Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
March 2nd, Gregorian Calendar
"Mind the Gap. The next train is for Trimms Green. This station is Heron Quays. Change here for the Waterfront Line, Elizabeth Line, Greenwich Hydrofoil, and other Docklands Light Maglev Trains. Disembark for Heron Quays docks, and heliport. Mind the Gap"
John Odie hated London weather. He had only been living in the UK zone for a year, and already he was doing his best to arrange to move somewhere warmer, and less prone to frigid deluges of mildly toxic rain.
He glared at the maglev trench below the platform and huffed. He hated the transport station AI's voice even more than the rain. It was terribly... British.
Odie was a North-Amerizone native, and had one asked his previous neighbors about him, they would have likely denied knowing him as anything more than the village idiot. He had made a name for himself in his small Oregon settlement. A bad one.
Moving to the UK had been a half-baked attempt at escaping potential charges after his last and greatest run-in with the Military Police. But none of that mattered anymore. Soon he would be in Southern Italy, and he could get back to his favorite pastime; Taking advantage of everyone he met to make a quick credit.
His reveries on the past, and future, were abruptly cut short as the train arrived, heralded by a melodic trill from platform-embedded speakers, and the hiss of rain being deflected off the pressure wave of the vehicle's passage.
The doors snapped open, and Odie shouldered his way in, not even bothering to wait for those trying to disembark. He helped himself to a seat, and snorted, staring up at a screen embedded above the opposite window that had been set to a news feed.
"This is Heron Quays. This is a Docklands Light Maglev train bound for Trimms Green. Please stand clear of the doors."
Odie winced, and tried to ignore the voice, and the chatter around him, as the train silently accelerated away from the platform. He passed the trip in silence, wishing everyone else on the train would just melt through the floor and seep into the magnet compartments. Especially the Ponies.
Their cheerfulness was a damnably irritating contrast against the gray sky, gray buildings, and Odie's gray mood. He hated contrasts.
"The next station is; Canary Wharf. Change for the Jubilee and Waterfront Underground lines, national maglev services, and city busses. Disembark for the Canary Wharf financial plaza, mall, and docks."
The train glided to a halt, the doors popped open, and the crowd began to file out. Canary Wharf was a major exit point in the morning, and few people were getting on to replace the departing passengers. Odie stretched as the seat beside him was vacated. In so doing, he noticed that the occupant had left his backpack behind.
It was an unassuming little scrap of fabric. Black, misshapen, and utterly ordinary.
"This is; Canary Wharf. Change here for the Jubilee and Waterfront Underground lines, national maglev services, and city busses. Disembark for the Canary Wharf financial plaza, mall, and docks."
Odie glanced around and tensed. Aside from a few humans buried in their DaTabs, an older Earth Pony in a rear corner, and two Unicorns facing the doors, there was no one else in the car. No one was facing him, or seemed to be paying any mind to the unattended luggage that was now so tantalizingly close.
Just peeking wasn't a crime, he reflected gleefully, as he silently endeavored to unzip the backpack without drawing notice. The moment the fabric fell away he wished that he'd simply gotten off at the wharf.
"This is a Docklands Light Maglev train bound for Trimms Green. Please stand clear of the doors."
Odie balked, scrambling from his seat. The backpack tipped over, as his attempts to disentangle his proverbial sticky fingers failed miserably. There was a loud metallic clank, and a silver cylinder rolled across the beige floor of the car, purple lights flickering regularly in time with a soft, insistent, accelerating beep.
All eyes, Human and Equine alike, fixed firmly on the device. There was a solitary instant of frozen deadlock as fight and flight vied for control of the passengers. Odie was the first to determine that discretion was the better part of valor, but by then it was too late.
The doors snapped shut with the innocuous hiss of hydraulics, and the train's magnetic motors began to spool up, their AI driver blissfully unaware of the unfolding catastrophe in the carriage.
Had anyone on the Canary Wharf platform been paying attention to the departing train, they might have just managed to glimpse a screaming, dirty, poorly shaven face pressed against the glass of car three's doors, before it was engulfed in a cloud of noxious purple gas.
London's subsurface tunnel network was one of the most extensive on Earth. Rivaled only by similar warrens in New York, Moscow, Paris, Rome, and Shanghai, it still dwarfed all but the original Catacombs for sheer size and mystique.
The passages ranged from massive four-track maglev tunnels near the surface, to tiny single-person pre-Winnowing passages. Some were as old as the middle ages, some had been built during the World Wars, and some were begun as part of a dearth of unfinished construction projects from the city's colorful past. Never finished, and never charted.
But the majority of the the tunnels, by volume, belonged to the Underground. Once an electrified third-rail subway, it had since been converted to a high-speed monorail configuration, and vastly expanded.
Even within the train tubes alone one could easily become lost. Workers had to be equipped with network-connected DaTabs, loaded with maps and RFID trackers, to avoid becoming permanently marooned in the writhing techno-mechanical wasteland.
Even in the rare cases where such devices malfunctioned, the AI that controlled the trains were networked to a host of sensors, cameras, and microphones. Most workers were smart enough to approach the nearest one, and put in a call for help. Rescue times were usually under an hour.
Yet there were still areas of the tube that were without surveillance. Blind spots in the network. Old maintenance junctures, and rip-tracks, that were charted but not directly monitored, aside from basic integrity sensors within the rail itself.
Whenever a train's internal sensors detected a contaminant, the protocol was for the internal AI to register the hazard, then direct the train to a siding for servicing.
Train 18593217-A; a Docklands Light Maglev unit, was occupying one such track. According to the manifest that track-control AI had access to, the unit was empty and had been sidelined due to a simple magnetic induction coil malfunction at Heron Quays.
The train sat, idling, within a small junction of maglev trench, tucked away deep below the Thames, between two service tunnels and an Underground tube.
Orange warning lights pulsed, illuminating the duracrete of the walls at regular intervals. The Train's AI projected a constant warning through external speakers, "Warning. Bio-hazardous Contaminants detected. Train Sealed. Quarantine in Effect. Train in Need of Servicing. Quarantine in Effect."
Under normal circumstances control-AI would have dispatched a hazmat team the instant the train's internal sensors registered a biological attack. But the train had, instead, registered that it was empty of passengers, and that it was malfunctioning. Control-AI had apportioned it a rip-track, and filed a maintenance request.
Despite the fact that the onboard AI knew the vehicle was contaminated, it could not send the information along. The same device that had released the biological hazard had jammed and replaced its transmissions to track control.
So the train waited in deadlock. Exactly as intended.
It wasn't the hiss of the doors, nor the resounding klaxon. It wasn't even the thump of hooves. It was the AI's voice that pulled Odie from unconsciousness, "Warning. Bio-hazardous Contaminants detected. Train Sealed. Quarantine in Effect. Train in Need of Servicing. Quarantine in Effect."
Everything felt wrong. His head hurt, his eyes didn't seem to want to focus, and his arms wouldn't move. The latter realization generated a rising sense of panic, that helped him to partially focus his vision, and hearing.
"...an you hear me? Are you awake yet? You have to wake up! They'll be here soon!"
Odie grunted, "Mmmph! Who..? What...? Talk *sense!* Help me free my arms!" As he spoke, he managed to bring the creature before him into focus. It was the Earth Pony from the back of the train car, an expression of panic plastered to his muzzle.
Before the Equine could respond, the doors behind him were violently pried open, revealing the blurry image of a figure in a white armored hardsuit.
The second the doors were open, there was a tense pause. Words came from the armored figure, but it took time for them to sink in through the haze of latent sedatives, "Twelve. Looks like three natives, nine converts." As he parsed the sentence, Odie noticed that the soldier-like figure was equipped with a stun baton, rather than a lethal weapon.
When the word 'converts' finally managed to make a connection with his conscious faculties, he stiffed. Memories of the moments leading up to his abrupt bout with unconsciousness flooded back. He began to feebly scrabble, desperately trying to wish away his new hooves.
As the realization that he was no longer Human fully set in, further feeding his panic, Odie could just make out a distinctly feminine voice speaking in response to the soldier.
The tone was not only casual, but almost matter-of-fact, "We need as many as we can get. Take them all."
He barely had time to make out the source, a hazy figure of a purple-hued mare, before the soldiers put their stun batons to use.
Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
Fourth Month, Fourth Day, Celestial Calendar
A fire was one of the many luxuries of travelling in charted lands. No creature in their right mind, so far south of the wilds, would attack three Gryphons and a Pegasus, no matter how visible they made themselves.
As he stoked the flames with a long sturdy pine twig, Fyrenn paused to watch the patterns of light play across his feathers. Three years since he had converted. Three years of being a Gryphon, and sometimes it still hadn't fully sunk in.
Usually it was little things that grabbed his attention. The mundane activities of life. On occasion the disconnect between his new existence, and his old Human routine would reassert itself in a bout of emotions, and he would find himself rediscovering the joyous small moments of wonder that came with Conversion.
He cast a glance upwards as he heard hoofsteps, confirming that Stan had returned with more wood for the blaze. As he silently added the new fuel to the mound, the red Gryphon wondered what it was like for his brothers. Kephic and Varan had adopted each other, having each lost their parents to war. Unlike Fyrenn, they were native Gryphons; Born and raised with feathers, wings, beak, and talons.
Some days Fyrenn wished he could have experienced youth as a Gryphon. Others he was grateful to be a Convert. The sheer contrast between old and new life meant that there were certain things he didn't take for granted, like his incredible vision.
Having once been blind, but for an uncomfortable ocular implant, he appreciated sight more than any of the other physical improvements his form brought, even if only by a small margin.
The reminiscence caused his train of thought to skip to a new tack; Earth. At first, he had visited with a certain degree of frequency, helping to get the then-nascent Gryphonization program off the ground by leveraging his experience as the first Gryphon Convert.
But after a year of going back and forth, he had settled in Equestria on a more long-term basis. He had the Gryphic equivalent of an apartment in the capital, a full time position in the Brotherhood of Knights, and for nearly two years he had been content to embark on missions for the Kingdoms, mostly in the companionship of his brothers and Carradan.
The Pegasus was not officially attached to them, but was often paid a mercenary fee for participating in their missions, which he supplemented by selling a column based on their adventures to Equestrian and Terran Newspapers.
Fyrenn chuckled. Old habits died hard. He and Stanley shared their Convert status in common. Though they had once been at odds, years of working, fighting, eating, and relaxing together had made them more like family than anything else. It had also, Fyrenn noticed, begun to erode some of Carradan's Equine pacifism, imparting a well balanced capacity for violent acts, when they were strictly necessary.
As he finished placing the final log, Fyrenn sighed, and slumped back into a prone, relaxed, leonine pose. His last visit to Earth had been a brief logistically-driven weekend-long stay just shy of two-years-previous.
He found himself wondering how much had changed. He stared into the dancing flames, and tried to picture people adjusting to the groundswell of change that he had played such a strong role in. His mental focus shifted again. He found himself wondering how *'she'* was adjusting to an alien world.
"Bit for those deep thoughts of yours?" Carradan's words were jarring. Sometimes the reporter's skill at reading someone was so powerful that it seemed preternatural. It wasn't hard to see that the Gryphon was lost in thought, but Carradan had chosen his timing deliberately.
Stan pressed his advantage, glaring good-naturedly at Fyrenn, "When are you gonna learn, featherbrains, that there's no secrets on camping trips?"
Fyrenn sighed and chuckled half-heartedly, "Just wondering how well Neyla is getting along. I shudder to think what might happen when she discovers espresso."
Carradan leaned in and grinned, his words tumbling out in a sing-song tone, "Yoouuu miiiissss herrrrr!"
Fyrenn snorted, and shoved Carradan away with an almost casual swipe that sent the big-boned Pegasus staggering backwards, "Of course I do. But not like that. She was... Is... A good friend."
Stanley chuckled, "Listen, pal, it's ok. I come from a world where 'if you repeat it enough times, it must be true' is an axiom."
Fyrenn glared, the expression tinged with a mischievous grin, "Don't you have better things to do? Like finding some water for supper..." Carradan glowered, so Fyrenn appended his sentence, "...Before I make *you* into appetizers?"
Stan sorted, rolled his eyes, and set off into the air with a lopsided grin, leaving Fyrenn to continue his reflections. Inwardly, he admitted that it would be nice to get the chance to see Neyla again.
She had been a friend and companion to the group ever since they had recruited her three years previous. Until one day she had decided she wasn't coming home with them.
Deep down, Fyrenn knew the reasons were complex, and had more to do with him than he felt comfortable acknowledging. When he wanted a simple explanation, he told himself that it was because she had finally given up on her life's dream, but still couldn't face that fact.
Neyla was a sentinel; A Gryphon from an independent family with no clan. She was doubly disenfranchised, given that she was also the last living member of her entire family.
She knew her family had not always been clanless, and for years since her father's death, she had labored to find legal precedent to redeem her clan's assets. If she were able to present a viable land-claim, or proof of a family tie by marriage to an existing clan, or if she were to marry a husband willing to leave his own clan, or merge it with hers, then she could lay claim to assets and proceed with the redemption.
The latter option was not appealing to her, for a plethora of painful emotional reasons, and difficult logistical reasons.
The other two options had been exhausted for some time when she had joined the group. She simply hadn't come to terms with it at the time.
The last Fyrenn had heard, she was doing paid work for the JRSF.
His ruminations were completely dispelled by the return of Kephic and Varan, hauling a large elk between them. Dinner.
Fyrenn put his thoughts firmly in the back of his mind, and cheerfully went about helping to prepare the kill. When Carradan returned with a skin full of fresh stream water, the four set to making stew with smiles and laughter.
As he neatly separated meat from bone with a talon, Kephic popped a small piece of the raw flesh into his beak, and chewed thoughtfully. The results were unusually tidy. Despite their ability and propensity to eat meat both cooked, and raw, Gryphons were not overly messy creatures, chewing their food with a hidden sharp edge inside their beak that performed the same function as teeth.
The speckled Gryphon spoke around his beak-full, "If I recall, this rendezvous we are... Misappropriating, is close to one of the new railway lines."
Varan nodded, "I saw as much on the charts. This particular spur connects a series of mines to the main line that passes through Neighvada. The Troll clans of the badlands own and operate it."
Rails and steam power were not new to Equestria, having existed in theory and practice even before Contact. But initial forays into railways had been primitive at best. The advent of human ideas had caused a major boom in the technology and associated industries that was still swelling and gaining momentum.
Stan took a sniff of the stew, made a face, and began rummaging through his saddlebags for hay. while he had become fairly accustomed to watching and smelling the cooking and consumption of meat, as a Pony he still had a deep inhibition towards consuming it, even if it came from a non-sapient prey animal.
As he extracted a large muzzle-full of golden-brown stalks, he added his own thoughts to the conversation, "So this is... Three? Four days away as we fly?"
Fyrenn nodded, "By my guess, assuming we don't exert ourselves overly."
Stan snorted, "Fine by me. When you fellas say 'double time' it feels more like triple."
The Gryphons shared a laugh at their companion's expense. Carradan smiled and stuck his tongue out gleefully. Even slightly out-of-shape as he was, the salmon Pegasus could move at military aircraft speeds, leaving the Gryphons far behind, in the short term.
In exchange, like all Pegasi, he had almost no agility or flight endurance by comparison.
The Gryphons could fly at what a Human would have called 'swift pace' for days and nights on end, stopping only to hunt, and even sleeping on the wing.
Carradan was lucky to go for a whole day without stopping to rest, under most circumstances.
How he had managed to stay so sedentary despite their active lifestyle was a great source of speculation to the Gryphons. Fyrenn's personal theory was an overabundance of chocolate consumption; The substance was so readily accessible in
Equestria, by comparison to its practical non-existence on Earth.
The conversation turned to light-hearted banter at the stew simmered. Even as the light of the fire, and the warmth of the camaraderie pushed back the cold mountain spring air, a small part of Fyrenn's mind still wandered in nostalgia. Wondering.
Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
March 2nd, Gregorian Calendar
"Beta team, this is Alpha team; popping the lid."
Neyla stiffened, and checked her weapon one final time. In place of her preferred arbalest, she was carrying a long thick javelin. Two blue hued slits near the leaf-shaped blade indicated that the weapon had full magnetic charge. At a twist of the central grip, the tip and the core of the haft would be ejected from the base at six times the speed of sound.
The weapon's blade had a monomolecular edge, and overall it clocked in at nearly a quarter of a ton in weight. The majority of the construction was pure depleted uranium.
She shifted uncomfortably in her armor. The thick, angular gray nano-ceramic plates were heavier than the gear she was accustomed to. It came with the posting. Scale-buster units had to fend off more than mere sharp objects and projectiles.
At her sides, just behind her twin short swords, two rail-pistols provided a comforting added bulk to her arsenal. She had to give the Humans that; They knew how to make incredible instruments of war.
She chanced a swift look around the corner of the building she was using for cover. To the north, she could see her first teammate, Beta three, perched atop a roof. His immensely bulky armor was made of a dull, color-adaptive material that could fool human eyes in a passing glance. Neyla could make out the centimeter-wide imperfections in the plating edges.
She knew that somewhere to her left, and ahead, the man's sister, Beta four, was crouched in a stairwell wearing a nearly identical super-heavy class armor kit.
Neyla was Beta two. Beta one was entirely unseen, which was a masterful feat of stealth considering his size.
When she had first met him, the large metallic Dragon known as Tirinel had not been known for subtlety in combat. But after two years of point-creature on their Scale-buster team, he had become as adept at concealment as a multi-ton silver-plated creature could possibly be.
It was an absolutely indispensable skill.
Far ahead, the sound of gunfire erupted. Neyla's keen golden eyes could pick out individual muzzle flashes, even at such distance. Without the warren of tall buildings that made up Dubai's suburbs, she could have read the lips of Alpha team.
The only response to the gunfire was a similar, but distinctly different staccato echo. No sirens, no screams. A twenty block radius had been quietly evacuated prior to the start of the operation. The first time a 'Buster unit had seen action, it had leveled eight blocks of Shanghai. Their operations tended to unavoidably produce large quantities of collateral damage.
"Get ready. Thermal just lit up like a Christmas tree. This one is a big one; At least fourteen meters."
Beta three sounded unfazed. Beta four's response, however, seemed just the tiniest bit breathless to Neyla, "How are they doing that? I thought newscales were relatively small."
"Growth accelerants. Likely the reason we're necessary in this instance. Dispense with the 'chatter.' "
Tirinel's voice was low, but surprisingly melodic, and at his insistence, the radio went silent.
Neyla tightened her grip on the javelin, and prepared her wings, unfurling them the slightest bit and tensing the appropriate muscles.
At a distance, the unaided Human ear might have mistaken the sound for a large truck. Beta team knew better. The growing rumble was the sound of a building roar. The sound of an irate Dragon.
Suddenly, the night was lit as brilliantly as noon-day by a column of vibrant flame. The hallmark natural weapon of a Red Dragon. The growl of the creature's fury, and the smashing noises of its flailing passage through various buildings, was gradually augmented by the noise of an approaching fuel cell engine.
A heavily armored APC, fitted with special secondary layers of heat-resistant ceramic plating, tore around the corner at what Neyla guessed was close to seventy miles an hour. The gun turret was revolved completely to face the rear, and spouting a constant jet of rail-rounds.
The vehicle's pursuer followed suit, scrambling across rooftops and demolishing weaker structures with the violence of its passage. A wild Red Dragon; Fully mature from a biological standpoint.
The latest in HLF terror tactics. Though Neyla wondered how much longer the organization could tolerate the damage it was inflicting to itself. A wild Dragon knew no master, no friends, no allegiance, and no conception of one target from the next.
Draconic Conversion was already risky enough, even with the stringent psychological testing required by Earthgov to try and weed out candidates with a high mental instability. The accelerants the HLF was adding to get full sized Dragons right-away were likely doing little more than vastly decreasing the chances of a successful Conversion.
The way Tirinel had described it, Dragonization was like a tightrope act thanks to the depth of a Dragon's connection to magic itself. You had to have just the right state of mind to emerge with your sapience intact.
In Neyla's experience, HLF soldiers were not what one might classify as 'ideal candidates.'
The APC rushed past her hiding place, carrying a blast of hot air in its jetstream. The ceramic outer hull had already been deeply carbon-scored in several places, and part of the railgun barrel had melted inward, then been punctured by successive rounds leaving the muzzle.
Despite the weighty caliber of the ammunition, and the exceedingly high muzzle velocity, the weapon was doing almost nothing to the pursuing Dragon. It generally took a straight shot from a ship-scale battery to do any damage. Dragons were not agile creatures, but their hides were so thick as to seem nigh invincible, even to the most formidable human weaponry.
Neyla had watched Dragons, allied and otherwise, shrug off acidic compounds, fresh magma, pure napalm, artillery railgun strikes, anti-material laser blasts, and even hits from small drone-based AMRAAM missiles.
Killing a Dragon was not an issue of brute force. Such a contest was the most literal approximation of seeing an unstoppable force meet an immovable object that any living being was ever likely to see. No, Neyla reflected, killing a Dragon was about agility, precision, and timing.
Like clockwork the APC ground to a halt, and in a seemingly display of abject battlefield stupidity, held its ground as the crimson juggernaut barreled towards it.
Just when it seemed as if the Dragon would simultaneously crush and incinerate the JRSF vehicle with its onslaught, the entire world seemed to explode.
Neyla's Gryphic eyes rendered the sequence for her in full detail, her brain processing time in a modified fashion, as most Gryphon minds were wont to do in combat.
Like a round from a gun, a monumental silver form exploded out of a nearby building, the front wall and most of the roof disintegrating to tiny chunks as powerful wings and claws laid waste to duracrete as if it were no more than wet toilet tissue.
Like the rest of Beta team, Tirinel was clad in armor; Gigantic Naval-grade alloy/ceramic plates that added a secondary layer of frigate armor as protection over parts of his already nearly-impenetrable metallic scaling.
A quartet of vehicle-scale railguns studded each foreleg gauntlet, and Neyla could just make out the two guided missile launchers tucked between the wing-joint protection plates. She also knew that there were no less than twelve car-sized hidden blades, with wicked serrated edges, concealed in the armor's outer layers.
Due to his Draconic lack of agility, Tirinel's weaponry was nearly useless at-range, or against a small target such as a person. Even a hostile unit with the weaknesses of a human could easily avoid his wrath. Were he unencumbered by his weaponry he would certainly have greater flexibility and deadliness towards small targets. But Tirinel's gear was designed for the swift and violent destruction of close, slow moving, large targets.
Tanks. Ships. Buildings.
And most especially other Dragons.
Large angry Dragons.
The great silver creature raised both of his forelegs, standing over two stories tall on his hind legs. Without warning or pleasantries, Tirinel fired all eight of his guns simultaneously with a flex of both claws, sending six of the eight shells directly into his enemy's back, and the other two through the leathery fabric of his wings.
The rounds that impacted scale simply crumpled and fell away, their momentum little more than a slap between the shoulders for Big Red.
But the ones aimed for wing passed directly through, shredding the thin material in a painful manner, and lodged in buildings far beyond the initial target. Evacuation had indeed been a wise precaution. Neyla knew, from experience, that this was little more than a kind perfunctory greeting compared to what would inevitably happen next.
Tirinel's enemy, while essentially a non-sapient rage-driven killing machine, was also larger than him by more than a third of his own body mass and length.
The enemy Dragon rounded on Tirinel with remarkable swiftness for something so large, and muscularly encumbered. He trumpeted a visceral, instinct-driven challenge to the skies. Tirinel calmly took the opportunity to fire again, managing to sink one round into the soft flesh of the enemy's tongue.
The infuriated Red reflexively let loose with a huge column of flame. The licking red tendrils engulfed Tirinel, the shockwave from their multi-thousand degree temperature bombarding Neyla with a gust of nearly unbearable warmth, even at-distance, and through the duracrete she was concealed behind.
Gasps from several troopers in Alpha team were audible over her headset. The sounds of distraught shock swiftly transformed into abject awe.
The flame dissipated, as if sucked into a vortex. In its place, a gust of bitingly cold wind swept over the block. A visible whirlpool of ice and vaporated water had formed at Tirinel's open muzzle, and consumed the flames wholesale, putting an instantaneous stop to the reaction with the power of pure entropy.
Tirinel abruptly switched tactics, blowing the pocket of sub-zero air back at his opponent. The gust washed over the red Dragon, instantly causing frost to form on the edges of his scales.
The beast dropped to his belly and moaned. Reds had a massive weakness for non-ideal thermal conditions.
Neyla sighed. Despite the red Dragon's unusual size, it was the swiftest end to a Scale-buster offensive that she had ever seen. Her evaluation was premature.
She saw the threat first; Her eyes picked up on the faintest of glimmers, "Twelve high!"
The shouted warning over the radio was all Tirinel needed. He sidestepped, almost casually, as a massive rail-round passed through the space his left wing had so recently occupied. The silver Dragon traced the source of the blast and fired.
The action, while fruitless in terms of damage potential, did manage to coax the new combatant into moving fully onto the battlefield.
The newcomer turned out to be an HLF heavy tank. A large main gun, and a quad of treads, augmented by two small independently gimballed flamethrowers, and four anti-personnel CIWS guns; All coated in enough beige colored, energy diffusing, nano-carbon sheathed alloy to stop an oncoming train.
The tank pilot was savvy. He trained his flame-throwers on the red Dragon, and the heat from the weapons was more than enough to rejuvenate the groaning monstrosity.
Tirinel was now badly outmatched. It was time.
As if on cue, Beta four rose from her hiding place, and shouldered her weapon. The CAV-7 XL was a heavy-class Close-Anti-Vehicle missile with a warhead packing the equivalent of a seven metric ton TNT bomb. Each round was equipped with heuristic tracking and detonation AI designed to ensure the warhead found its target, and waited to detonate until all proper criteria were met.
The trooper ran up to the JRSF APC, which had begun to fire its weapon into the tank, and was in danger of being obliterated. She ducked behind the gray beleaguered vehicle for cover, and leaned out hesitantly.
After a momentary pause, she aimed the launcher directly at the tank. The laser beam was invisible to human eyes, save for the spots where it passed through a mote of dust, but Tirinel's thermal vision, and Neyla's lightspeed eyes could make out the entirety of the menacing red meridian.
"Tik tik..." Beta four pulled the trigger, and the missile flew across the intervening meters, moving too quickly and at too close a range for the tank's anti-projectile CIWS to stop it. The warhead buried itself up to the fins in the armored hide of the vehicle's turret.
Beta four paused, seemingly arbitrarily, but any seasoned combatant knew that she was merely allowing the missile to complete its 'inchworm' algorithm. The round gyrated and writhed using rotating external plates, and internal gyros, working itself as deep into the enemy vehicle as possible like a drill bit.
Inside her opaque, thick-set helmet, Beta four smiled, "...Boom."
The explosion tore most of the turret off the tank entirely, pushing the base back several feet with the force of the blast. The quad of treads tore trenches in the Dubai street, synth-rubber stripping off so swiftly that it combusted, leaving a short flame trail.
As the tank shuddered to a halt, Neyla snapped her wings to their extended position, and launched with all the force she could muster. Beta three stood from his hiding place, and began firing all his weapons at the primary target.
Neyla knew that now the crux of the operation rested with her. For all his power, Tirinel had no chance whatsoever of killing the red Dragon single-clawed without seriously injuring himself in the process. The size disparity was simply too great.
With support from HLF armor, his chances of survival were slim to none. The Gryphoness knew that the CAV missile would not have completely incapacitated the tank, despite the level of damage it had done, so now the onus was on her to finish off the red Dragon, and do it as swiftly as Gryphicly possible.
While she knew she was swift, and agile enough to avoid any expression of her enemy's wrath, she also knew that he would be instinctively capable of defending his weak points. Now it was on Tirinel and Beta three to keep his attention fixed firmly on them so that she could make her move unhindered.
She heard and felt the approach of the shells long before they arrived. It was an easy thing to dodge the oncoming stream of railgun fire, but quite another task entirely to do so while also approaching an immense and furious red Dragon that was lashing out with all of his limbs at anything within reach.
The HLF tank had survived intact enough to run both of its CIWS guns with full fire-control. One was trying, and miserably failing, to get a bead on Neyla, and the other was punching credit-chit sized dents in the JRSF vehicle.
Neyla just barely had time to glimpse Beta four loading another CAV-7 warhead, before she had to cut a daring negative-G reverse-corkscrew to slide between Red's outstretched wing, railgun fire from the tank, and a missile from one of Tirinel's launchers that had missed its target, and was on the return arc to re-acquire.
The move placed her almost precisely where she needed to be. The Gryphoness decided, in what appeared to be a split second, to take an enormous risk. In reality, for Neyla, nearly twenty seconds of internal time had passed. Of all a Gryphon's combat abilities the capacity to think and act on a higher plane of speed and agility, that Humans referred to as 'bullet time,' was perhaps the deadliest.
Seeing her beginning her dive prematurely, Tirinel launched himself fully at his opponent, sinking his claws into the hard edges of the red Dragon's belly-plates, and locking in. He latched his jaws around part of his enemy's neck, and began projecting frozen air, while simultaneously firing his foreleg guns at their maximum rate.
The added weight caused Red to reflexively go into a partial kneeling position, and that gave Neyla precisely the conditions she needed. With a speed so great that a Human would not even be able to fully perceive it, Neyla landed directly on the back of the red dragon's head, right where the plates of the neck joined the ones between the ears that protected the brain-case.
All Scale-Buster troops were trained heavily in Draconic anatomy. Dragons were possessed, in addition to their incredible scales, of a highly durable skeleton. The braincase itself would take an enormous amount of force to crack, even without the plating layer. Neyla had come prepared.
Even as her enemy began to feel her presence, she began the highly-practiced routine. First she inserted her left claw's lethally sharp and unbreakable talons into the tiny joint between the final neck plate, and the first head plate.
She pried with all her might, and managed to get enough width, nearly two centimeters, to ram the blade of her javelin into place. The massive collection of ruby scales beneath her began to buck, and writhe, but at the speed she was perceiving time she was able to compensate, if only barely.
She leaned into the javelin, forcing the scale plating up enough for the weapon to gain entry. It abruptly sank in down to the grip, and Neyla was rewarded with a scream of defiant rage and pain from her target.
The red, unable to reach her with his feverishly scrabbling limbs, instead turned his unchecked pain and fury on Tirinel, shaking his neck-hold and acquiring one of his own. But it was far too late for him to do any further damage.
Neyla grinned devilishly and whispered into her opponent's twitching crimson ear, "Well fought. Goodbye."
She twisted the grip of her javelin hard, and there was a loud 'clunk-CRACK-squish.'
Driven by a full capacitor discharge, the one-time-use weapon propelled its quarter-ton depleted uranium core inwards, monomolecular blade carving a path effortlessly through sinew, muscle, bone, and brain tissue, backed by incredible magnetic forces and its own weight.
The projectile penetrated all the way to the inside of the red Dragon's brain, instantly and painlessly cutting the creature's miserable life short.
As the enormous form caved downwards, Neyla nimbly backflipped, coming to rest on top of the fallen creature's skull in a proud pose as the dust settled. As if to offer backdrop to the victory, the brief silence was momentarily interrupted by the concussion of Beta four's second missile shredding the HLF tank, and its occupants, to shrapnel.
Neyla glanced up at Tirinel and smiled, "Well done. You almost dented him this time."
Tirinel raised one great eyebrow and snorted, "Congratulations are in order for you too. You could have almost halfway managed this one without my considerable contribution."
The Gryphoness chuckled, and sighed, "What is it the Humans say? 'If wishes were fishes...' "
Tirinel huffed, "Then at least one of us would dine well."