Red One was alive again. "Ah, my baby's come back," Echelon crooned, waggling his wings and feeling the response of the fighter.
Willow snorted. "Colts. Delivery was clean... retracting bay extension." There was a series of clunks and whines from Red One's belly as the insertion pod collapsed, allowing the bay doors to close and rendering her hull back to its normal smooth and stealthy finish.
It's amazing what losing a couple of tonnes will do to your figure. "Much better, thank you, Willow. Anything on our route to the next target?" He increased the throttle smoothly, accelerating to the Loup-Garou's cruising speed, just a hair below Mach two.
"We're past the outer skin of air defence radars and scope is clean. Mass driver battery, designation Copper... we'll be over their horizon in thirteen minutes," Willow said. They flew on in silence for a while, Echelon manoeuvring the fighter around the taller mountain peaks and along valleys. "I'm getting updates... CAP is up around Copper, no surprise, but is thinner than expected. Looks like they were pulled out of position by some of the earlier strikes."
Thank Luna for small mercies. Pity we lost the drone. Echelon swallowed, taking a sip from the drinking tube just below his jaw. "Any change to the point defence locations?"
"Some extra mobile units; K31 Hornet swarmjet launchers, by the looks of it."
She shunted a map overlay to his HUD, and Echelon let the autopilot take care of the flying while he mulled over the best route in. The time passed quickly, and before long the final set of mountains were on the horizon and fast approaching. Echelon pulled Red One back a little, letting Green Two and Red Two take the lead. His own warload had been reduced by the bulk of the insertion pod, and countermeasure stores were particularly low after the first engagement.
A shiver ran down his spine, spreading into a whole body, near subliminal tingle that concentrated in the leading edges of his wings. Everything grew suddenly quiet, even the infra to ultrasonic roar of the engines fading, as if someone had taken those tonnes of white-hot metal and wrapped them in layers of deadening foam.
"Suppression arcarna active," Willow grunted, her words squeezed out like she was trying to breathe during a high G turn. The scent of her sweat leaked through the shared air system, making Echelon's upper lip twitch.
Down, colt, down. The thought was fleeting and vanished he swept his eyes over the status lights. "Thermal, radio and sonic indicators are clear; suppression confirmed." Red and Green Two, only a few hundred metres away, had vanished, only really visible because he knew where to look; they were clear glass sculptures of themselves, slightly distorting the background. At that moment the little squadron popped over the next ridge and had a clear view of the target's outer defences.
Red designators swarmed over the hills and crags like clouds of flies over dung. Each was a radar drone, reporting back to an air defence site. Cheap and with long endurance, their crude phased arrays were transmit only, allowing the launcher to remain electromagnetically silent while waiting for targets.
This was a good tactic, but the local terrain was too rough to allow the mobile sites much movement, and the Express had been watching when the drones were launched. Under those points of red light were fuzzy blue diamonds, snapping into sharp focus as the fighter's sensors locked on to the swarmjet projectors. Designators changed with a ripple as each fighter took its share of the target list, then went amber as weapons were released.
Red One remained out of this fight, saving her ordinance for the main target, but
more lights in Echelon's HUD went amber, this time the ones for the crew biometrics. "Hang in there, Willow," he called, wishing he could turn and give the mare some physical comfort. Each of her gasping breaths sounded thick and strained, matching the flashing warnings from the medical systems.
The missile launches were stealthy and carried them a good distance from the fighters, but nothing could hide them when their high-acceleration engines fired.
Bright in the infrared and vacuum ultraviolet, the dozen missiles accelerated to a kilometre a second in the space of a breath, taking tangential, curving paths to their targets. On the ground, visible as camouflage netting blew away, were the blocky spider-shapes of high-mobility vehicles, legs churning as they started to move. On their backs were fat cylinders, snapping up and around to track the missiles, then flares and puffs of chaff blew up in choking clouds, shrouding the rocky slopes and peaks in smoke.
Fire rippled out of the launch bays, blasts of smoke and flame that ripped away the ground behind the exhaust ports. Dark points rode out on the tips of yellow spears, hundreds upon hundreds of unguided rockets designed to do nothing more than fill the sky with high-velocity metal.
The closing speeds of the weapons were ferocious, but the Equestrian missiles were as smart as the gryphon ones were dumb; they plotted the launches and measured trajectories and velocities, manoeuvring when they could. The swarmjet spreads were wide, giant shotgun blasts, and tailored to potential escape routes, so this was frequently impossible. In these cases the missiles detonated early, all the force of their tetranitrotetrahedrane cores birthing their lethal progeny, a cluster of nanocrystalline tungsten alloy rods, at terrible speed.
Explosions filled the sky as the time fuzes on the swarmjet rockets triggered, each of the hundreds of projectiles spraying out a thousand or more flechettes. The sheer numbers of them actually obscured the ground a little, a literal cloud of arrows.
Metal met metal at close to five kilometres a second. The Equestrian weapons that were struck, though much heavier than the swarms of bullet-sized needles, instantly flashed into smears of white fire, their tungsten cores heated to far beyond their pyrophoric ignition temperatures. Thermal and optical pulses lashed the hillsides, like sudden flashes from a titanic strobe light.
Missile flight times were measured in a few, scant, seconds, but the fighters all started to turn as soon as danger zones, coded by the probability of impact, appeared in virtual displays. Red One was in a volume marked amber, with sprays of polychromatic light emerging from her tiny model that dictated where she needed to go to evade the onrushing storm of metal needles. Echelon twisted his wings, pulling the Loup-Garou around in a sharp turn and onto a 'green' vector.
Tiny models of the other two fighters stumbled and spun in Echelon's peripheral vision, and he was attracted to a flicker of crimson. Ah, pony. How's your luck? Red Two was deep in a zone of dark red, at the confluence of three swarmjet trajectories. Just bad luck; there was no way the Razorclaw defences could know where they were, other than in general terms, so they'd swept the sky, firing in areas they might have been. Here the lack of dynamic communications and target sharing had worked in the gryphon's favour; an Equestrian network would have spread the firing solutions evenly.
While the counterfire was still approaching, the missiles did what they were supposed to do, releasing their cargo of tungsten rods at the correct distance and vector to cause the most damage. Explosions dotted the mountain slopes, hard, bright things filled with the glowing, smoke-trailing shrapnel of burning rocket motor fuel being sprayed in ballistic arcs from each impact site. Flame stabbed out from hatches and ports, like the inside of each armoured box had been turned into a jet turbine on full afterburner.
His own model went green, then the wavefront of flechettes swept over Red Two's position. The fighter suddenly appeared, visible across all the wavelengths from millimetre radio to hard ultraviolet, disks of yellow light popping into being between the onrushing projectiles and the Loup-Garou's thin skin. Come on, Chicory, hold that field togeth-- The arcane defence went out as the distant point of sophisticated metal and polymer, flesh and bone, disintegrated into sprays of ragged components haloed by streamers of burning jet fuel.
Willow gave a sobbing sound, then the subliminal feeling of magic vanished. "All Hornet launchers down," she said in a clipped tone, then her voice dropped to a whisper. "Goodbye, Chicory and Anabatic. I'll raise a glass for you."
Don't say that, there's a chance-- Echelon stopped the thought before it could turn into words. They would be lucky to find anything bigger than a hoof after a strike like that; hundreds of those little needles would have passed through each square metre of Red Two's airframe. Echelon gritted his teeth and tried not to imagine that happening to Willow, then switched the fuzes on his remaining missiles to deep penetration.
The next ridge took them to within visual range of the target, Copper. The mass driver battery, part of Razorclaw's coastal defences, had a huge range, either by direct fire, or by boosting self-powered hypersonic weapons on trajectories that could take them halfway around the world. The one thing that Razorclaw had in abundance was mountains, and the mass driver took advantage of that.
The knife-edged ridges swelled into a cluster of peaks, the largest of which housed the mass driver. This whole section of the Dragonsback range had been reworked to house Copper's installation, with the surrounding peaks sliced off to give the weapon a clear field of fire. The high valleys surrounding the weapon were all flooded and dammed, pump storage facilities that acted as simple and robust power reserves, things whose moving parts were buried so deep that even nuclear explosives would have trouble disrupting them.
The mass driver itself occupied the central peak. It was housed in a squat, massive sphere of a turret, replacing the whole top of a mountain, with its attendant bunkerage dug into the rocky roots below. More weapons, smaller things designed for smaller targets, were scattered throughout the upper slopes, all with overlapping fields of fire and able to wipe the ground clean of any enemy in sight. Airfields, sunk into the rocky slopes, completed the defence in depth, each loaded with shredders and aerodynes.
Trying to hit the thing from altitude was suicide; if you were above its horizon, it could hit you and any weapon you cared to send its way. Vast power reserves and bottomless magazines filled with cheap, dumb metal meant a sneak attack was the only way to get close enough; get inside that massive, and thus slow, turret's reaction time. It was turning to meet them, had probably been doing so since the swarmjet launchers had fired, but that was only a dozen seconds at most.
The CAP was diving to meet them, but it was slow, far too slow. One of the penalties of having too much faith in your point defences, Echelon thought grimly, grasping the trigger paddle in his teeth and biting down. His missiles leaped away and he poured on the power, stealth less important than distance after their encounter with the K31's. As fast as the Loup-Graou was, the missiles were faster.
Of the six launched, four were intercepted by the circlet of high-rate autocannon strung like beads of pearls about the throat of the mountain. The remaining two struck the turret, kicking up little puffs of dust, seemingly inconsequential against that spherical bulk. These were not the simple constructions of dumb mass he'd fired at the point defences or those poor, naked gryphons, these were spellcraft arcana specifically designed to attack complex mechanisms.
Deep within the mountain-top mass driver, magic flared and pulsed, seeking out straight lines and perfect, pure materials. Carefully designed armatures, things made of the toughest alloys and faced with refractory ceramics, warped and twisted in subtle ways, with nanometre fractures opening within their structures. Metre thick superconductors, fed from massed banks of graphene-boron nitride capacitors, suffered from atomic drift at the most tiny of scales, disrupting the property that made them the most valuable.
As they flew away, the turret completed its turn, finally achieving a firing solution for the stinging insects that had bitten it. High velocity loading mechanisms whined, bringing up the first of many sheaves of metal arrows, an order of magnitude more numerous and more massive than those used by the swarmjet launchers. Under computer control, firing permission long since given by taloned forelimbs, electronic switches opened, instructing the capacitor banks to discharge into the weapon's barrel.
There was thunder inside the peak, or at least that was how Echelon imagined it; no sound could reach them as they far exceeded its laggard velocity. A blue-white flash burst from the barrel and the whole massive structure seemed to sag, a plume of black, gritty smoke shot with orange flames poured from the opening.
"Gotcha," he muttered, one eye turned up towards the still diving CAP aircraft, then reached for the master throttle, pressing it to its maximum. "Catch me if you can!"
===
Chirr followed the FOALs into the prison block. Inside was the smell of many gryphons who had not had the opportunity for much in the way of personal hygiene, but this was still an improvement over the stench of the room he had just left. As the insect drone swarm video showed, the nearest cells were completely empty, their doors half opened and the insides scarred with the marks of fighting. Trailblazer, Night and Blevie swept through the cell block, surrounded by an ephemeral haze of the tiny camera drones, each one manoeuvring to place the ponies at the centre of a ring of surveillance, much like their exoweapons, but Chirr held back, looking into one of the occupied cells.
The gryphons within stared back in silence, whatever improvised weapons they had managed to construct clutched tight in foreclaws. There were obvious strop marks on the concrete walls and fresh abrasions on every talon he could see; even those with weapons had been busy trying to get their claws sharp. The closest prisoner, one with the common white head feathers of Razorclaw's southern gryphons, moved hesitantly forwards, letting the heavy steel bar fall. Chirr's exoweapons chose that moment to crawl around his body, poking their snouts around his shoulders to focus on the prisoner.
The gryphon flinched, freezing under that blank gaze, then relaxed slightly when Chirr made them retreat. He twitched his lips through the complex set of menus controlling the basic suit functions, finally managing to retract his visor and muzzle guard. "So you are a pony," the gryphon breathed, "I thought..." He shook his head, reaching forward to grip the bars. "Open this door; let us out!"
"I don't think so," Trailblazer said, appearing at Chirr's shoulder. "Sergeant? Time to go."
"You've come for those others haven't you?" The gryphon gave a quiet, angry hiss. "Always knew the Talons had made a mistake in taking those ponies. No one cares about a vanished gryphon... but ponies have friends." He narrowed his eyes, then reared up, holding on with both sets of foreclaws and pressing his beak through the bars. "I met one of them... a unicorn; a little cream thing with a red mane. The Talons took my family from me for it. Listen... there's something freakish here. They empty the cells and they never bring the prisoners back. The guards... they don't look right."
Chirr nodded. Political prisoner, then? Perhaps the worst gryphonkind has to offer' is a matter of opinion. "Thank you. We're here to--" He paused, resealing his suit. "Never mind. We'll be back." He backed away, feeling the pressure of every eye in the cell, following the quiet hoofsteps behind him
"My mate is in here somewhere; be careful, please!" he called out in a fearful whisper, one foreclaw reaching through the bars, grasping after the chiropt.
Not trusting himself to speak, Chirr nodded again, then turned and loped after the FOALs.
===
Night opened the next three barred gates; their simple mechanical locks failing under the expert flicker of her magic, either by direct manipulation or damage to their internal components. They travelled down another level, through a cell block occupied by female gryphons and the occasional, well hidden, chick, ignoring their increasingly desperate entreaties, when the network of surveillance drones started to fail. More of the tiny flying things flowed into the void, but it swallowed them up in an expanding zone of darkness.
Tactical systems flagged this immediately, and the FOALs sent their exoweapons forward, creeping along the junctions between wall and floor. Chirr stayed at the back, not wanting to get in the soldiers’ way, crouching down in the deepest section of shadow he could find. Abruptly, every single drone died, filling the cell block with a scattering of blue sparks and Chirr's visor with a burst of error messages. Then, at a gallop, a pair of large gryphons came through a gateway at the far end of the cell block, all gaping beaks and extended claws, and far, far faster than any gryphon he'd seen move before.
He fired, as did four other exoweapons, the quiet coughing of the low-velocity shock rounds the loudest sound in the room, at least until the still-captive gryphons in the closest cells let out startled screams. The ammunition exploded in brilliant flashes of red light, bursting at some immaterial surface a pace from the lead gryphon and sending sparking metal fragments ricocheting off the walls and ceiling. The first attacker, a blurred, strangely asymmetric rush that mixed dark grey feathers with a patch of pale green, struck Trailblazer with wide-spread talons, sending the heavily-built pony slamming into the closest cell door.
In the same bound it landed on one of the scuttling exos, crushing the carapace, then leaped away, straight at Blevie. The pony ducked and turned, her exoweapons firing, not with the quiet coughs of shockers, but the ear numbing cracks of high-velocity rounds fired so fast that they blurred together in a solid wall of sound. Their targeting was perfect, and the creature was wreathed in red fire and a haze of vapourised metals. It let out a harsh, atonal shriek, as if from two throats at the same time, landing awkwardly enough that Blevie managed to roll away.
She left behind a sphere the size of a chicken's egg, which promptly detonated, flicking the gryphon off its paws and into the wall. Chirr's eye widened; a ball of red light surrounded the attacker at the instant of the explosion, and the shockwave curled over the arcane field, blasting grooves from the ceiling. The creature was stunned for a moment, still enough that he could get a brief glimpse of steel-grey fur and feathers interspersed with a dragon's skin of fine scales and odd flecks of pastel green, then it was on its paws, bouncing upright with a horrible vigour.
A bare twitch of his lips and his own exoweapons flicked into 'lethal' mode so fast that Chirr almost thought that the expert system was operating under remote control. Magazine feeds changed in the blink of an eye, and he dropped the pair of robotic weapons into autonomous mode and gave them their target before it could move a pace. The air was filled with dust and thunder, the writhing shape of the gryphon outlined by chaotic pulses of red light, like it was a captive electrical storm, under the combined onslaught of Blevie and his exos.
The other gryphon had gone after the stunned Trailblazer and was on top of the pegasus, forclaws raking his body like a cat with a mouse, trying to get its beak around his throat. Night was off to one side, staggering backwards as red tendrils contracted about her horn. The unicorn's own magic, a feeble glow compared to the furnace glare of the other's arcane power, fought the incursion, but she seemed barely conscious of her surroundings and was banging her head against the wall as if trying to dislodge something. High-pitched whinnies, full of pain and horror, cut through the radio bands for a moment, then went silent as if choked off. Night dropped to the floor, legs uncoordinated and thrashing.
The reaching claws caught on the carapace panels on Trailblazer's flanks, pulling open the armour plates and exposing the pale green of the pegasus' right wing. A hindpaw came forwards, stamping down on the panel to hold it open, then the foreclaws reached inside, coming away with a fist full of feathers and bright, arterial red. Hooves flashed, catching the creature in the belly and between the hind legs, but it did little more than jerk under the impact, dropping the bloody wing and plunging its talons back inside Trailblazer's armour, digging deeply.
His own exos reported that their target was down, but Chirr ignored them and the feeble excuse for a weapon attached to the side of his head, hitting the emergency open command for his helmet, unlocking his muzzle guard and making it split in two from side to side. Then, wings firmly closed, the chiropt jumped towards Trailblazer, aligned his neck, throat and muzzle into a single, long tube, and squealed. The sound was horribly loud to his ears, the protection of his helmet doing little against direct bone conduction of what was half whinny, and half complex, instinctive waveform, rich in both ultrasound and frequencies so low that even an elephant couldn't hear them.
Chirr put all his strength into the scream, jagged pain running claws down the inside of his throat as all the relics of the Nightmare's changes came alive and functioned just as the mad goddess had intended. Red light vanished and the gryphon's head whipped sideways, just in time to be struck by the full force of the chiropt's charge. It might have been almost twice his size, but Chirr was at full gallop, and the pair collided with a thunderous crash, the impact throwing the gryphon into the wall.
The creature seemed confused, and Chirr turned to kick with the full force of his hindlegs--
"Get down!"
He dropped, the aborted motion of the buck leaving him sprawled on the concrete floor, as something flashed overhead, subliminally fast. There was a flat, wet sounding thump, then silence, only broken by rapid breathing and whimpers. Chirr struggled to his hooves, helmet still hanging open, and turned to stare at the creature. It was dead, it had to be, with half its belly ripped away, but the little whimpers were coming from the corpse.
Recalling his exoweapons, Chirr stared at the thing. What in Tartarus is it? Superficially similar to a gryphon; it shared the same basic shape, but that's where the similarity ended. Grey feathers and fur poked out from the gaps between ragged patches of scales that would have looked more at home on a dragon, layered over a musculature that could have come from a demon body-builder. In that it was similar to the guards on the upper level, although here the changes were magnified and combined with odd alterations in the underlying skeleton; some bones were longer or shorter than they should have been, giving the creature a lopsided appearance.
More disturbing were the patches of pastel fur that spread over its shoulder like somepony had sprayed it with pale blue paint. That looks like... The whimper came again, the body twitching slightly. Suddenly feeling sick, Chirr hooked a forehoof under one of the creature's wings, pulling it over so he could see the other side.
There was more blue fur, much more. Mouth open, Chirr swallowed, ignoring the pain from his raw throat, and traced the smooth bulges of gryphon muscle to where it blended in to a second head, a pony's head, on a short neck. Some kind of new chimera? You knew who we were facing; why is this such a surprise? The second head moved, drawing in a shallow, wet-sounding breath, then twisted a little in the chiropt's direction.
The eye opened, big and violet, ringed with delicate lashes. On the top of the head was a horn, flickering with light, not red, but a pale blue. "Is it over?" The voice was trembling and raw, but unmistakably female. Chirr nodded, wanting desperately to turn and run, but forced his legs to remain still. Tears welled up in the mare's eyes, running down her cheeks to soak into the gryphon's fur. "I'm sorry, I tried so hard to stop, but he was always stronger. Did I kill the unicorn--?
Chirr risked a glance over his shoulder; Trailblazer was on the floor, hooves to one side and twisted wing splayed out across the concrete like an untidy flag, being tended to by Blevie. Nightstorm was shakily pacing the cell block, her own helmet open. The unicorn looked shaken, and blood was dripping from her nostrils. "No, you didn't," he said, trying to keep his scratchy voice steady. "What's your name?" he whispered, dropping to his knees.
"Rose," she said, her voice becoming faint. "He has others, all those poor ponies..."
Her neck flexed, as if to look down the length of her body, but Chirr gently nuzzled her, blocking the movement. Her lips twitched into a slight smile, ears relaxing from where they were pinned against the sides of her head. "Don't look. I have a medical kit; are you in much pain?" Cursing himself for being a fool, he turned, dipping his muzzle into his right pannier, coming back with the trauma injector. Where am I supposed to apply it? He looked blankly at what was left of the mare, then slumped, the single use injector tumbling from his lips, and leaned forwards to close her eyes. "Goodbye, Rose. I wish I could have met you sooner."
He stood up, coming muzzle to muzzle with Blevie. "Why? Why do this to us? He could make anything he wants to, out of nothing, so why do this?!" he said, voice rising to a ragged shout.
Blevie stared down at the body. "Because he finds it funny to watch us suffer." She twisted her head, pulling a short rod out of her panniers and offering it to him.
Chirr stared at the device, one of the two spellcraft beacons they'd brought with them from the Express. Why is Blevie giving me her-- His head whipped sideways, and he pushed past the earth pony, skidding to a stop next to Trailblazer. Orange light flared over his exposed flank, visible through the gaping hole left where the carapace panel had been ripped away. The stallion's helmet was open, and he lay there, unmoving.
"Luna, no..." he whispered.
Night sat back, the light about her horn going dark. "Too many chances, too much risk. It catches up with us all eventually. I don't know of any FOAL unit that has kept all its ponies." She sniffed, shaking her head angrily to flick away the tears. "No time for this, not now. We will mourn Blaze later." She gently closed the carapace panel over the injury. "Now we will build him a pyre that can be seen from the moon."
"Discord will pay for this; he will pay and pay and pay." Chirr clenched his teeth, cheek muscles bulging and flexing, then reached forward to close his helmet's muzzle guard with a decisive click. On his back, the pair of exoweapons moved fluidly, hunting for the targets that had made their master angry. I only wish I knew how.