Ensign Rainbow Dash, Royal Manticoran Navy, sat in Titan Squadron's flagship ready room, trying to decide if her wing of cards justified bluffing or folding.
"Raise fifty cents," said her squadron skipper, Commander Philip Dinovic, tapping the command on the table. The holographic pot incremented. "That's a dollar fifty to you, Dash."
Dash, of course, was not the sort to fold. "What's the limit?" She closed her wing of two cards and placed it on the table, then lapped from a bowl of Manticore Pale, Landing City's best ale. She was fully capable of drinking from a mug, but she found that lapping like a pet disconcerted some of the others, knocking them off their game. Just one of her little tricks as the only pony in the squadron.
The five face-up cards in the center of the table showed three twos, a seven, and a queen; Dash hoped to bluff the others into thinking she had a full house or four of a kind. Chances were better than even none of the others had that last two in their hole cards to bust her bluff.
"Two dollar raise limit," replied Lieutenant Emily Ikeda, "As you bloody well know. Dash is about to bluff, y'all."
Poker among light attack craft jockeys was always a cutthroat business; when the Navy had founded the LAC corps, they deliberately resurrected naval aviation's two-thousand-year-old traditions among the crews, and the consequences—like addiction to extreme sports, obsessive attention to physical fitness, and brutality at card games—followed inevitably.
"Am not bluffing!" Dash said, her feathers fluffing up.
"Her feathers fluffed up," Ikeda crowed. "That's her tell."
Her feathers fluffed up more. "That's cheating," Dash grumped, then lapped at her beer.
"Now her tail's thrashing," Ikeda said. "She's absolutely bluffing."
"You can smell when we're bluffing, Dash," Dinovic said, pointing a finger at her. "Don't pretend you can't. Remember last week? I had the busted flush? I bet the limit. You leaned in, sniffed me, and called my bluff."
"You can't prove that."
The screen on the other side of the ready room rang. The snotty sitting nearest it put down her sandwich, wiped her fingers and mouth on a napkin, straightened her beret, and answered. "Titan Squadron ready room, Midshipwoman Irwin speak—"
Irwin's eyes widened, her face paled, and she snapped to parade-ground attention in front of the video pickup.
"Is Ensign Rainbow Dash there?" demanded a vaguely familiar voice from the screen. "I need her immediately."
"Ma'am yes ma'am!" Irwin shouted, still at attention, like an academy plebe facing a marine drill instructor. An angry drill instructor.
"Fold," Dash said, leaping from her highchair. She squared her black RMN beret onto her mane and straightened her uniform tunic, brushing away crumbs from the hazelnuts she'd munched over the poker game.
"Told you she was bluffing," Ikeda said.
Dash triple-timed across the ready room and shouldered past the still-at-attention midshipwoman. Dash stood about thigh-high to the middy, and looked up at the underside of the table, so she had to get to her rear hooves, plant her forelegs on the table edge, and crane her neck to see into the screen and get her face into the pickup's view. "Ensign Rainbow Dash, as request—"
Dash's ears went up and her feathers fluffed out. Her tail thrashed.
The woman wore a vice admiral's uniform. Dash suddenly recognized the voice, now that it was too late. Dash's forehooves, on the edge of the table, almost slipped off as she straightened up another centimeter. "Admiral Truman! Ensign Dash, as requested!"
"There's a pinnace leaving Boat Bay two in ninety seconds," Truman said. "Be on it. I've already sent a runner to your bunk for your vacuum suit."
"Ma'am, yes ma'am! Boat Bay Two, ninety seconds!" She saluted with her right wing.
"Why are you wasting time saluting? Eighty-five seconds."
The screen went blank.
In point of fact, it had taken Dash one hundred and nine seconds, even at a sprint, but the pinnace waited for her. She was its only passenger.
Dash now sat in the jumpseat of the pinnace's flight deck, ignoring the passenger cabin's more comfortable seats. No human seats ever fit a pony's butt correctly, so 'comfort' was a relative measure; besides, as a pilot herself, she wanted to keep an eye on the pinnace's flight crew. Just because the master chief at the controls had been flying pinnaces since well before Dash's birth didn't mean she knew what she was doing, right? Dash wanted to keep an eye on her.
"That's turnover, ma'am," the chief said as the pinnace reversed itself in space and began decelerating to intercept the light cruiser HMS Loyalist out-system. "Seventy two minutes."
"You don't know anything else?" Dash asked for the fifteenth time.
"No, ma'am, Ms. Dash," said the pilot for the fifteenth time. The co-pilot and flight engineer shook their heads, too. "We were the ready pinnace on-call, we were told to spool up the reactor and prepare to take a single passenger at zero-safety-margin maximum acceleration to HMS Loyalist out near the hyper limit. Two minutes later, you piled in through the boarding tube."
"Interesting..." said the co-pilot, a junior petty officer. "Our sensors are now tagging the Loyalist. It's about ten kay-klicks off a medium-sized merchie. Merchie is maybe four million tons."
Dash's ears vibrated. A light cruiser sitting thousands of kilometers off a merchant ship, out at the hyper limit... that brought back some memories. Bad memories.
"They just tapped us with a communication laser," said the flight engineer. "We're not heading to the cruiser, after all. They want Ensign Dash to EVA to the merchie. Marines EVA in power armor will point you to the proper airlock, ma'am."
Dash slumped in her jumpseat, her head light and dizziness surrounding her.
There were only two reasons a cruiser of Her Majesty's Navy would send marines EVA to a merchie:
First, to take a prize back from pirates.
Second, to take a slave ship away from slavers.
And the only reason the cruiser would stay thousands of kilometers back was if the marines hadn't secured the reactor room and they were afraid a pirate or slaver might yet blow the merchie to avoid arrest and to take as many Manticorans to Hell with herself as possible.
Dash scowled and her stomach twisted.
When they were five minutes out, she donned her vacuum suit. Once the pinnace was motionless below the merchant's keel, she thanked the crew, waved goodbye, sealed her helmet, and airlocked out.
"Here's the situation, ma'am," said Gunnery Sergeant Motta, leading Dash through the ship at a quick trot.
Through the slave ship—even without a soul aboard, the high-security bunkrooms and spartan functionality would have been utterly distinctive.
And the ship wasn't abandoned. They passed huge groups of genetic slaves—now ex-slaves, free men and women, momentarily in the care of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps—being examined by the sickbay attendants and surgeon from HMS Loyalist. But there were only a wing-full of medics, and easily two thousand slaves.
The task force had plenty of medical personnel—but without control of the reactor room, it was too dangerous to risk more than a wing-full aboard a ship that might suddenly do a supernova impersonation.
As Dash trotted, she also passed clusters of slavers, face-down on the deck, hands cuffed behind their backs, covered by marines armed with flechette guns or pulse rifles. The marines' faces were cold and their trigger fingers carefully outside their trigger guards, but Dash smelled the tightly disciplined, murderous rage boiling off them.
Marines hated slavers almost as much as Dash did.
Dash and Gunny Motta jogged past a greasy red smear of a close-quarters flechette blast. Shreds of civilian fabric told Dash the puddle had been a slaver rather than a marine. Her nose wrinkled and she breathed through her mouth.
"One slave got loose during the boarding action," Gunny Motta continued. "Somehow—we think because she's so small—she got past both us and the slavers and locked herself in the fusion room."
"Is she threatening to blow the fusion bottle?"
"No. She probably doesn't know how. Mainly, we don't know if the slavers set it to blow, and the chief engineer really, really wants her people in there to check it out before we find out the hard way."
"Engineers are funny that way."
"The slavers armored their fusion room like the Crown Jewels' vault under Mount Royal Palace, so it'll take days if we have to break in," the gunny continued. "The task force's hospital ship will intercept in two hours, but we can't bring it close enough to start transferring passengers until we control the fusion plant."
"Why am I here? I'm no marine. There's a Criminal Investigative Division detachment on the flagship—they should have put one of their hostage negotiators on the pinnace and left me to my poker game. I was winning!"
"I was told you're an ex-slave, ma'am."
Dash flicked her ears. "Yeah. So? Surely there's at least one aboard a cruiser the size of Loyalist?"
"Two, actually. One's a marine sergeant you'll meet in a second."
"Who's the other?"
"CIC sensor rating. But I was told you're the only pony ex-slave in the task force."
Dash skidded, vacuum boots scrabbling against the floor. Her wings instinctively tried to flare, but her vacuum suit held them to her sides and simply left her cramping up. Her helmet, slung over her back, whacked her on the back of the skull. She came to a dead stop and the gunny had to turn around and jog back to Dash.
"What? What? She's—she's a pony?"
"A filly, yeah," the gunny said. "Maybe young teens, I can't tell. We just got a split second of her on a marine's helmet camera as she bounded through a firefight and took the ladder to the fusion room."
Dash sat down. She was the only pony ex-slave in the entire Star Kingdom, not just in the task force, but no need to bring that little tidbit out. She took a few deep breaths, recentering herself.
"Ensign," Gunny Motta said, "time is a bit of a factor. Ma'am."
Dash stood, shook her head, and returned to a trot, following him. "Sorry. I just—I thought I was a failed experiment and the Mesans stopped growing ponies after me."
"You were the first?" he asked.
"We think so. Hard to know until we take Mesa and start interrogating folks. Preferably by hot irons applied to scrotums, if anyone asks my opinion."
"Here we are."
Gunny Motta scrambled up a ladder and Dash followed awkwardly, wishing the vacuum suit didn't cover her wings.
The machine shop outside the fusion room was large, about the size of Titan Squadron's ready room, the walls lined with shelves and lockers and the center of the room filled with tools and fabricators. It was well lit and the lighting showed dust bunnies and grease stains on the floor that no military crew would have tolerated, but the slavers clearly gave no damns about. Such sloppiness.
Five spacers and a squad of marines waited outside the armored fusion room door.
"This is Ensign Dash," Gunny Motta announced. "The flagship sent a pinnace with her."
Dash examined the crowd. One of the marines resembled a ground combat assault vehicle; he had to be the ex-slave Gunny Motta mentioned, from one of the Mesan's heavy labor product lines, genetically engineered for a high-gravity world. His skin was one shade darker than deep space, designed for a planet with a blue star and excessive ultraviolet.
Of the five Navy personnel, the rating and one of the petty officers were ponies. Dash's ears flicked—she was surprised a ship the size of Loyalist had even one pony, much less two. Last she had read, the RMN was well under half a percent pony.
"Hydroponics tech Applejack, ma'am," said the spacer with a sloppy salute. "We've dun been trying to talk her out but she's as scared as a weevil in a gyrotron sterilizer."
"Sickbay attendant third class Fluttershy, ma'am," said the petty officer. She forgot to salute Dash, instead wringing her hooves and flicking her ears in consternation. "I'm trying to see if she'll let me in to examine her, but the poor thing, she's just so... so terrified."
The marine who resembled a tank just shrugged. "Squad Sergeant Fredericks, ma'am. I talked to her, but she's not interested."
Dash and Fredericks looked at each other for a few seconds, sizing each other up, then gave each other the tiny nod of recognition no one else in the anteroom would notice... or understand.
The other three petty officers were fusion engineers, waiting to secure and safe the reactor.
"Pleased to meet you all." Dash flicked her ears politely. "Ensign Rainbow Dash, First LAC Wing."
"Gunny?" asked Applejack, tilting her head at Dash. "Why in tarnation did the flagship send her? The problem ain't that we don't got enough folks talking. Is a flight suit with a head so big she's gotta grease her helmet ring really what we need?"
Dash grinned. LAC jockeys always enjoyed their reputations preceding them. "What kind of pony is she?" Dash asked.
"Pardon, ma'am?" asked Gunny Motta.
"Pegasus?" Dash clarified. "Earth pony? Unicorn? Let's hope the Mesans aren't manufacturing alicorns..."
"Pegasus," said Petty Officer Fluttershy, who swallowed twice and turned pale. "I watched the firefight footage, ma'am."
"Pegasus, eh?" Dash stripped out of her vacuum suit, straightened her black uniform tunic, and stretched her wings. She then walked to the bulkhead next to the armored door, hopped up onto her back legs to reach the video screen, and mashed the Call button with her nose.
"W-what?" came a young, terrified voice. The screen showed only an empty fusion room.
"Can you move to where I can see you?" Dash asked.
"I can see you, that's enough."
"What's your name? I'm Ensign Rainbow Dash, Royal Manticoran Navy."
There was a pause. "They let ponies be officers?"
Spacer Applejack and Petty Officer Fluttershy exchanged an annoyed glance. Dash ignored them. "If we can graduate from the academy, then of course they make us officers. What did you expect?"
"So you're here to try to talk me out, too?"
"I guess?" Dash said. "My orders got lost in the shuffle, but a Queen's officer is supposed to use her initiative. You wanna come out and talk in person? Or let me in to talk pony-to-pony?"
"Heck, no."
"Can you let Petty Officer Fluttershy in to examine you and make sure you're healthy? She's a medic, you realize? She's worried about you. She looks like she's about to cry."
"Am not," Fluttershy mumbled, wiping away a single tear.
"Nope!" came the voice from the screen.
Dash looked at the marines, then back at the screen. "What's your name?"
"C dash eight one nine A slash four nine seven seven dash one slash four."
Fredericks mumbled a curse.
Dash nodded her head with a grim frown, her fears confirmed. "I asked for your name. Not your serial number."
"Slaves don't have names. That's how they control us."
Dash leaned closer to the video pickup and slowly extended her tongue. Gasps came from the circuit and from behind her.
Dash left her tongue out for a few seconds, until she was sure the pony on the other side of the circuit had gotten a good look at the bar code the Mesans had engineered into her as a zygote, then pulled her tongue back in. "C dash four zero one A slash zero zero two dash two slash six. But I am Rainbow Dash. I was Rainbow Dash when I was still cargo, I just didn't let them find out I had taken a name."
"I... I... uh..."
"Your serial number starts with a 'C', just like mine."
The audio link was very, very quiet.
"So..." Dash said, blinking hard and fighting the tremble in her ears and the thrash in her tail. Even after years as a free pony, and so many hundreds of hours of psychological counseling, it still took her a few seconds to get her voice under control enough to say the next sentence: "You're also a pleasure line?"
Petty Officer Fluttershy gasped and plopped to her rump. Spacer Applejack and Fredericks's marines cursed; Fredericks just gripped his pulse rifle more firmly.
Because 'pleasure line,' of course, was Manpower, Inc.'s marketing term for 'living sex toy.'
"I'm—my name's Scootaloo. And yeah. I'm a—yeah. Yeah."
"You were. Not anymore. Now you're whatever you want to be. It's nice to meet you, Scootaloo. Can you move into the field of view of the pickup?"
An adolescent pegasus—bedraggled, filthy, small—walked into the view of the screen. It was usually possible to judge a pegasus teenager's age with a year or two of precision from a close look at her wings... but there was something wrong about Scootaloo's wings.
They were tiny. The Mesans had genetically engineered the flight right out of the pegasus. The edges of Dash's vision went red and she fought the desire to head down a deck, find one of the handcuffed slavers, and buck him to death.
"You're covered in blood," Dash said. "Please let Petty Officer Fluttershy in to examine you."
"It's not my blood. A marine shot a slaver as I sprinted past." There was a pause. "That particular slaver really deserved it. He... liked me. A lot."
Dash learned a new curse word from Applejack. Gunny Motta made a speed it up gesture and tapped his wrist.
"Lemme ask you," Dash said, "why did you lock yourself in there? What can I do to get you out?"
"I'm kinda happy here," she said. "There's a bathroom and locker full of rations. And a cot to sleep on. I think I'll just stay here. By myself. Where no one can... can..." She sobbed once.
"It's called a 'head'."
"...what?"
"It's a 'head,' not a 'bathroom,' on a ship," Dash said. "And a 'bunk,' not a 'cot'. And they're 'victuals,' not 'rations'."
Scootaloo cocked her head. "What? Why?"
"So that we spacers can act smart and make civilians feel dumb, of course."
That earned a tiny snort of a laugh.
"I bet those emergency rations suck," Dash said. "I guarantee we can find you something better."
"I thought they were victuals?" Scootaloo said. "Besides, I'm not hungry right now."
Dash squinted at the screen. The filly looked properly muscled and fleshed-out. That didn't surprise Dash, having been 'cargo' herself, once upon a time. Hydroponic-grown food was cheap and slaves were expensive to engineer and manufacture, so the Mesans, damn their souls to the deepest hells, at least kept their cargo well fed.
"How'd you get loose?" Scootaloo asked, frowning, her voice suddenly angry. She flared her stunted wings. "They engineered my wings down because pegasi kept escaping. Is that your fault?"
"Afraid not, Squirt," Dash said. "The Royal Navy stopped my ship and put Royal Marines aboard."
"Oh. Oh... How old were you?"
Dash cocked her head. "About like you are now. We don't know what my real birthday is, so we kinda guessed at my age."
Scootaloo frowned. "The slavers on your ship gave up? Surrendered?"
Dash felt her face go pale and her ears drooped. "Hardly. One of them decided to take some company to hell, but he wasn't near the reactor room to blow the ship, so he just released the gas."
"Gas?" Scootaloo whispered. "What gas?"
"You saw this ship. The bunk rooms are near big airlocks. If they think they can get away with it, slavers will release nausea gas to drive the 'cargo' into the airlocks, to try to dispose of the evidence, if they see a man-of-war vectoring for intercept."
Scootaloo's eyes went wide.
"There were about two thousand of us in the shipment," Dash said, her own eyes unfocused as she remembered the worst hour of her life. "They dumped the gas. And it's horrible stuff, no one can resist running from it, no matter how tough they are. You'd be happy to breathe vacuum to get away from it."
"How-how-how did you..." Scootaloo asked, voice hoarse.
Dash spread her wings and flapped forward, as if reversing a headwind. "I couldn't fly at the time. They kept my primaries clipped, so I hadn't figured it out yet, but my instincts kicked in and I set up a little weather vortex to cancel the ventilators carrying the gas into our cabin. The sixty of us in my bunkroom survived long enough for mom's platoon to take the ship, shut off the gas, get regular life-support back, and arrest or kill all the slavers. The other nineteen-hundred odd cargo in the other bunkrooms... didn't have a pegasus to protect them."
Dash blinked, trying to clear sudden clouds in her vision.
"Mom?" came the tiny voice. "Your mom?"
"The marines' platoon leader." Dash shrugged her wings. "She adopted me."
Scootaloo looked at the screen, studying Dash. "But you can fly now? You learned to fly? From humans?"
"Yeah. I can teach you the same way, if you come out of there."
Scootaloo snorted again, but this was a laugh of disdain, not humor. Her voice was harsh, approaching hysterics. "Look at my wings. I'll never fly."
"That's where you're wrong, Squirt."
"Don't lie to me. I'm not dumb."
"In my bunk, back on the flagship? I've got a counter-grav belt. I'll loan it to you. Heck, they're cheap. I'll give it to you."
Scootaloo's eyes got wide and her wings buzzed. "Counter-grav belt?"
"Every spaceport in the galaxy sells them. On a high-gravity world, the tourists buy counter-grav belts so they don't get hurt if they stumble. On low-gravity worlds, the tourists buy belts and turn the gravity up, so they don't hit their heads on the ceiling."
"You-you learned to fly that way?"
Dash nodded and fought the urge to smile. "I grew up in Landing City. Our apartment building was small, just two hundred stories. Mom or dad would take me up to the roof, we set the belt to zero gravity, and I learned to move myself around under my own power. We slowly turned the cancellation down a percent or two a week—took me over a year—until I could fly without it."
"You-you really think I could... I could...?"
"Mom almost peed her pants the first time I stepped off the roof without the belt on at all. I, uh, might have pretended to trip over the parapet. And might have done a fifty-story cannonball before flaring wings and turning velocity into lift."
This time, Scootaloo's laugh was real.
"I dove down to street level, reversed, and shot up into the sky past mom. Left a rainboom behind me. Best day of my life..." Her smile turned into a sour frown. "Until Air Traffic Control knocked on the door two hours later."
Scootaloo looked at her own stunted wings. "I'll never fly without the belt," she said.
"I bet you could, on a low-gravity moon or asteroid habitat. But I promise to teach you to fly if you come out of there. I'm a Queen's officer, so that means my promises are backed by the honor of the Star Kingdom of Manticore."
Scootaloo left the view of the video pickup. A moment later, the latches inside the massively armored door began to retract.
They were in a large public park, between the beach and capital spaceport of... whatever this planet was called. Admiral Truman's task force had punched out so many Solarian Navy pickets and system-defense forces that Dash couldn't keep track of where they were this week.
It was clear this system needed its government cleaned out. The Loyalist had been false-flagged, squawking the local revenue service's transponder code, and the slave ship allowed them to pull alongside. The system governor had probably been on the Mesan's payroll, looking the other way as they used her orbital warehouses for 'cargo' transshipment.
Sunlight that was just a little too red shone on Dash and gravity that was just a little too weak pulled at her. The sea breeze smelled just a little too strongly of iodine. But those minor issues aside, it was a pleasant planet for shore leave. It was local spring, not far below the topics, and the weather was perfection itself. Hundreds of RMN or allied personnel filled the park, but Dash and the other three ponies took a small corner of it for themselves.
"Okay, Squirt," she said, and dialed the counter-grav belt to cancel ninety-two percent of the local gravity. She then popped a martial arts helmet onto Scootaloo's head and clipped it under her chin.
Scootaloo sneezed on the dusty sea breeze and the recoil shot her two meters high. Her wings buzzed and brought her to a landing next to Dash. "I nearly flew!"
"You did! That was a well-controlled landing." Dash put a hoof under her belly and lifted her off the ground. "Flap."
The tiny wings buzzed and she lifted herself off of Dash's hoof, hovering. The grin on her face was the most wonderful thing Dash had ever seen.
"Tilt a little forward," Dash said. "Try to re-vector lift into thrust."
"What?"
"We need some ground school, I see." Dash grinned. "Try to move forward."
Scootaloo raised her rump and dipped her head, and ended up doing a forward flip and a half before landing flat on her back. "Oof!"
Dash adjusted the counter-grav belt's bias, moving the center of mass fifteen millimeters back, away from Scootaloo's wings and towards her tail. "It's fine, try again."
She flipped onto her hooves, buzzed her wings, and got back into a hover. With a tilt forward, she got some momentum and began an awkward circuit around their little shore-leave party.
Dash walked back to where Spacer Applejack and Petty Officer Fluttershy sat at a picnic table.
"She's doing very well," Fluttershy said. "I was never a strong flier myself, so I'm glad you're here to teach her."
Dash looked at Fluttershy, then at AJ. Aboard the slave ship, they'd both been wearing their vacuum suits, devoid of decorations, but now wore their service undress uniforms. AJ had a cuff ring for five Manticoran years of service—eight Equestrian or Terran years. "Why aren't you a petty officer, AJ?"
Applejack frowned. "I was. But then I was a little too... honest with a lieutenant commander who happened to be both a duke's nephew and a durn fool."
"Ah."
That wasn't the only thing about AJ's uniform that Dash noticed. She was surprised (unfairly, Dash admitted) to see that despite being a hydroponics tech—a farmer, essentially—there was a Conspicuous Gallantry Medal ribbon on AJ's breast. Scuttlebutt said that aboard her last ship, she'd taken command of a dead chief's damage-control party and extricated the crew trapped in a smashed missile magazine... and had done so after the captain ordered 'abandon ship' and armed the high-megaton scuttling charges.
And Fluttershy? The timid sickbay attendant's breast bore the ribbon of the Osterman Cross—the second-highest medal enlisted could earn, just below the Parliamentary Medal of Valor itself—and her sleeves bore blood-red wound stripes. That was probably quite a story, too. Dash hoped to hear it someday, and would probably have to extract the story from AJ, since Fluttershy seemed unlikely to tell it.
Dash's Sphinx Cross for finishing off the Solarian superdreadnought seemed paltry by comparison.
"The transport's pullin' out for the Capital in three days," AJ said.
Dash nodded and blinked to clear her vision. She wasn't crying, of course. It must be the iodine-smell from the beach making her eyes water. Dash said, "My parents are probably the only people in the Star Kingdom who can raise a foal with her... background. They're going to be a bit surprised to find her on their doorstep, but my letter explains everything."
"I'm surprised they didn't offer you detached duty to escort her home," Fluttershy said.
"They did, and I almost accepted, but I can't abandon my squadron in the middle of a campaign. We've taken enough casualties that no one can fill my slot. The squadron'd be short one LAC."
Fluttershy nodded.
"M' brother," AJ said, "is at the University in Landin' City, ever since we leased out the farm. Little sis lives with him. Just a few subway stops from yer parents, it sounds like. I'm sending Mac a letter on the transport, too. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo will be thick as thieves, I'm sure."
"Good," Dash said. "Great!"
"'Leased out the farm'?" Fluttershy repeated.
AJ swallowed loudly, twice. "After my parents... passed... we're letting some cousins work our land on Gryphon. Granny watches Apple Bloom, gets her to school and such, while I'm deployed and Big Mac is in his classes."
They sat silently for a minute.
AJ looked away and wiped her eyes. "A smoky dragon is takin' a hundred-year nap on our land back in Equestria, so we moved to the Star Kingdom, since there's land for free takin' on Gryphon to anypony or anybody who wants to work it. Apple Bloom was born there."
Dash nodded. Gryphon was the Star Kingdom's most sparsely populated planet and the government was happy to attract immigrants from anywhere.
Fluttershy whispered, "We came to Manticore when I was a 'tween. Mom and Dad work weather up north in White Haven. With the last two Earls White Haven being admirals, most of us in school joined up... Your parents, AJ...? If you don't mind me asking."
"When the First War started," AJ continued with a sniffle, "Mom and Dad both volunteered. Dad made chief, Mom warrant officer. Dad was KIA at Second Basilisk, Mom with the Hyacinth convoy. M'brother left active duty to be 'Bloom's guardian. He's studying engineering, figures to be a naval architect. Apple Bloom is hopin' for the Academy." AJ touched the red officer's shoulder board on Dash's uniform. "Mom 'n dad would be just... they'd be just as proud as pigs in slop if their little Baby 'Bloom wore that fanciness someday."
They sat in silence, watching Scootaloo hover a meter off the ground and make a slow circuit around their picnic table. "Scootaloo's already making noise about the Academy, too," Dash said. "She can't hear enough about the Navy. ...She asked me what it's like to helm a light attack craft through a missile exchange."
"What did you tell her?" Fluttershy asked.
"'Terrifying.' I also told her that to get accepted to the Academy, she's got about six years to do twelve years of schooling, so she'd better work her tail off."
Scootaloo tried to reverse direction, wings buzzing, and floated head-first into a lamp post.
"I always wanted a little sister," Dash continued. "It's just a tragedy she had to go through the same things I went through, though."
"But we saved her, her and two thousand others," AJ replied. "That's why I joined the Navy in the first place. Ain't nothing feels better than bushwhacking a slave ship."
Dash and Fluttershy grunted.
A unicorn that Dash vaguely recognized from the flagship trotted towards them from the direction of the spaceport. She wore the uniform of a petty officer and the insignia of a flag officer's yeoman... well, yeomare. The uniform had a few extra flourishes that didn't look quite regulation, and her black RMN beret sat jauntily behind her horn.
Although Dash recognized the unicorn, they'd never actually met. She was an enlisted member of the admiral's staff, and Dash was an officer from the embarked LAC wing, so they never crossed paths except during the scramble to battlestations.
"Ensign Dash?" she asked.
Dash nodded. "Yes?"
"Yeomare First Class Rarity." She gave a parade-ground salute. "The commodore, that is, the admiral's chief of staff, wishes to discuss your charge—" she glanced at Scootaloo "—and requests you to repair aboard the flagship and meet him in his office at your first convenience. By which he means 'five minutes ago'. I'm personally to fetch you and ensure you are not distracted, delayed, or diverted, and thence to deliver you to the commodore directly."
Dash looked at Rarity, cocking her head. "You've got a touch of a Landing City accent."
She frowned, puzzled. "Yes, Ensign, Darling, Landing City, born and raised, Spaceport District. I'm the preeminent proprietress of quadruped couture in the Star Kingdom, you may know, and I'm trying to break into hexaped, but treecats don't like clothes... Mother and Father and Sweetie Belle are running my shop while I'm in uniform."
"Sweetie Belle..." Dash mused. "Is that a little sister, by any chance?"
Petty Officer Rarity scowled in confusion. "Yes, she certainly is, equal parts endearing, infuriating, and inflammable. Why do you ask?"
Dash grinned and pointed at Scootaloo, who was turning a slow circle in place, hovering a meter high. "Your sister just made a new friend."
The End