and Russia alike that’d tried to push their pork-barrel project3 HLF units to the forefront of the war.

It’d been a dark time. Yael had friends from bases in some parts of the US, places that weren’t so friendly to ponies, who didn’t know if the lights would be on when they woke up the next day.

She knew that Miss Cherry had not been regarded by all as the true heir to the Golden Lyre. A lot of popular sentiment had deemed, and still did, that Lady Cadance would be the natural inheritor for the role of the great bridge between worlds. It was only Cadance’s own endorsement which had decisively swung the vote in favor of the Head of Cultural Preservation.

Amongst the High Command, Cheerilee was considered a moderate, and sure enough, a willingness to please both sides ran with the ever-present risk of satisyfing neither – those who felt she was too accomodating with the HLF, or those who felt she gave too much of a carte blanche to the PHL’s extensive paramilitary wing. To men like Gardner.

Right then, though, Gardner seemed content to just sit and listen.

“We know the HLF,” Cheerilee continued. “Even amidst the fallout of Portland’s shelling, we can’t afford to lose sight of one thing– that whole crisis at the Maine Medical Center was not their work, anymore than it was ours. Through the PER, the Solar Empire continues to operate in indirect and labyrinthine ways, everyone… And tempting as it is, we’d be very wrong to treat Shieldwall’s anomalous creature as just icing on the cake.”

She eyed Yael.

“Lieutenant Ze’ev. Colonel Gardner just praised your contribution to containing this Newfoal in the hospital. I’ll brief Time Turner and R&D to send someone over, but is there anything you can tell us from what you saw?”

Yael tried not to let her anxiety show. She felt Gardner looking at her closely. “Apologies, Ma’am. I’m afraid I did not get a good look at the creature during the fight. However, perhaps Heliotrope can tell us more. I’d sent her out to scout the area, before it happened.”

Yael knew what Heliotrope would have to say, and Heliotrope knew she knew. Yet under the circumstances, it was as good as it would get.

“Wish I could, Ma’am,” Heliotrope said wearily. “Shieldwall’s getting real smart, that’s one thing I can tell you. I was gonna sneak up on PER holed up in the Richards Building’s upper floors when my flightsuit gave out. Completely fritzed out the invisibility.”

Cheerilee’s lips thinned. “This is serious news, considering your suit’s… uniqueness, Sergeant Heliotrope,” the PHL’s leader said, a hint of distaste in her voice. “What could’ve caused it?”

“I dunno for sure,” said Heliotrope. “But I think they’d set up something to interfere with the crystals, maybe even a totem-prole.”

Gardner interrupted her with a cough. “I’ve already run a first sweep of the Richards Building, Ma’am,” he told Cheerilee. “A right fucking wreck it was upstairs, but we did secure another few prisoners, including one human. No sign of a totem-prole, though.”

“They had transfer-crystals, according to one source,” Heliotrope said. “If a totem-prole was there, ‘porting it away would take precedence over their own lives.”

“Typical Imperial philosophy,” Cheerilee agreed. She looked thoughtful. “Heliotrope, you mentioned a ‘source’. What source might that be?”

Heliotrope glanced at Yael and Gardner before answering. “Petty Officer Nebula. A thestral. Attached to… um, the Coast Guard, I think. She... had a thing about breaking windows–” This had to be meant in jest, though what the joke was, Yael didn’t think even Heliotrope knew. “–but it got her places. That, and her innate stealthing abilities worked where my suit failed.”

Yael tried telling herself Heliotrope hadn’t sounded a little bitter there.

“I see,” said Cheerilee. “Then Petty Officer Nebula is to be commended. I should like her report in my inbox as soon as possible.”

‘Should have seen that coming. Shit.’ 

“Can we also get her preferential treatment for a prosthesis?” Heliotrope asked. “She fought as hard as some of the PHL’s elites, if not harder. She lost a wing, and I think she deserves something as thanks.”

Raleigh looked at her, confused, pursing her lips.

“Physical therapy and bed rest are agony for a pegasus,” Cheerilee said, nodding. “Very well. While I do that, we must look into the totem-prole hypothesis. If one was installed in the hospital, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s somehow connected to the super-Newfoal’s creation. Shieldwall’s got a reputation for experimenting.”

Even through her worry, Yael saw the wisdom in Cheerilee’s words, so she just nodded too.

“I’ve read the number of PER prisoners taken,” Cheerilee said. “Two female pegasi, one male earthpony, one male human?”

Yael could just hear the earthpony mare asking herself ‘and why were there so few?’ internally.

“You’ll understand I’d like to be updated on any intel from them as we garner it. But now, back to the HLF.” She coughed. “Gardner, you’ve made a very special prisoner. What’s your next move?”

Gardner smiled mirthlessly. “What else? We have Viktor Kraber in custody, so we’re going to interrogate him to the best of our ability. Next, we’re going straight to Defiance. I have more than a few questions I want to ask all of them.”

“Excellent,” Cheerilee said. “We’ve been trying to get in contact with them, but there’s been complete radio silence. Our contacts in both prisons in Berlin, New Hampshire–”

(She pronounced it the German way,  Ber-LIN, not BERlin. That detail had always thrown Yael off whenever she visited her cousin.)

 “–have been trying their best, but no luck.”

Yael thought about that, and wondered about Cousin Nny. He lived pretty close by, and it’d be nigh-impossible for him not to know someone from around there.

“Whose bright idea was it to have two prisons housing HLF that close to that terrorist camp, Ma'am?” Gardner scoffed.

“They were close to a rail-line, and we had a lot of criminals after the Purple Winter,” Cheerilee explained. “It made perfect sense at the time.” She looked at Gardner sternly. “Remember. This is mainly saber-rattling. I’ll have Captain Reiner as Command’s eye and ears at Defiance, and I’d wish to avoid further escalation.”

The Commandant glanced at a spot on her side of the viewscreen which Yael deduced represented Raleigh’s feed.

“I’ve conferred with the USMC in the person of Brigardier-General Raleigh,” Cheerilee said conclusively. “The federal government wants someone to pay for Portland as much as you do, but for the sake of keeping this from spilling over with other groups of HLF, they don’t want it to look as if a formal raid’s being conducted on Defiance due to guilt by association. Officially, this is still being treated as a matter between the PHL and the HLF– the National Guard or the Marines will only intervene if the PHL show signs of fanning the flames. Am I clear?”

Gardner nodded. “Very well then, Commandant… So, sir,” he said, addressing Raleigh, “just what does this mean in practical terms?”

Yael observed the Brigadier-General’s face as he drew himself up.

“In practical terms,” Raleigh stated, “what it means is, the feds are ruling out a drone strike on Defiance as an option.”

“Fine by me,” said Gardner. “I want them to look me in the eye.”

“Just remember, Robert, this is a refugee camp of–”

“Terrorist camp, Joseph,” Gardner hissed. “Their leader is directly responsible for the fact that I’m now standing in a city that looks for all the world like it’s gone through Barrierfall. Every one of their citizens has been raised to hate us. Their children play with pony bones and weave pegasus feathers into their hair.”





Dancing Day

“Did they… did they ever do that?” Dancing Day asks, looking profoundly sick.

“If they did,” Kraber says, “It wasn’t while I was there. There might’ve been one, or two, but… no. I’d fokking hope not.”





Yael

“Those are just rumors,” Lieutenant-Colonel Northwoods said placatingly.

“If they do this,” Gardner said, “I wouldn’t claim any cruelty to be above them.”

‘...Doesn’t he mean ‘beneath them’?’ Yael wanted to ask. But she wasn’t going to interrupt a superior officer. This all felt precarious enough as it was.

“There are families there,” Northwoods said. “It’d be madness not to go, but. I will not see you burning it to the ground.”

“Or what?” Gardner asked, and Yael felt as if something in him was tensing, coiling–

There was a beeping sound on the monitor

“Lovikov only took his elites with them,” Cheerilee said, removing her hoof from a switch. “We can’t risk another war at such a crucial time. You’re going, Colonel, but you’re not bringing your full force.”

Gardner nodded. “Fine.”

Cheerilee looked him dead in the eye. “Fine, what?”

Gardner nodded again. “Fine, Ma'am.”

Incredibly, he managed not to make that last part seem sarcastic.

“Good,” Cheerilee said curtly. “We’ll be sending over a transport to move your captured prisoners to the respective facilities. Watch over the prisoners in the meantime, and try to get as much information out of them as you can.”





Kraber

Kraber didn’t have any plot-relevant dreams that told him cryptic phrases that might as well have come from a cryptic phrase birthday game on Facebook, like ‘The Obelisks Do Not Know You. Repent, They Too Have Teeth’, or ‘Beware the Quartz’ or ‘Sixty-Two Days. The Everstorm Comes’.

He didn’t dream about his wife. He didn’t dream about his failures.  That was actually pretty lekker. And for once, he woke up relaxed.

For a moment, he was imagining that this was the little house in Garmisch-Partenkirchen just off the slopes. The one inspired by that week over in Yellowstone, with all the wooden furniture.

‘Viktor,’ Kate was saying, ‘I told the hospital you were taking a sick day. It’s just us, baby.’

‘I need to work,’ Kraber had said, ‘mom has that podcast, and they-’

‘Hannah saw you try to get drunk during an alcohol shower,’ Kate had replied, ‘And, not, like. With a beer in the shower. As in, you were using alcohol to shower.’

That was very true.

‘Trust me, you need this.’

The reason he’d tried to get drunk was because… well, that was too horrible to even consider recounting.

Right up until the moment he woke up and started wondering where the hell he was, what was going on, and how he got there.

He looked around the room. It looked like someone’s bedroom. Basement floor, judging by the tiny windows and the extraordinarily dreary atmosphere.

The first thing anyone thinks when they wake up in a new and comfortable bed should not be ‘Oh shit.’

But Kraber’s life had developed a near-limitless capacity to surprise him. He looked to one side of the bed, reaching for his backpack.

He rifled through it. ‘No guns. Stuffed animals are here, which is a plus… no armor, either.  Well, this is nice. Least the stuffed animals are here.’

He walked towards what looked like the way out. Tried to open it. No luck. Stared through the peephole, to find a long hallway full of doors.

‘Shit.’

No luck. The closest thing he could find to an exit was a first-floor window. It looked like some pretty thick glass, too.

‘What to do what to do what to do…’

As his mind raced, he heard voices. From down the hallway.

“... Was him all this time?!” 

“That face, the beard… pretty distinctive.”





Quiette Shy

Here was what had been happening at that moment:

Quiette Shy and Yael – Summers and Gardner following, soon enough – had been at the questioning of the captured PER human. Heliotrope stood in the background, assault-saddles ready, mouth trigger hanging just slightly below her chin.

There were many ways people described PER like the one they’d been interrogating at the hotel. Filth. Grapes. Lobes – that one had taken Quiette Shy a while to understand, until someone had explained it was short for “lobotomy”. Traitors. Vials. Zombifiers. Zeds. Zs. 

In this particular case, the most defining word was “human.”

That kind of pissed Quiette Shy off. 

She’d known some PER from her social circles in Canterlot back home, second or third or fourth or even fifth sons of nobles that had joined the PER from a distance, convinced that they could import the refinement and culture and benevolence of Equestria to Earth. Allegedly they weren’t being racist, but in hindsight Quiette couldn’t say they weren’t not being racist. Ponies like that, like Jet Set or Hoity Toity or Brandywine Flask who had all the benefits of their home, seeing the good they could do from the comforts of an armchair, that she understood. Almost.

But–

“How Bucked Up,” Quiette Shy said to the thin, shaking little human sitting before her, “Do You Have To Be To Take A Look At An Entire Planet With Thousands Of Years Of Innovation And Culture And Think, ‘It Deserves To Die. Nothing’s Worth Saving’? To Resign Yourself To Rolling In The Muck, Hated By All?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” said the thin, dark-haired human sitting at the table. One leg tapped against their chair.

The other leg had been amputated. It wasn’t entirely the PHL’s fault – they’d been recovered from a team sweeping Maine Medical, most of their leg a pulped ruin beneath the knee. Apparently Kraber had shot them there.

“I Don’t Want Any World To Be Destroyed,” Quiette Shy asked. “I Don’t Believe This World Is So Repugnant It’s Beyond Saving.”

“You weren’t born here,” the human PER operative said. “Do you know what it’s like, knowing we’ll always hurt each other? That we’re too dumb to keep ourselves from destroying the planet? How older generations, I am convinced, wish we were dead?”

All their gear had been stripped away, and sat in the hotel’s loading dock under guard of various PHL, National Guard, and police. It would be placed on a truck, then it would be moved to a PHL-commissioned freight train and sent up to Montreal, or the Nevada desert, or some flyover country between East and West Coast.

“I don’t see how that equals something worse than genocide,” Yael said. “And I hope I  never grow to hate everything as much as you do, here and now.”

“You should,” he said, turning to Yael. “What America does to people like y-”

Quiette Shy could imagine that whatever she thought about a human telling her how she should feel, Yael felt it too.

“I’m Israeli,” Yael interrupted. “There’s a lot of context here that gets lost on me.”

That seemed to derail the PER operative’s train of thought, just a little bit.

“Can’t you admit that where you’re from would be happier without religion?” the PER man asked. “The problem with humanity is humanity itself.”

“You justify your actions,” Yael said, “By refusing to see any positives. For me, Judaism isn’t just religion. It’s identity. It’s moral framework, it’s our culture, it’s what binds us together. My beliefs are not the problem. The problem is sociopaths who think only their beliefs matter who can’t live and let live.”

Quiette Shy nodded approvingly. Yael had never exactly been that serious about religion, not as much as she made herself seem.

Honestly, Quiette Shy thought that Yael’s usual defenses of her religiosity were heavily out of spite. If Quiette Shy was in her friend’s shoes, she wouldn’t be letting PER go after something she cherished so.

“I justify nothing,” the PER man said, “Duty to Shieldwall and Solar Empire are their own reward.”

“So Then What Is This Duty?” Quiette Shy asked.

“To a higher cause.”

“That’s what your kind of fascist always does.”

“Fascists,” Quiette Shy said, tapping one hoof against the floor. “Oh, That Is Rich. I’m From A Country That Treats Us Like Citizens Until We Cross The Line, Then We’re Just Raw Material. You’re Leading Armed Insurrection That Will Kill A Planet And Entire Cultures.”

“We are revitalizing it,” the PER man hissed.





Yael

“Oh?” Quiette Shy asked. “Tell Me. How Many Crops Have You Gotten From This Revitalized Earth? How Many Ecological Cascade Events, And Wolf Attacks Have You Dealt With? How Many Factories In New Prance Have Been Revitalizing The Earth With Their Own Pollution?”

Quiette Shy kind of liked Earth’s wolves. It’d been funny watching Earth’s predators attacking Imperials in the wilds back during the Bad Old Days. Watching ponies that hadn’t been told Earth was basically the Everfree Forest on a planetary scale getting caught flat-hoofed.

That, and there was something funny about the way it was so easy to make them act like dogs with perfectly applied head scritches from Oscar.

The PER man was silent.

“How Many Homes Have You Destroyed?” Quiette Shy asked. “I Know Potion Isn’t Much Of A Weapon. How Many People Have You Killed Instead?”

“They were necessary sacrifices,” the PER man insisted. 

“Funny how sacrifices can be necessary when you’re not making them,” Yael said. “So, what’s so important to Shieldwall that you’re willing to make so many of them?”

“Even if I could tell you,” the PER man said, “I wouldn’t. You can start breaking my fingers, one by o–”

“Even if we did,” Heliotrope said, “Nobody would complain.”

This was technically true. Yael couldn’t imagine anyone shedding tears for tortured PER. Bliss Kraber had been right when he said you could do anything awful to them and nobody would care.

That said…

‘Why does everybody think militaries see torture the same way some people see hammers?’ Yael wondered. 

Agent Garrett Nichols had once told her something she’d always… well, ‘believed’ was a strong word. But she’d considered it much more palatable;

“People likely want to tell you what they did. Either they feel guilty or they’re proud of it. Once you put people through enough pain, you can make them confess to murdering John Lennon just so the pain stops. It’s not reliable.“

‘So, which one is he?’


Yael had narrowed it down to prideful. The complete lack of remorse. The seeming glee in his own superiority as PER.

“Can’t have that much useful information anyway,” she said.

Quiette Shy and Heliotrope stared at her, but neither one said anything. They trusted her.

“What?!” the PER man asked.

“I already know he’s planning something like Portland,” Yael said. “The deeply-placed traitors?”

Okay, that one she could only guess. You didn’t reveal that many assets unless you had a goal, and Yael’s best guess was that it had been a spur-of-the-moment maneuver to discredit the PHL during a crisis.

But why, then…

“The teleport spikes we found?” Yael continued. “And obviously, it involves anomalous Newfoals. From there, it’s not hard to figure out. Shieldwall regards those mutant freaks as his bread and butter.”

It was a bluff, of course. Transparently so.

“You think we have this planned?!” he laughed. “Nah, that’s the trouble with you PHL. You can’t think big enough. If you could, you would’ve given up on being a total human a long time ago!”

Thankfully, he was taking the bait.

‘Good…’

“But it all makes sense for how Shieldwall is going to–” Yael started.

“Think,” the PER member said, laughing slightly, “bigger. We need you worn down, so we can strike you at your weakest. With Project Fillydelpia, we’ll bring this country, the PHL to its knees, we–”

His mouth stopped working abruptly. He fell over, staring at Yael, Heliotrope, and Quiette Shy in utter horror. He tried vocalizing, tried making sounds, but his jaw was clenched shut.

“Geassed, then,” Yael said off-handedly. “Already pre-enlisted as a future recruit of the Royal Guard, did he? Guess I’m done.”

Gardner shook his head, placing his hands in his pockets. “Never did care much for Delayed Entry, myself,” he said sadly. “It’s unbecoming for the greatest democracy in the world.”

A pitifully ironic statement, given how the number of outright child soldiers had gone up worldwide in the past year alone, but Yael glanced at him, feeling a rare moment of warmth for Robert Gardner. While Israel’s military service may have given its people an edge once a new war came, countries that hadn’t always lived under a constant fear of annihilation shouldn’t be pushing their youth towards militarism the same way.

“Looks like all we’ll get of him, then,” Heliotrope added, nodding. “When does his mouth open up again, anyway?” 

“Not my problem,” Yael said, as the three of them walked out the door. “We’ve got more to do, then.”

“Like interrogating Viktor Kraber,” Gardner said.

Yael had to wonder, how long had he been there?

“I want to know what the fuck he and Lovikov were thinking when they did this,” Gardner said. “After all he’s destroyed…”





Kraber

“... does he even feel regret?”

‘That asshole?! Kraber thought. The one that called me a rapist?!

 “I’ll tell you what he will feel. Pain.” That voice came from someone Kraber didn’t kn–

‘Wait a minute. The one who pointed his gun at me. The blond one with the nine-millimeter.’





Dancing Day[(/b]

“It was Summers,” Heliotrope interrupts.

Kraber grumbles. “So, is the fact that he wanted to make like Thomas Calvert on me still fokkin’ surprising?”

“I don’t know who that is,” Aegis says, and in that moment Heliotrope is saying:

“Oh, that one guy from Worm?”

“You read Worm?” Rivet asks, surprised.

“Lorne’s little sister’s name is Taylor, it was kind of unavoidable for them,” Heliotrope explains.

[/hr]

Yael

“The humans and ponies he’s killed,” Yael said. “Shooting my friend. The things he’s stolen. That monster once stole from a caravan we were bringing to a camp full of ponies. He–”





Dancing Day

Yael suddenly looks very uncomfortable.

“Look,” Kraber sighs. “It’s fine, Yael. I live in a glass house on this one. I can’t throw stones. At this point, I’m just glad you didn’t use a car battery and a dog collar.”

Soarin’ and Spitfire look at Kraber with confusion, and then near-identical faces of disgust.

“Viktor,” Heliotrope says, “Why.”

“Don’t like that, huh?” Dancing Day asks, not really sure what Kraber means.

“....Uh,” Kraber says. It does not quite sound like a yes to her. He sounds almost embarrassed. “That’s… kind of the opposite of the problem.”

Dancing Day doesn’t really get what that means, but she has the sense it’s better not to know.

“Oh no,” Aegis says, placing one hoof against his face.





Kraber

“–needs to pay. Besides, he’s Lovikov’s friend, on all accounts,” Yael finished. “They’ve worked together on and off since North Africa. We can get a lot of good intel out of him.”

“Like the Sorghum,” Gardner said. In a way that made it absolutely certain he expected Kraber to know. And wouldn’t take any other answer.

‘Shit.’

“You think he knows, though?” someone asked.

“How could he not?”

And Kraber realized he couldn’t argue with that logic. Fokking dammit. He was supposed to be Lovikov’s friend. He was one of his most trusted soldiers.

‘And he didn’t tell me about the ship.’

Kraber couldn’t prove that Lovikov knew about it. But it wouldn’t make much sense for him not to know, would it? Lovikov’s right hand. An escape from the Rig. Impersonating PHL. He was well and truly–

“THAT FOKKIN’ KONTGESIG!”

A night-stand shook. A cheap mass-produced lamp that was an imitation of an imitation fell to the ground, and shattered.

Kraber stared at the wreckage, seething, foot throbbing.

“FOKKIN’ PRICK!”

‘He didn’t tell me about the ship.’

“ASS SANDALS!” 

A wooden chair splintered against the wall.

“THAT MOTHERFOKKER!”

Lovikov had known. Had absolutely, no questions about it, known about the ship. Or, part of him whispered, at the very least, they’d known enough about him to want to support him. But that… For all the sense it made outwardly, it just made sense to assume Lovikov knew.

‘The shit we could have done, and he didn’t let me know. Who else was in on this?! What fokker didn’t tell me?!’

An armchair flew into a window, glass spider-webbing under its weight.

‘The shit we went through together! The Europe Evacuation, Innsbruck, fighting alongside the Russian Army, Tunisia, the hunt for Pinkie! The Mercy Ships where I kept him on life support after that infection, the time I performed surgery on his leg!’

“What am I, JUST FOKKIN KATSPOEGIE TO HIM?!”

A desk tumbled across the room, near the still-locked door.

‘I gave my everything to him! It was supposed to be us against the world, against the Solar Empire! I give all that to him and he doesn’t fokkin’ tell me?! He has to go behind my back like THIS?!





Dancing Day

“Uh,” Dancing Day says, “This is… Look… Kraber, we know you like men and women, were you–”

She instantly regrets this question, as Kraber’s face contorts into a look of pure distilled hate that makes it look like he is about to chew nails and spit out paperclips.

“FFFFF-”

“Uh….” she says, backing away slowly.

“Viktor,” Aegis says. “Are you…”

“Fine,” Kraber says, a little too quickly. 

“...You’re sure,” Yael says evenly.

“Ja,” Kraber says, nodding. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because we know you,” Vinyl says, “And you’re usually angry.”

Heliotrope gives Vinyl a Look. One that makes it absolutely unclear whether she wants to agree or say something about how that’s not something you say to your friends.

“Nooit, Vinny’s got a point on that one,” Kraber says, chuckling lightly.

“...Vinny?” Vinyl asks.

“I thought it was lekker,” Kraber says. 

“Nickname’s worth thinking about,” Vinyl says, a hoof under her chin.

“But for the record, fok no,” Kraber says. “Not touching that with a ten-foot pole. I just… how many of us in here have been falsely accused of something?”

Nearly every hand or hoof in the room goes up. 

“That’s… more than I expected,” Kraber says. “But the reason I asked, well… something similar to this thing with Lovikov happened,” Kraber says. “I just… Years of friendship. Of being together. I talk to the guy, I trust him. I just want the benefit of the doubt. But no, somehow I’m an entitled kontgesig who is the worst fokkin scum for asking for that.”

“I know what you mean,” Heliotrope says.

Kraber looks over to her. “You do?”

“Sure I do,” Heliotrope says. “I serve in the PHL, I work with Yael, I go above and beyond… But parents still hide their children when I’m nearby sometimes. Sometimes, even if their kids aren’t afraid. Somehow that hurts more.”

Aegis nods sadly. That one silent motion says a lot.

“It especially hurts because we’re supposed to be really cute to humans,” Vinyl says.

Everyone looks at her.

“Come on, it’s true!” Vinyl protests.

Kraber looks over to Aegis. “I’m a scientist, and I’ve just confirmed that.”

“You’re a sci-?!” Aegis starts. 

“I was studying making cyborg limbs before the Purple Winter,” Kraber admits off-handedly. “I loved Deus Ex ever since playing it with my big brother Edward and my little brother Hayden, and it was always a childhood dream.”

“Um. That’s a lot. But. Anyway,” Aegis stammered.  “Well, thanks, Vik.”





Kraber

Kraber had calmed–

Well, that was a relative term. ‘Calm’ and ‘Kraber’ were, at this point, rarely anything other than acquaintances who treat each other with barely restrained contempt.

But he was certainly calmer than he’d been while throwing furniture, so that was something.

He looked outside. He had no real way to tell what time it was, but by the looks of the long shadows, the slightly darker sky, it had been awhile.

He stared through the window at the city. It wasn’t much of a view, but even so, it did not look very good. There was rubble littering the alleyway that faced this room, and – he thought – someone’s hand sticking out of it. 

‘...What have I done. They’re going to torture it out of me.’





Dancing Day

“...Were you, though?” Dancing Day asks.

Heliotrope looks distinctly uncomfortable.

“Viktor,” she says. “I want you to know that-”

“I probably do know, and I don’t care,” Kraber says. “It’s not important right now.”

“No,” Yael says. “No. I wouldn’t have stood for it. If you’d said you didn’t know what the Ship was, I…”

“You wouldn’t have believed me,” Kraber says offhandedly.

“Of course I wouldn’t have. I would’ve asked a few more questions, just to be sure. Then I would’ve believed you,” Yael says.





Heliotrope

Heliotrope glanced over one wing. “What’s going on over there?”

“I read a psych file,” Gardner commented, shrugging. “He has some mental disorder that makes him periodically lose his temper. Nothing to worry about.”

Yael nodded. Apparently, as usual, she’d read psych files beforehand.

“IED?” said Quiette Shy.

“What?” Summers exploded. “He has explosives on him?! Why didn’t any of you search–”

“We did,” Yael said. “We didn’t see anything to worry about after we confiscated his guns.”

“This is Viktor Kraber,” sighed Heliotrope. “There’s almost certainly something to worry about.”

Whatever Kraber was doing in there, he sounded pissed. How exactly someone so thin could move around so much furniture, Heliotrope had no idea, but there he was, apparently destroying a perfectly good hotel room.

The five of them were getting closer to his room. Ever so closer.

“COCK-FOKKING FUNGAL RIMJOB PIECE OF SHIT!”

There was the sound of glass shattering.





Kraber

He slid onto the street on his belly, the pavement rubbing against his stomach like a cheese-grater.

‘Ow.’

He’d pushed the backpack out first. The shards of glass scratched against it slightly, but didn’t break the canvas.

‘Fokking ow.’

With one final pull, he dragged his legs through the window. He gasped, breathing a sigh of relief as he was finally able to stand up.

He slung the backpack on, and walked down the alleyway. Finally. He was out. He was–

‘Um.’

Kraber’s train of thought derailed.

‘Well, fok. Now what.’

It admittedly wasn’t the first time in the last twenty-four hours he’d realized just how alone he was, but it was the first time he truly didn’t have anywhere to turn. Not even any PHL to fool.

‘Would Tanaka help? No. I don’t know her apartment. And Nebula? No, I don’t even know where she is. What to do, what to do…’

He looked to both sides of the alleyway. Somehow, the PHL hadn’t heard the window break. Maybe it was a small window, it was just one more noise among the city’s tapestry of background noise upon background noise, it was hard to say.

They’d absolutely have guards posted on either side. Which meant…

Kraber looked up at the building that had crumbled into this alleyway, bricks spilling levery which way, shattered glass poking from former windows.

‘Only way is up, I guess.’

He crawled onto the rubble. Lifted himself up, digging his fingers into the gaps between bricks.

‘This is a terrible idea.’

He looked from side to side as he scaled the ruined building. Nobody seemed to have noticed just yet, but–





Heliotrope

“He’s escaped!” Gardner yelled.

That same fury surged through Heliotrope. He’d been part of this absolute shitshow. He’d lied to her. Escaped them. Made them all look like fools.

And there he was, about to escape any responsibility for his actions.

‘You may have helped us,’ Heliotrope thought, ‘but that sure as Tartarus doesn’t erase what you’ve done.’





Kraber

‘...Shit.’

He crawled through what was once a living room.

‘Can’t let them find me!’ Kraber thought frantically, looking for somewhere, anywhere to– ‘Wait a minute.’

He crawled through a roughly man-sized hole in the wall. Found himself in a hallway. It looked… well, hell. It looked like it could crush him at any second. But at least it wasn’t outside. He heard not a sound from all over the building, and he was absolutely certain of one fact:

‘This place is empty.’

He looked outside. Saw PHL troops leaving the improvised prison next door – he guessed it was temporary? – and filtering into the streets.

‘They won’t look for me here. They’ll all think I’m on the run. I wait for dark, and get out when it’s da–’

He looked down. More PHL traversing the streets. A police car wailing down the broken street.

‘ ...No, I can’t let them set up a perimeter. That’s fokkin dof. What I have to do is wait for them to thin out here, and get out of the city as fast as possible.’





Yael

“He’s proven,” Gardner said, “That he’s not going to be reasonable about this.”

They hadn’t noticed Kraber in the destroyed building nearby,

But what they were doing was working to cover the city, to prevent his escape.

“Summers, Smoky, and I will look for Kraber near the train station,” Gardner said. “Boniface, Nilsdottir, Mikkelsen, Chinook, you’re with Heliotrope, by the bay. Shy, Walker, Herbert, you’re also with Lieutenant Ze’ev– you’ll be heading north towards Eastern Cemetery to guard our perimeter. I’m leaving the rest of our troops to guard the hotel until the transport gets here. Now MOVE IT, PEOPLE! We’ve got a wide area to search!”

Lorne looked confused at that, before shrugging and heading off with Yael.

“What made you so confused?” Yael asked, as the four of them rushed towards an APC.

“It’s not Herbert,” Lorne said, “And the Colonel knows that.”

Yael nodded. “I understand. Way too many superiors don’t want to know how to pronounce ‘Yael’. Not that they’d have to.”

The two of them threw open the doors. Bro had – somehow, by osmosis or process of elimination or whatever – taken the role of driver.

Lorne slid towards the gun turret. For a moment, Yael wondered if he’d fit. But no, Lorne wasn’t that big.

“The Colonel’s one of them,” Lorne said. “There’s worse out there, but… man, does it get tiring.”

The APC grumbled to life, and gently rolled out into the packed confines of Franklin Street. Thankfully, they were given a wide berth, citizens and others moving out of the way.

“I Know What You Mean,” Quiette Shy said. “Too Many People Keep Thinking I’m Some Delicate Little Flower, And… Tartarus, Even Some PHL Don’t See Me That Differently From The Solar Empire.”

Bro took a moment to look at the white unicorn mare. “Seriously?!”

“‘Seriously’,” Quiette Shy said, her voicebox playing back a recording of Bro’s voice. 

“That’s a damn cool trick,” Lorne called down from his seat in the gun turret. 

“Thank Heliotrope, Not Me,” Quiette Shy said. “I’m Just Here Because I Had To Be. Because I Can’t Sit By In My Fancy Bathroom The Size Of This Hummer–”

“Wait, what–” Lorne started.

“With Functioning Bucking Vocal Cords,” Quiette Shy said, and Yael wondered if she detected a bit of resentment in her voice. Most of the time, it felt like any attempt to ascribe an emotion to the pale dirty-blonde unicorn’s voicebox was merely projection, but sometimes… well, sometimes that didn’t quite feel right. “I Suffered To Be One Of The Stranded. One Of The Timberwolves–” By which she meant the elite Equestrian unit devoted to bringing ponies home. “Destroyed My Throat Because I Wouldn’t Stop Talking About That Kid They Ponified,” she continued. “And Still. I Feel Like I’ll Never Be Welcome Here Sometimes. Do-”

She stopped.

Lorne chuckled a little, but there was no humor in it. “Been feeling that way since I was born, QS. You too, fri–”

A rock bounced off the windshield.

“SHIT!” Bro yelled.

Yael saw a little boy barely into their teens, with a dirty face and bandage over one eye, looking for all the world like they’d just thrown the rock at the car. Someone that could’ve been his brother or father stood in front of him, a fearful but defiant look on his face. 

‘Ungrateful little son of a bitch… What did we just fight at the hospital for?’

But Lorne didn’t do anything about it.

“Could’ve just been rubble, First Lieutenant,” Lorne said, “Isn’t that right.”

“Absolutely,” Yael said, nodding. “It was, after all, just a rock on the windshield.”

They moved on. Already, the bandaged kid and his companion were receding from view.

Bro coughed. “Have to admit. I’m kind of surprised.”

“Ambrose…” Lorne said, a warning note creeping into his voice.

“I mean, with your…” Bro said, before his voice died in his throat. A note of fear crept into that last syllable.

“It’s alright,” Yael said. “It’s alright… It’s absolutely not worth wanting to shoot people. Especially not right now.”

“What made Nipville so worth it, though?” Bro asked.

“Ambrose, don’t you fuckin–” began Lorne.

“It Was  A Bucking War Crime,” Quiette Shy said. “I Saw Ponies Being Drained of Magic. The Whole Town Felt Like A Death Camp.”

“Don’t doubt it,” Lorne said, “But the problem is... “ his voice trailed off, just like Bro’s had.

“It’s alright,” Yael said, tiredly, “I don’t care that much.”


“Alright. If you have that much of an easy time deciding,” Lorne asks, “How easy is it gonna be next time?”

“Huh,” Quiette Shy said, as Yael looked out the window.

They turned down Congress Street, where the civilian congestion lessened. Before them loomed a row of spires – this part of town was a melting pot of faiths, Yael recalled, with a Catholic cathedral and an Anglican church side-by-side, and hidden away, a synagogue.

It wasn’t all bad. She could see plenty of the PHL’s humanitarian division working together to fix the city. Human volunteers lifted rubble thanks to devices of magic and machinery, and there was even one large earthpony standing by a mobile tureen marked ‘St. Vincent de Paul Soup Kitchen’, full of piping hot soup.

Such was the image of the PHL in its early days, the dawn era of Ambassador Heartstrings, before the paramilitary wing had grown in size and influence. It was only six months since that horrible day when the news had broken of the Ambassador’s capture aboard the Thunderchild, less than half a year since her execution – but sometimes, Yael wondered if a part of Heartstrings’ dream hadn’t died before then.

She watched as a pegasus, who’d been patrolling the charred remains of a red-brick building’s upper floors, carried a unicorn down to street level. In her forelegs, the pegasus held a very large, slightly-burnt stuffed elephant.

The two landed. A little girl squealed with joy, and scooped up the elephant in both her arms.

It wasn’t all bad out there.

‘We didn’t make this,’ Yael thought. ‘Whatever that prisoner meant by ‘tearing us down,’ I just need to remember what I’m seeing right now.’





Kraber

Kraber’s escape plan had been predictably grandiose. 

‘Okay, so I jump from building to building. I break in through the roof. I walk out, try to keep the guy at the desk from noticing me. There’ll be epic parkour.’

But what really happened was that he was standing on top of the roof, finding that it book-ended another apartment, and that all he had to do was climb up about a foot to get onto its roof.

‘...Oh. Well, that’s disappointing.’

The door at the roof was, predictably, unlocked. As Kraber opened it, he looked towards the city center – towards the hospital that straddled the hill at the center of Portland. 

And then for a moment, he wasn’t in Portland. Walls and roof and floor and ceiling all ran together, and he could have been somewhere in Europe or Africa during the Evacuation. He could have been in Cairo or Zagreb or Belgrade or Innsbruck or Munich. He could have been witnessing devastation from the shellfire they had rained down upon the ponies’ Imperial strongholds thanks to totally-not-gifted-by-the-Russian-government Soviet military surplus. He could have been in those wartime ruins in Bosnia full of ponies camped out, running from an unrecognizable home much like him across a Europe that gone mad, where none welcomed them, was being eaten by the Barrier and descending into anarchy.

He could have been on a crumbling concrete ruin with the old Kalashnikov which old Lovikov had gifted him, staring down at ragged-looking Equestrians circed around a fire, just behind a cart lined with food. 

‘Hoarding it while the real victims here suffer.’

He could’ve been about to open fire and shred through one pony with a 7.62x39mm round.

For a few moments, Kraber had thought of how glorious that felt.  But then none of this happened. There was no Europe anymore, and there was no glory.  If there’d ever been any.

And then there he was, standing on a rooftop in an area bristling with PHL out for his blood.

The walk through the apartment building was inconsequential. The interior was mostly unchanged… save for another hole in the wall, caused by shellfire. An enormous torso that transitioned to twisted, long-dried mass of shattered muscle and bone lay in the middle of the hallway, flung from the site of the explosion.

‘This must have been one of the first casualties,’ Kraber thought, reaching down towards the hoodie. It was a dark, nondescript olive green, with a peeling indecipherable logo. ‘What was he doing?’ Kraber pondered, stripping the hoodie off. ‘Was he just… on a computer? Watching TV?’

It wasn’t quite his size. Then again, with his tall, lanky build,  most things weren’t. It almost felt like a tent on him.

‘He had nothing to do with this. Just sit gat, rus bene. And this pissing match over the man who told us it was okay to do this, the man Lovikov practically worshiped, just got him killed.’ 

He was still mulling it over as he tramped onto the street, hood kept low. 

Tempting as the prospect of parkour had been, it was best he just tried to blend in. Become a part of the scenery.

About two minutes had gone by before Kraber started wishing that he’d gone for the visible, highly dangerous route, because walking through the city felt like coming down from a bad trip. It would’ve felt sick and wrong to say it was fun coming to this city in the first place, but it had been an incredible adrenaline rush. He’d been king of the world, he’d taken down a monster, he’d won... 

But….

Looking over these wrecked buildings, these streets torn apart by artillery fire, the shattered windows, the dazed, shell-shocked people wandering the streets, it was hard to keep up that same feeling. 

The streets were cratered, and in the morning dew the dust and filth clung to everything, settling in a deathly pall. People moved through the grey waste like ghosts, scavenging, looting, rummaging for the dead.

He adopted a shambling gait, adding to the act of the average bergie, as he staggered through the streets.

“...Can’t imagine what this has to do with ‘saving’ humanity,” one woman said, holding up a heavy piece of rebar and using it as a lever to push a slab of concrete off of a pony.

“Oh, damn, thank you!” the pony gasped. “My… my legs… ah God, that hurts…”

And Kraber saw what he’d done.

‘This… this is who we are,’ Kraber realized. ‘This is what we do.’

He walked towards an overpass. Miraculously, it seemed to be undamaged… but all the same, it was clogged bumper-to-bumper with traffic. He’d probably have an easier time leaving the city at walking speed.

‘By train, then,’ he thought. Portland Transportation Center it was.

He walked on. 

His first option was to turn north, if only for a brief detour. Going north, he’d spotted from on high, would take him past Arcadia National Bar –  from what he’d seen, a bar that sold itself on the old-timey charm of an 80s video-game arcade, with a life-size weighted-Companion Cube before the entrance to catch next-generation gamers’ eyes.

His kind of place, in better days. But a quick thought was enough to tell him why going that way would be the worst idea possible. The pursuing PHL were sure to spread out in a perimeter as they searched for him. Even ‘lilting’ from his path would be too dangerous. He had to cover all the ground he could between he and them.

So, against his gut instinct, he followed Congress Street – westward, not east. Only for a couple city blocks, however. As it opened before him between the Portland Museum of Arts and the State Theater, he recalled from his previous day’s venture that the street curved to and fro, and would lead him back to Maine Medical.

He had no wish to go there.

Apprehensively, he did turn north now, past the Theater, letting himself disappear for a moment into the smaller streets of Portland.

Until, eventually, he emerged next to a place called, of all things, ‘The Holy Donut’. The shop lay opposite what must have once been a huge, verdant parkland, but emergency farmland initiatives and the shelling had turned into a brown husk.

Pulling down his hood further, hands in his pockets and eyes lowered, he continued from that point on in a straight line and never once looked up again till he’d reached his destination.

This was not the first time Viktor Marius Kraber had ended up at a train station that looked more like a refugee camp. There’d been that one time at Ramses Railway Station in Cairo, where the beautiful marble floors had been crowded with hucksters, carts full of belongings, refugees, and even tents.

The railroad had been at the point where they were sending boxcars, livestock cars, flatbeds, anything that could hold people. They had not been getting to the point they were deciding how many people couldn’t be allowed in, unlike what Lovikov’s dear friend Kessler from Colorado was claiming. 

And they wouldn’t be doing it here, either. But deep down, Kraber wondered if they wouldn’t get to that point.

The Transportation Center’s parking lot was full. Kraber was of the opinion that if people there could’ve parked on top of each other, they absolutely would have.

He slunk into the station. A fairly generic box of a building with sloped roofs. It wasn’t as bad as he was expecting inside – no tents, no people cooking on hot plates, nothing like that – but it felt a bit too close for comfort. Humans, ponies, others from Equestria sat camped out on the floor.

‘…I did this, he thought, the idea barely registering. I did this.

Was this unlike anything he’d ever done in the HLF? No. Of course he’d burned cities before, of course he’d caused mass vandalism, of course they’d bombarded positions.

But the first two things had been before Spader. And the bombardment had been on Imperial positions with soviet-era materiel of a provenance Helmetag could never quite explain. All of it had been stuff that, well… made sense. This was not.

He’d been on the receiving end of a Solar Empire bombardment before, as potion mortars, sunspears, other weapons he didn’t have names for at the time rained down on Algiers. He’d seen the Solar Empire doing awful things to cities.

‘This,’ Kraber thought, ‘is starting to look a lot like their work. War with PHL? With the US? Is that what happens next? This can’t end well.’

There was a crowd of people gathered around the ticket booth. 

“Hey,” he said, tapping the shoulder of a fat man in a dust-coated, ratty suit. “Hey. How long till the next train?”

“Good question,” the man said.

“Better question is how long till we get on it,” said a teal pegasus with a purple mane. “You need a lot of ID to get on that one. The PHL, the National Guard? They’ve been checking the creds of everyone trying to get out.”

Kraber’s blood ran cold. 

‘...Shit.’

“Wait looks too long,” he said, turning on his heel and heading towards the door. Were those soldiers at the gate looking at him?

‘Fok fok fok fok…’





Heliotrope

The bay looked like the Europe Evacuation all over again, clogged with boats ready to leave ASAP. Counter-intuitively, the boats so close to the rig had received the least damage, and so – with so many homes destroyed – leaving the city was starting to seem like a smart option.

Heliotrope watched over all the boats jockeying for position. 

They had to keep watch here. Otherwise it’d turn into chaos. The Europe Evacuation had taught her that.

Below her, Oscar and John moved to and from with PHL power cores, passing them on to various boats that’d been converted to electric and solar. 

“Just leave that in the sun as often as you can!” Heliotrope called down to one woman, “The crystals will give it enough solar power to keep the boat going a loooong time.”

“Will do!” she called up, a look of gratitude on her face.

Heliotrope hadn’t expected gratitude. Like Quiette Shy was saying at that exact time, a lot of the time she didn’t exactly feel… welcome. 

Especially because, simply put, they had failed. 

‘We should’ve. Should’ve saved more.’

They could’ve done better. Kraber had still escaped, the city was still in ruins, and all this devastation was still there.

And yet they still had such gratitude.

‘Do we even deserve it?’ Heliotrope wondered.

“Any sign of Kraber?” Gardner’s voice crackled over the earpiece.

“Not yet,” Heliotrope said, scanning the area. For such a bombastic personality, he was nowhere to be found.

“Two National Guard say they saw Kraber at the Portland Transportation Center, near the Fore River,” Gardner said matter-of-factly. “We have him now. Summers, Smoky, and I are the closest to his position.”

There was a pause.

“We are going to make him pay.”





Kraber

This meant back into the city.

‘I can’t walk away from it all. I can’t hide. I can’t take the train. I can’t take a car. I’ll have to hotwire a boat.’

The walk back through the city wasn’t any better. If anything, it felt like the first time all over again.

It was when he saw the street leading to that gaming bar and saw the same square where he’d been hanging around with Dayoung and Megan off in the distance that the problems began.

‘Oh God. I did this.’

He saw a chunk of rubble from one building that had crushed that same zebra from… barely twenty-four hours ago? God. It felt like years since then.

‘They were innocent in all this. Unlike those po–’

That thought lost momentum at exactly the moment he started thinking it. Nebula. Caduceus. They’d been willing to help him, even if Caduceus hadn’t exactly been happy about it. About Tanaka. About Rime Ice and Melody and Jolu. 

(What the hell happened to those last 3, anyway? Kraber wondered. I kind of forgot about them)

‘I hurt them. I was part of all this. They weren’t PER, they weren’t Solar Empire, they didn’t ponify kids and mothers at their fokkin’ birthday parties. And I hurt their friends all the same. How many others have I hurt? Do they know someone I killed?’

Were those tears straining against his eyes? Gasping from the pain, taking in deep breaths, hyperventilating as if he had just been shot, he clasped one hand to his head. The left side of his brain was pulsing, throbbing. It hurt almost as bad as being shot.

‘If they asked me before today, would I even care? Would I just say ‘Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down’?’

He’d killed hundreds, enough that his body count was enormous. He remembered stripping the flesh of the living, salting the wounded, and a litany of drownings, beatings and stabbings.

He thought about the stories of Yael Ze’ev, and how she and Heliotrope had arrived to save the city. She and Quiette Shy.

‘...Didn’t I shoot Heliotrope once? If the shot hadn’t gone wild, she might not have been here to help. I’m not the hero here. I’m worse than that. What have I let myself DO? How many people have I left just as fucked-up as me?’

He remembered the words “tell us what you know or we’ll send you to Kraber“, becoming a shibboleth of the Front’s torturers. Remembers his growing myth, of being built up as some kind of monster, of coming to believe his own propaganda. Kraber: the rabid dog on a chain, the kind of story told to frighten children, by loving parents full of the kind subconscious hate for their own offspring that inspires those scary stories, on the offchance that a little dose of nightmare before bed will make their children behave, be good, stay close, and avoid the HLF.

He couldn’t be that way, could he?! He was… he was not… Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, not Kraber, not that much of a kontgesig, this was fokking evil. Surely this had to be someone else? Ivan Bliss? No, people like Nebula and Caduceus would be looking for Ivan Bliss. He would become someone else. Someone from Leith, maybe, someone–

‘Who am I kidding? I’m fokking terrible at keeping up a Scottish accent.’

Verdict. Your name is Viktor Marius Kraber, and you give up.

He slumped against a large piece of concrete in an alleyway. Out of sight, out of mind. All around him, the city dragged itself back to what little life it could ever have again. 

‘Last night felt good. Cos’ for once, I know I wasn’t being a bastard. Did that unicorn from that checkpoint do something to me? Is she the reason I don’t want to…’

But he couldn’t stomach that. No, whatever had happened, this was for the best.

“You’re not a partisan,” Victory said, trotting up next to him. “You’re not a hero. You’re not even anything special among humans.”

But–!

“You all do this, or at least you all want to. There’s only one way to break that cycle.”

“No,” Kraber muttered, ignoring the looks he was getting. “I may be this beaten down, but I refuse to do that. This was my fault and no-one else’s.”

“You’ll find that you don’t have much worth to give. But if you finally give yourself to queen Celestia, and you’re smart…. You can see your family again. You can-–”

“Viktor Kraber,” a familiar voice uttered, “You didn’t think you could hide from us for that long, did you?”

“I was sort of hoping,” Kraber admitted, turning up to see…

Colonel Robert Gardner.

Flanked by the soldier that had tried to shoot him during the hospital shootout, and an unfamiliar coal-black earthpony. Both these individuals Kraber would later learn were named Shawn Summers and Smoky.

“Alright,” Kraber said, everything in his body urging him to run. “It’s over. There’s not much more I can do.”

“That,” Gardner said, “is certainly true.”

He reached for his gun. As did Summers.

The earthpony… Well, it was hard to tell what exactly they were doing, as they’d kept the triggers in their mouth the whole time.

There was no thought like ‘It’s over’ or ‘Guess I got what I deserved’ in Kraber’s mind.

“Look,” Kraber said, very carefully, the way Kate had spoken to police officers. “I’m surrendering. I can assure you that I am completely unarmed.”

He raised his hands slowly.

“What about the backpack?” Summers asked, his ACR jabbing against Kraber’s abdomen. Without any body armor, it was a lot more painful than it had any right to be.

Kraber didn’t express any signs of pain. 

“It’s just full of spare clothes and some stuffed animals,” he said. 

Summers chuckled lightly. “What kind of pussy is nearly thirty and sleeps with a stuffed wolf?”

“They were my son and daughter’s,” Kraber hissed, “You kontges–”

The heavy boot-shaped stock of Gardner’s rifle slammed against Kraber’s face. He fell to the ground, panting heavily.

‘Man,’ he thought, through the throbbing of his jaw, just as he fell to the ground. ‘Good thing it’s not a wood stock like last time.’

“We’re going to confiscate them anyway,” Gardner said. 

“You son of a–” Kraber started, before catching another stock to the jaw.

This wasn’t right.

Far be it from Kraber – as in, from one continent to another – to call someone out for protocol, but this didn’t feel right. Three soldiers. An alleyway. Him alone. The hungry looks on Gardner, Summers, and the black earthpony’s faces.

The very same look he’d worn time and time again.

‘I’ve done this before, haven’t I?’ Kraber thought, his blood running cold. ‘Fok. FOK FOK FOK FOKKIN’ FOK, I NEED A WAY OUT–’

“Come on,” said the earthpony, “Don’t make this any harder for us than it has to be...” He wore a look of utter rage on his face as he said it. 

“What,” Kraber said, slurring slightly due to the one bruised half of his jaw, “do you want.”

“What I want,” Gardner said, “is order in a world that aggressively lacks any. You people went against the wishes of the government back during the Purple Winter-”

“Because they did a grand total of jack shit, and jack fokkin’ shit!!” Kraber interrupted. “We had people turning into those little fokkin’ zombies, and the BfArM and FDA telling me it was all well, hundreds, and befok when I WAS STARING AT THAT FOKKIN’ PINATA AND TYING A CLOWN TO A CHAIR!”

“Shut up and let me finish,” Gardner growled, “or I’ll say you resisted arrest.”

The earthpony momentarily faltered. There was a little flicker of disbelief in their eyes, and then it vanished.

“You wouldn’t,” Kraber said.

“Wouldn’t I?” Gardner asked, still growling. “You, Viktor Kraber, are a monster by any metric of the word. How long has it been since you killed a foal, hmm?”

Kraber rocked like he’d been hit again with a rifle stock.

“Probably last night,” Summers said, smirking.

“Or, maybe...” Gardner began, looking over to Summers, and Kraber hated more than anything how they were playing off each other, playing with their food–

‘Shit. This is an execution.’

But if it was play, the two men did it with looks that only superficially resembled joy.

“Maybe,” Gardner said again, “it was four days ago, In Rangeley, Maine.”

“What did you…” Kraber asked, shaking.

‘How did they know, what are they going to–’

“I can’t imagine that saving one foal and her mother would have made up for that,” said Smoky. “And then you blew up this city. A human city. Full of the people you said you were protecting. How do you look at yourself in the mirror?”

“Look,” Kraber said, “I know I’ve done horrible things, but I can… try my best to–”

“As a matter of fact,” the coal-black earthpony said. “You really can’t.”

“I can put Lovikov behind bars!” Kraber protested. “I can tell you where we sell the moonshine and drugs we use to pay a lot of the expenses! I can tell you where Kagan Burakgazi is, I can tell you who really burned down the Stabil Mobile in Graz, I can tell you where we got a lot of the guns, I can tell you where our arms caches are. I can even tell you where Defiance i–”

“Do you seriously think we wouldn’t fuckin’ know?” Summers asked. “We have satellites, you Nazi fuck.”

“Here’s the thing,” Gardner said, “I don’t need you. With everything I can connect Defiance to, it doesn’t matter that you’re a witness. They’ll be dime-a-dozen for me in the next twenty-four hours. Nobody will care. Nobody, not even Lovikov, will mind.“

“To be fair,” Kraber said bitterly, “That last part’s probably true.”

“And nobody is going to stop us,” he continued. “Come on, think about how many things you did. You’ve operated illegal checkpoints and stolen from people. You’ve shot up and extorted refugee camps. And then there’s how you must’ve treated your wife.”

 “Don’t you fokkin’ dare–!” Kraber yelled, noticing a small brick on the ground next to him.

“We’re going to use you as an example of what the HLF is,” Gardner said. “Ass-kissers like Munro won’t be able to stop me then. You’re the lynchpin for us finally burning the whole HLF, the whole fucking thing, to ash. Bastion, that prick Romero, that flowery fuckhead Kevin…”

‘Aw, fok, not Kevin, everyone loves Kevin!

“…they all go down,” Gardner finished. “Because you’re the HLF. A murdering, violent, insane monster. That’s all they are, and all you are.”

‘...Yarrow was good to me. Even when I didn’t deserve it. Same for Kevin. They… when they were in the same camp, I even cooked for them.’

“You’re going,” Kraber said, “To use me. As an excuse to kill them. There’s kids there in Bastion, on Romero’s ships! Maybe the last people that got to grow up outside the PHL’s grip!”

“Don’t pretend,” the coal-black earthpony said, “You finally care about children. Even without all the foals you shot, how many kids did you orphan during the Purple Winter? I’d bet some of those same kids you’re talking about lost their parents to a certain someone there.”

“Just stop lying to yourself,” Summers said, walking ever so closer, pistol held out. “Even without that, I can’t imagine you being one much for kids anyway. Your temper? A black woman? Your kids? I almost think they’d be better off being pon–”





Dancing Day

Kraber stops. He’s seething. Breathing heavily. 

“Now do you believe me, Yael?” Kraber asks.

“It’s been a long time since either of us would disagree here,” Heliotrope says. “I know full well what Summers was like, now. I just…”

What comes out of her mouth next doesn’t sound like it was pulled out, like she might say. It sounds more like something she pressed out.

“I didn’t want to admit it,” Heliotrope says. “Cos’ then, well…”

“I get it,” Yael says, nodding.

“Alright,” says a new pony who clearly hasn’t been in the room for long. He’s clearly a new arrival. He looks to Dancing Day like an out-of-work, uh… worker. He’s got the large build and the half-grown two-day beard of one. Also, he smells like her dad after the end of a long day of work. “Please. For the love of Ce… for the love of Luna. I am not working for another place that sees murder like hammers.”

“We’d never-” Mommy starts.

“Well, apparently you did!” the earthpony retorts.

All Dancing Day can think of is that she’s glad Verity isn’t there to hear this.

“Alright,” Spitfire says. “I’m not going to say it doesn’t exist. Yes, people do lose their tempers. But it’s not official policy. Absolutely nobody in this room is going to defend even a tenth of the things Gardner did. We don’t...”

She looks to Yael.

“How did you put it?”

“We don’t see them like hammers,” Yael says.

“Exactly,” Spitfire says. “Gardner was the kind of soldier who lets their service give them an Alicorn complex, and it caught up with him.”

“Wait, do you mean God complex?” Heather asks.

“I…” Spitfire starts. She seems to be caught flat-hoofed. “I mean, maybe, but…”

“That’s a weird mental image,” Aegis says. “Kraber, you want to drink to forget later?”

“DO I?!” Kraber asks enthusiastically. “Fok ja! Heather, you wanna come? It’s been too long.”

“Not your worst idea,” Heather says. “I’m in.”

“It’s an awful mental image,” Heliotrope adds. “Someone like that, with alicorn in him? Faust!” 

“I’d almost rather the Sol…” Dancing Day starts, before realizing her mistake. Oh no.Her mouth clamps shut.

“I want to argue,” Aegis says, “But I really can’t.”


“More specifically, it caught up with his face,” Heliotrope adds. “Besides. There were lots of other PHL helping to rebuild the city. You don’t have to worry about us here.”

There’s a pause, and finally Dancing Day remembers that Viktor is supposed to be telling this story. She wonders just how he survives.

“What was with that part about ‘The PHL’s grip?’ she asks, looking over to him.

“I… didn’t trust governments all that much,” Kraber says. “At the time, all I really thought of was the establishment not helping during the Purple Winter.

“And now?” Mommy asks.

“Let’s just say Lovikov didn’t sell me on the alternative,” Kraber says. He seems much calmer.

“Are… are you okay?” Rivet finally asks. “I remember what happened the last time someone told you that. You, uh….”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Kraber says. “Don’t worry. I handled it like a responsible goddamn adult.”

[/hr]

Kraber

“ COMMIT ALIVEN’T, YOU UGLY FREAK!” Kraber yelled, and smashed a brick into Summers’ face.

It left a massive dent in the man’s visor. It didn’t shatter, and Kraber hadn’t given Summers a concussion.  But there was only so much someone could cope with, body armor or no, after having a brick slammed into their face at close range.

“NEXT ONE GOES UP THE OTHER END!” 

He curled up his toes and kicked Summers in the balls.

But Kraber had only enough time to think ‘shit’ when he realized Gardner and the coal-black earthpony were pointing guns at him.

“FOK YOURSELF!” 

He pushed Summers in front of the earthpony, just at the second they started firing.

“SMOKY, YOU IDIOT!” Summers yelled, as four bullets pummeled against his spine, punching through the backpack he wore.

Kraber turned to face Gardner, who was–

KLONK

SHIT!

Everything blurred as Gardner clasped both hands together and smashed them against Kraber’s ear, knocking him against the wall. Kraber felt his ear burning, felt a ringing in his ear as he tumbled towards the wall.

No… towards the earthpony!

Turning his back to Kraber, Smoky bucked him full-force in the shins. He gasped from the pain – it felt like a high-speed freight train had rammed into his legs, full-force. Kraber stumbled back, falling against the wall, and Gardner drew back a right hook, crushing him between wall and fist.

Everything went white. Kraber had just enough time to see Smoky rearing up on both legs, and then driving a right hook with his forelegs directly into Kraber’s gut.

He coughed. It felt like whatever he’d eaten in the past twenty-four hours was about to come up, Everything hurt. Being punched with hooves felt like being pummeled with brass knuckles again, but somehow worse. 

Summers lay on the ground, moaning from the punishment of the brick to the face, kick to the groin, and several bullets face-tanked by his back.

“So,” Gardner said, “You’re still conscious? Guess I need to work on my left…”

He drew back another punch, even as Smoky’s hooves came down on Kraber’s stomach again, and again, and again…

“HOOK!” Gardner yelled.

Kraber weakly punched out towards Gardner. Several things happened. The punch missed Gardner’s chest, face, throat, anything he could’ve been aiming for…

And instead hit Gardner’s elbow. The punch went wild, and Gardner staggered, momentarily off-balanced. Smoky and Summers turned towards this spectacle, briefly distracted.

Kraber lunged straight into that opening. And it was in this moment that Kraber remembered he was wearing his favorite boots. The ones with the reinforced toes. The ones that were good for hiking, and had kept his toes safe if someone dropped a wrench or scalpel near his feet.

“BOOT!” Kraber yelled, and kicked Gardner square in the fokkin’ eiers.

Not his best one-liner, but whatever.

He couldn’t have gotten more of a reaction if the boots were weapons in Warframe and he’d modded them for blast damage. In fact, he almost could’ve sworn he heard something like a tiny explosion when boot made contact with crotch. Felt something give that shouldn’t have given.

Gardner staggered back again, hands moving down towards his balls. Kraber stepped forward, blowing past Smoky, bending over, one arm wound backwards, fist clenched.

“SHORYUKEN!” Kraber yelled, and punched Gardner in a straight, narrow arc that exploded against his throat like a grenade.

PHL body armor, like most serum-proof armor, had a weak spot near the neck. To ensure proper range of motion, you understand. There was little, if any plating there.

So Kraber’s uppercut went right to the source. Gardner wheezed, staggered back, then started falling face-first towards Kraber, writhing in pain. 

Before he could land, Kraber drew back a foot and kicked him in the face. Gardner jumped backwards, landing on his shoulderblades and bouncing slightly. Kraber lunged forward, striding forward on his left leg. With his right leg, he stomped down on Gardner’s crotch with the kinetic energy of an industrial steel press.

“YOU–” Smoky yelled, leaping at Kraber.

‘At times like this, there’s only one thing to do!’

“SHOULD’VE TAKEN MY DEAL, JOU SHRIMP DICKED FOKMAGGOT!” Kraber yelled, and reached out, grabbing Smoky by the shoulders.

He bent backwards, and suplexed him down to the ground, headfirs–





Dancing Day

“That,” Vinyl Scratch interrupts, “Did not happen.”

“Believe it or not, it actually did,” Kraber says.

“You seriously expect me to believe you suplexed someone?” Vinyl asks.

“Is it really any more unbelievable than literally anything else in this story?” Kraber asks. “Just wait till we get to the part with the pirates.”

“You’re just bucking with me, aren’t you?” asks the earth pony that’s very clearly new to the PHL.  He looks over at Kraber, as if expecting a joke.

“Yeah,” Heather asks. “Viktor’s always been kind of a weirdness magnet, but–”

“He’s not,” Heliotrope interrupts.

Heather and the new arrival look at each other in dismay.

“Oh, great,” Heather sighs.

[/hr]

Smoky screamed as his face had a short but passionate meeting with the ground.

Kraber picked himself up. The last one left was Summers, who was back on his feet, currently reaching for a gun, his gun, which had flown out of his hands–

BANG

What happened next was hard to describe. In an after-action report with all the honesty you would expect, Summers would say Kraber displayed superhuman reflexes, the bullet skimming within a millimeter of his head.

Kraber would just say “Fok it, I don’t fokkin’ know, maybe it was close range and that lying dickpuppet didn’t think to look up from his toppie’s fokkin’ jakob and he didn’t aim? It all happened pretty fast.”

And then Aegis would go “Wait, his what’s what?” and Kraber would walk out of the room to explain it, and then Aegis would be all “What the Tartarus, man,” when they both walked back.

Whatever happened. A gun was fired. Kraber, not noticing the impact or even registering if he’d been hit – he hadn’t – shot forward and lashed out with one foot.

He didn’t hit.

(SHIT!)

 Summers stepped back and delivered a straight, near-flawlessly accurate punch to Kraber’s face.

Before Kraber could step forward, suddenly there was a knife in Summers’ left hand. He stepped forward, scything the knife in a wide arc that came within a millimeter of Kraber’s face. Summers pressed forward again, thrusting the knife towards Kraber’s throat like a guillotine. Kraber reached out, trying to grab the knife with his left hand, and-

It stopped. Everything stopped. Summers was looking at Kraber in momentary surprise.

Kraber didn’t understand why – didn’t need to understand - and clenched his right hand, readying himself for a solid right uppercut that would break Summers’ jaw. He pivoted it upwards–

Summers intercepted it flawlessly, forcing the knife (Where the hell had it been?!) and Kraber’s left hand towards his throat.

“We’re saving the world,” Summers said. “And I’m–”

In that moment, Kraber decided to use his head. He looked up to the sky, opening his neck to Summers’ strike. There was a hungry look on Summers’ face as he pushed closer, closer, closer–

“–gonna show you,” Summers said, slavering like a hyena over raw meat, the knife drawing ever closer to Kraber’s jugular, “what happens wh–”

DONK

Kraber slammed his forehead down against Summers’ skull. Everything went white, and Summers looked momentarily shocked. Which meant Kraber headbutted him again, this time even harder, with more intensity. He felt something wet on his face, somewhere near his hairline.

Summers’ helmet deformed, and spiralled off his face. 

What the hell?! Kraber thought. There must’ve been something wrong with the seals, that shouldn’t-

And it was in that moment that an idea occurred to Kraber.

‘Oh, I’m gonna enjoy this so much. I think my murder-boner for this is going to count as an armor-piercing weapon.’

As Summers struggled to get his bearings, Kraber pivoted to the right, drawing his right arm over his left shoulder.

“EAT THIS AND CHOKE!” Kraber roared, and whipped the entirety of his right forearm against the side of Summers’ head in a nuclear-scale bitchslap, smashing him left-cheek first against the much-abused wall.

“YOU–”

Summers was reaching for another weapon at his hip. Something that looked like a police nightstick as filtered through one of Kate’s nightmares, studded with nails.

It was at this moment that Kraber finally realized why Summers’s knife had stopped, why he’d been able to push Kraber’s left hand so easily. The knife was embedded in his left hand’s palm and poking out the other side just behind a knuckle, blood oozing around both sides of the cut.

‘Someone should definitely do something about that!’ Kraber thought, and ripped the knife out of his left hand. 

Pain barely registered. The blood sprayed out in an arc, landing just at eye level with Summers, who stumbled, swinging the little war crime of a club unsteadily. That was all Kraber needed, as he lunged forward and ramming one boot into Summers’ balls, harder. 

“WAS IT?! THAT?! FOKKIN’?! HARD?! JOU WANT MY SKINDER THAT’LL FOKKIN’ HELP?!” Kraber yelled, and slammed him face-first into the wall with his right hand.

Kraber put his first idea into action. With the left side of Summers’ face pressed against the wall, Kraber began to push. Slowly. Surely. Feeling the wall grinding against Summers’ like he was pressing parmesan against a cheese grater.

“WELL, HOW BOUT JOU! FOKKIN’! GO! TO! THE DOLLAR STORE!”

Summers’ face molted pink and red against the brickwork, as the man screamed all the while. Spotting Smoky getting back up, Kraber flung Summers to the ground, leaving him to bounce unsteadily, blood misting off from what had once been the left half of his face.

“BUY SOME FOKKIN VIAGRA!” Kraber yelled, and – finally – rammed another boot into Summers’ skull. He twisted slightly and fell to the pavement limply on his back, and Kraber couldn’t see if he was breathing. “CUT THAT SHIT OFF WITH SOME FABRIC SCISSORS!” 

“SHAWN!” Smoky yelled, galloping back towards Kraber.

“TURN IT SIDEWAYS, AND IT’LL HELP YOU GO FOK YOURSELF IF JOU FOKKIN’ MA HASN’T BEATEN YOU TO IT!” Kraber yelled as he pivoted, remembered playing football as a kid. 

He drove a kick into the earthpony’s jaw. Smoky backflipped and landed on his assault saddles. He didn’t get back up.

Heavy breaths wracked Kraber as he stood. Steadily, the pain flowed back into Kraber, and he found himself clutching his impaled left hand.

‘This kind of sucks,’ Kraber thought, staring disinterestedly at the blood coming out of his hand wound.

“Whoa!” someone yelled, stepping into the alleyway. “Are you–“

”AND WHAT IN THE FOK DO YOU WANT?!” Kraber shouted, face bloody, covered in bruises, reaching for one of the lost guns, standing over the broken, moaning Gardner.

Cooler heads did not prevail, and the man scampered away.

‘... I have to leave. Now.’

Kraber ran, picking the gun and shoving it into his pants’ pocket as he rushed out into the street. The harbor was close by. He could do this.

He could escape.





Yael

‘Good God,’ Yael thought, minutes later. ‘Why didn’t they call backup?’

When they had found Gardner, Smoky, and Summers, the trio looked as if they’d gotten in a fistfight with a snowblower. And lost.

Gardner was barely conscious, lying prone on the ground, shaking in pain, his face looking like it was composed entirely of bruises and elbows. Smoky was concussed, blood matting his fur, a goose-egg of a bump so prominent it almost looked to Heliotrope like the skin had grown over a short unicorn horn, fur scraped off his ears. And Summers was…

“Mother of God,” Lorne gasped.

Summers, without question, had sustained the worst of it. By the looks of him, he could have been fed into said snowblower face-first. The skin from half his face looked about the same color and texture medium-rare hamburger, his nose was broken, and part of his jaw seemed broken, too.

“One Human,” Quiette said, voice sounding like it was coming from very far away, “Did All This. With His Bare Hands.”

“Looks like,” Oscar said, nodding.

“Christ,” Lorne said.

“Colonel,” Chinook asked, fluttering up towards Gardner. “What…. What happened?”

“We tried to make him surrender,” Gardner said, sounding like was forcing the words out syllable by syllable. “It didn’t work. He went ballistic, hit Summers in the face with a brick, and started beating us to bloody pulp.”

“Why didn’t you shoot him?” Yael asked.

Summers rolled over on his stomach. His back was peppered with impacts from 5.56 rounds. The body armor had stopped them, but… at near point-blank range, it’d clearly done some damage. Summers was definitely going to have to visit a doctor soon.

“I–” Smoky started. He looked…

Well, Yael wasn’t really sure how to say he looked. There were a lot of emotions crossing his face. Guilt. Fear. Possibly nausea. Not helping was that he looked concussed as well.

“W-we tried,” Smoky said. “I sh-shot my friend!” 

“What in the–” Bro started, confused. 

“That bastard threw me in front of Smoky when he started firing!” Summers snarled, before almost immediately touching his face gingerly.

Talking had hurt. A lot.

‘Friendly fire, then.’

Gardner picked himself back up gingerly. He was wheezing slightly as he did.

“So,” Lorne said, “Why’d Kraber go so far with Summers?”

“What?” Gardner asked, a little too quickly.

“Don’t… fuckin’ know,” Summers wheezed, very pointedly not looking at Gardner.




 
Dancing Day

“Normally, this would be the point where a character would describe how they suddenly realized the holes in the story,” Yael says now, in December of 2022. “But honestly, I think I figured it out within seconds of getting in that alleyway.”

“Wait,” Aegis says. “Really?”

“It wasn’t hard,” Yael says.  Heliotrope cringes slightly as Yael says this.

“You’re sure?” Kraber asks. “Could’ve fooled me. Because this seems a bit less like you figuring it out, a bit more like you reading ahead. And, you know...”

He mimes an explosion with both hands.

“Positive,” Yael said. “Viktor, it looked like you were about to kill them with your bare hands.”

“Speaking of which,” Heliotrope adds, “Why didn’t you?”

“Damn near did. And they stopped moving,” Kraber shrugs. “I guess that I figured if I was standing over the corpses of Gardner, Summers, and Smoky, then you’d absolutely kill me. I didn’t need to kill. I needed to leave.”

Aegis nods. “I guess that makes sense.”

“If that happens to anyone in this room, with a radio, you’re going to call for help,” Yael says. “It’s a basic survival impulse to call for help. We didn’t get any. Which told me something was off. When Summers said he didn’t know, that was when it solidified.”

Kraber nods. 

“Mister Kraber,” Amber Maple asks, “You hit them in the head. Do you think you gave them any brain damage?”

Kraber opens his mouth, a fragment of a syllable about to be–

“And please don’t say it probably wouldn’t be the first time,” Rivet adds. 

Kraber sighs, his shoulders sagging. Then, as he is stroking his beard in thought, Heliotrope speaks up:

“Aegis,” Heliotrope says, “What did Summers do?”


“Trust me when I say you don’t want to know,” Aegis says. “All you need to know is, I’m glad I got that damn apology for not joining in that time.”

Heliotrope looks over to Aegis’ foals. Amber shakes her head slowly. Rivet looks anywhere that Heliotrope isn’t. Dancing Day can’t read his face.

“I’m guessing,” Heliotrope says, with the smooth, millimeter-precise intent of a bomb defusal expert, “It wasn’t a big leap from what he said to Vi–”

“Yes and no,” Aegis says, bluntly. “Don’t ask. Just don’t.”

“If Summers did that before and after Kraber turned his face into raw hamburger,” Heliotrope says, “Smoky was already practically codependent, and Gardner was–”

“Gardner?” Yael asks.

“A total shitfucker, ja,” Kraber interrupts.

“At that point,” Heliotrope says, “I don’t think it really matters if Kraber gave any of them head injuries.”





Yael

So, there it was. Or would be. Yael figuring out that something wasn’t right. This wasn’t to say she’d learned the whole story. That she suddenly flipped ahead to the next chapter posted on the site.

But there was definitely something wrong.

“Radio Sergeant Heliotrope,” Gardner ordered.  “We’re bringing this bastard in, no matter what.”

“Sir?” Yael asked.

“If anyone can find that psychopath, it’s a pegasus with invisibility,” Gardner said, nursing his raw wounds. “He left the alleyway heading that way.”

Gardner pointed east, towards the sea.

“He’s escaped our custody. Made me look like a fool. We are bringing him down.”





Kraber

“You could still-” the thing that was not Kate said.

Some part of Kraber told him he running into the street, covered in blood, wearing a stolen hoodie, was not a good idea.  But in his defense, it…

Actually, scratch that. It was still a stupid idea. 

‘The PHL are trying to kill me! I mean, I thought it would’ve happened earlier, maybe like a week ago! And it’ll be like trying to pick GG Allin out of a crowd! Everyone will know it’s me!’

He wished he’d looked at a map during Lovikov’s planning session. That he had a sense of where he wa–

There, looming on the hill, was Maine Medical. Behind him. He’d been heading… south? Yeah, probably south.

‘Oh. Okay. I could see water from the hospital. I think I actually recognize where I am. First off, I’m not going into any buildings. I’m heading for the ocean. I’ve got two ideas. Freight train or boat. Freight train’s the safest one. People steal rides on them all the time.’

The more Kraber thought it over, the slower he went. Until, before he knew it, he was…

Walking.

‘Get back to running, you dom fok! They’ll–’

Wait. Kraber’s thoughts slid back into place and then he remembered.

‘I’m covered in fokkin’ blood and I’m a wanted man. What part of running will actually help here.’

So he forced himself to walk. The blood on his face and hands, the bruises, the dirty hoodie…. If he just walked depressed enough, staggered a little, made himself feel a little less there, people wouldn’t notice.

He would later learn that he was not actually covered in blood – he’d just taken a lot of hits to the face, and his hand had been wrapped in gauze, so it wasn’t all bad. He was just panicking.

All around him, the street hummed with activity. A unicorn mare – wait, was that Socket Wrench?! he wondered as he watched her – lifted a chunk of rubble off a pile. A group of soldiers – PHL, National Guard, whoever – stood there, helping someone out from under there.

An arm hung limply at their side.

Pegasi fluttered across the street, carrying carts up towards the upper floors of buildings too damaged to safely ascend. 

‘How do they do that?’ Kraber asked himself, watching as one dark green pegasus with a green-black tail streaked through with pink as a cart trailed behind him, suspended by nothing he could see. ‘What happened to Nebula?’ He watched as another pegasus flew by, despite the fact that the sky was getting darker. ‘Do they have prosthetic wings? Is she dead?’

“God,” he said, surprising himself with the sound of his voice. “...It was for me. Why did it have to be for me?”

‘Twenty-four hours ago, I would’ve been trying to kill them like it was the most natural thing in the world. And here they are, fixing my damage. Saving my life. She shouldn’t have done it for me. I’ve got no place here. I’m not fokkin’ worth it.’

Gardner had proved that by trying to kill him. Same for those two grunts with him. If the PHL put a man like that in charge during the siege last night, he didn’t have a chance of getting out alive. And with the city like this, with that many ponies here? He’d be dead instantly. They’d want him dead, no question about it. Just like Ga–

‘Wait a minute. If they wanted me dead, they would’ve just shot me.’

As Kraber passed a great earthpony singing lightly as they dragged something large on their back into a building, one man and one woman keeping it stable – ha-fokkin’-ha – on the enormous pony’s back, as he was wondering if the three of them and indeed most of the street were singing ‘We All Lift Together,’ another realization came to him.

‘They wanted me to suffer. They liked the idea of being able to go fokkin’ befok without limits. Cos’ that’s what I would do. Have done. Will do. And that’s someone they trusted to put out this fire. It’s like throwing water on a glue fire. I’m gonna die if I stay here. I need to get out.

He waited at a crosswalk, hood pulled down, keeping his gaze fixed just low enough to the ground that his face would be just hard enough to discern.

‘First stop, freight depot.’





Heliotrope

Common knowledge was that Heliotrope was patient. Able to stand still, invisible, for great periods of time. As Yael could attest from most times, the truth was… mixed. To say the least.

“Kraber’s on the move,” Yael said over comms. 

Memories of the hospital bed in Varosha came back like water splashing across her face.

“Summers, Smoky, and I?” Gardner put in. He sounded very, very winded. “We had him, but he… he beat the fucking shit out of us.”





Yael

Yael couldn’t interrupt here. Maybe it was intentional – though how could it be – but Gardner had effectively blocked her from anything she could say, for that moment. 

‘What am I going to do? Interrupt my superior officer to tell Heliotrope I have a feeling that he’s lying?’

“His survival,” Gardner said, “Is optional.”

‘Wait, what?!’

Yael remembered Alexander Reiner’s words like she’d heard them only two days ago, probably because she had. 

“You realize your order for there to be no prisoners was on record. That was an illegal order according to the Geneva Convention-”

“Sir, they weren’t following the Geneva Convention,” Heliotrope had put in.

“-And so you decided ‘to hell with the laws of war’, burnt a town, screwed over our political situation and murdered seven children?!”

‘We’re doing the exact same thing, Yael thought. He’s issued an illegal order.

“Sir,” Yael asked, “Isn’t…”





Heliotrope

“...a take-no-prisoners order illegal?” 

Heliotrope thought about what her friend had just said. She did remember what PHL command had said. She definitely remembered the idea it was illegal.

“I can see why you’d be confused,” Gardner said, voice full of self-confidence. “But think about it. First, this is Kraber. He participated in the bombardment. He lied to all of you. He shot Heliotrope once before. In fact, if not for him, she could’ve brought Haddon in!”

BUCK! Heliotrope thought.

That part stung. Knowing that she’d healed Viktor Kraber, costing valuable time… had she really slowed them down, given the Solar Empire more time to react?

“Just think of what we could’ve gotten from Haddon if he hadn’t ponified!” Gardner said.

And Heliotrope found herself nodding along.

‘I could’ve brought him in… I failed. I failed humanity. I failed the PHL. Because of me, the bastard that shot me gets to live, Haddon is ponified and gets off clean.’

She looked to Quiette Shy. Her expression was unreadable behind the dark coal-black glasses she was wearing. She could’ve just as easily been asleep. Still, there was a strange… fragility to her posture. She looked like she’d prefer to be anywhere else. 

“I Am Not Apologizing,” Quiette Shy said, “For Fixing A Man’s Broken Back And Punctured Lung.”

“Wait, he what?!“ Heliotrope asked. “How in the Luna-damn…”

Quiette Shy nodded. “He Was Probably Going To Survive Anyway, Too.”

Did she sound… bitter?

“How the buck did he survive any of that, too?” Heliotrope asked. “I thought humans actually took months to recover from injuries.”

“We do,” Bro said.

“Oh, That’s Simple,” Quiette Shy said, “I Read Viktor’s File Once We Brought Him In. My Best Guess Is That Various Processing Issues Give Him An Absurdly High Pain Tolerance.”

“So being crazy makes him immune to pain?” Eva asked. “Damn, wh–”

Quiette Shy glared at her.

“I was going to ask why I didn’t get that,” Eva said, sulking slightly.

“...I Don’t Know If That’s Better Or Worse,” Quiette Shy said.

“Look. It’s easy to make snap judgments like this. But sometimes the obvious choice,” Gardner said, “is the wrong choice.”

Heliotrope fluttered upwards. 

“I need to look for someone,” she said, “who looks like they’re…. Not blending in. He’s going to be acting like a wounded animal.” 

“Could he be looking for a train, or a bus?” Bro asked.

“No,” Summers said. “He was walking away from the train station. They’d want ID. He wants some way out of the city that’ll let him leave without it.”

“Something without checkpoints,” Heliotrope realized. “Which means, he’s either going to steal a boat, hitch a ride on a freight train, or walk out.”

“Excellent thinking,” Yael said.

“Sergeant Heliotrope,” Gardner said, “Your team is going to coordinate with any National Guard about the ocean. Ze’ev, you’re going to the freight yard on the south end of this part of Portland. I’ll be checking with our perimeter.”

“Isn’t this overkill for just one person?” Chinook asked.

“It’s a mass murderer who escaped from our custody and beat the shit out of me. Summers’ face looks like something out of Kitchen Nightmares because of him,” Gardner said. “At this point, I don’t give a damn about overkill. Just ‘dead’ and reload.”

Gardner cleared his throat.

“Attention all units…”





Dancing Day

“I have the phone number of this pony who was working with Gardner, on the outskirts of the city,” Yael says. 

“Huh,” Astral Nectar says, “Really? I’d love to hear what happened over there.”

“You’re sure?” Aegis asks. “I… think that’s a mistake.”

“Then again,” Heliotrope says, “Anything involving him is probably already a mistake.”

“I kind of want to hear it,” 

“Alright,” Yael says. “Calling Blackpowd–“

“Wait,” Kraber says, “Hou jou fokking bek, Blackpowder?! The stallion I met in Bethlehem?!”

Yael nods.

“Small, funny little world,” Aegis says in an absurdly high-pitched voice.

“Bru, nice, “ Kraber says, his open hand meeting Aegis’ hoof in a gesture that everyone has just sort of defaulted to classifying as a high-five out of force of habit.

“Why weren’t you there?” Heliotrope asks, curious. 

“Parental leave,” Aegis shrugs. “Besides, I was discovering that the real axe murderer was love all along, remember?”

“Wait, I thought you were kidding about that,” Dancing Day says.

“You’ll never know,” Aegis says.





Blackpowder

Outpost Sourmash was Gardner’s rather grandiose name for a little PHL command post near Portland Jetport. A stallion by the name of Blackpowder stood guard in front of one of the holding cells.

And Blackpowder went to the holding cells they were using, now – some outbuildings from back when the Portland Jetport had remodeled, leaving rooms and rooms that nobody had any cause to use. There were plenty of cells to use, too – this was, after all, an airport.

Blackpowder trotted down that line. A Somali-originating National Guardsman from Portland by the surname of Warsame – distinguished by his dark skin, black two-or-three-day beard, baseball cap, and aviators – leaned against a wall, M700 sniper rifle slung across his chest as he sipped coffee so  strong Blackpowder almost wondered if the fumes would wake him up.

(They did. From down the hall, no less.)

Warsame’s requirements for caffeine could accurately be described as a war crime against taste-buds.

Smoky didn’t like walking by the prisoners.

“–ing gluestick, I’ll boil and–”

“–Betrayer, you–”

“Come on, come on, you’re a Betrayer, you don’t know what’s–”

That last one came from a human. And that kind of pissed Blackpowder off – he had about as much right, maybe more, to tell them how to be human. Wait, definitely more – it wasn’t like he was saying an entire world deserved to die.)

They’d shot all the Newfoals on sight. Sure, there were humans out there who talked a good game about saving the Newfoals, and how it wasnt right because these used to be people, and how they could cure them someday if only they just…!

“Just what?” Blackpowder would ask, and they’d say something about Newfoal asylums, and Blackpowder would just sadly shake his head. Because, thing was, he knew a guy named Vadim who received letters from his friend Anton, who worked at the Bellwether Newfoal Stable Zone. And the things that Anton had talked about before that place had been… “liberated” by Shieldwall troops were nightmarish.

There were some duties that took a special kind of creature. Duties that could make anyone save for this special kind of creature into a monster.

“Attention all units,” Gardner said over Blackpowder’s earpiece. “Viktor Kraber has escaped PHL custody. He’s proven unwilling to cooperate, and is fleeing the area.”


There was a pause.

“I am approaching Outpost Sourmash with a man he wounded, and I expect you all to help bring him to justice. I am setting up an operation in coordination with the police to head him off at one of his most possible escape routes,”

Gardner paused.

“He’s armed. He’s dangerous. He’s not going to talk to us, no matter what we do. He assaulted one of my men. He’s helped destroy this city. This isn’t a battle anymore, men. This is motherfucking war.”

The line went dead.

“Kraber’s escaped, yeah?” Warsame asked. “Looks like Gudrun and I are off to help.”

“Abe,” Blackpowder sighed, “I swear to Discord, if you were naming your rifle again-”

“Gudrun is my new spotter,” Warsame said. “She’s one of the new meat from the Free Militia of Griffonstone.” 

“Huh,” Blackpowder said, because he couldn’t think to say anything else.

“This,” a voice said over the loudspeaker, “Is Captain Samuels. Gardner is en route to the base with wounded. Be ready to greet him, and get to your positions.”

“Well,” Warsame said, “Looks like it’s time to get to work.” 

As the two of them headed out, leaving only a skeleton crew of guards, they head the laughter coming from one improvised cell. From a man with a dyed mohawk. He’d been shirtless during last night’s abortive pro-Carter protests, which might’ve looked wild and intimidating then. But now, it looked…

Blackpowder wasn’t attracted to human chests. The pale, hairless look, the way he could see the man’s ribs, the lack of fur…. He could sort of understand how, with human taboos about nudity – he remembered the shock as the ERP or Equus Resettlement Program had moved him up to Bethlehem and he’d found out that no, people did not go nude in small towns. But here, now, it just looked sickly. 

He’d been captured only an hour ago, and nobody had gone and found him a shirt. Nobody had really cared.

“You think you’re gonna be able to stop Kraber,“ the mohawked HLF man said. “The Night Surgeon. He’s the best of us. He’s gonna kill you all, he’s gonna rip off your heads and piss in your skulls–”

“Yeah,” Warsame said, looking away from him, “10/10 resisting. Except the part where, y’know, you blew up my house. And my school. And probably my friend’s dog.”

Warsame was clearly trying to make a joke of it. The only problem was that he was failing. And badly. 

“Hope you’re fuckin’ proud of yourself, motherfucker,” Warsame muttered. “I bet all the little kids you blew up must’ve been real evil horsefuckers.”

“My cousin came home from Spain and lost everything thanks to gluesticks like you!” the mohawked man yelled. “This! THIS IS WHAT YOU FUCKING GET FOR CODDLING THEM!”

“Bold words for someone in Jamila range,” Warsame said, stepping forward, hands on his rifle. He wasn’t aiming anywhere, and his finger wasn’t on the trigger guard. He didn’t look like he was seconds away from shooting the shirtless prisoner.

But these were times where tempers were frayed. And Blackpowder wondered very much how many people didn’t care about putting in the effort to keep calm.

“Abe,” a short-ish red-haired woman said, stepping in front of him, “He’s not worth it. We need to get to the captain.”

“Guess you right, Riley,” Warsame said. 

“Now,” Blackpowder said, realizing only then that he’d been holding his breath, “Let’s go and meet the Colonel.”

It was about ten minutes later when Gardner got their outpost’s infirmary, traveling in an APC. He was a heavyset, imposing man, who looked almost as broad as he was tall. He had graying blonde hair, and a hairline that wasn’t receding enough to be considered “balding” and left him with a very, very prominent widow’s peak.

His nose looked broken, and his face looked like it was about 60% bruises.

“You,” Gardner said. “Unicorn, ah… Blackpowder. Help me carry this man.”

“Sir yes sir,” Blackpowder said, trotting up to Gardner’s APC. Gardner gestured to a stretcher, which Blackpowder held open in midair with his TK, channeling magic through his horn. Summers slid on, and Gardner grabbed the other end of it.

A nervous-looking black earthpony with a considerable resemblance to Blackpowder followed, looking every which way. Well, save for the mostly surface-level wounds like a massive bruise on the forehead and missing patches of fur.

But as Summers slid onto the stretcher, Blackpowder got a long, hard look at what’d once been the left side of Summers’ face. 

“Holy buck,” he breathed. “What did Kraber do to this man?!”

If anything, he looked worse than Gardner.

The face of one Shawn J. Summers looked, as Heliotrope, Warsame, Riley, and apparently Kraber would put it, like “raw hamburger.” Blackpowder didn’t have experience with that, as he preferred vegetarian burger substitutes, but he was led to understand it was red-pink and looked kind of like burn scars but wet.

That…

Wasn’t too far off from what’d happened to Summers’ face.

“Bass’rd ground my face against a brick wall and kicked m’innit,” Summers mumbled. “We… could’ve had’t all together if he’d just shut up n’ listened.”

Blackpowder would not have needed any skill in field medicine to see that Kraber had probably done something very bad to the man’s jaw.

“We were trying to bring him in peacefully,” Gardner said, voice brimming with authority. “Isn’t that ri–”





Dancing Day

“Peacefully,” Kraber said, voice flat.

“Now,” Heliotrope said, “Viktor, I know you–”

“He. Said. Fokking. ‘Peacefully’,” Kraber said, voice icy cold. This was new. Normally when Kraber actually bothered with things like subtlety before an outburst, it was a sign he was about to put someone in the hospital.

“Look,” Yael said, “We didn’t know and had no reason t–”

“If he can call that kak ‘peaceful’,” Kraber said, “Then I can go and peacefully shove my fokking hand so far up his gat that I can use him as a fokking handpuppet, so maybe I can finally hear an apology coming out of that fokkin’ mouth of his. Call up that bastard, right now, and tell the PHL’s patent office I am about to invent a whole new fokking level of pain for that varknaaier!”

“The PHL don’t have a patent office,” Soarin says. 

“They fokkin’ will when I’m done!” Kraber yells back.

“How can Kraber make having a patent office sound like the a threat?” Astral Nectar whispers to Yael.

“Third word in that sentence,” Yael says, not evening looking at her. “It’s Kraber, we don’t have to explain it.”

“Sweet Mother of Faust, I really have to wonder about his bedside manner…”

“Look,” Aegis says, “Viktor. Out of everyone in this room, you probably have the best reason to hate him. But if you head up and kill him right now, you will get nailed for murder.”

Kraber shrugs. “And, that’ll make how many by now?”

“Well–” Aegis starts.

“Don’t answer that,” Heliotrope says. “Look. He’s gone. You and Yael, you’ve won. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.”

“Very,” Yael says. “But… look, Viktor. We’ve won this one at least. I just wish it wasn’t us.”

“Why?!” Kraber asks, the single syllable sounding tortured through his clenched jaws.

“Because if it wasn’t us, then someone else could’ve gotten their shot in,” Yael says. “Like Heliotrope-”

“Actually, I’m fine,” Heliotrope interrupts. “Cause of, y’know, the thing with the-”

Yael nods. “Right. Or Aegis, or…”

“It’s a long list,” Astral Nectar says, nodding.





Blackpowder

“Isn’t that right,” Gardner said. It wasn’t a question.


“Absolutely,” said the earthpony that could’ve very well been Blackpowder’s brother. 

“Sir,” Warsame said, looking over to Gardner, “Do you really think he’ll come this way? I mean, near an airport?”

“I can’t know that,” Gardner said. “But right now, we are ending this. You, ah…” he scanned Blackpowder, seeing a nametag stitched onto the unicorn’s tac-vest. “Blackpowder. Come with us and get Summers to the nearest infirmary.”

As Blackpowder trotted off in the direction of the airport’s infirmary, he channeled a very small amount of magic away from the stretcher, away from keeping the wounded human atop it, to listen to what his friends were saying.

As he turned back, he saw a griffon – slightly more purplish than normal – alight on the grass next to Riley and Warsame. 

“...Tartarus happened to that guy’s face?” the griffon asked. They sounded female. Blackpowder assumed that meant this was Gudrun, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Apparently, Kraber ground his face against a brick wall and kicked him till he stopped moving,” Riley said. 

“He was willing to fight three PHL at once, and did that?” Gudrun asked. “Don’t know if he knows this, but he’s basically screwed himself over. There’s basically nothing protecting him right now.”





Kraber

Had Kraber known at that moment the exact specifics of what was going through the PHL grapevine, he would’ve approached a soldier, cold-clocked him, stalked Gardner, and then promptly emptied an entire magazine of whatever gun he got into Gardner’s or Summers’ crotch. Even if it was a grenade launcher. He wasn’t particular.

It wasn’t to say he didn’t understand he was fokked sideways. That part seemed pretty obvious.

‘None of them would’ve been willing to let me surrender anyway,’ Kraber thought. ‘I need to live through this, so how do I… Hmmm…’

One plan came to mind.

‘Whatever town I get to, I find the air-raid alarms and try to turn them on.’

Never mind that he didn’t know how to turn on said alarms.

‘I find a shelter. Hold it at gunpoint, or… No. I get a hostage and put this Beretta up to their ear. I say that I won’t come out unless I’m given a peaceful surrender, and not shot on sight. That’ll fok over those sanctimonious pricks who treat you like a hero one minute and utter fokking SHIT the next!’

He ambled down the streets, heading for the bay and the mouth of the river.

From what he could guess, this had once been a big shipping area. The train tracks stopped very abruptly, cut off by an overpass, and it looked like they were in the process of being rebuilt towards the waterfront, past all the trendy fokkin’ hipster bars that took dives with names like Flynn’s and replaced them with art nouveau places that sold overpriced drinks. Or maybe he was just projecting on that. He was thinking about the worst fokkin’ dive bar he’d ever found in Boston, somewhere a fifteen minute walk from campus, a dark, forgotten place with dark beer the color of coffee and these greasy burgers piled high with melted cheese and mushrooms sauteed onions, ones that left the bar’s regulars continually amazed he stayed so thin, and–

‘Focus, Viktor.’

The train yard looked quiet. He could see locomotives that were being loaded up with rubble and other junk, trucks buzzing, workmen and a few Equus natives looking busy.

It wouldn’t be hard to slip between all of them. Jump into a hopper car.

Kraber moved gingerly down the hill. From tree to tree.

It must’ve taken ten minutes to get down to the street. But it still looked promising, didn’t it? Still the same locomotives that were being loaded up with rubble and other junk, trucks buzzing, workmen and a few Equus natives looking busy.

Kraber hung behind a series of long, low buildings, heading for the end of the railroad, the one that lead onto the edge of the port he’d come near. One that he remembered as having an absurd little narrow-gauge railroad.

‘…So now I have four options? Is hitching a ride on a narrow-gauge railroad an option? I don’t think they’d be as strict about the IDs, maybe…’

Kraber thought that over as he scoped out the fence around the railyard. There had to be a way in, right?

He saw the overpass. Saw the concrete pylons on either side of a set of double track, with a big black diesel with a long orange line cutting across its sides,  lying silently in wait. Another orange and yellow locomotive, he thought – a BNSF, going by the lettering.

So he kept going. Kept moving along, ever-closer to the overpass. He could see it a little better, noticing a ramshackle array of buildings underneath it. Structures built of shipping containers, the remains of boats, cast-off wood…

It looked like an awful place. Like some of the HLF shelters he’d lived in while escaping the Barrier. The strange thing about places like America, he’d noticed, was that the allegedly temporary shelters had opportunities to grow and metastasize, becoming something too permanent to really be taken apart before Barrierfall.

‘I can sneak on easily from there. Or at least around there.’

He walked into the street, passing the same railroad workers on the locomotives that were being loaded up with rubble and other junk, trucks buzzing, workmen and a few Equus natives looking busy. They were talking about… something’. Kraber couldn’t hear what they were saying. The background noise of the city and rail yard enveloped it like a warm coat over a wallet buried deep in a denim jeans pocket.

The little shanty filling the space between road and overpass was within a few meters, now. As he noticed,  the shanties crept over the road, creating a small tunnel. One deck even jutted out above the road, threatening to push out from the sides of the road like the neck frills of some lizard.

The lights were on. Kraber saw the lights of a television flickering through one. 

In no way was this architecture possibly up to code.

A green pegasus fluttered above, looking down at him. Were they… were they looking at him too long?
 
Kraber saw a flight of stairs leading up, through one little alcove. Could see light shining through a gap. Could imagine the pathway that could give him a clear avenue towards the freight yard. 

He turned to cross the street. Looked over towards the railyard, and saw the same railroad workers on the locomotives that were being loaded up with rubble and other junk, trucks buzzing, workmen and a few Equus natives looking b–

‘Wait a fokdamned minute.’

This was too easy.

Kraber stood, squinting, looking at the railyard. True, this wasn’t the same angle, wasn’t the same sight. But…. it looked the same. It all looked the same. 

No trains were moving. The engines were running, but nothing was happening. There was a man wearing unstained coveralls that looked brand new, walking towards him. And the Equus natives he saw were… missing something. They didn’t look like they were used to working here.

‘Shit.’





Yael

As the only one with any police training, Yael had taken control of the sting. It was, frankly, amazing how Gardner had to coordinate it… and how Summers managed to brute-force his way into getting this open.

“We’re dealing with a monster,” he’d said. “Are you really going to stand in our way? Aid and abet him? Let him ride out of here consequence-free?”

‘That,’ Yael thought, ‘is someone who knows what it is to be police.’

He hadn’t even needed a chance to convince the police. The few that were in fighting shape at the end of the night were out for blood. Not even the totally-not-in-a-hate-group-nor-do-I-know-anyone-who-is crowd were willing to argue.

“Sir,” one policeman said, “If this is the endpoint of the HLF, I want nothing to do with it.”

“You’re one of the good ones,” Gardner had said.

If anything, she was glad it was her. There was something about Gardner’s attitude towards all of it that bothered her. Why hadn’t he told Yael until after he’d started beating up Kraber?



 

Dancing Day

“Until after I started beating them up,” Kraber says. “There’s a difference.”





And more importantly, Kraber had gone out of his way to help. He’d gotten people off the rig. Helped out at the hospital. Nearly died.

“Does that seem right to you?” Yael had.

“I hope you’re not defending him,” Heliotrope said. “This man…. He fucking shot me. He’s stolen from refugees, shot people at checkpoints, murdered people of several species…”

“I want answers,” Yael had said from her hiding place in a nondescript building that could’ve been an office or temporary housing or anything, really. Oscar was hiding in there with her, Penetrator at the ready. 

Bro was hiding in the yard as well. 

“This all seems like a lot,” Yael said, “For one man.”

“It’s not just one man,” Smoky said. “One, it’s Kraber. Two, we’ve managed to capture plenty of HLF at our perimeter.”

“You’re both still out there?” Yael asked.

“Nah, Summers isn’t,” Smoky said off-handedly or off-hoofedly, “He’s getting his face treated for infections and stuff.”  

“He’s coming,” Chinook said, over the radio. 

“Feel free to make him hurt when he gets there,” Smoky said. “That bastard hurt my friends. I want him to suffer.”

That… would not be a unique sentence. ‘In the end,’ Yael decided, ‘it was less about what he’d done tonight than what he had done in total.’

Besides. This was, after all, Kraber. 

“He’s under the overpass now,” Chinook said, “I don’t think he notices me.”

They were right on top of him now. He was heading for the little shantytown built under the overpass.

“I still don’t see,” said one engineer, a hard-bitten man with an ugly two-day beard and a round face, “Why we still have to go along with liars like you.”

Yael had never been able to figure out if people who used that slang term were saying “Liar” or “Lyre”, and she’d learned from experience that it was best just not to press it. People who were willing to say that, to her face, they were never worth talking to and they’d always seize on any opportunity to cut her down.





Kraber

His mind raced. They knew he was there. But they didn’t know that he knew they knew. The train was out. They were… Was that someone moving towards him? Was that someone in that coffee place looking at him, watching, waiting?!

He couldn’t start running. That would… if the PHL saw him running, they'd know beyond a doubt it was him. 

He was walking faster and faster. He could see the area with the little narrow-gauge railroad drawing closer and closer.

‘You could give up…’

Oh, like hell he would! Not to Gardner, anyway. Definitely, definitely not to Gardner.

‘I’m not going to be able to stay free by the end of the day. The only question is how to surrender. What to do, what to do!’

He looked up to the pony in the sky. The green one. Shooting him wouldn’t work. That’d bring more PHL onto him like flies to a corpse.

‘They’re not going to let me live. Gardner won’t, and I was part of this. I was Lovikov’s inner circle. They– Wait a minute. I wasn’t part of his inner circle. Not even fokkin’ close. But he’d say I was. Bastard didn’t trust me. But that doesn’t matter.’

He wasn’t exactly thinking clearly at the time.





Yael

“...He’s gone,” Chinook said, amazed. “I don’t get it.”

He’d escaped from her and a pegasus that could turn invisible, twice! In one fucking day! Yael felt herself breathing heavily. Both fists were against the table and Yael didn’t remember if she’d pounded them against it.

‘Today,’ some distant part of Yael thought, ‘is not my day.’

“Can things,” Yael said, “Just work for once today.”

It was just… a rainstorm’ of little annoyances coming down around her in sheets. Slamming down her like rain drumming on corrugated metal.

Yael took a few deep breaths, breathing heavily. 

“...Ma'am?” asked the same engineer that’d talked to her in such depth earlier. “Are you…”

“Yael?” Quiette Shy asked. “ Are you okay?”


“No,” Yael said bluntly. “I am very much not okay. Kraber keeps on not being captured.”

Quiette Shy backed away a little.  “So… what do we do now?” she asked.

Yael thought of everything that would calm her. Counted to four in her head. Exhaled. Then walked over to a cheap map lying on a 70s-era desk for reasons that the owner of the office probably didn’t even remember.

‘Draw it up. Having a plan will help.’

“Do you mind if I…” she asked, looking over to some official in a ratty work shirt.

“Does it even matter at this point?” he asked, shrugging. “Besides. I got more.”

Yael took a pen, and circled the approximate area of the railyard. It was a terrible map, so it was mostly coasting by on guesswork. Thankfully, by the looks of things, Quiette Shy could follow her.

“He’s not going to double back if he knows we’re in the railyard,” Yael said. “So…”

She started marking the docks of the city. Little marinas, anywhere she could find a boat... All the way up to the narrow gauge railroad. 

“We keep guards, police, any of our allies over here,” Yael said. “Unless he’s thought of a fifth way out, he’s still either going here or to find a boat.” 

“What if he doubles back, Ma'am?” Chinook asked.

“He can’t know our troop movements,” Yael said, “And he’s not going to turn back. He’s this close to the edge of the city, he’s not going to make things worse for himself. He won’t be thinking that clearly.”

Indeed, as it turned out.

“Do You Think He’ll Take The Narrow-Gauge?” Quiette Shy asked.

“Possible, but,” Yael checked her phone, “not likely. The next train doesn’t get here for awhile. He won’t want to wait.” She turned to a wall, activating her comms. “Heliotrope, I’m going to need you to keep an eye on the coast. He’s looking for a boat.”

“What happened?” Heliotrope asked.

“He slipped through our fingers,” Yael said. “And no, I don’t know how.”





Dancing Day

“But wait, did both of you just… forget he killed Reaper?” Rivet asks, confused.

“To be honest, well…” Heliotrope says, looking a little sheepish, both forelegs clopping together.

“Look, it didn’t mattermuch to the three of us,” Kraber says. “I figured that it didn’t matter what I had done, and I figured that if your commanding officer was going to kill me, no way he wouldn’t order you to do i…”

“He kind of said it was optional,” Heliotrope admits.

“...Oh yeah,” Kraber says. “He did say that. I’m beginning to wish I caused even more–”

“Be satisfied with what we did get, Viktor,” Yael says.

“Yeah,” Heliotrope says. “I just… really wish I got to join in. Actually, just how did you do slip through their, well, um, our hooves?”

“I thought I told you,” Kraber says.

“You didn’t,” Yael says.

“Well, it’s actually pretty fokkin’ simple,” he says, shrugging. “I’d jumped onto a lorry, landing somewhere between the trailer and the main body.”

“...How did you not die from that?” Astral Nectar asks.

“That is easily the least unbelievable thing that hasn’t killed me.”

Dancing Day looks over to Aegis. “...He’s not wrong,” she admits.





Kraber

FOK!

His foot hurt. His back hurt. His… okay, almost  everything hurt. But he wasn’t going to get shot. So, y’know. Silver linings. He thought it over. The truck seemed to be heading for the docks. Maybe for a ferry, maybe a container ship. Which meant...

‘Option five, bitches!’ Kraber thought, before realizing. ‘Oh. The trailer’s going to have to be moved.’ He clung to a small outcropping of metal that didn’t look like it’d crush his hand. ‘I guess I’ll have to reschedule my death again, huh? Jackass!’

As soon as the truck had drawn to a stop at an intersection, Kraber jumped off and barreled down the street, much to the shock of nearby pedestrians.

Kraber sprinted across the docks, more thankful than ever that he’d run track back before he was in college. Just ahead of him he saw a short, screen on a metal frame resting in a bed of pebbles, reading off the departures for a nearby narrow-gauge railroad.

‘Narrow-gauge railroad?! Okay… come on…’

It was a vain hope, and in no way could it possibly work. But it was something. He’d have more hostages, be in a more enclosed space.

He checked the timetable. Another narrow-gauge train in ten minutes.

‘TEN MINU-’

Wait. 

He heard something. He looked over his shoulder to see a pegasus diving towards him, forelegs outstretched.





Yael

“He’s getting away!” Yael cried. “Chinook, keep your eyes on him, take him out if possible!”

This was her last chance. If he couldn’t be stopped now, well…

The ocean would complicate things. What if Romero rescued him? What if he got to Canada? No, Canada probably wouldn’t give him immunity. But what if some politician tried to nail the PHL for violating Canadian sovereignty or something? What if Kraber just ended up stuck in bureaucratic limbo and nobody could find out what was going on?

No, Yael didn’t like that.

“But go non-lethal. This is one of our last chances.”





Kraber


Kraber didn’t have time to think about why the pegasus wasn’t shooting first. He leaned low to the ground and dove under the timetable. The pebbles scratched against his skin under the T-shirt, and he struggled to regain his footing.

Finally, he slid back upright, feet pounding the wood of the docks.

‘You kontgesigs made me do this. Then again, this is probably a fokkin’ dof idea’, Kraber thought as he raced along the planks. ‘Anything would be a safer bet, but…’

He looked over his shoulder. The pegasus hadn’t hit the billboard, but he had been thrown off a bit. Rainbow Dash or Wonderbolt-quality, this pegasus was not.

If he was absolutely certain they wouldn’t let him live, then a boat would be the fastest way to get out of the city. No traffic jams. No PHL checkpoints. 

The PHL were right behind him. And just in front of him, he saw a man in a speedboat.

A speedboat with keys in it. ‘Keys that had only just been inserted.’

“Hey, man,” the man in the boat said, “What’s–”


‘At times like this, there’s only one thing to do!’

Kraber leapt off the dock and rammed the soles of both feet into the man’s face. 

The man tumbled back awkwardly, head bouncing against the metal railing surrounding the windshield of his speedboat. He fumbled, reaching for something, his hand not quite sure if it was reaching for the dashboard or his pocket–

Kraber drove a solid right hook into the man’s jaw again, knocking him into the water.

He turned the keys. The boat roared to life, and he shot out into Casco Bay.





Heliotrope

Assigning her to keep watch near the coast had been, putting it mildly, an awful idea. She flew back and forth, she kept watch by marinas, but overall it was a huge area to cover.

She’d been in touch with Oscar when she heard from Yael and Chinook. Kraber had sussed out the trap she’d laid, somehow, and was en route to a marina, running like his life depended on it.

‘It probably did.’

She’d been flying towards the marina Kraber thought he could escape through, when she saw Chinook diving towards him.

‘Good…’

But then Kraber did something unexpected. He dove under some kind of billboard. Chinook, fixated on chasing Kraber, was on a trajectory that’d put his skull straight through it.

‘Chinook, no!’

He managed to bank, just barely, a look of clear panic on his face as his stomach fur grazed the top of the board. He struggled to maintain control, everything

‘Kraber or letting him…’

Chinook looked like he was about to hit something else. He was barely in control of himself, wobbling this way and that, dizzily plummeting towards the ocean.

‘...I’m gonna hate myself if I let him die.’

Heliotrope flew towards him and caught him between both forelegs.

“He got away!” Chinook yelled. “I failed, Sergeant!”

“There’s a boat leaving for the wild blue yonder!” Heliotrope yelled. “He’s escaping!”

“Can things,” Yael said, “Just stay controllable for more than two minutes in this city?!”

“Apparently not,” Gardner said tersely. “I’m sending a PHL Blackhawk for Lieutenant Ze’ev, Sergeant Heliotrope, Mikkelsen and Shy. Chase him down and subdue him by any means necessary. Everyone else is to regroup with me for the prisoner transfer.”

“Yes, sir,” Heliotrope said. “Where did he get that boat from…”

“Heliotrope,” Gardner said, “Regroup with Lieutenant Ze’ev to get on the chopper.”





Kraber

“Stop!” someone yelled, and Kraber heard the ‘tac-tac-tac’ of a 5.56 rifle. “STOP, GODDAMMIT!”

“SEEYA, FOKSUCKERS!” Kraber yelled, flashing a middle finger back at them.

The boat roared out into the ocean, towards the Atlantic, and Kraber found himself finally relaxing. The first thing he did was reach for a roll of gauze in his backpack, and pour some vodka he’d found stashed in the boat on his hand wound. The second thing was to  smash the running lights.

If Kraber had either a) known absolutely anything about boats other than how to hotwire them, or b) not been panicking, he would’ve known this was an absolutely awful idea.

‘South? No, everyone’s going to be heading that way. North… hmmm. North north north. I could…’

A thought that could not quite be verbalized sailed through the troubled waters of his mind.

‘Would that work?’

It was – putting it very, very mildly – something that even the most casual of passing observers could never describe as being even on speaking terms with a good idea. But it was also the only idea.

...Especially since the guy he’d kicked in the face was lying in the water near the docks.

‘I did not think this through.’

He would find the Reavers. He’d rejoin them, as he’d heard they were in Maine at this moment. And then he would either find a way to disappear into their ranks or head west, or, if worst came to the worst, use them as human shields while surrendering. The Reavers, for reasons he could neither comprehend nor explain, did seem to care for him. They would hand him over – of course they would – but the PHL wouldn’t open fire on a settlement like Bastion, would they? Or the Reavers would just… hand him over to the PHL.

The plan was simple. Except it wasn’t, on account of the fact that it had a number of variables he couldn’t control, ran mostly on random chance, and he couldn’t predict how the Reavers would react.

‘How do I know they won’t kill me?’

The answer seemed obvious. 

‘Everyone else will. Or ponify me, so… fok no.’

The shore grew farther away. Kraber seriously wished he knew where to find a map. After minutes more driving, the shore was just a dark line on the horizon. Thankfully, the boat had a compass, so he probably wouldn’t have to worry about getting lost at sea. 

He wondered if he was good enough at navigating to track by the North Star. That… was extremely unlikely. Compass, then. And he’d try to use the coast as a guide.

He switched on the motor, and let the boat rush along the shore. 

‘I can do this. I can win.’

He was going to run away. He was certain of it. He was going to take the boat down south, get as far away as he could, and put all of this out of mind. Forget he’d ever been part of the HLF, and maybe, for the first time in three fokkin’ years, do something right by anyone, anyone at all.

But for now, this was…

Actually kind of nice. The wind in his face. The smell of the salt in the air. The spray of saltwater against ragged clothes, that…. Had he taken a shower in the last forty-eight hours? 

‘That would never be acceptable in any hospital.’ He started laughing slightly. ‘Heh. Reminds me of the time I had to take an isopropyl shower. I didn’t get vrot, but God dammit, I fokkin’ tried!’

It was peaceful, out on the sea. No Solar Empire, no Lovikov, no Equestria, no hallucinatory Newfoals, no nothing.

It felt like Lake Patrol had, a long time ago. Or two days. Was that really how long it’d been? Dacosta, Joca the border collie and her tendency to headbutt him, Gage, Mariesa, that little pub he liked, the house he and Emil shared…

He’d never see any of that again.

‘This is what, the fourth time I’ve been musing on being alone?’ Kraber wondered. ‘Is it… is it because I’m on the ocean? I need to think about some other fokkin’ thing.’

To distract himself, he switched on a tiny radio. 

“...investigation continues into the public abduction of Sutra Cross. So far, no official statement has been given by authorities, but all signs point to the HLF.”

He tuned it to another station.

“...death toll in Portland continues to rise. Reports of Newfoals are…”

“Jag kan inte sova…”

“...city has been cordoned off to prevent the escape of both PER and HLF…”

“Oh, this is just a mess out here, this is-”

“IYA NIE NE NOOIT NE… Ovdje je sve mračno… ”

Kraber knew enough Croatian from Grandpa Dragan to get the basic idea of that last part. ‘It’s all dark in here.’

The rest of it… well, that sounded  like various different ways to say ‘no’. 

‘I don’t need this,’ Kraber thought, trying to switch it to another station. 

‘“–Maine 99.9 The Wolf! Coming up next, the 2000s called and we’re giving them some love. Up next is Destrophy’s ‘This is Not My Life,’ and they’re right–”

That last syllable, ‘they’re’, had started to warp. The speakers contorting the afternoon DJ’s voice into an absurdly out-of-place Swedish accent, changing the pitch so the gender became nigh-impossible to place. 

He twisted the knob again.

‘I don’t  need this.’

‘“Right!”’

The last one had sounded like an insurance ad or a car dealership ad, some obnoxiously folksy thing from some middle-of-nowhere businessman.

‘“Ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son,” the radio crackled. Kraber felt something that moved in the general direction of relaxation. “Behind you!”

‘Is it following me?!’





Yael

The Blackhawk rushed across the Atlantic. With the exception of Gardner, Summers, and Smoky – who were being treated for what Kraber did to their faces – Yael had packed near everyone inside. 

Heliotrope, Quiette Shy, Oscar Mikkelsen… and their newer soldiers, like Chinook, Lorne, Bowie and ‘Bro’, and Eva.

The pilot was a Japanese woman named Tetsuko. An earthpony mare with the name Tumbleweed sat in the co-pilot’s seat. This had surprised Heliotrope the first time she saw it.

“What can I say,” Tumbleweed had laughed, “Always wanted to fly.”

Portland almost looked close enough Yael could jump out and swim there – not a good idea all the same – when suddenly the static came.

The radio had, at Tetsuko’s request, been tuned to a station playing some tune from the 2000s, when suddenly-

“IYA NIE NE NOOIT NE… Ovdje je sve mračno… ”

Yael had heard of Gestalt, obviously. If you were on the East Coast it was impossible not to have heard of it. She had no idea what any of it meant. And from what she could tell, few other people did. There were PHL codebreakers on the case, but no real progress had been made.

And then it vanished as quickly as it appeared.

“I hope we have someone on that,” Lorne said.

“Something’s Weird Here,” Quiette Shy said. “It Always Stays On Multiple Frequencies. It’s Like This Is… Moving Around."





Kraber

“...saker rör sig snabbare och snabbare. Vinniger. Faster.  Nader koorshogte. Fever.”

Whoever or whatever it was making Gestalt’s voice sounded… different. More stressed. Kraber understood some of it, the parts that were in Afrikaans, but the rest sounded Swedish. Or some Scandinavian language, anyway.

“Det er noen nye. Nuwe. Kažkas, kas neturėjo pasirodyti. Nouvelle. Bul bardik murun bolgon emes ele. Before. Bar bolçu. Il y avait. Before.”

As usual, Gestalt was incoherent. Kraber thought he’d caught some Lithuanian in there. He didn’t speak Lithuanian especially well – German, Croatian, Polish, and Russian were the only Eastern European languages he spoke well enough.

‘There is something new,’ Kraber thought he heard. Then the word ‘new’, but in French.

“Tu mani nesaproti. Tu neko nesaproti.”

...Something about cats? No. That was definitely, definitely not Japanese. It sounded vaguely like Lithuanian.

“Du kan inte förstå något av detta.”

Something Scandinavian again.

“Još gore. Neki to razumiju. Vree hulle. Hulle sal jou vernietig om 'n punt te bewys. B’karov, Shieldwall lir’tzot hishh’it. Corrupt. Roes. SPOIL. Consume.”

“UNDERSTAND?!” Kraber yelled. “Understand FOKKIN’ WHAT?! Croatian?! Afrikaans?! Hebrew?! I literally grew up hearing that! You're clearly trying to tell us something, but it sounds like word salad made on International Day at a fokkin’ high school!"

"Aweh, Viktor. Is hierdie beter?" Kate asked over the radio.

What.

‘Is this better.’

Kate's voice. His native fokking tongue.

Before the tiny shred of self-control Kraber had left shredded itself to pieces, he had just enough time to think ‘Well, shit.’






Yael

“First Lieutenant Ze’ev,” Gardner said, over the radio, “Are you hearing this?”

“Am I hearing what?”

“The Gestalt signal is switching from station to station,” Gardner said. “It’s following Kraber, somehow.”

“Is that even possible, Colonel?” Lorne asked. 

For all Yael knew, it was. It just wasn’t as if she had any knowledge about radios.

“Apparently it is, Herbert,” Gardner said. “That fucking thing is talking to Kraber.”

In that instant, the radio said something about Kraber having suplexed a woman. Yael kew full well from Kraber’s file that it had happened - the man had a long, well-documented history of aggression, violent outbursts, and -

“It’s His Wife,” Quiette Shy breathed, and Yael thought she saw her eyes widening under the red-tinted goggles.

“No,” Bro said. “No no no no no. That’s literally impossible. You don’t just come back from ponification.”

“And, how many Earth biologists said my physiology was impossible at this point?” Heliotrope asked.

Bro looked over at her. Raised a finger. Looked like he was about to argue.

“You’ve got to admit,” Bowie said, “She’s not far off.”

Yael nodded. That did make sense. And plenty of human biologists had, indeed, made the case that most Equus physiology was impossible. Right up until they’d seen Rainbow Dash flying.
 
“Alright,” Yael said. “Heliotrope, Quiette Shy, if this really is talking to Viktor, I want to know how to find him. And I know you do too.”

Heliotrope nodded, a determined look on her face. Quiette Shy was - typically - unreadable.

“You,” Yael said, “Are the best thaums we have on hand…”





Kraber

“Ek kan nie. I can’t… ek… Ek wens u alles van die beste. But I. Kann ich dir nicht sagen. I wish it was both of us against the world again.”

“Like the time I punched that kid who thought you were kidnapping Anka?” Kraber asked.

His voice sounded to him like it was coming from far away, and he felt like he was just out of view of a camera, watching an actor he’d hand-picked to portray him – probably Sharlto Copley – reading his lines.

The incident Kraber related sounded absurd. Probably because a) it was, and b) it never happened. 

“Are you sure you remember – onthou – it right? Reg.” Kate asked. “You didn’t punch a kid, you suplexed some annoying white girl. Just like that bitch of a GP.”

Actually, that was what happened. Anka had come out whiter than her brother, so seeing her next to a black woman in the Star Market had set something off in some woman convinced the world revolved around her. She’d assumed Kate was a kidnapper. So, after seeing someone trying to take his daughter, Kraber had done what he felt any sane and rational father would do, and suplexed the offending white woman into a wooden shelf, leaving her unconscious.

Okay, that was more what his own father would’ve done, so the jury was still out on that.

There was no reason he’d suplexed her, specifically. He probably could’ve just punched her. Or kicked her. Or yelled at her. Suplexing had just seemed funny at the time.

Also he’d suplexed a GP once, but that wasn’t important.

“Was that a Mexican suplex or a German suplex?” Kraber asked.

“Is Mexican suplex even a thing?” Kate asked. “I mean, you’re German, so maybe it was going to be a German suplex no matter what.” 

“Infallible logic,” Kraber said, nodding to himself robotically.

Because if he put emotion into that, then he’d have to come to terms with the fact that he was fokking talking to his ponified fokking wife over a fokking primitive radio that had no logical fokking way of receiving his fokking words, using fokking pony magic, and this was impossible, this was fokmothering impossible, motherfokker–

Reality came crashing down around him.

“KATE?!” Kraber yelled. “WHERE ARE YOU?! You were… you were fokkin’ ponified! I saw the house! I saw the pinata! The serum everywhere!”

“We don’t have time for that,” someone else said, their voice like Kate’s and like Gestalt’s but neither, with an inexplicable Swedish accent. 

“BUT YOU’RE PONIFIED!” Kraber screamed. “HOW… WHO… THIS IS FOKKING IMPOSSIBLE! BUT IF YOU WERE HERE, THEN WHO WAS PHONE?!”

There was a pause.

“Really? You’re doing this now?” Kate asked. 

“Why shouldn’t I?!” Kraber yelled back. “THIS MAKES NO GODDAMNED FOKKING SENSE!”

He looked down at the radio, searching it for what must have been the fourth time.

“I DIDN’T EVEN TOUCH THE FOKKING MICROPHONE!”

“I wish I could explain, Viktor!” Kate exclaimed, pleading. “But we don’t have time!”

“Really?!” Kraber asked. “Because we had enough time to talk about me suplexing some fokkin’ Karen, but apparently not enough to tell me why THE WOMAN I LOVE WHO IS FOKKIN’ PONIFIED IS TALKING TO ME?!”

“We wish I could tell you everything,” Kate said. “But… the most important part is this. Shieldwall is going to attack a city. He plans to use this to destroy the PHL. And if the PHL falls, that’ll be the end of the greatest force uniting humans and Equestrians.”

“And then what happens?!” Kraber asked. “And he can’t just… stage a land invasion, not until Barrierfall. They tried that during the Blackdog Raids!”

“We can’t… tell you that…” said the thing that may have been Kate. “He won’t let us. Me. Us.”





Heliotrope

“You’re the best thaums we have on hand,” Yael had said. “Is there a way we can hone in on it?”

And for a moment, it was like Heliotrope was back in the workshop she had during the years after the Crystal War. Like a filly in Sugarcube Corner. Just her hashing out solutions…

But with Quiette Shy. That part was nice.

The thing that Heliotrope – and Quiette Shy – always found so strange about magic on earth was that there were so many ways she had to reinvent the wheel. There weren’t any crystals or foci that they could just borrow from home or buy from the store. There was always a computer a fraction of the size and exponentially better that they could use.

Heliotrope found herself thinking of how she’d read Perdido Street Station once. How the summoning from there involved a machine designed to summon electrical – excuse me, Mister Mieville, elyctrical – elementals and channeling them into a ritual circle or something to create ‘the victimless sacrifice!’

While the PHL absolutely didn’t use ritualistic pony sacrifice and didn’t use stolen tissue from Newfoals to make magic items, Heliotrope couldn’t help but feel some resonance with that passage. 

“Agate?” Quiette Shy asked, looking over to Heliotrope.

“Does a quartz work?” Heliotrope asked, rolling one over with her foreleg to Quiette Shy, who held it in place with a lightly glowing red aura.

“I Guess,” Quiette Shy said, nodding. “Now I Need A Radio.”

Walker reached onto his armor and pulled a walkie-talkie off of its velcro, tossing it to Quiette Shy. She easily caught it in her TK.

“Going to Need Some Wire, Maybe Fiber-Optics For The Crystal,” Quiette Shy said. “Also, a Chocolate Bar.”

Heliotrope passed the wires and a Hershey’s over to Quiette Shy, who wrapped the quartz in the wires, then held it to a radio.

She closed her eyes. A red aura surrounded her, and – lightening to white – arced from her to the console of the helicopter.

“The Gestalt Broadcast Is Homing In On A Radio, Currently Traveling North By Northeast From Us,” Quiette Shy said, her eyes glowing behind her goggles. Flashlight-beams of red shone from her eyes, lightly illuminating the back of a chair. “We Find This Radio, We Find Him.”

She looked over to Tetsuko.

“Turn 50 Degrees East,” she told the pilot. 

“On it,” Tetsuko replied. Heliotrope felt the helicopter banking to the right.

“What was the chocolate bar for?” Heliotrope asked.

“I Got Hungry,” Quiette Shy said.





Kraber

“Who?!” Kraber asked. “What’s happening?! Where are you, where did–”

“There were three things that could have happened next,” said the thing that might have been Kate. “First, the PHL won. Things carried on alright, until that thing with the Amplifier. Or the Solar Empire won, and the PHL crumbled. But there was a…. Disturbance. Something, or someone from a space outside spaces entered that earlier world and moved things around. And from that arose other endings: There was a…. Corruption. And it could win.”

“Is it the HLF?” Kraber asked.

“Not exactly,” she said. “Look. There’ll be someone else who wants the PHL to lose. Someone who will promise you every awful thing you’ve ever wanted. Turn this world into a hell for all that aren’t human.”

“Lovikov?” Kraber asked.

“Worse,” Kate said. “Viktor. Beware the Quartz.”

“Was that a Steven Universe ref–” Kraber started.

“She knows too much,” the thing that resembled Kate said, “and it’s taken - Removed! Killed! - things from her that you don’t know you can lose. Loss. ”

“What’re you talking about, Kate?!” Kraber asked. “What’d she… what’d the Quartz lose?”

“Everything,” Kate said. “Beware. Hate. Beware the EHS. Fear.”

“Beware what!” Kraber asked. “Kate, who are the EHS? Where are you! Where are you going?! WH–”

He heard a helicopter in the distance, the repetitive thrumming drowning out the sound of the broadcast. Kraber’s eyes almost began to water from the ear-piercing static creeping in to the broadcast.

“And there’s one more,” she said. “Something from Outside. Something that followed this newcomer.”

THITH-THITH-THITH

Kraber turned around to see a helicopter rushing towards his boat, a big PHL lyre stamped on one of the doors next to the American flag. Its blades were thrumming as it roared over the sea. It was pretty low to the water, too. Enough that if he threw a rock, it’d probably hit the chopper.

“WHAT THE FOK IS IT?!” Kraber yelled. “WHAT IS ANY OF THIS?! WHAT THE FOK IS GOING ON?!”

“NO!” Kate screamed. “YOU CAN’T, I WON’T LET YOU, THIS IS-

The radio cut to static.

“KATE!” Kraber screamed. “WHERE THE FOK ARE YOU?! KATE! NO, NOT AGAIN, I CAN’T FOKKING LOSE YOU AGAIN, FOKDAMMIT, WHERE THE FOK, I NEED YOU, COME BACK!” 

...FOK.





Heliotrope

She’d been looking forward to getting up close and personal to Kraber.  But, as usual, something had ruined it. 

“And just what the buck did any of that mean?” Heliotrope wondered aloud. She looked through the cabin of the helicopter, seeing confused face after confused face through the transparent helmet faceplates. The squad looked from face to face, murmuring.

“That,” Oscar said, “Was weird.”

It was hard to parse any emotion from his voice.

“Weird isn’t the half of it, big guy,” Chinook said. “I mean, that… if that was someone coming back from ponification, I just…”

His voice trailed off.

“I mean, heck,” he said. “Where do I even begin. Sounds like some serious dark magic.”

“That,” Heliotrope said, “Sounds…”

“What,” Chinook said, “Far-fetched? Because I think we passed that point a long time ago.”

Heliotrope nodded. They had, after all, fought zombies the night earlier. “I mean, Newfoals were probably already dark magic at this point. Plus. What else would last night be?”

“...You’re sure,” Bro said, “I’m not really sure tha–”

“How Could It Be Anything But Dark?” Quiette Shy asked. “Magic Is Supposed To Enrich Life, Not… Twist It.”

“And what was the thing about a quartz about, anyway?” Eva asked.

“Well, Heliotrope and Quiet used a quartz, so…. Do you think that’s what it meant on the radio when it said ‘Beware the Quartz?’ Lorne asked.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think it is.”

“Why?” Heliotrope asked. “I’ve never even heard of the EHS. Plus, it’s not like everyone thinks ”

“It Sounds Familiar,” Quiette Shy said, “But I Can’t Quite Place It.”

Heliotrope nodded. It did sound vaguely familiar. But how…

“Alright, everyone,” Yael said, “We’re coming up on his boat, and he’s armed.”

‘It’s just him with maybe a pistol against all of us,’ Heliotrope thought. 

“I don’t think neutralizing him will be much of an issue.”

Yael raised an eyebrow. “It’s not that. It’s that I want to bring him in with as few people getting hurt as possible. Us included. I’m going to be the one to talk him down.”





Kraber

The helicopter followed him at a steady clip, spraying up water into his boat.

Kraber might as well have been on a different planet.

“WHAT?!” Kraber screamed. “What in the fok is it?! What’s the EHS?! What’s this other thing?! I’ve lost everyone in my life that I cared about at this point, and I’d really appreciate some fokdamn guidance!”

He slammed his left fist down on the radio. The plastic cracked, and somewhere he felt like he should have probably noticed how much that should’ve hurt his left hand.

But the radio didn’t respond. After all, it was just a radio.. It had been crazy to believe it could ever be talking to him, wasn’t it? 

A song started playing.

“This is not my life…
And these are not my eyes…”

Kraber turned back to stare up at the helicopter.

‘Take it out by aiming the pistol upwards! You’ve already killed a lot of helicopters today, one more can’t hurt! But someone has to drive this. And then I’ll be a sitting duck!’

He looked through the mirror the boat had installed just near the steering wheel. Then looked back at the chopper. It had the PHL logo stenciled on one side. And he could see a couple of Equestrians at the helicopter’s door, wide open. 

One of them was aiming a very large gun at his boat. A purplish-pink pegasus with a blue-green mane, wearing tinted goggles. Standing next to her was a tall brown-skinned woman with dark brown or black hair, who seemed to almost scrape the ceiling of the chopper. And a man in face-concealing heavy armor that was incredibly poorly-suited for these summer months.

Kraber couldn’t recognize the third man, but it was Yael and Heliotrope. The terrors of HLF units the world over, especially the Americas.

‘Always knew I’d go out like this,’ he thought.

He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He knew they looked excited, though.

No, not excited. Angry. Absolutely livid.

‘They found me!

He looked back. Saw Yael Ze’ev aiming towards his boat with a Big Fokkin’ Gun the size of the average pony.

“Viktor Kraber,” Yael said, “You are ordered to–”





Dancing Day

“I’d just like to say,” Yael interrupts, “What you did next was not my fault.”

Spitfire narrows her eyes. “Lieutenant,” she says quietly, “You were aiming an autocannon at a man in a boat.”

“And I thought she was going to kill me no matter what,” Kraber says.




Yael

Yael was aiming the cannon towards Kraber. Whatever she was thinking, Heliotrope couldn’t tell.

The Obregon was designed for use against Newfoals, against larger Equus targets. But it seemed likely that just having the cannon aimed at the boat couldn’t be a bad idea. It’d reinforce the overwhelming power of the PHL.

“You are ordered to cease and desist,” Yael said, voice amplified by a spell from Quiette Shy, “By the…”





Kraber

“.. authority of the PHL,” Ze’ev said, “for your role in the destruction of Portland, the Sfax Raid, murder of countless innocents, and–”

Kraber looked over his shoulder. Saw the helicopter.

He heard Gardner’s voice in his head. 

“Nobody is going to stop us. Come on, think about how many things you did. You’ve operated illegal checkpoints and stolen from people. You’ve shot up and extorted refugee camps. And then there’s how you must’ve treated your wife.”

Kraber would wish he thought to say something. That he had some answer.

Instead, panicking, realizing that he had a cannon aimed at him, he whipped out his stolen Beretta and started firing. Two three-round bursts ripped through the summer air, towards the helicopter. 





Yael

Her shoulder exploded with pain.

She staggered backwards, left hand to her right shoulder, breathing heavily. And, maybe it was just her, maybe it wasn’t, but it felt like the helicopter shook lightly.

‘Don’t let me fall don’t let me fall don’t let me fall– Kraber, you bastard.’





Kraber

‘Oh, shit!’

He stared at the Beretta like he was holding a bomb that’d just armed itself all on its own. His eyes tracked from the sights, all the way up to the helicopter. At Yael off-balance, close to the Obregon that they were using as a door gun.

At Heliotrope.

Logically, Kraber knew he was too far away from the gluestick pony to see the expression on her face.

But, probably due to a logical guess, he knew that her face was contorted in anger.





Heliotrope

‘NO NO NO NO…’

It was like Heliotrope was staring at herself lying on the street in Varosha, bleeding to death from an artery under the wing. 

‘You helped us,’ she thought frantically, ‘and now, you didn’t listen. You’re dead.’

She rushed towards the door Yael had occupied. Spreading her wings, and flying towards the Obregon.

“YAEL!” Quiette Shy yelled, catching the tall Israeli woman in her TK.

 Heliotrope hit the spade grips of the cannon, swinging it so hard towards the helicopter it was near parallel to the doors.

Her hooves stuck to the grips, and she felt energy spreading from her hooves over the triggers. She’d done this before. Held weaponry, tools, and other things against her hooves, but it’d been years since she’d fired weaponry without a mouth trigger.

The massive gun fired, its barrel lighting up the early-morning light of the Atlantic. The barrel rotated slightly.





Kraber

A plume of steaming water sprayed up, spattering the windshield.

‘They’re shooting back,’ Kraber thought, amazed, ‘with a goddamn cannon.’

He stood, transfixed, as the gun tracked towards him.

‘Might be a good way to go out,’ he thought. ‘Besides, I was enough of a boef they wouldn’t even try to keep me alive.’

So he stood there for a second that felt like an eternity. Watching. Waiting.





Heliotrope

She didn’t want to stop. This was Kraber. The man that’d shot her, committed countless atrocities during the Europe Evacuation, and had lied to them. Been part of the shelling of Portland.

She aimed down towards the engine, a fraction of a fraction of a movement.





Kraber

The cannon or whatever the fok it was fired, and time seemed to freeze.

“You’re not going to stop here,” someone said. It sounded for all the world like Kate’s voice, whispering in his ear. Or maybe it wasn’t. Who knew.

‘You know,’ he heard himself thinking, ‘maybe you don’t want to die?’

“You gotta admit,” Victory said, “that’s infallible logic. Besides, if you die you can’t eat pancakes anymore.

That was a fair point. Kraber bent over in a running start, ready to fling himself off the bow. His feet were just at the tip when–

‘...Shit’

He felt himself being flung from the deck of the boat, and a wave of heat licking at his back. He felt weightless, and somewhere in his mind, was dimly aware that the ocean was beneath him. 

Kraber slammed against the surface of the water, and everything around him went dark.





Yael

She wasn’t going to die. It’d just been a couple 9mm rounds to body armor, at fairly long range, and they hadn’t hit anything vital. 

But it had taken her by surprise, and it had hurt. Yael stood up, breathing heavily and looking over to the three others in her helicopter. Oscar Mikkelsen, Quiette Shy, Heliotrope. Plus Tetsuko and Tumbleweed, the pilots. 

“Did you get him?” Yael asked, looking over to Heliotrope, who stood behind the MP20 Obregon, rearing up on her hindlegs.

The barrel was smoking slightly.

“Did we really need to do that?” Tumbleweed yelled back from her seat.

“I don’t know,” Yael said, quietly. But…

She’d wanted Kraber taken down for a while. There’d been the awful things he’d done in Tunisia, the Innsbruck and Graz massacres. The Equestrian prisoners whom the Menschabwehrfraktion had shot.

And now, she’d wanted answers. Answers that… she wasn’t getting.

She didn’t regret it, but she also didn’t feel satisfied. It was hard to say just what that meant.

Heliotrope was touching her right foreleg to a spot on her left side, just under one of her wings, wincing slightly – but still, she looked triumphant.

“That’s for the time you shot me, you bastard!” the pegasus called down to the flaming wreckage of the speedboat.

“Heliotrope,” Yael said shakily, “We… just killed a man with an autocannon.”





Heliotrope

Of course they had.

“I thought you were going to die,” Heliotrope said somberly. “You, stumbling, falling back-first into the ocean…”

Yael nodded.

“I panicked- He’d nearly killed me, and… I just couldn’t bear losing you too.”

“I wasn’t going to fall,” Yael said.

“I couldn’t tell at the time,” Heliotrope explained. “And he’d already made it clear we weren’t going to capture him.”

“That is true,” Yael said, nodding. “I… guess we’re done.”

“Yeah,” Heliotrope said. “We did what we had to.”

Something about those words didn’t feel right, though.

‘No,’ she thought. ‘Kraber’s gone. My friend’s alive. And Gardner said there’s plenty more people from Defiance to capture, right? It’s going to be fine. Isn’t it? We did what we had to.’





Dancing Day
December 2022

“But you didn’t die, right?” Dancing Day asks.

Everyone – Kraber, Aegis, even Yael Ze’ev and Heliotrope on their videochat – looks right at Dancing Day.

“...Fokkin nogal?!” Kraber says, not mad, just supremely confused. “How in the… What the fokkin’... I… How loskop can jy–”

He sighs. 

“Sorry. No need… I’m here, aren’t I?” he asks. “So clearly, I survived having... bietjie-baie MP20 Obregon shells?”

“About seven,” Heliotrope supplies. “I’ll have to ask Oscar.”

“Izzit?!” Kraber asks, a smile spreading across his face. “Eish. About seventeen MP20 Obregon shells hitting my boat.”

“You know, I’ve been meaning to ask how you survived that,” Yael says. 

“I jumped off right before the shells hit the boat, the explosion must’ve made it look like I was caught in the blast,” Kraber says. 

“Let me rephrase that,” Yael says. “How you managed to survive while being set on fire-”

“Fell in the ocean?” Aegis suggests. At which point Kraber nods, clearly thinking something along the lines of ‘sounds about right.’

“And without being cut apart by shrapnel or hit by the shockwave,” Yael continues, without missing a beat. “And without being noticed.”

Kraber is about to answer, stops himself, then frowns. “Aweh, thaaaaaat one I don’t have an answer to.”

“Look,” Heliotrope says, “Maybe it’s just not that important. I mean, like Aegis said, we’ve seen Viktor die–”

“Nearly die,” Dancing Day interrupts.

“Nearly die,” Heliotrope says, “like four times now.”

“It’s closer to five,” Aegis points out.