Cherry Berry, still wearing her helmet, scarf and flight jacket, walked into the throne room of the Badlands Hive just in time for a wadded-up piece of expensive paper to hit her in the muzzle. “Hey!”
From her throne, Chrysalis glared down at her. “Read that,” she said.
“Good morning, Cherry!” the pink pony said sarcastically as she bent down and began uncrumpling the paper. “Did you have a nice flight from Horseton? Why, yes I did! Is construction of the space laboratory coming along? Very nicely, thank you! And how has your day been?”
“Read that and find out,” Chrysalis grumbled.
Cherry Berry sighed, then began reading the crumpled letter. Her eyes went wide when she figured out who had written it. “What’s this about other hives?” she asked. “And why is Princess Celestia concerned about them?”
“Because she knows it’ll annoy me,” Chrysalis snapped. “Yes, there are other hives, but they’re still in the hide-and-survive school of thinking. I don’t think any of them even operate in Equestria. More likely the changelings she’s got in her jails are just afraid of what I’ll do to them when they’re turned back over to me.”
“Says here she’s not turning any changeling prisoners over until you can prove they’re yours,” Cherry said. "Once you have some sort of uniform identification system, she'll start turning them back over to you again."
“Proof? Bah!” Chrysalis snapped. “We’ve been issuing birth certificates every time Celestia’s paper-pushers ask for one. Isn’t that enough?” She waved her hooves above her head in frustration. “And anyway, carrying around a paper that says who you really are? Isn’t that self-incrimination? I thought you ponies had laws against that!”
"To be honest," Cherry Berry said, slipping her flight scarf off her neck, "I'm surprised you got by this long. At least she was nice enough to wait until we were done with the moon landing, and then the holidays."
Chrysalis got up off her throne and walked over to Cherry. "Are you telling me all you ponies carry pieces of paper around telling other people you are who you say you are?"
"Not all the time, no," Cherry said. "For day to day stuff we have our cutie marks. Those can't be faked."
"Except by shapeshifters," Chrysalis pointed out.
"Well, of course."
"And they go away if an evil necromancer sucks your magic dry."
"Well, yes," Cherry admitted, getting a little annoyed.
"And there was that time Starlight Glimmer-"
"My point is," Cherry Berry interrupted, which Chrysalis would tolerate from nobody else in the world, "they're good enough for identification for ordinary ponies. But ponies in certain professions do have to have licenses showing that they have been properly trained and tested to do the things they're supposed to do. I take my pilot's license with me everywhere I fly." She reached a hoof under her flight helmet and pulled out a little card with a littler photo of Cherry smiling gormlessly at the viewer. "And every member of Celestia's guard and the E.U.P., from the Wonderbolts down to the greenest Manehattan traffic cop, has one to go with the badge."
Chrysalis took a moment to consider this information. It might go a long way to explain why all her attempts to slip an infiltrator into the Royal Guard had failed. (There had been one who'd got in literally by the front door, but he was an exile and didn't count.) "All right," she said reluctantly, "I can see a purpose in that. But why do I have to give one of these to every ling in my hive?"
Cherry tucked the card back into her helmet. "Refresh my memory," she said in a sing-song tone Chrysalis just knew she did only to be annoying, "but is the Badlands Hive not technically still at a state of war with the Kingdom of Equestria?"
"No," Chrysalis snapped. "We are in a state of undeclared hostilities currently in a condition of informal cease-fire. And I've gone to some trouble to keep it that way."
"What's the difference?"
"War has more rules."
"Riiiiiight," Cherry drawled. "So, mostly-war, then. And did you not also say, on multiple occasions, that every member of the hive is a warrior?"
Oh. In an instance Chrysalis saw how this was going to end. She decided she would go down fighting anyway. "I might have said that, but that doesn't mean-"
"And I'm quite sure, because I've had to put it on the forms for Cherry's Odd Jobs," the pink pony interrupted again, "that the entire justification behind you bailing whatever changelings you want out of any jail in Equestria is that, technically, they're all soldiers in your service. Right?"
"That only applies to the useful ones."
"Oh. Well, that makes it simple," Cherry said. "Just tell Princess Celestia that only the useful changelings are your warriors. You don't have to give any of the useless drones licenses- just the ones you want."
"I don't keep useless drones in my hive!" Chrysalis snapped.
"You don't? Could have fooled me," Cherry smirked. "But that means you'll have to give a license to all of them." The smirk grew a little broader. "Do you even know all of them?"
"Of course not!" Chrysalis roared. "I have something like thirty thousand of them! They're scattered across the continent! Some I don't see for years at a time! It's not a queen's job to know every single subject!"
Cherry's smirk went away. "Well, it's somepony's job to know," she said. "I mean, how do you even know that thirty thousand number is accurate?"
"Because I-" Chrysalis paused. She'd got that number because Pharynx, in the preparation for the invasion of Canterlot, had told her they needed thirty thousand sets of armor if they were going to send every single changeling into combat. In the end only about half went, partly due to lack of time to finish the armor, partly because a lot of her subjects, if you put them into battle, would be more help to the other side.
But that was an estimate. She didn't really know, did she?
And how many changelings did she actually know, anyway? She could name every changeling she'd given any position of authority, even the ones she'd put in place so they'd stay out of the way of more important things. She could name every changeling she'd exiled, every changeling who had self-exiled before she could order it, and every changeling whose exile/not-exile status could be summed up as, "It's Complicated."
But, and this occured to her with a slight jolt, she didn't even know the names of all the changelings working in the space program, and that was only a few hundred. There were quite definitely over ten thousand changelings resident in the hive itself, and thousands more out in the world gathering love (some openly these days, but many still in secret). Even now, even when she'd spent years debriefing infiltrators when they returned, she couldn't name a tenth of them.
And why should she? She'd never cared before.
But she cared NOW, because she'd just realized she actually had no idea who, or even WHAT, she had in her hive.
This realization took a bit of time to run from beginning to end, and part of her noted that Cherry Berry, far from interrupting or mocking her, sat watching and waiting, most politely, for Chrysalis to close her gaping mouth.
"Pony," she finally said, after shutting her mouth again, "do you people have something that, well, writes down a list of who everyone is and what they do?"
"Yes," Cherry Berry said cautiously. "It's called the census. How have you not heard of it?"
Chrysalis waved around the two of them, at the throne room carved out of the desert sandstone. "I don't know," she said sarcastically, "maybe because I literally live under a rock?"
"Fair enough," Cherry shrugged. "We do it about once every ten years, so the princesses can make sure every pony gets the services they need and that nopony gets taxed too much or too little. They also provide raw information to companies like the railroads and the airship services so they know where to build-"
"I get the picture," Chrysalis said. "How is it actually done?"
"Well," Cherry said, "they hire a bunch of ponies to go door to door and get everyone to fill out a form. I signed up for it the last time." She frowned a little at this. "Three months of nonstop walking to every farm, hut, and hole within fifty miles of Ponyville, and there were twenty of us doing it. Next time I think I'll pass."
"Isn't Canterlot within fifty miles of Ponyville?"
"Oh, so it is," Cherry sneered, "and I'm sure you never exaggerated anything in your life either, Your Majesty."
"Of course not," Chrysalis said. "And also I have never lied once in my life."
"Of course," Cherry echoed. "It was a lot more than once."
Despite herself, Chrysalis couldn't quite control the smirk of amusement at Cherry's comeback. "So, get everyone to fill out a form," she said. "Then what?"
"Get someone to add up the forms," Cherry said. "How many ponies are farmers? How many are farriers? How many sell quills and sofas?"
"One," Chrysalis pointed out. "And let me add that your Ponyville routinely defies all the known laws of economics."
Cherry snorted. "Whatever. The point is, somepony turns all those forms into information ponies can use."
"Well, don't look at me," Chrysalis said. "I've got better things to do than spend all day doing sums."
"Of course," Cherry said. "Princess Celestia doesn't do it either. Get someone else to do it."
"Fine. How-"
"Not it!"
"Shoot!!"
"I have decided, for the good of the hive," Chrysalis declared to the two fearsome warriors kneeling before her, "that there shall be a census of all my changelings. And you two, being the commanders of the largest portion of my hive, shall organize it."
She paused to allow Elytron and Pharynx, the heads of the hive's offensive and defensive forces, to respond. In an ideal world she wouldn't have brought either of them into this. Yes, they each fit the roles she had for them, but they both gave her headaches.
Elytron would never actually be allowed to command in the field- that was Chrysalis's job- but his utter lack of imagination meant that he would do what he was ordered to do and not much else, and his shouty, bullying nature meant he enjoyed getting the warriors underneath him to do it too. The problem arose when he encountered any situation where he didn't already have explicit orders. His solutions, which he always thought were utter genius, invariably cost Chrysalis a lot of time and effort to undo.
Pharynx, on the other hand, was as intelligent and imaginative as Elytron was stupid. That was the problem. Pharynx could be counted upon, in Chrysalis's absence, to keep the hive protected from all known threats… and all unknown threats, including quite a lot that not only didn't exist but could never exist. She would have exiled him to join his brother Thorax long ago but for two things: first, Pharynx kept the warriors in good shape and well armed, something Elytron usually overlooked; and second, Pharynx's fever dream contingency plans sometimes saved the hive from things even Chrysalis hadn't expected.
So, in summary: both took care of things Chrysalis didn’t want to deal with, but both were also themselves things Chrysalis didn’t want to deal with.
Neither commander made a move or sound, so she continued, "Take this form and have fifty thousand copies of it made." She tossed down a piece of paper, on which she'd sketched out a fill-in-the-blank form listing the main things the pony had said went into a census: name, address, age, employment, and so forth.
She hadn't bothered with "marital status" because, although even though the vast majority of her changelings had no long-term relationships to speak of, once you set those aside the rest of them required rather a lot more categories than "single", "married," "divorced," and "widowed." She'd also left off "income" because, if she'd brought up her subjects correctly, not a single one of them would give a truthful answer.
She'd been about to leave off "gender" as well, because shapeshifting, until Cherry Berry pointedly asked her if she should start addressing her as King Chrysalis. Onto the form it went with a snarl, wondering to herself for the umtpy thousandth time how the pony was still alive after so long.
"Once you have the copies, give one to each warrior on your rolls," she continued. "Have them fill it out, then return each to the hive clerk's office. Also, Pharynx, I want you to give me a list of most trustworthy infiltrators for each major population center we currently operate in. Two each for Canterlot and Manehattan. They will be tasked with getting the other infiltrators to fill out the forms. Occupant and Cherry Berry will do the same for Horseton and Appleoosa."
"Understood, my queen," Elytron said.
"Your pardon, my queen," Pharynx put in, "but I must question this entire enterprise on two grounds. First, would it not be most convenient for the enemy if they were to stumble upon all this information? They would know all our deployments, all our agents, everything! Assembling this data into one place is simply asking for an information security disaster! I beg you not do it!"
Chrysalis raised one eyebrow. (At least once per week she practiced this for ten minutes at the bathroom mirror for maximum effect.) "I will grant your request upon one condition, my most loyal subject," she said, dripping sarcasm like venom from her fangs, "that condition being, that you tell me why you want your rightful queen to not have that information."
Pharynx, being one of the smartest changelings in the hive, knew when to retreat. "I humbly withdraw my request, my queen," he said. "I have no such reason."
"Then that is settled-"
"Your pardon, my queen, but the other reason-"
Chrysalis let her cool facade slip a bit. Pharynx was intelligent, but he was also one of the most stubborn changelings in the hive, which made him all the more annoying. "Have you priced a train ticket to the Crystal Empire recently?" she hissed. "Because if you want to visit your brother, I can arrange that!"
"My queen, my brother who we do not name-" because Chrysalis had forbidden the use of the name Thorax by the hive- "and others like him are the whole point of my second objection! Who shall count those who have been exiled, or who have left the hive voluntarily? How will they even be found? I wouldn't know where Th- my brother is if not for his greeting cards!" Under his breath he added, "I've told him and told him about operational security, but..."
Elytron, not half as soft-voiced as Pharynx, put in, "You still keep the stupid cards, though."
"Those exiled by my order," Chrysalis said, putting a firm stop to other voices of any volume, "are no longer of this hive. There is no point in counting them. If the Crystal Empire likes your brother so much, they may keep him. The others I shall approach personally, as, unlike you, I have been very careful to keep track of them." She leaned forward on her throne, glaring at the two warriors. "Are there any more impediments to promptly obeying your queen's command?"
"No, ma'am," two voices said at once.
"Well, there must be," Chrysalis growled. "Possibly your hooves are glued to the floor? Temporarily paralysis?"
Two faces looked up in obvious confusion.
"What I mean is," and then Chrysalis took it from a soft growl to a regal roar, "WHY ARE YOU IMBECILES STILL HERE? GO DO WHAT I SAID!"
A moment later Chrysalis gave herself a mental pat on the back. As ego-gratifying as it would have been to adopt the custom of forcing departing courtiers not to turn their back on royalty, not having it sped up their departures so very much.