“Holy Hell,” High Admiral Timber Wolf said, staring at the summary Blacklight had prepared.
Flight chuckled. “That was our thought when we finally got a proper scan of your force,” she observed. “What did you do, bring the entire fleet?”
The High Admiral looked up. “Er… Yes, actually. There’s six ships left in Equineothame orbit- and by now, some new construction will be joining them as well.” She looked back down at the tablet. “But- But five thousand ponies?”
Flight nodded. “Yeah. Took our ten soldiers all of fifteen minutes to rescue them- had our shuttles running back and forth at full speed, and I even had to bring the First Light close enough for direct transfer a couple of times. Complicated by the naval battle, of course.” She chuckled. “Surprised even me, but our life support is overloaded by about an order of magnitude, so I’m glad we didn’t have to go all the way back to Equineothame to drop them off.”
The Admiral chuckled as a couple of junior officers guided a contingent of rescuees into the shuttle the Admiral had come in; it was going to be taking them over to a troop transport vessel with the life support to spare for them. “Yeah, probably a good thing. How much LOX you have left?”
“Quite a bit,” Flight chuckled, as she started leading the way to her bridge. “We burned more of it refueling the shuttles than we did making air, so we can do that again… though that battle was a bit of a tight gamble I’m not too keen to repeat.”
The Admiral chuckled. “And now that I know what we’re out here for, if you want to hit another one, we should be able to sneak the Fleet in quite a bit closer,” she told her. “Give them hell. Probably even slip a capital ship or two in with you, to help with that ‘naval battle’.” She chuckled. “My tac officer might only be two months on the post, but she said it looked like you hadn’t taken a single hit.”
Flight shrugged. “I have a good ship and a very good crew,” she told her. “Willowstone is some sort of goddess at the tac station, then Star is similar with engines, Coils managed to run our reactors at almost a hundred and twenty percent for the entire time, Blacklight is so good with electronic warfare that half the time, they were shooting our targets instead of their own…” She shrugged. “Still, though, we were pushing her to her limits. I think we fired almost two thousand missiles. Mostly little tiny ones, for antimissile defense, but a few punishers on the attack as well.” She grinned. “Then of course, we also recovered Willow’s sister… who happened to be serving as the pirates’ unwilling tac officer, so she knew just about everything there was to know about that base, making our campaign that much more effective.”
“You know, I’m kinda curious where you found Marines capable of raiding a pirate base and saving so many ponies so quickly.”
“In deep space,” she answered, and paused outside the bridge door. “Um, before we hit the bridge, you should probably know that a majority of them are actually thestrals. Turns out they’re amazing soldiers.”
She paused. “... Huh. So I take it you rescued a stranded thestral vessel?”
She nodded. “Yup. Happened to be a warship, so when we were later attacked, they just fell into place- and even in a short artillery duel, they were so efficient we made the arrangement permanent.” She tapped the door control, and led the way onto the bridge.
“Welcome back, Captain.” The speaker was a thestral, sitting in what the Admiral instantly recognized as the First Officer’s seat. The Captain’s chair, which seemed to be up by the front window instead of at the back of the Bridge, was empty.
“Captain, huh?” the Admiral said, glancing sideways at Flight.
Flight sighed. “Yeah. I haven’t, ahh, told them.”
A mare sitting at the electronics station looked over. “Told us what?”
She sighed again, and averted her eyes. “That I’m the Princess of Equineothame.”
There was silence for about three seconds.
Then Willow, sitting at the Tactical station with another filly about her age that wasn’t a thestral, raised a hoof into the air. “I knew that!” she cried.
A wave of laughter swept across the bridge.
“Probably a good thing you didn’t tell us right away,” the First Officer said, rising from her seat to trot over. “We’d probably have been struck with too much fear to be of any use- even if our lives were in danger.”
“I… I suppose,” Flight muttered. “Anyways, this is High Admiral Timber Wolf of the Royal Equinothame Navy- and Admiral, this is my First Officer, Night Skies; Astrogator, Astral Eye; Electronics Specialist, Blacklight; and the filly sitting next to Willow is her sister, River Skip.”
“Mom’s going to be so surprised,” Willow giggled.
Flight giggled as well. “Yes, I bet she will. Though, the Admiral apparently brought the entire Fleet, save only six ships, so we’ve got way more than enough firepower to go raid another few pirate bases. Whaddya say?”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Skies told her. “All the soldiers will be just as excited to kick ass as they were this time.”
“And chew bubble gum,” The Admiral chuckled.
“And chew bubble gum,” Skies agreed. “Especially in General Shadow Flight’s case.”
“But she’s all out of bubble gum,” Willow observed.
Another wave of laughter swept the bridge. Even the Admiral joined in.
“You’ve got a general?” Admiral Timber Wolf asked, glancing down at Flight.
Flight nodded. “Yeah, surprised me too. Skies here used to be an Admiral of the Midnight Navy before we picked her up.”
“Uh, the High Admiral of the Midnight Navy, actually,” Skies muttered, averting her eyes.
The windshield suddenly darkened and an image projected up onto it, showing a starmap with several bright dots. “The base we just hit was an auxiliary site,” Willow told the room. “Their main base is a light-month or so further from Equineothame, and houses several large warships- call it a small national Navy, if you will. Also, the Midnight Navy’s last remaining stronghold is on the way to the next satellite base; if we stop there, we could ally ourselves with their remainder, then start snapping up satellite bases and finally larger pirate bases one at a time with really no difficulty.”
Skies glanced over. “True,” she muttered. “Last I was there, there were about fifty ships in varying states of disrepair, and a thousand or so thestrals, eight hundred of whom were soldiers.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, our naval ratings seemed to die off the fastest.”
Flight looked up at Admiral Wolf. “How about it, Admiral?”
She rubbed her chin, thinking, then smiled. “Sounds like a plan, I think. Especially if you’re right and these pirates have been manipulating the Equineothame crown.” She paused. “Might cause a bit of trouble when we get back to Equineothame, though.”
Flight shrugged. “Oh well. Nobody’ll know if my hoof slips while I’m transitioning to VTOL to land at the Capital Landing Pad and happen to be facing the King’s bedroom, will they?”
“At that range, our artillery would have a flight time of roughly two percent of most sensors’ refresh rates- we’d be the only ship in the system that knew what had happened. They’ll think somepony hid a pile of heavy plasma bombs under his bed.”
Flight glanced up at the Admiral, as if to sound her out, then smiled back over to Willow. “Alright then. If Dad doesn’t cooperate when we get home, let’s plan on that.” She sighed. “He never cared for the people anyways.”
Princess Little Bubble might not have been an engineer before her capture, but the pirates had seen her engineering inclination and trained her into becoming one. She’d quickly been transferred to their main base, where she maintained the entire base.
Unfortunately for the pirates, for as much as she professed it, she wasn’t actually loyal to them. As such, when her specially-upgraded base sensor net picked up a signature that perfectly matched the Royal Equineothame Navy… it told her, but the base tac officer- who really was loyal to the pirates- didn’t see anything.
Bubbles then used her Chief Engineer trump card to enter the armory to install an upgraded comms module onto the powered armor… and started doing that to all of them.
Except, it wasn’t just a comms module. It was also a control module- so after the first few, one of them went ‘berserk’ and killed all the pirates in the room. Non-loyalists weren’t allowed in the armory at the main base.
Once she finished installing those units in every suit in the room, she used the facilities to put on the last one, linked to her sensor net, and checked on the Navy.
Twenty superdreadnoughts were sneaking in through one of her deliberate sensor “blindspots”, led by a small fleet of much smaller vessels- skirmishers, mostly, it looked like. One of them was large enough to be a corvette- maybe a bit bigger.
A moment later, she recognized that one. It wasn’t the same as the ship she’d approved with her sister, moments before her capture, but it did look very similar.
Then a sudden shockwave of artillery entered the base out of nowhere, and the entire power grid went down, alongside the entire superdreadnought squadron the pirates had in the base going up in smoke. Her sensor net went onto local emergency backup power- which was a phantom feature she hadn’t told the pirates about, so they only reported to her.
At about the same time, the superdreadnoughts shifted into a standard ‘wall of battle’ formation- a formation that maximized the firing arcs of each vessel, both offensive and defensive, and started salvoing missiles. All of the smaller ships suddenly became a hurricane of assault vessels, punching through all sorts of base walls as hundreds of soldiers, all in what her net reported was powered armor, smashed into the base.
She tapped a chin switch in hers, which ordered all of the suits under her command to flip their allegiance badges- another phantom feature- from the pirate flag to the Equineothame flag.
She’d become a combat systems engineer with a stealth specialization, after all.
Another chin switch triggered a number of heavy explosive charges she’d secreted about the base, blowing apart almost every area that non-loyal members weren’t allowed to go… Except the armory, that one would go off as soon as she was far enough away. That would cripple any of the pirates’ resistance- and open most of the spaces the loyalists would be in to space.
One of the Cruisers sitting in the drydock for her to upgrade suddenly unleashed a salvo of missiles from both sides, completely demolishing the drydock and both other ships in it, in response to the same switch. It was part of her escape plan… which would’ve taken her another couple years to ‘acquire’ more ships like that to be safe, but now was as good a time as any.
She then began smashing through the base herself.
Her first stop was a nearby storage room, where she collected a large number of emergency space suits and the same plastic seals the attacking soldiers were using, before she started charging through the rest of the base as well.
Three stops later, she had almost a thousand ex-prisoners with her when she froze, suddenly face-to-face with some of the attacking soldiers- they smashed into the area she was in right as she was getting the last few suited up.
There was a pause as their rear guard sealed their hole and looked at her.
“Are you here to save us?” she asked.
The silence held for about two seconds.
“Is everypony suited up?” the pony at the front, who had a General insignia on her chest, barked.
She glanced at her HUD. “Almost,” she reported.
The last pony sealed their helmet, and their suit checked out green.
“Yes,” she corrected herself.
During that same gap, the General tapped a comms ID card gently against the side of her helmet. Her HUD indicated successful download of a frequency and encryption.
“Go for rescue,” the General said, while looking slightly to the side- a transmission. Then she spoke, without transmitting. “I’m Shadow, you’re Parrot.”
Bubble switched comms- and heard the response, while nodding her acceptance of the temporary callsign.
“Roger, one moment.”
About a moment later, six huge spears suddenly protruded from the exterior wall behind the soldiers… then split into fingers and vomited rocket fire, ripping the entire wall clean off.
They were the so-called ‘Bunker Buster’ missiles, designed for the removal of walls that one wanted to fire shipboard weapons through.
Two seconds after they vanished from view, a massive warship- her sister’s ship, specifically- thundered to a stop next to the hole, with a bay door standing wide open. It looked like the ship was only a foot or two away from hitting the base.
“Have the rescuees board the ship, Parrot,” the General- Shadow- commanded her.
She nodded, and relayed the command to the emergency suits’ comms modules. “Get aboard the ship,” she commanded them. “Remain calm, you’ll be fine.”
“How’s your force?” Shadow asked her.
“Remote controlled with AI support,” she answered, “from my unit. It’s a comms module modification.”
“Do you have 3-D mapping?”
She nodded, and transmitted the map she had, with every location that non-loyals might be marked.
A second later, well over half of them were suddenly marked as cleared.
Then the last pony jumped over to the ship, which then started moving away.
“Let’s get moving, then,” Shadow commanded- and Bubble went with them when they smashed through a wall. “What’s your discipline?”
“Huh-?” she began- then paused, briefly. “Engineer,” she answered. “Combat systems. Specialized in stealth.”
Shadow grunted her acceptance as little markers started appearing on Bubble’s map to indicate what order which group should hit them in. Presumably, the ship was tied in not just to the comms but the mapping systems, so a tactical officer could guide them from the ship.
One thing she noticed, that seemed a little weird, was that the soldiers seemed to be able to use their armored wings to help guide themselves, even as they leaped through the vacuum of space.
One last shredded base later…
Princess Little Bubble took a deep breath when she finally set hoof aboard an Equineothame-flag vessel; the one she’d taken control of had been destroyed, though its sudden addition to the fight had confused the pirate vessels so much that the Navy’s point defense crews had gotten bored.
Then she looked behind her, as the last of her remote suits landed as well- in time to see the base suddenly vanishing into the distance with the speed of something falling behind a warship under Gravity Drive.
No wonder it had once again been her sister’s ship that stopped by for the soldiers.
Her attention was then drawn to the side, were there was a huge display set up on the side of the bay, showing a zoomed-in view of the pirate base. “Three!” an oddly familiar voice cried excitedly over the intercom. “Two! One!”
At the unvoiced zero, the whole base suddenly vanished in what looked like a small star.
“Aaand, the pirates are dead, courtesy of the Royal Equinothame Navy,” the voice laughed, while the bay door landed shut and started pressurizing. “We’ll be rendezvousing with the Navy in an hour or so, at which point we’ll need to transfer most of you off- we’re almost ridiculously overloading this little ship’s life support right now. Good thing we’ve got lots of LOX.”
She laughed- and when the lights indicated it was safe to remove her helmet, she did so- and exactly as expected, smelled the crisp coolness of freshly boiled LOX.
“Ahh, Miss Bubble?”
Little Bubble looked up. She’d been surprised to find out that all the soldiers she’d been working with were thestrals, but had decided to roll with it, so she’d been putting her stolen powered armor away in the ship’s armory, on extra racks that had been erected specifically for the stolen armor. “Yes?”
Shadow- or Shadow Flight- was smiling at her from the entrance. “The Captain would like to meet you,” she told her.
“Huh-?” she began, then stopped herself. “Oh. Sure. Show me the way?”
Shadow did exactly that. She led her through the densely overcrowded ship- it was not built in a way even loosely resembling that which she had approved with her sister- to a large room that had windows all across the front. She recognized it instantly as some sort of cross between a warship bridge and an aircraft cockpit.
“Captain,” Shadow greeted. “This is-!”
“Crown Princess Little Bubble, I know.” The voice came from the filly that had just vacated the Captain’s chair… her sister, Princess Short Flight. “You’re alive,” Flight observed, moments before trotting straight into her for a hug.
She stumbled back a couple steps from her sister’s unexpected strength. “You have wings,” she observed, returning the hug. “And yes, I’m alive.”
Flight chuckled softly. “Yes, I have wings.” Then they broke from their hug. “They grew in over the last year of antipiracy action,” she informed her. “Anyways, we’re about ready to head home, once we transfer the rescuees out- I wasn’t kidding, we’re like thirty times over life support capacity right now.” She paused. “How would you like to stay here with me, on the First Light?”
“The First Light, huh? She’s quite different from what I remember.”
Flight laughed- but there was a twinge of darkness to the sound. “After… After the pirates attacked the Flying Surface- lost with all hands, unless they grabbed any- I had the engineers redesign her into a warship. They did really well with that, too- she might be a glass cannon, but we managed to raid an entire pirate base when the rest of the Navy was a full light-hour away.”
Bubble froze for a second. “Y-You mean the whole ship can kick ass and chew bubblegum?”
“And I’m all outta bubblegum again,” Shadow observed.